Thursday, August 17, 2006
A Bitter Pill
By Charles Cohen
A New Biotech Park Promises to Cure What Ails Middle East, but Not Without Side Effects
he corner of Eager and Collington streets was where Leslie Lewis played games of red-line as a child. Now, the corner's walls serve as a crowded memorial for fallen drug runners. The alley adjacent to her house not far from that corner makes an excellent open-air market: isolated, dark. Dealers give the call and shoppers come from nowhere, lining up dutifully while one man collects the cash, another doles out the rock, and another keeps the peace with his gun.
Enduring the drug dealers on her way to and from work, Lewis says she once believed that the simple act of staying put in her house, on her block, was an act of defiance. Lewis did not think of herself as an activist. She was just willing to quietly provide a mooring for hope. And now that hope is coming in the form of the East Baltimore Development Project, an 80-acre, $800 million revitalization plan designed to make room for a 2-million-square-foot biotech park in the neighborhoods (generally known as Middle East) surrounding Johns Hopkins' medical campus.
According to a study by University of Baltimore Professor Richard Clinch, the biotech park, scheduled to be completed in about 10 years, will eventually create 8,000 jobs and crank out more than $772 million in business just within the park; factor in indirect benefits to local businesses and you're talking more than 4,000 additional jobs and a total of $1.66 billion in business. The city's Empowerment Zone program is supposed to set up job-training programs for local residents to help them fill up to a third of the new jobs. In addition, a brand-new residential neighborhood is to spring from these careworn East Baltimore streets. "There is more put in place to try to see that city residents benefit for this than [I've seen in ] any other city," Clinch says.
But the first thing that needs to happen for this transformation to occur is for Lewis and about 800 other households, homeowners and renters alike, to move out, at the behest of the city and its use of eminent domain.
"It will probably be really nice when they get finished with it," Lewis says. "But what does it do to the people who are here now, who actually cared about being here, who have tried and worked while everyone else seeped off?"
Talking to people in East Baltimore over the past year has revealed a myriad of emotions, almost always with an undertone of resentment. It's not just that people are losing their homes, but what the action of relocation says to them. Here's a community that has endured the worst the city has to offer; the very act of staying has shown the kind of fortitude that makes for a real neighborhood. Their reward--a package to help them relocate somewhere else. The message they take from it: These people are not worthy enough to be included in the new neighborhood. In fact, they feel they are seen as a liability.
For its part, East Baltimore Development Inc., the nonprofit public-private partnership that's orchestrating this massive project, is talking real compensation. East Baltimore Development promises that area residents will get a chance to move back into the new community. Under the plan, a third of the revitalized homes will be priced to be affordable to lower-income residents, another third priced for moderate-income residents, and the remaining third will be priced at "market value." In the meantime, the residents in the project's path will receive the appraised value of their home plus up to $70,000 more to spend on a new home in the city. Residents will be assigned a housing advocate and a relocation counselor by East Baltimore Development to assist their move.
"This is not about simple real estate," says East Baltimore Development President Jack Shannon. "This is a community-building effort that will continue to involve those who live in the community today, as well as those we hope will decide to raise their families here in East Baltimore in the future."
Doug Nelson, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, hails the relocation deal as "the most generous package of supplemental cash benefits and proper fair market value that has ever been offered anywhere to any group of homeowners under any urban renewal project of this scale." But the project fluttered for few months until the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development stepped in with a $21.2 million loan to the city, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Johns Hopkins put up $10 million dollars in grant funds for supplemental benefits for the displaced families.
But as initial demolitions on unoccupied properties begin, such gleaming promises still have to overcome a credibility problem on the east side. The first crop of condemnation letters is slated to go out to 250 households in January for the first phase of the project. Demolition and construction of new homes is expected soon after. Over two years have gone by since the project was announced, and yet many residents still don't know where they are going to move, how much money they will have to buy a new home, or even if Baltimore's tight real-estate market will prove affordable. Meanwhile, those in other phases must wait for an unknown time until the project progresses to their doorsteps.
These soon to be displaced residents share the same limbo, but each lives with his or her own predicaments. What follows is a series of vignettes on how the residents of this part of East Baltimore are dealing with the imminent loss of their community and a future based solely on promises.
Leslie Lewis
Most people have had their bond with their childhood home compromised by moving out at some point. But Leslie Lewis, who has stayed with her 86-year-old father, Edward, in the house where she grew up, has retained an intimate sense of her past. Everything around her is laden with personal history--from the delicate pink china that the senior Lewis picked up in Japan during World War II to the mantel full of family photos. The baby granddaughter in one picture has just gotten married.
