June 2011 Issue

CAN OTIS ROLLEY WIN? 路 ROOFTOP DECKS 路 VINYL MAKES A COMEBACK jun e 2 011 i s s u e n o. 8 4

the

two

wheel Revolution

How bikes can save the city

FEATURE STORY

WHEN KIDS BECOME CRIMINALS

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Joe's Bike shop Fells Point 723 S. Broadway Baltimore Md 21231 443-869-3435

mt. washington 5813 fallS rd Baltimore Md 21209 410-323-2788 www.joeSBikeShop.coM 4  june 2011  www.urbanitebaltimore.com

this month

#84 June 2011

features 30

departments 45

The Labyrinth

about the cover: Illustration by Harry Campbell

by Michael Corbin A trip through the state’s juvenile justice system exposes our divided and contradictory thinking about young criminals—and suggests a way out.

7

Editor’s Note 9 What You’re Saying 11 What You’re Writing 15 Don’t Miss 17 The Goods —— baltimore observed 21 Agents of Change

by Michael Anft Can Otis Rolley’s creative, tech-savvy supporters buck Baltimore’s political establishment in this fall’s mayoral election?

23 Urbanite Online 25 Voices

—— poetry 43 An Invitation to Ophelia’s Tea Party

by Susan Adler George

59

—— space 45 Up on the Roof

by Martha Thomas From wet bars to vegetable gardens, three of Baltimore’s best roof decks

——

transit

web extras

more online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com Michael Corbin on the proposed juvenile jail: http//:bit.ly/juvenilejail The full “Crime & Punishment” series: http//:bit.ly/corbincrime Baltimore’s bike culture (video!): http//:bit.ly/baltimorebikes

on the air

Urbanite on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 fm June 23, 5 p.m.: Juvenile Justice June 30, 5 p.m.: Biking in Baltimore

37

food + drink 49 A Rare Breed

by Michelle Gienow

Shifting Gears

by Mat Edelson Can Baltimore become a truly bike-friendly city? Can it afford not to?

Baltimore’s shad eaters are well into their golden years—and for the fish, that may be a good thing.

37

53 Dining Reviews 55 Wine & Spirits

—— arts + culture 57 Just Among Friends

by Brandon Weigel A local indie music label is riding the rising wave of local talent, but nobody is getting rich.

59 Book 61 Theater 61 Visual Art

—— 63 The Scene —— 70 Eye to Eye Urbanite #84 june 2011 5

issue 84: june 2011

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publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com general manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-in-chief Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com assistant editor Rebecca Messner Rebecca@urbanitebaltimore.com digital media editor Andrew Zaleski Andrew@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-at-large David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com online editors food/drink: Tracey Middlekauff Tracey@urbanitebaltimore.com arts/culture: Cara Ober Cara@urbanitebaltimore.com proofreader Marianne Amoss contributing writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Heather Dewar, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Michelle Gienow, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Robin T. Reid, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac editorial interns Elizabeth Cole, Jonah Furman, Breena Siegel

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bottom photo by Allison Samuels; middle photo by Debbie Doerfer; top photo By Elias Corbin; photo of greg hanscom by j.m. giordano

contributors

editor’s note

Michael Corbin, author of “The Labyrinth” (p.

30), got his first teaching job at Casa Del Pueblo, a church basement in Washington, D.C., that served as a school for refugees from El Salvador, where the United States was fighting a war at that time. He began writing about his teaching when a young Salvadorean student observed in his first class, “Pensé que personas fueron iguales en América,” and asked how to say it in English.

Arts educator and writer Susan Adler George, who wrote “An Invitation to Ophelia’s Tea Party” (p. 43), is a native Marylander and the developer of Create Visions, a multi-arts, semi-improvisational children’s program. She has been published in various local and regional newspapers and magazines and has presented her writing at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has a degree in English from Towson University and has studied writing under award-winning author, essayist, and commentator Andrei Codrescu.

Brandon Weigel has contributed to the Washington Post, City Paper, Washington City Paper, the Baltimore Business Journal, and USA Today.

These days he mostly writes about Baltimore’s independent music scene in articles like “Just Among Friends” (p. 57). He was woefully late to the Baltimore music scene, having not bought a local album until 2005’s The World & Everything In It by the Oranges Band. It still ranks among his favorites.

Greg Hanscom

the crowd that had gathered outside city hall one year ago was making, by any measure, a last-ditch effort. Chanting “Education not incarceration,” and “Books not bars,” fifty-some activists were out to stop a proposed juvenile jail. The facility had been in the works for five years, and, if all went as planned, would begin to rise east of downtown within a few months. Estimated to cost $100 million, it would house young people charged as adults, many of them for violent crimes.

The opposition campaign certainly made logical sense. Why not put more of the state’s resources into schools, recreation centers, and other youth services, eliminating the need for a facility like this? With juvenile crime down both locally and nationally, was the jail really necessary? Well, no—at least not on the scale the state had imagined. This May, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency released a study commissioned by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Open Society Institute-Baltimore, and the state, which agreed to put the project on hold until the study could be completed. The National Council researchers found that, based on current trends and sentencing guidelines, the size of the facility could be cut in half. Changes to state laws could reduce the needs further.

The fight against the jail offers a glimpse of a juvenile justice system that is often shaped by misinformation and fear, rather than the betterment of young people. It is into this web that former prison educator Michael Corbin takes us in this month’s feature story, “The Labyrinth” (p.

30). In the latest installment of his year-long “Crime & Punishment” series, Corbin brings us the voices of young people who have been swept up in the system—young men who say, among other things, that a new juvenile jail is needed in this city. He also tells of a national model that gives young offenders real hope for redemption. You can find his analysis of the National Council report, which hit the streets at press time, at http://bit.ly/juvenilejail.

Other stories in this issue center on the theme of change and the challenges of making it happen in a place that is often preoccupied with (or plagued by) its past. Mat Edelson draws a surprising connection between the decline in urban crime and the rise of a bicycling culture in “Shifting Gears” (p. 37). In “Agents of Change” (p. 21), Michael Anft takes a hard look at this fall’s mayoral election and asks whether young techies and artists might be able to throw a wrench into Baltimore’s old-school political machinery.

And last, on the subject of change, we have a few to report around here.

Urbanite welcomed a pack of new staffers this spring. You may not know Art Director Peter Yuill’s name, but you’ve probably seen his work: He’s the former chief of the design desk at the Baltimore Sun. Assistant Editor Rebecca Messner jumped into her chair after finishing a documentary film about renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted called Olmsted and America’s Urban Parks, which has received rave reviews after showing on public television stations around the country. Digital Media Editor Andrew Zaleski joins us direct from Loyola University Maryland, where he just earned a degree in English Literature and was editor-inchief at The Greyhound. Welcome, too, to new ad sales staffers Amy Sicard, Joe McMonagle, and Natalie Richardson.

Coming next month

CAN THE ’BURBS GROW UP? The story of a suburban “utopia” that is becoming ever more urban

Urbanite #84 june 2011 7

what you’re saying

SpECIAL SECTION

IME! V I VA L · F I L M F E S T T N · CRAFT BREW RE G R E E N I N G D O W NnTo O. W8 3

STARTupS IN THE CITY

issue m ay 2 011

Green Economy Re: “Sandtown Green,” about an eco-friendly rowhouse, April 2011

QOFuEEN ARTS HOW THE DIRECTOR OF A MARBLE-HALLED MuSEuM BECAME LOCAL ARTISTS’ FIERCEST CHAMpION

Great collaboration, research, and application. Many of these features seem extravagant and could perhaps increase the cost of construction beyond what is considered affordable in Baltimore. Including in-kind donations and sponsorships of both labor and materials, what was the cost per square foot of this home? What can be replicated and reproduced in a real-world setting to create an affordable, green Baltimore rowhouse for communities like Sandtown? If the team could take it further by publishing some of this data and information, I believe it would certainly benefit the community.

—cab

Have a Seat Re: “The Greening of Downtown,” about a plan to build more parks, May 2011

Collegiate Conflict Re: “Good Neighbors,” about towngown relations in Baltimore, April 2011

An easy start to make [Preston Gardens] more usable would be to install small benches (too short to sleep on) so that residents and workers have somewhere to sit other than the urine-soaked stairs. The only benches are at the far north end of the park. I wrote the City with this suggestion, but it was not given consideration.

Interesting @UrbaniteMD story on univ/comm relations in Bmore. Bmore peeps, does it understate comm/JHU animosity?

—Resident and worker

Pleasant Prose Re: Christine Grillo’s fiction piece, “This Woman,” May 2011 Ah, Christine, there is a rugged, honest wisdom to this story that seems particularly timely in this age of stinkbugs and bedbugs. The yoking together of the friends getting divorced, the friends going to the gym, on chemo, with the tired but almost stoic heroine is particularly nice. Bravo!

—Carl E

Famous on the Radio Re: “Making Waves,” an interview with Ira Glass, May 2011 When I saw him last night, he signed my copy of this interview. Yay! —Beth Lacey Gill

—eclisham

Twitter Can Be Touching Re: Eye to Eye, about a series of Twitterinspired photographs, April 2011 Surprisingly poignant: Artists photograph sites of geocoded tweets, pair with originating text. h/t @UrbaniteMD —stephencearley

LOVING IT door open so I can hear the birds chirping, coffee provided by @jekkierae, and the April issue of @UrbaniteMD. This is a good morning

I love my neighborhood! RT @UrbaniteMD “Wouldn’t it be so cool if we had a bakery and we grew wheat on the roof?”

—cindylopher

Historic Urban Gardens I am writing in reference to the article “Locally Grown: Down on the Urban Farm,” in the January 2011 issue of Urbanite. Let it be known that the city’s history of community gardening was launched in the late 1970s with the federally funded University of Maryland Extension’s Master Gardeners program. Many community gardens that were established because of this program cultivated trash-filled vacant lots, while several were formed on city parkland. In fact, Mayor William Donald Schaefer liked the community gardening concept so much, he instructed the Department of Parks and Recreation to take ownership of gardens on park property. Regardless of a community garden’s location, each received expert horticultural advice from the Extension educators, as well as support from the university’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources faculty.

Extension-trained master gardeners have been instrumental in the expansion and sustainability of urban horticulture. In the meantime, each Baltimore City community garden has developed its own personality; introduced new vegetables and fruits to diets and enhanced the consumption of nutritional produce; increased surrounding property values; and continued to serve as a stabilizing force in neighborhoods.

Additional information can be obtained from Jon Traunfeld, Extension specialist, fruits and vegetables and master gardener coordinator, at jon@umd.edu.

—Gwendolyn Bailey Jackson, city Extension director and family and consumer sciences educator, is retired.

Corrections In April 2011’s article “On the Line,” we incorrectly identified West Baltimore resident Roberta Jackson as Roberta Johnson. Also, we mistakenly named the MTA’s Station Area Advisory Committees “Station Area Action Committees.” Our apologies.

—Emisspartacus

Re: “Off-Offbeat,” a review of Alchemy restaurant, April 2011 Yet another epicurean delight in #Hampden! I LOVE my neighborhood.

—DianaGross

Re: “Rising to the Challenge,” about a couple creating an all-local bakery in Hamilton, April 2011

Join the conversation. Follow us on Facebook (and use the “Suggest Urbanite” button to recommend us to friends) and Twitter (@UrbaniteMD).

E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211.

Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 9

what you’re writing over from fires we made in colder seasons. I can smell Ryan’s shampoo, and I feel his hand slide down my thigh. I wonder if Bruce knows Ryan and I have been having sex here on the nights he doesn’t come. I hope not. I don’t want anything to change, but I know I have to leave this place soon.

That was twenty years ago. Ryan and I still talk, but only on holidays. Bruce killed himself in 2001. I was the first one to leave and the only one to truly come back, buying a house not far from where I grew up. The old tracks are now a bike and hike trail, and Cave Rock is still there.

Sometimes when I walk by, I catch the scent of wood smoke over the fecund earth.

—Cari Gohlinghorst lives in Parkton. When she’s not homeschooling her kids or gardening, she likes to write creative nonfiction and young adult fiction.

illustration by angela ahn

one summer night, Jeff and I sat at

tommy james and the Shondells played on the radio that summer, and my mother drove a white Plymouth Valiant with red carpet and push-button transmission. My mother was dropping us off at a party in a quiet Randallstown neighborhood; my best friend sat in the back seat.

A scruffy-looking guy darted from the house and bounded down the block, his long hair swaying in the breeze.

Oh, crud, I thought. There goes the night.

My mother’s piercing eyes tailed the hippie like a heat-seeking missile. “We’ll be fine,” I assured her.

The party was in the basement. There were chips and soda. Tommy James sang “I Think We’re Alone Now” on a portable record player.

The boys gathered on one side of the room, the girls on the other. A real hell-raising crowd.

As the music grew louder, the basement grew darker. Then lights started flashing. They flashed through one window and then the other.

Flash, flash. Flash, flash. The pattern repeated every few minutes.

“Headlights,” I thought. “A car is circling the block.”

I glanced around the darkened basement. No one seemed to notice the flashing lights. They were all I could think about.

The lights flashed all evening.

“Did you notice the flashing lights?” I said to my friend as we waited for our ride home.

“What lights?” she asked.

My father drove the Valiant. You could have cut the tension in the car with a vinyl longplaying record.

My parents had spent the evening on hippie patrol. Flash, flash.

—Marsha Nathanson is a freelance writer living in Clarksville. She writes for small creative companies and individuals. Passionate about preserving family history, she would like to apologize to her parents.

the rocks hit my window screen with no planned rhythm and not much force, but I’m half awake and listening for them.

I slip a pair of cut-off jeans on under my T-shirt and head quietly downstairs. My little brother and sister are sound asleep, dreaming, while the fan blows its slow circle of air on top of their cotton sheets. My mom’s light is off and depression has made her into a great sleeper, so I have no worries about waking her. Our ancient dog doesn’t even lift his head when I step over him in the hall. He’ll be dead within two months and we should have had him put down, but there’s no money for that.

The doorknob has been missing for years now, so I stick my finger in the hole where it used to be and gently pull. We live so far out in the country that nobody locks their doors anyway and like most other things in our house, there’s never been any money to get it fixed. At least we have electricity this month.

Outside, Ryan and Bruce are waiting for me, and the tree frogs peep and the cicadas trill as we make our way down the old railroad tracks.

The river runs beside us, the current mimicking our footsteps, getting faster and louder as we get closer to Cave Rock. Inside Cave Rock it smells like rotting leaves and wood smoke left

the kitchen table in the steady breeze of a box fan. We shared the second floor of a Baltimore rowhouse that had four windows and four cramped, stuffy rooms.

“Can’t breathe,” he said. “I’m roasting, everything sticks.” He flapped his undershirt and then wiped a sweat drop from his nose. “Reached one hundred today.” He eyed the red line on the wall thermometer. “Now it’s a toasty ninety-two.”

I shrugged.

“Ain’t you hot?” he asked.

“Doesn’t bother me. I’m freezing.”

“Freezing? You sick?”

“I’m pretending to be on an Arctic cruise. The wind is kicking up snowflakes.” I brought makebelieve binoculars to my eyes and squinted. “I’m searching for polar bears and glaciers.”

“You are sick.”

“Turn off your sweat glands,” I said. “Think about something cool.” I clicked my teeth. “I’m chilled to the bone.”

Jeff rolled his eyes as he cracked the refrigerator door, reached in, and pulled out two bottles of beer. “Only two left,” he said. I could taste the refreshing liquid, feel it trickle down my throat.

