Pen Lucy

After a blessing by Deacon Lynwood Wimbish of Wilson Park Christian Community Church, the bus carting 50 community leaders left the old Hampden headquarters at seven minutes after 7. Spirits were high as a cowbell clanged to call for silence.The host of the Wednesday-night whistle-stop tour of Baltimore's Northern District, police Maj. Robert Biemiller made it clear the spring-night spin was not just for fun. "What are we collectively going to do to get the job done?" he asked.Since crime can cross boundaries, the idea was to take people beyond their neighborhoods to show how the district's parts fit together.

Shootings this week have left three people dead in or near North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood, raising fears about a resurgence of drug violence in an area singled out by police for extra enforcement.Community leaders and officers had hoped that the arrests of 14 suspected members of the Old York and Cator Avenue gang in December would help quell brisk cocaine sales in the Old York Road corridor.Police said yesterday that those suspects remain in jail awaiting trial on drug and shooting charges, but officers are concerned about upstart dealers possibly trying to fill the void.

When heavily armed police officers swarmed into a Pen Lucy rowhouse last month, they thought they had finally busted a drug gang suspected of selling crack cocaine in the North Baltimore neighborhood.They seized three handguns -- one of which police linked to four shootings and a homicide -- and said they found a man sitting at a kitchen table filling vials with crack cocaine, getting them ready for street sale.But an alleged member of the Old York-Cator Avenue Boys -- who was convicted of manslaughter in 1991 and served 15 months in prison -- posted bail a day after his Dec. 15 arrest.

The city air is as hot, thick and humid as a wet wool blanket, but everything's cool on Gussie Tweedy's tree-shaded East 42nd Street front porch.She sits and talks and waves to passers-by, a lovely, round-faced woman of 68 with a ready smile that's wild raspberry-sweet, and short, iron-gray hair that suits her more serious, sharper side.Kids pass, and she calls their names. Everybody says "hi." Young women going to work, fathers on their way to pick up their kids at school, a few older people braving the heat, teen-agers -- everybody knows her.She's been living in this neighborhood for the better part of 50 years with only a brief hiatus or two. She's been an activist and community leader almost since she moved in."

A man was killed and an elderly woman injured last night when a one-alarm fire extensively damaged the second floor of a two-story house in Pen Lucy in North Baltimore, a fire official said.Battalion Chief Mark Wagner of the Fire Department said the blaze was reported at 9: 21 p.m. and brought under control in less than an hour.Wagner said a man in his mid-50s died in a second-floor room.He said an elderly woman broke her left leg after jumping to the ground from a second-floor window and was being treated at Union Memorial Hospital.

From a block party in East Baltimore with bands and games to a march through North Baltimore's troubled Pen Lucy neighborhood, communities around the city are taking part today in the National Night Out Against Crime.The event, in its 15th year, is a way people across the country can present a united front against drug dealers and other criminals who make communities dangerous. Homeowners are encouraged to turn on their outside lights to show solidarity."I'm kind of disappointed in the crime reductions," said Robert Nowlin, a community activist in the Pen Lucy neighborhood who for the past decade has spoken out about crime, even after his house was shot up by drug dealers eight years ago."

Fourteen members of a North Baltimore gang that allegedly sold $8,000 in narcotics daily in the Pen Lucy area were arrested in a raid last night, police said.Maj. Robert Biemiller, commander of the Northern District, said the raid on a house in the 600 block of Cator Ave. was the result of an undercover effort.He said that when officers entered the house about 9: 30 p.m., they surprised 14 alleged members of the Old York Road-Cator Avenue Boys, in the kitchen packaging suspected crack cocaine in vials that sold for $20 each.

Byong Wan Pak's little food market with the bright yellow front was supposed to be the start of something better.He worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day and skipped his honeymoon -- hoping for the payoff promised by hard work. But he was shot by a robber Nov. 1 and died a week later.The 45-year-old South Korean immigrant who came here 16 years ago died Saturday, and police yesterday returned to his Friendly Food Market on Old York Road in Pen Lucy in North Baltimore hoping that publicity will lead them to his killer.

Byong Wan Pak's little food market with the bright yellow front was supposed be the start of something better.He worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day and skipped his honeymoon -- hoping for the payoff promised by hard work. But he was shot by a robber Nov. 1 and died a week later.The 45-year-old South Korean immigrant who came here 16 years ago died Saturday, and police returned yesterday to his Friendly Food Market on Old York Road in Pen Lucy in North Baltimore hoping that publicity will lead them to his killer.

It's ALWAYS EASY to point a finger at police whenever a community appears to be lost to lawlessness. People are learning, though, that there will never be enough officers on the streets to catch every criminal and stop every crime. They are learning that if they want safe neighborhoods, they have to help the police make them safe. Community policing doesn't work without the community.In that context, it is heartening to read about Robert Nowlin Sr. (July 9, "Seeking safety in the city"), the president of the Pen Lucy Association in North Baltimore, who doesn't mind confronting hoodlums.

