February 2010 Issue by Urbanite LLC

Long Odds on Slots? â&#x20AC;˘ Spring Arts Guide â&#x20AC;˘ The Hungry Traveler Eats the Mid-Atlantic february 2010 issue no. 68

More than a half-century after the end of legal segregation, it still defines how we live in the city. But not for long.

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contents

february 2010 issue no. 68

the race issue 28

keynote: the integrationist

law professor sheryll cashin says that too many of the promises of the civil rights movement have been unfulfilled. so why is she so optimistic about what diversity will look like in the 21st century? interview by marc steiner

the color line

it’s a familiar observation: there are “two baltimores”—one black, one white—and rarely do they mix. except when they do. a case study in race and neighborliness on one integrated block. by joan jacobson

separate lives

thoughts on race and segregation in baltimore, from those who live it interviews by brennen jensen and donna m. owens

white space, black space

don’t call it self-segregation. here’s why african americans still need places to call their own. by lester k. spence

departments

editor’s note

what you’re saying

11 15

this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com: voices: more thoughts on race in baltimore

blurring the lines

heavy metal memory

what you’re writing

creation myth: explaining two moms, in search of noah’s ark, and a pregnancy scare

corkboard

this month: a transit symposium, a fine craft show, and kids’ consignment stuff

the goods: lingerie for the ladies. plus: derby gear, custom skin care, and blown

baltimore observed cashed out

glass

the future of maryland’s slots isn’t a solid bet. by michael anft

home, again

african refugee children settle in to baltimore, by marianne k. amoss

on the air:

a sampler of regional restaurants worth the drive

urbanite on the marc steiner show, weaa 88.9 fm feb 10: the full “keynote” interview with sheryll cashin feb 16: the history of housing segregation in baltimore feb 25: lester k. spence on racial segregation

on the cover:

photo by sam holden

escape the hungry traveler

b y d a v i d d u d l e y, m a r t h a t h o m a s , a n d m a r y k . z a j a c

eat/drink seeds of love

the latest foodie fad: artisanal chocolate by martha thomas

wine & spirits: syrah by any other name

the feed: this month in eating

art/culture: spring arts guide 2010

eye to eye

urbanite’s creative director, alex castro, on raoul middleman

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Issue 68 : Febr uar y 2010 Publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro Genera l Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne K . Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com

Google began as a student research project in 1996.

Literar y Editor Susan McCallum-Smith literaryeditor@urbanitebaltimore.com Proofreader Robin T. Reid Contributing Writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Clinton Macsher r y, Tracey Middlekauff, R ichard O’Mara, Andrew Reiner, Mar tha Thomas, Sharon Tregask is, Michael Yockel, Mar y K . Zajac

By 1998, it had almost 60 million indexed pages.

Editoria l Interns Amanda DiGiondomenico, Brent Englar, Maren Tar ro Design/Production Manager Lisa Van Horn Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffi c Production Coordinator Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer K ristian Bjørnard Kristian@urbanitebaltimore.com Videographer/Website Coordinator Chris Rebber t website@urbanitebaltimore.com Production Interns Tyler Fitzpatrick, Kelly Wise Senior Account Executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan Econ Econsusan@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R . Lev y Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives R achel Bloom Rachel@urbanitebaltimore.com Cour tney Lu xon Courtney@urbanitebaltimore.com Adver tising Sa les/Events Coordinator Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com Book keeping/Marketing Assistant Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com

a lot ca n happen in t wo years.

Founder Laurel Har ris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Ofﬁ ces 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050 ; Fax: 410-243-2115 w w w.urbanitebaltimore.com

At Towson University’s Graduate School, two years is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be. With more than 70 affordable programs, you’ll get the practical knowledge and experience you need to go further in your career, or start a new one. And it only takes two years — sometimes even less.

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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 2010, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved.

Thinking outside.

Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211.

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Urbanite is a certiﬁ ed Minority Business Enterprise.

photo by Talitha Tarro

photo by Lester K. Spence

contributors Lester K. Spence is an assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. His specialties include black politics, racial politics, urban politics, and public opinion. He has published work in Salon, the Washington Post, and Africana.com, as well as such academic journals as the British Journal of Political Science, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Du Bois Review. His book, Stare in the Darkness: Rap, Hip-hop, and Black Politics, will be released by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011. Spence’s essay on racial self-separation, “White Space, Black Space,” appears on page 42. After an unflattering exit from culinary school, Urbanite editorial intern Maren Tarro floated around the restaurant industry until settling on writing about it as food critic and contributing reporter for one of the Southwest’s largest alt-weekly newspapers, Albuquerque’s Weekly Alibi. While at the Alibi, Tarro reported on the city’s ever-emerging restaurant scene as well as other local issues. When her husband took a job in the Baltimore area in 2009, she left behind her New Mexico life of raising chickens in a small mountain village; she’s now busy exploring her new home. This month, she mapped the dining geography of the Mid-Atlantic for “State Fare” (p. 48). “Apparently, there’s more to food in Maryland than crab cakes,” Tarro says.

editor’s note

So, have we transcended race yet?

Ask Harry Reid, the Nevada senator who, at press time, was still struggling to explain away a cringe-worthy observation he made in 2008 about “light-skinned” then-candidate Barack Obama’s non-use of “Negro dialect.” Or ask Michael Steele, the former Maryland lieutenant governor, who jumped at the opportunity to distract critics of his own gaffe-laden chairmanship of the Republican National Committee by crying double standard over the lack of lefty outrage about Reid’s alleged racism. Remember Trent Lott’s career-ending thumbs-up to segregationist Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential run? Wasn’t that just as bad as using an anachronistic racial modifier? Of course, this is the same modifier that conservative icon William F. Buckley was cheerfully using in print as recently as 2004. But don’t get me started. Argh—too late. Post-racial America might not need one more white guy opining about what skin color does and doesn’t mean, but I’m reporting for duty anyway, joining my pale brethren in the national conversation about exactly when talking about race becomes racism. It’s a worthy question, even if our attempts to answer it often lurch toward the unintentionally comic. Or the intentionally comic: In “Is This Racist?” a monthly podcast on the local webzine Beatbots (www.beatbots.com), the two provocateurs on our cover this month, Emily Slaughter and Mickey Freeland, play racially loaded pop songs and then discuss whether they officially cross the line. Is Cher’s “Half Breed” racist if Cher herself is part Cherokee? (“It’s hard to tell,” Slaughter notes, “because it’s such an awesome song.”) Slaughter is one of the many Baltimoreans who offer personal thoughts on race in this issue (“Separate Lives,” starting on p. 35, with many more online at www.urbanitebaltimore. com). This special Urbanite issue, which was supported in part via a partnership with Open Society Institute-Baltimore, is an effort to figure out what a military strategist would call the “ground truth” on race relations in town: the reality behind the apparent physical and psychological separateness of different racial communities. Going into this endeavor, I had my own assumptions—hell, let’s call them prejudices—about this self-evident self-segregation: The Baltimore that I experience daily is a divided city, a maze of racially homogenous neighborhoods and mutually suspicious social worlds sharply demarcated by color and class. But, perhaps not surprisingly, the story that emerged was more complex. Veteran housing reporter Joan Jacobson, tasked to hunt down the mythic stable-and-integrated Baltimore block, returned with a detailed snapshot of post-white-fl ight East Baltimore (“The Color Line,” p. 32) that might offer a glimpse of the multiracial city of the future. Lester K. Spence, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, explains why racial separateness can sometimes heal instead of harm (“White Space, Black Space,” p. 42). And Georgetown Law School professor Sheryll Cashin, author of The Failure of Integration, talks about why, despite decades of public policy futility, she’s optimistic about urban America’s multiracial prospects (“The Integrationist,” p. 28). Her optimism may be contagious. In mid-January, a new nationwide Pew Research Center survey on race revealed a veritable surge of positive vibrations: More than half of black respondents see a better future ahead, despite the country’s economic woes; even more encouragingly, there’s convergence in black and white perceptions of shared values and living standards. (But not, sadly, actual living standards—that race gap is actually growing.) Much of this can be ascribed to the election of Barack Obama last year, but something else may be at work as well—a historic reckoning with the progress America has made since the civil rights era, despite alltoo-frequent reminders of the distance left to go. —David Dudley

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what you’re saying

the big freeze As a supporter of curbside and backyard composting, a few words in defense of “the bucket” lurking in the kitchen (“The Greatest Thing Since …” January). A friend told me of a solution he developed: keep your compost bucket in the freezer. No more fruit flies, moldy science projects, or stinky smells! Now, those curbside rats are another story … —Meredith Wehrle, Baltimore mixing mission and money I appreciated you including Program Related Investing (PRI) in your Breakthroughs issue (January), but do want to correct something. The article says that with PRI, “interest rates, by law, must be below market rate.” Unfortunately, many foundations reject the use of PRI for just that reason, even though the IRS regulation clearly states that making a return is fine. The IRS states that Program Related Investments are those in which “1. The primary purpose is to accomplish one or more of the foundation’s (tax) exempt purposes,” and “2. Production of income or appreciation of property is not a significant purpose.” Most foundations use a below-market interest rate to ensure that there will be no questions from the IRS about PRI, but they are not limited to how much they profit. The regulations specifically state: “If an investment incidentally produces significant income or capital appreciation, this is not, in the absence of other factors, conclusive evidence that a significant purpose is the production of income or the appreciation of property.” PRI is a very important tool for foundations to further their missions now that their endowments have shrunk significantly over the past few years. With loans, venture funding, and even equity ownership by foundations, the pool of capital available to support

foundations’ missions grows immensely. To paraphrase Luther Ragin with the F.B. Heron Foundation, “Are foundations just money management firms giving away excess interest, or our we true providers of capital to support our missions?” —John Campagna is managing director of Benchmark Asset Managers. kudos I write to congratulate Charlotte Irby on her writing contribution to “Fresh Start” (“What You’re Writing,” January). Though short, it really made a big impression on me. Your magazine has been in my path a lot lately. I recently read (and kept for future reading) “Edge City” by Martha Thomas (January). What a well-written article. I was so impressed with Ms. Thomas’ objective and fair reporting that I forwarded it to a friend, who is a former journalist. Ms. Thomas’ article was a lesson for me on restraint of the writer on political subject matter. Urbanite could be the forerunner of a new trend in local writing. I sure hope so. —Jerry McBride, Washington, D.C. get the lead out Thank you for your compelling editor’s note in the November issue, in which you brought attention to the dramatic increase in school readiness for Baltimore City children, up to 65 percent this year from only 27 percent in 2003–2004. While you mention several key health indicators associated with this jump, the decrease in blood lead levels among Baltimore City children (down to 3.5 percent as compared to 6.4 percent in 2003 with an overall 97 percent reduction since 1993), demonstrates a laudable achievement, not only for short-term childhood health

measures, but also for the long-term, sustainable development of our communities. While lead exposure is associated with decreased cognitive ability and I.Q., scientific evidence has also linked it to attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, aggression, and violence. Studies have shown that lead-poisoned children are more likely to become involved with the juvenile justice system and are seven times more likely to drop out of school. The remediation of blood lead levels among Baltimore’s children presents even more promise than a “glimmer of hope.” The taxpayer money saved from special education programs and juvenile justice systems— matched with the economic returns expected from fewer days of school missed, increased graduation rates, and sustained productivity—provides a veritable beam of optimism for Baltimore. In fact, national studies show that we save $732,000 for every child who doesn’t get lead poisoning, and the federal government estimates that preventing childhood lead poisoning would save between $32 and $57 billion across the current cohort of children between birth and age 6. The decrease of blood lead levels among Baltimore city’s children reminds us of what we can do with strategic and consistent investments coupled with the effective enforcement of sound public policy. —Ruth Ann Norton is executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. corrections A statement about the relative effectiveness of “touchless” car washes in the January issue (“Green Washing,” p. 19) was not properly attributed. Urbanite did not independently verify the claim and does not take sides in the “touchless” vs. “soft touch” debate. Our official recommendation: Try ’em both and see which works better on your car. Also: A story about the new Joe’s Bike Shop in Fells Point (“Double Duty,” p. 17) strongly implied that there was not an existing bike shop in the neighborhood. There is indeed: Apologies to Broadway Bicycles. Urbanite regrets the errors.

We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore. com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

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what you’re writing

illustration by Kristian Bjørnard

sword buried by the ark, proving that Armenians are the descendants of mankind.” There have been multiple expeditions to the mountain in a quest to find the ark. But no scientific evidence has yet demonstrated that it ever existed. Less than a decade after fi rst hearing this tale, I traveled to Armenia for work. As my plane approached the airport in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, I spotted the magnificent Mount Ararat beneath us. Like a little kid, I raced from one side of the aircraft to the other, absurdly hoping to catch a glimmer of the ark or the hidden sword. —Freelance writer Tina Wolfe resides in Baltimore. She has lived and traveled extensively in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Creation Myth TWO YEARS AGO, my partner and I sat in our living room, poring over sperm bank catalogs. We wondered what it would mean to chose a donor who looked like us or didn’t, who had a family history of heart disease or alcoholism, who listed “poker player” as his profession. Would we choose an anonymous donor or one whose identity our child could find out when she or he turned 18? Years from now, how would our yet-unconceived child feel about our choices? I gave birth to our son eleven months ago, and we’re still thinking about these choices. We think about what to say when a stranger at the grocery store tells my partner how much she and my son look alike or asks whether he has “daddy’s eyes.” What will we do when he’s older and can understand the conversation? How will we help him to tell his own story, to find a balance between hiding who he is and discussing sperm donors with strangers at the grocery store? Within our family, what stories will we tell? How can we help our son make sense of himself as the product of me, his other mommy, our extended families, and donor #5701? Our baby’s pale-blonde hair looks just like my little brother’s did, and he has my almond-shaped eyes. But the grocery-store comments come partly because my partner and son do look alike—in their complexions, the shapes of their faces. Part of his inheritance will also be the silly songs (including a certain boisterous drinking song) that my partner’s parents will surely teach him. My son approaches the world as if everyone is his new best friend. His first word was “hi,” and he learned to wave early. At day care he has been nicknamed “the happiest

baby ever.” Where does this temperament come from? Probably not from my staid New England relatives. Is it #5701’s doing? Or exposure to his jolly relatives on his other mommy’s side? Or perhaps it’s his own unique personality. What stories will my son tell himself about who he is and how he came to be? —J. McCann lives in Baltimore City with her partner of nine years and their son. She enjoys reading, rock climbing, and aerial dance. IT’S NOT THE FLICKERING NEON LIGHTS of the casinos dotting the main highway from the airport to the capital. Nor is it the eternal flame at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial that mourns the estimated 1.5 million victims of the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century. What captivates one’s imagination in this ancient city is a fascination with Mount Ararat. Today, the almost-17,000-foot giant dominates Armenia’s skyline but lies within Turkish territory. However, it once belonged to the Armenians. The loss of this mountain after a re-drawing of borders in the early 1920s still provokes frustration and adoration. Nearly every Armenian household and public institution displays the biblical landmark on its walls, in photographs and paintings. It’s a symbol of identity, a source of pride. Some believe that, after the flood, Noah’s ark rested on Mount Ararat. An Armenian friend expanded the story: “My ancestors,” he said, “who were powerful kings in the land of Urartu [today’s Armenia], conducted an expedition to find Noah’s ark. They climbed Mount Ararat, found it, and left a magical

“HOW DO YOU THINK you were made?” Justin asked me. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to seem stupid. Justin was older, cooler, and more knowledgeable than I was. I responded with a cool “I think it’s when a boy puts his penis in a girl’s vagina.” I had heard enough Howard Stern radio to piece that much together. “That’s kind of it, but not really,” Justin said in return. I was too prideful to ask how it really happened. Justin was a surprisingly worldly 10year-old. In second grade, he’d made me guard one of the empty rooms at Twin Lakes summer camp so girls could go in and flash their privates for him. I saw none of this firsthand but later heard him bragging about his exploration of their bodies. When my chance arose one day at school, I timidly went after it. I knew the girl liked me; unfortunately, the feeling wasn’t mutual. I did, however, remember what Justin said about making a girl like you so she’ll want to show you her privates. So I knew I was going to do it. Nap time; the teacher had stepped out on break. I called the girl over; she sat next to me and began to remove her clothes. I reached out to feel her but stopped myself. I remember what Justin had said about making babies. I didn’t know how it happened but knew I didn’t want a baby. I started to freak out. I wanted to touch her so bad, but if it wasn’t my penis that got her pregnant, then maybe it was just me touching her. It was called a private area for a reason. I desperately wondered why I hadn’t asked Justin the real way to make a baby. —Spurgeon Carter is in the twelfth grade at St. Paul’s School for Boys. The name in this story has been changed. I WATCHED as my newborn child received a resounding smack on the behind.

