Lawrence bought his first baseball bat recently, but for all the wrong reasons.
The 76-year-old Pigtown resident keeps the Louisville Slugger beside his front door to ward off intruders.
"Half my neighbors have been robbed," says Lawrence, whlives four blocks from Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
He waggles the bat with wrinkled hands. "I'm not too old to swing this thing."
There's big trouble in Pigtown, a small neighborhood of 6,250 that anchors the southern gateway to the city and is surrounded by tourist attractions. From I-395, Pigtown appears as a blur of tightly knit row homes between the dome of the B&O Museum and the stadium.
Community leaders say that an epidemic of crime is helping to fracture this blue-collar, racially integrated district already stressed by economic ills.
If the stadium symbolizes the New Baltimore, then Pigtown, where pigs once were herded through the streets on the way to slaughter, represents the working-class past.
Here, baseball bats have little to do with fun and games; they're a low-cost means of home defense -- or a tool for robbery or burglary.
Complaining that tourists have more political clout than they do, residents say they want better policing. They wonder if City Hall has forgotten them while providing first-class protection at the stadium, the Inner Harbor and other tourist attractions.
The Police Department acknowledges Pigtown's crime prob
lem but says there is no double standard for policing. Downtown "has to be protected but that doesn't mean we ignore Pigtown," says Capt. Howard Parrott of Southern District. "We do the best we can with the numbers [of officers] we have."
The criminals, mostly young addicts desperate for money, will steal from anybody or anyplace -- even the dead and the local Roman Catholic church.
Not even a policeman's family feels safe. A Baltimore County officer moved out after threats from drug traffickers.
Residents and business owners go to extraordinary lengths to protect themselves: pistols, shotguns, dogs, steel bars, videocams, bats.
A house is burglarized perhaps every other day in Pigtown, police say. Last fall, thieves were nabbed in the home of a Carroll Street resident who had been dead in his house for several days.
Some days, automobiles are ransacked, or stolen, as often as one per hour, police say, especially during Oriole games when some fans park free on neighborhood streets.
