An article in yesterday's editions of The Sun misstated the background of Dave Johnson, an IBM field engineer. Johnson said that, as a teen-ager in the South Bronx, he was a runner for criminal organization, but he said he never sold drugs.
The Sun regrets the error.
Growing up, finding trouble, going to jail, Alonzo Brown always knew he was a businessman. He had a paper route, owned a candy cart, and made a living selling drugs for a few years -- all in his "hometown," the South Baltimore neighborhood of Cherry Hill.
"Even when I made mistakes in my life, I was always thinking about business," he says. "Business was always something good about me. To get a chance to be an entrepreneur again, that's the chance I've been waiting for."
This fall, Brown, 33, will open a new business in Cherry Hill and, perhaps, a new chapter in his life there. "Bird-33," as Brown has named his athletic shoe and apparel franchise, is being billed as a prime attraction of the neighborhood's refurbished shopping center.
Brown's new business also represents a triumph against long odds -- not only for the store's proprietor but also for Catholic Charities, which bought the failing shopping center for $1.1 million in January 1997.
That purchase, a bold move by a nonprofit charity into the for-profit world of commercial development, has been followed by $5.5 million in reconstruction.
The lofty goals established by Catholic Charities, and the nonprofit community group it created to manage the shopping center, make this one of the most ambitious projects attempted in a residential Baltimore neighborhood.
The aim is to transform an isolated south city area of 12,000 residents, long dominated by a public housing project, into a mecca for working-class blacks.
The shopping center to be run by the Cherry Hill Town Center Inc., backers believe, will bring new visitors and potential homeowners into a neighborhood with a tough reputation.
It will keep residents' shopping dollars -- often spent in West Baltimore or the suburbs -- in Cherry Hill. And it will provide retail space for a new generation of home-grown entrepreneurs.
But local politicians and businessmen here and in Newark, N.J. -- site of a successful inner-city shopping center on which the Cherry Hill project is based -- have expressed doubts, particularly about finding local residents who can build small businesses.
"I really hope people like Mr. Brown will succeed," said Sixth District City Councilman Melvin L. Stukes, a Cherry Hill resident. "But I don't know if a shoe store can be supported in the long term by a community of fewer than 15,000 people. I want it to work. I don't know that it can."
Early occupancy figures for the shopping center have been encouraging. Ninety-five percent of the space in the 50,000-square-foot complex is leased. Of the 14 retailers, 12 are owned or operated by African-Americans.
And nine will be run by current or former Cherry Hill residents. Among these entrepreneurs are Brown; Melvin C. Davis III, owner of the new laundromat; and Wendell S. Jones, 34, a Cherry Hill native who will operate the Subway and Mama Ilardo's franchises in the new food court.
"The commitment of money to this shopping center is amazing," says Jones. "And I think a lot of us feel a heavy responsibility to ourselves and to our friends and family to succeed. We want this to be a success story."
Overcoming bad choices
Thus far, there is no greater success story than Alonzo Brown's tale of bad choices, perseverance and an obsession with a Boston basketball star.
Born in New Jersey, the fifth of six children, Brown was 13 when his mother moved the family to public housing in the 3400 block of Spelman Road. Often a cut-up in school, Brown was a smart, articulate teen-ager at home who was serious about saving and making money, his family says.
After graduating from Southern High School, he bought a bus and sold candy out of it in Cherry Hill. The venture added to his renown in the neighborhood.
Folks called him Lonnie or "Bird," testimony to his devotion to Boston Celtics forward Larry Bird, a life-size picture of whom Brown kept on his bedroom door.
"Oh, my goodness. He just loved to watch that man play basketball, when everyone else preferred Michael Jordan," recalls his mother, Julia Cheeks, now 58 and a cashier.
"Alonzo had such an independent spirit about him, I figured if he made it out of Cherry Hill alive, sooner or later he would succeed."
Brown left Cherry Hill, but not in the way his mother had hoped.
Lured by friends from the streets, and frustrated that his business instincts weren't carrying him further, Brown began selling drugs in the mid-1980s "and making a nice profit," he says.
He was arrested on drug manufacturing and distribution charges in 1989 and received a four-year prison sentence, records show.
"He had such spunk that he was a natural leader in the drug trade," says Dave Johnson, an IBM field engineer who became Brown's mentor and friend when he was on parole. "He was so well connected in Cherry Hill that everyone knew his name."
To shorten his sentence, Brown attended a Jessup boot camp as an alternative to prison and was paroled after six months, he says. Boot camp "let me know that I had hit rock bottom, and forced me to think about how I was going to make up to people what I had done," he says.
By the time he left boot camp, Brown was determined to open a business in Cherry Hill.
U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, then in the state legislature, met Brown in a boot camp "after-care" program and remembers "Alonzo telling me that he was going to use what had happened to him as a passport to lift up other people."
Engineer's introductions
Brown also got to know Johnson, a volunteer in the after-care program who had been the first black field engineer employed by IBM in Maryland. Johnson grew up in the South Bronx, where he says he was briefly a runner for a drug organization, and saw something of himself in Brown.
Together, they refined Brown's shoe store concept. Johnson, now 61, made introductions for his friend at the nonprofit Development Credit Fund and with a few prominent African-American businessmen.
"That fell on deaf ears. Alonzo was still on parole, and people didn't want to take the chance," says Johnson. "But he was terrifically patient and did not let his anger affect his dreams."
Instead, Brown got a job cleaning office buildings at night downtown. He later added a second job, a clerical post at the Baltimore Teachers Union.
When his parole ended in 1995, Brown, with the encouragement of neighborhood barber Alexander Foy, approached the shopping center's then-owner, A.R.T. Management, about opening a shoe store. But Brown found the rents too high.
Early last year, he read about Catholic Charities' acquisition and wrote a letter to Patrice Cromwell, a Catholic Charities board member. She wrote back, and Brown began laboring over a business plan for a franchise of FootStop, a minority-owned, Philadelphia-based chain.
Help from family, friends
He says he is in the final stages of arranging $130,000 in financing to get the store started. Family and friends are helping him with his personal contribution, which will include $3,500 from the income tax refund of his stepfather.
"It's hard enough to get people to give you money, even when you don't have a criminal record," says Brown. "People are putting their trust in me, and I've got to live up to that."
On a visit to his store's site at the shopping center, which is in the final stages of renovation, Brown is such a businesslike presence in a dress shirt that John Harris, an old friend, stops his car to tease him about it.
"How does it feel to be the next mayor?" Harris asks Brown.
The space that will hold Bird-33, about as big as your average Foot Locker, is empty, but Brown already knows how it will look when it opens in November. Women's shoes and apparel on one side, men's on the other, and a parquet floor -- just like Boston Garden -- down the middle.
His employees will be from the neighborhood, he says.
If the concept is successful, Brown would like to create his own chain of shoe and clothing stores in urban areas all over the East Coast.
"I'm 33 years old now, and Bird's number was 33, so this could be my year," says Brown. "I believe I'll be in business in Cherry Hill for the rest of my life."
Pub Date: 8/11/98