THERE'S STILL HOPE

Residents Want A Return To N. Ridgewood's Stately Past

North Ridgewood Avenue wasn't always a boulevard of broken dreams,
with human drama fueled by drugs and prostitution in the open for all to see.

Matt Larsen, 36, owns several buildings including an apartment house
on Tanglewood Street he bought last year. Larson, like many residents
in the North Ridgewood area, wants to see an end to the drug dealing
and prostitution to make the neighborhood more habitable. In the
1930s, when stately homes and sprawling oaks lined the avenue,
decadence played out in secret.

Those are the memories of at least one man who grew up in Daytona
Beach and saw North Ridgewood Avenue change from a residential
thoroughfare popular with pedestrians to a scrappy, depressing street
where haggard prostitutes sell themselves for crack cocaine and drug
dealers and pimps conduct business on bicycles.

While proud property owners say something can be done to turn this
place around, they realize a bumpy road is ahead and it will take time.

After all, it took decades to get this way.

"I remember when a prostitute cost $1.50," said 88-year-old Gaulden
Reed, who moved here from New Smyrna Beach when he was a toddler. "In
those days there were four houses of ill repute on Ridgewood. But the
prostitutes were never out in the open. People knew where to go if
they wanted one."

Reed and three others -- including a retired police chief and a
homicide investigator -- who have lived in the city for decades,
recalled how the now well-traveled thoroughfare went from residential
to raunchy.

Daytona Beach Mayor Yvonne Scarlett-Golden, 80, who was born and
raised in the city, said she remembers when the only business
district was on Beach Street and Ridgewood was a quiet area where
"nothing much happened."

Both Scarlett-Golden and Reed say the biggest changes on Ridgewood
began after World War II when many people -- now prospering -- sold
their homes and, looking for bigger and better places, moved out.
Mom- and-pop motels slowly started replacing residential parcels and
the face of Ridgewood began its metamorphosis.

Retired Daytona Beach police chief Paul Crow also lived near north
Ridgewood. Echoing Reed and Scarlett-Golden, the 62-year-old Crow
said that growing up, he never thought anything negative about the area.

"We never heard about prostitutes or the homeless on Ridgewood in
those days," said Crow, chief from 1988 to 1996.

In fact, when Crow was a young cop walking the beat near Ridgewood,
he remembers the biggest headache for officers was Main Street, where
a handful of rooming houses and bars created havoc.

Then the 1970s came, and with the new decade was the birth of a
bolder kind of prostitution on Ridgewood, Crow recalled.

This time the women weren't hiding in the back rooms of
well-appointed homes on the avenue. It was time to strut their stuff
along the sidewalks of North Ridgewood.

Crow and Shon McGuire, a former Daytona Beach policeman who is now
the lead homicide investigator with the State Attorney's Office, said
three women -- sisters Ernestine and Margaret McKinney and their
mother, Daisy -- were responsible for bringing prostitutes front and center.

"The sisters were prostitutes and their mother was a madam," said the
50-year-old McGuire, who also walked a beat on Ridgewood.

At the time, McGuire said, the drug of choice on the street was
Dilaudid, a narcotic analgesic prescribed for pain.

But Dilaudid soon made way for a more addictive drug by the time the
1980s rolled around.

Crack cocaine took off like a rocket, and with more hookers on city
streets it quickly became the payment of sorts for many of the
streetwalkers who preferred it to cash.

"Crack hit Daytona like a frickin' tidal wave," McGuire said. "The
prostitutes became addicted to crack, and they worked to feed their habit."

And with the crack came the dealers who saw ready customers in the
prostitutes and outsiders who drive onto the side streets off
Ridgewood where they know they can get a rock starting at $20,
according to narcotics investigators.

"You look at Ridgewood now and it's sad," Crow said. "It gets to the
point where you don't have the manpower to deal with it."

Is There Any Hope

Two neighborhood homeowners say their community could shed its "red-
light district" perception if certain changes are made.

Chris Daun of Pierce Street said he is pushing for a historic
district designation. With the trove of architectural styles --
Craftsman bungalows and Sears homes built from the 1920s to 1940s --
that dominate many of the neighborhoods, Daun said community leaders
should work to preserve the homes and the area's uniqueness.

"I believe that if we reinvest in the housing stock we can turn this
area around," said Daun, a neighborhood advocate. "There are a lot of
good people in this community who are hard working and have lived
here for a long time."

He said the neighborhood would benefit by having a supermarket. Not
only would it be convenient for residents, it would stimulate
business and help erase the negative image that the only commodities
available on Ridgewood are cheap sex and illegal drugs.

City Commissioner Shiela McKay, who represents part of the North
Ridgewood area, says she would back Daun's ideas. She says many of
the homes have historic value.

"They are not just junk," McKay said.

Resident Matt Larsen, who lives just a few blocks from Daun on Taylor
Avenue, agrees. Larsen, who owns three properties on Taylor and
Tanglewood Street, stands at the intersection pointing to colorful,
quaint houses.

"Do you see any houses that look like slums or that are not
well-kept?" he asks. "Our problem in this neighborhood is not code
enforcement because the people who own homes here and live here are
proud of their properties.

"Our problem is with law enforcement and lack thereof," he says.

Police say they're working on it, using undercover stings and
surveillance. But it takes multiple arrests to get the drug users off
the streets.

On a stroll down Tanglewood and up to Madison Avenue, Larsen focuses
on some of the properties that he says cause grief in the
neighborhood -- a handful of rooming houses teeming with unemployed
tenants who sit on soiled sofas on their front porch in the middle of
the afternoon; a crack house where business is brisk.

"The crack house is next to a halfway house where people are trying
to recover from drug addiction," Larsen says, shaking his head.

He insists, however, that there's hope because he and other residents
have made a pact to keep an eye on the problem properties and call
police 24-7. Residents meet monthly at neighborhood watch meetings
where they discuss crime and ways to improve the area.

"We don't need this city to sell our neighborhoods to developers,"
Larsen says adamantly. "We just need active law enforcement that will
get rid of the crack houses and the drug dealers and the prostitutes.

"Then things will begin to change."