Billy Warsaw awakened to the sound of rattling glass and focused his one good eye on the swaying light fixture above his bed. Even before his two stepsons came running into the bedroom, he knew something was terribly wrong.
"Muriel!" Warsaw yelled for his wife. "Get up, girl! Something is going on outside!"
Warsaw rolled out of bed and hobbled to the window with all the speed he could muster from his 64-year-old frame -- just in time to see the big yellow crane boom sweep by and annihilate a row of abandoned houses across the narrow divide of Port Street.
"Hold it, hold it, hold it!" his wife yelled, as she ran out the front door in her bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. "You're not gonna knock down this house with us in it, are you?"
Three months later, the Warsaws are the only family left in the shattered 1100 block of N. Port St. in East Baltimore.
They reside in a battered brick box crawling with vermin at the end of an alley pocked with craters and strewn with debris. Heroin addicts skulk across the blacked-out terrain at night.
By day, children from nearby Dr. Rayner Browne Elementary School play in rubble bristling with syringes.
"It's what I imagine hell would look like," says Muriel Warsaw, 50. "It's like living in hell."
Caught in the whirlpool of an epic struggle between Baltimore's biggest low-rent landlord and a cadre of young city housing lawyers intent on harpooning negligent property owners,the Warsaws are guppies in this bleakest of neighborhood tales.
At the helm stands Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III, who is embarking on one of the largest demolition campaigns in city history as a last-ditch effort to clear Baltimore of about 40,000 derelict dwellings -- a wall of empty rowhouses 90 miles long.
In his path bobs Stanley Roch-kind, whose portfolio of more than 1,000 units makes him the biggest whale at the bottom of the housing pool and the largest private owner of vacant properties in the city, housing lawyers say.
Part banker, part landlord and part folk hero, he is a man of almost mythical stature in the city's poorest quarters -- benefactor, father-confessor and scourge all rolled into one.
Entangled in the complex legal fight between the city and Roch-kind's dozens of corporations are people such as the Warsaws and 350 elementary school children besieged in a slum neighborhood that local residents call "Zombieland" -- a decades-old narcotics market.
For Rochkind owns Port Street, or most of it, court records show. And parts of Biddle. And some of Bradford. And a few addresses on Chase.
The little brick schoolhouse is surrounded by Rochkind's holdings. For residents and school officials desperate to lift the pall that hangs over this part of the city, he is the man to see.
Rent is in the mail
Rochkind stands at the corner of Biddle and Port streets in a rumpled white shirt, black mourning suit and fedora, his arms open wide, the picture of gray-bearded beneficence.
"Mr. Stanley!" one woman calls from her second-floor window. "The rent is in the mail."
"How you doin', Mr. Stanley?" a passing man asks, lightly patting the landlord's back.
"What's up, Mr. Stanley?" a teen-age boy calls from the other side of Biddle.
Says Rochkind: "Do you hear that? They love me! These are my people. I'm the only guy in this whole rotten city who is trying to help the neighborhoods.
"I get no loans, no grants, no subsidies -- not a nickel -- to help me do any of this. And I have to deal with the drugs, the crime, the theft, the vandalism. Those are not things I created.
"But all I'm getting is abuse from the housing department."
Rochkind then leads a tour of his neighborhood, pointing with disgust at the flooded foundations of adjoining houses demolished by the city, one of which is leaking into the basement of a unit next door that he just repaired for $30,000 under a court order.
That order, issued in May, requires Rochkind, his partners and subsidiary companies to repair or demolish 150 houses by the year 2000 or face contempt-of-court charges. And it represents a turning point in his long, uneasy relationship with the city.
Accustomed to years of negotiating deficiency notices and neighborhood complaints with officials of the Department of Housing and Community Development, Roch-kind bitterly contends that he is being shut out of City Hall.
Commissioner Henson, for example, has refused to meet with him since taking office in 1993.
Says Henson: "For me to meet with him would be a waste of my time and the taxpayers' time. This is a man who, literally, was used to getting his own way around here. And talking to him over the years has accomplished absolutely nothing. Those days are over."
Instead, Rochkind's properties have begun to show up on demolition lists, and his name is being stamped onto lawsuits with increasing regularity. In addition, records show, he has more than 230 outstanding violation notices.
Michael Seipp is director of the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition, a nonprofit group charged with tearing down 1,000 slum dwellings in East Baltimore, usually by buying out private owners. But like the housing department, Seipp is refusing to deal with Rochkind.
"You can disagree with this, but there's a principle involved here," Seipp says. "Stanley and his companies are among the worst landlords in the city. They know the procedures and the law so well, and they employ so many lawyers, that they have managed to hold off enforcement on even their worst properties for years.
"A landlord who has sucked so much out of the community should not now be rewarded. That's a socially responsible position to take. It's morally correct. And, in this case, it feels like justice to a whole lot of people."
'Renovating, re-renovating'
Says Rochkind: "That's just plain wrong. I have put hundreds of thousands of dollars into renovating and re-renovating, only to lose it all when these neighborhoods turned sour. Do these people have any idea how hard it is to make that money back when most of my tenants are paying $250 a month rent -- or not paying at all?"
