Third and Indiana

Third and Indiana is a novel written by Steve Lopez. It is about the experiences of several people connected to 14-year-old Gabriel Santoro, while living in the dangerous gang-controlled streets of the Badlands section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The novel gave notoriety to Third Street and Indiana Avenue, a real-life intersection in the Fairhill area known for the prevalence of drug dealers. The first printing had 50,000 copies printed. Published in 1994, it was Lopez's first novel.

Steve Lopez arrived in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s. Lopez said that he began considering writing a novel because "what I saw in the neighborhood that I found so shocking and so unlike what I had seen in my years of reporting in other cities. There were just so many compelling images that I would walk away with every time I went into the neighborhood." Lopez said that the novel was, as paraphrased by Douglas J. Keating of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "essentially the story of a parent in search of a child in danger." Lopez said that his book mainly focused on "adult relationships".

O'Neill said that the central characters "redeemed" the novel despite that it had had some cliche minor characters. Stepp said that "Lopez specializes in paradox. His kids embody both ruthless bravado and baby-faced terror; the adults, both faith and despair. Villains are both monstrous and pathetic, wise-cracking street rogues and remorseless perverts." Yagoda argued that "[o]ne never shakes the feeling that" the "hard to credit" characters "are stand-ins for the author, notebook-wielding observers of a poor, crime-riddled neighborhood rather than real participants in its daily life" with Gabriel being the "worst" example. Toby Zinman of Philadelphia City Paper said that in the play version "the caricatures rather than characters pander to every prejudice in the audience; the Italians are ridiculous cartoons, the African Americans are either vicious or victims, and every crucial scene of emotional or moral crisis is broken by a laugh line, effectively trivializing the characters and their ordeals."

The play adaptation of Third and Indiana was produced by the Arden Theatre Company in Philadelphia. The play ran from March 20 to May 4, 1997, at the Arcadia Stage, an Arden-operated theater in Old City, Philadelphia. The writer of the play, Aaron Posner, was the artistic director of the company. A teenager, Bernard Gray, assisted Posner with the street slang.

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