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S h e t h i n k s sh e ’s c o m i n g down with a cold. * * * What she doesn’t know is that her shortness of

breath is a result of a problem with her mitral valve, o r t h a t i n f o u r m o n t h s s h e ’ l l h av e i t r e p a i r e d a t t h e Un i v e r s i t y o f M a r y l a n d H e a r t Ce n t e r. S h e d o e s n ’ t know that there isn’t a better or more experienced t e a m , o r t h a t t h a n k s t o t h e m i n i m a l l y i nv a s i v e procedure, she’ll recover in a fraction of the time. I n t i m e t o e n t e r n e x t y e a r ’s m a r a t h o n , a s i t t u r n s o u t .

w e h e a l . w e t e a c h . w e d i s c o v e r. w e c a r e .

u m m .e d u/ h e a r t | 8 0 0 - 49 2 - 5 5 3 8

She inhaled, then objected with all the power that first breath would allow. “What a cruel way to come into the world,” I thought. I believe that we are all a combination of genes passed down from ancestors, but until the moment the nurse placed my daughter in my arms, I had never been aware of any “guiding hand.” She was so tiny, yet as I gazed down at her, I saw my mother‘s face and thought, “Only a guiding hand could have put this particular combination of genes together to form my perfect baby girl. What a miracle she is.” Years later, as I sat praying at my unconscious mother’s bedside, I heard her say, “OK, I’m ready to go now.” She inhaled, then sat upright in the bed, her arms outstretched. With a sound like the rushing wind, she exhaled; her body fell, lifeless, back onto the pillows. I believe that life—our spirit, everything we are or have become, minus the body and our bond to earth—slips away to another place with that last breath. I could never have accepted the death of my husband of thirty-seven years, who left this life behind in December 2008, if I had not first observed my mother passing. I have no idea where this other place is, or what to call it. But everyone I love will be there, so why not call it heaven? ■ —Lillian Murray Jones is a retiree who lists her interests as “psychology, reading, writing, people, walking outdoors, exercise with weights, food, nutrition, and bird watching. In that order.”

“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 previously unpublished, nonﬁction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Only one submission per topic, please. Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore. com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic Fired The Most Beautiful Thing Into the Wild

Deadline Feb 9, 2010

Publication Apr 2010

Mar 9, 2009 Apr 12, 2010

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One Less Car Symposium

Feb 3

The Baltimore-based nonprofit One Less Car hosts the thirteenth annual Smart Transportation and Bicycling Symposium. Those interested in walking, bicycling, and commuting issues can take in presentations and share information with state and local officials, planners, and community leaders.

Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. Senate Building, President’s Conference Center, East 1 11 Bladen St., Annapolis 410-960-6493 http://onelesscar.org

Great Baltimore Fire Bus Tour

Feb 7

In February 1904, a wind-driven conflagration raced across the rooftops of downtown Baltimore, consuming about 140 acres of the city’s business district. Local historian Wayne Schaumberg will trace the Great Fire’s path, giving a slideshow presentation and narrating a motorcoach tour of significant sites. The tour begins and ends at the Fire Museum of Maryland in Towson.

Fire Museum of Maryland 1301 York Rd. $48 per person; $42 for museum members Reservations required; call 410321-7500 or e-mail msmoot@ firemuseummd.org by Feb 3 www.firemuseummd.org

Motor Trend International Auto Show

Feb 11–14

You can’t buy the shiny cars at the Motor Trend International Auto Show, but you can sit in them and dream. A variety of new cars, trucks, crossovers, and sport utility vehicles—including exotics, preproduction models, and alternative-fuel vehicles—will be displayed. On Feb 14, children 12 and younger get in free with a paying adult.

Baltimore Convention Center 1 W. Pratt St. Go to www.AutoShowBaltimore. com for ticket information and discounts

Across the Divide

Feb 22

As part of its Talking About Race series, OSI-Baltimore (this issue’s sponsor) will team up with the Stoop Storytelling Series to present Across the Divide: Stories About Race in Baltimore . Seven storytellers get seven minutes each to share tales about their experiences of race and ethnicity in Baltimore; three audience members will also be chosen to participate. Pre-show entertainment by Ebony and Irony, the local duo of composer Lorraine Whittlesey and visual artist Joyce Scott.

Center Stage 700 N. Calvert St. 410-332-0033 www.stoopstorytelling.com

American Craft Council Show

Feb 25–28

The thirty-fourth annual American Craft Council Show lends a splash of energy to the doldrums of mid-winter. The juried show features work by more than seven hundred artists, including jewelry, clothing, home décor, and furniture. Also promised are special sections of children’s, green, and outdoor items. Get in for just $6 on Feb 26 after 6 p.m.

Baltimore Convention Center 1 W. Pratt St. Go to www.craftcouncil.org/ baltimore for ticket information

Wee-Cycle Mart

Feb 26–28

Parents looking for good deals on new and used kid stuff, head to the Wee-Cycle Mart. It’s a huge, semi-annual consignment sale of clothes, shoes, equipment, bedding, and more. Saturday’s Momsfest features free treats such as makeovers, spa treatments—and childcare! There are four sales scheduled around Maryland; Baltimore County’s is this month.

$2 adults (good all weekend), or $1 with a donation of a bag of nonperishable food; children, consignors, and volunteers free Call 410-458-9082 or go to www. wee-cyclemart.com for location information

Photo credits from top to bottom: no credit; courtesy of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Maryland State Library Resource Center; courtesy of the Motor Trend Auto Show; © Michael Brown | Dreamstime.com; courtesy of Wendy Walden; © Cs333 | Dreamstime.com

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Sheer Fantasy Sorry, fellas: When it comes to slinky underthings, it’s just not about you. “That secret—what you have on underneath—really sets the mood for your day,” says Sonia Trepetin of Art de Femme , Cross Keys’ new upscale lingerie and swimwear boutique (94 Village Square, Village of Cross Keys; 410-433-1818; www.artdefemme.com). “If I’m going out for an anniversary dinner, I wear La Perla”—an elegant Italian label known for its hand craftsmanship and Leavers lace. “If I’m going out to a nightclub, it’s Marlies Dekkers”—a more risqué Dutch designer that is big on extra straps and Swarovski crystals. Art de Femme carries both labels in several price point lines (panties sell for $45 and up, bras for $81 and up) as well as Lise Charmel, a French label known for its intricate embroidery, and several less expensive lines. And guys, there are some things here for you, too: Snug-fitting microfiber underwear from Marlies Dekkers and sassy low-rise briefs from Piss & Vinegar. —Greg Hanscom

Skin Deep Since ReNew Organic Day Spa closed in May, master esthetician Shelley Birnbaum has set up shop across the street as ReNew Organic Skin Care (822 W. 36th St.; 410-4002745; www.reneworganicskincare.com), where she splits the second-floor space with organic massage therapist Missi Kibelbek (410-889-7107; www.missikibelbek.com). In her cozy one-room studio, Birnbaum concocts organic skin care products for both clients with straightforward skin and those who fall “between the cracks,” as she puts it—whose skin doesn’t conform to the “normal,” “dry,” or “oily” categories. Birnbaum, who boasts more than eighteen years of experience, uses her own line of all-natural, non-toxic cleansers, moisturizers, and masques as a base, then customizes each product for customers while they wait. She also offers facials and waxing by appointment, and—guys searching for Valentine’s Day gifts, take heed—gift certificates. —Marianne K. Amoss

courtesy of Sheila Beatty

Baubles Dot Com After taking a jewelry-making class at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Velina Glass decided to use her business background to help jewelry makers market their work. In August 2008, Glass launched ArtJewelryOnline.com , which currently features the work of fourteen artists who employ such materials as enamel, resin, and gold in creating works of jewelry art. Participating artists include Shana Kroiz (see Urbanite, March ’09), founder of MICA’s Jewelry Center, and New Jersey-based cloisonné artist Sheila Beatty; many (including Glass herself) will appear in person at the American Craft Council Show this month (see p. 15). How does Glass choose the artists? “The work complements the rest of the group but doesn’t duplicate it,” she says. “That allows us to have a large variance in price as well as aesthetic.” Prices range from less than $200 to more than $1,000. —M.K.A. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m f e b r u a r y 1 0

Rolling Stock

illustration by Monica Gallagher

It’s derby season in Baltimore again, with the local leagues—the Charm City Roller Girls, the all-male Harm City Homicide, and the upstart co-ed, pirate-themed Chesapeake Roller Derby—either already on or gearing up to hit the track. Derby girls and guys (and fans of regular old roller skating) can buy gear from Black Eyed Susan Skate Shop (866-443-2051; http://blackeyedsusanskateshop.com). Launched in January 2008 by three local roller girls, BESSS sells everything from helmets and mouth guards to toe stoppers and wheels, both online and on location at bouts up and down the East Coast. BESSS also offers in-person skate fittings by appointment—something that co-owner Brandy Tomhave (aka Marzipain), who also co-founded the nascent Chesapeake League, says is rare but very important. Illfitting skates can cause accidents and injuries. “It’s absolutely essential to be skating in a skate that fits,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be a fancy skate, it doesn’t have to be expensive, but it has to fit.” —M.K.A.

Uncorked

photo by Tyler Fitzpatrick

Looking to share a nip with that special someone? The ladies love Ty Ku , a line of Asian wine and spirits created in 2004 as a class project by then-Columbia University students Kirk Spahn and Trent Ulicny. Ty Ku’s four high-end beverages range from 15 to 20 percent alcohol; they contain comparatively few calories and skip additional preservatives or sweeteners. There’s a premium sake and an ultra-premium sake dubbed “White” (both are gluten-free), soju (a vodka-like distilled beverage that originated in Korea), and a liqueur that contains green tea and several antioxidant “superfruits.” The company has garnered several awards, including nods for its sleek bottle design; in a fun-but-freaky twist, the green liqueur bottle glows when picked up. See website for local availability; area purveyors include Wells Discount Liquors near Towson (6310 York Rd.; 410-435-2700; www.wellswine.com) and City Café in Mount Vernon (1001 Cathedral St.; 410-539-4252; www.citycafebaltimore.com). —M.K.A.

photo by George Peters

Heart of Glass In the 1970s, Anthony Corradetti was studying ceramics at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia when he got interested in the school’s glassblowing program. Corradetti took up the technique and in 1981 moved to Baltimore to build his own glassblowing studio. Corradetti Glassblowing Studio & Gallery (2010 Clipper Park Rd., #119; 410-243-2010; www.corradetti.com) sells vividly colored vases, platters, bowls, and other one-of-a-kind glassware, in addition to offering glassblowing and fusing classes. “It’s a good way to let people get up close and personal with glass,” Corradetti says, “and come away with a product as well.” Check the website for a listing of this month’s classes. —Brent Englar

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a l s o i n b a lt i m o r e o b s e r v e d : 25 Transformer An after-school program for African refugees

baltimore observed

Cashed Out The real problem with slots: In a down and oversaturated gambling market, is there enough money to go around?

ou could run out of fingers and toes counting up the reasons to visit West Virginia. There’s the scenery, the air, the quiet. But hundreds of Marylanders motor to the land of the wild and wonderful to do something else entirely. They sit in smoke-filled rooms in Charles Town Races and Slots, staring at screens they activate with cash and operate with the push of a button. Rightly, state government types in Maryland have seen this as a problem. People are, after all, leaving the state—and not just to go to West Virginia, but to Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania too—to spend up to a billion of their hard-earned dollars each year, if you want to believe pro-gambling types, at slot machine parlors and gaming tables. With hopes of keeping that money at home and winning some tax relief, Maryland voters passed a referendum in 2008 legalizing slot machines. The state went on to form a “slots commission” to license five parlors that would bleed $1 billion from (mostly in-state) slots players annually. In return, the state would win as much as $90 million in up-front licensing fees and twothirds of the annual cut—$660 million—to spend on education and help for the horse racing industry. That was the idea, anyway.

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Attend the 2010 Hopkins Conference on Craft

12/21/09 5:46:09 PM

Florence, Italy June 27 – July 7, 2010

The Conference on Craft is accepting applications for a limited number of slots for non-Hopkins attendees at its Sponsored by the MA in Writing intensive summer workshops and seminars in Florence, Italy, with graduate credit available to qualified applicants. Program at Johns Hopkins University

For more information, visit writing.jhu.edu/craftconference

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12/30/09 10:41 AM

—Michael Anft

baltimore observed u p d at e

pro-slots law, a county in West Virginia— worried that new competition might cut into the 96 percent of Charles Town gambling revenues that come from outside the state— voted in blackjack and poker. Delaware upped the ante further by trying to corner the East Coast market on professional sports betting, a matter that is winding its way through the courts. And now Pennsylvania is expanding table games beyond slots. State officials might deem this gambling arms race an ideal way to save residents from a tax hike. In Maryland, those who pushed for slots remain unbowed. “The bigger risk is not getting involved in slots at all,” says Shaun Adamec, press secretary for Gov. Martin O’Malley. “Our border states are using slots to take Marylanders’ money. We’re glad that we got involved when we did.” In Baltimore, Deputy Mayor Andrew Frank says he’s cautiously optimistic about gambling’s future near the stadium complex, which will ostensibly be aided by hundreds of millions of dollars in investment by developers. Slots revenues, he says, could help the city knock back its region-leading property tax rate “by six to eight cents over the next five to seven years.” “We don’t believe the ship has sailed on slots,” agrees Joseph Weinberg, a partner at the Cordish Co., whose plans for Anne Arundel County include a palace for 4,750 slot machines, five restaurants, and three spots for entertainment. Total cost: $320 million. “There’s a substantial market within a halfhour from Arundel Mills; there’s about five million people we can tap,” says Weinberg. “Given the opportunity, people will travel to a closer facility.” Still, the promises of the pro-slots campaign in 2008 have faded a bit, like the felt on a decrepit blackjack table. And, some argue, that may be just as well. John Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says gambling sucks money away from the consumer economy and small businesses. Kindt and others estimate that as a slot machine takes in $100,000 per year for casino owners, it eliminates one job elsewhere in the economy, eventually leading to three times that amount in lost consumer spending and taxes paid. Meanwhile, slots force states to absorb more in “social costs,” such as an uptick in gambling addiction. “The taxes charged by Maryland on this amount [of slots income] are miniscule in comparison with what the state will lose,” he says. Marylanders might just be better off if slots don’t catch on. Introducing gambling, Kindt says, “is like throwing gasoline on the fires of the recession.” ■

courtesy of Parks & People

Fourteen months later, slots remain a mirage. Licensees have been found for parlors near Ocean City and in Perryville in Cecil County. Gamblers will be able to file into spiffed-up slots palaces there, most likely late this year. But the mega-operations planned for Anne Arundel County and Baltimore City, and a smaller outpost in Rocky Gap State Park in Allegany County, were up in the air at press time. What’s the hang-up? Development has been slowed by the recession and, critics say, by the state’s large take of the cut, which has discouraged would-be casino owners from gambling on Maryland. In Anne Arundel County, local residents are collecting signatures in an effort to overturn the Cordish Co.’s zoning approval for a gambling parlor adjacent to the Arundel Mills mall. In Baltimore, a group that planned to open a casino downtown failed to come up with the $22.5 million in licensing fees, leading the slots commission to reject its bid in December. But industry experts say there’s something deeper at play: After dithering and debating the slots question for a decade, Maryland got in the game too late, and it might be crowded out from the table. Casinos in Las Vegas and along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast are experiencing serious, ongoing declines. Harrah’s Entertainment— the largest casino company in the world— lost an unprecedented $1 billion in the third quarter of 2009. “When casinos in Atlantic City can’t figure out a way to make their industry profitable, it’s clear [the business] isn’t what it used to be,” says Daniel Campo, an assistant professor at Morgan State University who keeps an academic eye on gambling. Industry spokespeople point out that gambling revenues in states such as Michigan, Missouri, and Indiana are down, but not way down. “A lot of destination casino areas haven’t done well, but the effect isn’t monolithic,” says Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., president of the American Gaming Association in Washington, D.C., which lobbies for commercial casino owners and makers of gaming machines. Racinos—hybrids of horse racing tracks and slots parlors—are doing well. But now that every state government in the country except for Montana and North Dakota is swimming in red ink, it’s likely we’ll see more of them float slots schemes to balance the books. And this raises the bigger question of market oversaturation: By getting into slots, Maryland is playing its part in a multi-state shell game in which money hopscotches from one area to another. Here’s how the game has played out so far: Pennsylvania slots took money away from Atlantic City’s boardwalk casinos. Delaware snatched horse-racing revenue away from Maryland tracks by using slots as a draw. And when Maryland passed its own

Dirty work: “Green Up, Clean Up” workers will make $8 to $13 an hour, plus benefits, to do work like this on the Gwynns Falls.

green for green: The city’s biggest “cleaner greener” champ may be leaving City Hall on February 4, but the spirit lives on. In January, the Parks & People Foundation announced that it would hire twenty-two workers to staff its Green Up, Clean Up initiative—a “green jobs” project funded with more that $1 million in federal stimulus money. The teams will restore wildlife habitat and streams, plant trees, pull weeds, and clean up trash in Baltimore City, mainly on the west side. Parks & People Development and Promotions Coordinator Kyle DeVaul says the program represents the top rung of a “green career ladder” that begins with environmental education in the local elementary schools. The money comes from the U.S. Forest Service, which received $28 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for forest restoration and other work. news hole: A January study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism trained a national spotlight on Baltimore’s “news ecosystem” —and found it not particularly healthy. The PEJ report, “How News Happens,” analyzed everything produced by newspapers, television, radio, and new media outlets—defined here as everything from news sites such as Baltimore Brew and Investigative Voice (see Urbanite, March and May ’09) to the city police department’s Twitter feed—during one week in July. Their conclusions: Eight out of ten stories “simply … repackaged previously published information,” and 95 percent of the stories that did contain new information came from traditional media, i.e. newspapers. Score one for dead-tree journalism, right? But PEJ also found that the number of stories generated by traditional media had fallen sharply: In 2009, the Sun produced 32 percent fewer stories on any subject than it did in 1999 and 73 percent fewer stories than in 1991. Furthermore, “the addition of new media has not come close to making up the difference.” This came as no surprise to digital guru Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at CUNY’s graduate school of journalism, “No shit,” he wrote on his blog, Buzz Machine. “We need a study to determine this?” Go to www.journalism.org/analysis_report/how_ news_happens to read the full report.

