Lexington Terrace

For 13 years, Chester Bailey brought the young and old at Lexington Terrace pocket-sized pieces of the outside world.Now the mailman has almost nothing left to bring.He arrives each day with a smaller stack of change-of-address forms, letters and bills as families continue to vanish from the Baltimore housing project that will be torn down in July.The residents of all but six of the 270 homes on his route have moved out of the northern end of the desolate high-rise complex. The rest will be gone within a few days, and Bailey's daily trek though that West Baltimore neighborhood, less than a mile from the Inner Harbor, will come to an end.As he walks through eerily empty, overgrown courtyards, Bailey, 49, recalls a time not long ago when the place was bustling with the rhythms of daily life, with children playing ball, mothers pushing strollers and elderly men pruning bushes.

A new city public school for the arts could open on the site of the Lexington Terrace public housing project on the western edge of downtown in a couple of years if myriad details can be worked out and money found to pay for it, says Walter G. Amprey, the city superintendent of schools.A committee has been meeting in recent weeks to discuss creating a school for children and possibly moving the renowned School for the Arts, a high school, from Mount Vernon to Lexington Terrace, Amprey said.

With 20,000 people watching, 700 pounds of nitroglycerin yesterday reduced the Lexington Terrace public housing project's five high-rise buildings to piles of rubble.The red-brick towers, which stood on the western edge of downtown for 38 years and had become symbols of a nation's failed policy for housing poor people, collapsed into themselves leaving only clouds of brown smoke some 20 seconds after the first of five booms just before 10 a.m. signaled the ignition of the explosive charges that would bring the buildings down.

On the front steps at Lexington Terrace Elementary-Middle School, Principal Patricia Dennis waits and watches for the children who aren't going to come.How many desks will be empty today? How many lunches should be cooked? Where are her "bright-eyed babies"? Day by day, amid mounting anxiety and increasing frustration, she and her teachers no longer know.As the Housing Authority of Baltimore City uproots the close-knit extended families of the Lexington Terrace public housing complex so that it can be torn down in July, the brick school is becoming a ghost anchor of a ghost neighborhood.

When the high-rises came down, in a 20-second implosion eight summers ago, it seemed possible that the demolition of Lexington Terrace also could erase the cycle of brazen drug dealing, gunplay and early death long attached to the troubled housing project. For Michael L. Taylor and Keon D. Moses, though, the deadly bonds of Lexington Terrace held fast. 2000 June 27, 2000: Victim: Cortez "Man Man" Bailey, 18. Authorities say Bailey was shot to death by Foster in retaliation for the shooting of another member of the Lexington Terrace Boys.

Everything was in place. White candles flickered on the table. A mouthwatering aroma of roast turkey drifted from the kitchen. Envelopes for the Christmas gift drawing hung from the tree.Yet as her sister, cousins and 84-year-old aunt bustled about putting the final touches on the Thanksgiving feast, Tammy Snead felt sad.This would be the last Thanksgiving her large, close-knit family celebrated in the 10th-floor apartment at the Lexington Terrace housing project in West Baltimore, an apartment she had lived in all her life.

A central witness in the federal prosecution of one of West Baltimore's most violent drug gangs was killed in a hail of bullets Tuesday, a month after authorities warned that the man "is in danger" as they tried to have him jailed to protect his life and ensure his testimony. Prosecutors called Samuel Carlos Wilder a critical witness in the federal death penalty case against leaders of the gang, the Lexington Terrace Boys. Wilder, 20, also was a reluctant witness: Prosecutors took the rare step of filing a material witness arrest warrant against him, and since early last month he was under a federal home-detention order.

The last seven families yesterday vacated the Lexington Terrace high-rise building that symbolized the problems of the Baltimore City Housing Authority."

The mother of a 10-year-old rape victim angrily picketed outside City Hall yesterday to call attention to problems at Lexington Terrace, the sprawling West Baltimore public housing development.City police said the girl was raped about 1:15 a.m. Sunday after a man approached her as she stood in front of an 11-story apartment building at 770 W. Saratoga St.Police said the man asked the girl to help him carry a snowball machine and shortly afterward he forced her into a vacant third-floor apartment and sexually assaulted her, police said.

The Baltimore housing officials have shelved plans to include middle-income people in the rowhouse communities that will replace the Lafayette Courts and Lexington Terrace housing projects.Instead, Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III said Friday, only poor people will rent or buy homes in the developments.Lafayette Courts, which had more than 800 units, was demolished a year ago. The 670-unit Lexington Terrace project is to be razed Saturday morning.Henson said the reversal was prompted by developers who doubted that middle-class people would buy houses in a development with poor people in subsidized housing.