March 2007 Issue

march 2007

B A L T I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

THE URBANITE PROJECT EXP ECT TH E U N EXPECTE D

issue no. 33

F O R

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urbanite march 07

New Destinations BENJAMIN LOVELL SHOES CITY SPORTS HANDBAGS AND THE CITY HARBOR N EWS SPA SANTÉ

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Coming Soon ARHAUS FOUR SEASONS HOTEL AND PRIVATE RESIDENCES LANDMARK THEATRES LEBANESE TAVERNA MARYLAND ATHLETIC CLUB HARBOR EAST

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 7

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IF YOU CAN’T FIND THE PERFECT ANTIQUE, HAVE IT MADE.

C Custom antiquesjust one of many new ways to explore Gaines McHale.

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urbanite march 07

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6

urbanite march 07

march 2007 issue no. 33

56

cover photo by Jason Okutake

f e a t u r e s

F O R

B A L T I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

issue no. 33

The image on this month’s cover was conceived by Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane and Designer Jason Okutake. While brainstorming about how to graphically represent the issue’s theme—bringing together unlikely yet complementary pairs—the two thought of the phrase “like apples and oranges.”

march 2007

march’s cover:

THE URBANITE PROJECT EXPECT TH E U N EXPECTED

what is the urbanite project? the author of the medici effect explains how the explosion of new ideas at the intersection of different fields can change baltimore—starting with you by frans johansson

58

hidden walls what if we walled off an entire city neighborhood? by robert blum, ed burns, pavlina ilieva, and kuo pao lian

58 60

terra incognita how do you give a voice to those who have been silenced? b y m a r k c a m e r o n , z o ë c h a r l t o n , r i c k d e l a n e y, a n d i r e n e p o u l s e n

62

black + white = green is the green movement too white? b y j o h n e l l s b e r r y, l i o n e l f o s t e r, a n d p e t e r q u i n n

64

64

renaming baltimore what’s in a name? by abbott miller and lalita noronha

66

immobility what would it take to free a generation from the burdens of the inner city? by bill mesler and jefferson pinder

68 66

the education experiment what would it really take to attract qualified teachers to the city and truly leave no child behind? by anirban basu and ramona s. diaz

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 7

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7. Support community groups

4. Buy what you want, not what someone wants you to buy.

8. Help out the environment

5. Create more good jobs

10. Show the country we believe in Baltimore

6. Invest in the community

9. Put your taxes to good use

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departments march 2007 issue no. 33

17

what you’re saying

21

what you’re writing

27

corkboard

29

have you heard …

35

food: drinking inside the box

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

original, nonfiction essays written by readers. this month, the topic is “what you believe but can’t prove.”

six not-to-miss events around town

people, places, and things you should know about

there’s a growing movement to embrace function over form and retire the cork by catrina cusimano

21

39

baltimore observed: nurture thy neighbor an unexpected partnership in this northwestern neighborhood results in a working model for public school reform by gary gately

45

encounter: the call of duty a day in the life of a juror at baltimore’s clarence m. mitchell jr. courthouse by heather harris

50

space: the tallest building in baltimore is the proposed design of 10 inner harbor a good thing for downtown? by adam gordon

39

71

sustainable city: complementary currency what can be gained when a community expands its notion of money? by julie gabrielli

75

out there: the blessings of nothing an american designer explores eastern european innovation and the hidden but profound benefits of starting from scratch by peter chomowicz

50

81

recommended

89

resources

94

eye to eye

books, bands, exhibits, and more

further reading on topics covered in this issue

a closing thought, curated by creative director alex castro

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

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Urbanite Issue 33 March 2007 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth A. Evitts Elizabeth@urbanitebaltimore.com Executive Editor Heather Harris Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial Assistant/Marketing Catrina Cusimano Catrina@urbanitebaltimore.com Copy Editor Angela Davids Contributing Editors William J. Evitts, Joan Jacobson, Susan McCallum-Smith Contributing Writer Jason Tinney Editorial Intern Tykia Murray Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer Jason Okutake Contributing Photographer Gail Burton Production Interns Madeline Gray, John MacConnell Web Coordinator George Teaford Community Coordinator Lionel Foster Administrative/Photography Assistant La Kaye Mbah Senior Account Executive Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives Abber Knott Abber@urbanitebaltimore.com Rebekah Oates Rebekah@urbanitebaltimore.com Kristin Pattik Kristin@urbanitebaltimore.com Bill Rush Bill@urbanitebaltimore.com Bookkeeper/Sales Assistant Michele Holcombe Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to the editor-in-chief (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors.

To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-2432050. Subscription price: $18 per year.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2007, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved.

Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. If you know of a location that urbanites frequent and would recommend placing the magazine there, please contact us at 410-243-2050.

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

10

urbanite march 07

editor’s

note

THE SINGLE BEST WAY OF

quotes

BREAKING OUT OF

YOU HAVE TO TAKE RISKS. WE WILL

WHEN YOU FIND THOSE CONNECTION

LIFE FULLY WHEN WE ALLOW

FROM OTHER FIELDS, INDUSTRIES, AND CULTURES.

POINTS , EXPLORE THEM AND PREPARE FOR AN EXPLOSION OF GROUNDBREAKING IDEAS .

photo by Sam Holden

THE PACK IS TO TAKE WHAT YOU KNOW RIGHT NOW, TODAY, AND COMBINE THIS KNOWLEDGE WITH IDEAS

ONLY UNDERSTAND THE MIRACLE OF

THE UNEXPECTED TO HAPPEN .

—Paulo Coelho, Brazilian lyricist and novelist

—Frans Johansson

IF YOU GIVE PEOPLE TOOLS, AND THEY

THE UBIQUITOUS ANNUAL ISSUE …

In 2004, when we first began considering how we would handle such a beast, we knew that we wanted to do an annual issue, but also that we didn’t want to create just another “best of.” Best nachos, best widgets … We also shied away from yet another list—top 100 this, top 50 that. Rather, we wanted to capture the spirit of Urbanite and bring the reader something unique and valuable. Instead of looking backward and counting, we wanted to look forward and make something that counted.

That first year, we called it “Up and Coming,” and we profiled the trends and the innovative individuals that we believed would affect the city’s future. This year, we decided to ramp up the annual issue concept. And we ramped it up a lot.

As breakthroughs often do, it began simply enough, with a conversation between myself and Alex Castro, our creative director. In our years working together on this magazine, Alex and I have had the opportunity to partner stellar writers with stellar artists. It’s always magical watching the written word come to life through the creative mind of an artist.

What often trips me up, though, is this: I sense a disconnect between the creative minds that we interact with through the magazine and, on the other hand, the reality of our daily urban experience.

At a street level, individuals from many, varied backgrounds have passion and talent and ideas about our city. But at the civic level, we bump up against a dearth of inspiration, engagement, and solutions.

So Alex and I, having seen the power of marrying people from different disciplines, wondered what would happen if we expanded that concept. What if we got passionate people who might not normally interact to work together around an idea? What if we told them to be bold, to not hold back, to not edit themselves? What if we gave over space in our magazine to showcase their ideas?

That wondering led to The Urbanite Project. This year, we created six teams composed of unexpected partners, and their ideas range from the humorous and the human to the audacious and the radical. You can see their ideas on pages 54 through 69, and you can learn more about their concepts on our website (www.urbaniteproject.com). You can also call 703-637-6781 to hear audio interviews with the team members about their experiences working together.

The Urbanite Project isn’t necessarily devoted to creating specific solutions. The goal is to allow people to take their thinking to a new level and to tap the creative power inherent in our city. We see this issue as a lightning rod for imaginative energy. It is amazing what can happen when you leave your individual silo and step out into the intersection of new ideas. By allowing a place for this kind of exploration, we hope to create dialogue that goes beyond what is and imagines what is possible.

—Elizabeth A. Evitts

USE THEIR NATURAL

ABILITY

AND THEIR CURIOSITY, THEY WILL

DEVELOP THINGS IN WAYS THAT WILL

SURPRISE YOU VERY MUCH BEYOND

WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE EXPECTED.

—Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft Corporation and American entrepreneur

NEARLY ALL THE BEST

THINGS

THAT CAME TO ME IN LIFE HAVE BEEN

UNEXPECTED, UNPLANNED BY ME. —Carl Sandburg, American poet, historian, and novelist

NONE OF US KNOWS WHAT THE NEXT

CHANGE IS GOING TO BE, WHAT

UNEXPECTED OPPORTUNITY IS JUST

AROUND THE CORNER, WAITING A FEW MONTHS OR A FEW YEARS TO CHANGE

ALL THE TENOR OF OUR LIVES.

—Kathleen Thompson Norris, American novelist

I’M LOOKING FOR THE UNEXPECTED.

I’M LOOKING FOR THINGS I’VE NEVER

SEEN BEFORE.

—Robert Mapplethorpe, American photographer 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 7

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Bill Forrest, a pianist and vocalist, will bring a touch of Gershwin, The Maple Leaf Rag or your own special sing along requests to the baby grand.

Live piano, Tuesday thru Saturday 5:30 to close with varying artists. A Mt. Vernon idea for cocktails before dinner or piano and cognac after.

behind

this

issue with the urbanite project teams

What is The Urbanite Project?

Frans Johansson Examining how dissimilar ideas and concepts can

work together to create positive results is what Frans Johansson does for a living.

Johansson’s 2004 best-selling book, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures , proposes that such juxtapositions are the first step to innovation and business prosperity. Raised in Sweden, Johansson is an author, speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur. He earned his masters of business administration at Harvard Business School, and his business experience is as wideranging as the theories in his book: Starting out as the cofounder and CEO of software company Inka.net, Johansson then worked as vice president of business development for Dola Health Systems, a Baltimore- and Sweden-based health company. He is currently the managing director of Medici Capital Management.

courtesy of Frans Johansson

The Urbanite Project asks, What if? What if we persuaded six unexpected pairs to collaborate? An architect and a television screenwriter? A filmmaker and an economist? Or a typographer and a fiction author? What if some of the city’s most creative minds were to intersect at the junction of frustration and passion? What if we let them ask the questions, and we didn’t edit the answers? In a special introduction, Frans Johansson, the author of The Medici Effect, explains how the explosion of new ideas at the intersection of different fields can change Baltimore—starting with you (p. 56). You can hear more about the genesis of each of these projects from the team members themselves. Call 703-637-6781 to hear Q&A sessions with the teams.

Johansson

the teams

1

Former Baltimore policeman and city public school teacher and current writer/ producer of HBO’s The Wire Ed Burns joined with interim director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute Dr. Robert Blum to figure out a way to radically change the future of Baltimore neighborhoods. With award-winning architects Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian of Hord Coplan Macht, they have come up with a plan to create safe environments for inner-city children by walling off certain city neighborhoods. This team believes that these walled neighborhoods would foster an environment in which children could be born, raised, and encouraged to develop their humanity in an otherwise inhumane inner-city setting.

2

photo by Mitro Hood

Robert Blum Ed Burns Pavlina Ilieva Kuo Pao Lian

Blum, Burns, Lian, Ilieva

Mark Cameron Zoë Charlton Rick Delaney Irene Poulsen

photo by Mitro Hood

Irene Poulsen and Mark Cameron of the Neighborhood Design Center in Baltimore are inspired by the city; they work continually to revive high-crime and low-income communities. Local artists and collaborators Zoë Charlton and Rick Delaney are similarly stimulated by Baltimore. This team of four is intrigued by Baltimore unobserved—the stories, personalities, and histories of neighborhoods lost either through abandon or gentrification. Using the seemingly archaic notion of terra incognita (unknown territory that has not been mapped or documented), the group seeks to immortalize the identities of these forgotten and ignored communities through recording the stories of their inhabitants.

Delaney, Cameron, Charlton , Poulsen 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 7

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Combining the creative talents of writer Lionel Foster with multidisciplinary artists Peter Quinn and John Ellsberry sparked dialogue about race and the current environmental movement. With Baltimore communities and sustainable living as their focus, Ellsberry, Foster, and Quinn propose a greater convergence of race, class, and environmentalism. Although these Baltimore natives come from disparate backgrounds, their work represents a singular perspective: Our basic need for clean, livable spaces, they say, can undercut any social division. This idea led to the title of their own campaign, “Black + White = Green.”

4

photo by Mitro Hood

John Ellsberry Lionel Foster Peter Quinn

Ellsberry, Foster, Quinn

Abbott Miller Lalita Noronha

photo by Lisa Macfarlane

Outwardly, Bombay-born scientist-turned-fiction writer Lalita Noronha has little in common with acclaimed designer and graphic design guru Abbott Miller. They both, however, understand how words and names carry specific connotations.

Through the nexus of image and invention, Noronha and Abbott explore the meaning of Baltimore’s name. Abbott explores the concept of renaming the city in an effort to evoke a positive perception while retaining an authentic identity; Noronha presents an original work of fiction investigating the poignancy of place and identity.

5

Noronha and Miller

Although they approach the subject from different disciplines, both Korean-born journalist Bill Mesler and multimedia artist Jefferson Pinder respond as social scientists when it comes to discussing the urban experience. In this partnership, Pinder and Mesler explored the concept of immobility in the American city.

Mesler challenges the accepted idea of a War on Drugs, analyzing its impact on our culture. Pinder explores resistance in his film, Mule, a performance piece where forward progress on an inner-city street becomes damn near impossible.

Both dare us to rethink our accepted ideas and to meditate on our future.

photo by Mitro Hood

Bill Mesler Jefferson Pinder

Mesler and Pinder

6

Anirban Basu Ramona S. Diaz

photo by Mitro Hood

While a partnership between an economist and a filmmaker may seem incongruous, a mutual inclination toward fact and truth is enough to ally Anirban Basu with Ramona S. Diaz. Basu, chairman and CEO of Sage Policy Group, relies on hard reality for business. Meanwhile, renowned documentary filmmaker Diaz depends upon authenticity for her craft. With the idea in mind that the future of Baltimore correlates directly with city youth, Basu and Diaz assess the city school system through the impartiality of a camera lens. They use the cinematic medium to record their observations about a unique teacher experiment and how it is affecting both students and teachers.

Basu and Diaz 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 7

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urbanite march 07

what you’re saying

march 2007

B A L T I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

issue no. 33

F O R

Missed Manners When I was growing up, learning manners was as much a part of our daily round as eating three nutritious home-cooked meals. Poor manners burn bridges; good manners build bridges. To all team leaders, business owners, CEOs, parents, and teachers, this should be a mandatory handout this year! I applaud every issue of Urbanite, but the Civility issue from cover design to article content warrants a standing ovation.

THE URBANITE PROJECT EXP ECT TH E U N EXP ECTE D

Getting Beyond the Bird Kudos to the artist who executed your January cover and to the editor who signed off on it. But I won’t bring this issue of Urbanite home to give me, and whoever passes the coffee table, the bird. I won’t even put it in the bathroom where we all wind up daily to perform those functions commonly expressed by other Anglo-Saxon four-letter words.

Somehow, I equate your graphic expression of how far we’ve come from the “civilized” world we used to know with stooping to profanity yourself when somebody cusses you out. I have read online Michael Paulson’s article, and it is a good overview of the insensitivity to others that has spread like cancer throughout our society. And those who scoff at sensitivity training are always the ones most in need of it. When I was at that “awkward age,” my mother decided I needed to attend the Bachelor’s Cotillion dances at St. Michael and All Angels Church. Intoxicated as much by the cleavage as the perfume of my partner, my two left feet never did learn to lead, and I couldn’t wait for the music to end so I could go get her a cup of punch. It wasn’t until years later that I realized what it was I had learned in the way of socialization.

From the halls of Congress down to the daily domestic disputes and barroom brawls that end in mayhem, we as a people no longer feel the need to

—Kerry Dunnington, a menu and recipe developer and food columnist, is author of This Book Cooks.

acknowledge and respect one another and, especially, strangers. It begins by ignoring the most basic conventions: please, thank you, good morning, etc.

Whether the situation requires that we speak first or that we respond rather than remain silent, more and more often the effort is not made. If this trend continues, our society will implode from within, long before any external threat can destroy us.

—Howard Crise is a writer and editor.

Going Public with Civility Beyond the interpersonal rudeness noted in the article “The Rules of Engagement” (January), a larger implication of the growing incivility in American society has been the increasingly negative connotations associated with the word public. Public was once clearly associated with civic virtue; now, public is something to be shunned. Think of how attitudes towards public education and public transportation have changed for the worse over the past thirty or so years. Whereas once the idea of public education embodied civic hope, now in many circles it’s associated with incompetence and failure. And whereas public transportation was once acknowledged as necessary for the public good, now it is seen as lowclass and dirty by many.

The growth of incivility, with its detrimental consequences for education and transportation, has paralleled the emergence of the conservative movement in American politics. Incivility has either been a consequence of conservative ideas antithetical to the ideas of the common good and positive government, or it was one of the causes of the conservative ascendancy—a backlash and a drawing-inward in response to a less civil society. From the Reagan era’s credo that greed is good, to the “culture wars” of the 1990s, to the privatization craze typified by George W. Bush’s attempt to change the social security system, conservatives have trumpeted ideas that have undercut the high ideals once associated with public, while dividing Americans against one another.

—John Bailey lives in Edgemere and teaches American history at Baltimore County Community College in Essex.

Where’s the Love?

Thanks for a great article on being civil, or rather, on being uncivil (“The Rules of Engagement”). It’s not just on the Maryland highways that courtesy is lacking, but also on the street, in the parks, and in every walk of life. I’m from Mississippi originally, but I’ve traveled to or lived just about anywhere you’d think 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 7

17

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was interesting in these United States. And in my travels, I have yet to come across any place that rivaled the South in hospitality or courtesy. The South has the market cornered, and no, folks, Baltimore is not in the South.

I learned very quickly when I moved here that I was not in the South anymore. In the South, people smile and wave as you drive by. They welcome you to Mom’s Bakery or Dave’s Bait Shop & Boutique more readily than anyone anywhere in any WalMart. Their greetings are honest and friendly. And the “Ya’ll come back, ya hear?” that leaps out after you when you leave the store is genuine, too. These people are happy you came by and are happy to have met you. And generally, you are happy as a result.

It’s nice to feel that hospitality. But in most other parts of the country, that kind of “love” is nowhere to be found; strangers are not friends we haven’t met yet, they are strangers we are not going to meet.

Manners should be viewed as a personal strength, an attribute. An exercise in manners demonstrates the grace and sophistication of the individual. And it displays the person’s kindness and respect for other people. It shouldn’t have to necessitate a trip to the South to be treated kindly, but until that changes, I’ll be visiting my hometown in Mississippi now and again for a healthy recharging of my civility batteries and a nice tall glass of sweet tea.

Common courtesy is an acknowledgement of being a part of a community. The “hellos,” “goodbyes,” “pleases,” and “thank yous” lubricate the social interaction. Without them everything becomes a hard-edge confrontation. We need the transition between us that courtesy provides.

—Scott Meek is a Navy veteran. He lives in Fells Point.

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

In a Manner of Speaking I appreciated your January issue on civility. Why aren’t we nicer to each other? is a great question with complex answers.

—Christy Bergland is an artist and arts therapist. She lives in Roland Park and has a studio in Woodberry.

update

“A Blaze of Glory, Flame Red Double Knit,” 2005, by James Rieck

Painter James Rieck The past year has been a successful one for Baltimore painter James Rieck. He has recently won two significant awards. Rieck (featured in Urbanite’s January 2006 and May 2005 issues) placed second in the Bethesda Painting Awards in June 2006. Then in September, Rieck was named the first-place winner of the Trawick Prize.

Both the Bethesda Painting Awards and the Trawick Prize are produced by the Bethesda Arts and Entertainment District. Carol Trawick, the chair of the district, founded the Trawick Prize in 2003 and later established the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2005. The two awards are annual juried competitions, featuring a panel of jurors from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., who are highly involved in the professional art world (teachers, chairs of art societies, museum curators, and the like). While the Trawick Prize gives consideration to a wide spectrum of contemporary visual arts, the Bethesda Painting Awards exclusively recognize painters.

According to Lauren DeGourse, marketing specialist for the Bethesda Urban Partnership (the umbrella organization that manages the Bethesda Arts and Entertainment District), Rieck’s “techni-

cally beautiful” oil paintings stood out in both competitions from the combined pool of more than five hundred applicants. Winning second place in the Bethesda Painting Awards meant a prize of $2,000; Rieck won $10,000 for the Trawick Prize.

Throughout his twenty-five years as a painter, Rieck has received several prestigious awards, including the Maryland Institute College of Art Painting Fellowship in 1987 and The Municipal Arts Society Henry Walters Traveling Scholarship in 2003.

In spite of this experience, he admits, “I didn’t think I had a chance in hell.” The panelists of the Trawick Prize, on the other hand, believed he did, making a unanimous decision in his favor.

When he is not working on his award-winning paintings, Rieck remains immersed in the artistic community as an adjunct professor at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. Still, Rieck will continue to create more oil paintings in his studio in Charm City—a place that he feels is a perfect environment in which to produce art. “Baltimore has a grit that I like,” says Rieck. “It feels real to me.”

—Saaret E. Yoseph is a former editorial intern.

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CITY OF BALTIMORE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION              

   

                                               

  

                                                             

  

                                                                               

  

                                                                      

  CITY  OF BALTIMORE   DEPARTMENT OF   TRANSPORTATION                     

    

TALENT. TEAMWORK. LEADERSHIP. Ask any CEO where graduate business programs often fall short,

                                                                                                

and chances are you’ll hear about the pressing needs for real-life business skills, collaboration, and sound ethical judgment.

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School programs are specifically designed to meet these needs, from your first class to your last.

To learn more about our MBA or master’s degree programs in marketing,

   

                                                                           u r b a n i t e  march 07 20 

finance, real estate, information technology, and organization development, visit www.carey.jhu.edu or call 1-800-GO-TO-JHU.

Johns Hopkins Carey Business.The MBA and more.

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 Tues., March 20 Noon-1:30 pm 2291

Columbia, MD Sat., April 14 10:30 am-Noon

Baltimore, MD Mon., April 30 6-7:30 pm

Rockville, MD Thurs., May 31 4:30-7pm

Adv

Pub

Inse Ad

Title

If yo in e con at (4

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

This month’s What You’re Writing theme was inspired by The Edge Foundation, a group of scientists and other thinkers. Each year on their website, www.edge.org, they pose a provocative question that their members and other con tributors answer. In 2005, the question was, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

I sat perusing

Urbanite magazine in the handicapped stall of the art center bathroom. I thumbed through to the “What You’re Writing” section and felt a familiar urge in my stomach—writerlust. It’s an electric gnaw that spreads up and out and then settles into a lingering throb. It’s approximately sensual arousal, envy, and apprehension. I get it every time I read something clever or something really poorly written but still published. It summons plot arcs and complicated characters and encourages irresponsible daydreaming. It’s rarely productive.

This time it brought me to consider how I could shape the e-mail I had just written on the relativism of tacky weddings to fit the next writing prompt.

