After dark on Greenmount Avenue, around 8, a few addicts, their gaits jumpy, scour Mund Park – “the square,” as people there call it – looking for a fix.<\/p>\n
The dealers are there, too. Eye contact. The head nod. And they walk away from the courts where groups of young men play basketball – just far enough to avoid the view of the police camera affixed to a nearby pole, its blue light flashing.<\/p>\n
It’s a scene not too different, if more muted, than in years past, when police swarmed this grim thoroughfare, says Marlowe Bellamy, 58, who knows well the Barclay and Midway neighborhoods that make up this pocket of East Baltimore.<\/p>\n
As city leaders embark on yet another plan to attack relentless crime in struggling neighborhoods, this area – once a focus of Baltimore law enforcement efforts – stands as a lesson in unmet promises and the difficulty of achieving a permanent turnaround. While residents talk of improvements and the future, violent crime is on the rise. Already, robberies, assaults, larcenies and burglaries are close to surpassing last year’s totals or have exceeded them in Barclay.<\/p>\n
“You take away the problem of crime by coming and arresting everybody, but the problems don’t go away,” says Henry H. Brownstein, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Chicago and former professor at the University of Baltimore. “What do people do for jobs? For housing? For food? It doesn’t help to just shut it down temporarily. There needs to be a comprehensive solution.”<\/p>\n
Years ago, Bellamy owned a small market across from the square, near East 23rd Street. Though the store is long closed, a sign advertises “fresh baked bread” for 69 cents. Bellamy used heroin, he says. And he sold it, too. The square used to be the spot for a “cop and blow,” he says, a fast deal.<\/p>\n
That was before “the raid,” as it is still called by the folks that live along this five-block stretch of Greenmount from North Avenue to East 25th Street, the 1994 bust dubbed Operation Midway, then considered by police as one of the most daring, in-your-face operations in the city.<\/p>\n
‘The raid’ and after<\/p>\n
Thomas C. Frazier, then the city’s police commissioner, hailed the sweep as a defining moment, proclaiming: “We took the worst, most dangerous, most violent area of town and went in and, in fairly short order, cleaned it up, took it back and held it.”<\/p>\n
Thirteen years later – after two mayoral administrations and three police chiefs – Mayor Sheila Dixon and her commissioner, Leonard D. Hamm, are again trying to eradicate rampant drug dealing and violent crime. This time, the city is targeting sections of Park Heights in Northwest Baltimore and McElderry Park in East Baltimore.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Greenmount Avenue, once the city’s highest-priority hot spot, where police had plucked more than 60 dealers in a public show of force – remains a troubled and depressed place.<\/p>\n
“They made a clean sweep,” says Bellamy, a slight man who tops his silk shirts and slacks with a straw hat and is known by nearly everyone in the area.<\/p>\n
This stretch of Greenmount Avenue is plagued by an abundance of empty storefronts, liquor stores and abandoned rowhouses. He says police made a serious dent in drug dealing back then, but it never completely went away, probably never will.<\/p>\n
In interviews during two days last week along Greenmount, residents, community leaders and police say the days of a vast open-air drug market that ravaged the neighborhood in the 1980s and early ’90s, when the area was at its worst, are long gone.<\/p>\n
But what has hampered this community for so long – high unemployment, boarded-up houses, killings, drugs – has never really left.<\/p>\n
So far this year, Barclay has logged three homicides, compared with four all last year. Last year, five people were killed in East Baltimore-Midway, two within blocks of Greenmount. This year, the neighborhood has not had any homicides, police statistics show.<\/p>\n
Struggling on<\/p>\n
But residents are still in need, holding on to hope, still waiting for promises made in 1994 to be fulfilled.<\/p>\n
A line of women and men snakes from the R.E.A.C.H. Mobile Health Services trailer, in a lot across from Freewill Baptist Church in the 400 block of E. 23rd St. On weekdays the trailer is there from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.<\/p>\n
Recovering addicts come for methadone. Mobile drug treatment facilities have operated there since about 1991, says Carol Butler, the director of service programs at R.E.A.C.H., which treats 480 people at the site, about half of whom live nearby.<\/p>\n
