Out of the hundreds of people who visit Pastor Duane Simmons’ old stone church in Baltimore’s Penn North community every week, only a handful are there to worship. Many others, famished, wait in line for a free meal. Battling addiction, they attend support groups. It’s but one sanctuary fighting a tide of despair.

When he looks out, Simmons sees that despair all around. He sees rows of vacant buildings with eyes of jagged glass. He sees a neglected playground near an open-air drug market. He sees dealers selling pills and powder in view of police cruisers while people nod off on stoops nearby.

“This is a hope desert,” Simmons said. “Where in this community can you really find hope?”

Across two days in July, two mass overdoses in Penn North sent shockwaves across the city and beyond. Ambulances rushed dozens of people to hospitals after they fell victim to a bad batch of drugs, likely the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl laced with dangerous additives.

After the overdoses, police cordoned off the bustling intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues. City leaders held news conferences in the middle of the street. And droves of city agencies, nonprofits and drug treatment programs blanketed the area, passing out overdose-reversal medication.

To neighborhood residents, it felt like the beginning of a familiar cycle: Crisis strikes. The community’s most troubling woes are thrust into the spotlight. Then the cameras are gone — and with them, the city’s immediate attention.

Those left behind include lifelong residents, business owners and community advocates who carry on the demanding, and often heartbreaking, work of trying to create pockets of hope. Banner journalists spent weeks recently chronicling the daily rhythms of the Penn North area through their eyes.

On these streets, drugs are the constant backdrop, syringes are shoveled from the streets and commuters at a bus stop hear the call of “bup bup bup,” from a man advertising buprenorphine, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addiction that is also sold on the black market. Drugs offer a means to both living and dying in this place where every day is a fight to survive.

On a recent August morning, 34-year-old Lionel Lynch Sr. pushed a stroller past boarded-up rowhomes in Penn North, down the same streets where he had sworn off drug dealing. It had been two days since Lynch’s last meal. In two more days, he estimated, he’d run out of diapers for his 1-year-old daughter. And somehow, before the month’s end, he would have to come up with $500 to pay for his rented room.

“I’m screaming for help,” Lynch said, an echo of a yet unanswered plea the wider community has made for generations.

Life and death in Penn North

Statistics shed some light on the neighborhood’s distress. Every day, Penn North had an average of between two and three drug and overdose-related 911 calls between 2022 and 2024 — more than any other neighborhood in Baltimore, an analysis of call data shows.

Part of the reason there are so many drugs in Penn North and the surrounding area, local residents say, is because the two major roads intersecting here are served by a half-dozen bus routes and the city’s only subway line, making it an easy stop for residents and visitors alike.

People come to this bustling corridor seeking not only drug sales, but also services as diverse as feeding the hungry, drug treatment referrals and blood pressure screenings.

While working at a resource fair on a frigid day in January, Sharon Hayes met a young woman in shorts and a T-shirt who briefly mentioned that she had been abducted in Florida and brought to Baltimore. The woman, who received a hot meal, new phone and warm change of clothes with help from Hayes’ organization, Clergy United for the Transformation of Sandtown, remained in Baltimore and still shows up from time to time, she said.

Surviving has only gotten harder for families in Penn North, recent Census data shows. With the cost of living rising, more than 4 of every 10 households in the neighborhood made less than $30,000 in a year, a figure that has hardly budged over roughly the last decade, according to a Banner analysis.

Inside the Phaze 2 Barbershop on West North Avenue, Diane Harrell, who sees her role as much as a therapist as a barber, said customers often open up about the hardships of finding work or making rent while she trims hair.

The choice can come down to paying $10 for a meal or $3 for an illicit pill that can curb the urge to eat, said Harrell, 33. “It be things like that that make people look for drugs to cope with.”

Just outside Penn North’s main drag, long-abandoned buildings shelter people struggling with homelessness and addiction. During a search and rescue during one mass overdose, emergency responders and volunteers searched through 177 vacant buildings. No deaths were reported that day, but over about a decade, more than 20 people who died from overdoses were recovered from abandoned properties in Penn North, an analysis of autopsy and property records shows.

In one case, 52-year-old Matthew Williams died from a drug overdose in a building near North Avenue and Division Street last October. When officers arrived, a friend told police he tried to save Williams with naloxone, an overdose reversal medication, but it was too late. An autopsy revealed he had died from a deadly mix of drugs that included heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine and an animal tranquilizer called xylazine.

