Skid row is a term for a rundown neighborhood where homeless and socially marginalized people live and congregate. The most well-known of these areas is the Skid Row neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. Whenever Ray and Japhy visit a different city, they spend their time in that city’s Skid Row, where the cheapest hotels, restaurants, and secondhand stores are located.
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Skid Row Term Timeline in The Dharma Bums
The timeline below shows where the term Skid Row appears in The Dharma Bums. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 15
...flannel and jeans, Ray wanders around San Francisco to test out his new rucksack. Some Skid Row bums are convinced that he’s going to go hunting for uranium and try to give...
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Chapter 16
...sleeps all night and wakes up in muggy LA, where he spends the day on Skid Row drinking coffee.
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Chapter 27
...bottle and buys another. The two of them get haircuts and buy secondhand clothes on Skid Row , and then they take a ferry across the San Francisco Bay. Japhy drinks a...
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Chapter 31
...proves to be fascinating, just like Japhy promised. Ray sleeps in a cheap hotel on Skid Row ; in the morning, he has coffee and buys cheap secondhand winter clothes before hitchhiking...
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