A community remembered
By: Dylan Waugh and Megan Miller
For 20 years, Mary Holmes lived on the third floor of
1058 Argyle Ave., one of the high-rises in West
Baltimore's notorious George B. Murphy Homes. Then, one
hot, hazy July morning in 1999, she blew it up.
"The man told me, he said, 'One, two, three,' and I
pushed the button, but…I don't think I blowed it up. I
think I just pushed a button and it looked like I did."
Holmes laughs at the memory but says there were tears
in her eyes as the buildings crumbled.
"I'm glad they [demolished Murphy Homes]," she said.
"But I just think about all the good times. We had some
good times."
Murphy Homes, a public housing complex, comprised 15
acres of low-rise townhouses, playgrounds and
basketball courts, centered on four 14-story high
rises. The towers contained one-, two- and threebedroom apartments, strung along central hallways.
With 375 pounds of explosives, it took just 20 seconds
for the housing project to disintegrate into a pile of
rubble and concrete dust, a victim of the Baltimore
Housing Authority's public housing redevelopment. Years
later, the Murphy row houses and high-rises still stand
in Baltimore's memory as "Murder Homes," a place of
crime, addiction and violence.
Yet some people remember a different version of the
Murphy Homes story, one that includes birthday parties,
neighborhood festivals and world championships. They're
people like Mary Holmes, who lives on the spot where
Murphy Homes once stood.
Holmes enjoys living in Heritage Crossing, the mixedincome development of homeowners and renters built on
the site of Murphy Homes. But she remembers Murphy as a
close community of friends and neighbors, which she
says Heritage Crossing has not replaced.
"We could open our doors [in Murphy] because we knew
everybody on the floor," says Holmes, who moved into
one of the high-rises, 1058 Argyle Ave., in 1979. "And
in the summertime we had a big playground and…we'd
watch each other's kids. Somebody would call, 'Ms.
Mary, I got to go to the store. Bess is outside; can
you keep an eye on her?' That's what we did."
Holmes, who eventually became tenant council president,
began her leadership by organizing children's birthday
parties.
"This little boy came to me one day and said, 'Ms.
Mary, today is my birthday. Can we have something?'"
Holmes organized with a few other mothers, made a cake,
and, "that's how that started."
Later came crab feasts and trips to Orioles games.
Over the years, a few Baltimore celebrities came out of
the Murphy Homes community.
In 1984 Leroy Taylor, a Murphy resident for most of his
life, won the world welterweight kickboxing title.
"…/world/ champion," The Baltimore Sun wrote of
Taylor's accomplishment, "not just East Coast champion
or Maryland champion or Murphy Homes champion."
Taylor not only lived in Murphy Homes, he trained
there. As part of his conditioning, he would run its 14
stories of stairs top to bottom, four times in a row.
Each trip took him about 15 minutes.
Taylor's brother John, also a champion kick boxer, told
The Sun, "They think that because you live in the
projects you don't have a future…It just happens that
this is where I train and I live, and I enjoy it.
Murphy Homes will always be my base."
The Housing Authority sometimes sponsored athletic
programs for neighborhood children, including dance
classes, boxing lessons and basketball games. Former
champion heavyweight boxer Larry Middleton, who came
within one qualifying match of fighting Muhammad Ali
for the title, ran a Housing Authority athletic program
at Murphy Homes in the early '80s.
Marvin McDowell, also a champion boxer, helped
Middleton run the Murphy program. He remembers 20 to 40
kids showing up to spar in the converted laundry room
that was their makeshift training area.
"The [Middleton] program was devised because of drug
activity as a preventive program for youth. They would
be there from 4 to 8 in the evenings," Gloria Burton,
who directed the program, says. "They had put them in
'The 851,' the worst building that they had."
By the late 1970s, 851 George St. was the worst of the
Murphy high-rises. Drug dealers sold in the stairwells
and outside around the neighborhood. They paid tenants,
often single mothers, to stash drugs in their
apartments. Other apartments – tenants estimated as
many as two or three per floor – were used as "shooting
galleries" where drug users could get high. With the
drugs came shootings, stabbings, and regular police
raids.
"Murphy Homes had become Murder Homes," former Housing
Commissioner Daniel Henson says. "What you saw on
[HBO's] 'The Wire' was very true" he says, referring to
the HBO series about life in Baltimore.
The problems were so severe that the Housing Authority
took unorthodox steps to try to fix them.
