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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 […]

PART VII BY JEFF DEENEY After lunch the students return to room 315 for a structured free period. On an average day the group spends structured free period playing board games like Battleship and Monopoly, but on a good day they might get to go to the computer lab. On a bad day the free period isn’t so structured and the behavioral health worker Mr. Thompson spends the hour breaking up shoving matches and trying to keep furniture from being thrown across the room. The school has a total of 6 aging Dell PCs for roughly 1500 students. Getting a reservation for the computer lab […]

BY JEFF DEENEY If there’s real concern that a physical confrontation between the students and staff in room 315 might arise the behavioral health worker steps in. Mr. Thompson’s official function falls somewhere between teacher’s aid and social worker; he’s supposed to help students with their work during those rare moments when they’re actually working, try to build a therapeutic bond with them when they have structured free time and de-escalate their behavior from the brink of violence if it reaches that stage. In reality, Mr. Thompson’s function is more like a security guard; he provides the muscle necessary to […]

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 […]

[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 […]