March 2008 issue by Urbanite LLC

march 2008 issue no. 45

F O R

B A L T I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

URBANITE PROJECT 2008 OUR SECOND ANNUAL EXPERIMENT IN THE POWER OF UNCONVENTIONAL IDEAS

Naked Truth: I Survived Life Modeling • You Bet Your Life: Downtown Casinos?

Exclusively at

FIND A neighborhood

FALL IN love

Start Your Search at www.LiveBaltimore.com View neighborhood profiles, complete with maps Search for homes in our classified section Get the inside scoop on neighborhoods

Visit our Home Center and Talk with the Experts

Meet with a real estate agent or mortgage lender anytime Pick up your FREE City Living Resource Guide

LIVE BA LTIMOR E

Live Baltimore Home Center | 343 N. Charles Street | Monday-Saturday, 9:00am-5:00pm | 410.637.3750 | www.livebaltimore.com

Baltimore City. Welcome to the Neighborhoods.

An Evening of Acoustic Jazz to benefit Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Place

The David Grisman Quintet Robinella and The Frank Vignola Quintet

Building a Better Baltimore One Person One Community At A Time

1118 Ward Street Baltimore, MD 21230 410-625-0775 www.paulsplaceoutreach.org

urbanite march 08

Saturday, April 12, 2008 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 8 p.m. Kraushaar Auditorium at Goucher College 1021 Dulaney Valley Road, Towson Buy tickets at www.ticketweb.com Sponsorships and more information available at www.paulsplaceoutreach.org or 410-625-0775 x20

Media SponSorS:

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Saturday, April 5, 2008

8 p.m. until Midnight

A CHIC, DELICIOUS, AND ECO-FRIENDLY EVENING From a delectable menu to an enviro-friendly auction and dancing in the Aquarium's two-story atrium, celebrate and embrace a vision for Generation Green. tickets, information, and sponsorships now available at aqua.org/greengala or 410-727-3474. Gala Partners:

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Austin Grill Babylon Nails Boston Street Dentistry Brocato’s Studio of Hair Design CakeLove Chesapeake Wine Company Cloud 9 Clothing Cold Stone Creamery Downs Stationers Electric Rays Tanning Salon GNC Kiss Café Lenscrafters Long and Foster Realtors Outback Steakhouse Pasticcio Ristorante Italiano Radio Shack Ray Lewis’ Full Moon BBQ Ritz Camera Starbucks Subway SunTrust Bank Vircity

Offices Alexander & Tom Benexx Community Analytics Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins University DAP Design Purchase Link Emerging Technology Center Francis Cauffman Notemarks LLC RPI Consultants Safe Harbors Travel

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c o n t e n t s march 2008 issue no. 45

f e a t u r e s

keynote: the accompanist interview by lionel foster

with two decades of experience as composer, bandleader, and sideman par excellence, jazz pianist cyrus chestnut ponders the mysteries of collective creation.

urbanite project 2008 for urbanite’s annual issue devoted to the power of collaboration, we assembled seven teams of baltimoreans from diverse fields, handed them each two pages of the magazine, and told them to dream big. here’s what happened.

d e p a r t m e n t s

what you’re saying

what you’re seeing

what you’re writing

corkboard

have you heard

double trouble?

urban animals

can’t win for losing

this month: a duke, a corpse, and a sharpshooter

laundering, minus the percs. plus: chic clothes, electric cars, and communal coffee

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c o n t e n t s

baltimore observed place your bets

will baltimore roll the dice on casinos?

march 2008 issue no. 45

by michael anft

beyond the bees with honeybees vanishing, farmers go native by sharon tregaskis

art object a novice model sheds her clothes and surprises herself by molly o’donnell

into the mystic remembering artist les harris by dale keiger

fiction dream date by jean mcgarry

41 78

space

sky high glass and glamour rise from an industrial icon by amanda kolson hurley

eat/drink true brew

the scoop on fair trade coffee by joan jacobson

reviewed: ethel & ramone’s and salt

wine & spirits: where have all the (cheap) imports gone?

art/culture

bring it on home why the city should think twice about bulldozing public housing by mike dominelli

plus: van halen lives, the pastor’s anniversary, “silent” film, and more

110

eye to eye urbanite’s creative director alex castro discusses dennis farber’s giant polaroids

this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com: interview: a conversation with author jean mcgarry photos: check out silo point, south baltimore’s audacious condo conversion, and tour the city's pre-war housing projects video: see inside the 2008 urbanite project at www.urbaniteproject.com on the cover: photo composite by jason okutake and lisa macfarlane

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urbanite march 08

Issue 45 March 2008 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com Copy Editor Angela Davids Staff Writer Lionel Foster Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com Contributing Editors Karen Houppert, Susan McCallum-Smith Editorial Intern Rebecca Messner Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer Jason Okutake Staff Photographers La Kaye Mbah, Jason Okutake Production Interns Ashley Kimbro, Bob Myaing Web Coordinator/Videographer Chris Rebbert Senior Account Executives Janet Brown Janet@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executive Michele Holcombe Michele@urbanitebaltimore.com Sales/Accounting Assistant Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing/Administrative Assistant La Kaye Mbah Administrative Assistant Lindsay Hanson 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 editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2008, 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.

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contributors

photo by Will Kirk/Johns Hopkins University

Jean McGarry Jean McGarry has been teaching fiction in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University for more than twenty years. She is the author of seven books of fiction, among them The Courage of Girls, A Bad and Stupid Girl, and the short story collection Dream Date. Her story, also called “Dream Date,” appears on page 75. “‘Dream Date’ was the name of a girls’ board game from the late 1960s, early ’70s,” she explains. “Somehow the name stuck with me, and I used it for the collection of stories, although no story therein had that title. Then, I wrote the story you’re publishing and discovered that, finally, I had uncovered the dream date so wished for.”

photo by Meg Lang

Christopher Brindley Freelance illustrator and fine artist Christopher Brindley graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005. Among the Montgomery County native’s publishing credits are his work in the Society of Illustrators Student Annual and Spectrum 12: The Best in Contemporary and Fantastic Art. Brindley’s work is a surrealistic blend of human, mechanical, and supernatural elements. “I like to incorporate everyday elements with unusual things, to create a sense of imbalance,” he says. This month, in his Urbanite debut, Brindley’s art accompanies the essays in our “What You’re Writing” department (p. 27). Find more of his work at www.christopher brindley.com.

photo by Jay VanRensselaer

Dale Keiger Dale Keiger is associate editor of Johns Hopkins Magazine and the Johns Hopkins Publishing Group. A graduate of the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, he has been a scribbler-for-hire since the age of 19, and is a past recipient of a Washington Monthly national journalism prize and an H.L. Mencken Award for investigative reporting. He teaches nonfiction writing in the Johns Hopkins evening graduate program. Each night he finds his way home to Reisterstown, where he lives with his wife of twenty-seven years, Marian Grant. His appreciation of artist Les Harris appears on page 49.

editor’s note

It’s Friday,

days before this issue heads to the printer, and the office of the publication you hold in your hands (or, for online readers, your browser window) is in a state of collegial frenzy. This (mostly) decorous deadline hubbub is par for the course, but this month things seem particularly abuzz, in part because the office is hosting a number of guests. These are the final days of Urbanite Project season, which means that various participants in the magazine’s annual adventure in group collaboration—you can see these intrepid Urbanauts on page 59—are putting the final touches on the two-page magazine spreads that they have been asked to conjure. This is a process far more hands-on than I could have imagined when I arrived here several months ago. All day, a parade of people—community organizers, artists, scientists, and other assorted non-magazine-professionals—have trooped down the hall to work on their layouts with the design staff; they’re fiddling with fonts and margins, learning the lingo (“What’s a sidebar?”), and generally taking the magazine for a spin around the block. It’s perhaps the most literal manifestation I’ve yet seen of this publication’s core philosophy of offering a monthly four-color forum for the widest possible cross-section of Baltimore. It wasn’t my idea. Credit goes to Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Urbanite editor from 2004 to 2007, who was instrumental in dreaming up this endeavor for the March 2007 issue. Part annual blowout issue, part social experiment, the project was conceived as a forward-thinking springtime alternative to the ubiquitous “Best of ” issues that are autumn staples of the city/regional magazine world. The original premise was to lure the city’s big thinkers out of their respective disciplines and make them work with each other: “We wanted to create a platform,” Elizabeth says, “for a conversation that normally wouldn’t happen.” The self-imposed ground rules hold that Urbanite maintains only the minimum of editorial oversight: Once we select the participants and assemble them into teams (six in 2007, seven this year), we largely recede into the shadows and encourage the teams to chart their own courses. This takes more work than one might think. Ably ushering the seven-limbed monster down the aisle was managing editor Marianne Amoss, who took on the logistical chore of helping nineteen individual participants collaborate both with each other and with us—a process that began back in August and demanded many a late night and working weekend over the past several months. Marianne should have known better—she is a veteran of the 2007 Project—but she volunteered anyway, and without her steady hand on the tiller the deadline hubbub outside my door tonight would be far less decorous. The final product, I think, justifies the challenges of such an exercise. This year, several participants rolled up their sleeves and took on knotty urban problems—wastewater management, lack of arts funding in the city’s public schools—while others addressed universal human issues or unleashed flights of pure imagination. Despite the multiplicity of approaches, some recurring themes emerged: There’s a hard-eyed recognition of the challenges the city faces, and a fierce yearning to overcome the barriers that have historically prevented just these kinds of crosscommunity collaborations. In this same spirit of passing the megaphone around to more mouths, don’t be alarmed if you start noticing critical writing that’s a bit more, er, critical in the months ahead, as Urbanite continues to expand its arts and culture section. Operating on the principle that this city can accommodate a vigorous range of opinion on things cultural, we’ll be looking for more voices that might take issue with conventional wisdom, explore an unpopular idea, and generally challenge the reader to think twice. Disagreement is encouraged—keep it civil, please—and tell us what you think: Write to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com. —David Dudley

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Bob Myaing Urbanite photography intern Bob Myaing, a Gaithersburg native and a junior at MICA, doesn’t mind a bit of dirt in his pictures—or on his knees, for that matter. “I’m interested in photographers who are taking pictures of everyday life, finding amazing pictures in places you wouldn’t expect,” he says. His own habit of traversing the streets of Baltimore on a bike, wielding a clunky German camera, has led to a few near-collisions. We’re glad he returned unscathed with photos for this month’s “Have You Heard” department (p. 37). Find more of his work at www.bobmyaing.com.

Who wants to know? Coming Next Month: Privacy, technology, and getting lost in the crowd.

www.urbanitebaltimore.com

F O R

B A LT I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

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 8

Ma Petite Shoe .

Shoes & Chocolate! A wide assortment of exotic chocolates and shoes from the world’s wildest designers. New for Spring: handcrafted slippers, luxurious socks, scarves and bags. Gift certificates available in any amount. Open 7 days a week.

832 West 36th Street • 410-235-3442 • www.mapetiteshoe.com

Paradiso. Antique to Modern Home Decor. Accent on exceptional furniture, lighting, fine craft, outsider art, jewelry and fabulous gifts. An outstanding destination! Open Fri-Sat 11-6, Sun 11-4. 1015 W. 36th Street • 410-243-1317 • info@paradisohampden.com

Mud and Metal. Hand made functional art created by artists to be used and loved! Ceramics, metal, jewelry, glass, fiber, paper. Enjoy! Art to live with! Open Mon - Wed 10am - 6pm, Thurs - Sat 10am - 7pm, Sun 10am - 5pm 1121 W. 36th Street • 410-467-8698 • www.mudandmetal.com

Fleckenstein Gallery & Archival Framing.

Art gallery featuring paintings, prints and mixed media by established regional artists (including former Hampden Hon, Deborah Donelson). Custom framing for posters AND Picassos, and everything in between.

3316 Keswick Road • 410-366-3669 • www.fleckensteingallery.com

D isc o ver

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Craig Flinner Gallery. Visit Craig Flinner Gallery at our new location on the Avenue in Hampden. We will open on February 23, 2008. Hope to see you there! 1117 W. 36th Street.• 410-727-1863 • www.flinnergallery.com

Golden West Cafe. Golden West Cafe serving up comfort foods in a New Mexican tradition since 1997. Join us for our “quickserve” menu Monday thru Thursday from 12-2pm. Lunch menu items guaranteed in 10 min or it’s free! 1105 W. 36th Street • 410 889-8891 • www.goldenwestcafe.com

ONE~the Wellness Spa @ Bikram Yoga.

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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

what you’re saying

photo by Jason Okutake

The Critic’s Critic Every month, I look forward to your magazine and its celebration of creative energy and all things sophisticated and cosmopolitan in Baltimore, of which the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is in the first rank. Having only recently moved to the city from the San Francisco Bay Area, I tell friends back there that going to hear the BSO live has been my greatest pleasure and reason enough to live in Baltimore. Under the baton of Ms. Alsop and with the leadership of first violin Jonathan Carney, the BSO is making its mark as an orchestra. It pains me to imagine that someone contemplating going to the BSO might be dissuaded by Steve Wigler’s piece, “Downbeat: Can the BSO sell classical music without selling it short?” in the February issue. I refer readers of Urbanite to the October 1, 2007, New York Times and the January 7, 2008, New Yorker reviews of Marin Alsop and the BSO for a different view. Mr. Wigler’s bitter attack on Ms. Alsop and the BSO repeatedly makes its arguments from authority, something you abet in his byline by alluding to his twenty years as a music critic, including writing for the Baltimore Sun. Please enlighten ignorant readers and concert goers, those whom he claims lack his superior judgment to know better—in other words, all of us who are thrilled with the new BSO—about Mr. Wigler. The byline ends, “He now writes about music from his home in Baltimore.” You should have added, “since he was fired by the Sun for plagiarism.” —Adam William Epp lives in Mount Vernon. Way to Go I am a recent architecture school graduate, and my master’s thesis explored the impersonal aspects and toxic effects of our traditional American funerary practices. Kudos to Urbanite for discussing such an important subject (“Compost in Peace,” January). We must acknowledge the fact that some of our most culturally ingrained traditions have tremendous negative impact on the family and the environment. Only when we begin to understand these shortcomings can we suggest and appreciate new alternatives. Even though cremation is considered more economical and efficient than traditional casketed burial, it is not without its downsides. I would suggest that anyone interested in this topic look into the process called Promession. This sci-fi-sounding

Editor's note: Steve Wigler was dismissed from the Sun in 1999 for lifting a passage from a musical reference book.

process involves the freeze-drying of the corpse, resulting in an organic compost without the harmful emissions of mercury, soot, and ash. The biodegradable powder allows the family much greater freedom when choosing how to dispose of those remains. For more information about Promession, visit www.promessafoundation.org. —Meg Lazzeri lives in Baltimore and works at JRS Architects Inc. in Clipper Mill.

Moving Up, Moving Out The article “Double Feature” (January) highlights one of many major redevelopments that has happened or is currently happening in Baltimore. While this article discusses how the city benefits from these redevelopments by drawing in younger families and couples, it fails to discuss what happens to the families that used to live in the community—the families that have lived in the city their whole lives.

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With the Hopkins (EBDI) redevelopment in East Baltimore, University of Maryland downtown, and Patterson Park in Southeast Baltimore, where do the families of low socioeconomic status go? They cannot afford the $300,000 to $500,000 homes in Patterson Park or the high-end apartments/homes that Hopkins has built. And every few decades, these families have to migrate from community to community. Redevelopment has many benefits for the city, for the residents, but is anyone monitoring the effect that these redevelopments have on the families that can no longer afford the communities they were forced out of?

update

An artist’s legacy lives on

—Adam Milam is a senior public health studies major at Johns Hopkins University and a native of Baltimore City who now lives in Randallstown.

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. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. You can also comment on our website (www.urbanite baltimore.com/forum). Urbanite.qxd:Layout 1

8/27/07

9:54 PM

“Violence has not been the last word,” says Debra Evans of the Better Waverly Community Organization. She’s speaking of artist Terry Koenig, who was killed in September 2005 in the home that he had spent thirty years lovingly restoring. In March 2005, Urbanite contributor Alice Ockleshaw explored the artist’s home. Koenig’s family set up a fund in his memory, dedicated to

arts and education programs for the residents of the Better Waverly neighborhood. The fund seeded a program called Artlink, which has sent kids to dance classes, orchestra and jazz camp, acting lessons, and even a Claymation course at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Last year, the family’s gift spawned something even bigger: When Habitat for Humanity announced plans to sell a building that Artlink had used for a summer art camp, a local resident bought the building, at 901 Montpelier Street, and turned it into the Better Waverly Community Arts Center. Now, the center hosts the summer camp, after-school art classes, and free music lessons for local kids on a donated piano. “You turn the lights on at 901 Montpelier, and there’s going to be a child’s face pushed up against that door,” says Evans. “I know Terry is just smiling when the kids are in that building.” —Greg Hanscom

Page 1

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urbanite march 08

107

http://advanced.jhu.edu

what you’re seeing

Urban Animals by Geena Gurvich

I am a designer, and I’m most interested in creating logos. So you can imagine my surprise and curiosity when I found a famous gramophone company’s trademark in perfect condition on the top of the Maryland Historical Society's Heritage Wing on Park Avenue. —G.G.

Starting next month, the “What You’re Seeing” department will no longer use monthly themes; rather, this will be the place for photography that captures the true spirit of Baltimore. Urbanite staffers will choose our favorites to publish in the magazine and on our website. Along with your photograph, please include a brief description of the image and your contact information. Go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/ wyseeing for more information on how to submit your photograph. Photos can be e-mailed to wyseeing@urbanitebaltimore.com.

PLEASE NOTE: By sending us a photograph, you are giving us full permission to publish the image in its entirety. This permission extends to the models and/or subjects in the photograph. It is essential that all people in the photograph be aware that the image may be published. Please read the limited license agreement on our website, www.urbanitebaltimore.com/wyseeing.

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PS-2007 Urbanite 12-10.qxd

12/10/07

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Open House

Page 1

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Saturday, March 29 at Park School

•

11am-1pm

REFRESHMENTS • ENTERTAINMENT • TOURS

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urbanite march 08

Mon-Fri 10-5 Sat 10-4

Winners and L o s e r

what you’re writing

might be getting somewhere. I press A to pass to a member of my team who is being controlled by Eric. He takes the shot and it rebounds off the far post back into play. My player is in perfect position to make the shot. Just press B, I think to myself. I press a button and my player slide tackles the goalie. —Abigail Sussman is in tenth grade at the Park School of Baltimore. She has yet to beat her brother at any type of video game.

illustration by Christopher Brindley

It was April 1996,

“Just press B to shoot!”

my brother, Eric, yells at me. We’re down by just one point in our Luxembourg versus Uzbekistan showdown in a simulated World Cup game on our Xbox 360. I of course miss the shot. I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. All I know how to do is slide tackle by pressing X, which has resulted in at least two red cards and Eric yelling gibberish about losing points on his username.

The first time Eric coaxed me into playing, we were on separate teams. He, Azerbaijan, beat me, Liechtenstein, 6-0. Being a generally nice guy, he now lets me play on his team. But it takes a lot more than just being nice to play on a team with me. My player runs uselessly around the ball while I try to make him pinpoint its actual position. Once I have finally gotten possession of the ball and turned to the direction of Uzbekistan’s goal, I feel like I

and I had recently ended an eight-year career as an Army officer to join my husband in Panama, in Central America. Compared to many other houses in the town of La Chorrera, the cinderblock home I shared with my mother-inlaw and seven other relatives was lavish: It had running water, a flush toilet, a cement floor, and three small bedrooms. It did not, however, have hot water, air conditioning, a washer, or a dryer. The resident population of large cockroaches scurried about the house, chased by the lagartijos (geckos) that also lived inside and feasted on the beetles. In spite of these cultural differences, I was happy and excited to be in a country I considered my second home. My husband was Panamanian, I had recently started teaching English to first-graders, and I had a passion for the language and music. Unfortunately, my bliss ended abruptly one otherwise unremarkable April afternoon when my husband uttered a phrase that left me cold: “I can’t stay here anymore, so I’m leaving.” As it turned out, “leaving” meant he was leaving me and moving in with another woman. I spent the evening racking my brain to the point of exhaustion. So many questions and accusations: “I left an Army career and relocated for this relationship, and it lasted less than two months after I arrived. He must have already been seeing her, so why didn’t he spare us both the agony by telling me before I moved?” I felt like a fool and a loser as I

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what you’re writing realized that my husband had the car I had helped him pay for. I had a 4-year-old son to support and a mountain of credit card debt I had wrongly assumed I would not be paying on my own. The next morning my utter despair gave way to resolve. “You can leave me at rock bottom,” I thought, “but I’m not staying here.” It took me five years to turn my situation around. I eventually returned to the United States and earned teaching certification in Spanish. It was tough to be a single mom, work full-time, and attend school. But when the smoke cleared, I had achieved a 4.0 GPA, earned my certification, and three years later was debt-free. I am proud of my accomplishments, but my true epiphany occurred one Saturday when I was laughing and playing with my then-6-year-old son. I am the one who gets to raise him and see him grow into a man, I realized. That makes me feel like a winner. —Lezlie L. Shackell is a Maryland Army active guard major who teaches Army ROTC cadets and is earning her masters in Spanish at Howard University. She resides in Baltimore with her husband of six years, her now-16-year-old son, and 4-year-old daughter. She enjoys writing in her limited free time.

I bounce the ball twice,

as I do before every serve, and toss it above my head. I don’t look at the ball as it heads skyward. After a couple thousand tries, I know where it will be. I strike the ball—not a lot of pace or spin, but it is no matter because this game is won. My success comes on a sunny July day, and as I play sweat crawls across my body like a serpent. Even Amesbury, Massachusetts, an idyllic seaside town on the New Hampshire border, simmers each summer. The town is home to Bauercrest, a sports camp for Jewish boys from Boston, New York, and their suburbs. A place parents put their kids so they can cheer in the mess hall about the Red Sox and the Mets, get a whiff of a real forest, and, briefly, try to forget the girls they danced with at their bar mitzvahs. That morning, the fairer sex is, indeed, distant from my mind. After grueling tryouts, I have proven myself worthy of my camp’s traveling tennis team and am now at Bauercrest’s yearly tournament with designs on victory. My first match only bolsters my confidence as I read the draw for the next round. My opponent is an unfamiliar one. His name is Spanish, feminine. “You’ve got the monster,” one of my teammates tells me. But he isn’t a monster. He is a she. A teenage girl nearly six feet tall with skin the color of wet sand and a taut, sinuous body. She coolly ignores the stares. And when she whips her dark hair over bare shoulders, the soundtrack in my head plays castanets.

Eight games later, I understand how she got her nickname. Her strokes are powerful, precise, and unrelenting. She plays with the boys because she is better than us. She is not only the most gorgeous creature I have seen in my fourteen years, but she is also a force. Damn it. I just lost to a girl. —When Simon Waxman first moved to Baltimore, he scoffed at the benches reading “Greatest City in America.” Five years later, he’s not sure they’re wrong.

