EMBATTLED BUT NOT BROKEN

NW Neighborhood Struggles To Emerge From Culture Of Violence

For the streets around Hobart Place NW, it was a day for renewal.
Homeowners tilled and turned rich, dark topsoil for a new community garden
on an abandoned lot. Footballs spiraled through the air during a flag
football game. Hamburgers and hot dogs sizzled on a grill as police closed
the street for the festivities.

But the real world was never far away. Even as D.C. Mayor Anthony A.
Williams brought truckloads of city workers to sweep streets and alleys in
the neighborhood along Georgia Avenue to kick off a citywide anti-litter
campaign March 30, the sound of nearby gunfire pierced the bright, sunny
Saturday, beginning at 9:15 a.m.

No one was hit by the shots. But to the T-shirt-and-jeans-clad police
officers who drew their service weapons and stalked down alleys in search
of a shooter as parents pulled their children indoors, the message seemed
clear: The elements of violence and destruction will not quietly relinquish
their turf to community do-gooders.

"It ain't even 2 o'clock yet," said Gloria Clark, reemerging from her house
on Hobart Place after the shooting stopped. "It's sad."

The 500 and 600 blocks of Hobart, once part of a proud working-class black
community, have been home to one of the District's most entrenched drug
markets since the mid-1980s. Since the end of February, two people have
been wounded in shootings there, part of a spate of drive-by shootings
across a broader section of Northwest Washington that have left four people
dead. On Hobart, the gunfire strafed the aluminum siding of houses, pierced
car roofs and cracked bedroom windows.

Police attribute the latest spasm of violence to feuds between at least
four gangs in the city. Among them: the Hobart Stars, a loosely organized
crew of perhaps a dozen youths and men who, some Hobart residents say,
borrowed their name from a neighborhood basketball team.

It isn't that the people, police and politicians haven't been trying to
restore the area.

Two years ago, Williams (D) vowed to wipe out the open-air drug market in
the 500 and 600 blocks of Hobart Place, promising increased police patrols
and more city services. An abandoned house was razed, and two homes were
rebuilt by Habitat for Humanity. The big drug market faded.

But it didn't disappear. Some dealers simply moved a few blocks west or
north, dispersing like seeds in the wind, and residents of the surrounding
blocks have seen deteriorationspread.

In the 700 block of Hobart just west of Georgia Avenue, where Annie Harris
moved into a two-story row house in the 1940s, drug dealers drive in to the
one-way block and park all day. They sometimes hide stashes from police in
the two tiny parks that straddle the block, or in the alleys or under car
tires. Broken glass, empty liquor containers and even urine-filled bottles
line the sidewalk.

Some days, the "business people," as Harris calls them, choose the shade
tree in front of her home to sell their drugs or to play dice on a car.
They treat Harris and her 85-year-old husband with respect, and she returns
the favor.

"Most of them are fine-looking young men and young women," she said. "It
really breaks my heart. They're just wasting their lives."

Rosebushes still bloom in the two tiny parks, just as they did when Lady
Bird Johnson dedicatedthem in 1968, but no one cultivates them anymore. No
children climb on the nearby jungle gym.

"Some people are afraid to go over to the park," said Harris, 84. "When the
businessmen are here, the parents keep their children in."

In decades past, neighbors would throw block parties, Harris said. And in
the '60s, the Hobart Club tended to the rosebushes.

"The 700 block used to be a lovely, lovely street," Harris said. "It was a
wonderful street. It was like a home."

A Harsh Introduction

Cathy Lanier, commander of the 4th Police District, knows Hobart Place
well. As a rookie 12 years ago in an area that her officers call "The
Jungle," Lanier was punched in the face by a heroin dealer during an arrest.

Lanier said that overall crime around Hobart has dropped significantly in
the past year and that property crimes have fallen by 50 percent as
undercover drug operations and high-visibility tactics are helping police
make arrests.

