LostInTheZone
Sep 25, 2007, 7:04 PM
Sasso linked to this Philadelphia Weekly cover story (http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=15286&highlight=Deeney%20Hurley) on his website (http://phillyskyline.com/). For those of you struggling to understand how this city can have such a high murder rate when there's such vibrant neighborhoods and activity downtown.
Showdown on Hurley Street
Events on what may be the city’s worst block provide a stark glimpse into a Philly many Philadelphians never see. One former resident survived to tell the tale.
by Jeff Deeney
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/images/issues/2007-08-22/large/img_15286_cover.jpg
Photographs by Jeff Fusco
Hurley Street—a tiny West Kensington side street between C and D just north of Allegheny, where residents park their cars halfway on the sidewalk—is so narrow you can stand on one side and spit on to the other.
The margin of error on streets this size is razor thin, and drivers here tend not to take much care. A lot of cars on Hurley get clipped, which is why so many are missing side mirrors. There’s no reason to drive down Hurley unless you’re here to cop a bag of wet, weed or Xanies. But then most of the buyers are locals on foot looking for nickels and dimes.
Hurley Street, say cops who work North Philadelphia, may be the worst block in the city. Most of its 100 or so residents say they’d leave if they could.
Most Hurley Street residents rent the squat two-story brick row homes they live in. The houses are worth about $13,000 each.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/images/issues/2007-08-22/large/img_15286_coverhurle_1.jpg
You can rent a three-bedroom on Hurley for $500 to $600 a month. Today five properties on the block stand empty with “FOR SALE” signs hanging from their facades. Many have been on the market for months, and some for longer. There are five boarded-up abandoned properties on the block too, one of which is tagged with scrawled black graffiti that reads “SMOKE, SMOKE.”
The racial makeup on the 3200 block of Hurley skews black, but there are Latin and white families too. Because people live on top of each other here, their lives spill onto the sidewalk, particularly in summer, when the treeless block heats up like a brick oven.
Few people on Hurley work. Most live on supplemental security income or welfare, or share in some kind of black-market revenue. People hang out 24/7. On Hurley Street, one family’s drama is every family’s drama. In fact drama may be the only thing on Hurley that’s not in short supply.
The most recent Hurley Street drama begins with the arrival of a new family—a young man from North Philadelphia named Ramon, his proud roughneck girl Shawn, their two daughters ages 2 and 5, and Shawn’s younger brother Hakeem.
They’ve come to Hurley because they want to get out from under Shawn’s mother.She “irks her life,” Shawn says. Ramon doesn’t get along with her either.
They’ve also come to Hurley Street because all they can afford is Hurley Street. The house they’re moving into has been vacant so long the landlord is grateful for any rent. Shawn and Ramon know the block is rough, but rough is all they’ve known. “Ain’t nothing here I ain’t seen,” Shawn says.
Ramon and Shawn are no saints. Ramon has priors for holding weed, having guns without permits, forgery, bad checks and drug dealing. Still, he’s soft spoken and good looking with a big, disarming smile, and you want to like and trust him despite his past. He’s now working construction for a relative.
Shawn struggles with anger that can flare into blind rage. She’s lanky and long-legged, and sucks on the knuckle of her index finger in between blurted hard-to-follow rapid-fire sentences.
Shawn also likes to fight—and she’s good at it. She says her mother used her like a trained attack dog on the streets as a kid, siccing her on troublemaking neighborhood women. When you tell her fighting is bad, she smiles slyly. She got fired from the Checkers at Second and Lehigh for fighting on the job, but hopes to start soon at the McDonald’s next door to it.
Ramon and Shawn’s children are little dollops of smiling sweetness. They like to splash in the kiddie pool Ramon has set up on the small square concrete slab that is their backyard. Shawn has a tattoo of a Hershey’s Kiss on her right forearm—a tribute to her daughter. A banner bearing her oldest daughter’s name waves from the piece of candy. She thinks her daughter is like a little piece of chocolate delight.
The couple’s eldest daughter, all of 5 years old, wears braids that sometimes unravel into a giant Afro that forms a dark halo over her tiny head. She wears tattered tank tops and frayed knee-length skirts that always seem to need washing, and prefers to walk around barefoot, even on the sidewalk, which rarely gets swept. She sucks on Fla-Vor-Ice, drinks Little Hugs and doesn’t have a taste for much of anything other than sugar.
When she stands on the block squinting with the sun in her eyes, she looks like a 1930s photograph of a Dust Bowl prairie child.
The neighbors on Hurley across the street from Ramon and Shawn are the primary source of the block’s insanity. Shawn says there’s drug activity in and around the house, but it’s hard to say exactly what happens behind the closed doors. Sometimes desperate-looking addicts come by to bang on the front window. If someone doesn’t immediately respond, the addict will start to shout, calling up to the second story.
