Streets Of Baltimore

Baltimore landlords will no longer be able to throw an evicted tenant's belongings onto the sidewalk, and gun offenders will be required to register their address every six months under a pair of bills signed by Mayor Sheila Dixon. The gun-offender registry, which was modeled after a similar program in New York, requires gun offenders to register their name, aliases, address and other information within 48 hours of a gun conviction or release from jail. Dixon introduced the bill in July, and the legislation slid through the City Council with little opposition.

The streets of Baltimore have been particularly bloody recently, which makes a decades-old question especially relevant again: Do you know where your children are? If they attend one of five Baltimore middle schools, the odds are better that they're home during the evening hours. And for that, the thank-you goes to a program run out of an East Baltimore rowhouse by a retired couple using a small budget, a chunk of time and a lot of soul. The program -- called Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

WHEN PEOPLE ASK me how I got interested in Baltimore, I respond with two words: "Sunday drives." It's a tradition I continue today. Baltimore and its environs are ever-changing.The city was never a mystery to me. My parents conducted weekly geography lessons from the front seats of a succession of Dodges and Ramblers. Each talked and chatted as we roamed the streets of Baltimore, a city that in the 1950s was still stained with years of coal soot. Formstone enjoyed a status not unlike a large, pressure-treated lumber deck does today.

Allie Harper has studied poverty in the hallowed halls of Harvard University and the streets of Baltimore. She likes the front-row view from Baltimore better.In her Ivy League classroom, the 19-year-old became "frustrated because everything people have tried to solve poverty in our cities hasn't worked." But this summer, getting paid $10 an hour by the nonprofit Safe and Sound Campaign to venture into local neighborhoods, the Roland Park native found hope.Harper, a sophomore, is part of a four-person "mapping" team of college-age students who spent the summer compiling statistics for Safe and Sound on after-school and out-of-school activities for Baltimore children, especially the disadvantaged.

When people ask me how I got interested in Baltimore, I respond with two words: "Sunday drives."The city was never a mystery to me. My parents conducted weekly geography lessons from the front seat of a succession of Dodges and Ramblers. Each parent talked and chatted as we roamed the streets of Baltimore, a city that in the 1950s was still stained with years of coal soot. Formstone enjoyed a status not unlike a large, pressure-treated lumber deck does today. The city was gritty, full of long traffic lights and overhanging signs.

Rep. Bartlett exemplifies capital gridlockI am shocked but, sadly, not surprised, at Rep. Roscoe Bartlett's decision to support the "ethically challenged" activities Speaker Newt Gingrich by voting against the sanctions which were imposed upon Mr. Gingrich by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee. Mr. Bartlett was one of only 28 members of Congress to vote against the committee's recommendations.In explaining why he voted against the bipartisan report, Mr. Bartlett said that in his opinion, other members had committed more grave violations, yet were not punished as severely.

150 years ago in The SunAug. 25: GOV. HENDERSON OF TEXAS NOT DEAD -- We learn from Washington that the announcement of Gov. Henderson's death was premature.Aug. 26: A fortnight ago, Monday night, the trains of the Erie Railroad were stopped by grasshoppers -- there being such numbers of them on the track as to grease it as effectively as though lard had been placed on the rails.Aug. 31: Peaches -- We do not recollect a season when our markets have been more crowded with this delicious fruit.

They were once as common a sight on city and suburban streets as the oyster salesman, the hokey-pokey man, the tin peddler or the a-rabs, and they willingly answered the call of anxious housewives who shouted, "Hey, mister! Sharpen my scissors! Hey, mister!"Grinders, one of the names they went by, were part of Baltimore's colorful street and alley life, as described elsewhere on this page by Jacques Kelly.In 1940, Santo Vasta, who is pictured at right, pushed his portable grindstone mounted on a pushcart through Canton's streets, using a bell attached to the cart's frame to summon customers with dull knives or scissors.

It's spring, almost a year after Bill and Fran Sirbaugh's lives were torn asunder, and they're back out on the streets of Baltimore plastering telephone poles with pictures of their daughter -- offering a reward for information leading to her killer.Police still have no promising leads in the June 21 slaying of Keri Ann Sirbaugh, the 21-year-old American University student who was found strangled and beaten in a densely wooded gulch outside her apartment in the 6400 block of Everall Ave. in Northeast Baltimore.

Drug money made Mumin Sahib Abdullah rich.The loft of his Owings Mills townhouse was filled with silk suits, fur coats and $600 shoes. He had four foreign cars, including a $50,000 Range Rover. His wife ran up monthly bills as high as $16,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and spent thousands more at other chic stores. Abdullah threw champagne parties at a private club.The couple's high-flying lifestyle was financed on the streets of Baltimore. Abdullah's heroin operation, begun in 1990, was an entrepreneur's dream.

