Kensington, Philadelphia, has been called many things over the years. The Walmart of Heroin. The Las Vegas of Drugs. “How do you know the toothbrush was invented in Kensington?” one longtime Philadelphia drug user joked. “Because anywhere else, they would have called it the teethbrush.”
The East Coast’s largest open-air drug market (according to the Drug Enforcement Administration), Kensington has long symbolized the dysfunction of a city that once served as America’s capital. Shots of Kensington’s “zombies” make for local news fodder and X outrage. The city’s failure to fix Kensington was central to the successful mayoral campaign of Cherelle Parker, a tough-on-crime Democrat, sworn in as Philadelphia’s 100th mayor in January 2024.
