Neighborhood Groups

Within six months all the so-called "junior" billboards advertising in Baltimore's residential neighborhoods will have to be removed as a result of a Circuit Court order signed yesterday by Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan.Nonetheless, community leaders who have been pressuring the city government to take down the billboards, which often feature tobacco and liquor advertising in the city's poorer neighborhoods, said yesterday that they view that order as a setback."The billboards are illegal. When I break the law, I have to go to jail or pay a fine.

On the downtown stretch of Charles Street, where small businesses still draw bustling midafternoon crowds, bookstore owner Jimmy Rouse saw failure creeping in. Crime and grime were draining the life out of the five-block area that he counts as Baltimore's cultural and historical heart.To turn it all around, Rouse didn't look to City Hall for help. Instead, he reactivated last year the long dormant Charles Street Association, hiring a retail planner, shopping for security cameras, crafting a marketing plan and raising nearly $60,000.

A neighborhood group has asked the Agriculture Center board to revise plans for a $2.5 million exhibition hall and construct the facility near existing buildings at its Westminster site.The 15-member board accepted the recommendation from the Neighborhood Advisory Committee Tuesday for consideration. The board meets monthly but officials couldn't say how long consideration would take."It is very good that the committee has devoted time and effort to this recommendation," said Lawrence E. Meeks, board president.

Westminster is the first municipality in Carroll County to have its own rental property maintenance code. The code, introduced in November after two years of planning, was approved unanimously last night by Westminster's mayor and Common Council. It goes into effect June 1. "Obviously we've wrestled with this over a long period of time," said Mayor Kenneth A. Yowan, addressing the two dozen people at the meeting. "I think this is a good ordinance. If you have any problems with this being enforced you can come back and see us again and you will be heard."

A proposal to build two assisted-living residences at Camp Meade and Andover roads, each to house 15 elderly people, will be discussed at 7: 30 p.m. April 9 during the Linthicum-Shipley Improvement Association's meeting.Constellation Health Services, a subsidiary of Constellation Real Estate Inc., would be the developer. At the meeting, Constellation officials will present their plans to residents and answer questions.The one-story buildings would each have 11 parking spaces. They would be built on a 2-acre vacant lot near Lindale-Brooklyn Park Middle School that is zoned for five homes per acre.

Kathy Rebeck flinched each time one of the mature trees snapped in her Turf Valley Overlook neighborhood."Lord, I hate that sound," she said over the whine of bulldozers.The sights and sounds of bulldozers clearing decades-old poplar and walnut trees in the middle of her neighborhood Thursday was cacophonous enough. But even more insulting, she said, was the fact that these trees are in the middle of what was St. Mary's Cemetery on Cemetery Lane.Rebeck, who with about 35 of her neighbors formed the group Friends of St. Mary's Cemetery and Preservation Society, contend that there are bodies buried throughout a 3.21 acre parcel now being developed as two lots.

The "West of 31" gang has an official name now -- more formal and more inclusive -- to reflect a larger geographic area being targeted by the new Westminster coalition.The group already includes one neighborhood east of Route 31, said Richard A. Geelhaar, president of The Greens of Westminster homeowners' association.And it could soon extend outside the city limits where residents of some neighborhoods are interested in working on area-wide issues such as schools or planning and zoning, he said.

Un Kim was up before the lark, with 49 members of her young staff, "ready to rock and roll" at a 6 a.m. meeting. It's the best time to catch everyone, she says, "to get their commitment, check on their well-being and integrity. Everybody gets to share." The dawn huddle was a glimpse of the get-up-and-go that has taken the 43-year-old South Korean immigrant from a single mother working at a Eutaw Street sewing factory to the owner of Papermoon, a thriving 24-hour diner in the city's blue-collar Remington neighborhood.

As the war over billboards in the inner city heats up, the company that owns the signs and the community leaders who want them removed say they will not back down.Yesterday, a dozen people from the West Baltimore communities of Harlem Park and Lafayette Square used a ladder and ropes to take down a billboard at Lanvale Street and North Fulton Avenue. The billboard was on a brick building outside the Briteway Laundromat. It advertised the U.S. Navy.The Rev. Norman A. Handy, pastor of the Unity United Methodist Church and president of the Harlem Park Neighborhood Council, said the billboards symbolize the advertising industry's deliberate effort to exploit vulnerable neighborhoods.

In the Edmondson neighborhood in West Baltimore, Charlotte Perry watches as criminals convert cars into drug vending machines. She says drug dealers store crack cocaine and heroin under gas caps until customers walk by, get the drugs and leave their money. That, homeowners in the area say, is about to change. Community leaders and police in the neighborhood south of Rosemont will try to reduce street drug-dealing by 90 percent by 2003. This year they will launch the city's second Justice Department Weed and Seed initiative, which is part of a federal program designed to wipe out crime and save deteriorating neighborhoods.