art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

ii. introduction to the case study
case study: maryland institute of art 19
In spring 2003, mica cap initiated a partnership with Banner
Neighborhoods, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to community
organizing and development efforts in an area north of Patterson
Park in East Baltimore. This collection of neighborhoods has experienced
profound demographic change over the past three decades.
Throughout the 1970s, this part of Baltimore had been solidly working
class, home of Eastern European immigrants and Native Americans from
the Lumbee tribe in North Carolina. Many of these residents moved to
Baltimore looking for blue collar jobs in the canning and steel industries
after the Second World War. With the decline of these industries in
the 1980s, these residents began to leave, at the same time that African
American families started moving into the neighborhoods. Baltimore
has been a racially segregated and politically divided city since before the
Civil War, and the arrival of black families accelerated the wave of
“white flight” out of these neighborhoods—a dynamic later exacerbated
by fly-by-night developers who preyed upon poor families with mortgage
flipping scams. During the early 1990s, when the Federal Department
of Housing and Urban Development began demolishing nearby high
rise public housing projects, many former hud tenants with Section 8
certificates rented homes in the Patterson Park neighborhoods.
When the cap team began working on art projects with youth from
Banner Neighborhoods’ programs, a new influx of immigrants had
recently arrived. A significant Latino/Hispanic presence was expanding
around Patterson Park. In addition, the Refugee Resettlement Center,
sited there, brought West African immigrants from Liberia, Senegal,
Mauritania, and Gambia, as well as Eastern Europeans from Bosnia and
Serbia. This cultural and ethnic mixture was further enriched by the
slow but steady arrival of middle class families—primarily white and
some African American, who were attracted by the efforts of such
organizations as the Patterson Park Community Development
Corporation. Efforts of the Friends of Patterson Park to upgrade the
usability and appearance of the park also increased the desirability of
the area and helped build a sense of community through volunteerism.
Yet this general upturn in the area’s outlook did not change the
realities of life for local youth, who closely identified with a community
of no more than a few city blocks. Youth playing in the streets were the
source of many calls to the police in the neighborhood (in Baltimore,
an average of 10,000 arrests for juvenile offenses are made each year).
Adults across racial and socioeconomic lines were angry and frustrated
with youth playing ball in the streets and sometimes damaging cars and
houses. Intergenerational tensions had reached a boiling point in 2001.