May 2007 Issue

may 2007 issue no. 35

Farm Fresh: The Downtown Market Turns 30 Building Tall in Texas: Austin’s Plan to Hogtie Sprawl

MARYLAND GOTHIC: CAN AN URBAN/AGRO ALLIANCE SAVE THE BAY?

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urbanite may 07

f e a t u r e s

This month’s cover was inspired

by Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic. This image features Molly O’Donnell, a contributing writer to Urbanite and proud member of the Charm City Roller Girls league, and farmer David Smith of Springfield Farm, an allnatural farm in Sparks, Maryland.

Unbeknownst to the Urbanite staff, Molly and David had already met, in a sense: Molly had eaten meat from a pig raised on David’s farm the week before the shoot. An earlier incarnation of the final image can be seen at right.

may 2007 issue no. 35

56

cover photos by Sam Holden

may’s cover:

the final frontier an unlikely alliance between maryland farmers and environmentalists could make for a healthier future for the bay by tom horton

last year, the chesapeake bay foundation publicly apologized to farmers and agribusiness professionals for how it had gone about trying to clean up the bay’s biggest source of water pollution—agriculture. while the move raised a few eyebrows in parts of the environmental community, supporters argue vehemently that this may finally crack the toughest nut in the twenty-five-year struggle to eliminate pollution and restore the chesapeake.

62

all together now will consensus and collaboration be enough to make “one maryland” a reality? a q & a with lenneal j. henderson by tom waldron

lenneal j. henderson is a national expert on issues regarding local governments and regionalism and has worked to analyze regional needs in several american cities, including baltimore. tom waldron sat down with henderson at a charles street restaurant to look back on his work and consider the state of regionalism in baltimore today.

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urbanite may 07

departments may 2007 issue no. 35

19

what you’re saying

23

what you’re seeing

25

what you’re writing

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

photographs from the streets of baltimore submitted by readers

original, nonfiction essays written by readers. this month, the topic is “laughter.”

29

corkboard

31

have you heard …

35

food: homegrown history

six not-to-miss events around town

people, places, and things you should know about

the downtown farmers’ market celebrates thirty years by joan jacobson

35

41

baltimore observed: the squid that might eat baltimore a local up-and-coming illustrator wraps his tentacles around a book deal by catrina cusimano

47

encounter: life and death in charm city baltimore is what it is, and for one writer that’s just fine by richard o’mara

52

space: just passing through a look at airports as the ultimate non-place by kerr houston

65 41

poetry: solitary woman in a glass house visual translations of selected emily dickinson poems art by don cook

69

sustainable city: hope for a sustainable world although much of the environmental news we’ve gotten lately has been negative, there are reasons to be hopeful—many of them right here in maryland by mare cromwell

73

out there: vertical leap by building up rather than out, the city of austin hopes to accommodate the continued influx of urban dwellers and put the brakes on sprawl by john egan

73

77

recommended books, bands, exhibits, and more

89

resources further reading on topics covered in this issue

94

eye to eye a closing thought, curated by creative director alex castro w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

11

Urbanite Issue 35 May 2007 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth A. Evitts Elizabeth@urbanitebaltimore.com Guest Editor Neal Peirce Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial Assistant/Marketing Catrina Cusimano Copy Editor Angela Davids Contributing Editors William J. Evitts, Heather Harris, Joan Jacobson, Susan McCallum-Smith Contributing Writer Jason Tinney Editorial Intern Tykia Murray Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer/Photographer Jason Okutake Contributing Photographer Gail Burton Production Interns Madeline Gray, John MacConnell Web Coordinator George Teaford Community Coordinator Lionel Foster Administrative/Photography Assistant La Kaye Mbah Senior Account Executive Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives Abber Knott Abber@urbanitebaltimore.com Rebekah Oates Rebekah@urbanitebaltimore.com Kristin Pattik Kristin@urbanitebaltimore.com Alex Rothstein Alex@urbanitebaltimore.com Bookkeeper/Sales Assistant Michele Holcombe Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to the editor-in-chief (no phone calls, please).

The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year.

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

Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. If you know of a location that urbanites frequent and would recommend placing the magazine there, please contact us at 410243-2050.

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

12

urbanite may 07

note

In the decades ahead, the emphasis must shift from limiting “urban sprawl” to making the resulting metropolitan fabric as green, habitable, and humane as possible.

—Rutherford Platt, from The Humane Metropolis

quotes

Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. photo by Sam Holden

editor’s

Why, in a magazine called Urbanite, are we running a feature article about issues impacting rural Maryland farms? In short, because we are all connected. Some call this approach “One Maryland.”

Others see the connections going well beyond state lines and into large, distinct regions.

Smart regional strategy is fast becoming one of the most valuable economic and political drivers in our country. Why? Because demographics are shifting. According to Robert E. Lang, founding director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria and an associate professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Planning and International Affairs, the United States is expecting one hundred million new residents by 2040. Populations are clustering into a series of regional areas that are economically linked. Lang and his research team have described these new areas as “megapolitans,” which are defined as “super regions that combine at least two, and often several, metropolitan areas.” Think Raleigh-Durham. Or, in our case, Baltimore-Washington. Lang believes that our megapolitan, which he has dubbed the Chesapeake Megalopolis, will soon span as far south as Richmond. “The people from Baltimore, D.C., and Richmond will be sitting down and chitchatting very soon” about things like transportation, economic development, and environmental impact, Lang contends.

In small ways, we have already begun. Veteran journalist Tom Horton explains in his article “The Final Frontier” (p. 56) that environmentalists and farmers in the region are beginning to set aside an acrimonious past to collectively save farmland, deter sprawl, and ensure the health of the Chesapeake Bay. This could affect the city as population growth is encouraged to expand to urban areas with existing infrastructure. It could also help ensure that our state remains a vibrant and diverse geography, with a healthy mix of urbanized areas and green space.

In a global world, we can no longer afford provincial thinking; we can no longer afford to get mired in petty turf wars with our neighbors. The cities that are going to succeed down the line are the ones that recognize their role in a broader, regional realm. If we ignore these realities and allow development to go unplanned and unchecked, we risk relegating ourselves to a hardscaped, traffic-clogged, unsustainable existence.

As we were readying this issue for publication, Catrina Cusimano, Urbanite’s editorial/marketing assistant, died in a car accident. Catrina was a bright and talented woman with a promising future ahead of her, and this loss is deeply felt by all who knew her. A magazine is a very transparent product—the intention and spirit of the people who put it together can be felt in the printed pages before you, and we were honored to have a talent like Catrina on our team. I am heartbroken that I will not have the opportunity to see her byline grace these pages in the future. (See page 17 for our memorial to Catrina.)

—Kenyan proverb

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

—Eugène Ionesco, French-Romanian playwright

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

—Helen Keller, American author, activist, and lecturer

There can be hope only for a society which acts as one big family, not as many separate ones.

—Anwar Sadat, third president of Egypt

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

—John Donne, British poet

—Elizabeth A. Evitts

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contributors

behind this issue

photo by Madeline Gray

photo by La Kaye Mbah

courtesy of John Egan

Madeline Gray Production intern Madeline Gray graduates this month from MICA with a degree in photography and a minor in art history. “Social issues and politics are what drove me to intern at Urbanite,” says the Ohio native. She is currently involved in photographing a group of girls in a juvenile rehabilitation center as part of a class curriculum this semester.

Gray admits she’s somewhat restless and has enjoyed traveling to other countries such as Ireland, Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, and Spain. After graduation, she plans on indulging her wanderlust by traveling the U.S./ Mexico border, camera in hand. Her contributions to this issue include photographing the Station North Flea Market for the “Have You Heard” department (p. 31).

John Egan John Egan has been a journalist for more than twenty years, reporting in the areas of business, economics, and state government. Raised in Kansas, Egan moved to Austin in 1999. His writing has appeared in such national publications as National Real Estate Investor and Small Business Review and the Austin magazine Tribeza. He was managing editor and then editor of the Austin Business Journal for nearly seven years.

In his spare time, Egan practices yoga, watches movies and sports, and savors Austin’s fine assortment of eateries. His article on Austin’s new vertical mixed-use ordinance appears in this month’s “Out There” department (p. 73).

John MacConnell Production intern John MacConnell graduates this month from MICA with a bachelor of fine arts degree in illustration and a minor in art history. The Richmond, Virginia, native spent a semester abroad at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, focusing on Dutch design and concept, an experience that has contributed to his new-found consciousness of typography and minimalism. After graduation, MacConnell is looking forward to focusing on his freelance illustration career. “I was the only child in my family to use crayons on the walls of the house. Since then, I have found more appropriate surfaces to work on,” he says. MacConnell contributed to the design and production of several advertisements in this month’s issue.

Mare Cromwell Sustainability specialist and freelance writer Mare Cromwell earned a master’s degree in natural resources from the University of Michigan and was the executive director of the Prettyboy Watershed Alliance from 2003 to 2005. She is the author of the book If I Gave You God’s Phone Number ... Searching for Spirituality in America, a memoir framed by interviews with diverse people. Cromwell studied extensively with environmentalists Karl-Henrik Robèrt and Paul Hawken. The Baltimore native leads many sustainability workshops in the Mid-Atlantic region. Her article “Hope for a Sustainable World,” about some of the positive changes people are making for the environment, appears on page 69.

courtesy of www.citistates.com

photo by La Kaye Mbah

with guest editor neal peirce

“I’m going to say it—the “R” word. Regionalism,” Neal Peirce told the Urbanite staff.

Columnist Neal Peirce is a progressive force on regional, urban, and community development issues. His weekly column, published through the Washington Post Writers Group, appears in more than fifty newspapers. When the column began in 1975, it was then (and remains) the only nationally syndicated column focused on cities, states, and regions within the American system. As a founder, then contributing editor of National Journal, Peirce founded and currently serves as chairman of the Citistates Group, a network of journalists, speakers, and civic leaders focused on building equitable and sustainable metropolitan regions.

Years of research earlier in Peirce’s career led to a series of books covering all states and regions of America, culminating in The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today. With Curtis Johnson, he wrote Citistates: How Urban America Can Prosper in a Competitive World, and with Robert Guskind Breakthroughs: Re-creating the American City.

Peirce uses the term “citistate” to describe an area characterized by mutual interdependence, one that relies on sharing resources and ideas (i.e., trade, commerce, and communication). He contends that the greatest gains can be made when regions view themselves as a whole, and when geographically separated areas form alliances. As a case study for Citistates, the Baltimore metropolitan region presented—and still does present—barriers to unifying the region. Peirce noted that many of the region’s problems stem from the fact that county and city inhabitants fail to understand their shared interests— and fate. The same lack of perception, paired with what can be perceived as Baltimore’s identity crisis, may best explain the halted and reluctant attitude in Maryland to thinking in regional terms. “A clear mega-region exists along the Northeast Corridor, between Richmond and Boston, and the question remains whether or not Baltimore is a separate economic unit or a part of D.C. Despite the major psychological wall between the two, statistics suggest Baltimore is tied to D.C. more than is realized,” he said. “Hopefully, the Richmond/Washington/Baltimore metropolitan region will start to force conversations.”

However, Peirce believes that Americans as a whole are today remarkably open to the tenets of regionalism, and that the positive physical effects in areas such as transportation, public housing, and access to food are readily measurable. The next logical step, he says, would be to transfer such advances to the humanistic side—such as education and poverty—which are, comparatively, less measurable.

“The consciousness has grown,” he said. “Part is economic pressures and business leadership—the leadership we have these days recognizes the need for regionalism.

Business doesn’t pay attention to municipal boundaries.”

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urbanite may 07

in memoriam

Catrina Cusimano Urbanite’s Urbanite ’s editorial/marketing assistant, died in a car accident on Tuesday, April 10.

It is never easy to face our mortality, but it is especially heartbreaking to lose someone as young, vibrant, and talented as Catrina. She came to Urbanite as an intern in June 2006, and her inimitable wit and aptitude quickly earned her a staff position in our small publishing family.

Catrina managed to juggle a nearly impossible load of diverse tasks, and she regularly amazed us with her range of skills.

Above all, Catrina was a born storyteller with a flair for putting those stories into just the right words, whether in one of her signature office e-mails or in the printed pages of the magazine. There were many days when Catrina’s laughter drew us out of our offices to circle around and hear her latest anecdote.

Her untimely death is a stark reminder of the brevity and uncertainty of life. But it is also a reminder to celebrate the simple, the funny, and the human. We can best honor Catrina’s life by remembering to take a moment out of our deadline-driven days to share our stories and to laugh with one another. We can also honor her spirit by fostering those same gifts in the coming generations.

Urbanite is planning to memorialize Catrina in a special way; we will keep our readers posted.

—Elizabeth A. Evitts

top photo by Adam Schoonover, bottom photo by La Kaye Mbah

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what you’re saying

may 2007 issue no. 35

Farm Fresh: The Downtown Market Turns 30 Building Tall in Texas: Austin’s Plan to Hogtie Sprawl

MARYLAND GOTHIC: CAN AN URBAN/AGRO ALLIANCE SAVE THE BAY?

Forfeiting History I appreciate Adam Gordon expressing my concerns much better than I could (“The Tallest Building in Baltimore,” March). I, too, am amazed at the lack of identity in the buildings being erected in the downtown area. While I’m not an architect, I have lived in Baltimore all my life. Baltimore is a historic city, and much of the new architecture blends in with that theme. Harbor Place (as mentioned in the article) has an old-style appearance; the Science Center doesn’t scream “corrugated metal;” many of the newer buildings along Pratt Street have an inviting ground-floor layout, and are not so tall as to have a major impact on the skyline. Rather, they blend together to create an overall “new” skyline.

It is not the skyline of my youth (if five-story brick retail/manufacturing/office buildings constitute a skyline), but it is still reminiscent of that skyline.

The photograph of 10 Rittenhouse Square and the description of Lehr Jackson’s modifications only reinforce the feeling that Baltimore is forfeiting its history to secure its place in the “Bauhaus-stainless” trend in architecture. 10 Inner Harbor can join other abominable examples such as Lockwood Place, the unnamed condos on 27th Street in Remington, and

Tear Down the Walls The idea of “walling in” or “walling out” to protect children within inner cities is simply ridiculous. Why don’t Blum, Burns, Ilieva, and Lian instead call their project the “Let’s Bury our Heads in the Sand Project?” They state, “Instead, we need to be prepared for the long haul. It will take time to create a process that will give those who are disenfranchised the means to take control of their lives, both individually and incommunity,” and yet they propose the exact opposite.

Why not address the problems of the inner city such as disenfranchisement, segregation, social and economic inequality, etc., rather than hide from them? Walls, of any kind, are not the answer.

—Tom Sanchez is director and associate professor of the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Virginia Tech’s Alexandria Campus.

the parking garage on Pratt Street. Whatever happened to brick?

