urban homesteading 路 greening the ghet to 路 can the bay be saved? a p r il 2 011 i s s u e n o. 8 2
GREEN CITY sustainable living in the urban ecosystem
special
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Celebrate Holy Week WitH us. emmanuel. april 17 (palm sunday) 8:30 AM & 10:30 AM
april 21 (maundy tHursday) 6:00 PM
april 22 (Good Friday) Noon to 3PM
Preaching of the Seven Last Words at First and Franklin Presbyterian Church
april 24 (easter sunday) 8:30 AM & 10:30 AM
811 Cathedral Street at Read Street Mount Vernon’s Church of the Arts
Follow us!
Visit emmanueldowntown.org
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4 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
2/25/11 1:49 PM
NAT I
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When Amy and Les Harlan of Reisterstown open their mailbox to find their monthly utility bill, they get excited. With the “amount due” line showing numbers as low as $32, every month they can see their investment in solar energy is yielding the returns they had hoped for. The Harlan’s took advantage of a Maryland state grant program and with the help of Greenspring Energy, had a photovoltaic solar system and a solar hot water heater installed. And today, these systems are utilizing sunlight to generate about 35 percent of the energy needed and used by the household, allowing the family to save money each month and live in a more environmentally friendly and “green” manner.
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Urbanite #82 april 2011 5
I’M A
PR E- COLLEG E STUDENT
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6 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
this month
#82 April 2011
features 33
departments 51
13
keynote
15
The Pathfinder about the cover: Photo-illustration by J.M. Giordano and Peter Yuill
9
19
interview by Rebecca Messner Environmental justice pioneer Majora Carter on turning dumps into parks, jumping the gun on green jobs, and dancing on Robert Moses’ grave
21
Editor’s Note What You’re Saying What You’re Writing Don’t Miss The Goods
—— baltimore observed 27 Cracking the Code by Amy Dusto Hackers are set loose in the city’s warehouse of digital data
36 The Bay Comes Calling
29 Urbanite Online 31 Urbanite Project
by Tom Horton As the impacts of climate change play out, we find ourselves with a greater hand in shaping the Chesapeake—and ever more at its mercy.
—— poetry 49 Skin by Elizabeth Hazen
—— space 21
51 Sandtown Green by Martha Thomas A West Baltimore rowhouse gets an eco-friendly rehab.
—— food + drink
higher learning
57 Rising to the Challenge by Scott Carlson Local duo learns just how complicated it can be to bake a good loaf of bread.
43 Good Neighbors
web extras
more online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com An architect’s model of the green house in Sandtown More about the Red Line at baltimore. newstrust.net/topics/redline
on the air
Urbanite on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 fm April 19: Denzel Mitchell of Five Seeds Farm on urban homesteading April 21: Tom Horton on climate change and the Chesapeake Bay
by Kristine Henry Colleges and universities build strong bonds with nearby communities—out of self-interest as well as good will.
61 Dining Reviews 63 Wine & Spirits
—— 27
arts + culture 65 By Their Compost Heaps Ye Shall Know Them by Michelle Gienow A new generation of urban homesteaders gets back to the land. 67 Music 69 Book 69 Theater
—— 71 The Scene —— 78 Eye to Eye Urbanite #82 april 2011 7
LB - Urbanite AD.pdf 1 3/10/2011 5:11:56 PM
issue 82: april 2011 publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com general manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-in-chief Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com assistant editor Rebecca Messner Rebecca@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-at-large David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com online editors food/drink: Tracey Middlekauff Tracey@urbanitebaltimore.com arts/culture: Cara Ober Cara@urbanitebaltimore.com proofreader Robin T. Reid contributing writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Heather Dewar, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Michelle Gienow, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac editorial intern Breena Siegel art director Peter Yuill
C
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production manager Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com
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staff photographer J.M. Giordano Joe@urbanitebaltimore.com
CM
production interns Angela Ahn, Amie Bingaman, Elizabeth Cole, Ed Gallagher
MY
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senior account executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com
CMY
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account executive Joe McMonagle JoeM@urbanitebaltimore.com advertising sales/events coordinator Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com jane of some trades Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com creative director emeritus Alex Castro founder Laurel Harris Durenberger — Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, md 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily share 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 2011, Urbanite llc. All rights reserved. Urbanite (issn 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, md 21211. Urbanite is a certified Minority Business Enterprise.
8 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
bottom photo by Amy Peyrot; top photo BY Angela Ahn; photo of greg hanscom by j.m. giordano
contributors
editor’s note
Design/Illustration intern Angela Ahn is a third-year MICA student, majoring in illustration with a concentration in graphic design. Ahn is currently working on a travel guide of her native country, South Korea, for one of her classes. She says her work is fun, whimsical, and always completed with a slight twist. For this issue, she contributed the illustration for What You’re Writing (p. 15). When not conjuring fantastical images, Ahn enjoys eating sushi and even playing a round of badminton.
Amy Dusto wrote her first freelance piece while an undergrad at Johns Hopkins University, for Peabody Magazine. She has since entered the university’s MA in science writing program and begun covering technology as a blogger for Discovery News. She writes locally for Bmore Media and various Hopkins publications. Dusto was tickled recently when her advisor referred to her as “a Baltimore girl,” as she actually hails from North Carolina. “Cracking the Code” (p. 27), about local computer programmers making use of a newly public stockpile of city government data, is her first story for Urbanite.
Greg Hanscom
my daughter and i sat at our dining room table recently, working on an assignment her first grade teacher had given her about dreams. The first task: Write about something you dream of doing some day. Lucia wrinkled up her nose, put her pencil to her lips, and said finally, “Save the world.” “Save the world from what?” I asked. I’ve spent more than a decade reporting on the environment, and I’m well-versed on the various ecological calamities that we face, but I wondered what was on her mind. “I don’t know,” she said at first. Then, “from that oil spill.” We had pored over the news photographs after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, spewing nearly 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Tar balls had washed up on beaches not far from the one where she plays with her grandparents each winter. At the ripe old age of 6, Lucia had a very clear sense that her world was under assault. Yes, it’s a fine mess we’ve made of things, kid. The gulf spill is just the tip of the melting iceberg. You also get to deal with climate change and its countless attendant ills, and if you live long, you will witness what some scientists are calling the Sixth Great Extinction; one-half of all species on the planet could disappear by the end of the century. Much of this we’ve seen coming for some time. And some have fought valiantly to stop it. But of late, the human race has shown a much greater propensity for tinkering with natural systems (intentionally or not) than for changing our own ways. I spent the late 1990s and early aughts writing about restoring natural landscapes and ecosystems. Back then, there was a sense that we could turn back the clock, or at least stop the runaway destruction. But over the past few years, it has become clear that for many ecosystems—and certainly when it comes to global climate change—we missed our chance. We hear less about restoration now and more about adapting to what is inevitably to come. The new green motto is “resilience.” This shift is at the heart of the issue you hold in your hands. In the feature story, “The Bay Comes Calling” (p. 36), longtime environment reporter Tom Horton comes to grips with the fact that the Chesapeake Bay is a dead man walking. Fifty years from now, it will be a fundamentally changed ecosystem, thanks to forces that we have already set into motion and have no way of stopping. But as Horton writes, the inevitable change is no reason to despair. We can still “Save the Bay,” as the slogan goes—it will just be a different bay than the one we’ve known. And the people we profile elsewhere in the issue aren’t wasting time crying. In the keynote interview, “The Pathfinder” (p. 33), environmental justice pioneer Majora Carter says that adapting to climate change and reviving urban landscapes and communities go hand in hand. In “Sandtown Green” (p. 51) Martha Thomas tells the story of a local effort that does just that. Michelle Gienow writes about a new generation of “urban homesteaders” who are seeking a sustainable way of life in her story, “By Their Compost Heaps Ye Shall Know Them” (p. 65). And Scott Carlson gives some sense of just how complicated this whole notion of sustainability can be in his story “Rising to the Challenge” (p. 57) about a new bakery that aims to use all locally grown flour. The message: While we face mind-numbing uncertainty and loss, adversity brings with it opportunity. Save the world? I don’t know, kid. But there’s plenty of good work to be done.
Coming next month
YOU CALL THAT ART? A trip through Baltimore’s art underground with a woman who really doesn’t belong there. Urbanite #82 april 2011 9
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Feeling better,
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ISINe X · haUte VeGaN CU r · fIrehOUSe reDU a f t e r t h e D r U Ge wa no. 81 1 issu march 201
what you’re saying
check
out
OUr reDeSIGN
Went to college with Heber Brown. He is the real thing. I’m glad to see a 30-year-old getting some attention in the media without running around with a ball, rapping, or getting hits on YouTube. Keep up the good work Pastor Brown. Morgan State Alum are behind you.
BaltImOre?
Who’s ma kin g it ha ppe n in
ls the way you look at si x loca t will transform , health, & governmen , urban youth, technology whose ideas about music th e city
—Da Spook
The @UrbaniteMD redesign looks great. It’s the little things and the better use of space. —root13design
The new issue and re-design looks great! I love this online [issuu.com] version too! —Lisa Van Horn
@UrbaniteMD is now using Issuu to show electronic copies of March’s issue. Convenient & green! Nice. —@billritson
MAKING CHANGE Re. “Keys to the City,” Feb. ’11 Urbanite: Ok, so props to all the peeps in @UrbaniteMD’s “Keys to the City”—you guys are keeping me inspired today! —@ginferra
Congrats to all the award winners at last night’s Urbanite magazine party. You’d think that they’d have run out of awards to give Dominic Shodekeh Talifero by this point but somehow they seem to keep churning them out. —What Weekly
Great issue, & thanks again for the love and support! Cheers! —Dominic Shodekeh Talifero
Fascinating @UrbaniteMD piece: Researchers issue Palm Pilots to drug users, track their moment-to-moment experiences. —@stephencearly
REALTY BITES Re. “Silver Lining,” Feb. ’11 Urbanite: NewsTrust A sense of the real people and places behind the numbers and stats we often hear about in Baltimore’s housing market. It seems as though community strength, more than bricks and mortar, have helped a number of neighborhoods weather the recession. —Andrew Hazlett
THE NEW URBANITE Re. Urbanite’s redesign and debut on issuu.com (see issuu.com/urbanitemagazine):
assumptions based on personal opinion— “Yet the ‘junkies’ hide away in our ideological predispositions, our moral judgments, and our assumptions about how addiction works.”
I’d like to encourage Jeff and Irina Coleman to look a little closer at the great school options in their area. In particular they should visit the fantastic schools that are part of the Northeast Schools Alliance. The three member schools are parochial (St. Francis), charter (City Neighbors), and traditional public (Hamilton) working in conjunction in the interest of children. Together we are reshaping the collaboration and competition between such schools into an asset that makes a community a wonderful place to raise kids. Rather than scraping by with limited options, folks in the Northeast have three great options that, while distinct in their approaches, all boast fantastic results for our students. Moreover, each of the three schools capitalizes on the resource, character, and diversity of the community. —Bill Murphy The writer is principal of Hamilton Elementary/Middle School.
Fascinating story via @UrbaniteMD: A detailed rendering of how addiction is lived in space and time. —@mkamoss
THE MYSTERIOUS ROOSTER Re. Baltimore Sun columnist Laura Vozella’s March 9 column in which she was mystified by the appearance, then disappearance, of the image of a giant bird “wearing a leather jacket and cradling what appeared to be the head of the crucified Jesus” on the wall of a West Baltimore rowhouse: @UrbaniteMD (which I guess no one @ baltimoresun reads) had an article on this st. artist (Gaia) in Oct. —@Lady _Baltimore
@LVozzella @baltimoresun Gaia’s Rooster: http://bit.ly/f0Rai6. Work was a cover feature in October’s @UrbaniteMD. —@jedweeks
RAT RACE Re. “The Sun Also Rises,” Feb. ’11 Urbanite: “News doesn’t just happen anymore; it runs like a meth-charged hamster on a treadmill.” sounds like i am in the right major. @UrbaniteMD —@emartinsen
YOUR CITY ON DRUGS Re. “On the Trail of Addiction,” Feb. ’11 web extra: NewsTrust Relevant and revelationary— this story educates us about the potential new tools to track addiction. Often this type of research is documented in a journal or other weighty tome, and is difficult to engage with as a layperson. I appreciate Urbanite’s effort to share in-progress research with us. The charts are very informative and add to the story. Even more data would be welcome. My only negative is that the opening paragraph makes
From one “meth-charged hamster on a treadmill” to another. —@mollytics
Join the conversation. Follow us on Facebook (and use the “Suggest Urbanite” button to recommend us to friends) and Twitter (@UrbaniteMD). E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.
Urbanite #82 april 2011 13
Baltimore Green Works presents
8th Annual Baltimore Green Week
TASTE & EXPERIENCE DOWNTOWN BALTIMORE. More than 45 Downtown Baltimore restaurants are featured at
DineDowntownBaltimore.com Print recipes, view featured chef profiles, browse special food and wine events, sign up for monthly emails, and learn more about all of the great dining options in Downtown Baltimore.
April 13-23rd, 2011 SCHEDULE HIGHLIGHTS
April 13th
Plant a Vertical Schoolyard Garden
Kennedy Krieger, 2 p.m. April 14th
Regeneration Art Exhibition
Second Chance, 5:30 p.m. April 16th
Mayor’s Spring Clean Up
Baltimore (city-wide) 8 a.m.
8th Annual EcoFest Druid Hill Park, Noon-5 p.m.
April 17th
Kid’s Unplugged
Irvine Nature Center, 11 a.m.
Localize It!
Ash Street Gardens in Hampden, Noon
Baltimore Green Forum
MD Presbyterian Church, 4 p.m. April 18th, CITY DAY
CITY CENTER
Talk & Tour-Lunch w/ the Mayor
MOUNT VERNON
Canton Waterfront Park, 9-4 p.m.
Tree Planting & Mulching
FEDERAL HILL
Druid Hill Park, 3:30 p.m.
Envisioning Bike Friendly Baltimore
FELLS POINT
JHU Homewood Campus, 6 p.m. April 19th
HARBOR EAST
Gwynns Falls Trail Clean Up
Gwynns Falls Trail House, 9 a.m.
INNER HARBOR
Green Space & Food Ecology
WESTSIDE
Green Business in a Jobless Nation
American Brewery, 4 p.m.
Baltimore Green Center for Careers, 7 p.m. April 20th
Green Garbage
Carrie Murray Nature Center, 12 p.m.
Habitat for Humanity: LEED
New Song Community Learning, 4 p.m. April 21st
Envision Baltimore TBA, 12:30 a.m.
Connectivity: Green Transit/Living Fitzgerald, 4 p.m.
Green Building Center Tour & Film
Vollmer Center, 5:30 p.m. April 22nd
Process of Peace, Art Opening
Towson Art Collective, 6 p.m. April 23rd
Who wants to be an Urban Farmer?
OCEANAIRE SEAFOOD ROOM
MARIE LOUISE BISTRO
WATERSTONE BAR AND GRILLE
Real Food Farms, 9:30 a.m.
Same River Twice G-Spot, 6 p.m.
Plan your visit Downtown: Find convenient and
An Initiative of Downtown Partnership of Baltimore
low cost parking at many Baltimore City garages on evenings and weekends, at www.DowntownBaltMap.com. Park once and ride the Charm City Circulator for free. www.CharmCityCirculator.com.
thanks the following sponsors for their support:
Special thanks to all of the Baltimore Green Week participants this year!
www.baltimoregreenworks.com or call 410-952-0334
14 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
what you’re writing the places you’ll go, Little Girl,” he’d say with a wink. “Wherever you fly, you’ll be the best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.” The cadence of the rhyme and deep timbre of his voice lulled me to sleep many nights, dreaming dreams of possibilities. Now I walk slowly down the dimly lit corridor on big girl feet to his room at the end of the hall. The room is quiet except for the steady sound of his breathing. I tuck the blanket around his bony legs that stick out like twigs from his hospital gown and smooth the sheet across his chest. “Hey, Dad,” I whisper, brushing a wisp of hair from his forehead. I settle next to him on the bed, pulling the well-thumbed book from my purse. The pictures have faded and some of the pages are missing from when my own Little Girl grabbed a handful and pulled. But the words and my father’s voice are ingrained in my heart. Some nights he stirs, and his pale blue eyes flutter open with a spark of recognition at the familiar words that have found their way into his addled brain. Some times I expect to hear, “Go on, Little Girl,” but it doesn’t happen tonight.
illustration by angela ahn
Bedtime Stories
—Sarah Righter is like the prodigal son, having returned to the East Coast after a few years out west. This is the first time she’s been brave enough to submit her writing.
i lie in the dark , listening to the my father only told me one bedtime story, a story repeated twice, about how he intended to slaughter my dog when he grew old. A product of a horrid Highlandtown childhood, exacerbated by wartime experience, Daddy viewed himself as the perfect, proletarian pater familias, a man “hard but fair,” laboring at General Motors to support his family. His family communication to us consisted solely of orders, insults, and imprecations. A dour Sicilian American, Daddy’s normal expression ranged from gray indifference to raging black. This night, however, he smiled. His brown eyes, identical to my own, were illuminated with the pleasure of his story. Congenitally unimaginative, this meanness made him fanciful. Daddy added sound effects, whistling, to show 7-yearold me how he would lead my pet into nearby Herring Run Park to shoot him. We stood in the knotty pine basement, the solid wood paneling an emblem of ‘50s workingclass prosperity. The wood was beautiful, but I hated it, for the knots seemed like ever-present, hostile eyes. Daddy never carried out his threat, and the dog, long after, died of old age. But still, on
summer nights, I sit in Daddy’s little rowhouse in Belair-Edison and listen to the helicopters rushing over. Some carry gunshot victims. Within me still, I can feel the shift and pull of the bullet from Daddy’s imaginary gun. —Name withheld
“go on, little girl,” my dad said, swatting my butt as I flew up the stairs on tiny kid feet, spindly legs poking out from beneath my nightgown. “Up, up, up you go!” While other kids had to be cajoled and coaxed, I anxiously awaited bedtime because it was time for my dad and me. I raced down the hall and dove into bed like an Olympian diving into a pool. By the time I came up, my dad was there, holding our book and ready to read. I fluffed up my pillow and snuggled in. He smoothed the blanket across my lap, brushed a stray curl away from my eyes, and sat down next to me. His tie, loosened, hung crookedly from his neck, and the top of his shirt was unbuttoned, giving him a disorganized look, although I knew he was anything but. I pressed my cheek against the starchy fabric of his rolled-up shirtsleeve as he opened the book and began to read. “Oh,
noises from downstairs. Laughter ends abruptly as the TV is turned off. I hear Joe moving about the kitchen, passing through the house shutting off lights; the five beeps as he arms the security system. Then his footfalls on the stairs, a hesitation at the top as I imagine him deciding between the guest room and the master bedroom, where I lie tensed on one half of our queen-size bed. When did it begin, his sleeping in the guest room? I seem to recall that he came home late one night from work, after I was asleep, and the following morning said he’d slept in the guest room so he wouldn’t wake me. The next time it happened, a few days later, it was because he wanted to read in bed and didn’t want the light to keep me up. I protested that I didn’t mind, but he insisted. That was two months ago. I stare at the ceiling in the dark. The water runs in the hall bathroom as he brushes his teeth and fills a glass with water to keep on the nightstand. In the silence after the water stops I strain to hear where he is. Nothing. Just the creaking of the house and soft whistle of air through the heating ducts. Then the quiet click of the guest room door closing. —Susan Yanguas has just completed her second novel, a
Urbanite #82 april 2011 15
DiD you know that: - The number of facial cosmetic procedures has risen 45% over the last 2 years*?
