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Kensington Tour

4th & Lehigh - Story of a Struggle

In 1995 we had a tent city at the lot at 4th & Lehigh. With the shelters closed, it swelled to over thirty families, with many children. It's covered in the film Poverty Outlaw by Skylight pictures and the book The Myth of the Welfare Queen by David Zucchino. This lot used to be a lace factory; it burned down and it set the surrounding houses on fire.

The city's response to the tent city was using the local police and the civil affairs. They would drop drugs or heroin needles, trying to say this was a whole group of heroin users trying to make a drug hangout. They brought it DHS and, citing health risks, took one woman's kids away. They gave her ten days to prove she had a house for them. Of course she couldn't. We lost her to drugs after that.

A lot of families struggle with losing their kids for economic reasons. One KWRU member, Miss Betty, was a grandmother who had worked her whole life until the factory she had worked at closed down. Her daughter couldn't take care of her kid, and she wound up, in her 50's, taking care of her baby granddaughter. She had a house fire which ruined the upper floor of her house. She was living in the bottom floor until she could get enough money to make repairs. DHS came in and took her granddaughter because of the condition of the house. In order to get her kid back, she needed to make the repairs, but families with children get priority for that kind of assistance. KWRU was able to get reunite Miss Betty with her granddaughter after a long struggle.

In any case, we used the fire hydrant at the end of the block to take baths and wash ourselves, clean our dishes. It’s river water. But when you don’t have a lot of options, you don’t have a lot of options. In many areas throughout Kensington, people use the local fire hydrants to get water because they don’t have any running water in their house. People tap electricity illegally because they don’t have electric in their house. People use their stove to heat their house because they can't afford anything else.

We eventually left the tent city because it was getting too cold, and the rats were starting to come out in force. All the families moved into the abandoned St. Edward's Catholic Church.