Located in the quiet Stevenson community, 1724 Hillside Road features a stunning, classic c. 1880 shingle-style, five-bedroom Dutch colonial home. Expertly renovated and expanded, this extraordinary home retains vintage flooring, original fireplaces and details.

A large entry welcomes guests into the bright and spacious living room with a fireplace, accented by a large picture window, and a powder room. The formal dining room also enjoys a fireplace, two sets of built-in bookcases, and a bay window with a built-in window seat. A wide cased portal leads into the sunroom with three walls of windows and French doors to the deck and the adjoining den with a fireplace. The adjacent family room features a fireplace and two sets of French doors to the large screened porch, a must-have for Maryland summers. The custom gourmet kitchen features commercial grade stainless appliances and granite counters.

A large sitting hall at the top of the main staircase enjoys a vintage built-in linen cabinet and access to the bedrooms beyond. The primary suite includes a bedroom, dressing room with two double closets, and primary bath with a glass enclosed shower stall. Four additional bedrooms and three baths share this level (including one en-suite bedroom built out as a library with built-in bookcases and base cabinets). The finished walk-out lower level features a recreation room with two double cedar closets, a built-in desk, and a large walk-in storage closet. An arched glazed door leads to the climate controlled wine room. The craftsroom/studio features an entry door, oak island with flat file drawers and deep storage closet. The laundry room, garden room/workshop, and utility room complete this level.

Just beyond the main house sits a stunning rebuilt three-story barn/office/studio with gorgeous views of the yard and stream from the fourth level cupola retreat and deck. A large bluestone patio at the rear of the main house is a peaceful retreat, overlooking the stone fishpond and waterfall.

With two beautifully landscaped acres including a deep back yard, enclosed, raised garden bed area and footbridge fording the Jones Falls stream, 1724 Hillside Rd offers a wide variety of beautiful indoor and outdoor living spaces in a highly convenient yet tranquil locale!

For more information, and to view other listings, click here:

he phrase “the new normal” has been thrown around since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and as America struggles to define—and design—what that is exactly, colleges are paving the way for what it might look like.

After the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, colleges and universities throughout the Baltimore region began to find their groove as they moved into the 2021-2022 school year. Coronavirus safety committees had been erected, new mandates put in place, safety protocols implemented—everything from vaccine requirements to temperature checks to quarantine procedures and wastewater testing that can pinpoint a COVID infection before anyone is symptomatic.

By some counts, colleges may very well be the safest places to live and work.

“Just following simple rules of wearing face masks and social distancing, using wastewater management and testing when we need to, we have, in many ways, been able to return to normal life,” says Goucher College President Kent Devereaux. “Full athletics, student clubs, dining in the dining hall, use of the library—everything that you’d normally have, we’ve been able to return to.”

Despite the challenges and anxieties faced by students, staff, and faculty alike, some unexpected silver linings have emerged.

“It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

The widespread adoption of technology across college campuses has proven to provide more flexibility, efficiency, and innovation—and even accessibility, in some cases. Counseling sessions, for example, began to be conducted remotely during the pandemic and many students found that they preferred it to in-person sessions. Students who cannot, for whatever reason, make it to an in-person class can now study from anywhere.

Challenging times, combined with advances in technology and the general acceptance of it, have also brought more cooperation and collaboration among schools. It’s becoming more common, for example, for schools that offer complementary programs to partner with one another to offer students an educational pathway to continue studies in their chosen areas. That may mean a discounted tuition rate, a transfer of class credits, or an internship through a partner school.

Maybe most importantly though, schools, at their best, foster an environment where students are supported, expand who they are, and connect with like-minded people. At a time when gathering together is not always safe, being in a community has become even more precious, and students have found new ways to connect.

OCA Mocha, a coffeehouse in Arbutus founded by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) students, is one example of how effective a gathering place can be at a time when people are craving human connection. What started as a class assignment—to design a community center of some sort—has become a gathering place not just for UMBC students and alumni, but the Arbutus community at large.

“We’ve heard a lot of stories from people who are extremely grateful to have this space,” says Michael Berardi, UMBC class of 2019 and co-founder and general manager of OCA Mocha, which stands for Opportunities for Community Alliances. The coffee shop includes a stage, a community room, and an art gallery, employs UMBC students and alumni, and provides internship opportunities for current UMBC students.

“We have local groups and organizations that meet regularly in our community space and are grateful to not have to meet in someone’s living room or church basement,” says Berardi. “We see a lot of connections being made. It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

We checked in with colleges and universities throughout the region to find out what’s new and what campus life and classes look like, two years into the pandemic.

COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
A historically Black institution founded in 1900, Coppin State University is situated in the heart of Baltimore City in the Mondawmin neighborhood. Part of the University System of Maryland in Baltimore, the school offers 32 undergraduate and 11 graduate degrees, along with nine certificate programs and one doctorate degree. It’s been rated No. 4 Best HBCU in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Program (Online School Center), and No. 17 Best Value in the Nation (College Consensus).

In the summer of 2021, CSU announced its Student Debt Relief Initiative, which clears roughly $1 million in student balances and provided a $1,200 credit to every student enrolled in the fall 2021 semester. CSU also created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin also takes esports (competitive video gaming) seriously. In the fall of 2021, Coppin became the first HBCU to open a building on campus exclusively devoted to esports. The Premier Esports Lab opened in September with a guest appearance from Grammy-nominated artist Cordae.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,383 undergraduates, 341 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $6,809 in-state, $13,334 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 40%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, and Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

DICKINSON COLLEGE
Founded in 1783, Dickinson College is a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a suburban campus that spans 144 acres. The school offers 41 undergraduate degrees within 17 fields of study.

It’s been rated as one of the best schools in the country for its sustainability efforts, which include an 80-acre, USDA-certified organic farm. Princeton Review rated it No. 2 in the Top 50 Green Colleges, and it was rated No. 2 in Overall Top Performers among baccalaureate institutions in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s “Sustainable Campus Index” in 2019 and 2020.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,345
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $58,708
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 52%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: International Business, Economics, Political Science & Government, International Relations & National Security, General Psychology

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
Gettysburg College, a private, liberal arts school, sits on 225 acres adjacent to the historical Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. Many of the buildings on campus are historically significant, so it’s no wonder that it draws students interested in studying history.

The school offers 65 academic programs, more than 120 campus clubs and organizations, and 800 events on campus each year, plus more than 100 study-abroad opportunities open to students.

Its Majestic Theater serves as a venue for the greater Gettysburg community, hosting national acts as well as performances by the school’s Sunderman Conservatory of Music students.

It’s ranked No. 12 for “students who study the most” by the Princeton Review, which also ranked Gettysburg College’s dining hall No. 9 in the country for best campus food.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,600
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $59,960
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 56%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Political Science, Economics, Health Sciences, Organization and Management Studies, History, Psychology

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college in Towson, Goucher College prides itself on its close-knit community.

Goucher was extremely proactive when it came to COVID-19 precautions, being the first in the state to implement wastewater testing, which is able to isolate COVID infections by dorm.

Also of note: The college recently opened two new residence halls as part of the school’s First-Year Village. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the school is committed to sustainability.

Most recently, Goucher has begun exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, and more to come, to provide a pathway for students to continue their education beyond Goucher. For instance, their 4+1 MBA Program allows students to earn an advanced business degree through Loyola via a “Fast Track” admission process, and at a 15% discount on tuition.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,000
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 79%
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Psychology, International Relations, Economics, Political Science, Business Administration

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) offers nine academic divisions and hundreds of courses of study, with campuses spread throughout Baltimore, including the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory in Mount Vernon. Its main Homewood campus is located on North Charles Street.

The prestigious, world-renowned university has a strong reputation for its public health and medical studies and has been compared to Ivy League schools.

One of its points of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100% of calculated need for every admitted student, without loans. This means JHU works with families to calculate what they can afford to contribute toward the total cost of attendance—including meals, books, travel, and other expenses—and JHU covers the rest with grants that don’t need to be repaid.

This school year, JHU added two new minors: Latin American Studies and Writing Seminars.

It also announced new efforts this year to move toward a broader, more flexible undergraduate educational experience that will include a required first-year seminar and the streamlining of major requirements to allow for greater intellectual exploration.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,333 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 6:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $56,313 for Peabody Institute, $58,720 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 9%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus in northern Baltimore City. Education at Loyola is based in the Jesuit tradition of scholarship cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Loyola is known for its academic rigor while helping students lead purposeful lives. Seventy percent of students study abroad. It currently ranks fourth in best universities in the North region according to U.S. News & World Report.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,787 undergraduates, 1,353 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 80%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education.

McDANIEL COLLEGE
McDaniel College sits in a bucolic setting near Westminster in Carroll County. The private, four-year liberal arts college offers more than 70 undergraduate programs of study and more than 20 graduate programs. McDaniel’s most recent addition to its curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security as well as the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

Also new this year, McDaniel appointed an inaugural associate provost for equity and belonging who provides vision and leadership to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and works in collaboration with the provost to co-lead the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion administrative committee, and guides the Bias Education Response Support Team.

The school also launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. It hosts workshops and other events while also supplying online and hybrid support.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,757 undergraduates, 1,324 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Morgan is a public institution founded in 1867. It is situated in northeast Baltimore. As a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution, Morgan provides instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offers more than 140 academic programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community level study and pioneering solutions.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,270 undergraduates, 1,364 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 73%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs from undergraduate through PhD, as well as Maryland’s only women’s college. It recently launched the first master’s of art degree in Art Therapy program in the state.
The beautiful, wooded campus is just steps from the bustling downtown Baltimore culture. With values rooted in Catholicism, the school focuses on service to others and social responsibility.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 783
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $39,675
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and continues to draw students from other states, though it remains part of the University System of Maryland.

Its campus continues to expand, with a huge new dining hall, a 23,000-foot recreation and fitness facility with an indoor swimming pool, and its 5,200-seat arena for sporting events and concerts. In 2021, it opened its new Science Complex, the largest academic building on campus at 320,000 square feet.

In September, Towson opened its StarTUp at the Armory, a space for startups and new businesses to engage with the broader community and larger businesses. It serves as a home to Towson’s entrepreneurship programs, as well as student competitions and events.

While Towson remains the largest supplier of medical professionals and educators in the state, the university has also built a strong reputation for its College of Fine Arts and Communication, as well as its Asian Arts & Culture Center, both of which bring students into the wider community and the Baltimore community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 17,907 undergraduates, 2,949 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $7,100 in-state, $22,152 out-of-state
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
University of Maryland, Baltimore is Maryland’s only public health, law, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 86 degree and certificate programs through its six nationally ranked professional schools—dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work—and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The school’s 14-acre BioPark is Baltimore’s biggest biotechnology cluster, employing 1,000 people, and remains on the cutting edge of new drugs, treatments, and medical devices.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 7,244
• ANNUAL TUITION: Varies by school
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
University of Maryland, Baltimore County educates a campus of more than 10,000 students in programs spanning the arts, engineering, information technology, humanities, sciences, preprofessional studies, and social sciences. Located on the edge of Baltimore County, it allows easy access into the city and all the conveniences of suburban life and housing. It also offers plenty of opportunities for study abroad.

In the fall of 2021, UMBC opened the Center for Well-Being, a new two-story complex that houses Retriever Integrated Health, Student Conduct and Community Standards, and i3b’s Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being. UMBC’s already significant NASA partnerships have continued to grow. In October, NASA announced a major award of $72 million over three years for the new Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II center. UMBC is leading the national consortium and will receive over $38 million. The GESTAR II consortium will support over 120 researchers, creating extensive opportunities for breakthroughs in Earth and atmospheric science research, and providing major opportunities for students to conduct research and be mentored by NASA scientists and engineers.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 13,638
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $12,280 in-state, $28,470 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

Cited tuition costs exclude room and board and books.

Maryland photographer Mary Brunst first heard about #TheFrontStepsProject through a friend who shared an article on Facebook. Two photographers in Massachusetts had started taking portraits of families—literally on their front steps—as a way to celebrate family, life, and community during this surreal Coronavirus quarantine.

“I thought it was a wonderful way to focus our attention on the good things still happening, as well as support those in our community,” says Brunst. “I wanted to be a part of that here locally.”

Since starting her local initiative, Brunst has photographed more than 30 families. She’s been asking for a voluntary $50 donation (but any amount is acceptable) per session to donate to Micah Clark, a two-and-a-half year old with a rare genetic disease and impaired immune system, a scary diagnosis during the pandemic.

“The Front Steps Project has been an incredibly fun and heartwarming to be a part of,” Brunst says. “It’s wonderful to see the community coming together to help Micah and others immunocompromised like him, while documenting this unusual season of our lives. We’ve never lived through something like this before, and while I’m not at all making light of current circumstances or the seriousness of the issues at hand, I think it’s also important to hold space for the good things happening.”

Specifically, Brunst says she’s been trying to focus on some of the positive of sheltering in place. It helps when the panic comes creeping in.

“It’s not all fear, uncertainty, sickness, and pandemic,” she says. “We are taking quality time to spend with our families, neighbors are helping neighbors, we are learning new hobbies, reading new books, we have the technology to virtually spend time with our friends, we are reaching out and checking in on those we care about—and maybe haven’t talked to in a while—and creating new habits.”

She’s been trying to capture all that on her camera—while communicating and posing people from 20 feet away.

“I’m practicing safe and significant social distancing—and I don’t believe that what I’m doing is any different than going out to walk my dog,” says Brunst, who unfortunately thinks her project will now be on hold, post Governor Larry Hogan’s stay-at-home order.

Heather Smertycha Bailey had Brunst come photograph her family last week.

“When I saw The Front Steps Project Instagram post, I knew I wanted to be a part of it,” Bailey says. “Mary brought huge laughs and smiles to our faces during this time of uncertainty and isolation. This time in quarantine has been a reconnection in many ways. It’s reminded my family to slow down, get back to the basics and enjoy one other.”

Maria Linz O’Brien, a family and wedding photographer, has also been using this unprecedented time to shoot families on their porches and stoops.

“Every one of us is doing our part to keep our families and neighbors safe, but social distancing can be stressful and isolating,” O’Brien says. “We’ve had some beautiful days these last couple of weeks, so I wanted to get outside and do what I love.”

For O’Brien, it’s all about bringing joy to her neighbors. She is also looking forward to providing photos for them to look back on in years to come.

“Social distancing is hard, but one of the benefits is the extra time many of us are getting to spend with family,” she says. “A lot of families, including almost 40 I have photographed in the last week, are happy to get to document this time, and have some nice family photos too.”

Like Brunst, she’s been trying to focus on the silver lining.

“I’m glad I’ve been able to bring a little relief from the stress,” she says. “There are ways we can all make this time a little more bearable for everyone and safely continue doing the things we love.”

This is a story about loving something so much you dedicate your life to it—about doing something not for the acclaim, but because it’s the right thing to do. Like all of life, it’s also a story about growth and loss, success and pain, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s about how, even when everything you’ve strived for goes up in flames, if you’ve done good work, you might find a community of people there to raise it up again. 

This is the story of The Book Thing, a place that is a little difficult to describe. It’s not a bookstore, because you can’t buy the thousands of titles it offers, and it’s not an exchange, because you don’t have to give books away to take them. It’s a place where, mind-bogglingly, you can take donated books for free, as many as you like, with no catch. And like many ventures in Baltimore that run largely on commitment and heart, it seems like it should have run out of steam—but miraculously, it hasn’t. Not even when a fire reduced it to a smoldering heap in March 2016. 

The Book Thing has been nurturing readers since 1999, when Russell Wattenberg, who arrived in Baltimore somewhat by accident, turned his hobby of collecting books and giving them away into a full-time thing—“Russell’s book thing,” as the patrons at the former Mt. Vernon mainstay Dougherty’s, where he used to tend bar, called it. The name stuck. The old warehouse near Waverly that Wattenberg used as The Book Thing headquarters—where books lined the walls, stacked along bookshelves that turned the rooms into a veritable literary maze—became a haven for bibliophiles who carried their finds by the armful. And Wattenberg could always count on more books, handed over in shopping bags, milk crates, or cardboard boxes tinged green with mold from years in dark, dank basements. 

His mission won national acclaim—The New York Times ran a story in 2002 called “Where Even the Dime Novel Doesn’t Cost a Cent,” declaring The Book Thing “one of this city’s grand treasure troves.” People magazine ran a feature. C-SPAN came to do a segment.

“I like when I can give a book to a person and tell them, ‘I think you’ll enjoy this.ʼ”

But it all came to a grinding halt in the early morning of March 2, 2016, when Wattenberg was roused from sleep by a pounding at his door. A neighbor told him that The Book Thing was on fire, and by the time Wattenberg threw on clothes and ran a few blocks over to Vineyard Lane, all that was left was smoke-stained shelves full of charred, soggy books. 

“I was just totally numb. That whole day was such a blur,” says Wattenberg. “It was amazing the number of people who were crying, men and women. It’s like you don’t realize how good something is until it’s gone, how important it was to these folks. There were a lot of people there who, before the fire, I saw every weekend or one or two days a week for 15 years. I have no idea what their names are, if they’re homeless or rich. That’s the beauty of The Book Thing.”

But The Book Thing wasn’t really gone—in fact, the very people who surrounded Wattenberg that day were there to resurrect it. 

To fully understand The Book Thing, you have to understand Russell Wattenberg. This burly, teddy bear of an unlikely hero prefers, for the most part, to stay out of the spotlight. But if you do catch him, say at the row of Formstone buildings on Vineyard Lane that has become The Book Thing’s temporary sorting headquarters, or at the neighboring brewery Peabody Heights, where he hangs out on Friday evenings, it’s clear how much he loves what he does.

“I like when I can give a book to a person and tell them, ‘I think you’ll really enjoy this,’ and they’ll come back later and say that they did,” Wattenberg says. “And then there are times, like when someone once brought in a class of fifth graders and one of them refused to look through the kids’ books and was off in a corner and ended up grabbing an oceanography college textbook off the shelf. He probably couldn’t read three-quarters of it, but he wanted that book. And he sat there and looked at it and flipped the pages for an hour. That made me feel good, you know what I mean?”

The Book Thing’s creation came about through equal parts chance and instinct, and Wattenberg shares the story as if what transpired still surprises him. “I never actually got the idea—it just kind of happened,” he says. “If I’d had the idea, I wouldn’t have done it. I really never even thought I’d be in Baltimore.”

Some 20 years ago, he was straight out of college, all of his belongings loaded into his van, on his way to visit his mother in Florida, when he stopped in Baltimore to get gas. To ease his travel-induced weariness, he phoned a friend and asked to stay at her place for the night. In exchange, he would help her boyfriend with some work at a house he was renovating. One thing led to another, and Wattenberg ended up staying long term and working at Dougherty’s. That’s when his hobby really took off. 

Wattenberg had always collected books, but not in the way you might think. He wasn’t in it for rare books or first editions—instead, he’d grab a dog-eared copy of To Kill a Mockingbird at a garage sale for 25 cents, or keep his eyes peeled at sidewalk sales for his childhood favorites like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. When he heard some patrons, who happened to be teachers, complaining about needing books, “I said, ‘Just go out to the van and grab whatever you want.’ So the word spread, and people started bringing me books they didn’t want anymore and leaving them at the bar. And it just kind of grew and grew and grew.”

In 1999, those same teachers put together the paperwork for The Book Thing to become a nonprofit, and Wattenberg quit his job (“Give books away; sell alcohol to drunks—it was a real moral dilemma there,” he says with a wink) and moved the operation to the 950-square-foot basement of a commercial Charles Village rowhome. It moved to a bigger home in 2005, when Wattenberg bought a former warehouse and darkroom near Waverly. 

He raised $60,000 in 60 days for the down payment and closing costs—“no bank would touch me for a mortgage, surprise, surprise,” he says. Someone also loaned him a good chunk of their retirement savings, and Wattenberg worked to pay off the benefactor in seven years, mostly through the sale of rare books, which is still the main way that The Book Thing funds itself. “I always say I can sell a first-edition Hemingway, which enables us to give away hundreds of Hemingways,” he says.

The Book Thing attracted readers by the thousands, as well as a corps of volunteers who kept the place running. Wattenberg isn’t good on exact numbers, but he can safely say “hundreds of thousands” of books have been given out and “hundreds” of people have volunteered their time, many on a weekly basis. For Diane Schaefer, who is retired from the health care field and has shelved books for the past three years, “the enthusiasm of the people who visit is why I volunteer. You absolutely never know who will show up or what books will show up, and I love being able to help people find what they are looking for.”

And it became everything to Wattenberg. His future wife was a volunteer, and the pair pined for one another for years before finally sharing their first kiss at The Book Thing over an old National Geographic issue on sequoias. One year later, they tied the knot at the annual anniversary party. “April 1 is our anniversary, and April 2 is our annikissery. We’re cheesy,” he says, grinning.

