Razing Hell

Sixteen years after the city leveled it, Stella Street remains a junkie wasteland.

by Frank Rubino

Although she could use a good scrubbing, she’s pretty, this petite woman in a black leather jacket trying to flag down cars near Germantown and Indiana by waving her crutches at them.

“Works!” she hollers repeatedly. “Works!”

When a stranger approaches, she admits she’s selling packaged syringes she gets for free from a van that exchanges the new “works” for old ones in an attempt to thwart HIV and hepatitis. She needs the crutches, she says, because she injured her leg in a car accident. She needs the money because she’s a heroin addict.

She sells herself too. “But no sex,” she says. “Strictly head.”

She’s 34 and has four sons. Talking about them makes her feel bad. “I’m not a bad person,” she explains. “I just got a drug problem.”

She won’t give her name, but promises to come up with a pseudonym. Before her, across Germantown Avenue, the spruced-up Fairhill Burial Grounds look picturesque on this sunny spring afternoon. Behind her, an expanse of flattened fallow earth under a green sign that reads “Stella St.” looks ghostly and forlorn.

“Yeah, I remember the drug houses that used to be here,” the woman says, though she says she never frequented any because she didn’t become an addict until after the city had flattened them.

Glancing down at her green T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Unlucky,” she grins. “Hey, call me that in the article,” she says. “Call me Unlucky.”

A white minivan brakes on Germantown Avenue, its driver-side window descending. Unlucky hustles over and starts negotiating.

It was a major story, played out before a throng of print and electronic media.

A big deal.

Open question: Neighbors can’t help doubting promises

Officials from the Police Department, the district attorney’s office and the Department of Licenses and Inspections targeted Stella Street for demolition after learning it had become a grotesque strip mall of shooting galleries and abandominiums populated by a colony of junkies, most of them addicted to heroin.

Not only that, but hordes of working-class addicts, many on the way home from their jobs, would routinely drive to the Stella galleries to shoot up among “professionals.”

For small fees they’d gain entrance, obtain clean works, heroin-cooking utensils and even the assistance of “doctors” who’d expertly inject them if they had trouble accessing veins.

Sometimes the cars would back up onto Germantown Avenue.

Which isn’t to say business always ran smoothly.

Longtime neighborhood residents such as 70-year-old Joan Berry, who’s lived on nearby Monmouth Street since 1961, once regarded pre-demolition Stella as a street to walk far around.

Eager to get home one afternoon, she hurried past Stella rather than walk around it, and watched as two men carried an overdosing addict from a drug house and propped him against a car.

“I thought they were gonna help him,” Berry says. “But instead they patted him down, went inside his pockets, even slid his shoes and socks off. They peeled him like a banana. Then they just dropped him and said, ‘Somebody better call 911.’ Then they went back inside.”

Eloise Valentine, 75, once lived on Orleans Street, directly opposite Stella. For years she maintained a large garden at the end of her block in which she grew beans, peas and other vegetables. The plot was a source of neighborhood pride, a nice-to-look-at patch of land in stark contrast to all the unpleasantness.

It would’ve looked nicer had it not been perpetually littered with syringes.

“Once I was at my window,” remembers Valentine, who now lives near 25th and Lehigh. “This man with no legs comes rolling out of one of the houses in a wheelchair. He had a needle in here [one stump] and one in here [his other stump]. That’s when I said, ‘I gotta get outta here.’”

It was anecdotes like these, as well as relentless phone calls and letters from people like the Rev. Clarence Hester, a Baptist minister and longtime activist whose attempts to revitalize the neighborhood predate the demolitions, that finally brought the City Hall suits and bulldozers to Stella Street in ’92.

Two to tango: Bennett Levin (left) and Rev. Clarence Hester blame the city for forgetting Stella Street

Then-police commissioner Willie Williams, DA Lynne Abraham and other bigwigs showed up that late winter morning to speak about the toll drugs exact on communities. Then-L&I commissioner Bennett Levin supervised the demolitions.

People like Berry and Valentine rejoiced in what looked to be the dawning of a new day for their ugly-duckling neighborhood.

“I thought all them politicians was out there because they was planning what they was gonna build back up,” says Valentine.

“People was feeling hopeful,” agrees Berry.

Hopeful the city would not only redevelop Stella Street, but expand the project outward. No one had promised that would happen, but no one dreamed the opposite would happen: that city officials would simply knock the houses down, clean up and disappear.

But 16 years later it appears as though that’s exactly what happened.

“Our community has been neglected by the past two administrations,” says Hester, who isn’t overly optimistic that Michael Nutter’s will be any different.

