August 2007 Issue by Urbanite LLC

august 2007

B A L T I M O R E â&#x20AC;&#x2122; S

C U R I O U S

issue no. 38

F O R

Stories from the Stoops: Baltimore, One Tale at Time

Stories

ergo,

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Stoops baltimore, one tale at a time

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B A L T I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

Stories from the Stoops: Baltimore, One Tale at Time

cover design by Cornel Rubino

august 2007 issue no. 38

F O R

issue no. 38

f e a t u r e s

august 2007

august’s cover: Urbanite invited artist Cornel Rubino to our office to create the cover and figures for this month’s feature story “Our Town” (p. 58). His images suggest both the stark, ﬂat forms of folk artist Bill Traylor and the subtle human nuances of Edward Lear.

Stories ergo, from the

Stoops baltimore, one tale at a time

this is your life (and how you tell it) the way people talk about their pasts reveals a lot about how they approach and write the future (reprinted from the new york times) by benedict carey

for more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make anna anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make andrew andrew. they have largely ignored the first-person explanation—the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why. in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality

our town baltimore, one tale at a time by brian simpson, susan mccallum-smith, susan muaddi darraj, lionel f o s t e r, j o a n n e c a v a n a u g h s i m p s o n , a n d k a r e n h o u p p e r t

dropping in on the folks who make baltimore baltimore, six writers collected stories from the streets, playgrounds, porches, clinics, and jails for a sketch of life in our city today

the front page a fabled tabloid’s quest for the holy grail: readers by richard o’mara

once upon a time in a city far, far away, a daily newspaper had to be redesigned. “we need to be more attuned to contemporary concerns,” the editor-in-chief told his bewildered staff as he added color photos, banner headlines, happy pictures of clowns, and controversial editorials about the city’s most burning issues, like the need for more traffic lights

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august 2007 issue no. 38

photographs from the streets of baltimore. this month, the topic is “city secret”

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

six not-to-miss events around town

people, places, and things you should know about

baltimore’s sweet summer treat has been made for decades with the bounty of maryland’s orchards by mary k. zajac

baltimore observed: netscape an urban trash collage speaks volumes by tom waldron

encounter: having their say storytellers take to the stage and bring the audience into their worlds by marianne amoss

50 45

space: fertile ground a dedicated group of mount washington neighbors transformed a desolate field into an urban oasis by elizabeth a. evitts

poetry: incident two poems of the same name, published more than eighty years apart by countee cullen and kevin young

out there: going out on a limb building a tree canopy in portland—and baltimore by donna m. owens

recommended

resources

eye to eye

books, bands, exhibits, and more

further reading on topics covered in this issue

a closing thought, curated by creative director alex castro

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Urbanite Issue 38 August 2007 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Guest Editor Marc Steiner Managing Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Karen Houppert Karen@urbanitebaltimore.com Copy Editor Angela Davids Editorial/Marketing Assistant Lionel Foster Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com Contributing Editors Elizabeth A. Evitts, Susan McCallum-Smith Editorial Interns Heather Rudow, Svetlana Shkolnikova Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer/Photographer Jason Okutake Production Intern Lindsay MacDonald Web Coordinator George Teaford Administrative/Photography Assistant La Kaye Mbah Senior Account Executive Janet Brown Janet@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives Abber Knott Abber@urbanitebaltimore.com Alex Rothstein Alex@urbanitebaltimore.com Bookkeeper/Sales Assistant Michele Holcombe Michele@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing/Sales Intern Lindsay Hanson Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2007, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved. Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. If you know of a location that urbanites frequent and would recommend placing the magazine there, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211.

urbanite august 07

note

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern. —Eric Hoffer, American author

quotes

Everyone has a story. —Neil LaBute, American film director, screenwriter, and playwright photo by Mitro Hood

publisher’s

When I was a child, Thursday afternoons meant coming home from elementary school to sit in the kitchen with Lillian, our once-a-week housekeeper and cook. She would tell me stories while she prepared my family’s favorite meal: fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn pudding, and a special treat for me, a dessert called “floating island.” As Lillian dipped the chicken parts in her secret recipe of flour and spices and dropped them into the iron skillets of popping grease, she would tell me stories, mostly tales from the Bible. One of my favorites was the story of King Solomon, who discovered the legitimate mother of a child by suggesting to the disputing mothers that the child be divided in half and shared between the two. The child’s true mother is revealed when one woman says she would rather give the child up to the other, rather than have it be killed. I remember reflecting on the wisdom of the king and vowing to grow up to be very wise. Occasionally Lillian shared personal stories, and there is one in particular that I’ll never forget. When Lillian was about 40 years old, her mother became very ill. Lillian, a woman of great inner and outer strength, gathered her mother in her arms and walked her to the hospital. This was in 1950s Baltimore, and Lillian must have known what she would confront when she got to the closest hospital, which was for “whites only.” The two were turned away, and her mother died in her arms. I find stories like this one every month in our “What You’re Writing” department; sometimes I find myself laughing out loud, only to have tears streaming down my face a moment later. There is something special about immersing yourself in the stories of your own city. Each month when I finish reading the essays, I find myself feeling hopeful about Baltimore. How can we possibly go wrong with amazing people like this … everywhere? To capture more of the stories of Baltimore, we asked Marc Steiner, host of WYPR’s The Marc Steiner Show, to be this issue’s guest editor. Each week, Marc brings his listeners stories from a vast and varied network—stories that illuminate our similarities, our points of difference, and our shared experiences. With his help, we tracked down some of our city’s storytellers, and sent out some of the best writers around to capture their tales; the article, “Our Town,” starts on page 58. We culled an excellent article from The New York Times as well; called “This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It),” the piece examines how the way in which we tell our stories demonstrates how we view ourselves (p. 56). And rounding out the feature well is a satire by longtime Baltimore Sun reporter Richard O’Mara, about what happens when you enter the business of selling stories for a living (“The Front Page,” p. 66). Enjoy these stories, and as you read, think about your stories and those of the people around you. What tales would we tell given the chance?

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. —Ursula K. Le Guin, American author

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. —Ben Okri, Nigerian poet and novelist

We’re all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. —Charles de Lint, Canadian author and Celtic folk musician

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. —Maya Angelou, American poet and memoirist

—Tracy Ward Durkin

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How do different people find a common language? Art on Purpose brings together people from different backgrounds, ages, races, and ethnicities to make and view art and to talk about the complex issues of our life. In just a few short years, Art on Purpose has introduced over 6000 people from the Baltimore region to exhibitions, workshops, and programs directly supporting education, social justice, and community service. Art on Purpose has partnered directly with nearly 600 professional artists, students, teachers, after-school programs, senior citizens, cultural and community organizationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all with the idea art can be a language that breaks the barriers and begins to build understanding and knowledge in an ever-increasingly complicated world.

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contributors

behind this issue

photo by La Kaye Mbah

courtesy of Ding Ren

photo by Doug Miller

courtesy of Steve Buchanan

with guest editor marc steiner

Steve Buchanan Maryland native Steve Buchanan is a graduate of the advertising photography program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His specialties include food and architectural photography. He also produces the occasional fine-art photo. By his own description, Buchanan’s work often deals with the often overlooked qualities of everyday objects. He respects the power of what he calls “pretty pictures,” the visual equivalent of a rich dessert, but he’s careful not to “lull viewers into a sense that everything is good.” There’s always more to see, so pay special attention to the peach cake in this month’s “Food” department (p. 35). Alan Gilbert For more than twenty years, Alan Gilbert has photographed for the leading architects, builders, and designers of interiors, gardens, and landscapes throughout the Mid-Atlantic. His work appears regularly in the magazines of our region. Gilbert is a pioneer in highresolution digital capture and a founding partner and co-owner of DOC Baltimore, a Hampden-based digital services and print specialist providing fine printing, design, and other related services to the fine-art and design community. He lives just north of the city with his wife, Nancy, and terriers Teddy and Bodie. When not behind the camera, he can usually be found in his kitchen, pushing the boundaries of pizza. He photographed the Mount Washington Arboretum in this month’s “Space” department (p. 50). Ding Ren Originally from China, Ding Ren now resides in Washington, D.C., where she is working on her master of fine arts degree in photography at George Washington University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Ren has contributed both her writing and photography to several local publications, including RADAR Review, PEEKreview, Locus Magazine, and Link. Her photography has been featured in group exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, UMBC, and MICA. When she’s not writing or snapping photos, Ren likes to cut out construction paper and sing in Chinese for the band Bible Kiss Bible. She wrote about Takeshi Murata for this month’s “Recommended” department (p. 79).

Marc Steiner is the host and executive producer of WYPR’s flagship public affairs program, The Marc Steiner Show. For fourteen years he has employed the same inimitable mix of passion, intelligence, and humor in interviews with Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, civic leaders, and everyday people—anyone with a perspective worth hearing. His ability to find common cause with celebrities and unknowns alike comes in part from personal experience. His resume reads like a list of past lives. After a tumultuous tenure as a student in the Baltimore City Public School System, Steiner spent fifteen years counseling juvenile offenders, ten years as a drama teacher, and two years as principal of Baltimore Experimental High School. From 1981 to 1982 he produced commercials for the advertising agency Trahan Burden & Charles. He ran political campaigns across the country, including Billy Murphy’s quixotic Baltimore mayoral campaign in 1983. From 1985 to 1988 Steiner was director of Sheppard Pratt’s Media Program before starting his own marketing and public relations firm, which he ran from 1988 to 1990. Along the way he founded three theater companies for young people, several community newspapers, and a grocery cooperative in Waverly. When he started his eponymous show in 1993 on WJHU, Steiner had no experience in public radio, no technical assistance, and a single two-hour slot one night per week. His explanation for his longevity—“Stuff happens when you just go after it”—applies just as well to his successful effort to lead the way in transforming a college radio station into a public station (WYPR) attuned to local, national, and international events. Six years ago, before his purchase of the station was complete, Steiner said to reporters and listeners, “Americans need to hear each other’s stories. I want Ruxton stories on the air. I want Pennsylvania Avenue stories on the air. Pikesville stories. Dundalk stories. All of ’em. That’s what National Public Radio should be all about. That’s what America should be about.” An inveterate teller and compiler of narratives, Steiner sees stories as “the fictionalization of our reality, our reality seen through fiction.” In Steiner’s view, stories aren’t just about our past. “They preserve the past for the future,” he says. “They guide the future with remembrance of the past. Stories are who we are.”

Heather Rudow Maryland native Heather Rudow is an Urbanite summer editorial intern. A print journalism major at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, Rudow has worked in print, radio, and stage productions. She was a staff reporter then features editor for the Franklin Gazette, a high school newspaper, and she was a cast member in the Quinnipiac University production of The Vagina Monologues. Her show Bam Thwok airs weekly on 98.1 FM WQAQ in Hamden, Connecticut.

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what you’re saying

Pushing for Preservation

t 2007 augus

E ’ S I M O R B A L T

no. 38 issue

F O R

O U S C U R I

Stories from the Stoops: Baltimore, Time One Tale at

ies

gro, eSrto ps he f rom t

Stoo e,

baltimor time one tale at a

Seeking City Support Recently, leaders of more than thirty historic Baltimore neighborhoods met to begin formalizing the Baltimore Historic Districts Council with a mission to maintain and enhance the unique architectural characteristics and economic potential of Baltimore’s historic communities and landmarks through advocacy, education, and shaping public policy. Although we have one of the oldest city preservation commissions (CHAP) in the nation, the preservation ethic that continually emerges from Baltimore City Hall is alarmingly weak. At every turn, preservation mechanisms are unsupported, and in many

From the tone and content of your recent article on historic preservation (“Ahead of the Game,” June 2007), it seems clear that your readers are concerned and perhaps outraged about the major losses of irreplaceable buildings in Baltimore City. Surprisingly, there is a very small group of preservationists who are funding and fighting these battles. We need Baltimoreans who care— including Urbanite readers—about these structures to join the fight. Without a larger and louder population pushing for preservation, we will continue to lose major battles in the future. In short, if we don’t want developers and large institutions to decide what gets demolished, we have to push back equally hard from the other side. So what can “urbanites” do to establish a real preservation ethic in Baltimore? 1. If you are an attorney, provide your services pro bono to community groups and preservation organizations that are fighting to save historic structures. 2. Write pro-preservation letters to The Sun, the mayor, and city council members.

prominent cases blatantly undermined or ignored. This is true in CHAP/City historical districts, National Register districts, urban renewal areas with preservation clauses, or simply in neighborhoods with goals or objectives that are contradicted by City policies. In the past five years, many thousands of people have moved to Baltimore, as the statistics show, slowing fifty years of population decline. These new residents are not moving to Baltimore because of our low

3. Demand an independent historic preservation commission from all of our elected officials. The current Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), under the umbrella of the pro-development Planning Department, is not independent and, therefore, it is neither effective nor powerful. 4. Join other communities in their battles. 5. Contact your neighborhood association president and make sure your community is a member of the new Historic Districts Council (hdcbaltimore.org), an independent organization that is closely monitoring CHAP’s work. 6. Withhold support and votes from elected officials who work behind the scenes and against communities to allow the destruction of historic structures. 7. Support candidates who support preservation values and who will commit to the establishment of an independent historic preservation commission, like those in New York, Boston, Annapolis, and Philadelphia—cities that understand the role of historic structures in economic development, tourism, and attracting new residents. —Susan Warren lives in Mount Vernon where she and her husband restored their own home seven years ago.

crime rate, our excellent public school system, or because of the thousands of well-paying jobs created by our numerous Fortune 500 companies—as we don’t have any of those things. They are moving here because they can purchase unique homes in interesting historic neighborhoods at a fraction of the cost of any other major city on the East Coast. To be sure, some new residents are purchasing the new townhouses and condos that surround w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a u g u s t 0 7

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—Lance Humphries is an art and architectural historian currently consulting on the restoration of James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia.

Save Our Land Your issue on preservation (June 2007) was well done and thought provoking. Yes, Baltimore

update

CARMELO ANTHONY

photo by La Kaye Mbah

the Inner Harbor, and that’s a good thing—but as a city we need to be thinking outside the Harbor if we are to achieve any long-term stability and permanently reverse decades of population decline. The Inner Harbor “revitalization” of the 1970s did little to stop another two decades of population loss—that itself should be a lesson. There is a disconnect in Baltimore City government with this reality on the ground. Over the past several years, since moving to Mount Vernon and restoring a townhouse, I’ve met hundreds of new Baltimore residents in historic neighborhoods—from Guilford to Canton to Union Square—and the complaint is usually the same: Once these new residents have bought in to the city, they feel unsupported by City Hall in their personal and communal efforts to make the city a better place to live. I’ve also met many long-term residents who have been working hard to keep their neighborhoods together—they are tired and frustrated, and they believe their city government is broken. The future mayor of Baltimore who will put our city on the road to lasting prosperity will be one who recognizes why people are moving to Baltimore, who will shake their hands as they cross the city line, and who will ask, “How can I support you as a participant in making this city a better place to live?” We need this ﬂood of new residents—both for their own economic contributions that will assist those already here, and for the infusion of energy they can provide to current battle-tired residents. The city’s support should include an overhaul of non-responsive city agencies, with new demands for an A+ performance at every turn, as well as supporting communities in their efforts to preserve the very thing that brought them to, or keeps them in, the city—their historic neighborhood. In order to accomplish this, we need an independent preservation department that ensures that Baltimore’s greatest assets are not subject to the whim of short-term development pressures, as they are today. As in other great historic cities, this department needs to be one that can support and help shape historic neighborhoods across the city, whatever their designated status. Of course, the mayor and city council must not only facilitate the creation of this new vision for Baltimore, but also support it after its formation.

