How Kensington Avenue’s open-air drug market went international — and the city’s fight to take back the neighborhood
Kensington’s viral moment has coincided with an unprecedented call for change. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker took office in January vowing to end the open-air drug market for good and stabilize the neighborhood. And as other countries look to Kensington for lessons in what to avoid, local leaders wonder whether the Parker administration will learn from past mistakes.
The challenge is enormous. More than one-third of the city’s homeless people live in Kensington. The zip code 19134 saw 1,270 fatal overdoses between 2015 and 2022, more than double any other neighborhood. Kensington endured a historic surge of drug-fueled gun violence during that same period, with more than 1,400 shootings, including 300 within a five-minute walk of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues.
Five months ago, Garcia, 27, returned from China to face Kensington, post-pandemic. She saw more businesses had closed, such as the Rainbow clothing store where she used to spend her weekly allowance. SEPTA trains, once an escape route from Kensington for her, had seemed to inherit her neighborhood’s chaos.Garcia didn’t learn about the generation before her that “got out” until she was a teenager.
At the same time, the neighborhood began to absorb the cottage industry needed to ease the suffering.that one state representative called Kensington “the drug rehab capital of the world.” Ed Rendell, the city’s mayor between 1992 and 2000, disregarded state law to open the first needle exchange program in Kensington to help quell the spread of HIV and other illnesses.
Along the Conrail train tracks that cut through the neighborhood — the same lines that used to provide factories with lumber and metal — a heroin user encampment known as “El Campamento” had grown into a public health crisis. Officials said they could no longer turn their backs on the squalor along the railroad gulch, which had brought national embarrassment.
Garcia understood the harm reduction approach. She wouldn’t want to die alone in an abandoned house with no one to save her. But the crises around Kensington Avenue spread faster than the city could act. Some people have moved toward Juniata, where Kate Scott runs the local civic association. Lawmakers have offered assurances that they won’t displace the problems, she said. “But no one can promise anything, and we all know that.”
Answers will likely come when Parker, Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel, and Managing Director Adam Thiel are expected to unveil details for their plan in April.to set clear goals, align Kensington’s vast but diffuse network of service providers, and give the disenfranchised residents a say in the solution.
After being robbed at gunpoint last year, her mother is now afraid to visit stores on the strip, many of which are either crowded with “So many years the community has been promised, promised, promised and nothing has worked,” said Buddy Osbourne, a Kensington native and pastor who runs Rock Ministries, a church-based youth boxing program on the avenue. “But I think now you have a lot of people buying into it from the community.”