The East Side Of Baltimore City

Confessions from the East Side....

2009-06-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

Baltimore is one of the nations biggest murder capitals. There is a reason it's known as Bodymore. In the swirl of paranoia and profit surrounding the heroin trade in the inner city.. guns are pulled quickly and indiscriminately with no regard for the loss of human lives or the consequences to the individual and the community at large. The drug game has long held roots in B-More, where the majority of the city's population is black. The politicians are black, the citizens, the cops, the administrators, the addicts and the drug dealers. Two years ago it was reported that Charm City had 10,000 dealers serving 65,000 heroin and cocaine addicts. This in a city with a population of well under a million.

The critically acclaimed HBO series, The Wire depicts fictional drug lords of the city's past in their struggles against law enforcement. But the cities real life history is more BET's American Gangster than make believe. As the emergence of Stop Snitching, the now-infamous underground DVD that discourages cooperation with police, that Carmelo Anthony had a cameo in, showed dudes from Bodymore go hard. The Wire portrays stretches of abandoned row houses, hard faced street characters and police helicopters trailing suspects with a spotlight, but to the natives of the city all that is nothing new. That shit is real life, day in and day out. Since way back in the day. When names like Little Melvin, Marty Gross, Anthony Jones, Itchy Man, Joe Dancer and Black Barney inspired fear, respect and admiration in the inner city. And it was not that long ago that Peanut King was the man, plain and simple. No and, ifs or buts about it. If they were talking about B-More premier drug lord they were talking about the man know as Nutt.

In 1982, the news from the television reported that the FBI had a warrant for the arrest of Maurice Peanut King, one of the biggest kingpins of the heroin trade in Baltimore history. The case which took five weeks to try arose from the operation of a major drug distribution organization in Baltimore City, court records indicate. The defendants were convicted in 1983 in the United States District Court of Maryland fengaging in a conspiracy to possess and distribute heroin and cocaine. King and Thomas Joe Dancer Ricks, two of the leaders of the conspiracy were convicted of conducting a continual criminal enterprise, CCE 848, the kingpin charge. Along with Clarance Magic Meredith they were named as the heads of the organization; defendant James Carter was the financial adviser; defendants Marcell Black Barney Moffat and Kerney Wilco Lindsey were lieutenants of certain inner city street corners where drugs were sold; defendant Clifton Frisby was a sub-lieutenant and distributor; defendant Stanley Rodgers was a courier of drugs and money; and defendant Beatrice Roberts was the girlfriend of Ricks who allowed her apartment to be used for illegal purposes and who otherwise assisted in the operation, court records relate.

The evidence was more than adequate to prove all elements that were charged in the narcotics prosecution, court records say but all of the above is just what was reported in the official record. And you know that's only one side of the story. We went to the street to get the other version of events and here it is the real story of the Peanut King Mob, one of the most notorious crews to ever do it in Baltimore. Allegedly led by one of the biggest names in the drug game- street legend Peanut King.

He was making $25 million a year, says a dude from Holbrook Street who was around during the Nutts reign. â€œPeanut King had Hoffman and Holbrook. That was the most lucrative area. He was putting seven to 10 percent pure on the street. He had a better cut on the heroin. They'd be coming from DC, Virginia- all over to get that bang for their buck. Most dealers put out three percent pure in that area so the heroin that Nutts people allegedly put out was of a higher quality and with the better product Nutt quickly cornered the market. The Peanut King Mob sold a lot of heroin and the price of a bag was $60 and $70. The Federal government said they estimated his mob made $45 million a year through his drug business.

Peanut King was bigger than the mayor because he took care of the ghetto,An oldhead from the era remembers.He did things in different ways. He was a businessman with morals. He knew if he took care of the people the people would take care of him. He had big Christmas dinners at Lafayette, pulled up a U-Haul van and gave a way presents for the kids, so how can you say something bad about a man like that. He was like the savior of the ghetto. He was one of the best con men in the business. If he could fool society and get them on his side while pushing dope and employing ruthless killers his game was tight. He knew how to play every angle.

He drove a Delorean and had a huge house in Silver Spring, Maryland. It's said the house had no windows, just surveillance cameras on all angles of the house. King and Meredith Market and Deli on East North Avenue was one of three stores owned by Joe Dancer, Meredith and Nutt. Peanut was feared by just about everyone. He wore bedroom slippers that cost $100 to $150. He dressed like a Mafiosi, top notch suits, top dollar shoes. A classy dresser well known in all the big nightclubs for his extravagant ways. It's said he used to step out of a big old limousine in front of the clubs wearing flawless diamond pinkie rings that Nutt said cost 40 grand

He had police, city cops on his payroll. Might of had a couple judges. He got out of a lot of shit. His style was like no other hustlers I have ever seen in Baltimore City's underworld. Him and his crew shopped at Bernard Hill, the best clothing store in the city. The old head says while the dude from Holbrook adds, He was a fly man. He had the Delorean. The stainless steel joint. The man was sharp. He had a lot of charisma. Real laid back. Very humble for the type of business he was in. He had the latest of everything. All the women gravitated toward him. They said he was a vicious crime lord, but we didn't look at it like that. He was trying to put people to work. He was trying to bring a better quality of heroin to the people in a way that showed respect to the addict. His business was about respect and that's how you get money, and Nutt put his money back into the community.

Black Baltimore

2008-01-12T18:27:00.000-08:00

By: M.Crenson

I heard about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education while listening to the car radio from the back seat of my father’s ’49 Studebaker. I was 11 and just finishing the sixth grade at a legally segregated elementary school in Baltimore. I thought that the court’s decision would take effect right away. It was, after all, supreme. I was unaware that the justices would hold the Brown case over for a year so that they could consider arguments about its implementation. The Baltimore Board of School Commissioners, however, acted more quickly than the court. Three days after the announcement of the Brown decision, Board President Walter Sondheim convened the commissioners to consider how they should respond to the ruling. Exactly two weeks later, the board voted unanimously to desegregate the city’s schools when they reopened in September 1954. The decision took about three minutes, and there was no public discussion. A week after that, the board members voted, again unanimously, to approve the desegregation plan that the school superintendent had drawn up at their direction. My expectations about the speed of the integration process turned out to be roughly accurate. In September, I would be attending a racially integrated, citywide junior high school named, ironically, the Robert E. Lee School.

Under the freedom-of-choice plan approved by the school board, the number of black students attending formerly white schools in September was not large. But they were concentrated in a relatively small number of schools, and several black children started with me at Robert E. Lee. We never talked about race. Neither did the teachers. In fact, I never heard anyone discuss the racial integration of our school with the students—no teacher, no principal or vice-principal, no counselor. No one tried to explain to us what was happening or why.

The city at large was almost as quiet as my teachers on the subject of school integration. It was so quiet that one segregationist expressed his puzzlement at the absence of debate in a letter to The Baltimore Sun. “Somewhere in this town of ours,” he wrote, “there must be others with the urge to voice the opinion.” For four and a half months, however, Baltimore did nothing but congratulate itself—quietly. Then, in white, working-class Pigtown, about thirty women picketed the neighborhood elementary school to protest its integration. A much larger crowd—mostly students—gathered at Southern High School. Fistfights broke out, and there were several arrests. But the protests lasted for only three days and affected only about three percent of the school population. In a statement that would later be echoed by public officials in the deeper South to dismiss integrationists, Southern’s principal blamed the segregationist disturbances on “agitators” who had spread false rumors about conditions at his school by telephone. Nineteen civic and religious organizations announced their support for the school board’s decision to desegregate voluntarily. A Superior Court judge threw out a suit challenging the desegregation of the city schools. The city’s police commissioner delivered a televised statement in which he warned that the picketing of schools might constitute a misdemeanor under a state law prohibiting disruption of classes, and that inciting children to boycott their classes was also a crime.

The protests evaporated, and for the time being the debate about school integration in Baltimore was over. Prolonged discussion would have suggested uncertainty and encouraged resistance. Saying as little as possible was the conscious policy of the superintendent of schools. According to a subsequent review of school integration, sponsored by city and state human-relations commissions, the superintendent “and his administrative staff, backed by the Board of School Commissioners, believed firmly that the less said in advance about integration the better, since talking about it would focus attention on presumed problems and create the impression that difficulties were anticipated.” In the schools themselves, integration would be carried out “by ‘doing what comes naturally,’ so that children would look upon it as a natural and normal development and hence nothing over which to become excited or disturbed.”

The silence that I encountered at Robert E. Lee was not just one school’s response to integration. It was not just an accident. It was the intentional response of the school system. The school board’s early and abrupt compliance with the Brown decision had been intended to minimize political conflict on the issue of race and foreclose public discussion of school integration.

School officials might find it convenient to pursue strategies that stifled public conflict about education, but the acquiescence of Baltimoreans in general could not be taken for granted. Thousands of white Southerners had migrated to the city during World War II to work in defense plants, and many whites who were native Baltimoreans shared southerners’ segregationist views. The city, after all, had named one of its public schools after Robert E. Lee. For the most part, however, Baltimoreans made little or no trouble for their leaders. The muffling of racial conflict was not just a matter of elite convenience but widespread political convention.

Racially Reticent City

African Americans have been a majority in Baltimore since the mid-1970s. But it was 1987 before the city elected a black mayor, and race was not an issue in the campaign, because both of the leading candidates were black. Only in 1995 did black representatives become a majority of the city council. They still hold a majority of the seats, but the mayor (as of press time) is once again a white man. If race had been a polarizing issue in city politics, the African-American majority would surely have risen up to claim its share of Baltimore’s government sooner than it did, and held it longer. But racial politics has been unexpectedly muted in Baltimore, a fact that puzzled the only black mayor that the city ever elected. Shortly before leaving office in 1999, Mayor Kurt Schmoke complained that Baltimore was a “city where issues of race continue to be important, but they are issues that no one wants to talk about. It’s almost as though people would like to ignore the fact that race continues to be a significant factor determining the quality of life in the city and the metropolitan area.”

Since Schmoke had been mayor of the city for twelve years, one might well ask what kept him from disrupting the culture of avoidance that has generally prevented the race issue from rising high on Baltimore’s political agenda. Schmoke himself conceded that he tried to avoid making race a subject of city politics. And as Schmoke suggested, Baltimoreans’ capacity to ignore the fact of race is striking. The city is hardly innocent of racial discrimination. It has a history of legally sanctioned segregation, and when it lost the force of law, segregation retained the force of habit. In the aftermath of the Brown decision, whites abandoned public education for the suburbs or private schools. Today the public school population in Baltimore City is eighty-eight percent African American. There are scarcely any stable, integrated neighborhoods.

Nothing about the present circumstances of Baltimore seems to explain why its deep racial divisions do not figure more prominently as political divisions. There is no reason to believe that Baltimoreans are less prone to racial antagonism than the residents of other big cities, but those antagonisms seldom come to roost on the city’s political agenda. Racial animosities have occasionally surfaced in local politics, but they do so only briefly and without much noise. When political candidates try to make racial appeals, they usually do so indirectly and cautiously, as when a black mayoral candidate in 1999 urged African-American residents to “vote for a man who looks like you do.” Mayor Schmoke’s bumper stickers in his 1995 reelection campaign were red, black, and green—the colors of black nationalism. Though he said almost nothing about race in his campaign, whites accused him of playing the race card, and the Baltimore Afro-American took offense at Schmoke’s belated discovery of the race issue. Schmoke himself later expressed regret about the design of the stickers. Baltimoreans have delicate sensibilities when it comes to the politics of color.

I didn’t discover just how delicate until I left the city to go to graduate school in Chicago, where I found that the discussion of race was loud, public, and raw. When I arrived in 1963, black Chicagoans were engaged in a full-scale ground offensive against the school superintendent, Benjamin C. Willis. They charged that he was blocking the racial integration of the schools by installing temporary trailers (“Willis Wagons”) to handle overcrowding at mostly black schools instead of moving the students into available spaces in mostly white schools. Almost every week an intense black activist named Al Raby would lead a protest march into the Loop to tie up rush-hour traffic. I had never seen anything like that in Baltimore. Four years later I moved to Boston. “Southie” had not yet been brought to a boil by court-ordered busing, but you could feel it coming. Baltimoreans harbor prejudices, some of them just as poisonous as the ones I encountered in Boston, but unlike Bostonians, most Baltimoreans don’t insist on telling you about them.

Why are we like this? Why don’t we scream at one another about race like people in other cities? Should we congratulate ourselves for being so non-confrontational? Probably not. The avoidance of race as a subject of public recrimination was invented long before we were around to take credit for it.

Border Town

In 1840, wealthy British social reformer James Silk Buckingham made an extended tour of the United States, which included a month’s stay in Baltimore. He found that Baltimoreans did not defend slavery as residents of New York and other cities did. They tolerated a variety of opinions on matters of race, but also exhibited a marked reticence on the subject. “In all our intercourse with the people of Baltimore,” Buckingham wrote, “and we were continually out in society, we heard less about slaves and slavery than in any other town we had yet visited.”

Polite discussion within Baltimore’s antebellum “society” reflected its position on the margin between North and South. Its merchant class included gentlemen from Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, where slavery was an established institutional presence. But during the Revolution, Quaker businessmen had emigrated from Philadelphia, where the British occupation had become an inconvenience to commerce, and they relocated in Baltimore, where their sons and grandsons made fortunes. Others were already here, taking advantage of Baltimore’s rapidly growing economy. Quaker abolitionists and proslavery patricians coexisted in Baltimore’s elite, socializing and doing business with one another. Among Baltimoreans who were “out in society,” there was one subject that could not bear discussion. When issues of race and slavery arose, polite citizens of the city probably changed the subject. That was why Buckingham heard so little talk of slavery, and Baltimoreans have been changing the subject ever since.

Baltimore’s location just below the Mason-Dixon Line has made it a place where white Northerners lived with white Southerners. In the past, the political and cultural differences between the two groups may have been more acutely felt than they are today. As a boy growing up in one of the city’s white neighborhoods, I was expected to declare my loyalty to either the Union or the Confederacy. The distinction occasionally became a cause—or an excuse—for fistfights and rock-throwing. But our elders managed to accommodate such differences without open conflict or public comment. It was the traditional way in which Baltimore’s grown-ups handled the issue of race.

Even the Quaker abolitionists toned down their expressed principles because they had to get along with proslavery business colleagues in a border town. The Quakers joined other emancipationists to form the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1789. But the society had disbanded by 1800, and Baltimore abolitionists’ attempts to revive it in 1807 failed when some of the town’s most prominent Quakers declined to take part. But in 1816, the abolitionists regrouped and formed a Protection Society. Its purpose was not to free the slaves, but to prevent free black people from falling into the hands of slavers. Its members might continue in private to hold to abolitionist principles, but in public at least they adjusted their aims to accommodate the sensibilities of slaveholders.

The complexities of life in a border town only begin to explain why white Baltimoreans tend to tiptoe around the race issue. In his study of race relations in post-Civil War Louisville, for example, historian George C. Wright found little reluctance to talk about race. The city’s ex-Confederate patricians did not hesitate to instruct their ex-slaves about the black place in local society and the kind of conduct needed for black Louis-villians to “succeed.” When a black resident tried to cross the boundaries set by whites, things could get nasty or even violent. But Louisville generally avoided the harshness of race relations further south. It practiced “polite racism.” Baltimore’s racism is not so much polite as passive-aggressive. If whites keep quiet about race, they provide fewer occasions for blacks to talk about it, at least in public. But some of the impediments that deter Baltimore’s African Americans from making a public issue of race probably have little to do with white people.

Nineteenth Century Black Capital

From 1810 to the Civil War, Baltimore was home to the largest concentration of free black people in the United States. In 1860, before Lincoln had freed a single slave, more than ninety percent of the city’s black population was free. Free black people achieved a critical mass in Baltimore at such an early date that they enjoyed a long head start over black communities elsewhere in which to construct their own collective life. Blacks had their own churches, private schools, social clubs, charitable institutions, and fraternal organizations, and eventually they would have their own labor unions, banks, business firms, and newspapers.

The scale and depth of black civic community was a distinct asset in some respects. Black organizations, for example, were the principal source of help for the destitute ex-slaves and the sick and wounded black veterans who poured into the city after the Civil War. But the black community’s organizational density could also be a liability. Organization meant division. The city’s African Americans belonged to different churches, different fraternal organizations, and different political coalitions.

In such a well-organized black community, whose members were divided by religious denomination, policy preferences, and political interest, it was not clear whether anyone could claim to speak for the race as a whole. Black Baltimore’s organizational complexity gave it many constituencies and lots of leaders. Unless they achieved unity, it would be difficult to raise the issue of race in a coherent way. Whites, of course, could have solved that problem. A concerted white campaign of public racism might have unified blacks. In Baltimore, however, whites consistently tried to sidestep frank and public discussion of racial divisions. Instead of responding to white Baltimore, black Baltimore has often responded to racial provocations beyond the city limits—the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, a lynching on the Eastern Shore in 1935, the state legislature’s attempts to suppress the black vote in the early twentieth century, or the recent statewide election campaigns for governor and U.S. Senate.

If Baltimore’s African Americans had arrived in a giant wave of migrants, as they did in many northern cities in the twentieth century, uprooted from home communities and disconnected from one another, they would have had only their race in common. Appeals to race would have been the most promising means to mobilize them as voters. But the well-established and many-stranded connections that tied black Baltimoreans together through churches, fraternal groups, labor organizations, and social clubs allowed their leaders to call them to the polls on the basis of direct or indirect acquaintance, not color. This made it possible for black politicians to form alliances with white politicians, deliver black votes to white candidates, and get government patronage in return. The most notable beneficiary of such arrangements was Jack Pollack, the white political boss who continued to elect white candidates from his district long after it had an African-American majority.

Political alliances with whites made it even more difficult for black politicians to present a united front. In 1971, for example, black candidates would make their first bid for the mayor’s office, following the election of the city’s first black judge, Joseph C. Howard, in 1968. Black Baltimore’s turn seemed within reach, especially after the incumbent mayor, Thomas D’Alesandro III, announced that he would not seek reelection. But the city’s African-American activists were unable to unify behind a single candidate. They divided between George Russell, the city solicitor, and Clarence Mitchell III, a state senator and son of the NAACP’s Washington lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell Jr., nephew of Congressman Parren Mitchell, son and grandson of revered leaders of the city’s NAACP branch. Russell had significant white support. Mitchell had his own political organization and dynastic resources. The two candidates divided the black vote, giving the Democratic nomination and the mayoralty to William Donald Schaefer, who would continue in office until 1987.

If Baltimore had been better able to make a political issue of race and segregation, different people would have been winning its elections, and different people would have been running the city for the last thirty-five years. Would they have made it a different kind of place? Maybe not. Today the cities where people screamed at one another about race seem no better off than we are when it comes to segregation, discrimination, and poverty—and no worse off. But I sometimes wonder whether personal relationships between black people and white people are more guarded in Baltimore than in those other cities. And now that high-rise public housing is gone and mixed-income developments are appearing and succeeding, now that couples and singles are moving into the city from the suburbs and out of town, now that new experimental and charter schools are raising test scores (however slowly), now that both major parties are competing for the black vote, is it possible that we may get a second shot at racial integration? A long shot, perhaps, but one that will not materialize at all unless Baltimore is willing to recognize that patterns of segregation and inequality are collective problems and will not give way to private, “quiet” solutions. We may even be better prepared than other cities to take advantage of our new opportunities. We haven’t really screamed at one another yet. Maybe we can discuss this without shouting.

Politic Ditto !!! How Things Got Done In Baltimore

2007-08-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

I have a friend, a reporter, who recently went to work for a newspaper in Philadelphia. He wrote frequently about Baltimore politics during the last six years, and is now absorbed with the infinitely more complicated machinations of Philly's elite. Asked to compare local pols to his new targets, my friend says he is now struck by the relative benevolence and civic-mindedness of Baltimore's bigwigs. Even the sleaziest ward heeler in Baltimore, with his white shoes and pinkie ring, has a heart, my friend says, but in Philly local leaders are often indistinguishable from foot soldiers for the Mob. In Baltimore, he observes, even the most ruthless political boss is mindful, in a genteel, almost Southern way, of his responsibility to the electorate, be it only the small slice of it in his district. In Philly, he says, even the most high-minded altruist is unmistakably in business for himself.

Despite its well-earned reputation for political corruption, Maryland harbors a domesticated variety of pol who deals, at his worst, in a very petty, white-collar sort of crime. In some larger cities to the north, pitched political battles are still occasionally fought to the death--punctuated by the proverbial long, dark drop to river's bottom. Even at the height of local bossism, the graft and patronage and outrageous public lies were perpetuated in a spirit of friendship and party (Democratic) solidarity. The relatively high rate of local great men jailed in recent years bears witness, perhaps, more to the amateurishness of local sleaze than its pervasiveness.

The entire modern history of local politics has been the protracted death throes of two citywide Democratic political organizations. At the turn of this century, city government was in the hands of two Irish-Catholic bosses whose control of patronage and votes, whose willful manipulation of public power for private gain, was so ingrained that even so-called reform candidates relied upon their support to win elections. When these two men died in 1928, their machines began to falter, splinter, and ultimately sputter to a stop. During those 50 years, most of the back-room figures named in the press as bosses were, in fact, mere bosslets--former lieutenants in the old organization. Only bosslets whose districts retained a degree of ethnic homogeneity exercised any real power, but their influence rarely extended far beyond their own ethnic boundaries. Jewish bosslets dominated these last remnants of the old organizations, in part because anti-Semitism enforced exactly the ethnic purity necessary. Today, even the last of the bosslets is gone. Confusion and disorganization reign, with candidates spending more and more money to prime the publicity pumps for their own cult of personality. It is only this lack of political structure that has kept Baltimore's black politicians from utilizing the electoral majority they possess. City politics await the emergence of a charismatic black leader. How and when that happens will be the story of the next 50 years.

There is a priceless 1928 photograph of two enormously fat old men seated stiffly in armchairs in the lobby of the old Rennart Hotel (now demolished) at Saratoga and Liberty streets. On the left sits John S. "Frank" Kelly, a big-boned loutish fellow with a grotesque growth protruding at the tip of his already substantial nose. Growling impatiently at the camera, to Kelly's left in a softer chair, is a rotund, squat little roughneck of a man named John J. "Sonny" Mahon (pronounced Mayin). Only months after the picture was taken both men died, so it is the rarest of the rare photos showing these recalcitrant old bosses together. When they were alive, all of city government was merely a reflection of their rivalry. Both men are legendary for their Irish pluck, charm, and industry, and both are notorious for having grown exceedingly rich at privately managing the public's business.

The system worked simply enough. It proceeded from a very practical observation of democracy in action; that is, most citizens know little and care even less about government. Kelly and Mahon knew the key to political power lay in motivating people who normally wouldn't vote to vote. They motivated people by rewarding them, frequently in advance. You could say that the bosses were in the business of doing favors, but the ultimate beneficiary of those favors were the bosses.

If they sent you a Christmas basket loaded with goodies during the holiday season, as Kelly was in the habit of doing, implied in your accepting it was a pledge of your vote next fall. If your brother landed, by the grace of Sonny Mahon, a lucrative job at the courthouse, implied in that might be the pledge of all the votes in your family (which, in Baltimore at the turn of the century, could have numbered 90 relatives in a few short rowhouse blocks). Since few voters gave public affairs much thought, and a steady job was a marvelous thing for a family to have, those implied pledges were honored willingly, openly, and often ardently. Over the years it got so that few city voters didn't feel some alliance with either Kelly or Mahon.

Once their men were in office, the bosses had more favors to hand out. Everywhere government touched a person's life, Kelly and Mahon were there with their hand out--either for more pledged votes or cash. If you wanted a license to open a tavern or a barbershop, you paid; if you wanted the ease, respectability, and prestige of a federal judgeship, you paid a lot. And power has its own momentum. In time, Kelly and Mahon were known to be in charge. They were the men to see if you wanted to get things done. The public perception of their power overflowed its actual limits, which had the effect of stretching those limits. By the time they posed, picturesque and fat like two old lions for that portrait in 1928, Kelly and Mahon's power seemed unlimited.

Kelly ran his organization from the unadorned basement of his Saratoga Street rowhouse. From that smoke-filled cellar, governors rose and fell, mayors were made and unmade, judges anointed and patronage subtly dispensed at the command of this corpulent thug, who started his career collecting garbage and grew rich collecting graft. He would stroll haughtily through Lexington Market every day handing out money to the poor, and issue commands on election day for his boys to use force if necessary to keep black voters in his district from the polls. In 1915, Kelly publicly entered into an agreement with Mahon, vowing formally at a gala coalition party to support the gubernatorial candidacy of Blair Lee. On election day, Kelly's machine coolly broke the promise and delivered a slim C. Harrington. Kelly was uncouth and illiterate, but he knew how things worked and was unscrupulous enough to exploit the knowledge. Crowds flooded the neighborhood to pay homage to Kelly the day he was buried.

Mahon was less admired publicly, but he was slightly better educated and shrewder than Kelly. He presided over the rival machine from the Rennart Hotel lobby, where he seemed perpetually ensconced in a game of pinochle. Mahon's motto (reminiscent of George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall's "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.") was, "Politics is my business and I make it pay. I would be a fool not to." He reportedly gained his first real foothold in the organization that he inherited by severely beating a ward leader and simply, by the power of his fists, taking over.

One old-time Baltimore pol remembers, as a young man, playing pinochle with Mahon at the Rennart. "He usually won, because he cheated," the pol recalls. "I caught him once, pulling an ace out of his vest pocket. I didn't say anything because I didn't think it was wise. But I never bet much money in a card game with Mahon after that."

It didn't pay to wager much in any game with Kelly or Mahon, because they were on record as men who would do anything necessary to win. The local press paid them reverential, fawning homage, portraying them as essential and colorful evils with hearts of gold. Pictures of Kelly with his famous Christmas baskets regularly popped up in local newspapers during holiday season. To the public, they must have seemed kindly old men who used their illicit power responsibly. In fact, they used it to enormous personal profit. Mahon left his family squabbling over a half-million dollars when he died, an amount substantially greater than anyone can cheat away at pinochle.

Their deaths left organizational politics in the city divided and in disarray. Kelly's number two man was a prim, professorial lawyer named Willie Curran. Curran struggled for the rest of his life to retain control over the machine he inherited, and for more than 20 years was the reigning back-room bosslet in Baltimore. But Curran never could put it all together.

The era of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal renewed public idealism and boosted its expectations of government. There was less and less tolerance for Kelly-Mahon types. The new political leaders played down patronage and payoffs, and often offered themselves as candidates for public office. While Curran became one of the most highly regarded criminal lawyers of his day, his forensic skill and surface refinement simply masked the political mold from which he came. With his monoclelike glasses perched frameless on the bridge of his nose, and his fastidious manner, Curran was always too, too precious for the tough-talking working-class voters of East Baltimore. When Curran moved out of East Baltimore to Roland Park in 1924, it just confirmed public suspicions of his snobbery. But Curran could never shake the onus of "Boss" in silk-stocking districts. He served for two years as attorney general after being appointed to fill out someone else's term, and won election to the state Senate. But both times he tried running citywide, for mayor, he lost. Each defeat dealt another serious blow to his standing as Kelly's heir apparent.

Both times Curran ran, he lost to Howard W. Jackson, a former Mahon lieutenant who served a total of 16 years as mayor, and who pieced together much of the old Mahon machine under his control. Jackson was a smooth-talking, hard-drinking thief when he first moved into City Hall, under Mahon's patronage, in 1923. He reportedly spent several hours every morning at his desk as mayor selling insurance, leaning on individuals and firms who needed his influential support. One year after taking office, Jackson awarded one-third of the city's $12 million fire insurance contract to his own firm. His undisguised drunkenness and extortion were partly protected from the public eye, because Jackson had carefully placed most of the city's lucrative bonding business with a firm (the Fidelity and Deposit Co.) partly owned by Van Lear Black, who published the Sunpapers. Enough reports of Jackson's improprieties filtered out to secure his defeat after one term, but he swore off the booze the day of his defeat (though not the boodle), and returned triumphant four years later to begin an unprecedented three complete terms.

During Jackson's reign, city politics became a shifting mosaic of alliances. Frank Kent, the Sun's political writer, noted at the time that the picture had become as muddied as the work of "a cubist artist." There were former Mahon soldiers Joseph M. Wyatt and George W. Della in South Baltimore, Ambrose Kennedy in the northeast, Patrick F. O'Malley in the north, Jack Pollack in the northwest, Tommy D'Alesandro Jr. in the southeast, William I. Norris in the east, and others with smaller followings.

While Jackson was more successful than Curran at getting himself elected, Curran actually became the more powerful political leader. Working behind the scenes had its advantages, and Curran had learned from the masters how to capitalize on them. He served as a focus for anti-Jackson political clubs, and as mayoral prerogatives alienated one special interest or another, Curran would pick up the pieces. When Jackson ran for governor in 1938, it was Curran who assembled the coalition that gave Herbert R. O'Conor a narrow victory. That must have been a particularly delicious moment for Curran.

His power had been gone for more than a decade when he died in 1951, but The Sun printed the kind of lengthy, reverential obituary it traditionally reserves for the rich and powerful. "Mr. Curran commanded the only all-weather, constantly-functioning Democratic organization attempting to operate on a cross-city scale," wrote Thomas O'Neill, a reporter with a romantic fascination for old-style bossism. O'Neill even tried to make a case for Curran being more powerful than the old bosses, noting that the phenomenal 58 percent turnout of Democratic city voters for FDR under Curran's stewardship exceeded the percentages of every other city boss in Baltimore history. But the percentage, of course, had more to do with FDR's remarkable popularity than Curran's power. In his heyday, Curran controlled enough votes in the General Assembly and in the City Council to make him the patronage king, and no doubt to rake in sizable graft.

The deathblow to Curran's power, and the event that set off the next era in city politics, came during the 1940 U.S. Senate campaign of Howard Bruce, a wealthy Baltimore County industrialist. Bruce had recruited Curran's support with a promise to spread around some of his personal cash reserves, so Curran in turn pledged substantial payoffs for political clubs who joined with him. But both Bruce and Curran had badly miscalculated post-Depression Baltimore's affection for wealthy industrialists. Shortly before the primary, Bruce paid for a poll which showed him losing badly. So he gave up. Deciding not to pour good money after bad, Bruce calmly reneged on his agreement with Curran, and left Willie to deal with the clamoring bosslets who had gathered at the Emerson Hotel to collect their dole. The most excitable and ambitious of those angry provincial leaders was James H. "Jack" Pollack, a tall, beefy ex-boxer who had shored up an efficient remnant of the old Kelly machine in his heavily Jewish Northwest Baltimore 4th District. Pollack stormed angrily from the hotel when he got the news. He withdrew his support from Bruce, and began building his own empire. Bruce lost every district in the city, and Curran, that dour Irish attorney, never regained the credibility he lost that day.

One emerging bosslet who stayed with Curran even after the Bruce debacle was Tommy D'Alesandro Jr., the dapper, gregarious leader of Little Italy. D'Alesandro had defeated his local political rival with Curran's help three years before to win a seat in Congress, so he owed a measure of loyalty to the declining Democratic leader that Pollack and others did not. During most of the 1940s, Curran could still pull enough support to remain an important factional leader, but by 1947, when Tommy wanted to run for mayor, Jack Pollack had become the most influential district Poo-Bah in the city. Curran gave D'Alesandro the cue he needed by refusing to OK the popular congressman's mayoral ambitions. Tommy split with Curran's increasingly impotent machine to join forces across the city with Pollack, and swept easily into the first of his three City Hall terms. From that day on, the new back-room bosslet of Baltimore was Jack Pollack.

Shortly after taking office, D'Alesandro prevailed on Gov. William Preston Lane to hand over authority for all state government patronage appointments in Baltimore to him and Pollack. They sealed the agreement at the Pimlico racetrack one afternoon. As Tommy left the track, he remembers seeing his old friend Curran, who had heard the news.

"I guess that means you're their boss now, Tommy," Curran said manfully.

"Yes," Tommy says he answered. "But they're still your friends, Willie."

With that, the torch, or the patronage and graft, was handed to a new generation.

Pollack was a hulking man with a wide, square face and rimless glasses. He had joined the Kelly machine as a young man, and had earned a small fortune in the Depression-Prohibition era as a bootlegger and petty criminal. A capable light-heavyweight boxer, Pollack was arrested 13 times in his youth, on charges ranging from assault to murder. He was never convicted of a serious crime, but his political connections even then raised questions about the ardor of prosecutorial efforts against him.

His brushes with violent crime lent considerable weight to the impression that Pollack was the sort of man who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. He amassed a despotic, nepotic empire of influence that was a significant force in city politics until he died in 1977. His Trenton Democratic Club on Park Heights Avenue hatched public officials like chickens, and collected the golden eggs of their dutiful service for decades. Pollack was crude, but sharp-tongued, dapper, and smart. His pedantic oratory, which was calculated to cloak his grade school education, occasionally mangled literary quotation, and presaged the extravagant excesses of Spiro T. Agnew--Pollack once labeled city Comptroller Hyman A. Pressman a "publicity-pandering, pettifogging, pompous popinjay." Throughout the later years of his life, Pollack was clearly a man trying to distance himself from the past. It wounded him to be portrayed in the local press as a two-bit thug. Criminal records from his youth mysteriously disappeared from city courthouse files soon after Pollack controlled patronage there. He wanted his children and grandchildren to be more and tried (with varying degrees of success) to make them judges and legislators until the day he died.

Pollack was the manipulator, and D'Alesandro was the vote-getter. One man thrived on patronage and power, the other on popularity and prestige. During D'Alesandro's three terms, he grew fat (he gained more than 100 pounds) on the ceremonies and perquisites of office, while Pollack grew even fatter, in a monetary sense, through a tightly organized, unchallenged network of bribery, payoffs, and patronage. A prominent city lawyer who was active politically during the Pollack-D'Alesandro years recalls:

"During D'Alesandro's administration every aspect of city government was under Pollack's influence. If you had to do business with the city of any kind, whether to open a bar or sign a contract, you first had to do business with Pollack. The odd thing was, I don't think Old Tommy had any direct hand in the graft. He seemed content to be mayor, and left the profit to Pollack."

Baltimore during the Pollack-D'Alesandro years was undergoing, with the rest of the nation, profound and irreversible change. Masses of poor blacks began migrating to Baltimore during World War II in search of wartime industrial jobs, displacing neighborhoods that had been white ethnic strongholds for generations. Racism, fueled by government incentives and the middle-class American dream of a home with a yard in a more relaxed, rural setting, started driving young white families out of the city. Their departure broke the traditional residential patterns in the city, and undermined the political structures erected to take advantage of them.

Only the city's Jewish community, which by 1940 had mostly resettled itself from East Baltimore to the outlying areas of northwest, retained the important ethnic homogeneity to support old-style political clubs. Restrictive real estate covenants barred many Jews from moving into neighborhoods elsewhere, and buttressed the already strong cultural solidarity of the community. By their own anti-Semitism, Baltimoreans paved the way for Jewish political leaders to enjoy the last gasp of bossism in Baltimore.

Two other factors combined to supplant the old political machines--civil service and television. Of all New Deal reforms, civil service had the most profound political effect. It meant that jobs that had once been a boss' to give and take were awarded strictly on the basis of merit, according to scores on an exam. A boss with no patronage is no boss. Pollack and the other remaining leaders clung doggedly to the few remaining positions that fell outside the purview of civil service--appointments to regulatory boards, judgeships, some courthouse clerkships, and some supervisory positions. But largess to support the likes of a Kelly or Mahon was no longer available. The second punch of this machine-destroying combination was television. Before the advent of the tube, only political clubs could give a candidate access to large numbers of voters, by holding rallies or distributing campaign information and cashing chits. TV could take an appealing candidate with no organizational ties and project his image and platform into every living room in the city simultaneously. All it took was money.

