Baltimore is famously known as a city of neighborhoods, one that sometimes seems more like a loose confederacy of independent nation-states. But the ties within those neighborhoods bind: Our loyalty to the block, and the city’s limited ability to chip in, mean that transformative change is often driven on the street level. One person can still make a difference here.

That’s the thinking that inspired the profiles in this issue. We went searching for neighborhood heroes—people fighting for and inspiring change in parts of town that needed it. What follows is a small selection from the flurry of nominations we received from nonprofits and community organizations around town. We put these individuals forward with the understanding that none of them act alone; they simply provide the spark. Perhaps their stories will incite you to act as well.

Starting next month and throughout the coming year, we’ll continue to profile these transformational figures in every issue of Urbanite. We welcome your suggestions. Send nominations to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com.



The Rehabbers


Bill and Anne Clewell of Greenmount West | photo by La Kaye Mbah

Three years ago, when mathematician Bill Clewell left his tenured professorship at the University of Baltimore to become a full-time home renovator, many of his colleagues wondered if he was making a miscalculation. At 60, even he admitted he might only have another five years of hammering and dry-walling left in him. But Clewell was not new to construction. He’d built his own vacation home. He and his wife, Anne, had renovated several homes in the city. And this son of a Lutheran minister was on a mission: to make one small part of Baltimore safer and more prosperous. So he and Anne started looking for properties to renovate.

In December 2004 they bought three adjacent houses and worked with a friend to buy a fourth, all on the even side of the 1800 block of Barclay Street in Greenmount West. Three of the four properties were in terrible shape. Floor joists had rotted and buckled, crashing into ceilings below. Clewell and his crew had to rebuild from the basement up, navigating a maze of city permits and regulations as they went.

The surrounding neighborhood had also seen better days. When a police officer drove through the open-air drug market that convened in the small park immediately behind one of his homes, Clewell chased down the car and asked the officer why she hadn’t done anything about the drug activity. “Don’t you know the neighborhood you bought into?” she asked.

But the Clewells were undeterred. In December 2006, they sold 1810 Barclay to a pair of artists who finished the renovations themselves; 1816 is occupied, and 1818 Barclay is finished and up for sale. Along the way the Clewells bought two more houses on the block.  With nearly $400,000 invested, the couple has either bought or renovated seven of the twelve homes on their side of the street and hopes to sell each of the remaining three to families who will help stabilize the area.

“Money has not driven us at all,” Anne says. “The most important thing is to rebuild this block.”

—Lionel Foster



The Neighborhood Activist


Donald Gresham of East Baltimore | Photo by La Kaye Mbah


It was Baltimore’s poster child for urban destitution, cheek-by-jowl with one of the most renowned medical institutions in the world. By 2001, decades of disinvestment, poverty, and crime meant that thousands of East Baltimore residents in the neighborhoods surrounding Johns Hopkins Hospital struggled at or below the poverty line, often on blocks where nearly every other house was abandoned. The sheer scale of decay, it seemed, provided the perfect opportunity to start over, to redraw sections of East Baltimore from scratch—which is essentially what East Baltimore Development Incorporated (EBDI), the quasi-governmental corporation vested with power to transform eighty-eight acres into a $1.8 billion biotechnology park and new worker housing, proposed.

“I didn’t know anything about the plans,” recalls area resident Donald Gresham. But when he learned about them a few years into the planning proces, he says, “I was mad.” Gresham is president of Save Middle East Action Committee, or SMEAC, an organization founded in 2001 to advocate for residents within the redevelopment area. Since its inception, SMEAC has been the voice of a community almost left for dead. The group successfully pushed for demolition practices that kept dust and debris off the sidewalks and out of people’s lungs, earned two seats for area residents on EBDI’s board, and, round after round, negotiated relocation compensation packages for residents. To date, 437 families have been relocated, with buyouts averaging $160,000, although most of the houses were worth less than $30,000. EBDI has also provided assistance in finding new homes for residents and helped acquire the credit needed to buy them.

While SMEAC has held rallies and marches denouncing EBDI’s handling of the largest neighborhood redevelopment project in Baltimore’s history, Gresham does not see himself and his fellow volunteers as obstructionists. “We’re fighting not the project,” he explains, “but its effects on the rest of our lives.” Now in his second term as president, Gresham says SMEAC is a model for disadvantaged communities worldwide that are being pushed aside to make way for economic progress. His message is radical for its simplicity: “When [developers] go into a community, the community should be first.”

—L.F.




The Fixer


Richard Anderson of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay | photo by La Kaye Mbah


Richard Anderson started fixing vehicles for Baltimore Gas and Electric in 1971. Today, he’s one of the overseers of the company fleet, but he still tinkers with his pickup truck and a Triumph Spitfire he bought twenty years ago as a hobby. “As a mechanic, your job is to take something that is broken or designed poorly and make it work as it should or better,” he says. “That seems to be my lot in life.”