Living in the house are a mother and her two sons. The mother is an obese woman with unkempt hair who wears ill-fitting, filthy clothes. The boys are teenagers—14 and 16, though the 16-year-old looks 26. His name is Lamar.
The boys wear white tank tops that expose snaking tattoos memorializing dead friends. They have wide eyes that stare hard at anyone on the block they don’t know. Shawn says they smoke dust and take Xanies on a daily basis. If you ask their mother why they don’t go to school, she’ll tell you they do whatever the fuck they want. Then she’ll tell you to shut the fuck up and stay out of her business.
Hurley Street has a block captain named Mona. Mona’s a tall, stick-thin woman who’s missing one of her two front teeth. She eats barbecue potato chips from a bag for breakfast, and claims to run a recovery house for women. It’s a doubtful claim, considering how high she looks most days.
Jailbirds: Some recent Hurley Street residents are now behind bars.
If you ask her what she does as block captain, her eyes roll back, revealing a sickly jaundiced yellow, and her knees dip, like the energy necessary to answer the question has sapped her strength. Then she’ll lick salty red dye from her fingertips. “Excuse me,” she’ll say. “I am not right in the mind this morning.”
It seems there’s always a wild, frenetic energy on Hurley Street. Standing in the center of it is like being in the eye of a tornado. The chaos whirls around noisily before disappearing, only to touch down at the other end of the block moments later. Little kids on the block, seemingly oblivious to everything, throw footballs over the dealers, and then run them back past the addicts.
Between 10 and 4 in summer, the block is roped off as part of the city’s Summer Food Service Program that alleges to provide “an average of 50,000 meals per day to recreation centers, playgrounds, playstreets, summer camps, parks, houses of worship, community organizations, schools and daycare centers throughout the city of Philadelphia.”
A lot of narrow side streets in West Kensington get roped off in the summer. This aggravates the cops, who think the neighbors use the ropes to keep patrol cars out.
Mona serves lunches maybe three out of every five days. The lunches come in black plastic containers divided into sections like TV dinners. In each container is a sandwich and what looks like applesauce or vanilla pudding. On some days there are no lunches—only an Igloo cooler with juice boxes on ice. And some days there’s nothing.
The block gets roped off anyway.
When Hurley Street is roped off, the only way to get on the block is to walk.
Walking the worst block in the city from end to end is an intense experience. There are dried piles of feces left by the feral cats and dogs that skulk everywhere. Flies rise up and buzz around your face as you walk past. There’s shattered glass everywhere, long and jagged pieces, from house windows hit by projectiles.
Young Latin mothers blast salsa and reggaeton from living room stereos while their children play on the dirty sidewalk barefoot, wearing only diapers. They don’t speak English and won’t make eye contact. The black families won’t either. They blast rap music from boom boxes in second-story windows.
If you keep walking, you see more children in diapers tiptoeing around the shattered glass and dried cat shit. The only one who regularly says hello is the old head perched on a stoop halfway down the block who drinks malt liquor from a brown bag for breakfast.
The first night Shawn and Ramon spend on the block their front window gets busted. Nobody claims to know who threw what, despite the fact the stoops are mobbed with people night and day. It would appear a case of simple jealousy.
Shawn’s landlord installed a $200 cabinet made of unfinished wood from Lowe’s before they moved in, and those on the block with the same landlord got nothing.
Shawn and Ramon’s landlord is tall and black with a lumbering gait. He works out of an office in Center City, and oversees a number of properties in Kensington, including the house across the street from Shawn and Ramon. He’s not a slumlord, though it’s hard to dodge the accusation with the properties he oversees.
This street wasn’t like this before, the landlord assures you. The changes it’s undergone are far beyond his control.
He installed the cabinets for Shawn and Ramon because he thought they were worth the investment. He won’t make any renovations of the house across the street because its residents are late with the rent and the cops are always at the door. He suspects the tenants of drug dealing and would like to evict but can’t bring himself to put them on the street, no matter how much he dislikes them.
Was the broken window a message intended for the landlord? Or to show Shawn and Ramon how things work on Hurley Street? Hard to say with no witnesses coming forward. But the broken window has set things in motion. The ball is rolling now, and there’s no way to stop it.
On her family’s second day on Hurley Street, according to Shawn, the neighbors start dumping garbage on their front steps. Shawn and Ramon rise up at this display of disrespect, talking loud at the neighbors from their stoop to let them know they aren’t scared. Shawn lets the young girls on the block know she doesn’t play, and would fight anyone at any time.
Shawn’s younger brother Hakeem—or “Young Cannon,” as he calls himself—doesn’t help by talking sweet stuff to the same girls after his sister disappears into the house. The mothers and brothers of the girls watch closely.
