April 2007 Issue

april 2007

B A L T I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

Is this the future of environmentalism?

Exclusive excerpt! Paul Hawken’s latest book • A Grand Idea: How the Masonic Temple was saved

issue no. 34

F O R

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urbanite april 07

BALTIMORE OPERA COMPANY MICHAEL HARRISON, GENERAL DIRECTOR presents

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april

join us on THE TOUR ‘07 on various evenings over

This month’s cover is a composite of two photos taken by Marshall Clarke. A 4-year-old Baltimorean holds an early spring flower. Behind him appears a section of Baltimore’s industrial landscape, taken by Clarke while on a “Toxic Tour” with Glenn Ross, the subject of this month’s feature article “The Changing Face of Environmentalism.” cover photos by Marshall Clarke

april 2007 issue no. 34

F O R

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B A L T I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

issue no. 34

f e a t u r e s

april 2007

april’s cover:

Is this the future of environmentalism?

Exclusive excerpt! Paul Hawken’s latest book • A Grand Idea: How the Masonic Temple was saved

the changing face of environmentalism a shift in the movement makes way for urban issues by bill mesler

the story of how glenn ross found the environmental movement, or rather how the environmental movement found ross and people like him, may be the story of environmentalism’s future in america.

56

blessed unrest: how the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming in his latest book, paul hawken traces the evolution of the environmental movement and predicts its future. from an economic viewpoint, what citizens have been trying to do for two hundred years is to force business to pay full freight, to internalize their costs to society instead of externalizing them onto a river, a town, a single patient, or a whole generation.

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departments

15

what you’re saying

april 2007 issue no. 34

19

what you’re writing

23

corkboard

25

have you heard …

29

food: seasoned to perfection

got something on your mind? this is the place for feedback from readers

original, nonfiction essays written by readers. this month, the topic is “second chance”

six not-to-miss events around town

people, places, and things you should know about

mother nature sets the menu for seasonal eating by joan jacobson

35 35

baltimore observed: all in the family a farm survives suburbia for five generations and counting by mary k. zajac

41

encounter: b-i-n-g-o at the h-i-p-p-o on wednesday nights in mount vernon, the queer side lets its square side show by heather harris

46

space: a grand idea how baltimore’s masonic temple was saved from demolition by mike dominelli

41

61

fiction: my small murders

65

sustainable city: trashy art

by ron tanner

the city is the medium, the canvas, and the inspiration for enviro-artist steve bradley by karen houppert

71

out there: the art of conversation just listen. that’s the sound of change. by julie gabrielli

71

75

recommended

89

resources

94

eye to eye

books, bands, exhibits, and more

further reading on topics covered in this issue

a closing thought, curated by creative director alex castro

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Urbanite Issue 34 April 2007 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth A. Evitts Elizabeth@urbanitebaltimore.com Guest Editor Van Jones Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial Assistant/Marketing Catrina Cusimano Catrina@urbanitebaltimore.com Copy Editor Angela Davids Contributing Editors William J. Evitts, Heather Harris, Joan Jacobson, Susan McCallum-Smith Contributing Writer Jason Tinney Editorial Intern Tykia Murray Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer/Photographer Jason Okutake Contributing Photographer Gail Burton Production Interns Madeline Gray, John MacConnell Web Coordinator George Teaford Community Coordinator Lionel Foster Administrative/Photography Assistant La Kaye Mbah Senior Account Executive Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives Abber Knott Abber@urbanitebaltimore.com Rebekah Oates Rebekah@urbanitebaltimore.com Kristin Pattik Kristin@urbanitebaltimore.com Bill Rush Bill@urbanitebaltimore.com Sales/Accounting Assistant Michele Holcombe Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to the editor-in-chief (no phone calls, please).

The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2007, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved.

Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. If you know of a location that urbanites frequent and would recommend placing the magazine there, please contact us at 410-243-2050.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211.

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urbanite april 07

note

What’s your relationship to your wife? If you say sustainable, I'll say I’m sorry. Sustainability is not really that interesting. … I’m interested in fecundity and celebrations of nature’s abundance and designs that enrich life.

—William McDonough, architect and author of Cradle to Cradle

I remember the day, about a year ago, when the special Green Issue of Vanity Fair came to the office. The cover featured Hollywood and political elite, like George Clooney and Al Gore, looking serious amid a lushly orchestrated backdrop of verdant plants and mossy rock—a modern-day Eden, replete with Julia Roberts crowned by a wreath.

Flipping through the articles on climate change and the galvanizing environmental movement in the United States, I remember feeling two things—first, it’s heartening to finally see intelligent, mainstream reportage on the realities of global warming and environmental degradation. Second, there are a lot of white people in this issue. In fact, almost all of the individuals featured were white. Amid those profiles were ads for expensive hybrid cars and an article titled “Looking Smart and Doing Your Part” that featured $57 tins of all-natural chocolate and $6,000 bamboo coffee tables. Green, it seems, had gone mainstream. And man, oh man, is it an expensive lifestyle.

The sustainability movement in the United States is, let’s face it, predominantly white and middle class. Conversations tend to revolve around animals and earth—polar bears and melting ice caps, bald eagles and parkland, hormone-free cows and organic vegetables—to the exclusion of a broader dialogue. What does it take for each of us to live a healthy existence? The truth is, our social balance is as out of whack as our ecological one, and their respective pathologies are connected.

Today, though, among the organizations functioning in the trenches, the conversation has moved beyond the eco-elite and is beginning to address the fundamentals of human life. No one represents this shift better than Van Jones, this month’s guest editor. A social activist based in the inner city of Oakland, Jones made the leap of connecting the green and social justice agendas. “I work in neighborhoods where kids go to school, thirty to a classroom, six books, and no chalk,” he says. “There are metal detectors that go off all the time—not because kids are bringing in guns, but because they are bringing in inhalers for their asthma, and I think we can do better than that in this country.”

We are a nation that has pitted industry against environmentalism, as if the capacity to be a thriving economy necessarily comes at the expense of nurturing values and human rights. Jones has seen the rise of socially responsible business and works to bring those jobs into poor urban neighborhoods.

And any conversation about socially responsible business must include Paul Hawken. Hawken has been the articulate voice of natural capitalism for more than twenty years, proving repeatedly that enterprise can be profitable without marginalizing humans or nature. We are honored to run an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (p. 56). In it, he looks back on the environmental movement and predicts its future.

So what, then, lies at the heart of fully realized sustainability? Essentially, it is that you cannot effectively salvage the planet without caring for the people who populate it. Yes, we need to recognize diminishing resources and climate change. Of course we value chemical-free foods and open spaces.

But thriving is also about education, healthcare, community, and jobs. Everything is connected.

In the oft-repeated quote printed above, William McDonough, architect and coauthor of the book Cradle to Cradle, suggests that perhaps “sustainable” isn’t the right word in the first place. We should not set our sights so low as to simply struggle for basic maintenance. Rather, we should learn to flourish and to recognize that prospering does not have to come at the cost of natural or human resources.

It is time, in other words, to move beyond sustainability.

—Elizabeth A. Evitts

quotes

photo by Sam Holden

editor’s

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery—not over nature but of ourselves.

—Rachel Carson, American ecologist and author

The future will be green, or not at all.

—Sir Jonathon Porritt, British environmentalist and author

The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.

—Ayn Rand, Russian-born American novelist and philosopher

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

—Abba Eban, Israeli diplomat and politician

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age. —Jacques Barzun, French-born American historian

We all live downstream.

—David Suzuki, Canadian geneticist, science broadcaster, and environmental activist

The frog does not drink up the pond in which it lives.

—Native American proverb

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contributors

behind this issue

photo by Madeline Gray

photo by Jill Eicher

photo by Terrance McCarthy

Mike Dominelli Mike Dominelli forsook New York some years ago to get in on Baltimore—the greatest city in America, he believes. Here he continues his trade of restoration engineering and green design. In addition to his engineering work, Mike has completed a “hobby degree” in urban planning.

He mentors middle-school students in planning and engineering for the Future City Competition (featured in Urbanite’s March 2006 issue, the program consists of students competing to plan functional and innovative cities of the future). Dominelli will keep the Formstone on his house, no matter what his neighbors say.

He wrote about the Tremont Grand renovation for this month’s “Space” department (p. 46).

Paul Hawken Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and author. He is internationally renowned as one of the leading advocates of corporate reform related to environmental practices.

Hawken (of home and garden retailer Smith & Hawken) has founded and run several ecological businesses; written and taught about the effect of business on the environment; and consulted with governments and corporations on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy. His latest book, Blessed Unrest, is to be published next month.

An excerpt from the book appears on page 56.

Ron Tanner Ron Tanner has published short stories in The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Speak, and many other journals, and in such anthologies as 20 Under 30: Early Works from Today’s Influential Writers and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. His awards for short fiction include a Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society gold medal, a Maryland State Arts Council grant, and a New Letters Award, among others. Most recently, he was the 2006 Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Lyon College and the 2006 winner of the Jack Dyer Fiction Prize. “My Small Murders,” which appears on page 61, is from his new collection of stories, Diversity! Tanner teaches writing at Loyola College, where he chairs the writing department.

Mary K. Zajac Baltimore native Mary K. Zajac has taught English, worked as a librarian, and, most recently, managed a fine wine shop before turning to full-time freelance journalism in 2005. Her writing focuses mainly on food and wine, with a few forays into music, art, and the fascinatingly quirky.

“Writing satisfies the voyeur, the insatiably curious part of me,” she says. “I never tire of hearing people’s stories and am touched by their willingness to share them.” Zajac, a columnist for Style and Chesapeake Life magazines, wrote about a White Marsh farming family for this month’s “Baltimore Observed” department (p. 35). Her work has also appeared in Saveur, Edible Chesapeake, and Maryland Life. She holds a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Human rights attorney and social justice visionary Van Jones has been called “the new face of environmentalism.”

The charismatic Tennessee native’s interest in justice and environmental issues started at Yale, where he earned a law degree and became interested in the power of investigative journalism.

In the wake of the Rodney King beating in 1991, the acquittal and uprising in 1992, and a general lack of services and support for victims of police brutality and misconduct, Jones founded Bay Area PoliceWatch in 1995. The hotline and legal documentation center was one of the only places victims and survivors could turn for help. And when PoliceWatch helped lead a successful campaign to remove a killer cop from the San Francisco Police Department, Jones and his project really took off.

In 1996, Jones and the other two PoliceWatch staffers founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Since then, the Ella Baker Center has taken on and won fights that other organizations wouldn’t touch. After ten years, the Ella Baker Center is a firmly established institution working to promote positive alternatives to violence and incarceration.

The Center’s four cutting-edge campaigns are all getting some much deserved attention: Books Not Bars is working to close California’s notoriously abusive youth prisons and replace them with effective rehabilitation programs—the kind proven time and time again to work better than prisons at helping young people get their lives back on track. Reclaim the Future is creating “green-collar” clean-energy jobs in Oakland, especially for those most in need of employment (e.g., the formerly incarcerated, the underemployed, young people of color, etc.). Silence the Violence is working to reduce violence by increasing opportunities—opportunities for work, recreation, and community involvement. And Bay Area PoliceWatch is still providing valuable legal assistance to victims and survivors of police misconduct.

One of Jones’ best-known innovations is the bringing together of the prison reform movement with the environmental movement. Though the two might seem unrelated at first glance, Jones has found the unity they share: the value they place on lives that too often get left behind.

“From my point of view, it has always been about uplifting people,” Jones told the Urbanite staff. “We don’t have any throwaway resources or species. We also don’t have any throwaway children or neighborhoods. It’s all sacred and precious, and we should act that way.”

Now, Jones works to forge alliances between environmentalists and business owners, activists, and others. “We need that kind of a grand coalition, a ‘green growth’ alliance that includes the best of business, the best of labor, the best of urban activism, and the best environmentalists to say: We can build a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty,” he said.

Jones has earned many awards, including the Reebok International Human Rights Award, the Ashoka Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Foundation “Next Generation Leadership” Fellowship.

courtesy of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

photo by Madeline Gray

with guest editor van jones

Van Jones will be the keynote speaker for the Third Annual Open Society Institute–Baltimore Celebration honoring its newest class of Baltimore Community Fellows at The Belvedere Hotel. The Baltimore Community Fellows, a corps of eighty-six social entrepreneurs, works throughout the city to improve life in Baltimore’s underserved communities. A limited number of tickets are available at $15 for the luncheon, which will be held Friday, April 27, noon to 2 p.m. For tickets, call 410-234-1091 or e-mail osibaltimore@sorosny.org.

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what you’re saying

april 2007

B A L T I M O R E ’ S

issue no. 34

F O R

C U R I O U S

Cohousing in the City?

I really appreciated your February issue, particularly the piece on cohousing (“Urban Oasis”). Baltimore is ripe for cohousing. An ambitious developer and group of residents could take over rows of abandoned homes or “build green” on empty lots.

Given the projected increase in city population, why not offer cohousing as an affordable, communityfriendly option? Who is Baltimore’s Don Tucker?

—Alyson Bonavoglia lives in Baltimore.

Is this the future of environmentalism?

Exclusive excerpt! Paul Hawken’s latest book • A Grand Idea: How the Masonic Temple was saved

Disrespect Is No Picnic Your January cover was worth more than a thousand words.

An incident at an outdoor concert/picnic last summer brought home to me the fact that impolite is too weak a word to describe the barbaric behavior all too common among today’s children.

A group of pre-teens, mostly girls, were trampling the flowers in a landscaped garden at the site (while parents were nearby) and throwing handfuls of dirt and mulch at each other, also sprinkling those nearby. Some of them were wearing T-shirts from a private girls’ school in the area.

As no one in my group would do it, I finally got up from my lawn chair and told them they were not to do this. The result was that I, a senior citizen, soon felt a clump of dirt hit me in the back of the head and trickle down under my collar.

Recognition of negative behavior patterns in the young has given rise to a plethora of “programs,” campaigns, and educational “innovations” that try to replace basic moral education but cannot.

Respect is learned in the home, and sitterraised, as opposed to mother-raised, children are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to relating to adults in a positive and respectful manner. In times

past, the family, the church, and the school not only agreed on the difference between right and wrong, but also required the learning of it as part of character development. As a result, the most common infraction of school rules (before God became persona non grata) was the chewing of gum. The throwing of dirt on bystanders would have been grounds for expulsion; deliberate trampling of a carefully planted garden was a matter for the police.

Today’s emphasis on “self-esteem” is really a lesson in narcissism, not self-respect or respect for others. Politeness is not an isolated lesson to be learned but the outward manifestation of moral and civilized people. Our country is desperate for a serious course correction. One generation of profound ignorance of what constitutes a civilized family and consequently a civilized nation is all it takes to self-destruct.

—Elizabeth Ward Nottrodt is on the staff at a local kindergarten.

Mile One …

“The Longest Three Miles” (February) is an informative read, particularly for someone from “out of

town.” It is a pleasure to read a piece in which the journalist did more than “checklist reportage,” covering the people and issues at multiple levels of life history, with an understated yet unequivocal social commentary.

A lingering question is why the burden falls to the black and African students and professors to reach out to their neighbors. Why is it that in this millennium, we are still fighting the battles of the previous one?

—Michael Wright is an urban planner who lives in Canada.

Mile Two …

Johns Hopkins University has long had a tumultuous relationship with the residents of Baltimore City. I am pleased to see Urbanite addressing the gap between the students at the university and the residents of the city. After a brief stint as a temp employee on the Homewood campus, I was appalled at the disdain that students expressed about their college town. The students seemed so cloistered and sheltered, they couldn’t conceive that there was more to Baltimore than the nightly news. I am glad

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to see a JHU alumnus (Lionel Foster) opening the discussion, and I hope that JHU students, not just the faculty, will continue to bridge the gaps between the school and the residents of Baltimore City.

reminded me that it is often within a society’s most appalling circumstances that a gem is produced.

Gems, like Justin Jones, and, I am sure, your Lionel Foster, are a rare find in today’s media.

—Laia Block is a research analyst at the Maryland State Department of Education. She lives in Morrell Park.

—Ebony S.

Timber!

Mile Three!

Though I wish there was no longer a need to discuss the subject matter, I am glad that some light was shed on the issue of racial insensitivity at the higher education level. I myself was first made aware of this issue by my own completely unanticipated firsthand experiences, which left me less optimistic about the impact that current higher education could have on the issue. However, Mr. Foster’s article left me hopeful that positive change is still possible, and

photo by John Dean

update

What a pleasure it was to read your very kind article concerning our project in Stone Hill (“History in the Making,” February). In the interests of accuracy and of giving credit where credit is due, we would like to correct an apparent misunderstanding regarding the decision to design the addition to our house as a timber-frame structure. The suggestion to convert Walter Schamu’s wonderful design to a timber-frame structure, and the subsequent engineering and execution of that plan, came from our builders, Traditional Builders, Inc., newly arrived

to Baltimore. We say this not in any way to diminish Walter’s contribution to the project, which was invaluable, but rather to draw attention to both the concept of timber-framing as an alternative to conventional stick-frame building and to this remarkable new entrant into Baltimore’s building community.

—Mark Thistel and Robyne Lyles

We want to hear what you’re saying.

E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Submissions should include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

LIA PU RPU RA Lia Purpura, whose poetry was featured in Urbanite’s March 2006 issue, has released her first collection of essays. Called On Looking, the lyrical and innovative essays have garnered Purpura much critical praise. She has just been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and she received a Maryland State Arts Council Grant, an award Purpura says is not about buying pens or laptops but buying time and allowing the flexibility to travel and research. Individual essays from On Looking have been named notable essays of 2005 and 2006 by Best American Essays, and her essay “Glaciology” won a 2005 Pushcart Prize. Although her two previous books were of poetry, Purpura doesn’t consider the essays a huge departure from her style. “With On Looking, I found a form that is well-suited to the way I walk through the world,” she says.

On the heels of her newly published book came a new post at the University of Iowa. Purpura is currently the Bedell Visiting Writer in the master of fine arts nonfiction writing program and will teach at the university for a semester. Still writer-

in-residence at Loyola College, Purpura will return to Baltimore in fall 2007. She calls her Iowa grad students “really sharp, critically keen, and terrifically supportive of one another,” and prefers to treat them as younger colleagues rather than students.

In addition to her other accomplishments, a libretto Purpura cowrote with composer Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez was performed at the Library of Congress by the choral ensemble Chanticleer.

The two worked together to create a piece that explores the existential and spiritual dilemmas associated with the California Gold Rush and the drive to push westward.

