Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2007-07-12 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

When they talk about neighborhoods in full catastrophe in the city of Baltimore, they can start with this one: North Patterson Park Avenue, bisecting Madison, Eager, Biddle and Hoffman, one after another.

Here, you find the vagrant kids running the streets day and night, the rows of decayed row houses and the police who don’t know where to turn first.

The best part of the day: Somebody’s opened a fire hydrant on the 900 block of Patterson Park Avenue, and children are frolicking in the spray while traffic goes past.

The hydrant’s just below the Primo Grocery Store, now shut down, and the Eastside Deli, now shut down, and it’s not far from three city recreation centers, also shut down. Half a block away, also, is Cheta’s Place, a liquor establishment. This is not shut down.

A block north of Cheta’s, you find a fellow riding in traffic in a motorized wheelchair adorned with two American flags. His legs don’t work due to a gunshot around the spinal column.

Also, Joe the Box Man, who has a full-time business here on the sidewalk fixing damaged furniture.

And the following individuals: Al “Slick Al” Wyche, 42; Aleathea Wilkerson, 35; Romaine Gee, 43; and Al “Big Al” Rich, not to be confused with Slick Al. Big Al’s feeling pretty happy these days, considering he’s been out of work for a month.

“That’s how long I been back on the street,” he says.

“Why were you inside?”

“Distribution, like everybody else,” he says. He wears a black stocking cap and has some gold teeth. “Doing what we have to do with no job.”

The four of them have the same story, told for so many years in such neighborhoods that it becomes a kind of generational legacy: You can’t get ahead, so you break the law here and there for extra cash. You get caught enough times that some judge with a real sense of revulsion finally sends you away. You come back out, and nobody wants to hire you with your history. And so you slip back to the only people who will have you.

And the frustration grows, and the anger, and we wind up with neighborhoods full of desperate, dead-end people who look at the contents of their lives and their miserable surroundings, and they will do what they have to do to survive.

And such pathology creates the endless, endless anxiety that washes across an entire metro area beyond these disheveled neighborhoods.

So we have Aleathea Wilkerson, who stands here in a sleeveless undershirt, mopping her face in the sweltering afternoon heat. She points to the abandoned row houses all around her, with the busted windows and boarded-up doors.

“Did they forget all about East Baltimore?” she cries. Against the rumble of traffic passing by, her voice has the urgency of a siren. “Don’t anybody know what’s going on out here? Ain’t nobody at City Hall paying attention? Look over there. That house and that house.” Disasters, every one.

“They buy up these abandoned properties,” Slick Al Wyche says, “and they sit on them, waiting for the right time when they can make big money on them.”

“Yeah,” says Wilkerson, voice still urgent, “but in the meantime, we got these teenagers going in there and getting high every night.”

“And they’re out here during the day,” Romaine Gee says, “with nothing to do.” She wears a T-shirt with words not precisely suitable for your daily newspaper. “So they’re hanging out on the corner, and they’re throwing rocks for fun. Or getting into them gangs. Those gangs ain’t no good. But they get in them for one reason: They want to be part of something. They ain’t part of anything at home. But they think they’re getting something from the gang.”

“They want to be loved,” Wyche says. “Most of ‘em got no parents. Those that got one, they take their anger out on them. But the family got their own frustrations.”

So the cycle commences right here.

With kids walking out of dysfunctional home lives into dysfunctional schools, and getting turned away from closed recreation centers. With adults, having run up prison time, emerging to discover they can’t find jobs.

“Times are desperate,” Wyche says. “I’ll do anything.”

He means legally. He says he’s done custodial work, which he now regards as a plum.

“Custodial work, prep cook, mechanic, you name it,” Big Al Rich says. “I’ll do it.”

The women nod assent. They’ll do anything. The whole world in this neighborhood’s in full collapse, and there’s got to be a stop to such existence.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com