There’s nothing like a cold beer on sweltering night. Jeff twisted a bottle cap off, threw his head back, and guzzled half a beer.

Then he held the unopened bottle under my nose. “I’d give it to you,” he said, wiping his lips. “But I’m awfully thirsty tonight, and ’cause you’re on an Arctic cruise, I know you’d prefer hot chocolate.”

—Rick Shelley enjoys collecting and assembling shiny things into mosaics. He teaches mosaic-making at the Creative Alliance and the American Visionary Art Museum. He also writes short stories about the eccentric characters he has known in Baltimore.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 11

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summer nights in the Waverly section of Baltimore in the mid-1930s were a far cry from those of today. This was pre-TV, AC, PC, or even HP (helicopter parents). We were allowed to run free and only told to come home when the lamplighter arrived. Yes, my dears, there were lamplighters who appeared at dusk, carrying a ladder to climb the pole to set the street lights aglow.

We played games—Red Rover, Cross Over, Home, Sheep Run. I don’t remember much about the games except that I spent a lot of time hiding behind garbage cans or squeezed into the space between the metal garages that lined the alleys.

On really hot nights I was allowed to stay up late, to let the upstairs rooms cool off. We didn’t have a big electric fan. Ours was a little, oscillating one. I loved that word and used it over and over while bragging to my friends about our new possession.

Our next-door neighbor was a World War I French war bride. Her hair was long, curly, and very black. Her skin was very white, with red circles of rouge on her cheeks and shiny crimson lipstick, which she touched up frequently. Many nights she played the piano and sang. I loved it.

Her repertoire consisted of World War I songs— “It’s a Long Way To Tipperary,” “Over There,” and a rousing rendition of “Le Marseille.”

I sat in the green rocking chair whose woven seats left waffle patterns on my bare legs, listening to the music with my mother and father. I knew I was home, safe and loved, and all was right in my world.

Dine Downtown Baltimore.

EXPERIENCE AUTHENTIC DINING IN DOWNTOWN BALTIMORE.

EDEN WEST

—Peg McAllen lives in Towson and is a proud member of the Wednesday Writers. She also enjoys sending her opinions to the “Letters to the Editor” column of the Baltimore Sun.

“What You’re Writing”

is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only previously unpublished, nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Only one submission per topic, please.

Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com.

Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic Deadline Publication Road Trip June 6, 2011 August 2011 Fresh July 11, 2011 September 2011 Ghost Stories August 8, 2011 October 2011

SOTTO SOPRA

THE CAPITAL GRILLE

DineDowntownBaltimore.com Food & Wine Events ■ Menus & Recipes ■ Videos & Photos ■ Giveaways & Promotions

An Initiative of Downtown Partnership of Baltimore

Urbanite #84 june 2011 13

LB - Dicover The freedom - Urbanite AD.pdf 1 4/25/2011 11:00:08 PM

C

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Shop.

Work.

Donate.

Shop any one of our 26 locations. www.goodwillches.org 14 june 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

don’t miss images (clockwise from top left): photo by Jay Simpson; Photo by Samuel Rodriguez; photo by Leah Miller; Photo by Joe Wall; photo by Caroline Irby © 2004; courtesy of Art in the Age

5

6

3

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1 June 1, 8 p.m.

3 June 9–11, 7 p.m.

arts/culture

community

The Contemporary Museum’s Mobtown Modern teams up for the second installment of “Synchronicity,” the group’s collaboration with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

The new-music troupe will perform Ayre by Osvaldo Golijov, combining spoken word with historic text in a celebration of Arab, Christian, and Jewish cultures.

Because the story of your uncle Roger’s wasted wedding toast will never get old, stop by Center Stage for “The Stoop Says ‘I do!’: Stories of Holy and Unholy Matrimony,” which will also feature wedding-band tunes from the Bellevederes and old-time sketch drama performed with live sound effects.

The show will be recorded for broadcast on WYPR on June 17 and 24.

$10 The Windup Space 12 W. North Ave. 410-783-5720 www.mobtownmodern.com

2 June 2, 5:30–9 p.m. arts/culture

To celebrate the iconic building’s 100th birthday, the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower Centennial Celebration will offer guests an evening of art, refreshments, live music, and tours of the tower, which once housed a factory for Bromo Seltzer and since 2007 has served as studio space for local artists.

Free 21 S. Eutaw St. 443-874-3596 www.bromoseltzerartstower.com

For more events, see the Scene on page 63.

$20 700 N. Calvert St. 410-332-0033 www.stoopstorytelling.com

4 June 10, 6–8 p.m.

Food/Drink

Craft liquor is the thing at the Evergreen Museum and Library, when Dr. Dennis J. Pogue, vice president of perservation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, presents “Evening of Traditional Beverages: Homegrown Spirits.” The tasting and lecture will focus on small-batch, traditional distilleries up and down the East Coast and will include hors d’oeuvres. $30, members $20 4545 N. Charles St. 410-516-0341 www.museums.jhu.edu

5 June 11, 6 p.m.–midnight COMMUNITY

Planned Parenthood of Maryland hosts “Sex. Art. Rock n’ Roll.” at Area 405, where artists, art fans, and supporters of reproductive health from around the city will mingle, participate in a silent auction, and hear live music from the Degenerettes, War on Women, and the Shondes. The main event will also feature burlesque performances, a funky photo booth, DJ tunes, and giveaways, including a 2005 Kawasaki Eliminator Motorcycle. $10, VIPs $40 405 Oliver St. 410-576-2165 www.plannedparenthood.org/maryland

6 June 25–26 Food/Drink

Mariachi, rumba, merengue, bachata, flamenco, and salsa (the music, though there will also be plenty of salsa, the condiment) will all provide the soundtrack for the thirtyfirst annual LatinoFest in Patterson Park.

Festivities that celebrate the Hispanic culture, music, food, and art of Baltimore will continue throughout the weekend. Proceeds benefit Education Based Latino Outreach.

Free Patterson Park 410-563-3160 www.latinofest.org Urbanite #84 june 2011 15

Visit our new website today.

EmmanuelDowntown.org

EclEctic EnlightEning Engaging EmmanuEl Sunday SErvicES

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the goods

what ’s new in style, shopping, & beyond cruise control

Photos (clockwise from left): Illustration by Lena Corwin; photo by j.m giordano; Photo by Joe Sterne

greg hanscom Daydream about the beach while you surf to work on this new set of wheels. The new Ave. Skateboard Shop in Hampden (843 W. 36th St.; 410-235-0047; www.aveskateboardshop.com) specializes in long boards, featuring decks by such brands as Earthwing and Landyachtz that are built for cruising. Owner Bill Crowley, a Baltimore native, has been skating seriously since 1985 and says some of the racers on the shop team hit 60 miles per hour on these bad boys. Oh, and step aside, Prius: When it comes to gas mileage, these boards out-perform anything else on the road.

aesthetic atlas

elizabeth cole

Bibliophile and textile designer Lena Corwin created almost seventy colorful city map drawings for Elle Décor magazine; she compiled her favorites, including one of Baltimore, into Maps, a coffee table book. She says her favorite cities to draw are ones like Baltimore, “with lots of water, because it winds in and out of the map and they end up being the prettiest.” Find it online at www.otherbooks.com for $35.

nailed it

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Maryam Dennis and Ambra Black, owners of the new organic nail bar Juste B (1624 E. Fort Ave.; www.juste-b.com), know that living organically goes far beyond our dietary choices. Juste B’s products are entirely organic, from the water-based nail polish to homemade natural scrubs and moisturizers. Manicures start at $18, pedicures at $23, with an array of additional services for kids, women, and men.

Curious about an organic waxing? Try the salon’s soy-based option.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 17

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6. Chesapeake Shakespeare Company Returning for its ninth year at the ruins of the unforgettable PFI Historic Park, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). It’s family friendly and kids are free! June 10- July 24th, Thursday-Saturday at 8:00 pm, Sunday’s at 6:00 pm.

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the goods carte blanche

elizabeth cole

Photos (clockwise from left): courtesy of Ella Moss; photo by j.m. Giordano; photo by j.m. Giordano

You won’t find these hot dogs at your average backyard barbecue. Before he opened Haute Dog Carte (6070 Falls Rd.; www.hautedogcarte.com) last July, owner Daniel Raffel taste-tested twenty hot dogs before settling on Angus beef for the H.D. Signature Dog. The dogs come encased in toasted baguette-like buns, and the menu includes daily dog creations like bison chipotle dogs, deli dogs, and duck sausage. Raffel also runs a catering business, A La Carte, but he says he prefers the Carte. “I’ve never had so much fun before in my life,” he says. He plans to open another cart at 401 University Parkway this summer.

cover girl

elizabeth cole The Federal Hill boutique Babe (910 S. Charles St.; 410-244-5114; www.babeaboutique.com) stocks fun, wearable brands for women like Hudson and Splendid. Shop owner Lisa Ponzoli’s favorite piece for summer is a sheer Ella Moss cover-up in “a watercolor type print that goes with everything ... Sheers, in general, are really strong this season,” she says, and this piece works well as a “sophisticated cover-up at a pool party.”

charmed, i’m sure

elizabeth cole

When the Bluehouse coffee shop closed two years ago, former employees formed a collective and opened a new cafe this winter. Charmington’s (2601 N Howard St.; 410-235-5004; www.facebook.com/charmingtons), as its name suggests, sits between Remington and Charles Village in the long-vacant and recently renovated Miller’s Court apartment complex. The calm coffee shop brews Counter Culture coffee and sells salads, sandwiches, and baked goods. Be on the lookout for smoothies, which will be added to the menu just in time for summer.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 19

The guy from Betascape knows the girl from Single Carrot whose fiancé works at the Beehive whose party you were at when you ran into the guy who gave you your start-up dream job.

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The Harlan’s took advantage of a Maryland state grant program and with the help of Greenspring Energy, had a photovoltaic solar system and a solar hot water heater installed. And today, these systems are utilizing sunlight to generate about 35 percent of the energy needed and used by the household, allowing the family to save money each month and live in a more environmentally friendly and “green” manner.

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20 june 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

baltimore observed

photo by J.m. Giordano-

feature / urbanite online / voices

Agents of Change Can Otis Rolley’s creative, tech-savvy supporters buck Baltimore’s political establishment in this fall’s mayoral election?

Long shot: Mayoral candidate Otis Rolley, a former city planning chief and aide to Mayor Sheila Dixon, is taking on the political establishment with support from the “creative class.”

S

By Michael anft

he stands somewhere near the middle of life and, more often than not, dresses up every Sunday to go to church.

She may come off as meek, but she is strong. She is African American Woman, and along with a handful of deeppocketed (and usually white and male) campaign donors, she’s the one that spins Baltimore’s electoral world.

For the last couple of decades, black women have been credited with deciding Baltimore’s elections. Observers say they make up the largest block of voters who turn out to the polls. By 1999, black women’s consistent presence at the polls had strengthened the voice of the black church to the point where it could even help swing an election in favor of a white guy, Martin O’Malley. In recent years, they

have been instrumental in electing people like them—Sheila Dixon as mayor, Joan Pratt as comptroller, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake as city council president.

But the black female/black church/big donor formula—the longhonored trifecta of city politics—isn’t the instant winner of a ticket it used to be, or so say some Baltimore technology entrepreneurs and artists. They say the young movers and shakers who have brought several city neighborhoods back to life could fill campaign coffers and stuff the ballot box during this September’s Democratic mayoral primary, the only vote in town that matters. Rawlings-Blake, who took the mayor’s seat when Sheila Dixon left amid scandal in 2010, will face a host of challengers, likely including former city councilman Jody Landers, state senator Catherine Pugh, and Urbanite #84 june 2011 21

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feature / urbanite online baltimore observed city councilman Carl Stokes. liberalize housing laws that often conflict with Many in the younger crowd are lining up artists’ need to live in the studio space where behind Otis Rolley III, the MIT-educated, techthey work. savvy former city planning director and oneFolks in both creative camps—the hightime chief of staff for Dixon. Although he is techies and the arts crowd—hope that Rolley, a black, Rolley positions himself as a post-racial fresh, charismatic candidate, will get out more candidate, going so far as to set up his camvotes than last year, when fewer than a quarter paign shop in Hampden, a neighborhood where, of the city’s 350,000-plus registered voters bothnot all that long ago, some people ered to show up at the polls. And they expressed fealty to the Ku Klux point to recent elections that have Klan. His policy stances are probucked the previous trends. Gregg small business, property-tax cutBernstein’s win last year over longtime city state’s attorney Patricia ting, and high-tech-centered.

Jessamy—one of the pols who had “There’s real potential for this ridden on the coattails of black feelection to be about more than males—demonstrated the weakness [the city’s] powerful [political] of incumbency in a town where peomachine,” says Dave Troy, CEO ple are fed up with crime and blight. of 410 Labs, a tech company that Likewise, 28-year-old Teach For builds e-mail servers and websites.

The problem with past and present America grad Bill Ferguson’s triumph leadership, Troy believes, is that last year against seven-term state city government has yet to build senator George W. Della Jr. exposed Matthew Crenson, faculty on its own base of knowledge. director of the Baltimore a chink in the armor of longtime inStatistics-heavy systems developed Scholars Program at Johns cumbents. Della’s loss was partly laid under O’Malley a decade ago have Hopkins University and a to the younger generation’s ability to get out the vote using Facebook, yet to be put to their most con- longtime analyst of city elections. structive uses. A report last year Twitter, and other online tools. from IBM, part of its “Smarter CitRolley’s supporters point out that ies” program, encouraged the city the old Baltimore machine likely to do more to open up government to citizens won’t be as well oiled this time around. Several via technology—smartphone apps, Facebook, sources of considerable campaign cash, includthe Internet—and to offer them a comprehening John Paterakis, the bakery magnate, and Ronald Lipscomb, the Dixon-connected consive, constantly updated stream of data. The city tractor, will be sitting out this election cycle would be policed more effectively and developed with fewer points of political friction, the report because of past run-ins with those who enforce implied. campaign finance laws.

Troy worked with Rawlings-Blake to open Folks like Troy—who gave the maximum $4,000 donation to Rolley—hope to fill the city data to the public (see “Cracking the Code,” April ’11 Urbanite) and on an unsuccessful bid breach. They’ll have a ways to go. A Rolley event to convince Google to make Baltimore a test in January featuring Bill Cosby didn’t raise city for its super-high-speed Internet service. anywhere near as much money as a concurrent But he says the mayor’s efforts have been winRawlings-Blake fundraiser. Over all, RawlingsBlake is out-reaping other candidates and podow dressing. “If we want to be the city we can be, we have to use the data at all levels, and right tential ones by at least a three-to-one margin. now we just don’t do it,” Troy says. “Real trans“In a city with as apathetic a voter base as Balparent government is strategically very different timore, usually cash plus name recognition is as from business as usual. You need someone with good as it gets for a candidate,” says longtime vision to make that transition. You have to do political pundit Brian Wendell Morton. “Throw more than cobble things together and keep the in the perks of incumbency and I’d say Stephacity running.” nie Rawlings-Blake is sitting as good as it gets.”

Artists, meanwhile, are riled up by RawlingsThere are occasional surprises in Baltimore Blake’s elimination of several hundred thousand politics—remember the “unbeatability” of Lawdollars in city art grants. “There’s a ton of porence Bell in the 1999 mayoral race? Still, the tential here for artists, but we need the mayor to Creative Class may ultimately have other things show us that she supports the growing numbers on its mind. “You know, people are so busy making art—and so many of them have a DIY, of creative types in the city,” says J. Buck Jabaily, director of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Aldon’t-need-the-government attitude,” says Gary liance and one of the founders of CreateBaltiKachadourian, who spent twenty-two years working for the city government on Artscape more, an attempt to get artists and tech mavens and murals programs. “If they do become acto work together to change politics. Others, including Tony Shore, an award-winning painter tivists, it’s like the fourth or fifth thing on their known for depicting classical subjects on list.” black velvet, add that the city could do more to

“Rolley will probably be best received in white areas like Roland Park—he’s got the right diplomas.”

