The residents of Baltimore's Seton Hill neighborhood are angry about drug dealers and even angrier when they call police and no one shows up.
"They are doing it in broad daylight," Shannon Doolin of Seton Hill told a bevy of city officials at a meeting this week. "They don't stop. They are very brazen. And when we call 911, we get no response."
The residents of Orchard Mews, a subsidized development that abuts Seton Hill, are angry about drug dealers and even angrier when they call police and someone does show up, fearing they've been marked for retribution. "You know we don't call the police because we live in fear every day," Venessa Baines of Orchard Mews shouted.
Two neighborhoods, side by side, with very different ideas for eradicating a problem they share.
Seton Hill is a tiny enclave of some of the oldest intact rowhouses in the city wedged between Pennsylvania and Druid Hill avenues. It is on the national historic register, and but for crime coming from the newer Orchard Mews development next door, residents say it could be the French Quarter of Baltimore.
The two communities have been at odds for years - Orchard Mews complains that the people of Seton Hill are accusatory and don't reach out; Seton Hill complains that the people of Orchard Mews harbor drug dealers and addicts that have ruined their slice of city life.
They couldn't even agree on whether Orchard Mews has joined or tried to join the Seton Hill Association.
It took last month's shooting of a city police officer making an undercover drug buy and an army of city officials to bring the two communities together. More than 100 people from both sides of Orchard Street packed the old seminary chapel in St. Mary's Park to get answers from public officials, but also to talk to one another.
Here is who showed up: the mayor, the City Council president, a city councilman, the housing commissioner, a police colonel, a police major, a representative from the city's transportation department, Baltimore's field office director from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the executive property manager and the vice president of portfolio management for Community Realty Management, which runs Orchard Mews.
