March 2005 Issue

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urBanite

2005 i s s ue no .

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up and coming People: 20 Baltimoreans on the rise Neighborhood: The final waterfront frontier?

Sport: Disc golf Food: The new spice Designers: Small Roar and Zvezdana w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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urbanite march 05

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AT T E N D A N I N F O R M AT I O N S E S S I O N Washington, DC

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Monday, April 4

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urbanite march 05

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urBanite B A LT IM OR E

“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”

Urbanite Issue 9 March 2005 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com

—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

e live in exciting times. Baltimore is at a point where we can truly believe that through our collective efforts we will rebuild our city’s economy, spirit and confidence.

America’s cities, for the first time in many decades, have a viable future. We know the story of decline: In the 1950s, Americans fled to the suburbs, aided by new highways and government loan programs. The 1960s were wracked by race riots, leaving many urban neighborhoods disinvested for years to come. In the 1970s and 1980s, the old urban economies of manufacturing and shipping were in precipitous decline with the rapid loss of jobs and population.

But there’s a new story emerging. In the late 1990s we saw the beginnings of a solid, marketdriven base of activity in urban centers, and today, people increasingly want to live in urban neighborhoods while institutions and businesses want to invest in them.

In Baltimore, the tide of decline and disinvestment appears to be reversing. Consider some recent good news: After fifty years that saw Baltimore lose 30% of its residents, population is leveling off and showing signs of a rebound.

In downtown Baltimore alone, the number of apartment units and condominiums will double by the end of 2005 (from 1999), fueling increased demand for downtown retail and services. Commercial building permits issued in 2004 amounted to $488 million as compared to $23 million three years ago. While median sales prices of city homes increased 25% between 2000 and 2003, many neighborhoods have seen property values double since 1999.

Last year, Baltimore City led the region in job growth, adding more than 8,000 new jobs. The robust growth of Johns Hopkins Hospital and the University of Maryland with two new biotech parks is leading the way to a new economic base.

Even our schools have made gains, in spite of their struggles. Three of the top ten Maryland high schools, as measured by the Maryland Assessment Test, are Baltimore City Public Schools.

The city’s tax base shows accelerating growth thanks to increasing property values—creating a self-sustaining funding source for tackling the city’s toughest challenges. We may actually be able to invest more dollars in our parks, education, and other essential ingredients of a prosperous city. As Mayor O’Malley said in his “State of

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urbanite march 05

the City” address in January, “Baltimore is poised to grow for the first time since Eisenhower was in the White House.”

In this issue of Urbanite, we highlight what is one of the most important ingredients of a thriving city: its people. But, this is not just a group of stories about the creative talent, innovation and entrepreneurial energy of a few individuals and businesses. These vignettes are a reflection of the real “up-and-comer,” which is Baltimore City itself. photo by Marshall Clarke

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—Tracy Durkin

Editor-In-Chief Elizabeth A. Evitts Elizabeth@urbanitebaltimore.com Art Direction Alex Castro, Castro/Arts LLC Designer Ida Woldemichael Art Manager Ann Wiker Copy Editor Angela Davids/Alter Communications Advertising Director Jeff Stintz Jeff@urbanitebaltimore.com Administrative Assistant Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial Assistant Robbie Whelan Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-467-7802 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial Inquiries: Send queries to the editor-in-chief (no phone calls, please) including SASE. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050.

Future Themes: April: Film May: Home June: Water July: Independence August: Literature September: Architecture and Design Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission

by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2005, by Urbanite LLC. All Rights Reserved.

This publication is FREE and is distributed widely throughout Baltimore City. If you know of a location that urbanites frequent and would recommend placing the magazine there, please contact us at 410-243-2050.

contributors

contents

9 editor’s note

elizabeth a. evitts

11 corkboard 12 have you heard…

photo by Marshall Clarke

Andria Nacina Cole Andria Nacina Cole was raised in a house full of women and learned everything she knows about storytelling from their mouths. Degrees in creative writing from the universities of Morgan State and Johns Hopkins taught her to tame that homemade style, though she still calls on it every writing moment. She has written a collection of poetry, Anthem: For Colored Women Only, and is working tirelessly to complete a novel tentatively titled Clean Piles of Daughter.

robbie whelan

15 food: cooking with tea steve blair

17 neighborhoods: last waterfront joan jacobson

20 home: one man’s treasure alice okleshaw

photo by Laura Callens

Mitro Hood A native of the West Coast, Mitro Hood moved to Maryland in the 1980s to complete a bachelor’s degree in photography/ art history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Mitro’s work has been featured in Baltimore Magazine, Artnet News, The Sun, Baltimore City Paper, International Medical News Group, Print Solutions Magazine, The Washington Post, and Smart Woman Online. He has also shown work in the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Contemporary Museum group exhibits, as well as in the documentary We Are Arabbers and a short film, Louisville.

23 encounter: disc golf anne haddad

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elizabeth a. evitts

26 baltimore’s up and comers: meet 20

people whose successes are making charm city better

photo by Jefferson Steele

Joan Jacobson Joan Jacobson recently co-authored and published her first book, Wised Up, the memoir of Baltimore FBI informant Charlie Wilhelm, who left behind a life of loan sharking, drug dealing, and bookmaking to become an honest carpenter. For twenty-eight years, Jacobson reported for Baltimore’s Evening Sun and The Sun, covering housing and neighborhoods in the city and murder in the suburbs. She now works as a freelance writer and researcher.

24 baltimore observed: graphic fashion

compiled by molly rath

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39 fiction: such evenings andria nacina cole

41 sustainable city: baltimore green week miriam desharnais

photo by Jefferson Steele

Molly Rath Molly Rath spent the last fifteen years as a journalist and writer, twelve of them in Baltimore writing about Baltimore. She lives in Bolton Hill and, when not writing, is busy raising two small Baltimoreans of her own, Lily and Nell.

43 out there: art on borrowed turf cara ober

44 in review 45 resources cover photographs: Mitro Hood

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what you’re saying

“success is

What’s Hip and Happening My name is Matt Vlahos and I’m with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra—a job that requires frequent visits to the WYPR studios, where I came across the January issue of Urbanite. Wow! I wanted to write and say how impressed I am with your magazine. I joined the BSO in mid-November, and although I was relatively familiar with the city and its arts community, I have since been blown away with all that’s happening. (I grew up, and currently live, just over the Mason-Dixon line, in Pennsylvania.) This is my first issue of Urbanite, but I think it’s safe to say you do a wonderful job capturing the energy and excitement of all that’s hip and new in Baltimore!

—Matthew Vlahos is the public relations manager for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

A Tree Grows in Waverly The Waverly Garden Project is respected and thriving. Eight years ago I had only hoped for a green open space on our street that we would keep clear of trash.

Today we grow tomatoes and eggplants, giant sunflowers, grapes, and pumpkins for the neighborhood kids at Halloween. There are raised beds, and beautiful ornamental trees from local landscapers. In the past five years, although all the alleys remain strewn with debris, we can’t say we have collected more than a bag of trash each time we mow. Last Spring, twenty Johns Hopkins University staff volunteers spent the morning mulching and preparing the garden for spring planting, and asking if they can please come back. Of course, the garden welcomes everyone who loves it—which brings me to my point.

The issue of ownership and insurance comes up every couple of years. The Baltimore City Council offers the title, and I shrug my shoulders and get back to weeding. The last act of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers comes to mind: “The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. … I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”

Those of us on the urban community garden front lines are busy willing the courage to redefine an

abandoned public space and take the responsibility of sharing that experience with our neighbors. Our city could learn that the relationship that stakeholders and neighbors have with their community gardens is sacred, and mortal; it lasts only day to day until the street lights come on. A city agency should be established to preserve the title and use of these gardens, providing a secure welcome for each generation that discovers this quiet, revolutionary work.

—Dianne Wheaton lives and works the land in Waverly.

The Missing Chocolate Link I want to point out to Steve Blair that he missed one of the best local chocolate companies in Baltimore.

Rheb’s Candies, located in the Lexington Market (400 West Lexington Street) and in Southwest Baltimore (3352 Wilkens Avenue), is in my opinion the best locally. My whole family and many, many friends have grown up with Rheb’s chocolates. It’s just the best!

—Christina L. Johnson works as a legal secretary in Baltimore.

Urbanite in Philly?

I picked up my employer’s copy of Urbanite, and I thought it was filled with terrific articles and features about what’s out there in the Baltimore area and how the city can be improved through sustainable principles. Do you know if there is a similar publication available for the Philadelphia area? Thanks for putting out such a great magazine.

—Greg Schwab lives in Philadelphia.

Greg, We have found a similar publication in Minneapolis, called Rake, but nationally, we haven’t found any others out there like us … yet.

Urbanite encourages its readers to write—and it does not have to be all about us. We want to hear what you’re saying. Send your letters, including name, address, and daytime phone, to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com. Mail may be edited for length and clarity.

the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

—Winston Churchill, politician

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

—Mark Twain, writer

“The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.”

—Ben Stein, TV personality and writer

“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”

—Henry Ford, industrialist “Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.

Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.”

—Kahlil Gibran, writer

“The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and an actualizer ... He can visualize something, and when he visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.”

—Robert L. Schwartz, professor of law

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

—Henry David Thoreau, writer

“Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as ‘suits.’”

—Paul Graham, essayist and programming

language designer “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

—Carl Jung, psychiatrist “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

—Pablo Picasso, artist

“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.”

—Robert Fritz, composer, filmmaker

and author “The secret of joy in work is contained in one word— excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”

—Pearl Buck, writer

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urbanite march 05

editor’s note

A journalist once asked Rita Dove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, former poet laureate of the United States and a collegiate professor of English, what her students most commonly ask her about living the writing life. She replied: “Rarely do they ask what really matters. How do you hold onto your dreams with dignity? How do you know when you should listen to others and when to follow your own hunches? How can you remain connected to that innermost spiritual hunger while negotiating the necessary commerce of living?”

Negotiating that “necessary commerce of living” while forging a path in life is no small task. At Urbanite, we are constantly amazed by the stories we hear about people in our city striking this tenuous balance between creativity and commerce, between making a living and making a life. It was with this spirit in mind that we launched this first annual “Up-and-Coming” issue (Baltimore’s Up-and-Comers, p. 26).

And what is up-and-coming for Urbanite itself?

In late January, Publisher Tracy Durkin and I went to the annual conference for the Independent Press Association in San Francisco. The conference is an opportunity for independent media in the United

States and Canada to gather and discuss our publications and the future of media itself. It offers a unique snapshot into the “other” world of print— the world outside the major conglomerates. Most everyone at this conference launched a publication against the odds by following their hunches and remaining connected to that “innermost spiritual hunger” that Dove refers to. During the conference, publishers, editors, and writers continually approached us about the niche our magazine is filling in the evolving life of cities. They remarked not just on the concept of this free, full-color monthly magazine and its design, but also on the stories and the talent coming out of Baltimore.

This month also marks our formal foray into publishing fiction on a regular basis, which will complement the poetry that we added to our pages in January. In this issue you will find a powerful piece by local writer Andria Nacina Cole (Such Evenings, p. 39). Andria is an emerging literary talent capable of tackling even the most challenging subjects with a purity and grace of language. As we grow, we will continue to bring you the creative voices that make our city so remarkable. And we hope that you will continue to reach out to us with your stories.

— Elizabeth A. Evitts is Urbanite’s Editor-in-Chief.

Two Gentlemen of Verona A Tony Award-Winning Musical Adapted from Shakespeare by

John Guare & Mel Shapiro | Lyrics by John Guare Music by Galt MacDermot | Directed by Irene Lewis Choreographed by Luis Perez

Feb 11th– Mar 27th

Tickets $10–$65

www.centerstage.org or 410.332.0033 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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PRESS RELEASE

WaterView Overlook coming soon

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SEE ARTICLE IN THIS ISSUE www.theatreproject.org

centerforthearts.towson.edu

The Jewish Community Center & The Senator Theatre ore alt im PRESENT All rBemieres! p

The William & Irene Weinberg Family Baltimore Jewish Film Festival

April 2-19, 2005

Gordon Center For Performing Arts 3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills

Wondrous Oblivion

Watermarks

Sat., April 2; 8:30PM

Tue., April 12; 7:30PM

Walk on Water

Secret Passage

Tue., April 5; 7:30 PM

Thur., April 14; 7:30PM

The Aryan Couple

Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi

Thur., April 7; 7:30PM

Tue., April 19; 7:30PM

Suzie Gold

Sat., April 9; 9:15

PM

Each film is followed by a discussion with a guest speaker

Hiding and Seeking Sun., April 10; 3:00PM

:

TICKETS $8/film Plan ahead; these films often sell out!

