March 2011

a f t e r t h e D R U G wa r · F I REH O U S E RE D U X · HA U TE V E G A N C U I S I N E m a r c h 2 011 i s s u e n o . 81

check

out our redesign

Baltimore?

W ho’s

maki

ng it h a ppe n

in

six locals whose ideas about music, urban youth, technology, health, & government will transform the way you look at the city

TRANSLATiNg iDEAS

iNTO ACTiON!

Andrea Sommer Owner of Ladybugs & Fireflies in Federal Hill

The Charm City Circulator reminds me of other popular resort attraction buses—except on the CCC, the drivers and riders are very friendly. Personally, it has encouraged me to visit more city attractions such as the Farmers’ Market, Fells Point and to see the Mt. Washington Tree Lighting. As a small business owner, I have noticed groups of people coming into my store from the Baltimore Convention Center. It has opened up the city for me—anything that makes it easy for people to ride and move beyond the harbor is a very real benefit.

Elaine Tucker CCC rider, Baltimore City Resident and Downtown Employee

I ride the Charm City Circulator every day to get to work. It’s always on time with a few delays due to the road construction.

Prior to riding the CCC, I used to pay using another system. A lot of people can’t afford to pay and I think it’s a good thing for Baltimore. It’s also very convenient. The drivers are always friendly and say “hi” to you. I’ve noticed that a lot of the riders are going to and from work. I always feel safe riding!

April Moran and daughter, Erin Moran CCC rider and Baltimore City Resident

I really appreciate the convenience of taking the Charm City Circulator with my children. Not only is it convenient and FREE, but it also serves as an adventure for my children. They really enjoy riding the CCC and it makes travel convenient when they are tired of walking. I feel safe riding it and will frequent the Harborplace Mall more often because of this service!

Amy Holloman CCC rider, Baltimore City Resident and Downtown Employee

The Charm City Circulator was one of the reasons I relocated in Mt. Vernon. I work downtown, and the Circulator is a convenient and FREE service that takes me from my home straight to work. I like to read during my commute and the CCC offers me a clean and comfortable environment to do that. The bus is open and airy. The drivers are always friendly, and answer questions and give directions as needed.

They also always greet you when you’re coming and going. The stops are all clearly marked and the maps are easy to use. I have also downloaded the iPhone app and have enjoyed using it was well!

Bill Millar Repeat Baltimore City Tourist

I found out about the Charm City Circulator from your booth at the Baltimore Convention Center. I come to Baltimore every four to five years for the soccer coaches’ convention. I was really surprised to hear that the CCC was FREE. I think it’s a great way to connect tourists to the sights of the city. Because the CCC is available, a few of the convention attendees and I rode to Harbor East for lunch at an Irish Pub we heard about. I really feel Baltimore has improved over the last 17 years and I think the CCC is a big part of that growth and improvement.

For more information visit

www.CharmCityCirculator.com

STEPHANIE RAWLINGS-BLAKE MAYOR

this month

#81 March 2011

features 31

about the cover:

departments 43

7

keynote

11

The Change Maker

13

interview by Marc Steiner Ashoka founder Bill Drayton on the power of turning simple ideas into action.

Editor’s Note What You’re Saying What You’re Writing Don’t Miss The Goods

17 19

——

Photo by J.M. Giordano

baltimore observed

35

23 Exit Strategy

by Michael Corbin The drug war is officially over, but the search for an intelligent post-war strategy goes on.

Keys to the City

by Greg Hanscom, Donna M. Owens, & Al Shipley Six people who have unlocked secrets for making change from the bottom up.

25 Urbanite Online 27 Urbanite Project

—— poetry 49 Phaeton

by Ishion Hutchinson

—— 23

space 51 Grand Illusion

by Brennen Jensen A formal Federal Hill facade hides a contemporary interior.

—— food + drink 57 Spice and Virtue

by Tracey Middlekauff High-minded eating in an age of upscale veganism and responsible butchery

real estate

43 Silver Lining

web extras

more online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com Michael Corbin on the ecology of addiction Real estate by the numbers

on the air

Urbanite on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 fm March 3: The full interview with Bill Drayton March 9: Change makers from this month’s feature story March 21: Mark Kleiman on a postdrug-war strategy

by Will Morton The home-buying glory days of the aughts are gone, but a look behind the numbers reveals that city neighborhoods have held on to much of what they gained.

61 Dining Reviews 63 Wine & Spirits 61

—— arts + culture 65 Lost in the Crowd

by Michael Yockel A local writer on belonging, and not belonging, at home and abroad.

67 Music 69 Theater 69 Film

—— 71 The Scene —— 78 Eye to Eye Urbanite #81 march 2011 5

issue 81: march 2011 publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com general manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-in-chief Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com managing editor Marianne K. Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-at-large David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com online editors food/drink: Tracey Middlekauff Tracey@urbanitebaltimore.com arts/culture: Cara Ober Cara@urbanitebaltimore.com proofreader Robin T. Reid

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contributing writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Heather Dewar, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Michelle Gienow, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac editorial intern Breena Siegel production manager Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com designer Kristian Bjørnard Kristian@urbanitebaltimore.com staff photographer J.M. Giordano Joe@urbanitebaltimore.com production interns Angela Ahn, Amie Bingaman, Elizabeth Cole, Ed Gallagher senior account executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com advertising sales/events coordinator Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com jane of some trades Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com creative director emeritus Alex Castro founder Laurel Harris Durenberger — Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, 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 2010, Urbanite llc. All rights reserved.

Urbanite (issn 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, md 21211.

Urbanite is a certified Minority Business Enterprise.

H E A LT H & F I T N E S S

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bottom photo by Marjan Zab; top photo by elizaBeth Cole; photo of greg hanscom by j.m. giordano

contributors

editor’s note

Will Morton wrote his first newspaper article at 18 at The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Virginia. He spent eight years in New York City as a newspaper reporter, a journalism student, and a wire service copy editor. Since moving to Baltimore County in 2004, Morton has spent most of his waking hours raising his two children, now ages 5 and 7½. He occasionally freelances and writes the B-More Dad blog at www.bemoredad.com. For this issue, Morton wrote about which city neighborhoods have kept their value during the recession (p. 43). “Writing about Baltimore real estate makes me miss the energy of living in the city,” he says, “but I found a rowhouse neighborhood with good schools and great neighbors, so I’m happy.”

Editorial intern Breena Siegel is a 2010 graduate of Earlham College, where she majored in social science, minored in journalism, and dabbled in photography and dance. Originally from the suburbs of Boston, Siegel is a recent transplant to Washington, D.C., and since her arrival has taken up break-dancing.

She is a passionate traveler, having lived in both India and Romania. When not typing away for Urbanite, she is exploring the charms of D.C. and Baltimore.

Greg Hanscom

when i arrived at this magazine a little over three years ago, the air in Baltimore was full of possibilities. Developers were busy turning the city’s derelict mills and factories into glittering urban oases, with shops and apartments and a sheen of youth and vigor more reminiscent of bigger, more well-to-do towns. Economic development schemes were being writ large across the urban landscape.

Those glory days are gone, as anyone who has read the powerful recent Daily Record series about the ruined plans in East Baltimore can attest.

But this city is no stranger to adversity. Hard times have inspired some of our best work. And the good days left a lasting mark on this city, one that we can build on if we are plucky and visionary and tireless.

Ideas abound for how we can push Baltimore forward. But how do we translate those ideas into action? That is the question that drives this issue.

We start the conversation with an interview with Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka, an institution that funds “social entrepreneurs” who are doing game-changing work around the world (p. 31). Our feature story, “Keys to the City,” features six individuals in the Baltimore area who are turning ideas into action and, in the process, transforming the way we think about music, technology, business, urban youth, health, and government (p. 35).

With this issue, we’re also launching the 2011 Urbanite Project, which follows the same theme. The Urbanite Project, you may recall, was hatched as a grand experiment in creative brainstorming. We handpicked people from a variety of backgrounds, paired them into teams of two, and watched as the brilliant ideas poured forth. This year, as you’ll read on page 27, we’re opening the project to all comers, putting some parameters on what we’re looking for, and offering up $10,000 in prize money to the best proposals. Our mission is to push beyond the pages of this magazine and become more of a force for tangible change.

You’ll also find evidence of this magazine’s evolution in the pages ahead, which debut our new design. The redesign is the product of a long collaboration among many staffers, including editor-at-large David Dudley and longtime creative director Alex Castro. The lion’s share of the credit, however, belongs to designer Kristian Bjørnard, who got locked in a room and charged with translating all of our contradictory ideas into something people would want to pick up and read.

And this brings me to one final variation on the theme of change.

Castro, a partner in the magazine, has stepped back as our creative director in order to concentrate on his own sculpture and architecture.

Also departing is one of Urbanite’s stalwarts, managing editor Marianne Amoss, who will take her considerable wordsmithing skills and creativity to a new job at the interactive Web design agency Fastspot. Finally, this will be Bjørnard’s last issue on staff, as his hands are more than full with other work, including a job as a graphic designer at the Contemporary Museum.

Sad as we are to see them go, we wish them all godspeed. As a wise person once said, “The place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.”

Onward!

Coming next month

can the chesapeake bay be saved?

Tom Horton tackles climate change.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 7

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There’s

BLACK in all of us.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION. What is a man?

What is black? We know you have a lot to say, and we want to experience it through artwork, words, and media.

We want to speak to who we are in the world as individuals and as a collectives society. This is a social learning experiment aimed at identifying issues, creating authentic narratives, and inspiring real change. We want to dig deep, challenge what we think we know and come out on the other side better informed and able to look beyond the surface.

You need not be a practicing artist, or black, or male to participate.

We will accept submissions from anyone who wants to be part of a new narrative on what it means to be black and male.

Feel free to use these media and collectives as a jumping off point to create relevant work.

COLLECTIVES

MEDIA

Poetry Music Visual Arts Photography Printmaking Sculpture Video Dance Performance Art Mixed Media Graffiti Art

Religion Self Race Family Children Gender Education Sexuality Past Present Future Culture

Politics Money Social Class Status Fame Ideas City Global Role Models Health Generations

Submit your art & words to be part of the project. Participate in upcoming performances, exhibitions & events, all kicked-off with a

COMMUNITY CELEBRATION JUNE 26. SAVE THE DATE!

SHARE YOUR TRUTH. JOIN THE CONVERSATION.

www.morethan28days.com

Black Male Identity is a project of Art on Purpose, an organization dedicated to bringing people and communities together to make and share art about issues that matter to them.

Leadership funding is provided by the Open Society Foundations Campaign for Black Male Achievement, a campaign to address the exclusion of large numbers of black men and boys from economic, social, educational, and political life in the United States. This project also made possible by grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, and from the Maryland Humanities Council, through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusion, or recommendations expressed by Art on Purpose do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Maryland Humanities Council.

Urbanite is proud to be a media sponsor of the Black Male Identity Project

liberal arts

MASTER OF

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Our program offers a flexible, part-time format with courses in the evenings and on Saturdays. e

Attend an upcoming open hous Online Tuesday, March 15 7:00- 8:30pm Homewood Campus Thursday, April 7 6:30-7:30pm

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what you’re saying

S ANAT OMY L S R E v I vA L • G R O S AWAY S • j O N E S f A L WINTER BEACH GET OYS T ER CULT URE •

well done I wanted to compliment you and the crew for a tough but attractive February issue.

The story on the Sun could N SU THTWE ITTER SAV E IT? CAN not have been easy. The mills on Jones Falls I have worked with in my professional role; that is an obscure side of Baltimore that many people do not know. Also, I’m looking forward to Baltimore Food Co-op this spring.

Your magazine is more than a photograph, better than a video, even, of our city. You paint and sculpt using rare materials from sources, some famed, some nearly forgotten, to depict, describe, and delineate. This issue and the varied stories made me feel as if I was viewing art on pedestals, strolling at the pace I desired.

—John Behle, Owings Mills

check the facts Greg Hanscom’s January editorial, “Welcome to the News Jungle,” references an enlightening recent study of Baltimore media ecosystem, released by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in January 2010. But he did not note the Pew study’s most disturbing revelation: that in the week of the study, at least 62 percent of the news stories Pew studied in Baltimore originated from government sources.

In one of the six ongoing issues Pew followed that week, the auction of the Senator Theatre, an astounding 94 percent of the news coverage originated from our city government.

As my investigation into City Hall’s ongoing misrepresentations of the Senator issue has revealed, much of what has been reported was erroneous and was clearly never fact-checked by the local dailies, TV news, investigative news sites, or most of the local bloggers. Throughout Baltimore’s media ecosystem, reporting on the Senator has been mostly replication of quotes from City Hall. It is apparent that high city officials have intentionally planted false information, ready to be cited as fact by the careless local media.

The new website NewsTrust Baltimore is very promising in its aim to educate people to activate their critical thinking skills when interacting with the news media. How can anyone begin to adequately question the veracity of the news they receive, however, without first acknowledging the Pew study’s implication that, at least in Baltimore, much of the news amounts to government propaganda?

—Laura Perkins is managing director of Friends of the Senator.

life in prison As one of the 134 lifers wrongfully removed from work release on June 2, 1993, I must respond to the letter printed in the January

issue, “A Life Needlessly Taken,” by Jovita Harris Okonkwo.

Had Rodney Stokes not “taken a life for the third time,” i.e. committed suicide, 134 other lifers wouldn’t have been removed from work release. Had Stokes lived, he’d have gotten either a life without parole sentence and died within fifteen years, according to actuary tables, or a trial and the death penalty. When Stokes killed himself, he deprived society of its desire for vengeance.

Stokes’ actions embarrassed both Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Governor William Donald Schaefer, who pointed fingers at each other.

Since they could not do anything to Stokes, they made political prisoners out of the other 134 work release lifers who hadn’t violated any statute or rule to lose our status. The 134 other work release and pre-release lifers were ready to return to the community. Lifers have the lowest recidivism rates and the most extensive exposure to college and treatment programs. We 134 lifers are, altogether, politically incarcerated for 2,345 years.

Okonkwo’s sister was right in believing that people can earn a second chance in life. But every barrel has a rotten apple. The tragedy is that there was a rotten apple in the barrel of the 134 other lifers who earned a second chance and have been denied by political whim for 17.5 years and counting.

—Douglas Scott Arey, Jessup Correctional Institution from the web

Our January feature, “The Sun Also Rises,” about the impact of Twitter and social media on the Baltimore Sun, has generated lots of buzz. On the just-launched NewsTrust Baltimore website, on which reviewers rate and discuss the quality of news articles, folks had this to say:

This article does more than posit a simple dichotomy between old-style, shoe-leather journalism on the one hand and corporate soullessness on the other. Instead, Mr. Anft deftly shows how younger reporters like Justin Fenton are melding time-honored reporting techniques with new media tools to produce high quality journalism.

Reporters like Fenton, Julie Scharper, Gus Sentementes, and others give me hope for the Sun and the state of American newspaper journalism. The coverage by Fenton and a halfdozen or so other reporters who worked the Hopkins murder/suicide story from a distance “combined a young staff and veterans who used various media in a way that told us the story as it happened.” This is exactly the sort of synthesis that news outlets should be striving for.

—Kevin Griffin Moreno

As someone who is a reporter at the Sun, I think Mr. Anft did a good job of capturing the

current zeitgeist in our newsroom. Reporters have, by and large, embraced different tools and different platforms for committing acts of journalism. Fenton and [fellow crime reporter Peter] Hermann are the most obvious examples because of the crime/breaking news beat, but many others are also embracing social media as a way to make their jobs more efficient and to connect with audiences and potential sources. With the economy improving ever so slowly, Sun staffers feel a little more comfortable that we’re beyond the cost-cutting and job-cutting. Our newsroom is working very hard to do journalism on the desktop Web, the mobile Web, and in print on almost a 24/7 basis. We’re still in the early stages of a new paradigm as journalists and as news consumers. But there’s far more confidence today in our newsroom than there was a year or two ago.

—Gus Sentementes

I believe this story, while interesting and well-written, seems to accept the idea that multi-platform delivery will somehow save journalism. That’s a long way from proven. It may even turn out that work such as Justin Fenton’s great job of live tweeting actually discourages people from buying the paper, because they’ve already gotten the news they wanted. The key question isn’t just how to deliver news effectively, but how to get enough revenue to support a sufficient number of journalists. This isn’t in any way to disparage the need to use new technology to deliver news or to disparage the heroic work of the current Sun staff, but to suggest the story needed to deal more fully with the problem of developing a working business model. Full disclosure: I was a reporter and editor at the Sun for thirty years and currently serve as union representative to the Tribune creditors’ committee.

—Bill Salganik

From Twitter: @billritson: Just finished reading @UrbaniteMD’s article on social media’s role in @baltimoresun operations... GREAT STORY -- Check it out. @sevensixfive: Can @twitter save the @baltimoresun?

