Crack Hill (Park Hill, Staten Island)

The Park Hill neighborhood of Staten Island was known for its crime in the 1980s and 1990s. The nickname “Crack Hill” has been cited in print since at least 1988.
   
Park Hill has also been nicknamed “Killa Hill”/“Killer Hill” since at least 1995.
 
 
Wikipedia: Clifton, Staten Island
Clifton or Park Hill is a neighborhood in northeastern Staten Island in New York City in the United States. It is an older waterfront neighborhood, facing Upper New York Bay on the east. It is bordered on the north by Stapleton, on the south by Rosebank, on the southwest by Concord, and on the west by Van Duzer Street.
(...)
The Park Hill Apartments, a privately-owned but federally-subsidized low-income housing complex on Vanderbilt Avenue, and also on Park Hill Avenue, became the site of steadily increasing crime and drug abuse beginning in the mid-1960s; by the late 1980s it had gained the nickname of “Crack Hill” due to the many arrests for possession and/or sale of crack cocaine that were taking place in and around the development and the adjacent Fox Hills Apartments to the south. However, crime in this area has dramatically decreased since the late 1990s. Community activists are addressing the ongoing conflict between Liberian and African American youth, primarily between the ages of 10-14. The community organizations run after-school programs to help keep the youth occupied in a productive way. This helps curb gang and street violence. The community tension that occurs in Park Hill is based on poverty and unemployment.
       
18 October 1988, Newsday (Long Island, NY), “Race, fear and death on Staten Island” By Alexis Jetter, pt. II, pg. 4:
The sale of crack is so prevalent in Park Hill that many of its young people call their home “Crack Hill.”
 
New York (NY) Times
An Immigrant Tale: Hard Life, Hard Work, All in the Family
By JOHN BRANCH
Published: November 17, 2006
The stories are unique to the Ogunleye family, but familiar to everyone in the projects of their old neighborhood.
 
The mother tells about the stray bullets that came through the window of their unit at Staten Island’s Park Hill apartments — a place the youngsters called Killer Hill and others dubbed Crack Hill.
   
SILive.com
They are true Kings of the Hill
Thursday, December 11, 2008
By TEVAH PLATT
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER
STATEN ISLAND, NY—CLIFTON—The people of Park Hill are standing up.
(...)
Park Hill has come a long way since the 1980s, when dealers and “fiends” earned the 15-acre complex of apartments the old neighborhood nickname, “Crack Hill.”
   
Google Books
Hip Hop in America:
East Coast and West Coast
By Mickey Hess
Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press
2010
Pg. 127:
PARK HILL
Park Hill Apartments was home to Inspectah Deck, Method Man, and Raekwon when Wu-Tang got started. Park Hill was known for being at the epicenter of violence and crime in Staten Island, along with its neighbor to the north, Stapleton. It was known as ‘‘Crack Hill’’ or ‘‘Killer Hill’’ for all the drug deals and shootings that went down from its foundations in the 1960s to the present day.