Neighborhood On The Rebound

LAKE PLACID - Minnie Jones saw Highway Park evolve over the 57 years of her life.

"It was small ... not rough, just a small community where everybody raised your kids," Jones said of the Highway Park of her childhood. It was segregated and not prosperous, but otherwise calm and close-knit. She even remembered neighbors spanking her kids if they acted up, and she did the same to theirs.

She then remembered the next generation. "The parents say, 'don't holler at my kids.'"

The generation after that? "You're scared of the kids now."

That fear isn't shared by everyone living there, but the crime some of them brought to the small neighborhood south of Lake Placid provoked community leaders and the Highlands County Sheriff's Office to turn the neighborhood around. By many accounts, the violence has ebbed over the past year since sheriff deputies picked up their patrols in the neighborhood. Residents remain divided, however, over the extent of the progress and what else needs to be done to both shed the neighborhood's notoriety and bring its youth up.

Images And Appearances

Highway Park, with a population of approximately 700, presents multiple faces, depending on where you are within the neighborhood.

Passersby going along U.S. 27 see the neighborhood's bar and store fronts, the loitering group of men and women in front of the bar and walking down the narrow Vision Street. A small convenience store and a few other shops are slightly less visible and far less busy. At night, this is where the block parties are. One man brings in a black van and blasts his stereo while some sit in front. Three of the 20-plus crowd spent New Years Eve at a table playing dominoes.

"That whole main street is the nucleus of that community," said Highlands County Sheriff's Lt. Jim McGann, who spearheaded a task force patrolling Highway Park last year.

Further into the neighborhood, adults returning from work or talking with neighbors spot the lit streets during the evening. On a Wednesday, the churches light up and draw a few worshippers, though at times their crowds are barely larger than those at the corner bar.

Sandra Johnson, 51, said her mother made her go to church every Sunday. Like Jones, she also had warm memories of the tight discipline and the "whoopin's" she and her neighbors dealt out as parents.

"You had to go to school," said Johnson, who also lived in Highway Park her entire life. "Couldn't drop out and the only time you could miss school was if you were sick or half-dead."

Until more than 30 years ago, both Johnson and her mother, Patricia Ward, remembered a movie screen at current-day Vision Street being the big hangout for the neighborhood's teenagers. Johnson herself had a curfew back then and wasn't allowed to go there when most of the teens were hanging out.

Nowadays, the kids simply play on the streets, riding bicycles and tossing foam footballs around, showing no fear of the occasional cars going between them. They take up the beaten grass lots between the old houses, their lawns sometimes looking worse than the lots the kids played on.

Despite the rough shape of the houses, Frankie Robinson, 70, said it could be a lot worse for the money.

"A lot of people came from Ft. Myers, so you know how the housing is there," he said.

Kenneth B. Blue, a stocky 39-year-old migrant worker who lives in Highway Park and has worked in places like New York, believes he and his two daughters are safe here. The violent reputation Highway Park had over the years, to him, seems way overblown.

"I walked these streets at 3 or 4 in the morning," Blue said of the rest of the neighborhood. "It ain't like Chicago."

Melinda Linares, who was with Blue and his family Tuesday afternoon, said she laughed when another woman called it "the hood."

"I've come in here, (and) I never had a problem and I'm not their color," said the South Bronx native. She's Hispanic in the predominantly black neighborhood.

But even Blue and Linares said that the "hot spot" was off limits to them.

Frank Branch, the owner of Highway Park Liquors, said passersby driving down U.S. 27 can say what they want about those crowds in front of his store, but he maintained it was an inaccurate reflection.

"People perceive what they like," he said. "You got hard-working people down there ... sure, you're going to have a criminal element anywhere you go."

Operation Safe Neighborhood And Its Effect

The whole neighborhood became increasingly violent through recent years. In Sheriff's Lt. Jim McGann's opinion, it came to a peak when Highway Park resident Quentin Pope was murdered in 2005.

Pope's murder took place after three men from Orlando came to Highway Park, jumped out of a car and tried robbing the entire group Pope was with. McGann personally caught one of the suspects the night of that murder.

"Highway Park certainly did represent a significant proportion of our time," McGann said.

The next year, the sheriff's office formed a squad to cover Highway Park and take on what McGann said was an "open drug market" in the area. He temporarily headed the squad and their effort, dubbed "Operation Safe Neighborhood."

It was as much a code enforcement project as it was a drug crackdown. According to sheriff's office records, six homes were demolished by the county's code enforcement between November 2006 and April 2007, including a labor camp that McGann said was a significant drug den for the neighborhood.

The same records indicated that the Highway Park squad made 144 arrests during the height of the operation from mid-November 2006 through March 2007, even though McGann said a small number of those were made elsewhere by that squad when there was little activity in their area.

Although there was no specific data available for the number of calls coming out of Highway Park, McGann said the volume of complaints from there dropped and "stablized" since Operation Safe Neighborhood ended in March.

"Has the overall crime problem been as prolific? No, I can say that with confidence," he said.

Now, McGann said that he and the sheriff's deputies working Highway Park are scaling back on the "enforcement" and trying to work on the "social" side. That basically involves getting business owners and residents there to trust him and his fellow deputies. He goes to their monthly district meetings and he even talks glowingly about the church choir services there.

In one case, Branch put up a sign on his bar last week instructing patrons to use the patio rather than the front of his property to drink. Branch said he and McGann discussed it and thought it would help.

"I felt that we don't need to be out on the side of the building with a beer in our hands," Branch said.

Underlying Matter?

Many of the residents approached by Highlands Today thought the police protection was helping, but they worry the underlying roots of the violence that gripped Highway Park remain, and it goes beyond what the sheriff's office alone can do.

"The young girls ain't got nothing to do, and the young boys, they just make babies," Frankie Robinson said.

He enumerated what he thought were the reasons Highway Park got to the point it reached before the police crackdown. The kids can't find jobs. They're not staying in school like they should. Some people are dealing drugs to them.

Aside from the strip, Martin Luther King Park is the only place brought up in Highway Park as a source of activities and recreation, while the school children also have the Star Center. Nobody mentions the hidden, poorly maintained and mostly unused boat ramp to Lake Huntley.

As she sat just outside the center Wednesday afternoon, Marcha McMinns, 18, suggested it might not be enough for the community.

"We could have another rec center," said the Lake Placid High School senior. "We just need something to do other than walk around."

Her sentiments were repeated by most of the adults living there. Funding and building a new community center was a major, years-long ambition for Vince Hill, the president of the Highway Park Neighborhood Preservation and Enhancement District Council.

Hill believed the community center would not only help bring up the children there but would also generate jobs and keep other community members from facing conflicts by having to borrow one of the churches for some events.

Theresa Williams, the program coordinator of the Star Center, did not completely agree, saying the parents there should "utilize what you already got.

"They got plenty they can do," she said. She added that new facilities would be left to deteriorate unless parents "grew up" and got their kids active.

Hill said he, and he thought everyone else, would beg to differ.

"If you shoot for the stars, you're going to land somewhere high. If you shoot for just the ceiling... you know what I'm saying?" he said.