For more information, call: 410.542.4900, x239, or go to www.baltimorejff.com

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D E V E L O P I N G

T H E

RHL

DEVELOPMENT

EQUAL HOUSING

OPPORTUNITY

F U T U R E

Open Hands Open Hearts Each year at the Bunting-Meyerhof f Interfaith Center at Johns Hopkins, Chaplain Sharon Kugler and the students of the Hopkins Interfaith Council organize Open Hands Open Hearts: Exploring Diverse Faith Traditions, a week-long interfaith program. Every night of the week is devoted to examining the traditions associated with Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and other faiths. On Wednesday, Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post will speak at the Interfaith Center, and on Friday the Sikh community will host a celebration open to the public at Shriver Hall.

3400 North Charles Street Feb 27–March 6 Free 410-261-1880 www.jhu.edu/~chaplain

Mondo Exotica The American Visionary Arts Museum, Baltimore’s quirky haven for outsider art, is hosting its “premier party,” Mondo Exotica, this month at the Jim Rouse Visionary Center. Food, beer, cocktails, and fantastic costumes will accompany a night of furious dancing to the psycho-cabaret stylings of Squonk Opera and the pumped-up polka of Brave Combo, all in support of the only center for truly alternative art in Baltimore.

3134 Eastern Avenue Apr 7 8 p.m.

410-276-1651 ct.org ww w.megaphoneproje

e Wilkerson

al Depenfrom The Ballad of Sexu NAN GOLDIN. Still Matthew rtesy the artist and dency, 1979–1996. Cou York.

Marks Gallery, New

Series Project Documentary Amplify: Megaphone ary ent um doc al t is a loc The Megaphone Projec ard the pany that strives tow com n ctio odu -pr film recent st mo ir The .” dia me “democratization of tales the Darkness, tells the production, Hearts in s live the and n ore wome of prostituted Baltim ng alo ed een scr be l wil that they lead. The film ies at entary Prison Lullab with the 2003 docum hone gap Me as par t of the the Creative Alliance y. plif Am series, Project’s documentary

SlideShow With the advent of digital cameras and personal website s, slideshows of fam ily vacations have be en replaced by ma ss e-mails with attached dig ital images. This month the BMA presents Sli deShow, the first major museum exhibitio n to examine slide s as a serious ar t form.

The various piece s will include single-ca rousel shows, mu ltipleprojector shows, and a large-scale projection on the ex terior wa ll of the museum .

Through May 15 10 Ar t Museum Dr ive 410-396-6310 ww w.ar tbma.org

photo by Angile

corkboard

BRAVE COMBO. (from left to righ t) Jeffrey Barnes , Carl Finch, Ala Emert, Cenobio n Hernandez, Dan ny O’Brien.

800 Key Highway Mar 12 8 p.m.–1 a.m.

410-244-1900 www.avam.org

ns ctio

photo by L’Opera Montreal

y to b pho

Le Nozze di Figaro Mozart caused quite a stir when he wrote his opera Le Nozze di Figaro, based on a French play of the same name. It was banned in Emperor Leopold II’s Austria for its seditious political undertones. But the beauty of the Austrian virtuoso’s music won out over the message of the story, and the opera has become part of the standard repertoire.

Lyric Opera House 140 West Mount Royal Avenue Mar 12 at 8:15 p.m., Mar 16 at 7:30 p.m.

Mar 18 at 8:15 p.m., Mar 20 at 3 p.m.

410-727-6000 www.baltimoreopera.com

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by robbie whelan

home...

A condemned building is a safety risk to most people, but to Tracey Clark and Ben Riddleberger, it is a treasure chest of decorative mantelpieces, delicate banisters, and vintage lighting. Clark and Riddleberger co-own Housewerks, a new 8,000-square-foot architectural salvage store located in a former BGE valve house building that dates back to 1885. The partners have been in the salvage business for more than a decade, spending their days gutting buildings that are being wrecked or remodeled, and saving everything from high-end accoutrements to kitchen sinks. Unlike other area salvage businesses, Housewerks focuses on the more decorative, delicate items, like pre-WWII decorative building materials. “It’s architectural salvage, but there is an artistic component to it,” says Clark. Clark, who studied archaeology, travels from the D.C. area up as far as Pennsylvania following hot tips on lucrative houses. Riddleberger has a background in art and conservation and he specializes in giving the pieces new finishes, wax-jobs, and polishes. “It’s just urban archaeology,” says Clark. 1415 Bayard Street; (410) 685-8047; housewerks@mac.com.

“baltimore phoenix” logo by Nolen Strahls, cover design and layout by Mike Riley

photo by Tracey Clark

have you heard. . .

music...

The most refreshing thing about the whole punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement is its commitment to self-propagation. It is a culture that simply refuses to die. And now, nearly thirty years after the punk movement made its first waves, Baltimore’s Charm City Art Space and its new zine, Burn Baltimore, are proving punk resilience in the twenty-first century. CCAS is an art gallery, concert space, and community center on the west side of the Station North Arts District. They make good use of what little space they have: Four or five bands (of all genres, but mostly loud) play most nights in the basement, while nose-ringed vegans mill about upstairs, reading hand-produced independent publications and perusing the latest exhibition. The CCAS zine, Burn Baltimore, a collection of articles submitted by CCAS members, is on sale at the desk up front next to homemade CDs by local punk bands. Its articles are mostly about local music, but the interesting thing is that much of its writing is selfcriticism from the DIY community. The writers urge Baltimore punks to stick to the traditional DIY, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate values.

They see the fragility of their community and criticize it in order to make it stronger. Charm City Art Space has counterparts all over the country, including Pittsburgh’s Mr. Roboto Project, Sound Idea Distribution in Brandon, Florida, New York’s ABC No Rio, and Championship Records in Lemoyne, Pennsylvania. Burn Baltimore is somewhat unique because not many of these community centers produce a publication through which their members can voice their concerns and thoughts in print. Most punks use their lifestyle to make a comment on culture, but CCAS puts in print, and in your face. 1729 Maryland Avenue; www.ccspace.org.

Contemporary Homes In Historic Neighborhoods Canton

Hampden

Roland Park/Heathbrook

New LuxuryGarageTownhomes Garage Townhomes From New Luxury From$279,900 $259,900

Patricia Massey • 410-534-0178

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urbanite march 05

photo by Em Kleiner

photo by Heather Tait

poetry...

Poet, freelance writer, and Fells Point native Julie Fisher thinks that poetry is “a necessity for the twenty-first century. It is a simple haven from the chaos of modern life and a cure for disconnection.” Her latest project, the recently launched website www.PoetryInBaltimore.com, is a connection in the truest sense of the word. It is a remedy for any Baltimore poet who thinks that the art of verse is dead, or that this city lacks a thriving, supportive writer’s community. The website lists upcoming events, such as the Thursday night spoken-word performances and open-mic readings at Notre Maison coffeehouse on 25th Street. In the first few days after the website’s birth, Fisher had posted more than 40 threads on the website’s forum, including dozens of calls for submissions to poetry magazines and competitions. Registered members are using it to drum up support for their own local ventures. But most importantly, local poets have begun to post their work and to trade notes and suggestions through comments on the site. Poets are not only making noise about poetry in Baltimore, they are also learning from each other and opening up the floor for dialogue, cooperation, and above all, beautiful language.

Tagle Urbanite

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2/2/05

3:56 PM

comedy...

When Mike Subelsky came here from San Diego as a 27-year-old Navy lieutenant a little more than a year ago, he was bothered by how little improvisational comedy there is in Baltimore. He found himself having to travel as far as Washington D.C. to get his improv fix, so he started the Baltimore Improv Group, a nonprofit that has grown into a thriving organization with two troupes, Few Bricks Shy, and It’s Not Me, It’s You. The group performs monthly and offers workshops called “Jams” that teach participants how to play improv games. “Everyone is very motivated,” says Kate Jones, the group’s secretary and a member of both troupes, “and we have a great sense of togetherness.” Its members have also worked in local high schools to teach kids that theater “isn’t always just Shakespeare,” according to Jones.

And now that they have established the tax status of a nonprofit, they hope to be able to afford enough advertising to get the word out about their monthly shows (up until now, the group’s performances were made known by an underground network of word-of-mouth and flyers hand-stapled to telephone poles.) Their next show is a charity benefit March 12 at Johns Hopkins University, and their monthly performance will take place March 26 at Christ Lutheran Church. 701 South Charles Street; (410) 547-6820; www.bigimprov.org.

Page 1

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w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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recipe

Poached Lobster with Vanilla Tea Sauce

1 2 lb. (approximately) live lobster 2 c. water 1 whole vanilla bean, split lengthwise to expose the tiny black seeds inside the pod

’ S B A L T I M O R E

A R T

C I N E M A

1 T. whole leaf black tea (I like using a rich, robust Ceylon tea like St. Coombs or Kirkoswald.)

2 c. fish stock (either homemade or purchased frozen) 4 t. sweet, unsalted butter

THE CHARLES RLES T H C H A1/28/05 NOU-2005-0052 1 7 1 1 N O RUrbanite

TREET S 4:42 PM Page 1

410-727-FILM

Originality comes simply from Nouveau.

Interior design service available.

what’s next.

Canton: 410.342.7666 Belvedere Square: 410.962.8248 nouveaubaltimore.com

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urbanite march 05

Salt to taste White pepper to taste

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil.

Plunge the live lobster head first into the water to kill it.

Remove from the water, allow to cool at room temperature for about 10 minutes and then remove the lobster meat from the shell, keeping the meat in as large pieces as possible (the tail can easily be removed by cutting the bottom of the tail shell down the middle using poultry shears, other strong scissors or a small sharp knife). Reserve any juices to add to the finished sauce.

In a 1-quart capacity saucepan, bring the 2 c. of water to just under 212 °F (just under a boil.) Add the vanilla bean and simmer for 10 minutes to infuse the water with the vanilla flavor. Remove the pot from the heat and add the tealeaves and allow to infuse for 3 minutes. Sieve out solids and retain the liquid.

Place the lobster meat into the liquid above and poach for 6 to 10 minutes at the barest simmer, or until the meat feels somewhat firm to the touch.

Do not boil or the lobster will become overcooked and tough. Remove the meat from the liquid, cover well with foil and set into a 200-degree oven on an ovenproof plate to keep warm. (If desired, just before serving, you can slice the lobster tail into ½ inch thick medallions, for ease of consumption.) Add the fish stock to the liquid and over high heat bring to a boil, reducing by half. Off the heat, whisk the butter in, tablespoon by tablespoon, taste to correct seasoning (adding salt and freshly ground white pepper to taste). Drizzle the lobster with the sauce and serve immediately over a blend of cooked white and wild rice and a vegetable of your choice. Provide plenty of fresh crusty artisanal bread to take full advantage of the sauce.

© Robert Wemischner, 2004

food

by steve blair

Cooking with Tea

Walk into any neighborhood coffee shop and you are sure to see a list of teas that is more extensive than the coffee and espresso drinks being offered. The myriad of teas, with their vastly different flavors, is prompting aficionados to rave that tea is “the new wine.” And just as wine is enjoyed as a beverage and as an ingredient, chefs are developing ways to infuse food with flavorful tea leaves.

“Tea can be paired with food just like wine, and it’s becoming especially popular with nondrinkers,” explains Robert Wemischner, coauthor of Cooking with Tea. “People are even starting to use the same vocabulary they use to describe wine to profile tea— using words like fruity, smoky and tannins.”

It’s not surprising then to mistakenly think someone is talking about cabernet while deciphering the complexities of black tea or thinking “savignon blanc” when hearing a description of oolong.

The gratifications of tea and cooking with it are not new; in fact, they are centuries old, but the awareness and practicality of tea is definitely on the rise. Gourmet magazine recently published a recipe from the famed Tabla restaurant in New York for Black Tea Custards, where loose black tea, like English breakfast, steeps in warm cream and milk before the yolks are added and the custard batter moves on to the firming process. Locally, Jerry Pelligrino,

chef and owner of Corks in Federal Hill, adds Earl Grey tea to the water in which he cooks quinoa. He finds that “tea can really enhance neutral and mild flavored grains. It’s a subtle infusion, but it works great.”