NBA player Carmelo Anthony ranks

high, on the court and off. Urbanite’s October 2005 issue featured a Q&A with the Denver Nuggets’ small forward. Since then, his philanthropic efforts have placed him at number eight on the Giving Back 30. The list, compiled by public charity organization the Giving Back Fund, outlines the top thirty celebrities in America who gave the largest public donations in 2006. Though beat out by other prominent figures such as Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods, Anthony’s contributions totaled an impressive $4,282,000 for that one year alone. Anthony donated more than $1.5 million to open the Carmelo Anthony Youth Development Center here in Charm City. The East Baltimore facility is a subset of the Living Classrooms Foundation, which provides educational and career resources for at-risk youth. The Center operates seven days a week, both during the school year and throughout the summer. Currently, the center has more than two hundred youths enrolled, many of whom come from low-income neighborhoods. The Center focuses on several uplifting principles, such as

civic development and cultural enrichment. In addition, the Center hosts lead screening and immunization programs, family night events, and job fairs. This summer, the Center was also the site for Boost Mobile’s “Building Leaders for Tomorrow” (BLFT) Summerscope Sports and Entertainment Camp, in which Anthony participated as a special guest. Launched June 25, the free, five-day event highlighted wellness and life skills through sports and entertainment. BLFT featured interactive workshops and educational/career guidance for Baltimore youths, ages 11 to 17. Anthony’s charitable undertakings are matched by the strides he’s made in the NBA. Though only four years into his basketball career, Anthony has already been named to the All-NBA Third Team twice. He is the second biggest scorer in the NBA, averaging 28.94 points per game. And while he may play for Denver, Baltimoreans can truly call him their own. —Saaret E. Yoseph, a former editorial intern, recently graduated from UMBC.

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does need to be more proactive in preserving its heritage. No, everything is not of equal value. I thought the angst over the destruction of the so-called Odorite building was excessive: The student center that replaced it has far more integrity. On the other hand, the destruction of the Rochambeau is a tragedy. The footprint of the building makes for a tiny “prayer garden,” but you still can’t see the Basilica from that vantage point, and now we have to look at the ugly wall of the neighboring parking garage. Did the Archdiocese of Baltimore really intend to do the Unitarians the favor of increasing the visibility of their church? After being active in several neighborhood groups, I have learned that in a capitalist culture, land is not a resource but a commodity. No matter how many master plans there are or how many meetings with the citizens, the people with the bucks usually get their way, and in Baltimore they may even get tax credits to do it. That’s the reason we now have a wall of high-rises surrounding the Harbor to the point where you can’t even see the water. This country is only slowly learning what Europe has already figured out: Our land and our buildings are a resource. Once they’re gone, it is rarely possible to turn back the clock.

7/2/07

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Page 1

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—Theodore Feldmann is a musician who lives in Charles Village.

People, Not Walls Robert Blum and colleagues’ contribution to The Urbanite Project (“Hidden Walls,” March 2007) has obviously generated controversy among Urbanite readers (“If Walls Could Talk,” June 2007; “Tear Down the Walls,” May 2007). For further insight into the debate, it’s revealing to re-read “Hidden Walls” after perusing Mare Cromwell’s article on environmentally sensitive rowhouses (“Home Sustainable Home,” June 2007). Cromwell describes how the developer of the Decker Walk “Envirowhomes” removed all of the fences in the back of each of its nineteen renovated units, noting (in light of the area’s history of crime), “the openness and invitation to socialize in the rear of the block will be a quantum shift from what the area harbored several years ago.” Contrast this with the solution offered by Blum et al. “What if,” they write, “we put up walls that would create safe spaces in the midst of dangerous environments?” Such walls, they argue, would create an “extension of the womb,” a quiet, ordered space separated from the chaos of life on the streets. Setting aside obvious yet awkward questions—for example, why walling off certain city neighborhoods is a good idea when certain other city neighborhoods are enjoying the benefits of tearing down fences—it’s worth revisiting the words of the late, great Jane Jacobs: That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. Perhaps it’s just that summer is the mischief in me, but (with apologies to Robert Frost) I wonder if I could put a notion in Blum and colleagues’ heads: something there is that doesn’t love a wall. —Joshua Garoon is a doctoral student in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health .

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what you’re seeing

Welcome to the new “What You’re Seeing” department. This is the place for photography that captures the true spirit of Baltimore, showing the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the sad—and don’t forget the wild, zany, and spectacular! Each month we will choose a topic; you send us one photograph that speaks to that subject. Along with your photograph, please include a brief description of the image along with your contact information. For more information on how to submit your photograph, please visit www.urbanitebaltimore.com/wyseeing. PLEASE NOTE: By sending us a photograph, you are giving us full permission to publish the image in its entirety. This permission extends to the models and/or subjects in the photograph. It is essential that all people in the photograph be aware that the image may be published. Please read the limited license agreement on our website, www.urbanitebaltimore.com/wyseeing.

Show us …

Deadline

Publication Date

The Oddest Thing A House with Character The Strangest Car My True Self

Aug 17, 2007 Sep 19, 2007 Oct 26, 2007 Nov 21, 2007

Oct 2007 Nov 2007 Dec 2007 Jan 2008

Visit www.urbanitebaltimore.com/wyseeing for more information on how to submit your photograph.

A City Secret by Dave Fink

I had just bought a brand-new camera and was eager to show my coworkers the new toy. As I traveled to work, there was a fog, unusual for a warm December morning. When I arrived, a few of the earlymorning folks told me I needed to see the fog from the seventeenth ﬂoor. Armed with my day-old camera, I raced to the elevator. The view was spectacular. There was a haunting, almost surreal, fog that enveloped the downtown harbor. I immediately started taking photos. The pictures turned out great, and they make you wonder what secrets lay beneath the folds of fog that blanketed the city that morning. —D. F.

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what you’re writing

illustration by Johnny Robles

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

Topic

Deadline

Publication

Origins White Lies First Times

Aug 17, 2007 Sept 14, 2007 Oct 12, 2007

Nov 2007 Dec 2007 Jan 2008

I CAN SEE HIS FACE

, but can’t remember his name. He walked up to me and asked, through a creamy white smile and a coffee bean complexion, “Would you like to have dinner?” I smiled back, flattered by the attention. He wasn’t handsome, not even very attractive, but he was polite and engaging. We stood there chatting outside my dorm, one day during the summer after my freshman year at North Carolina Central University. We talked, laughed, and found a place that sold fried chicken and corn on the cob. We walked through campus and down Fayetteville Street; we turned a corner, went through a door, up a flight of stairs, and into a dark, tight room that he rented. The danger I was in remained invisible until I was on my back, on his bed, and under a promise of swinging fists against my face if I didn’t shut up. I stopped struggling and crying and begging him to stop, long enough to remove myself from myself, while he raped the lonely girl who’d walked into that dingy little room with him. Hours later, he chaperoned me down the stairs and up Fayetteville Street back to campus, while lecturing me on the risks a pretty girl might face if walking alone. I went inside my dorm, into a shower, and that’s where I left that summer day. Twenty years later, I started crying and didn’t know how to stop. I cried in the office of a too-young, licensed, discount therapist, who assured me that suppressing a trauma doesn’t negate its effects, who asked me questions

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about my mother, who gave me crayons so I could draw a self-portrait, who I visited for three ineffective months before I swallowed the memory again. —D. Lynn Strickland is a first-year graduate student at UMUC who likes to paint and take online writing classes. This is the first time her writing has been published.

My father was the tallest man in the world.

His lean frame spanned the height of the basement in our two-story Baltimore rowhouse, the top of his close-cut Afro (or was it a Jheri curl?) reaching just inches below the ceiling. He had to bend his neck slightly to pass under the bronze maze of slim pipes suspended overhead. In the backyard I would boast to my playmates about my father’s amazing height. I countered any opposition with a statement of irrefutable fact: My father is as tall as the ceiling. In my memory, my father only lives in the house for a few distinct days and exists only in the basement. The first day I am 3 years old and an only child. His music-studio equipment spreads out in front of me like a wide tar pool with blinking lights as he shows me how to sing into the microphone. On the second day I remember, I am a little older, singing “Proud Mary” with my mouth touching the mic, as I shake my long plaits like Tina Turner. On the third day I am 5, my sister is 2, and we are at the top of the basement stairs, holding small bags of potato chips. My sister’s foot gets caught in the empty space between the steps as we run past a Grace Jones album cover taped to the wall above the banister, afraid that she will jump off of the cover and chase us. My sister topples, landing face up on the concrete floor, the golden potato chips scattered along the stairs like flower-girl petals. She cries, mourning the loss of her potato chip prize as my father gathers her into his arms. On the last day in my memory, my parents are separated. My father exists only through his things. The studio equipment is gone. He has left behind band stationery and a Chaka Kahn album, pencil nubs and a desk that holds an old chocolate bar that my sister and I get in trouble for eating. My memory of him being there becomes both nonexistent and undeniable, like punctuation left on a piece of paper where someone has erased all the words. In the days to follow I learned many things, like the fact that album covers are inanimate objects and that rowhouse basements have low ceilings. —Aja Dorsey is the mother of a 7-year-old, a community organizer, and a writer of short stories. She has lived in Baltimore since birth.

When I was little, my parents had a

small bathroom with blue tile and a frosted shower door. And every morning my father had to shave. Had to. I remember people saying he had a five o’clock shadow by 11 a.m. I don’t know that I under-

stood what that meant or why he needed to shave, but it fascinated me. I remember the steam and the dampness. I remember him wiping the fogged-up mirror with his towel. I loved to watch as he patted his face with water then lathered it with shaving cream bit by bit. When he had a full beard of white foam, he loaded his razor with a straight blade and turned the little knob until it snapped shut. I laughed at the funny way he twisted his face from left to right and how he stuck his chin up in the air so he could shave his neck. I sometimes wondered if he exaggerated his movements just for me, because he would twist and scrunch his face in different ways and then smile at me. I liked the slow, scraping sound, the menthol smell of his shaving cream, and the swish of water as he rinsed his razor after each stroke. I liked watching his face appear again. We never talked while he shaved. It always seemed so quiet in there, and I liked that. It’s been more than thirty years since he died. What I wouldn’t give some days to be little again, in a quiet bathroom, watching my father shave. —Caroline Silva is a counselor in Baltimore. She writes to remember that life is both silly and serious.

I was 12, almost 13, and I had just received the

news that I was going to be sent south for the summer. Before I knew it, I was put on a train with my shoebox lunch. I had to change trains in Cincinnati and move to a segregated rail car. When I finally reached Brownsville, Tennessee, my uncle was there to pick me up in a buckboard. This was 1948, and I was being picked up by a horse and buggy. It was dusk when I arrived at the farm. My grandmother was rocking on the porch and spitting tobacco juice into an old Prince Albert can. The rest of the summer children had not yet arrived. I sat with her and when she fell asleep I went to a pallet of cornhusks in the corner and slept like the dead. The smell of frying salt pork and chicoryflavored coffee woke me up. “Always remember,” my grandmother said, “that when you fry salt pork, put a little water in the pan to take out some of the salt. Then keep frying until it’s crisp. It’s going to be salty enough to make your mouth pucker, but have a saucer of molasses to dip it in (it cuts the salt). Bite the biscuit and take a swig of black coffee and you’ve got good eats.”         My grandmother surprised me at lunchtime. She asked me to catch a chicken and bring it to her. I did. While still sitting in her rocker, with just a few flips of her wrist, she broke its neck and snapped off its head. The headless chicken went flying and flapping in the yard. I kept my poise and did not freak.           “Don’t just stand there,” she said, “put some hot water in the tin tub and soak that bird until the feathers come off.” Pulling the smelly feathers from the chicken almost made me gag, but my ordeal was not quite over. Grandma gave me a sharp knife and told me

how to cut up the chicken. Finally, after I got rid of the feathers and guts, my grandmother cooked mustard greens, made mashed potatoes, and fried the chicken. I ate until I was as fat as a tick.  During the lull after the meal, my grandmother looked at me and smiled. She said, “You come down here by yourself, you did what your grandmama told you to do, helped fix the food, and was only half crazy. I guess you thinks you a man now.” There was a pause. “Well, you is.” I will always remember when I became a man in 1948. —Herbert Johnson is a 71-year-old resident of Basilica Place. He loves to read, eat out, and go to Center Stage. His hometown is Cleveland, but he loves living in downtown Baltimore.

I set the alarm so that I can rise and

witness the conditions of light at 6:45 a.m., exactly two years after the fact. Maybe then I can answer my 4-year-old grandson’s question, which he repeats again and again, “How could the driver not see you?” His hands ball into fists. Each time he asks, I cry. Sitting in darkness on the edge of my bed, I wait for the exact time, periodically looking out the window. It’s still dark out; cars speed along the street with headlights on, and street lamps are on. That intersection was fully lit two years ago. The driver should have seen me as I began to cross Charles Street at Cold Spring Lane on foot. The radius cast by headlights must have grown menacing and distorted like fireballs with each revolution of the wheels until speed, metal, and sound were upon me. Since December 9, 2004, my full-time job has been to heal and restore function to my legs. So how did it come to this, my own private 9/ll? The one paragraph scribble of police report leaves much unanswered. Then there’s me. She doesn’t remember, people say. Whatever the driver says, that’s how it was. Though I witnessed it, I can’t testify. Yet there’s lingering proof: the ramp at my door, the cane I walk with after extensive therapy, and three orthopedic surgeries. At times I think of memory as a register of deeds that records conscious experience for posterity. But trauma, medications, and attending complications blocked that entry for me. Or the deed was never recorded. It sneaked up on me before I got a look at the culprit. How did I incur such a catastrophic loss? I want to remember. If the crash hides deep within me, it will resurface when I’m strong enough to relive its horror. Perhaps I’ll encounter the driver again—though not on the road, please—and his face will trigger recognition. I must have seen it, heard his voice. They say he was nice, that he stopped and called for help. Maybe he checked my pulse mid-street, and said something like, “Try to keep still.” ■

—Teresa M. Elguezabal lives and writes in Baltimore. She spends time with her family and continues in physical rehabilitation post-injuries.

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d i f f e r e n c e

CORKBOARD CORK Improv Comedy The Baltimore Improv Group is holding its first-ever Improv Festival. Committed to all things off-the-cuff, the festival showcases some of the funniest East Coast talent, including the Upright Citizens Brigade Touring Company, which achieved notoriety with its Comedy Central television series.

Theatre Project, 45 West Preston Street Aug 2 and 3, 8 p.m.; Aug 4, 7 p.m., 8 p.m., and 10 p.m. Tickets range from $5 to $15; call 1-888-745-8393 or go to www.brownpapertickets.com www.baltimoreimprovfestival.org

Blues on the Bay Dust off your black suit and shades and head to Sandy Point State Park in Annapolis for the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival. Since 1998, legends such as James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and John Lee Hooker have made the festival a stop on their summer tours. The same star power will shine this year when Aretha Franklin, Otis Taylor, and Buddy Guy take the stage.

1100 East College Parkway, Annapolis Aug 4 and 5 10:30 a.m–8 p.m. One-day pass $50 in advance; two-day pass $90 in advance Go to www.ticketmaster.com or call 1-800-551-SEAT for ticket information www.bayblues.org

Jazz in the City Some view jazz as America’s greatest contribution to the arts. Now Baltimore has its own festival featuring the music we can call our own. Earth, Wind & Fire, B.B. King, Etta James, and Al Green are among the list of performers at the first-ever PAETEC Jazz Festival Baltimore.

Pier Six Concert Pavilion 731 Eastern Avenue Aug 9–11 Tickets $49–$135 Tickets available online at www.ticketmaster.com Go to www.paetecjazz.com for performance schedule

The Spookiest Show on Earth Hunt Valley’s calm gives way to frightening howls and blood-curdling screams during the eighth annual Horrorfind Weekend. The horror convention will attract imps and ghouls from across the country for film screenings, book signings, a haunted house, and scaryoke.

Marriott Hunt Valley Inn 245 Shawan Road Aug 10–12 Go to www.horrorﬁndweekend.com for admission prices and hours 443-465-0645

John Waters Marathon Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse Cinema takes the drive-in concept to the extreme with outdoor screenings of famous films in famously appropriate places. Baltimoreans can see four John Waters classics— Hairspray, Polyester, Desperate Living, and Pink Flamingos—in one night here in Charm City.

