The Way That I See It Is...: Evidentiary Facts about 1627 Eastern Ave Baltimore

I will add to this as new info comes to me. There is input in here from several other residents (current and former) of 1627 Eastern Avenue Baltimore City. Most of the evidence presented here is from my personal experiences and some is effectively revealed in videos I shot and have posted online. I was a photographer in the US Army 1969-71 on peaceful Okinawa. The fact to begin with is that if our elevator goes out again, we do not have keys to the two locked doors to the stairs at the far end of the building’s entranceway hall. If no one can be phoned upstairs - and it needs to be someone who can still walk down and up steps - any resident can be locked out due to another elevator failure. It has stopped working several times while I’ve been here, and a few weeks before I moved in the elevator had been down for more than a month. One resident made it down the stairs to go see her doctor, and she was kept in a hospital for that month. It was alleged to me that an elevator repair company was owed big money. This is about the worst aspect of how we residents can come and go in and out of the building.

Yesterday, I learned that water leaks from the roof of a 4th-floor apartment when it rains, requiring several containers to catch the water. The ceiling is about to collapse. Four unoccupied units there may also have water coming in from the leaking roof.

A resident told me about a basement door being unlocked for a long time and might still be unsecured. That man told me he walked down there one time and found pistol ammo laying on the floor, indicating that some homeless criminal was in our building armed with a firearm.

Then there is government web page info that a huge water bill for this building goes unpaid.

One woman said she went into throw her trash out and she told me, “A man was washing his ass in the sink. I told him I appreciate you keeping your ass clean but not cleaning it in here.”

Some months ago, the laundry room and trash area door was being locked in the evening and unlocked in the morning same time every day by a female resident, but then one evening a large, fierce and filthy (inside out) man who was preparing to sleep there all night told the lady that she was not going to convince him to exit the building then added the question of did she know he could rape her right then. That woman told the office about it and was asked did she call the police, and then that was it. Any call to the cops and that mean man who has access to the building may come back and brutally sexually assault and murder her.

Several years ago, a female resident answered a knock on her door, when a man said, "Maintenance!" She opened the door to see a knife pointing at her, then the shocked lady slammed the door shut.

A homeless guy once attacked a maintenance man, and luckily there were two other maintenance men in the building - including the first man's nephew - and it took the three of them to force the violent homeless man out of the building.

One time, several homeless men had cut the lock off the door to empty apartment, and they were there several weeks. I think it was four there when forced out, but only one was arrested and that was for theft from a store.

One weekend a resident went up and down both stairways and took evidential photos of crack smoking, iv drug use, cheap booze empties, and food container waste. Homeless have used the stairs to urinate and defecate on for years now.

Several months back, a resident had two men from City Councilman Zeke Cohen's team tour the building and those two fellows informed that resident that there was a work order on file from two or more years prior that demanded certain code violations be remedied, and there was a record of the job being signed off as done by someone, but the work had not been done.

A resident told me that sometime in the recent past a politician had said that the building will no longer be inspected by private contractors, and code enforcement activities will be performed by government inspectors. This is a federally subsidized apartment house, and our governemnt is not getting our monies' worth.

The rental agent Jean once replaced the name of the hier to a resident's life insurance policy with her name. About a year later, a new resident moved into the building and Jean started asking her if she had her finances straight, and do you have life insurance. That lady is no fool, and realized that Jean was up to no good. The offended life insurance owner is afraid to complain because Jean may put the good woman out.

I do not know of any resident who has always had their heat and air conditioning working. Neither my gas heat nor electric air conditioning ever worked for me. Months into me living here, BGE had to come and remove my gas meter because they said it was not working and they had no idea if I was using gas or not. At that point in time, I knew so much about the bad aspects of the building and its maintenance that I do not trust having gas run in through the old lines and fittings that might leak. Then there’s the horrible dangers of carbon monoxide poison in the air from incomplete combustion of the gas heater’s pilot light or main burner. I had to help with a situation up in Maine, back in 1969, where three men (died) and a boy (lived) suffered carbon dioxide poisoning from a crud-compromised gas-powered refrigerator back in the woods at the family’s camp.

The other bear hunting guide who worked for my uncle’s lodge was there when two dying men needed a four-wheel drive ride out to the main road to meet an ambulance; the two middle-aged brothers were projectile vomiting and defecting bloody messes in the back of the lodge’s pickup truck. They died there. My uncle and I rode out to wait by a float plane pilot’s place, and the coroner was unloading one body-bagged man from the float plane and also waiting for the other two who’d been declared deceased and coming out in the ambo. The other man I worked with had to deal with the bloody mess in the truck happening, so I took on my best place to help and drove the truck back to the lodge and cleaned out the back. I don’t want that kind of a scene to be me in my apartment horrifically dying alone.

Last year, for several weeks, I was in a nursing home. I live with steady pain from spinal injuries and arthritis (my knees go bone on bone) and it had me down a bit too much to take full care of myself. They had excellent physical therapy that helped me get back to moving around better and when I was about to be discharged, I looked at the recent usage on my BGE bill and saw it was above ten dollars a day without me being home. So as soon as I walked into my apartment again I checked to see what electric users were on, and it was only my refrigerator – which is about a fifty cents a day user. I made online and telephoned complaints to BGE requesting full investigation of my electric overcharge situation. I could not keep up with that over-the-top electric bill and was cut off from electric power for a time. In the months since my electric has been turned back on, I now average two dollars a day use.

