Leo Grey Van Stop # 3 is "O" Block - Well I'll Be Dipped and Rolled!

67th & Martin Luther King Drive:  Coming up on "O" Street from the South!

 They call it “O Block.”
It’s a notorious stretch of South Side real estate known for violence.
On maps, it’s the 6400 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. But it’s just O Block to people there and in frequent references to the street in the blood-drenched lyrics of Chief Keef and other Chicago rappers.
The sprawling Parkway Gardens low-income apartment complex sits on one side of the street. A string of businesses including an Auto Zone, a food mart and the Chicago Crusader newspaper lines the other. Gang members gave O Block the name. The O was for 20-year-old Odee Perry, a gang member gunned down just around the corner on a summer’s night in 2011. His killer? A female gang assassin, police sourcesT say. She later was shot to death not far from here.
Perry was one of 19 people shot on O Block between June 2011 and June 2014. That makes it the most dangerous block in Chicago in terms of shootings in that three-year period, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis has found." 

Sun Times Photoabove - I am parked right where these gents are standing every AM at 6:40. I usually need to wait a good ten minutes for the lads to rub the sleepy from their eyes and make their ways down to warmth of the Leo Grey Van #7, and vie for already occupied by gents from Englewood and Gresham

Out in the parkway there are parents with little guys and working stiffs coming home from midnights and I have gabbed with many, knowing that the late Odee Perry had shed his mortal husk nearby, but making that fact of little consequence. I wait for my charges and take them to head north to Bronzeville and the siouthbound route through Bridgeport and Canaryville and then Leo High School.

63rd & King Drive Going past "O Street 




Parkway Gardens is "O"Block???
Well, I'll be dipped and rolled!

I did not know that my third stop for Leo students every school day morning is "the most dangerous block"in Chicago. I'd have thought 86th & Morgan, 74th & Western, or 51st and Racine far more fierce. Show to go one.

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