Aug 10 8:30 p.m. See website for location Free www.originalalamo.com

Cookin’ and Cruisin’ Summer in Baltimore just isn’t complete without some time spent on the water and some time spent enjoying good old Maryland crabs. This summer, learn to make crab cakes à la Phillips: The acclaimed Maryland restaurant chain is now offering Cooking Lunch Cruises, during which you can learn Phillips’ secret recipe while sailing aboard one of Baltimore Harbor Cruises’ boats.

561 Light Street Aug 17 12 p.m.–2:30 p.m. $42.90 per person 410-727-3113 www.harborcruises.com/phillips.htm

Photo credits from top to bottom: photo by Andrea Kostin; illustration by Take-One Digital; photo by Anthony Montes De Oca/2006; photo by Aaron Rutten/Dreamstime.com; photo by Marshall Fowler; photo by Winthrop Bookhouse/Dreamstime.com

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have you heard . . .

compiled by lionel foster

Wine Trail … courtesy of Linganore Wine Cellars

Even Maryland natives may not know that Frederick County is a hotbed of wine activity. The Frederick Wine Trail gives wine connoisseurs and novices alike a chance to explore several of the county’s wineries. The five wineries that comprise the trail (plus a sixth that will open next summer) total 120 acres of grapes and account for more than half of Maryland’s wine production. Each one offers guided

tours, wine tastings, and other grape-related fun; and their proximity to each other makes it possible to visit several sites (or all of them, if you’re feeling ambitious) in one trip. Go to www.frederickwine trail.com. —Lionel Foster

Cafe and Gallery … Located one block north of the Charles Theatre, Station North Arts Cafe Gallery is one of the newest additions to the officially designated arts district from which it takes its name. Co-owner Kevin Brown, a public relations consultant with a passion for the arts, has created a tasty mix of food and art. Breakfast dishes like Triple Thick Cinnamon French Toast with maple syrup and lunch items such as grilled panini are available all day. Works by local artists line the walls of the three gallery rooms. The

Station North Fine Craft Gallery one floor down is separately owned, but the relationship between the two businesses is symbiotic: Brown and coowner William Maughlin enthusiastically promote the craft gallery’s artists on their website. Open Mon–Fri 7 a.m.–3 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.–6 p.m. 1816 North Charles Street; 410-625-6440; www.station northarts.com. —L. F.

h Kaye Mba photo by La

Frank Lloyd Wright House …

courtesy of Polymath Park Resort

If you’ve ever wanted to spend the night in a house designed by a famous architect, you’re in luck. Duncan House opened in June, making it the sixth Frank Lloyd Wright House in the country open to the public for overnight stays. Named for its original owners, Duncan House was initially situated in Lisle, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The red-roofed Usonianstyle house is one of the few remaining examples from a series of Wright’s prefabricated homes. The original pieces for the house were cut fifty years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, and, more recently, carefully

disassembled for the trip to Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Duncan House is near two other famous Wright creations, Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob. $385 covers one night’s accommodation for up to three people ($50 more for each additional person) and provides full use of the home’s three bedrooms and access to the private resort’s amenities. There is a two-night minimum requirement. Go to www.polymathpark.com. —L. F.

Have you heard of something new and interesting happening in your neighborhood? E-mail your news to Editorial Assistant Lionel Foster at Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com, and you may see it appear in a future issue.

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have you heard . . . Gelato …

photo by Lindsay MacDonald

Pitango Gelato founder and owner Noah Dan is picky. The pistachios he imports for his pistachio gelato are harvested once every two years on trees just a few miles from an active volcano in Sicily. He uses milk produced by a single herd of grass-fed cows living on a Mennonite farm in Pennsylvania. He uses only fresh fruit. “It’s a challenge,” he admits, but worth the trouble to reacquaint dairy dessert lovers with quality ingredients. Even in the short

time he’s been open (since May), he’s noticed a few distinct characteristics of his clientele: “We attract people who care about what they’re eating, and people with curiosity.” Dan’s approach has been so successful that he’s already planning a second location in Washington, D.C. 802 South Broadway; 410702-5828; www.pitangogelato.com. —L. F.

Yoga … Baltimore Yoga Village combines an ancient Indian tradition with grassroots community building. Indeed, husband-and-wife owners Pradeep and Anjali Teotia would argue that the two elements are really one and the same; their stated mission is to “build on the strength of each individual to create a supportive and peaceful community.” After teaching yoga in the public school system, gyms, nonprofits, private homes, and businesses, the couple has been putting the best of what they know into their own studio in Hampden. The majority of classes are walkin sessions, catering to all skill levels and ages. For $8, the one-hour community yoga sessions introduce

novices to the basics. Prenatal and Itsy Bitsy Yoga cater to pregnant women and moms’ tiny companions. Family dance and several programs that combine music performance and instruction round out the offerings, fulfilling the couple’s dream of developing a vibrant community center. Join them on August 3 and 10 for two concerts by Hasu Patel, one of the few world-renowned female sitar players. 3000 Chestnut Avenue, Suite 15; 410-662–8626; www. baltimoreyogavillage.com. —L. F.

courtesy of Constellation Books

Books ... When an astronomer set her sights on life after the Hubble Space Telescope project, the result was Constellation Books. Opened in May, Constellation is one of the latest additions to Reisterstown’s historic Main Street and the only bookseller on the cozy, pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare. Owner Lauretta Nagel’s six thousand titles include westerns, mysteries, children’s lit, history, poetry, home and garden, and, of course, science fiction. The store frequently hosts book signings for a diverse array of literary and nonfiction writers from Maryland and

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other parts of the country. Nagel facilitates onsite book club meetings and book launch parties and hopes to soon host wine tastings and CD-release events for local singer/songwriters. Although the store’s small sign (a bigger one is in the works) makes Constellation an elusive target for first-time visitors, Nagel gives guests plenty of reasons to keep coming back. 303 Main Street; 410-833-5151; www. constellationbooks.com. —L. F.

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food

by mary k. zajac

photography by steve buchanan

A Peach of Cake Baltimore’s sweet summer treat has been made for decades with the bounty of Maryland’s orchards

There are certain edible treats Baltimoreans come to expect during the summer—fried soft crabs, Silver Queen corn, icy cold snowballs with sticky marshmallow topping—but perhaps none is as anticipated by the sweet-toothed as peach cake. Mention peach cake to Baltimoreans (as I did at a party recently), and you’ll get boasts of which local bakery makes the best or memories of peach cakes past (“Remember in the ’60s,” one enthusiast reminisced, “when you could get a slab of peach cake at Hergenroeder’s on Hamilton Avenue for twenty-five cents, and when you picked off a peach, it left an indent in the cake?”). For the uninitiated, peach cake is a local treat bearing no resemblance to the iced layer cakes that mark birthday celebrations. Instead, try to imagine something like a rectangular peach pizza where, instead of tomatoes and cheese, you find sliced or quartered peaches and a sprinkling of sugar or brush of simple syrup on sweet raised dough. Come mid-July, when freestone peaches (peaches whose flesh separates easily from the pit, as opposed to stubborn cling peaches) are ripe and ready for harvest, glazed squares of peach cake appear behind the

glass counters of Baltimore’s historic bakeries, only to disappear toward mid-September when the peach season ends. Like other local bakers, Sharon Hooper, owner of Hoehn’s Bakery in Highlandtown, speculates that the origins of peach cake are most likely German, one of the culinary remnants of the city’s early immigrant history. As we talk, we sit on the broad, immaculately scrubbed wooden work counter in the back of the bakery her grandfather, William Hoehn, a German immigrant, opened in 1927. Hooper has made peach cake at Hoehn’s for more than thirty years (and, for the last twenty, with the help of her cousin and business partner, Louis Sahlender). Using her grandfather’s recipe for the sweet raised dough that is the base for peach cake as well as for doughnuts and buns, Hooper begins by measuring out the sugar, salt, and shortening into a well-used scale whose surface has the texture of dry elbows. Experience enables her to forgo the scale and freehand the amount of flour she needs for the dough (the amount varies based on the temperature or the amount of humidity in the air), which is then

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urbanite august 07

mixed in an ancient mixer. “Everything here but the pan washer is old,” she jokes. “Up until last year we had a rotary telephone.” Hooper points to the counter on which we are sitting. “Louis rolls out the dough here,” she says, and once it’s rolled out, the dough is brushed with raspberry jam (“It adds color and keeps the peaches from sliding all over the place,” Hooper explains.) and left to proof (rise). Then quartered peaches are placed gently on the dough, followed by a sprinkle of sugar, and the cake is ready to bake in the same massive brick oven Hooper’s grandfather used. When the cake is removed from the oven, Hooper sprinkles it with more granulated sugar and gives it a light wash of simple syrup to which a little orange pulp has been added. “And that’s it,” Hooper says with a grin. “There’s nothing special about our peach cake,” except that so few bakeries make it anymore. But of the ones that do, including New System Bakery in Hampden and several in Northeast Baltimore, the same basic recipe prevails, with only a few variations. Other bakeries forgo the raspberry jam; Fenwick Bakery on Harford Road in Parkville uses brown sugar instead of granulated in the topping.

Weber’s Farm in northeastern Baltimore County peels and slices peaches from their own orchards and sprinkles them with cinnamon, while Gardenville’s Woodlea Bakery tops off their cake with a peach glaze. But all bakers agree that the crucial ingredient to successful peach cake is local freestone peaches. Sharon Hooper swears by the Red Havens and Lorings she buys from Bill Harris and Peggy Campanella of Harris Orchards in Lothian, Maryland. “You bite into one of [Harris’] peaches and the flavors are just so complex,” she explains, “and they’re dark red in the center, so they’re really beautiful.” Harris Orchards’ peaches have won top prize at the Maryland State Fair for ten years. Harris credits the orchard’s success with peaches to the excellent soil in southern Anne Arundel County, the great care he and his partner take in maintaining the trees, and the fact that when the peaches get to market they are literally right from the tree. “The peaches are pretty much picked the day before we sell,” Harris explains. “We leave them on the trees until the very last minute. They are truly tree-ripened peaches.” That ripeness is what leads to a perfect peach’s velvety texture, he adds. All that effort is appreciated by baker Sharon Hooper. “If the peach is hard, you can bake it ’til the cows come home, and it’s still gonna be hard,” she says. “If it’s not a perfect peach, the cake’s not going to taste right, and it’s just not worth it.” ■ —Mary K. Zajac is a regular contributor to Urbanite’s “Food” department. Have you enjoyed Baltimore peaches or peach cake? Share your memories at www.urbanitebaltimore. com/forum.

Recipe You can only get Hoehn’s signature peach cake at the bakery, but you can make a version of it at home. The following recipe was adapted by our recipe tester, Kerry Dunnington, from one published by Baltimore Gas & Electric in the 1984 book Treasured Recipes Honoring Maryland’s 350th Anniversary. If the thought of working with a yeast dough is too daunting, Fenwick Bakery sells sweet yeast dough for $2.75/pound. Please call the bakery at 410-444-6410 to make sure the dough is available.

Peach Cake 1¾ cups white flour ¼ cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1 package (¼ ounce) active dry yeast 2 tablespoons butter, softened ½ cup hot water 1 egg, room temperature 1½–2 cups peaches (about 2 medium peaches), peeled and chopped 3 tablespoons sugar ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon ½ cup apricot preserves In a large bowl, combine ½ cup flour, sugar, salt and undissolved yeast. Add butter and beat for a few seconds on medium speed. Gradually add hot water, and beat for 2 minutes on medium speed, scraping sides of bowl. Add egg and ½ cup flour, and beat on high speed for 2 minutes, scraping sides of bowl. Stir in remaining ¾ cup flour. Lightly coat a 9-inch round pan with cooking spray, spread batter into pan. (Batter will be thick and sticky, but don’t be concerned if you can’t spread the batter evenly; the rising effect will evenly distribute batter.) Top batter with chopped peaches. In a small bowl, combine sugar and cinnamon, sprinkle over peaches. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until double in bulk, about 1 hour. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Bake cake for 25 minutes. In a small saucepan, heat preserves over low heat. Allow cake to cool for 10 minutes. Carefully transfer cake to a serving platter. Spoon apricot preserves evenly over cake. Serves 8.

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baltimore observed

Netscape An urban trash collage speaks volumes

Above: In Canton, a barrier keeps garbage from spewing into the harbor.

by tom waldron

photography by jason okutake

Baltimore, it seems, is filled with litterbugs. Nowhere is this more evident than in the water alongside Boston Street. There, in the heart of rehabbed Canton, an underground drainage stream called Harris Creek empties into the Harbor, enormous pipes spewing out water collected over 1,200 acres on the city’s east side. After every rain, the small basin fills up with an impressive, multi-colored array of trash—thousands of empty bottles, cans, Styrofoam cups, chip bags, candy wrappers, and old diapers. Dig deeper and you’ll find countless cigarette butts, hypodermic needles, clothes, condoms, and, heartbreakingly, more than a few rubber balls that bounced down Ellwood Avenue or Oliver Street, before dropping into a sewer. Aside from the smell, it is a beautiful urban collage.

Not long ago, such trash littering the streets of Baltimore would have washed into the storm drains with every rain shower, flowed into the city’s creeks and streams and then poured into the Harbor. Now it collects alongside Boston Street because of a new trash-collection system installed in the spring of 2006. Four twelve-foot-long trash nets are suspended in the water under a floating collection platform. An arcing plastic boom is designed to catch the trash and funnel it into the collection nets. But due to its design limitations—and the sheer volume of trash that flows out of the storm sewers—trash routinely overflows the boom and fills the holding area inside a second, outer boom. After major rainstorms, a crew of Baltimore Public Works employees must row through the mess and use big nets to scoop up the trash—a chore that can take days for a crew of three or more. While im-

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“We’re a bunch of pigs,” Phillip Lee says. And he should know. Nobody has paid more attention to the trash nets than him. “We’re a bunch of pigs,” Phillip Lee says. And he should know. Nobody has paid more attention to the project than Lee, a professional civil engineer in Canton and a board member of the Baltimore Harbor Watershed Association. Three similar trash-net collection systems are now in place around the city—Harris Creek, on Gwynns Falls in Carroll Park, and near Alluvion Street just south of M&T Bank Stadium. A more prominent one is planned for the middle of the Jones Falls later this year, giving tourists and locals an up-close view of the trash-collection effort. Along the Promenade in Canton, nets collect litter from Baltimore’s creeks and drainage systems as they join the Harbor.

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And visibility of the trash nets is key. After all, Lee is the first to acknowledge that the trash nets do not solve the littering problem. They do, however, provide a stark demonstration of the extent of the problem. “You bring people to the trash collector and they see all this debris and they’re shocked,” he says. The nets work at one end of the trashdisposal system. Reducing litter will require other steps. One of the most promising would be a bottle and can deposit law for Maryland. Now in place in eleven states, such laws require consumers to pay an extra deposit (typically between five and fifteen cents) on each container they purchase. When they return the containers (typically at a grocery store, liquor outlet or redemption center), they get their deposit back.

States with bottledeposit laws have seen their bottle litter reduced by at least seventy percent. The Baltimore Harbor Watershed Association pushed for a deposit law in Annapolis this year—the first time the idea has been considered in fifteen years. Del. Peter A. Hammen, whose district includes Canton (and the Harris Creek trash collector), sponsored the legislation. But the bill ran into strong opposition from the bottling industry and beverage companies and died in a House committee. Evidence strongly suggests that a bottledeposit law would lead to a cleaner Baltimore. On average, states with such laws have seen their bottle litter reduced by at least seventy percent, according to a variety of studies. Lee will keep working for the bill’s passage, but he would like to see a long-term educational initiative to teach young people about trash. “You really have to change the culture for kids in grades K through 12,” Lee says. “Maybe in ten years we can reduce that sixteen tons of trash to ten tons. But that doesn’t solve the problem. All we’re doing is picking up after people.” ■ —Tom Waldron is a freelance writer and the author of Pride of the Sea. Do you have any ideas about how to deal with the city’s trash? Tell us about them at www.urbanitebaltimore. com/forum.

