Irvington gets its name from founder Irving Ditty, a lawyer and former Confederate cavalry officer-turned-businessman who married into the wealthy Schwartze family and later redeveloped their estate into a railroad suburb community. In the last 150 years, Irvington has taken shape as a charming pocket in Southwest Baltimore with greenery and a diverse mix of housing—from standalone Victorians to newer multi-level apartments to porch-front rowhomes—that draws in families who tend to stay awhile.

SHOP: Close-by grocery stores include Giant and Weis off Wilkens Avenue, plus Save-a-Lot over the county line in Arbutus and Shoppers, Great Wall, and others in Catonsville. For shorter notice shopping, Frederick Avenue has a few small convenience shops and chain dollar stores.

DINE: The main drag of Frederick Avenue offers breakfast, chicken, quesadillas, and other comfort eats from Sugar Mama’s, Chinese carryout (China House), or pizza, wings, and other snacking things (Ravens Icon Pizza, Pizza Hub). A short drive west puts Atwater’s, State Fare, The Beaumont, Doozy’s Diner, Ships Cafe, and other Catonsville favorites on your menu.

PLAY: Irvington Park, abutting Beechfield Elementary/Middle School, has acres of greenery to enjoy, including a soccer field and baseball diamond. Explorers will relish the ecological regrowth and programming at Stillmeadow Peace Park, just a mile west on Frederick Avenue, or the sprawling stream valley trails of the 1,216 acre Gwynns Falls/ Leakin Park to the north.

ARTS/CULTURE: Historic draws include the 173-year-old, nearly 500-acre Loudon Park Cemetery, St. Joseph’s Monastery off Old Frederick Road, and the National Historic Register-listed Schwartze Mansion, once home to slave-owning textile industrialists who sold their estate to Ditty (who then redeveloped it into Irvington). In recent decades residents have developed heartwarming festive traditions like an annual Thanksgiving dinner and a neighbor-to neighbor Christmas basket delivery.

Neighbor Spotlight 
Dorothy Cunningham, 68, has lived in Irvington for three decades and served as president of the Irvington Community Association since 2005.

“When I first moved here, the neighbors were so generous and came and introduced themselves. I felt the warmth, I felt welcome, I felt all that. I started attending the community association meetings, then I got voted in as vice president and then as president.

“For the last 20 years, I have been developing relationships with the city agencies. You have to have a strong leader to get anything done. And you have to be consistent. I started doing community cleanups and working with the developers that want to come into my community. I do Thanksgiving dinners every year—I get donations and my family helps me a lot—but I cook all the food myself. Last year we fed 125 people.”

Neighborhood Stats
Population: 4,224; Occupancy Rate: 87 percent; Owner/Renter Split: 39 percent/ 61 percent; Median Home Purchase Price: $220,000; Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $1,902; Estimated Rent: $977; Walk Score: 67; Bike Score: 37; Transit Score: 53

A storied rowhouse community bordering Charles Village, Greenmount Avenue, and Station North, Barclay embodies some of the best elements of urban life in Baltimore with its proximity to dining, theaters, greenspaces, and more. Two- and three-story rowhomes have retained much of their historic architectural elements, and strong stewardship from community advocates combined with new waves of investment have made this feet-on-the-street neighborhood an ever-more-desirable place to call home.

Shop: The 25th Street Safeway is your most reliable bet for stocking the fridge and pantry. Charles Village’s Streets Market, the Waverly Giant, and the weekly 32nd Street Farmers Market on Saturdays are just a short commute away, and assorted corner stores can help fill in the gaps in a pinch.

Dine: This is a sweet spot for dining and nightlife. Standouts include the regally adorned Caribbean cafe and bar Mama Koko’s, gin haven Dutch Courage, the trendy wine garden Fadensonnen (plus chicken and tasty sides from Chachi’s), soul food from Terra Cafe or Taste This, Yeiboh Kitchen’s internationally influenced Southern cuisine, pupuseria Mi Comalito, award-winning mezcaleria and taqueria Clavel, the wing centric iBar (try them chef’s style), Korean BBQ at Kong Pocha, Jong Kak, or Be-One…the list goes on.

Play: Spaces to get out and move include the fenced-in green expanse of Calvert Street Park, the playground and basketball court at King and Kennedy Park next door, and the Greenmount Recreation Center to the east. Just outside Barclay’s borders are Harwood Park’s playground and urban garden to the north, as well as the sprawling 16-acre Wyman Park Dell with its winding trails, jungle gym, Ping Pong table, and the grassy green down the slope.

Arts & Culture: If you’re already over toward Wyman Park, stroll through the Baltimore Museum of Art and its outdoor sculpture garden. Closer to home are beloved, Black-art-centric spaces like Waller Gallery, Galerie Myrtis, and newcomer Aye Gallery & Altar Studio. The Station North Arts District just to the south, has plenty more galleries, arts education activities (Arts for Learning), vinyl stacks to comb through (True Vine), movie theaters (The Charles, The Parkway), and tons of creative stimulation.

Neighbor Spotlight

Yojinde Paxton, 44, resident of Barclay for the last 11 years and a member of the Greater Greenmount Community Association

“I’m originally a Baltimorean—I grew up ‘Over West’ [in West Baltimore]. After I had moved away and finished going to school, I moved back to Baltimore. I was drawn to the Barclay community, and I found this house that I now live in on E. 22nd Street. I inquired about it and they told me it was the only house where the third floor was an open floor plan in a three-story house. Sight unseen—they hadn’t even started the rehab—I just had to put in an offer.

“I had no idea that my family had roots in this area. My grandfather lived on Guilford and 21st and my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my great-aunts lived on Boone and 22nd. My grandmother actually used to wash the marble steps in the area with Ajax for 25 cents. They were renters, though. I’m actually the first one that bought a home here.”

Neighborhood Stats
Population: 2,692. Occupancy Rate: 84 percent. Owner/Renter Split: 40 percent/60 percent. Median Home Purchase Price: $265,000. Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $2,291. Estimated Rent: $1,114. Walk Score: 93. Bike Score: 79. Transit Score: 82

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore.

Straddling the city-county border, Overlea combines suburban comforts, space, and greenery with city living, including a Main Street feel on Belair Road. This community, grounded in a proud multigenerational residential heritage for many families, is conveniently just inside the Beltway and supported by MTA bus lines moving to and from White Marsh and downtown Baltimore. Housing options are wide-ranging, with regal Victorians, Cape Cods, newer mid-century builds, and more.

Shop: Belair Road has a plethora of grocery and big-box chains to choose from, including BJ’s, Weis, Giant, Lidl, Aldi, and Food Lion, among others. For hyperlocal goods, there’s the Overlea Community Association’s biweekly farmers market (June-October, now in its 10th year) with farm-grown produce, local makers, and more for sale.

Dine: Enjoy a slice of Americana (and a milkshake) at the neighborhood’s namesake Overlea Diner, local crustaceans and other seafood from Skipjack’s Crab House, or a whole pie from the no-frills, time-honored Frank’s Pizza and Pasta (of recent Dave Portnoy fame).

More international flavors within a short drive include Caribbean (Lindo), Pakistani (Tikkaville), Japanese (Arigato, Yama), and Mexican (El Salto). And don’t forget the reliable watering holes of Buck Fowler’s Tavern and the City Line Bar & Grill.

Play: Holt Park and Center for the Arts is Overlea’s recreational centerpiece with 16 acres of woods, meadows, and open space to explore via walking trails, plus an outdoor amphitheater and historic cabins. Ballfields, athletic courts, and other play spaces are within reach at surrounding parks, among them Keyes Field on Moyer Avenue and Linover, Fullerton, Belmar, and Double Rock parks.

Arts & Culture: The Holt Center hosts low-cost or free educational and arts workshops where you can learn to make Halloween fairy houses and glass jar pumpkins or nature-inspired wreaths before Christmas. The Overlea ArtsFest at CCBC-Essex has celebrated community artistry since 2016 with juried exhibitions, workshops, and more, and this month, the community college will host the Overlea ArtsFest Short Films Festival.

Neighbor Spotlight

Doris Franz-Poling, 69, an Overlea native, is a board member for the Overlea Community Association, and board trustee for the Natural History Society of Maryland, located in the neighborhood.

“My parents moved here in 1955 from Bayonne Avenue in [nearby] Raspeburg with four kids—I was the bonus baby. I was born and raised on Manor Avenue and went on and had kids and a husband. The house I live in now we bought in 1991 and it’s one street over from where I grew up.

“You know, I could be at the age where we could be looking at [a retirement community] and all of that. But it’s so heartwarming to be able to go out onto your porch and talk to your neighbors and they know you and you know them. It’s really very much a community. I just love knowing people here. They’re my neighbors.

“We love Overlea and we want people to know about it. That has been our mission for more than 15 years, [to share] that this is a great place to come and live and know your neighbors.”

Neighborhood Stats 
Population: 797. Occupancy Rate: 88 percent. Owner/Renter Split: 81 percent/19 percent. Median Home Purchase Price: $332,500. Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $2,874. Estimated Rent: $1,578. Walk Score: 44. Bike Score: 35. Transit Score: 49.

*Includes only Baltimore City. No statistics available for Baltimore County residences in Overlea. 

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore. 

Italianate and Federal-style rowhomes constructed decades before and after the Civil War largely define this historic Southwest Baltimore neighborhood’s residential fabric. Large, gracefully restored three-story dwellings line Union Square Park and surrounding streets, while blocks of smaller rowhomes—erstwhile workforce housing for the railroad and factories—emanate in all directions. Neighbors boast of their community’s sense of safety, racial and cultural diversity, and easy access to downtown and highways.

Shop: Hollins Market’s new grocery stall fills a gap for fresh produce and household staples within walking distance, or you can go fill up a shopping cart at Jumbo Fresh Supermarket at Mount Clare Junction. A one-of-one stop for fashionable streetwear is City of Gods in Hollins Market, a fixture since 2009.

Dine: Hollins Market, just a few blocks east, is Southwest Baltimore’s foodie hub with staples including Neopol Smokery, French- inspired Rooted Rotisserie, Zella’s Pizzeria, and the Back Yard across from the B&O Railroad Museum. The market building itself is getting a makeover, with new food stalls forthcoming. Other choices include Jamaican (HeyDaddy’s), seafood (Sea Pride Crab House), and assorted pizza and chicken carryouts dotting West Baltimore and Pratt streets.

Play: The 2.5-acre Union Square Park features its signature Greek Revival Pavilion and fountain at center, built atop a natural spring in the 1840s and ’50s. The park is a regular gathering space for residents (dogs included) and serves as the community’s nucleus. Other play spaces nearby include Vincent Street Park (basketball court, playground) and 117-acre Carroll Park with its nine-hole golf course, skatepark, ballfields, and more.

Arts & Culture: Union Square’s annual holiday cookie tour draws visitors into the homes of proud residents every December (not to mention a new Christmas market, added to the mix just last year). The park often hosts concerts, including weekly jazz and the monthly Sunday Sounds in the Park series from April through October. Historical attractions include, among others, celebrated journalist H.L. Mencken’s house and museum on Hollins Street and the B&O Railroad Museum.

Neighbor Spotlight 

Debra Rahl, 70, and her husband, Francis, have lived in their Union Square rowhome for 45 years. Rahl was a founding member of Union Square’s famous cookie tours.

“My husband and I were looking to buy a house in the city back in 1979. We used to just drive around, and one night we happened to drive by Union Square and we thought, ‘Well, this is pretty, what park is this?’ Our real estate agent suggested we come look at this house on Stricker Street across from the park. We came over and fell in love with it.

“It’s a really diverse community age-wise, and everyone is included in events around the neighborhood. If our neighbors see my husband and me doing something stupid, like trying to carry something heavy into the house, they’re right there to help us.

“Same way with shoveling the snow. When we first moved in, we shoveled the snow for our elderly neighbors. Now when I look out the window, I see someone shoveling snow and I just tell my husband, ‘Step back, we’re the old people now.’ Everyone looks out for each other.”

Neighborhood Stats
Population: 1,011 Occupancy Rate: 75 percent Owner/Renter Split: 37 percent/63 percent Median Home Price: $244,950 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $2,117 Estimated Rent: $1,081 Walk Score: 86 Bike Score: 57 Transit Score: 77

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning; Live Baltimore 

For McKay Jenkins, no week is complete without getting his hands in the dirt.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the local writer and educator shuffles up and down I-95 in his electric pickup to the University of Delaware, where he teaches journalism in the English Department. But on afternoons in between, he is busy planting trees at the Stillmeadow Peace Park in Southwest Baltimore or tending to the vegetables growing at his Rock Rose Food Justice Project urban farm in Woodberry.

During warm-weather months, he’ll drop off more than 100 pounds of radishes in the spring or sweet potatoes in the fall to community kitchens across the city.

At 62, Jenkins has rooted himself squarely between both worlds, using his professional writing and physical labor to become an environmental steward of the Mid-Atlantic. Though as he sees it, they’re one and the same.

“I never thought of myself as an academic scholar,” says Jenkins, who began his career as a staff reporter for newspapers like the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. “As a journalist, I was always engaged with the world and writing about it, so the transition to doing the work was a very thin line.”

A native of Yonkers, New York, Jenkins knew from early on that he wanted to write books, finding the format of those daily papers constricting. Earning his doctorate at Princeton University, he honed his narrative craft under legendary nonfiction writers like John McPhee, whose meticulous reporting style and interest in nature resonated with Jenkins—a lifelong outdoorsman, who in his spare time can often be found hiking, biking, and paddling down the Susquehanna River. Now an author himself, his books have delved into natural disasters, toxic chemicals, and genetically modified food.

All the while, he’s melded his subject-matter expertise with lived experience. Jenkins, who began working at urban farms during graduate school, has managed various environmental projects in Maryland and Delaware over the past three decades, from working with local Native American tribes on forest regeneration and garden re-establishment to steering food equity initiatives in Baltimore.

Here, in 2019, in a fallow community garden, he launched Rock Rose, where harvests get donated to community partners like Love & Cornbread and Soul Kitchen to be turned into ready-to-eat meals for city residents in need. On the side, he collaborates with other ecologists, educators, and faith-based institutions on a variety of volunteer efforts, from stream cleanups and tree plantings to the removal of invasive plants from local properties and city forests. Oftentimes, he enlists his students to lend a hand, having launched an environmental humanities minor at UD, where he’s taught since 1996.

