THE CALLER, A WOMAN named Jan Danforth, apologized for taking "a kid's-eye view" of an environmental crisis that everyone assured her was more complicated.

She needn't have apologized. It's not kids who have made a mess of nature.

The issues are many: billboards, the old swimming hole, a new housing proposal, the Northern District police station, Loyola College, Children's Hospital, BGE, the MTA.

If you looked at them piecemeal, over time -- the way Baltimore always looked at them -- maybe it didn't seem such a crisis.

But if you saw it, like Danforth, from the standpoint of the Woodberry neighborhood where you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and returned in 1997, it has been an assault on everything you held dear.

Especially Woodberry's woods, in which it is still possible to walk, amazingly, after a couple centuries of urbanization, along kids' trails and paths a lot of the way from Druid Hill Park, north to Cold Spring Lane.

She wasn't sure what to do, Danforth said, so she started taking anyone who would listen on walks -- with kids along whenever possible.

Setting forth in a cold northeaster, Danforth is hatless, oblivious to the slants of rain. She plunges into Druid Hill Park, across the street from her mom's rowhouse, pointing out a curious series of large, circular stone-walled depressions.

Until the city let them go to save on water bills a few decades back, these were ponds, ringed by weeping willows.

They were jewels of the park and places where Woodberry kids ice-skated and Danforth exercised her pet duck. Now, thickets of trees have claimed them. A park master plan includes restoration, but who knows when money will be there.

You can change worlds by walking a few blocks in a city. Now we're in struggling Park Heights, where Parks Sausage awaits a new owner.

Where there are warehouses now, Danforth recalls an arbor walk, fine trees and the old Carlins amusement park and a roller rink. It was not idyllic even then. Integration brought fights, and she stopped going skating.

Along Greenspring Avenue is an elementary school, Martin Luther King, built with no playground. Kids have been known to roll down a steep slope -- their only open space -- to the busy street.

At Children's Hospital off Greenspring, Danforth gets visibly upset. Struggling financially, the facility has cut "several hundred" fine oaks and beeches for expansion, she says.

That is just Phase One of three construction stages. Children's has a state-approved "forest conservation" plan that lets it cut all but about 10 acres of its 27-acre forest without replanting. The fact that it has agreed to preserve about 12 acres is, ironically, "a plus," says Beth Strommen, a city environmental planner.

We pass more warehouses where kids used to swing from trees and ride bikes on trails and attend neighborhood festivals. A current ugly little playground is all asphalt and concrete.

An old quarry that used to be a swimming hole became a landfill, from whose slopes methane seeps and old tires "migrate" constantly to the surface.

But Loyola College, cramped for space over by Guilford and Homeland, is proposing to buy land adjacent to the landfill from the city for four athletic fields -- three with artificial turf -- and a 5,000-seat stadium. Even here, a scruffy woods is taking over the slopes.

In the forest on Woodberry's northern end, residents are fighting a city proposal to bulldoze trees for 40 housing units. In the same area, Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. plans to remove an old gas storage tank so the Mass Transit Administration can pave a 500-car parking lot for light rail commuters.

The Northern District police station, under construction, rises from these same woods. With acres of existing buildings in need of rehab, and paved spaces crying for redevelopment, Baltimore bulldozed more scarce, urban green space.

Danforth and her neighbors have no illusions about what they're up against. They've spent years, and thousands of dollars, fighting to keep single billboards from Woodberry's border along the Jones Falls Expressway -- often losing.

But they have hopes. The community association has been revived. A neighborhood pride day got good response. Woodberry has a newsletter now. Last fall, thousands of people flocked to a festival, to hike and canoe along the Jones Falls through several city neighborhoods that border it.

Most important, they're seeking signatures (200 and climbing) on a forest stewardship plan that looks at Woodberry's woods as a whole -- as the city should have done, rather than pursuing the tax dollar from whatever project came along.

Danforth and her neighbors hope they can negotiate with Loyola, and persuade the city to be innovative with any proposed housing development.

One can only hope the city gets the message. Too much of what's being done in Woodberry's open spaces seems to be for anyone but those who live there.

The state, whose Smart Growth policy aims to refocus development into urban areas, should also pay heed. In Woodberry and elsewhere, Strommen says, it seems that development moving back into the city is wiping out the last urban forests, rather than redeveloping and reclaiming older buildings.

As even a kid could tell you, Woodberry's woods are as vital to that community's well-being as any public works project or edifice.

Pub Date: 3/05/99