Nichole Morris is dancing on the corner of York Road and E. Lake Avenue. It’s an overcast, muggy July morning and Morris is getting ready to photograph the Cedarcroft neighborhood. She’s wearing a bright orange tie-dye Harley Davidson T-shirt and oversized headphones, and her movements are innocently joyful.

The only things she’s carrying are an umbrella and her Samsung Galaxy S21 phone.

Of Baltimore City’s 270-ish neighborhoods (this is according to Morris’ own Google research, while Live Baltimore puts that number at “more than 250”), she has shot close to 92, but that number increases almost daily.

It’s a passion project born of a simple desire to be surrounded by others. She’s photographed Blythewood, Bolton Hill, Pigtown, Cameron Village, Canton (“it took the longest to fully explore”), Forest Park, Otterbein, Fells Point, Milton-Montford, Little Italy, Poppleton, Woodbourne-McCabe, the Baltimore Peninsula, Beverly Hills, and Roland Park. She shot every type of home, from petite rowhouses to stately Tudors.

She was shocked to find so many parks, and even deer in the city. There was Abell, Hollins Market, Hoes Heights, Heritage Crossing, Inner Harbor, Lake Walker, Liberty Square, Evergreen, Harwood, and her own neighborhood of Bromo.

And everywhere she walked, she saw beauty—in the cobblestone streets, alleyways, residents, public transportation, abandoned buildings, pets, and the different foliage depending on the season.

Morris, 28, didn’t grow up anywhere. Maybe that’s why she’s so keen on neighborhoods. By the time she was 18, she had moved 15 times. Her mom, who was in banking, changed jobs a lot, she explains.

“I’m very quick to try to make friends and get to know people,” she says of the constant relocation. “But I think it makes it hard to have roots anywhere or really get to know a city.”

She’s fascinated with the concept of being born in a particular place and becoming a permanent part of that neighborhood’s fabric.

“In my life I’ve had to make friends quickly, and kind of get used to losing people here and there,” she says, then blinks. “So that’s a really sad thing.”

But Morris’ persona is the opposite of sad. Her energy is warm and engaging. She’s smart and thoughtful and her voice is so spirited that when she speaks, it almost sounds like she’s laughing. But she also freely talks about her struggles with depression and how one can feel so lonely even in a city of more than 550,000 people.

Having lived her life as a nomad (which has included some stints living in her car, some by choice, others by necessity), it’s hard to say whether she grew up with no community or too many communities. But it’s structures that have always brought her reassurance.

“Architecture was the only thing that gave me comfort when I was homeless and still gives me peace of mind.”

When we talk over the summer, she is newly back in town after spending the last two months in California and Arizona. Before that, she was in downtown Baltimore for five months and before that she was living in Essex for two years. (This was after spending a year here during early COVID living in an Airbnb in Riverside.)

“This is actually the longest I’ve stayed anywhere, if I’m honest,” says Morris. “So, this is kind of new for me.”

The one constant for Morris has always been her love of photography. “I’ve been taking photos since I could hold a camera,” she says. “I got it from my mom—she was always behind the camera, doing family events or outings. And then I started taking pictures myself, and I got really happy. It was my happy place.”

So, when she pushed herself to get to know Baltimore outside of the few places she had visited and lived (Bromo Arts District, Riverside), she turned to some old reliables—photography and mental health walks.

“For kicks and giggles I walked around a few times and then I said, ‘You know what? How many neighborhoods are here? It can’t possibly be a lot.’” (That proved to be far from the truth, but didn’t deter her.) “I’ve never been too good with keeping promises to myself,” she admits.

And this project—photographing every neighborhood in Baltimore—seemed impossible. But she decided she needed impossible and challenged herself.

“I decided to make it a sort of New Year’s resolution.”

Her no-plan plan involved walking around (with lots of dancing) and simply taking photographs. She figured at the very least, she’d improve her mood. And at the very most, she’d make some friends.

At first, she would do research on neighborhoods (mostly via Baltimore Reddit) before heading out, trying to seek the little things that made that place special. But she realized that too much prep was creating preconceptions, so she now goes into most areas completely blind and often picks her next stop based on recommendations from her social media followers.

She also doesn’t have a traditional camera. She simply uses her cell phone to document everything and then posts to Instagram and Threads (@withnichole). Some posts are just her photographs, others have vulnerable words attached, and others push back on what is considered “beautiful” in Baltimore. She says that some of what are deemed the roughest neighborhoods in Baltimore have offered her the friendliest encounters. And other safer areas have made her nervous.

“I really did think that Baltimore was just some rowhomes and people who liked Old Bay,” she confesses.

But now she knows the city better than people who have lived here for decades. We all know we live in a city of neighborhoods, but how many of us have actually taken the time to visit many of those neighborhoods?

Back in Cedarcroft she’s “caught” photographing a home’s front yard, but the homeowner is tickled at her interest and spends almost 45 minutes walking her around the neighborhood, talking about his plants, his own family’s history, and showing her his favorite homes.

Morris has an almost infectious curiosity that makes people want to assist her. It’s interactions like this that keep her going. But she’s also learned that one person is simply a part of a neighborhood, not its entire identity.

“Like if you were to ask me what Riverside is, I wouldn’t know how to describe it to you. When I think of Riverside, there was a guy that was always in a robe first thing in the morning standing outside a coffee shop with his coffee for like 20 minutes, like it’s his front yard or something.

“Or there was a girl who’s always running, and I don’t run but I’d jog with her, and she’d be like, ‘Let’s talk about the gossip of the neighborhood.’ She knew everything. And there was a girl who always has dog treats. She sits on her porch during warmer weather looking for dogs and I think maybe, like me, is like looking for a connection,” says Morris.

All those little things are what made Riverside feel like home to her—but how to explain those special qualities to an outsider? “I wouldn’t know,” she says.

So now, each morning she rises before dawn and decides what neighborhood she’ll try to capture next. She’ll slip on her headphones—she loves musicals like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Dear Evan Hansen, but also rap. “I just heard of Doechii, so I’ll listen to her or some Nicki [Minaj]. I have a Disney playlist because I love Hannah Montana”—and look at the bus schedule.

“I don’t mind the weird stares anymore and I’m feeling more comfortable about who I am as a person,” says Morris. Sometimes people look because she’s dancing down the street or lying between two cars to get a photograph.

“I’m starting to understand that places truly are a lot more diverse than expectations, because I really did think it was just rowhomes and then I started thinking a little of The Wire,” she says. “And it’s like, well, a city is not one thing, it’s a multitude of things.”

Her project has had some wonderfully unexpected consequences. She’s booked a few gigs as a photographer (yes, they know she shoots solely on her phone), sold a few prints, and has plenty of social media followers rooting for her success.

She knows there are some incredible photographers who shoot Baltimore—but is learning there is room for her, too.

“It’s all different sides of one place,” she says. She’s had people tell her, “You’re nice, but you don’t really show Baltimore Baltimore.”

In other words, her viewpoint is overly optimistic or unrealistic.

“And I’m like, I’m trying to walk all of it so I can understand Baltimore,” says Morris. “This is just my personal idea of this city.”

For more than 20 years, the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) has tracked neighborhood data, everything from crime statistics to how many trees are on a given street. It began under the leadership of Odette Ramos (now a City Council member) with seed funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The idea then was to gather data for nonprofit organizations working in Baltimore City to track the efficacy of their programs. Every year, BNIA publishes its data in “Vital Signs.” Since 2011, the project has been overseen by Seema D. Iyer, who is on a statistical mission to improve Baltimore’s neighborhoods one micro-metric at a time.

Explain how BNIA began.
Neighborhoods had been rapidly declining for a long time. Then in the late 1990s, e-government was coming into existence. That confluence of electronic information and ways to compute it using geographic mapping systems created an “Aha” moment. What if we actually took all this data, integrated it, and put it out for people to see what was happening in the neighborhoods?

What is the value of tracking neighborhood data?
It isn’t just about who called 911 on 301 Main Street. It’s about what that means. One of the best examples was people were calling 311 every time they saw water trickling in a certain neighborhood. That could lead to sewer backups and possible basement flooding, which could impact the housing stock. If you look at that data continuously, you can often see early warning signs. The key is to track things routinely over time—the trend is what really matters.

How has BNIA and its Vital Signs report changed over two decades?
The first decade was really about, “What do you want to know about your neighborhood?” It was the first time people were even asked that question. In 2011, when I moved over to BNIA, we had just published our 10th “Vital Signs” compendium of data and I realized in our second decade the key was not just to put the data out there, but to tell a story with that data. We’ve gotten good at putting the information out to anyone who needs it, but, more importantly, we’ve gotten better at telling the story of, for example, what it means if your neighborhood has a high vacancy rate. In order to tell that story, we’ve gotten to know our communities. We present to neighborhoods and community associations every year, like a doctor giving an annual checkup.

Can you provide an example of that community outreach in action?
In doing this outreach to communities, we had a neighborhood that said there were too few vacancies being reported on the “Vital Signs” report. So they went to the housing department and the housing department actually went on a walk with that community. The next year, they saw an increase in vacancy reporting. The fact that there was an increase in vacancy wasn’t a good thing, but the fact that they could tell their story accurately, that they could say the neighborhood needed help, that was what they wanted and what they got. We’ve created a way for communities to connect with their government to improve their own neighborhoods.

You track over 100 indicators annually—vacancy rates, number of children in public schools, crime—but it gets pretty granular. What are some of your favorite metrics?
In 2011, we realized we didn’t have quality-of-life metrics, like how much open space is in your neighborhood or air and water quality. Those are indicators that the community is a good steward of the neighborhood. We created a new chapter called “sustainability.” The other one we created is “arts & culture,” things you can do in your neighborhood that bring people together. There has to be a mechanism to get know each other.

My favorite data set is a partnership we started with the Enoch Pratt Free Library. We now know how many people in your neighborhood have a library card. The reason this is such an important indicator is we know what it means—it means a lot for early literacy, which is so important for life success later on; it means a lot as a place where people access information, go to talks, get books; and it has mean- ing for Internet access and job searching. And it’s such an actionable indicator. If you see that rate in your neighborhood is low, you can put out a card table on your street and have a get-carded event.

 

IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO PUT OUT THIS INFORMATION…WE WANT TO ADDRESS PROBLEMS HEAD ON WITH INFORMATION THAT CAN REALLY HELP US MOVE THE NEEDLE.

 

It’s been 21 years. How is BNIA improving quality of life in Baltimore?
I came in 2011 and I loved putting out the data, and then Freddie Gray happened in 2015. And it happened right outside our window—we’re located less than a mile from the CVS that burned. We saw the protests on Charles Street. It was personally devastating because I thought, “What’s the purpose of our work if we can’t prevent things like this?” As I mentioned, it’s all about the early warning signs and you could see them. We had seen vacancy in Sandtown-Winchester consistently rising since 2000. In 2015, it was our number-one neighborhood for vacant and abandoned housing. We all did a lot of soul-searching: It’s not enough to put out this information, it’s not enough to go to community meetings and tell people, we have to do more. We want to address problems head on with information that can really help us move the needle.

What’s the future of BNIA?
We at BNIA know a lot of stuff. We’re looking at how we can impart that knowledge in a systemic way and train the next generation of data scientists. And we’re trying to get to the root cause of our neighborhood problems since 2015. That meant getting out of our comfort zone. We usually interact with city government and community associations. Before, we didn’t really interact with advocacy groups, like those involved in affordable housing, and didn’t really interact with the media. Now we do. If I see something in the media that’s inaccurately describing our city using our data, I will actually go hunt down that reporter. We’re like data vigilantes!