Staging my own wardrobe malfunction at the office holiday party?
- Dr. Ira Papel and Dr. Theda Kontis are Board Certified experts in Facial Plastic Surgery specializing in both surgical and nonsurgical treatments for facial enhancement? You are invited to attend an OPen HOuse to “Meet and Greet” Dr. Papel and Dr. Kontis at our office on Thursday, April 28, 6-8pm. Space is Limited. RSVP: 410.486.3400
(*survey data from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, January, 2011)
That’s when I knew pop had taken control of my life.
Ira D. Papel, M.D., F.A.C.S. Theda C. Kontis, M.D., F.A.C.S. Board Certified: The American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
410.486.3400 | 1.800.847.0296 1838 Greene Tree roAD, SuITe 370 | BAlTIMore, MD 21208 FOUNDRY MED SPA & LASER CENTER AT STUDIO 921 921 E. FORT AVENUE, FEDERAL HILL/LOCUST POINT, FREE PARKING 410-783-7727
www.FACIAl-PlASTICSurGery.CoM 16 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
If you or someone you know is dealing with a pop addiction, there is hope. WTMD 89.7. STOP THE POP INSANITY.
detective/adventure story set in Ellicott City and Catonsville. This is the second time her work has appeared in Urbanite magazine.
—Timonium resident Illiyas Mirza attends St. Paul’s School for Boys.
“What You’re Writing” is the place for cre-
ative 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 previously unpublished, nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily 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. Only one submission per topic, please. Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned. Topic Deadline Publication Summer Nights April 11, 2011 June 2011 Water May 9, 2011 July 2011 Road Trip June 6, 2011 August 2011
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i have always had trouble sleeping. When I was little, my parents thought I was too cold, so they gave me an extra blanket. I would lie in my bed and wrap myself in the blankets like a little cocoon. I would slowly start to sweat a lot, and eventually I would break out of my cocoon and just lie there again. Then they thought maybe I was too hot at night. So they gave me a bed sheet and no blankets. After about two to three minutes, I would be freezing and get a real blanket. The final thing they tried was a bedtime story. My parents told me to go find a book in the house that I liked and they would read it to me. The only books we had in our house were books with words that I still to this day can’t pronounce. They would read me one chapter a night. My mom would start reading and get so into the book she would eventually be reading in her head. She would slowly get quieter and quieter until there was no noise besides her breathing. My dad would read as fast as he could. Once he finished, he would say, “Now go to bed and don’t disturb me.” Eventually my mom bought a real kids’ book. The book was Captain Underpants. She read me the first chapter, and I fell in love with it. Once she left the room, I was up all night finishing the book. So I still barely got any sleep at night. But I did read every Captain Underpants book in about two weeks.
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Urbanite #82 april 2011 17
I finally got tired of pretending I could hear the conversation
Now, I “get it” Over the years, I began to realize that I was missing parts of the conversation, especially when I was out with friends or business partners. I didn’t want to annoy anyone by asking them to repeat themselves, so I often guessed what people were saying to me - which made me look a little foolish at times. It got boring, I felt left out, and I began missing opportunities. Now, I can’t believe I waited so long to get a hearing test and the help I needed to hear better.
THE HEARING AND SPEECH AGENCY offers comprehensive hearing services in a state-of-the-art facility, conveniently located just off Northern Parkway, at 5900 Metro Drive in Baltimore. Our audiologists are not just technicians. They meet the highest level of professional certification, including completion of graduate programs at top-tier universities. HASA audiologists use advanced diagnostic equipment to evaluate hearing, including high-tech, sound-treated booths. Because hearing loss is usually progressive, getting help sooner can preserve more of your natural hearing
ability and speech clarity.
HASA Audiology Services Comprehensive hearing evaluations Hearing aid evaluation and selection Hearing aids (from standard analog to the latest digital technology) Hearing aid repair Hearing aid training and orientation Assistive listening devices Custom hearing protection Cerumen management Non-sedated ABR evaluations for infants, young children and adults (threshold and diagnostic) Auditory processing evaluations Cochlear implant candidacy screening and counseling Routine cochlear implant mapping
Please call 410.318.6780 for more information or to schedule an appointment. Visit us online at www.hasa.org
don’t miss images (clockwise from top left): Photo by OSA Images, Costumes by Kym Barrett, Cirque du Soleil 2010; courtesy of B&O Railroad Museum; © Mylightscapes | Dreamstime.com; illustration by Teddy Johnson; photo by Dan Meyers; c/o Homewood Museum, Johns hopkins university
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1 April 8, 6 p.m. arts/culture
The Parks & People Foundation hosts a special benefit performance of Cirque du Soleil’s Totem, a visually stunning exploration of man’s evolving relationship with nature. A party at the Baltimore Rowing Club precedes the main event, and all proceeds support the foundation’s environmental, educational, and recreational programs. $150 3301 Waterview Ave. 410-448-5663 x 119 www.parksandpeople.org
2 April 9, 9 a.m. COMMUNITY
The CollegeBound Foundation provides the guidance and encouragement needed to send struggling Baltimore high schoolers to college. On April 9, the organization provides you with water and post-race refreshments as you run 5K in support of its cause. Not quite ready for the big time? There’s also a 1-mile family run/walk. $35, $40 day of Patterson Park 410-308-1870 www.collegeboundfoundation.org
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3 April 9, 7 p.m.
5 April 15
STYLE/SHOPPING
arts/culture
Students in MICA’s fiber department showcase eight months of their work at RACK: An Experimental Fashion Event at the 2640 Space on April 9. More than 150 designers, models, and performers will participate.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the B&O Railroad served as the dividing line between a country at war with itself. See the largest assemblage of Civil War railroad equipment in the world during The War Came By Train, an exhibit opening at the B&O Railroad Museum April 15.
$5, $10 at the door 2640 St. Paul St. 410-230-0450 www.redemmas.org
4 April 10, 12-3:30 p.m.
$14, seniors $12, children 2-12 $8, members free 901 W. Pratt St. 410-752-2490 www.borail.org
arts/culture
Imagine life without your iGadgets as you try your hand at calligraphy, plaster casting, and other arts from the 19th century at Johns Hopkins University’s Festival of Historic Arts. Workshops on the afternoon of April 10 at the Homewood Museum are part of the larger JHU Arts Festival that is on campus all weekend. $8, seniors $7, students $5, members free 3400 N. Charles St. 410-516-5589 www.museums.jhu.edu For more events, see the Scene on page 71.
6 April 23 HOME/DESIGN
The Rotating History Project shifts its focus to the Jones Falls Mills for Same River Twice, a special multimedia show on April 23 at the Gspot. The falls themselves, along with the mills built along their banks and the people and culture that sprouted around them, are the subject of works of visual art, music, performance, and writing. 2980 Falls Rd. 410-889-6767 www.rotatinghistory.blogspot.com Urbanite #82 april 2011 19
Optical Couture Latest Styles!
Join us today in celebrating our SPRING FLING SALE. For a limited time only, Sofas Etc. * * is offering an additional $50 OFF any purchase of $499 or more or $100 OFF any purchase of $999 or more. That’s in addition to our everyday 30% - 40% discounted prices. You’ll always find the latest styles from Precedent, Henredon, Highland House, Rowe, Palliser, Elran, Ekornes and many others. Plus, we have a great selection of etceteras as well... coffee and end tables, lamps, pictures and accessories. Come in today to browse our collection. Just present or mention this ad to receive your discount.
Valid through May 1, 2011.
410-661-6600 1903 E. Joppa Road Towson, MD 21234
*Prior sales excluded. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Does not apply to Ekornes products.
20 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
410-290-7003 8895 McGaw Road Columbia, MD 21045
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the goods
what ’s new in style, shopping, & beyond
If These Walls Could Talk
Photos (clockwise from left): Photo by Katherine Fahey; Photo by Howard Korn; photo by Amie Bingaman
breena siegel
Gone are the days of sacrificing precious shelf space for your plants. Introducing the Living Wall: plants that cling to vertical surfaces. Baltimore Contained (2400 Fleet St.; 410-732-7717; www.BaltimoreContained.com) offers models from $40 to $60. Shop owner Anne Fleshman, who will put planters in frames for an additional fee, says Living Walls purify the air, calm people down, and even increase productivity. For more ambitious walls, Fleshman offers custom design framing and drip irrigation systems.
Musical Inspiration
rebecca messner
Katherine Fahey, the artist behind the Whitmaninspired brand 2hawks2fishes, took early inspiration from some of Baltimore’s best folk musicians. “It became this sort of chain reaction,” she says. “We just kept collaborating.” Fahey, who designed the cover art for Wye Oak’s album, If Children, created a shadow puppet show for the band’s forthcoming music video for “Fish.” Catch the show live at the Windup Space April 22. T-shirts and prints available on Fahey’s Etsy site: www.etsy.com/shop/2hawks2fishes.
Designing Women
breena siegel Interior designer Jayne Kelly, co-owner with Theresa Alosa of Mount Vernon’s Market Centre Design (339 N. Charles St.; 410-244-8283; www.marketcentredesign.com), once followed a customer all the way to Florida (sans hourly fee!) to see her design vision through. You, however, don’t have to travel that far. Most of the upholstery is designed in-house, and items for purchase include a fold-out regency table made from recycled mahogany ($1,562), and a 17th-century tote bag reproduction ($150).
Urbanite #82 april 2011 21
GREENGREENGREEN
their men in Italian dressing.
Gian Marco Menswear 517 North Charles Streeet | Baltimore, MD | 410.347.7974 Mon - Sat. 10-6 pm | www.gianmarco.org
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Hip Resurfacing at the
Rubin Institute for Advanced Orthopedics at Sinai Hospital
Rubin Institute for Advanced Orthopedics at Sinai Hospital
For an appointment or doctor referral, call 410-601-WELL (9355)
www.lifebridgehealth.org
An exciting alternative to standard total hip replacement surgery is now available at the Rubin Institute for Advanced Orthopedics (RIAO) of Sinai Hospital. Hip resurfacing is an approved procedure by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the United States. Now, patients with hip pain and arthritis can benefit from this treatment approach. Arthritis has several different causes and almost all of them can be treated with hip resurfacing. Primary osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, is especially well suited for this new technique. Dysplasia patients, who suffer from an abnormal hip anatomy that leads to increased “wear and tear,” also are prime candidates for the resurfacing technique. Those with avascular necrosis or osteonecrosis, which results from altered blood flow to the hip joint, can also benefit from this technique. Until recently, orthopaedists were recommending standard total hip replacement for almost all later stage surgically treated hip problems. These hip replacements require removing a large amount
22 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
of bone from the femur or thigh-bone and inserting a long metal stem into the center of the remaining bone. “Hip resurfacing, on the other hand, preserves the femoral bone, and requires surgeons to remove only the top centimeter of the head of the thigh-bone,” says Michael A. Mont, M.D., director of the RIAO’s Center for Joint Preservation and Replacement. “Patient recovery time can be fast and patients often walk normally and participate in high-level activities sooner. And if future revision surgery is required, it often is a less complex and traumatic procedure.” One recently published gait study at the RIAO showed that hip resurfacing patients had a more normal speed and other walking parameters when compared to traditional hip replacements. The hip resurfacing implant that matches the patient’s natural head size may allow for more stability than traditional hip replacements. “Traditionally, only the ball of a hip replacement was made from metal, and the socket was lined with a plastic cup,
which often wore out over the course of many years,” says Ronald E. Delanois, M.D., an orthopaedic surgeon at the RIAO. With new metallurgy and manufacturing techniques, both components are made of highly polished metal. “The benefits to patients who undergo the hip resurfacing procedure are clear,” says Barry N. Waldman, M.D., director of the Center for Joint Preservation and Replacement at the RIAO. “The implant’s size, surface, and bone-sparing ability makes it an excellent choice for young, active patients.” “Hip resurfacing may be a dramatic breakthrough for many patients. We must remember that standard total hip replacements also function well and patient selection for this new procedure is important,” says Harpal S. Khanuja, M.D., an orthopaedic surgeon at the RIAO. For more information about hip resurfacing procedures performed at Sinai Hospital’s Rubin Institute for Advanced Orthopedics, call 410-601-WELL (9355).
Photos (clockwise from left): courtesy of SPARK Experience Design; photo by Elizabeth cole; photo by Michael Patrick O’Leary
the goods
MARYLAND MOONSHINE
rebecca messner Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Cook are bringing Maryland back four decades to its golden days of distilling. Their Blackwater Distillery (184 Log Canoe Circle, Stevensville; www.sloopbetty. com), has packed its first product, Sloop Betty Vodka, with local goodness. “The water comes from the Eastern Shore. The boxes come from Baltimore. Even our marketing comes from Maryland,” says the elder Cook. Sloop Betty herself, with her scanty negligee and coy over-the-shoulder stare, is named after a historic ship that once sailed the Chesapeake.
Nothing to Sneeze At
rebecca messner
Chain Gang
breena siegel
Race Pace Bicycles (1410 Key Highway; www.racepacebicycles.com), with locations already in Columbia, Ellicott City, and Westminster, opened in Federal Hill in March. “The city has become much more bicycle friendly over the past years, and we wanted to become part of it,” says coowner Marc Lefkowitz. The 13,000-squarefoot store is one of the biggest of its kind in the country and sells commuter, cruising, and foldout bikes, plus exclusive racing lines like Pinarello, Cervélo, and Felt.
Dr. Emily Telfair and Sarah O’Leary, coowners of Seeds Center for Whole Health in Hampden, have an answer for those of us bewildered by the Whole Foods natural supplement aisle. Their Wellness-in-a-Box kits have everything you need to stay healthy naturally. “Clear Headed: Seasonal Allergy Support” is new for spring and features natural antihistamines, a nasal rinse kit, and “Kitchen Cupboard” DIY remedies. Available at Seeds (3600 Roland Ave., Ste. 4; 410-2351776) or online at www.wellnessboxes.com.
Urbanite #82 april 2011 23
special advertising section
PNC Community Outreach by Robin T. Reid
When PNC Financial Services
Group Inc. merged with Mercantile Bankshares Corp. in March 2007, it acquired a bank that had been a Baltimore institution since 1864, leading some to wonder what was going to happen to banking in Baltimore and the company’s long-standing commitment to the community. Today, PNC clients will tell you that the company offers a diverse set of financial services and philanthropic initiatives designed to meet the needs of the community, the businesses (large and small), and the people (regardless of where they live and work) in the places we call home. Every PNC employee plays a role in bringing this vision to life. Here are a few who provide insight into the company’s products, services, people, and core values.
retail banking
Curtis Pope Jr. wants your whole wallet. But his intentions are good; the PNC banker wants to help you manage that wallet and maybe fatten it up. Pope manages PNC’s Paca Street branch, one of the newest in the city. There, he and the staff spend much of their time making customers aware of the full menu of services available. “We’re not just here to provide checking and savings accounts,” he said. “We try to hit each and every avenue of finance: loans, mortgages, and investments. We’re trying to help you save money, manage your money, and make life more convenient.” Sometimes this means making the basic services more accessible. Take for example PNC’s Foundation accounts. “We understand that some people have been down on their luck, and we’re able to help them open a savings account,” Pope said. “They agree to take a financial literacy class we offer first. And when they graduate, they can open an account. “We talk to them about the different ways they can save money,” he continued. “And we monitor the account. You can’t overdraw.” Another service PNC offers is its Virtual Wallet. This comprises a primary checking account, a reserve account that acts as a backup to the checking, and a savings account. “The great thing about the reserve account is that it covers overdrafts,”
Pope said. “Without it, you might have to pay a fee if you’re overdrawn.” Informing folks about the Virtual Wallet and the other services is the obvious aspect of this banker’s job. The less obvious but equally important aspect is weaving PNC into the community it serves. “We’re visible,” Pope said. “Last August, the branch participated in the Stone Soul Picnic; we were the only financial institution there. And we provided a grant to The Hippodrome Foundation so that kids from Francis Scott Key Elementary/Middle School could see the Broadway play ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ We’ve also established
“The Baltimore region has a great deal to offer for area residents and local businesses,” said Louis Cestello, PNC’s regional president, Greater Maryland. “We believe our success is directly tied to the health, strength, and well-being of the communities we serve. We have a vested interest in leveraging the talents of PNC to help.”
photos of Curtis Pope Jr and Ron Voight are by David Rehor; Lourdes Montes-Greenan photo courtesy of PNC Bank.
