May 2008 Issue

Inside Hampden’s Police Station Rehab • Richard O’Mara on the Tyranny of the Smile may 2008 issue no. 47

Special Issue: Crime & Violence

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c o n t e n t s

38

keynote: a history of violence interview by sondra guttman

when 30-year-old author stacey patton sat down to write about her abusive childhood, she didn’t expect the research to take her back in time to america’s slavery-era plantations.

may 2008 issue no. 47

special issue: crime & violence 45

the end of violence a note from guest editor philip j. leaf, ph.d.

46

through a glass, darkly by michael anft

the june 2007 robbery-beating of zachary sowers had all the components of a true-crime horror story—a white victim, young black assailants, and a neighborhood in flux. what really happened that night, and why?

46

52

man of conviction by lionel foster

a reformed felon now devotes his life to keeping ex-offenders out of trouble. can ellsworth johnson-bey’s unorthodox crusade become a national model for prisoner reentry?

52 58

raising oliver by greg hanscom

a 2002 murder made the oliver neighborhood ground zero for violent witness intimidation. will current development plans help turn the page?

64

64

murder, interrupted by mat edelson

in an innovative anti-violence program imported from chicago, former gang members try to intervene before a beef becomes a body.

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 8

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c o n t e n t s

d e p a r t m e n t s

may 2008 issue no. 47

19

what you’re saying

23

what you’re seeing

25

what you’re writing

31

corkboard

33

have you heard

72 71

philosophical differences

old facades

guns: buyback, all in the family, and the color of blood

this month: picking flowers, waving flags, and dancing in the streets

energy superstars. plus: shag bags, beehives, and teeny tiny tees

poetry eight by kathleen hellen

72

space cop shop a preservationist bails out an old police station by marianne amoss

77 77

eat/drink pillow talk rollin’ ravioli with the saints at st. leo’s by mary k. zajac

83

reviewed: night of the cookers and vin

85

wine & spirits: italy’s rebellious super-tuscans

87

art/culture smile! the forced gleefulness of modern photography by richard o’mara

plus: front matter, native reservations, finding our way, and more

95

110

eye to eye creative director alex castro on lesly deschler canossi’s woven magazines

this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com: resource guide: links and information on community violence prevention interview: a conversation with poet kathleen hellen photos: a neighborhood portrait of oliver by ellis marsalis blog: anne haddad liveblogs the maryland film festival

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 8

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Issue 47 May 2008 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com Staff Writer Lionel Foster Lionel@urbanitebaltimore.com Contributing Editors Karen Houppert, Susan McCallum-Smith Editorial Interns Charles A. Hohman, Rebecca Messner Design/Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer Jason Okutake Staff Photographers La Kaye Mbah, Jason Okutake Production Interns Ashley Kimbro, Bob Myaing Web Coordinator/Videographer Chris Rebbert Senior Account Executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Janet Brown Janet@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Advertising Sales Assistant Carol Longdon Carol@urbanitebaltimore.com Sales/Accounting Assistant Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing/Administrative Assistant La Kaye Mbah Administrative Assistant Lindsay Hanson Administrative Intern Cara Weigand Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050.

Subscription price: $18 per year.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2008, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved.

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

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

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urbanite may 08

y u b o t e m i t r e t t e b o n i N n o i t a c o l t s e b e h t n i . e r o m i t l a B f all o

Living in decision. is th e d ou ma ve that y lo d ltimore’s n a e ar t of Ba outsid e p h te e s th to oing being in You’re g ast e means u V e on the e h T s r r te o n e a c n n urban 0 Alicea growing t s ts, either 85 te s fa the restauran f o e it e r n o o v is your fa ast. This n walk to a Harbor E c uth u o y ere Pazo, So h t: w s e d b o o e h Only th neighbor t’s here? a ’s coast, a h W . s ovie s, Fleming y m o e R , th e n tr e a v ark The ps and e ds, Landm ’ll o retail sho o F le o side, you Wh in , e d c n y o A J . s y the wa der, Jame more on n Moon Un e You v e ’s e ther menities. , a e s r m u iu o c m of pre AC. Of nd plenty a and the M , s g in il center. high ce indows, the sales w y b e g p r to la s enjoy online or ll us, go a c o s y in toda can move

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urbanite may 08

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editor’s note

photo by Jason Okutake

In a classic

best-of-times/worst-of-times formulation, the crime headlines this April were notably mixed. The month began with a hopeful statistic: The fifty murders the city tallied in the first three months of the year were the fewest in twenty-three years for that time period. But not long after this bit of cheer was reported, news broke of a high school art teacher attacked and beaten in her classroom by a student, with footage of the incident posted online. The story—often packaged with a similar youth-run-amok incident involving teenage girls in Florida—inspired fresh hand-wringing. Conversation quickly shifted from “Are things really getting better?” to “What’s wrong with our kids?”

I asked our guest editor to speculate on the first question. Philip Leaf is the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, and he agreed several months ago to partner with Urbanite for this special issue on crime and violence in Baltimore. Dr. Leaf, like any good scientist, was cautious about drawing conclusions based on a three-month statistical dip. Maybe the new emphasis on policing strategies that target the most violent offenders was working, he allowed, or perhaps Baltimore is just belatedly getting in line with most other American cities, which have already seen widespread declines in murder rates. “There’s no magic wand,” Leaf told me. “It’s a bunch of little pieces.”

This is a theme of his work: In a city that has harbored a culture of violence for generations, substantial improvements in public safety can come from thousands of incremental, personal changes, not sweeping policy strokes. It’s also a theme in this special issue of Urbanite.

Two things require explanation about this issue: We both revived the guest editor title—a feature that attentive readers will recall as a part of this publication’s first years—and partnered with that editor’s home institution. The staffs of Urbanite and Johns Hopkins Magazine shared resources to help create the stories, and some elements of this issue’s feature package will appear, in different versions, in the June issue of the university’s alumni magazine. When I approached Hopkins editor Catherine Pierre with the notion of joining forces, I sold the idea as both a natural extension of the advisory role Dr. Leaf would be playing and an opportunity to make the statement that the subject matter itself—crime and violence in American cities—was important enough to justify a collaboration between the two publications.

Baltimore’s shallow media pool being what it is, the mechanics of this temporary alliance were not difficult—some individuals on the two staffs are regular contributors to each other’s publications, former colleagues, present drinking buddies, or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, tailoring the material for each publication still took patience and dedication from the writers, editors, photographers, and designers who took up the challenge of serving two masters. And sometimes a third: Catherine and I met, individually and together, with Dr. Leaf several times in recent months, and his expertise and counsel helped shape the four stories that Urbanite is publishing this month.

There is no magic wand in here. Nor do we spend too much time wringing out the latest crime stats or wade too deeply into the politics behind American drug policy and its role in perpetuating Baltimore’s violence epidemic—that’s enough for another special issue or two. Instead, we do what the magazine does best—tell stories about the people who are confronting the fundamental challenges facing the city. Johns Hopkins Magazine senior writer Michael Anft’s account of the beating death of Zach Sowers (“Through a Glass, Darkly,” p. 46) uses 2007’s most high-profile murder to examine how young people become violent and why their acts so terrify us. Urbanite staff writer Lionel Foster looks at prisoner reentry by spending some time with Ellsworth Johnson-Bey, a fiery ex-offender waging an unorthodox war against criminality itself (“Man of Conviction,” p. 52). Urbanite senior editor Greg Hanscom’s “Raising Oliver” (p. 58) ponders the brick-and-mortar of mayhem: How do you create a safe community in a neighborhood that is physically broken? And contributor Mat Edelson shows the inner workings of a program that short-circuits deadly violence before it has a chance to happen (“Murder, Interrupted,” p. 64).

These four special features devoured much of the magazine’s real estate this month—the “Baltimore Observed” department is on a one-month hiatus. Look for it again in June, when Urbanite resumes its regularly scheduled programming, while our partners at Johns Hopkins Magazine (www.jhu.edu/jhumag) will continue the conversation on violence.

Partners in crime. From left: Marianne Amoss (manag ing editor, Urbanite), Lionel Foster (staff writer, Urbanite), Catherine Pierre (editor, Johns Hopkins Magazine), Michael Anft (senior writer, Johns Hopkins Magazine), Dale Keiger (associate editor, Johns Hopkins Magazine), Alex Castro (creative director, Urbanite), Philip Leaf (director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence), David Dudley (editor, Urbanite), Greg Hanscom (senior editor, Urbanite), Shaul Tsemach (art director, Johns Hopkins Magazine).

—David Dudley

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 8

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urbanite may 08

what you’re saying

46 ue no.

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Banding Together I am 63 years old and have been struggling with drug addiction and alcoholism all of my adult life. I often think about all the experiences and opportunities I’ve missed because of my addiction and it makes me very sad. Drug dependency has caused me to lose homes, cars, jobs, relationships, self-respect, and hope.

There were times I would have been homeless had it not been for concerned friends and relatives who housed, fed, and enabled me when I had nowhere to go and was ready to give up. I

Bullish on Frankfurt Bringing esoteric methodology to the study of the mundane is hardly above criticism; it is essential to philosophy, that endeavor that seeks, as Aristotle and Bertrand Russell remind us, to inspire wonder about everyday objects and thereby prompt analysis of our most basic concepts about human beings and our relationship with the world. But Harry Frankfurt (“Heartbreaker,” February) seems to think that any methodology will do for these purposes—how else can we explain his willingness to employ the uncritical, slap-dash methodology that emanates from his ill-conceived and poorly substantiated ideologies about love and truth?

Having spent an hour or so reading On Bullshit, Frankfurt’s “Farmer’s Almanac” of the Socratic Method, I am appalled not only that it accrued serious readership, but also at the possibility that some readers may have categorized it as part of the nowsubstantial body of philosophical literature.

Perhaps we can forgive Frankfurt for simply not knowing that thinkers such as Lionel Trilling, Kant, and Aristotle have reached similar conclusions about honesty and love. But the fact that a twenty-page essay can be cloistered on the same

update took advantage of their generosity and now owe them amends.

I sometimes wonder, “Is it too late for me to live a fulfilling life? Am I too old to change?”

Back in 1985, my ex-wife hauled me into court for non-payment of child support. After I recited my prepared sob story to the judge, Miriam jumped up in the courtroom and shouted, “Sam is a drug addict!” Instead of throwing the book at me, the judge asked me if I wanted to attend an AA meeting with him during the lunch recess. That was my first introduction to recovery, yet I have not been able to sustain continuous clean time and sobriety because of chronic relapses.

The Baltimore Station Band (“Group Therapy,” April) reminds me that everything happens for a reason and I need not ever regret the past … there is hope for the future. If this diverse group of guys had not been addicts, they never would have met in rehab, never would have shared their beautiful music and positive message of recovery with addicts like me.

Despite years of self-destructive behavior, I have survived so I can help others and I am especially grateful for my wonderful relationship with my daughter, Eryka. The Station Band is a living example of the miracle of recovery, and your article inspires me to stay clean and sober, a day at a time.

—Samuel Augustus Jennings works as an Amtrak conductor between Washington, D.C., where he lives, and New York City.

shelf as Critique of Pure Reason is complete and utter bullshit.

—Daniel G. Jenkins, MA, is the coordinator of the philosophy department at the Community College of Baltimore County.

Correction Baltimore artist Bernhard Hildebrandt’s name was misspelled in the review of the Contemporary Museum show “Double-Take: Poetics of Illusion and Light,” which appeared in the March issue. Urbanite regrets the error.

We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. You can also comment on our website (www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum).