“You absolutely never know who . . . or what books will show up.”

So it makes sense that he was crushed to see his life reduced to a pile of smoldering embers. It still makes him emotional thinking about it. “I’ve been doing The Book Thing seven days a week, 80 to 100 hours every week for so long, and then just to see it all . . .” his voice trails off. “Shocked isn’t the right word. It’s almost as if I was seeing my own funeral.”

Immediately, on March 2, the day of the fire, people flocked to the scene. There were volunteers like Schaefer, who was supposed to work a shift sorting books and instead arrived to the smell of ash in the air. “It was devastating to see just the charred remains,” she says. “But there was also a lot of hope, which was wonderful. The volunteers immediately started to clean up, moving the remaining bookcases, taking out anything that was left.

Edward O’Keefe, the event coordinator at Peabody Heights Brewery, walked over with some beer and introduced himself to Wattenberg. Instantly, a friendship formed. “Russell is 100-percent genuine. He’s one of the few people in this world who has no ulterior motives,” O’Keefe says. He quickly knew he had to help however he could. 

Soon, the fundraisers started. Peabody Heights hosted a trivia night that people lined Greenmount Avenue for blocks to get in, with all 600 of them packing the brewery and raising thousands for the recovery. Peabody Heights also became The Book Thing’s satellite location, a tradition that will likely continue, O’Keefe says. “People sometimes look at us strangely that there’s a bookcase in a brewery,” he says. “And when we tell them to take [the books], some people ask, ‘Is there a catch? Do we have to buy a bunch of beer?’” Baltimore independent rock label Friends Records put on an epic concert with more than a dozen acts, including rapper Eze Jackson and up-and-coming rockers Sun Club, that pulled in $8,000. Hip Remington taqueria Clavel donated a portion of its sales one night. So did brewery institution The Brewer’s Art, as did Whole Foods. Even Baltimore Ghost Tours pitched in.

Others honored the loss in other ways. “The heart of this city thrums with a faintly anarchic spirit. We don’t do too well with authority, preferring to conduct our transactions unmediated by regulation and restraint,” writer Patricia Schultheis editorialized in The Sun a week after the fire. “Mr. Wattenberg understood Baltimoreans well enough to know they’d respond to his notion of free books by endlessly replenishing his supply.” 

Finally, this fall, all 7,000 boxes of books will move across the street.

All of this caught Wattenberg off guard. “People were raising money that we didn’t even know about. It got to be so much that I started telling people to give it to homeless shelters or someone who really needed it.” 

Before long, book donations started coming again, so Wattenberg rented temporary space across the street from The Book Thing’s shell. Wattenberg knew he wanted to rebuild on the same spot near Waverly, and aimed to be back up and running within a year. But then he was hit with construction, permit, and design delays that pushed back the re-opening. Still, he persevered, forging through dealings with the insurance company, firing and hiring architects and construction firms, never giving up. Now, finally, this fall, all 7,000 boxes of books, plus Eleanor, a tabby cat who is the nonprofit’s unofficial mascot, will move across the street, and The Book Thing will be home again once more.

One morning in July, Wattenberg leads a tour of the renovations, showing off the freshly painted walls, new offices, and yet-to-be-installed windows like a proud papa. “This is what’s going to be here for the next 20, 30 years,” he says, as buzz saws whir in the background.  

Wattenberg asked the construction company to save him a piece of one of the burnt joists. “I had them cut out a section, and I’m going to throw some shellac on it and hang it up here,” he says. “It’s not so much sentimental—it’s a reminder of what we’ve been through. And now we’re stronger.”

Gather Baltimore

What they do: Collect unsold food from farmers’ markets, farms, and other sources for redistribution to local meal programs, faith communities, and others in need.

How to help: Volunteers always needed to help “glean” (aka collect) foodstuffs; donate to its Give Corps campaign to purchase freezers and refrigerators for its Remington warehouse, which will help increase capacity.

Contact: Visit in person at the JFX farmers’ market and Oliver Farm Stand (1400 N. Bond St.) every Sunday; gatherbaltimore.org.

Health Care for the Homeless

What they do: Provide health-related services, education, and advocacy to reduce the incidence and burdens of homelessness.

How to help: Donate online or by mail at Health Care for the Homeless, 421 Fallsway, Baltimore, MD, 21202; attend its annual fundraiser The HCH Chocolate Affair on February 15, 2014.

Contact: hchmd.org.

Maryland Food Bank

What they do: With three locations statewide, the Maryland Food Bank coordinates the procurement and distribution of food donations from manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and government agencies to organizations providing free food to the state’s hungry.

How to help: Donate money via website; virtual food drive via website allows donors to purchase in bulk the most-needed items; bring canned donations to Ravens Food & Funds Drive at M&T Bank Stadium on November 24; bring canned donations to or make a monetary donation at the register at participating Giant food stores through November; throughout November and December at participating Safeway locations buy pre-packaged bags of food to be delivered to those in need; donate food in person Mon.-Fri., 8:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. at 2200 Halethorpe Farms Road, Baltimore, MD 21227; warehouse volunteers always needed to help sort and pack donations in 3-hour shifts Mon.-Sat. and Wed. evenings.

Contact: 410-737-8282 or mdfoodbank.org.

Jobs Housing Recovery

What they do: This all-male nonprofit offers a continuum of care that encompasses food and shelter, skills and job training, and substance-abuse treatment and counseling.

How to help: Always in need of warm clothing, including hats, scarves, men’s boots, coats, and jackets; volunteers needed to help with daily food service, holiday decorating, and activities; donations accepted through Paypal at jhrbaltimore.org.

Contact: 410-522-2232

Fuel Fund of Maryland

What they do: Provide resources to vulnerable Maryland families for heat and home utility needs.

How to help: Monetary donations can be submitted online through its website, via your monthly BGE bill, or via check at Fuel Fund of Maryland Inc.,
P.O. Box 62266, Baltimore, MD, 21264-2266. Also accepts gifts of stock.

Contact: 410-235-9080, fuelfundmaryland.org

Marian House

What they do: Waverly-based nonprofit offers high-quality rehabilitative services and housing to homeless women and their children.

How to help: Donations accepted through marianhouse.org or in person at 949 Gorsuch Ave., Baltimore, MD, 21218

Contact: Offers tours of the facility the first Friday of every month; for more information, call 410-467-4246 and ask to speak with advancement assistant Tamar Klein.

Overwhelmed and need help deciding where to begin? Do a search onvolunteermatch.org. Enter your preferences (location, subject matter, age, etc.) into the website and receive a list of area organizations looking for volunteers just like you!

There are many good and noble causes out there. But beware, all nonprofits aren’t created equal. To help you decide where to put your time, money, and effort, use Charity Navigator, an independent American nonprofit corporation that evaluates charities in the United States based on financial health, transparency, and accountability.charitynavigator.org.

Giving Tuesday is a new national campaign to promote charitable activities at the start of the holiday season. It’s designated for the Tuesday following Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday—this year, December 3. More information atgivingtuesday.org.

It doesn’t take Joe Ehrmann long to explode dumb-jock stereotypes. Earlier this year, the former Colts great—who’s been called “the most important coach in America”—gave a TED Talk at Morgan State University that brought the audience to its feet, and some listeners to tears, in a little more than 10 minutes. Of all the thinkers and creative types who spoke that day, he was the only one to get a sustained standing ovation. His coaching workshops at the Patterson Park Youth Sports and Education Center are even more startling. Dressed casually in a blue polo shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, the 64-year-old Ehrmann exudes a gentle power. His seen-it-all expression and upbeat demeanor suggest sadness and hope, which is disarming in a man so large. He works Eastern and Native-American philosophies, mythology, social activism, Christianity, and African-American history into his talk and often sounds more like a self-help guru, or life coach, than a defensive coach.

Someone once asked, prior to a presentation, if he would be discussing offense or defense, and he responded: “Neither. I’ll be talking philosophy.” And that’s pretty much what he does. Ehrmann’s workshops are required for coaches using the park’s new, multipurpose field and sponsored by Living Classrooms Foundation, which hopes to make his teaching program a citywide model.

Ehrmann tells the dozen coaches assembled at the youth center that sports are a vehicle for social change, which elicits a few puzzled looks. He stresses the importance of making sports co-curricular, rather than extra-curricular, so they become an extension of the school day, and he talks about players’ social and intellectual development and the importance of empathy and kindness.

He then pivots into more emotional, and potentially uncomfortable, territory. He insists that hugs are more effective than the histrionics in heavy rotation on SportsCenter and suggests his listeners ask themselves, “How does it feel to be coached by me?” He pauses a moment before saying there are two kinds of coaches: transactional and transformational. The transactional coach uses his players to meet his own needs. The transformational coach, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, helps people recognize things in themselves they otherwise wouldn’t see.

At this point, you can practically see the lightbulbs going off over the heads of his listeners, as they nod in agreement and scribble notes to themselves. Everyone, it seems, has had these types of coaches, and the memories are so clear that Ehrmann doesn’t have to ask which they’d rather be.

Ehrmann, knowing he’s connected with these men, ups the ante even further by saying they must also confront social justice issues, issues that affect the lives of not only their players, but also the community at large. He touches on economic disparity, racism, sexism, gender violence, homophobia, and how social messaging and warped perceptions of masculinity and femininity adversely affect boys and girls.

He covers a remarkable amount of territory over the course of an hour, but never loses sight of his main point: “The playing field is a field of transformation.”

Ehrmann grew up in Buffalo and came to Baltimore in 1973. “They’re both blue-collar, shot-in-your-beer towns,” he says, sitting in his Hunt Valley office, which is filled, not with sports memorabilia, but with books—the range of titles includes Growing Up in America, The Male Ego, and Dean Smith’s A Coach’s Life.

The Colts selected Ehrmann in the first round of the draft, the tenth pick overall, out of Syracuse. A ferocious defensive tackle, he lined up alongside Mike Barnes, Fred Cook, and John Dutton to form the team’s much-vaunted “Sack Pack.” His anger issues, stemming largely from an abusive father, played well on the football field. Off the field, he became a fixture in Fells Point and drank and drugged away his mental and physical pain.

At the height of Ehrmann’s football fame, his 19-year-old brother, Billy, was diagnosed with cancer and admitted to The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Coming to grips with his brother’s illness had a sobering effect on Ehrmann, who spent the better part of four months confronting death and suffering in a pediatric oncology ward. “It made me question my purpose in life,” he recalls.

A local psychologist gave him a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. “It was the beginning of a real metamorphosis for me,” recalls Ehrmann, “because Frankl says that the greatest of all human freedoms is the ability to change how you respond to any given situation. No matter what life deals you, you can find meaning in it and add value to it.”

After Billy passed away in 1978, Ehrmann founded Baltimore’s Ronald McDonald House and dedicated it to his brother’s memory. In 1980, his last season with the Colts, he entered the seminary as something of a wounded warrior and emerged an ordained minister committed to social justice. By that time, he was married—he met his wife, Paula, through a radio contest in which he was the “celebrity date”—and winding down his football career. He was also looking to make a difference.

He started preaching at Grace Fellowship Church in Timonium and founded a community center, The Door, in East Baltimore. Middle East was an area plagued by all sorts of urban ills, but Ehrmann didn’t shy from the challenge. In fact, he and Paula moved to nearby Buthcers Hill.

“He cared about standing up for those who were unable to stand up for themselves,” says Paula.

“Playing football gave me the opportunity to cross so many social and economic strata,” he says, “and I wanted to confront the discrepancies between the haves and have-nots.”

One day, he ran into Biff Poggi, an old friend from his Colts days, who was delivering a carload of donated food to The Door’s food pantry. As a teenager, Poggi snuck into the weight room during Colts workouts at Goucher College. Some players grumbled and wanted him tossed out, but Ehrmann befriended him. “Even then, he was reflective and kind,” says Poggi.

After reconnecting at The Door, they stayed in touch and talked about football and philosophy. When Poggi was named head coach at Gilman, he asked Ehrmann to be his defensive coordinator. Ehrmann had hoped to coach at Lake Clifton High School but says the city wouldn’t let him, because he wasn’t a teacher. He accepted Poggi’s offer, which changed his life and set him on his current path.

With Poggi’s blessing, Ehrmann brought his holistic approach, philosophical bent, and empathic worldview to the locker room. “When we first started, Biff got it immediately,” recalls Ehrmann. “We were just coaching out of our hearts and trying to create a team where kids could be real and authentic and become good people. We knew that creating more football players wasn’t the answer to any of society’s problems.”

Writer Jeffrey Marx, a former Colts ball boy, followed Gilman’s 2001 season and documented Ehrmann’s approach in his 2003 book, Season of Life, which turned out to be a bestseller. It gave Ehrmann a national platform. “I started getting calls from all over the country,” he says. “After one or two speaking engagements, I saw the power of that book, and I decided to take the message outside [Gilman], while Biff stayed inside. I’ve been on the road almost 10 years now, speaking and conducting workshops.”

Poggi calls his friend’s work “prophetic,” and Ehrmann’s client list includes the NFL, NCAA, and the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation. But as Matt Hanna, a coach at the Patterson Park workshop notes, “What Joe does is the missing link in a lot of settings. He teaches things that should be common sense.” And Ehrmann himself will tell you the scope of his work has evolved to become “much broader than the sports piece.”

His four children are grown and out of the house, so he can devote more time to expanding his reach. Because his message applies to just about any community setting imaginable (from the boardroom to the classroom), he’s also worked with the Naval and Coast Guard academies, Teach For America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, family shelters, and companies such as Verizon and Boeing.

He works with Living Classrooms through its Target Investment Zone, which provides a variety of services to East Baltimore neighborhoods. “We’ve admired Joe for many years, and he became a founding partner of that program,” says Living Classrooms President and CEO James Piper Bond, who views Ehrmann’s efforts as “a health-and-wellness initiative more than simply a sports program.”

These days, Ehrmann also focuses a lot of energy on the issues of child sexual abuse and gender violence. After scandals at the likes of Penn State and Vanderbilt, he feels compelled to speak out and raise awareness. “Addressing all these issues is basically the same work I did at The Door, just on a macro level,” says Ehrmann. “You know, you don’t have to be poor to be concerned about poverty. You don’t have to be black to be concerned about racism. You don’t have to be a woman to be concerned about sexism.

“There’s a power in the collective, in learning about and from other people. That’s how you build a team.”

Twenty years ago, Joel Lee, a 21-year-old Korean-American beginning his senior year at then-Towson State University, was robbed, shot in the face, and killed while heading to a classmate’s home in Northeast Baltimore. “He wanted to borrow a computer-science book because he was determined to get his grades even higher this year,” his friend, Folashayo Babalola, told The Baltimore Sun after the September 1993 murder. “Joel was very quiet, very ambitious,” Babalola continued. “This has really shaken me. . . . ”

The brutal slaying also shook Baltimore’s Korean-American community, whose leaders still recall the tragedy. Already feeling under siege following attacks directed at Korean-American merchants in the 1980s and 1990s, the Lee case and trial was followed closely in the city. The acquittal of the accused two years later by an almost all African-African jury spurred a protest march downtown and appeared to reflect a troubled relationship between the Korean-American community and traditionally African-American neighborhoods where many of their businesses were located.

(It wasn’t only in Baltimore where relationships between Korean-American merchants and the African-American community were overheating. A year before Lee’s murder, in Los Angeles, Korean store owners were caught in the middle of rioting following the acquittal of white police officers in the beating of Rodney King. In New York, there had been Korean-American store boycotts.)

In Baltimore, there was also a boycott of a Korean-American-owned store, which was eventually closed by the Health Department. And there was a contentious debate over the renovation of the Lafayette and Belair Markets, where Korean-immigrant owners felt they were being pushed out by the city.

Into this fraying backdrop, the Baltimore-based Korean-American Grocers & Licensed Beverage Association of Maryland (KAGRO) was founded in 1995. Forming a nonprofit to help Korean-Americans deal with vendors and navigate the myriad city regulations had been discussed for six months, says Jay Park, who operated a Park Heights liquor store for 25 years and was an early KAGRO president. But the group’s focus quickly expanded in the wake of the Lee trial—which was followed by a wave of four Korean-American store shootings in an eight-day period in January 1997. Immediately, KAGRO began working to build relationships in local communities—starting a scholarship fund, organizing outreach events, and attending meetings. Merchants tried to develop a better relationship with the city police, which had proved a struggle, if for no other reason than the cultural and language barriers.

“The timing [of KAGRO’s launch] wasn’t tied directly to the Lee case,” says Park, “but it concentrated our attention on the most pressing issues we had to deal with, which were not problems with the vendors.”

At his son’s memorial service, Joel Lee’s father said he didn’t “want my son’s death to have no meaning.”

A generation later, Park believes something positive can be connected to that tragedy. “Up until that time, I think we had been looked at and treated differently because of our skin color, our language,” Park says. “But after that, I think people saw us coming together and began to see us as a part of the community, too.”

“Korean-Americans, we don’t have a lot of resources when we arrive.”

But it has never been easy running a corner store in Baltimore. Crime and poverty persist in wide swaths. And now, after decades of struggle on tough corners, city officials are planning to significantly reduce the number of neighborhood liquor stores—the vast majority of which are owned by Korean-Americans. In a sense, Park says, KAGRO members “feel under attack again.”

Among the first things KAGRO did 18 years ago was start a scholarship program for local students. Since then, the association has awarded about $300,000, via annual grants to students in the neighborhoods where KAGRO-member stores are located, as well as to high-school and college-age children of store owners. Two police officers are also annually awarded “appreciation” honors at a ceremony at the Greenmount Senior Center.

The scholarships, as well as different community events and outreach forums, Park says, helped defuse tensions over time. “We tried to go around and get questions from the community, we tried to listen and get the community’s perspective as well as the merchants,” Park says. There were also meetings with former Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke’s Korean liaison and municipal departments, and later with the O’Malley and Dixon administrations. By 2004, the Maryland Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had produced a report—years in the making—that found that, while problems persisted between the African-American and Korean-American store owners, “some merchants enjoy friendly relationships in the neighborhoods where their stores are located . . . ” The report, however, also found that “city agencies can do more” to provide services without bias. Not that there wasn’t work needed on the store owners’ side.

“There are cultural differences between the West and East,” says Jin Wook Kang, a restaurant owner and lower Charles Village liquor-store operator. “In our home country, making eye contact is viewed as disrespectful in certain relationships, for example, between a student and a teacher; with a police officer or government official. We listen, but we look down. In our home country, we put change on the counter and push it toward a customer—it’s considered more polite than touching someone’s hand. But here, someone would tell police, ‘They’re rude, they put the change on the counter and push it toward you.’ The opposite was true. It was a misunderstanding. But things have improved a great deal.”

Jay Park arrived in Baltimore as a 17-year-old in 1973, at the start of a Korean boom following the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished nation-based immigration laws giving Europeans preference. Ninety-five percent of Korean-Americans consist of post-1965 immigrants and their children. In the Baltimore region, the Korean-American community has grown from 2,000, Park estimates, when his family arrived, to 60,000.

“My father dreamed of a better life, a better life for his family—the land of opportunity—and he applied for immigration,” says Park, a fit and young-looking 57, casually dressed in a maroon golf shirt tucked into gray slacks at KAGRO’s office at North and Maryland Avenues. He speaks in accented but perfect English, smiling as he recalls his family’s early struggles to acclimate and make ends meet in their third-floor Patterson Park apartment. “Immigration was open to ‘skilled labor’ immigrants and he was an auto mechanic. He brought the whole family and only had $400. I think about it—there were seven of us—five siblings. Where does anybody get that kind of courage?” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t think I could’ve done it.”

His father eventually landed a Sparrows Point union job, where he punched a clock for 15 years. Park graduated from Towson in 1980 with a business degree, and, after a series of entry-level retail jobs, including door-to-door sales, he decided to strike out on his own. It was not just a desire to be self-employed; it was almost a necessity, he says.

“All of us have a family . . . counting on us, and this is the one thing we know.”

“First-generation Korean-Americans, we don’t have a lot resources when we arrive,” Park says. “People may have a lot of education in Korea, but they don’t know anyone and might have limited language skills. So, people pull resources together. We pull our own funding together, sometimes through a gye—a fund community members contribute to each month and then have access to. That’s how a lot of Korean-American merchants start—even today—though less than before.”

Michelle Ha, current KAGRO president, has been here since 1980 and lives above her East Biddle Street liquor store, which she’s owned for 15 years—not far from where Park’s family first settled. She throws an annual spaghetti block party, collects school supplies for neighborhood kids, and gives away Thanksgiving meals. “I love doing those things,” Ha says. A community council member, she works closely with Eastern District police—she has the commander’s cell-phone number—and officers know her by name. She also puts together an annual summer Day of Hope festival at Bocek Park, which includes children’s activities and rides.

