Joy Sushinsky is not your average busybody. She is not the type of person who peeks at neighbors from behind her curtains and gossips about their activities.
Instead, Sushinsky, a soft-spoken, 28-year-old homeowner on one of Hampden's few troublesome blocks, has become - somewhat reluctantly - a driven neighborhood activist, a watchdog with a purpose higher than mere curiosity.
Upset by the aimless, belligerent teenagers and low-level drug dealers who congregate on Elm Avenue and a tiny park there, occasionally harassing residents and committing random acts of vandalism, Sushinsky has strong-armed city officials, the Baltimore Police Department and various community groups into doing something about it. But it has taken three years, she said, and the battle is far from over.
Almost single-handedly, and at her own peril, Sushinsky has prompted a stepped-up police presence, which led in the past few months to the arrests of several teenagers and evictions from two vacant houses that had turned into drug dens and flophouses. Sushinsky, her housemate and a handful of like-minded neighbors have forced other official responses, including an effort - so far half-hearted, she said - by the Recreation and Parks Department to improve lighting and maintenance in the park.
"All I'm trying to do," she said, "is live in a nice, quiet neighborhood and pay my taxes, like normal people."
And yet the teenagers' drinking, cursing and drug use, Sushinsky added, have made her street nearly unbearable.
While the increasing gentrification of blue-collar Hampden in the past few years has had beneficial effects - not least a boost in property values and the arrival of an eclectic mix of stores on West 36th Street, known as The Avenue - it has also served to drive lower-income residents into smaller concentrations of cheap rental housing or out of the area altogether.
At the same time, youths who once loitered on 36th Street when it was far less fashionable have been shooed away from its new, more upscale businesses and have moved to the easy alternative of the park on Elm Avenue and its adjoining alleys and sidewalks.
On any given afternoon, 20 or more teens might be hanging out there. Drug transactions, sometimes from passing vehicles, take place in broad daylight. Youths have been blamed for ripping trees from sidewalks and plants from pots on steps, tossing trash, spraying graffiti and vandalizing residents' cars, including $2,000 damage when the convertible top to a new Saab was slashed.
