By: Holden Warren

Sometimes change starts with a hot cup of coffee

photography by Holden Warren


“I was once the drug dealer, the bad guy. I was making sure that I was the only one serving on the block,” says Gerry Palmer, owner of the Sandtown coffee shop Gerry’s Goods. “But I guess God had a plan to cut me off. All that came to a halt. Somehow he pulled me back, and now I’m serving another way. Every day I walk out that door, it’s not just coming here just to open up a store. It’s like this is what I have to do.”


On a bright summer morning, business is brisk at Gerry’s Goods, a coffee shop in the West Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown. A couple of middle-aged women order iced mochas. Three stoic young men buy muffins and AriZona iced tea. A young kid grabs bags of Munchos and Funyuns for his buddies from the shelves of snacks in the back of the store. With a stainless steel coffee grinder on the counter and a menu on the wall behind the baristas listing espressos, doppios, and Americanos, the sunny space looks a lot like any other coffee shop. But for proprietor Gerry Palmer and his business partner, Antoine Bennett, in this neighborhood, on this corner, it is much more than that.

Depending on who you talk to, Sandtown is either one of Baltimore’s greatest success stories or its most heartbreaking failure. In the 1990s, the neighborhood was the city’s poster child for urban renewal. With the enthusiastic support of Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and more than $60 million in public and private dollars—much of it from developer- philanthropist James Rouse—the Enterprise Foundation, Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, and other organizations constructed close to a thousand new homes here. New Song Urban Ministries, a Christian nonprofit that is Sandtown’s largest and most active community-based organization, opened a new school for neighborhood kids in1991. But while the effort increased homeownership and improved education for neighborhood children, the redeveloped portions of Sandtown today remain an island in a sea of blight. Crime is still rampant, and the drug trade rules many streets. Most of the stores here—and there are only a handful—are run by outsiders who barricade themselves behind bulletproof Plexiglas.



“A few years ago, this corner was not a place you could sit and drink coffee,” says Antoine Bennett (above), rattling off a list of those killed or wounded in an ongoing street battle between rival cliques. Crime is still a part of life in the neighborhood, and unmarked police cars frequently prowl the streets. But since Gerry’s Goods opened, Bennett says, “knock on wood and thank God, we haven’t had any major issues with theft or robbery or anything like that. I feel like we are loved and protected by the people who live near our shop.”






Palmer and Bennett know their community’s troubles well. On June 6, 1989, on the corner where Gerry’s Goods now stands, Bennett, then 18, shot a man who threatened his friends. Bennett was a founding member of the CBS gang, named for the streets that made up the intersection its members vowed to defend: Calhoun, Baker, and Stricker. “I was the enforcer, quick to fight and stand up for my clique,” he says. A judge found him guilty of assault with intent to murder and sentenced him to ten years in prison. He was released after three years and five months.

Palmer once controlled the drug game on this block. He started hustling at the age of 18, to provide for himself and his two younger sisters. His father was dead of a drug overdose and his mother incarcerated. It was the early 1980s, and the crack cocaine epidemic was spreading through the streets of Baltimore.

For both men, transformation came hard. Bennett says it was prison that changed him. He earned his GED behind bars, and upon his release, he enrolled in a program that taught construction skills, later teaching others. Today, he is the co-director of New Song Urban Ministries, which acts as the umbrella for a job development and placement program called Eden Jobs, as well as Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, New Song Academy, and a substance abuse transitional facility called Martha’s Place (see Urbanite, July ’08). In March, Bennett received the Champion of Hope Award from YouthBuild USA, presented by Martin Luther King III.

For Palmer, the turning point came in his 20s, when the drug game became more violent and people he knew started dying. His wife laid down an ultimatum: Either me or the streets. Palmer chose the girl, moved across town to East Baltimore, and got a job at a Safeway outside the city. “Do you have any idea what that was like, to go from running a corner to being the night porter, the low man, at a enormous supermarket where I was the only black person?” he asks. But he stuck with it. “After six years, some [of the other employees] still might not have liked me, but they all respected me.”

Today, Palmer is divorced and lives in a Habitat house down the street from Gerry’s Goods, which opened last New Year’s Eve. He got a crash course in coffee shop management from friends of New Song founder Allan Tibbels and a brief stint serving coffee at Starbucks. New Song spent $275,000 to remodel the building and is providing two years of technical assistance, including a full-time business advisor during the first seven months.


“I’ve had pigeons all my life. I think if I didn’t have them, I probably would have been on the streets earlier … selling drugs,” Palmer says. He claps to make the birds fly higher and whistles when it’s time for them to return to their backyard coop to feed. “I don’t know what I would do without ’em. You know, coming home from a hard day’s work, and couldn’t really get a grip on things, and then I come home to them. It’s just family, you know?”


While the business is not expected to turn a profit for nearly three years, Palmer says he wants to offer up not just steaming cups of coffee, but also inspiration. “My role is as a leader,” he says. “Hopefully one of the young guys here might look up to me and want to do the same thing in their community.”

Sandtown Habitat for Humanity also opened a ReStore last year, which sells donated building materials. In the future, with the right combination of time, resources, and people, New Song plans to incubate more businesses in its five other corner properties. It is this patient, methodical, and homegrown approach to redevelopment that distinguishes the current redevelopment efforts from those of previous decades, says Bennett’s co-director at New Song, Patty Prasada-Rao. “Jim Rouse thought when he came here [in the 1990s] that in ten years, this neighborhood would be turned around,” she says. “But it’s going to take at least a thirty-year commitment.”

“This is our community. This is what we do,” says Palmer. “When the sun go down and the people come out, we still here. You know? This is our community.”

—Urbanite Senior Editor Greg Hanscom and Marc Steiner Show producer Justin Levy contributed to this report.

Gerry's Goods is located at 1500 Presstman Street, at the intersection of Presstman and Stricker streets; the shop's phone number is 443-759-4253.



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