Armistead

The promoter of last year's Starscape Festival says a new event he's marketing that targets a similar audience won't have the safety problems associated with last year's June concert. Promoter Evan Weinstein says he wants to disassociate the new Moonrise Festival from the issues of Starscape last year. City officials said Starscape, the long-running electronic dance event at Fort Armistead Park, could not return because of issues at last year's concert, including overcrowding and drug overdoses.

Some places just can't get a break. Here are the people of Armistead Gardens in East Baltimore, striving to eke out an existence in a neighborhood hemmed in by highways, heavy industry and a city incinerator.The neighborhood is a stone's throw from a decrepit stretch of Pulaski Highway, pimpled and pockmarked by no-tell motels and seedy, windowless bars. A body gets carried out of one of the establishments every so often. Prostitutes -- females dressed as females or, occasionally, males dressed as females, according to police -- saunter up and down the highway; in a reverse tug-of-war, city officers push the hookers north and county vice detectives repel them south again.

Here's the scene on a hot Wednesday afternoon at the end of the wooden pier at Baltimore's Fort Armistead Park: A newly arrived immigrant from Vietnam struggled to reel in a 2-pound catfish from the murky depths of the Patapsco River. A black man from West Baltimore put a net in the water to capture the writhing fish. A white man from Arbutus grabbed the line and hauled it in. Then all three men - from two generations and three cultures and races - stood over the pail and admired the biggest catch of the day. Less than an hour earlier, a city judge had denied bail to a white man who police said came to this park early Tuesday and attacked a 76-year-old black fisherman while yelling racial slurs.

Close to one o'clock every morning, a man on Federal Street performs an unusual task. He deposits eggs outdoors for his friendly neighborhood fox.Paul M. Watson, 69, lives in the Armistead Gardens section of eastern Baltimore. His street dead-ends at Herring Run Park, a natural stream valley greensward that curves through several highly populated city neighborhoods."I can say this about the foxes, I haven't seen any rats around here. And you'll never see a rabbit," says Watson, who retired a few years ago as an Amtrak baggage handler.

As thousands of late-night revelers partied to thumping electronic dance music in the graffiti-marked remains of an old fort in Baltimore last month, some overdosed on drugs or became overwhelmed by the heat, according to a report by the city fire marshal. While the overnight Starscape festival at Fort Armistead Park stretched into the early-morning hours, emergency medical crews from the city and Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties struggled to keep up with calls for help from the venue, responding to the park "continuously" for 12 hours, the report says.

A white supremacist accused of beating a 76-year-old black fisherman goes by the nickname "Hitler" and has a tattoo of the Nazi leader on his stomach that also reads "He lives," according to police and court records. Court documents released Wednesday show that the victim, James Privott, suffered a fractured eye socket and lost two teeth in the South Baltimore attack, which suspect Calvin E. Lockner told police "wouldn't have happened if he was a white man." Lockner, who faces 19 criminal charges including attempted first-degree murder, was ordered held without bond as new details about his criminal past emerged.

Residents of East Baltimore's Armistead Gardens have asked the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center to set up shop in their small working-class community, where there are a large number of elderly people who need health care but have difficulty traveling to nearby medical centers."

Sean Roberts is realistic about his Armistead Gardens community of small rowhouses in a semi-isolated section of northeast Baltimore."It certainly isn't the best neighborhood, but it's not the worst," Mr. Roberts said yesterday as the city's police commissioner stood nearby. "We don't want it to get any worse." He said the community is threatened by a budding drug trade and is hoping that a legal crackdown by Baltimore police and prosecutors can nip the problem.Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier and Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy held a news conference at the 1,500-home complex yesterday to announce the filing of civil lawsuits against five residents under the state's nuisance abatement law.Mr.

More than 150 police officers swept through Armistead Gardens in Northeast Baltimore yesterday afternoon hoping to break up a ring of teen-age drug dealers who they said were relatives and friends of another drug gang busted eight months ago."I stood here on this very corner and watched the cops arrest the older brothers of the people we are locking up today," said police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier, standing at Quantril Way and Harper Way. "We are going to keep coming back here until this behavior stops."

It's not the exotic dance club advertised as a "House of Latin Fire" that bothers Denise Jeannetta. It's not even the prostitutes in skin-tight vinyl jeans who cruise the median strip a quarter-mile from her home.But when a discount adult video store opened at the entrance to her East Baltimore neighborhood, Ms. Jeannetta decided it was time to fight back.Her neighbors in Armistead Gardens, a tidy working-class community off Pulaski Highway and Erdman Avenue, also shuddered at the arrival of a shop specializing in sex, titillation and videotapes.