LIFE AND DEATH ON WHITNEY STREET

A Child's Slaying Inspires Residents To Reclaim A Once-Proud Neighborhood

Abundant Life Christian Center on the corner of Jay and Whitney streets is
two blocks, one boarded-up building and a dusty vacant lot from the patch
of asphalt where 10-year-old Tyshaun Cauldwell lost his life.

In this section of west Rochester -- encompassing "People of Dutchtown" and
eight other neighborhoods -- the slogan is "A Place Where Generations Grow
- -- Come Grow With Us."

In fact, little in this part of town survives, much less grows, without a
struggle. Even the grass on the litter-strewn lawns is mostly dead.

At any time, there are approximately 2,100 open code violation cases in
this section of Rochester -- 18 percent of the city's total caseload, says
Terry Borschoff, Neighborhood Empowerment Team director.

The vacant houses invariably are claimed by neglect or decay, vandals or
arsonists, drug dealers or addicts.

What thrives here, police say, is a busy and dangerous drug zone, where
pushers keep loaded AK-47s on hand and do business on the streets, in drug
houses and occasionally on the School 17 playground.

"Every day I walk in here, it's like a fury with gale-force winds. And I'm
just riding up and down on those waves," says Capt. Joseph Davis of the
Rochester Police Department's Maple Section. "We have a serious drug-house
problem here, and we're chasing it now."

Indeed, Maple Section spent $100,000 in anti-drug and anti-violence
details, in addition to its $85,000 budget last year, says Davis.

This is a neighborhood caught in what police and Mayor William A. Johnson
Jr. refer to as the "fatal crescent," a scythe-shaped piece of Rochester
curving from the northeast to the southwest that is devastated by poverty,
crime and an overwhelming drug scourge.

This is a neighborhood on drugs. It is home to 108 suspected drug houses,
according to maps in the Maple Section office. And Sgt. Mark Freese
estimates that "at any time, there is the potential for 200 drug houses,
because they're in vacant houses, or because tenants allow it."

Dealers trade bags of drugs for wads of cash in public, and in full view of
children. Sometimes, Davis says, the dealers themselves are children.

It's not the addicts that frighten 14-year-old Roxanna Siaca, who lives on
Broad Street. "It's the things they'll do for it," she says. "Drugs lead to
violence. We're always around that, always knowing we're not safe."

Twenty-one people were killed in drug-related slayings in Maple Section
between 1992 and 2000, according to John Klofas, professor of criminal
justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Ten-year-old Tyshaun --
"Ty" to his friends --was the latest in that line of victims.

He was killed June 29, when an argument at a Whitney Street drug house
erupted into gunfire. Straddling his bike about 11 p.m. that night, his
sister standing next to him and his mother 30 yards away, Tyshaun was
struck in the head by a single bullet.

"If you have a block with six drug houses -- three of them selling weed,
two of them selling coke and one of them selling heroin or crack -- you're
going to have a Tyshaun Cauldwell incident," says 41-year-old Dave Allen,
father of two, PTA president and Orchard Street resident for six years.

"Whitney Street," Allen predicts, "is bound for destruction."

Tyshaun's death has spurred a storm of activity aimed at halting that
destruction. Neighbors have twice gathered for community meetings in the
School 17 cafeteria; they met again to clean up a muddy lot on Smith Street
that will become the Tyshaun Cauldwell Memorial Park.

Homeowners on Orange Street are trying to a form a block club. Others
nearby are working with Maple Section police to host a drug summit. And
funds from a new federal community block grant have enabled workers from
the advocacy group Action For a Better Community Inc. to help organize
residents of the School 17 neighborhood.

These groups, their fliers proclaim, aim to "take back" the streets and
"stop the killing" in a neighborhood once celebrated for its quality of life.

"Deutschtown" -- so named for the Germans who settled the area between 1830
and 1850 -- at one point contained "upwards of a thousand thrifty,
law-abiding German families," according to a 1939 Democrat and Chronicle story.

Whitney Street in particular was a "place to be happy," according to a 1980
story about the way life in the neighborhood used to be. "The street was a
playground," and the neighborhood kids were creatures of the street --
skipping rope and playing hopscotch in the middle of the pavement."

Some people attribute the start of the area's decline to the construction
in the early 1960s of Interstate 490. It sliced the neighborhood in two,
took down 400 houses and displaced hundreds of people. "A feeling of defeat
started to grow right then," said one resident in a 1981 Democrat and
Chronicle story.

Today, 99 percent of the children attending School 17 live below the
poverty level, says its principal, Ralph Spezio. On four blocks of
Tyshaun's neighborhood, property values have slid from an average of
$39,793 in 1986 to $26,295 in 2000. The number of owner-occupied homes has
been halved in that time, from 117 to 53, while the number of
investor-owned properties has more than doubled, from 52 to 123.

And the streets are infected with drugs.

Where there are drugs, there are often guns. Where there are guns, there is
often tragedy.

"But does there have to be another Tyshaun Cauldwell?" asks PTA president
Allen. "It may be too late for Tyshaun. But it's not too late for us."

A sign at Abundant Life church relays a similar message. In bold blue
letters, at the back of the building:

"We Serve A God Of A Second Chance."