A sampler of the fresh, Web-exclusive content posted weekly at www.urbanitebaltimore.com

On a Roll From Food/Drink “We don’t really trust everyone with the knives,” jokes RA Sushi chef Aldon Blackwood in an introductory sushi making class. Manager Andy Gaynor interjects: “Maybe in Sushi 102.” http://bit.ly/sushi101 Bottle Battle From Food/Drink A battle royale at B&O American Brasserie pits cocktails and wine in a head-to-head culinary fight to the finish. http://bit.ly/bottlebattle When “Us” Becomes “Me” From A rts/Culture It’s quite possible that author Michael Kimball has the ability to predict the future. But not in a Dionne Warwick, “You’ll marry three times and become very wealthy” kind of way. http://bit.ly/michaelkimball

Practice and Meditations Perspective informed by cross-cultural experiences is the theme running through two new collections at C. Grimaldis Gallery. http://bit.ly/urbanitegrimaldis top PHOTO by Gil Jawetz ; bottom photo Courtesy of C. Grimaldis Gallery

Urbanite #84 june 2011 23

Downtown Baltimore

Distinctive Living, Distinctive Experiences.

PHoTo: EvAN JoSEPH

What ’s Your Style of Distinction?

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Downtown offers convenient access to employment, culture, dining, shopping, and entertainment.

For additional information about living options in Downtown Baltimore, visit www.GoDowntownBaltimore.com

24 june 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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Silo Point Ten14 N. Charles Street Condos The Towers at Harborcourt Twelve09 North Charles The Yards of Federal Hill

voices baltimore observed It was scary. There was nobody who looked like me there. There was a lot of staring, as if we were freaks of nature. What my mother would do, to keep us balanced in her mind’s eye, was to take us back to the city on the weekends. It was a dance that my sister and I learned really early, and it has been the biggest blessing, to be able to cultivate enough identity and comfort in our own skin that we can feel comfortable wherever we land. urb:

I understand that your friends in the ’burbs helped inspire the work you’re doing now.

mfs : One of the things that impacted me the most was that all of my Jewish friends talked about their ancestry and their heritage. They would talk about, “My grandmother is Polish,” or “I have a Russian grandmother,” or “I have a grandmother from Hungary.” And they would talk about going to visit these places. I could never get any further than North Carolina when I was talking about ancestry.

Photo by Bruce Weller

Yuk it Up Comedienne and youth activist Meshelle Foreman Shields on The Wiz, the president’s birthright, and what’s funny in her life Interview by Greg Hanscom

Y

ou may know Meshelle Foreman Shields as “the Indie Mom of Comedy,” a standup comic, and a sometime radio and TV personality. But there’s more to this Baltimore native than meets the airwaves. She recently landed a community fellowship from OSIBaltimore to help a group of girls from the Park Heights neighborhood trace their ancestry and ultimately travel to Africa. Her organization is called GoalDIGGERS, and her mission, she says, is to create leaders who will turn out to be “the next Michelle Obamas.” A tall order, perhaps, but then, it comes from a woman who recently performed for the First Lady in a mutual friend’s living room.

mfs: I grew up watching The Wizard of Oz. It was one of those things that, you heard it was on and everybody gathered around the television. We had never had people who looked like us playing these epic roles. When [the movie version of] The Wiz came out, I remember my aunt taking me down to either the Hippodrome or maybe the Mayfair. The line stretched out of the door. It was a major event.

This was our Wizard of Oz. When I got in college, it was my chance to have my little footprint on something that was epic in terms of musical theater and motion pictures for African Americans. urb:

You spent your early years in Park Heights.

mfs:

urb:

I read this morning that you played Dorothy in The Wiz. mfs :

You’ve been Googling me. That’s called cyber-stalking, Mr. Hanscom.

I played Dorothy in The Wiz for two years. I went to a historically black college called Bowie State.

It was the highest grossing musical production that the university had ever done. It went so well that they wanted me to play Dorothy the following year. urb:

Was there something about the role of Dorothy that resonated with you?

Park Heights was a very different neighborhood then. It was a place that you would want to grow up. There was nothing but working class and middle class African American families that had consciously decided to live in this part of the city. We lived with my grandparents. My mother had us when she was a teenager. People thought we were her sisters. My uncles would take us out, and we would sit up on the billboards and watch them play a little makeshift game of baseball.

They would make go-karts and put little strings on them. It was just like The Little Rascals. urb:

So why did you move to the suburbs?

mfs : My step dad thought it would be a better place for us, as kids. It didn’t seem better to me.

As I got older, I said, we need our birthright. We need to know about our ancestors who made it through this great middle passage, this horrific system of chattel slavery. We need to know what made them be able to hold onto sanity in the middle of an insane institution. urb : The whole controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate—for African American kids, what does that do to their sense of identity? mfs : It’s a slap in the face. It’s showing young people of African descent, not only do you have to be clear about who you are, but you’ve got to be eight times more gracious, eight times more intelligent. You have to exercise more civility and humanity than folks who think they’re entitled to this American lifestyle. urb:

Amid all of this, how is it that you can find such humor?

mfs : You have to. People who have been disenfranchised have found ways to use humor to get through it. Historically, they’ve used it so that they can wake up in the morning, so that they can hold their heads up, so that they can pursue this quote-unquote American dream. urb:

What’s funny right now?

mfs: The people that I birthed. Those three little people in my house. The skit that I’m writing because of this morning is: What in your mind’s eye, at 4 years old, could cause you to hold Cheerios in your mouth for 20 minutes while you get driven to preschool? What mechanism in your brain tells you, “I’m gonna hold this rice milk and Cheerios in my mouth for 20 minutes because I did not want to finish them”? Can we bottle that and give it to some politicians? If you’re that eagle-eyed at 4, we can solve Medicare.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 25

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If your current depression medication just isn’t enough, consider the STEP-D study.

Our office is helping to evaluate an investigational medication as an add-on treatment to an approved anti-depressant medication. You may be able to take part in this STEP-D study if you: • Are 18-65 years old • Have been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) • Have been experiencing symptoms of depression for at least the past 2 months • Have been taking at least one antidepressant medication as prescribed, but it is just not helping you enough Study staff will review additional criteria with you at your first study clinic visit. The study lasts 15-22 weeks and all office visits, study-related medical and psychiatric evaluations, and study medications will be provided to participants at no cost.

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410-602-1440 26 june 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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Compete for $10,000 in prize money and the chance to implement your innovative, creative solution to a pressing city issue: the qualityof-life issues brought about by the construction of the Red Line.

The proposed Red Line is a 14.5-mile, light rail transit line that will run west-east from Woodlawn through downtown Baltimore, Fells Point, and Canton to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center Campus. Its construction could dramatically disrupt city life with noise, dust, traffic snarls, and more.

We think we can take advantage of this period to create a unique, vibrant, productive urban space.

What do you think?

To learn more, go to www.urbaniteproject.com

special advertising section

Getting through to DUI’s most likely suspects

BY STEPHANIE SHAPIRO

Illustration By James Anderson

MICA students send a graphic message to their peers in Loss and Consequences: The Drunk Driving Project Every year in Maryland, approximately 150 people die in drunk driving crashes. It’s a grim figure often lost on those who are statistically most likely to be at fault: men age 21 to 34.

Theirs is an age bracket drawn to risky behavior despite the potentially deadly consequences. Conventional anti-drunk driving messages aimed at this target audience seldom sink in.

It’s also known that peer-to-peer communications do reach their audience. That’s the inspiration behind Loss and Consequences: The Drunk Driving Project, an exhibition of work by students enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). With words and images that speak directly to the artists’ own generation, Loss and Consequences makes the price of poor judgment personal and real.

Growing out of a partnership with the Maryland State Highway Safety Office (MHSO), Urbanite, and MICA, The Drunk Driving Project brought a new dimension to the school’s network of community-based art initiatives in Baltimore. In turn, it gave MHSO access to a versatile talent pool. And students gained real-world experience in public health communication.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 27

special advertising section

1 3

2

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1. Poster design by Jim Alley 2. Bus shelter poster design by Lauren Toma 3. Coaster design by A. Walters 4. Billboard design by Paige Roma

The project was a win for all participants, says Karen Stults, who directs the Office of Community Engagement at MICA. The project “enabled us to work directly with important organizations outside of the institution that are working toward a public good, such as safer roads,” she says. “Our students are providing a benefit for the greater community. In turn, those organizations offer a rich opportunity for our students.”

Perhaps as important, Loss and Consequences enabled a difficult

conversation to take place. Catherine Behrent and Dennis Farber, co-chairs of MICA’s foundation program for freshman, embraced the project as a forum for educating students about depression, addiction, and suicide. They asked instructors to incorporate the project into a required, two-semester course for freshmen.

“In making art about impaired driving, we could bring in the bigger discussion about drugs, alcohol, and depression,” Behrent says. Students were also exposed “to the idea that they are citizens, and have a responsibility to be part of

special advertising section

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Drink and Ride.

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Taxi Light Rail Local Bus Marc Train Metro Subway College Town Shuttle Charm City Circulator

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5. Poster designs by A. Dougherty 6. Sculpture by Margaux Siegel 7. Poster design by Sophie Moore 8. Poster design by Jenny Leiferman

the community and contribute in some way.”

More than 400 students created sculpture, graphic design, video and audio pieces for Loss and Consequences. A modest stipend covered art supplies and production costs for many.

In the spring, a jury panel selected 66 pieces for a traveling exhibition.

Supported by federal highway safety grant funds, MHSO has recently launched a variety of edgy and well-received safe driving campaigns produced by professionals. The concepts and creations of the MICA students, though, “totally

exceeded my expectations,” says Jeremy Gunderson, MHSO communications coordinator. Selected works from the project will appear on banners, buses, billboards, and television spots in statewide MHSO drunk driving prevention campaigns through 2011.

Loss and Consequences: The Drunk Driving Project will be displayed in the Main Gallery of MICA’s Main Building, 1300 W. Mount. Royal Ave. from June 7 through July 14. The show will then move to the Urbanite tent for Artscape from July 15 to July 17.

Scene of the crime: Brian Wonsom is accused of killing a teacher and leaving her body near this spot at the Cheltenham Youth Facility. Thirteen at the time of the crime, Wonsom is being held without bail and tried as an adult.

H

LAB YRI NTH

THE

A trip through the state’s juvenile justice system exposes our divided and contradictory thinking about young criminals—and suggests a way out.

By

Michael Corbin

Photography by

J.M. Giordano

annah Wheeling’s body was found in the snow on the morning of February 18, 2010, just outside the grounds of the Cheltenham Youth Facility. Cheltenham, in the nomenclature of Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services, is a “secure” facility. Located in semirural Prince George’s County, it is the most chronically overcrowded juvenile facility in Maryland, home to more than one hundred mostly A f rican American youth. Wheeling, 65, was a teacher. She drove each morning from her home in Harford County, where she lived by herself, to teach in a program called Re-Direct, just outside the Cheltenham fences, a place for boys deemed of less risk than those incarcerated inside the locked buildings.

A week before she planned to retire, Wheeling was beaten and sexually assaulted during her workday, inside her workplace. She died of blunt force trauma caused, police believe, by blows delivered with a concrete block. Her killer dragged her body outside, where it lay in the winter night, not discovered until the following day. Brian Wonsom, a 13-year-old boy from Forestville, Maryland, who was in the Re-Direct program, was charged in adult court with her murder.

A month after Wheeling’s death, Juvenile Services secretary Donald DeVore addressed a press conference to let the public know that things were being taken care of—people were being held responsible not just for the murder but also for the larger problems at Cheltenham. Changes were being made. DeVore had come to Maryland four years earlier with fanfare and a thirty-year record as a juvenile justice reformer. “I’ve never lost a staff member,” DeVore told the press that day. “The death of Hannah Wheeling has been a huge loss.”

Eight months later, he resigned.

This March, Maryland Circuit Court Judge C. Philip Nichols Jr. ruled that Wonsom, now 14, would be deemed an adult and charged with murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense, and carrying a dangerous weapon. The youngest person ever to be tried as an adult in Prince George’s County, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. He awaits trial now in the Western Maryland Children’s Center in Hagerstown. “The court is simply not prepared to accept the risk of his premature release,” Judge Nichols Urbanite #84 june 2011 31

wrote in his ruling.

The Cheltenham murder and the facility itself embody the profound contradictions and ambivalence within our juvenile justice system. We intuitively know that young people are plastic, capable of being molded. A 13-yearold murderer challenges our sufferance of the young, however. It confirms our suspicions: Those kids aren’t like our kids. In America we fear the idea of Brian Wonsom as much as the monstrousness of his alleged crimes. That fear colors our judgment, deforms public will, and enfeebles our ability to even imagine a system of true juvenile justice.

Maryland processed more than 40,000 juvenile cases in 2010. Most of them were nothing like Brian Wonsom’s. Yet our current system on any given day keeps hundreds of kids locked in large facilities without meaningful treatment, therapy, or opportunity for redemption. Still, a convergence of forces—outcry over the Cheltenham murder, the substantial decrease in juvenile crime locally and nationally, and the need to prioritize investments for the public good in an age of austerity—make this the opportune time to move beyond our fear and see meaningful justice done for kids.

Baby booking: “We’ve made some progress,” says Senator Bobby Zirkin. “But many of our facilities ... like Cheltenham and the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center can be dysfunctional, miserable places.”

he quest for justice for young offenders in Baltimore begins with the shouting of names at the city’s Juvenile Justice Center, a nearly blocklong structure east of downtown that stands out against the abandoned retail hopes of Old Town Mall and the decaying facades of the once-vibrant urban thoroughfare of Gay Street. The institution, which includes three circuit courtrooms, hearing rooms for juvenile masters, offices for prosecutors and public defenders, and a 144-bed detention center, is known more prosaically among those who use its services as “Baby Booking.” Inside, adolescents slouch on hallway benches, waiting for public defenders to call their names and sheriff ’s deputies to open the courtroom doors.

Both the early morning and afternoon sun can cut through the three-story glass atrium so that, sitting in the waiting area, you have to shield your eyes on bright days. Before hearings, you can watch the public defenders file out, shoes clapping upon the tiled floor. Some pull wheeled carriers of file folders. Many leaf through folders with proliferating sticky notes, searching for the name, getting familiar with the case. The lawyers, most of them young, often meet their clients for the first time moments before entering the courtroom where a judge or a juvenile master will decide what should happen to a young person in trouble.

There was a time in the United States when we thought of young people simply as little adults, reckoning them fully responsible for their actions. The country’s first juvenile court appeared in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899 as part of Progressive-era reforms that also gave

us child labor laws and compulsory public education. The court operated under the English common law principle of parens patriae—the parent of the country—acting on the behalf of those unable to legally act on their own. The new court embodied a then-novel understanding of childhood and how we viewed complicity with crime and meting out punishment. Young people didn’t get due process, but they were at least seen as kids.

Parens patriae still informs what goes on at the Baltimore Juvenile Justice Center, but those public defenders are there because of Gerald Gault. When he was 15, Gault made an obscene phone call and was sentenced to six years in a juvenile detention center. In 1967, the Supreme Court threw out Gault’s conviction and, in a landmark decision, established that under the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, kids accused of crimes must be afforded many of the same due process rights as adults so as not to be arbitrarily incarcerated.

