On North Avenue, a barbershop operates out of a converted rowhouse, surrounded on both sides by vacant homes.
Across the street, a man who learned how to tattoo in prison runs his own parlor and keeps a supply of Narcan nearby; he estimates he’s revived more than a dozen people in the past 18 months.
A few feet away, a convenience store sells snack chips, soft drinks and cigarettes — as well as brass knuckles and fold-out knives.
Penn North is a busy intersection, its soundtrack the usual city sounds of cars and SUVs stopping and starting, and buses groaning to a stop. Those sounds are occasionally punctuated by a nearby ambulance or police siren. Around each of the four corners, groups of people — mostly men, ranging in age from their 20s to elderly — congregate in knots, talking among themselves. In spots, the smell of marijuana is evident. Near carryouts, the scent of greasy food hangs in the air.
Scenes from several weeks’ worth of typical days in the Penn North neighborhood reveal the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in the once-vibrant community. On and near the intersection — which neighborhood workers, worshipers, and residents agree is the fulcrum of illicit drug use and sales — one can also find heavy doses of resilience, despair, chaos, frustration, and hope.
“This place is its own ecosystem,” said one Baltimore police officer assigned to the neighborhood, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the department had not cleared the person to be interviewed.
Since July, three mass overdoses have shaken the West Baltimore intersection and briefly drawn national attention. Each time, first responders, city workers, volunteers, officials and TV crews flooded the scene — and then left. But after the cameras disappeared, the people who live and work in Penn North kept going, navigating daily life amid open drug sales and use. Business owners keep Narcan close at hand, and parents warn their children to avoid the corner. The drug problem is unmistakable — and so is the resilience of the community.
To learn about life in Penn North, The Baltimore Sun spent three weeks in the neighborhood,, conducting more than four dozen interviews with those who use drugs, residents, business owners, public health researchers, law enforcement officers, city officials and neighborhood volunteers. This is the second story in a three-part series on how Penn North is confronting an escalating drug crisis.
‘Are you OK?’
To some outsiders, Penn North looks like a neighborhood in an around-the-clock crisis. The sale and use of drugs, mostly fentanyl, crack, and heroin, is rampant.
Drug users slip into alleys and abandoned homes to get high. Almost every day that The Sun was in the neighborhood, street dealers made eye contact and asked, “Are you OK?” — a street code for, “Do you want to buy drugs?” Street dealers invariably politely accepted a response from The Sun of “I’m good.”
The illicit drug activity means the challenges of everyday life in Penn North are sometimes punctuated by chaos. A July 10 mass overdose at the intersection of Penn and North sickened 35 people, and subsequent mass overdoses on July 18 and Oct. 8 hospitalized 16 others.
On a crisp, sunny November afternoon, a few middle-aged Black men roam around on foot, outside the intersection, hawking packages of white athletic socks and men’s thermal long underwear. Now and then, one of them silently holds up his wares, making it clear he’s got merchandise for sale.
On Pennsylvania Avenue, one block south of the Penn North intersection, a man and a woman quietly set up portable stands and a small table to sell laundry detergent, soap, deodorant, toothpaste, and other items. Ten feet away, another woman sells men’s clothing — jackets, pants, and sweaters — displayed on portable racks.
Near Penn and North, a side street is lined on both sides with rowhouses. A middle-aged man stands in front of the rowhouse he rents from his brother.
“This block here is quiet, but if you go one block up, it’s a different world,” said Eugene, 57, who declined to provide his last name. “Up there,” he said, nodding toward the nearby intersection of Penn and North, “they look like ‘The Walking Dead.’”
Precautionary measures
Businesspeople had a wide range of views regarding what it’s like to operate a commercial enterprise in the middle of a drug zone.
“It’s not as bad as it’s portrayed,” said the man who manages the barbershop surrounded by empty rowhouses, who identified himself as Coolgi, which is pronounced cool-gee.
Business is steady, and he has both regulars and walk-ins. Coolgi regulates who comes in; he keeps the door to the barbershop locked, and he has a surveillance camera that allows him to see who wants to enter. The barbershop has a cozy feel; its walls are painted royal blue, and Coolgi has a rack of books customers can read while they wait. The titles include “Becoming Muhammad Ali,” “Brother to Brother: Black Men Speak to Young Black Men,” and books about former NBA stars Carmelo Anthony, who grew up in Baltimore, and Grant Hill.
