A GENTLE JEWEL AMID THE ROUGH IN SE

In Nearly Abandoned Building, Woman Clings to Tidy Home and Memories

A housing inspector visited the old hulk of a building a few weeks back. He
gagged on the stench of feces and urine in the hallways and chased a couple
of crackheads outside. Then he rapped on Irmgarden Stanford's door.

She let him in, and he found blue china dishes in the cupboards. Two
antique dolls propped up on the sofa, flowered wallpaper, romantic oil
paintings and a fireplace. And he found Stanford, a 63yearold retired
waitress who still has traces of Bremerhaven in her speech, who offered him
coffee, danish, German potato salad and a hug.

"I found a Taj Mahal in the middle of hell," is the way he put it.

The housing inspector finds someone like Stanford every once in a while in
Washington, an older woman or man left like flotsam in a flood's wake.
Tenants who refuse to give up on their buildings.

But when drugs and violence take over a neighborhood, when landlords walk
away and city officials refuse to spend the money to rehabilitate rundown
buildings, when the police simply suggest that tenants move, well, there's
not much a housing inspector can do.

In Stanford's building on 13th Street SE in the Congress Heights
neighborhood, 12 of the 15 apartments are vacant, doors gone, windows
blasted out. The landlord of record has stopped paying taxes.

So twice a week Stanford puts on her slippers and mops the public hallways.
She strings sheets across windows in abandoned apartments, sweeps away the
green and blue crack vials, installs light bulbs and puts a throw rug by
the front door.

She cajoles garbage collectors to swing by her dumpster every couple of
weeks. She dips into her $319amonth Social Security check to pay for
furnace repairs. (No one collects the rent anymore.) Last week, she
prevailed on a boyhood friend of her son's to sweep the rain off the roof
and fix the lock on the building's front door.

And, with her kitchen scissors, she cuts the vines and weeds that erode her
building's brick walls.

`Where Would I Go?'

"People ask, `Why the hell don't you move?' " Stanford flashes a look
halfway between indignation and puzzlement. "Where would I go? Where would
I live? This is my neighborhood. This is where I've spent my life."

She came to this country 33 years ago, with an African American husband
fresh out of the Air Force and three children in tow. They found a garden
apartment with whitewashed terraces and lilylined walkways and had another
baby.

That idyll dissipated long ago. Stanford and her husband divorced. One son
was slain. The other children married or joined the Army and moved out. One
granddaughter eventually came back.

Now the woman known to everyone as "Gerdy" is standing on her terrace,
looking east at a desolation of public housing complexes and several of the
city's deadliest streets. Just last week, a teenager was found dead in a
nearby gully, four bullet holes tracing a path across his chest.

She shakes her head, a bit embarrassed. She knows the view undercuts her
protestations. "It's a bad sight. You can't sit on your porch no more,
that's for sure."

She takes more comfort in the blocks to her west. Those streets retain a
stout vitality, with rows of bungalowstyle brick houses and aging
homeowners who sweep their pavement clean each morning and bid each other
hello.

Down that way, a retired schoolteacher with graying hair pulled back in a
neat bun leans on her rake and appraises her block of Congress Street. She
has lived here 28 years and doesn't walk anywhere at night. She insists
that her husband call her before he parks the car and walks home. But she's
not ready to give up, either.

"Except for those who lived in Gerdy's building, we're still here," she
said. "I tell the boys not to throw garbage on my sidewalk, and they do
respect me and our block."

Stanford, who is working class to her core and nurses a chronically sore
back that forced her to retire after 30 years of waiting tables at a German
American restaurant, shares that ethic: You take care of your home. Even if
it's an abandoned relic.

She is proud of how she has lived and what she has lived without: no
welfare, no food stamps, no charity. "I work, I clean, I work," she says.
"I put it in God's hands and hope someone helps."

Stanford speaks in an unusual patois, a linguistic brew that sounds a bit
like that of a New Orleans woman swept ashore in Washington. It can even
bring a smile to the face of a crackhead or two.

"It's all how you talk to them," she says of the addicts who gather like so
many moths around her building at night.

"Someone be standing in the parking lot outside, blasting music at night,
and I go out on the terrace and say, `Sweetheaaaart, will you turn it
down?' Most of the time, they know my voice and say, `Yes, ma'am.' "

The crackheads watch out for her, after a fashion. A junkie clambered in
her window on a hot morning during the summer, stole a few knickknacks. She
told a couple of neighbors about the theft. And by nightfall that same day,
three crackheads had hunted down the thief and returned everything to
Stanford.

It is tempting to mold heroic sculpture from such clay, to say that
Stanford and her aging homeowning neighbors are bravely beating back all
that's cold and dangerous in the city. But that would overlook the
corrosive fear, the strange sounds that send Stanford padding to her door
and windows six times during an hour's conversation.

And it would ignore the despair of the last 10 years, as Stanford and her
neighbors watched crack and heroin roar through their workingclass
neighborhood. She lost her youngest son, Patrick, to this whirlwind.