Altogether, these efforts have helped make his writing feel more actionable—getting “your body into the work itself,” says Jenkins, while also deepening his interest in “peeling back layers” and “trying to reveal systems,” both social and environmental.

To that end, he became a certified master naturalist in 2018 after completing University of Maryland’s certification program, which educates residents on how to identify, maintain, and repair local ecosystems.

That led to his latest book, The Maryland Master Naturalist’s Handbook, an educational guide co-edited with UMD’s Joy Shindler Rafey and published in June by Johns Hopkins University Press. A collaboration with various experts, the Handbook explores the ecological wonders of the Old Line State, from Appalachia to the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore City, which can be used by researchers and laypeople alike to learn about everything from geology, soil health, native wildlife, and invasive species to citizen science, climate change, and environmental justice.

The goal is to inspire others to help spread the environmental gospel, and in turn protect the place which we call home, says Jenkins, using a fitting literary analogy to convey this point: “It’s like painting the fence in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You turn people on to this, and then everybody wants to get on board.”

LIVE
Tree-lined streets, ample suburban properties, and a mix of largely Colonial and ranch-style homes today have filled much of the former 25,000-acre Hampton historical site once owned by Maryland’s Ridgely family.

Hampton’s eponymous 235-year-old Georgian mansion (built by enslaved people) and 63 surrounding acres have endured as a National Park Service-preserved National Historic Site since 1946, a reminder of the community’s century-old roots in racial subjugation.

The community built around it, once the Ridgely property was subdivided for development after 1929, is known today as a mid-20th-century suburb prizing safety quietude, and spaciousness.

SHOP
While an entirely residential community, Hampton is only a 10-minute drive to shopping mecca Towson Town Center, plus gourmet grocery stores in downtown Towson such as Fresh Market and Whole Foods.

Roughly equidistant is the York Road Corridor, which has bountiful grocery options (Safeway, Aldi, ShopRite, Giant, and more) and almost any chain you can think of.

DINE
Take advantage of uniquely picturesque waterside dining options along Loch Raven Reservoir, like the cozy McFaul’s IronHorse Tavern and upscale Indian cuisine at Peerce’s. Beyond the many convenient chains on York Road in Timonium and Cockeysville are decades-old local favorites (Michael’s Cafe, The Peppermill) and seafood staples (Pappas, Ocean Pride, Bluestone Restaurant).

Downtown Towson also has plenty to choose from, including more chains as well as a strip of bars and favored local mainstays like Cunningham’s Cafe and Bread and Circuses Bistro.

PLAY
Hampton backs right up to Loch Raven Reservoir, a haven for fishing, boating, paddling, hiking, and biking, all against a reservoir backdrop with more than 50 miles of trails and a wealth of scenic views. Just to the east is Cromwell Valley Park with its Willow Grove Nature Education Center, orchards, trails for wandering through streams and ridges, and more to explore.

ARTS/CULTURE
The center of the community itself is its own cultural lesson, with Hampton Mansion’s historic architecture and dark history as a working plantation. For other options, look to Towson University’s Center for the Arts for live sporting events and concerts at Towson’s 5,200-seat TU Arena, as well as Goucher College for arts exhibitions, writer talks, orchestral performances, and ballet.

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT

George Jones, 63, is the president of the Hampton Improvement Association who has been a resident of Hampton since 1998.

“Before moving to Hampton, we were in Anneslie and we lived in a much smaller Cape Cod. We had just had our second child, and we were looking to get a bigger place. This house, it’s a Colonial and it’s brick, it was on a nice lot with old-growth trees—there are a ton in this neighborhood. The elementary and middle schools are good. Even though you’re right off the Beltway, it’s not in your face. For people who work downtown like I do, it’s an easy jump to get on the highway and go.

“Hampton is just a nice place to live, to bring up your family—it’s a quiet, safe neighborhood, it’s bucolic. We take walks every weekend and it’s nice to walk down the streets with no traffic and big trees and see the deer. You do have a feel for being out in nature that you don’t get in some more crowded communities.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS
Population: 5,180 Occupancy Rate: 96 percent Owner/Renter Split: 99 percent/1 percent Median Home Value: $592,700 Median Household Income: $171,969 Walk Score: 18 Transit Score: 24

—Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Walkscore.com 

LIVE
The distinctive homes within this cluster of Northeast Baltimore neighborhoods run the gamut, from Parkside’s spacious, porch-front rowhouses to Arcadia’s regal standalone bungalows, colonials, and cottages, to the attractive Tudor revival duplexes (and even some surprising Pueblo revival dwellings) of the charmingly named Beverly Hills. Families here prize the wooded escape of Herring Run Park, the increasingly lively main commercial strip in neighboring Lauraville, and proximity to several schools.

SHOP
Residents enjoy a bounty of grocery options, plus a weekly Tuesday farmers markets at Lauraville’s Harford Road community space offers local produce for sale, as well as prepared food and Baltimore-made goods. For gifts, check out Found Studio Shop, Habitual Work+Shop, and Snug Books.

DINE
Foodies and casual carryout fans alike can indulge here. Lauraville alone has Koco’s (famous for crab cakes), cozy farm-to-table stalwart Maggie’s Farm, elegant-yet-approachable Cafe Campli, Zeke’s Coffee, and more. And just up Harford Road, options include beloved Silver Queen Cafe, Micky’s Joint, Hamilton Sports Bar & Grill, Diasporan Soul, Lost in the 50s Diner, Stoko’s, and Big Bad Wolf BBQ.

PLAY
These communities sit just north of Herring Run Park, a 375-acre refuge of trails, woods, and so much more to explore along the namesake stream. Play areas abound, from Lake Montebello’s reservoir walking loop to the ballfields at Hooper Field to Hall Springs, a streamside picnicking spot with swings, a playground, and a half-basketball court.

ARTS/CULTURE
Neighborhood parties and festivals bring the community together frequently. Favorites include the Lauraville Fair in September (38 years running), Arcadia’s block parties, and the Harford Road Spooktacular come Halloween. Harford’s commercial strip also hosts monthly First Fridays at art galleries, and boasts yarn and sewing shop Domesticity, the Strand Theater in Hamilton, and music lessons at Four-Hour Day Lutherie and Hamiltone Music.

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT

Josie Rhodes, 40, is a Northeast Baltimore native. She has lived with her family in Arcadia for three years and previously owned Red Canoe Cafe in Lauraville, a family business she took over from her mother.

“Arcadia just turned 100 years old and it’s right next to the park. There are a ton of trees, these really giant oak trees, and a ton of children. Our kids are 10 and 12, and it just seems that our house ends up being the epicenter of activity. I grew up that way in Mayfield on the other side of Herring Run, with an abundance of kids running around. It’s a nice mix of young families and then families who have been in Arcadia forever. A lot of the kids I went to school with, their parents still live here.

“It’s huge being near Lauraville, to have proximity to an over-100-acre park and then walkability to farmers markets and retail and a grocery store. I feel like I’ve watched that main street struggle for so long to turn into something. And in the last 10 years, it’s really blossomed.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS
Population: 4,120 Occupancy Rate: 90 percent Owner/Renter Split: 85 percent/15 percent Median Home Purchase Price: $250,000 (Arcadia)/ $280,000 (Beverly Hills) /$120,000 (Parkside) Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $2,161 (Arcadia) / $2,420 (Beverly Hills) / $1,037 (Parkside) Estimated Rent: $2,177 (Arcadia)/ $1,375 (Beverly Hills) / $1,961 (Parkside) Walk Score: 24 Transit Score: 42

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning/Live Baltimore

LIVE
Named for its recently refreshed, Italianate-style market house dating back to 1838, Hollins Market is a shining example of the Baltimore rowhouse lifestyle, with tight-knit blocks, cozy and distinctive alley streets, and an alluring mix of walkability and a Main-Street feel. Low-scale rowhomes that were constructed densely for workers at nearby rail yards in the 19th century now house a diverse mix of residents spanning the generations, from legacy homeowners to young professionals and newer families.

SHOP
For snacks and quick essentials, small delis and convenience stores dot West Baltimore Street along the neighborhood’s northern edge. Just several blocks south of Hollins Market, the welcome arrival of Jumbo Fresh Supermarket at Mount Clare Junction this summer filled a void left by Price Rite’s departure in late 2022. The forthcoming grocery stall at the renovated market will only boost the fresh options available in the neighborhood.

DINE
Citywide-beloved spots in this enclave include Zella’s Pizzeria, a mainstay since 2007; Neopol Smokery, which arrived in the Lion Brothers Building on Hollins Street in 2021; and Rooted Rotisserie, a buzzing French-inspired eatery (the recent recipient of major TikTok acclaim) that debuted across from the market building in September 2023. Soon-to-be-completed stall renovations at the market will add options to the mix.

PLAY
Parks large and small offer choices for a quick stroll or a whole day outside, from Little Lithuania Park to the regal Union Square Park. Sprawling Carroll Park—with basketball courts, baseball and soccer fields, a skatepark, and nine-hole golf course—is just a little southwest of the neighborhood.

ARTS/CULTURE
Black Cherry Puppet Theater has been hosting live puppet shows and performances since 1980. Check out Carlton Street Stables on Sunday afternoons to learn about arabbers, the horsedrawn carriage vendors who sell fresh produce across the city. Families and train enthusiasts often flock to the historic B&O Railroad Museum on Pratt Street. Lithuanian heritage is also represented here, with Lithuanian Hall on Hollins Street providing gathering space for its community and hosting lively, late-night dance parties for all on the first Friday of every month.

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT
Howard Hughes, 53, is a 25-year resident of Hollins Market and the vice president of the Hollins Roundhouse Neighborhood Association.

“I moved here to be closer to where I worked downtown at an investment banking firm. The house that I chose is something I fell in love with as soon as I walked in. It has the all-natural wainscoting and brick-face walls on one side and open-air stairs—it was a Baltimore house. And it was a great location where I felt right at home. You’re a 20-minute walk to everything: downtown, Lexington Market, the Inner Harbor, both stadiums.

I love my area, my neighbors, the houses. I’m a DMV guy—I’m from Prince George’s County—and when I came here looking at houses, I saw each block had its own different identity, and that’s what makes Baltimore and Hollins Market really great. It’s been my home for 25 years and I wouldn’t change it.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS
Population: 1,716. Occupancy Rate: 76 percent. Owner/Renter Split: 20 percent/80 percent. Median Home Purchase Price: $195,000. Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $1,685. Estimated Rent: $1,309. Walk Score: 91. Bike Score: 80. Transit Score: 91

Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore

LIVE
Dating back to the late 1700s, this West Baltimore mill town community, nestled into the northwest corner of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park, stands alone among city neighborhoods for its distinctive geography and architecture. Dickeyville’s rows of stone and Victorian homes, 150-year-old churches, and leafy, winding roads reflect the character of an English village, though there are also newer, 20th-century dwellings up the hill. Residents here prize architectural character, a shared embrace of diversity, and a naturalistic appreciation for their own backyard.

SHOP
ShopRite of Howard Park and various stores in Catonsville and Woodlawn (Safeway, Weis, Lidl, Giant, H Mart) offer a full roster of nearby, drivable grocery options. The planned $30-million transformation of Security Square Mall (three miles west) will be a major draw.

DINE
Although there are no restaurants in Dickeyville, eateries abound nearby on Johnnycake Road and Route 40 in Catonsville—everything from breakfast (Double T Diner), Mexican (El Agave), Chinese (Chung Wah), and Vietnamese (Pho #1) to Korean barbecue (Iron Age, Bebop, Honey Pig). And there are the main-street staples of Catonsville’s Frederick Road (Atwater’s, State Fare, Catonsville Gourmet, The Beaumont).

PLAY
The 1,000-acre Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park is one big playground of off-street biking and walking trails, a nature center, and more. In this neighborhood, the eponymous Dickeyville Trail leads from the main drag of Wetheredsville Road down along the stream and into the city’s largest park. Forest Park Golf Course is also just a quarter mile up the road.

ARTS/CULTURE
Holidays are a big deal here. The annual Fourth of July celebration includes a dinner, dance, parade, golf tournament, live music, and more. For Halloween, residents deck out their homes for flocking trick-or-treaters. Wintertime brings neighbors together for caroling and their very own house-to-house progressive dinner on New Year’s Eve.

Neighbor Spotlight 
Mel Currie, 75, is a mathematician who has lived in Dickeyville with his wife, Shirley, for 32 years.

“We moved to Dickeyville in September of 1992. Our daughter was only five months old, and we had been married for just about a year and a half. It’s a beautiful place—artistic, very homey, and beautiful at the same time. Sometimes you don’t appreciate it, but then someone walks [through the neighborhood] and you talk to them and you’re appreciating it through their eyes.

“It’s a close-knit community. As you walk, you think you’re going deeper into the wilderness, but you’re actually going into the city and into the park. We’re basically living in a heavily wooded park.

“If you come into Dickeyville, it’s because you want to come here, and you have to go out the way you came in. If this neighborhood were out in Howard County, I don’t think I could afford to walk down the street, let alone to buy a house. A lot of people hear, ‘Oh, it’s in Baltimore City, I don’t want to go there,’ and many people don’t even come and look. But it’s a gem and worth taking a look at.”

Neighborhood Stats

Population: 729 Occupancy Rate: 85 percent Owner/Renter Split: 96 percent/4 percent Median Home Purchase Price: $379,000 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $3,284 Estimated Rent: $1,670 Walk Score: 24 Transit Score: 42

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore 

Much of Faith Leach’s work as Baltimore City’s chief administrative officer sounds complicated and inaccessible—reforming outdated systems, for example, or securing philanthropic donations for city programs. But it’s all too real when she’s out driving around town.

“I feel it every day,” says Leach, 40, who explains that her job is essentially to keep the city running smoothly. “[City agency] directors will tell you how they get daily texts and phone calls from me about everything from traffic signal optimization to litter and trash in roadways. These are all things that impact our daily life.”

After nearly 20 years of government service in North Carolina and a stint as deputy mayor in Washington, D.C., Leach was appointed by Mayor Brandon Scott in January 2023. Her mission of “professionalizing” city government culture and streamlining how it all functions is no small order, but she’s up to the task.

How would you describe the culture of municipal work today in Baltimore City?
Our public service members are very proud. They love their city fiercely, but the thing I’ve noticed is that for a very long time, city government and its employees were forced to use piecemeal solutions to make up for broken and antiquated systems, and we really needed to professionalize the overall management of government and strengthen our service delivery.

