A thick red Oriental rug lies on the living floor of Ernestine Slaughter’s row house on the corner of St. Mary’s and Tessier streets in Baltimore. Carved elephants and figurines from Africa line the windowsills. Eighty-two year old Slaughter, a retired high school teacher, answers the door wearing an apron printed with images of children in greens, reds and purples. Some of the children have brown faces and black hair, some white faces and blonde hair.
Her apron is perhaps the perfect emblem for a woman who has spent the last 34 years of her life in a downtown Baltimore neighborhood — Seton Hill — that has a long history of racial integration.
"I like it here" she says, reminiscing about her long life in the city. "I don’t think there’s anything hard about living here."
Slaughter is black. Her next-door neighbor, 29-year-old Bryan Dunn, is white. A graphic artist, Dunn moved to Seton Hill four years ago, attracted by the ambiance of the early 19th century row homes, the proximity to destinations such as museums, markets and theaters and the low cost of housing.
"It was like $140,000 and downtown," he says of his three-story row house with hardwood floors, fireplace, exposed brick walls and a small courtyard out back.
The median price for a home when he moved in was $108,000 and has stayed stable for the past two years at about $200,000.
The neighborhood is made up of about a dozen narrow streets surrounding St. Mary’s Park, a grassy area that once was the site of St. Mary’s Seminary and University and is still home to a brick Gothic revival chapel built in 1808. This community is filled with cultural diversity. The park’s waist-high brick walls lend a European flavor to the neighborhood, while the gable-roofed brick row houses framed by a distant church steeple look as if they’ve been lifted from a Dutch painting.
Out on St. Mary’s Street, Dunn greets Michael Bishop, a black Russian Orthodox deacon who says he likes living in integrated neighborhoods and that he jumped on the opportunity to move here.
"Is there any other way to live?" asks Bishop, stepping carefully from his car to avoid banging his door into the tree stump named Paul. The tree stumps in the neighborhood are all named so that the neighborhood association can better identify them to the city for removal.
As Dunn strolls the sidewalks, he talks about pruning the trees that line the streets with Seton Hill Association president Kevin Macartney because the city lacks the funds to do so. He chats with neighbor David Courvillion, an eight-year resident. Church bells chime on the quarter hour, filling the air with music.
Slaughter and another neighbor, Kevin-Douglas Olive, a French teacher, estimate that the neighborhood is now mostly white. According to 2000 U.S. Census data, however, Seton Hill is part of a narrow strip of Baltimore’s downtown that is 32 percent white and 56 percent black.
The area, once part of Baltimore’s French quarter, has been integrated since the 1790s, when Baltimore took in about 500 refugees from the Haitian revolution. Many of these immigrants, French-speaking blacks, settled among whites already living in Seton Hill.
At about the same time, France’s revolutionary government closed Roman Catholic institutions, leading Sulpician priests, a teaching order, to move to the United States. In 1791, the priests opened St. Mary’s, the first Catholic seminary in America, in Seton Hill. In 1829, Father James Joubert, a Sulpician, and four black women began the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first sustained order of black nuns in the country.
The neighborhood is also famous as a place where Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first canonized U.S. saint, had a house — which still stands and may be toured by visitors.
The Afro-American, a black-owned newspaper, originated in the enclave in 1892 and was headquartered here until 1996.
Resident Ann McKenzie, who moved into Seton Hill in 1964, says the neighborhood has been racially integrated for as long as she can remember.
"It’s unusual, especially when we had practically a caste system in this town," she says.
In fact, many of the residents arrived from other places — Tennessee or New Jersey, Virginia or Pennsylvania — blithely unconcerned with the unwritten, but rigid, Baltimore protocols that kept blacks and whites segregated.
The neighborhood used to be wild and fun, McKenzie says, in the center of a vibrant downtown that during the Sixties included grand department stores and ornate movie theaters.
But the Sixties were also a turbulent time, and McKenzie tells a story about the riots that took place after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
McKenzie, who is white, says her black neighbor, Vergie Jones, sent a child over to warn McKenzie that any house without a black ribbon tied around its doorknob would be burned down. McKenzie took an old black lace petticoat and quickly cut it into strips, which she distributed to her neighbors. The neighborhood, she says, was largely left untouched
as other parts of Baltimore went up in flames.
Seton Hill was named a historic and architectural preservation district of Baltimore in 1968 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Yet, it still struggles for recognition.
Dunn, who joined the Seton Hill Association soon after he moved in and is now on the board, calls the neighborhood the hidden gem in the city.
He hopes to get the neighborhood included as part of the city’s Heritage Trail, a walking tour of points of historic interest in Baltimore, speaking with both enthusiasm and frustration that an area so rich in history could be so overlooked.
He notes that St. Mary’s Park is the largest in downtown Baltimore and shows drawings of plans for the park’s renewal that include raised paths, a courtyard, a rebuilt fountain and a sculpture.
