The Pope of Whitelock Street is practicing Duke Ellington tunes on a baby grand piano in the front window of his Reservoir Hill rowhouse. Atop the piano is a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. Beyond the statue lies a desolate stretch of Baltimore known as the 900 block of Whitelock St., the desert in which Catholic priest Thomas F. Composto has tried to do good since 1968.
A former Jesuit, expelled by his order for reasons neither he nor the Jesuits will explain, Mr. Composto keeps his chops sharp to pick up extra cash at senior citizen sing-alongs. Other money comes from counseling work and teaching courses on ethics and death. A few years ago, he was a maitre d' in Glen Burnie.
All to sustain himself for his life's work as staff and soul of St. Francis Neighborhood Center, a Catholic mission born amid the despair of Whitelock Street during the social activism of the 1960s.
Trying to do good on Whitelock Street for nearly half his life -- almost 27 years of patience and labor that earned him the title of pope -- has not been especially kind to Tommy Composto.
The city had so little faith in Whitelock Street that all that was left to do after two decades of indecision and decay was to knock it down and start over.
"Whatever we tried to do, it just didn't seem to ever work on Whitelock Street," said City Council President Mary Pat Clarke.
The city housing department is accepting bids from developers for a combination of private housing and businesses. What the agency won't take is carryout restaurants, drug testing or rehabilitation centers, any place selling liquor, or halfway houses.
"I just hope they don't take as long to build the block up as they did to tear it down," said Ronald Thompson, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1958.
Residents such as Mr. Thompson, who remember the glory days of Zurosky's meat market, G-Cleft Records, Montgomery's Barber Shop and Jerry Cohen's variety store, are eager to see business return, but finding merchants willing to take a chance on Whitelock Street may prove difficult.
Built in the first years of the 20th century, the 900 block of Whitelock St. percolated for decades as the Main Street of Reservoir Hill, a sprawling community of stately townhouses and about 8,500 residents between the Jones Falls Expressway and Druid Hill Park.
Where the Herling Brothers once delivered kosher meat to your door by bicycle, drug touts now direct a steady stream of customers from all over the city to supplies of cocaine and heroin.
"There aren't a lot of developers beating down the door to put up commercial buildings on Whitelock Street," said David Elam, a recently departed housing official.
The south side of the block came down in August, leaving rubble and bulldozers beyond the end of Tommy Composto's piano.
The north side is expected to tumble next month. When it does, St. Francis Center at 936 Whitelock St. will go down with it, along with the next-door dental office it spawned to serve the working class and poor.
Goodbye to a home
When St. Francis and its rough basement chapel go, Tom Composto will say goodbye to the only real home he has known since leaving his mother and father to enter the seminary.
"St. Francis has paid attention to the ordinary, everyday people," he said. "All the people who've helped over the years have added to it, but it's hard to find people who don't quit after awhile."
You could call him stubborn.
Hard-headed would not be too harsh.
"Or you could call me dedicated," he said. "I'm combative because I've been hurt personally by higher-ups in public service or church service who wouldn't do what they dedicated themselves to doing. Most of them just want to climb. So many people have used this neighborhood as their social laboratory, and then they leave."
Although Mr. Composto is losing his home, a deal with the city gave him another one around the corner, at 2405 Linden Ave., for $500. It is something of a wreck, but he intends to fix it up and install a new chapel with $71,500 a judge awarded as compensation from the city for the taking of 934 and 936 Whitelock St.
His decision to stay is a renewal of his original commitment to Whitelock Street, even if some days that commitment doesn't go much beyond smiling and saying hello to a child who must navigate around gangs of drug dealers on the way to school.
"We've tried to be a voice for the marginal people of this neighborhood, to let them know that somebody gave a damn about them and cared enough to stay," he said.
The day Tom Composto first pulled up to Whitelock Street -- back in the days when Reservoir Hill was the darling of young Catholics enamored of social justice -- a large, skeptical resident stuck his face into the seminarian's car window.
He demanded: "Are you a priest?"
Pointing to the St. Francis Center, the man asked: "You going in there?"
And then: "You going to go away as soon as we get to know you?"
Mr. Composto remembers answering: "It's not my style to hit and run."
He was 29 then, less than a year from his ordination in his native New York. He's 56 now, with a Don Quixote belt buckle and hair gone to silver.
Expelled by Jesuits
Although the Jesuits expelled him in 1990 and he has no authority in the Archdiocese of Baltimore to work as a priest, the sacrament of Holy Orders asserts once a priest, always a priest, so he remains "Father Tom" to himself and the neighborhood. The third vow of the Jesuits, after poverty and chastity, is obedience.
It is a virtue that does not lay easy on the temper and savvy of the Brooklyn-born Mr. Composto, an excitable man who doesn't flinch when drug dealers curse him out and isn't above using similar language in his chapel when something upsets him.
"I'm living in some turmoil right now," he said. "Every time I go outside, there's a new set of drug dealers on the street. They look at me and say: '[Expletive] you.' "
When Baltimore tried to take his house and the one next door for a total of $45,000 -- the way they took the rest of the 900 block of Whitelock St. with urban renewal legislation passed in 1972 -- Mr. Composto called his old friend Harold Glaser, a well-known local attorney who made his mark defending drug lords.
Trying the case pro bono, Mr. Glaser wound up winning Mr. Composto an additional $26,500 in a lawsuit that made the priest the last resident on the block.
"I think he's the Lone Ranger by personality," said the Rev. Robert Kearns, the pastor of St. Peter Claver parish. "Ecclesiastically, he's in no man's land because he has no [church] credentials and he's working in a tough, tough, tough area. I don't care who you are, you better be paying attention when you go to Whitelock Street."
