Help us find Annie
Woodlawn's usual gang of bigots uprising again
More than 43 years after the historic desegregation of the Gwynn Oak amusement park, bigotry remains alive and well in Woodlawn, Maryland.
The Gwynn Oak Park had been built in the 1890s as a "trolley park," a destination at the end of one of the city's trolley lines that would provide an excuse to run the cars on weekends. In addition to a wooden roller coaster and other rides, there was the Dixie Ballroom, a venue for concerts and dancing. This being the Jim Crow era, black people were excluded altogether from admission to the park. The owners had failed to see any economic advantage, and thus had not even gone the extent of providing the separate-but-equal sort of facilities to be found in some of the city parks, such as Druid Hill Park.
On July 4, 1963 the situation reached a tipping point, and a large group of demonstrators marched from the city to the amusement park, demanding the right to spend their money there. Several people were arrested, and the event is said to have been the first time that white clergymen participated in a desegregation action. Chester Wickwire, the chaplain of Johns Hopkins University, was one of the arrestees.
The park owners grudgingly admitted black customers, and the results were predictable. A rowdy element among both races provoked a few fights, and the owners apparently decided it was no longer worth keeping up the place. The condition of the park and its rides deteriorated, until Hurricane Agnes dealt it the final blow.
Fast forward to around 1987, the year I left my 9-to-5 job to become a real estate salesman. Having lived in Woodlawn for twelve years, I decided it should be my home turf as a salesman. It was not until then that I discovered bigotry still alive and well. One popular watering hole was not formally segregated, but there seemed to be an understanding that blacks were welcome to order carry-out food through the liquor store up front, but far less welcome to spend their money in the bar/dining room. Just around the corner, a block away, I found myself trapped in a conversation in which a local lawyer and a local real estate appraiser were casually discussing how they might "keep the niggers from taking over Woodlawn." It seemed to me that particular ship had already sailed, not to mention that what they were about to discuss would have been a federal crime, so I made an excuse to leave.
Now it's twenty years farther along still, and the bigots are still out in force. Ironically, it appears that the old-time white bigots have joined forces with some black ones.
The Baltimore Sun reported the story thus: [commentary added in brackets]
School's dorm proposal has neighbors worried
It would be too much like group home, some say
"We don't know where these kids are coming from," said Van Ross, president of the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association. "We don't know if they are troubled young people or what. How would you like a dormitory or a group home next to your house?"
[comment: This property is located on the corner of Gwynn Oak Avenue and Dogwood Road. The property immediately abutting the proposed school is a large tract of land that has been home to a commercial diving operation, and used for the storage of heavy equipment. The owner of the diving service DID live there, until his recent death. Across the street is Hertsch's Tavern, where you can easily observe rowdy behavior in the parking lot, in addition to a number of illegally posted beer and liquor signs on the fence. Across Dogwood road are a pair of two-story office buildings, perpetually under-utilized because they were built in a flood plain, and periodically flooded.]
A zoning hearing on the religious school's plans, originally scheduled for Monday, has been postponed, in response to a request by County Councilman Kenneth N. Oliver and community leaders, who have expressed concerns about the proposal and said they want to learn more about it.
The school, Darul Uloom Maryland, is seeking approval from Baltimore County to build a dormitory for 15 to 20 students.
[The school also happens to operate a web page, which explains quite adequately its mission. My impression is that it will be the Islamic equivalent of a Rabbinical school.]
***
Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr., a Baltimore County Democrat who organized a meeting with residents this week about the boarding school, said, "We don't want to appear that we are anti-Islamic. But we don't want any more group homes in our district."
As of last year, about two-thirds of the approximately 500 group homes in Maryland were in Baltimore County. Most are in Randallstown, Woodlawn and elsewhere in the northwestern part of the county.
[Now, nobody knows precisely how many group homes exist in the state, much less where they are located, because no single government entity regulates them. Burns, a political veteran who knows which side his bread is buttered on, knows he'd better make some kind of obesiance to Islamic people, since there are any number of Nation-of-Islam "mosques" in the Baltimore City portion of his district.]
In letters to county officials, neighbors of the boarding school said they are also concerned about businesses being allowed to open in residential areas and about possible disruptions of what they describe as a quiet, peaceful area.
"Please," one resident wrote to county officials, "don't disturb a good thing."
[This "good thing" that the anonymous letter-writer mentions includes the high school with the absolutely worst academic performance in the county, a middle school that is in the bottom 1/3 of the heap, and a community with the county's worst crime rate. As for "businesses"opening in the immediate area, there are two auto repair shops within a block of Darul Uoom, both of which maintain junkyard conditions, in violation of county law. the high school has a football "stadium" that draws, on game days, dozens of illegally parked vehicles, and whose P.A. system can be clearly heard more than a mile away. The neighborhood is dotted with day care centers, including one that for at least five years has touted itself as providing "Christain [sic] Day Care," and the enterprises that cause the worst traffic congestion are churches of the penetcostal flavor. In the so-called business park whose buildings are scattered throughout the area inside the Beltway along Security Boulevard, the worst problem is the number of medium-to-large office buildings that have remained vacant for at least a decade.]
