Community center gives hope to neighborhood

Sep 11, 2007 3:00 AM (592 days ago) by Michael Olesker, The Examiner

Dayshawn Caldwell, 2, plays in the Child Development Room of the new Pimlico Arts and Community Center while his mother attends classes.

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Baltimoreans gaze toward the future when they go to the polls today, but they should also gaze inside a place such as the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Pimlico Road Arts and Community Center, just off lower Park Heights Avenue. Not long ago, this was a collection of scruffy vacant lots where the cops uncovered murder. Now, there are little children in immaculate, brightly lit rooms here, trying to cast off the neighborhood’s shameful past.

Its most recent past, anyway. Time was, this part of Northwest Baltimore was a mecca of middle-class living, where post-World War II Jews and civil rights-era blacks reached for the good life. Then, with the flood of drugs and the splintering of families and homes, came the familiar urban pathology of the past quarter-century.

But the new center’s a $3.5 million statement that better days are coming.

“It’s been more than four years in the making,” said Ellen Frost, who served as project developer for the Episcopal Housing Corp., one of the center’s prime movers, “which is enough to send any developer running.”

“But nobody ran,” said the Rev. Gregg Knepp, whose St. John’s Evangelical Church, across the street from the center, just off Pimlico Road and Cold Spring Lane, was another key supporter.

Knepp understands how hungry this neighborhood is for help. His church hosts 12 Narcotics Anonymous meetings each week. Many of these meetings, he says, are attended by more people than his Sunday worship services.

Then there’s the neighborhood violence.

“Right by those trees over there,” said Valerie Williams, the center’s director, pointing out a first-floor window. “Right after last Easter, they found that young man’s body. Stabbed to death, and his house burned down to try to cover the murder.”

“A gang initiation,” Knepp said.

By that time, the center was about to open its doors — though its grand opening won’t be held until Sept. 19. There’s a Head Start program here. There’s an after-school program, and a preschool program. There are services for expectant teenage parents. There are music and art programs. Several hundred families are expected to use the facilities.

“All,” Knepp said, “based on what community people told us was needed.”

And all of it started when the center’s founders went to Del. Howard (Pete) Rawlings, who pushed $750,000 in startup money through the state legislature before he died. Then came money from more than a dozen private foundations, some of whose members recalled when this neighborhood seemed the embodiment of the good life, and not a symbol of the city’s most self-destructive instincts.

“Like the thing with Rocky,” Knepp said. He means the young man killed in the gang stabbing. Rocky lived with two girls, 10 and 12, who were his cousins. When the center’s founders made their bid for state money, they brought the girls to Annapolis to formally speak to legislative committees.

The 10-year-old, Knepp said, said how much the center was needed. The 12-year-old told legislators, “Please hurry, or the center will be too late for me, it’ll be for my kids.”

“Imagine,” Knepp said, “a 12-year-old projecting the needs of her future children.”

“A lot of these children,” Williams said, “are accustomed to be shunted aside. When we opened the building, one little girl walked in and said, ‘This building doesn’t belong here, it belongs in the county.’ ”

“They think that’s where beautiful things are,” Knepp said.

“The little girl was smiling when she said it,” Williams said, “but the words are really heartbreaking.”

“It says if you’re poor, or you live in the city, or you’re black, you expect second-class,” Frost said. This place is first-class. Children have already begun decorating its walls with hand-printed signs:

“I Wish the Killing Would Stop.”

“I Wish There Was Less Poor People.”

“I Wish the Drugs Would Stop.”

“In my congregation,” Knepp said, “drugs have affected every single family.”

It’s more than that. The Park Heights Family Support Center, which meets with teenage parents, occupies one section of the center, where administrator Linda Harvey said: “We’re seeing girls as young as 16. We’re not allowed to take them any younger, though we’ve had girls as young as 12 call us. We want to teach them how to raise their babies. We want to tell them not to give their babies, or themselves, corn curls and coke for breakfast. They don’t know how to parent. They haven’t been parented themselves.”

At the new center, some surrogate parenting awaits them.