Provocative headline from @UrbaniteMD, cover by @bjornmeansbear @Ekwaun: Wow. Good work..@justin_fenton RT @UrbaniteMD Can Twitter save the Baltimore Sun?

We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 11

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what you’re writing Problem Solved

illustration by angela ahn

i stared at the fuchsia juice box in my hand, willing it to multiply. They came in even numbers, so how could I have just one? And why did I wait until 9:30 on a Sunday night to pack lunches? I thought about pulling my sons out of bed and going to the store. I cringed and yanked open the refrigerator door to scan the sparsely stocked shelves for a solution.

“Mom? I need some water.” A voice came from behind the open refrigerator door. I closed it to find my younger son, Matt, who was supposed to be in bed. One hand on my hip, I opened my mouth to scold him for this, his third attempt to boycott bedtime. Instead, my tired brain began to conceive an idea.

“Wait!” I said, the idea gaining hold. “You will drink milk. You can buy milk at school!” My excitement waned as I tried to work out the details of this plan. Matt was in first grade and, as far as I knew, had never touched a school lunch.

He and his older brother, picky eaters one and two, ate bagged lunches every day. Because of this, I had no idea how much school lunch or milk cost, nor did I know the procedure for buying it. Did he buy at the beginning of the day from his teacher? Did he make the purchase at lunchtime in the cafeteria? Could he use cash or did I have to place money on one of those cards they mentioned at Back to School Night?

“Matt, do you know how to buy milk?” I asked in desperation. He rolled his eyes.

“You take the money. You give it to the man.

He gives you milk.”

“Great.” I pulled out my wallet and put $1.50 in a Ziploc bag. “Here’s the money. It’s more than enough. I’m putting it in your lunch box.”

He climbed on a kitchen chair, so his eyes were level with mine. “I’m going to tell you now.

If you give me that money, I won’t buy milk. I’ll buy ice cream. Just so you know.”

—Amy Carr lives in Anne Arundel County with her two sons. Among other things, they provide her with a great deal to write about.

at 11:15 a.m. last October 25, “transfer” became the most important word in my vocabulary.

At the time, I was not aware of this. In fact, I was anesthetized on an operating table at Union Memorial Hospital as a surgeon removed my left leg from above the knee down. My journey from free-moving adult to amputee had begun three weeks earlier with a minor accident—I walked into a metal bed frame and badly bruised the leg—that triggered previously unknown medical conditions, including an aneurysm just above and behind the left knee

that blocked the blood flow through the limb.

Three doctors and twenty-one days later, I was rushed into Union Memorial with a calf as cold and white as death. Gangrene developed.

Having no time to prepare for this lifealtering event, I had not read any of the literature on amputation or talked to amputees. I had walked on two legs for 61 years. I had no idea what to expect.

I am not the “woe is me” type. I am/was determined to live life as I had before the amputation at least as much as could be humanly achieved minus three-quarters of a leg. After a week in the hospital, I was sent to Harford Gardens Rehab Center where, over fifteen days, the occupational and physical therapy staff taught me how to bathe, groom, and dress myself. But the most important lesson was the “transfer”— getting from a bed or chair to the wheelchair or vice versa. I begin by raising myself up on my good leg and pivoting. After steadying myself for balance, I ease myself into the desired destination.

Even before I was out of rehab, I was “escaping” to theaters and restaurants in the evening.

Immediately, my friends and I learned that simple “raised entrances” and “single step” foyers might as well be the Himalayas when it comes to getting a wheelchair over them.

You (unless you’re in a wheelchair or close to someone who is) would be shocked at how many public places do not have ramps despite the Americans with Disabilities Act. My solution: For those business entrances with multiple steps, I just spend my money elsewhere. For those with one or two steps, I wheel my chair right to the step or entrance. I have a chair from inside brought to the door. I “transfer” from the wheelchair to the chair, and then my wheelchair is passed over my head. I

“hop” the chair until I have turned 180 degrees and then “transfer” back to the wheelchair so I can proceed to my table.

Two months and fifteen restaurants later, it’s “problem solved” 100 percent.

—Joe Challmes is a former Sun reporter who works as a freelance writer.

“funny story,” said Andy, our interpreter, looking out over the rooftops of Iraq.

“This place reminds me of my sister’s house. Her husband, he built it, and he built it facing west, toward Mecca. It was the only house on their street that didn’t face the street. Day and night, she would bitch : ‘ I want a house that faces the street.’ Then, last summer, when there was fighting, my sister and her family, they fled.

The insurgents used the house for a base. So then the Americans bombed the house from a plane. When my sister came back, the house was destroyed. Just rubble. And she was crying and crying, ‘My house, my house,’ and I said, ‘What’re you crying for? Now you can build your house facing the street!’”

—Vinnie Lyman did two tours in Iraq with the 101st Airborne. He teaches in West Baltimore.

mr. james, my neighbor, was hopping mad at the kids who vaulted over his fence and stole tomatoes from his backyard. One morning, he made a fake security camera by spraying a milk carton with black paint and gluing a glass marble into a bottle cap for a lens. After screwing it above his back door, he said, “Looks real. It’ll scare ’em off.” That afternoon, the kids stole every tomato and his fake camera, too.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 13

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3

Trixie, another neighbor, had better luck keeping kids off her property. A mesh fence topped with a round iron railing surrounded her backyard. After school, kids leaned on the fence and mashed it while they yakked, smoked, and cussed. Some kids sat on the railing and dangled their feet into her prize rose bushes. “I don’t want to yell at them and become a target,” she said. While they were in school, she smeared Vaseline on the mesh and along the railing. The kids frowned at the greasy smudges on their pants and skirts. They moved on and never returned.

I live in a corner rowhouse with five marble steps. Nearby, several stores and fast food joints cater to the school kids. On their way home, they started gathering on my stoop and leaving scraps of food, paper wrappers, soda bottles, metal tabs, plastic spoons, straws, and wads of chewed gum. I considered making a no-loitering sign or gluing thumbtacks on the edge of each step. Like Trixie, I didn’t want to rile the kids and become a target. I had to figure out something clever. My neighbors inspired me.

I used to make pottery and searched my basement for clay. I pinched out a handful of brown lumps and arranged them on the marble steps. “Fake,” I whispered to Mr. James and Trixie. “Not even a dumb kid will sit next to dog poop.”

—Rick Shelley teaches mosaic-making at the Creative Alliance and the American Visionary Art Museum. He has written a collection of short stories based on the eccentric characters he has known in Baltimore.

“What You’re Writing” is the place

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

Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@ urbanitebaltimore.com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic Deadline Publication Growing Pains March 7,2011 May 2011 Summer Nights April 11, 2011 June 2011 Water May 9, 2011 July 2011

Urbanite #81 march 2011 15

Baltimore

April 15 - 17, 2011 Baltimore Convention Center

Justin Kauffman

Friday 4-8 • Saturday 10-6 • Sunday 10-5 Adults $10

Looking for something special?

Come see what these talented craftsmen have for sale, order or commission!

There is a wide range of styles and materials furniture & accessories for every room of your home from city condo to country estate!

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Gary Keener

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Arnold d’Epagnier

Tree Theory

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images (clockwise from top left): © Salahudin | Dreamstime.com; Courtesy of Edmar CastaÑeda; courtesy of Geof Oppenheimer; courtesy of Kirikou And The Wild Beast; no credit; © Serguei Bachlakov | Dreamstime.com

don’t miss 2

3

6

5

1

4

1 March 5 & 6

5 March 19, 8 p.m.

arts/culture

The African Film Festival Traveling Series makes its annual stop at the Baltimore Museum of Art March 5 and 6. The critically acclaimed features and shorts, all with English subtitles, include the documentary Guew Bi, about the street-corner drumming and dance parties popular in Senegal, and the feature film Shirley Adams, about a single mother struggling to care for her paraplegic son, Donovan. $10, students $5, members free Baltimore Museum of Art 10 Art Museum Dr. 443-573-1700 www.artbma.org

2 March 10, 7:15 p.m. green/sustainable

Learn the basics of beekeeping at a course led by the Central Maryland Beekeepers Association at Oregon Ridge. Class begins March 10 and runs for four subsequent Thursdays, with a Saturday class on April 9. Call 410-562-3464 to register. $30 individuals, $35 families Oregon Ridge Nature Center 13555 Beaver Dam Rd. 410-887-1815 www.oregonridge.org

Food/drink

3 march 12, 3 p.m. arts/culture

Colombian folk harpist Edmar Castañeda and his trio perform their unorthodox blend of Latin jazz, bebop, and Colombian music at Evergreen Museum and Library, which calls Castañeda “a master at realizing beautiful complexities of time, while skillfully drawing out lush colors and a dynamic spirit.” $20, members $15, students $10 Evergreen Museum and Library 4545 N. Charles St. 410-516-0341 www.museums.jhu.edu

4 March 13, 2 p.m. community

For more than fifty years, Irish dancers and musicians, bands from local schools, and more march through Mount Vernon for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Runners take to the streets beforehand for the Shamrock 5K. Parade begins at the Washington Monument www.irishparade.net

Alton Brown will talk about his award-winning cookbooks and experiences on the Food Network shows Good Eats and Iron Chef America at the second annual Foodie Experience. All attendees have access to post-show tastings of food from area restaurants; VIP ticket-holders can attend a reception and cooking demonstration with Brown. $94, VIPs $250 Hippodrome Theatre 12 N. Eutaw St. 410-547-SEAT www.france-merrickpac.com

6 through may 1 Arts/culture

In Agitated Histories, the latest exhibit at the Contemporary, six artists both challenge and draw inspiration from history. They include Ulrike Müller, who creates performances, videos, and activist interventions that explore female identity and the history of feminism.

Suggested donation $5, students $3 Contemporary Museum 100 W. Centre St. 410-783-5720 www.contemporary.org

For more events, see the Scene on page 71.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 17

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the goods

what ’s new in style, shopping, & beyond

Local Flavor

tracey middlekauff

images (clockwise from left): photo by j.m. giordano; no credit; photo by Cynthia Grim

Federal Hill Cooks! is an eclectic collection of more than two hundred local and family recipes from the South Baltimore peninsula. The brainchild of Jane Seebold, executive director of Federal Hill Main Street, the project was conceived last June as a way to promote her beloved corner of town.

Each recipe comes with a personal story or anecdote from the contributor, revealing the way that food memories are integral to a sense of place and neighborhood connectedness. Along with residents, well-known neighborhood restaurants, including Corks, Matsuri, and Bluegrass Tavern, also give up the secrets to some of their most popular dishes.

Sudsed Up What’s Old is New Again

amelia blevins

Local fashionistas Pam Haner and Erin Fitzgibbons launched Salome Vintage (www.salomevintage.com) this past October as an online hub for vintage apparel and accessories. The duo curate Salome’s selection of men and women’s clothing, shoes, jewelry, and bags based on what’s in fashion right now. “Erin and I both really love clothes. We love watching the runway shows,” Haner says. “The trends get ingrained in what you’re buying.”

Salome ships anywhere in the country; see the website for spring arrivals.

amelia blevins Barbara Stratton can’t handle the fragrance in mass-market soaps, so she makes her own. Her Baltimore Soaps come in more than forty all-natural, made-from-scratch varieties and are affectionately named for local people and places, like Duff’s Scruff Beer Shaving Soap, after the Charm City Cakes owner. It’s made with Abita Purple Haze Raspberry Wheat Brew, which Stratton says helps work up a strong lather, and clay, which provides a good amount of slip. Purchase Baltimore Soaps from Etsy (http://etsy.com/people/baltimoresoaps), Zeke’s Coffee retail shop (4607 Harford Rd.; 410-254-0122; www.zekescoffee.com), or the Woman’s Industrial Exchange (333 N. Charles St.; 410-685-4388; www. womansindustrialexchange.org).

Urbanite #81 march 2011 19

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Best of Baltimore: Thrift Store Monday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm 1835 Washington Blvd, Baltimore 410-837-8081 www.deboistextiles.com

Visit our Thrift Corner all under $10 Winter ClearanCe!

Photos (clockwise from left): photo by Melissa Moore; photo by Amie Bingaman; Courtesy of bambeco

the goods

Inside Out

amelia blevins

Go Get ’Em

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Local musician, installation artist, and designer Melissa Moore is turning her attention to lighting with Nikkuu Design (pronounced nee-koo). Her line of handmade clear acrylic/industrial lamps, chandeliers, and hybrid furnishings, such as the pictured seating/lighting combo Stuups (which also boasts a cup holder), plays up “the utilitarian aspect of things, letting people see how things are made,” as Moore puts it. Check out her expanding line of products at http://nikkuudesign.com.

Made With Love

amelia blevins

In December, HeARTwares (3512 Keswick Rd.; 410-366-2054) opened up in Hampden to sell artwork, home accessories, jewelry, and gifts made by students and volunteers with community arts nonprofit Art with a Heart. “When they see the public admiring what they’ve created and then even purchasing what they’ve created, they have an incredible sense of pride and accomplishment,” says Art with a Heart Executive Director Randi Pupkin. Kids in Art with a Heart’s programs also work at the store, learning the ropes of working retail. Go to www.artwithaheart. net/heartwares.html for hours and information about public workshops.

Now that the weather’s warming up (kinda), treat your best friend to a muddy game of fetch with Bambeco’s 30 Love Eco Balls. Made of natural rubber and covered in heavy-duty felt, the tennis balls come in small and large sizes (2 and 2.5 inches) and four cheerful colors.

The metal carrying buckets can be personalized. Available at www. bambeco.com.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 21

Loring Cornish

DID YOU KNOW THAT:

In Each Other’s Shoes

- The number of facial cosmetic procedures has risen 45% over the last 2 years*?

- Dr. Ira Papel and Dr. Theda Kontis are Board Certified experts in Facial Plastic Surgery specializing in both surgical and nonsurgical treatments for facial enhancement?

February 13, 2011 to July 17, 2011

You are invited to attend an OPEN HOUSE to “Meet and Greet” Dr. Papel and Dr. Kontis at our office on Thursday,April 28, 6-8pm.

Space is Limited. RSVP: 410.486.3400

(*survey data from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, January, 2011)

Ira D. Papel, M.D., F.A.C.S. Theda C. Kontis, M.D., F.A.C.S. Board Certified: The American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

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WWW.FACIAL-PLASTICSURGERY.COM 22 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

15 Lloyd Street Baltimore, MD 21202 410.732.6400 jewishmuseummd.org

baltimore observed

Photo by J.M. Giordano

feature / urbanite online / urbanite project

Exit Strategy

The drug war is officially over, but the search for an intelligent post-war drug strategy goes on. seventeen-year-old Sadiq decides to change the choreography of today’s dance.

He will hold the gel-caps of rock cocaine and heroin along with a few E-pills in his hand rather than stash them behind a small pile of bricks dislodged Michael Corbin from the rowhouse michael corbin is a former that adjoins this West city school teacher and Baltimore alleyway. He prison educator and presently a teacher of trusts his 14-year-old adjudicated youth. brother, a block up, to keep him safe, to look out. “This is more dangerous, ’cause if the knockers roll down on us, I’m holdin’. But this is quicker … Serving

hand-to-hand to the fiends,” he says with a boyish smile.

Customers in cars and on foot and from all social stations keep him busy. Between 6 and 11 a.m., he nets $850, which he rolls up tightly with a rubber band and palms into his hoodie pocket.

It’s Monday morning, a bright, fall day, and this West Baltimore alley is a scene in the abiding local pas de trios of retail merchant, his customers, and the de facto business regulators, “the knockers”—the police—in what the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates conservatively as the $400 billion

This is the second installment in a year-long series about the criminal justice system. For the full series, see www.urbanitebaltimore.com.

annual global business in illicit drugs. No other single issue so powerfully informs the public imagination of crime in Baltimore and urban America than the commerce in getting high.

And no other crime-fighting effort expends so much to such little effect.

Today in America, more than half a million people are locked up on nonviolent drug charges, while 1.9 million incarcerated Americans are “substance involved” (i.e., were under the influence of alcohol or other drugs at the time of their offense, stole money to buy drugs, are substance abusers, and/or violated alcohol or drug laws), according to the National Center Urbanite #81 march 2011 23

table: Baltimore City Police Department

37%

40,000 14.5%

223

1985

The decline in arrests made in Baltimore City since 2005

The number of fewer arrests this decline has caused

Homicides in Baltimore City in 2010

The last time the city saw fewer homicides than in 2010

The decline in violent crime in Baltimore City since 2005

on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Yet despite locking up an astonishing number of people and turning parts of many cities into quasi-militarized zones, we have managed to change the availability of drugs very little over the last thirty years.

Prices have gone down and purity up.