I froze,

staring at the uniform faces of the eager crowd. Disappointment ran through my body as I squeezed my large brown eyes shut, fighting back the tears. My mind was blank; I forgot the next note. Lowering the violin with my left hand, I stood onstage motionless, not sure of what to do next. Mrs. Watkins, my violin instructor and worst enemy, was sitting at the piano six feet away. She smelled of stale coffee and mothballs, a distinctive smell I could never forget. She was the kind of person who terrified me at age 7 and still intimidated me now at 15. Mrs. Watkins’ harsh teaching techniques made her students winners—everyone except me. “She has so much potential for a young girl, just like her sister,” Mrs. Watkins once said. She attempted to continue playing the piano accompaniment to Minuet No. 3, but I refused to go on. Her prophecy was incorrect. I knew it was my last violin recital. I walked offstage slowly, returning to my seat on the red velvet church bench. Mocking my weak performance, the audience applauded. I tried to be strong, but my tears were irrepressible. I sat there, humiliated and saddened, staring at the obnoxious green pineapple dress I had been forced to wear. Glancing at the small, whiny violin resting on my lap, the blonde girl next to me tried to comfort me, saying, “That was embarrassing.” —Molly Wassel is a sophomore at the Park School. Now, she prefers to play her iPod rather than the violin.

I think about

the day we ran into the thicket. The hard cement under our sneakers, our ankles stinging from crackling brush. There had been an ice storm, and our bottoms were sore from sliding down the inch-thick sheets over your parents’ lawn mulching. The day we ran over the swamp, the day you got caught in the water. The day you screamed and I ran back to pull you free. Your leg was bloodied. “Keep going,” you said. We ran faster, the water freezing on your pants, our tiny hands raw and red and stiffening flesh, until we found the oak tree. We used rocks to break the layer; we dug into the earth, our fingers meat. We hid our matching

plastic barrettes far into the sleeping wormholes. Giggling, handholding, we ran until it started to get dark, until our chests seized and our lungs could hold no more ice air. We fell onto the slippery frozen steps, watching toward the woods where the fates stayed, promising we’d be back while the owl and the moon sang. I think about the day you said, “You cannot continue to ride your bicycle like that. It is embarrassing to be with you.” We were 8 and I hadn’t yet learned to balance without training wheels. You got off your bike, backed up thirty yards, and ran at me full speed like it was some sort of rugby match. Our miniature bodies went flying onto the concrete. You stood, held out a hand to shield me from the blinding sun, and said, “That is the worst thing that’s going to happen.” Twenty years later, I see your photograph looking tired and old and weary in the newspaper and I think, I think about when we knew the things we might have since forgotten. ■ —Nicole Elizabeth is a resident of Hampden. She is a textbook editor at Words and Numbers and enjoys writing fiction.

“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 reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. 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 e-mail your story to What YoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Please keep submissions under four hundred words; longer submissions may not be read due to time constraints. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic

Deadline

Guns Mar 7, 2008 Keeping Score Apr 4, 2008 Theft May 2, 2008

Publication May 2008 Jun 2008 Jul 2008

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 8

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urbanite march 08

d i f f e r e n c e

CORK Body Worlds 2

Through Sept 1

The traveling Body Worlds exhibit features real human bodies meticulously preserved through a process called plastination. Posed as if they are running, jumping, and bending, the figures offer insight—sometimes quite literally, with cross-sections of organs—into the machinery just beneath our skin. This second version of the world-famous show focuses on the “three-pound gem,” the brain.

Maryland Science Center 601 Light St. Go to www.ticketmaster.com for tickets

Washington Balalaika Society in Concert

Mar 9, 3 p.m.

Maybe it has something to do with the climate, but everything just seems bigger and sturdier in Russia—their weightlifters, their winter apparel, their rhetoric, and, apparently, their musical instruments. Some versions of the balalaika, a quirky three-stringed cousin of the guitar, are five feet tall. You can gawk at these and other musical curiosities as the Washington Balalaika Society’s Russian Folk Orchestra performs a free concert.

Catonsville Presbyterian Church 1400 Frederick Rd. 410-747-6180 www.catonsvillepresb.org

Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert

Mar 9, 3 p.m.

Many people don’t know that the jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, the mastermind of such hits as “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” was deeply religious. The choral group Columbia Pro Cantare, along with jazz ensemble the Eric Mintet Quartet, presents selections from Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, three works composed in the last years of his life.

First Evangelical Lutheran Church 3604 Chatham Rd., Ellicott City In advance: adults $20, seniors and students $18; at the door: adults $22, seniors and students $20 410-799-9321 www.procantare.org

St. Patrick’s Day Parade

Mar 16, 2 p.m.

Honorary Grand Marshall Edwin F. Hale Sr. and the U.S. Naval Academy Band join procession participants in Baltimore’s 51st annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. A morning Mass, the annual Parade Champagne Brunch at the B&O Warehouse, and the Shamrock 5K run will precede the march.

Parade steps off at the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon Go to www.irishparade.net for brunch and race registration details

15th Annual Marble Show

Mar 29, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

While much of the world is busy scrambling for Nintendo Wii’s and other hightech toys, the Perry Hall Recreation Council is harking back to a simpler time with a day of marble selling, trading, and exhibitions. There will be free appraisals of marble collections, a Chinese checkers tournament, marbles games to watch and play, and trick demonstrations by national champions.

Perry Hall Elementary School 9021 Belair Rd. Adults $1.50, children 25 cents or one marble 410-285-1829

Eastside-Westside Life Stories Project

Mar 30, 3–5 p.m.

Baltimore has been home to a diverse array of folks, from transplanted sharecroppers of the Deep South to city natives with ancestral ties to Europe, each with a story to tell. The Jewish Museum of Maryland hosts this traveling oral history project in which older residents recall significant moments from growing up on the east and west sides of Baltimore. Audience members are invited to share their own tales at the end of the performance.

Jewish Museum of Maryland 15 Lloyd St. Free; reservations recommended 410-732-6400, ext. 14 www.jhsm.org

Photo credits from top to bottom: courtesy of Maryland Science Center; iStockphoto.com/Viktor Kitaykin; no credit; courtesy of the Baltimore St. Patrick Parade Committee; © photographer: Sayuriao|Agency: Dreamstime.com; courtesy of Fran Wilson

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 8

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Summer Camps in Voice, Strings & Dance Private & Group Classes for Children & Adults, Beginner to Advanced

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To the Trade Flooring Showroom Full-Service Workroom • Binding Serging • Taping • Sewing

410.561.9200 2147 Greenspring Drive • Timonium, MD 21093 • www.greenspringcarpetsource.com 32

urbanite march 08

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Be stronger than your excuses. Exercise actually adds years to your life. It also bumps up your energy and stamina now, giving you back the time you lost feeling tired. And

at the MAC, we have programs tailored to get you in and out—minimal time, maximum benefits. You’ll have fun with our group exercise classes (over 100 to choose from), 4 saltwater pools, and programs guaranteed to deliver results. Shower in our spotless facilities, grab a coffee on the way out, and face the day ready to shred your excuses. Visit macwellness.com today—stop feeling rushed and start feeling strong.

Join any MAC and get one month FREE, plus a $50 gift card *. (Card good for any MAC service or product.)

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have you heard

compiled by lionel foster

Batteries Included his facility in Knoxville, Maryland (2130A Jefferson Pike; www.harveyev.com). Licensed as a scooter rather than an automobile, the three-wheeled “personal transport” includes weather protection and room for five bags of groceries. It costs under $10,000 and hits speeds of up to 50 mph. Coming soon: A two-seater version and deluxe lithium-ion model with a 100-mile range. —David Dudley

courtesy of Goozex.com

photo by Mike Harvey

Mike Harvey, founder of Harvey Coachworks , recalls the moment in 2006 when he decided to go into the electric car business: “When gas first hit $3 a gallon,” he says, “I got torqued off and decided I could do this myself.” The former car customizer made good on that promise, first by converting his ’92 Volkswagen to battery power, and later by selling his own line of electric vehicles, or EVs. His latest venture is a space-age electro-capsule called a BugE. Harvey buys the unassembled body and chassis from an Oregon EV outfit, then builds the cars to order at

Virtual Swap Meet One day—eyes bloodshot, thumbs blistered, and hopped up on Mountain Dew—you will finally beat Halo 3. Then what? The game disk itself will be as worthless as a beer coaster, and Halo 4 will set you back another $60. Now there’s a solution: Goozex. com , an online video-game trading platform created by University of Maryland alums Jon Dugan and Mark Nebesky. For just a dollar a game, members can trade games with over 1,500 other online users. The site includes over 24,000 titles, giving each

a point value based on its retail value and trading demand—which means you won’t have to fork over your new Call of Duty 4 for that old-school Mario Brothers. “Jon and I are still gamers,” says Nebesky, who serves as chief operations officer for the company, based in College Park. Up next? “Europe and Asia,” Nebesky says. “Since day one, we’ve been thinking big.” —Rebecca Messner

photo by Peter Schmader

The Anti-Starbucks Take everything that comes to mind when someone says “coffee shop,” and chuck it out the window: the overstuffed couches, the tasteful Norah Jones soundtrack, the chalkboard listing fancy lattes, everything. Add some second-hand furniture in fake leather and velvet, light fixtures rigged from heating ducts, and, in place of the cash register, a paper cup marked “2$ 4 COFFEE.” Now you’ve got Hampden’s new latenight coffee house, El Rancho Grande (3608 Falls Rd.; myspace.com/itsabigranch). Proprietor Peter

Schmader says he modeled the place after a Beat coffee house he frequented as a teenager in 1960s Cleveland. He plans to bring in occasional music acts, but otherwise, he says, “I lay the groundwork, and you take it from there.” Look for the turquoise, orange, and purple facade (there’s no sign), and the hours that a customer has inked on the front window (Mon–Sat 6 p.m.–2 a.m., Sun 3 p.m.–9 p.m.). —Greg Hanscom

Have you heard of something new and interesting happening in your neighborhood? E-mail your news to staff writer Lionel Foster at Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com, and you may see it in a future issue.

SPRING WINEd UP 2008 Tuesday, March 18th from 6pm-9pm Wine Tasting & Sale Up to 20% discount off wines Tickets sold in the wine shop or by phone 410.244.6166 $35 per person all included Tickets are limited

Over 30 wines from around the world paired with Hors d’Oeuvres by Chef Christian.

• Brunch on Sundays (11:00-4:00) • Lunch, Tuesday-Friday

• Dinner 7 days a week • Wine Shop open 7 days a week

921 East Fort Ave. Baltimore, MD 21230 at the Foundry on Fort www.the-wine-market.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 8

A beautiful surprise awaits you... specializing in european & designer collections

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urbanite march 08

have you heard Out of the Mouth of ...

photo by maxglanville.com

By the time 29-year-old Timonium native Lisa Ponzoli opened her own clothing boutique, she had already helped manage an apparel specialty store, worked as an assistant buyer for two national chains, and held positions in fashion sales, design, and production in Washington, D.C. “I started when I was in high school sewing all my own clothes,” she says. Now she has her own store Babe (910 S. Charles St.; 410-244-5114; babeaboutique.com), where she rings up sales, carefully selects the stock, and even models most of the clothes on the website. Ponzoli carries

designer denim lines like Hudson, Miss Me, Rich & Skinny, and Raven, along with apparel by BCBGirls, Sky, Rails, and Code Vintage. Most items are priced between $40 and $200 for a look that’s sophisticated yet versatile and fun. “You don’t have to spend a lot to look good,” she says. Beginning this month, Babe also offers shoes (from Steve Madden, Diba, and Luichiny). —Lionel Foster

Color Me Impressed with Aura white. It’s not cheap—Aura retails for roughly $50 per gallon, depending on the tint—but without primer and extra coats, you might save money and time in the end. Plus, it’s low-VOC and dries quickly. In the Baltimore area, Aura is available at Budeke’s Paints (1862A Reisterstown Rd., 410-6025060; and 2103 Greenspring Dr., 410-560-1230).

photo by Bob Myaing

If months of gray winter skies have you yearning for a little extra color in your life, check out Benjamin Moore Paint’s new Aura line (www.myaurapaint. com). The stuff is so thick, its creators boast that you can finish most jobs—even turning a black wall white—with no more than two coats and no primer. In a product review for the New York Times, writer Fred A. Bernstein let his sons go Dada on an apartment wall before easily covering the masterpiece

—L.F.

The Unlaundered Truth

photo by Bob Myaing

Dry cleaning, despite its name, is an incredibly dirty job: The solvent that most cleaners use to give your clothes that fresh, unruffled look is a carbon-based chemical called perchloroethylene (“perc” for short), an EPA-regulated air pollutant and suspected carcinogen. And you can’t be blamed for not liking the smell. Last year, concerned about perc’s environmental and health effects, Shawn and Alexandra Goldfaden opened Sparks Cleaners (10 Fila Way, Suite L, 410-472-4934; and 7206 York Rd., 410-832-5326;

architecture

1208 Light Street Baltimore, Maryland

sparkscleaners.com), one of a growing number of operations using an odorless, silicone-based substitute known as D5. The verdict is still out on this new solvent’s purported health and environmental risks and benefits—the EPA is officially agnostic at this point—but at least you won’t smell like a chemical factory. —L.F.

interior design

CL Design Studio LLC 410-244-0360

planning

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AIABALTIMORE

2008 AIABALTIMORE SPRING LECTURE SERIES The Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIABaltimore) invites you to attend its annual spring lecture series – a Baltimore tradition for decades. Join us in welcoming architects from throughout the country. This year’s series is a stellar alignment of West Coast influences, Northeastern innovators, and International Masters.

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Geoff Manaugh

March 19, Wednesday

The Preservation Maryland Lecture in memory of Michael F. Trostel, FAIA Geoff Manaugh, the senior editor of Dwell magazine, founder and editor of Archinect, and the creator of the award-winning BLDG BLOG will present theories on infrastructure and urban landscapes in relation to historic preservation ideals. San Francisco

Gregg Pasquarelli, AIA April 2, Wednesday

Gregg Pasquarelli, AIA, architect and professor at Columbia University, is a co-founder of the architectural firm SHoP in New York City. Receiving several design awards in its short yet impressive lifespan, SHoP is an innovative, yet streamlined firm, creating evocative, yet real world projects. New York

Teddy Cruz, AIA April 9, Wednesday

Teddy Cruz, AIA, an architect located on the border of San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, will ground us all with tales from his bicultural territory. Estudio Teddy Cruz is essentially a living laboratory that studies housing, community planning, and zoning in conjunction with complex border control issues. San Diego

design matters LIVE LEARN WORK PLAY in harmony with the environment

Daniel Libeskind, AIA April 24, Thursday

Manekin Construction, LLC is the major sponsor The 2008 Lecture Series finale features the distinguished Daniel Libeskind, AIA, whose work is celebrated for its poetic bridging of socio-cultural events and spiritual understanding via theoretical hallways of deconstructivist and avant garde forms. Libeskind’s ideas have influenced a new generation of architects and those interested in the future development of cities and culture. New York All lectures begin at 6 p.m., and are followed by a reception. Maryland Institute College of Art, Brown Center, Falvey Hall, 1300 Mt. Royal Avenue 100 free parking spots will be available at the RK+K lot at the east end of Mosher St., one block east of Mt. Royal Ave., and accessible from the northbound lane only. Series tickets are $45/public and $35/AIA and BAF members. Please send payment to AIABaltimore. Students are free with I.D. Individual lecture tickets are available at the door for $15, as space permits. 1 AIA/CES (HSW) with registration.

11 1/2 W. Chase Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201 410.625.2585 fax 410.727.4620 info@aiabalt.com www.aiabalt.com These advertisers are among the firm members of AIABaltimore.

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baltimore observed

When the chips are down: Gambling proponents such as state senator Lisa Gladden (above) and a blue-ribbon mayoral committee recommend moving beyond slots to full-tilt casino gaming.

development

Place Your Bets The deal was too good to pass up. For about $100, Lisa Gladden could fly out from BWI, stay at a hotel, and take a “Casino Magic tour” through Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. It was also a cheap way to get to New Orleans, which, at the time— around 2000, she says—had yet to suffer the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. So Gladden, now a Democratic state senator from Northwest Baltimore, took the trip, gambling that she wouldn’t be wasting her time. What she saw did more than make her feel like she’d won the luck of the vacation-deal draw. The Casino Magic Hotel soared fourteen stories above the Gulf Coast, its 38,000 square feet offering numerous “wagering opportunities.” And in the gleaming new building, which stood at the center of a trailer and RV park, Gladden saw hope. “You could see the community growing from that,” she says. “You could see that the casinos were helping to rebuild that town.” A bunch of other Baltimore city leaders see similar, if more modest, possibilities here. A blueribbon committee appointed one year ago by Mayor Sheila Dixon raised the question: Why not bring casinos into Baltimore, skim off a share of their daily take with taxes, and use the proceeds

to lower the city property tax rate? Knocking back the city’s sky-high levy—$2.27 per $100 of assessed home value—could jump-start investment and draw more middle-class homebuyers. Even at a lower tax rate, that would mean more money for more services, and on and on. “The mayor asked us to look at ways to grow the city’s tax base,” says Jody Landers, the former city councilman and co-chair of the twenty-six member committee who now heads the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors. “We decided we couldn’t do that when the city’s tax rate is at least 109 percent higher than those found in surrounding counties.” The panel drew up sixteen revenue-generating, tax-lowering options—everything from instituting a commuter tax to increasing the local income tax rate to charging much higher levies on people who own vacant properties. But the most controversial suggestion involves tapping into casino revenues and slots, which could, the committee’s 104-page report asserts, raise as much as $46 million per year for the city and lower its property taxes by 17 cents per $100. The non-slots take from casinos would be around $13 million. The panel knew that casino gambling had kicked up once-dead economies on Native Ameri-

can tribal lands, while embroiling Atlantic City, New Jersey, in ongoing debates over whether the place had been better off without it. A host of casino measures are being discussed in several states, including California and Massachusetts. To measure the possible effects of expanded gambling in Baltimore, the mayor’s panel needed a comparable urban area to examine. So it did what forward-thinking cities typically do when they search for ideas to make their urban spaces more livable. It looked to Detroit. In 1999—three years after voters finally signed off on allowing the state to license casinos in Detroit (and after five previous referenda votes failed)—a casino opened in the Motor City. The city’s reasoning in pushing for blackjack tables sounds alarmingly familiar to longtime followers of Maryland’s slot machine debate: With little else going on downtown— and casinos across the Canadian border in Windsor raking in Michiganders’ dollars—why shouldn’t Detroit be allowed to put gambling dollars to work at home? Financially, the move has paid off handsomely. With an $800 million MGM Grand Hotel and Casino and a new MotorCity Casino (built in a former Wonder Bread plant) both opening recently, Detroit’s take from the tables is growing: Last year, the three 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 8

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courtesy of MotorCity Casino Hotel

baltimore observed

The house wins: The MotorCity Casino Hotel is one of three new casinos operating in downtown Detroit.

casinos brought in $1.3 billion, with $160 million in taxes going to the city and the state each. Things look even brighter this year. “We’ve been able to pour $42.5 million into a small business development fund, so that we can get things moving in other parts of the city, through gambling revenue,” says James Canning, deputy press secretary to Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Casino money has been used to seed a “micro-enterprise loan fund” and to supplement basic city services, including paying for more public safety efforts in a city that surpassed even Baltimore with its 2006 murder rate. Canning adds that the liquid nature of the city’s casino cut—the city receives its share daily at 3 p.m.—makes it especially attractive. “It’s regular as rain,” he says. Landers and others point out that Detroit’s scenario could translate nicely to Baltimore. Among the reasons: • Despite gambling’s historical associations with corruption and organized crime, major street crime in downtown Detroit has dropped by more than 20 percent since 1999, according to police department figures. • Taxes on casino gambling are paid not just by nearby residents who gamble, but by tourists who come in from other states to play the tables, then spend more money on a hotel and on meals. • Casinos prospectively bring in more high rollers, lessening fears that gambling offers little more than a “poor tax” that disproportionately fleeces players from the lower end of the economic scale. By them-

selves, slots tend to draw working-class and middleincome patrons. (Despite this, Landers says there is no call for a gaming tables-only, no-slots casino. “Slots would still represent about 80 percent of all casino revenue,” he says.)

Detroit mayoral spokesman James Canning says that the liquid nature of the city’s casino cut—the city receives its share daily at 3 p.m.—makes it especially attractive. “It’s regular as rain,” he says. • Casinos create more jobs than slots parlors. (Detroit, for example, added ten thousand new jobs.) • Entertainment outposts, hotels, and resort destinations are more likely to be built around casinos than slots parlors, thus increasing investment and employment. So, are casinos the savior of the post-industrial urban economy? Some in Detroit aren’t so sure. Groups of clergy have railed against casino gambling, arguing that members of their flocks have been forced into bankruptcy after losing control of their habit. The number of gamblers referred to Michigan counseling programs has mushroomed in the casino years. And, some community leaders have argued, gambling tourists tend to sequester themselves in sunless casinos and attached hotels; win or

lose, they roll out of town without bothering to see, eat, or shop outside the casino walls. What’s more, while most casino jobs pay more than minimum wage, they don’t offer the high-ceiling positions that make raising families easier. And ten thousand jobs isn’t all that much when you stop to consider that the United Auto Workers estimates the Detroit region has lost as many as one hundred thousand auto industry jobs in the past decade. All of which may explain why many of Lisa Gladden’s constituents who live near Pimlico Race Course vociferously opposed slots at the track, as has Mayor Dixon, who has said that Park Heights and other vulnerable communities shouldn’t “pay the price” for expanded gambling (although Dixon more broadly supports slots as a way to raise government cash). Gladden and other Northwest Baltimore leaders managed to reap a windfall of several million dollars in “slots impact” cash from the state legislature for the neighborhood in the event one-armed bandits arrive. “We convinced people the community needed the money anyway,” says Gladden, a vocal proponent of both slots and casinos. For years, the state General Assembly and various governors have indulged in an alternating dance of feckless arm-twisting and cowardly avoidance on slots. In November, the legislature and Governor Martin O’Malley—a lukewarm proponent of slots, unlike his predecessor, Robert Ehrlich—decided to pass the slots issue to state voters this coming November. According to recent polls, slightly more than half of Marylanders favor legalizing slot machines, up from 39 percent a decade ago. But pollsters and pols say that, traditionally, such legislation engenders campaigns that tend to drag down support, meaning that we can expect strong campaigning on both sides come fall. Ostensibly, slots at Maryland racetracks and other spots around the state—if voter-approved— would help pay for public education and save the Maryland horse racing industry, which the state appraises as a nearly $600 million industry. Nevertheless, City Hall has long been besieged by callers who see slots as not only troublesome in community terms, but also immoral. One can only imagine the reaction that the prospect of casinos would engender. Legalizing casino gambling would require another state law—and, possibly, a labor-intensive, time-consuming constitutional amendment. Despite that, the panel’s casino recommendation will get a fair hearing by the one politician who matters the most: Mayor Dixon. “As we discuss this further with the City Council and the public, everything in the blue-ribbon report will be on the table,” says Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for Dixon. He didn’t lay odds on whether that table would be topped by green felt. ■ —Michael Anft 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 8

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sustainable city

Beyond the Bees At Honey Grace Farm near Oakland, Maryland, a few of the parsnips always go to seed. It’s a sight you’ll rarely see, even on the region’s small, family-run organic operations: the biennial root vegetable left in the ground over winter, sending up shoots the next spring, each as tall as six feet and topped by extravagant yellow flower heads. The first year it was an accident, admits proprietor Nancy-Elizabeth Nimmich. But the summer day she spotted a wealth of insects swarming the blossoms, she decided to make a habit of it. “The parsnips were at the edge of the garden, and they were covered by all kinds of pollinators,” says the herbal educator. “It was amazing.” Pollination has garnered a surge of interest in the past two years, as a mystery illness has devastated European honeybees, the workhorses of modern American agriculture. And as the fuzzy, black-and-yellow mainstay faltered, an array of native species, from bees to bats—similarly capable of transforming spring blossoms into the makings of an abundant harvest—captured the limelight. In 2006, the U.S. Postal Service launched a popular line of stamps featuring hummingbirds and butterflies. Last year, Congress drafted the Pollinator Protection Amendment to the Farm Bill. Scientists redoubled their efforts to catalog and understand the critters, native and not, whose efforts yield one in every three bites we raise to our mouths. A new attitude emerged: Perhaps, in farm ecology as on Wall Street, diversification could serve as a critical buffer in lean times. Most industrial farms rent honeybees, introduced from Europe in the 1600s, to pollinate their crops. To exploit the lucrative market, the nation’s beekeepers haul their charges from California almonds to Florida oranges and Maine blueberries, arriving just in time for pollination. On the road, the bees dine on high-fructose corn syrup—a cheap honey substitute—and heavyduty antibiotics that guard against the diseases that can flash through a colony locked in their hive for days. At journey’s end, the bees flit from blossom to blossom; when the job is done, beekeepers load the hives back onto trucks. Soon after, the farmer sprays a broadspectrum insecticide to kill off potential pests, and the fruit develops unmolested. Until they started dying off, Apis mellifera warranted as much consideration as any other component of commercial agriculture in the United States— namely, a calculation of their economic contribution to the system: about $12 billion annually.