Leslie Lewis, 37, takes a seat at her dining-room table after a long day working at Towson University's post office, sweeps aside her weariness, and tries to explain what the relocation process means to her and her father.
"There was no electric wiring in the house when he purchased it in 1948," Lewis says. "He did the paneling, the floors, and the concrete in the backyard. He built a garden there. He had kids here, sent them off to school, sent them off to war, sent them off to college. My mother died here.
"This isn't just a house--it's a home," Lewis says with a faint smile. "There are memories here that you can't take with you."
For an hour, Edward Lewis opts not to speak, explaining to his daughter through hand gestures that the idea of displacement is just too much for him to discuss. She speaks for him and other elderly people who don't have a child living with them.
"A lot of [older people] are sitting there and they are worried about it," she says. "They don't have work to go to, children to take care of, and things to distract them from sitting there hours and hours. 'When are they going to put me out of my house? When are they going to take away my home?' This is it for them. This is their house. They didn't plan to go any place else."
As the conversation meanders around to the house's marble front steps, a standout architectural feature in a block of brick and cement stoops, Edward Lewis suddenly speaks up, his voice shredded by an 18-year struggle with shingles. He describes how he built the steps himself, fixed them on top of a brick foundation. As a laborer in Sparrows Point for more than 40 years, Lewis knew how to lay brick, and his workmanship was tested when a car smashed into the steps. But the marble was just--his hand sweeps the air--"scratched."
Edward Lewis takes over the conversation and tells tales of Baltimore in the jazz era, a time when he sang, a time when he and a woman named Billie Holiday sat backstage sharing some drinks in a club on Bond Street. Shaking off any appearance of infirmity, he chugs across the room and slides the new CD player off his old record-player console, ready to play some 78s.
But when asked how he feels about his impending forced move. Edward Lewis stops suddenly, the boyish elasticity draining from his face, his eyes looking into nowhere.
"Oh man," he says, his voice scratched like an old record. "That's rough. That's rough."
There's a pause.
"I worked my whole life for this house."
Lisa Williams
What once was a rowhouse stands alone like a watchtower on Madison Street, surrounded by tidy paved lots caged by chain-link fencing. Back in August 2002, a resident of 1000 block of Wolfe Street took the steps of her house with a group of neighbors and lambasted the city and Johns Hopkins and the construction crew for harassing her neighborhood with 24 hours of demolition.
It was small rally, just 21 people, but the newly formed group known as the Save Middle East Action Coalition was able to grab some media attention and suddenly there was an attitude change. Save Middle East members went into ongoing negotiations with the city and East Baltimore Development Inc. eventually pushing through the current package of compensation for displaced residents.
A year later, Lisa Williams stood at the grand opening of the Community Resource Center on East Chase Street, a facility created to assist residents in the relocation process. She was surrounded by a political who's who, from Mayor Martin O'Malley to U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, all of whom enthused about the anticipated promise of the proposed biotech park.
"The people of East Baltimore said, 'We have waited long enough,'" O'Malley declared in a speech. "'We are tired of the incremental nibblings on the edge. We want to do something big and dramatic in our lifetimes so that our children can benefit.'"
Cummings added, "There will never be a project like this that will come to Baltimore [again] in my lifetime."
When Williams' turn to speak came, it appeared at first she was praising the project. But in fact she was putting all the power players on notice. She mouthed back the promises and subtly, with a smile on her face, asked them to live up to their words.
"One thing we are really looking forward to is keeping the lines of communication open with everyone up here to make sure that when redevelopments get started that our community doesn't get lost," she told the crowd and the dignitaries.
Listening to Williams, now Save Middle East's president, talk in her living room today, it is obvious she left much out of that speech. It's also obvious that she won't let the politicians and developers forget their obligations. For Williams, who is compelled to make sure "people are not treated like objects," the relocations are personal. She loves living with her husband in her Wolfe Street house. Now she has been told she has to move to make room for a better community. "I don't see moving everyone out and moving new people in makes it a better community," she says.
Despite its name, Save Middle East never pretended it could preserve the community. She says Middle East's demise was set when the project was first announced in 2001. Instead, the organization focused on getting the best deal it could for the residents, and even though she has since found faith in some city and state leaders, she still resents the patronized position in which she and other residents find themselves. She says the community is being forced to play the part of children being told by an adult what's best for them. Bottom line, Williams says her community is still "forcefully being displaced out of this [area] so they can gentrify [it] for other individuals to move in here.
"We are going to rebuild the community, and now when rebuilding comes, we're getting a one-way bus ticket," she says.