Convicted criminals will not be the only ones required to give up their genetic “fingerprints,” thanks to a bill passed by the state legislature in March. The bill, to be signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley soon, allows law enforcement officers to take DNA samples from people who are arrested on suspicion of committing violent crimes or burglary. It was met with fierce opposition from civil liberties advocates and the Legislative Black Caucus, who argued in March that it violated constitutional safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, and that it would lead to “genetic racial profiling.” (See “The Test,” in Urbanite’s April 2008 issue.) The Black Caucus did win some concessions from the governor, who was one of the bill’s biggest supporters. While law enforcement officers will be allowed to take a DNA swab at the time of arrest, the sample cannot be analyzed or entered into a database until arraignment, when the suspect is formally charged with the crime before a judge.

If there is no arraignment, the sample must be destroyed. If the suspect is found innocent, the sample must be destroyed and the DNA profile erased from all databases. The bill also prohibits “familial” DNA searches, in which law enforcement officers search databases for DNA similar to that collected at crime scenes; once they’ve identified the owner of that similar DNA, they round up close relatives to see if they can find the perfect match. In a final concession, the law expires in five years, and requires the state to closely document the program’s effectiveness, its racial bias, and its impact on the state’s ability to process DNA samples from crime scenes. “The amendments did some significant damage control, though the bill itself still represents a civil rights violation,” says Maryland ACLU Legislative Director Cindy Boersma. “I have no doubt that someone will challenge it in court.”

—Greg Hanscom

This month, artist Steve Bradley , the subject of Urbanite’s April 2007 article “Trashy Art,” will officially launch his URBANtraces project. By tuning a radio to 87.7 FM, the public can hear stories and other “sonic art” created by people who live and work in the Station North Arts District and Greenmount West neighborhood. The transmitters are located in homes, shops, and art spaces from Howard Street and West North Avenue to East Lanvale Street near Charles Street; broadcasts will be available through August 2008.

The free May 6 event, to be held at 20 West North Avenue, will begin at 2 p.m. with an appearance

by Mayor Sheila Dixon, followed by a reception, tours, and live music until 4:30 p.m. For more news and information about the project, go to www.urbantells.net.

—Marianne Amoss 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 8

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F O R

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A complimentary chauffeur-driven limousine. A dramatic skylounge. 24-hour concierge services to make your busy life easier. Are you ready for a life of unparalleled convenience and cosmopolitan services? At 39 West Lexington, your expectations will be exceeded. You’ll know you’ve arrived— from the moment you enter the grand lobby. Visit us today to be among the select few who will be able to call this Baltimore landmark home.

LU X URY R ENTA L A PARTMENTS | ST U DIO | 1-BEDROOM | 2-BEDROOM | PENTHOUSE | 2-LEV EL PENTHOUSE

39 WEST LEXINGTON STREET, BALTIMORE, MD 21201 FOR MORE INFORMATION, OR TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT, CALL 888.761.3055.

39WESTLEX.COM

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baltimore’s newest

most exciting restaurant Baltimore Pho serves traditional Vietnamese and fusion cuisine in a fully renovated space complete with a welcoming bar and friendly staff

monday: tuesday: wednesday: thursday: saturdays:

sin night (service industry night) half price wine night guest bartender night absolutely girls night out champagne lunch buffet 11 to 4

happy hour every afternoon 4 to 7 early bird specials until 5:30

1114 hollins street baltimore, md 21223 410.752.4746 hours: 11am –10 pm, bar: stays open ’til ? across the street from historic hollins market former location of the cultured pearl

Š2008 Closet Factory. All rights reserved.

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410-247-4400 877-925-6738 www.closetfactory.com 22

urbanite may 08

107

what you’re seeing

I consider myself an observer of the world, and I use photography as a way of capturing these observations. The pinhole camera specifically allows for rules to be broken. Metal can bend and perspective can shift to something that does not exist in our vision. Light captured through the camera has unique qualities that define in a single image the passage of time.

Canton’s Boston Street is a unique space that is a combination of lost history and new development. It is bursting with rhythm and repetition of form.There is a sense of movement in the still objects; the texture of the surfaces can be felt and heard.

—Kate Lynn Morrill

The “What You’re Seeing” department is the place for photography that captures the true spirit of Baltimore. Urbanite staffers will choose our favorites to publish in the magazine and on our website.

Along with your photograph, please include a brief description of the image and your contact information. Go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com/ wyseeing for more information on how to submit your photograph. Photos can be e-mailed to wyseeing@urbanitebaltimore.com.

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

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CHANGING THE FACE OF BALTIMORE

“Best of Baltimore”, 2007 Baltimore Magazine

TRUNK SHOW TIFFANY & CO. BVLGARI Friday, May 16 11am-6pm Saturday, May 17 10am-5pm

PA R I S W E S T O

P

T

I

C

A

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Stop in to view the entire collecton of eyeglasses and sunglasses from these luxury collections

521 N. Charles St. 410.528.1877

ARCHITECTURE INTERIOR DESIGN MASTER PLANNING HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE

www.pariswestoptical.com

1104 Kenilworth Drive, Suite 500 Towson, MD 21204 p: 410-337-2886 f: 410-337-2974 135 West Patrick Street, Suite 200 Frederick, MD 21701 www.rubeling.com Career Opportunities Available

INTEGRITY. CREATIVITY. RELIABILITY. INNOVATION.

It’s your turn to spoil her

Mother’s Day Gift Certificates now available Canton Towson Timonium Pikesville AboutFacesDaySpa.com

8113 Main Street • Ellicott City, MD 21043 410.480.2210 • www.craigcoyne.com Enjoyable People • Happy Faces Good Times

24

urbanite may 08

ABF000408_Urbanite May 2008.indd1 1

4/3/08 11:35:48 AM

what you’re writing

photo by Eddie & Tripp

GUNS

For a Christmas present,

Magan said she wanted to shoot guns. In no time, my dad had three rifles, four kinds of bullets, and a lawn chair thrown into the bed of his big pickup.

Down by the Potomac, the December wind rolled over Dan’s Mountain, licking our ears and turning Magan’s nose runny. She’d been excited back at the house, when the promise of a kicking rifle was still exciting, but now, the slim .22 resting against the chair like a poised viper, she was doing her laugh that she does when she’s nervous. Magan and I call each other “buddy.” “Here I go, buddy,” she said, one eye squinted and the other open as wide as she could bear.

She did great, making the gun go pop pop pop so fast and gentle it felt, in my ears, like a harmless toy gun. But then Dad loaded the second rifle, a thirtyaught-six, his go-to deer-hunting rifle. That rifle, all dense wood and cold barrel, had fed us when I was growing up: tender coffee-mug-sized chops and, when they were gone, hunks of shoulders that Dad would start in the Crock-Pot cold mornings before

we went off to school, a packet of Lipton onion soup working its way into every fiber.

The rifle weighed something; it felt like American industry, like a locomotive or a tractor. Eye to scope, I tried to calm my breathing. But the morning’s coffee took over, or else my true nature did.

The paper target, through the scope, went right and left, up and down, and diagonal, like a mosquito. I couldn’t make the crosshairs behave.

But then, like suddenly learning how to ride a bike, I got it. The crosshairs settled. I closed my eyes.

I said some kind of prayer to someone or something, a prayer so short it was over before I knew I’d said it, and pulled the trigger. The world exploded, like it had fifteen years earlier when I’d last shot a gun: a total, all-over jolt that knocks the shoulder back two inches and pushes in the eardrums a millimeter. Eyes still closed in that half-second, I thought: I remember you, and you still scare me. I thought: The world is a fragile place. I thought: I’ve got a lightning bolt tucked into my right shoulder and holy Jesus I just tamed it. My ears began ringing. I

opened my eyes and was a little surprised that I was still there, sitting in that lawn chair, breathing as I’d always done.

—Seth Sawyers lives in Mount Vernon and teaches a writing class at UMBC. His personal essays have appeared in River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Fugue, and elsewhere. He is working on a memoir called I Wanted, about growing up in the 1980s.

At the risk

of sounding like a Hinckley, Chapman, Whitman, Berkowitz, Oswald, McVeigh, or one of their most recent college campus contemporaries, I declare: I love guns! A man cannot have too many guns. God bless the Second Amendment.

I am not a “gun nut;” I’ve never “gone postal,” and I am not a member of any militant, survivalist, or skinhead group. I am, however, a life member of the NRA. I have used guns most of my adult life,

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 8

25

FRIdAy MAy 2 Can Company celebrates 10 years with free outdoor concert by legendary musician,

MARSHAll CRENSHAw Opening by Baltimore favorite, The Crawdaddies

6-9 pM More info visit thecancompany.com 2400 BOSTON STREET IN HISTORIC CANTON

THE NEIGHBORHOOD Shops And Restaurants

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26

urbanite may 08

2400 Boston Street, Baltimore, MD 21224 410.558.CANC (2262) | www.thecancompany.com

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

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what you’re writing professionally and for sport and fun. I detest labels tagged to those who own or use guns, like motorcyclists detest being associated with the Hells Angels.

I have many guns (to gun owners and collectors, numbers are as secret as your ATM pin), both long guns (rifles and shotguns) and handguns (pistols which are either semi-automatic or revolvers— wheel guns). I belong to gun ranges where I can shoot my pistols for practice and fun. Target shooting is a confidence builder; an adrenaline rush; an exercise in breathing, keeping calm and collected in the case of emergencies; and, ultimately, skill development. I volunteer and teach “gun safety,” home/personal protection, and the state’s hunter safety course.

A waterfowler and conservationist, I eat what I kill. I love the smell of gunpowder (not necessarily in the morning), but especially in the still, cold air of an Eastern Shore daybreak with Canada geese honking and barking overhead by the thousands.

The magnificence of this wild migratory sight can be breathtaking. I love the sound of a firearm, the explosion of a 10- or 12-gauge shotgun with 3.5-inch magnum rounds—and the birds drop, their hearts stopped and yours left pounding.

There are millions more like me and fewer like those infamous characters in my first paragraph.

Let’s keep it that way.

—Name withheld

“Dontell, goddammit! Stop ’at! Choo

’eer me?” the boy’s mother scowled, as she yanked his tiny shoulder. Dontell’s mother, Arlene, was on the verge of birthing a baby at any time, given the enormous swell of her belly. She had come to the cramped city office to seek help with her utility bill. On the job only a few days as the development director for the nonprofit that would provide that help, I had planned to observe her meeting with Miss Hazel, who’d been doing this work for fortyfive years.

After gently guiding Arlene to the guest chair, Miss Hazel pointed to a box of toys, but Dontell was clearly not interested. He kept trying to climb onto his mother’s lap. The more Arlene pushed him away, the more Dontell sought her attention.

I realized that distracting Dontell was going to take some doing. So I grabbed the box of toys. A worn set of dishes, plastic food, and silverware were all I had to work with. “Mmm, I am sooo hungry!

Let’s have lunch, Dontell!” I hyped as I ate imaginary food. His eyes—so pale and translucent they edged on eerie—lit up. He scrambled onto my lap and began feeding me, jabbing my mouth roughly with his spoon. “I’m full! I’m full!” I protested. But Dontell’s eyes fixated on my mouth as he rammed that plastic spoon into my face.

I grabbed his tiny wrist and our eyes met. For a moment, we relaxed. As I turned to Arlene and Hazel, I suddenly felt a dull jab to my neck as Don-

tell whispered in his baby voice, “I’m gonna kill you!

Bang! Bang!”

I jumped up, shoving Dontell and his plastic banana gun off my lap. Arlene swung around, “What da hell choo do, choo li’l piece a shit?” Dontell lunged at his mother, pulling at her elasticized top and exposing her braless breasts. “Choo no good sonovabitch li’l bastard!” Arlene spewed expletives as she slammed her open hand hard across the side of the boy’s head.

