Between Rock and a Hard Place

Not all of the crackhouse patrons arrived on foot, and not all were black. Every five or ten minutes, a car with a white face behind the wheel turned onto the block and drove slowly until the driver and a dealer on the sidewalk exchanged "crack nods," a slight raising of the chin and eyebrows that is both inquiry and response. The driver -- usually male, middle-aged and alone, or male, in his early twenties and with a carload of friends -- then pulled to the curb. The dealer leaned in the window for a few words and then got in the car and rode with the driver off the block.

Down the street from the derelict beauty parlor, a trio of crackheads squatted on the stoop of a green rowhouse, openly smoking their glass pipes, reeling back and grinning like evil clowns with each full-lunged hit. One of them stood up, tucked his pipe away, unzipped his fly and urinated on a nearby wall.

Next door, four more crackheads lined up at the back door of a yellow three-story Victorian, where a dealer wearing sunglasses and dreadlocks doled out his wares as if the addicts had just rung his doorbell and cried, "Trick or treat!"

"It's so sad and dysfunctional, all the screaming and whistling and tweaking and pissing and ass-scratching," said Mary, sitting on her front steps to survey the dozens of dirty deals going down. "Humans are supposedly sentient beings, but if this is sentience, it's sentience gone horribly awry."

Just then, a gaunt man wearing overalls stumbled out of the beauty parlor clutching a super-sized bag of cheese puffs, his fingers and mouth stained bright orange with junk-food dust. A raw-boned woman with graveyard eyes approached him and tried to reach into the bag. He slapped her hand, howled "Bitch, you trippin'!" and shoved her away.

Mary has lived on the 2700 block of Downing since October 2000. It wasn't nearly as bad then. "A lot of the buildings on the other side of the street looked a little run-down, maybe abandoned, but they weren't crackhouses. I've been around the block enough to recognize the signs, and this definitely wasn't a heavy-duty crack-dealing street until just a few months ago," she says.

A former waitress at the Mercury Cafe, Mary now runs her own house-cleaning company. She moved to Five Points because she was sick of living in Lowry and because the price was right: She bought her 1,500-square-foot abode for less than $100,000, which seemed like a sweet deal in Denver's boomed housing market.

"I love diversity, and I wasn't crazy about living around only white people anymore. I believe in living in the inner city, and it seemed like a pretty good investment," she says. "What can I say? I took a chance."

Mary wasn't the only one.

Most of the other residents on her side of the block have lived there less than two years. Like Mary, they are first-time home buyers who gambled on a rough-and-tumble street in an up-and-coming historic neighborhood, and saw potential in the two-story Victorians and Craftsman-style bungalows mixed in with the block's empty storefronts.

"We call these people 'urban pioneers,' where they come in and find some really nice, old houses for cheap, and they think they're going to be able to just settle down and fix up the house. They realize too late what's going on across the street, and they're naturally a little upset," says Officer Cortez. "They generate a lot of complaints, where, on the other hand, the people on the street who have lived in the area for several generations, they've seen it before. They know these things have a rhythm of their own, where a street will be hot for a while, then go cold, then get hot again. If we hit the dealers and smokers hard in one place, they all move a few blocks, and some time passes and then we hit 'em hard again. That's just the nature of the beast."

It wasn't always that way in Five Points, one of Denver's oldest and formerly most vivacious neighborhoods. Founded in the 1860s as one of the young town's first residential suburbs, the area ultimately took its name from the five streets that intersect at its heart. (Denver's tramway company came up with the nickname because its streetcar signs weren't large enough to list all of the thoroughfares at this end-of-the-line stop.) Five Points blossomed and became the black cultural center of the West, a title it held from the jazz age through the post-World War II era. In 1951, Beat writer Jack Kerouac immortalized the heyday of the area in On the Road: "I walked among the lights of 27th and Welton in Denver's colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best of the white world is not enough."