The drug crisis of a neighborhood is completely shown in a beloved Bronx -Park

When Martin Rogers’s relatives left their home in Manhattan in the 1920s, they were looking for a new house with access to more green space and open air. They found it in the South Bronx and in a 35 -hectare park known as St. Mary’s.

Mr. Rogers, 70, said that he spent many summers in childhood playing stickball at St. Mary’s and swimming in the swimming pool in the recreation center from the early morning until the street lamps rose. It not only offered him an escape from the small, burning apartment of his family, but also loved him from the drugs, riots, crime and poverty that the surrounding neighborhood stitched.

St. Mary’s ParkThe largest in the South Bronx, for decades, was a refuge for many residents in one of the most impoverished areas of New York City.

But while the homelessness and opioid crises of the city deteriorated in recent years, it became something else: a place where people shoot and nods under stately oaks, and where the grass and rocks are strewn with needles and broken glass.

Residents see the transformation of St. Mary’s so emblematically for the persistent poverty, drug problems and neglect that the South Bronx bullying. They are worried that the state of the park helps to perpetuate the harmful stigmas around the area while the gentrification wants to ward off.

The community has sought help from the city and state for years, but residents say they still have to see solutions that work.

“What happens in St. Mary’s Park is a symptom of what is happening in the wider South Bronx,” said Carmen Santiago, who lives in the neighborhood and argues for cleaning up the park. “The situation is just a perfect storm.”

Mrs. Santiago, 61, a veteran of the army and retired building manager, runs the length of St. Mary’s who collects litter week after week. On a recent day she entered East 149th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue and went up a grassy hill in the direction of a rocky peak, with each step needles, shards of glass and human stool.

On top of the hill, an empty blue bag dangled with the “Overdose of rescue kit” from a tree that claps in the wind. The ground underneath was covered with Naloxon containers, needle caps and waste.

“Seniors no longer come here and walk around,” said Mrs. Santiago. “My mother is 85 and she says,” I’m not going there. “

In the back of Mrs. Santiago, her cousin, whom she described as a middle -aged man who struggled with resource abuse. Friends have seen him with drugs in the park and a few blocks away at the Third Avenue hub, a busy commercial corridor with shops and stops by public transport.

Every time she steps out, Mrs. Santiago said, she hopes she won’t find the dead body of her cousin.

Police officers in the 40th district, which includes the neighborhoods Port Morris, Mott Haven and Melrose, have described the hub as a central location where people buy drugs, score for free and steal from stores. When they are overdose, they are only blocks removed from a hospital.

In February, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city Community Link ProgramThose local coalitions creates with community leaders, law enforcement and city institutions to tackle chronic quality of life, would start working at the HUB. The program has also been aimed at six other neighborhoods since 2023.

Camille Joseph Varlack, the deputy mayor for administration, said that the “systemic challenges” of the area made it a good candidate for the program. She said that her office had held monthly meetings with local stakeholders to keep track of the progress of the effort.

“I think the local feedback has been incredibly positive,” she said. “Our goal is to finally authorize our stakeholders in the community, so that when we withdraw the city resources, perhaps to go to another area that is challenged in the same way, they have points of connectivity that we have created.”

The city department of the city has said that cleaning up St. Mary’s Park is a priority.

In recent years, the department has spent around $ 50 million to improve the amphitheater of the park, the recreation center, the toilets, the dog run and the playgrounds, according to Gregg McQueen, a spokesperson. It collected more than 34,000 in the park last year alone.

Those investments were very welcome, but residents continue to witness the daily hardships that have contributed to the decline of the park.

Data collected by the health department of the city In 2023, the most recent available year, it showed that neighborhoods in the South Bronx had the highest overdose rates in the city, as in 2021 and 2022. The agency discovered that 858 residents of Bronx died of overdoses in 2023. Hunts Point and Mott Haven, were special Hotspots.

Residents of South Bronx are confronted Economic snapshot of the area Produced by the State of the State of the State in 2023.

Another report published that year by the city of the city more competentDiscovered that those inequalities penetrated the infrastructure of the city.

“Unwanted” facilities, such as homeless shelters and treatment centers for substance abuse, were disproportionately concentrated in color communities with a low income, said, while richer neighborhoods had more parks and squares for recreation.

The report insisted on city officials to refrain from flooding certain neighborhoods, including in the South Bronx, with hiding places and treatment centers.

Such facilities are often seen as a “Drag on Quality of Life”, wrote the office of the Comptroller, while parks are facilities that serve as “essential infrastructure for the physical, mental and social health of New Yorkers.”

While neighbors express their concern that the park has become a magnet for homeless people and drug users, those who work with New Yorkers who struggle with addiction and mental disorders emphasize the need for compassion.

Joseph Ruffalo is a recovery employee at Samaritan Daytop Village, one of the different non -profit organizations that offer drug abuse and other services to residents of the South Bronx.

“We see the good, the bad and the other,” he said. “They are just imprisoned in the handles of addiction and psychological problems.”

Mr Ruffalo, 61, is part of the Outreach team of his organization. For him the work is personal.

He is sober for almost two years after a decades of battle with addiction. A former Wall Street effect broker, he said he used drugs to cope with the head after being abused as a child. He found Samaritan Daytop after being forced to check in in a psychiatric department.

He now spends most days in and around St. Mary’s with a small cart in tow, with people sandwiches, overdose of rescue kits and wound care. He encourages them to visit his group’s head office to eat a meal, to shoot a round swimming pool or watch a movie.

Sam Rivera, the executive director of another non -profit for damage limitation, Onpoint NYCsaid that people who use drugs to cope with trauma often have not going anywhere. That is what leads them to quiet places such as St. Mary’s.

“Inside those trees you see poverty, you see dirty, you see waste,” he said. “And that is not because these are bad people. This is what our people have received.”

Onpoint sends clean -up plowing to hotspots, including the park, to pick up needles and left drug para. Employees also encourage people to visit Prevention centers for overdose Where they can use private drugs, under supervision.

Despite those efforts, many residents say that they avoid St. Mary’s, afraid to step on scattered needles or otherwise cause damage.

Willie Estrada, 68, who has been living in the South Bronx for decades, has watched frustration while the park fell into disrepair.

He often looks at the park from his window, he said, longing for the days when children ran through his trees all day and slide over the rocks.

Mr. Estrada, formerly a member of the Imperial Bachelors -gang, said that spending time in St. Mary’s in his youth helped him to send him away from a life of street violence.

The recreation center offered a place to hang around and more productive activities, such as dance parties and photography lessons, he said. Teenagers were not allowed to wear gang colors, and he finally stopped wearing them completely and left the gang. He became a professional dancer and promoter.

But now, he said, the park has become so “disgusting” that he does not allow his grandchildren to play there.

The bad conditions have strengthened existing stereotypes about the South Bronx, according to Steven Payne, the director of the Bronx County Historical Society. He regretted that the perception of the area was kept as dirty and dangerous despite the efforts of local leaders and organizations.

“If you spend more than two seconds in the neighborhood, there are so many great groups, so many great individuals who work to improve the daily lives of other people,” said Mr. Payne. “But that is all lost.”

South Bronx Lifers such as Mr. Rogers and Mrs. Santiago, who hope the park can be restored, said they were determined to continue to insist on solutions.

“We tolerate on behalf of our children,” Mr. Rogers said, “and because people have no choice.”