Lots Of Love-A True Story About A Magical Decade In The Crack Hood

They called it the gut; the waist pile spewed out of the bottoms. Cratered, crumbling sidewalks, and cracks full of clovers, the treacherous terrain banished pedestrians to the streets.

I had only gone there once before that day. It did not go well. A child no older than ten years old pulled out a gun.

That was then, and this was now. Blight and decay's momentum altered magnificently on the cusp of the new millennium. The RNC brought hundreds to the hood, where they made puppets for the protests in the old trolly barn. That was the first time I saw the kids of the hood interacting instead of reacting. 

He was there, Jamal, the child with the gun. All the kids from the hood were there helping to build giant puppets. So were the feds, in the guise of union construction workers volunteering their efforts. Yes, the cops made the puppets they would soon destroy.

Nestled in what everyone would agree was the transition from the colon to the rectum, Bodhi sat in his hermitage, guarding his treasure of twisted metal and rusting bike parts. He had a house, one of only four, with all walls intact and supporting a functional roof. Drunken blues belted out of the tarpaper cavern. Every stanza was punctuated with the exclamation, "what a world!"

This world became my world from 2000 through 2010. I lived across the street from Budd st. Budd is the root of Buddha - enlightenment. I would never have seen the light in the darkness without a coincidence. Fate guided everybody in Everybody's Kitchen to park the school bus/kitchen at the other end of the road to Buddhahood. 

The transformation was rapid. Within a week, the 'hands-off' message had spread. Crime had shut down voluntarily. 

The food was delicious; they could have cooked for kings. It was abundant. They fed two thousand people three meals a day. There was excess, a ton a day they sent out into the community. It was nutritious, almost all vegetarian, the best we had ever tasted, at an unbeatable price. Absolutely free.

The first year was transformative. Jamal, Lala, and dozens of other kids came by daily to help cook. They no longer wandered the streets aimlessly, throwing rocks at unbroken windows. Now they ran up to you with great big hugs. 

The day of the puppets didn't go as planned. When loading them into a truck, a dozen police raided the warehouse, arresting everyone over eighteen. A dozen trash trucks crushed the puppets beneath their wheels as the children cried over all their hard work. 

That was the day we built the oven. The lots in the hood were buildings collapsed into the basements and covered in a thin layer of clay. Clay and broken bricks were the perfect materials for a super-effective pizza oven. From the day it was built until it was destroyed late at night, we had fired up the oven that transformed into a fireplace around the clock for three years straight. At an estimated fifteen hundred degrees, pizzas were baked to perfection in seconds flat. 

Everybody's Kitchen belonged to everybody. For forty years, they had traveled the country sharing food wherever people were hungry. They would return three months out of every year except 2005, the year of Katrina, when eighteen other traveling kitchens would join them in the disaster zone. No matter how much the hood appreciated them, it came time for them to move on. 

They left a hole.

Every day we were asked the same question "when is the bus coming back?" I had no answers.

Candyman was the only one in the hood, smart enough to avoid the drug trap. Candyman had a profoundly low IQ. Mentally challenged, he struggled to communicate simple phrases. We attempted to continue providing food using only the oven for cooking. We failed. We lacked support vehicles. 

Tony, aka Candyman, turned up his nose and exclaimed, "blah, gross," tasting our first attempt at soup. 

That day, the only other person was Reverend Hamdiya Mu (r.i.p.), who suggested, "since we can't do a kitchen, what about a garden?" We already had four raised beds full of mung bean sprouts.

Candyman jumped to his feet excitedly, pointing. "Lots of love, lots of love, mmhmm that, over there, mmhmm lots of love."

Hamdiya pretended to read the stack of papers Tony always had in hand. The circular alphabet belonged to no written language; it was just Candyman's way of documenting the world around him. "Tony, I like lots of love. Did you just come up with that?"

Now that we had a name, we had a purpose. Over the next several months, we dug in the soil that was more brick than dirt. It was painful work, especially for me, being a quadriplegic. The constant jarring of tendons and joints was agonizing. By winter, we had transformed the entire block. 

Word spread, and people came. People from the other coast traveled to the hood to camp in its peaceful ambiance. 

The walk from my Powelton Ave apartment to Lots Of Love is a mere three blocks. Those few short blocks took up to an hour to transverse. In the summer heat, most doors hung open, and half the residents sat on their porches—every last one wanting to talk. The neighbors gave us the neighborhood. 

Let us take a journey through time back to this magical place. I long to experience that peace once again.

A police car approaches, and the window slides open. "Have you seen John?" The officer's white shirt denoted rank, like the Luitenant about whom he was inquiring. 

"Who is that? Sam?" I asked, shielding the blinding glare. "Not today, late night last night. I had a date last night. We fell asleep in the garden. I just dropped her at her car, and on my way back now. Why? Haven't you seen him?" They had radios, of course, yet different officers asked me the same question a few times a day. "He was in an unmarked by the deli last night. After dinner, we drummed around the fire and saw John and another officer climb into the back of a van. We wanted to wake them after several hours but figured it might be a stakeout."

The officer leaned over; he had features hard like chiseled out of granite. He chuckled. "Paperwork, nothing much left to stakeout this side of Lancaster Ave. John left you some tomatoes and a new oven door. He heard through the grapevine the old one got damaged?"

The car door was scorching to lean on, but I stuck my head in the cruiser's window. "Tell him thanks for the tomatoes. We'll send him a wheelbarrow full of radishes if he wants. We got more than we can give away. Where did he get an oven door?" He was the kind of tough-as-nails officer that sent fear crawling down your spine if you saw him emerge beneath flashing lights. 