There is an unrented apartment down the hall from me that is covered with years of dirt, dust, along with a massive number of mouse droppings that dries and turns to toxic dust in the air here. Then there is the horrific, massively moldy, mouse dirt-covered apartment down on the other side of the hall from the other mouse house (see video of Bruce's apartment in the post prior). Wiring is possibly compromised by mice chewing on the insulation. There is a lot of rot all through those apartments. Neither place had heat nor air conditioning for a long time nor hot water, so those systems need serious checking, maintenance and replacement. It’s gas heat, so that is another danger with a system that might have leaks coming on.

I stay deeply concerned for the safety of citizens using the first & second-floor Polish club during social events because the citizens who illegally enter the premises represent many arrests and decades of penitentiary time. One time when the elevator was not working, I was standing in the entranceway talking with a Polish club member when two homeless crackheads walked right in past us and up the stairs two levels. A few minutes later I had to walk up those steps and did indeed witness them smoking crack. I converse with homeless folks a lot, and some of them and I know each other. I don’t want any hard maneuvering to go down against them. It is incredible how widely and years-long the building I live in has been known amongst homeless drug addicts. It is wrong that they are allowed to become painfully adjusted to surviving another and another miserable night sleeping in the laundry room or on one of the two stairways of the old schoolhouse but then finally be prevented from ever doing it again. It will remain difficult to keep them out, but we residents need them kept out. The stairways are designed for a stream of kids walking up and another stream going down the stairs, with wide and roomy stairway landings that accomodate sleepy dopers. Desperate people in need of a place to consume hard drugs and/or crash-out are not opposed very much by anyone. Some of those unhoused people urinate, defecate (a three-week-old one lays dry right now), a few regurgitate, and all leave their foul wastes for someone else to clean up. All will want to do harm to any of us residents who oppose them being here, which puts us in danger of being violently attacked in this building or out in the neighborhood.

I fear having family and friends up to my place because if any homeless start trouble with them I might be forced to use my pepper spray, my legal edged or blunt weapons against the offender, and I possess no qualms about hurting or killing any attackers at anytime. Whether I be with people I care about or by myself.

I have worked several security guard jobs decades ago and I know that a 24hr uniformed security guard service should be begun. Take a table or desk out of the auditorium or wherever and at least one comfortable desk chair. There are the two bathrooms in the entrance, and an electric outlet across the hall, so that makes it good for a security post. The camera system needs replaced, and possibly be able to handle live feeds so the guard’s coworkers can watch for emergencies. Maybe by the guard’s laptop, tablet or cell phone. If anyone offensively goes at a guard, they need an instant 911 call made, and the homeless crack heads will try what they can to get by the guard, and some won’t want to take a no from anyone and really let loose verbally and or physically abusively towards the offended security personnel.

The right, fair and solid way to remedy the worst of the problem of easy entry to the place is to post a 24hr guard service in the entrance area with their back to the inside double doors. Whether it be with or without firearms is not within my ability to discern, that is for when seasoned 21st Century security pros come look the place over and learn the levels of danger. I am hoping the women and men who each take a shift there only need defensive spray & they do!, a stun device? a tactical pen, kubatons, any legal baton.

The 1627 Eastern Avenue security post is definitely a good post for people who only have to be 100% aware of who’s in the entranceway or outside the front doors. A guard can do on the internet or unconnected devices what is permitted by their company; speakers, head phones, ear pieces volume need be in line with safe awareness of sounds, and the spot where the guard will sit has solid walls and doors on each side and the rear and when I enter the area from outside and having my portable speaker playing from my Rollator the music really sounds louder and better defined. A guard can like the post better with low volume speaker clearly making the movie, sports game, music, web pages sound good enough to hear the spoken dialogues and parts of music. Having it any louder limits hearing things happening at or near the outside of the door. Also, it is absolutely pertinent that guards can easily, immediately, clearly speak with and hear anyone who comes in. The guard may not realize that the unknown person talking nicely to a resident as they walk in the door may be trying to sneak in to the upstairs. There are not many people going to be coming and going so guards will probably be on name known basis with the daily regulars. There will be individuals who try to come in as someone walks out or in and some outsiders will get themselves in to some degrees of good and/or bad conversation with a security guard.

Now is the time for free access to the homeless to be stopped. This causes so much trauma here to us residents that we’re often talking it over with each other, our various therapists and medical personnel. Multiple complaints have been given to politicians, city housing agencies, media, been posted on Facebook, housing advocates, and to the lawyer Richard Hackerman as a class action lawsuit on behalf of about eight of us residents against our landlord. We went to the lawyer’s office and signed the papers many months ago, but he does nothing. I can never forget when right after we signed, as he gathered our paperwork into one stack, he half-heartedly quipped something about now having to figure out how to go about that kind of case. He possessed no well-honed strategy because it is not his type of legal work. No experience in the ways of it. None.

I need to move to a healthy home of my own. My health situation requires part-time help with household chores and driving plus a service dog. I need to move out to the dry air of the West and have a small handicap-adapted house with a fenced yard. It’s getting more and more painful just walking between rooms in my small apartment. I suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury in April 2023. My anxiety and depression are making a muddy hell out of my very existence, and I am receiving medical help for all my disabilities.

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