Laverne McWhite, manager of Murphy Homes from about
1979 to 1984, remembers a Housing Authority experiment
in the 851 high-rise that attempted to reduce the
building's crime by relocating problem tenants and
replacing them with "not elderly, but mature adults 55
and over."
/ /
At the same time a few minor renovations were done to
improve 851's appearance. McWhite credits herself with
the idea to repaint the inside of the building a salmon
color.
"I was listening on a Sunday to '60 Minutes.' And '60
Minutes' had a program where the warden in this jail,
or prison, had decided to paint the walls what they
call salmon color. And it seemed to have calmed [the
prisoners] down. So I went to work the next day, and
said I want to order this paint."
/ /
McWhite says that 851, renamed Fremont House, seemed to
improve after the changes and stayed that way for at
least a few years. But by the mid-1980s it was clear
that all four high-rises were decaying.
Elevators were constantly broken, forcing some
residents to climb the stairs to the 14th floor.
Clogged trash chutes caused garbage to accumulate in
the hallways. Plumbing, heating and electrical systems
were unreliable.
Even the concrete structures themselves had become
dangerous. In 1989, Raymond Toulson, 12, died after
being struck on the head by a 2-foot-long piece of
concrete that broke off a ninth floor balcony of one of
the towers. Engineering studies revealed that, because
of the way the balconies were made, they would continue
to crack and crumble unless completely rebuilt or
removed altogether.
In addition to physical problems, Murphy remained a
major center of the city's drug and crime activity.
It became more and more difficult to find tenants
willing to live in the high-rises. A Jan. 13, 1993, Sun
article reported: "At George Murphy Homes…25 vacant
apartments are ready to be rented. But…after making
offers to the top 300 applicants on the waiting list,
the agency has not been able to find a single tenant
willing to live one of those 25 apartments."
"The families weren't moving in," says Gloria Burton.
"People had to be very desperate, or come from a
shelter, to move into the high-rise, because in the
high-rise you wouldn't have any control over your
neighbors, the elevator, or anything."
"With both crack cocaine and heroin available readily
in that part of town, and people coming to prey on
folks in Murphy Homes, nobody wanted to live there,"
said Henson. "Only the poorest of the poor wound up at
Murphy Homes. You only lived there if it was the only
place you had to live."
Then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke called the high rises
"warehouses of poverty."
Henson said that by the time Murphy Homes was imploded
in 1999, almost 90 percent of its residents were
unemployed.
By the early '90s it had become clear to urban planners
nationwide that the high-rise public housing experiment
of the mid-20th century had failed. When Baltimore
received federal funding through the HOPE VI program to
revitalize its public housing, the Housing Authority
decided to start over, using a completely different
model.
"The elimination of the concentration of poverty was
absolutely necessary," said Al Barry, formerly a
planner for Baltimore City.
Murphy Homes was slated to become the third high-rise
project demolished in Baltimore, after Lafayette Courts
and Lexington Terrace and b b before Flag House Courts.
But before the towers could be blown up, officials
needed to relocate the people living there.
The federal government offered tenants vouchers – then
called Section 8 certificates – to subsidize their rent
payments if they chose to move to housing owned by
private landlords. Some used the certificates to move
away from Baltimore to the counties. A few, Henson
says, moved out of state.
But he adds that many residents turned down the Section
8 certificates, wanting to stay in public housing,
where their rent – fixed at 30 percent of a tenant's
income – covered everything, including utilities.
Those who rejected the Section 8 vouchers were offered
three choices in other Baltimore public housing
projects, Henson says.
Murphy's concrete towers were replaced with a suburbanstyle townhouse community called Heritage Crossing. To
satisfy HOPE VI regulations, the new community placed
public housing rentals next to market-rate homes.
Heritage Crossing has about one-third of the housing
units of Murphy Homes. The majority of these units are
privately owned, owner-occupied houses.
When Heritage Crossing was built, the names of former
Murphy Homes residents interested in returning were
entered into a lottery. Mary Holmes was one of those
selected.
"They found places for everybody," Holmes says. "A lot
of people didn't come back because after they moved
they liked where they were. But they still have a list
of people who would come back [to Heritage Crossing] if
they had a place to come to. If somebody'd move out or
somebody'd die or something like that."
She says that Murphy residents who did return to
Heritage Crossing found a very different community than
the one they'd left.
"I like it here," Holmes says, smiling. "But this is
not Murphy. Let's put it like that."