Smith wouldn't comment on whether security has been hired, saying that to confirm one way or another it could endanger lives. But she did accuse Seton Hill of refusing to help pay for the guards. Members of the Seton Hill Association told me they shouldn't have to pay to keep the residents of Orchard Mews safe.
But the two sides are not completely at odds.
They agree that crime is a problem and that something needs to be done.
They agree that the cul-de-sac at one end of Orchard Street should be demolished so the street can connect to Pennsylvania Avenue, which runs perpendicular to it. French and Smith each said that would help police more easily move about the neighborhood.
And they agree that a portable floodlight put up by city police several months ago to light up the cul-de-sac needs to be fixed. Back in December, I wrote about how drug dealers cut the wires and broke the light. The city fixed it, and the drug dealers broke it again.
Finally, city workers told police it was a lost cause and they wouldn't fix it anymore. The Seton Hill Association complained that the city had surrendered to drug dealers.
French said the floodlight was put back Dec. 19. "And of course, it hasn't been working for the last week and a half," she said yesterday.
Orchard Street may divide Seton Hill and Orchard Mews, but the two communities are inextricably linked. When the occupants of the quaint rowhouses on Tessier Street take out their trash or retrieve their morning paper, they are steps from where the officer was shot. They can't avoid the boots dangling from the wire above.
Smith told me she's signed up her management company as a business member of the Seton Hill Association. And French said, "Most of us more recently, at least members of the board, have felt we should encompass the reality of the neighborhood."
That means expanding their reach beyond the "historic boundary" that ends halfway down Orchard Street.
The reality of the neighborhood is that there really are no boundaries. The drug dealers won't stop at a historic marker, and the people on both sides of the streets deserve a safe place to live.