Purpura plans to continue writing new poems and essays, although she doesn’t want to reveal the nature of those projects—to us or to herself. “I like to keep myself in the dark as much as possible about my work’s new directions and not puncture or deflate the mystery for myself,” she says.

—Tykia Murray is Urbanite’s editorial intern.

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12/19/06

1:38:47 PM

what

you’re

writing

Topic

Deadline

Publication

Anticipation Memory A Day’s Work Serendipity Origins

Apr 13, 2007 May 18, 2007 June 15, 2007 July 20, 2007 Aug 17, 2007

July 2007 Aug 2007 Sept 2007 Oct 2007 Nov 2007

In 1999

, without so much as a “bye” or “I’m leaving,” he backed up the truck to the entrance of the building and emptied our apartment. When I arrived home from my sister’s house and opened the front door, I was met with echoes. He had taken everything but the couch, my toothbrush, and some personal items.

I was mystified and horrified. He made his new home with a hot momma and her 2-year-old son in a nearby housing project. The therapist called it nesting: The need to set up more than one household in case a relationship fails. I call it unfortunate, sad, and unforgivable.

I never took the key from him. Maybe I should have.

One evening, after enjoying my freedom for six months, I returned home to find him lying across the only piece of furniture he had left, toothbrush in his hand, duffle bag at his feet. About the departure and sudden return, no words were spoken. It was understood that he needed a second chance.

Within two months he would go blind and need dialysis. I still loved him and gave him that second chance until the day he died: June 4, 2006.

—Jo Ann McKinney-Ajamu is currently employed at the Greater Homewood Adult Literacy program as

photo by RaRah, www.rarahphoto.com

“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month, we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We have the right to heavily edit for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Due to libel and invasion of privacy issues, we reserve the right to print the piece under your initials. Submissions should be typed (and if you cannot type, please print clearly). Only one submission per topic, please. Send your essay to Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 or to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Please keep submissions under four hundred words; longer submissions may not be read due to time constraints. Due to the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned. The themes printed below are for the “What You’re Writing” department only and are not the themes for future issues of the magazine itself.

an instructor/advocate. She loves to read and enjoys writing children’s books and material for adult learners.

Saturday morning my dog is up at 5:30.

He runs up and down the stairs until I can’t stand it anymore. At 7:00 I get up and walk him.

We’re on the home stretch, about to turn the last corner of our daily route, me stumbling, him pulling, when I smell it. The sharp scent, like burning aerosol, slices through the air. I hear voices.

“Whose is it? Whose is it?” a man yells. The next thing I know, my dog is pulling me to the top of concrete steps that lead down to a neighbor’s basement door. Below are three people arguing and smoking crack. My dog, always eager to make new friends, starts to drag me down towards them.

I yank my dog, hard. He is sixty-five pounds and much stronger than I am, but he senses my fear and comes willingly. As we walk the final steps home, I am furious that it has come to this. You can’t even walk your dog on a Saturday morning without literally stumbling onto a bunch of people smoking crack. I think, “I’ve had it. I can’t live this way. I want out of this city.”

My dog and I reach my stoop, only a few houses from where three people are now getting high. I take out my key and glance behind me, as I have learned to do. As I do, I see the sun cutting across the harbor and hear the seagulls calling out in the morning air. I take a deep breath, watching the light gleam gold in the windows of Baltimore’s tallest buildings. I think, in that instant, how easy it is to fall apart. I turn back, twisting the key in the lock. We go inside, and I shut the door behind me, home.

—Anna Maria Gualtieri is a master of fine arts student in Goucher’s creative nonfiction writing program. In her free time, she enjoys taking adventurous walks with her dog, Nino, and husband, David.

The countdown came and went, and I was still standing there with padded cuffs around my ankles, on a bungee tower fifty meters above the north Han River, an hour from Seoul. I wanted to jump, but overriding millions of years of survival instincts was harder than I thought.

“Just a minute,” I mumbled, and took another deep breath. The next countdown also came and w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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Boutiques. Antiques.

And all things unique.

And you thought e r o m i t l a B n o k c o l a had , p i h , y k r qui d n i k a f o oneshops.

here’S An IdeA for A dAY trIp:

Distinctive | surprising | Original

the Queen’s ink— Classes and supplies for stamp and collage art www.queensink.com 301-497-9449

....................................

.......................

rams Head tavern— Great food, Fordham beer, live music every weekend www.ramsheadtavern.com/savage 301-604-3454 ..................................

Memories of Finland— Gifts from the Land of the Midnight Sun www.memoriesoffinland.com 301-490-7666 ..................................

Go antiquing, boutiquing and treasure seeking in Maryland’s most unique shopping destination, Savage Mill. Browse hundreds of original fashion, jewelry, antique, contemporary art, collectibles, craft and home shops as distinctive and unique as you are.

And top off the shopping with lunch, dinner or drinks at the ram’s head tavern. It’s all less than a half hour south of Baltimore, just off I-95 and route 32.

Meet You there.

Find more shops in the directory at: www.savagemill.com/directory.html

8600 Foundry street | savage, MD 20763 1-800-788-Mill | www.savagemill.com

20

urbanite april 07

Family game store — The best in gaming for all ages 301-776-5980

lucy & ethel’s— Cottage chic home accessories and gifts 301-317-9040 ....................................

artcraft— Unique American crafts and furniture www.artcraftonline.com 301-604-6518 .......................

and sew it goes— Quilting fabrics, books, kits and classes 301-725-5548

Bonaparte Breads— Authentic French bread and pastries; open daily 410-880-0858

For directions visit www.savageMill.cOM

went. The jump operator told me there were other people waiting and I had missed my chance.

Three of us went back down. The cuffs around our ankles tethered to belts around our waists made us look like shambling felons. We didn’t make eye contact with anyone at the bottom. After looking forward to this for weeks, I had been let down by the only person I had to be able to rely on: myself.

The second group went up the tower. They all jumped.

“Esonee!” Park Seokjin, the tour guide and a good friend, called the Korean version of my name.

“You want to try again?” There was space in the third group.

“Yes,” I said, not sure if I did.

When they asked who wanted to jump first, my hand went up. It was much harder the second time.

As the jump operator was attaching the cuffs, Seokjin said something in Korean that was probably, “This guy chickened out before.” The operator looked me in the face, shook his head in disgust, and went to take the cuffs off.

“Will you jump this time?” Seokjin asked.

“Yes,” I said, certain for the very first time. It was the look of scorn on the operator’s face that did it.

A final quiet moment on the edge of the platform. Winter-naked trees across the river. Soft whistling wind. I took another deep breath. I barely heard the countdown this time. The murky green of the river filled my sight as I plunged toward it.

I closed my eyes against the wind and cold. Time stopped and gravity ceased as I reached the end of the cord and bounced, twisting and turning in the air with no idea which way was up or down. I felt calm, utterly at peace.

The crowd below cheered me for going through with the jump, but I didn’t hear it.

—Anthony Gilbert is an Australian who works as a computer programmer in Columbia. He spends the rest of his time looking for some of life’s answers in Baltimore.

My mother gave my father

many second chances, most of them in the ten years of their marriage before I was born. Had she not, I would not be writing this, the romanticized version of what to my older brother must have seemed a horror story that would not end.

But I have always loved stories, and though my mother wanted to keep the details of their marriage and why it finally did end secret from me, I was curious and asked questions: about why my father’s image was cut from photographs; about the wedding dress she had not saved for me; about the scar above her lip, where he had hit her with a belt.

As a child I was fascinated with her scars. When we showered together in the mornings I would trace my fingers on the raised surgical scar that ran up her back, as if her spine were on top of her skin. I asked over and over about the scar on her belly—the evidence that she wanted me.

The story’s facts are far from romantic: After my delivery, the IUD that had failed as contracep-

tion tore the placenta from my mother’s uterus. She bled to death, but the doctor revived her, performing an emergency hysterectomy. My father approved the operation with a drunken scrawl, even though I was born at 1:12 p.m.

My mother would tell me that God wanted her in heaven, but she came back, because she loved me that much.

We stayed in the hospital for six days. When we arrived home, my brother was crying. My father had left “with some woman.” Days later, when he returned, he threw my mother, brother, and me out of the apartment. My mother drove us around all night in a snowstorm, realizing, through this chance to be a mother for a second time, that she no longer loved my father.

We went back to the apartment, and my mother took nearly four more years to leave the marriage for good. I love both my parents. I believe that two people make a marriage and can rip it apart. I retell, revise, and rewrite their story, because in doing so I learn about forgiveness and thankfulness. And this time, I realize that I forgot, when my mother called on my birthday this year, to thank her for coming back.

—Ashlie Kauffman is a freelance writer glad to be reacquainting herself for the third time with Baltimore, after growing up here.

I feel like Miss USA

. Not perky and sexy, with a desire for world peace, but grateful.

Like the Miss USA who was the catalyst for the latest Donald Trump freak show, I’ve been given a mulligan, a second chance at a life guided by hope, not by a needle.

I’d always romanticized the junkie’s life. It was probably a combination of feeling sorry for myself as a little boy, reading too many William Burroughs books, and listening to the junk science of victimhood advocates. Whatever the reason, I became a jobless, friendless junkie.

That all changed in an instant. After spending a miserable weekend in a strange city where I ran out of drugs, I drank bottles of Nyquil and chewed holes in my arm to assuage my sickness as I made my way home. When I arrived, I went to score in a shady ghetto, surrounded by drug dealers, perverts, murderers, and victims of city blight. And ran into the law.

My guardian angel had traded in his white robe and wings for a shoulder holster, ratty sport coat, and undercover narc officer’s badge. I sat handcuffed on a curb, looking up at him. I knew I wouldn’t survive a night in jail. I prayed he’d let me go. He said the truth would set me free.

In that instant, I saw myself as others saw me.

I knew that if I didn’t change, my life would be never-ending jail terms, halfway houses, poverty, regret, and sadness. I vowed to change. The detective let me go; I don’t know why. My life has never been the same.

My father saw me turn around before he died, my wife stuck by me, and we now have a beautiful baby boy. I have a job. And I’m alive. Lots of junkies

can’t say that. I have a lot to be thankful for. Just like Miss USA. —Donald Fleury is a documentary film producer, writer, and recent transplant from California. He plays banjo, stays busy trying to improve his credit rating, and lives in Baltimore with his wife and son.

I dropped my clipboard

and sprinted to the far corner of the soggy, dew-covered field where the rest of the field hockey team had gathered around her, barely even finishing their first Saturday morning warm-up lap.

Her lips were blue and speckled with tiny drops of foamy saliva. The pink in her cheeks was rapidly disappearing and her eyes were rolled back in her head—only her empty, icy whites stared back at me.

“Megan! Megan honey! Can you hear me?” Oh, my God. Does she have asthma? Did I forget to check her school physical? Later on, when they played the 911 tape on the six o’clock news, listening to myself was surreal.

Megan wasn’t breathing. She had no pulse. She was making the most bizarre sound; it was like a low, breathy moan. The doctors later explained that after a person dies, their organs begin to release gases that might produce sound.

I tried to explain this noise to the operator. She didn’t get it. “She’s not breathing!” I cried. “But she’s making a weird noise!” I screamed this over and over again, waiting for the operator to instruct me to perform CPR. Because Megan was making this noise, she thought she was still breathing.

I looked at Megan again, her face now void of color. I threw the cell phone into the grass and told the girls to back up. I pinched Megan’s nose and gave her two breaths. Then I began chest compressions but forgot how many I was supposed to do. One of the girls picked up the phone and held it against my ear while I screamed at the operator again, this time getting an answer I wanted.

My assistant coach arrived to practice while I was kneeling over Megan, pressing on her chest.

Later, she told me that when we first made eye contact, my expression was something “straight out of National Geographic.”

The doctors said the heart attack would’ve happened no matter what Megan was doing, probably around the same time it did on the field. I wasn’t supposed to have practice that day; it was a Jewish holiday but I misread the calendar. Megan’s parents said that if I didn’t have practice, she’d still be sleeping. She would’ve never woken up.

A year and a half later, Megan and her family gave me a diamond necklace on the day she graduated high school. I didn’t want to accept such an expensive gift, but Megan insisted, with very pink cheeks and wide, sparkling brown eyes. ■ —Jenna Zava is in her fourth year coaching field hockey and teaching English at Overlea High School in Rosedale.

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urbanite april 07

Show this ad and get 10% off any purchase over $100.* Have a green spring.

1407 Fleet Street, Inner Harbor East 410 276 1180 www bluehouseLIFE com *Offer not valid with any other discount. Expires June 21, 2007.

CORKBOARD CORK Grossed Out and About Great for kids and interesting to all is the ongoing Grossology exhibition at the Maryland Science Center. The exhibit incorporates virtual reality, video technology, and life-like models and interactive displays that allow visitors to explore the human body inside and out. Bodily functions are presented in a way that is not only informative, but utterly engrossing.

Work and Play

A collaborative dance project by MacArthur Award winner Martha Clarke premieres at the Peabody Institute. The original performance, New Work, is a four-part piece, involving composers, dancers, choreographers, singers, actors, and visual artists from Peabody and other local arts institutions.

The Maryland Science Center 601 Light Street Through April 29 See website for hours and admission prices 410-545-5927 www.mdsci.org

Peabody Institute 1 Mount Vernon Place April 14 and 15, 7:30 p.m.

General admission $14; students and seniors $7 with ID 410-659-8100, ext. 2 www.peabody.jhu.edu/dance

Highlandtown Vino The fourth annual Highlandtown Wine Festival celebrates the tradition of home winemaking. The festival includes a homemade-wine competition, bocce tournament, food, entertainment, and, of course, wine tastings. Admission price includes five wine tastings as well as a souvenir glass.

Our Lady of Pompei Convent Garden Conkling and Claremont Streets April 22, 1 p.m.–6 p.m.

General admission $20; tickets can be purchased at DiPasquale’s Italian Market (3700 Gough Street; 410-276-6787) and Mastellone Deli & Wine (7212 Harford Road; 410-444-5433) www.highlandtown.com

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS Poetry transcends time and space when it takes the form of a four-day festival sprawl in Maryland and Virginia. The Yockadot Poetics Theatre Festival features staged readings, outdoor performances, and poetry performance projects, celebrating the vitality of the word through “avant-garde” poetry.

Various Baltimore and Alexandria and Arlington, VA, area locations Begins April 26; see website for a listing of locations, dates, and times 703-400-2984 www.yptfest.org

Dry Spell Naomi Wallace’s play Things of Dry Hours is a surprising blend of poetry, history, ideology, and romance. The main character, Tice Hogan, is a black, Bible-reading, unemployed communist during the Depression who lives with his widowed daughter, Cali. Things heat up when Corbin Teel, a white outlaw, knocks on their door.

Flower Power

Spring is in full swing with Mount Vernon’s annual Flower Mart.

Festivities include entertainment for the whole family: food, contests, crafts, vendors, and, of course, plenty of flowers for sale. Be sure to check out maypole activities and the themed costume pet parade before buying a bonsai for mom.

Center Stage 700 North Calvert Street April 27–June 3 See website for show times and ticket prices 410-332-0033 www.centerstage.org

Washington Monument May 4 and 5, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

Free www.flowermart.org

Photo credits from top to bottom: courtesy of The Maryland Science Center; photo by Malcolm Druskin; photo by Elizabeth Lipinski; logo by Justin Sirois; photo of Director Kwame Kwei-Armah by Lorenzo Agius; photo by Mike Evitts, Downtown Partnership

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Make Connections With GesherCity If you’re a Jewish adult, ages 22-39, looking to meet others like yourself, GesherCity is the place.

What are you into? “Cluster” groups include: City Cinema n Night on the Town n Beagles & Bagels

Shabbat Dinners n Skiing, Tennis, Golf n Bike & Brunch

n

n

And Much More!

Don’t see something that fits? Start your own group.

We’ll show you how. Contact Julie Karpa: 410.356.5200, x590 or jkarpa@jcc.org

www.geshercity.org

state-of-the-art fitness center

fresh mussels

Tempted? the most spacious new apartment homes on the water. rooftop pool overlooking the baltimore harbor.

Parent/infant/toddler program Ages Birth-36 months tempted yet?

• Two convenient JCC locations • Non-members welcome • Join any of 15+ Baby and Me programs

410.732.8702 EdenApts.com

Year-round activities for you & your child For more information, call Sharon or Linda: 410-356-5200, x347, or email: parenting@jcc.org, www.jcc.org/parenting Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore 5700 Park Heights Avenue, Baltimore 3506 Gwynnbrook Avenue, Owings Mills

Managed by Legend Management Group

24

urbanite april 07

luxury apartment living that’s fells point to the core.

have you heard . . .

edited by marianne amoss

Spices …

photo by Madeline Gray

Almost everyone has experienced the frustration that comes from spending an hour searching in the kitchen for dried basil and finding only nutmeg that may be from the early ’90s. Tsp Spices has the solution. The Baltimore-based company provides certified-organic spices in foil-lined and sealed pouches, each holding exactly one teaspoon of spice. These “packets of pure adventure,” as founders Katie Luber and Sara Engram say, are housed in chic tin cans that make a great presentation for a gift. With collections like “sweet basics,” “sun shine,” and

“savoir fare,” there is something for every taste; individual spices like anise seed, ancho chile, and ground cardamom are also available. Tsp Spices’ website offers several recipes to inspire your own spice revolution, as well as a newsletter and blog where you can share your creations. Order through the company’s website or stop by Atwater’s in Belvedere Square (529 East Belvedere Avenue; 410-3232396; atwaters.biz). Go to www.tspspices.com.

—Tykia Murray

Junk Mail …

Who doesn’t hate junk mail? Wouldn’t we all love to eliminate that wasted paper and save a few trees?

Now there is a way—Greendimes.com. For the price of about a dime a day, the eco-friendly service removes your name from junk mailers’ lists and keeps it off. That means virtually no more unsolicited credit card and mortgage applications, which goes a long way toward preventing identity theft.

Greendimes also plants one tree in your name for every month that you’re a member. The company’s

website reports that twenty-eight billion gallons of water and one hundred million trees are wasted in producing junk mail every year— subscribing to this service is a small way to make a big difference. Memberships come in three levels: Seedling ($4/month), Sapling ($36/year), and Tree ($360/lifetime). Sign yourself up or give a gift membership at www.greendimes.com.

—T. M.