Then, between 1984 and 1994, the juvenile homicide rate nearly tripled, and the use of guns by juveniles to kill their victims quadrupled. The public and the lawmakers they elected became terrified by the behavior of the dispossessed young living in this country’s metropolitan cores. By the mid-1990s, nearly every state had amended its laws to transfer more young offenders to the criminal courts and to sentence them more severely than they would be in the juvenile system.

By 1996, then-Princeton University professor John DiIulio was warning that “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile

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32 june 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

‘superpredators’—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join guntoting gangs and create serious communal disorders.”

DiIulio, first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush, later distanced himself from his theory, which spawned a small industry of promoters and elaborators.

And while the crime wave that he predicted would peak in 2010 never materialized, the emotional essence of his allegory remains with us. “The state’s juvenile justice system isn’t set up to deal with today’s violent, repeat, youthful offenders and it leaves vulnerable communities less safe than ever,” an August 2009 Baltimore Sun editorial trumpeted after 17-year-old Lamont Davis shot another teenage boy and, while doing so, accidentally put a bullet in a 5-yearold girl’s head.

The scary phantasms of youth cut loose not just from our laws but also our social norms recur in the American social imagination. Less the youth-outlaw hustle of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in his Adventures and more the ominous nihilism of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, they reappear and always seem to make us feel less safe than ever. Today, that fear challenges our very notion of what kids are and disfigures our notion of juvenile justice: Do we simply lock those kids away, or do we really invest in saving them?

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uvenile justice in Maryland has grown by accretion into an archipelago of courts, treatment programs, group homes, secure institutions, detention areas, and lock-ups that are run by a combination of for-profit, private, and public companies and agencies. These institutions are staffed and run by public defenders, judges, masters-inchancery, truant officers, psychologists, social workers, probation and corrections officers, and philanthropic benefactors who see a problem in need of a solution and find their raison d’être in the state’s arrested and euphemistically “adjudicated” youth.

I have worked in this landscape, as a teacher in the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center; in prison, where young people are not uncommon; and in programs for kids in the community after they have been adjudicated. I have also visited and counseled dozens of youth in far-flung corners of the state’s juvenile justice system. I have seen how each of these corners lacks consistency with other parts of the system and how a community that proclaims belief in rehabilitation and redemption often lapses into incarceration and control. More, in the absence of shared purpose, appropriate institutional spaces, and adequate staff, I have watched again and again how the failure of children is attributed to some inherent

Dark history: Industrialist Enoch Pratt deeded Cheltenham to the state in 1870 to create the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children. “We have a large colored population among us [who are] in a deplorable state of ignorance,” he said, “and … ignorance and crime go hand in hand.”

He tells me about the graduates of a particular boot-camp program that the police revered. “They said these kids were the most polite kids they re-arrested.”

—Mark Steward, founder and director of the Missouri Youth Services Institute criminality. I have seen our prejudice and fear, spoken and unsaid, in jurisprudence, pedagogy, programs, and practice, work itself out on the very bodies of the state’s young people.

Kids’ voices can be painful and revealing as they narrate their journey through Maryland’s system, so I always make sure to listen. Last fall, I asked a group of adjudicated boys I was teaching to consider Hannah Wheeling’s murder. “I don’t think he should have killed her,” a dreadlocked young man on juvenile probation said in a measured tenor that cracked occasionally into something higher, younger. “But I have been at Cheltenham. That’s some real country, and they don’t give a fuck about what we’re going through. Cheltenham is about being locked down and away from home. That’s it.

Sometimes the stress and all just gets to you.”

I asked them about the kids who commandeered

a vehicle and escaped from the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County last fall. The former Maryland Training School for Boys, Hickey was under a consent decree with the United States Department of Justice for its inadequacy when then-governor Robert Ehrlich ordered it closed in 2005. It is still open.

Others tell me about their time at the Silver Oak Academy, the rebranded Bowling Brook Preparatory School in rural Carroll County where guards killed an incarcerated teen in 2007. I hear their stories of being locked in the city Juvenile Justice Center, which was under Justice Department oversight until 2010 for violations of the federal Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. Many who have worn them also tell me about how they are able to juke GPS monitors attached to their ankles or simply cut them off,

knowing that the system didn’t work or that the people tracking their movements didn’t seem to care where they were. Lamont Davis was wearing one of these when he shot the teen and the 5-year-old girl. At trial, the Nebraska company that was supposed to be monitoring him and the Department of Juvenile Services both acknowledged that the system couldn’t or didn’t work. Davis, 17 at the time of the crime, was charged as an adult and found guilty of attempted murder. “What’d they give Lamont?

Life plus thirty? ” one of my students offers.

“They are going to bury him under the jail.”

I always ask my students about any time they spent in L-Section, a former maximum security lock-up in the Baltimore City Jail, sections of which date from the 19th century, where juveniles charged or waived-up as adults are confined prior to trial. In 1999, Urbanite #84 june 2011 33

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Human Rights Watch found the conditions in L-Section “appalling.” The State of Maryland has for years proposed building a new pre-trial detention center to house juveniles charged as adults. Last year, however, as plans for a new $100 million facility neared completion, local faith and youth advocacy groups rallied to oppose it. Groundbreaking was to begin this fall, but Governor Martin O’Malley has suspended awarding contracts for the building until the state completed a study of how many youth it will need to hold. (That study was released at press time. See http//:bit.ly/juvenilejail.)

Still, talk to the kids who have spent time in L-Section, and you hear the often fatalistic realism that both state officials and the advocacy community regularly miss: “Of course they want a new jail for us with their millions,” one of my students quips. “But they do need a new jail, because L-Section is hell, straight up hell.

And them ministers and what-all out there protesting need to get with that too.”

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ore than just in the voices of children, the contradictions of Maryland’s juvenile system have played out in state politics in a tragicomedy of rhe-

torical excess.

“We are outraged by the patterns of abuse that are being alleged at the Department of Juvenile Justice’s boot camps,” wrote thenGovernor Parris Glendening and Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in 1999 in response to the horrors of a now-discredited reform effort. “Violence will not be tolerated,” they assured the citizenry.

Robert Ehrlich, who defeated Townsend in the 2003 governor’s race in no small measure by hammering her stewardship of juvenile justice, declared in 2005, “My administration is working to dismantle a broken system that suffered from a decade of neglect and replace it with a new, child-first culture centered on treatment and education.”

Five years later, Governor O’Malley stated that “anyone would be pressed to find evidence of improvement under [Ehrlich’s] watch.” His own administration, he asserted, had “made great strides in the toughest of times … better serving the youth that these facilities are trusted to care for.”

This type of partisan one-upmanship and piecemeal reform is a recurring national theme that keeps us from seeing the bigger picture, says Barry Feld, a national expert on juvenile justice from the University of Minnesota Law School. “I once was at a conference at Harvard for judges who heard juvenile cases,” Feld says.

“They would tell the story about how they saved this kid or that one. It was like kids coming down a river, struggling, drowning without help. The judge would reach in and save one.

But more were coming down the river needing help. And this would go on and on. Save a few,

The “Youth Facility”: “Clearly, the only wrong thing to do is lock kids up in institutions,” says University of Minnesota Law School professor Barry Feld. “The research shows us that anything three months of longer is developmentally disruptive.”

By the Numbers

33% 56% 57% 49% $14 The decline in the national juvenile arrest rate from 1996 to 2008

The percentage of kids in juvenile detention in Maryland who are re-referred or re-arrested within one year

The decline in juvenile homicides in Baltimore City from 2006 to 2010

others drown. But no one was running up the river to see where all these kids were coming from in the first place.”

However, more than a century after the creation of the concept of juvenile justice, a remarkable national consensus about the way forward is emerging—even if, as in Maryland, the politics of fear can still stand in the way.

“I’ve been to some states where I have to tell them, ‘You can’t get there from here,’” says Mark Steward, founder and director of the Missouri Youth Services Institute, an organization that helps states reform their juvenile justice systems. “When I was in Maryland I could see that you had some of the pieces to work with.”

Steward spent seventeen years as director of Missouri’s Division of Youth Services, where he led the creation of what is widely acknowledged as the country’s most successful juvenile justice system. What Missouri does with young offenders is deceptively simple but politically and culturally very hard. The state has abandoned the large locked facilities like those that define Maryland’s system. Instead, youth are housed in small facilities in groups of ten to fifteen on average. Dormitory-like homes are located in the kids’ communities, not isolated behind walls or out in the countryside. But more than its institutional spaces, the Missouri

The amount by which the state over-estimated the necessary size of a new juvenile detention center

The cost, in millions, of detaining 130 Maryland youth in out-of-state facilities in 2010

model fundamentally changes the way people view kids who break the law. It treats them as kids, inherently capable of redemption. Highly trained teams of staff provide intensive treatment, therapy, care, and extensive support after they are released.

The system works. In Maryland, 26 percent of kids released from residential confinement in a juvenile facility are sentenced to adult prison within three years, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which champions the Missouri model. In Missouri, only 8.5 percent end up in prison three years later.

Steward is at pains to point out that his approach is not somehow easy on juvenile offenders. “Missouri is not soft on crime,” he says.

“I’ve worked under Republican Governor John Ashcroft and Democratic Governor Mel Carnahan. There are very few things in Missouri that everyone believes in, but this is one of them.”

Of course, building that broad support took work. Lawmakers, Steward says, “can get that Willie Horton syndrome.” Horton was the convicted felon serving life who, after participating in a weekend furlough program in 1986, committed assault, armed robbery, and rape and became a symbol for those who believe that rehabilitation and redemption are continued on page 67 Urbanite #84 june 2011 35

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Shifting Gears Can Baltimore become a truly bike-friendly city? Can it afford not to?

Night rider: Alex Ticu is one of Baltimore’s roughly 1,000 daily bicycle commuters, according to city Bike Czar Nate Evans. Baltimore’s bike ridership in 2010 increased by 35 percent.

o got á , C olom bi a , circa 1993, and Baltimore, today: 2,408 miles and a generation apart, yet with reputations more alike than any of our civic leaders would care to admit.

The former’s very name conjures up ominous visions of Miami Vice-like drug cartels, daily drive-bys, blood in the streets, and a populace terrified into silence. The latter city has had its TV image simultaneously updated and downgraded (thank you, HBO), but all the other props are essentially the same in a city where roving gangs and random violence have created the perception that last call downtown is a call to arms.

W hich makes the turnaround that’s actually happened in Bogotá so stunning.

Consider the numbers. In 1993, in the midst of its murderous miasma, 81 out of every 100,000 Bogatáns were homicide victims. By 2006, that number had plummeted to just fewer than 19 per 100,000.

(By contrast, in roughly that same time period, Baltimore’s homicide rate went from 48.2 to 37.3 per 100,000—a drop, to

Photography by J.M. Giordano

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By Mat Edelson

Urbanite #84 june 2011 37

be sure, but nowhere near what’s happened in Bogotá or, for that matter, the rest of the U.S., where Charm City is number 3 on America’s hit list.)

So what did Bogotáns do to take back their city? One imagines Diesel-esque vigilantes hunkering down with clandestinely acquired weapons, a cell-phone-managed resistance with father and son (and mother, and daughter) fighting shoulder to shoulder, their weariness braced by the realization that, finally, they were taking the fight to their oppressors.

Bogotáns did take to the streets by the thousands, although their weapon of choice was one that surely would have made Gandhi or King smile. They did not take up arms. Instead, they rode bikes.

Don’t laugh: It’s beginning to happen here.

And if history is any indicator, turning ourselves into a biking city could be a major force for social change.

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he signs—or to be more accurate, the sharrows—are everywhere. Ask any cyclist about these international road lane markings—usually two forward-pointing stripes sitting atop an outlined bicyclist—and they’ll tell you that they amount to a two-word battle cry: “We belong.”

While Congress wrestles with the idea of “Complete Streets”—a 2009 bill by that name, aimed at making all streets accessible to cyclists and other non-motorized users, ultimately died in committee—policymakers are still targeting bicyclists as key players in transforming neighborhoods. Last March, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, perhaps caught up in the moment, eschewed the speaker’s podium and jumped on a table at the packed National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C.; he was there selling the Livable Communities Initiative of 2010 by announcing that President Obama planned to set aside federal money for bike paths. (The bill never got to the f loor, but Obama hasn’t slashed those funds in his proposed federal budget.)

LaHood told the assembled D.C. biking advocates that he and his wife spent every nice weekend cycling on the 200-plus-mile-long C&O canal. “We ride [the canal] as far we can,” he said.

“Pittsburgh? ” called out some of the seasoned riders in the crowd.

But in truth, it’s not going to be the hardcore, spandex-clad, 3-percent-body-fat cycle hounds that lead this extreme urban makeover. While these lean, mean, veering machines prove, by sheer persistence, that people-powered vehicles can breathtakingly navigate even the most car-coveted thoroughfares, if there’s to be a biking revolution in Baltimore—or anywhere else in this country— it’s more likely to take place at space-normal speed, among waistlines as accustomed to 38 june 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

donuts as Diet Pepsis.

Think of it as the bell curve of potential ridership. On the far left side of the bell, representing perhaps 10 percent of cyclists, are the hale and hearty sorts. “We call them the ‘Kamikaze Cyclists,’ the bike messengers, and, frankly, people like myself who’ll ride no matter what the conditions are,” says Greg Cantori, executive director of the Knott Foundation and former president of Bike Maryland.

On the other end of the curve is a group, Cantori says, “who won’t ride no matter what.”

But between those two groups, there’s a large group—perhaps 60 percent of the population—who will ride if the right incentives and safety protections are in place.

Experience has shown across the world that if cities create a solid infrastructure, biking can catch on extremely quickly in a populace seeking alternative forms of transportation.

Call it the sardine effect: The little critters, before they end up in those tin cans, like to swim in one direction, but studies show that just 15 percent moving against traffic can cause the entire school to shift en masse.

In Baltimore, Bike Czar Nate Evans (his official title at the city’s Department of Transportation is Bicycle & Pedestrian Planner) has done a quarterly ad hoc riding census, standing on relatively busy bikeways such as Falls Road and Maryland Avenue. The citywide numbers speak of a small but growing ridership, up 35 percent in 2010 over the previous year, according to Evans, who puts the total number of daily commuters at “maybe a thousand.” That’s progress, but as a percentage of total commuters that’s pretty paltry: The much-maligned Light Rail draws, at last count, 36,300 daily riders; Metro pulls 56,800; and buses 232,857, according to the Maryland Transit Administration.

As an aggregate, one wonders what bicyclists’ numbers have to be to achieve some kind of critical mass.

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hich brings us back to Bogotá. It would be hyperbole to say that biking alone rid the city of its drug wars. Better police deployment and training in high-crime areas, numerous at-risk youth programs, and a push to use mediation to resolve citizen disputes certainly played a pivotal role. But getting people to feel comfortable that the streets were truly theirs to use, almost as a right of citizenship, can’t be discounted.

And that’s where Ciclovia comes in. Roughly translated as “Bike Path” or “Bike Road,” the Ciclovia concept—a temporary closing of streets to all cars—had been around Bogotá since the ’70s, more as the exception than the rule. In the mid 1990s, Gil Peñalosa saw the Ciclovia as just the unifying force the population needed. As commisioner of Bogatá’s

Parks and Recreation, Peñalosa closed more than 70 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday morning for seven hours. By 2000 the Ciclovia was so popular—more than a million Bogotáns took to the streets each week—that it lead to a permanent, extensive bike network around town.

