This used to be Bethlehem Steel and H.L. Mencken. The Colts. Memorial Stadium. Johnny U. "Diner."Talk about Americana. On one side of the coin, a smiling mother with a beehive hairdo in Hamden. On the other a smiling brother shilling heroin in a snowstorm on Scarey Street.
You want to talk class and race and history and architecture? You want to talk foreshadowing and foreclosures?
Redemption and storefront churches?
So here are some thoughts on an eight year stint in one of the most curious and plucky and damaged places I have ever lived.
I don't know if I have enough distance on this thing to bring the story forward but I'll try. This place had a profound, lifelong impact on me, in good ways and bad. I'll try not to get too carried away here.
I feel as if I've lived in a part of the country that resides deep inside the American psyche. What do I mean? I mean that all those things that each one of us wants to keep hidden from the world, in Baltimore, it's there for everyone to see.
I mean that Baltimore's striving, it's failures, successes, history, fissures, trajectory, past, present and future are there for all to see. Every crack and crevice holds a story. Every knuckleheaded landlord running some half-baked scheme -- it's all there.
Why do you think that Barry Levinson, John Waters and David Simon have built careers on Baltimore? The city is drunk on drama.
Baltimore lies at the intersection of hope and despair. It's a question mark. Can we slay our demons? Of racial divide, of addiction, of exploitation, of malfeasance and mediocrity?
It's scary because the answer is, it doesn't look like it.
