By: Lionel Foster

Parts of Baltimore are changing radically and quickly. At first glance, the change seems good. Blocks that, for decades, had more boarded windows than residents are being renovated. Property values are rising. New buildings are going up. Many welcome such developments as long overdue. But as someone who was born into a neighborhood’s downswing and asked to move for the sake of progress, I have reservations. Several years after sitting by and watching the buildings in my neighborhood razed to make room for Johns Hopkins’ new biotechnology park, I ask myself, “How do we know what’s worth saving, and can we ever take full stock of those losses in advance?”

Midway through my junior year at Johns Hopkins University, I flew home from a semester in Italy and arrived on the steps of my grandmother’s house in East Baltimore. Granny, as we called her, had been living in the brick rowhouse at 1034 North Wolfe Street for thirteen years. Just a few blocks from my part-time job at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the free intercampus shuttle, it would be a good place to stay while I finished my degree.

This part of East Baltimore wasn’t new to me. All of Granny’s children and the oldest of their children had grown up east of Charles Street. During the holidays, five generations of the Wilsons happily crammed into the ten-foot-wide home. Just as the house became jam-packed with each new entrant, so too did we jam-pack our wild family stories with hyperbole. If you’d simply been part of the supporting cast in the millionth telling of “That Day at the Beach, 1984” before you walked in, by the time you hugged and kissed your way through the living room, you were the hapless 6-year-old protagonist in a cautionary tale about scheming uncles who made you cry as they coaxed you into the roaring surf. We told stories like this at Granny’s throughout the night, with her small house providing the perfect backdrop; several times a year it put each of us at the center of a loving little universe.

But every other day there was a struggle. The two years I lived with Granny, the house was crowded—myself, a cousin, and my great-grandmother also lived there. The ceilings were low, the rooms small, and the design poor. There was no central air and few windows to support portable, plug-in units, so it was no surprise to open the paper on a summer morning and discover that an elderly person who died of heat stroke the day before lived nearby. It happened all the time, and none of us who lived there was surprised. The backyard was cooler than the interior and quieter than our street-side stoop, but the alley it faced had been used as a dumping ground for so long that the stench wasn’t always worth the trouble. Dead cats lay rotting in the sun, and it wasn’t unusual to see the rats that might have killed them running back and forth. Yes, the rats killed the cats, which may be why the mice stayed inside.

On those days when the heat was too great indoors and the smell too intense in the alley, you settled yourself on the front stoop. Here, you witnessed another kind of struggle, less Wild Kingdom than How the West Was Won. East Baltimore had too many problems to name, but the drug trade was its most visible. Just one block from Granny’s was an open-air drug market—dealers blasting music and trading bags around the clock. The dealers and their customers didn’t seem to sleep, and the police didn’t seem to care.


I somehow managed to remain a reluctant albeit fascinated observer for years until the violence touched me. On May 16, 2001, just two nights after successfully completing my last exam of the year, I was robbed at gunpoint. I had spent the evening playing basketball at the Homewood gym before catching the last JHU shuttle home around 11 p.m. The only thing that could make the night even better, I thought, would be an hour of SportsCenter over a pint of greasy Chinese food. The carryout was two blocks away. Two blocks more, and I’d be home. Exams were over. My game had been good. That night’s NBA highlights would be even better. I was a happy man.

“$5.63,” the cashier said, handing me my paper bag of shrimp-fried rice.

Too happy to think about what I was doing, I pulled out my very plump wallet—full of club cards and IDs, but very little money—and handed over six dollars. Ten steps out the door and I was jumped by two young men who had been waiting on an upcoming order. One forced me to the ground. The thin one held a gun while his partner rifled through my pockets. I braced myself for the obligatory kick to the ribs I’d always seen on TV—the one that comes whether or not the victim resists.

It never came.

The gun was never discharged.

“Stay down and count to ten or we’ll kill you!” they demanded—then took off running down the street.

I counted to twenty.

And, somehow, I was still alive.

When I got home, I immediately called the police, who showed up in fifteen minutes. (Not bad for that part of Baltimore.) The officer said I was lucky to be alive, but then chastised me. “You know better than to pull out a wallet in a dive like that, right?” he scoldedI did.

He told me that was stupid.

I had to agree.

The police officer left. I cancelled a few credit cards, ate my Chinese food, watched TV, and tried not to think about it.