My first adventure in cooking with tea was bittersweet. I made a time-honored Hunan recipe for tea-smoked chicken and, while the results were delicious, they were not worth the hassle. I found the process laborious, but I blame my indifference to the hazardous process of smoking something in my tiny, urban kitchen more than I blame the tea itself.

Any infusion of tea in a dish will be a subtle one. Remember this. Don’t expect to be blown away.

Rather, approach cooking with tea, like any new culinary venture, “with curiosity and a sense of fun,” says Diana Rosen, who edits Tea Talk, a newsletter of all-things tea, and who coauthored Cooking with Tea with Wemischner. “Use it like an herb or infuse it in salad dressing to calm the vinegary taste,” Rosen recommends. “As Confucius said, let your palette be your guide. Drink it first and ask yourself about the taste of the tea and what it would go with.

Also think of color—the range of color in tea is enormous.”

Rosen explains that more and more people are turning to tea as a beverage and are quietly celebrat-

ing the ceremony of “having” tea now that the news of its healthful benefits, namely its antioxidents, is more widespread. As for its use in cooking, Rosen and Wemischner want to see more of us using tea to emphasize or extenuate the other spices we’re using and allow the tea to make everything more interesting and flavorful.

Take scallops. Wemischner thinks tea is very complimentary to seafood. In one recipe, he glazes seared scallops in a reduction made by steeping the wiry tea Keemun in orange juice sweetened with honey and flavored with ginger, garlic and soy sauce.

This recipe seems much more feasible than smoking a whole chicken with tea leaves, but if you want to start out simply, you can always try pouring fresh-brewed green tea over your next batch of cooked, white rice. Perhaps silly sounding, this is actually a fast, easy way to get yourself acquainted with the subtle nuances that tea can bring to the foods you cook in the future. p. 45

—Steve Blair wrote about Baltimore chocolatiers in February. Cooking questions can be directed to him at Steve@pulpkitchen.com.

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urbanite march 05

neighborhoods

by joan jacobson

photography by marshall clarke

A Neighborhood By Any Other Name...

The Patapsco River has been good to Baltimore’s renaissance. It gave the city a reason to rebuild the Inner Harbor, Fells Point, Canton, Locust Point and Inner Harbor East.

Now, the river that natives call the “Pat-aps-ico” has one last frontier to offer the Baltimore revival. It is the most convenient of places for commuters and downtown workers to live—but the least likely place to imagine new development.

You can find it driving south on Hanover Street over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge.

Look off to the right. There it is—the river’s Middle Branch, a near-rectangular body of water, scarred by a stunning array of abandoned industrial buildings bordering some of the city’s poorest communities.

Cherry Hill. Westport. Mount Winans. Lakeland. Names associated for decades with poverty and decay.

Not names mentioned in the same breath with words like “upscale,” or “luxury.” Or with a price tag of $400,000 for a townhouse.

Until now.

Developers, lured by a blank slate (after the old industrial buildings and a hillside of trees are removed), see potential for residential and commercial development just blocks from the I-95 and 295 ramps, walking distance to the light rail, and a fewminutes drive to downtown.

Above a hillside overlooking Middle Branch Park and the Baltimore Rowing Club, developer A. Rod Womack is planning a $35 million project called Waterview Overlook with 40 luxury townhouses and 65 condominiums. Womack’s Consolidated Investment & Management Group hopes to complete the project by 2006. It will include a tennis court, pool, fitness center and a clubhouse, he says.

On eighteen acres along the river’s western shore, the former factory of the Carr-Lowrey Glass Company will be torn down and replaced with a residential and commercial development, says developer Patrick Turner of Henrietta Development Corporation. Details of the project, located steps way from the Westport light rail stop, have yet to be finalized, he says.

Just north of the 115-year-old glass factory, two enormous abandoned Baltimore Gas and Electric Buildings are up for sale, says Keith Cunningham, spokesman for Constellation Energy, which oversees the properties.

And at the north side of the bridge, the National Aquarium is planning a Center for Aquatic Life and Conservation on nineteen acres that will include a garage renovated into an environmentally “green” building where sick animals will receive care, an education center, plus restored wetlands and a park.

The project will begin in 2006.

“We love the idea of being part of another waterfront renovation in the city,” says Molly Foyle, the Aquarium’s director of media relations.

Unlike investors of Fells Point or Federal Hill, who three decades ago used the famous historic names to lure high prices for homes and businesses (and unofficially expanded their boundaries to in-

Above: The Middle Branch, the city’s last untouched waterfront, could be transformed by development planned for the South Baltimore area with a view of downtown. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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crease real estate prices), developers of the Middle Branch want to exploit the waterfront convenience, but not the community names that carry the negative connotations of an impoverished city.

So they have come up with a new, unofficial (and somewhat controversial) name—Inner Harbor West.

The name has already been purchased as an Internet domain name (innerharborwest.com), though a website has yet to be built.

Above: Rowhouses in Westport, with the smokestack of the recycling center in the background.

Right: Two abandoned BGE buildings (background) are for sale for development between Westport’s rowhouses and the Middle Branch waterfront.

Below: The light rail runs through Westport and would be walking distance from new proposed homes.

Womack admits he was wary of building in Cherry Hill at first. But that was before he saw the land he would eventually purchase—and before he met Cherry Hill leaders who are working to turn the neighborhood around.

He said he told a friend, “I don’t know if Cherry Hill has come far enough to do this deal. Then I walked up on one of those hills.” Once he saw the view of the water and downtown, “It hit me. I saw the potential.”

He’s been working closely with the Cherry Hill community and doesn’t want any negative neighborhood image to reflect on his project.

“I don’t even want to attach the notion of a stigma. They have done a tremendous job to turn the neighborhood around.”

Cathy McClain, executive director of Cherry Hill 2000, an umbrella group of community groups, institutions and businesses, says her group supports Womack’s development.

“Rod was very good in coming to us to tell us what he was planning. We’re pleased he’s bringing an expensive product to Cherry Hill to improve the economic picture for the whole neighborhood,” she says, yet adding that she is concerned with protecting older homeowners from being forced out by rising property taxes.

The residents of Cherry Hill, she says, have worked hard to reduce crime and build affordable housing in a neighborhood that was burdened with

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urbanite march 05

an absurdly high concentration of public housing— 1,500 units at one time.

Nevertheless, she said she understands Womack’s reluctance to market the homes with the neighborhood’s name.

“If you call it Cherry Hill people would not come. I understand that,” she says.

Less than a mile away, on the Western bank of the river, three other communities—Mount Winans, Westport and Lakeland—work to reduce crime, help residents pay utility bills and promote homeownership. Their community umbrella group is located two blocks from the waterfront, on a shabby, gaptoothed stretch of Annapolis Road. The group, Project TOOUR (Teaching Our Own Understanding and Responsibility), has its office in a boarded storefront protected by a rusty security gate, with the entrance on the side.

TOOUR’s executive director, Linda Towe, hopes the new development will help revive her neighborhood.

“Once that waterfront is developed, it’s going to have a ripple effect,” Towe says, though she too is concerned about rising property taxes for older homeowners.

But she doesn’t like the idea of renaming the community “Inner Harbor West.”

“They didn’t change Canton’s name. They didn’t change Federal Hill’s name. Westport and Cherry Hill should be able to keep their names. If people knew it as Westport for worse, they should know it as Westport for the better,” she says.

Long-time Westport resident and activist Elizabeth Arnold also supports the development, but is wary.

“You want to see improvement in the city, but you don’t want to be run out,” she says.

The city’s planning department is taking steps to protect the old neighborhoods, making sure a master plan preserves public views of the water and keeps tall buildings away from nearby rowhouses.

The city also hopes to make the waterfront more accessible to people in Westport, who have been cut off from the shoreline by industrial property.

“We’re using the powers we have to protect the community and make sure there is affordable housing and economic diversity,” says City Planning Director Otis Rolley.

With all the talk about redeveloping the Middle Branch, the waterfront neighborhood—whatever you call it—is still pretty quiet these days.

Along Middle Branch Park, the city’s Baltimore Rowing Club and Water Resource Center sits alone on the bank, looking just as out of place as it did when it was built in 1986—a monument to one of the most peculiar brainchilds of the mayoral administration of William Donald Schaefer.

Sculling, after all, was never the pastime of neighbors struggling to find work and decent housing.

But soon, the boathouse could finally have compatible neighbors.

“At long last,” says Cherry Hill’s Cathy McClain with a smile, “It was a project before its time.” n

The vacant Carr-Lowery Glass Company—the site of future residential and commercial development—as seen from the Middle Branch’s east shore.

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h o m e

b y a l i c e o c k l e s h a w

photography by anne gummerson

one man’s treasure

How a Waverly home became the ultimate canvas

For much of his life, Terry Koenig moved north. In his childhood, his family gradually migrated from Chicago to its northern suburbs. As a young adult in Baltimore, he moved almost block by block from Mount Vernon to Waverly. But the journey that has defined the greatest part of Koenig’s life has happened not from south to north, but from top to bottom.

Sitting in his warm kitchen, Koenig, 64, is a natural extension of his surroundings. Wearing lived-in sweats, and sandals over his socks, the sharp-witted painter blends seamlessly with the eclectic furniture he bought at auction, the fragrant green tea warming on the stove, and the symmetrical painted lines covering the floor. Everything around him—and on all three floors of his Waverly home—is the result of nineteen years of painstaking top-to-bottom renovation. With just one room remaining, the house is almost exactly as he wants it. “I really wouldn’t change a thing,” he says.

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urbanite march 05

Perhaps that’s because everything in this unique home—every intricately painted detail and every carefully selected furnishing—whispers of its creator.

And its creator, who lives alone, is clearly a man deeply in love.

As he wanders through the house he has occupied for three decades, he seems genuinely surprised and delighted, as if discovering it for the first time.

Varied art and salvaged furniture add to its charm, but the home’s true magic comes from Koenig’s vivid painting. Covering nearly every inch of the floors, ceilings and walls, his artistry is all the more impressive once it’s made clear it almost didn’t happen.

In fact, if not for a chance encounter with a “drunken housepainter” who picked him up when he was a student hitchhiking home from college in Illinois, Koenig might never have lifted a paintbrush.

“He told me he would start me at $2.50 an hour, and

if I was good, he’d raise it to $3,” he laughs. “He never raised it.”

Koenig saved enough money to follow in his father’s footsteps by attending law school in 1969.

But just a year after graduation from the University of Maryland School of Law, he returned to his first passion—painting. “I love the orderliness of it,” says Koenig, who is now a licensed contractor. “The results are immediate and you know when you’re doing something right.”

Several years later, when St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center helped Koenig buy his first home—one half of a $10,000 boarded-up house off Greenmount Avenue—he saw an opportunity. “It was a mess,” says Koenig, “but there was a little detail on the outside that made me think it had potential.” The detail: two authentic gas-fed porchlights.

Today, the same house has fulfilled that potential. From the inside out, the striking home reflects

thirty years of Koenig’s varied tastes and influences.

The Philadelphia gallery that houses the Barnes Collection inspired the bright hallways; the ceiling of the recently completed dining room mimics an Italian “vaulted” look; and the flowers lining the walls evoke the Met’s Unicorn Tapestries. The unfinished parlor, which Koenig anticipates will be done in a year, will ultimately “feel like walking into a Vermeer painting,” he says.

Even what’s beyond his walls seems to fit perfectly with Koenig’s vision. “Look at that,” he marvels, pointing out a second-story window at a row of snow-dusted Baltimore backyards. Although he can’t deny he finds fault with the challenges of Waverly, he loves the freedom that the neighborhood and city life provide—and the simple moments of beauty they afford.

“Why would anyone want to live anywhere else?” he asks—a question that suggests Koenig’s next journey might happen right where he is.

—Alice Ockleshaw wrote about Highlandtown in the February issue.

Page 20, far left: Bright colors, found art, and stained glass leave little evidence of the shabby walls and cracked windows of the home’s former life.

Page 20, middle: Koenig’s artistry often reflects what inspires him, like this painted interpretation of the Unicorn Tapestries.

Page 20, above: In the recently completed dining room, a cathedral inspired the floor design, and the ceiling is painted to appear vaulted.

Above: Koenig’s intricately painted property stands out among the homes in his Waverly neighborhood. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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“I was attracted to Clipper Mill for a number of reasons; the location, the architecture, and the support we received from Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse. This space is perfect for designers, artists, and craftsman.