Brewing Company …

courtesy of Hook & Ladder

Finally—a beneficial beer! Brewing company Hook & Ladder was founded by brothers Rich Fleischer (a firefighter) and Matt Fleischer in March 1999 in San Francisco. The brewery’s mission is twofold: to make high-quality beer and to give back to the community. Hook & Ladder started “A Penny in Every Pint,” an initiative that donates $4 to local groups like the Metropolitan Firefighters Burn Foundation from every barrel sold. The nonprofit foundation works to help rehabilitate injured firefighters and burn patients. Just last year, Hook & Ladder donated

$10,000 to the foundation. More than a year ago, the brothers moved the company from the Bay Area to their home state of Maryland, and the brewery is now located in Silver Spring. Hook & Ladder’s award-winning brews (“Golden Ale” and “Backdraft Brown”) are available at more than thirty Baltimorearea restaurants and bars. Look for their signature firefighter-axe tap handle. Go to www.hookandladderbeer.com.

—T. M.

Have you heard of something new and interesting happening in your neighborhood? E-mail us at haveyouheard@urbanitebaltimore.com.

Where do locals go? www.buylocalbaltimore.com

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www.buylocalbaltimore.com

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Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance www.csballiance.org

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BilligInheritUrb2

BEFORE

Robert R. Gisriel, AIA

3/8/07

7:55 PM

Page 1

AFTER

Residential Architect

Redesign and additions to existing homes a specialty.

Good design & buildable plans make construction more affordable.

Did You Inherit An Estate Or A New Set Of Troubles?

Robert R. Gisriel Design Corp.

Sometimes an auction seller requires more than just a speedy sale. That's why our family-owned business offers comprehensive services that start working the moment you list your property.

With our customized programs, we do it all, from marketing your home to cleaning and preparing it for auction. You need only pick up the phone and the work is done. For over 85 years, we've been serving Maryland real estate sellers with the kind of professionalism and integrity that makes for good relationships and great auctions. So you'll just have to worry about something else.

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LATTANZI LANDSCAPES r e - e nv i s i o n i n g y o u r o u t d o o r s p a c e professional design consultation • creative direction brickwork • landscape construction stone work • patios • walkways decks • water features • ponds fencing • grading • retaining walls perennial gardens • renovations • installations

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Professional Tooth Whitening for $285.00 until June 30th 100% goes to children’s charity. Call today for an appointment.

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26

urbanite april 07

have you heard . . .

Chocolate and Tea … sphere with food offerings ranging from the lite fare Chinese chicken salad to baked cod with miso. The intimate “Bird’s Nest” (as Lee refers to the store’s second level) is the perfect place to peruse books on Buddhist philosophy while sipping decadent hot chocolate made from melted truffles. At Chocolatea, stress melts just as easily. Open Mon–Fri 7:30 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sat 9 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sun 9 a.m.–5 p.m. 3811 Canterbury Road; 410-366-0095.

—Catrina Cusimano photo by Jason Okutake

photo by Jason Okutake

Fine chocolate and tea might seem like an odd pairing, but when combined in an eclectic, cozy setting, they are simply comfort matched with comfort.

Chocolatea is a new cafe drawing a crowd as varied as its menu listing—Hopkins lacrosse players can be found scarfing down pre-practice breakfasts of Belgian waffles while Canterbury neighbors explore panini with Asian flare. The unlikely alliance of chocolate and tea isn’t a new one for Oscar Lee, who is one of the owners of Truffles & Tea in Cross Keys as well. Chocolatea has a more relaxed atmo-

Boutique …

A new high-end boutique on Antique Row will have you packing Italian designer shoes in with your antique lamps. Soul 2 Sole has opened to provide high-fashion lines to Baltimore’s high-fashion crowd. Co-owner Samuel Bowden opened the shop with longtime friend Marty Mason, owner of Mason Custom Jewelry located a few doors down. Soul 2 Sole carries European-style footwear and apparel, as well as accessories. Lines include boots by Jo Ghost and men’s clothing (blazers, hoodies, button-down

shirts, etc.) by Joystick, Monarchy, and Scott Langton. Bowden is getting in several new lines these days and plans to continue expanding the shop’s offerings. “There’s nobody like us in the city, carrying the stuff we’re carrying,” he says. Open Mon–Sat 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sun 12 p.m.–6 p.m. 857 North Howard Street; 410-728-0753.

—Marianne Amoss

Antiques …

photo by La Kaye Mbah

The recent opening of Woodward’s Antiques Gallery and Auction Theatre is the best old news.

The antique gallery and auction house has found a home in what was once the Ideal Theatre (built in 1908) on The Avenue in Hampden—the perfect location for vintage. In their 5,500-square-foot space, Woodward’s houses a varied selection of nostalgia— everything from jewelry to mid-century furniture.

Hard-to-find gems like Ringling Bros. Circus banners and Chicago Opera House stage props have been sighted there. Though the marquee is long gone, the original stage of the theater remains, providing the

PS-2007-1146_9.125x2.625

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perfect setting for the store’s monthly auctions. A pleasant contrast to the new plasma televisions and sound system within the renovated auction area (installed specifically for the auction arena) are light fixtures that are both originals or reproductions from the theater’s early years. If anything, Woodward’s twists the cliché: Out with the new, in with the old. Open Mon–Sat 10 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sun 10 a.m.–5 p.m. 903 West 36th Street; 410-662-1875.

—C. C.

Page 1

We invite you to visit your child’s future.

May 17 at 9am.

• “Take a First Look”—a spring open house, First-year Kindergarten to Grade 12, Thursday, May 17, 9-10:30am.

• Meet the educators—dedicated to teaching children how to think, not what to think.

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• Tour the campus—classes, science and math wing, arts center and theaters, athletic center, sports fields, and ponds.

• Ask questions concerning academics, arts, athletics, SATs, college admissions, and long-term outcomes.

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Free Parking! at both locations 28

urbanite april 07

food

by joan jacobson

photography by gail burton

Seasoned to Perfection Mother Nature sets the menu for seasonal eating

Above: The menu at Chameleon Cafe on Harford Road is inspired by seasonal fare.

Susan Smith rarely buys produce in a supermarket, preferring her spinach “muddy from the field.” She likes her cheddar made in Maryland on a farm in Bel Air, her chicken raised on a local pasture in Sparks, and her Mountaineer apples from a favorite Pennsylvania farmer she knows from the Sunday farmers’ market.

To Smith, a Baltimore lawyer, eating seasonally—and, consequently, eating locally—is not just an environmental and political act. Getting to know the farmers who grow her food, and the merchants who sell it, gives her “a sense of community and a sense of place,” she says. “It connects me.”

Smith is part of a growing national movement to eat unprocessed, seasonal food produced by local farmers.

“Knowing who’s handled your food is a very intimate thing. It’s a very primal thing,” she says.

So it doesn’t make sense to her to eat food out of season that traveled half the globe to get here.

“Why am I eating a papaya from South America in January? It just doesn’t seem right,” says Smith.

Her principles are echoes of Michael Pollan’s best-selling Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History

of Four Meals, in which he writes that “there exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry …”

Smith grew up in Northern California where eating seasonally has been popular for decades.

Chef Alice Waters promoted it when she opened her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, in 1971. Smith recalls a “crunchy granola” upbringing in the 1970s, when milk and yogurt were delivered to her Palo Alto home, her mother made her own baby food, and family meals “did not come from a box.”

Baltimore, she says diplomatically, “is finally catching up. It’s a little bit behind the curve.” In recent years Smith and other Baltimoreans have found many ways to follow this “back to nature” movement with farmers and merchants offering a variety of locally produced food and restaurants offering seasonal menus.

For Smith, who spends her workdays in her car and at her computer, “It’s a way of keeping at bay the artificial, mass-produced, highly processed, industrialized stuff that comes into my life.”

More simply put, “Your food has a face,” says Janna Howley, who has made a career of promoting

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Jeff Smith cooks up seasonal dishes at Chameleon Cafe.

the movement to eat seasonally and locally. Howley is marketing and outreach manager for Freshfarm Markets in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit that operates six farmers’ markets in the D.C. area. A Baltimore resident, she is also volunteer cochair of Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance, which is organizing an “eat local” campaign.

Howley says discerning consumers want a comfort level they don’t have when they buy food—even if it’s organic—that travels thousands of miles, changing temperatures and many hands.

“The spinach contamination [in California last summer] is a really good illustration of why people are more concerned about where their food comes from. When you buy locally and you’re buying seasonally, you’re developing a relationship with a producer. If you’re buying from a farmers’ market, you’re learning about traceability,” she says.

The popularity of Baltimore’s farmers’ markets is a testament to this concern for “traceability,” with 200,000 people drawn annually to the city’s downtown market on Sundays. And concerns about food safety elsewhere in America “may be contributing to the success of local farmers’ markets,” wrote Marian Burros last December in The New York Times.

More local chefs have begun cooking seasonally, changing their menus several times a year.

Jeff Smith is one of them. When he and his wife, Brenda Wolf Smith, opened Chameleon Cafe on Harford Road in Northeast Baltimore in 2001, Smith knew he wanted a revolving seasonal menu. Today he has six menus, including a popular summer menu that includes a pureed green tomato soup with

In recent years Smith and other Baltimoreans have found many ways to follow this “back to nature” movement with farmers and merchants offering a variety of locally produced food and restaurants offering seasonal menus.

Maryland blue crab meat. His fall menu includes a grilled pork chop marinated in apple cider, turnip potato mash, sweet and sour walnuts, and pork glacé.

“In the summer I’m driving all over the place,” says Smith. He goes to the Waverly farmers’ market for apples and pears, grown in Pennsylvania by Reid’s Orchard, and to George’s, a long-time farm

stand on Harford Road in Parkville, for his local tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, and eggplants. He gets his cheese from Broom’s Bloom Dairy in Bel Air. A Baltimore native, he also swears by blue crab caught only in the Chesapeake Bay’s Maryland waters. “It’s far better, hands down,” than blue-crab meat from any other state. It’s sweeter, he says, and has more mustard, an acquired Baltimore delicacy.

“Serving seasonal menus also helps keep the costs down,” says Wolf Smith. “You’re not paying for strawberries in January.”

The “eating local, eating seasonally” movement has gotten a big boost from Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, which dissects the origins of industrialized food and cracks the myth of large-scale organic operations where animals often never see grass.

More inspiration came recently from Vermont environmental writer Bill McKibben, who in 2004 and 2005 spent September through March eating food “only from the watershed in which I live, the mountains and fields on either side of Lake Champlain.” He wrote about his eating adventure in Gourmet magazine in July 2005.

He survived heartily on a bounty of local fruits and vegetables, baguettes from a baker using local wheat, as well as local maple syrup, milk, and butter.

Apple cider replaced orange juice, and he feasted

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Seafood

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Connie Briscoe & Michael Cunningham Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black Women Over 50 Kevin Merida & Michael Fletcher Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas Jabari Asim & WYPR’s Sunni Khalid The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why

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on Art Craw t l i m l Ha May 4th - 9th

The Events First Friday Photography Exhibit & Art Openings Baltimore Improv Group Family Art Day (Make a Kite!)

Local Music Showcase Hole in the Wall Cabaret Remember When (Historic Hamilton: Reception, Photography Exhibit and Discussion with Baltimore Author Eric Holcomb, author of The City as Suburb: A History of Northeast Baltimore Since 1660) Hamilton, the movie directed by Baltimore's Matthew Porterfield Starving Artist Happy Hour Specials

Sponsors Big Bad Wolf’s House of Barbeque (http://bigbadwolfbarbeque.com/) Hamilton Business Association Hamilton News Mart Hamilton Vacuum Harvest Fare Baltimore Development Corporation Lakein’s Jewelers Hamilton Federal Bank

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urbanite april 07

Pick up your Hamilton Art Crawl Passport at participating businesses.

For more information about the Passport and a full schedule of events, visit www.hamiltonarts.org/crawl. Get 10% off your check at the Big Bad Wolfe House of Barbeque when you bring in your Hamilton Art Crawl Passport May 4-9.

“Hotel Rwanda” manager Paul Rusesabagina debuted his memoir last year, part of a day that attracted nearly 2500 to CityLit Festival.

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on apples kept fresh by a local farmer in a storage shed with an oxygen level lowered to slow ripening.

He drank a locally brewed Belgian style beer called witbier and ate venison burgers, goat cheese soufflés, and Lake Champlain perch frozen in Cryovac packages. His experiment permanently altered the way he eats, he wrote, and introduced him to a community of inventive and tenacious farmers he called a “web of connections” he otherwise would never have known.

It’s a way of keeping at bay the artificial, mass-produced, highly processed, industrialized stuff that comes into my life.

In Maryland, where the growing season is longer, eating seasonally can be a lot less complicated.

And it comes with a simple message, says Howley.

“There is no better way to convert people to eating seasonally than when they taste something.” ■ —Joan Jacobson is a contributing editor for Urbanite.

Baltimore lawyer Susan Smith gets her groceries from local merchants that sell seasonal produce.

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urbanite april 07

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baltimore observed

by mary k. zajac

All in the Family

“We’re one of those places you go by a hundred times and never know we’re there,” says Les Richardson, of his family’s farm and retail store. Tucked away in Baltimore County between the creeping sprawl of White Marsh and the not-yet-fashionable Bowleys Quarters, Richardson Farms isn’t hard to find if you know where you’re going. Dodge the speeding traffic hurtling east on Route 40, and take a right at the White Marsh Double T Diner. From there, follow Ebenezer Road through a mix of woods and modest homes and over the Bird River. The farm, a patchwork of fields, barns, low-slung buildings, and a retail store, sits on the north side of the road, and if you look carefully through the trees across the street, you’ll see the silhouette of new homes under construction.

The Richardsons have worked this farm for five generations and have the proud honor of being the largest producer of greens in the state of Maryland—no small accomplishment for a family-owned farm in a heavily developed suburban county. “We don’t know exactly when the farm started,” explains

Les, “but we have been at the Northeast Market on historic East Monument Street since 1930, and we were at the Canton market before that.” Les’ father, Bill, purchased the farm in 1984 from his mother, Doris. Bill was born in what is now his daughter Diane’s home—a roomy, renovated farmhouse that is adjacent to the retail store. Les’ mother, Barbara, was born just a stone’s throw away in a house that is now part of the farm property. And five of the Richardsons’ six children, along with their parents, run the White Marsh farm and the store (and the two other family-owned farm properties), as well as the business at the Northeast Market.

Running a family farm business in this contemporary economy isn’t easy, and part of the success, Les explains with a chuckle, is that “we all know what we don’t do.” Barbara tends the White Marsh store, often with the help of her niece, Mandy. Bill and Diane run the Northeast Market stall. Twin brothers John and Donald run the White Marsh and Glen Arm farms, respectively, and Les’ twin brother, Wes, manages greenhouse operations. Les plainly

courtesy of Richardson Farms

courtesy of Richardson Farms

A farm survives suburbia for five generations and counting

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

35

photo by Gail Burton

Les stands amid the kale crop. The Richardsons are the largest producers of kale in the state.

states, “I’m not a farmer—that’s what my other three brothers do.” What Les handles is “anything that involves paper.” He’s also the general contractor for the new buildings that are part of the White Marsh farm.

Les is quick to point out, however, that it is the combination of having an urban and suburban market base, among other factors, that has contributed to the success of the Richardson farms. The farm store at White Marsh is the yin to the stall at the Northeast Market’s yang. In White Marsh, women in sweatshirts and Easy Spirit tennis shoes exchange pleasantries with matriarch Barbara, coo over photographs of Les’ newborn daughter, and select fryers and roasters or maybe even a saddle of rabbit from the tidy glass meat case. A frozen food case holds sirloin steaks and hamburger patties from Roseda Black Angus Beef in Monkton and ice cream from Keyes Creamery in Havre de Grace. During the summer, folks drive from as far as Montgomery County for chicken manure for their gardens, canning tomatoes, Silver Queen corn, and bedding plants.

Downtown, greetings of “Hi, Miss Diane!” ring out against the shiny, white-tiled walls of the Northeast Market where Diane and a small, friendly staff wait on ladies in fur coats and Sunday hats

(although it is a Tuesday afternoon) buying produce.

The thwack of a cleaver dividing turkey necks provides the back beat for the orders given at the far end of the stand where a man in an oversized black

parka orders three bags of chicken wings because his sister is going to do some cooking this weekend.

Where White Marsh shoppers prefer the soft tomatoes needed for canning, downtown shoppers tend

to buy the number-two grade, which are harder and smaller. And Northeast Market shoppers buy more turkey year-round. (The farm does not produce its own turkeys, but buys only turkey that passes their rigid inspection.)

Both markets, but particularly the one downtown, are meccas for customers who buy the farm’s greens—the dark leafy trio of collards, spinach, and kale that provide a tangy and bitter foil to the savory taste of bacon or a little fatback. Customers downtown stand in the “greens line,” which during the holidays can stretch twenty feet long. “We fight to keep it in the door,” Les says.

Greens are just part of the savvy planning that has allowed Richardson Farms to grow. Fifty percent of their greens crop is sold to wholesale distributors at the Jessup Market and in New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and during the high season, roughly from Easter to Christmas, the farm handpacks nearly one thousand crates of greens a day.

Though the hand-harvesting of greens makes them a labor-intensive product, the labor is worthwhile because they can be grown and sold all year, Les explains.

Chicken production works in much the same way. Realizing that selling eggs was not financially

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

37

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urbanite april 07

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A bird’s eye view of the farm, an oasis in the middle of sprawl

viable, the family decided instead to raise, process, and sell chickens on site, which allows their retail store to remain open throughout the year. The family has built two new chicken houses with several more to be completed, and the farm boasts a USDAapproved processing house where informal family business meetings take place while the Richardsons process chickens. “It’s the one time we’re all together,” John jokes.

In order to farm, however, a farmer must have land, and the Richardsons have taken steps to ensure that Baltimore County farm land remains farm land. In addition to the 35-acre farm in White Marsh, the family also owns a 175-year-old farm in Glen Arm. They sold the development rights to that property to Baltimore County in 1999. Not only does this preserve the property as farm land, but the compensation the Richardsons received from the

deal allowed them to buy another farm property, a former pig farm, on Ebenezer Road, not far from the White Marsh property. The family also rents farm land in Bowleys Quarters.

In order to farm, a farmer must have land, and the Richardsons have taken steps to ensure that Baltimore County farm land remains farm land.

Les keeps a file of the five or six unsolicited requests to buy the farm he receives each year—not that the family is thinking of selling. “Nobody could afford the land here to farm it,” Les explains, and the family is not thinking of giving up the land for other purposes.

