East Baltimore Community

It was always a forbidding yet fabled place of erudite learning, miraculous healing and vast dimensions -- blanketing 44 acres with more than 40 buildings and a beehive of nearly 25,000 workers and visitors every day.Wrought-iron gates still protect the rhododendron-adorned entrance. A marble statue of Jesus -- 10 1/2 feet tall -- towers over visitors in the foyer, enhancing the grandeur of the place with its engraved invocation: "COME UNTO ME ALL YE THAT ARE WEARY AND HEAVY LADEN AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST."

A year after an arson claimed the lives of seven Dawson family members in the Oliver community of East Baltimore, about 400 people gathered in a church a block from the charred rowhouse yesterday to remember them and pray for help in an ambitious $100 million-plus proposal to rebuild the neighborhood. During the meeting at Memorial Baptist Church in the 1300 block of N. Caroline St., a gospel choir sang, preachers raised their voices in prayer for the cause, and community organizers showed slides sketching out their vision of new houses, playgrounds and tree-lined streets.

Eric Booker was asleep in his grandparents' house in East Baltimore when his grandfather, Frederick Booker, came to him in a dream. "I need you to take care of Granny," the dying old man told him. The next day, Eric visited Fred at Johns Hopkins Hospital. "I touched him on the forehead, grabbed his right wrist with my right hand and said, `You don't have to worry about Granny.'" Twenty-four hours later, his grandfather was dead. That was in 1993. Three years later, Booker left Northern Virginia to move into 1705 N. Washington St., where his grandmother, Leola, still lived and where he had grown up, just around the corner from the neighborhood's most prodigious structure, the vacant, city-owned American Brewery.

Community leaders urged East Baltimore residents to ask their elected officials to preserve funding for family services programs yesterday. Meeting at Casey Family Services on North Caroline Street, they said they worried that funding to the programs will be cut to help reduce the state's projected $1.8 billion budget deficit. "We recognize the importance and difficulty of this task. But don't balance the budget on the backs of our children," Traci McLemore, director of the East Baltimore Collaborative, told the crowd of nearly three dozen adults, many with small children.

Two dozen volunteers were on their hands and knees Sunday morning, harvesting abundant greens or bagging them to give away in a Baltimore neighborhood where both healthy food and money are in short supply. Thanksgiving was on some of their minds, but the effort is about far more than eating well on one day of the year. Gather Baltimore, the fledging group that organized the rapid harvest, does this work every week - collecting food that would otherwise go to waste and distributing it in city neighborhoods.

It's mostly weeds that grow in the old industrial lots in East Baltimore, but developers have a plan to turn a collection of tumbling-down buildings at a former water pumping station into a place to produce something a bit more nutritious. Gregory Heller, a senior adviser with Econsult Solutions and the project's manager, described the vision for a "Baltimore food hub" Saturday to a small tour group clustered on the pavement in front of the former Eastern Pumping Station at Gay and Wolfe streets.

Hundreds of residents have been relocated and dozens of homes cleared from Baltimore's Middle East neighborhood in recent years. Now the area just north of Johns Hopkins Hospital may be losing something more: its name. As an ambitious redevelopment project with biotech research labs, corporate offices and homes reshapes the neighborhood, the area is being marketed around the yet-to-be-built Eager Park - a strategy that upsets some longtime residents. "They want it to sound like there's no history here until they got here," said Donald Gresham, a leader of the now-defunct Save Middle East Action Committee, created more than a decade ago to oppose the displacement of residents.

Mortician Erich March told me he was tired of seeing people in his East Baltimore community die of conditions like diabetes and hypertension. He blamed the lack of grocery shopping choices in the neighborhood where he grew up and where his Aisquith Street funeral home is located. He and his wife, Michele Speaks-March, were determined to bring a new style of shopping to the Oliver, South Clifton and Darley Park neighborhoods. They were not targeting the vegan or food faddist crowd.

Kyle Brooks, City SPORT Basketball BOYS STATS -- The 5-foot-8, 175-pound junior guard averages six points, 12 assists and three rebounds for the Knights, who won 13 of their first 17 games in the Baltimore City League. SIDELINES -- A linebacker on last fall's City League Division I champion football team that reached the Class 3A state semifinals , Brooks also stars as a pitcher and third baseman for the Knights and excels in bowling. He was a Maryland Youth Bowling Championships runner-up last March.

Heavy rains caused three sanitary sewers in Baltimore to overflow last week, a city agency said Wednesday. Two of the overflows occurred in the East Baltimore community of Middle East, according to a statement from the Department of Public Works. A 75,500 gallon overflow took place in the 1700 block of E. Chase St. and a 66,250 gallon overflow happened near the intersection of E. Eager and Durham streets, the statement said. The third overflow, of 110,000 gallons, arose in the 1900 block of Falls Road in the Jones Falls Area just west of the Charles North neighborhood.