Carl Patty and Tom Davies live only a few blocks from each other on the narrow streets of Annapolis' Historic District, but the gulf between them could be miles.
Mr. Patty is helping to start the Historic District Association, a neighborhood group he hopes will replace the decades-old Ward One Residents Association, led by Mr. Davies. His group would be more friendly to restaurateurs and the tourist industry than the old one, he said.
"The Ward One Residents Association has some people entrenched in there for a long time, and they're of a one-track mind against development," said Mr. Patty, whose group is holding its first meeting Wednesday at City Hall.
Mr. Davies wouldn't speak on behalf of his association, but wondered if the new group has been organized by business leaders -- using a few historic district residents as a cover -- to lobby for restaurant owners and shopkeepers.
"People who have businesses clearly have a stronger vested interest in change, and they have money and they're doing it as a job, not as a homeowner," said Mr. Davies, who has lived in Annapolis for 15 years.
The new group, which would embrace local business owners, began to take shape last month when more than 25 business owners met with Historic District residents.
"These young businessmen, they cleaned up City Dock and got people to come here," Mr. Patty said. "Rather than alienate these people, you've got to get them on your side. They know how to make this town grow because they built it."
But Mr. Davies wondered about the group's plans. "What's their agenda anyway? Are they forming this group just to attack the Ward One Residents Association?"
Mr. Patty, who has lived in Annapolis for three years, said he is angered by much of the city's preservationist establishment. The Historic District Commission (HDC), for example, exercises too much control over downtown residents, he complained.
"The guys across the street wanted to put new brick on their driveway, but they wanted to lay it in a herringbone pattern and the Historic District Commission said they couldn't, they said it had to be straight," he said. "That's the attitude here. You can't put your property the way you want it, the way you think it's most attractive."
Mr. Patty, an artist who lives with his wife and three English bulldogs in a two-story townhouse on East Street, said his group would lobby to make the commission's review process "more reasonable."
But critics say Mr. Patty and many of his allies are relative newcomers to Annapolis, a town where historic buildings and street signs bear the family names of people who still live there.
"Carl Patty? I don't believe I know this gentleman. How long has he lived here?" asked Joan Kaplan, an HDC member who has lived in town for three decades.
Ms. Kaplan, who left the Ward One association after city officials accused the HDC of being too cozy with the group, said Annapolis has been able to handle the competing demands of business owners and Historic District residents until recently.
"All of a sudden everybody wants to satisfy their own individual interests," she said. "Pretty soon we'll have so many organizations, everybody will be represented individually. It's so much more divisive."
With the addition of the new neighborhood group lobbying the City Council on Historic District issues, the debate is likely to get even more complicated.
"Consider this the opening shot of a civil war downtown between two formal groups who claim to represent the interests of historic downtown residents," said 5th Ward Alderman Carl O. Snowden.