In all three of these locations, the Richardsons coexist easily with their suburban neighbors, occasionally even benefiting from the development in the area. Diane notes that her home on the White Marsh farm was able to switch from septic to sewage with the building of houses across the street from the farm. However, Les admits that the traffic increase on Ebenezer Road has forced the family to buy two sets of equipment, one for each of the farms; tractors traveling between properties would clog up an already busy thoroughfare. Yet, he is philosophical about the suburban growth in White Marsh, “A lot of farmers complain about development,” he muses. “It doesn’t offend me to see people moving in across the street. I call the new people that move in ‘customers.’” ■

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Red Tree.

Home furnishings and artistic goods from around the world and around the corner. From furniture to jewelry, wall art to handbags, you’ll find a variety of creatively designed goods.

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Modern lines and indie designs, showcasing emerging designers through an inspired mix of clothing, jewelry, handbags and other darling notions. Come visit us at the “top” of the Avenue. “Best reason to shop in Baltimore” —Baltimore Magazine, 2006. “Best Women’s Clothing Store” —City Paper, 2006.

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urbanite april 07

encounter

by heather harris

photography by michael northrup

B-I-N-G-O at the H-I-P-P-O On Wednesday nights in Mount Vernon, the queer side lets its square side show

Above: Andora, always looking fabulous, is a fixture at the weekly bingo night at the Hippo.

“How many straight people do we have tonight?”

Dave threw his hand up. Richard and I glanced around the room. It was one of those moments when I hoped to be pegged as maybe doing like the Romans. Sadly, my super-duper-fresh-scrubbed suburban exterior undoubtedly gave me away as the one thing you really shouldn’t be, whether gay or straight, at the Hippo on bingo night: Closeted.

I must not have been the only one, because the number-caller quickly reassured us heteros: “We love straight people! If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be here!” Indeed. Hooray for procreative-style sex.

The evening had started in a normal enough way. I was unaware that Richard had fractured his ankle earlier that week in an unfortunate garbagetransporting incident and called him suggesting that a night of bingo at the Hippo might be fun. Yes, it’s a gay club, but it’s also legendary. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed there back when it was called The Chanticleer, and it’s one of the oldest gay nightclubs in the country.

At first, Richard got stuck on the bingo part.

Bingo? Who plays bingo? Well, only lots of people every Wednesday. Then the Hippo part sunk in.

There was silence for a moment, and then, “Oh, no.

Uh-uh. Not me. Not interested. Sorry. I’m staying on the couch.”

Dave, my husband, didn’t want to go either, but he hates to be left out when people might be having fun. He thought he heard Richard agreeing to go and hollered in, “Oh, I’ll go.” On the other end of the line, Richard, who had been housebound for forty-eight hours, changed his mind as well.

At 8 p.m., Dave and I found Richard propped up at the bar in the middle of a room full of tables, Yuengling in hand.

We arrived in time for the early-bird specials and the introduction of Andora.

“Andora’s on time tonight!” announced a disembodied voice through invisible speakers. “Grandmother must have shaved her chest.” Unruffled and self-possessed, Andora swept by in sky-high

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heels, a teal and lime-green sequined jumpsuit, a big blonde curly wig, and a perfectly applied smoky eye.

“Andora’s your waiter tonight. Give her the clap!”

Roger Dimick, of some infamy in gay bingo circles, is the bingo host and number announcer. He calls from a table that’s tucked in the corner near the restrooms; he is not so much a physical presence as The Voice. “Peaches!” he hollered at the man selling bingo cards and daubers. “Are you selling the yellow daubers?” Peaches looked sheepish. He was selling yellow, the color everyone knew didn’t show up very well. (To Peaches’ credit, he had warned me away from yellow; Dave, Richard, and I were all armed with red Dabbin’ Fever Winners Ink, which showed up great.)

In the midst of all this pageantry, bingo began.

“B1!” Dimick hollered. “Big Daddy’s wearing Brut, and it’s making me sneeze. G57!”

The sound of power tools being used somewhere in the building stopped Dimick for a moment.

“Lesbian bingo,” he announced. “They’re making their own cards.”

The game resumed. Dimick called a few more numbers before a woman yelled out, “Oooo, bingo!”

“Must be a straight girl,” Dimick commented flatly.

By this time, my team was down to the serious business of trying to win. Richard was expressionless, head down, scanning quickly for each number as it was called. Even Dave had gotten the hang of it and was hitting most of the squares he was supposed to.

“We should go to Atlantic City,” Richard suggested, feeling his gambler’s high.

“I like Atlantic City in the winter,” I said. A twenty-something guy, probably straight, definitely in a red sweater, was sitting at my table and looked over.

“Why do you like Atlantic City in the winter?” he asked.

“It’s usually gray,” I said. “I like the gray ocean and the abandoned beaches and boardwalks.”

“You can also get shanked on the street,” he replied.

“You’re thinking of prison,” I said.

The special “Top or Bottom?” round was about to start, and Dimick made the last call for players.

“Remember, we’re playing for the GLCCB [The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland] and AIDS Action Baltimore!” A black man in a yellow fleece bounced up and down.

“Yea, gay people!” he cheered.

One of the men distributing cards sashayed by. “What’s Top or Bottom?” I asked. He mumbled something about it being a special round, which I already understood, so I said, “Okay. Thanks.” He did not try to hide his irritation at my ignorance and stood there, letting me hang out in his thanksfor-making-me-stop-and-talk-to-your-dumb-assfor-nothing expression before moving on to more informed players.

Dimick called the last few numbers of the regular round over the rising din of the crowd (“Shut up! This ain’t karaoke!”) and got ready for Top or Bottom?

Someone’s long curly red wig sat in a plastic bag on a nearby ledge. Andora moved through the crowd with drinks for thirsty players and then disappeared for a few moments. When she reappeared, she was wearing a strapless pink gown, a rhinestone necklace, and a long curly red wig. She was stunning, really: willowy, glamorous, and confident. Richard and Dave slid to the edge of their heterosexuality

The sound of power tools being used somewhere in the building stopped Roger for a moment. “Lesbian bingo,” he announced. “They’re making their own cards.” and watched her nervously. Richard said what they both were thinking: “Don’t let me drink enough so that that looks good.” I looked to see if the bagged wig was gone, but it was still there. I guess everyone in that room owned a Nicole Kidman-style curly red wig.

We played ten more rounds of regular bingo after someone declared himself a top or a bottom, but none of the slackers on my team won. Richard was still steady and serious. Dave was still vaguely overwhelmed. No one won a cent. It was time for the next special round: The Glory Hole.

Early in the round, a man sitting at the bar announced premature victory by shouting “Glory Hole!” When it was determined that he had not won, he was escorted to the side of the room where he had to sit on a stool and wear a dunce cap.

“Now everyone laugh at him!” Dimick commanded. And we did. There he sat for the

Usher Joe Diffenbaugh sullenly wears the bingo dunce cap.

next round, wearing a hat that said, “I’m a drunk. I’m a whore. I ain’t got no BINGO.”

Just when I thought I’d acquainted myself with the full cast of characters, a man of the cloth came in and started taking pictures. He was a stout man in a black jacket that said “CHAPLAIN” across the back in big white letters, without any hint of irony. He stood at the head of our table and asked, “Is anyone camera shy?”

“No. But thank you for asking,” a mannerly lesbian replied.

We were down to the last few rounds of regular bingo, and I had given up on winning. But RedSweater-You’ll-Get-Shanked Guy surely hadn’t.

“Show me some love,” he chanted. “I need gas money. I19. C’mon, show me some love!”

“I19!” Dimick hollered, and Red-Sweater had bingo. Now the only losers at our table were me, Dave, Richard, and a lesbian whose friend had won twice.

“Last round! B8! The lesbian number!” A man sitting behind my table wearing a T-shirt that said “Welcome Wagon” made some comment, and the woman who had graciously thanked the photographer-clergyman belly laughed like Jerry Falwell had asked her to be his girlfriend.

Twenty rounds of regular bingo were over. We finished our drinks while Andora examined the bagged red wig. She found a slip dress in there too, but determined it was too small. I put Dave’s and my red daubers in my bag; Richard took his with him.

“I’d come do this again,” he said, lurching onto his crutches. ■ —Heather Harris is a contributing editor for Urbanite.

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Plus, for many of our residences, we reclaim celebrated historic buildings. It adds up to a green way of life. And that’s what Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse is dedicated to – invigorating all of us to approach life with a commitment to doing what’s best for our planet.

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s p a c e

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Grand Idea How Baltimore’s Masonic Temple was saved from demolition

There is only one top-hatted doorman in Baltimore.

He stands outside 225 North Charles Street providing an elegant kind of security for the recently opened Tremont Grand Meeting Facility. The building is a seven-story pile of marble, a not unpleasing pastiche of Renaissance Revival and Beaux Arts styles, with an undeniable Second Empire flavor to it.

It was built for the Masons as the Maryland Grand Lodge, completed in 1869. Since then it’s almost burned down twice, and then, in 1998, it faced demolition to make room for a parking garage. That was when the combination of a preservation-minded owner, an innovative architect, and assistance from the City—a rare series of fortunate events—coalesced to create a plan to save the building. Rather than face the wrecking ball, “the building has become a kind of tourist attraction,” says J. Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore.

Historic preservation in Baltimore has been recently discussed only in terms of its perceived failures. How many people in the city really wanted to see the Rochambeau Apartments torn down in favor of a grassy area? How many want to see the continued demolition of St. Stanislaus in Fells Point for townhouses? How many really support Mercy Hospital’s demolition of downtown’s last group of 1820s rowhouses? The rescue of the Masonic Temple is a welcome success story.

In 1985 William C. Smith & Co., the Washington, D.C.-based developer of the Tremont hotels, converted a portion of an office building located at 222 Saint Paul Place to the Tremont Plaza Hotel.

They expanded to its current three-hundred-room capacity in 2001. In 1998, the company bought the w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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vacant Masonic Temple on Charles Street, directly behind the Tremont Plaza Hotel, for $500,000. Its intention was to convert the building into a banquet and meeting facility, providing a function that its two hotels could not accommodate.

Then the company received a condemnation notice for the building.

The City’s Department of Public Works, unbeknownst to William C. Smith & Co., had already hired the Baltimore-based architectural firm of Murphy & Dittenhafer to design a new garage on the site of the Masonic Temple and the parking lot south of the hotel. Though the Masonic Temple would be razed, the City considered retaining the façade of the building.

Murphy & Dittenhafer prepared the requested plan, showing a traditional five-hundred-car garage on the parking lot and the site of the Masonic Temple, with the front façade of the building remaining.

Troubled by the creation of a Potemkin Village of compromised historic fabric, and aware of the hotel owner’s intentions for the Masons Hall, Murphy & Dittenhafer decided to present, at no cost to the City, an alternate plan.

“We saw the opportunity to bring together William C. Smith & Co.’s need for an event space and the City’s need for parking,” says Michael Murphy, AIA, the chief designer of the project.

The alternate plan showed the Masonic Temple remaining, and being converted to the event facility that William C. Smith & Co. envisioned. The development potential of the “air rights” above Lovegrove Street (parallel to Charles and Saint Paul) would then be used for the parking structure. The garage would be an unconventional configuration and height—thirteen stories tall—and would serve as a link between the hotel and the event space. “The internal connections between the hotel, the garage, the Masons Hall, and Charles Street were key to making the project work,” says Murphy.

Murphy & Dittenhafer’s alternate concept, though unsolicited, was approved by then-mayor Kurt Schmoke and the Department of Public Works. “They agreed to it,” Murphy recalls with what sounds like lingering surprise in his voice.

The Masonic Temple had survived this threat to its existence.

This was not the first time the building was almost destroyed. The original building was designed

by Edmund G. Lind, best-known for his design of the Peabody Institute, to replace the original Grand Lodge on Saint Paul Street. A fire destroyed the interior in 1890, and a second fire again gutted the building in 1900, also destroying the upper stories.

Repairs were completed in 1909, according to designs by Joseph Evans Sperry, architect of Belvedere Terrace and the Bromo-Seltzer Tower. It was Sperry who added the Beaux Arts sixth story and attic, as well as the elaborate ornamentation around the entryway.

Above: The Masonic Temple was slated to be demolished by the City to make room for a parking garage.

Previous page: The Oriental Room includes stained-glass windows and detailed wood inlays.

The Masons occupied the building until 1994, when the organization moved its Grand Lodge to Hunt Valley. They left behind a series of lavishly decorated meeting spaces, designed around the various rites and functions of the organization.

The rooms read like a survey course in architectural history. There are rooms named and styled after the Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite orders of ancient architecture. Tudor and Gothic Revival rooms accompany an “Oriental” (actually Moorish) room. The building has six pipe organs, stained glass, brass, murals, and a glut of marble in every space.

Murphy & Dittenhafer, whose other projects have included the University of Baltimore Student Center (site of the former Odorite building) and the Hippodrome Theatre, first set about documenting

these conditions before proceeding with their design for the City. Very few original drawings of the building were available, so Murphy & Dittenhafer used an innovative automated laser measurement system to document the existing conditions. “It’s a cuttingedge technology. But the process took more than a month to complete,” according to Murphy.

After developing preliminary plans, they then performed an extensive feasibility study, taking probes and checking to see if all of the proposed ductwork, piping, and wiring involved would actually fit within the tight confines of the historic space.

“Historic buildings are notorious for their surprises,” says Murphy. The construction work was carried out by contractor WCS Construction, LLC, and the decorative finishes restoration was done by Thomas Moore Studios. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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The facility can now accommodate up to 1,500 people for a seated buffet, with its largest room providing dinner for up to 260 people. The goal, which appears to have been met, was to use the building’s opulence as the basis of the banquet facility’s business model. “We match the name ‘Grand’ in the environment and the service,” says Michael Haynie, the managing director of the facility.

The Grand is a welcome presence on Charles Street. Bringing life to the shuttered building has “transformed the block,” says Fowler, and it has “activated Charles Street, especially on nights and weekends,” says William C. Smith & Co. Senior Vice President of Development Brad Fennell.

The project faced numerous technical hurdles.

The building had inadequate exits, elevators, lighting, and no air conditioning. The architect and contractor had to install these items with as little impact on the historic fabric as possible. New elevators and exit stairs were suspended over Lovegrove Street to the rear. Air conditioning ducts were squeezed into the tightest interstitial spaces and falsework. A fire alarm system was substituted for a sprinkler system in the most ornate of the spaces.

The Marble Room

continued on page 81

The Edinburgh Hall is also available for use as a wedding chapel w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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The

C ha n g i n g Fa ce

of

Environmentalism

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A shift in the movement makes way for urban issues By

Bill

ph o t o g r aph y

b y

Me sler m ar sh al l

c l ar k e

G l e n n R o s s s ta n d s at t h e p r e c i p i c e o f a h i l l just behind the Kennedy Krieger offices on Biddle Street and looks out at the fourteen-acre landfill below. It is an enormous pile of concrete and building waste that dips then rises like a mountain before us, stretching on the length of several football fields. Ross points to the tips of some telephone poles just barely visible over the enormous mound. “That shows you how high it really is,” he says, shaking his head in amazement.

Sometimes Ross follows the trucks as they haul the debris from construction sites throughout the city to this cemetery of the Baltimore skyline. Ross is 56, old enough to recall when a portion of the site was still a graveyard of a different sort, back when his family moved just down the block some fifty years ago. “There used to be headstones right here,” he says. “I remember when they bulldozed it. They planted this area with African ferns and sunflowers to remediate it. Of course we didn’t know it back then, but the African ferns absorbed the arsenic in the ground, and the sunflowers were there to absorb the lead. We used to pick those sunflowers and take them home and eat them. There was no warning, no sign. Nothing. Then a couple years later the city sent in all these guys in hazmat suits to harvest the stuff.”

We make the long drive around Edison Highway, and take in the view from the ground up.

The huge pile blots out the tall hill where we just stood. For the past five years, Ross has worked for the Civic Works B’More Green initiative, which uses federal Superfund money to train young people for entry-level positions in environmental technology and to help with career placement, tackling the twin inner-city problems of environmental degradation and endemic unemployment.

Today Ross himself plays the role of an environmental inspector. He combs the base of the landfill, and finds sewer drains clogged by the ubiquitous industrial dust that clings to the gutters like a thick grey paste. “Improper drainage,” he says. “All this is going to seep into the ground and end up in the harbor.”

The giant landfill is perhaps the most telling of our stops on a trip that has taken us past power transformers, barren industrial wastelands, and tracks of trash-strewn empty lots where houses once stood but now only rodents call home.

This is environmental activist Glenn Ross’ “Toxic Tour,” a half-day journey through East Baltimore that showcases the environmental challenges faced by his community. He gave his first “Toxic Tour” a year ago, at the behest of Johns Hopkins students studying urban environmental problems, and he continues to take visitors on his bleak journey—believing in the transformative power of witnessing the devastation firsthand.

A huge African-American man with two gold crucifixes around his neck, Ross doesn’t quite fit the stereotypes conjured by the word “environmentalist.” It is a label that even he would only recently have embraced. Ross spent the last twenty years building a reputation as one of the city’s most prolific and recognizable neighborhood activists, but he never made the connection between w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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I realized that I am not only black, but I’m also green.

Glenn Ross in his home office

environmentalism and the issues that consumed him—sanitation, public health, decent housing. Environmentalism, for Ross, had always been about problems far removed from his inner-city world. “When I used to hear the word environment,” he says, “I used to think of mountains and bears.” But the story of how Glenn Ross found the environmental movement, or rather how the environmental movement found Ross and people like him, may be the story of environmentalism’s future in America.

T w o t h r e a d s r u n t h r o u g h t h e h i s t o r y of American environmentalism. There is an older “conservationist” thread that traces its roots to John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, the “mountains and bears” kind of environmentalism Glenn Ross speaks of. Then there is a more modern manifestation, an activist-driven movement strongly influenced by Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and even Henry David Thoreau, who in the 1850s married his belief in naturalism with the struggle against slavery.

In 2004, these sometimes-complementary, sometimes-contradictory historic threads clashed, and then began to come together in interesting ways.

In October of that year, two prominent environmental strategists, Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, wrote an essay entitled “The Death of Environmentalism,” which they presented at a meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. The authors argued that environmentalism was becoming irrelevant and had failed to connect with the larger progressive movement, and that the big environmental organizations were like “generals fighting the last battle,” more concerned with tiny conquests than with winning the larger war. The days when environmentalists could claim big victories—the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the 1977 Clean Water Act—they insisted, were over. The essay spurred a lot of collective soul-searching. It also started a bit of a firestorm— with some of the most pointed criticism coming out of more-activist environmentalists who had been forging new ground in communities of color.

