The East Side Of Baltimore City
Thursday, August 17, 2006
The Death Toll
Young Men Struggle to Find Meaning in a Neighborhood Where Homicide is Routine
By Anna Ditkoff
Two hundred and seventy-eight people were murdered in Baltimore City in 2004. That’s an average of five people a week. They were shot down in the street, executed in cars,or killed by their own parents. And while the carnage affected the city from the Northwest to the Southeast, some areas were harder hit than others. Put a pushpin in a map of Baltimore for each of the dead and parts of East Baltimore all but disappear under clusters of tiny plastic beads.
In the heart of East Baltimore, in an area surrounding Johns Hopkins Hospital about a mile and a half square, 30 people were murdered in 2004. And for some of the people who live in those neighborhoods, homicides have become so commonplace that tears are few and far between as they speak of those they’ve lost. They are more likely to just shake their heads.
Terrell Fowlkes, a wiry young man who favors baggy pants and an enormous puffy jacket that make him seem much larger than he is, buried five of his friends last year. One of them died right in front of him. As he runs down the list of the dead—Kenny, Craig Mac, Rabbit, Troy, Tanash—he says each name without emotion as though he were going through a grocery list. When asked how he feels about losing so many people, he leans back in his chair and says simply, “It’s messed up. It ain’t right but I can’t do nothing. I can’t change it.”
Talk to a number of people in the surrounding community and they will confirm a long list of those they knew who died in its streets in recent years. Ask them to talk about those people and their answers are short: “He was cool.” “He was down to earth.” “A good kid.” Ask them for more and they grow quiet. What is there to say?
These are people living in a war zone—watching friends, family, and acquaintances die is a part of their existence. Given so much death, words come hard.
Walker Gladden is a man of words, a man of mantras. Certain phrases pepper his speech: “the heart of the community,” “agents of change,” “negative contributors.” Gladden is the youth coordinator for the Rose Street Community Center, an East Baltimore organization that helps ex-offenders reintegrate into society and works to keep others off the street and out of jail. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Gladden uses his words to try and reach an ever-changing group of young men from the neighborhood. Many of these men, most of them in their 20s, have been on the streets and in the drug trade since they were in elementary school. Few have graduated from high school or held down regular jobs. They crowd into the sparse living room of Rose Street Community Center’s Madison Street transitional housing facility, sitting on sagging black couches and folding chairs, keeping on their caps and jackets to hold off the cold that drafts in through the center’s ever-open door. And they listen to Gladden’s words.
“Your lives are so precious,” he tells them. “Everyone in this room is a genius . . . and one thing we know for sure is we don’t want nobody to be the next homicide victim.”
Gladden has been struggling to do something about the once-again escalating homicide rate for years. He’s sued Martin O’Malley for $1 four times since October 2003 in an attempt to hold the mayor accountable for his failed promise to get the homicide rate down to 175 a year (the first three cases were dismissed). Gladden has gone to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to try and get homicides in Baltimore declared an epidemic in hopes of capitalizing on the additional funds and programs that such a designation would bring to the city. He has even been handing out a letter to people in the community begging those still on the street to change their lives.
But on a cold December day at Rose Street, he is focused just on the guys in the room. Some of them are part of Gladden’s program. They are getting their GEDs, going to college, working in apprenticeship programs. Some are still out on the streets. They are weighing their options, trying to decide what direction to go in, as they listen to Gladden and collect the $5 he gives each for coming.
Gladden understands where they are coming from. A large man in sweatpants and a knit cap with pens jutting out from underneath, he has been where they are. He was born and raised in East Baltimore. He spent his youth on the streets, in and out of juvenile facilities and, as he got older, prison. After his last stint in jail five years ago, when he served just over two years of a 12-year sentence on drug and burglary charges, he went to the Rose Street Community Center, where founder and former prison guard Clayton Guyton helped show him another way. But Gladden remembers a time not so long ago when he thought he would be on the streets forever, referring to the streets like an old flame. “I loved her,” he says. “I would have died for her.”
A lover that was hard to leave, he says, because she was all he knew. Back then, he didn’t have long-term goals because he didn’t think he had a long term to worry about. “You see 300 people die in 365 days, and what are my chances?” Gladden asks. “As a young man I didn’t think I would see 30, and I realized that I didn’t mind dying because everyone around me was dying anyway.”
He sees the same sense of fatality in the men that come to his meetings. “Death has become very normal in the thinking system of the youth that live in the heart of Baltimore City,” he says. “They move on [mentally and emotionally], because it becomes a part of the norm. It’s not normal for life to be taken the ways it’s being taken. That’s not normal at all.”
That’s what he tries to teach these young men—that it isn’t normal, that things can and will change for them. They’ve made the first step by coming in, he says to them: “The only thing you have to do now is not fear change.”
But the men, most of whom sit with their heads down as Gladden talks, aren’t entirely sold. Change seems, if not impossible, highly unlikely.
“Them police aren’t worrying about nobody killing nobody,” one says.
“Nobody care about us,” another says.
Gladden’s response? “Guess what? We care.” He points to his 15-year-old son, Walker, who sits at the foot of the staircase and says, “The same way I feel about his life, I feel about every one of you. The same way I don’t want anything to happen to him, I don’t want anything to happen to you.
“I’d lay down my life for anyone in this room,” he says, and then pauses, “under the right circumstances. You rob a bank, you want my help—I’ll, um, see you later.”
Slumped on a couch, Terrell Fowlkes laughs. He’s been coming to Rose Street for four years, but he says he only stopped dealing drugs last month. After a close friend stole from him, the pleas from his mother and 7-year-old daughter finally had an effect.
“I’m trying to do the right thing for a minute,” he says, stretching out the word “trying.” “If it don’t work, I got to go back to doing what I got to do.”
Fowlkes is a handsome man with big brown eyes and the kind of mischievous smile that makes him seem like he’s constantly up to something. There is an intensity about him—he tends to keep his head down and chooses his words carefully, taking long pauses before offering a sentence or two. But he’s the kind of person who, when he does talk, you listen.
Fowlkes grew up around Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus. At 27, he’s the oldest of 12, including a sister by his mother, with whom he grew up, and nine brothers and one sister by his father. But Fowlkes says he only really knows six of his siblings: “I never saw half of them. They walk up on me today or tomorrow, I wouldn’t know who they was. And if they were to say they were my brother, I still wouldn’t carry ’em like family.”
He got involved in the drug trade when he was 9, holding weed for others. “I kept seeing everybody making all the money, getting all fresh, so I wanted to do that,” he recalls. “Then somebody said, ‘Come on, come with me. We’re going to do this.’ That’s how I started.”
By the time he was 13 he was working for himself, selling heroin and cocaine. He says he’s made as much as $50,000 in a day on the right block with the right package. And his life style reflected his success: “I was young, dumb, and full of come. I was tricking, I was buying cars, clothes, jewelry.”
After a few years, he started putting money in the bank, but he says that money was seized by police. He’s been arrested at least nine times on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to possession with intent to distribute. He was kicked out of two high schools in a row. In the mid-’90s, he was kicked out of Patterson High School for participating in what he describes as a riot. About a year later he was expelled from Francis M. Wood Alternative High for fighting.
Fowlkes says he’s been shot at on several occasions. Once, when he was 17, a bullet connected, hitting him in the ass. And over the years, he says he’s lost many friends to murder, the first one when he was just 10 years old. But he insists it’s no big deal.
“I’ve been growing up around it my whole life,” he says. “The first couple times I seen it, yeah, it shocked me. But it’s nothing now.”
In February 2004, Fowlkes’ friend Kenneth Peay was shot in the forehead in the 1500 block of Lester Morton Court. In June, Fowlkes’ cousin Troy White was found dead in the 1200 block of Ashland Avenue, shot repeatedly in the chest. A month later, another friend, Craig Joyner, was sitting at a red light at Chester and Gay streets when someone walked up to his car and shot him several times through the window. In September, Fowlkes’ friend Nathaniel Jackson was found on the ground in the 1200 block of Appleleaf Court, shot in the back of the head.
He talks about them in the most basic terms and gives few details. “Kenny, he was cool. He was all right.” Joyner “was an all right guy.” And Jackson, who he calls Rabbit, was “just Rabbit.” He doesn’t even know most of their full names.
But he has a full name for one. He can recite where he died, the time, the place: Tanash Kimble was murdered on Oct. 15 in the 800 block of North Bond Street in the middle of the afternoon. Kimble was one of Fowlkes’ best friends, and Fowlkes watched him die.
They knew each other for 15 years and spent pretty much every day together, hanging out on the corners, drinking, smoking weed, and talking about girls. But still, Fowlkes has to be coaxed to say anything about him. When he does, it’s mostly more of the same.
“He was a good guy,” Fowlkes says. “He was cool, real down to earth. He had fun. That’s what he liked to do.”
He agrees to talk to a reporter about Kimble, but he seems to have little to say, giving phrases instead of sentences, speaking softly with long pauses. The answers to most questions are “yeah”s or “nah”s as he rolls his hat down over his eyes and shifts in his chair. Maybe it’s because, though he wants to talk, he doesn’t want to tell.
Telling is a big issue on the streets of East Baltimore. If you tell, you’re a snitch. And few things are worse than being a snitch. Michael West, a friend of Fowlkes who got home in August 2004 from a six-year stint in Eastern Correctional Institute for armed robbery and has just started attending Gladden’s meetings, sums it up.
“There’s the government of the mainstream that say that if somebody get killed and you know something about it, it’s OK to talk about it, right?” West says. “But then there’s the government of the streets where . . . you don’t tell nothing. You seen it. You heard it. You keep it to yourself. That’s the government of the streets, and it’s totally different. It’s two different rules. And these rules ain’t written down and passed around. It’s either you know ’em or you don’t, and if you don’t know ’em then ain’t nobody going to tell you, and you’re going to be subject to the same violence that’s out there.”
Gladden chimes in: “Unless someone come through with a different way of thinking and show them exactly what’s normal, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to share information about somebody you care about.”
But even Gladden, who preaches to a room so powerfully you could be two doors away and hear his message, becomes quiet when it comes to talking about specific people who have died.
Lewis Johnson was shot and killed just around the corner from the building where Gladden holds his meetings. The 20-year-old was talking to someone in the 700 block of Belnord Avenue on July 12 when a man came out of a nearby alley and shot him repeatedly. Johnson ran to his home just a few doors away and collapsed.
Gladden says he knew Johnson well. He even spoke at his funeral. But when asked to describe him, Gladden says simply that he was a “very gifted young man, well-behaved young man.” Then he quickly turns to the topic of homicides in general, and the toll it takes on the neighborhood, to “the heart of the community,” to “negative contributors,” before finally admitting that he can’t do it. He can’t talk about the individuals: “It’s too painful to do it that way.”
That’s why we only have pieces of Tanash Kimble’s life story. His friends say mostly that he was cool and fun to hang around with. His mother refuses to say anything, sending Michael West away when he comes to ask her to talk to a reporter about her son. A memorial page on the March Funeral Homes web site offers a picture of him, a solid-looking young man with close-shaved hair and a hint of a mustache and goatee, and a brief biography—his birthday, the names of his parents and his three children, the school he attended, and where he worked.
While details of Kimble’s life are hard to come by, over the course of a few days spent with Gladden, West, and Fowlkes, the details of his October death begin to emerge. It starts as more of the same.
“He was the type that just liked to have fun and crack on people, play the dozens and all that,” Fowlkes says. And then he adds quietly, “That’s my man, and they killed him, for nothing.
“They killed him like a bitch. They shot him in his back. Yeah, he wasn’t no bitch, he didn’t deserve it,” Fowlkes says, leaning forward, his voice rising, his quiet mumble becoming clear. “I mean, if they were going to kill him, they should’ve . . . ” His voice trails off. “He didn’t deserve to die like that. Getting shot in the back—nah, nah. That ain’t how he shoulda went out.”
Fowlkes and West were hanging out with Kimble and a few other friends on Bond Street that afternoon. “Just sitting there smoking weed, tripping, and having fun,” Fowlkes recalls. “[Kimble] was talking about the girl he was trying to get with ’cause she liked me. He was asking me to hook him up with her.”
Fowlkes went down to the corner to talk to some other friends, and Kimble went the other way. “I walked down the street, I sat down—that’s all I heard was something go ‘pow.’ I’m thinking it’s a firecracker because it wasn’t that loud. So I stood up, like, ‘Man, these little kids playing with firecrackers.’” Then he heard more pops.
“And I seen Tanash running with a smile on his face, and I seen the dude behind him pointing. All I seen, I look and I just seen him pointing like this—bang bang bang bang bang. Ran down on him in the middle of the street.
“I was standing there. I froze up. And he looked right at me. Both of ’em, looked right at me.” (Fowlkes says he didn’t recognize the shooter.)
Kimble fell on the street just a few feet from Fowlkes. But when asked if he was scared, Fowlkes gives a look suggesting that the very idea is absurd. Of course not. “It just shocked me. It caught me off guard,” he says.
Gladden, Fowlkes, and West are walking through the streets of their neighborhood, pointing out sites where people died on Belnord, Jefferson, McElderry, Madeira, Monument, Monument, Monument. At some spots there are memorials—teddy bears duct-taped to street signs, rips written on walls, rust-colored handprints on light posts.
“That’s their way of expressing how they’re feeling about the homicides that haunt our community,” Gladden says. “This is a burial ground in the heart of the city.”
But most of the sites where people fell go unadorned. Fourteen people were killed this year in an area just six square blocks around the Madison Street center. Expand the range out a few blocks and the number almost doubles. All of the 14 people who were murdered right around the center were African-American men with arrest records in Baltimore City. Nine were under the age of 30. All but one was shot.
These figures aren’t unusual. In a city with 278 murders in 2004, 246 of the victims were African-American. The same number were male, and according to police data, 241 had been arrested before. The most frequent method of homicide was guns, with 213 people shot to death in Baltimore City last year.
It’s a situation that has left the young African-American men of Baltimore looking like an endangered species. They make up the largest percentage of the dead, with 135 African-American men between the ages of 18 and 29 falling last year alone. And East Baltimore in particular has felt the weight of these numbers. The Eastern Police District, the second smallest in the city, was the site of the most homicides, 55, with the expansive Northwestern District at a not-so-close second with 40.
Over the years, the Baltimore Police Department has tried various tactics to stem the violence in the Eastern District: gun buy-back programs; community-focused policing; former Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier’s 1994 Operation Midway, which featured widespread raids; and 1999’s Operation Cease Fire, which focused on violent drug gangs. In 2000, then-police Commissioner Edward Norris assigned 120 extra officers to the district. Over the years, various “zero tolerance” campaigns have been implemented. While many of these programs saw a temporary decline in violence, critics say they just moved the violence from neighborhood to neighborhood, corner to corner, and none has had any lasting effect.
And of the 278 homicides citywide in 2004, only 119 of those cases are closed. That’s a 43 percent clearance rate, which falls well below the national average of 60 percent. In the Eastern District, detectives closed 42 percent of homicide cases, leaving more than half of them open, unsolved. While David Thornton and Mathew Troy Evans were arrested in December for Kimble’s murder (only Evans has been indicted), Fowlkes doubts justice will be served.
“It don’t matter,” he says, “because ain’t nothing really going to happen. They going to get punished for what they got caught with, but for murder? I don’t think they’re going to catch any time for that.”
Of 110 Baltimore City murder cases that made it to trial during 2004 (most of them for murders committed in 2003 or earlier), 72 resulted in homicide convictions; only 21 of those cases resulted in convictions for first-degree murder.
