The End of the Dive Bar on Skid Row

At the Los Angeles Times, "The last call for a skid row era at King Eddy Saloon":

Wire-thin and slumped like a question mark, James Maley nurses a watered-down whiskey at the battered bar inside the King Eddy Saloon. Around him a boisterous crowd presses in. Maley taps a cracked fingernail nervously on his glass and stares warily at the newcomers.

They've come to see novelist John Fante's son, Dan Fante, read at the bar that inspired his father's 1939 classic "Ask the Dust." They're also here to experience skid row's last dive bar before it shuts down for renovations on Sunday.

"If this happened every day, I would never show up," says Maley, who lives in transitional housing a few blocks away.

Other time-worn regulars, many with leathery skin, bad teeth and watchful eyes, nod in agreement. The bar provides home and family for those who have neither. They come for community and to spend what little money they have on plastic pitchers of beer and $2.50 gin and tonics.

When the Fante reading ends, the interlopers quickly disperse.

"There go the slummers," says John Tottenham, a poet who has been coming to the King Eddy since the 1980s.

Chances are the crowds will be back when the bar reopens under new management. The owners plan to use old photos to restore the bar's Midcentury look. They hope to renovate the abandoned speak-easy in the basement and open the bar's windows that are covered by stucco, letting natural light into the place for the first time in decades.

They haven't finalized their plans, but one thing is for sure. Drinks won't come cheap at the new King Eddy.

The bar is located on the corner of 5th and Los Angeles streets in the King Edward Hotel, which was built in 1906 and was a tony destination for visitors to what was once a thriving commercial district. The hotel now provides low-income housing for many of King Eddy's regulars.

The pre-Prohibition era King Eddy is painted black. With neon beer signs providing most of its light, the room is dim and gloomy. Its black-and-white checkered floor is grimy. Plastic beer flags hang from the ceiling and the place smells of stale smoke and disinfectant.

The bar itself, shaped in a square, commands the center of the room, with cracked vinyl banquettes lining the perimeter. A glassed-in smoking space is set off to the side. Behind the bar is a tiny fluorescent-lighted kitchen where prepackaged burgers, pizza and sandwiches are heated in a microwave. A beer and burrito would set a person back only $4.

Next week, Maley and the other dislodged drinkers will have to find another bar, but they face a new downtown landscape of high-end mixology bars, restaurants and Brazilian waxing salons...

Well, it's probably for the better, right? Skid row's the roughest of rough-and-tumble hardscrabble habitats, so cleaning up the place is good policy. But if you're down and out downtown, this kind of gentrification can force a relocation to even more dangerous haunts. It's hard out there on the streets. Hopefully folks can hang on to a little stability and continuity.

Continue reading at the link.

Against Despair

From Jonah Goldberg, at National Review:

I’ll be blunt: I do not think Mitt Romney ran a good campaign. Don’t get me wrong, I think he worked his heart out as did many who worked for him. I think he made himself into the best candidate he could (which is different from saying he was a great candidate). But I also think that Romney’s theory of the contest was wrong. As I wrote at the time, the Republican convention was a mess. I think Romney strategist Stu Stevens’s contempt for ideas — never mind conservative ideas — was absurd. I think the failure of the Romney campaign to offer a compelling explanation of any kind (at least until the second debate) for how it wasn’t a third Bush term was fatal (as I discussed here and elsewhere). Politics is about persuasion. And persuasion requires making serious arguments. Stevens, by all accounts, has contempt for serious arguments.

None of this means that all of the talk about changing demographics and long-term structural challenges for the GOP is without merit. I have strong views about all of that as well.

In fact, I have a different view from some about the coming wave of recriminations: I welcome it. I don’t know that things need to be vicious or personal, but they do need to be honest. And honesty requires we say things that may feel personal to our friends. This is one of the great and abiding strengths of the conservative movement and the thing I love about it most. Contrary to the conventional wisdom among liberals, conservatives are actually far more willing to examine their dogma and their first principles than liberals or “centrists” are. This has been the source of conservatism’s lasting strength.

It’s going to take a while to sort through this mess...

I like that part about Mitt's seriously flawed campaign.

I said so much in September, although Mitt's debate performances were excellent (even the third debate, which Bill O'Reilly pegged as weak and costing Romney the election, which is absurd).

But read Goldberg's piece in full, at the link.