These social and political changes began to outpace the talents of men like Pollack and D'Alesandro. City politics had always pitted one power group against another in heated competition for the spoils of patronage and graft. This system rarely attracted men who could handle more than the routine administration of city government. Preoccupied as they were, city pols paid little heed to growing racial unrest, the city's fast-declining property tax base, persistent poverty, and, with all of this, the evident decay of downtown. Crime accelerated suburban flight, and with the migration of the city's upper middle class suburbs-ward went the small shops, department stores, and business so vital to the city's economic survival.

By the early 1950s, the waterfront and business districts were dangerous and deserted at night. Baltimore's putrid Inner Harbor was ringed by flophouses, brothels, and seedy taverns--each with its own connections to political bosslets. Faced with their own hypocritical inadequacies, Baltimore's pols promptly pointed an accusing finger at the leaders of local business and banking institutions, blaming them for the inevitable. At a chamber of commerce convention in Pittsburgh, Mayor D'Alesandro, fired by what the city's super-rich Mellon family had done to rebuild downtown, poked fun at the assembled Baltimore businessmen.

"Pittsburgh had its Mellons," Tommy said. "And Baltimore has its watermelons."

Old Tommy believes it was that rather awkward insult that triggered formation of the Greater Baltimore Committee, a group of key financial and business leaders united to begin addressing, in the absence of any coherent public policy, the deteriorating situation downtown. But the GBC, or something like it, was bound to happen anyway. The city couldn't continue to decline without cutting sharply into the profits of local businessmen. So, with Pollack and other bosslets standing hungrily by awaiting big contracts, D'Alesandro adopted the GBC's plan to simply tear down downtown and rebuild it. Exercising their considerable political muscle, Pollack and the mayor cleared a legislative path for the necessary condemnation and urban-renewal powers through the state and city legislatures, and Tommy condemned almost 30 acres of downtown real estate.

Charles Center and Hopkins Plaza, the Civic Center (now 1st Mariner Arena), and the Inner Harbor project were public-spirited efforts motivated by savvy private businessmen. For more than 20 years the GBC was the most forceful, influential, and positive factor in the city, though its impact on the electoral politics and patronage that still preoccupied the city pols remained insignificant. It has only been in the last four years, during the second mayoral administration of William Donald Schaefer, that City Hall has reclaimed its proper public responsibilities--planning and shaping the city's future.

By the end of D'Alesandro's third term, public perception of the crucial differences between traditional bossism and pressing civic responsibilities had grown. Weakened by an ill-fated run for U.S. Senate in 1958, Old Tommy began a halfhearted campaign for his fourth term, backed solidly, of course, by Pollack money and organization. But organizational politics had splintered so badly by this time that D'Alesandro's Democratic opponent, a young former FBI agent named J. Harold Grady, was backed by rival leaders within Pollack's own district. Behind Grady were Phillip H. Goodman, a Pollack protégé who commanded a substantial and well-organized 4th District machine, and Irvin Kovens, a wealthy gambler and businessman who would soon usurp Pollack as the city's most powerful back-room bosslet.

It was a race between the dinosaurs and the dynamos. Grady's campaign was the first in city history to heavily employ TV advertising--fueled by Kovens' fundraising talents and created by Kovens' adman friend Lou Rosenbush. "Sixteen years is too much," the ads said, over and over again, infuriating D'Alesandro by adding four years to his 12-year reign. Ironically, Tommy and Pollack's fate was sealed as much by their tested ability to command city patronage as the ads. Shortly before election day, Gov. J. Millard Tawes, who had won election the year before by hocking his soul to Baltimore's bosslets (through his appointments adviser George Hocker), handed down his "green bag" of political appointments. The list was loaded with Pollack-D'Alesandro choices, including Pollack's son-in-law, who was nominated to head the city's traffic court (Pollack was famous for fixing tickets), and Tommy's namesake son, who was nominated for chairman of the city elections board. The deck was too stacked for city voters, who gave D'Alesandro and Pollack the boot days later.

Harold Grady's political career was one of the fastest and most spectacular in city history, especially remarkable because the man possessed no apparent qualities to account for it. A Loyola College graduate who attended law school locally, Grady had worked for the FBI during World War II. Bureau credentials were politically valuable during the Joe McCarthy, commie-scare era, so Grady's stock rose fast when he joined the city state's attorney's office after the war. By 1956, he was the number-two man in the office. When the state's attorney left without completing his term, Grady became acting state's attorney. He ran unopposed for the office two years later, but before he had even taken the oath of office, Goodman and Kovens had talked him into running for mayor. Goodman, who ran on the ticket for City Council president, supplied the organizational backing, and Kovens put his considerable fundraising talents to work. A candidate for City Council in Pollack's district who ran with Grady and Goodman's ticket was William Donald Schaefer.

The victorious "Three-Gs" ticket of 1959 (Grady, Goodman, and Dr. R. Walter Graham, comptroller) was the first truly modern political campaign in city history. Besides being the first to heavily employ television, it was the first to make an issue of bossism. Kovens, the primary strategist, turned the ticket's relatively weak organizational backing to advantage by contrasting it with the Pollack/D'Alesandro machines, which were portrayed as old and corrupt. Kovens' own gambling connections and several close brushes with criminal prosecution were not widely known. Goodman's rival 4th District organization was younger, more aggressive, and appeared to be less mired in tradition than Pollack's. Grady's background as an FBI agent and as top city prosecutor capped the ticket's clean, outsider image. But the Three-Gs simply brought a new kind of bossism to City Hall, a quieter, more image-conscious one. It was impossible to rule city patronage or collect graft as openly as bosses had in the past, but powerful private citizens continued to exert strong influence on government jobs and contracting, and important decisions continued to be made, as always, by men who were almost completely invisible and unaccountable to the public.

Grady was, in fact, as nonpolitical as his campaign literature promised. But his independence stemmed from genuine disinterest rather than conviction. In his run for mayor, Grady was up to his ears in the same sort of back-room machinations he condemned D'Alesandro of engineering, but he never took a strong personal interest in any of it. Kovens and Goodman, who lived for politics, called the shots, and Grady fired.

So it was no wonder that Grady, after assuming the office, should demonstrate little or no interest in it. He found the work tiring and tedious, according to those who knew him then; he labored to understand the budget, but never achieved the mastery Goodman demonstrated at Board of Estimates meetings. Grady admits as much. He recalls casting around for a federal judgeship before completing the first half of his mayoral term. Failing that, he met with Gov. Tawes to ask for an appointment to the state courts. After his name found its way onto a list of eligible candidates in 1962, Grady was rescued from the drudgery by a Tawes appointment to the state Supreme Bench. In four years he had gone from private citizen to state's attorney, to mayor, to a lifetime judgeship (with periodic, unthreatening judicial elections).

Someone else profited by Grady's success, someone who wanted desperately to be mayor, but who knew he would have difficulty winning the office at the polls--Phillip H. Goodman.

There has been unproven speculation over the years since that Goodman and Kovens used Grady to win the office, and then helped push him out of it to the Supreme Bench to clear the way for Goodman. Jewish politicians in the late 1950s could count on anti-Semitism hurting them at the polls citywide. By succeeding Grady, who says all he wanted all along was a judgeship, Goodman could serve part of a term as mayor, prove himself to voters, and run for office on his own with the full advantage of incumbency. Grady and other pols contemporary with those years harrumph respectably and deny it, but it is safe to assume that there was more at work than mere chance in the swift changes from 1959 to 1963.

If Goodman actually feared running for mayor himself, his judgment was borne out in 1963 when he was defeated, incumbency and all, by Republican Theodore R. McKeldin. No better politician ever walked the streets of Baltimore than McKeldin, a big awkward man with a quick wit, a giant ego (he enjoyed handing out autographed pictures of himself), a thoroughly pragmatic political mind, and the oratorical skill to sway even the most skeptical voters. A Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, McKeldin managed to serve two terms as Baltimore's mayor and two terms as Maryland's governor. Several times during his career he was touted as a dark horse candidate for president.

McKeldin mastered the minority party art of piecing together coalitions from Democratic organizations defeated in hard-fought primaries. Earlier in the century, bosses like Kelly and Mahon had their differences; they lied to one another frequently and publicly; they stopped at nothing to beat one another; but in the end the old bosses were unswerving Democrats. Over time, power was more difficult to come by so it became more valuable. Jack Pollack was one of the first city bosslets to drop the guise of party loyalty. If his man lost in one party's primary, he'd throw his support in the general election to the other party's candidate. Power tasted the same served as an elephant or an ass. After D'Alesandro lost the 1959 Democratic primary to Kovens' Three-Gs, Pollack threw his support to McKeldin, who ran a respectable but doomed general campaign against Grady. By the time Goodman was ready to run on his own for mayor in 1936, Pollack and McKeldin had had time to lay the groundwork for success.

In 1959, Old Tommy had refused to throw his club's strength to a Republican, but in 1963, Tommy's son became a born-again Republican, joining McKeldin's ticket as a candidate for president of the City Council. Pollack even recruited the popular Democratic gadfly lawyer Hyman A. Pressman to run on the Republican ticket, for comptroller. With this polymorphous ticket, McKeldin united the remnants of those who had ruled during Old Tommy's three terms. The Sun, which was becoming more and more important politically as the machines lost power, had grown disenchanted with Goodman and Kovens in four years. Ignoring the obvious roots of McKeldin's strength, the newspaper assailed Goodman and Kovens as "bosses," and endorsed the Republicans. McKeldin squeaked into office by only 5,000 votes, and Pollack was restored.

All that changed four years later was the name of the man on top of the ticket and the name of the party. Near the end of McKeldin's term, young Tommy D'Alesandro III had found his way (with Pressman) back into the Democratic fold, and had siphoned off enough of McKeldin's old base of support to make himself mayor. For once there was even peace between Pollack and Kovens--Schaefer agreed to join D'Alesandro's ticket as a candidate for City Council president.

Young Tommy had grown up in the midst of his father's political battles, but he strove to present himself as a new politician, a liberal on social issues, an advocate of more federal urban spending, in short, a candidate concerned and articulate about big public issues instead of a provincial political leader. Young Tommy had much of his father's charisma, and had the good sense to keep Pollack and Kovens well into the background. But the bosslets still controlled non-civil service jobs at City Hall and the courthouse, and through their men in Annapolis, much, much more. D'Alesandro's administration was like a renovated townhouse with a clean, spruced-up, modern facade atop the same old dark foundation. His term was like his name--an inextricable union of present and past.

But the past cannot cruise unmolested into the future. Seething social problems, poverty and racism, had been neglected for too long by the time Young Tommy took office. In 1968, one year after he was elected, they erupted. For three days after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Baltimore burned. Six people died, and an estimated $14 million in property damage was done by mobs of grief-stricken, frustrated, and angry blacks. It took a full force of city police, National Guardsmen, and federal troops, who patrolled the riot-torn streets with fixed bayonets, to quell the disturbance. When it was over, city and state politicians were left to pick up the pieces.

"One day I just woke up and decided I would rather not put up with the hassles of being mayor anymore," D'Alesandro recalls. "When I was in office it was like war, nothing like the days when my father was mayor or in the decades before that. The late '60s were turbulent times. Every day all the different groups would line up to bring their protests to me. They would lay down out in the ceremonial office at City Hall and refuse to move. At first I enjoyed walking right out and meeting them. But you can take only so much abuse. After awhile, I used to send my aides out to deal with them. In time, I just decided that I really didn't need the troubles any more."

The growing presence of black voters in Baltimore had been a threat to the city's white bosses for most of this century. Kelly and Mahon used whatever Ku Kluxian tactics necessary to keep blacks from the polls during their years of power. All through the 1930s and 1940s, so-called black political leaders took money from white bosses to hold picnics with free booze and sandwiches for blacks on election days to keep them from voting. The history of black political gains in Baltimore had been one of outrageous compromises with whites until the late 1950s, when Carl Murphy, publisher of the Afro-American newspaper, helped push several more independent black leaders into challenging the white machines. Mrs. Verda Welcome, member of a prominent Baltimore black family, formed her own ticket in 1958 and successfully challenged Jack Pollack on his home ground. Pollack, never one to let personal convictions or prejudices of any kind stand between himself and power, responded to the challenge by integrating his own tickets. Behind Mrs. Welcome, now a state senator, came other strong and primarily independent black families--the Douglass family in Northeast Baltimore, and the Mitchell family in West Baltimore. In 1970, Parren Mitchell, a Morgan State College professor and a strong civil-rights spokesman, was elected to U.S. Congress from the west side's 7th District. At least one wealthy black, William L. "Little Willie" Adams, emerged as a Kovens-like figure supplying money and strategy behind the scenes.

Just as the riots of 1968 convicted Baltimoreans that the needs of the city's struggling black population could no longer be neglected, the emerging black electoral majority and political structure demanded the attention of white bosslets. When Young Tommy decided not to seek re-election in 1971, Kovens and other white leaders joined ranks behind City Council President Schaefer. Black support coalesced behind black city solicitor George L. Russell Jr. It was the first real head-to-head challenge by Baltimore's black politicians. Schaefer won with a comfortable 56 percent of the Democratic votes--Russell gathered 35 percent, and state Sen. Clarence M. Mitchell III, Parren's nephew, garnered 4 percent. Schaefer campaigned with machine alliances citywide, but won with a combination of factors relatively new in city politics. He relied heavily on television and advertising--utilizing the money Kovens seemed to raise effortlessly--and won endorsements from several of the new and increasingly powerful community improvement groups across the city.

A top campaign aide remembers how vital a role Kovens played in Schaefer's first mayoral campaign:

"We had so much money from Kovens during that campaign that it was almost embarrassing," the aide recalls. "It just kept coming in and coming in, for TV, radio, billboards, whatever. Toward the end I actually tried to restrain them. Kovens was incredible. If we needed something as simple as a pickup truck to deliver some signs, I'd say, `Call Mr. Kovens,' and voilà! Within minutes a pickup truck and driver would be waiting outside. If we needed a few thousand for a TV show, presto! Kovens would hand over the dough."

Schaefer's alliance with Kovens began as a partnership of convergence with Goodman, who in the 1950s was working to build a 4th District organization to rival Pollack's Trenton Democratic Club. Schaefer's original power base was the relatively small, German (Gentile) corner of the district. Schaefer needed support from the Jewish leaders to win in his heavily Jewish district, and Goodman needed every scrap of power left in his district that Pollack didn't already own. Kovens, a wealthy in-law to the super-rich Hoffberger family who had earned a fortune on his own in the installment furniture business, racetracks, casinos and land investments, was probably the most valuable anti-Pollack scrap in the 4th.

By the time Schaefer took over the mayor's office at City Hall, Kovens, who had never owned the kind of streets-up machine that had traditionally been the backbone of political power in the city, was the most influential bosslet in Baltimore. Martin Mandel, the governor, was a strong Kovens ally who had campaigned upon the same largess that Schaefer tapped for victory in 1971. Kovens exercised his power more subtly, by necessity, than past bosses. His friends frequently won appointments to sensitive and potentially lucrative state and city boards and agencies, to judgeships and important government positions. But since Kovens' friends were also Mandel's and Schaefer's, it was difficult to fully credit Kovens with control. His touch was light, elusive, but ever-present. Finally, it was his intimate friendship with Mandel that brought him to trial. Federal prosecutors charged Kovens, Mandel, and several others in 1977 with engineering a complex legislative maneuver to enhance the value of a racetrack Kovens had allegedly invested in secretly. They were convicted in federal court a year later, and almost a year after that, a federal appellate court reversed the conviction. The group, now driven from any real political power, is still waiting to see if federal prosecutors will bring them to trial again.

Even as Schaefer's political godfather was being hounded from public affairs, the mayor, now in his second term, was building a new structure of citywide support that has made him the most important political figure in the city, free, as perhaps no mayor in city history has been, of debts to back-room manipulators.

He is an indefatigable man, short, nervous, dedicated, quick to anger, and hard to cross. A bachelor, Schaefer is truly wedded to the city and to his job. He is sensitive to the city's serious social problems, wringing revenue-sharing funds out of an increasingly dry federal budget and sponsoring innovative and much-imitated programs to better living conditions throughout the city. Schaefer has taken over much of the planning role usurped by civic leaders with the GBC 20 years ago. In the last eight years, he has more and more come to embody the new spirit of Baltimore nationwide. During that time he has seen the small community groups he courted in 1969 become the most important political organizations in the city--though improvement clubs bear little or no resemblance to the old-style organizations. Schaefer has somehow even managed to recruit the support of powerful black leaders without opening up his ticket for a top citywide office to a black candidate. Schaefer has simply become the city's most conspicuous personality in a political age dominated by personality cults.

With his enormous popularity, and with the depth of his political support, Schaefer seems strong enough to stay mayor as long as he pleases. The future of the city's politics is taking shape beneath him, as most white areas of the city fall under umbrella civic organizations, and blacks continue to battle among each other for pre-eminence. Population statistics indicate that the city will eventually be dominated by black politics, but so far, black pols have been unable to take advantage of their majority. Without the patronage leverage necessary to build an old-style political machine, and without a candidate charismatic enough to break through the layers of cynicism and frustration that have hardened black voters, black leaders will be hard-pressed to mobilize them in sufficient numbers to assume the majority position in city government that is rightfully theirs.

With the infinite wisdom of a half-century's progress, it is easy to write off the Kellys and Mahons and Currans and Pollacks as thugs and crooks, which, of course, they were. But they were much more than that. They presided over the mechanics of democracy, and cannot be entirely blamed for the fact that the system in practice bore so little relationship to the system in theory.

In theory, that white-gowned saintly spectre of reality, an enlightened citizenry chooses a leader on the basis of his character, talent, and opinions. In practice, the vast majority of the citizenry is ignorant, careless, and easily influenced by any number of petty or selfish factors, be it the promise of a job, of favored treatment of some kind, or simply pressure to go along with the majority. A candidate who has one or more of these factors on his side needs only be a vertebrate and a practicing heterosexual to win office. The political machines that formed a sort of darkened, grotesque mirror of revered official forms of government for most of Baltimore history were the perfectly logical outcome of the way people actually were, not the way they should have been. The machines were the way things got done, though not always the way things ought to have gotten done. That Frank Kelly or Sonny Mahon or someone else got rich in the process was only natural; they were industrious and much-envied men who, in Plunkett's words, "Saw their opportunities and took 'em."

One reason politicians live such precarious lives today is that people expect more from them. In the days of Kelly and Mahon, government was supposed to perform relatively mundane chores with reasonable efficiency and otherwise just stay out of the way. A pol who made something on the side was just pocketing the plunder that belonged by right to the rich and powerful. Government wasn't supposed to be the moral arbiter of civilization, the enforcer of goodness, health, truth, and justice.

We have our regulatory agencies to perform those tasks today, and we expect it of them. Advocates of more limited government interference in private industry and private lives frequently forgot that it wasn't the do-gooders in government who created regulation; the agencies were the innovation of big-time bosses, who set them up for one reason: graft. You paid the regulatory board off and they left you alone. Today the same agencies and boards are under great pressure to in fact regulate the industries they are charged with. Many continue to resist that pressure heroically, and pocket the graft. But today the public is horrified and titillated by accounts of it, so reporters are pressed to probe and spy and expose the traditionalists. The end result is inept regulation and graft, instead of just graft.

Politics have become so disorganized with the decline of political organizations that public officials and affairs are all confused. Pols used to know when it was their turn to run for higher office, because some Poo-Bah or other gave them the nod. Today any charmer with a toothy smile can win one office, and go trotting off after a better one before he's even had time to botch the first. No one in politics is sure of his strength anymore, so everyone takes polls. But when the polls show you ahead or behind, to what do you owe it? Your smile? Your deodorant? Your position on the construction of I-95? The politicians of the future will all be Zen campaigners, like California's Jerry Brown, running for the sake of running rather than for the reward (the reward is the run, and vice-versa).

Government will bob haphazardly along on the crest of one mellow personality after another. We'll probably be bobbing that way until somebody rediscovers the dark truth behind Frank Kelly and Sonny Mahon; and then he'll organize.

“White Privilege”

2007-07-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

1. a. A right, advantage, or immunity granted to or enjoyed by white persons beyond the common advantage of all others; an exemption in many particular cases from certain burdens or liabilities.
b. A special advantage or benefit of white persons; with reference to divine dispensations, natural advantages, gifts of fortune, genetic endowments, social relations, etc.
2. A privileged position; the possession of an advantage white persons enjoy over non–white persons.
3. a. The special right or immunity attaching to white persons as a social relation; prerogative.
b. display of white privilege, a social expression of a white person or persons demanding to be treated as a member or members of the socially privileged class.
4. a. To invest white persons with a privilege or privileges; to grant to white persons a particular right or immunity; to benefit or favor specially white persons; to invest white persons with special honorable distinctions.
b. To avail oneself of a privilege owing to one as a white person.
5. To authorize or license of white person or persons what is forbidden or wrong for non–whites; to justify, excuse.
6. To give to white persons special freedom or immunity from some liability or burden to which non–white persons are subject; to exempt..

In order to make the structures of white privilege—its causes and effects—less socially invisible, primarily by pointing out instances in U.S. society where it is or seems to be at work. I needed, therefore, a good working definition of the social phenomenon I was looking for. I hit upon the long, detailed definition—which has been used in antiracism education in many educational contexts, including a wide–range of colleges and universities and even PBS—one day, rather suddenly, while talking to a friend of mine, the philosopher Bijan Parsia, who’s spent a good deal of time working on the philosophical theory of oppression. “White
privilege is after all,” Bijan said, “a form of social privilege per se.”

If that’s true, one good way to define racialized social privilege is by reference to social privilege generally. In other words, you can figure out what white privilege is in part by figuring out what any social privilege is. So I walked over to my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, looked up the word “privilege”, and after reading it through a few times, I realized that if I rewrote the definition of privilege to refer to white people, rather than people in general, I would have the basis of a working definition. And so that’s what I did, with a few modifications and changes as seemed
appropriate.

In that sense, the definition is like a working hypothesis, subject to change and adjustment as we accumulate and study more and more facts. I have from time to time tried to make the defintion less verbally complex (because I initially didn’t realize that the OED’s language is a bit stilted for everyday use) but its main conceptual claims have remained stable.

Why is it important to define “white privilege” so carefully? Because, in part, many people want to deny that it exists at all, especially in response to other people’s assertions that it is at work in some particular situation, that it exists unjustly and so should be dismantled. This pattern of assertion and denial is itself racialized: for the most part, people of color say white people enjoy white privilege, while white people for the most part deny not only that they have it, but that such a thing even exists. I have been assured countless times by white people that there is no such thing as
white privilege and that the very idea is nonsensical.

(For example, among the objections to the idea of white privilege, there is one which deserves some consideration here. Given the fact of a systematically unjust society, such as is the case in the U.S., the differential possession of basic human and political rights becomes a privilege. Yes, every person by virtue of being a person has the right to enjoy and possess certain rights. But, in fact, over the long course of U.S. history only white people have enjoyed and possessed the rights which they loudly proclaimed were fundamentally human rights. I think it is fitting and accurate, in such an unjust situation, to call the racially differential possession and enjoyment of human rights a privilege arising out of particular social relations.)

In studying historical examples and theories of oppression, it becomes clear that social (in)visibility is an important strategy. Early feminists make this point over and over. If men and women equally believe, for example, that women are by their very nature subordinate to men, then gender oppression seems natural, inevitable, timeless. If you can design structures of oppression which are invisibile, which seem natural, they will be more effective than structures which are visible. If you can convince everyone, but especially members of the oppressed group itself, that the way things are is natural or inevitable or unavoidable, people will be less likely to challenge the way things are.

If that idea is correct, then we should expect the very idea of racialized social privilege—that is, social privilege which attaches to a group or groups which are identified racially (whether one understands ‘races’ culturally or scientifically)—to be invisible socially. We should expect that members of the dominant group, the one which has the privilege, to deny that it exists or that it could exist. Which is precisely what we white folks do (for the most part) when faced with claims by people of color that we enjoy social privilege by virtue of the social fact that we are taken to be white.

To sum up, (1) white privilege should be defined carefully because it is contested; (2) that contestation is itself racialized, (3) which is what we should expect, since (4) socially invisible structures of oppression are more effective and enduring than socially visible ones.

We define it in order to make it a problem for white people, to show that it is an unjust, historical creation. Whatever has been made by human hands can be unmade by others.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

7. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.

11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person's voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.

12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

16. I can be pretty sure that my children's teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others' attitudes toward their race.

17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge", I will be facing a person of my race.

25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.

26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children's magazines featuring people of my race.

27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.

28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.

29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.

30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn't a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.

31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.

32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.

33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.

34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.

36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.

37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.

38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.

39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.

40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.

43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.

44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.

45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.

46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.

47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.

48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.

49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.

50. I will feel welcomed and "normal" in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.

The Mind Was Set

2007-06-05T18:38:00.000-07:00

"Gentlemen. I greet you here on the bank of the James River in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves. Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies, where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome's would envy us if my program is implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we Cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its highways in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasions. I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree, a couple miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, You suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed. Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them. In my bag here, I HAVE A FULL PROOF METHOD FOR CONTROLLING YOUR BLACK SLAVES. I guarantee every one of you that if installed correctly IT WILL CONTROL THE SLAVES FOR AT LEAST 300 HUNDREDS YEARS. My method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it. I HAVE OUTLINED A NUMBER OF DIFFERENCES AMONG THE SLAVES; AND I TAKE THESE DIFFERENCES AND MAKE THEM BIGGER. I USE FEAR, DISTRUST AND ENVY FOR CONTROL PURPOSES. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South. Take this simple little list of differences and think about them. On top of my list is "AGE" but it's there only because it starts with an "A." The second is "COLOR" or shade, there is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, SIZES OF PLANTATIONS, STATUS on plantations, ATTITUDE of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill, East, West, North, South, have fine hair, course hair, or is tall or short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you a outline of action, but before that, I shall assure you that DISTRUST IS STRONGER THAN TRUST AND ENVY STRONGER THAN ADULATION, RESPECT OR ADMIRATION. The Black slaves after receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self refueling and self generating for HUNDREDS of years, maybe THOUSANDS. Don't forget you must pitch the OLD black Male vs. the YOUNG black Male, and the YOUNG black Male against the OLD black male. You must use the DARK skin slaves vs. the LIGHT skin slaves, and the LIGHT skin slaves vs. the DARK skin slaves. You must use the FEMALE vs. the MALE. And the MALE vs. the FEMALE. You must also have you white servants and over- seers distrust all Blacks. But it is NECESSARY THAT YOUR SLAVES TRUST AND DEPEND ON US. THEY MUST LOVE, RESPECT AND TRUST ONLY US. Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them, never miss an opportunity. IF USED INTENSELY FOR ONE YEAR, THE SLAVES THEMSELVES WILL REMAIN PERPETUALLY DISTRUSTFUL. Thank you gentlemen."

LET'S MAKE A SLAVE

It was the interest and business of slave holders to study human nature, and the slave nature in particular, with a view to practical results. I and many of them attained astonishing proficiency in this direction. They had to deal not with earth, wood and stone, but with men and by every regard they had for their own safety and prosperity they needed to know the material on which they were to work. Conscious of the injustice and wrong they were every hour perpetuating and knowing what they themselves would do. Were they the victims of such wrongs? They were constantly looking for the first signs of the dreaded retribution. They watched, therefore with skilled and practiced eyes, and learned to read with great accuracy, the state of mind and heart of the slave, through his sable face. Unusual sobriety, apparent abstractions, sullenness and indifference indeed, any mood out of the common was afforded ground for suspicion and inquiry. Frederick Douglas LET'S MAKE A SLAVE is a study of the scientific process of man breaking and slave making. It describes the rationale and results of the Anglo Saxons' ideas and methods of insuring the master/slave relationship. LET'S MAKE A SLAVE "The Original and Development of a Social Being Called "The Negro." Let us make a slave. What do we need? First of all we need a black n-word man, a pregnant n-word woman and her baby n-word boy. Second, we will use the same basic principle that we use in breaking a horse, combined with some more sustaining factors. What we do with horses is that we break them from one form of life to another that is we reduce them from their natural state in nature. Whereas nature provides them with the natural capacity to take care of their offspring, we break that natural string of independence from them and thereby create a dependency status, so that we may be able to get from them useful production for our business and pleasure

CARDINAL PRINCIPLES
FOR MAKING A NEGRO

For fear that our future Generations may not understand the principles of breaking both of the beast together, the n-word and the horse. We understand that short range planning economics results in periodic economic chaos; so that to avoid turmoil in the economy, it requires us to have breath and depth in long range comprehensive planning, articulating both skill sharp perceptions. We lay down the following principles for long range comprehensive economic planning. Both horse and n-words is no good to the economy in the wild or natural state. Both must be BROKEN and TIED together for orderly production. For orderly future, special and particular attention must be paid to the FEMALE and the YOUNGEST offspring. Both must be CROSSBRED to produce a variety and division of labor. Both must be taught to respond to a peculiar new LANGUAGE. Psychological and physical instruction of CONTAINMENT must be created for both. We hold the six cardinal principles as truth to be self evident, based upon the following the discourse concerning the economics of breaking and tying the horse and the n-word together, all inclusive of the six principles laid down about. NOTE: Neither principle alone will suffice for good economics. All principles must be employed for orderly good of the nation. Accordingly, both a wild horse and a wild or nature n-word is dangerous even if captured, for they will have the tendency to seek their customary freedom, and in doing so, might kill you in your sleep. You cannot rest. They sleep while you are awake, and are awake while you are asleep. They are DANGEROUS near the family house and it requires too much labor to watch them away from the house. Above all, you cannot get them to work in this natural state. Hence both the horse and the n-word must be broken; that is breaking them from one form of mental life to another. KEEP THE BODY TAKE THE MIND! In other words break the will to resist. Now the breaking process is the same for both the horse and the n-word, only slightly varying in degrees. But as we said before, there is an art in long range economic planning. YOU MUST KEEP YOUR EYE AND THOUGHTS ON THE FEMALE and the OFFSPRING of the horse and the n-word. A brief discourse in offspring development will shed light on the key to sound economic principles. Pay little attention to the generation of original breaking, but CONCENTRATE ON FUTURE GENERATION. Therefore, if you break the FEMALE mother, she will BREAK the offspring in its early years of development and when the offspring is old enough to work, she will deliver it up to you, for her normal female protective tendencies will have been lost in the original breaking process. For example take the case of the wild stud horse, a female horse and an already infant horse and compare the breaking process with two captured n-word males in their natural state, a pregnant n-word woman with her infant offspring. Take the stud horse, break him for limited containment. Completely break the female horse until she becomes very gentle, where as you or anybody can ride her in her comfort. Breed the mare and the stud until you have the desired offspring. Then you can turn the stud to freedom until you need him again. Train the female horse where by she will eat out of your hand, and she will in turn train the infant horse to eat out of your hand also. When it comes to breaking the uncivilized n-word, use the same process, but vary the degree and step up the pressure, so as to do a complete reversal of the mind. Take the meanest and most restless n-word, strip him of his clothes in front of the remaining male n-words, the female, and the n-word infant, tar and feather him, tie each leg to a different horse faced in opposite directions, set him a fire and beat both horses to pull him apart in front of the remaining n-word. The next step is to take a bull whip and beat the remaining n-word male to the point of death, in front of the female and the infant. Don't kill him, but PUT THE FEAR OF GOD IN HIM,
for he can be useful for future breeding.

THE NEGRO MARRIAGE
UNIT

We breed two n-word males with two n-word females. Then we take the n-word male away from them and keep them moving and working. Say one n-word female bears a n-word female and the other bears a n-word male. Both n-word females being without influence of the n-word male image, frozen with a independent psychology, will raise their offspring into reverse positions. The one with the female offspring will teach her to be like herself, independent and negotiable (we negotiate with her, through her, by her, negotiates her at will). The one with the n-word male offspring, she being frozen subconscious fear for his life, will raise him to be mentally dependent and weak, but physically strong, in other words, body over mind. Now in a few years when these two offspring's become fertile for early reproduction we will mate and breed them and continue the cycle. That is good, sound, and long range comprehensive planning.

CONTROLLED LANGUAGE

Crossbreeding completed, for further severance from their original beginning, WE
MUST COMPLETELY ANNIHILATE THE MOTHER TONGUE of both the new n-word and the new mule and institute a new language that involves the new life's work of both. You know language is a peculiar institution. It leads to the heart of a people. The more a foreigner knows about the language of another country the more he is able to move through all levels of that society. Therefore, if the foreigner is an enemy of the country, to the extent that he knows the body of the language, to that extent is the country vulnerable to attack or invasion of a foreign culture. For example, if you take a slave, if you teach him all about your language, he will know all your secrets, and he is then no more a slave, for you can't fool him any longer, and BEING A FOOL IS ONE OF THE BASIC INGREDIENTS OF AN INCIDENTS TO THE MAINTENANCE OF THE SLAVERY SYSTEM. For example, if you told a slave that he must perform in getting out "our crops" and he knows the language well, he would know that "our crops" didn't mean "our crops" and the slavery system would break down, for he would relate on the basis of what "our crops" really meant. So you have to be careful in setting up the new language for the slaves would soon be in your house, talking to you as "man to man" and that is death to our economic system. In addition, the definitions of words or terms are only a minute part of the process. Values are created and transported by communication through the body of the language. A total society has many interconnected value system. All the values in the society have bridges of language to connect them for orderly working in the society. But for these language bridges, these many value systems would sharply clash and cause internal strife or civil war, the degree of the conflict being determined by the magnitude of the issues or relative opposing strength in whatever form. For example, if you put a slave in a hog pen and train him to live there and incorporate in him to value it as a way of life completely, the biggest problem you would have out of him is that he would worry you about provisions to keep the hog pen clean, or the same hog pen and make a slip and incorporate something in his language where by he comes to value a house more than he does his hog pen, you got a problem. He will soon be in your house.

Mobtown USA by Seth Rochman

2007-04-01T19:13:00.000-07:00

A curious handbill circulated in Baltimore during September 1835. This "EARNEST AND DIRECT APPEAL" chastised city residents "who vainly claim to be considered Orderly." Indeed, an afternoon stroll through town revealed shocking scenes of lawbreaking and moral apathy: merchants and storekeepers blocked sidewalks with crates and boxes, housekeepers dumped kitchen waste in the streets, and dog owners allowed their canines to bark all night at the expense of neighbors’ sleep. When upright citizens perpetrated or tolerated such behavior, outright anarchy could not be far behind. "To obtain that admiration which is due to the Monumental and Picturesque City," the handbill’s author concluded, "nothing is wanting but more attention to–ORDER."

A month earlier, the ruins of Baltimore’s finest homes were smoldering, an armed militia patrolled city streets, and a dozen men had been shot in three nights of rioting. Obstructed sidewalks and barking dogs were the least of Baltimore’s problems! As out-of-place as September’s handbill might seem, its author saw an obvious connection between littering and rioting: why would the "ignorant" respect the law if their social superiors flaunted it with impunity? Prohibiting men from riding their horses too rapidly along city streets and prohibiting the dispossessed from looting the homes of the rich–these were parts of the same project, a project common to the fastest growing cities of the early republic. Places like Baltimore strove to create bourgeois tranquility but faced deeper social disorder that no municipal traffic regulation could alleviate. Baltimore might gain the admiration of other cities for its refined public spaces and orderly streets, but it was just as likely that Baltimore would earn scorn as Mobtown.

