A new look and energy at East Baltimore’s Johnston Square
Johnston Square in East Baltimore has scored another victory. It may seem small, but it’s telling.
A three-story home that had been vacant for 40 years has found a buyer. The property, a rowhouse with marble steps, new baths and kitchen, stands at East Biddle near Forrest Street. The selling price was $325,000.
“We are now confident we’ll strike our asking prices,” said DeVonya Jones, a development manager with ReBuild Metro, the nonprofit leading the neighborhood’s revival.
Over the next 18 months, there’ll be more renovated homes to sell and rent along Chase, Mura and Preston streets and Homewood and Greenmount avenues. Many will be in the $200,000-range and are aimed at first-time buyers.
This 400 block of East Biddle Street was vacant except for two families who stayed with their homes.
This is an important year for Johnston Square. Additional Biddle Street homes are now under heavy construction and restoration.
The re-emergence of the neighborhood is being guided by those who live there and defend it.
“We are moving ahead one project at a time,” said Regina Hammond, executive director of the Rebuild Johnston Square Neighborhood Organization. “And on some days it’s two projects at a time.”
Hammond, a retired paralegal and activist who moved to Johnston Square many years ago (south of Green Mount Cemetery) did not like what was happening to her community. She resolved to change things.
One of her early victories was securing a grant to reconfigure and rename the old Ambrose Kennedy Park. The park, with its swimming pool, has been renamed for Henrietta Lacks, who died of cancer but whose cells were used for medical research, initially at the nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Later this year, construction of an affordable housing complex will commence at Biddle Street and Greenmount Avenue with a new Enoch Pratt Free Library branch on its first floor.
The neighborhood is seeing the transformation of another block of Biddle Street as housing dedicated to teachers who can rent quarters for $700 a month.
An old corner bar is being made into a teachers’ communal work center with a copier, whiteboards and other scholastic amenities.
Perhaps the most visible project planned this year is the start of construction for the 3.5-acre Greenmount Park, stretching from Chase to Biddle streets just east of the Jones Falls Expressway.
Nearby landmarks, visible from the recently sold home’s front windows, include the historically African-American St. Frances Academy, the Metropolitan Transition Center, formerly known as the Maryland Penitentiary, and in the distance, the downtown Baltimore skyline.
Johnston Square is a fairly large neighborhood that fans out on both sides of Greenmount Avenue along Biddle, Chase and Preston streets. Some know it as the old Tenth Ward where numerous 19th century Irish immigrants settled.
The neighborhood has its own bright yellow mural, commissioned by Charm City Meadworks, one of Johnston Square’s anchor small businesses.
It is a neighborhood of contrasts. Johnston Square hugs the eastern edge of the Jones Falls Valley and its expressway. If you cross a highway bridge, you are in Mount Vernon and steps from The Ivy, perhaps one of the most expensive boutique hotels in Baltimore. A little, but not much more distant, is the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and Prime Rib restaurant.
Hammond is working with ReBuild Metro, the nonprofit housing dynamo that for over 17 years has worked in a part of Baltimore that was being abandoned. Previously there was a concentration of vacant housing that looked like a poster of urban failure.
Beginning about 2006, ReBuild Metro began working on the Oliver neighborhood and tackled 200 vacant homes. ReBuild moved on to North Broadway, an area adjoining the Johns Hopkins Medical campus. Using state of Maryland funds, ReBuild also assisted numerous homeowners with repair issues.
ReBuild’s work has been deliberate, steady and without much fanfare, but, after 17 nonstop years, is transformative.