An 'incredible opportunity' for would-be Army contractors

                      
Baltimore Business Journal - by Jimmy DeButts Staff

Major developments in Baltimore, Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County are picking up the pace. Financing is coming into place at the $1.5 billion Westport Waterfront project that has the potential to reshape South Baltimore. Meanwhile, dirt has been turned on the $117 million McHenry Row and $68 million Buckingham projects. Here’s a look at several projects that weathered the economic downturn and financing crunch:

Westport Waterfront
Turner Development Group’s $1.5 billion South Baltimore project is scheduled to begin construction of roads and sidewalks in November or December, according to developer Patrick Turner. Groundbreaking on the first wave of apartments, office buildings and townhomes is slated for nine months after the roads are completed. Turner expects the first set of buildings to be finished by the end of 2012. He said his group planted wetlands on the front of the 54-acre property. Landex Corp. will construct a 200-unit apartment building. Plans include a 65-story office building, 500-room hotel and 300,000 square feet of retail space.

It happened last summer, for a day, when two of the world's best teams, AC Milan and Chelsea, came to M&T Bank Stadium, bringing more than 72,000 fans with them. It happened recently, during the month-long World Cup, when fans of the game piled into bars and crowded near the harbor to watch the U.S. team's run to the knockout
round.

But could it happen on a more regular basis?

City officials, developers and local soccer aficionados believe it can, if plans move forward for a soccer-only stadium and if Baltimore is successful in luring D.C. United away from Washington. The next step in that process will likely take shape in early September, when a Tampa-based marketing consulting firm will release the findings of a $100,000 feasibility study requested by the Maryland Stadium Authority.

"I think there is a large international population in Baltimore and there is an extreme interest in soccer for sure," said deputy mayor Kaliope Parthemos. "There's definitely a fever and excitement for soccer in Baltimore City and we're hoping to capture that."

While the fever might not be as high as it was for last year's international match that featured one of the game's biggest stars, Ronaldinho of Brazil, a crowd of around 35,000 is expected Saturday for a "friendly" between European Cup champion Inter Milan and Manchester City of the English Premier League. As of Wednesday, a little over 32,000 tickets have been sold.

Baltimore is also on the list of 18 possible sites if the U.S. is successful in its bid for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup.

The proposed soccer-only stadium and an adjacent hotel that could accommodate up to 500 guests would be of a $1.5 billion mixed-use project being developed on the waterfront in Westport. Developer Pat Turner pointed to the fact that television ratings in Baltimore for the World Cup is indicative of how such a stadium -- with the possibility of D.C. United playing there -- would be received in the city.

"Baltimore was the No. 2 city in the nation in terms of watching the World Cup," Turner said Wednesday. "Obviously it's up to D.C. United whether they make a decision to move here or not, but I think the support here is more than what it is up in Philly [where a soccer-only stadium was opened this year for a Major League Soccer expansion team]."

Doug Hicks, director of communications and marketing for D.C. United, said last week that the team had very preliminary talks with the city last fall about a possible move to Baltimore, but won't enter "formal" discussions until a commitment is given about a facility. Hicks said that a soccer-only stadium interests D.C. United, but is not a prerequisite for such a move.

"A right-sized facility that would serve as a primary home for D.C. United and for soccer, that would allow modern amenities and that would improve revenue streams, that would allow our club to become more viable," Hicks said.

Despite a loyal fan base, "playing here makes for tough business for us," Hicks said of RFK Stadium, a venerable but outdated facility. "It's a great building with a lot of history, but in a lot of ways we need something that is more modern and has the revenue structures that allows us to maximize our business."

Said Parthemos, "We know they are also looking into Northern Virginia and D.C., we know they're keeping their options open, but that they are very interested in what the study has to say. They understand that it (Westport) is a development site that is ready, there's a private developer that's eager to get them going and there's a large group of interested individuals who are ready to partner together to bring them here."

Kevin Healey, president and general manager of the Blast, the city's indoor professional soccer team, said last week that Baltimore's reputation won't be damaged if a soccer-only stadium isn't built, but "anything to support soccer is good for the sport in the city and the state. Obviously a soccer-specific stadium supporting an outdoor franchise along with many other events would be a good thing."