—Richard Truelove is a lifelong resident of Baltimore, and he currently calls Roland Park home. He is a civil engineer in private practice.

Eye of the Beholder I have to take issue with some of Adam Gordon’s observations in his article. First, Mr. Gordon is factually incorrect in stating the site is entirely surrounded by superblock-scale development. Last time I checked, the Otterbein neighborhood that borders the site to the west (save for one taller structure) is a neighborhood of attractive two-story attached houses.

Perhaps Mr. Gordon’s disdain for the design and its contextual presence stems from his overall observations on “the wacky designs that predominate in the architectural morass downtown.” As for Baltimore being on the receiving end of Robert A. M. Stern’s second-class work as opposed to his “good work” that Philadelphia received at 10 Rittenhouse Square, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.

Placed in the context of large-scale brick high-rises elsewhere in Baltimore, 10 Rittenhouse would disappear into the landscape as another mixed-use tower.

The Rittenhouse site is certainly not incongruous with ARC Wheeler’s stated philosophy of siting projects on significant parks.

Projects such as ARC Wheeler’s 10 Inner Harbor have the ability to dramatically shift outsider’s views about a city’s trajectory relative to its architecture.

Fortunately, 10 Inner Harbor is more a reflection of global, urban style than a more Baltimore-centric architectural slant. As a reminder to Mr. Gordon, those residential buildings with a more local style (e.g., Harbor Court, Scarlett Place) were dramatic failures at inception.

—Owen Rouse is a partner at Manekin, LLC. He grew up in Baltimore City and recently moved to Towson.

Always Second-Best Adam Gordon’s article laments that Baltimore deserves a better building at Light and Conway streets than the one unveiled by noted architect Robert A. M. Stern. A keen observer of Baltimore architecture,

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~Baltimore Magazine

however, would realize that our city is littered with second-rate designs of some of the world’s bestknown architects.

I. M. Pei’s World Trade Center in Baltimore is best known (if known at all) as the tallest pentagonal building in the world, not a great Pei design. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s One Charles Center is a watered down version of the Seagram Building. Frank Gehry designed the rather boring Harper House at Cross Keys prior to his more recent exciting museum designs throughout the world. Walter Gropius designed Temple Oheb Shalom—not one of his more notable works. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a Usonian house in northwest Baltimore; its most distinguished feature was a carport built around a tree, but when the tree died the carport’s hole was filled during a renovation that compromised the house’s interior. Baltimore also has examples of the work of D. H. Burnham; Pietro Belluschi; Marcel Breuer; McKim, Mead and White; and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Although some are decent designs, I doubt if any would rank in the top ten buildings of these noteworthy architects.

The author raised the question, What would James Rouse do? James Rouse’s company demolished the McCormick Building and the Marburg Tobacco Warehouse that stood on the site of the proposed Stern tower! The Rouse Company put up a temporary parking lot that has lasted for eighteen years instead of eighteen months—in fact, the parking lot outlasted the company.

We had truly wonderful Baltimore buildings on this site that perfumed the Inner Harbor with the scents of spices, and we allowed them to be destroyed. So now we get a second-rate building from a first-rate architect. I’d rather have back the buildings that housed one of Baltimore’s last great local companies and tearoom featuring Edwin Tunis murals.

—Fred B. Shoken is a resident of Bolton Hill. He is a city planner with the Baltimore City Department of Planning, Historic and Architectural Preservation Division.

Whang-Ray? Way Wrong!

Though a happy couple for several years, Rachel Whang and Benn Ray of Atomic Books are not married, as we mistakenly reported in the February issue in the article “Stop! It’s Hammer Time!” Our apologies to all the Baltimoreans who thought they hadn’t been invited to the Whang-Ray wedding, and to Rachel and Benn.

We want to hear what you’re saying.

E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Submissions should include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

update

DELETED true tales of myspace In the August 2006 issue, Marianne Amoss revealed her addiction to social networking website MySpace in the article “True Tales of MySpace.”

“With MySpace,” she wrote, “I feel like I’m always in this warm happy spot. In some ways, it’s my favorite place to be.”

Since then, however, Amoss has made a life change: On February 19, 2007, Amoss quit MySpace, cold turkey. This unexpected move originated in a conversation she had with friend Julie St. Clair, who suggested that the two of them take the plunge and leave MySpace together, and see what happens. (At

press time, St. Clair had not yet deleted her MySpace account. Nor did she respond to barbed accusations of treachery made under Amoss’ breath.)

Nevertheless, Amoss stands firm. She doesn’t want her movements and feelings to be broadcast to the world at large anymore, she explains. “Just by looking at a person’s profile, you get an idea of what’s on that person’s mind. I decided that I didn’t want anyone to know what was going on in my life unless I told that person myself,” she says.

Excerpts from Amoss’ personal journal, written, bravely, on paper, show that withdrawing from the MySpace lifestyle was difficult—but not the end of the world: February 19, Day One: I sat in front of my computer today for a long time, considering clicking on “Cancel My Account.” Do I really want to do this? I thought.

I’ll miss everything. Is this crazy? Everyone’s gonna hate me. No one’s gonna know me.

I decided to go for it. I clicked “Cancel My Account.” Nothing happened. I clicked it again. “Are you sure?” it asked. “Yes.” “No, really, are you sure?” My hands shook; my eyes started to cross. I literally had to click “Yes, Cancel My Account” twenty-five times before it was actually done.

I’ve felt a pit in my stomach all day. Some people on my friends list will be impossible to locate again— like Chris from Cuernavaca. When will I ever get to go to Cuernavaca? Where is Cuernavaca? Crap!

February 25, Day Seven: This has been the worst week of my life. I feel out of touch and completely alone. I cried last night during CSI. I miss MySpace so much. I miss the me I was on MySpace, the MySpace Marianne me.

But today, when I was driving home after work, I started to feel like it all was gonna be okay. I looked around and saw people walking down the sidewalk talking on their cell phones or to other people. People still do that? Wow. Cool.

In the future, Amoss plans to divert the creative energy she used on MySpace to more personal projects, like her job. The best part, she says, is that she’s lost that sneaky feeling that she’s a creepy voyeur, stealing peeks into strangers’ lives. “It’s a great relief,” she sighed happily. “I don’t have to worry anymore about accidentally blurting out stuff I learned about people from MySpace when I meet the, like, real people.” ■

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what you’re seeing Welcome to the new “What You’re Seeing” department. This is the place for photography that captures the true spirit of Baltimore, showing the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the sad—and don’t forget the wild, zany, and spectacular!

Each month we will choose a topic; you send us one photograph that speaks to that subject. Along with your photograph, please include a brief description of the image along with your contact information. For more information on how to submit your photograph, please visit www.urbanitebaltimore.com/wyseeing.

The photo below is an example of the what we’re looking for. This shot ran in the “Eye to Eye” department of our February 2007 issue and was the creative spark for the “What You’re Seeing” department.

Show us …

Deadline

Publication Date

A Street Corner A Bad Hair Day A City Secret A Peaceful Place The Oddest Thing

May 7, 2007 May 17, 2007 June 15, 2007 July 20, 2007 August 17, 2007

June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 Sept 2007 Oct 2007

Visit www.urbanitebaltimore.com/wyseeing for more information on how to submit your photograph.

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

A Street Corner

“Suburbia”

by Jason Okutake A street corner in suburban Glen Burnie

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detail of “Blue Garden” by Melissa Dickenson

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

Due to the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer.

Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned. The themes printed below are for the “What You’re Writing” department only and are not the themes for future issues of the magazine itself.

His laughter was like

a bellow.

He would fill up with great booming breaths and release them, his eyes watering the whole time. The frequency and familiarity of my uncle Bill’s laughter always made me feel safe, warm, and thankful to be somewhere other than home. On weekend mornings, he would make silver-dollar pancakes. I would engulf them in sticky, sweet syrup and put a whole pancake in my mouth.

He found the connection between my cousin and me wonderful. She was five years older and took it upon herself to look after me. Keri would always put her gorgeous, Amazonian frame between her mother and me after I had accidentally broken a

Topic

Deadline

Publication

Memory A Day’s Work Serendipity Origins

May 18, 2007 June 15, 2007 July 20, 2007 Aug 17, 2007

Aug 2007 Sept 2007 Oct 2007 Nov 2007

cherished knickknack. She saved me from a hidetanning a time or two, I’m sure.

After Keri’s murder, my uncle’s laughter was not the same. The mischievous look in his eyes that always made me think he knew something I did not was gone. His massive body and broad shoulders became sunken, as if he was carrying the weight of everyone’s sorrow. I was convinced he had shrunk.

His laughter now seems contrived, forced out like the last of the toothpaste. I do not grieve for my long-departed cousin anymore. I mourn now for the loss of my uncle’s laughter, which, like Keri and silver-dollar pancakes, will forever remain a beautiful, sad memory.

—Matthew Weaver grew up three blocks from Memorial Stadium; his cousin was murdered about two miles from there. His connection to Baltimore is thick; it is truly home.

“I, um, got in a fight

with my sister six times,” I said, looking down at the lush burgundy carpet on the church altar. I could feel my cheeks flush with shame, but not because of my sister. I had bigger things to confess. At fifteen, I had already committed what my parents told me was the worst sin: premarital sex.

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“That’s not so bad, sweetie,” Father S. said, smiling. “You just need to try to get along with her better, right?” I sat on the steps, looking up at him.

He looked old and grandfatherly, wearing his long white robe with gold trim and sitting on a chair perched at the front of the altar.

The church was darkly lit and smelled of incense. People called St. Joe’s the “church of the flying Jesus,” and looking up I could see the outstretched hands of a life-size Jesus suspended over the altar with invisible wire. As a kid, it seemed as though Jesus was floating above the congregation, looking down, silently watching everyone. It was almost creepy.

I came to confession because I didn’t know where else to go. Scared and confused about whether I had made the wrong decision, I didn’t know if I could actually say the words, but I needed to tell someone. I couldn’t tell my parents. They wouldn’t understand, and I knew they would be furious. I thought they would kill me. But I needed to confess, to lift the weight off my chest and start over.

“You just need to say five Hail Mary’s and try to be nicer to your sister,” Father S. said, his eyes twinkling as he let out a short chuckle. I could feel the tears start to well up in the corners of my eyes and my chest tighten. I was going to miss my chance because he didn’t understand. He was laughing at me. “You young girls are so cute. Say hello to your parents, and may the Lord be with you.”

And with that, I got up and left.

—Christine Drexel is recently engaged and lives in Upper Fells Point.

She died

when I was about 4 so I don’t remember much; there is a rocking chair and bony hands with hard rings that knocked against my spine. But I look at the picture on the windowsill, dusty and forgotten, and I know she must have had a great laugh.

She is standing in the yard, her skin pale against the spring grass, her thin white hair crowning her head. Her head is thrown back, and I can see the skin around her mouth straining as she opens wide, teeth gleaming in the sunlight. I can hear her laughter starting deep in her throat and bubbling up out of her mouth until she can’t control it anymore and throws her head back, giving in to her joy.

I imagine that the photographer said something funny just before he held up the camera.

I have never asked anyone about her laugh.

I am afraid if they do not remember, that I will stop believing in it. Instead, I keep that part of her

locked away, and when I remember her, she is always laughing.

—Anne Laterra is a senior at Friends School of Baltimore, where she took her first course in fiction writing this year.

My father’s favorite

trick was catching an invisible ball in a paper bag. He’d take a small paper bag, pretend to toss a ball in the air, and then catch it with the bag he gripped between his fingers and thumb. By snapping his fingers, he’d ruffle the bag, which sounded, even appeared, as if a ball had plunked inside. Sometimes he’d add flourishes like throwing the “ball” against a wall or catching it with the bag behind his back.

Everyone likes my dad. Growing up, my friends loved to hear him tell a joke, stoop-sitting summer evenings on our front marble steps. On summer Sundays, my sisters and I would load one friend each into our black Ford Falcon station wagon for a day at the Beaver Dam Swimming Club. In the pool, my dad would play the mountain over which we crawled, climbed, and clung. He also coached several of my baseball and basketball teams. His practices were less disciplined than energetic and fun—a lot of fun in an era preceding the myopic “winning is everything” mentality that now permeates sports from peewee to pro. He did all this—running, swimming, and sometimes working two jobs—with an inimitable limp, a steady hitch in his giddyup from an atrophied lower right leg and foot that was a consequence of the polio he suffered when he was 14.

Despite the kinship with my friends and the fun on the field, the court, and in the pool, my relationship with my father became strained. I suffered common teenage malaise and once went several weeks without speaking to him. I was angry about something, or nothing; it didn’t matter. It’s the type of anger only fathers and sons understand.

Today, Dad is suffering from chronic pain in his lower back, shoulders, and wrists, and has difficulty with his balance and strength. We fear it’s a recurrence of the polio, a condition unique to polio survivors and puzzling to the medical community.

Now I finally have the opportunity to help him by driving him to the doctor and picking up his prescriptions. Last Saturday, as he removed the jar of pills from the small, white pharmacist’s bag, my dad laughed. “Ever seen my invisible ball trick?”

Some things never change. That’s my favorite part of the trick.

—Michael Eckhardt lives and writes in Baltimore City. continued on page 83 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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CORKBOARD CORK art that moves Works of art go mobile for the ninth annual Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race, sponsored by the American Visionary Art Museum.

Though most of the race takes place on pavement, other segments challenge the participants to travel through mud and sand—as well as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

800 Key Highway May 5 Opening ceremony 9:30 a.m.; award ceremony 5 p.m.

410-244-1900 www.kineticbaltimore.com

Baltimore Green Week’s EcoFestival The EcoFestival launches Baltimore Green Week, which is sponsored in part by Urbanite. Enjoy a range of family fun that includes environmental art, local music, guided nature walks, and a farmers’ market.

Packed with speakers, workshops, and vendors, the festival is a great way to learn more about sustainable living.

Druid Hill Park May 5; 12 p.m.–5 p.m.

410-225-0330 www.baltimoregreenweek.org

Falsettos Fells Point Corner Theatre brings you Falsettos, a Tony Awardwinning show that chronicles two years in the life of a Jewish family.

The musical infuses humor into the compelling and poignant story of an American family trying its best to stick together.

251 South Ann Street May 11–June 10; performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.

Adults $15; students and seniors $12 410-276-7837 www.fpct.org

Music at the Square The free, weekly outdoor concert series featuring live music by some of Baltimore’s local favorites returns this month at Belvedere Square.

Urbanite is a sponsor. Summer Sounds at the Square includes entertainment, food, and drink from the vendors of the Belvedere Square market and restaurants.

Belvedere Square, corner of York Road and Belvedere Avenue May 11–September 7; every Friday evening 6 p.m.–9 p.m.

