It might be the biggest cover-up in Baltimore.
And the most unsuccessful.
For decades, the hollow shells of vacant rowhouses have served as the most visible and poignant reminder of city blight, a "Welcome" sign to addicts, dealers and criminals. The 16,400 abandoned buildings mar the landscape, their sagging brick and Formstone walls outnumbering livable and lived-in homes on blocks throughout the city.
Tired residents and overwhelmed city officials - stymied by delayed court hearings, held up by lengthy foreclosure proceedings, frustrated by absent and uncaring owners, hampered by urban scavengers and waylaid by a plodding bureaucracy - have struggled to find innovative ways to make the boarded-up homes look palatable.
The answer: Cover them up.
With artwork of flowers. With different kinds of brick and mortar. With large, taxpayer-funded photos of faux windows and curtains glued over plywood.
But it doesn't fool anyone.
Bill Cunningham owns a vacant rowhouse on Remington Avenue just south of the Johns Hopkins University campus, and he's caught in a years-long battle between Baltimore and federal housing officials over what can be done with a strip of vacant houses on the street.
He pulled up as I walked the block. Someone with a can of paint had decorated the plywood boards, some with flowers; another had drawn pictures of a boy and girl on the second story. At first glance, the scene makes you smile. At least somebody cares to bring some order to the street.
But Cunningham, who mistook me for a government official who had a solution, just shook his head in dismay when I asked him about the art. "It's just another boarded-up building," he told me. "And when you have boarded-up buildings, it's a mess. It doesn't matter what they paint on it, it's not good for the neighborhood." He'd like to see the houses refurbished and sold.
I drove around the city looking at the various methods used to seal vacant houses. On the east side, where Hopkins is redeveloping vast areas, they've torn down block after block of decaying real estate and are busy rebuilding, one real sign of life rising from the rubble.
Other areas still suffer, with homeowners stuck between empty houses, most boarded up in the traditional way: sheets of uniformly cut plywood, secured with screws (making it harder for vagrants and addicts to pry open) and decorated with familiar stenciled words warning that the property is owned by the city and giving a phone number to call if an animal is trapped inside.
