Risk and Reward

Tom Boram ("What You're Saying," September) looks at the ad for Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse's Village Lofts project on Saint Paul Street and sees "corporate greed manifest." I see a company investing in the city, even though putting the same amount of money into a similar project in the suburbs would be a safer bet, and more profitable. Where Boram sees a "monstrous mid-rise," I see a fi ve-story building with an interesting rhythm of bay windows and balconies and a fifth floor set back like a mansard roof on a Parisian row, framing Saint Paul Street very nicely. Where he sees a project that will somehow make the neighborhood unaffordable for businesses like Video Americain, I see hundreds of new customers who want precisely what Video Americain has to offer, offsetting any rent increases. He sees the project "replac[ing] beautiful, classic Baltimore architecture," but I've seen hundreds of similar homes on dozens of streets in Baltimore waiting for Boram's "creative indies that love the city (read: Baltimoreans)" to buy and renovate them.

But does it have to be Baltimoreans? Recently, I read in Baltimore magazine about two creative, independent men who (like Enoch Pratt and George Peabody) moved to Baltimore from New England. They bought a rowhouse in a neighborhood that had been threatened with demolition to make room for a highway and so had suffered much neglect. They borrowed $10,000 from their mother and invested a lot of "sweat equity" to fi x up the house. Once they'd finished, they looked at each other and wondered if they'd made a huge mistake. Federal Hill in 1974 was still a neighborhood in transition, its direction very uncertain, and the Inner Harbor was just a brick promenade. Still, they pressed on, took on two partners, and moved on to ever-larger projects, like an old cannery on Boston Street with toxic waste problems. Other developers wanted to level it, scrub the site, and build high rises or an enclosed mall. These four—and the similarly creative, independent people whom they'd hired—liked the scale and architecture of the place and turned it into The Can Company, a beautiful project that respects the scale and history of its neighborhood and makes it more livable by providing amenities that residents need and want. At the same time, their efforts improved the tax base for the city. In what universe is this a bad thing?

Like Tom Boram, I don't know either of the brothers Struever (those two New Englanders mentioned above), or Eccles, or Rouse personally. Most of what I know about them I've read in the papers. No doubt, being human, these men have their failings. However, to write—against all evidence—that greed and an indifference to "preserving the real Baltimore" are among those failings is ridiculous.

—Jamie Hunt is a senior writer for Dartmouth College. He lives in Grantham, New Hampshire.


Turning Point Essay: Wolf Outside my Door

There is a blues song called "Good Day for the Blues" that contains the line, "Got up early one morning so I could walk the floor / I got to hit the street 'cuz there's a wolf outside my door." Besides singing along with the tune on my father's stereo, I'd never caught a glimpse of what that wolf looked like—not until my summer job at an employment agency when I was a college student relishing independence in my hometown of Washington, D.C.

The agency had one large industrial contract with the Washington Navy Yard. Every Friday, workers streamed in to the agency's plush offi ce to pick up their checks. On one payday, the men came in to find that they had not been paid for the hours they'd worked. Others received no check at all because of missing time sheets. People piled in, and we reached a crisis point.

More than fifty angry men had jammed themselves into the offi ce. There were just three office workers then including me, all of us women. Some of the workers stood at the front desk where I was stationed and demanded their money. Rents were overdue. Refrigerators were going empty. Car repairs were imminent. Borrowed money was owed. Child support payments were in arrears. Each man had a desperate story—each man had a wolf outside his door.

I felt that one man's piercing eyes might burn right through me as he recounted how he'd been evicted and forced into a shelter the previous month. He needed his check (the one that wasn't there) to get out of the hellhole he described to me.

Another man was so outraged he began circling the coffee table, saying that he was going to come back and set the place on fi re. The rest of the group gathered in small circles, shaking their heads and commiserating about working at a job that wasn't worth their trouble—a job that garnered them no respect and subjected them to constant humiliation and headache. But it was a job they needed. And that was what made the red veins in their eyes burn so fiercely.

The scene simmered just below nuclear meltdown for nearly four hours. Finally, a call came down from the agency's ivory tower notifying us that corrected checks were on the way by courier. When I announced that the checks were coming soon, the tension in the air couldn't be shattered with a sledgehammer. Everyone stood in angry silence, riding out the storm.

The checks did come, eventually. But not before I saw what powerlessness looks like in a husband or father's eyes. Not before I understood that people go to war everyday for themselves and their families. There have been times since my college days that my husband and I have stood watch for the wolf outside our own door, but just like those men I remember, we rise as gladiators everyday, ready for battle, ready to circle the wagons.

—Morowa Yejidé is a freelance writer who lives in the Westgate area of Baltimore City.