Park Lane Community Wins AFRO Clean-Green Block Award

Mayor Sheila Dixon on Aug. 13 announced the finalists and overall winner of the 2008 AFRO Clean-Green Block Awards, a partnership with the mayor’s “Make a Difference” initiative. The AFRO Clean Block Competition began in 1934 and is the oldest existing environmental program in the nation. This year it went “Green” and officially partnered with the city of Baltimore. The program is designed to promote cleaning, greening and sustaining projects in Baltimore neighborhoods.

More than 30 blocks entered the competition this year.

The overall winner was the Park Lane Neighborhood (4500 Block of The Strand).

The finalists were: Sunset and Levindale Community (5100 blocks of Sunset and Levindale); Better Waverly Community (700 block Belle Terre, 3200 block Frisby and 3200 block Ellerslie); and Sharp Leadenhall Community (900 Bevan Street and 101 E. Cross Street).

The winner and finalists in the AFRO Clean-Green Block Award received prizes that included t-shirts, fluorescent light bulbs, a six-month subscription of the AFRO, a block party and a visit from Mayor Dixon on “Neighborhood Appreciation Day.”

“Collaborating to beautify our neighborhoods is crucial if we want to make our city and planet cleaner and greener for future generations,” said Dixon. “Every contribution you make promotes our environment and our civic pride.”

Photo by Mark Dennis

Pride in Park Lane

The people who live on the 4500 block of The Strand take great pride in their neighborhood, so winning the AFRO Clean-Green Block Award didn’t come as a complete surprise to some of them.

Mary Freeman and Margarine Bethea have lived in the Park Lane community for more than 40 years. And their neighbors have always kept it clean, they said – picking up any trash left in the front yard and keeping their lawns trimmed and edged.  

This community is part of Park Heights, an older neighborhood of porch-front row homes and free-standing houses with peaked roofs along tree-lined streets. The neighborhood is served by commercial districts on Reisterstown Road and Park Heights Avenue. An area whose population once comprised mostly upscale professional Jews now includes middle-income African Americans and Asians.

The neighborhood is also known for the famous Pimlico Race Track that hosts “The Preakness,” an American Grade I stakes race for three-year-old horses, on the third Saturday in May each year.  Now, the Park Lane community is coping with its own publicity.

Mark Hughes, vice president of the Park Lane Neighborhood Association, said the group had two meetings -- July 3 and 17 – to discuss the AFRO Clean-Green Block initiative. The 4500 block of The Strand was among the 15 blocks that Hughes signed up.  “We pretty much had it set up so that people – if they needed help, they could get volunteers,” he said.  They also had people who were required to perform community service hours available to hand out fliers.  With The Strand, he added, “We offered to help but they said, ‘Oh, we’re going to take care of it.’ And they did.”

When Margarine Bethea sees the school children coming down her block with candy wrappers and empty fast-food bags and paper cups, she takes their trash or makes her trashcan available for them.  “When people walk through our neighborhood, or even when we come out, we like to see everything nice without a whole lot of trash,” Bethea said.

In addition to signs designating their community as the AFRO Clean-Green Block winner, Park Lane community also received large planters with flowers for both sides of the street, a visit from Mayor Dixon and a six-month subscription of the AFRO.

They opted out of the block party and instead settled for light refreshments which, according to Mary Freeman, they donated to the James D. Gross Recreation Center for its program that promotes proactive participation by children active in their communities.

“The Park Lane Association has a food bank once a month that gives food out to the community. The children there, after school, would always come over to the hall and help us clean up,” Freeman said. “So we felt it was our place to give back. Instead of having a block party, what they were going to give us we gave to the recreation center to have something for the children.”

Hughes said he saw the AFRO Clean-Green initiative help bring the community closer, with residents working together.  “I’d certainly like the AFRO to see just how much it galvanized and energized people to stay involved.”

Coming Together in Levindale-Sunset

Two months ago, the Levindale-Sunset community sprang into action to get their area clean after learning about the AFRO Clean-Green Block initiative.

Now, community association president Eddie Brooks said the program has instilled a sense of pride after their community became a finalist in the clean-green block initiative.  It also helped to bring the community together.  “Some of the community people live right around the block – around the corner – but they never get to meet each other. Not even at the [community] meetings a lot of the time,” Brooks said. Since then, he added, “The last meeting [Sept. 8] we had, maybe 80 people there. We’ve never had that before.”

Like Park Lane, the Levindale-Sunset area is also located in Park Heights, an older Baltimore neighborhood that includes a variety of single-family, semi-detached and row homes.