Soon a full-blown beef is in the works. Lamar comes from the house across the street to let Shawn and Ramon know the official Hurley Street rules. He tells them he doesn’t like them turning the lights off at night, and demands they keep the shades up 24/7. He suspects Ramon and Shawn are informants, and that when the lights are off they’re watching his house. Shawn and Ramon tell Lamar they’ll have their lights any damn way they want them. They take offense at the implication of snitching.
Shawn and Ramon also think their house was a stash spot before they arrived. The house directly south of theirs—the one that’s sported a “FOR SALE” sign forever—is one of the block’s many unoccupied structures.
The windows are shattered, and there are more long, jagged shards of glass piled up on the sidewalk in front. It’s become the new stash spot. Lamar and some Latin boys on the block have taken over the house, and are using it to sell weed and wet.
It’s now a week into life on Hurley Street, and Shawn and Ramon report things are getting seriously crazy. The boys on the block are throwing quarter sticks of dynamite into the empty houses late at night. The dynamite echoes in the dark like bomb blasts. The children can’t sleep. This seems far-fetched, but a look inside one of the many shattered windows reveals scorch marks on the carpet.
“How can we raise kids here?” Shawn asks. “We can’t even let them sit on the stoop. They have to stay in the kiddie pool in the back by the alley.” Shawn says she looked out her kitchen window one afternoon and saw a couple of little kids pissing in the pool through the fence from the next yard over.
A storm brews, but Mona won’t take sides. But in an attempt to adhere to her duties as block captain, she’s signed up Shawn’s two daughters for free lunches. Shawn is suspicious of the lunches, and won’t let the girls eat them.
Everyone on the block knows something is going down. Details are scarce, and there are different versions of what goes on at night. This just happens to be Shawn’s.
The block seems to be getting sicker, rotting from the inside in the summer heat. And the heat is relentless—humid, murky and oppressive. More windows get broken, and more boards get nailed up over broken windows.
Lamar is now controlling not only the house next to Shawn’s, but the house next to that one as well. He comes and goes between them freely.
He ducks into the house two doors down, and emerges breathless, pacing in circles around parked cars. He’s fixated on something in his mouth, and stares at it in the side mirror of a beat-up SUV.
He pulls his lips back, gets close to the glass and inspects his gums. After he’s finished staring at whatever it is he thinks he sees, he starts to walk away from the mirror.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/images/issues/2007-08-22/large/img_15286_coverhouse_2.jpg
Now boarding: Neighbors trashed Shawn's house, rendering it uninhabitable.
But he turns back, obsessed, unable to look away, probing with a Q-tip he pulls from his pocket. A daily diet of dust and Xanax will make anyone obsessive. And Shawn says she’s seen 16-year-old Lamar with a gun.
The big Hurley Street blowout starts with a basketball game. Hakeem and Ramon are playing pickup with the other boys on the block at a portable hoop. They usually play at the McVeigh Rec Center at D and Ontario, but tonight they’re convinced to compete at home. The Hurley Street regulars intend to humiliate Ramon and Hakeem in front of the whole block.
But instead Ramon and Hakeem make their opponents look bad in front of their girls and moms. Ramon and Hakeem grab their nuts while celebrating, oblivious to the flaring tempers around them.
Afterward Hakeem is upstairs playing video games with his 12-year-old cousin when there’s banging on the front door. He opens it to find a 10-year-old boy from up the block claiming Hakeem’s cousin hit him in the face. Hakeem tells the boy his cousin has been upstairs all afternoon, and shuts the door. Two minutes later there’s more banging and another accusation of assault levied against the cousin. Again, Hakeem shuts the door.
This happens three more times until Hakeem is out in the street stepping to the little kid and his friends. Hakeem is frustrated. His buttons are getting pushed. He’s sick of his neighbors, and doesn’t give a fuck anymore if escalating the situation isn’t a smart thing to do.
Though he doesn’t know it, Hakeem has become a marked man on the block. After he disappears back into the house the neighbors call for his head in response to his utter lack of respect.
More kids bang on his front door. They throw a basketball against the board that covers the house’s shattered front window. Parents scream from the adjoining stoops, joining in the fracas.
Lamar appears. He has a gun, and he wants to make a statement. He sticks the gun in the ample space between the narrow board covering the front window and its frame. He has his whole hand inside the house, panning the gun across the living room. He wants Shawn to know this isn’t a game.
Shawn hurries the kids into the basement. Ramon pulls out his cell phone.
At this point the details get sketchy.
Ramon calls his boy Spike. Spike carries a gun. Ramon tells Spike what’s going on, and asks Spike to come get his back. Ramon fears for his family. Lamar doesn’t fire the gun, but withdraws it from the window and backs away, satisfied with his taunt.
Shawn calls the cops. Shawn never calls the cops, and does so now only out of fear for the lives of her children. Within minutes there are two cruisers on the block.