Williams acknowledges that this "one-way bus ticket" does come with opportunities, especially for renters, who have been a nonpresence at the meetings about the East Baltimore Development biotech project and its consequences; displaced renters will receive low-interest loan opportunities. But Williams warns that the opportunities must come swiftly. People need to be relocated in new homes in safe neighborhoods, she says, and if East Baltimore Development Inc. is serious that the revitalization of the east side is a people-first project, then displaced residents must get a chance to move back into the new community. Despite being at the table for the planning process, Williams says she has a hard time believing that a third of the new housing construction will carry affordable prices. If low-income homebuyers must compete with the kind of higher-income residents developers are hoping will vie for space in the new community, she wonders how many original east siders are going find their way back.
"I wanna stay to see the redevelopment," she says. "I wanna see this community rebuilt back up to the way it used to be."
Nia Redmond
On a crisp Halloween day on the corner of North Patterson and East Chase streets, up steps a kid in a Grim Reaper robe. Peeking out from the hood is a mask modeled on the one from the Scream movies--a melting white face with menacing black hollows for the eyes and mouth. Even for Halloween, it's a creepy sight, seeing such a specter drift against the flow of sidewalk traffic passing a well-known drug corner. But that kind of thing--death strolling through an open-air drug market--is everyday stuff for Nia Redmond.
Redmond sits at a desk in a boxy purple rowhouse addition that juts out onto the sidewalk along North Patterson Street like a snowball stand. For nearly three years from this spot, she has run Kids' Scoop, a newspaper that encourages neighborhood kids to write about their world. Not only does Redmond have an expansive vantage point, watching the goings-on through a huge window that looks out onto the street, but during the summer months she rolls up a security door and the office becomes open air. Neighborhood kids, some of whom step over from the corner, park themselves in front of donated computers and stay there until late at night.
Her newspaper may be written from a kid's point of view, but that doesn't stop Redmond from serving as the curmudgeonly editor, the one who says she knows all the "off the record" truths about this section of East Baltimore, which will eventually be gobbled up in the biotech park's later phases.
"How can you have the world's most famous hospital and then have this kind of misery and rot right outside its door?" she asks. "But then they go into Third World countries, rescuing people. They should be embarrassed."
And yet, Redmond, 52, concedes that "with all the contributing factors, all you can do is bulldoze this thing out of here."
She anguishes over her conclusion, the way a family might feel about stopping life support on an ailing relative. Despite being heartened by some of the players, such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation and newly hired East Baltimore Development Inc. president Jack Shannon, Redmond says she believes the welfare of the area's current residents aren't a serious concern for the people and organizations behind the project. For one thing, she says, if the powers that be were serious about allowing the residents to share in the revitalization, they would give them a financial share of the funds generated by the biotech park.
Redmond is equally as critical of the local African-American community, which she says should have taken a more active role in supporting East Baltimoreans throughout this process. She asks where are Morgan State University, Coppin State College, the Afro-American newspaper, the Baltimore Times, and the NAACP, all of which she files as MIA.
"Sooner or later, a people got to raise up and begin to help themselves," she says. "You should have them sitting up asking Hopkins, asking the Casey Foundation, 'Are you doing the best thing for the people down here?' Some of those women are scrubbing the floors in Hopkins to send their kids to Morgan."
The biotech park project also raises a personal ghost for Redmond.
One summer day in 1998, a childhood neighbor she knows as Cowboy stopped by and pulled out a proclamation honoring his late mother, Henrietta Lacks, which was written by Lacks' former neighbors in the Dundalk neighborhood of Turner Station. The proclamation explained how after Lacks died at Hopkins in 1951 the hospital took some of her cells and eventually developed a culture that's still used in medical research worldwide today. The cells were used with neither the woman's nor her family's permission ("Wonder Woman," April 17, 2002,www. citypaper. com/2002-04-17/html).
Two years later, when Redmond attended the first meeting announcing the East Baltimore Development biotech plan, she held a copy of the Lacks proclamation in the air and called for naming the new biotech park after Henrietta Lacks, but her request carried no more weight than her other laments about Hopkins. Recounting the incident now, a tear crosses Redmond's cheek. She wonders if her community will suffer a fate similar to Lacks', who still lies in a grave without a headstone.
"This has been swelling inside since 1998," Redmond says. Recalling a conversation with a neighbor with three children who is also losing her house, Redmond recalls thinking, How many of her children went to college and now you're going to bring the biotech park.
James Kane
James Kane has always prided himself on the property that he has acquired over the years. Since getting out of the Army after World War II, he and his wife, who is now deceased, have bought and sold 31 properties. But now there's just one left, other than his home, and that one last property has been stressing him like none he has ever had before.
