Third and Indiana

Third and Indiana (1994) is a novel by American journalist Steve Lopez. Composed of a series of vignettes, it follows a number of characters in the lower strata of urban Philadelphia. The plot loosely pivots around a central character, Gabriel Santoro, a teenage artist and drug dealer, who has run away from his family. As he becomes more involved with Philadelphia’s underground crime rings, his mother, Ofelia, frantically searches for him, enlisting the help of a priest Father Laetner and police officer Bill Bagno. The novel’s main antagonist is Diablo, Gabriel’s drug lord, who refuses to relinquish control of him. Minor characters include Eddie, a runaway from South Philly who is being pursued by the mob, and Gabriel’s friend Mike, a criminal entrepreneur who aspires to become a grave burglar to settle his friends’ financial problems. The book, though fictional, is based on Lopez’s observations of the darker areas of Philadelphia, and is credited with bringing attention to certain sociologically interesting sites, including the Badlands and Fairhill regions.

The novel takes place entirely in the streets of Philadelphia, particularly in the Badlands, an area notorious for its criminal activity. The Badlands have been essentially wrested from the control of law enforcement by local gangs. Gabriel runs away from his parents at the young age of fourteen, deciding to make a living by dealing drugs. He leaves behind his Dominican-Canadian mother, Ofelia; his Italian-Cuban father, Ruben, had previously abandoned the family. Possessing a hybrid racial identity, Gabriel is cast mainly as an outsider: he is precocious, but also anxious and misguided, seeming to care little for the plight of those to whom he sells drugs. His customers include young mothers, who throw away money they could use to care for their children in exchange for crack cocaine. Gabriel is cast as a morally ambiguous and sympathetic protagonist.



The second main plotline concerns Eddie Passarelli, an Italian American in his late thirties. Eddie suffers a bad breakup with his girlfriend, leading up to the dissolution of his marriage. While on a driving assignment for a trucking company, his truck inexplicably catches fire. His industry boss, a mobster named Thin Jimmy, blames him for the loss of capital, ordering him to fork over $10,000 plus interest. Unsure what to do, he moves from his home in Roxborough, lodging at a rental unit owned by his mother in Kensington. He meets Gabriel, and they establish a mutual bond akin to that of a father and son. He ultimately helps salvage Gabriel from a life consigned to the criminal world and the predatory Diablo.

Father Laetner, the third foremost character, hails from Pittsburg, California. Schooled in Roman Catholicism, he moves to Pittsburgh and is startled to see that it is so infested with crime. When Ofelia loses Gabriel, he vows to help her recover him. Laetner serves as a character foil to Gabriel, trying to preserve, or at least restore, Gabriel’s innocence, as Gabriel plunges further into crime, falling in love with a prostitute.

The conclusion of Third and Indiana is left open: Gabriel returns, tenuously, to his familial roots, but it is implied that his conception of self has become inextricable from the drug world. Moreover, Gabriel’s mother, Father Laetner, and Eddie still labor more or less under the same hopes and dreams to escape their social, economic, and existential conditions. Lopez casts the lower strata of Philadelphia, immersed in its drug trade, in an ambivalent light, suggesting that surviving even in this morally corrupt world requires a certain kind of maturity and resilience.