“That was a report written by white men who only talked to white men, and that’s why they came to the conclusions they did,” says one of the essay’s fiercest critics, Dr. Michel Gelobter, president of Redefining Progress and a board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gelobter is a relative rarity in the environmental movement, an African-American man head-

ing one of the nation’s most influential environmental think tanks. He says one can’t understand environmentalism without understanding the larger context that race plays in American society.

“Take urban sprawl,” says Gelobter, turning to the long process of white flight in American cities. “You can’t understand water pollution and you can’t understand transportation problems, without understanding sprawl.

And you can’t understand sprawl without understanding the centrality of race.” But not only is race an essential piece of the history and shape of the American environmental movement, says Gelobter, but it may also be the key to understanding where it is headed.

For activists like Gelobter, the modern phase of American environmentalism really began back in 1982 in Warren, North Carolina, when a group of civil rights activists joined environmentalists in staging sit-ins to try to stop the placement of a landfill in a predominantly African-American neighborhood. They were angry that yet another environmentally hazardous facility was being sited in a poor minority neighborhood. The protests led to a study that found that three out of every four environmentally hazardous facilities were sited in low-income minority neighborhoods (a phenomenon we now call environmental racism). The sit-ins also spurred a drive for environmental equity in the poor communities long overlooked. The environmental justice movement had been born.

For Gelobter, environmental justice isn’t just an ancillary to mainstream environmentalism. When he looks at the future of environmentalism in America, he sees a future that is increasingly black and, particularly in the West, brown. “Just look at California,” he says, from his office in Oakland.

“White people are in a minority here. And we’ve enacted some of the most progressive legislation in the country.”

But for many black environmentalists with roots in the cities, getting the more mainstream environmental groups to listen to their story and to join in their battles is a struggle. Morning Sunday Hettleman, former environmental editor for The Afro-American Newspaper and current host of The Environmental Report, heard weekly on WEAA (88.9 FM), recalls her first visit to an continued on page 83

Morning Sunday Hettleman broadcasting her weekly show, The Environmental Report

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Blessed Unrest:

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How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming In his latest book, Paul Hawken traces the evolution of the environmental movement and predicts its future

O

illustration by tra selhtrow

n June 16, 1962, The New Yorker magazine published the first of three installments of a forthcoming book, Silent Spring, by biologist Rachel Carson. The magazine’s legendary editor, William Shawn, was ecstatic about the series, telling Carson that it was a “brilliant achievement … full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling.” Carson was already widely read. Her previous book, The Sea Around Us, spent thirty-nine weeks atop The New York Times best-seller list and was translated into thirty languages.

But unlike her previous works, all of which were widely praised, Silent Spring created an uproar that has never truly subsided. Carson’s argument stood firmly in the tradition of demands for social and environmental justice that extended back to concerns about environmental health during the Industrial Revolution. It also marked, almost inadvertently, a turning point in the unspoken elitism and racism of the early environmental movement.

Her exposé of industry-sponsored poisoning of the environment brought for the first time a broad cross section of the population into the environmental dialogue. The environment now included people’s bodies, mothers’ milk, African Americans, farmworkers, and the poor, some of whom were just as polluted as the Cuyahoga River, which famously caught fire. But as the environmental movement gradually became more diverse in its membership and broader in its scope, it incrementally lost the support of business and politicians, and was even seen as their enemy, and as such was left to fend for itself.

Rachel Carson’s subject was chlorinated pesticides, which she came to because of a controversy about aerial spraying of DDT over Long Island and New England by the USDA in an effort to eradicate fire ants, gypsy moths, caterpillars, and mosquitoes. Carson read letters from angry residents describing the death of songbirds, bees, and grasshoppers, and soon afterward agreed to write the magazine series. At the time, DDT could be purchased in bulk for fifty cents a pound. It had been a savior during World War II, the first war in which fewer combatants died of disease than from combat wounds. This was almost entirely the result of DDT sprays and dustings that killed typhus-carrying fleas. There was no gainsaying this fact, and Carson’s analysis of the benefits and costs of DDT and other newer pesticides therefore ran contrary to the pesticide industry’s triumphal claims. Based on scientific evidence, she believed that some of the new chemical compounds introduced after the war were killing birds, fish, and animals, as well as causing cancer and other diseases in human beings.

Silent Spring began with a “Fable for Tomorrow,” a fictional essay describing a storybook town’s hellish descent into a pesticide-poisoned reality.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields

of grain and hillsides of orchards. … Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients.

There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

Carson could not have devised an opening passage more likely to inflame her critics. Science writing was supposed to be objective and rigorous, without emotion. The admixture of fable and science enraged some scientists as well, but the qualities that made the book anathema to them made it particularly accessible to the broad public. Certainly the “shadow of death” that caused children to die within hours was a bit excessive, but the book was no jeremiad, and Carson’s prediction as to the eventual outcome of the uncontrolled use of these chemicals could not be more convincing: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poison on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? ... [M]an is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

Before Silent Spring, corporations were attacked by reformers and social critics primarily for their rapaciousness and inhumane working conditions. In Carson, they were faced with a soft-spoken critic who alleged that their products shouldn’t be made at all. Her goal was to reduce, if not eliminate, a new class of pesticides used in agriculture, even though she supported the moderate use of safe pesticides and biological control agents. For the first time, modern industry had been broadsided and outflanked by an environmentalist. Shocked and infuriated, it reacted with condemnation, assaults, and mockery. Food giants such as General Mills and Gerber’s, the pest control industry, agribusiness, chemical companies, and government agencies such as the USDA worked separately and together to try to destroy Carson’s reputation and credibility. With this seminal confrontation, industry and the public relations industry cut their teeth, preparing them for the battles ahead. They have never relented in their fight. They have

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long since perfected techniques to marginalize scientific data that conflicts with their financial interests. Their basic approach to counter such troubling evidence is to foreshorten time by emphasizing imminent problems over long-term concerns. For example, while Carson hypothesized that it would take a century for the full effects of pesticides to be seen, pesticide makers warned of potential crop losses that could occur as soon as the next planting season. When the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated in 1997, albeit with only a slim chance of being ratified in the United States, the fossil fuel and automobile industries likewise ran advertisements showing people forced into dangerous small cars, or contending with having no fuel at all.

In the controversy that followed, a basic dynamic was established between environmentalists and industry. Both used fear to engage the public, and the threats each warned of all had a basis in fact. While environmentalists were genuinely apprehensive about a toxic future, industry was alarmed about its own future, in the form of sales. A mismatch in terms of scope, perhaps, but it was a psychological draw on the emotional level.

Robert White-Stevens, the somewhat frantic spokesperson for American Cyanamid, exemplified the quality of rhetoric employed by companies: “The real threat, then, to the survival of man is not chemical but biological, in the shape of hordes of insects that can denude our forests, sweep over our crop lands, ravage our food supply and leave in their wake a train of destitution and hunger, conveying to an undernourished population the major diseases, scourges of mankind.” The denunciations were biblical in scope, apocalyptic in tone. Joining the counterattack, Monsanto satirized Carson’s work in a pamphlet entitled “Desolate Spring,” wherein a small town, similar to the one Carson imagined, sees all its plants and lives destroyed by ravenous insects. “The bugs were everywhere. Unseen. Unheard.

Unbelievably universal. On or under every square foot of land, every square yard, every acre, and county, and state and region in the entire sweep of the United States. In every home and barn and apartment house and chicken coop, and in their timbers and foundations and furnishings. Beneath the ground, beneath the waters, on and in limbs and twigs and stalks, under rocks, inside trees and animals and other insects—and yes, inside man.”

After Silent Spring was published, and for years to follow, no peer-reviewed studies were conducted to justify the overwrought claims of the book’s critics. No one challenged the fact that DDT killed insects effectively, but hard measurements of yield and cost benefits simply did not exist. Longitudinal studies done later did show large increases in crop yields starting in the early 1950s and extending into the 1970s. The problem with these data was that increases were entirely attributed to pesticides, ignoring any improvements in fertilizers, machinery, hybrid varieties of seeds, irrigation, and other factors. One study that compared crop losses in 1936 and 1957 showed that the amount of losses due to insects had not changed.

But what did start in the 1950s were large-scale payment programs to farmers designed to reduce crop surpluses and provide price supports.

With this perverse incentive in place, farmers removed arable land from cultivation to qualify for subsidies, and worked their remaining fields more intensely, eliminating crop rotation and diversity, thus encouraging the spread of insects. New synthetic pesticides allowed such cultural practices, which farmers would have once seen as injurious and foolish. And because constant spraying kills beneficial insects along with destructive ones, pesticides have the opposite effect of what their promoters intend: They increase the insect population, and that population’s pesticide resistance.

The result is a self-defeating cycle for farmers, who have no choice but to spray, and who must constantly find new types of pesticides to fight off insects resistant to current varieties.

Silent Spring transformed a few hundred quiet conservation groups predominately concerned about birds, national parks, and hiking into a much larger and more vocal movement. Historians generally treat the environmental movement as a postwar phenomenon, but Carson reignited an

issue that has resonated with people for hundreds of years in ways conservation never did: public health. Her genius was to link the loss of human health with the mind-set of biological dominance, with the idea that business and science had a mandate to conquer and exploit nature.

The environmental movement discovered that to protect the environment, it had to confront power, corruption, and mendacity in the world of commerce, a struggle that extended back through history and across the world. From the beginning, an environmental movement had to be an environmental justice movement, and an environmental justice movement was de facto a social justice movement. Two seemingly unrelated elements of history had become reengaged in the public mind because of Carson’s work.

The question that continues to reverberate to this day is whether human rights trump the rights of business, or vice versa, a conflict that has been ongoing for more than three hundred years.

Business justifies these rights because of its indisputable argument that it creates value, a position that nevertheless neatly evades the other side

Concerns about worker health, living wages, equity, education, and basic human rights are inseparable from concerns about water, climate, soil, and biodiversity. of the issue: How much value does it destroy in the process of carrying out its activities? Whether value is taken from the environment in the form of resources or despoliation, or from people in terms of wages, conditions, or worker health, it is largely unaccounted for in the calculation of rights. Rachel Carson’s reluctant conclusion was that once-respected businesses were creating products that destroyed value. They were exceeding their license to operate, and creating a public health hazard that threatened the web of life.

Business rights are illegitimate if they remove rights from others, if they are not reciprocal and mutual with the rights of citizens, and if they extirpate other forms of life. From an economic viewpoint, what citizens have been trying to do for two hundred years is to force business to pay full freight, to internalize their costs to society instead of externalizing them onto a river, a town, a single patient, or a whole generation.

Just as ecology is the study of the relationship between living beings and their environment, human ecology examines the relationship between human systems and their environment. Concerns about worker health, living wages, equity, education, and basic human rights are inseparable from concerns about water, climate, soil, and biodiversity. The cri de coeur of environmentalists in Carson’s time was the same … as in the time of Emerson, the same as in the time of 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya. It can be summed up in a single word: life. Life is the most fundamental human right, and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment, and freedom from external tyranny. Whenever and wherever that right is violated, human beings rise up. Today, they are rising up in record numbers, and in a collective body that is as often as not more sophisticated than the corporate and governmental institutions they address. ■ —Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken. Copyright © Paul Hawken, 2007

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fiction

by ron tanner illustration by jon macnair

My Small Murders The Problem Year before last, my wife and I were catching mice in our apartment. As many as three or four daily. We used every kind of trap on the market, as well as dish towels and buckets, grocery bags and brooms. Some catches were painless, and the mice released unharmed to the out-of-doors; others were gruesome, sad sights of broken bodies.

It had started simply enough, with a single furry visitor—a pretty creature, we thought, its dark gray fur lustrous from meticulous grooming.

(One book on mice describes their hygiene as “fastidious.”) We joked: People pay good money for mice at pet stores, don’t they? And we joked some more: If we made available an exercise wheel, would this one give it a spin? It was remarkably brazen, wandering into the living room to browse and sniff while we sat nearby and watched in disbelief.

Alas, where there is one mouse, there are many more. Soon we found ourselves startled by a furry fleeing flurry whenever we flicked on the kitchen light.

Pets Teri has never liked animals. This should have given me pause when we first met, and now it’s not clear which one of us was more deceiving or selfdeceiving, she in her pretense of liking Celeste, my fat aged Tortie, or I in my blindness to her obvious discomfort. Her allergy didn’t seem a serious allergy.

After we moved in together, she—I thought—had accommodated herself to a compromise of sorts.

I wanted to make her happy. So eventually I gave Celeste to a cat-needy family. Teri resented that I had waited so long. Since she had never owned a pet, not even a fish, there was no way I could make her understand the difficulty of losing what was, in essence, a member of my family.

All of this is by way of saying that, soon after Celeste’s departure, our place was overrun by mice, though only once had we seen Celeste catch a mouse—which I took from her and released into the alley.

A Man’s Job Although I said “we” were catching mice, the truth is that Teri refused to take any responsibility for their extrication and/or extermination. She didn’t have the stomach for it, she said.

I didn’t either. But somebody had to take control.

“You make a project of everything,” Teri had often complained because I am capable of tremendous, sometimes obsessive, focus when I undertake a task, as when I spackled and painted the apartment in a single weekend. My projects could be intrusive and irritating, I admit, but this was one instance where it seemed Teri didn’t mind my “project mode.”

No need to get into the touchy gender-typed assumptions we make about hunting and trapping. Suffice it to say, if I were successful—and I would be successful—I would prove to Terri that she had married the right man.

Why did I feel the need to prove anything?

By this time we had been married for only two years, after a dizzying oneyear courtship. Friends and family had warned us to slow down because both of us were coming from recent divorces. Our first marriages we put down to youthful ignorance. This, our second, was sure to last. We were both painters, after all: She oils, I acrylics, she still-lives, I landscapes. She painted in the bedroom, I painted in the front room, the apartment reeking of turpentine, linseed oil. … Still, there were conflicts and misunderstandings we had to negotiate, as every couple must. Our small apartment—bought with a loan from her father—increased the stress of living together as each of us worked our day jobs, painted in the off-hours, sent out slides of our work, and fretted about getting a gallery or a show.

Mice, those small surprises at every turn, only made things worse. Their sudden, startling appearances were like cruel practical jokes.

Trapping As I began trapping—first with Sav-a-Lifes—I kept count of the catch. It seemed a kind of game. But then my captures and later my killings became so

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numerous that, in disgust and dismay, I stopped counting, with thirtyone dead mice on my conscience. If heaped together, they would have filled a bucket.

Our co-op manager sent over his exterminator, a middle-aged fellow who reminded me of former heavyweight world champion boxer George Foreman.

I heard him before I saw him, thumping laboriously up our six flights of stairs. One of his legs was prosthetic. It was a hot August morning and I felt badly for him.

“You got no weight on you,” he said by way of introduction, meaning, I supposed, that I was slim enough to take the stairs lightly or I was wasting away, maybe from worry over mice.

I introduced myself with a polite nod. (Does one shake hands with one’s exterminator?) George nodded in return, smiling his benevolent George Foreman smile, sweat streaking his hairless scalp.

“Mice, you know,” he said, “got no bones, they slide right under the door, you can’t keep ’em out, you’ve got to discourage them.”

“No bones?” I echoed.

“You want to find them,” he continued, “you look for their drippings.”

“Drippings?”

“Like so.” With two large fingers he pointed to the baseboard under the living room window.

Droppings.

Teri and I found a trail of them every morning along the edges of our kitchen counter, which I wiped down with bleach before attempting breakfast.

“You mind?” George raised his thin brows at me and nodded to the open bedroom door.

I motioned him forward, though I must have looked skeptical.

He reached into his plastic garbage bag and retrieved a small black plastic box the size and shape of a covered butter dish. He then filled this with poison that looked like bright blue, powdered laundry detergent. The hole at either end of the butter dish would accommodate even the fattest mouse.

“Mice run in here for eats,” George explained, “then go off and die.”

By the time he was done, he had set those little black boxes of poison along baseboards, in closets, behind furniture, and in every corner of the apartment.

I wondered: Is this blue powder universally appetizing to rodents? I mean, there must be some persnickety feeders out there, a few of the fittest who will survive this attempt at genocide. I imagined mice languishing in the walls of my apartment. The stench of death.

I found George peering behind the gas stove in our tiny kitchen. “Here’s where they’re comin’.” He nodded at a gas-pipe hole in the wall.

“But it’s so high,” I protested.

He laughed. “Mice can climb.”

Jesus Christ, I know nothing about mice, I realized.

George stuffed the hole with steel wool, something mice can’t chew through, he informed me.

“That should do,” he said. The sweat dripping down his face didn’t seem to bother him.

He thumped out of the kitchen. He hadn’t been in the apartment for more than ten minutes.

“You got more problems, I’ll come back,” he promised.

After he left—I was surprised at how well he took the stairs (going down looked harder than going up)—more questions occurred to me: How long does the poison last? How long do I keep the black boxes in our apartment?

Appetite The way George described them, mice seemed as relentless as cockroaches.

Our cockroaches, by the way, those fig-sized waterbugs that occasionally found their way up from the basement, had disappeared. Mice eat roaches, though they’ll leave the antenna and legs.

Mice, in fact, will eat just about anything. Chew the insulation off your wiring, the bindings off your books, the laces off your shoes, eventually bring the whole damned house down around you. Some of the stunning facts I learned after a little research: Mice can live without water. In times of famine, they will submit to a quasi-hibernation. Or they will eat their own excrement.

More Mouse Advantage Contrary to what George-the-exterminator said, mice do have bones, but are capable of remarkable compression. A half-inch may be enough for mice to slip through. More disturbing is their prodigious climbing: Aided by tiny toenails, they easily clamber up lamp cords, curtains, couches, chair-backs, you name it. Which is why we found “drippings” on window sills, desk tops, bookshelves. Most disturbing of all is their rate of reproduction. A mature mouse, two months old, can have five to twelve babies every month. Which is why the Romans used to say, “It’s raining mice.”

Fading Hope The poison seemed to have no effect. It got to the point where Teri would make plenty of noise before entering a room—she didn’t want to see little leathery tails coiling into the darkness or furry humps skittering across the kitchen counter. I tried to be braver than she but, no matter how I prepared myself, a glimpse of a fleeing mouse was always the most unpleasant surprise, like seeing a severed hand wriggling on the floor.