It’s a situation that leaves many East Baltimore residents feeling that nobody cares. Watching Kimble die cemented that for Fowlkes. After Kimble was shot, Fowlkes says it took 30 minutes for help to arrive, even though they were right across the street from Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Fowlkes doesn’t know if Kimble could have been saved, but he says, “We heard him breathing. He was, ‘huh, huh,’”—Fowlkes imitates labored breathing. “We was like, ‘Hold on, yo. Hold on.’ He was, ‘huh, huh,’ and then he just stopped. He was breathing for, like, a good 15, maybe 10 minutes after they shot him. And Johns Hopkins is right across the street from where we was at, so why it took them that long to get there is beyond me. ’Cause we not in the county, we not in the suburbs. That’s why.”
When help did arrive, Fowlkes says it was less than sympathetic. The police officers at the scene “were standing around him joking, laughing, talking about shit that happened the night before or happened a couple of hours ago,” he says. “They don’t care. They don’t care. They talk that whole, ‘Oh yeah, we got up lift our black people, we got to do this, we got to do that.’ That’s bullshit. They don’t give two shits about none of us.”
When an officer came over to ask him about the murder, Fowlkes says he was almost too angry to speak: “I came real close to spitting in his face.”
He is not the only one with a story like this. Gladden remembers walking down Monument Street one day, and when he got to Madeira Street he saw a large crowd being held back by the police and a young man lying on the ground in the alley near a drainage grate. He was still breathing, and Gladden says that “they [were] just talking over the body while it’s still moving.”
Gladden says he saw none of the officers try to help the man or see to his wounds. No one yelled for help or demanded that the ambulance come quickly. “I think you only see that in movies now,” he says. “The value of life didn’t hold no significance in the mind or the hearts of those officers on that particular day on Monument Street.”
That perception has an impact on the community’s already strained relationship with the police department. Gladden says when people in the neighborhood see behavior like that he describes, “they say, ‘Look, I want nothing to do with the police department, I want nothing to do with this city, when really we should be working together as a unit, as a team. We need the city. We need the police.”
Antonio Williams, the chief of the city’s Detective Division and an 18-year veteran of the force—seven years of that in the Eastern District—was surprised to hear Fowlkes’ and Gladden’s stories.
“[That] suggests that the police, number one, take death very lightly, and number two, that the police stand around and laugh and joke when a person’s dying. And that can be nothing further from the truth,” Williams says. Police are trained to administer aid to victims the second they get to a crime scene, he says: “Our first priority is preservation and protection of life.”
If police are joking at a homicide scene, Williams says, it is, in some ways, a coping mechanism. “Unfortunately, Eastern District police have had too much experience dealing with murder scenes. So when they get there they focus, they do the job, but in the meantime, while they’re doing that job, if they’re talking about something completely unrelated to that body on the ground and they laugh, the public, from a distance, looks at that and says, ‘Oh my god, they’re horrible people, they’re laughing and this person is dying, or this person is dead.’ It’s not about that,” Williams contends. “Sometimes the only way to focus and keep from being too emotionally involved is by doing your job.”
Williams does say that the Eastern will be a major focus of the current administration. Under acting Commissioner Leonard Hamm, Williams says, the police department and the city will be taking a more holistic approach to the violence: trying to bring in social services and finding out what the neighborhood needs, addressing the root of the problem instead of just the symptoms.
“In other words,” Williams says, “instead of just saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a bunch of people out on the corner here, police go lock them up or issue them citations,’ let’s find out why these people are on the corner.”
Standing on the corner of Bond and Ashland, Fowlkes looks nervous. He fidgets and moves around from spot to spot. This is where Kimble was killed, a place Fowlkes has not been since a candlelight vigil held for his friend a few nights after he died. White splotches of wax still dot the sidewalk around the spot where his body lay.
“It’s not right,” Fowlkes says, shaking his head. “It’s not right being out here.”
“It’s just like waking up a lot of memories, just being here, because normally I don’t even come through this block,” says West, who laid his coat over his dying friend that October day. “It’s a difference between knowing it happened like if you wasn’t here, then being here.”
They point out where they were and where Kimble was. “I was walking to the corner. I was standing right there,” Fowlkes says. “They were sitting on the step, and then [Kimble] got up and went round the corner right there to pee or something. That’s when I heard the first shot, and I seen him running round the corner. And that’s when I heard the other five.”
As they talk, Fowlkes says something he hasn’t said before: “I could have stopped it.”
It’s quiet at first, but he keeps repeating it: “I think I could have stopped it. He might of got shot, but he wouldn’t have died if I wouldn’t-a froze up.”
What would he have done?
“There’s a lot of things I could have done that day,” he says. “If I wouldn’t-a froze up, dude would have never made it off of this block. He wouldn’t have even been able to shoot him six times.” He looks around the site as if imagining the actions he didn’t take. “I say he’d a shot him about three times if I wouldn’t have froze up. He wouldn’t got killed though. He wouldn’t-a died. I could have prevented the whole thing.”
A few friends see Fowlkes and West standing on the street and come up to join them. They knew Kimble, too, and as the four of them start talking, the words come out more freely.
“That was my man,” a guy with a gold tooth shining in the front of his mouth says. “He was like a brother to me. A big brother, too, and I’m older than him. We looked out for each other. Everybody that grew up with each other looked out for each other.” Others say Kimble was a smoking buddy, a riding-around buddy, a friend.
West runs a few yards down the street to Kimble’s mother’s house to see if she wants to come out and talk. She demurs—she isn’t feeling well. “She told us to really give y’all the kind of person he was,” West says.
But Fowlkes is still reliving the incident in his head. Watching himself freeze. “I still feel like a little piece of it was my fault,” he says. “I could have prevented it. ’Cause I froze up. I froze. First time ever in my life I froze up—at the wrong damn time.”
It wouldn’t have made up for Kimble’s death, West adds, but “it would have been like you did what you could have done, you know, for a friend.”
“And it’d have sent the message back to whoever he was dealing with—‘You come around here again like that, you better come with a bunch of motherfuckers. You better come correct,’” Fowlkes says. “That’s a message I was going to send to ’em.”
“Because it wasn’t like Tanash out there doing so much cruddy stuff that this should happen to him,” West says. “He was a good dude. I mean, you needed something and he had it, it was yours.”
Fowlkes agrees: “He looked out for you as much as he possibly can.”
Now Gladden is trying to look out for Fowlkes and West, steering them toward GED and apprenticeship programs. Fowlkes wants to be a landscaper. West has grander plans. He says he wants to create his own neighborhood, a safe one, with schools, restaurants, and maybe a place like the Rose Street Community Center.
Still, Fowlkes and West paint a bleak picture of East Baltimore. They list the problems and then list the people who don’t care enough to fix them. It sounds like there’s no hope. But Gladden sees it differently.
“Listening to them express themselves in a different way is hope,” he says. “To see them not on streets, to see them not with guns and drugs in their hands, to see them speaking about the things they’re speaking about now, that’s a great fire of hope.” A hope that, at least, no one will have to drip candle wax on a spot of sidewalk where these two men fell. ¶ 7:07 PM 2 comments
Young Men Struggle to Find Meaning in a Neighborhood Where Homicide is Routine
By Anna Ditkoff
Two hundred and seventy-eight people were murdered in Baltimore City in 2004. That’s an average of five people a week. They were shot down in the street, executed in cars,or killed by their own parents. And while the carnage affected the city from the Northwest to the Southeast, some areas were harder hit than others. Put a pushpin in a map of Baltimore for each of the dead and parts of East Baltimore all but disappear under clusters of tiny plastic beads.
In the heart of East Baltimore, in an area surrounding Johns Hopkins Hospital about a mile and a half square, 30 people were murdered in 2004. And for some of the people who live in those neighborhoods, homicides have become so commonplace that tears are few and far between as they speak of those they’ve lost. They are more likely to just shake their heads.
Terrell Fowlkes, a wiry young man who favors baggy pants and an enormous puffy jacket that make him seem much larger than he is, buried five of his friends last year. One of them died right in front of him. As he runs down the list of the dead—Kenny, Craig Mac, Rabbit, Troy, Tanash—he says each name without emotion as though he were going through a grocery list. When asked how he feels about losing so many people, he leans back in his chair and says simply, “It’s messed up. It ain’t right but I can’t do nothing. I can’t change it.”
Talk to a number of people in the surrounding community and they will confirm a long list of those they knew who died in its streets in recent years. Ask them to talk about those people and their answers are short: “He was cool.” “He was down to earth.” “A good kid.” Ask them for more and they grow quiet. What is there to say?
These are people living in a war zone—watching friends, family, and acquaintances die is a part of their existence. Given so much death, words come hard.
Walker Gladden is a man of words, a man of mantras. Certain phrases pepper his speech: “the heart of the community,” “agents of change,” “negative contributors.” Gladden is the youth coordinator for the Rose Street Community Center, an East Baltimore organization that helps ex-offenders reintegrate into society and works to keep others off the street and out of jail. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Gladden uses his words to try and reach an ever-changing group of young men from the neighborhood. Many of these men, most of them in their 20s, have been on the streets and in the drug trade since they were in elementary school. Few have graduated from high school or held down regular jobs. They crowd into the sparse living room of Rose Street Community Center’s Madison Street transitional housing facility, sitting on sagging black couches and folding chairs, keeping on their caps and jackets to hold off the cold that drafts in through the center’s ever-open door. And they listen to Gladden’s words.
“Your lives are so precious,” he tells them. “Everyone in this room is a genius . . . and one thing we know for sure is we don’t want nobody to be the next homicide victim.”
Gladden has been struggling to do something about the once-again escalating homicide rate for years. He’s sued Martin O’Malley for $1 four times since October 2003 in an attempt to hold the mayor accountable for his failed promise to get the homicide rate down to 175 a year (the first three cases were dismissed). Gladden has gone to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to try and get homicides in Baltimore declared an epidemic in hopes of capitalizing on the additional funds and programs that such a designation would bring to the city. He has even been handing out a letter to people in the community begging those still on the street to change their lives.
But on a cold December day at Rose Street, he is focused just on the guys in the room. Some of them are part of Gladden’s program. They are getting their GEDs, going to college, working in apprenticeship programs. Some are still out on the streets. They are weighing their options, trying to decide what direction to go in, as they listen to Gladden and collect the $5 he gives each for coming.
Gladden understands where they are coming from. A large man in sweatpants and a knit cap with pens jutting out from underneath, he has been where they are. He was born and raised in East Baltimore. He spent his youth on the streets, in and out of juvenile facilities and, as he got older, prison. After his last stint in jail five years ago, when he served just over two years of a 12-year sentence on drug and burglary charges, he went to the Rose Street Community Center, where founder and former prison guard Clayton Guyton helped show him another way. But Gladden remembers a time not so long ago when he thought he would be on the streets forever, referring to the streets like an old flame. “I loved her,” he says. “I would have died for her.”
A lover that was hard to leave, he says, because she was all he knew. Back then, he didn’t have long-term goals because he didn’t think he had a long term to worry about. “You see 300 people die in 365 days, and what are my chances?” Gladden asks. “As a young man I didn’t think I would see 30, and I realized that I didn’t mind dying because everyone around me was dying anyway.”
He sees the same sense of fatality in the men that come to his meetings. “Death has become very normal in the thinking system of the youth that live in the heart of Baltimore City,” he says. “They move on [mentally and emotionally], because it becomes a part of the norm. It’s not normal for life to be taken the ways it’s being taken. That’s not normal at all.”
That’s what he tries to teach these young men—that it isn’t normal, that things can and will change for them. They’ve made the first step by coming in, he says to them: “The only thing you have to do now is not fear change.”
But the men, most of whom sit with their heads down as Gladden talks, aren’t entirely sold. Change seems, if not impossible, highly unlikely.
“Them police aren’t worrying about nobody killing nobody,” one says.
“Nobody care about us,” another says.
Gladden’s response? “Guess what? We care.” He points to his 15-year-old son, Walker, who sits at the foot of the staircase and says, “The same way I feel about his life, I feel about every one of you. The same way I don’t want anything to happen to him, I don’t want anything to happen to you.
“I’d lay down my life for anyone in this room,” he says, and then pauses, “under the right circumstances. You rob a bank, you want my help—I’ll, um, see you later.”
Slumped on a couch, Terrell Fowlkes laughs. He’s been coming to Rose Street for four years, but he says he only stopped dealing drugs last month. After a close friend stole from him, the pleas from his mother and 7-year-old daughter finally had an effect.
“I’m trying to do the right thing for a minute,” he says, stretching out the word “trying.” “If it don’t work, I got to go back to doing what I got to do.”
Fowlkes is a handsome man with big brown eyes and the kind of mischievous smile that makes him seem like he’s constantly up to something. There is an intensity about him—he tends to keep his head down and chooses his words carefully, taking long pauses before offering a sentence or two. But he’s the kind of person who, when he does talk, you listen.
Fowlkes grew up around Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus. At 27, he’s the oldest of 12, including a sister by his mother, with whom he grew up, and nine brothers and one sister by his father. But Fowlkes says he only really knows six of his siblings: “I never saw half of them. They walk up on me today or tomorrow, I wouldn’t know who they was. And if they were to say they were my brother, I still wouldn’t carry ’em like family.”
He got involved in the drug trade when he was 9, holding weed for others. “I kept seeing everybody making all the money, getting all fresh, so I wanted to do that,” he recalls. “Then somebody said, ‘Come on, come with me. We’re going to do this.’ That’s how I started.”
By the time he was 13 he was working for himself, selling heroin and cocaine. He says he’s made as much as $50,000 in a day on the right block with the right package. And his life style reflected his success: “I was young, dumb, and full of come. I was tricking, I was buying cars, clothes, jewelry.”
After a few years, he started putting money in the bank, but he says that money was seized by police. He’s been arrested at least nine times on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to possession with intent to distribute. He was kicked out of two high schools in a row. In the mid-’90s, he was kicked out of Patterson High School for participating in what he describes as a riot. About a year later he was expelled from Francis M. Wood Alternative High for fighting.
Fowlkes says he’s been shot at on several occasions. Once, when he was 17, a bullet connected, hitting him in the ass. And over the years, he says he’s lost many friends to murder, the first one when he was just 10 years old. But he insists it’s no big deal.
“I’ve been growing up around it my whole life,” he says. “The first couple times I seen it, yeah, it shocked me. But it’s nothing now.”
In February 2004, Fowlkes’ friend Kenneth Peay was shot in the forehead in the 1500 block of Lester Morton Court. In June, Fowlkes’ cousin Troy White was found dead in the 1200 block of Ashland Avenue, shot repeatedly in the chest. A month later, another friend, Craig Joyner, was sitting at a red light at Chester and Gay streets when someone walked up to his car and shot him several times through the window. In September, Fowlkes’ friend Nathaniel Jackson was found on the ground in the 1200 block of Appleleaf Court, shot in the back of the head.
He talks about them in the most basic terms and gives few details. “Kenny, he was cool. He was all right.” Joyner “was an all right guy.” And Jackson, who he calls Rabbit, was “just Rabbit.” He doesn’t even know most of their full names.
But he has a full name for one. He can recite where he died, the time, the place: Tanash Kimble was murdered on Oct. 15 in the 800 block of North Bond Street in the middle of the afternoon. Kimble was one of Fowlkes’ best friends, and Fowlkes watched him die.