For a moment things ebb. Shawn, Ramon, Hakeem and children leave the house.
They’ve decided to go to a relative’s apartmentuntil things die down.
The cops are talking about Golden Girls reruns with the neighbors across the street, whom they know from previous calls.
The family slinks toward Allegheny Avenue, where Spike waits with his gun, offering protection from the mob that has formed behind Lamar.
Lamar tails them, calling for Hakeem’s head.
The cops don’t follow. They assume it’s more of the same old Hurley Street bullshit. They let Shawn know this as she backs away and starts to walk.
A brawl breaks out on the corner of Hurley and Allegheny. Seven guys converge on Hakeem, swinging fists. Hakeem swings back, blindly throwing his arms. And just like that, it happens.
Gunshots.
The crowd peels away. Lamar’s on the ground, shot twice in the back. The cops break away from their idle talk to scoop up Spike and Ramon.
Shawn, Hakeem and the children watch as they’re driven off in the back of police cruisers before hightailing it to a relative’s house.
Up next: retaliation.
With Shawn gone, the angry mob descends on her house. Lamar’s younger brother kicks the back door off its hinges, then unlocks the front. Neighbors stream in. Furniture is upended, cushions torn open. Big holes are punched in the walls, revealing wooden slats behind the plaster. All the windows in the house are shattered, showering more glass on the sidewalk. The refrigerator is bashed in; its shelves dangle at odd angles. The doors to the new kitchen cabinets have been ripped off.
Upstairs, it’s worse. Someone takes a sledgehammer to the toilet. Huge holes are put in the walls. A TV is thrown through a second-story window in the rear of the house, landing in a cascade of glass on top of the kiddie pool. The children’s clothes follow. The computer Hakeem used to obsessively check his MySpace page gets carted out and relocated across the street.
The next morning the shooting is on the news.
No details are given about the buildup to the shooting or the carnage that ensued. Just another teenager shot on Allegheny Avenue. In the morning newspaper the story takes up all of 10 lines.
The following day Hurley Street is triumphant. The neighbors congratulate each other on Ramon’s arrest and the house getting fucked up real proper. They still vow to hunt down Hakeem, who’s hiding.
Shawn’s landlord arrives on the scene to survey the damage, and is brought to tears by what he finds. During the night someone smeared shit over the living room walls.
The landlord can’t process what he sees. His contractors board up every possible entrance to the house before they leave. It doesn’t really matter much. There’s no more window glass to break, and nothing left in the house worth stealing.
Later that afternoon Hakeem and Shawn surreptitiously cruise the neighborhood. They stay off Hurley Street but get close enough. They’ve come to check on their mother’s house, which is nearby. They’re worried the Hurley Street folks know where she lives. Shawn’s mother’s house is untouched. Shawn and Hakeem stay crouched low in their seats, worried they might be spotted.
Soon afterward Shawn’s landlord says he’s suffering from depression. He calls on his faith, asking the Lord why evil people do what they do. He prays that Jesus will help him understand, and restore his hope for humanity.
Two weeks later Shawn wants to go back to Hurley to open the house up and claim what’s left of her meager life.
There are two cruisers parked in front of the house when Shawn and Hakeem arrive. Crowds gather to watch. Mona is sitting two stoops down, having a sober moment. Her eyes are clear, their whites restored.
“I’ll be off this block soon,” she says. “I won’t be around here too much longer.”
She’s not serving lunches today. There isn’t even a cooler with ice and juice boxes.
She looks at the surrounding houses, and shakes her head.
The whole block is now destroyed.
Six more houses had their windows blasted out, their interiors gutted and graffitied. Hurley Street looks like a war zone, now literally. Rough neighborhoods are compared to war zones all the time. You hear them called Beirut.
Usually it’s an overstatement. This time it’s not.
Hurley Street looks like tanks rolled past, firing at random. The destruction is inexplicable, a product of bestial rage. This is madness. This is a place forsaken by society, forsaken by its own people.
The hopelessness of it all is unbearable.
Jeff Deeney is a freelance writer in Philadelphia who covers urban poverty and drug culture. Comments on this story can be sent to letters@philadelphiaweekly.com
Epilogue
It’s a month later, and Shawn says Ramon’s still in jail. He was transferred upstate to Graterford because the county lockup is overcrowded. Turns out Lamar was grazed in the shooting. He bounced back and hit the streets again a couple days later.
Shawn thinks Ramon will be released after the charges are dropped. The likelihood of Lamar going to court and bearing witness against him are diminished now that she says Lamar got out of the hospital and went straight to prison a couple days later for beating up his mother. Lamar already missed a court date, causing Ramon’s case to be continued. Shawn thinks Ramon will be home by December.