These aren’t visitors, I decided, these are parasites. They would keep coming, in ever greater numbers; they would nibble and chew and gnaw and scratch and climb and piss and shit every minute of every hour of every day, the apartment seething with their inexorable, inexhaustible scampering and scavenging until, drained of all resources and patience, Teri and I would flee in terror. The only good mouse, I concluded, is a dead mouse.

My research told me the same. “Mice are a viral reservoir!” cautioned one expert. They carry one of the deadliest of the new hemorrhagic plagues, the hantavirus, which may be spread through the air. A disturbing thought when, every morning, I was wiping up those little black bullets of excrement from the kitchen counter with a damp paper towel.

New Art I started putting mice in my paintings. It wasn’t a plan, exactly, it was more an impulse—a way of exorcising them.

“Is that a dead mouse?” Teri asked, standing behind me as she surveyed my new work.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Does it look dead?”

“Yes,” she said.

I had depicted, in very crude strokes, a mouse lying on a napkin. Its eyes lacked definition. Maybe that was why it looked dead.

Teri said, “So you’ve moved to still life?”

This gave me pause. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said.

Did she think I was going to compete with her still lifes of moldy cheese?

She had a series of eight and was planning more.

Then the irony of my new work struck me: Maybe I’d do a series of mice—we could have a joint show, my mice, her cheeses! I was smiling now, about to suggest this, when Teri said: “Nobody’s going to want to look at dead mice.”

Since when had we been worried about what people would or would not want to look at? I dabbed at the canvas, then rubbed off the dab with my rag.

“Do you mind?” I said. “I’m working here.” continued on page 87

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sustainable city

by karen houppert photography by jason okutake

Trashy Art The city is the medium, the canvas, and the inspiration for enviroartist Steve Bradley

Above: Artist Steve Bradley uses the trash he finds all over Baltimore and other cities to make art. “Like an archaeologist who would go to the rubbish dump to unravel a civilization’s cultural past, we can tell a story this way,” he says.

Steve Bradley’s sunroom is trashed.

Literally.

Inside his otherwise tidy and ordinary suburban home in Catonsville, the artist and UMBC professor has turned this room over to garbage collection—a pursuit he engages in with the same fervent devotion other collectors might dedicate to say, stamps.

Heaps of litter are piled high in boxes in the corners of the room. More of this trash, culled from the streets and sidewalks of our fair city, has been carefully cleaned, sorted, gathered into handfuls, and tenderly bundled in cellophane wrap. Arranged into oblong sausages, these eerie blobs of plasticwrapped rubbish creep across his floor in a grid pattern, oddly beautiful totems to modern waste.

For now, the debris languishes on the floor. But soon, Bradley explains, this three-dimensional trash tribute will be on display at The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park. Visitors who step close to the wall to peer through the plastic wrap in an attempt to decipher its components—is that a Hello Kitty pacifier? An Utz bag? A plastic fork?—will trigger a switch buried beneath the carpeted floor of the gallery. Out will pour the voices of Baltimoreans talking about their homes, streets,

neighborhoods—reminiscing about the very places where this garbage has been collected.

Steve Bradley’s art is all about human detritus.

And he interprets that term loosely. Sometimes it is sound pollution, sometimes water pollution, and sometimes it is a single Doritos bag that captures his attention. With a nod to Marcel Duchamp, who famously put a ceramic urinal on display in Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in 1917 and called it art, Bradley plays with context and his own version of found art.

He wants his audience to look twice—and think hard—about what is all around them.

But with a playful twist on Duchamp and the Dadaists’ “readymades,” Bradley also likes to move his art out of the traditional gallery and put it back on the street. “The city is my subject,” says Bradley.

“And like an archaeologist who would go to the rubbish dump to unravel a civilization’s cultural past, we can tell a story this way.” To do this, he has been doing site-specific projects that incorporate technology in ways that force passersby to see, hear, and feel the way our society’s “leftovers” continue to haunt us in our daily lives.

Two years ago, Bradley formed a collective with likeminded artists James Rouvelle and Joe Reinsel. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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Calling their group URBANtells, the three Baltimoreans are using art and technology to engage the public in a dialogue about their environment.

“What is interesting about working with technology, from high-end to low-end, is that it gives you an opportunity to work outside the confines of the gallery or museum in new ways,” Bradley explains.

Playing with live and recorded sound, for example, URBANtells can take its art to the streets as a comment on architecture, community, history, and commodities culture.

Bradley calls these explorations in “acoustic ecology” and nudges listeners and viewers to reconsider the ambient sounds we live with. For example, last summer URBANtells did a project in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The artists set FM transmitters with microphones inside various places— a hair salon, a bar, a community TV station, someone’s apartment, an art gallery—and broadcast the sounds, live, into the streets. “We were exploring the unpacking of private and public dialogue,” explains Bradley. While many vendors and individuals originally agreed to participate, some got very squeamish when the artists actually showed up with the mics.

Suddenly they realized that everything they said or their customers said or that they did in their homes would be broadcast out into the street. In truth, the broadcasts were far from titillating. “The fidelity was so low you couldn’t really pick up too many words,” Bradley admits. But the artists accomplished their goal of bringing the inside outside. “Passersby got a sense of what was going on inside, a good look at the acoustic feel of the place they were strolling by,” he says. Even if they couldn’t make out each word, they were acutely aware that this was a private conversation being broadcast—a disorienting sense of eavesdropping. “And that really made pedestrians stop and think.”

Bradley, who moved to Baltimore in 1995 to teach art at UMBC, works both internationally and locally. He has developed and presented site-specific installations in areas ranging from Hull, England, to Plovdiv, Bulgaria. In the United States, he has participated in the Transmission 003.3 sound art festival in Chicago, the International Festival of Electronic Music and Art in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Reduce/Reuse/Reexamine exhibit at New York City’s Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, among other venues and shows. Still, he continues to find himself drawn to deeper and deeper explorations of Baltimore—and currently is one of the artists featured in the Contemporary Museum’s Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone exhibit, which runs through April 22.

Recently, as part of Free Fall Baltimore, URBANtells did a series of radio workshops at Station North. Participants in the workshop learned to build primitive radios, interviewed area residents about their neighborhood, and learned basic editing techniques. At the “opening,” the public was invited to take a free radio—theirs to keep—and to wander the streets, tuning into to various recorded broadcasts to hear locals talk about their community. (In fact,

if you stand on the corner of North Avenue and Howard Street and tune your radio to 87.7, you can still hear one of the recordings.)

“This was about educating the public on something we take for granted and something that’s really changing now,” says Bradley, explaining that satellite radio and the Internet are altering our perceptions of air space and ownership. “This is an opportunity to take an old technology, to re-embrace it, and re-think it.”

It also fulfilled its mission of bringing art to new audiences. “I think ninety percent of the radio giveaways were to the homeless,” says Bradley, noting that the solar-power design made them particularly coveted by this population. He laughs. “At one point we had one hundred people in line out the door trying to get free radios!”

B

radley, 53, is an Air Force brat who grew up with the keen awareness of place that comes from hopscotching the globe—Mississippi, Korea, New Mexico, Spain—from an early age. “Living in Tague, Korea, in my teens, I became acutely aware of the differences between American culture and Korean culture, especially through their ‘mysterious’ music and speech.” Bradley, who lived on a U.S. military base surrounded by a seven-foot wall topped with razor wire, recalls being filled with questions.

“Were they keeping me in? Or the Koreans out?” he wondered, and found himself very curious about the world outside those guarded gates. “I could see that nothing was wasted there. Plastic, metals, fabrics; everything was recycled and reused.”

The contrast between this and the American lifestyle was striking—even to the teenaged Bradley.

Later, as a graduate student at Florida State University where he studied with photographer Robert Fichter and mixed-medium artist Paul Rutkovsky, Bradley found himself once again sucked into reflection on the environment. He was fascinated by the unfolding news story of the infamous garbage barge, the Mobro, which in 1987 traveled up and down the East Coast trying to discard its 3,200 tons of contaminated

From top to bottom: “Untitled I,” digital photo documentation of trash found on Oak Island, North Carolina, March 2000; “Trash Totem,” Baltimore trash, earth globes, and sound of black flies and televisions set to a local channel, installed at University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2000; “Fossil Hunters II,” digital print, 2000 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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The Steven Kaufman AIDS Outreach Project is a program of Jewish Family Services, an agency of THE ASSOCIATED: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore.

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trash. No municipality would accept the refuse which, as the summer progressed and the heat rose, put off a stench that announced its presence in undeniable terms. Bradley followed the barge’s plight as it was rejected by three countries and six states before ending its seven-month journey in Brooklyn, New York, a few miles from where it started. (After some legal jockeying in the courts, the trash was finally incinerated in Brooklyn and more than 430 tons of ash were buried in a landfill on Long Island.)

“I don’t know what it was about that barge, but it really made me start looking at my own environment—and there was trash everywhere,” Bradley says. “I decided to set aside my painting and do something on garbage.” Bradley took eight walks all over Tallahassee, which he marked on a map, and collected all the trash he found along the way. “I weighed it and then went through it piece by piece and made a list. I noted who the manufacturer was, what the material was, where it was found—and tried to make connections about its manufacture, distribution, and consumption as a way of unraveling the cycle.” Bradley put his rubbish on display in a store-front gallery window. Then, he went through his database of garbage and invited those who created it— the manufacturers and, in some cases, those whose names and addresses were on letters that blew about the streets—to come see his exhibit, thanking them for their contributions to his work. While none of the “patrons” showed, a few of their cranky lawyers did. One donor, whose tattered letterhead was featured, wanted it back. “Hey, your rubbish is now my art,” he told them.

“That project was a real turning point for me artistically,” Bradley

recalls. “Because now I was in a dialogue with the public. We were talking about this problem—the environment—and I’ve been dealing with it ever since.”

T

oday, Bradley has moved from working with solid waste to what he describes as “deeper, more difficult issues with the environment.” In what is perhaps his most technologically complex project to date, Bradley’s newest work of art, sponsored by the Public Works Museum, will be on display in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. (The proposed start date of April 22 will ultimately depend on funding.)

This object, a deceptively simple-looking elevenfoot buoy floating a few yards off Pier 7 by the Public Works Museum, will sit just where the very polluted Jones Falls enters the harbor and will be an interactive comment on the changing water quality. Titled Call & Response, a sign on the buoy will invite passersby to dial the buoy’s phone number on their cell phones. Upon dialing the number, viewers will hear a menu of options. If they press one button, they will be treated to a live recording of the underwater sounds drawn from a below-surface mic on the buoy.

If they press another button, they can listen to the same sounds they actually hear around them—cars passing over the bridge, horns honking, passersby, etc.—only filtered through a recording. If they press yet another button, they will hear scientific data about the water quality, such as the current oxygen and turbidity levels. Perhaps most interesting, this raw data will have been converted to sound patterns—an eerie, haunting, musical commentary on pollution.

“In this information age, we’ve reached a point where you can’t just look at this complicated raw data about pollution levels and say, ‘I understand it.’

But by taking this information and reconfiguring it into another form where you can sit there and listen to the pollution levels, you get a chance to use another sense to understand a complex phenomenon,” Bradley says. “You may casually glance at that water and say, ‘Wow, that doesn’t look very healthy,’ but this gives a real voice to our delicate ecosystem.”

And Bradley, who had to jump through lots of hoops to get permission from the U.S. Coast Guard and Homeland Security to place his buoy in the Inner Harbor, worries that our ecosystem is drifting toward a state of emergency. With a sly wink to the aforementioned agencies, Bradley’s buoy will respond to the water’s changing pollution levels by flashing a warning with colored LED lights: Code Yellow, Code Orange, or Code Red. ■ —Karen Houppert wrote about a Stone Hill home renovation in the February issue of Urbanite.

From top to bottom: “YMCA Kids,” digital print, 2000; “DeValue/ReValue,” installation for Reduce/ Reuse/Reexamine show at New York’s Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, 2004; “Untitled II,” digital photo documentation of trash found on Oak Island, North Carolina, March 2000 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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by julie gabrielli

courtesy of The Hub

out there

The Art of Conversation

Just listen. That’s the sound of change.

Above: At The Hub, an incubator for social innovation, individuals from around the world gather to hash out new ideas in this comfortable, welcoming space.

In a comfortable home in Portland, Oregon, paper mill owner David T. Quigg is introduced to a representative of Portland General Electric, the local utility. Quigg’s Washington-based company, Grays Harbor Paper, makes a one hundred-percent recycled paper called Harbor 100, and runs the entire operation with energy from biomass generated by waste wood from the timber industry or building and land clearing. Quigg isn’t even a customer of PGE, but the party’s host, entrepreneur Ruby Gates, thought it might be interesting if Quigg had a chat with PGE’s director of sustainability. From that conversation, says Gates, “They created a program to use the thirty-eight percent excess energy that [the paper mill was] generating. It hadn’t even occurred to [Quigg] to explore what to do with that extra energy.”

The intimate setting, topical talk, mojitos, and snacks are hallmarks of “Upside Hour,” Gates’ innovative networking session. Why does Upside Hour work so well? Portland has a sustainable leadership community and these people see each other often at large events. “But when you open it up in a home, a nurturing and intimate space,” Gates observes, “people go much deeper with each other. Many more possibilities arise than at that 7 a.m. coffee talk.”

Part of what Gates discovered with Upside Hour is that “just the facts” is only half of the picture. Measurable things like behavior and systems (which we typically think about when trying to make changes that improve our lives) have a reciprocal relationship with our values and emotions, all that interior “touchy-feely” stuff. Ignoring the fact

that people act based largely on how they feel shortcircuits much of the great work being done on the exterior (policies, formal incentives, programs). Even corporate culture is essentially a collective set of unconscious and conscious beliefs and values.

Innovators like Gates who recognize the critical role of the interior have developed settings and practices that create an environment of trust, which fosters real conversation. Social entrepreneurs around the world are engaging in a practice known as the Art of Hosting Conversations. This humane and egalitarian approach to problem-solving involves creating a place and the conditions for the wisdom of a group to emerge. Hosting helps open people up to creativity and possibility, and also guides them to synthesizing and making decisions.

Take, for example, The Hub, an incubator for social innovation located in London, Bristol, Johannesburg, and São Paulo. According to Maria Glauser, who hosts the London Hub, “You can design the best space in the world, you can design the best meeting or conference, but it’s the art of constantly nurturing what emerges that makes the difference.

It’s like gardening. A host is the gardener of a space and is responsible for nurturing it and keeping it alive, while being himself part of the garden.”

The Hub hosts space for innovative change agents to gather and hash out ideas in a creative, supportive space. They provide Internet connectivity, phones, fax, and whatever else the convening group needs. Some of the events The Hub has hosted are: a planning session for an earth-sheltered enviw w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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ronmental education center attended by sustainable architects, engineers, educators, and project managers; a “Communicating Climate Change” forum; a “Fashion Addict Experiment,” gathering intrepid fashion addicts attempting to prosper in the world of sustainable fashion; and a “Learning Laboratory,” a radical experiment with Finnish students in learning by doing.

But there’s another dynamic often at play when people gather to talk about change. When we are overly focused on fact-based solutions, we tend to talk at people, rely on experts, and revert to a hierarchy of communication and decision-making. Experts have answers; they see the big picture and pull programs out of their bag of tricks. Their emphasis is usually on analyzing data, making a plan of action, and designating certain people to carry out the plan. However, if the emotions, values, and beliefs of everyone involved are not taken into account, this top-down method is often unsuccessful. Alternatively, hosting can provide the keys to unlock not only the individual and collective interior, but also to unleash the collected expertise of a group, which encourages solutions to arise almost organically.

When the interior is factored in, the dynamic shifts from talking to listening. Awareness of the fact that everyone present has wisdom and is entirely necessary to the project at hand develops. People yearn to be listened to, to be heard. This is at least partly because we are so used to being talked at by experts. In the right circumstances, we each have an innate sense of our own wisdom, but in many cases, no one has asked us what we think, let alone how we feel.

This may seem counterintuitive, but listening is active, not passive. The Art of Hosting centers on asking people how they feel and what they think, then letting nature take its course. In the words of sustainability practitioner Tatiana Glad, “It is about finding the right question, a question that opens up the space to inquiry, curiosity, to new energy around a given topic. A ‘wicked question,’ we sometimes call it!”

Used in a conservative corporate setting, hosting can lead to surprising results. Anita Paalvast, an operational risk manager for a large international bank, brought the practice to a yearly gathering of fifty risk managers from around the world. Instead of drafting the usual schedule and filling it with presentations, her planning group asked, “What is it actually that we want to achieve?” As she tells it, “We slowly worked toward what kind of questions we wanted to answer here at this conference. Then, we started planning what kind of methodology we would use.” In this somewhat reverse fashion, her group arrived at framing questions that got at the

It is about finding the right question, a question that opens up the space to inquiry, curiosity, to new energy around a given topic. A “wicked question,” we sometimes call it! interior dimensions of an ever-larger scale of work relationships.

Paalvast’s conference generated high-level, inspiring results because hosting “allows people to respect each other better than other meetings where agendas and roles are pretty strict and too much controlled. Hosting leaves more room for people to express themselves.”

Hosting can be useful for any group that has a need for strategic conversation, and, according to Glad, “the willingness to trust opening the space up to others rather than controlling outcome.”

Despite the diversity of the groups she has worked with, two aspects are almost always present. The first is the fear of letting go of control. The second is that when the team feels safe, “everyone seems to find something to honor in the other. Rarely does a group leave still with judgment or discord within

it.” Glad notes that this “interior” success brings external, measurable success as well. “The results are often more relevant, resilient, and encouraging of real commitment. Most clients are surprised at how much gets done in a less controlled or traditionally top-down process.”

The practice of hosting appears to be successful across cultural and institutional boundaries. In Canada, it was introduced as part of the “Imagine Calgary” program, which is envisioning a sustainable future for that city.

In Zimbabwe, the eco-village Kufunda (which means “learning” in the Shona language) is rooted in the principles of the Art of Hosting. Kufunda cofounder Marianne Knuth states on its website: “A starting assumption for my work here is that people already know how to work in creative and self-sufficient ways, and that the challenge is to help them access that knowledge—and the self-confidence to act on it—generating concrete and often surprising results in the process.”

In Ohio, health care executive Phil Cass says that hosting is “the underlying system we are using [to create] affordable and sustainable health care in the community.” He introduced hosting to Columbus two years ago, and the practice is spreading to other organizations in the city.

These days, we are faced with a great many challenges. In our desire to find solutions, we tend to turn to experts to help us. What if we embraced the notion that a group has all the wisdom it needs within itself to create its own solutions? With an Art of Hosting practitioner to facilitate, we can have authentic conversations that allow for the emergence of true solutions. ■ —Julie Gabrielli wrote about complementary currency in Urbanite’s March 2007 issue. She is a Baltimore-based eco-architect.