When it first appeared in 2006, the mystery illness, dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, was attributed to everything from aliens to disorienting cell phone signals and psychotropic pesticide residues. Entire hives went empty as bees inexplicably abandoned their young and their honey. Commercial beekeepers reported losses up to 90 percent, and farmers became very, very nervous. Scientists ultimately blamed the condition on a synergy of factors, including an Israeli virus, stress, and pesticide use. Madonna Pool, Honey Grace Farm’s beekeeper and president of the Appalachian Beekeeping Association, sees it as another symptom of a far more alarming truth: Our ecosystem has gone haywire. “Honeybees are getting the shaft, every which way you turn,” she says. In traditional, small-scale agriculture—and even more so in the wild—a host of pollinators ensure the mixing and matching of plant gametes throughout the season. Insects, birds, and bats collect both nectar and pollen as food, and inadvertently transfer a bit of pollen in the process, setting the fruit that produces seeds, and thereby ensuring the long-term survival of both plant and pollinator. Yet modern agribusiness has erased the majority of pollinators from that equation, poisoning them with insecticides, destroying their underground nests with extensive tilling, and starving them with vast fields of a single crop that produces nectar only a few weeks each year. Urban and suburban pollinators, their habitat paved over and their food sources eliminated in favor of tidy lawns, haven’t done much better. “There was no pollination crisis before we had huge acreages of crops,” says retired USDA entomologist Suzanne Batra, who devoted her twentyfive year career at the Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, to pollination. “The native bees nesting nearby did the job.” The smaller-scale farms of the Mid-Atlantic don’t seem to be feeling the pollinator pinch as much as larger farms elsewhere. They never embraced the vast economies of scale, and now a growing body of scientific research suggests that the four hundred bee species native to this region might enjoy a significant advantage. Princeton ecologist Rachael Winfree has found that native bees fully pollinate 91 percent of watermelon farms in Pennsylvania. “I think it’s the type of farming we do here,” she says. At the Accokeek Foundation’s eight-acre Ecosystem Farm on the banks of the Potomac in Prince George’s County, Mike Snow goes out of his way to accommodate native pollinators as he cultivates the heirloom tomatoes, yams, cilantro, figs,

strawberries, pole beans, and other crops that help feed sixty families throughout the growing season. “You want as much diversity as possible,” says Snow, who also provides pollinator habitat in fallow fields and hedgerows. “The more different kinds of things I can grow and eat the better, because the pollinators are going to eat, too.” An added bonus: Those beneficial insects also keep pests in check, reducing the need for Bay-poisoning insecticides. At Honey Grace Farm, Nimmich now sows calendula, and lets the yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace run wild throughout the acre she cultivates for vegetables and ingredients in herbal salves. The valerian—prized for its root’s soporific effects—blossoms and goes to seed like the parsnips, providing yet another food source for a rich assortment of beneficial insects. And while it may look messy, Nimmich leaves behind dry stems and leaves for the native bees to use in their nests. Pool, meanwhile, says the wealth of blossoms benefits her European honeybees, too. “We’ve lost so much bee pasture—contiguous land with native plants,” she says. “The most important thing for honeybees is good nutrition.” And ultimately, what’s good for the bees—both native and nonnative—is good for the entire ecosystem. “Biodiversity, wild habitat, and native plants are the backbone of ecosystems,” says Liz McDowell of Elk Ridge NatureWorks, a native plants nursery and environmental education center in Grantsville, Maryland. “Pollinators are a part of that whole web.” ■ —Sharon Tregaskis

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 8

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baltimore observed

encounter

Art Object What did I think this would be like? The question echoed in my mind until it became funny. I needed to laugh without actually laughing, though: I was not allowed to move. Nude modeling was not what I had imagined. When I signed on for a class benignly dubbed “Life Drawing” at Zoll Studio in Lutherville, I was thinking in grand terms about the role of the nude model in the history of art. I was definitely not focusing on the physicality of being splayed on a platform in front of anyone who thought “Life Drawing” sounded like an interesting way to spend an evening. Stillness was hard work. In college, I’d once thought I’d earn a couple of easy credits by taking a meditation class. The immobility was oppressive. Somehow I’d forgotten that experience until the very moment I began to repeat it, with the added horror of being completely naked. To distract myself, I stared at a painting of a sheep at the far end of the room. Gazing at the sheep’s hindquarters, I began to see bearded faces: a clown, Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky’s Ivan. This eventually proved unnerving, so I moved on to dreaming up alternate titles for the class, settling on “Most Embarrassing Way to Get a Cramp.” I’d signed up for three rounds of this—one night each week, three hours each night. On the first night, I idiotically agreed to hold a threetiered pose: My arms were elevated on a tall box, my butt was poised on a short stool, and my feet were twisted up on an even lower chair. The position seemed comfortable at first. But when I rose to put on my robe for a break

after twenty minutes, I nearly fell off the platform. My right leg was completely numb. On her website, a San Jose, California, model named Iona Lynn lists some attributes required for posing nude. Among them are flexibility, strength, and mild insanity. I heartily agree, and have another quality to add: fearlessness. I was a women’s studies minor, and I try not to buy into fashion-magazine ideas of beauty. Nevertheless, when I stood in front of the class, I felt as if every eye in the room was scrutinizing my weird scar, faded tattoo, and stretch mark. One artist in particular, an attractive young art instructor named Palden Hamilton, made me conscious of my Buddha-like belly. I noticed that a

I try not to buy into fashionmagazine ideas of beauty. Nevertheless, I felt as if every eye in the room was scrutinizing my weird scar, faded tattoo, and stretch mark. woman at the back of the room was painting a pig. She reassured me she wasn’t painting me. I wasn’t so sure. In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf asserts that there is a “double standard for men’s and women’s nakedness … that bolsters power inequalities.” Film theorist Laura Mulvey observed that women in film are often presented as mere eye candy. She called the phenomenon the “male gaze,” and others have made comparisons to the fine arts. Nude models throughout history have largely been female, after all, and the artists that portray them have mostly been men. Obviously, things have changed since the time of Jean Auguste Ingres’ The Turkish Bath. Once you’ve thought about the historic imbalance, however, it’s difficult to ignore. I wanted to find out if nude modeling felt objectifying in the flesh. Matt Zoll, the studio’s owner, seemed to read my mind: He looked around the art space cluttered with easels and chairs and assured me, “I’ve been doing life drawing from the age of 13. I always knew the difference between nudity for art, and sexualized or exploitative nudity like you might see in pornography.” As I posed, I ran through all these things in my mind. Then I realized that fretting about objectification was prob-

ably making me look cantankerous and puffed up like a weird bird. Then again, the artists themselves looked like strange birds, bobbing their heads rapidly between me and their canvases, sketchbooks, and computerized drawing pads. The idea of a digitized version of my nakedness scared me. Two of the artists in attendance the first night were video game designers. The female characters I’d seen in video games were lithe, large-breasted warriors. Surely my proportions must have disappointed these two. But the second night, one of the video game guys—his name was Greg Barley—was back. He couldn’t have hated me that much. I realized that there was another perspective from which to view female nudity: empowering. Given many cultures’ brutal control of women’s bodies, being nude could be construed as an act of political agency. Maybe my curves could do some good. Perhaps there would soon be a video game starring a Rubenesque girl with a faded tattoo and a weird scar. By the third and final night, however, political agency was beginning to feel elusive and naive, as incongruent with the experience as feminism and high art. My right leg was once again numb. Gripping a long staff, I must have looked like a naked shepherd, a thought that occurred to me as I stared at the now much-hated sheep painting. Still, after nearly nine hours of glowering on freeze frame, I was slightly more comfortable. The easy atmosphere of the studio and kindness of the students and instructors was helping me relax. And as I did, I began to find a secret pleasure in the experience. None of the artists knew that I’d been up there each night passing judgment on the world of art, as they passed judgment on their creations, and perhaps on me. Even nude, we all have something that can’t be scrutinized: No amount of gazing can reveal the contents of our thoughts. Plus, some of the drawings, especially Palden’s and Greg’s, were quite lovely. They made me almost fond of my paunch. When the session was over, I walked into the dressing room and locked the door behind me. Then I broke out laughing. Was I afraid of someone seeing me dressing? As I left, I wondered how much I had really learned. If I was still locking doors, was I still the paradox of shame and self-righteousness that I’d been when I walked in? I left much as I had come, but I was slightly more brave, and carried a new understanding of the physical toll exacted in the name of beauty. Above all, I’d learned something of the inscrutability of the mind, and of what can be saved for oneself. ■ —Molly O’Donnell

The author, as seen by Palden Hamilton of the “Life Drawing” class at Zoll Studio 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 8

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The artist in his labyrinth: Les Harris in 2002

appreciation

Into the Mystic I never knew what to make of Les Harris, who died January 14 at age 84. I suspect a lot of people felt that way after an hour, or four hours, or forty hours in his presence. Six years ago, as I was preparing to write a magazine profile on him, I spent a lot of time with Les, his wife Sally, and the peculiar assemblage of art, copied art, sculpture, and found objects he called “The Labyrinth at the Amaranthine Gallery.” Installed in the first floor of an industrial office building in Woodberry, the Labyrinth was indeed labyrinthine, a progression of chambers filled with assorted artistic stuff that all made sense to Les, if not so much to me. (In 2006, the Labyrinth, renamed the Amaranthine Museum, was relocated to a neighboring space in the Clipper Mill complex in Woodberry, home also to Urbanite’s offices. Harris’ daughter Laurel Harris Durenberger is this magazine’s founder and former publisher.) When I met him, Charles Leslie Harris was 78 years old, with failing eyesight, a racing mind, a lifetime of eclectic reading, a tendency to launch into extended verbal riffs, and a professed disdain for facts. He also professed disdain for science. This had not prevented him from acquiring an impressive knowledge of physics. The first time he

strung out a bebop line of conversation about Bell’s inequality and non-locality and Kaluza-Klein theory, I thought uh-huh. Then I looked up his references in some physics texts and found out he’d nailed every one of them. I was impressed, a little contrite, and no closer to understanding Les than I’d been before I met him. In his life he’d been a soldier in George Patton’s army, an interior design student at Maryland Institute College of Art, a theatrical set designer, an art teacher, a welder, an estimator, a dancer, and a painter. He called himself a mystic and a nut (once, more specifically, a hazelnut), and I wasn’t inclined to disagree with either label. He’d start talking about the quantum field, then surge into something called “the primordial scission” before segueing to the ancient Egyptians and “the rupture of the perfection of the absolute” before barreling into the Greeks and the Hyperboreans, and finally back to the non-locality of quantum physics. Then he’d pause and say, “My whole premise is that matter is a superstition.” By the time I met him, he’d poured twenty-five years of work into his labyrinth, a testament to his manic energy and enormous capacity for creation. I walked through it with him several times, always wearing a coat because he couldn’t afford to heat

the gallery. There were large paintings of the Egyptian zodiac, a meticulous reproduction of the rose window of Notre Dame, spray-painted mannequins missing their hands, unbraided strands of telephone wire, and dozens of his reproductions of famous paintings, all of it, in Les’ mind, a linear history of art and a visual explication of his theory of … I’m not sure what. When I left him to write my story in February 2002, Les was frustrated by his lack of recognition, and bitter about losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. Now and then he seemed forlorn. But then he’d wind himself up and deliver another bewildering torrent of words and I’d realize that what the public thought about his art or his ideas was immaterial, a word I think he would have liked. What mattered to me about Les Harris was a quality I lack and envy. Les was exuberant. And an exemplar of a life well lived. ■ —Dale Keiger Les Harris' Amaranthine Museum is now a nonprofit arts center. Donations to help preserve the museum can be made to: the Amaranthine Museum, 2010 Clipper Park Road, Baltimore, MD 21211. 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 8

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keynote

urbanite march 08

The Accompanist Jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut riffs on the subtleties of collaboration Inte r v i e w

b y

P h ot ograph

In his recent book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on the science of creativity, offers a provocative thesis: “[L]one genius,” he insists, “is a myth; instead, it’s group genius that generates breakthrough innovation.” Sawyer is also an amateur jazz pianist, and one of his primary illustrations of group genius at work is a jazz ensemble engaged in the act of collective musical creation. For Urbanite’s second annual issue devoted to the power of collaboration, it seemed natural to ask Cyrus Chestnut—the man that Time magazine recently declared “the best jazz pianist of his generation”—for some insights into exactly how this dynamic works. Born in Baltimore in 1963, Chestnut started playing piano when he was 5 years old. By age 9 he was a regular fixture behind the pedals of the organ at Mount Calvary Church on Eutaw Street and a student at the Peabody Institute. He graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 1985 with a degree in jazz composition and arranging. After a formative tenure accompanying vocalist Betty Carter, he released his first major-label album, Revelation, on Atlantic Records in 1993. Chestnut is at once a throwback and a modernist, blending gospel, blues, and bebop into a sound that is warm, rhythmic, and sometimes deeply contemplative. While he’s performed with a host of major jazz artists, such as Wynton Marsalis and Roy Hargrove, he’s also explored musical collaborations with other performers, including operatic soprano Kathleen Battle and soul icon Isaac Hayes, in settings that range from orchestras and big bands to small ensembles and his own trio. His most recent release, Cyrus Plays Elvis, is a jazz reinterpretation of some of Elvis Presley’s most popular tunes.

Q A

What does the word “improvisation” mean to you?

The way I think of improvisation is that I compose on the spot. I take everything that I’ve learned—all musical points of view, all musical influences—and I do my best to create melodies and chain these melodies to tell a musical story. It happens instantly, and I don’t have the chance to say, “Oh, that didn’t work right.” You’re in the moment, so seeing anything or hearing anything or feeling anything can affect how you think. That’s how it works for me.

This sounds difficult enough to achieve as a soloist. What happens when you bring in other people?

L I O NE L

F O S TER

M a r s h a ll

Clarke

It’s reactionary. You want to quickly get an understanding of the person and an understanding of their tendencies. Now, it’s very easy if you’re working with the person for many years and you really know exactly how they flow. But sometimes that doesn’t happen, so you have to be willing to trust the other person, to be willing to hear what they’re doing and make the necessary adjustments right then and there. You still use all of your talent, but you have to know exactly when to say, “Hey!” and back off. I remember having a conversation with Dizzy Gillespie just about that. He said it’s important for the piano player to know when to speak and when to shut up. It’s really being intuitive and sensitive to what’s going on, caring about the music as a whole. You say, OK, I want to contribute this so that the whole collective shines. And it’s not that you shine any less. Actually, in many senses, you shine even more because you’re able to contribute and let the music blossom into this beautiful flower, versus just being this one little thorn or being this polka-dot petal on a red rose.

I’ve heard you described as a telepathic accompanist. Is that the goal, to get to a point with the group where you don’t even have to think about it?

There may be books written on the art of accompaniment but I think that’s something that time has to teach you. You can get an understanding of how to work with one person. For instance, working for Betty Carter is one way, but if I was to turn around and do a concert with Kathleen Battle, I’d have to play in a different way. It’s always about making adjustments. I think the key word for me is “collaboration.” It’s not all about you.

Q A Q A

What’s been your best experience within a group?

Oh, gosh. That’s tough. That’s really tough. I’ve had some good ones and not so good ones. What are some of the factors that detract from a group experience, then?

Maybe when one member’s heart, mind, and soul are not really into it. It could be a problem with instruments, if it’s an instrument that one’s not used to playing. I don’t have the luxury of taking an acoustic piano with me from place to place. Not all Steinways, Yamahas, Baldwins, or Mason &

Hamlins are created equal, so you have to make adjustments. Sometimes the instrument has limitations. Sometimes you’re able to work through them and

sometimes it’s an uphill journey. There was one time in my life that I got a

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little discouraged and I started to give up. [Trumpeter] Terence Blanchard laid into me so hard that I’ll never forget it. He said you have to always play as if you’ll never get an opportunity to play again, regardless of the situation. I like to say there are Rolls-Royce situations—everything is perfect, and all you have to do is just go and play and let it happen. Then there are Ford Pinto situations. The question is, can you make that Ford Pinto ride like a Rolls-Royce?

Q A

Do you have to have rock-solid technique before you can begin to improvise, or can you develop both at the same time?

I think balance is very important—one can have flawless technique and nothing to say. Sometimes the most beautiful things come out of cracked notes. I can give you a great story. I’ll have to leave the names out to protect the innocent. I did a recording in 2000, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and we did the song “Greensleeves.” This one person was playing, and there was an instrumental malfunction, but it was so cool. Needless to say, the instrumentalist raised a ruckus and demanded that it be redone. So after pleading and pleading we said OK. When it was done again, it was done without the malfunction, but it didn’t have the same feel.

Q A Q A

So which cut made the fi nal track?

Of course, the one with the malfunction. In recording, it can be so perfect but have no feeling. I want the recording to feel good. You once said that you like music that surprises you. Do you ever surprise yourself when you’re improvising?

Yeah. It wouldn’t be improvisation if you weren’t surprised. [One of my mentors] told me something that I carry with me now, that improvisation is creation. Now, if you rehearse something and get it perfect, that’s re-creation. Creation is thinking of it right then and there. You have to be willing to step into the deep end. You almost have to kind of fall off a cliff.

Q A

Do you ever experiment live in front of an audience?

Always. I don’t believe in a safe zone. I wasn’t taught that way. I was taught to take chances, to really push it. It would be easy just to take a basic song form and just go around the same form over and over again, but sometimes you gotta move outside of that, challenge other people in the band. I’ll give audibles and say, "Let’s go here."

Q A

Mid-song?

Uh-huh. You have to keep it interesting and challenging for the musicians on the bandstand because they can’t go on automatic. I believe in musical thoughts, a whole story. You don’t just say the same paragraphs over and over again. It has to develop. Sometimes I think it’s important to go into a certain place and create intensity, to put everyone on a cliff. I call it the slingshot theory. First off, you and the musicians have to feel it. Oh my goodness. This is building. Where’s it gonna go? If that’s happening on the bandstand, can you imagine how the audience feels? Their ears perk up. People may not understand it, but they’re feeling it. You pull back and pull back. The rubber band is stretching. You start to see parts of the rubber band separate, and you don’t know what’s going to happen, and at the point of no return you let it go.

Collaboration is great when it works, but as a bandleader and composer are there ever times when you simply have to say, “Look, this is the way it’s gonna be”?

Of course—as a bandleader you have to voice your ideas, you have to lay out a structure. Now, my structures are liquid. This is my idea, and whatever it is the other person’s going to do should be based off of that. Sometimes, if it’s just not happening, I’ll say, “Well, you know what? It’s not feeling good right now.” There have been certain situations when I just have to ask, “Maybe you should stick to the idea and play this idea for a while and let it get into your system, and once you really got it under your fingers and ears, then go ahead.” There are times when people just start going all over the place. That doesn’t work. And you learn how to tell them, “That sucks.” But you have to be diplomatic about it. I’ve been in situations where that hasn’t happened. I’ll go back to Betty Carter once again. If something wasn’t right, she told you it was horrible. She didn’t pull you aside. Right there in front of twenty thousand people, she told you, “What is that mess you’re playing?” She had other choice words.

Pretend you are a member of an Urbanite Project team, with a twist. If we could pair you with any two people from any period in history working in any fi eld, who would you choose, and what project would your group undertake?

A Q A

Johann Sebastian Bach and an Impressionist painter. And what would you all do?

Figure out a different mode of energy—something different from gasoline, diesel fuel, ethanol.

Are you sticking with Bach and the Impressionist painter for that project?

I like to say there are Rolls-Royce situations— everything is perfect, and all you have to do is just go and play and let it happen. Then there are Ford Pinto situations. The question is, can you make that Ford Pinto ride like a Rolls-Royce?

Yeah! Think about it. You have a person from the Baroque. Now the Baroque history, I believe, says that there were certain melodies written down, but it was not like today, where the melody and all harmony and all parts are written down. Sometimes it was just melody and a figured bass, which was kind of the beginning of chord changes, OK? So we have basic tools and a basic idea. The Impressionist painter would come outside the box. I see myself as the bridge.

Q A

Who would get to play the piano, you or Bach?

If there’s something I should play piano on, that’s OK. If not, I’m not gonna say, “Well, I have to!” That’s Bach! Come on! Bach, Beethoven, they pushed the envelope. We would still be singing Gregorian chants if it wasn’t for the Baroque. Music would still sound a certain way if some gentlemen didn’t say, “No, it doesn’t have to happen that way.” There’s Ravel, [Francis] Poulenc, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, George Clinton—so many different people who came up understanding what was going on. But that just wasn’t enough [for them]. You have to figure out a way to keep moving it along, come with a whole different point of view. I hope to keep pushing the envelope. Where it will lead, I don’t know. But I hope it’ll keep me going for the rest of my life, until it’s time for me to leave. —Lionel Foster is Urbanite’s staff writer.

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 8

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URBANITE PROJECT 2008 ED I T ED

M A RI A NNE

A M O SS

If you’ve ever been on a blind date, you understand the Urbanite Project.