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Having Their Say

Storytellers take to the stage and bring the audience into their worlds

Above: The storytellers and their hostesses, clockwise from top left: Jessica Henkin, Diane Finlayson, Asa Keiswetter, Laura Wexler, Hannah Feldman, Mick the Pirate, Joanne Juskus, and Andre Miller

“I’ve been a dyke for a long time,” says Asa Keiswetter. He stands on the well-lit stage at the Creative Alliance, in front of a microphone stand. His hair is cut close to his head; he has a stocky build and wears a muscle tee and knee-length shorts. He doesn’t look like a dyke. In fact, he looks like a twentysomething male, which he is—now. Since October, Asa has been taking male hormones. He is in the process of transitioning from female to male, a transformation that is never easy. It’s been particularly confusing for him. For years, Asa was easily pegged as a lesbian. “When I walked down the street, people would say, ‘Oh, there’s a dyke.’ That’s just how it was. I’ve never been able to be not out.” But now that Asa looks so convincingly male, he can’t be readily identified. “Now that I look like a guy, when I say I have a girlfriend people think I’m straight—or they think I don’t know I’m gay,” he says. At this, the audience laughs uproariously. Their laughter fills the entire theater, and Asa joins in.

Moments like these are common at The Stoop Storytelling Series, in which Asa is a participant. The series, created and hosted by Style magazine senior editor Laura Wexler and improv theater veteran Jessica Henkin, has become known for the camaraderie that the participants and the audience create, through the simple act of sharing their stories. On this June evening (the eighth since the series launched), as at each Stoop, seven storytellers get seven minutes to tell a true story that falls under a theme. The storytellers are chosen ahead of time— Laura and Jessica seek some out; others just fall into their laps—and they do one formal rehearsal with the whole group (the hosts discourage storytellers from writing down their tales, but recommend verbally practicing). Also, three audience members are given three minutes each to tell a completely off-thecuff story. “I have always been into the empowering aspect of telling your own story,” says Laura. “We believe in the process of figuring out what the story is, and

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what story from your life is worth telling.” Tonight’s theme is “(Re)Creation Stories: Tales about Crisis, Change, and Rebirth.” The six storytellers (one couldn’t attend the performance due to a family emergency) run the gamut—hot sauce purveyor Mick the Pirate, Baltimore magazine senior editor Hannah Feldman, singer/songwriter Joanne Juskus, A&E series Random 1 cocreator and costar Andre Miller, and WYPR radio host Diane Finlayson. They sit next to the stage, their chairs positioned diagonally so they can see both the audience and their fellow storytellers; onstage is that single microphone stand, with Caleb Stine and the Brakemen, the official Stoop band, sitting with their instruments in the background. Before the show begins, Laura and Jessica take the stage and welcome the crowd. The audience is clearly filled with regulars, people who know what to expect. The mood is upbeat and friendly, fueled by Laura and Jessica’s stage banter: Laura plays the straight man, while Jessica is the silly one, taking easy shots at Laura. One by one the storytellers station themselves before the mic, but to my surprise, they don’t look alone up there. Rather, they seem to be buoyed by the atmosphere. Although some are clearly nervous, they look happy to be here. The crowd is friendly and ready to laugh. (“In New York,” says Jessica, “audiences

are stingy; it’s hard to get laughs. Baltimore in general has gracious and warm audiences.”) And although the stories are often funny, they are just as often terribly sad (and sometimes the audience mistakenly laughs at things that aren’t meant to be funny at all). Although Andre, for example, tells his story with humor and spirit, it is a heartbreaking one. His father, once a champion boxer, started drinking and became abusive to his family after he lost his touch. Andre became the “step-up child,” the one who stepped up to protect his siblings and mother from his father’s fists. Andre describes the turning point in their relationship: “I had had enough, and I confronted him, and he had hidden a knife underneath the cushion of the wicker chair. He took the knife and he went like that, and I didn’t flinch. I looked at him and he did it again and I didn’t flinch. And that was the end of our relationship.”

Telling your story reminds you that you’re alive and that you have connections with others. “There’s so much at stake—that’s what keeps the audience coming,” says Laura. True—these stories revolve around the basics: Who am I? How do I express that? And to whom do I express it? Back on stage, Asa continues his story. He describes a recent decision to befriend a young woman in his anatomy and physiology class. “I kind of have to tell her who I am, right? I think I do. In order to be her friend, I think I have to tell her.” So, he says, “We’re watching the teacher present the reproductive system”—here, the audience erupts into laughter again—“and I write a little note and it says, ‘Amy, I’m not just an effeminate guy. Six months ago I used to be a girl. I’m transgendered.’” The girl, though initially confused, was unfazed by the revelation. And Asa got a little closer to figuring out one piece of his puzzle. “I guess what I’ve decided is that I’m going to tell the people who are important to me who I am. I don’t want to be someone who has

a big secret. I just want to figure out what kind of guy I am.” And I—I realize—have some things to say about figuring out what kind of person I am. I have a re-creation story too: The first half of 2007 was filled with endings for me—the deaths of a favorite dog, a long-term relationship, and a dear friend. Those months of mourning seemed to drag on forever—but now, I have a new apartment, a new position at work, good friends who support me, another dog, and an understanding of how strong I can be. My story is a good one, I think. I want to get up on that stage and tell it! I’m a little envious of these six. I know they were anxious ahead of time—I saw them pacing and nervously chatting backstage—but now I can see their exhilaration, and I want to feel that too. Laura and Jessica share my feeling, they admit. “For the first couple of shows, we were kind of jealous. When else do you get that moment in life to say, hey, here’s who I am?” says Laura. It’s an attractive opportunity. “Telling your story reminds you that you’re alive and that you have connections with others,” says Jessica. “Why are twelve-step meetings so successful? It’s a claiming of your autonomy, and at the same time saying you are not alone.” Tonight’s show is the last Stoop at the Creative Alliance. Even though Jessica and Laura admit that leaving the cozy and quirky Patterson Theater is heartbreaking, they feel they can’t keep turning people away. (Every show has sold out, many of them very quickly.) Their new home, Center Stage, will allow many more people to attend the events and hear the stories of other Baltimoreans, and perhaps consider telling their own tale—if not at The Stoop, then maybe to friends over dinner, or to an acquaintance at a bar, or in the pages of a journal. “We believe everyone has a story,” Laura says. ■ —Marianne Amoss is Urbanite’s managing editor. The first Stoop of the season, on the topic “Corpus: Stories about the Body,” is September 24 at Center Stage (700 North Calvert Street). Go to www.stoop storytelling.com for more information.

Is there a story you’re burning to share? Post it at www. urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.

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or walk to work. Bike or walk to the grocery store, market, shops, restaurants or park. Walk to school, class or continuing education. Maybe drop by an artist’s studio or have a cup of coffee with a neighbor. The bottom line is – We believe in city living. After all, urban living is green living. Plus, for many of our residences, we reclaim celebrated historic buildings. It adds up to a green way of life. And that’s what Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse is dedicated to – invigorating all of us to approach life with a commitment to doing what’s best for our planet. We are city people.

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urbanite august 07

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urbanite august 07

space

by elizabeth a. evitts

photography by alan gilbert

A dedicated group of Mount Washington neighbors transformed a desolate ﬁeld into an urban oasis

When I was a kid, a large patch of honeysuckle grew along the boxwoods in our yard. Each spring it bloomed around the same time that fireflies began their seasonal light show. My brother and I would pluck the soft petals off of the vine, pull out the centers, and touch the tiny bubbles of nectar to our tongues. In the evenings, the thick, sweet scent of it would travel on the wind and fill our house. My parents’ experience with honeysuckle was much less innocent. They spent countless hours pulling and pruning to keep the invasive vine from eating the garden. Today, I suffer the same fate in my own yard, where the yellow and white flowers have crowded out other plants and trees. I swear if you stop and look long enough, you can actually see the stuff growing. On a recent walk through the Mount Washington Arboretum with my tour guide Dr. Mike Sherlock, something akin to honeysuckle caught my eye. The plant I spied at the arboretum was a little different from the one taking over Baltimore: This one had a more intricate flower, colored an incredibly vibrant coral. It looked exotic, so I was surprised when Sherlock explained that the plant was native to Maryland. In fact, “seventy percent of the plants here in the arboretum are native,” Sherlock says. And unlike that invasive Japanese honeysuckle in my yard, the other thirty percent here that are nonnative get along well with their neighbors, he says.

In car-clogged, heat-stricken Baltimore, it’s sometimes hard to believe that lush green spaces still exist. But tucked in a nook off of busy Kelly Avenue and edging along part of Western Run Stream, the Mount Washington Arboretum is a lushly orchestrated landscape, filled with more than three hundred species of trees, shrubs, and flowers, most of which are indigenous to the Mid-Atlantic. Incredibly, just eight years ago this flourishing nearly one-acre space was an empty expanse of dirt. “The City had to put in new sewer lines, so they cut down all of the existing trees and cleared the land,” Sherlock explains. The community approached the City about making it a garden and, with City approval, began planting a few trees and building raised beds for flowers and vegetables. Sherlock, a pediatrician who lives and works nearby, took a lead role in cultivating the soil and planting new foliage. (Sherlock had become so enamored with tending community gardens that he earned a landscaping certificate in 1997 from George Washington University.) Today, Sherlock is a dedicated horticulturist with a passion for the history and provenance of plants. Each tree, each shrub, each flower has a

Above: An ingeniously designed water system in the Mount Washington Arboretum collects rainwater from a gutter and transports it via this aqueduct. Left: The TKF Foundation of Annapolis gave the arboretum benches on which visitors can relax and enjoy the natural landscape.

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story. As Sherlock leads me through the arboretum, he rattles off the names of trees—red maple, pin oak, Hawthorn ‘Winter King,’ purple redbud. He tells stories about the native oakleaf hydrangea and the swamp rose, one of the few roses native to Maryland. Pointing to a leafy green patch, he says, “These cinnamon ferns preceded the dinosaurs.” He talks about the medicinal uses of the plants and how one particular leaf is thought to have saved the early settlers from scurvy. Passing a modest-looking tree, he says, “Don’t let it fool you. That’s the smoketree. It lights up like a lantern in the spring when the sun hits it.” In addition to cultivating a place for plants and animals, Sherlock and crew also wanted to create a haven for city dwellers. About two years into their venture, they approached the TKF Foundation for funding. TKF is an Annapolis-based organization whose goal is to engender contemplative moments in urban environments. “Our motto is: open spaces, sacred places,” says Mary Wyatt, TKF’s executive director. “We’re about supporting contemplative green space that feels welcoming and inviting to as broad a public as possible.” Wyatt says that the foundation was impressed with what Sherlock had accomplished, and over the years they have given some $25,000 to the arboretum, with the funds going to new plantings and to infrastructure. TKF supplied benches on which visitors can pause and soak in the natural beauty, as well as a journal permanently installed on the site that invites visitors to record their experiences. “This place is a midday antidote to phones and hard drives, flickering fluorescent lights, and gray carpets that don’t show dirt,” a recent entry reads. “I love the way the stems and branches lean out of their confined spaces, reaching every way at once. I love the way a flowering bush becomes a bouquet of butterflies and bees ...” Sherlock and his son, David, who is a carpenter, constructed a natural watering system to keep the arboretum sustainably irrigated. They created an ingenious contraption that pulls rainwater from a nearby house’s gutter, down a hill, and through an

aqueduct that empties into a series of connected barrels. When one barrel fills, it overflows into the next (like filling an ice-cube tray). From there, the water flows into another aqueduct and empties like a waterfall into a watering system, from which the water is circulated back into the pond. Hoses feed water to the field when needed. The water-containment area has a green roof, and Sherlock created a mini version to show visitors how to build their own using shale and hardy sedum. Sherlock and his team share their growing knowledge of horticulture with the public through a regular series of lectures and classes that teaches citizens how to identify and grow native plants. Since my visit to the arboretum, I am suddenly aware of splashes of coral dappled throughout the city landscape. How had I not noticed the abundance of native honeysuckle before? That may be the greatest gift of what Sherlock has created: It is a poignant testament to the simple beauty that surrounds us everyday—and a reminder that we all need to occasionally stop and smell the (swamp) roses. ■ —Elizabeth A. Evitts wrote about natural ventilation in the July issue. Tell us about your trip to the arboretum, or any other green space in Baltimore, at www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.

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V160

your life this is

(and how you tell it) By

BE N E DIC T

or more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why. Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow. Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with

urbanite august 07

CAREY

the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow.

very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy. Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life—and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones. “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity—stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.” Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent. YouTube routines notwithstanding, most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability—to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am—develops across adolescence.” Psychologists know what life stories look like when they are fully hatched, at least for some Americans. Over the years, Dr. McAdams and others have interviewed hundreds of men and women, most in their 30s and older. During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed. In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase. By contrast, so-called generative adults—those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved—tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life—protected, even as others nearby suffered.

In broad outline, the researchers report, such tales express distinctly American cultural narratives, of emancipation or atonement, of Horatio Alger advancement, of epiphany and second chances. Depending on the person, the story itself might be nuanced or simplistic, powerfully dramatic or cloyingly pious. But the point is that the narrative themes are, as much as any other trait, driving factors in people’s behavior, the researchers say. “We find that when it comes to the big choices people make—should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country?—they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not,” Dr. McAdams said. Any life story is by definition a retrospective reconstruction, at least in part an outgrowth of native temperament. Yet the research so far suggests that people’s life stories are neither rigid nor wildly variable, but rather change gradually over time, in close tandem with meaningful life events. Jonathan Adler, a researcher at Northwestern, has found that people’s accounts of their experiences in psychotherapy provide clues about the nature of their recovery. In a recent study presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in January, Mr. Adler reported on 180 adults from the Chicago area who had recently completed a course of talk therapy. They sought treatment for things like depression, anxiety, marital problems and fear of flying, and spent months to years in therapy. At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of wellbeing—who had recovered, by standard measures—told very similar tales about their experiences. They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it. “The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle. The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said. Mental resilience relies in part on exactly this kind of autobiographical storytelling, moment to moment, when navigating life’s stings and sorrows. To better understand how stories are built in real time, researchers have recently studied how people recall vivid scenes from recent memory.