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Through MAY 13 order tickets today! Call 800-919-6272 or visit artbma.org Become a Member and get free tickets! Call 443-573-1800.

Generously supported by the Florence Gould Foundation and The Alvin and Fanny Blaustein Thalheimer Exhibition Endowment Fund. Citigroup is the corporate sponsor. Supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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March 2007

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Urbanite

PISSARRO

An artist who wasn’t afraid to take it outside.

Publication:

Camille Pissarro. Banks of the Oise at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, (detail), 1867. Denver Art Museum Collection, Gift of the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation in honor of Annalee G. Newman, 2001.310.

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MUSIC

photo by Will Kirk, courtesy of the Peabody Institute

“It’s hard for Baltimore bands to break out,” says John Irvine, the singer/songwriter and guitarist of local music veterans The Jennifers. “The clubs are always dodgy. As soon as a good one gets going, it closes. And since most national bands play in Washington, D.C., not Baltimore, a local band often needs to go outside of Baltimore to make a name for itself.”

Irvine knows of what he speaks. The Jennifers, whose members also include Skizz Cyzyk (drums), Joe Stone (guitar, vocals), and Joe Tropea (bass), have been one of Charm City’s best pop outfits for a decade and a half without ever making a splash outside of their hometown. The band did experience a fleeting whiff of glory when, in 1995, they won “Best All Male Band” in an MTV contest. Alas, their video was never broadcast on the cable channel.

A thinking-person’s garage band, The Jennifers marry the songwriting influences of Robyn Hitchcock and XTC’s Andy Partridge with the interlocking guitar work of Television and My Bloody Valentine. Throw in the occasional twang of surfguitar legend Dick Dale and you have a strange, which is to say intoxicating, brew that sounds like few other bands, local or otherwise.

Colors from the Future, The Jennifers’ latest release, marks the band’s artistic highpoint. “Mrs. Gray,” the uptempo opening salvo, waxes humorously about a modern-day Mrs. Robinson in this, the age of cosmetic surgery: “Mrs. Gray, you look so surprised. With all that work done to your eyes I’d think you could see the light. Mrs. Gray, you’re looking younger than you should. You’ve got a husband with a practice, he snips the skin fantastic … .”

Other highlights include “Great War,” an infectious romp that sticks with you hours after you last hear it, and a spirited reading of Robyn Hitchcock’s

photo by Sam Holden

By Robert C. Knott

The Jennifers: Joe Stone, Skizz Cyzyk, John Irvine, and Joe Tropea

“Queen of Eyes.” No less compelling is the album’s coda, “Saturday,” in which Irvine and Stone, true to their influences, weave a melody that no one guitarist possibly could. For their part, Cyzyk’s and Tropea’s driving backbeat infuses the album with a live, kinetic energy.

The bottom line: Colors from the Future is a very good album. If they hailed from Greenwich Village, many in Baltimore would nevertheless be hip to The

Jennifers. Conversely, because the band makes its home in Baltimore, precious few audiophiles in the Big Apple are likely aware of them.

Meanwhile, Irvine is realistic about the future of The Jennifers. “We have no delusions we’re going to be rock stars. But we also believe a lot of people will like our music if we get it to them. We don’t want to make a huge career of the band, but it’s our job to get the music out there.”

ART

By Kerr Houston Michelangelo reportedly said that Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Florentine Baptistery doors, cast between 1425 and 1452, were worthy to be the Gates of Paradise—but, happily, you don’t have to travel to either Florence or Paradise to gain a sense of their power.

Since 1879, the Peabody Institute has housed a halfsized copy of the gilded bronze portals. The copy stands in the anteroom entrance to the lovely Leith

Symington Griswold Hall. Look closely, and you can see where years of students about to take the stage for their final recitals have rubbed one of the male figure’s noses for good luck. And, if the copy leaves you wanting more, you’re in luck: Three of Ghiberti’s original panels are currently touring the United States.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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FILM

This year’s opening night shorts program features a pair of pretty big names: Nathaniel Kahn, whose Two Hands was nominated for

During the Maryland Film Festival, I always wish I had one of those devices you see only in movies—a magic, manipulative clock that would allow me to watch one film, then roll back time to watch another one that was showing down the hall.

The next best thing to magic is going to the shorts. Short films, that is.

A film festival is practically the only place to see a short film at all. I realized this when I went to Video Americain a few months ago and asked for the DVD of my favorite short film from last year’s festival, Have You Eaten?

Video Americain, which has never not had a movie I wanted, did not have this one. Shorts, the staff told me, are shown at film festivals, and that’s about it. Some get collected and put on DVDs, but not many.

“Short films have been the orphans of the film world,” says Jed Dietz, director of the Maryland Film Festival. “There’s a whole lot of interest in YouTube and other sites that show some short films, but nobody has figured out a way for short films to make any money.”

And so the Maryland Film Festival organizers decided in 2004 to embrace the short film, and to celebrate it in a big way.

“We have devoted our opening night to shorts, which no other general film festival in the country does,” Dietz says. “Typically, a festival will have some extravaganza on opening night with major stars. We just saw an opportunity to do something for short films that nobody else was doing.”

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an Oscar this year in the documentary short film category, and Leon Fleisher, the famed pianist and Peabody Institute professor—and the subject of this 18-minute film. Fleisher, at the height of his career, lost the ability to play with his right hand, and regained that ability decades later.

You can scour the festival program for other shorts whose directors or cast members you will recognize. The 2005 festival opening

night featured a short film directed by Aaron Ruell, who played Kip in Napoleon Dynamite.

But don’t overlook the films made by the notso-famous. That same festival included a film I now wish I had gone to see—West Bank Story, which won the Oscar this year for best liveaction short. It’s a musical comedy take-off on West Side Story, about an Israeli soldier who falls in love with a Palestinian beauty while their families run feuding falafel stands.

Director Ari Sandel’s acceptance speech acknowledged that most people watching the awards show don’t know what short films are.

A lot of short films “are made by directors who are trying to get noticed,” Sandel said. “And it relies on perseverance and stick-to-it-iveness and hustle and dedication and loyalty from a cast and crew who are doing it for pennies—if not for nothing.”

Shorts do, of course, appeal to the adventurous who are willing to take a look at something new. Yes, some of these films will miss the mark for you. But they are shown in groups of about three to six or more, and chances are that at least one will be unforgettable. I have gone to the comedy shorts presentation, watched the first half, and then walked over to the animated shorts, and watched a few of those. You will have to buy two tickets, but look at it this way—it’s one of the few things that you can do to show your support for these filmmakers.

To view the schedule for the 2007 Maryland Film Festival, go to www.mdfilmfest.org.

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literature

By Susan McCallum-Smith

I found the following lines in the indispensable new Collected Poems by W. H. Auden: “Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; / He knew human folly like the back of his hand, / And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; / When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, / And when he cried the little children died in the streets.” Written in 1939, “Epitaph on a Tyrant” captures in a single stanza the theme unifying this month’s selections: the terrible consequences of wars fought in the name of ideology, waged by those unfettered by conscience or empathy.

Our libraries weep with books about Vietnam from the point of view of Americans who fought there, but Tom Bissell’s masterly 2007 memoir, The Father of All Things, may be the first to consider its effect on those born to its veterans, on those who sat down with Dad and Vietnam every evening at the dinner table.

In 2004, Bissell traveled to Vietnam with his ex-Marine father to trace his father’s tour of combat and visit the location where he was injured by a roadside bomb. Part travelogue, part history, all memoir and all heart, The Father of All Things is anchored by an expertly researched primer on the causes and progress of the war, including whiplash accounts of the fall of Saigon and the My Lai massacre. Bissell’s frightening intelligence is leavened with a self-deprecatory humor and emotional honesty—the reader scrabbles for a hanky as often as she scrabbles for a dictionary—as Bissell and his decent, damaged, taciturn father dance around the issue of personal responsibility.

Soldiers are sometimes seduced by war, explains Bissell; it makes civilian life feel suffocatingley banal. The “olfactory orchestra of the jungle itself, the warm buttery smell of a cleaned M14” make you “long for Vietnam … in Vietnam you never lost your simple human awareness of being alive. It was a young man’s land covered in a dew of terrifying possibility.” Will anything ever

again be so immediate, so tangible, and, yes, so exhilarating?

The worst wars are the sectarian wars, and the one in Northern Ireland has commonly been referred to by the ironically understated “the Troubles,” as though it were the equivalent of an upset tummy. Louise Dean’s wonderfully evenhanded This Human Season (2007) dramatizes the “dirty blanket” protests in the Maze Prison outside Belfast during 1979, through parallel narratives from each side of the political divide.

Kathleen Moran, a housewife with three kids, smuggles notes and tobacco to her eldest son, incarcerated in the Maze. He is on the blanket: refusing to wear the prison uniform, to shower, or to use the latrines, in protest at the withdrawal of special privileges that had given the IRA the status of political prisoners. Meanwhile, John Dunn, an Englishman and former soldier, starts his new job as a guard at the Maze prison, tempted by the high salary.

Then, prison guards begin to be assassinated; John’s son arrives from England, baffled by the conflict and indiscreetly curious; Kathleen’s youngest follows his brother’s violent footsteps; and the prisoners’ protest develops into a hunger strike. Through it all, Dean manages to mine humor and humanity from cell walls streaked with human excrement.

“It’s not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer,” says a Maze inmate (quoting Terence MacSwiney of the IRA), a fact proven in Vietnam, in Northern Ireland, and in Russia, where the Bolsheviks triumphed despite fewer numbers and the intervention of foreign powers. The Russian Revolution provides the backdrop in James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love (2005). Russian in sentiment and location only, its style is the antithesis of torpid Dostoevskian prose. (I’m going out on a limb here, if you’ll pardon the pun, to declare that Meek’s yarn about castration and cannibalism will come to a cinema near you.)

In 1919, in a small village in Siberia, a dispirited brigade of Czech troops is trapped between the advancing Bolsheviks and the White Russian

army. A stranger arrives in town, the enigmatic Samarin, who spins a tale about escaping a penal colony and being stalked by a cannibal. Toss in a horny widow, a psychopathic military commander, and a religious visionary, and you have a recipe for gory goings-on.

The rapid-fire action nails the reader’s attention, and despite its violence, it is often funny. Admittedly the humor is of the Gogolian variety, a humor derived from chasing sables, punning about missing appendages, and being able to respond when you are told you are eating cat for dinner, “Thank God for that. I thought it was horse.”

Despite its historical adventure trappings, Meek’s book is a meditation on terrorism and our post-9/11 world. Samarin sacrifices others for a political ideal, the visionary sacrifices himself for a religious ideal, and both believe their actions to be entirely motivated by love.

Be wary of those who are single-minded in their pursuit of ideological perfection, these books warn, echoing the sentiments of Auden; those who profess to be on the side of the angels often take demonic form. ■

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A Grand Idea continued from page 51

The Central Hallway

“You have to resolve the dichotomy between old structure and new use,” says Murphy.

To accommodate this new use, a new kitchen was built in the basement. The kitchen serves all floors, and a freight elevator had to be installed to bring food up to all the floors. Some of these alterations triggered disagreements with the federal Department of the Interior and the Maryland Historical Trust, organizations charged with safeguarding the historic integrity of the building, which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Cathedral Hill Historic District.

“It’s a constant series of negotiations and compromises,” says Murphy. But, “if the food’s not hot, all the historic detail in the world won’t get people to come back,” says Haynie.

The cost differential can be a major hurdle to the restoration of historic buildings, especially those like the Masonic Temple of such rich detail.

The restoration and transformation of the 96,000square-foot Masonic Temple into the Tremont Grand took $27 million, or about $280 per square foot. The cost to build a new no-frills facility would have been only $150 per square foot. But, to create a

building comparable to the Masonic Temple would have cost somewhere near $1,000 per square foot.

There are benefits to restoring this detail, such as increased demand and higher rental rates.

Even considering these benefits, Fennell says that “the key to surmounting the high costs of preservation was the availability of tax credits.” Credits given for historic preservation by the federal and state governments, as well as the federal New Markets Tax Credits program that gives tax credits for development in certified low-income communities, allowed for substantial savings to be built into the finance model for the project.

These tax credits are often seen as a kind of free money, but they are, in effect, a public subsidy of a private project. In this case, as well as many others, they are necessary for a project to go forward.

In addition to cooperation with City officials, an owner and architect with vision, skilled specialty contractors, and an outstanding building to work with, a high-caliber restoration project needs public funding. It’s money well-spent. This public money allowed for what is essentially a public good—the retention of one of Baltimore’s unique buildings. ■ w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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The Changing Face of Environmentalism continued from page 55

Earth Day planning meeting, in Baltimore in 1990. “I was sitting in this meeting—I was the only black person there—and I asked, What are you doing to let the larger African-American community know what you are doing?” she says. “And they said, Why don’t you do that? And they gave me a roll of stamps and some envelopes.” In 1995, Hettleman started Black Earth Day, sometimes called Urban Earth Day, to advance environmentalism in the African-American community. It is now a national, week-long event, held each October.

Today, Hettleman sees tremendous potential for spreading the environmental message to the inner cities: The Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans brought home that the face of any future environmental catastrophe in America would most likely be a black face, a poor face, the “kind of people who live paycheck-to-paycheck.”

It is a message that the more mainstream environmental groups may not always have heard. But there are signs that slowly, glacially, groups like the Sierra Club seem to be trying to listen. The Sierra Club is the most prominent of America’s environmental organizations, and one that has traditionally straddled the fine line between conservation and activism. But the conflicts between the two wings began to erupt in the mid-1990s, when the group endured a divisive debate over immigration, with some “zero-growth” members calling for the organization to take a conservative position on immigration, arguing that America’s growing population was straining the environment.

The ugly public battle that ensued made elements of the organization look xenophobic and even racist.

Ironically, that struggle may have helped push the group and many mainstream environmentalists to reach out to the broader progressive movement. “It galvanized those of us who have a historic heart for justice,” says Melanie Griffin, director of the Sierra Club’s Environmental Partnerships Program. “And it made us realize that diversity and environmental justice are important issues.”

Part of the difficulty mainstream environmentalists have in reaching out to low-income minorities is that both the traditional deficiencies cited

by Griffin—a lack of people of color as members and a lack of focus on environmental issues associated with the inner cities—compound each other to make changing the status quo even more difficult. Without a diverse membership base, mainstream groups can’t really understand the unique

Overlooking the old Texaco oil tank field at Haven and Boston streets. The mounds indicate where the oil storage tanks once stood.

problems of the inner city. And without understanding those problems, they can’t really diversify their movement. Those twin problems have greatly contributed to the historic divide, and have made change difficult.

But groups like the Sierra Club seem to be moving in the right direction, or are at least trying to. Griffin’s role is to forge alliances outside the Sierra Club’s traditional membership base, which she describes as “mostly white and suburban.” The organization has built partnerships with innercity churches and activist organizations that haven’t traditionally had an environmental focus. Still, she acknowledges that change has been slow. “As a group that was established in 1892 in the mountains, it has been an ongoing challenge for us,” she says, “but we’re finding that there is a lot more common ground than we might have assumed. We’re seeing so much more increased interest from local groups in communities of color and from the larger white [environmental] groups. Within the Sierra Club there is now a huge demand to understand what environmental justice is, to understand white privilege. We’ve gone from kind of clueless to kind of hungry.”

The story of how Glenn Ross found the environmental movement, or rather how the environmental movement found Ross and people like him, may be the story of environmentalism’s future in America.

If the re i s an e me rgi n g e n vironme n ta l i sm specific to inner-city African-American communities, it is an environmentalism of problems not distant but near, rooted in issues of public health and public space and environmental discrimination. It is a kind of environmentalism written quite literally on the walls, in the living room of Glenn Ross’ home near the Johns Hopkins East Baltimore campus.

It is really less a living space than a large, cluttered office, with an endless array of binders and folders arranged beneath a banner that reads, “It’s Baltimore, Don’t Trash It,” and a huge street map of the city, which Ross uses to point out the region’s most egregious polluters. Beside the map hang some two dozen clipboards, all ideas for future projects. On another wall are newspaper clippings from the many battles Ross has fought as an activist, so many they cover the surface like wallpaper. Ross uses the press coverage to chronologically trace his own history. Gradually the topics take on a more environmental bent, and Ross becomes animated when he arrives at a group of articles from The Baltimore Sun about landlord abuses in Section 8 housing, in private homes rented with vouchers provided by HUD for low-income residents. “These houses were owned by city-agency heads,” he says of a story with a large photo of himself standing in a decrepit hallway with peeling paint. “And here’s a woman whose child had asthma, and her whole basement was full of lead and mold.”

Yet Ross never really considered his work “environmental” until he started working with the B’More Green project. Then about three years ago, Ross joined the Environmental Justice Partnership, a coalition of environmental health specialists and several East Baltimore activist groups. The w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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The old Texaco oil tank field with Brewers Hill in the background

EJP emerged out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as a way to link the researchers studying urban environmental issues—pollution, lead paint, disproportionately high rates of cancer, heart disease, asthma—and the communities right outside their doors that were grappling with those same problems. Ross was tasked with helping to build a network of East Baltimore community organizations dedicated to fighting just the kinds of urban environmental battles they had been fighting all along, though they had never really thought of those issues as environmental. The EJP has since allied with some of East Baltimore’s most important neighborhood activist groups, like The Door and the Rose Street Center, both of which have earned their reputations fighting gangs and drug abuse, problems more traditionally associated with the inner city.

The EJP also created some unlikely partnerships, like that between Ross and Johns Hopkins toxicologist Michael Trush, Ph.D. When Trush first came to Hopkins in 1983, he says there was a fundamental disconnect between the issues urban environmental scientists like him studied and the very human faces who were the victims of the problems he specialized in. Theirs was a theoretical work of the laboratory, not a practical work to be applied to their own community. This began to change at Hopkins and at similar research facilities through the country, after Kenneth Olden, Ph.D., became the first African American to head one of the institutes of the National Institutes of Health (the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences), in 1991.

Olden found the argument for environmental justice persuasive, and in 1996 the NIEHS mandated that the research university centers receiving NIEHS funding each create a community education and outreach program. At Hopkins, this meant working more closely with the residents and community groups in the low-income minority neighborhoods in their area.

