By
Bob Allen
4/22/1989
Baltimore City Paper
"It's probably the
most powerful image of my
entire life."
Jonathan
Herman, late of Queens and
Baltimore, mayor of the
3,500 residents of
Sykesville, Md., is
recalling the coruscating
moment when he really came
to understand the big
picture of small-town life,
when he stopped asking
himself, "Why do I live
where I live?"
"It was
around Christmas several
years ago, and I was working
on this house I'd bought and
was renovating on Upland
Road in Roland Park," says
Herman, 45, by day a
portrait artist and owner of
a small historic-renovation
company. It had been a
renovation project that
brought him to Sykesville in
1985, but the life-long
urbanite hadn't planned to
settle in the little Carroll
County town.
"The [Roland
Park] building was terribly
deteriorated--probably the
most dangerous place I'd
ever set foot in. Parts of
the second floor of the
house had caved in and
fallen through to the
basement. It was dirty,
disgusting work. Basically
every day was spent digging
debris and garbage--the
grossest stuff imaginable,
in this cold, damp building
with no windows. I'd be so
cold at the end of the day
it would take me the entire
ride home to Sykesville just
to start to get warm.
"As I drove
home I'd go through some
Baltimore neighborhoods that
were sad. I'd see these
little 3- and 4-year-old
kids out wandering the
streets in T-shirts in the
middle of the winter without
parents or siblings. I mean,
I'm dirty, with soot all
over me, and I'm seeing
this"--he shakes his head
gloomily--"and the whole
world, in my mind, is like
this sad, sorry place.
"Then I
drove across the [Patapsco
River] bridge, past the old
train station, into
Sykesville, and it was like
another world." He pauses,
grins. "The town was having
its Christmas open house. I
see all these people walking
around, all these Christmas
lights and carolers and
Santa Claus. . . .
"I was
transformed into this Norman
Rockwell painting! I
thought, My God, I've
died and gone to heaven."
For all the
faith Americans seem to
invest in the manufactured
nostalgia of Norman
Rockwell's Main Street
images, the decades since
World War II have not always
been kind to our small
towns. Some, in Maryland and
elsewhere, have survived and
flourished, but many more
have been swallowed up by
the prevailing forces of
suburban sprawl. Some have
gained the world and lost
their souls by overadapting
to these forces; at the
other extreme are towns that
stood by and watched as
their vitality was sapped by
Wal-Marts and megamalls.
Sykesville,
nestled about 20 miles west
of Baltimore in a wooded
ravine on the Carroll County
side of the Patapsco, almost
suffered the latter fate.
The sleepy little river town
bottomed out economically in
the late 1960s and early
'70s. Municipal officials
seriously considered
legislating Sykesville out
of existence.
But as the
'90s wind down,
Sykesville--while not yet
free of growing pains--is in
the midst of an impressive
revival, a transition
emblematic in many ways of
the changes taking place in
similar-sized towns across
Maryland and the nation.
Sykesville's Main Street
commercial occupancy rate,
down to a dismal 60 or 70
percent in the '70s, is back
to 100 percent. More than a
dozen antique and specialty
shops and three restaurants
now occupy the century-old
downtown buildings, which
were placed on the National
Register of Historic Places
in 1985. The circa-1884
Baltimore & Ohio train
station, which stood
neglected and in near-ruin
for years, has undergone a
lavish $100,000 renovation.
Once used by CFX to store
barrels of creosote, it's
now home to Baldwin's
Station and Pub, an upscale
restaurant and concert venue
that stands next to the
river, in the shadow of an
old feed mill.
"It's been a
real surprise to me recently
how many people have turned
out at town meetings on the
town's historic-preservation
projects and told us they
moved to Sykesville because
of the historic district,"
Herman says with
satisfaction. The mayor--who
took office in 1994--resides
a couple of blocks from Main
Street, in a big
113-year-old Victorian he
and his wife Becky bought
and restored. It's one of
three old houses in town
they've purchased and
renovated since moving to
Sykesville in 1985.