The premise here is a bit more high-minded: Take creative thinkers from unrelated disciplines, toss them together, and stand back to see what happens. But the first moments of these intellectual shotgun marriages offer a familiar mix of awkwardness and exhilaration. For two months last summer, the Urbanite staff held meeting after meeting, winnowing down lists of potential project participants, mailing invitations, poring over reader applications, and then toying with the most intriguing team combinations. We looked for a diversity of expertise and backgrounds, with just enough overlap to give collaboration an opportunity to flourish. Then we sat around a table, squinting our eyes and trying to imagine how these strangers might react when combined in the Urbanite Project petri dish. Finally, we put our experiment to work, summoning each team and introducing the new partners to each other. Some of these early encounters were as socially uncomfortable as one might guess: Participants warily recited their bios and bona fides, eyed each other up, and generally wondered what they’d gotten themselves into. Others embraced the challenge (literally—artist Mina Cheon surprised her teammate, conductor Markand Thakar, with a big hug) and got down to business. Within minutes of the first handshakes, Johns Hopkins scientist Ellen Silbergeld had announced her current research interest in the perils of urban fishing, and her new partners, eco-architect Julie Gabrielli and artist Joshua Schwartz, took the bait: That conversation became the springboard for the team’s ambitious proposal to re-invent the urban watershed. The fruits of all seven teams’ labors—the sum of all those awkward and exciting moments—can be found on the next fourteen pages. We hope these projects can inspire others to dream up and pursue their own ideas, no matter how wild or unlikely. As the saying goes, it’s so crazy, it might just work. For more about the individual projects—photos, videos, and other material—visit each team’s page on the Urbanite Project website, www.urbaniteproject.com.

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We are a city of neighborhoods. We are a city stratified and fractured along racial, social, and economic lines. More than 270 unique communities and sub-communities, each with its own history and socioeconomic profile, fit together within the larger border of the city. The idiosyncrasies and individual character of these neighborhoods contribute to Baltimore’s rich texture and coarse charm, but they also reinforce Baltimore’s stratification and contribute to its entrenched problems. Neighborhoods are pitted against one another for shares of city resources, close neighbors willfully ignore problems in adjacent communities, and residents are discouraged—through ingrained habits, prejudices, or political pressure—from straying beyond their neighborhood boundaries. City neighborhoods can be just as gated as any private community in the suburbs, with walls as psychological as they are physical. Newcomers to Baltimore are less aware of these divisions. Without the baggage of history and knowledge, a new resident may feel freer to cross borders, having yet to absorb the voices that whisper, You shouldn’t go to that neighborhood. Our Urbanite Project team is composed of three transplants to Baltimore, each having moved here in the past fifteen years. With time, we each grew to love the city for all of its beauty, blemishes, and frustrating problems. The blessing of initial ignorance, which allowed

the neighborhood exchange program By Vic Frierson, Nolen Strals, and Bruce Willen

Predominant racial composition Median income per household

park heights

hampden

mt. washington

97% Black; 1% White

83% White; 10% Black

72% White; 21% Black

$21,218

$34,084

$58,653

Violent crimes reported per 1000 residents

19.9

10.2

Voter registration

55%

53%

81%

Avg. home sale price (2006)

$68, 931

$196,612

$339,053

Pop. under 25 years old

40%

28%

25%

High school completion rate

84%

87%

100%

Sources: Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (www.bnia.org) and LiveBaltimore.com

us to disregard some of the city’s borders, faded as we began to sense the subtle and not-so-subtle prejudices and barriers erected around each neighborhood. The very makeup of our Urbanite Project team is indicative of the community divisions within Baltimore. How frequently in this city would a black, Ravens-loving community activist who lives in a predominantly black, middle-class family neighborhood cross paths with two white, nerdy, twentysomething graphic designers residing in a predominantly white, transient neighborhood? However, within the space of a fifteen-minute conversation, we discovered our shared passions for music and city life, as well as our mutual observation about the dual nature of Baltimore’s neighborhood structure. We decided to address our city’s “walled” communities by creating the Neighborhood Exchange Program. Like a localized student exchange program, the project attempts to build connections between neighborhoods, bridging the mental and political lines that can divide two nearby places. For the purpose of this project, we chose three very different neighborhoods within the city lines: Park Heights, Mount Washington, and Hampden/Woodberry. Epitomizing the patchwork nature of Baltimore’s communities, the statistics for each neighborhood could not be more different if they were thousands of miles apart (see sidebar). Yet these communities are not only within walking distance of one another but are also abutting. To initiate the Neighborhood Exchange Program, we enlisted participants from each of the three neighborhoods: Park Heights community members Karen Evans and Oscar Cobbs; Allen Hicks, Nadja Martens, and Ben Claassen III from Hampden; and Mac Nachlas and Carol Schreter of Mount Washington. Hicks and Nachlas are presidents of their respective neighborhood organizations, and all participants in the program are active and invested community members. We assigned each neighborhood group the task

of creating a “tour” of their respective community. The goal was not merely to show the well-known landmarks of each neighborhood, but to also illuminate the communities’ hidden corners, local highlights, and most pressing issues—in short, to paint a realistic portrait of each neighborhood from the perspective of its residents. We also engaged each group in a frank discussion about the stereotypes associated with their community, as well as their perceptions of the two other neighborhoods. The tours themselves took place on a Friday in December. Piling into a large passenger van, we rode through each neighborhood, disembarking at strategic points along the way as our groups discussed neighborhood highlights and issues. We saw a gorgeous aerial view of Hampden and the Baltimore skyline from the roof of 3838 Roland Avenue. We walked through the community-built Mount Washington Arboretum, tucked into a hidden nook by Western Run Park. We discussed the future of slots and the Pimlico Race Course in Park Heights, and we learned about the city’s redevelopment plans for the area, set forth in the Park Heights Master Plan. Each group showed us true insiders’ perspectives of their neighborhoods, illuminating each community in new and often surprising ways. The tours gave a human and personal face to the traits and nuances of the three communities, but they also highlighted the shared goals and concerns of these three disparate neighborhoods. Park Heights, Hampden, and Mount Washington may be very different, but they all share the same four most pressing issues: safety, schools, recreation, and development. In fact, the three neighborhood groups found themselves in agreement on many fronts, and they all felt frustrated with the city government and politicians for exacerbating, and in some cases capitalizing on, the divisions between communities. “Every place I’ve ever gone,” says Hampden’s Allen Hicks, “whether it’s a black community or white community, it’s always the

same issues: education, safety, recreation for the kids. But [within the city] it’s always compartmentalized.” Each group repeated the theme that a lack of knowledge and communication between adjacent communities caused frustration, confusion, and slow progress on a number of shared issues. During our discussion, several participants expressed beliefs that the Department of Recreation and Parks moves resources from one neighborhood to another without explanation or prior discussion, that the school system makes decisions based more on political maneuvering than neighborhood needs, and that the Baltimore Development Corporation flies under the radar to evade community involvement in major development projects. The lack of communication and human connections between neighborhoods prevents residents from fully comprehending or influencing city government decisions such as these. The participants from these three neighborhoods, along with residents of adjacent and subcommunities, aim to continue the Exchange Program’s dialogue with a Neighborhood Summit. Their goal is to forge more human connections between their neighborhoods and work together to address shared issues that affect the communities at large. The Neighborhood Summit will begin convening in spring 2008 and continue to build this network of invested neighbors. We hope that other neighborhoods will see this as an impetus for their own Neighborhood Exchange Programs, reaching across the walls to meet with the unknown other that we are taught to avoid, combat, or ignore. This idea should not be limited to community groups—any individual can take steps to expand his or her horizons. The goal is to reach out and meet our neighbors, looking outward as well as inward. We believe that a collection of neighbors and neighborhoods can rally around their commonalities and respond to their collective differences, proving literally greater than the sum of their parts.

Left to right: View of Hampden from atop 3838 Roland Ave.; group discussion in Park Heights; future home of Learning Inc. in Hampden; talking in the van; Mount Washington Arboretum

TEAM 1

photos by bruce willen

Vic Frierson (middle) is the founder and director of Partners Educating Artists, Composers, and Entertainers (the PEACE Project), which targets teenage performing artists at risk of committing or becoming victims of violence. He is also the executive director of the Park Heights Community Health Alliance, whose mission is to improve access to health care for the underserved Park Heights community. A resident of Baltimore since 1992, Frierson is also a jazz vocalist who has performed with several music legends, including Dizzy Gillespie. Nolen Strals (right) and Bruce Willen (left) are the founders of award-winning graphic design and typography firm Post Typography. Baltimore residents since the late 1990s, they also make up two-thirds of Baltimore post-punk band Double Dagger. To see footage from the Neighborhood Tours, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project/teams/team1. photo by La Kaye Mbah

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The Great Baltimore Treasure Hunt

The latitude is 39°21'13.30" N. The longitude is 76°40'58.91" W.

When was last time you went on a treasure hunt? In the summer of 1974, Mayor William Donald Schaefer launched the first citywide treasure hunt, an attempt to mint the phrase “Charm City” and inspire Baltimoreans to visit local tourist attractions. By following the maps, participants would discover charms— both literal and figurative. Now, instead of maps, we have Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. Instead of treasure hunts, we have geocaching. Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a kind of treasure hunt currently being played all over the world. The basic idea is that people or groups set up “caches”—small, hidden boxes filled with various articles—somewhere, anywhere. When you go on a geocaching quest, you use your GPS device to seek out the location using latitude and longitude coordinates. When you get there, you search for the cache. Open it. While the articles inside may seem insignificant at first glance, in the context of exploration, every discovered object is a talisman. You can take one, leave one, or write a note that you were there. Perhaps your quest has changed you in some way. Simply sharing an object or musing on a shred of paper is an encouraging act, prompting the recipients to ponder who might have left it and what they were trying to say.

knew existed. We believe that confronting spaces and people that are unfamiliar can unleash the imagination. For those who tend to stick to a set of habits, routes, and places (all of us, to some extent), the act of exploration and being open to what may be an unfamiliar Baltimore can make for an experience that is truly illuminating.

How do you fi nd out where the treasures are hidden? Our vision of geocaching in Baltimore includes a website (geobaltimore.blogspot.com) that invites you to design and post your own quest. Others download the quest and begin exploring. You might go on a quest suggested by Mayor Dixon, for example, and see the city from her eyes. Or she could see the city from yours. Among even those who love their fair city, Baltimoreans have a tendency to sequester themselves. Neighborhoods are tightly defined and people are territorial, and over time we have become set in our ways rather than adventurous. We believe there is a positive side to Baltimore’s sequesteredness: It makes the act of exploration more transcendent. The simple act of seeking and seeing places for the first time may help us surpass our assumptions and consider a Baltimore that we never

Why geocaching? Geocaching is an expression of technology that can help us learn about the spaces around us, encourage our curious side, and communicate our experiences. It is an activity that compels us to exceed our selfimposed boundaries and bridge not only the virtual and physical worlds, but also the considerable gap between what is familiar and what we have not yet found. When you go on a geocaching adventure, you are committing time and effort to follow a path that someone has suggested for you. You are standing where someone has asked you to stand, exploring the manifold treasures and charms of Baltimore great and small.

Who will create geocaching quests? Teachers, students, public officials, parents, dreamers of all ages will participate—all those who want to share their unique perspectives of the city. How about a cycling geocache for those who want to quest on two wheels? How about a quest to find Baltimore’s neon signs? What quest would a history teacher create to help her students learn about the War of 1812? What quest would you create for us? While there are many places in Baltimore that are rightfully considered to be “treasures,” a lot of Baltimore’s sacred, communal, and whimsical places remain unknown to many of us. All of us are familiar with 39˚17'51.08" N, 76˚36'56.38" W, but how many of us have enjoyed the view from 39˚19'43.07" N, 76˚35'14.14" W? Who would think that one of Baltimore’s spiritual centers would be at 39˚17'54.24" N, 76˚34'58.22" W? What could we learn about our city or ourselves at 39˚17'11.51" N, 76˚34'00.73" W?

The simple act of seeking and seeing places for the ﬁrst time may help us surpass our assumptions and enable us to consider a Baltimore that we never knew existed.

urbanite march 08

For more information about our project and to begin geocaching in Baltimore, go to geobaltimore.blogspot.com.

Steps for your GPS Quest 39˚19'26.19" N, 76˚36'57.07" W

1. Go online to our site or other caching websites. 2. Find a list of treasure boxes, formally called “caches,” near you. 3. Use the latitude and longitude coordinates found on the website to locate the cache.

39˚18'14.05" N, 76˚37'57.77" W

4. Bring a small item for trading at the cache. It should be something you are willing to give away, but might be of some interest or value to another person. 39˚17'11.51" N , 76˚34'00.73" W

5. Open the cache and browse the trinkets and goodies within it. You should always trade something of equal or greater value. 6. Find the logbook within the cache. Make a new entry in the book noting the date, time and a line or two about your journey.

39˚18'33.30" N, 76˚37'17.90" W

TEAM 2

To learn more about renting, borrowing, or buying a GPS receiver, go to geobaltimore. blogspot.com.

photos by Aaron Meyers

7. Close the cache back up securely and hide it in the exact same place and manner in which you found it. Log back into your chosen caching website and log your visit. Include the same kinds of details that you wrote in the cache logbook.

Mario Armstrong (left) is a media entrepreneur who explores how technology impacts our society. He is heard regularly on NPR as a technology correspondent (for Morning Edition and News and Notes) and is the host of technology talk shows on XM radio, WYPR, and WEAA. Bobbi Macdonald (right) is the founder and president of City Neighbors Charter School in Northeast Baltimore. She is also a board member of the Maryland Charter School Network and a founder of the Coalition for Baltimore Charter Schools. She and her husband, Rob, recently started Education Rising, a company dedicated to improving public education.

photo by Jason Okutake

continued onfor page Aaron Meyers (top) has lived in Baltimore for the last thirteen of his 25 years, except four90 that he spent at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he majored in international studies. Currently he is employed by the Baltimore Community Foundation and lives in Mount Vernon. 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 8

photo by Chris Meyers

Fishing For Sol

courtesy of Enoch Pratt Free Library, Central Library/State Library Resource Center, Baltimore, Maryland

Can the $940 million that is currently being spent to update the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aging wastewater infrastructure be leveraged into a range of innovative, design-sensitive, community-centered economic opportunities?

urbanite march 08

Mayor E. Clay Timanus and his Sewerage Commission broke ground on the new sewer system for Baltimore in 1906. Their innovative design separated the sewer and stormwater lines, laying them both in steambeds to take advantage of gravity as a means of moving the water. This kind of bold thinking was unusual in its day.

As the four great streams—Gwynn’s Falls, Herring Run, Middle Branch, and the Jones Falls—pass through Baltimore, they become rivers of pathogens, carrying a multitude of viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms that cause disease. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found high risks of exposure to pathogens from handling fish caught in these waters, as well as Back River. Since the beginnings of the modern sanitary movement in the 1850s, we have used water to remove our human wastes. This decision was based on an incomplete understanding of the intricacies of urban ecology and public health. It was made when many streams and rivers were little more than open sewers, and when fresh water was assumed to be inexhaustible.

photo by Mark DeKay

As both recreation and cultural tradition, fishing connects people with nature. Unfortunately, Baltimore’s serene waterways also host dangerous contaminants.

The dramatic BioWorks in Fredensgade, Denmark, processes waste from 129 apartments and six stores as part of an eco-renovation of a complex of forty old buildings. A plant nursery in the glass pyramid provides a marketable commodity. Can we introduce some innovative pilot projects for site-based wastewater treatment?

This is a tremendous opportunity to look beyond the obvious answers and begin asking a new set of questions. The devastating destruction of the Great Fire of 1904 presented an opportunity to rethink the urban infrastructure, which led to the formation of the 1905 Sewerage Commission and the construction of a world-renowned, state-of-the-art, integrated sanitary system. The city dedicated itself to spending nearly $3 billion (in today’s dollars) to create a magnificent support system for a confident, growing metropolis. This system served us well and, over the years, met the demand for better water treatment and waste-management methods. What it could not overcome was a century of neglect, disastrously overloaded wastewater treatment plants, and a dilapidated network of aging sewer and stormwater lines.

lutions

Do we have to mix our waste with water? Think not only of the miles of piping to get it to the Back River treatment plant, but then all the steps required to reclaim this water from the wastes. The treatment plant draws seven megawatts of electricity to drive its many processes—enough to power about 6,300 homes.

In 2002, the city was legally bound by the EPA to spend almost $1 billion by 2016 on system renovations to prevent sewage overflows into our streams. This is a tremendous opportunity to look beyond the obvious answers and begin asking a new set of questions.

We challenge this group to apply the same daring and open-mindedness as the 1905 Baltimore Sewerage Commission. A century ago, these visionaries adopted the best practices of urban ecology and environmental engineering to design an innovative and resilient system that included lasting monuments of civic architecture, such as the Jones Falls pumping station and the many reservoirs in our city. We should do no less.

This rainwater tower in Chattanooga is part of their new green infrastructure, to use stormwater as a resource. Can we leverage the $940 million infrastructure-update allowance to build green roofs, tear up paving, or set up or neighborhood rainwater collection?

photo by Mark DeKay

We propose to establish the “2008 Committee,” in the tradition of the 1905 Sewerage Commission. Intelligent and creative people both in Baltimore and worldwide are already thinking about aspects of the problem—the 2008 Committee could invite these artists, environmental engineers, watershed organizers, public works officials, city leaders, ecologists, landscape architects, etc., to mold a new direction from their important, unique perspectives, adding their pieces of the puzzle.

photo by Joshua Schwartz

People ﬁsh in Baltimore for the same reasons they do anywhere.

It should be safe to engage with our rivers and streams. The idea of swimming across the Back River or kayaking on the Jones Falls should not provoke horror. And fishing should not require disinfectants. This is where we started our project: fishing alongside children, retired bus drivers, and families who simply enjoy the water.

TEAM 3

Special thanks to Beth Feingold, Dr. Rolf Halden, Thaddeus Graczyk, John Martin, Beth Strommen, Fran Flanigan, Mark DeKay, and Robbie Woodson

Julie Gabrielli (right) is an architect who has been specializing in green design for more than a decade. She is the founder of Gabrielli Design Studio. Honorary team member Toby Garver (bottom) is Julie’s son. A visual artist, filmmaker, and poet, Joshua Schwartz's (top) work discusses the merging of American cultures—high, medium, and low—through an examination of social trends and popular behavior. He graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006. Ellen Silbergeld (left) is a professor in the environmental health department of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was a 1993 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow. For a copy of the 2002 EPA Consent Decree, photographs and videos of the Back River Treatment Plant, and innovations from other cities, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project/teams/team3. photo by La Kaye Mbah

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Northwest: Pimlico Middle Utilization: 32 percent Available seats: 1,012 out of 1,485 West: Lockerman Bundy Elementary Utilization: 42 percent Available seats: 248 out of 428

Southwest: Calverton Middle/Lafayette Elementary Utilization: 52 percent Available seats: 869 out of 1,800

South: Federal Hill Elementary Utilization: 63 percent Available seats: 192 out of 512

urbanite march 08

Northeast: Lake Clifton/Eastern High Utilization: 49 percent Available seats: 1,450 out of 2,833 East: Laurence Dunbar High Utilization: 43 percent Available seats: 664 out of 1,169

Southeast: Canton Middle Utilization: 51 percent Available seats: 493 out of 1,005

This map is a sampling of the available space resources in schools throughout the city as of 2006. For the full list, go to: www.bcps. k12.md.us/departments/facilities/PDF/All_Approved_Recommendations.pdf.

Map from www.bcps.k12.md.us/departments/facilities/PDF/All_Approved_Recommendations.pdf

North: Baltimore Polytechnic Institute Utilization: 59 percent Available seats: 854 out of 2,093

the Creative Class room Space for Exposure

Of great importance to schools struggling to close achievement gaps are the indications that for certain populations— including students from economically disadvantaged circumstances and students needing remedial instruction— learning in the arts may be uniquely able to boost learning and achievement. —from The Arts: Critical Links to Student Success by Richard J. Deasy and Lauren Stevenson

TEAM 4

After a long night of waiting tables, an emerging Baltimore artist arrives back at her studio with intentions of working on a painting for an upcoming exhibit. Exhausted but motivated, she is confronted with an eviction warning under her door. With her part-time income going to pay for her apartment, health care, and bills, it is hard to afford an art studio too. It comes down to two options for most working artists: Make money or make art. This is not a unique problem. Many visual and performing artists are in a perpetual hunt to find the perfect studio space at the right price. Historically, artists flock to the lowest-rent pockets in a city. But in both an affirming and cruel way, as a part of town becomes established as an “arts district,” the real estate becomes highly desirable and soon becomes the “hot” spot. Shortly thereafter, the vicious cycle begins. Rent goes up, the artists are forced to move out, and their studios are transformed into luxury condominiums. This is not an unsolvable problem. What if free studio space were made available to artists in locations throughout Baltimore? Studios that would provide artists the opportunity to devote more time to making their work and less time to working odd jobs to pay for studio rent. Studios that would allow artists time to be more productive and allow ideas to evolve and flourish. Studios that would spread the uplifting effects of an arts district into the wider city. A look at the 2006 facilities inventory shows that many Baltimore City schools have excess capacity—large amounts of it, in many cases (see map at left). We thought, what if that space were made available to painters and sculptors and musicians and dancers as places to work in exchange for providing a certain amount of instruction to students within that school? How inspirational would it be for students to be able to see or hear work being created in the moment? It would be an entirely different experience than simply taking an art class with an art teacher. And when this artist/teacher spoke with a student, they would engage in a much richer, more powerful dialogue about what each was doing. One of the things we know through research in education is that the arts not only provide “enrichment” to our children’s curriculum, but they also have been actually proven to enhance the ability to learn, a phenomenon documented well by Richard J. Deasy, director of the Arts Education Partnership. The students of Baltimore would benefit through this interaction and opportunity to work with artists. It is well known that music and math are related. Relationships between drawing and geometry, illustration and literature could be cultivated. Students would have an additional outlet for personal expression under the guidance of a mentor, and

budget-strapped schools would get to reintegrate the arts back into the curriculum at no cost. How would this opportunity for artists and students affect the community? In Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, he discusses the correlation between a city’s economic development and its “creative class,” arguing that communities that are attractive to the creative class are winning the economic development race: The distinguishing characteristic of the creative class is that its members engage in work in which the function is to “create meaningful new forms.” The super-creative core of this new class includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the “thought leadership” of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers.

By fostering opportunities for Baltimore’s creative class, we are engaging in a practice that also stimulates economic and social development for the city as a whole. The city would benefit by attracting creative talent and by engaging and inspiring our children. Two generations of creative class could be cultivated in Baltimore at once, each inspiring the other. This effort does not need to end here. There are programs that already exist in Baltimore that support artists with opportunities for free or affordable work space, including the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, the Friends of the Arts in Baltimore, Load of Fun, and Creative Alliance, to name a few. These are exciting opportunities for artists, and we need more of them—a lot more. For example, what if developers reserved a small amount of space in their buildings, just a few hundred square feet, for artist studios as part of the One Percent for Art initiative? What if corporations sponsored studio spaces as part of One Percent for Art in exchange for artwork? The artists would be able to develop a year’s worth of work, and corporations would spend the same amount of money. We cannot assume that there will be a surplus of space in the school system indefinitely (at least, we hope not), so developing additional programs for artists within the community is necessary. Imagine a city in which artists are working in schools and commercial buildings throughout the city, creating new bodies of work, bringing the arts into every community, and fostering the development of the creative class—sprinkling creativity, innovation, and economic development across the city.

