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| Baltimore, viewed from the Pagoda in Patterson Park (Photos by Bonnie J. Schupp) |
The city of my birth
has problems but promise,
reflecting urban America
Let's take a ride for the 'Ettlin Tour'
In September 1814 -- two and a half weeks after burning and
ransacking Washington -- thousands of soldiers and sailors in the military of
English King George III attacked Baltimore. But the defenders proved far
stronger than anticipated, and the city endured. Some would say it saved the
young nation after the bombardment that inspired the eventual National Anthem.
In July 2019 -- just over three weeks after a speech in
which he confused events of the Revolutionary War with the conflict a
generation later -- would-be American King Donny the First also attacked Baltimore, in a
bombardment of words.
The result was predictable, because this city -- despite its
many problems -- has no shortage of defenders. And herein, I join them.
I was born in Baltimore, raised near the famous Pimlico race
course, and lived in the city for but a few months of my first 35 years. And
when I left, I didn't go far... just about 17 miles to the south for the sake
of a large, tree-shaded yard, quality public schools for the kids, and close to
the camera business then owned by my new wife.
For the 38 years since that move, Baltimore may not have
been home. But it remained the center of our universe. Friends and family live
there or nearby, and in retirement our cultural life is focused there. And when
we have visitors from afar, many from other countries, or meet new friends, I
offer them an experience known as "the Ettlin tour" drawn from my
knowledge as a native and, for 40 years, local news journalist at the Baltimore
Sun. The tour for decades was part of the orientation for new hires in the
newsroom... even for new publishers.
From Sandtown to Guilford, the Great Divide
I show off the best and worst of Baltimore, from the poverty-mired
Sandtown slums and source of the 2015 Freddie Gray uprising to the mansions and
gardens of ritzy Guilford. Baltimore well illustrates the enormous gulf between
rich and poor in the United States of America.
Most of Baltimore's some 620,000 residents exist in the
middle of that economic chasm, probably more of them in the lower middle of the
income spectrum. And since the peak population and industry era of the 1950s,
when Baltimore topped out around a million strong, the complexion of its ever-smaller
population has darkened. It is a majority black city. And there is not an issue
facing the city that does not have a racial aspect... schools, policing,
economic development, housing, health, welfare, politics.
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| Inner Harbor promenade |
With that as a backdrop, we drive on my tour through the extremes
and in-betweens. But first we marvel at a gleaming city from the hill --
Federal Hill, which affords the "signature view" of Baltimore's still-growing
economic heart around the Inner Harbor.
History is all around. I point to the right, where Fort
McHenry still stands sentinel around the Patapsco River's bend, and talk about the
Star-Spangled Banner. And over there, at about 2'clock across the harbor but
out of sight, is the restored President Street Station and Pratt Street where
Union soldiers summoned to Washington to defend the nation's capital in 1861 were
greeted by a mob of Southern-sympathizing attackers. At least a dozen people,
including three solders, were killed and many more injured in the Pratt Street
Riot, the first casualties of the Civil War.
Our vantage point on the hill was occupied thereafter by
Union troops, cannons aimed at the city center, to neutralize Baltimore for the
war's duration. With its location below the Mason-Dixon Line considered the
nation's geographic border between North and South, Baltimore then and still
could be viewed as the most northern city of the South or most southern city of
the North.
The view takes in the terraced apartments of the old,
transformed red-brick Scarlett Seed Co., which decades ago began the slow-to-develop
trend of condo real estate in Baltimore; the city's World Trade Center (which
has its own great viewpoint on the 27th floor); Harborplace, symbolic but
fading jewel of the Inner Harbor dream of the late mayor and governor William
Donald Schaefer; the Hyatt Hotel (also pushed by Schaefer and backed by a quasi-city
city development loan guarantee, at a time when the Holiday Inn was jokingly viewed
as the city's best hotel); the lighting towers and upper reaches of two major
sports stadiums; the National Aquarium and Maryland Science Center; the
Columbus Center, failed as a tourist attraction but now where the University of
Maryland explores marine sciences; the quirky American Visionary Art Museum;
and finally the rowhouses that once could be bought for a song but now rise steeply
from the upper $200,000s.
