Neighborhood Voices on the Red Line Route:
ESTELLE KENT

      If the Red Line means change for her west Baltimore neighborhood — an end to the drug abuse,  joblessness and poverty – then bring it on, says Estelle Kent.   

      This 54-year-old longtime community activist very much favors the Red Line transit project — which would send light rail cars right up the middle of Edmondson Avenue, not far from her house. The Red Line, she’s convinced, will bring development that would boost up her proud-but-challenged community. Kent has seen it steadily deteriorate, she said, since moving there from Calvert County in 1969.

     “Today, it’s nothing like it was then,” said Kent, vice president of the Lower Edmondson Village Community Association. “I hope it will become more safe for everyone around here, that it will be pretty. Right now the way it looks around here, I would not want to move here. The consensus in my neighborhood? They want to see change and they think the Red Line could bring it.”
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Neighborhood Voices on the Red Line Route:
BEN ROSENBERG
       Baltimore’s Red Line mass transit project has been Ben Rosenberg’s induction into civic engagement — and protest. An attorney, he spent years at a prominent law firm before he and three other guys went out on their own. He’s a litigator, which means he can be tied up for weeks in court; he’s raised three children and has been busy in recent years enjoying his three grandchildren. Five years ago, he and his wife left Ruxton for a town house with a harbor view in Canton.

      Until now, he says, “I never had the inclination or time to do something like this.”

      The “this” is Rosenberg’s activism against the MTA’s proposal to build a surface rail line through Canton. Read the rest of this entry »