City Neighborhoods

One man was fatally shot early Saturday in Baltimore and a second was shot in the left elbow in separate incidents. Darrien Jackson, 22, was found shot around 1:45 a.m. in the 1300 block of Lakewood Ave. Jackson, of the 3400 block of Kenyon Ave., was pronounced dead at Johns Hopkins Hospital at 8 a.m. Around 3:40 a.m., officers responded to Sinai Hospital, where a 24-year-old shooting victim walked in. The man told police he was walking in...

The banner at Greenmount Avenue and Preston Street proclaims the Lillian Jones Apartments are coming. For the past year, I've watched this building take shape in a neighborhood that needed all the help it could get. Come spring, new tenants will begin moving into these 74 units of affordable housing. As City Councilman Carl Stokes told me, Greenmount and Preston had been a "horrible corner. " That's changed as work crews complete the apartment building and rebuild numerous adjacent rowhouses.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM holds that educational institutions benefit the city at large to an extent that justifies inconvenience to individual neighborhoods or small groups of people. But is this always true? Can institutional expansion plans threaten harm to neighborhoods that will make them less attractive, more likely to lose both population and tax base? Take, for example, the sports complex that Loyola College proposes to build in Woodberry Forest. Woodberry, adjacent to Hampden, is poised for a residential resurgence.

Habitat for Humanity of the Chesapeake has received a $1 million grant from The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, of Owings Mills, that will go toward building and rehabbing homes in Baltimore. “We are proud to receive support from the Weinberg Foundation to assist the financially disadvantaged and vulnerable individuals and families in our homeownership program,” said Habitat Chesapeake CEO Mike Posko. The grant will go toward rehabilitating 56 vacant properties over two years, Posko said in a statement.

Tonight across Baltimore, neighborhoods will participate in the 20th annual National Night Out, an observance that involves turning on porch lights and spending an evening outdoors as a way to take a stand against crime. Participation will include block parties, ice cream socials and children's events in neighborhoods such as Belair-Edison, where residents on 25 blocks plan to join in the festivities. The Baltimore Police Department's Believemobile will be on Reisterstown Road near Coldspring Lane from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Free food, refreshments, a marching band, live entertainment and a moon walk for children will be available.

GOVANS OR Waverly? Butchers Hill or Fells Point? Irvington or Violetville? Forest Park or Ten Hills? Neighborhoods all across the city compete with one another to attract buyers who are willing and able to invest in their homes and in their community. While many factors influence a homebuyer's decision of where to purchase, one important factor is the perception of the neighborhood's health and the viability of its real estate market. Mayor Martin O'Malley plans next week to announce the names of six Baltimore City neighborhoods selected to participate in his first Healthy Neighborhoods Initiative.

When Baltimore Heritage's latest series of walking tours gets under way this weekend, those who attend are in for an important lesson: Architectural excellence is not the only concern of historic preservationists.The series of five tours, to be conducted on weekends through Nov. 4, begins Sunday with "Formstone: Friend or Faux," one of the two new additions to the walking tours lineup."Our goal is to mix tours about architecture with tours about neighborhoods," says coordinator Dean Krimmel, of the non-profit group that advocates cultural and architectural preservation in the city.

Prospective buyers of homes in Baltimore could be eligible for $3,000 toward down payment and closing costs by attending the seventh annual Buying Into Baltimore Home-Buying Fair and Neighborhood Tours on Saturday. The event, sponsored by the Live Baltimore Home Center and the city, will offer home- ownership sessions, previews of home listings and tours of city neighborhoods. The first of two fairs this year will focus on the regions west of Charles Street in North Baltimore and west of Russell Street in South Baltimore, including the neighborhoods of Ashburton, Forest Park, Reservoir Hill, Washington Village, Edmondson Village and Hampden.

Ruth W. Rehfeld, an activist who spent four decades championing city neighborhoods, died of cancer yesterday at Roland Park Place. The former Mount Vernon resident was 75. Director of Northwest Baltimore Corp. in the 1970s, Mrs. Rehfeld was recalled for her vigorous promotion of citywide racial understanding and neighborhood preservation through enforcement of zoning laws. Born Ruth Wolf in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, she left her home in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. She lived briefly in Sweden with a foster family before moving to Baltimore and the Mount Washington residence of Bea and Sam Strouse, who sponsored her through a Jewish welfare organization.

