Olesker: Mayor Should Soothe Neighborhoods' Crime Anxiety

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake took to Baltimore's streets Tuesday evening, and not a moment too soon. She was out there as a symbol of toughness against crime, and she scheduled visits to Park Heights and Govans, Charles Village and Oliver, and Reservoir Hill and Morrell Park.

While she was at it, she should have gone to Guilford and Station North, where people are feeling a lot more on edge than usual these days and nights.

But then, in a city with such widespread crime problems, where does a mayor turn first?

Rawlings-Blake took part in the annual National Night Out Crime Prevention events, designed to “heighten public awareness of crime” all across the country.

As if anybody in Baltimore needed more awareness.

“These are our streets, and we need to work cooperatively with the police, our faith community, community leaders and residents,” the mayor said.

Maybe she could have offered some of that “cooperation” Tuesday evening to Station North and Guilford.

In Station North—that area bounded by Penn Station, North Avenue, Howard Street and Greenmount Avenue—a 22-year old man standing at a bus stop at North and Maryland avenues was shot twice in the back early last Friday morning.

That kind of violence isn’t anticipated in an area that’s been showing so much potential, and so many signs of life, after so many years of abandonment and decline.

Meanwhile, in Guilford, the community association sent notice to area residents listing a series of recent incidents: a burglary on Warrenton Road, an attempted break-in on Wendover Road, thefts from cars and garages on a couple of neighborhood streets.

That’s not supposed to happen in Guilford, the north Baltimore neighborhood that bills itself as “Baltimore’s premier residential community.”

“There is nothing to suggest that these are related incidents,” declared a Guilford Association email, “but the frequency of the occurrences in recent days in certainly alarming.”

We’re a city where people are accustomed to anxiety. We know there’s crime—is there any other story that leads the nightly coverage on the 11 o’clock news?—but we like to tell ourselves it’s always somebody else’s neighborhood, not ours.

And, in truth, much of the city’s crime is carried out in familiar neighborhoods, usually where there’s high drug traffic, high poverty and high desperation.

All of which makes the incidents in Guilford, and in Station North, so distracting.

Guilford has long been one of the city’s true neighborhood treasures. The lovely Sherwood Gardens is there. Homes that range from cottages to stately mansions are there, along graceful, tree-lined streets.

Whatever problems the city has suffered over the last half-century, Guilford has generally floated above most of them.

Station North is a different story. For a lot of years, there were big chunks of it where you didn’t want to venture after dark.

Over the past decade, though, there’s been some terrific rejuvenation. The Charles Theater sparked some of it, as well as the Everyman Theater, along with some of the nearby restaurants and bars where young people light up the night.

Up on North Avenue at Howard Street, for example, the old Pump Room restaurant is now the Joe Squared restaurant and bar, with some of the best pizza anywhere in the state.

There are nights when the place is bouncing with live music, and with crowds that seem equally composed of middle-age suburban types and students from the nearby University of Baltimore and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Those students have helped spread enormous new energy and hope to the Station North area.

And that made that shooting last week so shocking—and feel like such an aberration.

It might be nice if the mayor of Baltimore could take a few moments to remind everyone of this, particularly on a night when she made the rounds to talk about fighting crime in her anxious city.