Search Results for: valley of the shadow deeney

The Valley of the Shadow is was an ongoing series documenting how those in Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods publicly mourn and commemorate their dead. Jeff Deeney, the man who brought you Today I Saw, knows these neighborhoods well from his days as a social worker. The hope is was to shine a light on the city’s untouchables, brighten the darkest corners and gather-and-share ultra-vivid and all-too-real stories of loss, grief and remembrance. BY JEFF DEENEY Initially the Valley of the Shadow series was conceived as a documentary effort aimed at exploring the street memorial phenomenon that has become […]

[Photos by JEFF DEENEY] EDITOR’S NOTE: This first ran on Phawker on August 26th, 2008. Sadly, it’s become no less current in the two years since we first published it. BY JEFF DEENEY For the next few weeks, the focus of Valley of the Shadow will shift to Chester, Delaware County. In 2008, Philadelphia experienced a significant reduction in homicides. That has not been the case in Chester. In fact, this month Chester saw six homicides in a single week, which for a city of only 35,000 is a staggering number. Before starting in on a series about Chester I […]

BY JEFF DEENEY Last week’s daylight shooting of multiply convicted drug gang leader Jose “Mostro” Ortiz and the wave of retaliatory carnage unleashed in the Badlands provides an opportunity to share some knowledge I’ve gained about that neighborhood’s inner workings.  I learned a little bit about the Badlands both during the time I spent working there in social services (most recently as a school based behavioral health worker in an elementary school not far from the original murder scene) and through conversations with former and active addicts who have recently been involved in the area’s drug culture.  Hopefully my contribution […]

BY JEFF DEENEY The economic development plan to save Chester hinges on building a major league soccer stadium at the foot of the Commodore Barry Bridge. The $500 million dollar revitalization effort would include transforming Chester’s heavily industrial waterfront into a verdant river walk and building hundreds of thousands of square feet of new office space and condominiums. The coalition pushing for the development plan, KickStart Chester, have a website where you can watch the radical transformation of the vast, neglected vacant lots the stadium will sit on into an artists rendering of what the project will look like upon […]

BY JEFF DEENEY There’s a street memorial on the corner of 10th and Tilghman Street in Chester so large that from a distance it looks like a growth engulfing the tree it sits under.  The memorial commemorates the night in April, 2006 when Carl “Bo” Johnson was shot and killed by a Pennsylvania State Police trooper.  The trooper was in Chester as a part of Operation Trigger Lock, a state run program aiming to sweep illegal guns off the streets.  The trooper responded to a call of shots fired in the area of the notorious Bennett Homes housing project and […]

BY JEFF DEENEY My interest in Chester’s gang problem that resulted in this week’s City Paper article “Home Turf”  began a couple months back when I stopped to gas up a rented U-haul at the Sunoco station on 9th and Kerlin Street on the city’s Westside.  I had just moved some stuff into a storage facility off I-95 in nearby Chester Township and was on my way to return the truck.  I pulled up to the pump and went to pay cash at the register.  In the two minutes that I was gone some punk came along and spray painted […]

BY JEFF DEENEY The memorial standing at the intersection of Green Street and McIlvain on Chester’s Eastside was erected to commemorate the anniversary of 19 year old John Strand’s death. Strand was shot in the chest after a street corner confrontation in the early evening of August the 7th, 2007 and died on the sidewalk as paramedics attempted to resuscitate him. I found Strand’s memorial while en route to the site of another homicide that just happened two blocks away. A piece of white poster board including loving messages from Strand’s mother, brother and other friends and family was propped […]

[Photos by JEFF DEENEY] BY JEFF DEENEY For the next few weeks, the focus of Valley of the Shadow will shift to Chester, Delaware County. In 2008, Philadelphia experienced a significant reduction in homicides. That has not been the case in Chester. In fact, this month Chester saw six homicides in a single week, which for a city of only 35,000 is a staggering number. Before starting in on a series about Chester I sat down with someone acquainted with the city’s underworld, a former junkie and mid-level Delco drug runner called Cupcake. Cupcake spent the better part of 10 […]

BY JEFF DEENEY While everyone else was at City Hall for the press conference concerning the police raid of a Francisville building last Friday, I was on Ridge Avenue hoping to find my old friend Ms. Edna Williams, of the Mary Jane Enrichment Center. I wrote about Edna in a City Paper article about grassroots homeless services not long ago; she’s been serving the needy from her SRO between 16th and 17th streets on Ridge for about 30 years now. Edna’s seen Francisville’s fortunes rise and fall over they years, as it changed from a prosperous commercial hub in the […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY On the morning of February 15th neighbors found a Jane Doe laying riddled with stabwounds in broad daylight near 55th and Market Streets. The body was in a narrow, fenced in alleyway next to an abandoned building on the corner of tiny Sickels Street that runs from Market to Ludlow between 54th and 55th. Patrol cars and news vans swarmed the scene and helicopters hovered overhead. The police hung sheets from the fence to block the body from view but it was a Friday morning and school kids were already out and on their […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY The intersection of Cambria and Amber streets is a good six blocks away from the endemic drug violence of the Badlands — sometimes that seems like six miles, and sometimes like six inches. It sits east of Frankford Avenue and a full five blocks from the El, far enough away that you can’t even see the hulking steel skeleton that straddles Kensington Avenue from here. Crime and violence has seeped north and east from West Kensington over the years, slowly and steadily creeping further and further into the surrounding neighborhoods of the Lower […]

[Photos by JUSTIN ROMAN] BY JEFF DEENEY I was standing on the corner of 2nd Street and Glenwood Avenue, looking over the stuffed animals tacked to a telephone pole, when a haggard white addict wearing deeply dirty construction boots, a holey T-shirt and a greasy ponytail walked past. He looked heavily opiated and all around pretty worse for wear. He jerked his thumb at the memorial saying simply, “Dead baby,” and kept walking. “Dead baby, huh?” I asked, hoping he would slow down long enough to say a few more words, but he kept trucking down the slope running alongside the […]