‘If we could just stop the homicides’

A couple of months ago, I was in the back of Joe Hooe’s tire shop on Hanover Street, on Baltimore’s south side, because he wanted to show me exactly what he had done to Beulah, my car.

Nice guy, this Joe. After explaining how he had balanced Beulah’s tires, he offered me beef tenderloin on a bun.

He had just grilled some in the lot behind the garage. How do you like that for customer service?

So I was standing there, chewing the tenderloin, when I looked to the west to see a great wall of new construction, a large building a block away, at Race and Cross streets, a thing that wasn’t there the last time I was in the neighborhood.

You know what I said? I said: “What the hell is that?”

And if you move around Baltimore enough, you frequently have that reaction.

Turns out, it was a big apartment building, part of a development called Stadium Square, which, when complete, will total seven buildings taking up three city blocks, with 300,000 square feet of office space, and 80,000 square feet of retail and 650 apartments.

It’s in a semi-residential, semi-commercial, post-industrial, hard-by-the-highway corner of Baltimore, near Sharp-Leadenhall and Federal Hill.

One building is finished already, a six-story office of 72,000 square feet at 145 W. Ostend. The developer, Caves Valley Partners, invited me to have a look, so I did.

Arsh Mirmiran and Steve Sibel, two of the partners, took me to the top floor to check out the view.

Looking north and east, we got a panorama of the south side of the city, the flat roofs of hundreds of rowhouses, garages and warehouses, and, in the distance, the city skyline and a construction crane that appeared to be touching the clouds over the Inner Harbor.

It was late morning of a weekday, and through the large glass windows the city looked big, busy and bright.

I could see construction workers on the new skyscraper at 414 Light Street. I could see people walking and running, people on bikes, people with dogs, and the usual stop-and-go of cars and trucks. Below me, black-eyed Susans had blossomed in front of a rowhouse.

To the north, beyond the old Durapak building and the Ostend Street post office, men in hardhats were at work on the exterior of Hanover Cross Street Apartments, the building I had seen from the back of Joe Hooe’s tire shop. To the west were the Interstate 395 ramps, the Sharp-Leadenhall Elementary School and M&T Bank Stadium.

From this new, cool office building Baltimore appeared to be bursting at the seams.

Mirmiran was just a few feet away, and in his hands were artist renderings for Stadium Square. He spoke about the development with the breathless enthusiasm of a man in a hurry to change the world, or at least three blocks of a city.

And it’s an infectious condition. You see what Mirmiran and Caves Valley have planned for the area, hear him talk about working with a Sharp-Leadenhall pastor and community leaders to connect the project to them — with a new rec center or community center — and you start to lapse into optimism for the city of Baltimore.

And it was just then, noting all the construction and activity within view, that I turned to Mirmiran and Sibel, and this is what I said: “If we could just stop the homicides.”

I was not trying to dampen Mirmiran’s or Sibel’s enthusiasm. (That didn’t seem possible, anyway.)

I was merely expressing what hits me these days when I see new construction in Baltimore and developers with rendered dreams in their hands.

It’s almost surreal — lots of new investment while the city struggles with a depressing pace of shootings and killings, drug addiction and overdoses.

But the reuse of old buildings or the construction of new ones says people with access to capital still believe in Baltimore, that they see population growth and stabilized conditions, less dysfunction, and eventually a critical mass of good neutralizing the bad.

“If we could just stop the homicides” is a wish, uttered in utter frustration, that the Baltimore that was left behind could catch up to the Baltimore that keeps moving forward. “If we could just stop the homicides,” we would have a more peaceful, healthier city.

I want to see a day when fewer of our young are so alienated from the mainstream, so focused on drugs and guns, that they feel nothing for their hometown, care nothing about apartments and office buildings with great views, convinced they could never live in the former or have a job in the latter.

Mirmiran wants to see local people hired, and their children tutored in technology by the companies he hopes to have as tenants. He seemed earnest about that, as we stood on the sixth floor, looking out on the once and future Baltimore.

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