Washington Hill

Betty Hyatt, executive director of Citizens for Washington Hill for the past 20 years, will receive the 1992 Clarence "Du" Burns Award for Community Service during ceremonies at Church Hospital on Tuesday at 7 p.m.The Johns Hopkins Health System is the sponsor of the award, which carries a $1,000 prize.In nominating Mrs. Hyatt, who is known as the "mayor of Washington Hill," representatives of the community group declared that her involvement in community development and maintenance has made the area "a true demonstration project for urban renewal."

I take exception to those who feel demolishing blight won't create new and better housing opportunities ("Market forces alone can't produce more affordable housing in Baltimore," Dec. 30). In 1980, the city demolished several acres of land in Upper Fells Point's Washington Hill neighborhood to attract development and moderate-income people to the area. The land was attached to a federal UDAG (Urban Development Action Grant) and a city block grant. Through the vision of Jay Brodie, director of the Baltimore Development Corporation, Betty Hyatt, a Washington Hill community activist, the Union Trust Bank and others, I and my partner Tom Henderson developed a community of 109 new homes surrounding a one-acre community park.

Betty Hyatt has spent 20 years seeing that the decaying housing in her East Baltimore neighborhood of Washington Hill is replaced by new housing for homeowners.About 800 new housing units later, she is just one project away from seeing her job completed.The city Board of Estimates yesterday authorized the Department of Housing and Community Development to apply for a federal Urban Development Action Grant worth slightly more than $1 million to finish the job.The grant would help finance a $4.5 million housing project expected to provide 66 new low- and middle-income housing units around the 1400 block of E. Baltimore St.More than half of the housing would be two- and three-bedroom condominium units with the rest being single-family townhouses.

The problem: A manhole cover in East Baltimore bangs every time cars drive over it. The back story: City residents endure cacophony as part of their daily routine. The wail of sirens, the clatter of helicopters overhead and the zoom of motorcycles whizzing past are part of the daily chorus in many neighborhoods, including Washington Hill, a few blocks south of Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore. But Joseph Thomas called about a particularly noisy element — a manhole cover at Baltimore and Wolfe streets that bangs when hit by vehicles.

Tucked between Orleans Street, Central Avenue, Lombard Street and Washington Street, the neighborhood of Washington Hill began as a shipping center in the mid-1700s, later transforming into a mostly residential neighborhood during the mid-1800s. Named for the former Washington Medical College, the site of Edgar Allan Poe's death, the neighborhood banded together during the 1970s to fight urban decay, saving many of its historic buildings. The city's successful "shopsteading" program preserved many of the neighborhood's storefront buildings.

For reminders of how she has spent much of her 68 years, Betty Hyatt needs only to look out the front window of her first-floor co-op in the 1700 block of E. Baltimore St.Out there are the streets of Washington Hill, where the daughter of Russian immigrants played during the Depression, where the single mother raised five children, where the former church worker dreamed up ways to occupy restless neighborhood teen-agers.She has devoted the past two decades to rebuilding those streets, to shaping solid rows of meticulous, red brick homes, some with marble steps and wrought iron railings, with doorway trim and cornices painted blue and green.

State officials yesterday suspended excavation of the Metro extension to Johns Hopkins Hospital because the tunneling may be causing gasoline fumes to leak into homes and businesses.Since late January, the city Health Department has been fielding complaints about gasoline fumes in the basements in a six-block area around East Baltimore Street and Broadway in Washington Hill.That's only two blocks south of where workers are excavating the two new Metro tunnels 40 to 60 feet underground. The tunnels currently stretch about 1,000 feet from Johns Hopkins Hospital to Bond and East Baltimore streets.

Washington Hill today is the Washington Hill of Betty Hyatt's youth, but in better condition. "It was a multiethnic community" of lower- and middle-income residents, she said. "It was a mix, but mainly it was just working-class people, a lot of blue-collar, white-collar, but not the executives," said Hyatt, 76, who was born in the 1700 block of E. Fayette St., where she still lives. While the Southeast Baltimore community may be in better repair now than in the beginning of the last century, it wasn't always that way. Some houses had been turned into apartment buildings and were beginning to show signs of wear even during Hyatt's youth.

Betty Hyatt, a longtime Southeast Baltimore community activist who had been president and director of the Citizens of Washington Hill Inc., where she spent decades fighting for rehabilitated and new housing for community residents, died Wednesday of cancer at Joseph Richey Hospice. The Washington Hill resident was 83. "Betty Hyatt was a trailblazer and a gifted organizer. Had it not been for Betty, Washington Hill wouldn't be the vibrant, close-knit community it is today. Betty loved her city.