Williams had been known by friends as “Snoop,” thanks to a passing resemblance to the famous rapper. He was homeless, stayed in the vacant building and was one of the most dedicated workers at Big O’s Hand Car Wash next door, said the owner, Omar Tate.

For about seven years, Williams spent nearly every day in sweltering heat and numbing cold scrubbing vehicles. He cracked jokes to cheer up his friends. The last time Tate saw him, they told each other, “I love you.”

Almost all those who work at the car wash have been homeless, Tate said. That includes 49-year-old Rodney Alston, whose family bounced between living at treatment programs and with friends in the past year. They take it “day by day,” he said, trying to save scant earnings from shining hubcaps.

With few places to go over the summer, Alston’s daughters, 6 and 11, spend long hours with their father at the business. On a recent afternoon, the older girl tried to flip Tate’s baseball cap backward, teasing: “You ain’t no gangster.” After a lighthearted retort, Tate told her to grab a candy bar.

But his face dropped as soon as she stepped away.

“That’s the part that kills me,” he said. “When you see children hungry, that hurts.”

A rich past

Longtime residents remember when Penn North looked much different.

It was once the heart of a vibrant Black community, resplendent with a movie theater, bowling alley and a sandwich shop that served some of the best corned beef in the city. The businesses sat just down the street from a world-class stretch of theaters and cabarets.

“I grew up with Black owners of everything. Everything around me looked like me,” said Alma Roberts, who lived near Penn North from the 1950s through 1970s. “That’s what kids need to see to be able to dream, to break down the negative narrative, to give them hope.”

But over the decades, the community hollowed out. Homeowners moved away and Black-owned businesses dwindled. With few other job options, many turned to selling illicit substances. The subsequent “war on drugs” ramping up in the 1980s further hurt Baltimore communities by disproportionately incarcerating Black residents.

The decline was by design, according to Lawrence Brown, research scientist for the Center for Urban Health Equity at Morgan State University. Starting in the 1930s, the federal government redlined Penn North and the surrounding area, starving it of the resources that poured into white neighborhoods.

“That historic disinvestment, that intentional denial of capital sets the stage of the proliferation of poverty and misery,” Brown said.

Today, to many, Penn North is known better as an open-air drug market than a thriving business district. Despite the challenges, many who run businesses say they coexist with drug dealers, from whom they have earned enough respect to be left alone.

But it’s an uneasy peace.

The specter of a witness intimidation case from more than two decades ago looms large, according to one local resident who asked not to be named because of fears of retaliation. The resident recalled the deaths of seven members of the Dawson family from a 2002 East Baltimore firebombing of their home, after the parents called police to complain about drug dealers.

From a cluttered storefront on Pennsylvania Avenue, Durwood Bush and his wife, Daisy, sell everything from ferret cages to snowballs. As one of the remaining Black-owned shops, D&D Variety Store serves local residents who don’t own cars or fear traveling to Mondawmin Mall to shop.

Bush, who also leads the local merchants association, said the city should try to contain the open-air drug market, if not eradicate it completely. “People need to feel safe,” he said.

Police often park their vehicles near Pennsylvania and North, emergency lights flashing at all times of day, with little apparent effect on public drug sales.

Drug arrests citywide have plummeted over the years, according to department statistics, in part due to the decriminalization of cannabis and changes to policing and prosecutorial strategies. In 2010, police arrested about 20,100 people for drugs citywide; by 2024, that number had fallen more than 90%, to about 1,700.

In a recent interview, Police Commissioner Richard Worley said officers are wary of making drug arrests because they may lead to potential blowback. While community members want officers to clear open-air drug markets, they also complain if officers use force during arrests for minor drug offenses, he said.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Worley said. “And that’s my fear, is that there’s going to be an ugly arrest, that there’s a use of force and ... it’s just not going to look good.”

Worley described the overall war on illegal drugs as a failure, saying mass arrests of drug dealers and users hasn’t made the city safer. However, he hopes the city can address the demand for drugs by helping those suffering from addiction by using Baltimore’s recent winnings from its major opioid lawsuit.

At the same time, Worley said, quality drug investigations are more complex than they appear, and they may have to begin with arresting more people who use drugs.