Dontell slid across the floor but rose back up as if on a spring. He stood as tall as a 3-year-old could, squaring off in front of his mother, staring her down with those eerie eyes. Tallying in his tiny head a short lifetime of pain and rejection … waiting for the day his banana gun could make good.

indicating it was the money. The now thirty to forty people with firearms perked up and began to discuss how many of us would actually get paid, and how many would likely be turned away.

At 11:15 or so the doors opened and the first few people entered. Half an hour later, they dribbled out. Comments about the tiny amount of cash inside rippled up the line, and I realized if I didn’t leave in the next few minutes I’d miss my haircut, so I said goodbye to my new gun-toting compadres and drove off.

A few days later, I called again and was asked to call back at 11 a.m., then 3 p.m. I called back today and they again had no money. So my unwanted, unneeded guns sit in a bag in my home. Like a rock on the top of hill. ■

—A lifelong Baltimorean, Lil Hughes Knipp is a writer, singer, and artist in her real life.

—J. Gavin Heck, who lives on the edge of Waverly and Pen Lucy, won the best art award for “Jazz Hand” in AVAM’s 2007 Kinetic Sculpture Race. He writes reviews and poetry for www.ourlittlebaltimore.com and has been a featured poet at Load of Fun’s Load of Poetry and Minás Gallery and Boutique.

At 12 a.m.,

it’s cold and dark outside; I am sitting on my bed polishing my toenails ruby red.

As I make another stroke on my second toe, boom boom boom. I tremble, spilling the ruby red polish all over the floor.

When the noise stops, I get up and look out my bedroom window, down into the alley full of people running in all directions. I hear police sirens drawing near and the sound of someone in pain. Lying on the ground is a teenage boy. The bullets ran right through his body; his life and blood leak on the ground, just like the ruby red polish oozing out of the bottle onto the floor.

—Jaime Stokes is a junior at Baltimore City College.

How does someone end up

with four extra guns that he no longer wants, needs, or feels safe having around when his teenage son comes for visitation? There was something appealing about the idea of getting rid of them, so I called my local precinct about their gun buyback program.

I joked I was going to take the money from these four somewhat crappy (but still potentially lethal) guns and buy a better one, but the truth is I’m saving for a motorcycle.

I arrived at 9:30 hoping to wait ’til 10, then be out of there by 11:30ish. About a dozen other gun buyback folk waited in line, and their tales bubbled up—how they got the ones they were selling, the ones they chose to keep. The man behind me pulled up his shirt and showed me his Claymore mine scar from Vietnam and proudly noted a fully functioning AK-47 machine gun he picked up as a war trophy … got to admit, I felt a bit of jealousy.

Around 10:15 an officer came out and said they had run out of money yesterday, and someone was on their way with more. At 10:45 an officer came with a small envelope—a standard mail-your-bill kind of envelope, not bulging—and waved it to us,

“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month, we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Due to libel and invasion-of-privacy issues, we reserve the right to print the piece under your initials. Submissions should be typed (and if you cannot type, please print clearly).

Only one submission per topic, please.

Send your essay to Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 or e-mail your story to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore. com. Please keep submissions under four hundred words; longer submissions may not be read due to time constraints. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic

Deadline

Theft May 2, 2008 Saying Yes June 6, 2008 Authority Figure July 4, 2008

Publication July 2008 Aug 2008 Sept 2008

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 8

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green

Fresh, locally roasted coffee, loose leaf teas and brewing accessories.

Our bark is as good as our bites.

“Local, fresh, healthy gourmet food.”

3003 Montebello Terrace, Baltimore, MD, 21214 Phone: 443.992.4388 www.zekescoffee.com

700 South Potomac Street, Baltimore, MD 21224 Phone: 410.342.0280 yellowdogtavern.biz

BETTERW RLD telecom

One-stop Green Shopping in Howard County Located off Rt. 32 at Rt. 108 in Clarksville, MD

Change the world. One call at a time.SM Sign up your organization with BetterWorld Telecom, the nation’s first carbon-neutral, full-service carrier

5805 Clarksville Square Drive, Clarksville, MD 21029 443.535.9321 www.rootsmkt.com

PHONE: 1.866.567.2273 EMAIL: wecare@betterworldtelecom.com WEB: www.betterworldtelecom.com

Recycle your newspapers, magazines, old mail, catalogs and mixed paper at the green and yellow bin. We pay you for the paper that is collected.

Urbanite sees sustainable living as a philosophy and a lifestyle. We are dedicated to providing regular news, analysis, product information, and consumer resources on environmental issues. For the latest in green thinking, pick us up every month or go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com

410-558-1704 www.paperretriever.com

Live Green at Overlook Clipper Mill.

Defining a new perspective on urban living.

3429 Woodberry Avenue 410.243.1292 |www.clippermillhomes.com Sales Center is open daily, 11am - 6pm or call to schedule an appointment

It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks, but at last the river must answer the call to the sea.

— Howard Thurman

place WVai^bdgZ \gZZclZZ`

8Wbj_ceh[ =h[[d M[[a continues to Looking to reduce your energy bills?

8830 Orchard Tree Lane, Towson, MD 21286 Phone: 443.322.7000 www.greenspringenergy.com info@greenspringenergy.com

Wise counsel, thoughtful strategies and investments for positive impact.

2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410.878.7084 Fax: 410.243.2115 www.benchmarkam.com

grow and evolve thanks to the seemingly limitless support and efforts of our sponsors, participants and volunteers.

It is hard in words to express the deep reservoir of support and help people from Baltimore have given to make Baltimore Green Week a reality. We truly are a community based organization and we are better for it!

J^Wdai Offering an amazing selection of beads, silver, tools, chains, gemstones, books, classes & crafts.

We celebrate the traditions and ingredients of the Chesapeake region by cooking the best and freshest produce, meat, and fish we can find.

501 N. Charles Street 410.837.2323 www.beadazzled.net

2010 Clipper Park Road, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410.464.8000 www.woodberrykitchen.com

bluehouse is your source for modern, green, and healthy furniture, flooring, housewares, gifts, and more. Located in stylish Harbor East near plenty of parking.

LEED design -- a continuous discovery process of working with nature and spreading the message of sustainability in a clear and seductive way.

1407 Fleet Street, Baltimore, MD 21217 410.276.1180 www.bluehouseLIFE.com

100 N. Charles Street, 14th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21201 t 410-576-0440 f 410-332-8455 www.cbhassociates.com

(&&. Ifediehi0

Providing the most comprehensive and professional green real estate services in Baltimore.

Amanda Lopez, Baltimore’s First Certified Ecobroker

410-889-3191 o • 443-831-5412 c www.amandaleelopez.com • www.cityliferealty.net

mmm$XWbj_ceh[]h[[dm[[a$eh]

WESTMINSTER,

MARYLAND

SENSE ThE DIffERENcE T wo College Hill, wesTminsTer, mD 21157 • www.mCDaniel.eDu/aDmissions • 800-638-5005

30

urbanite may 08

CORKBOARD CORK Baltimore Flowermart

May 2–3

Baltimore’s annual rite of spring celebrates its ninety-first year with food, flowers, and games encircling the Washington Monument. New features this year include a Red Hat Contest in which the stylishly attired members of local Red Hat Societies sport their finest brims. And don’t forget the beloved Flowermart traditions: the mascot-crowning Pet Parade, the Friday morning maypole dance, and, of course, peppermint sticks.

Washington Place, Mount Vernon Free 410-323-0022 www.flowermart.org

Kinetic Sculpture Race

May 3, 9:30 a.m

On the first Saturday in May, if you happen to see costumed teams of people slogging their way across pavement and through mud, sand, and water in human-powered vehicles, don’t blame it on the cost of gas. Now celebrating its tenth year in Baltimore, the Kinetic Sculpture Race is an artistic endeavor, a grueling test of physical endurance, and one elaborate excuse to have a good time.

American Visionary Art Museum 800 Key Hwy. Spectators free 410-244-1900 www.kineticbaltimore.com

Opera in Plain English

May 4, 2 p.m.

After 104 years of performances around the world, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, the story of a young Japanese bride’s betrayal by an American naval officer, is one of the most well-known Italian operas. Before the Lyric Opera House stages a week of Butterfly productions (May 10–18), James Harp, the Baltimore Opera Company’s artistic administrator and chorus master, will dissect the masterpiece in a free lecture for Butterfly veterans and newcomers.

Enoch Pratt Free Library 400 Cathedral St. 410-396-5430 www.prattlibrary.org

Preakness Celebration

May 2, 9, and 16, 6 p.m.

Before you grab a Black-Eyed Susan and jockey for lawnchair space in the infield, warm up for the Preakness with three free concerts. Nationally acclaimed singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw performs at the Can Company May 2, Cajun fusion group the Crawdaddies play Belvedere Square on May 16, and Grammy nominee Ryan Shaw sings in Harbor East on May 16, one night before the big race.

Free www.preaknesscelebration.org

Living American Flag

May 20, 9 a.m.–12 p.m.

A fitting prelude to Memorial Day and Flag Day, the Living American Flag project unites thousands of elementary school children on the grounds of Fort McHenry to form a human replica of Old Glory. Children can learn about flag history, tour the fort, interact with historic characters like Frederick Douglass and Ben Franklin, and meet Maryland Public Television host Bob “the Vid Tech” Heck. Adult volunteers are needed.

Fort McHenry National Monument & Historic Shrine 2400 E. Fort Avenue Free 410-563-3524 www.americanflagfoundation.org

Balticon 42

May 23–26

Baltimore County hosts the area’s biggest science-fiction/fantasy convention Memorial Day Weekend. The four-day extravaganza includes a costume contest, appearances by more than eighty science fiction/fantasy authors, and presentations by a wide range of actual scientists. This year’s guest of honor is award-winning sci-fi author Connie Willis.

Baltimore Marriott Hunt Valley Inn 245 Shawan Rd. $59 registration fee covers all four days 410-563-2737 www.balticon.org

Photo credits from top to bottom: photo by John Valentini Jr.; photo by 209 photography; photo courtesy of the Baltimore Opera Company; photo by Stan Barough; photo courtesy of the Living Flag Foundation, Inc./www.americanfl agfoundation.org; photo by Christian Lantry

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 8

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from the

Explore Fell ’s Point

INSIDE

OUT

There’s no limit to how much you can earn as a real estate investor— especially if you learn how to invest from the best in the business. And no one knows more about real estate investing than the experienced, successful professionals at Investors United School of Real Estate.

We and our instructors will work one-on-one with you, mentoring you, sharing our real estate investment methods and strategies so you can “earn while you learn.“ Is real estate investing for you? Find out at a free, introductory class Tuesday evening at 6:30. You’ll meet some of the most successful real estate investors in the area. And you may be on your way to becoming one, yourself.

FREE INTRODUCTORY CLASS Tuesday, 6:30 p.m.

“You will succeed. Guaranteed.”

6721 Harford Road, Baltimore, MD 21234 • 410.426.6000 • InvestorsUnited.com

32

urbanite may 08

2008 HISTORIC HARBOR

HOUSE TOUR OF FELL’S POINT

May 11, 2008 11AM - 5PM

TICKETS $15 IN ADVANCE - $18 TOUR DAY. CALL 410-675-6750 EXT. 12 OR 16 TO ORDER, OR VISIT THE FELL’S POINT VISITOR CENTER (1724-26 THAMES ST.), LONG & FOSTER REALTORS (701 S. BROADWAY), THE BALTIMORE VISITOR CENTER (401 LIGHT ST.) OR ECLECTIC ELEMENTS (723 S. BROADWAY). FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT US ONLINE AT WWW.PRESERVATIONSOCIETY.COM

have you heard

compiled by lionel foster

The Life Aquatic

courtesy of Meadowbrook

This summer in Beijing, Olympic swimmers will don the futuristic, drag-reducing Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit—and so can you. The Meadowbrook Swim Shop (5700 Cottonworth Ave.; 410-433-8300; mbrook.com/proshop.htm) will stock the high-tech pool togs starting this August. All season long they’ll carry their usual array of natatory equipment for competitive swimmers and poolside loungers alike— from anti-fog drops and swim caps to goggles and sunblock. Tucked inside Mount Washington’s Meadowbrook Aquatic Center, the shop, which is open to

the public, has been around since 1994, when Meadowbrook co-owner Patricia Stephens would peddle suits from her trunk during summer swim meets.