410-534-BELV www.belvederesquare.com

Poet Billy Collins Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins gives a free Mother’s Day reading as part of the annual Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading. A reception and book signing will follow the event.

Shriver Hall, Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus 3400 North Charles Street May 13; 5 p.m.

410-735-4100 cty.jhu.edu

Wine in the Woods For the fifteenth year, Wine in the Woods is a celebration of diverse tastes guaranteed to satisfy every culinary and musical palate. A variety of wines from the Old Line State will be available to sample, along with live music ranging from rock to country to jazz. Artisans, craft vendors, and connoisseurs convene in the woods to enjoy the festivities as well as the fruits of Maryland wineries’ labor.

5950 Symphony Woods Road May 19 and 20; 12 p.m.–6 p.m.

410-313-4632 www.wineinthewoods.com

Photo credits from top to bottom: Photo by David Kone; courtesy of Baltimore Green Week; illustration

by John MacConnell; no credit; photo by Barbi Reed; courtesy of Howard County Recreation and Parks

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have you heard . . .

edited by catrina cusimano

Biking … the journey. (A recent search for routes near Baltimore resulted in sixty-three different trails to follow.) For the bike enthusiast, membership (which is free) connects you to a growing community of cyclists sharing tips on everything bike-related, like parts and accessories and bike reviews. Go to www.bikely.com.

dreamstime.com

Spring has sprung—park the car somewhere and get on your bike. If you’re not sure where to go or how to get there, try Bikely.com. Simply type in your location and the free service provides a user-supplied listing of ways to get around on two wheels. It catalogs routes, distances, and information on whether the rides will be scenic or urban, for beginners or advanced riders, suited for commuters or recreational riding. Click on one of the routes, and you’re taken to a step-by-step map that breaks down each leg of

—Tykia Murray

Baby Shoes …

Kim Gross, a mother of two with one on the way, had a problem. The marketplace seriously lacked shoes for infants and toddlers that both looked good and supported little feet. The solution? Rileyroos—a fashionable and functional collection of shoes for little ones. The Hunt Valley-based company, named for daughter Riley, was launched this past winter, and the shoes are already carried by ten boutiques in Maryland and three online retailers. The flexible rubber and leather soles are lightweight yet protec-

tive, designed to imitate barefoot walking; and the uppers are stylish, like miniature versions of hip adult shoes. Prices range from $28 to $34 per pair, and sizes are available for 6 to 12 months and 12 to 18 months (with larger sizes available soon). Go to www.rileyroos.com for store locations.

—T. M.

photo by Madeline Gray

Flea Market …

After a successful test run at the tail end of last summer, the Station North Flea Market has returned.

Located on the parking lot opposite the Charles Theatre, the community-based market is held every first Saturday of the month. Anyone can sell their wares, and tables are free—but be sure to register two to three weeks in advance to reserve your space, as spots fill up fast. Besides offering an array of goods and vendors, the flea market also features carnivalesque entertainment—including jugglers and

fire-eaters. Where else can you find unique treasures while being awed by pyrotechnics? The flea market is sponsored in part by the Charles North Community Association and LoadOfFun.net for the purpose of bringing together Baltimore residents and artists and entertainers. Open 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Go to www.loadof fun.net/FleaMarket.html.

—T. M.

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

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have you heard . . .

courtesy of Vino Volo

Wine Bar …

Time spent in an airport is often frustrating, chaotic, or something akin to purgatory. Thankfully, BWI has just opened a branch of Vino Volo (meaning “wine flight” in Italian), a San Francisco-based upscale wine bar catering to airport clientele. Here, a high-end retail store fuses with a sophisticated tasting lounge and bar. Travelers can purchase wines by the glass or in “flights,” in which three different varieties of wine are available to taste. Every “flight” comes with a data sheet detailing the wines’ complex characteristics—an in-store Wine Discovery Book offers even more information. If you want to avoid airplane food

(and who doesn’t?), Vino Volo also offers a wide range of options, from delicate artisan cheeses and dry cured meats to more complex menu items such as smoked salmon wrapped around crab meat and crème fraiche, as well as lentils braised with bacon—all of which are conveniently available to-go. Admission, however, costs one plane ticket—Vino Volo is located after security checkpoints, in Concourse A near Gate A6, limiting its patronage to travelers only. Go to www. vinovolo.com.

—Catrina Cusimano

Architecture Guide …

If you love D.C. but loathe navigating the labyrinth of one-way streets and traffic circles, grab the newly updated American Institute of Architects Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. and put on your sneakers. Author G. Martin Moeller Jr., a respected architecture critic and the senior vice president and curator of the National Building Museum, maps our nation’s capital through a comprehensive review of historic buildings and infrastructure. Each chapter is organized by neighborhood, with each building indicated by number on a map. This allows the reader to explore

D.C. through nineteen separate walking tours of buildings, monuments, bridges, and cemeteries.

Accompanying the photo of each spot is pertinent information, like date of construction, and colorful factoids—bet you didn’t know that the National Museum of Natural History once housed one of the world’s largest exhibited ant farms. The guide is available through the Johns Hopkins University Press (www. press.jhu.edu). The only question now is, when do we get one for Baltimore?

—C. C.

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Magic …

A bar in Federal Hill without happy-hour specials or sports permanently showing on plasma TVs is something of a mirage—actually, it’s more like an illusion.

Enter the aptly named and recently opened Illusions Magic Bar and Lounge. Co-owner Ken Horsman and son, Spencer (co-owner and manager), have spent the past year conceptualizing and renovating the space to feature live, spontaneous entertainment in an upscale, Art-Deco-style setting. Everything is a throwback to the days of Houdini—from elegant architectural

touches, like coffered ceilings and iron railings, to a pianist playing period music. On any given night you might even witness Spencer escape from a straitjacket suspended from the ceiling as you sip on your topshelf cocktail. Open Wed–Sat 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. 1025 South Charles Street; 410-727-5811; www.illusions magicbar.com.

—C. C.

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food

by joan jacobson

photography by gail burton

Homegrown History The downtown farmers’ market celebrates thirty years

Above: Pam Pahl and her family have been selling their farm products at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market since 1977.

Jennifer Pahl’s earliest memory of Baltimore’s downtown farmers’ market is from inside a playpen, watching her parents sell fruits and vegetables grown on their farm in the Baltimore County neighborhood of Granite.

“I just remember sitting in the playpen in the back of the truck and watching all the different kinds of people walking by,” says the 17-year-old high school student.

By the time she was watching the world from her perch on the truck bed, Jennifer’s parents, Pam and Les, were already veterans of the Sunday market, which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year.

Even older than Artscape (which turned twenty-five last year), the Baltimore Farmers’ Market is the city’s longest-operating outdoor institution, having long outlasted the City Fair.

The Pahls were there on the first Sunday in June 1977, and they’re still there today. But much has changed in the Pahl Family—and in the farmers’ market, as well.

Who would have thought when city dwellers flocked to the fledgling market at Market Place for Silver Queen corn, kale, green beans, and tomatoes

in 1977, that thirty years later thousands of Baltimoreans would be buying crepes, Thai egg rolls, jerk chicken, squash blossoms, purple tomatoes, gooseberries, Asian pears, and many descendants of Silver Queen corn—all under the Jones Falls Expressway?

The market has grown from fifteen farmers selling traditional Maryland fruits and vegetables to a weekly international food festival that runs from May to December, with nearly forty farmers from all over Maryland and neighboring states, plus another two dozen food vendors.

For Pam Pahl, the market has not just been a way to make a living. It’s been an indispensable community of farmers whom she considers her closest friends.

“I couldn’t be a farmer and stay home all day,” she says.

Thanks to a man named Dick Curran, Pam Pahl was never stuck on the farm.

Curran was Baltimore County’s agricultural extension agent in 1976 when he got a call from Esther Lichtenberg of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and Tourism. A citizen had called the mayor’s office wondering if there was a way for city residents to buy fruits and vegetables directly from farmers. Could it

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Left: Joe Lomicky and his son Emerson look at the variety of apples available from Reid’s Orchard.

Center: Jennifer Pahl, Dick Curran, and Pam Pahl

be done?

It was a novel idea. Washington, D.C. had no farmers’ market. And New York City had opened its first market the year before. The many produce vendors at Baltimore’s indoor markets, such as Lexington and Cross Street, did not grow their own produce (except, coincidentally, the Pahl family, which had a stall in Lexington market years before Les was born).

For Curran, it was a serendipitous phone call.

He had been trying to help farmers make ends meet at a time when their only option was selling

They sold out so quickly on one of the first Sundays that they had to get both their mothers to rush down from Western Baltimore County with more produce. In that first year of the market, Pam was 19 and a business administration student at Towson University. Les, at 22, was a fifth-generation farmer.

Like many of the first farmers, they grew to love the market and the gratification of knowing the people who ate what they cultivated.

Curran began seeing signs created to identify each farm family.

“They were proud of their name and what they

We had a woman who was 80-some years old and she used to buy from Les’ grandparents in Lexington market. Her niece still buys from us. to wholesalers, who were keeping prices so low that some farmers were hardly breaking even, recalls Curran, who is now retired and living in Westminster.

The chance to sell directly to consumers would allow farmers to name their prices.

Curran helped city officials contact about fifteen farmers and set up a little open-air market with tables by the old fish market on Market Place, east of downtown. The city paid for advertising, and a television station reported the news event.

That first day, Pam and Les Pahl didn’t know what to expect.

“I remember getting stuff ready and going to market. Les and I wore white shorts,” she says, laughing at the memory. “They didn’t last long. We were swamped.”

were growing,” he says.

For the last three decades, the Pahls’ lives have revolved around the Sunday market. Pam jokes that all four of her children accommodated her by being born during market “off days” or out of season. The children grew up with the other farmers’ families.

Her oldest daughter, Donna, now 20, would often go home for sleepovers with the Reids (another longtime farming family) to their Pennsylvania orchard.

Several years ago, Les became ill with cancer. He died in June 2003. “You’ve never seen so many people cry,” Pam says. “He was the farmer, and I was the marketer. It’s hard.” Despite the difficulties, she has managed to keep up the farm—and their place at the market.

Today, the farmers’ market sits under the Jones

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Left: The Pahl family’s greens table Center: Nina Santasing prepares and sells spring rolls and mango sticky rice

Falls Expressway at Holliday and Saratoga streets, shading the produce from the hot sun and protecting the farmers and their customers from the rain.

It has electrical outlets, thanks to the City Fair, which spent its last years there. And many of the ugly concrete columns have been painted with colorful murals.

On a Sunday morning last December, Market Manager Carole Simon strolled through the market with a purple clipboard, making sure everything was under control (which means evicting dogs banned by health regulations) and introducing a reporter to the farmers and food vendors she knows by name.

“I love this job. It doesn’t feel like work,” says Simon, who enjoys watching the waves of shoppers who flood the market all morning—police, firefighters, and hospital workers coming off their shifts, and churchgoers coming from worship.

When she stops at the concession for the Old Style Sauce Company, salesman Gary Thornhill explains his own addiction to the market.

“It’s like church—the fellowship, the energy,” he says.

For the Pahls, it’s all about continuing a long family tradition.

“We had a woman who was 80-some years old and she used to buy from Les’ grandparents in Lexington market. Her niece still buys from us,” she says.

Today, daughters Donna and Jennifer, and 12year-old twins Dan and Greg, help Pam keep up with the pace at their market tables.

Jennifer says she still loves to go to the market, except perhaps when she has to wake up on very cold Sunday mornings at 4 a.m. Though she’s considering a career in law enforcement, she also wants to keep farming.

“All four of us kids, we all plan to keep on farming,” she says. “We are the sixth generation.” ■ —Joan Jacobson, a contributing editor for Urbanite, wrote in the April issue about eating seasonally.

Be sure to visit the Downtown Farmers’ Market on opening day, May 6, beginning at 8 a.m. for an Urbanite-sponsored event: Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA) will provide a range of resources on food and gardening. Watch cooking demonstrations by local chefs and middleschool students. Taste samples from restaurants using fresh local produce. Learn about buying local, sustainable foods, and discover Parks & People’s Neighborhood Greening program and its KidsGrow program and SuperKids camp. Find out how you can get involved locally by supporting the city’s sixtyacre farm (the Bragg Nature Center), as well as globally by learning more about the Global Warming Solutions Act.

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

39

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baltimore observed

by catrina cusimano

illustrations by kevin sherry

The Squid That Might Eat Baltimore A local up-and-coming illustrator wraps his tentacles around a book deal Kevin Sherry loves squid. Not the kind you eat, or the kind you visit at the aquarium—the kind you draw, and then sell to a major book publisher.

At 24, Sherry is one of the youngest authors to be signed to a three-book deal with Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Books. His first title, I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean, a whimsical tale of a young squid in the sea, is set to hit bookstores May 10.

The road to becoming a children’s book author began at an early age for Sherry. Inspired by acclaimed writers/illustrators like Quentin Blake, Shel Silverstein, and Maurice Sendak, Sherry went on to earn his bachelor of fine arts degree in illustration from MICA in 2004 with the intent of designing for young readers. The artist often turned to his “visual vocabulary”—a massive collection consisting of the works of his favorite children’s authors coupled with old issues of Zoobooks and Highlights—for inspiration. He began to create quirky animals and would later gain notoriety in Baltimore’s DIY scene for his varied depictions of marine life—something that

would give rise to the squid as a personal trademark of the young artist. This hearty obsession with ocean inhabitants evolved into a business, Squidfire, which he cofounded in the summer of 2004 with Jean-Baptiste Regnard. Sherry’s quirky illustrations of animals began popping up all over Baltimore on T-shirts, shoes, tote bags, and onesies. Soon, the duo was loading up a van with products to promote their work at craft shows.

It was at the MoCCA Art Festival in New York City that Nancy Mercado saw Sherry’s designs. A senior editor of Dial Books, Mercado asked for a business card. “I’m not sure if I was thinking ‘This guy could do a picture book’ or ‘I want to order this guy’s T-shirts for me and everyone I know,’ but either way, I checked out his website when I got home,” says Mercado. Shortly thereafter, she invited Sherry to her New York office to pitch a book.

“I gave them three pitches,” Sherry recalls.

“I wanted to write the book I always wanted as a kid—a smart kid’s book. So I came up with a story called Little Devils about a group of children that, when they act mischievous, they literally turn into little devils,” he says. His ideas didn’t resonate with the publishers and he heard the words made famous

by Hollywood in such situations: We’ll call you.

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progressively as it compares its size to every sea And when they didn’t call? “I was crestfallen,” creature it encounters. I’m the Biggest Thing in the he says. “I then came up with one big major scheme: Ocean explains what it means to have a “Napoleon I’m going to read every book written for children complex” in a playful way to 3 year olds. and see what books are popular and selling.”