After months of grueling training, an estimated 20,000 people plan to wake up really early Saturday morning just to run the streets of Baltimore. If you are not one of them, you are so not alone. But even if you're not lacing up your sneakers for one of the several races of the Baltimore Running Festival, you can still participate in the festivities. Hordes of city residents are expected to line the streets of the marathon course to cheer on the runners. And those runners mark an event record this year, with more than 20,000 from 44 countries and every state plus D.C., organizers say. Also expected to run on Saturday are five Olympians: two in the marathon, two in the half and skater Kimmie Meissner in the sold-out 5k. "The enthusiasm and the energy from the city is quickly what the event is becoming known for," said Dave Gell, a spokesman for the event.

In the summer of 1970, my father and I took a Sunday drive along Falls Road and encountered a fledging enterprise known as the Baltimore Streetcar Museum. A group of streetcar enthusiasts had made good on their determination to preserve and run some of Baltimore's revered transit vehicles of the previous 100 years. That day, we watched in amazement as aged streetcars appeared. And each year, these volunteers at the museum extended the overhead wires and the rails a little more along Falls Road into the Jones Falls Valley.

Devotees of the world's most popular sport descended Friday on Baltimore, filling sidewalks and tailgating lots with Chelsea blue and AC Milan red-and-black in a city more accustomed to pigskin. The European soccer clubs that faced off in a much-hyped match are "the cream of the crop," said Jeff Bondura, a construction worker from Baltimore, who awaited the event in the shadow of M&T Bank Stadium as his sons and their friends played a soccer scrimmage in Lot N. The two prestigious teams found a receptive audience in a town where most fans this time of year are either grousing about another lost Orioles season or growing antsy for the start of Ravens training camp in Westminster.

Wendell Mundrow knew him as Anthony, a fellow middle-aged man living on the street. Mundrow, 50, remembers sharing space at a lot near a downtown federal building two years ago with Anthony, where the two swapped stories about life and the circumstances that left each without a place to stay. Last night, Mundrow attended a memorial service and candlelight vigil at the Inner Harbor Amphitheater for Anthony and dozens of others who died this year while living on the streets of Baltimore "He died because he was homeless.

The underground electrical fire that blasted a North Charles Street manhole cover skyward Monday continued to hobble downtown traffic and commerce yesterday - a frustrating reminder of how the aging, unseen matrix of wires and pipes beneath Baltimore can spur sudden chaos above ground. City firefighters struggled for nearly 10 hours into yesterday morning to control the subterranean blaze that sent flames 14 feet into the air. It was extinguished only after the Baltimore County Fire Department arrived with a carbon dioxide-spewing device that smothered the flames about 3:30 a.m., a fire official said.

Charm City still challenges cyclists The Sun's editorial notebook "Baltimore should be biking" (June 21) encouraged readers to park their cars and commute to and from work on their bicycles. But there are a couple of problems with that notion. As with camping, the idea of commuting by bicycle is better than the reality. Camping sounds wonderful until you are confronted with a reality that includes clouds of ravenous mosquitoes, ankle-deep mud and fellow campground users who blast obnoxious music until 4 a.m. and then come to visit asking whether you can spare any marijuana.

When a shooting victim testified that the Park Heights man charged with the crime was not his assailant, the prosecutor successfully argued to a jury that the victim was lying - that he was obeying "the law of the streets" in Baltimore, "the city that bleeds." Kevin R. Lee was convicted and sentenced to 30 years behind bars. Maryland's highest court said yesterday that the prosecutor went too far in invoking Baltimore's notorious "stop snitching" culture, and reversed Lee's 2005 conviction.

Baltimore has been many a musician's muse over the years. Today, the indie rock group Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks release their latest album, Real Emotional Trash. Malkmus was the primary singer and songwriter for the indie rock band Pavement until they split in the late '90s. Based in Portland, Ore., the band looked to the East Coast for the title to its new single, "Baltimore." The word "Baltimore" has popped up in plenty of songs. But unlike some other cities - New York with Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York," San Francisco with Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" - Baltimore doesn't have an anthem, per se. Culturally speaking, Baltimore is better known for the work of John Waters and for the TV show The Wire than one particular song.

Greg Cantori wants to get into the Colombian import business and bring his product to the streets of Baltimore. No, Cantori isn't a character on The Wire. Nor is he risking a federal drug rap. He's president of One Less Car - a group that advocates for better infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians. What he'd like to import is a concept called ciclovia - a weekly festival on the streets of Bogota. He and his colleagues have been meeting with city officials, urging them to bring the idea to Baltimore under the Americanized name "Sunday Streets."

Melvin O. Miller, an artist whose oil paintings depicted Baltimore scenes of streetcars, harbor tugs and wooden market sheds, died of a heart attack Monday at St. Agnes Hospital. The Woodlawn resident was 70. Mr. Miller belonged to a group known as the Realists of Baltimore, artists who rejected abstract expressionism of the 1950s and employed luminous paints based upon ancient formulas. He stored 300 pigments in apothecary jars in his studio. "He had a way of capturing the activity on the streets of Baltimore," said fellow artist and friend Nancy Conrad, with whom he shared a Fleet Street studio.