Where did the term originate?

Skid Row, or Skid Road, is black humor. It's a place where people live who are 'on the skids' - i.e. on a downhill course in life.

Skids are mechanical devices used in logging, shipbuilding, etc., which allows an object, e.g. a big piece of timber, or a ship, to be moved with some help from gravity from one place to another, lower place.

So a person 'on the skids', living on 'Skid Road', is going downhill.

I believe the original Skid Road was on the Seattle waterfront, a path along which logs were dragged or "skidded."

As a classic American term for the district in nearly any sizable city where residents down on their luck congregate, their problems often magnified by alcohol, "skid row" dates back to the 1930s, but its roots go back even further.

The first skid rows were in the logging towns of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900s. Faced with the chore of dragging felled trees out of the forest to the mill, 19th century loggers built "skid roads" -- roads paved with "skids," usually railroad ties or heavy wooden planks. It didn't take the loggers long to discover that the logs were far easier to move down these roads if the "skids" were greased, and "grease the skids" became a popular metaphor to describe speeding up the process of removing something. "Skid road" also became the popular term for the part of town where the lumbermen themselves lived. Often lined with bars and flophouses, the "skid roads" were magnets for poor, often alcoholic, transient workers down on their luck and said to be "on the skids." -Google The word deective

skid row doesn't mean that you are going downhill. it's simply refers to a place where people are having fun. mostly drinking, gambling, smoking, telling jokes, or whatever else make them happy. some of you seem to make it sound like it's a place where low-lifes go, but a lot of intelligent, working class people hang out there, just to have fun. not only do blacks hang around on skid row, whites do also.

honilov: The non-pejorative sense that you describe above is new to me. I think the usual usage of "skid row" implies a run-down, derelect area of town with high rates of homelessness, crime, vacant buildings, etc.

But it seems that new senses of a word or phrase emerge every generation or two, sometimes opposite in meaning from the previous.

Then again, I don't think that every passing fad of usage necessarily gets "official" recognition or description by a published dictionary until it has been around a while.

professor, i think your definition of "skid row" is correct for the larger cities. actually, i'm from a smaller city, and skid row here are not as bad. a lot of people have better places to go after leaving skid row. but some are just drunks, with no where to go, and i actually think that's all they want to do. some of them wouldn't work if you offered them a job. for some crazy reason, the government are giving some of them a check each month, and all they do is buy liquor and hang out on the street all night.

honilov:
since no one had mentioned race, i'm assuming you have some confusion about the term 'black humor.'
it doesn't refer to race; it refers to humor about 'dark' subjects like death or other misfortune.

i'm sorry, i did misunderstand. i've never heard the term "black humor" before. i thought you meant black people having fun and joking around. that's one advantage of answerpool, you can learn something new everyday.