In Kensington, Hope Is Hard-Won — But It’s Growing

Eddie Zampitella and Dana Mitchell at Graffiti Pier / Photography by Kyle Kielinski

One afternoon in April, a beautiful spring day, I drive with Eddie and Anthony from the Last Stop in Kensington to Graffiti Pier on the Delaware River.

Eddie Zampitella founded the Last Stop, a nonprofit that helps people with drug and alcohol addictions, 30 years ago. It is what the name implies: a place for anyone to go when they’ve run out of hope.

Anthony, a longtime user from New Jersey, happened to walk by the Last Stop one day last winter, and a guy outside suggested he go in; Anthony was adrift, lost, still using — it was meth now. Eddie’s a small, energetic, sinewy guy, 69 years old, with a near-constant patter that seems to be about whatever crosses his mind; before Anthony, quiet, 38, with a very long beard and shaved head, left that day, Eddie pressed: “Call me tomorrow morning.”

The next morning, there was no call. But Eddie had gotten Anthony’s number, and he made the call instead. For the next several weeks, Anthony lived at the Last Stop.

And that’s how it often goes there, I learn. The Last Stop is something of an institution in Kensington; struggling people show up and make it home for a while, sleeping on eighth-inch-thick yoga mats for months, sometimes years. There’s recovery, death, marriages, births, with holiday barbecues and dinners for those with nowhere to go. And Eddie has a particular way of trying to reach people in need.

Graffiti Pier is an odd place, a piece of the old Reading Railroad line that juts into the river. The huge cement support structures for the tracks are still there, filled with graffiti of various hues, almost all of them bright. Eddie points to a metal framework 40 feet up, something he built, up where the tracks once were — he lived there, off and on, for several years. The pier’s a surprisingly clean place, devoid of trash, since Eddie always brings a couple of trash bags to fill; his grandfather used to bring him here, and it’s a kind of sanctuary to him. Now he brings addicts to give them a break from Kensington, to sit by the water with a spectacular view of the Ben Franklin Bridge, to talk. Eddie might do most of the talking, about anything: “Now here’s the river,” he says as we walk to the pier. “Let me show you my groundhogs. I’ve been feeding them fat, too.” He points to an embankment along our path, to the holes he stuffs with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches­ for giant rodents.

For weeks, he made a daily trek here with Anthony; early on, Eddie challenged him to climb up the steel spikes he’d hammered into the concrete to reach the top. “I was a little nervous doing it,” Anthony says. I’m thinking that his hesitation wasn’t about the climb itself, that it had more to do with why Eddie would ask him to do it. Anthony smiles. He knows now what Eddie was up to — that it was a challenge of trust.

I’m struck by Anthony not because of his backstory — he got addicted to heroin and did six years in prison for selling it — but because of the opposite: how gentle he seems. How calm. How … landed, as if he might have found, with Eddie, something he’s been looking for all along. His quietude seems easy.

The ongoing story of Kensington is unavoidable. It’s the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, with the attendant human horror on full display on the sidewalks: users seemingly posed, standing, as if frozen in place in awkward positions. One day near Kensington and Allegheny avenues, a man goes up to another lying on the sidewalk and taps him — not gently — with his foot. Then he saunters on, and for a moment I don’t know what the verdict is — until I see the man on the sidewalk move an arm.

Things got so bad a few years ago, during Mayor Jim Kenney’s do-nothing administration, that City Councilman Allan Domb proposed declaring a state of emergency in order to get the feds and state in for disaster relief; it went nowhere. Videos of Kensington’s drug scene have made it an international sensation for gawkers on YouTube for years now, defining — or confirming — something egregious about America.

McPherson Square Library in Kensington

Meanwhile, the drug of choice shifted from heroin to fentanyl and then to fentanyl laced with xylazine, the animal tranquilizer commonly called tranq, with the effect of disintegrating bones and sometimes costing users their hands or lower legs. Still, people come from all over, then stay, trapped by addiction, and many boys who grow up in Kensington fall easily into the drug trade, since the schools are poor and there aren’t any jobs that compare.