Antanas Mockus, an associate professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia who served two terms as Bogotá mayor, wrote in a lengthy 2004 paper that citizen “ownership” of the city was a key to deciding what kind of behaviors would no longer be tolerated. He noted that, among other improvements, “important investments in … special roads for bikes and pedestrians have helped to celebrate citizens’ identity and to fix some [cultural] norms.”

Gil Peñalosa’s brother Enrique was mayor of Bogatá from 1998 to 2000. He saw bikes as the great equalizers of the haves and havenots. “We created … a protected bicycle path network,” he said in a 2007 interview. “[That] is a symbol that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important as one in a $30,000 car.”

Between the Ciclovias and the permanent bike paths, within six years, Enrique Peñalosa says ridership in Bogotá went from negligible to some 400,000 bikers daily.

Gil Peñalosa now works to create Ciclovia events around the world, including a growing number of American cities. Across the

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Downhill from here: Ticu, left, rides with Micha Moise, center, and Robert Hawk.

According to the League of American Bicyclists, commuting by bike has increased 75 percent in Baltimore from 2000 to 2008.

country the names may differ: “Sunday Streets” (San Francisco), “Sunday Parkways” (Portland, Oregon), “CicLAvia” (brand-crazed Los Angeles), “Bull City Open Streets” (Durham), “Walk + Roll” (Cleveland). Nomenclature notwithstanding, the events consistently draw crowds in the thousands, opening the eyes of citizens and civic leaders. Worldwide, there’s evidence that the commitment that can begin with Cicloviastyle events can change a town’s commuting behaviors, even in cities with relatively tight streets, like Baltimore.

“In San Francisco, the businesses were against the Sunday Bikeways,” says Gil Peñalosa of the once-a-month closures first tried around the ritzy Embarcadero area in 2008.

“All of a sudden the same businesses realized they were doing better on that Sunday when they were open to people walking and bikes and closed to cars. Now, the business community is asking the mayor [to close the streets to cars] every Sunday.”

Similarly, business owners in Seville, Spain, supported the establishment of bike lanes physically separated from car traffic when a Chamber of Commerce study revealed that 21 percent of the shopping downtown was being done by those 6.6 percent of Sevillans who chose to regularly ride their bikes.

One need go no farther than D.C.’s 15th Street, NW, to see the viability of such segregated lanes.

There, running from U Street down to the White House are two dedicated 3½-foot bike lanes that run adjacent to the curb. The cars formerly parked there have been moved farther into the street, serving as a barrier between biker and traffic. A little creative street striping and thigh-high f lexible plastic inserts keep all players in their place; timing on pedestrian signals has been changed so bikers—if they obey the signals—can’t be hit by crossing traffic. Total cost? Relative to the normal multimillion-dollar street projects, it wasn’t that expensive. “A few hundred thousand dollars,” says former Baltimore bike messenger Chris Holben, who is a bicycle program specialist in D.C.’s Department of Transportation.

D.C. has also created the Capital Bikeshare program, a permanent on-the-street consortium of 114 rental pick-up and drop-off bike stations that attracted some 11,000 annual members (at $75 each) and 30,000 one-day users in just its first seven months of operation.

Of course all these efforts take money (some $5 million for the Bikeshare initial outlay, which is expected to break even over time) and lots of planning (Holben uses everything from traffic congestion charts to D.C.’s public

commitment to reducing its carbon footprint to make his case for biking). And ultimately, Holben says it takes someone with serious juice in a city to make it so. “You need a council member or mayor to be the champion. And you really need a champion if there’s opposition, someone who is not going to worry about getting voted out of office.”

Biking does have those champions—former San Francisco Mayor and current California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York—who seemingly by dint of will turn desire into reality.

(How else do you explain a man who decided that, in the country’s arguably most congested city, he would take away lanes of car traffic and parking on 9th Avenue, giving bikers a safer, separated thoroughfare through the Big Apple? Even against vociferous opposition, the lanes have stayed put.)

It’s been a long time since anyone in Baltimore had that kind of unifying force. Former Mayor Sheila Dixon, renowned for her biking forays around town, didn’t have the time—or perhaps the desire—to make cycling a central focus of her administration. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is considered middle-ofthe-road on the issue. The results? There’s no doubt that biking in this town has suffered, relative to the rest of the country, because it lacks a single, high-visibility advocate. In a very real sense, Baltimore’s just beginning to kick off its training wheels.

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iven Mobtown’s notoriously fractious nature, it seems only de rigueur that the push for biking here is coming from many small but determined voices, as opposed to a shout from on high. Like free-floating ions, these biking proponents aren’t always the most cohesive lot, but it’s not for lack of trying. And there’s a chance—just a chance, mind you—that they could coalesce into a mighty powerful front.

The pieces are nearly all in place: From the growth of cycling competitions to the recognition (and city funding) of infrastructure improvements, the consciousness for the potential of biking in this town has probably never been greater. More than 1,300 riders participated in last year’s thirteenth annual regional Bike to Work Day, a 30 percent jump over 2009. Other regular events such as Tour Dem Parks and the availability of some 39 miles of off-road trails and 77 miles of city bike routes are drawing greater numbers to local cycling clubs and regional organizations such as Bike Maryland.

Kris Auer has seen the city’s cycling verve grow geometrically in the last decade. The owner of Hampden’s Twenty 20 Cycling Company, Auer, who has raced all over the world, introduced cyclocross (a pacechanging circuit course that includes on- and Urbanite #84 june 2011 39

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off-pavement riding) to Patterson Park in 2001 nearly in half. and has run the Charm City Cross races annuTo stretch his bucks, Evans has learned to ally in Druid Hill Park since 2005. An event play piggyback. Whenever a road-resurfacing that at first drew 250 riders on one day now project is on the transportation department’s book, Evans tries to get, at a minimum, some pulls nearly 1,500 over two. “We’re one of the largest events in the country,” he says. bike lane striping and sharrows laid down.

(So if you’re wondering why bike lanes sudThis taps into a trend long known among denly appear and then disappear, well, there Baltimore-area bike shop owners: Competiyou go.) In theory, given enough time and tive cyclists, particularly American Tour De France winners such as Greg LeMond and enough lane resurfacing, the city’s bike lanes Lance Armstrong, have spurred interest in will eventually knit together to provide riders all levels of local riding. Throw in other preswith some sense of continuity. sures and cultural shifts—rising But unlike D.C., the plans for now call for riders to share gas and downtown parking prices, the road with cars. High-profile the various green movements, everon-road cycling deaths, such as growing traffic congestion—and the business and political commuthat of 67-year-old John R. “Jack” nities are beginning to recognize Yates in Charles North, and seconsumer demand. According to rious injuries, such as those of How do surveys by the League of AmeriJohns Hopkins student Nathan Baltimore’s bike can Bicyclists, the percentage of Krasnopoler, have highlighted lanes stack up? cycling commuters jumped 43 perthe potentially dangerous nature Baltimore cent between 2000 and 2008, with of such road arrangements. To make that situation somewhat Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis; safer, Evans has created signed Sacramento; Washington, D.C. ; miles biking networks along less travSan Jose; Milwaukee; Chicago; and eled routes in areas including Anchorage all at least doubling Minneapolis Southeast Baltimore and Park their ridership.

Baltimore is doing its share, up Heights. Construction is also set miles 75 percent in the same time period. to begin on a new north-south route running on relatively Bike shops here have long proBogotá moted commuting to work (Alex lightly traveled Guilford Avenue Obriecht, owner of three-decadesfrom University Parkway to Mt. miles old Race Pace Bicycles, gives his Royal Avenue. employees a dollar for each way While one can’t blame Evans Copenhagen they bike to work, which they usufor working with the hand he’s ally put toward more biking gear), been dealt, the lack of political but larger commercial entities are will to create completely segremiles now catching on. In front of Congated lanes at least along some Portland stellation Energy’s Market Place major north-south and east-west offices, the bike racks are jammed routes is distressing to many riders. Cit y Hall ’s response every day. Constellation economist miles could best be characterized as Peter Rosenthal says there were good intentions but, to date, hardly any bikes there just four or New York City incomplete (to be kind) followfive years ago. “In times of high gas through. Councilwoman Mary prices, the bike is a great equalmiles Pat Clarke, a biking enthusiast, izer,” he says. “You can find a bike for a hundred dollars and not have introduced seven biking bills in Los Angeles to pay anything else to get where 2009 either enacted or adopted you’re going.” by the city. These included a CyIt falls upon the city’s Nate Evclists’ Bill of Rights, a “Complete miles * goal by 2020 ans to help ensure riders can get Streets” approach to road planthere safely. Buried deep inside ning, requirements to install bike-friendly storm grates on city streets, the City’s Department of Transportation data cloud is Baltimore’s Bike Master Plan. Evans and “BMore Streets For People”—Baltimore’s has the unenviable task of trying to connect official adoption, according to the bill, of Bothe dots, and he’s been forced to take an entregotá’s Ciclovia program, which had been tried preneurial approach. Three years ago, Evans on a small scale in Roland Park earlier in 2009 became the first (and to date, only) full-time (and again in 2010), attracting some 1,000 city employee (he has a part-time assistant) participants. whose primary responsibility is getting bikers The initiatives have been battling inertia or downright resistance from the start. Deon city streets and getting them home in one spite the police department’s pledge to work piece. His budget on day one was $1.5 million; with the city on BMore Streets, it reportedly since then it’s been slashed (hello, recession)

The Slow Lane

42 127 186 200+ 324 500 1,680*

wants to slap a $35,000 fee on coordinators who wanted to expand the event to include a 12-mile loop from Lake Montebello to Druid Hill Reservoir. “That’s just not sustainable; you’re not going to be able to have that kind of event every few weeks,” says Bike Maryland Executive Director Carol Silldorff. “Other cities have allowed crossing guards or trained volunteers [to control intersections] so it almost costs nothing. We want to work with the police, and I think they want to work with us, but until their fear of liability is diminished, the price will be too outrageous for us.”

Switching storm grates would seem to be a simple enough fix: Turn the grates 90 degrees, perpendicular to the lane, so a rider’s tires won’t get stuck in them, destroying the wheel (and sometimes the cyclist) in the process. And yet, when Public Works was initially approached about changing or adapting the storm grates, they threw up their own roadblock, requiring the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Committee to produce documentation showing that the new grates would conduct water. “We said to them, ‘Every other city in the country is putting in this newer design’; and our Public Works was saying, ‘Oh, no, that doesn’t have sufficient water flow,’” recalls Greg Hinchliffe, who chairs the committee.

B

iking in Baltimore is clearly at a crossroads. The opportunities are there (as are the bike racks—some three hundred of them since Nate Evans showed up), but so are the impediments. The deciding factor may ultimately be found in the distinction between livability and survivability. Eventually those terms, when relating to the city’s viability, might become synonymous. If the future of any city is, arguably, its youth, then catering to those aspects of city life they desire—and being bike-friendly certainly ranks up there—could economically sustain a city such as Baltimore, which currently is seeing its best and brightest prospects leave, post-college, in rates higher than comparable cities.

“Companies, if they decide to move to or stay in Baltimore, are looking at who is here that’s educated, young, talented, and available,” says Mary Pat Clarke. “A lot of young people commute and get around on bicycles.

If that’s the case, let’s become a bike-friendly city, encourage this as a city for young people.”

Maybe what biking comes down to is a two-wheeled prescription for health, for both Baltimore and its citizens. It may well be a ride worth taking.

—Urbanite contributing writer Mat Edelson’s first bike was a banana seat Schwinn on which he learned to ride wheelies and skid to a perfect, rubber-burning stop.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 41

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Poetry

An Invitation to Ophelia’s Tea P arty

by Susan Adler George

Welcome to Ophelia’s tea party we are serving ways to rid ourselves of sadness Our self-imposed madness Dip into the shallow pond of water with me and chat about graves that have no appetite for death We’ll do away with the thunderous clanking of the blood throbbing in our punctured hearts We will assure ourselves that we were loved once That mother’s black milk nourished our hopes And we will grow into nuns and monks and play cloistered games We will single out despair as if possession were nine tenths of the creative law And chat about the past the self-inflicted fast We’ll muse over the time we were so proud of our pain that we laundered it And when the pain was presentable we wore it with intellectual arrogance You’re invited to mingle with those who haunt their own imaginations And you will be taught how to keep the ghosts away from yours

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Up on the Roof

Room with a view: Jill Bloodsworth’s rooftop deck in Canton provides 360-degree views of the city.

From wet bars to vegetable gardens, three of Baltimore’s best roof decks

W

by martha thomas | Photography by Daniel Bedell

e city dwellers cling to any outdoor territory we can find, claiming public parks as our backyards, perching on fire escapes, sitting on stoops. An old boyfriend of mine and I would haul beach chairs, a cooler, even the dog (on a leash, of course) through the skylight of his Brooklyn apartment building to take in the views from

the tarpapered roof. The lucky ones have rooftop decks—not the improvised kind that involve a certain amount of stealth and athleticism to get up to, but the real kind, with railings, flower boxes, shade umbrellas, and wet bars.

“Outdoor space is a hot commodity,” says Cheron Porter, a spokeswoman for Baltimore Housing, which proffers permits for outdoor decks. There’s no way of determining how many roof decks there actually are in the city, although permits average about 200 per year. Porter points out that while permits are required to

construct a deck, “there’s nothing illegal about going out on your roof,” as long as things don’t get out of hand. “If there’s a big party going on, I would think that your neighbors would call the police.”

Jill Bloodsworth’s neighbors are more likely to try and score an invite to one of the parties on her roof deck than they are to call the cops.

Bloodsworth and her husband, Eric, bought the four-story building in 2005 and transformed it into a modern showplace with white walls, pale maple floors, and minimalist décor. The Urbanite #84 june 2011 45

Raising the bar: The addition of a wet bar with modern, aluminum stools makes the deck an enviable party spot.

The top of Bloodsworth’s 4,200-square-foot house, once a commercial bakery, commands views from the water, to Patterson Park, to the glittering panorama of downtown Baltimore.

28-by-16-foot roof is covered with a soft rubbery flooring the color of concrete, and the couple designed a glass, wood, and aluminum bar to conceal venting pipes. Aluminum stools—Jill calls them “butt cups”—are at the ready. Shake me up a martini, please.

Across town, after he added the top floor to his mushroom-shaped, three-story house off Elm Avenue in Hampden, Adam Preller started hearing people describe it as “the unprintable name for a male appendage.” So in 2006, when he renovated the place for the second time, he added a roof deck, as well as a stone veneer around the bottom floor and some fancy gingerbread work to the exterior, hoping it would look more like a castle than a … well, you know. Indeed, the deck atop the former carriage house feels like a parapet, with views all the way downtown. “You can see the Key Bridge 17 miles away on a clear day,” says Preller, who rents the house to Melinda and Joe Mele.

Melinda, a seamstress, and her husband, Joe, 46 june 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

who works for the State Department, fell in love with the house after seeing it on Craigslist. “We were considering living in D.C.,” says Melinda, “but when I saw the photos on the Internet, I fell in love with it—and I knew it was going to go fast.”

Alhough they both have roots in Baltimore, the couple moved here with their three pugs from Manhattan’s East Village. Hampden, says Melinda, is the Baltimore neighborhood “most likely to feel like New York. When you go outside you feel like you’re already someplace.”

When Casey Jackson went looking for a place to live in the city, it was November, and she wasn’t thinking about a garden. “I just wanted something cheap,” says Jackson, a regulatory specialist for a pharmacology company. But when spring rolled around, she got the itch. Once a chronically unhealthy eater, she was sparked to make a change after experiencing gallbladder problems in her 20s. Now, she says, “I’m addicted to growing my own produce.”

