“My initial thought,” Ms. Sabir told her children, “was that on this evening, all these young people were so powerful.” But imagine, she added, if they could channel that anger in a positive direction, “if we took that power and that energy and put it toward our greater good.”

Everyone in the car fell silent.

Focusing on the bigger picture can be difficult.

The following evening, on Wednesday night, as Mr. Sabir reclined on his front stoop, he shook his head as car after car whizzed through red lights at the corner. He mentioned a man from the neighborhood who was left in a vegetative state when an S.U.V. plowed into his car a few weeks earlier. “It aches,” Mr. Sabir said.

He rolled his eyes when a car pulled up to a house across the street at about 10:30 p.m. and started honking loudly. “Every night,” Mr. Sabir said.

And he just looked away when a man strolling in front of his house ditched a knife behind a parked car, only to be confronted by two police officers, with Tasers drawn, who arrested him. “Mass incarceration,” Mr. Sabir said.

But just as it seemed that the burdens of living here were converging, Mr. Sabir’s phone buzzed with a reminder of why it was all worth it. The alderman representing the area where most of the past week’s vandalism had occurred wrote that his battered neighborhood could really use a Juice Kitchen.

“Help us,” the alderman wrote, “be the Phoenix that rises from the ashes.”