Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, January 1, 1998

One lost, one a haven: A tale of 2 city neighborhoods

Violence and drugs rule in the place they call Oz.

By Alfred Lubrano,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Tonight, it's fun with white people in the Land of Oz.

Caucasians driving through the drug bazaars in Fairhill - ``Oz,'' to residents and police alike - will be maximally and enthusiastically hassled by cops this evening.

Tired of greenbelt junkies who roll their cherry Volvos like shopping carts down dense streets stocked with product, the police officers of the 25th District will be messing with the heads of dope-hungry pilgrims from Narberth and New Castle and Cinnaminson who look up with those ``What did I do, officer?'' eyes and say they must have taken a wrong turn to wind up here.

``I like to think,'' Officer Mike Anderson tells his partner, Robert Wade, ``that I'm ruining their night.''

He is. But white people are not the only ones who flock to the mostly Latino neighborhood; they're just easier for police to spot. Suburbanites are merely one constituency of a rank, rising tide of folks who flood the place - designated Sector G by police - to feed heads and habits.

And with drugs comes violent crime: dealer-turf homicides, robberies for narcotics money, aggravated assaults on buyers.

Bounded by Cambria Street on the north, Front Street on the east, Lehigh Avenue on the south, and Fifth Street on the west, G has the highest rate of violent crime in the 25th, itself one of the two most violent police districts in the city. G is the archetypal inner-city neighborhood in decline: gutted by crime fostered by the drug trade, beyond the help of police or government, a quicksand of pathologies and distress.

``I come out my door at night and expect Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone to jump out and say, `Don't touch that dial,' '' resident and school-crossing guard Yvonne Barry says. ``I mean, it's been called Oz, the Badlands, everything but what it is. This is the slum. This is the ghetto. This is, like, forget about it.''

Graffiti, the shorthand of chaos, covers everything in G. Drive by at 25 m.p.h., and the tagging looks like one, long, 10-block word.

Pusher pit bulls mess the sidewalks and strain at their leashes, taught by their owners in quiet moments how to find bone in a man's arm, the cops say.

Two black ostriches stand in their own waste, dumb-eyed and trapped, behind a Cyclone fence down an alley where, police say, a drug dealer lives.

Police have found a tiger just outside G sector, and there is a story among cops - perhaps apocryphal - that two more dealer-owned tigers and an alligator prowl around G, maybe living in a basement, ready to bite blue pants.

There are 3,062 people, 77 percent of them Latino, living in G, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Scott Snyder of DataSpace Consulting. They crowd into a tiny rectangle around one-tenth of a square mile.

So many people look hollow-eyed and starved, hungry and lean. There's not much fat in G, where approximately 64 percent of the residents - and 80 percent of the children - are poor and where 27 percent of the adults actually work.

Gunshots are a constant counterpoint to the salsa music that spices the air at night. Dead factories, their boarded-up windows looking like eyes battered shut in a street brawl, remind people of the work that used to be.

The jobs are gone, but the factory parking lots remain, offering convenient berths to the more daring out-of-district buyers, who leave their cars to shop for crack, marijuana, heroin.

Woks heat up in G just after 6 p.m., when the drug dealing intensifies and the hole-in-the-wall Chinese takeouts get cooking.

``Restaurant'' interiors are devoid of furniture. The walls are decorated in spray paint by the patrons, who never consult with the owners about motif. The proprietors cook with their heads down behind bulletproof glass, while famished dealers troop in and out of the places all night long.

The kingpins of the North Philadelphia drug trade are nourished by stir-fried bok choy, broccoli and beef. You can always tell when business is going well out here - the air is redolent with egg foo young.

And through it all - up Hancock to Cambria, down Hope Street (with a ``D'' graffitied over the ``H'' by dealers substituting a more apt name) - the police officers of the 25th ride their patrol cars in endless passes.

Drugs are sold at midblock. So corner lookouts shout ``Five-oh'' or ``Bajando!'' (``Coming down!'') whenever the police show up. On one block, lookouts sound a boat horn. By the time the officers reach the dealers, they have moved or have hidden the drugs.

