By Theo Francis
Daily Record
PATERSON — A tower from the Alexander Hamilton
housing complex rises behind 68-year-old Irene
Elvin’s backyard, one of several in the development.
When she moved there as a child more than five decades
ago, the towers were not there. Neither was the bustling
drug trade that flourishes in the parking lot between her
yard and the buildings.
Back then, when she was 11, there was little traffic
on East 31st Street, which runs in front of her house.
Back then, the green house was flanked by empty lots.
"You never had to have your doors closed,"
she said. Pictures from her childhood show the street
with flower-strewn lots and her, wearing a white cowboy
hat, on horseback.
Now, Route 80 is barely a minute away, an artery to
carry a steady supply of customers to feed the heroin and
cocaine market. The buyers often park on her street
before they walk the few yards to make their purchases.
The block is irrevocably changed, a place for
prostitutes and addicts where she remembers horses and
flowers. But Elvin, like her neighbors, holds on to the
remnants of the neighborhood through compromise and sheer
determination.
Once, gardening in her backyard, her dog Peppy began
barking. A shower of glass and bottles from the other
side of her double fence answered. She took the dog
inside, and stayed there herself.
"I had to stop, I couldn’t do any
more," she said.
Some years ago, when her mother was still living in
the house, they tore down a dilapidated garage that local
youths were using as a roof-top clubhouse. She has had
rose bushes and azaleas stolen from her front lawn. But
when she heard four gunshots on a Sunday night this
month, then another two, she called the police.
Mostly, Elvin just stays inside.
"I put my alarm on and I don’t hear anything
from anyone," she said. "It’s getting
terrible around here."
Across the street and a few houses farther away from
the drug market, Sidney Barrier is feistier.
"I chase ’em," the 68-year-old says.
"I say, ‘I don’t care what you do over
there, I don’t go over there. Don’t you come
over here.’"
Both legs amputated because of circulatory problems,
the retired professional boxer says he takes no guff from
strangers who try to park in his handicapped spot, hit
him up for change or try to scam him into letting them
inside his home. He still trims the front lawn of the
house he bought 13 years ago with hand shears, walking
himself across the grass on his hands. In his backyard,
he lifts 300 pounds on a weight bench.
"Some of them say they’re going to get
me," he said. "I don’t worry about
it."
The dealers are so bold — so uncaring, perhaps
— that they’ll approach anyone, he said.
"Every time I go out," he said, "they
hit me up for some money, or (ask) do I want drugs."
As he talks, cars occasionally drive by, slow and stop at
the end of the block, near the housing-project parking
lot.
Despite his bravado, Barrier is careful.
"I can’t say they’re not dangerous, but
they’re most dangerous when they have a crowd,"
he said. "They will hurt you when they’ve got
10 or 20 together."
That threat is most frightening to those who, unlike
him, did not grow up in Paterson, Barrier said.
"They are afraid to call the cops," he said.
"They are afraid (dealers) are going to come through
and blacken your eye or break all your windows."
Joseph Brown, 52, lives across 31st Street from
Barrier, in a house he bought 15 years ago. He is more
wary than his neighbor, though he, too, has tried to hold
out against the changing neighborhood.
A dozen years ago, as crack cocaine spread and drug
dealing and violence in the neighborhood reached a fever
pitch, he grew scared to walk the few feet from his
narrow driveway to his house a night. He installed a
motion sensitive light.
"When the light came on," he said,
"they took bottles and tried to break the
light," throwing them over his back fence into his
driveway. The rain of glass broke his windshield.
Dealers sometimes gather at the other end of the
block, where it intersects with 22nd Avenue, he said.
Before they got to know his car, they sometimes swarmed
it as he turned into the street.
"They run to you and think you’re coming to
buy from them," Brown said. "They charge the
car. That scared me."
Even beyond the fear they inspire, the drug trade
brings endless nuisance, from steady traffic to the
hundreds of glassine envelopes and other litter peppering
the block, Brown said. His street is one way heading
toward the housing development, but many customers
don’t know that and barrel up the street the wrong
way. Still, few customers linger to cause problems.
"Once they buy whatever, they take off,"
Brown said. "They don’t even (use) it here.
They just go."
The parking lot is one of what police estimate to be
90 to 100 open-air drug markets in Paterson, which has
150,000 residents. Police say crime in the neighborhood
by the Alexander Hamilton project probably hasn’t
changed much. Statistics show a big jump in recent
arrests, rising from 95 in 1994 to 319 so far this year,
Lt. Ray Benedetto of the Paterson vice squad said. That
has more to do with the police than the criminals,
however.
"A lot of it depends on our manpower and the
amount of time we have," Benedetto said.
"We’re a 25-man squad, and it's a big
city."
None of the three neighbors have qualms about calling
authorities when necessary, though they say they have
learned to pick their battles. All call the police when
the pulsing music gets too loud late at night, or when
the small crowds that gather at each end of the block
become too threatening. Brown sometimes calls the mayor;
Elvin calls her city council member.
"We stick together pretty good," Barrier
said. And sometimes the neighborhood can do more than
call the police.
Both he and Brown fondly remember Bill, a man who once
lived next to Barrier. Now in a nursing home, he was spry
and energetic. He would wear a radio at his belt and walk
up and down the street, telling loiterers to move along.
He looked for all the world like a cop, Brown said.
"He used to get a kick out of doing that."
The neighborhood has improved since the height of the
crack boom, in large part thanks to increased police
patrols, Brown said.
"They used to raid that (parking lot) so much,
the last year or so it’s been quiet," he said.
"It’s much better."
The parking lot is busy enough. On a recent Monday
night, police staked it out for two hours, arresting
eight heroin and crack customers, three of whom lived or
grew up in Morris County. At times, four dealers ran to
meet each buyer.
On the grounds of the Alexander Hamilton complex,
residents say their story is different that that of their
neighbors on 31st Avenue, though few are willing to talk
candidly.
"You’ve got people who want to come down
here and sit on a bench and watch their kids, and they
can’t," Sherman Reams, 29, said in a patch of
morning sunlight in the parking lot, on his way to a
construction job one day recently. Talking about
drug-dealing, he occasionally nods his head toward some
young men clustered at the lot’s far end.
"The dealers have respect for the grown-ups and
the kids," he said. "They don’t deal in
front of the kids, or they say, ‘That’s my
mother over there. Don’t do it in front of
her.’ "
Most of the time, the dealers are just interested in
making money. The customers just want to buy and leave.
Most of the time.
"You have to be more cautious and careful,"
one 33-year-old man who has lived at Alexander Hamilton
for three years. "It’s an environment where
anything can happen at any time. You live until you can
do better."
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theo@theowire.com
