Search Results for: valley of the shadow

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY The intersection of Cambria and Amber streets is a good six blocks away from the endemic drug violence of the Badlands — sometimes that seems like six miles, and sometimes like six inches. It sits east of Frankford Avenue and a full five blocks from the El, far enough away that you can’t even see the hulking steel skeleton that straddles Kensington Avenue from here. Crime and violence has seeped north and east from West Kensington over the years, slowly and steadily creeping further and further into the surrounding neighborhoods of the Lower […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY I was standing on the corner of 2nd Street and Glenwood Avenue, looking over the stuffed animals tacked to a telephone pole, when a haggard white addict wearing deeply dirty construction boots, a holey T-shirt and a greasy ponytail walked past. He looked heavily opiated and all around pretty worse for wear. He jerked his thumb at the memorial saying simply, “Dead baby,” and kept walking. “Dead baby, huh?” I asked, hoping he would slow down long enough to say a few more words, but he kept trucking down the slope running alongside the […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY Near the corner off 11th and Tioga is a memorial set up around the base of stop sign for Tim Haines, aka Boosa, a 24 year old who was gunned down here one early Saturday morning late last month during a violent weekend that left five dead citywide. This is a neighborhood I know fairly well; as a social worker I had a client who lived nearby and longtime readers might remember that around this time last year I got caught in the middle of a daytime shoot out around the corner on […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY Possibly the largest and most elaborate memorial we’ve seen so far is the mountainous pile of stuffed animals, votive candles and other assorted personal objects stacked up on the corner of American Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. There’s a reason for its enormity: On Jan. 13, three young Latin kids from nearby neighborhoods were killed here in an auto accident that rocked the community and spurred an outpouring of sympathy for the victims’ families. The accident was a hit-and-run — the other vehicle’s driver, Hanifasim Saed Presley, fled the scene on foot […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY We discovered the pile of teddy bears gathered around the base of a stop light at 54th and Kingsessing while on our way to the scene of another recent homicide in Southwest Philly. This wasn’t the first time we stumbled upon a street memorial by accident while en route to another site; it isn’t surprising in this extremely violent part of town, and especially not along Kingsessing Avenue, which has had a double-digit number of shootings and homicides along its length over the last two years. A clue as to who is memorialized […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] TEXT BY JEFF DEENEY The twisting network of back streets between the 5000 blocks of Westminster and Haverford Avenues in West Philly includes Hoopes, Ogden, Parrish, Funston, Reno and Farston; here you’ll find some of the city’s bleakest sights. Abandoned houses that are practically falling down and have been converted to drug establishments line each of these streets. At the heart of the neighborhood is dreary, mostly concrete park with decaying and graffiti-covered basketball courts called, “The Pit.” This is not a place to come joy riding: Last year there were three homicides, eight shootings and […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY On Lippincott Street, just east of Kensington Avenue, the entire west-facing wall of one row home is dedicated to Andrew Strimel, a 19-year-old murdered almost a year ago today during what was an outrageous weekend of violence that left 10 dead citywide. His street name, “Ice,” rises balloon-like, as if the fat, graffiti-style writing is filled with helium, afloat above a tiny grass lot between houses. The same name is written everywhere on the surrounding blocks, as if his friends got carried away by their grief, tagging “RIP Andrew” on house facades and […]

[Photo by JUSTIN ROMAN] The Valley of the Shadow is an ongoing series documenting how those in Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods publicly mourn and commemorate their dead. Jeff Deeney knows these neighborhoods well from his days as a social worker. The hope is to shine a light on the city’s untouchables, brighten the darkest corners and gather-and-share ultra-vivid and all-too-real stories of loss, grief and remembrance. BY JEFF DEENEY One of the hard things about being a social worker in Philadelphia is seeing your client’s block turn up in newspaper crime reports. Sometimes details about shootings and homicides […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] EDITOR’S NOTE: The Valley of the Shadow is an ongoing series documenting how those in Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods publicly mourn and commemorate their dead. Jeff Deeney knows these neighborhoods well from his days as a social worker. The hope is to shine a light on the city’s untouchables, brighten the darkest corners and gather-and-share ultra-vivid and all-too-real stories of loss, grief and remembrance. * BY JEFF DEENEY The air around the Norris Apartments — the high-rise housing project on the eastern fringe of Temple University’s campus — is thick with blunt smoke on […]

[photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] EDITOR’S NOTE: The Valley of the Shadow is an ongoing series documenting how those in Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods publicly mourn and commemorate their dead. Jeff Deeney knows these neighborhoods well from his days as a social worker. The object is to cast Philadelphia’s disadvantaged in a new light, brighten the darkest corners and gather-and-share compelling personal stories of loss, grief and remembrance. BY JEFF DEENEY On the corner of 52nd and Larchwood, across from West Philadelphia’s vibrant and thriving Malcolm X Park, on the south facing wall of the Food Plus corner store, […]

BY JEFF DEENEY While everyone else was at City Hall for the press conference concerning the police raid of a Francisville building last Friday, I was on Ridge Avenue hoping to find my old friend Ms. Edna Williams, of the Mary Jane Enrichment Center. I wrote about Edna in a City Paper article about grassroots homeless services not long ago; she’s been serving the needy from her SRO between 16th and 17th streets on Ridge for about 30 years now. Edna’s seen Francisville’s fortunes rise and fall over they years, as it changed from a prosperous commercial hub in the […]