For example, we have a notoriously inefficient procurement system and employees had to figure out how to [purchase inventory] with a system that just frankly did not work, and that became a part of the culture.

After a year and a half, what’s your biggest victory so far?
We’ve really gotten a lot done together. As soon as I walked in the door, one of the biggest things I heard about was recycling. I pulled together a cross section of our government leaders to dig into the challenges and we developed a plan to not just return to weekly recycling, but to stabilize our Solid Waste Division. We hired almost 70 drivers and laborers, we right-sized and optimized our routes, and we set about updating our fleet, which was well out-of-date. It was this very thoughtful exercise to ensure we brought recycling back in a way that was sustainable for the city.

Do you have moments when you’re off the clock and notice, “This is where my work impacts daily life”?
One of the things that moves me the most is when I drive through a community with vacant houses and lots that haven’t been maintained, and I see young people at bus stops or walking to and from school—this is what they pass every day. That’s when it really hits home for me how important this work is. It’s those quality-of-life issues that impact the growth of our young people. It impacts our ability to grow our city and sustain and maintain our population. Those are the things that we have to get right if we want to really be the best version of ourselves as a city.

LIVE
Named for its purple spring blooms, Southwest Baltimore’s Violetville has a unique medley of mid-20th-century rowhomes and older single family dwellings, from quaint cottages to more spacious houses on generous lots. Residents here prize their community’s diversity, neighborly bonds, the recently renovated elementary/middle school, and the revitalization of 10-acre Violetville Park. This locale sits along the city-county line directly off I-95, providing easy access to BWI Airport, MARC stations, downtown, and more.

DINE
Wilkens Plaza across from nearby St. Agnes Hospital has no-frills but reliable carryout options like Friends Deli and Great Taste Chinese. Less than 10 minutes driving puts local favorites in Arbutus (Fish Head Cantina) and Catonsville (State Fare, The Beaumont, Atwater’s) within easy reach.

SHOP
Giant Food and Weis Markets are reliable grocery options just down the road off of Wilkens Avenue. Rheb’s Homemade Candies, a fourth-generation family business tucked away near St. Agnes, sells truffles, chocolates, and other handcrafted sweets.

PLAY
Violetville Park offers plentiful greenery as is and is getting an upgrade courtesy of devoted nonprofit Friends of Violetville Park and Baltimore City Recreation and Parks. Recent or pending improvements include new basketball courts, a pollinator garden, and playground renovations, and future phases call for new walking paths, tennis court renovations, and more. Carroll Park is also just down the road for golfing, baseball, basketball, the skate park, and more.

ARTS/CULTURE
Friends of Violetville Park is planning its first Spring Fling this month, with community planting events, live music, children’s games, and other fun. Close by seasonal draws include the springtime Sowebo Arts and Music Festival in Hollins Market and the Cherry Hill Arts & Music Waterfront Festival at Middle Branch Park in July.

Neighbor Spotlight
Linda Delp, 66, is a Violetville native who moved back to her childhood home in 2021 and leads a neighborhood gardening club.

“My parents moved from here from Lancaster County to start a small Mennonite church. They had four kids and they’d been wanting to get back into farming, so they started looking for a place that had some land. I grew up in Violetville and played down at the park, knew our neighbors.

“When I finished college, I moved to Los Angeles and lived there for decades. In 2021, during the pandemic, I moved right back here to the home where I grew up. I had never owned anything before, so my first homeownership experience was a 100-year-old house with an acre of land, and I came from apartment living in LA.

“Building ties with neighbors, that’s my favorite part of living here. Any city—Baltimore, LA, wherever—has communities and you can make it your home. I love being back here, I really do.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS
Population: 2,403 Occupancy Rate: 92 percent Owner/Renter Split: 65 percent/35 percent Median Home Purchase Price: $132,750 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $905 Estimated Rent: $1,300 Walk Score: 59 Transit Score: 47

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore 

In the woods next to the Stillmeadow Community Fellowship church in Southwest Baltimore, Pastor Michael Martin has another sanctuary he eagerly shares with visitors. The church leaders poses meditative questions—”What do you hear?” “What do you see?” “How does it make you feel?”—as he walks parishioners, neighbors, and other participants in Stillmeadow’s “daytime retreats” through the 10 acres of once-neglected, church-owned property overlooking busy Frederick Avenue. Here, freshly planted and fast-growing saplings, carefully carved-out walking trails, and streamside sitting areas invite each person who passes through to pause.

“Cars become white noise, and you shift from what you’re used to,” says Martin from his office inside the church. “All of a sudden, you can hear the trees and the breeze. You hear birds—and now, you hear different birds. And you can see different trees. You can tell that there are different things going on in this park. And then you get down to the water, and it’s flowing and making that cooling sound [and you think], ‘Hey, I didn’t remember I liked this. This is beautiful and I’m really affected by all of this.’”

Just a few years ago, this small woodland tract was an arboreal graveyard, strewn with dozens of ash trees leeched of life by the invasive emerald ash boring beetle, which in the late 2010s wiped out much of these woods. Rampantly growing vines and ravenously grazing deer were also playing a part, killing off other native species and the next generation of trees before they could mature and fill in the void of the dead ash grove.

But you’d never know that today, what with the hundreds of new poplar, willow, elm, and oak trees, some just two years old but already topping 30 feet, that are deepening their roots in carefully maintained, protected plots uphill from the church. Starting with an inspired vision from a parishioner and nurtured by an outpouring of collaboration and resources, the Stillmeadow woods have been given a second chance. And in just a few years, they have already become a nationally renowned proving ground for ecological resilience.

Since 2020, the U.S. Forest Service has been working with the church to use the self-proclaimed community “peace park” to research the potential of smaller-scale reforestation in city environments. They’re not only planting native and climate-adaptive tree species, but also studying soil resiliency, testing planting cycles, trialing groundcover materials, and even training new generations of urban foresters here in Baltimore, with an ultimate goal of establishing long-term networks of community caretaking.

Can small, degraded urban forests like this one regenerate in healthy, sustainable ways? And can they establish a framework for their communities to be invested in them for years to come? That’s what the dozens of people now involved in this project hope to find out. Elementary, middle, high school, and university students have poured out in droves to pitch in, clearing dead trees and invasive plants, planting saplings, laying down woodchips, maintaining trails, and more, while forging their own bonds with the park in the process.

And of course, there’s Martin, the church parishioners, and their neighbors, who are spreading the naturalistic gospel through tree giveaways, community education, and by ho- listically reconnecting with the land.

Baltimore, a city of many famous firsts, is a fitting setting for this pioneering ecological restoration. Stillmeadow is its own tale of environmental justice, natural reinvention, and community-led caretaking. It’s an instructive case study in how forestry and environmental resilience research can and should—focus more on resource-deprived communities in cities, says McKay Jenkins, a restoration volunteer and partner at Stillmeadow.

“What Baltimore is showing the rest of the country is that the environmental restoration impulse has to extend into the city,” says Jenkins, a local environmental journalism professor and author of the forthcoming The Maryland Naturalist handbook and field guide. “Cities are obviously human communities but also ecological communities, and always have been. Environmental justice is not just air pollution. It’s a holistic view of the way that communities should be able to live.”

“Stewardship” was the assignment that drew Pastor Martin from his longtime home of Los Angeles back to Baltimore in early 2017. The Michigan native and Morgan State alumnus was up to the task of bolstering the spiritual health, membership ranks, and financial standing of Stillmeadow, a 34-year- old church located in the Beechfield neighborhood south of Leakin Park. But he soon learned that the assignment was bigger than the church itself.

Nine months after his arrival, Martin first journeyed into the woods up the hill, led by one of his parishioners, Patrick Healey, who hacked a path through the brush with a machete. This had long been just “the woods” to Stillmeadow’s congregants. But Martin saw an opportunity in the winding expanse that they wandered through together.

“We kept going and we got down to the creek—I was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’ it just wouldn’t end,” he says. “I’m a city boy, but even that experience told me, this is a lot here.”

Another parishioner, Troy Burke, coined the idea for a “peace park” in those woods. The vision was a space for trauma resolution and quietude in a historically underserved, often-overlooked, majority-Black neighborhood. Why should Southwest Baltimore residents have to escape to rural areas to be in a space for solace and contemplation, wondered Martin. “We could do this in our own way here in the city limits.”

Nature set things in motion the following spring. In May 2018, Stillmeadow became a hub for food and water distribution as well as disaster response coordination following a two-day flash flood that overtook Frederick Avenue, inundating the local stream, known as Maiden’s Choice, and sending a seven-foot surge of water down the thoroughfare, dam- aging more than 140 homes. The church received a measly $250,000 in federal aid and otherwise sparse attention compared to Old Ellicott City, a wealthy white suburb also destroyed by the flooding.

But the new relationships that arose from this catastrophe would pave the way for the Peace Park project. Among the connections that Martin made in the aftermath of the flood was Morgan Grove, a research forester at the Baltimore Urban Field Office of the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in Catonsville, where he has worked since 1996. The federal agency would soon commit $90,000 over three years, plus staff time and planting materials, while also coordinating with the church on a plan for silviculture—the cultivation and management of trees—to respond to the uncovered ash tree blight.

Bonnie Sorak, director of Baltimore City and County outreach for Interfaith Partners for the Chesapeake, was another connection. The regional nonprofit helps faith-based entities—churches, synagogues, mosques—secure funding for environmental projects and programs that will improve the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Religious congregations make excellent tree-planting partners for a few reasons, starting with the fact that many religions view trees as the source of life itself, says Sorak, who is Jewish. “It resonates with people of multiple faiths…We call trees God’s cure-all.”

Places of worship also tend to have an audience receptive to participating in community-based projects. “After I started engaging with [Stillmeadow], they learned that they were part of the problem—by no means can they solve the flooding on their own, but also, if you have a large roof and a large parking lot, you’re creating stormwater runoff,” be it into the city streets or, ultimately, the Bay, says Sorak. The decimation of the ash grove in the nearby woods hadn’t helped either. A single tree can absorb hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of runoff each year, but trees left to rot can’t contribute.

“IT RESONATES WITH PEOPLE OF MULTIPLE FAITHS…WE CALL TREES GOD’S CURE-ALL.”

And then there’s the property aspect: Many churches and other such sanctuaries have significant land holdings around their buildings that provide their own opportunities for native plantings, rain gardens, and other stormwater capture and green-space projects. “With the vast amount of land that spaces of faith own and manage and steward, they can have a huge impact,” says Sorak.

Other partners joined the mix—among them Jenkins (who has recruited his own University of Delaware students as volunteers and helped obtain grant funding through the school), as well as the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Annapolis-based Nature Sacred, Baltimore Tree Trust, Blue Water Baltimore, Civic Works, the National Wildlife Federation, and various city and state agencies, to name a few. After roughly two years of planning, the church held a grand opening ceremony for Stillmeadow Peace Park in October 2020.

And so began a years-long commitment to restore a neglected urban forest into a thriving ecosystem once again, beginning with cyclical plantings of thousands of new trees, constant maintenance of invasive species and overgrowth, and phased improvements each year.

Since 2021, they’ve planted more than 2,500 trees in phases, including 970 this past fall. The park now has a community vegetable garden, a small trail network, multiple meditation areas, and various programs for visitors of all ages. Future plans call for replacing impervious surfaces, including in the parking lot down below.

The ensemble of collaborators, which Grove describes as a “jazz band,” is growing stronger each year, with new resources pouring in and momentum increasing as the trees establish themselves. The Forest Service, for its part, gave the project a big boost with a $2-million forestry grant this past December.

Even so, it’s going to take multiple generations to complete, and the many partners and volunteers know that they are in it for the long haul. And while it might not be a solution to prevent more natural disasters from occurring in the first place, a healthier forest will provide outsized ecological, community health, and other benefits, says Grove.

“To get this whole forest going is not going to solve the flooding issues. As for the flooding issues—just look up,” he says. “But this forest is going to solve a whole bunch of other problems. It’s like when you walk into the doctor’s office and you’ve got this one problem, but the doctor actually says, ‘Hey, you’ve got all these other things you need to pay attention to.’”

When most people think of the U.S. Forest Service, it’s about fighting wildfires or managing vast expanses of woods out West. The agency has 193 million acres under its purview, including 154 national forests, 20 grasslands, and myriad other public lands.

But small patches like Stillmeadow are vital areas of study for the federal agency’s nine urban field stations. Baltimore’s Urban Field Office is the oldest city research station among them, and Baltimore is actually “one of the birthplaces of urban ecology,” explains Nancy Sonti, an urban ecologist who works alongside Grove studying the social and ecological benefits of trees in cities. Since 1997, Baltimore has been the subject of the Forest Service’s multi-decade Baltimore Ecosystem Study, which examines the city and its metropolitan area as a social-ecological system.

In New York City, where Sonti began her career studying street-tree growth and human engagement with urban green spaces, “I was used to thinking all green space was good,” she says. But vacant or neglected land does not provide the same advantages as a well-tended forest.

When a space becomes overrun by invasives or loses significant canopy, its utility diminishes in many regards, such as its ability to capture greenhouse gases like carbon or foster native plant species, which better thrive in local environments and sustain a biodiversity of native wildlife. Conversely, its function improves if it’s well-loved; trees can grow to their full potential, shade out invasives, and capture more storm-water in their root systems.

A growing body of research indicates that, aside from improving air quality, providing cooling in heat-absorbing cities, and mitigating damages caused by heavy rainstorms, trees can also simply make us happier and healthier. Studies have linked urban tree canopy to lower stress levels, reduced blood pressure, and increased participation in physical activity. A 2020 study by Cornell University researchers, for example, determined that spending as little as 10 minutes in natural spaces could make an impact on the moods and heart rates of college-aged students.

Stillmeadow has drawn so much federal interest because, with the hillside’s ecosystems disrupted by deer populations and invasive plants, as well the need for community stewardship, “this is representative of many forests in the Mid-Atlantic,” says Grove. For these reasons, the Forest Service and its partners are using this land as a test ground for different silvicultural techniques in urban settings. And so far, the findings have been promising.

“We’ve seen really incredible tree growth,” says Sonti, with the researchers trialing everything from where and when to how they’re planted. “We’re learning to sort of trust that the land is resilient, and we can regenerate biodiverse forest.”

