COLUMN ONE : Hope Sown in Crack’s Rocky Turf : At 850 Longwood, South Bronx, the dope dealers found a home. The few tenants left lived without water, heat and dignity. But Carlton Collier thought it could change.

There is a place here in America’s most famous slum where five busy street corners come together in the shape of a contorted star, the intersection darkened by the latticework of the el tracks above.

Any of these corners would make a good spot to sell crack cocaine, but the dealers chose the weary old building at 850 Longwood Ave., the one with the mangled front door and paint smeared across the thick columns of its portico.

Drug operations thrive in such run-down shelter, taking grasp like creeper vines and spreading floor to floor. With them often follow all the urban plagues one upon the other: fires and vermin and a mortal spray of gunfire.

A crack infestation can be a merciless thing, burrowing inside the living space and then within the people. There is an immense power to it, with its own logic and its own economics. It overwhelms even the police. And the tenants who stay in a stricken building can lose themselves or their families for the effort.

In the last four years, that is what happened at “850,” the drug emptying the place of its essences--its warmth, its balance, its sense of sanctuary. It forced away every good tenant except those too mulish to bend or too feeble to go. The building became scarcely more of a home than the rugged street beside it.

Then something remarkable happened. With little to hold on to but cold and dreary space, the remaining handful found a champion to rally around, a community association with a corny slogan: Don’t move, improve!

And a few of them hold on still, unmoved and improving as they can, awaiting a resurrection in a tiny corner of the Bronx.

America may have no grand strategy to save its cities, but grass-roots organizations keep trying to patch up its neighborhoods. They are especially overtaxed these days. Crack is killing inner-city buildings, relentless as any wrecking ball.

These groups are an overburdened and underfunded lot, trolling the shrunken reservoirs of money, working building by building and block by block.

Most often, their triumphs go unnoticed. The labors are too gradual and unspectacular and the conquests too tenuous, much as here at 850 Longwood.

The worst of the havoc had begun back in 1987. Crackheads lit their pipes in the gloom of the corridors. They scribbled names and curses and the arithmetic of their transactions on the walls. They emptied their bladders wherever, those with some remainder of shame ducking into the mailbox alcove, off the foyer.

Violet Smiley, home from her domestic work, would find strangers crowded near her front door at Apartment 2A. “Excuse me, can I pass, please? I pay rent here,” she would say. Her granddaughter Dawn, not yet a teen-ager, would be mistaken for a user. “How much you want?” the dealers would ask her.

Always, there was that same question, a constant mumble: “How much you want?” Day in, day out, up and down 850’s six flights, the light bulbs unscrewed, the crunch of empty vials underfoot. “How much you want?”

By 1988, a crafty young man named Pablito had taken over the territory, police said. He hired street toughs as his “managers,” some of them just 14 or 15 years old, apprentices in the crafts of thuggery. They commanded an ever-changing crew of “pitchers” who did the actual hand-to-hand sales.

These pitchers were nothing more than crack-starved derelicts, doleful as basset hounds, lower in rank than anyone but lookouts. For a meager fee of $10, they dealt a bundle of 40 vials at $3 a hit. Any of them crazy enough to smoke up the inventory or “jet” with the cash got a blade in the back.

Clorinda Rios, an endearing 85-year-old sprite whom everyone called “Mamita,” had lived in Apartment 4E for 24 years. Cancer had settled in one of her breasts, and her legs were now not much thicker than the cane she used to steady herself. She feared going downstairs to buy a carton of milk.

The hallways had the look of an ant farm--all that crazed back and forth. Mamita had never seen people like this, some almost delirious with need, others sly and purposeful. She could peek at them living by candlelight in vacant units. “They would cook with wood, like cavemen,” she said.

Many of her best friends had moved away, Matilde and Blanca and Kim. The various landlords had long neglected 850, but now they abandoned even the pretense of upkeep. No rent was collected and no repairs were made.