Bill Struever is standing inside the belly of a beast. For nearly a century, this massive 85,000-square-foot brick complex in East Baltimore was home to one of the most prolific lithographic printing companies in the world.

In its heyday, A. Hoen & Co. produced National Geographic maps, Buffalo Bill Cody posters, Dr. Seuss books, and Topps baseball cards. But it’s been shuttered since 1981, slowly crumbling over the past four decades like much of the surrounding neighborhood in the distressed area north of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and “north of the tracks” (read: wrong side to investors) where Amtrak rolls into town. Struever, however, is in his element.

“We’ve unearthed some of the old lithograph stones,” says the rumpled, 67-year-old developer, whose company, Cross Street Partners, is leading the long-hoped-for rehabilitation of the abandoned Hoen factory, which consumes an entire city block between East Biddle and East Chase.

Struever, on his way to a meeting in rolled-up jeans and a plaid workshirt, earned a degree in urban anthropology at Brown University and a master electrician’s license on the side. To his credit—and Baltimore’s benefit—he has always paid as much attention to the history and details of the buildings he’s repurposed as the construction, design, and financing process. He notes, for example, the relief sculpture in honor of Alois Senefelder, the inventor of the lithograph process, and the Latin words, Saxa Loquuntur—“the stones tell”—above the Hoen plant entrance.

But more than anything, it’s the reimagining of urban neighborhoods that animates him. He read acclaimed New York journalist, activist, and author Jane Jacobs’ book in college—she’d helped save lower Manhattan from urban highway destruction—and it became his Bible.

“You look out the window and realize Hopkins and the Henderson-Hopkins School [the first new school in the area in more than two decades] and the new Eager Park townhomes and apartments are just down the street,” says Struever, whose enthusiasm is both genuine, and, like any great salesman, contagious. “The American Brewery [home to nonprofit Humanim today] is a few blocks away, and there’s The Food Hub in the old Eastern Pumping Station on Oliver Street.”

Both the redevelopment of the wild-looking, late-19th-century American Brewery building—its central tower housed a 10,000-bushel grain elevator—and the Eastern Pumping Station are Struever partnership efforts. “To me, this is as exciting as anything we’ve ever done.” Which is saying something.

Practically everything Baltimoreans love about the city’s repurposed built environment—Canton Cove and the Can Company factory, Cross Street Market, Belvedere Square, the Tindeco and Bond Street wharfs, Stieff Silver in Hampden, Under Armour’s headquarters in the former detergent plant at Tide Point, the Clipper Mill complex, even the winking neon Mr. Boh atop Brewers Hill—Struever played a major hand in developing.

“When people ride Amtrak through East Baltimore, coming to the city for the first time,” says Struever, optimistic as ever, “they are going to see a transformation from the old sets of The Wire.”

After years spent digging out from his company’s collapse in the wake of the global financial meltdown in 2007, the visionary developer is now back in the fray with adaptive reuse projects in East and West Baltimore—a dramatic geographic shift in focus from the “white L” to the city’s historically redlined “black butterfly.”

“[People] are going to see a transformation from the old sets of The Wire.”

Mary Ellen Hayward met then 25-year-old Bill Struever in the summer of 1977, shortly after finishing her doctorate in American Studies. He was rehabbing rowhouses in Federal Hill and had already reached out to the Maryland Historic Trust about a research project around the homes and buildings in the Federal Hill National Register Historic District. She tapped on the door of his small office tucked in a recently rehabbed house on East Cross Street and inquired about a job.

“‘Can you write?’ was his first question,” Hayward says. “Bill was the same as he is now. He could be a little spacey,” Hayward adds with a chuckle. “He’s not always engaged with the conversation right in front of him because he’s looking ahead. Then, when he’s excited about something that interests him, he can talk fast, be hard to follow, jumping from idea to idea. He walks fast, too. He was that way when he was 25.”

