“I picked Memphis, Elvis Presley’s town,” he continues, shaking his head at the randomness of it all. Unlucky in Tennessee, he and his brother headed for Arkansas, then east, with five other Mexican buddies crammed into the station wagon, to Georgia and South Carolina. “We were day laborers, standing outside the 7-Eleven.”
Finally landing in Laurel, hired for Route 1 construction gigs, genuine opportunity arrived. “A lady showed up one day and said, ‘Hey guys, we want to get you worker’s permits,’” Ramos says. “We came in from the shadows.”
He and Carlos, now deceased, purchased a functional pickup truck and took English classes. In 1986, President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, providing amnesty and a path to citizenship. Four years later, Dry Wall and Painting by Ramos opened in Upper Fells Point at a time when Latino community barely registered a blip on Baltimore’s radar.
“When I came to Baltimore there were two Latino businesses on Broadway, La Botanica, a tiny, pharmacy/convenience store, La Internationale, a grocery/discount store,” Ramos says. “Since 1990, we did a lot of construction work.”
Married at St. Michael’s Church (a longtime home for Baltimore Latinos before it was closed due to age) he bought his first home at 17 St. Ann St. with a personal loan for the down payment from a church deacon. Eventually, Ramos bought 10 buildings, including the one at 129 S. Broadway that houses Arcos.
Recycling heavy beams and hardwood from Fells Point and Canton homes, pews and frosted glass from a Washington, D.C. church that he rehabbed, Ramos spent four years crafting the bar, tables, chairs, doors and patio inside his restaurant. He added authentic Talavera tiles, Mexican artifacts and photographs, finished the original brick interior, and launched Arcos for Cinco de Mayo in 2005.
Today, Ramos has four children, including a daughter at Dickinson College. He’s served on the Governor’s Hispanic Affairs Commission, as president of Baltimore City’s Hispanic Business Association and as part of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s transition team. He’s hosted events for Gov. Martin O’Malley, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Rawlings-Blake and Odette Ramos, who ran for city council this year.
“Do you know what Arcos means?” Ramos asks. “Arches. Arches connect two points. I wanted to bring a little bit of culture, food and ambience of Mexico to Baltimore. “I saw the potential and fell love with in Baltimore,” he continues. “Looking down from Johns Hopkins to Fells Point, I could see the possibilities. But on Broadway there was prostitution, crime and drugs [in the 90s]. You couldn’t walk the street at night. Now, we call it Latino town or Spanish town and everybody sees what I saw.”
Pigtown
Washington Boulevard
July 12, 2012
11. Slumlord Justice
Carol Ott had enough. “Maybe I woke up on the wrong side of bed that morning,” she says. “I don’t know exactly what pushed me over the edge.”
For years, the feisty, 5-foot-1, mother of two dutifully attended Pigtown neighborhood meetings. Each time, the same topic—the shuttered shopping center at the intersection of Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards—came up. It was bad enough that the community’s grocery store had departed. Now, across the street from the Welcome to Pigtown mural at the Southwest Baltimore neighborhood’s gateway, the abandoned shopping center had degenerated into an open-air drug market and the portico alongside the long-gone Save-a-Lot, for all intents and purposes, had become a homeless camp.
“When I moved there in 2000, the grocery store was still open, but it closed several years later and became an eyesore, garbage strewn everywhere,” Ott recalls in the living room of her rowhouse on a recent evening. “Nobody was maintaining it. A doctor and his business partners, including at least one other physician, owned it, and were doing nothing to improve it. Apparently, they wanted an extraordinary amount of money for the property and, meanwhile, the drug activity kept up.”
Frustrated at another community meeting one night—“we had like five different neighborhood groups then, and I went to most of them”—Ott stood up and walked out, swearing she was done with meetings.
“There’s got to be a better way of dealing with this,” she remembers thinking. “It was typical of neighborhood meetings anywhere, city or suburbs, doesn’t matter. Same people, same complaints, nobody steps up. I figured I’d force the shopping center owners’ hand and make it public on the Internet.”
Not long after reaching her boiling point in late 2008, Ott launched her still-active, slightly infamous Wordpress blog—Baltimore Slumlord Watch. The blog, which includes pictures Ott takes of abandoned properties as well as “reader-submitted” photos of abandoned homes, provides information on the legal history and housing violations of blighted properties, their impact on the surrounding neighborhood, contact information for local elected officials, and the names and addresses of negligent owners. It’s direct, data-base researched, and at times, just a bit snarky, like Ott, who typically goes vacant-house hunting in jeans and bright red Converse high tops, generally toting a cellphone camera—and box cutter, for protection. It’s not a coincidence, she notes, that vacant homes attract crime. (Until this story, Ott maintained her anonymity as the person behind Baltimore Slumlord Watch, partly for fear of retribution toward her family.)
Her initial post outed the Timonium doctor listed as the resident agent for the company that owned the then-vacant Pigtown shopping center and listed the hospital where he had surgical privileges. From there, the plan to goad one irresponsible landlord into accountability grew into a citywide housing resource. Ott regularly posts updates on Baltimore issues like lead paint and fire-department station closings, as well as vacant housing efforts in other cities.
Today, Baltimore Slumlord Watch, with 12,000-15,000 hits in a month, possesses genuine social media clout. “Friends” and “followers” on Facebook and Twitter include City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young, Baltimore City Del. Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., and Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, among other politicos, not to mention numerous housing advocates and journalists. Not all are necessarily fans, however; one local columnist and talk-show host, Ott says, blocked her Twitter account after describing the blog as a negative portrayal of Baltimore.
E-mails from property owners, unsurprisingly, are nasty, but generally at least threaten legal action, not physical harm. “I get, ‘Dear Mr. Slanderer,’ a lot,” Ott says with a laugh. “I’m like, if you’re going to threaten me, at least get the legal term right if you want me to take you seriously. It would be libel. Then again, I’m very careful.”
(Postscript: In 2018, Carol Ott transitoned to a job with the Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland, where she serves as the director of tenant advocacy.)
Butcher’s Hill
East Fayette Street
Aug. 16, 2012
12. A Dream Un-deferred
Gustavo Andrade lifts up a megaphone and asks several hundred Latino students and young adults outside East Baltimore’s CASA de Maryland an important question. “He vivido en Estados Unidos de América salir por mas de seis meses des del el 15 de junio de 2007? (Have you lived in the U.S., since 2007 without leaving for more than six months?)”
Andrade, a senior CASA organizer, then asks those in line if they have a high school diploma, GED, or are enrolled in school or a career-training program. Finally, “Estuve presente en EE.UU. el 15 de junio de 2012?” (Were you present in the United States June 15, 2012?)
That last day, June 15, is significant because it’s the day President Obama signed the Deferred