Catonsville residents and historians are desperately fighting a prominent county business? attempts to replace a historical wood-frame farm house with a parking lot.
Sitting before the county?s highest appellate board Wednesday, community activists struggled to understand the complex zoning debate between their attorney and that of Erickson Retirement Community. Erickson plans to raze the 1885-era Frederick House on its Charlestown campus inCatonsville to make room for a parking lot. That must be stopped, the activists said.
“It?s wrong to just tear down that building,” Kensington resident Edith Robinson said. “We?ve been neighbors to Charlestown a long time. That flies in the face of a lot of feelings.”
The community says members of the county?s Landmark Preservation Commission neglected to hold an advertised public hearing before they approved the demolition. Erickson also wants to double the size of another historic building ? known as the carriage house ?to accommodate office space.
Instead, the commission discussed and voted on the proposal informally at a regularly scheduled monthly meeting, residents? attorney Peter Max Zimmerman said.
“There wasn?t real public notice of that process, there was no realistic opportunity in advance to evaluate what was being proposed,” Zimmerman said. “There was nothing really to appeal.”
But the Erickson attorney and former county Zoning Commissioner Lawrence Schmidt said both the county?s Planning Board and zoning commissioner approved the plans subject to the Landmark Commission?s consent. The commission ? which is tasked with adding structures and buildings to the protected historical inventory ? could have requested a special public hearing, but deemed it unnecessary.
Erickson officials at the hearing declined to comment.
The two buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the state?s historic inventory, Catonsville historians said. Members of the Board of Appeals will deliberate publicly at an undetermined date.
