Where Gentrification And Crack Collide

In the cold logic of urban evolution, can gourmet restaurants and art galleries rout crack?

That's the six-figure issue for residents of Spring Garden, a gentrifying neighborhood of stately trees and grand six-figure Victorian homes - but also a neighborhood with a flourishing crack trade on its streets.

It was just four years ago that one of the leaders in the gentrification movement predicted that simple economics guaranteed change for the rectangular neighborhood northwest of Center City. Housing was affordable, elegant and accessible to Center City. Growth seemed inevitable. Spring Garden developer Tom Scannapieco called it evolution.

But the law of evolution is survival of the fittest, and gentrification had a rival. Spring Garden has a stubborn, decades-old tradition of drug dealing

from its streets. While the trend toward investment and renovation transformed many old urban neighborhoods during the 1980s, so did the investment in cheap, smokable cocaine.

In Spring Garden, the two trends collided.

"The drugstore is closed!" chant the frustrated neighbors who have joined forces to break up the corner drug markets.

"It's nothing personal," is the reply of dealers, some of whom live in the neighborhood themselves.

In the last decade, the Spring Garden area has indeed evolved into a neighborhood of restored townhouses with the beginnings of a new, upscale culture: a sleek, high-tech Italian restaurant, an art gallery, a gourmet grocery, a trendy bistro offering the quiche of the day. But at the same time, the local drug trade has evolved, maturing and spreading from the comparatively quiescent cocaine trade along 18th and Wallace Streets to a crack dealership along Mount Vernon Street with three shifts of workers who peddle drugs dyed pink.

The infusion of a crack sales force equipped with cellular phones has had a profound effect: Some Spring Garden residents have banded together and are battling to reclaim territory with a group called NOMAD - Neighbors on the Move Against Drugs. Some are floating the notion of starting a private security force. Some are making money from drug sales. Others have simply retreated to the suburbs.