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our town

Dropping in on the folks who make Baltimore Baltimore, six writers collected stories from the streets, playgrounds, porches, clinics, and jails for a sketch of life in our city today art by cornel rubino photography by nancy froehlich

Making Peace

Four decades of war protests By Brian W. Simpson

he white-haired, 67-year-old woman sits in court again, yellow notepad and beach novel in hand. The charge: ignoring a police officer’s order to move as she prayed on the White House sidewalk. Elizabeth McAlister. War protester. Former nun. Excon. Grandmother. Cofounder of Baltimore’s faith-based, nonviolent resistance community, Jonah House. Widow of Philip Berrigan, the ex-priest and “Catonsville 9” leader who famously torched draft records in May 1968. On Friday, June 22, 2007, McAlister chats with friends in Room 100 of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Fluorescent lights throw a sickly blue hue on the wood-paneled courtroom and its burgundy-and-grayflecked carpet. McAlister waits for the trial to begin. The case against McAlister and fourteen others stems from the bitter cold night of March 16, 2007. After a National Cathedral service, three thousand people in the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq protest trudged through rain and sleet to the White House to pray. More than two hundred people were arrested that night for crossing police lines and ignoring orders to move off the White House sidewalk. Many chose to avoid judicial hassles by “posting and forfeiting,” which is like paying a traffic ticket. McAlister and friends wanted their day in court. “I’ve had a few experiences in court,” she says. “I don’t know how many. I’ve been resisting this country’s wars and weapons since the mid-1960s. They add up after a while.” Her longest prison stint lasted just over two years in the 1980s, punishment for hammering holes into a B-52’s bomb-bay doors. At the time, the youngest of her three children was 2 and her oldest was 9. As the trial begins at 10:50 a.m., McAlister seems prepared for the butt-numbing judicial proceedings. She dresses comfortably in faded jeans, brown leather hiking shoes, and a short-sleeve blue oxford. During pauses in proceedings, she dips into her book (Shenandoah Summer by John Jaffe) or slips outside to bum a couple of Marlboros from friends. Except for a few young people, her fellow defendants and supporters are gray-haired and a bit wizened. They come from California, Minnesota, and Texas, as well as Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. They proclaim their message on buttons (“Declare Peace”) and Tshirts (a blood-spouting oil derrick borders the words “Bring Our Troops Home Now”). With an attorney-adviser’s help, they represent themselves. Before the trial, one defendant advised another, “We don’t use the term ‘your honor’ because we’re all equal in God’s eyes.”

urbanite august 07

McAlister’s face is deeply lined, her resonate voice nicotineroughened. She is supremely confident in her opposition to war. “The Jesus we know would die rather than take a life,” she says. But trials still make her nervous. “It’s never routine. We could get some jail time,” she says. “Especially those of us who have a long record.” At 11:45, the tousle-haired young prosecutor, Jeffrey Shapiro, stands and tells Judge Joan Zeldon that all but one of six police-officer witnesses are currently at the White House, where eight hundred protestors are attempting to scale the fence. “It’s a state of emergency,” he says. Judge Zeldon is skeptical, but orders the trial to reconvene in the afternoon. After lunch, the courtroom learns the crowds were protesting the Vietnamese president’s visit, striking an eerily familiar chord for many. The early report of hundreds of fence-jumpers was not borne out. At 3 p.m., Shapiro calls two U.S. Park Police officers, who speak in the awkward syntax of their police reports. McAlister rises to the podium to cross-examine each. She grills them on the night’s events but fails to dent the government case. When she asks a beefy, mustachioed SWAT team commander if he realizes that a vast majority of Americans have “deep grief and/or anger” over the Iraq war, she draws an immediate prosecutorial objection sustained by the judge. Another question prompts Judge Zeldon to tell her, “This seems to be a tangent that doesn’t get you anywhere.” The communal defense is spirited and ardently argued. The defendants invoke higher moral values, the Geneva Conventions, and Rosa Parks. The judge shrugs them off and denies motions for acquittal. By 4:30, after the closing statements, Judge Zeldon sternly addresses the group. “I find you guilty,” she says, imposing $100 in fines each for most defendants. McAlister is unperturbed: “It’s what we expected.” She mulls whether or not she will pay the fine, and says coyly, “I’m taking that under advisement, as they say.” For her, the trial is just another battle in a long struggle. “I don’t know if there’s anything we do that we ever really complete,” she says. “We’ve got gardens and we weed them. And we weed them. And we weed them. What do we do that is ever done? If you’re raising children, you change a diaper. And you change another one. And another one. You keep at it. How do you live faithfully without keeping at it?” As the clerks write up the sentencing paperwork, Elizabeth McAlister heads outside for a quick smoke before returning to the fight.

Playground Politics

Young environmentalists work to save an endangered bird By Susan McCallum-Smith

his guy right here,” says Austin, nudging Mike, “can identify any bird just by looking up into the sky.” Mike Hudson, the lanky 11-year-old founder of the Friends of the Red Knot Club, has shoulder-blade-length brown hair and a sensitive expression, and he wears a T-shirt with a crayon drawing of the plump, rosy red knot bird on the front, his name handwritten underneath. Austin Roth-Eagle, 10, Harry Huntley, 9, and Harry’s little brother, Russell, 7, wear similar T-shirts—only I’m convinced that Austin and Harry have swapped theirs to confuse me; Austin has the tousled, cherubic looks of a boy wizard, while paleeyed, tanned Harry vibes surfer-dude. Russell’s arms are stained indigo from palms to elbows. “Were you painting today?” I ask. Russell stretches his arms out and swivels his wrists as if he’s tightening valves on a submarine. “Yeah,” he sighs, with a tinge of regret. “We got ink for stamps. I just rolled in it.” I meet the members of the Red Knot Club on the afternoon that the GreenMount School closes for summer vacation; it is the hottest day in June. The pupils stagger from the Remington neighborhood school, blinking, into the rippling heat. They clutch science models made from wire and ping-pong balls and art projects shedding glitter and tissue. White labels pinned to their chests declare, “We’re going to miss you!” I trail the boys, sweltering damply, to a large tree whose knurled roots fan out in the center of a small park next to the school. We slip, relieved, into the shade. “The original club actually first met on this spot,” says Mike, touching the bark of the tree, recalling the founding moment of his eight-month-old w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a u g u s t 0 7

campaign to save the red knot. He hatched the idea after going on one of the monthly bird-watching walks in Patterson Park organized by the local Audubon Society. The walk’s organizer, David Curson, had explained that the red knot was likely to be extinct by 2010, unless it was placed on the endangered species list. Mike formed the club to save the bird and raise awareness of environmental damage in the Delaware and Chesapeake bays. Since January 2007, the Red Knot Club members have collected signatures for a petition and helped write or generate more than nine hundred letters to Dirk Kempthorne, secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. (To date, no reply has been received.) The club’s website has received almost one thousand hits, and their campaign has been profiled by the Defenders of Wildlife. Tenacious and nomadic, the red knot migrates an astonishing ten thousand miles every year from the tip of Tierra del Fuego in Chile and Argentina to the Arctic regions of Canada, pausing in Delaware Bay to refuel on horseshoe crab eggs. But, as Austin explains, “People are over-fishing horseshoe crabs to use as bait for commercial fishing.” “So,” Mike ticks off points on his fingers, “one, the birds are not getting enough to eat to continue their migration; two, when they get to the Arctic they get there too early or too late so the food isn’t as abundant. What they eat in Delaware Bay has to last them the rest of the journey.” Russell folds his blue arms and follows the volley of conversation like a spectator at a tennis match.

“The red knot is about the size of a robin,” says Mike. “Or maybe a tiny bit smaller. They have long wings and short tails, though, so they can lift themselves better. And there’s only the slightest difference in the red color. The girls are a bit more cinnamon, the boys are a bit more toward a scarlet shade. The boys are not like bright red like this,” he points at the drawing on his chest, “but more toward an orangey shade, and the girls are a bit more gold-y. Would you say that sounds about right?” Russell nods vigorously. “And the reason they eat the horseshoe crab eggs,” says Harry, “is that they are very high in protein—” “Protein and fat,” clarifies Mike. “So they can last a very long journey. And there was this one I saw, about one hundred and seventy something … grams, I think. It wasn’t even ready to fly yet.” “It takes one or two months to get from Tierra del Fuego to the Delaware Bay and another month to get to the Arctic,” says Harry. “About three months altogether.” “Two or three,” agrees Mike. “They have about three brown speckled eggs,” adds Austin. “And they wait until they get to the Arctic.” “Sounds cold,” I say. “The lower part; it’s not so cold, just chilly.” I write this quote in my notebook, attributing it to Harry, then score out his name and replace it with Austin. “Who made the T-shirts? “Mikey.” “Good idea.” Like a canary in a coal mine, the red knot’s decline signifies more than its own demise, a fact of which the kids have a precocious, instinctive understanding. “We are saving more than the red knot by saving this entire ecosystem—” stresses Mike. “We’re saving the horseshoe crab,” interrupts Russell. “—and every shore bird that migrates the route through Delaware Bay. I’m not saying all but almost every bird does—so we’re helping marbled godwits, whimbrel curlews, sanderlings, dulins, and ruddy turnstones, etc.” He pauses after this impressive recitation. “These are not issues that we have statistics for, but what we’re giving you, it’s close enough.” I ask what their teachers think of them and their club. All the kids make talking motions with their hand indicating that they probably yak too much in class. Still, they have given presentations about the red knot at school, and Harry is convinced his teacher appreciates their activism. “One of the things she likes about me is that I am a great environmentalist.” We laugh. He grins, but insists, “Austin and I are both big environmentalists.”

“Me, too,” says Russell. Mike mentions a friend who had written to President Bush about saving the polar bear. “She got nothing back. Just some letter about being a good student in school or something.” “We had a chess tournament to raise awareness about pollution in the Chesapeake Bay,” Austin says. “Can you all play chess?” The kids nod. “But my sister’s better than I am,” says Mike about Emily, peeping around her mother’s skirt. I frown, nonplussed, at the 7-year-old, blonde child.

Our conversation ebbs. Despite the mugginess, they squirm, antsy, eager for flight. I admire their tenacity. Some of their friends think bird watching is weird and boring but they do it anyway. This new generation is determined to fix the damage caused by my own. Sweat puddles round my feet. I feel myself wilting, I feel myself age. In a branch over our heads, a bird chirps the same three notes relentlessly. “We actually started right here on this spot …” Harry says, breaking the lull. “I told her that already,” says Mike. I’m losing their attention. I don’t want them to leave. I ask them their plans for the summer. “Get more letters sent for the red knot campaign,” says Mike. “There’s nothing interesting going to happen unless my mom lets me go to the Arctic.” The kids look wistfully across the park, kicking the grass at their feet. I release them. They scatter from the base of the tree, whooping and swooping their way toward the swings and a long, hot, childhood summer. I pass Mike as I wade back to my car. He pauses, spins around, and looks up at the sky. To learn more about the Friends of the Red Knot Club’s efforts to save the bird from extinction, go to www.friendsoftheredknot.org.

Journalism by Ordeal

A Baltimore Sun veteran’s forty-year career By Susan Muaddi Darraj

t a celebration commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, David Ettlin—one of the group’s founders—offered the audience these words: “I have proof that time travel exists. There are just two drawbacks— the first is that it goes in only one direction, and the other is that it happens too fast.” For Ettlin, forty is a magic number—on June 1, he accepted a buyout from The Baltimore Sun, retiring from his position as the night metro editor after—yes— forty years. “To the day,” he emphasized when I met with him. He leaned forward in his seat, hand on his chin. “That was a career,” he added with a smile, his blue eyes shining. “Does anybody want to work longer than forty years in the same place?” Ettlin’s career at The Sun assumed many forms and manifestations: He worked “rewrite” for many years, assembling and editing reporter’s notes, as well as writing scut—“filler stuff ”—for different sections. He’s worked the Sunday courts (hearings held on Sundays for people who’d committed crimes during the weekend) and penned weather stories that tried his patience and creativity, as well as edited the real estate section for four months—an assignment he calls “journalism by ordeal.” Many stories have inspired him: There was Inky the Whale, a female pygmy sperm whale that had been found beached on a New Jersey shore and brought to the National Aquarium to be rehabilitated and studied. Scientists at the Aquarium saved her by locating and removing plastic debris from her stomach that had been endangering her life. Ettlin followed the story from its beginning to its conclusion, when a healthy Inky was released back into the waters off the coast of Florida five months after her initial rescue. Many more stories have broken his heart. Early in his career, he covered a fire that broke out in a large, old frame house on Braddish Avenue in Baltimore. As fire crews fought the blaze, it became apparent that four children who had been sleeping in the attic were missing. Ettlin knocked on a neighbor’s door to speak to their mother, who was waiting there to hear news of their fate. He found her in the kitchen, sitting quietly. “She was trying to sip coffee; her hands were shaking.” He said, “I think in her heart she knew that the children were dead.” She calmly gave him their names and ages. “I thanked her and I was backing away when someone came in the front door and shouted out that they’d found the children. She jumped from the table and went rushing out the door, just in time to see firefighters carrying out rubber sheets that had smoking bodies in them. “And I heard her scream,” he added simply, “and I was overwhelmed.” Despite the shock of the event—he went home that night with a 102degree fever—he said, “I survived that night as a reporter. And I thought, ‘Maybe it can’t ever get worse than that,’ but it enabled me to understand what people go through in tragedies, to understand that there is a roleplaying thing that goes on. You are the reporter, and you have to ask the questions.” He learned the job of the reporter: to document history. “If

nobody writes the names and ages of the children who died in the fire, what testimony is there in the world that they even existed?” The story that still haunts him is that of Rita Fisher, who was found starved to death by her mother and others in her household in 1997. The gruesome tale of the 9-year-old girl who weighed only 47 pounds made Ettlin, a toughened reporter by then, break down and cry. “It was one of the most hideous cases of child abuse of all time,” he said. “The mother’s boyfriend had said that the girl had misbehaved, that she’d steal things and they had to punish her. We sent a young reporter to interview the elementary school principal; she came back with a quote that stunned me, that just tore me up. She told the principal what the family had said about Rita, about how she would steal things. And the principal said the only thing she ever stole was food.” Ettlin had to walk away from his desk to compose himself. “That destroyed me. It still does.” It was a rare instance. “I’m in a lot of ways a pessimist, because the world is not a pretty place,” he said. “Look at what happens on a local level. We are so inured to people killing each other that it’s part of our landscape.” Armed with forty years’ worth of gripping stories and a lot of free time to travel, explore, and pursue other kinds of writing, Ettlin thinks he may try his hand at fiction. Having written about tragedy and human suffering from a reporter’s point of view, he will rely on that as he explores fiction as well. “I may have to draw on the ghost of Rita Fisher to remember the things that haunt people.”

urbanite august 07

The Sentinel Standing guard with a helping hand By Lionel Foster

hortly before last Christmas, a 14-year-old boy walked into the Baltimore City Health Department’s North Avenue facility to be tested for HIV. Although approximately 17,000 city residents live with the disease and the STD clinic is just one of the four community health programs housed within the two-story building, the boy’s youth and uncertainty set him apart. He walked through the high, concrete archway, stopped, unsure of how to proceed, then asked the security guard, who doubles as a receptionist, what to do. The boy feared the worst. After having unprotected sex, his health was failing. Four hours later he knew the cause. “When you hear that you have AIDS,” says the security guard, Steave Williams, “death flashes in front of your eyes. I gave him a hug, said a prayer, and wrote down my phone number in case he needed help with anything.” Six months later he hadn’t heard from the boy, but incidents like this don’t stop Williams from helping the facility’s tens of thousands of annual visitors however he can. For two years he’s been the first face the Health Department’s West Baltimore clients see en route to one of four facilities: a dental office, a men’s health center, a family planning program, and an STD prevention and training center. The last area, known to many simply as “the second floor,” is by far the most popular destination. “I see 125, sometimes 150 people per day,” Williams says. “Of that number, a hundred are headed upstairs, and sixty-five will be familiar faces.” But he’s not complaining. “If they’re here, it means they’re getting treatment. I just wish more would come.” He welcomes each client with the same heartfelt greeting—“How are you, my brother? How are you, my sister?”—because he never knows what frame of mind the next client might be in. “I just show everyone good hospitality. It wins.” And there’s a lot to combat. “One man went wild upstairs. He said, ‘I am going to kill myself ’ when he found out he had AIDS. I had to talk him down until the police arrived.” Eight months later, “a woman tried to run over her boyfriend with her car as soon as he stepped out of the clinic. She’d just found out that she’d contracted AIDS from him.” Deborah Ruffin, echoing the sentiments of many coworkers, calls Williams “an angel” and insists he’s “sent straight from God.” Within minutes of meeting him, total strangers divulge their most painful secrets, and his skills have led at least one high-ranking police officer (an officer is always posted upstairs) to request that he join the force. Williams is greatly admired, but after two years, the vast majority of people he meets through his day job have no idea exactly how highly qualified he is. He spent ten years as a psychologist’s assistant at Catholic Charities.

His time at Catholic Charities coincided with a decade-long reign as the International Kickboxing League World Middleweight Champion and a 1997 induction into the World Martial Arts Hall of Fame. Williams grew up the eighth of eleven children in one of the few houses that could accommodate such a large family in West Baltimore’s George B. Murphy Homes. For years before its federally subsidized demise, the densely populated high-rises represented the worst in American urban planning. Williams says he personally witnessed at least thirty murders during his time there. A friend of his, in trouble with area drug dealers, was shot four times in the back during a game of dodgeball. Williams might have taken a similar route if it hadn’t gone against his natural instincts. “I was out with a few of my friends during a stick-up and tried to talk them out of it,” he recalls. “After that, they didn’t want me involved. The deal was, I’d stay in school, and they’d make sure nothing happened to me.” Several years later he graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, then the Ohio Institute of Photography & Technology. When he returned to the city, he took up kickboxing at the Murphy Homes Recreation Center under Leroy “Superfeet” Taylor, himself a world champion. Williams held five different regional, national, and international titles simultaneously for ten years, while defeating opponents in England, Poland, France, and the United States. He lost the world championship belt in 2002 to a 25-year-old from Massachusetts. Williams was 41 years old. He ended up with the Health Department by happenstance when the security firm he signed on with to supplement the income from his kickboxing studio won the contract. Today, both jobs are going well. He’s getting more calls to offer classes in local schools, and his battle-tested calm is an asset behind the desk. He’s happy to be what some would consider overqualified: “I go beyond what the job requires,” he says. “I have to help, reach out, and be of service to my community. If you don’t, they’ll never go right.”