Sociologically, there have been early lessons in building community networks, too. Partnerships are bearing fruit, like the Forest Service collaboration with Turnaround Tuesday, a local work-training nonprofit that graduated an inaugural class last summer of five young adult foresters, some of whom are now employed by Baltimore Tree Trust, or volunteer engagement with students from nearby schools, such as Beechfield and North Bend Elementary/Middle, Edmondson-West-side High, Friends, Gilman, and Mount Saint Joseph.

“It’s really different than saying this project is only going to be controlled by researchers,” says Sonti. “Everyone feels invested in its success.”

Martin was initially cautious about providing a de facto federal research lab on Stillmeadow’s grounds. There’s a sordid history of researchers unethically studying minority communities, particularly Black residents, using them as guinea pigs, profiting from findings, and disappearing without sharing the benefits—most infamously in the Baltimore tale of Johns Hopkins Medicine and Henrietta Lacks. But after several years, “everybody is learning healthily,” he says.

On a soggy December morning, Jenkins and Grove are gathered in the Stillmeadow parking lot, ready to show off what this jazz band had composed so far. With them is Lenwood Hayman, a Baltimore social psychologist recently hired by the Forest Service to serve as a liaison for the community.

“This was a shitshow,” says Grove, before gushing, “It looks so beautiful!”

There, in the parking lot, he gazes up at the newly landscaped south-facing hillside next to the church, now adorned with fresh plantings atop a shallow wall of rock repurposed from the 2018 flood. Volunteers spent long days here clearing out English ivy and porcelain berry, and planting new native species such as red oak and shadbush, and their work shows.

Today, while ambling through the grounds, Jenkins and Grove light up as they reflect on each part of the journey: the more than 100 dead ash trees cut down to start anew; the five plots of young local oak, disease-resistant elms, and willow and poplar trees, slowly helping to restore the decimated canopy; the 45 cubic yards of wood chips heaved up and poured out using wheelbarrows; the small garden at the foot of the hill, which in 2021 temporarily housed 850 tree saplings in two-gallon pots; even the stubbornly reappearing Japanese honeysuckle and wineberry down near a sitting area overlooking Maiden’s Choice.

“We can’t get behind with clearing the invasives,” Grove laments. “I’m gonna be out here every Saturday.”

The logs lining the trails are solemn remembrances of the earlier generations of ash trees killed by the boring beetle. Many bear serpentine scars from the larvae. These insects—an Asian pest now infamous, loathed, and detected by foresters in 36 states, plus Washington, D.C.—burrow into the trunks, eat away at tissues beneath the bark, and lay their offspring within. Tens of millions of ash trees have fallen victim nationwide, becoming like hollowed-out “straws with sawdust in them” before they ultimately snap in two, says Jenkins. Still others remain dead in place as existing habitat at Stillmeadow, easy to spot in the tree line with their severed trunks.

Grove likens those carefully placed trail markers to fallen soldiers. It’s a similar approach to that taken on the Green Road at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, where logs from deceased trees were incorporated into a therapeutic trail network for veterans, he says. “In this community, it’s a reminder of not just soldiers—it’s also your children, your brothers, your sisters in Baltimore who have been lost.”

And with its visibility along Frederick Avenue, the restored hillside serves as its own powerful symbol as well.

“Living in Baltimore, it’s much like any other city—there’s all kinds of chaos all over,” says Hayman, a former professor at Morgan State University’s School of Community Health and Policy. “But if we’re able to see examples of folks working in chaos and still finding purpose…then hopefully when folks drive by, they not only see a renewal of a forest, but they can find a renewal in their spirits.”

“IT’S NOT JUST THE EXPERTS THAT ARE GOING TO FIX THIS. WE ALL HAVE TO REALIZE THAT WE’RE DOING THIS TOGETHER.”

And it’s working, says Martin. The church has facilitated giveaways of hundreds of trees to local residents with Blue Water Baltimore. A communal journal placed in the park is filling up with observations and reflections. People are there every week now. And multiple generations of parishioners are deepening their ties, from wide-eyed youth taking field notes to seniors reconnecting with the land via activities like daytime nature walks and nighttime bird-watching “owl prowls.”

“Everybody is remembering being 10 years old in Georgia, Mississippi, going down to the Eastern Shore every summer,” says Martin, glowing. “It feels not just nostalgic, but so natural and normal.”

In this sense, Stillmeadow has become a symbiotic project. Martin’s church benefits from an improved ecosystem that’s more resilient, biodiverse, and inviting for its entire community. The Forest Service can apply research findings from this project to similar communities in other cities. And both partners and volunteers are learning firsthand about not only the history of environmental degradation in Black urban areas like this one, but also—hopefully— how to help reverse it during a time of ever-worsening climate change.

All signs indicate that periods of prolonged drought, as well as more intense rainfall and temperature swings, are part of the new normal in the Mid Atlantic, putting more stress on communities and their native ecosystems.

“This kind of dynamic is going to happen more frequently and more chaotically in more places,” says Jenkins. “The more communities can anticipate that, they can learn how to use their various resources—scientific, but also community resources—because they’re big, complicated problems and they take a lot of voices.”

Standing on the trail overlooking Maiden’s Choice, water gushing in from heavy rains the night before, Jenkins considers the interconnected nature of so many social challenges confronting Baltimore communities: cycles of poverty, stunted economic development, and ecological neglect. Fixing these problems calls for many minds and bodies working together. In this way, this forest restoration project is no different.

“It’s not just the experts that are going to fix this,” he says. “We all have to realize that we’re doing this together.”

LIVE
This treasured enclave near downtown’s west side, formerly Baltimore’s French Quarter, is a tight-knit rowhome community situated around St. Mary’s Park, named for the historic Catholic seminary dating back to 1793. (The first of its kind in the U.S.) Most residences are small, well-preserved two- or three-story gabled rowhomes, with larger exceptions from the early-to- mid-1800s. Close proximity to Light Rail and bus lines adds convenience and walkability, and brick sidewalks, hearty street trees, and a varied cadence of rowhome façades amount to rustic urban charm.

ARTS/CULTURE
Few neighborhoods have such easy access to live theater (Arena Players, Everyman Theatre, Hippodrome Theatre at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center), art and history museums (The Walters, Maryland Center for History and Culture), and live music or other performances (Le Mondo, Current Space, Eubie Blake Cultural Center). Spiritual history is enmeshed via the central placement of St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel, a 216-year-old Neo-Gothic sanctuary, and the adjacent Mother Seton House, formerly home to the country’s first American-born Catholic saint and now serving as a museum.

SHOP
Walkable grocery options include Garden Produce at Lexington Market, Save-a-Lot in Bolton Hill, and Streets Market downtown. Various streetwear and natural goods shops have popped up around Lexington Market along Howard and Eutaw, and Benedetto Haberdashery is a trusty men’s fashion go-to on Park Avenue.

PLAY
The community tends dutifully to St. Mary’s Park, a 6.5-acre, triangular green oasis with gently sloping tree-shaded lawns, a fountain, and walking paths. The park holds space for all, from morning walkers to warm-weather picnickers to cyclists convening for the lively Baltimore Bike Party launch point. Social canines will also appreciate the nearby Howard Street Dog Park.

DINE
Trinacia, the 116-year-old Paca Street Italian deli/market, is the neighborhood’s pride and joy for sandwiches, pasta, cookies, and assorted kitchen goods and Italian delicacies. Within a 10-minute walk are dozens of stalls at Mount Vernon Marketplace and Lexington Market, coffee and artisanal teas (Dear Globe, Ceremony Coffee, Cuples Tea House), vegan ice cream (Cajou), Ethiopian (Addis, Tabor), and more on downtown’s west side and in Mount Vernon.

Neighbor Spotlight
Karen French, art conservator at The Walters Art Museum, president of the Seton Hill Association, and a neighborhood resident of 27 years.

“I love the fact that I look out of my window and I’m looking at trees. St. Mary’s Park is basically my yard. When you look in the park, it’s like a little European enclave, but then you look in the background and see the modern city. Both my husband and I could walk and cycle from the neighborhood, and that was a huge appeal.

“At the time when we had kids, very few people had children here. Now there’s a lot more people having young children. I knew the neighbors; the kids knew the neighbors. The kids went to climb the trees in St. Mary’s, and they would ride their bikes in the park. Even though we’re in the heart of the city, we have that intimacy. The neighbors are across the street, and you can keep an eye on them. We look after each other, which is a nice thing in the city that I think doesn’t always happen everywhere.”

Neighborhood Stats

Population: 1,129 Occupancy Rate: 89 percent Owner/Renter Split: 15 percent/85 percent Median Home Purchase Price: $91,000 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $621 Estimated Rent: $1,270 Walk Score: 91 Transit Score: 100

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore 

LIVE
The Southeast Baltimore enclave has maintained a strong Greek base since the 1930s, though today a broad range of residents proudly call this rowhouse community home. Amid a wave of recent change—Greektown’s population grew 31 percent during the 2010s alone—the neighborhood has embraced an influx of young families and newcomers from Latino and other non-Greek backgrounds while retaining a shared sense of safety and mutual community support.

SHOP
Residents here enjoy unusually plentiful options for Baltimore. The main drag in the 4600-4700 blocks of Eastern Avenue includes corner stores and small grocers for basic household and kitchen items. Prima Foods around the corner in Bayview has endless wholesale-priced feta cheese, imported olive oil (and olives), and other Greek specialties for sale, and close-by shopping centers (Yard 56, Canton Crossing) provide the usual chains and big box stores.

ARTS/CULTURE
While the characteristic white-and-azure flags and painted facades decorate the neighborhood year-round, major annual festivities include the lively Greek Independence Parade every March and the annual four-day St. Nicholas Greek Folk Festival in June.

PLAY
Families enjoy the beloved playground and tot lot at Lehigh and Gough (named after the late, longtime neighborhood caretaker, Gloria Hertzfelt). A drive up to the eastern border of Hopkins Bayview brings you to ball fields, basketball courts, and a wading pool at Joseph Lee Park.

DINE
No surprise Greek cuisine is the star here. Mainstays like Ikaros (founded in 1969), Samos (1977), and Zorba’s (1989) have served up pastitsio, dolmades, kebab, and countless other favorites for decades. Estiatorio Plaka, owned by Greektown’s own John Zoulis, took over the former Acropolis space this summer and has already stirred up fresh buzz. Central and South American flavors add more range to the menu in Greektown, from Mexican (Charro Negro) and Salvadoran (Pupuseria Mama Tana) to Ecuadorian (La Taverna Ecuatoriana) and Colombian (Delicious Colombian Food).

Neighbor Spotlight
Lia Dimas, Lifelong Greektown Resident

“I’m born and raised here for 42 years. I live one block away from where I grew up. My parents live across the alley. They are creatures of habit, so every morning they go out in the backyard, and they have their Greek coffee, so we always wave to them as we head off on our day.

“Growing up, Greektown was more like a blue-collar type of neighborhood, but today it’s a mix. You still have the old-school generation of Greeks living here, and some younger, newer generation of Greeks like me and my husband. But now it’s a melting pot really, we have all kinds of people living here. I don’t think there’s anything else like Baltimore’s Greektown—you won’t see a Greektown in as many parts of the U.S. that’s as residential as it is here.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS
Population: 4,757 Occupancy Rate: 89% Owner/Renter Split: 51% / 49% Median Home Purchase Price: $194,000 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $1,323 Estimated Rent: $1,580 Walk Score: 88 Transit Score: 67
—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore 

LIVE
Proximity to the harbor, a shared affinity among neighbors for preservation, and a major jumpstart in the 1970s from the city’s famous Dollar Homes revitalization program have collectively made Otterbein one of Baltimore’s most desirable and best-preserved rowhome communities. Residents here enjoy a tight-knit urban fabric, easy access to transit, and major ballparks in their own backyard.

SHOP
Walk just a few blocks south to Federal Hill for boutiques (Pandora’s Box, Brightside Boutique), used books and records (Protean), and the weekly Sunday Cross Street Farmers Market. For a grocery run, Whole Foods in Harbor East and the McHenry Row Harris Teeter are both about 10 minutes away.

ARTS/CULTURE
Take in concerts at the walkable Pier Six Pavilion and CFG Bank Arena and seasonal cultural festivities at the Inner Harbor. For a glimpse at the community’s 18th-century roots, visit Old Otterbein United Methodist Church, situated at Sharp and Conway streets for more than 250 years.

PLAY
There’s arguably no better place for an Orioles or Ravens fan, with home games at Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium practically within earshot on most blocks. Nearby Key Highway boasts premier public spaces at Rash Field and Federal Hill Park, and closer to home are the Otterbein Swim Club, playgrounds and ballfields at Solo Gibbs Park, and Wheel Park at the neighborhood’s center.

DINE
Relative newcomer Morning Mugs on Hughes Street has supplied the neighborhood’s caffeine fix since 2021. Options abound—too many to count—for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert in Federal Hill. Out on Light Street near the Inner Harbor, Ramen Utsuke offers noodle bowls, sushi, gyoza, and other traditional Japanese favorites.

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT
Steven Stegner, a 44-year resident of Otterbein who purchased and renovated his West Hill Street rowhome as part of the city’s original Dollar Homes program.

“I just think being in the city is fantastic. Before Otterbein’s Dollar House revitalization came along, I was 26 and renting and working downtown. When the program came up, I thought, wow, and put my application in. I wanted to get a house in the city, and I didn’t have a lot of money to buy one outright, and so I didn’t mind.

It was an opportunity to fix it how I wanted. As it turned out, for my whole career, I was able to walk to work as a civil engineer with the Corps of Engineers downtown. I tell people who are going to visit that everything is here—we’ve got restaurants of all imaginable types that you can walk to; the harbor and all the events; the museums aren’t far away; Fort McHenry. It’s [all] right there. I think the history and the location is just ideal.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS 
Population: 2,677 Occupancy Rate: 90 percent Owner/Renter Split: 38 percent/62 percent Median Home Purchase Price: $389,000 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $2,653 Estimated Rent: $1,720 Walk Score: 93 Transit Score: 100 —Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning, Live Baltimore 

At this point, it’s hard to imagine that an abandoned gas station once stood at 4500 Harford Road. Gone are the asphalt rubble and old auto repair shop from the site’s former life, replaced by weekly farmers markets, summertime concerts, and, most recently, a modern building and landscaped lot that invites the community to gather and play.