This was fortunate for Pablito. His business had a demand for stash locations. When any of the 36 units became empty, he could pop the locks and take over as he pleased. Other apartments filled with an accumulated mulch of squatters, many of them careless with fire.

Ceilings were left with gaping holes from water damage. Mamita lost all her bedspreads, her photo albums, the family burial papers. Wind found pathways through the burned-away structure.

Crackheads, desperate for money, scavenged pipes from the boiler and plumbing, then sold the hardware for scrap. The city made emergency repairs to send up some steam. The pipes were stolen again. The city stopped coming.

For two years, there was no heat, no water, no gas. Tenants took turns at the fire hydrant across the street, looping plastic jugs over broom handles and carrying the load like coolies. Toilets were flushed sparingly. A bath was a luxury, the water heated on electric hot plates.

For warmth, people huddled around space heaters, heavy coats across their shoulders. Pipes sometimes burst. Sewage leaked into Apartment 3B, freezing on the floors. “We’d break it up with an ice pick, and then set down newspaper and sawdust,” said Robert Tubens, whose family left in January of 1990.

Who knew whom to trust anymore? The crack was sucking up the people as fast as the people were sucking up the crack. Violet Smiley’s girl, Amanda, was using it and shoplifting and selling herself to pay the way. Lula Nimmons’ daughter, Sandra, was dealing right out of her mother’s flat.

Apartments could be locked against intruders, but there was no peace from the shrill voices in the hall or the awful stink that sat in the air. Trash was tossed from windows; toilets rinsed straight down to the basement floor.

When the police entered the building, the dealers flushed the crack away, knowing it could be easily retrieved with a flashlight in that foul cellar.

The drugs were then wiped off and sold by those pitiable, melancholy pitchers, who barely eyed their approaching customers before asking:

How much you want?

Like so many buildings in the Bronx, 850 breathed the sigh of some lost heyday. Its red-brown brick facade was graced with rounded terraces, decorative ironwork and windows framed in stone. It had once been comely.

Seventy years ago, it even had a formal name, the Manhanset. It had gone up amid a frenzy of development, a few miles across the river from the colossus of Manhattan. Many of its tenants were immigrants then, skilled in tailoring, each day jamming the trains for the trip to the garment district.

After World War II, the South Bronx roiled with change and so did the building. The names on mailboxes now belonged to working-class blacks and Puerto Ricans. There was still a wonderful buzz and vitality to the neighborhood, but at its edges was the frayed hem of an expanding ghetto.

By the 1970s, currents had formed an undertow. Aging buildings had become decrepit. Operating costs soared while city laws froze the rents. Landlords simply gave up, or paid arsonists to light the way to insurance claims.

Much of the South Bronx would soon turn into a ghastly necropolis, with a place such as 850 Longwood Ave. notable for the very fact of its survival.

It had withstood--or at least it had until crack discovered the handiness of its corner location.

Carlton Collier knew the building from the outside only. He passed it on his way to the Prospect Avenue elevated station. Once, he had heard a gunshot coming from 850, and it seemed as if the bullet ricocheted onto the platform. After that, he always waited for his train indoors by the token booths.

Collier worked just a few blocks from it at Banana Kelly, a community group that took its odd name from the gentle curve of Kelly Street. His gift was affability. He had been a labor organizer for six years, then tired of it and ended up riding a garbage truck and driving a gypsy cab.

He was still new to Banana Kelly in 1990. They used him to organize tenants. He would find a building’s best people, then bring them together to work for their rights in getting things fixed. The main thing was to reclaim the entire neighborhood, but the tactic was to do it a building at a time.

Collier’s job paid $18,000 a year and ate up shoe leather fast. He knocked on doors uninvited, leaving behind banana-peel colored business cards with that slogan: Don’t move, improve!

The local drug dealers would stare him up and down as if to say: Who the hell are you? And that always brought another slogan to mind, the one from the old deodorant commercials: Don’t ever let them see you sweat.