City officials screened a new documentary yesterday on the efforts of Baltimoreans in the 1960s and 1970s to stop an interstate from cutting through and destroying many of the Inner Harbor's historic neighborhoods. Road Wars, an 11-minute movie, was produced by the city's Heritage Area program and the Mayor's Office of Cable and Communications, and made in part with a grant from the development company Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski introduced the film yesterday at a ceremony at the Inner Harbor visitors center.

A man was shot in the leg in the Orangeville community of East Baltimore on Thursday night, according to city police. Officers responded to the 4500 block of Ashland Avenue about 9:19 p.m. for a report of a shooting and found the injured man, said Detective Angela Carter-Watson, a police spokeswoman. The community is a handful of homes dropped in the middle of — and relatively isolated within — an otherwise industrial area. It is not known for violence. The man was taken to an area hospital, Carter-Watson said.

Alimay Thompson Kendrick sits in her dining room and recalls the first meeting of a neighborhood club she joined in 1959. It was a garden club, composed of both men and women, all African-American, formed to represent the neighborhoods of Forest Park, Windsor Hills and Ashburton. It was named For-Win-Ash and its aim was to keep these communities green, clean and beautiful. Most of Baltimore remained racially divided at that time, although public schools were integrating. Black professionals were moving into the three neighborhoods and adjacent areas, such as Callaway-Garrison, where she and her husband, physicist Webster Moyse Kendrick, had recently bought a home.

In baseball, they'll tell you that a loss is not always just a loss. Sometimes you learn things even when you don't come out ahead. While that may be easy to understand in sports, it's a little fuzzier when it comes to a city's population: If you're not growing, then you're losing, right? Well, it's more complicated than that. Although Baltimore's total population has declined in the past 10 years, it was the slowest rate of decline in decades. And, through forward-thinking efforts to establish data-driven measurement systems in the last decade, we have fine-grained data available to learn from these losses - and there is much to be gained from what we know now. While the city as a whole lost population between 2000 and 2010, more than a third of its neighborhoods grew.

Baltimore's scenic reservoirs could be transformed into lakes criss-crossed by rowboats as the city removes them from the water supply to comply with a federal health mandate. To meet the 2006 federal water safety rule to protect drinking water from contaminants, the city is spending tens of millions of dollars to install underground tanks to replace the reservoirs. The Department of Public Works will fill its small reservoir in Guilford to install tanks there, but other reservoirs will be decommissioned by 2018 and could become places for recreation.

One man was fatally shot early Saturday in Baltimore and a second was shot in the left elbow in separate incidents. Darrien Jackson, 22, was found shot around 1:45 a.m. in the 1300 block of Lakewood Ave. Jackson, of the 3400 block of Kenyon Ave., was pronounced dead at Johns Hopkins Hospital at 8 a.m. Around 3:40 a.m., officers responded to Sinai Hospital, where a 24-year-old shooting victim walked in. The man told police he was walking in...

Most neighborhoods with strong or improving reputations have at least one thing in common: a vibrant neighborhood association or community group. These groups often help stabilize neighborhoods that were teetering, experts say, preventing further slides and turning around a community's outlook. Through beautification efforts, public safety groups, newsletters and festivals, associations often help boost neighborhood pride and exposure among homebuyers and others. "We're no longer talking about stemming decline," said Cheryl A. Casciani, programs director of the Baltimore Community Foundation, a charity organization.

The City Council's support for the convention center hotel plan seems increasingly linked to the willingness of Mayor Martin O'Malley's administration to open its wallet to assist struggling neighborhoods. With a vote to move the publicly funded hotel bill out of committee coming as early as this afternoon, and with a close vote expected, the plan's supporters have waged an intense campaign in recent days to win over the few still-undecided council members. Siding with inner city clergy who have demanded that if the city supports the $305 million hotel it must invest equally in efforts to combat blight, some council members who have opposed the hotel now say they will support it in exchange for redevelopment dollars.