January 2007 Issue

january

B A LT I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

2007

F O R

issue no. 31

The Lack of Common Courtesy: Why aren’t we nicer to each other?

A Sprawling Problem:

The first in a series on development in Maryland

Soul Food with a Heart:

Vegetarian Southern cuisine

80 Years in Duckpin Country:

Patterson Bowling Center celebrates a milestone

2

urbanite january 07

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F O R

B A LT I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

issue no. 31

This month’s cover was created through a partnership with Maryland Institute College of Art. Illustration professor Cornel Rubino, who has contributed to Urbanite, worked with his “Illustration Concepts I” class to come up with cover ideas. Third-year illustration major Nicolas Djandji created the winning image. “To me, civility means to subdue things you want to say outright,” says Djandji. He chose to place a PostIt note over the finger because the paper is like a memorandum. “It’s used to cover something up but is also a reminder,” he says. Another of Rubino’s students, Swedish exchange student Sarah Forsberg, illustrated the feature article “Me vs. The World” on page 50.

2007

f e a t u r e s

january

cover note:

The Lack of Common Courtesy: Why aren’t we nicer to each other?

A Sprawling Problem:

The first in a series on development in Maryland

Soul Food with a Heart:

Vegetarian Southern cuisine

80 Years in Duckpin Country:

Patterson Bowling Center celebrates a milestone

the rules of engagement in the war against incivility, do manners still matter? by michael paulson

schools and programs are popping up all over the country in response to our sense that we could and should conduct ourselves in a more appropriate manner. has the whole notion of manners and civil behavior become a quaint and outdated concept? and if so, can a return to formal etiquette training solve the problem?

50

me vs. the world the struggle to balance self-interest and selflessness by marianne amoss

in today’s busy world, taking a few minutes to help a stranger doesn’t always seem like a good idea. how much does being civil to people you don’t know really matter?

52

architecture of happiness in an excerpt from his latest book, the architecture of happiness, best-selling author alain de botton explores the impact of the man-made environment on our daily well-being by alain de botton

belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places—and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.

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

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what you’re saying

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what you’re writing

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corkboard

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have you heard …

31

food: vegetarian soul food

departments

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

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

six not-to-miss events around town

people, places, and things you should know about

a reformed carnivore finds a way to reconnect with her culinary heritage by meshelle

35 31

baltimore observed: eighty years in duckpin country patterson bowling center celebrates a milestone by jason tinney

39

encounter: the duct-tape man a lone soul connects a bus full of strangers by tykia murray

42

space: no child left outside a local architecture firm takes a sustainable approach to portable classrooms by mary k. zajac

35

57

poetry: al fresco

59

sustainable city: sprawl nation in the first of a two-part series on regional development, urbanite talks with anthony flint about his new book on america’s lifestyles and land use

by michael salcman

by amy cynkar

63

out there: courting change a new york judge and his court raise the bar for justice by combining social services with sentencing by myisha cherry

42

67

recommended

73

resources

78

eye to eye

books, bands, exhibits, and more

further reading on topics covered in this issue

a closing thought, curated by creative director alex castro

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

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Administrative Assistants Catrina Cusimano La Kaye Mbah

7/25/06 11:23:23 AM

6535 North Charles Street Pavilion North, Suite 250 Baltimore, MD 21204 410-828-4123 • 877-828-4123 (toll free) 410-828-4124 (fax) • BaltimoreFaces.com

Senior Account Executive Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives Rebekah Oates Rebekah@urbanitebaltimore.com Kristin Pattik Kristin@urbanitebaltimore.com Bill Rush Bill@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Interns Christina Bittinger Sheri J. Booker La Kaye Mbah David Meinrath Saaret E. Yoseph Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to the editor-in-chief (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050.

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

editor’s

note

quotes

Time has been increasingly divided and subdivided, an obsession which is a feature of modernity, to divide time—that infinite and beautiful thing—into the mere infinitesimal decimal …

photo by Sam Holden

—Jay Griffiths, A Sideways Look at Time

In the course of any given day, I am often late.

This is not because I’m unaware of the time. At home seven different devices display the hour, from my alarm clock to my coffee machine. You can triple that at the office, where every single computer ticks off digital minutes and personal calendars ding audible reminders of upcoming appointments.

To trick myself into being prompt, I’ve set the clock in my car fast, but this only means I wind up doing a math problem whenever I turn over the ignition. (Elizabeth sets out in her car doing thirty miles per hour in a twenty-mile-per-hour zone, rushing across town for an appointment that’s to begin in ten minutes. She is five minutes late, but her car clock reads eight minutes fast. How much time does Elizabeth have before she is officially behind?)

I’ve relied on my cell phone as the ultimate arbiter of the time, since it’s the one device that can’t be set fast or grind to a halt during a power outage. And then one day I noticed that my phone and my boyfriend’s phone are one minute apart. It stopped me short. Where did that minute go? He has Cingular. I have Verizon. Which clock was correct? I could just picture the conversation: “I’ll see you at 3 p.m. Verizon Standard Time.”

Pondering this sixty-second discrepancy, I was struck by how preoccupied we all are with time. This month was ushered in with a second-by-second countdown. We’ve collectively changed our calendars to 2007, some of which now offer six-minute increments for “enhanced” time management. We are a culture obsessed; we parcel out our days in ever-shrinking intervals, managing our schedules to the minute.

It wasn’t always so. What was considered “late” in the Roman Empire, when time was told by a set of communal sundials? What is “late” in the forests of Indonesia today, where time is calculated by nature?

Author Jay Griffiths addressed these questions in her 1999 book, A Sideways Look at Time, published on the eve of this time-frenzied new millennium. Linking our time fetish to interpersonal behavior, she describes a man who works in the money markets of London. “He is a man in love with speed. He describes his faults as speedrelated: being easily frustrated by people, short-tempered and intolerant.”

In this issue we ask what happened to common courtesy. Perhaps, as Griffiths suggests, it perished at the hands of the nanosecond. Being convivial requires time we don’t have.

Like most people, my to-do list way outpaces the hours in the day. In those many moments when I’m short on time and long on obligations, I am at my most uncivil. I snap. I lash out. I find fault with the world.

To make amends, I actually set my clocks faster in an effort to cheat time. It means that my mind is minutes— and months—ahead while the present is a blur. Where does the time go? It goes into a calendar with six-minute increments.

“Speed harms relationships between people,” Griffiths warns. “The faster you go, the less spontaneous you can be; no pausing, wondering or re-routing.”

When our daily lives are stripped of the things that make us human—time to take a breath, enjoy our friends and families, linger over a meal—it’s no wonder we’re all so cranky.

So what’s the answer? I know more and more people who pay attention to the natural rhythms of their lives to offset the artificial rhythms we’ve created with our technologies. They are eating seasonally, with nature, embracing the dark days of winter by slowing their own pace. As our lives become more harried and complex, our choices need to become more intentional. I can’t give myself more time, but I can decide to give myself more freedom within that time. I can remember to consult my internal clock, where minutes don’t exist. And what is it telling me? It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s winter … it’s time to take a nap.

Civility is but a desire to receive civility, and to be esteemed polite.

—François de la Rochefoucauld, French nobleman and writer

Polite conversation is rarely either.

—Fran Lebowitz, American author

True politeness consists in being easy one's self, and in making every one about one as easy as one can.

—Alexander Pope, British poet

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything .

—Evelyn Waugh, British writer

Whenever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness .

—Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman rhetorician and senator

—Elizabeth A. Evitts

I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.

What if we renamed Baltimore?

—Michel de Montaigne, French writer and inventor of the essay

What if we had the best public schools in the country?

What if we stopped to ask, “What if?”

The Urbanite Project

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—George Eliot, pen name of British novelist Mary Ann Evans

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urbanite january 07

contributors

behind this issue

photo by Lisa Macfarlane

courtesy of Tykia Murray

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Amy Cynkar In June 2006, Amy Cynkar moved to Baltimore’s Ridgley Delight neighborhood after spending the first twenty-five years of her life in the Chicago area. A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, her previous writing experience has mainly been within the healthcare and nonprofit sectors. For this month’s “Sustainable City” department, Cynkar wrote about urban sprawl and Maryland’s place in the ”smart growth” initiative (p. 59). Cynkar has firsthand experience with this subject: “Too much of my time back in Chicago was spent in a car, driving around the city’s suburban sprawl,” she says. “Despite the problems Baltimore City still faces, city living is and will always be where the action is.”

Christina Bittinger Christina Bittinger, one of Urbanite’s fall production interns, spent the summer of 2005 working with several other college students on an exhibition promoting the Station North Arts District. The exhibition was displayed at the State House in Annapolis for one year, and has temporarily been moved to the Owings Mills campus of Villa Julie College. Bittinger has traveled the world, exploring the eclectic architecture of places like England, Maui, and California. A December 2006 graduate of Villa Julie College, she is currently working in marketing and print media design at BlueWater Agency in Annapolis. When she isn’t conceptualizing designs, Bittinger takes in performances of Broadway plays like Rent.

Tykia Murray For this month’s “Encounter” department, Tykia Murray wrote about a particular experience on a city bus (p. 39). “For me, riding the bus is not only a necessity but something that makes life a lot more interesting,” she says. “I could never experience that variety of people while driving.” A senior at Loyola College, Murray is looking forward to her May graduation with excitement and some anxiety.

She doesn’t have any definite postcollege plans, but she hopes to one day travel to Antarctica. “It’s like the end of the world,” Murray says.

“Once you reach the end, what is there left to be afraid of?”

David Meinrath Urbanite’s second production intern, David Meinrath, spent most of his childhood in the hospital due to an intestinal disorder; while there, he spent much of his free time learning to draw. The Houston, Texas, native is currently an illustration major at Maryland Institute College of Art. When he’s not drawing, Meinrath performs in a local hip-hop group called Tha Hellacopstas. Meinrath says his most favorite things are “Kurt Vonnegut, small dogs, going to Rite Aid and smelling deodorants, and the music of Paul Simon.”

P. M. Forni was born in Italy in 1951 and graduated with a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1981. He has taught Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University for the last twenty years. A student and advocate of manners, civility, and politeness, he heads The Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins. His work has been instrumental in the launching of civility projects in Minnesota, Ohio, and elsewhere. His 2002 book, Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct, has been reprinted several times and continues to be adopted by schools, corporations, and organizations across the United States.

Dr. Forni has been an expert source for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, and ABC’s World News, among others. His commentary “The Civility Challenge” airs every week as part of the Satellite Sisters nationally syndicated radio show. He often lectures on the benefits of fostering a culture of civility in the workplace. Dr. Forni lives in Towson with his wife, Virginia.

photo by La Kaye Mbah

photo by La Kaye Mbah

with guest editor p. m. forni

A humanities professor by trade, I happily taught and wrote on medieval Italian

literature for a couple of decades before asking myself: “What if kindness is as important as art? What if it is more important?”

I am not sure what brought this about. Maybe it was a sign of my middle-age crisis. All I know is that such questions lingered, eventually turning my life in a new direction—an extraordinarily exciting one. After a loyal militancy in the ranks of esthetics, I was developing a strong interest in ethics. Maybe there was a kernel of truth in that odd thought that came visiting one day and stayed: In the first part of our lives we look for beauty; in the second part we look for goodness. Also, having lived and breathed the works of wonderful writers from an almost forgotten past for such a long time, I eagerly cast my glance on the present. I was ready to fall in love with something relevant to everybody’s everyday life. Civility presented itself as the obvious choice.

I began to look at this form of gracious goodness, to study it and reflect on it, finding unexpected and fascinating facets to my subject, but also discovering myself in the process.

Making the Johns Hopkins Civility Project a reality in 1997 was part of that process and so was writing Choosing Civility and publishing it in 2002. Years have gone by, but my fascination has not flagged. The Civility Project has become The Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins, but the goals we pursue are still to research and promote civility—or if you prefer, relational competence or social intelligence.

Civility is a benevolent awareness of others that shows itself in restraint, respect, and consideration. In it, altruism and self-interest find an enlightened way of coexisting. Do stop and think about it for a moment; this is quite remarkable. Civility is good and it is good for you. When you are civil, you tend to the well-being of another, but you are also liked and as a result the quality of your relationships increases and with it the quality of your life. Social intelligence is a much more accurate predictor of success in life than the kind of intelligence we measure with IQ tests. The world is the oyster of the likeable.

A compelling argument for the fostering of civility in society at large is the connection between incivility and violence. Many of the billion acts of physical violence taking place in the world every year have their origin in an exchange of uncivil words or actions. See for instance the typical spiraling from rude gesturing to a fisticuffs or a shooting in road-rage incidents.

By raising the levels of civility, we can lower those of physical violence. Putting civility on the national agenda of public discourse for the new year is a very smart way to promote everyday safety.

I love telling youngsters who are afraid to be perceived as weak if they are kind that nice guys need not finish last—not if they are also smart. In fact, smart and nice is as powerful a combination for success as we can imagine. I love showing executives how employee quality of life can benefit from the fostering of a culture of civility in the workplace, and the ways that that is beneficial to the lives of organizations. I never tire of repeating to all willing to listen: Take civility seriously because social skills strengthen social bonds, and we need strong social bonds to survive and to thrive. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 7

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what you’re saying

We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Submissions should include your name, address, and daytime phone number; letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Meet the Neighbors Thank you for the important articles on race in the November issue. But I think you left some stories on the table. Some great stories … stories of victory. Stories of racial integration and highperforming schools.

True, Baltimore sometimes feels hopeless. True, Baltimore sometimes believes that black and white families just can’t live together. Can’t trust each other. Won’t love each other. But I say, Baltimore, come to City Neighbors Charter School in Northeast Baltimore. Here you will find the children of various races, absorbed in their work on meaningful projects together. You will witness real friendships building, real pride developing. You will meet students who know that they are “equal, but separate.”

These young people are the fulfillment of the dream of many great leaders who marched the streets of America for equality.

This is the real race story in Baltimore. This is the story that must be told.

