Union Square

Named for its two dominant old features, the Union Square-Hollins Market Historic District is known for the shady park across the street from H.L. Mencken's home as well as the oldest public market building in Baltimore that is still in use. These days, the community, which lies less than a mile from Camden Yards and has easy access to major roads, is diverse ethnically, in age, by income and by occupation. Its wide streets are lined with brick homes of varying sizes dating mostly from the mid-to-late 1800s, many retaining original decorative architecture.

Russell Baker remembers the library of his Baltimore childhood as "a wonderful, mysterious place with cathedral beams in the ceiling -- I tried to read my way through the whole place one summer."It was the late 1930s, and the future writer's dreamland stood at the corner of Hollins and Calhoun streets. Old branch No. 2 of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, just down the block from H. L. Mencken's house, was one of the four original libraries bequeathed by Mr. Pratt to the city in 1886."I remember those great ceilings and the sense of richness on the shelves," said Mr. Baker, a New York Times columnist and former Sun reporter whose book "Growing Up" won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983.

In the mid-1980s, Michael Lamason moved the Black Cherry Puppet Theater to two abandoned buildings he snatched up for $12,000 across the street from Hollins Market. His traveling performance company brought him into a growing artists' community. It's in a neighborhood that's not a geographical place but a state of mind: Sowebo. "I've never lived in Sowebo, but it's my home," said Lamason, who lives a mile away in Seton Hill. Coined in the mid-1980s amid a busy bar and restaurant scene in a neighborhood swelling with artists' residences and studios, Sowebo, or SoWeBo, stands for Southwest Baltimore.

At last, the old No. 2 Branch of the Pratt Library breathes again.After more than 30 years of underuse and neglect, the former Union Square Pratt Library branch will be re-introduced to the public today, with a community redevelopment center as its tenant -- serving as an example of how neighborhoods can use what Pratt assistant director James C. Welbourne calls "retired libraries."The Neighborhood Design Center Inc., a nonprofit organization that assists community organizations in revitalization projects, will lease the building, also to be used as a community meeting space and as headquarters for a Pratt Library online service.

Across from the rowhouse where writer H.L. Mencken once lived, a fountain in the middle of Union Square memorializes "The Sage of Baltimore." But it's in disrepair. The water has not flowed for years. Some of the cherub-like figures cavorting about the fountain's top are missing limbs. And of the 33 bronzed depictions of Mencken books dedicated to fountain donors that once dotted the granite seating circle, three are missing and several more are damaged. In early May, the Union Square Association voted to replace the fountain as part of a revitalization project.

Gunfire on an MTA bus in West Baltimore left one person dead and two wounded, sending passengers fleeing in panic last night, city police said.At least 20 passengers were on the bus when the shooting occurred about 7 p.m. in the 100 block of S. Gilmor St., near Union Square.Mass Transit Administration spokesman Anthony Brown said at least two of the passengers and the driver, a 10-year MTA employee, suffered minor injuries in the rush to get off the bus when the gunfire broke out. They were taken to University of Maryland Medical Center and Bon Secours Hospital.

Just as the last bites of seafood and pasta primavera were washed down with Chablis, Ardebella Fox looked admiringly at the friendly faces around her at a recent neighborhood dinner and said: "This has been wonderful."That also appeared to be the sentiment of the 60 or so Union Square residents busily chatting with their neighbors. The dinner is a monthly event that longtime resident Fox began last fall to help foster neighborliness and, eventually, community improvement."At a neighborhood meeting, you only get 25 people or so, but look how many people we have here tonight," Fox said, as she handed out name tags and collected the $6 fee for dinner at a local restaurant.

Karen Darden's house was a mother's nightmare.Need reasons? Take your pick. The three dead dogs in the back yard, maybe. A kitchen so crawling with cockroaches it looked as if the walls were moving. Non-locking doors and nonexistent windows. Holes in the ceiling from water damage, and holes in the walls from a former owner's indoor BB-gun practice.Any one of these might be reason enough for a mom to say, "Not for my daughter!"Ms. Darden's mother is made of stronger stuff, though. When she looked at the shabby three-story row house she didn't say, "You can't do this to me," but "We can do it!"

Union Square might not have looked that good in decades: The parked cars were gone, the decorative fountain sent up a spray of water, stragglers were few and the trash - well, what trash? It was 35 minutes before C-SPAN's cameras were scheduled to send live images of the historic Baltimore neighborhood across the nation, in a program on the cable network focusing on the neighborhood's most famous resident, the late scribe H.L. Mencken, and Union Square was transformed. "It looks like a ghost town right now," said Brett Betsill, a director for C-SPAN, as he glanced at a bank of monitors in the network's production van. It was a city block as restrained as the program on the cable channel better known for its views of Congressional debate - a detailed look at the life, writings and influences of Mencken, the Evening Sun writer and editor who died in 1956.