On Soledad Street, where junkies and angels reside, a clash is coming.

~ • ~ • ~

It’s Saturday morning and a group of university students show up on Soledad Street in jeans and college sweaters. They feel lucky that they were able to find the one-block strip in the center of Salinas—streets are all one way. The area is cut off from downtown by the railroad tracks and sandwiched in by North Main Street and Sherwood Drive. About 130 volunteers, many from CSU Monterey Bay, spent Saturday of last week sprucing up this derelict stretch.

The south end of Soledad Street is dominated by a strip of deteriorated buildings with shattered windows and pigeons as their only occupants. They are rotting shells of old restaurants, markets, and hotels, closed down since at least the 1980s. There are only two exceptions: Dorothy’s Place and Victory Mission, a night-time Christian shelter for men.

Most volunteers were corralled within the black, wrought-iron fence of a sprouting community garden at the north end of the block. The patch of dirt, which was once a place for people to park (and sometimes sleep in) their vehicles, has been transformed into a budding garden of native plants, herbs and opportunity.

Tino Soper, a crew leader in an orange vest and shorts, shows volunteers how to make walls for the garden’s tool shed of out straw, sand and clay.

Later in the day the garden crew leaders received a certificate for graduating from a six-week job-training program that covered everything from plant irrigation to résumé writing. The nine graduates are all either homeless or in transition from homelessness.

Sara de Campos, one of the graduates, shows me how to sow seeds for raised beds near the garden’s entrance. She puts some soil in a black plastic tray, makes a hole with a spoon, drops a seed in, and repeats the process. The work is tedious. I quickly get bored with inserting sweet-pea seeds in the tiny squares of soil. So I switch to sticky-monkey seeds. The plants will eventually be transferred to raised beds in the garden. This sowing of seeds seems symbolic of the uncertain efforts to make change on Soledad Street.

The big volunteer effort comes down to Chinatown once or twice a year. Progress has been made since the last “Beautification Day,” organized by CSUMB in April.

Stepping outside the glass doors of a Chinese social club called the Bing Gong Tong, Frank Tang is smiling and excited to see activity on the street. Tang is the caretaker for the tong, one of two clubs that once operated gambling halls on Soledad Street.

He says he hasn’t seen Chinatown this clean in about 20 years, when a homeless day shelter called the Swinging Door was moved here from Market Street. Before that, he says, the area was littered with food containers; now Dorothy’s Place volunteers regularly pick up trash.

Just a door down from the tong is a community center run by CSUMB. The white building houses offices for Steven Levinson, interim Soledad Street revitalization manager, and Iris Peppard, the garden’s coordinator. The center at 22 Soledad St. is also where the Downtown Community Board meets monthly to hash out the neighborhood’s perplexing issues of poverty and drug addiction.

Until recently, the area’s drug dealers and squatters were tolerated, but now community leaders are plotting ways to make the area safer, cleaner and prepped for redevelopment.

“What has changed is there is now an active dialogue about what the future of the neighborhood will be like,” says Seth Pollack, director of CSUMB’s Service Learning Institute.

For the past decade, the university has been sending students to Dorothy’s Place to do the “service learning” work that every CSUMB student is required to do. Over the past five years, students have been putting in a combined 3,000 volunteer hours a year on Soledad Street, Pollack says.

About a year ago, the university started spending a three-year, $600,000 grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The grant is designed to facilitate a community planning process for the neighborhood and provide jobs and training for the disenfranchised. The money has enabled the creation of the garden, the lease of the community center and the hiring of staff to manage the neighborhood’s progress.

“If it wasn’t for CSUMB, [Soledad Street] would have been the same as it was,” says business major Daniel Jimenez.

Jimenez shovels topsoil into a barrel planter while two women volunteers, who look more than twice his age, set bulbs in place. Jimenez is a CSUMB student from the South County city of Soledad. It is his first visit to the street, and like dozens of other undergraduates he is going to do his service learning here this semester.

“I never knew how bad Soledad Street was before,” Jimenez says. “When you pass down the street you don’t see how bad it is.”