The feasibility study is also looking into a 8,000-10,000-seat stadium to house Baltimore's current professional team, Crystal Palace Baltimore, which plays in a league a level below Major League Soccer. The team has played at several sites this year, and recently agreed to play the remaining games this season at Calvert Hall.

"It's not going to be a major versus minor type of study; it's going to be evaluating both projects so that we can make a determination which project makes economic sense," Parthemos said.

Requested by the Maryland Stadium Authority last fall at the urging of then-City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake after the stunning turnout for the AC Milan-Chelsea match, Crossroads Consulting Services could report that a soccer-only facility is worth the investment

, as it did in proposing last year that a similar stadium be built in Prince George's County.

But that recommendation never made it through the political gauntlet: a bill proposed to the state legislature never got out of committee.

"At the end of the day, it's a political judgment," said Gary McGuigan, project executive for the Maryland Stadium Authority.

Michael Frenz, executive director of the Maryland Stadium Authority, said that a project such as this should be approached with caution.

"Not every [MLS] franchise is successful in every city, so that's what the study is designed for," Frenz said. "It's a considered judgment and not one based on someone's intuition."

Erik Stover, managing director of the MLS New York Red Bulls, said in an interview last week that "I couldn't quantify it or put it in words how important" the team's new 25,000-seat arena in Harrison, N.J., is to the future of the franchise. Stover said that the team would not have even attempted to sign French star Thierry Henry had it not been for the new facility. The team moved there from Giants Stadium.

Though not a single taxpayer dollar was used in building Red Bull Arena, the process of getting the project completed was "brutally hard", Stover said. Red Bull Arena, like many of the new MLS facilities, is tied to a real estate deal. Typically, MLS has bought acres of land in remote or rundown areas.

Turner said that light rail already goes into the neighborhood, and a second station would likely be attached to the stadium. While Red Bull Arena cost $200 million -- "it has all the bells and whistles", Turner said -- a soccer-only stadium in Baltimore would cost considerably less since it would share commissaries and suite

levels with the hotel.

If D.C. United agreed to move to Baltimore, "it could go pretty quickly," Turner said, estimating it would take 18 months to two years to complete the stadium. Turner said that a stadium could also host concerts and other events and become "a great source of revenue

...because of the nature of Westport itself, there's a lot of sources of money coming into Westport."

Turner said he is aware of the obstacles, but "if you get a lot of smart people together in a room, we can get it done."

don.markus@baltsun.com

National Aquarium seeks contractor for Westport park - Baltimore Business Journal


Officials at the National Aquarium in Baltimore are looking for a company to manage a planned $5.4 million park in Westport, where they hope to eventually move their Animal Rescue Program.

Once the Patapsco waterfront park is ready for joggers, bikers, and nature enthusiasts, a company must oversee the property’s upkeep. The call for property management firms or landscape maintenance contractors is the next move in the process to gear up for the park’s estimated June 2011 opening.

Ads placed in newspapers and online say the firm should be adept at landscaping; repairs to structures; shoreline, trash and graffiti cleanup; and security.

For the past year, the aquarium has organized efforts to tackle pollution on the 12.5-acre site, removing 7,500 tons of soil dumped from construction projects to ready it for native plants and wildlife. The finishing touches of the cleanup — a few asphalt paths and some fencing — should be complete within the next two weeks. Construction of the actual park elements won’t begin until next spring, officials say.

As of Thursday, the request for proposal — created by a team of aquarium staff and hired consultants — was not available for public release, and no budget had been set. Interested companies should contact Tim Pula, the aquarium’s director for capital planning, to receive a copy of the RFP when made available.

Companies’ proposals would ideally project the dollars and manpower the project would call for, plus give suggestions for the type and method of work to be done, Pula said.

The park’s design process is still in the works, but “90 percent complete,” he said. Once finished, the park will include asphalt walking and biking pathways, plaza areas, a 100-foot recreational pier, solar lighting, and signage, plus 8 acres of native landscaping.

Plans to also construct about $50 million worth of classrooms, space for public demonstration, and a new facility for the Animal Rescue Program — currently located in Fells Point — have remained shelved since fundraising efforts stopped last year due to the recession.

apino@bizjournals.com or (410) 454-0523.