“I believe that all weddings are tacky to somebody

Topic

Deadline

Publication

Possession Anticipation Memory A Day’s Work Serendipity

Mar 16, 2007 Apr 13, 2007 May 18, 2007 June 15, 2007 July 20, 2007

June 2007 July 2007 Aug 2007 Sept 2007 Oct 2007

W h a t y o u b e li e v e b u t c a n ’t p ro v e

higher up on the social food chain, but I can’t prove it.”

The premise was kind of hollow so the writerlust took on a more anxious wobble that included some dull shuddering. I thought about more cerebral topics, but I could prove all of the ideas that came.

I decided then that I should probably get back to my office. On my way out, I searched my face in the mirror like I did in my college days when I used to try to catch myself looking drunk. I saw no more now than back then.

I got back to my office, and I was completely preoccupied; characters from three unpublished novels were goading me. I knew that succumbing to the urge would mean writing something I prob-

ably wouldn’t finish or submit. That was not going to help me complete last week’s paperwork, so I headed to the office coffee station to heat up some water. I’d distract myself from the distraction with afternoon chai and some pleasantries with our administrative assistant. It didn’t work. I was soon sipping tea and clicking through the Urbanite website with my office door shut. A few minutes later I began writing this.

I started writing with no real direction—the lust doesn’t provide outlines, just some scattered brainstorms. However, I was pretty certain about one idea: I believe I am a talented writer, but I can’t prove it.

—Mark Elliott Riding is a Kansas City, Kansas, native who married into a love of Baltimore; as of this print ing, his writerlust has become writerbliss.

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 7

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the borrowers’ bash A Celebration of Books Into Film—featuring food, live music, swing dancing, authors and auctions, all to benefit the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

saturday, april 14, 6:30 pm 400 Cathedral Street, baltimore, Maryland Meet Special Guests Christopher Buckley Author of “Thank you for Smoking” and John Astin, baltimore’s own academy-award nominated actor. Also, swing dance lessons provided by the FlyCats.

Tickets: $75 Per Person borrowers’ bash Co-Chairs: Mary and Scott Wieler and rosalind and Vernon reid For ticket information and sponsorship opportunities, contact Sharon Connell at (410) 396-5283 or sconnell@epfl.net.

SPonSorEd by:

NewspaperAdV3.indd 1

2/1/07 1:30:53 PM

GRAND OPENING Thursday,

Harbor East Office 250 S. President Street Baltimore, MD 21202 Office: 410-675-5500

Nadya Workman 410.746.3104 Susan Colandrea 443.540.3906 Fran Dugan 410.627.4944 Kenn Hobbs 410.274.7665

22

urbanite march 07

March 22

I believe that shiny = happy. I’m not talking about glowing, shiny skin, or even glossy, shiny hair. I’m talking about shiny sparkly things.

Some feel too obvious and redundant: A diamond engagement ring under the right circumstances could bring great joy (especially to the one not paying for it), and the shiny chrome of a new Harley Davidson would undoubtedly make boys (and girls) who like two-wheeled toys very happy.

But think, for a moment, of your own dusty, pedestrian, utilitarian car (okay, perhaps pedestrian isn’t the word to describe it). Isn’t there some joy when it’s newly washed and so shiny you can see your face in it?

Or Christmas—all the crystal baubles, the tinsel, the metallic orbs on the tree. Look at one—actually look for a moment—and I defy you not to feel the upward twitching of your mouth.

I remember when I was little and a shiny gold star was the going reward for practicing the piano.

Why shiny? I have to admit, I was less moved on the odd occasion my teacher ran out of the stars and all we’d get would be some happy-face sticker.

Even now, years past my most recent stickercollecting endeavor (I’m not saying how many years), I still get a kick out of something shiny and sparkly.

And I’m clearly not the only one. I see enough sparkly beads, shiny watches, and tinfoil swans to believe I am not the slightest bit unique.

—Julianna Kohler is originally from Portland. She just returned to the states after working for several years on health issues in Asia and Africa.

I believe that when

I leave my comfortable, neatly arranged senior apartment near the harbor, someone or some people come into my comfort zone and go through my things. Oh, if I could only be a fly on the wall with a camera held in my hairy fly legs taking pictures, I’d have the proof.

Doors are open that I left closed; clothes are rearranged; undies, personal papers, writings are disturbed. CDs, books, and radio stations are changed.

Paper bags and boxes packed with ornaments and the like are disturbed. What could someone be after?

Seniors, black or white, especially females, can be jealous, rude, nosy, and mean. They don’t seem to remember that they were pretty or handsome at one time, and smart, or at least willing to learn something new. Instead of being so vicious you’d think they would be preparing to meet their God in a good way! Yet they argue, find fault, and block your path, using their canes, walkers, and carts as weapons.

And they still want you to get them something nice at the store or take their trash down to the chute when you go that way. I sold my house over a year

ago to move to a more secure senior housing apartment, and I am more afraid of these 70-, 80- and 90year-old seniors than young adults.

—PJ Helpful is 63 years old. The house she sold was in West Baltimore.

From the fan

of orange paint chips, I pick out “August Morning,” not to be confused with “Monarch,” “Marmalade,” or “Bergamot Orange.”

Despite these luscious titles, to me the colors are only given their due if called “Infinite Tang,” “Toucan Beak,” or “Neon Tangerine.” They are bright and loud, and I love them.

They are not the pale blues and powder pinks I once imagined for this space, though I loved them, too. This room’s proper decorations were meant to be oversized stuffed animals, toy trucks, and coloring books. Until these objects had a reason to exist, an owner to animate them, the room was space held in reserve. Blank walls and a dull paisley bedspread allowed the room to masquerade as a guest bedroom.

I suffered wondering how long my life would stay on hold, waiting for that space to be filled. Had I imagined a nightlight in that outlet? Jinx! Did I let myself wonder where we would read bedtime stories together? These thoughts seemed more potent than twenty black cats. Simple biology was preventing me from coloring in the time between my present and an imagined motherhood, and that room would not let me forget the passing days.

I began sitting in that room, letting myself break into the sacristy. I saw colors. Orange, deep blue, Moroccan prints, burnt red. I saw a wood floor and thick rugs, my sketches and oil paintings. There in the corner, I could put my easel. Along that wall would be a place for my books. Under the slanted roof, I could sit with my much-abused laptop tapping out my next creation.

I see it in the looks of those who love me. Had I given up on motherhood? Was this decorating frenzy a pacifier for my inner pain? I smile to myself and don’t say a thing. Bono and the Edge wail from speakers as I press blue tape against the seam of floor and wall. I have no promises. But in the whispers that brush the back of my head from some distant corner of the universe, I hear a voice that says, “It’s your room to play in too.” This I know, but cannot prove.

I believe that if

my mother had not suddenly left me at four months of age when I was still nursing, I would be better adjusted to the world and its demands. My weaning was abrupt, not the gradual passage from breast to bottle that most babies experience. It must have been a shock for me—one day nestled in my mother’s arms, the next, fed through rubber and plastic by my father. My mother came back once the family emergency was resolved, but I believe from the day she left, I was less trusting, less socially adept than other children.

I bite my nails—another effect, I think. I used to offer this as my excuse when people chided me for having a finger between my teeth. I knew it sounded weak, and people would scoff or roll their eyes and remind me that oral fixations are psychobabble. The older I got, the more normal I felt, but I never did stop biting my nails.

Several years ago, I was given a kitten, the runt of the litter, a third of the size of his siblings, and far too young to be away from his mother. He sucked on everything—my cheek, a blanket, his toys—until his lip was bare. I let him suck on my fingertips, hoping he’d adjust to this new, weaned life with more ease than I did. I think it worked—he’s pretty normal for a cat, perhaps even more trusting than most. He grew out of that sucking phase, but he still chews on things—just like me.

—Rachel Mack, the communications coordinator for the American College Health Association, lives and writes in Baltimore.

I believe in monsters

. They are everywhere—walking down the street, driving to work, even sleeping in bed.

Some monsters hurt people so they can impress their monstrous friends. Others pretend to be your friend until they get what they want.

There is one in particular that hurts me. This monster doesn’t care about anything but making others feel as low as dirt. This monster threatens the ones I love, which hurts me even more than hurting me.

What’s worse, I can’t do anything. It’s pathetic, but I can only wait until the monster leaves.

I can’t wait for the day she leaves, my sister. But who will believe that I live with a monster? ■ —Sarah Sanders is an advanced-placement eleventhgrade student at Overlea High School in Rosedale.

—Kelly Keenan Trumpbour is an author of books and articles who splits her time between the city landscapes of Baltimore and Washington and the countryside of northern Maryland.

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 7

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Clipper Mill represents the combined vision and special partnership of two very unique companies – Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse and Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund of the Jonathan Rose Companies. For more than three decades, SBER has been a pioneer and leader in redefining the urban experience as a multi-role developer and builder. The Jonathan Rose Companies are internationally acclaimed and its Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund is the first national real estate investment established to invest in real estate that is fiscally, environmentally and socially responsible.

Clipper Park Road at Union Avenue, Baltimore, Md. 21211

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Situated on the site of a former foundry that played a key role in Baltimore’s history, this new neighborhood is setting out to make some history of its own. Vibrant. Dynamic. Built from a “green” perspective. Clipper Mill possesses an undeniable charm and character. Here, you can live, work and play within the wooded Jones Falls Valley, nestled between Hampden, Woodberry and Druid Hill Park. Clipper Mill is close to everything you love and need in the city, including great shopping and dining, cultural attractions and public transportation. Plus, you’ll have easy access to the Light Rail and I-83. Not only will you be surrounded by more than a dozen amazing artist’s studios, you’ll have the city’s most spectacular swimming pool right at your doorstep. And coming soon, the Woodberry Kitchen, the area’s only “farm to table” restaurant.

Jonathan Rose Companies For Office Leasing: 410.347.7545 | For Retail Space: 443.573.4246 | For Home and Condominium Sales: 410.243.1292 | For Rental Apartments: 410.243.2929

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2/2/07

5:13:28 PM

AiA BaLtiMOrE SPriNG LeCTUrE SEriES 2007 More information may be found at www.aiabalt.com or by contacting the AIA office at 410.625.2585

R. Allen Eskew FAIA ARCHITECT

Julia Gersovitz OAQ,OAA,FRAIC ARCHITECT

Walter Hood, Jr.

ASLA

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

Bernard Tschumi AIA ARCHITECT

tuesday, MARCH 06•2007

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INDIVIDUAL TICKETS

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SERIES TICKETS tickets may be purchased at the door

thursday, APRIL 05•2007 wednesday, APRIL 25•2007

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Lectures begin at 6 pm and are held at Falvey Hall at the MICA Brown Center. 1300 Mt. Royal Avenue.

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105 W. Hughes St. Balto, MD 21230

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26

urbanite march 07

AFTER

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CMY

K

Artists: YSL Hapmudo Studios | Shizumi Dance of Japan | Japanese Choral Society of Washington | Curation by Jordan Faye Block | Toho Koto Society | Gina Tackett Jewelry | Fashions by the CENTERSTAGE Costume Crew

take two: puchi nippon You are invited to Puchi Nippon (“Little Japan”) hosted by CENTERSTAGE. Immerse yourself in sushi, sake, koto, ikebana, hapmudo, geisha dance, samurai swordsmanship, tea ceremonies, fashion shows, music, art, culture and foods from Japan.

4.18.07 7-11 pm tickets and information:

www.centerstage.org

410.332.0033

Toho Koto Society

CORKBOARD CORK Knocking on Freedom s Door Collaboration among the Maryland Historical Society, Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture has resulted in At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland, an exhibit that looks closely at the history and vestiges of slavery in The Old Line State.

Exhibition is at both the Reginald F. Lewis Museum (830 East Pratt Street) and the Maryland Historical Society (201 West Monument Street) through October 28 Go to www.africanamericanculture.org and www.mdhs.org for more information and to learn about the various public events held in conjunction with the exhibit

Ten Minutes of Fame The second annual In10 Festival features new ten-minute plays written about women and their relationships with each other. Four plays were selected from a pool of submissions, and they will be performed along with a work by a noted playwright (this year, Heather McDonald).

University of Maryland, Baltimore County UMBC Theatre 1000 Hilltop Circle March 1–4 Go to www.umbc.edu/theatre/In10show. html for performance times and ticket information

The Entertainment Revolution Is Here!

Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey, Baltimore’s beloved acrobatic burlesque duo, present an evening of feisty fun—including a performance by vaudeville accordionist Full Bladder, go-go “kittens” Fluffy and Whiskers, and a recital featuring the graduates of the Burlesque Bootcamp.

Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Avenue March 2 8 p.m. doors, 9 p.m. show General admission $15; Creative Alliance members $12 410-276-1651 www.creativealliance.org

MEET THE MYSTERY WOMAN Baltimore mystery writer Laura Lippman’s newest book, What the Dead Know, comes out this month. Lippman will sign copies of the new suspense novel—a standalone book, not part of her famed Tess Monaghan series—at Daedalus Books & Music.

Belvedere Square, 5911 York Road March 17, 2–4 p.m.

410-464-2701 www.daedalusbooks.com

Operatic Afternoon The Harbor Opera Company, a group of current students and recent graduates of the Peabody Conservatory, sing two one-act operas in English: Italian-born American composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief and American composer Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti.

The Walters Art Museum, Graham Auditorium 600 North Charles Street March 24, 2–4 p.m.

Free; reservations encouraged 410-547-9000 www.thewalters.org

This is the Age of the Transmodern The fourth annual Transmodern Age Festival brings together experimental artists of all kinds for a four-day festival of music, performance, exhibitions, and film. A special event this year is the Peter Zahorecz Memorial Film Night.

Events run March 29 through April 1 Exhibition of visual art runs March 26 through April 27 at Goucher College, Rosenberg Gallery Go to www.transmodernage.com for more information

Photo credits from top to bottom: “Plantation Diary, Image No. 1” by Linda Day Clark; logo by Jeanna Ivy; no credit; photo by Jan Cobb; courtesy of The Walters Art Museum; photo of D UNDERBELLY by Geoff Albores

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Make Connections With GesherCity If you’re a Jewish adult, ages 22-39, looking to meet others like yourself, GesherCity is the place.

What are you into? “Cluster� groups include: City Cinema n Night on the Town n Beagles & Bagels

Shabbat Dinners n Skiing, Tennis, Golf n Bike & Brunch

n

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And Much More!

Don’t see something that fits? Start your own group.

We’ll show you how. Contact Julie Karpa: 410.356.5200, x590 or jkarpa@jcc.org

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granite countertops

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Tempted? the most spacious new apartment homes on the water. rooftop pool overlooking the baltimore harbor.

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Shalom Baltimore can show you ways to discover where you fit in Jewish Baltimore by: • Helping you find a Passover celebration • Connecting you to resources • Introducing you to new people • And much more . . .

For more information call Eileen Berman at 410.356.1661 or log on to www.shalombaltimore.org.

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urbanite march 07

luxury apartment living that’s fells point to the core.

have you heard . . .

edited by marianne amoss

Dance Party … photo by Madeline Gray

Small hideaways tucked into neighborhoods are part of what makes the city unique. Lithuanian Hall in Sowebo is just such a place. A cultural meeting spot for Baltimoreans of Lithuanian descent for more than eighty-six years and the home of the annual Night of 100 Elvises phenomenon, the hall is also host to a monthly dance party. On the last Friday of every month, folks of various generations cut a rug on the lower level of the building. DJs spin a wide assortment of music genres—from mod to under-

ground to Motown, there’s something that appeals to every sensibility. Regular DJs include local talent like Pablo Fiasco, who’s been known to seamlessly mix the ostensibly divergent reggae with pop. And don’t miss the house drink specialty: viryta. Just one shot of the high-proof honey liqueur will help to push you out on the floor. Cover charge is $5.

851 Hollins Street; 410-685-5787.

—Molly O’Donnell

Travel …

Spring is just around the corner, and travel plans are brewing on many a mind. Moleskine, the line of notebooks treasured by writers and artists like Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, now comes in a travel journal format. Called the City Notebook, it contains special features that can make moving around the world easier. They include ruled and unruled paper for note-taking and drawing, maps that can be overlaid with provided clear sticky sheets so you can trace routes around a metropolis, an alphabetical listing of street names, and metro maps (where

applicable). Use one as a guide and a journal to record your travels, or give it to a friend planning a trip. Currently City Notebooks are available for major European cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, London, and Prague; this spring, notebooks for Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., will be available. Go to www.moleskine.it/eng.

—Marianne Amoss

photo by Madeline Gray

Boutique …

“Fashion was always my life,” says Carrie Benney, co-owner of the recently opened boutique Remember When. With her boyfriend, Preston Mitchum Jr., Benney runs the small Federal Hill shop, specializing in vintage-inspired dresses and jewelry for women.

The shop carries both casual and formal dresses, from labels like Adrianna Papell and Max and Cleo, and many are versatile enough for both the office and a post-work cocktail. (Moms and daughters can do their prom shopping there, too.) Prices range

from $80 to the mid-$200s. When they’re not tending to the boutique, Benney and Mitchum, a news videographer, spend much of their time outside the shop working on various community outreach projects to help Baltimoreans in need, under the umbrella of the Preston Mitchum Jr. Foundation (www.pmjfoundation.org). 16 East Cross Street; 410-234-0400.

—M. A.

Have you heard of something new and interesting happening in your neighborhood? E-mail us at haveyouheard@urbanitebaltimore.com.

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LATTANZI LANDSCAPES r e - e nv i s i o n i n g y o u r o u t d o o r s p a c e professional design consultation • creative direction brickwork • landscape construction stone work • patios • walkways decks • water features • ponds fencing • grading • retaining walls perennial gardens • renovations • installations

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Connect with your inner artist keep ahead of your ever-changing world

At MICA, one of the country’s leading colleges of art and design, the Division of Continuing Studies offers a wide array of courses, workshops, and certificate programs that nurture creativity and encourage personal exploration.

Fine arts programs inspire adults to develop their artistic abilities and bring fresh ideas to life, from painting and drawing to jewelry-making and ceramics. Professional development programs keep design professionals at the forefront of industry trends in graphic design, illustration, new media, and more.

The Certificate in Creative Entrepreneurship, partnering with University of Baltimore, provides business tools for arts-based entrepreneurs. Contemplate…Create!, a collaboration with The Walters Art Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art, offers access to the experts with guided museum tours and studio time with MICA instructors.

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urbanite march 07

View a full course listing at www.mica.edu Call 410.225.2219 to request a catalog

MICA

Maryland Institute College of Art

Division of Continuing Studies

Where life is a work in progress

have you heard . . .

Cookbook …

Many of Baltimore’s restaurants turn out a number of excellent dishes night after night. If you’ve ever wanted to recreate those meals in your own kitchen, take a look at The Great Chefs of Baltimore . Edited by restaurant reviewer and cookbook publisher Barbara Tasch Ezratty and with a foreword by Baltimore Foodies founder Lars Rusins, the cookbook features appetizers, main dishes, desserts, and more from some of Baltimore’s most well-respected chefs.

Learn to make Fried Green Tomatoes with Chive Oil

in the style of Cindy Wolf, or Reuben Dip à la Marc Attman of Attman’s Deli. Although the accompanying photography leaves something to be desired, this volume is a good addition to any Baltimorean’s cookbook collection. Available at major and local bookstores and through the Baltimore Foodies website (www.baltfoodies.com).

—M. A.

Handmade Furniture …

For many homeowners involved in renovations, environmentally friendly furniture can be hard to find. That’s become easier with the presence of Bluehouse in Fells Point, a purveyor of eco-friendly furniture and other home products. Now, Baltimore design and build studio Luke Works has partnered with Bluehouse to release a product line. The Katharos Collection (Greek for “clean”), the first line produced by Luke Works, currently contains three pieces of fine bathroom furnishings. One is a vanity cabinet, made of bamboo, with a poured concrete top of thirty-percent recycled content ($2,799 to $3,699); there’s also a mirror with a bamboo frame ($499), and a bamboo storage shelf ($1,099). Each

piece is handmade to order; customers can choose from a variety of colors and several sizes, and all pieces are stamped, dated, and signed. Luke Works is run by Mark Melonas, an artist, designer, and craftsperson with many years of experience in the building trades. He and Bluehouse owner David Buscher embarked on this initiative together because they value each others’ goal of making usable, attractive, eco-friendly home products available. Bluehouse: 1407 Fleet Street; 1-877-276-1180; www.bluehouselife.com. Luke Works: 410-366-6161; www.lukeworks.com. ph

—M. A.

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photo by Madeline Gray

Restaurant …

After losing his father to cancer, and enduring several more cancer diagnoses in his family, Joe Ushinski decided to take matters into his own hands and address what he believes to be the root of the problem: the chemically saturated foods we eat. Thus Fusion’s Grill, an organic and natural restaurant, was born. While the decor is a tad bland, the menu at Fusion’s Grill is anything but, featuring organic produce as well as antibiotic- and steroid-free meats and low-mercury seafood. Chef Ushinksi’s California cuisine menu includes both classic American fare (burgers cooked to perfection and chicken salad

mixed with shredded lettuce and the house rice vinegar dressing) and worldly favorites like hummus, perfectly marinated kebobs, and bourbon chicken.

Everything from the Fusion’s house salad with sundried berries to the last bite of homemade organic carrot cake is light and full of flavor. The restaurant has catering services as well as take-out and delivery, and there is a full beer and wine list. 1330 Reisterstown Road, Pikesville; 410-753-3001; www. fusionsgrill.com.

—Hellin Kay

From our basic steel insulated garage doors to our Custom Classic Carriage doors

410.636.6306 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 7

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Better to talk about a colonoscopy now, than to talk about colon cancer later.

If you:

Are 50 or older or Have a family history of colon cancer or Are of African-American or Eastern European Jewish descent or Are overweight, inactive, use tobacco or alcohol …

…then we need to talk, because you’re at risk for colon cancer.

A colonoscopy can dramatically reduce that risk — and it’s really not as bad as you may think.

D o n ’ t ta k e a c h a n c e w i t h c o l o n c a n c e r .

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Don’t wait. Call to schedule a Hopkins colonoscopy today. We’ll take care of you as only Hopkins can.

the Johns hopkins hospital providing services in downtown Baltimore, Green Spring Station and howard county

Johns hopkins Bayview Medical center providing services in southeast Baltimore and white Marsh

(410) 955-4166 www.hopkins-gi.org

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Best of Baltimore 2006

designer clothing & denim in the heart of federal hill

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urbanite march 07

Clipper Mill Living.

Ahh, the peace and quiet of city life.

Spring Specials.*

The Assembly Apartments at Clipper Mill are between Hampden & Woodberry, right next to the park. You’re also close to fun shops & restaurants, your favorite hangouts, Light Rail & I-83. Walk inside and you’d never know this place used to make large machinery (“Assembly,” get it?). Picture 2-story lofts with arched windows and lots of natural light. There’s even a pool that flows through stone ruins. And yes, a

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Coming Soon to Clipper Mill – Woodberry Kitchen, the area’s only “farm-to-table” restaurant.

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clippermillliving.com From the upper $200’s.