Romney's Internal Polling Shows GOP Up in Ohio, Tied in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin

From Toby Harnden, at London's Daily Mail, "Exclusive: Romney UP one point in Ohio and TIED in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to his campaign's internal polling":

Mitt Romney is ahead by a single percentage point in Ohio - the swing state that many believe could decide the election, according to internal polling data provided to MailOnline by a Republican party source.

Internal campaign polling completed last night by campaign pollster Neil Newhouse has Romney three points up in New Hampshire, two points up in Iowa and dead level in Wisconsin and - most startlingly - Pennsylvania.

If the Romney campaign's internal numbers are correct - and nearly all independent pollsters have come up with a picture much more favourable for Obama - then the former Massachusetts governor will almost certainly be elected 45th U.S. President.

Well, don't get cocky, kid.

RELATED: At Instapundit, "NATE SILVER ALSO GAVE SHARRON ANGLE A 75 PERCENT CHANCE OF WINNING IN 2010..."

Hey, there's someone who really ought not get cocky.

I'll have more on the wonder boy suicide watch later.

Sheesh.

Donna's Diner in Elyria, Ohio

I don't worry about the national polls. My biggest concern is Ohio. And while I discount PPP's Democrat-leaning surveys (the poll's a Daily Kos joint, with new numbers out today having Obama up by 5 points, unrealistically), I'm not sure if the first debate was enough to give Romney a decisive advantage there. Things look pretty good at RCP's polling average for the state, and even there the NBC/Marist poll along with PPP is skewing the average to the Democrats.  And more on these two polls at AoSHQ, "Pollsters: 1/5 of Ohio Vote Already In! Me: Bull."

In any case, more later on the polling numbers --- especially a week or so from this Tuesday and the next presidential debate. Meanwhile, here's a ground-level report from Ohio, at the New York Times, "At the Corner of Hope and Worry":

ELYRIA, Ohio

Another day begins with a sound softer than a finger-snap, in an Ohio place called Elyria. In the central square of this small city, the gushing water fountain applauds the early-morning chorus of sparrows. A car clears its throat. A door slams. And then: click.

The faint sound comes as 7:00 flashes on the clock of the Lorain National Bank building, looming over the square. The pull of a string — click — has sent life pulsing through a neon sign, announcing to all of Elyria that, once more, against the odds, Donna’s Diner is open.

Its proprietor, Donna Dove, 57, ignites the grill that she seems to have just turned off, so seamlessly do her workdays blend into one endless shift. She wears her blond hair in a ponytail and frames her hazel eyes with black-rimmed glasses that tend to get smudged with grill grease. She sees the world through the blur of her work.

A dozen years ago, Donna found a scrap of serendipity on the sidewalk: a notice that a local mom-and-pop restaurant was for sale. After cooking for her broken family as a child, after cooking for county inmates at one of her many jobs, she had come to see food as life’s binding agent, and a diner as her calling. She maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401(k) and opened a business to call her own.

Donna’s Diner. Donna’s.

You know this place: It is Elyria’s equivalent to that diner, that coffee shop, that McDonald’s. From the vantage point of these booths and Formica countertops, the past improves with distance, the present keeps piling on, and a promising future is practically willed by the resilient patrons.

It is where the recession and other issues of the day are lived as much as discussed. Where expectations for a certain lifestyle have been lowered and hopes for salvation through education and technology have been raised. Where the presidential nominees Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each hope that his plan for a way back will resonate with the Donna Doves, who try to get by in places like Elyria — where the American dream they talk about can sometimes seem like a tease.

Continue reading, on some of the hardship Donna and her patrons are facing, and then this:

The fresh aroma of coffee face-slaps the air. Soon the Breakfast Club regulars, that gaggle of Elyrian past and present, will be here to renew their continuing discussion of what was, is and isn’t in this city of 55,000. The presidential election sometimes serves as a conversation starter, like a curio placed between the salt and pepper shakers.

The talk will continue as yolk stains harden and refills turn tepid. Their Ohio is a swing state, after all, and their Elyria sits precariously on that swing. More Democratic than Republican, it has several global companies and the memory of many more; an embattled middle class and encroaching poverty; and the faint sense that the Next Big Thing better arrive before even its beloved park fountain, visible from the diner’s front window, gets shut off...

Remember, a Month Ago Nate Silver Gave 4-to-1 Odds Against Romney

Read Robert Stacy McCain's post, "Liberals Beginning to Realize They’ve Overestimated Obama’s Popularity?"

It's now a 3-1 margin against Romney, but it's still early.