Eddie the King Stories from LA's Skid Row

Skid Row is not what you think.

Behind the headlines and statistics are people—fighters, drifters, schemers, and survivors—each with a story worth telling. In Eddie the KIng, Michael W. Corcoran, who spent nearly twenty years at the Baltimore Hotel in the heart of Skid Row, brings those stories to life with grit, dark humor, and startling tenderness.

Written with the eye of a bartender and the heart of a witness, Corcoran blends grit, pathos, and absurd comedy into portraits that feel both larger-than-life and painfully human. More than a book about Skid Row, this is a meditation on resilience, survival, and what it means to call even the most broken places home.

Here are haunted hotel rooms that whisper their legends, a one-legged war hero who drinks like it's still 1945, a porn star turned hotel desk clerk spinning outrageous tales, and countless others who walked the blurred line between tragedy and comedy. Together, they form a mosaic of resilience in a place most people only cross the street to avoid.

Part memoir, part street chronicle, Eddie the KIng captures a world that is vanishing even as it endures. It is a book about time, about the people we lose and the ones we never forget, and about finding a strange sense of home in the least likely of places—this book doesn't just tell you, it takes you there.