With thousands gathering for this weekend’s 150th running of the Preakness Stakes, I thought I’d drive past Pimlico Race Course and keep on going along lower Park Heights Avenue. No crowds were gathered on Park Heights, but there’s been plenty of running.
The running has been going on for about 60 years. It’s running from, not running to. The running’s been going on for so long that many alive today have no memory of Park Heights when it blossomed, or of Pimlico when it didn’t have to be torn down to be saved.
The big news now is that salvation is possible for Pimlico and maybe even for Park Heights.
Last week, the Maryland Board of Public Works approved a $14.3 million contract to begin the racetrack’s demolition and reconstruction. Consider the vote a kind of municipal prayer.
It’s a prayer for a treasured racetrack that’s been falling apart for several decades and now has a shot at rebirth. It’s a prayer for all it’s meant as part of thoroughbred racing’s history, and Maryland’s financial ties to it, which are estimated at about 28,000 jobs and $3 billion in annual economic activity.
And it’s a prayer of hope for the increasingly desperate attempt to cash in on the Preakness Stakes weekend, the track’s single day of profit each year.
Also, by extension, maybe it’s a prayer for Park Heights Avenue and all the battered little sidestreets of homes once considered middle class and now considered a disaster.
There was a time when Park Heights Avenue seemed the great boulevard of hope in Northwest Baltimore. In those post-war years, if you’d found a place north of Park Circle, your family was beginning its reach toward the American dream.
Gone were a quarter-century’s memories of the Great Depression and World War II. Now arriving were healthy public schools, crowded movie theaters, a busy public library, bustling synagogues and churches, and businesses.
But then came the great suburban exodus of the ‘60s, and Park Heights from the Pimlico area on down became a danger zone. As realtors transformed once-stately homes into rental units for multiple families, homes began falling apart.
As incoming family incomes dropped, and drugs moved into the area, crime soared. As more people moved away, home decayed and owners took a hike. For years along Park Heights, you could count vacant, falling-down, eyesore homes by the score.
Each one gave lower Park Heights the look of a war zone.
You drive along the big street today, from the racetrack area to Park Circle, and there are still stretches that make your eyeballs bleed. Vacant, decayed houses, empty storefronts.
But there are also stretches where those dying buildings have at least been torn down, and there’s grass growing on open lots where something good might blossom one day soon. There are a couple of big, handsome new apartment buildings, too, around Woodland Avenue.
A drive along lower Park Heights still makes you mourn its decades-long decay. But it’s clear that somebody’s begun paying attention to the long-neglected area. Change has begun arriving.
Maybe better days are coming for Park Heights and for Pimlico Race Course, too.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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