—Bobbi Macdonald is founder and president of City Neighbors Charter School. She lives in Northeast Baltimore with her husband and three young children.

life would not be the same. Not everyone is going to be cordial and no one is going to say “Hello” back.

Growing up in the South and being African American, I experienced racial injustices and seemingly unjustified favoritism. But living in Maryland for only two weeks, the imperfect world of the South cries out to my heart.

Since I settled in such a beautiful city, not one fast-food restaurant or family grocery store I have entered has superseded the pleasantness of the brilliantly lit night skyline. Everyone seems to be harboring some suppressed emotion of turmoil and great pain. It’s totally acceptable to run into your fair share of rude employees, as I was once employed by similar companies in the past and I, too, wasn’t always the happiest. But to shop at numerous establishments and feel that same sense of animosity and hostility from the employees is borderline ludicrous.

Is this a trait and attitude that is taught when growing up? Is it something you become accustomed to? Did I make a mistake? Only time will tell.

Fran Weber

You’ve turned this into a wonderful publication.

It sparkles. It’s trendy and hip and you’re covering stories that no one else is. People around town are saying, “I read it in Urbanite!” The October article on Reid’s Orchard was great; I’m a weekend devotee to the city farmers’ markets and you provided one of my favorite farmers with some real nice publicity.

Fran Weber, a pigeon fancier featured in Urbanite’s September 2006 article “Flight Club,” is a champion pigeon racer who has won countless trophies in the sport. Since the release of that issue, Weber has gained even more recognition. “I’m on cloud nine!” he says.

Weber says that Urbanite’s article prompted Washington D.C.’s Fox 5 News to do a story on him, an experience that he thoroughly enjoyed. He has also won two major competitions since the September article: the Black-Eyed Susan Classic and the Tolson Pigeon Club Memorial Race, annual competitions that are well known in the pigeon-racing circle.

The Black-Eyed Susan began October 10, 2006, at 8 a.m. in Lexington, North Carolina.

A tracking device attached to each pigeon clocked its time. Little Rock, Weber’s firstplace pigeon, traveled at a rate of 1724 yards per minute and returned to his owner’s home in Baltimore by 1:11 p.m. that same day.

For the Tolson Pigeon Club competition, fanciers released their birds October 29, 2006, in Charlottesville, North Carolina. Just as they did in the Black-Eyed Susan Classic, the pigeons in this race flew back to each of their coops in Baltimore, traveling a distance of about 360 miles. Like a proud papa, Weber says that his first-place pigeon, Bright Star, accomplished this feat in only five hours and thirteen minutes, averaging seventy miles per hour. He also raced two other pigeons that won third and fourth places in the competition, settling into their coops just a minute after Bright Star.

Weber has dedicated fifty-six years of his life to pigeon racing and has no qualms about his commitment. Bad health would be the only thing that could deter him from racing—then and only then would he give up his life-long hobby. “I gave up seventeen women for pigeons,” Weber says. “I wouldn’t just quit!”

—Martha Merrell lives in Hampden.

—Saaret E. Yoseph

—DeMarick Thomas recently moved to Baltimore from North Carolina, where he spent a year after living in South Carolina for twenty-two years.

From the editors: DeMarick, you’re not alone: Americans recently polled believe that our culture is getting ruder all the time. Take a look at this month’s feature articles (starting on page 46) to see how some are combatting our culture’s seemingly growing incivility.

Northern Exposure … to Rudeness Coming from the Deep South, you grow to have certain expectations in your life. You figure that everyone is going to marry, have kids, and produce that perfection of the American Dream, filled with love, joy, and a sensation of completion. Another expectation that is nurtured from birth is kindness and consideration from others. No matter how one feels about you deep down inside, respect and hospitality are first nature outside the privacy of one’s home.

Moving to the city of Baltimore, I was forewarned by parties already residing in the area that

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urbanite january 07

what you’re writing

city life “What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers.

Each month, we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We have the right to heavily edit for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Due to libel and invasion of privacy issues, we reserve the right to print the piece under your initials. Submissions should be typed (and if you cannot type, please print clearly). Only one submission per topic, please.

Send your essay to Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 or to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Please keep submissions under four hundred words; longer submissions may not be read due to time constraints. Due to the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned. The themes printed below are for the “What You’re Writing” department only and are not the themes for future issues of the magazine itself.

Deadline

Publication

Second Chance Laughter Possession Anticipation Memory

Jan 19, 2007 Feb 16, 2007 Mar 16, 2007 Apr 13, 2007 May 18, 2007

Apr 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 Aug 2007

illustration by Okan Arabacioglu

Topic

A baby’s cry, loud and insistent, blasted through our open bedroom window early one Saturday morning. I woke with a jolt and nudged my snoring husband out of his deep sleep. My maternal instincts had charged into overdrive; something tiny and helpless was in distress and close at hand. My hubby grunted, then pulled the covers over his head.

He didn’t seem too concerned.

“It’s our new neighbors,” he mumbled. “They had a baby.”

“They did? When?”

“About four months ago. Go back to sleep.”

How could I have missed a pregnant woman on our street, much less one who lived right next door to me? And what happened to the old neighbor, Mike? Or was it Mark?

More than ten years in the same East Baltimore neighborhood and I’d turned into the worst kind of city dweller—totally oblivious.

—T. R. Keurejian is still not perfect, but has improved vastly since attending the annual block party.

When I first moved back to Baltimore, I rushed to help a catatonic, stumbling woman outside of Lexington Market. She looked blissful as she swayed and came dangerously close to falling.

A passerby told me, “She’s just high, lady. She’ll be fine.” A year later, I don’t even blink when I pass by the couple tucked in an alcove shooting heroin into their thread-like veins.

I used to open my wallet and give money to people with sad stories of sick mothers in hospitals and no bus fare to visit them, or of broken-down cars just a few blocks away and no way to get home. A year later, I tell them, “I have nothing to give you.” I only give my money to people who work. I tip the workers in Dunkin’ Donuts at least twenty percent every time I get a cup of coffee.

From my apartment, I hear traffic going over manhole covers, police and ambulance sirens, people yelling, the squeaky brakes of buses, the din of loud rap music from car stereos. It used to keep me awake at night. Now, it lulls me to sleep.

I love walking to Oriole Park, Little Italy, The Charles Theatre, the Enoch Pratt Library, the Walters Art Museum. There is beautiful architecture in

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Baltimore, some pleasant city parks, a diverse ethnicity, unique neighborhoods, and history. My heart sinks, however, when I see trash strewn all over the sidewalks and pigeons gnawing on discarded chicken bones. On some streets the stench of urine is strong, and I hear a cacophony of angry, foul language when I walk by any bus stop.

When someone asks me where I’m from, I tell them I’m from Baltimore. The response is either sympathy or praise. I get sympathy for working and living in a city with a high crime rate, and which has fallen from grace over the past several decades. I get praise for exactly the same reasons.

windows when the sun goes down, and winks at me as he presides over my backyard barbecues. My parents met at the National Brewing Company back in 1976 when National Bohemian beer was still brewed in Baltimore, so, you could say I owe my life to Natty Boh.

—Amy Brown is a “recycled Marylander” and a nurse, and lives in downtown Baltimore.

day with a new bike. Every boy in my South Baltimore neighborhood wanted a bicycle with a banana seat and high-rise handlebars, and that’s what I was given. It was even “cooler” because the banana seat was tiger-striped.

A few weeks later I was intimidated into giving Worm—a thug, soon-to-be hippie, sooner a junkie, and then dead in a few years—a ride on my new bike. I panicked when he reached the end of the block and disappeared around the corner. I don’t know how my mother found out so quickly about the bike, but suddenly there she was, running on adrenaline and anger, and I was following. A few minutes later, she ran down Worm in Riverside Park and retrieved my bike. The sight of her walking it back, like a small horse she’d just broken in, is as vivid in my mind as if it occurred yesterday.

And yesterday evening, I was sitting outside a coffee shop in Federal Hill, watching a local boy named Jarrod walk back and forth, obviously troubled about something.

“Hey, Jarrod, what’s up?” I asked during his third pass.

“Aw, some big boy just stole my bike,” he blurted, fighting a losing battle with tears.

“That sucks. What happened?”

“I had it inside CVS, and he just took it.”

I remembered seeing a burly boy weaving a bike in and out of moving cars. In fact, he had just whipped by me on the sidewalk.

“Was he wearing a red shirt?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“He just went that way,” I told him. I gathered my notebook computer and the folders I had splayed on the table. “Let’s go get him.”

Jarrod’s surprise eased his tears to a sniffle.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. “You’ve got flip-flops on. Can you run in flip-flops?”

“I guess we’ll see,” I said.

We searched around the block. To break the silence, I told him the story of my stolen bike. Just then he saw the boy with the red shirt on his bike, riding with another kid. They were a half-block away. I ran after them, flipping and flopping.

“

Which way are you going?”

“I don’t know!”

I heard the frustration in her voice. She’d driven a long way to see me and despite what may or may not have been explicit directions, my friend had gotten lost after getting off I-95.

“What direction are you going?” I asked.

“How would I know?”

“Well, do you see Natty Boh?” “Natty who?”

“Natty Boh. Look up. Do you see a big, oneeyed, neon guy with a moustache, on the top of a building?”

“No.” “Then turn around.”

I waited while she turned her car around and, sure enough, it wasn’t long before I heard her laugh.

I first met Mr. Boh two years ago, when I moved to Baltimore on a snowy Saturday in January; it was the first snow of the new year and the beginning of an exciting new chapter for me. Not wanting to spend my first night alone, I called up a few friends who, like most Maryland drivers, were not prepared to brave a few flakes for an impromptu housewarming. Luckily, a fearless friend with Wisconsin roots and a pickup truck showed up like a knight in shining armor, and we donned our boots and traipsed to one of Mr. Boh’s favorite bars. After last call and last song, we ended up on a rooftop deck with some new friends watching Natty Boh wink happily through the falling snow.

Although he makes an excellent navigational landmark, Natty Boh is much more to me than an orange beacon in the night. He and I exchange pleasantries on a daily basis as I walk to work and the gym. I see his mustachioed kisser (as Bill Griffith called it in his Zippy the Pinhead cartoon) from the window of my office on Boston Street. He watches over my house, his soft glow creeping into my rear

—Colleen Stanley is a “Quirkyalone” who lives in Brewers Hill and thinks Charm City is a pretty cool place to call home.

“Hey, gimme that bike!” was all I could come up with, but apparently all that was needed. We turned a corner to find Jarrod’s bike abandoned against a tree. Jarrod jumped on it and checked it over.

“Thanks,” he said.

I flip-flopped home, trying to remember if I had ever thanked my mom for retrieving my bike with the tiger-striped banana seat. Damn, I loved that bike.

—Michael Eckhardt lives in Baltimore City.

My parents surprised me on my tenth birth-

Whenever

I told people that I’d left San Diego to move to Baltimore, the response was usually a puzzled and shocked “Why?” Sometimes even I wasn’t quite sure why, especially after I came back from a trip to find that someone had attempted to steal my car from in front of my Hampden apartment.

I should have bought a Club to prevent this from happening again, but no. I was not as city-savvy as I had thought, plus I had no idea why someone would try to steal a 1989 Dodge Spirit with no heat or air conditioning. It was my first and only car and I loved it—the kind of love reserved for worn-out dolls. I thought it had no value to anyone but me.

Six months later I had another trip planned.

The day before, I walked to my car to go to work and found nothing but an empty space. My car was gone.

Baltimore was mocking me: You can’t handle city life, can you? I had had it with this town; I took the car theft as a sign that I wasn’t meant to be here and I decided to leave. I gave notice to my job and prepared to move back to Southern California.

But then fall came. I enjoyed the history and quirkiness of Baltimore during a sunny autumn afternoon at the Fells Point Festival. I felt a pang of disappointment that I wouldn’t be able to wear my cozy sweaters in perpetual seventy-degree weather; my resolve to move wavered. I enjoyed cucumber margaritas with my friends at Holy Frijoles; I postponed my move. I admired the beauty of the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., in the spring, enjoyed sangria outside Tapas Teatro as it got warmer, and wondered how I could ever give up movies at The Charles.

I never did. I’m still here. San Diego might be a paradise, but Baltimore has a beauty only seen by those willing to break through her tough exterior.

She’ll kick your butt, but if you can stick it out, you’ll see her charm, and she’ll earn your respect. ■ —Jennifer Calista Wiley has been living in Baltimore for almost five years and is still discovering new charms of the city, while always keeping a Club on her car.

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

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urbanite january 07

AFTER

CORKBOARD CORK A Circus by and for Kids The Russian American Kids Circus returns for a second appearance at the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis. The stars of the circus are all between the ages of 6 and 16.

801 Chase Street Jan 14, 3 p.m. $23 410-263-5544 www.mdhallarts.org

Celebrate the Civil Rights Leader Commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with two events this year. The city’s annual parade takes place Jan 15; the procession steps off at noon and moves south on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and includes high school marching bands, floats, choirs, and balloons. On Jan 16, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra hosts Soulful Symphony’s twenty-first-annual tribute to the civil rights leader.

Parade: Begins at the intersection of Eutaw Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard Soulful Symphony: Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall 1212 Cathedral Street 8 p.m. $15–$55 410-783-8020 www.baltimoresymphony.com

Going to the show Everyman Theatre hosts the Baltimore/Washington area premiere of Lee Blessing’s Going to St. Ives. The play tells the story of a meeting between two women—one a respected eye surgeon, the other the mother of an African dictator—and centers on the question, “If you could save thousands of lives by sacrificing your ethics, would you?”

1727 North Charles Street Jan 17–Feb 25 (special “pay-whatyou-can” performance on Jan 16 at 7:30 p.m.)

See website for performance times and ticket information $17–$30 410-752-2208 www.everymantheatre.org

Cell-Phone Art And you thought that a camera phone was just for fun. The latest show at the Contemporary, Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile Phone, features art created with cell-phone technology. Over thirty international artists and artists groups will show their work.