Officially, at least, there is acknowledgement that the old policies have failed. “I ended the war on drugs,” proclaimed President Barack Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, when visiting Baltimore last summer. Baltimore’s police commissioner, Frederick Bealefeld, says he has moved on as well: “I’m not trying to win the drug war,” he said last spring. “I’m out to win the war on violence.”

The change in rhetoric has led to tentative changes in policy and practice. Congress last year changed the 25-year-old law mandating that a person convicted of crack cocaine possession get the same mandatory prison term as someone with 100 times the amount of powder cocaine—a policy whose “disparate racial impact,” former Drug Enforcement Administration head Asa Hutchinson testified dryly to Congress, fundamentally undermines “the integrity of our judicial system.” Now the ratio is 1 to 18. And locally, Baltimore police have arrested thousands fewer people over the last four years, targeting fewer criminals while tolerating more of the city’s retail drug commerce.

Yet despite the shifts in laws and policing, we still struggle to define a post-drug-war America. We do less warring now, but we slouch toward an exit strategy.

Mark Kleiman is a leading voice attempting to define a post-drug-war strategy that would reduce drug abuse while shrinking the fiscal and human costs of enforcement efforts. “In some cases, the solution will look like prohibition; in others it will look like regulation and taxation,” says Kleiman, a Baltimore native who is a public policy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment . “It’s a practical problem, to be handled by practical means-ends reasoning, not by the enunciation of profound truths about human nature or the role of the state.”

Kleiman and other researchers have shown that police decisions not to regulate the retail drug trade can lead to reductions in violence.

Police roundups, the use of criminal informants Read Michael Corbin’s story about Johns Hop kins researchers studying the ecology of ad diction at bit.ly/urbaniteecologyofaddiction.

feature / urbanite online baltimore observed

to simply arrest more drug dealers, and the violent “dynamic-entry” house raids that have become an iconic drug war tactic can all contribute to violence by producing uncertainty and risk in drug markets and by emphasizing force. More targeted, low-arrest enforcement can produce just as much market control with less force and its violent consequences.

In terms of treatment, Kleiman says we don’t need more—we just need to do it more intelligently. “We can no more treat our way out of our current drug problems than we can arrest and imprison our way out of them,” Kleiman writes in Brute Force. Still, there are simple ways to improve on the current system: End the bias against opiate substitution therapies, for example, that have been shown to dramatically reduce crime among those who receive them. Rather than mandating that drug users attend treatment programs of dubious quality, he says, we can promote “spontaneous desistance” through regular testing and sanctions.

If drug users understand that a positive test will lead swiftly and reliably to a short stay in jail, they are more apt to change their behavior.

Kleiman points out that most drug users can recover fairly quickly and on their own. “The minority, with the chronic, relapsing form of drug abuse disorder, generate, and suffer, a large share of the bad consequences,” he said in a recent talk.

Baltimore has learned some of these lessons.

Yet on the streets, young retail drug merchants say local police often improvise in prosecuting the drug war. Downtown, local political leaders and prosecutors talk tough but have yet to articulate a clear way forward for drug crime in the city. (See “Crime and Punishment,” January ’11 Urbanite.) Treatment advocates simply call for more.

Most importantly, we have yet to acknowledge how the drug war defines Baltimore and how getting beyond this war could change the city.

For Sadiq and other young men, selling drugs is just one economic decision among many. “The business is different now … but it is just as easy to get high as it ever was,” says James, a former drug dealer who spent six years in federal prison and lives in the city now.

“I tell the young brothers today who are going to hustle—and they are going to hustle —to hustle with a purpose. There ain’t no 401K in the ’hood.”

Mark Kleiman on a post-drug-war strategy on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on March 21

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

Material Girls from arts/culture The newest exhibit at the Lewis Museum features eight contemporary African American female artists. bit.ly/urbanitematerialgirls Hot Pursuit from arts/culture Falling Off The Edge at Open Space showcases the work of two young sculptors. bit.ly/urbanitefallingofftheedge

La Vida Cocoa from food/drink Taste-testing artisanal, gourmet chocolates bit.ly/urbanitelavidacocoa All Hopped Up from food/drink Up close and personal with local brewer Brian Stillwater Strumke, the creative force behind Stillwater Artisanal Ales bit.ly/urbanitestillwater top PHOTO By Cara Ober; bottom photo by gil jawetz

Urbanite #81 march 2011 25

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

The proposed Red Line is a 14.5-mile, light rail transit line that will run west-east from Woodlawn through downtown Baltimore, Fells Point, and Canton to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center Campus. Its construction could dramatically disrupt city life, with noise, dust, traffic snarls, and more. We think we can take advantage of this period to create a unique, vibrant, productive urban space. What do you think?

To learn more, go to www.urbaniteproject.com or attend the information session on March 8, 5 p.m.–6 p.m., at the Walters Art Museum.

urbanite project baltimore observed RED LInE

Ideas in Motion Introducing Urbanite Project: Open City Challenge Red Line Locally Preferred Alternative courtesy of the baltimore department of transportation

by marianne amoss

B

ack in 2007, we at Urbanite were trying to find a way to encourage innovation in the city, and we knew one of the best ways to do that was to bring together folks from different disciplines and viewpoints. So we launched the Urbanite Project. We matched up unlikely teams of two or three, putting an artist with a neurosurgeon or an architect with an environmental lawyer, and asked them to collaborate on a project of their choosing. To us, the end result wasn’t the point—although several projects had physical manifestations, including the 2007 “Black + White = Green” project, which brought together a multi-racial crowd under the banner of care for the environment during the inaugural EcoFest. It was the collaboration between these people from very different worlds—who might never have met had we not introduced them—that we thought was vitally important.

This year, we're taking the project a step further, focusing on helping these ideas come to fruition.

Introducing Urbanite Project: Open City Challenge, a project of Urbanite, the year-long Exhibition Development Seminar at Maryland Institute College of Art, the D center, the

Maryland Transit Administration, and the Baltimore City Department of Transportation.

We’re inviting self-organized teams to compete for $10,000 in prize money (provided by the MTA) and the chance to implement their solution to a pressing city issue: the quality-oflife issues brought about by the construction of the Red Line.

The proposed Red Line is a 14.5-mile, light rail transit line that will run west-east from Woodlawn through downtown Baltimore, Fells Point, and Canton to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center Campus. It will link up with the existing light rail, Metro subway, and MARC train lines, creating a comprehensive transportation system that runs both aboveground, mostly on medians along existing roads, and in underground tunnels.

Baltimore, whose neighborhoods were once connected by a network of streetcars, is now served by one light rail line and one subway line, which do not serve many of the city’s neighborhoods in East and West Baltimore. The Red Line has the potential to not only alleviate traffic and provide all the usual public transit benefits, but also to create connections between communities that are traditionally separate.

Aside from these potential benefits, one major drawback of the Red Line is that construction could dramatically disrupt life in the communities through which it is to pass. Construction is expected to begin in the next five

August 2009

years and could last up to five years after that.

Sections of this town are going to be torn up, with traffic stopped or slowed and pedestrian access limited.

While many look at the construction period and see nothing but hassle and inconvenience, this kind of disruption also brings opportunities. We think we can take advantage of this period to create a unique, vibrant, productive urban space. Call it creative urban design, installation art, whatever: We have an opportunity to turn this construction period into an economic benefit, help open up conduits of travel and communication along the route, and potentially leave a lasting positive impact on the city.

Why not create a string of community gardens along the route, with cookouts to draw the neighboring communities together? Could we turn much of the line into a walking mall, bringing new businesses and art galleries to formerly boarded-up storefronts? How about designing artwork to mask construction walls?

For more information, go to www.urbanite project.com. There, you’ll find the official RFP and details about an information session on March 8.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 27

2011 AIABALTIMORE SPRING LECTURE SERIES

AIABALTIMORE

The Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIABaltimore) invites you to attend its annual spring lecture series – a Baltimore tradition for decades. This year we host speakers from Chicago, Toronto, Boston, New York, Seattle, and beyond.

Join us in welcoming them to Baltimore!

A Window of Opportunities…

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Historic cHaracter ~Gilman Hall at Johns Hopkins University

COmmerCiAl residentiAl HistOriC renOvAtiOn

INFORMED, PURPOSEFUL & COMPELLING

Martin Felsen, AIA Urban Lab, Chicago Civic Space through Ecological Urbanism March 10, Thursday

www.rubeling .com

RUBELING

Panel discussion with Mason White, Lateral Architecture, Toronto; Paul Lukez, AIA, Paul Lukez Architecture, Boston; and Hillary Brown, New Civic Works, New York.

Moderated by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson.

Infrastructure Systems: Cities for a Changing World March 24, Thursday

& ASSOCIATES

ARCHITECTURE INTERIOR DESIGN MASTER PLANNING HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE

Deb Guenther Mithun, Seattle Transformative Integrated Landscapes April 7, Thursday

30 1981-2011

ZIGER/SNEAD

Fourth lecture to be announced.

______

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, 21217 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 $30/AIA, ASLA, BAF, and BH members. Please send payment to AIABaltimore or call with your credit card. 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.

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keynote the

Change Maker Ashoka founder Bill Drayton on the power of turning simple ideas into action interview by Marc Steiner

bill drayton describes the bedrock principle of his organization like this: “What’s the most powerful force in the world? It’s the big idea, but only if it’s in the hands of a really good entrepreneur.”

Since 1981, Ashoka, a nonprofit based in Arlington, Virginia, has helped kickstart entrepreneurs who are tackling society’s toughest issues. Ashoka fellows receive stipends, professional support, and access to a growing network of like-minded “social entrepreneurs” around the globe. The goal, Drayton says, is to “tip” the world around us, to create real change—and not just on the local level; these projects are designed to go big. Within five years, he says, more than half of Ashoka fellows have fomented a change in national policy.

To date, Ashoka has funded roughly three thousand fellows. They have taken electricity to more than a million people in rural Brazil, given children in Mumbai access to police and health care services, developed a hotline that allows Africans to determine whether the medicine they are buying is counterfeit (40 percent of the drugs in Africa are fake, Drayton says), and helped thousands of low-income high school kids get into college.

In a world that is changing at exponential rates, Drayton says, this kind of entrepreneurial thinking— and putting ideas into motion—is the only way forward.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 31

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keynote

urb: I’d like to go back for a moment to 1963, when you drove from Munich to India. Tell us a bit about what happened to you on that journey. bd: I loved history and geography growing up. I wanted to see India for the longest time. And we couldn’t afford planes, but four [college sophomores got] together [in a Volkswagen] microbus. We made it across the dirt roads of Tehran and whatnot, and it was wonderful. We were trying to understand this extraordinary culture at a remarkable moment of rebirth. That [led] ultimately to spending some time with the Narayana, the person that Gandhi called his guru and who led the social change part of the Gandhian movement after independence.

It was an extremely powerful set of experiences.

If you know India, they are an extraordinary open, friendly, hospitable people. They like to talk. They like to argue. The only place that even begins to compare to it is where I grew up, New York City. You walk down the street, and you’re surrounded by people who are living all these different lives and coming from different centuries, if not millennia.

Ashoka came out of that trip. When you see a hundred-to-one difference in income [between the northern and southern hemispheres] and it’s no longer a statistic but people you know, if you are an entrepreneur by temperament, you have to say, “What are we going to do to close the north-south gap?” Well, sophomores don’t control a whole lot, and so you automatically have to ask, “Well, what’s the most highly leveraged way of doing that?”

urb:

Can you describe the kind of social entrepreneurship you’re talking about?

bd: Before I do that, let me just context it. There’s no astrophysics involved. It’s a mistake to think that you couldn’t do this.

Let me start with a Canadian [Ashoka] fellow, Mary Gordon. She is a teacher in Toronto, and she saw a problem—that more and more children coming to her class had no way of responding to other children who made them uncomfortable other than with aggression.

Which of course invites aggression back. And every time those children go through that cycle, it gets deeper. [She said], “This is the big problem. I want to solve it, not just for my class, but for all schools.”

Jumping ahead, she’s gone from two classes to fourteen thousand classes in five countries in a little over four years. After she’s done her work, bullying rates come down and stay down.

So what does she do? She brings an infant, at the beginning of the school year, to the class, and the infant wears a little T-shirt that is labeled “The Professor.” The Professor resides on a green blanket, is accompanied by mom, occasionally dad, and the first-graders or thirdgraders have the responsibility of figuring out what the Professor is saying. And then later, what the Professor is feeling.

Empathy, which is what we’re developing here, is not genetic; it’s a learned skill. This is not so much cognitive as it is limbic learning, so [the kids are] feeling their way.

Infants are really good at nonverbal communication. And you have the role-modeling of the mom and the infant, which is probably the strongest empathetic tie that exists.

So this is very powerful, but it’s also really simple.

All Mary Gordon asks is a couple of hours a month, for eight months, and you have it. The kids have grasped empathy, and they’re on a different path.

To give you another example, just to give you a sense of diversity, [there’s] Jill Vialet, a Californian. She thinks it’s a mistake to drop recess. She thinks kids should have a right to play. She gets principals to cough up $24,000.

She [hires and] trains a local young person and, after a couple weeks, recess begins to have islands of kids playing games, and after three to six months, that’s 78 percent of the kids.

OK, well, that’s good. But think about it. How do children practice empathy? Group play turns out to be pretty important. So these two pieces fit together. Mary helped young children grasp empathy, and Jill is putting in place one of the mechanisms that’s really important for them to practice it. urb:

Why is this stuff so important?

bd: Every young child must master empathy. Every teenager has to be practicing empathy, humor, leadership, change making … if they’re going to be a contributor in a world defined by change. You don’t get it by reading a book. You gotta practice it.

Teenagers, thank God, haven’t stopped noticing that there are problems. So at some point, your 15-year-old daughter’s going to say to you, “Oh, this is a mess”—fill in the blank. And if you say to her, “Well, why don’t you get your friends together and go and solve it?”

“Who, me?”

“Yes, you! And by the way, this is the most important thing you’re doing. Can piano practice. This is really important. And I’m sorry if the school is behind in understanding this, but this is really key, and you go for it.”

Now, any parent can do that. And they’re helping their daughter get the most important gift, which is the gift of being a powerful person who has the skills to be able to contribute.

urb:

You said recently that hierarchical structures are dying and this idea of collaborative social entrepreneurship is what has to take their place.

bd: In the 1900s, almost everyone was on the farm.

Then you had the assembly line. Now, that model is dying.

The first company in any field, the first citizen group in any sector, who figures out how to be an “everyone-achange-maker team of teams” is just going to walk all over the competition.

So Condé Nast told us, for example, that 55 percent of U.S. travelers would consider having their vacation be for social service and learning, and 24 percent want it.

How many hotel chains are catering to that need? Well, if they changed the culture so that everyone understood that the best thing you could do would be to spot a new need, and you know if you’re the doorman and you spot this need, the company says, “Go for it, test it, let’s see if it works,” and then you become, you know, the head of that division ...

We actually know how to do this. If you look at Google, the newer institutions, that’s what they do.

That’s why they attract the change makers from all over the world. And the great industrial cities, especially those years ago who missed it, are really in trouble.

urb:

Are there former industrial centers like Baltimore that are doing things in ways that you’re describing to revive communities?

Seattle was not a high-tech center not so long ago, but they made a conscious decision and researched Triangle Park in North Carolina. Boston was an old industrial city, but it had great assets in terms of universities and finance, and so it made that change very successfully. But remember when the textile industry was dying? Things weren’t looking so good.

We’re just building up to the awareness that things don’t work—all across the world, not just America. It’s time to realize that we’re no longer in a world of hierarchies, [with] only a few people thinking and controlling everyone else. We are now well into a very different way of organizing human society.

It’s like literacy. Very few people were literate in the 1300s. Now it’s something that everyone has to be. It’s necessary. Well, these social skills, the redefinitions of you as a powerful person, you as a person who can solve problems—that’s a much more attractive world.

A much more stable world. A much fairer world. We’re right on the lip of it. bd:

Catch the full interview with Bill Drayton on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on March 3.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 33

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city Six people who have unlocked secrets for making change from the bottom up

Baltimore magazine, the city’s venerable glossy monthly, holds the title of the nation’s oldest city magazine; it celebrates its 104th birthday this year. As such, it probably has a legitimate claim to the invention of the “Power Issue.” Now duplicated annually in a hundred city mags across America, it is a bow to the Top Dogs—the political elite, CEOs, and developers, the loftiest of the high society—who run the metropolis.

It was telling, then, that when Baltimore released its annual ode to urban might this January, the staff had a hard time deciding who to write about. “Once was, it was easy to identify the powerful people,” editor Max Weiss wrote. “But now, as more local headquarters are closing (or being bought out), and as the old guard is retiring (or dead), there’s a bit of confusion in this town. Who’s running Baltimore?”

