Sense Of Community

Moving into the Baltimore County neighborhood of Academy Heights carries a responsibility.Residents adhere to a strict covenant and strive to keep the community uniform and looking its best. But they also have a strong sense of camaraderie, evident in the way the community takes care of its own.Homeowners must follow restrictions that mandate slate roofs, black or brass front porch lights, green awnings. Mailboxes must be green, black or brass and masonry foundations must be painted white, gray or sandstone.

Roots Fest 2011 , which begins Wednesday in West Baltimore, is as much a call to action as a celebration, which makes it entirely appropriate that it will be taking place on the remains of one of the most divisive urban projects in Baltimore's history. Organizers see Roots Fest as a way to use culture and the arts to breathe new life into the surrounding community, to inspire joy and promote enthusiasm in an area where both are sorely needed. It will culminate in a two-day street festival, set for June 25 and 26 along the infamous (and now largely abandoned)

When Mark Morrison put his home in Elkridge up for sale last year, he envisioned moving to a place with some acreage in the country. Rosemary, his wife, wanted to live in a neighborhood with strong community spirit. They looked all over Howard and Carroll counties and eventually found what they wanted in Mount Airy. "She got that sense of community with the neighbors nearby, and I've got that nice view from the back yard," Mark Morrison said. Their subdivision, Summit Ridge, is a neighborhood of new two-story single-family homes just north of the historic area of Mount Airy.

Soon after Harford County Councilwoman Veronica L. "Roni" Chenowith was diagnosed with leukemia in 2006, she waged a vigorous campaign for re-election and won a fourth term. "You need continuity," she said in explaining her rationale for wanting to remain on the council. "You need experience and knowledge to make good decisions." In the past few months, when she relied on portable oxygen and a walker, she insisted on attending weekly council meetings. Joe Chenowith Sr., her husband of 48 years, drove her to the sessions.

Robert Wagner remembers when Mount Airy had a high school. Like other residents, he remembers neighbors mingling at the school fair and crowding the gym to see a local drama club's productions.He also remembers when the school closed -- and students were bused to a new, larger school 13 miles away."They cut out the heart of this community when they took our school away, and we never have regained the cohesiveness we had," said Wagner, a longtime resident who was on the front lines of the battle to save the school.

Betsy S. Nelson, head of the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers, worries that Baltimore might be bleeding philanthropists. She fears that the city's future heirs - people who in a different era would have lived here their whole lives, getting involved in the community and giving money to their favorite causes - are leaving town. Even worse, she is afraid that some might be uninterested in philanthropy altogether. Her worries are echoed in cities and towns across the country. In the next 50 years or so, about $10 trillion will pass from one generation to the next, by some estimates.

A rusted blue car sits idling in the parking lot outside Dietrich's Bar on Furnace Branch Road in east Glen Burnie. A man in his 40s runs from the car under a blinking sign advertising cheap beer into the long cement building with barred windows.Moments later he emerges from a back door grasping a slender brown bag by the neck. He jumps in the car and takes off.It's a familiar scene, people pulling up and buying alcohol from the bar at Dietrich's, even though a liquor store is less than a half-mile away.

Donnie Warthen remembers when city folks took the bus from downtown Baltimore, got off at Wilkens Avenue and, with fishing poles in hand, walked through Violetville to fish in the pond near his house.Warthen, 58, and his brother, Bob, 54, fished and caught frogs in the pond in the summer and skated on it when it froze in the winter. They hiked and hunted in the surrounding woods, and bought fresh vegetables or chickens at a Violetville farm.The pond disappeared in the 1960s when Samuel Pistorio bought the parcel of land south of Benson Avenue and transformed it into a business park.

It's Saturday morning, and Cusack's is busy. The restored deli, coffee bar and sandwich shop at the corner of Bolton and Mosher streets is bustling with people, some sitting outside with newspapers and coffee.Around the corner on Park Avenue, 40-year resident Mary Paulding Martin is watching the Wimbledon tennis matches on TV. But she takes time to show a visitor her mid-1800s rowhouse and her tiny garden, with its brick walk and volunteer magnolia tree.Down the street at the Bolton Swim and Tennis Ltd., a private club, dozens of children and their parents make use of the pool and tennis courts.

NOTHING revives a sense of community like an unexpected big snow storm. Neighbors are united by a mission as they try to recover their cars from billowy drifts. Our mutual interdependence is underscored when a total stranger with a four-wheel drive vehicles becomes a Good Samaritan. The storms aftermath also brings out the worst in many people. Just ask any Marylander who puts time and effort into digging out a parking space -- only to have it stolen by someone else. This weeks snow storm was the biggest one to hit Maryland since a whopper four years ago dumped more than 22 inches.