At the time, blocks of rowhouses on Federal Hill’s north end stood vacant behind chain-link fencing, recalls Hayward, who went on to write several books about Charm City’s architecture and rowhomes. Acquired by the city when plans were still in the works to build a bridge across the Inner Harbor—to link to a planned urban expressway through Fells Point—the rowhouses had been abandoned after the defeat of the highway by local activists, including a certain feisty social worker named Barbara Mikulski.

Other houses on South Charles Street remained burned-out shells, and more homes on South Hanover Street were empty and boarded up. Stories in The Sun referred to the “slums” of South Baltimore. A body was reportedly discovered in one of the abandoned rowhomes they purchased.

Three years earlier, Struever’s mother had accepted a job at Hopkins teaching Renaissance history, and he’d decided to tag along to the city following graduation from Brown. He’d learned of then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s $1 housing program and saw potential opportunity in Baltimore even as others were fleeing for the suburbs. He dragged his brother Fred and college roommate, Cobber Eccles, with him to the city.

The trio bought a pickup and plastered a hammer logo on it, earning beer money their first year from basic home improvements. “I thought it might be something that lasted a year before I headed to graduate school,” says Eccles, who remains a Struever partner.

Their first home at 436 Grindall Street in Federal Hill—Struever has never forgotten the number—was purchased with a $10,000 loan from his mother. They eventually rehabbed three more in the group and created a grassy knoll between them, naming it Chandler’s Yard in tribute to the ship chandlers who had lived nearby. But Struever soon realized that if they were going to be successful flipping old houses, they needed to revitalize the neighborhood’s commercial life—jump-start the kind of businesses, restaurants, and shops that make urban neighborhoods convenient, attractive, and fun for pioneering young home buyers.

“Our banker told me someone needed to do something with the Cross Street Market and reopen the nearby storefronts,” Struever says. “Otherwise, nothing would sell. [But] I didn’t have any money. Then he told me he’d loan me the money to do it. We eventually bought 40 storefronts, and I’ve been borrowing money ever since.” Struever and his partners launched the Sundae Times ice cream parlor on the south side of Cross Street, a children’s bookstore, and a gourmet cheese stall in the market.

Their most successful venture proved to be a bar and live-music venue called Hammerjacks at the corner of Cross and South Charles streets. “We sold more cases of Budweiser than any bar east of the Mississippi,” Struever says with a bit of pride.

Ever restless and adventurous (Struever has been known to kayak across the harbor to meetings), he quickly turned his attention to more audacious projects, such as redeveloping Clipper Mill, the former sail factory on the Jones Falls. Inevitably, as with the Tindeco, Canton Cove, and American Can Company projects, he saw value where few dared to tread. He also displayed a knack for marrying private investments with public subsidies and tax credits, which continues to this day. In the process, he reshaped the city’s deindustrialized harbor and decaying riverfront mills into national models of adapted renewal.

Struever didn’t invent the exposed piping, beam, and brick aesthetic, nor the modern commercial, office, and residential district, as Baltimore architect and former Struever collaborator Klaus Philipsen points out. That had been done previously in places such as SoHo, San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square, and the docks of East London. But Struever convinced an often-timid Baltimore, Philipsen recalls, that it could be done here. “I arrived in Baltimore [from Germany] about when Bill did, and the city was in transition, and not in a good way,” Philipsen says. “He and his team were enterprising, the first to use adaptive reuse principles. He understood the power of design and value in preserving these assets. It’s much easier to go to the suburbs and build where nothing else exists.”

Struever’s mentors included the also famously rumpled, civic-minded developer James Rouse, who built Harborplace, Cross Keys, and, from whole cloth, Columbia. Ted Rouse, James’ son, became the fourth partner of Struever’s team early on. Not that Struever was in concert with James Rouse on everything. “We disagreed over Columbia,” he says. “Why create something out there when you already have the density and ingredients and creative energy of city life? I was never interested in the suburbs. It’s fake. Nothing’s authentic.”