“She’s a fixture in that community,” says Lt. Col. Melvin T. Russell, commander of the department’s community partnership division. “When I need help, she is one of the first people I call. She serves as a go-between with the small businesses [and police], and I know she provides holiday meals for hundreds of people. The city needs more people like her.”

Ha, however, is concerned about her future. Baltimore may need committed activists like Ha, but city officials don’t want the kind of business she owns in residential communities anymore. Part of the city’s massive rezoning effort entails scaling back the number of liquor licenses. Proportionally, the rollback will hit the Korean-American community, which owns the majority of corner “Class A” liquor stores, hardest.

Currently, there are 1,330 liquor licenses in the city. About 300 are “Class A” licenses, of which 128 are slated for cuttng. Thomas Stosur, Baltimore City’s director of planning, notes studies showing a correlation between crime, violence, poor public-health outcomes, and the number of liquor stores in densely populated residential areas. He adds that the last time the city underwent a rezoning overhaul was in 1971 when the 128 current liquor licenses the city wants to remove were “grandfathered” in. “We refer to them as ‘non-conforming’ because, under current law, they wouldn’t qualify for a liquor license because they are in a residential area,” Stosur says. “That’s where that number comes from.”

Stosur adds that many “Class BD-7” licenses (bars that do a majority carryout business) will be affected as well and are not typically Korean-American owned. In both cases, he says, the city intends to assist storeowners in retooling their business, if possible, so they can remain. Owners may sell their licenses, though that won’t be easy, Stosur admits.

Councilman Nick Mosby, who successfully sponsored a bill last year to stop liquor-store sales of candy, soda, and snacks to minors, says the effort to remove liquor stores from residential streets is overdue. “At the end of the day, this is an opportunity to build healthier communities,” he says. “Our juveniles grow up surrounded by liquor stores to a point where it becomes normalized. I ask people, ‘Where do you live? Would you put up with it on your block?'” Mosby acknowledges many owners have developed good neighborhood relationships, but says rezoning liquor stores out of residential areas and away from city schools is just common sense. Mosby expects the proposed rezoning to come before the City Council this fall—hearings last spring were emotional and contentious with KAGRO members voicing opposition—with a vote next spring. Owners “will have had 3 to 4 years to make necessary adjustments,”he says.

Still, Park, Ha, and KAGRO members feel they were excluded from the rezoning discussions. Park points out that while many businesses fled in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, the Korean-American business owners stayed. Many in the Korean-American community did move their residences to Baltimore and Howard Counties, but still worked with city officials to reduce crime and improve neighborhoods where they owned businesses. Station North, where KAGRO’s office is located, never quite became “Korea-town,” as Park puts it, but remains the center of the city’s Korean community and includes popular restaurants that date back to the 1980s. Those restaurants and the Korean community helped keep Station North viable before its Arts & Entertainment District designation and recent boom. “Now,” says Park, “they don’t need us anymore, and it’s goodbye.”

Of course, most of Park’s children, like other store owners’ kids born here, don’t have an interest in taking over the family business. Not after watching their mothers and fathers spend seven days a week, 12 hours a day, operating a corner store in a gritty section of town, often stuck at a cash register behind bullet-proof glass.

“Our kids don’t want that,” Park says. “They want professional jobs.”

Their parents, however, can’t afford to lose their stores, where their income and retirement remains tied up.

“All of us have a family and people counting on us, and this is the one thing we know how to do,” Ha says. “Once you start, you have so much money and time invested. How do you get the return that you have worked hard for?”

His appearance on stage last fall at Centennial High School’s auditorium, with friends Brock Yetso and Lance Armstrong in tow, should’ve been a simple, happy homecoming for Doug Ulman. The 36-year-old CEO of the Livestrong Foundation had won three state soccer championships here with Yetso, never losing a game. He’d gone on to play at Brown University before receiving a cancer diagnosis just prior to his sophomore year and then, remarkably, survived two more bouts of cancer in school while also launching the Baltimore-based Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults. Instead, however, a cloud hung over the “Lance Unplugged” event in the Centennial auditorium. Yetso, hosting the forum with Armstrong and Ulman, noted more than 50 cancer survivors were signed up for the Half Full Triathlon in Ellicott City the next day—which Armstrong had entered at the last minute. “Why this race?” Yetso asked the Tour de France legend. “You could do any race in the world.”

Armstrong responded with an awkward smile and a glance toward the audience—acknowledging the elephant in the room. “Well, that’s technically not true.”

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) had just handed Armstrong a lifetime competition ban after he announced he’d no longer contest the organization’s blood-doping charges. In truth, he came to Howard County because race organizers relinquished their USA Triathlon sanction just for him—in hopes his participation would raise more money for its charity, the Ulman Cancer Fund. The $50 Lance Unplugged tickets sold well, and auctioning off a Trek bike and jersey signed by Armstrong raised another $7,500. Still, there was a sense the other shoe was about to drop for Armstrong. Which it did.

Three days later, the USADA published its final report—more than a thousand pages of evidence and testimony from more than two dozen people, including 15 cyclists—documenting payments, e-mails, and test results proving “the use, possession and distribution of performance-enhancing drugs by Lance Armstrong.” Two weeks after his Centennial High appearance, Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.

Ulman admits today he’d held private doubts about the veracity of Armstrong’s denials for some time. But it wasn’t until he read the USADA report that he was forced to acknowledge his good friend—Ulman got married in Armstrong’s Austin, TX, backyard—had lied to him for years. “There’s not one thing in particular that I remember, except that it was a sad occasion,” Ulman says of Armstrong’s apology to him over dinner before his infamous confession with Oprah in January. “It was definitely emotional.”

Of course, Ulman’s broader concern was the hit Armstrong’s cancer foundation—whose mission had become his own life’s work—would take in the fallout around the disgraced cyclist. Suddenly, the nonprofit’s survival was being questioned.

“There is no playbook for dealing with this sort of thing,” Ulman says.

A compelling public speaker with his own powerful story, Ulman is now assuming what had been Armstrong’s public role. Among high-profile media appearances, he appeared on Today shortly after the USADA report came to light. In March, he did a Q & A with Time magazine.

He also has had to assume a greater role in motivating Livestrong staff and volunteers, admitting morale at Livestrong headquarters suffered a blow as the bottom fell out of the founder’s story.

Sitting in his office, a yellow Livestrong bracelet still around his wrist, Howard County Executive Ken Ulman recalled the summer afternoon 17 years ago that led to his younger brother’s initial cancer diagnosis. “We were running together through Dorsey’s Search [a Columbia neighborhood] and he kept coming back to check on me—because he was faster and in a lot better shape,” says Ken Ulman, a former Centennial point guard, but by then no longer a competitive athlete like his brother, who was preparing for his second season in the Brown midfield.

“He had asthma, but it had always been manageable. This time, though, he couldn’t get his breathing under control and went to Howard County General. They took a chest X-ray, almost as precaution, and that’s when it showed up.”

The X-ray revealed a tumor attacking rib cartilage in the then 19 year old. Ultimately, he underwent surgery for bone cancer, but was far from in the clear from cancer, and, over the next year, Ulman was diagnosed and treated twice for malignant melanoma. Determined to play soccer again, he returned to help Brown to three Ivy League Championships in four years. At the same time, he was turning his attention to a new challenge.

In college, Ulman, who could pass for Armstrong’s younger brother and possesses a similar blue-eyed intensity—albeit matched with earnestness rather than arrogance—studied American history and education. He had every intention of becoming a social studies teacher and soccer coach. But while in school, with assistance from his family, particularly his mother, long active in the Howard County community, he founded the nonprofit Ulman Cancer Fund. It provides support, education, and resources to young adults diagnosed with cancer, including help navigating the health-care system.

“Cancer may leave your body, but it never leaves you,” says Ulman, who discovered few informational sources while receiving treatment. “You get a cold or the flu and you wonder if you are okay. I still go to the dermatologist regularly for a scan, and the week leading up to that, I can experience a little anxiety.”

Early on, Ken Ulman says, his parents, Diana and Louis Ulman, instilled the importance of making a difference in the lives of others—volunteering the brothers at a local homeless shelter—as well as giving them the optimism and confidence that they could be leaders and problem solvers. (Diana and Louis Ulman, it should be noted, have overcome their own bouts with cancer.) Ken Ulman believes his always-driven brother—who was also Howard County Student Government Association president in high school—“is drawing on those qualities now” as he leads Livestrong through the public-relations crisis related to its founder.

Yetso, who has known Ulman since they were 10, says his pal’s resiliency was apparent on the soccer field long before his battles with cancer. “It was almost like he enjoyed being down 1-0 in a game,” Yetso says. “He is just someone who always responded to a challenge. He would’ve been a great social studies teacher and a coach that won state championships in soccer if he’d stayed on that track. He definitely became more focused [after cancer]—that experience changed him—but at the same time, he’s always been that way.”

As a junior at Brown, Ulman received an unexpected e-mail from Armstrong—who had not yet won his first Tour de France, but had learned of the young soccer player’s struggle with cancer. “I feel as if we are the lucky ones. Nobody can really have the perspective and the focus of a cancer survivor,” Armstrong wrote. “If there is anything I can do to help your cause, please let me know. Otherwise, look after yourself and take care.”

If there’s any doubt about Ulman’s affinity for a challenge, he did a 100-mile Himalyan ultra-marathon several years ago.

Staying in touch via e-mail for two years, Ulman eventually ventured to Texas to meet Armstrong in person during a charity ride.

Armstrong, of course, despite vigorously defending himself (to say the least) against doping allegations for the past decade, has always been the face of his cancer foundation. Raising millions for his cancer nonprofit may have enabled him, in terms of good will, to deflect negative publicity from the persistent doping allegations—as some have suggested. But it’s hard to question Livestrong’s efforts, which do not fund cancer cure research, but aim “to inspire and empower” cancer patients and their families, guiding individuals through the cancer experience and encouraging them to live an active life as a survivor.

Ulman, named president and CEO in 2007, helped develop Livestrong into one of the world’s best-known philanthropic organizations—one that took in $48.5 million in 2012. Not only does Livestrong have a legion of cancer-survivor supporters, including 116,000 donors worldwide last year, it has earned a four-star rating—the highest—from Charity Navigator, an independent charity evaluator.

But in the wake of the doping revelations, he quickly had to make a number of moves to separate the organization’s mission and work from its association with Armstrong. The first, Ulman says, was a commitment to “over communicate” both externally and internally. “We’ve probably had 50 meetings with our staff,” says Ulman, “some an hour, others five minutes.”

Most noticeably, three weeks after Armstrong lost his titles, the Lance Armstrong Foundation dropped the name of the disgraced cyclist from its title, officially changing its name to Livestrong.

Two weeks later, after discussing the issue with Ulman, Armstrong resigned from the board.

Still, he can’t—and probably no one can—replace Armstrong as a celebrity rainmaker. Instead, according to Meg Algren, associate professor of communications at Towson University, the key to Livestrong’s survival must be a renewed focus on its “product”—serving those with cancer diagnoses and cancer survivors.

Marian Stern, a philanthropy consultant and head of Projects in Philanthropy, says Ulman must manage a delicate balance in distancing Livestrong from Armstrong, but believes that Livestrong can survive. She also says Livestrong’s ability to thrive post-Armstrong will reveal more about how the organization was built, in terms of strength and integrity, than any single response to the cyclist’s ongoing crisis. (In April, the U.S. Department of Justice joined a lawsuit alleging fraud related to Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service sponsorship.)

Ulman already knows that the organization will suffer in terms of its fundraising. He says it has reduced its internal budget for this year by 11 percent, but adds that major grant funders like Nike and Oakley remain on board. To Algren’s point, Ulman is also quick to add that Livestrong is “doubling down” on its mission in 2013, planning to spend more this year—it maintains a $38 million endowment—on its various programs than last.

“We are going to use this opportunity to get the word out about who we are,” he says.

Ulman, who reportedly earned $354,150 in 2011, says he never considered cutting ties with Livestrong. “I feel such a responsibility to the organization and our mission,” he says, remaining grateful to Armstrong in many ways. “Without him and the intensity of his efforts, we wouldn’t have been able help the hundreds of thousands of people that we have.”

In the end, Ulman says, accepting his good friend Armstrong’s mistakes—however gross, including going after former teammates—is akin to dealing with the bad behavior of a family member. “You can be disappointed, frustrated, but you don’t cast a family member or friend aside and overlook what they’ve meant to you and the good things they’ve done.

“It’s ironic,” Ulman says. “We are in the business of survivorship. And all of the tools that we use to help people navigate cancer—now we have to apply those same principles to the organization.”

UPDATE (5/30/13): Nike announced that the company will stop production of its Livestrong line of exercise apparel and gear at the end of this year, terminating a licensing agreement that helped raise $100 million for the cancer foundation, according to Reuters and numerous media outlets. Ron Cassie is following the story here.

Sandy Bauer’s fingers tremble, the light bouncing off her red nail polish as she clenches her hands together. Her eyes well with more than two decades of grief, frustration, and longing as she recalls the worst day of her life. It’s not often that she talks about her younger sister, but when she does, the emotion and the loss jar her as if it were still 1989. That year someone savagely murdered 27-year-old Terry Schmansky inside her Dundalk apartment. The lifeless body of the young mother of three was found by Schmansky’s brother and her oldest daughter, Tonya, nine at the time, who had just returned from bowling while Terry worked her shift at nearby Squires restaurant.

“She was the sweetest thing on earth. She should have never lost her life,” says Bauer, who babysat her sister’s other two children that September night.

Twenty-four winters have since passed, the case growing colder with each one. Somebody has gotten away with murder.

“It’s hard,” says Tonya, now 32, who has struggled with the unfathomable lingering mental effects of discovering her mother’s maimed body. “I remember every bit of it and, for a long time, it took a very big toll on me. I have post-traumatic stress disorder from that day.” Bauer, a medical-billing specialist who lives in Essex, remains convinced that she knows who killed her sister and, for seven years after the murder, fought tirelessly to convince investigators to see it her way. Police found evidence from the scene, including the weapon, a knife tossed into a Dumpster just down the road at a gas station. But still, no one has ever been named a suspect, a mind-boggling issue for Bauer.

Years of anger, Bauer admits, caused her to lose her religious faith and even blame God. “I was depressed for seven years. I was engulfed in it,” she says. “I was addicted to solving it, and I really just began to realize this is way too much sadness. I had a healthy, beautiful family of my own, and I needed to look at the sunshine, and I needed to let go.”

But police say they haven’t forgotten about Schmansky, or any of the other 233 crimes and missing person cases prioritized by the Baltimore County Police Department’s cold case unit. Many will likely remain unsolved, but since being formed in 2002 by now-retired detective Philip Marll and his partner of 25 years, James Tincher, two-dozen cases—including several decades-old crimes—have been cracked. Each year, the cold case unit’s two or three successes, often transposing new DNA technology onto old cases, bring not just closure for victims’ families, but also for a committed group of detectives that make up the squad. In 2012, police made arrests in two cold cases, including the murder of another young Dundalk woman, 24-year-old Heidi Louise Bernadzikowski, who was killed in the spring of 2000. Already this year, they arrested the suspects wanted for a 2009 Woodlawn murder.

For Marll, who will celebrate his first full year of retirement next month, his dedication to each of the investigations he worked remains as strong as his distinct Bawlmerese accent. But he’s especially committed to ones like the Schmansky case, the heartbreaking crimes that he never solved. After he left the force, he asked to keep his department cell phone active so prosecutors, colleagues, or victims’ families could reach him, if need be, about an unsolved case.

“We e-mail the heck out of Phil,” says Det. Carroll Bollinger, 50, a 28-year veteran who joined the cold case unit nine years ago. “Or I’ll call him and say, ‘Where were you going with this line of thought?’ if I’m looking at a case that was his.”

One cold case Marll worked was the murder of Sheila Rascoe, an Essex woman, raped and strangled in her apartment in 1979. Her killer, Thomas Grant, lived just down the street, it would turn out. He walked free for nearly 20 years before Marll and his unit, using science not available at the time of the crime—the ability to test and identify an individual’s unique genetic encoding molecule, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)—put him away.

Rascoe and her boyfriend, Albert Bell, had planned a weekend getaway to Richmond, VA, but when Bell arrived to pick her up, he found Rascoe’s partially nude body with a vacuum-cleaner cord squeezing her neck. Bell himself drew the initial suspicions of investigators when it was discovered that he was married—which Rascoe never knew. But any error of his ways ended there, and police eventually pushed the case aside. “There was a lack of evidence. Back when it happened, they didn’t have DNA,” says Marll.

When Marll and Tincher created the cold case unit, they did so with the intention of going first after unsolved rape and murder cases. The county had just joined an FBI-backed nationwide database called “CODIS,” which stands for “Combined DNA Index System.” The database could match the DNA from crime scenes to criminals, and the detectives knew they had a better shot at solving the cold cases where DNA meant everything.

“Sheila Rascoe happened to be one of the cases. We figured, let’s knock these out, the rape-murders, because if there is any evidence it’s gonna be easy evidence to locate,” says Marll. In 2005, the detectives returned to her case and didn’t take long to spot a T-shirt in a photo of the victim lying near her buttocks area. Sure enough, the shirt sat locked away with evidence from the scene and was sent off to county police forensic biologist Laura Pawlowski, who located a semen stain.

She immediately ordered the semen to be tested at an outside lab and compared against CODIS. Unlike on TV, warns Pawlowski and others in law enforcement, a DNA hit takes time. A lot.

“It would take me at least a few weeks to do the DNA process,” she says. “I enter it into CODIS and CODIS will not just spit out a name. It’ll tell me [if] I have a match. Then I have to contact the lab I have a match with. They have to do all these confirmation steps before they release a name to me.” Once a suspect’s name is retrieved, investigators must then swab the suspect after he’s charged and do their own confirmation to avoid any potential computer errors.

“The CSI shows are about as real as professional wrestling,” says Lt. William Duty, commander of the homicide and cold case units. “You’ll see a guy [on TV] bring a technician in a DNA lab a piece of evidence, and they’ll work up a profile and enter it into their CODIS without any kind of authentication. And then they come up with a name from a computer while he’s standing there, like he’s waiting at a McDonald’s for a cheeseburger.”

Eventually, however, Grant’s name came back after being entered into CODIS sometime during one of his five prior arrests over the years on sex offenses. In 2008, a judge sentenced him to two life terms after the case’s trial. “When we went back with the family, it was jubilation,” recalls Marll. “They were extremely happy because they still cared about her from 1979 like it happened yesterday.”

The four officers and the commander who make up the Baltimore County Police cold case unit warn that the artistic license taken by our favorite crime dramas goes well beyond condensed storylines, sometimes with real-world implications. Shows like CSI and Cold Case have also made it harder when cases are brought to trial, tainting jurors with what police refer to as the “CSI effect,” according to law enforcement.

“In our homicide trials, the prosecutors have to spend time in the beginning of the trial explaining to the jury that this isn’t CSI, that they have to forget what they watch on TV,” adds Cpl. Larry Gick, 40, an 18-year veteran who joined the cold case unit in 2007.

The process of getting prosecutors to take a cold case to a jury can also be painstaking, not like the quick meetings so often portrayed on Law & Order. Prosecutors don’t hesitate to send detectives back to work for a more complete investigation. “Certainly when we say ‘no’ I believe they’re disappointed,” says Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger. “We only get one bite at it so if you go to trial and lose, even if the person turned around and said after, ‘Yeah, I did it,’ you could never prosecute it again.”

“It’s definitely not the one-hour show you see on TV,” adds Gick, 40.

And of course, there’s the process of looking into a case gone cold, requiring detectives to examine several thousand pages of documents and notes from binders bursting at the rings. They’ll reach out to former detectives and re-interview witnesses, occasionally traveling out of state as witnesses or family may have moved away after so many years.

For the cold case detectives, time often counts on money. This year, for example, the unit will work from a tighter budget after losing a federal award they’d received the past two years. The grant could be applied to travel, DNA costs, and overtime. It’s a frustrating, but not completely debilitating hit for the unit.

“It is a little depressing we don’t have it because it was always something we could fall back on,” Gick says. “The cases won’t suffer. It just presents doors that are a little harder to push open.”

In fact, Gick says, funding cuts could slow new DNA testing on a potential clue in the Terry Schmansky case. He notes investigators have recently taken up evidence that they hope will shed new light on a potential suspect thanks to the latest updates in DNA technology and are awaiting results. “It varies how long it will take [for results] because with the grant running out, it depends on whether this evidence will make it out [in time] to be tested under the grant, or if it has to happen in house and that may take a little longer,” he says. “This is the last piece of evidence to be tested for DNA. There’s nothing left,” says Gick. “So if this doesn’t provide us with anything, we have nothing left to test.”