100 West Centre Street Jan 21–Apr 22 Museum open Wed–Sun, noon–5 p.m.; open until 7 p.m. on Thurs Suggested donation: adults $5, students $3 410-783-5720 www.contemporary.org

Happy 198th Birthday, Poe! Mark the Baltimore writer’s birthday with theatrical performances of Poe’s works “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “Berenice,” and a Toast to Poe at the Edgar Allan Poe House’s annual celebration.

Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, Westminster Hall 519 West Fayette Street Jan 27 and Jan 28 Go to poecelebration.tripod.com for event and ticket information

This Barney’s Not for Kids Media artist Matthew Barney makes a rare appearance at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., as part of the museum’s Meet the Artist series.

He will discuss the influence of German artist Joseph Beuys on his work, with Nancy Spector, Guggenheim Museum curator of contemporary art.

Corner of Independence Avenue and 7th Street SW Jan 31, 7 p.m. (doors open at 6:30 p.m.)

Free; advance ticketing for limited seating starts at 6:15 p.m.

202-633-4674 www.hirshhorn.si.edu

Photo credits from top to bottom: photo by Maike Schulz; courtesy of the Baltimore Offi ce of Promotion and the Arts; photo by Stan Barouh; “cell:block” by URBANtells, courtesy of the Contemporary Museum;; photo by La Kaye Mbah; courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum.

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urbanite january 07

have you heard . . .

edited by marianne amoss

Workout …

photo by La Kaye Mbah

When is exercising about revolution? It can be, when you’re practicing the martial art Capoeira Angola. Baltimore has a satellite chapter of the International Capoeira Angola Foundation (ICAF), an organization that aims to preserve the art’s African and Brazilian traditions. Skher Brown, head of ICAF’s Baltimore affiliate and a twelve-year student of capoeira (ca-po-WAY-ra), says Capoeira Angola was “born in Africa but raised in Brazil,” arriving in Latin America during the slave trade. The art is physical, cultural, and social, blending athleticism

with rhythm and song. ICAF-Baltimore hosts weekly classes open to all ages and fitness levels. Those intrigued (but maybe a little intimidated) can attend a sparring match during one of ICAF-Baltimore’s monthly “rodas,” a formal celebration of song and play. Go to www.baltimorecapoeira.org for weekly class locations, fees, and information.

—Catrina Cusimano

World Change …

If you want to help change the world but don’t know where to start, look to WorldChanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. The hefty volume (five-hundred-plus pages) is an offshoot of the website www.worldchanging.org, and it is filled with “solutions, ideas, and inventions” that can make a positive difference. Learn about things like which household cleansers do the least environmental damage, how nonviolent resistance works, and how to gauge your ecological footprint. Opening with a foreword by Al Gore, the book includes writing by notables like ReadyMade magazine Editor-in-Chief

Shoshana Berger and writer and activist Leif Utne of Utne Reader fame. Meant as a reference guide and a springboard for readers, WorldChanging also has an extensive index to help readers navigate through the hefty tome. As Editor Alex Steffen says in his introduction, “Consider this an invitation to join the adventure. What kind of future will you create?” Available at most major booksellers.

—Marianne Amoss

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Bar and Karaoke …

When Adam Meister was shopping for a spot to host his Classic Hipster Animal (CHA) Karaoke night, he had very specific requirements: He wanted a central location, enough space for a crowd, and a kitchen that stayed open after midnight (a Baltimore rarity). Carlos O’Charlie’s Sports Bar & Grill, opened by Orioles’ chef Carlos Cruz in August 2006, turned out to be the perfect habitat.

Housed in a former electronics warehouse on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown, there are two floors of fun.

On the ground floor, where the karaoke happens every Thursday from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., is a dance floor and two pool tables; upstairs is the twenty-eight-seat Spanishtiled main bar, a formal dining room, and smaller island-

inspired “tiki bar.” The thirty-four televisions that line the walls throughout Carlos O’Charlie’s serve up the sport du jour, including Central and South American soccer games. And yes, hungry hippos, the kitchen serves its full menu of Mexican/Salvadorian treats like carne asada and pastelitos de carne (spicy beef pie served with marinated cabbage), plus standard bar fare like burgers, nachos, and wings until 1 a.m. On the weekends, a DJ spins salsa and merengue tunes after 10 p.m. 3508 Eastern Avenue; 410-675-1485; www.carlosocharlies.com.

—Shannon Dunn

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Chi-Shiang Chen, M.D. 410-332-8484

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Internal Medicine Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

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urbanite january 07

Now accepting new patients.

Please call for an appointment.

Valet and discount patient parking available.

have you heard . . .

Katrina Relief …

poster by Don Clark of Asterik Studio

It’s been more than a year since the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and New Orleans still needs help. If heading down south to volunteer isn’t possible, lend a hand from afar. The Hurricane Poster Project is a web-based initiative that raises funds by selling original posters in hand-numbered editions of 25 to 100, all of them tributes to New Orleans and the relief effort. Prices range from $15 to $2,000, depending on how many of the desired posters are available. Individual designers and firms can

also get involved by creating their own limitededition Katrina-themed posters and submitting them to be sold on the site. (See the website for submission guidelines.) All proceeds go to the American Red Cross. Go to www.thehurricaneposter project.com.

—M. A.

Biodiesel …

Biodiesel, the ultimate alternative to petroleumbased diesel, is now available in Baltimore. As defined by Biodiesel.org, “biodiesel is the name of a clean-burning alternative fuel, produced from domestic, renewable resources … biodiesel is simple to use, biodegradable, nontoxic, and essentially free of sulfur and aromatics.” Baltimore Biodiesel, a newly launched buyers’ co-op, allows owners of cars with diesel engines to take advantage of this alternative fuel, which is converted from vegetable oil by local companies and delivered to a five-hundred-gallon tank in Remington. The initiative is a joint effort of Charm21, a group of environmentally minded citizens, and the Chesapeake Sustainable Business

Alliance, a local chapter of international nonprofit Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. Membership in Baltimore Biodiesel costs $30 per year, and first-time members also put down a $70 refundable deposit. Currently, members can fill up their tanks on Saturdays from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the pump located next to Mill Valley Garden Center and Farmers’ Market at 2800 Sisson Street; hours may be extended in the future. Those interested in volunteering or learning more about the initiative can go to www.baltimorebiodiesel.org.

—M. A.

Organic Salon …

photo by Alan Kolb

We’ve all come to appreciate the benefits of an organic diet, but what about organic beauty products?

That’s a question that has plagued Rachel Epstein for years. A veteran hairstylist, Epstein espouses an organic lifestyle rich in seasonal foods, but found that her occupation was often at odds with her diet. Many hair dyes, shampoos, and conditioners are mixed with chemical components that can be harmful when absorbed through the skin. Epstein resolved her conundrum in November 2006 by

opening Sprout—An Organic Salon, in which she uses and sells only all-organic haircare lines, like Aubrey Organics and John Masters Organics.

These products aren’t the only eco-friendly things at Sprout—the salon was renovated with salvaged and sustainable materials like bamboo. 925 West 36th Street; 410-235-2269; www.sproutsalon.com.

—Elizabeth A. Evitts

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food

by meshelle

illustration by deanna staffo

Vegetarian Soul Food A reformed carnivore finds a way to reconnect with her culinary heritage

I grew up the granddaughter of Mary Alice and Willie Lee Foreman, who were raised on the finest Southern cuisine, also known as soul food. I have eaten offspring of any species that fell prey to the clutches of my family’s patriarch, who unapologetically hunted rabbit and snapped the necks of the same chickens that we fed and befriended. Even our vegetables had to have some animal’s foot, neck, thigh, or toe in it for the dish to be what we knew as “seasoned to perfection.” (If food is supposed to evoke thought, no wonder my mind was always wandering in the pastures.) I suffered from the emotional guilt of consuming generations of flesh, and after years of fried chicken, collard greens with smoked pork bones, pork chops with gravy, and fried fish, I suffered the physical effects, too. I became what I ate—sedentary, slow, and a bit stout.

In college I watched a Barbara Walters television special about the effects meat had on people, such as obesity and high blood pressure. I immediately divorced red meat and its distant cousin, pork, from my diet. That was the genesis of my lifestyle shift. Fast forward six years: I was in the second year

of graduate school, a staunch poultry and seafood eater, when I met “Mr. Vegan,” now my husband of seven years. While dating, he introduced me to a vegetarian lifestyle, full of tasty foods that invigorated me and left me satisfied, not catatonic.

I began to see changes in my refrigerator—soy cheese, veggie burgers and sausage, and lots of fresh veggies, but nobody’s lip or ear for seasoning. Instead, there were liquid aminos and seitan (a chewy, protein-rich food that resembles meat and is made from wheat).

I looked up one day and there was nothing in my refrigerator that had once had a pulse. What kind of a root did this Midwestern man put on me?

Having family from Mississippi, he assuredly had soul food before. What happened to him? What television special had he seen to send him to greener pastures? He was an excellent cook, and I was smitten by it all. It was my goal to create equally scrumptious meals. I began experimenting, making veggie Salisbury steak and meatless gravy with the veggie burger patties and gravy mix. That was my first stab at it and there were no casualties. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 7

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urbanite january 07

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Since then I have offended every member of my family at every meal. I have never made announcements at outings about my diet and I never proclaimed the dangers of meat and pork or any other friend of Old MacDonald for that matter, yet I was considered a public offender. My grandmother wanted to know how I could eat like that. It’s just not natural. She would shake her head disapprovingly as we brought in our substitutes at Thanksgiving and other family gatherings. I can still hear her lecture at our initial dinner when she was introduced to our vegetarian lifestyle: “What do you mean, you don’t eat meat?

Well, get some chicken then. What? You don’t eat chicken? Well, get some fish. What? You don’t eat that either? Okay, well then, just starve because I don’t know what to tell you. You just gonna have to sit there looking crazy then. Get yourself some vegetables. There are greens and lima beans and cabbage. What do you mean, ‘What are they cooked in?’ A little smoked ham and a few necks. What do you mean you can’t have any? Well, you know what?

Just sit there! I ain’t never heard nothing so crazy in my life. All you eat is vegetables and ain’t even got sense enough to season them! You ain’t gonna live long like that. You ate it all your life and now you too good to eat my food! Fine then. Sit over there and eat you a bread sandwich. Can you eat that?”

I began to wonder if I had lost my soul for good food. I realized that I did miss the taste of seasoned greens and baked macaroni and cheese. I pledged that I would get my soul back without losing my new lifestyle. I was in this for the long haul and was prepared to recreate my childhood cuisine with a soul-food kick.

I began researching cookbooks about vegetarian soul food, and to my dismay I kept coming up empty. Instead, I found Zen cooking, liquid diets full Saratoga_Urbanite.pdf

11/22/06

of smoothies and vegetable juices, and pasta, pasta, and more pasta. There were recipes for Seoul food, leading me into Asian cooking. I was disillusioned and felt like an anomaly. So what does a sista do?

Create. That is the spirit of soul food.

My ancestors took the scraps of pigs and cows that were left after the slave masters threw them away and made delectable dishes to sustain them in the hot sun while working on the plantations.

They passed the recipes down, perfected them, and they have been recreated all over the world. In the spirit of the ancestors, I created Dishes that Touch the Soul: A Vegetarian Guide to Soul Food and More!

My cookbook chronicles my culinary journey and all the spin-off recipes that I grew up on, but with a vegetarian twist.

I have been like a mad scientist ever since, rendering my own version of fried-chicken-style tofu, cabbage and carrots, nondairy potato salad made with Nayonaise (soy mayonnaise), fried-fish-style tofu, baked macaroni and cheese (using soy cheddar cheese), and eighty other recipes.

I have two energetic “veggie-babies,” as Mom calls them, ages 5 and nearly 3. I prepare dinner at least four nights a week and most Sundays. I am currently diving into the world of vegan baking.

It’s amazing what a lifestyle change can do to convert even the most reluctant family. My mom no longer uses amputated parts to “season to perfection” and is a soy-milk drinker. And my grandmother puts her order in for my lima beans and my cabbage and carrots once a week. Who ever would’ve thought it? ■

Meshelle’s Vegetarian Baked Macaroni and Cheese 10 ounces unbleached or whole wheat elbow macaroni 12 ounces Soya-Kaas mild-cheddarstyle cheese 7 ounces shredded Galaxy rice cheddar cheese 2 tablespoons Earth Balance nonhydrogenated buttery spread 4 ounces vanilla soymilk ¼ cup Egg Beaters Sea salt Fresh ground pepper Paprika

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cook macaroni according to package.

While macaroni is boiling, shred Soya-Kaas cheese and place in casserole dish. Drain macaroni, place on the shredded cheese, and stir. Add rice cheese, soy milk, Egg Beaters, and natural buttery spread. Stir until ingredients are melted and evenly distributed. Add salt and pepper to taste and sprinkle paprika on top. Bake for 40 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes. Serve warm.

—In addition to being a dedicated vegetarian, Meshelle is a touring comedienne who wrote about a home-going ceremony in the September 2006 issue of Urbanite.

6:18:12 PM

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

33

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34

urbanite january 07

baltimore observed

by jason tinney

photography by sam holden

Eighty Years in Duckpin Country Patterson Bowling Center celebrates a milestone

This year the Patterson Bowling Center—the oldest operating duckpin bowling alley in the nation— turns eighty. It’s a fitting distinction given that the sport itself was invented right here in Baltimore, or so the legend goes.

“That’s the rumor,” says Theresa McElhose, 50, who has owned the Patterson Bowling Center with her husband, Charles, since 1995. “I can’t verify it,” and with a laugh she says, “I wasn’t around back then.”

Some accounts put “small ball” bowling in Massachusetts as early as 1894, but according to Henry Fankhauser and Frank Micalizzi’s The Book of Duckpin Bowling published in 1969, it was at the now-demolished Diamond Alleys on Howard Street that “duckpins” were born.

With bowling considered a winter sport in the early 1900s, most bowling alleys—sometimes called houses—closed down during the summer.