These days, Meadowbrook is a supplier to the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, where Olympians Michael Phelps and Katie Hoff have trained. So not only can you belly-flop where greatness has swum, but also wear their gear. Open Mon–Fri 10 a.m.–8 p.m., Sat 10 a.m.–4 p.m., and Sun 12 p.m.–4 p.m.

—Charles A. Hohman

Buzz Bin sometimes sassy kitchen gadgets, cocktail accoutrements, and wall art, plus eco-aware items like reusable grocery bags and herbs that grow in biodegradable pots. Plus, the Beehive boasts the added attraction of the couple’s friendly golden retriever, Oky. Go to www.funkybeehive.com for spring hours.

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Whether you’re hosting a soiree for friends or decorating your new pad, Federal Hill’s Funky Beehive (906 S. Charles St.; 410-685-HIVE) might add just the right spunk. Owned by husband-and-wife team Kara Hanson and Oscar Fontana, the shop is named for the eponymous Baltimore hairdo and premised on Hanson’s philosophy that “life’s too short not to have fun.” It contains a variety of whimsical and

—Marianne Amoss

courtesy of Sweet Pepita

Sweet Ts Outgrown your old Sex Pistols T-shirt but aren’t ready to part with it yet? Give it to your newborn!

Shannon Delanoy of Sweet Pepita clothing custommakes long- and short-sleeved T-shirts from organic and recycled materials for tots up to size 4T. Send in your old (freshly washed) shirt, choose from colors like avocado or arctic blue for the sleeves and trim, and Delanoy will hand-sew your very own hipster baby creation. Browse her website (sweetpepita.etsy. com) for pre-made, thrift-store-chic designs, like T-shirts with a screen-printed image of the late PBS painting guru Bob Ross and his “happy trees” or the modern idiom “Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.”

Also for sale: pixie hats for infants, bibs, and colorblock scarves for adults. The line is named after Delanoy’s daughter, Alice Antonella Pepita, and inspired by the fashion rights of babies. “When Pepita was born, we got an onslaught of pink clothing,” Delanoy says. “It was like we lived in a bubble-gum world. If you meet my daughter, she’s not that girl. We felt she should be able to wear blue and green.” Also available at Red Tree (921 W. 36th St.) and Bediboo (4321 Harford Rd.).

—Rebecca Messner

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

Bertoia Collection Steel frames available in chrome, black, or white; Numerous fabric choices.

Annual Knoll Space Sale 10% off all orders May 2—11 Visit www.knollspace.com to see over 100 iconic classics and new designs

FURNITURE | LIGHTING RUGS | DESIGN SERVICES Mt. Washington Mill 1340 Smith Ave | Baltimore www.homeontheharbor.com

410—433—1616 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 8

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Visit our new ROLL WAREHOUSE stocked with quality rolls of upscale broadloom all offered at special value prices!

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

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

Whiten your smile and brighten a child’s life!

Professional Tooth Whitening for $285.00 until June 30th

100%

goes to children’s charity.

Call today for an appointment.

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urbanite may 08

Sedation Dentistry Sweet dreams.

$100 off your Comprehensive New Patient visit.

Offer can be shared with family and friends. Please present offer at time of visit.

Used in conjunction with dental insurance. Not valid with any other offer.

DENISE M. MARKOFF, D.D.S., F.A.G.D.

835 Light Street, Baltimore, MD 21230 | 410-727-3388 | www.FederalHillSmiles.com

have you heard Pottery Barn American ceramicists—will run clay classes for area seniors and youth ages 6 and up. For $5 per person, special Saturday workshops in May and June will give kids and adults a chance to make Mother’s Day vases (May 10) or animal masks (June 21). For information on registration for summer classes, call 410-578-1919 or go to www.baltimoreclayworks.org.

—David Dudley

photo by Stefanie DiBenedetto

photo by Bob Myaing

Attention pot throwers: The Park Heights branch of Mount Washington-based Baltimore Clayworks has a new home. In January, the community-minded potters, who first opened their satellite studio in Mondawmin Mall five years ago, packed up their wheels and kilns and moved into the brand-new Pimlico Road Arts and Community Center (4330 Pimlico Rd.). There, Clayworks teachers and visiting artists— including Syracuse University professor David MacDonald, one of the best-known contemporary African

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Annapolis duo Stefanie DiBenedetto and Alli Oliver have taken the concept behind those canvas bags you always mean to take to the grocery store, and created something they hope will become a permanent fixture on your shoulder: the Shagbag —a lightweight, reusable bag made of sturdy Tyvek that folds up small enough to fit in your pocket. You can get a Shagbag with “green” written across it in rainbow letters, but most are decorated with such things as pink flip-flops or the oh-so-cool winged “flygirl.”

—Greg Hanscom

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architecture

1208 Light Street Baltimore, Maryland

ergy performance. “In every single home we’ve been in we’ve found hidden energy leaks,” says Peter Van Buren, a partner in the Baltimore-based environmental consulting company Terra Logos, which is participating in the program. The homeowner pays for both the audit and the recommended work, but the benefits can be substantial: cleaner air inside your home, a reduced ozone impact, smaller energy bills, and increased resale value. For more information and to find a list of certified contractors, go to www.mdhomeperformance.org.

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Spirit India Boutique. Namaste Hon! Just arrived in Hampden. Dressing home, body and soul. Discover Indo-Chic . . . hip and elegant clothing, jewelry, accessories, art, gifts and exotic home accents from the time-worn streets of India. Pure shopping Nirvana. Be transported!

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a mpde n

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Ma Petite Shoe . Shoes & Chocolate! A wide assortment of exotic chocolates including Szechuan Pepper, Goji Berry and the amazing Bacon Chocolate. New Spring shoes from around the world and handcrafted slippers for Mother’s Day. Gift certificates in any amount.

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Paradiso. Antique to Modern Home Decor. Accent on exceptional furniture, lighting, fine craft, outsider art, jewelry and fabulous gifts.

An outstanding destination! Open Fri-Sat 11-6, Sun 11-4.

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Mud and Metal. Hand made functional art created by artists to be used and loved! Ceramics, metal, jewelry, glass, fiber, paper. Enjoy! Art to live with!

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A History of Violence Memoirist and historian Stacey Patton on the abuses of the past and the present I nte r v i e w

b y

P hot ograph

by

T

oni Morrison ends her Nobel Prize-winning novel Beloved with a refrain— “this is not a story to pass on”—that contains a troubling doubleness; the history she tells both can’t and must be told. Based on a true story of a slave who murdered her infant daughter to keep her from being returned to slavery, Beloved speaks to the inexplicable ways that violence has reverberated through generations of American families.

Historian and writer Stacey Patton finds a similar imperative in history. Her memoir, That Mean Old Yesterday, weaves her story as an adopted daughter of an abusive mother into the history of slave children on American plantations. “History is not simply a dead past,” she writes. “Things that happened hundreds of years ago, hundreds of days ago, hundreds of split seconds ago, influence right now. Slavery still lives through us. The past is immortal.”

Patton’s book goes far beyond the familiar observation that violent behavior is rooted in childhood: She argues that widely accepted African American childrearing practices normalize and condone violence against children, reproducing the psychological terror tactics used against slaves. “[In slavery] whipping was something that was designed to distort and destroy black bodies to bring about deference,” she writes. “And out of that legacy, my black mama tried to break, distort, and destroy my spirit to make me obedient.”

Patton, 30, spent her early years in foster care. Adopted at age 5 by a middleclass couple in Trenton, New Jersey, Patton endured years of abuse before running away; after a short stay in a shelter, she won a scholarship to the Lawrenceville School, a prestigious boarding school. She spent two years in Baltimore as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, writing for the university-run Gazette and also for the Baltimore Sun. She finished her degree in journalism at NYU and is now a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Rutgers University. In addition to teaching history at Montclair State University and writing her dissertation, Patton is working on an oral history of the African American and Caribbean communities in Montclair, New Jersey.

Q

How did this book evolve from a straight memoir to this structure, where you alternate between telling your personal history and telling the history of slave children in the U.S.?

A

My editor said to me, “You just need to figure out why you want to tell a story.” She asked me to describe my writing space. I told her the things that were on my wall—pictures of slaves and their scars. And then she asked me to run my fingers down the side of my face, and she said, “I want you to connect your scars to the scars of slaves and the people who came before you, because nobody lives and dies without being scarred in some way.”

So I divided my story into three parts: slavery, freedom, and redemption. At the same time, I was going to graduate school and I started discovering parallels between the types of games that slave children played and the games I played as an African American child growing up in the 1980s and ’90s. For every little memory that I could think of from my childhood, I found something else in history that matched that. And I said, “Wow. I didn’t live on a slave plantation, didn’t grow up during Jim Crow, but I was still impacted by that history.”

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So ndr a

G uttman

Marshall

Clarke

Once I was able to identify the parallels between what I knew and the past, I had to make a larger argument. I said, “Look, within the African American community, we talk about this issue of whipping children the wrong way. We laugh about it; we preach about it; we call it a black thing. We laugh at white people who don’t beat their kids. We laugh at black people who don’t beat their kids.

We give all these really bad justifications for this type of violence toward kids.

And we ignore the social costs.”

Q A

What are the costs? Can you connect the dots for us?

I think it starts in the home. Before these kids pick up a gun, before they sell drugs, before they join a gang or become corner boys, there’s something that happens in the home that’s teaching them to be violent.

You see a 2- or 3-year-old child on a bus, in the subway, in a grocery store, asking questions. And you see some young mother cursing at the child or hitting the child. Right away when you do that you’re teaching the child to solve conflict, to gain power and control, through violence. When they go to school and they’re in a classroom with a teacher who can’t hit them, can’t curse at them, who is not supposed to be yelling at them, do you think that child’s going to listen to that teacher? That child’s probably going to curse the teacher out and rebel. They don’t develop a healthy respect for authority that’s nonviolent. And as they get older, they get bigger, they get stronger; they get more defiant and more rebellious. And they take it to the street.

Q

There’s a scene in your book where a classmate of yours at a Lutheran elementary school is beaten by his mother in front of the whole class, with the teacher and the principal looking on, because he called a white student a honky. It reminded me of Richard Wright’s 1937 essay “ The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” when he recounts how his mother beat him for fighting with white boys. One might think there would have been more progress, from the early 20th century to your own experiences in the 1980s.

A

I think there’s been progress. Black people aren’t being strung up from trees anymore. But racism and discrimination still exist. I hear a lot of this from single black mothers who are raising black boys. They really fear for their boys’ lives. They’ll say, “If we don’t beat them, the police are going to do it.” And that’s a reality in a lot of urban communities. Black people aren’t imagining this stuff.

And they understand that, even if they have a young black male who does what he’s supposed to do, he’s still a threat. Black parents still tell their kids today, “If you act out in school, if you act out in public, the consequences for you are much more harsh.” They have to prepare them, and the way they do it is with violence.

There is double terror here. You do have to socialize your kids and help them understand the realities of being black in this country, but when you beat one of these kids down, you’re undermining the child’s future and you’re undermining the future of the race. These kids are killing each other. They’re joining

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gangs. They’re not learning in school. You have to learn more creative ways to raise children and socialize them.

