Beating nighttime boredom

It was nearing 1 a.m., and Ebony Bell, 16, and her best friend, Mary Boyd, 14, were hanging out on the stoop of 4 and 6 Lyndhurst Street, one of the apartment buildings in the area residents call the Hell Zone. The girls were people-watching, laughing as the dope fiends, drug dealers, and prostitutes paced their block. They said there is little else to do during the summer.

''Look at her! Look at her!" squealed Boyd, pointing to a woman in a blue tank top who was shaking noticeably as she rushed inside the brick apartment building next door. Bell said the woman is a known drug user.

''She's always around here," Bell said. The girls watched. And learned.

They are among the young people the Rev. Bruce H. Wall says he is trying to reach during his weeklong occupation of Lyndhurst Street, to help stamp out drug use and violence such as the fatal shooting July 4. Yesterday, Wall expanded his nighttime patrols to include sections of Blue Hill Avenue and the Ashmont MBTA station.

But the teenagers who hang out on the corner of Lyndhurst and Washington streets, alongside adults from all walks of life, are missing the message from Wall and all the others who try to tell them that standing on the street at night is not the way. They are too bored to listen.

The neighborhood is rich with resources to reach young people, and yet they can be found on the streets every night.

There is a Boys & Girls Club and a YMCA less than a mile away. A host of other groups that target youth are located within walking distance: a program called STAR, which tries to help teenagers become leaders; the CyberShop, which aims to help teenagers earn money and develop business skills; the Sports Plus program, which offers soccer and basketball; and the Dorchester House Multi-Service Center, which has a community pool and a gym.

Those programs all presuppose that if young people are busy by day, they will be at home in bed at night.

At least 30 churches operate within a 10-block radius of Lyndhurst Street, some with ministers and other leaders who say they want to help the community.

Greer Toney, a Lyndhurst Street resident who operates Chez Vous roller skating rink on Blue Hill Avenue, said the young people who hang out on the street lack the maturity to seek out the programs by themselves and do not have an adult to guide them.

''Most of the kids who are going to these programs are kids who have someone to take their hand and walk them there," Toney said. ''These kids here are young parents themselves, or they're on their own, or the adults in their lives have their own problems. They need someone to show them what's out there."

Persuading youth to abandon the street for summer programs has long been a challenge, several program directors said.

''For one thing, you are competing with the corner mall, the Xbox [video-game system], the TV, and their friends, " said Bob LaVallee, director of community programs for DotWell, a neighborhood group that offers clinical and community services and sponsors the CyberShop and sports programs for teenagers in Codman Square.

Another problem, he said, is finding youth workers with the teaching skills and the knack for getting teenagers into the programs.

Some programs, such as the Boys & Girls Club on Talbot Avenue, charge membership dues that the teenagers cannot always afford. They also fill up quickly.

''We're not that big of a building," said Hector Alvarez, director of operations at the Boys & Girls Club, which is raising money to expand.

Boyd, an eighth-grader at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, said police officers who catch her outside at night tell her she will end up like the characters she watches on the block. She said she has other plans. She wants to be famous like her idols, the late civil-rights lawyer Johnnie Cochran and Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

But Boyd and Bell, a junior at the English High School, say the Boys & Girls Club is too far away. Anyway, they say, their neighborhood is not as dangerous as people think.

''There's drugs going on, and fiends walking up and down all day, but they're not bothering us," Boyd said. ''Watching them, it's funny. Sometimes it's scary."