Another Day in Kensington
By Courtenay Harris Bond
Temperatures hovered around 85 degrees late one recent evening in Philadelphia’s Fairhill/Kensington neighborhood, where dealers sling heroin at nearly every corner — an area known as the “Badlands.” It is one of the largest open-air drug markets on the East Coast, according to Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Patrick J. Trainor. The hellish, hidden epicenter of it all is “El Campamento,” a camp of makeshift housing structures and a shooting gallery, the harrowing entry point to a half-mile stretch of Conrail tracks where addicts have been living, buying and injecting drugs, mostly ignored, for nearly three decades. The city and railway officials have wrangled for years over who is responsible for cleaning up the heaps of used syringes, empty wrappers, discarded furniture, dumped tires and other debris — and what to do about the addicts and dealers circulating through the area — with next to no forward motion.
Until now.
Spurred by the opioid crisis, with 907 fatal overdoses in Philadelphia County last year alone, city and Conrail officials finally signed an agreement last month. Plans announced at a recent press conference include disposing of an estimated 500,000 used syringes, other garbage and overgrown vegetation along the railway line and blocking off the area to prevent future trespassing and illegal dumping. Conrail will also deposit broken cement and rocks under bridges where homeless addicts have been living and daytrippers have been getting high. Conrail will erect and maintain a fence along the tracks, and the city will fence off bridges in the area. According to the agreement, work will begin by the end of the month, although the start date has already been delayed. City and Conrail officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Now many Philadelphia-area residents are wondering what will happen to the people who have called the railway underpasses home and where the throngs of individuals who travel through the encampment day and night to use after buying dope on nearby street corners will move next.
According to the agreement, the city will provide housing and treatment options to those living in El Campamento, as well as “additional services” to address ongoing quality-of-life issues in the neighborhood. For instance, the city has designated approximately 30 housing slots for those who will be displaced from the tracks. But local users, concerned citizens and harm-reduction activists, some of whom are lobbying for the city to open a supervised injection facility, fear these efforts may be insufficient. At the same time, many area-residents are thrilled that higher-ups are finally doing something to clean up the railway and make the nearby neighborhood more habitable.
“I would like it clean, so they can stop going down there and getting killed — what do they call it, ‘ODing’?” said Aida Figueroa, 48, who has lived near El Campamento for years.
Where she just moved from, Somerset Avenue and C Street, — a busy drug corner also near El Campamento — “is crazy. It’s too much drugs in front of my house,” Figueroa said. The dealers don’t care, she added. “When I talk to someone with respect, they don’t care.”
“They’re not from around here,” Figueroa said about the addicts. “It’s a lot of white people.”
Rosario Sosa, who has lived at Lehigh Avenue and B Street near El Campamento with his wife and children for 10 years, said he chose the area because he had family nearby and they told him it was inexpensive. He said that living near Philadelphia’s heroin scene doesn’t actually bother him.
“Whatever they do is their business,” Sosa said about seeing addicts all the time. “I do my business. They do their business.
“They don’t bother me, you know,” he added. “If they sit on my stairs, I just tell them move away because you know we have kids over here… It’s not good but we can do nothing. I can do nothing… Poor people working hard can do nothing.”
June, who lives on Gurney street just up the road from El Campamento, was sitting on his front stoop, drinking with his father, Julio. A 20-gallon inflatable pool took up most of the cement front porch. A skin-and-bones cat stretched out front.
“Everybody’s afraid of something around here,” June said, a longtime resident of, “the hood, the badlands,” as he describes it. “Back in the day it was worse… kids couldn’t even play out on the sidewalks… it’s a lot better now than what it was but there’s still a lot of deaths. In the past week there was about eight girls that died in them train tracks… It was stinking, you could smell it.”
Julio held court in a lawn chair, gripping a bottle of tequila in one hand and a bottle of Corona in the other.
“We don’t do no drugs,” he said. “We only drinking and swimming.”
