Editing San Angelo City (section)

===== Armory =====

A gritty neighborhood of rooming hotels, shelters, liquor stores and soup kitchens, the Armory takes its name from the central National Guard Armory.

The last stop for San Angelo’s down-and-out, the neighborhood has one of the highest concentrations of homeless people in the city. Despite complaints by Vietnamese and Laotian refugee families who have moved into the Armory, nothing seems likely to change.

Dilapidated brick hotels, some nearly a century old, rise over Armory streets crowded by shelters, dining halls, missions and other charities. A handful of neighborhood stores, offices and cafes occupy age-worn commercial buildings, though many storefronts stand empty.

The National Guard Armory, a blocky, concrete structure, and the San Angelo County General Hospital are the two largest buildings in the neighborhood.

Seedy liquor stores scattered along the main boulevards, intermixed with an occasional greasy spoon diner, thrift store or gloomy bar, constitute the bulk of the Armory commercial scene.

Back streets are home to recyclers, body shops and other light industry.

Enterprising Vietnamese and Laotian newcomers to the neighborhood have opened a few small restaurants featuring Southeast Asian cuisine.

There are few houses in the neighborhood, but some older storefronts have second-story flats. Rooming hotels, aging structures nearly a century old, offer long-term housing for those too poor to scrape up the deposit for an apartment. Most tenants of these dingy, pest-infested hotels are just a short step from homelessness.

Cheap apartment homes near the looming San Angelo County General Hospital house recent waves of Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants, who are unhappy about the ever-declining state of the neighborhood and the large numbers of street people.

Panhandlers are endemic in the Armory, and homeless people of all descriptions shuffle through the neighborhood in daylight hours. At night, many find refuge in doorways or alleys.

A glut of dining halls, shelters and other charitable endeavors are found in the Armory, including the Golden Rule complex and the county-run N Street Shelter.

Residents of nearby neighborhoods claim that the concentration of social services in the Armory serves as a magnet to the homeless, but have so far failed to persuade the City Council to force some of the shelters to relocate.

City police are a regular sight on Armory streets, where they handle endless cases of public intoxication, disturbances, noise complaints and fistfights between derelicts. Reported crimes in the Armory tend to involve property thefts or trespassing, but crimes against the homeless are rarely reported to police. Assaults, robberies, rapes and even murders are not unknown among the down-and-out residents of the Armory.