Whispers Of Resurgent Gangs In Pen Lucy

Baltimore police maintain there is no gang resurgence, that retired members are making news on their own and not as part of an organized criminal enterprise on the streets of Pen Lucy. The stabbing on Tunbridge, they said, was an isolated dispute and not, despite the charging document's wording, a new chapter in an old war story.

"There are young ones out there who are trying very hard to use the old names," Nowlin said. "There is a gang problem, but it's nowhere near what it used to be. Their attempts to become as strong as they used to be are being thwarted."

The violence might have ebbed, but the Old York Road thoroughfare remains forlorn and desolate. Only two shops are open on the street that winds through Pen Lucy - a corner liquor shop and a dry cleaner with a front desk behind bullet-resistant glass. Across the street, in a rowhouse-size lot, there is a memorial garden built last year with the help of the cable network HGTV.

Some fought the garden, arguing the community shouldn't memorialize people lost to gunfire attributed to drug and turf battles that turned this neighborhood into another of the city's killing fields.

The names of Pen Lucy's dead are on a plaque in the garden's center, in raised letters; street names and street slang are omitted, but with the innocent and the players listed side by side. Just the names, such as Clifton Turner and Antwan Palmer. Unstated is that the former was a Morgan State student killed in crossfire as he walked to school in 1997, and the latter was the target of the 1992 gun battle on Old York Road.

It's possible the gangs are gone.

But the memories are still fresh.