Life in the Towers: 'I'm Tired Of Ducking Bullets'

The bottle whistled past her head, nearly hitting her, and exploded onto the cement with a loud POP. White paint splattered across the sidewalk like a Jackson Pollock painting.

"Now you see what we're up against," she said, and raised one eyebrow.

After the last flower was planted, and Letitia sat down on one of the round benches across from the PA system, a woman took the microphone.

"It's clean up day at River Park Towers," the woman shouted. "This is on us! If not for the Bronx, if not for the River Park Towers, then do it for yourself."

"I'm tired of ducking bullets all my life," the woman said, her voice cracking.

An older woman hovered near Letitia as the woman on the PA spoke. "Tell 'em to fix the goddamn elevators," she muttered.

Before they moved to the Towers, the Ledans spent six years living in a vacant lot in East New York. They moved to the Towers seven years ago after a shelter helped them receive Section 8. It hurts when people accuse those who are on assistance of ruining the building, Letitia said. "I don't want to hurt where I live at," she said. "I hear a lot of people say that people from the shelters mess up the building. Maybe I'm different. I don't know."

Letitia's life is ruled by the same problems as most everyone in the building. She struggles to make ends meet. Her nephew was tragically killed this month in a gang-related incident in upstate New York. She is trying to do something about this. She tries to be a positive influence on her nephews. She became an organizer for Picture the Homeless a few years ago, with no prior organizing experience.

"A lot of people give up on their neighborhood," she said. Letitia wanted to, at one point. A year or so ago, she said, someone lit a small fire in the hallway and she and Tony stayed inside their apartment as smoke curled underneath the front door, and joked about who would jump out the window first.

Letitia has since organized the tenants into a successful protest when the owner of the parking lot tried to raise lot fees to $100 a month. Now, she is trying to figure out what to do about the interplay between crime and police intrusion.

Crime seems to be going down in the building and around the neighborhood. Major felonies in the local 46th Precinct are down 14 percent compared to 2009. The drop in crime might be due to the heightened police presence, Letitia thought. The police regularly sit at an outside station on the bridge that connects the Towers to the street and patrol all 40 stories of the two buildings.

But to the Ledans and many other residents in the Towers, it's getting hard to fully appreciate the police presence. The police regularly enter apartments without warrants, residents say. Last February, the police burst into Letitia's apartment at six a.m. without a warrant and without reason, she said, scaring her and her husband. The police ran their flashlights over ashtrays in her living room, into her cabinets and lifted her mattress to look underneath. They said management asked them to inspect the apartment for squatters, Letitia said.