Clipper Mill creates an environment where we can bring the value of the worker and the designed craft to the forefront of the community.�

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urbanite march 05

encounter

b y a n n e h a d d a d

di

c s

It was a late spring day in 1959 when Norman Eckstein, 12, fell in love while watching the neighbor kids just home from college, on Cordelia Avenue in Pimlico. The object of his affection was the plastic flying disc they were throwing to each other.

“I fell in love with this flying thing, and since then, I’ve never been without one,” he says.

The Frisbee was a novelty then, before it grew as ubiquitous as the beach towel. But the kind of discthrowing Eckstein and his friends do now bears as much resemblance to backyard Frisbee as the Masters Tournament does to miniature golf.

In fact, Eckstein plays golf with his discs. So do a lot of other people around the country, who have a professional association and a glossy color magazine devoted to the sport called “disc golf.”

The game borrows from the structure and rules of “ball golf,” as disc golfers call the kind played with clubs. But instead of hitting a ball toward a hole in the ground, disc golfers throw a disc toward a basket made of chain and mounted atop a metal pole.

At the Druid Hill Park course, Eckstein sends a disc sailing in and around the trees, landing it eerily close to what seemed like an impossible target. You have to wonder if this is a trick.

He does have a bag of tricks, so to speak. It looks like a square-ish camera bag, but it holds about a dozen discs, each of which serves a different purpose. One disc tends to curve to the left, and another curves to the right. They have model names like “Leopard” and “Eagle.” Some are heavier, or roll along the ground on their edge if that’s what the thrower wants. Frisbee makes special models for

g

photography by marshall clarke

f l o

disc golf, and so do other manufacturers, such as Innova.

In all, Eckstein owns about 1,000 flying discs, but that includes commemorative and collectible ones. It’s a staggering number at first, but then put it in perspective: A music lover might have that many CDs, right?

Years ago, disc golf became Eckstein’s avocation. He made his living in retail sales, but he lives for this sport. Pursuit of the game led him and his local club, the “Freestate Flyers” to rescue a neglected corner of Druid Hill Park and turn it into this course.

In 1984, Eckstein raised $1,000 from a Frisbee festival he organized here. He and a few other disc golfers went to the city offering to put that money toward building a disc golf course somewhere in a public park. A city official took them to a series of parks that were not appropriate—they were flat and uninteresting, with none of the trees and natural obstacles that make disc golf a sporting challenge.

“That’s one of the features of disc golf,” Eckstein says. “We like to blend in with what’s already there.”

The last park on the tour was the northwestern edge of Druid Hill. Eckstein saw a discarded water heater and other illegally dumped garbage.

Waist-high weeds shrouded the paths and stone

steps where picnickers had strolled in the park’s glory days.

Still, Eckstein knew right away it was perfect.

The trees and hills were just right.

“There’s a lot of undulating personality to this course,” Eckstein says. “All the other parks they showed us were like Phyllis Diller. This one is Marilyn Monroe.”

The game is the main thing for disc golfers, but environmental responsibility is a foundation of it.

“You can get disqualified from a tournament for willful destruction of plant life,” Eckstein says. “You have to fit in with Mother Nature, not vice versa.”

In other words, if there’s a tree branch making it difficult for you to retrieve your disc or score with it, you may not snap it off. Cell phones going off and disturbing the calm are another no-no. If your cell phone rings during a tournament, it’s a “courtesy violation.”

So in making a home for their sport, Eckstein and his friends gave all of us one more beautiful, peaceful, urban expanse of park. p. 45

—Anne Haddad wrote about Sandtown in November.

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baltimore observed

by elizabeth a. evitts

Two designers imprint clothing with a photo by Marshall Clarke

unique style.

Zvezdana Rogic Zvezdana zigzag@zvezdana.com

Mike Weikert and Zvezdana Rogic are rethinking the “design” in graphic design. As students of the Maryland Institute College of Art Graphic Design MFA program (crafted in large part by Program Director Ellen Lupton), Weikert and Rogic have been encouraged to reconsider the ways in which their design work could be applied to daily lives. By channeling their creativity into entrepreneurial productivity, Weikert and

which are primed to launch full force upon graduation in May.

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urbanite march 05

photos by Nancy Froehlich

Rogic each developed clothing lines,

Zvezdana Rogic, an émigré from Belgrade, is at once an artist, sculptor and designer. Heavily influenced by the war in the Balkans that marred her homeland of Serbia, Rogic has dreamed of a way to reconnect to her country through art. She found that connection with the creation of her Zvezdana clothing brand and the design of her Zig Zag shirt.

Rogic, like Weikert, was interested in applying graphic motifs to clothing. She found herself thinking about EKG readouts of heart activity. “It has a lot of connotations to me,” Rogic says. Last year, she stitched an EKG-like graphic over the heart of a tapered cotton shirt and sold several through local avenues, like MICA’s annual Buy Product event.

Rogic then took a scouting trip home to see if she could establish a manufacturing link between the United States and the Balkans. She caught the eye of Azzaro, a Belgrade-based fashion house with boutiques throughout Europe. Rogic and the company are now negotiating the mass production and distribution of shirts under her Zvezdana brand. Locally, Zig Zag shirts are available for purchase through her e-mail address and at Shine Collective in Hampden.

Mike Weikert Small Roar www.smallroar.com Mike Weikert entered the graphic design program at MICA last year with no preconceived plans. The former creative director for a graphic design firm in Atlanta, Georgia, wanted a fresh start. “I didn’t want to apply any of my corporate notions,” he said.

Weikert plunged into MICA’s cross-disciplinary curricula, and found himself drawn to clothing. Not fashion, but rather the power and place of graphic design in the clothing industry. He began with a T-shirt.

“The T-shirt is an icon in our society, it’s a cheap, effective way to communicate,” Weikert says.

It struck him that T-shirts are billboards for the designer’s thoughts and the market is saturated with other people’s opinions. He created the Free Speech T-shirt, where an empty text bubble looks as though it is coming from the wearer’s own mouth (www. freespeechwear.com).

The recent birth of his daughter, Maya, took this thought process a step further. The most innocuous of clothing, Weikert realized, is infantwear. “There’s no real personality or voice or contemporary feel to baby clothes.” Weikert developed Small Roar, a line

of baby onesies with sophisticated and fun graphics.

Small Roar will be available late spring through his website and at Raw Sugar in Belvedere Square.

Top left: Zvezdana Rogic and Mike Weikert wear their original designs.

Left: Zvezdana Rogic’s ZigZag shirt is available for both men and women.

Above: With his Small Roar collection, designer Mike Weikert gives parents with personality a choice in baby wear.

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baltimore’s up-and-comers 20

Meet people whose successes are making Charm City better. compiled by molly rath photography by mitro hood

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urbanite march 05

The shop owner whose name you don’t know, the stage actor chasing the big screen, the preacher, the advocate, the corner-office guy, the musician. All successful in their own right, yet all tirelessly pursuing that next level of success. And all are contributing to the goodness that is uniquely Baltimore in the process.

In a city that annually anoints its “best” everything, Urbanite enters the annual celebratory fray with a series of profiles that shed light on the many other great things going in town, specifically the people making them happen. Spanning many professions, they’re people who are enjoying success right now but are also on a definite trajectory; they’re making an impact in their fields and are poised to reach beyond Baltimore if they haven’t already. They’re people you may or may not know, but their work represents Baltimore stories that should be told. They’re folks who are putting Baltimore on the map and doing it proud. They’re Baltimore’s upand-comers.

—Molly Rath

Jennifer Elisseeff

Duff Goldman

31 Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering Johns Hopkins University

30 Owner Charm City Cakes

Jennifer Elisseeff may change your life someday. The biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University is growing tissue for joint repair, an innovation that could lead to a far less invasive alternative to knee and hip surgery in the near future. In 2002 and 2003, MIT’s Technology Review named her a pioneer of technologies most likely to change the future. Weighty praise—and arguably pressure—for the young mom who treks from her Charles Village home to the lab, sometimes with her 6-year-old daughter in tow. But the unassuming Elisseeff, once the self-described “nerdy kid” with the microscope, will tell you she’s just somebody who loves her job. “I get to do engineering and design, trying to solve a problem,” she says. “I get to satisfy my curiosity and do something to help people, too.”

Elisseeff ’s scientific curiosity runs in the family. Her father is a material sciences professor, her sister a systems and industrial engineer, and her brother holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. Her own background is in material science, but she’s long been intrigued by medicine. Her current work combines those two worlds, and it was this unique combination of skills that helped spur the discoveries honored by MIT: using light to change material and finding new ways to inject materials for tissue repair.

Elisseeff is hard-pressed to pinpoint what, exactly, spurred her breakthrough. “I don’t think you know from the start; things are always clearer after the fact,” she says. “You have some idea of where you’re going, but it’s somewhat cloudy.”

She continues to experiment, ready to build on her past success. “You’re constantly defining yourself,” Elisseeff says, “trying to define what you like and also define your niche [and] where you can make an impact.”

Duff Goldman honed his cake-making talent in posh restaurants in Washington, D.C, Vail, and Napa Valley, but chose to make his own culinary mark in Baltimore—a city rarely noted for its gourmet fare. Not only has he made his mark, earning a national reputation for his wildly creative confections, he’s also built a six-person operation that has to turn business away. Not bad for a baker who figured he’d always have to fall back on a second job.

“This town is starved—no pun intended—for talent, and Baltimore is very receptive to something different,” says Duff. “We would probably do okay in almost any city, but Baltimore embraced us.”

While studying philosophy and physics at UMBC, Goldman worked with renowned Baltimore chef Cindy Wolf at the former Fells Point restaurant Savannah, where he baked cornbread and biscuits. He then studied pastrymaking at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley and toiled in some of the country’s finest kitchens. Five years ago he started churning out tiered, painted cakes from his Charles Village apartment. A website followed, and two years ago he made his first hire. Last year he moved to a new space, which he’s already outgrown. And a couple recent orders have pushed Charm City Cakes into a whole new cake kind of stratosphere: Last year the Baltimore Museum of Art ordered 55 BMA-shaped cakes as table centerpieces for its ninetieth anniversary gala. In January, a D.C. law firm commissioned a suitcase-sized replica of the United States Capitol for a presidential inauguration party. Today, Goldman and his employees are booking orders into 2006—at $175 to $1,800 a pop. “If somebody wants us to hang a cake from the ceiling,” Goldman says, “we’ll find a way to do it.”

—Jackie Powder

—Judy Oppenheimer

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Steve Yasko 42 General Manager WTMD FM 89.7 In the 1990s, Steve Yasko was well ensconced in NPR’s talk radio culture: He had helped the now-essential Diane Rehm Show go national. So why then, when a small college station approached him to help it convert from smooth jazz to rock and roll in 2002, did he bolt at the chance? “Music has always been my first love,” Yasko says. “Ever since the days of ’HFS and [on-air personality] Weasel, when ’HFS was a contributor to the society of radio … .”

The love of music can overwhelm, and the last two years have been heady ones for Yasko, now general manager of the revamped WTMD 89.7 FM. The station has whipped up loyal listeners, swerving back and forth between Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay and Luna. How about some trip-hop of the Brazilian Girls or the grind of Yo La Tengo? Why not, Yasko says, so long as the music is played by musicians who pay more attention to their craft than video choreography. “Music you’ve known all your life and music you have never dreamed,” he likes to call it. Music is spun by DJs, mostly Towson University grads, mostly for the 35- to 44-year-old set. With this formula WTMD has grown from 2,700 members to its current 6,000 who, along with station underwriters, fund a full three-quarters of WTMD’s budget. By June, Yasko is aiming to tack on another 3,200 members.

Major challenges still loom. The station needs new computers to switch from analog to digital, a costly proposition. But the passion that’s bouncing back and forth between DJs and the listeners reminds Yasko of the support that once built so rapidly behind NPR. “It’s an astounding thing for me to see a kid fall in love and be so passionate about radio,” he says. “And that’s when you realize the power of radio.”

David Plunkert 39 Principal Spur Design When David Plunkert and partner Joyce Hesselberth bought an old screenprinting plant seven years ago on Ash Street, just outside Hampden, the space was more than they’d wanted for their commercial design shop. But the couple has filled the 10,000-square-foot building by growing their business, Spur Design, and creating a gallery for graphic artists. Outside of the Maryland Institute College of Art, says Plunkert, “there aren’t that many spaces in town devoted to showing the work of commercial artists.”