“What the workers tell me, when we are there, the dealers stay out of the area, but as soon as we leave, they come out of the woodwork,” Butler says. “It’s terrible that you have someone who wants to receive treatment, then has to wade through drug dealers. I think it’s pretty bad in the neighborhood when we’re not there.”<\/p>\n
Baltimore police officer Adrian Amos, assigned as a neighborhood services liaison to the area, says he’s worked there for the past 10 years and thinks the streets have gotten cleaner and drug dealing has abated.<\/p>\n
“It’s nowhere near what it used to be,” Amos says. But what’s changed, he adds, is that the street hustlers have gotten younger. The older players in the drug trade are dead or in jail and the people taking their places on the corners and in the alleys are getting younger and younger.<\/p>\n
In February, a 17-year-old boy was gunned down in Barclay in a killing that police say might have been gang-related. In September, two young men were killed at East 22nd Street and Guilford Avenue because one was a Bloods gang member who wouldn’t leave turf claimed by the rival Young Gorilla Family.<\/p>\n
Marcus Preston, standing at Greenmount and 21st Street, says he dabbled in a gang, but he won’t talk about it. The 23-year- old, a month out of jail, with “the box” – an electronic monitoring device – around his ankle, served a one-year sentence for selling drugs in the neighborhood. Dope, coke, weed. He’d sold, he says, since he was 14.<\/p>\n
“It’s not hard,” Preston says. “I could get back in it right now. I wasn’t no petty hustler. I had people hustling for me.”<\/p>\n
But he doesn’t want to go back to jail. He’s filled out job applications at Safeway and to be a window cleaner in Baltimore County.<\/p>\n
“I’m trying to do the right thing,” Preston says. “I’m not going to hustle again.”<\/p>\n
In some blocks off Greenmount, homes with windows and doors boarded up with sheets of wood outnumber those with residents. Behind many of the houses are dumping grounds.<\/p>\n
People’s Homesteading Group Inc. is working to refurbish boarded-up rowhouses – about 20 in the 400 block of E. 22nd St. alone, says Grace Willis, one of the group’s board members who has lived in the neighborhood since she was young.<\/p>\n
“We have a lot of seniors here like myself who really don’t want to go anyplace else,” says Willis, 70, as she stands by her home, adjacent to a garden she tends, which has flourished with lavender bushes, red and yellow tulips and a Japanese maple.<\/p>\n
“We have a lot of people here who are so concerned. I don’t do a lot of walking in the neighborhood anymore because I don’t feel comfortable walking. … I don’t know the people. There’s a lot of transients. … I just look at these young people that aren’t working and I think, ‘Who’s supporting them?'”<\/p>\n
‘A sense of identity’<\/p>\n
Another force for change, which is growing in popularity, is the Greenmount Recreation Center, across from Mund Park. Boys and young men play basketball. There’s a television with cable, where the kids gather to watch music videos; a computer lab; and a weight room.<\/p>\n
One night a week, the center opens its doors for a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Another night, a 100-member marching band uses the space for practice.<\/p>\n
Terri Fulp, 45, the center’s director, says that when she took over two years ago, attendance was low.<\/p>\n
“When I first came here, we didn’t have a lot of kids participating, but it’s getting busier,” Fulp says. “They’re coming.”<\/p>\n
Occasionally, Fulp says, she hears them speak about the shootings and the homicides.<\/p>\n
The Rev. Andre Humphrey, 50, who runs Reaching the Unreachable Outreach Ministries, says he thinks the neighborhood has shown signs of possibility. But he worries that gangs are attracting younger recruits – a phenomenon that he says was not a big issue five or 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
“All this [stems] from kids needing a sense of identity, to belong, territory,” he says. “If we had more stable programs and churches that received these kids off the streets, the problem would minimize.”<\/p>\n
He says he’s frequently asked by young people, including members of gangs, if he could help them find jobs. But Humphrey acknowledges that it’s a tough endeavor. “I can’t promise if I can’t deliver,” he says.<\/p>\n
Before the raid in 1994, there were shootings almost every day. Ten shots at a time. The shots used to rouse Leroy Hawkins, now 63, from his sleep, he says, when he lived in an apartment above Hawk’s, the combination bail bonds and liquor store he still owns on Greenmount Avenue.<\/p>\n
