THE BATTLE OF CASTLE PARK

It's The Good Guys Vs. the Good Guys in Main South's Drug Wars

Frank Zitomersky is hot. Furious, you could say.

He and his cohabitating friend, District 4 City Councilor Barbara
Haller, have just finished another cleaning of Castle Park, which for
decades has served as a shooting gallery and hangout for drug addicts.
Among the garbage they collected were discarded bleach kits -- used by
drug addicts for cleaning needles -- brochures and other materials
handed out by a different set of community advocates -- outreach
workers from agencies such as the private non-profit Health Awareness
Services of Central Massachusetts.

The sight practically sickens Zitomersky, a longtime neighborhood
resident and activist who for years has tried to keep a bad element
out of the park. He can't fathom and can't stand that anybody would do
anything to attract more addicts there.

As he drives down Main Street in his truck, Haller in the seat next to
him, he sees a HAS outreach worker, Daniel Czechowski, in front of the
Island Bakery. The worker has a table set up. He's distributing more
bleach kits along with other informational materials.. Zitomersky
snaps. He gets out of the truck and storms over to Czechowski.

In the course of an ensuing shouting match, during which Zitomersky is
doing the shouting, he overturns the worker's table. He also,
allegedly, shoves Czechowski, a charge Zitomersky denies.

The confrontation is now old news. It happened in April and was
covered by Dianne Williamson in a June Telegram & Gazette column.
Zitomersky expresses regret and the people at HAS say they want to
mend fences, to find a way to work together. But the incident was only
the most heated battle in a war between two groups of people, both
with righteous intentions, but who differ drastically in their approaches.

HAS Director of Education Michael Downs, who supervises the outreach
program, says of the incident, "I understand that sometimes people
don't necessarily agree with what we do but there are more productive
ways of bringing up your ideas and having discussions."

In a recent interview, Zitomersky was in a calmer mood even though his
criticisms of HAS's methods haven't softened. "Overall, the objective
is the same, to help people, but we have a different approach," he
says. "What they were doing [at the park] was just littering. This is
a de facto way of saying 'This is where you can do your drugs.' Let me
bring [bleach kits] to your neighborhood and bring [them] to your
house. Let's see how you like it."

For a long, long time, Zitomersky's neighborhood has been pretty tough
- --maybe the toughest in town. The specific area in question begins at
the corner of Madison and Chandler streets and ends somewhere around
Clark University. While there's trouble elsewhere on Main Street, and
also on neighboring side streets, the most action happens along this
roughly one-mile-long stretch of road lined with old apartment
buildings, neon-inflected bodegas and ethnic restaurants.

Every morning at around 8 a.m., the neighborhood comes to life, if you
can call it that. Because for many of the people on the street at this
hour, each new day simply represents a signpost amid the permanent
midnight of their addictions. Every new morning means a fresh fix to
start the day.

At peak times, the strip throbs with a riot of life. Garish
automobiles dart out of side streets. The sounds of hip-hop, reggaeton
and bachata create a chaotic din. The sidewalks are as packed with
bodies as downtown at lunch time. Faces stare from every stoop and
peer from every doorway. It seems like everyone is looking at everyone
else. It seems like everyone is looking at you.

Among the chaos, the addicts are easy to spot. Take the young Hispanic
woman who staggers listlessly out from behind a closed store one
recent morning, stopping to squint at a passerby. She's wearing
sagging black tights with flared cuffs, dirty, untied white hi-top
sneakers, a bright blue sleeveless top, and an expression that is at
once desolate, stupefied and searching.

It's clear that alcohol takes its share of victims here, too. Main
South's alcoholics even have their own unofficial turf -- sometimes
they sit along the stubby wall, located across from the Tropigala
nightclub and next to a liquor store, where they sit, talk and
sometimes pass out.

Sometimes it's hard to determine who has a problem until you get up
close. Take the Hispanic man in his 30s who stops to talk with an
outreach worker near the Tropigala nightclub. Straddled atop a shiny
bike and wearing fashionable, new-looking clothes -- long red shorts
and a sports jersey -- the man has a handsome, fine-boned face and
delicately trimmed mustache.

On the surface, he presents a portrait of confident, street-wise
togetherness, one that clashes with an apparent track mark on the
crook of his left arm, and with the bleach kit he accepts from the
worker before pedaling away.

But usually, you can tell right away, and what you see isn't hopeful.
Some of the people who eke out an existence in this neighborhood will
tell you that themselves. "It's a good world, but a world full of
drugs," says a dark-skinned Puerto Rican man of about 40, who agreed
to speak through a translator on condition his name was withheld.

The man sits atop a trash receptacle at the corner of Charlton and
Main, near the People in Peril wet shelter, his knees hunched against
his chest. He's wearing pants and a sturdy coat, but gives off an
almost imperceptible shiver, despite the hot June weather. He has been
on the streets for four years, he says, even during our bitter New
England winters, and by now, he's "not afraid of anything."