They knew each other for 15 years and spent pretty much every day together, hanging out on the corners, drinking, smoking weed, and talking about girls. But still, Fowlkes has to be coaxed to say anything about him. When he does, it’s mostly more of the same.
“He was a good guy,” Fowlkes says. “He was cool, real down to earth. He had fun. That’s what he liked to do.”
He agrees to talk to a reporter about Kimble, but he seems to have little to say, giving phrases instead of sentences, speaking softly with long pauses. The answers to most questions are “yeah”s or “nah”s as he rolls his hat down over his eyes and shifts in his chair. Maybe it’s because, though he wants to talk, he doesn’t want to tell.
Telling is a big issue on the streets of East Baltimore. If you tell, you’re a snitch. And few things are worse than being a snitch. Michael West, a friend of Fowlkes who got home in August 2004 from a six-year stint in Eastern Correctional Institute for armed robbery and has just started attending Gladden’s meetings, sums it up.
“There’s the government of the mainstream that say that if somebody get killed and you know something about it, it’s OK to talk about it, right?” West says. “But then there’s the government of the streets where . . . you don’t tell nothing. You seen it. You heard it. You keep it to yourself. That’s the government of the streets, and it’s totally different. It’s two different rules. And these rules ain’t written down and passed around. It’s either you know ’em or you don’t, and if you don’t know ’em then ain’t nobody going to tell you, and you’re going to be subject to the same violence that’s out there.”
Gladden chimes in: “Unless someone come through with a different way of thinking and show them exactly what’s normal, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to share information about somebody you care about.”
But even Gladden, who preaches to a room so powerfully you could be two doors away and hear his message, becomes quiet when it comes to talking about specific people who have died.
Lewis Johnson was shot and killed just around the corner from the building where Gladden holds his meetings. The 20-year-old was talking to someone in the 700 block of Belnord Avenue on July 12 when a man came out of a nearby alley and shot him repeatedly. Johnson ran to his home just a few doors away and collapsed.
Gladden says he knew Johnson well. He even spoke at his funeral. But when asked to describe him, Gladden says simply that he was a “very gifted young man, well-behaved young man.” Then he quickly turns to the topic of homicides in general, and the toll it takes on the neighborhood, to “the heart of the community,” to “negative contributors,” before finally admitting that he can’t do it. He can’t talk about the individuals: “It’s too painful to do it that way.”
That’s why we only have pieces of Tanash Kimble’s life story. His friends say mostly that he was cool and fun to hang around with. His mother refuses to say anything, sending Michael West away when he comes to ask her to talk to a reporter about her son. A memorial page on the March Funeral Homes web site offers a picture of him, a solid-looking young man with close-shaved hair and a hint of a mustache and goatee, and a brief biography—his birthday, the names of his parents and his three children, the school he attended, and where he worked.
While details of Kimble’s life are hard to come by, over the course of a few days spent with Gladden, West, and Fowlkes, the details of his October death begin to emerge. It starts as more of the same.
“He was the type that just liked to have fun and crack on people, play the dozens and all that,” Fowlkes says. And then he adds quietly, “That’s my man, and they killed him, for nothing.
“They killed him like a bitch. They shot him in his back. Yeah, he wasn’t no bitch, he didn’t deserve it,” Fowlkes says, leaning forward, his voice rising, his quiet mumble becoming clear. “I mean, if they were going to kill him, they should’ve . . . ” His voice trails off. “He didn’t deserve to die like that. Getting shot in the back—nah, nah. That ain’t how he shoulda went out.”
Fowlkes and West were hanging out with Kimble and a few other friends on Bond Street that afternoon. “Just sitting there smoking weed, tripping, and having fun,” Fowlkes recalls. “[Kimble] was talking about the girl he was trying to get with ’cause she liked me. He was asking me to hook him up with her.”
Fowlkes went down to the corner to talk to some other friends, and Kimble went the other way. “I walked down the street, I sat down—that’s all I heard was something go ‘pow.’ I’m thinking it’s a firecracker because it wasn’t that loud. So I stood up, like, ‘Man, these little kids playing with firecrackers.’” Then he heard more pops.
“And I seen Tanash running with a smile on his face, and I seen the dude behind him pointing. All I seen, I look and I just seen him pointing like this—bang bang bang bang bang. Ran down on him in the middle of the street.
“I was standing there. I froze up. And he looked right at me. Both of ’em, looked right at me.” (Fowlkes says he didn’t recognize the shooter.)
Kimble fell on the street just a few feet from Fowlkes. But when asked if he was scared, Fowlkes gives a look suggesting that the very idea is absurd. Of course not. “It just shocked me. It caught me off guard,” he says.
Gladden, Fowlkes, and West are walking through the streets of their neighborhood, pointing out sites where people died on Belnord, Jefferson, McElderry, Madeira, Monument, Monument, Monument. At some spots there are memorials—teddy bears duct-taped to street signs, rips written on walls, rust-colored handprints on light posts.
“That’s their way of expressing how they’re feeling about the homicides that haunt our community,” Gladden says. “This is a burial ground in the heart of the city.”
But most of the sites where people fell go unadorned. Fourteen people were killed this year in an area just six square blocks around the Madison Street center. Expand the range out a few blocks and the number almost doubles. All of the 14 people who were murdered right around the center were African-American men with arrest records in Baltimore City. Nine were under the age of 30. All but one was shot.
These figures aren’t unusual. In a city with 278 murders in 2004, 246 of the victims were African-American. The same number were male, and according to police data, 241 had been arrested before. The most frequent method of homicide was guns, with 213 people shot to death in Baltimore City last year.
It’s a situation that has left the young African-American men of Baltimore looking like an endangered species. They make up the largest percentage of the dead, with 135 African-American men between the ages of 18 and 29 falling last year alone. And East Baltimore in particular has felt the weight of these numbers. The Eastern Police District, the second smallest in the city, was the site of the most homicides, 55, with the expansive Northwestern District at a not-so-close second with 40.
Over the years, the Baltimore Police Department has tried various tactics to stem the violence in the Eastern District: gun buy-back programs; community-focused policing; former Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier’s 1994 Operation Midway, which featured widespread raids; and 1999’s Operation Cease Fire, which focused on violent drug gangs. In 2000, then-police Commissioner Edward Norris assigned 120 extra officers to the district. Over the years, various “zero tolerance” campaigns have been implemented. While many of these programs saw a temporary decline in violence, critics say they just moved the violence from neighborhood to neighborhood, corner to corner, and none has had any lasting effect.
And of the 278 homicides citywide in 2004, only 119 of those cases are closed. That’s a 43 percent clearance rate, which falls well below the national average of 60 percent. In the Eastern District, detectives closed 42 percent of homicide cases, leaving more than half of them open, unsolved. While David Thornton and Mathew Troy Evans were arrested in December for Kimble’s murder (only Evans has been indicted), Fowlkes doubts justice will be served.
“It don’t matter,” he says, “because ain’t nothing really going to happen. They going to get punished for what they got caught with, but for murder? I don’t think they’re going to catch any time for that.”
Of 110 Baltimore City murder cases that made it to trial during 2004 (most of them for murders committed in 2003 or earlier), 72 resulted in homicide convictions; only 21 of those cases resulted in convictions for first-degree murder.
It’s a situation that leaves many East Baltimore residents feeling that nobody cares. Watching Kimble die cemented that for Fowlkes. After Kimble was shot, Fowlkes says it took 30 minutes for help to arrive, even though they were right across the street from Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Fowlkes doesn’t know if Kimble could have been saved, but he says, “We heard him breathing. He was, ‘huh, huh,’”—Fowlkes imitates labored breathing. “We was like, ‘Hold on, yo. Hold on.’ He was, ‘huh, huh,’ and then he just stopped. He was breathing for, like, a good 15, maybe 10 minutes after they shot him. And Johns Hopkins is right across the street from where we was at, so why it took them that long to get there is beyond me. ’Cause we not in the county, we not in the suburbs. That’s why.”
When help did arrive, Fowlkes says it was less than sympathetic. The police officers at the scene “were standing around him joking, laughing, talking about shit that happened the night before or happened a couple of hours ago,” he says. “They don’t care. They don’t care. They talk that whole, ‘Oh yeah, we got up lift our black people, we got to do this, we got to do that.’ That’s bullshit. They don’t give two shits about none of us.”
When an officer came over to ask him about the murder, Fowlkes says he was almost too angry to speak: “I came real close to spitting in his face.”
He is not the only one with a story like this. Gladden remembers walking down Monument Street one day, and when he got to Madeira Street he saw a large crowd being held back by the police and a young man lying on the ground in the alley near a drainage grate. He was still breathing, and Gladden says that “they [were] just talking over the body while it’s still moving.”
Gladden says he saw none of the officers try to help the man or see to his wounds. No one yelled for help or demanded that the ambulance come quickly. “I think you only see that in movies now,” he says. “The value of life didn’t hold no significance in the mind or the hearts of those officers on that particular day on Monument Street.”
That perception has an impact on the community’s already strained relationship with the police department. Gladden says when people in the neighborhood see behavior like that he describes, “they say, ‘Look, I want nothing to do with the police department, I want nothing to do with this city, when really we should be working together as a unit, as a team. We need the city. We need the police.”
Antonio Williams, the chief of the city’s Detective Division and an 18-year veteran of the force—seven years of that in the Eastern District—was surprised to hear Fowlkes’ and Gladden’s stories.
“[That] suggests that the police, number one, take death very lightly, and number two, that the police stand around and laugh and joke when a person’s dying. And that can be nothing further from the truth,” Williams says. Police are trained to administer aid to victims the second they get to a crime scene, he says: “Our first priority is preservation and protection of life.”
If police are joking at a homicide scene, Williams says, it is, in some ways, a coping mechanism. “Unfortunately, Eastern District police have had too much experience dealing with murder scenes. So when they get there they focus, they do the job, but in the meantime, while they’re doing that job, if they’re talking about something completely unrelated to that body on the ground and they laugh, the public, from a distance, looks at that and says, ‘Oh my god, they’re horrible people, they’re laughing and this person is dying, or this person is dead.’ It’s not about that,” Williams contends. “Sometimes the only way to focus and keep from being too emotionally involved is by doing your job.”
Williams does say that the Eastern will be a major focus of the current administration. Under acting Commissioner Leonard Hamm, Williams says, the police department and the city will be taking a more holistic approach to the violence: trying to bring in social services and finding out what the neighborhood needs, addressing the root of the problem instead of just the symptoms.
“In other words,” Williams says, “instead of just saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a bunch of people out on the corner here, police go lock them up or issue them citations,’ let’s find out why these people are on the corner.”
Standing on the corner of Bond and Ashland, Fowlkes looks nervous. He fidgets and moves around from spot to spot. This is where Kimble was killed, a place Fowlkes has not been since a candlelight vigil held for his friend a few nights after he died. White splotches of wax still dot the sidewalk around the spot where his body lay.
“It’s not right,” Fowlkes says, shaking his head. “It’s not right being out here.”
“It’s just like waking up a lot of memories, just being here, because normally I don’t even come through this block,” says West, who laid his coat over his dying friend that October day. “It’s a difference between knowing it happened like if you wasn’t here, then being here.”
They point out where they were and where Kimble was. “I was walking to the corner. I was standing right there,” Fowlkes says. “They were sitting on the step, and then [Kimble] got up and went round the corner right there to pee or something. That’s when I heard the first shot, and I seen him running round the corner. And that’s when I heard the other five.”
As they talk, Fowlkes says something he hasn’t said before: “I could have stopped it.”
It’s quiet at first, but he keeps repeating it: “I think I could have stopped it. He might of got shot, but he wouldn’t have died if I wouldn’t-a froze up.”
What would he have done?
“There’s a lot of things I could have done that day,” he says. “If I wouldn’t-a froze up, dude would have never made it off of this block. He wouldn’t have even been able to shoot him six times.” He looks around the site as if imagining the actions he didn’t take. “I say he’d a shot him about three times if I wouldn’t have froze up. He wouldn’t got killed though. He wouldn’t-a died. I could have prevented the whole thing.”
A few friends see Fowlkes and West standing on the street and come up to join them. They knew Kimble, too, and as the four of them start talking, the words come out more freely.
“That was my man,” a guy with a gold tooth shining in the front of his mouth says. “He was like a brother to me. A big brother, too, and I’m older than him. We looked out for each other. Everybody that grew up with each other looked out for each other.” Others say Kimble was a smoking buddy, a riding-around buddy, a friend.
West runs a few yards down the street to Kimble’s mother’s house to see if she wants to come out and talk. She demurs—she isn’t feeling well. “She told us to really give y’all the kind of person he was,” West says.
But Fowlkes is still reliving the incident in his head. Watching himself freeze. “I still feel like a little piece of it was my fault,” he says. “I could have prevented it. ’Cause I froze up. I froze. First time ever in my life I froze up—at the wrong damn time.”
It wouldn’t have made up for Kimble’s death, West adds, but “it would have been like you did what you could have done, you know, for a friend.”
“And it’d have sent the message back to whoever he was dealing with—‘You come around here again like that, you better come with a bunch of motherfuckers. You better come correct,’” Fowlkes says. “That’s a message I was going to send to ’em.”
“Because it wasn’t like Tanash out there doing so much cruddy stuff that this should happen to him,” West says. “He was a good dude. I mean, you needed something and he had it, it was yours.”
Fowlkes agrees: “He looked out for you as much as he possibly can.”
Now Gladden is trying to look out for Fowlkes and West, steering them toward GED and apprenticeship programs. Fowlkes wants to be a landscaper. West has grander plans. He says he wants to create his own neighborhood, a safe one, with schools, restaurants, and maybe a place like the Rose Street Community Center.
Still, Fowlkes and West paint a bleak picture of East Baltimore. They list the problems and then list the people who don’t care enough to fix them. It sounds like there’s no hope. But Gladden sees it differently.
“Listening to them express themselves in a different way is hope,” he says. “To see them not on streets, to see them not with guns and drugs in their hands, to see them speaking about the things they’re speaking about now, that’s a great fire of hope.” A hope that, at least, no one will have to drip candle wax on a spot of sidewalk where these two men fell. ¶ 7:07 PM 2 comments
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 0 comments
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 0 comments
A Brief Economic History of Modern Baltimore
In 1950, Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country, home to 950,000 people and a thriving manufacturing and shipping industry. As the economic base of Maryland, Baltimore provided 75% of all jobs to workers in the region. Many were manufacturing jobs in textiles and automobile production. The region’s economic powerhouse, however, was the steel industry.
The Rise and Fall of Steel in Baltimore — Sparrows Point
Steel was brought to the City with the construction of a steel mill and shipyard by the Pennsylvania Steel Company in 1893, and came to dominate the local economy following the company’s acquisition by Bethlehem Steel in 1916.
Along with the plant, the company established a residential community called Sparrow Point. Workers from rural Maryland and Pennsylvania and the South, of Welsh, Irish, German, Russian, Hungarian and African-American descent, were attracted to the promise of high pay of industrial employment, and many came to live in the company town. There, they enjoyed low rent (between $4 – $14 a month for a nine room house) and free home maintenance, company-subsidized churches and schools, easy access to credit, and a strong sense of community.3
The company segregated residents by race and by rank, which determined the size and location of houses. Community high schools prepared steelworkers’ sons for jobs at the mill, reserving training in skilled jobs for whites. Still, steel work offered new opportunities for advancement to families of all backgrounds; the first school for African-American children, the Bragg School, produced many black business leaders and educators who grew up in Sparrow Point.