Coolgi said he installed the security measures in response to widespread damage to businesses that occurred during citywide protests that broke out following the death in police custody of Freddie Gray in April 2015. Baltimore police officers from the Western District, which includes Penn North, arrested Gray. His death while in police custody from a spinal cord injury sparked six days and nights of protests, civil unrest that included the looting of more than two dozen pharmacies, including the CVS pharmacy at one corner of the Penn North intersection. The civil unrest damaged up to 350 businesses citywide, causing about $9 million in damage.
“It’s a precaution,” Coolgi said. If civil unrest were to break out again, Coolgi said, he didn’t want to run the risk of any drama spilling into the shop.
Brazen thievery in a beauty store
About 50 yards east of the barbershop, at the northwest corner of Penn and North avenues, the manager of JAS Beauty Mart has a completely different take. The store sells women’s beauty products, such as hair gel, wigs, cosmetics, and clothing.
“Sometimes people come in and take the clothes right in front of me, and walk out,” said the manager, who declined to provide his name. As a demonstration, he walked out from behind the cash register, grabbed a bottle of hair product and stepped toward the door.
The manager said he’s seen people who stole items try to sell them right outside the store. “It’s frustrating,” he said.
“My good customers come from other parts of the city,” he said. “But they don’t want to come here, they don’t want to deal with all the people who are outside.”
Many of the people who live in the immediate neighborhood don’t have the money to shop at the store, said the manager, who’s worked there for five years.
U.S. Census data backs up the manager’s assertion that many Penn North residents don’t have deep pockets. The data show that 25% of residents in the Penn North neighborhood live below the poverty line, while 32% of children (under the age of 18) and 35% of seniors (age 65 and older) are below the poverty line, according to censusreporter.org, an independent nonprofit that presents Census data in a reader-friendly way. The per capita income for the area is $26,793, about two-thirds of Baltimore’s. The vast majority of residents in Penn North — 87% — are Black, 7% are white, with small numbers of Asians, Hispanics and people from other groups rounding out the population.
Penn North was once a vibrant entertainment area
The Pennsylvania Avenue corridor has long been a hotspot for illicit drug sales, according to “Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of American Romance with Illegal Drugs,” by Jill Jonnes.
In the years following World War II, a “subterranean drug scene” took root on Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, a district that at the time included “every kind of diversion from fancy nightclubs to down-and-funky pool halls to prostitution,” Jonnes wrote. The Royal Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, known as “The Avenue,” hosted an array of top-flight entertainers, including Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Workers demolished the building in 1971 as part of an urban renewal initiative.
Over the years, the drug trade in Penn North — and in other Baltimore neighborhoods — evolved and expanded, with the introduction of crack and fentanyl on the street in recent decades.
In 1950, two fatal heroin overdoses were reported in Baltimore, Jonnes wrote. In 2023, Baltimore reported 1,043 drug and alcohol-related deaths, according to the Baltimore City Health Department. The vast majority of those deaths — 921 — were fentanyl related, the department said. Between November 2024 and October 2025, authorities tallied 499 deaths attributable to opioids in Baltimore, of which 462 involved fentanyl, according to the Maryland Department of Health.
A ‘go-to lady for everything’
On the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and North Caroline Street, one block south of the intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues, Darrell Simmons, 66, clad in a green jacket, sits on a folding chair near rolling trays and boxes filled with body oil, shampoo, NyQuil, Mucinex, laundry detergent and other household products.
Simmons is on the corner several days a week, selling most items for a handful of dollars. He said he purchases the items in bulk, at a discount, which allows him to make a small profit. Simmons shares some of the proceeds with the church across the street, Simmons Memorial Baptist Church, where his brother is the pastor.
He also takes donations of men’s and women’s clothing and shoes to sell, so long as they’re in near mint condition.
“Business is usually pretty good around the first of the month, when people get their government benefits,” Simmons said.
In addition to helping the church, his corner business provides a service to neighborhood residents, Simmons said. He gestured toward the CVS a block away, on the northeast corner of the Pennsylvania and North Avenues intersection. “
People can’t shop at the CVS anymore,” he noted.