Plunkert’s own work, meanwhile, can be seen on display posters for Theatre Project productions, and local clients include the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and AIDS Interfaith Residential Services. For the past two years, Spur has earned Best of Show from the Baltimore Advertising Association. Since its 1995 inception, the company has won numerous national design and illustration awards as well, and attracted big-name clients, like Business Week, the New York Times and MTV. “Beyond being idea-driven, there’s a deliberate coarseness to our work that I think makes it seem authentic,” Plunkert says. “It’s pretty easy these days to create a pristine, shiny piece of print or a professional-looking website. It’s far harder to make either look like a human hand was involved in their creation when everything gets poured into the computer strainer.”

There’s even a hint of Baltimore to Spur’s designs. “It’s a very unpretentious town, and as a result I think our work can be a little gritty and dirty,” Plunkert says. “The visual vocabulary of a Baltimore street is very different than Manhattan.”

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—J.P.

—Charles Cohen

Lisa Cimino 34 Jewelry Designer Chee-me-no No one was more surprised than Lisa Cimino to discover she’d become a workaholic. But that happens when you find your true calling. As a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Baltimore native “dabbled at everything, every class, pretty much—just to see what clicked.” When she did metalwork on a lathe, she knew she’d found her future.

Her peers agree. This winter, the American Craft Council (ACC) tapped Cimino for its exclusive mentor program, which teamed 10 promising newcomers with veteran artists. Cimino says being singled out by the ACC was the break she’s been working for and getting a spot at their annual February show was “an incredibly big deal.” The event, which juries its participants very carefully, attracts more than 3,000 wholesale buyers from around the country. “When I say American Craft Council,” says Cimino, “everyone says, ‘Wow.’” These days, Cimino is in a design zone. “The visions are nonstop,” she says. “The more I work, the more things come to me. I work six or seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day. That’s what I feel like I need to do.”

Cimino doesn’t have to look far for inspiration. Her mother is a painter, her father a carpenter, and her ACC mentor, veteran jewelry maker Teri Logan, “a bundle of knowledge and wisdom,” she says. Cimino is currently using her website to sell her Chee-me-no jewelry line (www.chee-meno.com) which is also available at Mud and Metal in Hampden. Soon, she hopes, “it will be all over the place.”

—J.O.

Eric Blair 32 Principal Mission Film Eric Blair has been developing his own camera style since he was 8 years old, aiming his Super 8 while tied to the roof rack of his father’s station wagon, his father coasting slowly so the little filmmaker could get that perfect panning shot.

The decades of practice show. Last May, the Maryland Film Festival screened Travellers & Magicians, a second film by Buddhist filmmaker Khyentse Norbu.

Shot in the tiny Himalayan country Bhutan, Travellers & Magicians blows up beautifully on-screen. Blair and crew skillfully crafted shots that both captured the subtle grace of the characters and framed the larger-than-life landscape. “The film itself was such a meditative and spiritual journey on a lot of levels,” Blair says. “The filmmakers are spiritual people and they made magic.”

But rather than wait for accolades to spur the next opportunity, Blair the cameraman immerses himself in one promising project after another. He’s producing edgy web advertising, documentaries and commercial music videos at Mission Media by day; after hours he’s hosting a Bhutan film crew that flew to Baltimore to work with him on a movie about Milarepa, a Tibetan Saint.

Blair has spent half a lifetime climbing the ranks of the film camera-manning business: ten years working for free on low-budget productions; camera assistant jobs on TV’s Homicide and the HBO special The Corner; and camerawork on numerous films shot in the region. Then in 2002, Alan Kozlowski, director of photography for Travellers & Magicians, asked Blair to go to Bhutan to work a camera alongside him and teach the Bhutanese crew how to shoot. “[The Norbu] connection, and Eric’s career path tell you all you need to know about the power of film and Baltimore,” says Maryland Film Festival Director Jed Dietz.

—C.C. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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David Miller 32 Chief Visionary Officer Urban Leadership Institute David Miller recently collected stories of Baltimore dope dealers, mothers mourning murdered children, and teenage witnesses to violence. He spliced them with locally produced hip-hop music and poetry, recorded a CD and gave it the name Why Cry When No One’s Listening?

Then he blanketed the city with 10,000 copies for free.

The CD is trademark Miller: plain-spoken, with words that can be emotionally difficult to hear. Firsthand accounts of three little girls killed by gunfire while jumping rope, or a rap tune about a 13-year-old boy ducking guns and drugs. The CD is equally difficult to ignore, making it effective— something that efforts to curb youth violence in Baltimore City haven’t exactly been in recent years. In a field where reliance on advocates and think-tank research is strong, Miller’s in-your-face approach to the plight of cities’ at-risk youth is unique, and it is winning ULI consulting contracts nationwide.

Miller grew up in Baltimore City, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Baltimore and a master’s degree in education from Goucher College, then taught in Baltimore City schools. Years of seeing friends and students get locked up and laid down triggered a personal mission to reverse the odds so heavily stacked against young black men.

“In today’s classrooms it’s Little Jay-Z, Little Lil’ Kim, Little Britney Spears. The children have changed,” he says. “The system hasn’t.” So in 1999, along with former fellow teacher LaMarr Darnell Shields, he founded ULI to consult mostly institutional clients on everything from youth empowerment to fatherhood and anger-management among African American boys and men.

Next fall ULI will open a Saturday school for boys. Meanwhile, Miller continues honing his message—giving youth a voice, and telling others what it’s like to be them.

—C.C.

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Thomas E. Wilcox 57 President Baltimore Community Foundation Outside Thomas Wilcox’s Guilford home sits six inches of snow, but the sun is shining. Wilcox, whose disposition typically mirrors the sky today, not the ground, exudes the cheery optimism of a city booster. Which he is. As president of the Baltimore Community Foundation, a collection of some 400 charitable funds, Wilcox uses his ebullience to woo would-be philanthropists to help the foundation fulfill its mission: improve the quality of life in greater Baltimore.

“We go to people and tell them what they can do to make a difference in neighborhoods,” Wilcox says. “We have to deal with this overwhelming poverty and suffering, but we also need to remember to build from our strengths.” That “difference” has been happening at a much faster clip in the four-and-a-half years since Wilcox arrived here from Boston. Between 2000 and 2004, the foundation’s annual contributions more than tripled.

That success comes in large part from the programs and services that have evolved under Wilcox’s leadership. He has overseen funding of successful pilot programs like the Healthy Neighborhoods Initiative, which makes small grants to neighborhoods for beautification, marketing, and belowmarket-rate mortgages. This fall, Wilcox’s team will launch a pioneering philanthropic program that will be the first of its kind in the nation and will serve to connect potential donors with specific areas of interest. “As we look to the future, we are thinking about how we can make our grantmaking more strategic, part of a big-picture vision for Baltimore, and how we can connect BCF donors and others to that vision,” Wilcox says. “We know that there are good things going on all over Baltimore, but we frequently hear that ‘the dots aren’t connected.’ We aim to connect the dots.”

—Michael Anft

Priya Rayadurg 38 Founder Cloud 9 In the risky world of retail last year, Priya Rayadurg did the unthinkable. She closed her original Cloud 9 women’s clothing store at Towson Town Center to focus on thriving shops in Hampden and Canton. Now she’s gambling on similar success with a new store—which, under a new name, will target a slightly older crowd—slated to open at Belvedere Square in April. With a current customer base that spans from teenagers to professional 30-somethings, and now 35- to 40-year-olds with the new store, Rayadurg bets her city-centered strategy will succeed. The stores project a unique attitude, she says. “We have sort of become a destination.”

Cloud 9 has also become that rare thing in Baltimore: a locally-based chain at a time when retail success odds in the city are spotty. Yet Cloud 9 has—methodically over a decade—gone from mall tchotchke kiosk to a multistore operation. It’s a strategy that makes “tremendous business sense, ” says Tim Hearn, a principal with commercial realtor KLNB Retail. “Those locations all have tremendous access to a young, hip urban population—either single or newly married,” he says of the Hampden, Canton and Belvedere Square stores.

“And that population doesn’t spend a lot of time in traditional mall locations.”

Rayadurg and her husband, Randy Shayotovich, ran kiosks at the Towson mall in the early 1990s. In 1997, one kiosk selling hippie-style revival clothes morphed into Cloud 9, and just kept evolving—from earthy to clubby to, when the Hampden store opened in 2002, slightly older and artsy. And now, under the name Sweet Papaya, the Belvedere Square store will target women ages 35 to 40. “I just go by what I feel is going to be the newest trend,” Rayadurg says.

—J.P.

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Aaron Heinsman 33 Public Relations Director Center Stage Theaters, symphonies, and cultural institutions in many cities are struggling to broaden their audiences and to remain viable. At Center Stage, the typical patron is an affluent, 55-year-old white woman. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that Aaron Heinsman, the theater’s new public relations director, would like to see those parameters open up to include, well, everyone else.

Heinsman, who was named to the post in May 2004, has already made great strides in reaching that goal. Not through slick marketing campaigns, and not because he has a bottom-line incentive to simply put people in seats, but because Heinsman truly believes in the power of theater to change lives.

Heinsman tested that belief in January when he held a community forum at the theater in connection with the production of Elmina’s Kitchen, a play about gang brutality and fatherhood set in London’s West Indian community.

Heinsman, who grew up with theater, knew the powerful play would hit home in a city where violence claims the lives of so many youth. So he created a day-long forum to address issues of families, fatherhood, and forgiveness.

(Urbanite cosponsored the event.)

Participants included the play’s author, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Acting Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm, and Aqeela Sherrills, a former Los Angeles gang leader-turned-peace broker. Most of the 350-plus attendees had never been to Center Stage before.

The event marked the theater’s entry into “a new era,” Heinsman says.

“We want to reach out, to cultivate a young audience, make theater-going part of their experience,” he says. At the end of the program, the theater gave discounted tickets for future performances to all attendees.

Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant 33 Founding Pastor Empowerment Temple If the Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant had to pick a life-changing experience, it was flunking eleventh grade. That and the following year he spent in Africa, where his father served as African Methodist Episcopal Bishop of Liberia. “It made me reevaluate my education, put things in perspective,” he says. “I realized I hadn’t been applying myself.”

The change was permanent. From there he earned a GED, then a BA from Morehouse College, followed by a master’s of divinity from Duke. For four years he served as national youth director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and then considered becoming a lawyer.

“But God had other plans,” he says. “I felt a call to pastor.” So back to his native Baltimore he moved and in 2000 started a church, the Empowerment Temple, which, with 9,000 members, has been billed the fastest growing African Methodist Episcopal church in the nation.

Aiming directly at young people, he appeared on hip-hop and R&B radio shows, delivering his message to the secular sector. “I was intentionally not trying to attract church people. And no other church group was advertising on those stations.” The strategy worked. Today, the church—with a staff of fifty-five, including six pastors-in-training—features an elementary school, a family life center, and a jail ministry.

Bryant hopes his ministry can keep up with the momentum. Meanwhile, he’s proud of his church—and his city, despite a travel schedule that takes him from Africa to America’s west coast in a single week. “I think Baltimore is really developing, on the cusp of doing great things. I wouldn’t want to be pastoring anywhere else in the world,” he says.

—J.O.

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—J.O.

Ellis Marsalis III 40 Poet, Photographer t.p. Luce lives on a block in Belair-Edison where a hungry kid might knock on his door at two in the morning, trolling for Pop-Tarts. And t.p. Luce, the nom de plume of Ellis Marsalis III, will oblige. “Most people want to help people only on their own personal terms,” Marsalis says. “I try to help them when they need it.”

Besides being the block source of midnight snacks, rides and small loans, Marsalis has spent his 10 years on Ramona Avenue chronicling the neighborhood in verse and through the lens of his camera. His block has become thaBloc: words, photographs and baltimore city in black, white and gray , a 114-page book of Marsalis’s often-arresting photo narratives set opposite his sometimes-bittersweet, sometimes-caustic musings on street life in Baltimore.

“My neighborhood is my people,” Marsalis says. “thaBloc is an attempt to create a document of record for them, not for the dominant culture.”

The son of a New Orleans jazz icon and brother to two others isn’t trying to change the world or even his block with his book, which stars Cuzzo, Little G, Krut, Juice, and Nita—his neighbors. A graduate of New York University’s photography program, he set out merely to tell their story. Having embraced the photo-narrative form in college, Marsalis moved to Baltimore in 1990; after failed attempts at cataloging black life on the east and west sides, he discovered Belair-Edison in 1994—and his subjects.

