Where Everybody Knew His Name

On the corner of 5th Avenue and Thomas Road in Phoenix, the 5th Avenue Café stands as a neighborhood landmark. Most of the parking is in the rear. If you go in that way you may likely see an older African American man in a gray hoodie, sweeping the alley with a well-worn broom. At least that was the case for many years, until last December, when he died.

He was Freddie Curtis Adams Jr., known as Curtis. He rode a bicycle too small for his six-foot-one, 200 lb. frame. He almost always wore his hoodie or, in summer, a cool rag on his head. He was remarkably shy. When he wasn’t working in the alley that ran behind the café and behind the string of other businesses along Thomas, to 7th Avenue, he might be taking a ride up to the Safeway or the Sprouts at Osborn to have a bite, do a little shopping or just to enjoy the weather, because he was like any of us.

You might have given him a five-dollar bill from time to time, saying that it was for helping keep the neighborhood clean, as he didn’t like charity. 

He is worth remembering not only because of his years of service to the neighborhood but also because of the way the neighborhood responded to him.  

He was not homeless. The owner of an office and retail building at the west end of the alley put a small, 90-square-foot storage building on an unused corner of the parking lot. It was then improved with electricity, an air conditioner, heater, and a port-a-john. 

Sarah Simpson, speaking on behalf of herself, her father, her mother and her sister, owners of the building, said, “Fred was a very private person and he always told us that a man should take care of himself. We offered him support regarding food, clothing, and shelter to the extent that he would allow us. His dignity was of our utmost importance. We will never forget him and we miss him greatly.”

MaryAnne and Lisa write: "We have lived in Willo for 22 years on the 500 block of Cambridge, so we were quite familiar with Curtis.  On the morning he was found, it was actually a neighbor who saw his body.  Neighbors stood there for a little over 2 hours until the Medical Examiner's office showed up. During this time, Beryl, the owner of the building, arrived.  We were so happy to meet the man who made Curtis' life more tolerable by providing him shelter and paying him a weekly stipend to keep up the area around the building. We were told the cause  of death was Complication of Pulmonary Emphysema with contributing causes being  Hypertensive Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes."

 I have been wanting to write about Curtis for years, but I feared that the City of Phoenix would declare his little home illegal. Beginning in the 1970s and 80s, I watched the city destroy thousands of units of affordable old hotels, motor courts, trailer parks, and whole barrio neighborhoods—all at a time when it was getting harder to find a job if you were unusual in any way, and harder to earn the kind of day-labor pocket money that used to allow some grace, dignity, and breathing room down on the bottom rungs of the economy. The affordable places are gone. The Produce District, where a person could drop in and make enough for the next night's room, is now a ballpark. A whole cluster of affordable hotels is now the Civic Plaza. It's land reform in reverse, with all the land serving only the higher-ups now. 

I watched the homeless tents go up on Library Park and elsewhere as those affordable units were torn down, and just at a time when our economic system was needing that housing. The destruction continues today, as the last of the mobile home parks are being picked off. That missing housing, and the way people can go crazy when they can’t find a way to an economic future, are the driving causes of homelessness. People in trouble can survive in the low-rent cracks and crevices until they can figure a way back up. But the city has long been cementing shut those places as fast as it can, often doing so with federal dollars meant to help people. 

But at least it’s now safe to talk about Curtis and his little refuge. The city can't come after his home.

“He would come in and ask for a Dr. Pepper or a water,” Yareli Guerrero of the 5th Avenue Café remembers, “—and his chicken sandwiches. He loved those, and the staff in back would say, ‘Oh, this is for Curtis,’ and get it out fast, because they knew he was a busy man. Some of us on staff, and our customers, would get him new shirts and blankets and things. Once we gave him a big box of stuff, and he really didn’t want to accept it, but he finally did. Last time I remember really talking to him he was excited about getting a new bike, but he said he missed his old bike.”

She didn’t know his history, but knew the lore told about him: that he had been in the service and maybe something happened and he came home broken. Other lore is that someone just let him off on the street years ago, she said, “and he didn’t know where he was or where he was from. But whatever might be true, he was so kind. He would never bug anyone. He was always around, helping out. He was very loved. He was very taken care of. Everyone would greet him when he came in. Everybody knew his name.”

Aziana Martinez, also of the café, said the restaurant staff and other employees of adjoining businesses, and many of the café’s regular customers, made a little candle and flower memorial for him.  

Latoya Boyce, who works at St. Joseph’s Hospital across the street, remembers seeing him often when she came across to grab lunch at Mika’s Greek. “He was such a nice man. Always on his bike, always so kind.”

The women in the nail salon remember him, too. One of them, who goes out to the alley to smoke, would give him a cigarette and they would visit for a moment. Adreanna Corrales, of the salon, said, “He would clean things up back there, sweep, take care of things, ask how you are doing. We would sometimes drop off snacks for him.”