Lourdes Montes-Greenan, assistant vice president and community consultant, talks with NFTE students at Calverton Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore City about financial literacy.
Curtis Pope Jr., Paca Street branch manager
School Bank programs in several Baltimore City elementary schools, and with parents’ approval, the kids can open a savings account with any amount.” So far, he thinks the proactive approach is working. “Clients are singling out the employees and the services we provide as what they like best about us,” he said. “And that’s the best compliment we can get.”
business banking
Ron Voigt, PNC’s business banking sales manager, oversees the newly established unit that specializes in small businesses. The Annapolis native took the helm last September after spending 22 years in the banking industry. Voigt’s team of four business development officers has an average tenure of twenty years in banking, and targets companies that have been in business at least two years with annual revenue between $5 million and $10 million. “In today’s market, there are very few cookie-cutter loans,” he said. “By design, my team manages a small portfolio of customers so they can spend a significant amount of time with each one and truly become financial advisors. They have detailed conversations about cash flow to identify, provide counsel, and offer solutions to better champion the client through the credit review process. community banking
When Lourdes Montes-Greenan moved to the United States nine years ago, she figured she’d keep her bank account in Guadalajara, Mexico. She didn’t know she needed one here. Montes-Greenan’s initiation into U.S. banking practices laid the foundation for her mission of helping immigrants become financially savvy. As PNC’s assistant vice president and community consultant for community development banking she works with émigrés throughout Baltimore. “These communities are very vulnerable,” she explained. “Many come from cash-based societies. Maybe in their home countries they don’t have checking accounts or they don’t trust banks.” Montes-Greenan teaches financial literacy workshops in Spanish for nonprofit groups in Baltimore, such as the Esperanza Center of Catholic Charities. She covers budgeting, money management, investing, and nine other topics. She also covers PNC’s various products that could benefit
“For example, Elegant Touch Bridal and Tuxedo came to PNC after struggling to find financing to purchase of a new location to expand their business that has been serving customers for more than 20 years. We worked closely with them to understand the company’s needs and financial situation. This allowed us to better present the credit opportunity. As a result, we secured a SBA loan, which enabled the client to purchase a commercial building in a location that best suited its needs.” Voigt’s team also includes two specialized bankers; one focuses on serving government entities, and the other in serving clients in low- to moderate-income communities and women and minority-owned businesses. “Maryland has one of the highest numbers of women-owned businesses in the country. There is a great need for access to capital,” he said. “PNC understands the challenges these business owners face, and provides the financial solutions and educational resources they need to flourish.” Additional services include: * PNC cash flow options—Tools and resources to help improve cash flow, including accelerating collection of receivables and investing excess cash. * Treasury/cash management services— Access to a wide variety of services including, but not limited to, overnight investing, online banking, and remote deposit capability from their office. * Merchant services—Allows a business
to accept credit cards and get funds the next day. “In this challenging economic climate, business financials do not tell the whole story of customer creditworthiness,” Voigt said. “Businesses need bankers who serve as advisors, help solve business challenges, and provide strategies and resources to achieve their financial goals.”
the students. The Esperanza Center is one of several programs that have picked up the bank’s financial education initiative, which covers almost all ages from kindergarteners to adults. Other nonprofits include the Baltimore Cash Campaign and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). “Our main audience is the low- to moderate-income neighborhoods and anyone who serves them,” Montes-Greenan said. “We cater to the needs of the audience, so I work with the nonprofit to understand exactly what they need. Sometimes they’ll have topics they want to cover in their own curricula, and we can weave our program into theirs.” She also takes PNC’s show on the road to schools; currently she’s working with three in the city, using the PNC School Bank program and Teach Children to Save curriculum developed by the American Bankers Association. “We try to work with a school that’s really committed, that will
work with the parents as well. We’re telling them that PNC is willing to support you with technical expertise and sometimes grants.” Teaching financial literacy is one of the larger projects the bank has undertaken to help. The branches also offer other types of assistance. For example, the Charles Village outpost is providing free tax preparation for the second year in a row, in conjunction with the Baltimore Cash Campaign. Families with incomes of less than $49,000 and individuals who earn less than $25,000 are eligible. Last year, more than 130 people used the service. “PNC wants to improve the lives of the people in our communities,” MontesGreenan said. “At first, some organizations were skeptical because they’re not used to bankers who are interested in community development. But it’s been my personal goal to explain the benefits of a relationship with a good financial institution.”
Ron Voigt, business banking sales manager
CityLit Festival
If your current depression medication just isn’t enough, consider the STEP-D study.
Danielle Evans
Our office is helping to evaluate an investigational medication as an add-on treatment to an approved anti-depressant medication. You may be able to take part in this STEP-D study if you:
Andrei Codrescu Jaimy Gordon Literary Marketplace
• Are 18-65 years old • Have been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) • Have been experiencing symptoms of depression for at least the past 2 months • Have been taking at least one antidepressant medication as prescribed, but it is just not helping you enough
Poetry Memoir ... and More! “A can’t miss event on the city’s cultural scene.” — Baltimore
Study staff will review additional criteria with you at your first study clinic visit. The study lasts 15-22 weeks and all office visits, study-related medical and psychiatric evaluations, and study medications will be provided to participants at no cost.
Presented by CityLit Project and Enoch Pratt Free Library
Saturday, April 16, 2011 / 10 am - 5 pm Enoch Pratt Free Library 400 Cathedral Street Baltimore, MD 21201 Complete Schedule: www.CityLitProject.org
For more information, please contact:
410-602-1440
www.pharmasiteresearch.com
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26 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Ear Surgery Pinning Repair Rejuvenation of Eyes Surgical Lift Scarless Removal of Bags Laser Botox
baltimore observed
illustration by donald ely
feature / urbanite online / urbanite project
Cracking the Code amy dusto
amy dusto is a freelance writer and a discovery news technology blogger. she’s working on her masters in science writing at johns hopkins.
Hackers are set loose in the city’s warehouse of digital data. Software developer Jonathan Julian gets a tweet from someone asking whether he can disprove the myth that traffic cops give more speeding tickets at the end of the month. He might be able to do it soon, if not today. Julian is in Canton at Baltimore’s first Civic Hack Day, a Saturday-long gathering of local developers and techies writing
computer programs that use city data for public benefit. At the Beehive co-working space in the Emerging Technology Center, about twenty guys are spread out on desks and tables. They type, talk, and point at their computer screens, squinting in the sun that streams through a ceiling of skylights. Baltimore Urbanite #82 april 2011 27
Photo By Andrew Liang (Top)
feature / urbanite online baltimore observed developer Lokesh Dhakar, 29, looks at a graphic Twitter, and the like. Once they have the data, documenting the population changes in a city they must contend with its messiness. Historineighborhood over the course of twenty years. cally, the city had no common format for collect“That would be cool to see animated, instead of in ing information across all agencies, so something pie charts,” he says. “The point of this is there’s a as simple as “male” or “female” could in one case lot of data. How can we slice and dice it?” show as M or F, in another 1 or 0, or in another The geeks have gathered to test drive Open- the words fully spelled out. The data must be Baltimore, an online data warehouse full of pub- cleaned to be usable. lic records. It’s part of an initiative signed into Having outside eyes on city records may ultiorder on January 26 by Mayor Stephanie Rawl- mately make this easier, Wham says. He hopes ings-Blake that aims to make government more “that the public will criticize some of these pieces transparent, accessible, and accountable. Open- of data, and force the people that maintain them Baltimore contains databases of information to make them better.” ranging from 311 calls to crime reports to propOnce data is available, the natural evolutionerty taxes. The hope is that citizens and private apparent is to hold an app contest. D.C. led the companies will use the data to invent software movement in 2008 with its month-long Apps for applications (“apps”) that offer creative solutions Democracy competition. The city offered $50,000 to city problems. “The developer community will in prizes and received forty-seven useful applicamake all kinds of nifty widgets out of it, and that tions, which the city estimated would have othwill benefit the non-tech community,” says Mike erwise cost $2.3 million to develop. Other cities, Karr, webmaster for the city who, along with lead including New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, developer Brian Wham, is in charge of managing also report whopping paybacks. OpenBaltimore. This “tremendous return on investment” is Among the ideas and prototypes to come out the result of the creative ecosystems that these of Civic Hack Day: an app that sends you a text competitions foster, says Brandon Kessler, CEO message when your parking fees are about to ex- of New York City-based Challenge Post, that pire; a map of 311 complaints that could be ani- runs BigApps for NYC and also the federal open mated to show changes over time; and an analy- government competition, Challenge.gov. “This sis of how many jurors are called each weekday. is not a get-rich-quick thing,” he says. Instead, Mike Brenner, who organized the event, says it participants are lured by altruism and the promwas designed to kick-start the use of OpenBal- ise of exposure, recognition, and intellectual timore. Brenner, creative director of Sunrise stimulation. Designs, calls himself a “community organizer.” “This is a nascent global trend with massive He founded the online networks Refresh Bmore implications,” says Peter Corbett, CEO of D.C.for Web professionals and Startup Baltimore for based iStrategy Labs, which created Apps for Deentrepreneurs. mocracy. As open data accumulates around the world, he continues, “we’ll move from protected ther cities have proven that open data or private government data to a sea of open data can be a binary-candy shop for imag- available to anyone who’s interested in working inative and analytical types alike. In with it.” Meanwhile, apps and Web services will New York, the “Sportaneous” app fos- be built by the thousands, hundreds of busiters pick-up sports games anytime, anywhere, by nesses will be created, and eventually, Corbett connecting players and providing information says, “most major Web and mobile applications about available facilities. Another app helps New that you use will integrate this data in some Yorkers share cab rides. In Washington, a Face- way.” Google Maps already adds more and more book-based app called “Where’s My Money, DC?” open transit data into its programs as it becomes tracks city spending orders of more than $2,500 available. and includes forums where people can discuss Baltimore still has a way to go. For one thing, what they think about the purchases. only about fifty data sets are currently available From connecting people, restaurant reviews, online, and adding each one takes time. Updatbike routes, landlord information—even a pro- ing everything is another issue: Some data is old, posal to track the movement of city government and some will be more useful if it can eventually representatives in the hopes that citizens will be uploaded in real time for, say, a person who stop them for a chat—the potential apps alone wants to track the Number 11 bus and time his could transform the quotidian. And that’s not to walk to the bus stop. mention all the ways open data can change life While OpenBaltimore is sure to provide a covertly. The more data and the more elegant the wealth of benefits for residents, Karr says that analysis, the greater the potential to influence governments across the nation and the globe policy and business decisions. can all learn from records kept accessible online. The process of getting something like this “Open data programs aren’t a one-time project. started, however, is somewhat tedious. In the They are a permanent extension of modern govmayor’s Office of Information Technology, Karr ernment, and in ten years Baltimore will have and Wham request records from city agencies transformed technologically because of it,” he based on what the citizens ask for in either the says. “It is, in my opinion, a requirement to be OpenBaltimore Web forums or through e-mail, considered a ‘modern government’.”
A sampler of the fresh, Web-exclusive content posted weekly at www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Thank You For Listening From A rts/Culture Baltimore’s art-house rock band, Thank You, owes its unique brand of caveman-poet head-banging to the city of Baltimore. bit.ly/urbanitethankyou Both Sides Now From A rts/Culture Loring Cornish explores shared histories of African Americans and Jews in In Each Other’s Shoes. bit.ly/urbaniteshoes
O
Must Love Meat From E at/Drink Up close and personal with BlueGrass Tavern’s executive chef Patrick Morrow, recently nominated for “Chef of the Year” bit.ly/urbanitebluegrass Some Pig From E at/Drink In recent years, the dining public has rediscovered—and fallen in love with —these flavorful specialty meats. bit.ly/urbanitepig
Urbanite #82 april 2011 29
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Compete for $10,000 in prize money and the chance to implement your innovative, creative solution to a pressing city issue: the qualityof-life issues brought about by the construction of the Red Line. The proposed Red Line is a 14.5-mile, light rail transit line that will run west-east from Woodlawn through downtown Baltimore, Fells Point, and Canton to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center Campus. Its construction could dramatically disrupt city life with noise, dust, traffic snarls, and more. We think we can take advantage of this period to create a unique, vibrant, productive urban space. What do you think?
To learn more, go to www.urbaniteproject.com
urbanite project baltimore observed
On the Line
For residents, the Red Line is both godsend and a headache by Rebecca Messner
Photo by j.m. giordano
T
he Red Line is making a lot of promises. The light rail train promises to connect the nowisolated neighborhoods stretching from the federal office buildings of Woodlawn through West Baltimore, the Inner Harbor, and Canton, to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. It promises to bring economic development to blighted areas and make strong communities stronger by making them more accessible and attractive to businesses. The Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) predicts that home values will rise, and that by 2030, 54,000 people will use the train every day. The Red Line is also a headache. A $1.8 billion affair, it will be the biggest infrastructure project ever undertaken in the state of Maryland. Construction on the project is expected to take up to five years. Last month, we introduced Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge. The contest offers $10,000 in prizes to the teams that can bring innovation to the Red Line, turning its construction—long, noisy disruption that it inevitably will be—into a positive experience for the community. We’re hoping to do more than paint pretty pictures over scaffolding and construction fences. (Though pretty pictures are welcome, too!) We would like this project to have a lasting impact on the city—to help bring together citizen and train, and unite neighborhoods that have traditionally been walled off from one another. “We’re seeing mitigation as a healing process,” says Marian Glebes of D:center Baltimore, which is a partner in the contest, along with the MTA, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Baltimore City Department of Transportation. “You’re making scars on Baltimore’s landscape, but ultimately the city will be healed.” To do this, it’s important to have a sense of the concerns and opportunities in the various neighborhoods that this train will touch. The challenges associated with its construction go beyond noise, dust, and traffic-buildup. Communities and transportation agencies will also have to deal with the physical and psychological challenges of reducing residents’ dependence on cars; convincing people to see beyond a potential five-year traffic jam; and, in some areas, reversing the impacts of years of disinvestment. To address residents’ concerns, the MTA put together Station Area Action Committees (SAACs), groups of appointed representatives from seventeen communities along the rail line. The groups meet every couple of months, and will ultimately have a say in such things as station placement and naming. “We’ve been given
Making the Best of It: Jason Fair and Roberta Johnson represent their communities on Station Area Action Committees, planning for the Red Line.
the task to think ten years in the future about the Woodlawn we’d like to have,” says Jason Fair, a member of the Security Square Mall SAAC who grew up in the neighborhood and works for the Baltimore Jewish Council. The Red Line will allow Woodlawn residents to reduce their dependence on cars. But for an area with easy access to Interstate 695 and a landscape dotted with more parking lots than parks, this may be a challenge. The first challenge, Fair says, will be getting people to the train. “If you have to drive to the Red Line and that’s not an easy, straight-shot deal for you, you’ll stay in your car,” he says. In West Baltimore, residents hope that the Red Line will breathe life back to an area beset with vacant properties, crime, and poverty. “It’s going to generate new revenue for businesses, up property values in the area, and introduce people to our neck of the woods,” says West Baltimore SAAC member Roberta Johnson, who has lived in her neighborhood since 2004. Of course, not all the residents along the Red Line are enthused about visiting her neighborhood—nor are they thrilled about the prospect of spreading West Baltimore’s crime across the city. But Johnson says her community will rise to the occasion: “You’re about to see a brand new West Baltimore.” To the east, where the train will surface on Boston Street after a long stretch of tunnel through the Inner Harbor and Fells Point, the
citizens of Canton have been the loudest opponents to the project. They worry that the tracks and train traffic will isolate the community from the waterfront, and exacerbate their already nightmarish traffic and parking. Dan Tracy, SAAC member and Canton resident of 23 years, is one of the only outspoken Red Line supporters in the neighborhood, though he has every right not to be. “What they call ‘the Portal,’” he says, referring to the spot where the train will rise from the tunnel, “will be pretty much directly in front of my house.” Tracy, who is retired, says he believes the new light rail will enhance the community, and thinks that the train (which, when it moves, is actually quieter than standing traffic) will help alleviate the traffic nightmare his neighbors fear. “This is history in the making,” Johnson says. “It’s a point where we are actually building the community from the ground up.” That community building starts now, and with Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge, everyone has a chance to take part. Next month: creative solutions from other cities. For more information on Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge and the Red Line, visit www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project. Urbanite has also joined forces with NewsTrust Baltimore to pull together the best reporting that has been done on the Red Line. Visit baltimore.newstrust.net/topics/redline. Urbanite #82 april 2011 31
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keynote
T h e P a th fi n d er
Environmental justice pioneer Majora Carter on turning dumps into parks, jumping the gun on green jobs, and dancing on Robert Moses’ grave
Interview by Rebecca Messner
M
ajora Carter is audacious. She’s challenged Al Gore—to his face—and his top-down approach to change. On her leg of the torch relay for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, she whipped a Tibetan flag out of her shirtsleeve and ran with it until security guards forced her off the course. After landing a $10,000 grant to help restore the Bronx River waterfront near her home, she raised some $3 million to build Hunts Point Riverside Park, restoring a view of the river that hadn’t been visible for decades. With a MacArthur fellowship, she founded the nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx). With SSBx, she started the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training Academy, one of the first
deliberate green jobs training programs in the country. Carter’s fight is personal. She openly bashes the late New York developer Robert Moses, whose highways, built to take wealthy suburbanites quickly from their homes into Manhattan, demolished the better part of her borough. After serving two tours in Vietnam, her older brother returned home to their hollowed-out neighborhood only to be gunned down on her street. Today, Carter runs her own consulting group and spreads the green gospel across the country. She still lives in the South Bronx, under the first green roof in the neighborhood. Urbanite #82 april 2011 33
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keynote urb: For people who haven’t heard your story, can you tell me about growing up in the South Bronx? mc :
I grew up literally as the Bronx was burning. There was years of financial disinvestment. My community, we had a thriving walk-to-work economy up until the ’50s and ’60s. Starting in the late ’60s and ’70s, lots of manufacturing companies moved out, either overseas or down south. We were left with all these warehouse facilities. Many got taken over by waste facilities, which created terrible environmental health for the community. We still have one of the nation’s highest childhood asthma hospitalization rates. urb: How did you feel that in your life as a kid? Did you play outside?
