Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 6, 1995 TAG: 9509060082
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Police say Old Southwest Roanoke's crime-ridden northernmost avenues - Marshall, Day and Elm - already are the city's most heavily patrolled, but residents report that trouble in the 600 block of Day Avenue Southwest is making the block nearly uninhabitable.
The weekend fire that badly damaged a large brick house being painstakingly restored by Iroquois Club owners Shirley and Ron Thomas seems like the last straw to many of the neighbors.
"Everybody's angry, burned out and frustrated," said the Rev. Louie Timmons, pastor of Highland Park United Methodist Church on nearby Ferdinand Avenue.
Trina Cline, a Day Avenue resident, said Sunday's fire was the latest in a string of defeats for Old Southwest Inc., an organization representing the area bounded by Marshall Avenue, Jefferson Street, the Roy Webber Highway and the Roanoke River.
Houses owned by the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia on the other side of Old Southwest are set to be torn down. And then there are all the fires and the continuing demolitions.
"We're losing it piece by piece," said Petie Cavendish of Old Southwest Inc.
"We do all this work to bring it back to life," Cline said of the old neighborhood, "and they burn it down. And it keeps happening, over and over."
City fire investigators couldn't be reached Tuesday, but residents said the fire at 621 Day was the third suspicious blaze since July on Day and Marshall. The other two were within a few doors of the Thomas property.
Damage to the Thomas house, where Shirley Thomas had sanded porch pillars by hand, was estimated at $50,000.
The house, with a slate roof, reportedly was built shortly after the turn of this century and once was owned by a doctor.
Day Avenue is hardly the same street Lola Palmer, 71, moved onto more than three decades ago.
"Peaceful" is how it was in those days, said Palmer, who worked at the Greyhound bus terminal cafeteria and at Davis Pizza on Williamson Road. "You could sit here and go to sleep on this porch."
Now, her front porch is where she sits when she cannot sleep - and what she sees is more violent and pornographic than anything on TV: Men exposing their genitals and urinating as they walk down the street. A prostitute performing oral sex on a man under a street light at 4 a.m. A neighbor's son being beaten by boys until his head cracks open. And drug-dealing she says goes on day and night at three houses on Day.
"It's a sad time, I think. A sad time."
Palmer believes somebody is setting the fires in her neighborhood. She's heard a street tough warn homeowners who complain about the noise and the drugs, "I'll make a big barbecue on Day Avenue, and you know I'm good at barbecue."
"I had a detective to talk me," she said Tuesday. "He said, 'Miz Palmer, you take my advice. This isn't going to get no better up here. You'd better get out.'''
Her son, Frank "Dock" Felty, could move her into his place at Burnt Chimey in Franklin County. Palmer would rather stay on Day.
A school bus dropped off a little boy Tuesday afternoon across the street from Palmer. His father was waiting to let him in, and shut the door quickly behind them. Palmer said the father tries to keep his two children in the house, though they play with children outside a house where neighbors said crack cocaine is dealt.
Palmer won't let her grandson spend the night with her, Day Avenue is so rough.
"I feel sorry for the kids who live here," said Robin Duncan, Palmer's next-door neighbor. The women said Day Avenue children watch adults fight, relieve themselves and have sex, all right out in the street.
Cline, Timmons and others say that when they call to report crime, police sometimes do little. "Several times I've seen the [police car] wheels not even stop rolling" when a patrol car comes to check out a complaint, said Cline.
According to records compiled by Cline, only six of the 24 houses or apartment buildings in the 600 block of Day Avenue are occupied by their owners. All the rest are rental properties.
Palmer feels safe because she has a gun, a watchful son, a cordless phone that never leaves her side and a house next door full of young men who've offered to help her any time of day.
Timmons, a member of an Old Southwest organization called Amos 5:24 ("But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream") offered to call police for Palmer if she or anyone else is in trouble.
"Mister," she told him, "I'll do anything to try to get this neighborhood back. ... If you could sit on your porch and not hear 'M.F.'''
Beginning at 8 a.m. on Sept. 16, Trina Cline is holding a "Block Pride Day" for the 600 and 800 blocks of Day and Marshall avenues. (There are no 700 blocks.) Volunteers are asked to bring brooms, shovels, dustpans, gloves and flowers for the neighborhood children to plant in their yards. For information, call Cline at 345-2019.
by CNB