    





Baltimore Begins Ambitious Waterfront Plan
By: Brenda Ruggiero, CEG CORRESPONDENT
The first phase of public improvements for a $1.2 billion mixed-use development project recently began in Baltimore, Md.

Westport Waterfront involves 50 acres (20.2 ha) along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) funding totaling $620,500 will be a portion of the money used to reconstruct the shoreline and create the waterfront tidal wetlands.

The construction manager for the shoreline reconstruction, wetland installation and infrastructure construction is the Whiting-Turner Contracting Company, based in Baltimore. The project is under the direction of Karl F. Mattoon Pletl and was awarded by the Maryland Department of the Environment.

Work began in December 2009. Shoreline reconstruction is set for completion in May 2010, and the overall project is expected to take eight to 10 years to complete.

Westport Waterfront is a 50-acre transit-oriented development located along the Patapsco River, which is a body of water five times the size of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

“With two million square feet of office space, 2,000 residential units, 300,000 square feet of retail and 500 hotel rooms, Westport’s master plan creates a dynamic, transit-oriented community on the forefront of sustainable ‘green’ design,” said Deb Kleiner of Cleo Communications, a spokesperson of Whiting-Turner.

Extensive active and passive open spaces will include multi-use pedestrian bike trails, urban plazas, a waterfront esplanade, and two piers for kayak and Olympic-style crew launches.

February 2, 5:25 PMInner Harbor ExaminerJason Jenkins

Turner Development CorporationWhen many Baltimoreans and tourist look out over that body of water we call the Inner Harbor, the first thing that comes to their mind is the Chesapeake Bay is somewhere out there in the distance. Most do not look at the harbor as the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River. However, all that is about to change. Developers are in the process of introducing everyone to all the different areas of the Patapsco – especially the Middle Branch.

First phase of Westport development begins

Pat Turner video interview:  Click here to see.




Urbanite #67 January 2010
By: Martha Thomas

Photography by: Jennifer Bishop








rendering by Turner Development Group

Sitting on her tiny front porch, as she does most days when the weather is nice, Deborah Guest sees a neighborhood boy she knows.

“How ya doin’?” she calls out. “Keep up the good work!”

Guest turns and explains: “One of my Sunday school babies. He was caught smoking weed. I said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ Where does this come from?”

Guest has owned her small brick rowhouse on Maisel Street since 1984. But she has lived here in Westport since 1958, where, four years after Brown v. Board of Education, she was enrolled as one of only a handful of African American children at Westport Academy, the elementary school across the street from her current home.

In those days, she could walk over to Annapolis Road to have a soda at the pharmacy or mail a letter at the post office. On Saturdays, farmers from the county would set up vegetable stalls on the dirt road, now an exit ramp off Interstate 295. Guest’s father had a job at Boston Metals in nearby Brooklyn; other neighborhood parents worked for one of the two glass factories in the area, at the Baltimore Gas & Electric plant, or at the GM factory at Sparrows Point. “Back then we had enough, so we didn’t know we were poor,” she says.

Westport, a working-class neighborhood tucked into the industrial zone south of the city along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, has changed. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, along with many of the people who held them. More than 20 percent of the 900 or so housing units in Westport are vacant, and only a quarter of the households are owner-occupied. A Department of Planning report in 2000 listed the neighborhood median income at $16,250 a year, with one-third of households earning less than $10,000.



Guest says that she sees a lot of young people hanging out in the streets these days: “They get up in the morning, and their day consists of going out to the corner and waiting for something to happen.”

When things do happen, they usually aren’t good. In September, one of her four children, 29-year-old Kareem, was shot and killed in an incident Guest describes as misplaced retaliation. The loss of her son served as yet another sign of how bad things have gotten. “How dare they come into this community and kill someone who’s lived here their whole life?” she says.

But something else is happening in Westport. Something that might change not only the long-neglected neighborhood, but the city itself: The developer Patrick Turner, who has had his eye on Westport for nearly a decade, is poised to transform Guest’s neighborhood by building a $1.4-billion, 4.8-million-square-foot development called Westport Waterfront. The plan calls for two thousand townhouses, apartments, and condominiums; a high-rise hotel; a smattering of exclusive retail shops; and enough open space and eco-friendly features to quicken the pulse of local environmental groups. Buildings will boast green roofs, the shoreline will be buffered by wetlands for migrating birds, and the streets will be constructed with gravel filtration to minimize river-polluting runoff. Turner says he’ll seek Platinum designation under the LEED for Neighborhood Development program, the U.S. Green Building Council’s rating system for neighborhood design.