It's a 1-acre junkyard on the south side of the railroad tracks on the corner of Eager and Chester streets that he had hoped to sell to the city--there was talk that the Light Rail was going to be extended toward Johns Hopkins Hospital. The extension never happened, though, and with the property facing condemnation he can justify hanging a sign reading kane's folly outside the old junkyard. The 82-year-old bursts out laughing: "It's nothing but the truth."
For a while he enjoyed this piece of speculation, thinking that if change came to East Baltimore, he would cash in big. As he awaited good fortune, Kane became a bit of an outsider historian. Along these bleak blocks off Eager Street, he started hanging homemade signboards depicting major events in African-American history under the heading black history should be taught 365 days a year, amen amen. He sometimes mixed in personal information, such as the fact that he was the first person to catch a touchdown pass playing football for Dunbar High School, as well as photographs from his service in World War II, where he lost his leg in Italy.
"I was trying to enlighten the neighborhood because I knew it was a bad area," he says. "A lot of the little fellas were coming along, and not everybody is bad."
But after the announcement of the biotech park, Kane lost enthusiasm and took the signs down. He believes that the condemnation process has robbed him of the opportunity to participate in the economic upswing. Now, he says, "all I want them to do is give me a couple of dollars and let me alone."
Kane's first bout with condemnation goes back to his childhood. His parents were forced to move in the 1920s to make way for the very same railroad line that abuts the junkyard. In the 1940s, he and seven brothers and sisters moved into his current house on the 1600 block of East Chase Street. After World War II, Kane came home and worked as a welder at Bethlehem Steel and bought real estate, including a bar called Kane's Blue Haven, which his wife used to run. He has since sold everything except his home and the junkyard to private rehabbers.
Several years ago, Kane says he got an offer for the junkyard from a man who claimed to represent Hopkins, only confirming for him that he had something valuable. Now he waits for a condemnation letter to arrive in the mail, when he says he will be free of the headache.
"When I came out of the service I wanted to be a millionaire," he says, "Man, now, poop on the millionaire, it's too much stress. After you get it, then you worry about who's going to take it."
Bill Foster
Bill Foster was once one of the younger board members of the Gentlemen of Charisma Social Club, a private club that has been a social hub on the 800 block of North Chester Street since it opened in 1979. In the 1980s, the board contemplated overturning a club rule that banned women from wearing shorts after 9 p.m.
"We were like, 'Hey this is changing. Girls want to wear little pants. We want to see that,'" Foster recalls. A vote was taken, and it was decided 5-3 that the rule would be repealed. And yet, because the old timers had seniority, the shorts ban remained in effect for years afterward. A sign anouncing it still hangs in the bar.
"I never figured out how three beats five," Foster says. "The three elders beat the heck out of us every time."
As far as Foster is concerned, this is how politics work outside the club as well: Don't look at the will of the majority; look at the power.
Foster recalls one of the early talks regarding the East Baltimore Development biotech park. About 75 residents went to that meeting, and they made it clear that they didn't want the biotech park, he says. At the time they thought they were "looking at another Aberdeen [Proving Grounds]." They didn't know that there would be an urban renewal ordinance giving the city eminent domain powers to take their homes.
"It makes you angry, you actually feel a sense of helplessness," Foster says. "You don't know what to do. If you go downtown, you're scared to deal with them because they feel it's for the betterment of the city."
For the next two years, Foster attended an exhaustive series of meetings where presenters would describe the wonderful cleaned-up streets that would spring up in an area now dismissed as a lost drug zone. Each time he would make the same point: "We're being ousted."
"I'm a realist," he says. "If my salary is $20,000 and you got a home that you're putting up in the area of $80,000 to $100,0000, I know I can't afford it."
But more than losing his own Robinson Street home, Foster still can't imagine that one day the Gentlemen of Charisma Social Club is going to disappear. The money that will be offered will never be enough to allow the club members, who all share in the ownership of building, to find another suitable spot, he says.
The Gentlemen of Charisma was originally opened for locals who didn't want go downtown and deal with what Foster calls "a lot of social barriers."
"A lot of blacks weren't really going downtown,' he recalls. "They were more or less into their [own] neighborhoods because that's where they got the most support, as opposed to going downtown. And if you didn't look a certain way, didn't act a certain way, you were more or less scrutinized."
Over the years, the Gentlemen of Charisma hosted weddings and christenings and then converted into a nightclub. As hair fashions went from Afros to jheri curls to shaved heads, Foster was always in the DJ booth, a place where he says he felt the most comfortable because he could be in charge of the evening. "I can go back and grab you some music like Louis Jordan that's way back in the '50s, and I can come right up to today with Beyoncé or anybody else you want to throw at me and never miss a beat,"' he says.