"At least
here," he says, "we have the
kind of planning and control
of our destiny that's really
in the hands of residents,
as opposed to a place like
Eldersburg"--the
unincorporated and heavily
developed community a few
miles away--"where for years
developers have been able to
more or less just show up
and build something in a way
that doesn't follow any
master plan at all."
Sykesville's
turnaround has not been
without internecine
struggles. Clashes between
local preservationists and
laissez-faire-minded
property owners have often
been heated. What they seem
to be clashing over is whose
future vision of Sykesville
will prevail.
As the
town's $400-a-month chief
executive, Herman routinely
finds himself in the line of
fire. It takes its toll in
stress and lost sleep as he
struggles to balance the
duties of office with the
competing demands of raising
four daughters (ages 1
through 17) and running his
business. Somehow he still
finds time to proselytize on
county and statewide issues,
such as the current drive to
bring charter-style
government to Carroll
County, and Gov. Parris
Glendening's anti-sprawl
Smart Growth Initiative.
It's no surprise that, as he
rushes from job sites to
Town Council meetings to his
kids' gymnastics and violin
lessons, he often looks
bedraggled.
"A lot of
times I have to stop and ask
myself, 'Why am I doing
this?'" he says, popping a
Jimi Hendrix tape into the
cassette deck of his
well-worn Toyota Takoma as
he drives slowly down Main
Street on a cloudy
afternoon. "Why am I
spending umpteen hours a
week away from my family,
away from my business, to
become involved in all this?
. . . It's, like, the last
thing I would have thought
about doing. I've had
absolutely no drive since
childhood to be in politics.
I've always been petrified
of public speaking, and I
never particularly liked
government or authority. And
a lot of times this really
is like beating my head
against a wall.
"But the
reason I'm doing it is
because there's progress
being made," he continues.
"Every once in a while my
brother, who lives in upper
Manhattan, comes down to
visit. He looks around and
says, 'My God, this place is
so dead!' But I always tell
him, 'It may look dead to
you, but I walk around and I
see people making all kinds
of improvements and doing
all kinds of things . . .
and even though there are
bumps in the road and it's
sometimes painful, I know
we're heading in the right
direction here."
At 9 a.m. on
an overcast Saturday morning
he could be spending with
his wife and kids or doing
fancy scroll work in his
carpentry shop, Herman is
off to smooth over yet
another municipal
mini-crisis. Residents in
one of Sykesville's newer
subdivisions are unhappy
with the gazebo the
developer has built in their
little park. They think it's
ugly. "When I think of a
gazebo," one irate homeowner
says, "I don't think of
this."
The
sleepy-eyed mayor, dressed
in his workaday outfit of
black stocking cap, dusty
jeans, a worn L.L. Bean
windbreaker, and tattered
athletic shoes, meets up
with Wiley Purkey, a member
of Sykesville's Historic
District Commission, in the
parking lot next to Town
Hall.
Purkey, an
Ellicott City native, moved
to town not long after
Herman. Back then, he
recalls, Sykesville was
"empty, with no hope . . .
not a positive place." Today
he lives on Main Street,
where he is co-owner of an
art and framing store. A
painter like Herman, Purkey
is one of the mayor's
right-hand men, and one of
the town's fiercest
historic-preservation
watchdogs.
"So what's
it gonna be today, Jonathan?
Hendrix, Dylan, or
Harrison?" Purkey teases
Herman as he slides into the
Takoma. Dylan's Time Out
Of Mind will be the
soundtrack for their gazebo
fact-finding mission.
Out at the
park, Herman, Purkey,
homeowners, and the town's
code inspector view the
gazebo from every
conceivable angle and
mentally deconstruct it,
flaw by flaw. They agree
that a few relatively cheap
modifications--a roof
overhang, some
crescent-shaped windows,
maybe a weather vane--would
provide the Victorian look
the homeowners pine for.
Later,
Purkey and Herman adjourn to
the Alley Cats Café, a new
Main Street eatery. Purkey
does a rough sketch of the
modified gazebo, as he
envisions it. For Herman,
who has fought tooth and
nail to realize town
leaders' plan for
Sykesville's historic
revitalization, even a
relatively small matter like
this reinforces his notion
of what a small town should
strive for in the late 20th
century.