Home to Nancy Pelosi and Frederick Douglass
And that's just the start of the tour. We drive around the
harbor and east past the still-rising office and apartment buildings of pricey
Harbor East; rowhouse neighborhoods like Little Italy, where U.S. House Speaker
Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi -- daughter and sister of city mayors "Big Tommy" and "Little Tommy" -- was born and
raised; little Dallas Street, where an early
developer of some still-standing rowhouses was Frederick Douglass (he lived for a time at 524 South Dallas); the historic
port neighborhood of Fells Point, where what is believed the oldest city
residence dates to the 1760s; and past the burgeoning waterfront homes, condos and marinas
of Canton.
We turn south on Clinton Street, still a working port area, where
a view across the water takes in Fort McHenry and its 15-star flag, and we pass
the berthed and Baltimore-built John Brown, one of two surviving Liberty Ships
that ferried troops overseas in World War II and lovingly restored by veterans.
Also of note, a nondescript and vacant old building that was the base of the
wiretap cops in David Simon's HBO series "The Wire." (Sadly, many
people think of the Baltimore in that great series as Baltimore when its depiction of the drug culture, police good and
bad, dying industry, poverty-mired schools and neighborhoods, racial politics
and compromised news is fiction derived from just a part of the city's many realities.)
We head uphill on Clinton Street to higher ground, the
neighborhood of Highlandtown (or as locals might say, "Hollantown"). Here we
are squarely in the economic middle ground, a mix of gentrification, hispanic
newcomers, shop-lined commercial arteries, and the old Patterson movie house
reborn as the Creative Alliance arts center, of which wife Bonnie and I are
members. Often, we take visitors inside to view its current gallery displays, and
occasionally encounter one of the half-dozen artists who have residency there.
We drive a short way up East Avenue from the arts center and
turn left two blocks to a place of history -- the eastern end of sprawling Patterson
Park, an area once called Hampstead Hill that was part of the dug-in defensive
line where Baltimore's 1814 defenders halted the British land advance into the
city. It is hallowed ground, and also affords a view from the east of the
2019 skyline.
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| Johns Hopkins Hospital dome |
Then we head west, making a few turns to drive past the
Collington Avenue rowhouses where my late mother grew up in the 1920s. Late in
her life, I drove her there to marvel at how one of the houses (her father lost
one for tax debt, then rented the other two doors away) had been enlarged, restored
and was for sale at a price approaching $400,000. Three large bedrooms, each
with a whirlpool bath and fireplace, and central air among the features in a house where she and
some of her 11 full, half- and step-siblings had lived. (In the heat of summer,
they slept in the cooler environs of the park.)
The next target is Broadway, driving north past Johns Hopkins Hospital's growing complex and its two oldest buildings --
Hopkins being one of the world's finest medical institutions and, with the
university campus several miles away and various other operations, Baltimore's
biggest employer.
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| American Brewery towers over Gay Street corridor ghost town. |
Echoes of 1968 on Gay Street
So enough of the great stuff. We turn right on Gay Street, a
diagonal artery heading northeasterly and spine of many distressed streets. And
we talk about its history mostly as a black neighborhood in the 20th Century
and one of several focal points in the rioting and destruction sparked by the
1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and years of economic
deprivation. This is always part of the tour, and increasingly in recent years,
many of the decayed houses and burned-out buildings have been leveled and given
way to grassy vacant lots. There is now a senior center, and across the street a restored
landmark -- the spooky, towering, long vacant 1877 American Brewery building now home to a
foundation focused on job development for the poor.
About 22 years ago, I took newly-arrived Baltimore Sun
publisher Mike Waller and a couple of other newspaper executives through this
neighborhood -- then far worse than today -- and was asked what I would do to
address its problems. My response: "A fleet of bulldozers and a really
good city planner."
The clearing at the top of Gay Street has come at a much
slower pace, but turn around, look back toward the city center and imagine
creation of a planned, mixed-income neighborhood overlooking that skyline, perhaps
with a limited light rail link, shopping, small businesses. But for now, the
land goes begging a vision.