Stop by our Sales Center

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Imagine... an old fashioned neighborhood grocery store,organic farmers market, gourmet specialty shop, European bakery, and supermarket all rolled into one. We are Whole Foods Market the leading natural foods grocer in the country and we are right in your neighborhood! ®

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Call for a complimentary in-home consultation

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urbanite march 07

Mt. Washington 1330 Smith Ave. 410-532-6700

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Spring is Here As of March 21st Winter is finally over!

With warmer weather on the way it’s time to get outside & enjoy Spring.

Whether you love cycling, hiking or picnicking…or just prefer to lounge on the patio with a good book, this is a great time to pamper your body. Visit our Whole Body Department & you will find a myriad of ways to be good to your whole body. Experience the Whole Body Department and let us help you express your inner beauty naturally.

Free Parking! at both locations

food

by catrina cusimano photography by gail burton

Drinking Inside the Box There’s a growing movement to embrace function over form and retire the cork

Above: Sommelier Chris Coker, member of the Boxed Rebellion, brandishes Three Thieves inside Corks Restaurant.

Four years ago, Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards delivered a eulogy for a central figure in the wine industry. A large New York audience, teeming with media, gathered to help Grahm celebrate the overdue passing. In an open casket laid the suited figure of a man composed of cork. Not memento mori, said Grahm. Memento torqui: Remember to screw.

Grahm’s problem with cork is that it values aesthetic over function. While corks support our fuzzy notion of a “good bottle of wine,” a cork allows for a staggering level of taint, ruining otherwise good wine. A screw cap provides a cleaner, tighter seal.

The gradual (very gradual) acceptance of the screw cap is providing a natural segue to something even more rebellious. Better than a screw cap is the technology behind boxed wine. Though still grounds for social suicide (or homicide, if you’re part of the misguided old guard), it’s just a matter of time

before boxed wine is on your kitchen counter and at your next party.

The concept behind the box is simple. Wine is packaged in a bag, or cask, that is sealed with a plastic tap. The cask collapses as the fluid is dispensed, eliminating the opportunity for oxidation (which makes wine smell and taste like vinegar).

The absence of cork eliminates the possibility of any dreaded trichloroanisole (TCA), the natural compound often present in cork that causes the wine to smell musty and taste lifeless (referred to as “tainted” or “corked” wine). A corrugated cardboard box holds the cask, and the consumer has his or her own keg of wine.

The Australians, who have an irreverent attitude toward winemaking (and almost everything else), have been screwing caps and boxing wine for years. Hardys winery accommodates consumer preference by offering wine at a lower cost per ounce in

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At MAC, every member defines their wellness differently. Be it peace of mind, lower cholesterol, rock-hard abs or more energy, wellness is as individual as the paths we offer to get there.

Visit macwellness.com or call 410-625-5000. Better yet, stop by our sales office at 805 Aliceanna Street and tell our trained staff what wellness means to you. We’ll make sure you achieve it.

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a box. More than fifty-two percent of the wine sold in Australia is sold in boxes, according to the United Kingdom’s Decanter magazine. Norway, Sweden, and even other areas of Europe, including France, are starting to catch on.

Here in Baltimore, the sommelier of upscale Corks restaurant in Federal Hill, Chris Coker, won’t run you out of his restaurant for asking where he stores the boxes. He’s more likely to gesture toward a one-liter cardboard box of Three Thieves perched innocently on a table in the corner. Coker has traveled to wineries in California, Washington, and Oregon, as well as in the Champagne and Burgundy regions of France. He has even tasted with acclaimed aficionado (and Maryland resident) Robert Parker, but he is not pretentious. He remains grounded in the idea that wine is meant to be consumed and celebrated, exalting what he describes as the hedonistic enjoyment of wine.

“It’s a myth that old wine is better. In fact, only about five percent of the wine produced is meant to be aged—everything else is meant to be consumed immediately,” says Coker. “It’s okay to drink what you like. Try everything. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good bottle of wine.” Just $10 to $15, says Coker, “and the doors of the world of wine are ripped off their hinges for you.”

In the United States, wine sales are on the rise.

The wine industry boasts $26 billion in annual sales, according to The Wine Institute, with 619 million gallons of table wine sold in 2005. While the sales of all table wine are growing, the dollar volume of three-liter box wines is increasing approximately nine times faster than the overall category. The most recent figures show that nontraditional wine packaging—meaning screw caps and boxes—is making the greatest headway. According to the World Wine Report, one in five glasses of wine in the United States is served from a box.

The advantages of boxed wine are indisputable. They are easier to transport and cheaper to produce, making wine more affordable for consumers.

They preserve the wine for up to ninety days after opening or one year

unopened, while an open bottle expires in as little as a few hours, and a few days at best. (Traditional bottling is better for wine that is meant to be stored for years, but, again, only a tiny fraction of wine benefits from aging. All boxed wine is part of the vast majority, ready for consumption.) The superior closure of a box tap lends itself to a one-glass-at-atime convenience. Though three-liter boxes hold the equivalent of four bottles of wine, the consumer has the luxury of not having to polish off the whole container in one night for fear of the wine spoiling.

And the containers are recyclable.

Boxed wine is also logical from a business standpoint. “There’s a lot of money in glass and a lot of money in cork,” says Coker. “Some restaurants already use cruet systems where aerosol cans dispense nitrogen into opened bottles of wine, preventing the wine from oxidizing. When you think of it, that’s wine in a box. Restaurants are able to offer a wider range of wines with less waste.”

Coker also acknowledges the obvious disadvantage of boxed wine. “There’s a lack of variety.

Black Box is good,” he says, referring to the Califor-

While corks support our fuzzy notion of a “good bottle of wine,” a cork allows for a staggering level of taint, ruining otherwise good wine. nia company that prides itself on premium quality paired with three-liter quantity. “But there are few companies packaging premium wine in boxes. The consumer has a responsibility. Companies will listen, but they won’t supply without a demand.”

Coker knows what he would do if he had to create a business plan for boxed wine. “Simple.

Tap into the new generation of wine drinkers.” A study conducted for the Wine Market Council on the wine habits of the millennial generation, the roughly seventy million Americans between the ages of 21 and 28, showed that this generation is more irreverent and experimental in their wine selections. It is a large and growing demographic, second only in size to the baby boomers.

If the face of wine is changing, why can’t the container?

It is. One-liter cardboard boxes of French Rabbit, and Three Thieves with screw caps, seem only a step away from gaining size and a spigot. The Wine Source in Hampden stocks the typical Australian three-liter boxes of Hardys and Banrock Station, along with a formidable range of boxes from Napa Valley and France. (Two worth trying are Cuvée de Peña and La Petite Frog.) A fortyish man in a threepiece suit stands in the boxed wine aisle of Beltway Fine Wine & Spirits in Towson and grabs a container of Black Box Cabernet Sauvignon 2003. “This is great,” he says. “Try it. I take it on all my business trips.”

The aesthetic remains the underlying dilemma and the largest obstacle. The question is: When will our romantic imagination stop interfering with function? In much of wine culture, the pop of a cork still trumps the twist of a screw cap, even if the quality of the screw-capped wine is better.

In food and wine, just as in life, some of the most pleasant marriages are the most unexpected pairings.

“Try fried chicken and champagne,” Coker suggests. “It’s delicious.”

Just drink quickly once you’ve popped the cork. ■ —Catrina Cusimano is Urbanite’s Editorial Assistant.

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 7

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Untamed

u The Art of Antoine-Louis b A r y e u ~ February 11 – may 6 ~

600 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21201

www.thewalters.org Hours: Wed.–Sun, 11 a.m.–5 p.m., Fri. until 8 p.m.

Tiger Hunt, 1834-36, Bronze ~ Untamed: The Art of Antoine-Louis Barye is presented by Ferris, Baker Watts, Inc. and The Milton M. Frank and Thomas B. Sprague Foundation, Inc., with lead support from an anonymous donor. Contributing sponsors are Mary B. Hyman and Sara Finnegan Lycett. Additional support provided by Sebbie and Marinos Svolos, Sotheby’s and Mr. and Mrs. Roger D. Redden.

Free Admission!

38

urbanite march 07

baltimore observed

by gary gately

photography by steve ruark

Nurture Thy Neighbor An unexpected partnership in this Northwestern neighborhood results in a working model for public school reform

Above: Tim King, an actor from Annapolis, portrays Jewish artist Saul Bernstein for fifth-graders at Cross Country Elementary School in a program presented

by The Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Jewish students haven’t attended the public schools of Upper Park Heights for decades. But today, paradoxically, Jews play a bigger role than they ever have in the neighborhood’s public schools, for they know this truism: As the public schools go, so goes the neighborhood. From that premise flows a smallscale school reform effort led by a Jewish group, Comprehensive Housing Assistance Inc., whose acronym, CHAI, means “living” in Hebrew.

CHAI formed the Northwest SchoolCommunity Partnership in 1997, focusing on four schools: Fallstaff and Cross Country elementary schools, Pimlico Middle, and Northwestern High.

With the diligence and persistence of a good Jewish mother, the partnership has relied on its considerable fundraising acumen, a small army of volunteers, and old-fashioned legwork to nurture the neighborhood schools.

While more liberal Jews fled the neighborhoods just north of Northern Parkway, Orthodox Jews

stayed because they could walk to the nearby synagogues. (Jewish law forbids driving on the Sabbath.)

Today, the Orthodox Jews, who attend Jewish parochial schools, live alongside blacks and Hispanics who attend the public schools.

CHAI, part of The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, views the partnership, which focuses mainly on the elementary schools, as not only a way to keep the neighborhoods stable, but also a natural outgrowth of a religion that has long prided itself on educational excellence.

“I think the issue of education is a natural for the Jewish community because I think of the Jews as the people of the book,” says Kenneth Gelula, CHAI’s executive director. “Learning and books have always had such a high priority, so that’s sort of the guide.”

The partnership brings together CHAI, the schools, community associations, and city officials who develop strategies for improving the schools.

Leaders of the partnership rely on help from corpo-

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Red Tree.

Home furnishings and artistic goods from around the world and around the corner. From furniture to jewelry, wall art to handbags, you’ll find a variety of creatively designed goods.

921 W. 36th Street

410-366-3456

www.redtreebaltimore.com

Paradiso.

Antique to Modern furnishings, lighting, decorative arts, fine craft, jewelry, gifts, outsider art. Representing artists Chris Antieau, Bryan Cunningham, Danielle Desplan, Nina Friday, Sally B.Jones, Jenny Mendes, Hideaki Miyamura, Dietlind Preiss, Plum Blossom Kimono, Naoka, Chilewich rugs, Slip lamps and more. Open Fri.- Sat. 11-6 Sun. 11-4 or by appointment.

coming soon . . .

1015 W. 36th Street • 410-243-1317

doubledutch boutique. moder n lines & indie designs apparel & accessories

dou b ledutch BOUTIQUE

410.554.0055 info@doubledutchboutique.com 3616 Falls Rd. at the Avenue in Hampden

Modern lines and indie designs, showcasing emerging designers through an inspired mix of clothing, jewelry, handbags and other darling notions. Come visit us at the “top” of the Avenue. “Best reason to shop in Baltimore” —Baltimore Magazine, 2006. “Best Women’s Clothing Store” —City Paper, 2006.

3616 Falls Road • 410-554-0055 • www.doubledutchboutique.co m

Shine Collective. Modern apparel • gifts • home furnishings

JOES Jeans • Wrangler 47 • Sweeties Dresses • LA Made Draugsvold Jewelry. Open Tues. - Wed. 12 - 6 p.m., Thurs. - Sat. 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. & Sun. 12 - 5 p.m.

1007a W. 36th Street • 410-366-6100 • www.shinecollective.co m

Discover

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Manual Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine. Dedicated to

healing, restoring, and preventing pain and disability. In addition to Physical Therapy, we offer Preventive Care Services such as: Osteoporosis Exercise Programs and Ergonomic Assessments of Business and Home Computer Workstations. Member American Physical Therapy Assoc.

3612 Falls Road • 410-889-8004 • www.ManualPhysicalTherapy.net

Sprout: An Organic Salon .

Cuts from Vidal classic to RockStar. Our permanent, super conditioning color is naturally preserved, contains no petroleum or parabens. Beautiful and long lasting, it’s the right choice for chemically aware people.

925 W. 36th Street • 410.235.2269 • www.sproutsalon.com

breathe books.

From Chakras to Shamans, music to meditation, bodywork to Buddhism -- in breathe books you’ll find an eclectic array books, gifts and music for your mind, body and spirit. We offer over 25 classes and events a month. Open Monday - Saturday 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. and Sunday 12 p.m. - 5 p.m.

810 W. 36th Street • 410-235-READ (7323) • www.breathebooks.com

rations and philanthropies, as well as scores of tutors and other volunteers from Jewish schools and synagogues.

The partnership has helped redecorate dingy classrooms. It opened a health center inside Northwestern High, providing primary care for students and family members. It brought in dozens of tutors and coaches. It plans to rip up asphalt (a sad excuse for a schoolyard) at Fallstaff, plant grass and gardens, and create outdoor classrooms where kids learn about the Chesapeake Bay and ecosystems.

It brings Everyman Theatre performers to all four schools, and takes Northwestern students to the Lyric Opera House for performances and to meet the performers.

Among its proudest accomplishments, the partnership successfully lobbied to convert Fallstaff from a middle school back to a neighborhood elementary, which then took in many of the students from what had been a severely overcrowded Cross Country Elementary. Now, neighborhood students walk to Fallstaff, eliminating sometimes-rowdy school bus stops. Living so close to the schools also makes parents more likely to get to know one another and participate in the education of their children, says Fallstaff ’s principal, Faith Hibbert.

(Cross Country and Fallstaff are both in the process of becoming Pre-K–8 schools by adding one grade level each year. Cross Country will add the eighth grade in fall 2007, Fallstaff in fall 2008; CHAI and the community are in support of this decision.)

“It takes more than just the parents,” says Patrice Wallace, who served as the PTA president at Cross Country for four years, until her second term ended last November. “It takes the community at large to be sensitive to the needs of the school. Everyone has to stop pointing fingers and realize they have to work together for the best interests of the schools.” Wallace attended Cross Country thirtysix years ago, and has three children enrolled there currently.

Much of the partnership’s work takes place behind the scenes and grabs few headlines: making yet another phone call; attending yet another meeting; writing yet another grant proposal; coaxing tutors and other volunteers; listening, watching, and visiting the schools regularly.

You can see the results at Fallstaff Elementary, where the library shelves held no books for the better part of last school year. Today, books line the navy-blue shelves of the library, and titles like A Picture Book of Harriet Tubman and Sweet Music in Harlem hang from the ceiling near a bank of computers.

You can see the results at Fallstaff Elementary, where the library shelves held no books for the better part of last school year. Nobody could play in the gym: Overturned furniture and long-abandoned file cabinets lay strewn across the floor. Nobody took to the stage much in the battered auditorium, either.

Today, books line the navy-blue shelves of the library, and titles like A Picture Book of Harriet Tubman and Sweet Music in Harlem hang from the ceiling near a bank of computers. Bookworms, a group of adult Jewish women volunteers, visits regularly and helps students with reading.

The gym floor gleams now, and the

kids play basketball and dance there, with Jewish high school students volunteering as coaches and teachers. The auditorium’s undergone an overhaul, too. Volunteers tore up the floor, replaced it with carpeting, and sanded and polished the stage to a sheen worthy of the spotlight for student shows.

On a Friday afternoon in January, Jewish teens teach students modern dance, art, and “empowerment skills” for girls. In the library, with cues from their coaches, eight fourth-graders—seven boys and one girl—leap, prance, circle, and spin while learning modern ballet.

Gaby Roffe, a 17-year-old volunteer from Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School, gives the dance lessons to students who might not otherwise be able to afford them. It builds bonds between Jews and blacks and Hispanics, says Roffe, an Orthodox Jew. “The Jewish community is trying to reach out,” she says. “I mean, we kind of live together, and we’re trying to work together.”

Volunteers in Elyse Gordon’s third-grade classroom at Cross Country often work with small groups of students to reinforce lessons and skills that Gordon teaches the class as a whole. “An extra pair of hands—that’s probably the biggest gift you can give a teacher,” says Gordon. “Volunteers help those who need that little push, maybe to get from a C to a B. And they get satisfaction out of seeing the children grow.”

Other after-school programs at both elementary schools operate with help from a grant from the William and Irene Weinberg Family Foundation. In these programs, certified teachers lead activities in drama, visual arts, photography, and computer technology. At Cross Country, the chess team, coached by a teacher, has won state and city tournaments.

“This is not babysitting,” says Matthew Riley, Cross Country’s principal. “We’re talking about certified teachers working with these children after school.”

Both of the elementary schools have thrived academically. At Cross Country, Riley says the community partnership has contributed to students scoring significantly above the national average in reading and math. And Fallstaff ranks among the top ten city elementary schools in test scores in reading and math, Hibbert says.

“I think when you galvanize the community to be in partnership with the schools, you can tap the

A photograph of Jewish artist Saul Bernstein 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 7

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incredible amount of resources—human as well as material—that can come in and be supportive of a school,” Riley says. “Whenever you push decision-making and resources to where you have the community and parents and schools engaged, you can make things happen.”

It takes more than just the parents. It takes the community at large to be sensitive to the needs of the school. Everyone has to stop pointing fingers and realize they have to work together for the best interests of the schools.

Wallace speaks of the partnership as a “publicprivate school” model that strengthens the school and surrounding community. “I think it guarantees the neighborhood will not only remain stable but flourish,” she says. ■ —Gary Gately is a Baltimore-based journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The New York Times.

Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School students Lior Mei-tal, 17, left, and Gaby Roffe, 17, keep track of the tunes during a game of “Jump the Brook” while volunteering at an after-school program at Fallstaff Elementary School.

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The Call of Duty A day in the life of a juror at Baltimore’s Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse

I lost my seat in the Quiet Room when I went to sign in and pick up my $15. It wasn’t a tremendous loss; it was 9 a.m. and the seat was right next to the bathroom. The constant stream of people with newspapers, the bump of the door, the flush of the toilet, and I was ready to take my chances in the jurors’ regular waiting area.

I found a seat along the perimeter of the doublewide room between a middle-aged woman with carved hair, like a Ken doll’s, and a younger man whose eyes were more alert than the situation warranted. The mystery of why the seat was vacant in an otherwise teeming room was soon solved.

A vending machine on the other side of the wall produced the blalalalalump sound of a soda being discharged every ninety seconds or so, and the carved-haired woman waxed tedious to the man on her left about the complexities of the war in Iraq, citing the least complex and most well-trodden of examples. “I just think it’s shameful that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction!”

I tried to read. Instead I wondered who befriended, married even, this loquacious master of the self-evident, and I watched as dozens of people in a room filled with a few hundred jockeyed for better seats and tried to save the ones they had with coats as they skittered off for relief or refreshment (blalalalalump). The room hummed like any urban

public space until an official came on over the loudspeaker.

“This is a big one, folks.” He then called for about 150 of us to report to a sixth-floor courtroom.

I was on the list, juror number 274. I collected my things, as did alert guy (turns out he was just a smoker), though Ken-doll lady did not, and I moved toward the door.

The city randomly selects its prospective jurors from public records and sends out the numbered notices: Report to the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse on this day and time, or face jail time. Many people try to beg off, and some succeed. Even if you succeed, your name goes right back to the top of the list for next time, so there’s not much incentive.

Those of us resigned to our fate on that day climbed the four stories to the courtroom.

As we filed in, the judge riddled us with tales of the room. “Eddie Murphy filmed a scene from one of his movies here,” she said. “The names carved in the plaster around the circumference of the dome above you are …” I don’t remember who they are. It hardly seemed to matter; the tedium of the day threatened to overcome me; it was like going through airport security for eight hours. I took off my sweater.

For the rest of the morning, the judge asked questions, we responded by standing, and the lawyers took notes. “Please stand if you have ever been the victim of a crime.” Almost everyone stood. I didn’t. I had my car stereo and cell phone stolen several years ago, but the people around me were recounting crimes that had put them at physical

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risk. It seemed disrespectful and melodramatic for me to group myself with them, so I stayed seated.

“Please stand if you are related to someone in law enforcement.” Not me. “Please stand if you would put either more or less stock in the testimony of a police officer.” Nope. I stayed seated throughout the questioning and listened to other people’s answers: “My brother is a correctional officer.” “I’d put less stock in a cop’s testimony.” “What was the question?”

At lunch, I weighed returning to the circus against the promised three days in jail. In the end, I decided that explaining jail time to future prospective employers and my in-laws would probably be more trouble than enduring the mayhem for three more hours.

Back at the ranch, juror number somethingsomething-something was a no-show at 2 p.m. The judge was mad. Where was he? Had anyone seen him? She told us more stories while we waited. “The courtroom was refurbished in …” I can’t even pretend I was paying attention. Where was juror number something-something-something, and what was going to happen to the rest of us if he didn’t return?

The judge grew more exasperated as 2:30 crept up.

“I’m putting him in jail,” she said to the bailiff, and then to us, “We can’t really proceed with a missing juror.” The attorneys looked around. The defendant, a thirtysomething black man from West Baltimore, stared.

At 2:35 the door opened, and in came juror number something-something-something. He looked at the judge, unconcerned, and said, “I got held up,” as he moved toward his seat.

Held up? I had countless unedited articles back at my office. This ass was probably caressing his Blackberry and saying things like, “At the end of the day, the paradigm is shifting, and I want to make sure my team is thinking outside the box,” to some guy named Blade. I hoped the judge put him in jail for a week.

Next, the building’s alarm went off. It was the kind of alarm that stokes your instinct to line up in an orderly fashion and follow the leader out to the safety of the playground blacktop.

“Sit down!” the judge hollered. “These things are so sensitive dust sets them off. Just sit back down. It’ll stop in a second.” It didn’t. We sat. The bailiff eventually came in and announced that it wasn’t a drill or a fluke and we needed to evacuate.

The judge, incredulous, acquiesced.

Outside on Calvert we were moved across the street by a frenetic guard. And while we were fairly herdable cats, the street vendor on the corner refused to budge, clearly seeing himself as outside the

jurisdiction of the bellowing official. A rumor meandered through the crowd, spread by eavesdroppers, as rumors are through crowds of strangers: There had been a bomb threat. Now I really felt like I was back in school.

During the bomb-threat fiasco, another rumor circulated through the crowd: Juror number something-something-something wasn’t held up, he was HELD UP, mugged, while on lunch break from jury duty. And the bizarre icing on the freaky cake was that another juror witnessed the crime and chased down the perp, detaining him until the cops arrived.

Lord help me, but I laughed. What next?

Apparently our victim-juror was too embarrassed to announce his lunchtime predicament in open court, but another juror, one of those nosy do-gooder types, wasn’t. Upon our return to the courtroom about forty-five minutes later, she immediately waved down the judge.

“Excuse me! Excuse me! Judge? He didn’t want to tell you this earlier,” she said gesturing toward the

I like to think that I landed in the seat of juror number ten because the defense attorney believed I would be fair. In reality, I think I flirted my way on to the jury. defeated man. “But he was mugged during lunch.