A city homicide detective investigating the shooting of Joseph Woah-Tee, a native of Liberia and a leader in the Pen Lucy community who intended to run for president of his homeland in 2011, is reaching out to the public in hopes that someone will provide information that will lead to the man's killers. No arrests have been made despite flooding the Pen Lucy neighborhood with an artist's rendering of two suspects in Woah-Tee's death May 31, Detective Arthur Brummer said. Brummer said Woah-Tee, 60, was shot about 3:40 a.m. as he stood behind the counter at Gaimei Nangbn Multi-Purpose Neighborhood Center in the 4300 block of York Road, a center he founded in 1990 that offered GED classes to those seeking to improve their lives.

Back one day in 1966, at a house party in North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood, two teenage boys asked the same girl to dance. One boy lived on Old York Road, the other on McCabe Avenue. The two fought, first inside, then on the street, and a feud began that turned two neighborhood groups into gangs that terrorized a collection of blighted blocks for more than three decades. Street wars between the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys would become legendary and deadly.

Peter Hermann's "Crime Scenes" is a reported feature that provides context about many of the incidents that take place on the streets of Baltimore and beyond. The last shots in the decades-long feud between the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys might have been fired years ago. Arrests, violent deaths and attrition have rendered these once-notorious neighborhood groups nothing more than street-corner legend. Graffiti and tennis shoes that once hung from power lines marking turf no longer mar the urban landscape that defines North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood, though its main street, Old York Road, remains a desolate, narrow passageway lined with empty, gated storefronts, one where a South Korean merchant was killed in a robbery in 1997.

Gunmen kill owner of Pen Lucy social hall The owner of a Pen Lucy social hall was shot and killed during an attempted robbery there early Sunday. Police said Joe Woah-Tee, 60, was standing behind the counter at Gaimei Nangbn Multi-Purpose Neighborhood Center in the 4300 block of York Road about 3:40 a.m. when a man entered and asked about renting the center. A witness told police that shortly after the man was told that a $10 holding fee was required, the man told Woah-Tee to give him money and reached through the opening in a security window.

As anyone who has gotten soil under his or her nails knows, to garden is to constantly ward off encroachment - the weeds, the slugs, the insatiable tulip-snarfing squirrels. Vivian Needum has another perennial interloper on her list: the threat of development. Needum has tended a garden on a couple of abandoned lots in the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood of Pen Lucy, a swath of grass and, in the summer, flowers and herbs and whatever else residents want to plant. It's a decidedly modest affair - you'd never mistake it for Sherwood Gardens and its manicured swaths of tulips over on the other side of York Road - but one that provides the community with a welcome bit of green space.

Army Spec. Robert John Nowlin Jr., a veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq and a former Pen Lucy resident, was killed Monday in a roadside accident near Savannah, Ga. He was 22. "We're not sure exactly what happened. He had some trouble with his car and then pulled off the highway. He got out of the car and was hit by another car," his father, Robert John Nowlin Sr., a well-known Pen Lucy neighborhood activist, said yesterday. "He was taken to Savannah Memorial Hospital, where he died." Specialist Nowlin, who was stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga., at the time of his death, was born in Baltimore and raised in Pen Lucy.

Once, the intersection of Cator Avenue and Old York Road in the Pen Lucy neighborhood was so troubled that people wouldn't sit outside on their porches or walk through on their way to church. Young men were being shot and killed on the street. And the corner lot was grassy and overgrown. But 22 years ago, Emma Worrell began tending to the broken lot, trimming the grass, inviting neighbors to plant flowers and, eventually, dedicating the rectangle of green to members of the community who had been lost to violence.

For 20 years, Emma Worrell quietly tended the vacant lot next to her rowhouse in Northeast Baltimore's troubled Pen Lucy neighborhood, making sure unwieldy grass and weeds were trimmed and that trash disappeared. She also hung a sign with the names of youths killed in the surrounding streets, a memorial to victims of the area's once epidemic violence. "We couldn't sit on our front porch for years," said Worrell, a retired city worker and a four-decade resident of Cator Avenue. "You never knew when they were going to break out shooting."

The floorboards inside three adjoining Habitat for Humanity-renovated rowhouses in North Baltimore are still bare, but the families about to move in are already thinking about how they'll decorate their first homes. Three soon-to-be homeowners got a preview of what their homes - and housewarming parties - may be like yesterday as they gave tours to friends and relatives, Habitat for Humanity volunteers and corporate sponsors of the construction. When they move in next month, those new homeowners will join three families already living on Cator Avenue in Pen Lucy through a Chesapeake Habitat for Humanity program that aims to renovate eight more homes on the once-blighted street by this summer.

Four years after public funding was approved, a multipurpose community center is set to open in a distressed stretch of North Baltimore. But the sense of celebration over completion of the Pen Lucy Community Center and its potential for helping to revitalize the neighborhood is accompanied by concern about the future of the Govans Economic Management Senate, a small nonprofit group that has overseen the center's development. GEMS, as the 15-year-old organization is widely known, owes about $22,000 in unpaid employee withholding taxes to the Internal Revenue Service -- and the city is refusing to turn over about six times that amount in locally administered federal funds until the problem is resolved.