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Explore

the Possibilities…

at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing

Open House Saturday, February 27, 2010, 9:30 am Featuring panel discussions on the Baccalaureate, Master’s, DNP, and PhD Programs Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing 525 North Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205 For more information and to register, visit www.nursing.jhu.edu/openhouse For disability access information, contact Mary O'Rourke at 410.955.7548 or e-mail jhuson@son.jhmi.edu.

urbanite february 10 2148Urbaniteopenhouse.indd 1

1/12/10 11:50 AM

baltimore observed Transformer

On a weekday afternoon, a spirited gaggle of elementary and middle-school kids erupt out of an MTA bus and wend their way, with shouts and leaps, across Pennsylvania Avenue to the back door of AME Zion Church. Keeping a watchful eye over the unruly crew is 13-year-old Aminata Ndiaye, one of the oldest kids in the Refugee Youth Project (RYP), an after-school program managed by Baltimore City Community College. Three years ago, Aminata and her family—including younger siblings Abdoul, 9, Amadou, 7, and Coumba, 6—made the move from West Africa to West Baltimore. It can be a challenging transition. In her native Senegal, Aminata spoke Pulaar and Wolof, two West African languages, along with a little French and English. To improve her English, she was initially given second-grade work when she arrived in Baltimore. Now she’s in eighth grade and helps serve as a translator between parents and staff at her school, Barclay Elementary/Middle. She also keeps the little ones in line. When 10-yearold Ibrahim Kamara creeps up behind her with a sly look in his eye, she banishes him with threat to tell his parents. “That’s what they’re scared of,” she says confidently. RYP was launched in 2000 with about ten kids, at the request of adult students in the English for Speakers of Other Languages program at BCCC, who needed native English speakers to help their children with homework. The program is fully grant funded by the Maryland Office of Refugees and Asylees and falls under the umbrella of the Baltimore Resettlement Center, which assists refugees, asylees, and internally displaced persons (those who flee dangerous situations but remain in their home countries). RYP coordinator Kursten Pickup says that last year Baltimore received between 500 and 600 refugees; about two years ago, the number was closer to 300. Most are families and single adults, due to the kinds of support services available here; other cities, for instance, receive more unaccompanied minors. There are 143 students enrolled in RYP this year, at three different sites—AME Zion Church in Upton, Millbrook Elementary in Fallstaff, and Patterson High School—and in a one-on-one program where a mentor meets with a student two hours per week. RYP serves children from more than seventeen different countries; all of the Zion Church participants come from Africa, from such countries as Mauritania, Liberia, Togo, and Sudan. Some bear two small, vertical scars

photo by Andy Cook

Home, Again

Resettled: Kids like 9-year-old Abdoul Ndiaye, 9-year-old Abdou Sy, and 7-year-old Amadou Ndiaye (pictured left to right, with Loyola University volunteer Laura Brazier) participate in the Refugee Youth Project, a program to help children of refugees transition to life in Baltimore. Last year, the city received between 500 and 600 refugees.

Some of the African children in the Refugee Youth Project bear two small, vertical scars at the outside corners of their eyes—ritual scarification, which can make them a target for bullying at school. at the outside corners of their eyes—ritual scarification. That, combined with the fact that many are Muslim and their families sometimes dress in traditional African garb, can make them a target for bullying at school. “The kids will say, ‘I don’t run around naked. I’m not covered in flies. Why do they think that?’” Pickup says. Trained volunteers, many from Loyola University Maryland, help the students develop cultural and social skills and give one-on-one homework help. While volunteers are not encouraged to ask the children for details about why they left their homes—or to assume that every child has narrowly escaped war or unrest, as that’s not always the case—they do encourage the kids to draw on their own cultural traditions. The kids painted murals at Furman Templeton Elementary School last year and have created several quilts that explore the theme of “home.” Recent field trips have included visits to the local farm Woodberry Crossing

and the Walters Art Museum, where the RYP kids go regularly; the museum provides transportation, art supplies, and a studio where they paint. And this spring, they’ll be learning African drumming with local beatboxer Shodekeh (see Urbanite, March ’09) and musician Jason Baker—through which Pickup hopes they’ll also pick up self-esteem and conflict resolution skills. It’s all part of the overall mission of RYP: to help kids learn to get along in their new homes. “They’ve been through so much,” she says. “They’re deserving of any opportunity that any other human is.” ■ —Marianne K. Amoss

Each month, Urbanite profiles people and programs that are transforming the city, one block at a time. To nominate a transformer, e-mail editor@urbanitebaltimore.com.

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keynote

The Integrationist Law professor and author Sheryll Cashin talks about the diversity imperative and “the civil rights movement of the 21st century.” interview by marc steiner | photograph by marshall clarke

heryll Cashin is a child of the civil rights movement. Literally. Her father, a dentist in Huntsville, Alabama, founded an independent political party in 1968, as the state’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, made a bid for the presidency. Six years earlier, when Cashin was just 4 months old, her mother had taken her to a sit-in, where she was arrested, babe in arms. “That’s how committed my family was to the idea of inclusion,” Cashin says. Cashin went on to study at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar and at Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review. She was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and an adviser on inner-city community development in the Clinton White House. Today, she is a law professor at Georgetown University, where she teaches “Race and American Law,” among other courses. But when Cashin looks back on the civil rights movement, as she has in her book, The Failures of Integration (2004), and her memoir, The Agitator’s Daughter (2008), she sees both its accomplishments and its shortcomings. “Only about 5 to 10 percent of American neighborhoods are stably integrated,” she says. She doesn’t blame racism, per se—her faith in Americans’ ability to coexist runs deep— but public policies that have encouraged whites and blacks to live separate lives long after official segregation laws were wiped from the books. But these anachronistic policies, Cashin says, are destined to die. Demographers predict that by 2050, the United States will be “majority minority,” meaning that whites will be outnumbered by nonwhites. California, Hawaii, Texas, and New Mexico are already mostly nonwhite, as are more than three hundred counties across the United States. “In the 21st century, you are not going to be able to avoid diversity. We can continue the way of the bulwark and try to be fragmented, and people can try to buy their way into an exclusive neighborhood,” she says. Or we can “make that transition in a way in which opportunity is going to be broadly available to the masses.” She is confident that we will choose the latter path: “We have no other option.”

Q A

Why was there this “failure of integration” once we broke the back of segregation? I want to underscore that we did have a chief victory with the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement transformed this country seemingly overnight. We went from a country where

urbanite february 10

80 percent of the people in surveys would say openly that “I would move if a black person moved into my neighborhood,” to where a vast majority of people would say the opposite: “No, I wouldn’t move. In fact, I might be happy that there’s some diversity coming to my neighborhood.” In opinion polls, the vast majority of Americans will say that they believe America should be an integrated society and that they think of America as a place where no one should be limited in their access to anything based on race. But where we’re falling down is [with] our public policies, [which] actually are premised on the idea that people should be separated based on race and class. We no longer have de jure segregation where the state mandated that the races be separate. But so many of our major public policies steer us in the segregated direction. [Consider] local zoning. America has more local governments than most westernized nations because we’ve bought this religion of local power that [says] democracy should occur at the lowest level, closest to the city. It fosters this parochialism and this idea that we have to zone to create the best tax base possible. So we won’t have garden-variety, affordable apartments in our town because that doesn’t give us high property values. Another is historic policies where the federal government taught banks and the lending industry to be fearful of neighborhoods where the classes mix, so investment in housing tends to be skewed toward segregated areas. I could go on and on.

Q A

Some say even in a heterogeneous nation like ours that separation is natural, that people do not come together naturally.

There’s a dissonance between what we say about liking diversity and what we actually choose. It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. There’s more demand for stable, integrated neighborhoods than there are neighborhoods to fill that demand. If you’re a black person living in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area, and you have the economic wherewithal and the credit score to get a mortgage—which is difficult in these times—the market doesn’t give you a lot of options. Either you can choose to live in a neighborhood where blacks are few, or you can choose to live in a neighborhood where blacks are a majority if not an overwhelming majority. There’s not a lot of in-between. It’s not surprising that a lot of African Americans might choose to live in a neighborhood where their own group is in the majority. That’s human nature. But public policy doesn’t have to be premised on the idea that people should be separated.

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Q A

What approaches would make communities more integrated?

Number one: inclusionary zoning—a policy which says explicitly that any new development above a certain size has to have low-income or moderate-income units. Some places like Montgomery County have had public policies on the books for thirty years requiring [that], in any new residential development, about 10 to 15 percent of the units be affordable units. And that county, because of that public policy, is much stabler. It’s a very diverse county, and it doesn’t have intense pockets of concentrated minority poverty, it doesn’t have ghettos, it doesn’t have barrios, because they’ve chosen to have public policies that foster inclusion. There’s more opportunity in the housing market, and there’s more opportunity to find good schools that happen to be both diverse and good. Another [policy] is MTO [Moving to Opportunity] housing mobility programs which give people vouchers and the ability to try to live in a variety of areas.

When they tried MTO in Baltimore about ten years ago, a congressman, Bob Ehrlich, who later became governor, led the fight in Baltimore County to “Say No to MTO,” and raised racist, populist anger about MTO and stopped it. So how does public policy change this behavior without being onerous and authoritarian?

I don’t pretend that these are easy issues. MTO is one of the most controversial policies because of the specter of fear. And let’s be frank: Whenever you talk about affordable housing, the fear factor is non-blacks’ fear of blacks. What comes to people’s minds is some ghetto-acting black person coming to my neighborhood. And the response is “H-E-L-L no.” But what is the alternative? Demographics are rapidly changing this country, and they’re going to change no matter what. The question is: How does America respond to those changes and harness them? If you think about what America is going to look like virtually everywhere in 2050, if the majority of the workforce is going to be black, brown, yellow, America is not going to be able to be competitive if you haven’t built a society where the vast majority of Americans are able to get an excellent education and good skills and be cultivated as citizens who feel like they have a stake in this society. I think we have no choice but to go the way of inclusion, and I’m actually optimistic about our ability to do that. There’s a lot of positive things going on in this country. You can see it in media. I don’t want to be too simplistic or flippant about this, but increasingly in media you’ll see images of interracial couples. Mainstream organizations and companies—Banana Republic [advertisements] featuring the black girl and the white guy in an intimate pose. I think there is this ethos of excitement about diversity.

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There’s a great chapter in your book about all the intentionally interracial neighborhoods in this country that have thrived.

A number of neighborhoods in the ’50s that were majority Jewish affirmatively decided—with the wave of the civil rights movement and changes in housing laws—when blacks started moving in that they were going to consciously try to be inclusive and remain integrated and fight blockbusting. And there are a number of examples of neighborhoods like that: West Mount Airy, Philadelphia; Shaker Heights, Ohio. It took an intentionality to create that environment.

I’m encouraged by the sort of optimistic, multiracial coalitions that are beginning to form in places like Baltimore. The two organizations in American society that are doing the best job at this are the Gamaliel Foundation—and they have affiliates in about fifty cities, and they basically teach grassroots, mass-based organizing, the kind of stuff that happened in the civil rights movement—and the Industrial Areas Foundation. There is an Industrial Areas affiliate in Baltimore called BUILD [Baltimoreans United In Leadership and Development]. [See Urbanite, May ’08.] Basically, there is a grassroots movement—you might think about it as the civil rights movement of the 21st century. There are church-based, regional organizations that are building these relationships across these artificial boundaries of race and class and getting to saner policies. Just a year ago in New Jersey, the Gamaliel affiliates succeeded in getting a piece of legislation passed. Now, because of this law, every single locality in New Jersey has to have its fair share of affordable housing. And that is a revolutionary concept. And the way they did it was they did the labor-intensive work of building these coalitions.

We’ve even seen it internationally. When you saw the hundred thousand people in Copenhagen, from every country in the world, crossing every racial line on the planet, fighting for a planet that we can all live on—that was amazing.

Yes. I don’t want to politicize this too much, but you saw that picture a lot during the 2008 election. When Barack Obama would speak, he was speaking to extraordinarily diverse audiences. And that’s what our world looks like. And the people who prevail in the 21st century are going to be the people and the political parties that speak to a broad range of people. If you are only speaking to your own identity group or your own single-issue group, ultimately you’re not likely to be very successful. You are not going to have any choice, increasingly, but to learn the skills of speaking across boundaries of difference, be it in the corporate sector or in schools, whatever. It’s the people who are culturally dexterous who are going to be successful in this century.

Q A

Would you consider yourself optimistic?

I would be lying if I didn’t say I have moments of despair. But I go back often to King. When I’m down, I’ll read that letter from a Birmingham jail. It’s profound, and if Martin Luther King had accepted the pessimism of some of his critics, even critics within his own camp, he never would have written that letter, and he never would have believed in a vision that—some people couldn’t see it. It was only around the corner. If you give into cynicism or your fears or pessimism, there’s so much that you could be missing. And so I choose to be optimistic. Because I see glimpses of this beautiful ethos that could be. So I will get up every day and fight for that vision. You know, there’s always going to be struggle. Things could always be better than they are. There is value and meaning in living a life in which you spend much of your waking hours fighting for what you believe in, even when there are going to be days when you fall down or your group falls down and doesn’t get what it hoped for. ■

On the air: Listen to a podcast of the full interview with Sheryll Cashin at www.steinershow.org or tune in to The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on February 10. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m f e b r u a r y 1 0

On this half-block of East Baltimore Street, there are six black households, six white households, one Hispanic family, and one biracial homeowner. And they all get along. Can one street point the way toward overcoming Baltimore’s long history of racial separation?

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s a boy, Edward Sauls knew where the boundaries were. He grew up on East Preston Street, not far from East Baltimore’s unofficial racial frontier. On his side of town were African Americans; several blocks to the south were whites. He only ventured over the border to attend St. Elizabeth’s of Hungary school near Patterson Park, where he was one of three black kids in his class. “I had heard stories from my mom and my uncles, of running through there because the white kids in the neighborhood would chase them out,” he recalls.

urbanite february 10

street map ÂŠ 2009 Google and US Geological Survey

Growing family: Shanaysha and Edward Sauls are raising three kids in the home they bought on East Baltimore Street in 2002.

Newcomer: Tracee Ford is from Columbus, Georgia; she bought her house in 2004.

Native son: Dorothy Burt-Markowitz and her son, Adam Stab, arrived on East Baltimore Street in the 1980s; Stab now owns his childhood home.

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So when his fiancée, Shanaysha, called him one day in 2002 with news that she’d found a handsome and affordable rowhouse to buy on the 3000 block of East Baltimore Street, his reaction was less than enthusiastic. “That’s Highlandtown,” he told her, slightly alarmed. “I don’t judge, but historically I knew that was a white part of town. I didn’t know anyone who lived in Highlandtown.” The neighborhood where the couple were shopping for their first home together is known on city maps as Baltimore-Linwood, but it hugs the northern edge of Highlandtown, a part of town historically known for spotless white marble steps and working-class European immigrants who have not always been hospitable to people of color. But Shanaysha knew little of the racial baggage of Baltimore neighborhoods because she was from Norfolk, Virginia. Despite his reservations about the neighborhood, Sauls liked what he saw—a modestly priced rowhouse with a handsome interior, a historic tin ceiling, and plenty of potential. And he would soon learn, gratefully, that the block wasn’t the forbidding no-man’s-land he remembered from his boyhood.

Seven years after moving in, the Sauls have found themselves on a mixed block: Along with white households of varied economic backgrounds and a Hispanic family new to Baltimore, there are middle-class African American professionals such as themselves— Edward is a special education teacher and Shanaysha is a political science professor at American University. The Sauls’ living room is full of tricycles and car seats; his two young daughters and a son romp nearby in dress-up clothes. The kids’ playmates are the children of the Dominican family next door. In this new community, Edward, a gregarious man, has befriended neighbors of all colors, once even chasing down a possible burglar for a white neighbor. “That’s the kind of care a block needs,” he says. “Coming together and looking out for one another.” Baltimoreans have long promoted theirs as a city of neighborhoods, but less so as a city of prejudices, with a legacy of invisible lines on a virtual map of racism. But those old boundaries are being erased, or at least blurred, by new forces: gentrification, immigration, and perhaps most encouragingly, a widespread and growing tolerance—even some celebration—of diversity.

In the mix: Neighbors on East Baltimore Street take pride in their block’s growing racial and ethnic diversity. From left: Chuck and Taniesha Matthews, Angel Castillo, Adam Stab, Tracee Ford, Allison Tomai, Jill Johnson.