Free Style The front porch as marketplace By Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson

n Charles Village, you could pick up a bowl of Mardi Gras beads, a palm-sized plastic wind-up robot, or a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina while out for a Saturday walk around the block. Such items are not for sale in one of the new trendy shops along St. Paul Street. These things, gently used, grace the front of some Victorian rowhouses, dotting the borderline between porch and sidewalk. They bear no signs or price tags, these mysterious closetclearing castoffs, but are a trashto-treasure community story. “People come here and say, ‘Can I really take this?’” says Lisa Simeone, describing the surprised reaction she gets when she assures curious pedestrians the stuff is free. “The ones who get the most excited are young people who are into vintage clothes or are rhapsodic about LPs. You put it out there and they will come.” A Baltimore resident for twenty-five years and a Charles Villager for twenty-two, Simeone is best known for her mellifluous voice as the former host of National Public Radio’s Weekend All Things Considered and current host of NPR’s World of Opera and the syndicated documentary radio series Soundprint. On this particular June evening, she sits gazing out an open window, barefoot, a glass of wine in her hand. She is stunning, as usual, wearing dangly gold earrings, a lime sleeveless tank, and a linen print skirt. She pets one of her three cats, Pupetto, and reflects on the souls of things. “Some things are too good to throw away, but not nice enough to sell,” she says. “There are lots of tinkerers in the world. And if someone can use something, God bless them.” Simeone’s Giveaway is a sporadic, year-round event, a spin on the urban porch sale in which rowhouse residents sell used things for fifty cents or five dollars. “I’m too lazy to have a porch sale and organize stuff and put prices on everything,” she says. When she gets the lighten-the-load whim, items just appear on the stoop: elegant ankle-strap heels, pots and pans, Depression-era glass, flatware, toaster ovens, tools, Madonna posters, Mozart T-shirts, and old LPs. Increasingly, friends and neighbors are joining her in this curious form of recycling. And there are treasures to be found. After all, Simeone’s personal flair is well-known: Her closets bulge with vintage 1950s Suzy Perette dresses; her umbrella stand contains a parasol trimmed with black rabbit fur; she owns a skirt draped with seven hundred peacock feathers (plumage was bought on eBay; the skirt, custom-made by a seamstress in Hawaii). In 1988, she painted her home a tricolor palette of pink, blue, and cream—a first in the Charles Village tradition of polychro-

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Up to one hour free parking at the West St. garage. Posted rates apply after 60 minutes.

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Amy’s Boutique Artists & Framers Charles Tiles Dan Brothers Shoes Dolce Vita Federal Hill Ace Hardware Holly G. Boutique Ladybugs & Fireflies Le Petit Cochon Light Street Cycles Lucinda Gallery Lucky Lucy’s Café M Vanity Morstein’s Jewlers My Flower Box Pandora’s Box Patrick Sutton Home Peninsula Gallery Phina’s Luxury Linen Poptronics Remember When Resurgam Gallery Shofer’s Furniture Sobotanical The Book Escape The Bottom Drawer The Gilded Peach Tradestone Gallery Vanessa’s Vintage Treasures Vineyard Wine & Spirits

matic Victorian rowhouse facades celebrated in the neighborhood’s occasional Painted Ladies contests. Charles Village, which also includes the neighborhoods of Abell, Harwood, and Old Goucher, was developed in the early 1900s as a “streetcar suburb” in northern Baltimore and boasts a population of more than fourteen thousand today. The area, about one hundred square blocks, houses a demographic blend of races, economic classes, and ages. “There are professionals, college students, and retired people,” Simeone says. Students, in this case from nearby Johns Hopkins University, are always on the prowl for cool, free stuff. “I put lots of books out there,” she says. “It seems a sin to throw away a book.” When clearing out her cellar one day, she found textbooks left behind by a foreign exchange student. “They were in Chinese,” she explains. And they were obscure. These were twenty-year-old textbooks with riveting descriptions of the principles of business management. And they disappeared. Quickly. “That’s this neighborhood. If you put out Chinese books in Roland Park, I don’t think they would go.” Is there anything Charles Villagers won’t take? If belongings are a reflection of their owners—their tastes or values—putting oneself out there isn’t always easy. In the end, Simeone does, indeed, wear her heart on her sleeve. And it can be broken. “There was a jacket,” she says. “A vintage tuxedo jacket, royal blue with black lapels, painted with floral designs in fabric paint. I bought it many years ago—it’s not my style now.” She pauses, remembering the jacket no one wanted. “I don’t know if they just hated it. Most of my stuff will go in ten minutes, twenty minutes, or, at most, I’ll leave it out a couple of days.” But the jacket just sat there, forlorn; she couldn’t bear to see it languish. “I brought it back in.” Simeone’s generosity of spirit is not a license to steal. Some porch furniture, chained down, remains clearly demarcated personal property. The items to be “shared” have their own space: Offerings are usually within arm’s reach of the sidewalk, yet not on the porch proper. “The lip of the porch is just outside,” Simeone says, mapping out the parameters. “You don’t have to walk up onto someone’s porch. It’s a different realm.” These are the unspoken rules of urban etiquette. City dwellers instinctively get it, this line along the porches that is so essential to maintaining private space in a public sphere.

Behind Bars Female corrections officers share an inside glimpse By Karen Houppert

have had some rough days, some good days, some bad days—and some situations where it was harrowing. But basically, I got through it because I’m a survivor,” says Frederica Grant, a tall, elegant, fiftysomething woman who spent a good chunk of her life as the rare woman among a slew of men inclined to hate her; she was a corrections officer for male prison inmates for fourteen years. Today, she continues to work with this same population as a case manager in a Department of Corrections work-release program in Baltimore. “The worst thing that ever happened to me, let me tell you, was one time when an inmate and I had a difference of opinion about his recreation time. He felt as though I should give him his rec when he wanted it. I said he had to take his turn.” Frederica shakes her head. The memory, more than a decade old, still burns her. “This inmate hid behind the door. And when I came into his cell, he took a shampoo squirt bottle and shot me with the concoction right in the chest!” I raise an eyebrow, waiting for the punch line. But she has stopped. That was the punch line. And she is waiting for my expression of horror. We are sitting over a few beers in the Charles Village Donna’s along with Michele Holcombe, a colleague of mine from Urbanite and an ex-corrections officer herself who used to work with Frederica. Michele nudges Frederica conspiratorially, then leans forward, dropping her voice. “Do you know what’s in the concoction?” I confess ignorance. “Piss, shit, and milk.” This time, my genuine expression of horror strikes them as adequate—and they laugh. continued on page 83

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* The FrontPage * A fabled tabloid’s quest for the holy grail: readers by Richard O’Mara illustration by Leah Palmer Preiss

Some years back I was having drinks with my colleague, Art, an uncompromising investigative reporter, who told me about a dream he had the night before. Those were the days, way back in the 1970s, when people in our trade had just started worrying about the future of newspapers and fretting that television would make print obsolete. “The man came on a white horse,” said Art. “He rode right into the newsroom—how he got the horse into the elevator, I’ll never know—and promised us he would make us whole and important again.” Art downed a dose of vodka. “We all cheered.”

Enter Clete Clevenger. From the start we knew we were in for big changes. Clevenger was a hands-on editor who promised to make newspapering fun again. All we had to do was to keep up with him. First off, the paper had to be redesigned; “attuned to contemporary concerns,” was the way he put it. The old book editor, who insisted on paying attention to the university presses, was let go. Clevenger wanted reviews of confessional biographies by drugdependent entertainers, sports stars, political felons. He wanted interesting stuff, with wide appeal, like the new best seller, Cooking from Cans, which got two fat columns on the food page. Next, Clevenger took Sally LaRue off the film beat. Sally had reviewed movies for too many years and was just unable to provide the new, positive criticism Clevenger said the times demanded. He put her on obits. Later, he went after Ferguson, our chief editorial writer. For thirty years Ferguson thundered about strategic choke points, the Yellow Peril, and more recently Islamic Fascism, and other threats to our great American way of life. But Clevenger wasn’t interested in choke points or perils of any color. He said people wanted to read about things close to their everyday lives. He organized focus groups. They told him they wanted traffic lights. Ferguson thundered for traffic lights. Clevenger brought in a new features editor named Harriet Harper from the defunct paper he used to run in Chicago. Harriet wore black suits and thrived on Diet Pepsi. She believed in Demographics. She worked late and revealed a mysterious ability to divide like an amoeba. Before long there were three more just like her, each editor heading a brand new section of the newspaper. We called them People, Accent, and Living. People, Accent, and Living also pumped Diet Pepsi through their kidneys unendingly and were practicing Breatharians. They ran features about important contemporary food trends, like the rage for dry cereal. We learned how to graze. Irwin Pangloss, our garden columnist, denied the divinity of Demographics and retired to a farm where he spitefully grew nonorganic tomatoes. Having gotten the features department in line, Clevenger turned his sights on the news department, where he had detected

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This satire is fictional, and any resemblance to actual events or persons is purely coincidental.

urbanite august 07

more than a little “dead wood,” as he put it. He regularly lamented the absence of an award-winning reporter on the staff. He despaired that we had not won a prize in more years than anyone could remember. So, with that damn-the-torpedoes audacity we came to associate with him, he declared his intention to capture a Pulitzer within three years and put our rag back on the map. You see, there was a time when we counted in the world of journalism. Clevenger promised we’d be a hot paper again. He hired four young reporters from Chicago and had them investigate the state-run nursing homes. The older staffers, aka the “dead wood,” referred to them unkindly as Famine, War, Conquest, and Death. They found a lot wrong among the seniors, these four. They amplified this information into a five-part series. It raised eyebrows, but won no prizes. But Clevenger was determined. Next, he next sent his boys into the state prisons. These they found unconscionably overcrowded, a consequence, no doubt, of the now-departed Ferguson’s editorial exhortations to lock ’em up and throw away the keys. “Zero Tolerance” had been Ferguson’s motto, even before it became chic. A ten-part series followed, ornamented with three pages of pictures, mostly of men staring dejectedly through cell bars. For maximum impact, Scott Mott, Ferguson’s replacement on the editorial page, pitched in with a hard-hitting editorial titled: “What’s to Be Done?” We felt sure we were breaking new ground. Sad to say, despite all these great ideas, circulation slipped. But only a spoilsport would blame this on Clevenger and his innovations. After all, he introduced Social Security Bingo. He brought in a syndicated sexology column by a doctor who claimed to have discovered a remnant of a primitive sex organ in one of his patients. He went on Oprah. Then Clevenger had an epiphany: We began using more color. Some of our hidebound readers criticized this right off. They said we couldn’t keep our reds from spilling into our yellows, and whined that we ran too many pictures of flags and clowns. One letter-writer complained that we had “rouged up the old gray lady.” We all thought that a pretty hackneyed metaphor. After all, this was a newspaper. A business. Didn’t a business have to make a profit? Anybody should have been able to understand that. Clevenger believed in pictures and graphics, and he suspected there were a few staffers, holdouts for the word, who might stand in the way of progress. Maybe he was right. Maybe someone was trying to sabotage him? What else would explain that screwy map of China we ran? There were recriminations on every side. The Graphics Department, in putting in the geographical place names, mixed up the Pinyin with the old style Wade-Giles Chinese-to-English spelling system, and it sure was suspicious that the pedants on the copy desk didn’t catch that. But nobody had an answer as to why the map ran upside down. Surely that was simply an accident? Fortunately, only one reader called attention to this boo-boo in a letter. Somebody will always cavil. continued on page 85

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poetry

c o u n t e e

c u l l e n

a n d

k evi n

Incident

from Color by Countee Cullen

from For the Confederate Dead by Kevin Young

Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me.

for Mr. David King who drove me all over Old Baltimore

courtesy of The Library of Congress

Countee Cullen

who you was driving let you go to the Chauffeur’s Ball— the womens would get dolled up, you know, and we’d go down to the DC—it wasn’t what you did but who you drove got you in.

you just couldn’t cross Such & Such Street. We’d come over here pick peach and strawberries and soon as we carried them back, whites would make us drop them sweet bushels and run. [Laughter.]

Back there then what they call your Inner Harbor was trouble— we named it Hobo Jungle. Blacks Jews Italians Puerto Rican Whites—we all communicated there—

I say I’m a mathematician cause I’d count and know how much steel percentage had to go to the suppliers—had seven white boys under me and still wanted me to walk all over creation to go to the commode. Not me. If someone said a word I’d draw my knife and cause commotion— that’d be the end of that.

photo by Tod Martens

Kevin Young Kevin Young is the author of five books of poetry, most recently For the Confederate Dead, currently up for the Quill Award in Poetry. His third book, Jelly Roll, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has edited four books, most recently the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets’ Jazz Poems, and is currently the Atticus Haygood professor and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

[Silence.] That fence wasn’t there then. Only time you’d see us over here was to caddy. If you were lucky

Dixon. Back then Baltimore had the racial discrimination— but you’re too young to recollect. Not that there were laws and court, so-so, or we couldn’t ride back of streetcars—

I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That’s all that I remember.

Born in 1903, Countee Cullen became one of the foremost poets of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book of poetry, Color, was published in 1925 and established him as a prominent voice on the scene; his second volume of poems, Copper Sun, came out two years later. Cullen died in 1946. The West 136th Street branch of the New York Public Library is named in his honor.

One’d take his stick and jab me in my stomach. I’d call him son of a b all while he was hitting me.

People think this is the last city in the South, first North, but really North starts up at your Mason-

Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

Whenever a group of us coloreds would be gathered, you know, talking, all it’d take is two, three cops to come along and sound us down. The others ran— I’d stand my ground—

yo ung

And the fish, you never seen so many! [Laughs] On the docks they flopped and fought strong as the smell—caught in nets or photographs— strung up between two, three men.

Thanks to Urbanite contributor Freeman Rogers, who suggested that we run these two poems together.

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out

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photography by chijo takeda

Going Out on a Limb Building a tree canopy in Portland—and Baltimore

Above: “The Park Blocks,” a tree-lined area in Portland, Oregon, near the Portland Art Museum and Portland State University

Long before Al Gore published An Inconvenient Truth, before hybrid cars dotted our roadways, and before recycling became hip, a small nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, was planting trees to help save the planet. Friends of Trees, a group dedicated to building community through tree planting, was founded in 1989, the same year that the first President Bush created urban forestry departments in all fifty states. And thanks to the organization’s consistent work over the last eighteen years—done cooperatively with Portland’s Urban Forestry Commission, the Bureau of Environmental Services, and other agencies—this West Coast port city of some 562,000 residents has gained a nationally lauded reputation for its urban “tree canopy.” The name refers to the top layer and widest branches of the larger, mature trees that form a vital umbrella over swathes of the city. This abundance of trees reduces the greenhouse effect, soaks up water to reduce storm-water damage, and promotes energy efficiency by shading homes so less electricity is needed to cool them. Portland, which has successfully planted and maintained hundreds of thousands of trees over

the last decade, stands as a model for older, East Coast industrial cities that are struggling with a host of complicated problems as they work to expand their own tree canopies. Last year, at the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors, Portland and Baltimore were linked as recipients of the Home Depot Foundation’s annual Awards of Excellence for Community Trees and Urban Forestry. Baltimore won first prize in the large city category (populations that exceed 100,000); Portland was runner-up. Both Portland and Baltimore have had rigorous, volunteer-generated tree-planting campaigns, but Baltimore suffers from a more robust set of challenges. Working in Portland’s favor is an outdoorsy, pro-environment attitude. “We’re a progressive city, with a sustainable environmental ethic,” says Friends of Trees’ executive director, Scott Fogarty, a Portland transplant and environmental activist who once battled coal mining companies in his native West Virginia. Also, Portland’s location plays into its environmental dedication. “We’re an hour from the Pacific Ocean and can see the peaks of Mount Hood, the tallest mountain in Oregon,” says Fogarty. “This is a very green, verdant area. People see the

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Volunteers plant saplings in a North Portland neighborhood.

natural beauty and can’t help but feel an environmental responsibility.” Indeed, from its efficient public transportation system to residents who take advantage of bikefriendly routes, this is a town of “tree huggers”—and they’re proud of it. “It comes from the mayor on down,” says Fogarty, who credits Mayor Tom Potter and his predecessors with showing a commitment to green policies in word and deed. “The past three mayors have come out to plant,” he notes. Portland has also instituted growth boundaries in the city code, and is considered a leader in controlling urban sprawl. The city has established an Office of Sustainable Development—something few large cities have done, and which Baltimore is currently in the process of establishing. Portland describes itself as a national leader in recycling rates. Portland wisely parlays its eco-friendly image into a tourist attraction, capitalizing on its value with a visitor’s association logo that features an abstract design of a tree and the slogan “It’s not easy being green.” “We plant on average 2,200 trees a year, and then about 20,000 native plants,” Fogarty says, explaining the city’s greening trajectory. “We plant by neighborhood, relying exclusively on volunteers. We have lunch and turn it into a party.”