The $600,000-plus overhaul is crucial to bridging the commercial stretches of Hamilton and Lauraville, says Daniel Doty, executive director of Hamilton-Lauraville Main Street (HLMS), pictured above, which has worked for the last eight years to make this project possible and help transform a once high-speed and at times blighted corridor into a more walkable, inviting, thriving thoroughfare for local residents and businesses.

“It’s like a magnet,” he says, “where you have this one nice thing that demonstrates that the community does care, and it helps lead to more.”

In early June, more than 50 observers gathered to celebrate the newly unveiled renovations of “The Lot,” as it’s colloquially known. The auto shop has been transformed into a community event space, while a lively abstract mural has been painted inside the former garage, which is surrounded by a freshly mulched lot with perimeter plantings, city-installed bicycle racks, and picnic tables.

“I want to have beer gardens and concerts and movie nights and all that stuff right here,” says HLMS board member and local resident Tom Creegan, joking about the “selfish” reasons he pitched in on this project, including helping to install the new poles that will soon hold sunshades and lighting.

Even with 400-plus hours donated by volunteers, it’s taken a variety of funding to make The Lot happen—which it almost didn’t. The project began in 2015 with a plan to convert the site into a commercial kitchen incubator. The idea ultimately proved too costly, and by the time Doty took over in 2021, work remained stalled. With community input, HLMS pivoted toward developing a multi-use space with the help of the locally owned TrueBuilt Construction and landscape architect EnviroCollab.

The year ahead will bring more landscaping as well as installations of play space equipment, permanent seating, and, potentially, a stage. Meanwhile, other neighborhood momentum is underway, like recently installed bike lanes, painted crosswalks, and a 146-unit apartment building.

“This is very purposeful, deliberate, and conscious place-making,” says Doty. “It’s really fulfilling to see this project that almost died get turned around—and, I think, end up as something even better.”

The forest green, light blue, and dark red exterior of Sandy Sparks’ rowhome isn’t the flashiest on her block, but the calming palette undeniably catches the eye. In fact, nine years ago, a panel of judges agreed, awarding the Charles Village resident a $1,500 prize for “best showpiece” in the neighborhood’s now-25-year-old Painted Ladies contest.

“You really have to keep after the painting,” says Sparks of her Guilford Avenue home. “It’s important to feel good about where you live. It makes life more satisfying.”

For two decades, this house-painting contest helped reinvent the residential aesthetic of Greater Charles Village and the surrounding Abell, Old Goucher, and Harwood communities. Today, the Painted Ladies—a moniker lifted from famous blocks in San Francisco—have become iconic for North Baltimore. They’re also ubiquitous, with their image posted everywhere from local airport and subway station ads to tourism brochures, real estate mailers, and government reports.

In their St. Paul Street rowhouse, painted in primary colors since 1995, Steven and Linda Brown Rivelis, pictured above, recount how the original contest came to be. One night in 1997, the Rivelises and neighbors Dawna Cobb and Lisa Simeone were mulling how to get other residents to add new hues to their homes. (Simeone was the group’s trailblazer, having painted her 31st Street home in muted pink, blue, and white in 1988.)

“It was a time when crime was on the rise, people said they were having trouble selling their houses, and we wanted a way to excite people about living in Charles Village,” recalls Cobb, who lived on 30th Street until 2016.

During the 1990s, these rowhome blocks were a contiguous shade of muddy brown—rumor has it Bethlehem Steel employees took home the plant’s brown primer as free housepaint.

“It led to a conversation of, ‘These are old Victorian homes, so why don’t we paint them in bright Victorian colors?’” says Linda. “That’s one [way to interest people], but if you incentivize it, that does more.”

That incentive would be cash. The group cold-pitched the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based national youth charity, and convinced them to contribute a whopping $20,000. Cobb and Simeone also canvased the neighborhood, leaving photo books about San Francisco’s Painted Ladies on doorsteps to drum up interest.

It was an immediate hit. Launched in 1998, inaugural awards included the most vibrant porchfront, the most colorful flush-front facade, and the best front door, with winners receiving posters and plaques to put in their windows. By the end of 1999, some 40 houses had been painted, and by 2001, there were nearly 60, with other categories added over time, like best house trim, railings, and facelift.

A variety of donors have helped carry on the tradition, with funding hailing from the Charles Village Community Foundation and the local Goldseker Foundation. The last competition was a decade ago, and there are no current plans for another resurrection—after a quarter-century, Charles Villagers don’t need a financial incentive to adorn their houses in bright colors; it’s simply part of the neighborhood culture.

Still, the contest will get a revival of sorts this summer, with the Painted Ladies serving as the theme for the annual Charles Village Festival. The June 3-4 event will include a history booth to showcase the houses, as well as a guided walking tour.

Simeone, who’s since repainted her home a spirited medley of lavender, coral, and buttery cream with a reddish pink door, says the tradition has shown what beautification can accomplish at the neighborhood level.

“Beauty is incredibly important in people’s lives,” she says. “It’s not going to replace a decent wage or a roof over your head; it’s not going to get rid of crime. But I cannot stress enough that beauty is an essential element for humans, for communities to thrive.”

LIVE
Tucked between Johns Hopkins Hospital and Patterson Park, Butchers Hill—so named for the meat salesmen who once lived above their stores—is a timeless Southeast Baltimore rowhouse locale. Of the 1,000 or so brick houses built between 1850 and 1915, most are well preserved today, and many have undergone rehabilitations. With some exceptions, the street grid guides the hierarchy of sizes and scales, with grand, three-bay-wide Victorian rowhomes on east-west streets, two-to-three-story houses on smaller lots along north-south streets, and interspersed blocks of cozy alley homes.

ARTS/CULTURE
Catch rotating exhibitions at MaxGallery, artist Maxine Taylor’s live-work space converted from an old arabber stable, and endless concerts and cultural events at Patterson Park and the Creative Alliance. Butchers Hill also has its own bi-annual flea market and craft fair every spring and fall and, of course, don’t miss the Great Halloween Lantern Parade & Festival every October.

PLAY
Patterson Park’s northwest corner, with its iconic Pagoda, borders the neighborhood’s eastern side, providing regal views and a gateway to 133 acres of the so-called “best backyard in Baltimore.” Family-friendly areas within the neighborhood include Castle St. Park playground on Fairmount Avenue and Charles M. Halcott Square’s sitting garden with picnic tables, trees, bursts of springtime blooms, and community gathering space.

DINE
There’s plenty here to please everyone, from barflies to foodies. Within Butchers Hill, there’s Argentinian fare (La Barrita), house-made pastas (Marta), and everything from breakfast to pierogies (Charmed Kitchen). In Upper Fells, just around the corner, are chef Sean Guy’s beloved seafood specialties (Water for Chocolate), burgers and cocktails (Bar 1801), beers on tap in a regal old church (Ministry of Brewing), and reliable dives (Mary’s Tavern, Butts and Betty’s).

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT
Martha Simons, mixed-media artist and Butchers Hill resident of 30 years

“What drew me here was these really big, beautiful old houses that were very close to Fells Point without having all of the shenanigans that go on down there, and these beautiful views of downtown and the harbor and near Patterson Park. It just seemed like the perfect place. It has changed quite a bit. Just about all the homes now are rehabbed.

 

Butchers Hill is the only neighborhood I’ve lived in in Baltimore. The only other city I’ve ever lived in is Philadelphia, and this is just such more of a small-town feel than Philly ever was. It’s very much a city of neighborhoods, where you feel like it’s your own little village in the city. I love the walkability. I’m retired, but I use my car like once a week now, because I can walk pretty much anywhere I need to go.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS

Population: 2,122 Occupancy Rate: 89% Owner/Renter Split: 51 percent / 49 percent Median Home Purchase Price: $262,950 Estimated Rent: $1,595 Estimated Mortgage: $1,794

*Sources: Live Baltimore, The Baltimore Department of Planning

From his desk inside Port Covington’s City Garage, ecologist Brett Berkley often feels the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River luring him and his co-workers out for a lunchtime walk. But while his GreenVest team works daily in support of this South Baltimore shoreline, their offices within a stone’s throw of its changing tides, that doesn’t always translate to as much facetime with the water as they’d like.

Even on a cold winter day in this otherwise visibly polluted, post-industrial landscape—interstate ramps, light and heavy rail lines, BRESCO’s towering waste incinerator, the muted drum of traffic rumbling across the Hanover Street Bridge—a brief escape outside can be quite restorative.

Despite its ailing state, the Middle Branch shoreline presents an alluring view into the natural landscape amidst the pulse of a busy city: squawks of gulls, gentle laps of waves, glimpses of ducks floating by or nesting osprey, an occasional blue heron gingerly plodding the surrounding grasses and sands as it fishes shallow waters.

“It’s very cathartic,” says Berkley, an ecologist and senior vice president for GreenVest, a Bowie-headquartered consulting company specializing in ecological resilience, restoration, and planning. “And that’s the whole point of what we’re trying to achieve here.”

With a full supply of reusable, dredged up muck from the Port of Baltimore, Berkley and a team of engineers, scientists, and other technical experts and contractors will spend the next few years restoring dozens of acres of depleted shoreline along this long neglected waterfront.

The city, partnering with the nonprofit Parks & People Foundation and the South Baltimore Gateway Partnership (SBGP), the casino revenue-funded economic development authority for this area, has tapped this technical team to help ignite a climate-resilience and biodiversity renaissance, with ripple effects for surrounding communities, too.

Their collective Middle Branch Resiliency Initiative (MBRI) looks to eventually add more than 50 acres of new wetlands, boosting the waterfront’s ability to mitigate increasingly frequent flooding and creating transformative new habitat for wildlife. And it will occur just offshore from some of the city’s most under resourced neighborhoods, which have grown more and more cut off from the rest of Baltimore by industry and infrastructure.

The MBRI is one of many layers in the grand vision of the Reimagine Middle Branch Master Plan, developed starting in 2019 and formally approved by the city’s Planning Commission in February. Led by renowned New York landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, of the High Line fame, the plan’s better-known elements include 11 miles of shoreline trails, new parks, boat launches, fishing piers, and a since-completed recreation center for its neighboring Cherry Hill community, to name a few.

Neighbors are keenly aware of what has been lost to the shoreline’s long-term degradation, says Ethan Abbott, SBGP’s transformational projects manager. It’s a painful reality to gaze upon a riverfront underperforming, with littered beaches, spotty grasses, and diminished habitat for aquatic life.

“I think knowing that you have natural resources that are not of the quality that they should be, and what they deserve to be and that you deserve to have as a community, it’s very demoralizing to see,” he says.

But by prioritizing the plan’s wetlands restoration, Baltimore is at the forefront of cities pursuing an ever-elusive vision for a sustainable, equitable, and naturalistic waterfront. Re-establishing these areas just offshore—some 90 percent of which have been lost to erosion, dredging, and rising sea levels over the last 150 years—could transform the Patapsco as we know it, resulting in a rare influx of natural capital.

Waterfront edges today are generally considered yet-to-be developed sites for offices, residences, commerce, or even public parks. The MBRI has a different plan, aiming to instead help communities to reconvene with the water’s edge. The vision of the MBRI, and Reimagine Middle Branch more broadly, is to restore this waterfront with immediate benefits for neighborhoods, and without displacing those already living there.

“Cities across America have rediscovered their waterfronts and realized that, in order to be competitive in the 21st century, they need to be able to provide high-quality environmental and recreational amenities,” says Brad Rogers, SBGP’s executive director. “At the same time, there are cities that face resiliency challenges, and there are cities struggling with longstanding issues of environmental justice and racial justice. I would say we’re the only place where all three of those are being layered on at the scale we’re talking about.”

Few spots are better candidates for this work than the unremarkably titled “Site 5A,” just northeast of Hanover Street and Frankfurst Avenue in South Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood.

 

BALTIMORE IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF CITIES PURSUING SUSTAINABLE, EQUITABLE, AND NATURALISTIC WATERFRONTS.

 

From her office on Hanover Street, Meredith Chaiken has seen the fallout of this depleted, marshy area becoming increasingly inundated during heavy rains and tidal overflows.

“That space is shared by a lot of people and it floods all the time, so it takes a tricky situation and makes it worse,” says Chaiken, executive director for the Greater Baybrook Alliance, a nonprofit community development corporation serving Brooklyn, Brooklyn Park, and Curtis Bay.

Soon, though, it will be transformed. In October, federal, state, and local officials announced nearly $48 million in funding, including almost $32 million from a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant, to fund the MBRI’s first of multiple phases. It starts with Site 5A, followed by three areas outside MedStar Harbor Hospital in Cherry Hill, and a fifth fronting BGE’s Spring Gardens energy facility in Westport.

The design for Site 5A, created by GreenVest and Baltimore-based engineering firms BioHabitats and Moffatt & Nichol, is up to 10 acres, incorporating a medley of habitats—low and high marshes, subtidal zones, mud flats, “scrub shrub” (or woody vegetation) areas, clusters of taller trees—all surrounded by forested edges and collectively rising up in elevation toward the road. The marsh’s base will be rebuilt with recycled materials, composed largely of sediment stored in the Maryland Port Administration’s Masonville Cove and Cox Creek containment facilities.

Berkley explains that this dredge from the port channels, after being tested for toxic contaminants, will be reused as a foundational building block for the aquatic habitat restoration, providing a base for the wetlands. That base will then be capped by sand and topsoil to host plants, grasses, and trees.

Construction is set to start this fall; GreenVest and SBGP are still finalizing permits and designs with city, state, and federal input, while stockpiling dredge, plantings, and other materials. But the process is moving along, Berkley says excitedly. The first wetland will take an estimated nine to 12 months to install, with others expected to follow within the next half-decade.

At the neighborhood level, amid growing anticipation, some residents have wisely asked how to keep these marshes from withering away like others before them, says SBGP’s Abbott. Fortunately, “we are working with our design team to make sure that those elements are already taken care of,” he says.

Berkley explains that the new wetlands incorporate a “custom-vented design,” likening its layout to “dendritic connections like the branches of a tree.” Once in place, this frame will promote gradual accumulation of more sediment, known as accretion, so that it won’t simply wash away. It also allows the marsh to be “self-organizing,” he says: Tides can move through freely, yet it will be stable enough to weather coastal storm surges.

The promised benefits extend beyond keeping water levels low along a flood-prone shoreline. Sediment-depleted habitats not only fail to mitigate or clean polluted water; they also fail to sustain robust ecosystems. Conversely, more robust wetlands and healthier waters on the Patapsco can support everything from micro-organisms to insects, fish, and birds of prey—something representative of “the historic habitat continuum,” Berkley says. “We’re trying to reset the system from the base of the food chain up.”