Separ ate Lives The story of this stretch of East Baltimore Street is in many ways a familiar one in this city. Here is one block—actually half of the 3000 block, from Potomac to Decker streets—three blocks east of Patterson Park. Some of the two-story rowhouses have exposed brick, while some still wear their old Formstone facades. Some boast shiny new brass light fixtures; a few are quite shabby. The surrounding neighborhood, once white and working class (in 1990, there were only nine black residents among the 222 people in the four-block area), tipped to majority African American during the 1990s. In 2000, the most recent census, there were 135 blacks and 78 whites and Hispanics. The Hispanic population grew from ten in 1990 to thirty-nine in 2000. The ensuing years could have followed a tired old plotline— another once-stable Baltimore neighborhood succumbing to white flight and slumlords preying on poor African Americans. But that didn’t happen. Today, the half-block’s racial demographics could be a snapshot of the community as a whole. It is home to six African American households, six white households, one biracial homeowner, and one family from the Dominican Republic. Two viable Hispanic restaurants flank the south side of the block, taking over longvacant spaces. And it is, by all accounts, a thriving and happily mixed community. What in the name of Charm City is happening here on East Baltimore Street? Baltimore’s neighborhoods are built on a sadly rich history of segregation, with race-restricted housing covenants, real estate profiteering (or “blockbusting”) to scare off white homeowners, and government-sanctioned redlining that prevented African Americans from getting mortgages. The city’s public housing was segregated by design, a decision that played a major role in determining the racial geography of the postwar city. In 1989, the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton made headlines locally when they labeled Baltimore as one of the country’s sixteen “hypersegregated” urban areas, based on 1980 population data. Currently, the city’s “dissimilarity index”—the most commonly used measure of residential racial segregation— places the city at seventeenth out of forty-three metropolitan areas ranked by the Census Bureau in 2000. (The most segregated American city? Detroit.) In 1957, a decade after Baltimore announced its plans for segregated public housing, Evanglia Vlahacos and her husband bought their house on East Baltimore Street for $10,000 after arriving off the boat from Greece. She spoke no English. Her husband suddenly died soon after their arrival, leaving her with two young sons. “I didn’t have a chair to sit on,” she says in her broken English, perched on the sofa in her neatly appointed living room. “I fight for my life. I’m a good seamstress and make clothes that rich people can’t find in a store.” In those days she was the only Greek person on her block of predominantly German-born immigrant residents, who were not always friendly. “Some Germans, they don’t talk to you. You say good morning and they don’t answer.” Vlahacos, now 84, has outlasted them all. “I’m the only one who stayed. I like it here, and I’m not rich. I don’t have money to move from house to house.”

Voices on race and segregation in Baltimore Interviews by Brennen Jensen and Donna M. Owens portraits by sam holden

Istruck came here from California twelve years ago. It me how few Latinos there were in Baltimore at the time. It was rare to hear Spanish spoken in the malls. I remember walking into a grocery store and the announcement over the loudspeaker was “We now have tor-TILL-as.” And I told my kids, “Where are we?” But now, of course, particularly in the Fells Point area, there are so many Latino stores and restaurants, and we see a growing population of Latino workers and Latino professionals. I have this friend who told me, “Anywhere you go, you can find a community. You just have to help establish that community and be a part of it.” In essence, I have found a community here. —Dr. Lea Ybarra is the director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth and the co-author of Americanos: Latino Life in the U.S.

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IBaltimore went to kindergarten in 1956, and that’s the year that City schools integrated. In elementary school we had some white teachers, but the students were black. When I went to middle school, the student body was integrated as well as the faculty. That was the first time it struck me how separate we were in the city. Baltimore was the leader in creating restrictive residential covenants—it is not a proud part of our history. But progress has been made. More African Americans of high income are living where they want. The politics of the city is much less racially tense than it’s been in prior years. I think the key issue toward more community interaction is a public school system of excellence. If we had a school system that everybody felt proud of, that people were sending their children to regardless of race, we’d see an interaction from the earliest ages that would carry through into the adult years. That’s the glue that holds the community together. Right now, our public school system at the elementary and middle school level is about as segregated as it was thirty years ago. —Kurt L. Schmoke served as the first elected African American mayor of Baltimore, from 1988 to 1999. He is the current dean of Howard University Law School.

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Her home is a monument to her endurance and pride: immaculate, with family photos adorning polished wood furniture. She is smartly dressed, her hair neatly coiffed. She sits erect on the sofa but can’t get around like she used to, hence the stair lift that takes her upstairs. In case of emergencies, the Sauls have her son’s phone number. “My son wants me to move in with him [in Howard County], but [this] neighborhood has changed. It’s better and better,” she says. “I don’t count nationality or color. I count the kind of person you are.” Two doors down from Vlahacos are Lisette Valdez and Angel Castillo, from the Dominican Republic. Like their elderly Greek neighbor, they speak less-than-perfect English, but they say they are very comfortable on the block and have family nearby. “I only don’t like the rats outside, but I like the neighbors,” says Valdez. Perhaps no one on the block understands the divide between black and white in East Baltimore better than Adam Stab. A biracial man with light skin and long dreadlocks, Stab is an artist who spent his adolescence on East Baltimore Street. (See Urbanite, March ’04.) He now owns his childhood home; his mother, Dorothy BurtMarkowitz, has moved several blocks away. Stab and his mother first came to Baltimore in the 1980s when he was a teenager. They rented a house on Streeper Street, just south of Monument Street, East Baltimore’s unofficial racial divide. “We moved into the border, and I was the border,” Stab says. “It was a safe zone, even for me, being mixed. The further south I went the more in jeopardy I was.” The white kids weren’t sure if he was black and black kids weren’t sure he was white. About a year and a half later, they moved to East Baltimore Street, where Stab and his mother had a front row seat for the deterioration of Patterson Park and its surroundings during the 1990s. When they first moved in, recalls Burt-Markowitz, “It was almost totally white and next door to us was an old Italian couple who spoke limited English.” Then, the crack, heroin, and PCP infestation swept through the community. “The amount of hard-core drug use ate away at the next generation that could have taken over the neighborhood. Their parents moved away,” Stab says. Their families were replaced by absentee slumlords who rented properties to low-income Section 8 participants; the neighborhood filled with corner drug dealers and prostitutes who solicited suburban johns on the park’s perimeter. Patterson Park also became known for violence: In 1991, a young man named Expedito “Pedro” Lugo was crossing the park when three teenagers grabbed his baseball bat and split his skull, nearly killing him. “I think that put an immediate halt of Latinos moving into the neighborhood and opened it up for slumlords,” says Ed Rutkowski, a fixture in the community who witnessed racism firsthand growing up in Highlandtown in the 1950s and 1960s. Rutkowski, who is white, later moved to the area around Patterson Park and became president of the Patterson Park Neighborhood Association. And then he watched the community fall to pieces. “In the course of racial change,” he says, “everybody was buying cheap.” Pulling Patterson Park out of its tailspin took a mix of luck, hard work, and smart intervention. Rutkowski helped found the Patterson Park Community Development Corp. (PPCDC), which raced against the slumlords in the mid-1990s to buy, renovate,

When Tracee Ford went house shopping on East Baltimore Street, her white coworkers warned her about the perils of being an African American moving into what they thought of as old Highlandtown. “They said, ‘You don’t want to move over there. It’s the Klan.’”

sell, and rent homes. Before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008, the corporation rehabbed nearly four hundred homes. While the PPCDC struggled to stabilize the housing market, neighbors watched an increased police presence chase the drug dealers and prostitutes out of the park. The PPCDC also invited the state to open the Baltimore Resettlement Center on Eastern Avenue, a facility offering one-stop shopping for refugees from countries that included Bosnia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “We came to the conclusion that we really needed to have a wider net of people we could attract, so the development corporation promised to find housing for every refugee the resettlement center sent its way,” says Rutkowski, who also welcomed Hispanic immigrants. In studies, sociologists have noted the influence of new immigrant populations—communities that function as “ports of entry” tend to achieve higher levels of stable diversity. The resulting multiracial, multiethnic community, Rutkowski believes, makes the “distinction between black and white less important. Once you start being able to ignore the traditional black-white distinction, your tolerance to diversity increases. … If you go far enough you start to embrace it.” In Patterson Park, that’s just what happened. Bill Kamperin, who has lived a few doors down from Stab for the last nineteen years, may be white, but he welcomes the block’s racial shift. “When I was a young man I was married to a black woman. Every time I see an interracial couple it warms the cockles of my heart,” says Kamperin, a mental health counselor “We have to commingle with each other to coexist with each other.” Tracee Ford bought her house a few doors down from Kamperin in 2004, but she moved into the neighborhood ten years ago, after relocating to Baltimore from Virginia. She’s originally from Columbus, Georgia. Ford, who is African American, is executive director of Community Mediation Program Inc., so she knows a thing or two about neighborhood conflict. When she went house shopping on East Baltimore Street, her white coworkers warned her about the perils of being an African American moving into what they thought of as old Highlandtown. “They said, ‘You don’t want to move over there. It’s the Klan.’” Still, she went to take a look. “At the top of the park there were six kids,” she recalls. She saw three African American boys, a white boy, a Hispanic boy, and a white girl. “They were just running down the street with a stolen grocery cart. I thought, ‘That doesn’t look like the Klan.’ It was like Sesame Street on heroin.” Chuck Matthews came from Louisville. His wife, Taniesha, is from Cleveland. He is African American, in the third year of his

Johns Hopkins residency in radiation oncology. An electrical engineer at General Electric, she is half Puerto Rican, half African American. Priced out of Canton when they went house hunting in 2007, they looked north and found a freshly renovated rowhouse with new hardwood floors and exposed brick walls. Although they worried about crime and finding common ground with neighbors, they discovered a few unexpected connections: Matthews and Edward Sauls were in the same fraternity, although at different universities. Taniesha and Tracee Ford are both alums of Spellman College. “I don’t think the word has changed about this neighborhood as fast as the neighborhood has changed,” Matthews says. as a nation, and as a city, we are far from declaring victory on residential segregation. Camille Charles, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says her research shows that Americans still exhibit strong race-based preferences when they choose a neighborhood. In her book Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class, and Residence in Los Angeles, she noted that survey data of various racial and ethnic groups ranked African Americans as “least desirable” neighbors. However, that tendency is slowly changing as mixed-race communities proliferate. More residents are staying in a community as it changes racially and discovering “over time that it doesn’t have to mean the demise of your community,” Charles says. A recent study of the hundred largest metropolitan areas found that the number of multiracial neighborhoods grew from 2.4 percent in 1970 to 14.6 percent in 2000, according to the Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies in Detroit, Michigan. In some communities in California, for example, there are people of so many races that “this notion of living together as a matter of race is irrelevant,” says Paul Brophy, a consultant in housing and neighborhood improvement. Brophy is also the former president and co-CEO of the Enterprise Foundation, a national nonprofit that promotes affordable and diverse housing. Founded in 1982 by real estate developer James Rouse, the foundation (now called Enterprise Community Partners) is still based in Columbia, the planned community built and promoted by the Rouse Co. forty years ago as “The Next America.” Columbia’s planners engineered the town with stable racial integration in mind; it was a place where interracial couples could find a safe haven during the 1970s, a place where it was normal, Brophy says, for “a house [to] be bought by an African American family and five years later sold to a white family.” Today, he says, multiracial neighborhoods succeed for the same reasons that neighborhoods that aren’t racially mixed do—because w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m f e b r u a r y 1 0

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of shared values and how well people of different ages, economic status, and tenure in the community get along. “What’s important is neighboring,” Brophy says. As cities transform, even the rules of deeming neighborhoods “integrated” and “segregated” are changing; one recent academic study from the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin challenged the Census Bureau’s model for defining diversity as being blind to multiethnic population dynamics and biased toward whites and against blacks, noting that historically blacks were expected to move into white neighborhoods, but whites were not expected to move into black neighborhoods. Their study of block-level integration in the fifty largest U.S. cities painted a picture of a less starkly divided Baltimore: Almost 20 percent of city residents, it noted, live on blocks that are at least 20 percent white and 20 percent black. Far from being “hypersegregated,” Baltimore as a whole ranks as the twelfth most integrated of the fifty largest U.S. cities.

M ost white Baltimoreans—not unlike most whites elsewhere—simply assumed the separation of races when it came to housing, and they could not conceive of anything else. So deeply entrenched was the conviction that any minority residency inevitably meant a neighborhood would change completely that it, sadly, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today, national surveys of public opinion find increasing levels of acceptance of residential integration by all races. But on both sides of the black/white divide, they also reveal a comfort level higher than the other racial group is prepared to accept. And the fear persists that stable integration may be hard to maintain. —W. Edward Orser is a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story.

The 3000 block of East Baltimore Street is not a touchyfeely enclave where neighbors have block parties or weekend cleanup activities. There is no block captain or leader. And while there is much to applaud about the racial progress of the community to which it belongs, there’s also enough racial tension to remind neighbors of the city’s ugly racial history. Tracee Ford, for one, is sensitive to racial slights to the area’s large population from the Dominican Republic. “They make really good use of the park,” she says. “I hear a lot of complaints lodged against them because they’re too loud or there is garbage. I don’t hear the same kind of complaints for softball or kickball teams that are predominantly white. I think folks are resistant to hearing that there is a race factor in the equation.” Until recently, Ford recalls, one of the block’s carryout restaurants was owned by a Syrian man, who was accused by one white neighbor of running a drug cartel and being part of an anti-American jihad—none of which was true, she says. “He was a good neighbor, and it hurt me that he would be maligned.” Carolyn Krysiak, chair of the board of Southeast Community Development Corp. and a member of the House of Delegates for the 46th district since 1991, grew up in what is now Upper Fells Point, when neighborhoods were segregated by nationality: Irish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, and German. Krysiak, who is Polish, remembers when a “mixed marriage” could be between a Polish Catholic and an Italian Catholic. Now 70, she still sees plenty of not-so-subtle racism. She recalls an elderly man of German descent who stopped her on Eastern Avenue recently to complain about “those kinds of people” overrunning the new Pratt library branch. The tension with Hispanic immigrants, she believes, is exacerbated by having the new arrivals lumped into one large group because they all speak the same language. “You never hear people refer to somebody as being ‘Honduran American.’ They’re all Latin American. If the Middle Europeans—Poles, Italians, Germans, Lithuanian—had all spoken one language and had been grouped together as one race, I wonder if there would have been [more] fear in the first part of the 20th century,” she wonders. To combat this fear and anxiety, a number of ongoing efforts and programs in the Patterson Park community have focused on promoting racial and ethnic harmony among the neighborhood’s various populations. At the Creative Alliance in the old Patterson Theater, Community Programs Coordinator Luisa Bieri de Rios w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m f e b r u a r y 1 0

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organizes an annual Salsapolkalooza summer festival to celebrate Highlandtown’s ethnic mix. The theater itself sits at a crossroads of cultures: There’s a liquor store owned by an Ethiopian family across the street from a barbershop owned by Dominicans. In 2007 and 2008, Bieri de Rios wrote and produced a play, Belongings: A Neighborhood Search, based on oral histories of people of several races in Highlandtown. It included commentary from the first African American moving into an all-white block, as well as the candid views of immigrants from Latin American and African countries. And at the Southeast Community Development Corp., Stephanie Post Boblooch works as a community organizing intern. A student at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, she is fluent in Spanish and is working to settle neighborhood misunderstandings. In one case, on the 3700 block of Mount Pleasant Avenue, she went door-to-door explaining to Spanish-speaking residents the new schedule for garbage and recycling pickup after a white neighbor complained the block was full of trash. Later, a Hispanic neighbor who spoke some English became a block leader. A followup block party brought out a crowd so racially diverse, Boblooch recalls, that she heard a little girl who appeared to be biracial exclaim to her mother, “‘Oh, Mom, there’s white kids and black kids and Mexican kids.’ It was the cutest thing.” Is this how the city of the future could look? A place so diverse that race matters less and stereotypes fade? The 3000 block of East Baltimore Street shows that not all educated, upwardly mobile African Americans are heading to the suburbs in the belief that “urban equals bad,” says Edward Sauls. When he first moved in, one neighbor took him for a drug dealer, while a group of African American teenagers assumed he was a cop. “All that’s left for young children as role models are the drug dealers who stay. You need a positive example to combat that. When I’m [a school] principal, I’m going to live in the city.” The school that Sauls attended as a young boy, St. Elizabeth’s, is now the Patterson Park Public Charter School, serving more than five hundred students near the corner of East Baltimore Street and North Lakewood Avenue. Ed Rutkowski is now its executive director, running the business side. The population is not yet as diverse as he would like it to be—currently, it’s 70 percent African American, 20 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent white—but he’s hoping it will even out in future years. He has seen this community come further in race relations than he thought possible when whites were fleeing and drug dealers ruled the park; it’s a transformation that has left him nearly breathless. “I think that now it feels pretty good no matter who’s coming down the street toward you,” he says. “No matter how big they are, no matter what color they are, no matter how scruffy they are. It’s all part of the neighborhood fabric.” Rutkowski remembers an evening not long ago, sitting in a restaurant at the corner of East Baltimore and Linwood streets, across from the park. “I used to eat there and look outside the window at night and see people walking around: white people, Latinos, black people. It surprised me. I never thought the neighborhood would be this good.” ■ —Joan Jacobson covered Baltimore housing and neighborhoods for the Evening Sun and the Sun for twenty years. On the air: Talk to Joan Jacobson about this story on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on February 16.