“It’s a struggle. With very few words on Sherry spent days sitting Indian-style in his a page you have to relay very big ideas,” low-slung Levis by the elaborate fishpond in the Sherry says.

Enoch Pratt Central Library’s children’s section, Sherry pays meticulous attention to immersing himself in every book the library had detail. In his Greektown warehouse, Sherry targeting the 3-to-5 age group. Whether it was the fastidiously examines each Peter Pan-Never Never Land Squidfire piece for flaws, setdemeanor of the twenty someI guess squid are my ting a high bar for quality. Using thing or the large bat tattoo watercolor for his book’s page nestled right under the base of spirit animal—they background, he layered his his neck that made him highly have eight arms and images through an animationsuspect in the eye of a librarian cell-like process that involved is uncertain. But something did. two tentacles. They’re sketching on Plexiglas with “She wanted to know why natural multitaskers. opaque ink.

I was there alone,” says Sherry.

Because of the His determination to become painstaking care Sherry took to construct a scholar of children’s books had been misconstrued the book, he was surprised by what hapfor something far more sinister. “Apparently you pened when the product left his need to have a ‘child guardian’ to be in the children’s hands. “See this?” He points to section,” he says. an old proof showing the rib In addition to countless hours in the children’s cage of a whale. “It’s upside section at Enoch Pratt, he put in time at bookstores down. [The publisher] missed and revisited his own personal collection. After that. Not a big detail, but months of writing, drawing, and reworking themes, some smart kid would figure it Sherry finally made the successful pitch: The adout and that would bother me.” venture of one squid in the sea, whose ego grows

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seems to be an apt metaphor, for in addition to his Sherry insisted that the change be made. Creating other activities, Sherry has also recently launched a children’s book was an intense collaboration bea new zine called Catatac—a free publication croptween publishing house and artist—something that ping up around town. The distribution plan is as was realized squid pro quo. erratic as the content, which includes everything Sherry’s contract with Dial Books outlines from cartoons to recipes. It’s something he launched two more books: one slated for 2008 and another with two friends, Mark Brown and Kate Levitt, to for 2009. His publisher has been pushing for the celebrate Baltimore’s writers, artists, and comedians. return of the squid in the sequel; an idea that, he Sherry and his “squidplosion” of ideas can’t seem to says, presents some problems. In the end the squid be stopped. is swallowed. “That’s kind of hard to write yourself Much like a squid, Sherry is frequently nocout of,” he says. turnal.

“People who own their own business, write Mercado, however, has no doubt that the young books, and publish magazines artist will be able to pull it off. “The guy is brilliant, Creating a children’s book can typically be found at midnight behind their desk and fast. Our sales force was an intense collaboralistening to David Letterman has really gotten behind on a broken TV, working and tion between publishing this book in such a major working,” he says. Someday, way. We are even doing house and artist—somehe hopes it will all pay off, ala display for the book— thing that was realized though fame isn’t knocking on something rare, since store his door just yet. “Right now space is at a premium squid pro quo. if you Google my name, the these days.” first thing that appears is Kevin F. Sherry, this guy Between Squidfire and his book, it would who wears really horrible Cliff Huxtable sweaters,” appear that Sherry is more than mildly fixated on he says. marine life, with a particular penchant for cephaloMaybe one day, this Kevin Sherry might be the pods. “I guess squid are my spirit animal—they have biggest thing on the web. ■ eight arms and two tentacles,” he says. “They’re natural multitaskers. The anatomy of the squid is a great metaphor for doing a lot of stuff at once.” This —Please see the tribute to Catrina on page 17.

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46

urbanite may 07

encounter

by richard o’mara photography by nancy froehlich

Life and Death in Charm City Baltimore is what it is, and for one writer that’s just fine

One evening last fall, my daughter and her husband took a walk in Wyman Park, by their house in Hampden, and found a body. Their dog, Frida, sniffed it in the bushes. The cops arrived within ten minutes of Lisa’s call. Probably thinking he might comfort her, an officer said the presence of the corpse indicated that she lived in a good neighborhood. When she questioned that unexpected reasoning, he explained that owing to intensive policing in the usual drugridden neighborhoods of the city, the dealers had taken to kidnapping their competitors and bringing them to places like this park to finish them off. The criminals know there aren’t many police in neighborhoods like hers, he said.

Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire’s character from Candide, unhinged by intemperate optimism, might have said something like that.

My wife and I live across the park in an antique building that might have been plucked off some Mediterranean shore a century ago, with its white stucco walls and terra-cotta roofs. Our neighborhood is botanically rich, full of birds and squirrels; now and then a fox wanders through. Forsythia and aza-

lea abound, and people walk their dogs and smile at you. We’ve been here eighteen years: It would take a regiment of Green Berets to move us out.

Before my dog died, I used to walk him along Stony Run, a block away. One day he rousted a huge doe out of a stand of trees. The deer probably had wandered down the stream from the suburbs into the city, unseen during the night. When it saw me, the deer bounded across the stream onto Linkwood Road. A woman screamed as it ran by her and up Tuscany Road. A passing police car stopped, turned around and chased the deer, presumably intending to arrest it. The deer met with a sad end: A neighbor told me a cop car ran into it. When I called the district headquarters, the police officer on duty said the doe was killed by a car—though he didn’t volunteer that it was one of their own.

Our town is unsafe for man and beast. But it is our town, and maybe its very distress inspires a certain sense of mutuality and empathy among us, what the literary critic Richard Poirier once called “a fellow feeling … in the face of the impersonality of urban life,” something that arises to pull us together.

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Not too long ago, I was with Lisa and my other daughter, Andrea, in a neighborhood bar on Remington Avenue, where we meet every month with two friends. We five constitute the total membership of The Patapsco River Book Club. The book under discussion that night, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, got a thumbs-up from us all. We had finished talking about the book and were ready to settle our bill when I noticed a man standing in the doorway open to the street. He had appeared suddenly, a mountainous silhouette in a parka and baggy trousers, his face concealed in the shadow of his hood.

Just as it began to dawn on me that he was intentionally blocking the door, a shout arose from the bar: “The place is being robbed!” The big man remained fixed until a smaller man dashed by him through the door carrying what turned out to be the cash register drawer. He got it by putting a pistol to the barmaid’s head, threatening to kill her.

The big man immediately followed the smaller man out. Somebody yelled, “Close the doors!” I heard the front door slam and felt the vacuum rush of the side door closing. “Don’t go outside; they’ve got a gun!”

Everyone started to talk at once in raised voices, from table to table, and eventually the doors were reopened and we all spilled out onto the sidewalk.

The crowd was vocal and complaining, loquacity fueled by relief.

The bar’s owner arrived from her house nearby, where she had gone to rest before returning to close up, as was her routine. Immediately she was among us, filling the air with bitter invective and repetitive profanity; her fury and disgust fueled our own futile anger. Then, suddenly, she started to cry, and all the

fury that had descended upon her, and on us as well, turned into a generalized sadness, a sense of control slipping away. It seemed to affect us almost like a benign germ, filled us with sympathy for her, for each other, perhaps, and for ourselves.

Finally the police came, rushing up on foot and swooping down in cars and wagons, young men and women in blue uniforms, with shining faces and serious demeanor, swarming around us, interviewing us with unperceptive questions, writing notes in little books. We were witnesses, and eager to be, feeling the reassurance derived from our participation in the start of the search. I heard someone say, “They were like shadows,” which seemed to me a perfect but utterly useless description. Who can hunt down or apprehend shadows?

Our town is unsafe for man and beast. But it is our town, and maybe its very distress inspires a certain sense of mutuality and empathy among us.

We went back into the bar to pay our bill, where our despondent waiter told us they had to close.

“We don’t have money; we can’t make change,” he said. So we put what we thought we owed on the table, and gave the waiter a big tip.

Out on the sidewalk again, my daughter Andrea approached the owner, who had stopped crying.

“We’ll be back,” she told her, and some others came over to her and made similar promises. A month later we were at the same table, this time discussing

John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. We found it thin, especially for a Nobel Prize winner.

I have lived in various cities around the world.

I prefer older cities, like this one, where people have created the narratives of their lives through generations, and the residue of those lives is sometimes detectable in its very streets. I’m with those Baltimoreans who try to see our town as it is, not as we would like it to be. As a group we are averse to effusive self-promotion, boosterism, branding, bumper stickers that read, “I (heart) City Life,” and bus-stop benches with ridiculous slogans painted on them, such as “Baltimore: The Greatest City in America.”

You might wonder at my antipathy to an innocuous bumper sticker. It springs from my conviction that such rapturous declarations are often tainted in one way or another. I can’t help suspecting that many who make these very public advertisements of their commitment haven’t thought it through, or are trying to stifle a secret impulse to bolt to the suburbs, a reflex strengthened by every murder they read of in the newspaper.

As for the benches, and their titanically preposterous slogan, they at least have provided a bundle of laughs, and have made me realize that perhaps the ironic spirit survives in City Hall. This is a quality every city dweller should cultivate, if he or she is to make it in this unsweet burg, one time denominated as Mobtown. Yes, it’s a tough town, but it can still touch the heart. At least mine. ■ —Richard O’Mara spent thirty-two years at The Baltimore Sun as an editor, editorial writer, and foreign correspondent, among other things.

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MILLRACE CONDOS New 1 and 2-bedroom condominiums in historic Clipper Mill Light rail connections at your doorstep Adjacent to the hiking-biking trails of the wooded Jones Falls Valley Spectacular community pool, coffee shop and farm-to-table restaurant Now selling – Priced from the upper $200’s For more Information: 410.727.6633 or www.ClipperMillLiving.com

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1209 NORTH CHARLES Contemporary new 1 and 2-bedroom condominiums in Mount Vernon Amtrak and MARC service just three blocks away Community, outdoor landscaped courtyard Walkable neighborhood cultural attractions and entertainment Now selling – Priced from the upper $200’s For more information: 410.685.0142 or www.twelve09living.com

OVERLOOK CLIPPER MILL New contemporary park homes in historic Clipper Mill LEED certified with Green innovations Spectacular community pool, coffee shop and farm-to-table restaurant Light Rail and mass transit at your doorstep Pre-construction sales begin April 2007 – Priced from the $400’s For more Information: 410.727.6633 or www.clippermillhomes.com

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FRANKFORD ESTATES Stylish new East Baltimore single-family homes Energy star appliances and energy efficient packages available Mass transit conveniences at your doorstep Neighborhood green space with pool and clubhouse Now selling Final Phase – Priced from the $200’s For more information: 410.325.8838

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Some places to live have a view.

THINKING GREEN: It’s not just about where you live. It’s also about how you live.

- We build urban residences that allow people to walk to work, school, neighborhood attractions and cultural events.

- We believe in mass transit at your doorstep and being close to bus stops, Light Rail, Amtrak and MARC - We create public green spaces in the city.

-We’re now building new residences built to LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) standards.

-We adapt historic buildings for smart urban living.

Ours have a view and a vision.

Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse creates places that help people adopt a green way of life. Residences where they can take mass transit

or walk to work. Bike or walk to the grocery store, market, shops, restaurants or park. Walk to school, class or continuing education.

Maybe drop by an artist’s studio or have a cup of coffee with a neighbor. The bottom line is – We believe in city living. After all, urban living is green living.

Plus, for many of our residences, we reclaim celebrated historic buildings. It adds up to a green way of life. And that’s what Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse is dedicated to – invigorating all of us to approach life with a commitment to doing what’s best for our planet.

We are city people.

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s p a c e

b y k e r r h o u s t o n

photograph by paul burk

The Southwest Airlines terminal at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport

JUST PASSING THROUGH Consider, for a few moments, an admittedly broad coincidence: Over the past five years, BWI underwent an ambitious $1.6 billion facelift. Officially renamed Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in 2005, the state-owned facility—the nation’s thirty-third busiest airport—now features expanded drop-off areas and ticketing space, a new daily parking garage, and a wider range of retail facilities. Now 55,000 passengers move through the building on an average day.

Meanwhile, the notion of airports as instances of “non-places,” or sites seen as typical of an emerging world that is ephemeral and experienced in a solitary manner, has gained a relatively wide acceptance. Popularized by Marc Augé in a 1992 book, the term non-place has been applied widely, but crops

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up most commonly in theoretical discussions of airports, which are sometimes viewed less as buildings than as mere transition zones.

In two very fundamental senses, then, our local airport has been altered: It looks different, and it is looked at differently; it has been both physically altered and re-categorized. But in what ways, exactly, can a $1.6 billion series of expenditures really be said to result in a non-place? Or, more broadly still: How do we relate to the spaces of our local airport?

In a discussion of New York’s original Penn Station (demolished in 1964), the architecture critic Vincent Scully once recalled, with nostalgic fondness, the building’s dramatic effect upon arriving visitors: “One entered the city like a god,” he said.

Despite its ambitious renovations, BWI can hardly be said to exert a comparable effect. The scale of

its single, angular terminal, perhaps, is superhuman. But at the very center of the airport, one finds, instead of Penn Station’s vast hall, a rather underwhelming staircase that trickles toward the baggage claim area. And, in any case, BWI, unlike Penn Station, is only loosely an entry point into a city. After all, it stands right between two cities, instead of in either one. It’s rather hard, really, to feel much like a god as one fumbles for quarters before a light-rail ticket machine, or waits on a traffic divide for a shuttle bus that will carry one closer to one’s final destination. And so the revelatory drama of Penn Station has given way to a more mundane, pragmatic experience: This airport generally remains a transition point, instead of a climax.

The airport’s surfaces and promotional materials reflect and extend this idea. Look around the

A look at airports as the ultimate non-place airport: You’ll see glass, marble, stainless steel, and sleek countertops, all of which combine to suggest a glossiness and an absence of friction. Just as the Terminal Map and Guide offers a slogan—“Easy come, easy go”—that suggests ease of transit, then the shiny, reflective components of the airport imply modern velocity. Of course, there’s also a fundamentally practical dimension to this, as the resistant surfaces are easily cleaned, and resist graffiti or the accretion of grime. But the resulting effect is notable, and presumably intentional. In several senses, the textures of the airport imply the unobstructed ease and pleasantness of jet travel.

It’s here that Augé’s ideas really become relevant. In his study of non-places, Augé argues that we are living, increasingly, in “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the tempo-

rary and ephemeral …” This may seem like a large claim, but of course large claims are what French intellectuals are best at, and his examples—airports, supermarkets, and automobiles—are intriguing, and are spaces in which we spend a lot of time, but rarely feel truly moored, or meaningfully present.