Marll holds out hope that justice will be brought to Schmansky’s killer, no matter how long it takes. He admits that the difficulty in solving the murder stems from a lack of physical evidence. “It’s a very tough case. When you commit a crime by yourself, and you don’t tell anybody, and there’s no witnesses to testify against you, and you don’t leave any physical evidence there, it’s almost impossible for police. We look like dunces that we can’t clear it,” he says.

However, not all cases rely on hard evidence, physical clues, or DNA technology in order to be cracked. Sometimes, investigators believe all a case needs is testimony from the right witness to bring a suspect to trial.

Meanwhile, Sandy Bauer checks in with police periodically. The last time was a year and a half ago.

“I just feel like there’s nothing more I can do,” she says. But still, she keeps the cold case unit’s number tucked in her pocketbook.

And Tonya Schmansky still thinks about her mother every day. She sees her in her two young children, especially her daughter, now 10—who shares a middle name, Anne, with her murdered grandmother and is just a year older than Tonya was when she found her mother’s body. She revels in the good memories of their time together to ease the pain of all the time since lost.

Her aunt feels the same way.

“I don’t want to say I’ve given up hope, but I guess I’ve learned to deal. You can’t live your life worrying and worrying and worrying about something you can’t control,” Bauer says. “I’ve just kind of learned to live with the fact that we won’t know.”

Only time will tell if her sister’s story has an ending.

“I think that for some weird reason it’s just not meant to be solved,” Bauer laments, adding that perhaps there is still somebody out there who will call with a tip that turns the case.

“It would be nice for me to be wrong.”

Sure, the current job market remains frustrating for many recent college graduates, but the long-term benefits of earning a college degree are clear: Over the course of a lifetime, college graduates can expect to earn almost twice as much as those with high-school diplomas. And in today’s increasingly digitized, engineered, and information-based global economy, the importance of a college degree—and advanced degree—continues to grow. Successful engineering, computer science, and nursing majors, for example, are in demand, yet many well-paying positions go unfilled because they’re aren’t enough qualified candidates. However, with college costs rising dramatically and a greater share of the financial burden borne by students themselves, choosing the right college becomes ever more critical. With all this in mind, we researched 13 local colleges and universities, digging for relevant data and interviewing school officials, current students, and recent graduates, to create our “insider’s guide” for students and parents considering local schools for the next step up the education ladder.

Coppin State University – Baltimore

Founded: 1900 President: Reginald S. AveryEnrollment: 3,300 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $5,732 Room and board: $8,549 Housing:50% of freshmen live on campus Student body:24% male/76% female Diversity: black: 87%; white: 2%; non-resident alien: 4%; unknown: 5% SAT average: reading and math combined: 850Acceptance rate: 53% Student-to-faculty ratio:16:1 Freshman retention rate: 64% Graduation rate: 4-year: 5%; 6-year: 15% Most-popular majors:psychology, criminal justice, nursing Most-popular grad programs: family nurse practitioner, rehabilitation and counseling, human service administration.

On Campus: Coppin State University is most widely known for its Helene Fuld School of Nursing. The school was also the first University of Maryland System school to go completely wireless. This fall, Coppin will break ground on its new science and technology building and offer the only bachelor’s degree in the state in health-information management.

Coppin added new educational and recreational programs in 2010 with the opening of its 246,000-square-foot sports complex. The new Physical Education Complex is designed to support Health and Human Performance academic programs, varsity and recreational sports, and the school’s community-outreach efforts. The $136-million project includes a 4,100-seat basketball arena, NCAA regulation pool, softball and soccer fields, fitness center, auxiliary gym, dance studio, racquetball and tennis courts, faculty and staff offices, laboratories, and state-of-the-art classrooms.

Nickname: Eagles School colors: old gold and reflex blue Organizations: 31, including Love You Like A Sister, Student Volunteer Corps, nine sororities and fraternities Sporting life (non-varsity): flag football, basketball, volleyballVarsity: known for basketball; competes in NCAA Division I Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Culture:Department of Natural Science’s Ernest Just/Percy Julian Lecture Science Series Favorite class:makeup application for the performing arts On-campus hangout: Austin Grill Off-campus hangout: Mondawmin Mall Cheap eats: J & G Jamaican American Carryout Can’t-miss party:February’s Homecoming Step Show Freshman tip:Take advantage of new rec facilities and activities.Alums: Stephanie Ready, first female coach in men’s professional basketball; Bishop L. Robinson, first African-American police commissioner of Baltimore City; Verda Welcome, first African-American woman in the U.S. elected to a state senate.

Goucher College – Towson

Founded: 1885 President: Sanford J. UngarEnrollment:1,446 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $37,072 Room and board: $10,864Housing: 86% of all students live in college-affiliated housing Student body: 33% male/67% female Diversity: white: 63%; black: 10%; Hispanic: 6%; Asian: 4%; international: 2%; Native American: 1%; unknown: 14% SAT average: reading and math combined: 1139 Acceptance rate: 73% Student-to-faculty ratio: 9:1 Freshman retention rate:81% Graduation rate: 4-year: 62%; 6-year: 70%Most popular majors: psychology, communications, business management Most popular grad programs:education, teaching, post-baccalaureate pre-medical.

On Campus: The bucolic 287-acre campus tucked just inside the Beltway nurtures experimentation, often leading to interesting post-graduate endeavors. (To wit: The Baltimore Rock Opera Society is the brainchild of Goucher grads.) The college’s artistic and literary disciplines are stellar, with the Creative Writing Program drawing particular attention for its high-profile faculty, including husband and wife scribes Madison Smartt Bell and Elizabeth Spires. The dance program is another standout. Goucher president Sanford “Sandy” Ungar has also pushed the college to embrace a global perspective, instituting the nation’s first study-abroad requirement.

A flurry of building activity in recent years has given Goucher the facilities to match its ambitious programs. Most notable is the recently opened $48-million Athenaeum, which houses classrooms, an art gallery, radio station, cafe, library facilities, and meeting and exercise spaces.

Nickname: Gophers School colors: blue and goldOrganizations: more than 60, including Student Government Association; Red Hot Blue, a cappella group raises money for AIDS/HIV nonprofits; Humans vs. Zombies Sporting life (non-varsity):ultimate Frisbee, flag football, racquetball Varsity:19 sports, including equestrian; competes in NCAA Division III Landmark Conference Culture:President’s Office Speaker Series brings politicians, scientists, and media luminaries to campus to speak about current events Favorite class: Any foreign-language class that offers inter-semester trips to the mother country On-campus hangout:residential quad Off-campus hangout: Loch Raven Reservoir Cheap eats: Towson Diner Can’t miss party: spring’s Get Into Goucher, aka GIGFreshman tip: Leave your car at home and utilize campus Zipcars Alums: Sally Brice-O’Hara, vice admiral and vice commandant, United States Coast Guard; Emily Newell Blair, League of Women Voters founder; Laura Amy Schlitz, author and Newbery Medal Winner.

The Johns Hopkins University – Baltimore

Founded: 1876 President: Ronald J. DanielsEnrollment: 5,066 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $43,930 Room and board: $13,390Housing: 99% of freshmen live on campusStudent body: 53% male/47% female Diversity:white: 52%; black: 5%; Asian: 20%; Hispanic: 9%; non-resident alien: 9%; two or more races, non-Hispanic: 4%; unknown: 2% SAT: 25th/75th percentiles: reading: 640/740; math: 670/770; writing: 650/750 Acceptance rate: 18% Student-to-faculty ratio: 13:1 Freshman retention rate:96% Graduation rate:4-year: 85%; 6-year: 92% Most-popular majors: biomedical engineering, public health studies, international studies; Most-popular grad programs: computer science, electrical engineering, physics.

On Campus: Consistently ranked among the very best national universities, Hopkins opens the four-story Brody Learning Commons this fall. The new building will be a light-filled, completely wireless hub, connecting to the school’s Milton S. Eisenhower Library on all levels. It will feature interactive media rooms, a 100-seat reading area, an atrium, 75-seat cafe, and will increase the library’s seating capacity by one-third—with 500 additional new seats. The building will also house the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, a new laboratory, and instruction space for the Department of Preservation and Conservation.

The university’s Whiting School of Engineering broke ground in the spring for Malone Hall, a state-of-the-art, 69,000-square-foot research center. Scheduled to open in the summer of 2014, Malone Hall will serve as the focal point for Hopkins’s individualized health initiative, bringing together researchers from the engineering, medicine, nursing, and public health schools to develop the best medical treatments for individual patients.

Nickname: Blue Jays School colors: Columbia blue and black Organizations: 370, including 22 fraternities and sororities, Center for Social Concern, Hopkins Organization for Programming Sporting life (intramural): flag football, wallyball, 3-on-3 basketball Varsity: national men’s and women’s lacrosse programs; other varsity teams compete at NCAA Division III level Culture: Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium Favorite class: Acting classes taught by John Astin (The Addams Family)On-campus hangout: “The Beach,” grassy area in front of library Off-campus hangout: all over Charles Village Cheap eats: Carma’s Cafe Can’t miss party: Three-Day Spring Fair Freshman tip:studying in the Hutzler Reading Room (the Hut), Gilman Hall Alums: Russell Baker, writer; Rachel Carson, ecologist and author; Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States.

Loyola University Maryland – Baltimore

Founded: 1852 President: Rev. Brian F. Linnane, S.J. Enrollment: 3,863 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $42,426 Room and board: $9,116Housing: 98% of freshmen live on campusStudent body: 39% male/61% female Diversity:white: 81.85%; black: 4.19%; Asian: 2.9%; Hispanic: 6.78%. other: 4.28% SAT: 25th/75th percentiles: reading: 540/640; math: 560/650 Acceptance rate:63% Student-to-faculty ratio: 13:1 Freshman retention rate: 89% Graduation rate:4-year: 79%; 6-year: 83% Most-popular majors: business, communication, biology Most-popular grad programs: business administration, pastoral counseling/spiritual care, school counseling, clinical psychology.

On Campus: Formerly Loyola College in Maryland, the school was officially renamed in 2009. School president and Jesuit priest Brian Linnane’s goal is to make Loyola the nation’s “leading, Catholic, comprehensive university.” The Ridley Athletic Complex, a $64-million soccer and lacrosse stadium, was completed two years ago. A $12-million addition to the Donnelly Science Center, completed last August, features, among other things, a microscopy center and a robotics laboratory. New minors in forensic studies and African and African-American Studies have recently been added. In addition to academics, roughly 60 percent of the school’s undergraduate body participates in service work through the on-campus Center for Community Service and Justice. Nearly 65 percent of students study abroad through one of Loyola’s sponsored programs or an accepted unaffiliated program. One highlight from last year: The men’s lacrosse team won the NCAA Division I lacrosse championship.

Nickname: Greyhounds School colors: green and gray Organizations: More than 150, including OPTIONS (social alternatives to drinking), Student Government Association, Relay for Life Sporting life (non-varsity): flag football, basketball, volleyball Varsity: Men’s lacrosse won NCAA Division I title last year; most varsity teams compete in NCAA Division I Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference. Culture: The Modern Masters Reading Series brings national and international writers to campus. Favorite class: Intro to Dance, where students choreograph end-of-semester performances On-campus hangout: Humanities Building porch Off-campus hangout: Roland Park Bagel Cheap eats: Chipotle Can’t-miss party: Loyolapalooza Freshman tip: Student Center’s third-floor Reading Room remains open late.Alums: Tom Clancy, novelist; Jim McKay, former host of Wide World of Sports; Frank Cashen, former New York Mets general manager.

Maryland Institute College of Art – Baltimore

Founded: 1826 President: Fred Lazarus IVEnrollment: 1,865 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $39,340 Room and board: $10,880Housing: 94% of freshmen live in college-affiliated housing Student body: 28% male/72% femaleDiversity: white: 55%; black: 5%; Asian: 12%; Hispanic: 4%; non-resident alien: 8%; unknown: 9%; multi-race: 8%; Native American: 0.3% SAT average: reading: 602; math: 571; writing: 592Acceptance rate: 54% Student-to-faculty ratio:10:1 Freshman retention rate: 85% Graduation rate:4-year: 65%; 6-year: 71% Most-popular majors: illustration, graphic design, painting Most-popular grad programs: business of art and design, studio art, graphic design.

On Campus: One of the leading art colleges in the country, the construction (scheduled to be completed by fall 2013) of Commons II, a new residence hall, will increase the capacity of the freshman-residential complex from approximately 350 to 590 students. In addition to the construction of the new building, renovations to the existing complex will include an expanded entrance lobby and co-curricular programming spaces for students. There are three new undergraduate concentrations: game arts, sound art, and sustainability and social practice. The MICA Graduate Studio Center at 131 W. North Ave. is in its final stages of construction and will re-open this fall. The century-old former JoS. A. Bank factory has served as a home for grad students for 12 years, and the renovation will make the building—with newly expanded galleries, cafe, and academic activity—an integral part of the Station North Arts & Entertainment District.

Organizations: More than 50, including Urban Gaming Club, Black Student Union, Students of Sustainability Sporting life (non-varsity): indoor soccer, volleyball, ultimate Frisbee Varsity: no varsity teams Culture: spring fashion shows and MFA Thesis Exhibition are among the highlights Favorite class: Puppets and Prosthetics On-campus hangout: Café Doris Off-campus hangout: The Windup Space Cheap eats:Pizza at Two Boots Can’t-miss party: Halloween costume party Freshman tip: Buddha statue is a quiet gathering spot. Alums: Jeff Koons, sculptor; Michael Owen, Love Project muralist; Gaia, street artist.

McDaniel College – Westminster

Founded: 1867 President: Roger N. Casey Enrollment: 1,600 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $35,800 Room and board: $8,010 Housing: 95% of freshmen live on campus Student body: 48% male/52% female Diversity: white: 73%; black: 13%; Asian: 4%; Hispanic: 7%; Native American: 1%; Unknown: 2% SAT averages: reading: 553; math: 553 Acceptance rate: 74% Student-to-faculty ratio: 12:1 Freshman retention rate:84% Graduation rate: 4-year: 70%; 6-year: 73% Most popular majors:psychology, exercise science and physical education, biology Most-popular grad programs: curriculum and instruction, counselor education, BEST Initial Teacher Certification.

On Campus: Technology has been a focus of President Roger Casey, who is active on both Twitter and Facebook, since assuming leadership at McDaniel two years ago. He created the new position of director of digital communications and social media. As part of a pilot program in the fall of 2011, 15 first-year students received an iPad2 for use in a three-course curriculum.

This fall, McDaniel launches a new master’s degree in public administration and a graduate certificate in romance writing established with a grant by the Nora Roberts Foundation—both offered entirely online. McDaniel also has received approval to offer a new major in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies.

Earlier this year, the school broke ground on an $8-million stadium project, and the college is also in the process of renovating Hoover Library, which will include academic learning spaces.

Nickname: Green Terror School colors: green and gold Organizations: more than 100, including Asian Community Coalition, Canine Companions for Independence, eight fraternities and sororities Sporting life (non-varsity): flag football, golf, kickballVarsity: 24 teams compete in NCAA Division III Centennial Conference Culture:Common Ground on the Hill, celebrating 18 years Favorite class: South Park and Contemporary Issues On-campus hangout: Casey’s Corner coffee shop Off-campus hangout: Birdie’s Cafe Cheap eats: Harry’s Main Street Grille Can’t-miss party: Annual Spring Fling Freshman tip: Don’t miss tailgating before football team takes field to original Star Wars theme Alums: Thomas Roberts, MSNBC anchor; Greg Street, “World of Warcraft” game designer; Frank Kratovil Jr., Maryland congressman

Morgan State University – Baltimore

Founded: 1867 President: David Wilson Enrollment: 6,711 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $7,012 Room and board: $8,878 Housing: 25% of all students live on-campus Student body: 42% male/58% female Diversity: white: 3%; black: 85%; Hispanic: 3%; multi-racial: 3%; other: 6% SAT average: reading and math combined: 909 Acceptance rate: 56% Student-to-faculty ratio: 12:1 Freshman retention rate: 73% Graduation rate:4-year: 13%; 6-year: 30% Most-popular majors: business, electrical engineering, nursing Most-popular grad programs: social work, engineering, urban educational leadership

On Campus: Morgan State University is one of the few historically black institutions offering a comprehensive range of academic programs in business, engineering, education, architecture, social work, and hospitality management, including 14 doctoral degree programs. This fall, the school will open the Center for the Built Environment and Infrastructure Studies, a 125,000-square-foot, $67-million facility housing the research and academic programs in architecture and planning, transportation and urban infrastructure studies, and civil engineering. Morgan ranks second among all campuses in Maryland and among the top 25 campuses nationwide in the number of doctorates awarded to African-Americans. Morgan will launch two new master’s programs beginning this fall in hospitality management and professional accountancy. University students led the fight for civil rights in Baltimore, and Morgan hosts annual Black History Month and Women’s History Month lecture series, bringing notable African-American activists, writers, and entertainers to campus.

Nickname: Bears School colors: blue and orange Organizations: 77, including S.M.O.O.T.H. (Strong Men Overcoming Obstacles Through Hard Work), National Council of Negro Women, nine fraternities and sororities Sporting life (non-varsity):basketball, tennis, softball Varsity: 14 teams compete in the NCAA Division I Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Culture: The Morgan State University Choir ranks among top university choral ensembles in the country. Favorite class: History of Morgan StateOn-campus hangout: McKeldin Center Cyber Cafe Off-campus hangout: Inner Harbor via Collegetown shuttle Cheap eats: Sunny’s Subs Can’t-miss party: Sigma Sweat Party Freshman tip: Avoid “Bridgeology 101,” (Hanging out on Coldspring Lane Bridge). Alums: Robert Mack Bell, chief judge Maryland Court of Appeals; Monique Angela Imes, Academy Award-winning actress; William C. Rhoden, The New York Times columnist.

Notre Dame of Maryland University – Baltimore

Founded: 1873 President: James F. Conneely Enrollment: 1,290 undergraduatesTuition and fees: $29,850 Room and board: $10,150 Housing: 53% of all students live in college-affiliated housing Student body: 5% male/95% female Diversity: white: 67%; black: 22%; Asian: 4%; Hispanic: 2%; unknown: 3% SAT average: reading: 533; and math: 509 Acceptance rate: 55% Student-to-faculty ratio: 12:1 Freshman retention rate:75% Graduation rate:4-year: 49%; 6-year: 61% Most-popular majors: nursing, business administration, education Most-popular grad programs: education, nursing, pharmacy

On Campus: Earlier this year, the Notre Dame of Maryland University Board of Trustees chose James F. Conneely, as the new school president. Conneely is the first man and only the second lay person in the school’s 117-year history to serve as Notre Dame’s president. Conneely succeedes Mary Pat Seurkamp, who retired after a 15-year tenure.

This fall, Notre Dame breaks ground on a new 38,000-square-foot academic building for the School of Nursing and School of Education. Designed to meet LEED certification in keeping with the university’s commitment toward sustainability, the facility will feature a lobby, student hub, gallery, and study space, as well as clinical laboratories and medical simulation labs.

Nickname: Gators School colors: royal blue and white Organizations: 32; including Omega Phi Alpha, a community-service sorority, Student Activities Board, Student Environmental Organization Sporting life (non-varsity): pick-up volleyball, soccer, and softball Varsity: Notre Dame fields eight NCAA Division III women’s teams Culture:Gormley Gallery displays the works of local and national artists Favorite class: Homer to Star Wars: The Epic Tradition in Western Literature On-campus hangout: Gator Lair Off-campus hangout: The Avenue in Hampden Cheap eats: Evergreen cafe Can’t-miss party: Winter ball Freshman tip: Do homework and meet new friends at Gator Alley. Alums: Dr. Susan Love, breast cancer surgeon; Mary Corey, The Baltimore Sun director of content; Eileen O’Neill, group president at Discovery and TLC networks.