Today, however, the club is empty, and it's just Foster in the booth, spinning records with no idea of what his future holds. ¶ 6:46 PM
By Charles Cohen
A New Biotech Park Promises to Cure What Ails Middle East, but Not Without Side Effects
he corner of Eager and Collington streets was where Leslie Lewis played games of red-line as a child. Now, the corner's walls serve as a crowded memorial for fallen drug runners. The alley adjacent to her house not far from that corner makes an excellent open-air market: isolated, dark. Dealers give the call and shoppers come from nowhere, lining up dutifully while one man collects the cash, another doles out the rock, and another keeps the peace with his gun.
Enduring the drug dealers on her way to and from work, Lewis says she once believed that the simple act of staying put in her house, on her block, was an act of defiance. Lewis did not think of herself as an activist. She was just willing to quietly provide a mooring for hope. And now that hope is coming in the form of the East Baltimore Development Project, an 80-acre, $800 million revitalization plan designed to make room for a 2-million-square-foot biotech park in the neighborhoods (generally known as Middle East) surrounding Johns Hopkins' medical campus.
According to a study by University of Baltimore Professor Richard Clinch, the biotech park, scheduled to be completed in about 10 years, will eventually create 8,000 jobs and crank out more than $772 million in business just within the park; factor in indirect benefits to local businesses and you're talking more than 4,000 additional jobs and a total of $1.66 billion in business. The city's Empowerment Zone program is supposed to set up job-training programs for local residents to help them fill up to a third of the new jobs. In addition, a brand-new residential neighborhood is to spring from these careworn East Baltimore streets. "There is more put in place to try to see that city residents benefit for this than [I've seen in ] any other city," Clinch says.
But the first thing that needs to happen for this transformation to occur is for Lewis and about 800 other households, homeowners and renters alike, to move out, at the behest of the city and its use of eminent domain.
"It will probably be really nice when they get finished with it," Lewis says. "But what does it do to the people who are here now, who actually cared about being here, who have tried and worked while everyone else seeped off?"
Talking to people in East Baltimore over the past year has revealed a myriad of emotions, almost always with an undertone of resentment. It's not just that people are losing their homes, but what the action of relocation says to them. Here's a community that has endured the worst the city has to offer; the very act of staying has shown the kind of fortitude that makes for a real neighborhood. Their reward--a package to help them relocate somewhere else. The message they take from it: These people are not worthy enough to be included in the new neighborhood. In fact, they feel they are seen as a liability.
For its part, East Baltimore Development Inc., the nonprofit public-private partnership that's orchestrating this massive project, is talking real compensation. East Baltimore Development promises that area residents will get a chance to move back into the new community. Under the plan, a third of the revitalized homes will be priced to be affordable to lower-income residents, another third priced for moderate-income residents, and the remaining third will be priced at "market value." In the meantime, the residents in the project's path will receive the appraised value of their home plus up to $70,000 more to spend on a new home in the city. Residents will be assigned a housing advocate and a relocation counselor by East Baltimore Development to assist their move.
"This is not about simple real estate," says East Baltimore Development President Jack Shannon. "This is a community-building effort that will continue to involve those who live in the community today, as well as those we hope will decide to raise their families here in East Baltimore in the future."
Doug Nelson, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, hails the relocation deal as "the most generous package of supplemental cash benefits and proper fair market value that has ever been offered anywhere to any group of homeowners under any urban renewal project of this scale." But the project fluttered for few months until the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development stepped in with a $21.2 million loan to the city, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Johns Hopkins put up $10 million dollars in grant funds for supplemental benefits for the displaced families.
But as initial demolitions on unoccupied properties begin, such gleaming promises still have to overcome a credibility problem on the east side. The first crop of condemnation letters is slated to go out to 250 households in January for the first phase of the project. Demolition and construction of new homes is expected soon after. Over two years have gone by since the project was announced, and yet many residents still don't know where they are going to move, how much money they will have to buy a new home, or even if Baltimore's tight real-estate market will prove affordable. Meanwhile, those in other phases must wait for an unknown time until the project progresses to their doorsteps.
These soon to be displaced residents share the same limbo, but each lives with his or her own predicaments. What follows is a series of vignettes on how the residents of this part of East Baltimore are dealing with the imminent loss of their community and a future based solely on promises.
Leslie Lewis
Most people have had their bond with their childhood home compromised by moving out at some point. But Leslie Lewis, who has stayed with her 86-year-old father, Edward, in the house where she grew up, has retained an intimate sense of her past. Everything around her is laden with personal history--from the delicate pink china that the senior Lewis picked up in Japan during World War II to the mantel full of family photos. The baby granddaughter in one picture has just gotten married.
Leslie Lewis, 37, takes a seat at her dining-room table after a long day working at Towson University's post office, sweeps aside her weariness, and tries to explain what the relocation process means to her and her father.