No one knows for certain, but State Rep. Ben Ramos, a Democrat representing the 180th House District, estimates that on G's busiest corner - Hancock and Cambria - dealers can take in $200,000 a week. ``This is not a nickel-and-dime operation,'' says Ramos, who bases his figure on police statistics.

When arrests are made, officers complain, an overworked judicial system spits back the dealers, who smirk and go on pushing, their fear of police diminished that much more after every small-time bust.

Emboldened dealers smile when Officer Anderson drives by. They wave from Jaguars, Lexuses. Tonight, Anderson is patrolling in a squeaking, dirt-encrusted Bronco with a radio that doesn't work.

``This district is getting old for me,'' the 30-year-old from Northeast Philly admits. ``It's like fighting a losing battle. Crime used to be more specific out here. Now, it's all over. It's just deteriorated.''

Undisturbed grime coats the corners. A fly strip with maybe 50 bugs stuck to it dangles like creepy mistletoe in the squad room. A cop graffito in a filthy first-floor bathroom that women refuse to use admonishes recalcitrant officers to think hygienically: ``Flush, you scum.''

The city plans to build the 25th a new building, but it's years away. For now, this will remain the decrepit launch pad from which officers cast themselves into the world of G.

In the bustle of the squad room, where rosary beads are draped over a police scanner, Officers Pat Sitek, 27, and Timothy McNicholas, 24, prepare to patrol.

Short, thickly muscled, with close-cropped hair, the men lift weights together and hang out away from the job. McNicholas sports a pin with twinned Irish and American flags. Sitek Velcroes a new, white bulletproof vest across his chest.

``In my opinion,'' says Sitek, when he and McNicholas settle in their patrol car, ``this is the worst section in the city. Every crime down here is drug-related. And not many of them are even reported.''

To start the night, the officers roll up to a white woman on the street.

``Where you live?'' Sitek asks.

``In Jersey, to be honest with you.''

She gets in her car and drives off.

``They rob white people buying drugs, and the people don't report it,'' Sitek says. ``Once in a while, you get an honest person: `I'm down here buying heroin, and they took all my money,' they tell you.''

McNicholas shakes to the omnipresent street salsa as the men ride with their windows down. They fight over who gets to talk on the radio, McNicholas slapping playfully at Sitek's hand. Hour after hour, crime after crime, the scanner crackles a calamity and an address.

It's a drug bust: The dealer scatters two fistfuls of crack vials onto the street, so nobody can say he had the stuff on him when the cops closed in.

It's a fight: Two women pound each other with spitting fury in the middle of the street, while spectating neighbors root for injuries and scream encouragements.

It's a gun run: One of four guys was seen with a weapon, and the cops arrive to pat them down, unable to find anything.

And so it goes throughout the night, the streets crowded with dealers and customers, a criminal promenade in the dark marketplace.

Sitek and McNicholas cannot stop the drug trade. The best they can manage tonight is to break up the traffic jams of cars lined up for product.

``A cop I know says when he's headed for this sector from the north, he crosses Erie and his car coughs,'' McNicholas says, smiling. ``By the time the car reaches Allegheny, it won't go. It refuses to come in.''

Cops can't cool the hot zone. Crime, social scientists know, needs a place to breed, some brackish waters that nourish the germs and diseases.

There's no political will to reestablish fallen areas like Fairhill, says criminal-justice professor Jack Greene, director of the Center for Public Policy at Temple University.

``There's no investment to maintain this area, and the community doesn't have the political clout to press the city for resources,'' he says.

Banks won't put mortgage money on the street. Many landlords don't keep up properties. People who own homes are trapped, because no one will buy them.

In high-crime places like G sector, there's a tendency to see only crime and forget about the complex factors that help rot a neighborhood - poor housing, lack of jobs, illiteracy, welfare, racism.

Some of the people even blame themselves.