well. But my dog took me running. She was a big dog, probably 80 pounds. She pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. Turns out that that dump was mapped as a city street. It could not be built on, so it was used as a dump for decades. That dump became one of the first waterfront parks in the Bronx. The funny thing about that street, it was meant to be another highway going through our community. That’s why they mapped it as a street. Robert Moses, the master planner who built all those highways, was really obnoxious to people, particularly poor people. Every time I go to that park, I think about, like, I’m dancing on his grave. urb : A lot of your work has been undoing the damage that Robert Moses did to communities like yours.
the private sector involved? mc : I don’t have much hope for Congress right now. I am interested in building public-private partnerships, working across different stakeholder groups—municipalities, business communities, community groups, and anybody else in between. Our real goal is to help municipalities see that they are wasting huge amounts of money. They are spending it on social services for their most expensive citizens. If we just reallocated some of that money to create training programs, and then created private sector business to do climate adaptation strategies—really do urban forestry, wetland restoration in coastal areas, really do green roofs—it’s a win-win for everybody. urb: Are there examples where that is happening?
mc:
We played in the streets. We never thought of our community as a place that had any kind of nature in it. The one place that had any trees … was where the junkies hung out. We were not allowed to go there. There was never a connection between me and nature in my neighborhood. urb : You have a background in arts and film. What pulled you back into your neighborhood after college? mc: I was broke and needed a cheap place to stay. [laughs] If my film career had taken off, I never would have gone back. urb: Tell me about how you started Sustainable South Bronx. mc : Before I was at Sustainable South Bronx, I wrote the original proposal for a federal transportation grant that provided $1.25 million to design the South Bronx Greenway, [a string of new and existing parks designed to connect communities to their waterfront and provide recreational opportunities]. For me, that greenway was not just a nice little cute amenity. It was a way to do local economic development. It was a way to do stormwater management. It was a way to clean the air. This was a way to create new alternatives for our community. I realized that what we needed as a community was an organization that brought project-based development. I really wanted to put real meat to people’s dreams about what kind of community people wanted to live in. They wanted clean air. They wanted safe places for their kids to play. They wanted jobs. Starting SSBx was a way to do that. urb:
You have a story about your dog being responsible for your career.
mc: I kept getting these notices from this group that was offering seed grants for starting restoration projects on the Bronx River. I thought, great, but you can’t get to the river from my neighborhood. I thought I knew my neighborhood pretty
mc: Right. It’s really living out the legacy of Jane Jacobs, [author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and a fierce opponent of Robert Moses], who was all about creating communities for people to live and learn and love in. I want people to be outside. I want them to get to know their neighbors. That’s how you build safety. That’s how you build security. That’s how you build love and respect for people who are not in your immediate circle. You can only do that by creating communities that people really want to be in, in terms of economic development, environmental quality, and social stability. So now I have my own company. We took what was happening in the South Bronx and said this is what needs to happen all over the country. We try to think about what are the ways to impact our nation’s most expensive citizens—people who are poor, who are veterans, people who are in and out of the criminal justice system. We are working to get them jobs in the environmental services, things that make our air cleaner, our water better, our stormwater management bills lower, that help us conserve our energy. They’re climate adaptation strategies, and they have the dual benefit of horticultural therapy: People actually get better when they work with plants. urb : In Baltimore, we’re waiting for the green economy to catch on. A lot of people are talking about it, but where are the jobs? mc: They are not there yet. What really bothers me is how it kind of got ahead of itself. We put the cart before the horse. We really needed to create structures that allowed green jobs to exist. We started talking about them as if they existed, which made people upset when they were not there. Right now, the fossil fuel economy is highly subsidized. That’s why you can get a gallon of oil that’s a lot cheaper than what it really costs. We don’t have those same structures in place in alternative energy, for work in urban agriculture. We needed to make sure that they existed. urb:
Is the solution to press Congress or to get
mc: Not yet, but we’re working on it. We’re starting a national brand of urban-grown produce. We’re trying to help people see that so much of our tax dollars are tied up in people. It takes about $60,000 a year to put somebody in jail for a year, and they come out worse than they were before. If those people are given the proper training and the opportunity to work, you have something to work with. Spend $25,000 a year [on job training], and they won’t go back to jail again. urb: You still live in the South Bronx, right? Tell me about the neighborhood now. mc: Right now, the greenway is being constructed. Next, I need to figure out how we make sure that we’re creating the right environment for a type of economic development that’s consistent with that greenway. That’s my next project. urb :
I understand that you got married in the park you helped restore.
mc : Yes. That was great. My husband is from Wisconsin. He’s a country boy. We were thinking about going to some kind of retreat center. We were never into it, to tell you the truth. So I made the proposal. I said, “I think our park might be done.” He said, “That’s a great idea.” I’ve never loved him more. The day of, it rained in the morning. It was really unpleasant. But it cleared up in the afternoon. There’s a group in the neighborhood called Rocking the Boat. They do education by helping kids build boats. They have a fleet of 14-foot wooden boats. My husband and his groomsmen came into the park in the water in these cute wooden boats with bag pipers. I came down from my house, just a few blocks away, with my “love brigade.” I came down with like five West African drummers. We walked through the neighborhood that way. We had a blast.
Special thanks to the folks at Baltimore Bicycle Works for letting us conduct this interview from their back room when we were caught in a logistical tangle.
Urbanite #82 april 2011 35
The B ay By Tom Horton
Photography by David Harp
Comes Calling
As the impacts of climate change play out, we find ourselves with A greater hand in shaping the Chesapeake– and ever more at its mercy. The Coming Flood: The last house on Holland Island slumped into the bay in October, the victim of rising waters and sinking land.
I
’m asking ecologist Dave Brinker about declines in a couple of bird species that depend on remote, unspoiled parts of the Chesapeake Bay, like Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore. The longtime Maryland Department of Natural Resources scientist interrupts: “You realize Dorchester’s toast.” Not real scientific, “toast.” But yes, in the next several decades we can say goodbye to Dorchester County as I have known it—during my years growing up as an Eastern Shore boy, hunting, fishing, exploring a landscape where I could still navigate by Captain John Smith’s 1608 charts and then for much of the past 45 years as an environmental writer. Dorchester is home to 40 percent of Maryland’s ecologically critical tidal wetlands, to world-famous Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, to remote islands full of nesting birds, big tracts of piney woods, and more bald eagles than anyplace else on the East Coast. And most of it will soon be gone, thanks to the now-inevitable impacts of climate change. The idea that humans could fundamentally alter the Earth’s climate was considered as early as 1896 when Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius noted that the burgeoning Industrial Revolution was “evaporating our coal mines into the air.” Science has been confirming Arrhenius since 1958, documenting the upward march of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as we unearth and burn fossil fuels. CO2 levels are higher now than anytime in the last 650,000 years, and rising as the world’s nations squabble over whether to get serious about cutting emissions. For years, scientists and activists warned that we would pay a high price for this profligate pollution. Recently, there has been a growing acceptance that those bills are coming due. The big reason is we’ve heated the oceans deeper down than once thought possible. Just the first 10 feet of the sea holds as much heat as all Earth’s atmosphere and releases it only very, very slowly. Think of it as having wound up a ponderous flywheel that will continue rotating for centuries even if you stop cranking it. “Even if we could stop [heating the planet] on a dime, substantial changes are going to occur,” says Donald Boesch, director of the University of Maryland’s three major environmental research centers. Talk about prevention has quieted, he says. “Now there’s more consideration of how to adapt.”
T
he changes we’re almost certainly in for this century will affect every corner of Maryland. Think 90-degree summer days becoming two or three times as frequent, and 100-degree days five to ten times as likely, according to two recent state reports that assess Maryland’s vulnerability to climate change. And while heat lacks the shock appeal of a hurricane or a tornado or a flood, heat waves kill more Americans—a thousand a year on average—than all other weather disasters put together. Nearly seven hundred Chicagoans died in a 1995 heatwave there—and 35,000 Europeans during 2003’s hot summer. More heat means more smog too, with its own suite of bad health effects. Hotter air translates to hotter water, and that means more energy for hurricanes to feed on as they spin across Urbanite #82 april 2011 37
38 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
last old, abandoned house, sole testament that a thriving community of several hundred lived there as recently as 1900. My dad knew Holland’s former owners, and I can recall playing a game of catch with a softball in the front yard of the house that toppled last fall. As recently as 1990 I led groups of schoolkids hiking there, passing large persimmon trees growing where now I troll for rockfish from my skiff.
M
ore than acreage, the mid-to-late 21st century Chesapeake loses complexity, charm, character, as its intimate twinings of land and water, prairie-like marshscapes studded with pine hummocks, and myriad coves and sloughs submerge and erode. The very essence of the Chesapeake will be altered. The temperature of its water has already risen close to two degrees in recent decades. By century’s end, the bay’s temperature could more resemble present-day Georgia, or even south Florida, the Maryland climate change report says. That does not mean alligators and coral reefs, but it does have profound consequences, scientists say. For some important bay species it may already be too late. For thousands of years, one of the Chesapeake’s great engines of biological productivity has lain in its vast meadows of underwater grasses. They are refuge and nursery to blue crabs and an array of fish, vital food for waterfowl from across North America. They oxygenate the water and absorb pollution, including CO2. They to damp wave energy, lessening shoreline erosion, and clarify muddy stormwater runoff by trapping sediment. Growing up, I just knew them as great fishing. My dad taught me early on to look until I found a small, bare spot of bottom amid the grasses. “Cast to that and you’ll get a rockfish,” he’d tell me. Twenty years later, after pollution hammered the seagrasses, I found myself on my old Dorchester fishing grounds looking across bare bottoms for a spot of grass to cast into. With restoration efforts, the seagrasses are rebounding in some areas. But one of the most important varieties, eelgrass, once dominant throughout half the Chesapeake in its saltier, southern portions, is beginning to appear unrecoverable. Maryland is winding down efforts to restore eelgrass, a cold-water species that is on the southern limit of its range in the Chesapeake. “Just a few blistering hot summers and we could see its extirpation,” Boesch says. Similarly, softshelled clams, once a lucrative bay fishery, have virtually died out as the water has warmed, effectively shifting their historical range northward. And for oysters and other shellfish, the increasing acidity of oceanwater entering the bay could prove harmful, making it tougher to form their shells. Blooms of toxic algae, which shut down boating and fishing on a couple of bay rivers in 1997, are likely to increase as waters warm. A big question for aquatic life, no matter
Source: satellite image c/o nasa, sea level data c/o epa
the Atlantic toward Maryland. Hurricane Isabel back the sea. in 2003 gave us a bitter taste of the future, pushAnd a 3-foot rise may be something of a besting Chesapeake tides up in an historic storm case scenario. State government is recommendsurge as much as 8 feet above normal in Baltiing Maryland’s sixteen coastal counties plan for more and Annapolis, wreaking $400 million in up to 4 feet. Six feet, which would dramatically property damage. For a time, people navigated alter Maryland’s several-thousand-mile coastdowntown Baltimore in canoes and small powline, is no longer considered outside the realm of erboats. Hundreds of homes, including some as possibility given recent findings of rapid melting much as 10 feet above sea level, were flooded or of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. destroyed in eastern Baltimore County by big Low-lying Dorchester County is the local waves rolling in atop the surge. All told, nearly ground zero for sea level rise, and the grand and 10,000 people filed for federal disaster assistance ominous climate change experiment we’ve set in motion. To date, scientists estimate that the in Baltimore City and Baltimore and Anne Arbay’s waters have already climed a foot as the undel counties. A warmer ocean will make future Isabels climate has warmed and the land has sunk: The bigger and badder, says J. Court Stevenson, an weight of glaciers, advancing into Pennsylvania ecologist with the University of Maryland who 20,000 years ago, bulged up the lands around has worked on climate change and sea level rise what is now the Chesapeake, and they are slowly here and abroad. Indeed, he says Isabel itself could have caused storm surges around twice as high. It was a monstrous Category 5 hurricane for some time, with a brief gust to 233 miles per hour, the highest ever recorded in an Atlantic hurricane. On its way here, Isabel tracked across a patch of ocean cooled by the passage of a previous hurricane, diminishing its punch to a Category 2 by the time it made landfall. Whether a warmer world means more frequent Isabels, climate science can’t say for now, only that they will have the potential to be significantly worse. Much more predictable is an accelerating rate of sea level rise, which alone dooms a huge chunk of Dorchester County, along with lesser portions of Somerset, Worcester, Talbot, Queen Annes, Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties. Stevenson and other bay scientists think around 3 feet by 2100 is “quite reasonable to expect.” Three feet of sea level rise means everyday high tides will be 3 feet higher; a repeat of Isabel would be 11 feet in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor instead of 8 feet, and the waves from nor’easters and other big Vanishing Waterfront: Areas shaded yellow, including wetstorms would roll into the state’s lands in Dorchester, Wycomico, and coastlines 3 feet higher. At 3 feet settling back to their original Somerset counties, are vulnerable to contour. of rise and above, Stevenson says sea level rise of 1.5 to 3.5 meters. Maryland will have to consider The southern and eastern “what we want to save.” Places portions of Dorchester are allike Baltimore and Annapolis might construct ready depopulating. Abandoned dwellings are a tide gates, multi-billion dollar barriers designed common sight, as are homes being jacked several to be raised when storm surges threaten. With feet in the air as a last resort. Earthen berms surBaltimore Harbor on his computer, Stevenson round many yards, and driveways sport humps of earth pushed up for parking cars during fretraces “choke points,” where the tide gates might go: “Fort McHenry to Lazzeretto Point would quent high water. Well before century’s end, the make sense. Maybe Wagners Point to Dundalk 338,000-acre county could lose an astounding Marine Terminal, but that would be a big in25,000 acres of forest and 60,000 acres of wetcrease in expense.” lands—more than 100 square miles of prime recLondon, Belfast, Venice, all have tide gates in reational areas, wildlife habitat, and commercial place or in the works, Stevenson says. London timberland. raises its gates maybe twenty times a year. At This very likely sea level rise also profoundly the mouth of the Chesapeake, Norfolk recently changes or eliminates many of the bay’s islands— spent $1.5 million to help protect a single city Smith, Tangier, Bloodsworth, Hooper; also much block—six homes—from rising tides. They are of Talbot’s neck region and parts of Kent Island. now getting strategic planning assistance from Holland Island in lower Dorchester made frontpage news last October as the bay claimed its the Dutch, who know something about holding
The City Submerged: Annapolis Harbor gets dunked during a strong nor’easter. One can imagine what a good storm will do when sea level rises 3 to 6 feet.
what temperatures suit them, will be how climate change affects water quality. Wetter winter and spring weather, considered likely, would exacerbate the bay’s oxygen problems as higher freshwater flows prevent oxygen from mixing into deeper parts of the estuary. Droughtier summers, a possibility, would worsen this more because farm crops would not take up as much nitrogen fertilizer, leaving more in the ground to ooze out into the bay, clogging it with excess algae. The impacts reach beyond the water’s edge, of course. Birds like terns and skimmers that nest on little sandy beaches and low-lying clumps are already in steep decline, as are some species of wetlands birds like the black rail. Baltimore orioles and the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly, the state insect, are also likely to diminish here as climate warms. There will no doubt be winners too. Brown pelicans are already ranging up the Chesapeake by the thousands, nesting farther north than they ever did in history. Tarpon, which already show up occasionally near the bay’s mouth, could become a more common trophy fish. Blue crabs and oysters already flourish in warmer southern latitudes.