But a handful remained open. “A few of these centers … gambled for survival on open-play bowling,” Fankhauser and Micalizzi write. “One of these centers was Diamond Alleys.” The owners stocked smaller six-inch balls, which bowlers could

use to play non-regulation games with names like “cocked hat” and “five back.” Diamond Alley’s manager, Frank Van Sant, then had a set of old tenpins trimmed down to accommodate the small bowling balls. Duckpin bowling became a summertime sensation.

The owners of the alley were “Uncle” Wilbert Robinson and John “Little Napoleon” McGraw, players on the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.

McGraw—an avid duck hunter—saw the way the smaller pins scattered when the balls collided with them, and remarked that the pins looked like a “flock of flying ducks.”

The sport quickly grew in popularity and soon duckpin bowling was played from New England to Georgia year-round. In 1927 the National Duckpin Bowling Congress (NDBC) was formed to standardize the sport (up until 1927 there were no specifications for lanes and gutters, nor a standard weight and size for pins and balls). Today the NDBC is based in Linthicum.

It was also in 1927 that Martin Ruzin opened the Patterson Bowling Center on Eastern Avenue, where it has remained all these years. Ruzin ran the

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fourteen-lane house—seven lanes on the first floor, seven on the second—for twenty-seven years. In 1955, Ruzin turned the alley over to his son, Bernie, who continued to run the business for forty years.

In the mid-nineties Bernie was looking to retire.

After seventy years in the Ruzin family, the Patterson Bowling Center was going up for sale.

“The For Sale sign in the window—that’s what led me here,” says Charles McElhose Sr., 51. He and Theresa take time out from their Tuesday-night Las Vegas League to chat about what is not only a business, but also a passionate hobby.

In 1995 Charles, an avid bowler since his teens, was looking for locations to hold a two-hundredmember duckpin tournament. “I came by on Eastern Avenue and noticed this little house and said, ‘Hey, that’s a store-front bowling alley. That’s got to be an antique.’ Sure enough, it was the oldest operating duckpin bowling alley in the country.”

Then he saw the For Sale sign. “I came in and met Bernie,” Charles says. “He had big Coke-bottle glasses and was the nicest guy you could ever meet.

He asked me, ‘What do you want to do with it?’ I said, ‘I want to keep it a bowling alley.’ That lit his eyes up. His whole life was in this bowling alley.”

In fact, Charles says, Bernie continued to bowl at the Patterson up until two weeks before his death in 2001. “We loved having him here,” Charles says.

During their first five years as owners, Charles and Theresa, who met in their high school choir and who have been married thirty-seven years, invested a lot of time and money into renovations for the old bowling alley. Prior to 1927, the building had been a broom factory. “When we first purchased it,” Theresa says, “a couple of bowlers had actually worked here when it was a broom factory. I found that quite impressive.”

As 2000 approached, Charles wanted to do something special for the bowling alley. Ironically, in the face of Y2K hysteria, Charles and Theresa installed computer scoring. “It was 2000. Speaking of computers going down, we’re bringing them in,” Charles says. And that came with a price tag. “It was about $100,000 to put them in.”

“You have to really love bowling to invest that kind of money,” Theresa adds.

The Patterson Bowling Center is now one of only two duckpin alleys left in Baltimore City— the other being Seidel’s on Belair Road. Although the popularity of duckpin peaked in the 1960s, the Patterson continues to bring in a devoted group of players. The rolling rumble of small balls and the scattering of pins—the flight of a flock of ducks— continues today inside the brick building with the

red, white, and blue awning and neon sign in the window that says OPEN. Two-toned bowling shoes are laced up by tourists seeking authentic Baltimore flavor and by locals enjoying birthday parties, wedding rehearsals, or a Friday night out for some laughs. It also doesn’t hurt that the Patterson has a BYOB policy.

But Charles notes the decline in participation.

“Bowling across the country has been on the up and down whether they’re tenpins or duckpins,” he says. “Many years ago, in the fifties and sixties,

I came by on Eastern Avenue and noticed this little house and said, “Hey, that’s a storefront bowling alley. That’s got to be an antique.” Sure enough, it was the oldest operating duckpin bowling alley in the country.

Hirsch, a distant cousin of Babe Ruth, has been bowling with the John Booth Senior League since 1991. (There is a photograph of Babe Ruth duckpin bowling on one of the walls, but no one is sure if he ever played at Patterson.) The spunky Highlandtown native with a dry sense of humor has been bowling for most of her seventy-five years and has fond memories of the Patterson Bowling Center. “It’s really good when you talk to people and they ask, ‘Where do you bowl?’ And I say, ‘Patterson.’ And they say, ‘Are they still in business?’”

The answer of course is yes, and Charles and Theresa have no plans of going anywhere. “It comes down to this,” Charles says. “As long as the city continues to support the bowling business, we’re going to be here.”

“I asked Bernie,” Charles continues, “‘You make any money here?’ He said, ‘Well, you can get by. It will pay its bills. You’ll probably be able to give yourself a paycheck, but you won’t get rich on it.’ I can see what he’s talking about. But, you know, I’m not here to be rich.” ■ —Jason Tinney is a regular Urbanite contributor.

you worked forty hours a week, came home and had three channels on the TV. If you didn’t like the program, well then, let’s go bowl. What else were you going to do? You went bowling.

That’s what they did in those days. Look at today. People have fifty-inch TV screens with six hundred channels, a remote control they can’t stop playing with, and on top of it, the kids have all these video games they can play on the same screen. Their time is occupied.”

Although Charles and Theresa have seen the numbers in open play increase, it’s been difficult to maintain league play. Most leagues run thirty to thirty-six weeks.

“People don’t want to make that long-term commitment,” Theresa says.

But still, the Patterson Bowling Center continues to host several leagues throughout the year, including the John Booth Senior League that meets every Tuesday morning at 9:30 a.m. Lorraine Ruth

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

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encounter

by tykia murray

photography by jaqueline schlossman

The Duct-Tape Man N

o one is looking at anyone. We are strangers on a bus, and it is mid-afternoon on a weekday. Our alienation is a voluntary one, a shrunken sweater worn only for its familiarity. The two-bytwo seats may as well be cubicles, cells, or islands.

We drift alone, similar but separate. Each individual stares out his or her window into the slate bareness of a cold winter day. She is a young mother; the baby’s face is buried in her elbow, a chubby little hand grasping the material of her sleeve. He is a professional wino; brown-paper-bagged booze nestled between his knees, the occasional stealthy sip. I’m a

cynical student at the back of the bus, taking it all in, separate from the others because my tuition for one year is more than most Baltimore residents’ annual income.

We pass uniform houses that blend into each other as we go by and see people whose breath floats among them like ghosts. The bus takes a wide turn onto a one-way street and stops. He boards; I don’t see it, but I can imagine the slow, pained steps aided by a cane, his chapped fists clutching a handrail for balance. Our heads turn the way dominoes fall until every last passenger is looking at him. He takes the

first seat behind the driver, in the horizontal rows that line the first few feet of the bus. He is covered in duct tape.

He sits very straight in his seat and stares out the opposite window with a look of unnerving determination on his face. A living memorial, his jaw is set; his eyes hold a hardened truth, one we may never know.

The tape does not wrap completely around him in a King Tut way; it is strategically placed in a connective, accenting sort of way. A thin strip circles the soles of his boots. Corresponding

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pieces were applied to the upper parts of his shoes, connecting them to his pants. Duct tape is set around the cuffs of his coat, the brim of his hat, and places in between. I’m not sure if the tape is functional (Is it holding everything together?) or ornamental (as in the shiny gray “X” on the lapel of his coat). In addition to being outfitted in the sticky gray strips of cloth, the man has duct tape on the bottom and handle of his cane, as well as on the radio headphones he wears. The bags he carries are the only things that don’t have tape on them.

The bus erupts into exchanged glances and whispers that aren’t quite whispers. The exchanges always end with eyes back on this man. Suddenly strangers become old friends, instant confidants with a common secret. They shake their heads knowingly or openly gawk, whispering speculations the whole bus can hear. Some people have seen him before.

“That’s the duct-tape man,” they say.

“Is he homeless?”

“He can’t be; he always got bags with him.”

“That’s a damn shame.”

They call him the duct-tape man, shrinking down his life to an assessment of his appearance.

It’s unfair to a person, to this man, who for whatever reason chooses to be different. He knows the effect his appearance has on people, but he still ventures

In addition to being outfitted in the sticky gray strips of cloth, the man has duct tape on the bottom and handle of his cane, as well as on the radio headphones he wears. The bags he carries are the only things that don’t have tape on them. out of his house to participate in life. He doesn’t shut himself away. Or is that why he wears the headphones? To shut out others’ insensitivities, others who don’t care enough to see through his torn and

taped world? I almost hate them for their ignorance.

It scares me.

I see it in myself.

I ask “why?” instead of “where?” or “how?” I’m just like them, the shallow citizens of the bus, my judgments leveled at someone who didn’t ask for them. Everyone stares, and they’re allowed to, but this man is not a curiosity. He does not exist for our speculation. His life extends beyond the few blocks we know him. I don’t know his story, but I understand what he does for us.

I turn back toward the window.

Two stops later, the bus stops and then continues on. We are passing a corner, and I see the man crossing the street. I didn’t notice, but he has gotten off the bus. He is on his way home just like the rest of us. The energy that coursed through the bus while he was on it seems to have left with him. The passengers settle back into their indifference. As we pass him, I turn around in my seat to get one last look, but it’s too late. He’s gone. ■

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s p a c e

by mary k. zajac

No Child Left Outside

images provided by Hord Coplan Macht

A local architecture firm takes a sustainable approach to portable classrooms

Above: A computer rendering shows one potential interior layout for the MODuLE, a sustainable prefabricated classroom.

Opposite page: An exterior rendering of the MODuLE. The design allows for flexible components, such as green roofs, an adjustable telescopic roof, and photovoltaic panels.

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L

ike many school districts across the nation, Montgomery County has solved the problem of their overcrowded schools by using portable classrooms or trailers. “We get a lot of grief because it’s not a good way to house children,” says Anja S. Caldwell, the green building program manager for Montgomery County Public Schools. But if the alternative is building an addition onto a school, she explains, trailers become the “cheap and quick” option.

“They’re supposed to be temporary,” she continues, “but I call them the temporary buildings that aren’t.”

If you’ve graduated from high school any time within at least the last thirty years, you have probably been taught in a portable classroom. Due to a combination of population boom, budget restraints, and reductions in class size, portables—also known as relocatable classrooms or, in common parlance, trailers—have become an inevitable, if not quite acceptable, solution to the nationwide problem of overcrowded schools. Montgomery County alone has more than six hundred.

Numerous studies conducted by school districts from Georgia to Oregon show that corrugated metal trailers, like the ones used by Montgomery County, harbor a multitude of problems that make learning challenging. The noise levels inside the classrooms are high; the climate control is tricky because there is often inadequate ventilation; and, because the structures are removed from the main body of the school, students have to walk outside to get to their classrooms. A 2004 study done by the Air Resources Board and the California Department of Health Services adds moisture problems and toxic residue found in floor dust to the list of hazardous conditions found in portables.

In January 2006, Montgomery County Public Schools, in conjunction with the Council for Educational Facility Planners and the Emerging Green Builders of the U.S. Green Building Council, hosted the Portable Classroom Design Challenge as a way of finding green solutions to the energy-inefficient portable-classroom problem. The challenge invited “design teams to develop a prototype for a prefabri-

cated classroom unit that makes the learning cottage ‘the cool place to be’ for students, staff, and after-hours community use,” and stipulated that “the design should further be in line with our strong commitment to environmental stewardship and high performance standards for durability, safety, and health.” The challenge also requested that designers adhere to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards as put forward by the U.S. Green Building Council.

We can actually see MODuLEs as a solution for a less affluent school district. You could create a whole school with MODuLEs. Enter architect Rolf Haarstad and his design team from Hord Coplan Macht in Baltimore.

Haarstad and his design group, which includes designers Pavlina Ilieva, Kuo Pao Lian, David Lopez, Daniel Umscheid, Jesus Robles, and architect Peter Doo, had been working on a modular design project for rural healthcare. When Doo came across the Montgomery County design challenge, Haarstad explains, “it became sort of a perfect storm situa-

tion here. The design challenge was picking up on the same concepts we were working with.”

Haarstad’s team designed and submitted MODuLE (short for Modular Learning Environment), a green classroom equivalent to a child’s toy “Transformer.” The key to MODuLE, Haarstad explains, is its flexibility. MODuLEs can stand alone or be grouped into courtyards. “We can actually see MODuLEs as a solution for a less affluent school district. You could create a whole school with MODuLEs,” Haarstad says.

Based on a tubular steel frame with structurally insulated panels and a mélange of component options, MODuLEs are twice the size of traditional portables and are designed as the energyefficient answer to traditional portables’ problems. For instance, to combat the low ceilings found in traditional portables, MODuLE has a

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A section view of the MODuLE. In addition to addressing the need for better temporary buildings on school property, the design team incorporated sustainable materials that reduce heating and cooling loads.

telescopic roof that can increase in height from eight feet six inches to thirteen feet to let natural light into the classroom. In viable climates, MODuLEs can have green roofs, which not only help in cooling the building, but can prevent rainwater runoff, allowing the water to be reused and recycled to flush toilets or as a basis for steam heat. “We want to get to the point where the building is not using energy—that the building could actually create energy,” Haarstad says. And the hope is that using as many sustainable materials as possible, like a grass roof, for instance, will reduce the building’s ecological footprint.

Haarstad notes that MODuLE’s interior is also flexible and can be accommodated to fit the needs of an ever-changing classroom community with traditional elements like desks, bookcases, and whiteboards as well as innovations like sliding panels to divide classroom space.

The designers also considered shipping and setup. MODuLEs would be shipped compactly in two pieces on one truck (as opposed to the two trucks typically needed for transporting portables), in a

hybrid version of flat packing that compresses the volume of the unit. Haarstad jokes that setting up the MODuLE with its telescoping roof and wings “is almost like a kit you can do with an Allen wrench.”