"It's
interesting," the mayor
observes. "Even in the newer
sections of the town people
still want that Victorian
comfort. They want those
aspects of an old town."
If the
gazebo represents a tiny
brush stroke in Herman's
vision for Sykesville, then
the town's recent annexation
of the 131-acre, 15-building
Warfield complex from
Springfield State Hospital
takes in the larger canvas.
The Warfield
complex's
turn-of-the-century
buildings and campuslike
grounds, deeded by the state
to Sykesville last December,
are slated to become a
natural extension of the
east end of the town's Main
Street, where it intersects
with Route 32. After the
complex undergoes an
estimated 20-year, $14
million face-lift, Herman
and the Town Council plan to
retrofit it as an
industrial/commercial
center. The long-range plans
are ambitious, as long-range
plans tend to be--perhaps
Warfield could be home to
high-tech companies, or a
university satellite campus.
To Herman, the recycled
complex is the cornerstone
of the town's future tax
base, and a buffer against
the burgeoning mall sprawl
of nearby Eldersburg. "If
the development that [took
place] here had been beyond
our control and not
congruent with our town, it
could have been
devastating," he says.
Securing
Warfield has taken Herman to
Annapolis numerous times to
canvass the governor, his
staff, and Carroll County
legislators for support.
Last summer he cornered
Glendening at a mayors'
conference in Ocean City in
hopes of hurrying the
property transfer. The
governor ultimately proved a
powerful ally.
"I'm
particularly impressed with
[Herman's] aggressiveness
and leadership," Glendening
says. "When Mayor Herman and
I talked about the Warfield
complex project after the
mayors' meeting last summer,
we agreed that it was the
type of initiative that
demonstrates exactly what
Smart Growth is about."
"These are
really some awesome
buildings, aren't they? They
don't make 'em like this
anymore," Herman murmurs one
sunny afternoon as he
strides across the Warfield
site's rolling lawn and
points to the large brick
buildings with their marble
steps, fancy cupolas, and
ornate cornice work. "Of
course, before they backed
out, the Carroll County
government was in
competition with us to
acquire this as a future
industrial site. They wanted
to tear all these buildings
down."
The subject
of the county powers-that-be
in Westminster tends to wipe
the smile off Herman's face
and bring a hint of contempt
to his voice.
"Let's just
say you inherited a $180
million business--which is
about what the county's
annual budget is. Would you
turn around and hire three
semiretired old men who
constantly fight among
themselves, and pay them
each $32,000 a year to run
it?" Herman says of Carroll
Commissioners Benjamin
Brown, Donald Dell, and
Richard T. Yates. "I think
not."
Herman is
passionate enough on the
matter to have spent a
couple of recent Saturdays
standing in the rain in
front of shopping malls
collecting signatures for a
petition drive to bring
charter government, with a
county executive at the
helm, to Carroll. With
enough signatures the
measure would go to
countywide referendum May 2.
(Similar proposals have been
voted down twice before.)
"If we had
one strong executive who
gave us good, clear
leadership, we'd save
ourselves tenfold by seizing
opportunities that are
currently being missed," he
insists. (The county
commissioners did not return
calls seeking comment on
Herman and the
charter-government
campaign.)
Herman's
contempt for the current
county leadership turned to
outrage in May 1997, when
Yates and Dell overruled
Brown in a 2-to-1 vote and
refused to take part in a
regional anti-racism
conference. Carroll County
has no racial problems,
Yates insisted. He went on
to say that, rather than
working to help Baltimore,
he'd prefer to watch the
city die. "Maybe [then]
we'll dig it up and make
farmland out of it," he
joked in a Sun
interview.
Herman and
all seven other Carroll
County mayors quickly
volunteered to participate
in the conference. "I think
Baltimore's a wonderful
city," says Herman, who
lived in the city for most
of the 1970s, graduating
from the Maryland Institute,
College of Art and working
as a laborer on then-mayor
William Donald Schaefer's
urban-renewal programs.
"I've seen the Schaefer
administration, the [Mayor
Kurt] Schmoke
administration; I've seen
Baltimore rise up, then
slide back down again. My
heart goes out to it. For a
healthy community like us to
look the other way is very
self-centered."
