Don't Smoke Crack Here. Please? A 34-year-old artist who had lived in the same apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for 12 years came home one day in April and found something strange on the floor of his building's lobby. It was broken and burned-looking, a little piece of garbage, but it was also like a postcard from the 1980s that had gotten lost. It was a glass crack pipe. The artist, who asked that he be identified only by his middle name, Eddie, and that his street not be named for fear of inviting trouble, said he knew what the thing was, even though he did not smoke crack. "I've seen "New Jack City," " he said, a film released when he was 11. He bent down and took a picture with his iPhone. That same day, a neighbor told him he had heard the sounds of lighters flicking in the lobby from behind his closed door. They might have thought this a fluke until another broken crack pipe appeared on the same floor about a month later. It seemed to Eddie that they had a problem, like a mouse or a loose railing, but worse. The building had a crackhead. Eddie wrote a sign on a piece of paper and taped it inside the front window. It read: "Please Do Not Smoke Crack in Our Building." But whoever was smoking crack either ignored the sign or did not see it, because the broken glass pipes kept showing up. Eddie urged the other residents in the building to stop propping open the lobby door, which locks, for visiting friends. He called 911 a couple of times last month, and the local precinct station house. "One guy told me he was surprised this was happening, that the neighborhood had changed," from its 1960s-era grittiness to its current hip incarnation. It used to be like a sleepy, Rust Belt town, and now it's a brand. Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of federal court in Brooklyn served as New York City's special narcotics prosecutor in the 1980s, the height of the crack epidemic. He was surprised when a reporter called and told him about the crack pipe, but for a different reason. Who would leave behind their crack pipe? "You get a crack pipe, that's gold," he said. He recalled the bad days. "People lined up out of crack spots as if they were handing out welfare cheese or free money," he said. He was getting a haircut once, "before God became my barber," when the guy cutting his hair asked a boy to run an errand. The boy did not know the location until the barber said, "It's right next to the crack spot." That all changed with gentrification and the harsh drug laws that later fell out of favor. President Obama criticized those laws on Thursday while commuting the prison sentences of eight inmates convicted of crack offenses. Deputy Inspector Mark DiPaolo, commanding officer of the 90th Precinct, where Eddie lives, said crack was hardly on the rebound in Williamsburg. His narcotics officers respond to an average of two drug-related calls a day, he said. Usually the perpetrators are gone when officers arrive, as was the case with the two calls from Eddie's building. "They're not the easiest arrests to make," he said. But they still happen. In November, officers from Inspector DiPaolo's precinct pulled over a vehicle with a defective taillight and found pounds of cocaine in the driver's pockets and in the trunk. The month before, Manhattan prosecutors announced the arrest of a Lower East Side man described as a crack kingpin operating out of the projects. Eddie began researching the situation the way other renters look into green roof initiatives or composting. He found articles online, like one published in Ontario, "What to Do if Your New Neighbour Is a Crack House," and from Salon.com, "4 Biggest Myths About Crack." The latter was surprising in its argument that crackheads don't really exist in the way they are depicted in, say, "New Jack City," as "sleepless bags of bones" who don't eat anything. And he learned that glass pipes break from overheating. He was surprised, in November, when his neighbor called him and said, "There's someone in the lobby," Eddie said. He went downstairs for a look. "I saw someone facing a corner with a hood up," he said. They were lighting something. It was a woman. "Her eyes were, like, huge," he said. She looked like someone who was sort of torn up. But she was as polite as the sign Eddie had taped up behind her. "She said, "Oh, sorry," " Eddie said, "and left." Email: crimescene@nytimes.com Twitter: @mwilsonnyt