The rest of Lamar’s family still lives on Hurley Street despite the fact they were evicted not long after the blowout. It looks like they intend to squat until the sheriff slaps a lock on the front door. Maybe then, once Lamar and his crew have moved on, Hurley Street will see some peace.
Showdown on Hurley Street
Events on what may be the city’s worst block provide a stark glimpse into a Philly many Philadelphians never see. One former resident survived to tell the tale.
by Jeff Deeney
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/images/issues/2007-08-22/large/img_15286_cover.jpg
Photographs by Jeff Fusco
Hurley Street—a tiny West Kensington side street between C and D just north of Allegheny, where residents park their cars halfway on the sidewalk—is so narrow you can stand on one side and spit on to the other.
The margin of error on streets this size is razor thin, and drivers here tend not to take much care. A lot of cars on Hurley get clipped, which is why so many are missing side mirrors. There’s no reason to drive down Hurley unless you’re here to cop a bag of wet, weed or Xanies. But then most of the buyers are locals on foot looking for nickels and dimes.
Hurley Street, say cops who work North Philadelphia, may be the worst block in the city. Most of its 100 or so residents say they’d leave if they could.
Most Hurley Street residents rent the squat two-story brick row homes they live in. The houses are worth about $13,000 each.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/images/issues/2007-08-22/large/img_15286_coverhurle_1.jpg
You can rent a three-bedroom on Hurley for $500 to $600 a month. Today five properties on the block stand empty with “FOR SALE” signs hanging from their facades. Many have been on the market for months, and some for longer. There are five boarded-up abandoned properties on the block too, one of which is tagged with scrawled black graffiti that reads “SMOKE, SMOKE.”
The racial makeup on the 3200 block of Hurley skews black, but there are Latin and white families too. Because people live on top of each other here, their lives spill onto the sidewalk, particularly in summer, when the treeless block heats up like a brick oven.
Few people on Hurley work. Most live on supplemental security income or welfare, or share in some kind of black-market revenue. People hang out 24/7. On Hurley Street, one family’s drama is every family’s drama. In fact drama may be the only thing on Hurley that’s not in short supply.
The most recent Hurley Street drama begins with the arrival of a new family—a young man from North Philadelphia named Ramon, his proud roughneck girl Shawn, their two daughters ages 2 and 5, and Shawn’s younger brother Hakeem.
They’ve come to Hurley because they want to get out from under Shawn’s mother.She “irks her life,” Shawn says. Ramon doesn’t get along with her either.
They’ve also come to Hurley Street because all they can afford is Hurley Street. The house they’re moving into has been vacant so long the landlord is grateful for any rent. Shawn and Ramon know the block is rough, but rough is all they’ve known. “Ain’t nothing here I ain’t seen,” Shawn says.
Ramon and Shawn are no saints. Ramon has priors for holding weed, having guns without permits, forgery, bad checks and drug dealing. Still, he’s soft spoken and good looking with a big, disarming smile, and you want to like and trust him despite his past. He’s now working construction for a relative.
Shawn struggles with anger that can flare into blind rage. She’s lanky and long-legged, and sucks on the knuckle of her index finger in between blurted hard-to-follow rapid-fire sentences.
Shawn also likes to fight—and she’s good at it. She says her mother used her like a trained attack dog on the streets as a kid, siccing her on troublemaking neighborhood women. When you tell her fighting is bad, she smiles slyly. She got fired from the Checkers at Second and Lehigh for fighting on the job, but hopes to start soon at the McDonald’s next door to it.
Ramon and Shawn’s children are little dollops of smiling sweetness. They like to splash in the kiddie pool Ramon has set up on the small square concrete slab that is their backyard. Shawn has a tattoo of a Hershey’s Kiss on her right forearm—a tribute to her daughter. A banner bearing her oldest daughter’s name waves from the piece of candy. She thinks her daughter is like a little piece of chocolate delight.
The couple’s eldest daughter, all of 5 years old, wears braids that sometimes unravel into a giant Afro that forms a dark halo over her tiny head. She wears tattered tank tops and frayed knee-length skirts that always seem to need washing, and prefers to walk around barefoot, even on the sidewalk, which rarely gets swept. She sucks on Fla-Vor-Ice, drinks Little Hugs and doesn’t have a taste for much of anything other than sugar.
When she stands on the block squinting with the sun in her eyes, she looks like a 1930s photograph of a Dust Bowl prairie child.
The neighbors on Hurley across the street from Ramon and Shawn are the primary source of the block’s insanity. Shawn says there’s drug activity in and around the house, but it’s hard to say exactly what happens behind the closed doors. Sometimes desperate-looking addicts come by to bang on the front window. If someone doesn’t immediately respond, the addict will start to shout, calling up to the second story.
Living in the house are a mother and her two sons. The mother is an obese woman with unkempt hair who wears ill-fitting, filthy clothes. The boys are teenagers—14 and 16, though the 16-year-old looks 26. His name is Lamar.