Ask Herman
how an aspiring painter/
sculptor and former urbanite
landed up to his elbows in
small-town politics and he's
apt to laugh and reply, "I
got stuck here!" But when
asked about his fierce
attachment to the small-town
ethos, he recalls his
childhood in a Queens, N.Y.,
planned community called
Fresh Meadows.
"It was very
avant-garde in the '50s," he
recalls with a trace of
dreamy nostalgia. "All
duplexes, lots of open
spaces. A beautiful
community. . . . It was like
a paradise to me when I was
a kid--big playgrounds, I'd
walk home from school every
day for lunch. I could go
where I wanted without the
fear of crime and violence
there is today."
The son of a
Manhattan jewelry salesman,
Herman attended the Art
Students League in Manhattan
and spent summers working on
his uncle's farm upstate.
After high school, he moved
on to Baltimore and the
Maryland Institute. He
graduated in 1975 and for a
while eked out a living from
his art.
"I was
living in this Korean
boarding house on Eutaw
Place, and one day I was
standing in my room doing a
cityscape painting of
Reservoir Hill, and I could
see all these buildings in
the distance being renovated
and getting prettier and
prettier," he recalls. "I
thought it was fantastic,
all these people fixing up
this decaying city. I wanted
to be part of it, so I went
up there and got a
$3-an-hour job carrying
sheets of plywood and
two-by-fours up these two-
and three-story buildings."
Herman soon
started his own one-man
home-improvement company.
(Even today, after winning
historic-preservation awards
for his renovation work, he
prefers to keep his crew
small and does much of the
detail work himself.) His
first major rehab project
was a burnt-out shell on
Maryland Avenue, which he
bought in the mid-1970s and
still owns.
"I was
living in this house with no
heat and one electrical
outlet. In the summertime
I'd be lying in bed on this
mattress on the floor and
these bats would come in and
swoop around my head," he
laughs. "I'd just pull the
covers over my head and try
to forget about it."
Herman had
his first lesson in the
power of local politics when
he applied for a $14,000
low-interest loan from the
city to rehab the property.
"The requirements for the
loan were so ridiculous I
don't think they were
expecting anybody to
actually show up and apply,"
he says. After a lengthy
runaround, the official to
whom he'd tendered the loan
application suggested they'd
both be better off if Herman
bowed out gracefully; he
advised Herman to write a
letter saying he no longer
wanted to borrow the money.
The loan officer turned out
to be one of many
bureaucrats who
underestimated Herman's
tenacity.
"I was
living next to the
Franciscan Center and I told
the sisters there about it,
and they said for me to go
see [then-City Council
member] Mary Pat Clarke.
Mary Pat told me, 'Jonathan,
you go ahead and write this
guy a letter. But instead of
telling him you don't want
the loan, tell him you want
a meeting with him, his
supervisor, and Mary Pat
Clarke.' I wrote the letter
and took it in to the guy.
He's sitting there thinking
it's my letter of
resignation from the loan
program. He starts to read
it, and all the sudden the
veins in his forehead pop
out and he takes it and
starts to crumple it up.
Then he smoothes it back out
again, and says, 'All right,
you can have your meeting.'
He ended up offering me
$30,000 at 3 percent.
Naively, I only took
$14,000, which was all I
wanted in the first place."
It was a
newspaper ad for an 1860s
Victorian house, built by
19th-century Maryland
governor Frank Brown, that
drew Herman and his wife
Becky to Sykesville. The
house was in such deplorable
shape that, once again,
nobody wanted to spring for
a loan. It was only Herman's
and a Union National Bank's
loan officer's mutual
fondness for raising
tropical fish that broke the
ice and got him the loan
after about 30 other banks
turned him down.
Herman
confesses he was not looking
to put down roots in
Sykesville. He figured he'd
refurbish the half-ruined
house, sell it, and move on.