Trush now works with the EJP as part of his role as deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Urban Environmental Health. He says his connection to activists like Glenn Ross (upon whom he lavishes praise) has brought new meaning to his work as a scientist. When asked about his proudest accomplishments, Trush eschews the typical recitation of studies and published papers. Instead, he cites his involvement in the paid relocation of residents in Wagners Point, where heavy industry had caused extreme health consequences for generations. “When I first started out, I never thought I’d be doing this kind of thing,” says Trush, who grew up among the coal mines in Western Pennsylvania. “But it has become a very rewarding aspect of my life.”

O n e m i g h t s ay t h e f i n a l s t e p in Glenn Ross’ evolution into an environmental activist came in 2003, when he was asked by the Green Party to run on its ticket for City Council in the 2004 elections. (He did, and finished a distant second.) “I read their platform,” he says, “and I realized that I am not only black, but I’m also green.”

There is one critical lesson that Ross says environmentalists need to learn to continue to draw people like him into their fold. He says they need to learn how to “market” themselves, a word also used by the Sierra Club’s Griffin. Urban activists have always been working on environmental issues, they just didn’t know it. And the mainstream environmental movement was slow to reach out—or simply unmotivated. Now that they are trying to, they still need to learn to bridge the class and racial divides and to speak to the more immediate concerns of poor people in the inner city.

Ross recalls a recent conversation with an environmental activist who was trying to engage Baltimore’s black community on environmental issues.

“He was telling me that when he comes into neighborhoods, it’s hard to get them to understand what he is saying,” says Ross. “I said, ‘You gotta break it down to urban: why you shouldn’t let the oil go down the sewer drain, why their kids are getting asthma.’ That’s the connect.”

Before Ross and I part ways, we take one final trip out to a park on Edison Highway in the Berea neighborhood. Ross points out a row of little white tubes he says are there to release the toxins from the ground. They are the only reminders that this park was once a landfill. “Barbara Mikulski, when she was a neighborhood activist, helped get that done,” he says. “In all my years in Baltimore, that fight against that landfill was the first time I ever saw the white community and the black community come together.”

It is a small park. But for Ross, a man who grew up in segregated Baltimore, it is really something much bigger: It is a symbol of environmentalism’s potential to diminish the class and racial divides we still live with.

“People have to realize,” he says, “that we are all connected.” ■ —Bill Mesler, a regular contributor to Urbanite, most recently participated in our March 2007 issue as a team member in The Urbanite Project. To learn more, visit www.urbaniteproject.com.

A “No Tresspassing” sign on the fence that runs around the old Texaco oil tank field

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My Small Murders continued from page 63

The Truth About Freedom During the few months I was freeing my captives, I didn’t know that mice have a remarkable ability to find their way home, nor did I understand that, since stray mice are not accepted by other mouse families, I was sentencing these strays to an unfortunate end. So, in my ignorance, I accomplished nothing: Either the mice returned to the building, then to our apartment (following the scent trails of their predecessors), or they were killed by predators or by other mice. After learning this much, I had to accept my role, finally, as exterminator. This was easier than I’d like to admit.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping I often lay awake at night waiting for the snap of the traps. Nothing worked as well as the old-fashioned, triggered trap. I could bait it any number of ways.

Mice prefer peanut butter to cheese, I learned. I was making a science out of killing.

Sometimes, horror of horrors, the trap only maimed. I came to dread the mornings when, half blinded by the kitchen light, I stumbled in to clean up the mess. At my most gruesome, I wondered if leaving the corpses out would serve as a warning to other mice, like Vlad the Impaler posting heads of his victims in front of his castle. The most heartbreaking sight I came across was a two-mouse massacre, where one mouse had apparently followed the other into the killing field, perhaps drawn by the sounds of the other’s distress.

Defi nition

That brush upright in my hand like a useless wand, I gaped at her. I hadn’t heard a line like that since I was in high school.

It took Teri two hours to explain that our marriage had been ill-advised from the start. At last she said, “Give me six months and we’ll see what happens.”

It had taken us at least six months to realize that we had a mouse problem. And more than six months to rid our apartment of these pests. What could I possibly expect of Teri in a mere six months?

Friends No More Teri and I tried to go out “as friends” but I couldn’t manage it and, in anger, I broke off relations. Then we tried marriage counseling, which she broke from, also in anger because she didn’t like the words the therapist used: dysfunction … transference … pathology.

Now we are negotiating our divorce.

I know—and I suspect she knows—that our mutual anger is a product of our profound dismay in ourselves and in each other. It’s surprising, and frightening, how much wrong we can find when we look for it.

The Apartment The apartment is now up for sale. One of its great selling points is that the place is mouse-free. “You should know,” I tell prospective buyers, who tolerate my tour with admirable patience, “that all of these old buildings downtown have mice. There’s no way of getting rid of them, you can only shut them out.”

Then I recount the many, painstaking steps I took to achieve this. “Nothing can get in,” I conclude proudly.

And nothing can get out either, I tell myself. The place is like a tomb.

A pest is a creature we can neither use nor accommodate.

The Way in Is the Way Out George-the-exterminator’s discovery of the hole behind the stove sent me on an expedition to find more. I spent a day working in the kitchen, seeking these out. I spent another two days sealing the rest of the apartment. When I was done, the place felt as tight as a new sailboat.

A Surprise Not long after this, Teri announced that our marriage was over. It seemed a cliché, her telling me she needed “space.” She felt claustrophobic, she said.

“You mean our apartment’s too small?” I asked.

“Our marriage is too small.” Having packed her bags, she was going to spend the weekend with Colleen, a friend in Hampden. Now on my fifth mouse painting, I was holding one of my long brushes.

I said: “I know we’ve been tense lately, ever since the mice—” “It’s got nothing to do with mice.”

“The mice haven’t helped,” I insisted.

“I’m leaving,” she said.

“Jesus, Teri, it’s not like you’re trapped—I mean, what have I done?”

She stared down at her carry-on and pensively wheeled it back and forth as she spoke: It wasn’t me, she said; it wasn’t another man; it wasn’t like we’d done anything wrong as a couple— “Fuck that,” I blurted, “something’s gone wrong!”

“Yes,” she admitted, “I’ve gone wrong. I shouldn’t have married you. It just all happened so fast and … ” “And what?” I wailed.

“And I’ve realized that I’ve loved you only … as a friend.”

Metaphor I can’t help thinking it was emblematic of our relationship that Teri refused to have anything to do with the mice, while I was relegated to the role of their executioner. Here I thought we were building something and all the while she saw things crumbling around us. Although, obviously, the mice had nothing to do with the demise of our marriage, the synchronicity of their demise and ours seems too tidy for comfort.

As for my series of mouse paintings—which I stopped at lucky number seven—a few respected galleries downtown have expressed interest but at this point it remains a matter of nibbles, no bites.

Me and My Shadow Here’s a surefire way to check for mice after you’ve moved into a new place: Open up the top of the stove and look under and around the burners. See any droppings? Clean them out, then check again in a week. I have done this in my new apartment and have learned that the droppings do return—so I have mice. But my new cat keeps them at bay. Whenever I notice him crouching on the kitchen floor and staring intently into the dark gap between the stove and the dishwasher, I know there’s a mouse back there, in the darkness, contemplating the possibilities. I try to view this as an acceptable compromise.

Just last night, though, I dreamed of seeing a fat mouse darting across the stove top. I had the sense that my life will never be as settled or predictable as I would like. Now, when I think of mice, I imagine them running in exercise wheels, hundreds, thousands of mice wheeling round and round, and I am appalled at their tireless energy, at their endless turning, as if together they were the world’s engine, the strength of their lowly multitude joined in a single, mindless task. ■

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29 Seasoned to Perfection

Theory of Love by psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explains our biological need for nurturing; Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine gives scientific support to the cry for language conservation; The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan (author of the well-received The Omnivore’s Dilemma) explores the idea that plants use us as much as we use them; and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold examines the impact of wireless communication devices on cultures.

The website of the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance is www.csballiance.org. Two of the many cookbooks featuring seasonally based recipes are Simply in Season, commissioned by the Mennonite Central Committee and available at Ten Thousand Villages (1621 Thames Street; 410-342-5568; www. tenthousandvillages.org), and Fresh from the Farmers’ Market, which features an introduction by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and is available through Amazon.com.

75 Recommended

56 Blessed Unrest The appendix to Paul Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest, contains many suggestions for further reading: How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein profiles people making notable social changes; Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus is a collection of Camus’ essays on literature, culture, and himself; Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson discusses the biological impulses of ants to work together and how those impulses can be beneficial in other connected systems like the Internet; A General

Art: The three restored panels of the original Florentine Baptistery doors will be visible beginning this month at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and will then travel, in July, to the Art Institute of Chicago and, in October, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The objects will then return in January 2008 to Florence, where they will be permanently exhibited in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

photo by Alain Jaramillo

Music: Download MP3s and check out upcoming tour dates for The Jennifers at www.thejennifers.com.

For more on the renovation of the Tremont Grand, see page 46.

Can we become “one Maryland”?

Coming Next Month. Guest Editor Neal Peirce, columnist and founder of The Citistates Group, joins us to look at the future of regionalism.

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Faux Finishes Murals Metallics Venetian Plaster Paintings on Canvas

Baltimore’s ONLY smokery, specializing in smoked seafood and meats, savory cheese pies, gourmet foods, smoked seasoning salts and chef’s supplies.

Residential & Commercial 410.433.6336

Belvedere Square Marketplace, 529 E. Belvedere Square

www.kyndlwalston.com

410-433-7700

Bikram Yoga

THE ORIGINAL “HOT YOGA” Beginners Welcome in All Classes New Students: $20 for One Week of Classes VOTED “BEST YOGA STUDIO”

By Baltimore Magazine 2003.

Yorktowne Plaza Shopping Center 40 Cranbrook Road in Cockeysville

410-683-YOGA www.bikramyogabaltimore.com

urbanite april 07

www.baltimoregarden.com

Kyndl Walston Decorative Painting

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Design - Installation - Maintenance

Find Your Inner Canoe.

Coffee Books Food Music Community Outdoor Seating

4337 Harford Road | 410-444-4440

www.redcanoe.bz

Our graduates are working in some of the finest salons in the area.

Baltimore Studio of Hair Design (410) 539-1935 Maryland Beauty Academy of Essex (410) 686-4477 Maryland Beauty Academy (410) 517-0442 www.baltimorestudio.net

Functional Fitness Integrative Therapy specializes in providing physical therapy for personal wellness, weight management and management of joint pain.

Physical Therapy Personal Training Wellness Coaching Breast Cancer Post-rehab 336 N. Charles Street, Lower Level (P) 410-837-0440 (F) 410-837-3600 w w w. f f i t . n e t

TASHA LINTON Mortgage Consultant I will provide a friendly, affordable and simple solution for any home financing needs!

Cell 443.992.0783 Fax 410.771.0480 Toll Free 866-855-0783

tasha@mtglender.net 170 Lakefront Drive Hunt Valley, MD 21030

Feng Shui Apprenticeship Training in Baltimore A depthful and sacred evolution of your design and your career.

Fine Swiss Chocolate Premium Estate Loose Tea

May 5, 6, 12 June 9, 10

We will customize the perfect gifts & packaging to suit your company’s or your special occasion needs.

Feng Shui Interior Design Consultations for Home and Office 410.486.6086 lifeworks@earthlink.net

62 village square – The Shops at Cross Keys Baltimore, MD 21210 410.532.8500

“Where you taste before you buy.”

Mon - Fri 11am - 5pm Sat 10am - 5pm Sun 12 - 5pm 17912 York Road Parkton, Maryland 21120

410-357-8644 www.woodhallwinecellers.com

“Have Fun, Get Fit & Feel Fabulous”

Chocolate cafe & Tea Lounge

• Awesome Group Fit Classes • Dynamic Personal Training • Easy Weight Management • Newly Renovated • New Equipment • Incentive Programs • Outdoor Group Activities • No initiation fees • No Contracts Open M-F, 6am-9pm Sa-Su, 9am-5pm

3627 Keswick Rd Baltimore, MD 21211 410-878-2039

Join Now! www.funfitnezz.com

Buy premium quality seafood DIRECT FROM THE MANUFACTURER!

• Crab Meat • Fish & Shrimp • Crab Cakes • Seafood Soups • Seafood Entrees & Appetizers ... and MORE!

burger bistro Burgers, Salads, Wraps, Pastries, Soups

Open Monday - Friday 11am – 6pm, Saturday 11am – 4pm Phillips HQ – Locust Point 1215 E. Fort Avenue (443) 263 – 1314

The Shops at Kenilworth Towson, MD

410-828-5559

Taste the Natural Difference..

• Organic salads • Natural beef & poultry with no antibiotics, steroids or hormones • Seafood with reduced mercury levels • Only sea salt used • Delicious vegetarian dishes • The Best Steaks in Maryland 1330 Reisterstown Road, Pikesville, MD 21208 410-753-3001

Taste The Adventure!

Waverly Farmers Market Saturday’s 7am till Noon

“We’re on it” Are you?

Are you in on the Secret?

Mill Valley Garden Center and Farmers Market Thursday - Sunday 8 am till 4 pm Friday till 8pm

www.buildingbaltimore.com

www.whiskeyisland.com 2800 Sisson Street Baltimore, Maryland 21211 410.236.0001

MIM

RENEWAL

Window and Patio Door BYReplacement ANDERSON™

full circle Unique Gifts!

Jo-Ann Aiken, Owner

3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 130 Baltimore, MD 21211 (410) 662-6623 www.madeinmetal.net

Window Patioa free Door Call me and to arrange Replacement in-home consultation!

Framing in Baltimore for over 20 years.

443-690-4698 Call me to arrange a free Litaconsultation!

Yoast in-home Sales and Design Consultant 443-690-4696 litayoast@andersencorp.com Lita Yoast Sales and Design Consultant litayoast@andersoncorp.com

410.528.1868 www.fullcirclephoto.com 33 East 21st Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218 conservation framing, printing & gallery

MHIC #121441

MHIC #121441

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Dionysus Restaurant and Lounge

The Admiral’s Cup

Bar & Grille 1645 Thames Street Fells Point, MD 21231

Located in Baltimore’s Cultural District, Dionysus offers serious diners and drinkers a relaxing haven. Enjoy Mediterranean cuisine in the attractive upstairs dining room or experience their fine selection of spirits at the cozy downstairs bar.

Restaurant: Sun-Thurs 5pm-10pm, Fri-Sat 5pm-11pm, Sunday Brunch 10am-4pm Bar: Daily 5pm-2am 8 East Preston Street Baltimore, MD 410.244.1020

410-522-6731 410-522-2727

• Renovations & Additions • New Construction • Architecture

Lisa A. London, AIA 410.580.1608

MHIC No. 124131

MHBR No. 5145

www.edifice.net

Operating Hours Mon. - Fri.: 7 am - 5 pm Sat: 9 am - 2 pm

Connecting Volunteers to the Community www.volunteercentral.net

410-366-6030

“life is short, eat dessert first”

*Breakfast till 11 am, Lunch till 5 pm Brunch on Saturdays & Sundays: 9 am - 2 pm

1000 Hull Street Baltimore, MD 410 837 0073

What if we persuaded six unexpected pairs to collaborate?

An architect and a television screenwriter? A typographer and a fiction author? What if some of the city’s most creative minds were to intersect at the junction of frustration and passion? What if we let them ask the questions, and we didn’t edit the answers?

Look for the radicaL resuLts at www.urbaniteproject.com

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4 Frederick Road Ellicott City, MD 21043 410.465.BAKE (2253) 410.465.9161 (fax)

n i g l l e S Now t i a s l a l h , e c n e e d i s r s i Th including fantastic amenities like:

• 10’ Ceilings • Garage parking • Hardwood floors • Private courtyard with fountain & outdoor fireplace • Tile kitchens and baths • Shops, cafes & restaurants • Maple cabinetry • Stainless steel appliances • Starting in the $300’s • Move in Summer 2007 • Washer/dryer • Gas cooking s e l Gallery a S r u o t i s i V S t s . , e l r a h C t s n e . c a N l m t l n i at 1205 m p For appo .

5 m a 0 1 . l e v e L Lower

9 4 4 4 3 7 4 43 - 5

MHbr # 4941 SaleS by McWilliaMS|ballard. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a p r i l 0 7

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eye to eye

We have seen them for years. They seem to have been there always, these uniquely designed classics of the genre. Creating their own aesthetic, they seem to gain power in repetition. A wall peppered with them seems alive with the city’s rhythm.

DayGlo colors, rough half-tones: They speak strongly of the rich culture that drives them. If all art could be so fresh and unassuming!

These posters are made by Globe Poster Printing, a company launched in 1929 in Philadelphia. During a card game, wealthy New Yorker Norman Goldstein and Philadelphia printer Harry Shapiro decided to go into business together. To select a location for their company, they folded up a map of the East Coast and then reopened it. The crease was on Baltimore, and the rest is history.

Today, Globe is run by the Ciceros (Joseph Jr., Frank, and Bob), who continue to create the “old style” boxing and concert posters that still form a part of the city’s visual environment. The two examples shown here, however, are vintage Globe posters.

—Alex Castro

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urbanite april 07

CELEBRATING THREE YEARS OF CULTIVATING PERFECTION.

IN CELEBRATION OF OUR THIRD ANNIVERSARY, THREE-COURSE DINNER FOR $30 Valid during the Month of April, Monday - Friday Only

Restaurant Row at Market Place � 614 Water Street, Baltimore www.BlueSeaGrill.com � 410.837.7300

Complimentary Valet Parking

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goodbye,

old windows — it’s time for a fresh, new look!

SAVE NOW on beautiful Pella replacement windows and doors. ®

• Wide variety of styles to choose from.

• Shop at home or in our showroom with a Pella professional.

• Relax, we install.

FREE

150

$

professional prefinishing!*

OR

off

each installed Pella replacement window, patio door or entry door*

PlUS

No payments for 6 months!*

(minimum purchase of 4 windows)

hurry, sale ends soon!

Call, stop by, or visit www.kc-pella.com to request your free consultation.

PEllA WINDOW & DOOR ShOWROOmS

K.C. Company, Inc.: Annapolis • Beltsville • Easton • Falls Church • Lewes • Salisbury • Timonium

866-211-3781

window & door replacement

* Does not apply to ProLine , Pella Impervia or ThermaStar by Pella products. Other restrictions may apply. See stores for details. Must be installed by Pella professionals. Not valid with any other offer or promotion. Valid for replacement projects only. Prior sales excluded. Financing available to qualified customers only.

Offers end 04/30/07. © 2007 Pella Corporation MHIC #38731 ®

®

®