Residents Make Tacoma Hilltop Quieter, Safer -- `Shooting Gallery' Image Changing

TACOMA - The collard greens are really blooming. Tall and robust, they look like rows of fat, green balloons. Once they seed, the greens will be plowed under so corn, tomatoes and squash can grow in their place. The air is sweet in this tiny pocket of land called "La Grande," on the corner of South 18th and G streets in Tacoma's Hilltop neighborhood. Here, the sky seems almost always sunny - a perfect spot to grow fruit and vegetables.

The field of greens didn't exist a little more than a year ago. Instead of collard greens, the sun brightened a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, wild grass and thick blackberry bramble. Winos relieved themselves, and addicts freely tossed their needles into the grass. Beer bottles, car parts and a soiled sofa completed the ugly picture. The lot resembled much of Hilltop not long ago - abandoned.

For almost a decade, the Hilltop, one of Tacoma's oldest neighborhoods, was a scary place - the kind of place where drivers automatically locked their doors and rolled up the windows: Don't look, don't stop, just drive. There was reason for the paranoia.

"The area was a shooting gallery," says Alberta Canada, who has lived in Hilltop for more than 30 years. "It was damn scary. I got the feeling that we were written off."

Hilltop has not miraculously changed overnight. Like many urban neighborhoods in our time, it is not crime-free, not all picket fences and mowed lawns. But it isn't the neighborhood it was 10 or even five years ago. And that itself is an achievement.

Once, Hilltop symbolized urban living at its very worst. Gang members brazenly wore gun holsters in the streets. Drug dealers waved down drivers as they passed, asking, "Hey, man, you looking?" Crackheads got high in the streets. And there were countless funerals for those murdered.

At the height of Hilltop's notoriety, in 1989, off-duty U.S. Army Rangers and suspected drug dealers fired at each other with semiautomatics, crouching for cover behind fences and porches. For more than 10 minutes, 300 rounds were exchanged before police arrived. Although no one was hurt, Hilltop's reputation was firmly sealed. Those who could left for the suburbs.

Those who stayed shored themselves up and struggled to restore Hilltop's image. It was never easy, and it has taken years. When neighbors and police first installed a video camera in 1993 to stem the drug tide at a Hilltop corner, one gangster pulled out his 9 millimeter, took aim and coolly shot the camera off its ledge.

Neighbors put up the camera again, along with six others at various corners. Block by block, residents organized and got city officials to pay attention to the neighborhood. Now, there is payoff. Police statistics show a 33 percent drop in property and violent crimes in 10 years. Drug dens have mostly disappeared, and a series of drug arrests from 1994 to 1997 captured nearly 200 dealers with the most violent profiles.

During community meetings, homeowners who once peppered police officials with questions about murder and gunfire now flock around representatives from the garbage department to request more street cleaning and to complain about illegal dumping. And Rite-Aid is scheduled to build a new pharmacy on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, the first major retail development in the area in years.

"We can't declare victory, but something is happening," asserts Tacoma Police Officer David Henry. "To me, the biggest change has been the attitude of people here and their expectations. They expect Hilltop to be quiet. Before, it was accepted that there would be gunfire or a kid would get shot, or a car stolen. Now they don't tolerate that."

Hilltop was home to many

Alberta Canada's grandparents moved to the outskirts of Hilltop in 1905, renting a place on Fawcett Avenue and 9th Street. Her grandfather, Charles Ray, held a respectable job as a city street sweeper, and her grandmother, Felicia, did wash. They were among a flock of families moving into the growing, highly affordable neighborhood. There were Italians, Russians, Irish, African Americans.

With the boom of the lumber and shipyard industries, times were good in Tacoma. And that spilled into Hilltop, where all kinds of houses were built and where several trolley lines went through to downtown. High rollers lived in big, boxy Foursquares and Queen Annes on Ainsworth Avenue, appropriately nicknamed Banker's Row. The working and middle class owned more modest craftsmen-style bungalows in enclaves throughout the 2-square-mile hill.