He adds that although a contractor would be necessary to do the setup, he “would like to get it to where a layperson can do it.” He also makes the connection between the setup of the building and

We want to get to the point where the building is not using energy—that the building could actually create energy. classroom learning. Having students observe the building being put together, he theorizes, makes the building itself a learning tool. Haarstad predicts a long lifespan for a MODuLE, perhaps as long as fifteen to twenty years, because parts are replaceable.

MODuLE was awarded Honorable Mention in the design challenge. And while Caldwell praised

the design’s “futuristic” look and “forward thinking” ideas, ultimately the cost of all of the entries has prevented the county from moving forward in adopting any of the submitted designs. (Haarstad estimates that initial costs of their design would be somewhat high, but would decrease once production got underway.) Nevertheless, Williams Scotsman, a supplier of modular structures, has signed on to develop a prototype of MODuLE. “We believe fundamentally that environment affects learning,” Haarstad says. This means creating a safe, nontoxic atmosphere, using as much green material as possible, and using standard material in what Haarstad terms a responsible, creative way.

“At the end of the day,” he reflects, “what we’re really after is creating the best environment we can.”

And those old trailers? “We could turn them into greenhouses,” he muses. ■ —Mary K. Zajac wrote about the Ghanian dish kelewele for our December “Food” department.

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The Rules of

Engagement

In the war against incivility, do manners still matt By

Mi cha el

phot o g ra p h y

L

ast October, Goucher College invited Judith Martin, otherwise known as Miss Manners, to speak to the student body about civility.

“What emerged from our conversation,” says college president Sanford Ungar, “is that there’s this sort of common-sense standard. We know when we see it, and we know when we’ve violated it.” However, the invitation to Miss Manners was in part a response to that “rougher behavior” that occurs on campus toward the end of the semester as exams approach, according to Unger. “We definitely notice a difference at those times, so we’re trying to get ahead of that,” he says.

Ungar isn’t the only one noticing and responding to increased roughness.

“Incivility is certainly a growing problem,” says Allan Slawson, coordinator of civility projects for the Cleveland HeightsUniversity Heights City School District near Cleveland, Ohio. Slawson taught math for thirty-three years but retired after growing weary of the escalating discourtesy in the classroom. “Respect is not something automatically given as it was at one time. It’s almost as if rudeness is valued.”

Slawson now helms a unique program that provides city public school students with comprehensive civility training, addressing issues of character development, empathy, compassion, and conflict resolution, among others. “The school has been forced to take on what was in the past a responsibility that we assumed parents were taking care of.”

Miss Manners and Allan Slawson are among a growing pool of professionals training both adults and young people in the lost art of courteous behavior. Schools and programs are popping up all over the country

b y

Pa u l so n jay

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in response to our sense that we could and should conduct ourselves in a more appropriate manner, which makes you wonder: Has the whole notion of manners and civil behavior become a quaint and outdated concept? And if so, can a return to formal etiquette training solve the problem?

If there is a frontline in the local civility wars, the Hunt Valley-based International School of Protocol is arguably one of its forward bases. Cathleen Hanson, a cofounder of the school, says that the school’s mission is to bring back civility, one person at a time. Hanson and Carol Haislip founded the school thirteen years ago as a response to the lack of proper conduct they witnessed in their roles as a college professor and an executive at a major corporation, respectively.

Offering training in protocol and etiquette to a broad demographic spectrum (from businesses to special needs adults to atrisk youth), the school holds classes covering an equal range of topics: effective networking, dining etiquette, how to dress like a professional, mingling. “These are skills we aren’t born knowing,” Hanson asserts. “Practice these skills and they will become a part of you, and people in turn will be respectful toward you.” Over the years, thousands have gone through the school’s programs, and in any given week the school offers ten to fifteen different classes.

At the heart of each class is a curriculum that stresses a return to fundamental manners. During a recent “Social Savvy” class for adults, Hanson greets her five students with a firm handshake, leaning in somewhat as she introduces herself. For the next couple of hours, Hanson teaches name badge placement, proper phone etiquette, the correct way to shake hands

Some of our incivility grew out of the civil rights movement and feminism. As we got away from rules that were not exactly fair—rules that did not treat people as equals—we somehow at the same time threw out the good with the bad.

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(keep your right hand free of rings and bracelets!), and sundry other rules that she says ensure success in a social environment.

During the dining instruction, students crowd around a table setting as Hanson explains what the funny-looking knife is for (fish) and elaborates on the mind-blurring series of rules involving gender and hierarchy that dictate who stands up when a diner leaves the table. The students role-play at making introductions, awkwardly discussing who will be the figure of higher authority—a necessary piece of information in the stratified realm of etiquette—and then take turns tentatively presenting each other.

The students’ reasons for attending the class are varied. A few IT workers feel their interpersonal skills need a boost, bemoaning the fact that their profession offers few chances for social interaction beyond the telephone or e-mail. A mother who enrolled her teen daughter in a similar course wanted to try her hand at what she calls “formal social training,” and a college student with corporate aspirations is seeking a certain polish to give him a competitive edge. Laura Brusca, who’s taken so many classes at the school that she now teaches a few, explains, “I was interested in learning more about fine dining. I thought it would give me more confidence.” The general feeling among adult students seems to be that they operate at a deficit when it comes to certain social codes.

These social codes and the resulting manners are discussed at length in the classes targeting children. In a lavender classroom filled with neat piles of silverware and board games based around table manners, the “Communication Skills for Kids” class meets with students ranging in age from 7 to 11. They introduce themselves and share where they go to school, rattling off the names of Baltimore-area private schools. Five boys and five girls then present their homework assignment: Learn a greeting from another country. Perhaps half successfully complete the task, entertaining their peers with French, Spanish, and Hebrew expressions; one preternatural 11 year old performs an eloquent

Japanese greeting. (Later, it is revealed she graduated from one of the interview classes the school offers to give students a step up in the private school admissions process.)

It is quickly apparent that these are not Stepford children. They segregate themselves by gender, like elementary school students are wont to do, gossiping in hushed tones. The kids’ attention waxes and wanes; their eyes wander; they goof around. With some prodding from the instructor, a pair of girls demonstrates what it means to be good conversationalists.

For more than two minutes, they stand in front of their classmates, lobbing polite chitchat back and forth, maintaining eye contact, moving from one subject to another (shoes, clothes, school); in almost eerie synchronicity, the girls sway to the left, then to the right as they talk, as if dancing in front of a mirror. The class ends with snacks, complete with a girl offering napkins (“Would you like a napkin?”) and a girl carrying a plate with the cookies (“You may take two cookies.”).

Do these lessons translate outside the classroom? “The school has definitely helped,” says Brusca, whose 10-year-old and 14-year-old sons have taken a few courses. “Kids like to hear something from a third party more than from Mom.” Brusca’s sons learned to write thank-you notes in International School of Protocol classes, a skill she reinforces at home. She recently encouraged her son to write a thank-you note to a school he received an offer from but declined to attend. He balked. “You never know when you’re going to cross paths with these people again,” she told him. “It’s part of building bridges for the next time.”

Hanson and Haislip also teach civility in YMCA of Central Maryland after-school programs. When the children, many of whom are considered “at risk,” complete three sessions of training, they are taken out for an evening of fine dining so they can practice their newly found grace.

Bradley Alston, the operations director at the YMCA of Central Maryland who oversees these programs, believes etiquette training is critical. “The children become more conscious that there is a prescribed way of acting and relating to each other that goes back hundreds of years. Martin Luther King learned this at Morehouse in Atlanta; Thurgood Marshall learned it at Howard University; Booker T. Washington instituted this kind of training at Tuskegee.” Alston pauses for a moment. “The important thing is that the kids are exposed to it. Some things stick and some don’t. But they can’t say that they don’t know. We’ve planted the seed.”

Slawson agrees that manners training is not just for those with country club memberships and fish forks at their place settings. “It’s odd; some of

Pictured on this page and the next are International School of Protocol students. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 7

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our incivility grew out of the Civil Rights movement and feminism,” Slawson says. “As we got away from rules that were not exactly fair—rules that did not treat people as equals—we somehow at the same time threw out the good with the bad. We’re afraid of rules because we’re afraid that the rules are going to take us back to a time when you had a role.”

Slawson’s goal is to recover the good that we lost in the name of progress.

“We have moved from roles to relationships,” he says. Hanson recognizes this shift as well. “In the United States your behavior and intelligence determines where you can go in life. These skills are the great equalizer.”

Complicating the issue further is technology. When people complain about rude behavior today, they are as likely to cite technology as they are to cite wayward young people. Cell phones, iPods, PDAs—the means and ways to be uncivil are often attributed to our newest gadgets. Just as the social rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s dramatically changed the way we relate to one

The important thing is that the kids are exposed to it.

Some things stick and some don’t. But they can’t say that they don’t know. We’ve planted the seed. another, technological developments have so outpaced our ability to gracefully integrate them into our public lives that there is genuinely no agreement on the proper use of electronics in public spaces.

Haislip and Hanson acknowledge the confusion and frustration that new technology can introduce, but they reassert that all the protocols can be reduced to thinking about how your behavior affects others. “We’ve eliminated a lot of the face-to-face interactions, and people do and say things they wouldn’t if they were face-to-face. But it’s all a common-sense litmus test.

Where am I being inconsiderate to other people?” says Hanson.

Being polite and truly thoughtful takes some work, and it is part of human nature to conserve energy. But this work matters. “Instances as horrific as Columbine escalate from a single act of rudeness,” Haislip points out. But the debate over what to teach about civility and how to teach it in today’s en-

vironment goes on. “I sort of reject the notion that you can turn to a rulebook or an etiquette book to tell you how to solve a problem of community standards,” says Ungar.

Brusca believes that individual acts governed by the rules of etiquette add up to a gracious person. “It’s an exercise in making that connection between manners and civility,” she says.

Slawson’s goal is to teach kids common sense and to let them realize “I can still behave with civility even if I’m using the wrong fork,” he says.

“Research shows that people cannot be successful in relationships without civility,” he adds. “Without success in relationships, there is a good chance that you’re going to have a limited chance at happiness.”

Everyone agrees that a healthy dose of common sense is critical in making decisions about how to behave and treat other people. “Civility just equates to thinking of others,” says Brusca. “It’s about eye contact and hand contact and taking a moment to give someone your full attention and say, ‘Hello.’” ■ —Michael Paulson is a teacher at the Friends School. He is a regular contributor to Urbanite’s “Recommended” department. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 7

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Me vs. The World T h e s tr u g g le to b a la n c e s e lf-in te r e st a n d s e lfl e s sn e s s

T

By

Ma ri a n n e

i l l u st rat i o n

By

he man approached with a smile. “Excuse me,” he said, the midday sun glinting off his round glasses. “I’m looking for 3600 Clipper Road. Do you know where that is?”

The man was looking for Mill Valley Kitchens, and I had never heard of it. “I don’t know, but if you go in this door,” I said, pointing to my building, “and down the stairs, you can find the leasing office, and I bet they’ll know.” He thanked me and headed off.

I hurriedly left the parking lot in my car, on my way to a dentist appointment that I was close to being late for. As I slowed to a stop at the Light Rail tracks, waiting for the train to pass, I saw the sign across the street: Mill Valley Kitchens. The man had simply been on the wrong side of the road.

I had no idea if he’d found what he was looking for, or if he’d found the right person to tell him where to go, and I suddenly felt responsible for him and for the outcome of his whole day. I began to feel that it would have made a huge positive difference in his life if I could find him and let him know that his desired destination was just a few hundred yards away. But I was about to be late, so I drove forward across the tracks instead of turning back.

I find myself in situations like this frequently, and I’m rarely sure of the right thing to do. Should I have helped him find his destination? Should I have walked him to the leasing office, or upstairs to my office to see if anyone knew where he should go? Was it right to do what I did, and release him into the world, knowing full well that he might never get where he’s trying to go? And—the most bewildering question of all—does it really matter?

Raised by a Catholic mother and Quaker father, I grew up in a socially conscious household. I attended Catholic grade and high schools, where the message was always the same: Treat others the way you would like to be treated. Like most people, this wasn’t always my first impulse. One afternoon, as my mom drove me home from middle school, I complained about our new band director, and she said, “Put yourself in his shoes, Marianne.” She was right; it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t compete with the memory of our recently departed band leader, who was a general favorite. I immediately felt ashamed.

Of course, seeing the right choice in hindsight is much easier than figuring it out in the moment. As a fairly shy and socially nervous person, I tend to agonize over these “should I” or “shouldn’t I” questions. Sometimes, even when I know I should do something nice, I don’t, because it feels awkward. A few months ago, I exited the supermarket and noticed that the same elderly lady who was waiting for her ride when I walked in twenty minutes prior was still there, shifting her weight and looking resignedly at her watch.

“Should I offer her a ride?” I wondered. I kept walking, because I was already out in the middle of the parking lot by the time the thought occurred to me, and I felt uncomfortable about turning around. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it or draw attention to myself or my act.

That’s in no way an excuse; I know better. It really doesn’t

a Mo ss

sa ra h

F o rsBerg

matter if I feel awkward or not. All that’s important is that I offer.

And really, what’s the worst that could happen? She could say no and I would go on with my day, no worse for the wear.

Yet I still fight out these battles in my head because I find social situations so taxing, and because sometimes the “right” thing to do doesn’t really fit in with my plans. Do I have to help a lost man find the location of his appointment if I’m late for my own? And do I have to put myself out there by offering to give someone a lift, and then give up time (and gas)? Do these kind acts even matter?

What do I owe the world? Where does my right to take care of myself (and expect others to take care of themselves) end, and everyone’s right to be cared for by the community (in other words, me, whenever I happen to be around) begin?

I don’t know. These things can’t be quantified—and, maybe, they don’t need to be. One thing these questions assume is that I am not a part of the larger community—that my needs are distinct and different from those of other people. That’s not really true. I can’t really ignore the fact that I actually am a part of the group. What happens to other people happens to me, and vice versa.