For 50 years, Greeks have made their way to Kentrikon, a shop on Eastern Avenue where they come to buy Greek music and trinkets, wreaths for weddings and christening ribbons after babies are born. Only now there is a new draw, and new customers. "Musica Latina de Venta Aqui," reads a sign visible from outside Kentrikon - "Latin music sales here." "The majority of people coming into the area are Hispanic," says owner Nitsa Morekas, 67, explaining her decision to branch out. "It's like Greektown international now."

The Bun Penny, a gourmet food, deli and coffee shop that has been an institution at The Mall in Columbia for more than 36 years, is expected to close its doors in the next few weeks. "I think this is just a warning, really, for small businesses of what's to come in this area," said McKenzie Ditter, 18, the daughter of store owner Jeff Ditter. "It's hard for a small business to survive in such a world and in such a mall." Jeff Ditter declined to comment yesterday on the status of the store, which his daughter said he has owned for 18 years, after starting as a deli boy more than 25 years ago. Yesterday, the store saw a steady flow of customers even as signs announced: "Clearance sale!

These days, Maple Lawn is more than the turkey farm in southern Howard County owned by the Iager family for more than a century. The mixed-use planned community of homes, offices, businesses and stores is about 20 percent finished and is expected to be completed over the next decade or so. The community of about 700 acres lies in Fulton, a rural area about midway between Baltimore and Washington. The design, with residences close to the street and sidewalks everywhere, is geared toward fostering over-the-fence neighborliness and pedestrian traffic.

The percentage of Baltimore-area residents who volunteered their time dropped slightly last year, mirroring a national trend as educated baby boomers grow impatient with unskilled volunteer tasks, according to a federal report being released today. Across the Baltimore metropolitan area, 27.1 percent of the population volunteered at least once in 2006, according to the report by the Corporation for National and Community Service, an independent federal agency. That's a 2.2 percentage point drop from 2005.

While teams of judges closely examined each photograph at the Columbia Art Center this month, looking for composition, quality and creativity in students' shots of life in Howard County, co-organizer Lisa Silverman, 17, saw a bigger picture. "We really are a strong community that is diverse," she said. "It was really neat to see such an accurate and sophisticated and creative depiction of our community within one room. The [students'] voices were heard, and their voices were strong and proud."

BOSTON - This is the phrase repeated again and again when Katrina broke through the levees of denial: "I can't believe this is America." The mantra of disbelief echoed from a veteran of the war in Afghanistan to the president of Jefferson Parish, to mothers and fathers in the Superdome to families around their television sets: "This doesn't happen here." For days, we watched a toxic gumbo of natural and man-made disasters cooking along the Gulf Coast. "The city that care forgot" felt forgotten.

THE SOUND of chain saws in Frostburg and surrounding hamlets in the Maryland mountains since Tuesday evening's tornadoes is the sound of hope, of rebuilding, of refusal to give in, of helping neighbors. Too bad we need a natural disaster to bring out the best in people and the sense of community, but somehow the challenge helps.Tornadoes are meant to be in Kansas, out there on the endless plain, the little angry funnel seen miles across the wheat fields. Maryland has had a few funnels, even in Baltimore, but they are rare and out of place.

Plans to outfit Owings Mills with a main street would be one of the most ambitious attempts in Maryland to create an old-fashioned town square, reflecting a nationwide effort to rekindle a sense of community in the suburbs. "When you go to Owings Mills, there's no there there," said Joseph Cronyn, a real-estate economist with Lipman Frizzell & Mitchell of Columbia and a consultant on the Owings Mills project. "There seemed to be a real yearning for someplace that could visibly say, `This is Owings Mills.

OCEAN CITY -- The end is coming for the last RV campground here in Maryland's beach resort, and Lee and Catherine Roberts are mourning already. It was 37 years ago that the couple from Laurel parked a trailer for the summer and began building friendships that now span three generations. But with $800,000 condos literally looming over their modest vacation spot, they weren't surprised to learn that the owners of the Ocean City Campground have gotten an offer they can't refuse. Land is at a premium on this 10-mile sliver in the Atlantic, and more wrecking balls and construction cranes seem to turn up every day. "This is going to be a real emotional separation," says Catherine Roberts, 66, a retired administrative assistant.

A Japanese girl's courageous struggle against leukemia and her campaign for world peace a half-century ago inspired a project by eighth-graders this spring at Ellicott City's Folly Quarter Middle School. Pupils studied Japanese history and culture, wrote poems and folded 1,000 paper cranes - tiny models of long-necked, long-legged birds - that they displayed at a recent assembly and plan to send to Japan this week. The project sprung from the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr, which tells the true story of Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukemia 10 years after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.