With a light rail station already in place, the development would be a model of smart growth, the anti-sprawl approach to urban planning that calls for transit- and pedestrian-oriented communities. The site sits in a Maryland Enterprise Zone, so tax credits are available for companies that provide new jobs, and its proximity to I-95 means it was also awarded BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) Zone status, which comes with infrastructure improvement dollars. With the nearby Middle Branch Park and the Gwynns Falls Trail, the development would be a key element in city’s Middle Branch Master Plan, the planning department’s ambitious 2007 blueprint to transform the entire Middle Branch region from isolated post-industrial backwater to the city’s southern “green gateway.”

In short, the rise of Westport Waterfront would transform the area, tripling the housing stock and dramatically shifting its income and racial mix. For Deborah Guest, at least, that is a change that can’t come soon enough. 




Second city: Renderings of Westport Waterfront (below left) show a mixed-use complex of towers on a scale that rivals the Inner Harbor. But, unlike earlier waterfront developments, this project will be built with a host of environmentally sensitive features, including green roofs and runoff-filtering wetlands constructed along the shoreline. Developer Turner says that Westport will seek Platinum designation in the LEED for Neighborhood Development program. | rendering by Turner Development Group


For a time in the 19th century, the sandy shores of the Middle Branch, easily reached by rail, were a popular destination for Baltimoreans who would come for boating and swimming by day, drinking and dancing by night. But in 1889, the Carr & Lowrey Glass Works factory opened, bringing industry to the area once again. In the early 1900s, Consolidated Gas, Electric Light & Power—BGE’s predecessor—built a coal-fired power station nearby. By 1923, the entire area was zoned for industrial use.

Those who lived in Westport’s residential neighborhood were typically white and working-class—people who were employed in nearby industries. Housing was built in the 1940s for the influx of war-related factory workers. Westport Homes was designated for whites only, while war housing in nearby Cherry Hill was built for black workers.

Beginning in the 1950s, highways went up, splitting the neighborhood in half and furthering its isolation from the rest of the city. Demographics started to shift. White residents fled en masse in the 1960s; today, about 90 percent of Westport’s population is African American. John Unglesbee, who grew up in Westport, worked for

Carr & Lowrey until it shut down in 2003. Like many white residents, he moved out of the neighborhood years before—he now lives in Lansdowne. But he still comes to the old neighborhood to sit at K’s Korner, a bar in the basement of a rowhouse on the corner of Sidney Avenue and Kent Street. The neighborhood has gone downhill, he says. “You used to have a bank, a movie theater, a shoe store, a barbershop. Now you just see a lot of boarded-up houses.”

You also see a huge stretch of undeveloped waterfront, an asset that has proven highly desirable to Baltimore builders. The neighborhood fronts a body of water five times the size of the Inner Harbor.

In late 2004, Turner invited Haskins to tour Westport. “The glass company was an abandoned facility. There was rubbish everywhere,” the banker recalls. But the two climbed to the top of the factory, where, fortified by the vista of water and the Hanover Street bridge, Turner sketched his ideas for transforming the area into a live-work-play complex to rival the Inner Harbor.

His vision appealed to Haskins, who founded Harbor Bank in 1982 with the mission of providing loans to small and minority-owned businesses that didn’t have ready access to traditional financial markets. “When you talk about the last thirty years in Westport, what people conjure is a community on the periphery, with all the negatives: low income, drugs, and crime,” Haskins says. “Here you’ve got a project that has the potential of bringing a new dimension to that part of the city. You have an opportunity to change lifestyles and lives.”

Turner Development Group paid about $14 million for the glass factory, the BGE facility, and adjacent properties—a total of about 42 acres, much of it heavily contaminated from industrial use. The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, got involved in 2007; as of the end of 2009, Turner says, property, demolition, environmental remediation, and design costs had reached $50 million—although nothing has been built.