But the story may be shifting. Mayor Cherelle Parker cleared out drug encampments in Kensington starting last year and added more focused 24-hour police patrols along a mile-long stretch of Kensington Avenue. She’s been praised by Kensington residents and lambasted by addiction activists, who charge that the city is putting addicts in even graver danger by scattering them all over the city without even the support network of one another. The problem is so difficult and long-standing that, once she claimed she would fix Kensington, Parker might have bet the success of her mayoralty on doing just that; if she fails she’ll look like a fool for taking the plunge. On the other hand, after years of inaction by city government, things in Kensington are finally coming to a head — Parker’s loud gambit is pushing us that far, at least. What, I wonder, is possible?

Kensington is a place where someone like Eddie can find his calling. He’s got a past too, starting with quitting high school half a century ago: “I lived on Cambria. And there was a bunch of guys like me who couldn’t read or write. Puffing glue, THC, meth, hash, drinking, whiskey, scoring. You were into all of it: girls, fighting in the neighborhood.”

When Eddie and Anthony and I head back to Kensington from Graffiti Pier that afternoon, there’s a line of 25 people outside the Last Stop, many of them hunched, seeking solace of some kind; Eddie’s work is never done.

I go to Kensington a dozen times in search of more people like Eddie, people who have dug in to change the story there — I go in search, really, of hope. What I find startles me, in the utter relentlessness of those I meet — a few who have built nonprofits aimed at large fixes; others, like Eddie, who stick closer to the streets. They are dug in, it seems, as deep as the trouble there. Even if most of us left Kensington for dead long ago, deep trouble brings out a different breed, those who show up — or refuse to leave — and insist that there really is an answer.

With that, I’ve found an inkling of the hope I’m looking for — much more than an inkling, it turns out.

Coke, according to his birth certificate, is Luis Cruz. Nicknamed Cocoa as a boy, with the inevitable shortening once he hit the streets at 15 as a dealer. Even though Coke moved weed, mostly, and not powder, the nickname stuck.

To understand his story — and what has gotten him off the streets and on to a mission to do the same for others — we need to understand what happened to put him there to begin with. Which is what happened to Kensington, once a workhorse mill town of America, over the past 75 years.

One day, I climb up to the top of an old carpet factory at A and Indiana, in the heart of Kensington, and it comes into sharp relief: clusters of rowhouses surrounded by the big brick factories and warehouses in easy walking distance, where hats, carpet, lace, and scores of other products were manufactured. A hundred years ago, Kensington supported 400 textile firms, with 30,000 workers, one of the biggest textile concentrations in the world.

Now some of those brick buildings are empty, while others are being developed; almost zero industry is left. Kensington got hit with something of a double whammy. As in so many urban neighborhoods in the eastern United States, what was once manufactured there became much cheaper to make elsewhere. By the late 1950s, factories were closing; workers were leaving. African Americans and Puerto Ricans came north to move into the empty houses. There were race riots and fewer and fewer jobs, and the big abandoned factories right off I-95 were perfect places for a new, quite lucrative industry, with plenty of nooks and crannies for the hiding and selling and taking of drugs.

A dizzying array of pretty much every facet of American drug culture hit Kensington: heroin in the late ’60s, speed in the early ’70s, then cocaine and crack and, starting in the early ’90s, heroin so pure it could be snorted, and then, in the past decade, heroin’s offshoots. For the most part, the rest of the city looked the other way, buried in its own concerns. The Conrail gulch off Gurney Street became a huge encampment of addicts beginning in the ’90s.

The city ignored that, too, for decades. In fact, nobody in the city saw fit even to include them in counts of Philadelphia’s homeless — as if they were so dangerous or hidden away that they didn’t exist at all. Finally, after Inquirer reports on Kensington made it impossible to ignore, the mayor’s office took a look and professed shock at the squalor and drugs and danger, and a tug-of-war ensued between the city and Conrail until the encampment was pushed out into the light of Kensington street life in 2017.

