A while ago, he says, the police upped their presence on the block and he and his neighbors enjoyed about four months of peace. But once cops shifted their focus to other drug-battered neighborhoods, the dealers happily resumed operations.
"This is outrageous," he says. "I don't know what to do."
So I told him about Marie DeLany, who shared with me this week an astounding tale of how she snuffed out drug dealing on her Frankford corner - by blaring Christian music out her third-floor windows.
Old-time standards like "Amazing Grace," "The Old Rugged Cross," "Nothing But the Blood of Jesus" and "The Lord's Prayer." You name the sacred song, it wafted three doors down to the intersection of Penn and Arrott streets, where dealers sold to addicts who stumbled up from the Arrott bus terminal.
"It wasn't loud enough to be obnoxious," says DeLany, 57, who staggered her broadcasts between noon and 8 p.m. "I didn't get complaints from neighbors. But it could definitely be heard."
Over the next few months, she says, the dealers drifted away. And they haven't returned, even though she hasn't barraged the block with "How Great Thou Art" in well over a year.
Say "Amen," somebody!
"God gave me the idea," says DeLany, head of Overington House Inc., a nonprofit that helps homeless mothers.
"I felt such hatred for these young men, and I prayed for the willingness to see them as human beings," she says. "We all have struggles and problems. If all I felt was bitter, how would that change anything?"
She thought of how, whenever she feels rattled by life, music calms her - especially the hymns that have been the soundtrack of her life (she and her minister husband, Ken, once headed their own church). Perhaps, if these young men heard these songs, they'd feel calmed too.
Or at least uncomfortable enough to move off a church-y corner that might remind them of a God-fearing relative who expected better of them.