Stevenson University – Owings Mills and Greenspring Valley

Founded: 1947 President: Kevin J. Manning Enrollment: 3,575 undergraduatesTuition and fees: $23,636 Room and board: $11,422 Housing: 43% of freshmen live on campus Student body: 33% male/67% female Diversity: white: 66% black: 19%; Asian: 3%; Hispanic: 2%; unknown: 9% Acceptance rate: 63% Freshman retention rate: 79% Graduation rate: 4-year: 45%; 6-year: 62% Student-faculty ratio: 16:1 SAT average:reading: 492; math: 499; writing: 488 Most-popular majors: health professions, business, visual and performing arts Most-popular grad programs: forensic studies, nursing leadership, business and technology management

On Campus: Stevenson, formerly known as Villa Julie College, has been boosting male enrollment and overall enrollment—up each of the past 14 years. Last fall, Stevenson purchased the former 28-acre site of Shire Pharmaceuticals for $10.5 million. The newly acquired property includes two buildings totaling 168,000 square feet, serving as the new location for much of the university’s School of the Sciences and School of Design. Earlier this year, Stevenson announced new master’s programs in cyber forensics and health-care management and a newly approved bachelor’s degree in fashion merchandising. Additionally, the school recently added a varsity football program, playing in a new $12-million field on campus—also home to its lacrosse, field hockey, and varsity soccer teams. The women’s varsity ice-hockey squad, the NCAA’s southern-most women’s team, begins play this year.

Nickname: Mustangs School colors: green and white Organizations: 48, including Phi Sigma Sigma, a service group of college women; Phi Beta Lambda, a fraternity of future business leaders; Wilderness and Ecology Club Sporting life (non-varsity):ultimate Frisbee, basketball, volleyball Varsity: 22 teams compete at NCAA Division III level, mostly in the Capital Athletic Conference Culture: Stevenson’s Baltimore Speakers Series in 2012-2013 opens with Bill Clinton Favorite class: Science & Science Fiction—Where Films Get It Right and Wrong Freshman tip: Don’t schedule Owings Mills and Greenspring campus classes back-to-back. On campus hangout: Jazzman’s CafeOff-campus hangout: NY Pizza Co. & Italian Bistro Cheap eats: The Flying Avocado Can’t Miss: Mustang Fest Alums: Martha Scanlan Klima, former Maryland delegate; Chris Tsakalos, part owner H&S Bakeries; Marc Bunting, owner of Alpine Bagel Co. and professional race car driver

Towson University – Towson

Founded: 1866 President: Maravene Loeschke Enrollment: 15,590 undergraduatesTuition and fees: $7,906 Room and board: $9,942 Housing: 85% of freshmen live on campus Student body: 40% male/60% female Diversity: white: 67%; black: 12%; Asian: 4%; Hispanic: 3%; unknown: 10% SAT average: reading: 540; math: 547; writing: 546Acceptance rate: 57% Student-to-faculty ratio:17:1 Freshman retention rate: 83%Graduation rate:4-year: 43%; 6-year: 73% Most-popular majors: business administration, education, social sciences Most-popular grad programs: information technology, human resource development, teaching.

On Campus: Founded as Maryland’s first teacher’s college, Towson still produces more teachers than any other university in the state. However, with 64 undergraduate majors and 45 graduate programs, the school’s mission and size—it’s the second-largest university in the state—continues to grow.

Last fall, the first new academic building on campus in more than 30 years, the 293,00-square-foot College of Liberal Arts Building, was constructed. In the spring of 2013, a new 5,200-seat multi-use arena facility, complete with state-of-the-art video screens and entertainment suites, will open.

The school’s “Towson Unplugged” wireless system remains one of the largest wireless networks in the Baltimore metro area, spanning the university’s 328 acres and campus residence halls. Parkville-native Maravene Loeschke, an alumna and former Towson professor, took over as president this year after previously leading Pennsylvania’s Mansfield University.

Nickname: Tigers School colors: black, gold, and white Organizations: 240, including Sports Club Council, 29 fraternities and sororities, Black Student Union Sporting life (non-varsity): soccer, basketball, beach volleyball Varsity: 20 teams compete at NCAA Division I level, mostly in the Colonial Athletic Conference Culture: 400 performances, exhibits, films, and lectures annually at campus Center for the Arts, other venues Favorite class: The “Colbert” course, aka Popular Culture and Politics: Comedy, Entertainment, Celebrity, and Democracy On-campus hangout: “The Beach” outside Cook Library Off-campus hangout: Recher Theatre, Towson Diner Cheap eats:Towson Hot Bagels Can’t miss party: Tigerfest Freshman tip: Go to Burdick [the gym]. Freshman 15 is real! Alums: Catherine Curran O’Malley, associate judge, First District Court of Maryland, First Lady of Maryland; Brian Stelter, The New York Times journalist/blogger; Charles S. Dutton, actor.

University of Baltimore – Baltimore

Founded: 1925 President: Robert L. Bogomolny Enrollment: 3,257 undergraduatesTuition and fees: $8,664 Room and board: UB does not provide housing Housing:84% increase in students living in midtown in recent years Student body: 42% male/58% female Diversity: white: 46%; black: 35%; Asian: 4%; international: 2.5%; Hispanic: 2%; unknown: 8% SAT average: verbal: 501; math: 480; writing: 484Acceptance rate: 58% Student-faculty ratio: 20:1 Freshman retention: 86%Graduation rate:N/A Most-popular majors: business administration, criminal justice, simulation and digital entertainment Most-popular grad programs: business, public administration, publications design.

On Campus: For three decades, UB was as an upper division-only institution, plus its graduate and law schools. The University System of Maryland school began accepting freshmen and sophomores in fall 2007 and has been functioning as a four-year university since. Three years ago, The Fitzgerald at UB Midtown luxury apartment complex was built on university-owned property and now serves as home to community members and students—as well as the school’s Barnes & Noble bookstore. This fall, The Varsity at the University of Baltimore, an 11-story, privatized student-housing project opens as more students move to housing within walking distance of the campus. The UB campus has grown significantly in the last few years, expanding its campus facilities by 150,000 square feet, with another 322,000 square feet, including a new law center, under construction.

Nickname: Bees Colors: blue and green Organizations: 67, including Digital Designer Guild, Black Law Student Association, Criminal Justice Association Sporting life (non-varsity): flag football, disc golf, billiards Varsity: No varsity teams Culture: Spotlight UB series features music, art, theatre, dance Favorite class: pop culture minor offers “zombies” course On-campus hangout: Student Center Starbucks Off-campus hangout: Charles Street cafes, restaurants, late-night pizza shops Cheap eats: Oriole Pizza Can’t-miss party: Annual block party Freshman tip: Catch the BeeBall Classic, the annual student-faculty hoops match Alums: William Donald Schaefer, former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor; Peter Angelos, Baltimore Orioles’ chairman of the board and CEO; Tom Condon, NFL agent.

University of Maryland Baltimore County – Catonsville

Founded: 1966 President: Freeman A. Hrabowski III Enrollment: 10,573 undergraduates Tuition and fees: $9,467 Room and board: $10,142 Housing: 72% of freshman live on campus Student body: 54% male/46% female Diversity: white: 48.6%; black: 16%; Asian: 21%; Hispanic: 5%; non-resident alien: 4%; two or more races, non-Hispanic: 3%; unknown: 2% SAT: 25th/75th Percentile: reading: 540/640; math: 570/670; writing: 530/630 Acceptance rate: 61% Student-to-faculty ratio: 20:1Freshman retention rate: 85% Graduation rate:4-year: 37%; 6-year: 57% Most-popular majors: social sciences, computer science, biological sciences Most-popular grad programs: education, information systems, computer science, electrical engineering.

On Campus: Known as a commuter school a decade ago, UMBC has raised its status in recent years. President Freeman A. Hrabowski III and the school were profiled on 60 Minutes last year and U.S. News & World Report named UMBC top “up-and-coming” national university for a third consecutive year. Scheduled to open this fall, UMBC’s new Performing Arts and Humanities Building (PAHB), located on 4.8 acres, will provide state-of-the-art facilities. The building will enhance UMBC’s teaching, research, and public outreach, and increase the visibility of the arts and humanities as major academic components on campus. The PAHB will be home to the departments of ancient studies, dance, English, music, philosophy, and theater, as well as the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities, the Humanities Scholars Program, and the Linehan Artist Scholars Program.

Nickname: Retrievers School colors: black and gold Organizations: 231, including 26 fraternities and sororities., Game Developer’s Club, Swing Dance Club Sporting life (non-varsity): co-ed flag football, indoor soccer, dodgeball Varsity: 19 teams compete in NCAA Division I America East Conference Culture: Center for Art Design and Visual Culture Favorite class: Social Psychology and Belief in the Paranormal On-campus hangout: The Commons game room Off-campus hangout: Habibah Cafe Cheap eats: Sorrento of Arbutus Can’t miss party: Spring Quadmania Freshman tip: Wear UMBC clothing to bookstore on Fridays for discount Alums: Jon S. Cardin, state delegate; Duff Goldman, Ace of Cakes owner; Kathleen Turner, actress.

University of Maryland, College Park – College Park

Founded: 1856 President: Wallace D. Loh Enrollment: 26,826 undergraduatesTuition and fees: $8,908 Room and board: $9,893 Housing: 93% of freshmen live in college housing Student body: 53% male/47% female Diversity: white: 56%; black: 12%; Asian: 15%; Hispanic: 8%; unknown: 3% SAT: 25th/75th percentile scores: reading: 580/680; math: 610/720 Acceptance rate: 44% Student-to-faculty ratio: 18:1Freshman retention rate: 94% Graduation rate:4-year: 65%; 6-year: 82% Most-popular majors: criminology, economics, accounting Most-popular grad programs: business and management, public policy, electrical engineering

On Campus: The University of Maryland College Park serves as the state’s selective flagship university, and new infrastructure projects include Oakland Hall, the first residence hall to open since 1982. The new student dorm features semi-suites, consisting of mostly two, two-person bedrooms connected by a shared bathroom. The building is environmentally sustainable and includes a large lobby, indoor bike storage, lounge, laundry facilities on every floor, study rooms, and a 24-hour service desk. Coinciding with the opening of Oakland Hall was the completion of the 251 North dining hall, a renovated, all-you-can-eat diner. In January 2010, the university opened the new $30-million home for the school’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. In May 2010, ground was broken on a $128-million, 158,068-square-foot Physical Science Complex, which will include 18 prep labs, 27 laser and condensed-matters labs, eight bio-physics labs, and 12 conference rooms. It’s scheduled for completion next summer.

Nickname: Terrapins School colors: red, white, black and gold Organizations: 842, including 52 fraternities and sororities, Black Student Union, Student GovernmentSporting life (non-varsity): flag football, basketball, soccer Varsity: 20 varsity teams, most compete in NCAA Division I Atlantic Coast Conference Culture: 318,000-square-foot Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center houses six performance venues Favorite class: History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1950-2000 On-campus hangout: “McKeldin Mall,” grassy area at McKeldin Library Off-campus hangout: Plato’s Diner Cheap eats:Marathon Deli Can’t- miss party: Saturday football tailgates Freshman tip: Find your classes before the first day—this is a huge campus. Alums: Jim Henson, Muppets creator; Kevin Plank, Under Armour founder; Sergey Brin, Google co-founder.

Getting To Graduation:

College presidents monitor graduation rates. Politicians talk about boosting graduate rates. So, should parents and students care about graduation rates? Yes. Of 4.3 million full-time freshmen entering college in the fall of 2004, roughly half had not reached graduation through 2010, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education study.

Obviously there are enormous costs—requiring loans, part-time jobs, and college savings—incurred to pay for two or four extra semesters of tuition and associated expenses, like housing and books. But what about the nearly 40 percent who never receive a diploma?

“For those who don’t graduate, it becomes a very costly waste of time and money,” says Donna Hamilton, associate provost and dean for undergraduate studies at the University of Maryland College Park, which graduates 65 percent of freshmen in four years and 82 percent in six years. “There are a lot of good reasons to go to college, but our mission is to award degrees. Four years is the gold standard. That should be the expectation.”

What holds students up?

A million things, Hamilton says. Sometimes it’s financial (a parent unexpectedly losing a job), homesickness or depression, or it’s social, failing to plug into campus life. Or it could be academic, failing to take advantage of campus resources for assistance. Working too many hours at an off-campus job often interferes with academic progress as well.

Often, it’s simply a failure to plot a course to graduation with an adviser and stick to it.

Changing majors, studying abroad, and internships may delay matriculation, but those are not necessarily bad things, Hamilton notes. But there are general rules students and parents can follow to ensure timely matriculation. Working a campus job tends to be better, for instance, than working off-campus. (An on-campus boss is more likely to understand a student needs time off during finals.) And anything more than a 20-hours-a-week job is considered too much for a full-time student.

Students also need to find a campus community. Join a club or two, in other words.

Parents shouldn’t force majors on students. Eventually, they’ll switch anyhow and likely lose time toward a degree, Hamilton says. If a freshman can’t decide on a major, Hamilton suggests narrowing the possibilities down to three options and having an adviser chart a course that will allow a student to look at all three without losing time toward graduation.

Required courses can fill up quickly, so students also need to work with advisers on getting required classes completed in order. Getting to know the faculty helps, Hamilton adds. They’re able to help select courses and garner internships (which lead to real jobs). Also, students struggling with emotional or psychological issues should seek assistance immediately as colleges generally offer free counseling to full-time students.

The bottom line, says Hamilton, is that students ultimately need to take responsibility for getting to graduation day. “At some point, they’ve got to decide, ‘I want a degree and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get there.’”

Around The State

Other four-year, bachelor-degree-awarding colleges and universities in Maryland.

Bowie State University – Bowie

Founded: 1865 Enrollment:5,600 About:Maryland’s oldest historically black institution of higher learning and one of the oldest in the country, Bowie State is a diverse university with 23 majors, 35 master’s programs, doctoral, and advanced certification courses.

Frostburg State University – Frostburg

Founded: 1898 Enrollment:5,429 About:Frostburg is the only 4-year University System of Maryland school west of the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

Hood College – Frederick

Founded: 1893 Enrollment:1,485 About:A longtime women’s liberal-arts school located in Frederick, Hood became a fully co-education institution a decade ago.

Mount St. Mary’s University – Emmitsburg

Founded: 1808 Enrollment:1,676 About:The country’s second-oldest Catholic university, Mount St. Mary’s rural campus offers more than 40 majors, minors, concentrations, interdisciplinary and special programs.

Salisbury University – Salisbury

Founded: 1925 Enrollment:8,000 About:Salisbury offers more than 40 undergraduate degrees in it’s Fulton School of Liberal Arts, Henson School of Science & Technology, Perdue School of Business, and Seidel School of Education & Professional Studies.

Sojourner-Douglass College – Baltimore

Founded: 1972 Enrollment:1,100 About:The downtown school offers 18 bachelor degree programs and several graduate programs.

St. John’s College – Annapolis

Founded: 1696 Enrollment:450 About:St. John’s College’s undergraduate program features an all-required course curriculum based on the great books of Western philosophy, theology, political science, physics, math, and history.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland – St. Mary’s City

Founded: 1840 Enrollment:1,992 About:St. Mary’s College of Maryland is a public, state-supported, liberal-arts honor school, offering 22 undergraduate degree programs, including a student designed option.

United States Naval Academy – Annapolis

Founded: 1845 Enrollment:4,603 About:The U.S. Navy’s undergraduate college develops students into naval officers, whose tuition is fully funded in exchange for active-duty service upon graduation.

University of Maryland Eastern Shore – Princess Anne

Founded: 1886 Enrollment:3,862 About:A historically black institution, UMES offers 34 undergraduate-degree programs, 14 graduate programs, and seven doctoral tracks.

Washington College – Chestertown

Founded: 1782 Enrollment:1,450 About: Located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an hour and a half from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Washington College, one of the 10 oldest in the nation, offers more than 40 majors and academic programs.

Anita Allen was about five years old when her big brother, Alton, a student at Baltimore City College, came home in his marching-band uniform.

“I remember him wearing that big top hat and playing the saxophone, and I thought that was just so cool,” she says. A few years later, when Alton became the first of Allen’s 15 siblings to graduate from college, she thought, “I need to go to that high school.”

But although Anita Allen was among the best students in Northern Parkway Junior High School, and lived on Gorsuch Avenue, just a few blocks from City, attending Baltimore’s most prestigious high school was not an option. Since its founding in 1839, Baltimore City College, known as “the Castle on the Hill,” had always been an all-boys school.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

The school closed in 1977 for a year of renovations, and the students moved to district headquarters on North Avenue. It re-opened in the fall of 1978 (even though renovations weren’t quite complete) as “the New Baltimore City College,” a co-educational high school. The girls and boys in the freshman class would have the school to themselves.

“Once they opened up the doors for females, I knew that was my opportunity and I had to get in,” says Allen, née Hill, who left her junior high school (which, like most at the time, went through 9th grade) a year early to join Baltimore City College’s class of 1982.

This month, Allen joins her fellow class of ’82 members to celebrate their 30th reunion. The class is notable both for being the first to include women, and for its stellar achievements, particularly among the women.

Veronica Jones-Freeman, the class president and the first female member of City’s Hall of Fame, is a finance manager for McCormick Company and has been the treasurer of the trustees of the Baltimore City College scholarship funds for more than a decade. Maria Price Detherage is the director of strategic programs for the Department of Health and Human Services. Deneen Fassett is a United States Postmaster in Baltimore County. Allen herself studies technology and is now a manager at Shield Consulting Solutions. Doctors, lawyers, and university administrators are all also among the class’s graduates.

From the first days of freshman year, it was clear that the women of the class of 1982 were uniquely ambitious, in everything from academics and extra-curricular activities to sports. Top achievers in middle schools and junior high schools throughout the city, they finally got the chance to shine at Baltimore’s most prestigious public historic high school—and they were determined to take advantage of it.

“From our moment of entry, we felt like this was an opportunity,” says Allen, who inspired a younger sister and brother to attend City, along with her daughter, Monet, who graduated in 2007, and her son, Phillip Allen III, who just finished his sophomore year there. “We knew that anything the women of our class did, it would be a historic moment.”

Neil Bernstein graduated from City in 1954, and has been active in the alumni association ever since. He first met the class of ’82 in the fall of 1978, when they were spending their freshman year in the basement of Eastern High School, the all-girls school near City, while the renovations were being completed.

To mark its 25th reunion the following year, the class of ’54 decided to give several $100 prizes to the top academic performers in the class of ’82, and Bernstein came to announce them to the students at an assembly.

“When I met those ladies and gentlemen, it was so refreshing to see how much they wanted to be there,” says Bernstein, who has served as president of the alumni association. “They came into a new environment, it was a co-ed school for the first time, they were in that basement, and yet they were excited.”

The move to make City co-ed came after a period when the future of the school was in doubt. There was a feeling that City had slipped in stature in the ’60s and early ’70s. The school board discussed making City a neighborhood school or shutting it down.

“The school system wanted the building taken down,” says Bernstein. “Allegedly, [Mayor] William Donald Schaefer and [Governor] Marvin Mandel, both City alumni, said ‘You ain’t gonna do that.'”

In addition to concerns about the quality of education, there was a national trend of integrating single-sex schools. A school board task force ultimately recommended that the school be shut down for renovations and re-opened as a co-ed magnet school.

“If they’d re-opened the school with inmates from Devil’s Island, I’d have been deliriously happy,” says Bernstein. “The fact that this wonderful school, which motivates people to incredible achievement, could be re-opened, I didn’t care who would be going there, as long as they were qualified to be college-preparatory students in a magnet school. The fact that it was co-educational didn’t make a difference to me.”

Bernstein helped convince alumni—some of whom were adamantly opposed to the change—to continue supporting their alma mater.

“The feeling was, if Western can stay all-girls, how come City can’t remain all-boys?” he recalls. “I said, ‘Here’s what we got: no school or some school with women. What’s your choice?’ We were just happy to get the school open with kids that wanted to be there.”

Over the years, Bernstein has watched with great pride as the class of ’82 proved to be one of the school’s most successful.

“I don’t know whether we put something in the water or what, but the ladies in that class—the gentlemen, too, but particularly the ladies—seemed to respond to what City College is all about,” he says. “Whenever I hear about a woman graduate doing something special, I say ‘Must be class of ’82.'”

In 1977, Deneen Fassett was an ambitious middle-school student who had planned to go to either Poly or Dunbar, until she heard that City was going co-ed.

“School was the priority in my house,” says Fassett, who grew up in Northwest Baltimore and took two buses to get to City. “When City announced that it would be co-ed, my mind was settled. The selling point was that we would be the first graduating class of ‘the new City,’ where girls would be allowed.”

Steve Williams, another class of ’82 grad and the current president of the Baltimore City College Alumni Association, says the school’s decision to go co-ed was pivotal to him as well. “That was one of the selling points: You can go to the Castle on the Hill, but now there’s going to be females,” he says. “New and improved, guys.”

Like a lot of aspiring athletes that went to City, Williams was also lured by the opportunity to participate in one of America’s great high-school football rivalries: the annual City-Poly game, which was played, usually on Thanksgiving, at Memorial Stadium until 1999. (It’s now played at M&T Bank Stadium.)

Williams keeps up a good-natured war of words with Baltimore Polytechnic Institute alumni. He refers to Poly as “that other school on Falls Road,” explaining with a smile, “I don’t curse, so I don’t use that other word.”