Furthermore, Augé adds, in such non-spaces we often interact more commonly with signs (Concourse D, Bakery, Exit 7) than with each other; social interaction is more incidental than fundamental. And, finally, even where there might be some meaningful interaction—two lovers, say, meeting outside an airport security checkpoint—the smooth surfaces of the non-place resist recording any permanent trace of the event. Each morning is as glossy and as glassy as the last, and history has, according to Augé, no real place in such environments.

Related to this is the assertion that airports— like supermarkets or gas stations—often lack any true geographical specificity. Of course, airports are geographically specific in several senses: Any Essex resident weary of the dozens of daily flyovers, or any environmentalist interested in protecting the wetlands that surround New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, can tell you that. And airports, moreover, often try to link themselves to their immediate region through various means. Denver’s huge airport features a white, tensile fabric roof that recalls the nearby Rockies; an Obrycki’s crabhouse at BWI evokes local tastes; a gift shop in the Port-of-Spain airport sells tapes of Trinidadian steel bands. But is there really, in the end, much difference between buying a shot glass decorated with an image of a lobster in the Bangor airport, and buying a shot w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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Paintings by Susan Henderson

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urbanite may 07

Airports, supermarkets, and automobiles are spaces in which we spend a lot of time, but rarely feel truly moored, or meaningfully present.

Or do we? Augé’s ideas have shaped a band of criticism, but I’m not sure that they always correspond to lived reality. The simplest proof of this, perhaps, involves a quick walk through the collection of exhibits near the BWI observation deck.

Aimed primarily at children, the various displays—a cross-section of a 737, video monitors that display the coordinates of current flights—are colorful and interesting, but they are also, in many cases, broken.

Worn down by years of small, eager fingers, several of the video monitors are blank, and a number of interactive buttons no longer respond to touch.

Children have played with these machines, and left their noticeable trace.

In fact, the more closely one looks, the more evident such traces become. BWI, like most airports (or fast-food restaurants, or malls), anticipates a basic range of functions (checking in, eating, waiting) and works to limit, both passively and actively, contrary behaviors. But in handling hundreds of thousands of passengers annually, airports are inevitably also shaped by the unpredictable demands of so many bodies; the human element always imposes itself. An infamously racy example of this took place at the Toronto airport in 2004, when two airline employees were accidentally locked into an airport holding cell while having midday sex. But other, less dramatic examples make the same general point. On a recent visit to BWI, I wandered into the meditation room, a peaceful, predictable space, designed to reassure through its simplicity—but in one corner a man lay sleeping, head on his bag, loudly snoring.

Despite the airport’s eminently sleek logic, then, the press of crowds can impose itself in unpredictable ways, and even the most carefully designed non-spaces, it seems, acquire personal histories, or patinas.

This is one of the lessons, it seems to me, of a series of photographs of the defunct TWA terminal

photo by Christoph Morlinghaus

glass decorated with an image of a crab at BWI? Most recent critical thinking assumes that there is not, and that our experience is ultimately closer to that of the narrator of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off.” Airports, for readers of Augé, may involve basic gestures toward place, but they also finally remind us that we are only travelers, rather than interactors.

We pass through a non-place; we don’t live there.

TWA terminal at JFK airport

at JFK, taken in 2003 by German artist Christoph Morlinghaus. Many of the photos evoke the sheer optimism of Eero Saarinen’s design, which reflected the broad hope that jet travel might offer a new form of liberation. But even Saarinen’s utopian terminal began, in time, to record the signs of its daily usage, and consequently Morlinghaus’ images reveal, in the words of critic Hesse McGraw, “a fatigued space— heavily stained carpet, cracks in the ceiling …— flaws in Saarinen’s future world.” McGraw’s decision to term the marks flaws is interesting, for we might also call them, in a less judgmental manner, signs of life. And just as Saarinen’s idealizing structure thus came to record human presences, the abstraction of non-places sometimes yields to the more immediate pressures of usage.

Admittedly, for the majority of visitors to BWI, the airport is merely a transitional space, instead of a destination. Thus James Kaplan’s conclusion, in his fascinating study of JFK, that “what is specifically absent from major airports is any sense of place: An airport is a no-place on the way to someplace.” No one goes to the airport without a larger itinerary in mind; at least, that’s why the gangster Omar, in an episode of The Wire, told his grandma that he worked a job at the airport—no chance that she’d simply drop by at some point, out of curiosity.

The airport is a means to an end, not an end.

But for much of the early twentieth century, airports were in fact endpoints in their own right. In the 1930s, for instance, a number of American airports featured public observation decks and restau-

rants that drew thousands of visitors annually: not travelers, on their way elsewhere, but curious locals who simply enjoyed the airport. That may seem like an odd idea, but what if we attempted to reprise it?

It’s fundamentally interesting, I want to suggest, to spend time in the airport without a ticket onwards.

For a traveler, the airport simply presents a series of necessary steps, but try sitting back, and watching the action at BWI, from a spectator’s point of view: The patterns of travelers can quickly seem foreign, and ritualistic. And the pleasure of the vast window that opens toward the southeast and faces approaching planes is mysteriously deep. When we don’t hope to be somewhere else, the airport becomes a collection of slow, meditative pleasures—and the very act of enjoying those pleasures, without keeping an eye on a departures screen, is almost transgressive. It’s the basic personal pleasure, ultimately, of making a non-place into a place.

To that end, then, let’s call the $1.6 billion well spent. To the literally minded, the bonds and federal funding went toward capital improvements and security measures and the installation of new technologies. But to the more abstract among us, the renovation may also serve as a reminder that even as theoreticians invent concepts such as the non-place, it is up to us to make places, even in the most improbable of spaces. ■ —Kerr Houston, a regular contributor to Urbanite, is a professor of art history at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

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The Final Frontier An unlikely alliance between Maryland farmers and environmentalists could make for a healthier future for the Bay By

T o m

P H O T O GR A P H Y

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H o rt o n BY

M I T RO

H OO D

Preparing to go where no greenie had gone before, environmentalist Kim Coble had reason to be nervous as she took the podium last December in Ocean City. The top Maryland official of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation was about to address the 2006 annual meeting of the Maryland Farm Bureau.

Her appearance was tantamount to a gun-control activist keynoting an NRA convention.

But with a twist.

from industry, fallout from dirty air, and runoff of fertilizer and manure from farmland all contribute to the growing problem.

Here in Maryland, many of these pollution problems are intertwined in ways that make cleanup very complicated. But what the new Chesapeake Bay Foundation strategy recognizes is that Marylanders actually have a common enemy: sprawl development. And if this makes for strange bedfellows, so be it. After all, the health of the Bay, the vitality of the state’s urban cores, like Baltimore, and its prime farmland are all in

Imagine if the advocate of gun-control had come to propose that they do some hunting together.

“We made a mistake,” Coble told the assembled farmers and agribusiness professionals. She conceded that her organization’s relations with this conservative agricultural group had been, “on a scale of one to ten … negative twenty.” She hoped things could change.

And indeed, the mere fact that the Chesapeake region’s biggest environmental group was now publicly apologizing for how it had gone about trying to clean up the Bay’s biggest source of water pollution—agriculture— marked a real turning point. Trust-building and partnerships, not regulation and litigation, was the new promise.

For the forty-year-old Chesapeake Bay Foundation, it was a course change that raised eyebrows in parts of the environmental community. But supporters argue vehemently that this new direction of working with farmers has tremendous promise, and may finally crack the toughest nut in the twenty-five-year struggle to eliminate pollution and restore the Chesapeake.

Around the Bay, around the nation, and around the world, balancing clean water with growing cheap, abundant food is a puzzle no one has solved.

“Dead zones” of oxygen-depleted water are expanding in size and can be found everywhere from the Chesapeake to the Gulf of Mexico, and from Europe’s Baltic Sea to Hong Kong Harbor. Sewage, development, effluent

this together—and all stand to lose if sprawl development continues apace. Today vast tracts of new housing—and the attendant roadways and services—are fragmenting the open spaces and transforming the countryside character of Maryland, already the nation’s fifth most densely populated state. Hundreds of thousands of acres of farms have turned to suburbs in recent decades, and at least another 150,000 acres, almost 240 square miles, will be lost by 2015, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “When farms go out of business, they are replaced by hard, developed land uses such as shopping centers, highways, and commercial facilities, and then the total impact on the environment is even greater,” says William C. Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Indeed, storm water from developed lands, while not the largest source of Bay pollution, is the fastest growing one. It is also the main cause of small stream degradation throughout much of Maryland. Correcting the problems caused by development is also costly: It is around twenty times more expensive to keep a pound of pollution from storm water out of the Bay, compared to a pound from agricultural runoff. And while one can reverse the impact fertilizer has on the Bay, it is far harder to reverse development.

Keeping farmland operational is also key to Maryland’s vaunted Smart Growth policy, aimed at steering growth back into the Baltimores, w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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Cambridges, Cumberlands, and Rockvilles where paving, sewers, and other infrastructure exist or is planned. That’s because clustering people in cities is actually smart environmental policy. Consider this: The large lots typical of sprawl consume open space roughly equal to Howard County to house 200,000 people—the same population that could fit easily into about a quarter of already-built Baltimore. And the best urban sewage treatment creates less than a third per capita of the pollution produced by septic tanks used in most sprawl housing.

But as long as developers find it cheaper and quicker to expand outward into the countryside, the urban cores will struggle, says Dru Schmidt-Perkins, executive director of 1000 Friends of Maryland, a statewide land-use organization based in Baltimore.

“The city is the solution for farmers,” she says. “We have the places to put the population growth and the need to buy the farmers’ food.”

Farmland loss could become the various cities’ loss in an even more direct way, says Chesapeake Bay Foundation Vice President for Environmental Protection and Restoration Roy Hoagland. Federal caps limiting overall Bay pollution may soon be invoked as the region misses the 2010 restoration goal of returning the estuary’s health to levels of half a century ago. “To the extent we can’t reduce farm pollution, we’ll have to regulate urban sewage, urban storm water, and urban air pollution more and more to meet the caps, and that in turn will cut into urban growth options and raise taxes,” Hoagland says. “That’s why in Virginia we’re seeing homebuilder organizations support increasing funding to clean up agriculture,” he adds. (The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a 177,000member organization, operates in Virginia and Pennsylvania, as well as Maryland, since those states share the bulk of the Bay’s 64,000-squaremile watershed.)

source of pollutants fouling the bay for nearly three decades, and that technologies to dramatically reduce farm runoff have been proven for years—planting forest and grass runoff buffers around fields; also sowing winter “cover crops” such as rye and oats to absorb pollution before it escapes to the water. Meanwhile, as progress has been made on other major sources like sewage and polluted air, the relative contribution of agriculture has been increasing. Nor is there a more cost-effective approach to improving Bay water quality than spending on agriculture—nearly half the cleanup needed could come from less than ten percent of the billions a healthy Bay will ultimately cost. So it made sense for environmentalists to focus on agriculture.

For their part, farmers chafe at their depiction as polluters and complain that costly regulations will put them out of business. Farmers uniformly see themselves as conservationists who’ve passed on the land for generations in many cases. They tend to feel blamed for more than their share of the problem, and assert that they are given too little credit for efforts already made. They detest government intervention in their business and want no restrictions concerning whether or not they sell their land for development. They have been a vocal and powerful voice.

As a result, state and federal environmental laws have mostly exempted agriculture. And local zoning in most of the Bay watershed still allows considerable development on farmland.

Farmers will proudly show you how they have voluntarily managed their operations to enhance wildlife habitat and control soil erosion, built manure storage facilities, and shifted to methods of plowing that minimize runoff and save energy. But with agriculture covering 18.5 million acres of the Bay’s forty-one-million-acre watershed, and with the intensive cropping and industrial-strength animal husbandry demanded by the modern food system, all that has not been enough.

Perhaps tougher than making farms cleaner will be preserving them. Only a handful of Maryland’s counties have rural zoning deemed protective enough to maintain farming in the face of development pressure, according to the Maryland Department of Planning. “We all say, yes, protect farms, but no one has a recipe for keeping them financially viable when they are selling in a viciously competitive international market,” says John Frece, associate director for the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland and the former communications director for Maryland’s Office of Smart Growth.

Environmentalists, including the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, frequently support more restrictive zoning, but the Farm Bureau is opposed to that, insisting that it infringes on their property rights. In

An Oppositional History So why hasn’t a winning alliance happened long before?

Environmentalists concerned about the Bay have known that farming is the major problem for years. They note that farming has been the largest w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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

fact, it is not unusual to see farmers teaming with developers to oppose tougher farmland zoning.

Coble would like to shift the paradigm, holding out hope in her 2006 speech that making farmers more profitable would mean “they only sell their land when they want to, not because they have to.” But translating this to sustainable agriculture in fast-suburbanizing Maryland is more hope than reality right now. The state spends millions every year to buy development rights from farmers, who in turn agree to keep the land in agriculture. But the state’s goal of protecting a million acres of farmland by 2022 seems likely to fall short by some 218,000 acres.

Shifting Strategies Historically, environmentalists have worked hard to impose regulations on farmers.

Traditionally, these groups made many of their considerable gains through government regulations and the courts, or by having the credible threat of such tools to help gain “voluntary” compliance with clean air and water efforts. But these techniques worked best with deep-pocketed industries that could pass costs through to consumers, and with pollution that came from industry’s identifiable pipes or smokestacks. But farms, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic states, are relatively small and inefficient— 87,000 of them spread across the vast, multistate Bay watershed—unable to pass on costs in a market driven by international supply and demand.

Additionally, farmers must compete with developers for land, even as they receive a declining share of the consumer’s food dollar. On federal Farm Bill subsidies, Bay region farmers get less than their fair share compared to politically powerful mid-western agriculture interests. So if the environmentalists’ typical methods of regulating grow too costly, many of the region’s farmers will go out of business.

Then everyone loses.

But inaction is equally problematic. As the Bay and its cities and towns struggle, farmland declines and sprawl and water pollution continue apace.

“The lack of action is pathetic. It’s frustrating,” says former Maryland

State Senator Gerald Winegrad, who labored for years without success to get mandatory controls on farm pollution. “It just makes you want to scream.” Winegrad recalls trying to enlist Governor William Donald Schaefer’s support for his efforts in 1994 as they waited amid the massive marble columns of the state capitol to begin the State of the State address.

“Schaefer started pounding his right fist against the marble, veins were popping in his neck—I thought he might have a heart attack. ‘Do you know what it’s like pushing against agriculture? Like beating on this column!’”

Three years after that incident, however, the Bay would be rocked by an explosion of toxic algae that ushered in the beginnings of mandatory controls on farm pollution. It also marked a new low in relations between Maryland farmers and environmentalists.

In the summer of 1997 a mystery algal bloom, identified at the time as Pfiesteria piscicida, killed thousands of fish and caused short-term brain damage in several people along Maryland’s Pocomoke River and other nearby Bay tributaries on the lower Eastern Shore. A decade later, scientists are still sorting cause and effect from that episode, which, had it recurred, would have destroyed the market for Bay seafood. But one message was clear: Excessive levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the water, mostly from farms, had set up a fertile breeding ground for algal blooms.