Still, as Lanier speaks of the ills police can heal, she also notes those
they cannot. She can assign only a few officers each shift to the area,
which encompasses about 50 blocks. Even the 90-plus officers who will be
assigned to a police substation scheduled to open this summer on Park Road,
six blocks north, may not be enough.

As for the drug market, Lanier knows that it is still in the area, though
somewhat dispersed. "You still have the addicts. You still have the users,"
she said. "You can't arrest your way out of a drug problem."

Tom and Dorothy Copps, the only white family in the 600 block of Columbia
Road NW, were called gentrifiers two years ago when they bought a crack
house that was renovated after it had been firebombed. The Copps, whose
back door faces Hobart Place, said Hobart has improved since they moved in.

But violence still can come from almost anywhere, at any time. About a year
ago, the couple's 24-year-old daughter looked out a back window and saw the
body of a man who had been beaten to death because he refused to fight his
pit bull against another man's dog.

The new neighborhood brought other surprises as well.

"We didn't actually know it was an open-air drug market when we bought the
house," said Tom Copps, 55, a drug counselor and pastor. "After we moved
in, we figured it out pretty quickly."

Although more police have been assigned to the streets around Hobart in
recent years, residents still complain about a lack of police presence and
how the drug sales often merely shift from one block to another.

But officers Junis Fletcher and Todd Reid drive and walk the streets around
Hobart almost every day. They can clear a stoop in moments, but the crowds
return 20 minutes later. Unless police directly witness illegal activities,
there's not much they can do.

Dozens of adults, young and old, wander the streets each day, like children
on an endless spring break. With little education and few skills, regular
employment is hard to find.

"It's like we're fighting an uphill war," Fletcher said.

The police also face a community that is often too scared, too apathetic or
too unorganized to help itself.

"These boys aren't selling drugs -- the people are buying drugs," said "Big
Bob" Green, who owns an office supply store in the area. "The community
will have to stop the drugs. The people will have to stop the drugs."

Made for Drug Trade

PCP was the rage in the late 1970s, powder cocaine and crack cocaine in the
'80s. Marijuana is now the drug of choice.

Hobart's very structure has contributed to its status as a drug market. The
500 and 600 blocks are open only to eastbound traffic, with one entrance
off Georgia Avenue, at the top of a hill. That allows dealers to scan the
whole street for police.

"It was almost as if they designed this street for drug activity," said
Kevin Esters, a Howard University accountant who bought a house on Hobart
nearly 15 years ago.

The drug sales are no longer as intense, but over the course of a
generation or so, the crime and other perils brought on by dealing drove
homeowners away. Businesses shut down. People died.

"A lot of people have given up," Tom Copps said. "It's almost an
oppression, a sense of being beaten down."

Nevertheless, the community keeps trying to rise, although sometimes in a
disjointed manner. Since the recent shootings, neighbors have met regularly
to discuss community concerns. And the Nile Valley Business Association,
formed four years ago, has worked to clean up storefronts and has hosted
flea markets.

"In a way, you can see small changes," said Yimooel Ben Yehudah, who with
his brother opened Everlasting Life, a grocery, across from Hobart Place
four years ago. "In a way, you pray and hope that you can do more."

Yehudah's Afrocentric health food store, with its soybean margarine,
organic produce and "Hip Whip" topping, probably would make more money amid
the black professionals and gentrifiers along U Street or at Logan Circle.
But he is happy with the shop where it is. "We don't make no money. We do
this for the people," Yehudah said. "We try to give a righteous example."

Yehudah recalled a childhood in Israel filled with open fields and bike
rides, free of the fears of drugs and violence. His wife and five young
children recently returned there to live, partly because of concern for
their safety.

"The children didn't get any sunshine, because you didn't know when
[violence] was going to pop off," he said.

The community efforts that have sprung up around Hobart, such as cleanup
days and police-sponsored flag football games, are fine, some residents
say, but they provide no backbone for the neighborhood. Fear still chokes
the hopes of many.

"We need help," Harris said. "Yes, indeed."