BEDFORD PARK; A CORNER ONCE SUNNY, MADE DREARY BY DRUGS

In an unexpected detour, Cheryl Graham pushed the stroller with her
squirmy 3-year-old into the crowded Kennedy Fried Chicken. Her
7-year-old son, Jyair, his dark eyes beaming, chivalrously held open
the door for his family.

Ms. Graham had been on her way to the grocery store in her Bronx
neighborhood when her boys started complaining of hunger, and so she
ended up here on the corner of East 198th Street and the Grand
Concourse, not far from Lehman College. The chicken joint, which sits
next to a bodega and a Chinese takeout place, is surrounded by grand
apartment buildings that symbolize better times past.

But Ms. Graham, a stately woman who wears her braids coiled on top of
her head, did not want to linger long. She parked her children at a
table and urged them to eat their pizza fast.

"We don't want to spend a lot of time in here," she said. "It's not a
good atmosphere."

She was alluding to the four tables around her, which were dominated
by a group of 10 male teenagers, mostly in jeans, baggy T-shirts and
Yankee caps. Only two appeared to have ordered any food.

Ms. Graham says -- and local merchants, residents, the police and The
Norwood News, a neighborhood paper, all agree -- that the corner
outside the restaurant is a hub of local drug dealing.

"At nighttime in here, it's like they own this," Ms. Graham said later
of the teenagers. "I don't like my children to see this and think it's
normal."

But in a way, what goes on here at the corner has become a kind of
normal, a situation grudgingly accepted as just another fact of life
on these hard-knock streets.

"What's new?" a nearby business owner responded sarcastically when
asked about the drug dealing. "It's a hot corner. There's a lot of
business." He did not want to give his name; he said he feared the
dealers would make him a target.

At night, he said, the corner sometimes crackles with the sound of
gunfire.

In April 2006, in fact, the corner made the news when two bystanders
were hit by stray bullets during a shootout in front of Kennedy Fried
Chicken. One woman was shot in the back while exiting a livery cab.
Across the street, a 16-year-old girl, walking with friends, was hit
in the arm.

Msgr. John Jenik of Our Lady of Refuge Church, on East 196th Street
five blocks from the restaurant, seemed as downcast as the anonymous
merchant; he can recite a long list of anti-drug initiatives that have
failed to eliminate the problem. "People in the street know this," the
pastor said. "They're not getting arrested or harassed. They're almost
operating with impunity."

This spring, complaints of drug dealing at Kennedy's prompted the
police to send undercover officers into the restaurant seeking to buy
drugs. Twice, according to Robert Messner, an assistant police
commissioner, a worker sold crack to officers from behind the
red-and-white tile counter.

In response, the police closed the restaurant briefly at the end of
April; to reopen, the business paid a $4,000 fine and agreed to allow
warrantless inspections and to hand over its security video. "We try
and hit these places and get them to be legitimate and stay
legitimate," Mr. Messner said.

Phillip Werbel, a lawyer for the restaurant, emphasized that the store
had no connection to any drug activity. "Employees can do things that
employers don't know about," he said. He added, "We have even invited
the police to put undercovers in the store; we offered to put them
behind the counter."

He noted that restaurants by their nature must let people sit and eat,
and besides, he said, most of the problems occur on the corner,
outside. "There's an ocean of difficulty on that sidewalk," he said.

As Ms. Graham watched her young sons nibble, she said that during her
23 years living in the neighborhood she has watched it go downhill,
especially along the Grand Concourse.

She'd like to move. "But where else am I going to get an apartment
with eight rooms for under $1,000?" she asked.

And with that, she gathered up her young children and headed toward
the grocery store.