It’s a formula that has worked for them. Over the past eighteen years, the organization has racked up impressive numbers: It has planted more than 340,000 trees and shrubs in the PortlandVancouver metropolitan area. Just in the past year, some 2,000 volunteers have collectively spent an estimated 14,000 hours planting more than 23,000 trees and shrubs. The group buys trees from nurseries, offering them to the public at reduced fees. They typically plant non-native tree species, such as Japanese snowbells, considered less invasive in urban forest settings.

“We plant by neighborhood, relying exclusively on volunteers,” says Scott Fogarty. “We have lunch and turn it into a party.” In Baltimore, a similar program exists—the twenty-three-year-old Parks & People Foundation— but the challenges it faces are different, and profound. “We have a harder row to hoe here in Baltimore,” says Guy Hager, who heads Parks & People, “because of our history, and a longer period of

development that has compacted the soils and left them polluted with lead, gasoline, arsenic, and other industrial pollutants.” Compounding this problem is the rainfall. “We have roughly the same forty inches of rain that Portland does, but their rain is more equally distributed over the year, while we have flash floods and droughts.” When the city was built, the implications of burying a vast network of streams beneath hordes of rowhouses was poorly understood. “Now the drains suck the water away from structures, but also the tree roots that need it. “A good ten to fifteen percent of the trees we plant here in Baltimore don’t make it,” says Hager. “And that’s higher than it should be.” The organization helps neighborhood groups plant approximately 1,000 trees a year—augmenting the city’s planting program, which adds another 2,000 to 3,000. Mayor Sheila Dixon has said that she plans to double that number to 6,000 new trees annually. The tricky part will be helping those trees survive. “We have a lot of red clay soil and sand here,” says Hager, “and that contributes to the difficulty some trees have in surviving.” Further, diesel fumes, especially prominent at bus stops and along busy truck routes, are deadly to trees. In 2001, the U.S. Forestry Service did a survey of the city’s trees and discovered that approximately ten percent of the

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urbanite august 07

Where life is a work in progress.

How to tend the sapling in front of your house T

Freshly planted trees line a city street in Portland’s Mount Tabor neighborhood.

standing trees were dead. A year and a half ago, Education is key here—and one of the placthen-mayor Martin O’Malley put an additional $1 es where the Portland populace differs in its attimillion in the budget to help with clearing and pruntude from some Baltimoreans. Occasionally, city ing. “Now the City has a systematic pruning cycle in residents complain that trees are messy (berries place that will make sure every tree has a look-see and leaves clutter the sidewalks). And some once every seven years,” Hager says. don’t realize that trees need care. “We’ve had In March 2006, Baltimore City adopted the “Urpeople leave our training session who say they ban Forestry Task Force Recommendation,” which never really thought of a tree as a living thing, called for doubling the existing land covered with but more like a light post that gets knocked tree canopies from an estimated twenty percent to down—you just put it up again,” says Hager. forty percent over the next thirty Still, both Portland and years. The goal is in response to “We’ve had people Baltimore tree huggers see real greater need for urban areas to changes and are optimistic leave our training better manage storm water run-off about not only their respective session who say that adversely impacts Chesapeake broadening tree canopies, but Bay water quality, and quality of life also the sense of community they never really issues in general. engenders. thought of a tree as tree-planting Parks & People is also work“Every culture across the a living thing,” says world—in Europe, the Middle ing very hard to educate the community about the care of newly East, Africa—has an unmisGuy Hager. planted trees—an essential element takable bond with trees,” Fogato keeping them alive. “Most of the trees planted rty says. “From the earliest times, we have used here are about five years old and their lateral roots their wood for shelter, their nuts and berries are severed when they’re dug up,” says Hager. “That for food, or we’ve rested under a tree. Human shocks and stresses a tree so severely that it takes culture is intertwined with trees.” ■ three years for it to truly recover.” It’s not enough to simply water a new tree for —Donna M. Owens is an award-winning journala season, says Hager, who encourages residents to ist who reports for print, broadcast, and Internet carefully tend the new trees that dot our city’s sideoutlets nationwide. She lives in Baltimore. walks. “You really need to baby that tree for three years to bring it back from its suspended animaHow important are trees to Baltimore? Share your tion.” (See sidebar.) thoughts at www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.

he first three years of a tree’s life on the streets are hard. It arrives in its dirt playpen already severely traumatized: Many lateral roots are severed as it is dug up; foreign soil throws it for a loop. As it matures, problems grow. Kids snap its branches. Bikes are locked to it. Diesel bus fumes suffocate it. To protect your own sidewalk sapling and dramatically increase its chances of survival, take the following steps:

1. Give the tree three to four large buckets of water once a week. Loosen compacted soil so the water penetrates, rather than simply running off onto the sidewalk.

Next time you’re at Home Depot, pick up an extra bag of mulch to put around your tree. It will help it retain moisture over the long, hot summer.

Never box a tree in with stones, logs, cement or any other impermeable material. They prevent vital rain runoff from saturating the tree well.

If you plant flowers around your tree, choose ones that require little watering so that they will not compete with the tree for water. Select flowers that are drought tolerant or that are listed as good for xeric conditions.

Don’t let your dog make this a favorite spot for pee-mail messages—this gesture begets more of the same from four-legged friends, and this is very bad for trees. —Karen Houppert

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recommended

MUSIC

Monday nights in Baltimore can be downright dismal as most restaurants and cultural institutions give themselves a night off. But for those looking to extend the weekend or kick off the week with style, it’s worth a visit to An Die Musik to hear the Peabody Jazz Quartet. Performing downstairs in the bar/gallery area every Monday night from 7:30 until 9 p.m., this group of upperclassmen undergrads plays classics from Coltrane and Miles Davis to smatterings of contemporary artists like Pat Metheny, as well as their own compositions, with a professionalism that belies their youth. Like classic jazz combos, the personnel of the quartet has shifted over the years as students have graduated and moved on. Currently, the quartet is made up of Cam Collins, saxophone; Todd Simon, piano; Blake Meister, bass; and drummer Shareef Taher. Taher describes the group’s cohesiveness as “kind of like a rock band vibe, because the same band plays together every week and a lot of the time that doesn’t happen in jazz.” As a result, he says, “the music gets deeper.” An Die Musik owner Henry Wong is committed to showcasing developing talent as well as established jazz artists, and he compares the excitement of hearing the student musicians grow into masters of their craft to the way fans follow minor leaguers through the baseball farm system. “There’s something special in hearing them evolve and develop their own style over time,” he says, “and we believe in them.” In turn, Taher and the quartet love to play An Die Musik because of the seriousness of the venue and the audience. “There are a million gigs in Baltimore,” Taher explains, “but not a lot of venues to play the way we want to play. An Die Musik is a place like that. It’s not a club where people go just to socialize. It’s a listening place.”

courtesy of An Die Musik

By Mary K. Zajac

—Mary K. Zajac is a regular contributor to Urbanite.

ART

courtesy of Takeshi Murata

By Ding Ren Featured in the Black Box Theater at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden are three short videos featuring psychedelic mash-ups by New York-based artist Takeshi Murata. Cone Eater calls to mind rainbow-colored video games—if they morphed into a pixilated screen saver from hell. Monster Movie features a Chewbacca-like yeti, whose image transforms into fluid

THEATRE

By Stephen Nunns

The venerable Baltimore Playwrights Festival is heading into its twenty-sixth season this month with nine plays showing off homegrown talent at seven different venues around town. Among the offerings this year is the premiere of Stefanie Zadravec’s Save Me. A frank discussion of loss and religious faith, Zadravec’s play chronicles the impending death from a brain tumor of a young woman, Caroline (Carolynne Wilcox), and how it affects her gay best friend, Martin (BPF chairperson

color—as if Murata used a digitized paintbrush to mix pixels directly on the screen. Lastly, in Untitled (Pink Dot), a mini Sylvester Stallone from Rambo points his machine gun at a pulsating neon pink dot, causing it to disintegrate into a liquid blur. Showing that even technology can lend itself to expressive art forms, Murata’s intricate videos will draw in the viewer with their hypnotizing swirls.

Rich Espey), and her born-again sister, Beth (Marianne Angelella). Adding to the complications is Beth’s contention that Caroline should not intervene medically, since the disease is, after all, God’s will. “It’s about people trying to be positive in a crummy situation,” says director Ian Belknap. “But it’s also about the struggles of and limits of faith.” —Stephen Nunns is the director of the MFA in theatre arts program at Towson University.

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recommended

literature By Susan McCallum-Smith

Time to fess up: I don’t select books for this column with the careful consideration P. Diddy gives to his ties. I’m seduced by their jackets, trip over them on my doorstep, steal them from passersby, or, in rare moments of conscientiousness, request the galleys from the publisher. After reading them, I slam them together at high speed in my head and hunt through the wreckage for salvageable parts. This is an accidental column: the critique equivalent of a car wreck. Chuck Palahniuk knows all about car wrecks. He writes of them extensively in his latest darkly comic novel, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, a book whose ravishing cover drew me across Barnes & Noble like a siren’s song. But the cover’s abstract rendering of a human heart hid a heartless interior. After Buster “Rant” Casey dies in a car wreck, his acquaintances reminisce about his life: from childhood obsessions with boogers, spiders, feminine hygiene products, and painting Easter eggs to resemble MK2 grenades; through an adolescence as “a sexually conflicted thirteen-year-old rattlesnake-venom junkie with rabies” to adulthood as a member of the Party-Crashing club (whose associates slam cars into one another for kicks), and final notoriety as mass murderer. I’m not averse to gore on principle, and I harbor crushes on other “bad boys” such as Irvine Welsh, but Palahniuk strikes me as a literary brother of schlock-sculptor Damien Hirst, another precocious artist with an adolescent obsession with entrails and goo. The oral history of Buster Casey is a rant, simply that; it is sound and fury signifying nothing. The oral and epistolary history in Maryland Voices of the Civil War (2007) could not have provided a greater contrast. I tripped over this new release skulking in my garden shrubbery, where it arrived, unbidden, from the publisher. Editor Charles W. Mitchell has compiled a generously illustrated history of Maryland during the Civil War using documents from the time. It layers the voices of shopkeepers and slaves, farmers and clergymen, students and

public officials, to culminate in a powerful depiction of a schizophrenic state. In 1861, Marylanders were deeply polarized in their support for North or South, leading to political and familial rifts that would take years to mend. This ideological tussle led to the first civilian casualties of the war, which occurred during a riot on Pratt Street on April 19, and to Lincoln’s declaration of martial law in Baltimore to protect critical rail and sea routes needed by the Northern forces. Letters written by soldiers and slaves are addictive and sobering; I began reading them while standing at my kitchen table. The keeper of Sandy Point Lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay, for example, described the indignities suffered by blacks during the lawlessness following emancipation. A man, he tells, captured a “Negroe woman, stript her and with a Cow Hyde Lasarated her flesh until the Blood oozed from every cut and She with in a Month of giveing Burth to a child.” Here, Mitchell records gore for purpose and with meaning. My husband found me still crouched over the table sometime later and remarked that we no longer lived in our first flat and therefore owned chairs. The day before I wrecked my neck over Mitchell’s history, I sat in my dentist’s waiting room next to a small boy who was reading Mars Needs Moms!, the latest from children’s author and Pulitzer Prizewinning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. Its back cover had an enticing picture of three slug-bodied Martians with fish-bowl helmets gazing longingly at the painting of Whistler’s mother. I leaned sideways and tried to see inside, but the boy refused to share. I mimed a swap: His glossy delight for my Rant (not the best choice to read at the dentist, it’s true), but the wee sod shuffled closer to his mom, and I was forced to go and buy my own. You’ve got to love a book that you can read in less than ten minutes. Milo’s mother has told him she would die for him, but he is unconvinced. Moms are “bellowing broccoli bullies and carrot-cuddling cuckoos,” and there is “nothing very special about that.” Then, the mommy-hunting Martians arrive, for Martians grow motherless from the ground “like potatoes,” and their society is a muddle of missed soccer practices and runny noses. Of course, the joy is in not simply the text but the cinematic, chuckle-worthy, and moving illustrations: the outstretched tongue of Milo’s bewhiskered orange and white scruff-mutt as it catches the drips off a soup can; Milo and mutt, sleeping butt to butt, the dog’s eye snapping open as a rocket lands in the garden; a harassed mom lured by Martians, “the color of jelly beans,” using Starbucks coffee baited

on a fishing line. Mars Needs Moms! is an ode to parenthood with visuals worth lingering over and a last line evoking To Kill a Mockingbird. Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady (2006), which arrived in galleys from the publisher (oh, organized me), is an ode to childhood—not to its delights, but to its cruelties and betrayals, and the damage it wreaks on the rest of our lives. While traveling toward a ceremony honoring his work, marine biologist Humphrey Clark remembers his childhood friends, Ailsa and Tommy Kelman. When young, Tommy Kelman had been “nondescript, pasty, sly and knowing. He was unformed, ugly, embryonic. But he was as clever as two monkeys and as quick as a weasel.” His sister, the siren-like Ailsa, had grown into an intellectual TV personality; she had “written her name in the sand at the water’s edge, with a big flat blue stone, and then she had written it in lights and in printer’s ink and on the airwaves and on the screen . . . . Her name had spread like an infestation of algae.” Margaret Drabble is the sister of A. S. Byatt, another phenomenal English novelist, and they seem to be tussling over who will inherit the mantle of the great Dame Iris Murdoch. Drabble is an old master; here, she seems to say to younger writers, is how it’s done. Almost every metaphor in her book refers to the sea, the longest sustained allusion I have ever come across during a lifetime of reading. I consider the wrecked remains of these four books on my desk, with their different styles, different sensibilities, and range of literary effectiveness, and I wonder: Why would anyone call themselves “Diddy?” Does he have any idea what that means? ■ —Susan McCallumSmith is Urbanite’s literary editor.

