18 Adams Street

As I walked along the road while on one of my neighborhood walks yesterday, I heard the crackle of broken glass beneath my feet. I stopped and looked down. Sure enough, broken window glass. I looked to my right, at the house there at 18 Adams Street. The front porch door was open (indeed, there was no door). But the porch windows were intact. So I glanced upward, and there I saw the reason for the glass: Someone had tossed at least a few objects out the upstairs windows, sending glass flying to the front of the house and sidewalk area.

There must have been a fairly good-sized object thrown through the left-side window, because it nearly ripped off the gutter, below it.



The whole house is pretty dumpy looking. I snapped a few photos, then walked back to my house to call the police. I was fairly certain that someone had already notified the authorities by now - it was, after all, 3:30 in the afternoon when I came across the scene, and whatever happened there must have made a hell of a lot of noise. It was a beautiful day out, and there are houses to either side of 18 Adams, plus another directly across the street. Surely, someone had picked up a phone, aye?

But I called it in anyway, and lo-and-behold, the dispatcher said that there had been no previous call on it.

No one had bothered to call the police.

That's just great. This is why blighted neighborhoods remain blighted. These poor communities are never going to lift themselves out of their current decrepit states if they don't learn to open up their mouths and complain about what happens on their own streets. This is also why I believe that "affordable housing" projects in these neighborhoods are only going to give the bad people new homes to live in. Tear down these houses, leave them down, and build well-managed and secure apartment buildings in their place, if need be. I would rather walk down a street with buildings like those on High Street (which have transformed the look of the neighborhood, there, just off of Maple Street) than deal with the refuse of renter-occupied or owner-occupied pig sties like this.

It is very unfortunate that this kind of "I don't want to get involved" mentality plagues blighted neighborhoods. But that is, after all, why they are blighted in the first place.

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