Which is the daunting mess that was left for Cherelle Parker, and the world that Luis Cruz — Coke — grew up in.

Coke Cruz in front of his Ride Free nonprofit

Coke was pulled into the drug trade early. His family life was solid — his father, the brother of former State Representative Angel Cruz, was a member of the electricians union — but he succumbed to the allure of selling weed. It wasn’t hard. There was a big-time dealer on his block who brought him in, and, before he hit 20, Coke was making $300 a day. He was never, he says, “a bang-bang guy,” caught up in the violence. Still, he found himself at the boot end of police brutality — they beat him with his own Glock during a raid, he says, after he’d thrown it on the ground as he ran from them — and spent three years fighting a gun charge that he eventually beat.

The worst of it all was bringing his little brother — seven years younger — into the business. A dozen years ago, his brother started to get worn down with legal trouble, violating probation with dirty urine samples; he was constantly in and out of prison. “He got tired,” Coke says. Now his voice, usually loud and rapid, gets soft, and slow. “He just got tired.” Coke was trying to get out of the drug business himself, and knew that hanging with his brother risked keeping him in. “My brother was a very, very hard guy, didn’t speak to many people, made people uncomfortable. But with me he was a baby. When he was in jail he’d call and cry at me.”

“I don’t want to see you,” Coke told his brother. He stopped talking to him. “That hurt him more than me being, like, ‘Fuck you, what the fuck are you doing?’ He was all alone.” Coke has three kids; he could go home to them. His brother had no one. He killed himself with two shots to the head.

Coke knew he had to not only get out of the drug trade but do something with his life — but it took some time. He started promoting outdoor rap concerts in the neighborhood and leading small drives to give out clothes and backpacks for kids, which led a friend of his, a janitor who worked for Kensington revitalization nonprofit Impact Services, to talk him up to Impact head Casey O’Donnell. It was during COVID, and Coke was still dealing, by phone. He talked to Casey about his anti-violence rap concerts, about helping out the neighborhood, and Casey had a question: “What’s next for you?”

Coke was startled. Having a plan — the possibility of a plan — was not on his radar. Casey promised him $800 to promote his next concert, and gave it to Coke’s janitor friend to pass to him. There was a small problem, however: The janitor used the money to buy Percocet, so the money never made it to Coke. Though something much better did.

Coke told Casey that he should talk to the janitor, that the janitor had a problem. That was the moment Casey knew his reading of Coke — that he was a guy with a certain backstory, yes, but there was a whole other side to him — was right: Coke wasn’t interested in retribution; he really wanted to help the guy. After that, Casey let Coke use Impact’s basement on Allegheny Avenue to create Ride Free, which has become a workforce nonprofit with a million-dollar budget and a dozen employees to help anybody caught up in the drug trade get off the street.

Five thousand people came through Ride Free’s doors last year. The setup is pure Coke: Dazzle them with what he calls “the fascination factor” — a recording studio (that’s the big one), along with T-shirt making (want to create your own clothing brand?) and a free barbershop. That gets them in the door. Then Coke’s staff asks a question: What are you really interested in doing? Quickly, Coke’s team turns to the nuts and bolts, offering Work Force Wednesdays, 11 to 2, where it’s all about life skills, résumé building, mock interviews. Leading to jobs in, say, construction, or as a forklift operator, or working for the city cleaning the streets, or at a hair salon. If none of that sounds all that glamorous, or lucrative, then you have no idea, Coke says, how desperate most people really are to get off the street, for a regular paycheck and a regular life. Never mind the pay cut.

Casey asked him, early on, if he’d be at risk in the neighborhood — the dealer who had gone legit, pulling a drug-block owner’s workers off the street. It hasn’t happened, Coke says. Now when he’s in the neighborhood there’s a different refrain: “Bro, can you get me a job?” It helped that Casey asked him to take some time to get his life together, a period between dealing and working under Casey’s wing in the basement. He was gone from the streets, and when he returned, he had something even a dealer who owned a block wanted.