That’s why, I think, that good old Golden Rule I learned way back in Catholic grade school might be the best way to figure out these situations. Once I accept the fact that I cannot escape involvement in other people’s lives, and that I can only see things from my own perspective, all I can do is decide how I would want to be treated and then attempt to treat others that same way.

The other day at the mall, I bought some things at Old Navy; the store’s registers were down so each cashier was adding items and calculating tax by hand and with calculators. Instead of giving me the right change, my cashier gave me back the total of my purchases: My total was $13.60, and she handed that same amount back to me after I gave her $20.

After I left the store, I said to my boyfriend, “I think she gave me too much change.” I debated for a moment those same old issues—do I go back? I should have said something at the register.

Does it matter? How much does it matter?

I decided to go back. The cashier thanked me, and she seemed a bit embarrassed by her mistake. But this time I didn’t care about being awkward. From my years working in retail, I know well the feeling you get when you make a mistake on your drawer. I didn’t want anyone else to get that bottomless-pit feeling in the stomach, if I could help it.

I know that if I had been that elderly woman waiting for a ride home from the store, I would have been really grateful if a nice person offered me a lift. But I don’t think I would expect that someone would drop everything to help me find an office, as long as the person was friendly and polite. Treating others as you want to be treated means understanding that every person—including me—has limitations, quirks, and needs, and that all we can do is try to be good to each other. ■ —Marianne Amoss is Urbanite’s Editor. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 7

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In an excerpt from his latest book, best-selling author Alain de Botton explores the impact of the man-made environment on our daily well-being

A R C H I T E C T U R E

A concern for architecture has never been free from a degree of suspicion.

Doubts have been raised about the subject’s seriousness, its moral worth and its cost. A thought-provoking number of the world’s most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead. The Ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus is said to have demanded of a heart-broken friend whose house had burnt to the ground, ‘If you really understand what governs the universe, how can you yearn for bits of stone and pretty rock?’ (It is unclear how much longer the friendship lasted.) Legend recounts that after hearing the voice of God, the Christian hermit Alexandra sold her house, shut herself in a tomb and never looked at the outside world again, while her fellow hermit Paul of Scete slept on a blanket on the floor of a windowless mud hut and recited 300 prayers every day, suffering only when he heard of another holy man who had managed 700 and slept in a coffin.

Such austerity has been a historical constant. In the spring of 1137 the Cistercian monk St Bernard of Clairvaux travelled all the way around Lake Geneva without noticing it was even there. Likewise, after four years in his monastery, St Bernard could not report whether the dining area had a vaulted ceiling (it does) or how many windows there were in the sanctuary of his church (three). On a visit to the Charterhouse of Dauphiné, St Bernard astonished his hosts by arriving on a magnificent white horse diametrically opposed to the ascetic values he professed, but he explained that he had borrowed the animal from a wealthy uncle and had simply failed to register its appearance on a four-day journey across France.

Nevertheless, such determined efforts to scorn visual experience have always been matched by equally persistent attempts to mould the material world to graceful ends. People have strained their backs carving flowers into their roof beams and their eyesight embroidering animals onto their tablecloths. They have given up weekends to hide unsightly cables behind ledges. They have thought carefully about appropriate kitchen work surfaces.

They have imagined living in unattainably expensive houses pictured in magazines and then felt sad, as one does on passing an attractive stranger in a crowded street. We seem divided between an urge to override our senses

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and numb ourselves to our settings and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations. An ugly room can coagulate any loose suspicions as to the incompleteness of life, while a sun-lit one set with honey-coloured limestone tiles can lend support to whatever is most hopeful within us.

Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places— and on the conviction that it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.

We are sometimes eager to celebrate the influence of our surroundings. In the living room of a house in the Czech Republic, we see an example of how walls, chairs and floors can combine to create an atmosphere in which the best sides of us are offered the opportunity to flourish. We accept with gratitude the power that a single room can possess.

But sensitivity to architecture also has its more problematic aspects. If one room can alter how we feel, if our happiness can hang on the colour of the walls or the shape of a door, what will happen to us in most of the places we are forced to look at and inhabit? What will we experience in a house with prison-like windows, stained carpet tiles and plastic curtains? It is to prevent the possibility of permanent anguish that we can be led to shut our eyes to most of what is around us, for we are never far from damp stains and cracked ceilings, shattered cities and rusting dockyards. We can’t remain sensitive indefinitely to environments which we don’t have the means to alter for the good—and end up as conscious as we can afford to be. Echoing the attitude of Stoic philosophers or St Bernard around Lake Geneva, we may find ourselves arguing that, ultimately, it doesn’t much matter what buildings look like, what is on the ceiling or how the wall is treated—professions of detachment that stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty’s many absences.

courtesy of The Walters Art Museum

“The Ideal City,” attributed to Fra Carnevale (circa 1480–1484, oil on panel)

O F

H A P P I N E S S

There is no shortage of reasons to be suspicious of the ambition to create

great architecture. Buildings rarely make palpable the efforts that their construction demands. They are coyly silent about the bankruptcies, the delays, the fear and the dust that they impose. A nonchalant appearance is a frequent feature of their charm. It is only when we try our own hand at construction that we are initiated into the torments associated with persuading materials and other humans to cooperate with our designs, with ensuring that two pieces of glass will be joined in a neat line, that a lamp will hang symmetrically over the stairs, that a boiler will light up when it should or that concrete pillars will marry a roof without complaint.

Even when we have attained our goals, our buildings have a grievous tendency to fall apart again with precipitate speed. It can be hard to walk into a freshly decorated house without feeling pre-emptively sad at the decay impatiently waiting to begin: how soon the walls will crack, the white cupboards will yellow and the carpets stain. The ruins of the Ancient World offer a mocking lesson for anyone waiting for builders to finish their work. How proud the householders of Pompeii must have been.

In his essay ‘On Transience’ (1916) Sigmund Freud recalled a walk he took in the Dolomite Mountains with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It was an exquisite summer’s day; the flowers were in bloom and brightly coloured butterflies danced above the meadows. The psychoanalyst was glad to be outdoors (it had been raining all week), but his companion walked with his head bowed, his eyes fixed on the ground, and remained taciturn throughout the excursion. It wasn’t that Rilke was oblivious to the beauty around him; he simply could not overlook how impermanent everything was. In Freud’s words, he was unable to forget ‘that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty that men have created or may create’.

Freud was unsympathetic; for him, the capacity to love anything attractive, however fragile it might be, was a hallmark of psychological health. But Rilke’s stance, though inconvenient, helpfully emphasises how it can be those most in thrall to beauty who will be especially aware of, and saddened by, its ephemeral character. Such melancholic enthusiasts

will see the moth hole beneath the curtain swatch and the ruin beneath the plan. They may at the last moment cancel an appointment with an estate agent, having realised that the house under offer, as well as the city and even civilisation itself, will soon enough be reduced to fragments of shattered brick over which cockroaches will triumphantly crawl. They may prefer to rent a room or live in a barrel out of a reluctance to contemplate the slow disintegration of the objects of their love.

At its apex, a passion for architecture may turn us into aesthetes, eccentric figures who must watch over their houses with the vigilance of museum guards, patrolling their rooms in search of stains, a damp cloth or sponge in hand. Aesthetes will have no choice but to forgo the company of small children and, during dinner with friends, will have to ignore the conversation in order to focus on whether someone might lean back and inadvertently leave a head-shaped imprint on the wall.

It would be pleasant to refuse in a muscular spirit to lend stray blemishes genuine significance. However, aesthetes force us to consider whether happiness may not sometimes turn on the presence or absence of a fingerprint, whether in certain situations beauty and ugliness may not lie only a few millimetres apart, whether a single mark might not wreck a wall or an errant brush stroke undo a landscape painting. We should thank these sensitive spirits for pointing us with theatrical honesty towards the possibility of a genuine antithesis between competing values: for example, an attachment to beautiful architecture and the pursuit of an exuberant and affectionate family life.

How wise were the ancient philosophers in suggesting that we exclude from our vision of contentment anything that might one day be covered by lava or blow down in a hurricane, succumb to a chocolate smear or absorb a wine stain.

A

rchitecture is perplexing, too, in how inconsistent is its capacity to generate the happiness on which its claim to our attention is founded.

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Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places.

We can feel anxious and envious even though the floor we’re standing on has been imported from a remote quarry, and finely sculpted window frames have been painted a soothing grey. Our inner metronome can be unimpressed by the efforts of workmen to create a fountain or nurture a symmetrical line of oak trees. We can fall into a petty argument which ends in threats of divorce in a building by Geoffrey Bawa or Louis Kahn. Houses can invite us to join them in a mood which we find ourselves incapable of summoning. The noblest architecture can sometimes do less for us than a siesta or an aspirin.

Those who have made architectural beauty their life’s work know only too well how futile their efforts can prove. After an exhaustive study of the buildings of Venice, in a moment of depressive lucidity, John Ruskin acknowledged that few Venetians in fact seemed elevated by their city, perhaps the most beautiful urban tapestry in the world. Alongside St Mark’s Church (described by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice as ‘a Book of Common Prayer, a vast illuminated missal, bound with alabaster instead of parchment, studded with porphyry pillars instead of jewels, and written within and without in letters of enamel and gold’), they sat in cafés, read the papers, sunbathed, bickered and stole from one another as, high on the church’s roof, unobserved, ‘the images of Christ and His angels looked down upon them.’

Endowed with a power that is as unreliable as it often is inexpressible, architecture will always compete poorly with utilitarian demands for humanity’s resources. How hard it is to make a case for the cost of tearing down and rebuilding a mean but serviceable street. How awkward to have to defend, in the face of more tangible needs, the benefits of realigning a crooked lamppost or replacing an ill-matched window frame. Beautiful architecture has none of the unambiguous advantages of a vaccine or a bowl of rice. Its construction will hence never be raised to a dominant political priority, for even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modelled to rival St Mark’s Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood.

Not only do beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness, they can also be accused of failing to improve the characters of those who live

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in them. It seems reasonable to suppose that people will possess some of the qualities of the buildings they are drawn to: to expect that if they are alive to the charm of an ancient farmhouse with walls made of irregular chiselled stones set in light mortar, if they can appreciate the play of candlelight against hand-decorated tiles, can be seduced by libraries with shelves filled from floor to ceiling with books that emit a sweet dusty smell and are content to lie on the floor tracing the knotted border of an intricate Turkoman rug, then they will know something about patience and stability, tenderness and sweetness, intelligence and worldliness, scepticism and trust. We expect that such enthusiasts will be committed to infusing their whole lives with the values embodied in the objects of their appreciation.

But, whatever the theoretical affinities between beauty and goodness, it is undeniable that, in practice, farmhouses and lodges, mansions and riverside apartments have played host to innumerous tyrants and murderers, sadists and snobs, to characters with a chilling indifference to the disjunctures between the qualities manifested in their surroundings and in their lives.

Medieval devotional paintings may try to remind us of sadness and sin, they may seek to train us away from arrogance and worldly pursuits and render us properly humble before the mysteries and hardships of life, but they will hang in a living room without active protest while butlers circulate the finger food and butchers plot their next move. Architecture may well possess moral messages; it simply has no power to enforce them.

It offers suggestions instead of making laws. It invites, rather than orders, us to emulate its spirit and cannot prevent its own abuse. We should be kind enough not to blame buildings for our own failure to honour the advice they can only ever subtly proffer.

Suspicion of architecture may in the end be said to centre around the modesty of the claims that can realistically be made on its behalf.

Reverence for beautiful buildings does not seem a high ambition on which to pin our hopes for happiness, at least when compared with the results we might associate with untying a scientific knot or falling in love, amassing a fortune or initiating revolution. To care deeply about a field that achieves so little, and yet consumes so many of our resources, forces us to admit to a disturbing, even degrading lack of aspiration.

photos by Paul Burk

Opposite page: The sculptural stairwell in the Peabody Institute. Above, left to right: The anguar design of the new BWI Building; the 1840s Greek Revival Pavilion in Baltimore’s Union Square; the gracious interior of Penn Station

In its ineffectiveness, architecture shares in the bathos of gardening: an interest in door handles or ceiling mouldings can seem no less worthy of mockery than a concern for the progress of rose or lavender bushes. It is forgivable to conclude that there must be grander causes to which human beings might devote themselves.

However, after coming up against some of the sterner setbacks which bedevil emotional and political life, we may well arrive at a more charitable assessment of the significance of beauty—of islands of perfection, in which we can find an echo of an ideal which we once hoped to lay a permanent claim to. Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colours before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings, whether in the form of a tapestry or a Corinthian column, a slate tile or a lamp. It tends not to be young couples in love who stop to admire a weathered brick wall or the descent of a banister towards a hallway, a disregard for such circumscribed beauty being a corollary of an optimistic belief in the possibility of attaining a more visceral, definitive variety of happiness.

We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can begin to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being ‘moved’ by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

In his memoirs, the German theologian Paul Tillich explained that art had always left him cold as a pampered and trouble-free young man, despite the best pedagogical efforts of his parents and teachers. Then the First World War broke out, he was called up and, in a period of leave from his battalion (three quarters of whose members would be killed in the course of the conflict), he found himself in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin during a rain storm. There, in a small upper gallery, he came across Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels and, on meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, surprised himself by beginning to sob uncontrollably. He experienced what he described as a moment of ‘revelatory ecstasy’, tears welling up in his eyes at

the disjunction between the exceptionally tender atmosphere of the picture and the barbarous lessons he had learnt in the trenches.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous

demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch. Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things. More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall—in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set. ■

—Alain de Botton is the best-selling author of three works of fiction and five of nonfiction, including How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Art of Travel. The above excerpt is from his latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, published by Pantheon Books of New York. A native of Zurich, de Botton now resides in London where he also produces documentaries.

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

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urbanite january 07

poetry

by michael salcman

Al Fresco In my reverie, the cool Tuscan air slides down my neck your damp brow and bare breast moist with early summer, wet with expectation; you breathe slowly above a white scoop of roses stitched blue and red onto your dress and a thin band of Florentine gold around your neck, bought on the Ponte Vecchio twenty summers ago, when our daughter hung like a great melon between your hips and I stood alone at the Arno.