Q

In your book you compare your life as an abused child to the life of a slave. In your view, how are children like slaves?

A

There’s this feeling that you don’t own yourself, your body. And a lot of times within African American culture, children are taught that they have to stay in a child’s place, they don’t have an opinion, they can’t say what they don’t like and don’t want. This is the same way slave children were treated. We treat them as an extension of ourselves, as our property. Until they’re 18 years old we can do what we want to them. And we tell other people, “Don’t tell us how to raise our kids; don’t tell me what to do with my property, my child.” You hear people say, “I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out.”

That’s not to say that [these] parents don’t love their kids and don’t want the best for them. But we have to let them come into their own.

Q A

Should children have more legal rights?

I think children should have the right to press charges against their parents if they assault them. I know that’s a very, very revolutionary idea. But I just think they should be treated as equal citizens.

Q

So, by the same token, should juveniles be treated like adults by the criminal justice system when they commit acts of violence toward others?

A

The reality is that when black children commit heinous crimes, they’re dealt with differently by the juvenile justice system, just as adults are. There are larger themes that have to be addressed—issues of poverty, race, and class— before we determine a universal standard for all kids who commit these types of crimes, because the standards are not the same. Black children have never occupied a space in that category of childhood innocence. I’ve read stories about a 5-year-old throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of class and being taken out in handcuffs by police officers. They’re not even dealt with the same way when they throw a temper tantrum, so what do we expect from the legal system when the kid does something really, really bad?

Q

Short of overhauling the legal system, what can be done to address the problem of violent kids?

A

I don’t think that giving them adult sentences is going to work. This has got to be a conversation that happens among people who care for kids, not just people who set the sentences.

Q A

What sort of responses have you received to the book?

I assumed that I’d get the largest response from black people. And I assumed that most of it would probably be negative. But the largest response has come from white readers, mostly white women—schoolteachers and social workers, the people who are dealing with the day-to-day realities of this type of dysfunctional behavior. They tell me stories of getting yelled at by some mother when they say, “Don’t hit the child; what you’re doing is wrong.” They fear they’ll make this situation worse for the child. Then they tell me about their frustrations at being outside the culture, and not understanding it. This book gives the history that’s attached to the stories to really help them understand something.

And they say, “Thank you, because this is something I didn’t necessarily know how to articulate.” And now they can pass the book on to a parent.

Q

Did anyone suggest that you were doing something dangerous or counterproductive by talking openly about the role of violence in African American childrearing?

A

I think it’s one of these books that make people uncomfortable. Especially black people, because black people don’t like dealing with the history of slavery.

They don’t like dealing with Jim Crow. They don’t like the graphic ugliness of it.

So far, the people who are most uncomfortable tend to be black women. They find my depictions of black women—as domineering, aggressive, loud, and rough with their kids—to be stereotypical. But this was my reality. My view was that since black women tend to be more responsible for black families than black men, if you go by the statistics, then black women are responsible for transmitting these lessons of violence to the next generation. The cycle continues through these women.

But I also talk about black women who were not like that.

I also expected to get a lot of backlash from churchfolk, because I impliThere is double terror cate black ministers who get up there here. You have to and say, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” They are aggressively—perhaps socialize your kids and unconsciously—aiding and abetting help them understand in a system of devaluation of black children when they tell parents to beat the realities of being their kids. And they use the Scripture black in this country, in the wrong way. The rod is a walking stick. It’s about guidance and direction. but when you beat one Don’t pick it up and beat your kid over of these kids down, their head with it.

And I also blame the fact that a you’re undermining the lot of people my age are reading street child’s future and you’re fiction. Ghetto literature. It’s like they want stuff that’s voyeuristic and sexual. undermining the future But any sort of serious stuff that talks of the race. These kids are about what we need to fix in our communities is not going to help them killing each other. escape. That’s what street fiction does.

It helps people escape while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes and dysfunctions and pathologies and glorifying all of it. My book is not one of those things. I wanted to stimulate some dialogue, some conversation.

Q A

Have you succeeded?

I have foster care agencies calling me, saying, “Can you come speak to our girls and our boys?” I’m doing an event in Newark soon, a candelight vigil to prevent child abuse. I’m talking to social workers, telling them, “When you’re doing your job right, you can save a life like mine.”

White sociologists and psychologists have written about “black family pathology” and “black dysfunction.” Those terms don’t get at the problem. We talk about statistics, like eightysomething percent of black people agree with whipping their children. Well, OK, tell us why. How as a culture do we understand this issue? What role does the historical transmission of trauma have to do with it? You don’t understand these issues without locating them in the history that spawned the behavior.

I thought I would write a book that would address these different things, not a book that would tell people how to raise their kids. I don’t have any kids, so I can’t speak on that. But as a historian, what I could do is not only locate myself within that history but also write something that would educate people about the history of this behavior—where it came from, and how we’ve passed it on from one generation to the next. ■ —Sondra Guttman teaches in the Liberal Studies program at Loyola College. Her research focuses on 20th century African American literature and culture. This is her first story for Urbanite. 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 8

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urbanite may 08

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urbanite may 08

The End of Violence A

n o t e

f r o m

i l l us trati on

g u e s t

and

e d i t o r

g r ap h i c s

by

P h i l i p

o liv er

J .

L e a f,

P h . D .

munday

for more than three decades,

Baltimore has had some of the nation’s highest rates of violence, poverty, and drug use. In too many of the city’s neighborhoods, only a few individuals can remember a time when a leading cause of death for youth was not homicide, a time when families and community residents ensured that children were safe and supported in their journey to adulthood. The duration of the problem has become part of the problem: For many, there is no memory of a time when life held greater value.

I moved to Baltimore from New Haven, Connecticut, in 1991. Trained as a sociologist, I had spent more than a decade at Yale University conducting large-scale epidemiologic studies of the distribution of and risk factors for mental illnesses. Shortly after moving to Baltimore, I secured funding from the Maryland Mental Hygiene Administration that provided a full-time mental health clinician in all of the public schools in East Baltimore and also created support teams of community health workers and parent liaisons. Two days after the opening of the East Baltimore Mental Health Partnership office on Monument Street, something happened that changed both my research career and my focus. I received a call from our project director, who told me that the staff had been forced to hit the ground as bullets came through the wall when a young man had attempted to rob the pharmacy next door.

As we enrolled more families, I began to get reports of our youth being shot, family members being shot. This was at a time when the city—particularly East Baltimore— was experiencing the historic height of the murder rate. The toll of this violence made me concerned that our success in helping the youth stay with their families was only increasing the likelihood that they would later become victims.

In Baltimore, there are neighborhoods that have had murders each year for more than three decades. It’s common to hear that the city cannot police itself out of this problem, but few discussions go beyond law enforcement, and few strategies involve working with the people who live in communities most afflicted by violent crime— some of whom are already engaged with disrupting the cycle of violence, usually via networks unknown to those who have the resources needed for change. These are the types of activities where experience and credibility are more critical than formal education.

In the following pages, you will discover several perspectives on the circumstances that perpetuate violence—and, more important, accounts of the efforts being made to break the cycle of violence. An increasing number of individuals and organizations recognize that peace must be actively waged, not just be expected to happen. Hopefully, this issue of Urbanite will stimulate discussions about how to better identify opportunities and solutions, and how to better support efforts most likely to achieve success. We need to move the discussion beyond what someone should do to what we as individuals can do to contribute to the creation of a safe, supportive, and economically viable Baltimore.

—Philip J. Leaf, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with joint appointments in the departments of Health Policy and Management, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the School of Education. Currently he is the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence and the senior associate director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. He is proud to be a resident of Baltimore.

Research assistance provided by Charles A. Hohman and Siobhan Paganelli 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 8

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What does the murder of Zach Sowers really say about Baltimore's ongoing crisis of youth and violence?

46

urbanite may 08

Through a Glass, Darkly B y

M i c h a e l

p h o t o g r ap h y

A n f t b y

j e n n ife r

b is h op

zachary sowers left his rowhouse

Out of the shadows: Her husband’s murder transformed Anna Sowers into an advocate for stronger sentencing of juvenile offenders.

near Patterson Park late on a ninety-degree afternoon on the first day of June 2007, looking forward to some drinks with friends. He met his buddy Bobby Byrd and others at the Bay Cafe in Canton, the neighborhood where he, his wife Anna, his brother-in-law, and a group of fellow twentysomethings who grew up elsewhere made a habit of enjoying city life.

Zach, seen by his crowd as an easygoing guy with an observer’s quippy sense of humor, wore a black collared shirt, jeans, and tan flip-flops on his wispy 150-pound frame, which was topped with a short crop of dirty-blond hair. For the moment, Sowers was a free man about town.

Anna had left Baltimore for a weekend off—a rarity for a woman who raced between working as a project manager for Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions during the week and studying for her MBA at Hopkins’ Carey School of Business on weekends. For her mini-break, she would barhop and shop for jewelry and purses with several girlfriends in Chicago. The city held special memories for Anna: During a visit two years earlier, Zach took her for a walk along the shores of Lake Michigan and clumsily proposed.

With the weekend to himself, Zach had arranged to hang out with Byrd for each of the two nights. Zach worked as a financial analyst for Johns Hopkins, but by night he, like Byrd, had a passion for deejaying, spinning trance-tinged progressive house music at clubs in Canton, Fells Point, or his native Frederick. The plan was to drink and socialize Friday night; on Saturday, they were going to a party downtown or in Washington, D.C. After several rounds Friday, Zach left Byrd and their crowd at the Bay Cafe around eight o’clock to head home to walk the Sowers’ pug, Mia. Zach and Anna had bought

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Risk assessment: Baltimore Health Department epidemiologist Caroline Fichtenberg is searching for ways to identify potentially violent kids earlier.

their rowhouse in the block behind the former Patterson Theater for $182,000 four years earlier. It was just north of Eastern Avenue—an area often perceived as beyond the ring of safety that encircles the nightlife of Canton’s square. “We wanted something south of Eastern, but when we went to look at the house, it was just beautiful,” says Anna.

She and Zach had already had some brushes with less savory aspects of city life: Both had cars broken into while previously renting a Canton rowhouse on Fait Avenue—south of Eastern. When they looked into the crime statistics for the area east of Patterson Park, they found they weren’t much worse than those in Canton. The gunshot murder of a teenage girl on the street around the corner in the summer of 2004 shook Anna, but she never felt seriously threatened. “Canton was developing,” she says. “I couldn’t see the area getting any worse.”

Around nine o’clock that night, Zach locked the front door and headed out to meet Will Cheng, Anna’s younger brother, at Claddagh Pub on the Canton Square, ten blocks from his house. Like the rehabilitated rowhomes in the blocks surrounding it, the strip is a magnet for the city’s young professionals. Sowers and Cheng, then a 22-year-old technical support analyst at the Johns Hopkins campus in Montgomery County, fit the bill. The two caught up over a pint of Yuengling, then walked a block east to J.D.’s Smokehouse and Grill. They went to the upstairs bar, where Zach turned Will on to a new coffee liqueur-infused shooter called a Shit and a Shower.

Meanwhile, Anna was sending Zach text messages from Chicago: Scottie Pippen, the former NBA star, was at the same club as she and her friends; she’d be taking an architectural tour on a boat in the Chicago River during the weekend. At some point, he stopped answering her.

Cheng lost sight of Zach after he had navigated his way through a crowd to the bathroom sometime around eleven. Cheng continued to call Zach’s cell phone. “I had it in my mind that we were going to walk home together,”

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Cheng says. “I must have tried him about a dozen times, but he got lost in the crowd and I never saw him again.”

if what happened to zach sowers as he

walked the ten blocks home alone on that Friday night wasn’t so horrific and real, it would qualify as an urban cliché, a cautionary tale from the gentrification file. Four young men—Trayvon Ramos and Eric Price, 16; Arthur Jeter Jr., 17; and Wilburt Martin, 19—came upon Zach near his house, robbed him, and beat him to near-death. The victim was white; his assailants, black. The Sowers were newcomers who chose to move into an up-and-coming city neighborhood. The teenagers were residents of the other Baltimore, the one blocks away but worlds apart from the rehabs and roof decks that limn the city’s newly affluent quarters.