When he
arrived in 1985, Sykesville,
after nearly two decades of
decline, was beginning to
show the first, inchoate
stirrings of its present
revival. But the inevitable
cycles of boom and bust were
nothing new for the town,
which sprang up around a
mill built by an Englishman
named John Sykes in the
1820s. Since its founding,
Sykesville has been
repeatedly battered and
revived by waves of
prosperity and adversity.
Sykesville
originally rose on what's
now the Howard County side
of the Patapsco and received
a big boost with the coming
of the B&O Railroad's main
line from Baltimore in 1831.
Even the Civil War--during
which a Confederate cavalry
detachment burned the town
bridge and tore up the
railroad tracks en route to
Gettysburg--didn't impede
Sykesville's 19th-century
progress. Nor did an 1868
flood that all but washed
away the town--it was
quickly rebuilt on the
Carroll County side of the
river and prospered anew.
Springfield Hospital opened
in 1896 (eight years before
Sykesville incorporated); in
the following decades it
burgeoned into the largest
public mental hospital on
the east coast, and
Sykesville flourished as a
company town.
By the
1960s, though, the boom
years were fading memories.
The B&O trains stopped less
frequently, then not at all.
In 1968, the state rerouted
Route 32 from Main Street to
an out-of-town bypass.
Cutbacks at Springfield
reduced the patient and
staff population to less
than a quarter of its peak
total, damaging Sykesville's
retail trade. The hit to
local merchants was
exacerbated by the coming of
nearby malls, such as
Carrolltowne in Eldersburg.
The town's
travails reached almost
cartoonish proportions,
sapping what little civic
morale remained. In 1969 the
firehouse caught fire,
destroying the town's two
engines. Around the same
time Sykesville's police
chief was arrested in
Frederick for drunken
driving. In 1972 Hurricane
Agnes washed out the Main
Street bridge. It was not
replaced for three years,
due in large part to local
apathy. Rats infested the
downtown food market, and as
the Main Street vacancy rate
soared, the town began
taking on the peeling-paint,
weeds-in-the-sidewalk
vestiges of decay.
The Town
Council prepared to dissolve
the town--just hand the
charter over to the county
and walk away. Only the
vehement opposition of
Sykesville's residents
halted the process. In a
referendum, they voted to
hold on to their small town.
Ironically,
some of the forces that
nearly destroyed Sykesville
in the '60s and '70s laid
the groundwork for its
subsequent revival. The
Route 32 bypass, devastating
when it happened, probably
short-circuited the rampant
commercial development that
typically follows a highway
through a small town. And
it's probably the biggest
reason why Sykesville, with
its rustic feed mill,
restored train station,
19th-century architecture,
staid Methodist church, and
stately houses overlooking
the river, still possesses
the drowsy, slow-lane charm
of a place frozen in time.
Similarly,
the rapid suburbanization of
southern Carroll and
northwestern Howard counties
also helped boost the town.
According to Bruce
Greenberg, who owns several
Main Street buildings and
whose wife is proprietor of
Greenberg's Great Train,
Dollhouse & Toy Show, it's
these affluent suburban
newcomers--"with much more
discretionary income and
looking for a recreational
shopping experience that's
an alternative to the
malls"--who have rejuvenated
Sykesville, much as
Columbia's emergence paved
the way for Ellicott City's
rebirth.
Jonathan
Herman's entry into
Sykesville's small-pond
political scene was--and
apparently still is--devoid
of any grand strategy. "I
was talking to a town
councilman one day not long
after I moved here about
some concerns I had and he
asked me why I didn't get on
the town's Planning and
Zoning Commission. I did,
and I discovered that the
planning aspect of a
town--where to put roads and
houses and trees--had a lot
more to do with design and
the things I'd studied as an
art student than with
politics. Then when I got on
the board and we'd make all
these recommendations, the
council would just shoot
them down, which upset me. I
finally thought, Well, if
that's where the power is,
that's where I wanna go.
I was one of several people
who ran for the council [in
the mid-1980s] who really
wanted to upset this
good-old-boy thing they had
going back then."
Before he
was elected to council,
Herman served on a volunteer
committee that oversaw the
ambitious restoration of the
train station, which was
completed in 1989, two years
before the town established
its historic district. (His
wife Becky is also a former
chairperson of the Historic
District Commission.)