Unfortunately for its football squad, when the class of 1982 entered City, there were no upperclassmen, so they were forced to field teams with students from just a single class, taking on older, bigger, and more experienced opponents.

“We took our lumps,” says Williams, who was City’s starting quarterback for four years, and was also point guard on the basketball team and a pitcher for the baseball team. For all four of Williams’s years at City, Poly defeated them in the annual game. “It was tough, but we hung in there,” he says.

Even in sports, the girls of City outperformed the boys. The brand-new girl’s volleyball team faced the same challenges as the boys teams and, yet, it went undefeated for four straight years, winning four citywide titles. “We were proud,” says Anita Allen, who played on the team and was voted “most athletic” and “most versatile” in her senior year.

Class of ’82 grad David Johnson was also lured by the football program. “It sounded really cool to be able to play in a professional football venue on Thanksgiving day,” he says.

Spending freshman year in the basement of Eastern, among the girls attending the neighborhood school, proved to be as demanding as any contest on the gridiron. “They were some rough young ladies—big and tall, and I don’t think they were all that happy that we were there,” says Johnson. “We were the nerdy kids.”

But soon enough, the students moved into the newly renovated building. “It was like going to a brand new school,” says Fassett. “That was the best.”

Every subsequent year, a younger class joined the school, but the class of ’82 was always the oldest, the perennial “seniors.” Johnson, who is now academic director of web media and technology at University of Maryland, University College, thinks their status helped them mature, and taught them how to handle great responsibility.

“We grew up a little faster and made our own way,” he says. “We forged our own identity, and we were always looked up to.”

When the school re-opened in 1978, it also started with an almost entirely new faculty. Susan Legg had been teaching English in the Baltimore City Public Schools for a few years when she joined City that year.

“We were excited to be there,” says Legg, who still works at City as director of testing. “It was like a new school, new faculty—only one teacher was held over from the previous faculty—and it was an intellectually stimulating environment.”

Legg recalls the criticism of City before it closed down, in particular that it had “gotten away from its standards.” But, like Neil Bernstein, she was relieved to find that the new students were motivated to learn.

“They were good students,” she says. “They took a risk and came into something totally new. For most of them, it paid off.”

Class of ’82 grads say their unique situations—being the first co-ed class, the first in the renovated building, the oldest class for four years—helped them form and maintain a lasting bond. “We’re like a family, more than a class,” says Johnson.

Steve Williams joined the military after graduation and connected with alums around the globe, even while in Iraq.

“I saw the class ring from a distance in the chow hall—it was unmistakable,” says Williams, who retired from the military several years ago and now works in the human resources department of The Johns Hopkins University. “We got to talking the next day, remembering the school.”

To this day, Anita Allen distinctly remembers going up the tower at City to write her name on the wall that all City graduates sign, knowing that she would be among the first women to be entered there.

“You could see all of Baltimore from up there,” she says. “That was truly awesome.”

On a clear, crisp March day, Officer Christopher Davies prepares the second floor of a long-abandoned building at Rosewood State Hospital to go to the dogs—or, more specifically, to the Baltimore County K-9 unit.

Earlier in the day, Davies had signed out dangerous controlled substances stored in a safe at Essex headquarters (many of which were seized during local drug busts) as well as an arsenal of explosives acquired through the State Fire Marshal’s Office. Now, as if preparing for a dangerous scavenger hunt, Davies plants plastic Zip-Loc baggies of heroin, hashish, meth, and explosive compounds such as R5 and PETN in various hiding places around the floor. The hash goes on a shelf in the bathroom; the heroin gets stashed in a room behind closed doors; the meth is hidden inside the receiver of a telephone that sits on top of a desk area.

“It’s like a game of hide and seek,” explains Davies. “That’s all we do out here all day.”

First to arrive on the scene is the team of 4-year-old German shepherd Bosco and his handler, Sergeant Daniel Buchler, a former lacrosse player dressed in County-issued navy cargo pants with Oakley sunglasses on top of his head and a 40-caliber sig (pistol) strapped to one leg. Bosco, with his bear-sized paws, is equally formidable—at 99 pounds, he is one of the K-9 unit’s larger animals and, like many of the canines, is a dual-purpose dog trained in explosives and patrol work.

Bosco sniffs his way across the floors of the empty, tiled hallways while Buchler eggs on his shepherd with words of encouragement.

“Let’s get the bad guy. Let’s get the bad guy,” he says.

As Bosco sniffs, Buchler guides the dog through the halls, running his hands along the walls. When Buchler points to a paper-towel holder in a bathroom, Bosco stands gracefully on his hind legs and shoves his snout along the edge of the dispenser. Suddenly, Bosco’s breathing shifts from a steady pant to a more excited one. “He’s easy to read,” says Buchler. “You can hear his breathing change as he inhales.” Bosco takes a whiff, spins around, and then offers his “final response”—”a sit,” which is what he’s been trained to do once he locates the explosives. Buchler retrieves the R5 shoved up in the dispenser and praises Bosco for a job well done. “Good boy. Good boy,” he repeats, tossing Bosco his Kong chew toy reward. “He’s a foam monster,” says Buchler as he beams at the sight of his drooling dog who appears to be foaming at the mouth. “Yes, he is.”

For decades now, police dogs (thought to have originated in Belgium in 1859) have been widely employed throughout the United States, although in the wake of 9/11, they’ve become an increasingly common tool used against terrorism, especially for explosives. And Baltimore has benefited. Thanks to a federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security in 2010, Baltimore County received six Suburban SUVs for the unit. (They’ve since tricked the Suburbans out with a customized HVAC “hot-dog” system to keep temperatures just right for the dogs who often have to wait in cars before their officers bring them out to sniff around.)

Even before the events of 9/11, the Baltimore area was ahead of its time in using man’s best friend to assist the men and women in blue. Founded in 1956, Baltimore City’s unit is thought to be the oldest in the country with Baltimore County and the Maryland State Police units—both founded in 1961—not far behind. (Baltimore County has a relatively large unit for the state, with 25 handlers, one bloodhound, four Labradors, and 23 German shepherds.) As of today, Maryland has a K-9 unit in almost every county.

It was the Baltimore County K-9 Unit that presided over Obama’s visit to Towson University in 2011 and guarded the perimeter of a Dundalk row house during the 2000 fight-to-the-finish standoff with spree killer Joseph Palczynski. Throughout the Old Line State, the K-9 units patrol our streets, our malls, and our airports. They are called to the scene during armed robberies or when citizens are lost or on the lam.

According to Lieutenant Stephen Troutman, top dog of Baltimore County’s K-9 Unit, his team handled 6,600 calls for service last year (in Baltimore County and beyond), which led to 129 apprehensions. Though, interestingly, Troutman notes that “the mere presence of a dog is such a powerful deterrent” that of those 129 apprehensions, only 25 times was a dog actually directed to bite.

Yes, the dogs are trained to bite, but using force is a last resort. And this reflects a certain shift in policy. In the “olden days,” explains Maryland State Police Corporal Rick Kelly, “These dogs were known as ‘alligators on a leash.’ Nationally, that’s how it was done. We’d say, ‘You have five seconds to show yourself before you get bitten.’ Those days are over—now, we ‘play fair’ and give one-minute warnings. When a dog is present, that’s often enough for people to turn themselves in.”

But it’s not just their bite that makes them an effective tool against crime. Simply put, dogs can do things that humans cannot.

“They can sweep a stadium with 40,000 to 80,000 people,” says Sergeant Eric Fogle, unit commander of the Maryland State Police’s Special Operations Division. “Or [inspect] a school with 1,000 kids that’s been shut down because of a bomb threat, or seize 39 kilos of cocaine. It’s hard to put a price on what they do. It’s immeasurable.”

Police canines are genetically blessed super soldiers of sorts. For starters, their olfactory senses can be up to “40 to one hundred times stronger than humans,” says John Pearce, associate director of the Canine Detection Research Institute at Auburn University where scientists have proven that dogs can smell 10 to 50 particles (that’s the size of something so small it could fit on a pinhead) per one trillion particles. In many cases, dogs have superior hearing, eyes equipped for night vision, and the ability to run up to 30 mph. In other words, dogs may be man’s best friend, but they can be a bad guy’s worst nightmare.

“As human beings, I don’t think we could genetically create something that would be a better tool for the tactics that we do,” says Davies. “If we sat back and said, ‘We are going to create an excellent tool for law-enforcement search and rescue, companion work, and public service, and let’s figure out how were going to do it,’ the first thing we would say is, ‘Let’s make sure he’s very stable—let’s give him four legs. Let’s make sure he’s very strong and can withstand the elements, so let’s give him fur and muscles everywhere.’ And as you went along with your list, you’d probably say, ‘That looks a lot like a dog.'”

Back at North Point’s headquarters in Essex, Steve Troutman is the guy who reads all the reports, deals with the litigation (Troutman can cite chapter and verse on seemingly every legal ruling involving K-9 dog bites), and oversees everything from the veterinary calls (because the work is so physical, it’s not uncommon for dogs to get injured in the line of duty) to the purchasing of new unit dogs.

“These dogs are living creatures and they become a companion to the [officer’s] family,” says Troutman, sitting in his office near a tiny memorial to Duke, Baltimore County’s first police pooch. “But the dog is still owned by Baltimore County, and is considered ‘equipment.’ It’s difficult to say that because it’s an animal, but it’s really like my handgun and my radio.”

Because of strict breeding standards, strong bloodlines, and a long history of using canines for police work, the “equipment” is most often imported from countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany. And though the price tag can be steep at upwards of $7,000 per dog, canines have proven to be quite cost effective. “One dog team [one cop and one canine] can replace the efforts of five officers,” points out Troutman.

Which is why ongoing training is so essential.

At Rosewood and other area training grounds, the point of the exercises is to expose the dogs—and their handlers—to an infinite number of scenarios they might encounter in the field. “You can never replicate everything that happens on the road,” says Davies, “but we try to be as creative as we can.”

The officers and their dogs go through a 16-week basic patrol school (think agility training, obedience, bite and hold work), plus an additional six-to-eight week “scent training” camp for the dog to learn to detect narcotics or explosives. Beyond that, each team is also required to “retrain” an additional 18 days a year to keep all involved on their paws and toes. It’s one thing to train in a controlled environment, says Troutman, “but the million-dollar question is if you move that task to a different location, from roadside to a ship to the interstate, can they do that simple task you trained them to do? And that’s why we never stop training.”

By the end of boot camp, the dogs and their handlers form a unique working relationship that extends off the job as well.

“Picture being married and being with [your spouse] 24 hours a day,” says Baltimore County Corporal Joe Putnam, who has a narcotics dog named Carbo. “At work. At home. On weekends and whenever you go somewhere—just because I’m off, doesn’t mean he wants to be. All he wants to do is work.”

Occasionally, a dog doesn’t have the right stuff to serve as a police canine, such as Buchler’s yellow Lab, Rusty, who is now happily living out his “retirement” at Buchler’s home. “The Lab is a washout,” laughs Buchler. “He was a bomb trainee who decided he preferred the permanent vacation concept. We got to that fourth week of training, and he just lost interest.”

Not so Buchler’s Bosco, Officer Chris Strevig’s Jett, and Corporal Michael Stricker’s Jack (who was given a set of titanium teeth after chewing through his cage—talk about a crime deterrent), who appear eager and ready to go. First, Davies calls out a series of military-style commands to the handlers, “Halt. Line up on your left. March. Pass your dogs. Leave them down.” Then, their handlers speak to the dogs in a mix of their “native” languages, most often German and Czech. “Sitz (sit), lehne (lay), zustat (stay), propustit (release),” and the dogs follow their every command.

In the ultimate test of canine self-control, Davies dresses as a decoy in a blue “scratch suit.” He comes within inches of each of the handlers and their charges, making sudden movements with his arms and loud cracking sounds with his whip. The dogs seem unbearably tense as they screech and whine, but none of them come within a wet nose of Davies. “He’s doing everything in his power to keep in control,” explains Putnam looking at Jett. “They have to ignore the decoy because the handler is telling them it’s okay.”

During “tug play,” the dogs let loose for a job well done, but Bosco’s tooth inadvertently nicks Buchler’s hand. “Almost all of the handlers have been bitten by their dogs at least once,” says Buchler. “You know what we say as a guy is standing there with two to four holes in his hand bleeding?” asks Buchler rhetorically. “We say, ‘Welcome to K-9.'”

But while dogs such as Bosco are fierce enough to apprehend suspects with a “bite- and-hold” technique usually aimed at the extremities (“Picture the pressure of three refrigerators on top of you,” cracks one of the officers), even more amazing than all the doggie derring-do is their ability to transform from ferocious warriors to beloved family fuzzballs.

“This is how terrible mine is,” laughs Buchler showing a photo of his 13-year-old daughter laying on the floor while hugging Bosco who, mere moments ago, looked like a ringer for Cujo. “On the weekends, he just plays,” says Buchler smiling at his partner. “On the weekends, he’s just a dog.”

here’s a ton of events for all ages on tap in Baltimore for the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. Here’s a roundup:

Wednesday, June 13

Head for the harbor to see a massive fleet of 13 towering tall ships, with their uniformed sailors lined up on the yardarms, arrive in Baltimore. Add the modern warships visiting town and there’ll be close to 40 in all, and the biggest include such majestic vessels as the Cisne Branco, a 250-foot-long, full-rigged tall ship of Brazil; the Dewaruci, a 191-foot barquentine crewed by Indonesian Navy cadets; the Cuauhtémoc, a 270-foot tall ship from Mexico; the Colombian Navy’s four-masted (23 sails), 257-foot-long Gloria; the Guayas, a 257-foot long tall ship of Ecuador; and our very own USCG Barque Eagle, the 290-foot globetrotting ambassador and sail training ship of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (Baltimore’s Curtis Bay Coast Guard Yard did the most recent refit of her), as well of lots of smaller ships like The Pride of Baltimore II and the Lady Maryland. The tall ships will be joined by modern warships from several countries and will be docked at the Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and Locust Point. Tours are available, but anyone touring a modern naval vessel will need to go through security similar to that at the airport, so leave your jack knife and ammo belt at home. Go to http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details about the participating ships.

Thursday, June 14 (Flag Day)

10 a.m.-4 p.m. Flag Day celebration at the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House , 844 E. Pratt St., 410-837-1793, info@flaghouse.org.

10:30-noon. Navy Ceremonial Band concert and welcome ceremony at the Inner Harbor Amphitheater. Starspangled200.com.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free Public Ship Tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point, Sailabration Villages open, check sailbaltimore.org for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point, checkhttp://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Friday, June 15

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point, checkhttp://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Saturday, June 16

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Star-Spangled Festival and Aircraft Display at Martin State Airport, Eastern Ave, Middle River. The main attraction will be the six FA-18 Hornets, flown by the U.S. Navy¹s Aerobatic Demonstration team, the Blue Angels, and the C-130 (Fat Albert) flown by the Marine Corps. When the Blues land after the air show, pilots will be signing autographs. There also will be other FA-18s, a E-2C Hawkeye, a T-45C Goshawk, a T-6B Texan, a T-34C Mentor, a P-3C Orion, MH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter, TH-57 Sea Ranger helicopter, and a MH-60 Seahawk helicopter. The Maryland Air National Guard will have one of their A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft on display as will the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum. Aircraft will begin departing Martin for the show in the early afternoon.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Afternoon TBD. Star-Spangled Air Show over Baltimore, featuring the Blue Angels. Best viewing location is Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

6-10 p.m. Celebration of the American Flag with concerts and fireworks at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

Sunday, June 17

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Star-Spangled Festival and Aircraft Display, Martin State Airport. See Saturday description above.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Afternoon TBD. Star-Spangled Air Show over Baltimore, featuring the Blue Angels. Best viewing location is Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine.

7-8:30 p.m. Star-Spangled Symphony by the BSO featuring the premiere of a new symphonic work, Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Bsomusic.org

Monday, June 18 (Actual anniversary of the Declaration of War)

Morning TBD. 200th anniversary event.

11 a.m.-6 p.m. Free public ship tours in Inner Harbor and Fells Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

1 p.m.-5 p.m. Free public ship tours in North Locust Point. Sailabration Villages open, check http://StarSpangled200.com/ for details.

Tuesday, June 19

11 a.m.-1 p.m. Parade of Sail departure.

All weekend

On June 10, the Maryland Historical Society will open a new 1812 exhibition. The museum is at 201 W. Monument St., 410-685-3750. Check mdhs.org for hours, details.

Crystol Moll Gallery, 1030 S. Charles St., is hosting an exhibition of paintings, photographs and prints of Ft. McHenry, Flag House, and tall ships in honor or the War of 1812. May 23-July 7 with a reception June 15. See crystolmollgallery.com for details.

It’s late on a crisp fall afternoon at the Glenwood Life Counseling Center in Govans. This is typically the quietest time of day, but there is still a small crowd chatting by the front door. One by one, individual clients duck inside, check in with the front desk, and go to one of three booths in the medication room where they receive a dose of Methadone, the synthetic opioid used to treat recovering heroin addicts.

There is a tall, dreadlocked construction worker wearing a bright orange vest, a hard hat tucked under his arm. An elderly woman with oxygen tubes strapped to her nose greets everyone with a broad smile. When a stocky man wearing a hooded sweatshirt approaches the booth, he is instructed to breath into a Breathylizer machine nearby, to make sure he hasn’t been drinking.

Nearby, there is a child-care room where clients leave their kids while meeting with case workers or attending group counseling sessions. There are the rooms, overcrowded with chairs, where the groups meet, and, nearby, a line of offices where case workers conduct the painstaking work of helping addicts put their lives back together.

“People often come here when they’ve lost everything,” says Lillian Donnard, who has worked at Glenwood for 13 years, and been director for five years. “For many of them, for five, 10, 20, 40 years, they’ve been getting sick and chasing drugs every day of their life, every four hours—it’s a full-time job.”

When clients first arrive, often referred by family or other addicts, they receive a medical exam and counseling to help them stabilize their typically out-of-control lives.

“Once they get stable, we start to work on the 50 other things that have become part and parcel of this drug addiction,” says Donnard. “They have no health insurance, no housing, no employment, they didn’t finish school, they have legal issues—it’s all about trying to build this recovery package that is about turning their life around.”

The medication room—where most clients come daily for their dose of Methadone—is the first stop for those entering Glenwood, but it is almost never the last. Most clients stop to talk to their case workers about employment, housing, or personal issues. Many attend support groups and workshops on everything from reading and writing to meditation. Some go to a book-club meeting. Others just sit in the lobby and knit, eat lunch, and chat.

“A lot of people come and stay and don’t really have any place else to go,” Donnard explains. “They live in a shooting gallery.”

Glenwood Life, which marked its 40th anniversary this year, is the second oldest Methadone treatment center in Baltimore. When the center opened in 1971, it had less than 200 clients. Today, it has 560. About half of the clients have been coming here for at least four years and some have been coming a lot longer than that. Because of its age, Glenwood is confronting a new problem for Methadone clinics, which first started cropping up about 45 years ago: treating elderly addicts.

“The thing that’s different now, in 2011, is that some of these people who have been here a long time are getting physically old,” says Donnard. “We have this whole overlay of normal problems of the aged—but also things that have been exacerbated by all those years of drugging and running—that nobody told us about or prepared us for, or that we have the resources to deal with. Our psychiatrist jokes that we look like the VA, with all the amputees that we have from diabetes and gout.”

And while the aging population presents new problems for Glenwood administrators and case workers, it also allows them to become more deeply connected with clients and to see the long-term results of their work.

“You go through this life with them,” says Donnard. “You hear about their children graduating and having their grandchildren.”

When Glenwood Life Counseling Center opened in 1971, it was the second full-service Methadone clinic in Baltimore and lots of people had reservations about it—particularly the center’s new neighbors.

“Forty years ago, everybody was flying by the seat of their pants—people didn’t know a lot about addiction, didn’t know a lot about treatment,” says Frank Satterfield, who started working as a vocational counselor at Glenwood soon after it opened, served as director for many years, and is now the center’s finance officer. “I had to go to 1,000 community meetings trying to explain what Methadone treatment was.”

Early on, the local city councilperson threatened to shut the center down because of the loitering associated with it. But, over time, administrators won over the community. It didn’t hurt that the center’s administrators built a playground across the street that is used by the community, or that they allowed local groups to use the building for meetings. But the most important factor in the détente was the community’s gradual realization that Glenwood’s clients weren’t causing problems. This, more than any community meeting, taught them what Methadone does.

Methadone was first manufactured in Germany in 1937 and introduced in the U.S. a decade later as a pain killer. In a landmark 1965 study, researchers discovered that the drug, which does not offer the same euphoric effect of heroin, could help heroin addicts wean themselves off the drug without debilitating withdrawal symptoms.

