Crooked Wood: Good morning Baltimore

Apparently New York City, my hometown, is “over” in the way 12-year-old girls signified the end of Uggs and leggings. First off, I reject this premise entirely. New York City is a complex organism that exists in various permutations for its multitude of residents and visitors. The observation, or rather pronouncement, is grounded in some reality. A significant part of New York is only available to masters of the universe. Every new plot of land that has a warehouse with any potential at all is consumed within minutes by developers and weeks later becomes a concert venue or luxury apartment. I have heard arguments that beyond its outlandish real estate prices, the city is too polished and too safe — the proverbial grit is gone. I grant you that New York has changed dramatically, and we’re not just mourning the dive bars and hole-in-the-wall eateries.

However, the claim that New York is “over” is simply untrue. Dynamism is a positive force that drew us all to the city in the first place. Besides the excitement of an ever-changing city, when people complain about the über chic façade of TriBeCa or DUMBO, they don't simultaneously yearn for the slime and fear of pre-Giuliani New York. So for all of the pitfalls and ramifications of the city’s transformation, we must recognize that there has never been just one New York. There are eight million. There are still collections of stomping grounds with plenty of room for our idiosyncrasies — the kinds of places where someone knows our name and our bagel order.

I do realize that this article is called “Good morning Baltimore,” and there’s a very good reason for my New York-centric prologue. Many have decided that Baltimore, like a good number of post-Recession/post-apocalyptic cities, is the next mecca for those who either can’t afford New York or simply don’t want to take part. Baltimore is the next Brooklyn... apparently. It certainly has the ingredients for a hipster collective with its vanguard of handlebar mustaches and ironic accessories. It’s got Clipper Mills, the old factories under the Jones Falls Expressway and the trolley museum. Hampden is full of charming antique stores and vintage clothing shops. Then of course you have the student scene and the local characters; you have the grit and the grime... in abundance. Yet I find myself shrinking away from the discussions of pilgrimages to Baltimore. I like traveling to places slightly off-color and leaving my comfort zone as much as the next undefined 20-something with a hankering for the “undiscovered country.” Yet for me, going to Baltimore and finding it perfectly quaint and appealing borders uncomfortably close to war tourism. Quite a lot of Baltimore is perfectly charming. I have my collection of Baltimore just as I do of New York. Yet I force myself out of it quite frequently. It’s easier to do this in Baltimore because the terrifying, nauseating parts of the city aren’t tucked away as they are in New York. I know a lot of people who don’t see this part of Baltimore. The only way you don’t is if you don’t leave whatever bubble you have membership to. But for anyone moderately curious, in need of a study snack or who ventures off to Giant past 8 p.m., they might find themselves doing some serious soul searching.

The poverty is not exotic. It is so past grit that it’s absurd to even use the term. First and foremost, Baltimore is the South. It’s under the historical Mason-Dixon line, and its borders have only solidified in its postbellum existence. I don’t call it Charm City even though it’s got a capital on cutesy. I don’t call it “Murdermore” either, perhaps because of my privilege but also because, like New York, Baltimore is multidimensional. Just as there is the New York of old timers and blue collar workers, the New York of the hipsters, of the yuppies, of the hippies, of the homeless, of the bankers and the upper east side doctors, of the students and neurotics, the commuters and the tourists, there is more than a black and white Baltimore. This common, binary reduction is far too simplistic. Yet racial tension defines Baltimore in a way that I have never experienced.

East Baltimore is notorious, and yet I always underestimate it. I’ve often described this huge and unavoidable swath of Baltimore to people trying to get a handle on the city as Sarajevo in 1992 or Homs in 2014. While these are obviously blatant exaggerations, they get the point across. There is one seemingly abandoned building after the other until you see a little shoeless child sitting on the porch and you realize a family, not junkies and squatters, live there. As I drove through it most recently, I took note of a fairly baffling billboard that read, “March Against Hopkins, Leave the Plantation.” Hopkins is the only reason Baltimore is not Detroit. The University is the biggest employer in the city and yet, without knowing the specific grievances that led to this sign, I can imagine them. We exist as a microcosm of privilege in a small, concentrated pocket in the middle of Charles Village. Even though we have projects that address the local population, like the Baltimore Rescue Mission Clinic and countless other small scale but important outreach programs, we have not met our potential in this area and have kindled the town-versus-gown dilemma that all too often results in such situations. Our relationship with the surrounding city is complicated, and Hopkins is certainly not burdened with Baltimore’s revival. It might behoove us to invest in more projects that treat our neighbors as equals with stories and insights to share, instead of as charity cases. Groups such as the Blue Haven at Yale partners with a slam poetry group called Kingdom Café in order to share poetry with the local community. Residents, often teens, read their work alongside Elis, elevated to the level they should be treated every day. Yet despite our tutoring programs and medical interventions, the federal-style campus teems with beech trees and marble stairs. Most of the people tending to the grounds and serving at the Hopkins Club are African American. If someone had dropped in on the scene without any background... well let’s just say I can see where the sign was coming from.

I think the takeaway of this is that while we can celebrate the Natty Boh guy proposing to the Utz girl, John Waters and the War of 1812-obsessed Inner Harbor, we must recognize its other half. We must be very careful not to minimize the human tragedy that is omnipresent there when staking our flag in the city in a quest to create the next Brooklyn or Portland. I wish that each of the homeless men I’ve treated at the clinic and each of the kindergarteners I worked with at Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School had Baltimore collections composed of Paper Moon and Sherwood Gardens, of Red Emma’s and Petit Louis, of the Peabody Library and the Book Thing. I wish that they could have stood with me in On the Avenue, a giant antique store in Hampden, a few days before Christmas — alone in the rafters I found an old edition of Great Expectations for a few dollars for my aunt and when I opened the cover, a photograph and letter fell out written to a lover in the 1940s.

I wish they could have watched A Midsummer’s Night Dream with me in the park in Bolton Hill or come to the American Visionary Art Museum to see the model of the Lufthansa built of toothpicks or the mirror covered school bus. But their collection of Baltimore is not a Norman Rockwell print. It is frightening and harsh. It is sex trafficking and racial profiling, food stamps and starvation. It is death and oblivion. And we’ve got to work on that, actively and deliberately, before we start to exploit the city’s natural resources, even with the best of intentions.