That effort
"really was the turning
point for the town," Herman
says. "The station brought a
lot of people together from
a variety of walks of life,
and they volunteered their
time, energy, and money
toward a single project. The
notion of town spirit sounds
intangible, but that really
stirred up all the spirit
that Sykesville has
today--that intangible thing
that inspires all these
baby-boom-generation
professional people to
volunteer their precious
time and become involved in
the steering of this town."
Not too
involved, however. When
then-mayor Kenneth Clark
resigned in the fall of 1994
to take a job out of state,
nobody wanted the
office--including Herman.
"It's a lot of additional
and sometimes thankless
work," he told The Sun
at the time. "Being mayor
would cut into time I just
don't have."
When no one
else stepped into the
breach, however, Herman
agreed to serve as interim
mayor. He handily won
election to serve out the
remainder of Clark's term,
and last year was reelected
without opposition to a full
four-year term. In both
elections the turnout was
minimal--only about 200
voters. "That's not unusual
for a town this size," the
mayor notes with a casual
shrug.
Compared
with some of Sykesville's
former mayors, Herman is bit
of a stick-in-the-mud. Leroy
"Happy" Keeney, a popular
mayor of the 1950s, kept
injured pigeons in his Main
Street barbershop and gave
kids who came in for a
haircut water pistols to
shoot at them. In the '70s,
the town had an English
mayor--Capt. Horace
Jefferson, who once piloted
a tugboat on Curtis Bay.
1980s Mayor Lloyd Helt Jr.
raised hackles by declaring
Sykesville a nuclear-free
zone.
Herman does
have one thing in common
with his colorful
predecessors--he is, as
Wiley Purkey says, "the
antithesis of the political
person.
"He's a
working man who has wrinkled
hands and a face that has
the character of the things
he's done and seen," Purkey
says. "He doesn't see the
mayor's office as a stepping
stone to anything else, and
he doesn't just have his own
self-centered vision for
Sykesville's future. He's at
the forefront of a vision
that's shared by a lot of
us, old-timers and newcomers
alike."
"Jonathan is
a diplomat," observes one of
the town's matrons,
life-long resident and
Historic District Commission
member Dorothy Schaefer.
"I've seen him in situations
that nobody would want to
face, but he can always
handle them. Yet, it takes
so much out of him that I
worry about him sometimes.
I'll even call Becky now and
then just to see how he's
doing."
It's hard to
find out-and-out Herman
detractors in town, but
there are a few skeptics,
particularly Main Street
building owners who perceive
the Historic District
Commission's powers to
approve or deny changes to
buildings as an intrusion on
their property rights and a
drain on their wallets.
Case in
point: vinyl siding--perhaps
the two most loaded words in
Sykesville politics right
now. Some Main Street
property owners, including
Bruce Greenberg, want to
apply siding that replicates
their buildings' original
facades. Doing so, they say,
would be far less costly and
require less frequent upkeep
than the antique wood
facades, which need frequent
scraping and repainting. But
the Historic District
Commission--like such
commissions most
everywhere--is adamant that
vinyl siding is incompatible
with legitimate historic
renovation.
Greenberg
managed Herman's first
campaign for local office
but has since fallen out
with the mayor over such
issues. He cites the
Warfield annexation as an
example of a flaw in
Herman's leadership style.
"Jonathan
has a very charismatic
quality, in his soft-spoken
way. He exercises a kind of
very persuasive moral
leadership, even though he
denies it," says Greenberg,
who, despite his extensive
Main Street holdings, lives
outside the town limits in
Howard County. "And because
of the nature of small-town
politics, because there is
no strong opposition leader
like you have on the
national level, he defines
and sets the terms of the
public discourse. . . .
"Because of
Jonathan's background, his
most important priority was
the preservation of those
old buildings--that's a
personal priority that he's
made into public policy.
Those [Warfield complex]
buildings are really just
expensive shells with
asbestos and all sorts of
other problems. What is the
tax burden going to be for
the people of Sykesville in
the next 10 years for the
maintenance and sale of
those properties? As far as
I know, that's not been
answered."