"I've been clean for four days," he confides. Those four days go up
against 20 years of addiction to drugs such as crack cocaine.
Haltingly, he describes how his addiction led to the demise of his
relationship with the mother of his children. A police record, along
with his addiction, has made the break permanent, he indicates. He has
basically given up. "I can't fight for [my family] so I don't need to
fight for my life," he says. "I find relief [in drugs]."

These discarded bleach kits were at the heart of a dispute between
Health Awareness Services of Central Massachusetts and Main South
resident Frank Zitomersky.

For all the neighborhood's problems, for all the troubled people like
this man, there are signs of stability. Dozens of businesses are
thriving here, and for every obvious junkie there are a number of
everyday folk.

But it's the former population that groups such as Health Awareness
Services aim to serve, and its workers have their hands full.

HAS's Downs defends his agency's presence in Zitomersky's
neighborhood. For one thing, he says, their activities have the
approval of the state Department of Public Health. (The bleach kits
actually come from the DPH, he says.) Second, the group's mission
isn't simply to cater to drug addicts. They aim to prevent the
transmission of deadly diseases and, when possible, get people on the
road to recovery.

Beyond distributing bleach kits, condoms and informational materials,
the workers also try to interview drug users to conduct "risk
assessments," surveys listing a person's dangerous habits -- injection
drug use, condom use -- that allow HAS to then give users referrals to
the right agencies for treatment.

At its Grove Street office, HAS provides family planning and mental
health services, as well as testing services for STDs, including HIV.
Its workers also attempt to find detox beds for users hoping to get
clean. That isn't always possible, given the short supply, Downs says.
"It depends on the day, it depends on what's going on," he says. "Nine
times out of 10 there isn't an available bed."

Getting a user to come in for an AIDS test or into a detox bed can be
difficult, judging from an afternoon spent with HAS workers as they
wound their way through Main South. It can be hard enough just to get
someone to stop and submit to a risk assessment.

One major stop on HAS's circuit is Castle Park, the flashpoint for its
run-in with Zitomersky.

Regularly, one and two at a time, addicts lope up Castle Street and
adjacent Oread Place, a short, rutted, dead-end road, to the park's
entrance, which is shrouded in brush and overhanging trees.

A stone wall rings part of the park's perimeter. HAS's Edwin Acevedo,
after talking with a couple walking down a path -- a young black man in
basketball-style attire and a thin-framed, stringy-haired white woman
in her 20s -- points out a number of crevices along the wall. In these
spaces, he and other workers hide bleach kits for users to pick up
later. Users don't like to carry the packets around for fear they will
give the police reason to search their person, Acevedo explains.

Clambering down a steep path partially hidden by brush, Acevedo stops
at a makeshift landing. Scattered around the site are empty bottles of
bleach and other drug-related garbage. In spots like this, too, he
will leave bleach kits for addicts to hopefully use.

Zitomersky is all too familiar with what Acevedo's doing.

In response to a call for an interview, he instead extends an
invitation -- to tour an abandoned lot off Davis Street, a stone's
throw from Castle Park and his home that he asserts is a haven for
drug addicts and a dumping ground for the materials HAS workers distribute.

Beyond those controversial bleach kits, HAS also distributes condoms
and informational materials.

The lot in question, which is tax-title land and owned by the city,
has become so overgrown with weeds, scraggly trees and bramble that
it's practically a jungle. Occasionally, Zitomersky says, the city
comes through and cleans the lot up. But it's clear that hasn't
happened in a while.

Although Zitomersky is a longtime neighborhood resident, a purchaser
of tax-title and other properties in the area (and on this day, is
accompanied by an abutting property owner, Gary Henrich), it's clear
who the outsiders are as he leads a reporter and photographer on a
tour through the lot.

One Hispanic man, clearly homeless or close to it, barely acknowledges
the group's presence as he weaves his way through the lot, scanning
the ground intensely for empty bottles.

Two beat-up easy chairs are positioned near each other under a canopy
of brush. Countless empty liquor bottles and scores, if not hundreds
of used and unused bleach kits and brochures -- the same materials
given out by groups such as Health Awareness Services -- are strewn in
multiple places throughout the lot.

"A picture's worth a thousand words," Zitomersky says, his anger and
frustration almost palpable, as a photographer snaps away at one
particularly large pile of drug-related detritus. "This is literally
150 feet from my house. And you wonder why I get a little upset."

"I understand what they're trying to do," he says of HAS. "But they're
creating future hazardous waste. When you put the packets at one
location, that's not outreach -- that's enabling."

Zitomersky isn't the only neighborhood activist who's ticked off. His
neighbor is well-known progressive activist and School Committee
member Joseph O'Brien, who lives with his wife, Lisa Weinberg, on
Oread Place in a home he purchased from Zitomersky.