When federal Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo announced in September that Baltimore would receive another multimillion grant to rebuild an east-side housing project, he did not expect to start a fight. HUD would send $21.3 million to demolish Broadway Homes, 429 low-income units at Broadway and Orleans Street, across the street from Johns Hopkins Hospital. By next year, a Hope VI development would go up there, with about 120 townhouses, about 20 percent of them for sale.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon has said little about the theft charges leveled against her nearly a year ago. But with her trial under way, the silent void is being filled by backers offering personal and political support. Dixon's family members streamed into the downtown courtroom last week for opening statements and the testimony of the first witnesses. So did members of Maryland Minority Contractors Association Inc., who took time off from running landscaping, demolition and construction firms to watch the proceedings.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon has said little about the theft charges leveled against her nearly a year ago. But with her trial under way, the silent void is being filled by backers offering personal and political support. Dixon's family members streamed into the downtown courtroom last week for opening statements and the testimony of the first witnesses. So did members of Maryland Minority Contractors Association Inc., who took time off from running landscaping, demolition and construction firms to watch the proceedings.

Betty Hyatt, a longtime Southeast Baltimore community activist who had been president and director of the Citizens of Washington Hill Inc., where she spent decades fighting for rehabilitated and new housing for community residents, died Wednesday of cancer at Joseph Richey Hospice. The Washington Hill resident was 83. "Betty Hyatt was a trailblazer and a gifted organizer. Had it not been for Betty, Washington Hill wouldn't be the vibrant, close-knit community it is today. Betty loved her city.

Tucked between Orleans Street, Central Avenue, Lombard Street and Washington Street, the neighborhood of Washington Hill began as a shipping center in the mid-1700s, later transforming into a mostly residential neighborhood during the mid-1800s. Named for the former Washington Medical College, the site of Edgar Allan Poe's death, the neighborhood banded together during the 1970s to fight urban decay, saving many of its historic buildings. The city's successful "shopsteading" program preserved many of the neighborhood's storefront buildings.

A small child's cries awakened the Washington Hill neighborhood yesterday morning. Like many urban areas, the 100 block of N. Wolfe St. just below the Johns Hopkins medical complex is far from silent on a weekend morning in late spring. But the cries were enough to prompt a resident's call to the police. And when the police responded to the call about 9 a.m., they found why the infant was sobbing so insistently. In an alleyway behind the block's well-kept, red-brick rowhouses, they found a young girl abandoned in a stroller.

A Montgomery County company was the high bidder yesterday at a court-ordered auction of three vacant rowhouses that sparked a long-running battle between a church-related development corporation on one side and the city and an East Baltimore community group on the other. PDA LLC beat out a half-dozen other bidders with an offer of $325,000 for the three-story rowhouses in the 1400 block of E. Lombard St., just east of Corned Beef Row in the historic Washington Hill neighborhood. After the auction, Parviz Vedadi, a representative of the two-year-old real estate company, said he did not know what the properties would be used for, but that the firm was attracted by their location not far from downtown and the waterfront.

Southeast Baltimore's Washington Hill is a 28-block neighborhood with a Greenwich Village feel.The community boasts a variety of architectural styles -- Federal, Queen Anne, Italianate, Second Empire and Victorian -- dating from the 1790s to the present. Some of the community's larger homes feature elaborate mansard, slate roofs, decorative New Orleans-style wrought ironwork, intricate stained glass transoms, wood cornices and limestone or brick embellishments.Other homes, some smaller, are characterized by 2 1/2 stories -- they are known as "eyebrow houses" -- and three-story, all-brick structures with sloped or flat roofs.

When federal Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo announced in September that Baltimore would receive another multimillion grant to rebuild an east-side housing project, he did not expect to start a fight. HUD would send $21.3 million to demolish Broadway Homes, 429 low-income units at Broadway and Orleans Street, across the street from Johns Hopkins Hospital. By next year, a Hope VI development would go up there, with about 120 townhouses, about 20 percent of them for sale.

Howard B. Silverberg, a former merchant mariner and labor organizer who later became a Southeast Baltimore neighborhood activist, died Tuesday from complications of pneumonia at University of Maryland Medical Center. The Washington Hill resident was 86. A board member and officer of the Southeast Community Association for nearly 30 years, he doggedly fought expansion plans for Johns Hopkins Hospital, hazardous waste at the now-closed Monument Street Landfill and a 1970s proposal for a prison ship to be anchored in the harbor.

Declaring three badly blighted rowhouses to be a "continuing nuisance," a city judge ordered the head of a prominent East Baltimore church and the church's community development corporation yesterday to clean up the buildings within 15 days and completely renovate them within a year. In issuing the order against Bishop Franklin C. Showell, head of First Apostolic Institutional Faith Church, and Apostolic Community Development Corp., District Judge Nancy B. Shuger set strict interim deadlines for obtaining financing and beginning renovation of the properties in the historic Washington Hill neighborhood.