A brighteyed, likable and somewhat wild kid, Patrick was 23 years old when
he took a knife in the stomach after a disco fight. He died on Easter
Sunday 1990. Photographs of Patrick, each adorned with an angel and a candy
cane, now cover the walls in Stanford's apartment.

Other neighborhood children have fared little better.

On a fine autumn day recently, Stanford walked into a vacant apartment and
found Ralph, a 38yearold man curled asleep on the floor, sweat beading on
his forehead. Once he played football with her sons and ate at her table.
Now two of his brothers are dead and a third sits in a prison cell. And
Ralph is in heroin's thrall.

Stanford grows impatient with her own tears as she talks of all that. Soon
her words turn to her granddaughter. Nisha, a teenager with a shy,
beautiful smile, had moved to Kentucky with her family but missed
Washington and came back.

So grandmother and granddaughter live together now in a building all but
transformed into a refuge for crackheads. Nisha is an honor student at
Ballou Senior High School and never never goes out at night.

"She needs a life," Stanford says. "I need a life. It's pathetic. We should
be enjoying something new, we two girls."

LetterWriting Campaign

Stanford wrote a letter to celebrity developer Donald Trump two weeks ago.
Asked him to buy her building and appoint her as its manager. She feels a
little foolish talking about this, but what the hell. Maybe Trump reads The
Washington Post.

"My granddaughter say, `Grandma, puhleeeeze don't write that man in New
York,' " Stanford says. "But I write him anyway, `Donald Trump, Trump
Building,' and the post office sent it back to me."

She peers a bit skeptically at her visitor, who himself grew up in New York.

"My God, you New Yaaaawk people aren't so smart if you can't figure out
where Donald Trump live."

She wrote to Arnold Schwarzenegger, too. Asked him to buy it. She shrugs.
"He's rich, I figure maybe he care."

She's quite serious. Who else is she supposed to call? She looks at city
government and sees only its daily derelictions. The police who fail to
roust the crackheads from the vacant apartments. The health inspectors who
come and go without levying fines, pausing only long enough to tell her to
move.

The memory annoys her. "I told those inspectors, `Hell no! You do your job
and save my building.' "

The building's landlord, a holding company in Maryland, hasn't paid
property taxes since 1993 and owes about $35,000 in taxes and fees,
according to D.C. records. City officials could foreclose and turn the
building over to a private landlord. Or officials could move the three
remaining tenants Stanford, a cabbie who lives next door and a
52yearold disabled man who lives on the third floor into one wing of
the building. Then they could tap into federal block grants and give a
community group a loan to fix up the building.

None of that happens in Washington.

City officials haven't foreclosed on buildings in years, and officials take
years more to board up vacant properties. The city Department of Housing
and Community Development has a $55 million backlog of unspent federal
grants, money intended to rehabilitate rundown buildings and houses.

So neighborhoods die, and Stanford is left to rely on her Social Security
income and the kindness of a housing inspector who tries to ensure that the
heat and water remain on. It's a bit like trying to hold back the Atlantic
Ocean with your hands.

Roy Stanford, her husky, handsome son who is an Army veteran and works as
deputy director of a private security firm, has asked his mother to leave,
many times. None of her children are well off, but they all work; they'd
make room for her.

"My love for my mom and what she's endured is so intense," Roy Stanford
said. "I look at how she catches the blues doing all this on Social
Security. It makes you wonder what the hell the city is doing."

Still, Southeast is Stanford's home, has been since she moved there from
Bremerhaven in 1964.

It's where her sons and daughter played tag and ran and flirted. Where you
can still buttonhole a neighbor in the street and chat for half an hour.
Where Stanford invites two dozen or so neighbors and family members over
every Christmas Eve, puts on a feast of hickoried hams, potato salads,
cakes and pies.

Stanford's neighbor, the retired schoolteacher, draws from the same stream
of memories. But she sees an era whose time has passed in that busteddown
apartment building. "I feel so sorry for Gerdy. It's disgusting what's been
allowed to happen. She needs to get out."

It was there that Stanford got word of Patrick's murder, and until now she
swore she wouldn't leave. But she leans forward in her chair and lets a
visitor in on a secret.

She has applied for a Section 8 certificate, bureaucratese for a federal
program that would subsidize her rent in another apartment. If city
inspectors paste a vacate order on the door to her building, maybe they'll
find her something around here, in her neighborhood.

She pauses. A banging echoes somewhere. Could be the drainage pipe finally
falling off. Or a crackhead ripping tin wires out of the walls. She circles
back to her bedroom window, then to the living room. She looks through the
glass doors and surveys 13th Street.

The dead oak tree on the hill has turned skeletal in the late afternoon
sun. The street lamps are punched out. There's no sign of anyone.

She walks back, sits on the couch and studies her hands, takes the measure
of herself as one might a car motor about to overheat.

"I really believe in God. I really love this neighborhood. But I can't take
this no more."