Collier relied on street smarts. He had grown up in the projects of Brooklyn. In his late 30s, he still had the trim of a playground hoops player. He fit in OK in rough places, enough to be asked: How much you want?

Street smarts told him there were some buildings better to avoid. He had never poked his head into 850 and he wasn’t too happy to hear of it from Mamita and the other two Puerto Rican women who had come to Banana Kelly.

“No heat, no water, two years,” they said in a smattering of English. One made a sandwich of her head in her hands. “The drugs, the drugs.”

Collier suggested that all the tenants meet with him one evening. Isabel Valentin volunteered her apartment on the sixth floor. Fine, great, he said.

But then he let himself get to thinking: What would that be like, climbing six flights of stairs through the druggies at night?

He said to the women: “Someone has to meet me outside. I don’t want to go up alone.”

About a dozen tenants showed up, and it was hard to keep track of names. People kept going in and out. Others stood by the front doorway. A few were tipsy. To them, the man from Banana Kelly was entertainment.

Collier made the mistake of starting a sentence with “you people,” and that set off Evelyn Thornwell like a cherry bomb. “You people!” she shouted. “I hate it when someone says you people , like we’re nothin.’ ”

They had heard a lot of promises before, from landlords, lawyers, city officials, one smart-mouthed weasel after another. A few years without running water had parched the final drops of trust right out of them.

Still, most people came back for a second get-together. Collier brought along an idea his boss had thought up. Banana Kelly would get the money to buy 850 and spend $2 million to rehab the 36 apartments and seven storefronts.

It had done similar projects before, putting together the financing with low-interest city loans and a variety of grants. The nonprofit group had a good track record for renovations and building management. If fixed up and run right, the building would be able to pay for itself off the rent roll.

What Collier wanted from the tenants was merely their support. He needed to show the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development that 850’s residents were committed to the building. OK, sure, people answered.

They did not really believe anything would come of it, but what was there to lose? Maybe this guy could get the boiler fixed before the winter.

Afterward, people came up to whisper tales about the druggies and the dealers. By then, Collier had seen much of what was going on in the halls.

It pained him. That was his way, to let the sadnesses of the world get to him, then to look for a way to confront them. He was a pessimist about government but an optimist about redemption.

If Banana Kelly did buy the building, the plan was for him to oversee the rehab. It would be his first big project. A real opportunity. And he told the tenants to get used to his style, which was head on, no b.s.

To begin with, he warned: “The city isn’t going to spend $2 million on a crackhouse, so if we do something about the apartments and the hallways, we’ve got to do something about that too.”

And everyone shook their head, yeah, yeah, no crackhouse, including the people watching from the hall, the dealers looking to see what was going on.

Pablito, 27, used an assortment of last names: Roman, Rodriguez, Batalla. He publicly denied being a drug dealer, though these renunciations of the trade seemed implausible to police and other observers.

To them, he was the “owner” of some cozy turf, no more than a few blocks really, his so long as he kept anyone else out. It helped that he had guns and guts and an untamed, fearless look to his eyes.

There was an earthiness about him as well. He did not spend his money on snazzy clothes, classy women or even a good dentist. He spread it among his “managers,” those acolytes and jesters following him up the street. His occupation came with headaches. He was a small businessman in a bad neighborhood. Customers begged for credit, then stiffed him. His sales force was unreliable, out for themselves, lying each time they moved their lips.

The pitchers “tapped” the crack vials, shaving off little pieces for themselves. The turnover rate was terrible. These were itinerant people, easily arrested, always at some cliff’s edge.

Pablito needed a solid right-hand man at 850 and he found one in Joselito Blanco, a friend of his from the Dominican Republic. Joselito was two years younger and a head shorter, but he had the same wild eyes and likable manner.

“I look out for Pablito’s stuff,” Blanco admitted proudly. Under his shirt was a sculpted upper body. His arms were firm as heavy cable, a Playboy bunny tattooed on one bicep, his mother’s name in a heart on the other.