Visual artist Dana Reifler Amato (right) graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005. She is the co-owner of Paperwork Gallery in Mount Vernon. Peter Doo (left) has been practicing architecture in Baltimore since the 1980s. He has recently established Doo Consulting, which assists organizations and communities in navigating LEED certification, sustainable business practices, and government policy. For more from this team, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project/teams/team4.

photo by Jason Okutake

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stimulate . . . CHANGE! What happens when three strangers who work toward making progressive change come together for a project? Passion, desire, dedication, and even disagreement. One works for change through environmental awareness and, more specifically, the physical and spiritual relationship we have with water. Another's mission is to stop homicides and shootings through constructive engagement with gang members and others with profiles of violence. And the third creates a platform for young women to redefine themselves apart from society’s standards of beauty and transform themselves into more complete women. We three change agents accepted the task of collaborating on a project that sought the roots and components of change, asking as many people as possible, “What one thing are you doing to make a change in your life?” Ultimately we decided to accomplish two things with this project. First, we wanted to get people to reflect on the conscious decisions they have made towards change. Second, we hope that after the project, our participants’ personal evolution will continue. We know acknowledging the need for change is only the first step toward making that change. We have posted our participants’ responses on the Urbanite Project website, and we hope that sharing this information could inspire someone or stimulate another to begin the process of decision-making in his or her life. The responses we received made us ponder and encouraged us that hope is a very special element that works wonders. Some made us laugh; others triggered more subdued emotions; still others made us think, “I should be doing that too!” We must thank everyone who took the time to think about the decisions they are making to cause change. From your replies we created three broad change categories: • Consciousness from the Inside Out: conceptualizing change as bigger than the self • Current Focus: conceptualizing change in the present • Exploration: conceptualizing change through different journeys

CONSCIOUSNESS FROM THE INSIDE OUT Responses categorized in this section focused on change as bigger than the self. Although the element that our participants wanted to change was about the self, it was driven by a desire to have an impact on close friends, co-workers, family, community, and the environment. I call people in this group “emotional humanitarians;” they see each of their actions as having a direct or indirect impact externally, and they have made the conscious decision to make that impact a positive one. One response reads, “The one thing I am doing to make a change in my life: Make less of a footprint in my consumption (gas, food, garbage, power). This leads to a fortification of my own personal health (physical/mental), and benefits everyone around me. In two words, tread lightly.” This is the reflection I wish I could share with each person who blatantly disregards recycling, believing that our actions have little to no effect on the environment. Through our conceptualization of this project, we agreed that the idea of change is somehow based on self-interest, and that is evident even in this group of responses. So many issues fight for our attention in day-to-day life that those who inadvertently disregard animal cruelty, for example, or stories on water pollution shouldn’t be judged harshly. Instead, we must also consider that, quite legitimately, not everyone has the time and financial means to make a difference. Further still, there is that tightrope balancing act—doing for self and for others—that many just haven’t figured out. But what if you experienced the proven health benefits and friendly companionship as a result of having a pet? You might now fight against animal cruelty. Or the next time you fill up your glass with clean water, you might begin paying more attention to water pollution. Some of us will turn away, but some of us will see ourselves as change agents contributing directly and indirectly to the things around us, and hence take on the responsibility to change something about ourselves that in turn changes something around us. One respondent who exemplifies this struggle wrote, “I pick up trash. It’s overwhelming, even paralyzing at times. But I pick it up … A stranger stopped me one day and asked, ‘Don’t you think that you are wasting your time?’ ‘No, I don’t’ ... I feel guilty if I can’t get it all. I feel ashamed that others don’t pick it up. I walked through a park the other day with about fifteen people. Every last one of the people in the group stepped over the trash and kept walking. Think of me next time you choose not to keep walking.” Responses within this category have left me with a continued appreciation for being a change agent, whether self-driven or externally driven, because it means that, in the midst of so many things, I am paying attention. I am paying attention to me, and you. So if I may speak for those who have chosen to change consciously from the inside out, it’s about caring beyond yourself and knowing that you are better internally for it. —OluwaTosin Adegbola

Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art of ending. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow There is a time for departure, even when there’s no certain place to go. —Tennesssee Williams

Let the experiment begin: “What one thing are you doing to make a change in your life?”

CURRENT FOCUS

EXPLORATION

The responses we received reflected people’s discontent with themselves and their determination to find both comfort zones within themselves and safe, prosperous zones on the outside of themselves. We divided the survey responses into three categories, one of which is the subject of this section, called “Current Focus”—what the respondents are doing now in the present regarding change as opposed to later. It is said that the only thing constant is change. We embark upon change as we strive to meet the challenges of life, whether those challenges are internal or external. The survey responses reveal some of the issues that people are currently focused on. A few may appear superficial; however, they are important enough to the person that he or she has committed to a process to reach the desired result. Change is a process, but what are its components? People who embark upon a willful change do so because of their state of discontent. They desire a result and are willing to let go of something else in order to get there. In the beginning of change is this dual focus on what one is letting go and on where one is going. Until we take ownership of our new reality, we pulsate between the old and the new. In his book The Way of Transition, William Bridges details the three steps of transition:

One of my close friends is an esteemed biophysical chemist. We have a running joke about the “research” I do in my artistic practice. This comes to mind when I reflect upon the responses people returned. Our collection of data does not compare to my friend’s scientific research by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is an attempt to develop an understanding of the phenomenon of change. Exploration is one of the areas many respondents addressed, which is why I mention research. Research is conducted for three purposes: exploration, description, and explanation. Respondents incorporated the theme of exploration in a multitude of ways when describing the methods, means, and strategies they would employ. Some desire to begin, renew, or strengthen a spiritual practice; others are in the midst of learning new information and the skills to challenge assumptions; still others are planning or are actively engaged in travel—the geographic cure. The goal generally stated by respondents is a desire to improve one’s perceived condition, come to terms with situations they cannot change, and gain comfort with things that cause anxiety and fear. Most felt that through personal betterment, they would be more confident and prepared to interact with others. Their ability to cope and interact would ultimately impact the world around them because they would have the skill, confidence, and desire to change both themselves and the world. One participant made reference to Gandhi’s words, “We must become the change we want to see in the world,” which seems to reinforce these ideas about exploration. Another aspect of exploration is being at ease not knowing “the answer” and relishing the process of finding one’s way. This may require giving oneself over to the unknown or a “higher power.” For some, the challenge, rewards, and excitement of obtaining a “goal” resembles a sound that continues to resonate in the ears. These prolonged, subtle, or simulating effects go beyond the initial impact and become embedded in one’s memory. For others, the echo is not enough. Most would agree that these acts of personal transformation do not come without a cost. Very few of us can modify behavior or habits without discipline and conscious focus. It takes increased attention and awareness. For some this is easier than others. One response in particular resonates with me: “Change is good. When change does not occur, then indeed we are dead.” The reference to death is about being truly alive, feeling, and capable of addressing the intricacies of making change. Oddly, the degree of difficulty was not mentioned by respondents. However, it was acknowledged that change is inevitable; it is a slow process that involves milestones, setbacks, and life lessons, all of which are generally accomplished over an extended period of time.

In the ending, we lose or let go of our old outlook, our old reality ... our old self-image. We may resist this ending for a while. We may try to talk ourselves out of what we are feeling, and when we do give in, we may be swept by feelings of sadness and anger. Why is this happening to me? ... Next, we find ourselves in the neutral zone between the old and new—yet not really being either the old nor the new. This confusing state is a time when our lives feel as though they have broken apart or gone dead. We get mixed signals, some from our old way of being and some from a way of being that is still unclear to us. Nothing feels solid. Everything is up for grabs ... Finally, we take hold of and identify with some new outlook and some new reality, as well as new attitudes and a new self-image. When we have done this, we feel that we are finally starting a new chapter in our lives ...

The survey responses demonstrate the immutable fact that human beings have a transcending nature and, like the phoenix, desire to rise above their ashes.

—Jann Rosen-Queralt

—Leon Faruq

TEAM 5

OluwaTosin Adegbola (left) is the founder and director of SimpleComplexity LLC, a public relations consulting firm. She earned her doctorate at Howard University and currently teaches at Morgan State. Her research focuses on women's images and identity. Leon Faruq (top) is the director of the Living Classrooms Foundation Re-entry Program Services, where he oversees operation of re-entry services for ex-offenders and directs Operation Safe Streets, a gang prevention/intervention initiative. He earned two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree while incarcerated in the Maryland Correctional System and was a 2003 Open Society Fellow.

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Artist Jann Rosen-Queralt (right) creates environmental sculpture, public art, and site-specific installations. She teaches in the interdisciplinary sculpture department and the master of arts in community art program at Maryland Institute College of Art and is a member of the city’s Public Art Commission. 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 8 To read the survey responses, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project/teams/team5.

Wired, but

urbanite march 08

Not Quite

...

Connected

In an era where the Internet has spawned virtual communities more prevalent, accessible, and even more meaningful to city residents than their actual neighborhoods, I worked with a group of students from the Baltimore School for the Arts and their photography teacher, Merlyn Rosenberg, to examine the disconnect and interconnectedness of Baltimore’s neighborhoods and people. The light rail system, a major connector of people and communities along Baltimore’s north-south axis, became the students’ “base camp.” They traveled within the city limits from Mount Washington to Patapsco Avenue and took photos at each stop. They noticed that some communities a mere stop apart remained disconnected in almost every other way. Some stops seemed to be nothing more than parking lots and transit centers with little housing or stores in the vicinity. They wondered if cheaper, more reliable public transportation would enable more of us to get around, venture beyond the absolute necessities of daily life—home, school, and work—and uncover more of the city’s secrets and opportunities. The students spent a good deal of time in Westport, finding themselves particularly inspired by its eerie, industrial emptiness. This lower-income, largely industrial waterfront community west of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial/Hanover Street Bridge will soon be the focus of major redevelopment—its past and future are coming face to face. While the students fanned out through the neighborhood, capturing images, I sought out local community leaders. Ruth Sherrill, president of the Westport Community Association, has memories of her neighborhood being ignored by elected officials for years while other waterfront communities prospered. When I spoke with her and another longtime resident, Elizabeth Arnold, they explained that they looked to the adjacent Mount Winans and Lakeland neighborhoods to build a consensus for future economic and community development projects, but they remain suspicious that there are people and city officials with private agendas trying to divide their community. They hope the impact of a planned Westport revitalization slated for the near future—condos, apartments, and townhouses, along with offices and stores—will extend beyond the waterfront and spur the development of a badly needed multipurpose community center. Linda Towe, executive director of TOOUR (Teaching Our Own Understanding and Responsibility)—an umbrella group covering Westport, Mount Winans, and Lakeland—sees the addition of new homes and shops along the waterfront as helping to rid the area of blighted properties, but at the same time she wants to ensure that homeowners don’t get displaced. Baltimore is slowly regaining some of what it lost in the last five decades, including a third of its population. While diminishing federal funds were channeled to a few high-profile projects, Westport and most of the other 250-some neighborhoods the city claims were left to fend for themselves. Some of those neighborhoods hung on, but other communities, especially those contrived after World War II, began to lose their glitter quickly. Large sections of the city

Historically, neighborhood identities run deep in Baltimore, and while that adds to the city’s charm, it can work against building the kinds of connections the city needs to reach its full potential.

deteriorated and still include a lot of people disconnected from work, living wages, and stable housing. In 1992, the new light rail line put the names of Westport and Cherry Hill on the city’s new transit map and some residents of these communities felt more connected and welcomed their easier access to modern public transportation. In recent years, new pedestrian-friendly streets, long promenades, and urban trails are helping to connect even more of Baltimore’s distant and diverse communities. Perhaps someday soon we’ll see fast MTA-operated water buses supplementing or replacing the current water taxi system and moving tourists and working people more efficiently between the city’s growing waterfront communities. Just east of Westport and Cherry Hill are Brooklyn and Curtis Bay, where I have worked for thirty years. Separated geographically from the rest of Baltimore City by the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, and from each other by attitude more than anything else, Brooklyn and Curtis Bay are now stirring with anticipation as the planned Masonville Cove Project is about to begin carving out a nature center, an environmental education center, and walking trails in the midst of the industrial shoreline. For years, many residents in this community felt short-changed on city services— disconnected and forgotten. “It became almost like a mantra,” says Richard Anderson, board president of Baybrook, the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay community development corporation. Anderson likes to tell the story of the little neighborhood girl who got lost in another part of town. When authorities asked her where she lived, she replied “Brooklyn.” Their immediate reaction was to call the NYPD to try to locate her family. Brooklyn and Curtis Bay community leaders finally decided that maybe Baltimore had taken this neighborhood identity thing too far for its own good. Encouraged by Senator George W. Della Jr. and Delegate Brian K. McHale, they formed Baybrook in 2000 as a 501(c)(3) and started going after resources as one contiguous neighborhood rather than two. They got some attention from government agencies and private foundations, and in 2002, the coalition was able to hire staff, which makes all the difference in a community where the leaders are working forty hours a week or caring for children and family members. They organized family events in neighborhood parks with marvelous views of downtown and planned housing fairs to showcase the diversity of styles and attract buyers. We live and work in this giant checkerboard with its more than 250 neighborhoods, each of us only one or two spaces from some community in the grips of the tragic urban trio of crime, poverty, and racial prejudice. Yet a multitude of community organizations and outward-looking people persevere. They work to repair communities like weavers mending the urban fabric. They remind us about those being displaced, unable to keep up or ride the wave of progress. They also realize the value of connections, looking outside their neighborhood boundaries to join others and make their case or better their situation. Let’s hope enough of us are listening. —Ivan Leshinsky

TEAM 6

New York native Ivan Leshinsky (far right) spent four years after college playing basketball with various international teams. In 1974, he settled in Annapolis and began working for the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, which he’s directed since 1980. He now lives in a 155-year-old rowhouse in Southwest Baltimore, which he and his wife began restoring in 2005. Merlyn Rosenberg (bottom, second from right) has been teaching photography to juniors and seniors at the Baltimore School for the Arts since 1999. She has photographed for such clients as Toyota, Sony, Utz, Rolling Stone, and Capitol Records. The Baltimore School for the Arts senior Photo II class: Faith Bocian and Kyle Tata (top row); Brandon Gordon, Ashley Lane, and Trevor Timson (middle row); Toya Moulden, Aamira Saunderlin, and Emily Waters (bottom) photo by Jason Okutake

To see more photos taken by the students, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project/teams/team6.

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 8

HAND to HAND Please HANDLE with care. I have funny-looking hands They measure my water retention Cutting paper dolls, scissor hands Double-jointed funny-looking thumbs My new series of artwork is all about my Childhood spending hours cutting out paper dolls My mother was never around (blame it all on the mother) She would give me 100 Korean won as she left each day And with that I would buy myself the paper dolls to play with all day My lifeline is too short. On the Other hand So I ask Markand, “Do you think that your son will become a conductor?” and he replies, “I’ll break his wrists before.” With a bit of a silence there, I look at Markand, the only maestro of this kind who I know personally, a very gentle and composed man, saying such harsh words. Incidentally, two very important people in my life have literally broken their wrists, and I found out in the later part of our discussion that Markand also broke his. On the one hand, I gather that wrist injury is common, most common in the sense that our common sense causes us to thrust our wrists to break a fall. On the other hand, I thought about what it must have meant for a music conductor to break his wrist, or an architect, or a writer to lose a hand. How about losing hands, losing grip of something? What does that mean? Why is it so important that one grips and has a grasp of something, a handle on things? How about being a master at something, something to do with using hands? I love it when media theorist Sandy Stone asks, Where does Stephen Hawking end and his technological device begin? Certainly, Hawking does not grasp his knowledge in the palm of his hands. Markand, however, was almost in denial about his wrist fracture; he mentioned it superfluously later, in another route of conversation, after he heard me tell story after story about the hand. I was curious why he would block that out. Was it too painful to remember or was it just another injury that healed so well that one has forgotten about it? Get over it, I tell myself.

photos by Jason Okutake

What is it in the hand that one disconnects from the body, what is it in the hand that makes a person think that an entire body can be supported by it, and what does it mean for people who use their hands for creative means to fracture their instrument of creation? For some reason, people give a lot of attention to artisans using hands, as if the genius were born in the hands. My art students quickly revert to thinking that the more hand involvement in artwork, the better. There is desperation for believing in the hands-on effect during our electronic era. Hmmm, maybe we need to go back to Frankenstein and consider how light and electricity is portrayed as the source of life. But then creation and monstrosity are similar. Who are we to suppose that we can create, and create poetry and beauty at that? There is something fictive about using hands to create something that has such high esteem. Why try so hard, as if it is even possible, and who and what determines something to be art, or poetry? I don’t even want to try to fake it. In philosophy, the contemporary way of thinking about the hand is that the hand is the face of the Other. In Lévinasian and Derridean senses, there is no beginning and ending to the hand. There is no finite way of grasping. Hence, if there is nothing so special in the hand, it can’t be severed, since hands are never truly vehicles of creation. Then why the drama when one loses the hand? Heidegger’s hand was too powerful and perhaps romantic, and if art was created as such in the palm of those hands, then maybe we must call them art for his sake. But, what about giving someone else a hand?

If the grip is fractured, then how much of an artist are you when you can’t hold a brush or a pen? If the grip is all it takes to be an artist, then how much of an artist is left when the grip is no longer there? How human are we when we face the Other? Amputation, phantom limbs, a blind person’s painting, a deaf person’s music—what are these monstrosities saying about our already monstrous existence? The dolls are interesting non-beings and a gift of my childhood when my hands were not big enough, strong enough, firm enough to hold scissors. Back then, I had no burden to pretend to make art; I was simply cutting. This page is dedicated to a friend who gave me a hand; now I have three of them, which makes it no hands at all. urbanite march 08

—Mina

It was a joke. Sometimes a joke is just a joke. This one was about the difficulty of music as a profession, and conducting in particular. But music can also offer the most intense rewards. For Mina the goal of art is to inspire thinking—it is to connect the viewer more intensely to his or her everyday world. Certain programmatic music can do that too. But unlike other art forms, visual art and music can also have what Mina calls “artistic merit.” They can bring you into yourself, away from the everyday world. If the artists have done their jobs supremely well, and if we open ourselves fully to the sounds (or the painting), we can “lose ourselves.” We can lose the duality that exists in our dealings with the everyday world between the “me” here, and the “everything that is not me” out there. We can connect with the essential “me;” we can touch our souls. So for me, and for the musicians in my orchestra, our hands are not objects of interest. They are simply tools that can create and shape sounds, which can provide a most magical, uplifting, exalting, life-affirming, transcendent experience.

TEAM 7

—Markand

Korean-American artist Mina Cheon is a media artist, writer, and educator. A professor at Maryland Institute College of Art, she has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally. She is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy of media and communications at European Graduate School and holds two master of fine arts degrees. Markand Thakar is music director of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra and the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra and co-director of the graduate conducting program at the Peabody Conservatory. He is the author of Counterpoint: Fundamentals of Music Making (Yale University Press). For more from this team, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project/teams/team7. photo by Jason Okutake

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fiction

Dream Date B y

J e a n

P hot ography

n our family, the word “outsider” meant neighbors, friends, in-laws, and even my aunt’s family who lived up in New York State, a hundred miles away. Outsiders were cars that drove around our corner too fast, our grandmother, who boarded with us, and sat for dinner at her own table by the window. When my sister started dating, she was one and, when I went to college, I was two. Maddy—the one with the boyfriends—was tough, bad-tempered, as ready to slap as to breathe and, although only one year older, I watched my mouth with Maddy, and even our older sister, Franny, kept her eyes peeled. Then there was Shrimp, our baby sister, seen but not heard. No one needed to sit on her. My mother, scared her baby was being bullied and crushed by the brutes laying about, kept Shrimp close, hand in hand, or on Mumma’s lap. “Put that big kid down!” my father would yell. “She’s too old!” “Never you mind,” Mumma would say, gathering Shrimp’s long legs and holding her five-foot, string-bean form just like a baby. “Enough to make you sick,” my father would say. “Oh, you,” Mumma would say back, “get used to it.” “Don’t you speak to me that way!” “Put it up,” we’d hear from the kitchen, where Nana was sitting eating soft, sweet things with her false teeth.

M c Ga r ry Christ ian

Je ria

“I don’t need to hear from you!” my father would roar. “Am I a prisoner? Am I a slave?” Nana would say. “If I am, just tell me, and I’ll move back to the Y.” “Now,” said Mumma, with Shrimp already sniveling—she had an ulcer and hated a fight—“see what you’ve done!” At a moment like that, Maddy, Franny, and I would scram, rather than be caught picking sides. But we couldn’t all leave at once. “Chickens! Look at the chickens!” my mother would start, and my father would finish. Turn your back on that mob, and you’d never know who’d hurl the blade. It was too much of a temptation. Even my grandmother got into the act. “Leave-taker, scaredy-cat, crybaby,” you’d hear with a tinkling laugh, as the yellow-belly was cast out, and all the rest ganging up, suddenly friends, allies, and who knew for how long. As often as not, I was the one they were zinging. As I pulled my heavy legs up the narrow, curved and carpeted stairs, I always stopped to look out the window, although what was there but a dumb dog (Lucky or Brutus lollygagging up the street), or the McInernies’ house with the shades still down at 12 noon. What were they doing in there? It was a pigsty, I’d heard my mother say, a hellhole. Later, though, the shades would fly up, the lights come on and cars line the street.