“Three things happen when you start using Methadone,” explains Donnard. “One, people don’t get sick anymore. Two, they don’t feel the effects of street narcotics. And three, they stop craving the drugs.” She stresses that the absence of withdrawal symptoms—during which, she says, “every cell in your body hurts”—is the primary selling point among addicts.

It was the beginning of a major shift from thinking of addicts as weak, flawed individuals to the understanding that addiction is a disease that can be treated medically. But changing the way people think about addicts is a slow process.

“The researchers found this treatment worked, but there was still this moral outrage in the early ’60s about giving a medication to people who are already abusing heroin,” says Donnard.

And still, there are people who doubt Methadone’s effectiveness.

“I sat next to a judge the other day and he asked, ‘Does Methadone really work?’ recalls Donnard. “I said, ‘Well, 100 percent of our clients come in addicted [to heroin], and after a few months, only 20 percent are. So, yeah, I would say it works.’”

In Glenwood’s early days, the heroin problem in Baltimore was relatively small and, in a lot of ways, addicts had an easier time maintaining their lifestyle than they do now.

“Dope was fairly plentiful, and there wasn’t the kind of enforcement there is now—people weren’t getting hassled a lot,” says Satterfield, who worked in the prison system before coming to Glenwood. “Jobs were plentiful—a lot of our folks worked at Sparrows Point or Lever Brothers, or building the highway. They had income, they had health insurance, they had good jobs. And it was easy to find jobs for people once they got into recovery. There was no AIDS, there was no Hepatitis C.”

Over the years, particularly during the 1980s, when AIDS and crack ravaged America’s inner cities, addiction rates soared. The number of people taking Methadone multiplied—it is now the predominant treatment for heroin addicts.

“Methadone is highly reinforcing,” says Donnard. “Once they’re here, people get stable to do the work in their life that they’ve messed up. A pharmacologist likens trying to live your life while addicted to going to class, but it’s right before lunch and you can’t concentrate on anything. Methadone gives you lunch.”

Rodney Jackson first came to Glenwood to treat his heroin addiction in 1995. He stayed with the program for two years, but then fell back into his old habits. In 2000, once he hit rock bottom, he returned.

“I was homeless,” he says. “I walked in without anything but the clothes on my back.”

It was a long way down for Jackson, now 52. For years, he worked as a special- education teacher in city schools and had even worked for a time as an adviser to the Baltimore City Police Department. For 20 years, he managed to conceal his addiction before things unraveled. Jackson, whose father was a drug addict, credits Glenwood’s onetime resident physician Dr. Robert McDaniel—a recovering addict himself who died in 2002—with getting him on the path to recovery.

“He treated me like a human being,” says Jackson. “At the time I came back to Glenwood, it had been a while since someone treated me that way.”

Jackson is one of six long-term clients who have become part-time peer-case managers. While Glenwood’s 14 full-time case managers oversee clients’ cases, they will often refer clients to peer managers to help them navigate the tricky waters of getting housing, employment, and other social services.

“We show them how to get a driver’s license, how to apply for Section 8 housing, how to get food stamps, insurance, things like that,” says Jackson. Like most clients, Jackson still takes Methadone every day. Case workers are very slow to wean clients off the drug, for fear of a relapse. They usually only begin that process after clients have been stable for many years. Few clients ever wean themselves off the drug entirely.

Jackson and the other peer managers work out of a house adjacent to the center and all share a passion for their work.

“We’re only supposed to work four hours at a time, but most of the time, we’ll stay all day,” says Jackson. “We know what it’s like.”

Donnard says one of the biggest rewards of staying at Glenwood for so many years is watching the transformation of peoples’ lives.

“We tend to serve people who have long histories of drug use and who are very disenfranchised,” she says. “And then, one day, you’ll see them at our book club, or celebrating their child’s birthday.”

After 40 years, Glenwood has the history and reputation of an institution, but it still manages to provide surprises almost every day. As Donnard says, “We walk this long life journey with so many of our people.”

Update: This article has been updated to contain a sponsored link from drugabuse.com.

In early 2006, still reeling from the loss of her father, groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor, and the dissolution of her six-year marriage, actress-singer-writer Rain Pryor packed up her Prius and headed east for a new beginning in Baltimore. Baltimore had made its mark on Pryor, when she performed her one-woman show Fried Chicken and Latkes at Morgan State University in 2004.

“I was depleted after my father’s death,” recalls Pryor, who actually received the news of her dad’s death while visiting friends in Charm City. “I was getting a divorce, and I wanted to get away from it all. I literally packed up my car and moved to Baltimore. I really liked it here. I had friends here, and it was cheaper than New York.”

Her mother, former go-go dancer Shelley Bonus, was not exactly happy about her only child’s cross-country move. “My Mom thought I was nuts moving here,” says Pryor, who has spent most of her 39 years in California.

More than two years later, Pryor couldn’t be happier with her new ZIP code. In the two years since she has been in Baltimore, she’s given birth to a baby girl, Lotus Marie (delivered on, as luck would have it, April 1, 2008), and moved into a Charles Village apartment with her fiancé, Yale Partlow, a native Baltimorean and nursing student she met at Dougherty’s Pub on Chase Street. For the first time in her life, Pryor says she feels completely at ease with not only her surroundings but also herself. “I love the museums, the music, and the history of Baltimore,” says Pryor, whose great-uncle played trumpet at The Hippodrome in the ’20s and whose fraternal grandmother, Viola, was Baltimore-born. “I love the variety of people, too—it’s more black than L.A. ever was. Being a biracial woman, it’s the first time I feel like I don’t have to define what I am in either the Jewish or the black community. In L.A., it was like ‘Who are you?’ But every girl here has big hair, it’s not like in L.A. where everyone’s hair is straight.”

Pryor, best known for her role as spunky T.J. Jones on the ABC sitcom Head of the Class, is the ultimate jill-of-all-trades. These days, when she’s not peddling her organic baby food at Baltimore’s Yabba Pot vegan restaurant (the jar’s tongue-in-cheek label features a photo of her beloved fraternal great-grandmother, “Mama,” an infamous brothel madam in Peoria, IL) or writing a parenting blog for Celebrity Parents Magazine, she’s pursuing her latest love: teaching acting. Since last fall, Pryor has been teaching a weekly class in Parkville at ModelREHAB, a marketing agency for fledgling models and actors.

“When I heard she had a workshop, I did some research on her,” says Washington, D.C. resident Kevin Troy, who auditioned for Pryor’s April workshop. “I was impressed with her work. I was a fan of her father’s but I could see she was a person in her own right.”

Pryor’s teaching philosophy is to offer the hard truth about her profession and have her students learn from someone who knows the business. “I am not all about, ‘I’m going to make your dreams of becoming an actor come true,’” says Pryor, who has written a one-act play, Colorism, which will be read at Hampden’s Minás Gallery on May 10. “I’m more like, ‘Let me come teach you, and you decide whether or not this is something you want to do.’”

For Pryor, a career in acting was practically preordained. In kindergarten, she performedThe Wizard of Oz as a one woman show, because, she says, smiling, “I thought the other kids weren’t doing their parts right. My grandfather was Danny Kaye’s manager. My mother was a performer. Acting was all I ever knew.”

It was also her catharsis. Pryor knew the profound pain of being a biracial child in a world that wasn’t ready for her. For the first few years of her life, her single mother was encouraged by her grandparents to put her up for adoption. Pryor didn’t meet her father until she was four, and though she was close to him, the relationship was complicated. While her father infamously battled his demons with drugs, prostitutes, and six marriages to five different women, young Rain cushioned the blows with trademark humor. “I thought all kids rode the Concorde, took limousines, and knew a hooker named Henrietta,” says Pryor, who attempted suicide at 16. But such thoughts are long behind her. “I don’t get not surviving,” she says. “I don’t know what it’s like not to walk through it. I have great angels all around me—that must be the explanation.”

Leaving the City of Angels has helped Pryor come to terms with both present and past. “You can have your baggage, and my baggage is still packed, but it used to be a trunk and now it’s just a suitcase,” she says with a laugh. “My past is no longer my story. It’s so over there,” she says, arms outstretched. “Moving here has helped me finally let it go.”

Mention the much-ballyhooed renaissance of Baltimore’s downtown, and what names come to mind? The guess here is that in most any roomful of random Baltimoreans, the two names most likely to pop up are those of politician William Donald Schaefer and developer James Rouse.

This is fair enough, as far as it goes. As Mayor in the 1970’s, Schaefer pushed the Inner Harbor project forward with a highly effective, always entertaining mix of political wiles and manic boosterism. He was in charge that day in 1976 when a fleet of tall ships sailed into the harbor, drawing throngs of tourists to a city that never realized before that such a thing might be possible.

Rouse earned his renaissance stripes a little later. When the shopping and dining pavilions designed by his Rouse Company opened on the Inner Harbor in 1980, they transformed the development from a playground for locals into an international model for the redevelopment of urban waterfronts that would inspire the likes of Barcelona, Belfast, and Sydney to turn their old port districts into tourist destinations.

But while Schaefer and Rouse did their fair share, their names don’t come close to telling the whole story of the renaissance. For that fuller tale, there’s no better source to turn to than Martin Millspaugh.

Millspaugh has been in the thick of downtown redevelopment issues for the last five decades. In the 1950’s, he covered downtown issues for The Evening Sun. Then, after a stint working on urban renewal issues for the federal government, he signed on in 1960 to help lead the redevelopment effort. Today, Millspaugh is playing the role of historian; he’s making a documentary film for the nonprofit Urban Land Institute about the renaissance.

Ask him to broach this topic, and the two-hour discussion that ensues will touch on dozens of names well worth remembering: J. Jefferson Miller, David Wallace, Hunter Moss, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., Theodore McKeldin, Robert Embry Jr., and more.

“That’s one of the amazing things to me about this subject,” Millspaugh says. “Whenever some obstacle loomed up ahead, it seemed like the right person just came along out of the woodwork and took care of it. The cumulative force of people getting together to accomplish something important like this, that’s a powerful thing.”

The story Millspaugh spins unfolds in three chapters. The first opens a couple of days after Christmas 1954, when news broke that the historic O’Neill’s department store was about to shut its doors. Even today, Millspaugh adopts a wistful tone when recalling this turn of events.

“I remember so well going there with my mother when I was a kid,” Millspaugh says. “It was kind of like the Saks Fifth Avenue of Baltimore, a place that people just revered.”

The demise of O’Neill’s struck Baltimore like a sharp slap in the face. It forced civic leaders to take a hard look at the reality of the damage the new postwar economy was doing to downtown. The suburbs were booming, taking middle- and upper-income families out of the city—and away from downtown’s stores and services.

Baltimore’s port was dying. The shipping industry was now using a new generation of container ships too big to maneuver in the cramped Inner Harbor. As a result, the waterfront warehouses that had served Baltimore so well for centuries were fast becoming obsolete.

The situation with office space wasn’t much better. Only one new office building had gone up downtown since the 1920’s. Vacancy rates were at 25 percent and climbing in some places. In the five short years between 1952 and 1957, the assessed value of downtown real estate dropped 10 percent.

“It was such a desperate time, and there was so little hope,” Millspaugh says. “But looking back, it sort of helps to explain why Baltimore was able to accomplish what it did before so many other cities. We were so far behind that we ended up ahead of them. We didn’t have any choice but to try something dramatic.”

“Jeff” Miller, the executive vice president at Hecht’s and a leader of the Retail Merchants Association, convened an emergency meeting of department store owners in the wake of the O’Neill’s closing. He convinced them to launch a new Committee for Downtown and to provide $150,000 in seed money to get it off the ground. The then-fledgling Greater Baltimore Committee soon tossed another $75,000 to the pot.

By Millspaugh’s calculation, that $225,000 adds up in today’s dollars to $1.5 million. That was enough to assemble a planning team headed by Hunter Moss, chair of the GBC’s Planning Council, and David Wallace, a Philadelphia-based city planner.

“David was able to bring in a real blue-ribbon group of young designers,” Millspaugh recalls. “The first thing they did was make a very smart strategic decision. Instead of trying to fix all of downtown, they decided to focus on just one project, something big enough to make a difference but small enough to actually achieve within a relatively short time frame.”

The target they selected was the 33 acres between Charles, Liberty, Saratoga, and Lombard streets. This stretch represented downtown at its worst, Millspaugh explains. He describes it as a “valley of depression” separating the still-healthy financial district to the south and east from the Howard Street corridor to the west that still boasted three popular department stores.

The Charles Center redevelopment plan was unveiled in March of 1958. It called for tearing 85 percent of the site down to the ground, leaving just five old buildings standing. It envisioned a mixed-use development featuring retail, hotel, residential, and office developments interspersed with public plazas and pedestrian skywalks.

“Everyone saw that it was a good plan, but there was still a lot of pessimism at that point,” Millspaugh says. “People would say, ‘We love it! It’s beautiful! But it’ll never happen. This is Baltimore, and things like this don’t get done here.'”

Viewed by today’s standard of civic undertakings, what happened next is difficult to fathom—a mad rush of commitment, unanimity, and selflessness among civic leaders in support of the project. Businessman Isaac Hamburger publicly endorsed a plan that demolished the building that housed his family’s clothing store, a building he’d just spent a small fortune remodeling. Elected city officials raised nary a peep of objection to a plan that demolished a public parking structure that was pretty much brand new. City leaders dangled a princely salary in front of Miller to take on the job of heading up the project; he told them to drop the salary to $1 a year.

In June, Governor McKeldin put Charles Center on the agenda of a special session of the state legislature and pushed the necessary legislation through at breakneck speed. In November, voters overwhelmingly approved $25 million in bond issues to finance acquisition and demolition costs. In March of 1959—one short, frantic year after it was proposed—the City Council and Mayor D’Alesandro signed off on the plan.

The rights to develop the first lot in Charles Center went to the Chicago-based Metropolitan Structures. Designed by the world-renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, One Charles Center was located on the site of the old O’Neill’s department store. It was still going up when Millspaugh signed on to become deputy general manager of the Charles Center project in 1960.

“We had three buildings finished and six others committed by 1963,” Millspaugh says. “We proved to the skeptics that we could do this.” The next year, the Charles Center project picked up the first of what would eventually become a slew of urban design and revitalization awards.

The success of Charles Center was an indispensable step on the road to the Inner Harbor. In fact, Moss and Wallace (along with local leaders) had considered tackling the waterfront first, instead of Charles Center. But sheer logistics scared them off: How long might it take to assemble a workable redevelopment site out of a mishmash of nearly 1,000 small parcels owned variously by the city, the state, the federal government, and private companies?

The second chapter of the renaissance story opens in 1963, when McKeldin—who by this point had left the governor’s mansion and gotten himself elected mayor—decided that the time had come at last to see whether Baltimore could make something of its waterfront. He called Wallace back from Philadelphia. He had Miller and Millspaugh head up a new entity called Charles Center–Inner Harbor Management, Inc. Later, city housing commissioner Robert Embry Jr. came aboard to oversee the initiative.

The Inner Harbor Master Plan they developed was ready in 1964; the first project was completed in 1967. But the logistics were difficult. The first phase of the plan called for office and retail construction along Pratt Street, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the state’s board of public works approved construction of the proposed World Trade Center. Next up came the reconstruction of bulkheads and the development of parkland and a public promenade on the water; that was completed in 1973.

This is the point when the charismatic Schaefer and his Office of Promotion started going into overdrive. They launched a series of gimmicky “Sunny Sunday” celebrations on the water, and they moved the city fair down to the harbor. Soon enough, the Maryland Science Center was going up on the harbor, and plans to build an aquarium had been announced.

“But I have to tell you, that was all the Inner Harbor was ever supposed to be,” Millspaugh says. “It was planned as a playground for Baltimoreans, and it never occurred to anyone back then that Baltimore could be a successful tourist attraction. It might look in hindsight like it all unfolded in a logical progression, but no one involved in planning it saw it unfolding that way.”

And so the third chapter of the renaissance story brings us full circle, to the bicentennial summer of 1976 and the arrival of those tall ships—and all the out-of-towners who came to gawk at them. Next came the National Aquarium, the Rouse-designed pavilions, the Hyatt Regency, and more—much, much more than anyone involved in planning the project ever really envisioned.

Millspaugh breaks out a map of downtown and runs a finger out toward what was then an industrial wasteland east of the Inner Harbor, below Little Italy—the area now known as Harbor East. “Sometimes we used joke about how that was going to turn into Baltimore’s Gold Coast someday,” Millspaugh says. “Then somebody in the room would say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and we’d all laugh at how ridiculous we sounded.”

Why It Matters

• As the city’s center—including its outmoded, rotting piers—began to empty and decay, a group of visionary civic leaders worked to build a new downtown.

• Two projects (Charles Center and Harborplace) gave Baltimore’s commercial heart a new base upon which it eventually built a glittering Inner Harbor that continues to be the city’s celebrated public centerpiece.

If you think your neighbors are bad, with their loud music and sloppy trashcan-lid replacement, consider the tales told by the still-jittery people who lived near a Mt. Washington family we’ll call The Smiths.

The tales told and recounted by neighbors (who almost all requested anonymity) are many, and include harassing calls to the police (to report neighbors as burglars when they were entering their own homes) and vehicular taunting (one family member used to gun the engine of his car—sans tailpipe—throughout the dinner hour in the summer).

The Smiths did love their cars. After two family members broke the windshield of another car during a fight, they replaced the glass with an ill-fitting plastic sheet that the driver had to peer over. Yet that wasn’t the car’s main problem: All four tires were flat, recalls Michael Gold, 43, who moved in across the street from the Smiths in 1998.

But neither the lack of windshield nor working tires stopped the Smiths from using the car as their regular transportation. “They were screaming around the neighborhood in this car on the rims—looking over this piece of plastic,” says Gold, a scientist who moved to Pittsburgh in October 2006. “Sparks [from the wheel rims] were flying everywhere.”

Many family members irritated neighbors, but some residents fondly remembered the Smiths’ 80-something grandmother, who had lived on the street for half a century. “[Mrs. Smith] was a nice woman, very kind,” says neighbor Diane Sheckells, 47, who moved into her in-laws’ house around the time the Smith house burned down.

Yes, burned down. The family’s ample Victorian in western Mt. Washington was destroyed by fire in early 2005, ending the active problems with the family—but the charred pile of rubble lingered for more than a year, visible amid high grass and vine-covered bushes.

“It was such an eyesore,” says Julia Pearson, 39, a four-year resident on the block of compact two-story bungalows. “They never really came back to deal with the property. They never came back to mow the lawn. Except the day the house was taken down—they came to get a rose bush and a lilac bush.”

Days before a showdown in court about the destroyed home—where four generations of Smiths once lived—a demolition crew tore the house down to the ground.

“Everyone is very happy about it being an empty lot,” says Pearson.

The rubble was removed, but the lot is still unkempt, said Sheckells, a city schools employee. “It’s becoming such a doggone eyesore again, because of all of the weeds that are growing,” she adds.

Nightmare neighbors: They steal your parking spot, harass you about noisy renovations, let their dogs use your lawn as a toilet, and make obscene gestures. Heck, they may even use their front yard as a helicopter landing pad.

What can you do to stop them? Mediation groups can help work it out, and they offer several tips toward solving neighborly disputes. But squabbles sometimes end up in the hands of lawyers or police, who may not always help much.

Baltimore County fields mostly noise complaints, police spokesman Corp. Mike Hill said. Police there don’t mind enforcing the law, which slaps up to a $500 fine or up to 90 days in jail for noise that “unreasonably disturbs the peace, quiet, and comfort of the neighboring inhabitants.”

Hill’s best advice? “Try to get along,” he says. “Sometimes just talking to the neighbor and coming to an understanding is all that needs to happen.”

In Howard County, an even worse feud rages on among two men in the Village of River Hill, in Columbia. Neighbors Timothy Cerny and David Elliott are due in court this month, capping off two civil suits, 13 criminal cases, 13 peace orders and nearly 100 visits from Howard County police since 1999. The dispute began, The Sun reported, over a proposed pool in Cerny’s backyard. In the current court case, Cerny, 47, faces a second-degree assault charge for allegedly spitting on Elliott, also 47, during an April screaming match that Elliott caught on videotape, the paper reported.

The Baltimore City rowhouse is a breeding ground for neighborly disputes, said Caroline Harmon, director of the Community Mediation Center on Greenmount Avenue in Baltimore. The private, nonprofit center intervenes in more than 1,000 conflicts a year from across the region.

Many people who come for mediation have called the police more than 30 times. Preventing that number of calls, Harmon said, translates into savings for both police and taxpayers.

