A story about the Liberty Road corridor in The Evening Sun yesterday should have reported that Ella White Campbell lives in Stevenswood. The Evening Sun regrets the error.
Driving past the gasoline stations, the fast-food places and the clutter of signs along Liberty Road, Ella White Campbell points out perceived trouble spots as though they are potholes in the road.
Over there is Woodmoor Shopping Center. "This has been one of the major sore spots in the community because it is so downtrodden," she says.
Then, there's Body Talk, a year-old nude dancing club that recently inspired the General Assembly to pass an emergency state law barring booze at such places. "Goodness gracious. It's a trauma," she says.
And, all along the strip "the same kind of stores," she laments. "Hair salons, cleaners, fast food, gasoline stations. . . ."
Long before a single article of clothing was shed at any Liberty Road commercial establishment, with its subsequent publicity, community groups have been fighting for greater control over the hodgepodge of stores, businesses and homes along this corridor traversing western Baltimore County.
As far back as the 1950s, civic groups fretted that the road was becoming a "gasoline alley," that many of its filling stations were becoming "hot rod hangouts."
The Liberty Communities Development Corporation, a group of about 200 business owners along the corridor, has drafted a plan to deal with some of the ills along Liberty Road, in the eight-mile stretch from the city line to Deer Park Road.
Campbell, as president of the Liberty Road Community Council, a group of neighborhood organizations along the corridor, is campaigning against the plan, although she favors most of its recommendations.
Some of the disagreement is substantial. But the conflict is partly about who speaks for the affected communities such as Woodmoor, Milford Mill and Randallstown.
In denouncing the plan to the county Planning Board last month as "an abomination of justice," Campbell, joined by others, objected to being excluded from the original drafting.
Jim Janas, the corporation staff director, counters that residents have had opportunities to comment on the plan, including at the recent Planning Board hearing. But the corporation had a reason for declining a seat at the drafting table to Campbell and her allies.
"We are not going to involve Ella White Campbell in this project. We know her response -- anti-everything," Janas says. "We're not masochistic."
Campbell and other residential leaders do oppose some of the plan's proposals, such as connector roads and more development. But she and her allies do favor much about the plan.
For instance, the Woodmoor Shopping Center that Campbell scores and that is owned by the organization of the late billionaire Harry Weinberg is one property the development corporation hopes to help renovate.
As for its criticism of Campbell, the corporation has much the same concerns over Liberty Road's evolution as does she. "We've got more places to get your car greased," Janas says.
Indeed, the four-lane road is lined with auto places and fast-food franchises as well as a Chinese restaurant with golden dragons on its roof and a surplus store marked with a rocket. It also has new and redesigned shopping centers with bright white and aqua facades. Between the strip shopping lots are wedged residential stretches, including new apartment complexes and older, slate-roofed houses with ample yards.
In 1963, when Rosario Caccamisi opened his barber shop in Liberty Plaza, closer to the western end of the corridor, "it was nothing but woods out here," he remembers.
Business was slow for a couple of years as he waited for the development near the Beltway to come west. When it did, Caccamisi added a beauty parlor to become Rosario's Total Hair Care.
He later became a leader of the Stoneybrook neighborhood organization as it fought to divert the planned Metro line to Owings Mills, where it is today. Says Caccamisi of plans to run the train line through their back yards: "They were going to turn this place into the Bronx."
But he couldn't stop the building of three more shopping centers nearby. With the arrival of these and others, "business has been spread so far apart," he says.
As Caccamisi discovered, one couldn't stop change in the corridor.
Emily Wolfson, an early Liberty Road area settler, recalls that her eldest child was bounced among nine different schools before graduating because "the schools were filled before they finished them."
She and her husband moved to Church Lane, just off what was then a two-lane Liberty Road, in 1957. She said they figured that her husband's Veterans Administration mortgage loan could buy more house there than in an older, established neighborhood such as Towson.
As more young families were drawn to the area for its moderate-priced housing, convenient shopping and access to the Beltway, business followed. The proliferating gas stations supplied "a suburban community that depended on the automobile," says Wolfson, a residential representative on the area corporation board who worked on the revitalization plan.
Hers was one stage of the corridor's growth.
Campbell, of the Liberty Road Community Council, belonged to a later one.
The neighborhoods that flesh out the Liberty Road spine were predominantly white when Campbell moved into the Stevenson section in 1970. She and her husband were part of a trend of black migration in the decade that followed. Today, the Baltimore County Council's 2nd District, which includes the Liberty Road corridor and its communities, is 40 percent black, the highest percentage of any council district in the county.
Although some merchants worry about the approach of "urban" problems, meaning crime and decay, the neighborhoods remain solidly middle class. Median household income was estimated last year at around $45,000 in the communities lining the corridor.
If the haphazard commercial development along Liberty Road gives little sense of vision, the corporation's plan would attempt to offer one. With new strategies for zoning and marketing, the plan would encourage concentration of automotive businesses on certain blocks. It also proposes assembling vacant properties for development as new retail centers that could enhance Liberty Road's off-price image, possibly sit-down restaurants, sporting goods and toy stores and midscale department stores.
After a public hearing on it, the plan ultimately needs the approval of the County Council as an amendment to the county's long-range master plan. The plan seeks to guide development in the corridor through the decade.
The upscale suburbanites will continue to shop for their clothes at stores such as Banana Republic in Owings Mills Mall, says Janas, the corporation director. But, when their children need new clothes and supplies for the next school year, he expects they will search Liberty Road for bargains.
Campbell and others, however, envision a conversion of Liberty Road to something more like Owings Mills. She wants the area to exchange what she derides as "low-grade stores" for elegant restaurants, computer software stores and camera shops.
But Wolfson, who witnessed the formative years of the corridor's commercial identity, cautions against such hopes. "You have to be realistic," she says. "Bloomingdale's is not going to open up on Liberty Road."
Where disagreement over the plan lies
Disagreement over a plan drafted by a business group to upgrade the Liberty Road corridor in western Baltimore County centers on these points:
* To relieve traffic, the plan by the Liberty Communities Development Corporation calls for a connector road from Owings Mills, new connections between shopping center lots and an extension of public bus service from the present turnaround at Chapman Road about a mile west to Deer Park Road. Some opponents say extended bus service would carry (( criminals to their neighborhoods.
* The development corporation, made up of about 200 merchants along the corridor, opposes any building moratorium lest it inhibit efforts to develop abandoned properties. The Liberty Road Community Council, however, an umbrella group of neighborhood groups along the corridor, believes the county should wait to expand water and sewer capacity before allowing new development.
* While some residents point to current vacant office buildings as proof that more aren't needed, the corporation recommends the creation of more office space as part of an overall market strategy for the area. Its reasoning: Corporations that may want the prestige of an Owings Mills address for their headquarters could be attracted to lower rents along Liberty Road for satellite offices.
The corporation was asked by the previous Baltimore County administration to draft an update to an original revitalization plan done in 1980. Under that plan, some areas of the corridor were renovated, landscaped or developed. In the proposed update, the corporation says that the influx of franchise stores, population and traffic in the past decade and the burden on an aging infrastructure call for new strategies.