Hollins Market-area community activists are asking the city for a 30-day postponement of plans to raze five crumbling alley houses to give them a chance to develop a plan to save them.
Some preservationists and others have called for the restoration of the red-brick houses in the 900 block of Lemmon St., saying they were part of a patch of dwellings built for Irish immigrant railroad workers before the Civil War.
The houses, they say, are testimony to the Irish labor that helped build Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, making Baltimore a major player in the nation's development.
"These are historically significant houses," said Mary Ellen Hayward, a preservationist charged with documenting Baltimore's 3,000 to 6,000 alley houses before they are lost to history. Many alley houses are among the 1,000 abandoned and neglected houses to be razed by the city this year.
City Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III said he would be willing to talk to people interested in saving the houses. However, he noted that Southwest Visions Inc., a neighborhood-based, nonprofit developer, had requested the demolition because of safety concerns.
Henson said demolition is to take place this summer, but no date has been set.
Vacant and abandoned
For years, the privately owned houses have sat vacant and abandoned, their back walls bowed or collapsed, some interiors exposed to the elements.
Drug addicts shoot up and children play there, say disgusted neighbors who want the buildings demolished immediately.
"We can't get rid of the mice in our houses because they keep coming from that filth over there," said neighbor Betty Hickson.
In the 1980s, federal money was allocated to repair some of the homes, but that money apparently was switched to other projects, said Micha Dannenberg, vice president of Hollins Market Neighborhood Association, which voted for the 30-day postponement Monday night and is seeking funding to help save the houses.
The houses are located in the Roundhouse neighborhood.
Contributing to preservation
Thomas Ward, a retired Baltimore Circuit Court judge who owns a rental property in the block, says he has long lamented the deterioration of the residences and is interested in contributing to their preservation.
"You have the world's oldest passenger railroad station [the circa 1830 Mount Clare Station] still standing there Then you have the places where the laborers lived. This has historic value for the world," Ward said.
