The neighborhood doesn’t have an official name. It’s the northernmost part of Rogers Park, the few blocks between Howard Street and Calvary Cemetery in Evanston, bordered on the east by Sheridan Road and on the west by the CTA’s rapid transit yard. Some people call it North of Howard, and if it ever becomes a trendy place to live some promoter is sure to shorten this to NoHo. But the area today is a long way from trendiness.
In the late 1960s blacks started to move in. It was then, the woman says, that Archie Bunker types resurrected the old name. Nobody who loves the neighborhood calls it the Jungle, she says.
There are two trees on the block and a fire department call box. The school could never be mistaken for anything else. It is a squat, three-story brick building, posted with NO BALL PLAYING ALLOWED signs, surrounded by a hurricane fence.
Occasionally a tactical car will be whistled down, but not often. The police know many of the dealers by sight and most of the dealers know the police. When the tactical team has an area under surveillance, from inside the school or from some other vantage point, they are often amused at how quickly the action shuts down whenever one of their unmarked cars cruises by. The dealers are well organized. They have their own lookouts in their own surveillance spots.
Opiola says his tactical team mainly worked the streets north of Howard and the Winthrop-Kenmore corridor south of Devon. “That’s where most of the narcotics were,” he says. “That’s where most of the crime was. Dope and crime work hand in hand.”
Jenkins’s arrest record wasn’t much by the standards of the neighborhood. He’d been charged twice with possession, once with assault, once with disorderly conduct, and once with delivery of a controlled substance, the only felony: he’d allegedly sold cocaine to an undercover police officer. But he’d managed all that in just over a year and a half.
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On that September day she had just walked in the door of the new apartment with the two boys when the phone rang. It was a friend telling her to turn on her radio, that something had happened. She turned on the radio and heard one of the early reports of the shooting. She knew something had to be wrong. “There’s no way he would have shot anyone,” she says. “I don’t even think he knows how to click a gun, or whatever you do.” She kept the radio on, listening for more news, then switched to the TV for the evening news. She waited for Allison to call but he never did call that day. The next time she saw him was in the visitors’ room at Cook County Jail.