He was referring to the fact that most of the CVS that was looted during the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray shut down on Sept. 30; the pharmacy remains open. Neighborhood residents and business people said they believe CVS shut down the store because of a widespread theft problem. In an email, Amy Thibault, a CVS spokesperson, attributed the closure to “local market dynamics, population shifts, a community store’s density, and ensuring there are other geographic access points to meet the needs of the community.”
Another mobile businessperson who doesn’t have a stationary store runs her business out of a white van with the legend “Pretty Mobile” emblazoned on its roof.
Natasha Baker posts up near the CVS almost every day, selling cellphones and usage plans for $25 and up to people who receive government benefits. She also sells clothes, such as knit hats and gloves, and candy, cookies, sugary drinks, and snack chips.
“I’m the go-to lady for everything,” Baker said. Like other businesspeople and volunteers who frequent Penn North, Baker keeps several containers of Narcan in her van, which workers with the Baltimore Department of Health provided. Narcan is a medication that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
Baker said she’s provided Narcan numerous times to people who alerted her that someone was overdosing nearby. “I’ve saved several lives,” she said.
‘I try to do God’s work’
Aside from people hawking items on the street to scratch out a small profit, volunteers provide free food to people who live in or near Penn North, which is considered a food desert, with no grocery stores within easy walking distance.
For example, every Wednesday at noon for eight years, Marvin McDowell, who runs a boxing program out of space on the corner of North and Druid Hill avenues, sets up tables and offers fresh vegetables and fruit to area residents, provided by two food rescue groups and a farm.
“I try to do God’s work in any way that I can,” McDowell said.
On one cold Wednesday in early November, about 50 people lined up in front of McDowell’s North Avenue neighbor, a pawn shop, for the free food.
“This is very helpful,” said one woman in line, who declined to provide her name. The woman said she picks up the fresh produce each week, not only for herself, but for two elderly neighbors.
Around the corner from the food giveaway, on a side street about 70 yards from North Avenue, a thirtysomething man raked leaves in front of his townhome with his teenage son and 9-year-old girl.
The man, who declined to provide his name, said his neighborhood is safe and peaceful. “Once you come down here, it’s different,” he said. The man said he tells his kids to stay away from the Penn-North intersection and not to talk to anyone they don’t know.
“It’s nice to live here,” he said. “It’s just the surroundings. Inner city living.” The man said he’d bought the house a year ago. Asked if he would buy it now, knowing how close he was to drug activity, the man said, “No.”
It’s not unusual for residents who live close to urban crime to feel safe on their specific street, said Hanna Love, a fellow at Brookings Metro with the Transformative Placemaking project at the Brookings Institution. She researches the intersection between place, economic opportunity and public safety.
“It’s block by block,” Love said. “Oftentimes, when you have people coming from outside a neighborhood, or people who don’t even go to a neighborhood, they don’t understand block-to-block dynamics, so they end up avoiding an entire neighborhood. Most people feel safe in their neighborhood.”
The Sun interviewed a half-dozen Penn North residents who said they’d never had a problem with crime and felt safe in their homes. One man, who owns a three-story rowhouse on North Avenue, about three blocks from the intersection of Penn and North, said he purchased his home in 2020 for $40,000 and feels perfectly safe.
‘I walk with God out here’
Dwayne Brown, 63, walked up and down North Avenue one afternoon, carrying a bag with socks, T-shirts, men’s thermal underwear and women’s clothing that he had for sale.
“I’m a wanderer. I don’t like standing still,” Brown said.
Brown said he’s in recovery. Before he stopped using drugs and alcohol, “I did it all,” Brown said. “Speed, crack, liquor, heroin.”
In 2003, while incarcerated, a jail official offered him the chance to enter a recovery program, he said. “I jumped on it with fear,” he said.
Brown said he’s remained sober since. He said he’s spoken at a couple of Baltimore Drug Court graduation ceremonies, and he used to try to talk to people around Penn North about recovery.
“Not no more,” he said. Most people he tried to talk to about living without drugs weren’t interested.
Asked if he’s worried about relapsing in a neighborhood where an array of drugs are easily available, Brown said, “I walk with God out here. My armor is on.”
Have a news tip? Contact Ruben Castaneda at 443-862-6133 or rucastaneda@baltsun.com.
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