Walking the walk
Most feel new walkway still a haven for drunks

Richard Bitsie takes a nap in the downtown walkway on Wednesday. Bitsie, who admitted to drinking that afternoon, was later taken to Na'nihzhoozhi Center Inc. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Phil Stake
Staff writer

GALLUP — It’s new, and it’s at the center of downtown Gallup, but many residents would just as soon avoid it.The Downtown Walkway, a pedestrian park that parallels Second Street between Aztec and Coal avenues, reopened May 8 following eight months of renovation. Between the opening and June 29, police responded to the walkway 29 times, according to records provided by McKinley County Metropolitan Dispatch. More than half those calls, 16, were for drunken people. The rest were fights, four, injuries, seven, and “disorderly” subjects. To business owners downtown — and even to the transients who frequent the walkway — not much has changed. It’s still a haven for drunken people.

“It’s not all fine and dandy being out here,” Christina Ray, who frequently “chills” inside the walkway, said Friday. “I come here to read the Journey and do my Sudokus,” she said.

“My honest opinion is that it’s just a gathering place for drunks, again,” Kristina Kerley, owner of Kristina’s Antique Touch at 204 W. Coal Ave., said Friday afternoon. Kerley said she opened her downtown business in 1992, that she’s been there 17 years.

Friday morning at 10:30 Leonard Martinez illustrated Kerley’s point. His eyes were red as rubies and his speech was incomprehensible. He was arguing with a man in a red cap. The argument was hard to decipher, filled entirely with sentence fragments, which were hurled rather than spoken — in both directions. The man in the red cap walked away with an awkward gait and rounded the corner onto Coal Avenue. Martinez watched until he was out of sight, and then looked around until he spotted a curious reporter.

Martinez said today is his 46th birthday. He reiterated this claim several times, and then asked for money.

“I don’t like to come down here because of the people,” Jo Morgan said Friday while her 3-year-old son teetered along the edge of the sandbox — part of a new playground installed next to the walkway.

Morgan said she lives in Window Rock and had come to Gallup for an optometrist appointment. While waiting for the doctor, she brought her son to the playground.

“It’s just because of that bar,” she said, pointing at the American Bar — the front door of which is about 10 paces from the Coal Avenue entrance to the walkway. “They come up to you and start talking to you and asking for money.”

“Why did they say they’re going to build a playground when there’s just a slide?,” Ray said. “There’s just a little slide over there. The children come out; they slide; they go back up; they slide. Besides, it’s a conflict of interest to have a children’s playground so close to an adult playground ...

When you get drunk your mind doesn’t operate on the right frequency ... then they come out here to smoke. I wouldn’t bring my kids in this direction. There’s always people trying to have a negative atmosphere.”

The expanse of the walkway, now lined with smallish Planer trees, is purported to be more open, with fewer out-of-sight places for nefarious deeds. But Ray said she knows where the surveillance cameras are, and she knows where the fights are.

“It seems to be where all the drunks go ... because of the bar,” 18-year-old Jamie Felts, whose family owns Cheap-o Depot at 233 W. Coal Ave., said Friday. “Police are over there all the time. Just two days ago they arrested two people ... probably a fight. I think it’s just somewhere that they can just chill ... it’s just the closest place to the bar that they can just hang out.”

Felts’s sister, 17-year-old Liz Felts, said she takes her 8-year-old brother to the playground.

“Normally, unless I have to, I don’t go by myself,” she said. “I don’t go by myself because they tend to say things, or ask for money ... some of the guys will call me sweetheart or baby girl.”

Felts said she hasn’t had the same experience when she’s with her brother at the playground; she’s left alone.

Gallup Police Lt. Miranda Littlefield and Officer Kelly Akeson have been patrolling downtown on bicycles since the second week of June.

“Crime is pretty low while we’re there, on duty,” Akeson said Thursday.

“In the evening I don’t see as many intoxicated people,” Littlefield said. “It seems like they have a cycle ... once they start seeing us, they kind of get the clue, get the hint. Some will even go up to one of us and ask to go to NCI.”

“Bobby saw them yesterday, chasing someone down near City Electric. One was on a bike and the other on foot,” Beadie DeArmond said while working Friday at Makeshift Gallery, 213 W. Coal Ave.

DeArmond had an otherwise glowing appraisal of the new walkway: “It’s beautiful compared to what it was. I see kids and families on the playground every time I walk by. I like the lights. The lights are cool.”

Kristina Kerley disagrees. “I think the money the city spent was wasted,” she said Friday. “Removing the bushes and the metal fence? New lights? They could have used that money to put in public rest rooms, which we desperately need for tourists ... I’m tired of dealing with the drunks, with the thieves ... and I really love downtown.”

Reporter Phil Stake can be reached at philip.stake@gmail.com, or by calling (505) 863-6811 x223.