Who Is Baltimore?

 

I've lived the vast majority of my life in Baltimore, and yet I never viewed myself as being from here.

People from Baltimore are not like me. They're either blue collar working class, elite doctors, suburban professionals, non-profit radicals, basic b's, or from demographics I still know very little about. I have never transcended the feeling that I don't belong here, yet I'm tied down for all sorts of health reasons from leaving.

I'm a begrudging native born citizen of Pikesville, a Baltimore suburb so Jewish it has its own yarmulke. Every writer needs an address - not an address at which they live, but an address from which their worldview is oriented, and my true address has never been in the city. More than fifty years ago, my family left the city in panic, and I suppose I inherited some small measure of fear and contempt.

For me, the city of Baltimore is a forbidding pinball machine where the obstacles can land you anywhere but a safe place - not safe physically, but spiritually. My college friendships proved far more durable than the vast majority of my friendships in Baltimore, and, speaking frankly, life here was always a series of disappointments - albeit with quite a few exceptions.

But there were always these many inlets of hope, and beauty and personality. The city as a whole's not been great to me, but there've surely been great times whose memories I would not give up for anything. Certain facets of the city, certain types of people, are absolutely unique to Baltimore. John Waters once said that he preferred Baltimore to New York because "people in New York think they're weird, but they're actually normal. People in Baltimore think they're normal, but are actually weird."

The Key Bridge was rarely part of my world. I remember sailing and biking around it and never stopped being awed by its size, but I can't ever remember driving on it. I grew up on the opposite side of the metro area, live in the opposite side of the city. Yet I knew like everybody that it was one of Charm City's most beautiful sights. The Key Bridge is what blue collar factory workers cross to get to work. It was opened in 1977, ten years already into Baltimore's decline, but it was a symbol of industrial boom: the productive town Baltimore used to be and we hope can be again.

Until 1970, Baltimore was our sixth-largest city by population. It used to be the port of the nation and one of its steel capitals. During World War II, it was where the ships were built that carried the planes of Detroit and Pittsburgh into war. Before and after, it was where the goods of the world were imported and our country's goods were exported. After World War II the US was more than fifty percent of the world's GDP, and Baltimore was a city to be reckoned with almost as much as DC. Appalachian miners came here to work in factories, immigrants came here to prosper. All that is over and has been my whole life.

It was impossible to grow up in modern Baltimore and not see the loomings of American decline. Drive three miles from my parents' house and you find urban blight, drug trades, hopelessness and constant violence. The city of Baltimore is basically divided into nine squares. Three of them comprise "The White L", where prosperity basically lives, while squalor affects so much of the other six. In all the other six are neighborhoods and parks still so beautiful that you marvel there can be crime and poverty within them, yet you look closer and its everywhere: a boarded up house on every block, thousands of unemployed men on the streetcorners drinking in full view, homeless drifters walking every sidewalk, police cars patrolling every road. I remember telling a friend's parents that live in rural Pennsylvania that they could get to Route 70 much more quickly if they drive through West Baltimore, but I couldn't remember the name of the road that got them there (US 40). I went up to a cop, an African-American cop, to ask him how to get to 70 and told him I was trying to give them directions through W. Baltimore to get there. His response: "Are you out of your mind?"

Drive around Baltimore and you realize there is so much promise here. It was a great American city, and but for a curse's worth of bad luck could so easily be again. There is so much that is beautiful: parks, churches, bars, factories adapted into artisan shops, housing stock and apartment buildings; with so many thousands of hardworking, nice and friendly people. Go to DC and try to start up a conversation with a stranger on the street, they'll be annoyed. Do it in Baltimore and you get a full conversation. Whether or not I feel part of that community, Baltimore is a community where people are banded to hope together. Despair is so easy here, yet people never give up through Baltimore's millions of hardships.

That is the most beautiful thing about Baltimore. Whether I find it easy to hope in Baltimore, there are thousands of people who hope in Baltimore because it's NOT easy, yet what choice do we have? Whether or not we feel at home, this is home, it is the place we make our lives, and we live here, another generation that amid its tragedies do the best we can to believe in something better, make it better, celebrate and hope.

Amen.