Since 2001, Anderson’s biggest fix-it project has been his South Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn and neighboring Curtis Bay. As board president of the nonprofit Brooklyn and Curtis Bay Coalition, Anderson has been a driving force behind rehabbing the old Polish Home Hall on Fairhaven Avenue, once a thriving gathering spot back when the shipyard, dry dock, and chemical companies kept locals at work. The coalition is in the process of building a block of environmentally friendly, affordable worker homes, and creating an environmental education center in a pocket of waterfront that was cleaned up to mitigate a nearby dredge spoils dump.

The group has also set out to revive Brooklyn’s moribund commercial center, where, not so long ago, people lined up for blocks on Friday nights to get into Gunning’s Crab House on Hanover Street. Gunning’s closed a few years back, but the Charm City Bowl duckpin lanes are still open, and a few new businesses, including a green building outfit, have set up shop. Anderson envisions Brooklyn again becoming a destination for people from across the Patapsco who will come to partake of eateries and produce stands, fish off the nearby bridges, and attend the annual Lead Sled Festival, a classic car show he started in 2005.

Asked why he sticks with it, Anderson recalls a scene from the 1989 TV miniseries Lonesome Dove, in which Robert Duvall, playing a Texas Ranger, is talking to a young prostitute who has dreams of leaving her hometown for California. “Life in California is still just life,” Duvall says. Adds Anderson, “I don’t think there’s anywhere that’s utopia. It’s what you make of it.”

—Greg Hanscom



The Community Organizer


Mark Washington of Coldstream Homestead Montebello | Photo by La Kaye Mbah


Mark Washington grew up on the streets of East Baltimore. “There were a lot of misspent days of a wasted youth,” he says. He was lucky to stay out of jail. A knack for sales and a little good luck led him into a legitimate career as a stockbroker, however, and when he eventually returned to the streets, it was “to help undo some of the problems I perhaps helped create.” Today he is executive director of the Coldstream Homestead Montebello Community Corporation, affectionately known as “CHUM.”

Washington is often seen patrolling his blighted eastside community in his white Lexus, wearing a well-worn hoodie and a backwards O’s cap, honking and hollering hellos—and enlisting residents to help clean up trash. He started five years ago in an illegal dumping ground behind the 1700 block of Montpelier Street. After a frustrating meeting with city officials, who (not for the first time) promised to help, Washington called a friend who owns a construction company. Armed with a bulldozer, a group of volunteers tore into the mounds of garbage, tires, and abandoned cars. Within a week, the city had prodded the property owner to finish the job.

Since then, Washington and his organization have created safe routes for kids walking to school, shuttered corner stores that harbored drug dealers, and, working closely with the police, driven gangs out of the parks and streets. They’ve cleaned up an outbuilding on the campus of Baltimore City College high school and turned it into offices, meeting rooms, and a recreation center and computer lab for local kids. And they’ve sponsored sports events and movie nights in nearby Clifton Park—not a place you would otherwise want to be caught after dark. The group is now working with philanthropists and developers to rehab abandoned houses and resurrect the local real estate market.

Washington’s first challenge, he says, was to “create a brand for CHUM as a self-reliant, can-do community.” Now he’s trying to use that brand to entice people back to a part of the city that has been left behind.

—G.H.



The Super-Mom


Nargas Hyman of Park Heights | Photo by La Kaye Mbah

There’s always that one house in the neighborhood, the one where all the kids seem to hang out after school. On Queensberry Avenue in Park Heights, just a furlong from Pimlico Race Course, that place was the neat brick-front rowhouse of Nargas Hyman’s grandmother. Hyman’s oldest son, Frank, would meet his friends there—sometimes twenty or thirty of them—to shoot hoops in the backyard, eat hot dogs, and play Nintendo. Hyman, a single mom and a registered nurse, liked that she could keep an eye on them there, but it bothered her that they weren’t doing their homework. “Next time you come,” she told the kids one evening, “bring your books.”

That was fifteen years ago, and Hyman’s ad-hoc basement homework center is now a nonprofit program called B-SPIRIT- A2Y, which stands for (deep breath) Brothers and Sisters Providing Information Relevant to Inspire and Motivate the African American Youth. In 2007, it moved around the corner to a scruffy, second-floor room on Belvedere Avenue that includes a bank of donated computers, a well-thumbed library of math and science books, and homemade posters explaining medical terminology (several B-SPIRIT grads have gone on to jobs in health care, including Frank, now 25 and working at nearby Sinai Hospital). Three evenings a week, Hyman drills neighborhood kids (including her younger son, Jamal, 12) on math, science, history, and health with the help of a half-dozen young adult mentors—themselves alumni of the program. Perhaps most importantly, the kids, ages 7 through 18, get a safe harbor in a neighborhood buffeted by crime and poverty.

The program, run entirely out of Hyman’s pocket until 2005, is now partially supported by grants from the Abell Foundation and the Family League of Baltimore. But there’s not enough funding for food, for the restaurant trips or roller-skating nights that Hyman organizes to reward kids for good attendance, or even for a sign for their new building, where she dreams of opening a jobs and resources center for adults in the vacant first floor. “There’s so much more we could be doing,” says Hyman. “It’s not just about the kids; it’s about the families.”

—David Dudley


Share your thoughts at www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.





EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT