When Martin Rogers’s family members left their Manhattan tenement in the 1920s, they sought a new home with access to more green space and open air. They found it in the South Bronx, and at a 35-acre park known as St. Mary’s.
Mr. Rogers, 70, said he spent many childhood summers playing stickball at St. Mary’s and swimming in the pool in its recreation center from the early morning until the streetlights came on. It not only afforded him an escape from his family’s small, scorching apartment, but also kept him away from the drugs, riots, crime and poverty that choked the surrounding neighborhood.
St. Mary’s Park, the largest in the South Bronx, was for decades a refuge for many residents in one of New York City’s most impoverished areas.
But as the city’s homelessness and opioid crises worsened in recent years, it became something else: a place where people shoot up and nod off under stately oak trees, and where the grass and rocks are littered with needles and broken glass.
Residents see the transformation of St. Mary’s as emblematic of the persistent poverty, drug problems and neglect that plague the South Bronx. They worry that the state of the park helps perpetuate the damaging stigmas surrounding the area as it seeks to fend off gentrification.
The community has sought help from the city and state for years, but residents say they have yet to see solutions that work.
“What’s happening in St. Mary’s Park is a symptom of what’s happening in the broader South Bronx,” said Carmen Santiago, who lives nearby and advocates cleaning up the park. “The situation is just a perfect storm.”
Ms. Santiago, 61, an Army veteran and retired construction manager, walks the length of St. Mary’s picking up litter week after week. On a recent day, she entered at East 149th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue and headed up a grassy hill toward a rocky peak, dodging needles, shards of glass and human feces with each step.
Atop the hill, an empty blue pouch labeled “Overdose Rescue Kit” dangled from a tree, flapping in the wind. The ground beneath it was covered with naloxone containers, needle caps and trash.
“Seniors don’t come here anymore and walk around,” Ms. Santiago said. “My mom is 85, and she’s like, ‘I’m not going there.’”
In the back of Ms. Santiago’s mind was her nephew, whom she described as a middle-aged man who has struggled with substance abuse. Friends have spotted him using drugs in the park and a few blocks away at the Third Avenue Hub, a busy commercial corridor lined with stores and public transportation stops.
Each time she steps outside, Ms. Santiago said, she hopes she won’t find her nephew’s dead body.
Police officers at the 40th Precinct, which covers the Port Morris, Mott Haven and Melrose neighborhoods, have described the Hub as a central location where people buy drugs, score free syringes and steal from stores. If they overdose, they are just blocks away from a hospital.
In February, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city’s Community Link program, which creates local coalitions among community leaders, law enforcement and city agencies to address chronic quality-of-life problems, would begin work at the Hub. The program has also focused on six other neighborhoods since 2023.
Camille Joseph Varlack, the deputy mayor for administration, said the area’s “systemic challenges” made it a good candidate for the program. She said her office had held monthly meetings with local stakeholders to track the effort’s progress.
“I think the local feedback has been incredibly positive,” she said. “Our goal is to ultimately empower our community stakeholders so that when we do pull back the city resources, perhaps to go to another area that is similarly challenged, they’ve got points of connectivity we’ve created.”
The city’s parks department has said that cleaning up St. Mary’s Park is a priority.
In recent years, the department has spent about $50 million to improve the park’s amphitheater, recreation center, restrooms, dog run and playgrounds, according to Gregg McQueen, a spokesman. It collected more than 34,000 syringes in the park last year alone.
Those investments were warmly welcomed, but residents continue to witness the everyday hardships that have contributed to the park’s decline.
Data gathered by the city’s health department in 2023, the most recent year available, showed that neighborhoods in the South Bronx had the highest overdose rates in the city, as they did in 2021 and 2022. The agency found that 858 Bronx residents died of overdoses in 2023. Hunts Point and Mott Haven, near St. Mary’s, were particular hot spots.
South Bronx residents face “chronic health, economic and environmental challenges” and have shorter life expectancies than the city at large, according to an economic snapshot of the area produced by the state comptroller’s office in 2023.
Another report that year, published by the city comptroller’s office, found that those disparities pervaded the city’s infrastructure.
“Undesirable” facilities, such as homeless shelters and substance abuse treatment centers, were disproportionately concentrated in low-income communities of color, it said, while richer neighborhoods had more parks and plazas for recreation.
The report urged city officials to refrain from further flooding certain neighborhoods, including in the South Bronx, with shelters and treatment centers.
Such facilities are often viewed as a “drag on quality of life,” the comptroller’s office wrote, while parks are amenities that serve as “essential infrastructure for New Yorkers’ physical, mental and social health.”
While neighbors express concern that the park has become a magnet for homeless people and drug users, those who work with New Yorkers struggling with addiction and mental illness emphasize the need for compassion.
Joseph Ruffalo is a recovery peer worker with Samaritan Daytop Village, one of several nonprofits providing substance abuse treatment and other services to residents of the South Bronx.
“We see the good, the bad and the other,” he said. “They are just caught in the grips of addiction and mental health issues.”
Mr. Ruffalo, 61, is part of his organization’s harm-reduction outreach team. For him, the work is personal.
He is almost two years sober after a decades-long battle with addiction. A former Wall Street stockbroker, he said he used drugs to cope after being abused as a child. He found Samaritan Daytop after he was forced to check into a psychiatric ward.
He now spends most days in and around St. Mary’s with a small cart in tow, offering people sandwiches, overdose rescue kits and wound care. He encourages them to visit his group’s headquarters to eat a meal, shoot a round of pool or watch a movie.
Sam Rivera, the executive director of another harm reduction nonprofit, OnPoint NYC, said that people using drugs to cope with trauma often do not have anywhere to go. That is what leads them to quiet places like St. Mary’s.
“Within those trees you see the poverty, you see dirt, you see trash,” he said. “And that’s not because these are bad people. This is what our folks have been given.”
OnPoint sends cleanup crews into hot spots, including the park, to pick up needles and drug paraphernalia left behind. Workers also encourage people to visit overdose prevention centers where they can use drugs in private, under supervision.
Despite those efforts, many residents say they avoid St. Mary’s, fearful of stepping on scattered needles or otherwise being harmed.
Willie Estrada, 68, who has lived in the South Bronx for decades, has watched with frustration as the park fell into disrepair.
He often looks down at the park from his window, he said, yearning for the days when children spent all day running among its trees and sliding down its rocks.
Mr. Estrada, formerly a member of the Imperial Bachelors gang, said spending time at St. Mary’s in his youth helped steer him away from a life of street violence.
The recreation center offered a place to hang out and more productive activities, like dance parties and photography lessons, he said. Teenagers were not allowed to wear gang colors inside, and he eventually stopped wearing them altogether and left the gang. He went on to become a professional dancer and promoter.
But now, he said, the park has become so “disgusting” that he does not allow his grandchildren to play there.
The poor conditions have reinforced existing stereotypes about the South Bronx, according to Steven Payne, the director of the Bronx County Historical Society. He lamented that the perception of the area as dirty and dangerous has persisted despite the efforts of local leaders and organizations.
“When you spend more than two seconds in the neighborhood, there’s so many amazing groups, so many amazing individuals that do work to try and improve the daily lives of other people,” Mr. Payne said. “But all that gets lost.”
South Bronx lifers like Mr. Rogers and Ms. Santiago, who hold out hope that the park can be restored, said they were determined to keep pushing for solutions.
“We endure on behalf of our kids,” Mr. Rogers said, “and because people don’t have a choice.”
Shayla Colon is a reporter covering New York City and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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