He was held up for his money. And that man over there,” she bobbed her wrist at a grinning bald black man, “chased down the attacker and held him until the police arrived.”

I pressed my lips together and tried not to laugh again as a ripple of applause moved through the audience and the judge processed this new information with a blank expression and a slack jaw.

We waited for her response. She composed herself and said, “I hope you went somewhere far away for lunch.”

Victim-juror number something-somethingsomething looked confused. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m very sorry that happened to you.”

At this point, the whole thing hardly seemed worth it. I mean, who even remembered why we were there in the first place? It was closing in on 3:30, the judge promised us we would be released at 5 p.m., and the attorneys hadn’t even begun to select their fourteen jurors from the throng of potentials still before them. A few of us had been dismissed for having toxic attitudes toward law enforcement, but other than that, we were all still there. The judge called a few remaining jurors-with-stories to the bench (“My cousin is a security guard at the Mall in Columbia, and she lived with me for a few weeks, does that count?”), and then she streamlined the process.

“Everyone remaining, please collect your things,” she directed. “I am going to call you forward in groups of six by your juror numbers. When I call you, please come and stand before the attorneys.”

She called the first six. One by one, each stepped forward from the lineup and the judge asked first the prosecutor, then the defense attorney if she and he approved of including this person on the jury. The prosecutor was fine with most of us. The defense attorney was much more dramatic. He peered at each of us over his reading glasses and then down at the list indicating our educations, job titles, addresses, and marital statuses. He rejected quite a few of the nominees. Each time he did so, the judge said, “Thank you, juror number so-and-so. You are dismissed.”

When my time came, I stepped forward, holding my sweater in front of me. I felt like a beauty pageant contestant or a 4-H cow, although I can’t be sure because I’ve never been either of those things.

The prosecutor barely raised an eyebrow before approving me. The defense took its time. I’m white. I live in a gentrified neighborhood. But I also work in a liberal field and am young enough to still have liberal dreams. I waited. They looked.

I like to think that I landed in the seat of juror number ten because the defense attorney believed I would be fair. In reality, I think I flirted my way on to the jury. The lawyer stared hard at me, and I smiled, defying the gravity of the situation in a most inappropriate way by giving in to the sensation of being a pageant contestant. (Pick me! Pick me!)

Something in me didn’t want to be dismissed even though I was behind at work and downtown parking is abusive. So I smiled, cocked my head, maybe even my hip, and the counselor, who seemed as surprised as I was, shrugged and nodded. Stranger things had happened that day. ■ —Heather Harris is Urbanite’s Executive Editor.

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 7

47

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by adam gordon

T H E

50

urbanite march 07

T A L L E S T

Is the proposed design of 10 Inner Harbor a good thing for downtown?

Adam Gordon, editor-in-chief of The Next American City, weighs in.

BUILDING

Of the many charms I found in my three years living in Baltimore, very few were located in the downtown core.

Sure, I’ll admit that there is something kind of nice about the Inner Harbor. But at the point at which Light Street turns from the charming commercial drag of Federal Hill into a six-lane highway, one could be excused for imagining being in downtown Houston instead of in the supposed center of one of America’s most historic cities.

Touted as Baltimore’s new tallest building—its 700-plus feet will be about one-third taller than the Legg Mason Building—10 Inner Harbor will make the downtown situation even worse. Its sleek, gray exterior could fit quite well in downtown Charlotte or Dallas.

Its angular shape, which The Baltimore Sun described as a parallelogram, threatens to break one of the most endearing features of the city’s skyline as seen from local vantage points (my favorite: the southern approach to the Harbor Tunnel). It will muddy the strong sense that, despite all of the wacky designs that predominate in the architectural morass downtown, the city still retains moorings in its historic grid (which, last time I checked, was not parallelogram-shaped). And its drab grayness breaks another good skyline feature: the dominance of reds and blue-greens (even if sometimes only in slight tinges as in the Legg Mason Building) that bring to mind the city’s rowhouses and water.

It’s an odd turn for Robert A. M. Stern, the project’s architect and the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, who has staked his reputation on contextual building and planning. That context has been evident in Stern’s great work, like the initially dismissed but ultimately successful master plan for New York’s Times Square, as well as lesser work like the plan for Disney’s new town of Celebration, Florida (which, though terrifying to experience, sure does scream Disney.) In contrast, 10 Inner Harbor has no context. It could be anywhere.

That said, this project isn’t all bad. As of press time, the proposed 1.3 million square foot (think the Mall in Columbia-size) building is the right size for the site, despite objections from neighborhood groups. The cat is well out of the bag for large-scale development in the area—the site is entirely surrounded by superblock-scale building instead of traditional neighborhoods. The former McCormick factory and current parking lot is a

in

perfectly reasonable place to add a tall building that will bring more people—both permanent residents in the proposed 285 condos and guests in the 192-room hotel—to the often empty streets of downtown. The first-floor retail will help fill a dead zone along streets like Charles and Conway that, due to their location between the Inner Harbor and Camden Yards, should be bustling—one can reasonably hope that the retail will spur even more retail in this area. I hope that the inclusionary zoning bill developed last year by a city task force and reputedly close to passage will be in place in time for a few of those condos to go to people with moderate incomes, to give a few more ordinary Baltimoreans an opportunity to live by the Harbor. But the uses and scale are otherwise basically on target.

Still, I just can’t shake the sense that this isn’t a Baltimore building. It’s designed more to show outsiders that Baltimore can play the big building and serious downtown game too, thank you. The developer, ARC Wheeler, frames the project as its “second ‘10’ brand project where mixed-use elements located on significant parks or waterfronts include luxury condominiums, high-end retail, celebrity restaurants, a destination spa, and a boutique hotel.” This is silliness—Philadelphia’s 10 Rittenhouse Square, the first “significant park or waterfront” in the brand, has about as much in common with the Inner Harbor as a Philly cheesesteak has in common with a Baltimore crab cake.

But local officials like Baltimore Development Corporation President M. J. “Jay” Brodie gush over it, seeing it as a sign that Baltimore has achieved “real city” status like Philadelphia (which, by the way, is getting a much better-designed Stern building that will fit quite well into that city’s skyline). But wasn’t “real city” status the whole point of then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s massive downtown redevelopment in the early 1980s?

It’s a different era now. Baltimore has proven that it can carry out big developments of national significance (Harborplace, Camden Yards, etc.); it now needs to build on its strengths with some level of selfconfidence, not just take a mediocre design simply because it’s tall and has the Stern imprint.

This important Baltimore site deserves a building with a Baltimore feel. What might that mean? One way

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Established major cities get Stern’s good work, like 10 Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia (pictured above). Baltimore gets a cookie-cutter incongruous hulk.

Saratoga_Urbanite_Feb.pdf

2/5/07

to answer that question is through posing another, time-honored Baltimore question: WWJRD? (What Would James Rouse Do?) Having failed to find a way to communicate with the dead by deadline, I did the next best thing and asked Lehr Jackson, the local urban retail visionary who figured out for Rouse how to make Harborplace’s commercial space work.

Jackson agreed that, whatever Rouse would have done, it would not have resembled this.

“It’s like an alien came and landed in Baltimore,” Jackson said. “It’s totally out of context with everything else that’s been designed. Just to be out of scale for out-of-scale’s sake is the wrong premise.”

Instead, Jackson envisioned a design that could have incorporated all of the uses that ARC Wheeler wanted, but fit in much better with its surroundings.

He would have made a “C-shaped courtyard facing the water” and started along Light Street with a sevenstory structure with a strong retail component that would have then scaled up with a mix of office and residential in either one large tower or two or three smaller towers going back towards Charles Street. As he talks, one can picture tourists stumbling out from their meals at Phillips and finding an inviting courtyard across the street, enticed to cross the six-lane highway to see what was on the other side, perhaps even wandering on towards Otterbein and Federal Hill.

But alas, the real-life development will do little to attract the tourists, or make more people “believe” in Baltimore. Baltimore’s development officials have been congratulating themselves in the press for having demonstrated Baltimore’s arrival in the league of real cities by landing a Stern tower. But the building just cements the second-rate status of downtown

Baltimore: While the established major cities get Stern’s good work, like 10 Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Baltimore gets this cookie-cutter incongruous hulk.

It may be folly to expect downtown to drive Baltimore’s future in the first place: The city will live or die in its neighborhoods, at the corner where I used to live at Fort and Light and thousands of corners like it. Still,

This important Baltimore site deserves a building with a Baltimore feel. What might that mean? One way to answer that question is through posing another, time-honored Baltimore question: WWJRD? (What Would James Rouse Do?) the McCormick site could have been, and perhaps still can be, done better. While the city’s Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel (UDARP) granted conceptual approval in February 2006, the site’s developers at press time were still tinkering with details of the building, and UDARP needs to give final approval before the building goes up. Details matter in design, and UDARP would be well-advised to look carefully at how the tower will fit into the city’s streetscape and skyline before granting final approval. ■ —Adam Gordon is cofounder and editor-in-chief of the The Next American City (www.americancity.org). He lived in South Baltimore and Charles Village from 2000 to 2003, while working for the Baltimore Regional Partnership.

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courtesy of Frans Johansson

+ = 1 1 54

703-637-6781

what is The Urbanite Project?

page 56 By Frans Johansson

The Urbanite Project asks, What if? What if we persuaded six unexpected pairs to collaborate? An architect and a television screenwriter? A filmmaker and an economist? Or a typographer and a fiction author? What if some of the city’s most creative minds were to intersect at the junction of frustration and passion? What if we let them ask the questions, and we didn’t edit the answers? In a special introduction, the author of The Medici Effect explains how the explosion of new ideas at the intersection of different fields can change Baltimore—starting with you.

You can hear more about the genesis of each of these projects from the team members themselves. Call 703-637-6781 to hear Q&A sessions with the teams.

the teams 1 hidden walls

by robert blum, ed burns, pavlina ilieva, and kuo pao lian

He stood on the pristine stretch of his back alley and eyed the tomato on the vine in Mrs. Bracken’s backyard. It was lush and ripe red and so very compelling. He surveyed the expanse of rowhouses; no one was about. He slipped the gate’s latch and was in and out of the yard in a blink. He cupped the fruit in his two small hands, took a deep breath, and launched it. It hung in the blue of the August sky for an instant before rocketing back. Splat!

Out of nowhere, Mrs. Williams appeared, leaning over her chain-link fence, head shaking with disappointment.

“Boy, I know your mother raised you better.”

“Yes ma’am,” he managed as the exhilaration choked in his throat.

Now he knelt beside the scrub bucket, working the bristled brush to gather up the mangled pulp. His mother, Mrs. Williams, and Mrs. Bracken stood over him, radiating a collective displeasure. “Just wait until your father gets home.”

A wall, as a definitive term, is described and visualized as a barrier, an obstacle, or an obstruction. Physically and metaphorically, it suggests confinement, separation, struggle, imprisonment, or even hate. Walls can be tools in which to hide objects, systems, situations, or people. But what if these walls can be interpreted as something else, something nurturing?

In the context of the deterIoratIng urban Infrastructure and socIal decay happenIng In our cIty, the fIrst step to a self-actualIzed process that brIngs IndIvIduals back Into the communIty Is to provIde a safe and nurturIng envIronment.

Block by block, a new intervention—“hidden walls”—will provide a boundary between external inadequacies and internal possibilities. Existing rowhouses of an urban block will be divided into two independent parts by physical walls constructed inside the structures. To allow for lively street life, the first floor of these buildings will be available to businesses and the general public; the other floors of the houses open into a courtyard accessible only by people living within the walls. This separation provides a clear delineation of public and private space and offers an added layer of physical safety.

some may say that we cannot afford such an approach; but we would argue that we can afford nothIng less.

Others would say that there is not the knowledge base for such a generational plan; but we could point to numerous demonstration programs at every age and stage of a child’s life to say that while all the evidence is not in, we know more than enough to move forward. The question is whether we have the will.

In the 1940s, when the great migration from the South began, African Americans came to Baltimore as had others before them, poor in pocket but rich in the intangible chemistry of self-in-community. They found work in factories paying good union wages and providing good union benefits. With the security of a paycheck and steady work, they crafted neighborhoods that functioned in the normally imperfect but adequate way, providing sufficient sustenance and support, comfort and connection to keep everyone afloat. The children were reared with a sense of expectation and went off to school prepared to learn. They made accomplishments despite being judged separate and unequal.

For most, life was good.

Then, without fanfare or warning, the economic engine sustaining their world lurched. America had shifted gears and stepped on the gas, leaving the Industrial Age but a speck in the rearview mirror. History will record it as one of those seminal moments when market forces converge with unforgiving power to rip entire populations from the fabric of a viable reality. This event was as fundamentally disruptive as the Trail of Tears and the Great Depression. Today, we know these forces as globalization and technology. They are touted as stepping-stones to a better life, but for a workforce left without work, waking up to a wasteland devoid of opportunity or any meaningful definition, they were anything but.

people no longer valued or needed often dIsappear Into hapless thIrd-world poverty, a state In whIch all of a person’s strength Is expended on the struggle to survIve. But this time it was different. While America went about the business of business, those abandoned went about forging a new economic engine out of a singular human need: the toxic fantasy of addiction. For many who could not escape, the buying and selling of dope and coke filled the void left by the loss of legitimate opportunity. It was a new construct based on raw, unfettered capitalism. Now man viewed his fellow man as a means to an end, not an end in itself, negating rules, codes, and allegiances. If you had the mind and the might, there was meaning to be found in cash and power. If you faltered and were weak, there was meaning to be found in the pipe and syringe.

At first adults competed for a place in the new pecking order, but very quickly— frighteningly so—custom became culture. Children were the casualties. Many were neglected. Others were crimped up by a cruelty of punches and sarcasm, of lies and let-downs. Ironically this soul-jarring process prepared the children elegantly for the new paradigm of the corner drug culture.

For more than thirty years, the slow conflagration of despair and addiction has burnt through the neighborhoods, with thousands killed, tens of thousands incarcerated, and hundreds of thousands marginalized. This has been the visible horror recorded on the daily news for all to see. What has been largely invisible, and in the long run more profound, is the disintegration of the social infrastructure. The loss of community has doomed many to a freefall in a downward spiral that became a selfperpetuating process of failure. They went from poor to impoverished, a change not of degree but of kind. The adults lost economic well-being, job skills, work ethic, and that intangible chemistry of self-in-community. The children lost the expectation to succeed, and if they came prepared to learn it was more from duty than desire.

At first, the government relied on traditional social programs such as unemployment insurance and welfare to jump-start a population caught in a fog of suspended animation. For some people these programs were the way out. But as more jobs relocated, the mechanisms were overwhelmed and were eventually inadequate for the task. Realizing the severity of the problem, the government turned to nontraditional approaches. Under the banner of the War on Poverty, it launched a series of initiatives such as Model Cities, Community Action, Job Corps, and prisoner reentry programs that were designed to target specific needs. Again, for some these were a lifeline out of the abyss.

The private sector also stepped in to try to alleviate the suffering. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, drug treatment centers, and community health clinics soon dotted the landscape. As public schools failed, preschool programs, juvenile interventions, after-school programs, and mentoring programs were established to stabilize children. But for many, these programs and government initiatives could not individually or in combination be capable of stitching together the social infrastructure necessary for the long-term health of the entire community.

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Hidden Walls

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Terra Incognita

page 58

we propose a shIft of emphasIs from what has become a bouquet of dIsconnected, short-term demonstratIon programs to a longterm commItment to rebuIldIng the socIal Infrastructure of our communItIes, block-by-block and neIghborhood-by-neIghborhood.

Rather than quick, dramatic, highly publicized programs that disappear once their seed money is gone, we propose rebuilding neighborhoods by working with and supporting those who reside there—those who are committed to rebuilding their neighborhoods through supporting the most vulnerable residents: infants and their young parents.

We propose weaving a web of supports for these young families so that from before conception there is nutrition; from before birth there are the prenatal supports necessary for children to be born healthy. It means doing whatever it takes to secure both the health and vitality of these young neighborhood residents and their families; and it means providing ongoing support throughout infancy, young childhood, the school-age years, and adolescence. It involves physical and mental health services, parenting education and child education, social services, and vocational training services; and at the end of high school it involves a promissory note of employment or higher education. It means creating a space where a sense of community can return.

This concept of inserting new support elements in the old block allows architecture to become a prosthetic process of local regeneration, rather than an evasive development of erasure and dominance. The hidden walls run along all four edges of the block, forming a continuous boundary around the re-planned interior courtyard. The system provides the community with daycare facilities, a communal kitchen, an urban farm, residences, local exchange systems for goods and services, and more. This protected area acts as an extension of the womb, a child-centered environment that not only focuses on providing a space for community-based learning, health promotion, and integrated social networks, but also on rebuilding the very fabric of community life.

In the past, unspoken laws ruled neighborhoods. These “hidden walls” governed people’s behavior, but in today’s inner-city neighborhoods these unspoken codes of conduct don’t exist anymore. But what if we brought them back? What if we put up walls that would create safe spaces in the midst of dangerous environments? Then maybe the decaying walls of our neighborhoods could experience new life. Maybe we could surpass our immutable failures.

We have the knowledge. We need the will. Failure has taught us that the solution will not come with the quick fix of a magic bullet. Instead, we need to be prepared for the long haul. It will take time to create a process that will give those who are disenfranchised the means to take control of their lives, both individually and in-community.

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page 60 terra incognita (n.)

Storytelling Is Political

an unknown, unexplored region; territory that has not been mapped or documented During the days of exploration, undiscovered territories were often identified on maps as terra incognita. These unknown territories were considered dangerous and exotic, full of mystery, strange beasts, and wild people. Until western explorers named and “civilized” the terra incognita, these areas were regarded as regions to be avoided.

In Baltimore, many neighborhoods have devolved into terra incognita, burdened and rife with vacant land and abandoned structures, and rampant with drug and gang-related problems. Like the early explorers who “brought civilization” to terra incognita, individuals today see these places only as a resource to be exploited, gentrified, or resold for profit. In reality these places contain residents and histories full of hope, promise, and the desire to make their neighborhoods safe and vital.

We propose two intertwined ways to foster recognition of terra incognita neighborhoods: • Stories of action—building on local knowledge, these stories share Bricks, boards, and blocks have been used to seal up houses, symbolizing the ambiguous and the neglected status of a community.

These neighborhoods are primarily highlighted when a crime, accident, or murder occurs. Their true identity has been obscured, and residents have sometimes been made to feel that difficult neighborhood conditions are their fault. It is important to change the misperception of these terra incognita neighborhoods by illuminating the circumstances that are behind these conditions.

Stories and histories related by residents create a more authentic record of their neighborhoods. These stories illuminate the challenges that incognita neighborhoods face. Sharing these stories supports residents in their struggle for recognition, justice, and control in gaining a status of health that all Baltimoreans expect and deserve.

www.interraBaltimore.com An interactive website that will allow geographically separated communities to be linked electronically. The website would be a virtual civic space shaped by the neighborhoods using three types of storytelling:

• Stories of everyday life—celebrating a kindergarten graduation, remembering a neighbor who was killed, or describing a community event. These stories are eloquent and profane, told through text, audio, pictures, and video journals.

• Stories of circumstance—telling how gentrification is affecting a neighborhood; questioning why the City fails to clean up a vacant lot; learning how to break a drug addiction. These are stories that give a human face to issues that affect neighborhoods.

advice, guidance, and ideas for effecting neighborhood change through a virtual community of online forums, discussion groups, and blogs.

Links would be provided to information, data, resources, and community people.

mobile story collectors Recognizing that a digital divide is still prevalent in Baltimore, we propose a series of mobile units (like a bookmobile) equipped with computers and classroom space. They would travel from neighborhood to neighborhood occupying vacant lots that, for several days, would become a new community gathering space to collect stories, teach people how to use the Internet and access information, and host meetings and events. The mobile units give form and place to www.interraBaltimore.com.

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35 What if you had to duck every time you heard the sound of a firecracker or a backfiring motorcycle because it was more likely to be a gun?

What if your kids walked through alleys strewn with trash and dead animals on their daily route to school?

What if your drinking water was poisoned by lead?

Our city is divided by race and class. But there is hope. The same language and energy we use to protect our natural resources can produce healthier lives for the city’s people.

The Event A collaborative spectacle during Baltimore Green Week’s EcoFestival in Druid Hill Park on May 5 will dramatically illustrate this point. Two parading groups made up of the people on hand will converge into one vibrant burst of green as cameras positioned high above the scene record the event.

May 5th 2007 2:00 p.m.

Photos of the event will be made into postcards that will be sold by local merchants. In a follow-up to the event, proceeds from those sales will be used for greening and beautification projects in neighborhoods surrounding the site.

4 5

Immobility

— John Ellsberry Lionel Foster Peter Quinn

DRUID HILL LAKE

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4 Where Hearts Lie

Renaming Baltimore

By Lalita Noronha

By Abbott Miller “So, Vinay, it’s settled then?”

Vinay nods. He’s heard it before—these questions that aren’t really questions. Nothing has been settled in his mind, but his wife’s mind was made up long before she’d posed the question. As always, Sonia brings things up just days before he’s set to leave for America, and today, he’s right in the middle of a shave. Can’t a man find peace even in a bathroom? He considers his face in the mirror—square jaw, deep piercing eyes, thin lips over straight white teeth, a handsome face by any standards. His eyes drift below his neck to his chest—firm pectoral muscles covered with short curly hair, and a hard abdomen with just a hint of love handles. He’ll take care of that, he vows. Once he returns from this trade show, there’ll be a lull in his travels. He’ll begin a serious work-out regimen. In fact, why not pick up a pair of Adidas in Baltimore?

He wants to stay fit for health reasons, certainly, but also for the way women eye him, especially whiteskinned American women, who have no false sense of modesty.

when you tell someone you live in baltimore, a strange smile comes over their face. It’s often not based on any true knowledge of or insight about the place: Instead, I think it’s because the word itself sounds funny. Here are some options to consider for renaming Baltimore and creating a new image for the Greatest City in America.

But, Sonia doesn’t like Americans at all. Never mind that she doesn’t really know any, except perfunctorily from contacts at the Lions Club or the Bombay Gymkhana whereas he, Vinay, knows all types—secretaries, professionals, housewives, people in planes, malls, grocery stores—as well he should. This is, after all, his seventh business trip to America. He’s been to England and Germany too, but for his money he’ll pick Americans anytime.

They’re warm, and friendly, if you overlook their quirks. But Sonia’s tapered view gleaned from the glitz of TV and magazine ads had led her to a dynamically opposite conclusion.

“They don’t mean what they say,” she’d once complained.

“How so? Why do you say that?”

“Well, because I know. Like that woman who works out in the gym every Saturday, Eva—Evasomething—can’t remember her surname. She’ll smile, sweet like halwa, and say, ‘how you doing,’ then doesn’t bother to listen. Why ask and then walk off? It’s insulting. Half the time I talk to her backside. And that tall white fellow …”

“Oh, but it’s an expression, for God’s sake—a form of greeting like namaste, or hi! You’re not supposed to launch into your whole life story. No one has time to listen.”