The boys wear white tank tops that expose snaking tattoos memorializing dead friends. They have wide eyes that stare hard at anyone on the block they don’t know. Shawn says they smoke dust and take Xanies on a daily basis. If you ask their mother why they don’t go to school, she’ll tell you they do whatever the fuck they want. Then she’ll tell you to shut the fuck up and stay out of her business.
Hurley Street has a block captain named Mona. Mona’s a tall, stick-thin woman who’s missing one of her two front teeth. She eats barbecue potato chips from a bag for breakfast, and claims to run a recovery house for women. It’s a doubtful claim, considering how high she looks most days.
Jailbirds: Some recent Hurley Street residents are now behind bars.
If you ask her what she does as block captain, her eyes roll back, revealing a sickly jaundiced yellow, and her knees dip, like the energy necessary to answer the question has sapped her strength. Then she’ll lick salty red dye from her fingertips. “Excuse me,” she’ll say. “I am not right in the mind this morning.”
It seems there’s always a wild, frenetic energy on Hurley Street. Standing in the center of it is like being in the eye of a tornado. The chaos whirls around noisily before disappearing, only to touch down at the other end of the block moments later. Little kids on the block, seemingly oblivious to everything, throw footballs over the dealers, and then run them back past the addicts.
Between 10 and 4 in summer, the block is roped off as part of the city’s Summer Food Service Program that alleges to provide “an average of 50,000 meals per day to recreation centers, playgrounds, playstreets, summer camps, parks, houses of worship, community organizations, schools and daycare centers throughout the city of Philadelphia.”
A lot of narrow side streets in West Kensington get roped off in the summer. This aggravates the cops, who think the neighbors use the ropes to keep patrol cars out.
Mona serves lunches maybe three out of every five days. The lunches come in black plastic containers divided into sections like TV dinners. In each container is a sandwich and what looks like applesauce or vanilla pudding. On some days there are no lunches—only an Igloo cooler with juice boxes on ice. And some days there’s nothing.
The block gets roped off anyway.
When Hurley Street is roped off, the only way to get on the block is to walk.
Walking the worst block in the city from end to end is an intense experience. There are dried piles of feces left by the feral cats and dogs that skulk everywhere. Flies rise up and buzz around your face as you walk past. There’s shattered glass everywhere, long and jagged pieces, from house windows hit by projectiles.
Young Latin mothers blast salsa and reggaeton from living room stereos while their children play on the dirty sidewalk barefoot, wearing only diapers. They don’t speak English and won’t make eye contact. The black families won’t either. They blast rap music from boom boxes in second-story windows.
If you keep walking, you see more children in diapers tiptoeing around the shattered glass and dried cat shit. The only one who regularly says hello is the old head perched on a stoop halfway down the block who drinks malt liquor from a brown bag for breakfast.
The first night Shawn and Ramon spend on the block their front window gets busted. Nobody claims to know who threw what, despite the fact the stoops are mobbed with people night and day. It would appear a case of simple jealousy.
Shawn’s landlord installed a $200 cabinet made of unfinished wood from Lowe’s before they moved in, and those on the block with the same landlord got nothing.
Shawn and Ramon’s landlord is tall and black with a lumbering gait. He works out of an office in Center City, and oversees a number of properties in Kensington, including the house across the street from Shawn and Ramon. He’s not a slumlord, though it’s hard to dodge the accusation with the properties he oversees.
This street wasn’t like this before, the landlord assures you. The changes it’s undergone are far beyond his control.
He installed the cabinets for Shawn and Ramon because he thought they were worth the investment. He won’t make any renovations of the house across the street because its residents are late with the rent and the cops are always at the door. He suspects the tenants of drug dealing and would like to evict but can’t bring himself to put them on the street, no matter how much he dislikes them.
Was the broken window a message intended for the landlord? Or to show Shawn and Ramon how things work on Hurley Street? Hard to say with no witnesses coming forward. But the broken window has set things in motion. The ball is rolling now, and there’s no way to stop it.
On her family’s second day on Hurley Street, according to Shawn, the neighbors start dumping garbage on their front steps. Shawn and Ramon rise up at this display of disrespect, talking loud at the neighbors from their stoop to let them know they aren’t scared. Shawn lets the young girls on the block know she doesn’t play, and would fight anyone at any time.
Shawn’s younger brother Hakeem—or “Young Cannon,” as he calls himself—doesn’t help by talking sweet stuff to the same girls after his sister disappears into the house. The mothers and brothers of the girls watch closely.
Soon a full-blown beef is in the works. Lamar comes from the house across the street to let Shawn and Ramon know the official Hurley Street rules. He tells them he doesn’t like them turning the lights off at night, and demands they keep the shades up 24/7. He suspects Ramon and Shawn are informants, and that when the lights are off they’re watching his house. Shawn and Ramon tell Lamar they’ll have their lights any damn way they want them. They take offense at the implication of snitching.