He visualizes a swell in biodiversity: growing numbers of winged predators—cormorants, green and great blue herons, eagles, egrets—feeding on schools of hickory shad and white perch returning to the Middle Branch from other stems of the Patapsco out in Howard or Carroll counties. (Another positive byproduct: fewer “fish kills,” caused by pollution and effectively low water oxygen—a regular occurrence around the harbor.)

Habitat restoration has positive implications for the humans living nearby, too, notes Zeevelle Nottingham-Lemon, executive director of the neighborhood revitalization nonprofit Cherry Hill Strong. Generations of Baltimoreans have grown used to physical separation from the water, littering without grasping the implications for waterways, and not observing functional ecosystems at work.

“It’s a connection that has to be made,” says Nottingham-Lemon. “I think one of the important things is that this doesn’t just happen around Cherry Hill and around these neighborhoods, and also that people understand why this is happening and what we can do. Understanding the things that we—the big ‘we’—have done to degrade our environment, and the fact that we have gotten to a point with technology and science that we can restore some of that—and some of that natural balance of the world around us to thrive—is huge.”

The history of local shoreline debasement dates back some 300 years here. In 1723, English merchant John Moale began mining his property at the mouth of the Gwynns Falls for iron ore while cutting down trees to power an industrial furnace. The land was also tapped for clay used to build Baltimore’s iconic rowhouses. Industry had yet to fully define the waterfront at the time of Lewis Brantz’s 1819 “Survey of the River Patapsco and part of Chesapeake Bay,” which depicts a soft shoreline with a generous delta and broader stems of the Patapsco River flowing in.

But a marked shift was underway by the mid-19th century, with the 1855 debut of a gas production plant at Spring Gardens near Westport, followed by the Carr-Lowrey Glass Company factory’s arrival next door in 1889, and a coal-burning power station in the early 1900s.

A network of rail tracks grew along the water’s edge, and on the peninsula across the water, the former War of 1812 stronghold of Fort Covington was redeveloped with mills, a distillery, and a wharf. The Western Maryland Railway would transform this area into a sprawling railroad terminal with much-desired water access, leveling the land and dredging up hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of shoreline sediment in the process. The Great Fire of 1904 also left its mark on the landscape, as journalist Dan Fesperman reported in The Sun nearly a century later: “Cleanup crews shoved much of the rubble right into the Middle Branch, filling marshes and narrowing the shoreline.”

By the 1930s, recreational access that Baltimoreans had enjoyed at famous sites like the Ferry Bar, a former beach and resort with boardwalks and piers, was significantly diminished. A 1932 aerial photograph depicts the Middle Branch more as we see it today: industry clusters in Westport and Brooklyn, the circa-1916 Hanover Street Bridge in full view, a since-abandoned freight swing bridge in active use between Port Covington and Westport, and a harder, if still-forested edge at what today is Middle Branch Park. Cherry Hill and Brooklyn are seen bordered to the east and west, respectively, by Reedbird Landfill, which was used as a city waste-dumping ground for the better part of a century.

 

“WE’RE TRYING TO RESET THE SYSTEM FROM THE BASE OF THE FOOD CHAIN UP.”

 

In the 1940s and 1950s, the city set aside 275 acres near the landfill as federal public housing for returning Black World War II and Korean War veterans, in the process founding Cherry Hill as Baltimore’s first planned Black suburb. Despite their proximity to the water, residents here and in neighboring communities like Curtis Bay and Brooklyn grew only more cut off as new industry, roadways, and rail tracks buffered the shoreline over the 20th century.

The Reimagine Middle Branch planners studying this history find it mirrors a familiar arc of urban waterfront development. There’s industrialization, where “you go from soft, green edges to bulkheads and factories and ports,” says Megan Born, a landscape architect and urban designer with James Corner Field Operations. Industry relocates elsewhere, usually to deeper water, and facilities become obsolete. Then, around the late 20th century, “you see the decline where we move from an industrial city to a post-industrial city.”

Amidst this arc, highway construction proceeds. On the Middle Branch, it occurred at a large scale, with new I-95 interchanges and flyovers carving up the waterfront. “The city, state, and federal highway system were prioritizing moving suburban folks through at the cost of the people in South Baltimore,” Born says.

Residents bear the burden of this physical separation and, ironically, quality-of-life pitfalls stemming from shoreline’s depletion, like flooding and resulting mold at home. Communities have periodically been promised change—the city’s earlier adopted Middle Branch Master Plan from 2007, for example, focused on restoring habitats, creating more recreation spaces, improving transportation, and more—and Rogers concedes that, fairly, neighbors have planning fatigue from unmet promises.

But there have been noticeable changes since Reimagine Middle Branch’s design process began in 2019. As new amenities materialize—the state-of-the-art, $23-million recreation center that opened in Cherry Hill last year, for example—there’s more cause to be hopeful.

“Actually starting to see projects that are coming to fruition is really exciting to [residents],” says Odessa Phillip of Assedo Consulting, a public outreach partner for Reimagine Middle Branch. “That’s what’s going to bring them back to the waterfront, and it’s what’s going to expose them to something they don’t know about with the ecology and the way that it serves them.”

Nottingham-Lemon has also seen an “intentional recognition” among partners to rebuild trust with strong public engagement. Examples include the Mobile Project Hub, which brought seven pop-up informal engagement sessions to surrounding neighborhoods and events last spring; Splash!, which drew hundreds out to paddle, row, and fish at Middle Branch Park in September 2021; Voices of the Middle Branch, a social media video interview series; and a partnership with the Environmental Justice Journalism Institute, which is producing a documentary and also putting young people to work with scientific data collection on water quality at a marina near Westport.

Arguably more important are ongoing check-ins with communities as the project advances. It can be difficult to include everyone—work and technology are real barriers for many residents—but the leaders of Reimagine Middle Branch have “seeded a system” of public involvement, says Nottingham-Lemon.

“What I think is really important is that they’ve taken an important historical scan and understand the need for leveraging this type of investment in South Baltimore.”

A walk along the Captain’s Trail at Masonville Cove offers a glimpse of the MBRI’s innate promise. The wildlife refuge, created by the Maryland Port Administration a mile west of Brooklyn, abruptly whisks visitors away from Frankfurst Avenue’s heavy industry to organic shoreline. A few birders are out walking, binoculars in tow, on a brisk February Saturday.

The Cove’s pair of nesting bald eagles—Baltimore’s first-ever known coupling—are perched on a branch about 50 yards away, overseeing it all, and there’s a gentle breeze in the air. The marsh’s pungent, muddy, brackish scent gets stronger toward the water, and suddenly you’re standing on soft Patapsco beachfront with a panorama of the Outer Harbor.

For most of the last century, this was a dumping ground for building debris, decrepit ships, scrap metal, timber, and more, but a cleanup effort and port-led restoration has revived it since the early 2000s. Taking up some 50 acres sandwiched among the port’s Fairfield Terminal, a CSX heavy-rail yard, and Vulcan Materials’ construction aggregates factory, Masonville Cove today is the city’s de facto proof-of-concept for urban wetlands restoration.

Baltimore, much like its Dutch sister city of Rotterdam, has been honing its craft with ecological restoration and sediment reuse for decades, from the filling-in of Hart-Miller Island State Park near Middle River beginning in the late 1970s, to the reconstruction of Poplar Island on the Eastern Shore starting in 1998, to the large-scale cleanup of Masonville Cove, next door to the port’s dredge containment facility.

The Middle Branch Resiliency Initiative is the next evolution, leaders say, in integrating scalable restoration with neighborhood life. Its success will be measured not merely in how it looks, mitigates flooding, or attracts new wildlife, but also in its ability to establish renewed human-nature connectivity.

“We should be able to see the Patapsco, feeling the presence of the water more than what we’re able to right now,” says Chaiken, of the Greater Baybrook Alliance. “The water should be a tremendous resource for the community, and it should be a piece of life in this community. The restoration and improvement of that green space, I hope it touches everybody.”

LIVE
Situated on Liberty Heights Avenue near the city line, Howard Park offers a wide array of largely stand-alone homes, from two-bedroom Cape Cods to spacious, three-story woodframe houses. Though just blocks from the Metro Subway, tree-lined streets and surrounding woods offer an air of suburban quietude.

SHOP
The 68,000-square-foot Howard Park ShopRite, Baltimore’s largest grocery store, has been a retail anchor in the community since its much-hyped debut in 2014, after considerable city incentives and lobbying. A neighborhood farmers’ market will return to the mix this year.

ARTS/CULTURE
Lively new public art outside the historic Ambassador Theater is a harbinger of great things to come. Minneapolis nonprofit Artspace is steering a multi-year, $20-million redo of the 1936 Art Deco landmark into a live performance theater with studios, galleries, and more.

PLAY
Wander Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park for winding trails and miniature trains, or hit the links (or the driving range) at Forest Park Golf Course. Lake Ashburton’s soon-to-be-restored loop and sprawling Druid Hill Park are just a few minutes’ drive east

DINE
Howard Park’s main strip on Liberty Heights includes Caribbean Heat and a handful of carryouts (Man Cheng, Rock Seafood, Fred’s). Get your summertime crab feast supplies up the road at United Crab & Seafood. A quick trip up to Pikesville’s Reisterstown Road brings Jewish delis and lots of options—everything from chains to specialty eateries for charbroiled chicken, Mexican, sushi, and more.

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT
Christopher Ervin, a Howard Park resident of 20 years and chairman of the Howard Park Civic Association

“I’m originally from New York City. I’ve been to San Francisco, Berlin—I’ve been to different places, and communities usually have a fairly uniform construct. The backs of the houses, the sizes of the yards, the roof construction is all the same—there’s uniformity there. And for some reason, we don’t have that uniformity. It seems to be a feature that gives us a uniqueness that works for us. You could start a family and stay here. You don’t need to move away to get a bigger house or, as you get older, there are smaller houses when you want to scale down. It really is about the homes. There’s a wide variety of beautiful homes in and throughout this community.”

Neighborhood Stats:
Population: 5,057; Occupancy Rate: 88 percent; Owner/Renter Split: 65/35 percent; Median Home Purchase Price: $177,000; Estimated Rent: $1,370 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $1,207; Median Household Income*: $50,992

*Includes Howard Park and West Arlington neighborhoods. Source: Live Baltimore, Baltimore Department of Planning, Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance 

When Tameeka Randall arrives home after a long day making Southern food at her family’s downtown restaurant, Next Phaze Cafe, she’d rather eat out than cook an entire meal. But the options are limited when it comes to sit-down restaurants in Southwest and West Baltimore, says Randall, who lives near Edmondson Village and co-runs Next Phaze with her father, Tony, pictured: “There’s really not many places to eat at all.”

But early next year, the father-daughter duo and a roster of six other food businesses will help address that dining dearth with the launch of The Mill on North, a 7,800-square-foot food hall at Walbrook Mill at West North and Braddish avenues.

Ground broke on the project in June and construction is projected to finish in the spring, with development partners including Coppin Heights Community Development Corporation, Timonium’s Osprey Property Co., and the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services. So far, the partnership has enjoyed success with its $25-million mixed-use transformation of the former Walbrook Mill & Lumber Co. yard, which opened in 2020.

This next phase, which will cost an additional $3.9 million, adds the new food-centric Mill on North to cater to the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as an eager audience of students and staff from Coppin State University next door. Each component adds momentum in breathing life into a long-underinvested section at the western end of North Avenue, says Dan Ellis, executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services.

“Does building a food hall solve the problems of West Baltimore? No,” says Ellis. “But if you build the housing and the food hall and you do economic development, each of these investments cumulatively makes an impact.”

Plans call for incorporating many of the classic elements—cafeteria-style seating and a sleek aesthetic, for instance—found in other popular local food halls like Remington’s R. House or the Mount Vernon Marketplace downtown. But Gary Rodwell, executive director of Coppin Heights CDC, said The Mill on North will stand apart with its all-Black vendor lineup, as well as by catering directly to both westside neighborhoods and one of the city’s two prized historically Black colleges.

“You’re going to have the intersection of the college community, with Coppin State University students and faculty being a part of it; you’re going to have a unique food hall situated in an African-American community; and you’re going to have a neighborhood institution that has the flavor of the [project’s] leadership and of West North Avenue in it,” says Rodwell. “It’s not replicated throughout Baltimore City, those three dynamics.”

The Mill on North’s vendor roster includes Next Phaze’s soul food, a baked potato project called Dancing Potatoes, a burger joint called The Blissful Burger Bar, sandwich purveyor D&B Deli, baked confections from Cupsey Cakesy, seafood specialist Dream St. Cuisine, and Caribbean-style brunch from 3 Chefs, plus a yet-to-be-named full-service bar.

April Richardson, a management consultant who formerly operated Savor food hall in Prince George’s County, says it’s been a careful process to assemble vendors through community outreach, noting that all seven tenants have some connection to West Baltimore.

“It wasn’t a short vetting process,” she says. “We met with them, interviewed them, tasted their food, listened to their story to figure out if they were a fit.”

After encountering years of delays, all parties are anxious to see the food hall launch in 2023. Randall’s father, Tony, emphasized the importance of working together to serve Greater Mondawmin and draw more visitors to the neighborhood.

“I’m looking forward to not just offering our food but being part of something to improve the economic state of the community,” he says. “This project offers that, and we’re just blessed to be a part of it.”

LIVE

Originally fashioned as a summer retreat for Baltimoreans, this Baltimore County village has retained much of its residential Victorian charm, thanks to diligent and dedicated preservation. Glyndon is filled with single-family homes dating from the late 19th and early 20th century, mainly two-and-a-half-story cottage houses with generous front porches, as well as shingle-style dwellings with sweeping roofs.

PLAY

Glyndon Swim Club has been a local summertime tradition since 1931. Glyndon Station Park, situated just behind the post office, is an ideal picnic spot with a playground for the kiddos.

SHOP

Peruse women’s apparel and accessories (Boxwood Collection) and Maryland-made specialty gifts (Black-Eyed Susan) across from Glyndon Square, the central shopping center. Main Street in historic Reisterstown has plenty to explore, from consignment shopping (The Elephant’s Trunk) to antiques (The Things You Love) to comics (Cards, Comics and Collectibles) and more.