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| Mural artist Michael Owen offered love to Baltimore. |
We've been out and about for more than two hours at this
point, and seen a lot of good -- and some bad -- of Baltimore. But there's a
lot more ground to cover, and lunch, so my tour unfortunately bypasses numerous
residential neighborhoods running for miles along the Belair and Harford roads
corridors.
My alma mater: "City Forever"
Baltimore City College
Sometimes I take my visitors across North Avenue, other
times toward 33rd street -- the latter for a drive-by of my alma mater,
Baltimore City College (Class of '63), third-oldest public high school in the
nation and, since the late 1920s, occupying a gothic castle-like building on a
hill whose tower, owing to its geographic location, is the highest vantage
point in the city. By tradition, students graduating are afforded a stroll up
some 180 steps to the tower roof, past graffiti left by predecessors and the chalky
poop of countless pigeons. For many, the school song remains fresh in memory: "City Forever."
33rd Street also was the site of Memorial Stadium,
home of the Baltimore Colts, briefly the Ravens, and from 1954 through 1991 the Orioles. Now called Stadium
Place, the tract includes mixed-income and senior housing, a nursing center and
a YMCA.
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| Murals in Greenmount West |
We reach Greenmount Avenue -- its name drawn from the historic
cemetery of rich and well-connected white folks dating back nearly two
centuries, Green Mount, near its southern end, and where as time allows we stop
to see the graves of Sun founder Arunah Shepherdson Abell, wealthy businessman
and university benefactor Johns Hopkins, and Abraham Lincoln assassin John
Wilkes Booth (whose believed plot, in the essence of Baltimore irony, is adorned with Lincoln
pennies).
Across the street is Greenmount West, a neighborhood brought
back from the edge of collapse and many houses restored as an arts community. Walls
along area streets feature many jaw-dropping murals. An abandoned clothing
factory formerly noted for ghostly rows of dust-covered suits was reborn as a
school of design, and a corner building offers apartments to artists with
limited income.
Charles Villagers
Charles Village rowhouses. where we first met....
We turn up Calvert Street, past large rowhouses dating
from the early 1900s. (I first met Bonnie as neighbors in apartments at 2935 North
Calvert in 1966, and owned 2937 in the late 1970s -- blowing through two marriages
and living with an assortment of zany friends who helped fill its eight
bedrooms. Sadly the house, known as Toad Hall, was recently turned into
apartments, most of its original features stripped away.)
The neighborhood was
originally called Peabody Heights, but renamed Charles Village largely through the
influence of its late resident and Baltimore Evening Sun copy editor Grace
Darin, who published a newsletter called The Charles Villager in the 1960s. The
name caught on, and the neighborhood two miles north of the city center -- anchored
by such neighbors as Johns Hopkins' Homewood academic campus, the Baltimore Museum of
Art, and Union Memorial Hospital -- has remained popular. I bought my house
there for $35,000 around 1975, and sold it in 1980 for $64,000. Comparable
properties now run close to $350,000.
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| Sherwood Gardens in bloom |
A window on the universe
Back to University Parkway, we turn left on San Martin
Drive. It curves through an edge of the Hopkins campus above Stony Run and past the Steven
Muller Building -- named for a former university president and home to the
Space Telescope Institute. This is the land base of the Hubble, astronomers' window
into unfathomable reaches of the universe. Most people in Baltimore likely have
no idea it's here.
A few right turns and a left take us to the quirky realm
of Hampden, a working-class neighborhood increasingly occupied and influenced
by people in the arts. The heart is the commercial length of 36th Street (and
often my tour stops for lunch there at the Hon Cafe on "The Avenue"), but from Thanksgiving to
New Year's the place to see is 34th Street and the city's most famous display
of lights and unusual decorations (like a hubcap tree, a flock of pink
lawn flamingos, crabs and the one-eyed mascot of cheap Natty Boh beer).
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| Miracle on 34th Street |
On Falls Road, at the western end of 36th, the shops include
Atomic Books -- a quirky store with unusual offerings including local arts
'zines, comics, and Baltimoreana. It is also the mailing address for the local filmmaker
and cultural maverick John Waters, and thus a place to find autographed copies
of his books and movies.