Separ ate Lives

Ychildou intalka just like a white girl.” I cringed. I was a growing city where white people didn’t exist. Their lives and their neighborhoods were distant lands of racial hostility and poverty or wealth. I knew that to be labeled white was a mark of shame. I was branded. In middle school, I refused to speak the full name of my school. Its name was cumbersome, and it included strange words like “country” and “day.” When I did mention it there were looks of disappointment from my peers. By the time I reached high school, I had accepted the fact that I lived as a foreigner in a distant land five days out the week. I left adolescence with my feet straddling two separate worlds, one black and the other white. —Tara Bynum is an assistant professor of English at Towson University.

White Space Black Space Don’t call it self-segregation: Making the case for separateness By

L est e r

i l lu s t r at i o n

k .

S pe n c e

wa r r e n

l i n n

ince I moved to Baltimore several years ago, I have lived in two predominantly black neighborhoods, by choice. My family attends a predominantly black church with a black pastor, also by choice. While I attended the University of Michigan for undergraduate and graduate school, I joined an all-black fraternity (Omega Psi Phi). When asked my religious preference, I (slightly tongue in cheek) answer, “house music.” When I go to clubs, I tend to go to black clubs—clubs that are run by and for black patrons, or clubs that sponsor events put on by black promoters. Again, by choice. There are a number of African Americans in my position who make the same choices, based on similar desires to live around and socialize with other African Americans. We need those black spaces to stay rooted, to stay healthy, to stay sane. Politically, we need those spaces to dialogue, to build, to grow. When I hear people talk about “self-segregation” and about how we need to get Baltimoreans to move beyond their racially clustered neighborhoods, I get it, theoretically and practically. Theoretically, diverse groups come up with better ideas and arrive at substantially better outcomes; practically, the central problems we face as a community, as a city, as a country, are problems that we have to deal with together. We breathe the same air. We drink the same water. Our employment/unemployment rates go up and down in the same way (although there’s an obvious gap). We all suffer when our children are undereducated. So we have to create shared spaces in which to create interdependent solutions. But at the same time I understand the need—at least for African Americans—to have a space in which we do not have to defend our racial existence, our humanity. A place where we don’t have to worry about being “the Other,” about having our presence questioned, about having our words deconstructed at best and ignored at worst. Let me expand by way of a story.

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Tickets $25 in advance; $30 at the door. For tickets visit www.wlcmd.org or call 410-321-8761.

See Facebook for a list of delectable treats provided by our sponsors.

FAQ LOYOLA UNIVERSITY MARYLAND GRADUATE PROGRAMS IN EDUCATION

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urbanite february 10

During the fall 2008 semester at Johns Hopkins University, I taught an introductory course on race and ethnicity. The goal of the course was to teach how what we think of as “race” and “ethnicity” are continually produced and reproduced as opposed to being something that we are born with. My “blackness,” rather than being some fixed quality that I have from birth until death, is something that is created and then recreated by individual, social, and institutional processes. My own children don’t identify someone as “black” because they’ve been genetically hardwired to do so. They do so because they’ve been socialized to do so. Inasmuch as whites too live with race, they also construct and reconstruct their “whiteness.” I spent the first day of class dealing with these ideas, using the example of the murder of Vincent Chin. A Chinese American, Chin was brutally beaten to death in Detroit in 1982 by two white autoworkers who, mistaking him for being Japanese, held him personally responsible for the decline of the American auto industry. Before that moment, the “Asian American” arguably didn’t exist—Japanese and Chinese Americans, for example, thought themselves part of (very) different groups. But afterward, when it became clear that some white Americans thought of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese (among others) Americans in similar (negative) terms, these formally disparate groups began to think of themselves as one (racial) group. I left the class exhausted but excited. The School of Engineering was having a reception on the patio nearby. I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink all day, so I walked over and asked the staff if I could have a couple of cans of Sierra Mist. I asked because I was conscious of two things—first, that I was not a member of the engineering faculty. Second, I was the only African American there. The catering staff welcomed me at first. But as I was getting ready to leave, a woman staffer rudely asked me to move my backpack from the table it sat on because the staff wanted students to have access to it. I thought this was curious because my backpack didn’t prevent students from using the table and because I was in the process of leaving anyway. So, confused by her request and by her rudenesss, I asked her why she asked me to move my backpack—more specifically, I asked her what she saw that caused her to ask me to do so. She told me she saw me taking things out of my bag, as if I planned to stay. I was still confused. She couldn’t have seen me take anything out of my backpack because I was leaving. So I chose my response carefully. “What did you see me take out of my backpack?” She then told me I would have to take my things and leave. Which of course made me even more upset. I asked for her name and to speak to her supervisor. She walked away without giving me her name, and after few minutes her supervisor, a white man appearing to be in his 30s, arrived. I introduced myself as a faculty member, told him I was leaving, and explained that I felt I had been treated rudely by one of the staff members. He nodded sagely. Then he told me if I didn’t leave, he would call security. I saw red. I told him to call security and that I would wait. When security didn’t come fast enough, I called myself. Because I identified myself as a faculty member when I spoke with the dispatcher, not only did three officers (two black and one white) arrive, but later one of their (white) supervisors arrived as well. continued on page 75

Separ ate Lives

ICleveland, grew up on the rough-and-tumble east side of Ohio, during the 1950s and ’60s, and the city that people saw as the promised land was Baltimore. Like Atlanta today, it was considered the “Black Mecca.” When my best friend moved here in 1960, he was the envy of the school. He bragged to us about “The City of White Steps,” and in my young mind I concluded these steps must be carved from the pearly gates of heaven. Enforced racism and segregation was rampant in Cleveland and Baltimore. The difference, though, was that the City of White Steps was where business opportunities for black people abounded. I knew about Parks Sausage when I was in the fifth grade, because the black grapevine had told my dad about a black Baltimore millionaire [founder Henry G. Parks] who lived like a king in Charm City. —Raymond A. Winbush is the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University and the editor of Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations.

continued on page 75 Web extra: More voices at www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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REGION A L TR AVEL SUPPLEMENT

The Hungry Traveler White hot: Frederick’s Volt became Maryland’s big night out when executive chef Bryan Voltaggio competed on Top Chef this fall.

Looking for a taste of something new? Hit the road to sample the Mid-Atlantic’s latest culinary attractions. photography by lindsay macdonald

Eastern Promise: Cambridge

f you squint, they look like oysters. Geographically, this would seem an apt place to dig into a plate of fried seafood: The Dorchester County town of Cambridge is home to the J.M. Clayton Co., which bills itself as the oldest commercial crab picking operation in the world. But these golden-brown morsels were of terrestrial, not aquatic, origin—sweetbreads, crisp-fried on the outside, soft and almost custardy within. Daubed with browned butter and lemon, the

appetizer-sized order served at Bistro Poplar (535 Poplar St.; 410-228-4884; www.bistropoplar.com), a little French eatery tucked into a storefront in downtown Cambridge, disappeared faster than a basket of nachos. Sweetbreads are the kind of dowdy/exotic item that has largely disappeared from restaurant tables over the last few decades. (Baltimore diners might recall them as a specialty of long-defunct Marconi’s.) Blame their slightly freaky provenance, perhaps—they are

State Fare

the thymus and pancreas glands of a calf or lamb, if you really want to know. The growing popularity of “nose-to-tail” eating among urban sophisticates might signal a rise in sweetbreads’ fortunes, but still, what on earth were they doing here, blocks from the Choptank River, in the gritty, history-laden heart of waterman country? One of the consequences of the foodie revolution is the re-invention of destination dining. Time was, not that long ago, that

Central Savage River Lodge

The Laurrapin

1600 Mount Aetna Rd. Frostburg, MD 21532 301-689-3200 www.savageriverlodge.com

209 N. Washington St. Havre de Grace, MD 21078 410-939-4956 www.laurrapin.com

Western

A mile and a half down a tree-lined country road, wild game sausages and coq au vin served amid wall-mounted hunting trophies.

A favorite of locals, the menu is part fusion, part standbys, with an emphasis on local and organic.

Deer Park Inn

Oxford House Restaurant

Southern

65 Hotel Rd. Deer Park, MD 21550 301-334-2308 www.deerparkinn.com

129 Baltimore St. Cumberland, MD 21502 301-777-7101 www.oxfordhouserestaurant.com

St. Mary’s Landing

Deep in the forested hills outside Deep Creek Lake, a French chef with a penchant for locally sourced, farm-fresh ingredients plies his trade.

Suits of armor and stained glass accompany Euro-style comfort food, like Weiner Schnitzel à la Holstein and Beef Bourguignon.

More Dining Destinations from Ocean City to Deep Creek Lake list compiled by Maren Tarro

Night moves: Downtown Cambridge on the Eastern Shore boasts a Capra-esque business district and a tasty roster of eateries.

urbanite february 10

29935 Three Notch Rd. Charlotte Hall, MD 20622 301-884-6124 Traditional family-friendly menu is packed with breaded and fried treats, plus the essential Southern Maryland specialty: stuffed ham.

the kind of meals worth traveling to in this country were limited to a handful of major cities known as culinary meccas: New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, maybe Chicago. Subtract the obligatory regional specialties and pockets of ethnic interest, and American towns fielded a largely interchangeable roster of coffee shops and chophouses and chains. Now, inspiring and interesting eating might pop up in all manner of unexpected places. For hungry wanderers who schedule their travels around lunch and dinner, that means that a dining day-tripper need not stray far from home to find a taste of something extraordinary. Take Cambridge’s cozy-but-slightlybedraggled main drag, for example. The town itself is grittier and less gentrified than nearby St. Michaels, where weekend vacation homes gobble up the waterfront and cute restaurants line the streets. Undaunted, Bistro Poplar’s 29-year-old chef-owner, Ian Campbell, launched the restaurant here two years ago (with financial help from his mother, grandmother, and aunt) with a vision of bringing the kind of simple, sophisticated bistro cooking he learned as a sous chef at Thomas Keller’s Napa eatery Bouchon to his scrappy Shore hometown. Bistro Poplar is the kind of place you’d wish would open in your neighborhood, a warm room dominated by a zinc bar and menu full of rustic, uncomplicated French fare: coq au vin, steak frites, buttery duck breast paired with polenta, a rich rare lamb leg atop of winey bed of flageolet beans. There’s poached lobster with celeriac remoulade, and not a crab cake in sight. Campbell admits that this uncompromisingly Gallic approach is a tricky sell for

the locals in no-jacket-required Cambridge, especially in the teeth of a recession. “People see the white tablecloths and they figure you have to rent a tux to get in here,” he says. (Much of his current clientele drives over from tonier Talbot County.) But once they’re in the door, he thinks he can convert them to the simple virtues of bistro fare. And he just might: The restaurant offers as accomplished a take on bistro cooking as you’ll find in Baltimore, if not better, and priced well below the city norm. But it’s not a sin to want a great crab cake when you’re in the capital city of the state crustacean. So after you watch the Choptalk roll by on the Cambridge waterfront, shop the gifty strip of Race and Poplar

streets, spend a few hours scouring the skies for flying objects at nearby Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge (2145 Key Wallace Dr.; 410228-2677; www.fws.gov/blackwater/) and head to Jimmie & Sook’s Raw Bar and Grill (421 Race St.; 443-225-4115; www.jimmieandsooks.com), a casual spot where the Maryland blue gets its due in dip, quesadilla, soup, and umpteen other forms. Sure, you can score a good cup of cream of crab soup in Baltimore, but it will taste even better eaten in the company of the waterman who landed the beasts.

ESCAPE

—David Dudley is Urbanite’s Editor-in-Chief.

French twist: Chef Ian Campbell is determined to turn his Bistro Poplar into a regional dining destination.

OC/Rebohoth

Eastern Market House

The Shark on the Harbor

236 Cannon St. Chestertown, MD 21620 410-778-0188 www.blueheroncafe.com

105 N. Talbot St. St. Michaels, MD 21663 410-745-6626 www.markethousegourmet.com

12924 Sunset Ave. Ocean City, MD 21842 410-213-0924 www.ocshark.com

This bright dinner spot offers understated sophistication, oyster fritters, and veal sweetbreads.

From shrimp and grits to lobster pie, the Market House specializes in high comfort, and they’ll pack a picnic basket for diners on the run.

Surrounded by working fishing piers, the Shark offers must-try Mako steak and a lovely view.

Latitude 38

The Watermen’s Inn

26342 Oxford Rd. Oxford, MD 21654 410-226-5303 www.latitude38.org

901 W. Main St. Crisfield, MD 21817 410-968-2119 www.crisfield.com/watermens/

50 Wilmington Ave. Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971 302-227-2444 www.saltairkitchen.com

Housed in a former gas station, Latitude 38 pumps out pan-seared rockfish and grilled duck breast.

This little inn boasts tempting desserts and surprises like lobster and corn pancakes, dished up in an unpretentious setting.

Blue Heron Café

Salt Air Kitchen

Locavore eating, Delmarva-style: free-range roast chicken, rockfish, and Chincoteague oysters in beach-y surrounds.

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Electric outlet: Top Chef helped make Bryan Voltaggio’s Frederick restaurant, Volt, one of the hottest reservations in the state this fall.

High Voltage: Frederick W

hen you eat at Volt, Bryan Voltaggio’s much-celebrated restaurant in a historic 19th-century brownstone mansion (228 N. Market St., Frederick; 301-696-VOLT; www.voltrestaurant.com), you can’t just pile a bunch of food on your fork and take a bite. Instead, you poke at the “sage air” on the handmade ravioli, taking a blob of the foamy stuff to your tongue before it disappears completely. Meanwhile, your dining partner is swooning over a ribbon of creamy, composed duck liver curled across the plate, with a sprinkling of crumbled pistachios laced with anise, to be spread on crisp, buttery vanilla brioche. And it’s only the second course— the meal began with a shiitake mushroom velouté, swirled in a bowl like yin and yang with a light-as-air pine-nut sabayon, and will end with the “textures of chocolate” dessert: white chocolate ganache, raw chocolate nibs, and a light-as-talc chocolate powder, its fat molecules removed.

Voltaggio’s food calls for the kind of rarified eating that only Food Channel judges do on a regular basis. Even if you wanted to spend this kind of money—upwards of $100 per person, nearly double that with the practically compulsory wine pairings (admittedly much cheaper than you’d pay for a comparable meal in New York or California)—it just requires too much focus. This is not about feeding your body; it’s about engaging all your senses for every bite. So what’s a place like Volt doing in sleepy little Frederick? The 33-year-old Voltaggio—a Frederick native—opened the place in July 2008 after working as executive chef for the D.C. launch of Charlie Palmer Steak. He was gambling on the possibility that well-heeled D.C. suburbanites might prefer a drive north over fighting their way into Washington for dinner. And Frederick itself is now large and prosperous enough to support a lively restaurant scene: Average household income in this city of 60,000-plus hovers around $72,000, and there are another 170,000 people in the county, with annual incomes even higher. Settled in 1745, Frederick played prominent roles in both the Revolutionary War and, later, the Civil War. Out-of-towners can visit numerous historic sites and battlefields; they can view surgical instruments and a table used for amputations at a field hospital in the Museum of Civil War Medicine or stop by the frame house where Barbara Fritchie waved her Union flag and taunted Confederate soldiers. “Shoot, if you must, this old grey head, but spare your country’s flag,” she said (according to abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier). In the last few decades, as the area has transformed into a D.C. bedroom community, many of the prosperous farms that surrounded Frederick have been turned over to suburban sprawl. There are glimpses of the past on the drive into town: The Frederick County Fairgrounds to the east, the stately manor house tucked behind Walmart on Guilford Drive to the south. The shops and restaurants that once served genteel farm families now constitute a charming downtown for those employed at places like the nearby headquarters of the energy company Bechtel, or Fort Detrick. The intersection of Market and Patrick streets is a mecca of small and independently owned gift, gourmet, and clothing shops—from Hunting Creek Outfitters (29 N. Market St.; 301-6684333; www.huntingcreekoutfitters.com), which specializes in Orvis products, to Dancing Bear Toys and Gifts (12 N. Market St.; 301-631-9300; www.dbeartoys.com), stocked with eco-friendly and battery-free toys. And nearby, there’s the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center, with six galleries and a roster of classes for children and adults, and the

revitalized Carroll Creek area, which boasts walking paths, galleries, and boutiques. The point is, Volt didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. “The change was already here,” says Richard Griffin, who heads the city’s department of economic development. “There’s a downtown business population that can support a place like Volt during the week, and on weekends there’s a strong population of residents and day-drive tourists.” Still, the restaurant is what’s really put Frederick on the map, thanks in large part to Voltaggio’s appearance—with his brother, Michael—on the most recent season of Bravo’s cooking competition show Top Chef, which began airing in August. It was a boost to Frederick’s image, Griffin says. “If I’d gone out and paid for publicity like that, I couldn’t have come close.” The show may have saved Volt itself: Things were not going well there early in the summer, Voltaggio admits. “We were doing terribly financially.” But the first episode of Top Chef—and some positive reviews in the Washington Post Dining Guide and other local media—“jump-started the restaurant.” He and Michael are now leveraging their sudden celebrity status to collaborate on such projects as a new website, www.voltaggio brothers.com, which features blogs written by the brothers and a discussion board for their foodie fans. “We’ve had people flying in from all over the country because of the show,” Voltaggio says. As significant as Volt is, there are other worthy eateries in Frederick. On Market Street just south of Volt are the Tasting Room (101 N. Market St.; 240-379-7772; www. tastetr.com), a contemporary wine bar with a menu ranging from tuna steak to roast duck salad, and the Asian-fusion restaurant Acacia (129 N. Market St.; 301-694-3015; www.acacia129.com). There’s Firestone’s (105

N. Market St.; 301-663-0330; www.firestonesrestaurant. com), which dubbed itself a “culinary tavern” before the term “gastropub” came into vogue, and Brewer’s Alley (124 N. Market St.; 301-631-0089; www.brewers-alley.com), which serves its own award-winning beer with a menu that goes well beyond wings and burgers. Jennifer Dougherty, a D.C. native who owned the Irish-American pub Jennifer’s (now known as Mick’s) for twenty-two years before serving as Frederick’s mayor from 2002 to 2006, has just opened a smaller place with a similar theme called Magoo’s (1-A W. 2nd St.; 301-378-2237; www.magoosfrederick.com). The new restaurant—with a menu of burgers, salads, chicken pot pie, and Guinness stew—will be a place where one could eat every day, she says. “The food is predictable. Ever since Jennifer’s closed, I’ve been hearing about how much people miss the burger.” Indeed, there are still plenty of people in Frederick who don’t seem concerned with the town’s nascent foodie fame. On the quiet winter morning after the Top Chef season finale, owner Murray Friedman helps a customer at Hunting Creek Outfitters pick out a fishing hat. I ask the man if he’s upset that Voltaggio took second to his brother. “Oh, did he lose?” he asks, looking a little crushed. Friedman jumps in: “Yeah, someone came in this morning and said, ‘Did you watch it last night?’ and I thought he was talking about a football game. To tell you the truth, I don’t pay much attention to that stuff. ”

ESCAPE

—Martha Thomas is a regular contributor to Urbanite.