“It’s been 16 years now and I can easily see it becoming 20 and beyond.”

At the same time, Levin says Rendell’s inaction didn’t surprise him.

The contoversial ex-L&I commissioner, who resigned from the administration in December 1995 because he “couldn’t take the bullshit anymore,” today looks back on Stella Street as a publicity stunt orchestrated to polish the image of a new mayor with higher political aims.

“Nobody really cared about the neighborhood,” Levin says. “The mayor didn’t care, because those people really didn’t vote. The only person who cared was Rev. Hester. He was their only advocate.”

Through the years, Levin, 68, retains a signature mental snapshot of the day: a teddy bear, discovered in one of the houses, with syringes stuck in it.

A junkies’ pincushion.

As far as the operation’s nuts and bolts are concerned, Levin says everything went smoothly after police raided the houses, brought 28 people out and arrested them on drug charges. Following an inspection of the houses for boobytraps, he says, “a bulldozer went down one side of the street and up the other side.”

After the dust cleared, only a handful of legitimately owned houses remained. (Today only one sealed house stands at the end of the block farthest from Germantown Avenue.) One of the dwellings temporarily spared belonged to Mark Carter, then 31, who’d actually been trying to raise a family amid the depravity.

Levin ended up personally brokering a deal whereby Carter was able to swap his shabby Stella Street home for a newly renovated city-owned row house on Eighth near Cambria. The Carters’ daughter Marquitta still lives there.

“Carter was a legitimate guy,” Levin says. “He had a deed to his [Stella Street] house. He lived there with his wife and two children, and they were lovely people. So we moved them.

“And the DA, Lynne Abraham, made a big brouhaha about it, though she had nothing to do with it, okay? But she grabbed it for her own political gain because it’s Philadelphia. It was free sport—grab whatever you can if you have political aspirations.

“You just take it and you run.”

Levin considers Rendell a master at that game.

“Stella Street was just like when he scrubbed the bathrooms in City Hall [days later],” Levin says. “It was like a wild West town, a facade with nothing behind it. He got the publicity out of it and he went on to the next show.

“But like the lady at Wendy’s said, ‘Where’s the beef?’”

Levin, who lives near Washington’s Crossing in Bucks County with his wife Vivian, would seem to regret signing on with the Rendell team.

“I wonder why I took four years of my life and wasted it, because nobody really cared inside that administration. Nobody cared about anything except getting reelected. They held out the promise for something better, but never delivered.”

Responding to Levin’s complaint about Abraham, DA spokesperson Cathie Abookire says, “Lynne has always been known for her involvement with people in all of the neighborhoods, and she feels very sorry that Mr. Levin feels underappreciated.”

As for Rendell, the governor’s press secretary Chuck Ardo says, “Ed Rendell has been widely recognized throughout the commonwealth and the nation for his stunning achievements as mayor of Philadelphia. To claim that his tenure as mayor was more sizzle than steak is ludicrous on its face.”

Eve of destruction: Stella Street resembled a war zone

“That’s where the heroin was really entrenched,” says Werner, commander of the Narcotics Field Unit. “[But] I don’t think of that area today as an area where you buy heroin. You maybe can get it there, but as far as heroin areas, I think of, like, the 2800 block of Mutter Street or Mascher and Cambria.”

Unlucky, on the other hand, thinks of the Stella Street area as a terrific spot for copping heroin today. And, smiling broadly because she just sold the guy in the white minivan 10 syringes for a buck apiece, she’s preparing to cop some right now.

The main brands around these parts, she says, are “Knockout,” available around the corner, and “Blood Diamond,” which you can get outside the deli down at Germantown and Lehigh, the one in which patrons sit at tables and drink Hurricane from paper cups as if it were a bar.

She says a few shooting galleries like those razed on Stella Street still exist in the area. Two or three bucks get you inside. A couple more get you a set of works and a “cooker,” both new. But you can’t stick around long.

“You can stay a few minutes to feel your nod,” she explains, “but after that you got to roll. Ain’t no bummin’ heat or nothin’ like that.”

A handsome, charismatic man of 52, Hester has lived on the 3100 block of Percy Street, a narrow, park-on-the-sidewalk passage several blocks northeast of Stella Street, since 1973.

While most regard his neighborhood as part of Fairhill, he calls it Glenwood, and considers its boundaries Broad to Eighth streets and Glenwood to Lehigh avenues.

Whichever name you prefer, it isn’t pretty.

Crumbling, boarded-up row homes with “KEEP OUT!” signs affixed to them. Broken windows. Trash-strewn lots. Iron-grated porches. Graffiti. RIP murals. Malt liquor bottles. Old tires. Stray cats.