In the front-page newspaper stories, online commentary, and talk radio tirades that the case has generated over the last year, the tragedy for the Sowerses came to represent far more than just another crime in a city that is full of them. Never mind that the case is an anomaly, a relatively rare instance of black-on-white crime. Last year, 282 people died of homicide in Baltimore.

Only thirteen were white. In the first three months of this year, only one white person in the city died of homicide: Zach Sowers, who perished on March 25 after ten months in a coma.

And never mind that the attack on him had nothing to do with the drug-trade-related violence that defines the city’s reputation. Just as the 1989 Central Park Jogger case that was wrongly blamed on “wilding” teenagers seemed to symbolize the urban anxieties of its era in New York City, so the Sowers beating has become a prism through which people view race, class, justice, and the clash between the Baltimore That Has and the Baltimore That Hasn’t.

In the months after the incident, Anna Sowers sought her own answers for understanding this clash, speaking out about turning Zach’s struggle for life—and ultimately, his death—into stronger laws, “so criminals no longer run this city.” She and many others expressed outrage about the lenience of the sentence: Jeter, Martin, and Price received thirty year sentences, with all but eight years suspended; Ramos got life with all but forty years suspended, and with a possibility of parole in twenty.

The debate the Sowers case has stoked is often ferociously binary. On one side are those who say that the crime was committed by amoral young men who should be treated as adults by the criminal justice system; on the other are those who say that poverty and social dysfunction will inevitably breed more desperate teenagers who tend to become violent.

Still others, viewing the Sowers case as just one of many, shrug and ask a more vexing, if utterly familiar, question: What are we going to do about these kids?

three of zach sowers ’ assailants lived

Shaded areas indicate the density of homes for juveniles arrested in Baltimore City in 2007.

Source: the Mayor’s Office of Citistat

Oliver Munday

in a neighborhood on the eastern edge of Highlandtown, eight or so blocks from his front door. Once an enclave of Italians and other old-line white ethnics, the blocks around Claremont and Conkling have been transformed within the last few generations. The salaried rank-and-filers who made the area home for much of the 20th century are gone, and real estate agents and speculators haven’t caught the fever here. There is often “activity” on street corners, some of it watched by blue light-flashing police cameras.

Almost directly across the street from the United Democratic Club, former bastion of legendary East Baltimore councilman Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro, sits a home with old windows and a weathered front door decorated with red heart stickers. The hearts match the one Latricia Reed has tattooed on her neck.

Reed, 35, lives there with two of her children and well-kept tanks of fish and turtles. Her oldest attends college, while her youngest goes to high school and is, she says, a good student. Because she lives in fear of retribution, Reed doesn’t want her children or their genders or schools identified.

Their brother, Eric Price, now 17, is in a state penitentiary in Hagerstown doing time for his role in the attack on Zachary Sowers. As Trayvon Ramos stomped and beat Sowers and two other young men waited in a car nearby, Eric served as lookout, police and prosecutors say.

Eric had started hanging with Ramos, who was then awaiting trial on a carjacking charge in Cecil County, sometime last May, about one month before the attack. “He hardly ever even left the house before that year,” says Reed, sitting on a threadbare living room sofa.

Although his mother says he had no juvenile convictions on his record, Eric Price’s childhood could hardly be called carefree. He was the kind of kid who was subject to a variety of interventions and services, but not quite enough. Facets of his story rhyme all too often with the fatalistic poetry of other inner-city lives.

Eric’s father, an ex-convict, was never on the scene—“a deadbeat dad,” says Reed. Healthy and happy during the first years of his life, Eric began to wet his bed during elementary school, worrying his mother when he’d fall asleep in a tub full of water he’d drawn to clean himself up. Like 14 percent of Baltimoreans, Eric suffers from asthma. (The national rate is 7 percent.) He was given counseling at Kennedy Krieger Institute for playing with matches at age 10, and prescribed drugs he would later refuse to take for attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sometime during his years at Highlandtown Elementary, he was treated for elevated levels of lead in his blood, the legacy of a past address in Oliver, where one in every eight kids suffers from the effects of too much lead, more than twice the average citywide. Doctors also diagnosed him with a language learning disorder common in children who have ingested or inhaled too much lead dust.

Eric sometimes acted out in school, especially after he was forced to repeat third grade. He was troubled that his younger sibling had caught up with him academically, then performed better than he did. He reacted strongly to teasing, sometimes ending up in fights. At age 11, he told a male teacher he would “fuck [him] up,” which led to a city school system psychiatric evaluation. He told a school psychologist he saw people who weren’t there and heard voices that made him want to hurt others. “Eric feels disliked, and he fears he will lose his friends altogether,” a school psychologist noted. “Yet,

on the other hand, he feels so victimized that he longs to be left alone rather than continue to be treated with a lack of respect.”

Reed says she got her son treated for a variety of conditions, including psychiatric ones. Although Eric would sometimes have minor problems later at Canton Middle School, where he received special education services, counseling seemed to help: He performed decently overall, according to his mother and school records.

Things began to change when he moved on to Patterson High. He began flunking several classes at a time. More distressingly, he started leaving the house around midnight and staying out until dawn. He would spend both days and nights in a house three blocks north with several other teens, “smoking weed and hanging out with girls,” Reed says. He got picked up by police for breaking the city’s curfew law and for trespassing. At home, he threatened to hit his mother. Less than a year before the Sowers attack, Reed had her son tested for emotional and mental illness at Villa Maria, a psychiatric services organization downtown run by Associated Catholic Charities, which recommended counseling for ADHD and learning and mood disorders.

Besides her, Reed says, the one thing that kept Eric from giving up on school entirely was sports. He set a goal of making the football team there as a halfback and receiver, even though he was a mere 5’5” tall and weighed 140 pounds. “He’s fast,” Reed says. He made the junior varsity as a sophomore, but soon after the season, an administrative snafu left him off the team. 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 8

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“That absolutely killed him. His dream was to go to college and play football,” she says.

Things got worse. Three Patterson boys beat him and robbed him of his cell phone and $25 in March of last year, around the time school officials and his mother tried to stop a run of truancy that kept him out of school about half the time. When the largest of the three boys returned to Patterson, Eric took a week off.

As Eric’s life began to spiral once again, his mother kept trying to regain control, but she had little help. Her mother and sister, both of whom had often watched her children as she worked jobs as a server at the Maryland Club and Hippodrome Theatre, had died in recent years. She contacted Patterson and asked that a counselor keep a close eye on Eric. She also asked for contacts of organizations or programs that could help keep her son off the streets after school, or offer him some guidance. Her options were limited.

Several programs in the neighborhood, such as the Police Athletic League center and a Boys & Girls Club, had closed down. Other options, such as the Choice program—a well-regarded case management, mentoring, and monitoring plan based at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County that serves two hundred troubled city kids—wasn’t available, because Eric was not yet under the eye of the juvenile justice system.

“There’s no programs, nothing for kids to get into, except for trouble,” Reed says.

eric price’s final descent into criminality followed a familiar path: He fell in with the wrong crowd. He had just gotten to know Ramos in the spring of 2007, but he had been tight with Arthur “Ace” Jeter Jr., a kid from Pratt Street two blocks north, for years. Jeter is a former special education student—in court, his lawyer said he never learned to read—with a juvenile criminal record for assault.

“Eric looked at Ace like he was some kind of god, like some kind of male role model,” Reed says. “Whatever he said went.” The two began to travel in a pack with Ramos and Wilburt “Man” Martin, who lived two blocks east of Eric on Claremont.

On the night of the Sowers attack, the four left Jeter’s girlfriend’s dingy brown Dundalk apartment building in her Dodge Stratus. “We went out to rob somebody,” Eric later told police. They parked in the block north of the Sowers home, behind Highlandtown Middle School. “We was looking for somebody at the last minute.”

As Eric remembered, Ramos saw Zach Sowers walking up Robinson and said, “Like him right there.”

“That’s when we was like, all right,” Eric said. “We stopped the car and hopped out and we went to really rob him.”

Ramos and Eric got out and walked south on Robinson Street, while Jeter and Martin waited. When Zach reached his front steps, Ramos asked him for a cigarette. Ramos, who outweighed Zach by ninety pounds, used his heft to knock Sowers out with a punch, Eric said. Ramos, dressed in jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and black shoes, then used the fender of a Nissan Sentra parked outside the Sowers home as leverage, leaning on it with his right hand as he repeatedly slammed his foot against the back of Zach’s head, which lay between the car and the curb.

When police arrived, they thought that the man lying face-down in the gutter, a flip-flop flung a few feet south of him, might have been drunk. A flashlight search discovered his head was bloodied—the first sign of the long struggle Sowers’ brain and body would eventually lose.

After brutalizing Sowers and stealing his watch, cell phone, and wallet, the four drove back to Dundalk, using his credit card to buy cigars, food, and gasoline, and rent two action movies—including Smokin’ Aces, a gunpowdercontinued on page 101

Common cause: Baptist minister Heber Brown of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance expressed skepticism about Anna Sowers’ efforts to mobilize African American leaders. “If all it took for crime to stop was to take twenty-five black leaders and have them say, ‘Stop it!,’ it would have happened ages ago.” 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 8

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Does a 60-year-old ex-con hold the key to turning lifetime criminals into law-abiding community members?

Man of Conviction B y

l i o n e l

p h o t o g r ap h y

fo s t e r by

ja s o n

okutake

one day in late february, Ellsworth Johnson-Bey, slouched behind a desk in his Park Heights office, got a call on his cell phone in the final minutes of what had already been a very busy morning. Bey is skeptical of overtures from the media, but he’d agreed, with some reluctance, to meet me for an interview on the fly. As the phone rang, he didn’t have long before a workshop he needed to attend would begin. Caught mid-sentence, he excused himself, peered down at the phone, then took the call with a sharp “Hello?”

Thus the interrogation began. There was talk of a letter. “Letter? What letter?” asked Bey. “You say you gave a letter to someone else to give to me? You know how much mail we get? I might or might not have it.”

It seemed the call would end there, but Bey suddenly changed tack. “Hello?

Hello, sir? I’ma put you on speakerphone. You don’t know this, but right now I have a journalist in my office. That’s an example of the circle of influence [we] can use on your behalf. Go ’head. Tell your story.”

The 36-year-old man on the phone had recently been convicted of his first crime— what, he didn’t say—and was awaiting sentencing. “You say this is your first conviction,” Bey asked, “but how many times you done something you should have been locked up for?”

“Countless times,” came the response.

And with that, Bey softened. He promised to submit a letter explaining that the man was enrolled in a program that would help with his rehabilitation. But he gave the 52

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4k

3k

2k

1k

incrementsofof100 100 ininincriments

MARYLAND COUNTIES Garrett Kent Queen Anne’s Saint Mary’s Calvert

Allegany Frederick Carroll Howard Cecil Caroline Talbot Dorchester Somerset Worchester

Washington Prince George’s Baltimore City Montgomery Baltimore Co. Anne Arundel Charles Harford Wicomico

Over half the inmates released from Maryland prisons return to Baltimore City. Of those, about 60 percent settle in five city zip codes.

(Bars represent number of offenders returning to each listed county.)