"There was no electric wiring in the house when he purchased it in 1948," Lewis says. "He did the paneling, the floors, and the concrete in the backyard. He built a garden there. He had kids here, sent them off to school, sent them off to war, sent them off to college. My mother died here.
"This isn't just a house--it's a home," Lewis says with a faint smile. "There are memories here that you can't take with you."
For an hour, Edward Lewis opts not to speak, explaining to his daughter through hand gestures that the idea of displacement is just too much for him to discuss. She speaks for him and other elderly people who don't have a child living with them.
"A lot of [older people] are sitting there and they are worried about it," she says. "They don't have work to go to, children to take care of, and things to distract them from sitting there hours and hours. 'When are they going to put me out of my house? When are they going to take away my home?' This is it for them. This is their house. They didn't plan to go any place else."
As the conversation meanders around to the house's marble front steps, a standout architectural feature in a block of brick and cement stoops, Edward Lewis suddenly speaks up, his voice shredded by an 18-year struggle with shingles. He describes how he built the steps himself, fixed them on top of a brick foundation. As a laborer in Sparrows Point for more than 40 years, Lewis knew how to lay brick, and his workmanship was tested when a car smashed into the steps. But the marble was just--his hand sweeps the air--"scratched."
Edward Lewis takes over the conversation and tells tales of Baltimore in the jazz era, a time when he sang, a time when he and a woman named Billie Holiday sat backstage sharing some drinks in a club on Bond Street. Shaking off any appearance of infirmity, he chugs across the room and slides the new CD player off his old record-player console, ready to play some 78s.
But when asked how he feels about his impending forced move. Edward Lewis stops suddenly, the boyish elasticity draining from his face, his eyes looking into nowhere.
"Oh man," he says, his voice scratched like an old record. "That's rough. That's rough."
There's a pause.
"I worked my whole life for this house."
Lisa Williams
What once was a rowhouse stands alone like a watchtower on Madison Street, surrounded by tidy paved lots caged by chain-link fencing. Back in August 2002, a resident of 1000 block of Wolfe Street took the steps of her house with a group of neighbors and lambasted the city and Johns Hopkins and the construction crew for harassing her neighborhood with 24 hours of demolition.
It was small rally, just 21 people, but the newly formed group known as the Save Middle East Action Coalition was able to grab some media attention and suddenly there was an attitude change. Save Middle East members went into ongoing negotiations with the city and East Baltimore Development Inc. eventually pushing through the current package of compensation for displaced residents.
A year later, Lisa Williams stood at the grand opening of the Community Resource Center on East Chase Street, a facility created to assist residents in the relocation process. She was surrounded by a political who's who, from Mayor Martin O'Malley to U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, all of whom enthused about the anticipated promise of the proposed biotech park.
"The people of East Baltimore said, 'We have waited long enough,'" O'Malley declared in a speech. "'We are tired of the incremental nibblings on the edge. We want to do something big and dramatic in our lifetimes so that our children can benefit.'"
Cummings added, "There will never be a project like this that will come to Baltimore [again] in my lifetime."
When Williams' turn to speak came, it appeared at first she was praising the project. But in fact she was putting all the power players on notice. She mouthed back the promises and subtly, with a smile on her face, asked them to live up to their words.
"One thing we are really looking forward to is keeping the lines of communication open with everyone up here to make sure that when redevelopments get started that our community doesn't get lost," she told the crowd and the dignitaries.
Listening to Williams, now Save Middle East's president, talk in her living room today, it is obvious she left much out of that speech. It's also obvious that she won't let the politicians and developers forget their obligations. For Williams, who is compelled to make sure "people are not treated like objects," the relocations are personal. She loves living with her husband in her Wolfe Street house. Now she has been told she has to move to make room for a better community. "I don't see moving everyone out and moving new people in makes it a better community," she says.
Despite its name, Save Middle East never pretended it could preserve the community. She says Middle East's demise was set when the project was first announced in 2001. Instead, the organization focused on getting the best deal it could for the residents, and even though she has since found faith in some city and state leaders, she still resents the patronized position in which she and other residents find themselves. She says the community is being forced to play the part of children being told by an adult what's best for them. Bottom line, Williams says her community is still "forcefully being displaced out of this [area] so they can gentrify [it] for other individuals to move in here.
"We are going to rebuild the community, and now when rebuilding comes, we're getting a one-way bus ticket," she says.