B
ut there’s a larger aspect to the specter of climate change than any listing of specific winners and losers can convey. It struck me on a favorite paddle down the lonely and wild Transquaking River, one of those classic, meandering sweeps of tidewater that perfuses the great Dorchester Marsh— “Maryland’s Everglades,” a naturalist friend calls it. It was on the Transquaking several years ago that something began to tap the metal rudder of my kayak, then to rattle it, hard—something big. For the next hour, I was virtually encased in the biggest spawn of striped bass I had ever witnessed. Fish of 10, 20, maybe 40 pounds rubbed and rolled and thrashed the length of my hull. I touched their glistening backs. I stuck a paddle down 2, 3, 4 feet. Solid rockfish all the way. I never before saw the like, nor have I since. Still, knowing it sometimes happens makes every trip through this quintessential Chesapeake landscape that much more special. But now it’s done, finished, ‘toast.’ Not next year, not even in the next ten or twenty, but for my kids probably, for my grandchildren surely. This “timeless” region will be altered more in the next several decades than in the last several centuries. It’s not ‘game over,’ but it’s a new game.
Save the bay? Of course. But which one? The one we thought the current massive, state-federal restoration effort would someday take us back to—a bay approximating the healthy ecosystem I came of age in during the early 1960s? We may have missed our chance. Save the wetlands? For decades environmentalists have fought the good fight against developers, contesting every quarter acre they want to fill. Every little bit counts—gotta believe that, except climate change is going to take wetlands by the tens of thousands of acres, no matter what. Instead, we’re left to save a bay that is changing in ways we can and can’t predict, forecasts changing every few years as the climate scientists refine and revise their computer models. Of course, change has always been a part of this ecosystem. Our Chesapeake is only the latest in a long series of bays that have come and gone through the millenia. Rapid climate change and sea level rise created ours beginning some 18,000 years ago. Sea level then lay 325 feet lower and the coast was 80 miles east of Ocean City. Then the glaciers began melting. A few thousand years ago the estuary was fully formed. But such “interglacials,” when the seas swell like rare geologic flowers within the river valleys of the Urbanite #82 april 2011 39
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coastline, are fleeting events, only occupying 10 per cent of the last several million years. Even in recent history, in Captain John Smith’s time, many Chesapeake marshes did not exist, or were smaller than they are today. They built up in just the last century and a half atop unprecedented quantities of sediment washing downstream from widespread plowing and deforestation. “We’ve modified the Chesapeake Bay already so far from its native state that what it once was is almost irrelevant,” says Erle Ellis, an environmental scientist at UMBC who investigates long-term ecological change in China and Baltimore. Ellis is one of many scientists who argue that even without climate change, significant human manipulations of the planet began millenia in the past, and have now reached such proportions that the current geological epoc should be reclassified as the “Anthropocene.” “Let’s accept that the bay is our creation now and work to make it a good one,” he says. If we don’t, says the University of Maryland’s Boesch, the climate change impacts we’re already committed to could look mild. If we allow temperatures to continue rising on their current track through this century, runaway and uncontrollable melting of the Earth’s icecaps is likely, leading to sea level rise and storm surges that would literally displace billions of people. (Roughly half of everyone on Earth lives on about 5 percent of the planet, mostly near coastlines.) Recent measurements in Greenland and Antarctica have already found ice sheets melting at a startling rate, the New York Times reported recently. “Some people say climate change is not our generation’s issue,” says Don Baugh, vice president for education for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “But I think it is our issue ... to give these kids a fighting chance.”
T
he Bay Foundation, the region’s largest environmental group, runs four residential education centers that are, by design, on the bleeding edge of sea level rise, located in lower Dorchester County and on Smith, Tangier, and Fox Islands. There are no better places for kids to meet the bay up close and personal, muck in the marshes, learn the culture of watermens communities, catch their dinner. Last year I took a college class I teach to the center on Smith Island to discuss sea level rise. A big nor’easter hit that week, pumping up tides bay-wide. It was way short of an Isabel, but by the time we landed at Smith, almost every street and yard in town was ankle- to knee-deep in the bay. “Do we need a lecture on climate change,” one student asked, “or should we just slosh over to the store and eat crabcakes?” Baugh recently closed the first floor of one education building on Tangier because of constant flooding. The road to his Dorchester center “is usually wet now.” Most of the centers will be swamped in the coming decades. “Eventually
Ecosystem in Motion: Tundra swans take flight near Holland Island, which has been reclaimed by wildlife as its human residents have left.
we might go to barges and just float up and down with the tides,” he says, half seriously. Still, Baugh says his organization sees no reason to change its ‘Save the Bay’ trademark. After all, addressing the immediate threats to the bay’s health and the somewhat longer-term issues associated with climate change will require some of the same solutions. Excess nitrogen is the current bay’s biggest problem. It fertilizes algae blooms that shade out the seagrasses and suck up oxygen, causing massive “dead zones” in the Chesapeake each summer. Both nitrogen and the carbon dioxide fueling climate change, Baugh says, are products of burning coal, gas, and oil. Energy conservation and switching to solar and wind energy can cut both dramatically. Additionally, keeping the lands of the bay’s sprawling, six-state, 64,000-square-mile watershed as undeveloped and green as possible will enhance environmental quality today and mitigate against runaway climate change. That’s because healthy, growing forests and wetlands absorb both CO2 and nitrogen. To keep the bay’s beleaguered tidal wetlands viable, we will need to give them space to migrate landward as sea level rises. In the short term, this can’t begin to offset wetlands losses, but it can help. William A. “Skip” Stiles, head of the nonprofit Wetlands Watch in Norfolk, says the key is to “keep our options open,” maintaining all the coastline we can in a natural state. In a similar vein, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is working to protect natural landscapes statewide that will protect corridors along which plants and animals can migrate in response to changing climate. While the federal government remains deadlocked on tackling climate change, Stiles has been getting traction at the local level. With the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast,
due in part to the subsidence of the surrounding land, Norfolk is the urban “ground zero” equivalent of Dorchester County. People in Norfolk’s Larchmont neighborhood move their cars routinely to drier streets during the highest monthly tides. Stiles didn’t get much response to “protect your coastal ecosystem” when he began raising awareness of climate change, he says. “But ‘protect your home,’ now that works.” Also protect your business. Giant Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding in Newport News, which must commit to projects lasting as long as six years in the case of an aircraft carrier, has become increasingly worried about the greater frequency of damaging storm surges, Stiles says. Maryland has been working with local governments for about eight years now to help them assess their vulnerability to climate change, says Zöe Johnson, head of the Department of Natural Resources’ Office of Sustainability. But locals can take or leave the department’s advice to plan for up to 4 feet of sea level rise, or to add 2 feet to the currently required elevations for new construction. To date, a few places have added a foot to requirements, but specific actions beyond that are few and far between. “Intellectually they understand the problem, but they all want development,” Court Stevenson says. Insurance companies, meanwhile, have begun to pay heed to climate change. In 2007 Allstate, State Farm, and Nationwide all moved to limit their liability for future storms, refusing new policies in flood-prone zones. They’ve been spooked by estimates that a Category 4 hurricane in the Mid-Atlantic could cause up to $110 billion in damage, double that of Katrina on the Gulf Coast. In some low-lying areas of Maryland, Lloyds of London is now the only company that will insure property damage—for a price.
continued on page 75 Urbanite #82 april 2011 41
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higher learning
Colleges and universities build strong bonds with nearby communities—out of self-interest as well as good will.
Good Neighbors
By Kristine Henry
R
Photography by J.M. Giordano
ev. Brian F. Linnane was one month into his job as president of Loyola University in Baltimore when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. As he watched the disaster unfold on television, he was struck by just how quickly the city’s fabric was shredded, and by the similarities between The Big Easy and Charm City. Both are historic port cities, both are known for their culture, and both have huge racial and economic divides. “I’m writing my inaugural address and thinking of the Catholic nature of the university,” he says. “And at the same time I’m watching the news and seeing New Orleans kind of dissolve, and it made me think about the role of an urban
university in such a situation.” The scene became the catalyst for Loyola’s Year of the City initiative in 2006 to ’07, designed to “reaffirm the university’s relationship with Baltimore,” Linnane says. In 2008, Loyola created a task force to study the needs of surrounding communities as well as resources the school could marshal to help address them. Last year, the university undertook a “listening project,” holding numerous meetings with the surrounding community. The result is a strategic plan for Loyola that puts a heavy emphasis on community engagement and partnerships with surrounding neighborhoods. “It seems that even the most creative and hard-working city officials are limited in what they can do to address issues that
Stepping Up: Joseph McNeely, executive director of the Central Baltimore Partnership, says, “Twenty years ago the universities were the beneficiaries of a larger civic framework led by the CEOs of banks and industry. Now they have to be the leaders of that civic framework.”
Urbanite #82 april 2011 43
“the city doesn’t Grow without the ‘eds and the meds,’ so when you find a partnership like that, it’s valuable. this new kind of social capital is what keeps A CITY together.” JOSEPH McNEELY, CENTRAL BALTIMORE PARTNERSHIP EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
are truly national problems,” Linnane said in his inaugural address. “But my concern is not to tell our officials how to solve the problems of racial and economic inequality. Rather it is to ask what difference a Catholic and Jesuit university like Loyola ... can make in a city like Baltimore.” Loyola’s efforts are part of a larger trend in higher education that can be seen from coast to coast. Colleges and universities are becoming more involved than ever before in their immediate communities, and not just with a few once-ayear neighborhood cleanups or volunteer projects, but with ongoing partnerships that seek to address issues at a deeper level. The trend toward fuller engagement began in the early 1990s, but really started taking off about six years ago, says Portland State University President Wim Wiewel, who is former provost at the University of Baltimore and a nationally known expert on universitycommunity or “town-gown” relations. Wiewel says state funds are harder to come by these days, so to get their slice of the public pie, colleges feel pressed to show that they’re not only educating the population and helping boost the economy, but that they are also making a difference in more immediate and visible ways. Many institutions are also expanding physically, he adds. “That, at times, leads to conflict and that’s a further reason for universities to show, ‘No, we are good neighbors, we are not just rapacious developers.’” It can also be hard to attract students and faculty to a campus that is surrounded by blight and crime. And nationwide, there is a growing emphasis on experiential learning—that is, going out and doing real things instead of just sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture. “In the 1950s through the ’70s people would talk about the city as a laboratory, and we still have some people who say that. My response is that if the city is a laboratory, then the residents must be rats,” Wiewel says. “The modern way of thinking is much more about jointenterprise activities.”
A
t Loyola, the effort to build new bridges to the community has three prongs. The first is creating more opportunities for area youth, such as literacy programs and counseling centers. The second is supporting the growth and strength of neighborhood organizations. The third is a partnership between the Sellinger School of Business and York Road
44 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Big Man Off Campus: Junior Christopher Brown is director of community relations for Loyola’s student government association. He works with neighbors on town-gown issues as well as the York Road Partnership on area cleanups and plantings.
businesses. Currently, students are students. “They’ve been very professional working on websites and social media and really on top of things.” projects for several local community asThat’s exactly the kind of thing Erin sociations and businesses such as the O’Keefe wants to hear. Loyola hired Bombay Garden restaurant and Neutral O’Keefe last year specifically to work on Grounds Café, a restaurant that employs the community initiative. (She had been former prison inmates and serves as a at Johns Hopkins University in a similar mentoring program. capacity.) “We’re looking at how we as a Jim Jones, owner of the Music Work- whole can work together instead of just shop, which offers music lessons in a having students or faculty members do shop north of the Loyola campus, says small projects,” O’Keefe says. “This is a he commented to his wife back in Oc- very broad effort that will last for a long tober that he wished he had someone to time.” help with marketing. Later that night he Karen DeCamp is president of the went to the Govanstowne Business As- York Road Partnership, an umbrella sociation meeting and was pleasantly group addressing quality-of-life issues surprised to find Loyola students eager for communities such as Cedarcroft, to volunteer for just such a task. A team Greater Homewood, Govans, and Woodof students has set up a Facebook page bourne-McCabe. “[Loyola] really studied for his business, and this semester they the York Road corridor, and I think they are working on direct mail and on get- really see the importance of the stabilting permits for an outdoor student con- ity of these communities,” DeCamp says. cert in the spring. “They’ll take an idea “It’s going to take years, and I think they and really run with it,” Jones says of the are fully cognizant of that. And frankly,
higher learning Lazarus. MICA created its Community conjunction with the East Baltimore DeArts Partnership Program, which pro- velopment Inc., a nonprofit supported by vides art programming for adults and the federal, state, and city governments, children in the neighborhood, in 1999. the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and “It was not just for the benefit of the com- others. he University of Baltimore, Johns munity, but it was also good for the stuThe early childhood center, slated to Hopkins University, and Mary- dents,” Lazarus says. “And there was a open within the next several years, will land Institute College of Art are recognition by the board that we needed be “absolutely state-of-the-art,” Blum big players in another town-gown a context of Baltimore that was support- says. “Our vision is that [the center] will collaboration, the Central Baltimore Part- ive of our mission. We wanted people to be more than a facility. There are many nership. The partnership is tasked with select MICA because of Baltimore, not in informal day care providers—family members, etc. How do we support those improving the area surrounding Penn spite of it.” Station. It’s an area with great promise: Like most colleges, MICA surveys ap- throughout the community who are doOn top of being a hub for the city’s bur- plicants who are accepted to the school, ing home-based day care services and geoning art scene, it has classic housing asking them why they enrolled, or chose how can we support this broader initiastock. But, like much of the city, it is be- not to. “For years, Baltimore was always tive throughout Baltimore?” sieged by crime and blight. on the list of reasons people didn’t come Perhaps not surprisingly, such talk The universities provide support in to MICA,” Lazarus says. “Two years ago, does little to assuage the sting that is a myriad of ways, says Joseph McNeely, for the first time, the city became a rea- still felt by many community members. executive director of the partnership. son people did come to MICA.” “We feel that all we are is a test tube,” says There are the concrete examples, such as Donald Gresham, past president of the Hopkins giving significant incentives for f course, no institution in Bal- Save Middle East Action Committee and its employees to live in the area; a design timore has a larger impact, or a resident of East Baltimore. “We don’t course at MICA that studies ways the a larger footprint, than Johns have a problem if they want to do somearts can serve as an economic stimulus; Hopkins. The hospital has thing and we are part of the conversation. and the University of Baltimore offering been in the news recently because its The problem is that things are a done financial literacy training to community far-reaching plans for a biotech park in deal, and they want us to validate them members. But there are also less tangible East Baltimore are not materializing as after the fact and say it was a community effort. We’re tired of being used.” Blum, for his part, insists that the uniWim Wiewel, versity and hospital have been commitPortland State ted to Baltimore for many decades. And it’s worth noting, he says, that Hopkins University president President Ron Daniels came to Baltimore from the University of Pennsylvania. At one time, the area around Penn was known mainly for blight and crime, and Penn was known to its neighbors as a hulking presence that was taking over the neighborhood. In the mid 1990s, Penn’s then-president, Judith Rodin, set out to transform the school’s relationship with the community. It built a public school; it offered health services; it gave professors incentives to live nearby; and it worked to reduce crime. The story of Penn and Philadelphia is Helping Hands: Jim Jones, left, owner of the Music Workshop, says a team of Loyola students has now considered a national model for good helped him with marketing, including setting up a Facebook page for his business. town-gown relations—and Hopkins has taken many pages from Penn’s playbook. things, like the economic currency that quickly expected, even as hundreds of “From where I sit, this is a true and very comes from having university presidents residents were displaced to make way for exciting partnership, and the people who on your steering committee—people who the project. live in this community have been actively can help move community projects along But Bob Blum, director of Hopkins’ engaged,” Blum says. “There have been and help finance local initiatives. Urban Health Institute, says many of the missteps over the years, and there will be Communities used to look to the cap- university’s community partnerships more. But if there aren’t missteps, then tains of industry for support, McNeely are still on track. Hopkins was also a you’re just not taking enough steps.” says, but now the heads of colleges are key player in opening the new East Baltaking on that role. “And this is not like timore Community School in the fall of —Kristine Henry was a staff reporter at rolling out of bed for university presi- 2009, which serves kids in kindergar- the Sun until 2002, when she left to start a dents. They didn’t do this twenty years ten through eighth grade. And plans for family and begin a freelance career. Since ago; twenty years ago all they did with health-care services and an early-child- then she’s written for a number of local hood development facility for families publications and for two years was comthe community was fight.” The relationship is definitely a sym- in East Baltimore are still in progress. munications director for the nonprofit biotic one, says MICA President Fred Hopkins is working on these projects in Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition. it’s in their interest, too, because having unstable, dangerous neighborhoods next to dorms is not an attractive thing. We all have self- interests.”
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O
“In the 1950s through the ’70s people would talk about the city as a laboratory. My response is that if the city is a laboratory then the residents must be rats.”
Urbanite #82 april 2011 45
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Town-Gown Teams
higher learning
College-community collaborations are popping up around the region. Here are some highlights.
