NEIGHBORS GO TOE-TO-TOE WITH BRASH DRUG DEALERS

Supply meets demand on a street in Paterson

[PHOTO CAPTION] `Some of them say they're going to get me. I don't worry
about it,' Sidney Barrier, 68, said of drug dealers that he chases away
from his Paterson home. The retired boxer lost both his legs to circulatory
problems. Photo by Dawn Benko

PATERSON -- A tower from the Alexander Hamilton housing complex rises
behind 68-year-old Irene Elvin's backyard, one of several in the development.

When she moved there as a child more than five decades ago, the towers were
not there. Neither was the bustling drug trade that flourishes in the
parking lot between her yard and the buildings.

Back then, when she was 11, there was little traffic on East 31st Street,
which runs in front of her house. Back then, the green house was flanked by
empty lots.

"You never had to have your doors closed," she said. Pictures from her
childhood show the street with flower-strewn lots and her, wearing a white
cowboy hat, on horseback.

Now, Route 80 is barely a minute away, an artery to carry a steady supply
of customers to feed the heroin and cocaine market. The buyers often park
on her street before they walk the few yards to make their purchases.

The block is irrevocably changed, a place for prostitutes and addicts where
she remembers horses and flowers. But Elvin, like her neighbors, holds on
to the remnants of the neighborhood through compromise and sheer
determination.

Once, gardening in her backyard, her dog Peppy began barking. A shower of
glass and bottles from the other side of her double fence answered. She
took the dog inside, and stayed there herself.

"I had to stop, I couldn't do any more," she said.

Some years ago, when her mother was still living in the house, they tore
down a dilapidated garage that local youths were using as a roof-top
clubhouse. She has had rose bushes and azaleas stolen from her front lawn.
But when she heard four gunshots on a Sunday night this month, then another
two, she called the police.

Mostly, Elvin just stays inside.

"I put my alarm on and I don't hear anything from anyone," she said. "It's
getting terrible around here."

Across the street and a few houses farther away from the drug market,
Sidney Barrier is feistier.

"I chase 'em," the 68-year-old says. "I say, `I don't care what you do over
there, I don't go over there. Don't you come over here.'"

Both legs amputated because of circulatory problems, the retired
professional boxer says he takes no guff from strangers who try to park in
his handicapped spot, hit him up for change or try to scam him into letting
them inside his home. He still trims the front lawn of the house he bought
13 years ago with hand shears, walking himself across the grass on his
hands. In his backyard, he lifts 300 pounds on a weight bench.

"Some of them say they're going to get me," he said. "I don't worry about it."

The dealers are so bold -- so uncaring, perhaps -- that they'll approach
anyone, he said.

"Every time I go out," he said, "they hit me up for some money, or (ask) do
I want drugs." As he talks, cars occasionally drive by, slow and stop at
the end of the block, near the housing-project parking lot.

Despite his bravado, Barrier is careful.

"I can't say they're not dangerous, but they're most dangerous when they
have a crowd," he said. "They will hurt you when they've got 10 or 20
together."

That threat is most frightening to those who, unlike him, did not grow up
in Paterson, Barrier said.

"They are afraid to call the cops," he said. "They are afraid (dealers) are
going to come through and blacken your eye or break all your windows."

Joseph Brown, 52, lives across 31st Street from Barrier, in a house he
bought 15 years ago. He is more wary than his neighbor, though he, too, has
tried to hold out against the changing neighborhood.

A dozen years ago, as crack cocaine spread and drug dealing and violence in
the neighborhood reached a fever pitch, he grew scared to walk the few feet
from his narrow driveway to his house a night. He installed a motion
sensitive light.

"When the light came on," he said, "they took bottles and tried to break
the light," throwing them over his back fence into his driveway. The rain
of glass broke his windshield.

Dealers sometimes gather at the other end of the block, where it intersects
with 22nd Avenue, he said. Before they got to know his car, they sometimes
swarmed it as he turned into the street.

"They run to you and think you're coming to buy from them," Brown said.
"They charge the car. That scared me."

Even beyond the fear they inspire, the drug trade brings endless nuisance,
from steady traffic to the hundreds of glassine envelopes and other litter
peppering the block, Brown said. His street is one way heading toward the
housing development, but many customers don't know that and barrel up the
street the wrong way. Still, few customers linger to cause problems.

"Once they buy whatever, they take off," Brown said. "They don't even (use)
it here. They just go."

The parking lot is one of what police estimate to be 90 to 100 open-air
drug markets in Paterson, which has 150,000 residents. Police say crime in
the neighborhood by the Alexander Hamilton project probably hasn't changed
much. Statistics show a big jump in recent arrests, rising from 95 in 1994
to 319 so far this year, Lt. Ray Benedetto of the Paterson vice squad said.
That has more to do with the police than the criminals, however.

"A lot of it depends on our manpower and the amount of time we have,"
Benedetto said. "We're a 25-man squad, and it's a big city."

None of the three neighbors have qualms about calling authorities when
necessary, though they say they have learned to pick their battles. All
call the police when the pulsing music gets too loud late at night, or when
the small crowds that gather at each end of the block become too
threatening. Brown sometimes calls the mayor; Elvin calls her city council
member.

"We stick together pretty good," Barrier said. And sometimes the
neighborhood can do more than call the police.

Both he and Brown fondly remember Bill, a man who once lived next to
Barrier. Now in a nursing home, he was spry and energetic. He would wear a
radio at his belt and walk up and down the street, telling loiterers to
move along. He looked for all the world like a cop, Brown said. "He used to
get a kick out of doing that."

The neighborhood has improved since the height of the crack boom, in large
part thanks to increased police patrols, Brown said.

"They used to raid that (parking lot) so much, the last year or so it's
been quiet," he said. "It's much better."

The parking lot is busy enough. On a recent Monday night, police staked it
out for two hours, arresting eight heroin and crack customers, three of
whom lived or grew up in Morris County. At times, four dealers ran to meet
each buyer.

On the grounds of the Alexander Hamilton complex, residents say their story
is different that that of their neighbors on 31st Avenue, though few are
willing to talk candidly.

"You've got people who want to come down here and sit on a bench and watch
their kids, and they can't," Sherman Reams, 29, said in a patch of morning
sunlight in the parking lot, on his way to a construction job one day
recently. Talking about drug-dealing, he occasionally nods his head toward
some young men clustered at the lot's far end.

"The dealers have respect for the grown-ups and the kids," he said. "They
don't deal in front of the kids, or they say, `That's my mother over there.
Don't do it in front of her.' "

Most of the time, the dealers are just interested in making money. The
customers just want to buy and leave. Most of the time.

"You have to be more cautious and careful," one 33-year-old man who has
lived at Alexander Hamilton for three years. "It's an environment where
anything can happen at any time. You live until you can do better."

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski