Creepy street

As she rounds the corner toward her apartment, she will fortify her muscles. She'll pump her legs, walking double-time. She'll crane her neck and swivel it, like a submarine periscope. She'll get hit by the aroma of urine-stained sidewalks or brown-bag booze or the exhaust stream from a row of burning crack pipes.

As she approaches her front door, she'll zigzag around the small knot of street people camped out on her stoop. She'll grip the Panasonic cellphone around her neck, the one programmed to speed-dial her younger sister, who knows English and can call the cops in an emergency.

After she squeezes into the foyer of her building, she will stop and relax her body. She will exhale, releasing the fear that walked beside her for less than 200 feet of her street. ''I made it safely," the 36-year-old mother will say to herself, after a typical journey coming home from work, selling furniture, two blocks away. ''I'm happy they didn't rob or stab me."

Home for Candy Wang is Edinboro Street, a small lane a few steps north of the grand front entrance to Chinatown at the Pagoda gate.

Just a few years ago, Edinboro was a chirpy byway of downtown theater revelers yearning to cap a night out with Chinese fare.

But on this single one-way block where two Chinese restaurants have closed over the past couple of years, retail business people say the fallout from Big Dig construction during that time -- including the erection of concrete-and-wooden barrier walls and the reconfiguration of traffic away from the highway -- has meant fewer customers and more scroungers, who in turn have turned off potential patrons.

Now, Edinboro has become a creepy little 24/7 destination of sketchy characters desperate to satisfy their drug cravings.

But a metamorphosis may be on the way. Just south of Edinboro, urban planners of the Rose Kennedy Greenway want to convert nearly an acre of land -- recovered during the Central Artery's rerouting underground -- into a lush park with bamboo screens, weathered stone, and a whirring waterfall, a project that could break ground as early as this spring, according to Mass Turnpike officials.

Meanwhile, farther south past Kneeland Street, blueprints for a new southern gateway to downtown are already taking shape. One proposal unveiled this month includes residential and commercial space, a supermarket, and a library.

In that arena, the tracts on Edinboro are valuable assets. But as it sits poised for prosperity, Edinboro has fallen into the neverland of neglect.

People on Edinboro fear --more than an onslaught of headline-grabbing crimes -- the ever-present unknown that accompanies the shadowy players in their midst.

''A lot of people scared," said Hoa, who declined to give his last name as he told the story of one of his Edinboro Street grocery shoppers who was recently robbed outside the store.

In addition, residents believe some landowners have let their properties atrophy from noninvestment as they await a potential windfall from the area's redevelopment.

King So, a 42-year-old restaurant worker, said he does not want to leave Chinatown even as he fights to stop his Edinboro apartment bathtub from spouting a neighbor's smelly waste water. He lives alone and says the neighborhood is convenient for buying Chinese CDs and products like fish and black beans.

Through an interpreter, So says ''I gather my guts" upon returning from work to his $550-a-month Edinboro flat. And though he wants the street cleaned up, he worries that his bank account will be cleaned out by rent spikes when the area is beautified.

''People are talking about rebuilding Chinatown, but not sure what that means," he says in English. ''Chinese people want to stay. People can stay, can afford. In the future, not sure."

The Chinese Progressive Association, a neighborhood group, is working with residents to organize against displacement.

Susan Elsbree, a spokeswoman for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, says the city overall has seen 7,900 units of new housing come on line during the past three years and wants to put 10,000 more in play over the next four, including thousands deemed affordable.

''Gentrification is always a concern of the BRA," she says. ''One of the best defenses against gentrification is creating more housing."

As it awaits its fate, Edinboro now wears a forlorn look -- one that is scarred by edgy-resident worry lines , scabrous junkie skin, and stupefied crack-induced glares.

Like the one that has just overcome the weathered face of 47-year-old ''Pops." Sitting in an Edinboro nook a week ago Thursday night, Pops's eyes glaze over in ecstasy as he takes a long drag on a makeshift crack pipe.

His instrument is built from pieces of a $1.25 copper pot-and-pan scrubbing pad, used as a screen to hold his crack, and stuffed inside a four-inch-long glass tube that sells for $1.25 in the Combat Zone as a knickknack -- with a removable fake rosebud inside -- under the euphemism ''rose in glass."

The tiny vessel is de rigueur for the crackheads of Edinboro Street, replacing the old liquor nips that were transformed into smoking apparatus.

''We call this crack street," says a dealer named Gladys ''Shorty" Delgado as she stands on Edinboro that Thursday night, around 9 p.m., sold out of crack packets and instead pushing $20 and $40 bags of heroin she calls diesel from the pocket of her baggy jeans.

On any given night, Delgado says, there are about 60 drug users and sellers weaving in and out of Edinboro.

''It's a good area to hang out in," says the homeless 43-year-old mother of seven. ''It's in the back. It's at the end."

Delgado says she set up Edinboro as her base to sell freebased crack cocaine and heroin two years ago after police rousted her from Boston Common.

Delgado says she can make $500 a night from clientele coming to Edinboro from as far away as Gloucester. She buys Chinese food or McDonald's or sends the cocaine or heroin back into her body.

''We smoke all day," says Delgado, who adds that she's been up seven days straight, roaming the streets around Edinboro and doing crack.

On Edinboro, she says, the Big Dig's mini Great Wall of barriers provides a partial shield from police and she can also keep track of them, and can scoot away, by hiding in the street's cavities.

''Everybody meets here," she says, the arms of her oversized fleece jacket flapping as she talks about Edinboro.

Not that the police haven't tried to flush them out. This year, from January through the first week of December, police responded to 166 calls on Edinboro, for everything from public drinking and assault and battery, to possible possession of cocaine, to traffic tie-ups and minor disturbances. That's more than double the 73 calls from all of last year.

Boston Police Captain Bernard O'Rourke, who commands the A-1 district that includes Chinatown, says Edinboro's geography makes it a challenge to root out perpetrators.

''It's isolated," he says. ''It's tough for us."

In the last several years, police and residents say, Edinboro has become a catch basin for dealers who've fled the drug turf wars of other Boston neighborhoods, and find the open-air souk-like atmosphere of Chinatown an easy place in which to lose themselves.

In the mix, according to police and Delgado, some dealers have recruited a small percentage of homeless from the area's five shelters into running or stashing drugs for them, in exchange for $5 or $10 or a bag of product.

Other street people are drawn to the area by the nearby liquor store that opens at 8:30 in the morning, or by the vent that warms them with hot air at the foot of Edinboro.

Meanwhile, residents lament the closing of the Dynasty Restaurant, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2002, records show.

Resident King So and others felt the illuminated bustle around the eatery acted as a buffer against those seeking a dark-corner hustle. Last month, in a space where city pols once dined on dim sum, city inspectors found evidence that squatters had crawled into the empty restaurant, and left behind urine and feces in tin cans.

The city had the Dynasty boarded up.

Still, violent crime in Chinatown overall declined 5 percent from January through mid-December of this year over last, while drug arrests rose 11 percent. And O'Rourke says he's been able to avoid major incidents on Edinboro by targeting the area with a combination of forces: patrol cars, bicycle cops, undercover officers, and, lately, motorcycle and K-9 crews. And he hopes to install in the Edinboro area one of the surveillance cameras that will soon become part of a pilot program in Chinatown.

O'Rourke believes it will be easier to patrol the area when the wooden barriers come down, perhaps as early as this spring, and the garden goes up. Meanwhile, he urges the people of Edinboro to continue to call police at the first sign of trouble, or hail down a cop in the neighborhood.

''It isn't too often you can go into Chinatown," he says, ''and not find an officer nearby."

With one eye on the lookout for cops, and the other for customers, Delgado and a friend relax with an order of fried rice and chicken wings on the steps of an Edinboro apartment building as if they've just ordered espresso and biscotti at a Newbury Street cafe.

Delgado says she hasn't eaten in three days.

Leaving her food behind, she bolts upright to chase down a customer. Her place is taken by a trickle of crackheads who move on and off the front stoop as if it were a quickie mart.

A man in a blue jacket and white sleeves begins to smoke, using an antenna as a pipe. A guy in a jean jacket stops by to fire up his copper and glass tube device, known on the street as a straight-shooter. A tall man in a black ski jacket pulls a straight shooter from his white sock, and puffs away.

Between 9 and 10:30 p.m., three residents of the building arrive at the front door. They all look annoyed, but say ''excuse me" and gingerly step around the strangers. One woman glances over her shoulder as she shuts the door behind her. She wears a worried look, but stays silent.

Candy Wang knows the feeling. ''I'm afraid to say anything," she says of the stoop-sitters.

Speaking in Cantonese through a translator, Wang says she tends to stay inside, as she sits in an Edinboro living room decorated with posters of American beauty products. When her 10-year-old son wants to play after school, he goes to a friend's house. She walks him home, and travels without a purse that could be snatched. She wants to buy her son lessons in martial arts so he can defend himself. She wants to leave her $526 one-bedroom apartment, but says she can't find another place in Chinatown.

''I'm stuck here," says Wang, showing a weak smile.