"The doors from his oven, the tomatoes he grew, and he said he planted some heirlooms by the old man's shack." His radio cut the conversation off abruptly. I was relieved. Not because he's unpleasant, on the contrary. It was always a pleasant walk through the reformed crack hood. I was tired of the delays and wanted to get there.

The narrow street lined with tiny row houses opened onto Haverford Ave. To the left, the trolley barn, the neighborhood was the housing for the immigrants that built the horse-drawn trolly that moved the settlers out into the Deleware tribe's hunting lands. To the right was a megachurch that bussed in partitioners from a three-state region. Wealthy black businesspeople worshipped in the shadows of crushing poverty.

At the time, buildings all over the city had collapsed due to blight. The main full-block-sized lot was one step beyond the church's back wall. On two sides stood collapsing buildings. Two houses remained intact. The rest, one by one, the mayor scheduled to tear down.

Waves of heat rose from the oven. It never put out smoke once it was hot. Candyman and Sunny were talking by the fire. Sunny was in uniform; he worked days at the armory. Michelle was already doing crafts with the kids of the hood. Lala, the youngest, was dancing and sprinkling glitter on the other kids' heads.

"Tony! Sunny! How are you, my friends?" Indeed they had become more like family. Tony ran up and handed me a stack of religious pamphlets covered in his circular alphabet. He repeatedly pointed at the gibberish text, then at the corner deli. It was the common belief that the delicatessen was the hub of the crack distribution network. Tony was pointing out that all the dealers had moved to the other side of Lancaster Ave.

A man with no name emerged from the darkness in Bodhi's tarpaper cave. Chief Whataworld. A man we referred to only by the two most common words/phrases he used. "Chief, what a world, eh?" He waved his arms, admiring the thriving garden that replaced the local garbage dump.

We all gathered around the massive slice of an old-growth oak that served as a table, balanced precariously on three stumps. Sunny sorted through the food that perpetually appeared on the table with no known source, selecting the items to compost. The children wanted to put on a play. Lala climbed onto my lap and once again pleaded for a stage. That would have to wait. The senior center wanted a garden opposite the children's flower garden on the next block.

We worked hard every day but also took time to enjoy the ambiance. The smiles, the waves, and the shouts of "love you guys," "keep up the good work," and "it's so beautiful now." The appreciation was undeniable.

A truck pulled up unexpectedly. The driver looked out the window at the piles of logs, mulch, and broken bricks and nervously inquired, "I hope I have the right place. I'm supposed to drop off two hundred bikes at an address on this block, but there's nothing here." We never found out who sent him, but we built a hundred and fifty bikes out of the parts. That was just how things worked there. Nobody knew who arranged what, but somehow magic happened daily.

The Horticulture Society honored us in the first year with the Best New Community Garden award. We were far from the best in being fancy, well-equipped, or on any other measure except for feel. There was stiff competition, and even though we built ours out of crumbled brick and dug-up trash, the love vibe in the hood carried us to victory. 

Night fell over the gut. Lieutenant John sat on a stump by the fire in uniform. The children's mothers had called them home. (Their fathers were all in jail or dead, the hood was a rough hood only months ago) only Jamal remained; he passed out fresh strawberries, mint leaves, and dill. 

John was speaking. "You know the mayor has a new operation to shut down over two hundred open-air drug markets. He targeted this neighborhood for enhanced enforcement. Starting tomorrow, you will see bike cops on patrol and an increased presence. The chief argued that it's a waste of time since the market moved to the bottoms when you arrived. Typical bureaucrats stated they could do nothing to change the plans." 

Seven cars rounded the corner by the church, driving the wrong way on the small one-way street. They parked on the impassable crumbling sidewalk. Pulling a heavy djimbe out of the back seat, Christian yelled to the officer, "is it okay if we park here?" John replied with just a thumbs up, ignoring the wrong-way traffic violation.

Later that night, a minister leaped back and forth over the fire shirtless. Two cops used their car's lights to provide a light show. Twenty drummers put out a raging beat that echoed off the decaying structures. And the first of many troops of bike cops streamed by smiling and waving. They came in such numbers the first were crossing Haverford on the way toward Powelton Village, as the last exited the bottoms across Lancaster.

Some police officers in the hood were surprisingly aware, 'woke,' and even spiritual. That was the last time I saw two of the officers. They had cooked on the bus before it left. The night we drummed till 3:00 AM, they confessed we inspired them to get out of the city and build a community in the mountains. 

Four of twenty drummers, including myself, had left their drums behind. Djimbes, authentic heavy wood african drums, worth $300-$600 each. Mine was still by the firepit. I didn't know others left theirs there, too, till a homeless man who lived in the basement of an abandoned shell pushed a rickety shopping cart along the brick-lined trail. He came through the grape-draped gateway and started piling drums up against the oven. Nobody ever stole anything; however, items were protected by those who had nothing.

After unloading the drums, he drew our attention to the fences; someone in the pre-sunrise hours had hung dozens of paintings along the walkway. The garden was becoming an impromptu gallery. Suitable since Councilwoman Blackwell offered us the last few buildings for an artist's collective. Alas, the mayor had other ideas and bulldozed the neighborhood.

The day the bulldozers came, they left one thing standing. The grape-covered archway, with a fortune cookie fortune, glued above the entranceway.

"Love is so close you can taste it."

Today there are dozens of brand-new low-income houses, and the garden returned to a shooting gallery. Now only the piles of used needles grow there.

For a decade, however, it was home. The safest place I have ever been. Made safe by simply planting seeds.