By the 1930s, Bethlehem’s steelworkers had outgrown Sparrow Point, and began to move to Dundalk and into Baltimore, where immigrant Finns, Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians and Italians settled in Highlandtown, and African-American workers settled in Old West Baltimore.
When the CIO set out to organize the steel industry by establishing the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, their first campaign to organize Bethlehem steelworkers found its greatest support among those newer transplants living outside of the company town. Foreign-born whites, many of whom had participated in unions before coming to Baltimore, and African-Americans, who in 1933 had launched a successful boycott of stores that refused to hire black employees, threw collective weight behind the organizing drive at Sparrow Point.
By 1941, the 15,714 employees of Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore had won the right to union representation. Soon, the steelworkers enjoyed health benefits, vacation and sick leave, and what one historian calls, “decent pay for one of the nation’s most dangerous jobs.”4
During World War II, the steel industry underwent a production boom. Bethlehem’s mill at Sparrow Point, which built cargo and transport ships, expanded quickly to meet supply needs. The mill reached its peak employment in 1959, with 35,000 workers.5 Second- or third-generation steelworkers earning union wages could achieve financial independence with middle-class living standards, save for the future, and afford higher education for their children to prepare them for employment beyond the steel mill.
In short, union representation helped to transform an industry with a self-replicating workforce of unskilled workers into a means for economic and social advancement.
The latter part of the 20th Century saw a nationwide decline in the manufacturing sector, and Bethlehem Steel was no exception to this trend. In 1971, when Sparrows Point was the largest steel mill in the country, a surge in steel imports led to massive layoffs among domestic producers. Three thousand workers at Sparrow Point lost their jobs that year, followed by another 7,000 in 1975.6
By the late 1980s, the workforce had dwindled to 8,000, accompanied by a decline in wages and benefits as the union conceded on many pay and benefits issues.7 Baltimore workers could no longer look to steel as a source of middle-class wages and job security.
The story of Bethlehem’s steel mill at Sparrows Point is a microcosm of economic changes that profoundly affected Baltimore and other “rust belt” cities across the US during this period. The manufacturing industries, having long been the economic base for employment and output for nearly a century, dwindled and disappeared.
Baltimore lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs between 1950 and 1995, 75% of its industrial employment — not to mention most of the jobs with union representation. Currently, only 6% of all jobs in the City are in manufacturing. The collapse of industry led to a number of changes in the demographic makeup of the City and the surrounding region, contributing to a crisis in urban poverty that lingers today.
The Great Decline into Post-Industrial Poverty
As factories bled manufacturing jobs, Baltimore bled residents: nearly one-third of its population left between 1950 and 2000.9 Businesses fled the City, followed by workers, and Baltimore began to lose its stature as the economic hub of central Maryland.
The City’s share of the region’s manufacturing employment had dropped from 75% in 1954 to 30% in 1995, while its share of the region’s retail sales fell from 50% to 18% in 1992.10
As the City’s population shrank to 657,000 by 1997, Baltimore’s suburbs grew from 387,656 residents in 1950 to over 1.8 million in 1997. Once the population center of central Maryland, by the end of the century, Baltimore contained only a quarter of the region’s total population.
Major Demographic Changes
Contributing to the suburbanization of the central Maryland region were changes in the racial makeup of the City’s population and the phenomenon of “white flight.”
Beginning in the early 20th Century, African-Americans from the rural South, many with sharecropping backgrounds, began moving north in great numbers. Baltimore became a major destination for southern blacks fleeing poverty and Jim Crow, seeking jobs and a better place to raise their children.
Northern migration transformed the makeup of Baltimore’s population. Prior to 1900, predominantly African-American neighborhoods did not exist in Baltimore: black residents were spread out throughout the City, and no single ward was more than one-third black.11 Between 1950 and 1970, Baltimore’s African-American population almost doubled, while whites moved away from the City. As a result, by 1997, Baltimore had gone from less than one-quarter to nearly two-thirds black.
Early on, black neighborhoods were largely confined to the areas directly northeast and northwest of downtown, but as more people moved in, these neighborhoods expanded into previously white neighborhoods. Middle-class whites reacted to these changes with uncertainty and alarm.
Urban developers preyed on racial anxieties in order to maximize their profits from housing sales. In areas close to expanding black neighborhoods, real estate agents would float generous offers to the first white residents willing to sell their houses, which they would quickly sell or rent to black tenants. Then, agents would use the presence of new residents to play up fears of racial change among the remaining white residents. Often they would threaten white residents with the prospect of lower property values for those who would be the last to leave.
One historian quotes a white former resident describing the change: “It was gradual — then a rush.… A lot of people said they would never sell their houses to blacks, and they were the first ones to do it.”12 Blockbusting is now illegal but the process was effective and extremely profitable for developers. In 1969, the Activists, a fair housing coalition, discovered that one developer, the Morris Goldseker Company, had bought homes north of Edmondson Avenue for an average of $7,320 and sold them immediately for $12,387, exacting a 69% markup from black home buyers.
Life was not easy for new residents. Black Baltimoreans continued to face discrimination, and were affected by poverty, unemployment, crime, and housing deterioration to a disproportionate degree compared to white residents. While the poverty rate for whites in the City was about 10% in 1960, it was roughly three times higher for blacks. Baltimore’s crime rate went up steadily through the 1960s, and by 1970, the City had one of the highest homicide rates in the country.
For many longtime residents, this decade — punctuated by the 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King — was the turning point. Middle-class whites began moving further and further towards the edges of the City, and increasingly began to look outside the city for an enclave apart from black expansion and social unrest. While in 1950, almost two-thirds of the region’s white population lived in Baltimore, only 12.5% lived in the City by 1997.
Flight of the Black Middle Class
Exacerbating conditions was the subsequent flight from the City of middle-class African-Americans. Increasingly, Baltimore’s black middle class followed white Baltimoreans who had fled to the suburbs before them. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of African-Americans living in the City declined for the first time, while the most recent census report shows a decline in Baltimore’s black population roughly equal to that of its white population.13 Now, after decades of population drain, the characteristic that defines the City’s polarization from the suburbs is not race, but economic class.
Rise of the Service Sector
With the decline of manufacturing, the service sector came to be the dominant base of employment for Baltimore City residents. Today, service-providing jobs account for over 90% of all jobs in Baltimore City.14 Such jobs have a heavily minority workforce; one study found that in 1990, 71% of low-wage service workers in Baltimore were African-American, though African-Americans represented only 59% of the City’s population.15
In many positions, the majority of workers are women; according to the same report, women filled 83% of administrative support positions and 84% of personal services positions. Three-quarters of the women included in the survey who supported a family were the sole source of income for that household. Service industries such as hospitals, nursing homes, and tourism had become the primary source of employment for poor and minority workers.
Service jobs are largely characterized by low pay, high turnover rates, irregular or part-time schedules, lack of benefits, job insecurity, and lack of union representation. Few offer vocational training or skills-building opportunities for advancement. Low pay forces many service workers to work second jobs, increasing their weekly work hours to more than 60 in some cases. Also, many workplaces are located far from the neighborhoods where service workers live, adding to transportation and child care costs for working families.
In a city an increasingly poor and minority population, the low-wage service sector has became the principal determinant of the economic status of Baltimore City residents. The growing concentration of urban poverty and the rise of low-wage service economy have at once reinforced one another and exacerbated poor living conditions for urban workers. ¶ 6:28 PM 0 comments
In 1950, Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country, home to 950,000 people and a thriving manufacturing and shipping industry. As the economic base of Maryland, Baltimore provided 75% of all jobs to workers in the region. Many were manufacturing jobs in textiles and automobile production. The region’s economic powerhouse, however, was the steel industry.
The Rise and Fall of Steel in Baltimore — Sparrows Point
Steel was brought to the City with the construction of a steel mill and shipyard by the Pennsylvania Steel Company in 1893, and came to dominate the local economy following the company’s acquisition by Bethlehem Steel in 1916.
Along with the plant, the company established a residential community called Sparrow Point. Workers from rural Maryland and Pennsylvania and the South, of Welsh, Irish, German, Russian, Hungarian and African-American descent, were attracted to the promise of high pay of industrial employment, and many came to live in the company town. There, they enjoyed low rent (between $4 – $14 a month for a nine room house) and free home maintenance, company-subsidized churches and schools, easy access to credit, and a strong sense of community.3
The company segregated residents by race and by rank, which determined the size and location of houses. Community high schools prepared steelworkers’ sons for jobs at the mill, reserving training in skilled jobs for whites. Still, steel work offered new opportunities for advancement to families of all backgrounds; the first school for African-American children, the Bragg School, produced many black business leaders and educators who grew up in Sparrow Point.
By the 1930s, Bethlehem’s steelworkers had outgrown Sparrow Point, and began to move to Dundalk and into Baltimore, where immigrant Finns, Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians and Italians settled in Highlandtown, and African-American workers settled in Old West Baltimore.
When the CIO set out to organize the steel industry by establishing the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, their first campaign to organize Bethlehem steelworkers found its greatest support among those newer transplants living outside of the company town. Foreign-born whites, many of whom had participated in unions before coming to Baltimore, and African-Americans, who in 1933 had launched a successful boycott of stores that refused to hire black employees, threw collective weight behind the organizing drive at Sparrow Point.
By 1941, the 15,714 employees of Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore had won the right to union representation. Soon, the steelworkers enjoyed health benefits, vacation and sick leave, and what one historian calls, “decent pay for one of the nation’s most dangerous jobs.”4
During World War II, the steel industry underwent a production boom. Bethlehem’s mill at Sparrow Point, which built cargo and transport ships, expanded quickly to meet supply needs. The mill reached its peak employment in 1959, with 35,000 workers.5 Second- or third-generation steelworkers earning union wages could achieve financial independence with middle-class living standards, save for the future, and afford higher education for their children to prepare them for employment beyond the steel mill.
In short, union representation helped to transform an industry with a self-replicating workforce of unskilled workers into a means for economic and social advancement.
The latter part of the 20th Century saw a nationwide decline in the manufacturing sector, and Bethlehem Steel was no exception to this trend. In 1971, when Sparrows Point was the largest steel mill in the country, a surge in steel imports led to massive layoffs among domestic producers. Three thousand workers at Sparrow Point lost their jobs that year, followed by another 7,000 in 1975.6
By the late 1980s, the workforce had dwindled to 8,000, accompanied by a decline in wages and benefits as the union conceded on many pay and benefits issues.7 Baltimore workers could no longer look to steel as a source of middle-class wages and job security.
The story of Bethlehem’s steel mill at Sparrows Point is a microcosm of economic changes that profoundly affected Baltimore and other “rust belt” cities across the US during this period. The manufacturing industries, having long been the economic base for employment and output for nearly a century, dwindled and disappeared.
Baltimore lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs between 1950 and 1995, 75% of its industrial employment — not to mention most of the jobs with union representation. Currently, only 6% of all jobs in the City are in manufacturing. The collapse of industry led to a number of changes in the demographic makeup of the City and the surrounding region, contributing to a crisis in urban poverty that lingers today.
The Great Decline into Post-Industrial Poverty
As factories bled manufacturing jobs, Baltimore bled residents: nearly one-third of its population left between 1950 and 2000.9 Businesses fled the City, followed by workers, and Baltimore began to lose its stature as the economic hub of central Maryland.
The City’s share of the region’s manufacturing employment had dropped from 75% in 1954 to 30% in 1995, while its share of the region’s retail sales fell from 50% to 18% in 1992.10
As the City’s population shrank to 657,000 by 1997, Baltimore’s suburbs grew from 387,656 residents in 1950 to over 1.8 million in 1997. Once the population center of central Maryland, by the end of the century, Baltimore contained only a quarter of the region’s total population.
Major Demographic Changes
Contributing to the suburbanization of the central Maryland region were changes in the racial makeup of the City’s population and the phenomenon of “white flight.”
Beginning in the early 20th Century, African-Americans from the rural South, many with sharecropping backgrounds, began moving north in great numbers. Baltimore became a major destination for southern blacks fleeing poverty and Jim Crow, seeking jobs and a better place to raise their children.
Northern migration transformed the makeup of Baltimore’s population. Prior to 1900, predominantly African-American neighborhoods did not exist in Baltimore: black residents were spread out throughout the City, and no single ward was more than one-third black.11 Between 1950 and 1970, Baltimore’s African-American population almost doubled, while whites moved away from the City. As a result, by 1997, Baltimore had gone from less than one-quarter to nearly two-thirds black.
Early on, black neighborhoods were largely confined to the areas directly northeast and northwest of downtown, but as more people moved in, these neighborhoods expanded into previously white neighborhoods. Middle-class whites reacted to these changes with uncertainty and alarm.
Urban developers preyed on racial anxieties in order to maximize their profits from housing sales. In areas close to expanding black neighborhoods, real estate agents would float generous offers to the first white residents willing to sell their houses, which they would quickly sell or rent to black tenants. Then, agents would use the presence of new residents to play up fears of racial change among the remaining white residents. Often they would threaten white residents with the prospect of lower property values for those who would be the last to leave.
One historian quotes a white former resident describing the change: “It was gradual — then a rush.… A lot of people said they would never sell their houses to blacks, and they were the first ones to do it.”12 Blockbusting is now illegal but the process was effective and extremely profitable for developers. In 1969, the Activists, a fair housing coalition, discovered that one developer, the Morris Goldseker Company, had bought homes north of Edmondson Avenue for an average of $7,320 and sold them immediately for $12,387, exacting a 69% markup from black home buyers.
Life was not easy for new residents. Black Baltimoreans continued to face discrimination, and were affected by poverty, unemployment, crime, and housing deterioration to a disproportionate degree compared to white residents. While the poverty rate for whites in the City was about 10% in 1960, it was roughly three times higher for blacks. Baltimore’s crime rate went up steadily through the 1960s, and by 1970, the City had one of the highest homicide rates in the country.
For many longtime residents, this decade — punctuated by the 1968 riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King — was the turning point. Middle-class whites began moving further and further towards the edges of the City, and increasingly began to look outside the city for an enclave apart from black expansion and social unrest. While in 1950, almost two-thirds of the region’s white population lived in Baltimore, only 12.5% lived in the City by 1997.
Flight of the Black Middle Class
Exacerbating conditions was the subsequent flight from the City of middle-class African-Americans. Increasingly, Baltimore’s black middle class followed white Baltimoreans who had fled to the suburbs before them. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of African-Americans living in the City declined for the first time, while the most recent census report shows a decline in Baltimore’s black population roughly equal to that of its white population.13 Now, after decades of population drain, the characteristic that defines the City’s polarization from the suburbs is not race, but economic class.
Rise of the Service Sector
With the decline of manufacturing, the service sector came to be the dominant base of employment for Baltimore City residents. Today, service-providing jobs account for over 90% of all jobs in Baltimore City.14 Such jobs have a heavily minority workforce; one study found that in 1990, 71% of low-wage service workers in Baltimore were African-American, though African-Americans represented only 59% of the City’s population.15
In many positions, the majority of workers are women; according to the same report, women filled 83% of administrative support positions and 84% of personal services positions. Three-quarters of the women included in the survey who supported a family were the sole source of income for that household. Service industries such as hospitals, nursing homes, and tourism had become the primary source of employment for poor and minority workers.
Service jobs are largely characterized by low pay, high turnover rates, irregular or part-time schedules, lack of benefits, job insecurity, and lack of union representation. Few offer vocational training or skills-building opportunities for advancement. Low pay forces many service workers to work second jobs, increasing their weekly work hours to more than 60 in some cases. Also, many workplaces are located far from the neighborhoods where service workers live, adding to transportation and child care costs for working families.