Shawn and Ramon also think their house was a stash spot before they arrived. The house directly south of theirs—the one that’s sported a “FOR SALE” sign forever—is one of the block’s many unoccupied structures.
The windows are shattered, and there are more long, jagged shards of glass piled up on the sidewalk in front. It’s become the new stash spot. Lamar and some Latin boys on the block have taken over the house, and are using it to sell weed and wet.
It’s now a week into life on Hurley Street, and Shawn and Ramon report things are getting seriously crazy. The boys on the block are throwing quarter sticks of dynamite into the empty houses late at night. The dynamite echoes in the dark like bomb blasts. The children can’t sleep. This seems far-fetched, but a look inside one of the many shattered windows reveals scorch marks on the carpet.
“How can we raise kids here?” Shawn asks. “We can’t even let them sit on the stoop. They have to stay in the kiddie pool in the back by the alley.” Shawn says she looked out her kitchen window one afternoon and saw a couple of little kids pissing in the pool through the fence from the next yard over.
A storm brews, but Mona won’t take sides. But in an attempt to adhere to her duties as block captain, she’s signed up Shawn’s two daughters for free lunches. Shawn is suspicious of the lunches, and won’t let the girls eat them.
Everyone on the block knows something is going down. Details are scarce, and there are different versions of what goes on at night. This just happens to be Shawn’s.
The block seems to be getting sicker, rotting from the inside in the summer heat. And the heat is relentless—humid, murky and oppressive. More windows get broken, and more boards get nailed up over broken windows.
Lamar is now controlling not only the house next to Shawn’s, but the house next to that one as well. He comes and goes between them freely.
He ducks into the house two doors down, and emerges breathless, pacing in circles around parked cars. He’s fixated on something in his mouth, and stares at it in the side mirror of a beat-up SUV.
He pulls his lips back, gets close to the glass and inspects his gums. After he’s finished staring at whatever it is he thinks he sees, he starts to walk away from the mirror.
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/images/issues/2007-08-22/large/img_15286_coverhouse_2.jpg
Now boarding: Neighbors trashed Shawn's house, rendering it uninhabitable.
But he turns back, obsessed, unable to look away, probing with a Q-tip he pulls from his pocket. A daily diet of dust and Xanax will make anyone obsessive. And Shawn says she’s seen 16-year-old Lamar with a gun.
The big Hurley Street blowout starts with a basketball game. Hakeem and Ramon are playing pickup with the other boys on the block at a portable hoop. They usually play at the McVeigh Rec Center at D and Ontario, but tonight they’re convinced to compete at home. The Hurley Street regulars intend to humiliate Ramon and Hakeem in front of the whole block.
But instead Ramon and Hakeem make their opponents look bad in front of their girls and moms. Ramon and Hakeem grab their nuts while celebrating, oblivious to the flaring tempers around them.
Afterward Hakeem is upstairs playing video games with his 12-year-old cousin when there’s banging on the front door. He opens it to find a 10-year-old boy from up the block claiming Hakeem’s cousin hit him in the face. Hakeem tells the boy his cousin has been upstairs all afternoon, and shuts the door. Two minutes later there’s more banging and another accusation of assault levied against the cousin. Again, Hakeem shuts the door.
This happens three more times until Hakeem is out in the street stepping to the little kid and his friends. Hakeem is frustrated. His buttons are getting pushed. He’s sick of his neighbors, and doesn’t give a fuck anymore if escalating the situation isn’t a smart thing to do.
Though he doesn’t know it, Hakeem has become a marked man on the block. After he disappears back into the house the neighbors call for his head in response to his utter lack of respect.
More kids bang on his front door. They throw a basketball against the board that covers the house’s shattered front window. Parents scream from the adjoining stoops, joining in the fracas.
Lamar appears. He has a gun, and he wants to make a statement. He sticks the gun in the ample space between the narrow board covering the front window and its frame. He has his whole hand inside the house, panning the gun across the living room. He wants Shawn to know this isn’t a game.
Shawn hurries the kids into the basement. Ramon pulls out his cell phone.
At this point the details get sketchy.
Ramon calls his boy Spike. Spike carries a gun. Ramon tells Spike what’s going on, and asks Spike to come get his back. Ramon fears for his family. Lamar doesn’t fire the gun, but withdraws it from the window and backs away, satisfied with his taunt.
Shawn calls the cops. Shawn never calls the cops, and does so now only out of fear for the lives of her children. Within minutes there are two cruisers on the block.
For a moment things ebb. Shawn, Ramon, Hakeem and children leave the house.
They’ve decided to go to a relative’s apartmentuntil things die down.