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the weather slowly changes in its airy ocean Michael Salcman is a physician, brain scientist, and essayist on the visual arts. He has been chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

Recent poems of Salcman’s have appeared in Harvard Review, Raritan, Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, River Styx, and The New York Quarterly. His work has been heard on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and in Euphoria, a 2005 documentary on the brain and creativity. His fourth chapbook, Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press), and first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press), are forthcoming this year.

like the heart does— unknowing in its motion— and your neck is bare.

When we hear the bell in the bodega ring, you don’t take my hand.

Perhaps you’ve lost it— the necklace I mean, it hasn’t circled your throat in years, not home, not here, not now as the shop door closes and you rush across the bridge in a bright blue pantsuit, not stopping once for sentiment, not searching in my shop of wonders where a goldsmith wished me a life of luck just twenty summers ago.

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sustainable city

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Sprawl Nation In the first of a twopart series on regional development, Urbanite talks with Anthony Flint about his new book on America’s lifestyles and land use

“The modern city is the most artificial and unlovely sight this planet affords,” said auto pioneer Henry Ford, after watching his first Model T roll off an assembly line in 1908. “The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the city problem only by leaving the city.”

Ford’s popularization of the automobile allowed Americans to follow his advice on solving the “city problem,” and since World War II, we have flocked to suburbia in droves. More than ninety percent of metropolitan-area population growth since 1950 has been in the suburbs, and today two out of three people live on the suburban fringes of urbanized areas, according to a new book by former journalist Anthony Flint.

This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America is based on stories Flint collected over sixteen years covering urban life, development, architecture, and transportation for The Boston Globe. The book, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006, offers an account of what has led to the country’s seemingly continuous exodus into the anonymous “exurbs” and “boomburbs” at the outer edges of metropolises. This movement away from our cities, known as sprawl, is characterized by low-density development that disperses the population over the widest possible area, separating homes, shops, and workplaces so they are connected only by limited-access roadways. The suburban lures are plentiful at first—affordability, convenience, good schools, and a sense of safety and security.

According to Flint, however, these enticements often come with ecologically destructive and financially

unsustainable consequences—traffic congestion, higher gasoline costs, longer commutes to work, air and water pollution, global warming, increased obesity, endangered wildlife, and a loss of open space.

“Living in sprawl seems like a bargain at first, but it turns out that the lower sticker price of the home is eroded very quickly by what you’re paying to keep the gas tank filled and to heat and cool a 3,000-square-foot home,” says Flint. “This, along with other attractions of urbanism—the desire for a sense of community, the ability to walk to places as a matter of physical activity and personal health—has begun to prompt some consumers to rethink how they live.”

In his book, Flint, now with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, introduces a number of alternatives to sprawl, collectively termed “smart growth.” These alternatives advocate more compact, mixed-use development that reduces our reliance on cars. Smart growth also promotes the use of existing infrastructure rather than the construction of additional roads, sewer lines, and water pipes. In essence, the smart growth movement campaigns for using land to its fullest potential.

These ideas are not new to Maryland, which Flint says served as one of the earliest proving grounds for smart growth policy.

“You couldn’t write a book about smart growth without devoting a chunk to Maryland,” he says.

The state has been a sponsor of growth management since the 1960s, and while Marylanders have mixed feelings about the success of smart growth w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m j a n u a r y 0 7

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initiatives in the state, national experts continue to recognize that Maryland leaders began thinking about and attempting to curtail sprawl before most other state’s officials had defined the problem. Flint discusses several of the state’s smart growth projects in his book.

In 1997, then-governor Parris Glendening, an influential but controversial figure in the smart growth movement, established an Office of Smart Growth to oversee the state’s general development policy and launched the Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiative, in an attempt to make Maryland a leader in smart growth policy. The program included policies to redirect state money to “priority funding areas” to help maintain and improve infrastructure in existing communities, and a farmland-preservation program to protect rural areas from being turned into subdivisions. “[Glendening] pushed a policy under which builders paid for water, sewer, and other infrastructure in undeveloped areas, while developers in places that were already built up got a streamlined permitting process and reduced fees,” Flint describes.

“Since Glendening came on the scene in Maryland, some three dozen governors have talked about growth management … and ten states have formed task forces or passed executive orders or legislation dealing with growth.”

Although Glendening’s policies helped bring key development issues and the concept of smart growth to light in Maryland, the reality is that implementation has been slow and the few outcomes have been largely disappointing. Flint argues that smart growth initiatives need to “get into the DNA” of

development and be actively pursued and executed rather than just included in a development plan that “sits on a shelf.” Almost ten years later, Marylanders are still debating the true effect of Glendening’s efforts to curb sprawl in the state.

“To bring about something other than conventional suburban development, you’re really turning a supertanker,” Flint says. “It’s my impression that Glendening’s Office of Smart Growth and the policies and procedures he put in place just started to make a dent in solving sprawl in Maryland.”

The central challenge now of the smart growth movement is finding a way for a range of people, including middleclass families, to be able to afford and feel comfortable living in revitalized cities and older suburbs.

With a population surge of nearly 1.5 million expected to hit Maryland in the next twenty-five years, the state now faces the challenge of determining how to “get into the DNA” of development quick enough to avoid inducing more sprawl. With its vacant homes and existing infrastructure, Baltimore City, and “anywhere there is an existing town and town center,” is an ideal place to absorb a substantial amount of this growth, and Flint encourages use

of the state’s priority funding areas as a foundation for intelligently distributing this growth.

Toward the end of his book, Flint rightly recognizes the challenges of living in the city—challenges that many Baltimoreans are all too familiar with: an underperforming public school system, high property taxes, and high crime rates. These problems, left unchecked, will continue to dissuade some people, especially families, from moving back into the city.

Flint recommends looking to programs that encourage homeownership and development of vacant lots in urban neighborhoods, but concedes that the smart growth movement has some additional work to do in developing real solutions for these issues.

“The central challenge now of the smart growth movement is finding a way for a range of people, including middle-class families, to be able to afford and feel comfortable living in revitalized cities and older suburbs,” says Flint.

With the continuing rise in transportation and energy costs, Flint concludes that the state will soon see additional consumer demand for more mixeduse, compact urban environments, and Maryland’s job will be to accommodate those looking for a more sustainable way to live.

“A number of people are looking at smart growth not as something that’s the right thing to do or something we need to do because of global warming—it is, by the way, something that we need to do because of global warming—but as something to pave the way for, because it’s just going to be much more in demand,” says Flint. “There’s really no sacrifice here; this is just how people want to live in the future.” ■

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Courting Change A New York judge and his court raise the bar for justice by combining social services with sentencing

On a rainy Friday afternoon in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, New York, Judge Alex M. Calabrese presides over the only courtroom in a community justice center located a block from the Red Hook Houses, one of the largest housing projects in Brooklyn. He sits there surrounded by lawyers and clerks, defendants and court officers—all the ingredients of a cinematic court scene. However, the plots and climaxes that take place in this courtroom are not typical of any television program.

A male defendant goes before the judge. His hands are humbly behind his back, and he stands beside his lawyer like a scolded child in the principal’s office. Weeks before, he was charged with a misdemeanor. Instead of jail time, the court recommended drug treatment, and today he must give an update on his progress. The news isn’t good.

Earlier in the day, he tested positive for cocaine.

The prosecution, frustrated and not optimistic, recommends to the judge that he spend sixteen days in jail. But the judge, acting more like a concerned counselor and life coach, is unconvinced. He asks the defendant if he has children, and if he sees them.

The man says that he does. “I don’t need to tell you to stay out of jail,” the judge admonishes. “You need to stay clean for your kids.” Instead of heeding the prosecution’s recommendation, the judge assigns him to twenty-eight days of resident drug treatment followed by six months of outpatient treatment.

In between drug-related cases, defendants who have violated codes of civil conduct also stand before the judge. These cases are referred to as “summons cases.” One man is charged with public

urination. The embarrassment alone seems like a suitable penalty. He is given the option of a fine, community service, or a lawyer defense. (Summons cases can be challenged with a lawyer in a summons trial.) He opts for community service, which will be served at the center.

A bicyclist dressed in a suit is up next. His crime? Riding a bicycle on a New York City sidewalk.

The judge simply informs him that what he did was illegal and advises him not to do it again. Some of these violators take a forty-five-minute quality-oflife class, informing them of how their actions affect the larger community.

There were 13,393 quality-of-life cases presented in the community justice court in 2005. “The NYPD has built an international reputation on the theory that by concentrating on the lower-level offenses, the index—or serious felonies—will come down,” the judge explains. Though it may seem that addressing these offenses occurs at the cost of time spent on more serious offenses, the presiding judge explains that they generally resolve the cases on the first court appearance without trial.

It is this kind of approach that is causing citizens and law practitioners from Brooklyn to Liverpool to take notice of Judge Calabrese and the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Judge Calabrese, the court’s only judge, is not simply dealing with crime by giving out punishments: He is attempting to eradicate crime by addressing the underlying causes.

This type of approach is termed “problemsolving justice.” It is an attempt to examine the causes of crime and to address it holistically. Judge Calabrese used this approach even before coming to the Red Hook Center. He recognized that crime was not happening simply for crime’s sake. It was time to get to the root of the problem.

Judge Alex M. Calabrese dispenses thoughtful, commonsense justice designed to eliminate the causes of crime.

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The Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“So I began to bring in social workers,” he explains. He used their services to deal with the issues behind the criminal behaviors. When the Center for Court Innovation (the New York court system’s independent, not-for-profit research and development arm) recommended opening the Red Hook Center in 2000, Calabrese, a former trial attorney for the Legal Aid Society of New York, came on board.

“If we see a young man in court for assaulting his mother, we know that it was more than an assault; there are some family issues that need to be dealt with,” says Calabrese. As a result, the center offers programs such as GED courses, childcare, AmeriCorps, Job Corps, and other on-site social services. Defendants can be overheard saying, “I can’t believe I’ve been drug-free this long,” and, “Thank you for believing in me.”

Even other countries have taken notice. Inspired by and based on the Red Hook Center, the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre opened in October 2005, the first of its kind in England and Wales. In addition, the Red Hook Center’s “Teen Court” model is being adopted in New Zealand, Canada, and Japan.

But where there is praise there is also criticism.

Some wonder if justice is being administered at the Community Justice Center because defendants are “treated” instead of “punished” for their crimes.

According to the judge, “Justice is rehabilitation— requiring people to do what they need to do to get

on track.” Calabrese acknowledges that some defendants fail to take advantage of the court’s options.

However, he explains that when defendants refuse to cooperate with the court, sentencing becomes harsher because of the ongoing interaction and accountability between the defendant and the judge.

“I give longer jail time because I pay more attention

Judge Calabrese, the court’s only judge, is not simply dealing with crime by giving out punishments: He is attempting to eradicate crime by addressing the underlying causes. than traditional courts. I take these cases more seriously than they do downtown,” he says. However, repeat offenses are infrequent. The center boasts a seventy-five-percent compliance rate.

“People deserve a real chance to get back on track before they’re locked up,” says Calabrese. ■ —Myisha Cherry is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and educator who is currently working on her third book of poetry.

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MUSIC

By Robert C. Knott

The New York Times says My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade may be the rock album of the year for 2006. Rolling Stone calls it the best mid-seventies record of the last year—“a rabid, ingenious paraphrasing of echoes and kitsch from rock’s golden age of bombast.”

Balderdash.

Yes, The Black Parade is long on bombast, so much so that Queen’s A Night at the Opera more closely resembles Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

Yet unlike those 1970s glam artists whose work has stood the test of time, be they David Bowie, Thin Lizzy, or even T. Rex, My Chemical Romance lacks the quality songs on which to heap layer after layer of dense sound. Production isn’t everything.

At their core, the album’s songs lack melody, tension, and drama. Lyrically, The Black Parade is both an unambiguous and unimaginative foray into the standard gothic fare of isolation, death, and love

lost. Whereas other artists adroitly tackle such topics with humor (Green Day), rawness (Nine Inch Nails), and self-effacement (The Smiths), the latest

by My Chemical Romance collapses beneath the weight of its own caricature.

Let’s move from style to substance.

While judging books by their covers is illadvised, we can sometimes approximate an album’s merits on the basis of its title. Evidence Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, and, for that matter, Kilroy Was Here. This notion is particularly valid with Yo La Tengo, the veteran indie rock trio whose stellar recordings include I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Ira Kaplan et al exhibit a characteristically broad range of sounds and styles on their latest release, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your

Ass, from the ambient meditation “I Feel Like Going Home” to “Mr. Tough,” an infectious ditty that features a salsa backbeat and Prince-inspired falsetto.

And what would a Yo La Tengo album be without a challenge? I Am Not Afraid Of You … begins with “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” a hypnotic, white-noise epic whose rewards multiply the more one listens to it.

Another great title, another great album. I Am Not Afraid Of You … is proof positive that Yo La Tengo remains one of the most innovative and distinctive acts in popular music.

MAGAZINE

By Michael Paulson

The magazine Good was conceived to stoke “a passion for potential mixed with fierce pragmatism and creative engagement.” With the help of Associate Publisher Al Gore III, Good trots out the big guns in its first issue, themed “America: Love It or Fix It.” Jeffrey Sachs contributes an article offering the urgently hopeful conviction that our generation can end global poverty. Jonathan Greenblatt (former Starbucks executive) examines the notion of corporate social responsibility and argues that the long-term benefits of sustainable

design and ethically sound practices will have “a much better chance of creating success that serves the needs of all stakeholders.” Good’s Marketplace features products from socially conscious companies—items that won’t tug at your conscience when you use them but might put a little dent in your pocketbook. A magazine that promotes critical thinking, lauds civic participation, and gives us the warm fuzzies inside, all in a tidy, attractive package? Sounds like a good idea.