Since publishing thaBloc last year, Marsalis has conducted readings up and down the East Coast, and his photos will be displayed at Minas Gallery in Hampden in July. He’s also at work on a new book based on the third section of thaBloc, “black (sonnets).” “It will deal with the whole black thing,” Marsalis says. “It will fill in the piece that’s missing when we talk about race in this country.”

—M.A.

Chris Gilbert 38 Curator of Contemporary Art Baltimore Museum of Art Chris Gilbert came to town 18 months ago and immediately went to work redefining the role of contemporary art in Baltimore. Gilbert set up “Cram Sessions,” a series of exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, each a month long, each aimed at expanding viewers’ conception of art. This year, the curator plans to follow up with eight solo exhibits that he says are “a little more intense.”

Gilbert describes his approach to curating as “somewhat different … probably unusual in American museums—an attempt to work in a more improvised way.”

BMA Director Doreen Bolger articulates his effect on the 90-year-old museum more boldly. “When people speak about contemporary art, they mean many different things,” she says. “For Chris it means art now, right now. He has broadened the definition of contemporary art. It is a leap for us. We’re pushing ourselves closer to the edge,” she adds.

Gilbert, who came from an associate curator’s post at the Des Moines Art Center, hopes to use contemporary art to offer “an alternative, an openness of discussion, and a permissiveness” to BMA patrons. And that, Bolger says, puts the BMA ahead of its time. “All the things we love the most today, like the Impressionists, at one time were revolutionary,” she says. “Time makes us see things in different ways. It’s unusual to have the quality of vision to be able to see now what others take decades to see. And Chris has that vision.”

If some exhibits tend to confuse the uninitiated, and those of us more familiar with traditional art, that’s okay with him. “Confusion can be an important part of the learning process,” he says.

—J.O. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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Lance Coadie Williams 27 Resident Actor Everyman Theatre The highlight of Lance Coadie Williams’ still-young acting career was traveling to Greece in 2003 with Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre to perform a production of Oedipus Rex that included original dance routines modeled on African dance. “To stand there, with the Acropolis behind you and 4,000 people in front of you waiting for you to open your mouth isn’t something you forget,” he says. “I remember standing there and saying to myself, ‘Man, this is a long way from West Baltimore.’”

It’s hardly the only highlight. The School for the Arts graduate has had people waiting for him to open his mouth in several cities. Besides his regular gig at Everyman Theatre, Williams has spent one season as a regular on The Wire (“as Bailey, the stickup guy,” he says), another at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, and another at the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C. But now, it’s his future that has folks talking. “He’s got that special something,” says Vincent Lancisi, Everyman’s artistic director, noting that Williams is equally comfortable in classics roles and contemporary plays.

“When Lance first walked in for an audition here (for a role in Blues for an Alabama Sky, by Pearl Cleage), you could see it.” Williams is hoping film and television casting directors see it too. And Lancisi reckons Baltimore will lose Williams to the big screen. “I’ll plan for him next season,” Lancisi says, “but I won’t be surprised if I get the phone call.”

If the call does come, Williams says he’ll hang around to keep an eye on his five siblings, all of whom are younger and have begun to follow his trail, from a rough-and-tumble part of Edmondson Village into the arts world. “They’ve learned that there are no limitations to what they can do,” Williams says. “I make sure they see everything I do.”

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—M.A.

Lea Gilmore 39 Blues Singer, Social Activist The next Ethel Ennis. That’s what people call her. When Baltimore’s own Lea Gilmore sings gospel and the blues, audiences are transformed. She’s played the Kennedy Center, fronted 2,000-voice choruses in Belgium, amazed crowds at venues throughout Europe and Africa, and performed solo with the Baltimore, New Haven, and Cleveland symphony orchestras. Gilmore has a voice that fills rooms. After a classic performance in Belgium, one writer said, “Seldom have I felt so much emotion flow through me as when hearing her voice.”

Gilmore is such a force, in part, because she isn’t just a talented performer, she is also a tireless advocate. She writes and lectures on African music, women’s rights and human rights. She celebrates the lives of the great blues women who paved the way through her award-winning website, “It’s a Girl Thang—Women in the Blues” (www.bluesland.net/thang).

The Morgan State graduate once served as the director for the local chapter of the ACLU. For a time, she questioned redirecting her focus away from her advocacy work to perform. Being pulled in two directions had Gilmore feeling conflicted. That is, until her mother gave her some priceless advice: “It’s not either/or, it can also be and,” Gilmore recalls.

In 2001, she released a CD in support of a nonprofit organization that assists people with leprosy and tuberculosis in third-world countries. Today, she continues to fight for reproductive health rights for women of color at the Diversity Program in Washington, D.C. Singing advances her belief in basic human rights. “If you can change the world with a word, then you’re doing something that might sound idealistic,” she says. “But honey, if you’re not doing it, who else will?”

After touring Europe this spring, Gilmore will return home to record her fourth CD of blues and gospel.

—C.C.

Svetoslav Stoyanov 23 Master Percussionist, Teacher Peabody Institute’s Preparatory Percussion Studios On a winter afternoon in his Mount Vernon apartment, Svet Stoyanov recovers from jet lag after a trip to Los Angeles, where the master percussionist gave a concert at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Within the month are appearances in Arizona, New York and Iowa. “I think Iowa,” he says, somewhat uncertainly.

Stoyanov is fast attracting notice on the international music scene. Six years ago he came to Baltimore from Bulgaria on full scholarship from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. After graduating in 2003, he won the annual international competition of the Concert Artists Guild. This prestigious New York agency for emerging classical music talent signed him and is grooming him for the life of a professional musician. So far, the contract has allowed Stoyanov to participate in collaborative projects with world-class musicians and composers. He made his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, premiering a Phillip Glass concerto. In March he’ll debut a piece for percussion and violin in Tucson. And when he’s not traveling, Stoyanov is working toward a graduate performance degree at Peabody and teaching percussion at the school’s preparatory division.

“He’s an unbelievably gifted kid,” says Peabody faculty member Robert van Sice. “It’s a lethal mix of natural talent and a very serious work ethic, and you rarely get both in the same package. I think he will develop a very serious solo career in the next five years.”

With his growing notoriety, Stoyanov hopes to bring percussion to a wider audience. And he’s encouraged by the response so far. “At concerts, people come up to me and say, ‘Can I get a CD?’” he says. “There’s something very new and very exciting about it. People love rhythm.”

—J.P. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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Nolan Rollins 32 President Greater Baltimore Leadership Association As a law school graduate working in the Baltimore City state’s attorney’s office, Nolan Rollins discovered the role of prosecutor wasn’t for him. “I realized what end of the spectrum I should be on—the end that prevents a person from ever having to see a state’s attorney,” he says. A subsequent stint working with prisoners confirmed that hunch as he often asked himself, “What could have helped them and prevented this?” And nearly three years ago, when he was chosen by Greater Baltimore Urban League President J. Howard Henderson to launch a young professionals’ auxiliary of the historic nonprofit, he believed he had his chance.

As president of the Greater Baltimore Leadership Association, Rollins oversees recruitment of 21- to 40-year-olds to carry out the Urban League mission: to empower African-Americans and other minorities through financial independence, education, public health and political activism. In the process, he’s helped grow the national group into an organization some 3,500 members and 47chapters strong; he serves as eastern region vice president.

Rollins’s work parallels a rebirth for Baltimore’s Urban League, which under financial duress nearly collapsed five years ago. He was recently named director of housing and community development for the organization, where he’ll do what he set out to do a few years ago. “The next logical step to the civil rights movement is economic parity and power,” Rollins says. “Housing is a huge issue … Maryland is the fifth least affordable market. [The urban league should] provide home-ownership counseling, work with low- to moderate-income folks, and act as the conduit.”

—J.O.

Jules Dunham 35 President Jul Enterprise Nonprofits live and die by the grant. But often it’s their obsession with funding that becomes their undoing. For the past five years, Jules Dunham, founder of the Upton-based development consulting firm, Jul Enterprise, has shown nonprofits how to steer clear of the desperate pursuit of money. Her tact: Get your financial house in order and the rest will follow.

“The nonprofit starts out strong, but they get weaker because they do what we call ‘chasing the dollar,’ and the next thing, they’re doing 12 different programs, ” Dunham says. With the nation’s top 1,000 foundations doling out $17.9 billion annually, she’s tell clients: The money is out there; don’t reinvent yourself for every grant posted. Then she’ll offer them business skills, like how to write a revenue-generation business plan.

Dunham fell into her current line of work thanks to a 1996 jump from the United Nations to the Baltimore-based International Youth Foundation. It was there that she learned the value of networking. “Sometimes money is not the most important thing for funding,” she says. “It’s access to the funders’ spheres of influence … they know others who have money.”

These days Dunham is working to give more nonprofits access to the funding network. She’s also doing her part to grow the funding pot. Last year, Dunham helped create the Legacy Leaders program to establish a fundraising arm for the alumni association of Associated Black Charities.

“Her passion for others leads her to be compassionate for their causes and issues, ” says Associated Black Charities COO Barbara Armstrong, adding that, as a brand-new graduate of ABC’s Legacy Leaders program last spring, Dunham encouraged her graduating class to raise some $4,000 to send other participants through the program this year.

—C.C.

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Will Backstrom 39 Vice President for Community Reinvestment Act Lending Bradford Bank Will Backstrom admits his job is hard to describe. There have been years spent organizing neighborhood potluck dinners in Mount Vernon, others spent talking up buyers about then-teetering Patterson Park, and a few when he worked to link homeowners with prospective neighbors in Butcher’s Hill and elsewhere. Through it all, he says, one technique has worked best when it comes to improving neighborhoods by “encouraging” people to buy into them: “Grab ’em, hold ’em to the ground, and don’t let them up until they sign the contract,” he jokes.

While he has stopped short of physical coercion, Backstrom and his years as a conduit between lenders, foundations, neighborhood leaders, and would-be homeowners have earned him a reputation as the city’s answer-man when it comes to rebuilding communities, one low-rate mortgage or home-improvement loan at a time.

As head of Bradford Bank’s community reinvestment office since July, Backstrom uses long-standing relationships with banks, city government, and neighborhood groups to help shore up communities on the edge. “Neighborhood revitalization is all about bringing capital in,” he says. “My job is to work to get creative loans for people who need them.” Toward that end, he has persuaded foundations to underwrite low-cost home improvement loans and hosted meetings on “neighborhood catalyzation,” which he helped bring to Patterson Park in the late 1990s.

Bradford Bank, a 101-year-old local institution, has made its community reinvestment office a separate unit in hopes of creating more loans for needy city neighborhoods. Backstrom says that Bradford’s local knowledge is rare in an era of national-chain banks and fewer local branches. “We have a chance to get a lot done because we’re here,” he says. “We want to use our resources to unlock bank money for community initiatives that aren’t giveaways. We know this stuff works.”

—M.A.

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Mark Komisky 39 CEO Bluefire Security Technologies Five years ago, Mark Komisky bunkered down in a garage with his business partner and his brother to hammer out a PowerPoint presentation to sell investors on a timely idea: the production of software to protect handheld, wireless data devices from hackers.

Today Bluefire Security Technologies, the company that grew out of that PowerPoint effort, has 38 employees and offices in Tide Point, with a new strategic partner in Motorola and a $10 million commitment from Grotech Capital Group, one of the largest venture capital firms in the Southeast. “Having Motorola as a strategic partner shows the industry that they believe in our future,” Komisky says. Komisky declines to say just how much Motorola is investing in Bluefire, but notes Motorola is the No. 1 provider of secured communication gear to government agencies. With the particulars still being finalized, Komisky expects Bluefire will expand this year and record its firstever profit.

Bluefire was founded in 2001 on the assumption that a viable company could be made from Charles Komisky’s product ideas and the financial acumen of Mark Komisky and Will Clemens. “That was the idea,” says CEO Mark Komisky, who with Clemens ran a firm that invested in early-stage companies before Bluefire began.

The recent investment by Grotech, which has backed a number of the region’s most successful technology start-ups, is a kind of graduation for Bluefire, signaling that it has the backing of a strong financial partner. Komisky doesn’t have to look too far for a model. Advertising.com is Bluefire’s neighbor in Tide Point, and it sold for $435 million in cash last year. Groetch was one of its main financial backers.

—C.C.

Baltimore Green Week is back in 2005 with 7 days of events celebrating the environmental resources of the region and highlighting sustainable design and

image courtesy of Shelley & Groll

communities.

