Butchers Hill

The word is out and the anxiety is growing. In neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, neat and messy Baltimoreans are keenly aware that a decades-old, twice-a-week rhythm of their lives is about to be disrupted. Soon the garbage trucks that pick up their trash will clatter down their streets just once a week. Oh, another truck will come a couple of days later, but it will only take recyclables, those mostly non-offending papers, boxes, bottles and cans - not the crab shells, baby diapers, cat litter, moldy bread and bruised spinach you don't want sitting around for the week in between pickups.

Sometimes, it's just the littlest of things that can bring people together. In this case it's a kitten, a little furry thing that's charmed an entire Baltimore neighborhood. No one's sure exactly when the kitten came into their lives. She was just there one day, perched in a window on Lombard Street. She was a tiny thing then, a black and white cutie. If someone would tap on the window -- and they always did -- she'd follow the finger with a pink paw pad. If she was feeling frisky she'd try to pounce on it -- not realizing a pane of glass was holding her back.

From the sidewalk in front of the Butchers Hill home of Jay Rubin and Frank Mondimore, a reminder unique to Maryland sport gives passers-by pause. Stubby and banged-up duckpins, alongside shiny bowling trophies, line the sills inside of two street-level windows. Next to that hometown image, a flower urn sits on a concrete slab in front of double oak doors, their arched windows reflecting the corner grocery store across the street. The brick exterior looks new, providing a clue that this house is a relatively recent arrival to the block.

Before Barry Glassman could begin his garden, he first had to find the ground. His row house had been an apartment building and the yard next door a dump for the residents' refuse for 20 years. In 1996, he bought the property and began the transformation. The first step, says Glassman who is retired from the banking and investment business, was to remove the trash — 40 contractor-size bags of it. He had no set plan in the beginning. "I knew enough to go out and rent the biggest Rototiller I could find," he says.

The view from Butchers Hill -- atop a three-level veranda with restored wrought iron scrollwork -- is a sweeping panoramic shot of downtown Baltimore, the harbor and Patterson Park. The inside of this hilltop house is also striking in scope and architectural detail, evoking the historic prosperity of a neighborhood that predates the Civil War. Over the decades, Butchers Hill was known as a home for tradesmen, industrialists, merchants and professionals. "This was a grand house," said owner Todd Vaughan, who has restored several other houses on the street.

The 24th annual Butchers Hill house tour is scheduled next week, with the Southeast Baltimore neighborhood association opening 12 historic homes to the public. The Baltimore neighborhood is north of Fells Point and Canton. The event is scheduled from noon to 5 p.m. Oct. 12. Tickets are $15 the day of the tour and $12 in advance. For more information, log on to www.butchershill.org or call Anne Belcher at 410-675-2795 or Sue Noonan at 410-522-6773.

The Butchers Hill Association will hold its 25th annual house tour next weekend with proceeds going to the group's education fund. The neighborhood, bounded by Washington Street to Patterson Park and Pratt to Fayette streets, includes a variety of housing and architectural styles. Twelve homes will be included in the tour. The event is scheduled for noon to 5 p.m. Oct. 17. It will begin at the White House, at the Patterson Park entrance at Lombard Street and Patterson Park Avenue. Tickets can be purchased for $15 the day of the tour and $12 in advance.

When John Murphy and Jennine Auerbach started house-hunting six years ago, they began their search for a Victorian-styled home in Roland Park, then settled on a townhouse in Butchers Hill."

Situated on a summit above Fells Point and Canton, Butchers Hill has the kind of homes that seduce new homebuyers. Common is the story of the couple who went on a house tour and became so enamored of the Butchers Hill atmosphere that they became residents as quickly as they could get to the settlement table. Some foolishly try to resist the neighborhood's spell. Dawn Letellier and Mike McGrail went on the Butchers Hill annual house tour two years ago and then rented an apartment in Fells Point.

Despite protests from some Butchers Hill residents, a small but pricey cluster of townhouses was unanimously approved yesterday by Baltimore's Planning Commission. E.R. Bacon Development and Stonington Partners proposed turning a former machine shop at the southeast corner of Pratt and Chester streets into six four-level town homes. The two-story brick building would be demolished to make way for three-bedroom homes with two-car garages that would cost $650,000 each. The community's main concern, said David Dyer, president of the Butchers Hill Association, was that the new housing would be built on property zoned commercial, which would allow the developer to build higher than on residentially zoned land.

