On Appleton Street, where some houses are neatly landscaped out front with hostas and hydrangeas and others are boarded and vacant, news that a vacant rowhouse nearby collapsed yesterday triggered long-standing worries about encroaching blight.

Witnesses said they saw two men who suffered head, neck, arm and back injuries sitting on a stoop afterwards and that an ambulance took one of them away.

“A lot of these houses need to be taken down – the City needs to take them down,” said Mark Martin, 58, who lives in the unit block of Appleton. “It could have been you. It could have been your kid. An older person. It’s sickening.”

Police responded mid-morning by blocking off a portion of the street with caution tape, and prevented anyone from getting too close to 1925 Edmondson Avenue. The adjacent structure’s facade was still standing beside a pile of brick and debris that bystanders said came down with a loud “boom.”

“I just got off the bus and heard it – it was like someone dropped a car down from the sky,” said a man, who declined to give his name. Fire Department officials said they received a call about the collapse at about 10:25 a.m.

By early afternoon, workers with P&J Contracting Co. pulled up with an emergency demolition order, saying they would soon be razing 1925 and the two adjacent structures, 1923 and 1921 West Edmondson.

Spate of Rowhouse Collapses

The victim of a house collapse earlier this year in West Baltimore was not so lucky as the two men who walked away from yesterday’s.

On March 29, 69-year-old Thomas Lemmon was crushed by a house along North Payson Street that many said appeared to be leaning as though it could fall for quite a while. Lemmon was enjoying his daily routine of listening to music in his beloved Cadillac, when the brick rowhouse toppled onto him.

Days later, amid heavy winds, at least five vacant rowhouses in West Baltimore fell in and had to be demolished.

Since the fatal Payson Street collapse, the city has “undertaken more than 100 emergency demolitions – a five-fold increase over the amount we typically do in a year,” said Tania Baker, a spokeswoman for Baltimore Housing.

“We are actively working with an engineering firm to update our criteria for assessing emergency conditions,” she said.

Baker confirmed that the building that collapsed yesterday was city-owned and being marketed for sale through the Mayor’s Vacants to Value program, through which the Mayor and city government try to renovate a number of vacant houses in the hopes of revitalizing neighborhoods.

Even though Baker said the house was city-owned, the database on the State Department of Assessments and Taxation still listed an out of state company as the owner of the building.

(Attempts to reach the property-owner listed online, Colin W. Furness, were unsuccessful. A staffer at M&B Realty, a Florida company also listed on property records, said she had no record of the transaction. )

Baker said the adjacent structures – 1921 and 1923 Edmondson – will be demolished, as well 1906 and 1908 Edmondson.

“The building has a Vacant Building Notice and was condemned in 2011,” Baker said.

Neighborhood at Risk

In the neighborhood where yesterday’s collapse took place, there were a number of properties displaying signs for Vacants to Value, which is aimed at restoring dilapidated vacant houses around the city and building affordable new ones.

In this area, judging by the look of it, the citywide program doesn’t seem to be keeping up with vacancy and dilapidation. Several blocks had at least half of their houses vacant and clearly in bad condition.

For some residents, yesterday’s collapse only reminded them of other unstable structures they fear may be next. Neighbors notified The Brew yesterday of a partial collapse at nearby 1923 Harlem Avenue they said was reported years ago and never properly fixed or demolished by the city.

With weeds growing along its walls and vines twining around its second story, the back of 1923  Harlem Avenue yesterday looked more like a collapsed ancient temple than a recent Baltimore collapse on the list for stabilization.

Tacked to its boarded-over front door was a Department of Housing and Community Development notice dated August 15 saying that City issued a “Notice and Order” that it “intends to stabilize the property,” back in 2010.

“The Notice and Order served as an order to rehabilitate or raze said structure” but the property remains in violation of the Building Code, the notice said.

Asked why six years passed before the city issued took action on the long-vacant house, Baker said officials decided it was not a high priority.

“1923 Harlem was inspected and found not to be an imminent danger,” she said. “Baltimore Housing is going through the legal process to stabilize the property now.”

Martin, the Appleton Street resident who has lived in the neighborhood for four years, said the city should act more quickly to protect people from unstable structures, even if it is costly.

“It shouldn’t be a money issue, it’s a human issue,” he said. “Why do they have to wait until somebody dies or gets hurt to take action?”