Lexington Terrace

Downstairs at 7 W. Preston St., the neighborhood cafe that boasts some of Baltimore's best ice cream is waking up to Latin jazz. In many ways, the Sylvan Beach Cafe, with its blond wood, ginseng juice and chocolate soy ice cream, is a typical upscale cafe: A law student juggling a stack of books orders a medium latte to go. An English professor takes a coffee to her usual spot by the window. The professor has a vague idea that something more than homemade ice cream is being made here.

When they offered Lawrence Campbell $50 to go away, the 44-year-old public housing tenant says he didn't hesitate before turning it down. Campbell was living at Lexington Terrace in 1995 when he heard all the speeches about how the demolition of the crime-ridden high-rise building on Baltimore's west side that had been his home for a decade would help build a new safer community. "He told us to dream, dream about what this neighborhood could be," said Campbell, recalling a speech by former Baltimore Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III. But three years after hearing that speech Campbell is still waiting to get back to his old neighborhood.

As part of the effort to rebuild the former Lexington Terrace Apartments, the city Board of Estimates has approved long-term lease agreements for $1 a year for the site where public and senior subsidized housing has been built. The city gave the Lexington Terrace Senior Housing Limited Partnership a 55-year lease on the land and the Lexington Terrace Townhomes Limited Partnership a 50-year lease last week. The developers received the deal because companies that build public housing are entitled to such benefits under city, state and federal law, said Arthur Gray, an executive assistant in the housing department.

Moving vans line up along Fremont Avenue as the first residents take up housekeeping in a rowhouse cluster that has arisen from the rubble of one of Baltimore's much-maligned 1950s housing projects.Newly quartered families -- several of whom lived in the Lexington Terrace or other battered apartment towers -- are putting up curtains in a new-as-wet-mortar neighborhood where a third of the residents (100 families) will own their homes, pay monthly mortgages and annual city taxes. The other two-thirds (203 apartment dwellers)

A huge West Baltimore public housing community will be demolished and replaced with a smaller community of low-income homeowners and renters in the city's latest effort to rebuild its troubled neighborhoods.City leaders will announce today that Baltimore has won a $31.3 million federal grant to demolish the high-rise towers of George B. Murphy Homes and the adjacent low-rise Emerson Julian Gardens in June or July.Under the plan, about 800 public housing units, mostly high-rise, will be replaced with 362 low-rise dwellings and townhouses.

Some of the students were uneasy yesterday, seeing themselves as a bunch of rich white kids in a convoy of tour buses, staring out through picture windows at poor black kids their own age who were hanging on street corners they would never dare walk along themselves.But Park School wanted its students to confront one of the nation's most complex and troubling social problems, even if it made them squirm.The Baltimore County school put about 150 Upper School students on buses yesterday and drove them through city neighborhoods, a trip that urbanologist David Rusk called a journey through time, space and race.

AS HENRY CISNEROS prepares to leave the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he is hearing lots of praise. One enthusiastic academic even describes him as the best housing secretary the nation has ever had.Baltimore was helped by Mr. Cisneros' performance. He changed the often silly and impractical rules by which HUD had operated. He innovated, simplified, realigned and cut back. Things that had seemed impossible to do -- like demolishing Baltimore's troubled Lafayette Courts and Lexington Terrace high-rise projects along with a total 23,000 problematic units nationwide -- suddenly happened.

It's not perfect, but for now, a renovated hotel near downtown will remain home to the Baltimore School for the Arts.The public high school has rejected an invitation to take over a vacant elementary school at the hub of Lexington Terrace public housing complex, scene of a $22.7 million redevelopment project."

A SUGGESTION by city officials that the Baltimore School for the Arts be moved from its current Cathedral Street location to a site in the Lexington Terrace public housing project on the western edge of downtown has been met mostly with incredulity.As they say in the Army, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.The School for the Arts has been one of this city's educational success stories. It draws a diverse student body from across the city and the region, and its outstanding arts instruction is matched by an excellent academic program.

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.