During hearings on Pfiesteria in 1998, it became embarrassingly clear that Maryland agricultural officials had no clue whether years of voluntary programs to reduce farm pollution had been working. This led to quick passage of a law in 1998 that for the first time in history slapped mandatory reporting regulations on Maryland farmers; they were required to account for where their nutrients were going.

Environmental groups, including the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, claimed victory.

Farmers felt they’d been steamrollered.

“It just scared the daylights out of me, with everyone shouting and nobody listening,” recalls Kenneth Bounds, a farm credit official who in 1998 was president of Delmarva Poultry Industry, Inc., which represents Maryland’s huge broiler chicken industry. “I was sure that law would cause a lot of young farmers to just get out of the business rather than risk being seen as criminals,” Bounds says. He tried to mitigate the damage: “I offered to act as a liaison to try to smooth things out, and Kim Coble’s predecessor at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation wouldn’t even have lunch with me— and I was buying.”

It was against this backdrop that Coble addressed the Maryland Farm Bureau convention last winter, nearly a decade after Pfiesteria. She didn’t know what to expect. “I could not get a read from the audience,” she recalls. “No heads nodding in affirmation, and no smiles, but no arm crossing or frowns either.”

Her speech covered fifteen pages. She talked about restoring the Bay and preserving farmland, about the Foundation’s accomplishments, about the value of agriculture. She apologized. And she laid out a future where the Foundation and agriculture, working as partners, could mount a coalition to finally get farmers the technical and financial resources to stay in business while doing their part to restore the Chesapeake.

“Toward the end, the room was quiet,” she says. “I finished and leaned down to get a drink of water. I looked up and the room was applauding, all standing—it moved me quite a bit. I don’t think I was so brilliant. I think all of us were just ready to move on, to try something different.”

The Foundation had actually begun working to repair relations with the farm community more than a year before Coble’s talk. It chose a farming family for its prestigious Conservationist of the Year award. It mounted major new efforts through its outdoor education program, taking farm kids from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley canoeing the length of the Potomac River, and Pennsylvania kids with agricultural backgrounds down the Susquehanna. (The Susquehanna and Potomac deliver nearly two thirds of the Bay’s freshwater—and also the bulk of its pollution.)

Nowadays, if you hang out in the Foundation’s Annapolis headquarters you may hear less talk about blue crabs and sewage pipes than discussions continued on page 85 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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All Together Now Will consensus and collaboration be enough to make “One Maryland” a reality?

By

Lenneal J. Henderson is distinguished professor of government and public administration and senior fellow at the William Donald Schaefer Center for Public Policy at the University of Baltimore. He is also a national expert on issues regarding local governments and regionalism and he has worked to analyze regional needs in several American cities, including Baltimore. In 1991, a report on the Baltimore region was led by this month’s guest editor Neal Peirce, with Henderson serving as a member of the analytical and interviewing team. Following the report, which ran in the May 5, 1991 edition of The Baltimore Sun, some area institutions took steps to promote regional cooperation.

Baltimore writer Tom Waldron sat down with Henderson at a Charles Street restaurant to look back on his work and consider the state of regionalism in Baltimore today.

Urbanite

: Governor O’Malley promotes the concept of “One Maryland.” Yet, this is a state of enormous diversity and regional divisions. Is there such a thing as “One Maryland”?

Henderson

: It’s a good framework for what we should be doing. When I hear “One Maryland,” I think of his efforts to bring the different constituencies of the state together. It makes sense. I think we are dealing with the reality of an increasingly global economy, and how it impacts on states and regions. The best way, in my view, to approach that kind of issue is for the state to have some consensus, some agreement about what it wants to be as it grows up—together. I also think about building economic, social, and political bridges between parts of the state that I think right now are competing more than they are cooperating. We’re going to see a StateStat [performance management system], and one of the things it can produce is a sense of where we are in state agency performance on issues that concern the entire state, and not just parts of the state. I think that will be one of the contributing instruments to the “One Maryland” strategy.

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T o m

W A L D RON

You hear the term “Baltimore region” sometimes.

What are the prospects for promoting regionalism in the Baltimore area, and who would benefit from such regionalism?

Right now I think it’s a troubled scenario. There are economic and infrastructural inter-dependencies among Baltimore and the surrounding counties that are only partly acknowledged. The counties, quite frankly, have a difficult time addressing anything in a regional context that isn’t infrastructural, transportation, or environmental. If you talk about housing or an incubator program for small-scale economic development that can help struggling businesses in Baltimore or in Baltimore County, you’re going to get resistance from the county. We have a long way to go to get certain folks in the counties to understand that whatever they recommend and do has to pay more than lip service to the region. [During a task force on affordable housing in Howard County, where I live], I was disappointed that our recommendations were not as strongly regional as they could have been. I thought we had a splendid opportunity to talk about, if nothing else, the development of affordable housing on the boundaries of Howard County and the other counties—Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County, and we couldn’t get the task force to go there. It’s that kind of struggle we’re going to have.

Many of the issues affecting Baltimore City—drug abuse, affordable housing, and deteriorating infrastructure, to name a few—are also problems for parts of the surrounding counties. Are there ways this region can work together on these issues?

The good news is we have a governor who will, I think, promote ways and means of cooperating between and among the counties, on dealing with criminal justice, social issues, housing issues, parks and recreation, water and sewer—things they have in common. We do have a number of mutual-aid agreements [among local jurisdictions]—about thirty-four or thirty-five of them— that cover police, fire, water, parks and recreation, social services, some of which are used and some of which are not used, that jurisdictions could use

together. I want to put those instruments back in front of them and say you have some existing policy tools you can use.

With the military realignment process bringing thousands of new jobs to Maryland, can Baltimore City and its neighbors work together to respond?

I think it’s a double-edged sword. The concentration of the expansion in and around the Fort Meade area could promote some regional cooperation on a bi-county level or a tri-county level. On the other side of it, military bases are almost black holes in that they draw a lot of economic gravity into themselves. These are going to be, from a military point of view, gated communities. I’m not sure how that’s going to help regionalism.

We suffer from what I like to describe as the tyranny of jurisdictions. We can’t seem to get beyond the politics that are arrayed around that.

If the legislature was inclined to use, for lack of a better term, an interstate-commerce-clause approach to get the counties to come together, they would be restrained by the local politics.

Regionalism really does help individual jurisdictions if they would just see it, but it’s hard to convince people of that. Many people think regionalism means regional government and it does not. I would be opposed to a regional government.

How does Maryland compare nationally in terms of regionalism?

We have some uniqueness. The state controls so much of what cities would control in other places—mass transit, for example. That means the transportation contribution is going to come from the state if it’s going to come from anybody. Also, Baltimore has had trouble developing cease-fire agreements with its county neighbors on certain issues, housing being the leading one. This all depends on who is the county executive and who is the mayor. It puts the city in a tough spot. The other thing is that the revitalization of the inner city of Baltimore has regional implications. Look at where these redeveloped neighborhoods are sited. They are ten to fifteen minutes away from county boundaries. Many of the people who are

buying homes in those areas are former suburbanites. If there’s a way to get that group, those former county residents who are now city residents, in on this bandwagon, it would be helpful. They have a dual consciousness now that could really help regional initiatives. They have a full knowledge of the suburbs. They may be a real untapped resource.

Is regionalism picking up momentum in the country, or has it peaked?

Regionalism was encouraged by the federal government in the 1960s. It sort of peaked there. The good news is that without the federal government telling you how to do regionalism, if you’re a progressive metropolitan area, you can determine it yourself, or the state can help you determine it.

Are there ways to encourage new alliances?

When I was chair of the Greater Baltimore Urban League, we actually had an agreement with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to pursue an environmental justice track on a regional basis, in conjunction with the Save the Bay initiative.

While it flourished, it was a wonderful idea. We were pushing brownfields redevelopment as part of that. If we could find a way to relate that to housing development, economic development, and environmental protection, we’d have the kind of coalition that could manifest itself regionally.

Portland and Multnomah County in Oregon, I think, have done a superb job of bringing in their cities and counties and their people into the process. One of the challenges is to figure out how politicians get brownie points for regionalism within their jurisdictions. If we figured that out, we’d be on our way. Thank heavens for folks like the Citizens Planning and Housing Association and the Greater Baltimore Committee who continue to preach that sermon and work at regionalism. ■

photo by Jason Okutake

Is there an area of the country that is doing a particularly good job of promoting regional issues?

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

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poetry

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poetry by emily dickinson 249

Solitary Woman in a Glass House:

Visual Translations of Selected Emily Dickinson Poems The images in this series result from projecting the structural schemes (syllabic count, rhyme, alliteration, etc.) of selected Dickinson poems into plans and axonometric volumes, which form the basis of the interior renderings. Because these works originate as a programmatic strategy to transition the poems from verbal to visual language, they constitute “translations,” rather than illustrations or interpretations.

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Rowing in Eden — Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor — Tonight — In Thee!

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Plan and Axonometric Projection of Poem 249

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Hope for a Sustainable World Although much of the environmental news we’ve gotten lately has been negative, there are reasons to be hopeful— many of them right here in Maryland

Global warming. Depletion of world’s fisheries by 2048. Loss of wetlands and forests. Submerged Chesapeake Bay grasses disappearing. The list goes on and on.

Hammered by all of these gloomy trends, most people find it challenging to believe that we can turn the tide and reverse the downward environmental spiral that we’ve collectively created. Yet there is reason for hope.

Quietly, incrementally, and largely under the radar of the media machine, millions of people are changing their ways to greener ones. Compact fluorescent bulb sales have increased by nineteen percent each year from 2001 to 2004. Close to 467,000 hybrid cars were purchased in 2006. Since 1970, the number of active farmers’ markets has grown by eight hundred percent across the United States, signaling Americans’ interest in consuming fresher, healthier foods that are not transported long distances.

Individuals are composting, buying seasonal food, installing solar panels on their homes, and more. Step by step, these small actions cumulatively signal that we are smart enough and wise enough to seek out a path of sustainability. This undercurrent of green awakening is rippling across the country, and Maryland is one of the leaders in that wave.

Addressing Global Warming Maryland, along with several other states, is setting increasingly aggressive carbon reduction targets, putting pressure on Congress to take significant

action on a national climate policy. This year, the state is preparing to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a coalition of states from Maryland to Maine committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through statewide reduction goals and a regional cap-and-trade program.

On a local level, Baltimore City has been recognized as a leader in energy efficiency measures.

In 2005, then-mayor Martin O’Malley received the Leadership Award from the United States Energy Association’s Energy Efficiency Forum—the first mayor in the nation to be bestowed such an honor.

O’Malley received the award for his creation of an Energy Conservation Office in the city. This office is overseeing the replacement of standard light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones, modification of heating and cooling systems, and installation of water conservation measures in a multiyear, energy-saving plan ending in late 2007.

Similar retrofits were completed last month at seven main fire stations and sixteen other municipal and police buildings, with additional retrofits scheduled for completion at about 170 city schools by the end of this year. To date, three Baltimore City buildings have earned the Energy Star label for superior energy performance from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as a result of O’Malley’s program. The City anticipates saving $8.4 million a year while simultaneously eliminating 61.4 tons of carbon dioxide, a significant contributor to global warming.

Even Baltimore City’s vehicle fleet is going green. The city has owned electric cars for several years, but following the national trends toward w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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biofuels (four billion gallons of ethanol, primarily from corn, were produced in the United States in 2006), all new city police cars by 2008 will have flex-fuel engines that can use either ethanol or gasoline. In addition to pumping ethanol, the city will be pumping biodiesel for its diesel vehicles by the middle of 2007. The City’s biodiesel efforts parallel those of the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance with the Baltimore Biodiesel Cooperative, in creating a pioneering biodiesel outlet next to the Mill Valley Garden Center and Farmer’s Market in Remington.

Expansive Greening of Construction Montgomery County approved the most aggressive green building legislation in the country in fall 2006, requiring that public and private construction and renovation of buildings that are at least 10,000 square feet meet LEED standards by 2008. Washington, D.C., followed suit as the first major U.S. city to require LEED standards by 2012 for buildings over 50,000 square feet.

This is a sign that there is greater interest in integrating environmental decisions into the business world and our government decisions.

“I’m quite excited about the progress in D.C. and Montgomery County,” says David Pratt, president of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Baltimore Chapter and principal of Lorax Partnerships, a green building consulting group in Columbia. “What I find strikingly important is that the development community in Montgomery County did not really resist the legislation. This is a sign that there is greater interest in integrating environmental decisions into the business world and our government decisions.”

Baltimore City has proposed creating an Office of Sustainability to oversee the implementation of a number of green efforts including environmentally friendly building initiatives proposed in 2006. The City is also considering instituting property tax credits for high-performance buildings as well as establishing green building requirements similar to those in Washington, D.C.’s recent building standards, which are based on LEED benchmarks. Public hearings about these three initiatives will take place early this month.

Regionally there are people and groups pushing the envelope beyond LEED to create buildings and indoor environments closer to the ever-elusive goal of a completely sustainable building. Baltimore-

based Furbish Company is the contractor for what will be the largest known strawbale building on the East Coast, at the Friends Community School in College Park. The 27,000-square-foot building is slated to be finished in fall 2007. This strawbale structure parallels the 2006 construction of a compacted-earthblock building at the Sandy Spring Friends School in Sandy Spring, Maryland. Both buildings are constructed of locally sourced, natural materials.

Adaptive Reuse and Green Redevelopment Baltimore is already seen as a leader in the adaptive reuse movement, an approach that creatively renovates derelict buildings. Tide Point in Locust Point and the Natty Boh Tower in Brewers Hill are examples. (Both projects were done by Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, an investor in Urbanite.) But sometimes “green building” can encompass more than an independent structure and instead involve an entire neighborhood.

One promising green redevelopment effort in the city is the Westport Waterfront project at the mouth of the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, just south of the stadiums. The area for redevelopment had been a derelict industrial site until the Turner Development Group bought it in 2004. This $1.4 billion, fifty-acre project is already being cast as a national model of urban development in its early stages.

The Westport project will be a mixed-use venture of residential and commercial areas. The National Center for Smart Growth and Research has been brought on as a consultant to assist from the early stages, to ensure that the redevelopment will incorporate as many eco-friendly components as possible. Located next to several mass transit stops, the project will include bioswales to capture and filter runoff, the re-creation of five acres of wetlands, and placement of ten miles of walking and biking trails.

Patrick Turner, the developer of the Westport project, says, “We’re exploring solar panels, and possibly a centralized heating and cooling plant for all the structures on site. Our vision is to transform what is now a rundown industrial site into a model sustainable neighborhood that can be emulated across the country.”

