HOW A FEW FIREMEN CREATED A SAFE HAVEN

By KEVIN FEDARKO/CHICAGO

Lieut. Arthur Lewis can be an exacting critic. As he leafs through a children's coloring book, his mustache twitches, and his eyebrows collide in a scowl. But now, Lewis turns to three small girls standing in front of him, a smile on his face, and pronounces their efforts superb. As a reward, the young artists receive three quarters apiece, enough for each girl to buy a "poor man's" sandwich at Harold's Chicken Shack. In most parts of America, this qualifies as an after-school snack. Here, on the South Side of Chicago, it's dinner.

Suddenly, any impression that Lewis may be running a halfway house for hungry kids in one of the poorest and most wretched neighborhoods in America is shattered by the blare of an electronic siren. The girls know the drill: they file neatly out of the red brick firehouse while Lewis and his crew snatch up their coats and helmets. In a flash, all five firemen are aboard their truck and rocketing out of the station to handle one of the 70 emergency calls they receive each week at one of the busiest station houses in Chicago. The 17 fire fighters of Engine Co. 16, nearly all of whom are black, specialize in more than fighting the high-rise infernos that ravage the Robert Taylor Homes, part of the largest public-housing projects in the U.S. They serve as mentors, guides and surrogate fathers to lost children.

Most of the residents stacked into the 16-story human warehouses of the Robert Taylor Homes are prisoners of their own apartments, marooned in a landscape bereft of opportunity. By day, mothers struggle to keep their children from playing on the enclosed porches for fear they will be shot. Inside, there are rats in the incinerator shafts, cockroaches in the hall and a stench in the elevators. "Robert Taylor ain't no future for no one," says Lasonya Evans, 20, who lives here with her aunt. "People have stopped dreaming. They don't have no more dreams."

Children account for nearly two-thirds of these projects' population, and many of them have fathers who are either missing, in prison or dead. The firemen, therefore, stand among a handful of male role models in this urban wasteland. On their days off, they drop by to tutor children in chess and math and to encourage them to stay in school. Most important, they offer discipline, tenderness and inspiration to a community where such things are in terribly short supply.

Until about 10 years ago, this tiny firehouse served as a training ground for rookies and a house of punishment for white firemen who had fallen out of favor with their bosses. Most of those men took little interest in the neighborhood--with the exception of the few black fire fighters who were there--and treated the station house as a fortress. Residents viewed them as outsiders, and some youngsters vandalized the place with rocks and graffiti. But as white firemen slowly transferred out, a core of African Americans who chose to remain behind began leaving the station's steel door open nearly 20 hours a day. At that point something unexpected happened: people stopped trashing the place, and children started venturing inside.

Initially pleased, the firemen soon realized the kids were skipping class to hang out in the firehouse. So Engine Company 16 approached Betty Greer, principal of the closest elementary school, with an unusual idea. "These men basically adopted us," Greer says. With profits from the pay phone attached to the firehouse, which had heavy use from local drug dealers, the firemen bought radios to give away each month to children who earned especially good grades. They persuaded police officers and junk dealers to begin dropping off broken bike frames. A local bicycle repairman donated old tires and rims, and a fireman named Kirkland Flowers, whom the children eventually tagged with the nickname "the mayor of Robert Taylor," started building bikes during his spare hours.

That brought a new ritual to the projects. Each spring on the final day of school, children race to the firehouse with their report cards. Those with perfect attendance or outstanding grades ride home on bikes that Flowers rebuilt the previous winter. Last June nearly 100 winners pedaled out the front doors on their rewards for making the attendance rate at Hartigan Community Arts Specialty School among the best in Chicago. "We were just delighted," says Greer. "These children need to know that there are men who are black and who don't sell drugs or aren't involved with drugs. They need to know that there are men who care for them and that this is what real men do."

In a sort of reverse adoption, each kid claims a fireman as his or her own. Some gravitate to Albert Shaw, who drives the truck and teaches chess at the kitchen table. Others crowd around Steve ("the Preacher") Ellerson, who gives haircuts and lectures on good grades. Andre Raiford, built like an oaken door, drills the children on multiplication tables. Each fireman imparts lessons in some area and helps enforce a strict behavior code. Swearing and drug dealing are prohibited. Faces must be clean, hair combed, hands washed. "All these kids know is what they see around the projects," says Lewis. "We show them that you can be successful and that you don't have to do it by selling drugs or playing basketball."

"These children can frighten you," says Rocky Morris, a fireman at Engine 16. He is interrupted by the crash of a vase thrown through a living-room window 16 stories above his head. As shards of glass rain onto the parking lot, Morris shoots a sardonic look toward a teenager whose face pokes through the shattered window. "We'll find who did that, and we'll work with that person," he says. "We can address them because most of us were raised in these projects." He pauses, then offers a comment that his colleagues would surely echo. "You know, you really have to love this neighborhood to stay here."