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The McIninnies—as we called them—were always having company. “What do they do,” my mother wanted to know, crowding me out of the window to get an eyeful, “sweep it all under the rug?” Because the McIninnies could shape things up just fine—we knew that because, although we were never invited as company, I’d seen it a few times and reported. Not only all “picked up” and vacced, but the Hummel figurines dusted and the Belleek tea set out with hot tea and Irish bread. “But,” I told my mother, all ears, “if any of those hoity-toity guests—the bishop or the bishop’s cousin or the Jesuit brother, or the nun sister, or the cousins who’d made money in beer trucks—pushed open that kitchen door ...” “Tell me!” my mother would scream. “I can’t describe it,” I’d say. “Try.” (“Don’t get started,” I’d hear from downstairs.) “Dishes in the sink?” she’d ask. “Not only,” I’d say. “Laundry piled up in the pantry?” I nodded. Schoolbooks and woolen hats and cupcake tins, old hairless dolls and mousetraps, Danny’s cassock and surplice on the table with the baby’s diaper and the eggy plates from breakfast with cigarette butts and—. “Go on.” But, now I had to whisper because my father did and didn’t want to hear— beer cans and whiskey bottles, ginger ale and Tom Collins mix, seltzer water and maraschino cherries, the ice cube tray and the highball “sweaters” from the last time company came, or just last night after supper, when the kids were upstairs raising Cain behind those pulled shades and the old folks—Cat and Bob and sometimes the old granddad, Big Dan—were having a few. “You can see all that from here?” my mother would say, jabbing me with an elbow and pointing to where the neat gray house had all its eyes closed, protected from the likes of us. To the McIninnies, we the Finnegans were outsiders, even though our house was clean, the shades were open at 9 sharp, sometimes 8, for anyone to see, and no empties slipped out in brown paper bags. One day, though, the sky fell and Danny Mac, kingpin of the McIninny tribe, invited me, Eileen Finnegan, to a canteen dance. “Queen for a day!” my father roared, when he heard. “What’d you have to pay him?” Maddy said. “I know that guy. He likes hard cash.” “What are you going to wear!” Franny shrieked. “Slow down!” my mother added. And my dream, the dream of a lifetime—or at least five years, because Danny was dream date parfait with a cherry on top—received its first pinprick, but not its last. I had five days and four nights to get ready, to gather my wits, but I had not five minutes’ peace. “Whatcha doin’?” I’d hear, just as I was flinging a petticoat of Maddy’s over my head of curlers. I stripped it off and under the bedspread and lay on it, as Maddy leapt in. (The door locks, but the screws are loose.) “Oh, pretty!” she said. “He should see you now. I wish I had a camera.” In the mirror: moon face with a halo of brush rollers, pink pins stuck in them like nails. “I’m cute!” I said. “Cute as death,” she said, flopping on the bed, feeling the lump, pulling out the brand-new petticoat, worn only once, and the fur flew. “You dirty rat. Where’d you find this?” But after she’d beat on me and screamed in my face, and extorted a promise for scouring the pots for a week, and taking the garbage out, too, she flung it in my face. “Here. You need it,” she said. “So, what gladrags are you going to wear? You’re not wearing anything else of mine!” I considered. I was going to wear something else of hers, but it wasn’t time yet to announce it. I was thinking. “You are!” she said. And then I was begging. “Here,” she said. “Gimme that brush.” I found the brush in the shambles of my dresser top, and suddenly the pins and rollers were dropping on the rug and my poor hair, just some tufts from the last cheap haircut that I repaired myself with the sewing shears, yanked by the rough brushing. “I’ll fix you up,” she said. “And I won’t charge.” “Sure,” I said, but I let her practice. My eyelashes were curled, eye shadow smeared on the top lid, and cake rouge applied to the cheeks and some on the

nose. My hair teased and sprayed so it looked just like a shower cap. When she was finished, I was crying. “What’s going on?” my mother said. “Why is your sister crying?” “I don’t know,” Maddy said, tossing the brush on the dresser and sashaying out the door. “What’s wrong with you?” my mother said. “What’s that stuff all over your face? Are you coming down with something?” I pushed them out and locked the door behind them, hammering in those loose screws with a dress loafer. There was nothing for me to do but cancel the date. But, oh no you don’t! they said. Don’t be a baby. And Maddy pushed open the door, screws pulled right out of the rotten wood, and threw in the purple skirt and white blouse I wanted to wear and were almost brand-new, and my mother, a pair of nylons still in their cardboard. “Your hair’ll grow back by Friday,” my mother said, and I could hear them laughing. It was mean, yes, but I knew I would go. ow did it happen that a teacher’s pet, immature, not yet 15 but already as big as my mother, would be asked to a canteen dance by a dreamboat like Danny Mac? I asked myself this question, long after the gang of boys came up to me in the schoolyard, where Mary Pat Eddy and I were doing gimp. They climbed the fence dividing boys from girls. “Hey, Finnegan!” “What?” I said. Mary ran away. She hated boys. I picked up the blue and white gimp she’d dropped. She’d made a mess anyway and I fixed it. “Hey Finnegan, what are you deaf?” “I heard you.” “Dan McIninny wants to talk to you.” I looked up. “He’s over at the bubbler,” they said. “So what’s it to me?” I said, because these boys—or any boys—had never given me the time of day, and nothing had occurred that I knew of to change that. “Go and find out.” Off the fence they jumped, and ran. I considered. What did I, a Finnegan, have to offer Danny Mac that he would want to talk to me? Did I have anything on him? I did, but so did everybody else. He was a pervert, a liar, and a sneak, and everyone knew it. He was also an altar boy, a choirboy, he had a vocation to be a Jesuit like his uncle, and would be class valedictorian when we graduated in ninth grade. Everything he did was pluperfect, even though, underneath, it was a different story. Just like the McIninny house. I was too curious not to take the bait. Over by the bubbler, Danny—blue eyes, blond crewcut, a little pudgy, but skin so smooth and nose so freckly cute, most of the girls couldn’t look him in the eye for the pain of it. “Hi, Eye. How’s the family?” He shook my hand. “Fine and you?” I said. “Good, thanks. I wanted to ask you a favor, Eye.” “Yeah?” “Can I ask you now?” “Go ahead.” “Eye, you know the canteen dance up at St. Peter’s Latin every Friday night? Eighth-graders invited every fourth week? I’m meeting somebody. A girl from the public. You don’t know her, or maybe you do. I was wondering if you’d do me a big, big favor. I’d practically kiss your feet.” “What?” “Loan this girl, Pinky Belliveau—she lives on Regent Avenue behind Mosca’s—your Mary Queen blazer, so she can put it on and get in. Once you’re in, throw it out the window. Get it?” “Yeah, I get it.” “Will you do it? Pretty please, Eileen Finn, with toasted almonds, hot fudge, and a cherry on top.” “I don’t know,” I said. “Say yes,” he said. “Okay.” “You’re a peach,” he said, giving me a punch in the arm.

continued on page 102

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S K Y H I G B y A m a n d a K o l s o n H u r l e y

Photography by Paul Burk

How do you transform a grain elevator into a glass-clad skyscraper?

ne day almost five years ago, developer Patrick Turner and architect Chris Pfaeffle went for a walk in Locust Point, scouting for real estate opportunities in the rapidly gentrifying South Baltimore neighborhood. Turner looked up at a 1920s-era grain elevator, three hundred feet tall, and saw their destiny. “I said, ‘Chris, there’s the project,’” Turner recalls. “He immediately agreed. It has magnificent bones to it.” Turner, a veteran Baltimore builder with a history of backing dramatic projects, pulled out his cell phone and called the number on a sign hung from the gate outside. Within minutes he was transferred to an executive at Archer Daniels Midland, the agri-giant that operated the elevator. The company declined his initial offers, but Turner persisted, purchasing the building, along with 182 cylindrical grain silos, for $6.5 million some months later. He has since poured “well over $100 million” into the site, he says, transforming the property into Silo Point, a complex of 228 luxury condos that will go on the market this summer. Pfaeffle, founding principal of the architecture firm Parameter and a frequent collaborator of Turner’s, had landed by far the biggest job of his career, and with it some vexing challenges. The only model he could find for this type of adaptive reuse was a hotel housed in old Quaker Oats silos in Akron, Ohio. (There is actually one other example—a condo complex in Minneapolis.) In any case, he and Turner soon dismissed the idea of inserting condos into the silos themselves: It was too complicated in structural terms, and designing “in the round” would be a headache. Besides, the main attraction was the elevator building itself, which was twice as tall as the silos and closer to the water. The largest and fastest grain elevator in the world when it was built in 1923, it housed a network of conveyor belts that scooped up grain from arriving trains, lifted it through a series of vertical

urbanite march 08

space

Heads in the clouds: Silo Point developer Patrick Turner (left) and architect Chris Pfaeffle hope to scale new heights of industrial chic.

shafts inside the building, weighed it, and deposited it in the bank of 110-foot silos. From there, the grain was loaded onto tankers for export overseas. A sand-colored, largely windowless tower on the outside, the building looks like an Egyptian temple inside. Massive octagonal columns twentythree feet high recede in long, even rows. Overhead, in the ceiling, openings from the grain shafts create a not-quite-regular rhythm of dark squares. Above this ceiling are a series of concrete bins, rising up nearly half the building’s height. Pfaeffle initially considered turning the bins into living units, but was again deterred by structural considerations, and the fact that the space wouldn’t yield enough condos to justify the cost. In the end, the team decided to leave the bins empty and tear down most of the silos, but the grain elevator is still the backbone of the project. The lobby for the complex will be nestled among those enormous columns, soon to be uplit for dramatic

effect. The upper portion of the building, and a new glassy structure that wraps in front of it, hold condos, all designed to conform to the elevator’s 16-by16-foot structural grid. Pfaeffle showed me an end unit within the front wrap and explained the thinking that went into

"Every time the marketing people talk about the view,” says architect Chris Pfaeffle, “I say, ‘It’s not view, it’s panorama.’ It’s cataclysmically different.” its floor plan: the placing of the balcony between rooms, not cantilevered off one, to honor the scenery; his fusion of a loft-like open floor plan in the living/dining area with a more traditional layout of the other rooms (inspired in part by the “Classic

Sevens” of prewar New York apartment buildings), to balance flexibility with privacy. Through the glass curtain wall—a rarity in red-brick Baltimore—the condo’s interior seemed to dissolve into the sky and water. “Every time the marketing people talk about the view,” Pfaeffle told me, “I say, ‘It’s not view, it’s panorama.’ It’s cataclysmically different.” Atop the structure sit two two-story penthouses with nearly 360-degree water views. A “sky bridge” leads from the old structure to a block of new construction, where more glass-walled condos wrap around a nine-story parking garage, anchored by a dozen remaining silos. On top of the parking garage perch two- and three-story “townhouses in the sky.” Clad in gleaming corrugated metal, they surround a courtyard where Pfaeffle hopes residents will chat, sunbathe, and watch their kids play. Who will move into Silo Point? “The creative class, whatever that definition drives down to,”

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Egyptian temple: Silo Point's lobby will nestle among these twentythree-foot pillars on the ground floor of the historic grain elevator.

Turner says, using scholar Richard Florida’s muchhyped term. “A mix of singles, young couples, and empty nesters; a variety of people.” However creative they are (how many artists can afford a 180-degree water view?), they’ll have access to a fitness center, a common area, and a lounge on the penthouse level. They’ll be able to control their lights, air conditioner, and stereo—and even make dinner reservations—using a touchscreen control panel in their unit.

"We want people to get the total 'wow' factor," Turner explains. "We wait 'til it's ready to go, then price it at what the market can bear." Depending on your perspective, Silo Point is either a monument to industrial chic built on the shifting sands of an overheated housing market, or it’s simply another, albeit bold, step in Locust Point’s inexorable modernization. Historically, the residents of “the Point”—many of them Irish, German, Polish, and Italian—have lived downwind from big industry, their modest brick and Formstone-faced rowhouses overshadowed by the grain elevator, the Procter & Gamble soap factory, and the (still active) Domino Sugar plant. For them, the water is a livelihood, not a view. Brian Mastervich, a board member of the Locust Point Civic Association and the co-chair of a task force that reviewed the Silo Point plan before it gained city approval, takes a sanguine view of the development. Although longtime residents have voiced concerns that the newcomers will be isolated and aloof, the completed first phase of the overall project—121 brick townhouses that were built by Pulte Homes just southeast of the grain elevator—have reassured him, he says. “I know at least ten people who live there and are active in the community.”

Turner, for his part, isn’t saying how much his new condos will cost, though early in the project he said that prices would range from $400,000 to more than $1 million. “We want people to get the total ‘wow’ factor,” he explains. “We wait ’til it’s ready to go, then price it at what the market can bear.” His decision not to do presales is unusual, but Turner, who famously planned an airplane-crash-themed restaurant on Key Highway (the idea itself crashed after the attacks of 9/11), is not your usual developer. Silo Point isn’t even the most ambitious project he’s currently working on. That would be Westport, a 42-acre, $1.4 billion “second downtown” with housing, office space, shops, and restaurants on the Middle Branch of the Patapsco. Turner shrugs off concerns about the cooling real estate market. He cites expansion at the

University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins, as well as military jobs arising from the base realignment and closure (BRAC) process, as drivers of future job growth in the Baltimore area. “We’re close to the bottom; we’ll be coming out,” he says. Besides, he’s aiming high: “Certain income levels aren’t necessarily affected by that. There’s a lot of quiet money here.” ■ —Amanda Kolson Hurley is senior editor of Architect magazine.

Web extra: See more photographs of Silo Point at www.urbanitebaltimore.com.

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eat/drink Spice company: Discover how to make ďŹ&#x201A;avored coffee blends with fresh-ground spices (p. 87).

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photo by Jason Okutake

Recipe Making ďŹ&#x201A;avored coffees from scratch

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Bean there: Local roasters Thomas and Amy Rhodes in Zeke's Coffee

True Brew

Is Fair Trade coffee really the fairest of them all? By Joan Jacobson

Zeke’s Coffee is a warm and noisy place, literally overstuffed with giant sacks of raw beans and hundreds of brown one-pound bags of roasted coffee. The roaster in the cramped shop runs full-tilt most days, venting intoxicatingly nutty coffee exhaust into the skies of Greater Lauraville from a galvanized chimney. Co-owner Thomas Rhodes says his modern low-temperature Sivitz roaster goes through about two hundred pounds of beans a day. The bulk of that business is in beans billed as environmentally or socially responsible. There are a host of labels for the modern coffee consumer to navigate: In addition to now-commonplace organic beans, grown without chemical pesticides, Zeke’s also carries shade-grown coffee—cultivated under trees that protect songbirds and other animals—and Rainforest Alliance coffee, which is grown on farms where forests, soils, rivers, and wildlife are preserved. But the hottest buzz-phrase in the boutique java lexicon is Fair Trade Certified, which refers to products labeled by TransFair USA, a nonprofit group that belongs to a global network of Fair Trade labeling organizations. TransFair USA monitors the coffee industry to assure that the farmers and workers who harvest the beans are paid above-market wages and that their children attend school, rather than work in the fields. The group reports that Fair Trade coffee is the fastest-growing specialty coffee in the country, with 74.2 million pounds certified between 1999 and 2007. Rhodes and his co-owner wife, Amy, estimate that 65 percent of the coffee roasted at Zeke’s carries one or more of these certifications, a trend that combines their philosophy of providing products to consumers who want to be part of Baltimore’s “buy local” culture with a second commitment to offer coffees with a conscience. Amy recalls that, when Zeke’s sold coffee at a fair at Goucher College last year, the customers “only wanted Fair Trade coffee.” And Zeke’s, says Thomas, is happy to oblige them. “I like to sell Fair Trade because it supports equal pay for equal work, and supports farmers and growers and pickers,” he says. When the couple started their business two years ago, Fair Trade offerings were slim. But now you can find Fair Trade coffees from Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Ethiopia, New Guinea, and El Salvador, with flavors that range from slightly spicy to nutty and chocolaty. As interest grows, Fair Trade products have become easier for small businesses to purchase. Zeke’s buys its coffee beans from a Staten Island wholesaler called Royal Coffee New York, which specializes in brokering organic, shade-grown, and Fair Trade beans. But what about the all-important taste test? When limited varieties of Fair Trade coffee first arrived, questions emerged about its quality. Coffee guru Kenneth Davids, a California writer and java expert who co-founded and edits the online consumer guide Coffeereview.com, addressed the issue in “Fair Trade Coffees: The Controversy and the Cup,” a September 2007 article. “How much quality and distinction do socially idealistic coffee lovers lose if they buy only Fair Trade 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 8

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At 7 p.m. on March 12, a delegation of four Ugandan coffee farmers will speak at Bolton Street Synagogue, 212 W. Coldspring Lane, about their interfaith Free Trade coffee cooperative, Peace Kawomera. For information, go to www.bolton street.org or call 410-235-5354.

How to grind your own flavored coffees

photo by Steve Buchanan

certified coffees?” he asked. After testing two dozen Fair Trade coffees from Rwanda to Brazil, his conclusion was “very little.” Eight TransFair-certified coffees he tasted rated 90 or higher on a scale of 100. Davids is a true gourmet coffee pioneer: He wrote the book Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying and began selling specialty beans at his coffeehouse in Berkeley, California, in 1973, a time when most Americans were drinking Maxwell House and instant Sanka. The Fair Trade movement, he says, has helped give intrepid drinkers access to types of coffee beans that the marketplace would have otherwise ignored: Many small farmers previously had little opportunity to enter the worldwide coffee market before joining Fair Trade co-ops. Davids recently visited a small coffee farming area at Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, where indigenous people were growing “a beautiful floral coffee with fruit notes,” he says. “If you went there you’d land from a boat … and you’d see two or three guys in the village with primitive scales and bags of coffee.” With the help of a Fair Trade cooperative, they brought their fresh beans down the hill from the mountains. The coffee was also shade-grown and organic “because they never had any money for chemicals.” Thanks to the Fair Trade certification, the indigenous farmers were able to sell their coffee on the international market at a reasonable price. But the availability of such coffee can be ephemeral. In 2007, he says, the Lake Atitlán coffee growers were “in trouble because of huge storms that carried away their farms.” He also says the success of a Fair Trade co-op is only as good as its leaders. “It’s just like a condominium association,” he says. “These have to be democratically run cooperatives, which is idealistic and wonderful. But just like a condominium association, if you have a little core of leaders who are really good, they can keep the unit moving. But if people give up, then things fall apart.” While Fair Trade certification is useful, Davids says that socially conscious coffee drinkers can help small farmers simply by avoiding the cheapest massmarket brands and buying any kind of specialty coffee. “The whole key,” he says, “is getting off the cans.” There are no cans at Zeke’s, and plenty of customers committed to paying a few extra dollars per pound. Bernie Trautner, who lives nearby in Beverly Hills, has been drinking Fair Trade coffee for several years. “People who grow the coffee get a fair and decent wage,” he says of the Fair Trade Honduran brew he favors. “I’m easily willing to pay more for it.”

A cup of distinction: Coffee guru Kenneth Davids recommends making flavored brews from scratch with fresh-ground spices.

These recipes are adapted with permission from Home Coffee Roasting: Romance & Revival by Kenneth Davids (St. Martins Press). Although this book is about roasting coffee beans at home, good quality beans roasted commercially can be substituted. The roasted beans are measured by volume, in fluid ounces. Unlike many artificial-tasting store-bought flavored coffees, these flavored coffees have a fresh, natural taste. The flavor is the best when brewed just after grinding the beans and flavorings. To prepare, use a blade-style coffee grinder (the kind that works like a blender).

Orange Peel Coffee To make dried citrus zest: Remove strips of the outer peel of an organic orange using a paring knife or potato peeler. Place strips on a cookie sheet in a 200-degree oven for 1 to 1½ hours until zest is dry and leathery. Store in an airtight jar. Zest from organic lemons or Seville oranges can be substituted. Cut strips into small pieces and combine with coffee beans in grinder. To every fluid ounce of roasted coffee beans add ½ strip dried orange zest. Orange flavor combines especially well with dark roasts.

Vanilla-Orange Coffee Vanilla both intensifies and softens the orange notes. To every fluid ounce of roasted coffee beans add ½ strip of dried orange zest and a ¼-inch piece of vanilla bean. Cut both into smaller pieces before adding with coffee beans to grind.

Cinnamon-Orange Coffee To every fluid ounce of roasted coffee beans add: ½ strip of dried orange zest ½-inch stick of cinnamon ¼-inch piece of vanilla bean Cut ingredients into smaller pieces and add with coffee beans to grind.

Anise Coffee Davids calls star anise “a particularly effective enhancement for those moderately dark through dark roasts.” To every fluid ounce of roasted coffee add ½ star anise cluster. If anise clusters are already fragmented, use 2 to 3 pods. Crumble anise into smaller pieces and combine with coffee beans to grind.

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Ethel & Ramone’s

photo by Ed Bloom

Credit Ed Bloom, longtime chef at this funkycute eatery wedged into a Victorian cottage in Mount Washington Village, with solving the riddle of the crab cake: How little filler do you need before the binder loses its powers and the cake falls to pieces? The answer is none: Just broil the crabmeat in a ramekin. At Ethel & Ramone’s, three little dishes of buttery and seemingly unadulterated jumbo lump appear as an appetizer, each dusted with Old Bay and accompanied by a fine but unnecessary remoulade. It may not be great cooking—practically all he did was warm the stuff in a little dish—but it’s an honest way to honor the delicate and increasingly precious resource that is the Maryland blue crab. Bloom’s menu—billed as “Chesapeake Creole”—explores the humid culinary borderlands between Bay Country and Acadiana: There’s an emphasis on the seafood common to both regions, and a bold hand with the seasonings that serves such ingredients well. Gumbo is an oft-lauded specialty, and it’s formidable—a dusky, roux-thickened brew with a massive density of flavor, thanks in part to the hunks of perfect andouille sausage sunk

within. Order it with seafood and it arrives laden with a generous pile of shrimp, crab, oysters, and mussels. A big rib steak, one of the revolving roster of daily red-meat specials, gets sauced with a lake of whiskey-laced reduction, a similarly unsubtle treatment, but the meat itself is aggressively charred and nicely aged. Ethel & Ramone’s has grown incrementally over the past decade—it opened as a lunch-only tearoom in 1994 and was BYOB until four years ago—but it still feels less like a professional restaurant than a wine-soaked dinner party hosted by some ambitious grad students. The kitchen is open and rambunctious, the chairs wobbly, the service chummily informal. New Orleans is (or was) littered with these sorts of ramshackle neighborhood joints, and it’s reassuring to see the model endure here. (Lunch and dinner Tues to Sat, dinner only Sun, closed Mon. 1615 Sulgrave Ave., Mount Washington; 410-664-2971; www. ethelland.com.)

reviewed

EAT/DRINK

—David Dudley

Born on the bayou: Seafood gumbo at Ethel & Ramone’s

Don’t go asking for ketchup at Salt. Jason Ambrose serves his celebrated duck-fat fries with a trio of dipping sauces—creamy truffle flecked with black fungus, tangy malt vinegar, and smoky honey-chipotle. Ambrose, chef and co-owner (with his mother) of the Butcher’s Hill tavern, has created a deluxe riff on comfort food that might be overly precious if it weren’t so darned tasty. Ambrose named his restaurant after his grandfather—he put salt on everything from beer to melon—but his cooking makes use of a substantially broader repertoire. It’s American basics gone exotic: a thick slab of tuna crusted with coriander, monkfish “osso buco” on a bed of barley-like faro with a tangy citrus-and-garlic gremolata made with roasted grapes. Beef short ribs are topped with chili mole, mussels are served in a red wine broth with tarragon and clementine wedges, and a warming bowl of chestnut pappardelle is tossed with hunks of braised wild boar and

butternut squash, seasoned with sage and chanterelles. There’s just enough space in this converted rowhouse on an otherwise residential block for a no-frills dining room, with darkwood tables and lime-colored light fixtures to lend a modern edge. At the lavender-ceilinged bar, an after-work crowd from the surrounding neighborhood congregates over burgers and fries. But that burger is a juicy $15 slider, topped with a hefty chunk of foie gras and a smear of truffle aioli. Red-onion marmalade stands in for the Heinz stuff, and the only thing familiar is the roll—as soft, white, and chewy as the one on your first Memorial Stadium dog. Starting this month, Ambrose will complete the meal with his over-the-top take on a chocolate shake: a bourbon chocolate martini. (Dinner Mon to Sat. 2127 E. Pratt St.; 410-276-5480; www.salttavern.com.) —Martha Thomas

photo by Jason Okutake

Salt

Burger king: Chef-owner Jason Ambrose of Salt, home of the foie gras slider

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Ghosts in the Bottle

courtesy of centuryads.blogspot.com

By Clinton Macsherry

Glass from the past: A vintage Mateus advertisement from 1968

If the “Hey hey hey, Mateus rosé” jingle rings a bell, you probably watched too much television in the 1970s. That’s when mass-market import brands introduced a multitude of Americans to wine. Mateus and another Portuguese pinko, Lancers rosé, eerily foreshadowed the rise of White Zinfandel, and their empty bottles rivaled the straw-covered Chianti flask as the candlestick holder of choice for the MiddleAmerican kitchen table. My mother bought candles specially designed to send multicolored drips cascading down the sides of the ruddy-colored bottle. Blue Nun and Black Tower from Germany, Riunite and Cella from Italy, the redoubtable Yago Sangria from Spain—one instinctively leans to the past tense when mentioning them. But these brands still reside among us, changing tastes be damned. To be sure, evolution molds the business world as inevitably as it does the natural order. The Banfi Products Corporation, which made a fortune importing fizzy Riunite Lambrusco, now produces critically praised Brunello di Montalcino and operates one of the prime “destination” wineries in southern Tuscany. In 2002, Mateus gave a sleek makeover to its traditional bocksbeutel bottle (originally from Germany and so named for its resemblance to a compressed gourd, a medieval prayer bag, or a goat scrotum—take your pick). Not all wines from that era have fared so well. More obscure imports, often from the Eastern Bloc, filled another market stream commonly fished by grad students, bohemians, and other cheap connoisseurs. Those of us lacking the budget for Bordeaux could slake our curiosity with the likes of Trakia