“Including you. You don’t have time either.”

Bitterness seeped from her pores. He’d decided to ignore the comment. He knew that tone; he heard that lorry filled with cement blocks coming full speed, and knew better than to stand there and get crushed.

In the beginning, life with her had been almost intoxicating. Everything about her, the way she carried herself, walked, talked, even scrubbed the floor, exuded an allure, a raw kind of sex, made all the more sexual by the unawareness of her movements. Other times, she was feisty, flirty, a very un-Indian girl, even on her “interview day.”

Arranged marriages, she would later joke, were interviews for lifelong jobs—no retirement, no benefits, just work! He remembered that day well.

Her high cheekbones were like soft contours of

desert sand, smooth and brown, tapering to a voluptuous mouth and a small upturned nose. Her eyes were an oasis to drown in. If she’d let you.

She was unexplored territory, a handful he knew he’d enjoy handling. And so he had. But now, still childless after ten years, they’d both abandoned their exploration. Disappointed and angry, she’d fed its embers. Her waist thickened, the beautiful angles of her body rounded, and even her lithe spirit was weighted with unspoken words.

Smoothing his jaw with approval, Vinay squints at the triple-headed razor, his newest American acquisition. How he loved these American-made products; loved the variety, choices, competitive prices. Hell, if you shopped around, almost

his jacket under his arm pits. He’d even laid away a portion of his salary from each foreign project assignment for a little start-up nest egg, hatched with his sister, Amira, who lived in Baltimore. In fact, he even got her to file immigration papers for him—a bold, perhaps foolish move, considering he hadn’t yet broached the subject with Sonia. Still, it was worth getting a head start. As a mere sibling of an American citizen, his priority rating wouldn’t be as high as those of children and spouses. It made perfectly good sense to begin the arduous formfilling, bureaucratic journey. If he was smart, he would sow the seed now, and let it germinate into an idea she could later claim as her own. What did it matter as long as she agreed?

He puts on a pair of well-ironed brown pants and a cream shirt. His fingers riffle along the edges of his ties. Dressing for the embassy, even just to pick up a visa, takes some thought. Important people look important, more important than merited. They carry leather briefcases, smell of Boss cologne, most likely purchased on the black market, and politely excuse themselves to the front of queues.

It is later than he wants it to be. The road through the bazaar is the shortest route to the train station. Dust, dirt, dead leaves, banana peels, lumps and bumps of cement blocks lie in his path. He passes carts piled with pyramids of fruit—papayas, pomegranates, guavas—and vegetables—brinjals, gourds, okra.

He is peripherally aware of the ire of women bargaining down prices. “Oh, bhaiya, give me a final price. Enough of this kit-kit; I’m in a hurry.”

One thing about Americans—no one quibbles about prices. Everything is always on sale. Time is precious in their culture; they hurry and get

everything done. Past meat stalls with fresh, red, lean sides of beef hanging from clips off a taut wire, his mouth waters for a juicy steak, with a buttery, un-spiced potato, but that will have to wait till he can rip off his vegetarian cloak in America.

One thing about Indians—they spice everything.

Everything looks yellow or red. He picks up his pace. A vagrant wind churns up loose-leafed newspapers and magazines from a pile lying beside a heap of coconuts. Passing a circle of women and children crowding the middle of the street, he wonders for an instant if something tragic has happened. But as the lilting, mesmerizing melody of a flute wafts in the air, he knows it’s only a snake

continued on page 85

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5

Is the green movement too white?

By John Ellsberry, Lionel Foster, and Peter Quinn “When Urbanite approached us, there was little in the form of direction,” writes Lionel Foster. “Early on we agreed on some sort of spectacle, something for the eye, and something with a social component. It had to pose some question about where we were collectively and spark a dialogue in response. We started batting around big words such as race, gender, and class. How could you tackle such huge concepts in such a small space? We kept talking about Baltimore, about the city’s disconnectedness and multiplicity. We thought and laughed and meandered, took breaks and met again, but the segregation remained a constant. It kept insisting on being our target, so we slowly took aim …”

What’s in a name?

By Abbott Miller and Lalita Noronha When approached about this issue, Abbott Miller had a thought. “People outside the area have the idea that they know what Baltimore is—even if they don’t,” he said. “The name elicits an odd reaction. So what if we just renamed the city?” Lalita Noronha took inspiration from that concept and over the course of several creatively charged weeks, she drafted an original piece of fiction that illustrates the poignancy of place and identity. Meanwhile, Abbott toyed with some ideas for a new city name. “Believemore,” anyone?

65

immobility Last December, a few days after Christmas, Walter Mesler, my uncle, passed away. I didn’t know Walter as well as I would have liked. Most of my life, nobody did. His problems began after his only son was born with severe retardation—the kind where you spend your life in diapers and only the desperate love of parents can keep you out of an institution. This was too much for my uncle, a profoundly big-hearted man. He lost himself in a haze of alcohol and drugs, and spent a good part of two decades at rock bottom, roaming city streets as a panhandler, a bum.

Somehow, with the help of a loving family, he got himself back on his feet. I was happy I had a chance to visit with him a couple of months before he passed away. We spent a lot of time talking about current events, which naturally led to some musing about our misgivings regarding our nation’s current wars. But there was one war in particular that we talked a lot about, a war that plays out almost nightly on our television news, marked by images of cities beset by chaos, hopelessness and despair, images of young men gunned down on the streets. It is a war that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and has compromised our nation’s core values of personal freedom and limited government. We talked about the War on Drugs.

Anthropologists say one can tell more about a society by what it doesn’t talk about than what it does, that a society’s most deeply held beliefs are never discussed, and hence never

Mule 8mm film digitally transferred (2 minutes, 35 seconds) 2006

challenged. In his last press conference as secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld was asked what, if anything, he would have done differently. Rumsfeld, the man whose very name has become an adjective symbolizing hubris and ideological inflexibility, said that he would not have used the term War on Terror. It was, he said, a misleading definition that distorted the nature of the problem. It is telling that Rumsfeld could make that observation, yet after decades of futility no national figure of similar significance has challenged the concept of a War on Drugs. We can contest the War in Iraq, yet we experience the War on Drugs as if it were an earthquake, a flood, an act of God that we are powerless to change. So many of us were born into this war that it is all too easy to forget we are fighting it. We are paralyzed by immobility, an immobility of thought and ideas—the kind that seems all too prevalent in America today.

That we are losing the War on Drugs should be obvious to everyone. I could cite statistic after statistic, tell you that marijuana is America’s largest cash crop, and that in some cities more young black men are going to prison than going to college. I could show you images of families ripped apart by violence, lawlessness, a trail of destruction from Colombia to Afghanistan. You know all that already.

We simply cannot “win” the War on Drugs because there is no “war” to win. Drug abuse is as old as civilization itself, mentioned as far back as Homer’s Odyssey. Drug

Mule is about resistance. Pulling a three-hundredpound log encrusted with pressed tin became my metaphor for struggle. In this performance piece, forward progress on an inner-city street becomes damn near impossible. The object that I move has been weathered by time. Dissected from deteriorating Baltimore homes, the log I am pulling is literally the wreckage of past generations. In a struggle to move forward, every ounce of energy

abusers were almost always viewed about the same as they are today: with a mixture of pity and disgust. But no one imagined a militarized solution that would turn our streets into battlefields and criminalize the very people who are themselves the greatest victims of their own drug use.

For that—and for the very term War on Drugs—we can give credit to Richard Nixon, who coined the term to divert the nation’s attention from another unpopular war abroad, the war in Vietnam, turning to the failed model of Prohibition.

The problem with this approach was anticipated more than two centuries ago by Adam Smith when he laid out his theories of supply and demand in 1776. By criminalizing a commodity, the state simply moves the economic activity into the realm of a black market, which then becomes dominated by criminal syndicates. That was the problem we ran into during Prohibition and the problem we are faced with today.

It is simply economics. No matter how many drug dealers are arrested, more will rise to fill the economic demand, just as every poppy and cocaine field eradicated abroad is simply replaced by new poppy and cocaine fields.

There are other answers. We can view drug addiction as a medical problem, the way Great Britain tackled an incipient heroin problem at the turn of the century. England virtually eradicated the use of heroin by allowing doctors (and later establishing clinics) to dispense drugs to addicts, all the while treating them for their addictions. Instead of

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—Bill Mesler

—Jefferson Pinder

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THE EDUCATION EXPERIMENT

purchasing drugs from street dealers with an economic stake in continuing them on their road of addiction, addicts were offered treatment and advice every time they needed a fix. Some will be cured. Others never will. But at least they will live with some modicum of dignity. The only losers will be the drug dealers and drug cartels who will suddenly find themselves without a market. And the vast resources now devoted to stemming the illegal flow of drugs could be devoted to rebuilding communities devastated by the drug trade, by creating jobs and funding educational and social programs.

It is not the only alternative. But it is a new idea, or an old idea, and we are all-too-short of any ideas at all. The status quo isn’t working. There is something wrong with a system where a privileged white guy can snort cocaine and go on to be elected president of the United States on a platform of restoring morality to the White House, while a poor black teenager can do the same thing and go to prison and then have a hard time getting a job at Wal-Mart.

We talked about that contradiction when I saw my uncle last. As we spoke, his daughter and grandson sat quietly on the sofa, their heads bobbing gently in unison, like old men falling asleep. They were heroin addicts giving methadone a try. It was a baby step, but my uncle knew how important baby steps were.

He knew that anything was better than immobility.

is utilized to create momentum. There is no end in sight. So with my body I pull and submit to the task that lies ahead. Like a mule, I am a beast of burden, not focusing on the end, rather pushing forward with blinders and hoping that the poetry of my labor amounts to a pure meditation of what has come before and what lies ahead.

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If she could glimpse the differences between Baltimore and Bombay, see beyond the superficialities of boundaries, she’d love Baltimore. Such a city of eclectic rowhouses; ethnic groups—German, Greek, Korean, Italian—who knew, perhaps there might even be a Little India tucked away in one of the neighborhoods. everything was half price. You could practically eat for free—well, not exactly, but you could pig out for a pittance at those all-you-can-eat places.

Nice places, mind you, with big smorgasbords— roast beefs, hams, a variety of salads, even midEastern stuff—tabouli, hummus, kebabs. Why, the breads alone were astounding—seven-grain, five-grain, multi-grain, whole wheat, with honey, without honey, sesame, and permutations and combinations, all catered to health nuts and America’s changing faces and palates. It was luscious living—opulent and free.

That’s why he’d like to migrate to America. It was the place to live. That’s why he’d been secretly buying dollars on the black market in Bombay and smuggling them in, sewn safely in the lining of

“In Baltimore, many neighborhoods have devolved into terra incognita, burdened and rife with vacant land and abandoned structures, and rampant with drug and gang-related problems,” writes Irene Poulsen.

“These neighborhoods are primarily highlighted when a crime, accident, or murder occurs, but their true identity has been obscured, and they have sometimes been made to feel that the condition is their fault.

Stories and histories, related by residents, create a more authentic record of neighborhoods. Sharing these stories supports residents in their struggle for recognition, justice, and control in gaining a status of health that all Baltimoreans expect and deserve.”

Renaming Baltimore

To volunteer for the Black + White = Green event or to be involved in one of the many other EcoFestival events, please visit Baltimore Green Week’s site at www.baltimoregreenweek.org. Let’s make our differences fade to green.

STORYBOARD

How do you give a voice to those who have been silenced?

By Mark Cameron, Zoë Charlton, Rick Delaney, and Irene Poulsen

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Get Involved

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“Imagine walling off a generation from the incivility and crime outside in order to save a community,” writes Ed Burns. “Some may say that we cannot afford such an approach; but we would argue that we can afford nothing less. Others would say that there is not the knowledge base for such a generational plan; but we could point to numerous demonstration programs at every age and stage of a child’s life to say that while all the evidence is not in, we know more than enough to move forward. The question is whether we have the will.”

Black + White = Green

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Saturday

The Impact

The Premise The slogan represents one step towards a broadening of what we commonly call “environmentalism” by emphasizing the ways in which it undercuts race and class.

Clean, livable spaces are a necessity for all human beings, and we shouldn’t have to go far to enjoy them. We work hard to protect certain species and their delicate natural terrains. A truly green philosophy maintains that human beings deserve the same consideration.

What if we walled off an entire city neighborhood?

By Robert Blum, Ed Burns, Pavlina Ilieva, and Kuo Pao Lian

If ever there was anything doomed to fail, if ever there was anything so poorly crafted short of war, this was it. But as an economist, I am quite accustomed to having the world work out differently than I had anticipated.

by Anirban Basu and Ramona S. Diaz

Ramona S. Diaz, a filmmaker who lives in Baltimore, is making a film that investigates the city school system’s experience with teachers from the Philippines. As a school board commissioner who typically interacts with the system through senior-level personnel, I was intrigued when Urbanite asked me to collaborate with Ramona and to provide my input on Baltimore’s overall experience with the plan.

Our plan was simple. I would speak directly to students and to teachers while Ramona and her team watched, gauging from their responses the success of the Filipino-teacher experiment. I would like to say that I went into this without preconceptions, but rumors strongly implying that this experiment was not going well already swirled around North Avenue and throughout the city.

Teachers from the Philippines were not connecting with their students and the students were neither engaged nor impressed. Some of the teachers were considering going home well before their contracts expired. It was unclear whether the students would notice.

Given that our school system is perpetually beleaguered, constantly maligned, and always striving for improvement, this appeared to be yet another item about which to be depressed. As most system stakeholders know, teacher recruitment has been a long-standing issue for the Baltimore City Public School System. Year after year we have told our young people that teachers just aren’t paid enough. So guess what? Many talented youth who would have made terrific teachers bypassed the opportunity, certain that they wouldn’t earn enough to make a workable living. Meanwhile, those educators who entered the field en masse during the 1960s and 1970s now stand at retirement’s edge. As a result of this and other factors, each year the system loses about fifteen percent of its teachers.

As if challenging demographics weren’t enough, Baltimore City has to compete with surrounding jurisdictions for highly qualified teachers. Who wouldn’t want to teach in Howard County, routinely judged to be Maryland’s finest school system? Who wouldn’t want to teach in the leafy suburbs surrounding Annapolis or in the general vicinity of Towson or Hunt Valley or Westminster or any number of other charming Central Maryland edge cities?

And so, Baltimore City finds itself scrambling each summer for teachers to fill classrooms; and with No Child Left Behind upping the ante for highly credentialed teachers, filling the gap has become even more challenging.

So famously parochial Baltimore City decided to radically expand the geographic reach of its teacher recruitment to include the other side of the world.

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And why not the Philippines? It is a nation with a high proportion of English speakers, a nation known for its capacity to generate graduates with a deep and abiding interest in mathematics and science, and a nation with a historic connection to America.

And if this worked, Baltimore City might just have found a cure to its perennial problem of recruiting highly qualified teachers. After all, though the Philippines has made tremendous strides economically as a nation, their estimated annual per capita spending power of $5,000 pales in comparison to America’s $41,000. And while Baltimore City has difficulty paying much more for teachers than surrounding school systems, it can compensate significantly more than the schools of metro Manila and its environs. Eventually, hundreds of teachers can be recruited from the Philippines, compensating for Central Maryland’s insatiable appetite for highly qualified instructors and its inability to supply them locally.

Bottom line: There is much at stake. That’s why I so dreaded my February interviews with Filipino teachers and their students. I presumed that I would hear the worst. What were we thinking? How could we expect there to be a meaningful and productive connection between teachers from Asia, with their culture of discipline and obsessive respect for elders and with our students, with their inner-city and American irreverence and questionable commitment to education.

If ever there was anything doomed to fail, if ever there was anything so poorly crafted short of war, this was it. But as an economist, I am quite accustomed to having the world work out differently than I had anticipated.

And as it turns out, the world is working out, at least in this instance. Shortly after the end of a bone-chilling school day, I sat down with eight students—seven African-American, one white—all of whom had at least one teacher from the Philippines and who together crudely approximate the simple demographics of our system.

It started exactly as I expected, with them telling me that they found these teachers from the Far East difficult to understand. As a school commissioner, I’ve developed a thick skin and I’m accustomed to grumbling from parents, administrators, staff, advocates, and of course students.

But then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the tone of the conversation changed.

Apparently, by November, roughly two months through the school year, the language barriers had melted away and the pace of learning had accelerated. “Oh, I like Mr. Veracruz. He makes science fun,” exalted one student.

“Before homeroom we talk about all kinds of things and she tells us stories about her life,” another student said about a female teacher.

“What would happen if these teachers went back?” I asked. The resounding reply: “We would miss them.”

Later that day, I went to the apartments at Symphony Center where many of our Filipino teachers live in one of Charm City’s newest addresses. And through an interview with eight teachers from the Philippines, the magnitude of our success was confirmed. Our students respect these teachers and these teachers are passionate about their students and passionate about their schools. “Why are you closing Harlem Park Middle School?” one asked as if we commissioners work for her, which of course we do.

“Why can’t we have smaller class sizes?” asked another.

“Why can’t we hold students back if they can’t read?”

“Why can’t we expand wraparound services for our special ed students?”

And so on.

After about half an hour, they simply forgot that I was there and discussed the virtues of certain teaching techniques, issues of curricula, and the quality of interaction with their respective administrators.

It’s important to recognize that it’s not all joy and reward for these teachers.

For many of them, coming to Baltimore represents a combination of lucrative opportunity and shocking despair. About half of those I interviewed have children they left behind, many of whom are well short of adolescence. Most have thought about returning to the Philippines on multiple occasions, typically when they are in their classrooms. But they stay and they toil on behalf of our children even as they long for their own.

Among the many failings of the Baltimore City Public School System come those occasional sweet successes. My only hope is that these teachers will be allowed to stay past the three years allotted to them by their visas. What we have on our hands is a permanent solution, not merely an interesting experiment.

What we have is beautiful.

—Anirban Basu

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What would it take to free a generation from the burdens of the inner city?

By Bill Mesler and Jefferson Pinder “Anthropologists say one can tell more about a society by what it doesn’t talk about than what it does, that a society’s most deeply held beliefs are never discussed, and hence never challenged,” writes Mesler. Here, both he and Pinder challenge norms. “Mule is about resistance,” Pinder says of his short film pictured here.

“In this performance piece, forward progress on an inner-city street becomes damn near impossible. Like a mule, I am a beast of burden, not focusing on the end, rather pushing forward with blinders and hoping that the poetry of my labor amounts to a pure meditation of what has come before and what lies ahead.”

The Education Experiment

What would it really take to attract qualified teachers to the city and truly leave no child behind?

By Anirban Basu and Ramona S. Diaz “Famously parochial Baltimore City decided to radically expand the geographic reach of its teacher recruitment to include the other side of the world,” explains Anirban Basu. “And why not the Philippines?

It is a nation with a high proportion of English speakers, a nation known for its capacity to generate graduates with a deep and abiding interest in mathematics and science, and a nation with a historic connection to America. What we have on our hands is a permanent solution, not merely an interesting experiment.” w w w. u r b a n i t e p ro j e c t . c o m m a r c h 0 7

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The author of The Medici Effect explains how the explosion of new ideas at the intersection of different fields can change Baltimore—starting with you

what is

Let me ask you a question. What is the connection between termites and architecture? Shoe designers and car engineers? Lollipops and sea urchins? Or butterflies and mobile phones?

The connections may not be too obvious at first, but each of those combinations represents a remarkable innovation, and an incredible idea. Those who find such unique connections (almost all of us) and dare to pursue them (a lot fewer of us than should be) are the ones who are breaking new ground. Those people who can step into an intersection of different fields or cultures are those who will change the world.

It may seem quite counterintuitive at first—but the fact is that you have the best chance of breaking new ground if you combine what you know today with ideas or concepts from other fields or cultures. Your best shot at innovation does not, in fact, come from you increasingly specializing in your current field. It may help you change things incrementally, in small, predictable steps. But it shuts you out of more intriguing and groundbreaking discoveries.

Take this guy, Mick Pearce, for instance. He is an architect that received a tough challenge to design an attractive building in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, but also, in the design, to get rid of any need for air conditioning.

This may, on the face of it, seem ridiculous. After all, it can get pretty hot in Harare. But Pearce solved the problem by basing his architectural designs on how termites cool their towerlike mounds of mud and dirt.

How was that again?

It turns out termites must keep the internal temperature in their mounds at a constant 87 degrees in order to grow an essential fungus. Not an easy job since temperatures on the African plains can range from above 100 degrees during the day to below 40 at night. Still, the insects manage it by ingeniously directing breezes at the base of the mound into chambers with cool, wet mud, and then redirecting this cooled air to the peak. By constantly building new vents and closing old ones, they can regulate the temperature very precisely.

Pearce’s passion for understanding natural ecosystems allowed him to combine the fields of architecture and termite ecology and to bring this combination of concepts to fruition. The office complex, called Eastgate, opened in 1996 and is the largest commercial/ retail complex in Zimbabwe. It maintains a steady temperature of 73 to 77 degrees and uses less than ten percent of the energy consumed by other buildings its size. And it saved $3.5 million immediately because they did not have to install an air-conditioning plant.

Pearce had become an innovator—he had changed the world, or at least a small part of it. What, exactly, enabled him to become such a leader? He was not a world-leading expert in architecture and he certainly was not an expert in termite ecology. But he did not have to be. Instead, Pearce used his knowledge within one field and joined it with ideas and concepts from another seemingly unrelated field. He, in other words, stepped into the intersection between those two fields—and struck gold because of it.

Pearce broke new ground, not because he focused relentlessly on one field within one culture. Instead, it was his willingness to explore ideas and concepts outside of his field of expertise that enabled him to break new ground. We can all do this. In fact, in the fast-changing world that has emerged during the last couple of decades, finding such intersections is a requirement. It is the surest way to generate groundbreaking ideas and make them happen.

I call the explosion of new ideas at the intersection of different fields “the Medici Effect” a name derived from a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy.

The Medicis were a banking family in Florence that funded creators from a wide range

The Urbanite Project?

By Frans Johansson

Illustration by Marc Alain

of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence.

There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines. Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. Leonardo da Vinci is the illustrious standard-bearer of the Renaissance and is the ultimate representation of Europe’s most creative explosions of art, culture, and science. The effects of the Medici family can be felt to this day.

We, too, can create the Medici Effect. We can ignite this explosion of extraordinary ideas and take advantage of it as individuals, as teams, and as organizations. We can do it by bringing together different disciplines and cultures and searching for the places where they connect. And there has never been a better time to do this than now.

In my travels around the world, while speaking at corporations and conferences and while talking to innovators of all kinds—entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, executives, artists, policy-makers—it has become very clear that the need for innovation is at a fever pitch. The world is changing at a breathtaking speed—faster than ever before. I have yet to meet an executive who with confidence can tell me where his or her industry will be five years from now. Imagine being an executive in the CD industry in the mid-nineties.

