The path to one of the city’s most spectacular views is more than a little unlikely.
Head west past Arundel Elementary/Middle on Veronica Avenue and take a right on Giles Road. From there, a quick left takes you down a short, bumpy road that leads to a methadone clinic and a shuttered mail station. But drive straight, past a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall on your left, and ahead of you is a serene outlook of the Patapsco and Baltimore’s skyline.
American flags affixed to the front of several rowhouses on Latrobe Park Terrace blow gently in the light breeze. The adjacent park on this 85-degree, mid-June afternoon is active – at the dog park, on the playground equipment, around Banner Field. We’re just a few miles from the heart of downtown, but everything about this scene in Locust Point feels suburban.
“We have a retired police officer on my street,” says Will Jovel, the Locust Point Civic Association’s design review chair, “and he said while he was on duty, they called [our neighborhood] ‘Mayberry.’”
Traipsing across the vacant, littered lot at the Southwest corner of Druid Hill Avenue and Baker Street, Anthony Pressley looked ahead proudly to 17 newly constructed homes. In this perpetually struggling West Baltimore neighborhood, those gleaming houses were a substantial victory for Pressley and his colleagues at the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation.
“This is the block where it’s scary to everyone,” Preston Greene says as we walk down the 4700 block of Liberty Heights Avenue, a once-vibrant stretch of Howard Park now marked by cheap carry-outs and a handful of shuttered storefronts. “There was a hardware store there, very small. This door is that of a halfway house – right next to a liquor store. A protected class of citizens. Are you kidding me?”
The houses sit on large, well-manicured lots. The neighborhood’s public elementary/middle school is one of the best in Baltimore City. Downtown is a quick drive down the JFX or a short ride from the Light Rail station. There are parks, a neighborhood swimming pool and a driving range, not to mention quality restaurants and bars, salons and boutiques.
Is there anything Mount Washington doesn’t have?
Pigs were unloaded off trains at the B&O rail yards and herded through nearby streets to the slaughterhouses. That’s the abbreviated version of how Pigtown got its name.
A tree-lined median bisects most of 33rd Street, stretching from the eastern edge of Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus all the way to the southwestern edge of Lake Montebello. To the north of 33rd from Old York Road to Ellerslie is Waverly; to the south is Better Waverly. They are two distinct neighborhoods, separated by that median, but connected by signs announcing entry to Waverly Village.
At its peak, Greektown was home to about 1,000 families. Now it’s around 600. People come and people go, mostly to the county. But the pull of this Southeast Baltimore neighborhood – particularly for Greek-Americans – remains strong.
“They come down to the restaurants, they come down to the little shops,” said Theo Harris, a Greektown resident and prominent local realtor. “Their weddings, their funerals, their baptisms, it’s all happening in the community. That’s really the bond.”
Stone houses from the 1850s sit on lush, spacious lots next to “new” construction built in the 1950s. Neighbors wave to one another on the streets, stopping for conversation with familiar faces and strangers alike. Our tour guide – the village’s unofficial historian – makes his living as a wood-turner.
We have entered Baltimore’s most anachronistic neighborhood. Welcome to Dickeyville.
“You might have heard today that there were three shootings that happened over there on Cold Spring. Part of that stuff is what we’re trying to weed out. That element, as long as drugs continue to rule …”
Julius “Julio” Colon is aware of the perception – and, as noted in the quote above, the reality – of Park Heights. In his role as president and CEO of Park Heights Renaissance, Colon sees evidence of urban blight every day. Vacant buildings throughout the neighborhood. Forty-some liquor stores dotting long stretches of Park Heights Avenue and Reisterstown Road. Significantly higher-than-average rates of teen pregnancy, HIV infection and recidivism among residents.
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