The tour goes north on Falls Road, named for and parallel to
the Jones Falls stream running through a green valley from the north and emptying
into the harbor, then westward on Northern Parkway across the valley, past
Sinai Hospital (which moved here around 1960 from my eastside birthplace near
the Hopkins medical complex), and Pimlico Race Course, home for more than a
century to the Preakness Stakes, second jewel in American thoroughbred racing's
Triple Crown.
My neighborhood, a then-and-now
Once a haven of the very middle class, the Northwest
Baltimore neighborhoods along Park Heights Avenue and Reisterstown Road are
troubled these days. So we weave through side streets below Pimlico, exploring and
talking about what was then, and seeing what is now -- rowhouses mostly in
various states of decay, some occupied, some empty and crumbling. It has been
changing in recent years, with increasing numbers of unsalvageable
properties now bare grass lots.
An apartment complex that was the scene of
multiple murders and drug arrests was condemned and demolished. A row that
included a 1930s house with a wooden Star of David decorating the end of a
lower roof is gone. The row of storefront buildings on Park Heights that
included Harry Der's laundry, where I took and picked up my father's shirts,
and the candy store where I spent my pennies, is just a memory.
But still standing sentinel over the neighborhood is the
substantial stone presence of St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church. Its parochial
school was closed as the archdiocese reduced the size of its education system.
And a priest no longer there started and lent its name to a low-income housing
aid program that still exists decades later.
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| Friend Stacey Patton, interviewing residents at Alcott Place |
Heading south on either artery takes us past mostly
challenged streets to Keyworth Avenue, where my Louisa May Alcott School No. 59
survives -- after years of vacancy, the 1910-vintage building
was lovingly turned into subsidized senior housing called Alcott Place nearly three decades ago. Like the
neighborhood, its residents are nearly all African-American, and their building
is immaculate. Each classroom was turned into an efficiency apartment. An empty
space under the roof was turned into a fourth-floor community and computer
center. In the midst of streets of Third-Worldly decay and chaos, Alcott Place is
a haven of decent and safe housing and community where people watch out for
each other.
I have stopped there several times, including two years ago
when I brought along the well-known Baltimore writer and radio personality Gilbert
Sandler -- a graduate there 24 years before me. We had the same first-grade
teacher, both growing up in a world very different from the decay and mayhem
that afflicts the rough parts of the city.
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| Where I come from, 3424 Royce Ave. |
Gilbert was reluctant about visiting his street, Cottage Avenue, a mile to
the south off Park Heights, fearing danger. I assured him we were fine, safe at
least in daylight. We turned a corner at Ulman Avenue, and there on the sidewalk was a memorial
to a murder victim, shot to death on that spot a few nights earlier. We drove
past the house where he was born and raised; it was vacant and boarded. That
distressed him. His voice choked a little as he pointed to the sidewalk.
"I had a lemonade stand there." (Gilbert died in December, at age 95,
but his archived Baltimore stories still air Friday mornings on WYPR-FM.)
The worst shore, and the Reagan connection
Here in lower Park Heights is the conception of Baltimore
underlying -- along with a measure of racism -- Donald Trump's condemnation of my
city. Here in this neighborhood, where
low-income people, mostly in rental housing under-tended by absentee landlords,
do their best to survive in an America on the worst shore of the economic gulf.
But on the tour, we are just passing through.
Park Heights merges with Reisterstown Road at the
northwestern edge of massive Druid Hill Park at a junction called Park Circle
-- and nearby into the 1950s was Carlin's amusement park, swimming pool and ice
rink. Part of its site became home to Baltimore's only black-owned Hospital,
Provident, which eventually vanished in a state-ordered merger with another
inner-city hospital.
Overlooking the intersection is the Dietz & Watson meat-packaging plant, successor here to the relocated home of the black-owned Parks Sausage Co. on land designated as an economic "enterprise zone" by the Ronald Reagan administration in 1982 and visited by the president. The White House, according to news reports, noted the area was home to about 44,000 mostly poor people.
On a side street blocks away is the little Towanda
neighborhood playfield and its wading pool, scenes of some earliest memories.
The houses around it are in disarray, neglect and abandonment having left them
looking post-apocalyptic.
