Penn Station, the city's bustling train, bus and taxi hub, sits almost exactly in Baltimore's geographic center. Within a two-mile radius lie many of the city's cultural treasures: four colleges and universities, two major art museums, a symphony and an opera hall and the stately main branch of the library.
Youthful entrepreneurs have transformed once-derelict blocks just north of the station with nightclubs, galleries, a movie theater and even a do-it-yourself electronics workshop.
But many of the blocks between these well-lighted places remain unsafe. The fatal stabbing of a Johns Hopkins research assistant as he walked from Penn Station to Charles Village last weekend is a grim reminder that the area has far to go to be a truly walkable cultural center.
"Part of why we bought a house in Charles Village is because we can walk to the grocery store and the park and everywhere else," said Melissa Schober, 31, who moved to Baltimore from Boston with her husband in 2007. "But it feels unnatural to not have the ability to walk from one neighborhood to another, to have these boundaries."
The killing of Stephen Pitcairn on Sunday, two days shy of his 24th birthday, has led residents to reconsider neighborhoods that had been considered among the safest in the city.
Police say Pitcairn was walking in the 2600 block of St. Paul St. about 11 p.m. when a man and woman robbed him of his wallet and cell phone, then plunged a knife into his chest.
John Alexander Wagner, 34, and Lavelva Merritt, 24, are charged with first-degree murder in his death. Wagner was ordered held without bond at a bail review hearing Wednesday; Merritt is also being held without bond.
Wagner and Merritt have a long history of drug abuse and violent crimes, but had served little time. Police say they found Pitcairn's belongings and a pair of bloody shoes in the couple's apartment in the 2600 block of Maryland Ave., two blocks from the crime scene.
City leaders fear that Pitcairn's death — the sixth homicide within the Charles Village Community Benefits District this year — is the type of crime that could drive away the students and families seen as key to the area's health.
"Folks ought to be able to walk from the train station to Charles Village," said City Councilman Carl Stokes, who lives a few blocks from the scene of the attack and represents the area. "This impacts persons who would go to the city to go to school or who would work at Hopkins."
The main campuses of the Johns Hopkins University in Homewood and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Bolton Hill have expanded in the past decade, and new businesses have sprung up around the schools. But a continuous cultural corridor is still a distant dream, said Michael Evitts, a spokesman for the Downtown Partnership.
"What you've got is pockets of development that are merging, and the challenge is to knit these pockets of development into a seamless whole," Evitts said.
In the meantime, the city's center remains a complicated tapestry of safe, well-lighted, redeveloped areas separated by blighted blocks where prostitution and drug dealing are rampant.
The Station North Arts District is flourishing, creating a key link between the better-established neighborhoods of Charles Village and Mount Vernon. But the blocks between North Avenue and 25th Street lag in development. And high-crime areas border the corridor to the east and west.
Schober, the Charles Village resident, commutes by MARC train every day to her job as a public health professional. She says the trip between her home and Penn Station — she often walks or rides her bike — is fraught with anxiety.
"It's unnerving," she said. "There are a lot of liquor stores, people getting in your face and asking you for money. Is that guy who is drunken catcalling about to do something more?"
The developed areas appear to be giving young residents — especially students or recent transplants — a false sense of security. Many walk or ride bikes late at night from popular spots such as the Brewer's Art or Joe Squared to homes in Hampden, Remington or Charles Village, seemingly unaware of the hazards in the intervening blocks.
When Pitcairn, who had spent the weekend with his sister in New York, got off a Bolt Bus at Penn Station Sunday night, he had several choices for making his way to his apartment in the 3000 block of St. Paul St.
He could have taken a cab, readily available around the train station; it would have been a $6 fare to his Charles Village apartment. In an interview with WBAL-TV, Pitcairn's mother said she had suggested that he take a cab home.
A university shuttle, which Pitcairn rode between his home and his job at the Hopkins medical school in East Baltimore, would have made its last Sunday stop at the station about 9:45 p.m.
Two Maryland Transit Administration bus routes that run to Charles Village stop at Penn Station on Sunday nights. The No. 3 stops every 40 minutes; the No. 11 picks up passengers each hour.
Instead, Pitcairn chose to walk. The air was cool and fragrant from afternoon storms. A nearly full moon shone brightly.
Pitcairn, who graduated from college in Kalamazoo, Mich., and worked in Japan before moving to Baltimore, took the most direct route home: straight up St. Paul, where few businesses remain open late.
Some U.S. cities have reclaimed older train stations and the neighborhoods that surround them. In Washington, the area around Union Station ranged from dicey to dangerous two or three decades ago. But redevelopment has brought shopping, dining and retail activity to the station, which now anchors an increasingly vibrant urban center.
Jeffrey Ian Ross, a University of Baltimore criminologist who lives in Washington, said the gentrification of the nearby Shaw, Chinatown and Capitol Hill neighborhoods over the past 10 to 15 years have helped make the Union Station area "a pretty safe neighborhood in general."
In Baltimore, M.J. "Jay" Brodie, president of the quasi-public Baltimore Development Corp., sees cause for hope in several new developments in the blocks just north of Penn Station.
"Things are percolating," he said. "The sprouts we're seeing in Charles North are partially us and partially people who see this as a very positive place. It's a very healthy sign."
The former Chesapeake Restaurant, which long sat vacant, is to be renovated and serve food again. And three properties — the old Parkway Theatre on North Avenue, the recently closed New York Fried Chicken just around the corner on Charles Street and an adjacent building — will be built into a nightclub, restaurant and shops. Long-faded posters are tacked to boards across the third property, and a tree grows from a third-floor window.
Further north, several smaller businesses — the popular Terra Cafe, a smattering of hair salons and clothing stores — have opened, but no large-scale projects are under way. And while that section is well-traversed during the day, most businesses close long before Pitcairn set off on his fateful journey.
Residents of Charles Village found a bitter irony in the location where he was attacked. They say they tend to breathe more easily once they get north of 25th Street, where vacant buildings give way to well-tended homes.
But it's not until 27th Street that a pedestrian comes under the added protection offered by Hopkins' security service, which patrols off-campus areas from Charles Street to Guilford Avenue and from 27th to University Parkway.
Dennis O'Shea, a Hopkins spokesman, said that perimeter includes about 80 percent of the university's undergraduates who live off-campus.
Pitcairn was not a Hopkins undergraduate but a researcher at the medical complex in East Baltimore. Students receive frequent warnings to avoid walking alone at night, O'Shea said.
As he sat on a bench in Charles Village on a recent evening, Remington resident Ken Gruz mused that he probably would have made the decision to walk from Penn Station.
The 52-year-old video producer said he felt safe in the neighborhood — he was working outside on his laptop well after 10 p.m. But he said the attack on Pitcairn was a reminder that danger could be lurking on any block.
"We tend to think we live on lines — it's safe up to here, but on this side of the street it is not," Gruz said. He was struck that both the victim and the suspects had lived in the same neighborhood.
"This makes you realize that side by side, there are people striving for the very best and people who are doing the exact opposite."