A better name for this slice of Cincinnati is spray-painted on weathered plywood: “Hell Town,” it says on a derelict building.

        It's the poorest, most dangerous part of Over-the-Rhine — from Central Parkway on the west to Vine Street on the east, from Washington Park at the bottom to Findlay Market at the top. It has streets named Pleasant and Race and an alley at 13th and Republic that police say is one of the most hazardous spots in Cincinnati.

        This is where a cop shot a black man who was running from police and ... well, we all know that story.

        This is also a part of town where good people try to get by without getting shot.

The drug boys

        An elderly man in a barbershop sums it up: “We all want the same thing — good schools and a safe place for our children to play. We want jobs.”

        Well, some want jobs. Not the drug boys who hang on the corners like clusters of poison grapes. They already have a “job,” running a drive-through for dopers: OxyContin, pot, coke, smack and soul-stealing crack.

        White kids from the suburbs sit in mommy's SUV and place their orders. A girl of about 16 had the scared and excited look of a kid at Paramount's Kings Island, but she and her apparent boyfriend with the styled white-boy dreadlocks were looking for another kind of thrill ride.

        They are safe, if they stay in the car. After all, they're trade partners for Hell Town's leading export.

        Mixed in with the white kids' Chevy Blazers are the polished Jaguars and gold-jeweled Caddys of the drug bosses, who float by like the biggest fish in the tank.
       

A dream resurrected

        “Urban Taliban,” says my friend and guide, Michael Howard, shaking his head as he passes out fliers for Mount Auburn United Methodist Church. On the street he is “Nitty,” from his days as a boxer, enforcer, addict and thief who did two tours of Ohio prisons. Now he spreads the gospel of Christ and the American dream, his “keys to hope for the hopeless.”

        He has no respect for the reverends who show up only for protest marches. “I'm boycotting too,” he says. “I'm boycotting the cycle of poverty, drugs, domestic violence, poor education, economic exclusion — anything that stands in the way of the American dream.”

        The drug boys take the fliers. They look at me suspiciously, probably the way people in white neighborhoods look at them. Two kinds of white people are safe here, I'm told: drug customers, and Christians who come to help.

        Nobody is safe at night.

        Bullet-pocked bricks mark a drive-by shooting that was never reported. No big deal — they missed. Businesses cling to Vine Street, slowly dying like frost-burned thistles in an abandoned garden.

        Old guys stumble by with eyes the color of watery custard — husks of drug boys. Prison and abuse have madethem thin as a bum's socks.

        Mike breaks up an argument that is climbing into the high notes where words give out and gunshots take over. A girl who should be in school watches while her tiny baby peeks out from blankets in a buggy, wide-eyed and innocent. This is the face of Cincinnati's future.

        God help the child. Who else will?

        E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.

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