With the poison of a junkie’s broken promise on his lip
It was 1985. I was 12 and standing next to my mother in a police station in Greenwich Village. She was a pretty red-haired gal in her late 30s, but the three police officers she was talking to weren’t looking at her. They were looking at the bag of crack vials she had in her hands, confused about what they were. I wasn’t confused. We had a lot of crack vials in our apartment at that point. Hundreds of them. My brothers and I played with them in Washington Square Park. We carried them around in our pockets the way other kids carried marbles.
I didn’t know then that this encounter would inspire a movement; that a group of local mothers would decide to do what the befuddled police would not: reclaim Washington Square Park from the drug dealers. (…)
My parents moved into our apartment at 32 Washington Square West in 1975. Over the next decade we watched as an army of dealers and their customers took over the heart of Greenwich Village. As a kid, I knew you didn’t ride your bicycle into the park, because a junkie would take it from you. The park’s arch, built as an imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, was covered in graffiti. When the city painted over it in 1981, Mayor Ed Koch applied the last stroke of white paint, then remarked, “That’ll last about an hour.”
artwork { Kathe Kollwitz, Death and a Woman Struggling for a Child, 1911 }