Although the tension between order and disorder was not unique to the first decades of the nineteenth century, scholars have interpreted much of this era’s history around these poles. The democratization of electoral politics, the proliferation of competing religious sects, and a new boom-and-bust economy unmoored individuals, families, and communities from previous forms of hierarchy, gender structures, and class relations. Rapid economic development spurred social mobility and the growth of cities, where strangers brushed shoulders across lines of race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Rather than the foundations of good order, democracy and capitalism augured disorder and dislocation in the early republic. It fell to a new middle class to impose its own notions of order upon urban spaces and urban residents. This struggle pit women against men, whites against blacks, native-born against immigrants, the saved against the damned, democrats against aristocrats, and the economically ascendant against the downwardly mobile.

There is no better city than Baltimore for watching this drama unfold, because unlike the other urban centers of the new nation (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston), Baltimore had no meaningful colonial past to shape its institutions or people. By the time of the riots in 1835, Baltimore had little more than fifty years of existence as a city. Those five decades had provided enough time to build an urban infrastructure, to create functioning institutions, and even to erect the nation’s first monuments to the veterans of the War of 1812 and to George Washington. But it wasn’t close to enough time to anchor Baltimore against the forces of disorder endemic to the first decades of the nineteenth century.

The settlement on the Patapsco River began as Baltimore Town in 1729, but its next thirty years were marked primarily by "battle[s] with the frogs and mosquitoes whose proper territory it had invaded." Although the population reached six thousand by the American Revolution, Baltimore’s strategic, economic, and political irrelevance saved it from British occupation or blockade. The 1780s and 1790s marked the crucial decades of Baltimore’s development. Situated inland near the mouth of the Susquehanna River, protected by the Chesapeake Bay, and within close sailing distance to the West Indies, Baltimore blossomed in tandem with the grain economy of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Baltimore’s millers and merchants linked backcountry farmers to an Atlantic market that showed an insatiable appetite for American produce. "Baltimore has the most rapid growth of any town in the U.S.," ruled the future jurist James Kent when he passed through the city in 1793. Thanks to its "hot Bed growth," Baltimore gained its municipal independence in 1797 and trailed only New York and Philadelphia in population. By 1820, the city’s population would stand at 63,000–more than twice as large as any other city below the Mason-Dixon line.

The leading chronicler of Baltimore’s rise was Hezekiah Niles, editor of the national newspaper of record, his Weekly Register. "There is not to be found, perhaps, in the history of any country, certainly not in that of the United States, an instance of such rapidity of growth and improvement as has been manifested in the city of Baltimore," he exclaimed in 1812. In the years since the American Revolution, Niles continued, Baltimore had moved "from absolute insignificance, to a degree of commercial importance which has brought down upon it, the envy and jealousy of all the great cities of the union." Niles reported that many city residents could recall when "cornfields and the native forests" stood downtown. Now, Niles noted at the end of the 1810s, "new streets, lanes, and alleys are opened, paved and built upon before one half of the people seem to know anything about them."

Like other boosters, Niles described Baltimore’s growth in the passive voice: the number of houses built, the miles of track laid, the tally of barrels shipped. Of course, new roads and houses did not magically appear–and to some extent, that was the problem. The labor to create a commercial emporium required thousands of workers, who made Baltimore one of the new nation’s most diverse, plebeian–and in the eyes of some, disorderly–cities. Baltimore’s population nearly doubled with every census not because of a huge migration of merchants, but rather with the arrival of men and women whose digging and paving made streets passable, whose carting brought goods to the waterfront, whose caulking readied ships for Atlantic voyages, and whose sewing, scrubbing, and serving kept better-off households clothed and fed. Niles estimated that one-fifth of the city’s 1816 population had arrived within the previous twelve months. Perhaps only one in twenty of the city’s adult residents had been born there. "Our manners are not fixed, as in the elder cities," Niles lamented. "There is little of that paternal or family influence, which, in older places constitutes a powerful bond of union, affection, and order," observed another commentator in 1812.

The riots that gripped the city in the summer of 1812 offered a case in point. An attempt to punish an antiwar Federalist newspaper editor soon turned into the worst bloodbath seen in any city in the early republic. The defenders of the Federal Republican shot several of their attackers, before being lodged in the city jail for their own protection. The enraged crowd stormed the jail and killed Revolutionary War general James Lingan. General "Light Horse" Harry Lee was beaten and left for dead. Whereas the early stages of the riot conformed to what historian Paul Gilje has called the "Anglo-American mob tradition," the jailhouse attack revealed the breakdown of the careful and scripted dance that usually took place between the crowd and civic officials. Rioters did not limit themselves to the destruction of property, nor did they deferentially accept the calming words of the mayor. Instead of burning their targets in effigy, the mob actually set one of its victims on fire. The militia eventually restored order, but Baltimore’s reputation had suffered serious damage. Massachusetts patrician Leverett Saltonstall fumed that his brother Nathaniel lived "in a place which is without government." Editors in Philadelphia heaped abuse on Baltimore as "the headquarters of mobocracy" and "a new Sodom." The Boston Repertory observed that Baltimore "contains a more various and mixed population than any other city in the U. States . . . made up of adventurers from other parts of this country, of foreigners, FUGITIVES OF JUSTICE, the OUTCASTS OF SOCIETY AND THE DISGRACE OF IT."

That might have been a little strong, but Baltimore’s diversity was nonetheless noteworthy. In 1820, Baltimore had the largest African American population of any city in the nation. With 4,357 slaves and 10,326 free blacks, more people of color resided in Baltimore than in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, or New Orleans. Although African Americans comprised only one-quarter of Baltimore’s total population, their numbers constantly drew the attention of travelers coming from northern locales. The majority of black Baltimoreans were free, but Baltimore’s hybrid economy witnessed a large number of enslaved men and women living on their own, earning wages, or finishing a term of labor in exchange for a promise of manumission. While people of color had few opportunities to work outside manual labor or domestic service, most jobs in those sectors still fell to members of the city’s 75 percent white majority. With white skin offering no immunity from drudgework and with German redemptioners (indentured servants) arriving through the 1810s, the boundary of slavery and freedom blurred further. Baltimore’s workers–black and white, male and female, native born and immigrant, enslaved, indentured, and free–shared neighborhoods and meager material circumstances, but differences of race, status, ethnicity, and gender kept the city’s laboring population from developing a coherent class identity or political voice.

For Baltimore’s elected officials, prominent merchants, and moral reformers (who were often in fact the same people), the bad behavior of their working-class neighbors required much attention. Petitions to the city council complained of black women washing clothes too boisterously in a stream, Irish laborers singing too late into the evening, and unsupervised apprentices, servants, and slaves cursing and gambling in the marketplace. "Boys and Negroes" were frequently implicated together for throwing firecrackers, ripping up trees planted in new gentrified public squares, and although "verging to manhood," bathing nude in Jones Falls. "We have often seen a fine, bright-eyed, intelligent little fellow belonging to this class," noted the artist and lawyer John H. B. Latrobe, "with his cap set jauntily on one side of his head, his arms akimbo, his hands in his pockets, his feet apart, and, with a cigar in his mouth, bandying oaths and obscene jests with full-grown men, as though their equal in years and vice."

By the end of the 1820s, Baltimore leaders had devised several means of stemming disorder. New ordinances banned boys from throwing rocks, female hucksters from selling food door-to-door, and people of color from assembling after curfew. Benevolent societies provided religious schooling to impoverished children, Bibles to their unchurched fathers, and sewing to their underemployed mothers. Groups advocating the colonization of free African Americans to Liberia, the regulation of drinking establishments, and the suppression of pauperism shared the goal of cleaning up the city.

Reformers in all cities of the early republic sought to stem vice. Where Baltimore truly distinguished itself was in its institutional response to crime and poverty. In 1822–while the city was still in the grips of an economic panic that started three years earlier– Baltimore’s poor relief officials terminated almost all cash aid to the needy, and instead required welfare recipients to perform mandatory labor in the almshouse. No other American city had discovered this secret recipe for lowering expenditures: if the poor could only gain relief in the almshouse, the threat of coerced labor would make them unlikely to do so. And those who did enter the almshouse would offset costs by growing food, sewing uniforms, and building cribs and coffins. As a committee of Philadelphia officials noted with admiration, Baltimore was able to "derive an income from that class who are always the greatest burthen." Boston almshouse administrator Artemas Simonds concluded that "a rigid, uniform system toward paupers, like that of Baltimore, doubtless has the effect either of driving the idle, dissolute, vagrant class to other places, or of compelling them to reform their course of life." Equally noteworthy was the Maryland penitentiary, where several hundred men convicted of property crimes funded the entire establishment with the proceeds of their compulsory weaving. By the end of the 1820s, this Baltimore institution was turning a $10,000 annual profit above its operating expenses.

Although the almshouse did not eliminate poverty any more than the penitentiary did crime, 1820s Baltimore attested to the optimism of a dynamic age. A massive parade celebrated the 1824 visit of Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution. An even grander affair marked the 1828 groundbreaking of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad–the city’s best hope for challenging New York’s commercial supremacy. A young newspaperman named William Lloyd Garrison honed his skills at Baltimore’s Genius of Universal Emancipation. A young slave named Frederick Bailey (but soon to be Frederick Douglass) learned to read by bribing Irish children with food on Baltimore’s waterfront. Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and William Wirt all garnered presidential nominations in Baltimore during the first national conventions in 1831 and 1832.

New possibilities always brought perils, however. Economic opportunities in the expanding city gave many working-class men and women enough money to become bank depositors. But the same opportunities gave financiers the chance to lose these deposits through reckless speculations. That is precisely what happened at the Bank of Maryland in 1834. Once it became known that the bank had issued fifty times more paper money than warranted by its holding in gold and silver, the savings of most small depositors instantly became worthless IOUs. Adding insult to injury, the bank's directors used the collapse to enrich themselves further. In previous years, they had borrowed large sums from the bank. Those loans would come due as the bank attempted to climb out of insolvency. Buying up credit slips from desperate workers for cents on the dollar, the directors quickly accumulated enough paper to meet their obligations. The bank's collapse prevented small depositors from reclaiming their money, but allowed the directors to repay their own loans with worthless paper. After waiting seventeen months for the directors to open their books, public outrage boiled over in August 1835.

In the name of defrauded workers and widows who had lost their life savings, a mob with "Judge Lynch at its head" targeted the unapologetic directors and defenders of the Bank of Maryland. The rioters championed a moral economy that placed community needs above the inviolability of the free market. After all, the banking scandal mocked the notion that the market could regulate itself in the best interest of all. "This is the most popular mob I have ever witnessed," observed one city resident, "and I have seen several. Many of our most esteemed citizens wink at it–the poor have suffered, they could not get redress through the law, and so they have sought it in their own way, as ruinous as it may be to the interest of our city–the cries of widows and orphans are loud, and they will be answered." The crowd demolished houses, burned furniture, and drove the mayor from office, but before the militia restored order, at least twelve rioters had been shot dead.

In the following months and years, order and disorder continued to vie for supremacy in Baltimore. As the 1835 riots had illustrated–and as the author of the ORDER handbill reminded readers–the misbehavior of the city’s best residents proved as threatening to Baltimore’s future as the uncontrolled rage of the crowd. The reminder fell on deaf ears. Property holders called for a militarized "City Guard" to "prevent riotous and tumultuous meetings of the lawless and unprincipled, too abundant in every large city." Boys continued to throw rocks and to brawl at the scenes of fires. Enslaved men and women refused to stay put. The same railroad that augured Baltimore’s future prosperity carried one Frederick Bailey into freedom and the new last name of Douglass. Baltimore remained the nation’s third most populous city at the time of the Civil War, but as the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania soldiers passing through Baltimore to Washington D.C.’s defense in 1861 quickly realized, the epithet Mobtown still applied.

Gary Webb Speaks on CIA Connections to Drug Trafficking

2007-03-10T10:37:00.000-08:00

Lets get DEEP!!!
A Conversation with Gary Webb..
Date: January 16, 1999
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: First United Methodist Church, 1376 Olive St., Eugene, Oregon

"One of the things that is weird about this whole thing, though, is that I've been a daily news reporter for about twenty years, and I've done probably a thousand interviews with people, and the strangest thing is being on the other side of the table now and having reporters ask me questions. One of them asked me about a week ago -- I was on a radio show -- and the host asked me, "Why did you get into newspaper reporting, of all the media? Why did you pick newspapers?" And I really had to admit that I was stumped. Because I thought about it -- I'd been doing newspaper reporting since I was fourteen or fifteen years old -- and I really didn't have an answer.

So I went back to my clip books -- you know, most reporters keep all their old clips -- and I started digging around trying to figure out if there was one story that I had written that had really tipped the balance. And I found it. And I wanted to tell you this story, because it sort of fits into the theme that we're going to talk about tonight.

I think I was fifteen, I was working for my high school paper, and I was writing editorials. This sounds silly now that I think about it, but I had written an editorial against the drill team that we had for the high school games, for the football games. This was '71 or '72, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War, and I was in school then in suburban Indianapolis -- Dan Quayle country. So, you get the idea of the flavor of the school system. They thought it was a cool idea to dress women up in military uniforms and send them out there to twirl rifles and battle flags at halftime. And I thought this was sort of outrageous, and I wrote an editorial saying I thought it was one of the silliest things I'd ever seen. And my newspaper advisor called me the next day and said, "Gosh, that editorial you wrote has really prompted a response." And I said, "Great, that's the idea, isn't it?" And she said, "Well, it's not so great, they want you to apologize for it." [Laughter from the audience.]

I said, "Apologize for what?" And she said, "Well, the girls were very offended." And I said, "Well, I'm not apologizing because they don't want my opinion. You'll have to come up with a better reason than that." And they said, "Well, if you don't apologize, we're not going to let you in Quill & Scroll," which is the high school journalism society. And I said, "Well, I don't want to be in that organization if I have to apologize to get into it." [More laughter from the audience, scattered applause.]

They were sort of powerless at that point, and they said, "Look, why don't you just come down and the cheerleaders are going to come in, and they want to talk to you and tell you what they think," and I said okay. So I went down to the newspaper office, and there were about fifteen of them sitting around this table, and they all went around one by one telling me what a scumbag I was, and what a terrible guy I was, and how I'd ruined their dates, ruined their complexions, and all sorts of things... [Laughter and groans from the audience.] ...and at that moment, I decided, "Man, this is what I want to do for a living." [Roar of laughter from the audience.] And I wish I could say that it was because I was infused with this sense of the First Amendment, and thinking great thoughts about John Peter Zenger and I.F. Stone... but what I was really thinking was, "Man, this is a great way to meet women!" [More laughter.]

And that's a true story, but the reason I tell you that is because it's often those kinds of weird motivations and unthinking consequences that lead us to do things, that lead us to events that we have absolutely no concept how they're going to turn out. Little did I know that twenty-five years later, I'd be writing a story about the CIA's wrongdoings because I wanted to meet women by writing editorials about cheerleaders.

But that's really the way life and that's really the way history works a lot of times. You know, when you think back on your own lives, from the vantage point of time, you can see it. I mean, think back to the decisions you've made in your lifetimes that brought you to where you are tonight, think about how close you came to never meeting your wife or your husband, how easily you could have been doing something else for a living if it hadn't been for a decision that you made or someone made that you had absolutely no control over. And it's really kind of scary when you think about how capricious life is sometimes. That's a theme I try to bring to my book, Dark Alliance, which was about the crack cocaine explosion in the 1980s.

So for the record, let me just say this right now. I do not believe -- and I have never believed -- that the crack cocaine explosion was a conscious CIA conspiracy, or anybody's conspiracy, to decimate black America. I've never believed that South Central Los Angeles was targeted by the U.S. government to become the crack capitol of the world. But that isn't to say that the CIA's hands or the U.S. government's hands are clean in this matter. Actually, far from it. After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.

But it's important to differentiate between malign intent and gross negligence. And that's an important distinction, because it's what makes premeditated murder different from manslaughter. That said, it doesn't change the fact that you've got a body on the floor, and that's what I want to talk about tonight, the body.

Many years ago, there was a great series on PBS -- I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this -- it was called Connections. And it was by a British historian named James Burke. If you don't remember it, it was a marvelous show, very influential on me. And he would take a seemingly inconsequential event in history, and follow it through the ages to see what it spawned as a result. The one show I remember the most clearly was the one he did on how the scarcity of firewood in thirteenth-century Europe led to the development of the steam engine. And you would think, "Well, these things aren't connected at all," and he would show very convincingly that they were.

In the first chapter of the book on which the series is based, Burke wrote that "History is not, as we are so often led to believe, a matter of great men and lonely geniuses pointing the way to the future from their ivory towers. At some point, every member of society is involved in that process by which innovation and change come about. The key to why things change is the key to everything."

What I've attempted to demonstrate in my book was how the collapse of a brutal, pro-American dictatorship in Latin America, combined with a decision by corrupt CIA agents to raise money for a resistance movement by any means necessary, led to he formation of the nation's first major crack market in South Central Los Angeles, which led to the arming and the empowerment of LA's street gangs, which led to the spread of crack to black neighborhoods across the country, and to the passage of racially discriminatory sentencing laws that are locking up thousands of young black men today behind bars for most of their lives.

But it's not so much a conspiracy as a chain reaction. And that's what my whole book is about, this chain reaction. So let me explain the links in this chain a little better.

The first link is this fellow Anastasio Somoza, who was an American-educated tyrant, one of our buddies naturally, and his family ruled Nicaragua for forty years -- thanks to the Nicaraguan National Guard, which we supplied, armed, and funded, because we thought they were, you know, anti-communists.

Well, in 1979, the people of Nicaragua got tired of living under this dictatorship, and they rose up and overthrew it. And a lot of Somoza's friends and relatives and business partners came to the United States, because we had been their allies all these years, including two men whose families had been very close to the dictatorship. And these two guys are sort of two of the three main characters in my book -- a fellow named Danilo Blandón, and a fellow named Norwin Meneses.

They came to the United States in 1979, along with a flood of other Nicaraguan immigrants, most of them middle-class people, most of them former bankers, former insurance salesmen -- sort of a capitalist exodus from Nicaragua. And they got involved when they got here, and they decided they were going to take the country back, they didn't like the fact that they'd been forced out of their country. So they formed these resistance organizations here in the United States, and they began plotting how they were going to kick the Sandanistas out.

At this point in time, Jimmy Carter was president, and Carter wasn't all that interested in helping these folks out. The CIA was, however. And that's where we start getting into this murky world of, you know, who really runs the United States. Is it the president? Is it the bureaucracy? Is it the intelligence community? At different points in time you get different answers. Like today, the idea that Clinton runs the United States is nuts. The idea that Jimmy Carter ran the country is nuts.

In 1979 and 1980, the CIA secretly began visiting these groups that were setting up here in the United States, supplying them with a little bit of money, and telling them to hold on, wait for a little while, don't give up. And Ronald Reagan came to town. And Reagan had a very different outlook on Central America than Carter did. Reagan saw what happened in Nicaragua not as a populist uprising, as most of the rest of the world did. He saw it as this band of communists down there, there was going to be another Fidel Castro, and he was going to have another Cuba in his backyard. Which fit in very well with the CIA's thinking. So, the CIA under Reagan got it together, and they said, "We're going to help these guys out." They authorized $19 million to fund a covert war to destabilize the government in Nicaragua and help get their old buddies back in power.

Soon after the CIA took over this operation, these two drug traffickers, who had come from Nicaragua and settled in California, were called down to Honduras. And they met with a CIA agent named Enrique Bermúdez, who was one of Somoza's military officials, and the man the CIA picked to run this new organization they were forming. And both traffickers had said -- one of them said, the other one wrote, and it's never been contradicted -- that when they met with the CIA agent, he told them, "We need money for this operation. Your guy's job is to go to California and raise money, and not to worry about how you did it. And what he said was -- and I think this had been used to justify just about every crime against humanity that we've known -- "the ends justify the means."

Now, this is a very important link in this chain reaction, because the means they selected was cocaine trafficking, which is sort of what you'd expect when you ask cocaine traffickers to go out and raise money for you. You shouldn't at all be surprised when they go out and sell drugs. Especially when you pick people who are like pioneers of the cocaine trafficking business, which Norwin Meneses certainly was.

There was a CIA cable from I believe 1984, which called him the "kingpin of narcotics trafficking" in Central America. He was sort of like the Al Capone of Nicaragua. So after getting these fundraising instructions from this CIA agent, these two men go back to California, and they begin selling cocaine. This time not exclusively for themselves -- this time in furtherance of U.S. foreign policy. And they began selling it in Los Angeles, and they began selling it in San Francisco.

Sometime in 1982, Danilo Blandón, who had been given the LA market, started selling his cocaine to a young drug dealer named Ricky Ross, who later became known as "Freeway" Rick. In 1994, the LA Times would describe him as the master marketer most responsible for flooding the streets of Los Angeles with cocaine. In 1979, he was nothing. He was nothing before he met these Nicaraguans. He was a high school dropout. He was a kid who wanted to be a tennis star, who was trying to get a tennis scholarship, but he found out that in order to get a scholarship you needed to read and write, and he couldn't. So he drifted out of school and wound up selling stolen car parts, and then he met these Nicaraguans, who had this cheap cocaine that they wanted to unload. And he proved to be very good at that.

Now, he lived in South Central Los Angeles, which was home to some street gangs known as the Crips and the Bloods. And back in 1981-82, hardly anybody knew who they were. They were mainly neighborhood kids -- they'd beat each other up, they'd steal leather coats, they'd steal cars, but they were really nothing back then. But what they gained through this organization, and what they gained through Ricky Ross, was a built-in distribution network throughout the neighborhood. The Crips and the Bloods were already selling marijuana, they were already selling PCP, so it wasn't much of a stretch for them to sell something new, which is what these Nicaraguans were bringing in, which was cocaine.

This is where these forces of history come out of nowhere and collide. Right about the time the contras got to South Central Los Angeles, hooked up with "Freeway" Rick, and started selling powder cocaine, the people Rick was selling his powder to started asking him if he knew how to make it into this stuff called "rock" that they were hearing about. This obviously was crack cocaine, and it was already on its way to the United States by then -- it started in Peru in '74 and was working its way upward, and it was bound to get here sooner or later. In 1981 it got to Los Angeles, and people started figuring out how to take this very expensive powdered cocaine and cook it up on the stove and turn it into stuff you could smoke.

When Ricky went out and he started talking to his customers, and they started asking him how to make this stuff, you know, Rick was a smart guy -- he still is a smart guy -- and he figured, this is something new. This is customer demand. If I want to progress in this business, I better meet this demand. So he started switching from selling powder to making rock himself, and selling it already made. He called this new invention his "Ready Rock." And he told me the scenario, he said it was a situation where he'd go to a guy's house, he would say, "Oh man, I want to get high, I'm on my way to work, I don't have time to go into the kitchen and cook this stuff up. Can't you cook it up for me and just bring it to me already made?" And he said, "Yeah, I can do that." So he started doing it.

So by the time crack got ahold of South Central, which took a couple of years, Rick had positioned himself on top of the crack market in South Central. And by 1984, crack sales had supplanted marijuana and PCP sales as sources of income for the gangs and drug dealers of South Central. And suddenly these guys had more money than they knew what to do with. Because what happened with crack, it democratized the drug. When you were buying it in powdered form, you were having to lay out a hundred bucks for a gram, or a hundred and fifty bucks for a gram. Now all you needed was ten bucks, or five bucks, or a dollar -- they were selling "dollar rocks" at one point. So anybody who had money and wanted to get high could get some of this stuff. You didn't need to be a middle-class or wealthy drug user anymore.

Suddenly the market for this very expensive drug expanded geometrically. And now these dealers, who were making a hundred bucks a day on a good day, were now making five or six thousand dollars a day on a good day. And the gangs started setting up franchises -- they started franchising rock houses in South Central, just like McDonald's. And you'd go on the streets, and there'd be five or six rock houses owned by one guy, and five or six rock houses owned by another guy, and suddenly they started making even more money.

And now they've got all this money, and they felt nervous. You get $100,000 or $200,000 in cash in your house, and you start getting kind of antsy about it. So now they wanted weapons to guard their money with, and to guard their rock houses, which other people were starting to knock off. And lo and behold, you had weapons. The contras. They were selling weapons. They were buying weapons. And they started selling weapons to the gangs in Los Angeles. They started selling them AR-15s, they started selling them Uzis, they started selling them Israeli-made pistols with laser sights, just about anything. Because that was part of the process here. They were not just drug dealers, they were taking the drug money and buying weapons with it to send down to Central America with the assistance of a great number of spooky CIA folks, who were getting them [audio glitch -- "across the border"?] and that sort of thing, so they could get weapons in and out of the country. So, not only does South Central suddenly have a drug problem, they have a weapons problem that they never had before. And you started seeing things like drive-by shootings and gang bangers with Uzis.

By 1985, the LA crack market had become saturated. There was so much dope going into South Central, dope that the CIA, we now know, knew of, and they knew the origins of -- the FBI knew the origins of it; the DEA knew the origins of it; and nobody did anything about it. (We'll get into that in a bit.)

But what happened was, there were so many people selling crack that the dealers were jostling each other on the corners. And the smaller ones decided, we're going to take this show on the road. So they started going to other cities. They started going to Bakersfield, they started going to Fresno, they started going to San Francisco and Oakland, where they didn't have crack markets, and nobody knew what this stuff was, and they had wide open markets for themselves. And suddenly crack started showing up in city after city after city, and oftentimes it was Crips and Bloods from Los Angeles who were starting these markets. By 1986, it was all up and down the east coast, and by 1989, it was nationwide.

Today, fortunately, crack use is on a downward trend, but that's something that isn't due to any great progress we've made in the so-called "War on Drugs," it's the natural cycle of things. Drug epidemics generally run from 10 to 15 years. Heroin is now the latest drug on the upswing.

Now, a lot of people disagreed with this scenario. The New York Times, the LA Times and the Washington Post all came out and said, oh, no, that's not so. They said this couldn't have happened that way, because crack would have happened anyway. Which is true, somewhat. As I pointed out in the first chapter of my book, crack was on its way here. But whether it would have happened the same way, whether it would have happened in South Central, whether it would have happened in Los Angeles at all first, is a very different story. If it had happened in Eugene, Oregon first, it might not have gone anywhere. [Restless shuffling and the sounds of throats being cleared among the audience.] No offense, but you folks aren't exactly trend setters up here when it comes to drug dealers and drug fads. LA is, however. [Soft laughter and murmuring among the audience.]

You can play "what if" games all you like, but it doesn't change the reality. And the reality is that this CIA-connected drug ring played a very critical role in the early 1980s in opening up South Central to a crack epidemic that was unmatched in its severity and influence anywhere in the U.S.

One question that I ask people who say, "Oh, I don't believe this," is, okay, tell me this: why did crack appear in black neighborhoods first? Why did crack distribution networks leapfrog from one black neighborhood to other black neighborhoods and bypass white neighborhoods and bypass Hispanic neighborhoods and Asian neighborhoods? Our government and the mainstream media have given us varying explanations for this phenomenon over the years, and they are nice, comforting, general explanations which absolve anyone of any responsibility for why crack is so ethnically specific. One of the reasons we're told is that, well, it's poverty. As if the only poor neighborhoods in this country were black neighborhoods. And we're told it's high teenage unemployment; these kids gotta have jobs. As if the hills and hollows of Appalachia don't have teenage unemployment rates that are ten times higher than inner city Los Angeles. And then we're told that it's loose family structure -- you know, presuming that there are no white single mothers out there trying to raise kids on low-paying jobs or welfare and food stamps. And then we're told, well, it's because crack is so cheap -- because it sells for a lower price in South Central than it sells anywhere else. But twenty bucks is twenty bucks, no matter where you go in the country.

So once you have eliminated these sort of non-sensical explanations, you are left with two theories which are far less comfortable. The first theory -- which is not something I personally subscribe to, but it's out there -- is that there's something about black neighborhoods which causes them to be genetically predisposed to drug trafficking. That's a racist argument that no one in their right mind is advancing publicly, although I tell you, when I was reading a lot of the stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times, they were talking about black Americans being more susceptible to "conspiracy theories" than white Americans, which is why they believe the story more. I think that was sort of the underlying current there. On the other hand, I didn't see any stories about all the white people who think Elvis is alive still, or that Hitler's brain is preserved down in Brazil to await the Fourth Reich... [laughter from the audience] ...which is a particularly white conspiracy theory, I didn't see any stories in the New York Times about that...

The other more palatable reason which in my mind comes closer to the truth, is that someone started bringing cheap cocaine into black neighborhoods right at the time when drug users began figuring out how to turn it into crack. And this allowed black drug dealers to get a head start on every other ethnic group in terms of setting up distribution systems and trafficking systems.

Now, one thing I've learned about the drug business while researching this is that in many ways it is the epitome of capitalism. It is the purest form of capitalism. You have no government regulation, a wide-open market, a buyer's market -- anything goes. But these things don't spring out of the ground fully formed. It's like any business. It takes time to grow them. It takes time to set up networks. So once these distribution networks got set up and established in primarily South Central Los Angeles, primarily black neighborhoods, they spread it along ethnic and cultural lines. You had black dealers from LA going to black neighborhoods in other cities, because they knew people there, they had friends there, and that's why you saw these networks pop up from one black neighborhood to another black neighborhood.

Now, exactly the same thing happened on the east coast a couple of years later. When crack first appeared on the east coast, it appeared in Caribbean neighborhoods in Miami -- thanks largely to the Jamaicans, who were using their drug profits to fund political gains back home. It was almost the exact opposite of what happened in LA in that the politics were the opposite -- but it was the same phenomenon. And once the Miami market was saturated, they moved to New York, they moved east, and they started bringing crack from the east coast towards the middle of the country.

So it seems to me that if you're looking for the root of your drug problems in a neighborhood, nothing else matters except the drugs, and where they're coming from, and how they're getting there. And all these other reasons I cited are used as explanations for how crack became popular, but it doesn't explain how the cocaine got there in the first place. And that's where the contras came in.

One of the things which these newspapers who dissed my story were saying was, we can't believe that the CIA would know about drug trafficking and let it happen. That this idea that this agency which gets $27 billion a year to tell us what's going on, and which was so intimately involved with the contras they were writing their press releases for them, they wouldn't know about this drug trafficking going on under their noses. But the Times and the Post all uncritically reported their claims that the CIA didn't know what was going on, and that it would never permit its hirelings to do anything like that, as unseemly as drug trafficking. You know, assassinations and bombings and that sort of thing, yeah, they'll admit to right up front, but drug dealing, no, no, they don't do that kind of stuff.

Unfortunately, though, it was true, and what has happened since my series came out is that the CIA was forced to do an internal review, the DEA and Justice Department were forced to do internal reviews, and these agencies that released these reports, you probably didn't read about them, because they contradicted everything else these other newspapers had been writing for the last couple of years, but let me just read you this one excerpt. This is from a 1987 DEA report. And this is about this drug ring in Los Angeles that I wrote about. In 1987, the DEA sent undercover informants inside this drug operation, and they interviewed one of the principals of this organization, namely Ivan Torres. And this is what he said. He told the informant:

"The CIA wants to know about drug trafficking, but only for their own purposes, and not necessarily for the use of law enforcement agencies. Torres told DEA Confidential Informant 1 that CIA representatives are aware of his drug-related activities, and that they don't mind. He said they had gone so far as to encourage cocaine trafficking by members of the contras, because they know it's a good source of income. Some of this money has gone into numbered accounts in Europe and Panama, as does the money that goes to Managua from cocaine trafficking. Torres told the informant about receiving counterintelligence training from the CIA, and had avowed that the CIA looks the other way and in essence allows them to engage in narcotics trafficking."

This is a DEA report that was written in 1987, when this operation was still going on. Another member of this organization who was affiliated with the San Francisco end of it, said that in 1985 -- and this was to the CIA -- "Cabezas claimed that the contra cocaine operated with the knowledge of, and under the supervision of, the CIA. Cabezas claimed that this drug enterprise was run with the knowledge of CIA agent Ivan Gómez."

Now, this is one of the stories that I tried to do at the Mercury News was who this man Ivan Gómez was. This was after my original series came out, and after the controversy started. I went back to Central America, and I found this fellow Cabezas and he told me all about Ivan Gómez. And I came back, I corroborated it with three former contra officials. Mercury News wouldn't put it in the newspaper. And they said, "We have no evidence this man even exists."

Well, the CIA Inspector General's report came out in October, and there was a whole chapter on Ivan Gómez. And the amazing thing was that Ivan Gómez admitted in a CIA-administered polygraph test that he had been engaged in laundering drug money the same month that this man told me he had been engaged in it. CIA knew about it, and what did they do? Nothing. They said okay, go back to work. And they covered it up for fifteen years.

So, the one thing that I've learned from this whole experience is, first of all, you can't believe the government -- on anything. And you especially can't believe them when they're talking about important stuff, like this stuff. The other thing is that the media will believe the government before they believe anything.

This has been the most amazing thing to me. You had a situation where you had another newspaper who reported this information. The major news organizations in this country went to the CIA, they went to the Justice Department, and they said, what about it? And they said, oh, no, it's not true. Take our word for it. And they went back and put it in the newspaper! Now, I try to imagine what would happen had reporters come back to their editors and said, look, I know the CIA is involved in drug trafficking. And I know the FBI knows about it, and I've got a confidential source that's telling me that. Can I write a story about that? What do you think the answer would have been? [Murmurs of "no" from the audience.] Get back down to the obit desk. Start cranking out those sports scores. But, if they go to the government and the government denies something like that, they'll put it in the paper with no corroboration whatsoever.

And it's only since the government has admitted it that now the media is willing to consider that there might be a story here after all. The New York Times, after the CIA report that came out, ran a story on its front page saying, gosh, the contras were involved in drugs after all, and gosh, the CIA knew about it.

Now you would think -- at least I would think -- that something like that would warrant Congressional investigation. We're spending millions of dollars to find out how many times Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Why aren't we interested in how much the CIA knew about drug traffic? Who was profiting from this drug traffic? Who else knew about it? And why did it take some guy from a California newspaper by accident stumbling over this stuff ten years later in order for it to be important? I mean, what the hell is going on here? I've been a reporter for almost twenty years. To me, this is a natural story. The CIA is involved in drug trafficking? Let's know about it. Let's find out about it. Let's do something about it. Nobody wants to touch this thing.

And the other thing that came out just recently, which nobody seems to know about, because it hasn't been reported -- the CIA Inspector General went before Congress in March and testified that yes, they knew about it. They found some documents that indicated that they knew about it, yeah. I was there, and this was funny to watch, because these Congressmen were up there, and they were ready to hear the absolution, right? "We had no evidence that this was going on..." And this guy sort of threw 'em a curve ball and admitted that it had happened.