His Jesuit superiors arrived at the St. Francis Neighborhood Center in 1990 to demand that Mr. Composto return to the order's New York province. He said his work was in Reservoir Hill and refused.
His superiors gave their regrets and said their goodbyes, and the Society of Jesus took its leave of Whitelock Street and Tom Composto.
*
Not much goes on at the St. Francis Neighborhood Center these days.
It has been that way for several years.
"I've got a 4,000-book library that used to be available to the community, back when I trusted them to come in my house. You can't trust a drug user," said Mr. Composto, who closed a summer Bible school two years ago, he said, because parents were afraid to send their children to Whitelock Street.
Mr. Composto celebrates Mass for a handful of people at 11 a.m. every Sunday; Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous groups meet in the chapel a few times a week; and every now and then a funeral is held.
At John Taylor's dental office next door -- where about 10,000 people have had their teeth fixed since 1972 at prices far below commercial rates -- clients continue to show up on Wednesday afternoons.
Although Dr. Taylor's mobile service to invalids and shut-ins will continue, the Whitelock office will close in deference to the looming wrecking ball.
'A feisty guy'
"When you've got drugs, you don't need any other factors to kill a neighborhood," said a man who grew up on Whitelock Street and comes back only to have his teeth fixed. "Everything else tumbles down behind drugs."
An old friend of Mr. Composto's -- an attorney involved in charity work who asked not to be identified -- admires the mission's longevity but questions its effectiveness.
"Why hasn't the center flourished more than it has? It takes a feisty guy to live in that neighborhood, but I think Tom creates as many enemies as he has friends," the friend said. "Why do certain do-gooders attract volunteers and dollars and others don't? He hasn't made much progress compared to what other martyrs have done in the city."
It wasn't always this way.
"I knew Tommy best when he was part of the beautiful chaos of that house," said Joseph Healy, who arrived as a Jesuit seminarian in 1967 and put in about three years at the center before leaving his order to marry a woman he had met in the neighborhood.
"We tried to live the way the neighbors were living, but we weren't kidding ourselves; our mentality wasn't poor. Once you realize you can walk away from it any time you want, you're not sharing poverty."
Now director of international programs for Loyola College, Mr. Healy continues to use St. Francis for dental work and remembers the project as a party with its heart in the right place.
"We were open until midnight, and every night we always had a dozen people for dinner. It was happening, it was fun, and we were young. What did we know? We were having a ball and hopefully helping someone."
Having a ball ranged from helping families get heat for the winter to putting on clerical collars to testify on behalf of youths in trouble with police.
Leased for about $100 a month, the St. Francis Neighborhood Center opened in 1965 as an extension of St. Peter Claver on Fremont Avenue. The idea of former Jesuit and anti-war activist Philip Berrigan, it was an attempt to introduce "storefront Catholicism" to a neighborhood with no parish of its own. As Mr. Berrigan got deeper and deeper into the anti-Vietnam War movement, other seminarians took over.
"I didn't think any of us had a plan to stay there the rest of our lives," said Mr. Healy. "We were playing it by ear."
Brendan Walsh became the center's first full-time resident in 1967.
"Every Saturday, the nuns came in and did some sort of teaching and lunch program with children," said Mr. Walsh, who, with his wife, Willa Bickham, has operated the Viva House soup kitchen on Mount Street for the past quarter-century. "It was simple hospitality. As the war heated up, we used the place as an anti-draft board."
Asked how Viva House is able to attract dozens of volunteers who helped serve 37,000 free meals last year in a ghetto nearly as desperate as Whitelock Street, Mr. Walsh said, "Good work and goodwill go hand-in-hand."
Perhaps the brightest moment of the St. Francis project was the Ralph Young School for Boys, a free, private junior high for inner-city youths staffed by Jesuits and neighborhood volunteers. It lasted about five years until federal Model Cities money evaporated.
"We never followed up to find out what happened to the kids we educated," said Joe Healy. "How did they end up? I don't know."
Ask Tom Composto to name one youngster who fought his or her way out of the neighborhood and you get the same answer.
As bad as things might have been in the 1960s, they are worse now.
According to the police homicide unit, there have been at least 10 homicides on or around the block in as many years, including the still unsolved 1988 slaying of 11-year-old Latonya Wallace.
The Police Department's escape and apprehension squad is frequently looking for fugitives there. Last year, a man robbed a liquor store with a device he claimed was a bomb, and the drug dealing is entrenched and blatant.
"Looking back to 30 years ago, it seems inevitable now that if anyplace was going to become a crack haven, it would be Whitelock Street," said Ed Sommerfeldt, a Coppin State College math professor who, with Mr. Composto, was part of the last wave of Jesuit seminarians who descended on the neighborhood in the late 1960s. "You could argue that Tommy doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. But you could also argue that things could have been a lot worse without him."
'Diminishing returns'
Mr. Composto said the reality of Whitelock Street may constitute a record of "diminishing returns," yet he continues to see his mere presence as his greatest achievement.
"I give what I can give by living here," he said. "I'm less naive than I used to be, so I get more discouraged. I see all these people hurting and I get mad that I can't pass a miracle.
"The dealers call me the [expletive] preacher up the street, but I'm the one they come to when they need to talk," he said. "I tell them, 'You got talent, you got brains -- you must have brains or you'd be dead by now. But you've got no friends, and at the end of the day, you can't even say you've done a good job.'
"I tell them, 'Whitelock Street is the [worst place in] Baltimore, and you're going to be here for the rest of your [expletive] life, as long as that lasts.'"
The same could be said of Thomas F. Composto.