With all of these efforts underway, and many more too numerous to include, eco-friendly change is definitely afoot. Perhaps not too far off in the future, as a result of all of these positive environmental trends, the only options we’ll have will be green, or greener. ■

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Above: 1400 Congress, a vertical mixed-use project in Austin, contains twenty-eight residential and commercial units.

Vertical Leap

courtesy of Jenée Arthur

out there

By building up rather than out, the City of Austin hopes to accommodate the continued influx of urban dwellers and put the brakes on sprawl In the next few decades, the U.S. population is forecast to swell to four hundred million. Cities are trying to find ways to draw these people into urban areas—a difficult task, as many Americans still favor singlefamily homes with front and back yards. In Austin, Texas, a largely horizontal city (like Baltimore, with its lines of rowhouses), a new development ordinance that’s being implemented this year aims to cut back on sprawl and encourage center-city density, use of public transit, and bustling urban life.

Austin experienced a nearly twelve percent rise in population in just seven years, from 656,562 in 2000 to 735,088 in April of this year. According to the City of Austin, the city’s population could surpass 800,000 by 2010. To deal with this expected population influx, the Austin City Council passed a complex, multifaceted ordinance on “vertical mixed-use” development last August; it took effect this January. It requires that new buildings along certain heavily traveled roads be comprised of a mix of residential and commercial space, with at least one residential floor atop the commercial space and with pedestrian access to the street.

To encourage developers to build these kinds of projects, some barriers that normally hinder construction are being removed. Among them are the ability to incorporate roughly fifty percent more housing units in a project than typically are allowed (until now, density and setback limits have reduced

a project’s developable square footage) and to allow varied use of the ground-floor commercial space (even when existing zoning ordinances say only offices can occupy the space, for example). To take advantage of these “relaxed standards,” developers must comply with recently adopted commercial design rules, which include such items as height restrictions and requirements for partially shaded sidewalks to protect pedestrians from sunlight.

Because of the relaxed standards, developers should be able to profit more easily from these projects.

To define where these vertical mixed-use projects can be built, a task force created in 2004 hammered out details of what’s called an “overlay.” It’s basically a blanket that covers various city neighborhoods that line heavily used roads, or “core transit corridors”—defined in the new design standards as roads with “population density, a mix of users, and transit facilities to encourage and support transit use.” Residents of areas included in the overlay are being given the chance to voice their concerns on how the vertical mixed-use ordinance would affect their neighborhoods (referred to as the “opt-in/optout” period). However, residents aren’t permitted to reject vertical mixed-use outright; they can only make recommendations, and the City Council has the final say on neighborhoods’ requests.

The overlay further promotes development by eliminating potential fights over zoning laws. Under w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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this new program, vertical mixed-use development can be undertaken without zone changes on a core transit corridor, according to Austin City Councilman Brewster McCracken.

McCracken, who is both an enthusiastic supporter of vertical mixed-use and one of the key players in creating the new commercial design standards, says the idea was prompted by a call from Envision Central Texas for more urban density.

Envision Central Texas is an influential nonprofit organization composed of neighborhood, environmental, business, and policy leaders who seek to sensibly develop the Austin area. The ordinance was patterned after a similar program in Arlington, Virginia. There, a “Special Coordinated Mixed-Use District” designation was established to create new, high-density development on public transit lines, resulting in more than thirty million square feet of new development and a lively downtown.

In Austin, more than twenty-five current and planned core transit corridors citywide fall under the vertical mixed-use overlay. The ordinance affects high-traffic roadways like East Riverside Drive. Each day, this road carries thousands of vehicles between Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and downtown. Where the east end of Riverside meets U.S. Highway 290 East, motorists are treated to a pretty, panoramic view of the modern and ever-burgeon-

Vertical mixed-use project Saltillo Lofts contains twentynine residential units and nine commercial units.

ing downtown skyline. However, the view along the road isn’t so pretty: Lining the roadway are fast-food joints, convenience stores, pawnshops, hundreds of cheap apartments (primarily for University of Texas students), run-down strip retail centers, and acre after acre of vacant parcels that are up for sale.

Under the overlay, East Riverside Drive could be radically transformed within five years into what McCracken envisions as “the gateway corridor into Austin.” Already, at least eight major vertical mixeduse developments are on the drawing board for the East Riverside corridor, according to McCracken.

Laura Morrison, president of the Austin Neighborhoods Council, says the vertical mixed-use program holds the potential to help Austin grow responsibly. “We know that there’s going to be growth, but we want that growth to be an enhancement to the city and not degradation to the city,” she says.

Still, Morrison says, some residents are concerned the boost in vertical mixed-use will harm the city’s infrastructure, aggravate traffic, and intensify parking problems.

In addition, some Austinites fear these new projects will price out current residents. Under the ordinance, only ten percent each of both rental and owner-occupied units must be affordable housing.

However, during the opt-in/opt-out process, neighborhoods can recommend deeper affordability. continued on page 87

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MUSIC

Heaps of praise are leveled these days on bands like The Hold Steady and Spoon for playing “good, old-fashioned rock,” as if the rest of the rock bands out there—the ones playing anything more experimental—have gotten totally out of control. Likewise, Chattanoogato-Baltimore transplants J Roddy Walston and The Business will be rewarded by the critics for their conventionality. But behind the Telecaster power chords and barroom rhythm section, the band has a sense of irony and taste, lyrics that are at times both playful and earnest, and a raw energy and talent that set them apart.

Take for example the song “The Times They are a Staying,” the fifth and perhaps best track on their new record, Hail Megaboys.

J Roddy starts by strumming and singing a disaffected ballad, with acoustic guitar, a chorus of “oohs” in the background, and a long, tension-building hold on a five-chord. But there is a moment, right around the thirty-second mark, where, as the front man’s Rod Stewart-meets-Springsteen voice rises with the line, “… and I see they finally got their hands on you,” and the song slips into a punkish boogie refrain—you get a chill. It’s the feeling you used to get when an otherwise milquetoast pop band like Fastball used to come out, every once in a while, with a really kick-ass single.

On the rest of the album, the band sticks to the same formula of its second EP, LMNEP: manic, piano-heavy rock (more Jerry Lee Lewis than Scott Joplin), and well-arranged Queen-style vocal parts. “Used to Did” snarls along with sneering country-punk lines like, “How bout this, give us a kiss, uh-huh / I got this gun, and girl it don’t miss / It makes babies / It makes that rock and roll.”

“Go for It” rips the Stones’ “Don’t Stop” to the point that you feel like you can sing along with it on first listen. “Generic in Love” lets a tongue-in-cheek barbershop quartet soda-fountain thing (think Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time”) get blown away by a head-banging punk-

photo by Jason Okutake

By Robbie Whelan

From left to right: J Roddy Walston, Steve Colmus, Zach Westphal, and Billy Gordon

rock chorus. The two truly weird tracks on the record—the angular, handclapping “Picnics and Kisses,” and “Sally Bangs,” a girl-about-town song that shames Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sing-along folk—are piled at the end of Megaboys, which makes the point clear enough: J Roddy’s real experimentalism as a band is secondary. They are, first and foremost, a solid, talented quartet, playing—what else?—that old-time rock ’n’ roll.

MAGAZINE

By Michael Paulson

Carbon footprints, sustainable design, hybrid vehicles … These terms have increasingly become part of the popular lexicon, thanks to a growing awareness of environmental issues. Whereas ecovacations and fair-trade coffee might once have been considered wacky fringe indulgences, magazines like Plenty have helped bring them into the mainstream.

This bimonthly publication offers a wide range of environmentally themed features and reviews. For instance, the April/May issue includes a piece showing how some developing nations in Africa deal with

the challenges to their food supplies posed by global warming; suggestions for eco-friendly culinary vacations; and a feature on environmentally conscious farmers. Such diversity is sure to satisfy even neophytes on the green scene, and it doesn’t hurt that the magazine’s ninety-six pages are attractively packaged and colorful; the design ensures easy reading. Even the very modest number of ads are fun to read, chock full of clever copy and cute animals shilling for advocacy groups. Just like its tagline promises, Plenty makes it easy being green.

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By Robert C. Knott

For more than a decade, Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin have been among the best singer/ songwriters in popular music. As evidence of this truth, one need only listen to the recordings each artist has recently released.

Williams’ latest, West, is a folk album on steroids—and very nearly the equal of her high-water mark, 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Its simple song structures and confessional lyrics are enhanced, but never overdone, by the adroit production of Hal Willner. Williams’ vocals, which are her emotional numbness and tells a paramour to taken from the album’s original demo tapes, “fuck off ” for, among other failings, his inability to are economically framed by strings, vintage satisfy her sexually. Pieced together, these otherwise organs, and a stellar ensemble that includes random entries tell a bigger story: Williams is at ease guitarists Doug Pettibone and Bill Frisell, in her skin and, as the album’s title signals, her new drummer Jim Keltner, and bassist Tony GarSouthern California digs. Personal liberation is a nier. Williams has never sounded better. wonderful thing, especially on West.

West unfolds like a well-worn diary.

Griffin, while being as talented a songwriter as Williams longs for a suddenly departed lover; Williams, is a very different artist. A storyteller, she mourns the death of her mother; documents

possesses a soulful voice and often works in styles ranging from pop to country to gospel.

Her latest, Children Running Through, is a towering achievement that chronicles Griffin at the height of her considerable powers.

The album opens with “You’ll Remember,” a wistful ballad that features Griffin against an acoustic bass and a lightly brushed snare drum. “Stay on the Ride” is a bluesy romp in the tradition of Memphis-era Dusty Springfield, whereas the up-tempo “No Bad News” builds to a rousing crescendo of acoustic guitars and Mariachi-style trumpets.

The highlight of Children Running Through, however, is “Up to the Mountain (MLK Song),” an exquisite hymn that reflects Griffin’s spirituality, which is a common thread on her four previous studio albums. Norah Jones, an admittedly fine vocalist, has never turned in so inspiring a performance.

Children Running Through is not only Griffin’s best album, it is among the best thus far of 2007. For those unfamiliar with Griffin, there is no better introduction to one of popular music’s best artists.

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literature

By Susan McCallum-Smith

“Secure your own mask before assisting others,” reads a line of accidental poetry found on aircraft safety leaflets, an ironic reminder that appearances are deceptive and to accept nothing, and no one, at face value.

Take newly wed Hanan, for example, in “The Journey Home” from Susan Muaddi Darraj’s first short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile.

Hanan’s husband introduces her to his colleague, who asks, condescendingly, what part of the Middle East she is from. She replies, “From 10th and Tasker,” referencing a junction in Philadelphia. Her audience is nonplussed—the colleague, because she contradicted his assumptions based on her name and appearance, and her husband, because he believes her rude for doing so. Hanan refuses to play the roles others assign to her.

The interlinked stories in The Inheritance of Exile meditate on such dangers of assumption, tracing the lives of four Palestinian women and their American-born daughters in a South Philly neighborhood. Muaddi Darraj rejects literary pyrotechnics and surface razzle-dazzle, in favor of a fresh clarity that exposes her characters’ contradictions. Although tinged by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she sidesteps politics to portray the daily struggles of ordinary life—immigrants attempting to maintain a fragile equilibrium between their heritage and their adopted homeland, mothers and daughters struggling to accept and love one another for who they are—with a touch as delicate as the coffee cup on its cover.

This biased reviewer is particularly gratified, as Baltimore resident Muaddi Darraj occasionally contributes to this magazine. Another talented writer in our own backyard is Jean McGarry, a professor at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins whose third novel, A Bad and Stupid Girl, was published in 2006.

On the eve of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, two girls share a dorm room: the bookish, disciplined Esther, and the flighty, selfabsorbed Siri, who hopes college will provide an escape from the suffocating tedium of her family, only to find “it was one more thing in life not worth your full attention.”

Although the prose is sometimes abstruse, A Bad and Stupid Girl merits close reading. A perfect example of the bildungsroman form, it portrays Siri and Esther’s emotional and intellectual developments. Subtly, McGarry indicts an educational system that rewards students for learning by rote, and argues that real wisdom requires “a life of infinite stretch. Thinking accommodated everything and everyone. It was free, it could be

hidden, it needed nothing, but could use whatever was available.”

McGarry’s portrait of shallow Siri, with her Madame Bovary obsession, was so effective I wanted to strangle the girl. She learns from steady Esther how to accumulate knowledge, but ultimately lacks the imagination to use it. The terrifying uncertainty of a life of infinite stretch was not for Siri: “If there was more than met the eye, she didn’t want to know about it.”

There is more than meets the eye in PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives (2005), the first and best of the three books published in conjunction with Frank Warren’s “found” art project. In 2004, Warren began to leave postcards in libraries and coffee shops, inviting people to write down and send to him, anonymously, their most intimate secrets.

Postcards soon clogged Warren’s Germantown mailbox, inspiring an award-winning website and several art installations.

PostSecret offers a smorgasbord of revelations, from the heart-wrenching “I love one of my children,” to the oddball “I used to get high and watch Lawrence Welk.” One author reveals, “I am a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife. No one knows that I do not believe in God.” Yikes! I can understand her keeping that one to herself; still, “I’m afraid of women who wear capri pants” was an enormous relief—I thought it was only me.

The innovative stylishness of the postcards exposes an artistic vein marbling this nation that is positively life-affirming.

Beyond its tactile quality and imaginative visuals, why is this book so appealing? Is it because it speaks of our common humanity, or because its effect is instantaneous? In these days of warpspeed gratification, an art book we “get” in less than fifteen minutes is cultural-fix as espresso— an emotional jolt without the time-consuming side effects of pondering and doubt. Nevertheless, PostSecret illustrates that a well-tuned sentence can still stun like a punch to the head.

An ode to sentence power, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences (2006), will make punctuation meanies and language snobs gleefully cock-a-hoop. Many Americans groan at the memory of sentence diagramming, that infamous, dubious aid to understanding grammar. Kitty Burns Florey’s guide traces the history of this preposterous tool, using rib-tickling examples of infinitives split and prepositions dangling. She concludes by cheerfully admitting that diagramming has no bearing whatsoever on one’s ability to write well.

I may send Mistress Florey’s manual to Matthew Sharpe, author of the newly published imaginative satire Jamestown, whose boundless

cleverness sometimes causes his sentences to miss their mark. “The girl who values niceness gets shoved back down my throat each day by bitches like the redhead here, why must they exist?” he writes. (Huh?) But then, “Maybe he’s one of those guys who won’t be what he should be till he’s half of what he was.” (Bull’s-eye!) This second example is superb because it works both figuratively and literally, since the character in question loses an ear, then a forefinger, then other appendages, ending the novel as a torso with a marginally improved attitude.