The college sponsors the Maryland team of Pro-Start students, covering expenses for the team’s competition in the National ProStart Student Invitational, and offers scholarships to all Maryland ProStart students.
by Rebecca Messner
Johns Hopkins University
College of Notre Dame of Maryland
Notre Dame education students offer tutoring for students in grades 1 to 5 at the St. Thomas Aquinas School in Hampden. Through AdvoCaring, first-year pharmacy students partner with Baltimore public health agencies. The women’s lacrosse team also mentors girls’ lacrosse teams at area middle schools. Coppin State University
The nonprofit Coppin Heights Community Development Corporation, established in 1995, has created affordable housing for residents of the Coppin Heights and Rosemont neighborhoods, and established a computer lab, open to members of the community. Coppin also provides support for students and teachers Rosemont Elementary and Middle School. Goucher
“Community-Based Learning” is a department in itself at Goucher, with courses like “Gateway to Service,” “Nonviolence in America,” and “Spanish in the Workplace,” that combine hands-on community-based work with classroom time. The school also partners with nonprofits including the Barclay Youth Safe Haven, the Greater Homewood Community Corporation, and Casa de Maryland. Loyola
Many courses at the Center for Community Service and Justice, such as “Documentary Productions: Baltimore Stories” and “Child and Adolescent Development,” have mandatory service-learning components. Loyola has also partnered with local busineses and community groups (see main story). These partnerships assist with programs like the CARES Food Pantry and Emergency Financial Assistance Center, and provide support for the students, faculty, and staff of Guilford Govans Elementary/Middle School and the Tunbridge Public Charter School. McDaniel College
Center for Community Outreach offers students college credit in return for volunteer hours at nonprofits. Students have hosted lessons for Carrol County nonprofits on how to use social media to support their causes. The school also recently partnered with the Westminster Boys & Girls Club, giving students more access to volunteer opportunities, and providing members of the club with access to college facilities and events.
residents, and has established partnerships with city and state agencies. With the MTA, Sojourner-Douglass established the Workforce Transportation and Referral Center, offering training for unemployed or underemployed individuals who want careers in transportation. Stevenson University
Students from Christo Rey High Schools can work in the Career Services Center at Stevenson and learn about college and career opportunities. In October, the school hosts Build Community Day at First Fruit Farms in Freeland. Towson University
Towson established its University Relations subcommittee in 2007 in an effort to improve relations between students living off campus and their neighbors. The Oral Health Intervention Program provides free dental care for the homeless, and the school’s partnership with the Cherry Hill neighborhood in South Baltimore has helped improve schools, health centers, and the community. University of Baltimore
University of Baltimore students log over two million hours a year in volunteer and outreach time. Highlights of the Coordinated Community Outreach Group include HEROES Academy, which offers Baltimore City and County high schoolers the opportunity to visit UB for a day to take college courses, perform lab experiments, and meet volunteer staff mentors. The school is also a part of the Central Baltimore Partnership (see main story). University of Maryland, Baltimore
The nonprofit Promise Heights, a project of UMB’s School of Social Work, partners with schools, churches, and health and recreation centers in the Upton neighborhood, offering parent-child services, as well as workshops on healthy eating and family literacy. The School of Social Work also offers free mental health counseling to parents and children, as well as vaccinations and development assessments at the Furman L. Templeton Preparatory Academy charter school on Pennsylvania Ave. The School of Nursing circulates the “Breathmobile,” diagnosing and treating children with asthma, and UMB’s medical school operates “Mini-Med Schools,” providing free dinners and lectures on disease prevention. University of Maryland Baltimore County
The community outreach arm of Morgan’s Institute for Urban Research (IUR) has started such programs as the Community Entrepreneurial Network and Training Center, which helps members of the community develop entrepreneurial knowledge. Morgan also established the Warrior Institute, where IUR director Raymond Winbush, teaches his Warrior Method “for rearing healthy black boys.”
At UMBC’s Shriver Center, a program established in 1985 for returned Peace Corps volunteers, combines graduate education and community service—and 90 percent of graduates choose to stay and and serve in the BaltimoreD.C. region. The center’s Choice program connects kids with school and community programming, as well as mentors and counselors. Last semester, a group of public history MA students conducted an extensive study of the Hampden neighborhood’s response to gentrification.
Sojourner-Douglass College
Baltimore International College
Sojourner-Douglass’s motto is “Bringing opportunity to the community.” The school runs a Community Solution Space, which makes technology available to East Baltimore
This culinary arts college is partnered with ProStart, a national career-building program for high school students interested in culinary arts and foodservice management.
Morgan State University
Among the more than fifty partnerships that Hopkins has made with Baltimore City Public Schools is the “Johns Hopkins Takes Time for Schools” program, in which staff members are given up to two paid days per year to volunteer in city public schools. The university’s Baltimore Scholars program gives eligible graduates of city public schools free tuition, and sometimes financial aid for room and board. At the Peabody Institute, faculty and students mentor new music teachers in city public schools. Johns Hopkins Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health
The Johns Hopkins Department of Pediatrics, with the Maryland Family Network, is developing an early childhood facility in East Baltimore, which is expected to be finished in the fall (see main story). Through the Access Partnership, established in 2009, uninsured East Baltimore residents are offered free specialty care. Also at Bloomberg is the Baltimore Food and Faith Project, which works to solve food-related problems through partnerships with faith-based organizations. Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)
MICA created the nation’s first Masters in Community Arts, which is now also offered as an MFA, and unveils two more community-based masters programs this fall. Community Arts classes are also offered to undergrads, who are paired with local youth—as in “Community Arts and Documentary,” which brings teen girls to campus to learn about filmmaking. In addition, a “Design Coalition” class, part of a 10-year-old partnership with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, works on healthy lifestyle and communication issues in East Baltimore. Tai Sophia Institute
Tai Sophia acupuncture interns help recovering drug addicts at Penn North, a free clinic in West Baltimore. Herbal medicine interns provide free consultation and discounted herbs through the Herbal Clinic for All program. The school’s library and herb and meditation gardens in Laurel are open to all. Baltimore City Community College
Students in the Dental Hygeine Program hold Sealant Saturdays, which provicde free protective sealant coating for kids ages 5-18. The college also recently hosted and cosponsored a free job fair, with representatives from city and private organizations. CARROLL Community College
With McDaniel College, CCC hosts a semi-annual “Westminster Clean-up” and provides weekly mentoring and workshops at the Westminster Boys’ & Girls’ Club. Physical therapist assistant students also help with the 4-H Therapeutic Riding Program of Carroll County. HARFORD Community College
Harford offers free adult literacy and math classes through the Maryland Association for Adult, Community, and Continuing Education, which also include ESL classes and GED test prep.
Urbanite #82 april 2011 47
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poetry Skin B y elizabeth hazen
1. Spread out, my skin is as big as a bed, this organ breathing through every pore—f linch constrict recoil burn— and just beneath my skin, the vagus nerve extends deep into my body, slows my heart to swooning when, for example, you touch my arm: my orbital frontal cortex lights up like a neon “Vacancy,” blinking invitation. Touch begets touch. I feel the skin over your wrist, smooth and cool and pulsing, so you pull me closer. Neuropeptides f lood my bloodstream. Scientists can isolate the biological basis of our connection, deeper than skin, chemicals reacting, self-perpetuating like fire: your touch, this calming, steady, burning breath.
2. The chemistry is conclusive: when you leave, my Pacinian corpuscles bend and falter. My heart rate quickens; cortisol increases: fight or f light? You are gone and there is no place to which I wish to f lee without you. My skin loses heat, but the constancy of my circulation suggests this longing is not fatal; your absence leaves no scars; science is designed to protect us, yet when you come back your fingers find my skin less receptive, my oxytocin slower to spread through my system, my shoulder cold and turned against you. For days I might resist your touch, though desire, like biology, is inevitable, and I, predictably human, want always more.
Elizabeth Hazen’s poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Smartish Pace, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Maryvale Preparatory School.
Urbanite #82 april 2011 49
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Green Sandtown
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Facelift: This Sandtown rowhouse blends in with its neighbors, but it may well be the most ecofriendly home in the city.
hen Kevin Wiggins saw his new home for the first time, the roof was somewhere in the vicinity of the basement. The house, recently acquired by Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, was one of about twenty slated for rehab last year (the group has fixed up close to three hundred since its founding in 1989), and Wiggins had been given a choice between two houses: this wreck, which was A West Baltimore rowhouse rebuild proves that little more than a basement filled eco-friendly living isn’t just for the moneyed set. with detritus and walls so collapsed the contractors couldn’t get By Martha Thomas an accurate measurement of its width—or a somewhat less daunting place around the corner on Fulton Street. But Wiggins had heard it was going to be a “green Urbanite #82 april 2011 51
Photos: Portrait by J.M. Giordano; kitchen and cabinet detail by Alice Chang c/o Ziger/Snead; rooftop by Danny Waid c/o Sandtown Habitat for Humanity; rain barrel, house demo, and panorama by Jonas RisEn c/o Ziger/Snead.
house” and that the athletic clothing company Under Armour was involved, so he went for it. And he’s glad he did. “I never thought I would live in a place like this,” Wiggins says today. “They pulled out all the stops.”
F
rom the outside, the 1,100-square-foot, twostory, brick-fronted building looks like a typical Baltimore rowhouse: 13 feet wide, with a narrow red door a few steps up from the sidewalk and even narrower windows looking out on a vacant lot across the street. But if you look up, you’ll see the silhouette of solar panels on the roof. And if you could look down at those sixteen panels, you’d also notice that the roof is painted white, to repel the blazing summer sun and keep the house cool. Just inside the door, there s a wooden storage bench built of knotty pine from beams reclaimed from another Sandtown Habitat project, with a nook for shoes beneath it. Jonas Risén of the firm Ziger/Snead, architect for the project, says that storage for grubby shoes and a mat affixed to the floor help keep particles of dust and dirt from the air, thereby improving indoor air quality. Even these small things bring the house closer to its goal: a platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. If it succeeds, the modest house on Laurens Street will be the first in Baltimore City to claim LEED’s highest rating. (At least one commercial building has already attained platinum certification: Baltimore Medical System’s Highlandtown Healthy Living Center. See “Healthy By Design,” Nov. ’10 Urbanite.) Even
52 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
if it doesn’t, the place is still a shining example of how a long-suffering structure can be transformed into a model of minimal impact. “From the beginning this was designed to be a pinnacle project,” says Will Phillips, who heads Under Armour Green, the department responsible for not only the company’s embrace of environmentally friendly operations, but also its use of sustainable materials such as recycled plastic bottles to make performance athletic clothing. The house was a collaboration among Under Armour, Zigger/Snead, Sandtown Habitat, and the U.S. Green Building Council. Also on the team were Prescott Gaylord of Hamel Green Construction and representatives from Straughan Environmental Services and Elysian Energy. Phillips jokingly points out that the house has comprehensive moisture control and temperature regulation—just like Under Armour’s clothing. The company plans to work with Sandtown Habitat on more houses in the future, he says. And while not every future Sandtown rehab will have solar panels (donated by 21st Century Power Solutions) or the extensive heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system supplied by BGE Home, there are plenty of novel techniques and products that can be replicated. “It makes sense to build homes as sustainably as possible so homeowners can benefit from low energy costs,” says Mike Barb, resource development manager and volunteer coordinator for Sandtown Habitat. Wiggins, who has suffered from asthma since he was a child, appreciates the good air quality in his new home. He removes his shoes when he enters and has
space
“I never thought I would live in a place like this, they pulled out all the stops.” KEVIN WIGGINS, HOMEOWNER
Green House: Kevin Wiggins’s house features Energy Star appliances (donated by Whirlpool to every Habitat house in the U.S.), cabinets made from recycled wood, solar panels and a “cool roof” up top, and, in the backyard, a deck made from locally sourced wood, rain infiltration beds with native plants, and barrel to catch rainfall from the roof.
taken to sweeping the floors at least once a day— things he rarely did when he lived in his mother’s house a few streets away. The healthy house has also inspired him to give up pork. “I’m trying to do things the healthy way,” he says. Those applying for Habitat homeownership, says Barb, fall below a certain income level, but are deemed credit-worthy—able to repay the modest mortgage loans held by the organization. In addition, those selected for homeownership agree to contribute a minimum of 330 hours of “sweat equity” to their own homes or others. Wiggins says he was terrified when he applied. “I never dreamed I could own my own home,” says the 24-year-old. And he became even more nervous after he got a call from Sandtown Habitat’s executive director, Laverne Stokes. Although his day job is in the mailroom at M&T Bank, Wiggins’ passion is writing poetry. The message on his answering machine was a long, rap-influenced poem. “It wasn’t lewd or anything, but there are a lot of metaphors,” he says. When he realized that Stokes had left him a message, he panicked. “I was worried that she was going to think I was some kind of heathen and say no.” When he called her back, says Wiggins, she laughed. And Kevin Wiggins got his house. An architect’s model of the green house in Sandtown from Ziger/Snead at bit.ly/ zigersneadhouse
Urbanite #82 april 2011 53
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56  april 2011  www.urbanitebaltimore.com
food + drink
Photo by Amie Bingaman
feature / dining reviews / wine + spirits
Keeping it Local: Kristin and Ruben Hernandez are on a mission to bake bread using only locally grown flour. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
R isin g to th e C h a l le n g e Local duo finds out just how complicated it can be to bake a good loaf of bread. Ruben and Kristin Hernandez had long tossed around the idea of opening a bakery, but their aha moment came from an unlikely location: the tar-coated roof of the Hamilton Tavern. Walking around the neighborhood, Kristin couldn’t help but notice the yellow boxes on the roof, where Arthur Morgan, of the urban farming project Hamilton Crop Circle, had planted vegetables. “Wouldn’t it be so cool if we had a bakery and we grew wheat on the roof?” she asked Ruben. It was a joke at the time, but it got Scott Carlson them thinking: Maybe they couldn’t grow Scott Carlson is a wheat on the roof, but they could grow staff writer for the Chronicle of Higher it—or have it grown—nearby. Local wheat Education, where he covers sustainability. would be a great hook to distinguish their new bakery from others in the city. Using
local wheat was also a way to fit into the spirit of the neighborhood, where the local-food spirit has permeated trendy restaurants on Harford Road such as Clementine and the Chameleon Café—and perhaps a way to appeal to restaurants looking for local bread. “You have to come in with a unique something,” says Kristin, whose father is part-owner of Bakery Express, a huge Maryland-based company that provides baked goods to 7-Eleven stores. (Ruben worked for the company for ten years.) “In this neighborhood, that was compelling.” This spring, the Hernandezes plan to hire bakers and start serving breads made from Maryland grains at the Hamilton Bakery, just a few doors down from Clementine, in a storefront that was once a bridal shop. Recently, the Hernandezes stood in the space. The walls were still painted baby blue with happy, fluffy clouds, but the rest was torn down to subfloor and joists, Urbanite #82 april 2011 57
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feature / recipe food + Drink with new drain pipes and gas lines sticking up here and there. They pointed to a corner where three different types of ovens will sit: a rotating oven, a deck oven with baking stones, and a convection oven. There is a place, too, for a stone mill—a tabletop version, against one wall. And they described the antique tables and chairs that will sit at the front of the store, where patrons will drink coffee and eat fresh bread and pastries made from locally sourced, organically grown, freshly ground flour. The Hernandezes’ quest for local bread has not been an easy one, however, for a basic botanical reason: Hard wheats, which are high in gluten, giving bread dough its structure and elasticity for rising, don’t grow well in Maryland. Jose Costa, a wheat breeder from the University of Maryland’s agriculture school, and Bob Kratochvil, the state agronomist, say the humidity can lead to diseases, which is why hard wheat is more commonly grown in the drier climate of the Great Plains. Producing high-protein hard wheat in this area requires higher amounts of nitrogen fertilizer—and the state recommends limiting nitrogen applications because they harm the Cheasapeake Bay. This is why Eastern farmers grow the lowergluten soft wheats, which are perfect for crackers, cookies, pastries, and pretzels. The pretzel empire of Snyder’s of Hanover was built on Eastern soft wheat. Still, with help from Costa, the Hernandezes
“Wouldn’t it be so cool if we had a bakery and we grew wheat on the roof?” Kristin Hernandez have found a source of local hard wheat: Eastern Shore farmer Aaron Cooper. “Organic wheat is a finicky crop,” Cooper says, but it’s easier to manage on a smaller scale. As for the rewards, “It’s not going to be a huge boon to me—maybe a few extra thousand in my pocket,” he says. Still, he ought to get a little more for the crop from the Hernandezes than he would get from a bulk buyer. Cooper is setting aside 5 to 10 acres to grow wheat organically, and he is building up hard wheat seed to grow for the Hernandezes in the future. He recently told them that he conservatively estimates that at harvest time, he could provide them with 1,200 pounds of soft wheat and 500 pounds of hard wheat. “That’s Maryland-grown hard wheat in October,” Ruben says.
“That’s exciting.” The Hernandezes still aren’t sure how much wheat they will be using on a weekly basis in the beginning. In fact, because of the local and whole-grain nature of this endeavor, much of the Hernandezes’ new business project is an experiment: Their bakers may have to test and adjust recipes for each batch of grain, or they may need to combine local wheat with imported hard wheat to raise the gluten levels or improve the texture or flavor. Ruben says in the order of priorities—flavor, local wheat, and environmental sensibilities—flavor comes first. And on that front, the Hernandezes say that freshly ground grain brings advantages that make the inconveniences worthwhile. Bread baked with fresh, whole wheat flour can have a nutty and more complex flavor than bread made from conventional flour. And since the nutrients start to deteriorate soon after grinding, bread from freshly ground flour is more nutritious, they say. And the local hard wheat is just the beginning. They’re thinking about introducing different kinds of local grains, like spelt, barley, rye, to the mix, and selling not just their bread, but also flour, to businesses and individuals. “Let’s say you want to bake your own bread from freshmilled wheat—you could come here and we’d grind it for you,” Ruben says. “We could grind grits or make fresh oatmeal. There are just so many opportunities.”