City Hall has been more than eager to help Turner’s cause. Last January, the city approved a bond issue of $160 million in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to pay for infrastructure improvements. The TIF—the largest in the city’s history—is an influx of capital that will be paid back by future property taxes: Turner predicts that the site, which currently brings about $95,000 a year to the city, will generate $45 million a year in property and hotel taxes once the development is built. He also anticipates that more than 15,000 jobs will be created. “We’re taking something that’s paying nothing and turning it into something that will pay a lot,” he says.

The shaky state of the bond market meant a delay in the issue of the first set of TIF bonds, currently scheduled to go to market this March. In November, Turner received another major boost: The city directed more than $21 million in federal stimulus funds to enhance the bonds and help make them more salable.

The timing of Turner’s negotiations worked in his favor: In 2008, the city passed the Inclusive Housing Law, calling for developers who receive substantial subsidies or benefit from major zoning changes on the part of the city to designate 20 percent of housing units affordable. But because the legislation came after Turner had begun negotiating with the city, Westport Waterfront doesn’t have to comply.  Turner nevertheless agreed to ensure that 200 units—10 percent of the total—will be available for low-income residents. According to Andy Frank, deputy mayor for neighborhood and economic development, 130 apartments in the waterfront development would be affordable rental units and $6.35 million of the TIF money would go toward the city’s purchase and renovation of seventy or more houses to be sold within the existing neighborhood. The value of affordable housing on the site, Frank says, is an estimated $21 million.

Some residents and affordable housing advocates don’t think that’s enough. Josh Civin is vice president of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, which strongly supported the housing ordinance. He believes that Turner’s project should honor the spirit of the law that he narrowly escaped. “The city’s position is that they’d been in discussions with Turner before the law took effect, so he’s not required to comply. But we argued for the full 20 percent.”

ACLU of Maryland attorney Barbara Samuels, the head of the group’s Fair Housing Project, agrees that the Turner Development Group’s concession isn’t enough. A sustainable city, she points out, “isn’t just about a green roof. Sustainability is about whether people from all walks of life can afford to live there and do business.”

In 2007, the city spent about $1.5 million to tear down the derelict Westport Homes Extension, a complex of 232 units on the west side of I-295. The demolition was part of a $59 million fund to develop low-income housing. Samuels finds the timing less than fortuitous. “It’s ironic that the city is putting $160 million into TIF funding without fighting for more affordable housing to be put into the project or built elsewhere, and in the meantime it’s tearing down public housing and claiming there’s no money to replace it,” she says.

Haskins has a different point of view. Westport, he says, “has enough poor people already.” As chairman of the board of East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI), Haskins says he learned some valuable lessons. A project like Westport is better done “from the top down.”

The EBDI project, on 88 acres to the north of Johns Hopkins Hospital, involves the creation of a $1.8-billion planned community that includes a biotech park and other amenities. The project so far has involved acquiring 1,600 parcels of land and using eminent domain to relocate hundreds of families, a tactic that has caused considerable community backlash. The new housing is planned for three income brackets: market rate, workforce, and affordable. Getting the optimum balance is very delicate, Haskins observes. “If you lead with the market rate [housing], you get tagged as gentrifiers. But if there’s too much low-end, you can’t change the neighborhood dynamic. You have to lead with a stronger mix to offset what’s already there. You’ve got to disproportionately weight it to market rate.”
 
Westport, with its “long history of not being desirable, needs to become an aspirational place to live,” he says. “The rest will fall into place.”

Turner insists that Westport Waterfront will be a project with income levels that are “across the board,” even in the waterfront housing: “Every building will have some affordable housing in it. Nobody’s gonna know what the guy next door makes.”

If that does indeed happen, CPHA’s Civin notes, it would be a first for Baltimore. “Walk around the harbor,” he says. “It’s hard to think of a recent prime waterfront development that has any affordable housing.”




Selling the neighborhood of Westport on its own reinvention has so far proved to be an easier task than EBDI’s overseers have faced in East Baltimore. Turner first met with Westport residents in 2004, soon after he acquired the first property in his master plan. “We told people to stay in their homes,” he says. At the time, houses were selling for $8,000 to $12,000. “We said, ‘You’ve put up with this shitty neighborhood for most of your life, and speculators are going to come in and offer what seems like a huge amount for your home. Don’t sell.’”