You could have the best, most strategic plan to conquer this industry, to become a global market leader. But today you would be dead. You’d be gone. The world is changing fast and we have to change with it. But how?

Today the world is converging in more places than ever before. People move between different countries and our communities get increasingly diverse; science and technology are converging faster than ever before, and the power of the Web connects people between places in ways that only a couple of years ago would have been unthinkable.

This convergence is giving rise to more intersections than ever—and more opportunities for each one of us to create the Medici Effect. Everywhere you can see such connections: Nike designers work with General Motors engineers to develop tire patterns that resemble a sneaker’s sole (for the H3 Hummer). Marcus Samuelsson, a black chef born in Ethiopia, learns how to cook food around the world and innovates Swedish cuisine at his restaurant Aquavit. He becomes the youngest chef to ever to receive a three-star rating from The New York Times, for dishes such as sea urchin lollipops. Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith steps into the intersection of violence prevention and health care and dramatically drops the level of violence and murder in Boston during the 1990s. Groundbreaking ideas spring out of such unusual connections. This is how we innovate; this is how we change our world.

In this issue of Urbanite you will see a few such remarkable collaborations. But any one of you can reach to a field or culture different than your own. If you can find a connection, you may have discovered the best chance to create something new, to change our world.

As it turns out, the single best way of breaking out of the pack is to take what you know right now, today, and combine this knowledge with ideas from other fields, industries, and cultures. When you find those connection points, explore them and prepare for an explosion of groundbreaking ideas.

So what about the intersection between butterflies and mobile phones? I’ll let you work that one out for yourself … They are connected, however—and the truth is that most things in this world are connected. The world is, indeed, a connected place. But it wasn’t created that way. There has always been someone making the connections.

It could be you. ■

1 hidden walls

by robert blum, ed burns, pavlina ilieva, and kuo pao lian

He stood on the pristine stretch of his back alley and eyed the tomato on the vine in Mrs. Bracken’s backyard. It was lush and ripe red and so very compelling. He surveyed the expanse of rowhouses; no one was about. He slipped the gate’s latch and was in and out of the yard in a blink. He cupped the fruit in his two small hands, took a deep breath, and launched it. It hung in the blue of the August sky for an instant before rocketing back. Splat!

Out of nowhere, Mrs. Williams appeared, leaning over her chain-link fence, head shaking with disappointment.

“Boy, I know your mother raised you better.”

“Yes ma’am,” he managed as the exhilaration choked in his throat.

Now he knelt beside the scrub bucket, working the bristled brush to gather up the mangled pulp. His mother, Mrs. Williams, and Mrs. Bracken stood over him, radiating a collective displeasure. “Just wait until your father gets home.”

A wall, as a definitive term, is described and visualized as a barrier, an obstacle, or an obstruction. Physically and metaphorically, it suggests confinement, separation, struggle, imprisonment, or even hate. Walls can be tools in which to hide objects, systems, situations, or people. But what if these walls can be interpreted as something else, something nurturing?

IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DETERIORATING URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE AND SOCIAL DECAY HAPPENING IN OUR CITY, THE FIRST STEP TO A SELF-ACTUALIZED PROCESS THAT BRINGS INDIVIDUALS BACK INTO THE COMMUNITY IS TO PROVIDE A SAFE AND NURTURING ENVIRONMENT. Block by block, a new intervention—“hidden walls”—will provide a boundary between external inadequacies and internal possibilities. Existing rowhouses of an urban block will be divided into two independent parts by physical walls constructed inside the structures. To allow for lively street life, the first floor of these buildings will be available to businesses and the general public; the other floors of the houses open into a courtyard accessible only by people living within the walls. This separation provides a clear delineation of public and private space and offers an added layer of physical safety.

SOME MAY SAY THAT WE CANNOT AFFORD SUCH AN APPROACH; BUT WE WOULD ARGUE THAT WE CAN AFFORD NOTHING LESS. Others would say that there is not the knowledge base for such a generational plan; but we could point to numerous demonstration programs at every age and stage of a child’s life to say that while all the evidence is not in, we know more than enough to move forward. The question is whether we have the will.

In the 1940s, when the great migration from the South began, African Americans came to Baltimore as had others before them, poor in pocket but rich in the intangible chemistry of self-in-community. They found work in factories paying good union wages and providing good union benefits. With the security of a paycheck and steady work, they crafted neighborhoods that functioned in the normally imperfect but adequate way, providing sufficient sustenance and support, comfort and connection to keep everyone afloat. The children were reared with a sense of expectation and went off to school prepared to learn. They made accomplishments despite being judged separate and unequal.

For most, life was good.

Then, without fanfare or warning, the economic engine sustaining their world lurched. America had shifted gears and stepped on the gas, leaving the Industrial Age but a speck in the rearview mirror. History will record it as one of those seminal moments when market forces converge with unforgiving power to rip entire populations from the fabric of a viable reality. This event was as fundamentally disruptive as the Trail of Tears and the Great Depression. Today, we know these forces as globalization and technology. They are touted as stepping-stones to a better life, but for a workforce left without work, waking up to a wasteland devoid of opportunity or any meaningful definition, they were anything but.

PEOPLE NO LONGER VALUED OR NEEDED OFTEN DISAPPEAR INTO HAPLESS THIRD-WORLD POVERTY, A STATE IN WHICH ALL OF A PERSON’S STRENGTH IS EXPENDED ON THE STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE. But this time it was different. While America went about the business of business, those abandoned went about forging a new economic engine out of a singular human need: the toxic fantasy of addiction. For many who could not escape, the buying and selling of dope and coke filled the void left by the loss of legitimate opportunity. It was a new construct based on raw, unfettered capitalism. Now man viewed his fellow man as a means to an end, not an end in itself, negating rules, codes, and allegiances. If you had the mind and the might, there was meaning to be found in cash and power. If you faltered and were weak, there was meaning to be found in the pipe and syringe.

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At first adults competed for a place in the new pecking order, but very quickly— frighteningly so—custom became culture. Children were the casualties. Many were neglected. Others were crimped up by a cruelty of punches and sarcasm, of lies and let-downs. Ironically this soul-jarring process prepared the children elegantly for the new paradigm of the corner drug culture.

For more than thirty years, the slow conflagration of despair and addiction has burnt through the neighborhoods, with thousands killed, tens of thousands incarcerated, and hundreds of thousands marginalized. This has been the visible horror recorded on the daily news for all to see. What has been largely invisible, and in the long run more profound, is the disintegration of the social infrastructure. The loss of community has doomed many to a freefall in a downward spiral that became a selfperpetuating process of failure. They went from poor to impoverished, a change not of degree but of kind. The adults lost economic well-being, job skills, work ethic, and that intangible chemistry of self-in-community. The children lost the expectation to succeed, and if they came prepared to learn it was more from duty than desire.

At first, the government relied on traditional social programs such as unemployment insurance and welfare to jump-start a population caught in a fog of suspended animation. For some people these programs were the way out. But as more jobs relocated, the mechanisms were overwhelmed and were eventually inadequate for the task. Realizing the severity of the problem, the government turned to nontraditional approaches. Under the banner of the War on Poverty, it launched a series of initiatives such as Model Cities, Community Action, Job Corps, and prisoner reentry programs that were designed to target specific needs. Again, for some these were a lifeline out of the abyss.

The private sector also stepped in to try to alleviate the suffering. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, drug treatment centers, and community health clinics soon dotted the landscape. As public schools failed, preschool programs, juvenile interventions, after-school programs, and mentoring programs were established to stabilize children. But for many, these programs and government initiatives could not individually or in combination be capable of stitching together the social infrastructure necessary for the long-term health of the entire community.

WE PROPOSE A SHIFT OF EMPHASIS FROM WHAT HAS BECOME A BOUQUET OF DISCONNECTED, SHORT-TERM DEMONSTRATION PROGRAMS TO A LONGTERM COMMITMENT TO REBUILDING THE SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF OUR COMMUNITIES, BLOCK-BY-BLOCK AND NEIGHBORHOOD-BY-NEIGHBORHOOD. Rather than quick, dramatic, highly publicized programs that disappear once their seed money is gone, we propose rebuilding neighborhoods by working with and supporting those who reside there—those who are committed to rebuilding their neighborhoods through supporting the most vulnerable residents: infants and their young parents.

We propose weaving a web of supports for these young families so that from before conception there is nutrition; from before birth there are the prenatal supports necessary for children to be born healthy. It means doing whatever it takes to secure both the health and vitality of these young neighborhood residents and their families; and it means providing ongoing support throughout infancy, young childhood, the school-age years, and adolescence. It involves physical and mental health services, parenting education and child education, social services, and vocational training services; and at the end of high school it involves a promissory note of employment or higher education. It means creating a space where a sense of community can return.

This concept of inserting new support elements in the old block allows architecture to become a prosthetic process of local regeneration, rather than an evasive development of erasure and dominance. The hidden walls run along all four edges of the block, forming a continuous boundary around the re-planned interior courtyard. The system provides the community with daycare facilities, a communal kitchen, an urban farm, residences, local exchange systems for goods and services, and more. This protected area acts as an extension of the womb, a child-centered environment that not only focuses on providing a space for community-based learning, health promotion, and integrated social networks, but also on rebuilding the very fabric of community life.

In the past, unspoken laws ruled neighborhoods. These “hidden walls” governed people’s behavior, but in today’s inner-city neighborhoods these unspoken codes of conduct don’t exist anymore. But what if we brought them back? What if we put up walls that would create safe spaces in the midst of dangerous environments? Then maybe the decaying walls of our neighborhoods could experience new life. Maybe we could surpass our immutable failures.

We have the knowledge. We need the will. Failure has taught us that the solution will not come with the quick fix of a magic bullet. Instead, we need to be prepared for the long haul. It will take time to create a process that will give those who are disenfranchised the means to take control of their lives, both individually and in-community.

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2

terra incognita (n.)

an unknown, unexplored region; territory that has not been mapped or documented B y M a r k C a m e r o n, Z o ë C h a r l t o n, R i c k D e l a n e y, a n d I r e n e P o u l s e n

During the days of exploration, undiscovered territories were often identified on maps as terra incognita. These unknown territories were considered dangerous and exotic, full of mystery, strange beasts, and wild people. Until western explorers named and “civilized” the terra incognita, these areas were regarded as regions to be avoided.

In Baltimore, many neighborhoods have devolved into terra incognita, burdened and rife with vacant land and abandoned structures, and rampant with drug and gang-related problems. Like the early explorers who “brought civilization” to terra incognita, individuals today see these places only as a resource to be exploited, gentrified, or resold for profit. In reality these places contain residents and histories full of hope, promise, and the desire to make their neighborhoods safe and vital.

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Bricks, boards, and blocks have been used to seal up houses, symbolizing the ambiguous and the neglected status of a community.

These neighborhoods are primarily highlighted when a crime, accident, or murder occurs. Their true identity has been obscured, and residents have sometimes been made to feel that difficult neighborhood conditions are their fault. It is important to change the misperception of these terra incognita neighborhoods by illuminating the circumstances that are behind these conditions.

Stories and histories related by residents create a more authentic record of their neighborhoods. These stories illuminate the challenges that incognita neighborhoods face. Sharing these stories supports residents in their struggle for recognition, justice, and control in gaining a status of health that all Baltimoreans expect and deserve.

Storytelling Is Political

We propose two intertwined ways to foster recognition of terra incognita neighborhoods: www.interraBaltimore.com An interactive website that will allow geographically separated communities to be linked electronically. The website would be a virtual civic space shaped by the neighborhoods using three types of storytelling:

• Stories of everyday life—celebrating a kindergarten graduation, remembering a neighbor who was killed, or describing a community event. These stories are eloquent and profane, told through text, audio, pictures, and video journals.

• Stories of circumstance—telling how gentrification is affecting a neighborhood; questioning why the City fails to clean up a vacant lot; learning how to break a drug addiction. These are stories that give a human face to issues that affect neighborhoods.

• Stories of action—building on local knowledge, these stories share advice, guidance, and ideas for effecting neighborhood change through a virtual community of online forums, discussion groups, and blogs.

Links would be provided to information, data, resources, and community people.

mobile story collectors Recognizing that a digital divide is still prevalent in Baltimore, we propose a series of mobile units (like a bookmobile) equipped with computers and classroom space. They would travel from neighborhood to neighborhood occupying vacant lots that, for several days, would become a new community gathering space to collect stories, teach people how to use the Internet and access information, and host meetings and events. The mobile units give form and place to www.interraBaltimore.com. w w w. u r b a n i t e p ro j e c t . c o m m a r c h 0 7

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35 What if you had to duck every time you heard the sound of a firecracker or a backfiring motorcycle because it was more likely to be a gun?

What if your kids walked through alleys strewn with trash and dead animals on their daily route to school?

What if your drinking water was poisoned by lead?

Our city is divided by race and class. But there is hope. The same language and energy we use to protect our natural resources can produce healthier lives for the city’s people.

The Premise The slogan represents one step towards a broadening of what we commonly call “environmentalism” by emphasizing the ways in which it undercuts race and class.

Clean, livable spaces are a necessity for all human beings, and we shouldn’t have to go far to enjoy them. We work hard to protect certain species and their delicate natural terrains. A truly green philosophy maintains that human beings deserve the same consideration.

The Event A collaborative spectacle during Baltimore Green Week’s EcoFestival in Druid Hill Park on May 5 will dramatically illustrate this point. Two parading groups made up of the people on hand will converge into one vibrant burst of green as cameras positioned high above the scene record the event.

STORYBOARD

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The Impact Photos of the event will be made into postcards that will be sold by local merchants. In a follow-up to the event, proceeds from those sales will be used for greening and beautification projects in neighborhoods surrounding the site.

Get Involved To volunteer for the Black + White = Green event or to be involved in one of the many other EcoFestival events, please visit Baltimore Green Week’s site at www.baltimoregreenweek.org. Let’s make our differences fade to green.

— John Ellsberry Lionel Foster Peter Quinn

Saturday May 5th 2007 2:00 p.m.

DRUID HILL LAKE

Photo courtesty of City of Baltimore, Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office of Information Technology, Enterprise Geographic Information Services

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4 Renaming Baltimore

By Abbott Miller

when you tell someone you live in baltimore, a strange smile comes over their face. It’s often not based on any true knowledge of or insight about the place: Instead, I think it’s because the word itself sounds funny. Here are some options to consider for renaming Baltimore and creating a new image for the Greatest City in America.

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proposal 1

· Utilizes existing signage, representing significant cost savings. · Sweetness is a natural component of “charm,” which is identified with Baltimore. · Optimistic, utopian spirit. · Same number of syllables as in Bal-ti-more.

proposal 2

proposal 3

· Evokes heritage and environmental consciousness. · Works well on T-shirts, license plates, meat, poultry, and fish.

· Shorter and more upbeat. · Fewer letters save time and money. · Would be the only city in America to have an exclamation point.

proposal 4 · Leverages the familiarity of a widely reviled campaign. · Inexpensive to reproduce (black and white). · Many existing “Believe” banners can be repurposed. · Transfers religious faith to civic pride. · Makes a hollow pitch to ease social crisis with a slogan.

proposal 5

proposal 6

proposal 7

· Emphasizes Baltimore’s proximity to the nation’s capital. · Gives the city an inside-the-Beltway aura. · Opens the door to future annexation-withoutrepresentation. · Hello, Monorail!

· Exploits the cachet of Baltimore-based crime shows such as The Wire, The Corner, and Homicide. · Incorporates numerals, recalling popular shows such as 24, Beverly Hills 90210. · Picks up two of the cities leading industries: crime and film. · Assertive and unapologetic (“Not the ’Burbs!”).

· Capitalizes on Baltimore’s dwindling inner-city population. · Creates a virtue out of second-tier status (“Not New York, and Proud of It!”). · Hip insider reference to the city’s architectural legacy as home to two Mies van der Rohe buildings.

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Where Hearts Lie

By Lalita Noronha

“So, Vinay, it’s settled then?”

Vinay nods. He’s heard it before—these questions that aren’t really questions. Nothing has been settled in his mind, but his wife’s mind was made up long before she’d posed the question. As always, Sonia brings things up just days before he’s set to leave for America, and today, he’s right in the middle of a shave. Can’t a man find peace even in a bathroom? He considers his face in the mirror—square jaw, deep piercing eyes, thin lips over straight white teeth, a handsome face by any standards. His eyes drift below his neck to his chest—firm pectoral muscles covered with short curly hair, and a hard abdomen with just a hint of love handles. He’ll take care of that, he vows. Once he returns from this trade show, there’ll be a lull in his travels. He’ll begin a serious work-out regimen. In fact, why not pick up a pair of Adidas in Baltimore?

He wants to stay fit for health reasons, certainly, but also for the way women eye him, especially whiteskinned American women, who have no false sense of modesty.

But, Sonia doesn’t like Americans at all. Never mind that she doesn’t really know any, except perfunctorily from contacts at the Lions Club or the Bombay Gymkhana whereas he, Vinay, knows all types—secretaries, professionals, housewives, people in planes, malls, grocery stores—as well he should. This is, after all, his seventh business trip to America. He’s been to England and Germany too, but for his money he’ll pick Americans anytime.

They’re warm, and friendly, if you overlook their quirks. But Sonia’s tapered view gleaned from the glitz of TV and magazine ads had led her to a dynamically opposite conclusion.

“They don’t mean what they say,” she’d once complained.

“How so? Why do you say that?”

“Well, because I know. Like that woman who works out in the gym every Saturday, Eva—Evasomething—can’t remember her surname. She’ll smile, sweet like halwa, and say, ‘how you doing,’ then doesn’t bother to listen. Why ask and then walk off? It’s insulting. Half the time I talk to her backside. And that tall white fellow …”

“Oh, but it’s an expression, for God’s sake—a form of greeting like namaste, or hi! You’re not supposed to launch into your whole life story. No one has time to listen.”

“Including you. You don’t have time either.”

Bitterness seeped from her pores. He’d decided to ignore the comment. He knew that tone; he heard that lorry filled with cement blocks coming full speed, and knew better than to stand there and get crushed.

In the beginning, life with her had been almost intoxicating. Everything about her, the way she carried herself, walked, talked, even scrubbed the floor, exuded an allure, a raw kind of sex, made all the more sexual by the unawareness of her movements. Other times, she was feisty, flirty, a very un-Indian girl, even on her “interview day.”

Arranged marriages, she would later joke, were interviews for lifelong jobs—no retirement, no benefits, just work! He remembered that day well.

Her high cheekbones were like soft contours of

desert sand, smooth and brown, tapering to a voluptuous mouth and a small upturned nose. Her eyes were an oasis to drown in. If she’d let you.

She was unexplored territory, a handful he knew he’d enjoy handling. And so he had. But now, still childless after ten years, they’d both abandoned their exploration. Disappointed and angry, she’d fed its embers. Her waist thickened, the beautiful angles of her body rounded, and even her lithe spirit was weighted with unspoken words.

Smoothing his jaw with approval, Vinay squints at the triple-headed razor, his newest American acquisition. How he loved these American-made products; loved the variety, choices, competitive prices. Hell, if you shopped around, almost

his jacket under his arm pits. He’d even laid away a portion of his salary from each foreign project assignment for a little start-up nest egg, hatched with his sister, Amira, who lived in Baltimore. In fact, he even got her to file immigration papers for him—a bold, perhaps foolish move, considering he hadn’t yet broached the subject with Sonia. Still, it was worth getting a head start. As a mere sibling of an American citizen, his priority rating wouldn’t be as high as those of children and spouses. It made perfectly good sense to begin the arduous formfilling, bureaucratic journey. If he was smart, he would sow the seed now, and let it germinate into an idea she could later claim as her own. What did it matter as long as she agreed?

He puts on a pair of well-ironed brown pants and a cream shirt. His fingers riffle along the edges of his ties. Dressing for the embassy, even just to pick up a visa, takes some thought. Important people look important, more important than merited. They carry leather briefcases, smell of Boss cologne, most likely purchased on the black market, and politely excuse themselves to the front of queues.

It is later than he wants it to be. The road through the bazaar is the shortest route to the train station. Dust, dirt, dead leaves, banana peels, lumps and bumps of cement blocks lie in his path. He passes carts piled with pyramids of fruit—papayas, pomegranates, guavas—and vegetables—brinjals, gourds, okra.

He is peripherally aware of the ire of women bargaining down prices. “Oh, bhaiya, give me a final price. Enough of this kit-kit; I’m in a hurry.”

One thing about Americans—no one quibbles about prices. Everything is always on sale. Time is precious in their culture; they hurry and get

If she could glimpse the differences between Baltimore and Bombay, see beyond the superficialities of boundaries, she’d love Baltimore. Such a city of eclectic rowhouses; ethnic groups—German, Greek, Korean, Italian—who knew, perhaps there might even be a Little India tucked away in one of the neighborhoods. everything was half price. You could practically eat for free—well, not exactly, but you could pig out for a pittance at those all-you-can-eat places.

Nice places, mind you, with big smorgasbords— roast beefs, hams, a variety of salads, even midEastern stuff—tabouli, hummus, kebabs. Why, the breads alone were astounding—seven-grain, five-grain, multi-grain, whole wheat, with honey, without honey, sesame, and permutations and combinations, all catered to health nuts and America’s changing faces and palates. It was luscious living—opulent and free.

That’s why he’d like to migrate to America. It was the place to live. That’s why he’d been secretly buying dollars on the black market in Bombay and smuggling them in, sewn safely in the lining of

everything done. Past meat stalls with fresh, red, lean sides of beef hanging from clips off a taut wire, his mouth waters for a juicy steak, with a buttery, un-spiced potato, but that will have to wait till he can rip off his vegetarian cloak in America.

One thing about Indians—they spice everything.

Everything looks yellow or red. He picks up his pace. A vagrant wind churns up loose-leafed newspapers and magazines from a pile lying beside a heap of coconuts. Passing a circle of women and children crowding the middle of the street, he wonders for an instant if something tragic has happened. But as the lilting, mesmerizing melody of a flute wafts in the air, he knows it’s only a snake

continued on page 85

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5

immobility Last December, a few days after Christmas, Walter Mesler, my uncle, passed away. I didn’t know Walter as well as I would have liked. Most of my life, nobody did. His problems began after his only son was born with severe retardation—the kind where you spend your life in diapers and only the desperate love of parents can keep you out of an institution. This was too much for my uncle, a profoundly big-hearted man. He lost himself in a haze of alcohol and drugs, and spent a good part of two decades at rock bottom, roaming city streets as a panhandler, a bum.

Somehow, with the help of a loving family, he got himself back on his feet. I was happy I had a chance to visit with him a couple of months before he passed away. We spent a lot of time talking about current events, which naturally led to some musing about our misgivings regarding our nation’s current wars. But there was one war in particular that we talked a lot about, a war that plays out almost nightly on our television news, marked by images of cities beset by chaos, hopelessness and despair, images of young men gunned down on the streets. It is a war that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and has compromised our nation’s core values of personal freedom and limited government. We talked about the War on Drugs.