“Nobody wants to sell drugs,” Coke says. “For a kid 15, 16 years old, yeah. But for a realistic person who’s from the real world, and who has a family — nobody wants to do this shit. Because it’s dangerous, because it’s doing a bad thing.”

Coke makes it clear that he has only so much time — he is constantly aware that getting up at 4:30, smoking a little medicinal weed, working out, and then diving into his workday is a headlong challenge in staying afloat, in getting things done, in surviving, and always will be. It’s the drug dealer’s assumption of an early death turned inside out: Coke is 38 years old and he has saved himself, but the world is fucked up and the only way out — actually, the only way to stay in, to stay alive — is to keep moving. And he wants more support.

At the end of last year he lost his funding from the city — Coke is sure that had everything to do with his struggles with police. A police mini-station and Ride Free were both housed in Impact’s building, and it was not a good mix, not when Coke and his workers would openly smoke a joint out front, not when they rubbed up against the cops every day. Not when some of those cops had once chased Coke down those same streets.

A lieutenant told Casey, “I want to talk to the guy in the basement,” and the writing was on the wall: Coke had to leave Impact. In desperation, with no funding, he made a call to City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who had heard about Ride Free, and also about the tension with the cops; he said he’d get back to Coke, and Coke was sure that was the end of that.

A few days later, Johnson called and said he would fund Ride Free this year with $500,000. Well, Coke thought, that was only half of his budget, but at least it would keep his doors open, at a new location down the street.

Some of the guys who show up are, Coke admits, “fucking murderers. But the fact that I can make you not want to be a murderer by giving you a job is amazing, right? And how do you clean this huge mess” — what Kensington has become — “when these guys are being ignored?”

Coke sees his mission as saving a lost generation. Why, he wonders, doesn’t he get more help?

Coke’s question comes alive in a lot of different ways as I keep searching for people who can’t take no for an answer when it comes to fixing Kensington.

Hulda Sanchez moved near Kensington’s Hope Park in 1981. She was a single mother with two young daughters, sewing mattresses at a factory a mile away; they were the only Puerto Ricans — the only people of color, period — on her block. Her house got broken into three times early on — there was nothing to steal; it was intimidation. Pure racism.

Hulda Sanchez on her front porch in Kensington

Over the years, Hulda watched the drug trade grow. But once dealing was happening there, on her street, right outside her house — no. One day she saw a guy hide a bag of dope in her downspout, and she shot out the door:

“Who the fuck you think you are, you motherfucker, to put that fucking shit in my pipe? Have you lost your mind?”

The dealer looked startled. “No, Mama.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

It’s funny, given that Hulda is five-foot-three, a ball of preternatural good cheer with flaming red hair. Really, though, it’s wrenching, what she’s had to put up with. Once she invited the dealer controlling her street inside her house for a chat; Hulda calmly explained that she was a working woman raising two girls alone, and she needed some peace and quiet. For a time, the dealers moved down the street.

She was always on guard. One day she came home from work early, and her daughters, ages 10 and 12, were sitting on the front porch — strictly forbidden if Hulda wasn’t home. She stopped the car in the street, leaped out, left it running: “What the hell do you two think … ?” Everything was fine, but — always on guard.

That’s how she had to live; her daughters are now married with children of their own, both in Florida. Hulda, though, isn’t going anywhere. And now her neighborhood has changed again.

Casey O’Donnell had a big hand in that. It had taken Casey almost a decade of leading Impact to be able to leave Coke to his own devices. Early on, he would have gotten involved with what Coke was up to in the basement, tried to control how it should go. Been the overriding problem solver. But if Coke and his method were going to work, he had to be left alone. Casey had to trust the people in the place he was trying to change.

Casey’s the son of Bob O’Donnell, who was elected speaker of the state House in 1990; Casey went to Quaker schools and grew up in Germantown, a childhood of both privilege and grit — “not that Germantown is a rough neighborhood,” he says, “but in the ’70s and ’80s it had its moments.” He was a lousy student, too antsy to sit at a desk. After college he went into construction, but pretty quickly discovered that he “was much better helping the guys I supervised figure out their lives than keeping them demolishing the interior of the old Bonwit Teller building.”

