In early June 1931, Darcy wrote to Jack Stachel about his first six months in the district. Party headquarters was at 734 Harrison Street, in a neighborhood Darcy called the “skid-road” and the local press called the “skid-way”—an area of inexpensive residential hotels, cheap cafes, and numerous bars and pool rooms, home to many male waterfront and maritime workers and unemployed or underemployed single men, as well as poor families and single women. Darcy found party headquarters “in the hands of ‘skid-road’ elements.” He explained, “While there are many good, normal workers on the skid-road, there are also very many degenerate elements, drunkards, dope fiends. . . . They completely discredited the Party.” On Darcy’s first day, he “had a physical fight with two of them who were among seven or eight who were lying around the Party Headquarters dead drunk.” On his third day, “two Party members made a hold-up on some other Party members, and we had all we could do to prevent the police from learning of the situation.” Darcy’s first task was “to eliminate these elements and to get factory workers or at least unemployed workers into the Party and into Party leadership” and “drive out a considerable number of these degenerates from the Party and Unemployed Council.”