In a recent conversation, O'Brien was nearly apoplectic. "I support
needle exchange, I support treatment on demand," O'Brien says. "But
the agencies are completely irresponsible with the way they go about
it. They leave big piles of them in the park. What if a kid went over
and drank one of those? You can't just leave piles of them in a park
where kids are going to come and play. I think if you check with the
state, the point of the program is not to drop packets all around with
them."

O'Brien's blood is up. "I just walked in the park," he says. "There's
guys shooting up on the wall, there are two guys doing a drug deal and
they don't give a shit. I walked over to the handball court. There's a
bunch of people shooting up. There's a woman with her pants down
around their ankles shooting up."

The tidy, bright-red O'Brien home stands out against the stark
backdrop of Oread Place. There's a well-tended -- and well-fenced --
community garden next to it. If you were to lift it from its moorings
and drop it on the West Side, the home would fit right in.

And until recently, O'Brien and his wife have been able to fit in as
well, he says: "The last couple of weeks it's started to get really
bad. I don't mind living among people with challenges, but now it's
become unsafe. It's getting to the point where they're going to start
breaking into my house."

But O'Brien swears the last thing he'll do is give up. "I'm not
leaving," he says. "That's never going to happen with me. The only way
I'm going out of here is in a pine box."

Downs acknowledges the quality-of-life problems Zitomersky and others
cite, but defends the agency's outreach work as both legal and
appropriate. "We understand the trash aspect of it, We've been trying
to encourage people to dispose of [bleach kits] properly. But when
there are no trash cans [in the park] people are less likely to
[properly] discard things. We do outreach in the park every two weeks
for 15 minutes," he says, and workers drop at most "three or four"
bleach kits at the time there.

Also, he says, "We're very willing, if neighborhood clean-ups are
going on, we're very willing to do that."

Zitomersky says that drug addicts should be offered treatment and
bleach kits at a central location, not catered to in known drug-ridden
areas. Downs disagrees: "You have to be where [drug users] are."

Still, Downs says he hopes the two sides can find some common ground
and he says there's already been some progress on that front. "When
[HAS Executive Director] Michael Mazloff and I met with Barbara
Haller, there were many things we agreed on," he says. However, he
says, no one at HAS has since heard back from Haller or anyone else in
response to the agency's offer of assistance. Haller says she'd prefer
that HAS pick up its trash on its own, but also says that she'll call
them when the next clean-up is scheduled. "We have ofered to help and
haven't heard anything at this point," he says. "Yes, trash is an
issue, but the bigger issue is someone passing on a virus, which in
the long run is a lot more costly."

In the meantime, you just can't get away from the drugs. Within 20
minutes at about 1 p.m. on a Friday in June, two ambulances scream by
the corner of King and Main streets. In between that, members of the
Worcester Police Department's vice squad squeal up to a King Street
apartment building and execute an apparent bust.

The scene quickly attracts a curious crowd that just as quickly
dematerializes, melting back into the streetscape. They've seen this
type of thing before.

A few minutes later, apparently in hot pursuit, an undercover
policeman screams away in a tan Ford Taurus. The car's piercing siren
slices cleanly through a throbbing fog of bass emanating from an idling car.

Scenes like that aren't isolated ones. Spend some time in the
neighborhood these days and the increased police presence is obvious,
with uniformed officers strolling along Main Street and both marked
and unmarked police vehicles in evidence.

The area has been declared a Zero Tolerance Zone by police and the
numbers bear that designation out; the police say they have arrested
more than 200 people in the area since May 11. The arrests are
focusing on prostitutes and their johns, drug dealers and users, and
other quality-of-life crimes. The crackdown, ordered by WPD Chief
Gerald Vizzo, comes after pressure and repeated complaints from neighbors.

Right now, however, it's just an expectation. A question that can't be
answered for some time is whether these efforts, particularly the
current, intense police presence, will have a lasting or temporary
effect.

For one thing, prostitution and low-level drug offenses don't
necessarily carry long prison sentences. What ends up happening,
judging by an extensive search of courthouse records and press
accounts of drug and prostitution sweeps, is that the same people keep
getting arrested time and again, often for the same crimes.

Then there's simply the nature of history, and the tendency of places,
once identified by either prosperity or trouble, to remain that way --
like societal magnets. In other words, Main South has been a hot zone
for a long, long time -- who's to say it can ever change?

Zitomersky says that he notices a short-term difference already. "The
park is cleaner," he says. "But how long can you sustain that kind of
police presence when the police department is suffering cutbacks? The
long-term solution to the park is to have the park utilized. To have
programs up there and have people use it and to have the police
presence when you need it." Also, he says, the war on drugs has to
coincide with a more equitable distribution of social service
agencies. Zitomersky and others complain that Main South contains a
great many organizations and facilities that cater to people with
special needs, including drug and alcohol addiction (see City Desk /
"Map quest," this issue).

"Overall, our neighborhood is a lot better than it was 15 years ago,"
Zitomersky says. "But how long can you keep on fighting? It's tiring."