So he got a doctorate in clinical psychology at La Salle, with a specialty in trauma.

When Casey came to work at Impact in 2013, he talked up his ideas about how trauma manifests in communities. The reaction? A lot of what the hell are you talking about? The concept was too new. But Casey didn’t lose sight of trauma-based solutions, and he began zeroing in on a particular ground-level project that tackled trauma without quite calling it that.

It started with Guillermo Garcia in 2016. He called Casey and complained that addicts were sleeping under a loading ramp across the street from where he lived near Hope Park; the ramp belonged to the old carpet factory that Impact owned. Guillermo had grown up in poverty­ in Kensington. He quit high school at 16, started selling weed, and was good at it, soon cruising around the neighborhood in a Cadillac Eldorado. But a prison stint in his early 30s cured him of the drug trade, and, in his 50s now, Guillermo comes across a little like retired Eagle Brandon Graham: He delivers a certain toughness by dint of a constant half-smile, as if he can’t help himself, that this is simply the way it is. Guillermo became the guy who knows everyone, and whom everyone listens to.

“You’ve got to get over here,” he told Casey, whom he had never met, in 2016. Casey went right over. “You get rid of that ramp,” Guillermo told him. If Casey’s guys couldn’t solve the problem, Guillermo said, he’d take the ramp down himself.

Casey said they could solve it together; a few days later, welders showed up and removed the ramp. Thus began a partnership with Guillermo and the community, part of the evolution in Casey, in the way he had to trust solutions to happen from within.

Casey O’Donnell (left) and Guillermo Garcia

“I had this 140,000-square-foot building on a campus at an intersection that was brutal, like brutal,” Casey says. In 2017, he held community meetings to find out how residents wanted the building used, though he made an early mistake by suggesting it could house addicts who had been living in the Conrail gulch right behind it.

“I got torn apart,” Casey says. “And I got calls from politicians threatening me. I got a call from the head of housing who said I was trying to take money from Prevention Point [an addiction-advocate nonprofit]. I didn’t realize how political all this was.” Casey smiles wryly, given his father’s profession: “I would never want to be a politician.”

As interested as he was in how trauma­ informs residents’ lives, Casey had somehow failed to see the depth of the rejection — ­the trauma — in how utterly­ ignored residents had felt for so long. Guillermo,­ Hulda, and others said they were sick and tired of the drugs, sick and tired of the services that did come around there being only for addiction. They didn’t want any more addiction services. And for good measure, they were sick and tired of the status­ quo that didn’t consider them at all.

“And so we committed to not bringing addiction-focused services into the factory campus,” Casey says. “Not at all. It was just a terrible posture.”

But he still believed the factory could become the anchor for the neighborhood, if its transformation could be collectively decided.

The neighborhood residents and Impact came up with two phases for the project: One was low-priced housing — what would turn out to be 48 units, renting for $650 to $900 a month, a range that Mayor Parker has taken to calling “affordable luxury.” Apartments are spacious and airy, with high windows. And in the second phase half the building will be commercial. Perhaps with a daycare center, or light manufacturing, or with the most basic need of so many poor communities: a grocery store.

There were other community-centered pieces: Impact secured $2 million for home repairs, because one of the ongoing fears of poor residents is displacement. How do we make sure that long-term residents can stay in their homes?

Guillermo knocked on doors, asked residents what they needed, and the level of poverty and disrepair shocked him: First floors had missing planks, so that you could look right down into basements; tarps put up to keep rain coming through roofs out of the center of houses were funneling waterfalls out back doors.

“We also cleaned the shit out of streets,” Casey says. And created small gardens out of vacant lots. The concept of greening is one he loves, since it taps his data-driven side: Studies show that heart rates go down when people walk past a green lot versus one filled with trash.

But half-acre Hope Park — a block away from Guillermo’s home and the carpet factory — ­was an ongoing problem.

