This Opa-locka neighborhood is often called the Triangle, usually with an adjective preceding: The crime-plagued Triangle. The impoverished Triangle. The notorious Triangle.
It was a place so overrun with crime and cocaine during the 1980s that the public works department blocked all but one entrance with metallic barriers.
The nine-block pocket of Opa-locka then became the very portrait of urban blight, framed by silver slices of steel. Those slices unnerved the Triangle’s residents as much as they protected them, leaving them to worry if the blockades would forever cast a shadow.
Now, miles away in the city of Miami, another troubled community is debating the politics of fencing itself in. Scarred by a summer of shootings, the Liberty Square residents’ council wants to block all but two entrances to a community with its own nickname, “Pork ‘n’ Beans.”
“We got to try something,” said Sara Smith, president of the Liberty Square residents’ council. “Too many people are getting shot.”
Three years ago, Opa-locka began removing the barriers on the neighborhood’s western edge. The city didn’t finish the job, but older residents lauded the move as an important first step in restoring the area’s forgotten reputation as a working-class neighborhood called Magnolia North.
On Wednesday, the area inched closer to that vision: Habitat for Humanity started demolishing a decrepit housing project, vowing to replace the beige buildings with 26 units of new, affordable housing.
“Those barriers served their purpose,” said Dorothy “Dottie” Johnson, an Opa-locka city commissioner. “We needed to start taking them down so the people in the community could move on, feel like they’re worth something again.”
Did they help?
Johnson, who grew up in Liberty Square, sees the history of the Triangle barricades as a parable. More than 20 years after the barricades were placed in the neighborhood, two questions still remain: Did the barriers have any impact at all? And will there ever be a right time to take them all down?
Cheryl Cason understands the desperation. She saw it firsthand when she was a cop on the beat in the Triangle.
“It seems like someone was getting shot every day,” Cason said. “And people, they were coming from all over into the community. It was like we had the best dope in the world.”
Growing up, Cason spent summers in this neighborhood. The area was then hot with heroin. The cocaine trade that came in the ’80s was a different type of monster, violent and pervasive.
Kids she once played with became major players in the drug game. Guns fired through the night. Men were run over for petty indiscretions like stealing $10 worth of crack rocks. Or they got killed with Uzis for worse.
By 1986, Miami-Dade County statistics showed a one-in-four chance of being assaulted in the area and a one-in-60 chance of being murdered there.
Of the 18 homicides the city tallied in 1986, this tiny neighborhood of 600 contributed nine.
In 1987, the city and state government concocted a $79,000 idea: Cut off the neighborhood. Place barriers down 17th Avenue on the east, and 22nd Avenue on the west, from the pocket between State Road 9 and the city limit at 151st Street. The barriers would contain the drug trade to one area and help police catch criminals who ran off. The name of the experiment took after the geometric shape of the neighborhood: Operation Triangle.
It was supposed to last six months.
“Those barricades didn’t do a thing,” said Nathaniel Malory, 60, who everyone calls “Truck.” “They shouldn’t have been there in the first place. What type of city has a barricade over it?”
Malory was one of those drug dealers who grew up with Cason. Since 1968, he has been arrested more than 30 times, including once for heroin trafficking and once for cocaine possession.
Malory remembers watching the barriers go up. Only 2 feet high, the barriers looked like guardrails propped on stilts – easily scalable for a pedestrian.
The first day, police seized $4,000 worth of cocaine and an assault rifle, and dealing soon dispersed into other pockets of the city. Those successes soon slowed.
“We felt like we were trapped, like this was a prison,” said Olive Jones, a property owner in the Triangle. “They put the barriers in, but the police didn’t finish the job. They didn’t put in any cameras, or any more street lights in the neighborhood. We didn’t need a barrier. What we needed was better policing.”
In the darkness, the drug dealers adapted. They learned the rhythms of police beats, residents say, disappearing when the units came by and returning when they left. Gangs started to use the barriers to mark off their territory.
A symbol
The barricades became a symbol of the city’s get-tough approach on crime – and it did limit traffic flow. So they stayed.
Pumpkin Shonda, 25, can’t really think of a time when she felt safe inside the Triangle.
“When I was growing up, you’d have to be crazy to take your kids outside,” she said. “We couldn’t even look out of the windows, because we were afraid of bullets. The place was hot.”
So everything she sees happening surprises her. As dusk falls on a recent day, Shonda sat carefree outside her white sedan as two of her children ran past shuttered stores on Ali-Baba Avenue.
“Nobody’s around here anymore,” Shonda said. “Everybody’s either dead or incarcerated.”
In nine blocks, there are eight churches, five abandoned homes, 18 boarded-up apartment complexes, two shut-down corner stores and a shuttered chicken-wing takeout place.
The neighborhood that Shonda’s kids are growing up in has full access to Northwest 22nd Avenue, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.
But the place is a ghost town.
“Don’t call it the Triangle anymore,” Cason, the cop, insisted. “It’s Magnolia North.”
When Cason says that, many in the neighborhood listen. In January she was promoted to police chief.
More than two decades after the barriers were placed, Cason was a part of a national network of law enforcement agencies that created a different strategy. Instead of isolating the neighborhood, they tried to isolate the troublemakers within the community.
The first step was the arrest and conviction of more than a dozen high-level drug dealers and gang members. Businesses and apartment buildings were shut down for code violations, choking out places that police and code enforcement thought fueled the underground economy.
The neighborhood hasn’t seen a homicide since 2008. In the past three years, only one person has been shot.
If the ex-convicts return, Cason hopes they’d be wiser from their experience. Just like her childhood pal, Truck. Once a big drug dealer, now he helps with the neighborhood crime watch.
New neighborhood
Social service agencies also are banking that convicts, if they return, will come to a neighborhood vastly different from the old: Homeowners will have moved into the Habitat homes. And the Opa-locka Community Development Corp. will have rehabbed the 70-plus units it has taken ownership of, a $7 million effort using federal and county money.
“Now is the time,” said Willie Logan, a former Opa-locka mayor and state representative who heads the community development corporation. “The population has been reduced significantly because so many buildings are vacant or abandoned. There’s not much crime because no one is there.”
Logan had two major issues with the barricades. First, the city didn’t come with a long-term strategy to better police the neighborhood. Second, to put it simply, the barricades were ugly.
Other solutions
Smith, the Liberty Square council president, says she wants to use barriers as just one of several strategies. Those include adding speed bumps, motion-sensitive lights, increased police patrols and gated entrances where IDs are checked. She envisions those barricades to be more beautiful, more like the kind used in the Morningside neighborhood in Miami or some of Miami-Dade’s western suburbs.
“Just because this is the projects doesn’t mean we can’t look nice,” she said.
Barricades in Magnolia North still cradle the eastern edge of the neighborhood, which borders the 7-year-old city of Miami Gardens. The residents on the other side of the barriers say they want them to stay there. They help distinguish their neighborhood from a place with such a bad reputation.
“One day, we’ll be ready, but the neighborhood still has a long way to go,” said Dwight Powell, the chairman of the Magnolia North Crime Watch.
“Maybe when we finally have people living in those new Habitat homes. I dream of a new neighborhood with no barricades, with a sign up front that says ‘Magnolia North.’ The Triangle? Nah, that’s old.”
