Which side are you on?

It’s about 3:30 p.m. and the Amtrak train from Chicago is hurtling into the city, its horn blaring out all the other noise as I stand near Rose Street. A few haggard looking men rush across the tracks and head toward the homeless drop-in shelter, down a rocky makeshift path strewn with thousands of cigarette butts, broken pints of cheap liquor and discarded shitty diapers.
The train tracks cut the city in two here. Starting at Westnedge Avenue and heading east for more than a mile, there are two Kalamazoos: the downtown area to the south with its shops, bars, parks and people wearing sunglasses and walking around with briefcases and places to go and an area to the north seemingly abandoned.
It’s here, on “the other side of the tracks,” that an area very much unknown even to those who have called Kalamazoo home for decades languishes beneath the fear and ignorance of the rest of the city’s residents.
Welcome to The Northside.
It’s a word that describes more than just a neighborhood. It has become part of the lexicon of this city, a word that has become synonymous with drugs and violence, prostitution and poverty, laziness and ineptitude.
One of the largest of Kalamazoo’s neighborhoods, it’s a place where the dreams of the city go to die, it’s said, an area where well-intentioned programs passed by city leaders fizzle and fail in the face of a residential population that could care less.
But there burning questions that swirl around the Northside that no media outlet in the city would dare ask because of the big issues that would undoubtedly bubble to the top. Thorny issues like race, class, poverty and lack of economic opportunity.
Hell, most reporters won’t even dare walk the streets here. I know, because I’ve seen the anxiety-filled inaction. It’s too dangerous, they say. Better to make a phone call to the police or find a person to talk to close to a major road. No sense in heading into the guts of the place. Lord knows the only thing they might find of you is your tattered reporter’s notebook with “HELP ME!” hurriedly written on the first page.
But that is exactly what drew me to this place.
Take a few seconds. Think of that word: Northside. What comes to mind? Perhaps you are one of those who wish you could drive faster than the 30 mph speed limit on the two main roads that cut north and south through the neighborhood. When do you frequent the area? An afternoon beer in the Bell’s beer garden?