Houses In Baltimore

During his last State of the Union speech in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled his "Second Bill of Rights. " Among them was "the right of every family to a decent home. " Nearly seven decades later, we have not reached Roosevelt's goal. Next week, Baltimore will welcome a former president who followed him to the Oval Office 30 years later to remind us that Roosevelt's vision is just as important today. Indeed, President Jimmy Carter's engagement with Habitat for Humanity is an acknowledgement of what hasn't been reached but the potential that lies before us. For too many, the dream of owning one's home is a distant dream; to many others, the presence of decent housing is equally unattainable.

The wife of disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff says he is at a halfway house in Baltimore. The wife of disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff says he is at a halfway house in Baltimore. Pam Abramoff declined to name the facility during a brief telephone conversation Thursday with The Associated Press. The 51-year-old former power broker was released Tuesday from the minimum-security federal prison camp in western Maryland after serving about 3 1 / 2 years of a six-year sentence for fraud, corruption and conspiracy.

Joseph Armando Liberto, a 54-year veteran of Baltimore movie houses who managed the Stanley, once Baltimore's largest cinema, died of Alzheimer's disease complications Sept. 19 at the Northwest Hospital Center. The Catonsville Manor resident was 82. Born in Baltimore and raised on Greene Street in downtown Baltimore, he attended St. John the Baptist Parochial School and was a 1944 graduate of Mount St. Joseph High School. While in high school, he worked summers in his family's Lexington Market produce business.

Clyde Nelson beamed as he held the keys to his new home. He is one of two future homeowners who have worked the past five months with volunteers and construction crews to gut and remodel the two East Baltimore homes they plan to move into in February. Yesterday afternoon, a crowd of about 60 people gathered outside the North Washington Street homes to celebrate their completion with Chesapeake Habitat for Humanity, the local organization that coordinated the program, and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, the homes' sponsors.

Through mud and icy drizzle, a team of city workers and volunteers yesterday began the arduous task of transporting to a makeshift stable 28 horses -- many of them used for arabbing, the Baltimore institution of vendors hawking produce from horse-drawn wagons. Meanwhile, other workers scrambled through the muck to put the finishing touches on two tents, fencing and a guardhouse on an empty lot beneath the Monroe Street bridge in Southwest Baltimore that will become the horses' temporary home.

The Laurelford community off Falls Road in northern Baltimore County is resplendent in its variety of stately, custom-built homes. Predominately Georgian and Colonial in style, they rest on large landscaped lots surrounded by tall trees. One of the first houses in the neighborhood - built in 1988 - was set apart in both space and style. Placed off the beaten path on nine wooded acres at the end of a cul-de-sac, the contemporary design, with its brick construction and commercial-looking doors and windows, was the joke of the neighborhood.

I NEVER thought I'd read that city planners would propose turning the city's schools headquarters into an apartment house, but then I never thought that the kind of people with the money to pay the rents envisioned would want to live at Calvert and North. But five decades of observing Baltimore have taught me not to be surprised. And, if I had any ability to predict the upward swings of Baltimore real estate, I'd have bought the houses in Federal Hill my brother suggested nearly 30 years ago. I'll give the city's Planning Department credit for a bold, pre-emptive assertion that the North Avenue building, which I persist in calling Old Poly (for Polytechnic Institute, where my namesake uncle was a graduate)

Stepping into 2100 St. Paul St. is like stepping back into Victorian Baltimore, redrawn by man with a passion for restoring self-playing organs and exceptionally large clocks. It's a tinkerer's treasure that ticks. Durward R. Center, 55, has spent three decades restoring the house and adding three tower clocks - two visible from 21st Street and one on the St. Paul Street side. The 220-pound clock weights, the size of gallon paint cans, hang in odd places such as in the stairwell from the third floor down to the first.

Chet Pajardo talked sports with neighbors, grilled in the back yard and played basketball with children in the street, neighbors said. He drove a red minivan and puttered inside his red brick house at the end of an Owings Mills cul-de-sac. "Typical everyday nice-guy neighbor," said John Parham, who lives next door to Pajardo on Kentbury Court. Only the swarm of police cars that surrounded Pajardo's red-brick house this week gave his neighbors an inkling that the friendly father of three might have legal problems.

Pigtown in Southwest Baltimore has gentrified to the point that City Hall has tried to give it the ritzier name of Washington Village, but dozens of vacant houses continue to blight the area still best known for its slaughterhouse past. Turning abandoned houses into livable homes can be almost as difficult as shaking an unflattering-but-catchy nickname, but that is expected to happen to 24 properties in the neighborhood. The city plans to sell the rowhouses to Chesapeake Habitat for Humanity as part of Mayor Martin O'Malley's Project 5000, a plan to return 5,000 vacant homes to productive use. Terms of the deal have not been worked out, but city officials say the plan shows the value of the project, which for three years has sought to obtain ownership, or clear title, to abandoned houses so that they can be sold and redeveloped.