Pub grub: A more casual side of town shows in Magoo’s, owned by former Frederick mayor Jennifer Dougherty.

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Beyond Cheesesteak: Philadelphia I

t’s snowing fat feathery flakes this Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia, but inside the Resurrection Ale House (2425 Grays Ferry Ave.; 215-7352202; www.resurrectionalehouse.com) there’s the sort of warm, burnished glow that comes from a copper ceiling, brass taps, and amber pints of beer. The bartender, a bearded fellow called Rocco, tucks a long strand of hair behind his ear while holding forth on the similarities between Philly neighborhoods and New York boroughs. (“South Philly is Brooklyn,” he proposes.) A couple at a table drink canned Natty Bohs poured into glass mugs, while a pair of friends at the bar sip Kulmbacher Eisbock between nibbles of house-baked cookies. As Serge Gainsbourg croons through the speakers, I look out the picture windows at the cars lumbering down sloppy Grays Ferry Avenue, past metal awnings and brick fronts, the tall tower of Greater St. Matthew Baptist Church with its parking spot for the pastor and first lady, the huge complex that was once the old naval hospital but has been renovated by Toll Brothers into a gated condominium community, and am grateful for my dry barstool perch.

Beer run: The Resurrection Ale House offers a Phillyflavored take on the English-style gastropub.

If there’s a recipe for the new Philly corner tappy, Resurrection’s owners, Brendan Hartranft and Leigh Maida, have followed it with this, their third venture in roughly eighteen months. The recipe goes something like this: Renovate a tavern in a transitioning neighborhood. Serve gastropub fare, including something for vegans, and install a dozen or so taps of international brews. Then welcome everyone, including neighborhood oldtimers and newbies, and host special events like the Mommy and Me Happy Hour on Monday afternoons, where moms get a dollar off draft beers and a chance to network with other women. It may all sound a little precious, but it works in Philadelphia, where an influx of hipsters during the Aughts had folks joking that the city has become New York’s sixth borough (Rocco’s metaphors aside), and where the state’s stifling beer and wine laws make it almost cheaper to drink at a tavern than at home. The Resurrection Ale House is a midpoint stop in a Saturday given to exploring Philly’s sprawling, vibrant food and drink scene. I’m not a stranger to the city; I’ve kicked around my fair share of pubs, and I have my must-visits for whenever I’m lucky enough to be in Philly to see friends. But I’m still impressed with the depth and breadth of restaurants and bars here. In asking friends for recommendations on new places to visit, I was told of Chinese dumpling haunts and oyster houses, barbecue joints and locavore havens, bars and confectioners. Today, my role is part tourist, part gourmand, and while the messy weather prevents the kind of ambling discoveries made on foot, it does provide a good excuse for holing up in a clean, well-lighted place. I begin my day across town on Chestnut Street in the heart of Philly’s historic tourist district. Independence Hall is mere blocks away, and as lines of tourists shuffle down the sidewalks under black umbrellas, my husband and I slip into Chifa (707 Chestnut St.; 215-925-5555; www.chifarestaurant. com), one of Iron Chef America’s Jose Garces’ five Philadelphia restaurants. This one is devoted to its namesake, “chifa,” the phonetic pronunciation of a Chinese character representing the Peruvian/Chinese culinary hybrid born of late 19th century Chinese immigration to Peru. From the outside, Chifa looks like an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant, with tomato-red grillwork and a pair of dragons rampant; if you blink, you might miss the “Comidas Latinas” sign. Inside, it’s hip and stylish, yet utterly comfortable—just the place where you expect to contemplate a list of cocktails (it is Saturday, after all) that includes a Chinese Five Spice Rye Manhattan and a Lima Bean Fizz. I choose the latter, a springy green concoction of house-infused cucumber vodka, Thai basil, lime, and, yes,

pureed lima beans that have been strained out of the drink but leave a sort of earthy vegetal quality. Between sips, I take advantage of Chifa’s two-course $18 lunch special, inhaling a Peruvian ceviche of corvino and pickled pearl onions—served, like the complex cocktail of flavors it is, in an oldfashioned glass—followed by the beef noodle bowl, an aromatic mix of frilly mushrooms, tiny cherry-colored rounds of hot peppers, slivers of bok choy, and beef slices. Meanwhile, my husband digs into a hot pot of glazed cod and mustard greens that boasts the unimaginable combination of tofu and bacon. “I’m glad someone thought of that,” I murmur between stolen bites.

Square, plus a Fermentation School in the Medical Arts Building on Walnut Street to accommodate the popular focused tastings. The Rittenhouse location is snug and crowded, with limited seating and a bar that runs half the length of the restaurant, but the staff remain cheerful as they squeeze through the throng delivering small plates of grilled artichoke and Bulgarian feta panini and gorgonzola-stuffed figs. They recommend small batch beers, but also approve when we choose a little-known Lagrein from the aptly-named “Funky Reds” portion of the wine menu.

ESCAPE

Fanciful fusion: Chinese and Peruvian fare mix at Chifa, one of Iron Chef Jose Garces’ five Philadelphia eateries.

Lips pleasantly tingling from the spicy broth, we drive southwest to South and 19th, where I stop for a yard of fabric at Spool (1912 South St.; 215-545-0755; www.spoolsewing. com), a shop that caters to sewists whose DIY tastes run more to wonky quilt patterns made with retro style fabrics than country calicos. Its sister store, Loop (1914 South St.; 215-893-9939; www.loopyarn.com), is a yarn goldmine for knitters and crocheters. From there we walk further west to Grays Ferry Avenue, sampling curry-infused fudge and a black magic cupcake at Betty’s Speakeasy (2241 Grays Ferry Ave.; 215-735-9060; www.bettysfudge.com), a tiny confectionary bursting at the seams with sweets and chocolate drinks. The evening takes us to yet another part of Philadelphia: trendy, busy Rittenhouse Square, where we meet friends at Tria (123 S. 18th St.; 215-972-TRIA; www.triacafe.com), a sliver of a restaurant specializing in three fermented items: beer, wine, and cheese. Since opening at 18th Street in 2005, Tria has added an additional location in Washington

Tria serves dessert, but no trip to Philadelphia is complete without a stop at Capogiro (119 S. 13th St.; 215-351-0900; www. capogirogelato.com). Some might argue that gelato has no place on a snow day, but they’ve never had Capogiro’s Cioccolato Scuro—so dark it’s nearly black and as rich as chocolate ganache. We spend several minutes taking advantage of the free samples, licking Thai coconut, pistachio, and persimmon flavors off tiny plastic spoons. No one cuts you off here because the flavors change daily, and you never know what will strike you. I settle for a small double scoop of pear sorbetto spiked with Wild Turkey and mocha, while my friend digs into the black chocolate and cinnamon. Warm air fogs the shop windows, and we watch bundled couples shiver through the late night downtown air before we take our final bites and walk out to join them. ■ —Mary K. Zajac wrote about Zion Lutheran Church’s annual sour beef supper in the October issue.

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eat/dr ink Seeds of Love Learning to talk chocolate with a new breed of connoisseurs

t began as a kind of whimsical afterthought: Susannah Siger decided to add some chocolate to the inventory at her Hampden shoe store, Ma Petite Shoe. “As soon as I opened, chocolate connoisseurs and travelers started coming in and asking about this chocolate and that chocolate,” says Siger, who now stocks more than a hundred types of chocolate, some unadulterated, some enhanced with flavorings that range from lavender and lemongrass to bacon. Since than, Siger has used her passion for chocolate as an excuse to travel the world. “Some go to see the seven wonders,” she says. “I go seeking chocolate.” Meet the artisanal chocolate geek, a pioneer on the next frontier of connoisseurship. Chocophiles can discuss the aromas, textures, and provenance of chocolate, much the way coffee nerds rhapsodize about their beloved beans. And they are not talking about the stuff stacked near the grocery store checkout. Take the chocolate of François Pralus, a French company that sells bars made with chocolate from places like Tanzania, São Tomé and Principe, Cuba, and Colombia. Each label contains longitude and latitude coordinates and tasting notes. The Trinidad chocolate “has a persistent aroma, spices, grilled smoked dried herbs, mild tobacco,” while an Indonesian bar is described as possessing a “fresh and subtle, woody aroma with wild mushrooms, slightly acid and long on the palate.”

by martha thomas photograph by la kaye mbah

61 wine & spirits The double life of Syrah

63 the feed

This month in eating

February 16

If you grow the right grapes, the wine making is easy

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urbanite february 10

genetically unrelated Theobroma cacao. Among other things, Saunders helped to develop disease-resistant plants when South America’s cacao was hit by fungal diseases in the late 1980s. He recently started an exchange program with students at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad to study the 2,600 cacao varieties grown there. Over the years, his taste for chocolate has shifted, Saunders says: “Learning about the crop has made me much more discriminating.” He prefers dark chocolate, and his favorite rendition is Latin American mole, a sauce made with chiles, spices, and fruits with a hint of unsweetened chocolate. To understand artisanal chocolate, it helps to know what you’ve been eating all these years. Cacao trees produce large pods full of gooey white flesh packed with seeds. The seeds and pulp are fermented, and then the seeds—or beans—are dried, roasted, and “conched” (or ground). In some cases, cocoa butter is removed to be turned into skin products or used to supplement more refined chocolate. According to Saunders, better chocolates have a higher concentration of cocoa and cocoa butter, while commercial brands add more milk, sweeteners, and emulsifiers. At Ma Petite Shoe, Siger eschews chocolate with additives, looking for labels with the “Pur” emblem—designating at least 50 percent pure chocolate. One day at the store, Eldersburg-based entrepreneur Pete Truby drops off a bar of Salazon chocolate—named for the sea salt sprinkled on top—in hopes that Siger will decide to carry it. When tasting a chocolate bar, Siger advises, you should first break it to hear the snap. Next, smell it, like wine, to pick up aromas of fruit, spices, or, well, chocolate. Finally, put a little in your mouth and let it melt to your body temperature. The Salazon, made near Pittsburgh, passes muster—Siger especially likes the black pepper version. Because it is organic, original, and more or less local, she’ll add it to her swelling inventory. Siger carries a few wares from local confectioners: Cacao Lorenzo in Timonium and Towson-based Mouth Party chocolate caramels. But most chocolatiers aren’t interested in point of origin; they shape and flavor chocolate bought in bulk from processors in Switzerland or Germany. Ma Petite Shoe, in contrast, once stocked a special edition Taza bar that, like a limited wine vintage, was derived from seventeen sacks of cacao the company had imported from a small farm in Chiapas, Mexico. “We’re more about the global experience of cacao,” Siger says. “We’re interested in the chocolate terroir.” ■ —Contributor Martha Thomas also explores Frederick’s food scene in this month’s Urbanite (p. 50).

eat / drinK The Sweet and the Spicy Hot Chocolate ( serves 2 ) At Woodberry Kitchen, head barista Allie Caran makes hot chocolate using sweetened Colombian cordillera chocolate. She slowly melts the chocolate discs, whisks in heavy cream to make a thick and syrupy base, then adds hot water, sugar, and steamed milk, fi nishing with a stroke of her spoon to leave a heart shape etched in the foam. Not your mother’s hot chocolate.

reCipe

“Craft chocolate is in a similar place to craft beer ten or fi fteen years ago,” says Aaron Foster, marketing manager for Taza Chocolate in Somerville, Massachusetts. “We’ve seen how the slow food and locavore movements have affected beer, meat, and cheese. Chocolate will follow a similar track.” Wait—locavore chocolate? The cacao tree is only grown in rain forests 20 degrees above or below the equator. But Foster insists that his company’s chocolate, even though most of it comes from the Dominican Republic, is still locavore-friendly because he supports small regional growers: “Just as organic has been redefined over the years, locavore can refer to local agriculture and local economies.” Cacao farming hasn’t changed much over the years, says Bill Guyton, president of the World Cocoa Foundation in Washington, D.C., which encourages sustainable farming. Cacao, he says, doesn’t lend itself to big industrial agriculture. “It’s a fragile tree crop that grows well among other tree crops,” he says. Even so, “there are ways to substantially increase productivity without increasing the size of the farm.” The WCF recently received a $20 million grant from the Gates Foundation to improve conditions for farmers in West Africa, where aging trees are producing less and some growers don’t have access to current information on cultivation. In Indonesia, Guyton says, farmers have cell phones and the ability to check daily prices, so they can sell for twice what most African growers get. He sees the heightened interest in chocolate helping the cause. “People want to know about how their chocolate came to be. It’s a trend in all food products right now.” The scientific name for chocolate is Theobroma cacao—or food of the gods. The Olmec of south-central Mexico are believed to have used the stuff as far back as 1500 BCE. In 16th century Europe, chocolate— sweetened with sugar or honey and spiced with cinnamon or vanilla—was a drink for the nobility. James Saunders, a molecular biology professor at Towson University, says that chocolate houses sprung up in Europe well before coffee houses. Saunders is an accidental chocolate expert. Before starting at Towson in 2003, he worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, conducting DNA fingerprinting on drug samples to determine their origin. That work led to his support of a program from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, introducing chocolate as a replacement crop for farmers producing illegal narcotics. “It was a nice change from tobacco, cocaine, and poppy plants,” Saunders says. “You never tick anyone off working with chocolate.” It turns out that some of the most fertile regions for Erythroxylum coca (the source plant for cocaine) are also suited for the

2½ cups sweetened chocolate 2 cups heavy cream 1½ cups water 1¼ cups sugar Melt chocolate. Slowly add remaining ingredients and whisk. Add milk to your liking. —Recipe courtesy of Allie Caran

Mole Poblano ( serves 4 –6 ) Towson University professor and chocolate maven James Saunders is a fan of mole poblano, a complex sauce from the Mexican state of Puebla that relies on the distinctive taste of unsweetened Mexican chocolate. Here’s a simplified version from El Azteca restaurant in Clarksville. Mole poblano is traditionally served with chicken, but pork and turkey make great alternatives. All the below ingredients can be found in markets that carry Central American foods. 8 oz of mole paste (Doña Maria brand) 1 chile ancho, toasted and seeded 1 chile pasilla, toasted and seeded 2 slices of white bread, toasted 3 oz dark unsweetened chocolate (Abuelita brand) 2 oz ripe plaintain 2 oz dark brown sugar ½ tsp ground cloves 2 oz roasted peanuts or 1 tsp peanut butter ½ tsp salt 1 qt chicken broth Soak all of the above ingredients for 2 to 3 hours in the chicken broth. Using a blender or food processor, puree all of the ingredients, adding them in slowly so they mix well and have a gravylike consistency. Transfer mixture to a saucepan and simmer over low heat, stirring frequently, for about 30 minutes, adding more broth if consistency is too thick. —Recipe courtesy of Gilberto Cortes, El Azteca restaurant in Clarksville

