By Sam Quinones
Published September 2025
The following text is reprinted from the Dreamland Newsletter report on the Kensington area in Philadelphia, PA
I’ve been several times to the district in Philadelphia where dealers awaken their customers each morning with cries of free “Samples!”
Kensington was once all about heroin. But fentanyl has taken over and addicts are frozen in bizarre positions — “Kensington yoga,” as it’s called. They’re also strewn on the street like yesterday’s trash. All this takes place under the elevated metro train – the El – that periodically thunders from above.
As an open-air drug market, Kensington is only a few blocks long. But in my experience, it is second in horror-film nightmare only to Skid Row, near downtown Los Angeles.
Kensington also feels like a test market for the latest synthetic drugs coming out of Mexico.
Xylazine, the animal sedative, was found on Kensington first, and is now in the drug supply nationwide, almost always with fentanyl. Medetomidine, a more powerful animal sedative, has been replacing xylazine in Kensington recently. The chemical BTMPS, which I wrote about a while back, has also been in the mix for a while.
I’ve never written about Kensington before because I never understood it. Recently, though, I met some recovering addicts – “Kensington alumni” – at Limen House, a long-term residential treatment house in Wilmington, Delaware, 25 miles away.
They helped me understand a bit of what the zone is about. Mike Maziarz was one of them.
I also met Angie Pike, who grew up near Kensington.
Angie, 43, told me the history she knew, which is that Kensington was once a working-class neighborhood.
For years, Kensington was known as the `Workshop of the World,’ with textile and food factories, breweries and furniture factories.
Together these plants employed thousands in and near the district. Angie’s grandmother worked at Anderson’s Potato Chip factory. “We could walk the neighborhood and it was safe.”
Kids got together at the Kensington Roller Rink.
“It kept us off the street corners,” she said, “out of trouble and was a way for people to make friends. Last time I remember going to Kensington Roller Rink I was 12. It closed when I was a little older.”
Kensington and neighborhoods near the Delaware River – known as the River Wards – were tough places. Large families jammed into small units. The schools were poor, futures limited. Dysfunction magnified — teen pregnancy, addiction, mental illness. Street fights among families were common.
This intensified as Kensington became a Rust Belt in the middle of a bustling metropolis, a centerpiece in Philadelphia’s declining manufacturing.
Beginning in the 1970s, the factories began to close or move abroad. This accelerated through the 1990s.
Residents went on welfare; houses were abandoned, property values dropped, businesses closed. “By the time I was 14, [small] businesses were struggling,” Angie said. “I knew to stay away from Kensington under the El because there were sketchy people.”
Then Oxycontin and other doctor-prescribed narcotic pain pills arrived in ever-growing supplies by the late-1990s. Some people turned to selling their prescriptions to make money.
Angie had babies at 18 and 19 and that saved her, she thinks, from teen addiction. But at 21, she began using pills. She had her third child at 25. Escaping family chaos and cramped apartments, she was on the street and using daily by 2010.
By then Kensington was the open-air drug mart it remains today.
“At one time, I had six stops [on the El] to get what I needed. Then it was one stop away. When fentanyl started coming out was when I started overdosing. It was knowingly causing the death of people, and people were going to that street to find it. Kensington became known as the Bermuda Triangle because people got stuck down there.”
Part of what keeps addicts stuck on Kensington is that the fentanyl sold on the street is so powerful that users develop an addiction that can only be satisfied with the drugs on that street.
“You cannot get well anywhere else,” Mike Maziarz told me.
Fentanyl metabolizes quickly in the body. This means folks on Kensington need to use daily far more often than denizens ever used heroin, when it was the drug on the street. So life has grown ever more desperate, as addicts scramble all day long for the few dollars another hit requires before withdrawals set in.
Meanwhile, Angie said, outreach workers on Kensington provided her clothes, food, and drug paraphernalia, which allowed her to focus on finding and using drugs.
“I never went without. Food was readily given out. There were places to shower. So I never strayed too far from the supply. I didn’t have to go too far to get what I needed.”
Thus she remained stuck, though desperate to leave, seeing death all around her.
Angie said her mother and aunt raised her children in those years.
What stopped her drug use, she said, was when she was admitted to hospitals for a brain abscess, then for endocarditis, a bacterial infection of the heart caused by dirty needles.
For much of a year, she was off the street. She couldn’t leave and she went through withdrawals hooked to an IV of antibiotics – enough of a pause, she said, for her brain to clear and see what she was doing to herself and assert her desperation to leave Kensington.
Eventually, her grandparents took her in. She pleaded with a judge to allow her to serve a probation term away from Philadelphia. “I told her I’d die if I went back to Philly.”
Angie was sent to Delaware — another world for her.
Eventually, she found refuge in the Limen House, and after years of sobriety now works in marketing and fundraising for the treatment center.
Being forced off the street where she was slowly dying was, to Angie, the first blessing.
“You don’t know what you want until you’re forced into it,” she said. “Once the fog cleared, you’re able to look back and see what you walked away from. That will to live returns.”
“Getting away from [Kensington] saved my life.”
This article can be found online on Sam Quinone’s Substack newsletter:
https://samquinones.substack.com/p/kensington-philadelphia
The article is paired with an audio tale on Sam Quinone’s Dreamland podcast titled “Leaving Kensington,” the story of Mike Maziarz. You can listen online at:
https://samquinones.substack.com/p/leaving-kensington-an-audio-tale
