North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood has always intrigued me. It's one of those places off the beaten-path (York Road), next to the upscale Guilford community (separated by a wall) and away from the traditional drug neighborhoods in on the east and west sides. Yet is has always been one of the most volatile spots on the city map.

Stories going back to the early 1990s documet fights and shootings associated with two neighborhood groups, which evolved into gangs, called the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys (a memorial to the neighborhood's dead is at left).

One of the early leaders, involved in a shooting in 1992 that left two people dead, became, according to police, the leader of a notorious prison gang that was recently brought up on federal charges (the very one that smuggled crab meat into their cells and recruited corrections officers to the payroll). Another recent stabbing near McCabe Avenue turf has raised questions of whether the old gangs are returning.

One of the long-time activists, Robert Nowlin, has always been outspoken. He's a blind man who recently lost his son to a car accident in Georgia last year shortly after he had returned from two tours in Iraq as part of the Army. Nowlin told me this week that the neighborhood is better now but he's frustrated by what he sees as police shackled by the mayor and unable to clamp down the way they should.

Still, I saw a different Pen Lucy then I remember, back in the mid-1990s when a South Korean merchant was killed in his store (though for some reason his name is not on the memorial), back when a young man who just got out of jail for a shooting was himself shot by friends of the man he had wounded. "It's the same people over and over again," the major of the Northern District told me in 2000. Now some of those same names are popping up in bigger and bolder crimes (the federal drug indictment, not to mention a man convicted last year of killing a police officer was a member of the old Pen Lucy gangs).

A makeshift memorial honoring the neighborhood's dead is gone, replaced by a more tasteful monument in a park that lists the names of the shooting victims. The neighborhood still looks shabby and dangerous, even if the violence is down. But it's a start.