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This Is Your Life continued from page 57

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They find that one important factor is the perspective people take when they revisit the scene— whether in the first person, or in the third person, as if they were watching themselves in a movie. In a 2005 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Columbia University measured how student participants reacted to a bad memory, whether an argument or failed exam, when it was recalled in the third person. They tested levels of conscious and unconscious hostility after the recollections, using both standard questionnaires and students’ essays. The investigators found that the third-person scenes were significantly less upsetting, compared with bad memories recalled in the first person. “What our experiment showed is that this shift in perspective, having this distance from yourself, allows you to relive the experience and focus on why you’re feeling upset,” instead of being immersed in it, said Ethan Kross, the study’s lead author. The emotional content of the memory is still felt, he said, but its sting is blunted as the brain frames its meaning, as it builds the story. Taken together, these findings suggest a kind of give and take between life stories and individual memories, between the larger screenplay and the individual scenes. The way people replay and recast memories, day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story. And as it evolves, that larger story in turn colors the interpretation of the scenes. Nic Weststrate, 23, a student living in Toronto, said he was able to reinterpret many of his most painful memories with more compassion after having come out as a gay man. He was very hard on himself, for instance, when at age 20 he misjudged a relationship with a friend who turned out to be straight. He now sees the end of that relationship as both a painful lesson and part of a larger narrative. “I really had no meaningful story for my life then,” he said, “and I think if I had been open about being gay I might not have put myself in that position, and he probably wouldn’t have either.” After coming out, he said: “I saw that there were other possibilities. I would be presenting myself openly to a gay audience, and just having a coherent story about who I am made a big difference. It affects how you see the past, but it also really affects your future.” Psychologists have shown just how interpretations of memories can alter future behavior. In an experiment published in 2005, researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. Half of the students reimagined the humiliation in the first person, and the other half pictured it in the third person. Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated them-

selves as having changed significantly since high school—much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth. And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene. The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.” Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person. The implications of these results for selfimprovement, whether sticking to a diet or finishing a degree or a novel, are still unknown. Likewise, experts say, it is unclear whether such scene-making is more functional for some people, and some memories, than for others. And no one yet knows how fundamental personality factors, like neuroticism or extraversion, shape the content of life stories or their component scenes. But the new research is giving narrative psychologists something they did not have before: a coherent story to tell. Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become. “The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside,” the writer Joan Didion has said of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her autobiographical play about mourning the death of her husband and her daughter. “I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw.” ■ From The New York Times on the Web © The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.

Our Town continued from page 65 Frederica says she went downstairs immediately to try to clean herself off. “Don’t let them see you cry,” a fellow corrections officer said. “Cry on the way home.” She cried the long drive from Jessup to her house. “I went back to work the next day,” she says. “I had a clean uniform on. I was spic-and-span clean.” Her supervisor offered to move her to a different hall where she could start fresh. She declined. “I worked that same tier that same night.” She sent a message; she would not be easily cowed. “The inmates said, ‘Oh, she’s that kind of person.’”

Frederica, who still works for the Department of Corrections (though no longer in the prison itself), and Michele, who would rather eat shards of glass than step into her old uniform, gently bicker about the merits of corrections work. It’s a debate that I sense they have had two hundred times before, and the only concession that Frederica can wring from Michele is that the overtime opportunities are good, and back in 1991, when Frederica first started working there as a single mother of two, the $21,000 plus health insurance looked pretty good. “This is a good job for someone who has no other options.” This is all Michele will concede. “And it made me hate men.” “It made me look at men differently,” Frederica says. “Oh, come on!” Michele says. “Well, sometimes if I’m out in a bar or something and see a guy who looks familiar, I’m like, Where do I know you from?” When it turns out that their paths have crossed at “work,” the encounter shifts. “They’re everywhere,” Frederica concedes about the ex-cons she runs into on the streets. “It also made me realize that a criminal has no particular face,” Michele says, explaining that they look perfectly ordinary and that is a deeply disconcerting realization to live with. “So everybody you meet on the street is suspect.” “I have a different perspective,” Frederica says. Frederica, her glass half-full, is a fervent champion of education. Education equals salvation. She tells story after story of hardship after hardship in her life, and the protagonist is always education. She married too early, divorced too early, was a single mother too early. She worked at the Stroh Brewery, worked retail, worked the prisons. After ten years of being passed up for promotions, she enrolled at Morgan State and got her degree in 2004; this got her out of the prison and into a nice 9-to-5 job.

Frederica’s faith in education—and the power of books—started early. “I used to stutter badly when I was a kid,” she explains. One time, Frederica’s Baltimore City teacher waved dismissively at her as a librarian approached her. “She said, ‘Oh, she’s retarded, don’t pay any mind to her,’” Frederica recalls. “But the librarian told me that lots of famous people stuttered—Moses, Winston Churchill, Carly Simon—and I should pay no mind to that teacher.” She handed Frederica some books. “‘Here, read these,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to say a word.’” Today, Frederica is enrolled in a graduate program for writing at Towson and it has given her a lens through which to filter her experiences, a way of tidying her life into stories. She tells me one true tale. “Years back, I was at work one night and they brought in a busload of new inmates to be processed,” she says. “And I saw this guy that was an old classmate of mine. “He was the class clown at school—always getting into trouble.” Frederica describes a cruel fourth-grade teacher who would hound her because of her stutter. “She was one of those teachers who was always saying to me, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up! Are you going to say it or not? We haven’t got all day.’ “She called on me this one particular day,” she continues. “I was smart. I knew the answers. But I couldn’t speak. She was zoning in on me, yelling. And this guy, he jumped up right on his desk and said, ‘I have to pee!’—very dramatically to get her attention. Her wrath left me and went to him. She was furious. And he did it on purpose, to help me. He was my savior. “I saw him that night across this crowd of inmates and thought about that. He recognized me, too.” Frederica pauses, a million miles away, and I interrupt her train of thought. “What was he in for?” She shrugs dismissively, as though my question were so naive it barely merited a response. “Drugs. Armed robbery. You know.” She takes a sip of her beer then sets her glass back down. “The usual.” ■

Cornel Rubino is a painter, lecturer, educator, and curator based in Baltimore. His work has appeared more than sixty times in The New Yorker magazine. He can be reached at ladolcevita@ mindspring.com.

Brian W. Simpson is a Baltimorebased freelance writer and editor of Johns Hopkins Public Health magazine. Prior to joining Hopkins, Brian worked as a newspaper reporter in Florida, an editor and writer in Texas, and a technical writer in Moldova.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is associate professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air. Her short ﬁction collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was published this past April by University of Notre Dame Press.

Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson is a freelance writer, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Literature on Deadline (Paciﬁc Isle Publishing, 2007).

Susan McCallum-Smith is Urbanite’s literary editor. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins writing program, McCallum-Smith ˇ also reads for the Baltimore Review and is currently working toward a master of ﬁne arts degree in creative writing at Bennington College.

Lionel Foster, Urbanite’s editorial assistant, is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. He earned master’s degrees in social policy and planning, and regional and urban planning, from the London School of Economics.

Karen Houppert is Urbanite’s senior editor and the author of several books. Her most recent nonﬁction book, Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military— For Better or Worse, about military wives whose husbands have been deployed to Iraq, was published by Ballantine in 2005.

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Not long after that, there were rumors of labor discontent, so Clevenger hired a new security company. He did it without telling anybody. One morning they were just there, in boots and epaulets. Clevenger said he thought too many strange people were coming into the building. It wasn’t professional, he said, to have gamblers, winos, and politicians wandering through the newsroom. No matter that we regarded these people as sources. And anyway, the only wino I remember was Harry Hanover who was running for Congress and had come upstairs one day to give us all campaign buttons. Harry had a certificate of release from a nearby mental institution, which he regarded as documentary proof of his sanity. We were all a little taken aback when Harry, right after we editorially endorsed his opponent, managed to get on one of the local television channels where he waved his sanity document and challenged our own Scott Mott to produce similar proof. The new guards were more efficient than the old crowd, though maybe a tad officious. The first few days I had a little difficulty getting into the building. The guards scrutinized my press card, signed by Clevenger himself, as if they were airport officials in an unfriendly country. Harry Byrnes, chief of the copy desk, lost it one morning, called them all “Huns,” and went home. He got most of his pension. With Harry gone there was clearly a strain on the copy desk and even Bart Bartleson, Clevenger’s managing editor brought from Chicago, appealed for more staff to get out the paper. But Clevenger just shrank the news hole again, to make room for new house ads. They showed a gorgeous young couple in pajamas with orange juice and a section of our paper propped up in front of each of them. The caption read: “Having something substantial for breakfast.” The shrunken news hole lifted much of the pressure off us. Our lunches got a little longer and wetter. After blocking in

the mandatory special feature, Today’s Good News, at the bottom of Page 1 under the smiley face logo, and selecting items for the Celebrity Antics column, there wasn’t much room left for real news (which our new marketing man told us nobody read anyway) and only the most important stories made it in, as shorts. Clevenger, by then, was following the advice of a very wise consultant just hired at a rumored six-figures. He was determined to boost the circulation by enhancing the paper’s street sales appeal. He would accomplish this by making sure every edition had a banner headline on the front page, in at least ninety-point type. On occasion we dipped into the really big fonts, what they used to call “Second Coming Type.” Clevenger was sure bigger was better. Clevenger also told us that since we were putting out this paper for the folks in our hometown, we should look for local angles in every story. Sometimes it was a stretch. “Cousin of Local Woman Drowns in Tasman Sea,” read one of our headlines. I can’t say we were surprised when we heard the news about Clevenger leaving. Strangely, the circulation was continuing to plummet. Dan McPurdy said it had been like going to sea every day in a leaky boat: You knew you were going to sink. It might have been better had we heard it from Clevenger himself. I mean faceto-face, instead of through that note his secretary pinned on the bulletin board, in which he told us he had “done his best to keep us going.” Some of us believed him. The wake at Duda’s bar was not as morose as I expected. Some old-timers came back. Sally was there, and Irwin. They seemed younger, unburdened. McPurdy had landed something on the New York Daily News. I got a feeler from Philadelphia. Clevenger? I heard he had been hired to rescue a failing paper in Idaho—or was it Iowa? Someplace like that. Who cares? It wasn’t a local story anymore.■ —Richard O’Mara spent thirty-two years at The Baltimore Sun as an editor, editorial writer, and foreign correspondent, among other things.

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35 A Peach of Cake Fresh peach cake is available from roughly midJuly to early September at the following bakeries: Fenwick Bakery (7219 Harford Road, Parkville; 410444-6410; open Mon–Fri 7 a.m.–5:30 p.m., Sat 7:30 a.m.–5 p.m.), Hoehn’s Bakery (400 South Conkling Street, Highlandtown; 410-675-2884; open Wed–Sat 7:30 a.m.–6 p.m.), New System Bakery (3400 Chestnut Avenue, Hampden; 410-235-8852; open Mon– Fri 6 a.m.–6 p.m., Sat 7 a.m.–5 p.m.), and Woodlea Bakery (4905 Belair Road, Gardenville; 410-488-7717; open Tues–Sat 6 a.m.–7 p.m., Sun 6 a.m.–4 p.m.). Weber’s Farm sells their own peaches and peach cake (2526 Proctor Lane, Carney; 410-668-4488; open every day 9 a.m.–7 p.m.). Harris Orchards’ peaches and other fruits are available for sale at the Highlandtown Farmers’ Market, held on Saturdays 8 a.m.–noon in the 3500 block of Bank Street through Oct 27; and at the Wednesday Farmers’ Market, held 11 a.m.–2 p.m. through Oct 24, near Eastpoint Mall in Dundalk (7839 Eastern Avenue).

58 Our Town StoryCorps is turning everyday Americans’ life stories into indelible pieces of American history, by archiving them in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. Go to www.storycorps.net. Smith Magazine (www.smithmag.net) offers advice and space to share personal experiences online. To send an e-mail to your future self, visit www.futureme. org. You can request delivery as late as December 31, 2037. For a listing of storytelling events, visit the

73 Going Out on a Limb For more information on Friends of Trees, go to www.friendsoftrees.org. To learn more about Baltimore’s tree canopy goal, go to www.ci.baltimore. md.us/government/recnparks/treeBaltimore. html. Discover how you can do your part to keep Baltimore’s parks and neighborhoods clean with the Parks & People Foundation (www.parksand people.org/programs.html). To find out what it takes to become a National Arbor Day Foundation Tree City USA and see which areas made the list, visit www.arborday.org/programs/tree CityUSA.cfm.

79 Recommended Music: The Peabody Jazz Quartet plays An Die Musik (409 North Charles Street, second floor; 410-385-2638; www.andiemusiklive.com) every Monday, 7:30 p.m.–9 p.m. Cover is $8/ $5 students. Theater: Save Me runs Aug 16 through Sept 2 at the Fells Point Corner Theatre. For tickets, call the theater box office at 410-276-7837. For information on the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, go to www.baltimoreplaywrightsfestival.org. Art: Takeshi Murata’s short films show through Sept 9 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW, Washington, D.C.; 202-633-1000; www.hirshhorn.si.edu).

photo by Alan Gilbert

resources

To read about the Mount Washington Arboretum, go to page 50.

Can Baltimore become a transit-friendly city? Coming Next Month: For September’s “Connection” issue, Guest Editor Clive Rock, director of strategic planning and policy with the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority, joins us as we look at the past, present, and future of transit in the city.

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908 York Road, Towson 410.828.4838 Gallery Hours Mon. Tue. Wed. Fri. 9am-5pm, Thurs. 9 am - 8pm, Sat. 10am - 4pm & Sun. closed

Let our expertise & creativity make your dreams a reality!

www.alexcooper.com 410-665-8887 Phone 888-665-8887 Toll Free info@signaturelandscapes.biz www.SignatureLandscapes.biz

NEOPOL Baltimore’s ONLY smokery, specializing in smoked seafood and meats, savory cheese pies, gourmet foods, smoked seasoning salts and chef’s supplies. Belvedere Square Marketplace, 529 E. Belvedere Square

410-433-7700

burger bistro Burgers, Salads, Wraps, Pastries, Soups The Shops at Kenilworth Towson, MD

410-828-5559

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ywggrealty.com

conklinmerbler.com

410.583.0400 Baltimore metro

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Yerman Witman Gaines & Garceau realtY ProudlY announce the oPeninG of

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cYnthia susannah Barnum

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YWGG Welcomes neW Partners B. conklin & roBert l. merBler, Jr. & associates

JudY dYBa Gri,crs

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andrea Griffin

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THORNLEIGH $430,000 Jane Barton 410-299-0200

POPLAR HILL $1,500,000 Brandon Gaines 410-583-0400

CEDARCROFT $289,000 Rebecca Perlow 410-916-2888

HOMELAND $985,000 Brandon Gaines 410-583-0400

LUTHERVILLE $575,000 Michael Yerman 410-583-0400

RUXTON $3,150,000 Marc Witman 410-583-0400

THE MOORINGS $724,900 Gloria Perkins 443-324-1981

BULLE ROCK $649,900 Shari Otto 410-241-9159

SPARKS/GLENCOE $699,900 Julie Bleuel 443-616-7206

Bare Hills Corporate Center, Baltimore, MD 21209

1113 Light Street Baltimore, MD 21230

timmie taff

443.226.3223

shana Witman

443.226.6038

MEDFIELD $197,500 Renee Reamer 443-744-9610

$600,000 Len Ottone 410-491-1657

BEL AIR/GLENANGUS

FALLSTON $899,900 Len Ottone 410-491-1657

303 S. Main Street, Bel Air, MD 21014

OPENING SEPTEMBER

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At the MAC, every member defines their wellness differently. Be it peace of mind, lower cholesterol, toned abs or more energy, wellness is as individual as the paths we offer to get there. Take your first step toward wellness: join our brand new Harbor East location, opening this September.

NEW TO HARBOR EAST 1000 Lancaster Street | 410-625-5000 | www.macwellness.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m a u g u s t 0 7

photos by Lindsay MacDonald

eye to eye

At first glance, it seems that there are many pleasant things happening behind these translucent panels: birds, bikers, dog walkers, all casting shadows against colored plastic panels. But, no, these figures don’t move. And the panels are not translucent, but painted metal. Michael Owen, a 2004 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, designed this mural for the Wyman Park Bridge over I-83 as part of the Jones Falls Trail project. Initiated by the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks along with the Department of Planning, the combined hiking/biking trail will eventually wind along the Jones Falls from Mount Washington to the Inner Harbor; this leg of the trail runs between Penn Station and the southern end of Druid Hill Park. Anne Draddy, trail manager, rightly feels that bringing art into the project “raises our hopes and lifts our hearts.” Assisting with the project were four students from the Baltimore School for the Arts. Funds for the mural came from a donation from the June 2007 “Tour Dem Parks, Hon” bike ride. —Alex Castro

urbanite august 07

Jones Falls Trail Mural Baltimore, 2007

Michael Owen, artist Assistants: Eleanor Fishburn Zoe Gensheimer Ali Linn Billy Mitchell

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866-211-3781

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