Disgruntled
property owners such as
Greenberg have formed an
opposition group called
Citizens for a Better
Sykesville. In their view,
the town would be better
served by a kinder, gentler
Historic District Commission
that promoted voluntary
compliance rather than
issuing legal mandates.
(Voluntary compliance,
Herman maintains, "has never
worked anywhere else and
would never work here.")
Frustration flared into open
anger at a February town
meeting on the Main Street
revitalization plan.
The meeting,
held in a cafeteria at
Springfield Hospital, drew
more than 100 residents on a
rainy night. Two consultants
from Kann & Associates, a
Baltimore company
specializing in
architectural preservation,
presented the results of
their $16,000 study on how
to most effectively make
Main Street more
shopper-friendly while
maintaining and enhancing
its antique charm.
As soon as
the floor was thrown open
for discussion, Greenberg
sprang to his feet and began
reading a statement of
protest on behalf of
Citizens for a Better
Sykesville. Herman, seated
at the head table with the
Town Council, interrupted
Greenberg and asked in a
soft voice, "Are we getting
into the vinyl-siding issue
again?"
At Herman's
suggestion, the five council
members made and passed a
motion to cut Greenberg off.
"Nobody's
even mentioned vinyl
siding," Greenberg protested
with quiet vehemence. "The
issue is deteriorating
buildings, pure and simple.
Sykesville is an ugly town!
How do you expect visitors
to come here?"
"We've
passed a motion," Herman
interjected.
"Just
unincorporate the town!
That's the best thing to
do!" a man standing in the
back of the room jeered.
A woman
turned and glared at him.
"These people are the town,"
she shouted, pointing to the
people seated around her.
"You're not representing
us!"
"That's
right!" another woman
hollered. "You presume that
we agree with you. We
don't!"
Herman
seemed to know all this was
coming. He stifled a yawn
and gently cleared his
throat. "The [Main Street
plan] has gone through the
legal process and represents
the view of the majority,"
he said in a quiet, slightly
weary voice. "If it turns
out you don't want a
historic district, then you
can vote the present mayor
and council out at the next
election. Currently, though,
we've been elected to
represent the majority, and
we're going to do this."
After the
meeting, as people milled
around the cafeteria talking
heatedly among themselves,
Herman walked over to a
window. For a moment, he
turned his back on the crowd
and stared out at the
February rain blowing in
sheets under the street
lights. All at once, he
looked very tired.
Now, he
nonchalantly shrugs off the
brouhaha and points to a
recent town survey that gave
Sykesville's government a
more than 70 percent
approval rating. "Those
people are the same ones who
used to block everything
back when I was on the
planning commission in the
'80s," he says of his
interlocutors. "They're very
wealthy people, and they're
just being cheapskates about
this. A lot of property
owners who are a lot less
well off are very supportive
and enthusiastic about the
[Main Street plan], and
they're putting their hard
earnings into historic
preservation."
In the
meantime, with sweeping
plans for the Warfield
complex moving forward and
the fine-line details of the
Main Street plan falling
into place, Herman has
bigger--and smaller--fish to
fry. So he slogs on,
inspecting gazebos, fielding
irate phone calls, and
fending off complaints from
critics when he's late
filing his annual
financial-disclosure
statement or when he puts a
sign advertising his
business at the end of his
driveway. Meanwhile, he
spends hours in planning
sessions or on expeditions
to recruit businesses to
Warfield.
Along the
way, he owns up to
occasional bouts of midlife
angst. He and fellow artist
Wiley Purkey agonize over
the fact there's so much
potential studio space in
their little Norman Rockwell
town but they seldom find
time to paint.
"I had a
talk with my uncle about
this a while back," Herman
says. "He's a painter, and a
retired town planner. I was
telling him how I really
would like to find the time
to paint and sculpt and do
all this stuff, but I never
do. Then it occurred to me
that the work we're doing in
this town really is like a
bigger picture. An enormous
creation. A living
sculpture."
He laughs
softly at the grandiosity of
his own imagery. "And after
you've worked on it for so
many years," he adds,
earnest again, "you just
want to see it get
finished."