Sergio Nava, of Presido Cocina Mexicana, a highly-rated Mexican restaurant, remembers Curtis as, “a really nice guy. He would keep things looking good and sometimes come in here for a quick bite. A very quiet man. Never, ever rude.”

Davon Simmons, branch manager of the loan office on the corner of 7th Avenue and Thomas, remembers giving him boxes of wings, which Curtis accepted only reluctantly. 

Eric Cadette, of Afternoons Studio, a photography studio, said, “Curtis felt like he was protecting the building, the area. In fact, I felt safe when he was around. It feels a little weird without him. He was really sick, I guess, and he didn’t want to tell anybody or do anything about it.” 

When we drive along a Phoenix street and see a homeless person or family, it is an affront to our sense of democracy, for we would not choose—or vote—to have our community treat people that way. Some communities have “dignity villages” of tiny houses. Some cities didn’t knock down all their older housing. There are many ways to return the city to a place we can call the product of our highest values. 

And we have the power to at least be kind and accommodating and understanding. Freddie Curtis Adams died among friends and in a neighborhood that gave him love and security. And he worked hard for it, as do we all. 

But who was he, really?

Was he one of the young men who came back from Army stints in Germany or Japan after too much alcohol or too many drugs? Was he an addict, dumped on the streets after burning through family and friends? He was not. With a contact provided by the Maricopa County Indigent Decedent Services Program and some quick work by a premier research firm, VR Research, we can see that his path was similar to that of many people on Phoenix streets. 

He was not Curtis, but Kirk, to his younger sister, Cassandra Williams of Houston, where they grew up. 

“He was a minister,” she said. “He was a very good associate minister, a preacher of God’s Word, at the Fontaine First Baptist Church in Houston. He did that while working a hard labor job at Foster Stone International, a steel pipe company. But he lost that job and he started acting strange. He and I looked for jobs together in the hard times of 1983. By 1984 we in the family were seeing signs that he was depressed,” she said. “He would just sit and stare.” 

Though they were not rich, his mother got him appointments with a psychiatrist, but to no effect. The family thought he might do better in a new place with brighter opportunities, so he went to live with an aunt in Phoenix. He took community college classes in mortuary science, which surprised his family. None of that seemed to get him out of his depression. 

He joined the Army. He served domestically for less than a full enlistment term before being given an honorable discharge for psychological health reasons. He returned to Houston but was still not himself. He lived with his brother but was getting stranger, doing things like digging holes in the backyard for no reason. It scared his brother’s wife. When his mother insisted that he get treatment, he bolted to Denver, where he dropped out of sight until a hospital contacted his mother. It was 1993. She went to find him. 

He was committed to a hospital where he improved with medication but refused to stay on them, complaining that they made him constantly sleepy. He decamped for Phoenix, but this time his elderly aunt was afraid of his unusual manner. He hit the street. 

His brothers and his mother drove to Phoenix to fetch him. They found him and cleaned him up and gave him new clothes and shoes, but he would not return with them. That was in the late 90s.

Years passed. In 2021, one of his brothers and a friend drove to Phoenix to look for him. They searched the streets and the shelters but could not find him. 

Early this year, Cassandra searched his name on her computer and found a death notice. It was over. 

“He was a very good person, and we could never figure out what happened,” she said. “He never had a problem with drugs or alcohol—it wasn’t like that.”

And it wasn’t trouble with the law. He was arrested only once, in Phoenix in 2011, for resisting the instructions of an officer. It was July, and he was probably trying to stay someplace shady.

His problem was untreated depression, from all accounts. 

“Our late mother, who cried to hear his name—her oldest son—was a praying woman. She prayed to the end of her life for him. She wanted God to put him in the company of people who would watch over him.”

Prayer answered. 

Cassandra said that she is comforted to know that he finally had a place to stay and a circle of kindness around him. She said it will be a comfort to several other people, too, for Freddie Curtis “Kirk” Adams Jr. had an ex-wife, a daughter now in her early forties, plus a granddaughter. Long-term job loss a long time ago, depriving him of the dignity of supporting his young wife and daughter, had cracked him open, and the pieces never came back together. 

He never met his own granddaughter, but he did meet the people of and around the 5th Avenue Café who came to love and respect him.

That relationship continued for a long time, though his vividness faded a bit over the years as he became part of the shadows. 

Benjamin Torkhan, of Thomas Market Liquor, said he knew Curtis for 19 years. “I’ve known him since our family bought the store. He was a very smart person, very sweet. He talked about his time in the Army, but he got quieter over the years. He was a really nice guy, and I miss him. He served his country and he served his neighborhood."

If you drive by the tents that continue to pop up downtown like mushrooms after a rain, you certainly know that there are too many broken stories, too much craziness, to be fixed by the kindness of strangers—particularly as more jobs disappear to increasing automation, further gutting the middle class. A fix will require the kind of creative political leadership we currently lack. 

But the kindness is something.