The Sun July 26, 2025
Fayvia Boyd thought it was time to come home to the old neighborhood.
She’d grown up on Barclay Street at 26th, gone to the nearby Margaret Brent School, and raised her family in the suburbs. Her family’s roots in the Greenmount Avenue, Barclay and Boone streets area were where her heart was. She had aunts, uncles and cousins living all over the 21218 ZIP code. And she had those memories.
While looking for a home, she spotted the restored and renovated houses coming on the market in the 400 block of East 22nd Street.
About five years ago, she moved to this block, which is now officially listed as part of the Barclay-Greenmount Historic District, a sort of urban village anchored by the Gothic Revival architecture and tall spire of St. Ann’s Catholic Church. Though St. Ann’s was officially closed by the Archdiocese of Baltimore, it retains its school, Mother Seton Academy.
“My house is amazing. I have three bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths,” said Boyd, an M&T Bank auditor. “People who visit my house are amazed to see how it looks on the inside.”
Her longtime neighbor, Grace Willis, who keeps a beautiful home and garden at Barclay and 22nd, says the block’s transformation is real and convincing.
“It’s beginning to look as it did when I moved here — and I was in middle school then,” she said of her family’s settling on 22nd Street in the 1950s.
The block has 48 houses, many of them with fancy Victorian wooden embellishments (they look like tiny porches) off the third floor. They are outfitted with beautiful white marble — actually Baltimore County limestone — steps. The original builders added a nice feature: white marble curbing around what would be a tiny front lawn, except these lawns are all paved.
Fayvia Boyd, left and Grace Willis own homes the 400 block of E. 22nd Street in the Barclay neighborhood.Michael Mazepink, a community housing strategist, began championing the block more than two decades ago, when its vacancy rate was over 40%. A Baltimore Sun article published several years later said, “Turnaround elusive for gritty Greenmount.”
“This block was basically being saved by a group of elderly widows who lived here,” said Mazepink, who founded the People’s Homesteading Group in 1983. “As houses went vacant, the ladies took wooden barrels and filled the tubs with flowers. They, of course, had flowers outside their own homes, so the block appeared OK and pretty. But it was not.”
Years of rain and snow tortured the roofs of the vacant houses. “The houses pancaked — the roofs collapsed downward and took the floors with them,” Mazepink said. “In some cases, all that was salvageable was a front wall. After the earthquake of 2011 and the rains that fall, one house bowed forward and was condemned by the city. It had to be taken apart brick by brick and then rebuilt.”
Mazepink became a one-person developer-housing dynamo, applying for grants and mastering the fine print of government housing assistance programs. “Michael is tenacious and detail-oriented,” said Charles Duff, who headed Jubilee Housing for many years. Duff’s group was his development lender.
A view of the 400 block of E. 22nd Street in the Barclay neighborhood. (Karl Merton Ferron/Staff)
A view of the 400 block of E. 22nd Street in the Barclay neighborhood.
“It’s an amazing block,” said Duff. “Architecturally it’s interesting and almost unique.”
Jake Wittenberg, whose Edgemont Builders recently finished nine home restorations on 22nd Street, said, “It’s a pleasure to work with passionate, mission-driven people.”
“The work is the result of years of fundraising and collaborations,” said Ellen Janes of the Central Baltimore Partnership. “It’s grassroots community revitalization at its best.”
“It offers homebuyers with modest incomes an opportunity to live in some of Baltimore’s most beautiful homes,” Janes said.
Janes also feels the strength of the 400 block of 22nd Street will mean that adjacent blocks — east of Greenmount Avenue and above Green Mount Cemetery — will be on a similar upswing.
“I saw the vacant houses as an opportunity,” Mazepink said. “Now we are getting appraisals for a three-story, renovated house with historic exterior features at $400,000. And it’s now a block with all income levels, from Section 8 housing to middle-class purchasers and everything in between.”
The refurbishment of 22nd Street is not isolated in this part of Baltimore near Green Mount Cemetery, St. Ann’s Church and other landmarks. Years of housing reinvestment are transforming Barclay, Old Goucher, Greenmount West and Johnston Square.
Asked about his 24 years focused on this block, Mazepink said, “I could have used some of those years back, but that doesn’t happen.”
Click here to read the full article