In a city an increasingly poor and minority population, the low-wage service sector has became the principal determinant of the economic status of Baltimore City residents. The growing concentration of urban poverty and the rise of low-wage service economy have at once reinforced one another and exacerbated poor living conditions for urban workers. ¶ 6:28 PM 0 comments
These Slums Brought To You By...
James M. Stein and George A. Dangerfield Jr. have used more than 100 corporations to control large blocks of Baltimore housing.
Acapulco Realty LP
Albany Realty
AM/FM Enterprises
Atlanta Realty
Augusta Realty
Badger Realty
Bahama Realty
Raton Rouge Realty
Bird Brain Inc.
Bohica Realty Inc.
Boise Realty LP
Carson City Realty LP
Columbus Realty LP
Concord Realty LP
Des Moines Realty LP
Denver Realty LP
Freeport Realty
Frankfort Realty
Green Mountain Realty Corp.
Harrisburg Realty LP
Indianapolis Realty
J.M.S. Realty Inc.
Jamaica Realty LP
Jeff Realty
Jefferson City Realty
Jim Me Realty Inc.
Juneau Realty LP
Kyle B. Realty Inc.
L.T.S. Realty Inc.
Lansing Realty LP
Lincoln Realty LP
Little Rhody Realty
Lou C. Realty Inc.
Nashville Realty Inc.
Oklahoma City
Old Dominion Realty
Ollie M. Realty Inc.
Palmetto
Panhandle Realty
Pick'n Chick'n Realty
Pierre Realty LP
Pink Inc.
Pleasent Pheasant
Pompeii Realty Inc.
Post Realty
Raleigh Realty
Rhody Realty
Sacramento Realty LP
Salem Realty LP
Salt Lake City
Springfield Realty LP
St. Croix Realty LP
Rhody Realty
Sacramento Realty LP
Salem Realty LP
Salt Lake City
Springfield Realty LP
St. Croix Realty LP
St. John Corp.
Steinway Realty LP
Tallahassee Realty LP
The Kid's Trust Inc.
Topeka Realty LP
Trenton Realty LP
WMBC1 Inc.
Dangerfield
1100 Investors Inc.
916 Investors Inc.
Bentley Realty Inc.
Byrd Realty Inc.
Crucify Realty Inc.
Discover Realty Inc.
Dude Realty Inc.
Eager Investors Inc.
ESG Management Inc.
Estate Management
GAD III Inc.
IJD Inc.
India Enterprises Inc.
KOB Inc. (King of Baltimore)
Millennium Mgmt.
Notorious Investors
P And G Management
Rover Realty Inc.
Smiley Enterprises
State Enterprises Inc.
Sweet Pea Investors
ZX Investors Inc. ¶ 6:11 PM 0 comments
Acapulco Realty LP
Albany Realty
AM/FM Enterprises
Atlanta Realty
Augusta Realty
Badger Realty
Bahama Realty
Raton Rouge Realty
Bird Brain Inc.
Bohica Realty Inc.
Boise Realty LP
Carson City Realty LP
Columbus Realty LP
Concord Realty LP
Des Moines Realty LP
Denver Realty LP
Freeport Realty
Frankfort Realty
Green Mountain Realty Corp.
Harrisburg Realty LP
Indianapolis Realty
J.M.S. Realty Inc.
Jamaica Realty LP
Jeff Realty
Jefferson City Realty
Jim Me Realty Inc.
Juneau Realty LP
Kyle B. Realty Inc.
L.T.S. Realty Inc.
Lansing Realty LP
Lincoln Realty LP
Little Rhody Realty
Lou C. Realty Inc.
Nashville Realty Inc.
Oklahoma City
Old Dominion Realty
Ollie M. Realty Inc.
Palmetto
Panhandle Realty
Pick'n Chick'n Realty
Pierre Realty LP
Pink Inc.
Pleasent Pheasant
Pompeii Realty Inc.
Post Realty
Raleigh Realty
Rhody Realty
Sacramento Realty LP
Salem Realty LP
Salt Lake City
Springfield Realty LP
St. Croix Realty LP
Rhody Realty
Sacramento Realty LP
Salem Realty LP
Salt Lake City
Springfield Realty LP
St. Croix Realty LP
St. John Corp.
Steinway Realty LP
Tallahassee Realty LP
The Kid's Trust Inc.
Topeka Realty LP
Trenton Realty LP
WMBC1 Inc.
Dangerfield
1100 Investors Inc.
916 Investors Inc.
Bentley Realty Inc.
Byrd Realty Inc.
Crucify Realty Inc.
Discover Realty Inc.
Dude Realty Inc.
Eager Investors Inc.
ESG Management Inc.
Estate Management
GAD III Inc.
IJD Inc.
India Enterprises Inc.
KOB Inc. (King of Baltimore)
Millennium Mgmt.
Notorious Investors
P And G Management
Rover Realty Inc.
Smiley Enterprises
State Enterprises Inc.
Sweet Pea Investors
ZX Investors Inc. ¶ 6:11 PM 0 comments
A Lord Of The Slums
Originally published December 19, 1999
Long before it was owned by the "King of Baltimore" -- before the rats moved in and the junkies bled all over the bathroom and the baby got poisoned in the parlor -- the Formstone rowhouse at 1120 N. Milton Ave. was already well on its way to rack and ruin.
It had sheltered a succession of blue-collar immigrant families through most of the century, providing them a thin slice of the American dream, until a decade ago when it fell into the hands of Pick'n Chick'n Inc. James M. Stein, proprietor.
The 42-year-old speculator has owned, rented and sold more than 1,000 rowhouses in the city over the past 15 years -- mining a personal fortune from the wreckage of the city's slums from his offices on a quaint, tree-lined stretch of Conkling Street in Highlandtown.
During that time, his properties have shown up in the investment portfolios of five convicted drug dealers, the medical records of 75 lead-poisoned children and in at least nine suspected arsons. More than 50 have been condemned as unfit for human habitation.
"The worst of the worst," declares Larry Little, chief of the city's demolition program. "Block by block, address by address, you're looking at properties that were rundown for so long that they've been stripped of any value. They're not safe for a dog to live in."
Operating in relative anonymity behind a wall of some 70 companies, Stein has benefited from an understaffed and antiquated city enforcement system that is unable to detect patterns of abuse by large-scale, corporate landlords.
But a computer-assisted analysis by The Sun of more than 10,000 pages of records from police, housing, health, tax and court agencies shows that Stein has a long history of questionable dealings that will soon be subjected to the glare of official scrutiny for the first time.
That's because he is the silent real estate partner of George A. Dangerfield Jr. -- the 30-year-old, self-proclaimed "King of Baltimore" who milled the profits from a cocaine ring into a slum housing empire that federal prosecutors are now seeking to seize.
Sentenced two weeks ago to more than a decade in prison, Dangerfield declined repeated requests for an interview. And Stein twice refused to comment about their relationship. But family, friends and former employees paint a consistent portrait of a master gamesman and his young apprentice trading on the dregs of the city's real estate market.
"Jim taught George everything he knows about the business," says Angie Jackson, 30, Dangerfield's niece and business manager. "How to set up his corporations, which lawyers to use, which inspectors to watch out for -- everything."
Before they were done, Dangerfield would be one of Baltimore's largest slumlords, enforcing his leases with paid thugs and routinely shutting off his tenants' heat when they fell behind on their rent, records show.
"He's a hero right now to a lot of the young dope hustlers," said Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III in a November interview before he left office. "But ever since we first read about this guy in the paper, a big piece of the story has been missing.
"I've been asking myself all along, how did a high school dropout learn to play the real estate market? How does a rank amateur become one of the 10 worst slumlords in the city?"
Here's how:
Dangerfield purchased a third of his portfolio of 125 rental houses on "installment" plans from Stein, paying him thousands of dollars a month toward one day owning them outright.
In the meantime, Dangerfield was free to rent out the substandard dwellings to poor families desperate for shelter -- and to plow his criminal profits into his seemingly legitimate holdings.
In the bargain, he also signed agreements that made his 24 companies responsible for all repairs, lawsuits or injuries in the often-decrepit dwellings, while Stein continued to hold the titles free of liability.
One result is that families with claims against Dangerfield might have to wait decades for relief, attorneys say, while Stein is legally free to repossess many of the houses and sell them again if he chooses.
"It may be appalling," says Rena Steinzor, a University of Maryland law professor. "But there's nothing illegal about it.
"There's nothing in our state law that says you can't sell houses to drug dealers -- unless you know you're being paid with drug money. And there's nothing preventing you from taking back the properties if the guy stops making payments while he's in prison."
Of immediate concern for federal prosecutors will be untangling the contractual relationship between Dangerfield and Stein -- and figuring out which houses Dangerfield actually owns.
"Suffice it to say that we are investigating the ownership of everything held by Mr. Dangerfield," says U.S. Attorney Lynne A. Battaglia. "And any silent partners he may have will be addressed in the appropriate manner at the appropriate time. But we have no intention of turning our back on this problem. The stakes are too high."
Just how high is only now becoming clear.
And the house at 1120 N. Milton is a good place to start.
The keys to hell
Shantell Robinson, a 24-year-old college student and single mother, knows the address well. Nearly two years after she moved out, the scars still feel fresh.
"I look back now sometimes and I realize we were lucky to get out of there alive," she says, stroking her little boy's braided hair. "I still wake up some nights, dreaming that we're back there."
Driven from her home by a fire, and unemployed at the time, she walked into Dangerfield's Estate Management office on North Avenue in May 1997, seeking temporary shelter. Her clothes smelled of smoke. Her life savings were in her pocket. And her 3-year-old son, Christopher, was squalling on her hip.
"Don't worry about a thing," she recalls the landlord telling her with a smile. "I have a place available. You can move right in."
What happened next to mother and child offers a keyhole into the chaotic world that city, state and federal officials will face in their investigation of Dangerfield's properties and his relationship with Stein.
Dangerfield showed Robinson into a rundown three-bedroom rowhouse on Milton Avenue in East Baltimore that had been illegally partitioned into a boarding house for five families.
All shared one kitchen under a caved-in ceiling and a cramped upstairs bathroom with a rotten, drafty window overlooking the abandoned 1100 block of N. Port St. Rats could be heard crawling in the walls.
For $55 a week, Dangerfield gave Robinson the keys to the front parlor.
It was a narrow room, not much bigger than the back of a bread truck, with chipped woodwork and curls of peeling paint on the ceiling that would sometimes flutter down like snow from the footfalls of the tenants upstairs.
Worse, the house was located in a small piece of hell on Earth known as "Zombieland."
The neighborhood around Dr. Rayner Browne Elementary School was a honeycomb of shattered rowhouse shells and slum rental units teeming with heroin addicts. Dangerfield himself owns at least a dozen houses there.
Outside Robinson's hollow door, dope dealers and junkies pounded up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, cursing, arguing, setting prices, paying debts, shooting up, passing out. There would be blood in the sink in the morning. And syringes on the back of the toilet.
"Please take care of this problem," Robinson pleaded two weeks before Christmas 1997 in one of many unanswered letters to Dangerfield. "This is the 5th time I have complained. My neighbors upstairs from me in 2A and 2B have people running in and out with drugs. There's blood on the floor."
And the tenants were freezing.
The furnace had broken down, and they were heating the seven small rooms by running all four burners on the gas stove around the clock, supplemented by space heaters.
It was around this time that Robinson began to notice the first signs of trouble with little Christopher.
The chilling diagnosis
A burbling bolt of energy who had begun walking and talking at an early age, the toddler suddenly seemed to be falling down a lot. He also had developed slight facial tics: a twitch around the eyes, a jerk at the mouth, small things that might barely have registered amid the day-to-day bedlam at 1120 N. Milton.
"There were nights we couldn't sleep at all," recalls Robinson. "I mean, we were tired all the time. But I had an intuition that something was wrong. Mothers just know. It was more than a lack of sleep. So I took him to the doctor.
"When they told me he was lead-poisoned, my heart just sank."
Kennedy Krieger Institute detected 35 micrograms of lead per a unit of Christopher's blood. It was 15 points above the state threshold for lead poisoning and five points below the level for mandatory hospitalization and a monthlong series of painful injections to strip the lead from his body.
"I almost threw up," says Robinson.
A bureaucratic quagmire
In the months that followed, Robinson was bombarded with information, pamphlets, phone numbers and treatment instructions from doctors, nurses and social workers. No fried foods. Wash clothes often. Mop floors daily. Wipe down walls. Scrub toys.
She was told that her son would likely suffer major learning difficulties, because lead interferes with nerve and brain functions in as little as 30 days after exposure.
Christopher would be seven times more likely to drop out of school and five times more likely to experience severe cognitive disabilities. He might suffer hearing loss. He'd have a greater tendency toward violence. He'd lag behind kids his age, maybe for the rest of his life.
"It blocks the reading and reasoning abilities of the brain," says Ruth Ann Norton of the Maryland Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. "It makes the kid less able to learn and more prone to a range of problems -- everything from speech, hearing, balance and coordination difficulties to a greater likelihood of criminal behavior.
"At levels above 35, we see kids having problems that last a lifetime."
The coalition was among the first agencies to intervene in Christopher's case, immediately arranging his enrollment in a speech therapy program at Rayner Browne Elementary after tests revealed an 18-month lag in his verbal skills.
The nonprofit group also sent counselors to the Milton Avenue house to help Robinson assess how dangerous it was.
Inside, they found serious lead hazards in nearly every room -- paint peeling from ceilings, windowsills and baseboards, lead dust on walls. Afterward, the coalition forwarded a final report to the Health Department for follow-up inspection.
Twice, beginning in September 1997, city inspectors left notices for Robinson to call and schedule a visit. Twice she called, but inspectors arrived to find her not at home. Finally, when a third attempt to gain entry failed, city inspectors gave up.
Under a policy that requires tenants complaining of lead poisoning or other housing deficiencies to personally grant inspectors access, health officials effectively shelved the warnings about the hazardous conditions at 1120 N. Milton.
The policy is designed to save the city the cost of obtaining court-ordered authorization for forced entries, but it often results in inspections being canceled altogether -- and in repeated lead poisonings at the same hazardous addresses.
"It is one of our biggest problems," concedes Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the commissioner of health. "We have 150,000 lead houses in the city and only 10 inspectors, and we're dealing with a transient tenant population that often moves before we can get into the house.
"And we have all the same automation deficiencies as the Housing Department -- the same lack of comprehensive computer databases, the same difficulties tracing corporate ownership and cross-referencing it to outstanding complaints. Most of what we do is on a case-by-case basis, which is an inadequate response when you're dealing with a large-scale property owner."
Meanwhile, students working in a poverty law clinic at the University of Maryland School of Law began looking into Dangerfield's company and quickly discovered that 1120 N. Milton was not licensed or registered as a rooming house.
And Tom Yost, a Baltimore attorney who agreed to file a lead paint lawsuit on Christopher's behalf, was bogging down in a swamp of paper.
Documents showed that the house was controlled by a corporation called India Enterprises, which had signed it over to an affiliated company known as Crucify Realty. Both were run by a third firm known as Estate Management -- which sometimes did business under the name Millennium Management.
All were held by Dangerfield.
But the only rental license on the property was held by Pick'n Chick'n, which state tax records listed as the actual owner. And Pick'n Chick'n was Stein.
Among the five companies, they had more than seven mailing addresses.
Exactly who owned the old house was difficult to determine.