Across the street, past cement blocks the city had already erected to try to prevent passage and parking, through a well-beaten path, sprawls El Campamento, a drug nest in its waning days. A 50-unit senior complex is slated to go up at Second and Indiana, the encampment eventually to be paved over for parking.
But that sultry summer evening, El Campamento was still in full swing.
A scrawny man sitting near one of the remaining shacks was trying to hit a vein in his thin legs. A woman used a mirror hanging from a tree to inject near her eyebrow. Lower down under the bridge several people shot up in the “lounge,” a table made from a wood slab atop an oil drum. Signs pinned to trees cautioned “no dumping,” ironically, above mounds of garbage: empty water bottles, discarded syringes, old tires, a soiled mattress.
A man came out of the “doctor’s office,” a hut made out of scavenged wood and tarps, where users can go to buy drugs and get help injecting for a fee, and tried to shoo us away. But then he fell into conversation with the photographer, whom he recognized from a previous visit. When asked about Conrail cleaning up the tracks, the man, who refused to give his name, said, “waste of money. Never going to work.” Then the man, looking particularly well-kept in his clean blue shirt amid the squalor, waved us through, granting us permission to descend the steep embankment toward the cavern under the bridge.
John Hezlep, 30, had just finished injecting. He said he favors heroin and cocaine, “speedballs.”
“Obviously, because I get high, I’m kind of mad about it,” Hezlep remarked about El Campamento’s imminent dismantling. “I’m in active addiction.”
He said he’d just keep doing the “same thing” he did every day. “Anywhere. This ain’t the only place people get high,” Hezlep mused.
In addition to his works, Hezlep was carrying a Sharpie pen and a folded piece of cardboard on which he advertised that he was homeless. He overdosed the first time he used heroin after getting out of prison in March, Hezlep said. Maybe it was because he had just been released and his tolerance was low, Hezlep wondered. Or maybe it was due to contamination by one of the deadly synthetic opioids now in circulation, such as fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.
When he overdosed, Hezlep said he did two bags of heroin and then a bag of “powder,” or cocaine. Then he started to wander away and fell down. His buddy had the opioid-reversal drug, naloxone, also known as Narcan, from Prevention Point Philadelphia, one of the largest needle exchanges in the country. But it wasn’t working. Luckily, someone thought to call 911.
“I woke up as soon as the paramedics came,” Hezlep recalled. “It was just a very scary situation. I tasted the nasty taste in my throat” and had a “pounding headache, one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had in my life.”
Another user shouted to Hezlep for his opinion on the quality of the dope. Hezlep called back to go elsewhere to buy, maybe from “Sponge Bob” — that the heroin was not that potent in El Campamento that night.
“What I’d like Conrail to do is to have a safe area to get high,” Hezlep turned back and said. “This is a safe kind of spot to get high at.”
He can’t recall seeing anybody overdosing down there, despite the fact that police and EMTs frequently respond to emergencies at the tracks. But Hezlep said that El Campamento is populated, so that if someone overdoses, there are people to help, including the “doctor” who keeps Narcan in his “office.”
“Obviously they get dead bodies on the tracks,” Hezlep said. “It’s not right here, though. Not right here.”
“It’s a terrible, terrible lifestyle, and once it gets you, it won’t let you go,” Hezlep reflected about using heroin. He said he wanted to get into a methadone program.
Frankie Padua, 33, interjected that that wasn’t such a good idea, that once one of his “old heads” was on methadone and that “he was a zombie.” Padua said he was an occasional heroin user. “I don’t really push it to the limit,” he remarked. “I do my thing here and there, but I take care. You know, people sleep down here.”
That’s not how he wants to end up, said Padua who lives nearby. He has a wife, a daughter and a steady job waterproofing basements. He doesn’t want his daughter getting stabbed by needles and seeing people inject. Even though he does heroin from time to time, he said he was in favor of the city and Conrail cleaning up the area.