The house she found with three roommates had no yard, so she looked to the roof. Her father, Al, helped her build raised beds, using salvaged materials from his renovation projects—he’s a contractor based in Crofton—and installing recycled containers as planters. In summer, they flourish with lettuce, kale, tomatoes, peppers, soybeans, carrots, cucumbers, and herbs.

Jackson, with her asymmetrical haircut and multiple tattoos, is the embodiment of the urban hipster, grabbing on to a pipe to swing herself up to the garden on an upper part of the roof. Now, she’s fully committed to producing her own food, growing about half of her mostly plant-based diet right here above Montford Avenue.

“It’s not just about nutrition,” she says. “Gardening improves everything in my life, and it inspires my friends too. I have dinner parties and ask someone to go up on the roof and cut some spinach. They love it.”

space

Life in a castle: Melinda and Joe Mele say the opportunity to rent their house in Hampden convinced them to live in Baltimore instead of D.C.

Vegetable vertigo: Although scaling her roof takes a certain amount of agility, the vegetable garden on Casey Jackson’s Montford Street rooftop deck makes the climb worth it— nutritionally, at least.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 47

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food + drink

courtesy of U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

feature / dining reviews / wine + spirits

A Rare

Breed Baltimore’s shad eaters are well into their golden years—and for the fish, that may be a good thing.

O

n a recent assignment MICHELLE GIENOW and the roe—these are a prized local delimichelle gienow is an in southern Louisiana urbanite cacy. We certainly don’t drop them into the contributing writer photographing Cajun murky bayou (or in our case, bay) waters as crawfishermen, I found myself sitcrustacean chow. Meche laughed long and hard. “Cher,” ting in the bottom of a flat-bottom he said. “Shad are trash fish. Nobody eats them. That’s pirogue talking, of all subjects, crazy!” about Baltimore’s love for shad.

I had just been called crazy by a man who, like most Jody Meche, the boat’s owner and a crawfisherman’s Cajuns, regularly consumes frogs, snapping turtles, crawfisherman, was harvesting his traps—dumping possums, and squirrels. Later that night, at the crawfish boil Meche threw for friends and family with his and sorting the crawdads and then re-baiting the traps catch from that day, he introduced me to everyone with large, silvery fish. Wait a minute, I said. Are you walking into the party with, “This lady’s from Baltiusing shad for crawfish bait?

I explained that, where I come from, we eat the shad more, and she eats SHAD!”

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feature food + Drink He’s right. I am from Baltimore, and I do eat shad. I began to wonder: How is it that we, the citizens of Charm City, came to embrace an otherwise rejected fish and to prize its reproductive sac as a springtime delicacy?

Once I started looking into it I found that— like Crack the Sky and peppermint-stick lemons—shad and shad roe are one of those uniquely Baltimorean enthusiasms that are ubiquitous here yet unknown pretty much everywhere else.

I grew up eating it with my grandparents; Pop particularly enjoyed breakfasting on roe fried with bacon and runny-yolked eggs. Once my grandparents were gone, though, I simply never sought shad on my own.

And for good reason. Although attractive— bright silver with a white belly and shimmery green racing stripe along its back—American shad is not an easy fish to love. Shad has dense, oily flesh that is famously full of bones—as many as 1,300 of them. As for shad roe, well, I’ve heard it compared to both beef liver and Styrofoam, and both are accurate. I suspect that most Baltimoreans eat shad due not to taste but early childhood exposure and our city’s stubborn dedication to tradition. The shad run was a local harbinger of spring, but our family (aside from my grandfather, whose other favorite breakfast was calves brains scrambled with eggs) used to look forward to shad roe as an Eastertime delicacy more from habit than delectability.

The Peppermill Restaurant in Lutherville proudly flies a “Shad roe!” banner as soon as shad season begins. “I’ll have people call me in December asking, ‘When you gonna start shad?’” says Rick Ziegel, Peppermill co-owner. “I’m told I’m the biggest user of shad and roe in the state ... Business definitely picks up during shad season.” Customers may flock to the Peppermill in part because few places still sell shad, as I found while seeking—and failing to find—other local restaurants that carry it during its brief season.

Like salmon, an infinitely more popular fish, shad spend most of their lives in their native Atlantic Ocean but migrate into freshwater rivers to spawn. The shad catch opens the first of February, starting in Georgia and moving up the East Coast as spring progresses, ending in late April when New York state’s shad finish spawning.

I called E. Goodwin & Sons seafood in Jessup, the largest shad dealer in the U.S., where I spoke with shad salesman Charlie Plitt. “It’s a dying breed,” says Plitt. “Very few local restaurants are still buying shad: the Peppermill, the Valley Inn on Falls Road, Josef’s. We do a good retirement home business, though.”

Ah. That might explain why, when I visited the Peppermill, of the many customers enjoying lunches of meaty, broiled shad and bacondraped roe I was the only one not well into my, um, golden years. Plitt had ventured that shad is mainly sought by, as he puts it, “the older generation,” a finding that Ziegel confirmed: “It seems that younger eaters just aren’t discovering it.”

Shad Roe a la Grace Phillips

T

his is how my grandmother used to cook shad roe for Pop, who enjoyed this roe, bacon, and eggs preparation any meal of the day.

Shad roe comes in “lobes” that typically weigh around 4 to 6 ounces each, although they can be considerably larger. The roe is deep red in color and very soft; it’s contained within a delicate membrane, so handle with care so as not to tear it. After cooking it firms up, turns golden in color, and has a rich and creamy yet somewhat grainy texture.

The taste? Even though these are fish eggs, the flavor is not at all like caviar. Roe has a delicate, ocean-y taste. Gram used to use half butter and half bacon fat to sauté the roe so the bacon flavor wouldn’t overwhelm.

1 set shad roe (2 lobes) 4 slices bacon 2 tbs butter 2 to 4 eggs ¼ cup white flour salt and pepper Fry bacon in a heavy skillet until crispy. Remove bacon and reserve. Leave rendered bacon fat in pan.

Gently rinse the roe and pat dry with a paper

Jeff Smith, chef-owner of Chameleon Café in Lauraville, has had both shad and roe on his menu. “Once people find out you serve it they’ll call every year and ask when you’re getting it in.

There’s a whole big crew of people who are very excited about the shad season, and they’re very vocal. Patrons who are getting shad from me are always talking about other places they get it and comparing one place to another, who’s got the best roe, how it’s served.”

Although he is a Baltimore native, Smith never ate shad or roe growing up. “I think my parents are just a little too young for it,” he says.

He enjoys it now, though: “The roe is a lot of fun to cook. It sorta pops, like an egg pops when you put it in the hot oil, and I like the flesh, too. It’s a meaty fish, got some taste to it. It’s good stuff.”

However, he says, “The 60-and-older crowd has by far the biggest demand. I see younger people trying it, but roe is pricey, and that makes it less appealing to someone who’s never had it before. Also, people are losing their preference for stronger fish—if a fish is anything other than white and flaky it’s a much harder sell.”

Bill Goldsborough, fisheries director for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, has an alternate theory: Younger people don’t eat shad because shad fishing, both commercial harvest and recreational catch, has been closed in Maryland since 1980 and in Virginia since 1990. Once upon a time, due to its reliable appearance early each spring, shad was a popular food fish, and “shad runs were so abundant that the American

towel. If you have a whole set of roe, separate the two lobes by cutting along the membrane.

Season the flour with salt and pepper to taste, then dredge the roe. Heat the skillet over medium-high heat and melt the butter. Gently place the roe in the skillet and sauté two minutes per side, until golden. Do not overcook.

Remove and reserve on warmed plates.

Cook eggs in same skillet, over easy or sunny side up—the important thing is that the yolks are runny. Some people like one egg per roe; others like two. Gently slide eggs on top of roe without breaking the yolk and garnish with bacon. This was heresy in Gram’s house, but I also like a squirt of lemon on my roe.

Caveat coquus: Roe tends to explode when it encounters hot fat. Gram always used a spatter shield. Jeff Smith of Chameleon says, “Shad roe is a lot of fun to cook—it, like, pops, like an egg pops when you put it in the oil. If you turn around it’ll pop and splatter hot grease on the back of your neck. You can tell when people are cooking the roe—they’re jumping and swearing.”

shad was the most valuable fishery in the Chesapeake Bay. And now we’ve depleted them all, everywhere.” Shad populations plummeted in recent decades, he says, due to over-harvesting and habitat destruction. Like much of the crab in “Maryland-style” cakes, shad is shipped in from afar.

And if your grandparents weren’t partial to shad-and-egg Sundays, you may have missed your chance to try it. Next year may well be the end of shad for everyone, everywhere: the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has declared an East Coast moratorium on shad harvesting after January 1, 2013. If states currently allowing shad fishing, such as Georgia and Delaware, want to keep their fisheries open, they will first need to provide a sustainable fisheries plan detailing how continued fishing will simultaneously protect the species. “There aren’t too many states that are going to meet that qualifier,” says Goldsborough. “It would take a lot of resources to analyze the shad population and develop a plan, and shad is just no longer a big money maker.”

Which makes me think of Meche, who spends six days each week, six months out of the year sticking frozen shad in his traps. His come from Cape May, New Jersey, as bargain-priced ocean by-catch. He says they attract the crawfish like no other bait.

And despite Baltimore’s historical appetite for the fish, given our changing collective taste, Meche just might miss shad even more than those of us who actually eat them.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 51

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dining reviews food + Drink

Mari Luna Bistro by martha thomas

photos by j.m. giordano

T

he idea of an aff licted restaurant space is nothing new, and labeling an innocent building as such may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy—one that doesn’t stop to consider the role of the people in charge. The spot across from Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, once Spike and Charlie’s and more recently vacated by Robert Oliver Seafood restaurant, should in all ways be the perfect place for a pre-symphony bite or post-show nightcap, but for some reason the corner-facing door has done plenty of revolving.

The newest tenant aims to stop the cycle.

Chef Jaime Luna has been charming Pikesville diners with his variations on Central American cuisine for years. The Mari Luna Mexican and Latin Grills, less than a mile apart on Reisterstown Road, upgrade familiar rice-and-beanbased Mexican fare with mole sauces, slowcooked meats, and ingredients that range from plaintain to lump crab.

The latest in the franchise, Mari Luna Bistro, ensures that those coming into the city from the northwest suburbs can land squarely in their comfort zone. Scoring a table at 6:30 on a night when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is playing across the street is about as easy as finding a parking spot on Preston Street, but it’s worth dropping in when things have quieted

somewhat after 8. Luna’s popularity with Meyerhoff audiences is without question. The feat, of course, will be to bring in a sustainable crowd on the remaining nights of the week.

The walls have received a fresh coat of cheery sunflower paint, with a dark turquoise ceiling, and there’s a guacamole bar at the far end of the restaurant, where avocados are ground to order in stone mortar and pestle bowls known as molcajetes. It’s easy to make a meal out of the generous portion— Latin locale: Mari Luna Bistro offers dining room and lounge seating. especially if you order a version blanketed with heavy béchamel and sprinkled packed with extras like crab, jicama and orange, bacon bits and queso fresco, or goat cheese and with pomegranate. Stick with a simple sautéed roasted corn. The menu covers the basics, with shrimp, tangy with garlic and lime, or a wild options for enchiladas, burritos, and tacos taimushroom quesadilla. lored to your preference for both fillings and Cocktails are also a specialty here, with sauces. Enchiladas, for example, come topped dressed up caipirinhas and mojitos, not-toowith mole, green tomatillo and cheese, or sweet sangria, and an assortment of Mexican “rancheras”-style with a fried egg. beers. In fact, with a small outdoor seating area As he does at his other restaurants, Chef adjacent to the narrow bar along the side, it’s Luna offers plenty of options for those whose easy to picture an after-work crowd that comes tastebuds aren’t acclimated to fire. There’s a for the handmade guacamole. salmon filet encrusted with pumpkin seeds, a Prices are reasonable, and there aren’t any seskirt steak with chimichurri (on the side), and rious competitors in the Latin food category in Latin-inf luenced Caesar and spinach salads the surrounding neighborhood. Still, it remains (Serrano ham on the former, sangria vinagrette to be seen if Mari Luna Bistro can build a folon the latter). Avoid the heavy-handed Chile lowing in the big city. (Dinner Tues–Sun; lunch en Nogada, a poblano pepper appetizer stuffed Tues–Fri; brunch Sun. 1225 Cathedral St.; 410with ground pork, apple, pears, and plantains, 637-8014; www.mariluna.com.)

humble dishes (even Italians didn’t seem to like the stuff much) transmogrified into red-sauce fantasias at the hands of Southern Italians in the United States of the 20th century. American cities in the Northeast used to be thick with family-run spaghetti parlors, each offering menus laden with musical names—Vesuvio!

Posillipo! Cardinale! When the downtowns emptied, Upper crust: Frank’s prides itself on its fresh, paste-free pizza sauce. the Italian joints that didn’t huddle together in Little Italys fled to the suburban strip malls, which is where Frank’s Pizza and Pasta lives, in the middle of a tidy stretch of Belair Road in Overlea.

Inside, it’s bright and carry-out-like: Only the paintings of gondolas and plastic grape garlands hint at the kitchen’s ability to faithfully conjure by david Dudley golden-age Italian-American feasts. n his new book, How Italian Food Conquered The pizza/sub/calzone side of the operation The World, the Esquire food writer John does a lot of the business, as the stacks of takeMariani chronicles how the peninsula’s notably out boxes indicate. It’s a good pizza, with a thin,

Frank’s Pizza I

tangy crust and a bright, simple sauce (no paste, the menu boasts). But the roster of pastas— cheesy, creamy, gooey odes to the old school— mark Frank’s as something beyond the carryout norm. A special of Veal Gennaro adheres to a typical formula: fried slabs of veal tossed with a mushroom cream sauce and topped with sautéed spinach, all atop enough fettuccine to feed two (or, probably, three). Seafood Pescatore, the priciest item on the menu at $16.99, buries linguine in a briny tangle of squid, shrimp, mussels, and baby clams, all soaking in a garlicky tomato sauce.

People can, and do, share bottles of wine over these dishes (Frank’s is BYOB), but prepare for a minimalist dining experience. You pay at the counter, grab the occasional plate when necessary, and share the no-frills dining area with boisterous crowds of regulars that, on a recent visit, included a platoon of bulletproof-vested police officers who were plied with huge bowls of pasta fagioli. “No more,” one cop said, surrendering to his stew. “I’m gonna bust.” (Lunch and dinner Tues–Sun. 6620 Belair Rd.; 410-254-2900; www.frankspizzaandpasta.com.)

Urbanite #84 june 2011 53

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wine + spirits food + Drink

Odd Duck

All that sparkles isn’t gold … or even pink.

By Clinton Macsherry

M

y friend Suzie returned from a trip to Australia with the following synopsis: Just about everything edible gets grilled on the “barbie,” and just about everything else is poisonous. The latter category includes some 700 plants, according to one Aussie government study, that have sickened humans and livestock at least since Captain James Cook’s voyage there in 1770. The world’s eleven deadliest snakes share the continent with assorted poisonous spiders and frogs. A day at the beach is no walk in the park, given the presence of killer jellyfish and other sea beasties. Even the shy, endearingly odd duck-billed platypus can administer venom through spurs on its hind limbs. Lethal to small animals, the venom inflicts excrutiating pain that has proven resistant to morphine.