``We've allowed this to happen to ourselves,'' says Will Gonzalez, executive director of the Police-Barrio Relations Project. ``We abdicate responsibilities. Our voting turnout rates are not good, our civic activities are not good, and our holding officials accountable isn't as good as it should be.''

There are responsible people in G who stand and fight, but it's a hard battle. Sister Carol Keck, a community activist, has chased drug buyers in her car, taken down their license numbers, then sent postcards to their homes, complaining that their autos were seen in ``a known drug area.''

``I become a raving-maniac white woman, screaming at these yuppie professionals in their cars with stickers from fancy, high-priced colleges,'' says the large, raging cleric. ``It makes my blood boil.''

Keck runs a safe haven for kids in the neighborhood, a place where they theoretically can play unbothered by violence. Yet, despite visits from U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, representatives of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, the police and the National Guard, her rowhouse safe haven wound up with 18 bullet holes in its walls from gunfights.

During an impromptu meeting in the office of the safe haven, Keck and some community people talk G sector.

``South Americans harvest the drugs, Puerto Ricans sell them, white people use them,'' says neighborhood resident Saro Rodriguez, who once had a drug dealer's bullet pass underneath his arm only to ricochet off a wall and hit his partner, Lucy Santiago, in the head, nearly killing her.

``I see doctors in their [scrubs] buying stuff here,'' he asserts.

``Families condone it sometimes,'' says Darling Rosario, a neighborhood activist who works with Keck. ``People who don't sell drugs get involved by hiding people, hiding drugs, stashing money.''

Amidst the swarming chaos, Rosario had to do something sane. So, in August 1996, he planted three pear-blossom trees on Lehigh Avenue off Hope Street, below his mother's apartment. To him, it meant goodness, growth, life.

The dealers, who might otherwise have chainsawed the trees just for the fun of it, have let them live - out of respect for Rosario's mother, Rosario believes.

``I'm not willing to give up my neighborhood to them,'' says Rosario, who counsels children and preaches a no-drug policy.

But life in a hard place breeds paranoia and begs tough choices. To protect her lifelong business, the Diaz Meat Market on North Fifth Street, Marta Diaz and her husband rented out the house they own in Feltonville to live in an apartment over their store.

She figures she'll have to be there another 10 years.

``I have to watch over my bread and butter,'' says Diaz, who became a Head Start teacher and activist in the community.

A candlelight vigil against drugs that she tried to organize fizzled, because so many people in the community were involved in drug dealing that ``they were ashamed to be part of it,'' she says.

For the good people uninvolved in the trade, living in a neighborhood compromised by drugs means having to find your own way. Rodriguez survives by making a deal with his local pusher.

``I ask him not to sell in front of my house,'' Rodriguez says. `` `If somebody comes to shoot you,' I tell him, `that 9mm bullet is going to go through my wall like butter while I'm watching TV. I can't tell you to leave the block, but this is my house, and I don't want to be shot for something I didn't do.' The guy says OK. He doesn't sell outside my door.''

Other people make other arrangements with pushers, most commonly one simple pact: I don't turn you in; you don't kill me. It helps keep residents alive and the drug trade thriving.

In G sector, people do what they have to do. Residents, drug dealers, police are all out there, trying to figure a way to survive. The good guys work, avoid getting in the dealers' way, keep their heads down.

``What else can you do?'' Rodriguez asks.

The drug dealers, such as Lupe (probably not his real name), who works off Lehigh, will tell you that they have no choice.

``It's the government's fault,'' says Lupe, a 27-year-old with a wife and three children. ``They cut welfare. What do they expect us to do - die?''

The cops try to catch the bad guys, but the drug trade and the attendant violent crime are overwhelming.

``You'd have to have a cop on every corner all the time,'' Wade says.

That's not possible, notes Tom Gill, crime-prevention officer at the 25th.

So what can be done to save Sector G from the drugs, from the violence, from the outsiders with cash?

``I can't see what they can do to change stuff,'' Gill says. ``I really can't.''