What killing says about Nicetown

A mural in a Nicetown park depicts a matriarch presenting a turkey dinner to smiling relatives.

Its message bespeaks social order, homey virtues, and veneration of the old - precisely the notions that were shattered last Monday when a well-regarded, 68-year-old handyman was shot on Rowan Street.

oThe daylight killing of Lawrence Bennett, allegedly by Tyrone Roberson, 17, has riled and disconcerted Nicetown, an impoverished neighborhood f sporadic violence bifurcated by the Roosevelt Expressway and Germantown Avenue in a postindustrial sector of North Philadelphia.

"Ordinarily, the elderly in Nicetown are given respect by virtue of their age," said Police Capt. Stephen Glenn of the 39th District. "People don't think the shooting is justified in any way, shape, or form.

"So I don't quite understand this."

Others say they do.

"Yes, it's unusual a young guy kills an older one," said Mary Suttles, 66, a community liaison from City Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller's office and a longtime Nicetown resident. "But there's no respect anymore. Kids don't care any more about an old person than anyone else.

"Lack of jobs, drugs, and bad education are to blame. It's depressing."

As tough as things are, many say Nicetown is on the rise after decades of drug-fueled violence. But older residents will tell you life was comparatively grand half a century ago.

Like much of North Philadelphia, Nicetown had a heyday, a time of bustling verve that made it a great place to live in the late 1950s and '60s, people recall.

"It was close-knit with a lack of crime," said Majeedah Rashid, executive vice president of the Nicetown Community Development Corp.

"It was lovely, clean," remembered Jesse Daniels, who moved to Nicetown on Juniata Street about 40 years ago, when he was 16. "Neighbors could keep their doors open. There were no abandoned buildings. It was a decent place to raise children."

Residents saw a fitting correspondence between the name of their community and the lives they lived, even though the name is derived from John Neisse, a Frenchman and a contemporary of William Penn's.

What kept Nicetown vibrant were jobs - specifically factory and warehouse jobs that were plentiful when America was a country of manufacturers.

Residents even now can rattle off the litany of companies that offered living wages and decent lives, then moved on: Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Midvale Steel, and, most recently, Tastykake.

At one time in the 1960s, the now-shuttered Budd Co. facility sprawled over 85 acres of Nicetown and employed 6,000 in its automobile parts plant, historians said.

Now, dead factories litter the landscape like wrecked ships marooned by permanent low tide.

There is, said Suttles, a bitter, mocking quality to the omnipresence of empty buildings whose jobs went elsewhere.

"It just breaks my heart," she said.

As in many poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, white people moved out of Nicetown, African Americans moved in, jobs left, and the local economy collapsed - all between the 1960s and '80s.

Drugs and their by-product, random violence, found purchase in a place that began leaking hope.

Daniels said the downfall, as in many of the city's neighborhoods, began in earnest in the 1970s with gang violence, and continued with crack, which incapacitated parents and forced kids to raise themselves.

The seemingly endless flow of drugs and violence "really tore things up," Daniels said.

A disembodied voice echoed in the hallways of Mercy Neighborhood Ministries last week, exhorting all who could hear it to "breathe in. Relax. Breathe in."

The center, run by an independent order of nuns in a once-abandoned warehouse on Venango Street, is an oasis of calm. Often, that quiet, safe place beckons the elderly of Nicetown and nearby Tioga, who visit for Women's Reflection Night.

During such times, said Sister Ann Provost, who runs Mercy, "the elderly come in to unburden and share."

"Mostly, they're looking for support from each other," Provost said. "They spent their lives supporting families. Now they worry about the violence and the drugs taking their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren.

"These are women on whom the wisdom of the community rests. And what they want is a safe and productive life for everybody."

It isn't easy in a neighborhood where most households are led by women and poverty reigns, Provost said.

She said the consequences of poverty - "chaos, confusion, and lack of family structure" - continued to plague the community. And they haunt the older generation of women, who witness in disbelief the breakdown of life they once knew.

"Children curse their own parents," said Suttles, of Miller's office, echoing the anguish of the Mercy women. "My neighborhood has deteriorated so. We've got computers, schools, libraries. We've got a church on every corner. But they don't seem to be the answer."

In the main hallways at Mercy, a painting of African women communing under a tree suggests the wisdom of women who derive power together.

Can the women - and men - of Nicetown come together to make a change? Provost often wonders.

Rashid, of the development corporation, believes so.

"Oh, someone gets shot, and outsiders come in here and see we have boarded-up, dilapidated buildings," she said. "That's all taken out of context. No one sees the efforts being made to turn things around."

"Crime is improving in Nicetown over the last few years," Glenn said. At the heart of the improvement was the "burning out" of two drug gangs whose members either killed one another or went to prison, he said.

Homicides occur at higher rates in other sections of the city, police figures demonstrate.

Glenn also credited "the strength of the development corporation," which has used a network of block captains and other community activists to nip crime before it blossoms.

"Before, people were apathetic and distrustful," Rashid said. "Now, we're resident-driven, with ongoing community cleanups and block improvements."

Chief among the corporation's aims is to revitalize the central commercial corridor of Germantown Avenue.

Rashid proudly described a $15 million development project under way in Nicetown that would bring low-income housing and commercial space to once-dead zones.

"We're trying to create more things to sustain Nicetown and make the community more livable."

To an extent, it's working.

"It's getting better, calmer," said Jose Nunez, who owns R&L Supermarket on Germantown Avenue. "I don't see as much trouble."

Robert Robinson, a married father of two, has owned a laundry in Nicetown on Germantown Avenue for nine years.

"The community is coming back," said Robinson. He said that the remodeling of the Baby Grand piano bar, a new ice cream parlor, and a big banquet hall were examples of businesses that would help Nicetown revitalize.

People say they are seeing evidence of pride in the community. At Panati Playground in North Philadelphia, Jacques Louis, director of youth development at the nonprofit Allegheny West foundation, said, "There are definitely traps in the neighborhood, but I still see people sweeping in front of their doorsteps."

Overall, said Daniels, "you do see something happening. "It's not too late for this neighborhood. It can be turned around."