A GUARDIAN

On some nights, from Polly Walden's front porch on Orchard Street, you can
see fireworks in the sky over Frontier Field or High Falls.

Eerie in the flashes, the Eastman Kodak office tower looms, old fashioned
and protective.

But on most Orchard Street nights, the fireworks are close-up: the boom of
rap, the whoop of police sirens, the periodic crack of pistol shots, and --
on at least one night that Polly remembers -- the hair-raising rip of
machine-gun fire.

"I'm from a little town," said Polly, a native of Dundee, Yates County. "I
like to ride a bike and sit by a tree. Where I grew up, the houses had no
locks."

But fate and friends brought her, her fiance and three children to one edge
of Rochester's crescent of high crime and low wages, which curves over the
Inner Loop like a scimitar.

In April, Polly's family lived in the rear apartment at 185 Whitney St.,
where in the driveway Tyshaun Cauldwell was later killed.

"What drove us out was the drug dealers, the constant firing of guns and
the fear the kids couldn't play outside," said Polly, 36.

At School 17, her daughter, Kai-Lin -- shy and partly deaf -- was as close
to Tyshaun as one finger to another. One day, her best friend's image
materialized on TV. "Mommy," Kai-Lin said, "is he OK?"

By then, Polly had moved to a frame house across from the playground at
School 17, "where my friends are just a yell away," she said.

Children gather there during the day, on the swings and to skip double
Dutch. At night, older boys filter onto the grounds, white T-shirts vivid
in the dark. Cars come and go. Deals go down, weed goes up in smoke --
enough sometimes to give bystanders an unwanted buzz.

Last month, on a trash-picking sweep of the playground with a friend, Polly
picked up with other junk 36 empty plastic marijuana "weed bags," half the
size of a credit card.

The one-time North Carolina security guard is a self-appointed neighborhood
guardian. On her porch at night, during card games or rambling chats with
friends, she records for the authorities the license plates of cars pulling
up to a nearby drug house.

"People tell me to keep my mouth shut," she said. "Why should I?"