Howard Street

Will this be the year when that elusive magic touch arrives at Howard and Lexington? My eyes have glazed over while I've read stacks and more stacks of redevelopment plans for Baltimore's old downtown shopping district. Seriously. There were proposals for Lexington Street during the mayoral administration of Theodore R. McKeldin. That's a long time for a place to be ailing - 40 years and counting. And because I enjoyed so many good times in this part of Baltimore, I hope that it can make the transition to a new day. Other places have been reconstituted and recovered a lot faster.

A city, if it has any vitality at all, will always be in flux physically. Buildings rise and fall. Streets open and close. People come and go.But do we sometimes become so accustomed to the transitory nature of our surroundings that visual clutter and jumble don't register anymore? Can we become so inured to ugliness that we no longer care about beauty?Those questions are prompted by the newest addition to Baltimore's Mount Royal cultural district, home of the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, the Lyric Opera House and the Maryland Institute, College of Art.Near the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Howard Street -- a gateway to the cultural district -- is land that was once a well-manicured lawn for the Baltimore Life Insurance Co. Now owned by the state of Maryland, the property in recent months has been turned into an open-air storage yard for a contractor working for the Mass Transit Administration.

A POTENTIALLY contentious election year in Baltimore -- with a lame-duck mayor and contests for City Council -- may not be the ideal time to execute a major redevelopment program. Yet a downtown revitalization strategy has to be implemented this year. Any delay may doom the city's best chance in decades to remake the old Howard Street retail corridor."Westside" is something of a misnomer for the Westside Master Plan, financed by the Weinberg Foundation. When it was released in June it involved 18 downtown blocks.

Enough heat wave already. No more!Who said there aren't any Republicans in Baltimore City? A lucky seven (7) are running for mayor.Financier Nathan A. Chapman is clearly the right regents chairman, if the goal is to bring University System of Maryland shares to market.When the lights went out on Howard Street, who (at City Hall) knew?Pub Date: 7/09/99

IS THE restoration of Baltimore's Hippodrome Theater in trouble -- or just a pawn that Gov. Parris N. Glendening keeps using against antagonists like Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke?Late last month, the governor withheld a $1.8 million capital budget allocation for planning the Hippodrome's transformation into a performing arts center. Citing "unanswered questions," the governor asked for firmer cost figures and details about city plans to revitalize the vicinity of the theater at Eutaw and Fayette streets.

Partnerships needed to restore, maintain the city's playgroundsI applaud The Sun's strong call for removing the hazards on many of Baltimore's playgrounds ("Playground dangers loom over children," July 13) and commend its coverage of the opening of the newly renovated ABC playground in Southwest Baltimore ("Safer play is aim of park," July 11).Formerly a site of drug dealing, the ABC playground has been reclaimed by neighborhood residents and children. This playground renovation was the result of a partnership among the state's Hotspot Communities project, city agencies, the nonprofit Neighborhood Design Center and community residents.

A POTENTIALLY contentious election year in Baltimore -- with a lame-duck mayor and contests for City Council -- may not be the ideal time to execute a major redevelopment program. Yet a downtown revitalization strategy has to be implemented this year. Any delay may doom the city's best chance in decades to remake the old Howard Street retail corridor."Westside" is something of a misnomer for the Westside Master Plan, financed by the Weinberg Foundation. When it was released in June it involved 18 downtown blocks.

For more than 60 years, barber John V. Patti Jr. was known for his 15-minute haircuts and for wielding quite possibly the fastest pair of scissors in a North Howard Street tonsorial parlor.Mr. Patti, who was known as the "mayor of Howard Street," died Sept. 9 of congestive heart failure at Northwest Hospital Center near his home in Margate, Fla. He was 86.Mr. Patti, who also maintained a home in Milford Mill, bought his first shop on the west side of Howard Street near Baltimore Street in 1940.

Chris Coleman believes a resurgence of shoppers along Charles Street downtown is on the horizon.The 55-year-old owner of Coleman Nelson and Sons Jewelers said he knows the city's installment of video cameras along the street near his store will make people feel safe enough to venture there.After the success of 16 video cameras on Howard Street, the city installed 16 others two weeks ago along Charles Street, from Lexington to Centre. A kick-off celebration for the Video Patrol will be held at 1 p.m. today at the south entrance of Mount Vernon Park.

BALTIMORE'S efforts to transform Howard Street into a bustling "Avenue of the Arts" will get a boost today, as work begins on a new home for the Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III are scheduled to join members of the Eubie Blake center's board of directors and others at 10 a.m. to mark the start of construction on the cultural center at 847 N. Howard St., part of Antique Row.Named for Baltimore-born composer Eubie Blake, the 28-year-old center provides instruction in the visual and performing arts, including dance, voice, piano, theater, and arts and crafts.