Oliver Munday

bey says his fir st stint under state

supervision came at age 8, with a six-to-eight-month sentence to Boys’ Village of Maryland in Prince George’s County. As he tells it, he was just too much for his single mother to handle, and she finally hauled him to juvenile hall. “The judge said, ‘Ma’am, there’s nothing that I can do, ’cause he doesn’t have a petition’”— the juvenile court equivalent of a statement of charges. His mother gave the judge an ultimatum: “She said, ‘You either lock him up or lock me up.’”

Bey came out of Boys’ Village so angry that, instead of returning home, he opted into foster care. At 13, he was sent to the Maryland Training School for Boys (later renamed the Hickey School) for being, as he says, “incorrigible, mischievous, and ungovernable.” At 16, he served three years in the Maryland Penitentiary. At 19, he did more time for drug possession, and by 21 he knew the ins and outs of the criminal justice system so intimately that, representing himself, he dodged a potential 140-year sentence by convincing a jury not to convict on seven counts of armed robbery when eyewitnesses could not identify him.

Rather than change his ways, Bey simply changed his M.O., turning to robbing drug dealers. “Dope dealers didn’t call 911 and say you stuck ’em up,” he says. He also picked up a habit of his own. “I used heroin, codeine, morphine, PCP, LSD, chronic, crank, mescaline, micro dot, purple dot, green dot, serpent, dummies, inhalants, cocaine, all the mists, never knowing about all the neurological, psychological, biological consequences, burning out the brain cells.”

Over the next twenty-nine years, Bey was in and out of jail, school, and jobs.

He recounts a life as a West Baltimore street hustler in the 1960s and 1970s, during the celebrated reign of drug lord “Little Melvin” Williams. “Pennsylvania Avenue then was like New York City, Las Vegas,” he says. “I’m a young guy, doing everything under the sun. People paying for protection because I had a little posse.” He always carried an attaché case. “Two things were in that attaché case,” he says. “I always had a gun and books.” Along the way, he earned degrees in correctional administration and criminal justice and worked as a substance abuse counselor. At 50, he went into drug counseling himself, something he wishes he’d done sooner. “My mother demised probably about a year or so before I went into recovery,” he remembers. “I’ve never really gotten over that.”

5k

# OF RETURNING INMATES

caller an assignment, too: He was to ask his family to call in to Bey’s radio program, “Breaking the Cycle,” which airs on WOLB 1010 AM on Sundays at 2 p.m.

“They need to tell your story, so that other people can benefit and so they can advocate on your behalf,” he said.

“Be strong,” Bey told the man before laying down the phone.

Brother Bey, as most call him, is the 60-year-old director of the Fraternal Order of X-Offenders, or FOXO, an organization he founded in 2000 to keep former inmates from falling back into lives of crime. Much of that work happens over the cell phone that rings steadily during our conversations: The contact number listed on FOXO’s website and business cards is the number to this phone, and Bey says he never turns it off.

Groups like FOXO have more people in need of their services today than at any time in American history: According to a much-discussed report published by the Pew Center on the States in March, 1 in 100 American adults is in jail or prison—that’s more than 2.3 million people. The rate is higher for men (1 in 54) and higher still for young African American men (1 in 9 of those ages 20 to 34).

Many are repeat offenders: A 2004 study by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research center, found that within six months of their release from prison, 32.1 percent of a large sample of Maryland inmates had been rearrested, and 15.5 percent were back behind bars.

To stop this revolving door, the key word is “reentry”—that is, smoothing out the turbulent transition from prison back to the world outside so as to prevent a return trip. In Baltimore, Bey has planted himself at the epicenter of this migration: In 2001, 9,448 people were released from Maryland prisons. Fifty-nine percent of them came to Baltimore City, and 30 percent of those settled in communities in and around a section of West Baltimore that includes Park Heights.

FOXO’s approach borrows the methodology of addiction therapy and applies it to criminality, using a technique rarely employed: It seeks to break the cycle of lawlessness by tapping into the talents and experience of what Bey calls “the population”—those who have themselves run afoul of the law. People, that is, like Brother Bey. “People learn what they live and live what they learn,” he says. “How I came up with that concept, all I did was study my own life … I got fifty-two years’ experience with the criminal justice system in every capacity. I have a history of violence. I have a history of robbin’, drawing blood.”

Source: Urban Institute analysis of 2001 MD DPSCS, Division of Correction data.

Today, Bey uses this wealth of personal experience to engage offenders in whatever stage of anger, acceptance, or denial they happen to be.

Since January, FOXO has been working alongside Prisoners Aid Association of Maryland, acting as the outreach-oriented component of Project P.E.A.C.E.—an acronym for Proper Education Always Corrects Errors. The program, which will be supported in part by a $300,000 city grant for exoffender transition, is a component in the Park Heights Master Plan, the wide-ranging effort to create what officials term a “human development zone” in the neighborhood. Project P.E.A.C.E. will involve a two-level approach: The 139-year-old Prisoners Aid will be the gateway to a number of bread-and-butter services for ex-offenders, including substance abuse counseling and housing; FOXO then steps in with one-on-one counseling and group sessions that challenge the thoughts and habits that put them in prison, one ex-offender to another.

The question is, can an ex-con succeed where prisons, governments, scientists, and traditional nonprofits have not? The answer could affect 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 8

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criminal justice policy, and determine whether FOXO, as Bey hopes, can be recognized as a national model.

mid-afternoon on the fir st tuesday

in March, FOXO’s weekly support group for recovering addicts and ex-offenders gathered in the basement of a women’s group home on East 25th Street.

Some of the attendees lived upstairs; others, male and female, came from all over the city. Bey introduced me at the start of the meeting and invited anyone who felt comfortable to share his or her story: “We want to market your success.” After a brief silence, a newcomer raised her hand. “I’ve never been to one of your meetings, but I’ve heard that they were some good meetings— that Brother Bey is off the hook.” The group clapped and cheered.

Another woman began, but her comments were too vague and nonspecific for Bey—he wanted details. “Tell us ’bout runnin’ ’round in the streets,” he pressed.

The woman began again. “New Year’s Eve, my daughter came to me sick, but I was too busy getting high,” she said. “On January 3, they found her dead.

If I had only stayed to find out the problem, maybe I could have helped her.”

Next, another woman recounted her struggle with using and dealing drugs. “I just celebrated one year clean,” she said. “I’d hustled most of my life.

I started out selling drugs when I was 16 years old.” After years on her own, the street itself became an addiction. “I’ve been raped. And I still got right back on the block.”

Bey understands this. Many of the ex-offenders he works with have battled drug habits, but he sees their persistent criminality itself as a disease.

Taking his cue from mental health professionals, he employs a process used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) called cognitive restructuring. The idea is that negative or “maladaptive” actions stem from maladaptive thinking, both of which can be adjusted with time and training. The National Institutes of Health have recognized CBT’s effectiveness for cocaine addicts, and many psychologists find it helpful in treating patients with depression, but the application to criminality that Bey uses is rare. So is his emphasis on peer mediation. Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous have made the idea of one addict helping another a mainstream article of substance abuse treatment. Letting recovering criminals counsel each other, however, is not as widely accepted.

Public policy researchers have found that CBT holds promise for reducing recidivism among criminal offenders. And it’s not hard to see how therapeutic the principle can be. In the support group meeting, a woman owned up to “using coke and dope. I started selling drugs, burning [that is, robbing] people, taking shit that wasn’t mine.” Now, she had a job, a bank account, and a healthy sense of self-esteem. After she spoke, she thought about why she’d shared this with the group.

“I ain’t the kind to be puttin’ my shit out there,” she said.

“What made you wanna put your shit out there?” asked Bey. “’Cause if I give it to you, I know I ain’t got to keep it.”

talking to offenders in group sessions,

on street corners, and on the radio, Bey picks apart inconsistencies with the mind of a research-minded clinician, a purpose-driven nonprofit leader, and a recovering addict. “My mom thought I was going to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a preacher,” he says. “I wound up being a little of all three.”

He calls himself and his staff of four, all of whom are fellow ex-offenders, “CPAs”—not certified public accountants but “Crime Prevention Agents.”

He’s packaged his methods in a DVD training course for ex-offenders called The Psychology and Sociology of Criminality. “We unorthodox,” he says of himself and his team. “We offer treatment on demand.”

The effectiveness of that treatment goes beyond the practical benefits of job training or drug counseling. More crucial are the intangible benefits of simply providing peers who understand what former inmates are going through. “A lot of these people don’t have a positive relationship with anybody—they’re totally disenfranchised. They’ve used up their friends and family,” says Philip Leaf, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention of Youth Violence (and this issue’s guest editor), who has been a longtime sup-

porter of FOXO. Bey, he says, may have one answer for cities struggling with prisoner reentry: “How do you reconstitute positive community with people who’ve been literally pulled out of society?”

Brother Bey puts it more concisely: “When people don’t help you,” he says, “the streets come calling.”

Bey and FOXO have picked up a number of influential supporters. Mayor Sheila Dixon attended Project P.E.A.C.E.’s grand opening event in January.

Thomasina Hiers, assistant secretary and chief of staff for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, hired him as a consultant for a peer-to-peer program aimed at offenders who were still imprisoned. Diane Bell-McKoy, president and CEO of Associated Black Charities, recently invited him to sit on a panel during a conference on African Americans and the middle class. But connections have not always come so easily: Bey’s style can be abrasive. “People don’t want people around who are challenging,” he says. “They just want people to go along, get along. Scratch it if it don’t itch. Laugh if it ain’t funny. I’m not that kind of guy.”

Indeed, the street skills that make Bey so credible among the offender population can be less effective with what he calls “the status quo.” “You lose the message for the messenger,” says Bey, who has little patience with the niceties of the nonprofit world. “In the world I came out of, you don’t say, ‘Hey man, I need help.’ Asking for help is an exemplification of being weak, that you have surrendered. In the street, you don’t surrender.”

Michael Brown, executive director of Prisoners Aid, was Bey’s case manager Many of the ex-offenders when Bey was in Bey works with have battled substance abuse recovery in 1998. drug habits, but he sees Brown recalls his their persistent criminality initial impression: “He was a jerk, an itself as a disease. educated jerk—a jailhouse lawyer,” he says. But Brown’s opinion changed as Bey signed on as a consultant for Prisoners Aid, moderating workshops like the one on 25th Street and eventually becoming a case manager in his own right. “I guess I could say he’s my alter ego,” says Brown.

“I’m not going to say things, I’m not going to push this person’s button, because I need to get re-funded. He’s not afraid to speak to anyone.”

Tara Andrews, former director of the criminal justice advocacy organization Justice Maryland, had a similar reaction when she first met Bey. “I quickly concluded that this was an individual I did not want to have a relationship with,” she recalls. “He was very aggressive and confrontational. But at some point I came to see that his argument with the whole movement, while maybe not brought forth in the most inviting way, was valid … Here we were, the good people who may have good education and good contacts, trying to lead and drive a movement on behalf of ex-offenders … It should have been the other way around.”

Colleagues such as Brown say that Bey has mellowed a bit in recent years: He’s more focused, and perhaps more diplomatic. Bey resists the suggestion that he’s changed, but admits his approach is different. Instead of going from meeting to meeting insisting that ex-offenders be heard, he has concentrated on building his own group. And he has taken advice from people like Bell-McKoy on how to dot his i’s and cross his t’s while running a human services organization. But today, he says that those with roles in public policy or traditional criminal justice organizations who speak highly of him are simply the ones who realize the truth of what he’s always said: At least part of the solution to crime and violence must lie with the offender population, not in the people who lock them up.

“We the headlights, not the taillights,” Bey says. “This population has a lot to bring to the quote-unquote academia experts. When we share, we feel what we share. It’s not like reading a book. It’s personal.” ■ —Lionel Foster is Urbanite’s staff writer.

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Can a neighborhood undone by generations of violence and neglect put itself back together?

