Residents not even safe playing boccie ball

THE BOCCIE court in Burdick Park in Northeast Baltimore is special -- home to the city's top Italian-American bowlers (they've bested boccie teams from Little Italy in tournament play in recent years) and a great good gathering place for anyone seeking signs of life in the city.

At a time when fraternal organizations (and bowling leagues) have been in decline, in the age of home entertainment and the Internet, as people become increasingly isolated in the suburbs and exurbs, as some Baltimore neighborhoods suffer wholesale abandonment, the regular meeting of friends in a city park is a sign of hope. The presence of the boccie players, middle-aged and elderly men arguing points under the tall trees in Burdick Park, is good for Hamilton, for all of Northeast Baltimore.

You go there, you see that -- people having fun, talking, taking care of their park -- and suddenly Baltimore is no longer the purported hellhole being forsaken at the rate of 1,000 residents a month. You feel the same when you see the summer crowds at the gorgeous swimming pool in Druid Hill Park, or people bunched up and gabbing on the sidewalk after a church service in East Baltimore, or the chess games in War Memorial Plaza, or the nightly boccie games at the courts in Little Italy.

What can I say? Like a lot of people, I get tired of the drumbeat of bad about Baltimore -- so I listen for positive rhythms and I look for signs of life, anywhere I can get them, in any form.

Virgilio Guglielmi and other Burdick Park boccie players assumed responsibility for the court a few years ago, a kind of paisano privatization. They gave the court a new surface. They groomed it, regularly and perfectly, so the boccie balls rolled true. They gathered Sunday afternoons for weekly games. Lights were installed so they could play weeknights during the summer. They pitched in to help the city with park maintenance. They raked leaves. They painted over the graffiti on the restroom walls. That's what Baltimore's neighborhoods need, of course -- people out of their houses, away from their televisions and computers, meeting their neighbors, bringing life to the streets and parks. Burdick Park has always been a neat place -- swings and a sandlot for kids, a baseball field, tennis courts, horseshoe pits. The boccie players make the people of Hamilton feel all the better about it.

Now, the bad news.

The Burdick Park boccie players were robbed.

At gunpoint.