The truly frightening part came the following afternoon. I suddenly realized that the men who’d done this to me lived nearby. As I thought back through the events leading up to the robbery, I remembered that one of my assailants had called the carryout owner by name. And of course, they had both obviously walked from their house to the take-out. This was not a destination spot; people ate there because it was convenient. This meant that I would see the men who had robbed me again soon. And that they probably knew exactly where I lived.

I thought about buying a gun. I casually priced one through a friend who said he could put me in touch with someone he knew who could sell me one for around $150. I kept thinking that this would happen again, that I’d be robbed—and that I’d have protection this time around. Still, as I played out the scenario in my mind, I realized that if I actually had a gun, and fired a gun, things could get really ugly. I dropped the gun idea.

Then, a month later, I saw my attackers. They were sitting on a stoop—their stoop, it appeared—just fifty yards from my front door around a corner I’d never had any reason to turn. They also saw me, and took off. I called the police and cited my incident number, but since the men had disappeared they said there was nothing they could do. I wasn’t a detective, and, apparently, neither were they.


That was six years ago. I lived with my grandmother for one more year after the robbery, but we never talked about it. Not me and my grandmother, not my relatives, not at any of the family gatherings where our family stories were replayed over and over. This was not one of the tales we discussed. Somehow, if we never talked about the fact that I’d been robbed at gunpoint by a few of my neighbors, it was possible to pretend—for all of us—that it had never happened. If we didn’t mention it, the fact that our lives were in danger in this neighborhood would stop being true.

Being robbed on my own street made me happy to hear in 2001 that Hopkins intended to raze seventeen blocks of this neighborhood, Granny’s house included. By this time, my grandmother’s health was poor. Between arthritis and diabetes she could barely get up and down the stairs. I knew that selling the place might help her afford more of the amenities she needed, like a disability-friendly bathroom, a single-level floor plan, and the type of open green yard she hadn’t enjoyed since childhood. She wasn’t alone in her aspirations, either. I think each member of our family saw this as a reason to move on: I was off to London for two years, my cousin bought a house, my great-grandmother moved into nicer quarters alongside Granny.

So, in spring 2002, when representatives from East Baltimore Development, Inc. (EBDI) came knocking on Granny’s door with an offer to buy her house for $44,743, we understood her decision to go.

Still, not everyone was comfortable with Hopkins’ plan to level an entire neighborhood to make way for a biotech park. “It makes you angry,” neighborhood resident Bill Foster (no relation) told City Paper in November 2003.  “You actually feel a sense of helplessness. You don’t know what to do. If you go downtown [to talk to the City’s leadership], you’re scared to deal with them because they feel it’s for the betterment of the city.” My university’s leadership made things even worse. President William Brody referred to my neighborhood as “the most blighted in Baltimore, if not in the country” and told a national gathering of his colleagues, “When people get negative, I tell them this area is so bad that the only alternative is calling in the National Guard and declaring martial law.” He alluded to tanks and soldiers in a way that made it clear this was never about saving a community. This was about getting a community out of the way.
 

Two years after she moved to a house just inside of the city-county line, my grandmother died. In her time there she enjoyed the front yard she’d always wanted and a bit more room to stretch her legs before she passed.

I thought about her when I came back to Baltimore for good in 2005.I would drive by this house we’d shared, feeling both horrified and vindicated whenever I saw how empty the surrounding streets were. EBDI had already bought up most of the houses. Most of the residents had moved on. The houses were still standing but the streets were utterly silent. No buses squealing to a halt. No old women fanning themselves on the stoops. No kids playing on the sidewalks. No dealers squabbling. Just silence. It looked like everyone had decided to remain quietly indoors despite the heat—a scene I had never before witnessed. Then, some time late last year, I drove by and saw that everything was gone. Just like that. Not a house, not a store, not a bar stood. There wasn’t even any rubble to gawk at or trip over. It was like driving off the edge of a map.

Just like the mugging, I never saw it coming. I couldn’t visualize the scale of the devastation, because somehow, even after the announcement and the evacuations and the bollards on the sidewalks, I wasn’t fully convinced it was possible to destroy an entire neighborhood. Conflicted, I stare at the devastation each time I pass by and wonder, how can a bulldozer do in minutes what decades of poverty and neglect never quite managed?

—Lionel Foster is Urbanite’s community coordinator.

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