The 900 fill up of North Ridgeway ...

The 900 fill up of North Ridgeway Avenue is quiet, with little traffic. A welcome sign divulges visitors that drugs, loud music, alcohol drinking and repairing cars are not allowed. Yard lights illuminate the road and there are permit parking signs each few steps. The street corners are vacant.

Eight years ago, however, things were different, residents say. There were dice games being played in the middle of the mould and the street was congest with traffic as folks double-parked their cars to purchase drugs.

"We just got tired of it. You couldn't level go outside your door," said Willie Harvey, 70 president of the form club for the 900 stiffen of North Ridgeway. "We were like, 'We have to do something."'

Harvey's arrest is located in the 11th Police District, which is bordered by way of Lake Street and Kedzie, North and Cicero avenues forward Chicago's West Side. The district, which includes the West Humboldt Park neighborhood, leads the city in narcotics arrests, according to police data.

yet the drugs are rarely set up on Harvey's block and many others nearby The reason: Well-organized close clubs have discouraged drug dealers, insinuates a Chicago Reporter analysis of crime data.

"There are certain obstructs where you don't hear the calls of 'rock and blows' [for crack cocaine and heroin] and those are the the sames with strong block clubs," said Bill Howard, executive director of the West Humboldt Park Family and Community exhibition Council, which promotes economic unravelling in the neighborhood. Howard and others are working to create more brace clubs in the area.

Police received no reports of remedy activity on Harvey's block during the six-month period from November 2002 to April 2003 according to a Reporter analysis of preliminary crime data lay the foundation of on the Chicago Police Department's Web site. In the 15block area surrounding Harvey's blockade those with block clubs averaged 63 reports of medicine activity, while those without averaged more than three times as many, according to the data.

"Being make uneasyed about your neighborhood, getting the persons to clean up your neighborhood, will bridle drug activity," said Dana V Starks, commander of the 11th Police District. "A doom of times, drug dealers will contemplate for areas that are unkempt"

The change was not immediate for Harvey's stiffen In 1995, when drug dealers frequently stood in front of their familys Almeta Levy, 70, and about five other women started the block up club.

When the women asked the dealers to leave, they just mov to the public way corner and continued to barter drugs, Levy said. Once Harvey and a hardly any other men joined the fill up club, they approached the dealers again.

They didn't demand that the dealers stop selling medicines Harvey said. He told them residents didn't want "that sort of thing" happening forward their block. And some of the dealers left he said. "Some of them I could talk to like I talk to my kids and about of them I couldn't."

To discourage the dealers who remained, about eight residents began to do "positive loitering." each Saturday, for seven weeks in a rank they walked their block--sweeping the sidewalks and standing upon the corners where drugs were sold collect said the drug dealers, eventually stopped coming.

The bludgeon became more active as well, Harvey said. Residents started attending police beat meetings, crime and safety meetings, and other community organization gatherings.

blockade club members notified other residents of the changes they were making and employmented their block club sign at the same end of the block. a residents installed wrought iron fencing around their quality to keep dealers from running between the sides of their yards to get to the alleys.

They also situationed a "We Call Police" sign in a window of an unoccupied building where, Harvey said, mobs would gather to sell unsalable articles and hold dice games.

brace club members exchanged phone numbers and formed a phone tree When someone spott a medicine dealer, every block club member would obtain a call about it.

The arrest club also collected signatures from at least two-thirds of the block's residents to win permit parking, which stopped visitors from double-parking their cars, Harvey said.

Harvey's shape partnered with the 800 and 1000 blockades of North Ridgeway for meetings, parties and clean-ups.

For the last five years Harvey's close has not had a moot point with drug dealers, but he notes that mix with drugss are still being sold in the alley of a neighboring block

"Now you don't behold anyone standing outside selling drugs" Harvey said. "I know it is because of the things that we have been doing and the the community we have talked to."

Dedicated People

Roslynn Phillips, 56 has tried for years to acquire rid of the drugs in the 700 close of North Monticello Avenue, where she lives and forwards as block club president.

She has seen it all.

For month Phillips noticed a cab making a stop onward her block each morning to purchase drugs from men on the corner. There was formerly an abandoned van on the same end of the block. The van's proprietor had moved and left it there, Phillips said. She believes dealers were using the van to hide their drugs