Union Square

At least seven people, several of them children, escaped a burning rowhouse in Baltimore's Union Square neighborhood yesterday morning. Three people suffered injuries and were treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the University of Maryland Medical Center. Chief Kevin Cartwright, a Fire Department spokesman, said firefighters were called to the 1400 block of W. Pratt St. about 10 a.m. and found fire on the second and third floors of a three-story brick rowhouse. The spokesman said the house was occupied by a woman and at least six children and young adults.

From the threshold at the entrance hall of Ron and Betty Brown's home in Southwest Baltimore, fireplaces can be seen blazing in three rooms. Crystal chandeliers, hanging from intricately carved plaster ceiling medallions, glow softly as scented candles flicker. Oriental carpets rest on floors of random-width Georgia pine, the planks reflecting the flames from the hearths. A grandfather clock chimes. "We want this home to feel welcoming," Betty Brown said, standing at the front door. The story of the Browns' house began in June 1975, when Ron Brown accepted a job in the office of city Comptroller Hyman A. Pressman.

Having grown up in Philadelphia, Karen Fretz knew the value of buying a piece of history. And that is exactly what she and her husband did in Baltimore when they bought a 125-year-old Hollins Street property, next door to the H.L. Mencken House on Union Square "I loved my house even when it wasn't nice," she says with a laugh. That was in 1985. The three-story, red brick townhouse in the West Baltimore neighborhood was on the market for $60,000. "You should have seen it," Fretz continued.

Union Square couple turns a townhouse that had been apartments into an art showcase Walking through the spacious, ornately decorated rooms of Debby and Francis Rahl's Victorian townhouse overlooking Union Square, it is hard not to gasp at a sales price of $60,000. "The neighborhood was a lot different back then," said Debby Rahl, noting they had bought the home in Southwest Baltimore in 1980. "There were a number of vacant [houses] and multifamily rentals. And more crime." Still, Debby Rahl, who grew up in the northeast neighborhood of Hamilton, didn't want to leave the city.

Until Tonya Osborne came along, hardly anyone ever paid more than $200,000 for a three-story townhouse on Hollins Street in the Baltimore City neighborhood of Union Square. "I heard through the grapevine," she said, "that many of the neighbors were shocked, and thought I was stupid." But Osborne, a 33-year-old lawyer with Miles & Stockbridge, knew what she wanted and, in the end, would have the last laugh. In February 2002, she paid $295,000 for her three-story, end-of-group brick townhouse.

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.

A TRAFFIC JAM and a miscalculated turn put the Holland Tunnel out of reach, so the only sensible way to get out of New York was to head downtown to the Battery and the tunnel to Brooklyn. But were ghosts stirring? On a gray day along the chop-river edge of lower Manhattan, still peppered with names such as Gansevoort and Schermerhorn, old stories seemed to hover in the air, despite all the pavement and waterfront jumble. It was like one of those optical illusions - you stare at it hard enough, and suddenly you make the mental inversion, and plain as day you can imagine Manhattan as a lonely outpost, a foothold in the New World, a city as young as the lives being lived in it. Here were sailing ships and barrels, molasses and beaver pelts; Indians, Africans and Europeans.

True, Rockville was quieter and "leafier," but during the two years Richard Pelletier and his wife, Linda Massey, lived there, it was hard to get two words out of any neighbors. "It was cold; nobody talked to us," Pelletier said. "My wife was scanning the Web for affordable areas between D.C. and Baltimore. We landed here one day. When we got out of our car, a woman sort of kidnapped us and gave us the pitch." That woman turned out to be longtime resident Karen Fretz, president of the Union Square Association.

Union Square wasn't altered for the cameras For some reason, Lisa Goldberg began her article "A man of letters returns to city, courtesy of C-SPAN" (April 8) with a series of unfounded insults that had nothing to do with the story. In fact, Union Square Park looked no different than usual. No special preparations were made, there were no pretensions and the square was hardly "transformed." As happens on most mornings, particularly on weekends, some of us picked up some trash, which might appear overnight in any urban park.

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.