There is one at Bainbridge Avenue and East 194th Street in the Bronx, and another down the block, and another around the corner: large wooden crosses, painted red, nailed above the sidewalk onto the poles that hold up the power lines. They are about eight feet high and three feet wide, and each one has the same message in English or Spanish. The stenciled words intersect so that they can be read two ways, not so much as a blessing, but as a warning:
DRUGS CRUCIFY.
CRUCIFY DRUGS.
Some Bronx residents ignore the drug dealers at street corners. Others call the police on them or hold community meetings about them. Only in Bedford Park did people publicly invoke God and raise crosses against them.
Con Edison maintains 204,182 utility poles in New York City and Westchester County for its overhead electrical wires. These poles often become free bulletin boards for concert posters, get-rich-quick ads and missing-pet fliers. New signs go up, and old ones come down. Yet in this gritty, hilly neighborhood north of Fordham Road, some of the crosses have managed to survive for two decades.
Parishioners from the Our Lady of Refuge Roman Catholic Church nailed the crosses to the wooden poles on Good Friday, 1986. They put up 14 in a procession inspired by the Stations of the Cross, a solemn tradition that observes the 14 scenes leading up to and following the crucifixion of Jesus. Many of the crosses have been taken down over the years, although no one is quite sure why or by whom. But a handful remain, tattered and weather-beaten miracles of 194th Street.
''There's no graffiti at all on them,'' said Msgr. John J. Jenik, the pastor of Our Lady of Refuge who led the march 20 years ago. ''I guess you can say in a sense they are treated not with respect, but maybe a mixture of awe and superstition.''
Drugs and violence have certainly not been banished from many neighborhoods in the Bronx and throughout the city. But the crosses of Bedford Park stand out as a kind of relic of that other New York, the New York of the 1980's, when crack ravaged whole neighborhoods. In 1986, the year the crosses went up, there were 408 murders in the Bronx, many of them drug-related. In 2005, the number was 129.
Residents said drug dealers can still be found in Bedford Park. The crosses, they said, have been up for too long to scare today's criminals away. But many feel if they have survived for this long, then there is no harm in keeping them up. ''It's more bitter than sweet that they're still needed,'' said John Reilly, the executive director of the nonprofit Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation. Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department's chief spokesman, said that the police in the 52nd Precinct have made more than 1,100 narcotics arrests so far this year and that overall crime has decreased 67 percent in the last 13 years in the area.
The cross at Bainbridge Avenue and East 194th Street looks out over a narrow, bustling intersection. All day and all night, men and women walk by the cross, barely noticing it. People pause beneath it occasionally, not to pray, but to put out their cigarettes on the pole.
Father Jenik went to see the cross one recent morning, pausing along the way to point out a bullet hole in one store's metal gate. On Briggs Avenue he stood on the spot where a 20-year-old man was shot and killed two years ago. Father Jenik had wanted to make a dramatic, visual statement to the dealers that day in 1986, and so he chose one of the most powerful images of Christianity.
''It's a positive and a negative,'' he said of the symbolism of the cross. ''It's redemptive, but it's also about suffering and death. But in this case, there's nothing redemptive about the suffering caused by drugs.''
Father Jenik walked to another cross down 194th Street. This one read: LAS DROGAS CRUCIFICAN. A woman in front of a liquor store saw him standing beneath the old cross. She called out to him. ''Hi, Father,'' she said.
''Say a prayer for me.''