“We offer people a way out, rather than going to police” with disputes over yards, porches, parking, trash, music, noise, and animals, Harmon says. “A lot of the issues have to do with Baltimore as a city of rowhouses, and that people are living 10 feet away from each other.”

Harmon has three simple tips to try to repair (and prevent) damage: Speak directly. Many disputes involve messages through family members or other neighbors. Said Harmon, “If people talk things out face to face, they can make it better.”

Spend time listening as well as talking. Talk about how the situation affects you, rather than how horrible the other person is.

And avoid saying “always” or “never,” or other phrases that escalate disputes.

For the people of Baltimore County’s Greenspring Valley, Nightmare Neighbor Number One was Martin Grass, the former chief executive of the Rite Aid drugstore chain.

Starting in the late 90’s, Grass commuted via helicopter from his gated home to work at Rite Aid headquarters in Camp Hill, Pa. Neighbors contested Grass’s landing the chopper in an area zoned for agricultural use.

“When it would come in, the whole house would shake, and it would wake up my kids,” says Deirdre Smith, 46, whose 1820’s farmhouse has been in her husband’s family for five generations. The chopper would come and go at all hours, and Smith blamed it for making her chickens curtail their laying. “It was very frightening and upsetting.”

Smith and her husband tried to solve the problem with a neighborly approach, but they received an unexpected response.

“He took my husband up in the helicopter to try to show him how cool it was,” recalls Smith, whose 70-acre farm is across the street from the disgraced executive’s former home. “He had a definite attitude that he had the right to do whatever he darn well felt like.”

The chopper use stopped in 2004, when Grass was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for accounting fraud.

Some neighbors get so worked up that they hire a lawyer to scare the other guy.

“People feel more strongly about their property than their kids or their other possessions,” says Stephen J. Kleeman, a Towson lawyer representing a rowhouse resident whose neighbor’s dogs allegedly urinated and defecated on his house. “When they get worked up about it, it’s just impossible to derail,” Kleeman says.

But not all attorneys like to take this kind of case. Hampden lawyer Alan F. Deanehan won’t handle criminal cases or family law, and he says he won’t do residential disputes, either. “The neighbors from hell is not my purview,” he says. “I try not to do anything I can die from.”

While nightmare neighbors might seem humorous to someone who has never had them, what’s really funny is how far people will go to catch each other in the act, Ellicott City attorney Mike Henderson says.

“They yell at each other, and they chase each other around with video cameras,” Henderson says. “I’d rather have a divorce case than a property line dispute because people are much more likely to agree on something.”

Realtors don’t like to touch these conflicts, either.

“It really does go against our code of ethics to talk about stuff like this,” says Ilene Kessler, president of the Maryland Association of Realtors. She hesitated even to offer advice on how to avoid ending up with nightmare neighbors.

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can’t tell you how to act,” Kessler says. “I can’t even tell my children how to act.”

One woman’s bad neighbors aren’t humans but rats, both dead and alive. Rats in the kitchen. Rats in the garbage. Rats in the attic. Rats running along a brick fence extending the length of the group of rowhouses.

“I’ve seen pictures, and it’s not mice, it’s rats,” says the woman’s lawyer, Shauntese Curry Trye, who has a case pending against the management company that owns the group of rowhouses the client lives in. The company blames the next-door neighbor.

Sometimes family ties complicate neighborly disputes. Attorney David Jacobson—a Roland Park resident whose neighbors once had a battle of abandoned junky convertibles—handled a case where land was passed down from grandparents. Hostile grandchildren subdivided the lots and built homes, which they separated with fences. One grandchild allegedly jumped the fence around his visually impaired cousin’s house and dug holes along it so his relative would fall during his walks, Jacobson says.

Jacobson says there’s an old adage among real estate lawyers, but this time it didn’t hold up: “Big fences make good neighbors.”

On a brilliant sunny day, Mercedes Eugenia steers her 2004 Acura sedan down Liberty Heights Avenue near Gwynn Oak. Not particularly attractive, the block has a seen-better-days quality, with a shuttered Super Pride market across the street from the long-darkened Ambassador Theater. Although the 4-G’s liquor store does a brisk business, as does the New York Fried Chicken carryout, it doesn’t look like the sort of place that would attract investment.

Here, in the heart of Howard Park, there’s no waterfront glitter and high-rise sparkle—qualities we’ve come to equate with urban development—in sight. Commuters driving this well-traveled stretch of road, connecting Liberty Road in Baltimore County to the city’s northwest corridor, probably aren’t aware that Howard Park is undergoing profound change, economically and socially.

The redevelopment going on here has been under the radar. It doesn’t involve any of the usual nonprofit funders or government programs. The people behind it haven’t issued a single press release. So motorists passing through wouldn’t even know to look for it. Still, they may have noticed more women wearing headscarves.

Eugenia, who grew up in Howard Park, has been president of the Howard Park Civic Association for the past three years. “If you drive down this main street, you have no idea what is actually here,” she says. “It in no way reflects what we have on these side streets.”

With that, Eugenia makes a few turns and lets up on the accelerator as she cruises down wide, tree-lined avenues. Skirting Hillsdale Park and the Forest Park Golf Course at the neighborhood’s southernmost boundary, she drives past three-story homes with wraparound porches, 1940s era cottages, vinyl-sided ranchers, and brick rowhouses—most of them exquisitely maintained with colorful flowers and shrubbery, close-clipped lawns, and, often, ornamental latticework on the doors and porches. “This is the flip side of Roland Park,” she says.

Some residents are out working in their gardens; others sit on their porches and raise a hand in greeting as Eugenia rolls past. Children race down the sidewalk on scooters. “Here, you have the ability to relax,” says Eugenia. “It reminds me of Charleston, South Carolina.”

Eugenia notes that Howard Park has more than 80 percent homeownership, and most of these homes sit on sizable lots, 7,000 square feet on average. But its population is aging, and with that comes instability as longtime residents pass away or move into nursing homes. “Upwards of 40 percent of our residents are senior citizens,” says Eugenia, “and we’re trying to make sure their needs are met, because we don’t want to lose this neighborhood.”

Factor an infusion of drugs, crime, and absentee landlords into the equation, and the prospect of losing Howard Park becomes all too real. “What you have here are pockets of drug trafficking,” says Eugenia. “There are some open-air [drug] markets. That’s nothing unusual for an urban area, but it’s unusual for the residents here, because they’ve never experienced that before. It’s not overwhelming or overbearing, but it’s a foothold we don’t want the drug dealers to have.”

She points to a house on the right that used to be a crack house, but a Muslim family lives there now. In the next block she points out another former drug house that’s been bought and renovated by Muslims.

Eugenia turns onto Maine Avenue. “Some people refer to it as Islamic Way,” she says. “It’s not completely Islamic, but there is a concentration of Muslims on this street. The houses here are beautiful, or they’re in the process of being redone. We’re quite pleased with what they’re doing.”

She stops beside an SUV that has just pulled to the curb in front of a huge house. A woman and three girls get out; the girls are carrying book bags—an Islamic school is located down the street—and they’re all wearing headscarves. Eugenia hollers to one of them: “Where are your glasses?”

The girl, about 13 years old, approaches the car window and explains that her glasses have been lost and she’s getting contacts. “But don’t you need to see in school?” Eugenia asks.

“I can see okay enough to do my work,” the girl responds, before asking Eugenia to come by later for a visit. Eugenia says she’ll do that, and the girl runs off toward the house and disappears inside.

A casual, seemingly inconsequential exchange, it’s nonetheless emblematic of what’s going on in Howard Park. “Around here, we have youth that you’re not afraid to talk to,” says Eugenia. “They are friendly, articulate, and educated. You can tell they are being raised in a family-friendly environment.”

She continues down Maine. “There is a revitalization occurring here on multiple levels and not just on the surface,” she says. “The catalyst has been, quite frankly, the infusion of the Islamic community.”

In the basement of a house in the 4100 block of Liberty Heights, Joshua Salaam cuts a length of copper wire.

Above him, the dilapidated home is almost completely gutted, a three-story shell of a building. Around him, workers come and go, some carrying debris. Wearing denim work clothes and a kufi (head cap), Salaam coils the wire and smiles. “There’s a lot of work to be done here,” he says.

The house, one of six adjoining properties purchased by an investor in Virginia, is in the process of getting new plumbing, electric, and drywall, along with a new roof, replacement windows, and siding, if needed. The investor is Muslim. The real estate company that made the sale and the contractor doing the rehab are Islamic. So is the roll-off company providing dumpsters to the work site. The three companies—The Development Group, Development Group Construction, and Roll-Off Services—are affiliated, and based in Howard Park.

Salaam is the manager of Development Group Construction. “They’re like sister companies,” he says of the three entities. “The investor who bought these properties from us is also using our construction company. Plus, a lot of the people who work for us live in the neighborhood. Ultimately, we’re trying to keep the dollars circulating in this area.”

Salaam’s cell phone rings. Someone working on the house next door needs an Allen wrench. With the coil of wire over his shoulder, he locates a set of the wrenches and hustles over to the other house, which is almost finished being rehabbed. Inside, the smell of paint hangs thickly in the air. Every wall, ceiling, baseboard, and molding sports a fresh coat of white paint. All the bathroom fixtures are new. “It’s looking pretty good, isn’t it?” Salaam asks, fully aware of the answer to that question.

“We’re not caught up in simply chasing a dollar,” he continues. “There’s money to be made everywhere, and if your intent is strictly to go where the money is, you might achieve that goal. But it might be at the expense of your own neighborhood. Our focus is bringing the money here and raising up this area.”

The cell phone rings again, and Salaam wanders outside to take the call. “Yes, I have it, 13 feet,” he says. “I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

With that, he places the copper wire in the bed of his pickup truck, and drives off to another work site.

Salaam’s boss, John Cason, is the man behind much of the redevelopment activity. Sitting at a conference table inside the Development Group offices at the corner of Liberty Heights and Granada avenues, he wears scuffed work boots, black sweats, and a Hasim “The Rock” Rahman jacket—Cason is the heavyweight champion’s father. One office wall is lined with books, including the Annotated Code of Maryland, William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, and multiple copies of a Qur’anic concordance. A sign over the door reads “Tactical Room.”

“One of the only things Howard Park has is the potential to develop solid community,” says Cason, “and that’s exactly what we, as a society, need more of. We have become a disjointed society, just looking for individual success and not realizing the collateral damage of not building and strengthening community. We live in neighborhoods as individuals, not community members. We care more about the value of our neighbor’s house than the person who lives in it. This happens to whites, blacks, Christians, and Muslims—you can go across the board.

“You probably live in a community where you have a certain amount of economic status, and you know people who live around you, but you don’t really know them. You say “hi” and “bye.” You talk about the golf course, or whatever it is you talk about. You are there solely because of your economic ability, and that’s it. As a result, you may not share the same morals and values. You may have nothing else in common.”

Cason, who has lived in Howard Park off and on since 1969, speaks from experience. The first member of his family to attend college, he got a degree in engineering and moved out of the neighborhood. He took a good job in Hunt Valley and relocated to Baltimore County. “For African Americans, it’s the typical upward and out story,” he says. “It’s the American success story—go to school, get a job, and start making good money so you can buy that nice car and house. I did that.”

But after getting out, he posed a series of tough questions to himself, questions such as: Am I welcome in my neighbor’s house? Can I rely on my neighbor in times of need? Can I trust my neighbor with my family and my property? Do I share common moral values with my neighbor?

Uncomfortable with the answers, he returned to Howard Park in 1998. By that time, Cason had converted from Christianity—both of his parents were Christian ministers—to Islam. “I always had some basic questions about the religion that I couldn’t resolve,” he says of his conversion. “But Islam, for me, provided all the answers.”

He formed the Development Group in 2001, with an eye toward facilitating more of a Muslim presence in the neighborhood, although his overall objective was broader. “Muslims and non-Muslims alike are looking for a suitable environment in which to work and raise their children, while worshiping God,” he says. “They want safety, peace of mind, and comfortable homes; an environment where they can grow, live with their children, and get old without feeling abandoned; and they want that environment to endure and be sustained over generations. Everybody wants that.”

Cason bought houses in need of repair—some were vacant, some were being used for illicit purposes—rehabbed them, and resold them to Muslim families. Because Muslims are forbidden to charge or pay interest, Cason describes how the sales were financed in accordance with Islamic principles: “Usually, I would buy the property, fix it up, and sell the property for an 80 percent profit margin over 15 years. That percentage sounds high, but it’s moderate.”

He explains: “Let’s say I buy a house for $50,000 and put $50,000 into it. Then, I have $100,000 into it, and I’ll sell it to you for $180,000. I’ll hold the note and not charge any interest. You pay me $1,000 a month for 180 months. It’s that simple, and I make money over that 15-year period.”

Upwards of 65 properties in the neighborhood have been purchased by Muslims in this manner. Cason estimates that 85 families, or about 300 Muslims—almost all of them American-born—have moved to Howard Park as a result.

Attorney Melvin Bilal purchased a home through Development Group and moved to Howard Park from Columbia, where he had lived for 30 years. Bilal, a former army lieutenant who currently serves on the board of directors at Provident Bank, says he “never imagined moving to Baltimore City,” but a visit to Howard Park during a business trip changed all that. “I was impressed with the friendliness and brotherhood of the Muslims here,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘I want to be part of this kind of community.'”

Leon Faruq and his wife, Noni, sold their Mount Washington home and moved to Howard Park in 2003. “I wanted the opportunity to live close to other Muslims,” says Faruq, who counsels ex-inmates (see Baltimore, August 2003, “Wanted Man”). “Muslims present in their living space a wholesome environment, which is important for family life. Anything that runs counter to that, Muslims will work to correct.”

The neighborhood had a similar appeal for Joshua Salaam. A former law enforcement officer in the Air Force with a criminal justice degree, Salaam moved from Germantown with his wife and two small children in 2003. “I didn’t just come here to be part of a Muslim community, although that affords me a certain comfort level,” he says. “I also came here to be part of a Muslim community that has a purpose in effecting a positive change in the general community.”

These newcomers now occupy renovated houses that likely contributed to blight in their previous incarnations. It sounds like a win-win situation, but it hasn’t been without its challenges. “Seeing a substantial number of Muslims scared some folks in the neighborhood,” says Cason. “After all, it’s been a long time since Howard Park experienced this degree of change.”

Howard Park was booming in 1947, the year the Howard Park Civic Association was founded. In 1898, there were just three houses south of Liberty Road (Heights). But by the end of the Second World War, there were few building lots left as a steady stream of construction transformed Howard Park’s open space into a leafy suburb.

After developers pressed for rezoning that would allow higher density, residents banded together to form the civic association and successfully fought the change. The association also spearheaded efforts to build an athletic field for local children. When the field was completed in 1949, 4,000 residents attended the dedication, which featured a parade of cars, decorated bicycles, and a half-dozen marching bands. Over the next few years, the increasingly active membership sponsored softball and bowling leagues, an annual Spring Dance at the Dixie Ball Room, and “Howard Park Day” picnics at Gwynn Oak Park. By 1952, the group had 1,120 paid members—who were all white, like the neighborhood itself.

That changed in August 1959, when an African-American family bought a home in the 5500 block of Belleville Avenue. More blacks followed, prompting an exodus of whites. “Those who remained were sometimes reserved toward the newcomers because they had never known Negro neighbors, and had been exposed to rumors linking neighborhood deterioration to race,” wrote Henry Suter, in his 1971 history of Howard Park. “But when they found that most Negro householders began to improve their property almost as the moving van was driving off, the older residents slowly came to recognize the unimportance of color as between good neighbors.”

Despite Suter’s sunny outlook, whites abandoned Howard Park, and years later, its population was still hemorrhaging. Howard Park lost 20 percent of its population between 1980 and 2000 (outpacing a citywide decline of 17 percent over the same period), according to a Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies report. That number seemed to baffle the researchers, who took note of “Howard Park’s suburban characteristics,” “affordable single-family detached homes with yards,” and “low occurrence of crime.”

They also pointed out that families with children were the neighborhood’s most rapidly decreasing household type, dropping by a staggering 50 percent since 1980. “This trend is difficult to explain,” the researchers wrote, “as key indicators suggest this would be an excellent neighborhood for households with children.”

No one had to tell John Cason that. He knew Howard Park was an ideal spot for families with children. And he knew the neighborhood was in desperate need of such an infusion. “I saw Howard Park go down,” says Cason, “and I knew we had the ability to raise it up.”

The newcomers were initially met with suspicion and, in some isolated instances, religious bigotry or outright hostility. In one oft-told incident, a longtime resident supposedly said she’d prefer a crack house to having Muslims as next-door neighbors. Such sentiments and suspicions escalated after 9/11, especially after two sheiks—one from Sudan, the other from Morocco—moved into the area, and an Islamic Center was established on Gwynn Oak Avenue.

“Four or five years ago, there was a lot of suspicion,” says Eugenia. “You’re looking at people who dress differently. You’re looking at people that moved into the community in a very systematic manner. Most people operate out of a base of fear rather than a base of knowledge, and, of all the religions on the planet, people know the least about the Islamic religion. We have an innate fear of that which we do not know.”

As attendance increased at the Islamic Center’s daily prayer services, parking became a concern in the area. That issue, along with stalled renovations at the Center, strained the relationship between the Muslims and a few neighbors in the immediate vicinity. Some complained that worshippers occupied too much on-street parking, while others contended that the half-finished Center was an eyesore. [Apparently, both issues are being resolved—a parking lot will be built at the Center, and money is being raised to renovate the building in a more timely manner.]

But overall, the fears and suspicions receded, as the Muslims became active in the community at large. Far from insular, they are increasingly engaged, both politically and socially. Melvin Bilal even ran for City Council in 2004—as a Republican.

Eugenia estimates that, of the Howard Park Civic Association’s 350 paid members, 150 are Muslim. She also points out that Joshua Salaam is chairman of the association’s board of directors. “And it wasn’t the Islamic community that made the difference in voting him in,” she says. “It happened to be the senior citizens. They love him.”

“What we’re trying to create here is a positive, neighborly atmosphere,” says Salaam. “Being neighborly isn’t just Islam, it’s part of Christianity, too. But how many people actually practice those aspects of knowing your neighbor? We’re trying to bring that back. In Islam, it says that you shouldn’t eat if your neighbor is hungry. How would you know that unless you’re in contact with your neighbor? That’s why the community can come to us and say, ‘We need help with this problem.'”

When drug dealing proliferated at Liberty Heights and Gwynn Oak last year, hundreds of Muslims participated in a rally that successfully drove the dealers from the corner. And when drug trafficking surfaced around a convenience/liquor store near Rogers Avenue, and the owner could not address it, Cason’s Development Group purchased the building. “I told him to move,” says Cason, “because he was a detriment to the community.”

“The Muslims are a dream come true for the president of a community association,” says Eugenia. “If there’s anything I need with regards to this association, I can call and get it. From protesting on corners and attending meetings downtown to circulating petitions and organizing clean-up drives, I’m able to call on them and get the job done. I can depend on them.”

Back at the Development Group offices, cason pulls a copy of the qur’anic concordance off the bookshelf. It’s a handsome volume, with a deep blue cover and gold lettering. Cason put together this edition—an alphabetical index of every word in the Qur’an that also notes the placement of each word’s occurrence in the text—which was an enormous undertaking.

Cason says that while studying the holy book, he searched for an English language concordance to help with his studies. He couldn’t locate one and was told that all the published concordances were in Arabic. Thinking it would be a useful tool for Engish-speaking Muslims, he went ahead and made one himself. “People ask me, ‘What gave you the right to do it?'” he says. “‘You have an associate’s degree in engineering. This is something a Ph.D. should do.’ “What gave me the right to do it is that no one else did it. There was a need for it. It’s just like what we’re doing in Howard Park,” Cason continues. “No one else was doing it, and there was definitely a need for it. So we’re doing it.”

He pulls a binder off the bookshelf, a binder containing copies of his companies’ payroll checks. “We don’t pay people under the table,” he says, turning the pages and noting that half of his 30 employees are non-Muslim. “We are employing the people of Howard Park, and you don’t necessarily have to be Muslim to be part of what we’re doing. We’re looking for people who want to come here and build community. We’d like them to respect Muslim values—that’s all we’re asking.”

Cason points out that no government money is involved. “This is bootstrap,” he says. “This is not some program, and we do not take a single dollar from the government. We’re doing this on our own.”

“Why did I do it that way?” he asks, anticipating a question he’s obviously heard before.

He re-shelves the concordance, letting the question hang in the air. He returns to the table, smiling. “Because I need to be able to say to others, ‘Go do it in your community,'” he says. “I want to set an example and show African Americans how to do it, and I want to show Muslims how to do it.

“But that’s not all. I also want to show Baltimore City that it can be done.”