In the end, the magazine profiled more than fifty people, with hat tips to dozens more, as if it was afraid of offending, or missing, someone who might prove to have been of some importance.

To explain this power vacuum, the young techies and culture mavens would no doubt tell us that there are no monolithic leaders anymore. We’ve entered the Age of Networks, when Facebook and Twitter and a host of Big Idea fests (IgniteBaltimore, Amplify Baltimore, CreateBaltimore, etc., etc.) are empowering a new generation of independent-minded do-it-yourselfers who are busy remaking this city one avant garde art den and coworking hack space at a time. Combine the buzzing arts and tech scenes with a wave of empty-nesters and millenials who are increasingly drawn to urban living, as well as recent improvements in the schools and declines in crime, and the city—or some parts of it, anyway—seems poised for transformation.

The question is, can this enthusiasm and energy be spun into action?

Can the techies and art kids and fresh urban dwellers break out of their silos and become a real political force? And who are the people in this town who can tell us something about how to effect change in a city where the power no longer resides in the hands of a small elite?

These were the questions that drove this, our own version of the Power Issue. We asked them of dozens of colleagues and acquaintances and rifled through a list of well over a hundred nominees (not a few of which were referenced in Baltimore’s Power Issue). In the end, we settled on six.

These people range in age from 30 to 71. They are men and women, white and black. Their educational backgrounds vary from a high school diploma to a PhD in biomedical engineering. Some of them work outside of established institutions, providing models of best practices and backing up their work with stories and studies. Others lead from within. Many do both.

But they all have a few things in common. They tackle their chosen challenges from unexpected angles. They have the ability to look at a situation, an institution, an artform, and not only imagine how it could be done better, but actually do it. And all are doing work that has the potential to “tip” the world around them, as our keynoter, Bill Drayton, would say—to create transformation beyond the boundaries of their cliques or neighborhoods or places of work.

If indeed the power to transform now rests in all of our hands, perhaps these six can provide some tools for how we might wield that power—not for the sake of winning respect from the outside world, but for building a city and a society where innovation, creativity, and progress rein as the power structures of the past continue to fade away.

—Greg Hanscom, editor

tex t by Greg Hanscom, Donna m. owens, and al shipley photogr aphy by j.m. giordano

A conversation with some of the featured change makers on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on March 21

Urbanite #81 march 2011 35

dave troy

Age

39

Computer programmer, “serial entrepreneur” Education BA in liberal arts from Johns Hopkins University

Home Bolton Hill Profession

Dave Troy hasn’t even settled onto a bar stool at the Mount Royal Tavern before he commences with the brain dump. “I have to tell you about this new project I’m working on,” he says.

The social networking site LinkedIn, he explains, has just introduced a function that allows you to create a “map” of your professional acquaintances and their connections to each other. When Troy, a rising star in the local technology and business scenes, tried it, he was surprised by what he saw. On one side of his screen was a cloud of tech geeks; on the other, a cluster of suits. The two groups don’t mix much, he says.

Collect this LinkedIn data from a group of well-connected individuals, and “we can document this city and how it works,” says Troy, who has of late been inspired by the work of Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist who developed equations that reveal the “hidden laws” of cities. “If we can animate this over time,” Troy says of the LinkedIn clouds, “we’ll be able to see silos breaking down and the old power structures fading away.”

It’s a glimpse into the mind of this former wunderkind, who started a computer store with a buddy in his native Severna Park when he was a sophomore in high school. (From that business, they spun off Toadnet, one of the area’s first Internet service providers, which they sold to the Weather Channel’s parent company in 2004.) Troy believes that Baltimore can be rebuilt as a center for technology start-ups and small-scale manufacturing.

But first, he says, we need to get everyone together.

It seems like a simple thing in the age of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and a million other social networking gizmos. But it wasn’t all that long ago that local techies felt like they were alone in this city, says Tom Loveland, founder and CEO of the Owings Mills-based company Mind Over Machines. “Twitter barely even existed three years ago. Facebook was just getting started,” he says.

It took a big political dust-up to get the geeks out of their closets and cubicles. In 2008, Loveland and Troy joined a host of other tech leaders who won the repeal of the state’s “tech tax,” which put a surcharge on computer services. “We fought hard, and we’re blood brothers now,” Loveland says.

Since then, Troy has played a central role in building and strengthening the tech community. In 2008, he created Beehive Baltimore, a shared office, or “coworking” space in Canton. He rallied a small army of volunteers to put on the first TEDx Mid-Atlantic ideas fest in November 2009. Last year, he helped spearhead the campaign to make Baltimore a test site for Google’s new super-high-speed broadband service. (Still no word on the winners.) This winter, he was among the organizers of CreateBaltimore, which brought artists, entrepreneurs, and techies together for a day of mind melding. And he is a steady presence in a dozen or more online interest groups, chat rooms, and social networks.

36 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

“Dave has done a lot in terms of creating community,” says Ann Lansinger, executive director of the Emerging Technology Center, a nonprofit business incubator affiliated with the Baltimore Development Corporation.

“He’s the major mover in our little local tech community.”

All the exchanging of business cards (virtual or otherwise) is a means to an end, Troy says. “If America wants to hang its hat on innovation, where does that come from? It comes from face-to-face interaction between smart people. Where does that happen? In cities.”

He is quick to add, however, that the high-tech “information economy” is just one part of the solution. He recently toured the old Lebow garment factory in the Station North arts district with a group of people interested in turning it into Canton-style loft apartments. “I got wondering, ‘What if it was a clothing factory again?’” Troy says. He imagines a day when local designers would team up with small-scale manufacturing operations to produce limited run T-shirts, sold on the Internet to people interested in unique, socially and environmentally conscious design.

“I think we’re seeing a real philosophical sea change from big projects and huge developments to atomic level investment in companies,” he says.

To help get this kind of work off the ground in Baltimore, Troy founded Baltimore Angels, an investment group that targets up-and-coming entrepreneurs. He’s got a few projects up his own sleeve as well. His company 410 Labs, which he started in partnership with former AOL exec Matt Koll, recently launched a new e-mail system called ShortMail, which he calls “an unholy marriage between e-mail and Twitter.”

“A lot of the real successes in Baltimore have been started here: Under Armour, Advertising.com, Bill Me Later,” he says. Don’t bother wooing big coporations to town: “We need to empower entrepreneurs.”

—Greg Hanscom

Reverend Heber brown III

Age

30

Pastor, Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, and community activist Education BS in psychology from Morgan State University; Master of Divinity, Samuel Dewitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University

Home Govans Profession

In his home office, Reverend Heber Brown III has a mural on the wall depicting Africa and two of his heroes: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Closer inspection of the art reveals that Brown is also painted into the scene. “My wife gave me this as a gift and put my face alongside theirs,” he explains. “It’s inspirational. I don’t see myself on their level, but I am striving to make just as much of an impact.”

When Brown says this, you don’t get a sense that his ego has run amok.

Rather, the young pastor seems committed to building on the tradition of those African American preachers who have been, to paraphrase King, “drum majors for justice.”

When it comes to activism, Brown is a triple threat. He speaks about social change from the pulpit, where he is a fiery, skilled orator. He blogs about religion, policy, activism, and what he calls “the simple life”—gardening, bicycling, and bucking the dominant consumer culture. And out on the streets of Baltimore, he’s gaining a reputation as a powerful community organizer. “For me, it’s impossible to separate my charge as a pastor from my role as an activist,” says the Baptist minister, ordained in 2006.

“When I read scriptures, I see that Jesus walked among the impoverished, the sick, the disinherited. And he spoke to the problems of the day.”

Brown is addressing issues not only on the local level, but also nationally and internationally. He was among hundreds of clergy members arrested near the White House for protesting the Iraq war. Last spring, he traveled to Israel with an organization called Interfaith Peace Builders.

The delegation met with Palestinians and Israelis who are working for peace in the region.

Close to home, Brown has been integral in the fight of community residents and child advocates to thwart state plans for a $100 million juvenile detention center east of downtown Baltimore. Last fall, the pastor and a few hundred others marched to the site of the proposed facility. The group cut fencing and staged a protest rally, leaving behind books—symbols of their desire to have more resources allocated to Baltimore City youth. In recent months, he and other activists have continued to press the matter, carrying signs and bullhorns to Gov. Martin O’Malley’s public events.

The outcome of the facility is far from resolved. A spokesperson for Maryland’s Department of Public Safety says the scheduled groundbreaking has been delayed until fiscal year 2012. State officials say they are just awaiting population projections. But Brown, who also mentors incarcerated young men, calls the developments a victory.

While there are many players battling to stop the facility, University of Maryland law professor Terry Hickey says Brown’s role in helping to inspire and engage the community was critical. “He was instrumental in humanizing this raw issue which overwhelmingly affects black boys,” says Hickey, who heads the local nonprofit Community Law in Action. “As a pastor and activist, he brings a certain moral leverage. He really walks the walk.”

Brown is a second-generation minister whose father, Bishop Heber Brown Jr., leads Shiloh Baptist Church in Edgemere, Maryland. There, the younger Brown cut his teeth as the minister for youth and social action.

Today, he serves as vice president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a local coalition of clergy. He juggles this community involvement while helping his wife raise two young sons and serving as full-time pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church near Belvedere Square. He’s led the congregation for about two and a half years.

From time to time, the church has received nasty letters and calls about Brown’s involvement in hot button issues. “Justice initiatives permeate every part of my life, but I’m very sensitive to not trying to be overbearing to my congregation,” he says. “I may preach about a particular social issue, but I don’t harp on it. It’s not just sermons on Sunday. More about how you are living Monday through Saturday.”

That philosophy impresses those who know him. “He believes the scripture when it says, ‘Faith without works is dead,’” says Otis Rolley, a former City Hall aide and planning department chief who is now a candidate for mayor. “In a city with a lot of faith-based institutions and leaders that are not engaged with the community and not serving beyond their religious obligations, he is a breath of fresh air.”

—Donna M. Owens Urbanite #81 march 2011 37

Sarah Hemminger

Age

30

Social entrepreneur, co-founder/CEO of the Incentive Mentoring Program Education BS and PhD in biomedical engineering, Johns Hopkins University

Home Eldersburg Profession

Back in 2004, Sarah Hemminger was stopped at a traffic light near Johns Hopkins Hospital when she had an epiphany about Baltimore.

“It was like I just saw for the first time the reality of things,” recalls Hemminger, an Indiana native who was then a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins medical school. “The Section 8 housing on one side of the street, and then these beautiful Hopkins buildings that were going up right in front of my eyes. I had a realization of not just the need, but also the possibilities.”

Soon after, Hemminger and her husband, Ryan, launched the Incentive Mentoring Program (IMP). The nonprofit aims to improve the overall wellbeing of at-risk inner city teens who are grappling with challenges that range from abuse and neglect to gang violence, drugs, and poverty. IMP’s model is innovative because it links the youngsters to a “family” of mentors who are completely committed to that one student during high school and beyond.

38 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

“We have a totally different view of what mentoring is,” says Hemminger.

“In our program, everyone—including the student—is a mentor, and everyone is also a mentee. Everyone is there to learn and to grow. Everyone has something valuable to contribute.”

IMP works with students from Dunbar High School in East Baltimore and the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Hampden. Hemminger and her team of three paid staffers identify high school freshmen who are failing the bulk of their classes and are chronically absent. The students are screened and interviewed before being assigned “families” of eight to ten mentors.

The students and their mentor families become close. They often meet over meals (pizza’s a favorite), and the mood is generally upbeat. Still, the reality is that this process can also be tough. “There are huge peaks and valleys with all of the kids— and the mentors too,” Hemminger says.

“These kids have developed certain habits over a lifetime, so they don’t just go away.”

Take the young man who vehemently resisted efforts to get him to attend school regularly. “One of his mentors drove him there and dropped him off,” Hemminger recalls. “He left and went back home. His ride came back and dropped him off again. He left again. This continued for a while, until he realized we were not going to give up on him.”

IMP mentors work with students until they graduate from high school and at least four years afterwards. This unconventional, long-term “family” approach has yielded dramatic results: To date, 94 percent of IMP students have graduated from high school and matriculated to college.

That success has won Hemminger and IMP praise in the community and various honors, including fellowships with the global nonprofit Echoing Green and the Open Society Institute-Baltimore and funding from Hopkins and the Lockhart Vaughan and Abell foundations.

Last year, IMP launched a summer institute in partnership with Johns Hopkins University that invites the teens to Hopkins’ medical campus during the summer months to receive tutoring and learn about such topics as nutrition and free speech. They also have paid jobs helping in university laboratories. “They’re earning their own money, which gives them a sense of pride and value,” says Daniel Hiroyuki Teraguchi, assistant dean for student affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of its office for student diversity. “It seems to transform how they see the world.”

Pamela King, director of Community Fellowships and Initiatives for OSI-Baltimore, believes IMP has the potential to be taken national. “The cool thing is that they are constantly fine-tuning and re-visiting their model,” King says. “None of this is an easy fix. But they are helping to empower young people who are out of the mainstream to learn to fix their own problems. I think [their] work is essential.”

Essential, yes, and incredibly difficult. But Hemminger has never given up on any kid in IMP. “By definition, if we’re really a family, families don’t give up on people,” she says. “Family is for life, regardless of what challenges we face.”

—D.O.

Robert Duggan OPENED his first practice in 1975 in the old American City building in downtown Columbia, in a space that had recently been vacated by the pioneering development firm the Rouse Company. It was an auspicious spot for an acupuncture clinic—particularly in those days. “It was really fringe then,” says Duggan of the ancient Chinese healing art he and his partner, Dianne Connelly, had brought to the states from England. The decision to locate in an uptown corporate center was deliberate: “We figured, people can think what we are doing is strange, but when they see it in Jim Rouse’s old office, they are going to do a double take.”

This spirit—putting “alternative” health care services in very “traditional” places—has animated much of what Duggan has done since then.

The clinic he and Connelly started in 1975 grew into the Tai Sophia Institute, a graduate school offering masters degrees in acupuncture, herbal medicine, transformative leadership, and social change. Today, it is headquartered in a gleaming, glassy structure in an office park in Laurel. Duggan has worked with physicians and researchers at Johns Hopkins, Morgan State, the University of Pennsylvania, and the U.S. military. He helped create a pioneering addiction treatment center in West Baltimore.

Duggan stepped down as Tai Sophia’s president this year. His next mission: to help turn Maryland into a model of a new type of health care system—a system that puts more power in the hands of patients, improves the health of the people it serves, and saves millions of dollars each year.

“Bob was a pioneer,” says retired colonel Wayne Jonas, president and CEO of the nonprofit Samueli Institute, which researches alternative health treatments. Jonas’ organization just completed a study in conjunction with Tai Sophia and Walter Reed Army Hospital that suggests that acupuncture can be effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. They’ve just started a study of acupuncture and traumatic head injury. “The military has realized that the standard medical approach to management of these conditions is not adequate,” Jonas says. “We need alternatives.”

The military isn’t alone. According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, 38 percent of Americans use some kind of alternative treatment. And it’s not all chakras and energy flow work. Duggan says a lot of what he does is simply listen.

A few years back, he received a call from an executive at a big tech company who was experiencing symptoms that looked like lupus or multiple sclerosis. She had visited experts and spent $100,000 on tests, but no one could tell her what was wrong.

“I sat with her and did my usual intake, looking at

Age 71 symptoms,” Duggan says. “And it was kind of scary.”

Asked if the symptoms ever went away, the exec Profession Acupuncturist, co-founder and president emeritus of the said no—well, yes: when she’d gone on vacation in Tai Sophia Institute Canada the previous summer. A little sleuthing re Education BA in philosophy, Saint Joseph’s Seminary and College, New vealed that the woman simply wasn’t taking care of York; MA in moral theology, Saint Joseph’s Seminary and College, herself. Duggan’s assessment: “You don’t eat. You New York; MA in human relations and community studies, New don’t sleep. You don’t breathe or exercise. Why don’t York University; LicAc, and MAc, College of Traditional Chinese you have another vacation?”

Acupuncture, United Kingdom “Your body is wise,” Duggan says. “That’s the basic tone that I’ve taken: redefining health as com Home Columbia mon sense and a body’s wisdom.”

It seems like a simple thing—but if we could listen to our bodies rather than dashing off to a specialist for every sniffle and bump, we could save a tremendous amount of time and money. The Center for Disease Control and other sources have estimated that approximately 70 percent of American health care spending goes to treat problems that are related to lifestyle, not to disease. Executives with health care giant Kaiser Permanente recently put that number at 90 percent. Change our behavior, and we could save billions annually.