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| For sale on Towanda Ave. |
We continue south on Park Heights, past Druid Hill (Droodle, many locals say) -- home to a botanical conservatory, the Maryland Zoo, picnic
grounds, ballfields and frisbee golf. (As the president was unleashing his weekend
tweet storm of "people living in hell in Baltimore," hundreds were spread out in happy picnic parties and family gatherings across the
park.
Druid Hill's old reservoir is currently a mess, under
reconstruction -- its fountain gone. Half a century ago, the body of a missing
woman had been found inside that fountain, which was surrounded by water... still one of my favorite unsolved Baltimore
mysteries, and an inspiration underlying a just-published novel by former
newspaper colleague and friend Laura Lippman, "Lady in the Lake."
Further south is Mondawmin, built in the 1950s as one of the nation's first urban
shopping malls, where Reisterstown Road meets Liberty Heights Avenue -- the
latter name immortalized in the title of one of filmmaker and local native Barry
Levinson's Baltimore movies ("Liberty Heights," "Diner,"
"Avalon" and "Tin Men"). The shopping center has seen
better days, and it was the ignition point of the 2015 rioting that followed
the funeral of Freddie Gray -- whose neck apparently was broken during a ride
in a police van after his arrest by city police.
Bill Clinton was here
We head northwesterly on Liberty Heights, about half a mile past
the campus of Baltimore City Community College (another alma mater, from when
it was called Baltimore Junior College), and a right turn into yet another
Baltimore neighborhood -- Ashburton. Once largely upscale Jewish in population,
and now largely black, I offer it as more proof that race cannot define
community. Much of Ashburton features owner-occupied, well-maintained homes.
Baltimore's first elected black mayor, Kurt Schmoke, former dean of the Howard
University law school and now president of the University of Baltimore, lived
in this community. President Bill Clinton visited Schmoke's house for a
fundraising gathering.
Then we cross Liberty Heights to turn up Hilton Street, then
onto Gwynns Falls Parkway to Windsor Hills. Just before I turn right onto
Windsor Mill Road, I ask my passengers to close their eyes for 10 seconds.
Because I am going to make the city disappear. We have reached the roadway through
Leakin and Gwynns Falls parks -- the closest Baltimore has to wilderness.
Leakin Park has a bad reputation as a dumping ground for the bodies of murder
victims. Once upon a time, it was well-deserved. But you rarely hear of such
acts these days. Killers don't seem to bother anymore. Their victims are left
where they fall. In "The Wire," some are disposed of in vacant
houses. Maybe that happens, too. Rarely.
Windsor Mill leads to Forest Park Avenue, and the entrance
to another surprise -- the neighborhood of Dickeyville, whose mill origins date
to the late 1700s and which features old houses covered by historic covenants
restricting changes. The entrance is from quaintly-named Wetheredsville Road,
which was severed by flooding in a 1970s storm and, by local preference, not
reopened for through traffic. The community looks every bit like a Vermont
village, hard to imagine as part of Baltimore.
Back down Forest Park, briefly crossing the city-Baltimore
County border, we reach the city end of Security Boulevard. A right turn would
take you toward the national headquarters of the Social Security Administration,
one of Maryland's largest employers. Its computers are so enormous that the
complex has emergency generators to take strain off the regional power grid
during extreme weather crises.
But we turn left, back into the city past tidy brick rowhouses on the edge of a neighborhood called Ten Hills. (I haven't counted, but am guessing
that's about right.) Then we reach the western end of Edmondson Avenue before
turning into the most charming section of Ten Hills -- almost a mini-Guilford with
ornate cottages and brick homes, big lawns and curving lanes that belie the common
conception of West Baltimore as a slum.
On the other side, at the end of Ten Hills, it's downhill to
Frederick Avenue and southerly back toward the city center. Often I turn right
on Marydell Road, the Irvington neighborhood street where the late Sun reporter
and famed New York Times columnist Russell Baker moved with his family as a
child and eloquently described in his Pulitzer-winning memoir, "Growing
Up." The family lived in the last house on the right, he told me,
remembering that its basement flooded during big storms.
It's not far from Maiden Choice Run, which flooded so badly during
tropical storm Agnes in 1972 that residents of basement apartments along
Frederick Avenue had to flee for their lives. The danger has prompted extensive
flood-control measures along the stream.
