Here we are, on the weedy old lots once occupied by long-gone Baltimoreans of the long-gone city, the Baltimore of the previous millennium that smelled “like a billion polecats” in summer (H.L. Mencken’s description) and teemed with more than 900,000 inhabitants, many of them crowded into row houses.
Here we are in the Oliver area of East Baltimore, a short walk from leafy Green Mount Cemetery, where many long-gone Baltimoreans are buried. Here, in the urban prairie lands where houses once stood, the sun is high and bright, the weeds freshly cut, a tent firmly anchored, and people with faith in Baltimore have assembled for a revival.
In spaces long abandoned during decades of population loss, new houses will be built — 13 of them on either side of a street not much wider than an alley. The ghosts of the old neighborhood will smile on this. Holbrook Street, once occupied, then not, will see families again.