Duggan believes this revolution could start here. “The day that the University of Maryland or BGE or the state says, ‘We have cut costs of health care for our employees by 40 percent,’ that will ripple across the country,” he says. “I don’t want theories about what the U.S. should do. I want frontline [reports] saying, ‘BGE has cut health care costs in half.’”

Robert duggan

—G.H. Urbanite #81 march 2011 39

hathaway ferebee

Age

57

Community organizer, executive director, Safe and Sound Campaign Education BA in sociology from Mary Baldwin College; MA in community planning from the University of Maryland

Home Hoes Heights Profession

Should you ever run into Hathaway Ferebee at a cocktail party and the talk turns to say, crime or the foster care system, get ready for an earful. That’s because the executive director of Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign is passionate about trying to improve the health, safety, and well-being of the city’s children and youth.

But this is not a woman who’s content to simply talk. Outspoken and doggedly persistent, Ferebee is determined to change the way Baltimore—and society at large—thinks about vexing social issues and to fundamentally change the way that institutions and government agencies address them.

The Safe and Sound team examines public policy and systems from what they dub an “opportunity” perspective, making intense use of data to analyze the costs and the outcomes. They then create a whole new way around the problem, focusing on innovative and less costly alternatives to “last resort” solutions such as incarceration.

Maryland spends about $750 million dollars annually to take custody of city residents in foster care, juvenile confinement, and prison. Ferebee insists the per-capita costs of these programs are “indefensible” when one compares them with the results. “It’s not that folks are born bad in Baltimore,” she says. “However, we spend a disproportionate amount trying to fix people.”

She offers this example: To put a juvenile in out-of-home placement costs about $86,000 dollars annually. An alternative called “multi-systemic therapy,” which includes counseling for the juvenile and his or her family, as well as job training, costs somewhere around $10,000 a year. “Confinement has a 25 percent success rate; the alternative has an 80 percent success rate,” she says. “It’s simply common sense.”

Safe and Sound has taken this kind of thinking to a larger stage with the Maryland Opportunity Compact. This series of public/private partnerships aims to redeploy and make more effective the way the state funds social services ranging from job readiness for juveniles to addiction treatment and reentry services for prisoners. The goal is to take excessive funding away from programs such as prisons and foster care—which studies show are typically costly and ineffective—and instead expand investments in alternative models that show successful results. The savings of tax dollars over time is reinvested in maintaining programs proven to “expand opportunities for people to become successful,” Ferebee says.

Safe and Sound’s results in this area have been positive, but it’s not always a lovefest. Ferebee has a reputation for pushing public officials to get what she wants and not taking “no” for an answer. That said, those who know her say that while she holds others to high expectations, she strives to meet those same standards herself.

Rosemary King Johnston, executive director of the Governor’s Office for Children, has partnered with the Safe and Sound Campaign. She first worked with Ferebee a decade ago. “The thing that impressed me is that she’s always been very positive and child-oriented, but she stressed right away the need to be good stewards of public money,” King Johnston says.

“She believes that if you give someone money, they must be accountable.”

Ferebee is a proud local girl with deep roots in the community. “She’s been able to mobilize and build strong relationships with funding communities, and she has certainly changed the way funders and the state think about community-based services,” says Phillip Leaf, who heads the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Some of her models could be used beyond Baltimore and tried nationally.”

For Ferebee, however, the here and now seems most important. “There’s no way people are going to succeed when more money is spent to harm then it is to help,” she says, summing up her philosophy. “We’re simply saying there is a better way.”

—D.O.

40 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

shodekeh

Age

33

Musician, beatboxer Education No formal degrees

Home Baltimore City Profession

In 2004, Dominic Earle Shodekeh Talifero took a job as an usher at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, just to spend time in the home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and to get “as close as I could to the music,” he says. Six years later, he was standing onstage performing with the BSO, not with a violin or a flute but as a human beatbox, producing an explosive, rapid-fire rhythm using just his mouth, lips, tongue, and throat. The most powerful moment in the performance came when Shodekeh borrowed conductor Marin Alsop’s baton and conducted first the orchestra, then the audience, in a thumping, bodily beat that resonated through the hall.

“I got to conduct the symphony as a symphony of beatboxers,” Shodekeh recalls with obvious pleasure. “I was definitely there to adapt to the symphony, but at the same time I was also there to say that beatboxing is not just imitating drum sounds. Beatboxing is being a vocal artist.”

The unlikely musical collision came about not because he’d once worked in the building, but because Shodekeh had made a name for himself as an extraordinarily versatile and forward-thinking musician, capable of plying his unusual instrument in virtually any context. The Washington, D.C. native, who settled in Baltimore after attending Coppin State University, has spent the last decade applying his beatboxing skills to everything from ballet classes at Towson University to experimental improvisation at the High Zero festival. High Zero Foundation member Shelly Blake-Plock recalls Shodekeh performing in 2007 with Dutch avant garde vocalist Jaap Blonk. “Seeing them together was no different than seeing two master horn players of different musical idioms come together and find sheer joy in each other’s sensibility,” he says.

The BSO concert in July 2010 was just one triumph in a year that also saw Shodekeh win a Baltimore’s Choice award and the Nancy Haragan Award in the Baker Artist Awards competition.

Beatboxing has been part of popular culture since the 1980s, when hip-hop trailblazers like Doug E. Fresh and Biz Markie brought the odd, seemingly rudimentary practice into the limelight. It grew out of necessity: Early beatboxers developed their skills because they couldn’t afford musical instruments. That, and the pure physicality of it, are what draw Shodekeh to the artform. “I’m interested in witnessing the human body hard at work, whether it’s a beatboxer, an opera singer, a martial artist, or an Olympic gymnast,” he says. “It speaks to the spirit of human will.”

The past few years have found Shodekeh sitting on the music faculty at the American Dance Festival at Duke University, speaking at the Conference of World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado, and serving as a panelist at the International Human Beatbox Convention. In 2009, he accepted an invitation from the Lithuanian embassy to travel to that country, where he beatboxed for a group of folk dancers. He is recently back from a residency at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he encouraged visual artists “to explore the musical qualities in their art,” he says. Here at home, in addition to his many performances, he holds periodic events under the banner Embody: A Festival of the Vocal Arts.

Kenny Johnston, a peer in the Baltimore beatboxing community who performs as the Bow-Legged Gorilla, says, “He does really grasp [beatboxing] as more of a musical instrument, rather than just a reflection of pop music, taking it in new directions.”

One of the reasons Shodekeh is able to transcend the limitations of his instrument and its traditional role may be his thirst to explore other artforms. “My first love was film, and one of the things I’ve always loved about film was the original scores that would draw me emotionally into the visuals,” says the beatboxer, who also studied at the New York Film Academy.

He says he fell in love with the movie Once Upon a Time in America in part because of the original score by Ennio Morricone. “I think those sorts of experiences always kept me open to different forms of music.”

But the real power of Shodekeh’s art may be its ability to tear down walls that are more cultural, even psychological. “When I conduct a voice circle, I want to make people forget that they’re inside a classroom, or the Meyerhoff, and realize that they are with a group of people,” he says. “I want to remove the power of celebrity, of the institution, and help people see that everything they need is inside them.”

—Al Shipley Urbanite #81 march 2011 41

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real estate

Silver Lining

The home-buying glory days of the aughts are gone, but a look behind the numbers reveals that city neighborhoods have held on to much of what they gained.

By Will Morton photography by j.m. giordano

sometimes baltimore city’s real estate market seems to have everything stacked against it.

There’s a nationwide housing meltdown, a credit crunch, and a painful economic recession.

The city’s property tax rate is more than double anywhere else in Maryland. Tens of thousands of dilapidated homes stand vacant. Crime’s bad, too. Then there are the young, trendy couples with a history of bolting for the ’burbs as soon as their children start school.

Between 2007 and 2009, home sale prices dropped nearly 20 percent citywide, according to an Urbanite analysis of real estate data. Seven out of eight city neighborhoods saw prices decline. And even those that held or gained value often saw fewer homes actually sell. Sales volume citywide plunged 42 percent. The hardesthit areas include those dominated by blue-collar workers and first-time buyers, but some of the boom years’ most bustling neighborhoods— think Reservoir Hill and some of the neighborhoods around Patterson Park—fell the hardest when the market went south. A sampling of data for 2010 suggest prices continued to slide in most of the city.

Amid the market’s wreckage, however, there are bright spots. A number of city neighborhoods held value through the Great Recession, and a handful saw home prices rise. Some neighborhoods that fared better were the ones that were more stable in the first place, particularly wealthier neighborhoods in the

north part of the city. Others are “edge neighborhoods,” where buyers are choosing cheaper properties that are still close to prime real estate. And despite the widespread decline in prices, most city neighborhoods have actually held on to much of the value they gained during the real estate glory days, according to a study by Johns Hopkins University graduate students.

Home renovation loans are also on the rise in many areas, suggesting a commitment by residents to stay in their neighborhoods despite shrunken prices and dried-up sales.

With investments in homes and neighborhood anchors such as community schools and parks, the boom days have left a positive legacy on the city and its many neighborhoods.

Whether Baltimore can hold on to those gains remains to be seen.

Fresh air: Residents walk their dogs in Patterson Park near the BaltimoreLinwood neighborhood. Home sale prices have dropped, but locals say the area has retained its vitality, thanks to investments made during better times.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 43

Gilded edge: Upper Fells Point seems to be faring relatively well, perhaps due to its proximity to the nightlife Mecca just down the street. The median home price in the neighborhood jumped from $177,000 in 2009 to $195,000 in 2010.

The Strongholds

It is almost impossible to generalize about what kind of neighborhoods or what regions of the city fared well. The real estate data seems to buck any attempt to identify clear patterns and trends.

But to find where home values are holding up best, look at who’s buying, says Anirban Basu, chairman and CEO of Sage Policy Group, an economic and policy firm. He says the deepest declines are happening in neighborhoods associated with first-time buyers, speculators, and populations that are “disproportionately susceptible” to job loss—i.e., those working in construction, manufacturing, distribution, and other blue-collar fields. At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, people working in government, health services, education, and professional services are less likely to be laid off.

The numbers generally support this. An Urbanite analysis of sales data obtained through the nonprofit Live Baltimore shows that expensive northern neighborhoods such as Guilford, Tuscany-Canterbury, and Homeland saw prices either increase or stay relatively strong. (The data, obtained by Live Baltimore, came from the national firm CoreLogic and factor in all title transfers, including realtor-assisted sales, salesby-owner, and familial title transfers. For a full listing, go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com.)

Other neighborhoods that fared relatively well

44 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Seizing opportunity: Richard and Tiffany May and their children, Brionna (top), Bryan, and Giovana, moved into the city from Owings Mills last fall. They bought a fully rehabbed home in Reservoir Hill for less than half of what it sold for three years prior and now enjoy nearby Druid Hill Park and a new Barnes & Noble and easy access to downtown via light rail.

include Federal Hill, a hotspot for young professionals, and the city’s cultural center, Mount Vernon.

The Hopkins study, done by a group of public policy graduate students led by policy studies professor Sandra J. Newman, backs this up, too. But her team noted that even in these high-income neighborhoods, fewer houses sold during the recession, and those houses that did sell spent more time on the market. Newman theorizes that owners in these neighborhoods are biding their time. “They’re hanging on to the prayer that their house will sell for a price that is very high,” she says.

Locust Point, once home to immigrant maritime workers, was one of a handful of neighborhoods that was truly ascendant. Sale prices there actually climbed 2.6 percent, from a median of $268,000 in 2007 to $275,000 two years later.

The number of sales more than doubled, too.

With good schools, access to green space and waterfront, and proximity to the interstate, plus big employers in the neighborhood such as Under Armour and Advertising.com, “there’s a lot that makes sense about Locust Point holding on to its value,” says Live Baltimore Executive Director Anna Custer, who is one of the city’s biggest cheerleaders.

Further buoying home prices in Locust Point is a shortage of new housing—at least below a

certain price bracket. Silo Point, the twentyfour-story former grain elevator that now houses more than two hundred luxury condos, still has vacancies. (See “Sky High,” March ’08 Urbanite.)

But for those priced out of the tower, dwindling construction during the recession meant fewer large groups of new units went on the market in many waterfront neighborhoods, Custer says.

Another new city stronghold is downtown, where the median residential sale price spiked in 2008 but finished 2009 back where it had been two years previous: about $245,000. The Downtown Partnership, a nonprofit working to improve and market the city’s central business district, estimates that some 41,000 residents now live within one mile of the intersection of Pratt and Light streets. That’s up 8 percent from 2007 and more than double what it was ten years ago, says spokesman Michael Evitts.

Most downtown residents came from outside the city or the region, Evitts says. The growth is fueled by two generational shifts: empty nesters who want to walk to cultural attractions and restaurants and “echo boomers” who want to live near work and don’t want to drive everywhere, he says. Raised in suburbia, these graduate students and under-30 professionals didn’t spend their childhoods watching suburban sitcoms like Green Acres or Leave It to Beaver, he says. “They had Friends and Seinfeld.”

real estate

Fixing up: A worker tears out the old porch on Jeff and Irina Coleman’s house in Waltherson in northeast Baltimore. The work is funded in part by a $10,000 matching grant from the nonprofit Healthy Neighborhoods. “I like the neighborhood,” Jeff says. Still, crime and schools are concerns. “We’re planning on having a child. When it gets to be time to go to school, we’ll move.”

Another source of downtown’s strength is couples who are bucking the tradition of leaving the city when they start a family, says Judy Chung O’Brien, who helped start the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance in 2007.

(See “The Kids Stay in the Picture,” June ’08 Urbanite.) The family alliance now has more than three thousand people on its e-mail list.

Neighborhoods on the edge

Perhaps a more revealing tale of how Baltimore has weathered the Great Recession can be found in its “edge neighborhoods”—areas that adjoin the strongholds. These are the areas that typically see the most dramatic growth and change during good times, as homebuyers look to get in on the prosperity and safety of the nearby hotspots without paying the hot prices. But they’re vulnerable, too. When the real estate market retracts, they can be the first to feel the pain.

Some edge neighborhoods have fared badly, according to the sales data. One example is Waverly, which borders Guilford and is just a few blocks from Charles Village and the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. Despite its location, ethnic diversity, and solid housing stock, the median price for home sales in Waverly plunged 61 percent, from $132,000 in 2007 to $51,000

two years later. Sales volume tumbled from seventy houses in 2007 to only twenty-seven two years later.

Still, even during the recession the edge effect sometimes holds: Edge neighborhoods can continue to be relatively popular, precisely because strongholds have retained much of their value, and new buyers, feeling the pinch of the recession, are looking for deals on the fringes.

Take Upper Fells Point, for example, just up the hill from the nightlife mecca for 20something students and professionals. “Three years ago, a buyer might have said it’s Fells Point or nothing,” Custer says. These days, however, folks seem willing to settle for a bargain a few blocks away from the coveted neighborhood. The median price in Upper Fells slid 16.5 percent from 2007 to 2009, not as bad as the citywide average of nearly 20 percent. While sales volume fell by more than a third as the recession took hold from 2007 to ’08, it jumped by a third in 2009—from sixty-four houses to eighty-eight. Numbers provided by the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors, a regional industry group, show the median home price in the neighborhood jumped from $177,000 in 2009 to $195,000 in 2010.

Most people moving into the neighborhood are young professional families, says Ed Marcinko, a lifelong resident and former

Fresh paint: Boom-era investments in the Baltimore-Linwood neighborhood include a charter Montessori school, increased activities in nearby Patterson Park—and many a paint job and rehab on local homes and businesses.

president of the Upper Fells Point Improvement Association. On his block of Bank Street alone, new residents in the past year include a husband and wife working at the nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital, a couple with a preschooler, and a 20-something single woman. Neighborhood moms tell him they send their children to Wolfe Street Academy, the nearby public charter school, because of strong parental involvement.

Similar thinking—that close by is close enough—seems to be at work in Brewer’s Hill, which gets a boost not only from its proximity to Canton, but also from something else: an abundance of parking compared with its trendier neighbor. Many of its blocks have interior courtyards that provide additional spaces—a must-have for families with multiple cars. “Don’t get me wrong, parking can be complicated,” says Mary Lou Hennigan, president of the Brewers Hill Community Association. “But it’s not like in Canton.”

The nesting instinct

Thousands of Baltimore residents have lost their homes to foreclosure in the past three years.

Others have found themselves so far underwater that they have opted to walk away from bloated mortgages and homes that they had little hope of ever owning outright. But the recession seems Urbanite #81 march 2011 45

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real estate to have had a curious impact on former industrial towns like this one: Existing residents are more apt to stay put, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. The allure of better opportunities elsewhere apparently loses some of its draw.