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Que Syrah? The tangled tale of the wine with two names

illustration by Chris Rebbert

By Clinton Macsherry

vergreen enigmas dot the world’s winescape. Some take on quasiphilosophical dimensions: Why, for example, might a wine taste different in varied settings? Others reflect mysteries of value: Is a $150 Cabernet three times better than a $50 bottle? Still others spring from the collision of our Aristotelian imperative to categorize and the sundry neuroses of our nature. How else to reconcile the disparate wine classification and labeling regimens of Italy and Germany, so zestfully chaotic on the one hand, so encyclopedically retentive on the other? Rarely does a grape variety pose this sort of conundrum, but such is the case with Syrah—or is that Sirah, or rather Shiraz? Even its origin has confounded scholars for centuries. Some link the variety to Cyprus or Egypt, while others connect it to the ancient Phocaeans, mariners from Asia Minor who colonized southern France. Another theory suggests discovery by Roman legionnaires on Sicily, near the classical city of Syracuse, from which the grape’s name perhaps took its first syllable. The most oft-repeated story traces the grape to medieval Shiraz, the Persian “city of poets, wine, and flowers.” In one retelling, French chevalier Gaspard de Stérimberg returned from a 13th-century crusade with a vine cutting from Shiraz. Thankful for his safe homecoming, he built a chapel to St. Christopher—still standing—on a hill above the Rhone River and propagated grapevines. The red grapes grown there came to be called Syrah, and the hillside became known as Hermitage. (The wines produced there take the latter appellation.) Since at least the 1700s, Hermitage has ranked among the world’s most prized reds. Thereafter the etymology gets pretty murky, but shortly following transplantation to Australia in the 1830s, the grape

reclaimed the name of Shiraz, its putative birthplace. The dual monikers remain to this day. Grape geneticists have a knack for sucking the fun out of stories. Over the last decade, researchers have documented the more mundane parentage of Syrah/Shiraz. Evidently the offspring of two plebeian Rhone-region varieties, its sole relation to ancient mariners appears to reside in legend. Similar studies have shown that most of what California vintners call Petite Sirah is genetically identical to Durif, a French cross between Syrah and Peloursin. However, some Golden State Petite Sirah vineyards apparently hold three other mislabeled varieties, including true Syrah, Peloursin, and a Peloursin-Durif cross. I’m sure glad science cleared all that up. Meanwhile, Syrah/Shiraz has undergone a different sort of identity crisis, one unrelated to DNA. Bad enough that it’s produced under two names, sometimes (as in the United States) within the same country. Syrah/Shiraz’s nearly global adaptability, which in 2004 prompted Wine Spectator to declare it “the world’s hottest wine,” has arguably proven more a curse than a blessing. Stylistically, the wines careen from the floral, meat, and mineral inflections of Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie, and their northern Rhone neighbors to the juiced-up fruit-bombs of Australia’s Barossa Valley, with their jammy, often port-like flavors. Versions from California, South Africa, and elsewhere can fall at or between these extremes. Streaks of black pepper and spice are common but by no means universal elements. So while worldwide plantings of Syrah/Shiraz have grown exponentially (from 81 acres in 1980 to more than 18,000 currently in California alone), recent sales by many accounts have slumped significantly. Quoted in the foodie-wineaux e-zine Zester Daily, renowned Paso Robles Syrah producer Justin Smith suggests an explanation: “There’s such a diverse range of flavor profi les—even committed geeks like me don’t know what to expect.” Sealed under a nifty glass stopper, Cusumano Syrah 2007 ($14, 14.5 percent alcohol) shows clear, deep ruby. Aromas of dark berries, roses, and rare steak carry a pleasant saline-iodine note. Mediumbodied but mouth-coating, it backs spiced plum flavor with blueberry and peppery tannins on the finish. Cusumano’s homeland, Sicily, has recently become a hotbed for Syrah. Although, thinking back to Syracuse, maybe it always has been. ■

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e u l a V of

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Th eVoice

This Month in Eating Compiled by Martha Thomas

A CHOCOL ATE AFFAIR

FEB 4

An annual fundraiser for the Baltimore nonprofit Health Care for the Homeless, A Chocolate Affair features both sweet and savory treats from more than fi fty local food purveyors, including Glarus Chocolatier, Chef’s Expressions, and Sofi’s Crepes. Also promised are beer and wine, live music, and spa treatments. $75, $85 at the door; $150 “chocolate angel” tickets include access to a pre-event reception. 6 p.m.–9 p.m. Urbanite is a sponsor of this event.

M&T Bank Stadium 1101 Russell St. 443-703-1396 www.chocolateaffair.org

HEAV Y SEAS OYSTER FEST

FEB 6

The third annual Heavy Seas Oyster Fest is an all-you-caneat-and-drink affair with eight to ten participating restaurants and twelve different Clipper City Brews—notably the Peg Leg Stout, its rich caramel overtones the perfect complement to slippery bivalves—plus a fi rkin, a small barrel of a unique brew. The event draws about four hundred folks and usually sells out; luckily, with plenty of kegs on site, it’s unlikely the party will run out of beer. $49. Noon–4 p.m.

Clipper City Brewery 4615 Hollins Ferry Rd., Suite B 410-247-7822 www.ccbeer.com

BELGIAN BEER FEST

FEB 12–14

Known for its dizzying choices (more than a thousand varieties of bottled beer are routinely available), Max’s Taphouse in Fells Point shifts the spigots to Belgium, hooking up more than 130 varieties of Low Country brew for its fi fth annual Belgian Beer festival. The Flemish influence will also show up in the food, such as a Belgian-style burger made of bison and topped with Trappist cheese and endive. A 4.5-ounce sample of any brew is $3. On Friday, a free breakfast buffet begins at 11 a.m. The featured treat? Belgian waffles. 11 a.m.–close daily.

Max’s Taphouse 737 S. Broadway 410-675-6297 www.maxs.com

ARCHITEC TUR AL CONFEC TIONARIES CONTEST

FEB 13

The rules for the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s annual Architectural Confectionaries Contest are simple: Construct a local building of “historical significance” from locally made sweets. The contest is twofold: Homemade structures can be delivered to the museum in the morning for judging; there’s a $5 entry fee. In the afternoon, for $8 participants can create entries onsite with confections supplied by the museum; their structures are judged at 2:30 p.m.

Baltimore Museum of Industry 1415 Key Hwy. To register, call 410-727-4808 ext. 146 or e-mail lfi nkelstein@ thebmi.org www.thebmi.org

DONNA’S WINTER SMALL PL ATES COOKING CL ASS

FEB 24

It’s one of the most popular in an ongoing series of cooking classes at Donna’s in Columbia. This year’s winter small plates class is inspired by chef/owner Donna Crivello’s early 2010 trip to Mexico. It’s a demonstration class, which means the fi fteen participants will relax with a glass of sangria and watch Crivello create ceviche, mole, and more. Everyone can then sample the dishes—and take home copies of all the recipes. $45 per person.

Donna’s in Columbia 5850 Waterloo Rd., Suite 100 Register at 410-659-5248 ext. 112 or donnasalad@aol.com www.donnas.com

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Unleash Your Creativity! Mitchell School of Fine Arts offers fine art instruction to Adults and Children. The emphasis is on training Artists in the Classical European tradition of the Old Masters and Modernist painters, with youth and adult classes including: · Portrait and Landscape Oil Paintings · Classical Drawing and Design, · Watercolor, Byzantine and Renaissance Painting Techniques

· Fashion Design · Acrylic Techniques · Art Around the World.

Mitchell School of Fine Arts 6247 Falls Rd • Baltimore, MD 21209 • 410.296-0077 • mitchellartschool.com

urbanite february 10

Where Baltimore learns to draw & paint

Various camps for boys and girls ages four to thirteen. Day camps, Technology programs, Drama, Spanish, and much more! Full-day camps include swimming, lunch and snack. Extended hours available 7:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Camp Warm-up week – June 14 – June 18 Camp Dates June 21 – August 13 5114 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210 410-649-3218 or 410-649-3209 www.fscamp.org summercamp@friendsbalt.org

Sports, music, dance, robotics, crafts, creative science, imaginative play, eco art and more. For boys & girls, ages 3 – 17. Free extended day. Lunch & snacks. Lots of new camps! Bryn Mawr & Summer: June 21 – August 20 109 W. Melrose Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21210 www.brynmawrschool.org/summer Vicky Burns - 410.323.1118 x1268

Courage, confidence, character, adventure, fun-filled journeys--make it part of her summer! Register her for Girl Scouts’ summer resident or day camps (for 2nd-12th graders). Camp Dates: June 21 - August 8. 4806 Seton Drive, Baltimore, MD 21215 410-358-9711 www.gscm.org/camp.html

Music and Dance for Infants to Adults June 21 – August 2, 2010, Registration begins April 1 Summer camps in voice, strings and dance. Private and group classes in music and dance for children and adults, beginner to advanced. Downtown, Towson and Annapolis campuses and Howard County locations.

21 E. Mount Vernon Pl, 1st floor, Baltimore, MD 21202 410-234-4630 or prep@peabody.jhu.edu http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/prep

St. Timothy's Summer Riding Camp offers a full day with the horses. Includes riding lessons, demonstrations, field trips, on-site swimming, crafts, and much more. Spend some time with us in the countryside.

June 21 – July 30, 2010 Enrichment and skill building programs for boys and girls grades 3-12. Courses include art, music, outdoor adventure, SAT prep, driver’s education, U.S. history, science, math, foreign language, plus sports camps.

Camp Dates: June 14 - June 25 • June 28 - July 9 July 12 - July23 • July 26 - Aug 6

Contact Maryann Wegloski, 410-323-3800 ext. 642.

8400 Greenspring Avenue, Stevenson MD 21153 410.486.5483 • www.stt.org

5407 Roland Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21210 www.gilman.edu

SUMMER CAMP! 2010

international music institute & festival An intense residential summer program for young violinists, violists, cellists, and pianists of all ages and levels. Work one-on-one with internationally acclaimed musicians on the beautiful campus of Mount St. Mary's University. New in 2010: "Prep" program for ages 5-13. July 11-21, 2010 (3-day Prep "immersion" program: July 19-21). P.O. Box 28060, Baltimore, MD 21214 410-426-6062 • info@imif.us www.imif.us

An unforgettable summer for kids 3 1/2 to 17. Programs for preschoolers, American Doll Camp, Park/API Sports Camp, science camps, and more. Open House is Sunday, April 11 from 1-3pm. June 14 – August 20 2425 Old Court Road, Baltimore, MD 21208 410-339-4120 www.parkcamps.com

Summer Art Camp

Community Art Center Towson University Professional art instructors teach drawing, painting, sculpture and mixed media. Museum tours, swimming, drawing on location and exhibitions. Extended Day. Three 2-week and one 1-week sessions. Ages 6-14. Also teen Computer Graphics Workshop. June 21 – August 6 8000 York Rd, Towson, MD 21252 410-704-2351 or cac@towson.edu www.towson.edu/cac

Programs for children ages 2 to 12 include recreational sports, nature, music, arts, science, Toddler Preschool & Summer Montessori. Session 1: June 14-25; Session 2: June 28-July 9; Session 3: July 12-23. Corner of Falls & Greenspring Valley Roads Lutherville, MD 21093 410-321-8555 www.montessorischool.net

SUMMERTIME AT ROLAND PARK COUNTRY SCHOOL June 14 – August 27, 2010

Day Camp, Creative Drama and Arts Camps, Doll Camp, Circus Camp and more! For information or to receive a catalog call: 410.323.5500 x3091

5204 Roland Ave., Baltimore, MD 21210 www.rpcs.org

art/culture

Urbanite’s

SPRING ARTS GUIDE Highlights from the city’s cultural scene

In Foreigners, Stevenson University’s spring foreign film series, six award-winning international films about “individuals uprooted by circumstance and exposed to the challenges of access and adaptation to the cultural and political realities of foreign lands” will be screened, including the 2005 Spanish film Border Crossing and the 1997 Russian film Brother. (Feb 4–March 11) (1525 Greenspring Valley Rd.; 443-334-2163; www.stevenson.edu)

Out of Africa The African Film Festival Traveling Series at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Feb 20 & 21 The IMAX Festival at the Maryland Science Center, through March 4

Film

Each year, acclaimed films from Africa appear in Baltimore as part of the African Film Festival’s Traveling Series. Shown at the BMA (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443-573-1700; www.artbma.org), they highlight the highly varied African experience and are all subtitled in English. Some highlights: On Feb 20 at 1 p.m., there’s the much-decorated 2008 film Nora, based on the life of contemporary Zimbabwean dancer Nora Chipaumire and shot on location in Southern Africa. And on Feb 21 at 4:35 p.m. is Sex, Okra and Salted Butter (pictured), a comedy about an extramarital affair. Africa also provides the setting for films in the Science Center’s IMAX Festival (601 Light St.; 410-685-5225; www. marylandsciencecenter.org), but here it’s the wildlife that takes center stage. In Africa: The Serengeti, wildebeests, zebras, and antelope make their annual 500-mile migration across Tanzania and Kenya, pursued by hungry lions and cheetahs. The king of the jungle also figures in Roar: Lions of the Kalahari, which depicts a young lion’s battle with an elder for control of a pride in Botswana. Other classic IMAX films showing on the five-story-tall screen daily include Mystic India, which follows the steps of a child yogi who spent seven years walking across India in the late 18th century, and Ring of Fire, featuring stunning earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Chile, Japan, and Indonesia. —Marianne K. Amoss

Maryland Institute College of Art hosts the Contemporary Israeli Films series, curated by Israeli documentary film editor/ cinematographer/producer Dan Geva and his wife/partner, Noit (Feb 4, 11, & 18). Geva is a resident artist at MICA this spring. (1300 W. Mt. Royal Ave.; 410-669-9200; www. mica.edu)

Gardner’s City of Rhyme, which chronicles young Brazilians’ effort to record a hip-hop album (Feb 19). There’s a pre-screening Brazilian dinner and a samba dance party the next night. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-2761651; www.creativealliance.org)

Novelist Michael Kimball (see Urbanite, September ’08) collaborated with writer/ filmmaker Luca Dipierro for the documentary films I Will Smash You, in which twenty people tell a story about an object and then destroy it, and 60 Writers/60 Places, which captures local writers reading their work in sixty different places. The films will be shown together at the Creative Alliance on Feb 5. Also at the Creative Alliance: Mari

Towson University presents Shooting Beauty, a documentary about fashion photographer Courtney Bent and her decade-long commitment to teaching disabled people about photography. Feb 11. The university’s Brazilian Film Festival includes screenings of Alice’s House (March 25), Grandma Has a Video Camera (April 1), Nailed (April 8), and The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (April 23). And it’s the tenth year of TU’s annual

Media Arts Festival, where student films in categories from experimental to documentary are judged at open screenings on April 19, 22, 23, and 26. A “best of the festival” screening, reception, and awards ceremony is scheduled for May 1. (Towson University Department of Electronic Media and Film: 410-704-3184; www.towson.edu/emf) On March 7, the Jewish Museum of Maryland (15 Lloyd St.) screens The First Basket, a documentary about Jewish basketball players, such as Ossie Schectman, who scored the opening basket of the first game of the nascent Basketball Association of American—which became the NBA. On March 14, the museum presents Ivy

courtesy of the African Film Festival Traveling Series

Film The Charles Theatre’s weekly Cinema Sundays series includes brunch, an introduction to each week’s film, and a postviewing discussion with a notable guest. Films are announced the week before on the website. (1711 N. Charles St.; 410-727-3456; http://cinemasundays.com)

Meeropol’s documentary, An Heir to An Execution, about her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were famously executed in 1953 after being convicted of attempting to share U.S. nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union. The 2004 Sundance Film Festival selection will be shown at the Edward Myerberg Senior Center, 3101 Fallstaff Road. (410-732-6400; www. jewishmuseummd.org) theater In its Pearlstone Theater, Center Stage presents the American premiere of Let There Be Love, a drama about “our shared immigrant experience” by Kwame Kwei-

compiled by marianne k. amoss and david dudley w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m f e b r u a r y 1 0

Baltimore City Community College

We Did It. You Can Too!

We’re seeking a candidate for the following position ... Advertising Sales Executive Urbanite is seeking a dynamic, selfmotivated sales professional with sales experience to join our team. We are a fastpaced selling environment in which you will prospect to establish an active account list, develop sales proposals, and successfully manage the entire sales process.

Enroll. Learn. Earn.

BCCC offers two-year degree and one-year certificate programs, and short-term certification/licensure training in Biotechnology, Construction, Nursing Assistant, Teacher Education, and more…

Apply online or in-person. Register for our 2010 Spring Semester.

Workforce. Pipeline. Solutions.

Urbanite is a customer-focused and forwardthinking company that rewards hard work, innovation, and teamwork. EOE. Send cover letter with salary requirements and resume to: Tracy Ward, Publisher Urbanite 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Flr. Baltimore, MD 21211 Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com www.urbanitebaltimore.com No phone calls, please

Preparing tomorrow’s workforce. Driving Maryland’s economy.