Under the terms of a 1993 installment contract, Dangerfield agreed to pay Stein $103.61 a month for 15 years, after which he would assume ownership of 1120 N. Milton. In the meantime, he was free to use it "as an investment for commercial purposes," so long as he assumed all the risks.
In effect, Stein would continue to hold title and realize income from the rundown cracker box, while shouldering none of the responsibility for repairs and no liability for injuries.
"You're talking about a guy who owns 45-plus corporations, none of which hold more than half a dozen houses or so -- and none of them are worth anything," Yost says. "Then he gets another guy to stand in his place for liability purposes, which gives him another level of insulation.
"Now, we have a brain-damaged child trying to collect payments from a drug dealer who's going to prison. In the bluntest possible terms, that's the position Christopher is in."
The 'King of Baltimore'
As Christopher's lead level continued to rise through Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1997, Shantell Robinson's anxiety gave way to fear.
"Discussed housing relocation, which is of concern to mother as child's Pb [lead level] is increasing," a counselor at Kennedy Krieger wrote in November. "Mother's income only $274/month. Christopher appears to have language difficulties."
By then, records show, Dangerfield had failed to respond to at least nine letters and notices from Robinson, the coalition and the hospital informing him of the problems in the house.
A month later, exterminators from the city's Rat Rub-Out program stopped by to bait the kitchen for vermin -- notably, a large and ornery Norwegian brown that the tenants called Ben.
Three months after that, the water was turned off when Dangerfield failed to answer a demand for payment from the city for $982.80 in unpaid utility bills.
What no one knew at the time was that the landlord was more than a little distracted navigating a sea of personal worries.
He had been convicted more than 20 times of violating basic safety and health standards, records show, and was riding a virtual merry-go-round through the city's housing court after being identified as a serial scofflaw by Commissioner Henson's newly beefed up enforcement office.
"We were well aware that Mr. Stein was behind some of these addresses," recalls Denise M. Duval, chief housing prosecutor. "But he's a master at masking his ownership through corporate shells and at finding investors who are -- how should I say this? -- arguably unsophisticated enough to assume his liability.
"It puts us in the position of taking people to court who are much less skilled at working the system. People like Mr. Dangerfield."
As court-ordered repair directives continued to pile up in his black-and-gold-trimmed office at 1747-1749 E. North Ave., the "King of Baltimore" increasingly found himself in paint-spattered jeans with a hammer in his hand.
Family members -- led by the landlord's father, a retired postal worker -- chipped in to help stave off the city's enforcers.
"Between the inspectors and the bill collectors and all the repairs, the money was going out of one pocket as soon as it came into the other," recalls Jackson, who left a position as a state correctional officer to help manage her uncle's foundering business.
Then, in April, one month after the city cut off the water to 1120 N. Milton, Dangerfield found himself surrounded by police and federal agents on the Baltimore Beltway as he entered the final leg home from a trip to New York City.
The officers had their guns drawn. A helicopter flew overhead. Police dogs barked nearby. They had been waiting for him.
"Keep your hands on the wheel!" they told him. "Make no sudden movements!"
With that, police dragged the president of Estate Management Inc. from his Audi sedan and handcuffed him on the side of the road. From the passenger seat, they seized a suspicious satchel. Inside was a half-pound of cocaine.
The case was what prosecutors call a "slam dunk."
Detectives had been listening to Dangerfield's conversations on the phone for months under a court-ordered wiretap -- linking him to a drug ring that employed more than a dozen convicted felons as runners, enforcers and collectors.
Police had also made three "controlled buys" of cocaine from the slumlord through confidential informants.
In his pin-striped gangster suits and two-tone shoes, his white Humvee and his Roman script tattoos, Dangerfield "styled" like a slightly updated Roaring '20s mobster. Tack on an earlier conviction for drug dealing in 1995 and his inventory of slum houses, and he looked every inch the high-flying dope tycoon.
It is a view that his family disputes.
"The reason George got so much attention was because of all these rundown houses," Jackson insists. "But nobody ever stopped to ask themselves, what are these places worth?
"And to this day, I never heard anybody say a word about Jim Stein's part in all this. He totally took advantage of the situation. It wasn't George who ran these houses into the ground. It was Jim Stein -- and he gets to walk away without a scratch."
Rotting investments
The past decade has not always been easy for the owner of Pick'n Chick'n Inc.
Beginning in his 20s as a self-made real estate investor, Stein got an early boost in 1984 when he persuaded three Baltimore savings and loans to lend him seed money to buy a sprawling collection of rental houses from the Morris B. Goldseker Foundation, records show.
Lauded in business circles during his lifetime as a frugal and farsighted investor, Goldseker was known in the African-American community as one of the worst slumlords in Baltimore and the owner of a vast portfolio of substandard housing.
Estimates of his holdings at the time of his death in 1973 ranged to well over 1,000 housing units held in more than 50 companies.
In little more than 10 years, his heirs would sell off the assets -- including at least 31 dwellings where children had been lead poisoned -- for about $26 million, forming one of the city's richest philanthropic trusts.
At the age of 27, Stein purchased 121 of the houses for $1.9 million, an average of $15,700 per rowhouse, that would serve as collateral for the purchase of hundreds more properties over the years, deed and mortgage records show.
Among the Goldseker houses Stein bought were at least three where children had been poisoned by lead during the preceding decade.
Beyond the potential lead liability, it was an inopportune time to be acquiring property in certain areas of Baltimore.
"You look at the history of these neighborhoods and you'll see that the crack cocaine just lit up this town around that time," recalls Robert L. Langston Sr., 47, a lifelong city resident, carpenter and handyman who worked on Stein's houses for 15 years.
"There was so much killing and drugs and carrying on that decent people couldn't live in them neighborhoods no more, and it got real hard for the landlords to find any kind of good tenant. But Mr. Stein also owned some of the worst houses in the city, no getting around that."
Stein's addresses would ultimately accumulate more than 200 violation notices for housing and health code deficiencies: faulty wiring, rotted window frames, leaky roofs, abandonment and lead hazards.
"I know," says Langston, who bought four of the units from his former employer, only to abandon them when the maintenance costs bankrupted him in 1998. "I made a living most of my life doing nothing but answering housing notices for Mr. Stein."
Declining fortunes
By 1996, records show, Stein's fortunes -- both in business and in his personal life -- were faltering.
In addition to the constant barrage of violation notices, his Goldseker loans had come due, and he was embroiled in no fewer than 14 lawsuits with disgruntled investors, former partners and tenants.
His wife of 13 years filed for divorce after he was convicted in May 1995 of soliciting oral sex from an undercover police officer posing as a hooker along Patterson Park.
"I usually pay $20," Stein told Officer Karla Lerner, after parking his Mercedes-Benz coupe in an alley behind Trinity Lutheran Church, records show.
In the bitter parting with his wife that followed, Stein was forced to liquidate his $750,000 custom-built home in Lutherville.
He also ceded to his wife a Mercedes-Benz sedan, $300,000 in cash, his exclusive rights to the family's country club membership, $19,000 a year in child support and more than $50,000 for his two children's tuition at a private academy.
Further, the divorce forced him to reveal publicly the extent of his rental holdings as of Sept. 11, 1997.
In a fluid portfolio of corporations through which he had churned more than a thousand properties, Stein had at least 449 lots on hand at that moment. And 40 percent of them were sheltered in a trust fund in the names of his 10-year-old sons.
Left unaddressed by the settlement agreement: Many of the houses sitting on top of those lots were a shambles.
Under Maryland law, landlords can retain ownership of the ground beneath a house -- and collect annual rent payments on it -- while selling the house itself through "lease-to-own" or "installment payment" contracts that leave tenants or investors responsible for its upkeep.
Originally conceived as a means of lowering purchase costs for working-class homebuyers, "ground rents" are now routinely exploited by slumlords as a means of severing their ties to decrepit houses while still collecting income from unwary buyers.
Even outstanding violation notices for serious deficiencies such as lead hazards or unstable roofs can be "signed over" to the buyer.
In a city known for its aged and often dangerously substandard dwellings -- the eighth-oldest housing stock in the nation -- local health and safety laws do not require that outstanding code violations be repaired before a property is sold.
Further, if the buyer stops making payments for any reason, landlords are free to take back the house and sell it again, secure within a corporate shell that protects their personal fortunes in the meantime.
"If the house falls down on somebody's head, the best the victim can do is sue the company, which usually doesn't own anything except a few more slum houses that aren't worth a quarter," says Anne Blumenberg, an attorney for the nonprofit Community Law Center.
"Meanwhile, the landlord is out on his yacht in the Chesapeake Bay, wrapped in a cobweb of corporations, counting his bag of money. It's a system you won't find in many other places, and it promotes predatory patterns and practices by landlords -- not to mention some fairly bizarre ownership scenarios."
Twists and turns
In the annals of such seemingly unlikely tales, few are as curious as the story of Stein's association with two young drug dealers and a pair of decaying rowhouses near Greenmount Cemetery.
At 23, Angelo R. Garrison looked like a rising star in Baltimore business -- the up-by-the-bootstraps owner of a west-side hair salon. The president of Angelo Inc. also controlled a small but growing catalog of eight rental houses.
Then the shooting started.
On the night of April 8, 1993, Garrison and his 3-year-old son were mowed down outside his office in the 200 block of Park Ave. by a gunman working for one of the most violent heroin gangs in West Baltimore.
The toddler was shot between the eyes as he licked an ice cream cone in the back seat of his father's Volvo.
Garrison, hit all over, fell to the pavement like a rag doll at the feet of his girlfriend. In the front seat, his younger son sat screaming, miraculously spared from the clawing bullets.
The killings flared in the news media for weeks, making front-page headlines and sensational television news. Garrison, it was reported, was himself a paroled drug dealer.
What few knew at the time was that Garrison was a lieutenant in the drug organization of imprisoned heroin kingpin Melvin "Little Melvin" Williams, court records would later reveal.
And Garrison was about to be indicted for selling 2 ounces of heroin and cocaine to an undercover federal agent after bragging that "he could obtain kilogram quantities" for future deals, court records show.
At the time of his death, Garrison was also suspected of laundering drug money through Angelo Inc. as part of a scheme by the Williams gang to deposit dope dollars in banks disguised as sales receipts from legitimate companies.
Williams himself was president of a corporation called Scrapp Inc. that owned a towing garage, an auto supply store, a nightclub, a carwash, an apartment building and a dozen rowhouses.
Federal prosecutors later seized his nightclub Underground on Edmondson Avenue after discovering that the labyrinth dance hall doubled as a bootleg dispensary -- where the profits from beer, wine and liquor sales were freely mingled with illegal drug proceeds.
U.S. Attorney Battaglia confirmed that prosecutors are still investigating at least five rowhouses that Williams transferred to family members through Scrapp Inc. As for Garrison's eight houses, they evaporated from his portfolio four months after his death, before federal agents ever had a chance to investigate them.
"I had hoped my other son might have been able to get some benefit from those houses -- sell them, rent them, do something with them," recalls Monica McNutt, 28, the mother of Garrison's two children. "But when I looked into it, I found out they were gone. There was nothing left.
"The guy he bought them from just reached out and took them back."
Deed records show that Garrison had purchased the eight dwellings on installment contracts from a string of companies named after U.S. cities: Albany Realty, Frankfort Realty, Topeka, St. John and Trenton.
James M. Stein, proprietor.
On Aug. 24, 1993, Stein filed papers in the sixth-floor deed room of the Circuit Court building on Calvert Street, taking back the properties after the late Angelo Garrison stopped making payments.
Fifteen months later, on Nov. 14, 1995, Stein resold two of the addresses -- a pair of red brick rowhouses at 1430-1432 N. Aisquith St. on the edge of a bullet-pocked crack bazaar near Greenmount Cemetery where at least eight drug murders and scores of internecine shootings had littered the streets with spent brass.
One of the dwellings had been under an outstanding violation notice from the city Housing Department for more than a year for a broken sewer pipe, rotted window frames and a crumbling tar roof.
The sale price: $18,073.60.
The buyer: a company called EAD Management.
The president: George A. Dangerfield Jr. -- "The King of Baltimore."
Four years later, repairs have yet to be made, housing records show.
The terrible cost
The Aisquith Street deal was part of a package of 12 slum houses that Stein sold to Dangerfield in just 48 hours -- including a $63,000 cluster of 10 units on Federal Street, where Stein had been cited at least four times for lead paint hazards.
One of those houses had been under a lead violation notice for four years, after the poisoning of a child there in 1991. Rather than make the repairs, Stein boarded up the doors and windows of 408 Federal St. and left it vacant until he sold it to Dangerfield.
In what anti-lead activists call a glaring gap in the law, city ordinances "deactivate" such notices as long as landlords leave their hazardous properties unoccupied -- or if they sell them to a new owner.
In Dangerfield's case, he was hit with a new lead notice at the property on Sept. 6, 1996, when Health Department inspectors learned of the sale and prohibited him from using it as a rental property until he refinished the interior.
Three years later, the two-story hulk squats with its front windows blown out, streaked with mildew and graffiti and heaped with trash like a relic from a long-ago war.
It was one in a series of difficulties involving some 35 addresses that Dangerfield eventually bought from Stein after a chance meeting at a real estate auction in 1989.
"Jim pretended to be George's friend," says Jackson, shaking her head. "He borrowed the Humvee to take his kids to the beach. He had George over to his place for dinner. He gave George referrals for carpenters and electricians. He told him how to handle himself in court.
"But when George got into trouble with the houses Jim sold him, he wouldn't return our calls."
And the troubles were considerable.
In all, 33 of the dwellings would be cited for violations of city health and safety codes by 1999, records show, contributing to Dangerfield's 23 housing convictions. Three of the houses would be condemned as unfit for human habitation -- including one on Biddle Street in such bad condition that city wrecking crews demolished it overnight.
Ultimately, nine more children would be poisoned by lead.
Together with Stein's 75 prior cases, it brings to 84 the number of children poisoned at addresses owned by Dangerfield and his silent partner.
"If that many kids were hurt in an industrial accident, there would be a revolt in this town," says Norton of the anti-lead coalition.
"It translates into literally millions of dollars in medical expenses, remedial programs, special education, court costs, you name it. And because these kids are from poor families, it's the public -- not Dangerfield and Stein -- who will wind up paying those bills."
Back in Zombieland, other costs are more apparent and more immediate.
As part of an urban renewal campaign to demolish or renovate 1,000 houses in the east-side slums, a nonprofit group known as the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition has been compiling a list of houses in the area for the past two years.
On that list are some 195 dwellings that have moved through Stein's portfolio over the past decade.
Nearly one-third -- 62 rowhouses -- now stand vacant or abandoned.
Nine have been demolished by the city.
Another nine are slated for probable demolition.
And 20 are awaiting prosecution for long-term code violations, including 12 that have been cited repeatedly in recent years.
"There's four of them on the 1000 block of N. Castle, two on the 1500 block of N. Dallas, three on the 1700 block of Ellsworth," says Michael Seipp, executive director of the nonprofit group. "These are some of the worst streets that I have ever stood on. They're hellholes.
"In the total package, conservatively, you're looking at two or three million dollars in rehab costs -- which, coincidentally, is about the same amount it would cost the taxpayers to tear them all down. You do the math. They're worth zero."
Says Henson: "It's a portfolio built on some of the worst neighborhoods in the city, and I don't think it's an accident. What you have here is someone who systematically exploited certain areas, and a certain population, for personal gain in a very deliberate way, over many years.
"I can only imagine the price that's been paid by the residents of these houses."