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dining reviews food + Drink
Alchemy by Martha Thomas
photos by: Alchemy: Elizabeth Cole; Demi: Amie Bingaman
O
n a Saturday night, with every table filled and a crowd of souls at the front willing to wait, you’d think Alchemy was the only restaurant around. Not so: Just across the Avenue, the place that once defined this neighborhood by offering up its old-timey residents as a symbol of kitsch, stands with tables at the ready. Alchemy, it seems, is the restaurant that Hampden has been craving. A newcomer that doesn’t define itself as offbeat or inexpensive— or even, like nearby Dogwood, imbued with social conscience—Alchemy might seem out of place in this bohemian ‘hood. But in spite of its post-modern décor (a steep white tufted-leather banquette along one wall and close-up photos of veiny autumn leaves and erotic plant parts) and its impeccably trained staff, whose members will stand at attention to let you pass en route to the restroom, Alchemy isn’t all about tony attitude. The husband-wife chef-owner team of Michael Matassa and Debi Bell-Matassa are clearly passionate about what they do and equally excited about sharing it. A meal won’t pass without a visit to the table from Debi, the sommelier and pastry chef. The couple, who formerly owned Fusion
Grille in Fallston, have brought a menu that’s equal measures classic and imaginative. The wedge salad has all the required elements: bits of crushed bacon, frizzled onion, and Maytag bleu cheese dressing, plus slices of egg, hard-boiled in black tea for a subtle smoke. Mussels are steamed in a “mojito” broth with Kaffir lime, dark rum, blood orange, and basil. Seared ahi tuna comes stacked on tortilla chips with avocado corn relish and ponzu sauce—a Tijuana-meets-Shanghai Fishy fusion: Seared ahi tuna comes stacked on tortilla chips with avocado corn relish and ponzu sauce. pairing we haven’t seen since, well, fusion was all the rage. one more thing: to say there’s nothing quirky Alchemy’s hearty portions seem to belie the about Alchemy is only a half-truth. The miscool elegance of the décor. It’s easy to cobble sion statement, printed on the menu, describes together a couple of starters for a filling meal: wizards in the kitchen creating magic, with the crab cassole, for example, a creamy dip references to both Harry Potter and Julia Child. laden with lumps, is served with crusty bread, If only they could magically add a few tables in or a flatbread with chevre, avocado, and basil. the dining room on weekends. (Lunch and dinEven a side of Brussels sprouts is more than ner Tues-Sun; Sunday brunch; closed Mon. 1011 you bargained for: a cereal bowl of caramelized W. 36th St.; 410-366-1163; www.alchemyon36. sprouts in a creamy sauce laced with bacon. com.) Don’t pass on desserts. In fact savoring them on a separate visit is recommended. And
Pop-Up: It’s a restaurant within a restaurant, akin to José Andrés’ notoriously exclusive Minibar in the Café Atlantico in Washington, D.C.
Demi
By Tracey Middlekauff
T
here’s nothing new about “small plates” dining, but Demi has managed to introduce a new (for these parts, anyway) twist to the concept: It’s a restaurant within a restaurant. This is an idea that has been taking hold over the past few years in major dining cities like New York and San Francisco and, closer to home, Washington, D.C., in the form of José Andrés’ notoriously exclusive six-seat Minibar in the Café Atlantico. Unlike at Minibar, however, it’s possible for average citizens to get a seat at Demi, open since December. Located in the basement of
Crush at Belvedere Square, the roomy space—which manages to feel simultaneously minimalistchic and cozy—seats thirty-two. For those who want to sit close to the action, eight stools line a counter with a view into the bustling open kitchen. Crush’s chef/owner, Daniel Chaustit, brought in executive chef and Baltimore native Tae Strain to create “new American cuisine,” that vague gastronomical term that can include everything from the very good to the very bad. Thankfully, Demi falls into the former category. One of the kitchen’s biggest strengths is the attention paid to the balance of flavors and textures in each dish. The mushroom and smoked mozzarella ravioli with red grape gastrique is a masterful combination of smoky, sweet, and umami, without any one flavor becoming too dominant, while the toasted shallots add a pleasant crunch that works well with the warm, soft ravioli. The tender fingerling potatoes with crunchy romaine and yuzu Caesar
dressing transform the standard Caesar salad, often a dreary and soggy affair, into something more playful, thanks to the brightness of the yuzu and the restrained application of dressing. Other standouts include the maple-glazed pork belly, a melting square of juicy meat and jiggly fat perched atop sesame seed spaetzle with crunchy snow peas; the spice-crusted beef carpaccio with its plate-lickingly good truffled mushroom emulsion; and the crab-crusted salmon, beautifully balanced by the ever-soslightly spicy kabocha squash curry and subtle note of lemongrass. Slightly less successful is the braised chicken with blue cheese purée, crunchy celery, and radish hot sauce. While not a bad dish by any measure—the chicken is tender, the hot sauce is tangy—it doesn’t transcend the dish (Buffalo wings) that it sets out to tweak. It lacks the flavor complexity and textural contrasts of the more memorable items, which all subtly and cleverly revamp standard dishes into something surprising and fresh. (Dinner Tues–Sat; 510 E. Belvedere Ave.; 443-278-9001; www.crush-restaurant.com.) Urbanite #82 april 2011 61
ON
www.BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com 800.343.3103 (M-F, 10a-5p EST) Groups 15+ Call 866.577.7469
Due to the nature of live entertainment performances, prices, dates, times and artists are subject to change. All patrons, regardless of age, must have a ticket. *Package prices vary by performance and seating location. Packages are subject to service charges and handling fees.
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wine + spirits food + Drink
Blind Luck
Think you can identify a wine with your eyes closed? Think again.
By Clinton Macsherry
T
he cut of a tail fin or shape of a grille can clue in a classic-car enthusiast to a vehicle’s make, model, and year. Many an opera buff can name that aria (and the diva singing it) in, say, four notes. I’m not sure what tickles your inner wonk. For me, it’s wine. But I make no claim to have joined the rarefied echelon of geeks who can taste wines blind and identify their grape composition, origin, vintage, and even producer—or attempt to, anyway. My favorite lesson in humility comes from the late Harry Waugh, an esteemed British connoisseur who was once asked if he’d ever mistaken a Bordeaux for a Burgundy. “Not since lunch,” he replied. Most wine lovers I know belie the wine-snob stereotype, but it remains a popular target for people who delight in exposing pretentions of expertise. The debunkers seemingly have some points. In a 2002 New Yorker article, Calvin Trillin investigated a widely circulated report of studies conducted by the enology faculty at the University of California, Davis. When given wines to taste in black glasses, many students and wine-biz visitors couldn’t distinguish red from white, or so the account went. Trillin found some loosely related research suggesting the contrary and concluded that the story constitutes an urban myth. Yet like most myths, it gives narrative form to a deeply held belief. photo BY J.M. GIORDANO
French doctoral candidate Frédéric Brochet took a sneakier approach in a prize-winning 2001 dissertation. Brochet asked experienced tasters to compare two glasses of wine, one of white and a second with the identical wine dyed red. The first elicited descriptors commonly associated with white wine, while the second evoked terms usually applied to reds. In a separate experiment, Brochet poured glasses from two bottles of Bordeaux, one labeled a cheap table wine, the other bearing the mark of a prestigious grand cru. Both bottles, in fact, held the same mid-rank wine, but tasters disparaged the first while praising the second. The experiments don’t necessarily disprove the existence of wine expertise, but they underscore the power of preconceptions. “You taste what you are expecting to taste,” as Brochet later told the Times of London. And the more Brochet’s subjects knew about wine—the greater their store of preconceptions—the more gullible they proved to be. Blind tasting circumvents preconceptions. Not everything I love about wine— its history and lore, for example, and the fellowship it brings to the dinner table—relies entirely on the quality of a bottle, but there’s no better way to assess taste than eliminating prejudicial cues. Depending on circumstances, blind tasting can combine parlor game with palate training. Some misguided geeks may also see it as an occasion to show off, but they do so at their peril, as my wife was eager to help me demonstrate. I bought four California wines for less than $10 each that I’d never tasted before: Coastline Syrah 2008, Mirassou Merlot 2008, Running With Scissors Cabernet Sauvignon 2008, and Shenandoah Vineyards Zinfandel 2009. My wife set up a dispensary station, poured the wines into glasses with different stem charms, and brought them for me to taste in a neighboring room. The first smelled sanguine and peppery, like Syrah to me, and my mind closed around that perception. It was, in fact, the Zinfandel. Errors cascaded. I mistook the real Syrah for Zin and similarly confused the Cab and Merlot for one another. Final tally: 0 for 4. I’m not the type to make excuses, but since you asked, I was fighting a wee cold and had to contend with some heckling from the dispensary station. That may have contributed to “test anxiety,” a factor Calvin Trillin cited when he muffed a red-white blind tasting. Give him credit: He was brave enough to try. There’s only Urbanite #82 april 2011 63
TREASURES OF HEAVEN
SAINTS, RELICS & DEVOTION IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE FEB. 13–MAY 15 For a show like this, however far you have to travel won’t be too far. —The New York Times
BECOME A MEMBER & SEE IT FREE! baltimore / 600 n. charles st. thewalters.org open wed.–sun. 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Reliquary Bust of an Unkown Female Saint probably a Companion of St. Ursula, South Netherlandish, ca. 1520–30, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. // This project received important early support through planning grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Magnanimous gifts from Paul Ruddock and an anonymous benefactor made the catalogue possible. We acknowledge with gratitude the support of Marilyn and George Pedersen and the Sheridan Foundation which, together with additional implementation funds from the Kress Foundation and a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, made the exhibition possible. Additional support is provided by an anonymous donor, Ellen and Ed Bernard, Ann K. Clapp, Mary Jo and Ted Wiese, Stanley Mazaroff and Nancy L. Dorman, and the Associated Sulpicians of the United States.
arts + Culture
feature / music / book / theatre
photos by J.m. Giordano
Simple Living: Denzel Mitchell grows food for a dozen CSA members as well as his own family on a vacant lot. Tele Darden says she’s learning to knit, weave and sew her own clothing.
By Their Compost Heaps
Ye S h a l l K n o w T h e m Tough economic times and environmental uncertainty inspire a new generation of urban back-to-the-landers.
michelle gienow
urbanite contributing writer michelle gienow lives on an organic fruit farm in baltimore county.
Tele Darden’s domestic priorities are to feed her family, then make sure they are warm and comfortable. Most people would do this by going first to the grocery store, then the mall, and once home, turning up the thermostat. For Darden, however, this means growing her family’s food in the backyard of their Parkville Cape Cod; learning to knit, weave, and sew their clothing; and, eventually, warming their home with a wood-burning stove—all the better to heat a kettle of homegrown herbal tea sweetened with honey from the bees she plans
to keep in the back yard. The rise of the DIY movement over the past couple of years has rendered such hardcore home-ec projects increasingly unremarkable. During one recent February brunch at Clementine, a Hamilton restaurant known for its locally sourced menu, it was possible to overhear conversations from nearby tables about wintertime organic gardening, installing rain barrels, and lamenting the four-bird limit for keeping city chickens. Any one of these undertakings could be daunting. There are, Urbanite #82 april 2011 65
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feature / Music arts + culture however, people who do all this, all at once, and much more—all on their tiny city or suburban lots. They are city kids gone country, hipsters turned hippies. They are urban homesteaders, right here in Charm City. “Urban farming is getting a lot of attention right now, but urban homesteading goes far beyond growing food,” says Jules Dervaes, a Pasadena, California-based urban homesteader who is commonly viewed as the movement’s patriarch. “Homesteading also encompasses rainwater capture, gray water reuse, reliance on alternative energy and fuels, extensive recycling, small animal husbandry ... The most underutilized space in America is the backyard.” Perhaps true for many, but not the Dervaes household: Last year, he and his three children harvested over 7,000 pounds of food (from more than 350 varieties of vegetables, herbs, fruits, and berries) from their 1/10th-acre yard just blocks from the Rose Bowl stadium. In addition to annually producing 95 percent of their own comestibles, the Dervaes family also runs the Web’s oldest and most comprehensive urban homesteading site, urbanhomestead.org. “We used to spend 90 percent of our time on homesteading activities and 10 percent online,” Dervaes says. “Now over 50 percent of our time is spent helping people looking to start their own setups.”
H
ere in Baltimore, the lack of jobs has been a driver. “It was economy driven, totally—we were all in different trades, and we all lost our jobs,” says Allison Guitard, one of the founders of the Baltimore Free Farm, a Hampden-based collective featuring a group house, urban farm plots, and a warehouse space to house their burgeoning community-building activities. “We didn’t even realize there was a homesteading movement until we just started doing it ourselves.” The Free Farm’s twelve full-time members, all in their twenties or early thirties, joined forces just over a year ago and labored mightily to transform three vacant city lots into attractively terraced hillside gardens that produced enough food for the collective members to feed themselves last summer, with extra to give away. In true self-reliant homesteading spirit, the Free Farmers specialize in creative reuse of materials. The group heats their shared house by wood stove, burning scrub wood left over from clearing the garden and scrap wood scavenged from construction; Free Farm member Mike Grabinski has even rendered lye from the stove’s ashes, which the group plans to combine with tallow donated by Woodberry Kitchen to make homemade soap. Why would young people invest such backbreaking labor transforming such a forgotten corner of the city into a productive homestead, when there are emptied-out towns in the Midwest literally paying young families to move there and establish farms? “In the country there
are already tons of farms,” Guitard says. “We want to grow free or low-cost food for people here who can’t afford or even find fresh vegetables.” Besides, says Free Farm member Billy Thomas, “Cities are where the people are. If you want to change the dominant paradigm, this is where you start.” Homesteading in the city makes sense pragmatically as well as philosophically. A core principal of homesteading is supporting yourself via home-based business, and “here, you’re living in the middle of your market,” says Denzel Mitchell. He operates Five Seeds Farm, a city-based community-supported agriculture program that provides food for a dozen CSA members as well as his own family. He farms a vacant lot across from the Belair-Edison home he shares with his wife and five children—and, out back, four beehives and twenty-two fruit trees. He strives to live as independently and off the land as possible, even foraging wild foods from Herring Run Park. The renewed homesteading movement is urban-based, Denzel observes, in part because tenets of sustainability and self-sufficiency crucial to the homesteading philosophy are already in place in cities: the ability to walk or bike to destinations, for example, or use public transportation. Mainly though, says the man now teaching two younger farmers to grow on vacant city lots, it’s because, “There’s land available here, affordably or even free, as the inner cities have emptied themselves out.” There is another force driving this movement. Celine Manekin, a 24-year-old Park School alumna freshly graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in environmental science, is starting a small CSA in her parents’ Cockeysville backyard. She is drawn to agriculture because, she says, her college courses repeatedly presented a “worst-case scenario” for the planet’s future. In the face of these grim prognostications, “I just really want to know how to feed myself and the people I care about, and eventually be able to teach others as well,” she says. This is a conviction familiar to Jules Dervaes from his seat on the front lines of the urban homestead movement. “This next generation is going to have to shoulder a huge burden,” he says. “When I was their age, we had acid rain. These kids are facing global tilt, polar shift, melting ice caps, global weirding, and depleted resources, and social upheaval from the resultant declining food production worldwide. “In the face of all that, I really admire the upcoming generation’s combination of positivity and pragmatism,” Dervaes says. “Instead of miring down in hopelessness, they’re getting down to work.”
Denzel Mitchell of Five Seeds Farm on urban homesteading on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, April 19
Between Worlds Hukam by Ami Dang (Ehse Records, 2011) By Brandon Weigel
T
he knee-jerk reaction after listening to Ami Dang’s Eastern-influenced music might be to compare her to Sri Lankan musician M.I.A., best known for her 2008 hit, “Paper Planes,” and her contributions to the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire. Dang, who is Indian American, doesn’t see any similarities in their sounds, but she doesn’t mind looking at M.I.A. as something of an inspiration. “It was really awesome to see a South Asian-British woman making music and art and performing around the world and embraced among all kinds of scenes—the indie scene, mainstream music, hip hop, and dance,” Dang writes in an e-mail. On Hukam, her full-length debut, Dang proves to be as capable a genre leaper, mixing looped club beats, sitar strings, and instrumental and manufactured percussion to create songs that touch on electro-pop, house, traditional Indian music, noise, and plenty of hyphenated hybrids in between. No matter how diverse the reference points, Dang has carefully arranged them in such a way that even the most unlikely of pairings feels like a natural fit. This level of care holds throughout the album, a collection of seven songs that is a unified artistic statement with cohesion and flow. Dang grew up in Glen Arm and started playing sitar around age 12 after her mom encouraged her to take lessons. In 2005 she began studying with a guru, Dr. Anupam Mahajan, dean of music at the University of Delhi. At Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music she took up electroacoustic composition. Two years ago she started writing songs with a more mainstream structure. “I’m not really interested in making music that stays within a specific genre,” she writes. “I love a lot of different music and often feel like creating music of different genres or blending genres. If not, I would just be bored!” Hukam starts with a meditative track that features layered sitar strings, electronic fuzz, and Dang’s chanting. But when the beat picks up at the end and the electro-pop of the second song, “Manali,” starts, it becomes clear how well the fusion of Dang’s different influences can work. The three songs that follow build a steady progression from the cleaner production in the beginning of the album to stacks of sonic layers at the end. The album closes with two swirling, densely packed soundscapes. Dang can rest assured that it is anything but boring. Urbanite #82 april 2011 67
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68 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
book / theatre arts + culture
Head and Heart
The Enemy of Good is Better by Michael Salcman (Orchises Press, 2011) by Sondra Guttman
Bottom photo courtesy of National Tour of west side story. © JoanMarcus, 2010; Top Cover image by Joshua salcman
M
ichael Salcman’s new collection of poems is cerebral in both senses of the word. Some of the poems are literally about brains— faltering brains, brain surgery, brain tumors. Others engage the mind with elegantly described paradoxes and ironies. In these poems, Salcman, who has been chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, unites the world of the messy, material body with the boundless abstraction of language. Salcman’s medical background gives rise to some remarkable metaphors. “The brain is a savage beast,” proclaims a poem on the voracious persistence of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. “It eats / when and what no other organ eats / so the head and eyes become as large as a child’s, / the body starves, extremities shrink.” In this poem and others, the imagery astonishes. One of the many poems on visual art describes an experience of painter JMW Turner, who strapped
Fight Songs
West Side Story at the Hippodrome April 13–24 One Flea Spare at the Strand April 21–May 7 By Martha Thomas
W
hen West Side Story opened in 1957, it was Romeo and Juliet for the times. Shakespeare’s famous tale of star-crossed lovers and filial betrayal was transplanted to the harsh streets of New York’s Upper West Side, where rival gangs—the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Italian American Jets—come to arms when the sister of a Shark falls in love with a former Jet. But Arthur Laurents, who wrote the original libretto, felt there was something missing. “The gangs in the original production were sweet little things,” he once said in an interview. “And the truth is, they’re all killers—every one of them. I wanted to do a much tougher West Side Story.” Laurents toyed with the idea of switching out languages, having the Latino gang members speak Spanish. The idea, he said, was to equalize the two gangs by allowing the Sharks to speak and sing in their own language. And while the revision was included—to positive reviews—in the 2009 preview in Washington, D.C., Laurents conceded that audience members who were neither Spanish speakers nor familiar with the show “had no idea what was being sung.” The current touring production, showing at the Hippodrome this month, will be in English,
himself to the mast of a boat during a snowstorm so as to be able to capture the scene on canvas. Evoking the sensual gaze of his painterly eye, Salcman describes how “his frozen gaze tongued the napes / of boarding waves like
maidens’ necks.” If, however, the poems strive for sensory verisimilitude, they also acknowledge its impossibility. “Stones in our Pockets” captures the poet at the mercy of language: “each sound, each sign, each referent, / bound by a flock of association, / lifts me up or beats me with its wings.” Likewise, the speaker of another poem implores his companion as they gaze on St. Michael’s Harbor in the spring, “Put your camera down … No picture can smell this sweet.” The collection features local landmarks and landscapes. “Baltimore was Always Blue” eulogizes the city’s vanished industries. “I Gave My Ticket to a Blind Man at Oriole Park” is touching and straightforward. “The Dog Speaks,” both a funny conceit and a serious contemplation, gives voice to the dog curled under the table in Matisse’s “Interior with a Dog,” a painting beloved by Baltimore Museum of Art patrons. “Really,” the pooch pouts to the museumgoer, “I wish you wouldn’t stare—it’s extra hard to be an icon / when you’re not an odalisque and have no hair.” The painting’s importance to modern art has little to do, the dog insists, with why people love it: “the kids think a gray dog is cute / and I’m the only dog in the room.” In this poem, as in others, Salcman’s wedding of material object, emotion, and idea engages mind and heart alike.