“It was essentially controlled by the narcotics trade,” Casey says. “We had guys that would mow it, and they stopped mowing because one day a guy rolled over a bundle [of drugs] and had rocks thrown at him by dealers.”

An Impact employee cleans up the neighborhood.

Casey — and pretty much everyone else — is adamant that the city can’t police its way into cleaning up parks or neighborhoods, that the effort has to come from multiple fronts. But as then-Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez railed about the horrible state of the park, as local police and the state attorney general’s office became a little more aggressive in policing the area, “that gave us the elbow room, it gave us the breathing room to go in with the city and find shelters for the homeless people there,” Casey says. “And if you don’t activate spaces, it creates a vacuum. You will hear police say, and narcotics people say, there’s nothing more dangerous than a vacant drug corner.”

For now, Hope Park, fenced off with a gate that residents have keys to unlock, is green and drug-free. Crime stats back up the apparent change in the neighborhood: The Inquirer reported in 2023 that within a two-minute walk of Hope Park, violent crime had fallen 36 percent from three years earlier, with property crime dropping 28 percent.

Guillermo says his street looks and feels like it did when he moved there, just before it got overrun with heroin in the ’90s, with people out and about, with kids outside playing, with the residents, not drug dealers or addicts, in control of their neighborhood.

I wonder if Casey is confident that the Hope Park neighborhood will remain safe. He thinks for a moment. “I am hopeful,” he says, and that pause is, more than anything, not doubtful so much as necessary. Being confident about change in Ken­sington can be a fool’s game, but hope? He needs hope to carry on.

Hulda has no such hesitation. She once sent a video of drug deals on her corner to City Hall through someone she knew who worked there, and got no response. Nothing. As if no one cared. As if she did not exist. But when she got new windows (along with a bathroom) from Impact’s home-repair program, she decided she did not need the bars put back over them.

The Hope Park area coming back is a victory, certainly, a demonstration of what’s possible from within the community when the right balance of leadership and residents act, but it also raises questions: Can it be scaled up? Are there enough driven people within Kensington to, say, make a real dent in the drug trade? Can addiction treatment get better? And what’s the city’s role? What, in other words, is really possible in greater Kensington?

There are a couple of unknowns to complicate any answers.

“Any time you create stability, part of the concern is whether all this effort opens the door for investors that just scoop everything up and push everybody out,” Casey says. It’s happening already, with development and market-rate housing creeping up the Market-Frankford Line. A report from a Kensington community-development nonprofit last August noted that more than 4,000 new units are either proposed or being built in Kensington; in 2017, only about 10 new construction permits were issued. Really, gentrification’s been building for a few years now: After the city cleared out drug encampments along Lehigh Avenue in 2019, ground was broken a week later for Kensington Courts, a 155-unit complex; a promotional video for it in 2021 called “thriving Kensington” the “next hot thing.”

The concern about new money and development is obvious: that addicts and the people Coke’s helping and poor residents who want to hold on to their homes will be given even shorter shrift. Or pushed into other neighborhoods.

Then there’s the other unknown: How far can Mayor Parker take her agenda?­ She’s been clear, at least, about what she wants. Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel says her first words to him, when she picked him for the job, were “What are you going to do about Ken­sington?” It’s a place he knows well: Under Operation Sunrise, Commissioner John Timoney’s aggressive late-’90s push to arrest drug dealers and prostitutes, Bethel­ was a narcotics strike force sergeant there. In the early 2000s, he led an investigation squad that partnered with the DEA to dig into trafficking organizations, which had him renting rooms in hotels at the airport to monitor drug runners from Mexico in the next room as they defecated out the heroin they’d wrapped in condoms and swallowed. Bethel’s answer to the mayor so far is putting more cops in the concentrated area where those drug encampments were disbanded.

Adam Geer, Parker’s public safety czar, heard the same thing from the mayor. When she vetted him for the job, she told Geer the administration was going to take on Kensington: “Are you up for it?”

