They used to gather under the streetlight with the shot-out bulb–looking tough, blocking traffic, selling drugs. There were about a dozen of them, most younger than 21, and they acted as though this little chunk of Humboldt Park near the intersection of Pierce Street and Kedzie Avenue belonged to them.
“We felt we had achieved the American dream,” says Colon. “Until then, we had never owned our own home. Isn’t that the American dream–to own your own home? The neighborhood was very calm and peaceful. We had all kinds of people: Indians, Hispanics, Poles, Italians. It was a big step for our family.”
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Eventually Colon (who works for the Board of Education) saved enough money to buy his own two-flat, just a few houses down from his father’s. His sister, Magdalena Martinez, and her husband also own a building on the block.
“Some property owners don’t have the money to take care of their buildings; others figure they can make more money out of a building by not keeping it up,” says Colon. “There’s this one big apartment building [nearby]; most of its tenants are poor Mexicans who work in restaurants or factories. The place is falling apart; there’s not enough Dumpsters; there’s no lights in the hallways. People don’t even use the Dumpsters they have. They just throw their garbage out of the window and into the alley. It’s awful, yet I hear they pay $300 a month for rent. They don’t know any better; a lot of them are illegals who don’t speak English. If you say anything to the landlord, he’ll tell you, ‘Hey, I’m providing a service. I’m giving them housing. Don’t complain to me.’”
“They just sort of took over the corner,” says Martinez. “They were very bold. They came out in day or night. They didn’t care who saw them. They dealt drugs out in the open. No one challenged them.”
They exchanged phone numbers and vowed to call each other and the police in the event of an emergency or any suspicious activity on the block. Their first goal was to make sure that the streetlight on the corner near Kedzie was permanently repaired.
Soon their reputation for vigilance spread to the point where local drug dealers painted “ojo” (“eye” in Spanish) on garbage bins in the alley. “That was their way of warning other gang bangers and drug dealers to stay away because we were watching the neighborhood and we would call the police,” says Colon. “We took that as a compliment.”