Mark Hughes, who works as a community organizer in Park Heights, signed up the area to participate in the clean-green initiative.  "With pride in their block they’re going to continue to do this work,” said Hughes, who learned about the clean-green block initiative at a Pimlico Merchants Association meeting with Hope Williams who works in the office of the Mayor’s Initiative for a Cleaner Greener Baltimore. “This is something that is clearly embraced by the community.”  

Brooks agreed.  The initiative inspired neighbors to pitch in and help senior citizens on their block by cutting their grass and assisting with other projects around the house.  It also made the community more self-sufficient.  “We don’t have to call the city to clean our alley or streets,” Brooks said. “We do that ourselves because it’s our community and we’re not just supposed to put everything on the city to do everything.”  Overall, he added, “We have pride. And we’re always going to have that pride.”

Bragging Rights in Better Waverly  

Over the course of a month, Joe Stewart noticed his neighbors taking the initiative to enhance their property by replanting flowers and touching up their homes and yards this summer.

The hard work earned the community bragging rights after placing as a finalist among two others in the AFRO Clean-Green Block.  "I think it's great that our mayor is providing the leadership on this," said Stewart, secretary and co-chair of the Hospitality Committee of the Better Waverly Community Organization. "This is going to help change the attitudes of a lot of people in different neighborhoods."

Stewart, along with his assistant Sharon Busching, passed out flyers to 150 households on eight participating blocks -- the 700 block of Belle Terre, the 3200 block of Frisby Road and both the 600 and 900 blocks of Gorsuch Avenue -- for a special clean-up that began on June 28 until the judging process during the first week of August.  "We basically encouraged everyone to do things on their own and do things together, and then we left it at that," Stewart said.

Residents were also told about grants from the Greater Homewood Community Corporation that helps 40 neighborhoods in north central Baltimore City become safer places to live, and through Healthy Neighborhoods that helps undervalued Baltimore neighborhoods increase their home values and markets the community while forging strong connections among neighbors.

With its single-frame, duplex and brick row homes along tree-lined lanes and broad boulevards, the beautification efforts helped maintain the green open spaces scattered throughout a community that boasts of its cultural, ethnic, racial and socio-economic diversity.

In addition to households, a couple of churches and a beauty salon were also invited to participate along with the community's Marian House that serves homeless women in transition from poverty, addiction, abuse, mental illness or incarceration

Of the enhancements, Stewart said, "A lot of people did participate - they came and got tools and worked really hard. They didn't make a big deal about it or advertise it. By the time the judges came around, the neighborhood was looking pretty nice."

Better Waverly also promotes greening projects through its organic community vegetable garden, "Homestead Harvest," that grows spinach, lettuce, scallions, radishes, carrots and tomatoes. In this co-op, gardeners share the crops -- that also include peppers, collards, cabbages, basil, okra, green beans and yellow squash -- with community residents.

Of the AFRO Clean-Green Block initiative, Stewart said, "We only included eight blocks because it was a lot of work to do. The next time around we'll involve more blocks."

  Ahead of the Clean-Green Game in Sharp-Leadenhall (Photo by Mark Dennis)

The Sharp-Leadenhall neighborhood was already ahead of the game with enhancing its green space and keeping its streets clean; they were already active in monthly clean-ups.

Two years ago, the neighborhood received a $5,000 grant from the Baltimore Community Foundation to do flower pots.

“We were trying to think of some ways to help beautify our communities,” said Betty Bland-Thomas, president of the Sharp-Leadenhall Planning Committee. “With the clean-up and the flower pots, people started sweeping their front [steps] more often; it just started going like wildfire.”

They received confirmation that they were doing the right thing when they were named one of the finalists in the AFRO Clean-Green Block initiative this year.

“We were truly excited because this is already a labor of work, but it’s very nice to know that the AFRO was still doing its clean block because you all initiated the real clean and green initiative,” Bland-Thomas said, referring to the AFRO Clean Block that’s also known as the nation’s oldest existing environmental program.

Sharp-Leadenhall is an African-American enclave that traces its heritage back to 1790, when a small colony of free Blacks resided where the Baltimore Convention Center sits today.

In a 2004 article, the City Paper reported that Frederick Douglass “attended the community’s long-demolished Sharp Street AME Church in the 1830s.”

That’s before urban growth shifted the enclave southward to West Street in South Baltimore.

Over time, the population and size of the area dwindled due to zoning in the 1930s, and the city-services neglect in the 1950s.

Today, the area is a part of the vibrant and active seaport community along the Inner Harbor.

“We were already working hard as a community group,” Bland-Thomas said. “What is even better is for us to finally get recognition to keep our community clean and green.”

The mural on Bevan Street was from a separate initiative that ended up coinciding with the events leading up to the AFRO Clean-Green awards ceremony and block party.

“On the day of the dedication with the AFRO, the mural was being worked on and was nearly finished,” Bland-Thomas said. “So that gave us a really nice backdrop.”