How the neighborhood that inspired “The Wire” is pulling its residents out of poverty

It’s not often that a street intersection becomes as notorious as the corner of Fayette and Monroe in West Baltimore. During the ’80s and ’90s, the corner was ground zero for the city’s open-air drug market. Both a manifestation and symptom of Baltimore’s rising poverty, the corner became an inspiration for the television series The Wire.

A few blocks away from Fayette and Monroe is Bon Secours Hospital, built in 1919 by a group of Parisian nuns on a social mission. George Kleb was just a few years into his role as executive director of the affiliated Bon Secours Foundation when a problem was brought to his attention: The foundation had just invested $30 million in a hospital that both patients and doctors were scared to enter.

“Say you’re going to interview for a job at Bon Secours and you’re waiting at that corner,” Kleb said. “A dozen guys are going to come up to you waving vials in your face and trying to sell you heroin and cocaine. A lot of folks just drive around the block and go home.”

It was 1993, and Baltimore was dealing with decades of economic disinvestment that left the area desolate and blighted, a prime environment for crime. Two-thirds of the properties in the neighborhoods surrounding Bon Secours were vacant, said Kleb. He refers to those blocks as a “disinvestment gap”—an area left vacant due to economic decline. The foundation decided to do something about it.

Read the full article here.