Before she met Turner, Deborah Guest had heard the buzz in the neighborhood. “People were saying this big developer was coming around and he was gonna take your house away,” she recalls. “But I didn’t see that. Nobody’s had their house taken away.”

Linda Towe, who doesn’t live in Westport but volunteers for a community organization called Project T.O.O.U.R. (Teaching Our Own Understanding and Responsibility), has had more difficult relationships with the Turner camp. She complains that community demands for a traffic study haven’t been met and recalls fears that Turner planned to acquire homes along Wenburn Street, a major entry point to the waterfront site, by eminent domain. Losing their homes, she says, remains an “underlying concern” of many residents. 

Beth Strommen, currently the director of the city’s Office of Sustainability, was southern district community planner for the city planning commission at the time. One early planning option, she says, was to widen the residential Wenburn Street into a boulevard.  After word got out, flyers were posted in the neighborhood warning of Turner’s alleged predation. The real fear, says Strommen, was of change. “People were wondering, ‘What’s going to happen to me when all this change occurs?’”

As EBDI chair, Joe Haskins learned a few things about how a big development project can invite a ferocious backlash from existing residents. “Many low income communitites see ‘urban renewal’ as ‘urban removal.’ You have to work quickly to debunk that.” Toward that end, Turner hired a full-time community liaison, Bonnie Crockett, a former banking attorney who had worked as executive director of the Federal Hill Main Street program. Crockett, now director of Westport Community Partnerships, has helped Turner disburse more than $250,000 to the neighborhood so far, funding football uniforms and tree plantings (in partnership with the Parks & People Foundation) and a high school scholarship program. He established a $50,000 fund to match homeowners’ facade improvements, up to $2,000 per property. So far, twenty residents have signed up.

Turner’s involvement with Westport’s residents was key to selling the project to its first partner, Landex Corp., which recently signed a contract to build two hundred apartments—most luxury, with thirty low-income rentals—on about an acre, says Catherine Fennell, whose real estate consulting firm, Heatherbrook Development, is working with Landex. “Usually people wait until they have all their approvals before they start working with the community,” says Fennell, who was development director for the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development from 1994 until 2000. Turner started early. As a result, “the project will go more smoothly than it would if he’d come in and tried to ram it down their throats.”

Fennell describes Turner as a “holistic developer”; Bonnie Crockett says he follows a sort of Hippocratic oath: “Do no harm.” Garth Rockcastle, dean of the University of Maryland School of Architecture, thinks that Turner’s concerns for the existing residents are authentic reflections of his own hardcrabble beginnings. “He identifies with his constituencies,” says Rockcastle, who has informally consulted with Turner on design elements. “He’s a self-made person and recognizes the potential in others.” Most developers, he adds, “would only do what they need to do, to get what they want.”

In Westport, it’s an approach that has paid off. “There’s no opposition,” Turner says. It’s an exaggeration, but not by much. “Even someone renovating a rowhouse has opposition. Everybody loves us. All the environmental groups. The city. The state. The neighborhood. We’re lifting them up.”

Like Pat Turner, Deborah Guest has her own vision of a neighborhood transformed. It’s more modest than the fanciful second skyline of towers in Turner’s digital renderings. There will be jobs, and her three surviving kids might consider moving back to the neighborhood. The streets of Westport will be safer, so she won’t have to worry about her grandchildren. “I see families coming back together and the open air drug market leaving,” she says.

She tells a story about the last time a big developer swept into her life. Back in 1984, she went to housing court because her landlord had refused to fix the furnace, the toilet, or the locks on the doors. One day she got a phone call from a housing advocate who told her that a man named Jim Rouse had set up a program to help people like Guest buy their own homes. “We were both crying,” Guest recalls.

Rouse, the celebrated real estate titan who developed Harborplace and founded the planned community of Columbia, established the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners) in 1982 to encourage affordable housing. The foundation handed Guest a $16,000 loan, enough for her to buy the house on Maisel Street—the house she still owns, the house she plans to keep.

“People see Pat Turner and think he’s gonna take and take and take,” Guest says. “But when I look at Pat Turner’s face, I see Mr. Jimmy.”

—Martha Thomas is a frequent Urbanite contributor.



  On the air: More on this story on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on January 28.Friday, November 13, 2009