Neighborhoods Celebrate National Night Out

Five years ago, a "drug house" set up shop in Pat Gibson's corner of Easton's South Side, the 300 block of Berwick Street.

"People were afraid to leave their houses," she said.

So Gibson threw a party, part of the  which aims to fight crime by having people out and engaged in their neighborhoods, meeting with police and getting to know each other.

Gibson invited everyone. Including the people in "the drug house." (They declined.)

These days, those residents are long gone, and people were dancing in the streets Tuesday night.

Literally.

Gibson turned up the sound system, "The Electric Slide" came on, and people started dance. Mostly women, but a few kids, an Easton firefighter, and City Councilman Ken Brown.

"We have good neighbors now. Good neighbors," she'd said earlier.

There were huge dishes of chicken and catfish and macaroni, plates of watermelon, dishes of ice cream and Italian ice. Kids played in streets normally busy with cars, explored fire trucks and tried on little plastic fire hats.

Across the city, on the 1000 block of Ferry Street, Judy Turlington was coming to the same conclusion. It's a good block, she said, filled with long-time residents who know each other. (She's a relative newbie after four years.)

In fact, one of the biggest problems was a house where no one was living. The home next door to the Turlingtons was apparently vacant for 25 years before it was bought and .

These days, it's in good shape, with a new owner. But before? It was in sorry shape.

"We kept fighting it and fighting it," she said. "The back didn't have a wall. You could see the bathroom."

Another neighbor, Tony Casella, told Turlington her house was haunted. She was skeptical. 

"I don't think I've got a ghost," she said.

"Maybe it moved with [the old owners]," he surmised, and recalled a piece of the evidence of the haunting he had seen: a phone that moved back and forth on a table by itself.

Turlington explained that by saying the table might have been on a slant.

"I prefer to think positively," she said, and went back to tend to some guests.