Continuing along Frederick Avenue, we
pass numerous challenged neighborhoods, much like lower Park Heights -- some of
the city's most dangerous and decayed -- in a vast stretch between this
southwestern artery and the mid-line spine of North Avenue. The route spills into Pratt Street, past a fading mural, concealed by tree growth, of idealized postcard-style images of city life and scenery including children black and white playing basketball together. And near the western
edge of downtown we come upon the great Mount Clare roundhouse of the old B&O -- near the
birthplace of American railroading and centerpiece of a railroad museum. It's
possible to turn into the parking lot and drive around a few of the historic
locomotives.
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| A scene at Troy Staton's annual block party |
A safety zone that briefly wasn't
Up nearby Arlington Avenue is Hollins Market -- one of half
a dozen public markets where stalls are rented by merchants selling fresh food
and other items. And cater-corner at Arlington and Hollins Street is the New
Beginnings barbershop, whose owner Troy Staton tends to the hair needs of his
chiefly African-American clientele and oversees his own art gallery there. Too
many people in the inner city have never been exposed to art in museums, he
says -- so he brings art to them. (His personal collection of African-American
art was displayed in a gallery show at the suburban Stevenson University.) He
also partners with institutions that provide free health screenings, and the
shop plays host to community meetings often moderated by his son Rashad, the
family's first college graduate as an alumnus of the city's historically black Morgan State University.
Troy holds an annual free street party there, supported by
donors and corporate sponsors and serving up a meal to as many as 200 people.
It seems a safety zone. But there have been scary moments --
like a Friday afternoon several years ago when a young man caught up in the
drug trade was shot to death on Troy's corner. And last Halloween, while he was
cutting hair, a still-unknown masked youth walked inside with a gun and opened
fire. His customer sustained a foot wound, and Troy was hit three times in his
neck. Luckily, all graze wounds -- an inch or two difference, and he could have
been killed. God spared him, Troy said, because he still has good work to do. The
barbershop shooting became front-page news.
Unfortunately, news skews
toward the bad. The tour is broader. We talk about history, the prejudicial
steering of housing patterns enforced by government and economic interests (as
recounted in my friend Antero Pietila's book "Not in My Neighborhood"),
the selective investment in neighborhood redevelopment and shunning of others,
the sociological challenges of urban America and disintegration of family
structures.
And after about six hours and 55 miles of driving, the tour
is done.
tRant
I've been urged for years to write about the Ettlin Tour.
But it was the ill-conceived and racist rant by the man who would be King Donny
the First, targeting Congressman Elijah Cummings and Baltimore, that finally
made me do it.
Let's remember his words.
Trump called Cummings "a brutal bully, shouting and
screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the
Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more
dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA."
Trump (maybe I'll start calling him tRant) also tweeted, "As proven last week during a
Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very
crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he
spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous
& filthy place."
He threatened to investigate the federal funds sent to
Cummings' district, and said that "no human being would want to live
there."
I would.
After 38 years planted in a suburb, I look at city houses
listed for sale -- even toured one across the street from Druid Hill Park's
botanical conservatory last week. It was built in 1920, three-story blonde
brick, architecturally similar to my old house on Calvert Street, restored,
central air added, garage in back. But maybe it's a fantasy. This one had more
stairs than our legs could deal with much longer, and the adjoining house in
the row is rotting at the seams. Two blocks away, there's a street where of
late there's been gunfire, murder and utility poles adorned with limp memorial balloons
and rain-soaked teddy bears.
It's priced at $400,000, with a historical preservation
benefit freezing the property tax at rock bottom for a decade. Won't be us, here
on one of Baltimore's urban frontiers. But someone out there is going to buy
it. The city has problems, for sure -- and plenty of promise.
(Blogger David M. Ettlin retired in 2007 after 40 years in
local news at the Baltimore Sun, and made a cameo appearance playing himself in
three episodes of "The Wire." His wife, Bonnie J. Schupp, whose pictures grace this post, was
raised in Northeast Baltimore, taught language arts in the city and Anne
Arundel County, owned a camera shop in Severna Park and wrote a newspaper
column on photography for the old Baltimore Evening Sun. They have lived in suburban
Pasadena since 1981.)
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