One of the people said, well geez, what was the CIA's responsibility when they found out about this? What were you guys supposed to do? And the Inspector General sort of looked around nervously, cleared his throat and said, "Well... that's kind of an odd history there." And Norman Dix from Washington, bless his heart, didn't let it go at that. He said, "Explain what you mean by that?" And the Inspector General said, well, we were looking around and we found this document, and according to the document, we didn't have to report this to anybody. And they said, "How come?" And the IG said, we don't know exactly, but there was an agreement made in 1982 between Bill Casey -- a fine American, as we all know [laughter from the audience] -- and William French Smith, who was then the Attorney General of the United States. And they reached an agreement that said if there is drug trafficking involved by CIA agents, we don't have to tell the Justice Department. Honest to God. Honest to God. Actually, this is now a public record, this document. Maxine Waters just got copies of it, she's putting it on the Congressional Record. It is now on the CIA's web site, if you care to journey into that area. If you do, check out the CIA Web Site for Kids, it's great, I love it. [Laugher from the audience.] I kid you not, they've actually got a web page for kids.

The other thing about this agreement was, this wasn't just like a thirty-day agreement -- this thing stayed in effect from 1982 until 1995. So all these years, these agencies had a gentleman's agreement that if CIA assets or CIA agents were involved in drug trafficking, it did not need to be reported to the Justice Department.

So I think that eliminates any questions that drug trafficking by the contras was an accident, or was a matter of just a few rotten apples. I think what this said was that it was anticipated by the Justice Department, it was anticipated by the CIA, and steps were taken to ensure that there was a loophole in the law, so that if it ever became public knowledge, nobody would be prosecuted for it.

The other thing is, when George Bush pardoned -- remember those Christmas pardons that he handed out when he was on his way out the door a few years ago? The media focused on old Caspar Weinberger, got pardoned, it was terrible. Well, if you looked down the list of names at the other pardons he handed out, there was a guy named Claire George, there was a guy named Al Fiers, there was another guy named Joe Fernández. And these stories sort of brushed them off and said, well, they were CIA officials, we're not going to say much more about it. These were the CIA officials who were responsible for the contra war. These were the men who were running the contra operation. And the text of Bush's pardon not only pardons them for the crimes of Iran-contra, it pardons them for everything. So, now that we know about it, we can't even do anything about it. They all received presidential pardons.

So where does that leave us? Well, I think it sort of leaves us to rely on the judgment of history. But that is a dangerous step. We didn't know about this stuff two years ago; we know about it now. We've got Congressmen who are no longer willing to believe that CIA agents are "honorable men," as William Colby called them. And we've got approximately a thousand pages of evidence of CIA drug trafficking on the public record finally.

That said, let me tell you, there are thousands of pages more that we still don't know about. The CIA report that came out in October was originally 600 pages; by the time we got ahold of it, it was only 300 pages.

One last thing I want to mention -- Bob Parry, who is a fine investigative reporter, he runs a magazine in Washington called I.F. Magazine, and he's got a great website, check it out -- he did a story about two weeks ago about some of the stuff that was contained in the CIA report that we didn't get to see. And one of the stories he wrote was about how there was a second CIA drug ring in South Central Los Angeles that ran from 1988 to 1991. This was not even the one I wrote about. There was another one there. This was classified.

The interesting thing is, it was run by a CIA agent who had participated in the contra war, and the reason it was classified is because it is under investigation by the CIA. I doubt very seriously that we'll ever hear another word about that.

But the one thing that we can do, and the one thing that Maxine Waters is trying to do, is force the House Intelligence Committee to hold hearings on this. This is supposed to be the oversight committee of the CIA. They have held one hearing, and after they found out there was this deal that they didn't have to report drug trafficking, they all ran out of the room, they haven't convened since.

So if you're interested in pursuing this, the thing I would suggest you do is, call up the House Intelligence Committee in Washington and ask them when we're going to have another CIA/contra/crack hearing. Believe me, it'll drive them crazy. Send them email, just ask them, make sure -- they think everybody's forgotten about this. I mean, if you look around the room tonight, I don't think it's been forgotten. They want us to forget about it. They want us to concentrate on sex crimes, because, yeah, it's titillating. It keeps us occupied. It keeps us diverted. Don't let them do it."

Former Los Angeles Detective Mike Ruppert blows the whistle on Wall Street's role in laundering drug money for CIA enterprises

Who benefits most from an addicted inner-city population?

It's not just who benefits most; it's how many people can benefit on how many different ends of the spectrum.

We published a story in my newsletter From The Wilderness in May of 1998 that was written by Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing [and Urban Development, HUD]. She produced a map in 1996, August of 1996--that's the same month that the Gary Webb story broke in the San Jose Mercury News. It was a map that showed the pattern of single family foreclosures or single family mortgages--HUD-backed mortgages--in South Central Los Angeles. But when you looked at the map all of these HUD foreclosures, they were right in the heart of the area where the crack cocaine epidemic had occurred. And what was revealed by looking at the HUD data was that, during the 1980s, thousands of middle-class African American wage-earning families with mortgages lost their homes. Why? There were drive-by shootings, the whole neighbourhood deteriorated, crack people moved in next door, your children got shot and went to jail and you had to move out. The house on which you owed $100,000 just got appraised at $40,000 because nobody wanted to buy it and you had to flee; you couldn't sell it, so you walked on it. And what Catherine's research showed was that someone else came along and bought thousands of homes for 10 to 20 cents in the dollar in the years right after the crack cocaine epidemic.

So the economic model is the same one that's always been in play for the ruling elite: use the poor people's money to steal their own land. You get the poor people to buy the drugs, using their money; you take that money to bring in more drugs, which destroys their property value, and then you steal it back. And the same thing has happened not only in Los Angeles; it has happened in Washington Heights in New York. As a matter of fact, it's been documented by a fabulous researcher, Professor John Metzger at the University of Michigan, who is one of my subscribers; he has a doctorate of urban planning. It was discussed in the Kerner Commission Report in 1967 after the Detroit riots, where it became US government policy that no more than a quarter of the population of any major inner city should be minority. "Spatial deconcentration" they call it, which really sounds Nazi to me, but it's in the Kerner Commission Report.

So the plan is literally to kill, loot...let me make it real simple...it's "Kill the Indians, take the land, take the wealth". So it is something of a misnomer or a misconception to believe that all of the cocaine or all of the crack cocaine was only used by African Americans. There was almost as much crack being used by whites as there was by African Americans, certainly in terms of total consumption.

Whites probably consumed more cocaine than African Americans, but they consumed powder. And what we saw was a deliberate effort by the Agency or Agency-related organisations to make sure that the large quantities of the cocaine, and the high-quality cocaine, got into the inner cities like Los Angeles. It was protected. And that's what I saw with the LAPD. I saw the hands-on working relationship, the interface between local police departments and the CIA.

I was first recruited when I was a senior at UCLA. The Agency flew me to Washington and said: "Mike, we want you to become a CIA case officer. You've already interned for LAPD for three years, you interned for the chief, your family was CIA, your mother was NSA. We want you to go back to the LAPD, and being an LAPD cop will just be your cover."

Now the Agency has done that; we've documented it in New Orleans, in New York, in police departments all across the country. And I've seen the interface where the CIA will deal very quietly with local agencies to protect their drug operations. That's one of the reasons they have to do it; it weeds out competition.

Off The Dome

2007-03-01T11:10:00.000-08:00

Good cops(lol), crooked cops, drug lords and snitches roam the streets of
East Baltimore. In these gritty neighborhoods, drug dealers sit on the front steps and sell out the front door. The police works hand-in-hand with the informants and undercovers trying to unearth that next hood star and money-getting dude who got the game on lock.

B-more is a black man's world(atleast in this context). The blacks are the politicians, the cops and the administrators. They are the wealthy, the poor, the gangbanging and the bourgeois.We are the city of slick. And for real, in the summer you can find them all at the Dome.

The Dome is the most unique outdoor basketball court in the United States. Spectators, hustlers, politicians and players have come from far and wide to see this unique setting.

Sitting in the heart of East Baltimore on North Eden and East Biddle Streets, the Dome is connected to the Madison Square recreation center. During the summer months, the court hosts three different leagues. The Craig Cromwell league, which was named in honor of a kid who was playing on Clavert Hall's national championship team but was shot and killed before the season started in 1982. Every high school team in the metropolitan area – including nationally known Dunbar High School – has a squad in this summer tune-up.

There is also the Baltimore Neighborhood Basketball League, which consists of AAU and rec teams around the city with division for all ages up to 19 years. And finally, there is the grand daddy of them all – Midnight Madness, with games on Monday and Wednesday nights at
10, 11 and 12 pm. These are the games where the hood stars, homegrown NBA players, college bigshots and street legends come out to show their skills.

The tournament boasts a rich tradition of notable players. From former Dunbar star and streetball legend Skip Wise – who was the only freshman to lead the ACC in scoring – in the 70's to the 80's – with Dunbar alumni and future NBA players Muggsy Bogues, Reggie Williams and Reggie Lewis along with hood stars like Big Spoon, Duke, Cosher and Tony Bunch – to the 90's – with homegrown B-more superstars and Division I players like Sam Cassell, Michael Lloyd, Kwame Evans, Keith Booth and Donta Bright. They shared the court with streetballers like Elbow, Muddow , Big Hop and Gloves. In the new millennium, you could see future NBAers Juan Dixon and Carmelo Anthony, college players like Mark Karcher, Kevin Braswell, Shawnta "Little Nut" Rogers, Kevin "Stink" Morris, Bootsy Thorton and Johnny Helmsley and several hood stars of the 21st century – including "DJ" Hairston, Beano, Big Zink, Big Vials, Colin "Get Up" Jones, Big Kofi, Lil' Geryl and Antwon Jennifer.

These are the names of the ballers that have rocked the Dome for the last three decades. Some of them have gone on to the NBA or the NCAA and won championships. Multiple in the case of Sam I Am. Some of them have starred in college or been in and out of the league. Some of them never made it out of the hood and still others ended up drug addicts or in the feds doing football numbers.

The Dome is a staple of the city. Like Rucker Park to New York. And everybody comes out for the games. The men, the women, the children and even the dogs and cats. Every young kid who balls in the city dreams of playing at the Dome. They come from all areas of Baltimore – E.A., Preston and Bond, Monument Street, Ashland Ave, Deakyland, Greenmount Ave and Lafayette projects – to try and compete with the city's finest.

The Dome is where Sam Cassell and Carmelo made their bones. It’s where they proved their heart and their games through sweat and tears, victories and losses. Before they shined on the national stage, they shined on the local one.

Skip Wise, Sam I Am, Carmelo, Muggsy, Reggie Williams and Juan Dixon are street certified legends in B-More who created their myths at the Dome. Their legends and feats live on to this day. But in the last couple of years the competition at the Dome has been dominated by one man – Michael Lloyd. He could have gone pro, but it was never to be. Instead he leads a team of pros in the Midnight Madness tournament every year and usually wins. His team, the Michael Lloyd team, has consisted of Carmelo, Marcus Hatten, Kwame Evans and streetballer Andre "Silk" Poole.

But other teams enter regularly too and give Mike Lloyd's squad a run for the title. Sam Cassell usually plays with the T&M Lakers along with Spoon, Elbow and Glen Stanley. The Ashland Ave Runners have Keith and Donta Bright. The Project Boyz boasted prison legend "DJ" Hairston, Mark Karcher and Bootsy Thorton. And you know Chocolate City always enters a team – the DC All Stars, who has Steve Francis, Curt Smith, Greg "The Wizard" Jones, Lonnie Harrell, Pep Tyson, Mike Gill and Big Mike Smith.

So in the summertime the Dome is jumping. The NBA players make their appearances and the street legends like Mike Lloyd hold it down. The Dome is for real. They got those Rucker Park specials on BET right now. And the And1 Tour is all over ESPN2. Even MTV did the Pee Wee Kirkland streetball special. But when are they going to show the B-MORE some love?

Smart Growth

2007-02-28T19:30:00.000-08:00

Between 1990 and 2000, Baltimore experienced the largest population decline of any American city. Some of the reasons for this decline are obvious. Throughout the decade, violent crime, drug addiction, and weak schools plagued the city without improvement. These evident problems make it easy to overlook another critical reason for Baltimore’s decline — the failure to pursue effective strategies for workforce development and attraction of young talent.

In many American cities, including Baltimore, failing workforce development programs leave thousands of people unemployed and underemployed, even in metropolitan areas with a growing and unmet demand for workers. At the same time, thousands of recent college graduates and young professionals seek opportunities to participate in building strong, diverse communities, but few cities focus on attracting this talent. Cities can thrive by developing these two under-tapped sources of human capital, which will in turn attract companies in search of talent. Unfortunately, most cities, particularly the nation’s older industrial cities, have failed to pursue either strategy with vigor or success. Baltimore is a case study for both types of neglect.

Current Programs Do Little to Address Resident and Employer Needs

Baltimore receives nearly $120 million annually in public funding to support workforce development — activities designed to enhance education levels, employment skills and job readiness, as well as form employer partnerships to increase job placement. These funds should connect Baltimore’s unemployed with businesses’ need for qualified labor, and in turn result in decreased crime and substance abuse, higher rates of literacy for Baltimore’s poor, and an increase in tax revenue for the city. Yet poverty and substance abuse rates have remained high or have grown worse over the past decade, and literacy has not improved. Employers’ difficulties in finding qualified workers have only grown. Overall, the existing workforce development system has failed to produce tangible results.

According to the 2000 Census, Baltimore has a 24% poverty rate — an increase from the 22% rate recorded in the 1990 Census. The Maryland Alcohol and Drug Abuse Administration estimates that there are 60,000 drug-dependent people within the city — nearly one out of every ten city residents. Almost 75% of the city’s adults read at the ninth grade level or lower, and 40% of residents older than 25 lack a high school diploma.

Meanwhile, local companies report a strong and steady need for more qualified employees. According to the Maryland Workforce Educational Needs Assessment Survey, completed bi-annually by the Maryland Business Roundtable, “Half of Maryland employers believe the lack of qualified employees has affected the ability of their firm to do business in Maryland over the past year. This belief is universally shared across different industries and sizes of companies. This concern has grown since the first study in 1997.” As recently as October 2002, the Maryland Business Climate Survey published by the University of Baltimore found that 43% of businesses in the state believe high school graduates do not have the most basic skills to perform their jobs. This crisis will only grow worse as skilled workers in the baby boom generation retire.

The workforce development system has failed to address either residents’ or employers’ needs because funding is fragmented among many workforce development programs. Since there is no coordination among these various programs (or between workforce development and economic development strategies in general), workforce development efforts have failed to substantially improve education or job readiness.

In the 2001 fiscal year, $118.5 million in public funding for workforce development went to eight agencies, as shown in the table below. This total does not include the Baltimore City School System, which spent $850 million in FY2001, or workforce programs in surrounding jurisdictions that add significantly to the overall total.

In and of itself, distributing funds to many agencies is not a problem. However, the different agencies fail to coordinate priorities for the use of these funds — thus undermining the overall effectiveness of the city’s workforce development program. In the long run, this leads to employers departing the city for surrounding suburbs or other regions where skilled workers are readily available.

The few residents who do attain employment through the complex mix of local workforce development programs often languish in service-level jobs with little upward mobility and stagnant wages. Why? Because Baltimore’s economic development strategies have largely focused on creating such jobs. Since the 1970s, Baltimore has spent more than $2 billion in economic development subsidies for tourist facilities alone. Such activities have led to more service jobs, including both high-level professional positions and unskilled entry-level jobs — but few middle-income jobs to replace those once provided by the city’s dwindling manufacturing base. The professional positions remain out of reach for Baltimore’s poor, instead going to high-income workers who tend to live outside city limits. The poor can only qualify for the unskilled positions, which provide little opportunity for advancement — thereby weakening incentives for low-income people to work and participate in the legitimate economy.

An increase in the number of unskilled service jobs also raises the demand for city services without increasing the city’s tax base. Unskilled jobs contribute little in taxes, and pay salaries that fail to cover everyday costs such as health care. For example, a new hotel development in Baltimore recently received $36.6 million in subsidies for a property that created 652 jobs — a total subsidy of $56,179 per job. The average pay of these jobs is approximately $20,000, placing them at the bottom of the local pay scale. A family of four whose prime breadwinner holds such a job would qualify for food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Maryland Children’s Health Insurance Program. The $56,179 that taxpayers paid for each of these jobs creates a need for years of additional public subsidy instead of providing true access to self-sufficiency.

There is little hope for such jobs to become self-sustaining. Since youth and women are increasingly joining the service sector on top of the existing low-income, predominantly minority base, the service sector labor market has become saturated. This saturation effectively minimizes the availability of full-time, year-round work with wages high enough to keep employees above the poverty level.

For this reason, while the number of jobs may increase as a result of tourism-focused economic development strategies, the concentration of new jobs in service industries means that growth doesn’t produce greater personal wealth among city residents. In fact, such low-paid job growth may actually widen structural unemployment gaps and lengthen the distance that residents must travel to leave poverty behind.

The Failure to Attract New Residents

Flourishing, growing cities both create opportunities for existing residents to improve their skills and attract talented recent graduates and young professionals. How do they do it? By improving the quality of the urban environment and maintaining the diversity of their residents. According to Richard Florida, a sociologist at Carnegie Mellon University, top destinations for recent graduates such as Washington, D.C., Seattle, Austin, and San Francisco score consistently high in “every measure of natural amenities, lifestyle amenities, and overall environmental quality.”

Places that fail to attract young professionals hinder the growth of their tax bases, jeopardize future civic leadership, and decrease their ability to attract new companies and help existing companies grow. Traditional economic development strategies that focus on downtown business districts too often maintain the status quo. Such strategies, as exemplified by Baltimore’s economic development programs, focus public funds on subsidizing the rent for downtown companies and building garages for downtown employees. In the long run (even sometimes in a few years), these companies will move if subsidies are the only reason for staying. A strong, young talent base can keep a company in town over the long run far more effectively than massive subsidies.

Hope for Cities

Hope for cities like Baltimore lies in creating an overall economic development plan that incorporates both effective workforce development and an effort to attract young talent. Here are six steps to move cities like Baltimore in the right direction:

1. Regional Workforce Development: A city must have a regional workforce development system. In Maryland, instead of being allocated in concert with regional economic markets, as done in other states such as Massachusetts, workforce development funding is allocated and administered by individual cities and counties. Each jurisdiction is responsible for its own programs, and there is no clear incentive for jurisdictions to work with one another. As a result, businesses — which must work with multiple agencies in multiple jurisdictions — face higher recruiting costs.

Since they can only participate in employment training that is available in their city or county, job candidates also suffer in this system. For example, a city may focus its training on low-paying service positions, while the adjoining county may possess plenty of higher paying jobs in manufacturing. Unfortunately, job seekers in the city can’t get training for the manufacturing jobs — even if they have access to transportation to those jobs. While the federal Individual Training Accounts (ITA) program, which provides job training vouchers usable at any state-approved training provider, has helped improve this situation, the program is chronically underfunded. Increased federal and local funding for ITAs, either through taking funds from ineffective programs or through new appropriations, would help overcome obstacles created by jurisdictional boundaries.

2. Coordinate Resources, then Market Them: Governments need a single, unified strategy to coordinate the funding of workforce development programs. The fragmentation of funding, as in Baltimore, often leads to the creation of ineffective and overlapping workforce development programs. This coordinated strategy must work for government agencies, companies, and job candidates, who often find it difficult to understand and access the many city services. Too often, residents become ‘lost’ after multiple referrals to agencies where services do not fit the candidates’ needs or desires.

“One Stop” career centers, created by the 1998 federal Workforce Investment Act, provide all available services in a central location. Due to poor marketing, however, many residents do not even know these “One Stop” career centers exist. This is partly due to a lack of aggressive outreach on local jurisdictions’ parts, and partly due to the centers' internal incentive structure — which prevent them from serving those in most need. To gain additional funding, federal regulations require the centers to demonstrate unrealistic results. This results in senior staff discouraging those they supervise from accepting participants deemed unlikely to find employment. Too often, instead of being given the opportunity to speak directly with job counselors, those clients who do find the centers are directed to a computer to try an Internet job search.

3. Restructure Economic Development Strategies: Too often, state and local business agencies focus on offering huge subsidies, tax credits, or tax waivers when trying to retain or attract new businesses. In certain situations, this strategy can be effective. But these enormous subsidies, as discussed earlier, are frequently offered at the expense of the people whom they are intended to help.

While cities need new developments like hotels, they should pursue more balanced strategies that use smaller subsidies. The money saved from the reduced subsidies should instead be used to train residents for skilled jobs in fields with labor shortages. Building a base of skilled workers will — over the long term — attract companies that seek skilled labor and pay decent wages.

4. Transportation: Cities must improve public transportation systems. Even when jobs exist, existing transportation systems often fail to make those jobs accessible to residents who cannot afford cars. Long commutes via public transit, bus routes that fail to serve neighborhoods with higher-paying jobs, and bus schedules that do not correspond to companies’ work shifts all make transportation a serious problem for lower-income city residents. For these reasons, many low-income workers often commute one to two hours each way for positions that pay less than $8.00 per hour. The high cost of spending hours daily on a bus — including, for example, additional day care — encourage many low-income workers to choose unemployment over ongoing transportation woes.

In Hartford, Connecticut, local transportation providers, the state transportation department, the metropolitan planning organization, job developers, welfare administration agencies, and associations of business and industry came together in the mid-1990s to form BORPSAT (Bunch Of the Right People Sitting Around the Table). BORPSAT performed a mobility assessment, identifying specific opportunities to improve suburb-to-suburb and city-to-suburb access to employment sites. After the study, the local transit agency extended its hours, implemented new city-to-suburb commuter options, and added new routes to job sites in previously under-served areas.

Transportation leadership can also come from the corporate community. In Columbus, Ohio, Sears, Roebuck and Co. and five other businesses agreed to work together to add new bus service to their facilities. They successfully lobbied for the addition of a new route, but received it on the condition that the businesses would pay for 40 passengers each way whether or not the seats were filled. Since ridership has consistently exceeded that number, the businesses have never paid a cent.

In many cities, underused commuter buses can provide a low-cost solution — “capacity transit.” Luxury buses that carry suburban commuters to and from the city can, in between morning and evening shifts, make additional trips to carry city residents to and from suburban jobs. Costs for this effort are minimal, especially if both urban and suburban employers take advantage of commuter tax credits, which provide federal (and in some cases state) tax deductions for businesses that provide workers with transit passes as part of their benefits packages. Such a system could also help make more service on suburb-to-city commuter routes financially feasible, thereby helping reduce both parking needs in central cities and company costs for employee parking. To succeed, such a program requires the full commitment and energy of businesses and elected officials from multiple jurisdictions.

5. The Talent Attraction and Marketing Office: Cities and states spend millions of dollars attempting to attract large, prestigious companies with significant payrolls, and rarely succeed. Cities, regions, or states could yield enormous gains by attracting individuals instead. Economic development agencies should devote resources to attracting young professionals from regions of the country with high concentrations of universities and young talented professionals. Traveling marketing campaigns sent to these regions could include presentations, followed by job fairs with representatives from area employers.

Of course, such efforts will only succeed if cities themselves become attractive places. Cities must invest in parks and open space, recreational opportunities, transportation, education, and improved police protection to make their cities viable. Cities should also try to build a positive image in the eyes of the local and national public. Marketing campaigns can boost local pride among residents and attract regional residents back to the center city. Image building should also include marketing to image-makers in the entertainment industry in order to receive positive placement in television shows and films.

6. The Retention Office: Like many cities, Baltimore is home to many excellent colleges and universities, but students are rarely courted to stay once they graduate. In fact, the very opposite often occurs — university administrators and organizations often disparage the places they call home. If more students remained in their college towns, the critical mass of educated young people might lead more companies to relocate to such cities. Indeed, this pattern of retention is largely what has allowed Boston to grow into a world-class city over the past half-century. Surveys indicate that a majority of leaders in top local firms came to Boston for college and stayed.

People: Cities’ Greatest Assets

At the turn of the last century, Baltimore was the second largest entry point for immigrants in the United States. This large pool of unskilled labor, together with skilled people from past immigration waves, provided the human capital that, above all else, made Baltimore a vibrant and successful city. Cities like Baltimore must once again recognize that people are their greatest asset, and place among their top priorities both improved workforce development programs for low-income residents and the attraction of talented young workers.

A city that makes this shift will become home to residents with more valuable skills and higher incomes, who pay more in taxes. The increased tax revenue will help the city improve basic services and schools, and cut crime, which will in turn attract more people to the city and better equip the city to help its poor, infirm and otherwise disadvantaged residents. This improved living environment will eventually enable the city's economic development agencies to attract more companies than any subsidies could, and cement the city's role as a place of choice for future generations of young leaders. While this vision demands determined leadership and a patient citizenry, the results of developing a premier workforce are worth the struggle.

by Mike Mitchell

Behind The Backlash by Kenneth Durr

2007-02-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

If you were born in Baltimore etc..... this is really a good read!!!

White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980

Exploring the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, recession, and the rise of urban crime...shows how legitimate economic, social, and political grievances convinced white working-class Baltimoreans that they were threatened more by the actions of liberal policymakers than by the incursions of urban blacks.

Chapter 1

A Contentious Coalition

In early 1944 John Cater submitted some verse written by coworkers at Baltimore's booming Westinghouse defense plant to the Baltimore Evening Sun. The paper published the piece, even though Cater disavowed authorship. It was a good thing he did. "Beloved Baltimore, Maryland," written from the point of view of the thousands of migrant defense workers who had flocked to the city for the duration, was a vitriolic attack on everything Baltimorean from its architecture—"your brick row houses should all be torn down"—to its economy. "You make us pay double for all you can sell," the piece concluded, "but after the war you can all go to hell." The Evening Sun received more than a thousand angry refutations. A postal worker dragged two bulging bags full of letters into the Sun Building's lobby, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a contribution of his own. Weeks later "Beloved Baltimore" was still the most popular topic of conversation around town.[1]

This incident, characterized by Life magazine as "The Battle of Baltimore," was less a fight between enemies than a quarrel between partners in a strained, but strong relationship. The coalescence of the New Deal coalition at large, a process also achieved amid the tumult of wartime, was equally contentious. Natives and newcomers, old-world ethnics and southern Protestants, all came into conflict but ultimately formed a political alliance under the Democratic umbrella. This rift between the New Deal coalition's white working-class constituents was fleeting, but there was a much deeper divide between them and the blacks and middle-class liberals who were also integral to the New Deal Democratic coalition, one that was temporarily bridged but never closed during the war years and the four decades afterward.

The Great Depression laid the groundwork for the New Deal order, based on agreement among urban and rural working whites, blacks, and middle-class liberals that grassroots political activity and an activist state could create a more economically equitable society. But in Baltimore, it was not until World War II that a viable coalition came together. Among the uproar, overcrowding, inflation, and anger, key institutions took shape and fragile alliances were formed. Machine politicians began to respond more to ethnic and working-class concerns and less to old-stock business leaders, liberal political groups—chief among them the NAACP—flourished, and industrial unionism became entrenched in Baltimore's workplaces.

This political transition was driven by three broader shifts. First, working-class Baltimore's "new immigrants" of Eastern and Southern European heritage gained political influence that began to rival that exerted by German and Irish ethnics and native-stock whites. Second, Baltimore's black working people, long restricted to unskilled, low-paid work, began to get better jobs—with and without government help. Finally, although many of the southern migrants who worked in Baltimore's war plants returned home as quickly as possible, many more did not. Instead, southern whites stayed to become members of Baltimore's postwar white working class.

The wartime boom made Baltimore, a relatively placid and culturally southern city, look more like a smoky, congested northern industrial city. Its politics also came to resemble that of other post-New Deal industrial cities. In presidential, state, and local politics a "New Deal" coalition of working-white, black, and liberal voters emerged, although each group understood the legacy of the New Deal differently. The most vocal of Baltimore's grassroots New Deal activists, urban progressives, CIO-affiliated laborites, and black civil rights leaders considered the war a political opportunity. Their conception of "New Deal Democracy" included not only the extension of blue-collar workplace rights but also the expansion of rights for blacks in the community and on the job. For Baltimore's white working people, however, the tumult of wartime was fraught with hazards. They welcomed the economic security that industrial unionism and wartime wages brought but resisted social initiatives that seemed to threaten the blue-collar community.

Economy and Society

Baltimore's roots were in commerce rather than industry; as late as 1881 there were still only thirty-nine manufacturers in the city.[2] By the turn of the century there were two hundred, but within a few years, as the nationwide tide of mergers swept the city, outside corporations bought up local firms and Baltimore became known as a "branch plant city."[3] Nevertheless, by the late 1930s municipal leaders touted an "industrial community" closely resembling its northern counterparts.[4] Iron and steel dominated the economy. Sparrows Point, owned by the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, was the city's largest single employer, sprawling over two thousand acres where the Patapsco River met the Chesapeake Bay.[5] Although the garment industry sweatshops downtown were closing fast, the textile industry remained Baltimore's second largest employer in the 1930s. Mills built in Hampden, north of the city center, still produced cotton duck as they had for a century.[6]

The transportation equipment industry was more robust. Bethlehem Steel had shipyards at Sparrows Point and along Key Highway in South Baltimore. Maryland Shipbuilding and Drydock was on the southern edge of the harbor.[7] Glenn Martin, built in 1928 at Middle River, eleven miles northeast of downtown Baltimore, was quickly becoming the largest single airplane factory in the world. General Motors (GM) opened plants in Southeast Baltimore in 1934.[8] Electrical equipment manufacturers like Westinghouse and Locke Insulator contributed to the city's industrial diversity. The largest of these was Western Electric, built in 1929 at Point Breeze, just inside the city limits on the northern edge of the bay.[9]

Baltimore's population was as diverse as its industry. A leading destination for nineteenth-century German immigrants, the city more closely resembled Cincinnati and St. Louis than predominantly Irish Boston or New York.[10] These old-stock immigrants had to compete for jobs with blacks much earlier and on a greater scale than those in northern cities where the black populations were smaller. Dependence on the port for employment made these unskilled laborers especially vulnerable to market fluctuations, and in hard times native and immigrant workers exploited racial tensions to force blacks out of work and to protect their jobs.[11]

Baltimore had a southern segregationist inheritance that was, if anything, heightened by what one historian has called the "assertive self-consciousness" of its black populace, 90 percent of which was free before the Civil War.[12] As Jim Crow descended on the border city, skirmishes between white and black labor heightened its effects, so that by the 1910s segregation was more pronounced in Maryland than in any other border state.[13] Up to the 1890s, when an influx of black southern migrants began, there had been few exclusively black neighborhoods in the city. After the turn of the century blacks began leaving overcrowded and disease-infested alleys, displacing whites in upper west central Baltimore, and by 1910 half of the city's blacks lived there. Whites petitioned the mayor to "take some measures to restrain the colored people from locating in a white community"; this resulted in a 1913 ordinance that made segregated housing legal in Baltimore. So effective was white Baltimore's effort that it set precedent for legislation in other cities.[14] This sanctioned black area, twenty-six blocks centered on Pennsylvania Avenue, became a booming black metropolis by the 1930s.[15]

When Eastern and Southern European immigrants arrived at the turn of the century, ethnic working-class neighborhoods coalesced around the harbor. Outlying industrial suburbs included Brooklyn, on the southern edge of the harbor, and Sparrows Point, far to the east.[16] Fells Point, Baltimore's eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century shipping and shipbuilding center, occupied the northeastern edge of the harbor along with Canton.[17] Up a gentle hill to the east was Highlandtown, a largely German community.[18] Pigtown, in the near southwest, was named for its early packing houses. South Baltimore lay just below the city center, and to its east Locust Point jutted into the harbor.[19] Only Hampden, home to Protestant textile millworkers, was largely untouched by the new immigration.[20]

It was at Locust Point that the new immigrants disembarked. Some boarded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and headed west. Others, especially the Poles, ferried across the Inner Harbor to Fells Point.[21] A few got off the boat at the foot of Hull Street, walked a few blocks, and spent the rest of their lives in Locust Point.[22] Over the next fifty years many of the Poles moved farther east into Canton and Highlandtown; others resettled in South Baltimore and Brooklyn.[23] Italian immigrants gathered in a neighborhood on the near east side that became Baltimore's "Little Italy" before gravitating west in later years.[24] Czech, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Greek enclaves also took shape in South and East Baltimore.

The Catholic Church lay at the heart of these ethnic enclaves.[25] The oldest parishes were Irish and German. A few remained that way, but others, like St. Leo's, which became the center of Little Italy, adopted the nationality of its new congregation.[26] The church served as a bulwark for both the existing social structure and the immigrant community. As these immigrants arrived, Baltimore's James Cardinal Gibbons lauded Catholicism's "tremendous power for conservatism, virtue and industry" among working people.[27] In the 1920s and 1930s Baltimore's Catholics shared Archbishop Michael Curley's faith in the "Catholic Ghetto," emphasizing self-sufficiency and disdaining secular individualism. Curley encouraged them to maintain their ethnic traditions and resist "forceful, improper Americanization."[28]

A building boom accompanied this influx of white ethnics, helped along by the institution of ground rent. Under this system, homes were bought and sold but landowners kept the "ground" and charged rent. This cut initial purchase costs, making housing more affordable for working-class people: Canton resident Bronislaw Wesolowski paid a mere $750 for his four-room row house in 1910.[29] Of the forty thousand homes built in the 1880s and 1890s, most were the two-story, narrow red brick row houses that came to typify Baltimore's working-class neighborhoods.[30] White working-class Baltimore prospered in the 1920s. Home ownership rates rose, families bought radios, and a few could even afford cars. Social and political clubs multiplied and ethnic institutions flourished as working people enjoyed rising living standards.

But trouble began near the end of the twenties. Unemployment increased, the economy slipped, and by late 1930 the full effects of the Great Depression had set in.[31] As the number of unemployed grew, private relief agencies joined church and community organizations to meet the needs of the jobless. By the end of 1933 their efforts had failed: one in six Baltimore families was on public relief. Blacks suffered the most, but ethnic Baltimoreans were also hard-hit. Nine percent of the city's population, foreign-born whites received 19 percent of the relief, and the insensitivity of city fathers was instructive.[32] Baltimore's conservative, business-oriented Democrats had long cultivated the ethnic vote with little difficulty. But the depression, the New Deal, and World War II hastened the decline of that system.

The Machine, Labor, and the New Deal

Maryland, like its border counterparts, has been called a "three party state" in which a weak Republican Party vied with two wings of a sharply divided Democratic Party.[33] Up to the 1930s these two wings included Protestant "Bourbon" Democrats in the eastern and southern parts of the state and business-led machine politicians in Baltimore. Customarily, according to one historian, the latter bought the votes of ethnic and working-class citizens "with a drink or a dollar bill."[34] The Democratic machine controlled both city and state politics from the 1870s to the 1910s, dispensing patronage and making policy in conjunction with civic and business leaders.[35] An interparty quarrel in 1919 let a Republican into the mayor's seat, but a two-party system never took hold because in segregationist Maryland the Republican Party was widely considered the party of blacks.[36]

As the citywide Democratic machine deteriorated, district bosses became increasingly powerful. William Curran, who grew up in Southeast Baltimore, ran what has been described as an "all-weather constantly functioning organization" in the 1920s.[37] But when he abandoned Southeast Baltimore for upper-class Roland Park, it signaled trouble for the Democrats. Curran was a Catholic, but he was also a well-known and well-compensated criminal lawyer at home with the old immigrant and native-stock businessmen who dominated Baltimore's Democratic Party. He deeply disliked organized labor.[38] In the 1930s Curran shared power with district boss Howard Jackson, who fit the pro-business, southern segregationist mold even more closely.

