The corner of East Baltimore's Milton Avenue and Biddle Street has two liquor stores, a convenience store, a church, blowing trash, a police surveillance camera, kids peddling drugs and idle men worn from age and disability catching up with old friends and old times.
Today, it is to have turkeys. Six of them, to be exact. And four hams. And plenty of other food set up on donated tables in front of one of those nondescript corner shops that sells malt liquor in 40-ounce to-go cans and seems to proliferate in impoverished neighborhoods, as common as boarded-up rowhouses and vacant lots.
According to the sign, the store is called "Kay's Liquor and Convenience: Grocery, patent medicine, beer, wine, liquors."
Its owner is anything but typical.
This is Michelle Ha's corner. She already feeds the people who come to the monthly Eastern District Community Relations Council. She puts on a crab feast for the officers and the residents and hangs photos of everyone happily mingling on the wall outside her bullet-resistant glass.
The "stop snitching" campaign stops here.
And today, Ha is having Thanksgiving on the corner. "Somebody has to do something for these people," she says.
Ha has been here for a decade and at another spot on East Preston Street for 10 years before that. She lives above the store and rules the corner with a stern determination and a respectful demeanor.
When she tells young drug dealers to get off her corner, they move. When she calls the police, they come. When a neighbor has a leaky basement, she calls a cop, and the Department of Public Works suddenly appears. When she tells the city's housing department she wants to buy a vacant rowhouse and convert it into a club for older patrons, they promise to make it happen.
She holds court on the street corner as often as she stands behind her counter in a cluttered back room with wooden shelves bending under the weight of vodka, gin and beer, and stocked with everything from chips to cold remedies.
"Hey, shorty," Ha welcomes a customer.
"Number 17," he answers
"You becoming a gambler?" she jokes, handing him a lottery ticket.
The line is steady for a ticket off the corner.
Ha regales another customer with a story about her 10-year-old son, Sean Chang, who just got another trophy for playing golf. She takes out a copy of the local paper in Southern Pines, N.C., which has her son spread over the front page of its sports section.