Neighborhoods thrive when they're home to a mix of residents who reflect a broad range of occupations found in a great city. That's the role of the so-called "creative class" - arts, design and media workers, computer programmers, educators, engineers and scientists - who have been so instrumental in creating lively new communities and driving economic development in post-industrial America. The new apartment building at 26th and Howard streets is therefore just the kind of project Baltimore needs to turn around a once-vibrant pocket of the city.

In 1969, strong community action from all over Baltimore defeated an expressway plan that devastated neighborhoods in West Baltimore and threatened to do the same in Canton and along Boston Street. I was one of hundreds of people across Baltimore who worked with neighborhood groups and the citywide Movement Against Destruction to prevent the building of an eight-lane East-West Expressway. Forty years later, Baltimore finds itself again in a debate about the best way to move people to and through our city.

Wondering what's been happening with some of the problems recently highlighted in Watchdog? Update:: The water has stopped running on Millers Island. Last week, Baltimore public works employees fixed a water leak at Cuckold Point Road and Bay Drive in eastern Baltimore County that had continued since September, and county workers repaired the street. "Everybody on this end of town is happy," said Edgar Bartlett, one of several neighbors who contacted Watchdog about the problem. They had called Baltimore County's number for the city's 311 service several times, since Baltimore's public works department maintains the city and county water systems.

THE PROBLEM : A crosswalk across a busy Howard Street intersection is nearly worn away. THE BACKSTORY : Sandra Heningburg saw the aftermath of the accident from her kitchen window. A Maryland Institute College of Art student was killed in February while walking across Howard Street at Dolphin Street, just north of the Sutton Place apartments, where Heningburg saw the flashing police lights. Heningburg, who crosses there herself to reach the light rail stop, worried that the crosswalk stripes were so worn that drivers wouldn't expect pedestrians, especially people headed southbound who pick up speed on the Howard Street bridge.

I wince every time I hear another forecast for downtown Baltimore's Lexington Street. The block between Park Avenue and Howard Street, where so many Baltimoreans once shopped, is to be reconstructed as apartments and some shops, maybe a hotel, too. I'm making a preservation pitch for the overlooked 1934 gem, the Read's drugstore at the corner of Howard and Lexington. I don't think of Baltimore as having many truly modern buildings in the sense of streamlined art deco-moderne structures.

The city's Department of Transportation has extended the closure of Howard Street between Lombard and Conway Streets until next Thursday. City workers are rebuilding the intersection near where Interstate 395 ends at the Camden Yards baseball stadium. Officials are encouraging motorists to use Sharp Street before the closure of Howard Street or take Lombard Street to southbound Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as an alternative to I-395.

David Roszel was on an evening walk along Lafayette Avenue in Bolton when he spotted me last Saturday night. In a subsequent conversation, he presented a version of the events that led to the Howard Street Bridge's construction in the late 1930s, a topic discussed in this column a few weeks ago. As a boy, he remembered his father awakening him and then watching the smoke and fire in the early morning of Jan. 13, 1933, as the 5th Regiment Armory burned....

It all began when a reader who lives on John Street in Bolton Hill wanted to learn the circumstances of the city's 1930s plan to extend Howard Street through his neighborhood via a route that includes the familiar hump-back bridge over the Jones Falls Expressway. I dug out old photographs and consulted maps because this part of Baltimore - the edge of Bolton Hill, and the general locale of the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, the Lyric and Mount Royal Station - is one of the city's more altered districts.

Staring at the terra cotta facade of the Mayfair Theater, with its graceful female statues and intricate relief work, Sean MacCarthy is amazed it has survived so much turbulence in the century since it went up. The rest of the historic building on Howard Street has not fared nearly as well. The inside was remodeled again and again, the arched windows were filled with masonry, the mosaic floors were torn up. And, in the final indignity, the roof collapsed in 1998, leaving a two-story-high pile of debris that has not been cleared to this day. But more than 20 years after the Mayfair stopped showing movies, MacCarthy sees new life for a theater left for dead.

The Howard Street Tunnel has been a headache from the day its opened in 1895. It drove the railroad that built it into bankruptcy. It's been obsolete for decades. A derailment and chemical fire in 2001 showed it to be a bottleneck for East Coast freight rail traffic. And it's likely to remain that way for a long time. Alternatives have been proposed, but any of them would be costly and take decades to build. CSX Transportation, the tunnel's owner, seems in no rush to replace it. "For the foreseeable future, that tunnel is an important part of our network," said railroad spokesman Bob Sullivan.