Kensington Ave, Philadelphia cloud & rainy day

The worst Street in Philadelphia The Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia has been in the spotlight of major news outlets for several years, and not in a good way. Local and national journalists armed with cameras descended on the homeless encampments and beneath overpasses where widespread opioid use was rampant, taking pictures of anything they could find. Community activist Gloria Cartagena said none of that media attention was good. “I live right on Kensington and Somerset. I see everything, but I’ve never seen a journalist stop me to talk about something good,” Cartagena said. “They just snap, snap, snap, snap.” Cartagena recalls seeing two men with cameras walking down Kensington Avenue wearing bullet proof vests. She watched them take pictures of people using drugs on the street, and laughing about it. She approached them to find out what they were doing. “They were trying to start some magazine or whatever it was. I think they were just BSing me, for real,” she said. “I didn’t like wha