410-462-8300

www.bccc.edu

One of the Nation’s Top Art Colleges Within Your Reach

MICA offers programs for adults, teens, and children… painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, jewelry-making, ceramics, design, illustration, new media, and more. Take your interest in jewelry-making to a higher level with the MICA Certificate in Jewelry or hone your business skills with the MICA Certificate in Creative Entrepreneurship. Discover what MICA has for you – call 410.225.2219 or visit www.mica.edu. Join us for the SUMMER 2010 YOUNG PEOPLE’S STUDIOS CAMP OPEN HOUSE: Saturday, February 20, 2010 from 10 – 2 PM in the Fox Building at MICA.

urbanite february 10

art/culture

THEATER

photo by Stan Barouh

Mommy Complex The Glass Menagerie at Rep Stage in Columbia, Feb 3–28 The Lacy Project at the Strand Theater, Feb 5–27 Laura Wingfield, the sweet victim of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 play, The Glass Menagerie (pictured), is as crippled by her mother’s expectations as her own bad leg. She finds solace in glass figurines, as fragile as she is, to escape the tragedy of mother Amanda’s own failed prospects—and the inevitable disappointment of a real live gentleman caller. Presented this month by Rep Stage (10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia; 410-772-4900; www.repstage.org), The Glass Menagerie is a classic of American theater—and a source of inspiration for Josh Bristol, who directed The Lacy Project, onstage this month at the Strand Theater (1823 N. Charles St.; 443-874-4917; www.strandtheatercompany.org). In The Lacy Project, 22-year-old Lacy can’t develop beyond the photographic images her mother, a celebrity photographer, took of her as a child, effectively freezing her as an icon of innocence and beauty. Lacy and Laura, says Bristol, “are two sides to the same coin: their development has been stunted, and they are unable to leave a place of innocence.” But the difference, he says, is that while Laura is withdrawn, “Lacy is outgoing and takes her fantasy to the outside world. She’s the star of her own little fairy tale.” —Martha Thomas

Armah, author of Elmina’s Kitchen and a CS associate artist (Feb 10–March 7), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a revival of August Wilson’s 1982 play featuring CS associate artist E. Faye Butler (April 7–May 9). Butler also performs in the theater’s new cabaret series (Feb 11–14), followed by Baltimore native Tracie Thoms, known for her appearances in Cold Case and the film version of Rent (April 29–May 2). In CS’ short works series is Cyrano, an adaptation for three actors of the classic 1897 play (through Feb 7), and Working It Out, a trio of short works about the workplace, including one penned by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin (March 3–28). (700 N. Calvert St.; 410-332-0033; www.centerstage.org) If you missed it the first time around, now’s your chance to see the medieval fantasy rock opera Gründlehämmer, featuring a sevenpiece metal orchestra performing original rock songs. The “face-melting” musical is being remounted Feb 19–21 at 2640 (2640 St. Paul St.). (www.baltimorerockopera.org) At Everyman Theatre through Feb 21 is Lee Blessing’s Two Rooms, about an American professor held hostage in a cell in the Middle East while his wife waits in a room at home. Following that is a minimalist version of Our Town—Thornton Wilder sans curtains, sets, or props (March 17–April 18). (1727 N. Charles St.; 410-752-2208; www. everymantheatre.org) Vagabond Players puts on Man of La Mancha, the 1960s musical inspired by Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote (through Feb 7). After that is The Drawer Boy, in which an actor, doing research on a theater piece about farming, becomes curious about the relationship between two farmers, one of whom is brain damaged (Feb 26–March 28). David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, a satire about Hollywood, runs April 16–May 16. (806 S. Broadway; 410-563-9135; www. vagabondplayers.org)

Spotlighters Theater presents Gaslight (Angel Street), in which a husband convinces his wife that she’s going crazy when he is accused of committing a murder fifteen years prior (Feb 5–7, 11–14). Next up is Partition, in which a young Indian math whiz travels to Cambridge to study under an acclaimed professor; they form a friendship with the help of an Indian goddess and a 17th-century ghost (March 5–28). Then it’s the musical Bingo!, a meditation on old friendship and new love, following three pals as they travel through a storm to their weekly bingo game (April 23–30, May 2–23). On Feb 19 and 20 and April 9 and 10 are installments of the Spotlighters series “Dead End: Do or Die Murder Mysteries,” billed as evenings of “murder, mayhem, and improv comedy.” (817 St. Paul St.; 410-7521225; www.spotlighters.org) Through Valentine’s Day at Fells Point Corner Theatre is Molière’s 1668 comedy of manners, The Miser, about a penny-pinching moneylender and his children’s attempts to marry their true loves. Then it’s Edward Albee’s 1994 Pulitzer-winner, Three Tall Women, in which a wealthy 90-something woman reflects on her life with satisfaction, shame, and regret (March 12–April 11). (251 S. Ann St.; 410-276-7837; www.fpct.org) Towson University’s theater department is putting on a yearlong series of plays written by contemporary Russian playwrights and performed in English, called The Russian Season. Set in the not-too-distant future, The Schooling of Bento Bonchev follows a Bulgarian graduate student who demands empirical evidence of the existence of love and sex, only known about from historical research (Feb 3). Playing Dead, the story of a man trying to make a living pretending to be dead for police crime scene re-enactments, will be performed at Single Carrot Theatre, Feb 17–March 14. The brief and violent Martial Arts depicts two children answering for the sins of their drug-dealing elders

(April 21–27). Frozen in Time is a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story set in a small Russian town (April 30–May 8). (410-704ARTS; www.towson.edu/theatre/russia/ frozen.html) Single Carrot Theatre puts on Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake); it’s the tale of an 11-year-old with a death wish who dreams of visits from the pop idol (April 28–May 23). (120 W. North Ave.; 443-8449253; www.singlecarrot.com) At the Lyric Opera House is The Color Purple, the musical based on the Pulitzer Prizewinning Alice Walker novel about a woman searching for her place in the world (March 12–13). (140 W. Mt. Royal Ave.; 410-9001150; www.lyricoperahouse.com) The Theatre Project’s spring lineup includes a new adaptation of Sea of Birds—featuring live music, shadow play, and paper sculptures animated by dancers—for both traditional and deaf or non-English-speaking audiences (through Feb 6); Bad Weather Ballads, a five-song cycle about the life cycles of northern rural communities (March 4–14); and The Grandmother Project, which portrays memories and reflections of loved ones through movement (March 18–28). (45 W. Preston St.; 410-752-8558; www. theatreproject.org) It’s the fifth year of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s In10 Festival: ten-minute plays featuring prominent female characters between the ages of 16 and 35 (March 3–10). (410-455-2476; www.umbc. edu/theatre/productions.html) READINGS The Pratt is hosting notable writers in celebration of Black History Month. The series continues into February with Gil L. Robertson IV, author of Family Affair: What It Means To Be African American Today, a

book of essays (Feb 20), and Jerald Walker, author of the memoir Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion and Redemption (Feb 28). Author and actor (CSI: New York) Hill Harper is the guest of honor at the library’s twenty-second annual Booklovers’ Breakfast, on Feb 6 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel (700 Aliceanna St.). See the website for more Black History Month events. (400 Cathedral St.; 410-396-5430; www.prattlibrary.org) The long-running, weekly open-mic series Organic Soul Tuesdays offers a spot in the limelight for poets, musicians, and writers at Eden’s Lounge (15 W. Eager St.). (www. organicsoultuesdays.com) Locals Jamie Gaughran-Perez, Robin Gunkel, Chris Toll, and Kate Wyer read from their work in the i.e. series, which leans toward avant-garde and language poetry. (Feb 12). (At the LOF/t, 120 W. North Ave.; www. ieseries.wordpress.com) HoCoPoLitSo—the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society—throws the thirtysecond annual Evening of Irish Music and Poetry, featuring a reading by award-winning short story writer Claire Keegan and live Irish music and stepdancing, at the Jim Rouse Theater, 5460 Trumpeter Road, Columbia (Feb 19). (410-772-4568; www.hocopolitso.org) Baltimore’s only dedicated fiction series, the 510 Readings, features Kevin Sampsell, Meghan Kenny, Ron Tanner, and Jane Satterfield on Feb 20; and Molly Gaudry, Jamie Iredell, and Todd Whaley on March 20. Held at Minás Gallery and Boutique (815 W. 36th St.). (http://510readings. blogspot.com/) Maryland poet laureate Stanley Plumly (see Urbanite, November ’09) is the guest of honor at the Poetry Out Loud state finals (Feb 27). Maryland eleventh and twelfth graders will recite memorized poems,

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n u d O er S B

i g b t e o h p t

March 5-28 Step right up

the BSO’s three-ring circus celebration. From Prokofiev and Corigliano to Copland and Stravinsky, come to the Meyerhoff Big Top and enjoy the BSO’s take on the circus, complete with popcorn, cotton candy and even a clown or two!

Don’t miss Thursday Wine Nights at 6:30 p.m. on March 11 & 25!

Mysterioso: Music, Magic, Mayhem & Mirth

Fri/Sat/Sun, Mar 5/6/7 Jack Everly, conductor The BSO SuperPops and conductor Jack Everly present a mystifying program of music, magic and comedy you won’t soon forget featuring illusionist Joseph Gabriel, quick-change artists David and Dania and the comedy of Les Arnold and Dazzle. Presenting Sponsor: Constellation Energy Media Sponsors: WLIF 101.9 & Baltimore Magazine

Cirque de la Symphonie

Thu/Fri/Sun, Mar 11/12/14 Marin Alsop, conductor Daring music and spectacular performances featuring Cirque de la Symphonie acrobats on and above the stage. Presenting Sponsor: DLA Piper Media Sponsor: WBAL Radio

Circus Maximus

Fri/Sat/Sun, Mar 19/20/21 Marin Alsop, conductor Prokoﬁev’s classic Peter and the Wolf takes center stage, followed by a gargantuan musical portrayal of the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome with members of The U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own” and the University of Maryland Wind Orchestra. Supporting Sponsor: Chapin Davis Investments Media Sponsor: WBAL Radio

Hearts, Cards & Carnival

Thu/Sun, Mar 25/28 Marin Alsop, conductor Baltimore School for the Arts dancers and Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist vocalists join the BSO in concert versions of two American operas and Stravinsky’s mad-cap score to Pulcinella. Media Sponsor: WBAL Radio

410.783.8000 | BSOmusic.org/circus

art/culture chosen from an approved list of both classic and contemporary poems, and vie for the title of Maryland champion, $200, and an all-expenses-paid trip to D.C. to compete in the nationals in April. Hosted by WYPR’s Aaron Henkin, the competition takes place at the central branch of the Pratt Library (400 Cathedral St.). (www.msac.org) On March 24, New York Times White House correspondent Helene Cooper stops by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to read from and sign copies of The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, her memoir about her exit from Liberia after the civil war in 1980. On April 7, NPR’s “voice of books,” Alan Cheuse, reads from and signs copies of A Trance After Breakfast, his 2009 collection of travel essays. (410-455-6798; www.umbc.edu/ dreshercenter/) Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, among other fiction and nonfiction works, will speak at Notre Dame Preparatory School as part of the Drs. Houston and Diane Dippold MacIntosh Women’s Lecture Series (March 25). (815 Hampton Ln.; 410-825-6202; www. notredameprep.com) As part of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum’s Lines Connect Book Club, on March 28 Jewell Parker Rhodes reads from and signs copies of her historical novel Douglass’ Women, about the love triangle of Frederick Douglass, his free black wife, and his white mistress. And on April 17, Sharon Ewell Foster reads from and signs copies of her Christian-themed novel Ain’t No Mountain. (830 E. Pratt St.; 443-263-1800; www. africanamericanculture.org) LITERARY CONFERENCES/WORKSHOPS Local writers, poets, and pundits take over the central branch of the Pratt Library (400

Cathedral St.) for the annual CityLit Festival, a day of readings, panel discussions, and craft workshops (April 17). (410-274-5691; www.citylitproject.org) The annual Maryland Writer’s Association Conference brings local and national writers, agents, and editors to the Baltimore Marriott in Hunt Valley (245 Shawan Rd.) on April 24 for workshops on everything from writing for children to business advice. (www. marylandwriters.org/conferences.html) Several craft workshops are being offered this spring under the Write Here Write Now banner. One is a poetry course taught by local bard Shirley Brewer; titled Making Change/Steering from the Inside, it’s geared toward women in transition but is open to everyone. Held weekly for eight weeks, beginning March 11, at the Creative Alliance. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-276-1651; www. creativealliance.org) CLASSICAL MUSIC The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess with a one-hour concert suite on Feb 5 and 6, featuring “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Feb 11–13, the BSO performs the East Coast premiere of Ansel Adams: America, set to Adams’ photographs of the American West and co-commissioned by the BSO and created by jazz pianist Dave Brubeck and his composer son, Chris. Feb 18, 20, and 21 bring the violin great Itzhak Perlman to conduct and perform with BSO principal oboist Katherine Needleman; on the program are Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, and the most famous symphony of all, Beethoven’s Fifth. In March, send in the clowns for “BSO Under the Big Top,” a four-week “music carnival” that mixes special comedic, acrobatic, and theatrical performances with circus- and mayhemthemed music: Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid,

Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella. See website for more details. (410-783-8000; www.bsomusic.org) Fans of the immortal Ludwig Van, take note: The Candlelight Concert Society’s six-concert, two-year project to perform all sixteen of Beethoven’s string quartets continues apace. On Feb 6 at Howard Community College, France’s Ebène Quartet takes on the Quartet in F Major, Op. 18, No. 1; Quartet in F Major, Op. 59; and No. 1 Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. On Feb 27 at St. John’s Episcopal Church (9120 Frederick Rd., Ellicott City), the Artemis Quartet from Germany weighs in with Quartet in G Major, Op. 18, No. 2; Quartet in F minor, Op. 95; and Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. (410-997-2324; www. candlelightconcerts.org) Austrian pianist Till Fellner has been winning raves for his cycle of interpretations of all the piano sonatas. He makes his debut appearance in Baltimore on Feb 6 at the Baltimore Museum of Art (10 Art Museum Dr.), where he’ll perform five of them, including Nos. 14 (“Moonlight”) and 21 (“Waldstein”). (www.andiemusiklive.org) On Feb 7, the Baltimore Classical Guitar Society presents ChromaDuo (Tracy Ann Smith and Rob McDonald), premiering their performance of a new BCGS commission by Christopher William Pierce at An die Musik. (409 N. Charles St.; 410-247-5320; www. bcgs.org) Fight the chill with Chamber Music on the Hill’s Romance in Winter, Feb 14: The Westminster Trio performs Robert Schumann, with special guests, at Carroll Community College in Westminster. (410848-7000; www2.mcdaniel.edu/Music/ cmoth.html) The Shriver Hall Concert Series continues with cellist Jean-Guihen Queryas and pianist Alexandre Tharaud performing Bach,

photo by Agostino Mela

Improvisations Beethoven and Mozart with a Twist at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Feb 25–27 Inside Out with Gilchrist & Formanek plus Bauer/Drake/Parker at the Creative Alliance, Feb 27

Schubert, and others on March 13, as part of the SHCS Discovery Series at the BMA. Back at Shriver (3400 N. Charles St.) on March 21 is Renaissance wind band Piffaro, making a series debut with their comically named period instruments (krumhorns! sackbuts!). (410-516-7164; www.shriverconcerts.org) CONTEMPORARY MUSIC Mobtown Modern, the Contemporary Museum’s music series at the Metro Gallery, begins 2010 with Home Grown, a retrospective of the instrumental works of the D.C.-based composer Alexandra Gardner, on Feb 3. Then, for Feb 24’s All in the Game, local musicians join Mobtown Modern regulars to play John Zorn’s Cobra, an improvised piece in which performers are prompted by cue cards. March 17 brings High Art, a night of way-up-there music for flute and clarinet. (1700 N. Charles St.; www. mobtownmodern.com) Composer and sound artist Joan La Barbara and composer/violinist Tom Chiu will perform contemporary music, including a new work by UMBC music professor Linda Dusman, on March 4 at UMBC. (410-455ARTS; www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/ calendar/) OPERA The Lyric Opera House presents a fully staged and costumed production of Carmen, featuring soprano Denyce Graves, with the New Jersey Symphony and the former Baltimore Opera Chorus, on Feb 14. (140 W. Mt. Royal Ave.; www.lyricoperahouse.com) From Peabody Chamber Opera comes poet Anne Sexton’s Transformations, which retells Brothers Grimm fairy tales via the contemporary music of composer Conrad Susa; it premiered shortly before Sexton’s suicide in 1975. (Feb 18–21 at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St.) On March 10–13,

MUSIC

Why hear music live? For the flirting-with-disaster thrill of hearing sounds created on the fly. In Beethoven and Mozart with a Twist, BSO audiences get a rare lesson in period-style improvisation from pianist Robert Levin, famous for “finishing” Mozart’s unfinished Requiem and for improvising his own cadenzas in 18th- and 19thcentury pieces. Here he’ll perform Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro overture and Symphony No. 41, plus Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 followed by an “Improvisation in the Style of Beethoven.” (At the Meyerhoff, 1212 Cathedral St.; 410-783-8000; www.bsomusic.org) In jazz, improvisation is a given, but it is pursued most fervently in that polarizing/exhilarating subgenre known as free jazz. Local and international masters of the form will converge on the Patterson (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-276-1651; www.creativealliance.org) in a noteworthy night of free jazz trios: German trombone wizard Conny Bauer, with the great bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, shares the bill with Baltimore’s versatile keyboard phenom Lafayette Gilchrist (pictured) and his new trio, featuring bassist/cellist Michael Formanek and percussionist Guillermo E. Brown. —David Dudley

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m f e b r u a r y 1 0

presents

2nd Annual

Meadowbrook

Aquatic & Fitness Center

Year round lap swimming! Michael Phelps Swim School Children & Adults Learn to Swim - Triathletes Welcome!

Save the Date Friday, March 19th 7-11 p.m.

New Member Special! Mention this ad and enjoy extra savings! 5700 Cottonworth Ave. • 410.433.8300 • www.mbrook.com

Frederick Douglass Isaac Myers Maritime Park and Museum

Tickets are on sale now! $75/ $40 w/ student ID Purchase online at www.baltimoregreenworks.com or call 410.952.0334