Another mentor was Walter Sondheim, the former chairman of the school board who spearheaded the desegregation of Baltimore’s public schools following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Struever, too, sat on the Baltimore City Board of Education for a period, among numerous boards over the years. He also practiced what he preached, living in the city and sending his daughters to public schools.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t think anyone can deny the redevelopment of the Can Company and Canton waterfront and the rest were thoughtfully done,” says Abell Foundation president Robert Embry Jr., reflecting on Struever’s landmark accomplishments. “He’s a city treasure. I grew up in Northeast Baltimore, and I’d never seen the water there as a kid. It was industrial. There was no reason to go down there.”

“It is much easier to go to the suburbs and build where nothing else exists.”

There were hiccups along the way—a failed effort to develop the Port Liberty area and the early ’90s recession took their tolls—but eventually the success of Struever Bros., Eccles, and Rouse enticed the celebrated developer to look beyond the beltway to places such as Wilmington, Delaware; Durham, North Carolina; and Providence, Rhode Island—even Boston and Fenway Park. And then, leveraged to the hilt as the financial crisis hit in 2007, the whole company came tumbling down.

Projects such as the State Center, Harbor East, and the completion of Brewers Hill had to be handed off to other developers. The Olmstead, a planned 12-story building on St. Paul Street in Charles Village, stayed a fenced-in hole in the ground. Lawsuits for failure to pay contractors and vendors and loans piled up across multiple states. Struever never declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which would’ve been the easier and personally less costly route, instead spending the subsequent half-decade mitigating the damage and working out of the mess. The formation of Cross Street Partners enabled him to begin again with consulting projects, but the heavy losses essentially sidelined him until recently in terms of full-blown development work.

“A lot of sleepless nights,” Struever says. “We employed about 400 people, and there were hundreds of others affected, obviously. That’s what keeps you up, trying to figure a way out.”

The $30 million Hoen project, which recently received $1.6 million grant from the federal government and a visit from a Trump Administration commerce official, has already attracted major tenants, including Strong City Baltimore and the Association of Building Contractors, which will move their trades training programs here.

With exterior brickwork and window replacement underway, the building is scheduled to open in 2020. Whether the A. Hoen & Co. Lithograph complex—135 years after its construction—can again serve as a catalyst for wider East Baltimore revitalization and convince mixed-income, black homeowners to remain, return, or buy in the broader neighborhood remains a open question. It could take a generation. Or two. It took decades for a tipping point of new young families in Canton and Federal Hill to send their kids to local public schools.

Barbara Mikulski says part of Struever’s genius in Locust Point and Canton, in particular, was recognizing not just the potential to renovate ex-warehouses and make them look hip, but the 21st-century innovation economy jobs they could attract. The 83-year-old, the longest-serving woman in the history of the U.S. Congress, had worked a summer in one of those old Canton factories making ketchup.

A half-century later, as senator, she helped bring a NASA incubator office into the Can Company building. In his second act in East Baltimore, Struever’s taking a calculated gamble on the continued expansion of Hopkins’ medical-research network and local nonprofits, like Strong City and Humanim, as well as the new Food Hub incubator and the Association of Building Contractors skilled workforce programs, to generate jobs. It’s a new kind of undertaking. It’s not just the buildings that have been left behind here, but the people who live in this community. Unemployment rates in East Baltimore are double that of the city as a whole. In some neighborhoods, half of the residents didn’t graduate from high school. “There needs to be a holistic approach,” cautions Rev. Donte Hickman of nearby Southern Baptist Church.

“The area needs more mass transit, the whole city does, and we need to invest more in our schools. That’s crucial, too,” adds Mikulski, who has paid close attention to Struever’s projects over the years. No one person is going to fix the city, she stresses, including the next mayor.

“There are no saviors,” she says. “But one thing Bill likes is to take people to Portland, or New York, and see what we can learn from each other. Pittsburgh and Detroit suffered the same body blows, and look at the great things happening in those places. We don’t want to copy them, but we can gather ideas. Bill gets people talking to other people about the city, its spaces, and [he] imagines what Baltimore can do—and it’s never cookie-cutter stuff. That’s what he does best.”