As the depression set in, the outlines of the national New Deal coalition began to be discernible in Baltimore, but because the business-allied Democrats had a lock on city politics, the pattern first appeared in Republican votes. In 1934 gubernatorial candidate Harry Nice, despite his Republican affiliation, exploited the popularity of the New Deal by promising a "New and Square Deal for All" and campaigned against the machine rather than the Democratic Party as a whole. Nice cut substantially into the incumbent's Baltimore margins and took office to the strains of "Happy Days Are Here Again." The Republican got crucial support from ethnic defectors in the city's eastern working-class wards.[39]

In the presidential races, Baltimore's move to New Deal Democracy was clear. In 1928 the most heavily Catholic wards backed Al Smith, but Protestant working whites supported Herbert Hoover and gave him a slight edge.[40] In 1932, however, Franklin Roosevelt carried Baltimore's white working-class wards by comfortable margins.[41] Four years later the city gave Roosevelt a more decisive victory: turnout was heavy and his margins exceeded even those in other industrial cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.[42] Most important, in 1936 FDR got the black vote in one city ward and did very well in others that had always voted Republican.[43] Overall, from 1930 to 1936 the nature of Baltimore's electorate changed. Working-class ethnics and black voters who had often stayed home were now turning out for "New Deal" candidates, be they Democrat or Republican.[44]

In 1938 Thomas D'Alesandro, a former Curranite with his base in ethnic East Baltimore's Little Italy, broke with the old guard to run for a congressional seat.[45] Distancing himself from the district bosses and their business allies, D'Alesandro waged a pro-labor, pro-New Deal campaign and won.[46] By the 1940 presidential election the shape of the city's New Deal coalition was clear. FDR got 65 percent of the black vote, 96 percent of the ethnic vote, and 97 percent of the vote from people living in substandard housing.[47] A year earlier, conservative Democrat Howard Jackson had retained the mayor's seat by a slim margin. But World War II provided the opportunity, and organized labor the effort, that broke the conservative hold on Baltimore Democratic politics.

In 1939, despite three years of CIO activism, the Baltimore Association of Commerce continued to boast that the city's "labor was notably conservative in its relations with industrial management."[48] In a sense, Baltimore combined the best of two worlds: the heavy industry of the North and the low wages of the South. Since the late nineteenth century the city had been home to dozens of AFL craft union locals, but the Red Scare and the open-shop drive of the early twenties sent them all into sharp decline.[49]

During the 1930s organized labor's dominant institution was the conservative, AFL-affiliated Baltimore Federation of Labor (BFL). There were some outposts of labor militancy, particularly in the garment and maritime trades, but the BFL generally took an accommodating approach toward labor-management relations. Few of the "new immigrants" and even fewer blacks found acceptance in the ranks of its affiliated unions.[50] Organizers who began working in the steel, shipbuilding, automobile, and electrical industries after the founding of the CIO in 1936 met with stiff employer resistance.[51] Some Baltimore employers, such as Bethlehem Steel and Western Electric, were anti-union stalwarts nationwide. But even General Motors, which recognized its Michigan workers after the Flint Strike, held out against the Baltimore Autoworkers until 1940.

Up to Pearl Harbor, Baltimore's reputation as an open-shop town was well founded. Stiff employer resistance had its effect, but labor activists blamed the Baltimore workers themselves for lagging behind other industrial cities in unionization. "In Baltimore," one organizer complained in 1937, "people crawl. Nothing moves, and the earth is still flat." The editor of the independent journal, the Baltimore Labor Herald, concurred that "nothing encouraging ever seems to happen in Baltimore."[52] By the time the nation began mobilizing for war, industrial unionism had scarcely a foothold in Baltimore.

White Workers for the Wartime Boom

Glenn Martin and Bethlehem Steel started taking defense orders even before the European war broke out in the fall of 1939. Although recent construction had doubled the plant's capacity, Glenn Martin had a $110 million backlog by 1940. At the same time Baltimore's shipyards had $80 million worth of orders to fill.[53] Industrial expansion swelled payrolls across the city. Glenn Martin's workforce expanded from 3,500 employees in 1939 to a 1943 peak of 53,000.[54] Bethlehem Steel's Fairfield Shipyard, established near Brooklyn to build Liberty Ships for the U.S. Maritime Commission, opened in 1941 with 350 workers. By the end of the year it employed 10,000.[55] Baltimoreans considered defense work a blessing—one called working at Fairfield "wonderful." Albert Arnold worked seven-day weeks his first year there, making $54 per week to more than double his previous income.[56] Fairfield's employment peaked at 46,700 in October 1943.[57] Few reached the gargantuan proportions of Glenn Martin or Fairfield, but nearly all local industries expanded for wartime production. At the end of 1939 manufacturing employment in Baltimore stood at 150,000. By May 1942 it had jumped to 251,000 with four out of five workers in war industries.[58]

Jim Crow's hold on Baltimore ensured that white migrants would fill most of these jobs: employers, state and local employment services, and the Baltimore Federation of Labor were equally uninterested in helping blacks into any but the most menial jobs.[59] The director of the Maryland Employment Service told an investigating congressional staffer that although there were lots of potential black workers in the city, "Baltimore is an old, conservative city with certain traditions to uphold."[60] Denied entrance to the State Employment Service's main office, blacks were directed to an annex where only common laborers were hired.[61] Glenn Martin asserted that the white mechanics at Middle River would walk out if blacks got high-paying production jobs and thus confined its black employees to a small plant in Canton.[62] Martin, like other Baltimore industrialists, felt no responsibility for solving the city's "social problems."[63] Local businesses were also reluctant to employ women in nonclerical work.

The combination of racial discrimination and industrial boom transformed Baltimore socially. Companies began advertising in southern states, and the Maryland Employment Service assured its counterparts in the South that it would take workers trained there.[64] Baltimore's population grew from 859,000 in 1940 to 1,250,000 by late 1942.[65] Within another year, about 150,000 to 200,000 migrants had arrived, and most were from the mountain South: Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee, in that order.[66] Many of the migrants came to stay, but others soon left, unable to find housing. Still more grew disillusioned by working conditions, transportation problems, and cold weather. More than 3,000 war workers quit their jobs and left Baltimore each month during 1942. Others "shopped around" for better work, making turnover a major problem.[67]

In Baltimore as in other industrial cities, scarcity of housing was the biggest wartime crisis. Builders erected more private homes than ever before but resisted building low-income rental housing. The federal government and the city built projects like Brooklyn Homes, which provided five hundred apartments near Fairfield Shipyard. The Farm Security Administration set up trailer camps at Middle River and Fairfield.[68] Many of the new defense workers moved into old blue-collar neighborhoods. South Baltimore was an especially popular destination since it was closer to the shipyards and had more rental property available than East Baltimore. In January 1941 South Baltimore's weekly paper, the Enterprise, reported that "thousands of workers are pouring into South Baltimore plants daily." One merchants' group, hoping to keep war wages in the community, lamented that apartments were "virtually unknown" and home owners had little room to spare.[69] One common solution was for property owners to subdivide their homes and businesses into apartments and become absentee landlords.[70]

Crowding was the rule. In Brooklyn, for example, thirty men employed at Fairfield Shipyard shared four rooms, sleeping in shifts, and one toilet.[71] The first newcomers established "home base," friends and relatives joined them, and migrant enclaves sprang up. In South Baltimore's "Kentucky Colony" one landlord rented out fifty-six rooms in five row houses to more than twenty-five families—over one hundred people in all. The heads of these families, men like Luzell Nettles and Israel Elkins, worked at Fairfield Shipyard and Revere Copper and Brass.[72]

Migrants from the mountain South were subject to discrimination rooted in a tenacious "hillbilly" stereotype. South Baltimore merchants wanted their money, but most other residents wanted them gone. Some locals resented the high wages they were making.[73] More disliked the leisure activities on which they spent those wages. A Lutheran minister expressed both attitudes when he said that "they are here to make money and have a good time."[74] "This part of town had a bad name," one second-generation Italian woman recalled later; "the bars were lousy … all kinds of carryings-on and tearing things up."[75] "Lousy" or not, the bars were also becoming increasingly unfamiliar places to Baltimore natives. During the war, the city's jukeboxes were mostly stocked with hillbilly tunes strange to urban ears.[76]

Working-class home owners were especially distressed at the toll the influx took on their neighborhoods. A South Baltimore woman felt that migrants "didn't give a damn because they were just here for the wartime moneymaking," with the result that "South Baltimore eventually became rundown, beat up." Others saw this as the point when their neighborhoods began to go downhill.[77] Some of the criticism reflected the biases of the observers. Heavy turnover at the plants was reflected in the neighborhoods, and although signs on each floor of the Kentucky Colony buildings said "Don't throw garbage into the sink," a visiting journalist found the apartments "surprisingly clean." Similarly, in Baltimore County, residents apprehensive about the newcomers reported a crime wave that police could not confirm.[78]

Despite the stereotyping and the hostility from both sides exhibited in the flap about the poem "Beloved Baltimore," most migrants were clearly industrious. One West Virginia native, a ship carpenter at Bethlehem Steel's Key Highway Shipyard, claimed to support his own family of eight, his brother's family of four, and his mother on his wages. He also sent money home to pay off debts.[79] Few could make their earnings go as far. Too often, those expecting "a pot of gold" in Baltimore found instead a high cost of living that consumed most of their earnings.[80]

Migrants resented their hostile reception and longed for respect. Harry Isner, a carpenter from Elkins, West Virginia, appeared before the U.S. House Committee Investigating National Defense Migration in July 1941. During his testimony a congressmen interrupted to expound on the possibility that Isner could be out of work in both Maryland and West Virginia after the war: "He will be floating, like a good many others in the country." Isner respectfully cut the congressman off and said, "well my intentions are, if I can do so, to buy me a home and locate here permanently, if I can get some money ahead."[81]

White native Baltimoreans were only temporarily ambivalent about the southern newcomers. In early 1944 the Baltimore Evening Sun concluded that they had been "praised and criticized, but ultimately accepted as part of the local scene."[82] More important, both southerners and Appalachians lived under a distinct color line, as did Baltimore's ethnic working people.[83] A new white working class had united with surprising ease because in the neighborhoods and on the job, everybody was white. But this was not the case at the polls.

Mobilizing Workers and Votes

Before World War II about 35,000 union members lived in Baltimore, most of them affiliated with the AFL. By November 1942 the ranks of organized labor had grown fourfold, not counting the company unions established at Glenn Martin and Western Electric.[84] The city and state CIO fought hard for these gains, but ultimately the war made the difference.

The most difficult of the CIO's unionizing drives was at Sparrows Point. Bethlehem was the cornerstone of "little steel" and notoriously anti-union. The Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) had low expectations, sending only two men to organize one of the largest steel plants in the world.[85] Residents of the company town stood to lose homes as well as jobs and viewed the effort with trepidation, so most of SWOC's support came from ethnic Southeast Baltimoreans and blacks consigned to the mill's dirtiest and lowest-paying jobs.[86] Most of the steelworkers, according to Brendan Sexton, one of the organizers, were southern whites who were "anti-black, but not violently so."[87] Accordingly, the company tried to use race to its benefit, warning white workers that they could lose their jobs to blacks if the CIO got into the plant.[88]

By 1940 the CIO was trying mightily to get into Bethlehem Steel and Glenn Martin because they were huge plants dependent on defense contracts—and federal law mandated that government contractors must bargain in good faith with unions. A strong company union at Glenn Martin helped fend off the CIO challenge, but Bethlehem, its Employee Representation Plan outlawed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), resorted to more repressive measures. The company used Pinkerton agents, armed "special police," and even local law enforcement officers against SWOC.[89] Even the FBI cooperated, planting an agent in a Highlandtown row house to monitor a SWOC organizer's activities.[90]

The next year Sparrows Point and the Bethlehem shipyards—including the mammoth Fairfield Shipyard—recognized the CIO under the multiple pressures of continuing worker militancy, mounting defense orders, and threats of federal intervention. GM and Westinghouse did likewise.[91] At Glenn Martin, though, the United Autoworkers (UAW) found it difficult to recruit from among the mostly southern white workers.[92] The aircraft plant was a prize sought by the International Association of Machinists as well as the UAW. It was also fiercely defended by the company union. The UAW got an NLRB election in June 1943, but only 40 percent of workers voted CIO whereas 42 percent voted "no union."[93] In September the CIO finally prevailed with 49 percent of the vote, but its hold remained shaky throughout the war.[94] The election won, it still faced "the job of making union people of the people in that plant."[95]

By the war's midpoint, a liberal leadership had begun to coalesce in Baltimore. It included officers of the state and local CIO, middle-class whites, many of them associated with the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), and civil rights leaders affiliated with the NAACP and the Urban League. Together, they helped make Baltimore politics New Deal politics.

The city's CIO unions banded together to form the Baltimore Industrial Union Council in July 1937. The Maryland and District of Columbia Industrial Union Council was organized shortly afterward.[96] Both groups, recognizing that industrial unionism owed its existence to New Deal support, were avowedly political in orientation. By 1939 the AFL and the CIO routinely mobilized to promote progressive national and state legislation. The city and state CIO councils pushed for wages and hours bills at the statehouse which, despite vigorous efforts, were defeated.[97] But in a few short years organized labor had become a formidable political force. The state CIO's per capita income was a little over $5,000 in 1942, but within a year it had increased 250 percent, and the state CIO mobilized working voters with its own edition of the CIO News and a weekly legislative report.[98] Wartime mobilization promised more potential working-class support for liberal causes, yet it also posed a challenge: how to transmit the growing union ranks into votes. Concerned that just such a development might disrupt politics as usual, the Maryland legislature passed a "Declaration of Intentions" law requiring all prospective voters to register one year prior to voting, a measure designed to disenfranchise the thousands of war workers in the state. The CIO fought back and in the fall of 1943 launched a massive campaign to register war workers for the 1944 elections.[99] The institution that thrust organized labor most forthrightly into liberal politics was the CIO Political Action Committee (PAC). In 1943 the state CIO began creating arms of the PAC in Maryland's congressional districts, beginning with the Third Congressional District covering much of working-class Baltimore. One of the first things that district CIO-PAC officials did was meet with Congressman D'Alesandro, Baltimore's New Dealer.[100] They also sought help from the Baltimore chapter of the Union for Democratic Action. In 1941 anticommunist activists, intellectuals, and trade union officials formed the national UDA.[101] The Baltimore UDA was founded the next year by a similar coalition. Important members included noted liberals affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, government officials, and labor leaders. The group sponsored a series of public meetings aimed at bringing government, business, and labor together to discuss Baltimore's wartime problems and enthusiastically supported the CIO's Declaration of Intentions Act campaign, providing printed materials and working with unions and other civic organizations to help spur registration.[102]

In segregationist Baltimore, the issue that most clearly distinguished the emergent liberal coalition was its support for civil rights. Leading the push was the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. Founded in the 1920s, the Baltimore NAACP languished until the mid-1930s, when energetic leader Lillie M. Jackson emerged from the city's black middle class and mobilized African Americans around antilynching and "don't buy where you can't work" campaigns to make the Baltimore NAACP one of the most powerful branches nationwide. Jackson's daughter established a dynasty by marrying Clarence Mitchell, a Baltimorean and a national NAACP leader. A second center of power in the black community was the Murphy family, which published the Baltimore Afro-American, one of the nation's leading black papers. For the next forty years, black Baltimore's political strength would depend on the state of the alliance between these two families.[103]

Civil rights activists, like labor leaders, saw the war as an opportunity to bring about social change. In 1942 local NAACP official Dr. J. E. T. Camper led a march on Annapolis to pressure the state to enforce equal opportunity in employment and housing.[104] The Baltimore Urban League, run mostly by whites, was less confrontational and worked effectively behind the scenes to open up jobs and training programs to blacks.[105] One small, but ultimately consequential, victory was gaining the abolition of a municipal ordinance requiring segregated toilet facilities in industries.[106]

The chief objective of all these liberal groups, both black and white, was to turn out the vote. The first test of the new activist coalition came in the 1943 mayor's race. The incumbent Howard Jackson, sensing trouble, had entered into an alliance with old rival William Curran, guaranteeing Jackson all the votes that the Baltimore machine could muster. His opponent, Republican Theodore McKeldin, forged close ties with civil rights groups, ran hard against Jackson's "greedy political machine," and won.[107]

It took a Republican—although not the Republican Party, which never really operated as such in Baltimore—to break the old-line Democratic hold on the city. Blacks who had changed parties to vote for FDR and the New Deal in 1936 switched back to vote for the racially progressive McKeldin. Three black wards that had voted 54 percent for FDR that year went 71 percent for McKeldin in 1943.[108] More significant, Baltimore's ethnic and working-class whites broke with the Curran machine and reversed parties to back the liberal candidate. Voters in white working-class wards 1, 23, and 24 voted for McKeldin by a margin of 63 percent, higher even than more reliably Republican outlying middle-class precincts.[109] The importance of the switch is underscored by the fact that although McKeldin beat Jackson decisively, every other Republican candidate lost by a substantial margin.

The major test for labor came the next year, when Franklin Roosevelt ran for a fourth term. Although the Declaration of Intentions Act remained on the books, and city and county election boards made registration as difficult as possible for war workers, the Baltimore City CIO-PAC, established in April 1944, worked hard to get out the working-class vote.[110] There was an early morning rush to the polls by war workers in East and South Baltimore, but turnout overall fell from 85 percent in 1940 to 65 percent in 1944.[111] Roosevelt's margins were also smaller in 1944, but working whites gave him 70 percent of the vote and Baltimore's blacks went three to two for FDR.[112] Although middle-class voters in outlying precincts voted decisively against him, Roosevelt got a plurality in Baltimore and swung Maryland to the Democrats.[113]

Although demographic and social shifts meant that it was only a matter of time, it was a twist in machine politics that made the 1944 election the pivot on which the Baltimore Democratic Party swung from old line to New Deal. The district controlled by Boss Jack Pollack was becoming majority black, and alert to changing political realities, he broke decisively with the Curran-Jackson machine and allied with the liberals. Curran responded with increasingly strident attacks on the New Deal, hastening the end of his influence. From that point on, factional bosses who relied on the support of labor and ethnic groups took control over Baltimore's Democratic politics.[114] Previously white working-class votes could be bought cheaply, but the liberal organizations demanded legislation instead of favors, ensuring that statewide, Bourbon-Baltimore Democratic coalitions would become increasingly hard to maintain.[115]

After the 1944 election the president of the Baltimore Industrial Union Council crowed that "the newly won strength that labor has gained by exercising its political rights will now be used to push a program of fully expanded industry, an end to race bias and security at home and the achievement of a lasting organization of world peace."[116] Such overarching rhetoric foundered on the details: local events suggest that a more modest assessment may have been in order.

Race, Housing, and the Limits of Liberalism

Baltimore's working-class whites and blacks may have increasingly been partners on the tally sheets, but they voted in different precincts and working whites preferred it that way. At the highest levels of political and intellectual leadership, Alan Brinkley has observed, World War II marked a period of transition between the reform liberalism of the early twentieth century and the rights-based liberalism that succeeded it.[117] But that was a transition that Baltimore's blue-collar residents were not prepared to make. They supported government efforts to cushion the effects of the free market and modestly redistribute wealth at the polls, but their actions at home and on the job demonstrated that they did not share the racially inclusive liberal vision extolled by social progressives in civil rights and labor organizations.

During the war years blue collarites steadfastly resisted New Deal efforts that even remotely threatened white neighborhoods, and since the residential boundaries established in the 1910s remained largely intact, the battle lines were drawn over public housing. Projects for both white migrants and blacks were proposed by the city and opposed by citizens, but in each case outcomes were quite different, demonstrating precisely where white working-class Baltimore drew the lines of both inclusion and exclusion.

In June 1939, when the city unveiled a federally sponsored project for white families to be built on a Southeast Baltimore site known as "Area D," civic groups from working-class Southeast Baltimore mobilized to oppose the project and found themselves in conflict with a leadership that invoked the New Deal in the name of racial inclusion. A liberal city councilman and a CIO official praised it at a Board of Estimates hearing, but the crowd of three hundred "roared its disapproval."[118] In another confrontation, a proponent's characterization of the project as "a New Deal measure" infuriated opponents from a Czech neighborhood.[119] Nevertheless, there was not enough clamor to stop Area D, and in 1940 the first white migrant war workers moved in. One of the most potent arguments during the controversy had been that despite assurances to the contrary, blacks might be allowed in; but they were not, and that made all the difference.[120] Baltimore residents never succeeded in blocking a single white housing development, and by 1943 there were seven large-scale projects in the city.[121] By mid-1943 over twenty thousand separate units of war housing for whites had been constructed in Baltimore, much of it with federal assistance, but wartime housing for blacks had yet to be built.[122]

Blacks suffered disproportionately from Baltimore's wartime housing crisis. From 1940 to 1942, 33,000 blacks came to Baltimore, half of them from rural Maryland and half from the South. The newcomers squeezed into the ghettos, where rents shot up and housing deteriorated. One 1942 study estimated that the city's black population—then at about 20 percent of the total—was packed into 2 percent of its residential space.[123] But white Baltimoreans steadfastly opposed any relief.

When, in the summer of 1943, a plan for a federally financed black housing project at Herring Run near the Area D site was proposed, citizens mobilized again but this time more effectively. In July, in front of a crowd of eight hundred hostile whites, Mayor McKeldin cautiously backed the plan, but, caught between two key constituencies, he disavowed any responsibility, claiming that final authority rested with the federal government.[124] The Baltimore CIO joined the NAACP and the Urban League in backing the Herring Run plan, but it came at a price since local politicians were much more attentive to white working-class concerns than to the arguments of organized labor.[125] "Politicians with whom we had developed friendly relations took the occasion to launch bitter attacks against the leadership of the CIO," one labor official complained.[126] This contention at the top deepened into a split between the leadership and the rank and file. The leadership of Local 43 of the CIO's International Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers (IUMSWA) endorsed the housing plan, but one of its members suspected that Washington was only courting black voters for the 1944 presidential election.[127]

Three city councilmen led the opposition, but among the more vocal opponents to the Herring Run plan were white home owner association leaders, Catholic priests, and even a rabbi.[128] One influential adversary was Lutheran minister Luke Schmucker, who had previously condemned white migrants at the Area D project for not being "interested in anything but making money." But the black housing threat led Schmucker to portray the migrants in a different light. Noting Herring Run's proximity to the Area D site, he complained that "middle class defense workers" would be set upon by blacks "in the streets, in the cars and buses, in the stores and movies, and even in the schools."[129]

The debate over Herring Run took place in the midst of escalating racial tensions nationwide. In Buffalo, a nearly identical controversy was raging spearheaded by priests representing their Polish and Irish Catholic parishioners.[130] In Los Angeles, white sailors had recently attacked Mexican American zoot-suiters, and only a month earlier, three days of rioting in Detroit left twenty-five blacks and nine whites dead.[131] A number of citizens who wrote angry letters to McKeldin had Detroit on their minds. Most expressed anxiety over property values and personal safety. Some explicitly blamed integrationists for racial tensions, agreeing with one man who warned that "it would not take much to set off another Detroit episode in Baltimore City."[132] The Baltimore NAACP applauded McKeldin's "courageous leadership" on the issue but spoke too soon.[133] Housing for Baltimore's black defense workers was not destined for a white area: McKeldin bowed to the greater pressure and settled on a site at Cherry Hill, insulated from Brooklyn and South Baltimore's white neighborhoods by water.[134]

The Color Line on the Shop Floor

Wartime exigencies brought an even more concerted challenge to racial segregation in industry. In early 1942 about nine thousand blacks worked in Baltimore's war industries; a year later there were twice as many, and by mid-1944 forty thousand black defense workers were on the job in city plants. By the end of the war companies that had once excluded blacks were advertising in the Afro-American, although according to the Baltimore Urban League's Alexander Allen, it was "the economics of the situation" more than Roosevelt's "fair employment" Executive Order 8802 that finally cracked Baltimore's segregated shop floors. "Some companies just ran out of workers to hire," he recalled.[135] The big CIO unions backed increased opportunities for blacks, but a public posture in favor of civil rights was easier to assume than enforce.[136] Total exclusion gave way fairly easily, but the white rank and file resisted working closely with blacks and tried hard to prevent them from taking skilled positions. One black member of Local 43 of the IUMSWA warned leaders of the state CIO that "if you are just going to give lip service and do nothing, you are going to be sorry."[137] The largest CIO union in wartime Baltimore, IUMSWA was also the most vulnerable to conflicts between natives and southerners, blacks and whites.[138]

Before the war, native Baltimoreans had used southern stereotypes to denote undesirable labor. A 1938 organizing flyer condemned "plow-jockeys and bean-pickers" willing to toil for low wages. These sorts of workers, the flyer said, constituted a menace to "bona-fide union men."[139] By 1940, however, the union was using southern images to appeal to, rather than to shame, workers. One leaflet, advertising a pipe fitters' department meeting, featured a sketch of an overall-clad worker, pipe wrench in hand, uttering "recken I'll be there."[140] Three years later, candidates for union office appealed to the Appalachian "ex-coal miners" at the Fairfield Shipyard and publicly sympathized with the controversial 1943 coal miners' strike.[141]

In the shipyards, so many workers were southerners that Baltimore natives may have realized that they had little choice but to get along. Still, white workers felt less pressure to coexist with blacks. African Americans were limited to maintenance or unskilled jobs that kept them away from whites, who, in turn, displayed a firm resistance to any further encroachments, regardless of CIO rhetoric.[142] Bethlehem's Sparrows Point Shipyard is a case in point. According to the U.S. Employment Service, Sparrows Point was "an old established plant" with many senior employees—a marked contrast to the turbulent Fairfield Shipyard with its large, undisciplined, mostly southern-born workforce.[143] If experience had been a determining factor, then Sparrows Point would have been peaceful. Instead, an attempt by black workers to surmount barriers of skill set off racial conflict.[144]

In late July 1943 fifteen blacks were admitted to a training school for riveters at the Sparrows Point Shipyard. The news soon spread to the riveting department, and after white riveters walked out in protest, the company removed the blacks from the class. When eight hundred black employees gathered to demand that the company resume the training, management—with approval from union leadership—complied. Meanwhile, white riveters marched through the yard gathering support. Thousands of whites ended up encircling a group of black workers who had to be escorted out of the yard by police. State police and federal troops stood by for eight days; the shipyard workers did not return to work until the company and the union pledged to adhere strictly to seniority in promoting riveters.[145]

IUMSWA leaders were convinced that a violent race riot had been narrowly averted at Sparrows Point. But one union official denied that the membership was in any way responsible. Instead, he said, "non-union men," both black and white, were "the chief agitators."[146] Civil rights leaders, on the other hand, had long known that racial tensions in Baltimore's shipyards were high; the NAACP observed that "the union was not as vigorous as it should have been in aiding the colored members."[147] Whites attacked labor from the opposite side. One of the most powerful arguments the UAW's opponents used at Glenn Martin was that the CIO would allow black workers on the shop floor.[148] One Machinists Union leaflet went further, exploiting the sensitive issue of skilled work for blacks. "If you want a negro boss," the flyer said, "vote for the CIO and get him."[149]

As economic necessity put more blacks in Baltimore's workplaces, white workers became even more determined to enforce the boundaries between skilled "white" work and unskilled labor. By the end of the Great Depression there were few of the company unions left that had been so ubiquitous in the 1920s. Wartime mobilization dislodged Glenn Martin's company union, but still the one at Western Electric hung on. There, as part of an effort to forestall CIO organizing, the Point Breeze Employees Association (PBEA) mobilized southern, ethnic, and native whites against workplace integration. It was so effective in accomplishing both that it ultimately triggered a federal plant seizure.

Before the war, Western Electric had a workforce of 2,500. At its wartime peak it employed nearly four times that number.[150] In late 1941 the company began hiring black workers and segregating its restrooms to comply with the Baltimore plumbing code. In early 1942, after the Urban League got the plumbing code changed, the company desegregated its washrooms. Meanwhile, as the proportion of black employees in the plant rose from 2 to 29 percent, whites became increasingly embittered.[151]

The precipitating event occurred in August 1943, when a black woman was promoted to a supervisory position and twenty-two white women working under her walked out.[152] In response, leaders of the Point Breeze association took up the issue of the desegregated washrooms, circulating petitions and threatening to strike.[153] In October the membership authorized a strike, but the PBEA agreed to postpone it until a December War Labor Board hearing. The War Labor Board backed the company, the union struck, and President Roosevelt ordered the army to take over the plant that produced critical communications cable. When the army finally left in March 1944, Western Electric's restrooms were effectively resegregated, although the company and the government described things differently.[154]

A complex of issues underlay the Western Electric strike, but most important the PBEA was using race to shore up its support. Both the Machinists and the United Electrical Workers had been trying to organize the plant, and at the time the NLRB was investigating the PBEA's reputation as a "company union."[155] Also, as a committee of black employees pointed out, although the union made the integration of facilities the ostensible strike issue, the factor of skilled employment was definitely involved.[156] By making a black woman an inspector, Western Electric had violated the same tacit agreement restricting blacks to unskilled positions that Sparrows Point Shipyard had.

The PBEA had relatively little difficulty getting white workers to draw the line between themselves and their black coworkers. Few other local defense plants had integrated restrooms, and white workers reported being taunted by neighbors who called the plant "nigger heaven." Some whites were also convinced that "the policy of the company [was] to coddle the negro in order to court government approval" and that supervisors favored blacks at whites' expense.[157]

It was easy to blame southerners for the racial strife at Western Electric. One worker accused black women of calling some employees "poor white trash," and during the War Labor Board hearing one army official complained that the "philosophy of legal customary segregation in the South seems to pervade the whole atmosphere of these Western Electric discussions." Segregation could not be challenged in the South, he said, but "when one of these questions arises in the North where there has been a lot of immigration of southerners, we are too prone to want to yield to their sentiments and attitudes."[158]

Although women precipitated the strike, men conducted it. When picket lines formed, they were almost exclusively male. In addition, most of those who crossed the lines were older workers whereas those who manned the lines were younger. Older workers were more likely to have been Baltimore natives, and younger workers were more often migrants.[159] When the army reopened the plant, though, those remaining out were mostly skilled workers, fewer of whom are likely to have been newcomers.[160] This suggests that although southerners readily joined the PBEA's effort, they were relatively quick to desert it. Though initiated by the local union leaders, the strike depended on southerners for critical support. But while the migrants were willing to help others enforce the color line, they declined to do it alone.[161]

When it came to race, the PBEA represented the prevailing attitudes of many white Western Electric workers. Few were moved by the strident condemnations of the Baltimore CIO and its insinuations that they were being manipulated.[162] Furthermore, white determination to enforce the color line can only have been strengthened by the left-led United Electrical Workers' strident denunciations.[163] Good unionists who happened to be Communist Party members were sometimes tolerated in wartime Baltimore, but Western Electric's workers never gave the UE a hearing, despite its persistence.[164] Not surprisingly, the UE had tried hardest to organize Western Electric's blacks: its only full-time organizer there was a black man.[165]

It is telling that the strike at Western Electric was touched off by women. By the war's end, 38 percent of Baltimore's industrial workers were female and the number doing war work had shot up 97 percent from 1940 to 1944.[166] As early as September 1942, Western Electric's workforce was 35 percent female, and by the end of the war over 55 percent were women.[167] Most of this increase came as women replaced draftees or transients, and although some were Baltimore natives, plenty of wartime working women were migrants themselves. Many of these women, like their male counterparts, agreed with the assessment of "Beloved Baltimore" and left town at the war's end. But about half—including a Louisiana man who helped write the poem, yet later married a Baltimore woman—made their peace with the city and its residents and became part of the postwar white working class.[168]

What Was Left Undone

By 1945 Baltimore, like its counterparts in the industrial North, was home to a strong industrial union movement, a growing civil rights community, and a political system increasingly sensitive to the power of ethnic and black working-class voters. In addition, the wartime economic boom provided southern and ethnic blue collarites with their first, albeit limited, taste of the plenitude on which the postwar New Deal order was premised while giving black working people a foothold in the industrial economy. But between working whites, blacks, and urban liberals, intractable problems remained. Baltimore's blue collarites had rewarded the Democratic Party as much for what was left undone as for what it accomplished.

Although New Deal legislation delivered little in terms of civil rights, President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, issued well after wartime pragmatism displaced New Deal fervor, marked a decisive first step toward the rights-based liberalism that would hold sway in postwar America. In response, urban liberals, labor, and civil rights progressives most responsible for mobilizing urban voters formulated a vision of racial inclusion that was sharply at odds with that held by urban white workers. White working people had seemingly attained long-sought economic rights and political representation. Liberal leaders in Baltimore as elsewhere, therefore, sought to use the economic growth and expansion of the federal government that began during the war as a platform on which to build a new, more inclusive social order.

Working-class whites were much less ambitious. For them, the New Deal order promised social security rather than social change. And despite the rhetoric of equality nominally embraced by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the workplaces and especially the neighborhoods of Baltimore's white working-class voters remained unaffected by racial change. Liberals seemed to have delivered much and demanded little, and working whites found few reasons to waver in their loyalty to the party of the New Deal. But in the postwar years, as the programmatic liberalism began to emphasize civil rights over economic rights, keeping this contentious coalition together would require a real commitment to racial equality, one that Baltimore's working whites were not prepared to make.

The Spaces Of Utopia by Oscar Wilde

2007-02-22T18:31:00.000-08:00

I have lived in Baltimore City for most of my adult life. I think of it as my home town and have accumulated an immense fund of affection for the place and its people. But Baltimore is, for the most part, a mess. Not the kind of enchanting mess that makes cities such interesting places to explore, but an awful mess. And it seems much worse now than when I first knew it in 1969. Or perhaps it is in the same old mess except that many then believed they could do something about it. Now the problems seem intractable.

Too many details of the mess would overwhelm. But some of its features are worth pointing out. There are some 40,000 vacant and for the most part abandoned houses in a housing stock of some 300,000 units within the city limits (there were 7,000 in 1970). The concentrations of homelessness (in spite of all those vacant houses), of unemployment, and, even more significant, of the employed poor (trying to live on less than $200 a week without benefits) are everywhere in evidence. The lines at the soup kitchens (there were 60 of them in the State of Maryland in 1980 and there are now 900) get longer and longer (30 percent of those using them have jobs according to some informal surveys) and the charity missions of many inner-city churches are stretched beyond coping : The inequalities - of opportunities as well as of standards of life - are growing by leaps and bounds. The massive educational resources of the city (Baltimore City has some of the finest schools in the country, but they are all private) are denied to most of the children who live there. The public schools are in a lamentable state (two and a half years behind the national average in reading skills according to recent tests).

Abandonment of the city: housing in Baltimore. In 1970 there were circa 7,000 abandoned houses in Baltimore City. By 1998 that number had grown to an estimated 40,000 out of a total housing stock of just over 300,000 units. The effect on whole neighborhoods has been catastrophic. City policy is now oriented to large scale demolition (4,000 were demolished between 1996 and 1999 and another 11,000 demolitions are planned). The 'official' hope is that this will drive the poor and the underclass from the city. The idea of reclaiming older neighborhoods - particularly those with a high quality housing stock - for impoverished populations has been abandoned even though it could make much economic and environmental sense.

Charity in the city: Our Daily Bread in downtown Baltimore. Our Daily Bread run by Catholic Charities feeds around 900 people daily. Visited by the Pope, it has long been a flagship operation for servicing the inner city poor. But in 1998, the Downtown Partnership, led by Peter Angelos, the multi-millionaire owner of the Baltimore Orioles (salary budget for baseball players at $90 million annually), began to agitate against poor people circulating in the downtown area because they supposedly fostered crime, devalued properties and deterred redevelopment. The Partnership urged the city to set up a `social services campus' for the poor away from the downtown area. Catholic Charities was asked to seek a less central location. In April 1999 it was announced that Our Daily Bread would be moved to a renovated building donated by Angelos, symbolically tucked away behind the city jail in an impoverished neighborhood. When local residents complained Catholic Charities abandoned that site and began looking elsewhere. The bourgeoisie, as Engels argued, have only one solution to social problems - they move them around while blaming those least able to deal with the burden.