ARTS/CULTURE

Step back in time with a visit to Emory Grove, a 154-year-old former Methodist camp that grew into a spiritual retreat, with a stately hotel and surrounding cottages for guests. For a taste of community theater nearby, there’s Reisterstown’s Open Space Arts, which offers regular productions as well as classes for all ages. 

DINE

Glyndon Square is the community’s dining go-to. Grab an Italian cold cut or assorted prepared foods (cold or hot) while doing your shopping at Santoni’s Market. For sit-down dining, head next door to Glyndon Grill for a menu of American classics and seafood dishes.

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT
Nicole Crumpler, who lives in Glyndon with her partner and their three children. Crumpler is vice president of Historic Glyndon, Inc. and owns The Salon on Main.

“It’s kind of this amazing, protected little pocket…but it’s accessible to city life. If you want to go downtown, you can be there in 30 minutes. But we also have an acre and a half of yard for our kids to run around. We’ve thought about, ‘Do we want to stay in Baltimore County?’—looking at schools and that sort of thing—and I truly don’t think I could leave the neighborhood just because of the sense of community we have here. I genuinely feel that way. The neighbors are amazing. The kids who grew up together here are now raising their families here. There are three generations of some families living here in Glyndon.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS (21071)

Population: 454 Median Age: 50.2 Households: 157; Owner/Renter Split (Households): 89 percent/11 percent; Median Value*: $345,700;  Median Monthly Mortgage: $1,394;

*Owner-Occupied Homes. Sources: U.S. Census, American Community Survey

LIVE

Few, if any, Baltimore neighborhoods boast as much residential architectural diversity as Reservoir Hill, and none are situated so close to a crown jewel park or multiple transit options. Beyond its essential core of late 19th- and early 20th-century rowhomes, Reservoir Hill features stand-alone mansions, porch front rowhouses, well-preserved Queen Anne-style rowhouses with turrets, and turn-of-the-century high-rise apartments.

ARTS/CULTURE

Take a walking tour and survey the many eras and styles of local architecture, as well as historic sanctuaries like Beth Am synagogue, and visit Dovecote Cafe for local art and a robust calendar of cultural events.

PLAY

Druid Hill Park’s bountiful 745 acres offer walking and bike trails, a pool, basketball and tennis courts, disc golf, the Rawlings Conservatory, the Maryland Zoo and more. The treasured Whitelock Community Farm has an inviting green space and small amphitheater across the street.

SHOP

The neighborhood has lacked a proper commercial stretch since the urban renewal-era demolition of a once-thriving shopping corridor, but for the bare essentials or a snack, there are a few corner stores (Luckies, Linden Food Market). The future is promising, with plans for a grocery store and more retail in the eventual redevelopment of Madison Park North.

DINE

Dovecote Cafe is the standout, providing a community-forward spot for coffee drinks, baked goods, brunch, and lunch fare.

NEIGHBOR SPOTLIGHT
Catalina Byrd, a Reservoir Hill resident who has lived in the neighborhood on and off for more than 25 years.

“My parents lived here when I was born. My first apartment when I was out of high school was on Eutaw Place. I never really go too far from home. For the last 50 years, we’ve seen the population change and migrate in a way, but you still have this wonderful nostalgic feel, like brownstones in Brooklyn. It’s historic architecture that’s unparalleled anywhere else in the city. There are definitely some stakeholders that have helped in maintaining the neighborhood, but the architecture, the community itself, still stands regardless of who’s in it because of the fact that they’re never gonna let a neighborhood this beautiful and this historic crumble. They will always be able to incentivize someone coming or someone staying or someone coming to do development in such a place. But I think, as with any community in Baltimore, it’s always the people. It comes down to the people.”

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS

Estimated rent: $1,120; Estimated monthly mortgage: $1,330; Median home purchase price: $195,500; Owner/renter split: 24 percent/76 percent; Transit score: 81; Bike score: 80

Sources: Live Baltimore and Baltimore Dept of Planning 

LIVE

This area is located on former Susquehannock Native American land and is named for Col. Charles Ridgely II, a plantation owner whose estate occupied part of the neighborhood during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The neighborhood’s first rowhouses were built in the early 1800s.

SHOP

Walk up to University Square Park for the weekly farmers’ market (May-November, Tuesdays 10 a.m.- 2:30 p.m.), or head across MLK to Pigtown Main Street to shop for books, clothes, gourmet groceries, and more.

ARTS/CULTURE

Soak in some Baltimore baseball lore at the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum. Several blocks north and east bring you to Edgar Allan Poe’s Grave, the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, and theater and entertainment options, including Everyman and The Hippodrome.

PLAY

Catch a ballgame at Camden Yards or M&T Bank Stadium, or head down to the Inner Harbor for the views and buzz. For open space, stroll through Conway Street Park or take the kids to the playground at Penn & Melvin Street Park.

DINE

The Corner Bistro & Wine Bar is a local favorite for good burgers and wine. Also try beloved pub grub options at Pickles Pub and Sliders Bar & Grille, and reliable American and Greek carryout from Penn & Pratt Restaurant, there since 1975.

“I moved here in 2000 because I owned a hair salon in downtown Baltimore, and I wanted to be able to walk to work. I was looking at other neighborhoods that were within walking distance, and the prices were just too expensive at the time. Ridgely’s was just very affordable and it’s very friendly.

As soon as I moved in, my neighbor across the alley came and introduced herself, the next-door neighbors introduced themselves. In my old neighborhood, where I lived for nine years, I don’t think I could tell you what my neighbors’ names were. I started going to baseball games with my Ridgley’s neighbors and I’ve had season tickets since I moved in. Even when the Orioles are playing terribly, it’s an event for our neighborhood. Instead of going to a neighborhood bar or going out someplace, we’re going to a baseball game.”

—Susan Clayton, a Ridgely’s Delight resident of 22 years and the owner of running apparel company WhitePaws RunMitts.

Neighborhood Stats

Estimated rent: $1,600
Estimated monthly mortgage: $1,947
Median home purchase price: $270,000
Median household income: $69,485
Owner/renter split: 22 percent/78 percent

Sources: Live Baltimore and the Baltimore Department of Planning

Back when he was nine years old growing up in Park Heights, Brandon Scott recalls, he had a friend who was ill-prepared for the arrival of winter. Money was tight, and his friend’s family couldn’t afford to buy him a new coat at the time, so the Scott family gave him an extra one out of their closet. That small gift, a piece of outerwear worth maybe $100, helped fill a need—keeping his friend warm—and also gave his family a bit of extra wiggle room in their winter budget. 

As Mayor Scott sees it, the ethos behind Baltimore’s new $5.5 million guaranteed income pilot program isn’t so different: it’s money to fill in the gaps and cover basic necessities that many families might take for granted. Applications open May 2, and starting this summer, the city will be giving $1,000 per month to 200 parents or guardians ages 18 to 24 who earn up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line, which is $27,750 for a family of four. The money will come with no strings attached, meaning parents and guardians can spend it as they see fit for the next two years.  

For a given family, that money could go toward making rent and staving off an eviction, or be used to buy a car instead of having to ride the bus for multiple hours a day to get to work, Scott predicted in March. “This is an opportunity to help those families, those children, to have a better life.”

Baltimore will be the latest city to test whether modestly padding an insufficient social safety net can demonstrably boost quality of life for families in need. Last February, Scott joined Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI), a growing coalition of city leaders committed to providing direct cash payments as a base income floor for citizens in need. MGI now counts 62 member city mayors and administrators, and 28 cities have launched or completed pilot programs tailored to a range of recipients. (Guaranteed income, it’s worth noting, is narrower in scope than universal basic income, which proposes giving cash to all adults rather than to a targeted audience.) 

Critics have long derided such cash payments as misguided handouts that could suppress recipients’ commitment to keep working. But early research has shown promising results that say otherwise. 

Stockton, California—where a pioneering, two-year, $500-per-month pilot program recently finished—found participating families had more full-time employment than before the program began and, compared to non-recipient families, better financial stability and overall improved moods. Early results out of tiny Hudson, New York, which is also giving $500 per month to families, showed a doubling in employment and improved health and relationship outcomes among recipients. 

Baltimore is funding its program with $4.8 million from the city’s $641 million tranche of the American Rescue Plan Act, plus private and mayor’s office funds to cover another roughly $700,000 in administrative costs. 

The key players:

The Guaranteed Income Steering Committee—made up of 20 researchers, social welfare organization leaders, philanthropists, and others—has been meeting bi-weekly since June 2021 to determine the pilot design and follow-up research topics. The group’s primary duties have been to gather public input—including conducting more than 500 individual surveys and five focus groups—as well as to determine the timeline, size of cash payments, and target population. The Mayor’s Office of Children and Family Success has brought on other partners to run the pilot itself. The nonprofit CASH Campaign of Maryland is serving as its administrator, and Steady, a Shaquille O’Neal-backed fintech startup out of Atlanta, will distribute the monthly payments—but the committee will continue serving in an advisory capacity for the next two years. 

Coincidentally, this work happened to kick off just as COVID-19 unleashed economic havoc on families across Maryland and nationwide. Open Society Institute-Baltimore Executive Director Danielle Torain, who served as the steering committee’s co-chair, says OSI had already been helping the city issue emergency cash payments and prevent evictions. She and other members had observed young parents, particularly those without strong family and support networks, were struggling to pay rent, buy groceries, cover child care, and maintain reliable transportation—“just taking care of the small things that many of us could otherwise take for granted,” Torain says. 

Who will benefit:

The committee considered various audiences for the pilot, including people returning from incarceration and squeegee workers. But eventually “the group consensus came back to young parents who are new, who are most fragile economically, who are trying to figure out how they can use this to stabilize their families,” says Joe Jones, the committee’s other co-chair and the founder and president of the Center for Urban Families near Penn North. 

The chosen audience will generate plenty of data to study, including how extra monthly income impacts families’ access to and use of child care, as well as parent-child engagement and resilience to financial emergencies and other unexpected costs. More broadly, the follow-up research presents a chance for Baltimore to be part of a discussion about guaranteed income and economic mobility—an area where Baltimore has underperformed, due in part to its historic legacy of redlining—says Lorraine Dean, a committee member and associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

“There’s a false argument in even thinking about this as a handout,” says Dean, who studies how social and economic factors affect family health. “Most people who are low-income do work. In fact, many times they will be working multiple jobs if they can, and if they’re not, it’s because they’re taking care of children because child care is so expensive.” 

Deep roots:

Baltimore’s and other cities’ pilot programs are a novel movement, though the push for a publicly provided income floor in the U.S. has deeper roots. The first formal U.S. guaranteed income proposal dates back to President Lyndon Johnson and his declaration of an “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964, explains Robert Moffitt, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. A commission from his administration recommended creating a base income for Americans, but Johnson opted instead for social safety net programs like Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps (now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and more, many of which are still active. 

These programs catalyzed other policy proposals, including those from Johnson’s successor, President Richard Nixon, who proposed an ahead-of-its-time Family Assistance Plan that would have provided an annual guaranteed income of $1,600 (nearly $12,000 in 2022 dollars) for a qualifying family of four. But Congress didn’t bite on the legislation. Conservatives argued it would dissuade people from working, while Senate Democrats said it wasn’t enough money. The conservative argument gained traction during the 1970s and during the Reagan era, with the late Republican president himself using the “welfare queen” trope in his campaigns. 

During the 1990s “the pendulum swung the other way,” Moffitt says, with leaders from both sides of the aisle working to dismantle anti-poverty programs. The Clinton administration made good on a pledge to “end welfare as we know it” as the president signed a bill passed by Congress in 1996. The legislation eliminated the Families with Dependent Children program, which since 1935 had provided cash assistance to families with children, and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which drastically reduced funding and began requiring recipients to show proof they are working. 

What remains today at the federal level is what Moffitt says are an insufficient collection of federal programs—just Medicaid and SNAP for most poor families, Moffitt says—that make up the work-based safety net, supplemented by the Earned Income Tax Credit every tax season. Poverty remains widespread, with 11 percent of Americans and 20 percent of Baltimoreans living below the federal poverty line, per the latest Census data. 

“Politically, I think that the interest in the guaranteed income is the result of a perceived failure of our current safety net,” Moffit says. “It is not providing anything more than food stamps and Medicaid, and low-income families need more than that, both for their short-term needs and their long-term futures.” 

The federal government flirted with expanding the safety net during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic with stimulus checks and the expanded child tax credit, which grew from $2,000 to $3,600 per child under six years old and $3,000 per child up to age 17. But the effort was fleeting—relief checks for $1,200, $600, and $1,400 came and went. And despite a push from the Biden administration to extend it, Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to dissolve after just six months. 

Sukhi Samra, MGI’s Stockton-based executive director, says that political fallout and the pandemic have only intensified families’ needs.  

“As we’re going on to year three of the pandemic,” Samra says, “a guaranteed income is a way to test out this solution for these evergreen problems of economic security and poverty.”  

Of the Scott administration’s soon-to-launch pilot, she says, “Baltimore gives us another opportunity to understand how guaranteed income can act as a floor for folks who are raising children.” 

Stakeholders in Baltimore hope to see proof in the data that an extra $1,000 monthly boost can help families achieve greater self-sufficiency, improved health, and other quality-of-life outcomes in two years’ time (if not sooner). Jones, of the Center for Urban Families, hopes the study of the results could even help inform statewide or federal policymaking to bolster the safety net. 

Spreading the word:

To kick this off right, they’ll have to make sure the right families know to apply. Torain expects the mayor’s office to lean on a community network with a “deep reach,” including community groups and workforce training programs in direct contact with clients who could qualify. The city will be launching its online application in early May, and a mix of social media, conventional neighbor-to-neighbor word of mouth, and traditional news coverage should all help to get the word out, she says. 

Jones looks forward to assessing the effects of financial empowerment for a young generation of families looking to level up. There will be doubters, he predicts, but “we want to move people who are unsure to be supportive, and the data is what we will use to do that,” he says. 

“These are relatively small investments in people—adults who are responsible for little people. To me, as a society, that value proposition—as we think about investments in hard infrastructure, as we continue to bridge the gap from a technology standpoint—is, what does it mean to give parents some real support with these unrestricted payments, to give them some autonomy over their decision-making?” 

Mayor Scott sees a chance to prove a point: “I think it’s time for us to start to say to those folks who continue with outdated right-wing talk points—racially motivated things, gaslighting—that that’s [all that] they are. This isn’t a handout. It’s a hand up for these people—because these are working people.”