This nesting instinct is difficult to measure. But one indicator is the number of home improvement loans and renovation permits residents are taking out, says Mark Sissman, president of Healthy Neighborhoods Inc., a community development nonprofit. His group oversees a $40 million home loan pool that targets forty-one city communities from Greater Mondawmin to Greektown to Brooklyn/Curtis Bay. In the past year, Healthy Neighborhoods issued thirty-four rehab and refinance loans, up nearly 50 percent from 2009, Sissman says.

“We’re seeing people who are making the decision to fix up and stay,” Sissman says. “This says that people have confidence in the neighborhood and its ability to achieve more value.

That doesn’t show up in the sales data.”

Much renovation and refinance activity has concentrated along the Harford Road corridor in Northeast Baltimore, from Lauraville and Hamilton down to Ednor Gardens-Lakeside, Sissman says. And in fact, a number of northeast neighborhoods have showed signs of resiliency, including Beverly Hills, Mayfield, North Harford Road, Hamilton Hills, and Chinquapin Park-Belvedere.

In Lauraville, residents are seeing dividends from years of investment in schools and the Harford Road business district that includes the Chameleon Cafe, Koko’s Pub, and Red Canoe Bookstore Café, says Kenneth Lockie, president of the Lauraville Improvement Association.

There’s diversity, too. On Lockie’s block, he says, residents include blacks and whites, the affluent and on fixed-income, and people of various sexual orientations and national origins. “That’s the strength of the community—that we have such diversity,” says Lockie, a native of Scotland.

Even in nearby Belair-Edison, where the market fell especially hard, Sandra Newman and her Hopkins grad students found that cityissued renovation permits increased 70 percent from 2002 to 2008. That led them to wonder if it and other neighborhoods are “turning lemons into lemonade,” she says. Her team also found notable upticks in renovation permits in Mount Washington and a pair of Northwest Baltimore neighborhoods—Ashburton and Mount Holly.

The boom’s lasting legacy

Some neighborhoods are finding that things are looking up, but the truth is, it’s still bad. Foreclosures and short sales made up a quarter of all 2009 sales in the city, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc., a Rockvillebased market research firm. That rate climbed

to nearly 40 percent through last November, and distressed sales made up 27 percent of the active listings in mid-December, according to the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors.

Reservoir Hill, just south of Druid Hill Park, is lined with mansions and townhouses built by wealthy Jewish merchants and industrialists in the late 1800s. Few neighborhoods in the city flew as high as this one during the boom days in the early aughts, as realtors and speculators drove prices up. And few fell so far when the market dried up. Between 2007 and 2009, the median sale price in the neighborhood plummeted 70 percent, from $199,450 to $60,000.

The neighborhood got a lot of well-deserved hype early in the decade because of its prime location and grand old homes, says H. Alexander Robinson, acting director of the Reservoir Hill Improvement Council. New homeowners moved in, fixed up, and put down roots, while nonresident investors helped drive prices up further. “All that added together meant that we got some inflation” in Reservoir Hill housing prices, Robinson says. But many owners have since found themselves underwater on their mortgages after having put big money into makeovers, and investors have abandoned unfinished renovations.

Still, many city homes got some muchneeded attention during the good times.

Combined with the low prices, this is generating a market for people hunting for bargains and riding a fresh wave of interest in urban living, says Jody Landers, a former city councilman who now leads the Board of Realtors. “More buyers have more choices.”

And the boom days have left other positive legacies as well. Take the Baltimore-Linwood neighborhood northeast of Patterson Park, which was the scene of much-lauded neighborhood development efforts in the early 2000s. By the numbers, the neighborhood finds itself near the bottom, with the median home sale price at $132,000 in 2009, off 39 percent from $215,000 two years earlier. Still, neighborhood advocates paint the area as a pocket of stability. Lifelong residents are blending with newcomers who put down roots and invest in neighborhood anchors such as the park itself and Patterson Park Public Charter School, says Ed Rutkowski, who led the neighborhood development corporation for a decade and now directs the charter school.

Rutkowski admits neighborhood prices got too high, too fast. But he walks through the park each day on his way to work. “I don’t see empty houses or boarded houses or people afraid to be on the street at night,” Rutkowski says. “I see tons of people in the park.”

The school opened in 2005 with three hundred students in grades K–4. Now it has 580 students from kindergarten through eighth grade.

And kindergarten applications have more than doubled in the past two years, to 101 at the

time of the school’s open house in January, Rutkowski says. Meanwhile, free programming by the Friends of Patterson Park has expanded to include a larger concert series, Easter egg hunts, and youth soccer and tennis clinics, says the group’s executive director, Tim Almaguer.

What next?

Despite the gloomy numbers, the boom times seem to have, thus far, left a lasting legacy in Baltimore. Sandra Newman and her research team looked at fourteen neighborhoods across the city in high-, medium-, and low-income areas. They combed through a state real estate database, which includes more than just deals handled by realtors. They took a long view, using 2000 as a benchmark from which to measure the housing boom, which crested in 2006, and the recession itself, which officially ended in 2009. They found that housing prices in the city fell from their 2006 highs, but only a few neighborhoods slid back to pre-bubble levels.

“A large portion of the value from the boom has held—for those properties that have sold,” Newman says.

Whether we will continue to hold this value is uncertain. In January, the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which tracks home prices in twenty U.S. metropolitan areas, found that urban home prices began to slide again from October to November. (The exceptions were Washington, D.C., and a few cities in California. Baltimore was not included in the index.) The New York Times suggests this might be the beginning of a dreaded double dip in housing prices.

A sampling of 2010 Baltimore numbers provided by Landers, with the Board of Realtors, show mixed results. Median home prices increased in some neighborhoods, including Reservoir Hill and Upper Fells Point, according to the data, which was gleaned from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems and includes only those homes sold by realtors. Other neighborhoods, including Locust Point, BaltimoreLinwood, and Lauraville, saw median prices decline.

And while there is a market right now for deals in the city, there is still a glut of homes sitting on the market. “When you have greater inventory, greater supply, that’s going to push prices down, even though there’s still demand to live there,” says William “Billy” Yerman, chief executive of Strata Group, parent company of Yerman, Witman, Gaines & Conklin Realty.

Can an influx of empty nesters and millennials counteract these broader forces? Not likely.

Not completely. The real estate market in many Baltimore neighborhoods will probably get worse before it gets better. But if the past three years are any indication, parts of this city will tough it out and potentially emerge even stronger.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 47

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by Ishion Hutchinson

Ground-levelled, behind a line drawn, he took aim at a circle of precious marbles, precise, interrupting the passaging ants, the shot was fired, and if they had known, the other boys, that before speaking, the poet of old had also bent and stroked the earth, dividing himself from his people— if they had known any poet—they would have stopped him before the sun burst from his fingers, scattering glass beads.

They found him with an empty third-eye the bullet drilled into his forehead, a deaf hole, knowing only its own darkness there in the parched-grass field; flies whirred, unwavering, a sun chariot’s axle-songs, heat rose a mirror before his skull, and his mouth opened, amazed to this mask, its bleached-stillness, like a stone lit from the inside, faded as a moon marked in the dust—at this face,

photo by nadia huggins

his mouth opened, amazed, stayed open.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica.

His work has appeared in several journals in the United States and abroad. Peepal Tree Press (U.K.) published his first book, Far District, in spring 2010. He is a Pirogue Fellow and currently teaches at the University of Baltimore and Maryland Institute College of Art.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 49

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space

Grand Illusion A formal Federal Hill façade hides a twice-designed contemporary interior. by brennen jensen

the towering rowhouse looming over more diminutive brethren along Federal Hill’s Montgomery Street has, in a sense, been lying to the world for more than 150 years. It was erected in 1855 in grand federal style, the façade’s balustrades and large multi-pane windows suggesting a banker’s mansion. But its purpose was decidedly more utilitarian: It was a firehouse. (Predating our municipal fire department, it was run by the Watchman Fire Company, an outfit associated with an insurance company.)

After the firemen and their Dalmatians decamped, well before the 1900s, the building fell into community and commercial use. In the 1980s, the 5,000-square-foot structure was purchased by Arnold Lehman, then director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, who engaged New York architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson to rework the space. The end result was a brashly—perhaps harshly—modern interior. (Unsurprising when you recall that one of Lehman’s claims to fame—infamy?—at the museum was removing the ornate gilt frames from the Cone sisters’ impressionist paintings.) And so an assiduously symmetrical formal exterior concealed a maze-like modernist interior of steel stairs, glass catwalks, and a color scheme that rarely strayed from black or white.

More recently, the staid facade stood silent watch while new owners (who request anonymity) hired architect Rebecca Swanston of Baltimore’s Swanston & Associates Inc. to update and rework the house. The results are stunning: The Victorian-era structure, retooled in the Reagan years, has been tastefully retransformed into a colorful, 21st-century living space.

“It had very industrial and cold 1980s vocabulary,” Swanston says of the home. “What I was asked to do was warm it up and bring it more into this time period.”

The new warmth and color begin in the retooled entrance hall, where a tomato-red and fuchsia display wall houses a collection of African beadwork dolls. The seemingly odd color combination works well with the fanciful figurines. Fuchsia/magenta is employed throughout the house, although deftly. The owners, who did their own interior design work, have employed this potentially outlandish color gingerly enough to be noticed but not to overwhelm.

Functional-chic black metal stairs from the ’80s lead to a mezzanine level receiving area, or perhaps a “starter living room.” The house is

Free parking: The ground floor of the former firehouse contains what must be the envy of the auto-choked neighborhood: a huge garage, a vestige of the days when horse-drawn fire equipment was housed within.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 51

then bisected by a large sky-lit atrium—although, alas, there is no fireman’s pole.

On the second floor, Swanston moved the master bedroom to a front room with 9-foottall windows. An enlarged bathroom was added as well—and one with a surprise. Approach the toilet, and its lid pops up in anticipation of your bodily needs. The high-tech Japanese Toto Neorest brand toilet/bidet combo even has a remote control.

Swanston did perhaps the most work on the third floor, home to the kitchen, dining room, and main living space. (An elevator was added

52 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

in the ’80s—not for handicapped access, but to help when hauling in groceries and such.) Swanston added a breakfast space in the rear, within a new three-sided glass pavilion of foldable doors.

From this perch above most of the rooftops, the view is stunning—a clean sweep from M&T Bank Stadium to the flag flapping atop Federal Hill.

The kitchen’s bank of stainless steel cabinets was retained, but a new island of blue concrete was added. Removed was a wall of jalousie windows that concealed most of the kitchen. “[The Lehmans] wanted to close off the kitchen, so when you had a party you didn’t see the catering

staff,” Swanston figures. “We wanted to bring it in line with today’s lifestyle and when we opened it up, it changed the whole feel.”

A daytime visit to this open, lofty living space is stunning enough. One wonders what a nighttime party would be like here, with the city skyline glowing to the north and Federal Hill winking away below. One wonders, too, how to get on these lucky homeowners’ dinner party guest list.

space Best seat in the house: From the top floor deck, the view of Federal Hill is stunning. The breakfast area can be opened up to the fresh air by folding back the glass walls.

Business time (left and above): Opening into the atrium is a home office area, where a cave-like bedroom was once hidden behind a sheetrock wall. “We opened this whole area up to give the house more depth and to borrow light,” Swanston says. The office can be closed off using a Raydoor sliding wall system, whose opaque inserts and black trim suggest the rice paper panels of a Japanese house.

Sky high: Swanston didn’t touch the dramatic, glassbottomed steel catwalk (above) that leads from the kitchen across the atrium to the dining room and raised living room (right). But she and lighting designer Bruce Dunlop did opt for discreet spotlights amid the ceiling beams to replace what she calls “industrial lighting of the sort used on highways.”

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food + drink

feature / dining reviews / wine + spirits

Spice and Virtue

photo by tracey middlekauff

High-minded eating in an age of upscale veganism and responsible butchery

it is a bone-chilling Saturday evening in mid-January, but inside Zia’s Café in Towson all is warmth and bonhomie. The air is redolent with garlic and spice, and the atmosphere is lively and boisterous, thanks in part to the freely f lowing wine that most guests have brought to this monthly BYOB event. The thirty-odd diners—couples, groups of friends, even singles—have braved the inTracey Middlekauff hospitable weather to sit at communal tables and enjoy a fourtracey middlekauff is urbanite’s online food/drink editor. to course gourmet feast prepared receive her weekly e-zine, go to by chef-owner Daniela Troia. bit.ly/ezinesignup.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 57

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feature food + Drink

photo by tracey middlekauff

But as each well-composed plate arrives, illuminated by the flickering tea lights, it becomes clear that this is not your typical gathering of food connoisseurs. There is no steak or duck breast or roast chicken. Nothing is caramelized or reduced or flambéed. In fact, none of the food is even cooked, and there are no animal products—no meat, no cheese, no eggs—of any kind here. The spread may be sumptuous, but it also just so happens to be raw and vegan.

As it turns out, these days not everyone who repudiates animal products is the stereotypical Birkenstock-clad hippie with a penchant for wheatgrass and bland brown rice. The modern vegan is just as likely to be an upwardly mobile professional, CEO, or lawyer with a welldeveloped, even epicurean, palate. And more and more people are becoming what Troia calls “crossover eaters,” otherwise omnivorous people who go raw, vegan, or vegetarian for several meals each week or month.

In fact, veganism is becoming increasingly popular among the very rich and powerful. Casino mogul Steve Wynn, real estate billionaire and publisher Mort Zuckerman, Bill Clinton, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, even boxer Mike Tyson—these are the type of guys you expect to find at an upscale steakhouse, ordering manly cuts of rare meat, and yet they’ve all gone vegan.

Writer Joel Stein opined in Bloomberg Businessweek that, aside from the proclaimed health benefits, executives may be attracted to veganism because it’s an exclusive, and hence desirable, club: After all, only 1 percent of the U.S. population is vegan, and what with supplements and specialty products it can be a rather expensive diet to follow. But then, money makes everything

easier: Wynn was able to change his diet on a dime, as all he had to do was tell the chef on the yacht he was sailing on to start cooking vegan.

Self-control is likely also an attractive factor for some. Sticking to a vegan diet—at least at first—requires discipline, which appeals to hard-driven Type A personalities. “I think it is a choice for intelligent people,” Troia says. “Yes, there is a trend factor, but the person who [goes raw or vegan] knows why they are doing it. …

The choice is reached from reading and from searching for information.”

One of the regulars at the Zia’s monthly feasts is Brian Hetrich, who spent twenty-five years in the corporate world as a sales rep for Honeywell, among other professions. He recently took up a new career as a nutritional consultant and spreads the gospel of his raw vegan lifestyle through a small start-up business, Natural Vibrant Health. “I have discovered my life’s true calling,” he says.

Since transitioning from vegetarian to vegan and finally to raw vegan over the course of three years, Hetrich says he has lost 100 pounds and credits his new diet with his improved mental clarity, boundless energy, heightened intuition, and overall excellent health. (Incidentally, these are many of the same claims made by those who follow the primal diet, which consists in large part of raw, and sometimes rotten, meats.) And for those who feel that being a vegan is a luxury for the rich, Hetrich retorts, “Sickness is a lot more expensive than health.”

The fact is, the luxury of choosing what not to eat is only possible in a society where food is plentiful. Rachel Black, a professor in the gastronomy graduate program at Boston University, points out that throughout history, the question of whether to include or exclude meat in one’s diet has revolved around issues of virtue and what it means to be a good person.

So whether you’re talking about the popularity of artisanal butchery and those who advocate eating the entire animal, offal and all, or, on the opposite extreme, raw vegans, “You either justify an excess because you understand where [the meat] comes from, or you reject all of that,” Black says. “Either way, it’s about how food brings meaning to your life and to your world.”

And more meat-loving chefs are starting to figure out a way to accommodate everyone’s idea of what it means to eat meaningfully, even if those ideas are diametrically opposed. Sarah Acconcia at 13.5% Wine Bar in Hampden creates vegan-friendly dishes such as the cauliflower steak, a seared “center cut” that’s served with a sweet potato mash and spinach. John Walsh of the upscale caterer Chef’s Expressions once concocted a meal for an all-vegan wedding that included Asian mushroom brochettes with a sweet soy glaze and mini creamer potatoes filled with a concasse of pumpkin and ras al hanout-roasted pumpkin seeds.

These days, it is possible to munch on roasted marrow bones while your date enjoys a carrot soufflé, both of you resting secure in the rightness of your respective choices. Don’t think of it as self-delusion. Think of it as being human. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin describes how, as a young man, he handily talked himself out of being a vegetarian. Craving a taste of some freshly roasted fish, he reasoned that since the fish ate other creatures, he surely had a right to eat the fish.