Anthropologists say one can tell more about a society by what it doesn’t talk about than what it does, that a society’s most deeply held beliefs are never discussed, and hence never

Mule 8mm film digitally transferred (2 minutes, 35 seconds) 2006

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challenged. In his last press conference as secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld was asked what, if anything, he would have done differently. Rumsfeld, the man whose very name has become an adjective symbolizing hubris and ideological inflexibility, said that he would not have used the term War on Terror. It was, he said, a misleading definition that distorted the nature of the problem. It is telling that Rumsfeld could make that observation, yet after decades of futility no national figure of similar significance has challenged the concept of a War on Drugs. We can contest the War in Iraq, yet we experience the War on Drugs as if it were an earthquake, a flood, an act of God that we are powerless to change. So many of us were born into this war that it is all too easy to forget we are fighting it. We are paralyzed by immobility, an immobility of thought and ideas—the kind that seems all too prevalent in America today.

That we are losing the War on Drugs should be obvious to everyone. I could cite statistic after statistic, tell you that marijuana is America’s largest cash crop, and that in some cities more young black men are going to prison than going to college. I could show you images of families ripped apart by violence, lawlessness, a trail of destruction from Colombia to Afghanistan. You know all that already.

We simply cannot “win” the War on Drugs because there is no “war” to win. Drug abuse is as old as civilization itself, mentioned as far back as Homer’s Odyssey. Drug

Mule is about resistance. Pulling a three-hundredpound log encrusted with pressed tin became my metaphor for struggle. In this performance piece, forward progress on an inner-city street becomes damn near impossible. The object that I move has been weathered by time. Dissected from deteriorating Baltimore homes, the log I am pulling is literally the wreckage of past generations. In a struggle to move forward, every ounce of energy

is utilized to create momentum. There is no end in sight. So with my body I pull and submit to the task that lies ahead. Like a mule, I am a beast of burden, not focusing on the end, rather pushing forward with blinders and hoping that the poetry of my labor amounts to a pure meditation of what has come before and what lies ahead.

—Jefferson Pinder

abusers were almost always viewed about the same as they are today: with a mixture of pity and disgust. But no one imagined a militarized solution that would turn our streets into battlefields and criminalize the very people who are themselves the greatest victims of their own drug use.

For that—and for the very term War on Drugs—we can give credit to Richard Nixon, who coined the term to divert the nation’s attention from another unpopular war abroad, the war in Vietnam, turning to the failed model of Prohibition.

The problem with this approach was anticipated more than two centuries ago by Adam Smith when he laid out his theories of supply and demand in 1776. By criminalizing a commodity, the state simply moves the economic activity into the realm of a black market, which then becomes dominated by criminal syndicates. That was the problem we ran into during Prohibition and the problem we are faced with today.

It is simply economics. No matter how many drug dealers are arrested, more will rise to fill the economic demand, just as every poppy and cocaine field eradicated abroad is simply replaced by new poppy and cocaine fields.

There are other answers. We can view drug addiction as a medical problem, the way Great Britain tackled an incipient heroin problem at the turn of the century. England virtually eradicated the use of heroin by allowing doctors (and later establishing clinics) to dispense drugs to addicts, all the while treating them for their addictions. Instead of

purchasing drugs from street dealers with an economic stake in continuing them on their road of addiction, addicts were offered treatment and advice every time they needed a fi x. Some will be cured. Others never will. But at least they will live with some modicum of dignity. The only losers will be the drug dealers and drug cartels who will suddenly find themselves without a market. And the vast resources now devoted to stemming the illegal flow of drugs could be devoted to rebuilding communities devastated by the drug trade, by creating jobs and funding educational and social programs.

It is not the only alternative. But it is a new idea, or an old idea, and we are all-too-short of any ideas at all. The status quo isn’t working. There is something wrong with a system where a privileged white guy can snort cocaine and go on to be elected president of the United States on a platform of restoring morality to the White House, while a poor black teenager can do the same thing and go to prison and then have a hard time getting a job at Wal-Mart.

We talked about that contradiction when I saw my uncle last. As we spoke, his daughter and grandson sat quietly on the sofa, their heads bobbing gently in unison, like old men falling asleep. They were heroin addicts giving methadone a try. It was a baby step, but my uncle knew how important baby steps were.

He knew that anything was better than immobility.

—Bill Mesler

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photo by Mitro Hood

THE EDUCATION EXPERIMENT

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If ever there was anything doomed to fail, if ever there was anything so poorly crafted short of war, this was it. But as an economist, I am quite accustomed to having the world work out differently than I had anticipated.

by Anirban Basu and Ramona S. Diaz

Ramona S. Diaz, a filmmaker who lives in Baltimore, is making a film that investigates the city school system’s experience with teachers from the Philippines. As a school board commissioner who typically interacts with the system through senior-level personnel, I was intrigued when Urbanite asked me to collaborate with Ramona and to provide my input on Baltimore’s overall experience with the plan.

Our plan was simple. I would speak directly to students and to teachers while Ramona and her team watched, gauging from their responses the success of the Filipino-teacher experiment. I would like to say that I went into this without preconceptions, but rumors strongly implying that this experiment was not going well already swirled around North Avenue and throughout the city.

Teachers from the Philippines were not connecting with their students and the students were neither engaged nor impressed. Some of the teachers were considering going home well before their contracts expired. It was unclear whether the students would notice.

Given that our school system is perpetually beleaguered, constantly maligned, and always striving for improvement, this appeared to be yet another item about which to be depressed. As most system stakeholders know, teacher recruitment has been a long-standing issue for the Baltimore City Public School System. Year after year we have told our young people that teachers just aren’t paid enough. So guess what? Many talented youth who would have made terrific teachers bypassed the opportunity, certain that they wouldn’t earn enough to make a workable living. Meanwhile, those educators who entered the field en masse during the 1960s and 1970s now stand at retirement’s edge. As a result of this and other factors, each year the system loses about fifteen percent of its teachers.

As if challenging demographics weren’t enough, Baltimore City has to compete with surrounding jurisdictions for highly qualified teachers. Who wouldn’t want to teach in Howard County, routinely judged to be Maryland’s finest school system? Who wouldn’t want to teach in the leafy suburbs surrounding Annapolis or in the general vicinity of Towson or Hunt Valley or Westminster or any number of other charming Central Maryland edge cities?

And so, Baltimore City finds itself scrambling each summer for teachers to fill classrooms; and with No Child Left Behind upping the ante for highly credentialed teachers, filling the gap has become even more challenging.

So famously parochial Baltimore City decided to radically expand the geographic reach of its teacher recruitment to include the other side of the world.

—Anirban Basu

clips from Diaz’s documentary

And why not the Philippines? It is a nation with a high proportion of English speakers, a nation known for its capacity to generate graduates with a deep and abiding interest in mathematics and science, and a nation with a historic connection to America.

And if this worked, Baltimore City might just have found a cure to its perennial problem of recruiting highly qualified teachers. After all, though the Philippines has made tremendous strides economically as a nation, their estimated annual per capita spending power of $5,000 pales in comparison to America’s $41,000. And while Baltimore City has difficulty paying much more for teachers than surrounding school systems, it can compensate significantly more than the schools of metro Manila and its environs. Eventually, hundreds of teachers can be recruited from the Philippines, compensating for Central Maryland’s insatiable appetite for highly qualified instructors and its inability to supply them locally.

Bottom line: There is much at stake. That’s why I so dreaded my February interviews with Filipino teachers and their students. I presumed that I would hear the worst. What were we thinking? How could we expect there to be a meaningful and productive connection between teachers from Asia, with their culture of discipline and obsessive respect for elders and with our students, with their inner-city and American irreverence and questionable commitment to education.

If ever there was anything doomed to fail, if ever there was anything so poorly crafted short of war, this was it. But as an economist, I am quite accustomed to having the world work out differently than I had anticipated.

And as it turns out, the world is working out, at least in this instance. Shortly after the end of a bone-chilling school day, I sat down with eight students—seven African-American, one white—all of whom had at least one teacher from the Philippines and who together crudely approximate the simple demographics of our system.

It started exactly as I expected, with them telling me that they found these teachers from the Far East difficult to understand. As a school commissioner, I’ve developed a thick skin and I’m accustomed to grumbling from parents, administrators, staff, advocates, and of course students.

But then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the tone of the conversation changed.

Apparently, by November, roughly two months through the school year, the language barriers had melted away and the pace of learning had accelerated. “Oh, I like Mr. Veracruz. He makes science fun,” exalted one student.

“Before homeroom we talk about all kinds of things and she tells us stories about her life,” another student said about a female teacher.

“What would happen if these teachers went back?” I asked. The resounding reply: “We would miss them.”

Later that day, I went to the apartments at Symphony Center where many of our Filipino teachers live in one of Charm City’s newest addresses. And through an interview with eight teachers from the Philippines, the magnitude of our success was confirmed. Our students respect these teachers and these teachers are passionate about their students and passionate about their schools. “Why are you closing Harlem Park Middle School?” one asked as if we commissioners work for her, which of course we do.

“Why can’t we have smaller class sizes?” asked another.

“Why can’t we hold students back if they can’t read?”

“Why can’t we expand wraparound services for our special ed students?”

And so on.

After about half an hour, they simply forgot that I was there and discussed the virtues of certain teaching techniques, issues of curricula, and the quality of interaction with their respective administrators.

It’s important to recognize that it’s not all joy and reward for these teachers.

For many of them, coming to Baltimore represents a combination of lucrative opportunity and shocking despair. About half of those I interviewed have children they left behind, many of whom are well short of adolescence. Most have thought about returning to the Philippines on multiple occasions, typically when they are in their classrooms. But they stay and they toil on behalf of our children even as they long for their own.

Among the many failings of the Baltimore City Public School System come those occasional sweet successes. My only hope is that these teachers will be allowed to stay past the three years allotted to them by their visas. What we have on our hands is a permanent solution, not merely an interesting experiment.

What we have is beautiful.

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What if we persuaded six unexpected pairs to collaborate? An architect and a television screenwriter? A typographer and a fiction author? What if some of the city’s most creative minds were to intersect at the junction of frustration and passion? What if we let them ask the questions, and we didn’t edit the answers?

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SEE THE RESULTS. WWW.URBANITEPROJECT.COM

sustainable city

by julie gabrielli photography by jason okutake

Complementary Currency What can be gained when a community expands its notion of money?

One evening last December, Susan Hughes tucked two little girls in with a bedtime story. She then set to work addressing Christmas cards and writing e-mails. It sounds like a typical night in the life of a busy mom, but it wasn’t. For Hughes, it was almost a mini-vacation. How so? Her husband was at home with their baby, and Hughes was down the street watching the neighbor’s children and earning a few “baby-bucks.”

Baby-bucks are the currency of the OakenExchange, a babysitting co-op in the Oakenshawe neighborhood of Baltimore. Participating families are issued forty baby-bucks when they join, and each business-card-sized “buck” is worth fifteen minutes of time. Four baby-bucks will buy one hour of babysitting, nominally worth a reasonable $4. Participants earn extra for minding additional children, feeding dinner, and other challenges.

“It really works,” says Hughes. “People will tempt you with their wireless and cable and wine to get you to come to their house. Now I’m checking my e-mail every day and hoping someone needs a sitter soon.” Hughes runs a graphic design business from her home, and appreciates the flexibility of the co-op. “If I ever have a meeting pop up on a day when I don’t have a nanny, I’m pretty confident that I can send out an e-mail and get someone.”

Baby-bucks are just one example of a local, or complementary, currency. A local currency resolves the three fundamental problems of national currency: It stays within the community it serves, it is issued by the people who use it, and it is in sufficient supply to meet the needs of that community. While local currency dispenses with the negative aspects of the national currency, it is not intended as a replacement. It simply sets up another means of exchange to catch those needs and resources that fall through the cracks of a nationally and internationally focused system of currency.

There are more than four thousand of these systems in operation around the world, ranging from small and single-themed to regional and broadbased. In the United States and Canada, there are about five hundred. Examples are as diverse as the human population. In Japan, the “Caring Friendship Ticket” tracks time spent helping elderly residents.

In Chicago, school children can earn a repurposed computer by tutoring younger children. In Brazil, a similar program envisions a tutoring chain that enables high school graduates to afford higher education.

Time-banking is another variation on this concept. The Columbia Association, in partnership with the Horizon Foundation, started such a program in August 2006, with its official kickoff open house held last month. The Columbia Association Network (CAN) serves everyone, from youth to elderly. According to Time-Banking Manager Muriel Stone Nolen, the time-banking concept originated twenty-five years ago with Edgar S. Cahn, J.D., Ph.D., author of No More Throw-Away People. The simple concept of service is based on such core principles as everyone

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has something to contribute, work can be defined as whatever it takes to build a healthy community, and helping is a two-way street, a service exchange. With time-banking, time is not given a dollar value; every hour spent in service earns one hour of credit. Services are in four categories: individual care, household, transportation and errands, and administrative support for CAN (which is a member of TimeBanks USA).

Nolen describes how the program works. “If you are interested, you go to the orientation and training session. At that time, you complete an application, selecting those services you can perform. It can be anything: teaching a foreign language, burning CDs, being a phone pal, anything! The two hours spent at the training session go into your time-bank account to get you started.”

Eventually, all the time tracking and recording will be done online, and members will do their own exchanges directly with each other. In the start-up phase, Nolen and her staff are keeping an eye on the program by making the matches and recording the information themselves. To request a service, a participant calls three days in advance. A staff

person makes the match and gives them two or three names. The person then calls and makes the arrangements. Afterwards, the service provider fills out a service transaction form and submits it. The staff members track every transaction and send out

A local currency resolves the three fundamental problems of national currency: It stays within the community it serves, it is issued by the people who use it, and it is in sufficient supply to meet the needs of that community. quarterly statements, just like the bank. Statements show all transactions and the number of hours earned and used.

Local currencies and time-banking begin to make sense when we realize that money is nothing more than a symbolic token, a medium of

exchange. Economic policies are mostly decided at the international level, even though these policies determine how our economy functions at the local level. Unfortunately, these rules keep money scarce, concentrate wealth, erode social capital, and favor short-term priorities, all of which are at crosspurposes to a vibrant local economy, not to mention ecological health.

Bernard Lietaer, an international champion of local currency, notes that these programs work well in communities where conventional money is scarce: neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, retirement communities, high unemployment zones, and student communities. The intent is usually to alleviate social problems, which is why the IRS does not tax time-banking systems.

Starting a local currency requires countless volunteer hours over at least two years. To prevent volunteer burnout, most successful organizations reimburse volunteers in the local currency or create a paid position. A Baltimore Hours program ran from 2001 to 2003. At its peak, there were about two hundred members. According to one of its founders, Brad Johnson, “The system we had was mostly continued on page 87

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out there

by peter chomowicz

The Blessings of Nothing The flight from Finland to Estonia was uneventful.

The plane, a twenty-seat, twin-engine turbo prop, made the trip across the Baltic in less than thirty minutes. When traveling to new cities, particularly coastal ones, I get a feeling of comfortable foreboding. It’s a dull sense of what lies beyond my destination, as if the city is just the tip of an iceberg with a large unseen mass rolling behind it. Landing in Tallinn, the capital, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this city is both the end of one world and the beginning of another.

Disappearing to the east under leaden skies lay the Russian expanse, a land spanning eleven time zones whose next major port-city is on the Sea of Japan. Perhaps because I’m a Cold War kid, I envisioned places like Tallinn to be hollowed-out former selves, emptied of individuality and purpose and filled with Soviet bloc control and sameness.

After all, how could a tiny country withstand the Communist steamroller? If this was the case before the Soviet collapse, it certainly is not true today. In fact, I came to this city to learn about high design in the twenty-first century.

Three years ago, the Estonian Academy of Arts (EAA), a school of roughly one thousand art and design students, launched the Design Innovation Centre. The Centre was created and cosponsored by the Estonian government with the understanding that it would help modernize Estonian industry and generate its own income. The Centre’s mission is to develop projects that promote academic, government, and corporate participation. Not all projects must have this mix of players, but as a hub of activity connecting disparate spokes, the Centre relies heavily on the cooperation of its partners.

Just a few examples of these collaborations include the development of new product lines in five different product categories for a ceramics manufacturer, new designs for the spring collection of a hosiery manufacturer, and the creation of a brand identity for a major grocery chain.

Still, Katri Ristal, the Centre’s director, wondered why an American would come to Estonia to learn about design and innovation. I visited in order to test a theory. Few can debate the marvel of American ingenuity and business savvy, but my experiences in Tallinn confirmed the existence of a startling trend—a trend I observed elsewhere in my recent travels, particularly in Asia. It’s what I call the blessings of nothing. Or, put another way, you can’t be against something you’ve never had.

While under Soviet influence, Estonia maintained its rich culture, language, and history, but

photo by Peter Chomowicz

An American designer explores Eastern European innovation and the hidden but profound benefits of starting from scratch

The Design Innovation Centre created a design map that lists significant design destinations such as galleries, shops, design offices, and cultural landmarks. The destinations are marked by hexagonal icons that identify them as a Design Innovation Centre partner.

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the economy was largely agricultural and heavymachine manufacturing. Gray Soviet mega-buildings may not dominate Tallinn as in other Eastern-bloc cities, but Moscow’s influence nonetheless extinguished creativity, competition, and commerce. Now the opposite is true. Every product, whether a cell phone, vacuum cleaner, T-shirt, book, or building, is an opportunity for the designer, according to Ristal.

In this environment, EAA’s textile design department and a psychiatric clinic are collaborating to serve children with special needs by developing toys and therapeutic aids. For Americans in the sleek and sexy world of beautiful objects, blessed with everything, each new product is often a marginal addition to the portfolio. But for the places “blessed with nothing,” each new innovation seems to double the capital stock of ideas.

It was upon entering the European Union that Estonians quickly realized they must compete in all areas of society. “We’re good at making things,” explains Ristal, “and we educate very good designers. The question is: Can we integrate design and business fast enough to compete with Europe’s powerhouses? My job is to show that good design is good business.” She went on to explain that even as

The question is: Can we integrate design and business fast enough to compete with Europe’s powerhouses? My job is to show that good design is good business. a country with limited resources, Estonia must still produce designers as good as those produced by the long-established European design schools. The trick is to keep the designers, but export their designs.

The good news is that the resources appear to be coming. According to an economist from Estonia’s central bank, the Estonian economy is red-hot. The unsustainable price of real estate, rising inflation, and increased job mobility (my cab driver in Helsinki commuted from Tallinn, and my Tallinn hotel manager was from Sweden) are evidence of this. The economist was confident that prices will soon stabilize, and Estonia will grow steadily with economic opportunity for all, particularly Estonians.

He explained that after the Berlin Wall fell and Estonia regained its independence, the citizenry had the opportunity to once again own their property.

At today’s prices, only foreigners earn enough to buy real estate, but this, too, is changing. “It’s all just flowing together,” the economist said. “Estonians are moving back for the opportunities, and they’re bringing their friends with them.” A walk around the city and one quickly sees that he’s right: shopping malls with Wi-Fi, construction cranes, and one of

the tightest housing markets in Europe.

Tallinn is finding its integration equilibrium: a unique balance of local and foreign, design and business.

It’s fascinating to me that an economist and a designer see these issues the same way. Each understands Estonia’s opportunities and obstacles. They also both know how rapidly the world is changing and feel the urgent need to find their unique place in it. But the real reason I’m so optimistic about Estonia’s future is that Estonians are fusing the best of their past with the prospects of globalization. Theirs is not a one-sector economy of cheap labor fueling back offices and manufacturing. It’s a place of beautifully preserved history (some think too well preserved, almost Disneyland surreal) that drives tourism and foreign investment. It’s a place of high technology, linking Estonia to competitors and collaborators like the Nordic Innovation Network, which connects Nordic and Baltic states to promote interaction between traditional craft and innovative design. And it’s a place that sees creativity and design intelligence as the glue that holds it all together.

EAA hosted an international conference in 2004 on globalization’s effect on culture and economics and the pressing need to address environmental sustainability. Just last year, the highly touted World Economic Forum organized their

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annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, under the rubric “The Creative Imperative.” The Estonian economist was right: It is all just flowing together.

Designers are discussing economics, and economists are asking designers for help with global problems.

When the Soviet finger was pulled from the Eastern European dike, the waters of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism began flowing across Europe. That trickle is now a torrent marked by efficacy and relevancy. Estonians are realizing that the things they make and the services they provide must matter and collaboration is the key.

Government, business, and academia know their country’s success depends on them working together. Eastern Europeans in general and Estonians in particular are seeking partnering relationships because in a place blessed with nothing there are no road blocks, no long-standing institutional barriers, no territories to infringe, and no toes to step on. Having nothing, it seems, means everything is possible.

Flying back into Baltimore, I couldn’t help but reflect on its similarity to Tallinn. Both are formerly industrial port cities preserving long histories that are important to the nation. Both have similar (and growing) population numbers, and both are rapidly modernizing and experiencing rising real estate prices. The notable exception is that Baltimore is blessed with everything. We have some of the

world’s best academies and most brilliant researchers; nearby are innovative companies like Black & Decker, Under Armour, and Big Huge Games.

We also have barriers. Blessed with everything unfortunately also means believing that each of us, regardless of our organization, can do it alone. In Baltimore we often don’t feel like we are blessed with everything because, like Estonia, we have a deep and troubling past. In our case it was not an occupying force that hollowed our soul; it was the exodus of human and financial capital. Maybe we go it alone because we feel alone. Maybe we do it out of habit, fear, or prejudice. Whatever the reason, we need to find our own glue to hold us together. Because when we do, just like in Tallinn, people will move back, and they’ll bring their friends with them. ■ —Peter Chomowicz is chair of the environmental design department at Maryland Institute College of Art and is the president of Baltimore-based Quadrant: Architecture and Consulting.

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recommended Catching up with all, or even most, of the music that dashes through the airwaves and concert halls of the city I currently live in—Mumbai (Bombay), India, fourteen million strong—is like

By Robbie Whelan expecting to see the same person twice on the commuter rail. Music, like people, is here today, gone tomorrow.

The soundtrack for Dhoom: 2, the current Bollywood blockbuster, is full of dance-floor tunes of a higher order than the average American fare. The opening tracks, “Crazy Kiya Re” and “Touch Me,” display strong Latin influences, and Sunidhi Chauhan’s vocals (sung in that charming language stew called “Hinglish”) are reminiscent of Shakira. The film’s de facto theme song, “Dhoom Again,” is a triumphant all-English anthem, with a slow bhangra beat that Mumbai club DJs have been mashing up with Rihanna’s 2005 Caribbean summer jam “Pon De Replay.”

In a more tranquil mood, a few weeks ago I caught an incredible two-day festival, called Ruhaniyat, of Muslim sufi (mystic) music. Mumbai-based organizers Banyan Tree Events have released four CD volumes of live recordings from years past, all of it music that is extremely unique and beautifully transcendent.

