Where would Jesus live?

Mark  Holmberg

It was called “The Hole.”

It was one of the worst apartment complexes on Tillman Street, one of the toughest streets in central Memphis’ infamous and bipolar Binghamton/Binghampton neighborhood.

The only ones in the hellish apartment building who had security doors and electricity were the drug dealers.

“Used to be afraid going to the store,” says 73-year-old Joseph Pulliam as he and a lifelong friend wait for the sun to set on the Tillman Cove housing complex a half-block away from the Hole. William Evans, 68, agrees from his lawn chair, puffing luxuriantly on his cut-rate cigarette. “The only ones who had rights was the criminals.”

The two friends watched this part of Memphis go to hell when crack cocaine came to town in the ’80s. In the past couple of years, they’ve seen it slowly turn around as a new breed of missionary has moved in.

When Christian developer Robert Montague bought The Hole, it was so raw that he called in building inspectors and “volunteered for 150 building code violations.” Drawing that kind of attention was the only way he could chase out the drug dealers who had dug in like cockroaches, he recalls.

The dealers struck back by firebombing the place, damaging but not destroying it.

This 745-acre hunk of central Memphis saw its homeownership and home values plummet in the ’80s, as did so many of the country’s inner cities.

Which is why, in more recent years, waves of refugees from Africa and Asia have settled here.

Inner-city decline
As property values declined, there have been the usual inner-city infestations of crime.

More than a few of its residents were swept up in a citywide spring cleaning by undercover drug and organized crime officers. Among the 85 offenders were 41 prostitutes. The youngest was 14.

One of those marked for arrest, Terrelle Beasley, sold drugs to undercover officers four times in one week, according to police.

But shortly before the wave of arrests, Beasley was shot to death.

Memphis police Lt. Joe Griffin pulls up where Beasley breathed his last, pointing out the teddy bear-covered utility pole that has come to say “sorry, murder scene” in Memphis.

A body hits the street, Griffin says, “and out come the teddy bears.”

It’s a jarring dichotomy, symbolic of the love and blood in this largely African-American district.

It also symbolizes a key lesson learned by those who are trying to save the neighborhood by living in it: “The guys on the street will hustle you in a minute,” Griffin says, “if they think you’re soft.”

Most of the mission-minded Christians who have moved into Binghamton are anything but soft.

Twin communities
A railway divides the area. Residents are quite particular about the two identities on either side of the tracks. Binghamton (bing-um-ton) to the west is not as hardscrabble — not quite as intense. Binghampton (bing-HAMP-ton), to the east, is the ’hood — the wrong side of the tracks.

But for those in Memphis’ more upscale neighborhoods, there is no right side of the tracks here.

It was, and is, a war-torn mission field, a testing place where people stay lean by “getting stretched,” as one of the main players in this area’s transformation calls it.

Binghampton is gaining fame for its effective homegrown array of ministries that have unofficially adopted the can-do maxim of President Harry Truman: It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t care who gets the credit.

The rat-infested Hole has become the glistening Hope Community Apartments for seniors.

Tillman has had a face-lift. House by house, block by block, the neighborhood is being born again, says Memphis’ deputy chief of police, Edwin E. Henderson.

The amazing thing for him: “They’ve never asked for a dime.”

So many faith-filled doctors, nurses and teachers have moved into the ’hood, the Memphis newspaper’s story about the “re-neighboring” trend posed the question: “Where would Jesus live?”

Where would Jesus live?
“It’s the kind of community Jesus picked His disciples from — and changed the entire globe,” says Roy “Soup” Campbell, a talkative yet rugged former pro baseball player who leads Eikon, a down-in-the-trenches youth leadership training ministry.

He calls his palatial home “Taj MaHood” — a converted, four-unit apartment building a block from “The Hole.”