From the sidewalk in front of the Butchers Hill home of Jay Rubin and Frank Mondimore, a reminder unique to Maryland sport gives passers-by pause. Stubby and banged-up duckpins, alongside shiny bowling trophies, line the sills inside of two street-level windows. Next to that hometown image, a flower urn sits on a concrete slab in front of double oak doors, their arched windows reflecting the corner grocery store across the street. The brick exterior looks new, providing a clue that this house is a relatively recent arrival to the block.

It's not every couple that can take full advantage of a 3,500-square-foot townhouse. "We use every room in this house," said Jennifer Foster of the property, which has three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, a brick patio and a courtyard garden leading to a two-car garage. "It's about relevance. " Born and raised in Philadelphia, and residing in Chestertown before moving to the Butchers Hill neighborhood in Baltimore, Foster, 48, purchased the townhouse in 2004 in order to return to what she calls "my urban love.

On Christmas Eve, I spent some time in three of the addresses featured in a new book chronicling landmark houses of worship in old Baltimore. That night I made stops at Saints Ignatius and Alphonsus and First and Franklin Presbyterian churches. I heard joyous choirs and inhaled clouds of incense. I also considered these settings, the rooms of worship, the sacred altars where the faithful have been gathering for the centuries. There was no escaping the spells cast by the architecture that night.

Jerome P. Bukovsky Jr., a retired Bethlehem Steel Corp. executive and volunteer, died Thursday of coronary artery disease at his Dundalk home. He was 73. Mr. Bukovsky, the son of a steelworker and a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised on Chapel Street near Butchers Hill. He was a 1955 graduate of City College. Mr. Bukovsky went to work at Bethlehem Steel after high school and attended the Johns Hopkins University for eight years, earning a bachelor's degree, a master's degree in arts and sciences, and a second master's degree in business administration.

Margaret M. Guccione, a retired Goucher College information technology librarian and volunteer who helped place stray animals, died Oct. 8 of colon cancer at her Butchers Hill home. She was 67. Margaret McFarlane, the daughter of a physician and a nurse, was born and raised in Alton, Ill. After graduating in 1961 from Marquette High School in Alton, Ms. Guccione earned a bachelor's degree in education in 1965 from St. Louis University. She taught English in St. Louis until moving to Germany in the late 1960s with her first husband, David Guccione, whom she later divorced.

Mark Simone makes a living convincing people to move to Baltimore. Monday afternoon, he helped a couple from Minnesota, recently hired by Johns Hopkins Hospital, settle on a $280,000 rowhouse in Upper Fells Point. Later that night, the 27-year-old real estate agent walked out of his own house in that same neighborhood and was jumped by a group of teenagers. They chased him, threw him to the ground, punched and kicked him and robbed him of his iPhone, $25 in cash and a black leather wallet.

Butchers Hill's 16 square blocks boast a rainbow of races, incomes and housing rarely found in a single urban neighborhood.Whites, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics. Blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals. Small, neat rowhouses on alleys, bigger homes with beautiful wood-and-glass double doors, and even bigger cornice-topped homes with lovely gardens and harbor views."The most important thing to me is the diversity and the neighborliness," said Catherine Boitnott, who has lived in Butchers Hill for 15 years.

Richard and Kathy Hackett walked up the townhouse stairs guarded by toy action figures and past the room decorated with the blow-up Hello Kitty chair. They had spent more than an hour touring townhomes in Butchers Hill yesterday, peering through doors usually closed to them, marveling at the spectacular views from the rooftop decks and at occupants' decorating styles. But William White's self-described "house of fun" - with its burlap rugs, purple doors and pantry full of Japanese candy toys - was something else.

He's 76 years old, the father of five, grandfather of 13, great-grandfather of four. He's a retired overhead-crane worker for a steel plant in Essex. He married the girl he started dating at the age of 15, who grew up two blocks from him in Southeast Baltimore, long before the area became tony Butchers Hill. He moved his family to Marietta Avenue in 1961, in the city's Hamilton neighborhood, to a two-story antique gold bungalow far off the main drag of cluttered Harford Road.