Williams acknowledges that this "one-way bus ticket" does come with opportunities, especially for renters, who have been a nonpresence at the meetings about the East Baltimore Development biotech project and its consequences; displaced renters will receive low-interest loan opportunities. But Williams warns that the opportunities must come swiftly. People need to be relocated in new homes in safe neighborhoods, she says, and if East Baltimore Development Inc. is serious that the revitalization of the east side is a people-first project, then displaced residents must get a chance to move back into the new community. Despite being at the table for the planning process, Williams says she has a hard time believing that a third of the new housing construction will carry affordable prices. If low-income homebuyers must compete with the kind of higher-income residents developers are hoping will vie for space in the new community, she wonders how many original east siders are going find their way back.
"I wanna stay to see the redevelopment," she says. "I wanna see this community rebuilt back up to the way it used to be."
Nia Redmond
On a crisp Halloween day on the corner of North Patterson and East Chase streets, up steps a kid in a Grim Reaper robe. Peeking out from the hood is a mask modeled on the one from the Scream movies--a melting white face with menacing black hollows for the eyes and mouth. Even for Halloween, it's a creepy sight, seeing such a specter drift against the flow of sidewalk traffic passing a well-known drug corner. But that kind of thing--death strolling through an open-air drug market--is everyday stuff for Nia Redmond.
Redmond sits at a desk in a boxy purple rowhouse addition that juts out onto the sidewalk along North Patterson Street like a snowball stand. For nearly three years from this spot, she has run Kids' Scoop, a newspaper that encourages neighborhood kids to write about their world. Not only does Redmond have an expansive vantage point, watching the goings-on through a huge window that looks out onto the street, but during the summer months she rolls up a security door and the office becomes open air. Neighborhood kids, some of whom step over from the corner, park themselves in front of donated computers and stay there until late at night.
Her newspaper may be written from a kid's point of view, but that doesn't stop Redmond from serving as the curmudgeonly editor, the one who says she knows all the "off the record" truths about this section of East Baltimore, which will eventually be gobbled up in the biotech park's later phases.
"How can you have the world's most famous hospital and then have this kind of misery and rot right outside its door?" she asks. "But then they go into Third World countries, rescuing people. They should be embarrassed."
And yet, Redmond, 52, concedes that "with all the contributing factors, all you can do is bulldoze this thing out of here."
She anguishes over her conclusion, the way a family might feel about stopping life support on an ailing relative. Despite being heartened by some of the players, such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation and newly hired East Baltimore Development Inc. president Jack Shannon, Redmond says she believes the welfare of the area's current residents aren't a serious concern for the people and organizations behind the project. For one thing, she says, if the powers that be were serious about allowing the residents to share in the revitalization, they would give them a financial share of the funds generated by the biotech park.
Redmond is equally as critical of the local African-American community, which she says should have taken a more active role in supporting East Baltimoreans throughout this process. She asks where are Morgan State University, Coppin State College, the Afro-American newspaper, the Baltimore Times, and the NAACP, all of which she files as MIA.
"Sooner or later, a people got to raise up and begin to help themselves," she says. "You should have them sitting up asking Hopkins, asking the Casey Foundation, 'Are you doing the best thing for the people down here?' Some of those women are scrubbing the floors in Hopkins to send their kids to Morgan."
The biotech park project also raises a personal ghost for Redmond.
One summer day in 1998, a childhood neighbor she knows as Cowboy stopped by and pulled out a proclamation honoring his late mother, Henrietta Lacks, which was written by Lacks' former neighbors in the Dundalk neighborhood of Turner Station. The proclamation explained how after Lacks died at Hopkins in 1951 the hospital took some of her cells and eventually developed a culture that's still used in medical research worldwide today. The cells were used with neither the woman's nor her family's permission ("Wonder Woman," April 17, 2002,www. citypaper. com/2002-04-17/html).
Two years later, when Redmond attended the first meeting announcing the East Baltimore Development biotech plan, she held a copy of the Lacks proclamation in the air and called for naming the new biotech park after Henrietta Lacks, but her request carried no more weight than her other laments about Hopkins. Recounting the incident now, a tear crosses Redmond's cheek. She wonders if her community will suffer a fate similar to Lacks', who still lies in a grave without a headstone.
"This has been swelling inside since 1998," Redmond says. Recalling a conversation with a neighbor with three children who is also losing her house, Redmond recalls thinking, How many of her children went to college and now you're going to bring the biotech park.
James Kane
James Kane has always prided himself on the property that he has acquired over the years. Since getting out of the Army after World War II, he and his wife, who is now deceased, have bought and sold 31 properties. But now there's just one left, other than his home, and that one last property has been stressing him like none he has ever had before.