A mother's prayers
Shantell Robinson and little Christopher are still paying.
Three months after the Christmas holidays in 1997, Robinson moved out of 1120 N. Milton and signed the lease on a "lead-safe" house owned by a nonprofit group that specializes in handling such cases.
Fearing retaliation from her former landlord, she agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that her new address not be mentioned.
"Christopher got mine own house now," the 5-year-old says. "Those Christopher's toys. Good house, Mama, right? OK!"
"He still has speech problems," Robinson says. "And they say it will be a while before it all straightens out. But the doctor says his lead is way down, like a level 12."
She pauses, then sighs, struggling to hold a smile.
"We pray together every day."
Also in her prayers, she says, is anybody who might be living now at 1120 N. Milton.
She is praying for Michelle Thomas.
A 35-year-old single mother, Thomas is paying $289 a month to Dangerfield's Estate Management to shelter her 10 children -- ages 18 to 4 -- and her three grandchildren, all of them in diapers.
An inspection by the Housing Department on Sept. 22 revealed 16 violations of the city construction code, including defective doors, walls, windows, electrical fixtures and plumbing. The repair order was issued to Stein's Pick'n Chick'n. But it is Dangerfield's family that has been struggling to complete the work.
"The damn house has been milked out," fumes Donald Dangerfield, 43, as he surveys the broken front door and splintered windows on his younger brother's dubious investment. "Stein absolutely milked out every nickel he could, all the time feeding George some line about making him a millionaire."
Meanwhile, two years after Robinson first reported the hazardous lead conditions at 1120 N. Milton to the city Health Department, paint chips and dust are still visible on floors, sills and stairs.
Peeling paint and broken plaster dangle from the ceiling in an upstairs bedroom, above a sagging mattress where three children sleep. In the kitchen, paint flakes like dandruff from a window frame charred in a long-ago fire.
An independent inspection Dec. 8, paid for by The Sun, found lead levels in the house "many multiples" above those allowed by state law, said Shannon Cavaliere of Arc Environmental Inc., adding that it "would fail at least nine out of 10 points" in a Department of the Environment visual inspection.
The estimated cost of repairs exceeded $5,000 -- roughly the value of the entire house.
"Greater than 50 percent of the surfaces sampled exceed the state standard," Cavaliere wrote in a final report to the newspaper. "And nearly 30 percent of the readings were 20 times the standard. Failed 5 of the 15 dust wipes that were collected."
"Don't tell me that's lead paint," Thomas gasps. "God, no, not lead! I got babies living here!" ¶ 6:08 PM 3 comments
Originally published December 19, 1999
Long before it was owned by the "King of Baltimore" -- before the rats moved in and the junkies bled all over the bathroom and the baby got poisoned in the parlor -- the Formstone rowhouse at 1120 N. Milton Ave. was already well on its way to rack and ruin.
It had sheltered a succession of blue-collar immigrant families through most of the century, providing them a thin slice of the American dream, until a decade ago when it fell into the hands of Pick'n Chick'n Inc. James M. Stein, proprietor.
The 42-year-old speculator has owned, rented and sold more than 1,000 rowhouses in the city over the past 15 years -- mining a personal fortune from the wreckage of the city's slums from his offices on a quaint, tree-lined stretch of Conkling Street in Highlandtown.
During that time, his properties have shown up in the investment portfolios of five convicted drug dealers, the medical records of 75 lead-poisoned children and in at least nine suspected arsons. More than 50 have been condemned as unfit for human habitation.
"The worst of the worst," declares Larry Little, chief of the city's demolition program. "Block by block, address by address, you're looking at properties that were rundown for so long that they've been stripped of any value. They're not safe for a dog to live in."
Operating in relative anonymity behind a wall of some 70 companies, Stein has benefited from an understaffed and antiquated city enforcement system that is unable to detect patterns of abuse by large-scale, corporate landlords.
But a computer-assisted analysis by The Sun of more than 10,000 pages of records from police, housing, health, tax and court agencies shows that Stein has a long history of questionable dealings that will soon be subjected to the glare of official scrutiny for the first time.
That's because he is the silent real estate partner of George A. Dangerfield Jr. -- the 30-year-old, self-proclaimed "King of Baltimore" who milled the profits from a cocaine ring into a slum housing empire that federal prosecutors are now seeking to seize.
Sentenced two weeks ago to more than a decade in prison, Dangerfield declined repeated requests for an interview. And Stein twice refused to comment about their relationship. But family, friends and former employees paint a consistent portrait of a master gamesman and his young apprentice trading on the dregs of the city's real estate market.
"Jim taught George everything he knows about the business," says Angie Jackson, 30, Dangerfield's niece and business manager. "How to set up his corporations, which lawyers to use, which inspectors to watch out for -- everything."
Before they were done, Dangerfield would be one of Baltimore's largest slumlords, enforcing his leases with paid thugs and routinely shutting off his tenants' heat when they fell behind on their rent, records show.
"He's a hero right now to a lot of the young dope hustlers," said Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III in a November interview before he left office. "But ever since we first read about this guy in the paper, a big piece of the story has been missing.
"I've been asking myself all along, how did a high school dropout learn to play the real estate market? How does a rank amateur become one of the 10 worst slumlords in the city?"
Here's how:
Dangerfield purchased a third of his portfolio of 125 rental houses on "installment" plans from Stein, paying him thousands of dollars a month toward one day owning them outright.
In the meantime, Dangerfield was free to rent out the substandard dwellings to poor families desperate for shelter -- and to plow his criminal profits into his seemingly legitimate holdings.
In the bargain, he also signed agreements that made his 24 companies responsible for all repairs, lawsuits or injuries in the often-decrepit dwellings, while Stein continued to hold the titles free of liability.
One result is that families with claims against Dangerfield might have to wait decades for relief, attorneys say, while Stein is legally free to repossess many of the houses and sell them again if he chooses.
"It may be appalling," says Rena Steinzor, a University of Maryland law professor. "But there's nothing illegal about it.
"There's nothing in our state law that says you can't sell houses to drug dealers -- unless you know you're being paid with drug money. And there's nothing preventing you from taking back the properties if the guy stops making payments while he's in prison."
Of immediate concern for federal prosecutors will be untangling the contractual relationship between Dangerfield and Stein -- and figuring out which houses Dangerfield actually owns.
"Suffice it to say that we are investigating the ownership of everything held by Mr. Dangerfield," says U.S. Attorney Lynne A. Battaglia. "And any silent partners he may have will be addressed in the appropriate manner at the appropriate time. But we have no intention of turning our back on this problem. The stakes are too high."
Just how high is only now becoming clear.
And the house at 1120 N. Milton is a good place to start.
The keys to hell
Shantell Robinson, a 24-year-old college student and single mother, knows the address well. Nearly two years after she moved out, the scars still feel fresh.
"I look back now sometimes and I realize we were lucky to get out of there alive," she says, stroking her little boy's braided hair. "I still wake up some nights, dreaming that we're back there."
Driven from her home by a fire, and unemployed at the time, she walked into Dangerfield's Estate Management office on North Avenue in May 1997, seeking temporary shelter. Her clothes smelled of smoke. Her life savings were in her pocket. And her 3-year-old son, Christopher, was squalling on her hip.
"Don't worry about a thing," she recalls the landlord telling her with a smile. "I have a place available. You can move right in."
What happened next to mother and child offers a keyhole into the chaotic world that city, state and federal officials will face in their investigation of Dangerfield's properties and his relationship with Stein.
Dangerfield showed Robinson into a rundown three-bedroom rowhouse on Milton Avenue in East Baltimore that had been illegally partitioned into a boarding house for five families.
All shared one kitchen under a caved-in ceiling and a cramped upstairs bathroom with a rotten, drafty window overlooking the abandoned 1100 block of N. Port St. Rats could be heard crawling in the walls.
For $55 a week, Dangerfield gave Robinson the keys to the front parlor.
It was a narrow room, not much bigger than the back of a bread truck, with chipped woodwork and curls of peeling paint on the ceiling that would sometimes flutter down like snow from the footfalls of the tenants upstairs.
Worse, the house was located in a small piece of hell on Earth known as "Zombieland."
The neighborhood around Dr. Rayner Browne Elementary School was a honeycomb of shattered rowhouse shells and slum rental units teeming with heroin addicts. Dangerfield himself owns at least a dozen houses there.
Outside Robinson's hollow door, dope dealers and junkies pounded up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, cursing, arguing, setting prices, paying debts, shooting up, passing out. There would be blood in the sink in the morning. And syringes on the back of the toilet.
"Please take care of this problem," Robinson pleaded two weeks before Christmas 1997 in one of many unanswered letters to Dangerfield. "This is the 5th time I have complained. My neighbors upstairs from me in 2A and 2B have people running in and out with drugs. There's blood on the floor."
And the tenants were freezing.
The furnace had broken down, and they were heating the seven small rooms by running all four burners on the gas stove around the clock, supplemented by space heaters.
It was around this time that Robinson began to notice the first signs of trouble with little Christopher.
The chilling diagnosis
A burbling bolt of energy who had begun walking and talking at an early age, the toddler suddenly seemed to be falling down a lot. He also had developed slight facial tics: a twitch around the eyes, a jerk at the mouth, small things that might barely have registered amid the day-to-day bedlam at 1120 N. Milton.
"There were nights we couldn't sleep at all," recalls Robinson. "I mean, we were tired all the time. But I had an intuition that something was wrong. Mothers just know. It was more than a lack of sleep. So I took him to the doctor.
"When they told me he was lead-poisoned, my heart just sank."
Kennedy Krieger Institute detected 35 micrograms of lead per a unit of Christopher's blood. It was 15 points above the state threshold for lead poisoning and five points below the level for mandatory hospitalization and a monthlong series of painful injections to strip the lead from his body.
"I almost threw up," says Robinson.
A bureaucratic quagmire
In the months that followed, Robinson was bombarded with information, pamphlets, phone numbers and treatment instructions from doctors, nurses and social workers. No fried foods. Wash clothes often. Mop floors daily. Wipe down walls. Scrub toys.
She was told that her son would likely suffer major learning difficulties, because lead interferes with nerve and brain functions in as little as 30 days after exposure.
Christopher would be seven times more likely to drop out of school and five times more likely to experience severe cognitive disabilities. He might suffer hearing loss. He'd have a greater tendency toward violence. He'd lag behind kids his age, maybe for the rest of his life.
"It blocks the reading and reasoning abilities of the brain," says Ruth Ann Norton of the Maryland Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. "It makes the kid less able to learn and more prone to a range of problems -- everything from speech, hearing, balance and coordination difficulties to a greater likelihood of criminal behavior.
"At levels above 35, we see kids having problems that last a lifetime."
The coalition was among the first agencies to intervene in Christopher's case, immediately arranging his enrollment in a speech therapy program at Rayner Browne Elementary after tests revealed an 18-month lag in his verbal skills.
The nonprofit group also sent counselors to the Milton Avenue house to help Robinson assess how dangerous it was.
Inside, they found serious lead hazards in nearly every room -- paint peeling from ceilings, windowsills and baseboards, lead dust on walls. Afterward, the coalition forwarded a final report to the Health Department for follow-up inspection.
Twice, beginning in September 1997, city inspectors left notices for Robinson to call and schedule a visit. Twice she called, but inspectors arrived to find her not at home. Finally, when a third attempt to gain entry failed, city inspectors gave up.
Under a policy that requires tenants complaining of lead poisoning or other housing deficiencies to personally grant inspectors access, health officials effectively shelved the warnings about the hazardous conditions at 1120 N. Milton.
The policy is designed to save the city the cost of obtaining court-ordered authorization for forced entries, but it often results in inspections being canceled altogether -- and in repeated lead poisonings at the same hazardous addresses.
"It is one of our biggest problems," concedes Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the commissioner of health. "We have 150,000 lead houses in the city and only 10 inspectors, and we're dealing with a transient tenant population that often moves before we can get into the house.
"And we have all the same automation deficiencies as the Housing Department -- the same lack of comprehensive computer databases, the same difficulties tracing corporate ownership and cross-referencing it to outstanding complaints. Most of what we do is on a case-by-case basis, which is an inadequate response when you're dealing with a large-scale property owner."
Meanwhile, students working in a poverty law clinic at the University of Maryland School of Law began looking into Dangerfield's company and quickly discovered that 1120 N. Milton was not licensed or registered as a rooming house.
And Tom Yost, a Baltimore attorney who agreed to file a lead paint lawsuit on Christopher's behalf, was bogging down in a swamp of paper.
Documents showed that the house was controlled by a corporation called India Enterprises, which had signed it over to an affiliated company known as Crucify Realty. Both were run by a third firm known as Estate Management -- which sometimes did business under the name Millennium Management.
All were held by Dangerfield.
But the only rental license on the property was held by Pick'n Chick'n, which state tax records listed as the actual owner. And Pick'n Chick'n was Stein.
Among the five companies, they had more than seven mailing addresses.
Exactly who owned the old house was difficult to determine.
Under the terms of a 1993 installment contract, Dangerfield agreed to pay Stein $103.61 a month for 15 years, after which he would assume ownership of 1120 N. Milton. In the meantime, he was free to use it "as an investment for commercial purposes," so long as he assumed all the risks.
In effect, Stein would continue to hold title and realize income from the rundown cracker box, while shouldering none of the responsibility for repairs and no liability for injuries.
"You're talking about a guy who owns 45-plus corporations, none of which hold more than half a dozen houses or so -- and none of them are worth anything," Yost says. "Then he gets another guy to stand in his place for liability purposes, which gives him another level of insulation.
"Now, we have a brain-damaged child trying to collect payments from a drug dealer who's going to prison. In the bluntest possible terms, that's the position Christopher is in."
The 'King of Baltimore'
As Christopher's lead level continued to rise through Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1997, Shantell Robinson's anxiety gave way to fear.
"Discussed housing relocation, which is of concern to mother as child's Pb [lead level] is increasing," a counselor at Kennedy Krieger wrote in November. "Mother's income only $274/month. Christopher appears to have language difficulties."
By then, records show, Dangerfield had failed to respond to at least nine letters and notices from Robinson, the coalition and the hospital informing him of the problems in the house.
A month later, exterminators from the city's Rat Rub-Out program stopped by to bait the kitchen for vermin -- notably, a large and ornery Norwegian brown that the tenants called Ben.
Three months after that, the water was turned off when Dangerfield failed to answer a demand for payment from the city for $982.80 in unpaid utility bills.
What no one knew at the time was that the landlord was more than a little distracted navigating a sea of personal worries.
He had been convicted more than 20 times of violating basic safety and health standards, records show, and was riding a virtual merry-go-round through the city's housing court after being identified as a serial scofflaw by Commissioner Henson's newly beefed up enforcement office.
"We were well aware that Mr. Stein was behind some of these addresses," recalls Denise M. Duval, chief housing prosecutor. "But he's a master at masking his ownership through corporate shells and at finding investors who are -- how should I say this? -- arguably unsophisticated enough to assume his liability.
"It puts us in the position of taking people to court who are much less skilled at working the system. People like Mr. Dangerfield."
As court-ordered repair directives continued to pile up in his black-and-gold-trimmed office at 1747-1749 E. North Ave., the "King of Baltimore" increasingly found himself in paint-spattered jeans with a hammer in his hand.
Family members -- led by the landlord's father, a retired postal worker -- chipped in to help stave off the city's enforcers.