but it retains plenty of evidence of Laurents’ rethinking. There’s an increased sense of violence, with a police officer brandishing a gun instead of a billy club, an oppressive— a l most c lau st rophobic— set, and more aggressive choreography. What hasn’t changed, of course, is the love story—in this version the young cast even closer in age to the Shakespeare original—of Tough Guys: The Hippodrome presents a newer, meaner version of West Side Story —but the love story remains intact. Tony and Maria, the soaring Leonard Bernstein score, and Stephen Sondheim’s snappy lyrics. Most of them games with Bunce, even as he is cuckholded by anyway. the sailor; Mrs. Snelgrave lets off sexual steam repressed since she was mutilated in a fire at The Strand Theater Company’s production of 17 (two years after her marriage). As if the plot Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare is likewise set in isn’t challenging enough, director Jayme Kila gritty city, but in this case, no one dares set foot burn, who is also the Strand’s artistic director, in the streets. The five main characters in this is staging the play in the round—the first such dark chronicle engage in role-playing, twisted configuration in the tiny theater’s two-year hissexual encounters, and class warfare, even as the tory. “I want to give the audience members the bubonic plague rages outside. feeling that they’re in the house,” she says. The “Flea” of the title is 12-year old Morse, who, with a swarthy sailor named Bunce, sneaks into the quarantined home of the wealthy Snelgraves. A disturbingly wise child, Morse observes and narrates as things get nasty in the suffocating space. Mr. Snelgrave plays power
West Side Story, 410-837-7400 , www.france-merrickpac.com One Flea Spare, 443-874-4917, www.strandtheatercompany.org
Urbanite #82 april 2011 69
THROUGH MAY 15
FREE
aRtbma.oRg
Generously sponsored by The Rouse Company Foundation Media sponsor City Paper
N Charles & 31st streets Baltimore, mD
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchased as the gift of Mr. and Mrs. James S. Riepe, Sparks, Maryland, in Honor of Arnold L. Lehman, Director, 1979‑1997, BMA 1999.535. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures
PANEL
opEn WEd – Sun
dIScuSSION WATcHING YOu: SuRvEILLANcE ExPOSEd SuN, APR 3 2 PM
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PHOTOGRAPHY LATE NIGHT FRI, MAY 6 6:30-10:30 PM
how often are you caught on camera? Featured Speakers Hasan Elahi Merry Alpern
entry to the Photography exhibition Films • Live Music DJ • Performances Cash Bar
Organized by Baltimore photographer Nate Larson.
Organized by Baltimore photographer Jim Lucio.
Media sponsor City Paper
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the scene
this month’s happenings
FOOD/DRINK The 4th annual Beer, Bourbon, & Barbecue Festival on April 1 and 2 at the Maryland Fair Grounds in Timonium promises a wellspring of sixty beers, forty bourbons, and barbecue overload. A general admission ticket gets you a souvenir glass, unlimited beer and bourbon tasting, and live music to wash it all down. (2200 York Rd.; 410-252-0200; www.beerandbourbon.com)
photos by Mark Dennis
Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health, brings her knowledge of Food Politics (and her book of the same name) to the University of Maryland on April 4 as part of the Hungry Mind series. (621 W. Lombard St.; www.foodpolitics.com) Need some more crunch in your life? Roots Market in Clarksville hosts its first ever raw foods tasting on April 10, featuring food from Zia’s Cafe. Nwenna Kai, author of The Goddess of Raw Foods will be on hand to sign books. (5805 Clarksville Square Dr., Clarksville; 443535-9321; www.rootsmkt.com) Baltimore sweet spots like Atwater’s, Berger Cookies, and One World Café pair their unique chocolate tastes with the good drink for Wine & Chocolate, a fundraiser for the Women’s Law Center of Maryland on April 16. (Hilda & Michael Bogomolny Room, University of Baltimore Student Center, 21 W. Mount Royal Ave.; 410-321-8761; www.wlcmd. org)
Wine tastes better in post-industrial space—don’t you agree? The Baltimore Museum of Industry and Kevin Atticks, chairman of the Maryland Wine Association, host a Maryland wine tasting and food pairing on April 28. (1415 Key Highway; 410-727-4808; www.thebmi. org)
ARTS/CULTURE LITER ATURE Baltimore celebrates its rich literary tradition on April 16 with the eighth annual CityLit Fesitval at the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s central branch. Special guests this year include NPR commentator (and one-time Baltimore resident) Andrei Codrescu and National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon. (400 Cathedral St.; 410-274-5691; www.citylitproject.org)
FILM See internationally recognized films at the Jewish Film Festival through April 14, including Holy Rollers, starring Jesse Eisenberg, about Hasidic Jews smuggling Ecstasy in the late ’90s. (3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills; 410500-5909; www.jcc.org) Waiting for Superman, the critically acclaimed documentary about what’s
wrong with America’s public school system, screens at the Carroll County Arts Center on April 5. A discussion with local and national education leaders will follow. (91 W. Main St.; 410-857-2290; www.carrollcountyartscouncil.org) On April 7, Found Footage Fest brings unintentionally hilarious VHS videos to the Creative Alliance, along with a screening of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a documentary about fans tailgating before a 1986 Judas Priest show in Landover, Maryland. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-276-1651; www.creativealliance.org)
Pianist Jenny Lin evokes centuries-old western fantasies of the Orient with Chinoiserie, on April 29 at An Die Musik. Lin’s program features various pieces by European composers who were enchanted by their travels in Asia. (409 N. Charles St.; 410-385-2638; www. andiemusiklive.com)
VISUAL ART
MUSIC
Support emerging artists and the Maryland Art Place (MAP) at Out of Order, the nonprofit’s annual self-hung benefit and silent auction on April 1. Proceeds from each work are split fifty-fifty between the artist and MAP. (8 Market Pl.; 410-962-8565; www.mdartplace.org)
Some of Baltimore’s best improvising musicians come together every Tuesday for Out of Your Head Improvised and Experimental Music Collective at the Windup Space. Arrive early on April 19 to see a live broadcast of the Baker Artist Awards. (12 W. North Ave.; 410244-8855; www.thewindupspace.com)
Cabaret, cocktails, and colored pencils come together on April 11 at the Windup Space for Molly Crabapple’s infamous Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School. Open to artists of all levels. (12 W. North Ave.; 410-244-8855; www.thewindupspace. com)
The student-run Hopkins Organization for Programming brings the Pittsburgh pride of rapper Wiz Khalifa to the Pier Six Pavilion on April 28. (731 Eastern Ave.; 410-783-4189; www.piersixpavillion.com)
April 14 is College and Arts Community Night at the Walters Art Museum. College students, staff, and faculty get in free to the special exhibition, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe. More
Usher in the freshness of the season at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market and Bazaar when it opens a month early this year on April 3. In addition to your usual fruits and vegetables, snag some smoked meats, cheeses, and original artwork. (Under the Jones Falls Expressway at Holiday and Saratoga Sts.; 410-752-8632; www.promotionandarts.com) For a full listing of area farmers’ markets, see http://bit.ly/baltimorefarmersmarkets.
Urbanite #82 april 2011 71
•
for for ONE GR GREAT PRICE ONE EAT PR ICE •
S P E C I A L O F F E R $ 2 5 • MARCH 1–APRIL 30, 2011 For more information, visit longwoodgardens.org or winterthur.org. Winterthur photos: Jeannette Lindvig; Longwood photos courtesy of Longwood Gardens.
72 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
the scene contemporary saints, Michael Jackson and Elvis, will also be celebrated. Urbanite is a sponsor of this event. (600 N. Charles St.; 410-547-9000; www. thewalters.org) The 8th annual Transmodern Festival is so multifaceted it defies categorization. From April 28-May 1 at the H&H Building, take in the city’s most creative renditions of music, fine art, film and video, and performance art, featuring artists that “celebrate the diversity of experimental culture.” (405 W. Franklin St.; www.transmodernfestival.org)
GREEN/SUSTAINABLE Get up early for a trail run through Cromwell Valley Park and then cool down amid the spring blooms when Talmar Gardens and the Baltimore Road Runners Club host their annual 5K Run and Daffodil Festival on April 2. (2002 Cromwell Bridge Rd.; 410-887-2503; www.cromwellvalleypark.org) Pick up plants that will feel right at home in your yard at the Herring Run Native Plant Nursery Sale on April 24. A grant from the National Fish and Wildlife
Foundation takes $10 off the price of trees more than $25 and $25 off trees more than $50. (6131 Hillen Rd.; 410-2541577; www.bluewaterbaltimore.org) Everything, Everywhere, Everybody— Saving Our Rivers Through Action on April 9 includes presentations from Bill Stack of the Center for Watershed Protection and Halle Van der Gaag of Blue Water Baltimore. Tickets include brunch. (4915 Greenspring Ave.; 410-367-2217; www.cylburnassociation.org) Now in its eighth year, Baltimore Green Week kicks off on April 16 with EcoFest, bringing free yoga, bikes to borrow, and worm composting demonstrations to Druid Hill Park. Festivities continue around the city through April 23. Urbanite is a sponsor of this event. (Swann Drive entrance, Druid Hill Park; www.baltimoregreenworks.com)
HOME/DESIGN As part of the AIA Baltimore 2011 Lecture Series, lauded landscape architect Deb Guenther from Seattle speaks at MICA on April 7 about Transformative Integrated Landscapes. Urbanite
is a sponsor of this event. (Falvey Hall, Brown Center, 1300 W. Mount Royal Ave.; 410-625-2585; www.aiabaltimorelectures.tumblr.com) AIA Baltimore teams up with D:Center and Baltimore Open City to present Commonwealth and the Open City at the Windup Space on April 13. MICA professors and architects Kuo Pao Lian and Dan D’Oca will explore issues of environment, local economies, and social equity. A reception at the North Avenue Market will follow. (12 W. North Ave., 410-244-8855; www.aiabaltimorelectures.tumblr.com) Browse handcrafted furniture and home accessories at the Baltimore Fine Furnishings & Fine Craft Show at the Convention Center April 15-17. (1 W. Pratt St.; 410-816-0963; www.finefurnishingsshows.com) Pick up a new piece of statement jewelry for spring when more than 250 crafters from across the country return to the Baltimore area April 29-May 1 for the Sugarloaf Crafts Festival in Timonium. (2200 York Rd., Timonium; 800-2109900; www.sugarloafcrafts.com)
Every year on the last Saturday in April, Rebuilding Together Baltimore hosts Rebuilding Day to organize volunteers and repair dozens of homes. This year, they’ll tackle Pigtown/Washington Village and Saint Helena in Baltimore County on April 30. (410-889-2710; www.rebuildingtogetherbaltimore.org)
STYLE/SHOPPING Forty breast cancer survivors, including Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s own mother, Dr. Nina Rawlings, will walk their fiercest walk on April 16 for the Steps to the Cure fashion show. Proceeds benefit HopeWell Cancer Support and the Red Devils. (594 Cranbrook Rd., Cockeysville; 410-666-1234; www. stepstothecure.com) The Baltimore Museum of Industry hosts an evening of fashion, music, and visual art for the Charm City Fashion Show on April 23. Check out styles from Whimsy Boutique and Natty Paint, among others, plus music by Lazerbitch and Damn Right. (1415 Key Highway; 410-727-4808; www.thebmi.org)
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The Bay Comes Calling continued from page 41
Some groups like Wetlands Watch are now challenging Army Corps of Engineers permits allowing residents to armor their property against erosion, claiming that law requires the corps to give wetlands and beaches room to migrate before a rising sea.
I
have little doubt we’re headed in the long run for a less natural Chesapeake, with most of our oysters coming from farms and other regions. Most of our crabmeat already comes from Indonesia, the Philippines, Mexico, and Venezuela—and honestly it’s hard to tell the difference in most crab dishes. (See “Hard Times in Crab Country,” Nov. ’08 Urbanite.) Many waterfowl hunters seem to enjoy shooting birds brought in from game farms and released. I don’t find this any more heartening than the drowned marshes and mega-Isabels we’ve already set in motion. But neither is there any reason to throw in the towel. If we can keep our most fundamental options open—natural and undeveloped shorelines, protected farm and forestlands, healthy water and free-flowing streams and rivers—then whatever bay we create will continue to have its virtues.
Save the bay? Of course. But which one? To the extent that hope for the future lies in a bold new bay, a brief visit to the once and future Poplar Island is in order. Located off the Talbot County shoreline, it had eroded from about 1.5 square miles down to a few sand dabs when I saw it in 1999. Now the new and improved Poplar is taking shape, surrounded by 7 miles of thick stone dikes, filled with some 40 million cubic yards of dredged spoil from near Baltimore, sculpted into some 2 square miles of new wetlands, sandy bird nesting areas, and forestland. It’s billed as environmental restoration, but environmental creation seems more appropriate. Even as earth is still moved and trees planted, the island has filled with wildlife. It cost $400,000 an acre, but with the Port of Baltimore’s constant need to dredge and nowhere else to put the spoil, the Army Corps of Engineers is enlarging Poplar further, and eyeing more eroded islands down the bay—maybe even pumping silt into the
Dorchester marshes to help them keep ahead of sea level awhile longer. All of that won’t nearly offset future losses to climate change. But meantime, the egrets sipping minnows from Poplar’s marsh pools and the yellowlegs progging the mudflats to refuel on their migration from Argentina seem not to mind their new home in the Anthropocene. —Tom Horton, a longtime environmental reporter for the Baltimore Sun, is author of several books on the Chesapeake, including Bay Country and An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake.
Tom Horton on climate change and the Chesapeake Bay, on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 fm , April 21
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eye to eye
nate larson took this photograph at GPS coordinate +33° 44’ 12.95”, -116° 14’ 9.12”, in Indio, California. He did not snap the shot to document a personal memory or experience. He did it to capture a tweet. He doesn’t know who wrote it or why, only that someone used Twitter to send this bittersweet thought out into cyberspace from that exact location: “Whenever I realize that you haven’t texted me in a while, I just remember that smile.” Larson, a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Marni Shindelman, a professor at the University of Rochester, have been working on the Geolocation Project for close to four years. Fascinated by the ability of digital media to simultaneously isolate and unite people, they have used geographical coordinates embedded in Twitter updates to document tweet locations in downtown Chicago, the Califorcara ober nia desert, up and down the East Coast, and in rural England. The messages run the gamut from sexy to cara ober is urbanite’s online arts/culture editor. to receive angry to depressing or shocking. Often there are her weekly e-zine, go to bit.ly/ grammatical errors or abbreviations, and the artezinesignup. ists leave those intact. The work aims to explore the dislocation between expressed sentiments, emotional connections, and the physical distances between people. “We think of these photos as historical monuments to small, lived moments,” Larson explains. “It also grounds the virtual reality of social networking data streams to the physical world, while examining how the nature of one’s physical space may influence online presence.”
78 april 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Remember That Smile (2011) digital print 30 x 22 in.
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