Chronic poverty and all manner of signs of social distress reign in the shadow of some of the finest medical and public health institutions in the world that are inaccessible to local populations (unless they have the privilege to clean the AIDS wards for less than a living wage or have medicare/medicaid status or a rare disease of great interest to elite medical researchers). Life expectancy in the immediate environs of these internationally renowned hospital facilities is among the lowest in the. nation and comparable to many of the poorer countries in the world.

Poverty in the city: in the shadow of "Johns Hopkins Hospital". The Johns Hopkins hospital and its associated School of Public Health are rated as among the best in the world. Yet the life-expectancy of individuals in the city is abysmally low and the health statistics in the immediate environs of these institutions tell an appalling story of impoverishment, marginalization, exploitation, and neglect. The pawnshops, the crumbling storefront churches, the bailbondsmen, all in the vicinity of the hospital, signify the social distress. But a crumbling mural expressing the desire to 'Climb Jacob's Ladder' out of misery to a condition of selfacceptance and reliance provides a glimmer of utopian desire. The living wage campaign in the city), and in Johns Hopkins (with its slogan of 'Climbing Jacobs Ladder) give hope for one step up that ladder.

(63 years for men and 73.2 for women). The rate of syphilis transmission is the highest of any city in the developed world (according to WHO statistics) and there has been an explosion of respiratory diseases (more than doubling for all categories in the city between 1986 and 1996, according to data collected for the Environmental Protection Agency, but led by an astonishing increase in the asthma rate from around 8 to nearly 170 per 10,000 inhabitants). The only notable public health success recorded in the city is the dramatic curbing of TB infections. This happened by way of a public health commissioner who, having had military medical experience in Vietnam, saw fit to adapt the Chinese communist idea of `barefoot doctors' to urban Baltimore and thereby bring the city's TB rate down within a decade from its unenviable position of worst in the nation to below the national average.

The affluent (black and white) continue to leave the city in droves (at a net rate of over a thousand a month over the last five years according to the Census Bureau) seeking solace, security, and jobs in the suburbs (population in the city was close to a million when I arrived and is now down to just over 600,000). The suburbs, the edge cities, and the ex-urbs proliferate (with the aid of massive public subsidies to transport and upper-income housing construction via the mortgage interest tax deduction) in an extraordinarily unecological sprawl) - long commutes, serious ozone concentrations in summer (almost certainly connected to spiraling respiratory ailments), and loss of agricultural land. Developers offer up this great blight of secure suburban conformity (alleviated, of course, by architectural quotations from Italianate villas and Doric columns) as a panacea for the breakdown and disintegration of urbanity first in the inner city and then, as the deadly blight spreads, the inner suburbs. And it is there, in that bland and undistinguished world, that most of the metropolitan population, like most other Americans who have never had it so good, happily dwell. Residency in this commercialized `bourgeois utopia' (as Robert Fishman,1989, calls it) anchors the peculiar mix of political conservatism and social libertarianism that is the hallmark of contemporary America.

There has been an attempt of sorts to turn things around in the city. Launched in the early 1970s under the aegis of a dedicated and authoritarian mayor (William Donald Schaeffer) it entailed formation of a private-public partnership to invest in downtown and Inner Harbor renewal in order to attract financial services, tourism, and so-called hospitality functions to center city. It took a lot of public money to get the process rolling. Once the partnership had the hotels (Hyatt got a $35 million hotel by putting up only half a million of its own money in the early 1980s), it needed to build a convention center to fill the hotels

Bourgeois Utopia: suburban sprawl. Like many other metropolitan regions in the United States, Baltimore has exploded outwards at an extraordinary rate Impelled by a complex mix of fears of the city, compounded by racism and class prejudice, the collapse of public infrastructures in many parts of the city, and attracted by the 'bourgeois utopian' desire to secure isolated and protected comforts, the elect of this prop""" indivadualism has been to create a remarkably repetitive landscape of low-density sprawl coupled with total dependence on the automobile. The ecological impacts are strongly negative and the social and economic costs of tragic congestion and infrastructure provision are rising rapidly.

Developers'utopia: Baltimore's Inner Harbor renewal. Almost everything to be seen on the present skyline of Baltimore's Inner Harbor has been constructed since around 1970. The background buildings largely represent off office and hotel spaces with high rise condominiums (both of which proved hard to sell of except at cut-prices) guarding either end. The tall condominium on the left was built on valuable land 'given away' to the developer in return for promises of help elsewhere that never materialized. In the foreground are the leisure and tourist activities that focus on the harbor front (Rouse's investments in a series of Pavilions occupy the central corner oftheharbor).Built through a public-privatepartnership' much of the development has had a checkered history. The Hyatt Regency Hotel (center top) gave Hyatt a $35 million hotel for an investment of $500,000 (the rest was public moneys). While this investment eventually turned out successfully for the city, the Columbus Science Center (with the white fluted roofline center bottom) cost $147 million of publicly secured private moneys but its main function, a Hall of Exploration, was forced to close in 1997 after nine months of operation. Rescued from bankruptcy by a State takeover, the building is now run by the University of Maryland with a marine biotechnology center as a main tenant.

get a piece of what is now calculated to be an $83 billion a year meetings industry. In order to keep competitive, a further public investment of $150 million was needed to create an even larger convention center to get the big conventions. It is now feared that all this investment will not be profitable without a large `headquarters hotel' that will also require `extensive' public subsidies (maybe $50 million). And to improve the city image, nearly a half billion dollars went into building sports stadiums for teams (one of which was lured from Cleveland) that pay several million a year to star players watched by fans paying exorbitant ticket prices. This is a common enough story across the United States (the National Football League -deserving welfare clients -calculates that $3.8 billion of largely public money will be poured into new NFL stadiums between 1992 and 2002). The state spends $5 million building a special light rail stop for the football stadium that will be used no more than twenty days a year.

This is what is called `feeding the downtown monster.' Every new wave of public investment is needed to make the last wave pay off. The privatepublic partnership means that the public takes the risks and the private takes the profits. The citizenry wait for benefits that never materialize. Several of the public projects go belly up and an upscale condominium complex on the waterfront does so poorly that it gets $2 million in tax breaks in order to forestall bankruptcy while the impoverished working class - close to bankruptcy if not technically in it - get nothing. `We have to be competitive,' says the Mayor and that `if they fail then no one else will want to invest,' apparently forgetting that the higher tax bills on the rest of us (including those who might upgrade their properties) is also an incentive to join the exodus from the city to the suburbs that has long been under way.

There is, of course, a good side to the renewal effort. Many people come to the Inner Harbor. There is even racial mixing. People evidently enjoy just watching people. And there is a growing recognition that the city, to be vibrant, has to be a twenty-four-hour affair and that mega bookstores and a Hard Rock cafe have as much to offer as Benetton and the Banana Republic . A hefty dose of social control is required to make such activities viable and signs of such control are omnipresent (Plate 8.9). The wish to be close to the action brings some young professionals (those without kids) back into center city. And when `gentrification' in the classical sense of displacement of low-income populations has occurred (as it has mainly around the harbor) it has at least physically revitalized parts of the city that were slowly dying from neglect (Plate 8.10). Some of the seedier public housing blocks have been imploded to make way for better quality housing in better quality environments. Here and there, neighborhoods

Public investments in the city: stadiums and a convention center for the affluent. During the 1990s nearly a billion dollars went into two publicly-financed sports stadiums ($500 million), an extension to the Convention Center ($150 million) and other major downtown projects (e.g, the addition of a light rail stop for the football stadium to be used no more than twenty times a year for $5 million). The argument for such investments is that they create jobs and generate income. But a careful cost-benefit analysis by two respected economists (Hamilton and Kahn, 1997) showed a net loss of the baseball stadium investment of $24 million a year. Meanwhile, libraries have been closed, urban services curtailed and investment in city schools has been minimal.

Public subsidy and private gain: the story of Harborview. After the Key Highway Shipyard closed in 1982 (with the loss of 2,000 jobs), the vacant site (top) became a focus of lengthy controversy. Approval was finally given in 19871o build a series of high rises on the site, in the face offterce local community opposition because the sheer scale of the project threatened the intimacy of existing neighborhoods and because access to the waterfront would be compromised. Funding for the project, initially confused by a mortgage foreclosure and multiple transfers of developer rights, was finally (and abruptly) procured from southeast Asia (Parkway Associates, then awash with surplus funds, put up the money without question since the site reminded their agent of Hong Kong). The project immediately hit difficulties with the financial crash of October 1987 and never seems to have turned a profit after the first tower was opened to much fanfare ('a new style in urban living') in 1993 (penthouse apartments marketed for $1.5 million). Eventually bailed out by a $2 million tax relief package in 1998, the developers have thrashed around to find nd ways to make the site more profitable. Proposals included building three more towers to make the first tower more viable. In 1999, construction began on luxury town houses and 'canal homes'with some modest high rise construction layered in between on the landward side. Another tower may yet be built.

Glossary of Re-Gentrification Terms A to B

2007-02-22T18:29:00.000-08:00

A

AAA tenant: A rating given to a prime tenant with the highest credit rating. The term is often used to describe the credit rating of a retail store. For example, a developer who plans to build a shopping center will seek a "triple A" tenant to help secure financing.

Absorption rate: A rate that is a forecast of how quickly properties can be sold or leased in a given area. For example, if a developer can lease 20% of the units available to the market in a given area for a given time, the absorption rate is 20 percent.

Abstract of title: A condensed history of the title of a property. An abstract of title should be a chronological history of recorded instruments that affect the title of the subject property. In some states, an attorney does a title search using an abstract. After a title search, the attorney issues an opinion that can be used to obtain title insurance.

Abstract of title: A summary of the public records relating to the title to a particular piece of land. An attorney or title insurance company reviews an abstract of title to determine whether there are any title defects which must be cleared before a buyer can purchase clear, marketable, and insurable title.

Abut: Connect or join. If two pieces of property touch each other, they abut each other.

Abutment: A load-bearing vertical member of a structure. A wall or a column are examples of abutments.

Acceleration clause: A clause in a note, bond, mortgage or deed of trust giving the lender the right to demand the remaining balance due and payable before its original date because regular mortgage payments are not made or for breach of other conditions of the mortgage.

Accessory building: A building or structure detached from but on the same property as a main building. Examples of accessory buildings are garages, storage buildings and guest houses.

Accident and health premium: A premium paid by a mortgagor for an insurance policy to ensure the continuance of mortgage payments if the borrower is disabled or ill.

Accommodation party: One who accommodates another by signing a note or a bill without receiving compensation (a note being a negotiable instrument such as a promissory note).

Accrued interest: Interest earned but not paid since the last due date.

Acoustical tile: Tile that absorbs sound. Acoustical tile is often used in the ceilings of apartment units and offices.

Acre (AC): Land that measures 43,560 square feet. A lot 208.71' x 208.71' is 4,840 square yards, 4,047 square meters, 160 square rods, 0.4047 hectare or 43,560 square feet.

Act of God: An event that causes damage by nature such as a flood, earthquake or winds; an occurrence not caused by man.

Action to quiet title: A court action to establish ownership of real property. This court action usually removes any interest or claim to title of real estate. The action results in removing any cloud on the title. Normally a lender will not commit to a mortgage with a cloud on the title. If the complainant is successful in the court action, the title is made quiet, or is clean.

Ad valorem: A method of taxation using a fixed proportion of property value; for example, real estate taxes collected at the rate of a specific dollar amount of appraised value or assessment. People use the ad valorem method as a formula to decide how much tax to pay the government. A commonly used formula for computing taxes is as follows (assumptions: properties are assessed at 25% of valuation, appraisal is $100,000 and the tax rate is $7.50 per $100): $100,000 x 25% = $25,000 1�2 $100 = 250 ($100 units), 250 x $7.50 = $1,875 1�2 12 (12 months) = $156.25 per month

Adaptive reuse: Providing a new use for an older, but sound, structure. An example would be an abandoned warehouse converted into business or residential condominiums.

Add-on interest: Interest added to the amount of the loan on the front end, or beginning of the loan repayment period. The balance is then paid by installments. This form of interest is much more expensive than simple interest paid on the entire amount for the entire term of the loan.

Adjoin: Connect or join. If two pieces of property touch each other, they adjoin or abut each other.

Adjustable living expenses: Expenses you can change, such as costs of groceries, utilities, telephone.

Adjustable Mortgage Loans (AML): See Adjustable Rate Mortgage

Adjustable-Rate Mortgage (ARM): A mortgage where the interest rate is not fixed, but changes during the life of the loan in line with movements in an index rate. The rate is usually based on indexes tied to the nation's economy. You may also see ARMs referred to as AMLs (adjustable mortgage loans) or VRMs (variable-rate mortgages)

Adjusted basis: The original cost of the property plus improvements (including what it cost to sell the property), less depreciation. Calculate the gain on the sale by subtracting the adjusted basis from the sale price.

Advance: To give someone a draw or payment by making them a loan.

Affordable Housing Program (AHP): A program of the Federal Home Loan Bank system which allows the Regional Banks of the System to make subsidized funds available through member institutions for the production of affordable housing to serve families below 80 % of their area median income (AMI).

Agrarian: Something that relates to land or to a distribution or division of land.

Agreement of sale: Known by various names, such as contract of purchase, purchase agreement, or sales agreement according to location or jurisdiction. A contract in which a seller agrees to sell and a buyer agrees to buy, under certain specific terms and conditions spelled out in writing and signed by both parties.

Air rights: The right to use the space or air above the ground but not the ground itself. Air rights can be sold or leased. Ownership of land includes air rights above the property. Some use of air rights, such as traveling through airspace by airplane no longer require the approval of the property owner.

Alcove: A recessed room connected to a main or larger room.

Alienation clause: A clause closely associated in meaning with Due-On-Sale Clause and Acceleration Clause. An alienation clause in a mortgage can give the lender the option to call the loan (declare the entire balance due) when the property owner transfers ownership, title or interest without the lender' s consent.

Alienation: A transfer or conveyance of property. Alienation is voluntary when it is with the consent of the owner. Involuntary alienation is a transfer of property without the consent of the owner, as in a foreclosure, adverse possession and eminent domain.

All Inclusive Trust Deed (AITD): Also known as a Wraparound Mortgage. A junior lien on a property which encompasses the senior financing. Enables the borrower to increase the amount of borrowing without paying off the original loan or paying the higher interest rates associated with other types of secondary financing. The borrower makes one payment (usually to the seller) from which the senior financing is paid with the balance going to ward the holder of the Note. May be advantageous to the seller in that he can experience an additional return on money (the senior financing) which he never loaned.

All-Inclusive Trust Deed (AITD): A new deed of trust securing a balance due on an existing note plus new funds advanced. This technique is similar to a wraparound mortgage.

Allodial system: Ownership of land with the owner having full and absolute dominion over the property. This system is the basis for our property rights in the United States. A contrasting system is the feudal system, which gives ownership to a king or sovereign who gives rights to the citizenry to occupy the land for a period of time.

Allowance for vacancy and income loss: An allowance used on pro-forma or profit-and-loss projections for income properties. You subtract an allowance for vacancy from gross income to decide net effective income (income before expenses). An investor cannot use rental property that is 100% occupied. Depending on the market area, the vacancy allowance for income properties such as apartments is usually from 5% to 10% of the gross rental.

Alluvion: The gradual building up of soil deposited by water against a shore.

Alluvium: Soil deposited by accretion along the shore or bank of a river.

Amenity: A natural or man-made feature that increases the value of property. Examples would be a view of a golf course or the ocean, or a beautifully landscaped yard.

American Bankers Association (ABA): A professional organization of banks based in Washington, D.C., that lobbies the federal government and monitors federal and state laws and regulations on issues pertinent to the banking industry.

American Institute Of Architects (AIA): A professional organization of architects. All registered architects subscribe to AIA' s standards of ethical practice.

American Institute Of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA): A professional organization of certified public accountants. AICPA is responsible for developing "GAAP" accounting -- generally accepted accounting principles. AICPA awards the CPA designation.

American Institute Of Real Estate Appraisers (AIREA): Formerly,.a member organization of the National Association of REALTORS (NAR). AIREA severed its affiliation with NAR in 1990 and merged with the Society of Real Estate Appraisers to form The Appraisal Institute. The Appraisal Institute officially began operation on January 1, 1991.

American Land Title Association (ALTA): An organization comprising title insurance companies, abstractors and attorneys specializing in real property law. ALTA has adopted many title insurance policy forms that standardize coverage nationally for property owners and lenders. Many states require ALTA standardized title insurance policies.

Amortization schedule: A list showing the payment number, interest payment, principal payment, total payment and unpaid principal balance. People sometimes call an amortization schedule a curtail schedule.

Amortization schedule: A timetable for payment of a mortgage showing the amount of each payment applied to interest and principal and the remaining balance.

Amortization: A payment plan which enables the borrower to reduce his debt gradually through monthly payments of principal. Fully amortized loans are paid in full at the end of the loan term.

Amortization: Loan amortization is paying off a debt or mortgage, usually by monthly payments. Regardless of whether a loan is a level payment mortgage, graduated payment mortgage, adjustable graduated mortgage or variable-rate mortgage, if it is an amortized loan there will be a portion for interest and a portion for principal reduction in every payment of the loan.

Amortization: The repayment of loan principal through equal payments over a designated period of time.

Amount financed: The base loan amount without regard to closing costs, discount points or mortgage insurance premiums. This dollar amount is associated with a disclosure statement used in compliance with the Truth-in-Lending Act.

Ampere: Measure of electrical current equal to the current produced by the force of one volt through the resistance of one ohm.

Anaconda mortgage: A mortgage that uses the subject property as collateral for all debts from various loans owed to the lender. Courts may disagree with what an anaconda mortgage intends since they may require a direct relationship between each loan and the collateral acquired by the loan proceeds.

Anchor bolt: A bolt that attaches the sill of a house to the foundation wall.

Anchor tenant: A retail store in a shopping center used as a major draw to the center. The presence of an anchor tenant helps secure financing for the center and enhances the chance of success for other tenants as it draws the public to its store. The store is normally part of a major chain and is a name easily recognized by the public. Depending on the size of the shopping center, there can be several anchor tenants.

Ancillary income: Income that is secondary in nature and not the main reason for being in the business; income that an investor would not receive if they were not in a particular business.

Annex: To attach or add; to add to something else.

Annual Debt Service (ADS): The total amount of principal and interest to be paid each year to satisfy the obligations of a loan contract.

Annual Percentage Rate (APR): A measure of the cost of credit, expressed as a yearly rate. It includes interest and points as well as other charges. It provides consumers with a good basis for comparing the cost of any loan, including a proposed mortgage loan.

Annual Percentage Rate (APR): A method for calculating an interest rate to the interest collected, discount points charged to either purchaser or seller or both, certain costs related to closing and mortgage insurance premiums.

Annual percentage rate or APR: The cost of a borrower's credit as a yearly rate. Defined by the federal Truth in Lending Act, it includes finance charges as well as the contractual interest rate.

Annuity: An assured income for life or for a given time. This term normally relates to the insurance industry, but is sometimes used in comparison with certain kinds of high-quality income from real estate investments.

Appointments: Decorative items such as furnishings and equipment in a building.

Apportionment: A division of expenses, liabilities, responsibilities or property among individuals.

Appraisal institute: An organization that officially began operation on January 1, 1991. The Appraisal Institute is the result of a merger of the former American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers (AIREA) and the Society of Real Estate Appraisers. The surviving designations are the MAI (Member of the Appraisal Institute) and SRA (Senior Residential Appraiser).

Appraisal report: A written opinion of value. The report contains the estimate of value; date of valuation; certification and signature of the appraiser; the purpose, qualifying conditions and description of the subject property and its ownership; a neighborhood description; the approaches to value; and the final determination of value. An appraiser shall report the present market value for existing properties and proposed developments. The appraiser may report a value as of the conclusion of construction and as of the projected date when stabilized occupancy is achieved.

Appraisal: An estimate of a property's fair market value by a licensed professional. Lenders take the appraisal into account when deciding whether or not to make loans.

Appraisal: An expert judgment or estimate of the quality or value of real estate as of a given date. Relies upon one or more of three different types of valuation approach depending upon the property type and current or anticipated usage: The Market Approach, Cost Approach or Income Approach.

Appraisal: An opinion of estimated value for a specific purpose of a described property on a given date. An appraisal can be either written or verbal.

Appraised value: The dollar amount of value given to the property appraised. There are three major approaches to estimating value of real estate. The market approach bases value on the sales of other comparable properties. The cost approach bases value on what it will cost to replace the property. The income approach bases value on the income produced by owning the property. In most appraisals all three approaches will be used, with the appraiser stating what approach was most influential in making the final determination of value.

Appraiser: One who estimates value on a professional level. Many appraisers have designations such as MAI (Member of the Appraisal Institute), SRA (Senior Residential Appraiser), SREA (Senior Real Estate Analyst) and SRPA (Senior Real Property Appraiser).

Appreciation: An increase in the value of a house due to changes in market conditions or other causes.

Appreciation: An increase in the value of property. The opposite of depreciation.

Appropriation: The private taking of property and dedicating it to public use. It is also the dedication of public land for a private use.

Appurtenance: An item attributable to the land, such as improvements or an easement. Something that comes from outside the property but is considered part of the property and transfers with the property upon sale or other transfer. A utility easement is an example of an appurtenance.

Apron: An area such as the entrance to a driveway or the concrete portion around a swimming pool.

Arm's-length transaction: A transaction between individuals who do not have a conflict of interest or reason for collusion. The parties are as strangers to each other. The value of property should be questioned for fairness or accuracy if there is not an arm's-length transaction between the seller and buyer. An appraiser should not use comparable sales not closed by an arm's-length transaction in the market approach to value.

Arrears: At the end of a period. You pay interest on home mortgages in arrears. You pay rent in advance. For example, a mortgage payment due May 1 is for the interest for April; rent due May 1 is for the month of May. The term can pertain to delinquent mortgage payments. A mortgage loan that is three months delinquent can be said to be three months in arrears.

Artesian well: A deep well where water rises to the surface by natural pressure.

As is: Property sold in its present condition with no warranties made about the plumbing, heating, electrical system or infestation of termites is said to be sold "as is."

Assemblage: Combining pieces of property to make one large, attractive property. The added value is plottage. People often use option contracts with the practice of assemblage.

Assessed valuation: The dollar amount or value on what real estate tax is levied. If a property worth $100,000 is assessed for tax purposes at 50% of value, the assessed valuation is $50,000. County or township tax assessors normally make appraisals for tax reasons. Many state laws require properties to be reappraised periodically. If the taxpayer disagrees with the appraisal, he or she can appeal to a board of appeal or board of equalization.

Assessed value: Dollar amount assigned to taxable property for tax purposes by the county tax assessor. It is usually a statutory percentage of market value. (Not to be confused with appraised value.)

Assessed value: The valuation placed upon property by a public tax assessor for purposes of taxation.

Assessed value: The value of real property established by the tax assessor for the purpose of levying real estate taxes.

Assessment: (1) The fair market value of property for tax purposes. (2) An expense appropriated to a unit of a whole such as a condominium assessment for common grounds, maintenance or an additional charge for improvement. (3) A levy for adding a product or service to a neighborhood, such as curbs or sewers. (4) A value given to a property owner for the taking of the property by the process of condemnation.

Assessor: Commonly called a tax assessor, an assessor is the individual charged with determining the fair market value for tax purposes. Tax assessors do not set the tax rate; they merely set the value for tax purposes.

Asset: Something of value that you own. An asset could be a car, a retirement fund, stocks or bonds, or even a valuable piece of furniture.

Assign: The act of transferring rights or property to another.

Assignee: One who receives rights or property. An assignee stands in the place of the assignor for rights, liabilities and interest in the property.

Assignment of Mortgage (A/M): A transfer of a mortgage from one mortgagee to another. Sometimes, FHA will accept an assignment of a mortgage to help a qualified, distressed mortgagor.

Assignment of servicing: A process of assigning the servicing rights from one lender to another.

Assignment: Transfer of one person's rights under a contract to another.

Assignor: One who assigns rights or property.

Assumability: When a home is sold, the seller may be able to transfer the mortgage to the new buyer. This means the mortgage is assumable. Lenders generally require a credit review of the new borrower and usually charge a fee for the assumption. Most mortgages now contain a due-on-sale clause, which means that the mortgage may not be transferable to a new buyer. Instead, the lender may insist that the entire balance is paid in full when the home is sold. Assumability may benefit the seller especially during periods of higher interest rates or after periods of property depreciation.

Assumable mortgage: A mortgage that can be taken over ("assumed") by the buyer when a home is sold.

Assumption of mortgage: An obligation undertaken by the purchaser of property to be personally liable for payment of an existing mortgage. In a full assumption, the purchaser is substituted for the original mortgagor in the mortgage instrument and the original mortgagor is to be released from further liability in the assumption, the mortgagee's consent is usually required. The original mortgagor should always obtain a written release from further liability if he desires to be fully released under the assumption. Failure to obtain such a release renders the original mortgagor liable if the person assuming the mortgage fails to make the monthly payments. (Not to be confused with a subject-to purchase.)

Assumption: The transfer of the seller's existing mortgage to the buyer.

Atrium: Usually a space in the center of a building with a translucent ceiling and sometimes decorated with such amenities as a water fountain and tropical plants.

Attachment: The actual taking of property into the custody of a court to serve as collateral for a judgment sought in an impending suit. Law, not private consent, creates the lien. This form of legal action is not available for obligations secured by collateral, as in the case of a mortgage.

Attestation: The act of witnessing a signature on an instrument.

Attic: The portion of a house between the ceiling of the top floor and the underside of the roof. There must be access to an attic. By inspecting an attic you can check for signs of structural problems in the rafters and joists and assure that there is adequate ventilation.

Attornment: A tenant's formal recognition of a new landlord. A mortgagee, who becomes an owner by foreclosure, with the tenant recognizing the mortgagee as the new landlord, has a defense against claims for rent by the defaulting mortgagor. Attornment starts a new tenancy between the new owner and the tenant.

Attractive nuisance doctrine: A legal doctrine holding that a property owner must protect children from injuring themselves by an attractive danger such as a swimming pool. As an example of adhering to this doctrine, a property owner should build a fence around a swimming pool.

Average life of a mortgage: The average number of years one dollar of principal investment remains outstanding in a mortgage loan. The average life is used in deciding the true yield of a mortgage. A 30-year mortgage is said to have an average life of 12 years; a 10- to 15-year mortgage has an average life of 7 years. Investors base the yield of a mortgage on the average life as opposed to the original term.

Avulsion: The sudden removal of land by action of a body of water, such as a river.

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Backfilling: The act of putting back dirt removed for construction. You backfill by filling the gap between the foundation wall and the yard so that water will drain away from the building.

Backup contract: A term often used with contracts to buy real estate. A backup contract is a contract that will replace a prior contract in the event of failure to perform or close by the parties of the prior contract. The seller should get a release from the buyer on the first contract before canceling the contract and proceeding with the second, or backup, contract.

Balloon mortgage: A mortgage loan with periodic payments of principal and interest that do not completely amortize the loan. The balance of this type of mortgage loan is due and payable in a lump sum at a specified time in the future. The borrower pays interest regularly, but may or may not make small principal repayments during the loan period. The unpaid balance is due at a specific time in the future as stated in the mortgage or deed of trust. For example, if you borrow $30,000 for 5 years, or 60 months, and the interest rate is 15%, your monthly payments will be only $375. But the payments cover interest only, with the entire principal due at maturity in five years. Thus, the borrower must make 59 equal monthly payments of $375 and a final balloon payment of $30,375 (the principal plus the last interest payment). If the borrower cannot make the final payment, the borrower must refinance (if refinancing is available) or sell the property. Some lenders guarantee refinancing when the balloon payment is due, although they do not commit to a specified interest rate. The rate at refinancing could be much higher than the borrower's current rate. Other lenders do not offer automatic refinancing. Without such a guarantee, the borrower could be forced to start the whole business of shopping for mortgage funds again, besides paying closing costs and front-end charges a second time. A balloon mortgage can be a senior or junior mortgage; i.e., a first or second mortgage.

Balloon note: A Promissory Note which requires only partial or no amortization (principal reduction.) Balloon Notes result in an eventual Balloon Payment. A Balloon Note may be coupled with an Extendible Rider which allows for the extension of the loan term as long as certain conditions are met. (Such as on 5/25 and 7/23 loans.)

Balloon payment: Amount of loan principal remaining unamortized and outstanding at the end of the mortgage term.

Balloon payment: The final payment in a balloon mortgage. The balloon payment ends the mortgage; the mortgage is paid in full. This final payment is called the balloon or bullet.

Balloon payment: The final payment of the balance due on a partially amortized loan.

Baluster: The support for the rail in a staircase; one of a series of upright posts.

Bank Holding Company (BHC): A corporation that owns interests in one or more banks.

Bankrupt: A corporation, firm or person who files for relief from the courts and surrenders all assets. Bankruptcy is a condition in which liabilities exceed assets and the person or business is unable to pay the creditors. Bankruptcy may be voluntary or involuntary. Involuntary bankruptcy is when a creditor forces payment of a debt of $1,000 or more and the debtor cannot pay. There are several chapters of bankruptcy. A lender will most likely encounter the following chapters:

* Chapter 7 covers liquidation of the debtor's assets.
* Chapter 11 covers reorganization of a bankrupt business.
* Chapter 13 covers repayment of debts by individuals (commonly called wage-earner). Som e plans may provide for full payment of debts, while others arrange for payment of reduced debts.

Under Chapters 7 and 11, dismissal of bankruptcy means that the debts, but not the liens, are dismissed. The courts must close the bankruptcy to release the liens. Under Chapter 13, dismissal means that the court has thrown a person or business out of bankruptcy. That person or business is no longer under the court's protection and is subject to the action of creditors. In reviewing a loan application from a person who has taken bankruptcy, lenders look at three important points: (1) the reason for bankruptcy, e.g., an inability to work due to bad health, an accident, etc., (2) the type of bankruptcy taken (the chapter) and (3) compensating factors.

Bankruptcy: When a person is declared by a court to be unable to pay her or his debts, that person is in bankruptcy. That person must then turn over any money or properties to a trustee, a person whom the court appoints, for management.

Base line: A surveyor' s term used to show an east-west line.

Base rent: The minimum monthly rent due to the landlord. Typically, it is a fixed amount.

Baseboard: A board that runs along the base of the wall where it meets the floor.

Basement: The space that is below the first floor. Basements are usually wholly or partly below the exterior grade. Basements should be checked for signs of water leakage. Dampness in comers is a sign of moisture problems, and water marks along the base of walls or any cabinets suggest that there is or has been some serious water leakage.

Basis points: A term used in relationship to interest rates. One basis point is equal to 1/100 of 1 percent. Basis points are used to describe the yield of a debt instrument, including mortgages. The difference between 9% and 9.5% is 50 basis points.

Basis: An unadjusted basis is the cost of the property minus the land value. Cost plus capital spent to modify the improvements minus the land value is the adjusted basis. For the purposes of determining capital gain or loss, it is the total cost of the property compared to the sales price minus the costs of the sale.

Basis: The total amount paid for a property, including equity capital and the amount of debt incurred. For a LIHTC project, the initial value that is eligible for tax credits.

Batten: A narrow board normally used to cover a joint or space between boards, often called a batten board.

Baty: The strip of insulation placed between the studs of a wall or joists of a ceiling or floor.

Beam: A load-bearing support that can be made of wood, iron, stone or other strong material.

Bearer bond: A coupon bond payable to the individual who has possession of the bond.

Bedrock: Solid rock for a foundation of a large building.

Bedroom community or suburb: Residential area for commuters who work at a nearby large city or employment center.

Before-tax income: Income used to decide yield from an investment before it becomes taxable to the investor. It is income used in an offering of an investment without regard to the investor's taxable income bracket used in filing income tax returns.

Belly-up: A project, business or venture that has failed is said to have gone belly-up.

Beneficiary: See Deed of Trust.

Billing cycle: The date a bill is sent out and the payment due. Some bills are sent out on the first of the month, some on the fifteenth, some on other dates.

Binder: A preliminary agreement, secured by the payment of earnest money, under which a buyer offers to purchase real estate.

Biweekly mortgages: Mortgage where payments are made every two weeks as opposed to more conventional monthly payments. Biweekly mortgages can be offered in any mortgage amount and term, at a given interest rate. Shorter payment intervals accelerate equity through faster amortization that will shorten the loan maturity.

Blacktop: A paving surface usually made of asphalt.

Blanket mortgage: A single mortgage used to secure a debt for money loaned on several properties such as the lots a builder owns in a subdivision. It is important for the borrower (mortgagor) to ask for a partial release clause in the blanket mortgage. A partial release clause will release each lot that is sold for a stated amount that is a portion of the entire debt. Without a partial release clause, the entire debt l have to be paid before the mortgage is released.

Blanket mortgage: Mortgage lien secured by two or more property parcels.

Blended rate: (1) A first-mortgage lender can use a blended rate in an advertisement to induce mortgagors to refinance and pay off their old low-interest-rate first mortgage. The first-mortgage lender could offer a 10% interest loan as compared to the going rate of 12% if the mortgagor will refinance the existing mortgage that is at 8 percent. (2) A second-mortgage lender or a wraparound lender will advertise not to pay off the old mortgage with the low rate and short term remaining, but instead, to place a second mortgage or wraparound loan behind the first and have a blended rate below market interest rates for first-mortgage loans.

Blighted area: Usually an inner city area where property values are falling and buildings are deteriorating.

Blockbusting: An illegal practice of promoting panic-selling in an all-white neighborhood because someone of a minority or ethnic background has moved into or is said to be moving into the neighborhood. The blockbuster will try to gain illegally from depressed prices either by buying or listing the properties at far below market values.

Blueprint: An architect's or designer's detailed plan for a building. If you remodel your house, you will probably need a blueprint.

Board and batten: Siding with batten boards nailed over cracks between wider boards.

Board foot: A piece of wood that is one foot square by one inch thick; 144 cubic inches = l'x l'x 1".

Board of adjustment: A government body that hears appeals concerning zoning matters. A Board of Adjustment can grant zoning variances.

Board of equalization: A government body that hears appeals concerning real estate tax assessments. If a property owner thinks the assessment is too high, they can appeal to the Board of Equalization. This board can lower assessments, causing a lower real estate tax.

Board of realtors�: The local association of REALTORS� who belong to the State and National Association of Realtors.�

Board of review: See Board Of Equalization.

Boilerplating: Standard language found in contracts, deeds or deeds of trust, and in covenants, conditions and restrictions (CC&Rs).

Bona fide: Genuine; sincere; in good faith. The term can be used in a sentence such as, "this is a bona fide offer to purchase your real estate."

Bond value: The mortgage bond's cash flow (or underlying collateral) that upholds the value of the bond. The mortgage bond's value is restricted to the mortgage loan's unpaid balance.

Bond: A formal certificate that evidences a debt and outlines the terms. It is a formal promise to pay a lender a specified sum of money at a future date -- with or without collateral. The promise must be in writing and signed and sealed by the maker (borrower). The balance owed is paid on a future date with a series of interest payments in the interval.