Saturday, April 2 Sunday, April 3 Monday, April 4 Tuesday, April 5 Wednesday, April 6 Thursday, April 7 Friday, April 8

Project Clean Stream Arbor Day Preparation ECO Festival Forum on Livable Communities BCSI Design Conference Arbor Day Activity AIA Lecture Sustainable Film The Great Green Celebration www.baltimoregreenweek.org

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fiction

by andria nacina cole

Such Evenings It was Thursday already, and anyway, you knew he was itching by the way he tapped his feet double time.

He said, “Don’t nobody want to take a ride? Don’t nobody want to catch some of that sweet air in they mouth? Stuffy in here, ain’t it, Lin? Pam, you not hot? Roy Jr.? Marian? Sugar, what ’bout you?”

And he coughed and fanned himself with a newspaper and then a magazine and finally with his hands the size of New York. He let his corduroy thighs open and close and squish his dick to a soft beige triangle between them.

“Naw, Daddy, we’re fine, thank you. We like it this warm. Too cold outside,” Pam said, pretending to sort through the mess of a doll baby’s hair.

But those words weren’t filling. He swallowed them with tight lips. Sure, he sat a spell. Quiet. Hummed made-up things to himself. Watched Marian whisper something to Sugar and then Sugar whisper back. After a while though, the humming turned angry and he pressed his fat lips closer. He choked the music inside his mouth, down past his open throat—deep as a well and absolutely always thirsty. Strangling those stupid songs back down his neck, he cut his eyes on them.

He said, “Ya’ll gonna have to take a ride! Shit!”

And Pam lay the doll in her lap. Her eyes went soft, and she found Linda to look at. Linda’s off-black knees peeked through her skirt, and she sat stone still on the sofa.

“I been working all day, I’m damned tired, damn it.”

And Marian and Sugar stopped their soft talk and smiles.

“I work hard for ya’ll and I need a little time to myself. Can’t a man spend a few hours of his day alone? Without a wife and hungry kids hounding him?

That’s a bunch of bullshit if that’s what you telling me! A man big and grown as me, working hard as I work, one day after the next, can’t get a minute!”

So they collected the ankles and bare feet beneath them like fruit and ran. All six of them. But the mother especially. From the kitchen sink, where she’d been listening with hands trembling in dishwater, she darted and began gathering the thick wool coats and mufflers and mittens. Her worn feet barely brushed the floor she moved so fast.

She said, “Please God, please God,” under her breath and tripped over the loose hem of her pants. Even Roy Jr., for whom the excitement meant nothing yet, stayed out of her way and pretended he was busy when all he was doing was counting his teeth with his tongue. The children lined themselves, like cans, against a wall in the mother’s bedroom. They knew she was swiftest and could have everything assembled and upon them before they blinked twice.

From bedroom to bedroom, she heaped hat over hat on her still-wet fist and hung scarves from her lithe arms. She tried to pass them on, but the children chose not to receive them and hung their hands at their sides like twine. They looked at her with all those questions almost tripping out their mouths.

She whispered, “Don’t start with me. Don’t say a thing. Don’t you ask me nothing. Don’t you say nothing to me.”

Hugging the coats, she closed the door with her hip.

“I’m trying, ain’t I? I’m trying. If one ain’t saved, well, I think that’s better than none. Don’t you?”

Their heads jerked left and eight brown eyes stopped on Linda.

“Don’t you answer that. I’m not asking that for an answer. I don’t need to hear nothing right now. All I need to hear is the air in an’ outta my ear or y’all running to the car. Stop looking at me.”

But they didn’t.

“This is bigger than me. He bigger than me. His fist’ll eat me whole. I shouldn’t say that … he ain’t one to hit. I’m just saying there ain’t nothing I can do. I’m trying to get us all outta here, but if y’all don’t go, well just be happy it ain’t you. And if it is you, well, … well, that’s what it is.”

And her hands, slight as the rest of her, became warm and one thing became two in her sight. And suddenly, she was the mother of ten blurry, bushyheaded things, not five, whose features she could not make out. And her heart, usually tired and weak as one dunk worth of tea, beat against itself so hard its pulse slammed through her neck and her ankles, and if she was still, through her mauve-colored lips. She rushed the hazy-faced children using that tone of voice, the one too high that made them pound their hands against their ears and bite the insides of their cheeks. She poked them in their stomachs and said, “Go on, go on.”

And they wanted to smack her and call her coward.

Linda, the second oldest, the prettiest, the one with bread-soft breasts and ass filled to the verge of her panties, always dressed the fastest. She was rabbitquick on such evenings. So much so that she missed a button, guaranteed, and absolutely always stood lopsided with deer-dumb eyes. She was this way just then and the mother pointed. “Your coat, Lin … your coat on wrong.”

“Don’t matter!” Pam said, but the mother snatched those words out the air like they were one single worker bee and said, “Don’t you try it. Don’t you try it ’less you want all our heads bashed in the ground.” And she was not stung.

The six of them made their way to the living room where Roy Sr. was still grinding his dick and fanning his squat face.

“Come on, kids. Roy Jr., Linda, Marian, Sugar, Pam.” The mother threw her quaking arms around their necks like rope while they posed for their father.

“Let’s give your daddy a minute to breathe and collect his thoughts. Working so hard for us, don’t he deserve a minute?”

Collectively, they took one step back. Then two.

“I tell ya, Roy, I know what you mean, needing a minute to yourself. I’m just gonna take the girls and Roy Jr. to that ice cream parlor around the way, and we’ll just set there for a hour or so. You think it’s too cold for ice cream, Roy?” They paused, waiting in their coats buttoned to the collar, with damp hands shoved to the lint bottoms of their pockets. No matter that it was one degree outside, they were hell hot waiting on that answer. For a whole minute before he spoke, they rocked from their left feet to their right, buoyed in the quiet, trying hard to disguise Linda among them. And Linda was so tall and so much browner than the rest of them—like the soft wet mud on their shoes.

They didn’t say one word watching their father in his chair with that neck thick as sirloin holding still that head that housed that mouth filled to the pink roof with an entire ocean of foul words.

He said, “I don’t care if you go to the moon … just get going.”

The mother, brown as she was, went cherry red, and her heart knocked her chest open like a screen door.

She turned and walked, as she knew she would, and the children did the same. At the door, they began their shoving against her and their voices sped to keep up with their hearts.

Then he said, “Linda, why don’t you stay here with me? Sit a spell and talk?”

And fine Linda, eyes dumb as a deer’s, coat plenty warm but buttoned all wrong, with those dumpling-sweet breasts and ass wide as the noon sun. Pretty Linda, tall enough to pinch her lips closed and almost kiss the sky. Linda. Linda, Linda. Linda Tichelle Grant. Miss Linda Tichelle Grant, big in all the wrong places, turned and took her seat next to the corduroy lap.

And the congregation of cowards leapt over the threshold, looked behind them only to be sure the door was shut, piled penny-roll tight into the car, and drove rabbit-quick to the moon. n

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urbanite march 05

The Towson University Multicultural Institute presents the 11th Annual Conference

Empowering The Creative Community

Keynote Speaker Rebecca Hoffberger Founder of & Director of the Visionary Art Museum Conference Co-Chairs Key Broadwater & Evangeline Wheeler

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Wednesday March 9, 2005

sustainable city

by

miriam desharnais

Baltimore Green Week April 2–8

GreenWeek B A LT I M O R E

When you think of Baltimore, does the word “green” drift before your eyes? Lush, verdant, leafy … wait, was that a piece of litter that just blew by? Sometimes living in the city makes it difficult to remember how nature fits into our lives and how we fit into nature. Yet there are groups of people—sustainable designers, ecologically minded architects and others of their ilk—who want to bring us models of what a harmonious environment could look like. They bring it to us through the annual Baltimore Green Week, to be held this year April 2 through 8 at various spots throughout the city.

Baltimore Green Week began with a conference call two years ago among a group of design and construction professionals who share a passion for keeping development sustainable. This small but dedicated subculture is like the architectural equivalent of the Slow Food movement, and they started to plan a get-together where they could exchange ideas and products. It quickly blossomed into a series of programs, and Baltimore Green Week evolved as a sort of umbrella organization for groups with shared interests. They held their first program in March 2004.

What was surprising was how many regular folks turned out. The public’s response to last year’s five-day series of events shocked even the organizers, who never anticipated that three and a half months of hard work would attract several hundred people interested in sustainable design.

Let’s pause for a moment here and make sure we’re all clear on what sustainable design means: “That’s the big question,” says Baltimore Green Week founding member Megan Nash. “It’s being cognizant not only of the resources we use in the

building of a structure, but of how to conserve over the whole life of the building.

“We’re not focused on projects that get a quick return on an investment in, say, five years” Nash says, “but with making something that lasts eighty years, longer even, and creates some harmony between the natural environment and the built environment.”

Interior designer and secretary of the Baltimore Green Week board, Julie Brady, offers examples of sustainable home design. “I have radiant heating in my house, which works well and saves money,” Brady says. “I use paints that are low in VOCs [volatile organic compounds], and [use] insulation and cabinets that have not been treated with formaldehyde. It results in cleaner air because there is less off-gassing.”

I wonder aloud how an apartment dweller like me can incorporate green design at home, and Brady rattles off a string of practices I either already do or have been thinking of doing—simple things ranging from using a weather-proofing kit on windows, to buying local goods when possible (saving resources used in transportation), to thrifting, salvaging and swapping rather than buying new. I’m greener than I realized!

Although a certain amount of theory is a part of Baltimore Green Week, the ultimate goal is to draw many new voices into a discussion on how to make practical daily choices. The program offerings are diverse, open to the public, and mostly free.

—Miriam DesHarnais lives the green life in Hamp den. She wrote about the Baltimore Rumor Control Hotline in February.

Here’s a sampling of events happening during Baltimore Green Week. Visit www.baltimoregreenweek.org for up-to-date program listings, times, and contact information.

Saturday, April 2: Project Clean Stream offers a chance for you and your wee ones to muck about in Baltimore Watershed streams picking up trash.

(Julie Brady says her 4-year-old son likes picking up trash so much that she’s getting him his own poker stick.)

Sunday, April 3: The Eco Festival, cohosted with the Baltimore City Department of Parks and Recreation, sounds like the Maryland Home and Garden Show, minus the bad pizza and aluminum siding salespeople. It promises educational programs and access to vendors with sustainable ideas for the homeowner and the renter alike.

Monday, April 4: The Discussion Forum on Livable Communities is an opportunity for residents to meet civic leaders and experts to explore how we can work together for more livable communities.

Wednesday, April 6 AIA sponsors a lecture on the Historic Preservation Movement with journalist and urban critic Roberta Brandes Gratz, author of The Living City: How America’s Cities are Being Revitalized by Thinking Small in a Big Way, and Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown.

Want to volunteer to help organize and execute Baltimore Green Week?

Contact Baltimore Green Week at info@baltimoregreenweek.org or call 443‑573‑4136.

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Media Partners American Craft Council, American Style Magazine, Clay Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Urbanite, WYPR, Comcast, Patuxent Publishing, Inside Annapolis, Skelton Design & The Cecil Whig Special Thanks to NCECA

out there

by cara ober

TURF

Art on Borrowed Rush hour froths about in New York City’s midtown.

Clogged traffic halts, then crawls, while pedestrians trickle through teeming sidewalks, amidst clanking horns and construction tape. Over in the large store window where mannequins once modeled the latest wares under bright commercial lighting, a griefstricken woman stands perfectly still. Her sorrow

photography by laura lee pedersen

New York’s Trans Urban Roaming Forum proposes a creative solution to downtown spaces in transition.

nal Street while at her day job in a real estate firm.

She convinced the owner of the building to donate six floors of the space for two weeks in August 2001. Then, she invited different curators, assigned each to a different floor, and the uncannily named Ground Zero—an exhibit exploring the transformation of the building and the surrounding neigh-

hiring a cleaning person to organize the room and then documenting the subsequent messes and cleanups. As the artist and cleaning person “reorder” each other’s decisions, her documentation illuminates the subtle and rarely noticed choices all of us make in clean-up and construction of a home, as the residence itself was being prepared for a new identity.

borhood—was born. After the initial success and support for this event, Liu was inspired to continue the roaming exhibitions.