Though when I ask Quiñones-Sánchez, who was on Parker’s transition team, about various mayoral initiatives — Wellness Court, treating addicts in the Northeast at a center the city has developed, an affordable housing plan, a job training program — she says, “Just knowing that the mayor continuously says it is not okay for people to camp out in front of people’s houses is huge.”

Kensington Avenue

It is, in other words, too early to tell if the city is making any headway on those other fronts. But when I talk to others who have invested significant time in Kensington, they tend to be, to say the least, adamant. Margaux Murphy, who has run a free grocery store on Kensington Avenue for three years, says the mayor is clueless about the ramifications of clearing the encampments: “All of Kensington and Allegheny moved to my doorstep. And so children with no shoes on are stepping over people, they’re stepping over needles and human shit. And what Cherelle Parker doesn’t understand is just because people are homeless doesn’t mean that they’re not loved. So a lot of people’s parents come down here and bring them food, bring them clothes, whatever, to see their kid. But then she had them spread out into all the side streets, and probably most of them died because they’re in abandoned buildings. And that’s on Parker.”

Moreover, Margaux, who lives in Port Richmond, a mile from Kensington, is seeing addicts who have drifted to her neighborhood, not getting help, simply avoiding police.

Denunciation of the city’s aggressive approach is common among addiction advocates, for vivid reasons. Amanda Cahill, a 31-year-old woman from Roxborough, was arrested in Kensington last year, along with 33 others, in a police sweep targeting narcotics violations and outstanding warrants. She died in jail three days later after she screamed for help and other inmates banged on their cells for hours trying to summon medical aid, according­ to multiple sources interviewed by the Kensington Voice. The prison system’s chief medical officer told the Voice that the jail’s own policies, coupled with an officer shortage, make timely care difficult; since 2018, according to the Inquirer, at least 29 prisoners in the city’s jails have died in drug-related incidents.

The Wellness Court, set up to allow addicts who are arrested for low-level offenses to go into treatment and then have any conviction expunged, is looking like an early failure, since virtually no one is opting into treatment (as I write this, the court is on pause); victim advocates view arresting people with a serious illness to manipulate them into treatment as a horrible — and illegal — idea to begin with.

Early this year, the Riverview Wellness Village, the city’s residential treatment center in the Northeast, opened to much fanfare, with 340 beds. But addicts taking tranq, who often develop open wounds and are at risk for losing limbs, and who often have myriad mental health problems, require care that advocates say the city isn’t anywhere near ready to provide. Moreover, Kensington currently has about 800 homeless people, by the Inquirer’s count last year. Recovering addicts, after completing a month at a treatment center, can stay for up to a year in residential care, but there are now only 850 recovery-house spots citywide, including Riverview, and the city’s waitlist for them is long. What that means, then, for homeless addicts in Ken­sington who do want help is likely a long wait — time they don’t have — to get it.

In Kensington, I find someone who takes the question of how to help addicts to the simplest possible place.

Britt Carpenter started the Philly Unknown Project in 2015, creating a community garden in Kensington and a clothing thrift store and workforce center in Brewerytown. He had been a jock in high school in the Philly suburbs, worked as a college administrator, and was addicted to heroin for a decade; Britt was quite familiar with Kensington. He overdosed five times before he got clean just before launching Philly Unknown.

The name has a double meaning: We’ve learned, over the years, to ignore addicts in terrible straits on our sidewalks, as if, somehow, they don’t exist. Which is true from a user’s perspective too. “I would lose all awareness of where I was and how I was feeling,” Britt says. “I would lose a sense of being.” For hours — or days — at a time.

That goes to the heart of what Philly Unknown is about: Britt came back to the place that almost killed him to engage people addicted to drugs on the street, offering them care packages and other assistance, and recognizing the basic humanity of people escaping theirs. It is, as he sees it, the only place to start.

The question of what’s possible in Ken­sington is still hanging.

Let’s go back, for a moment, to Jim Kenney’s time as mayor. City Councilman Allan Domb called Governor Tom Wolf to share his idea of declaring a state of emergency in Kensington to get federal and state help. Wolf was receptive — he told Domb to push a resolution through Council, which Domb did, and then have Kenney give him a call. A call was set up, Domb says, but Kenney didn’t make it. A second call was set up; Kenney didn’t make that one either.