Hawkins’ son, just a young boy on his bike in 1993, was one of 12 wounded in a shooting after a dice game in the 500 block of E. 21st St. – an incident that attracted national television coverage of the city’s desperate crime problem.<\/p>\n
The scene along Greenmount was abysmal: dealers on every corner; crack and heroin for sale; hordes of addicts; a rising murder rate; blocks of abandoned rowhouses.<\/p>\n
The culmination of a six-week undercover investigation brought more than 100 police to the neighborhood on a March afternoon. Police raided 14 houses and arrested more than 60 people on drug and weapons charges. Yellow school buses lined Greenmount Avenue to haul away suspects. People tossed guns and drugs from rowhouse windows.<\/p>\n
Schmoke and Frazier hailed the effort as a groundbreaking enterprise in one of the city’s most crime-ravaged neighborhoods. Five years later, while city officials still dubbed the operation a grand success, citing a decline in shootings and drug sales, some residents complained that many of the neighborhood’s ills had returned: high unemployment, lack of housing, drug addiction.<\/p>\n
“It brought some temporary relief to the community, but the biggest problem was, we kind of took down foot soldiers in the war on drugs,” Schmoke said in an interview Friday. “But because it’s so profitable, those guys get replaced after a while with younger people. For the short run, the community felt really tremendous relief.”<\/p>\n
Barry West, 46, hung out on Greenmount from 1987 to 1993. He sold dope and used it, too. While he made about $100 a day, his drug habit cost $300. He was in jail in Western Maryland during the raid.<\/p>\n
After that, things were never the same, he says. He gave himself to God.<\/p>\n
“I was up in Hagerstown when they had the raid,” says West, who now works as a cook at the Quality Food Shop, in the 2400 block of Greenmount. “A couple of my friends got caught up in it. Where are they now? Some of ’em locked up. Some of ’em dead. Some of ’em doing good. It stopped a lot of hustling.”<\/p>\n
nicole.fuller@baltsun.com gus.sentementes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After dark on Greenmount Avenue, around 8, a few addicts, their gaits jumpy, scour Mund Park – “the square,” as people there call it – looking for a fix. The dealers are there, too. Eye contact. The head nod. And they walk away from the courts where groups of young men play basketball – just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9999,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"subheadline":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"feature":[],"location":[],"type-of-work":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5124272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"post_status":"","edit_last":0,"edit_lock":0,"highlights":"","original_byline":"","original_canonical":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/news\/bs-xpm-2007-05-10-0705100070-story.html","original_category":"\/news","original_email":"","original_id":0,"original_pubdate":"5\/10\/2007 4:00:00 AM","original_source":"","primary_section":"","primary_tag":0,"print_workflow_body":"","print_workflow_exported_ts":"","print_workflow_exported_username":"","print_workflow_shapes":"","print_workflow_side":"","really_short_title":"","short_title":"","syndication_source":"","market_neutral_title":"","social_title":"","dfm_hub_post_id":0,"paywall_level":"premium","featured_media_content":{},"attachments":[],"authors":[],"taxonomies":{"category":[{"term_id":85,"name":"News","slug":"news","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":85,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":8,"filter":"raw"}]},"featured_media_array":[],"syndication_canonical":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2007\/05\/10\/turnaround-elusive-for-gritty-greenmount-2\/","apple_news_notices":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/baltimoresun.com\/2007\/05\/10\/turnaround-elusive-for-gritty-greenmount-2\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Turnaround elusive for gritty Greenmount","url":"http:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2007\/05\/10\/turnaround-elusive-for-gritty-greenmount-2\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2007\/05\/10\/turnaround-elusive-for-gritty-greenmount-2\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":""},"articleSection":"Other","author":[],"creator":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Baltimore Sun","logo":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/baltimore-sun-fallback.png?w=600"},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2007-05-10T00:00:00Z","datePublished":"2007-05-10T00:00:00Z","dateModified":"2021-09-30T07:03:04Z"},"rendered":"