Bond-type security: An investment security, especially a mortgage-based one, that has the characteristics of a typical corporate bond, including a long-term, fixed rate of return and repayment of principal at maturity.

Book value: An accounting term used to show the value of a business as a whole or particular asset, such as real estate. You show the value by accounting records that give the cost of the assets plus any improvement minus depreciation. It is the value of an asset. Depending on the reason for valuation, book value may be marked down for a distress sale, but it is normally never marked up to reflect an increase in value.

Boot: Cash or other non-real-estate assets exchanged for real property.

Boot: Something of value given to even the exchange of like properties. For example, if parcel A is worth $100,000 and is exchanged for parcel B (worth $80,000) and $20,000 in cash, the boot is the $20,000 in cash.

Boring test: Using samples obtained by boring deep holes in the ground to decide the strength of the subsoil for construction purposes.

Borough: A section of a city, similar to an incorporated village, that has control over local matters. New York City has five boroughs.

Boti'om land: Low land situated near a body of water.

Bottom line: A phrase that means the net result, such as after-tax cash flow, or the final consequence.

Bracing: Placing boards between floor or ceiling joists to prevent them from twisting.

Breach of contract: Failure to perform according to the terms of a contract. The party who has not breached the contract can rescind the agreement and sue for damages or for performance.

Breach of trust: Abuse of the responsibilities or authority as set forth in a trust agreement.

Break-even cash ratio: Equalization of the ratio of operating expense plus debt service to gross income (1:1.) Interpreted as the occupancy level that must be achieved to break even.

Break-even point: A point when gross income will cover operating expenses and the debt service.

Breakpoint: The Sales threshold over which percentage rent is due.

Bridge financing or bridge loan: Short-term mortgage financing between the end of one loan or financing instrument and the beginning of another.

British Thermal Unit (BTU): A unit used to measure the efficiency or capacity of heating or cooling systems. A unit of heat required to raise one pound of water One degree Fahrenheit at sea level.

BTU: See British Thermal Unit.

Buffer strip or zone: Land between two areas of different use, such as commercial and residential.

Builder's risk insurance: Insurance used to protect builders against fire and special risks while they have buildings under construction.

Building code: Local and State Laws that set minimum construction standards.

Building line or setback: Distances from the ends and/or sides of the lot beyond which construction may not extend. The building line may be established by a filed plat of subdivision, by restrictive covenants in deeds or leases, by building codes, or by zoning ordinances.

Building permit: A written permit that must be purchased from the local government by anyone doing remodeling or rehabbing work on a property.

Buydown: With a buydown, the seller or borrower pays an amount to the lender so that the lender can offer a lower rate and lower payments, during the earlier portion of the loan term. If the seller pays, he may increase the sales price to cover the cost of the buydown. Buydowns can occur in all types of mortgages; fixed rate, interim fixed and adjustables.

Buyer's agent: A real estate agent who works for the buyer of a house, not the seller.

Revitalization (a.k.a. Gentrification)

2007-02-22T18:23:00.000-08:00

Cherry Hill....This community of 7,500 stands at a crossroads of those two economic processes, by being part of a trend known as "gentrification," a movement which unmasks the barbarity of the New Economy, and the need to overcome the small thinking of the population...The story starts to unravel at an evening meeting at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Community Center. Present are various elected officials, a city planner (who is drawing up the plans for the new Cherry Hill), and many residents. A police officer puts forward the city's proposal for dealing with drugs and crime, the first local problem on the agenda: Continue with daily arrests, but move to evict the dealers and anyone close to them (friends, girlfriends, etc.) so they can be a problem for another jurisdiction. And thus, the audience accepts a policy that does nothing to solve the drug problem and creates a pretext for wholesale eviction of the poorest neighborhoods. The announcement of a forum to discuss the new shopping center covers the economics portion of the meeting. Community leaders brought attention to health care and other issues, emphasizing the need for volunteering and self-help.

This kind of local control process is the bedrock of a much larger change, never mentioned directly that night: the gentrification of blighted city neighborhoods, supported by many of the notables at that meeting. Its supporters usually call it "revitalization," and it has a kind of mystical appeal to community leaders and many residents who are being told it will bring money into the community. And so, the executive director of Cherry Hill 2000, a community group that interfaces between businesses/developers and residents, can say to the newspapers that the plan is supported 100% by the people there.

Now, let's step out of the microscopic geometry of this localized thinking to see whats really happening. - Former Industrial Powerhouse -

Cherry Hill is a waterfront area on the southside of Baltimore City. The community developed in the 1940s as an offshoot of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and the war drive, which made Baltimore as a whole one of the biggest manufacturing centers in the country. The city was home to a proud, well-paid industrial workforce, and the waterfront bustled with three ship-building plants, numerous steel mills (including Bethlehem Steel, which employed 30,000 workers), and various other factories and machine shops. As the FDR New Deal policies were reversed, so was the progress of the city. By the 1970s, city politicians like then-Mayor (and current Maryland State Comptroller) William Donald Schaefer were singing the tune of adjusting to "inevitable" changes in the economy. Baltimore's manufacturing base evaporated, and in its place came a flood of narcotics: By some estimates, more than 10% of city residents are drug addicts. Baltimore has become a poster child for the post-industrial society; it has seen a net decline in population of almost 30% since the 1970s, and a large number of the current residents live in dangerous, drug-infested housing projects, with almost no opportunities for productive, well-paid employment.

And then came "revitalization" (a.k.a. gentrification). Real estate developers and politicians promise the population an economic recovery if they will support (or at least tolerate) these development schemes. One of the fist was the Inner Harbor project in the '70s, which converted much of Baltimore's waterfront area into a playground for tourists and college students to blow disposable income at trendy restaurants and shops. Other projects kept coming, with an emphasis on higher-priced housing, shopping centers, and office space for post-industrial Information Age jobs. As land area is converted from post-industrial wreckage into high-priced real estate, the developers and the investors behind them make a killing.

Cherry Hill provides a good example of how this process works. It's still a close-knit community, and hasn't deteriorated as much as many other Baltimore areas, but the post-industrial shift has been increasingly leaving its mark. For a long time, it had the highest concentration of public housing in the city; hundreds of these units have been levelled in recent years and hundreds more boarded up. Drug trafficking has become a major source of employment for the young, and signs of it are everywhere. Among the lots for sale are a power plant, a concrete-mix plant, and the Carr-Lowrey glass works—all closed down.

But the real-estate developers have plans. Condominium apartments starting at $200,000, and townhomes at $450,000, will be built. Yes, the mortgage bubble is coming to town. And how many current residents will be priced out of the area as real estate prices rise? Where will they go? The developers claim there is another side of the story: city residents who are first-time home owners in Cherry Hill and other areas because of these revitalization drives. And it's true: Some of the middle- and working-class community residents get a home (and a piece of the doomed mortgage bubble), and since these people are more active in the community, they spread the word or organize support for the endeavor, in most cases without understanding this process. It's the same localized outlook that would lead one to fight drugs with evictions; to compensate for diminishing government services with volunteering; or to solve unemployment with low-wage service jobs at a shopping center. The poorest and most marginalized are sacrificed; and, as the overall economic collapse continues, unaffected by the magical incantation of "revitalization," how many of the survivors-of-the-moment will join them?

As for the investors behind this drive, tunnel vision is hardly the problem with their outlook. A look at one of the developers active in Cherry Hill will suffice. The Enterprise Foundation was started in the early 1980s by real estate mega-mogul James Rouse, who has been heavily involved in the post-industrial transformation of Baltimore all along, with help from mostly Democratic Party politicians. Enterprise, which is active throughout the country, bills itself as a force for home-ownership and economic well-being for the poor and working class.

Almost every top foundation and business of the financier oligarchy that dismantled the New Deal and brought us this economic collapse is represented on the board of trustees and financial backers of this organism: J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Fannie Mae—the list could go on for pages. Two names on the Board of Trustees immediately jump out: Hollywood actor Ed Norton, who is especially proud of the green/solar-power initiatives that the Enterprise Foundation housing projects have worked out with British Petroleum; and former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara, who ushered in an era of genocidal looting of the Third World as World Bank president starting in 1970.

Different City Same Tune

2007-02-19T19:36:00.000-08:00

THE MILITARIZATION OF URBAN SPACE by Mike Davis

In Los Angeles--once a paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and "cruising strips"--genuinely democratic space is virtually extinct. The pleasure domes of the elite Westside rely upon the social imprisonment of a third-world proletariat in increasingly repressive ghettos and barrios. In a city of several million aspiring immigrants (where Spanish-surname children are now almost two-thirds of the school-age population), public amenities are shrinking radically, libraries and playgrounds are closing, parks are falling derelict, and streets are growing ever more desolate and dangerous.

Here, as in other American cities, municipal policy has taken its lead from the security offensive and the middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation. Taxes previously targeted for traditional public spaces and recreational facilities have been redirected to support corporate redevelopment projects. A pliant city government--in the case of Los Angeles, one ironically professing to represent a liberal biracial coalition--has collaborated in privatizing public space and subsidizing new exclusive enclaves (benignly called "urban villages"). The celebratory language used to describe contemporary Los Angeles--"urban renaissance," "city of the future." and so on--is only a triumphal gloss laid over the brutalization of its inner-city neighborhoods and the stark divisions of class and race represented in its built environment. Urban form obediently follows repressive function. Los Angeles, as always in the vanguard, offers an especially disturbing guide to the emerging liaisons between urban architecture and the police state.

FORBIDDEN CITY
Los Angeles's first spatial militarist was the legendary General Harrison Gray Otis, proprietor of the Times and implacable foe of organized labor. In the 1830s, after locking out his union printers and announcing a crusade for "industrial freedom," Otis retreated into a new Times building designed as a fortress with grim turrets and battlements crowned by a bellicose bronze eagle. To emphasize his truculence, he later had a small, functional cannon installed on the hood of his Packard touring car. Not surprisingly, this display of aggression produced a response in kind. On October 1, 1910, the heavily fortified Times headquarters--the command-post of the open shop on the West Coast--was destroyed in a catastrophic explosion, blamed on union saboteurs.

Eighty years later, the martial spirit of General Otis pervades the design of Los Angeles's new Downtown, whose skyscrapers march from Bunker Hill down the Figueroa corridor. Two billion dollars of public tax subsidies have enticed big banks and corporate headquarters back to a central city they almost abandoned in the 1960s. Into a waiting grid, cleared of tenement housing by the city's powerful and largely unaccountable redevelopment agency, local developers and offshore investors (increasingly Japanese) have planted a series of block-square complexes: Crocker Center, the Bonaventure Hotel and Shopping Mall, the World Trade Center, California Plaza, Arco Center, and so on. With an increasingly dense and self-contained circulation system linking these superblocks, the new financial district is best conceived as a single, self-referential hyperstructure, a Miesian skyscape of fantastic proportions.

Like similar megalomaniacal complexes tethered to fragmented and desolate downtowns--such as the Renaissance Center in Detroit and the Peachtree and Omni centers in Atlanta--Bunker Hill and the Figueroa corridor have provoked a storm of objections to their abuse of scale and composition, their denigration of street life, and their confiscation of the vital energy of the center, now sequestered within their subterranean concourses or privatized plazas. Sam Hall Kaplan, the former design critic of the Times, has vociferously denounced the antistreet bias of redevelopment; in his view, the superimposition of "hermetically sealed fortresses" and random "pieces of suburbia" onto Downtown has "killed the street" and "dammed the rivers of life."'

Yet Kaplan's vigorous defense of pedestrian democracy remains grounded in liberal complaints about "bland design" and "elitist planning practices." Like most architectural critics, he rails against the oversights of urban design without conceding a dimension of foresight, and even of deliberate repressive intent. For when Downtown's new "Gold Coast" is seen in relation to other social landscapes in the central city, the "fortress effect" emerges, not as an inadvertent failure of design, but as an explicit--and, in its own terms, successful socio-spatial strategy.

The goals of this strategy may be summarized as a double repression: to obliterate all connection with Downtown's past and to prevent any dynamic association with the non-Anglo urbanism of its future. Los Angeles is unusual among major urban centers in having preserved, however negligently, most of its Beaux Arts commercial core. Yet the city chose to transplant--at immense public cost--the entire corporate and financial district from around Broadway and Spring Street to Bunker Hill, a half-dozen blocks further west.

Photographs of the old Downtown in its 1940s prime show crowds of black, and Mexican shoppers of all ages and classes. The contemporary "renaissance" renders such heterogeneity virtually impossible. It is intended not to "kill the street" as Kaplan feared, but to "kill the crowd," to eliminate that democratic mixture that Olmsted believed was America's antidote to European class polarization. The new Downtown is designed to ensure a seamless continuum of middle-class work, consumption, and recreation, insulated from the city's unsavory streets. Ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways, are tropes in an architectural language warning off the underclass Other. Although architectural critics are usually blind to this militarized syntax, urban pariah groups whether black men, poor Latino immigrants, or elderly homeless white females--read the signs immediately.

MEAN STREETS

This strategic armoring of the city against the poor is especially obvious at street level. In his famous study of the "social life of small urban spaces," William Whyte points out that the quality of any urban environment can be measured, first of all, by whether there are convenient, comfortable places for pedestrians to sit. This maxim has been warmly taken to heart by designers of the high corporate precincts of Bunker Hill and its adjacent "urban villages." As part of the city's policy of subsidizing the white-collar residential colonization of Downtown, tens of millions of dollars of tax revenue have been invested in the creation of attractive, "soft" environments in favored areas. Planners envision a succession of opulent piazzas, fountains, public art, exotic shrubbery, and comfortable street furniture along a ten-block pedestrian corridor from Bunker Hill to South Park. Brochures sell Downtown's "livability" with idyllic representations of office workers and affluent tourists sipping cappuccino and listening to free jazz concerts in the terraced gardens of California Plaza and Grand Hope Park.

In stark contrast, a few blocks away, the city is engaged in a relentless struggle to make the streets as unlivable as possible for the homeless and the poor. The persistence of thousands of street people on the fringes of Bunker Hill and the Civic Center tarnishes the image of designer living Downrown and betrays the laboriously constructed illusion of an urban "renaissance." City Hall has retaliated with its own version of low intensity warfare.

Although city leaders periodically propose schemes for removing indigents en masse--deporting them to a poor farm on the edge of the desert, confining them in camps in the mountains, or interning them on derelict ferries in the harbor--such "final solutions" have been blocked by council members' fears of the displacement of the homeless into their districts. Instead the city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of cold war, has promoted the "containment" (the official term) of the homeless in Skid Row, along Fifth Street, systematically transforming the neighborhood into an outdoor poorhouse. But this containment strategy breeds its own vicious cycle of contradiction. By condensing the mass of the desperate and helpless together in such a small space, and denying adequate housing, official policy has transformed Skid Row into probably the most dangerous ten square blocks in the world. Every night on Skid Row is Friday the 13th, and, unsurprisingly, many of the homeless seek to escape the area during the night at all costs, searching safer niches in other parts of Downtown. The city in turn tightens the noose with increased police harassment and ingenious design deterrents.

One of the simplest but most mean-spirited of these deterrents is the Rapid Transit District's new barrel-shaped bus bench, which offers a minimal surface for uncomfortable sitting while making sleeping impossible. Such "bumproof" benches are being widely introduced on the periphery of Skid Row. Another invention is the aggressive deployment of outdoor sprinklers. Several years ago the city opened a Skid Row Park; to ensure that the park could not be used for overnight camping, overhead sprinklers were programmed to drench unsuspecting sleepers at random times during the night. The system was immediately copied by local merchants to drive the homeless away from (public) storefront sidewalks. Meanwhile Downtown restaurants and markets have built baroque enclosures to protect their refuse from the homeless. Although no one in Los Angeles has yet proposed adding cyanide to the garbage, as was suggested in Phoenix a few years back, one popular seafood restaurant has spent $12,000 to build the ultimate bag-lady-proof trash cage: three-quarter-inch steel rod with alloy locks and vicious out-turned spikes to safeguard moldering fishheads and stale french fries.

Public toilets, however, have become the real frontline of the city's war on the homeless. Los Angeles, as a matter of deliberate policy, has fewer public lavatories than any other major North American city. On the advice of the Los Angeles police, who now sit on the "desicion board" of at least one major Downtown project, the redeveloplnent agency bulldozed the few remaining public toilets on Skid Row. Agency planners then considered whether to include a "free-standing public toilet" in their design for the upscale South Park residential development; agency chairman Jim Wood later admitted that the decision not to build the toilet was a "policy decision and not a design decision." The agency preferred the alternative of "quasi-public restrooms"--toilets in restaurants, art galleries, and office buildings--which can be made available selectively to tourists and white-collar workers while being denied to vagrants and other unsuitables. The same logic has inspired the city's transportation planners to exclude toilets from their designs for Los Angeles's new subway system.

Bereft of toilets, the Downtown badlands east of Hill Street also lack outside water sources for drinking or washing. A common and troubling sight these days is the homeless men--many of them young refugees from El Salvador--washing, swimming, even drinking from the sewer effluent that flows down the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River on the eastern edge of Downtown. The city's public health department has made no effort to post warning signs in Spanish or to mobilize alternative clean-water sources.

In those areas where Downtown professionals must cross paths with the homeless or the working poor--such as the zone of gentrification along Broadway just south of the Civic Center--extraordinary precautions have been taken to ensure the separation of the different classes. The redevelopment agency, for example, brought in the police to help design "twenty-four-hour, state-of-the-art security" for the two new parking structures that serve the Los Angeles Times headquarters and Ronald Reagan State Office Building. In contrast to the mean streets outside, parking structures incorporate beautifully landscaped microparks, and one even a food court, picnic area, and historical exhibit. Both structures are intended to function as "confidence-building" circulation systems that allow white-collar workers to walk from car to office, or from car to boutique, with minimum exposure to the street. The Broadway-Spring Center, in particular, which links the two local hubs of gentrification (the Reagan Building and the proposed Grand Central Square) has been warmly praised by architectural crirics for adding greenery and art to parking. It also adds a considerable dose of menace--armed guards, locked gates, and ubiquitous security cameras--to scare away the homeless and the poor.

The cold war on the streets of Downtown is ever escalating. The police, lobbied by Downtown merchants and developers, have broken up every attempt by the homeless and their allies to create safe havens or self-governed encampments. "Justiceville," founded by homeless activist Ted Hayes, was roughly dispersed; when its inhabitants attempted to find refuge at Venice Beach, they were arrested at the behest of the local council member (a renowned environmenmlist) and sent back to Skid Row. The city's own brief experiment with legalized camping--a grudging response to a series of deaths from exposure during the cold winter of 1987--was abruptly terminated after only four months to make way for the construction of a transit maintenance yard. Current policy seems to involve perverse play upon the famous irony about the equal rights of the rich and poor to sleep in the rough. As the former head of the city planning commission explained, in the City of the Angels it is not against the law to sleep on the street per se "only to erect any sort of protective shelter." To enforce this proscriprion against "cardboard condos," the police periodically sweep the Nickel, tearing down shelters, confiscating possessions, and arresting resisters. Such cynical repression has turned the majority of the homeless into urban bedouins. They are visible all over Downtown, pushing their few pathetic possessions in stolen shopping carts, always fugative, always in motion, pressed between the official policy of containment and the inhumanity of downtown streets.

SEQUESTERING THE POOR

An insidious spatial logic also regulates the lives of Los Angeles's working poor. Just across the moat of the Harbor Freeway, west of Bunker Hill, lies the MacArthur Park district--once upon a time the city's wealthiest neighborhood. Although frequently characterized as a no-man's-land awaiting resurrection by developers, the district is, in fact, home to the largest Central American community in the United States. In the congested streets bordering the park, a hundred thousand Salvadorans and Guatemalans, including a large community of Mayan-speakers, crowd into tenements and boarding houses barely adequate for a fourth as many people. Every morning at 6 A.M this Latino Bantustan dispatches armies of sewing operadoras, dishwashers, and janitors to turn the wheels of the Downtown economy. But because MacArthur Park is midway between Downtown and the famous Miracle Mile, it too will soon fall to redevelopment's bulldozers.

Hungry to exploit the lower land prices in the district, a powerful coterie of developers, represented by a famous ex-councilman and the former president of the planning commission, has won official approval for their vision of "Central City West": literally, a second Downtown comprising 25 million square feet of new office and retail space. Although local politicians have insisted upon a significant quota of low-income replacement housing, such a palliative will hardly compensate for the large-scale population displacement sure to follow the construction of the new skyscrapers and yuppified "urban villages." In the meantime, Korean capital, seeking lebensraum for Los Angeles's burgeoning Koreatown, is also pushing into the MacArthur Park area, uprooting tenements to construct heavily fortified condominiums and office complexes. Other Asian and European speculators are counting on the new Metrorail station, across from the park, to become a magnet for new investment in the district.

The recent intrusion of so many powerful interests into the area has put increasing pressure upon the police to "take back the streets" from what is usually represented as an occupying army of drug-dealers, illegal immigrants, and homicidal homeboys. Thus in the summer of 1990 the LAPD announced a massive operation to "retake crime plagued MacArthur Park" and surrounding neighborhoods "street by street, alley by alley." While the area is undoubtedly a major drug market, principally for drive-in Anglo commuters, the police have focused not only on addict-dealers and gang members, but also on the industrious sidewalk vendors who have made the circumference of the park an exuberant swap meet. Thus Mayan women selling such local staples as tropical fruit, baby clothes, and roach spray have been rounded up in the same sweeps as alleged "narcoterrorists" (Similar dragnets in other Southern California communities have focused on Latino day-laborers congregated at streetcorner "slave markets.")

By criminalizing every attempt by the poor--whether the Skid Row homeless or MacArthur Park venders--to use public space for survival purposes, law-enforcement agencies have abolished the last informal safety-net separating misery from catastrophe. (Few third-world cities are so pitiless.) At the same time, the police, encouraged by local businessmen and property owners, are taking the first, tentative steps toward criminalizing entire inner-city communities. The "war" on drugs and gangs again has been the pretext for the LAPD's novel, and disturbing, experiments with community blockades. A large section of the Pico-Union neighborhood, just south of MacArthur Park, has been quarantined since the summer of 1989; "Narcotics Enforcement Area" barriers restrict entry to residents "on legitimate business only." Inspired by the positive response of older residents and local politicians, the police have subsequently franchised "Operation Cul-de-Sac" to other low-income Latino and black neighborhoods.

Thus in November 1983 (as the Berlin Wall was being demolished), the Devonshire Division of the LAPD closed off a "drug-ridden" twelve-block section of the northern San Fernando Valley. To control circulation within this largely Latino neighborhood, the police convinced apartment owners to finance the construction of a permanent guard station. Twenty miles to the south, a square mile of the mixed black and Latino Central-Avalon community has also been converted into Narcotic Enforcement turf with concrete roadblocks. Given the popularity of these quarantines save amongst the ghetto youth against whom they are directed--it is possible that a majority of the inner city may eventually be partitioned into police-regulated "no-go" areas.

The official rhetoric of the contemporary war against the urban underclasses resounds with comparisons to the War in Vietnam a generation ago. The LAPD's community blockades evoke the infamous policy of quarantining suspect populations in "strategic hamlets." But an even more ominous emulation is the reconstruction of Los Angeles's public housing projects as "defensible spaces." Deep in the Mekong Delta of the Watts-Willowbrook ghetto, for example, the lmperial Courts Housing Project been fortified with chain-link fencing, RESTRICTED ENTRY signs, obligatory identity passes--and a substation of the LAPD. Visitors are stopped and frisked, the police routinely order residents back into their apartments at night, and domestic life is subjected to constant police scrutiny. For public-housing tenants and inhabitants of narcotic-enforcement zones, the loss of freedom is the price of "security."

Dominance of Johns Hopkins in the Baltimore Economy

2007-01-27T13:31:00.000-08:00

If increasing low service sector wages is to be the engine of a responsible economic development plan, the plan must begin by examining the critical role of the employer that has the most profound impact on Baltimore's private-sector economy: the Johns Hopkins Institutions. As the largest private employer in the state of Maryland, with over 46,00 employees in 2002, the Johns Hopkins Institutions have surpassed and replaced Bethlehem Steel and other manufacturing industries as the economic powerhouse of Baltimore's new economy.

Hopkins' Profitability

According to a report commissioned by Hopkins, the non-profit Johns Hopkins Institutions -- comprised of Johns Hopkins University, the Schools of Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, and other post-graduate institutions, as well as the Johns Hopkins and Health System -- generate over $7 billion in business statewide: one of every 28 dollars in the Maryland economy.

The Hopkins Institutions are among the most "profitable" of all private institutions in Maryland, both non-profit and for-profit. The Hopkins Institutions earned a combined income of over $200 million in the 2002 fiscal year. Their unparalleled renown in research and medical care attracts more grant funding than any other academic institution: $1.4 billion in 2002, more than twice the amount of the second-highest ranking recipient.

From the National Institutes of Health alone, Hopkins received $510 million in 2002, nearly $100 million more than the second-highest recipient [University of Pennsylvania, $418,546,510; University of Washington, $405,729,042; University of California at SF, $365,364,909; Washington University, $343,792,077] of NIH grants.

The Hopkins Institutions also regularly attract the nation's top doctors and medical students, having earned Hopkins Hospital the top spot in US News and World Report's annual hospital rankings for 13 years in a row.

Tax-Exempt Status

The Hopkins Institutions' non-profit status does not come without a cost. As Baltimore struggles with a dwindling tax base, the City's charitable institutions, and Hopkins in particular, generate an ever greater portion of overall income -- and these institutions are exempt from taxes. Within Baltimore City alone, Hopkins Institutions own $505 million worth of tax-exempt property, according to current tax assessments.

Were these properties subject to taxation, Hopkins would have to pay $12 million a year in property taxes to the City. Instead, the burden of paying for schools and other services falls on the rest of Baltimore's residents and businesses.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital

The Johns Hopkins Hospital plays an enormous role in both the Hopkins universe and the local economy. Johns Hopkins Hospital generated over $40 million in net operating income for the system as a whole in 2002, more than double the amount it earned the year before, and its total fund balances (net worth) grew $110 million for the five years ending in fiscal year 2002, to a total of $380 million.

As a non-profit entity, the hospital is obliged to reinvest those earnings in the community which it serves.

In comparison to other hospitals, however, Johns Hopkins Hospital devotes a much smaller percentage of its care to local residents. According to the Hopkins report . . . nearly one quarter of all Johns Hopkins Hospital's total revenue came from out-of-state patients, compared to just 4% at Bayview Medical Center and just over 2% at Howard County General Hospital, both components of the Johns Hopkins Health System.

Indirect Funding: Hidden Subsidies

As noted above, a substantial number of Hopkins Hospital service workers are eligible for public assistance while working full-time at the hospital. Thus public assistance to full-time workers is a hidden government subsidy to the hospital, supplementing the low wages it pays to its service employees. As the chart below shows, Hopkins and other Baltimore hospitals shift the burden of wage payments into the community at large

Shifting the Burden of Low Wages

A Hopkins Hospital environmental service worker who earns an annual income of $20,800 a year ($10/hour) while supporting two children, qualifies for the following public assistance programs:
Public Assistance Program

Annual Cost to Taxpayers

Maryland Child Care and Development Fund

$2,853.37

Federal CCDF expenditures

$8,222.12

Maryland Children's Health Program

$498.00

Baltimore City public Schools Reduced Price Meal Program

$1,222.00

Women, Infants, and Children Program
(if pregnant, nursing, or has an infant child)

$770.25

Total Annual Costs to Taxpayers Per Worker

$13,570.74

America's Leading Hospital Is No Wage Leader

Johns Hopkins Hospital employs far more workers than any other hospital in the City. Including Hopkins Bayview Hospital, Johns Hospital medical institutions account for 35 percent of the city's hospital workforce. [Bon Secours 2%; Maryland General 4%; Harbor 5%; Mercy 6%; Good Samaritan, 7%; St. Agnes 8%; Union Memorial, 8%; Sinai 8%; University of Maryland 11%]

Hopkins thus has the greatest influence over wage rates among Baltimore hospital employers. Yet Hopkins Hospital is not the wage leader among Baltimore hospitals.

[Compared to wages paid by University of Maryland Medical Systems and Prince Georges Hospital Center, Hopkins 2003 Wages comes in 3rd for the positions of Maintenance Mechanic (slightly above $18/hour), Nursing Aide (less than $14/hour), File Clerk (less than $12/hour); Environmental Service Worker ($10/hour); Dietary Aide (less than $10/hour)]

Despite the millions it earns in net income, Johns Hopkins Hospital directs only a small portion of its tax-exempt earnings toward raising the wages of its most poorly paid employees. Despite Hopkins' robust growth and profitability, the wages it pays its employees fall well behind the wages paid to service and maintenance employees at a number of other private Maryland hospitals.

In many job classifications, Hopkins Hospital's average base wage rates rank in the bottom half of all Maryland acute care hospitals. many of the hospitals leading Hopkins in wages are also located in Baltimore, and earn far less in net operating revenue than Johns Hopkins.

Hopkins service and maintenance employee wage policies are clearly independent of the hospital's ability to pay. Hopkins simply chooses not to pay.

The result of that choice is a longstanding wage stagnation for all Baltimore health care workers. Other employers don't have to pay middle-class wages if Johns Hopkins does not.

Higher Wages in Hospitals' Interest

Henry Ford realized early in his career the self-interest employers have in paying their workers fairly: besides providing labor, employees make up much of the industry's consumer base. Ford could not expect to sell cars if his own workers were not paid enough to afford one of their own.

Baltimore's hospitals could learn from this example.

Johns Hopkins, geographically, serves a community with enormous needs for health care services, yet without sufficient means to pay for them.

[Baltimore area residents spent an average of $4,252 on health care, compared to $3,532 for those in the national capital area. Low wage workers, who are heavily concentrated in Baltimore, are far less likely to receive fully-paid health insurance from their employers. Few low-wage workers can afford to pay for private health insurance. . . . The rate of increase of out-of pocket health care expenses for Maryland residents continue to rise -- There are 550,000 Marylanders who are without any form of health insurance.]

Nationwide, predominantly minority minority and low-income neighborhoods such as East Baltimore, where the Hopkins medical campus is located, have some of the highest rates of asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV-related illnesses.

Baltimore area residents already spend more on health care than residents of other regions in Maryland. When they cannot afford health coverage, however, many are either forced to rely on charity care, at great cost to the hospital, or forego care entirely until their situation is dire, at great cost to the entire community.

Better wages would go directly into the community Hopkins serves, resulting in increased utilization of health services, a shift in reliance from emergency facilities to preventive medicine, and a greater number of privately insured patients, improving the hospital's payor mix.

Additionally higher wages decrease employee turnover and cut down on training costs, allowing for a more stable workforce to provide hospital services. Workforce stability is of great importance for patient care. Studies show that patient satisfaction and employee satisfaction at hospitals go hand in hand.

A Matter of Public Policy

Raising hospital workers' wages needs to become more than an issue of employer responsibility to Baltimore. It needs to become a matter of public policy, as well, if only to prevent the further deterioration of the communities in which health industry employers like Johns Hopkins and other hospitals operate.

Bold and visionary leadership is needed to compel trend-setting employers like Johns Hopkins to pay self-sufficiency wages, at the very least, to the workers they employ.

If the influence of such leadership is not brought to bear on Baltimore hospitals, these hospitals and the service sector employers that compete with them for labor will only continue to pay wages so low as to force their employees to rely on public assistance, creating additional burdens for a city that already lacks sufficient resources.

If leading Baltimore hospitals like Johns Hopkins are encouraged to raise their wages to self-sufficient wages levels, the rising incomes and spending power of Baltimore service workers will be harnessed as a major engine of economic growth and development that will contribute to meeting the human needs of Baltimore families, local businesses, and struggling communities of our city.

Revive Ghetto with Biotech

2007-01-26T16:51:00.000-08:00

In the hollowed-out neighborhood known as Middle East, three blocks from the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, La-Z-Boy chairs compete with broken-down Ford pickups for space in vacant lots. Row houses sit empty, their windows cemented. And whether it's 11 a.m. or 11 p.m., a clerk at High-Hat Cut-Rate Liquors sells cigarettes from behind a 5-foot-high wall of bulletproof plastic.

Here, on streets where cardboard signs announce that "drug trafficking or loitering is not permitted in this block anytime," Baltimore is trying to attract a different kind of drug business: biotechnology. Invoking eminent domain, the city will soon evict 250 families and over the next year demolish 300 houses to make way for a 2 million-square-foot office park, wiping out an entire neighborhood in a project reminiscent of 1960s-era slum clearance.

It is a drastic proposal. But when it comes to Middle East, city officials say they have run out of easy options. The only way to save the careworn stretch of 17 blocks, they contend, is to tear it down. Then, they say, the international prestige of Johns Hopkins research laboratories and the immutable laws of the free market will kick in and do for the neighborhood what four decades of urban-revitalization efforts never could: turn it around.

City leaders say the $1 billion biotechnology park will transform the east side of Baltimore into a shiny new corporate Mecca for drug developers, medical-device makers and gene decoders. In 10 years, they say, the park should create 8,000 jobs and 2,000 new and renovated homes. Then scientists will move into new housing, spend their paychecks in the neighborhood and throng to new restaurants, banks and retail shops.

Stakes are high

Many U.S. cities have tried to remake their most troubled neighborhoods with huge reconstruction projects. And dozens of communities around the country have plunged into expensive efforts to court the 25-year-old business of biotechnology, with its promise of cutting-edge science, blockbuster products and economic growth. But Baltimore may be the first to try to do both at the same time.

"The stakes are high for everyone," said Mayor Martin O'Malley, a Democrat. "For the residents, for me politically, for Johns Hopkins. But there really isn't an alternative that makes sense."

Under the plan, homeowners will be given as much as $70,000 in moving costs plus the value of their home, advisers to guide them throughout the move, credit counseling and even rides to inspect potential new homes. Renters will receive the same services and up to five years of rental assistance.

East Baltimore Development, the nonprofit group set up to build the center, says housing built around the biotechnology park will include affordable townhouses and detached homes, meaning that some residents can move back. One-third of the jobs, it says, will be available to those with only a high-school diploma.

Jobs in doubt

So far, there is little organized opposition to the proposal in the predominantly black neighborhood. But there is widespread doubt that the biotechnology center's benefits will ever trickle down to those whose lives will be uprooted to make it possible.

Isaac and Rochelle Jones bought their home on North Wolfe Street 20 years ago when working-class blacks bragged about living in Middle East. In the 12-foot-wide house, they laid white tile in the kitchen and installed central air conditioning, new windows and a baby-blue front door. Today, they have seven years left on a 15-year mortgage.

"I was content to stay in a house that was paid off," said Rochelle Jones, 41, a former state employee disabled by lupus.

She is also concerned about her sons. Antwan, 25, works at Wal-Mart; Maurice, 19, works part time at a Johns Hopkins hospital. Both would like better jobs, but neither attended college.

"If you don't have a college education, you might as well be sweeping the floors," said Isaac Jones, 60, a former factory worker. "You tell me what kind of jobs they can get in biotech."

Best hope

There is little question that Middle East needs help. The blocks of red and white, brick row houses slated for demolition have been plagued by some of the worst violence, unemployment and poverty in the nation. One in four of the houses is vacant. For two decades, the city tried just about everything to clean it up: house-by-house renovations, generous tax credits, stepped-up police patrols.

Nothing worked.