The neighborhood's good-news rag, a monthly calling itself The Woodlawn Villager, reports the story a little differently. The rationale this paper cites is that:
...the members of the communities surrounding the proposed school noted that the additional traffic on the narrow streets would cause safety concerns for their children.
[Unfortunately, this is more than a little disingenuous. People traveling to and from the school will use Security Boulevard (a major local highway), the widest portion of Gwynn Oak Avenue (most of which is one-way), and Dogwood and Windsor Mill Roads, two other minor traffic arteries in the area. The only reason for school staff or parents to drive on the "narrow streets" would be if they lived there! Moreover, none of these concerned citizens have stepped forward to complain about the traffic and illegal parking created by the Redemption Christian Fellowship, a block away on Dogwood Road, or the New Rehoboth Baptist Church, another large congregation two blocks away on Windsor Mill Road.]
The contention that "group homes" is insupportable, at least in terms of any hard evidence. When the community meeting was announced, I queried Captain Barry Barber, commander of the local police precinct, about trouble and group homes. Here's our exchange of emails:
Captain Barber:Does the BCPD keep track of the number of calls to so-called group homes?***Stan,
... We don't arbitrarily track statistics at all group homes in the Precinct. When we start to notice an increase in calls for service, especially criminal calls, at a particular group home location, we then begin to track all calls there.
At the same time we start to target the location with increased enforcement. At the same time we contact the home administrator in a effort to relocate some of the problem residents and/or to close the facility all together.
For all other homes, if given an address, we can pull up calls for service over a given period. We will not do this unless specifically asked to do so.
[This is a convenient policy on the part of the County. If they don't track the calls to group homes, the county government will have no "bad news" to report. Considering that the last three council members elected in this district have made a lot of political hay about the so-called proliferation of group homes, you'd think someone would have asked the police to compile statistics, wouldn't you? Rather than calling upon Burns and Oliver to intervene in this particular case, the "concerned citizens" should be taking them to task for allowing this don't ask/don't tell policy to stand.]
[Captain Barber continues] As for the location on Dogwood Road, it is not a group home. The proposal is for this to be a dormitory for an Islamic School. There are no known problems connected to the school and there is no reason to believe that its presence would cause a problem within the community.
My sense of the group home situation in general is that it has been blown out of proportion. You see a few mentally handicapped people on the streets, and of course they are the most high-functioning members of that little sub-group. I have never known one of the folks I see regularly to misbehave in any way. We also see groups of people from these homes escorted here and there--for example you'll find them eating at Old Country Buffet, or taking a trip to the bank. Again, no problem. [The same can't be said of the local high school students, who can regularly be heard swearing at each other and us homeowners on their way to and from school. One afternoon as I was letting my dog out, some high schooler accosted me from forty yards away, yelling "What the fuck are you lookin'at, cracker?" As far as I could see, he was not mentally handicapped or a Muslim. And I'm sure it was not a Muslim or a "mental case" who scrawled "Black is Back" on the side of my car, or who made any of the three attempted thefts of my vehicles.]
What bothers me the most about the attitude towards the group homes is that it's so unrealistic. People don't want this kind of housing in their neighborhood, but they also want the Rosewood School closed, and the same for Spring Grove. Unless someone decides to propose shipping these people out of state or euthanizing them, they have to live somewhere.
The "group home" category also includes housing for people with devastating physical problems, as well as mental ones. On Carlynn Avenue, there's one poor fellow whom I've seen now and again being dropped off at the house or at Kernan's, who is completely paralyzed, apparently with cerebral palsy, and horribly atrophied. [The man is literally a "basket case."] Again, since we do not euthanize people in this country (thank God!) the choices of housing for someone so helpless boil down to either a so-called group home, which might at least look and smell like a genuine home, or [permanent] hospitalization.
Furthermore, the houses that become group homes are often functionally and economically obsolete. The former Bauhof residence, where Darul Uloom has located itself, is a prime example of this. When the Bauhof family sold it to Mr. Cignatta (who owned it until recently), the place had between six and nine bedrooms, and only one bathroom. When you have a property of that sort, there are only a few alternatives, and re-adapting it for a commercial or educational enterprise is one of the best. Others get cut up into apartments, often in violation of the zoning regulations, and still others end up vacant and boarded. Those houses don't do anything for the neighborhood.
I'm impressed by the fact that Darul Uloom has--at least thus far--not applied for tax-exempt status. As you know, many "church" operated properties get themselves a tidy little exemption, removing a valuable property from the county tax base. (One example is the Set the Captives Free center. That property is worth at least two million, and we don't see a dime in property taxes from them. Another is the New Rehoboth church, which I believe sold
for more than half a million dollars.)