Neither man smoked crack. “Do that, you go straight down,” Joselito said. He preferred a marijuana high, the company of perfumed women, loud merengue music. He had use of an Uzi and shotgun and enjoyed firing them into the air.

His job was to keep the lid on. The police knew 850 was a drug spot, but there was no use calling extra attention to it. Joselito did not want those crackheads loitering around too long. “Cop and go,” he told them.

To the tenants, Joselito and Pablito were much like local constables. Never mind that they sold drugs. Crack is a fact of life among the urban poor, and many of them act as if they were the conquered in occupied territory.

Isabel Valentin invited Pablito to play dominoes at her place. Violet Smiley asked him to keep her apartment safe while she was at work. When someone did break in, she told him and not the police.

The tenants depended on Joselito as well. When the hall got too foul, he tossed a few vials to the dopers and ordered them to mop it up.

Carlton Collier had an opportunity with 850. He could revive something.

Three kinds of tenants were living there, he concluded: drug dealers, drug users and people with so little self-confidence they adjusted to any type of corrosion, inside themselves or out.

“How do people live without heat or water?” Carlton asked. “I don’t understand it. There are other places for them to go, but they’d have to get off their asses and look. Some people can’t do that. Life has screwed them over too many times. They’re paralyzed.”

If there was an exception to his three categories, it was Mamita. She had been on the block 42 years, 24 of them at 850. She was the building’s matriarch, affixed to it by a sheer adhesion of will.

Butch the mailman no longer made regular deliveries to the building, but he always brought Mamita her Social Security check. Mike Amadeo, owner of the record shop around the corner, prayed whenever he heard an ambulance wail: “I just hope it’s not Mamita.”

A happy life had signed its name to her face. The 85-year-old woman lived with her daughter, granddaughter and two great-grandchildren. Her husband, Pedro, was there, too, but age had addled his mind. He shuffled along in his slippers, wandering room to room.

When the fires first began, Mamita slept in her clothes, ready to move for the door. Once, coming home from the grocery, she saw the pumper trucks pull up. Flames crackled and hissed. She followed the firefighters right up a ladder.

After all, the building was like a part of her, the canopy that protected her memories. Her mother had died at 850. Grandchildren had been born there. Inside every room were important stops on the long route of her history.

Back in 1968, Mamita had paid $500 to get a choice unit from the landlord, Morris Oresky. All the vitality of the street corner was there to watch from a living room chair. A short walk away was the Woolworth, Ralphie’s candy shop, schools.

When Morris Oresky died, his brother Benjamin took over. He and 850 grew old together. He became a cranky man, hard of hearing, with a bad heart. Toward the end he visited the building every day, and it brought him only nervousness. He wore a gun in a shoulder holster.

Oresky sold out in 1985. The building then passed from owner to owner, not visible people but such-and-such incorporated. Who was there to complain to?

Mamita and the other ladies would demand repairs at the Bronx housing court. “I went often enough to move my pillow there,” she said.

But nothing came of it. They were poor people, not lucky and not strong. Her apartment was to become her hideaway, shut off with a double lock.

She likes to say that the secret of a long life is carefree dancing, a little beer and a lot of rice and beans. But that is not all.

The secret is also knowing when to stay behind the door.

Slowly, Carlton Collier began to sort out the players. The links among them were complicated. The drug trade was like the hub of a wheel, and most every tenant fit into it with a spoke and was part of the spin.

In this neighborhood, things were not so simple as drug and non-drug, good and evil. Everyone knew someone who smoked crack; most families loved someone who did it.

Rosie Rodriguez was a drug addict. Rachel Santiago had a dealer for a sister. Isabel Valentin’s boyfriend, Shorty, picked up a few bucks doing favors for Pablito.

Violet Smiley seemed a hard-working woman, but her 20-year-old daughter, Amanda Johnson, was a heavy user and already the mother of a crack baby. Her life was a foraging for cocaine.

Amanda sat in the halls, afraid to miss something. Occasionally, there were free samples from a new batch. More often, there were men who’d share their purchases for a go at her body. “When you really want a hit, you’ll be offering yourself,” she said.