John Shannon Jr., president of East Baltimore Development, said biotechnology is the neighborhood's best hope. The development will be less than two blocks from Johns Hopkins University, a hotbed for the kind of medical research that becomes the basis for biotechnology companies.

In 2001, the university attracted $1.2 billion in research money, the second-biggest sum in the country behind the University of California system, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. Nearby researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, last year attracted $324 million. If there is space in East Baltimore to commercialize the fruits of all that research, the logic goes, biotechnology companies will sprout up. Those, in turn, will support dozens of new businesses.

"The ability to have world-class expertise across the street is very attractive to companies," said Craig Smith, chief executive of Guilford Pharmaceuticals, a Baltimore biotechnology firm.

The city will offer businesses incentives: 10-year credits against property taxes for new construction; one- to three-year tax credits for wages paid to new employees; low-interest loans; and work-force-development grants.

Still, with just a few months left to go before the city sends hundreds of eviction notices, not a single company has committed to building on the site.

Tall order

Shannon concedes that persuading biotechnology executives to put offices in Baltimore's toughest area is a tall order.

Even with Johns Hopkins next door, experts say, East Baltimore will face an uphill battle because of the simple economics of the industry.

The cost of commercializing a biotechnology product is exceedingly high, while the odds of its success are exceedingly low. On average, it takes at least $500 million and 10 years for a biotechnology drug to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the goal of every company. Most companies run out of money trying.

"This is a mania," said Joseph Cortright, an economist who has written extensively on the development of biotech centers. "Ten years ago, everyone wanted to be the next Silicon Valley. Three years ago, they wanted to be the center of e-commerce. Now that both of those have fizzled, everyone in the economic-development fraternity thinks they need to be in biotechnology."

East-Side Biopark spends $60M to acquire properties

2007-01-26T16:25:00.000-08:00

The city's effort to revive a low-income East Baltimore neighborhood with new housing and biotechnology companies will grow next year as officials begin to acquire more than 900 properties north of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Jack Shannon, CEO of East Baltimore Development Inc., the organization leading the east-side project, said the total cost for acquiring properties, relocating families, demolishing buildings and preparing land in the new 57-acre second phase is estimated to be $60 million.

The total project is planned for 88 acres.

Shannon said it will be a challenge to get the needed funding. So far, it has received financial backing from the city, state and federal governments and nonprofits.

"Given the positive momentum we've been able to achieve, along with the overall consensus that we need to continue to advance the work we're doing, we should be able to assemble the necessary resources," Shannon said.

With a biotech building on the 800 block of N. Wolfe Street under construction and expected to be finished by spring 2008, the 31-acre first phase of the project is well under way. Nearly 400 families have been relocated, and hundreds of rowhouses north of Johns Hopkins Hospital have been demolished.

In the project's first phase, homeowners were given an average of $153,000 to compensate for the loss of their home. Officials have pledged that residents of the second phase will get the same level of benefits.

EBDI has spent the past year meeting with neighbors and community groups to develop a plan for the next stage of the project. Shannon estimated that 300 families will be required to move from the neighborhood.

One of those people is Donald Gresham, president of the Save Middle East Action Committee, a neighborhood group representing residents of the area. Gresham, who lives on the 900 block of N. Castle St., said he would like to move into some of the new housing being built, but he worries about whether he will be able to afford to a property and pay increased property taxes.

"My desire is to stay right in the neighborhood," he said.

Gresham said his group is being heard by EBDI. "We are now at the table," he said.

Residents of more than 100 of the 1,040 properties in the second phase will be able to stay in their homes, Shannon said.

Housing at East-Side Biopark

2007-01-26T16:11:00.000-08:00

.... As many as 700 new homes are being proposed for a downtrodden section of East Baltimore next to the Johns Hopkins medical campus as part of a $1 billion plan to build a life sciences park there.

That's more than double the minimum of 300 housing units -- a mixture of apartments, townhouses and condominiums -- originally set by planners of the proposed New East Baltimore Community, which is slated to be built in a neighborhood plagued by high crime rates and boarded-up rowhouses.

To accommodate the developers' interest in building housing, the initial phase of the project has been expanded to include 30 acres north of Johns Hopkins Hospital, up from 20 acres. The overall project is designed to be 80 acres.

Each of the three development teams being considered to build the project's $500 million first phase is interested in constructing more than 500 homes as part of the project, said Jack Shannon, president and chief executive officer of East Baltimore Development Inc., the city-affiliated organization overseeing the project. One developer has even proposed more than 700 housing units, he said.

"There is a marketplace for housing north of the Johns Hopkins campus," Shannon said.

The developers believed that more new apartments, condominiums or townhouses could create enough "critical mass" to generate momentum for the neighborhood's turnaround, Shannon said.

Housing could also be attractive to Johns Hopkins graduate students in such fields as medicine, public health and nursing, most of whom live off campus.

Some of the East Baltimore families who are being moved out of the area to clear way for the project may want to move back to the neighborhood when the project is done, Shannon said.

Bill Cassidy, sales manager of the Long & Foster realty office in Fells Point, agreed there will be strong demand for new housing north of the Hopkins campus, especially since nearby Butcher's Hill and Patterson Park are already seeing an influx of new residents who are sprucing up old rowhouses.

"Once the whole area is redone, it will become very much like a new part of the city," he said.

The area north of Hopkins could compete with new suburban townhouse developments because there are always people looking to buy newly constructed homes, Cassidy said.

And the chance to avoid a highway commute to downtown Baltimore could be enticing for many homebuyers.

Spacious townhouses with on-site parking and easy access to the subway could be attractive to buyers who also are looking at small rowhouses with no parking spaces in nearby Canton.

The 11-member EBDI board is now slated to make a decision on a master developer for the overall project sometime in December, a delay from the original goal of mid-November. Shannon said the decision has been delayed because the board wants to do a careful and thorough review of all three proposals.

At first, the project's planners did not know, Shannon said, how big the market would be for housing in the area.

One third of the housing would be sold or rented at market rates. Another third would be designated as affordable housing, with the rest set aside for low-income households. All three proposals include a mix of rental properties and for-sale properties.

One of the three potential lead developers, Steven Grigg, president and chief executive of Washington-based Republic Properties Corp., said the residential part of the project is "probably the most important feature from an urban planning standpoint" because it could have the most impact on the area. He declined to describe his company's proposal in detail.

The other two possible development team leaders are the Washington division of Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises and a joint venture between Baltimore development firm Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse Inc. and New Hampshire-based Lyme Properties LLC. Neither could be reached for comment.

The timeline for the initial phase of the project is likely to become clearer when the developer is picked next month.

Johns Hopkins has one graduate student dormitory on the East Baltimore campus, Reed Hall

"We believe that there is some demand for some folks who want to come back to the campus," said Richard Grossi, vice president and chief financial officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine. Additional apartments could help to meet that demand, he said.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has committed to lease 100,000 square feet of office and laboratory space in the life sciences park, Grossi said.

That space is slated for researchers in the medical school's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.

The project's first phase calls for 1 million square feet of office space. Hopkins is playing a role, Grossi said, in trying to recruit companies to the park.

"We've had some people come unsolicited and say, 'Look we're interested in being there,' " said Grossi, who declined to give names. "I'd like a couple of large companies."

Middle East Conflict

2007-01-26T16:09:00.000-08:00

By Charles Cohen
Lisa Williams had planned to live in her East Baltimore home for a long time--perhaps even the rest of her life. She and her husband have invested money, emotion, and 18 years of their lives in the house they own on Wolfe Street in this struggling neighborhood, known as Middle East, so she was not pleased when the city approached her in 2000 and told her that she would soon have to move out.

Beginning on Aug. 27, the Baltimore City Council will hold hearings on the long-awaited plan to relocate the residents of Williams' neighborhood to make way for the East Baltimore Biotech Park, a 2 million-square-foot, state-of-the-art, mixed-use development project. The park--a joint effort between the city, the state, the business community, and Johns Hopkins Medical Center--is the linchpin in a plan to redevelop the area around the hospital complex. The park will contain space for emerging biotechnology companies, retail businesses, and mixed-income residences and apartments. If implemented, plan proponents say, the biotech park, its accompanying homes, and supporting businesses could transform Middle East's drug-blighted streets and boarded-up rowhouses into a vibrant planned community. The $1 billion development would be overseen by a nonprofit community redevelopment agency.

In order to put the plan into action, the City Council has but to pass five bills to allow for the condemnation of properties in five different neighborhoods, including Middle East. If the bills are passed by the end of summer, as project proponents anticipate, it will take about 18 months for the city to purchase the homes and begin the first phase of the project. According to Baltimore Deputy Mayor Laurie Schwartz, the first new building projects could be completed by the end of 2003.

But Williams and her neighbors, who say they have been the backbone of a neighborhood which has languished for years, say they want to participate in the creation of a new, prosperous Middle East. After all, Williams says, residents like herself have been the only ones offering the area any kind of stability. But despite a year's worth of city-led presentations designed to inform residents of the east side's bright future, as the time approaches for the city to hold its hearings, Williams and other Middle East residents are becoming more anxious about the city's plans. The city has put together a buyout proposal that will restrict dislocated residents' housing choices. Community members who have invested significantly in their neighborhood also fear that the new Middle East will be beyond their financial means, despite assurances from the city that some of the 2,000 new or rehabbed homes will be "affordable." Schwartz says that the city has yet to set a price for the homes.

"I would love to stay where I'm at and see this redevelopment and live among it," Williams says. Instead, the city plans to move residents from Middle East to other ailing city neighborhoods that need more homeowners as a stabilizing force. But Williams and her neighbors say they don't want to trade one blighted area for another. "We want a decent home in a stable community," she says. "We don't want to move into another area where there are dilapidated homes on each side of where the renovated homes are going to be."

Last Monday evening, two dozen or so of Williams' neighbors gathered in front of a home on Madison Street--one of the last left standing on the a block lined with chainlink fences and scabbed with empty lots--to draw attention to their plight. Above all, they demanded the right to participate in the decision-making process and fair compensation for the loss of their properties.

The city has offered homeowners what it considers a fair deal: Displaced residents will receive the assessed value of their houses, plus moving costs, up to $70,000; residents would be allowed to obtain a $47,500 forgivable mortgage that would be paid off by the city after five years.

But there's a catch: The city will only offer the deal to Middle Easterners who agree to move to other blighted east-side neighborhoods. Residents who choose to move elsewhere will receive less money. For example, those who wish to purchase homes outside of east Baltimore will only be allowed a $27,500 forgivable mortgage.

According to the members of the Save Middle East (Baltimore) Action Committee, however, part of the money being offered to them and their neighbors comes from federal sources that don't allow municipalities to dictate where recipients may live.

On July 12, the group sent a letter to City Council members Paula Branch, Bernard Young, and Pamela Carter objecting to the city's restrictions. "According to the federal housing quality standards . . . the relocatee gets to choose the house he or she desires and therefore determines when a house meets his or her own quality standards," the letter says. "The Federal Relocation Act does not restrict those affected to be bound to specific geographic areas."

Members of the Save Middle East group say that, thus far, their demands to be "treated with respect" by the city have not been met. They say that the first stages of demolition to make way for the park is disrupting their lives (parts of the neighborhood have already been reduced to rubble, and a fine, dusty haze fills the air). They say they want to be able to move to decent neighborhoods, where the quality of life is at least as good as it was in Middle East.

"We haven't even fought the process of a biotech park," says Pat Tracey, the group's president. "What we are saying is, if we have to sacrifice our houses, at least let us choose where we are going to go."

Schwartz says the city is aware of the residents' concerns about the reimbursement deal and is now evaluating its relocation proposal. "There is some question whether it's legal or whether it violates fair-housing laws," she acknowledges, adding that the city is now planning to open an outreach office to give residents a place to voice their concerns and have their questions answered.

Councilperson Branch says she agrees with residents who say they shouldn't be told where to live. As chair of the council's Urban Affairs Committee, she will oversee the council hearings on the project that begin later this month. Branch says residents will have a chance to voice their concerns at the meetings, and that properties that don't need to be demolished to make way for the biotech park will be spared. "If a resident's home is in good condition and up to standard housing code, and they don't want to move, then [the house] will be amended from the bill," Branch says. However, she acknowledges that the Middle East neighborhood--which is situated where the heart of the biotech park is going to be--is going to be difficult to spare.

Despite reassurances, residents feel they are struggling against the political process that is stacked against them and lack advocates in high places.

"It's like we don't have any say because we don't have any money," Williams laments. "They are going to dictate [to us] what they are going to do."

Williams resents the fact that the neighborhood's representatives in the city government seem to be working to have their neighborhood--where she and her neighbors have fought blight and crime for years--rebuilt for someone else.

"This total disrespect for east Baltimore must stop," Tracey shouted through a bullhorn at Monday night's protest. "How do you think this would be done in Roland Park? Would they just roll up the trucks and knock down the buildings?"

"Is this a government for the people, by the people?" asked John Hammock, who had hoped to turn a bakery he owns in the neighborhood into a cooking school for kids. "Are we the people, or is this a joke? I feel like the Indians being put off the reservation."

Eastside Development Begins by Chet Dembeck

2007-01-26T15:26:00.000-08:00

One of the most blighted sections of the city has taken a giant step toward revitalization.

Federal, state and city officials were all on the same page when they came together Monday to celebrate the groundbreaking of the first of many new buildings being constructed as part of a $1 billion project slated to revitalize a large portion of East Baltimore in the next 10 years.

When completed in 2007, the 282,000-square-foot building at 855 N. Wolfe St. will be the first piece of the Science and Technology Park at Johns Hopkins.

Officials said the 2002 partnership involving the city, state and communities of East Baltimore is beginning to huge pay dividends.

“Johns Hopkins is one of our biggest job generators that we failed to harness in past years,” Mayor Martin O’Malley told The Examiner before the ceremony. “This is a tremendous opportunity for Baltimore’s future.”

Before the project reached it current momentum, the Greater Baltimore Committee raised $1 million to help support East Baltimore Development Inc., the nonprofit that acts as the arm of the partnership, said Donald C. Fry, president of the committee.

Fry said that when completed, the renewal of East Baltimore will act as a catalyst for the rest of the city.

“It’s like dropping a pebble in a pond,” Fry said. “You’ll get a ripple effect.”

Aris Melissaratos, secretary of the Maryland Department of Economic Development, expressed enthusiasm for the project’s potential.

“It is the total rebuilding of an entire community,” he said.

The boundaries of the 80-acre project run from Broadway to Madison Street to Collington Street and the railroad tracks. It was one of the city’s depressed areas with a 56 percent vacancy in some sections, according to city data.

When completed over the next 10 years, the science and technology park will boast 150,000 square feet of office and retail space. It will also include 1,500 new homes for buyers with mixed incomes. Officials estimate the project could generate about 6,000 jobs.

The kinds of jobs the project will generate is particularly important, Joseph Haskins Jr., chairman of East Baltimore Development Inc., told The Examiner.

“This will create opportunities across the board from entry level to highly credentials positions,” he said.

Haskins, who is also the president of The Harbor Bank, said he and others stood steadfast in their hope for transforming the area when others had “written off the neighborhood.”

On Wednesday, The Examiner will explore another project that is breathing new economic life into Baltimore.

Funding for project

» Baltimore: $30 million

» State: $22.5 million

» Federal: $21 million

On Shaky Ground

2007-01-26T14:43:00.000-08:00

Baltimore's arcane system of ground rents, widely viewed as a harmless vestige of colonial law, is increasingly being used by some investors to seize homes or extract large fees from people who often are ignorant of the loosely regulated process, an investigation by The Sun has found.

Tens of thousands of Baltimore homeowners must pay rent twice a year on the land under their houses. If they fall behind on the payments, the ground rent holders can sue to seize the houses-- and have done so nearly 4,000 times in the past six years, sometimes over back rent as little as $24, The Sun found.

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More than half of the ground rent suits filed in the past six years were brought by entities associated with four groups of individuals and families, court records show.

Most ground rent holders insist that home ownership is rarely put in peril. But Baltimore judges awarded houses to ground rent holders at least 521 times between 2000 and the end of March 2006, The Sun found, analyzing court computer data and studying hundreds of case files to document the trend for the first time. The properties ranged from boarded-up rowhouses to a 7,000-square-foot Victorian in Bolton Hill.

In many cases, ground rent holders used their extraordinary power under state law to oust the owners from their houses and then sold the homes for tens of thousands of dollars in profits. Some homeowners reached settlements to regain their houses, paying legal and other fees many times the amount of ground rent owed, though court records don't make clear how often that happens.

While some of the most aggressive investors have owned ground rents for years, it wasn't until the late 1990s that rising property values in Baltimore City made it attractive to attempt to seize houses. The number of new lawsuits rose 73 percent last year and shows no signs of leveling off.

This activity occurs across Baltimore but has clustered in some areas as they have started to gentrify, including neighborhoods just north of Patterson Park and around Washington Village.

Told of The Sun's findings, outgoing Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. said he had ordered an immediate investigation, adding that it might be time to phase the system out. "An older couple or a widow could forget this, and for someone to come and take their house, when it's worth so much more than they paid for it, is an outrage," Curran said.

The Sun's investigation also found that:

• In nearly every aspect, the law favors ground rent holders. Homeowners rarely win once a lawsuit is filed. And the longer a case goes on, the more it can cost the homeowner.

• No other private debt collectors in Maryland can obtain rewards so disproportionate to what they are owed. In contrast with a foreclosure, the holder of an overdue ground rent can seize a home, sell it and keep every cent of the proceeds. To prevent a seizure, homeowners almost always have to pay fees that dwarf the amount of rent they owe.

• State law puts the onus on property owners to track down their ground rent owner and make payments, though it's sometimes next to impossible to find that information. No registry of ground rent holders exists, and property deeds typically contain only the barest of details about them.

• Some investors seek out overdue ground rents to purchase, then file lawsuits to take the property built on the land. In some cases, the legal owners of these houses have died, and the law is not clear about whether investors must give relatives a chance to satisfy the debts and keep the homes.

'Business is business'
R. Marc Goldberg is a Baltimore attorney and ground rent owner who acts as a spokesman for about two dozen rent holders, including his family and some of the other investor groups that pursue the most ground rent lawsuits, called "ejectments."

He doesn't dispute that clashes over property ownership occur more often these days as investors scramble to reclaim decrepit parts of Baltimore. But he denies that they exploit the ground rent law or charge excessive fees. Nobody gets in trouble if he pays his rent on time, Goldberg said.

"I'm not looking to put people out and to be mean and nasty," he said. In a series of interviews with The Sun, Goldberg repeatedly used the refrain "Business is business."

"I can't deny an economic incentive to make a windfall profit," he said.

Many investors say that while the returns remain attractive, the business is difficult -- with many challenges in collecting the rent or tracking down owners of vacant houses. They say they deserve to be paid their rent on time -- and that they sue to take homes only after lengthy collection efforts, and because it is their only remedy under the law.

"If you don't pay, you are putting your property at risk," said Lawrence Polakoff, a Baltimore Realtor whose family has filed more than 100 ejectment lawsuits since the start of 2000. "A ground rent owner isn't going to just sit back and say, 'I'm sorry someone's died,' and forget about it."

"You can make a very good living doing this," said Polakoff, adding that the increase in ejectment lawsuits is directly related to rising real estate prices.

Most ground rent holders say they rarely, if ever, try to seize homes. For smaller holders, the cost of pursuing an ejectment can be prohibitive. Some investors are fearful of seizing properties that have lead-based paint or housing code violations. Others say they avoid seizures on principle.

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"We would never allow ourselves to be in that position. We are about helping people, not hurting them," said Greg Cantori, executive director of the Marion I. and Henry J. Knott Foundation. The foundation, which supports Catholic charities, owns about 1,600 ground rents but hasn't filed an ejectment lawsuit since 1996.

Landlord Baltimore
Estimates of the number of Baltimore properties subjected to ground rent run as high as 120,000, many of them the familiar red-brick and white-marble-stepped rowhouses.

Ground rents take the form of 99-year leases, renewable forever. All property deeds must note whether there is a ground rent. Rents generally range from $24 to $240 a year; some very old leases are written in shillings.

Their origins can be traced to the summer of 1632, when King Charles I of England gave Cecilius Calvert all the land in what is now Maryland. Calvert, better known as the second Lord Baltimore, did what any self-respecting aristocrat did in those days: He charged rent to the colonists who wanted to build on his soil.

Starting in the early 1900s, developers built miles of rowhouses in Baltimore with ground rents. They saw the system as a progressive way to keep home prices within reach of the working class, because people wouldn't have to buy the land as well as the house.

Charities, foundations, churches, banks and some retirees have held ground rents for years as investments. Investors often buy and sell them from each other, sometimes through classified ads.

More recently, some property owners have created new ground rents -- at rates several times higher than the previous rents -- when they sell a property. This is allowed by the law.

Homeowners, however, have the right under state law to buy out ground rents created after 1884 under specified price formulas and conditions.

Though there are residential ground rents in other areas of the state, including Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, they are far more common in Baltimore City. While unusual, ground rents exist in other places; for example, much of Hawaii has them.

"We view ground rent as one of the sticks in the bundle of property rights," said Carolyn Cook, deputy executive vice president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, adding, "For the majority of the people, it doesn't have much of an impact."

Loss and gain
Thelma Parks, 56, lived for more than two decades in Druid Heights, just a few blocks from the boyhood home of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, until losing her house last year in an ejectment case. It was filed by a trust set up by Fred Nochumowitz, whose relatives have long held ground rents.

Records show that the Nochumowitz trust bought the ground rent on Parks' house in January 2002. Parks couldn't make her payments, which with the fees for the court action came to "about $1,200," she says. With more time, she says, she could have paid off the $1,200.

After taking her property, the trust sold it to an investment company for $70,000 in September 2005. That company resold it about six months later for $128,000. Parks, meanwhile, was forced to rent in another part of town.

"It ruined every one of my plans," said Parks, who works for the federal government. "They all went out the window. ... I'm going to have to work until I fall apart.

"I can't retire," she said. "Everyone is making a profit from it but me."

Geoffrey Forman, the attorney who handled the Parks case for the Nochumowitz trust, said he wouldn't discuss any cases he was involved in. A woman at Fred Nochumowitz's Boca Raton, Fla., residence identifying herself as Mrs. Nochumowitz said her husband wasn't available for comment and that she didn't know when he would be.

Reporters for The Sun witnessed six property seizures stemming from ground rent between early summer and late fall.

Some played out matter-of-factly. Once deputies from the city sheriff's office determined that nobody was home, workers hired by the new owners popped out the door locks and replaced them within minutes. The crew could then empty the house and pile its contents in the street -- so long as cars could get through.

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In the 2600 block of Mura Street in the East Baltimore community of Berea, electric candles still shined in the front window of the vacant rowhouse, and an Easter wreath hung on the front door as the ejectment crew arrived on the morning of July 26.

Strewn throughout the rooms were personal mementos, from bowling trophies to religious icons to two ticket stubs from an evening showing of Scary Movie 4 three months previously. The unpaid ground rent was $252, though fees and other costs boosted the bill to $2,118.67.

In three cases, deputies told occupants they had to get out immediately unless they could work out something with the new owners.

On a hot August morning on North Brice Street in the Midtown-Edmondson area, one family lost a rowhouse adjoining the one where it lives. Minutes later, an elderly man told a child about to put his tricycle away in the seized house: "You can't put it in there. It ain't our house no more."

The actions of some ground rent holders upset some traditional investors, such as Cantori of the Knott Foundation.

Cantori says that the foundation relies on the income from ground rent -- about $200,000 a year -- to help pay its operating expenses, but that it is redeeming or selling dozens every year and writing some off as uncollectible.

Property records show that the Knott Foundation -- among other charitable and religious groups -- sold ground rents to investors who filed ejectment lawsuits. It typically has sold those leases for their redemption value under state law -- for example, a $90-a-year rent sold for $1,500.

Cantori calls the rise in ejectment actions and seizures "unconscionable." He says the foundation sold ground rents because they were delinquent and wanted to "get them off the books" after failing to collect the rent through normal procedures. He says he didn't know that the new owners had sued to seize the properties.

From owner to renter
Deloris McNeil still doesn't understand how she went from owner to renter in her West Baltimore house.

Court records give only part of the answer.

Fred Nochumowitz, acting as trustee for some family ground rent holdings, filed suit against McNeil in April 2002, asserting that her ground rent -- $96 a year -- was more than six months behind. McNeil admits that she let the debt slide, but only did so because she was sick. Later, she said, she couldn't afford the legal fees added to her bill, and didn't realize she could lose her house.

McNeil, 59, said she is disabled and suffers from high blood pressure, which she keeps in check by taking seven pills a day. She says she suffered a stroke after her daughter died.

McNeil never tried to defend herself in court, though court records show she was served with legal notice of the suit. She says she couldn't face going to court.

A judge handed over her rowhouse to the Nochumowitz trust. Property records show that the trust sold the house about a year later for $15,000 to Lauren Montillo, who specializes in rehabilitating city properties for resale as rentals.

Montillo, who has bought at least 22 properties from Nochumowitz family interests, says she chose not to rehab the house and evict McNeil, so long as she paid her $550 a month in rent. "I don't have the guts to throw her out," said Montillo. "I have a little bit of a conscience."

Says McNeil, "It would mostly kill me" to move.

McNeil is luckier than others who lost ownership of their homes, but she says she doesn't feel that way.

"Sometimes I feel like screaming at the top of my lungs," McNeil said, seated at her cluttered dining room table, dabbing at tears with a crumpled tissue.

McNeil's loss of her house without a fight is not unusual. The Sun's analysis of court data found that homeowners didn't respond in nearly 60 percent of the ejectment lawsuits in which property changed hands during the past three years.

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'Uninformed public'
There's no single explanation for why this happens, according to a review of hundreds of court records and interviews with more than a dozen people facing ejectment.

Some people say they didn't understand the process, especially the severity of the consequences for failing to pay. Some say they couldn't afford an attorney. Others say they hadn't been contacted. A few people who were owners of boarded-up or abandoned properties didn't seem to care about losing them, even when told that they could be sold for thousands of dollars.

Court officials don't know why so few people respond. As a result, they can't tell whether the lack of response is a growing problem or not. "By itself, that doesn't raise any suspicions," said Judge Evelyn Omega Cannon, judge in charge of the civil docket in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

Some lawyers and people sued say that part of the problem is that, even with all the fees added to ground rent bills, it costs more to hire a lawyer than to pay the amount the lawsuit is seeking.

"If they're not eligible for our services and they can't hire a lawyer and they don't know enough to file a letter with the Circuit Court, then it's all over," said Louise Carwell, senior staff attorney in the housing consumer law unit of the Legal Aid Bureau in Baltimore.

Three years ago, after a Towson lawyer complained about an ejectment suit filed against a 93-year-old client, the General Assembly capped a ground rent holder's attorneys' fees for preparing and filing an ejectment lawsuit at $700. But the law also allows ground rent holders to charge the property owner $300 for searching property titles, and pass on all other costs of collecting the debt -- copying, process servers, lawsuit filing fees -- plus up to $500 in costs of recovering back rent for periods before the lawsuit was filed.

The best a homeowner can hope for in most cases is that a judge will approve an installment plan for paying off these fees -- which can be 20 to 50 times the amount of rent owed -- but that happens infrequently.

Reviewing more than 500 case files, The Sun found fewer than a dozen in which homeowners won their cases outright.

"Unfortunately, in many of these cases, you're dealing with an uneducated public and an uninformed public," said former Circuit Judge Thomas E. Noel, who heard numerous ground rent cases before leaving the bench in April.

Even a lawyer who represents ground rent holders says his side has a clear advantage. "The people who file these cases know the law inside and out," said J. Scott Morse. "Other people [homeowners] don't have a clue about it."

It takes a lawyer
Before filing an ejectment lawsuit, a ground rent owner must send a registered letter to the property owner's "last known address" demanding payment. But if there is confusion over the address, or for any other reason the person fails to receive the bill, problems can result.

Linda McGill, a mortgage broker, got into ground rent trouble over a West Baltimore house she had bought for her grandmother, who later died. The relatives living in the house after her grandmother died initially failed to send the ground rent bills to her, she says.

McGill says she discovered that the rent was overdue when the relatives passed a bill on to her husband. An April bill demanded $1,715 -- of which the overdue ground rent was $84. McGill sent the ground rent holder, Houndswood LLC, a check for $84, but Houndswood refused to accept it.

For weeks afterward, McGill says, her calls and letters to Houndswood went unanswered -- until the day before she was scheduled to appear in court. She got a call from longtime Baltimore real estate investor Jack Stollof, a Houndswood consultant who is a founding director of another large ground rent holder, Jack & Harvey Inc. Houndswood filed 522 ejectment lawsuits between January 2000 and November 2006, making it one of the most prolific filers, court records show.

"In the beginning, he was pleasant on the phone," she said of Stollof. "He hinted at $1,500."

McGill had offered $1,050 in the letter she wrote to Houndswood's attorneys in April -- reasonable, she thought, considering the overdue ground rent was $84. But she says Stollof told her that wasn't enough, and that she had no chance in court.

In court the next day, McGill was surprised to hear not only that the bill had grown to $1,837, but also that Houndswood wanted the house -- although that demand had been in the lawsuit. "We're asking for the possession of the property, because the payments have not been made," Herbert Burgunder III, an attorney for Houndswood, told the judge.

"You're in a tough spot because they're acting in accordance with the law, and the law does allow them to impose fees," Circuit Court Judge Joseph H.H. Kaplan told McGill. "How much of the $1,837 can you pay?"

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"I agree to pay $900," she responded, no matter that she had offered $1,050 earlier. "To me that's fair."

But the judge asked if she was willing to pay more.

"If you pay $1,500, I will allow you to keep the property," Kaplan said. "Will you?"

Stollof at that point acknowledged the phone call to McGill the day before. "I offered this young lady yesterday the chance to avoid this," he said in court.

McGill wrote a $1,500 check immediately after the hearing.

"For $84, your house can be taken," McGill said after court. "I'm a mortgage broker. Half my clients don't know how to contact their ground rent owners. This is going to take place all day long in Baltimore City, and it does."

Stollof declined to discuss his business when approached after the hearing.

In rare cases, property owners have won ejectment suits by arguing that the ground rent holder did little or nothing to find them.

In October 2003, Brent W. Procida got a call from his banker, telling him he was being sued over $38 in back ground rent. The house in Canton that he owed the rent on was vacant and under renovation; Procida was living five blocks away.

The suit, which demanded $1,615, had been filed in August. But Procida said in court papers that he didn't get a copy of the lawsuit until two days after he got the call from his bank. The ground rent bills had been sent to the vacant house, which is why Procida said he never saw them.

Procida sent a check for $57 to the ground rent holder, Jack & Harvey Inc., to cover the overdue and current rent. Jack & Harvey, however, refused to accept the check because it didn't include the attorneys' and other fees, court records show. Procida said in court papers that he also offered Jack & Harvey $800 to settle the case, to no avail.

Unlike most homeowners taken to court, Procida, a lawyer himself, fought back. He argued in court papers that Jack & Harvey didn't try to look him up in the phone book, which would have taken "approximately 15 seconds," just so it could justify "the exorbitant fees on which it has built its business."

Jack & Harvey argued that it was entitled to all of the fees it sought and had sent notices to Procida's "last known address" as required by the law. Circuit Court Judge Stuart R. Berger ruled in Procida's favor.

Burgunder, who represented Jack & Harvey in the case, declined comment.

Attorneys' fees
The fees in Linda McGill's case are the norm rather than the exception, an examination of hundreds of court files shows.

"The staggering sum of money is the attorneys' fees. It has nothing to do with the ground rent. You only lose your house because the attorney fee is not paid," Noel said. "That's where the problem is."

Noel, the former circuit judge, says he regularly urged settlements when he felt fees were too high. The ground rent system, he says, "should have been investigated 20 years ago."

"Think of how many times judges rendered these judgments in all the courtrooms over all those years," he said. "You're talking about a lot of property. A lot of people were affected by the loss of these houses."

Kim McGavin is an attorney who has advocated ground rent legal reform since a 93-year-old client in a nursing home was sued in an ejectment proceeding.

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She and other critics contend that the largest holders tend to do all their legal and title-search work in-house, and can do much of it by computer, making their actual costs minimal.

"Even if you're billing at $200 [an hour], that's three hours, and there's no way it takes that long," she said, referring to the cap of $700 for "reasonable" legal costs. " ... Even if you sent your paralegal to Calvert Street by camel, it's not going to take that long."

Goldberg, the spokesman for the ground rent owners coalition, says ground rent holders must be able to justify the amounts whenever questions are raised.

"I spend $500 in legal fees, a title search, a judgment report and postage before I even send a letter [demanding payment of overdue rent]. A lot of people don't like that. ... Then you get to court and there's that additional level of fees, and people don't like that, either," he said.

"I really don't see [that there is] a problem with gouging. People are never happy to pay a lawyer, especially someone else's lawyer. They should have paid in the first place."

'Land of the undead'
In most cases, homeowners who have mortgages and are subject to ground rent have little to worry about; their payments are made by their lenders from escrow accounts.

Problems can begin when the mortgage is paid off, making the property owner responsible for the rent payments, or when a mortgage is sold by the lender or refinanced, particularly if the new lender is unfamiliar with Maryland's ground rent system.

Ground rent owners typically send homeowners a postcard or form letter every six months as a reminder that it is time to pay. Because there is no uniform style for bills, and they might bear unfamiliar return addresses, they can be easily overlooked by homeowners or dismissed as junk mail, especially by newcomers to Maryland who have never heard of ground rent.

Some ground rent owners use post office boxes or corporate names that can't be found in any telephone directory or don't include a phone number to call. Some never send bills, or they send them directly to the property address, rather than the owner's home address.

Paul Anderson, chief legal review officer for the state Department of Assessments and Taxation, says that homeowners who lose track of a ground rent owner can find themselves in the "land of the undead," unable to either pay the rent or take steps to buy it out.

Noel, the former circuit judge, says he presided over cases in which a mortgage was sold and the new lender stopped paying the ground rent -- unbeknownst to the homeowner. "I'm not suggesting it was anything nefarious. They may not have known who to pay the ground rent to," he said. "The new company had collected this sum of money and they didn't know what the hell to do with it."

Mortgage companies acknowledge that it takes extra vigilance to stay on top of ground rents.

"When a Maryland loan comes in, we identify if there's a ground rent," said Bob Smiley, executive vice president of U.S. Bank Home Mortgage in Owensboro, Ky., which services about 8,500 Maryland loans -- about 1,000 with ground rents. "If you don't, it spirals out of control real quickly."

New rents bloom
Lauren Montillo and another Baltimore rehabber, Petar Pecovic of Touch of Class Properties LLC, have found seizures to be sources of inexpensive housing for their rehab businesses. Each has purchased about two dozen properties from the Nochumowitz businesses, property records show.

Montillo says she feels for people such as her tenant Deloris McNeil. "It's pretty bad what they [ground rent holders] are allowed to do," she said. "The average person can't afford it. How can they come up with four grand?"

Pecovic says he thinks the system has outlived its usefulness. "People losing their houses like this, it's terrible," he said. "Their families have worked for years for these houses."

Even so, he sometimes creates new ground rents -- at $240 a year -- on the properties he fixes up and sells.

"The ground rent business is a great business," Pecovic said. "You just have to be ruthless."

The Death Toll

2006-08-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

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.

A Bitter Pill

2006-08-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

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.

A Brief Economic History of Modern Baltimore

2006-08-17T18:28:00.001-07:00

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.

These Slums Brought To You By...

2006-08-17T18:11:00.001-07:00

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.