Chardonnay (from Bulgaria), Premiat Pinot Noir (Romania), and Avia Cabernet Sauvignon (the former Yugoslavia). The wine and gourmet shop Morton’s of Eager Street—now long gone, sad to say—used to stock them all in a bathtub, any three for $10. The Monsieur Henri Wine Company, which hit paydirt with Yago Sangria and Black Tower, did a decent business with Eastern European wines like Trakia and Premiat in the ’70s and ’80s. No more. Recently “rebranded” (that had to hurt), Monsieur Henri is now Gemini Spirits & Wine, part of the New Orleans-based Sazerac Company. According to Fabrice Ramcourt, a Gemini marketing manager, the demand for those wines “dramatically declined over the years. There have been a couple of generations of new consumers, and they’ve gotten more sophisticated—$2.99 wines have lost tremendous market share.” Monsieur Henri shut down the Trakia brand in the mid-’90s; Premiat hung on a while longer. If there was any major slice of the market left for such wines, Ramcourt adds, the onslaught of inexpensive Australian brands “put a knife in it.” There’s an exception: Egri Bikaver, a robust Hungarian red for which I’d make the occasional dinner-party splurge twenty years ago, survives. It used to cost about $6 or $7. It still does. In case your Hungarian’s a little rusty, “bikaver” means “bull’s blood,” and “Egri” indicates its origin in the region surrounding the city of Eger. During a mid-16th century invasion of Hungary by Turkish Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the story goes, outnumbered soldiers defending Eger Castle fortified their courage with the indigenous red wine. They were, apparently, slobs; the Turks thought the stains on their beards and armor meant that they drank the blood of bulls for supernatural strength. It’s hard to say how Egri Bikaver has hung on while similar brands have failed. “It’s not high volume, but there’s still a steady flow,” says Ramcourt, who attributes continuing sales to “older, ethnic consumers” and points to pockets of HungarianAmericans in New York, Illinois, and California. Probably so. But I’d also like to think that there’s still a corps of the curious and shallowpocketed, and thus an ongoing market for a decent $6 or $7 wine that you don’t see every day. The Egervin Egri Bikaver 2003 (12 percent alcohol, $6.50) tries gamely to fit the bill, with a nose of freshly washed cherries and a touch of barnyard earthiness. Typically a blend of Kekfrankos, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Zweigelt grapes, this bears little resemblance to the hearty wine I recall. Light in color and body, its acidity all but overwhelms the thin, tart red-berry flavors, and it develops a tinny, altar-wine quality after a bit of air time. Still, it’s worth a taste—for the funky story if nothing else. If you’re looking for something more reliable in the $6.50 range, look for Borsao Campo de Borja, or even a generic Chianti like Gabbiano. Just stay away from straw-covered bottles. ■ 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 8

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urbanite march 08

photo from Housing Authority of Baltimore City Annual Reports 1943, courtesy of Enoch Pratt Free Library, Central Library/State Library Resource Center

art/culture 95 97 99

music

David Dudley on Van Halen

film

Violet Glaze on Woman in the Dunes

art

Ding Ren on DoubleTake: The Poetics of Illusion and Light

poetry

Molly O'Donnell on Katherine Cottle's My Father's Speech

theater

Martha Thomas on The Pastor's Anniversary and Bad Theater

101

books

Literary editor Susan McCallum-Smith makes an effort

Bring It On Home Should Baltimore save its pre-war public housing?

The good life: Armistead Gardens, a former public housing project on the city's eastern edge, soon after it opened in the early 1940s

The two public housing projects that sit north of Fells Point are not places that many passersby stop to admire. Perkins Homes and Douglass Homes are grim complexes of dark brick low-rises, harshly regimented in rows that look away from the street. Their facades are strictly without ornament; grids of barred windows face patches of barren yard. But look more closely: This is not how they were built. At one time, both developments had streamlined awnings over the doors, and the rectilinear regularity of the facades was set behind individual gardens, complete with picket fences. But years of hard use, the post-war march of urban blight, and some dubious “improvements” have transformed Perkins and Douglass from modern and crisp to strict and menacing. Some of the buildings’ original charm is still visible in their community centers, decorated with bas-relief sculptures. At Perkins Homes, three panels symbolically depict music, lit-

by mike dominelli

erature, and theater; at Douglass, two panels extol peace, understanding, liberty, and knowledge. These sculptures remind the careful observer that public housing was once a source of civic pride. Outside of any housing policy debate about the fate of city projects such as Perkins and Douglass—many of which are targeted for demolition—there is another, more purely aesthetic question: Do these projects have some lasting significance as architecture? There are movements in Chicago, New Orleans, and Indianapolis to preserve pre-war public housing, usually by selling the buildings to the private sector for market rate or mixed-income re-use. But Baltimore has acquired a national reputation for demolishing its high-rise public housing in favor of more contextual new construction. Since the 1990s, high-rise towers at Lafayette Courts, Lexington Terrace, Murphy Homes, Hollander Ridge, the Broadway, and Flag House have met spectacular ends via 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 8

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controlled implosion. The city has also demolished low-rise housing at Fairfield Homes and Julian Gardens. Likely to be soon added to this hit list: Claremont Homes, Latrobe Homes, Gilmore Homes, O’Donnell Heights, Somerset Court, Cherry Hill, Mount Winans, and Westport. These buildings may bear the burden of seventy years of federal housing policy, but in many cases, the bones of good construction remain. This is especially true of those projects built in the 1930s and 1940s, a time when public policy supported the idea that the science of modern housing would permanently solve the problems of urban decay. These buildings were constructed with idealism and dedication to quality. They are even, in some cases, beautiful. Upton’s McCulloh Homes, for instance, consists of a series of courtyards warmly surrounded by lowslung two- and three-story buildings. Their strong horizontal lines are provided by brick banding, flat aluminum canopies, and matching aluminum coping. Though built in the early 1940s, McCulloh recalls that Mid-Century Modern look that has people so excited again: Picture Pikesville circa 1955. On McCulloh Street, statues of a boy playing a harmonica and a girl reading a book flank a courtyard entrance, both in a jaunty contrapposto. They are kitschy, but their unexpected jubilance makes up for the rough stylization of the figures. Early residents of projects like McCulloh had good reason to be delighted with their new homes: When these structures went up, half of the houses in the city’s urban core had no flush toilet; 70 percent were either structurally unsound, overcrowded, or lacked central heat or plumbing. The Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) chose project sites “on the edge of the worst slums,” a 1939 report stated, “because in this way continued expansion of the blight was halted.” Somerset, in Oldtown, was built on the site of “a festering slum of the worst character.” Nearby Latrobe Homes includes land that had once been a slave market. Though they were built around the same time, Somerset and Latrobe look nothing alike. Somerset is built in the vernacular style of the Baltimore rowhouse—plain salmon brick, arched window heads, a minimal cornice—with a few elegant touches: brick quoins at the corners, ashlar stone foundations. Latrobe looks like Baltimore’s last gasp at streamlined Art Deco. There are false corner windows a lá the Chrysler Building, and the facades are circled by horizontal bands of multicolored brick. When Latrobe opened in 1941, the Sun described “tenants thrilled at what they find … modern conveniences for some for the first time.” The projects were great successes: Somerset Court, for example, housed more people than it displaced and doubled the amount of usable open space. Families were given privacy and independence; each dwelling unit had its own front door and semiprivate outdoor space. All of the developments were fireproof and rat-proof, with central heat, cross ventilation, and modern plumbing and appliances, plus playgrounds and recreation rooms to “help keep the children off the streets,” according to the HABC. The projects were always meant to be physically attractive. “Former slum dwellers,” HABC chair Don

Old enough to dance: David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen, together again

music Youth Without Youth Van Halen at First Mariner Arena, Mar 9

Behold the Dad Band, that shambling assemblage of guys on the far side of fifty jamming in America’s suburban basements. Laden with equipment they couldn’t afford at 18, they mortify their teenage children with Eagles covers and MySpace pages. Sometimes the kids get dragooned into playing along: Two of the year’s most-hyped reunions are Dad Bands— multigenerational endeavors that, depending on your take, are either heralds of rock’s end days or stirring affirmations of the genre’s age- and logic-defying powers. For Led Zeppelin’s historic reanimation in London in December, drummer Jason Bonham assumed his late father’s throne behind the kit, and the present incarnation of Van Halen features guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s 16-year-old son, the magnificently named Wolfgang, on bass. It is, one hopes, a thrill for the teen Van Halen to maintain the bloodline and gig with Dad and Uncle Alex, but for local audiences, March’s show at First Mariner represents a more epochal event: the long-awaited return of clownish frontman David Lee Roth, who quit the band in 1985 to embark on a solo career in self-parody. (The band would soldier on for another decadeplus of commercial success in the company of journeyman belter Sammy Hagar.) The Diamond Dave restoration in 2007 after a twenty-two year

interregnum, like so many rock reunions, is both implausible and somehow inevitable. The biological clocks on these guys are winding down. Roth is now a 53-year-old ex-radio jock (he did a brief turn as Howard Stern’s replacement on WNYC); Eddie is 52 and the survivor of a host of lifestyle-related infirmities: hip replacement, cancer, alcohol rehab, divorce. And yet, here they come, lean and leathery and thrashing through “Hot for Teacher” with hammer-ons and scissor-kicks largely intact. Critics seem grudgingly impressed with this current Van Halen tour, all the more remarkable considering that the band’s pre-Hagar catalog is quintessential young men’s music—athletic, technically precise wank-o-ramas constructed around Eddie’s supernatural musicianship and Dave’s preening horndoggery. This is not material that ages gracefully, and there’s something odd about the prospect of hearing teen anthems like “Drop Dead Legs” and “Everybody Wants Some!!” performed by men of this demographic. But even if you haven’t laid a needle on Diver Down since junior high, it’s possible to celebrate the return of Van Halen as a Rocky Balboa-like feat of physicality, a triumph of the boundless boomer capacity to summon the roar of youth. And for all the Dad Bands out there in the crowd, it’s one last, precious chance to dance the night away. —David Dudley 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 8

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C A N TO N C R O S S I N G

Web extra: Take a photo tour of Baltimore’s historic pre-war public housing at www.urbanite baltimore.com

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Frank Fenn declared in 1947, “respond to the stimulus of good housing.” This was a precept of pre-1960s environmentalism, which held that people are a product of their environments. The idea, progressive but paternalistic, was that slums created slum-dwellers. “Crowded and squalid abodes are productive of discontent, disease, and crime, much of which has been eliminated by these projects,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Hamilton Atkinson said in 1943. “Juvenile residents in particular reflect improved morale, for, given adequate space to play in, they naturally amuse themselves differently than if compelled to seek ways and means of recreation on crowded and dangerous streets.” Poppleton’s Poe Homes (a block away from the actual Poe House on Amity Street) succeeds in creating “adequate space to play” without forsaking the idea of the public street. The buildings, which opened in 1940, jog back and forth along the street, setting rowhouse uniformity to a staccato rhythm. Most striking are their courtyards, which retain much of their landscaping and lead to a two-block-long central mall. The courtyards and the mall are proportioned as real public spaces rather than passive leftover land. The other pre-war project, Armistead Gardens, is no longer owned by the city, and as such it provides a response to the question: What would happen if you gave a subsidized housing project to its residents? (Answer: A lot of vinyl siding and Formstone.) After the war, it was sold to its occupants as a cooperative. Located off Pulaski Highway on the eastern edge of the city, it has a more suburban feel, with a combination of two-story rowhouses and “row-ranchers.” Its older portions are daringly Modernist: plain concrete block with steel casement windows and flat canopies over the entryways. Some of the houses remain unaltered, surprising in their now-outdated modernity. Armistead, like the rest of Baltimore’s public housing, isn’t landmarked or otherwise officially “preserved,” and it’s not likely to be. As architecture, these projects compete against the modern reality that the city does not appear to want housing as one of its governmental functions. Present housing policy debates focus mainly on supply-side incentives and demandside subsidies, and there is no movement afoot to revive the social optimism of the Modernist era. But if we as a city decide that these buildings should no longer serve as subsidized housing, the alternative does not have to be demolition: We should at least have a discussion about the fate of architecturally or historically significant public housing projects, before they are blindly cleared. With adequate maintenance and some long-delayed capital improvements, some could still serve populations of diverse incomes. In an age when innovative developers proudly remake factories, grain elevators, and even shipping containers into residences, it might be worth considering turning homes back into homes. ■

No day at the beach: Kyôko Kishida in Woman in the Dunes

film quiet, Please Woman in the Dunes at the Homewood Friends Meeting House, Mar 27 What’s the difference between a silent film, and a film about silence? See for yourself when Art On Purpose and the Baltimore Lyceum jointly screen Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) as part of their “What Takes Place in Silence” film series. The film is a dark, surreal satire of the matrimonial trap and the indentured servitude of the Japanese male. An amateur bug collector (Eiji Okada) searching for specimens in a remote seaside village is forced to lodge overnight with a local woman (Kyôko Kishida) when he misses the last bus out of town. Her home is a ramshackle hovel located at the bottom of a gaping crevasse of shifting sand. There’s sand on the floor, sand in the bed, sand in their food; every night she has to shovel out just enough to keep the house from being buried the next day. It’s a miserable place to live, but she’s lonely, and besides, this job is too big for one woman working alone. When the other villagers don’t lower the rope ladder the next morning, the bug collector knows he’s stuck like a butterfly on a pin. With its hypnotic, droning score of atmospheric sound, Teshigahara’s twisted parable has more in

common with Eraserhead—David Lynch’s 1977 art-horror film about arranged marriage and fatherhood—than with the samurai costume dramas normally associated with Japanese film. But silence doesn’t only mean an unobtrusive soundtrack: Much of this film—from the frighteningly passive-aggressive politeness of the woman to interval shots of shifting sand and scuttling desert insects—is about the meaning between moments, not in them. Once you understand, you’ll be eager to see the next films in the series, including Michael Haneke’s Caché (April 24). Woman in the Dunes is preceded by the hard-to-find Turkish film Distant (March 13), a sound film that nevertheless forgoes almost all dialogue. —Violet Glaze

Following the 7 p.m. screening there will be a discussion moderated by David O’Donaghue of the Baltimore Lyceum.

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Double-Take: The Poetics of Illusion and Light at the Contemporary Museum, through May 11

Turned on: Bernhard Hildebrant's This Is Not Kosuth, a playful homage to the work of neon word sculptor Joseph Kosuth

With subtle tweaks of light, cleverly selected hues, and simple gestures, the three artists featured in Double-Take: The Poetics of Illusion and Light toy with the viewer’s perception. Curated by the Contemporary Museum’s executive director, Irene Hofmann, the exhibition explores how slight visual shifts can create multilayered experiences. A spinning wire sphere hanging from the ceiling confronts the viewer upon entering the exhibition. Made by Alexandra A. Grant, the wire comprising the large sculpture, Nimbus II, is meticulously twisted and shaped into words from Nimbus, a hypertext poem by Michael Joyce. Lit with theater lights, the sculpted words are projected as shadows that flicker against the walls. Mary Temple also plays with shadows. At first glance, a section of the museum appears to be bathed in late-afternoon sunlight streaming through a plant-filled window. It takes a few moments to realize that there is no window—this is Temple’s piece Southwest Corner, Northeast Light. The shadows are actually painted on the wall, yet a sense of calmness pervades, as if the viewer could soak up the tromp l’oeil sunlight. The work of Baltimore-based artist Bernhard Hildebrant reconfigures art history concepts. In his film Un-erased de Kooning Drawing, sections of a de Kooning drawing that Robert Rauschenberg famously erased in 1953 are digitally restored. In his Untitled works, a white or black enamel painting is displayed next to a photograph of the same painting, creating a tautological reference to 1960s conceptual art. By juxtaposing representation with reality, Hildebrant asks the viewer to contemplate perception as it relates to genuine and fabricated experience—a theme that emerges from this innovative exhibit as a whole. —Ding Ren

poetry Digging for Clues My Father's Speech by Katherine Cottle Apprentice House Although poet Katherine Cottle has been publishing her work for twenty years, her debut collection of poems arrived just this January. My Father’s Speech is also the first-ever winner of the annual Apprentice House Chapbook Competition, sponsored by Loyola College’s Apprentice House—the country’s only collegerun, student-staffed book publisher. “Apprentice House began years ago as a mock company developing pretend projects,” explains Gregg Wilhelm, director and editor-inchief of AH. “But as printing technology caught up to the idea, students’ book projects were actually published.” The chapbook competition arose out of what he describes as “the great tradition of striving to give poets some exposure in a crowded marketplace.” (The next deadline for the Apprentice House Chapbook Competition is March 14; go to www.apprenticehouse.com for details.) Selected from fifty manuscripts submitted by poets from across the country, Cottle’s

chapbook takes an unflinching yet nostalgic look at the rural coal-mining life of her West Virginia ancestors. “My Father’s Speech centers around my own search for meaning in a world where I am continually digging for a place of understanding,” she says. Throughout the book, the Maryland resident references everyday objects and images—a spit can and coleslaw—to powerfully reflect her subjects’ hardscrabble lives. The final poems capitalize on this method to the greatest extent, bringing simple elegance to charged memories. In “Arrowhead,” Cottle gracefully portrays her father in both boyhood and old age as a passionate and troubled soul: “Even now … he dreams of the tool … and wakes to the grind of stone / against stone, the cry of his own / palms—silent, bleeding, alone.” My Father’s Speech achieves its aim: communication of the lives bravely lived in a trying world. —Molly O’Donnell Katherine Cottle will sign copies of My Father’s Speech at Greetings and Readings in Hunt Valley on March 8, 1–3 p.m.

theater Lighter Sides

The Pastor’s Anniversary at Arena Players, Mar 28–Apr 20 Bad Theater at the Mobtown Theater, Mar 27–30 The Arena Players’ new play, The Pastor’s Anniversary, revolves around the minister of a church called St. Peter and St. Paul Baptist, who, in anticipation of his anniversary with the church, points out congregation members’ failings: A mother has become addicted to prescription drugs; a man tries to pass as the female soloist in the choir by dressing in drag. “It’s a riotous play,” says playwright Robert E. Russell, a retired art and drama teacher for Baltimore City Public Schools. The play is the third in a trilogy of faithbased comedies that includes The Church Mortgage Burning, about a minister who embezzles to do good works, and The Church Lottery Ticket, about a congregation divided over whether to use the proceeds of a winning ticket dropped in the collection plate. In its fifty-fifth year, the Arena Players is the oldest continuously run African American community theater company in the United States. Members of its youth theater have gone on to roles on Broadway and television, from The Jeffersons to The Wire.

While Arena Players looks to church groups to fill the house, the new company Theater for Rent targets young people who might think of plays as an old folks’ pastime. “There’s a stigma among young people that theater is boring; they’d rather go to a movie or a bar,” says company founder Peter Shipley. The company’s first official production is Bad Theater, which tells the story of two playwrights who can’t seem to get it right—until their characters step in to help them out. “It’s got a kind of Stranger Than Fiction feel,” says company member Celeste Perilla, referring to the movie in which Will Ferrell plays a character in a novel who tries to redirect his fate. Shipley, a graduate of Goucher College, cowrote the play with Alexander Hancock and says there’s nothing deep about it: “I just want to give the audience a jolt of pure entertainment.” —Martha Thomas

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by susan mccallum-smith

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby (Pantheon) The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter (Pantheon) Day by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf) The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Pantheon)

ometimes it seems, to li’l ol’ me, that it is more acceptable in the United States to be perceived as harmlessly ignorant than rationally smart. To be an intellectual (a word currently synonymous with elitism, heathenism, liberal looniness, and a pigheaded attachment to public television and semicolons) is somehow un-American, somehow not just us folks. The tragedy is, of course, that ignorance isn’t harmless. And Susan Jacoby is hellfire-and-brimstone mad about it. Our nation, she writes in her new critique of contemporary culture, The Age of American Unreason, is “ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance,” peopled by a public who derive opinions from “soundbites and blogs,” and are in thrall to “the fruit of the tree of infotainment.” Jacoby scorches through “conversation avoidance devices” such as text messaging, e-mail, and, of course, TV. She berates parents who use Baby Einstein products as nannies for their kids, deluding themselves about its educational value and ensuring that future generations are “sucking at the video tit from cradle to grave.” The dangerous tendency in some media to present content without context and equate fairness with balance, that “bland centrism that always locates truth equidistant from two points,” infuriates her, and she argues, controversially, that we must approach religion with intellectual rigor. “One of the most powerful taboos in American life,” she writes, “concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith—an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions.”

Jacoby occasionally embodies the stereotype she is so desperate to dispel and sounds like a snob, and the threads of her arguments often tuft with woolliness. Still, I feel her pain when she wails, “What has been lost is the culture of effort.” Charles Baxter’s eerie new novel, The Soul Thief, requires the culture of effort to appreciate its subtle exploration of the slippery nature of identity, but such careful reading is well rewarded. At graduate school during the 1970s, Nathaniel Mason becomes entangled with two fellow students, sexy Theresa and enigmatic Jerome, and the consequences of this relationship haunt him the rest of his life. One night, Jerome and Theresa play a cruel trick on Nathaniel that leaves him reeling. “If you had died,” Jerome comments nonchalantly, by way of apology, “we would have become you. We would have taken you on.” In the following weeks, Nathaniel feels under siege; his apartment is robbed, and he realizes that Jerome has begun to “steal” aspects of his life, appropriating Nathaniel’s personal narrative. Years later, Nathaniel, now married with children of his own, is jarred by a sudden phone call from Jerome, who makes a strange request. “You know,” Nathaniel’s wise stepfather once remarks, “few people really want to become individuals. People claim that they do, but they don’t.” To be an authentic individual, Baxter implies, takes guts, takes effort. His prose poem about identity concludes with a twist that may annoy some readers but, on reflection, underscores his theme. Some books evoke certain colors, and A.L. Kennedy’s marvelous new novel, Day, evokes blue: the smoky blue of military uniforms, chilled skin, hunger, and the ashes of cities laid waste. Day, too, rewards effort, although its challenges are stylistic rather than thematic. The narrative voice—fluctuating between first, third, and the tricky realms of second person—throws “you,” the reader, off balance, forcing you to stand still and pay attention.