Canada's grandparents stayed in Hilltop until they were able to afford a house of their own in South Tacoma. Her mother, Bernice, moved back to Hilltop in 1963, into a handsome house on M street just off 21st. Canada and her siblings attended St. Leo's parish and went to parochial school just blocks from their home. They played a fierce game of softball at Stanley Field. In 1986, Canada purchased the home from her mother.

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when a neighborhood changes. One day, children played in Hilltop. The next, teenagers carried guns in their belts. In the late 1980s, crack cocaine moved into Hilltop. It was cheap and readily available. A hit was $5, but lasted only five or 10 minutes. The need was relentless. California gangs, which supplied street-level crack, moved up the I-5 corridor into Tacoma, and into Hilltop.

"We were not prepared," says Officer Henry. "We thought we were isolated from that."

Canada, a former Social Security administrator, watched her daughters struggle with friends who were gang members. She rattles off names of those murdered. There's Quantika, Martino, Kunte Kinte, Rhonda, Lamont. . . . She pauses. She can't remember one child's name, and that bothers her. She sees his face.

"You know, I can see them all," she whispers. "They stick in your mind like that. They don't leave, no matter what."

Shootout highlighted problems

Bill Foulk bought his house on Ash Street in 1987, in the southern border of Hilltop. Vacant and abandoned for 12 years, it was the worst house on the block. Foulk purchased it for $10,000 and set out to make it livable. A staff sergeant with the Army Rangers' 2nd Battalion, he was 32 years old and ready to settle down. He wanted a place near Fort Lewis and he liked the modest, working-class neighborhood; old-timers lived here. People cut their grass and took their evening walks, and kids rode their bikes. It was a perfect fit for the young man.

In 1989, Foulk was frequently away from home for military maneuvers. Each time he returned, the neighborhood had changed. From the steps of his home, he watched people purchase drugs from a yellow house across the street.

"I used to sit on the porch instead of watch TV. It was like a scene from a bad B-movie, but worse than anything you can imagine."

The block was rabid, says Rick Walker, whose mother lived next door to Foulk. "Your life was in jeopardy just by walking out the door."

One day that September, Foulk and others on the block decided to have a barbecue to unify the neighborhood against the drug dealers. Throughout the day, a group of men drove by his home repeatedly and told the party to break it up and leave. They threatened to burn Foulk's house down if they didn't.

"We knew there was the potential to get ugly," Foulk recalls. "We decided we were going to stand our ground and not be pushed out."

He called friends in the battalion for backup. They brought their own weapons - semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns - all legal. Parents sent their children elsewhere.

They sketched out a plan using army tactics; Foulk pointed out the "friendlies," his neighbors' homes, and the enemy, the drug dealer's place. Foulk armed himself with a 9 millimeter.

"Don't shoot anybody if you don't have to," he told the Rangers.

Twenty minutes after 9 p.m., someone fired the first shot. Hundreds more followed. In the end, no one was hurt, and no one was charged with any crime. But those 10 minutes made Hilltop national news.

"In retrospect, it was the best thing to happen," says Henry, the police officer. "It brought attention to the neighborhood that something had to be done."

Block groups were formed

After the shootout, neighborhood groups sprouted throughout Hilltop, where about 15,000 people live in 163 blocks. They started small, sometimes with only one or two people, watching each other's homes and keeping tabs on suspicious activities in their streets. They jotted down car license plates and tracked crack houses.

"Residents began taking charge of their own blocks. It was a key factor. Before, they felt helpless and crawled into their houses," says Herman Diers of the Hilltop Action Coalition, a nonprofit organization of 76 neighborhood block groups working to reduce crime and clean up Hilltop. Last year, the coalition helped shut down 60 houses that had drug involvement.

The groups routinely attended community meetings and noisily berated city officials about crime. And they worked with church and nonprofit groups committed to developing the neighborhood. They organized weekend cleanups and targeted street corners frequented by drug dealers.

The neighborhood groups persuaded property owners to let them haul garbage away from vacant lots and till the land for vegetables and flowers. One notorious street corner was turned into a park.