LIVE

The neighborhoods that make up Govans boast a wide range of housing, from traditional rowhomes in Winston-Govans to Victorian and Craftsman houses in Radnor-Winston, and more spacious, luxurious properties in Homeland.

SHOP

The vendors at Govans Farmers’ Market (June-September, Wednesdays 3-6 p.m.) sell locally grown produce and handmade crafts; for secondhand gems visit Illicit Rag Vintage and Wise Penny.

ARTS/CULTURE

Catch a movie at the historic Senator Theatre and tour artist Landry Randriamandroso’s B’more Birds murals along York Road.

PLAY

Get outside and stroll along Chinquapin Run Park or head to the playground, ballfields, basketball courts, or rec center at Dewees Park.

DINE

A dozen options (from ramen and Thai to pizza and lobster rolls) at Belvedere Square; on York Road, try Nailah’s Kitchen, Heritage Smokehouse, Noir, Full Tilt Brewing, Zen West, and Real Deal Jamaican.

“I bought my house in 2005. In this area, you have a little bit of living in the city, with a county feel. I made quick friends with my neighbors—and one of the funniest things I can remember is I didn’t cut my grass right way, and my neighbor said, ‘Hey, do you need a lawnmower?’

What makes living here great is the diversity. We have so much to learn from each other to make the community better and stronger. We have a diverse group of individuals here—masons, doctors, professors, lawyers, civil workers for the city. In a small radius, you can walk down York Road and address basic fundamental needs like health, food, gas, mechanical, salons, barber shops, and spiritual worship. If you want it, it’s there. And if it’s not there, we’re gonna put it there.”

–Christopher Forrest, president of the York Road Partnership, lives in Winston-Govans, one of about a half-dozen widely varying communities that make up greater Govans.

NEIGHBORHOOD STATS

Median household income: $32,674, Winston-Govans; $49,958, Radnor-Winston; $77,813, Belvedere
Estimated rent: $1,045, Richnor Springs; $1,430, Mid-Govans; $2,510, Homeland
Share of residents graduated college: 3 percent, Winston-Govans; 23 percent Rosebank; 31 percent Radnor-Winston

Sources: Live Baltimore and Baltimore Department of Planning

As local politicos and project partners took turns at the mic during a ceremonial ribbon-cutting at the Inner Harbor Friday morning, locals weren’t waiting for them to christen the brand new park at Rash Field on the waterfront.

In view of the podium, children climbed up and down a new mound of bright green turf surrounded by a sea of recently finished walking paths, rain gardens, and lines of planters filled with native plants and trees. To their right, a growing crowd of skateboarders took turns gliding around the new concrete skate plaza abutting the Maryland Science Center. Next door, children gleefully ascended the ropes and traversed the new Adventure Park playground.

This was precisely what this $17 million project was meant for, said Laurie Schwartz, president of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore.

“We hope to see families from all over the city gathering together in a shared space, enjoying this gorgeous park and having moments of joy and happiness,” she said, “a break from our everyday lives.”

With a design influenced for years by public input and reviews from a city design panel, the first phase of Rash Field’s redevelopment has amenitized this section of waterfront with a new pavilion and cafe—complete with a green roof with vistas of the harbor—as well as a nature park, rain garden, shaded lawn, and the aforementioned skatepark and kinetic playground.

Future plans for the yet-unfunded phase two, covering another five acres, call for upgrading the existing swath of beach volleyball courts, adding exercise equipment and new lawns for youth sports and games, relocating the Pride memorial, and replacing the built-in bleachers along Key Highway with sloped paths.

Since the mid-1990s, the city has cycled through discussions of how to remake Joseph A. Rash Memorial Park into something attractive and useful. Since its 1976 debut, the six-acre public space has hosted countless state fairs and cultural festivals and housed a once-beloved carousel and gathering space under the Harry D. Kaufman Pavilion (both have since been removed). But more recently, it had fallen into general disuse, save for hosting the occasional public rally, skateboarders, or resting tourists and harbor-goers. Older proposals called for adding hundreds of parking spaces underground and implementing attractions like a Ferris wheel or a zip line, though none of those ideas materialized.

The Waterfront Partnership and its partners dreamt up something else. In 2016, city leaders and the nonprofit agreed upon a softscaped vision leaning into recreation and nature, working with Mahan Rykiel Associates as the landscape architect and Whiting-Turner Construction Co. as the general contractor and construction manager. Other partners included architecture firm Gensler, which designed the pavilion, Seattle-based skatepark builder Grindline, the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks, and the Baltimore Development Corp.

Construction kicked off in May 2020 and wrapped up last week, some 18 months later. The city and state provided the bulk of the project’s funding, $10.5 million and $4.3 million respectively, which was later complemented by $1 million from Baltimore Gas and Electric (securing naming rights for the pavilion and nature park) and a mix of donations from Baltimore companies like T. Rowe Price, Brown Advisory, and M&T Bank, as well as local residents.

“This was no small project,” said Senate President Bill Ferguson, whose 46th District includes the Inner Harbor, at the ribbon-cutting. “At every corner, there were new hurdles or new wrinkles or new changes or additions. But along the way, consistently, a clear vision that was executed every single day is what brings us all here today.”

Joining Ferguson Friday morning was a lineup of city officials, including Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Eric Costello, and Recreation and Parks Director Reginald Moore.

Scott, too, praised the Waterfront Partnership for “bringing this project on time and on budget,” and for exceeding originally set goals for hiring minority- and women-owned contractors to carry out the work. In particular, he focused on the benefits of adding more usable green and play spaces at a waterfront location accessible to families from across the city. He said he hopes Rash Field can become “one of the premier parks in the city,” alongside Druid Hill, Herring Run, and Patterson parks.

“This is the first portion of the reimagining and the rebuilding in the 21st century of what Baltimore’s Inner Harbor is going to look like,” he said.

The coming months will bring more small changes, including a new cafe operator to the pavilion—to be announced in the spring—as well as educational signage for the nature paths and decorative trash bins painted by local students.

But Schwartz is already looking further ahead. A week before the ribbon-cutting, we sat with Schwartz on a bench at the nearly finished park to discuss the process of the entire project. She said she hopes the debut of phase one can help spark more fundraising for the second phase. And beyond Rash Field, “we’ve gotta add more greenery over on the West Shore, we’ve gotta activate the north side of the harbor [home to Harborplace.]” (City dwellers and stakeholders are patiently awaiting details of a potential redevelopment of Harborplace, the once-iconic commercial pavilions in the harbor that have since lost their luster.)

Schwartz called back to her time working in the city housing department under Mayor William Donald Schaefer, as well as the Charles Street Management Corp.—a predecessor to the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore. During those years, she took it to heart that with any project, “you can’t just create something and then say, ‘look at this’ and gloat for a year. You’ve gotta keep building on that foundation.”

Of Rash Field, she said, “Let’s keep going. We’ve got a lot of work to do yet to make it a place where people want to come again and again and again.”

Geoff Danek distinctly recalls one particularly brief exchange with a Hampden neighbor in the spring of 1996. He was hard at work on the build-out of his new restaurant in a tiny space on West 36th Street when the man popped his head in to ask about the building’s future. When told of the plans for Holy Frijoles, a new Tex-Mex joint being added on a stretch then filled mostly with pizza shops and takeouts, his visitor offered a less-than-inspiring “good luck” and headed away.

“I always remember that, like he figured we were doomed,” Danek said recently, seated at a table inside. “And here we are, 25 years later.”

In that quarter-century, Holy Frijoles has become a beloved mainstay in the North Baltimore neighborhood known to many for its strip of varied restaurants and shops.

The business has grown its space—more than fivefold in terms of capacity—by taking over next-door properties. It has also managed to overcome two destructive fires, one in 1999 that shut down operations for four months and another in 2016 that interrupted business for a year. Along the way, Holy Frijoles has amassed a loyal following by slinging margaritas and buckets of beer, offering its impressive collection of retro pinball machines, and leaning on a dependable menu of tacos, burritos, chimichangas, and the like.

Today’s public health crisis permitting, Danek and his team are now looking to honor that legacy over the weekend of Sept. 18-19 with $2.50 tacos, taquitos, and tequila shots, $25 “all-you-care-to-drink” day passes (with commemorative mugs), free pinball,  DJs, and possibly live music on Saturday evening.

Danek says he’s not much for celebrating milestones or birthdays, but this quadranscentennial event is about saluting the “family of people we’ve created.”

One of his proudest points has been providing a haven for musicians and creatives to work while learning how to help run a business. He himself was a 22-year-old bass player and first-time entrepreneur when he opened Holy Frijoles with a former business partner.

“This has always been a place that’s been here for younger people to find themselves and go on and figure out what they want to do in life,” he says. 

Those individuals have usually been, like him, musicians and artists, often covered with tattoos and piercings (more unusual traits in Hampden 25 years ago than today, Danek notes.) Organically, Holy Frijoles has fashioned a flexible, appreciative workplace culture that has long supported working creatives, several current and former staffers say.

“[Danek] let me go on tour as long as I got my shifts covered,” says Victoria Legrand, one half of Baltimore-born dream pop duo Beach House and a former employee from 2005 to late 2009. “He was and is an avid lover of music and community and I love him for it.”

She adds: “I don’t think I would have been able to support myself as an artist without him being such an amazing boss. He deserves that credit.”

Beyond setting the restaurant’s vibe or playing shows, some of those staffers even helped build the space as it exists today.

Katrina Ford, lead singer of Baltimore psych-soul band Celebration and a Holy Frijoles manager and bartender from 2011 to 2020, recalled putting up drywall, painting, and helping update the aesthetic of the restaurant during an expansion after the 2016 fire.

“It was heartbreaking to see it happen,” she says, “but the win-win, the silver lining…for [Danek] was to come back bigger. He wanted to come back better, and it was really fun to be a part of that creation.”

Danek has also risked his own financial health for employees, notes current general manager Nick Jankowski. Even when Danek was unsure of how to cover repairs from the 2016 electrical fire that left much of the restaurant scorched and suffering from water damage, he kept paying his workers.

“He was literally putting the entire business on the line to make sure that all of the employees could pay their rent,” Jankowski says. “You can be nice or whatever, but when it comes to putting your money where your mouth is, that’s the most serious example of that that I’ve ever seen.”

A wild mix of dedicated customers has also helped the eatery to survive and grow. As one of the older “new” businesses in Hampden (see also Golden West, opened in 1997,) Holy Frijoles has ingrained itself in a neighborhood where the divide between old and new grows starker every year.

“There were a lot of people there that were different from regular old Hampden people that I knew,” recalls Frankie Morgan, a real estate agent who worked as a host and server from 1999 to 2006. But unlike some newcomers to The Avenue over the years, he doesn’t recall any backlash for Holy Frijoles when it opened. His own family has been in Hampden for 125 years, “and [they] went there and they loved it.”

As Danek prepares to celebrate an elusive restaurant industry milestone, he doesn’t have much certain to say about the future. But he jests that the 50-year mark is “mathematically possible.”

“[At this point] I’ve been in this building for more than half of my life,” he says. “I don’t know how long I’m gonna keep doing this or how long I can keep doing it… but for me, this one has to be celebrated, it has to be noted.”

In Reservoir Hill, a prismatic display has erupted over the asphalt and sidewalks. Last spring, Graham Coreil-Allen gathered neighbors to help paint the intersection at Whitelock Street and Brookfield Avenue with a carefully placed rainbow of literal street art, bolstered by flex posts and fresh crosswalk lines that, together, urge approaching drivers to slow their roll.

“Before it was a lot of speed-thru action going on,” says Lauren Miller, a local resident and volunteer at the Whitelock Community Farm across the street. Now, “it’s a cognitive thing. When you see brighter colors, you’re gonna look. You’re gonna stop.”

Since 2016, Coreil-Allen has run with that theory to make Baltimore City streets safer through his design-build business Graham Projects, working with neighborhoods, transportation officials, and traffic engineers on inventive art that doubles as a traffic-calming tool. The lifelong artist has built a brand on advocacy, engagement, and collaboration, becoming a sort of street-design expert along the way.

“My work is very much driven by the needs of communities,” he says. “No public art is ever going to make everyone happy, but the goal is to have an equitable process and something that builds bonds of spirit and, ultimately, trust.”

Interested in urban design since adolescence, Coreil-Allen immersed himself in making radical public art at the New College of Florida. After graduating, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he created work that called attention to issues such as pedestrian safety and affordable housing. He relocated to Baltimore in 2008 to earn his master’s degree at the Maryland Insitute College of Art, and his first permanent local street art project, “Hopscotch Crosswalks Colossus,” added four usable sets of painted footprints to an intersection in the Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District on downtown’s west side.

 

“When you see brighter colors you’re gonna look. You’re gonna stop.”

 

He’s since helped transform intersections across Baltimore. His portfolio only continues to grow, with the city—notoriously lacking in its pedestrian-friendly infrastructure—most recently announcing official partnerships with Graham Projects at busy intersections outside Druid Hill Park and Lake Montebello.

Coreil-Allen emphasizes that the spirit of his work is less about waging war on drivers than it is about humanism and empathy. He considers the roughly one-third of Baltimoreans who lack access to a car, per Census data: “Those people deserve the same level of safety and access as all the cars driving up and down the road.”

In an unexpected turn, his art also benefited from a burst of urbanist experimentation during the COVID-19 pandemic last spring through the city’s Design for Distancing program, which was created to help neighborhoods reorient public spaces for the pandemic era.

On Harford Road, Coreil-Allen worked with neighbors to reimagine three commercial blocks, filling a parking lane with benches and tables for seating, all set on a can’t-miss display of blues and yellows and protected by temporary barriers and planters. Using good old-fashioned community engagement, he crowdsources design details from residents, leads his own neighborhood association, and even co-chaired Mayor Brandon Scott’s Art and Culture Transition Committee.

How can he tell when his projects are successful? For one, there’s the before-and-after traffic behavior data gathered from his “walking audits” or collected by partners like MICA. And there’s the feedback from the actual users, like the bespectacled, elderly woman who approached him at Beaumont Avenue and York Road.

“Are you the designer?” she said, waiting for her bus near the painted, sunset-like medley of reds, yellows, and blues, featuring Adinkra symbols of birds and peace signs and more. Coreil-Allen smiled and shared his story. “I’m so glad you did this,” she said.