Welcome to Glenwood.

“It’s absolutely an ugly neighborhood,” says Carrie Hartsfield, who’s lived on the 3100 block of Percy for even longer than Hester. “It’s ugly and it’s dirty. When I tell people from other neighborhoods I did some work on my house, sometimes they’ll say, ‘Really? Why?’”

Hartsfield, a retired insurance worker, is sitting in her immaculate living room on a warm spring evening with Hester, Berry and longtime Glenwood Avenue residents Evelyn Colbert and Louise Smith.

They’re reminiscing over a time when their neighborhood looked and felt entirely different. Their eyes are far away.

“When I first moved up here, Stella, Orleans and Monmouth Street was three gorgeous little blocks,” says Berry, who estimates that half the houses on Monmouth are now unoccupied.

In those days Colbert owned a friendly mom-and-pop grocery at 12th and Indiana. A quiet little bar offered respite a block away. Kids jumped double-dutch on well-scrubbed sidewalks. Anyone loitering on a corner risked being called out.

“The whole neighborhood was beautiful at one time,” Hester recalls.

But the crack cocaine explosion of the ’80s changed everything. Glenwood was suddenly the western fringe of the Badlands. And much of its charm promptly vanished.

“When the drugs started coming in, people start ed moving out, started leaving houses to children, leaving houses vacant, and the drug dealers started taking them over,” says Hester, adding that his block was one of the first on which that syndrome played out.

Hester is an actor who’s appeared in commercials, plays and about a dozen low-budget films. When the crack epidemic hit, his flair for the dramatic served Glenwood well.

He led neighbors on anti-drug marches, armed with a bullhorn à la the late Herman Wrice of Mantua Against Drugs. He got in dealers’ faces. And in spite of repeated death threats, he never backed down.

“We set our chairs out every night on the corners right in front of the dealers,” confirms Hartsfield, who doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with Hester. “Rev. Hester was very courageous, yes he was.”

City Councilman Darrell Clarke, whose Fifth District includes Stella Street, remembers encountering Hester for the first time when Clarke was working for then-Fifth District Councilman John Street. The two trekked to Hester’s block (which is actually in the Seventh District) one day after hearing about a disturbance.

“He was on his porch, railing against the drug dealers,” Clarke recalls. “He had the entire block tied up, and the civil affairs police were there because apparently his life had been threatened. He was on his game, hollering into the bullhorn and all that. He had absolutely no fear. And I said, ‘Man, this guy’s crazy.’”

Hester might have appeared crazy, but the Glenwood Community Development Corporation he’d co-founded with Hartsfield in ’88 was effecting change.

Hester says the group’s tactics, coupled with vigilance by 25th District police officers, forced dealers to migrate from the 3000 blocks of Percy and Hutchinson streets across Germantown Avenue to the Stella Street vicinity.

He subsequently helped persuade then-Mayor W. Wilson Goode to raze 82 dilapidated properties, many former drug houses, at Percy and Hutchinson.

Hester, a divorced father of seven and grandfather of 10, held out a vision for the new lots, one that later incorporated Stella Street: a sparkling community center surrounded by affordable houses designed for working families.

But none of that materialized while Goode was in office, and few of Hester’s visions for Glenwood have taken form since, a fact he blames on the Rendell and Street administrations.

From the early ’90s until 2003, officials from both mayors’ offices of Housing and Community Development (OHCD) attended Glenwood Community Development Corporation meetings, Hester says, adding that some pledged support for his plan.

Still, nothing came off, even after the hoopla surrounding the Stella Street demolitions.

“Rendell was all about Penn’s Landing and Center City,” Hester says. “And Street’s department commissioners cared nothing about our neighborhood.”

A long road home: Neighbors wonder if Stella Street

Hester, meanwhile, watched enviously as pockets of new affordable housing sprouted up around Temple University, and in Strawberry Mansion, Brewerytown, Kensington and elsewhere.

“There has been development in North Philly over the past 15 years or so,” he says. “Just not here.”

“It seems like we’re always the ones left out,” adds Louise Smith.

Word that Clarke and OHCD acting director Deborah McColloch say two housing initiatives in Glenwood will break ground soon evokes sarcastic hoots instead of cheers.

“We’ve been told so many different things by so many politicians,” Hartsfield says.

As for Hester, he’s apparently unfazed that one of the developments—a 40-rental unit complex sponsored by the nonprofit Women’s Community Revitalization Project—will reportedly begin going up in May right where he’s long envisioned the community center of his dreams. In fact, he’s penned an overture that reflects either dogged perseverance or, well, denial.