ART

In a decade often shaped by the sober utterances of high modernism, Jasper Johns played something like the role of a court jester: His impish, splashy works acted as a fresh alternative to, and a devastating critique of, the rigid dogmatisms of Abstract Expressionism. His paintings and plaster casts dissolved the line between media, re-introduced the body as a subject of artistic scrutiny, and suggested the possibilities of Pop Art—all while maintaining a consistently dynamic physical presence. Jasper Johns: An Allegory of

Painting, 1955–1965, which opens this month at the National Gallery of Art, brings together many of his best-known works, and gives us a chance to consider, a half-century after the fact, his influence. The material is so insistently strong that you will likely excuse what has to be a new low in the history of clever sponsorship: Johns, perhaps best known for his encaustic images of targets, must be wryly amused to find his retrospective underwritten by none other than discount retailer Target.

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

detail of “Target with Four Faces” by Jasper Johns, courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, NY

By Kerr Houston

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recommended

fiction

By Susan McCallum-Smith

If you’ve made a resolution to read more in 2007, don’t go straight from CSI to Moby Dick cold turkey. Withdraw gradually by nibbling on a short story during the commercial breaks. Writing good short stories is hard; writing exceptional short stories takes genius.

The short form has no room for excess, no time for error, no tolerance for superfluous words or authorial ego. Some writers, like Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, wrote little else, managing to encase the human condition in perfect bite-size nuggets for those of us with the attention span of a gnat, while other writers, the merely mortal, ran howling into the forgiving parameters of the baggy, longer form as though their butts were on fire.

Edward P. Jones gives a short story master class in last year’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children, cementing his reputation as America’s ascending literary idol. The book’s title alludes to the biblical Hagar, slave of Abraham and Sarah and mother of Ishmael, and long-revered as the spiritual forebear of the African-American nation. In fourteen stories spanning twentieth-century Washington, D.C., Hagar’s descendents struggle to live the promise of both the Bible and the Constitution. Not only do poverty and racism refuse to let the pot melt, but also plain old ornery human nature, as seen when one black family discriminates against another: “None of Derek’s people had ever used the g on their ing words; one of the first things she herself had been taught early in life was never to lose the g. The g is there for a reason, they had told her. It separates you from all the rest of them …” Language is born again in Jones’ hands and his sentences rise from the page like fresh-baked bread.

Another collection of short stories chronicling Hagar’s descendents is 1992’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan, set in the fictional North Carolina town of Tims Creek. Kenan cites James Baldwin as a major influence on his work, and his characters consistently undercut cultural stereotypes, whether sacrilegious or pious, straight or gay, straight-laced or oddball. As Kenan himself has noted, “there are over thirty-six million ways to be black.”

Although better known for his plays, Anton Chekhov wrote more than two hundred short stories during the second half of the nineteenth century, and some of his best, including “The Kiss” and “The Lady with the Dog,” are collected within 1998’s The Essential Tales of Chekhov, edited by Richard Ford.

Brevity is the sister of talent, Chekhov maintained, and readers new to his work will be startled by its modernity. Meanwhile, writers continue to reference Chekhov’s oeuvre like a how-to manual, turning to him for guidance whenever their own scribblings pop a widget or spring a leak.

William Trevor, Chekhov’s appointed heir, becomes more of a minimalist with each new collection, achieving ever greater subtlety with even fewer words. His focus in the twelve stories within 2004’s A Bit on the Side is the quietly devastating disappointments of everyday life. “He married me for the forty acres,” says a widow following the death of her husband in “Sitting with the Dead,” admitting a truth she’d known for more than thirty years. “Ah, now, now,” says a friend, a line that captures both the cadence of Trevor’s southern Irish setting and its cultural proprieties, which would rather such truths remain unexpressed. “The truth, even when it glorifies the human spirit, is hard to peddle if there is something terrible to tell as well,” Trevor states in a later story. We never dare be so honest with those we love, he suggests, because they may find us unlovable.

Emily Dickinson would probably have agreed with him. She recommended that one “tell the truth but tell it slant,” a mantra that defines 2005’s In Case We’re Separated, Alice Mattison’s linked tales about a JewishAmerican family. In the title story, Bobbie discovers her longtime lover is married, yet decides to say nothing, ignoring his duplicity in order to save their love for one another. Her son discovers this secret in a later story (“Change”), triggering a conclusion of surprising tenderness, which reveals the compromises we make to snatch a little happiness. A thread of optimism runs through this collection, heavily leavened with a pessimism earned on the rocky road of immigration—what a life we live, and still we live it, Mattison says, under a “God who could move the ocean aside, but mostly didn’t.”

What television show could possibly cram such wisdom and eloquence into forty-five commercial-free minutes? ■

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resources

15 Behind This Issue

59 Sprawl Nation

The website for guest editor Dr. P. M. Forni’s Civility Project at Johns Hopkins University is www.jhu. edu/civility. A list of recommended further reading on civility can be found on the site by clicking “Books.” His book Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct is available at major bookstores.

Dr. Anthony Flint recommends the following publications for further reading about sprawl and related issues: books Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck; Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America by Bruce Babbitt; and magazines Planning, Urban Land, Grist, Yes!, and Landscape Architecture.

The bibliography section at the end of Flint’s 2006 book, This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America, contains a listing of additional related resources.

46 The Rules of Engagement Writer Michael Paulson recommends the following books on manners. If the courtly etiquette manuals of the eighteenth century were narrated by a dog and put in the context of contemporary office life, they would be called Clues for the Clueless by Dilbert’s Scott Adams. Donald McCullough’s Say Please, Say Thank You: The Respect We Owe One Another discusses basic ideas of respect and commonality among people in the context of the modern world.

Lynne Truss’ Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door offers some answers to the question, “Where did common courtesy go?”

P. J. O’Rourke’s Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People is not so much a guide for how to behave properly as it is a cynic’s handbook to dealing with everyday life. For more information on the International School of Protocol in Hunt Valley, go to www.internationalschoolofprotocol.com.

67 Recommended Magazine: To learn more about Good magazine, go to www.goodmagazine.com.

Art: Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965 is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from January 28 to April 29, 2007. The museum is located on the National Mall To read about between 3rd and 7th streets at Constitution Patterson Bowling Avenue NW. It is open Mon–Sat 10 a.m.– Center’s 80th birth5 p.m., and Sun 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Go to day, see page 35. www.nga.gov for more information.

www.urbanitebaltimore.com

From contemporary interiors to historic rehabs to DIY projects, you’ll get plenty of home hints to get you through the winter months. Author, New York Times design blogger, and former editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine Allison Arieff joins Urbanite for our “nesting” issue.

courtesy of Allison Arieff

Coming Next Month

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

73

urbanite marketplace Feed Your Heart

full circle

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Breast Cancer Post-rehab.

coMputer harbor

coMputer harbor

Small business support Networking, Point of Sale, Customer Management, Small Business Accounting, Repair, Data Recovery Training, and Web Pages

coMputer Small Business and Home User support center

1123 Light Street Historic Federal Hill Baltimore, MD 21230 (410) 576-1118 obrieng@computerharbor.com

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

410-828-5559

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

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

Specializing in Container Gardens & Urban Landscaping Commercial & Residential Design - Installation - Maintenance www.baltimoregarden.com 4007 Falls Road Baltimore, MD 21211 410-366-9001

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The Admiral’s Cup

Bar & Grille

Water-Front Dining, Open-Air Deck & Plenty of Parking HOURS Monday - Thrusday: 4 p.m. - 12 a.m.

Friday - Saturday: 11:30 a.m. - 2 a.m.

1645 Thames Street Fells Point, MD 21231 410-522-6731 410-522-2727

Sunday: 11 a.m. - 12 a.m.

www.littlehavanas.com 1325 Key Highway Baltimore, MD 21230 410-837-9903

matthew John Hair Design

1014 Morton St Baltimore, MD 21201 410-685-7711

You haven’t been to Lillies yet?

“fashion with style” Monday - Thursday 4pm-2am Friday - Sunday 11:30-2am

JUDGE’S bench

8385 Main Street Ellicott City, MD 21043 410-465-3497

MON-WED-FRI TUE THUR SAT

11:00 AM-5:30 PM 11:00 AM-6:00 PM 11:00 AM-7:30 PM 10:00 AM-5:00 PM

4002 Roland Avenue Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone 410-235-4140

1026 S. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21230 Phone 410.752.3810 Fax 410.752.0639 ccscorks@aol.com www.corksrestaurant.com

Bertha’s Restaurant & Bar Dinning Hours: Sun-Thurs 11:30 am-11 pm Fri-Sat 11:30 am-12 am Bar Hours: Mon-Sun 11:30 am-2 am

734 South Broadway 410-327-5795 www.berthas.com

Johnny’s Bistro on Main • • • •

tapas private events wine bar now open speciality fare with a creative touch

8167 Main Street Ellicott City, MD 21043 phone:410-461-8210 www.johnnysbistro.com

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Gourmet Food Beautiful View Daily Food and Drink Specials Ample Free Parking Hours: Mon-Fri 4-10pm Dinner Sat & Sun 11-3pm Brunch 3-11pm Dinner 500 Harborview Drive, Baltimore, MD 21230 Phone 410 230 0704

Mad city Coffee Nature’s finest grows to perfection 10801 Hickory Ridge Rd Columbia, MD phone 410-964-8671 & Howard County General Hospital Main Lobby 5755 Cedar Lane Columbia, MD

John Steven Ltd. Tavern hours: 11am till 2am - Mon thru Sun Restaurant hours: 11am to 11pm - Sun thru Thurs 11am to midnight Fri & Sat 1800 Thames Street Telephone: 410-327-5561 www.johnstevenltd.com

Cacao Lane Resturant

8066 Main Street Ellicott City, MD 21043 Tel: 410.461.1378

www.cacaolane.net

Annabelle’s Fine Wine Shop and Bar 8210 Historic Main Street Ellicott City, MD 21043 410-750-8800 www.annabellsfinewine.com

Cafe International Cafe 10 10 International Coffee House Coffee House A Perfect Blend of of A Perfect Blend Coffee & Community Coffee & Community 6355 Ten Oaks Road 6355 Ten Oaks Road Clarksville, MD 21029

Clarksville, MD 21029 410-531-7182

410-531-7182

www.cafe10.com

www.cafe10.com

Come In and Drink with Us! 410-534-BEER www.bartenderbaltimore.com

2218 Boston Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21231

MILLRACE CONDOS New 1-2 bedroom condominiums in historic Clipper Mill Easy commuting and Light Rail connection at your doorstep Adjacent to the hiking-biking trails of the wooded Jones Falls Valley Spectacular community pool in the center of a lively neighborhood Now selling — Priced from the $300’s For more Information: 410-243-1292 or www.ClipperMillLiving.com

VILLAGE LOFTS New loft-style, 1-2 bedroom condominiums in Charles Village Smart city living with extraordinary amenities Spacious gourmet kitchens and private balconies Where modern conveniences meet vintage neighborhood charm Now selling — Priced from the $300’s For more Information: 410-243-0324 or www.village-lofts.com

FRANKFORD ESTATES Stylish new East Baltimore town homes, duplexes and single-family homes Urban energy with tree-lined tranquility Numerous floor plans and models to suit your lifestyle Beautifully landscaped neighborhood with pool and clubhouse Phase III closeout —Priced from the $300’s - only 8 left For more information: 410-325-8838

OVERLOOK CLIPPER MILL New contemporary park homes in historic Clipper Mill Green designed and uncomprable green features and options Easy access to Light Rail and hiking and biking trails Spectacular community pool Pre-construction sales have begun - priced from the $400’s For more information: 410-243-1292 or www.clippermillhomes.com

THE OLMSTED Premier 1, 2 and 3 bedroom condominiums in Charles Village All of the finest qualities and innovations in urban architecture Neighborhood on the cutting edge of art, music and higher learning The fusion of function and fun—And certified Green Preview sales begin 2006—Priced from the $300’s For more Information: 410-243-0324

1209 NORTH CHARLES Contemporary new 1-2 bedroom condominiums This is life, artfully done At the gateway to Mt. Vernon in the heart of culture and entertainment The synergy of style and sophistication A celebrated landmark building with new architecture and amenities Now selling— Priced from the upper $200’s For more information: 410-685-0142 or www.twelve09living.com

THE VUE HARBOR EAST

SOME PLACES TO LIVE HAVE A VIEW. OURS HAVE A VIEW AND A VISION.Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse is transforming the way Baltimore lives, works and plays. Reclaiming celebrated buildings. Rethinking smart design. Reinventing neighborhoods. Reinvigorating all of us.

Be a part of it.

Mary Louis owns a condominium at Clipper Mill

Spectacular tower 1, 2 and 3 bedroom residences in Harbor East Breathtaking living spaces high above the Harbor Everything you need to live easily and exceedingly well Open and intelligent floor plans with room to room flow Now selling — Priced from the $400’s For more information: 410-685-1695 or www.vueharboreastcondos.com A joint venture with H&S Properties Development Corp.

1040 Hull Street Suite 200 Baltimore, Md 21230 443.573.4000 www.sber.com

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photo by H. S. Park

eye to eye

With obvious visual allusions to string theory, hyperspace, force fields, and the universe itself, one can’t help but feel in another world when viewing this installation. For me it merges the heavens and the seas, both subjects usually too vast to incorporate into one work.

Mina Cheon, who goes by the name MINALIZA1000, is a Korean-American artist who works in the United States and Korea and is currently a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. This is a photograph taken from within an installation that covers approximately five hundred square feet of gallery space. Made of white bungee strings and accompanied by interactive video projection and sound, the installation encourages viewers/participants to move through it. Each change of position offers a vastly changing perspective.

“What you are seeing is from the inside of the string installation looking toward the gallery doorway,” says the artist. “The work is about a feeling of groundlessness as we move from understanding the world with our senses to an intellectual model of a particle-based universe. It is a kind of universe in a box.”

—Alex Castro

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MINALIZA1000 (Mina Cheon) Groundless & Desiring Infinity, 2005 Approx. five hundred square feet Interactive bungee string installation with video and sound Exhibited in Gallery II of Dizz/placement, an invitational solo exhibition at Insa Art Space of the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation in Seoul, Korea www.MINALIZA1000.com

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