Baltimore Rowhouse

Three young brothers died yesterday and their parents were critically injured as a blaze ripped through a Southwest Baltimore rowhouse - the third fatal residential fire in the city in as many days. Police identified the couple as David and Angie Alger, and their three sons as Glen, 9, Christopher, 7, and Jonathan, 4. Neighbors said the family rented the two-story rowhouse in the 1200 block of Washington Blvd. Flames roared through the windows and roof about 2:40 a.m., leading David and Angie Alger to fall or leap to the sidewalk.

An early morning two-alarm fire in South Baltimore sent five residents to an area hospital with minor injuries and severely damaged a rowhouse. Baltimore fire officials said firefighters encountered heavy fire when they arrived about 3:30 a.m. to the 1200 block of Battery Ave. in the Riverside neighborhood. Flames and smoke were coming from the first floor of the three-story home. Flames became so intense that the second floor collapsed onto the first. Crews continued to battle the fire throughout the morning; at 8 a.m., it remained a working fire.

"The Baltimore Rowhouse," by Mary Ellen Hayward and Charles Belfoure. Princeton Architectural Press. 212 pages. $30.''The two-story houses that were put up in my boyhood ... all had a kind of unity, and many of them were far from unbeautiful," H. L. Mencken observed in the late 1920s. "The builders of the time were not given to useless ornamentation: their houses were plain in design and restful to the eye ..."While Baltimore's rowhouses may have been held in high regard during Mencken's era, today they're under siege.

Baltimore City firefighters quickly brought a basement fire in a Govans rowhouse under control Wednesday morning. Crews responded at 7:25 a.m. to the fire in the 700 block of Beaverbrook Road. No injuries were reported. Mary.gail.hare@baltsun.com Text NEWS to 70701 to get Baltimore Sun local news text alerts

A 58-year-old man was killed and two people were hospitalized when a fire caused by careless smoking damaged a Southwest Baltimore rowhouse yesterday, a fire official said.Battalion Chief Hector L. Torres said firefighters responded to the one-alarm fire in the 400 block of Furrow St. about 2: 23 a.m. and rescued a 43-year-old woman from a second-floor room and a 53-year-old man near a stairway.Torres said a man in the basement, who alerted other residents, was taken out of the house but died later at Bon Secours Hospital.

A 17-year-old Patterson High School student and standout wrestler who aspired to attend college on an athletic scholarship was found slain yesterday morning in his East Baltimore rowhouse, city police said. Kevan Fletcher Jr. had been dead for several hours when he was discovered by a friend about 8:10 a.m. in the home on the 2500 block of Orleans St., police said. Fletcher had suffered head trauma and might have been shot, police said. Fletcher's friend told police he was going to walk with the teen to catch a bus for school, but got no answer when he knocked.

Three people were injured in a fire at a Southeast Baltimore rowhouse just before midnight yesterday. The fire might have been caused by combustible materials too close to a heat source, said Kevin Cartwright, a Fire Department spokesman. Firefighters arrived at the house in the 600 block of Savage St. about 11:55 p.m. and found the stairwell and second-floor hall engulfed in fire and smoke, Cartwright said. Two people -- a woman in a wheelchair and a man -- were trapped in a second-floor room, he said.

A fire yesterday in a West Baltimore rowhouse killed a man in his 90s and critically injured a firefighter who fell 20 feet from a ladder and landed on the oxygen tank strapped to his back.Karl Zimmerman, 36, a nine-year department veteran, suffered at least one crushed vertebrae and was being treated at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center, said Battalion Chief Hector L. Torres."It appears there has not been any damage to the spinal cord," said Torres, a department spokesman. "He does have sensation to his extremities."

Three city firefighters were injured early today when the roof of a burning three-story West Baltimore rowhouse collapsed on them.Two other firefighters were overcome by the oven-like heat of the blaze, and another received a sprained or broken left arm.No civilians reportedly were injured.Battalion Chief William Goodwin and Fire Department spokesmen said a captain and two firefighters were on the second-floor landing of 123 S. Gilmor St. shortly after the first alarm was sounded when the roof fell.

