Kensington Blues
“I can’t be with him because I’m on drugs, but I’m on drugs because I can’t be with him.”
- Mary speaking about her son.
In Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, the opioid epidemic unfolds against the backdrop of a place once defined by industry. For generations, Kensington was a center of textile mills, manufacturing plants, and steady working-class employment. When those factories closed in the late 20th century, jobs vanished, buildings emptied, and the neighborhood’s economic foundation eroded. Today, that vacancy intersects with addiction, housing precarity, and chronic poverty. Along the elevated rail line and surrounding blocks, fentanyl and heroin circulate through fragile economies of need and risk, shaping rhythms of withdrawal, respite, relapse, and return. The crisis is not only medical; it is social, economic, and deeply human, entangled with decades of policy neglect and structural inequity.
In Kensington Blues, JEFFREY STOCKBRIDGE spends time with residents navigating this landscape, acknowledging both the gravity of the crisis and the resilience of those who continue to survive within it.
“I started trick’n when I was seventeen… I was hanging in Liddonfield Projects up in the Northeast… that’s how I got introduced to prostituting and stuff like that. That’s an addiction in itself too, you know, because it’s easy money. The longest I got clean was five years and most of the ladies I first knew when I came out are either upstate doing time or — I hate to say it — dead. They OD’d or got killed.”
-Terry
“I don’t really have any friends. I just think everybody’s intentions out here aren’t to be friends, it’s that they want something from you. When I get my money I need to support me, I can’t support other people. I don’t really ask people for a lot. I get my money. A lot of times if you get people to take care of you, you have to lie to them, lead them on, make them think you’re gonna get clean. Then it ends up getting to be too much where they’re trying to control what you do. I’d rather just get the money and end it at that, no strings attached, ’cause I don’t need someone following me around, trying to drop me off at rehabs and shit. I’m trying to get out of here now. I just want to have a normal life. Get an apartment and go to college and stuff like that.”
-Nichol
“As soon as you start again, your habit’s just as bad as before. You know what I mean? It doesn’t build up again. It goes right back to where it was. I know what I’m saying. I know what the right thing to do is. I’m not at that point anymore where I’m like, Oh I’m depressed, I’m a drug addict. You know what I mean? I know right from wrong and I know I can’t let things that happened to me in the past decide the way I live my life today. Right now I’m just fucking up because I don’t care. I’ve been clean, I know I can do it, I’m just not where they’re at. They’re all depressed and shit, and I’m just fucking up right now. I know I’ll get back to where I need to be, but this is what it is right now.”
-Krista