It's a 1-acre junkyard on the south side of the railroad tracks on the corner of Eager and Chester streets that he had hoped to sell to the city--there was talk that the Light Rail was going to be extended toward Johns Hopkins Hospital. The extension never happened, though, and with the property facing condemnation he can justify hanging a sign reading kane's folly outside the old junkyard. The 82-year-old bursts out laughing: "It's nothing but the truth."
For a while he enjoyed this piece of speculation, thinking that if change came to East Baltimore, he would cash in big. As he awaited good fortune, Kane became a bit of an outsider historian. Along these bleak blocks off Eager Street, he started hanging homemade signboards depicting major events in African-American history under the heading black history should be taught 365 days a year, amen amen. He sometimes mixed in personal information, such as the fact that he was the first person to catch a touchdown pass playing football for Dunbar High School, as well as photographs from his service in World War II, where he lost his leg in Italy.
"I was trying to enlighten the neighborhood because I knew it was a bad area," he says. "A lot of the little fellas were coming along, and not everybody is bad."
But after the announcement of the biotech park, Kane lost enthusiasm and took the signs down. He believes that the condemnation process has robbed him of the opportunity to participate in the economic upswing. Now, he says, "all I want them to do is give me a couple of dollars and let me alone."
Kane's first bout with condemnation goes back to his childhood. His parents were forced to move in the 1920s to make way for the very same railroad line that abuts the junkyard. In the 1940s, he and seven brothers and sisters moved into his current house on the 1600 block of East Chase Street. After World War II, Kane came home and worked as a welder at Bethlehem Steel and bought real estate, including a bar called Kane's Blue Haven, which his wife used to run. He has since sold everything except his home and the junkyard to private rehabbers.
Several years ago, Kane says he got an offer for the junkyard from a man who claimed to represent Hopkins, only confirming for him that he had something valuable. Now he waits for a condemnation letter to arrive in the mail, when he says he will be free of the headache.
"When I came out of the service I wanted to be a millionaire," he says, "Man, now, poop on the millionaire, it's too much stress. After you get it, then you worry about who's going to take it."
Bill Foster
Bill Foster was once one of the younger board members of the Gentlemen of Charisma Social Club, a private club that has been a social hub on the 800 block of North Chester Street since it opened in 1979. In the 1980s, the board contemplated overturning a club rule that banned women from wearing shorts after 9 p.m.
"We were like, 'Hey this is changing. Girls want to wear little pants. We want to see that,'" Foster recalls. A vote was taken, and it was decided 5-3 that the rule would be repealed. And yet, because the old timers had seniority, the shorts ban remained in effect for years afterward. A sign anouncing it still hangs in the bar.
"I never figured out how three beats five," Foster says. "The three elders beat the heck out of us every time."
As far as Foster is concerned, this is how politics work outside the club as well: Don't look at the will of the majority; look at the power.
Foster recalls one of the early talks regarding the East Baltimore Development biotech park. About 75 residents went to that meeting, and they made it clear that they didn't want the biotech park, he says. At the time they thought they were "looking at another Aberdeen [Proving Grounds]." They didn't know that there would be an urban renewal ordinance giving the city eminent domain powers to take their homes.
"It makes you angry, you actually feel a sense of helplessness," Foster says. "You don't know what to do. If you go downtown, you're scared to deal with them because they feel it's for the betterment of the city."
For the next two years, Foster attended an exhaustive series of meetings where presenters would describe the wonderful cleaned-up streets that would spring up in an area now dismissed as a lost drug zone. Each time he would make the same point: "We're being ousted."
"I'm a realist," he says. "If my salary is $20,000 and you got a home that you're putting up in the area of $80,000 to $100,0000, I know I can't afford it."
But more than losing his own Robinson Street home, Foster still can't imagine that one day the Gentlemen of Charisma Social Club is going to disappear. The money that will be offered will never be enough to allow the club members, who all share in the ownership of building, to find another suitable spot, he says.
The Gentlemen of Charisma was originally opened for locals who didn't want go downtown and deal with what Foster calls "a lot of social barriers."
"A lot of blacks weren't really going downtown,' he recalls. "They were more or less into their [own] neighborhoods because that's where they got the most support, as opposed to going downtown. And if you didn't look a certain way, didn't act a certain way, you were more or less scrutinized."
Over the years, the Gentlemen of Charisma hosted weddings and christenings and then converted into a nightclub. As hair fashions went from Afros to jheri curls to shaved heads, Foster was always in the DJ booth, a place where he says he felt the most comfortable because he could be in charge of the evening. "I can go back and grab you some music like Louis Jordan that's way back in the '50s, and I can come right up to today with Beyoncé or anybody else you want to throw at me and never miss a beat,"' he says.
Today, however, the club is empty, and it's just Foster in the booth, spinning records with no idea of what his future holds. ¶ 6:46 PM