The cops are talking about Golden Girls reruns with the neighbors across the street, whom they know from previous calls.
The family slinks toward Allegheny Avenue, where Spike waits with his gun, offering protection from the mob that has formed behind Lamar.
Lamar tails them, calling for Hakeem’s head.
The cops don’t follow. They assume it’s more of the same old Hurley Street bullshit. They let Shawn know this as she backs away and starts to walk.
A brawl breaks out on the corner of Hurley and Allegheny. Seven guys converge on Hakeem, swinging fists. Hakeem swings back, blindly throwing his arms. And just like that, it happens.
Gunshots.
The crowd peels away. Lamar’s on the ground, shot twice in the back. The cops break away from their idle talk to scoop up Spike and Ramon.
Shawn, Hakeem and the children watch as they’re driven off in the back of police cruisers before hightailing it to a relative’s house.
Up next: retaliation.
With Shawn gone, the angry mob descends on her house. Lamar’s younger brother kicks the back door off its hinges, then unlocks the front. Neighbors stream in. Furniture is upended, cushions torn open. Big holes are punched in the walls, revealing wooden slats behind the plaster. All the windows in the house are shattered, showering more glass on the sidewalk. The refrigerator is bashed in; its shelves dangle at odd angles. The doors to the new kitchen cabinets have been ripped off.
Upstairs, it’s worse. Someone takes a sledgehammer to the toilet. Huge holes are put in the walls. A TV is thrown through a second-story window in the rear of the house, landing in a cascade of glass on top of the kiddie pool. The children’s clothes follow. The computer Hakeem used to obsessively check his MySpace page gets carted out and relocated across the street.
The next morning the shooting is on the news.
No details are given about the buildup to the shooting or the carnage that ensued. Just another teenager shot on Allegheny Avenue. In the morning newspaper the story takes up all of 10 lines.
The following day Hurley Street is triumphant. The neighbors congratulate each other on Ramon’s arrest and the house getting fucked up real proper. They still vow to hunt down Hakeem, who’s hiding.
Shawn’s landlord arrives on the scene to survey the damage, and is brought to tears by what he finds. During the night someone smeared shit over the living room walls.
The landlord can’t process what he sees. His contractors board up every possible entrance to the house before they leave. It doesn’t really matter much. There’s no more window glass to break, and nothing left in the house worth stealing.
Later that afternoon Hakeem and Shawn surreptitiously cruise the neighborhood. They stay off Hurley Street but get close enough. They’ve come to check on their mother’s house, which is nearby. They’re worried the Hurley Street folks know where she lives. Shawn’s mother’s house is untouched. Shawn and Hakeem stay crouched low in their seats, worried they might be spotted.
Soon afterward Shawn’s landlord says he’s suffering from depression. He calls on his faith, asking the Lord why evil people do what they do. He prays that Jesus will help him understand, and restore his hope for humanity.
Two weeks later Shawn wants to go back to Hurley to open the house up and claim what’s left of her meager life.
There are two cruisers parked in front of the house when Shawn and Hakeem arrive. Crowds gather to watch. Mona is sitting two stoops down, having a sober moment. Her eyes are clear, their whites restored.
“I’ll be off this block soon,” she says. “I won’t be around here too much longer.”
She’s not serving lunches today. There isn’t even a cooler with ice and juice boxes.
She looks at the surrounding houses, and shakes her head.
The whole block is now destroyed.
Six more houses had their windows blasted out, their interiors gutted and graffitied. Hurley Street looks like a war zone, now literally. Rough neighborhoods are compared to war zones all the time. You hear them called Beirut.
Usually it’s an overstatement. This time it’s not.
Hurley Street looks like tanks rolled past, firing at random. The destruction is inexplicable, a product of bestial rage. This is madness. This is a place forsaken by society, forsaken by its own people.
The hopelessness of it all is unbearable.
Jeff Deeney is a freelance writer in Philadelphia who covers urban poverty and drug culture. Comments on this story can be sent to letters@philadelphiaweekly.com
Epilogue
It’s a month later, and Shawn says Ramon’s still in jail. He was transferred upstate to Graterford because the county lockup is overcrowded. Turns out Lamar was grazed in the shooting. He bounced back and hit the streets again a couple days later.
Shawn thinks Ramon will be released after the charges are dropped. The likelihood of Lamar going to court and bearing witness against him are diminished now that she says Lamar got out of the hospital and went straight to prison a couple days later for beating up his mother. Lamar already missed a court date, causing Ramon’s case to be continued. Shawn thinks Ramon will be home by December.
The rest of Lamar’s family still lives on Hurley Street despite the fact they were evicted not long after the blowout. It looks like they intend to squat until the sheriff slaps a lock on the front door. Maybe then, once Lamar and his crew have moved on, Hurley Street will see some peace.