Amanda shoplifted with Sandra Nimmons on 3rd Avenue. They would boost Folger’s, Mazola, Wisk, Baby Wipes, items people always needed.

Sandra, 30, was pixie short, foul-mouthed and conniving. She was guilty of all the pitcher sins: tapping the vials and jetting with the cash. Joselito hated her and took it out on her defiant face.

But Sandra had her value to him. She dealt on the second floor by day, working a 12-hour shift. She was a familiar face, asking: How much you want?

Sandra’s mom was so damned sick of it, people beating on the door with cash in their hand, her own daughters always high. Lula Nimmons, 63, complained, “Sandra can’t even find the time to get some welfare for her three kids.”

Lula wanted to throw her daughters out. They would scream at each other all the time. “She knew what we were doing out in the hall,” Sandra said. “So I’d have to let her see some of the money, you know, just to shut her up.”

Collier was having better luck with winning over the people than buying the property. The building’s corporate owner--caught in the real estate bust--was behind in its payments, its taxes, its bills to the city for emergency repairs. The mortgage holder, the Bank of Tokyo, was foreclosing.

Let us buy the building, Banana Kelly asked the bank. But the deal was on hold, not a pressing concern. The bank dawdled.

Collier’s boss was Getz Obstfeld, a longtime activist with the sincere face of a folk singer. He was experienced at tunneling through bureaucracies. Why not have the tenants pay a surprise visit to the bank, he suggested.

Collier had to pony up some of the fares for the subway ride to Rockefeller Center. A scruffy group in T-shirts and sneakers, they gawked at the handsome fountain at the entrance to the bank’s offices in the Time-Life Building.

The receptionist sat near a big sign with the latest prices of the yen. The tenants asked to see bank officer Larry Kneip, and that set several underlings to scramble: That’s right, these people say they’re here to see Mr. Kneip.

After a few minutes, they were led up a spiral staircase into a conference room. Mamita and Isabel noticed the fine grain of the table. They sank right into the comfortable chairs. The air tasted as if it had been sterilized.

Carlton had coached them. They were supposed to ask blunt, even angry questions: What happens if we get sick? Doesn’t the bank have some liability?

But they were too awe-struck to do that. Instead they whined about not having water to wash their clothes, always talking with hesitancy and respect. They didn’t push for answers or commitments. It was all over in 15 minutes.

Back home, the mission seemed a failure, though Obstfeld thought maybe not. Remember how quickly they were herded out of sight, he said. Possibly, their power was their own raggedy presence, a big annoyance at a stuffy bank.

A few days later, in fact, Kneip got back in touch, ready to move on the deal. This would cause some chortling at Banana Kelly. The tenants had not come off as so meek to the banker; he was amazed they knew where to find him.

“God, they’re tough,” he had said on the phone.

In late 1990, the city housing department pushed through the loan at an interest rate of only 1%. Collier had made a friend among the brass, assistant commissioner Barbara Leeds. She had actually come out to visit 850.

City records showed that in the three previous years the building had been cited for an astonishing 174 Class C violations, the type considered life-threatening. Now, suddenly, there was a rush on to get things fixed. An order was given: Heat and water had to be restored before Christmas!

That began days of disgusting labor. In the basement, the human waste had collected ankle-high. Norman Anderson, a Jamaican, was among those who scooped it out. “I had no idea people in America could live like this,” he said.

So after all those months, the building long disemboweled, there was now an urgent deadline--and urgency prevailed. This made Collier seem a savior.

Each apartment was fit with a single line of operating pipe, enough for one faucet. Water pulsed into kitchen sinks. Steam sang from radiators.

Collier milked his success. He knocked on each door. “Can I have some water, please?” he asked. Then he came in to dwell on the moment.

To protect the new plumbing, Collier appealed to the most effective of caretakers. Pablito and Joselito agreed to keep the addicts from stealing the pipes. The two drug boys were enjoying the comfort of repaired utilities.