The aim of TURF is to create opportunities for emerging artists and curators in New York City where the amount of professional quality art exceeds the available exhibition locations. Combined with the notion that there is an abundance of temporarily unused real estate in the city, TURF is able to create whole new audiences and exhibitions for artists and curators while incurring a minimal expense. As a nonprofit organization, TURF is funded by grants and donations, and is supported by board members and volunteers. Besides the opportunities for artists, these roving exhibitions increase exposure for real estate professionals and developers without expensive advertising on their part.

Curator Erin Donnelly favors the temporary and site-specific projects because these locations are “not simply neutral containers for art” but rather, “an opportunity to explore a unique building, neighborhood, or even the act of transformation” that has left the spot temporarily available.

Artists who work with TURF are encouraged to use the setting itself as inspiration. TURF artist Franziska Lamprecht, in her exhibition Kunstputze, utilized a space being renovated from a residence to a school. Lamprecht’s installation resembled an unkempt apartment constantly shifting its appearance.

The performative part of the installation involved

Bringing the art to the audience isn’t a new idea, but TURF accomplishes this goal in a more direct and personal fashion than museums and galleries. According to Donnelly, “the more people who can be involved in the art conversation, the better.”

Along with the exhibitions, TURF schedules supplementary lectures, film screenings, performances, and panel discussions, which also connect artists and audiences. Because these exhibits are more available and are in less intimidating environments, Donnelly says a new opportunity arises “for the audience to break out of traditional roles of recipients of culture, and instead, [become] participants.”

Baltimore has begun exploring similar programs, with both Mayor O’Malley and Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership, championing the creative reuse of empty spaces. TURF can serve as a good model. By developing empty spaces, by offering artists residencies, studios, and galleries, and simultaneously reinvigorating corporate offices, neglected storefronts and neighborhoods, arts advocacy groups can work with the city to change the way spaces in transition are viewed and utilized, creating a window of opportunity for artists, developers, and city-dwellers.

TURF-sponsored artist Pia Lindman performs in Manhattan.

is unmistakable: Her shoulders are bent, with one hand holding up her head. As she changes her pose and appears to be weeping, several pedestrians stop in their tracks and stare at the odd and poignant spectacle in the Roger Smith Hotel window.

The woman is artist Pia Lindman, and her performance is part of a one-woman show titled New York Times September 02–September 03. Based on the images of grieving she collected from the newspaper from 2002 to 2003, Lindman created drawings of the gestures, then made a video of herself re-enacting the poses, and then used the poses as “instructions” so that she could perform a series of them in front of a live audience.

Preferring a busy storefront window to an art gallery, Lindman is able to reach a diverse audience, encouraging a dialogue with all types of people who lived through the tragedy and grieving process following the attacks on New York. Sponsored by TURF, the Trans Urban Roaming Forum, a nonprofit arts advocacy organization, and co-curated by Erin Donnelly and Susanna Cole, Lindman’s exhibition gives New Yorkers the opportunity to thoughtfully ponder during their daily commute the nature of their own grieving.

Throughout New York City, TURF has sponsored countless other exhibitions and performances in, as they put it, “borrowed” spaces. The invention of cofounder and president Lin-i Liu, TURF began when Liu got a tip on an empty loft building on Ca-

—Cara Ober is a painter, curator, and writer living in Baltimore.

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by susan mccallum-smith and robbie whelan

Courtesy of the Peabody Institute

in review

BOOK Lalita Noronha, Where Monsoons Cry: stories (Alexandria, Va.: Black Words Press, 2004)

MUSIC Pierrot Lunaire Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University March 29

In “The Arrangement,” one of the stories in Lalita Noronha’s engaging debut collection, Where Monsoons Cry, Suresh travels from America to India to meet a prospective bride. He panders to his mother’s wishes, assuming he can manipulate the negotiations and return to his American lover, only to find himself entranced and outmaneuvered by the woman in question. His prospective bride insists, despite his squeamishness, that they place all their cards, however soiled, however bruised, on the table.

In this story, as in the others, Noronha captures and conveys the disconnect and longing of the immigrant, and given that we live in a land of immigrants, this book has a resonance far beyond the culture with which it deals, a resonance for all who made the hard bargain between staying and leaving.

Born in India, Noronha now lives and works in Baltimore. Inevitably, comparisons will be drawn with authors Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri, especially in her portrayals of landscape and food that make savoring her work such a sensual delight, yet Noronha need not fear them. Her voice is unique, crisp and sure.

The short fiction form is difficult to master. Noronha proves herself more than up to the task. If, occasionally, the stories hint at a writer finding her way— a slight self‑consciousness in a few descriptions, a tendency for some stories to last a paragraph too long—they never disappoint and often surprise. Indeed Noronha’s skill strengthens as the collection progresses, and her touch is never more deft than when characters are forced to choose between their natural and adopted cultures. In “The Sari,” a young couple quarrels over the wife’s desire to wear traditional dress to an American wedding, and Noronha takes the measure of their marriage using just six yards of silk. In “Hybrid Mother,” she captures the contradictory desires of a daughter who wants her Indian-born mother to forget her former life of penury and embrace consumerism, while loving precisely her failure to do so.

Themes of bartering run through the book, and often it is the women, those “deep wells of sorrow” that are the commodity changing hands. Women, whose hopes of romance or self‑fulfillment are pushed aside by the demands of practicality, by the need to have food on the table, a roof over their heads, a father for their children, or the memory of poverty eradicated, (the memory of that “scrape of spoon against vessel”), and who convince themselves that these things alone must suffice as proof of a life valued and well-lived.

Noronha is perceptive enough to know that they do not suffice, not in any culture. Jaya, who prostitutes herself with an American in order to secure a home in “Deep Wells,” is not so different from a woman (or man) who struts on reality TV in the hope of snaring a millionaire. Although one may act through necessity and the other through choice, the nature of the bargain is essentially the same. One day, both will be forced to measure what has been gained against what has been lost.

In 1912, Arnold Schoenberg, the famous Viennese modernist composer, premiered Pierrot Lunaire, a short piece for a vocalist and a five-member chamber ensemble. Based on the poetry of Belgian writer Albert Giraud, Pierrot has become an “unimpeachably important work,”according to Paul Mathews, music theory and composition professor at the Peabody Institute. The composition is recognized, along with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, as a seminal work in modern music. It was one of the first to explore atonal music and, like all great art, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time. On March 29, a faculty chamber recital at Peabody will include a one-of-a-kind performance of Pierrot Lunaire with soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson.

Schoenberg wrote a stark chamber accompaniment to go with the piece’s use of the Sprechstimme (“sing-speak”) technique, in which the vocalist strikes each note at its correct pitch for only a moment and then lets her voice drop off into speaking tones, giving the work an engaging, visceral appeal.

This is not an easy piece to execute. “When it was first performed, even the musicians didn’t really know what they were doing,” says Richard Hoffman, an emeritus professor of theory and composition at Oberlin Conservatory, and a former pupil of Schoenberg. “[Schoenberg] uses such a new, unusual ensemble, and he rotates the timbres in retrograde fashion,” he adds. “Today they call this a ‘paradigm shift,’ but Schoenberg was just moving music from extended tonality to atonal.”

Phyllis Bryn-Julson, a voice instructor at the Peabody Institute, is one of the world’s foremost performers of Pierrot Lunaire. “She can pull any pitch right out of the air at any moment,” says Mathews.

Even though Schoenberg produced a prodigious oeuvre of written work to accompany his music, it remains unclear how performers should address the Sprechstimme technique, and how faithful the vocalist should remain to the tones written in Pierrot. “There’s a bit of controversy about how it is performed—how much pitch you should actually use,” says Mathews, who is coauthoring a book on Pierrot with Bryn-Julson. “Phyllis and I are of the opinion that every note is sacred,” he says.

This is part of what is so special about this opportunity to see Bryn-Julson perform. She is an undisputed master of Pierrot, but her interpretation is so singular that it still sparks serious discussion among critics, musicologists, and other performers.

Bryn-Julson has been singing the piece since 1970 and yet it still offers her inspiration. “Rather than thinking about the atonal mode and the difficult techniques, I think about the character, Pierrot,”she says. “I have a wild imagination about things … and this piece allows me to make the most of that.”

—Susan McCallum-Smith is a freelance writer living in Baltimore. She’s currently working on her first novel.

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urbanite march 05

Pre-concert lecture with Richard Hoffman, 6:30 p.m. Goodwin Recital Hall.

Performance, 8 p.m., Friedberg Hall. Peabody Institute; One East Mount Vernon Place; 410-659-8100, ext. 2, or boxoffice@jhmi.edu.

—Robbie Whelan is Urbanite’s editorial assistant. He also writes about music for the City Paper.

Resources

Food: Cooking with Tea From p. 15 Local Tea Resources: Zensations by Jen Custom herbal tea blends available at the Whiskey Island Pirate Shop 842 West 36th St. (Hampden) 410-235-9501 Cookbooks: Cooking with Tea: Techniques and Recipes for Appetizers, Entrees, Desserts and More Robert Wemischner and Diana Rosen (Periplus Editions, 2000) Eat Tea: Savory and Sweet Dishes Flavored with the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient Joanna Pruess and John Harney (The Lyons Press, 2001) Online Tea Resources: www.adagio.com A thriving e-tailer that combines loose-leaf tea sales with customer education. www.teamuse.com Online newsletter and community for tea aficionados, hosted by Adagio Teas.

Includes the “Tea Chat” forum and “Ask a Guru” with Diana Rosen.

EVERYMAN THEATRE

Encounter: Disc Golf From p. 23

YELLOWMAN

by Dael Orlandersmith

Disc Golf Courses: Druid Hill Park For more information, contact Tony Dinisio at 410-866-4831.

Goucher College Disc Golf Course, next to the campus tennis courts.

For more information, contact Paul DesMarais at 410-377-4027.

Patapsco Valley State Park For more information, contact Jim Myers at 410-683-0474.

Sponsor: Media Sponsors:

March 18 – April 24, 2005 Previews March 15, 16, 17 Baltimore Premiere Wednesdays through Sundays Ticket prices: $15–$28 Box Office: 410-752-2208 www.everymantheatre.org 1727 N. Charles Street, Balt., MD 21201 Photo of Paul Nicholas and Dawn Ursula.

Photo by Stan Barouh.

Online Resources: www.pdga.com The Professional Disc Golf Association website includes a course-finder by state, as well as information on nationwide competitions and disc golf-related news stories. www.discgolfworld.com You can order disc golf merchandise and equipment, and also subscribe to Disc Golf World News, a quarterly magazine devoted to the sport.

next month Guest Editor, Jed Dietz joins us as

we examine the city’s film scene: Is Baltimore an emerging film town?

Free subscriptions upon request: www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a r c h 0 5

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urbanite march 05

Baltimore’s Most Tasteful Destination

Today, the good life is about savoring. The restaurants and shops at Harbor East offer the very best options to please every palate. From gourmet entrees fusing the finest, freshest ingredients to shops and services that satisfy the most discriminating shopper, the place to be in Baltimore has turned in a whole new direction…East.

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WWW.HARBOREAST.COM LOCATED WHERE PRESIDENT STREET MEETS ALICEANNA STREET ON BALTIMORE'S WATERFRONT

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THERE’S A RADICAL TRANSFORMATION TAKING PLACE AT SINAI HOSPITAL. AND WE’RE SURE YOU’LL SOON DISCOVER IT’S AN APPROACH NOT SHARED AT ALL BIRTHING CENTERS. THE APPROACH? SIMPLE. LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE WHO MATTER MOST. PEOPLE LIKE PATIENTS, DOCTORS AND NURSES. AND THEN USE THEIR FEEDBACK TO BUILD AN AMAZING FACILITY. BECAUSE WHEN YOU ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS, YOU GET THE RIGHT ANSWERS. COMING SOON, THE LOUIS AND HENRIETTA BLAUSTEIN WOMEN’S HEALTH CENTER AT SINAI. IMAGINE THE

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PLEASURE OF LARGER LABOR ROOMS, SPACIOUS, PRIVATE ROOMS, A HIGHLY SKILLED CARE TEAM TO PROVIDE COMPASSIONATE CARE FOR YOU AND YOUR NEWBORN, AND FOR ADDED PEACE OF + NEONATAL MIND, ONE OF THE NATION’S TOP TIER LEVEL III INTENSIVE CARE UNITS. AND THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING OF WHAT WE’RE DOING TO MAKE YOUR EXPERIENCE THE BEST AND SAFEST. LEARN MORE BY VISITING LIFEBRIDGEHEALTH.ORG OR CALL 410-601-5615.