We don’t know if declaring a state of emergency would have been the right path in helping Kensington, but it was certainly much easier to do nothing, because doing nothing was what we’d been doing for so long.

But maybe, just maybe, the tide is beginning to turn in Kensington. Domb, no longer on City Council, now drives past what was the hottest drug spot — Ken­sington and Allegheny avenues — once every couple of weeks to take a look, to see how things are going there. He’s encouraged; Kensington looks better since Parker cleaned up the encampments. Which is a good thing, in his view, since we have to start somewhere.

Not so fast, says Bill McKinney. He runs the nonprofit New Kensington Community Development Corporation, and more than anyone I get to know in Ken­sington, he believes that the only avenue to actual change is tackling every aspect of a system designed, for the past 75 years, to keep Kensington exactly where it is: at the bottom of the barrel. It’s a long view diametrically opposed to Parker’s make-a-splash approach.

“If you think of the ’80s and the early ’90s there was a real focus on some of the neo-Marxist analysis, especially in higher education, and one of those pieces is that capitalism essentially creates a mask so that people can’t see through it and see the oppression that is happening to them,” McKinney says. “But what those theories also looked at was that there are actually cracks in that mask, but the only people who can see through it are those who are most oppressed. We need to listen to them.”

Casey O’Donnell, much more interested in ground-level change than in theories­ about blowing everything up, would like more help from institutions in Philadelphia. Local universities, he says, nod toward Kensington’s plight — Casey notes that Penn Medicine is located in the same building on Lehigh Avenue where Wellness­ Court was held every Wednesday, and Penn provided free services for people being brought to court there. “But as the anchor institutions in our city,” he says, “I think the universities should be more deeply invested in providing resources­ and expertise on the ground instead of primarily­ viewing Kensington as a research opportunity.” Then there’s the business community, and deep-­pocketed philanthropists. For a long time, both have generally taken a pass on tackling any of Kensington’s problems.

I take it as a matter of faith that Mayor­ Parker, who despite multiple requests did not sit down with me to discuss Kensington, cares as deeply about it as she says she does, given the risk she’s taking, what failure­ there will likely do to her politically. But there’s no getting around this: Her administration is confronting a dauntingly complex problem. And the way she’s going about it — “building the plane while I fly it,” in her almost jokey metaphor — is, well, we’re waiting to see just how that turns out.

Which is why I went to Kensington, with the hope of finding people there who were really up to something. I found Eddie and Coke and Casey and others, whose work is really more of a mission, as if they have no choice, who are making sense of their own past or finding the thing to do with their lives that takes on a monumental­ challenge, or both. Regardless, what is fundamental to the people I found in Kensington is how much they’re in it for the long haul, even if it feels like they’re fighting the good fight alone. As if there’s no other place they would rather be, no other work they could be doing.

Eddie Zampitella at the Last Stop in Kensington

A couple of weeks after Eddie and Anthony­ and I spend an afternoon at Graffiti Pier, I go back to see Eddie at the Last Stop. On the walls at either end of the meeting room, dim with colored lights, are dozens of names: One wall is people who got sober; the other is people who didn’t make it. Anthony has moved to a halfway house, and he’s doing fine, Eddie tells me. He keeps tabs on Anthony: Always at risk for falling back is, of course, the nature of addiction.

But just as Parker is, I fear — like others­ before her — in over her head, it’s impossible­ for random people, no matter how dedicated, to solve Kensington. The people I’ve met who have dug deep into the neighborhood can’t go it alone.

There’s one more question, then, that’s not for our mayor, or city government, or cops, or Kensington residents, or those living­ on the street. And it’s not for any of the obsessively committed people I’ve gotten­ to know there. It’s really a question for the rest of us, and the answer — more than anything else — will decide the fate of this star-crossed place: How much do we really care?

Published as “New Day Rising” in the July 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.