Long ago in Reservoir Hill, a neighbor confronted Father Tom Composto, the Jesuit priest who established the St. Francis Neighborhood Center to serve the poor in the 900 block of Whitelock Street.

“How long,” the neighbor asked, “will it be before you leave, like everyone else?”

The challenge in that question hit Composto in the soul.

It was 1966 and, while still in seminary, he’d felt the call to social activism. Stubborn and feisty, Composto spent the rest of his life in service to the needy, the sick and the troubled in Baltimore.

He refused to leave Whitelock Street, even decades later, when his Jesuit superiors ordered him to take a new assignment in his native New York, even when that refusal cost him his collar.

“So many people have used this neighborhood as their social laboratory,” Composto said years later, “then they leave.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard expressed many times by Baltimoreans devoted to neighborhoods that had fallen to abandonment and blight, door-to-door poverty and crime.

“So many people have used this neighborhood as their social laboratory, then they leave”  – Father Tom Composto.

“We don’t need anymore grad students coming through with clipboards, asking questions,” a community organizer in Broadway East told me. “We need action.”

Tom Composto, a man of action and undying faith, planted his flag in two old houses on Whitelock, opening a welcome center, a chapel, food pantry and dental clinic for the poor.

He became known as the “Pope of Whitelock Street.” He was downright fierce about the drug dealers who came into the neighborhood. I watched him yell at them from his porch: Either stop dealing or move on, Composto told them.

“We’ve tried to be a voice for the marginal people of this neighborhood,” he said, “to let them know that somebody gave a damn about them and cared enough to stay.”

A lot has changed since then.

Free After-School Programs

Thirty years ago, the city demolished the 900 block of Whitelock Street — 20 vacant houses and boarded-up stores that had been used as stash houses by drug dealers and shooting galleries by people addicted to heroin. It was considered a sweeping effort at crime reduction. The original St. Francis Neighborhood Center ended up in the dusty rubble.

Composto did not quit. He moved his mission into a rundown, three-story house at Whitelock and Linden Avenue. A financial settlement with the city, compensation for his first Whitelock properties, helped pay for renovations.

After a period when the mission seemed to be in doubt — during a time when I lost touch with Composto — something happened:

A grant from the Knott Foundation helped the SFNC establish a free after-school educational and enrichment program for children from low-income families.

Composto died two years later, in 2011, leaving the center in capable hands and with a new mission, focused on children.

When I visited the place a few years later, 43 kids, ages five to 14, were enrolled in the after-school program. They arrived each day between 2:30 and 3 pm. They got a snack, help with homework, help with reading, maybe an art class, and time in a computer lab. They also got a hot meal before going home for the evening.

The center partnered with the 10 schools where the children were enrolled to track their progress in class work and on tests.

During my last visit, in 2014, the staff and volunteers at St. Francis were pleased with the progress the kids were making in math and reading. Christi Green, the center’s executive director, told me she had a waiting list of families that wanted to enroll a child in the St. Francis program.

Yoga, a Library, a Study Hall

Since then, the St. Francis Neighborhood Center has grown — in 2021 by three classrooms, an elevator, a computer lab, a kitchen, courtyard, art studio and new bathrooms.

And this month there will be a ribbon-cutting on a further expansion — more classrooms on two floors and a multipurpose center of the ground floor — the result of a 10-year, $10.6 million capital campaign to allow the SFNC to serve more kids and more adults from the community.

The expansion and operating costs are made possible by donations from foundations, grants, money from the state of Maryland and fundraisers, says Torbin Green, who started as a volunteer at the SFNC before succeeding his wife as executive director.

These days, 66 children take part in the after-school program, and high school and college students serve as interns to help with tutoring.

With the latest expansion, there are new or improved spaces for community meetings, adult yoga and meditation classes, a library and study hall. The SFNC still gives away donated food on Mondays and Wednesdays to help neighbors stretch their grocery budgets.

The SFNC calls itself “the oldest continually-operating neighborhood center providing enrichment in Baltimore City.”

That might be true, though, with so many nonprofits and faith-based organizations working to improve conditions, I’m always careful about anointing any institution “oldest” status.

But, one thing is certain: The SFNC is a busy place, and respected because of the commitment Tom Composto made in the 1960s to help the community recover from the problems associated with flight from the city, the explosion of drug abuse and the concentration of poverty.

The Pope of Whitelock Street is not forgotten, and it was Torbin Green who saw to it.

If you walk along Whitelock, where the recent additions to the St. Francis Neighborhood Center are clearly visible, there’s a sidewalk bench. On the back of the bench there’s a small plaque with Composto’s portrait, a memorial to the man who stayed and whose legacy endures.