Some people talk of whistling past the graveyard and mean it figuratively. Not Tony Fernandez. The other day, he walks among the headstones outside St. John’s Church, Greenmount Avenue and 30th Street in Waverly, and by the time he reaches the sanctity of the church basement and runs into Gail Kreusinger, the two of them are recalling ghosts and goblins and haunted, happy moments from half a century ago.
“As a kid,” says Fernandez, who grew up and still lives in the neighborhood, “I’d walk past this graveyard every day on the way to school. But I’d always cross over to the other side of the street, so the ghosts couldn’t get me. That’s how scary it was. Remember?”
“Oh, do I remember,” says Kreusinger, another Waverly lifer. “Remember the Halloweens we used to have here on Greenmount Avenue? Three nights of trick-or-treating. And the tricks! We’d go to people’s porches and unscrew their light bulbs. Not break ‘em. Just un-screw ‘em, so the people thought the bulbs had burned out.”
“Well, we got a little worse than that,” says Fernandez. “I mean, I remember cutting a few clothes lines, too.”
“Yeah,” says Kreusinger, “we were bad kids, weren’t we?”
The two of them laugh at the very thought. Waverly was terrific back then, and parts of it still are. There are still the charming remnants of former estates and summer cottages, still shady residential streets and Victorian homes with sun porches, still some bustling businesses.
And parts, also, teetering so precariously between charm and shabbiness that here they were, in the basement at St. John’s Church the other day, half a dozen concerned area residents meeting with Eddie Leon and Johns W. Hopkins to figure out how to hold onto the good stuff and revitalize the troubled.
Leon’s a city planner with the Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, and Hopkins is executive director of the preservation group Baltimore Heritage.
Their immediate concern is that commercial stretch of Waverly from 28th Street up to 35th, and all the side streets off Greenmount Avenue stretching toward Charles Village on one side and the vanished old Memorial Stadium on the other.
“Demolition by neglect,” Leon called it. He meant deteriorated homes and businesses in the area. He mentioned “vacant landlords.”
Then Laura Kindseth, Waverly Main Street Manager of the Greater Homewood Community Corporation, mentioned the old Boulevard and Waverly movie houses, long shut down. A couple of nice old book stores are gone, and a great old newsstand. In too many spots, there’s been a long slide across the years. This initial meeting at the church is a beginning attempt to turn things around.
The next step, everyone agreed, is to alert other neighbors and get them in on the action.
There’s a lot of really good stuff to build on in this neighborhood, including Union Memorial Hospital, the Enoch Pratt library branch at 33rd Street, schools and churches and lovely residential blocks. There’s the Waverly Crossroads Giant that opened a few years ago on 33rd Street, after years when the area lacked a big-name grocery store.
The old Memorial Stadium’s gone, but it’s been replaced by Stadium Place’s affordable housing for seniors and the first new YMCA built in the city in more than 60 years, along with a playground and open green space. The old Eastern High School’s gone, but the old building now houses offices of Johns Hopkins University, whose main campus is nearby.
“There are beautiful buildings,” says Kindseth, “but they’ve got to be preserved. We’re seeing too much peeling paint and rotting windows and absent landlords. What we want to do is create a historic awareness.”
She’s not talking about a vague general awareness, but designation of the area as a National Register historic district. Such a designation would mean government preservation dollars and tax credits. It would mean sprucing up shabby buildings.
“Restored structures,” said Leon, “tend to uplift surrounding communities and stabilize property values.” He mentions other communities around the metro area where such a designation has had a rejuvenating effect: Homewood and Hampden, Dickeyville and Bolton Hill and Charles Village.
They’ve all got their charms. So does Waverly. But you walk outside St. John’s Church, and there’s the graveyard Tony Fernandez once found so haunting. He walks among the gravestones now, years from his childhood when Waverly was jumping. He looks past the little cemetery to Greenmount Avenue. Nobody wants the haunting to go any further.