Back on the road, a woman with a her hair in a tidy bun came out of a rustic gazebo at the corner of Water and Gurney streets. She had a tattoo on her ankle, “Che” in script, and started looking through the photographer’s Kensington Blues book on the hood of a parked car. When she spied a picture of an elderly couple pushing a shopping cart with scrap metal, she laughed with affection remarking, “they go everywhere together.”
Declining to give her name or have her photo taken, she said she had lived for 15 years in a row house across the street, where she had raised 11 children. She has 22 grandchildren. A pretty teenager with long, bleached hair and a shirt that read, “Fun Fact: I don’t care” stood next to her. Two little girls ran across the street. The one in spotless black shoes started blowing kisses.
The older woman’s family and friends were in the background, sitting on stoops and in plastic chairs on the broken, uneven sidewalk. A river of water ran down the street from a hose and an open hydrant at the end of the block.
“I raised all my kids here,” she said. “I want to move. For the kids, it’s no good.”
Often, she said, she helps users who are overdosing. She throws water on their heads. “A lot of people,” she said.
On a recent day when an injured man climbed out from the tracks with a badly bleeding hand one neighbor used his power washer to help clean the wound and she handed over a roll of gauze.
“This,” she said, gesturing across Gurney Street toward El Campamento with disgust. “Oof!”
Jose Benitez, director of Prevention Point Philadelphia, which offers a needle exchange, medication-assisted treatment program, medical care, counseling, a 23-bed shelter and other services, has been working hard with his staff to increase outreach to those in El Campamento. Benitez estimates that right now between 60 and 70 people are living in the drug camp and along the tracks.
“It’s a complex issue, so we want people to know that there’s a not a quick fix,” Benitez said. “This is 30 years in the making, and for us to think that we’re going to solve it in a year or two is not realistic. There aren’t enough resources out there. It’s definitely not something that is going to be solved right away.”
In advance of the Gurney Street clean-up, Prevention Point received city funding to reopen its shelter — where people can stay without having to give up drugs and which usually closes in early spring — for the summer. In addition, staff have been visiting the El Campamento daily to tell people about the coming work and try to connect them with services. Prevention Point is also setting aside a portion of its 200 slots in its Suboxone program, a form of medication-assisted treatment, to help those who will be displaced from the tracks.
But Benitez said that to really make a dent in the opioid crisis, more treatment needs to be available on demand, the same day that a person wants it, and that medication-assisted treatment needs to be more widely available.
“Gurney street is unique to Philadelphia, but the access issues — the issues people are having accessing treatment — is no different than anywhere else in the country,” Benitez said.
Gregory Anzak, 35, who grew up in Kensington and who has been doing “hard drugs” for the past seven or eight years, is one of those people who has been having a hard time accessing treatment. While shooting up on Gurney Street he stopped to talk about his life, saying he sleeps “here and there. Wherever seems safe and remotely comfortable and preferably dry.”
Anzak laughs while he reflects on his current predicament. “It’s funny, cause now that I actually want the rehab, I can’t get it.” He’s been fighting with CBH, Community Behavioral Health, the insurance that he has through welfare, and although he has filed 2 appeals they continue to deny him coverage. “Inpatient treatment would be the solution to a lot of my problems… I’d get my dose stabilized, I’d be clean when I come out, I get housing set up when I come out, you know, cause I’m also on the streets currently, and it’s just not happening. I don’t even know what other options I have at this point.”
Anzak says he tries to be mindful of children and neighbors when he shoots up. He’s in favor of the city opening a supervised injection facility.
“I just feel like it would cut down on I mean, not necessarily crime, but like I said there’s a lot of stuff that goes on in these neighborhoods that not everybody is very happy about,” he remarked. “If you could take that element out, I think it would make for a better community in general, even though I’m part of that element.”
An edited version of this story originally appeared in TIME.
Due to misinformation, the news outlet posted an erroneous byline.
Courtenay Harris Bond reported and wrote the story.
Jeffrey Stockbridge provided photos and contributed reporting.
