A Corner Once Sunny, Made Dreary by Drugs
In an unexpected detour, Cheryl Graham pushed the stroller with her squirmy 3-year-old into the crowded Kennedy Fried Chicken. Her 7-year-old son, Jyair, his dark eyes beaming, chivalrously held open the door for his family.
Ms. Graham had been on her way to the grocery store in her Bronx neighborhood when her boys started complaining of hunger, and so she ended up here on the corner of East 198th Street and the Grand Concourse, not far from Lehman College. The chicken joint, which sits next to a bodega and a Chinese takeout place, is surrounded by grand apartment buildings that symbolize better times past.
But Ms. Graham, a stately woman who wears her braids coiled on top of her head, did not want to linger long. She parked her children at a table and urged them to eat their pizza fast.
“We don’t want to spend a lot of time in here,” she said. “It’s not a good atmosphere.”
She was alluding to the four tables around her, which were dominated by a group of 10 male teenagers, mostly in jeans, baggy T-shirts and Yankee caps. Only two appeared to have ordered any food.
Ms. Graham says — and local merchants, residents, the police and The Norwood News, a neighborhood paper, all agree — that the corner outside the restaurant is a hub of local drug dealing.
“At nighttime in here, it’s like they own this,” Ms. Graham said later of the teenagers. “I don’t like my children to see this and think it’s normal.”
But in a way, what goes on here at the corner has become a kind of normal, a situation grudgingly accepted as just another fact of life on these hard-knock streets.
“What’s new?” a nearby business owner responded sarcastically when asked about the drug dealing. “It’s a hot corner. There’s a lot of business.” He did not want to give his name; he said he feared the dealers would make him a target.
At night, he said, the corner sometimes crackles with the sound of gunfire.
In April 2006, in fact, the corner made the news when two bystanders were hit by stray bullets during a shootout in front of Kennedy Fried Chicken. One woman was shot in the back while exiting a livery cab. Across the street, a 16-year-old girl, walking with friends, was hit in the arm.
Msgr. John Jenik of Our Lady of Refuge Church, on East 196th Street five blocks from the restaurant, seemed as downcast as the anonymous merchant; he can recite a long list of anti-drug initiatives that have failed to eliminate the problem. “People in the street know this,” the pastor said. “They’re not getting arrested or harassed. They’re almost operating with impunity.”
This spring, complaints of drug dealing at Kennedy’s prompted the police to send undercover officers into the restaurant seeking to buy drugs. Twice, according to Robert Messner, an assistant police commissioner, a worker sold crack to officers from behind the red-and-white tile counter.
In response, the police closed the restaurant briefly at the end of April; to reopen, the business paid a $4,000 fine and agreed to allow warrantless inspections and to hand over its security video. “We try and hit these places and get them to be legitimate and stay legitimate,” Mr. Messner said.
Phillip Werbel, a lawyer for the restaurant, emphasized that the store had no connection to any drug activity. “Employees can do things that employers don’t know about,” he said. He added, “We have even invited the police to put undercovers in the store; we offered to put them behind the counter.”
He noted that restaurants by their nature must let people sit and eat, and besides, he said, most of the problems occur on the corner, outside. “There’s an ocean of difficulty on that sidewalk,” he said.
As Ms. Graham watched her young sons nibble, she said that during her 23 years living in the neighborhood she has watched it go downhill, especially along the Grand Concourse.
She’d like to move. “But where else am I going to get an apartment with eight rooms for under $1,000?” she asked.
And with that, she gathered up her young children and headed toward the grocery store.