“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature,” Franklin writes, “since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

Urbanite #81 march 2011 59

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dining reviews food + Drink

Isabella’s Brick Oven Pizza and Panini

BY Michelle Gienow

Italian eats: Isabella’s Lombardi pizza is topped with sliced pancetta, gorgonzola, and walnuts.

bottom photo by amie bingaman; top photo by elizaBeth Cole

I

sabella’s is located near Baltimore International College, which is handy for the culinary school’s chef/instructors, who frequently duck in for a vero Napoletano version of fast food. The menu offers pizza, salads, and panini, but don’t let its simplicity mislead: Handmade ingredients and unswervingly authentic flavors elevate Isabella’s fare to levels of deliciousness other (and fancier) Little Italy restaurants reach for yet often seem unable to grasp.

This tiny storefront eatery combines classic

Italian salumeria with homey neighborhood pizzeria. Led by co-owner Nicholas Harris, Isabella’s polyglot staff scratch-makes many items each day. These include the intriguingly dense fresh mozzarella; crusty, oven-warm loaves unrelated to flabby American versions of “Italian bread”; and marvelous contorni such as incandescently red roasted peppers studded with fat cloves of garlic, big balsalmicmarinated mushrooms, and rapini.

Ah, the rapini: robust, bitter broccoli rabe cooked with a positively indecent amount of garlic and red pepper. Enjoy it on its delicious lonesome or co-starring in one of Isabella’s twenty-eight different sandwiches. (The rapini paired with rosemary-scented house-roasted porchetta is the favorite of Isabella’s other co-owner, Daniel Stewart, whose background in imported foods allows Isabella’s to bring in such deliciously authentic ingredients.) Noncarnivores will exult in the Bosco, a simple yet brilliant pairing of rapini and roasted red peppers, or the modestly named “mixed green” salad that generously parades roasted eggplant and peppers, marinated artichokes, and

black olives atop mesclun greens in a balsamic vinaigrette. They will, however, want to steer a broad berth around the meat-o-licious Scooch salad, wherein capicollo ham, soppressata, and the exemplary porchetta are rolled together around Gouda cheese chunks and served atop a bed of abashed-looking lettuce.

Interestingly, the least compelling item at Isabella’s might be the pizza margherita. This classic pie is the yardstick by which all selfrespecting Neapolitan pizzerie are measured, and the one place that Isabella’s has unwisely messed with success: In place of marinara sauce, Isabella’s employs sliced tomatoes. This might be a sublime combination during the brief season when tomatoes are truly terrific, but when you try to pull it off with pale, grainy, food service fruit, well ... Even the brick-oven pizza dough and fresh-made mozz can’t save it.

Better to grab one of the perfect panini, maybe a mini cannoli, and enjoy what Isabella’s does best: simple food, skillfully prepared from impeccable ingredients. (Lunch and dinner Mon–Sat; lunch Sun. 221 S. High St.; 410-9628888; www.isabellasbrickoven.net.)

Alewife

BY Martha Thomas

A

lewife is so packed on a Friday night, you’d be tempted to assume the recession doesn’t affect 20- to 30-somethings, who stand in boisterous groups around the bar and pack the surrounding tables, ensuring an hour wait or more for non-reservation-holders. Not one of these revelers looks headed to the ballet at the Hippodrome across the street. And there’s not even a game on the flat screens suspended above the former counter, now missing the teller windows. This place has a happy vibe that leaves you wishing all those troublesome big banks would just become bars instead.

The newest iteration of the Eutaw Savings Bank building, Alewife carries on admirably in the space, one you’d be tempted to call “troubled”—considering this is its third restaurant in as many years—if it wasn’t so beautiful, with high ceilings, elaborate wood paneling, and curious details (dinner in a vault, anyone?).

Alewife seems determined to do a few things only, and do them very well. The menu leans toward the gastro and won’t leave anyone hungry.

For meat eaters, there’s pork chop, skirt steak, and braised oxtail with a double chocolate stout demi-glace; for vegetarians, a black bean burger and a risotto cake, sautéed crisp, oozing buffalo mozzarella and drizzled with truffle

Bank on it: Alewife is the latest restaurant/bar to stake a claim to the Eutaw Savings Bank building on Eutaw Street.

cream. And for those in-between, there’s seared rockfish with parsnip puree and braised leeks.

But the dish you’ll come back for is the Smoke Burger, so named for its charred exterior, the smoked Gouda meltingly embedded within, the smoked bacon and chipotle aioli without. The kitchen should probably offer a prize for eating the whole thing, especially if you’re nibbling on the accompanying duck fat fries along the way.

If you’re not up for the challenge, there’s plenty of opportunity for grazing—on the goat cheese flan, for example, savory custard with a strong smoky flavor, sliced heirloom tomato and pea shoot salad on the side. There’s a meat and cheese board with a selection of charcuterie. A handful of appetizers and sandwiches

(including the Smoke Burger) are available for lunch and after 10 p.m.—convenient for those who are attending a Hippodrome event.

Alewife also specializes in beer: High on the wall, there’s an ever-changing list of forty or so drafts with cool names (Green Flash Hop Head Red, Corsendonk, Mama’s Little Yella Pils) written in expressive colored chalk. There are also a reputed 100 bottled varieties on hand, should the need arise.

You might be tempted to find some hidden meaning in the naming of this restaurant, with its cranberry-colored walls. But if Alewife is indeed a red herring, a bank in disguise, diverting us from worldly cares, so be it. Pass the IPA. (Dinner daily; lunch Sat and Sun. 21 N. Eutaw St.; 410-545-5112; www.alewifebaltimore.com.)

Urbanite #81 march 2011 61

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wine + spirits food + Drink

Bitters Medicine

A brief history of the beverage billed as both curative and cocktail

By Clinton Macsherry

D

espite mounting evidence of health benefits of moderate consumption of alcohol, the risks associated with drinking continue to make it controversial in medical circles. I’m not a doctor, and playing one doesn’t sound like much fun to me, but here’s a prescription for your next cocktail: Add a dash or three of bitters.

They may or may not measure up to their former medicinal claims, but bitters sure can cure a jaded palate.

Bitters might seem as old-fashioned as, well, an Old Fashioned—one of the drinks with which they’re commonly associated. In fact, the earliest recorded definition of “cocktail,” offered by a New York newspaper in 1806, cited bitters as one of four standard ingredients, along with spirits, sugar, and water. Bitters’ history intertwines with so-called patent medicines, typically hooch- or dope-laced concoctions boasting esoteric ingredients and curative properties for ailments ranging from scarlet fever to “female complaints.” At times when the zeitgeist might have frowned upon liquor, the ostensibly therapeutic purposes of patent medicines made them comparatively respectable.

Two of the oldest surviving bitters brands— Peychaud’s and the market-leading Angostura (70 and 90 proof, respectively)—were developed in the 1800s as “stomachics,” tonics to ward off dyspepsia, improve digestion, and stif le flatulence. “Modern pharmacology,” Wikipedia drily notes, “does not have an equivalent term.”

Nonetheless, they may actually work. Webbased herbalists seem pretty well sold on the efficacy of gentian root, a key ingredient in some bitters. Tell certain old-school bartenders that you have a stomachache, and they’ll likely pour you a bitters-and-soda for relief. But passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in the early 20th century mandated labeling reforms and led to restrictions on unproven medical claims. Advertizing for bitters today highlights mixology over medication.

Within cocktaildom, bitters brands can inspire devoted followings. Their f lavors— dominated by herbs (often called aromatic photo © Bruce Shippee | bigstockphoto.com

bitters), citrus peel (as in orange bitters), or other infusions—can vary subtly or dramatically, and the recipes are mostly kept secret. Peychaud’s, associated with New Orleans and specifically the time-honored Sazerac, retains a distinct niche.

Fee Brothers, another brand with 19th-century roots, offers a diverse line that includes rhubarb bitters and a version aged in whiskey barrels. The cocktail renaissance of recent years has brought new bitters to market from as far afield as Germany. And innovative bartenders from coast to coast have created formulations for their own in-house use.

That’s all swell, but pretty much everyone knows that Angostura—with its stubby brown bottle and oversized label—rules. And so, when problems with the bottle supplier interrupted production at Angostura’s plant in Trinidad in 2009, precipitating a worldwide shortage, semifacetious alarm rippled through the press and the blogosphere. “Bitters shortage strains bartenders,” quipped one headline; “Angostura bitters shortage shakes up cocktail world,” tittered another. A couple of others riffed on the phrase “bitter end.” Puns notwithstanding, Angostura partisans took it pretty seriously. Happily, the shortage abated in early 2010.

It’s hard to describe precisely what Angostura ($8 for a 4-ounce bottle) adds to a cocktail, but I’ll bet the both of us could readily detect its absence in, for instance, an otherwise wellassembled Manhattan. Although my dyspepsia is mostly of the figurative variety, I have tried Angostura on its own. Bark-y orange-brown in color, it offers an appetizing nose of clove, ginger, and cinnamon. Those flavors echo with an intense and not particularly pleasant bittersweetness on the palate. In the form of a few dashes splashed in drink, however, Angostura sings a different song. It adds jazz tones to fruitjuiced cocktails and lends some bass notes to vodka and gin. With rum or whiskey, in particular, it seems to elevate the aroma and reveal layers of spiciness in the liquor—more of an accent or amplification than an alteration. Open your mouth and say “ah.”

Urbanite #81 march 2011 63

For a show like this, however far you have to travel won’t be too far. —The New York Times

TREASURES OF HEAVEN SAINTS, RELICS & DEVOTION IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE FEB. 13–MAY 15

BECOME A MEMBER & SEE IT FREE! baltimore / 600 n. charles st. thewalters.org open wed.–sun. 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

WHAT WILL YOU DISCOVER? Arm Reliquary of the Apostles, German (Lower Saxony), ca.

1190, The Cleveland Museum of Art. Treasures of Heaven has been organized by the Walters Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and The British Museum. This project received lead support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Sheridan Foundation, Paul Ruddock, and Marilyn and George Pedersen, with additional support from other generous individuals.

The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

arts + Culture

feature / music / theater / film

Lost in the Crowd

Illustration by Pat Kinsella

A local writer on belonging, and not belonging, at home and abroad

By Michael Yockel

michael yockel is a contributing writer to urbanite.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 65

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feature/music arts + culture in the title piece from Susi Wyss’ novel-instories, The Civilized World, Janice, an American international health care project manager working in Senegal, returns for a brief vacation to the Central African Republic, where years earlier she’d served as a Peace Corps volunteer. Janice argues with her British boyfriend, an international development worker, about how best to address poor Africans’ needs. She ruminates on a disturbing home invasion she experienced during a previous assignment in Ivory Coast. And she watches in wonder as a cloud of white butterflies descends on the car in which she rides, clogging its engine and temporarily stranding Janice, her boyfriend, and their driver in a forest.

Sitting at Fells Point’s Asahi Sushi, not far from her office at Jhpiego, a Johns Hopkins University affiliate that supports international health programs, Wyss amiably dismisses the notion that Janice acts as a surrogate for herself. This, despite the fact that Wyss—45 and a resident of Silver Spring—did a stint in the Central African Republic with the Peace Corps, managed health care programs in Ivory Coast (and was victimized by a nasty burglary there), and marveled as a blizzard of white butterflies conked out her car during a return visit to the C.A.R. Scheduled for publication at the end of March, The Civilized World, Wyss’ first novel, perceptively recounts the lives of five women— two West African, three American—in nine interconnected stories. Smart, searching, and serious, the women contemplate or muddle through motherhood (or the lack thereof) and couplehood (or the lack thereof). More broadly, Wyss examines the idea of identity, with her stories propelled by character, not plot.

Throughout the book, Wyss dispels the vague Western concept of Africa as a monolith, a continent teeming with poverty, disease, and relentless civil unrest; instead, she depicts its quotidian ebb and flow—what she terms its “human aspect.” She hopes that the book imparts the sense that “we have more in common than we have differences.”

True enough: Wyss takes a catholic approach to fashioning her five women. Irrespective of their race and culture, she depicts each wrestling with many of the same uncertainties about roles, relationships, and responsibilities, with all emerging as credible and convincing characters. While Wyss successfully transmutes personal experience into affecting fiction to create elements of Janice, her most complex and compelling protagonist is Adjoa, a single, childless, 30-something Ghanaian beauty shop owner who springs from Wyss’ deftness at splicing her observational powers to her powers of imagination.

In the story “The Precious Brother Salon,” in which Adjoa launches her business while coping with the devastating death of her twin brother, Wyss writes:

At the thought of Kojo, Adjoa felt a dull familiar throb in her right arm. Here it came again, the same pain that had started right after his death. The doctors she’d consulted were mystified, subjecting her to tests and Xrays that proved useless to explain its cause.

She stopped consulting the experts when her childhood friend Gifty, in the course of a conversation about Gifty’s work as a nurse, happened to mention phantom pain: the sensations that amputees feel in their lost limbs for years following an amputation.

Losing her twin—with whom she’d shared everything, even her mother’s womb—had been even more agonizing than the loss of a limb. Although more than a year had passed since she’d buried Kojo in Abidjan and traveled back to Accra, telling her family that he’d died of cerebral malaria, Adjoa had begun to think of the on-again, off-again ache as a form of phantom pain.

All the Pieces Fit

Hello Paradise by Celebration (Friends Records, 2011)

by Al Shipley

“Whether it’s literal or whether it’s figurative, they’re [her female characters] all in one place but want to be somewhere else,” Wyss explains.

“As someone who has lived in many different places, I’ve often had that sense of not really belonging to where I am.”

Born in Washington, D.C., to Swiss parents, Wyss and her family moved to Ivory Coast for three years when she was 7. Her father worked for the World Bank. Back in the United States, she earned a bachelor’s in international political economy at Vassar College and a master’s in public health at Boston University before spending two years back in Africa with the Peace Corps.

Wyss joined Jhpiego as a program manager in 1995, shuttling between Baltimore and about a dozen African nations for the next eleven years. Simultaneously, she obtained a master’s in fiction writing from Hopkins in 2004, completing “Monday Born,” the lead story in The Civilized World, as part of the program. She returned to Jhpiego in 2009 after taking a sabbatical to write the book.

Ed Perlman, poetry advisor in the Master of Arts in Writing program at Johns Hopkins, lauds her craft. “Wyss has a landscape artist’s ability to capture the mood of a place, and the decisions her characters make originate from the land they walk upon, the environment that shapes them, and the countryside that can nurture them or drain the life from them.”

Wyss already has begun writing a second novel, a coming-of-age story about a young girl in the C.A.R., that’s—not surprisingly— inspired by her own experiences in that nation.

“It’s not that easy to live in Africa,” she concedes. “I never really felt like I belonged there.

Of course,” she adds with a laugh, “there are times when I don’t really feel like I belong here, either.”

I

n the spring of 2009, the Baltimore psychedelic soul trio Celebration began unveiling their third album, one song at a time, as part of a series called Electric Tarot. Nearly two years later, all of the songs have been assembled into an album called Hello Paradise. (Vinyl and CD versions, as well as free digital downloads, are available at www.friendsrecordsbaltimore.com.)

And the results feel anything but piecemeal, the nine songs sequenced as a cohesive, arresting listen—perhaps the band’s best effort yet.

Katrina Ford’s big, dramatic voice is Celebration’s calling card, her delivery landing somewhere between a cabaret singer, a cooing indie ingenue, and some kind of otherworldly presence. The versatile drummer David Bergander acts as her anchor, while multi-instrumentalist Sean Antanaitis fills up every other available nook and cranny of sound with guitar, organ, and electronics. Three other musicians join in when Celebration performs live: Tommy Rouse on guitar, Tony Drummon on keys and back-up vocals, and Walker Teret on bass.

Hello Paradise opens with a few plucks of a sitar, giving way to the exotic groove of “What’s This Magical,” immediately signalling that the adventurous, omnivorous spirit of Celebration’s first two albums is only being taken further here. But the band doesn’t really push outside their comfort zone in a truly surprising way until halfway through the album, when “Great Pyramid” interrupts all the swirling epic rockers with a funky clavinet riff and a thumping low end. Before the song is over, it flies off in several other directions, marking it as paradoxically one of the most ambitious and most accessible songs on the album.

Celebration plays a record release show on March 5 at 2640 Space, with local bands Future Islands and Arbouretum. For information, go to www.redemmas. org/2640.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 67

What do you call major grantees from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Institutes of Health, a recipient of the German Cross of the Order of Merit, the President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, an authority on humanitarian law for Amnesty International, Fulbright Scholars, gubernatorial appointees, the expert on romance novels, the founder of a program that prepares free tax returns for low-income families, an invited lecturer at the University of Paris, an award-winning children’s writer, and the authors of books on subjects as diverse as global religion, digital painting, thermoluminescence and behavior management?