Twenty-five-year-old Alfred Day, a young man “sitting behind a young mustache,” is so severely damaged by his experiences in the British Royal Air Force and as a prisoner during the Second World War, that, like a child picking at a festering scab, he takes a job as an extra in a movie being made in Germany about prisoners-of-war. As a teenager, Alfred “had decided to be a tail gunner and nothing else” and “had decided to kill his father.” His former decision feeds off his latter— Alfred’s soul is bruised by self-loathing, a result of his failure to protect his mother from a life of casual abuse. “They kill you,” he says, explaining why he’s volunteered to take the most dangerous role in the bomber crew. “That's why it’s been what you’ve wanted, from the very first time you heard.” His choice is not one of patriotism but pragmatism: He wants to get life over with, like yanking off a Band-Aid in one go. During the war, Alfred restricts the number of people he meets and knows, inoculating himself against future heartbreak. He fears “he wouldn’t die … He would have to be there, be Alfie Day and feel.” And his fears are realized, for he bonds with his crew and falls in love with a married woman, who, in one of the most exquisitely lyrical sections of the book, leans against his shoulder and “covers his stripes, strips his heart back to the breech.” The melancholy tones and cultural contexts of these three books remind me of Guiseppe de Lampedusa’s masterpiece, The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958. The Leopard opens in 1860 during the Risorgimento, the movement for the unification in Italy, at the moment of Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily, the ball at the toe of Italy’s boot. The Prince of Salina, whose family has held power on the island for centuries, holds himself aloof from world events, refusing to alter his daily schedule of stargazing and womanizing. When history inevitably knocks on his palace door, he gives the revolutionaries a gentlemanly hearing, thinking, “I understand now; … you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers.’ You just want to take our places.” With appalled admiration, he watches the devious machinations of the local mayor jockeying for political position, “free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners.” Although the prince abdicates any responsibility in the new unified Italian State, seeing himself and Sicily as indivisible, both “hankering for oblivion … hankering for death,” he is shocked to discover that the referendum to decide whether Sicily should join the new state was rigged. Lampedusa’s triumphant novel charts how changes in government may often result in no more than the replacement of one form of feudalism by another, and that sometimes it is to the benefit of those in power to keep a populace uneducated. Another reminder, as if one were needed, of the Thomas Jefferson-penned epigraph to Jacoby’s book: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” ■ 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 8

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Dream Date continued from page 77 I had never been (Maddy had, of course) to a canteen dance, but I knew the score. You met a boy there, or you went stag with a bunch of girls, and stood so close together that no boy in his right mind would crack the circle. But my friends didn’t go to canteen dances and no boy had ever invited me to meet him there.

hat was a Monday and now was the Friday. At breakfast no one remembered so I had peace and quiet. Nana had made a pot of Wheatena and I spooned a gluey inch in my Peter Rabbit bowl, using my baby spoon with the loop to stick my thumb in. Maddy saw it and laughed. “I don’t get it,” she said, and then, “Oh yes, I do! You’re scared, you guppy! She’s scared,” she turned to my mother, scraping a piece of burnt toast. “Today’s her date with Danny Mac!” Everyone—Nana, Daddy, Mumma, Franny, and Mad—looked. “Eileen Frances,” my mother said, “put that stupid baby bowl back. And get yourself a real spoon. Are you mental?” My father—it was early for him—was swearing under his breath; he took his coffee into the den, but we could still hear him, and he us. “Mind your own beeswack,” I said. “Danny and Eileen, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S,” Maddy started, “I-N-G.” “Tell her to stop,” I said to Mumma. “You tell her. And eat up. You’ll be late and I’m not driving you.” “Maddy,” I said, trying another tone, “why are you doing this to me?” She looked at me, thoughtful. “I’m on your side. I know what you’re facing. But that doesn’t mean you should suck your thumb and wear your rubber pants.” I scraped my Wheatena into the sink and rinsed out my baby bowl. “Are there any donuts?” I said. “Look,” my mother said. “You’ve got eyes.” I ate two sugar donuts and drank a milky coffee and was reaching for a cinnamon cruller, when my mother grabbed my hand. “First, you’re a baby, now you’re a pig?” I was still pinching the cruller. “Put it down,” my mother said. “I’ll eat it later.” “No, you won’t,” she said, prying it out of my hand. “If you eat donuts all day, you won’t fit into your sister’s skirt. Have you thought of that, my girl? Oh, no!” “I have a stomachache.” “Go to school!” I collected my books and dumped them into my bookbag with my name chalked all over it in different fancy scripts, and left. My mother’s head was out the window: “Aren’t you going to say goodbye?” I kept walking. “Eileen Finnegan,” I heard, “stand up straight!” I looked out of the corner of my eye, head down, at the McIninnies’, shades all pulled, quiet, no hullabaloo, and out of that stinking pigpen would come the four Macs, clean, neat, every corn-silk hair brushed smooth. How could they even, I wondered, find a comb in that rubble? I looked down at my uniform skirt, not visibly stained, but sticky in places. The hem was pinned and my knee socks were slipping down to my ankles. Even my underpants had a loose elastic around the waist. If I didn’t hitch them up high, down they’d come—not all the way down, but drooping, then inching down. Under my schoolbag, propped over my chest, I kept a thumb hooked around both waistbands. I wasn’t going back to change. By mid-morning devotion (“O, Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer you my prayers, works, joys and sufferings—”), I was wide awake, my hand shooting up to answer every question: Bible history, cube root, French and Indian War—didn’t matter. But Sister Magdalen didn’t call on me once. “I know you know,” she said, dismissing my answer to a “thought” question about faith and free will. Luckily, Danny Mac was in none of my Friday classes. He had Sister Ethna; she could control the boys. After lunch and the walk home and back, I was fagged and was resting my head on the desk, when my name was called out. “Miss Finnegan! Wake up, miss. Come up here, please.” Sister Mags sent me to the principal’s office and told me to take a drink at the bubbler and splash my face, while I was at it. I got out of there before I had to hear any remarks about my “home” life and getting the proper rest and nourishment. Why is it, I wondered, that the nuns and priests,

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and whoever was paying attention, thought my family, my house, my standards were low and uncleanly, when the McIninnies, who deserved their scorn and more, were given the benefit of the doubt? Where did we go wrong? That’s what I heard my father say, or think and not say. This was depressing, especially given what I was facing, as family envoy, so instead of going to the principal’s, I left the school through the front door, which no student ever used, and even the nuns used it only on special occasions. I stood on the top step of Mary Queen School, right under the motto, “spes messa in semina,” special mess in the seminary, is what we thought. I looked out—no cars on the street, no priests in the churchyard, no nuns on the walk, no bats in the belfry, no sacristans, no biddies in black, no stray dogs, not even a hunk of newspaper floating down the street. I sat down on the steps—forbidden at all times because of the slovenly look of it. I pulled my uniform skirt over my knees and down to my ankles and tucked it between my legs, in case anybody wanted to see. Who wants to look at the likes of you? I heard myself think. But people do look! That was also true. My next thought was: And they’re more interested if it’s something you’re trying to hide. But there were other reasons, too. I was deep into these reasons when the monsignor’s car, a black Buick bought new last Easter with cash (my father’s words every time the subject came up), wheeled around the corner and stopped. “Hey, little girl,” I heard, but there was a certain curl of thought just out of my reach and I wanted to get nearer, because then, something mysterious might add up. “Miss?” I heard and soon the monsignor, a big man, was clunking up the steps in his black shoes. “Do the sisters know you’re out here?” I took a moment to think, but the lie was already there on the tip of my tongue. “Yes, Father.” He thought a minute. “Are you in detention?” “No,” I said. He kicked something off his shoe and looked at his watch, then shook down his cuffs. “I’ve gotta go. Are you all right?” “Yeah.” “I’m off to the Veterans’ Hospital.” “Oh, yeah? Why?” I said, although you were never supposed to ask a priest (or nun) an idle question. “Why?” he repeated. He looked once at the rectory door, as if he expected to see someone he knew. “Visit the sick,” he said. “Bring them Communion?” I said, “the last rites?” “Not today,” he said. “Just a visit. I go on Fridays. I know some guys up there. Is your father a veteran?” “Yup.” “Well, I gotta go now, little miss. I’ll be late. Why don’t you go back in now? It’s almost time to go home. They’ll be missing you now, won’t they?” I looked at him. I often thought you could tell better what people were thinking if they wore glasses because things were reflected in the glass, but the monsignor’s face was empty, maybe just a little impatient. His hand was in his pocket shaking his keys. “Will you be all right?” he said. “Yes, Father,” I said. “You want me to walk you back in there? That way,” he said, winking, “they won’t kill you for disappearing.” “They won’t kill me,” I said, winking back. “Don’t worry. So long, Father.” “Shall I give you my blessing?” “Aren’t you getting late?” I said. He looked at me, and I looked back. “You’re a real little wisecracker, aren’t you?” he said. “Run along now, before I lose my temper.” But I didn’t. I watched him drive away and only then did I stand up, dust off my skirt, and open the big glass door. It was quiet and smelled of wax and furniture polish, dust and poster paints and old milk, paper bags and winter coats and radiator fluid; the nuns always had their own smell, especially in summer. I stood there in the “vestibule” until all the bells went off, then I snuck down the side of the corridor, merging with the lines of marching students. Everyone saw, but no one squealed. I waited for my own class to file out and squeezed between Mary Eddy and Geraldine Makem. I didn’t have books, bag, assignment pad, but I didn’t care. I was all set, because out there on the steps, talking to Msgr. Cavanaugh, and even before talking

to him, something had come to me. No matter what happened, I was the one with the date.

t was after supper and everyone but Nana and Daddy was in my room pestering me. I still had spoolies in my hair. Underneath my bathrobe and slip were a training bra and panty girdle borrowed from Mumma to help me fit into Maddy’s straight skirt with the kick pleat. The ironed blouse was hanging on a doorknob with a little ribbon tie that matched the skirt. I was sweating bullets and my face was gleaming from the beauty mask that Maddy had smeared on and peeled off. She was applying lipstick (a color my father wouldn’t see as I was slipping out the door), then she coated my eyelashes with vaseline and I rubbed it in. “Eye!” she screamed. “Now your eyes are all red!” I looked in the mirror and they were, or one was. “Get the witch hazel,” said Mumma, and Shrimp ran to the bathroom. Things settled down. I stepped into the skirt—it fit just right if I sucked in my breath—tucked in the blouse and tied the ribbon under the collar, but Mad slapped my hands away and tied it herself. Everyone was quiet. “You must be on pins and needles,” Mumma said. “You should feel her hands,” said Mad. “Ice cold and yick!” she said, as I placed one of them on her neck. “Are you all set?” my father said, cracking the door to peek in. He was driving me, but the whole family was going along, even Nana. No one wanted to miss it. Dad whistled (“Is that my little girl?”) and other things embarrassing but predictable, and Mad sprayed me with “toilet water”—that’s what they call it. I had forgotten my shoes. Back they went in a mob to fetch them. I walked down the stairs and stopped at the window. “Keep going!” They were all behind me, but I pointed to the McIninny house, still shaded. We were all quiet. We looked, but nothing happened. And there was no sign that anything was going to happen. “Doesn’t matter,” my mother said. “Keep your chin up.” “And act like a lady!” my father chimed in. Maddy whispered in my ear to remember not to let his arm dip below the waist, or he might feel the girdle. “Yeah, I know,” I said. What they didn’t know was no dances were planned between Danny and me. I was on my own. They dropped me off at the curb in front of a mob of kids. A line was forming, so long I had to walk halfway around the school to find the end of it. A Christian Brother was monitoring a straggly group, nervous boy and girl and two older girls, 16 or 17—why would they even want to go? The brother in cassock was standing alone with his back to the hedge. I lined up behind the older girls. They were just immature enough to turn their backs and fold in their shoulders, as if I might angle my way into their group. Their voices were low, but I could still hear. “Is that Mary Queen,” I heard behind me, “that you go to? My sister went there.” It was the brother. “And so did my mother and my aunt.” “Good evening, Brother,” I said. The girls turned, but rotated back when the male voice was who they’d forgotten was standing there. Where do you live? What does your father do? All this and more he wanted to know, but soon the line was moving. He had gone to St. Pete’s for high, then entered the CBs. We walked around the edge of the campus together. He was young—I could tell—and had two brothers, one a Jesuit and another a Christian Brother, farther along. His sister was a nun. “The whole family!” I said, less polite than I should have been to the cloth, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Yup. My mother cried every time, and with me, the baby of the family, they had to put her up in Butler, she had such a case of nerves.” “And you still went?” He didn’t answer. He was a step behind me and then two steps. Some other kids had come along, dropped off or just walked, and they tread the sidewalk behind me. It took an hour to make it to the door where, on one side, they collected the dollar fifty, and on the other, checked IDs and pinned an orange cardboard circle to the school blazers. I was in, and so was the baby of the family; right behind me. I’d never seen the inside of this school and I stopped to look at a classroom— brown paneling, light green walls, crucifix, and clock. “Do you want to see my homeroom?” I heard.

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“I’m supposed to meet some kids,” I said. “Just friends,” I said, “and it’s so crowded. But maybe after?” I added, and he looked relieved. Who wants to be snubbed by a kid? He said where his posts were. He had to keep moving between two and sometimes three spots. Would I remember? I said yes, and he turned—to take up the first spot, I thought—but instead he went downstairs. After a half-hour of circling, I bumped into Danny Mac near the bandstand. Hardly anyone was dancing: it was early. “Hey, Finnegan,” he said. “Hi, Danny.” “Pinky couldn’t make it,” he said. “She couldn’t?” “So I don’t need your jacket after all. You can keep it on.” I had already taken it off, although the plan had been to remove it in the girls’ room and toss it out the window. No one was supposed to remove the blazer “with school insignia” while on the property. “You can put it back on. Here,” he said, holding it for me. “How’s the family?” he said, right into my ear. “Fine. How are the McIninnies?” He smiled to hear how I said it. “We’re all fine. You wanna dance?” I didn’t think I’d heard right, and I was on the brink of saying what? excuse me? please? or come again? as my father would say, when I felt his hand on my back and leading me to a corner of a dance floor slowly filling with couples. “Blue Velvet” by Bobby Vinton, a slow song. I was taller than Danny but he was bulkier. It was just the one dance—he had other plans for a Friday night, with or without Pinky, and only a fraction of this fun would be had at a boy-girl dance at St. Pete’s, or at least that’s the impression he gave me. I wasn’t really listening. I was doing four things: feeling the print of his hand on my waist, especially when he pulled me in tight and I could feel the shape of his belt buckle, if I let my stomach relax to meet it. There was also the feel and smell of his school jacket shoulder with him in it and—last of all, only for a few minutes, but enough to remember till I graduated and had something else to replace it—the touch of that smooth, pure McIninny skin on my cheek, jaw and, sometimes, neck. Danny Mac said he was dog tired and was just going to rest his head on my blazer shoulder, but I could feel lips on my neck and from there a wire shot to everywhere else— electric but also something cozy as sleep. When he lifted his head, he told me a joke. Two minutes later, the brothers had to pull us apart—not my friend, but an older one and another who knew Danny Mac. But before they got there, the McIninnies and the Finnegans from across the street were one unit, one slowmoving ball. Where did Finnegan begin and McIninny end? At the end of the song (the longest I’d ever heard, but also the shortest), and before the brother landed on us, Danny Mac put both lips on my hot cheek and kissed it. When I tried to return the favor, he told me another joke, then said, you’re a good kid, Eileen Finn you’re all right. I needed to sit down so I picked my way through the corridor pairs and groups and was about to fall down the marble steps when I grabbed the railing (was I going to be sick?) and then leaned against the wall. Little by little, I made my way to the basement where I knew Cokes would be sold for a quarter apiece. I bought an orange Nehi and flung myself into a chair. Just sitting at a high-school boy’s desk was a thrill and the sweet soda bubbling down my throat reminded me of where I had been and with whom. I put my head down on the desk; I wanted to cry and ease some of it out of my system when I heard a chair scraping and a body hurling itself down. Behind my eyelids, I could see myself in a gown; the Finnegans on one side of the church, the Macs on the other. All seven Finns would—from that day forward—parade across the street and on Friday, every Friday, the door would open and everything the McIninnies had behind the walls of their house—the things we could sometimes see and hear from all the way across the street: the jokes, the ice clinking in glasses, the roars of laughter, the party-perfect Mac living room with the rubble ranged behind closed doors—would be ours. I looked up. The brother was there, of course, baby of the family, and for a minute, I thought he, too, had been invited to the McIninnies. I smiled at him, and then I burst into tears.

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Live Green at Overlook Clipper Mill.

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Jones Falls Expressway (I-83) south to Cold Spring Lane, exit 9A. Make a left onto Cold Spring Lane, a right onto Falls Road, a right at Union Avenue, a right onto Clipper Road and a left onto Clipper Park Road.

Back home, where the baby and another brother drove me and rang the bell to deliver me, I was sent upstairs, but came right back down. The brothers couldn’t explain what had happened when asked. “Maybe she was overheated,” the baby said. “It’s a warm night.” “Calm down,” my mother said, bringing me a St. Joseph’s orange aspirin and water. “Quiet down now.” “I don’t want to quiet down,” I felt like saying. I never wanted to quiet down again. The brothers took off: evening prayers and lights out and maybe they had to clean up after the canteen dance—bottle caps and cupcake papers, and put all the chairs back in the assembly hall. “Go to bed now,” my mother said. “You’re overtired.” And here was Maddy coming home from her date. I knew it was Maddy because my mother rushed over to flick on the porch light before they had settled on the steps for something Maddy would have to confess on Saturday. The surprise was no one tattled to Maddy, who’d never let me live it down about crying like a baby and being driven home by the Christian Brothers half an hour before my father was set to pick me up. Not a word was said. A first. Instead we all sat down in the den. Even Nana came down in robe and slippers with Shrimp in tow, who left my grandmother’s custody to climb on my mother’s lap, and no lip from my father either. We were at peace, why? I was going to figure out why, but Maddy was plying me with questions. And my mother wanted to know too, now that the crisis was past. What was it like? What was it like? I closed my eyes, but there was no wedding in there. Just the goofy face of the baby telling why he’d become a brother and not a priest, as if—at that moment—I cared! He’d become a brother because, although he had a vocation, he didn’t know how much of one; the brotherhood was something in between, but closer to the laity. It’s easier to leave, he’d said, it’s not as final a vow. Had I studied theology in school yet, did I understand the difference? he asked me. I said I thought I did. But Maddy and Mumma wouldn’t want to hear any of this, so I told them the clean joke. (The second one had embarrassed even me.) “Big deal,” said Maddy. “He told you a joke. Was it worth all that trouble?” “He has a vocation,” I said. “That’s what he told me. He wanted to go to a dance with a girl before he gave all that up.” “Get outta here!” Maddy said. “Yes, he does,” I said. “He’s entering right after high.” “Why did he pick you, then?” “He liked me.” “What good is it if he’s going to become a priest?” “He’s not a priest yet.” “That’s a sacrilege!” I could have gone on, but something about this conversation was irritating my father. It was one thing to get an invite from a McIninny, but another (I could read his mind on this one) to make too big a deal of it. My mother might have pelted me with a few more questions, but she was tired. Maddy was hungry and made herself a snack. “Go ahead,” she said, before she left the den, “be selfish. Don’t tell us anything. No one’s interested anyway.” “Leave her alone,” my mother said. “I gotta get this one,” meaning Shrimp, “to bed.” Everyone trailed off to bed. I was still sitting in my chair. “Turn the lights out,” my father said. On the way up to bed, I stopped by the stairway window. Sure enough: Every one of those lights was blazing. Cars were still in front of the house. Maddy was right behind me, taking up most of the room. “Big deal,” she said. “Whatever it was, big deal.” After I washed my face and brushed my teeth and read a magazine in the bathroom—“Put that light out!” my father yelled—I went back to the window. The lights were out. Even the McIninnies were asleep. I sat on the steps, so low down that all I could see with my head thrown back was the navy blue and speckled sky. ■

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urbanite marketplace

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eye to eye

I recently visited Dennis Farber in his studio and was astounded by how his work ranges: from a photo-based painting that I would have liked to make off with (County Fair), to re-photographed drawings from vintage children’s books and new honeycomb metal works that need a three-dimensional environment in order to be understood. But there were also large Polaroids, made while the artist was in New York in the ’90s—images that just wouldn’t let go. Like tunes you can’t get out of your head, these stayed in the corners of mine, waiting for renewed attention. This one, in particular—an inverted doll’s head, simply photographed—just wouldn’t be dismissed. Perhaps an important aspect of art in general is this insistent quality. Farber teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art. His work is in important private and museum collections. This spring his work will be part of the Critics’ Residency at Maryland Art Place. —Alex Castro

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Dennis Farber Vessel 1990 Polaroid (Polacolor) print 20 x 24 inches

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each installed Pella® replacement window, patio door or entry door*

FREE

OR PROFESSIONAL PREFINISHING*

NO PAYMENTS AND NO INTEREST FOR 6 MONTHS! * PLUS

Get it done now!

866-211-3781 www.kc-pella.com

Pella Window & Door Showrooms — K.C. Company, Inc. Annapolis • Beltsville • Bethesda • Easton • Falls Church Frederick • Lewes • Salisbury • Timonium

* Does not apply to Pella Impervia®, ThermaStar by Pella® or ProLine® products. Other restrictions may apply. See store for details. Must be installed by Pella professionals. Not valid with any other offer or promotion. Valid for replacement projects only. Financing available to qualified customers only. Prior sales excluded. Minimum purchase of 4 windows. The Pella Windows and Doors Visa card is issued by Wells Fargo Financial National Bank. Special terms of 6 months’ no-payments/no-interest option will apply to purchases charged with approved credit using your Pella Windows and Doors Visa line of credit. No payments are required during the option period. The no-interest option means there is no interest if your purchase is paid in full within 6 months after the date of purchase; otherwise, interest accrues from date of purchase at the APR for purchases using your Pella Windows and Doors Visa card line of credit, which is 25.4%. The standard APR for transactions using your Visa line of credit will be 13.4%. If you do not pay the total minimum payment when due, the APR for transactions using your Visa line of credit will be 25.4%. All APRs given are as of 01/01/08. All APRs may vary. If you use your card for cash advances, the cash advance fee is 3% of the amount of the cash advance, but not less than $10. MHIC #38731 Offer ends 03/31/08. © 2008 Pella Corporation