"Between the inspectors and the bill collectors and all the repairs, the money was going out of one pocket as soon as it came into the other," recalls Jackson, who left a position as a state correctional officer to help manage her uncle's foundering business.
Then, in April, one month after the city cut off the water to 1120 N. Milton, Dangerfield found himself surrounded by police and federal agents on the Baltimore Beltway as he entered the final leg home from a trip to New York City.
The officers had their guns drawn. A helicopter flew overhead. Police dogs barked nearby. They had been waiting for him.
"Keep your hands on the wheel!" they told him. "Make no sudden movements!"
With that, police dragged the president of Estate Management Inc. from his Audi sedan and handcuffed him on the side of the road. From the passenger seat, they seized a suspicious satchel. Inside was a half-pound of cocaine.
The case was what prosecutors call a "slam dunk."
Detectives had been listening to Dangerfield's conversations on the phone for months under a court-ordered wiretap -- linking him to a drug ring that employed more than a dozen convicted felons as runners, enforcers and collectors.
Police had also made three "controlled buys" of cocaine from the slumlord through confidential informants.
In his pin-striped gangster suits and two-tone shoes, his white Humvee and his Roman script tattoos, Dangerfield "styled" like a slightly updated Roaring '20s mobster. Tack on an earlier conviction for drug dealing in 1995 and his inventory of slum houses, and he looked every inch the high-flying dope tycoon.
It is a view that his family disputes.
"The reason George got so much attention was because of all these rundown houses," Jackson insists. "But nobody ever stopped to ask themselves, what are these places worth?
"And to this day, I never heard anybody say a word about Jim Stein's part in all this. He totally took advantage of the situation. It wasn't George who ran these houses into the ground. It was Jim Stein -- and he gets to walk away without a scratch."
Rotting investments
The past decade has not always been easy for the owner of Pick'n Chick'n Inc.
Beginning in his 20s as a self-made real estate investor, Stein got an early boost in 1984 when he persuaded three Baltimore savings and loans to lend him seed money to buy a sprawling collection of rental houses from the Morris B. Goldseker Foundation, records show.
Lauded in business circles during his lifetime as a frugal and farsighted investor, Goldseker was known in the African-American community as one of the worst slumlords in Baltimore and the owner of a vast portfolio of substandard housing.
Estimates of his holdings at the time of his death in 1973 ranged to well over 1,000 housing units held in more than 50 companies.
In little more than 10 years, his heirs would sell off the assets -- including at least 31 dwellings where children had been lead poisoned -- for about $26 million, forming one of the city's richest philanthropic trusts.
At the age of 27, Stein purchased 121 of the houses for $1.9 million, an average of $15,700 per rowhouse, that would serve as collateral for the purchase of hundreds more properties over the years, deed and mortgage records show.
Among the Goldseker houses Stein bought were at least three where children had been poisoned by lead during the preceding decade.
Beyond the potential lead liability, it was an inopportune time to be acquiring property in certain areas of Baltimore.
"You look at the history of these neighborhoods and you'll see that the crack cocaine just lit up this town around that time," recalls Robert L. Langston Sr., 47, a lifelong city resident, carpenter and handyman who worked on Stein's houses for 15 years.
"There was so much killing and drugs and carrying on that decent people couldn't live in them neighborhoods no more, and it got real hard for the landlords to find any kind of good tenant. But Mr. Stein also owned some of the worst houses in the city, no getting around that."
Stein's addresses would ultimately accumulate more than 200 violation notices for housing and health code deficiencies: faulty wiring, rotted window frames, leaky roofs, abandonment and lead hazards.
"I know," says Langston, who bought four of the units from his former employer, only to abandon them when the maintenance costs bankrupted him in 1998. "I made a living most of my life doing nothing but answering housing notices for Mr. Stein."
Declining fortunes
By 1996, records show, Stein's fortunes -- both in business and in his personal life -- were faltering.
In addition to the constant barrage of violation notices, his Goldseker loans had come due, and he was embroiled in no fewer than 14 lawsuits with disgruntled investors, former partners and tenants.
His wife of 13 years filed for divorce after he was convicted in May 1995 of soliciting oral sex from an undercover police officer posing as a hooker along Patterson Park.
"I usually pay $20," Stein told Officer Karla Lerner, after parking his Mercedes-Benz coupe in an alley behind Trinity Lutheran Church, records show.
In the bitter parting with his wife that followed, Stein was forced to liquidate his $750,000 custom-built home in Lutherville.
He also ceded to his wife a Mercedes-Benz sedan, $300,000 in cash, his exclusive rights to the family's country club membership, $19,000 a year in child support and more than $50,000 for his two children's tuition at a private academy.
Further, the divorce forced him to reveal publicly the extent of his rental holdings as of Sept. 11, 1997.
In a fluid portfolio of corporations through which he had churned more than a thousand properties, Stein had at least 449 lots on hand at that moment. And 40 percent of them were sheltered in a trust fund in the names of his 10-year-old sons.
Left unaddressed by the settlement agreement: Many of the houses sitting on top of those lots were a shambles.
Under Maryland law, landlords can retain ownership of the ground beneath a house -- and collect annual rent payments on it -- while selling the house itself through "lease-to-own" or "installment payment" contracts that leave tenants or investors responsible for its upkeep.
Originally conceived as a means of lowering purchase costs for working-class homebuyers, "ground rents" are now routinely exploited by slumlords as a means of severing their ties to decrepit houses while still collecting income from unwary buyers.
Even outstanding violation notices for serious deficiencies such as lead hazards or unstable roofs can be "signed over" to the buyer.
In a city known for its aged and often dangerously substandard dwellings -- the eighth-oldest housing stock in the nation -- local health and safety laws do not require that outstanding code violations be repaired before a property is sold.
Further, if the buyer stops making payments for any reason, landlords are free to take back the house and sell it again, secure within a corporate shell that protects their personal fortunes in the meantime.
"If the house falls down on somebody's head, the best the victim can do is sue the company, which usually doesn't own anything except a few more slum houses that aren't worth a quarter," says Anne Blumenberg, an attorney for the nonprofit Community Law Center.
"Meanwhile, the landlord is out on his yacht in the Chesapeake Bay, wrapped in a cobweb of corporations, counting his bag of money. It's a system you won't find in many other places, and it promotes predatory patterns and practices by landlords -- not to mention some fairly bizarre ownership scenarios."
Twists and turns
In the annals of such seemingly unlikely tales, few are as curious as the story of Stein's association with two young drug dealers and a pair of decaying rowhouses near Greenmount Cemetery.
At 23, Angelo R. Garrison looked like a rising star in Baltimore business -- the up-by-the-bootstraps owner of a west-side hair salon. The president of Angelo Inc. also controlled a small but growing catalog of eight rental houses.
Then the shooting started.
On the night of April 8, 1993, Garrison and his 3-year-old son were mowed down outside his office in the 200 block of Park Ave. by a gunman working for one of the most violent heroin gangs in West Baltimore.
The toddler was shot between the eyes as he licked an ice cream cone in the back seat of his father's Volvo.
Garrison, hit all over, fell to the pavement like a rag doll at the feet of his girlfriend. In the front seat, his younger son sat screaming, miraculously spared from the clawing bullets.
The killings flared in the news media for weeks, making front-page headlines and sensational television news. Garrison, it was reported, was himself a paroled drug dealer.
What few knew at the time was that Garrison was a lieutenant in the drug organization of imprisoned heroin kingpin Melvin "Little Melvin" Williams, court records would later reveal.
And Garrison was about to be indicted for selling 2 ounces of heroin and cocaine to an undercover federal agent after bragging that "he could obtain kilogram quantities" for future deals, court records show.
At the time of his death, Garrison was also suspected of laundering drug money through Angelo Inc. as part of a scheme by the Williams gang to deposit dope dollars in banks disguised as sales receipts from legitimate companies.
Williams himself was president of a corporation called Scrapp Inc. that owned a towing garage, an auto supply store, a nightclub, a carwash, an apartment building and a dozen rowhouses.
Federal prosecutors later seized his nightclub Underground on Edmondson Avenue after discovering that the labyrinth dance hall doubled as a bootleg dispensary -- where the profits from beer, wine and liquor sales were freely mingled with illegal drug proceeds.
U.S. Attorney Battaglia confirmed that prosecutors are still investigating at least five rowhouses that Williams transferred to family members through Scrapp Inc. As for Garrison's eight houses, they evaporated from his portfolio four months after his death, before federal agents ever had a chance to investigate them.
"I had hoped my other son might have been able to get some benefit from those houses -- sell them, rent them, do something with them," recalls Monica McNutt, 28, the mother of Garrison's two children. "But when I looked into it, I found out they were gone. There was nothing left.
"The guy he bought them from just reached out and took them back."
Deed records show that Garrison had purchased the eight dwellings on installment contracts from a string of companies named after U.S. cities: Albany Realty, Frankfort Realty, Topeka, St. John and Trenton.
James M. Stein, proprietor.
On Aug. 24, 1993, Stein filed papers in the sixth-floor deed room of the Circuit Court building on Calvert Street, taking back the properties after the late Angelo Garrison stopped making payments.
Fifteen months later, on Nov. 14, 1995, Stein resold two of the addresses -- a pair of red brick rowhouses at 1430-1432 N. Aisquith St. on the edge of a bullet-pocked crack bazaar near Greenmount Cemetery where at least eight drug murders and scores of internecine shootings had littered the streets with spent brass.
One of the dwellings had been under an outstanding violation notice from the city Housing Department for more than a year for a broken sewer pipe, rotted window frames and a crumbling tar roof.
The sale price: $18,073.60.
The buyer: a company called EAD Management.
The president: George A. Dangerfield Jr. -- "The King of Baltimore."
Four years later, repairs have yet to be made, housing records show.
The terrible cost
The Aisquith Street deal was part of a package of 12 slum houses that Stein sold to Dangerfield in just 48 hours -- including a $63,000 cluster of 10 units on Federal Street, where Stein had been cited at least four times for lead paint hazards.
One of those houses had been under a lead violation notice for four years, after the poisoning of a child there in 1991. Rather than make the repairs, Stein boarded up the doors and windows of 408 Federal St. and left it vacant until he sold it to Dangerfield.
In what anti-lead activists call a glaring gap in the law, city ordinances "deactivate" such notices as long as landlords leave their hazardous properties unoccupied -- or if they sell them to a new owner.
In Dangerfield's case, he was hit with a new lead notice at the property on Sept. 6, 1996, when Health Department inspectors learned of the sale and prohibited him from using it as a rental property until he refinished the interior.
Three years later, the two-story hulk squats with its front windows blown out, streaked with mildew and graffiti and heaped with trash like a relic from a long-ago war.
It was one in a series of difficulties involving some 35 addresses that Dangerfield eventually bought from Stein after a chance meeting at a real estate auction in 1989.
"Jim pretended to be George's friend," says Jackson, shaking her head. "He borrowed the Humvee to take his kids to the beach. He had George over to his place for dinner. He gave George referrals for carpenters and electricians. He told him how to handle himself in court.
"But when George got into trouble with the houses Jim sold him, he wouldn't return our calls."
And the troubles were considerable.
In all, 33 of the dwellings would be cited for violations of city health and safety codes by 1999, records show, contributing to Dangerfield's 23 housing convictions. Three of the houses would be condemned as unfit for human habitation -- including one on Biddle Street in such bad condition that city wrecking crews demolished it overnight.
Ultimately, nine more children would be poisoned by lead.
Together with Stein's 75 prior cases, it brings to 84 the number of children poisoned at addresses owned by Dangerfield and his silent partner.
"If that many kids were hurt in an industrial accident, there would be a revolt in this town," says Norton of the anti-lead coalition.
"It translates into literally millions of dollars in medical expenses, remedial programs, special education, court costs, you name it. And because these kids are from poor families, it's the public -- not Dangerfield and Stein -- who will wind up paying those bills."
Back in Zombieland, other costs are more apparent and more immediate.
As part of an urban renewal campaign to demolish or renovate 1,000 houses in the east-side slums, a nonprofit group known as the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition has been compiling a list of houses in the area for the past two years.
On that list are some 195 dwellings that have moved through Stein's portfolio over the past decade.
Nearly one-third -- 62 rowhouses -- now stand vacant or abandoned.
Nine have been demolished by the city.
Another nine are slated for probable demolition.
And 20 are awaiting prosecution for long-term code violations, including 12 that have been cited repeatedly in recent years.
"There's four of them on the 1000 block of N. Castle, two on the 1500 block of N. Dallas, three on the 1700 block of Ellsworth," says Michael Seipp, executive director of the nonprofit group. "These are some of the worst streets that I have ever stood on. They're hellholes.
"In the total package, conservatively, you're looking at two or three million dollars in rehab costs -- which, coincidentally, is about the same amount it would cost the taxpayers to tear them all down. You do the math. They're worth zero."
Says Henson: "It's a portfolio built on some of the worst neighborhoods in the city, and I don't think it's an accident. What you have here is someone who systematically exploited certain areas, and a certain population, for personal gain in a very deliberate way, over many years.
"I can only imagine the price that's been paid by the residents of these houses."
A mother's prayers
Shantell Robinson and little Christopher are still paying.
Three months after the Christmas holidays in 1997, Robinson moved out of 1120 N. Milton and signed the lease on a "lead-safe" house owned by a nonprofit group that specializes in handling such cases.
Fearing retaliation from her former landlord, she agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that her new address not be mentioned.
"Christopher got mine own house now," the 5-year-old says. "Those Christopher's toys. Good house, Mama, right? OK!"
"He still has speech problems," Robinson says. "And they say it will be a while before it all straightens out. But the doctor says his lead is way down, like a level 12."
She pauses, then sighs, struggling to hold a smile.
"We pray together every day."
Also in her prayers, she says, is anybody who might be living now at 1120 N. Milton.
She is praying for Michelle Thomas.
A 35-year-old single mother, Thomas is paying $289 a month to Dangerfield's Estate Management to shelter her 10 children -- ages 18 to 4 -- and her three grandchildren, all of them in diapers.
An inspection by the Housing Department on Sept. 22 revealed 16 violations of the city construction code, including defective doors, walls, windows, electrical fixtures and plumbing. The repair order was issued to Stein's Pick'n Chick'n. But it is Dangerfield's family that has been struggling to complete the work.
"The damn house has been milked out," fumes Donald Dangerfield, 43, as he surveys the broken front door and splintered windows on his younger brother's dubious investment. "Stein absolutely milked out every nickel he could, all the time feeding George some line about making him a millionaire."
Meanwhile, two years after Robinson first reported the hazardous lead conditions at 1120 N. Milton to the city Health Department, paint chips and dust are still visible on floors, sills and stairs.
Peeling paint and broken plaster dangle from the ceiling in an upstairs bedroom, above a sagging mattress where three children sleep. In the kitchen, paint flakes like dandruff from a window frame charred in a long-ago fire.
An independent inspection Dec. 8, paid for by The Sun, found lead levels in the house "many multiples" above those allowed by state law, said Shannon Cavaliere of Arc Environmental Inc., adding that it "would fail at least nine out of 10 points" in a Department of the Environment visual inspection.
The estimated cost of repairs exceeded $5,000 -- roughly the value of the entire house.
"Greater than 50 percent of the surfaces sampled exceed the state standard," Cavaliere wrote in a final report to the newspaper. "And nearly 30 percent of the readings were 20 times the standard. Failed 5 of the 15 dust wipes that were collected."
"Don't tell me that's lead paint," Thomas gasps. "God, no, not lead! I got babies living here!" ¶ 6:08 PM 3 comments