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theater / film arts + culture

From the Land of the Rising Sun

Noh plays—about two hundred are currently performed in Japan—are mostly familiar fables with archetypal characters: the old man, the demon, the ghost, depicted by actors wearing masks, accompanied by percussion and a chorus. Performers are trained for years, often born into Noh families who pass the art form from generation to generation.

Members of the renowned Katayama Kashu-Juku Noh Theater at Towson University, March 19 family, which has been Snow Falling on Cedars at Center Stage, March 9–April 3 performing Noh since

by Martha Thomas the 17th century, visit Towson University for one night only as part of here may be a good reason that Noh a two-week U.S. tour, a coup that has Suewhei performances are rarely seen in the United Shieh, director of Towson’s Asian Arts and CulStates. The 600-plus-year-old Japanese theater ture Center, thrilled. “In the twenty-five years form—with its highly codified movements, sets, I’ve been here, I’ve wanted to bring authentic and costumes—is antithetical to our instantNoh theater from Japan,” she says. “So when I gratification culture. All-male actors move found out about this tour, I grabbed it.” slowly across a barren stage, and the execution The program will begin with a traditional of a simple plot can often take the better part dance, followed by the usual comic interlude of a day.

bottom photo by andrew laumann, poster design by post typography; top photo courtesy of Kashu-Juku Noh Theater

T

Second Time Around Putty Hill at the Charles Theatre, March 4–10

by Anne Haddad

P

utty Hill is a fictional film, but it looks and feels like a documentary about workingclass Americans, set against strip malls, messy teenage bedrooms, and a karaoke bar.

The second feature by local filmmaker Matt Porterfield, it is a character- and place-driven meditation on the life of a young man named Cory, revealed through the collective memories of family and friends grieving his death from a heroin overdose.

Putty Hill is also a lesson in economy and industriousness. Porterfield, who grew up in Baltimore and studied film at New York University, had been working with screenwriter and producer Jordan Mintzer on a different film, Metal Gods, about a group of disaffected Baltimore County teens amid the culture of heavy metal. But they couldn’t secure funding to do justice to the screenplay they had written.

“So that’s when I began work on Putty Hill, “ Porterfield says. “After the exercise in frustration that Metal Gods became, it was really important to me and to my collaborators to push forward quickly. We decided to use the

called Kyogen, and will end with the performance of one of Noh’s most popular tales, Lady Aoi, whose title character is the wife of Genji—the hero of a classic work of Japanese literature—and is possessed by a demon.

Shieh hopes the Towson audience will appreciate the Noh aesthetic. “When the actors move, they float across the stage. It’s very meditative.” center stage will take a radically different look at Japanese culture—at least Americans of Japanese descent—with Snow Falling on Cedars, an adaptation of David Guterson’s poetic 1995 novel set on an island in Puget Sound just after World War II. The story involves the death of a fisherman (of German descent) and his accused killer, a childhood friend named Kabuo Miyamoto who is Japanese-American. Both men served in the war, and Miyamoto’s family was imprisoned at an internment camp. Director David Schweizer says the stage version retains Guterson’s evocative writing, with the actors shifting between storytelling and presenting what he describes as “a good courtroom yarn.”

The suspenseful plot, he says, captures the “tangle the war caused over ethnic allegiances.”

For tickets to Kashu-Juku Noh Theater, call 410-7042787 or go to www.tuboxoffice.com.

For tickets to Snow Falling on Cedars, call 410-332-0033 or go to www.centerstage.org.

resources we had, the money we had, and make the best film we could.”

Rather than write a new screenplay, they developed the scenario about Cory’s death and allowed the cast of nonprofessional actors to improvise dialogue within that structure. “It was a very open construct,” Porterfield says. “We mostly worked with the cast we had [from Metal Gods] and the locations [we’d scouted] in and around Baltimore.”

Porterfield and company shot Putty Hill during twelve days in August 2009 on a shooting budget of about $18,000. The film went on to the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, a.k.a. the Berlinale, and the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, and sold out two showings at the 2010 Maryland Film Festival. It also won the “best feature” prizes at festivals in Chile, France, Bulgaria, and Atlanta, Georgia.

“Overseas, people get very excited about new visions of America, especially stories about the American working class,” Porterfield says. “Everyone seems to know Baltimore from The Wire, so they know it has a gritty side, but Putty Hill is real without being sentimental or dark, and audiences seem to respond to that.”

For more information, go to www.puttyhillmovie.com.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 69

THROUGH MAY 15 Generously sponsored by The Rouse Company Foundation Additional support provided by Carol and Alan Edelman and the Susan B. Katzenberg Fund at the T. Rowe Price Program for Charitable Giving Media sponsor City Paper Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchased as the gift of Mr. and Mrs. James S. Riepe, Sparks, Maryland, in Honor of Arnold L. Lehman, Director, 1979‑1997, BMA 1999.535. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

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Ted Serios, Untitled [Normal of Serios & Eisenbud], ca. 1964–1967, Polaroid Photograph, Photography Collections, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, UMBC

art Ending the yearlong celebration of Baltimore Clayworks’ thirtieth anniversary is Transcending Integration, an exhibition of ceramics by established and up-andcoming African American artists that explore the idea of integration. Go to www. baltimoreclayworks.org for information about panel discussions, workshops, and other public events. March 5–April 16.

(5707 Smith Ave.; 410-578-1919) In Gallery 1448’s POINTS OF VIEW: Erotica From a Male/Female Perspective, twelve artists explore desire through photography, drawing, screen painting, and other mediums. Through March 13. (1448 E. Baltimore St.; 410327-1554; www.1448.org) Small Magic: Photographic Transformations features work by photographers who “create small-scale environments and photograph the work in a way that transforms their creations into something more significant,” according to MAP’s Sofia Rutka. At Maryland Art Place through March 19. (8 Market Pl.; 410-962-8565; www.mdartplace.org)

and bachata workshops for all ability levels, live performances, and nightly dance parties that last until 4 a.m. (2004 Greenspring Dr.; www.baltimoresalsafest.com)

exhibits See more than two hundred quilts created by members of the Baltimore Heritage Quilters’ Guild in Quilt EXPO 2011, their biennial show. To mark the sesquentennial of the Civil War, quilts made with fabric from that era will also be on display. March 12 and 13 at Goucher College. (1021 Dulaney Valley Rd.; www.baltimorequilters.com) At Towson University is Pride and Passion: The African American Baseball Experience, a traveling exhibit about the challenges faced by black ball players in the post-Civil-War era. Through April 8. (8000 York Rd.; 410-704-ARTS; www.towson.edu/artscalendar/)

literature Fiction and nonfiction author Beverly Lowry is the writer in residence this semester at Goucher College. On March 1, she’ll read from and sign copies of her eight books and answer questions about her work. (1021 Dulaney Valley Rd.; 410337-6333; http://events.goucher.edu) Poetry and fiction writers gather in Western Maryland March 31–April 3 for the Spring into Writing retreat, which covers both the craft of writing and publishing. Instructors include novelist Jessica Anya Blau and poet Gerry LaFemina. For registration info, call 301-687-4024 or go to www.citylit project.org.

music Local recording studio Mobtown Studios throws the NOVO Festival at the Windup Space again this year. It’s

five days of instrumental music (hence the name, which refers to “no vocals”) by a dozen national and local artists, including Susan Alcorn and Big in Japan.

March 1–5. (12 W. North Ave.; 410244-8855; www.novofestival.com) On March 11, indie folk outfit Vetiver and folk duo Sarah Lee Guthrie (the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie) and Johnny Irion perform at the Metro Gallery. (1700 N. Charles St.; www. themetrogallery.net) Youngsters in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program create a musical procession for the March 31 and April 3 performances of Pied Piper Fantasy. Also on the program is the premiere of a new BSO commission by David Rimelis and Prokofiev’s Cinderella Suite. (1212 Cathedral St.; 410-783-8000; www.bsomusic.org)

To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the American Abstract Artists group, Towson University hosts Fluid, an exhibition of artwork by three current group members, all of whom create textile-based installations: Lynne Harlow, Marthe Keller, and Rossana Martinez. Through April 9. (8000 York Rd.; 410-704-ARTS; www.towson.edu)

dance March 25–27 at the Crown Plaza hotel in Timonium is the annual Baltimore Salsa Fest, a weekend of salsa, cha-cha,

In the 1960s, a man named Ted Serios claimed he could project his thoughts onto Polaroid film, creating what he called “thoughtographs.” Some of these photos appear in Psychic Projections/ Photographic Impressions at the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery through March 27. (1000 Hilltop Circle; 410-4552270; www.umbc.edu/arts)

Urbanite #81 march 2011 71

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the scene musical theater The hit Broadway musical Les Misérables takes the stage at the Hippodrome Theatre March 1–6, with new staging and scenery inspired by the paintings of Victor Hugo, the author of the book that inspired the play. (12 N. Eutaw St.; 410-547-SEAT; www.francemerrickpac.com) On March 12 in the cabaret at Germano’s Trattoria, Charisma Wooten performs A Night With Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley, about the life of the controversial and successful African American stand-up comedian. (300 S. High St.; 410752-4515; www.germanostrattoria.com)

opera Opera Vivente’s second production of the season is George Frideric Handel’s 1731 Rinaldo, set during the First Crusade.

March 4, 6, 10, and 12 at Emmanuel Episcopal Church (811 Cathedral St.; 410547-7997; www.operavivente.org) March 25 and 27 at the Engineers Club, Baltimore Concert Opera presents To Be or Not to Be?, an evening of opera favorites and potential pieces for future performances. Lectures take place before both performances. (11 W.

Mt. Vernon Pl.; 443-445-0226; www. baltimoreconcertopera.com)

theater March 18–April 17, Everyman Theatre puts on the Baltimore premiere of Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly, about the reaction of an African American family to meeting one son’s white girlfriend. (1727 N. Charles St.; 410-752-2208; www. everymantheatre.org)

food/drink For the inaugural Frederick Restaurant Week, more than a dozen restaurants— including VOLT, Acacia Fusion Bistro, and Firestone's Culinary Tavern—offer prix fixe two- and three-course lunches for $10.01 and $20.01 and two- and threecourse dinners for $20.01 and $30.01.

March 7–13. (http://frederickrestaurant week.com) On March 8, as part of the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s Charm City Conversations, Philip Tulkoff, president of Tulkoff Food Products Company, talks about his family business, which started in the 1930s and is now one of the country’s largest distributors of horseradish

and other food products. For reservations, call 410-727-4808 ext. 132. (1415 Key Hwy.; www.thebmi.org) Baltimore Health Coaches Lucas Seipp-Williams and Richele Henry lead a Spring Cleaning Cooking Demo, with a focus on dark leafy greens; preparations for beginner, intermediate, and advanced cooks will be demonstrated.

March 19 at Carrick Health and Chiropractic (623 W. 34th St., #200; 443-4189534; www.baltimorehealthcoach.com) The perks of the annual Heavy Seas Real Ale and BBQ Festival on March 26 are many: bottomless tastings of cask ales, one-of-a-kind firkins, barbecue and sides from local restaurants, and brewery tours. The event usually sells out ahead of time, so get tickets early. (4615 Hollins Ferry Rd., Suite B, Halethorpe; 410-2477822; www.hsbeer.com)

green/sustainable At Baltimore Green Works’ annual fundraiser, the Ecoball, partygoers can dance to live music, sip wine and beer, and nosh on food prepared by Baltimore International College students, who will compete in a Top Chef-style competition

to create the best dishes using locally sourced ingredients. March 18 at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Museum. (1417 Thames St.; www. baltimoregreenworks.com/ecoball/)

home/design This year, the Maryland Home and Garden Show looks toward warm weather with a theme of “Symphony of Spring.” The two weekends—at Timonium Fairgrounds March 5–6 and 10–11—include fully landscaped gardens, thousands of orchid varieties, outdoor furniture and fire pits, and home improvement experts and vendors. (2200 York Rd.; www.mdhomeandgarden.com) As part of the House Beautiful lecture series at Evergreen Museum and Library, Emily Evans Eerdmans talks about the Château de Malmaison, the country house of Josephine and Napoleon Bonaparte, and its revival by mid-20thcentury interior designers. March 30.

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The Center for Thrombosis Research, part of the Heart Center at Sinai, is conducting groundbreaking research in the area of platelet aggregation or stickiness. The clumping together of platelets, or aggregation, is the main reason blood clots develop, causing heart attacks, strokes and the blocking of new coronary artery stents. Currently, aspirin, Plavix and Effient are the major FDA approved conventional medications to prevent platelet aggregation in patients who have coronary artery disease.

The Sinai Center for Thrombosis Research, led by Paul A. Gurbel, M.D., a prominent interventional cardiologist, questions why some patients continue to form deadly blood clots despite being on these medications. As director of the Center for Thrombosis Research at Sinai, Gurbel’s findings have exposed the pivotal role blood platelets play in causing a heart attack. He and his research team are helping to personalize antiplatelet therapy. Their work is transforming the way cardiac patients are tested and treated, potentially saving many lives around the world.

Gurbel has been leading research on Plavix, the second biggest selling drug in the world and the most highest commonly prescribed anti-clotting medication after aspirin. His lab was the first to discover Plavix resistance. In a recent investigation, Dr.Gurbel, in collaboration with Dr. Alan Shuldiner, director of the Program for Genetics and Genomic Medicine at the University of Maryland, identified a link between a common genetic variation and risk for subsequent cardiac events after coronary artery stenting. It is estimated that the genetic variation is carried by 30 percent of the general population and plays a major role in determining response to Plavix.

These findings of Gurbel and his team have been published in hundreds of peerreviewed medical journal articles, have been presented worldwide, and helped shape treatment guidelines related to the dosage of antiplatelet drugs from both the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. Their research has also created the platform for the discovery of new drugs.

Gurbel and his team have partnered with top pharmaceutical companies that have sought them out to test new antiplatelet drugs that may fill the critical treatment gaps associated with Plavix.

“I believe that the blind administration of antiplatelet drugs without confirming a good response is coming to an end,” says Gurbel. “A genetic analysis and platelet function measurement should be used in the future to determine which drug should be chosen for each patient.”

Currently, investigators at the Center for Thrombosis Research are performing a study to examine the use of point-of-care genetic and platelet function testing to identify patients at risk for cardiac events after coronary stenting.

Therapy will be altered based on the test results with the goal of improving patient outcomes. The center’s research will strongly influence the way doctors treat cardiovascular disease in the future and will likely mandate the universal measurement of the degree of platelet stickiness to ensure that the drugs given are actually doing their job.

For more information about the Center for Thrombosis Research and the Heart Center at Sinai, please call 410-601-WELL (9355) or visit www.knowyournumbersbaltimore.com.

Urbanite #81 march 2011 77

eye to eye

most artists will tell you their inspiration lies at a crossroads between their immediate environment and their imagination. The successful integration of these two very different worlds is what turns ideas into art and what distinguishes an expert from an amateur. Sangram Majumdar’s paintings walk a tightrope between measurement and invention. A few steps in one direction would generate skillful, predictable still lifes, and a few steps in the other direction would yield abstract expressionist works.

Instead, Majumdar paints complex visual places that cannot possibly be real yet are deceptively easy to believe.

In Veils, the artist depicts a woman sitting in an elegantly patterned chair. He paints woman and chair with loving detail and then, just as carefully, dismantles his vision. Under his hand, a cara ober solid world of velvety cushions, shiny black hair, and fleshy skin disintegrates into a flat painted cara ober is urbanite’s online arts/culture editor. to receive surface and, further back, a simple line drawing. her weekly e-zine, go to bit.ly/ A veil of perception lifts: The believable flesh and ezinesignup. fabric is nothing but an illusion of light and color in buttery strokes of oil paint.

“The constant impossibility of painting a tangible space that is psychologically elusive is what kept me in the painting,” says Majumdar, a painting and drawing instructor at Maryland Institute College of Art. “The drawing on the wall was my way out of it.”

Negotiating, and sometimes dismantling, the classical rules of depiction, Majumdar paints what he sees, as well as that which cannot be seen.

78 march 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Sangram Majumdar Veils (2010) oil on linen 64 × 60 in.

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TIMONIUM • 410.252.6666 ELLICOTT CITY • 410.461.4044 ANNAPOLIS TOWNE CENTRE AT PAROLE • 443.321.0300

2/10/2011 9:51:05 AM

LIVE BY THE WATER. NOT BY THE BOOK.

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1 BEDROOMS FROM $289,900 2 BEDROOMS FROM $399,900 3 BEDROOMS FROM $569,900

On site: Call on Jack™ Concierge | Life FX Fitness & Wellness | Miguel’s Cantina | Privé Salon and Spa | STYLE Sky Lounge | Secure covered parking

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INNER HARBOR

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LATROBE PARK FORT McHENRY

SILOPOINT.COM | 866.979.1952 | 1200 Steuart Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21230