Some residents had been on the verge of leaving Hilltop. In 1990, Canada decided she couldn't raise her family in Hilltop because she was afraid she couldn't protect her children. She was ready to buy a house elsewhere.

"I saw so much destruction and loss of life - my neighbors, my neighborhood. It seemed like we had gone way backward. I was beyond discouraged."

But her house deal fell through, and she stayed in the neighborhood.

"We dug down deep," says Canada, now the executive director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Housing Development Association, which buys, fixes and rents affordable housing in Hilltop.

"We didn't fight the battle on one front. A number of people dug down deep and would not be moved. Many people observed the slaughter of the children. There had to be change."

In the '90s, Hilltop became the best-organized area in Tacoma, says the Rev. David Alger, director of Associated Ministries, an interfaith council of churches. The neighborhood now has 76 active block groups with more than 2,000 active residents involved.

City and community officials also pushed for more homeownership. Hilltop had traditionally been a place where families owned their own homes. But two-thirds of the homes became rentals by the end of the 1980s. The idea is that homeowners take better care of their own neighborhood, says Gary Andrew, director of the Hilltop Homeownership Development Center.

Since 1994, the center has built and remodeled 48 houses, some of which were once crack houses. The center then helped first-time buyers purchase the homes.

In 1990, Tacoma Police moved into the neighborhood, sharing storefront space with the TCI Cablevision of Washington cable company at 12th and MLK Way. Officers worked with health, building and fire-department inspectors to force absentee landlords to clean up their properties. They used the city's building code to condemn houses that had no electricity, water or sewer service. That meant most of the drug houses.

"We tell property owners, `Get those people out,' and hit them in the pocketbook," Henry says.

So far, police have boarded up as many as 200 drug houses. And with the help of federal agencies, they have arrested nearly 200 dealers and gang members in a series of undercover drug stings from 1994 to 1997.

A turnaround in the making

No one knows precisely when mayhem lost its stranglehold on Hilltop. Maybe it hasn't completely. There are still street corners where it is best to drive by quickly. But there are fewer.

Bill Foulk still lives in the same house on Ash Street. He has patched up the bullet holes in his house and put up a nice, white picket fence around his property. The neighborhood has settled down, he says, and it's quiet again. The suspected drug dealers no longer live across the street.

Next door, Rick Walker watches his 8-year-old granddaughter, Dulonda, from his living-room window. She shoots basketball with her friends. They're giggling, laughing in the sun.

"Things look optimistic," Walker says. "I can watch my grandchildren play in the street now."

Foulk feels so comfortable on his block that he purchased three other houses in the neighborhood. The former Army Ranger, who still wears his hair closely cropped, laughs almost sheepishly when he talks about the gunfight and the attention it had wrought on his block.

"It was probably the single biggest event in Hilltop," Foulk says. "It brought attention to this area and made people realize what was happening here - that people had to bear arms to protect themselves."

In old newscasts about the gun battle, Foulk looks dazed by the media attention and the absurdity of a Western shootout in the middle of Tacoma.

Today, he shakes his head. "It's pretty hard to believe it happened."

`People are helping people'

There's an orchard of fruit trees a block away from the La Grande field. To get to the plums, cherries, pears and apples, you have to walk through an alley lined with fig trees. The trees were planted years ago by Italian and Greek immigrants who were among the first to settle in Hilltop.

Gardener Carrie Little waits patiently in the orchards for her bees to arrive - about 30,000 of them. They're being delivered in the afternoon. The bees, she says, have a tough job ahead of them. Not only do they have to make honey, they also have to pollinate the many fields that have sprouted in the past few years along G Street, where neighbors and volunteers from Tacoma Catholic Worker have borrowed the land from property owners and tilled them into working fields.

People aren't so afraid to let children play in the street anymore, Little says. "It's opened up. Neighbors are getting to know neighbors. People are helping people."

She surveys the fields. It's calm among the collard greens. So quiet.

"Some days, I expect to see a cow cross the road."

Lily Eng's phone message number is 206-464-3312. Her e-mail address is: leng-new@seatimes.com