Baltimore's Housing Authority began extensive repairs yesterday to a West Baltimore rowhouse -- owned by the authority -- where a family of 10 has lived with boarded-up front windows since late November.After a four-hour inspection, housing officials blamed "tenant abuse" for the $8,000 in damage requiring repairs at 1304 W. Lombard St.And police removed needles, syringes and other drug paraphernalia from the house's basement.Sheila Williams and her family, who lease the four-bedroom rowhouse for $98 a month, will be moved this week to another public housing unit while repairs are made, said authority spokesman Zack Germroth.

Henry Hager, the husband of former first daughter Jenna Bush Hager, is entitled to a $296 property tax discount on his South Baltimore rowhouse for the current tax year, the state Department of Assessments and Taxation says. An article Tuesday in The Baltimore Sun questioned the validity of Hager's homestead credit for the year that began July 1. The credit program is supposed to be available only to owner-occupants, and Hager has rented out the house since August - nearly the entire tax year.

It's been about a year and a half since former first daughter Jenna Bush Hager and her husband, Henry, reportedly left their South Baltimore rowhouse for new digs in Manhattan. But Henry Hager still owns the Baltimore place — and the couple still enjoys a property tax break that's supposed to be available only to owner-occupants. The Hagers' tax credit this year is small: a $296.40 discount on a tax bill approaching $9,000. Still, why would they get any break as absentee owners? On Friday, a Baltimore Sun reporter knocked on the door of the Hagers' home.

"It was late in the spring of 1923 and the very popular Anne Arundel County strawberries were running very late. It seemed like the rain would never stop and the sand was being splashed up onto the waiting berries. "Finally, the sun — greeted with mixed emotions — came out in all its glory and beat down on the Maryland hillside. Mixed emotions because now, acres and acres of strawberries would ripen suddenly, needing to be picked, packed, and shipped to Baltimore quickly or the entire spring cash crop would be lost … perhaps a call to a Baltimore agent would yield some help.

A woman suffered first- and second-degree burns to about 90 percent of her body after she was rescued from a house fire on North Fulton Avenue in West Baltimore on Friday, a city fire spokesman said. The woman, 55, was taken to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, and a 41-year-old woman was taken to another hospital for possible smoke inhalation, said fire department spokesman Kevin Cartwright. Firefighters were called about 4 p.m. to the three-story home in the 200 block of N. Fulton Ave. in the Franklin Square neighborhood to find smoke coming from the second floor.

Anybody besides me wondering about that giant rooster in West Baltimore? If you live in the area of West Franklin Street and North Franklintown Road, or drive through it, as many commuters do on their way to and from downtown, you know the one. A huge, sketchlike image of the bird appeared a few weeks ago on the side of a boarded-up rowhouse at 406 N. Franklintown, across from the Hess station. Unusual graffiti to say the least, even if the rooster hadn't been wearing a leather jacket and cradling what appeared to be the head of the crucified Jesus . Perhaps owing to the charcoal-drawing style, or the bumpy canvas provided by the weathered rowhouse, the picture had the appearance of something that had been there for years.

Former University of Maryland pharmacologist Clinton B. McCracken has been deported to his native Canada, ending more than three months of limbo since he pleaded guilty in March to growing marijuana. "I am thrilled he's back home," said his lawyer, David B. Irwin. He said McCracken, 33, was transported north June 29, 17 days after immigration authorities picked him up in Baltimore and sent him to a detention center in York, Pa. The deportation ends an odyssey for McCracken that began last September when his 29-year-old fiancee, Carrie E. John, a fellow pharmacologist at Maryland, died in a drug-shooting session at their Ridgely's Delight rowhouse.

With more than its share of blue police lights and boarded-up houses, the West Baltimore neighborhood seemed an unlikely place to find a Memorial Day celebration. For most, the day is celebrated at the beach or in the backyard, or, for those who hold to its original intent, at a parade celebrating veterans or at a cemetery honoring the war dead. But here indeed, in Leah Hamm's rowhouse, was the true spirit of Memorial Day, as family and friends of her nephew, Jonathan Hamm, celebrated his life even as they mourned his death in Iraq, just 11 days before the holiday.

As plans were completed for the first funeral yesterday, investigators struggled to pinpoint the cause of the fire that killed six people in a crowded East Baltimore rowhouse, in part because of the intensity of the blaze and way it ravaged the structure in a matter of minutes. "This investigation is very complex, if no other reason, the number of victims and the amount of damage that was done," said Theodore G. Saunders, the Fire Department's deputy chief of administration. "This complicates things and slows the process down," he said.