On an overcast Sunday afternoon, the park, lined with winding brick paths and dotted with trees, is almost empty despite friendly clumps of daffodils tended by Seton Hill resident Mico Milanovic, vice president of the Seton Hill Association.
Drug users have dampened enthusiasm for using the park, Dunn says, and he hopes that a plan to lock it up at night while making it inviting by day will restore its status as a neighborhood jewel.
Because of the efforts of the Seton Hill Association, the park has new lighting and the light poles are fitted with electric outlets to make it easier to host festivals. The lights are part of a $700,000 park project financed by the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks that Macartney hopes will help lure more citywide events to the park.
"We’ve been working towards getting those improve-ments for a long time," he says.
Macartney notes that residents of nearby Mount Vernon have complained that they have too many festivals and fairs in their neighborhood. He says Seton Hill is hungry to absorb the overflow.
"We really want to create a park that everybody in the city can enjoy," Dunn agrees.
Dunn, who grew up in Columbia, a suburban Baltimore community designed to showcase racial integration, contrasts life there to life in Seton Hill.
"In the suburbs, people may be of different races," he says. "But they all tend to have the same income and outlook and to value their privacy."
He says he’s gotten to know his neighbors here better in four years than he did in 25 years of Columbia life.
"Here it’s more like a team," he says, "you depend on your neighbors for fighting crime. You lean on each other quite a lot."
Community cohesion has also been important for successfully organizing improvements, including having a Baltimore Gas and Electric company substation built in brick to match the neighborhood’s architecture.
Yet, Dunn understands the vulnerability of the city neighborhood he’s embraced.
"I think it’s important for you to know what a struggle it is to hold a community like this together," he says.
Seton Hill is an amalgam of contradictions. Rows of brilliant, well-tended pansies in big pots line people’s stoops. Ernestine Slaughter sweeps her small brick stoop daily. Residents rave about Tribecca — the Italian grocery — which sells, among other things, cannoli shells, lasagna, and good, cheap wine. Neighbors in the tightly knit community stroll there on Saturday mornings for the warm, freshly baked bread.
Olive believes the neighborhood is gentrifying. And residents including Bishop and Dunn express delight with the amenities within walking distance, from the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall to Lexington Market.
However, trash sits matted in the gutters of quaint brick sidewalks — crumbled aluminum, fast food wrappers, broken Styrofoam cups, plastic soda bottles, and miniature liquor bottles get caught in the grass of the park. Dunn says some of the trash blows in from other areas.
Low-income apartments abut the historic district. These Section 8 complexes bring crime to the neighborhood, say Dunn and Olive.
"In the suburbs you might not know everyone on your block but you’re also not likely to have a drug dealer shot in the leg on your sidewalk," Dunn says.
"Managers of some of the low-income apartments have been poor neighbors," says Olive, who’s lived in the neighborhood for six years. "They don’t attend Seton Hill Association meetings and don’t rid their apartments of known criminals."
Some people get so nervous about the crime that they move.
"A cop says to me Seton Hill is where the two Baltimores meet," says Olive, meaning the Baltimore of revitalizing neighborhoods and the Baltimore of entrenched black poverty.
Reaching out to the nearby poor and segregated has not always been easy, Olive adds.
"There is a kind of divide," he says, though its one of class rather than race. "There isn’t a lot to bring us together."
But he mentions that when he sits on his stoop, people from nearby low-income housing sometime stop to chat.
Other interactions are not so positive, such as seeing what Olive calls "zombie-like" drug users wandering in St. Mary’s Park.
All the same, residents dream of a fully restored park as the centerpiece of a neighborhood that can embrace all its neighbors, not just its middle class residents.
"The park is potentially a place we can all come together," Olive says.
Despite the problems, some exhibit a passion to lift the neighborhood higher.
You can sense the energy, from Slaughter’s delight in her bedroom skylights and living room fireplace to Dunn’s enthusiasm for all things Seton Hill.
"Morale is high," he says, showing the wall in his tiny back yard that he stuccoed himself, brimming with ideas for improving his house and community.
To him, the neighborhood is nearing the tipping point where it might be finally and fully appreciated. He talks of wine tastings and classical music concerts in the park.
"It’s so close to being amazing," Dunn says. A few more improvements, a little more attention and the gem — polished — will sparkle with an irresistible light.
Yet, Ed Terry, 72, strikes a more cautionary note.
"It’s just about what it was like when I moved in, in 1980," he says. Back then too, he says, the neighborhood was filled with vivacious personalities who sensed a renaissance just around the corner.
As a homeowner, Terry says he’d be delighted to see the neighborhood’s real estate values skyrocket.
But he wonders if perpetually trembling on the edge of success might be the secret of Seton Hill’s special magic.
"What it is now, is fine with me," he says. "Just as it is."