The Johnston Square renaissance started with a $5,000 grant for lawn care equipment.

It was sometime in 2013, and Regina Hammond was brimming with ideas for her compact East Baltimore neighborhood. With a little help, and a loving touch, she believed she could help turn it around.

Fast forward a decade and change, and many of those seeds have borne fruit. Empty lots have bloomed into gardens; the neighborhood park has an upgraded swimming pool. And on Monday, a $55 million, 109-unit apartment building with a new Enoch Pratt Free Library branch on the ground floor celebrated its grand opening — an idea once so farcical even Johnston Square’s proudest booster harbored doubts.

“This is truly a divine intervention, because who would have thought that we would have been able to turn what used to be on this street into what you see today?” Hammond asked a cheering crowd of supporters. “But as you see, look at what we together have done.”

The building — aptly named The Hammond at Greenmount Park, in honor of Regina and her husband, Keith — will house mixed-income renters, including 12 who were homeless. And the 9,000-square-foot library, the library system’s first new branch in more than 15 years, will offer a range of services and programs for children and adults.

It’s the latest achievement for the small but mighty neighborhood, bounded by Green Mount Cemetery to the north and East Eager Street to the south, that has created the blueprint for reducing Baltimore’s glut of vacant homes at scale and with a level of community support.

Over the last decade, Johnston Square’s community organizers and development partners have mapped out a block-by-block strategy to eliminate about 550 vacants. The approach was so successful that the city adopted it, intent on rehabilitating over 3,000 blighted blocks across Baltimore with a $3 billion plan. The “whole block” approach emphasizes redeveloping an entire block, house by house, and persisting until every last one is stable, then moving on to an adjacent block until the market rebounds.

So far, more than 200 properties in Johnston Square have been restored or put in the pipeline, and community supporters say the changes can be felt throughout the area. There are more places to safely recreate, more resources for older adults and additional programming for children and teens to keep them busy. Crime is down, home values are up.

Sean Closkey, president of the community developer in charge of the overhaul, ReBuild Metro, is first to admit that it hasn’t been easy. Financing The Hammond alone required getting money from all levels of government, as well as major banks and private donors. He once likened his job to “juggling chain saws.”

At center of Johnston Square’s transformation are the Hammonds, whose advocacy and presence have helped the neighborhood win major philanthropic gifts and score competitive grant awards and prevented neighbors from getting displaced. The couple joined Mayor Brandon Scott, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen and a suite of other civic and elected leaders Monday to ring in the promise of the building.

“It is an important and inspiring story of hope and renewal and community,” Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, said. He lauded the effort as a direct rebuttal to the ongoing chaos in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers continued to spar over the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history.

Johnston Square is another story. Beyond The Hammond’s opening, the community will soon see more than 70 vacant lots transform into a four-acre park and sports field next door. The overhaul of Mura Street a few blocks north is also underway. There are calls for more density, more resources, more programming.

Regina Hammond is just warming up.

“For anyone listening in here that wants this to happen to your neighborhood, it can happen,” she said. “And we’re going to do it all over Baltimore.”