Collier had gotten off to a good start with them. He explained that he only wanted to improve the building. And what could be wrong with that?

Joselito slept there with a girlfriend, except those nights he went home to his common-law wife. Sometimes Pablito stayed over too.

Their main base of operations was Apartment 2B, though they also made use of 2C, 3B, 3F, 5E, 6B and 6D. Collier convinced Pablito that he would need the 2B unit to house a building superintendent. The Dominican amiably moved to 2D.

In fact, one day the drug dealers began hauling in lumber. They had their own ideas for renovations. “We fix up ourselves,” was what Joselito said.

Almost certainly, this was only a brittle peace. Collier intended to empty 850 of everyone without a legitimate source of income. Drug-dealing would not qualify. Quite likely, there were ugly times to come.

Who would be there to save his neck, if and when? With drugs, everything was unpredictable. How would he know when he had stepped over some indecipherable line, jarred some demon awake, cost someone too much money?

Collier was a danger to Pablito for what he knew--and a danger to himself for what he did not. He needed to have an ally inside the building. And he had a brainstorm: The super’s job was his to hand out. He could hire a friend.

Back in Brooklyn, a young Carlton Collier had become pals with a slightly older and very cerebral boy. Mike was a talker and a dreamer. He lectured Carlton about girls. He taught him how to drive. They read each other’s poetry.

Mike was handy with tools. But better yet, he had a robust personality to match his large frame. He would be possessive about 850, a live-in Carlton.

As soon as Collier pitched the idea, Mike--being Mike--began to concoct grandiose plans. He would take over one of the storefronts when the building was finished, open a rec center for kids, maybe even start a theater company.

This was the chance of a lifetime, Mike said, though there was one hitch. He already had a good-paying job, which he wouldn’t give up. They’d need someone else at the building to haul the garbage and sweep the stairwell.

For those chores, Carlton had a second friend named Dennis, who was homeless. A third pal, Jay, signed on too. In his wilder days, Jay had done every drug out there, known the hustles, even ripped off a few dealers.

Together, the three men (only their first names have been used here in exchange for candor) made a formidable team. Carlton was excited about how it was working out. He had helped himself by helping his friends.

Some days, he even lapsed into this fantasy: He and his crew would move from building to building, oversee rehabs, take on the dealers.

There would always be a need for caution, of course. He warned the others: “Remember, you’re not the police. Secure the building, but that’s all.”

Even then, it was something to see. At times, crackheads would come in, expecting the incessant mumble of the usual welcome: How much you want?

Instead, they were greeted with the stop sign of a vertical hand.

They were told, “Nothin’ happenin’ here.”

To Collier, victory in the nation’s war on drugs seemed a lot like the horizon, always out there but impossible to get to. Only small battles were winnable. His three friends advised him to proceed slowly at 850 to cut the risks of retaliation. They would handle things, they promised.

Jay had seen Joselito pistol-whip a crackhead on the stairs. “He’s a killer,” Jay decided. “Look at his eyes and you can tell he’s not totally there. The lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

Mike observed it too. He had met Joselito on the stairs. “Check this out, I’m the super,” he said. “We can work together or everyone can go their own way. If everybody goes for themselves, that’s bad for business.”

“What you want?” Joselito said evenly.

“No smoking in the hallway.”

They cut a deal. Joselito would keep the druggies off the first two floors. In return, Mike opened up three more empty apartments upstairs. The crackheads could smoke their heads off right there--or go up to the roof.

Collier knew nothing of the arrangement. In fact, much of what went on last summer escaped his attention. He was in the building only off and on--and then only during daylight. His job had other duties to worry about.

He did not see the young girls sashaying into the super’s apartment or witness the weekends that were lit with laughter and sex and intemperance. Mamita and the others saw, but they did not tell.

This was for Carlton to find out for himself. And he did, though months later, as construction began. Something powerful had settled into the faces of his three friends.

The crack, always burrowing, was now within them.