On the Upper West Side, Killings Bare a Grit That Never Left

To even the savviest Manhattanites, those with a supposed connoisseurship of the borough, the address — Amsterdam Avenue between 83rd and 84th Streets — may have conjured images of Upper West Side yuppiedom: brasseries with aproned waiters, purebred Maltese terriers, eggy Sunday breakfasts in the brunch belt.

And not without reason. On the west side of the block stands Roam, a small home furnishings store selling shea butter soaps and nickel-plated trivets. Across the street is Good Enough to Eat, an invitingly homey sandwich shop whose patrons seem intimately familiar with the product lines at Banana Republic and J. Crew.

But the city block — like the city itself — is an ecosystem far too complicated to be captured in a simple phrase or label. This one happens to contain a drug rehabilitation clinic, a center that counsels troubled youths, and several Section 8 apartment buildings. One local saloon has had sufficient trouble with the drug trade, its owner said, that it now maintains a “ban list” to keep out unwanted clients.

Then there were the events of Thursday afternoon, when three men in one family were gunned down in their home by a former state inmate who fell to his death while trying to escape. A cardboard box filled with heroin worth six figures, the police said, and an uncut “rock” of cocaine were found in the apartment. The police are investigating whether the killings were drug-related, involved a jailhouse vendetta, or were perhaps part of a robbery. But even if it turns out that drugs were involved, there is no denying that innocents, including the wife and daughter of one of the victims, were either harmed or terrified by the attack.

Homicide demands a resolution — justice — but it also wants an explanation. And before the men in dark suits turn up asking “Whodunit?” residents often ask themselves, “How did this happen?” — or sometimes, more pointedly, “How did this happen here?”

Superficially, at least, there was a lot of that on Friday even as detectives from the 20th Precinct combed the building, at 492 Amsterdam, for any remaining clues. Amazement was expressed; horror was evinced; people touched their chests and said, “On this block?”

But underneath the disbelief, there was a current of stubborn knowledge. Some longtime residents and business owners said that the deaths of the three men — Carlos Rodriguez Sr., his son Carlos Jr., and Fernando Gonzalez, the elder Mr. Rodriguez’s father-in-law — had left them less than stunned.

“I’m not at all surprised,” said Jim Goldsmith, the owner of the Blue Donkey Bar, directly across the street from the murder scene. “You’re looking at a stretch of Amsterdam that’s had a history of this type of behavior, and not all of it has moved out.”

True enough. In the early 1970s, for example — before the advent of the chic boutique and the French toast brunch — the neighborhood was a notorious drug bazaar.

“There weren’t any French bistros,” said Rick Brosen, a painter and alumnus of Public School 87 on 78th Street. “It was all, ‘What do you want, man? I got it. Five dollars.’ ”

Barry Feinberg, who has owned BRG Check Cashing at Amsterdam and 83rd Street since 1972, said there were “drug addicts all over the streets” when he first opened and prostitutes in many of the buildings. “Not a day went by without someone coming in to sell you stolen merchandise,” he added.

Police statistics nonetheless suggest a huge decrease in reported crime in the last few years. While murders have always been relatively rare in the neighborhood (there was one last year in the 20th Precinct, and there had been two this year before the killings on Thursday), rape decreased by 80 percent from 1993 to 2009, robbery by 84 percent, felony assault by 36 percent and burglary by almost 90 percent.

Mr. Goldsmith, however, insisted that the drug trade on the block was “out there” on the street. He added that he had fought hard to keep it out of his bar, with a zero tolerance policy, and that the local stationhouse had applauded his efforts to call when he had problems.

Mr. Goldsmith also said that New York being what it is, the microneighborhood of the block was unlike areas only minutes to the north or south. “We’re on an island,” he said. “I saw all the knee-jerk reactions” after the killings happened. “People saying, ‘How could this happen in the quiet, yuppified West Side?’ Well, this block is not that.”

Bill Perley, a co-owner of Good Enough to Eat, said that the drug trade was not quite as conspicuous as it was in the 1970s, and that with gentrification “the visibility of these things go away.”

“It might get slightly marginalized, but it’s still there,” Mr. Perley added. “The thing is, the city is so compact that you never know what’s happening in the apartment upstairs or below.”

As for the homicides, Mr. Perley, who has been in the neighborhood for 28 years, said, “I don’t think there’s a single average New Yorker who would be surprised it happened in this neighborhood.” Then again, “I don’t think the average New Yorker is surprised at much.”

One neighborhood store clerk, who asked not to be identified because she knows relatives of those killed, said: “It wasn’t a big, big surprise to me because of having lived here for 30 years. It’s these new people coming in as gentrifiers saying, ‘Oh, God, really?’ This is life. It’s life. Things happen.”