Amid crowds and flora, a skid row mission makes Rose Parade debut

In the winter of 1890, a Pasadena hunt club eager to promote the young city as a temperate winter paradise organized a January sports contest with a parade of flower-adorned floats.

The following year, a horse-drawn “gospel wagon” rolled onto the dirt streets of downtown Los Angeles offering “food, clothing and salvation” to saloon denizens.

The region morphed into a sprawling metropolis in the decades that followed, but those early efforts at civic improvement endured and became two of the area’s most venerable institutions: Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses and skid row’s Union Rescue Mission.

This year, the mission will make its first appearance in the Rose Parade. A group from the shelter will ride the route Monday in a replica of the gospel wagon to highlight its 125^th anniversary and serve as a reminder that poverty and addiction still accompany L.A.’s enviable climate and flora.

“We’re just hoping to raise awareness about people experiencing homelessness,” said the Rev. Andrew Bales, the mission’s chief executive.

California is in the middle of a housing crisis, and L.A. leads the nation in chronically homeless people, with nearly 13,000.

“We have stepped up as never before,” Bales said.

The mission has more clients than at any time in its history, with some 1,300 people, mostly women and children, at its San Pedro Street facility and a second campus in Sylmar.

“The way they receive you with such care and love — it’s just amazing,” said Robert Brandt, who got sober at the mission after 50 years of alcoholism and will be riding in the parade wagon Monday.

Brandt’s wife dropped him off at the skid row mission two years ago after hearing Bales on a radio show, and he now lives and works there. The 67-year-old said that while his background was different from many of his fellow residents — he was a college graduate from Playa del Rey with a career — he found “wonderful acceptance” at the mission.

“I’ve learned that alcohol and drug addiction is an equal-opportunity destroyer,” Brandt said.

For many years after its founding by Union Oil president Lyman Stewart in 1891, the mission didn’t have a building and relied on the gospel wagons that collected alcoholics who wanted to dry out.

“Someone in the saloon might not be seen for a while and someone would say … he’s on the wagon. If he came back, they’d say he fell off the wagon,” said Liz Mooradian, a special assistant to the mission’s CEO and the group’s historian.

Richard Chinen, a past president of the tournament, said that securing a place in the parade was a competitive process, but the mission’s long history of service went perfectly with this year’s parade theme: Echoes of Success. The community effort that went into beautifying the city and decorating the floats was not so different from the aim of the mission, he said.

It is “volunteers cultivating beauty around them, and that is what the Union Rescue Mission is about … trying to bring out the beauty in the less fortunate,” he said.

About 700,000 people are expected to line the parade route, according to organizers, with as many as 28 million around the world watching on television.

harriet.ryan@latimes.com

@latimesharriet

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