Sharpe makes history fun again. He reimagines the founding of Jamestown in 1607, placing it in an undefined time period blending both future and past: New York is in ruins, the Indians are in buckskins, and PDAs are the preferred method of trade negotiation. The good ship Godspeed is a bullet-riddled school bus, peopled by marauders (most of whom seem to be called “John”) who’ve come a-hunting for oil on behalf of the Manhattan Development Company.

They’re an unattractive bunch, with a penchant for Tarantino-esque violence and frat-boy humor, with the exception of John Smith, whose broad-chested decency and asexual tone implies he wears a cape and underpants over tights.

The mythologized meeting between Pocahontas (“Poke-a-huntress”) and John Smith (“Jacks Myth”) falters most frequently over the pronunciation of names. “Look, Poke-hunt-ass, I want something from you …” he begins, to which she replies, “Look, Jackshit …”

This month, the State of Virginia celebrates the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the United States with a helluva wingding at Jamestown (though what Native Americans have to celebrate eludes me). Will we reflect on its complex and thoughtprovoking history, as spoofed by Sharpe, or will we fall for the misdirection of masques, pageantry, and fireworks, and stare at the sky, slack-jawed, bedazzled … blinded? ■

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What You’re Writing continued from page 27

I had become

inexplicably obsessed with the Motown classic “The Tears of a Clown,” so soulfully delivered by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles circa 1967. As the daughter of a stone-cold Motown mother, I have listened to this song on countless occasions. But for eight solid weeks beginning in late October, I could not stop listening. The central character of the song is laughing and smiling, appearing glad, while the music laughs and smiles along with him. Yet underneath his happy hum, our clown is sad … sadder than sad.

Right before the song possessed me, I had a serious conversatoin with my absentee father. I mean, I laid it on the line. I expressed the hurt, pain, and deprivation of growing up without his influence. I am a daughter of mothers, and because of my own mother’s successful parenting and nurturing, it took me thirty years to realize that my father’s absence detrimentally affected me. But it did, and I had to let him know in plain English, “You did me wrong.

I hurt because of you.” He cried the tears of a clown that day.

My father died eight weeks later, and I realized that my obsession with the song was about him.

Everyone at his funeral talked about his infectious laughter. “Oh, he had a way that he could laugh.”

“Oh, he had the most unique laugh.” “Oh, his laugh just made you laugh.” Oh, his laugh … his laugh … his laugh …

But I know better. My father was one of the most dynamic dudes I have ever met; you meet few like him in this life. But he was sad, sadder than sad. He lived a life of regret, anger, and frustration, tortured by his inability to adapt and evolve. He refused manhood, including being a husband and a father. He laughed his way through this life, a melancholy man.

When he first met his second wife, she had a collection of five-hundred-plus clowns: clown clocks, clown watches, clown phones, clown figurines, clown paintings, clown key chains, porcelain clowns, happy clowns, sad clowns, funny clowns, red clowns, blue clowns, an invaluable assortment of jesters. She abandoned her collection many moons ago. I imagine she traded them all in for the saddest clown of all. My father, may he laugh in peace … ■ —Tonya Taliaferro is the author of AfricanAmerican Entertainment in Baltimore, a photographic history of Baltimore’s arts and entertainment legacy.

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The Final Frontier continued from page 61 on fencing dairy herds away from streams and “intensive rotational grazing”—both good for water quality and farmers’ bottom lines. A new bill in Maryland’s legislature, backed by the Foundation and the Maryland Farm Bureau, would create a $130 million-a-year fund by taxing each square foot of pavement, rooftop, and other impervious surfaces created by new development. About a third of that money would be earmarked for farm cleanup. Governor Martin O’Malley and House Speaker Mike Busch have both thrown their support behind it.

Also high on the Foundation’s agenda for this year is working with farmers to redirect hundreds of millions of federal Farm Bill funds into programs that would pay Bay region farmers for water quality and other environmental improvements. The will is there, if the money and technical help is, the Foundation says. The Foundation points to a 2003 survey it conducted showing 174,062 out of 204,313 applications for cost-share assistance to farmers for conservation programs throughout the Bay region had been denied because of insufficient funds.

“We see huge potential to reduce pollution and no downside whatsoever” to a more conciliatory approach to farmers, says Foundation President Baker. He thinks recent gains in other areas like sewage and air quality are beginning to revive the Bay restoration after several years of stalled progress.

The Foundation’s Hoagland says polling that the organization conducted a few years ago showed that despite documentation of agricultural pollution, the public just doesn’t view farmers as polluters.

“The family farmer is an icon just like the Bay,” says Hoagland, “so to the extent we were to [confront] the farm community, it would have been a difficult message to push.” Still, Hoagland says the new agri-environmental alliance will need to show proof that it is actually reducing pollution.

“Ultimately it’s all about pounds of nitrogen [in the Bay]. … Once we get a significant slug of dollars, then we need to see, within a year and a half, real, measurable results.”

Will it Work? Debating Feasibility It is hard to find anyone in the Bay restoration community openly critical of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, if only because existing approaches to taming the farm pollution gorilla have clearly failed. But there is some skepticism about these new tactics, mostly because the voluntary approach has not had a great track record either. “The future of agriculture in the Bay region has to be stricter rules, with some resources to ease the burden on farmers,” says Howard Ernst, a political science professor and author of Chesapeake Bay Blues, a critique of the Bay restoration. “You can’t put all the costs [of farm cleanup] on the public,” Ernst continues, “but there’s no doubt the Foundation has removed regulation from the political dialogue for now.”

Former State Senator Winegrad notes that substantial public money has already been spent on largely voluntary approaches to agricultural pollution—at least $250 million since 1983 in Maryland alone; but it has not been effectively targeted toward actually reducing nitrogen and phosphorus. He believes mandatory regulations—with teeth—have to be part of the equation. The 1998 mandate that enraged farmers following the Pfiesteria scare, he says, has been “eviscerated,” so weakened and chipped away at by legislative amendments and lack of enforcement and monitoring that it never got a fair trial.

Tom Simpson, a University of Maryland professor in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and chair of the Bay restoration program’s nutrient subcommittee, says “partnerships and collaboration are always good, and can produce some ‘win-wins’”—but only up to a point. The magnitude of the cleanup problem is so large it will also take fundamental changes. For example, there might be considerable resistance from farmers who are asked to substitute unfertilized crops like switch

grass, potentially of use in making ethanol, for substantial acreages now in corn, a mainstay of feed for the region’s poultry industry. “I can’t say the Bay Foundation’s wrong, but we’ve been trying the partnership and incentive-based approach for decades now,” Simpson says, noting that they’ve been only marginally successful.

Still other environmentalists have opted for a more direct, confrontational approach. In Pennsylvania, PennFuture, a Harrisburgbased environmental group, has taken its fight against pollution in the Chesapeake to the courts. It is going down a list of some 250 large animal farms, covered by federal and state water quality rules that don’t apply to the majority of farms, filing notice of intent to sue those that are polluting.

Pennsylvania’s part of the Bay watershed produces more farm pollutants then either Maryland or Virginia, so success here could be significant.

“The whole history of the Bay restoration demonstrates the failure of the voluntary approach alone,” says Jan Jarrett, vice president of PennFuture. She notes that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has recently joined her group in criticizing a flawed Pennsylvania government plan to clean up farms by allowing pollution credit trading with other sources like sewage treatment plants.

For his part, the Foundation’s Hoagland takes the critiques and different tactics in stride. “I have always thought there is never one exclusive strategy for solving environmental problems,” he says. “We’ve picked the tools that work for us, and other groups can choose theirs.”

Still others say it is not about this or that strategy, but pursuing several strategies simultaneously. “Until we get money, regulation won’t do much.

And to the extent we can get farmers money, perhaps our regulation can be a little more robust,” says Lamonte Garber, who has worked with agriculture for the Foundation since the 1980s.

Meanwhile in Maryland, the Foundation appears to have struck up an unprecedented partnership with agriculture, albeit one with few illusions. “There was still a lot of skepticism after Kim’s speech, but their actions have eased a lot of concerns,” says Earl “Buddy” Hance, the former Maryland Farm Bureau president who left his post to become deputy secretary of agriculture for the state. “Things are so much better now, and it’s clear we both want the same things, and that when farmland becomes development, no one wants to see that.”

“I’m excited,” says Jim Perdue, head of the largest poultry company headquartered in Maryland. Perdue and others have noted in recent years that rampant development is making it harder for them to expand with new chicken houses and to find enough cropland on which to apply poultry manure. “In a cooperative atmosphere you’re willing to do more,” Perdue says. For example, his company has signed an agreement with the EPA to enroll larger chicken farms in a pilot program aimed at reducing water pollution. “The response from farmers has been excellent,” Perdue says.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little skeptical, but I really think something good is going to come of this,” says Bobby Hutchinson, who farms more than 3,000 acres on the middle Eastern Shore with his brothers.

Coble says she thinks many farmers still don’t understand the magnitude of what agriculture will eventually have to do to restore the Bay. “There’s still skepticism in the environmental community that anything will really be different, and that’s a fair point. We’ve got to show results.”

It’s too early to tell whether the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the fight to restore the Chesapeake have turned a critical corner, but the benefits to every sector of Maryland—urban, agricultural, and natural—are too immense to ignore. “The business of being caretakers of the land … is what makes the farmer and the environmentalist similar,” Coble concluded in her Farm Bureau speech. “Does a businessman, doctor, lawyer … get up in the morning, check the weather, smell the air, feel the soil, and watch the birds to determine what they are going to do that day? Do they watch the fish, the crabs, and the bugs in the soil or mud as indicators of their job performance?” For Coble, the agri-environmental alliance is potentially powerful and can be understood as a logical extension of shared interests.

“How well do most people understand that what we do on and to the land ultimately determines our future?” ■ w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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Vertical Leap continued from page 75

hind other regions—including Baltimore—in terms of mixed use development. Five years ago, urban mixed-use was a relatively new concept in Austin, according to Terkel. But with the economic incentives of the mixed-use program in place, he says, it’s now more financially enticing for developers to pursue vertical mixed-use projects.

courtesy of Jenée Arthur

We know that there’s going to be growth, but we want that growth to be an enhancement to the city and not degradation to the city.

This vertical mixed-use project in Austin, the AMLI 2nd Street District project, will be completed in fall 2007.

One woman who’s an officer in her neighborhood association and a leader in a neighborhood planning group worries that the new mixed-use plan will create “a haven for the wealthy” because, she says, few current residents will earn enough to live in even the “affordable” housing, and the majority of new mixed-use apartments and condos will be too expensive for her current neighbors along East Riverside. Toni House, who owns a 45-year-old, 1,700square-foot home in a neighborhood just south of

East Riverside, says she isn’t necessarily opposed to improvement of the East Riverside corridor. “We do want it to look really nice, we do want revitalization—but not at the expense of existing residents.

We don’t want to force everybody out,” House says.

Despite concerns like these, more vertical mixed-use is on the horizon. Real estate developer Tom Terkel, vice president of the Real Estate Council of Austin, says the new program will accelerate the mixed-use trend in Austin, which is slightly be-

However, Austin architect Richard Weiss says it won’t be clear whether the vertical mixed-use overlay works until it’s “road-tested” over the next year or so. Annual reviews will be performed to monitor the progress of the program, says Weiss, who helped craft the ordinance.

By building up rather than out, city leaders envision being able to boost population density in the city to accommodate the continued influx of urban dwellers and decrease sprawl. “I don’t think anyone in the country has done something this significant,” McCracken says of the vertical mixed-use program.

“As more communities learn about it, I would fully expect them to adopt something like this.” ■

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Title

If yo in e con at (4

52 Just Passing Through

73 Vertical Leap

Both Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities and Marc Augé’s book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity are available at Amazon. com. Some of photographer Christoph Morlinghaus’ work can be viewed at www.morlinghaus.com.

To read more about Austin’s vertical mixed-use ordinance, go to www.ci.austin.tx.us/planning/ designstandards.htm, or visit the website of Austin City Councilman Brewster McCracken at www. brewstermccracken.org.

56 The Final Frontier

77 Recommended

Keep on top of developments about the Bay on the website of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (www. cbf.org). The website for 1000 Friends of Maryland is www.friendsofmd.org. Stay up to date on planning decisions and smart growth in Maryland at the state’s department of planning website, www. mdp.state.md.us. The website of the Maryland Farm Bureau is www.mdfarmbureau.com. Find out more about the chicken industry on the website of the nonprofit Delmarva Poultry Industry, Inc., www.dpichicken.org. You can buy Howard Ernst’s book Chesapeake Bay Blues: Science, Politics, and the Struggle to Save the Bay through the publisher’s website, www.rowmanlittlefield.com. The website

Music: For tour dates and more on J Roddy Walston and the Business, go to www.jroddy.net. Lucinda Williams’ website (www.lucindawilliams.com) contains show dates, downloadable albums, photos, and merchandise. For tour dates and news about Patty Griffin, go to her website at www.pattygriffin.com.

Magazine: Plenty can be found in Baltimore-area Barnes & Noble and Whole Foods stores, as well as at Harbor News (1010 Aliceanna Street; 410-2445140). To subscribe, go to www.plentymag.com.

photo by Gail Burton

for the Penn Future group is www.pennfuture.org.

Several books about the Bay by writer Tom Horton can be found at Amazon.com.

resources

To read about the downtown farmers’ market’s thirtieth anniversary, go to page 35.

What Are We Trying to Save?

Coming Next Month: Guest Editor Roberta Brandes Gratz, the award-winning journalist, author, and urban critic who serves on New York City’s Landmark and Preservation Commission, joins us as we look at preserving landmarks, neighborhoods, and a sense of community. www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 7

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urbanite marketplace

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eye to eye

So much of what art is, lies in the process of creation, yet we seldom have the opportunity to enter an artist’s mind to get a sense of how a work of art actually develops. I have always found the work that best expresses its process to be the most interesting. Perhaps it is that I can feel the spirit of the artist when I have a sense of her struggle to find that final form that, in a sense, represents the artist’s development.

Cara Ober is a young Baltimore artist who is garnering a great deal of interest both within and beyond this city. We recently had an exchange about her work, and I found her to be especially forthcoming.

Of the painting shown here, Ober says, “This image is a painting I sort of hate but love too much to get rid of. I have been fascinated with shadows and darkness, and the idea that for everything light and good, there is a balance. So I wondered what would happen if I made a really dark, almost black painting ... Paintings need to have a bit of agony in them to be really interesting, a struggle where you push yourself somewhere new and unknown, where you really have no idea what to do next, or where you have to let go of the elements you love best in order for the whole to work.”

—Alex Castro

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urbanite may 07

Cara Ober Coupled Up in Bedroom Skin 2006 40 x 40 inches Mixed media on canvas

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