Werner Kloetzli Jr. sent me this nice e-mail about Tiffany Square, where 17 years ago 6-year-old Tiffany Smith was shot and killed while playing with a doll. The community named the area where she was shot -- Rosedale Street and Westwood Avenue in West Baltimore -- in her honor.

I visited the square earlier this week after another little boy was shot on Myrtle Avenue. Ronald Jackson, 14, was killed while delivering grapefruit to an elderly neighbor across the street. I had hoped we might have learned something from Tiffany's death, and the deaths of all the other children that followed. I found a square filled with drug dealers shouting out the name of their heroin product -- Kill Bill. I later talked to the woman who helped build the square; she gave up after two years and left the city.

Here is what Mr. Kloetzli wrote, and told me I could post for all of you to read:
 
When I was a 5th and 6th Grader (1938-1940), I was a crossing guard at the traffic light at Bloomingdale Rd. and Rosedale St., which, as you know, is at Tiffany Square.  At the time I was a student attending the adjacent Elementary School on the NE corner of Rosedale St. & Westwood Ave.  The school building is apparently still there, but not used as a school.  Those times were happier times.
 
I was at that traffic light every school day before school, at the beginning and ending of lunch hours, and after school, helping fellow students cross the street.  Twice a day I walked between the school to our home in the 3100 Block of Belmont Ave., where we lived till 1942. 
 
In 1938 we moved into that home from PA.  My father had just gone into the restaurant business in downtown Baltimore, not at Werner's, but at a restaurant on Light St. known as Hornick's (see the Sun ad on p.9 of Sat. morning May 8, 1937).  Hornick's was located on the NE corner of Light and Water Sts.  In 1950 my father closed Hornick's and bought the Redwood St. Fountain Restaurant  which he renamed as Werner's.
 
Getting back to Tiffany Square, I can personally testify that there are no geographic reasons for the Tiffany Square area to be other than a happy place.  The unhappiness there since the 1940s "from which the city has yet to recover" is due to other than geographic reasons. 
 
Organized crime and drugs have been allowed to generate.  And the peace loving people living there are no longer organized as a civilization ought to be organized.  So crime is winning in the area.  Today each home has to be a fortification unto itself, with little or no help from its neighbors.  This is unfortunate, especially  since the peace loving people of the area are certainly in the majority.  They need to organize to overcome the problem.
 
But how should they organize?  I have heard of little effort in that respect that has been successful.  There have been no responses to my suggestions as to how to solve the problem. So what should be done?  Nothing?  And continue the unfortunate situation that exists?
 
For one thing, one of those roundabouts that I suggested, with a police car in the center, could be located right on top of Tiffany Square.  And guarded gated neighborhoods could be planned adjacent thereto.  Do you have any better ideas?