Circles of Hell in an American City
A stroll through the old neighborhood in Philadelphia where the cherry blossoms are blooming, and people are dying in the street
It was a rather beautiful afternoon in Philadelphia yesterday, the cherry blossoms budding, as is their ancient habit, the air warm in Washington Square Park. Up Fifth Street, I headed to Northern Liberties, where I once lived, to see what’s become of the old neighborhood. Violence and shootings are creeping closer into Northern Liberties from the impoverished areas to its west, while the neighborhood of Kensington, home to the largest open-air drug market in the United States, and a festering wound in the national opioid epidemic, sits several blocks north. And yet, despite all of that, Northern Liberties continues its own kind of transformation, blissfully unaware of its surroundings, or so it seems, as new fitness studios, cooking class kitchens, and boutique storefronts have arrived to cater to the more than 1,500 new luxury housing units built across several immense, amenity-rich complexes with the highest standards of living.
At Fifth and Spring Garden, a couple of blocks south of my old apartment, where I’d once take my two-year-old for challah French toast at the breakfast spot around the corner, the strip of restaurants, as well as my old gym, had been razed and surrounded by fences. The construction on a 105,000-square-foot development was well underway, with the machines pushing dirt underneath the giant crane carrying the pieces of what will become 382 high-end units in a 13-story building. Towering over the small two- and three-story row homes, which had once been the tallest thing in the neighborhood besides the modest manufacturing warehouses that employed thousands of blue-collar residents, the premium housing structure will cover more than 60,000 square feet of retail space to accommodate an Amazon Fresh grocery.
I went north to Girard Avenue, the wide boulevard that served as the neighborhood border with Kensington and its drug-filled streets, and walked east toward the El train stop. Police labor shortages, high law enforcement resignation rates, and the rapid uptick in violent crime had made it increasingly difficult for the public transportation authority, SEPTA, to police the trains. “We are in crisis mode,” the SEPTA Assistant General Manager Kim Scott Heinle wrote last year to city officials, with stations overtaken by drug users, dealers, and violence. One station in Kensington got so bad the city simply closed up its gates, the Inquirer reported, to try to catch up on the “damage caused by urination, human waste, discarded needles, and other debris.”
At the bottom of the steel steps at the El stop, I saw five people counting the change out of a white styrofoam cup. Their clothes were ragged, one was barefoot, and their movements as they thumbed the coins in their hands were exaggerated and slow, in the way of opioid users who have to lug around the weight of their habits. A block up, a woman walked past me, and I overheard her say to her companion, “He was 13 months sober, what else could I have done?” To describe what has happened to Kensington is to speak in terms of the apocalyptic. Last year, the Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro estimated the neighborhood’s drug market is “approaching a billion-dollar enterprise,” with drug corners worth $60,000 a day and some premium blocks earning the dealers a cool million per week.
“The laws that govern drug sales, use, and acceptable behaviors on streets, in park spaces, and even on private property in the rest of Philadelphia very purposefully do not apply here,” a longtime Kensington resident wrote recently. “Here on the block where I live with my wife, drug dealers herd people deep in the throes of addiction like cattle toward the promise of a small amount of free drugs, in hopes that they’ll come back for more. They gather 50 people or more at a time. Sometimes people fight, driven by withdrawal, trauma, and the powerful effects of the drugs themselves. The whole event can appear in minutes.” In 2020, a person died of a drug overdose once every eight hours in Philadelphia on average.
In Kensington, many residents lack a high school degree, and the median income hovers below $17,000. That stands in stark contrast to the core of the city, where almost 80% of residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree.
Back in Northern Liberties, I stop by the Piazza, the most ambitious development project in the neighborhood, which extends over several structures on a 1.1-million-square-foot complex with 1,131 premium dwellings in various stages of loud and messy construction. Their steel frames and exposed beams loom over Second Street, the commercial corridor where patrons try to ignore the noise for the lunch hour at the restaurant tables lined up along the sidewalk.
The Piazza’s Alta building is perhaps the gem of the project, with both penthouse and standard units (two-bedroom floorplans start at $5,695 a month) that offer tilt-and-turn picture windows to emphasize the natural light through the variety of Scandinavian, sleek, and classic interiors. Mayhem may rule the streets seen off in the distance in Kensington, but that might as well be in another country from up on the rooftop pool, where a 20,000-square-foot water surface designed in the fashion of an ancient ruin flows serenely.
On my way out, I walk by a new health spa on Second Street offering March specials (two packs of Botox cheek filler syringes just $1,100) and head to grab a cup of coffee with a friend who still lives in his place down the street from my old apartment. Not long after I moved away, he and his wife had been driving back from picking up their daughter at school in the middle of the afternoon when they slammed on the brakes and ducked for cover, as a shooting was taking place. The shooter fled and no one was hurt, but along with the record-breaking homicides last year, the city’s highest in recorded history, the incident had shaken them up.
To the good fortune of the luxury property developers, the drug market and ambient drug violence has yet to seep from Kensington into Northern Liberties. Still, I wondered if my friend had seen any uptick over the past several months. Nothing like the shooting, he told me, though in the morning, as it happened, he’d had several packages stolen off his porch, supplies for a long-planned, fast-approaching vacation that were snagged by a thief before he could get them. He showed me the recording of the thief on his phone, captured by a doorbell camera, of a young man in layers of clothes too warm for the weather. “What can you do?” I said to him. “Not much,” he replied. But at least he’ll get a week outside of the city.