Under the bridge at Lehigh and Emerald, drug users find a temporary home
By Courtenay Harris Bond
Under the overpass at Lehigh and Emerald streets, a shifting pack of Kensington drug users have established an enclave, partly as a result of last summer’s razing of El Campamento, the drug haven at Gurney Street and down along the Conrail tracks.
On a recent afternoon, Rose, who only wanted to use her first name, said she had spent “plenty” of time at Gurney Street and had been living at Lehigh and Emerald for less than a month. “It’s safer down here as far as woman. No one’s getting raped or hurt.” Rose said she was raped at Gurney Street and got “15 staples” in her head from the assault.
“It’s hard, it’s hard,” Rose said. “I cry myself to sleep sometimes. So it’s easier just to keep the pipe up.”
Like many, Rose has found temporary shelter under the overpass, hardly an ideal home, but a place to sleep, to cop, and to use somewhat protected from the elements. Even with the weekly roundups, when police and sanitation workers oust people from their perches and make them cart off all their belongings, users return soon enough.
Nearly 1,000 Philadelphians are homeless, and nearly 6,000 live in temporary housing or shelters. However, Philadelphia’s Office of Homeless Services placed more than 300 chronically homeless people into housing this fall, and a $1.4 million center at Suburban Station is being built to serve homeless individuals starting this winter. Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services has been expanding outreach across the city, trying to connect people with drug treatment, as well as with mental health and disability services. And Prevention Point Philadelphia in Kensington, the largest needle exchange in the country, also offers medical and social services, in addition to an expanding shelter for users.
Still in Philadelphia, which has the highest poverty rate of any American city, many can’t find their way into rehab, housing, or jobs. So many homeless users keep coming back to Lehigh and Emerald, a microcosm of what ails the city and of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis
All along the sidewalk, up against the wall, people set up makeshift beds of blankets. At least one person dragged in a mattress. A couple of users had wheeled in cast-off office chairs. Sitting in one of them, a man flexed a switchblade open and shut, open and shut.
A trio of women squatted next to three stacked plastic drawers, the kind found at Bed, Bath, and Beyond or the Container Store. Several people had shopping carts handy to wheel away their belongings when the cops came to clear them out. One woman appeared to be shooting up under a blanket that she draped over her head. Others injected out in the open.
People milled in and out, calling to each other. Someone had a garbage bag full of clothes she was trying to sell. “Come back later when I have money,” another woman said.
One longtime user, Doug, who only gave his first name, was dressed in just a T-shirt. He asked if I had anything else he could wear against the chill. I gave him an old fleece I had on under my jacket, and he gladly put it on.
Deeper in the tunnel, several women huddled next to each other on a blanket. One of them, 22, who didn’t want to be named, said that she only came to Lehigh and Emerald during the day to help her boyfriend, 25, who was staying in the tunnel. They have a 2-year-old who lives with her at her parents’ place. “He’s here for now,” she said about her boyfriend. “I come down here and help him and take him to my parents’ to have a shower. Right now, we’re in a real hard spot.”
She held out a picture of her daughter under the shattered screen of her phone. “People think we’re just a lot of junkie losers,” the woman said.
A guy in a wheelchair scooted past, calling out, “Newports, two for a dollar!”
Ignoring him, Alyssa Carlin inhaled from a crack pipe. “I do dates and stuff,” she said. “Most girls do — just crashing anywhere. It’s pretty tough. I been out on the street since April, out here since June (at Lehigh and Emerald). We definitely look out for each other as far as being hungry, cold.”
Carlin said outsiders sometimes passed through handing out drinks and socks, but that the police “come every week and do a sweep. We have to take everything.”
Nearby, a woman who was nodding, most likely high on heroin, kept being saved from falling off the trolley she was slumped on by her neighbor, who didn’t want to share his name. He said the tunnel was the “perfect shelter,” except for the fact that the “police come and run their sirens at 3 a.m.” He hugged the woman close and gave her a kiss. They were not “intimate,” he said, “just good friends. Most of the females down here are good friends. I try to be supportive of them, protective of them.”
He said he’d seen an increase in the number of women living at Lehigh and Emerald over the past six months or so, attributing their appearance in part to El Campamento’s closing. “All access points have been terminated. The females are learning this is a place they can come. They’re trying to establish a place where they can leave whatever personals they have, a place to stay.”
Another man named Dave said his family had lived in Kensington for five generations. He said he’d been in and out of addiction since 1984. “I’ve had a lot of friends who have died.”
The woman sitting next to him said she went by the name “El/Babygirl.” She visited El Campamento once. “That was my first and last time, because I was raped and beaten and tied to a tree. But I’m over that.
“I don’t stay down here,” El/Babygirl, 25, said. “I just slide through. I was out on the streets rippin’ and runnin’ hard. I’m still rippin’ and runnin.’”
She got up and walked away on her spindly legs.
Doug, who I gave my jacket to, said he traveled “back and forth between, like, nowhere.” He started copping drugs for his girlfriend and fell back into using again. Although he grew up in Trevose, in Bucks County, Doug, 47, landed in Kensington because “it’s where you go to get drugs, where you go to get high.” He said he did crack, coke, heroin, “everything.”
“This shit is retarded,” Doug said. “It’s just ridiculous as shit. I got to wrap it up soon. I can’t do this in the fucking cold. I think I’m gonna get sober, hang it up.”
