A police chase and an important message
By all accounts, despite its threatening appearance, the neighborhood around Fletcher Field is as safe as its been in 20 years.
Paul Weekes, proprietor of Otto Schemansky Sons Monuments on the corner of Van Dyke and Nuernberg, no longer carries a loaded pistol on his hip.
“I still have it,” Weekes said as we stood outside the 115-year-old business a few weeks ago. “But it’s in my desk drawer, unloaded. I don’t need it anymore.”
Weekes went on to say that the situation was entirely different a decade ago, when crack cocaine was still in its heyday and he carried the gun – loaded – with him at all times.
“Ten years ago we couldn’t have stood out here and had this conversation without finding trouble,” Weeks said.
Others who have lived in the neighborhood for at least the last two decades tell a similar story.
“The locusts have gone,” a longtime resident of the area told me at Fletcher Field last November. “They came in fast, devoured what was here and have moved on.”
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Posted by Carlos Sagastume on September 30, 2008. Filed under HUD Homes.
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