Most of the performers were wandering fakirs or ascetic minstrels from remote rural areas in Rajasthan or Bihar. This year’s show-stealer, who performs on Ruhaniyat Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, was Parvathy Baul, who sings in the haunting baul style of West Bengal. She took the stage wearing monk’s robes and waist-length dreadlocked hair and carrying the one-stringed drone instrument ektara. Her vocal style strongly evokes the gypsy laments of Spanish flamenco vocalists—pained, passionate, and deeply spiritual.

Descending deeper into the trance, I spent the following Sunday listening to 67-yearold sitar master Ustad Rais Khan play a concert of raags. Hindustani classical music is rhythmically and melodically far more complex than Western classical music, but it lacks the harmonic depth of a Beethoven symphony or string quartet. As a result, live performances are more like jazz shows— Khan and his accompanists started out slow, playing a composed theme, then moving through faster and more complicated variations, and ending with a mind-blowing technical improvisation.

Exploring his back catalog, I found that Khan’s live recordings (Live at the ICA London, August 3, 1985 and Rag-Rang) are much more sublime when compared to his gift-shop ready studio efforts (Romantic Sound of Sitar and Melodious Sitar of Rais Khan). The music may come and go, but if you hang around until you aren’t a tourist anymore, it’s worth the wait.

MUSIC

FILM

By Anne Haddad between betrayal, sacrifice, and martyrdom are blurred for us, but not for these passionate characters. The actors barely need their lines—they have faces.

If that’s too heavy for you, just go straight to the popular French heist film, starting with 1955’s Rififi (an upcoming remake will star Al Pacino). You’ll want more, so have at the ready Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur, and also Le Cercle Rouge, in which Yves Montand steals not only diamonds but also the film—first by enduring a surrealistic delirium tremens, and later by seizing a thrilling moment of sobriety and redemption.

ART

By Ding Ren Paper dolls are generally known as fun caricatures with trendy clothes. But for Arabella Grayson, they are an important source of history. From Aunt Jemima to Beyoncé, more than one hundred black paper dolls from her collection are now on display at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in the exhibit Two Hundred Years of Black Paper Dolls: The Collection of Arabella Grayson. Dolls from the late 1800s depict black men in tribal clothing and “untamable” black women with crazy hair, dark skin, and brightly painted lips. Early-twentieth-century mam-

mies stand by in unchangeable servant’s clothes, ready to help white girl dolls change into several outfits.

Paper doll publishers began to issue dolls of influential black figures in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. But even today there are flukes that remind us of our notso-distant past: The only black American Girl paper doll is a former slave. The snapshots provided by Grayson’s collection chronicle social and cultural shifts, revealing that although some progress has been made, stereotypes are still alive and well, sometimes held in place by an innocent set of dotted lines.

image of “Black Baby Articulated Paper Doll” by Steven M. Cummings, Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum

image of Simone Signoret in Army of Shadows courtesy of Rialto Pictures

I can’t resist the spectacle of Oscar night. But the more interesting winners come out of the New York Film Critics Circle, which named Army of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres) the best foreign film of 2006. Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece, inspired by his own days in the French Resistance, was not released in this country until last summer. It doesn’t feel like a war movie; it belongs to the dark and stylish French crime film genre in which Melville made his name. But the complex heroes and the lone heroine (played by Simone Signoret) are patriots instead of jewel thieves and gamblers. The lines

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By Susan McCallum-Smith

Patricia Marx’s first novel, Him Her Him Again The End of Him (2007), is cute. The title is cute, the book jacket blurbs are cute, and the characters are adorable and quirky. It goes over easy like new shoes and needs tethering with ribbon lest it float away.

While studying at Cambridge University, the book’s unnamed heroine is smitten by Eugene, a narcissistic American post-grad. Eugene adopts a ponsy English accent and uses words like anon and hegemony in general conversation, signaling to the reader, right off the bat, that he is a bounder and a cad. It takes our heroine a further 222 pages and several years to come to the same conclusion.

This book has witty lines aplenty, given that Marx is a former writer for Saturday Night Live: “I love narcissists—even more than they love themselves. You don’t have to buoy them up.”

However, writing humorous fiction is not the same as writing stand-up comedy—in fiction you don’t pause for the laughs. Marx frequently does, peppering the reader with asides like, “I know what you’re thinking.” Oh, no, Marx, you really don’t. I’m thinking that although I enjoy lite-lit as much as any other chick, why are quick-witted authors like Marx afraid to portray self-confident women? Sassy women fall down stairs, and fall for worthless plonkers, just as often as ditsy ones. The spinster lifestyle of the peerless Jane Austen, whom such writers claim to emulate, dents their courage: If I’m smart and funny, I may never get laid!

Sheila Kohler’s third novel, Cracks (1999), is not cute. With her trademark dark wit and clinical perception, Kohler dissects the phenomenon of group behavior within an all-girls school in 1960s South Africa. She narrates Cracks using the collective pronoun “we” and includes a character named after herself, making us all com-

plicit in the wicked games played by the 12- to 14-year-old members of the swim team. The girls have a crush on Miss G, the amoral, charismatic games-mistress. “Miss G was our crack. … You left notes for your crack in her mug next to her toothbrush on the shelf in the bathroom. If you accidentally brushed up against your crack and felt her boosie you nearly fainted.” Any foreign girl who came to the school left soon after, as, “The mosquitoes were too much for her. Africa was too much for her; we were too much for her.” But that was before Fiamma, who enters this erotic maelstrom of adolescent pheromones and incites, to the horror of the girls, Miss G’s less than honorable attention. Heat builds, fissures split the parched grasslands, and “we” begin to behave less like a team and more like a mob.

The last sentence of Cracks deliberately evokes the ending of Heart of Darkness, the most famous African-based novella. Joseph Conrad’s story, first published in 1899, recounts a journey through the Congo to track down a deranged and AWOL trading-company man, Kurtz. Some literary revisionists have dismissed Conrad as racist and imperialist due to the behavior and opinions of Marlow, his main character. As a typical British colonialist of his time, Marlow views both Africa and Africans with fear and derision, yet is forced to concede that some imperialists practiced “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale.” But judging nineteenth-century literature using twentiethcentury values is as pointless as shouting at a puppy for piddling on the floor, and even now, some critics have difficulty distinguishing the writer of a novel from its protagonist.

“You interchange the two, Detective, the writer and the protagonist,” argues a character in Death of a Writer (2006), rising to the de-

fense of a novelist who stands similarly accused.

An irresistible blend of campus comedy and noir thriller, Michael Collins’ sixth novel lives up to its blurbs. Two rival writers meet at school; one becomes a lauded best-selling author while the other malingers in artistic obscurity at a secondrate liberal arts college. After his botched suicide attempt, it is revealed that the malingerer wrote an astounding book, which far surpasses the quality of his rival’s oeuvre. Hailed by the critics as “Nietzsche meets Charles Manson,” the book causes a literary sensation, especially when it is discovered that the repellent scene at its heart bears an eerie resemblance to an unsolved crime.

What, Collins asks, is the writer’s responsibility to his or her material? And where exactly is the line between fiction and nonfiction?

Pertinent questions, indeed. As real-life author Augusten Burroughs is sued by the Turcotte family over their portrayal in his best-selling memoir Running with Scissors (2002), the American publishing industry braces itself for another “truthiness” scandal.

Writing lite-lit is looking more attractive every day. ■

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Where Hearts Lie continued from page 65 charmer charming a venomless snake and a gullible audience.

The platform is swarming with people. In the first-class compartment, he finds himself squashed against the window, peering out as the tracks race beneath. Huts, streets, buildings blur past. Vibrantly colored saris hang from balconies, bathed in sunlight. A strong putrid whiff assails his nostrils as the train whistles over a polluted inlet of the bay, bordered with mud huts packed in rows like biscuits in a tin.

He wonders if tonight might be an opportune time to plant the seed. Amira had estimated a two- to three-year wait before his application would inch to the top. In the meantime, Sonia’s waffling could begin—What? Why? Why to go to America?

No, never. Then, a toning down, a mulling over, yes, well maybe, then all the obstacles, the buts and what-abouts, regressing back to no, no, never, and the vacillating cycle would begin again. He pulls out his passport nestled in his breast pocket and looks at it—midnight teal, the Ashoka lion seal, The Republic of India embossed in gold. It looks imposing, imperial. Some day, perhaps, he’ll carry a different passport—smaller, bluer, with the seal of the United States.

On this trip to America, he thinks, he should splurge for Sonia—buy something beautiful, alluring, a piece of jewelry, heart shaped. Or, perhaps not. American gold was dull, not like India’s turmeric-yellow, twenty-two carat.

Something she’s never seen before, perhaps, sexy underwear, or Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, or a palette of eye makeup with complementary lipsticks. If she could glimpse the differences between Baltimore and Bombay, see beyond the superficialities of boundaries, she’d love Baltimore. Such a city of eclectic rowhouses; ethnic groups—German, Greek, Korean, Italian—who knew, perhaps there might even be a Little India tucked away in one of the neighborhoods. With the steady influx of immigrants it was just a matter of time. It was a smart city, too, bursting with colleges and universities and businesses. The city benches read “Baltimore—The Greatest City in America.”

And unlike Bombay, people were friendly. They called you hon or sugar and told you to have a nice day. And they named their neighborhoods after parks—Hanlon Park, Druid Park, Roland Park, Park Heights. Amira said they might even rename the whole city—Balti-more-or-less, or Believemore, or just More! Imagine a city with an exclamation point! Maryland had it all, she said, all within the span of a three-hour drive—mountains, a bay, beaches, a harbor, four gorgeous seasons, and a mere hop away from the sheer madness of New York and Washington.

With his American visa tucked safely against his breast, he takes the steps up to the second floor, two at a time, a bunch of yellow roses in his arms.

He feels spirited, uplifted. Sonia is dressed in a pretty purple sari with sprays of pink and lavender flowers scattered all over. She has swept her hair to one side, draped it softly over her neck; her lips and the bindi on her forehead are a deep pink, and suddenly she looks younger than she has in years.

She stands in front of her dresser, considering a

pair of dangling amethyst earrings and a matching bracelet.

His eyes take her in. “Wow! Where are you going? You look beautiful.”

She purses her mouth as if to wince, then smiles instead. “You don’t know? I asked you this morning if it was settled, remember?”

He makes a quick, calculated recovery. “Oh, but of course. Yes, you did.”

She grins. “So what was it?” He hasn’t fooled her. For once her eyes are shining, playful. “You don’t have a clue, do you?”

He gives in. “No, actually I don’t.” Her flirty flippancy excites him. “So, tell me.”

“We’re going to Meena’s birthday party. She turns 40 this year.”

“Oh!” He moves closer, yellow roses still in hand. “I brought you these. I thought we might …”

“Might what?”

His arms tighten around her. “Stay home tonight.” His fingertips linger on the bare skin of her back, dip into the indent of her spine, slowly swinging up and down along the groove, as if they were on a trapeze. She arches, leans in, the softness of her breasts against his shirt. Her eyelids flicker open and shut like butterfly wings, then close. He lets the roses drop to the floor, freeing both his hands, and in one swift movement undoes the pleats of her sari at her waist. Lifting her gently on to the bed, he loosens the strings of her sari petticoat, unbuttons her blouse and buries his lips in the depths of her neck, moving down slowly. Slowly.

At the Baltimore Washington International airport, Vinay hugs his sister. She is wearing a pair of tight jeans and a shirt open at the collar. He holds her at arm’s length. “You look younger every year, behnji.”

She hugs him tight. “Oh, poof! Take your pick.

I made sandwiches fresh— turkey club, and steak and cheese, just for you. Flattery won’t make them fresher.”

He piles his luggage into her station wagon and gets in beside her. She eases the car through the exiting airport traffic and settles back at a steady cruise. He begins to fidget with the radio knobs.

“News, news, everywhere. What happened to songs?”

Amira perks up. “Oh, speaking of news, I have some good news for you.”

He blurts it out before he can stop himself.

“What? Are you pregnant? Am I going to be an uncle?”

Her face drops to the car floor. “No. Is that all you think about?”

He kicks himself, yanks his foot out of his mouth, and says nothing. Her eyes veer away from the steering wheel briefly and meet his penitent ones. “Oh, okay, I’m a little testy,” she says. “It’s just that Anand and I have been really trying, and nothing works. Just like you and Sonia. We have bad luck in our family.”

“Oh, I doubt it.”

“I’ve been drinking turmeric milk with almonds, and eating three hundred pomegranate seeds every morning.”

“Three hundred?”

“Yeah, people say it helps.”

They pull into her driveway. He’ll just have to wait for the good news. Perhaps it isn’t all that good

after all.

It isn’t till the next day that Amira brings up the topic again. “It looks like your papers will move quickly—Anand’s friend who works at the immigration office has pulled your application to the top of the heap.”

He bounds off the sofa he’s lounging on.

“Really? This isn’t going to take three years?”

“More like three or four months.”

The news is phenomenal. For the next several weeks, he works long hours, even weekends, eager to return home to India to prepare. Plans glide past his eyes like a movie reel. He won’t sell his entire business in India; just one-half, enough to get started in the States. He’ll apply for a private import/ export license. He’ll keep options and operations alive in both countries; he’ll hire a manager for the Indian segment. Globalization. What perfect timing!

Vinay glances at his wristwatch. His plane for India leaves in three hours. Chuckling, he makes the sign of the Cross, the way he joked with his Christian school friends, tapping his forehead, groin, left and right jacket pocket, saying, “Spectacles, testicles, passport, ticket.”

It has been more than two months since he’s seen his wife. She’d decided not to meet him at the airport—the long cab drive back and forth, the pollution, the crowds, and the noise. “Don’t even think about it,” he’d said on the phone. “I’ll see you soon.” Then, unable to restrain himself, he’d burst out. “I have some great news.”

As on that night they’d stayed home, she is dressed in the same purple sari with lavender flowers, her hair swept to one side, except that she looks more radiant. She walks into his arms. “I have news for you, too,” she whispers. Taking his hands, she directs them to her belly. Her eyes glisten. “Can you guess?”

He steps back. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Not on the phone! Your mother said to wait, to tell you in person. We have a puja tonight! And after the ceremony, a big dinner. Everyone is coming! My mama is already planning for me to come home.”

“Come home?”

“Of course. Because I’m pregnant, silly! Like Amira would come to her mother’s house if she was pregnant.”

His heart jumps like a yo-yo in his chest, up and down, the highs and deep lows. He looks at her face—she who has never been abroad, who marks time by the fire of gulmohur trees in bloom, and the rolling monsoons in June, who can crack a coconut down the middle with one swing of a hatchet, who cannot fathom that “how you doing” isn’t a genuine question. Nothing in his suitcase will allure her away to a distant land, not in the immediate future, if ever.

Yet, the timing is perfect. A child born in the United States would be a citizen, and its parents would become citizens, too, before long. It could be ideal, but no, not to Sonia.

She looks up into his face. “Now tell me your great news. Is it greater than mine?” In her eyes, there is an instantaneous burst of light, quick as a firefly, there and gone. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy?”

His voice is high. “Yes, of course!”

On the dresser, past her shoulders, he glimpses a vase of fresh yellow roses, their petals shimmering with water droplets. ■ w w w. u r b a n i t e p ro j e c t . c o m m a r c h 0 7

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Complementary Currency cont. from page 73 individual services, not businesses. The concept was that people have extra time, but currency is scarce, so we’ll create some.” Johnson went on to explain why he believes the Baltimore Hours model failed.

“The truth is people don’t have any extra time since we don’t have mass unemployment or a deflated currency. Also, in a big city there isn’t really the desire or sense of community that would support collective work exchanges without a clear guarantee that you could redeem the money. We really had no goods backing the system.”

But hope continues to spring for strong local economies and cohesive communities. A new local currency called Anacostia Hours was started last year. The founders issued their first currency in early October 2006, having spent the previous year doing research and organizing. The hub is Mount Rainier, where the formative members of this nonprofit are based. The targeted communities are within the Gateway Arts District: Mount Rainier, Brentwood, North Brentwood, Hyattsville, and the surrounding areas. The currency is available in denominations of one hour, a half-hour, and a quarter-hour. For the purpose of reporting income to the IRS, one hour is valued as comparable to $10. When people enroll, they pay a $5 fee to be listed in the online directory and are issued two hours. Anacostia Hours has seventy members as of early January 2007, and about 140 hours are in circulation. The board is exploring other ways of increasing the number of hours if it sees indicators of pent-up demand for more. For example, current members earn two hours when they refer a new member. Another method that other hours programs have used is establishing a bank where people can buy hours using U.S. dollars.

The group has cast a wide net to build diversity

of goods and services into the program. Nick Williams, a board member who offers tree pruning and nonprofit consulting services, has used his Anacostia Hours to buy pies from Timmy’s Pieces of Peace bakery and a meal at the Artmosphere Cafe. “This is meant to foster person-to-person, face-to-face relationships, unlike many transactions in today’s commercial world. It provides a medium of exchange, as well as opportunities for neighbors to meet and get to know each other,” Williams says.

Nick Williams, a board member who offers tree pruning and nonprofit consulting services, has used his Anacostia Hours to buy pies from Timmy’s Pieces of Peace bakery and a meal at the Artmosphere Cafe.

household tasks, trips to the doctor, or simple companionship; working parents need reliable child care; families need decent housing; local businesses need customer loyalty and access to low-cost micro loans; underemployed people need job skills; and everyone needs safety and affordable health care. What do we have in the resources column?

Seniors and school-age children with time; middleschoolers with energy; people with skills at all levels, from housekeeping to home repair to bookkeeping; sturdy housing stock (in need of renovation); locally owned businesses; and locally produced goods. The logical act of matching these needs and resources would foster connection in the neighborhoods of our city and inspire all of us to reconsider our definition of wealth. ■ —Julie Gabrielli wrote about microenterprise in Urbanite’s June 2006 issue. She is a Baltimorebased eco-architect and a change agent for a restorative economy.

Ultimately, the founders would like local businesses to be able to include Anacostia Hours in workers’ salaries, and to pay their suppliers with them. Since this is only possible with local vendors, it creates incentives for sourcing locally, further stimulating the local economy and keeping the hours in the community.

Fundamentally, money is just a convenient way of matching unmet needs with unused resources. So imagine Baltimore’s long list of needs matching up with its under-used resources. School children need tutoring and protection from bullying; older children need money for higher education; seniors need help with

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resources

helping each other and parents getting involved.

The website of the Local Exchange Trading System (www.gmlets.u-net.com) has all the technical information needed to start your own local exchange trading system.

35 Drinking Inside the Box

71 Complementary Currency The website of Maryland-based Anacostia Hours is www.anacostiahours.org. The E. F. Schumacher Society (www.schumachersociety.org) is all about building local economies and has a long history with complementary currencies. TimeBanks founder Dr. Edgar S. Cahn sees time-banking as a powerful tool for social change (www.timebanks.org). One of the original local currencies in the United States, Ithaca Hours (www.ithacahours.org), is a standard by which many other “Hours” currencies have been built. Chicago Time Dollar Tutoring (www.time dollartutoring.org) is an inspiring story of students

81 Recommended Music: Finding the albums mentioned by writer Robbie Whelan may require a bit of a search, but some are readily available. Ruhaniyat volumes 1 and 2 can be purchased on www.rhythmhouseindia.com. Ustad Rais Khan albums and the Dhoom: 2 soundtrack are available on Amazon.com, and can be downloaded from iTunes.

Art: The Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum (anacostia.si.edu) is located at 1901 Fort Place S.E. in Washington, D.C. Two Hundred Years of Black Paper Dolls: The Collection of Arabella Grayson runs through April 29.

photo by Tuuli Antsov

Writer Catrina Cusimano recommends the brands Black Box (www.blackboxwine.com), Three Thieves (www.threethieves.com), Cuvée de Peña, and La Petite Frog. Some of these boxed wines can be found at The Wine Source (3601 Elm Avenue; 410-467-7777; www.the-wine-source.com) and at Beltway Fine Wine & Spirits (8727 Loch Raven Boulevard; 410668-8884).

For more information on Estonia’s design culture, see page 75.

What’s next for the environmental movement?

Coming Next Month. Guest Editor Van Jones, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, joins us as we look to the future of sustainability.

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 7

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FEED YOUR HEART Women’s Growth Center is a small, non-profit collective of therapists. We offer individual, couples, family, and group therapy.

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5209 York Road #B12 410-532-2GROW (2476)

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coMputer harbor

breakfast lunch catering 400 East Pratt Street open Monday - Friday breakfast(across lunch catering from the Aquarium) 6:45 am - 4:00 pm 410.347.9898 www.bohemecafe.com 400 East Pratt Street open Monday - Friday breakfast(acrosslunch catering from the Aquarium) 6:45 am - 4:00 pm 400 East Pratt Street (across from the Aquarium) 410.347.9898

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School of Language, Literature, and Culture

Non-credit courses of Italian LANGUAGE (beginner to advanced levels), LITERATURE, CULTURE (Dante, Italian Cities, Films, Italian Cuisine).

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To receive a brochure call 410-235-0006 www.centerforitalianstudies.it

breakfast lunch catering 400 East Pratt Street (across from the Aquarium) 410.347.9898

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Small business support

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Bikram Yoga

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INNOVATIVE CUISINE AND HOUSEMADE BEERS IN AN OPULENT SETTING 1106 N CHARLES ST (410) 547-6925 WWW.THEBREWERSART.COM

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Functional Fitness Integrative Therapy is a studio that specializes in providing physical therapy for personal wellness, weight management and management of joint pain.

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Offering a Hand Up, Not a Hand Out Innovative Housing Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing, financing and managing affordable housing in mixed income settings.

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Chestnut Ridge Farm Market

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1026 S. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21230

BALTIMORE MAGAZINE 2006

We now offer a few tapa items after the kitchen closes... so customers can eat and drink!

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• • • •

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

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Johnny’s Bistro on Main

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Tavern hours: 11am till 2am - Mon thru Sun Restaurant hours: 11am to 11pm - Sun thru Thurs 11am to midnight Fri & Sat

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Dionysus Restaurant and Lounge

The Admiral’s Cup

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

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

Cafe 10 International Coffee House A Perfect Blend of Coffee & Community 6355 Ten Oaks Road Clarksville, MD 21029 410-531-7182 www.cafe10.com

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eye to eye

Is this a diagram? A poem? And where do you begin? Essentially, it is both diagram and poem, and you begin wherever you choose.

Justin Sirois is a poet and graphic artist living in Baltimore. He says, “Three Wells is a nonlinear, unending sentence that can be started at any word. It’s a Venn diagram* narrative about three perspectives (or systems or characters) caught in a conflict over a very precious natural resource. The three feuding systems end up sharing a fraction of what they could.”

Having recently been in Ireland, a land filled with language and debate, I myself see three earnest gentlemen sitting in a pub, coursing over this diagram endlessly. Where does your mind place it?

As a note, Sirois was recently awarded the highest 2006 Individual Artist Award for poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council.

—Alex Castro * Venn diagram: a graph that employs closed curves and especially circles to represent logical relations between and operations on sets and the terms of propositions by the inclusion, exclusion, or intersection of the curves.

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urbanite march 07

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