“We want the supplier who’s bringing the drugs in,” Worley said, adding, “But unfortunately, you have to start at the bottom a little bit and work up.”

Promises made

Over the years, the city has sought to turn the tide on drugs, crime and unemployment.

In 2006, the city created the Penn North Area Master Plan, which called for demolishing blocks of vacant buildings that attracted drug dealers and helping to revitalize the area with more housing and new jobs.

The plan envisioned pedestrian walkways from Penn North into Druid Hill Park, with easier access to its zoo, pools and tennis courts. The playground at Westside Elementary School would be improved, and after-school hours at Parkview Recreation Center would have expanded for community activities and fairs.

Much of that vision has not come to pass. Several blocks marked for redevelopment remain overgrown and vacant. The neighborhood remains separated from the park by several lanes of speeding traffic. The school and the recreation center, once singled out for upgrades, closed more than a decade ago.

“For many years, there’s been so many broken promises of revitalization in Penn North,” said state Sen. Antonio Hayes, a Democrat representing Baltimore City who once attended Westside Elementary.

However, there has been recent progress by the West North Avenue Development Authority that he helped create four years ago, Hayes said. It has purchased empty buildings to make way for new housing, while helping to open a food hall and laid plans for a new grocery store nearby.

The mass protests in 2015 in response to the death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained in police custody also sparked pledges to transform West Baltimore. But in the decade since, progress has been slow and uneven, according to many residents.

Bush, who owns D&D Variety Store, applauds the gains that have been made so far. He said he has seen the city make positive, though “minimal,” changes to the neighborhood through demolishing some vacant buildings and helping businesses make storefront improvements.

Indeed, over the past five years, fewer buildings in the neighborhood are sitting vacant. City statistics show about a 12% decline, though there are still hundreds left.

Bush said his own story is about how people can change. He was released from prison in 2004 after serving a two-decade sentence for theft. Then, he started an organization to distribute food, mentor youths and give bicycles to children.

While “everyone wants to point fingers at the government,” Bush said he believes everyone has a role in helping to improve their communities.

Planning a better future

A few doors down from Bush’s store is the Arch Social Club, an institution founded in 1905 to provide Black men with a sanctuary for socialization and activism. It hosted civil rights leaders and famous musicians alike.

Over time, Arch Social fell into disrepair and nearby vacant buildings became “shooting galleries” for people using drugs, according to club president Sozufe Nnamdi.

But today, the club features a pristine back lawn, cleared by the city and maintained by youth volunteers. Nnamdi said they plan to erect a gate around the green space, transform a dilapidated building next door into a new cafe and establish a center to host science, technology, engineering and arts programming for kids. Inside the club, renovations to the events space are underway.

Just recently, workers mounted a new illuminated marquee that will help “make Pennsylvania Avenue what it used to be years ago,” said 100-year-old Larry Washington, the oldest member of the organization. The sign now flashes a message — “Thank You Mayor Brandon Scott” — at the busy intersection.

In July, after the mass overdoses, Scott visited the neighborhood, and during a press conference, acknowledged the long history of disinvestment in the Penn North area. “We’re not going to change all of that overnight,” Scott said, adding he expects the community will see progress with investment in several upcoming revitalization projects.

In 2023, officials announced plans to move the city’s cable television station, CharmTV, into a planned 20,000-square-foot redevelopment in the neighborhood envisioned as a hub for artists and creatives. Last year, Maryland secured federal funding to move forward with designing the long-awaited connection between Penn North and Druid Hill Park. The city is also reopening Parkview Recreation Center in its old location on Francis Street.

For now though, the lawn behind Arch Social Club sits empty. Any benches or tables, neighbors fear, would only draw drug activity back to the block. Officials say the city stands ready to help improve and secure the neighborhood, including partnering with the club to offer resources twice a week.

Nearby, Lynch’s desperate trek to feed and house his family took him past the club, to Pastor Simmons’ church, where several nonprofits had assembled for a resource fair.

There, he met outreach workers who helped him find mental health treatment, housing resources and diapers for his 1-year-old daughter.

But first, they offered water and food — his first meal in days — and words of comfort.

“Let it out,” the man told Lynch. And he did, sobbing in his embrace.

Banner reporter Justin Fenton and data reporter Sahana Jayaraman contributed to this report.