Jacques KellyContact ReporterThe Baltimore Sun

A bulldozer knocked down rowhouses on McDonogh Street one late autumn day more than eight years ago.

I stood and watched as a part of East Baltimore disappeared that afternoon and skeptically considered what would replace them. I wrote a few days later about the "decimated and emptied neighborhood" just north of the Johns Hopkins medical campus.

This week, I returned to the spot. Over this past winter, 49 townhouses shot up, priced beginning at $280,000. The first group has sold well, according to Scott Levitan, development director for Forest City-New East Baltimore Partnership — they were targeted for home ownership by Hopkins employees — and cleaners were running vacuums before the arrival of new residents.

The new homes are much larger and certainly more prosperous-looking than the humble and narrow 19th-century homes that made up much of a neighborhood called Middle East.

Levitan, whose company was hired by Hopkins for the project, said 23 people and families are now living in homes once marked by nothing more than stakes in the ground when offered for sale in September 2016.

Of all the sales, two-thirds were to Hopkins workers. Another 250 townhouses are scheduled to be built.

Levitan said the owners of nearby commercial structures pay for a fund that covers the costs of security patrols, extra street cleaning, and maintenance of parks and trees.

"We would love to have a great grocery store here too," he said, but added that attempting to draw a top-quality grocery to an emerging urban neighborhood can be daunting.

The area already has a Walgreens drugstore, Atwater's Bakery and Helmand Kabobi Afghan restaurants, Harbor Bank, and a Starbucks Opportunity Cafe that trains local residents.

Work crews were taking down construction fences this week around the new Eager Park, a three-block-long, 5.5-acre greensward that officially opens Saturday. A group of mechanics were attempting to get a walk-through fountain working. The park also features an amphitheater named for former Mayor Clarence Du Burns, who lived nearby on Mura Street.

The park is big, well designed and is a green centerpiece for this grand design called the Johns Hopkins East Baltimore Initiative. The park, a city block wide, sets off the big labs, student residence buildings and the science-technology structures that are grouped to the north of Hopkins' main medical campus.

As you walk northward, at Ashland Avenue, the buildings grow less tall. By the time you reach Eager Street, the neighborhood ceases to be institutional in character and looks more relaxed. This is where the people live.

The place has changed so much that I had to look around to get my bearings and then spotted a reassuring sight: a No. 13 southbound bus marked "Canton."

This is an urban space that marries a busy hospital and a research park with new and existing neighborhoods. It is not as dense and gritty as what was demolished. Like Harbor East, it is new and takes some getting used to.

There is still more work to be done — there are some vacant lots for a new apartment building and more individual homes will rise this summer. Some will face the Eager Park green space.

And the transformation of this area is not happening in a vacuum. A few blocks away in the Oliver neighborhood, other blocks have changed dramatically since my last visit there in November. Oliver, which once had 450 vacant houses, is now down to about 30 vacants.

"You can see the trend is in the right direction," said Sean Closkey, president of TRF Development Partners, the nonprofit that is overseeing Oliver's restoration. "The Hopkins Initiative was an ambitious project. It was so large. It took years and years, and now, this spring, all of sudden you are starting to see the benefits of consistent, annual investment. The momentum is on our side."

jacques.kelly@baltsun.com

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-kelly-column-hopkins-20170505-story.html