Australian w i nes have quite a kick too, although lately only their sa les have been toxic. After more than a decade of ex plosive g row t h t hat culminated in the export of nearly 24 million cases to the U.S. in 2006, the market for Australian wine has gone bust, with recent years showing double-digit percentage drops in volume and value. Blame that in part on a marketplace overly saturated with lower tier “critter label” brands (Yellow Tail and its myriad imitators). Shifting tastes may also have taken their toll, with the perceived homogeneity of overripe Australian “fruit bombs” falling out of fashion.

Given plummeting demand and an oversupply estimated at 100 million cases, Australia’s wine industry faces a crisis in which few see anything resembling opportunity.

What a shame. Typecasting aside, Australia produces unquestionably fine expressions of classic varietals. Some, such as Penfolds’ Grange (a Shiraz-based red blend) and Leeuwin’s Chardonnays from the Margaret River region, have become high-ticket, international trophy wines.

Others come in distinctive styles that belie Aussie wine’s prevailing reputation. Australia’s Illustration by Angela ahn

cool-climate Cabernets, gorgeous dry Rieslings, age-worthy Semillons, and fortified Muscats and Tokays deserve much wider audiences.

And then there’s sparkling Shiraz, something like the platypus of Planet Wine. I think I can safely say that red sparklers constitute the wine spectrum’s narrowest bandwidth. Usually served chilled, with off-dry to frankly sweet profiles, they run counter to what most wineaus expect from red wine. Atypical even among this uncommon company, sparkling Shiraz—an Aussie specialty—is full-bodied and dry. The thought of red bubbly may bring to mind André Cold Duck, which would be unfortunate: If you’ve tasted Cold Duck, chances are you wish you hadn’t. Launched commercially in 1967 and pretty popular for a time, its name directly translates the German kalte ente, a possibly facetious corruption of kalte ende (“cold end”), which refers to a putative Old World custom of pou r ing together leftover red, white, and sparkling wines after a big party. If that sounds like a curiously unappetizing way to brand a wine, then ponder the mysteries of marketing and consider yourself warned. More ambitious fizzy reds, such as Italy’s Brachetto d’Acqui and some artisanal versions of Lambrusco, raise the quality bar considerably, but still come off as frothy flyweights. Sparkling Shiraz is an altogether different animal.

Woop Woop “The Chook” Sparkling Shiraz (non-vintage, $21, 13 percent alcohol) pours a purple-pink, strawberry-scented bubble bath that falls back quickly but retains a slow, steady bead. Its nose of ripe plum and black cherry carries hints of cracked pepper and lavender. Like most good bubblies, it dances with stars in the mouth, although more like Emmitt Smith than Stacy Keibler. Yeasty flavors of blueberry cobbler and date bread tango into a chocolate milkshake finish. A fruit bomb with Shiraz’s typical mega-tonnage might feel somewhat ponderous for warm weather, but a slight chill and its inherent effervescence give this sparkling rendition a food-friendliness ideal for summer meals.

It makes a perfect toast to grilling season. Go ahead and fire up the barbie.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 55

arts + Culture

photo by: J.M. GIORDANO

feature / book / theater / visual art

Why can’t we be friends? Jimmy MacMillan and Brett Yale the co-founders of the local label Friends Records

I

by BRANDON WEIGEL

t’s around 12:30 a.m. at Floristree, the DIY arts space six loft floors over Franklin Street in dow ntow n’s west side, and nobody is manning the Friends Records merch table.

The label’s band, Weekends, is about to play a set marking the long-awaited arrival of vinyl copies of their debut album, Strange Cultures. Brett Yale, co-founder of Friends, and thus one of the guys who sank a considerable amount of his own money into the box of new LPs behind the table, is out among the crowd of mostly college-aged kids still not

Just Among Friends

A Local indie music label is riding the rising wave of local talent, but nobody is getting rich.

old enough to drink.

When asked who is watching the table, Yale laughs and says, “No one. I want to see Weekends. I’m not missing that.”

Yale has probably seen Weekends more times than anyone else in the world. He’ll see the band again in about thirteen hours at the Johns Hopkins Spring Fair. Regardless, there is no way he’s going to miss the basement fuzz rock that led him to make Weekends one of the first bands on his label over a year ago. No fan would.

And “fan” is really the best way to describe Yale and his business partner, Jimmy MacMillan. Owning a boutique record label is no way to make the big bucks, and owners invest Urbanite #84 june 2011 57

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Feature / Book arts + culture a lot more than dollars and cents (although, let’s be clear, those are invested, too); rather, it’s the chance to work with artists they love and share the music. “The reward is getting people to hear it,” says Yale. “To know that someone in Greece is putting a Sri Aurobindo record”—Sri Aurobindo is another of the label’s bands—“on their turntable and listening to it is awesome to me.”

It was that love of Baltimore music that, a year and a half ago, brought Yale, who started the blog Bmore Musically Informed in 2008, together with MacMillan, an employee at the Fells Point record shop, the Sound Garden, who managed his first Baltimore band in high school in the ‘90s. Since then, their label has become one of the most prominent in the handful of local imprints, boasting a top-flight list of bands and collaborators from Baltimore’s burgeoning underground music scene.

Yale first broached the idea of starting a label after offering to help the post-wave trio Future Islands find a label for a 7-inch split release with North Carolina band Lonnie Walker. A contact at another label suggested he do two things: one, put out the record himself, and two, get in touch with MacMillan. Neither knew the other particularly well, but after talking shop about music, local and national, they decided they wanted to showcase Baltimore bands, since the scene to them seemed flush with talent but lacking a truly local place for all of it to land. “It finally seemed like the time was right for Baltimore,” says MacMillan. “It seemed obvious—beyond obvious—that we should get together to do this.

It quickly went, ‘Well, if we’re going to do this, we’re not going to do just one record. Let’s pick three.’”

They selected Future Islands, Weekends, and the psych-rock band Sri Aurobindo to be the first three items in their catalogue. When the Future Islands release was pushed back, the duo decided to put out the first LP from rapper Height. “We just started agreeing on records and haven’t stopped,” MacMillan says.

Since then, Friends Records has corralled a solid lineup of local up-and-comers, including the soulful indie rockers Secret Mountains and the chamber pop group Lands & Peoples. But perhaps their biggest coup has been getting already established bands such as Celebration to put out releases through the label, contribute to compilations, and even launch solo or side projects. A forthcoming compilation tape will include a song from Wye Oak lead singer Jenn Wasner’s solo project, Flock of Dimes, which Yale debuted to the world on his website in late April, and a song from Ponytail members Dustin Wong and Molly Siegel. Matthew Papich, better known as Ecstatic Sunshine, released the first tape of his side project Co La through Friends in April.

Yale and MacMillan have been able to attract this talent because when they go in on something, they go in all the way—booking shows, promoting albums, running to Kinko’s

to print out artwork they will later cut and fold themselves, manning the merch table, even constructing and hanging fake clouds from the ceiling of an old church because, well, the band wants fake clouds hanging from the ceiling of an old church. If a band has a vision, MacMillan and Yale will do their best to make that vision reality.

Their catalogue is almost entirely cassette tapes and vinyl records (although records include a CD inside the sleeve) because, they say, most people use CDs as a conduit for getting music onto their computer and other digital devices. Records, and even tapes, which they make by hand with a dubbing machine, require more dedicated listening.

It is that kind of artistic energy that attracted Celebration to the label, says the band’s multiinstrumentalist Tony Drummond. “We can sit around this table and come up with a concept, we can come up with an idea, and those guys will make it happen,” he says. “There’s not, like, that wall between an idea and producing something.”

Celebration had put out two releases with storied indie label 4AD, and while they got decent press, the band became disenchanted with the old-fashioned rigidity of the label structure that doesn’t allow for total and complete creative freedom. They gave away their third album, Hello Paradise, online for free without solid plans for another physical release, until Friends came along and showed a serious interest in putting out a record. “It’s best to work with the energy we put into what we do, and these guys exhibit that by just being fans,” says Katrina Ford, the band’s lead singer. “That’s why we do it: The fans.”

In some cases, the term “friends” becomes less a moniker for their label and more a description for the relationship between the collaborators. As Ford puts it, “They are their name.”

While Friends Records has enjoyed success, it has not come without substantial costs. Yale and MacMillan have each poured more than $10,000 of their own money into the company.

They’ve produced a fairly steady output, due in part to taking on a few smaller investors and sinking everything they’ve made thus far right back into the label. But sustainability, let alone profitability, is still far off.

“I just did our taxes, and it’s all losses,” says MacMillan, eliciting a chuckle from Yale. “Eventually we’re gonna have to stop and make some money off of this, so the taxes don’t screw us.”

MacMillan likens the investment to walking up to a roulette wheel and simply putting it all on a black. You take your chances, and if you lose, that’s that. So far, he says, they haven’t hit it big, but making it this far has been rewarding in and of itself. “Our investment was paying for however long we can ride this for, and we’ve gone way past our initial investment,” he says.

“And we’re getting more out of it than we ever thought we would.”

Utopian Dystopia Kiss Me, Stranger by Ron Tanner (Ig Publishing, 2011)

By Rebecca Messner

I

n Ron Tanner’s illustrated novel, Kiss Me Stranger, chaos abounds. A dictator has left his capital city in ruins. The militias fighting a civil war are so disorganized, they often forget which side they’re fighting for. Starving citizens forage for metal scraps that they trade in for Presidential Toffee (the dictator’s favorite) or concentrated Presidential Cheese Food. When the novel opens, our heroine, Penelope, mother of fourteen, grates wood into her children’s stew like it’s hard cheese in an effort to fill their stomachs.

The novel’s situation is unbelievable enough to stay light and funny (the dictator, who demands to be called “The Man,” is so enamored of Gregory Peck that he remakes To Kill A Mockingbird, casts himself as Atticus Finch, and mandates that every child in school must memorize his lines), even as everyone starves and freezes and scavenges barbarically. Yet it’s also not entirely inconceivable. “Authoritarianism is absurd,” says Tanner, a self-proclaimed pacifist. “When I read passages of The Man, I think of Muammar el-Qaddafi.”

Tanner’s characters keep the book on this side of totally ludicrous. Penelope, our immensely sympathetic narrator, is burdened with the care of her many children, whom she admits she never quite planned to have yet loves more than she can stand. Marcel, her husband, off fighting for the Presidential Militia, moves with the unflinching goal of finding his way back to his family. The children, who act more like a blabbering pack than individuals, offer comic relief and display an uncanny propensity to stick together. (They are also the artists behind the book’s charming illustrations.) Only Lon, the couple’s oldest son and a soldier for the Revolutionary Militia, seems lost, in large part because he’s decided to stray from the pack.

It’s no surprise to learn that Tanner wrote Kiss Me, Stranger in the middle of a painful divorce. The novel’s family is the one element of constant good amidst a world that is otherwise crumbling, which Tanner hopes will leave people optimistic. “If [the family] can act humanely, in a very loving way, in the novel’s world, I’d like to think people can do that in the real world, too.”

Urbanite #84 june 2011 59

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theater / Visual Art arts + culture

Going it Alone

doing magic tricks when he was 8 years old to break out of his shell. Theater, he says, saved him. In the same way, his inept character begins the play believing “he doesn’t have an artistic bone in his body” and eventually “learns to see the world like an artist.” The fool is a perfect vehicle for his message, Richardson says: “There’s a sense that artists and scientists solve problems and change the world by thinking foolishly, by seeing the world upside down.”

What the Fool?!? at Theatre Project, June 3–4 Ed Asner as FDR at Columbia Festival of the Arts, June 18

By Martha Thomas

Bottom photo Courtesy of John Ruppert; Top Photo by Terry Clark

D

rew Richardson started doing one-person shows twenty-five years ago at the tender age of 21, as a way “to get cast without auditioning,” he says. Since then, he’s honed his persona, the bumbling, Chaplin-esque Dramatic Fool, at theaters all over the country—including Baltimore Theatre Project, where he’ll be performing his latest, What the Fool?!?.

Richardson, based in Pittsburgh, says he got tired of traveling with a carload of props: His last appearance in Baltimore culminated in the actor jumping rope with his pants down and one foot stuck in a bucket while standing on a giant rubber ball. This time, he’s creating site-specific works using what’s available at each theater.

The Fool—a reticent fellow in a gray suit with “a bad comb-over,” he says—will begin the performance by parking his car in front of the theater (a parking citation is not part of the act). Audience members are invited to follow the neophyte theater-goer as he enters the building, navigates

Ed Asner will bring a somewhat different worldview to the Columbia Festival of the Arts with his own one-man show, in which he plays Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The stocky Asner, known fondly to a generation of TV viewers as the title character in the newsroom drama Lou Grant, bears scant resemblance to the thirty-second president, but that’s not the point. The affinity we’re meant to experience is to current events.

Asner has taken much of the script from Dore Schary’s 1958 Sunrise at Campobello, but like Grant, he is a flinty editor, paring out the personal to focus on what it means to be a strong leader when faced with a faltering economy and a country at war. the tricky stairway, encounters an usher—who angers him by ripping his ticket—and finds his seat. Those who prefer can watch the opening antics on a video feed.

Richardson says he was a shy kid who started

For tickets to What The Fool?!? at Theatre Project, call 410-752-8558 or go to www.theatreproject.org.

For tickets to Ed Asner as FDR at Columbia Festival of the Arts, call 410-715-3044 or go to www.columbiafestival.com.

John Ruppert. Core (Installation), 2011, 6 x 8 x 8 feet.

Galvanized steel and cast iron.

Second Nature

The Nature of Things at C. Grimaldis Gallery, June 16–August 27

By Cara Ober

F

or more than twenty years, sculptor John Ruppert has taken his inspiration from geological forces, architectural forms, and the natural landscape. In The Nature of Things, his fourth solo show with the C. Grimaldis Gallery here in Baltimore, Ruppert continues to blur the boundaries between the natural and man-made worlds in several large installations, video projections,

sculptural objects, and a new series of photographs.

“I work with a lot of different industrial materials,” explains Ruppert. “I see casting as a metaphor for geological activity and the creation of the earth.” Ruppert is probably best known for taking glacier boulders and river rocks from the landscape, creating exact molds from them, and then casting them in different metals. The resulting objects look like the actual rocks from a distance, but their metallic sheen, as well as the lines created by the seams in the molds, give them away as man-made.

Most sculptors remove all evidence of the casting process, but not Ruppert. “The original rocks were created by changing forces in nature, and this is evident in their appearance,” says the sculptor. “Mine are made from a mechanical process, and I want them to retain all the information from their fabrication.”

In larger sculptural works, Ruppert employs the opposite process, creating new landscapes out of building materials. He’s used chain-link fence in the past to fashion rounded forms that resemble giant hives or flattened geodesic domes.

His newest sculptures are spiral architectural

forms made of the metal mesh typically used to build highway barriers.

Ruppert’s architectural grids have been exhibited in a number of environments, but he prefers them to be seen in a natural landscape, where the structures are animated by light, shadow, and season. When he exhibits the same sculptures in a gallery setting, Ruppert projects original videos onto the forms to replicate that natural energy. His newest work does this, going beyond singular objects to create experiential installation environments.

Photography represents another new direction in this exhibit for Ruppert. Taken on location in Maine, where he vacations every summer, the photos depict landscapes obscured by fog or night. The artist describes them as “singular windows into another place.” Unlike traditional landscape photographs, Ruppert’s landscapes depict shallow spaces in abstract, velvety surfaces.

It is unclear from their appearance whether the finished prints are paintings, prints, or photos.

In addition to the exhibit at the Grimaldis Gallery, an Artscape satellite exhibit has been planned at Ruppert’s studio, a converted trolley car barn off Druid Hill Park.

