"There are just not enough phones on the street," said a resident of Blake Avenue who identified herself as C. Hardy.

South across Blake Avenue is another six-story Brownsville building.

"It bothered me," Mr. Watt said yesterday at another site on Blake Avenue that had not been used as a garden.

As they did so outside 150 Blake Avenue, he ran around a corner onto Union Street.

"Rookies," said Sandra Carter, 60, as she sat on a bench outside 372 Blake Avenue.

It is sometimes considered to go as far north as Blake Avenue.

They forced her a short distance to a building that is being renovated at Blake Avenue and Pine Street.

The abandoned blocks along one main street, Blake Avenue, were lined with fields of scrub grass and saplings.

Not only the ravages of street crime and drug abuse turned Blake Avenue from a vital enclave of the working poor into a miserable ghetto.

The game continued in and around an abandoned car, stripped of its wheels and left sitting in the blazing sun on Blake Avenue.