The Housing Authority

She never drank when she went to other cities as a representative of activist groups or the Housing Authority, she says. "People in the projects might have known, but not out of town," she says.

Fred Gibbs knew. He was the manager at Heritage House. One month, Brown accidentally paid the phone bill twice and didn't have the money to cover rent. "He called me in and said, 'Here's what you're going to do. You're going to go upstairs, and if you're not in treatment by Friday, you will no longer be living here,'" Brown recalls.

She went to rehab at ReStart in 1988 or '89 — she can't quite remember. Brown says she hasn't relapsed since.

Her bad choices weren't confined to the bottle. She says she's been married five times. "No, wait," she says, and starts counting on her fingers, muttering men's names. One was named Carl; he was the first. One of them she married twice, but she wouldn't recommend that to any woman. She waves off her marriages, saying she was too independent to settle down. She doesn't want to dig into specifics. "It's something that I went through that I'm not proud of."

Eventually, the owners of a private housing complex recruited her to run a program that was like a neighborhood watch organization for tenants. They gave her a two-bedroom place for free. Then, in the mid-'90s, she got a job as a drug- and alcohol-abuse counselor for Project Neighborhood. It took her back to the projects to meet with public housing residents who were struggling with addiction.

But her health had started to slow her down. Her arthritis was bad. She suffers from asthma and has all the troubles that come with being overweight. She doesn't deny that her health problems are of her own making. She knows that the years of drinking are catching up with her and that all those years of organizing wore her down.

In 2000, Brown moved to Cropsey Place, a federally funded housing complex for the elderly and people with HIV and AIDS. That's where she met Walter. They became close friends, and when he got so weak that he couldn't walk, Brown took care of him. Walter became her fifth husband on May 19, 2005.

"I married him because we're friends," she says. "He didn't want to go to a nursing home, and I didn't want to keep living alone and die by myself."

The housing at Cropsey Place was fine, but they wanted to be in a place where they could hear kids playing. About the same time, Florine Jones asked Brown to think about another stay in public housing. Jones had lived in Theron B. Watkins back when Brown had been at Wayne Miner. Both were longtime housing advocates and had been friends for nearly 40 years.

"She told me about all the good services and how this place had really changed," Brown says. "She said, 'Ah, Lizzie, come on back. It's different now.'"

It wasn't. Brown remembers Chouteau Courts in the early 1960s. She was struck by the stately brick buildings and the bright-green lawns in the courtyards.

Forty years later, Brown says she has accepted that this is where the Lord wants her to be.

After moving back in June 2005, she quickly learned the rhythms of the place. Activity picked up as the sun went down. At night, she'd hear the dogs barking in the junkyard lot on the other side of Independence Avenue. That let her know someone was crossing the street, walking the cracked sidewalk, passing through Chouteau's wrought-iron fence.

Often, these visitors weren't residents or their friends. Even in daylight, strangers stopped residents, asking if they knew where a guy could "get some work." Many of Chouteau's residents are families, but Brown never heard children playing on the jungle gym behind her building.

Residents started calling one building "the Hole" because of its prostitution, crack dealing and rodent infestation.

When Brown moved in, she and Walter had enjoyed watching kids through their bedroom window play basketball. By February 2006, so many drug deals were happening in the court that maintenance workers took down the basketball rims. That winter, security cameras were put up — and vandalized. Extra lights were installed — and broken. Most tenants kept to themselves and stayed inside.

Brown, on the other hand, became a one-woman crime crusader.

She was elected president of the Tenant Association and she called or visited with housing officials almost every day. She volunteered to appeal personally to the drug dealers through the media, tell them on live TV to take their business elsewhere. She suggested that the Housing Authority bring in people from the community so that Chouteau's problems wouldn't remain a secret to the rest of the city. She asked Chouteau's managers to get out of their offices and get to know residents.

Her approach wasn't always pleasant.

At a meeting early this year, Brown ripped into Chouteau manager Shari Taylor so relentlessly that Taylor choked back tears in the hallway afterward. Brown has so little respect for Director of Facilities Lawrence Pitts that when he greeted her brightly at a police meeting this spring, she pursed her lips and looked at the ceiling like a petulant teen.