For more information, call 410-539-1080 or go to www. cgrimaldisgallery.com.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 61

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the scene

this month’s happenings compiled by Rebecca Messner

ARTS/CULTURE DANCE Moldable sculptures, translucent mirrors, and videography come together to enhance the dancing of DEEP VISION, featuring the local Deep Vision Dance Company and the world premiere of original choreography by Nicole A. Martinell and Renée Brozic-Barger. Performances are June 10 and 11 at Theatre Project.

(45 W. Preston St.; 410-752-8558; www. theatreproject.org)

The Third Annual MovieFest at Cross Keys this year focuses on Academy Award winners, showing Shakespeare in Love on June 4, The Blind Side on June 11, The King’s Speech on June 18, and Slumdog Millionaire on June 25. Go early to take advantage of pre-movie dinner specials at the restaurants in Cross Keys. Urbanite is a sponsor of this series.

(5100 Falls Rd.; 410-323-1000; www. villageofcrosskeys.com)

MUSIC

photo by Jay W Photos

LITERATURE Atomic Books hosts graphic novelist Paul Hornschemeier as he reads from Life with Mr. Dangerous on June 3.

Self-proclaimed “Illustratrix” Emily Flake, creator of the comic Lulu Eightball, will also be present to celebrate the launch of a new mini-comic. (3620 Falls Rd.; 410-662-4444; www.atomicbooks.com)

FILM MONDOBALTIMORE: Trash Flicks and Cult Epics, a film series that focuses on “horrible, beautiful, awesome, fucked-up VHS movies,” returns to the Windup Space on June 2 with a double bill of hard rock films from the mid-1980s: Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Hard Rock Zombies, about Nazi sex perverts and a hard rock band. (12 W. North Ave.; 410244-8855; www.mondobaltimore.com)

Local indie darlings Secret Mountains, purveyors of joyful, meditative psych-rock, play Golden West on June 1.

Catch them in this intimate show before they become Baltimore’s Next Big Thing.

(1105 W. 36th St.; 410-889-8891; www. goldenwestcafe.com) Matt and Kim, a couple from Brooklyn, create happy pop rock with the aid of a drum set, a keyboard, and a massive amount of energy. They play Rams Head Live on June 1. (20 Market Pl.; 410-2441131; tickets.ramsheadlive.com) Turns out the Palins weren’t the only group to come out of Wasilla, Alaska.

Catchy indie rockers Portugal, The

Man (now based in Portland, Oregon), play Rams Head Live June 8.

Jazzway 6004, a nonprofit jazz music venue, is actually the home of jazz singer Marianne Matheny-Katz and her husband, Howard Katz. On June 11, they welcome pianist and percussionist Warren Wolf and award-winning trumpet player Jeremy Pelt. Tickets include beverages, hors d’oeurvres, and dessert.

(6004 Hollins Ave.; 410-952-4528; www. jazzway6004.org)

projections, on their way to parenthood.

(120 W. North Ave.; 443-844-9253; www.singlecarrot.com)

VISUAL ART June 12 is International Family Day at the Walters Art Museum. Celebrate your community’s global roots with art activities from around the world, displays of refugee and immigrant youth art, and youth-oriented films and performances about refugees and immigrants.

(600 N. Charles St.; 410-547-9000; www. thewalters.org)

THEATER The Baltimore Rock Opera Society returns June 3–5 and June 10–12 with a double feature of original rock operas: Amphion, “a tragic love story set in Constantinople in the year 532 AD” and The Terrible Secret of Lunastus, a tale of space exploration that promises lots of lasers. (Showtime Theater, 9 W. 25th St.; www.baltimorerockopera.org) The kids at the Single Carrot Theatre present Linus & Alora, a play by Andrew Irons, June 10–July 10. The play chronicles the wild imagination of the title characters, who journey through a smattering of theatrical elements, including stream-of-consciousness video

Rick Shelley, master of broken, shiny things (also a contributor to this month’s “What You’re Writing” section), teaches a mosaic workshop on June 18 at the American Visionary Art Museum. (800 Key Hwy.; 410-244-1900; www.avam.org) Beginning June 25, works from the five finalists of the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize will be on display in the Alvin and Fanny Blaustein Thalheimer Galleries of the Baltimore Museum of Art. This year’s finalists are Stephanie Barber, Louie Palu, Mark Parascandola, Matthew Porterfield, and Rachel Rotenberg. Through August

Celebrate the diversity of your community at the Baltimore Pride Celebration June 17–19. Festivities kick off on Friday with cocktails and boogieing at “Twilight on the Terrace” at Gertrude’s restaurant and continue through the weekend. Don’t miss the fierce competition of the high-heeled race on Saturday, followed by a performance by Deborah Cox. (Various locations; 410-837-5445; www.baltimorepride.org)

Urbanite #84 june 2011 63

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COMMUNITY

The Maryland State Arts Council uses the Creative Alliance as the setting for Maryland Traditions Folklife Festival, a day-long free festival of traditional folk arts on June 18, featuring fourteen performances on two stages by singers, musicians, and dancers, along with craft workshops and traditional foods. (3134 Eastern Ave.; 410-767-6450; www. marylandtraditions.org)

Linganore Vineyards hosts a Beach Party Wine Festival June 25–26 on its 230-acre estate, and while there won’t be much in the way of sand and waves, the winery will evoke the spirit of the beach party with live bands and summer wine tastings. (13601 Glissans Mill Rd., Mt. Airy; 410-795-6432; www. linganore-wine.com)

FOOD/DRINK

GREEN/SUSTAINABLE

The restaurants and food shops of Belvedere Square take to the street on Fridays this summer for Summer Sounds, a series of outdoor concerts. Bands, such as soul/reggae rockers Nelly’s Echo (on June 17), fill the square with sweet tunes.Urbanite is a sponsor of this event.

(540 E. Belvedere Ave.; 410-464-9773; www.belvederesquare.com)

France, schmance. Tour Dem Parks, Hon! on June 12 is Baltimore’s answer to the great bicycle ride of Europe, offering four routes, from a 12-mile family ride to a 64-mile metric century, that wind their way through the city, coming into contact with nearly all of Baltimore’s parks, including Carroll, Druid Hill, Herring Run, Clifton, and Patterson. (Rides begin and end at Carroll Park, 1500 Washington Blvd.; 410-396-4369; www. tourdemparks.org)

The O’s play the Toronto Blue Jays on June 5, and if you buy your ticket through the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance, a portion of the proceeds will go to help the organization. (Oriole Park at Camden Yards, 333 W. Camden St.; 410-929-2161; www.dbfam.org) See what a bunch of creative folks dreamed up to make the Red Line construction process easier on Baltimore’s neighborhoods when public voting opens on June 17 for Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge. Entries will be displayed Wednesday through Saturday through mid-July. (218 W. Saratoga St.; 410-243-2050; www.urbaniteproject. com) On June 18, the Maryland Science Center celebrates the first day of summer the funky way, with Solstice 2011: The Science of Soul, featuring a ten-piece Motown band, a bountiful buffet, and cocktails to send you soulfully through

June 4 is Bin 6-0-4 Day, when the Harbor East wine store will offer tastings

all day long, in honor of the date and its birthday. (604 S. Exeter St.; 410-5760444; www.bin604.com)

HOME/DESIGN The Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects hosts UNCOVERING MULTIPLICITIES: Heterogeneous Urbanisms in Bhopal, India, on June 9 in which professors and students from the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University present their research on the Indian city of Bhopal and the tough spot it’s in as a mid-sized city in the shadow of megametropolises like Delhi and Mumbai.

Hm. Sound familiar? (11½ W. Chase St.; 443-885-1890; www.aiabalt.com)

STYLE/SHOPPING The Big Victorian open house and trunk show on June 4 is part of a quarterly series showcasing local and regional designers, including clothing from Catapult and Julie Bent of LOT201, and lighting and furniture from Nikkuu Design by Melissa Moore, which donates a percentage of all proceeds to the Baltimore Curriculum Project. DJ Cex will spin tunes, and Ceriello Fine Foods will provide the cured meats and cheeses. (2826 Montebello Terrace; 443844-4094)

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For more information on vendor opportunities, sponsorships, registrations to walk, please contact Brenda Campbell at campbell.tuttiesplace@yahoo.com or 410 277-9170. Visit www.tutties-place.org.

Urbanite #84 june 2011 65

RACING FOR Aunt Shan ________.

We all know someone.

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Solutions exist. We just need the will ...

The Labyrinth continued from page 35

justice is more than fitting the pieces together.

“The way I like to describe it is that the ideas fantasy. are just really the roux of the gumbo,” he says.

To combat the politics of fear, Steward used More important is changing how we treat kids: to take freshman state legislators to Missouri’s “Those on the administrative track can get lost. juvenile maximum security building. “It really You have to lead by example, sell it to your was just a former school building,” he says. frontline staff. You need staff with understand“Once [the legislators] met them, got some exing, empathy, real passion, and dedication. posure, played around with these kids, and saw “The other thing that gets mistaken for meaningful reform,” Steward says, “is simply our numbers and success, it was easy for them making kids comply. Programs can spend a to support the work.” lot of time, effort, and money Bobby Zirkin, a Maryland getting compliance, and that state senator from Baltimore is seen as success. It is not.” He County, has worked for years for Missouri-like reforms in tells me about the graduates of a this state. “If we could do one particular boot-camp program thing in Maryland,” he says, that the police revered. “They “it’s to get on the phone and get said these kids were the most Mark Steward up here.” Speakpolite kids they re-arrested.” ing in February about Donald By exchang ing fea r and DeVore’s replacement as Secreprejudice for hope and redemptary of the Department of Juvetion, the Missouri model points nile Services, Zirkin said, “After to a successful way forward for Maryland and America. “The so many decades of decay, we decline [in juvenile crime naneed someone with fresh ideas. tionally] really makes this the The main requirement for the time to do meaningful juvenile job, in my mind, is to come in Barry Feld, a national like a house afire and change justice reform,” says the Univerexpert on juvenile justice things dramatically.” sity of Minnesota’s Feld. from the University of DeVore’s replacement, apBut ultimately, the challenge Minnesota Law School pointed this winter, has begun of reform comes down to a queshis tenure with deliberation. tion of political will, and on that Sam Abed, 35, is a former prosecutor and spent front, reformers are less than optimistic. “It’s easy to shortchange this issue now, given the five years as deputy director of Virginia’s juvenile justice agency. “The biggest deficiency that financial times,” Zirkin says. we need to address is the management funcFeld is more blunt: “America is unwilltion here at [the Department of Juvenile Sering to invest in the welfare of other people’s vices], how we operate as a system,” Abed told children.” me recently when I called to ask about his vision for Maryland. One of his first priorities is he detention area at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center where I to address the chronic lack of therapeutic settaught is on the first floor. Employtings that leads to kids remaining in detention ees are searched when they arrive, settings or being sent out of state. “One of the but after you become a regular, or best practices in Missouri is having therapeuif you come early enough to work, when the tic settings near families,” he says. “Obviously entrance is unmanned, the guard behind the if we are having to send kids out of state, we are not achieving that.” glass just buzzes you in. There are no windows Still, when asked about trying to fit pracon the Gay Street side, but the hallways have tices like Missouri’s into Maryland’s existing natural light from the windows that open onto system, Abed says, “I have to caution myself an interior courtyard. In that light, the pastel every day not to try and fit a square peg in a cinderblock interior doesn’t look like a prison— round hole. I am still getting to know the sysjust a generic institution. tem and all the other child services and providKids are separated into “pods” based on who they are, what they’ve done, and where ers, figuring out how to coordinate with other they are in the process, and officers facilitate agencies, leverage resources. We don’t have the each pod’s movement through the facility in capacity of Missouri. If we don’t work together single file. White T-shirts and gray sweats or we won’t have enough resources.” jeans are the uniform. The institution-issued Mark Steward, for his part, says juvenile

“America is unwilling to invest in the welfare of other people’s children.”

T

sandals keep the danger of laces and the invidiousness of shoe consumption in check. Kids assert their individuality in the details and the exaggerated exposure of boxers.

The Juvenile Justice Center was, when I taught there, still under federal monitoring, and the young principal at the school worked tirelessly to make sure all the paperwork was in order and everyone got his lessons. Everyone tried to stay in compliance. Occasionally, I would deliver a lesson to a kid confined to “the Unit”—the area where they slept—for behavioral or safety reasons. I usually preferred this, because I could get some one-on-one time with a student.

On one such occasion, I visited a young man who, earlier in the day, had cussed out a guard.

I told him I knew he did it on purpose, that he was making a show, trying to make his minders afraid. “Yeah, I just didn’t feel like going,” he said with a mischievous grin. Some kids, particularly those who have been in Maryland’s system for a while, develop a sophistication about compliance.

“Ain’t a damn thing going on at that school,” the boy told me. “You got a shop class with no tools, a technology class”—he puts air quotes around “technology”—“with no computers, some teachers showing movies all day everyday, and a bunch of [Black Guerilla Family] comrades beefing with a bunch of fake-ass Bloods.

I’m ’a just stay over here and chill.”

A youth counselor sat in an office nearby talking on the phone. The guard who brought me over to the unit had already dozed off in a chair near the locked door. I was overwhelmed by my inadequacy to intervene in this young man’s life, to change where this story was going. We didn’t do the lesson I brought over and played a game of chess instead.

We talked about his time at Hickey after he got kicked out of Thurgood Marshall High School. He also spent some time in Frederick County at the Victor Cullen Center. He had been at the Juvenile Justice Center for five months after the judge convicted him. Even though the center was designed for pre-trial juvenile detention, it regularly holds kids after their adjudication as they await placement and meaningful help. There’s always a backup.

In his ruling that Brian Wonsom would be tried as an adult, Judge Nichols noted that, according to expert medical witnesses, the boy needed ten to fifteen years of therapy and that none of the juvenile facilities the court had approached was willing to accept him. A date for Wonsom’s murder trial has still not been set.

He remains held without bond.

“They say as soon as a bed opens at Cheltenham I’m over there,” the young man in the Unit told me, without emotion, as he looked over his plastic chess pieces. “I really don’t want to go over there. My mans told me it was a mess.”

Urbanite #84 june 2011 67

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baltimore painter christine neil’s watercolor Balance of Herma depicts a precariously balanced pillar of stones. Set against a simple white background, the rocks’ visual qualities become more pronounced and their place in nature less important. Craggy in texture with a chalky surface, the bluish-gray stones are rich in detail but fairly ordinary. Their arrangement, however, imbues them with a mysterious energy and links them to thousands of years of historical purpose.

Whether you prefer the Pete Seeger or the King James version, the image of a world in balance is captured in the famous “to every thing there is a season” Bible verse, which says, “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.” Called “cairns” or “herma,” piles of stones have been used by cultures around the globe as travel signs, religious cara ober monuments, ceremonial objects, and burial markers. Despite its simplicity, a herma is a powerful talcara ober is urbanite’s online arts/culture editor. to receive isman, a monument to a primal human existence her weekly e-zine, go to bit.ly/ that extends beyond the basics of food and shelter. ezinesignup.

Cairns serve as reminders of people who have come before, as well as humankind’s complicated relationship with nature.

It is unclear in this painting whether the rocks were physically piled on top of one another or the artist composed them on the page. Either way, they are engaged in an unstable relationship that requires a great deal of balance to achieve—an ideal vision. In a world that often seems out of balance, this particular pillar of stones serves as a reminder that individuals, environmental systems, and civilizations need to exist in equilibrium. An impossible balancing act, yes, but a worthy and timeless endeavor.

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Christine Neil Balance of Herma watercolor on paper 30 x 22 inches

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