On paper, Rochkind's 150 problem houses were little more than numbers two years ago -- columns of addresses labeled "Exhibit A, B, C and D." Among them were long stretches of houses on Bradford, Castle, Chapel, Dallas and Port in and around the neighborhood of Rayner Browne Elementary.
The lists were among the first to land on the desk of Denise M. Duval after she was recruited by Henson to head a beefed-up legal office last year in preparation for his onslaught against blighted houses.
All had some connection to Roch-kind, his partners or his companies.
At a glance, the 1100 block of Port St. looked worst. Fifteen vacant properties, carrying unanswered complaints dating back as far as 1991. Duval got in her car and drove to East Baltimore to confirm her suspicions.
"It was just devastated," she said. "Some of them were falling into the street. Some had caved-in roofs. They were full of rats and addicts, you name it.
"It was depressing. And the neighbors around there were screaming for help."
So Duval sued Rochkind.
And when he tried to sell the properties to two investors, she sued them too.
And then she sued all the corporations involved.
By the time she was done, court records show, 47 defendants had been dragged into court for a yearlong battle that pitted the diminutive 33-year-old housing attorney against at least a dozen lawyers from four downtown firms.
Meanwhile, in the housing department's construction office, the 1100 block of N. Port St. had been added to the city's demolition list -- even as negotiations were under way in court to determine their fate.
But when the list was sent to the Department of Public Works for disposal by city wrecking crews, little note was made of the fact that there was still at least one family living on the block.
The job of moving the Warsaws had fallen to the housing department's Relocation Office, which had run into a roadblock.
The money to move the family would come from a federal housing fund, but the Warsaws had to move before they could get the money.
And the Warsaws, living on about $700 a month in Social Security disability payments, didn't have the money to move.
Last spring, the mix-ups converged with near-disastrous results when Rochkind ended the first round in what is expected to be a marathon bout of court fights as Henson's demolition campaign gains momentum.
In agreeing to settle the dispute over the 150 slum houses, he cleared the way for Port Street to be torn down -- while the Warsaws were still living there, rent-free, courtesy of Rochkind.
"My God!" Muriel Warsaw recalls the crane operator saying after she ran screaming from her house in July. "There isn't supposed to be anybody living here. How could anybody live here?"
Forced to work around the stranded family, city crews left five crumbling houses standing amid the resulting moonscape -- to keep "Stanley's place from falling down around their ears," Duval says -- as mice and roaches fled the wreckage for the safety of the Warsaws' home.
For the family, the arc of the wrecking ball came late in lives that have seen nothing but want and trauma.
When they moved into 1119 N. Port St. 21 years ago, the house and the block were already in bad shape. But the price was right: $200 a month bought a leaky roof over their heads, five cramped rooms and an ancient iron furnace in the basement that guzzled oil and spewed soot, giving the walls their grayish-yellow patina.
It was more than they had dared to hope for.
Cycle of poverty
Muriel was the second of nine children born to an impoverished East Baltimore family. By age 19, she had two of her own -- twin boys, both disabled, one of them blind. Jerome and Jerry have lived with her ever since, defining her existence for better and worse for the past 31 years.
Billy was working as a hospital janitor then, the latest in a long string of jobs, most consisting of hard labor. Before that, he dug ditches for the city water department and considered himself lucky to have a job.
Blinded in his left eye in a boyhood bow-and-arrow accident, Billy Warsaw failed miserably in school and went on to a brief career in crime as a teen-ager that landed him in jails and detention centers for five years.
Convictions for larceny, robbery and heroin dealing left him all but unemployable by the time he was 22. "I was young and stupid then," he says. "Now, I'm just old and sick."
The irony of his current state is not lost on him.
An early participant in the neighborhood narcotics trade 40 years ago, he now finds himself living with the results in a blighted, bullet-scarred enclave where every alley and abandoned shell bears the blood, vials and needles that are the artifacts of the addict culture.
City health officials estimate that at least one out of every four people who live here is strung out on dope. Local residents say that's an optimistic view.
"Who knew then that it would lead to all this?" Billy Warsaw says, dragging on a cut-rate cigarette that isn't helping his heart condition any.
"It wasn't something we thought about when we were doing it as kids, but I damn sure think about it now. I been paying for it all my life."
On Nov. 21, 1981, Billy Warsaw married Muriel Branch in the tiny living room of the house on Port Street, further binding their memories to a rented cracker box on a block that was verging even then on collapse.
One by one, the old folks died off -- including Billy's mother, who passed away two doors down at 1115 N. Port St. in 1984 -- and they were being replaced by a younger, more aggressive class of neighbors.
Loud music blared into the night. Police came and went. And Billy thought it wise to buy a shotgun, which he has kept behind his chipped and peeling bedroom door ever since.
"I can't see so good no more," he says. "But with a shotgun you don't need to see so good."
Adds Muriel: "All we want now is to get out of here, to live someplace where you don't need a shotgun to feel safe."
Responding to inquiries from The Sun on Thursday afternoon, the housing department vowed to relocate the Warsaws soon and to make the 1100 block of N. Port St. safe for the children from Rayner Browne by finishing the aborted demolition.
"It's a dire situation, everyone here is clear about that," said housing spokesman Zack Germroth.
Pub Date: 10/18/98