Calumet City and Hammond have more than the state line in common: The cities share the same prostitutes and drug dealers.
“This used to be a nice little Polish neighborhood,” said Renee Hartman on Tuesday morning as a moving truck pulled up in front of her home on 156th Street in Calumet City. “There are a lot of memories here, but what these prostitutes and drug dealers have done to the neighborhood is a real shame.”
Hartman lives just a stone’s throw from State Line Road, the dividing line between two cities and two states.
The street slices through only one neighborhood, though–a neighborhood where Calumet City residents can walk across the street and buy cheaper cigarettes in Indiana and Hammond residents can cross to buy liquor on Sunday in Illinois.
But crossing that street at any hour of the day means having to walk by the riffraff who have staked out street corners and alleys.
For the past decade each city addressed problems on its own side of the road. Calumet City established a tax increment financing district in the State Street and State Line Road area and demolished dozens of bars and strip joints that made up the bulk of its “sin strip.” Hammond moved forward with a revitalization of its once-thriving downtown area, which had become a mainstay for transients.
“For years, things have been done on each side of the street independently and without regard for the other side,” said Calumet City Police Chief George Vallis. The police do their best to combat drug deals and prostitution, he said, but they are often ineffective because officers are prohibited from crossing the state line to make misdemeanor arrests.
“It is certainly a frustrating thing for these officers to go through,” said Hammond Police Chief John Cory. “They can watch the crime as it’s about to happen, and then the drug dealer or the hooker sees the unmarked unit, crosses the street and basically says, `Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, you can’t catch me.’ “
But the two police departments are working on a plan to allow officers to work both sides of the street. If their state law enforcement boards approve, Hammond officers will be sworn in in Illinois and Calumet City officers will take the oath in Indiana.
“Trying to fight the problem as it exists in two different states isn’t working–this is really a neighborhood that just happens to be divided by a state line,” Vallis said.
Calumet City has installed cul-de-sacs at 155th Street and 155th Place, cutting off through traffic in an area that accounted for the department’s highest number of 911 calls, Vallis said.
“At two or three in the morning, you could come over here and see hundreds of cars just circling these two blocks,” he said.
Just last week the two police departments conducted a joint prostitution sting, and they are planning more, in addition to several reverse drug stings.
But for Hartman, those efforts came about 10 years too late.
“I don’t know how many times I have called the police,” Hartman said as she prepared to move out of the home her grandfather built in 1940.
All of her cousins started their families in the house’s basement apartment, but the family spent the last decade watching prostitution and drugs take over the streets, with people hiding drugs under porches and turning tricks in front yards.
“I think it’s kind of a lost cause right now,” Hartman said.
Vallis and Cory say it’s too fast to rush to judgment on their plans. With installation of the cul-de-sacs, a lot of the crime moved over to Hammond, where cars have better access to State Line Road. But if the departments are equally equipped to fight the problem from both sides of the street, the chiefs believe it will be possible to reclaim the neighborhood.
“There are people who have lived here for years, and as they are walking their kids to school in the morning they have to walk by these prostitutes strolling up and down the street,” Cory said. “And these johns are just like sharks circling for a fresh kill. Some of these screwballs have been known to pull up in front of a residence and try to solicit a woman working in the front yard. These families don’t need to live like this.”
Verna Wolak, who lives down the street from Hartman, said that things aren’t bad enough to keep her from enjoying a nice night on her front porch.
“This new thing might be helpful,” Wolak said, adding that she has kept the hookers and drug dealers away from her home simply by turning on her porch light.
“They like the dark,” she said.