It reads: “Our community does not wish to bash or debase anyone, but we do solicit the support of our political leaders, and encourage any developer that would like to work with our community to consider helping us bring to fruition a full-service community center and affordable housing that would include both ownership and rental.”

“Most of the properties [across the city] that have been demolished over the past quarter-century have not been development sites,” says Kromer, now a senior consultant at Penn’s Institute of Government.

Kromer, whom Bennett Levin remembers as “a really good guy, a gem,” cites weak neighborhood real estate markets and a perpetual scarcity of public funding as the reasons.

As for Hester’s complaint that Rendell gave short shrift to the notion of developing in Glenwood beyond Stella Street, Kromer says the administration gave priority to CDCs that aligned themselves with reliable developers, and formulated strategic neighborhood plans—essentially arguments that their neighborhoods were salvageable.

Glenwood’s CDC, while successful in battling drug dealers and running youth programs, failed to present that sort of case for its housing needs, Hartsfield believes.

Even Hester concedes as much.

“Some of it could be our fault,” he says. “There were different developers, agencies that maybe I should’ve aligned myself with. Maybe I should’ve put myself under their wing.”

Kromer adds that despite Rendell’s reputation for lavishing all his attention on Center City, he supported housing development by groups such as the Association of Puerto Ricans on the March and the Hispanic Association of Contractors and Enterprises in neighborhoods that bordered and mirrored Glenwood.

Street, who served as mayor from January 2000 to this past January, and now teaches urban politics and policy at Temple, similarly defends his community revitalization record in an email interview conducted via his BlackBerry.

“We spent hundreds of millions of dollars and created thousands of new housing opportunities for people,” Street writes, adding that banks and other financial institutions followed his lead and invested millions in mortgages and loans across the city.

“Unfortunately, we probably didn’t do enough in Rev. Hester’s neighborhood,” Street continues. “[But] I assure you I care and the people of my administration care about all neighborhoods including Rev. Hester’s.

“But we could have used another couple hundred million dollars. No way our administration could correct in eight years conditions that accumulated over a 50-year period of neglect.”

Ed Schwartz, founder and president of Center City’s Institute for the Study of Civic Values, which he characterizes as “a center for building community,” says the absence of sufficient federal housing money is a constant reality for cities.

“People think there’s some sort of magic in the city of Philadelphia, that there’s always money around,” says Schwartz, who served as Mayor Wilson Goode’s housing director from ’87 to ’92. “But there’s no magic. Housing development is funded by the federal government. There’s nothing in the city budget for housing. And there never was.”

Schwartz runs a website, bushbudget.com, that spotlights what he views as the federal government’s decreased willingness to financially support communities, including cities, for such things as affordable housing.

“Bush has been on a relentless campaign to eliminate [numerous] federal programs, and his housing cuts have been the most devastating,” Schwartz says.

Adds Kromer: “The competition for public funding isn’t going to get easier with the end of NTI [Street’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative] and the continuing federal budget cuts. The money is going to be even more scarce.”

So is there any hope for Glenwood?

Clarke says there is, and that it’ll start manifesting itself next month when the Women’s Community Revitalization Project initiative breaks ground.

Then sometime over the summer, he adds, the Philadelphia Housing Authority will start constructing 95 new homes on Warnock, Somerset and Cambria streets only blocks from Stella Street. The venture includes retail outlets on Germantown Avenue as well.

“We’ll eventually get to Stella Street,” Clarke says while declining to provide a timeframe. “We’ll get there. Stella Street won’t always look like it does now.”

“I’ll believe it when it happens,” says Carrie Hartsfield.

When he reaches the wooden fence fronting Stella Street, he offers Unlucky a vanilla cookie. His face is freshly scraped and marked by small black scars from past abrasions. He wears a gold hoop in his left ear. He says he’s 51 and has been hooked on heroin since he separated from the Army in the ’70s. “My habit got a habit,” he says with a hopeless laugh.

He struggles to keep his balance while trying to sit on the wooden fence, and admits he’s high right now. His filthy sweat jacket is inscribed with the word “Unique,” and Unlucky says that should be his name in the article.

“We’re both doctors,” she adds proudly after he says they’ve known each other for 12 years. Perhaps Unique’s nod is bringing Unlucky’s jones on, because she’s suddenly acting fidgety and glancing toward Indiana Avenue.

Abruptly she announces she’ll be right back and disappears around the corner, perhaps on her way to snare a bag of “Knockout” that’ll be rushing through her system in minutes.

“That’s my friend, man,” Unique mumbles as he slides yet again off the wooden fence that fronts Stella Street all these years after they knocked the drug houses down.