Raising Oliver B y

G r e g

Ha n s c o m

p h o t o g r ap h y

by

e lli s

m arsalis

on a sunday morning in early march, , parishioners file into Memorial Baptist church on East Preston Street. The women wear their finest hats; the girls have ribbons in their hair. The choir, backed by an old Hammond B-3 organ and a drum set, is getting the place warmed up before the service.

Outside the church walls is Oliver. This is the East Baltimore neighborhood that earned enduring citywide infamy in the early hours of October 16, 2002, when 21-year-old Darrell Brooks kicked in the door of a rowhouse on the corner of Preston and Eden streets, sloshed a jar full of gasoline on the stairs, and set the house ablaze. The fire killed Angela Dawson, her husband, and five of her children. Dawson had clashed with the drug dealers who lorded over the street outside her house, and this was their final word.

On this late winter day, clusters of young men—a demographic that is noticeably lacking in the Memorial Baptist pews—sit on stoops and congregate on corners. Many residents say that little has changed since the Dawson tragedy. Last year there were six murders in the community, which lies between Greenmount Cemetery

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urbanite may 08

Renewal notice: A rain-soaked bulletin board collects newspaper clippings about the big changes coming to East Baltimore.

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Scenes from Oliver: Residents of this East Baltimore neighborhood are hoping that a wave of redevelopment will help reduce the neighborhood’s chronic crime and violence.

and the northernmost stretch of Broadway. In July, the body of a 52-year-old man was found stuffed in a garbage can in the alley behind Bond Street.

But in the sanctuary of Memorial Baptist, the bloodshed seems far away. The choir sways from side to side; women in the pews cool themselves with cardboard fans printed with an ad for March Funeral Home. The church secretary makes the weekly announcements and men in black suits carry silver offering plates up the aisles.

It is not a large gathering. Even at the height of the service, there are perhaps a hundred and fifty people attending, with room for another hundred. But people give what they can, offering up singles and fives, and then join a procession around the church to drop another offering into a collection plate held by a young girl with wise eyes “This is just the start at the front of the room. Reverend Calvin Keene reminds his of a complete, citywide congregation that God loves a strategy for rebuilding joyful giver.

“Joyful” doesn’t capture neighborhoods,” says the mood here. “Determined” BUILD’s co-chair, Bishop might be closer to it. Over the past decade, this congregation Douglas Miles of and four others nearby have Koinonia Baptist Church. quietly amassed well over $1 million, part of a grassroots effort to accomplish what years of official programs and promises have not: reclaim this community and offer hope to the people who live here.

Baltimoreans have become fond of the mantra, “You can’t police your way out of a crime problem.” In Oliver, they’re trying to bulldoze and hammer their way out.

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Keene and his fellow pastors are leading an effort to rehabilitate or rebuild hundreds of abandoned and crumbling houses. It is redevelopment on a scale rarely seen in such a blighted neighborhood, but the effort has created a storm in this community, and Rev. Keene stands right at the center of it.

Keene steps to the pulpit and begins his sermon. He starts slowly, quietly, telling the story of the Last Supper. As the tale unfolds, the energy and volume build, and by the time Keene gets to Christ’s betrayal, his booming voice— and the congregation’s Thank you Lords and Hallelujahs—fill every corner of the church.

those who grew up in oliver in the 1950s and ’60s have gilded memories of the place. Mary Ballard, a great-grandmother who was among the first blacks to move to the historically white neighborhood in the 1940s, remembers teachers, firefighters, steelworkers, and longshoremen sharing walls with doctors, shopkeepers, and musicians. There was a lively business district on Harford Road. Ballard’s husband ran the local cab company.

Lifelong resident Lawrence Pully, 70, remembers flocking with the other neighborhood kids to the television display room at the Sears store on North Avenue on Saturday mornings. “As long as you didn’t disturb anybody or make any noise, they would let you sit there and watch the Westerns and the comics,” he says. The kids would gather soda bottles and return them to the grocery store, collecting the 25-cent admission to the Apollo Theatre on Harford Road, where they could watch the movie play as many times as they liked.

All this changed forty years ago, on April 4, 1968. Pully was 30 years old and working for the Baltimore City Fire Department when riots broke out following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He remembers work-

a few weeks after the dawson tragedy,

the mayor’s office sent out a lengthy press release detailing the city’s efforts to clean up Oliver. “To insure that the Dawson family didn’t give their lives in vain, Mayor O’Malley dispatched City agencies and resources into the Oliver community, forcefully engaging the forces of urban terrorism at work there,” the release said.

But beyond a fresh layer of blacktop on Preston Street and more regular trash pickups, residents say the new efforts made no dramatic difference.

Even before the Dawson fire, however, Oliver’s ministers had been quietly laying the groundwork for what they hoped would be more lasting change. In 1995, Rev. Keene began collecting money for revitalization efforts from his parishioners—many of whom come from neighborhoods better off than Oliver—recounting the Old Testament story of Nehemiah, who gathered representatives from all the tribes of Israel and returned to Jerusalem to rebuild the holy city. In 2000, Keene joined the ministers of four other Oliver churches in a partnership with Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, or BUILD, a community organizing group known for its bare-knuckled, Bible-thumping crusade to save the city’s poorest neighborhoods and underserved young people.

By 2004, the Oliver ministers had amassed $1.2 million, which they used to buy some 250 houses and vacant lots. With BUILD’s help, they muscled their way into

According to a house-to-house survey, 44 percent of the properties in Oliver are vacant. Residents are isolated and fearful of the drug trade that runs unchecked in the streets. Grassroots efforts are underway to resurrect the neighborhood by renovating and rebuilding hundreds of homes.

Oliver Munday

ing a fire at a bar on the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Harford Road that night, and watching flames roll out of a furniture and jewelry store up the street. “I could hear Engine 43 responding from York Road,” he says. “They were getting closer and closer, but they had to come a good distance. Meanwhile, the fire was walking from the store to the house next door, to the house next door.”

After the riots, Oliver’s business district was in ruins. Today, the neighborhood can claim only a handful of businesses; most of the occupied storefronts are either churches or funeral homes.

“They claimed they did it because somebody killed Martin Luther King,” says Lillian Brown, 70, who has lived in Oliver since 1960. “Well, ain’t no one in Baltimore killed Martin Luther King.”

The other forces working against the neighborhood were themselves born of the movement King led: When race-based real estate covenants were loosened, black residents were free to join the flight to the suburbs. “Oliver was a great place for African American families to take advantage of civil rights gains,” says Rev. Keene, 52, who grew up in the neighborhood. “It provided kids a chance to see a plethora of opportunities.” Keene was one of many who jumped at those opportunities, attending Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and the University of Maryland, then going on to a career in computers before joining the ministry.

As those who could leave left, Oliver followed the trajectory of much of Baltimore. The houses fell into hands of speculators and slumlords; derelict houses became havens for the crack cocaine epidemic that swept through the neighborhood in the 1980s. By the time Keene returned to Baltimore in 1993 to pastor at the Oliver church he attended as a boy, the neighborhood had changed, he says, “from a place where people wanted to live into a place where they settled on living.” Childhood asthma, exacerbated by roach and rodent infestations, and lead poisoning were rampant. A door-to-door survey done by residents in 2000 found that 44 percent of the property in Oliver was vacant.

Brown lives in a rowhouse on a shady stretch of Caroline Street, one of the neighborhood’s better sections. Still, she points to half a dozen vacant houses on her block, including the one next door, where there was a fire a few years back. A window awning fell into her backyard, but she hasn’t been able to get anyone to clean it up. She says her godson has tried to buy the house, but the owner won’t sell.

“In another neighborhood, my house would be worth a lot. I have five bedrooms, central air,” she says. “But who wants to live next to an abandoned house?”

Residents like Brown have been isolated, terrified by the drug trade and the accompanying violence that run unchecked outside their doors. Calvin B. Scruggs Jr., who runs the funeral home named for his late father on Preston Street, describes the open-air drug market that flourished on the street between the funeral home and the Dawsons’ house as “crazy.” “There was just constant traffic,” he says.

In 2002, the year of the Dawson firebombing, there were more than eightyseven juvenile arrests for drug-related offenses for every one thousand youth in Oliver and the surrounding area—almost double the citywide rate. That same year, there were roughly thirty-one violent criminal offenses per one thousand people, compared to twenty-two citywide. The Dawson family murders brought the neighborhood total for the year to at least eleven.

Source: BUILD

the mayor’s office, where they helped convince O’Malley and then City Council President Sheila Dixon to create a $59.8 million “affordable housing” fund to help neighborhoods clear the way for redevelopment. In the first round of allocations from the fund, Oliver brought home $1.2 million. With the property bought and some of the worst houses demolished, the group laid plans for dozens of rehabilitations and new homes, to be sold to low-income buyers for between $99,000 and $139,000.

The New Oliver project, as some call it, grows out of experiences in the 1990s, when BUILD was involved in a similarly ambitious project in SandtownWinchester on the west side. With the enthusiastic support of Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and more than $60 million in public and private dollars, the Enterprise Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, and BUILD constructed close to a thousand new homes. But, beyond the individual blocks that were repositories of this mountain of outside money, little has changed. On the 1100 block of Calhoun Street, where every rowhouse was gutted and rehabbed, there were only three drug-related police calls in 2003, according to BUILD. Three blocks south, on the still-blighted 800 block, there were 254 calls.

The lesson of Sandtown is, “If you build from weakness, you end up with an island of strength in a sea of despair,” says BUILD’s co-chair, Bishop Douglas 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 8

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This December, BUILD threw its 30th anniversary party at Memorial Baptist, using the occasion to announce that it had raised nearly $10 million from the Rouse Company Foundation and others for rebuilding efforts across East Baltimore. With help from TRF, the group estimates it can leverage another $143 million. BUILD has also pulled in more than $720,000 in state money to help low-income homebuyers, and won Oliver a more-than-$500,000 share of the federal funds allocated for the biotech park development. At Memorial Baptist, Mayor Dixon announced the city would sell BUILD 155 of Oliver’s vacant houses, giving the ministers domain over more than four hundred houses in the neighborhood.

“For the last thirty years, we’ve tilled the soil,” Rob English told the Sun. “Now we’re going to plant the seeds.”

not everyone has embraced build and

Miles of Koinonia Baptist Church. Describing the group’s new approach, he borrows a line from champions of neighborhoods such as the ones surrounding Patterson Park, which have rallied dramatically in recent years, thanks in part to their proximity to the park and to gentrified Canton: “You have to build from your strength.”

Where is Oliver’s strength? A few blocks southeast of Memorial Baptist, bulldozers rumble across a huge swath of orange dirt, leveling the land where 550 houses once stood above the Johns Hopkins hospital and medical school.

Rising from the barren ground between Oliver and Hopkins is the Science + Technology Park, a facility at the heart of an eighty-eight-acre, $1.8 billion redevelopment project that will change the face of East Baltimore.

the east baltimore redevelopment project

will include five lab buildings and other businesses that could eventually attract eight thousand new jobs. There will also be 2,250 new houses and apartments, as well as parks and a new school. Plans are being laid for a new MARC train station that will connect residents to jobs in Washington, D.C., or Aberdeen. There could be significant economic “spillover” into Oliver, says Jack Shannon, president of East Baltimore Development Inc., or EBDI, a nonprofit created by Hopkins, the city, the state, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation to oversee the project.

BUILD is banking on it. This winter, its development partner broke ground on the first of 122 new and rehabbbed affordable housing units to be clustered in a six-square-block area at the southeastern corner of the neighborhood, adjacent to the biotech park’s Phase II. The strategy grew out of a 2003 meeting where Keene presented BUILD’s plans in Oliver to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “[Foundation President] Doug Nelson came to us in the aftermath of the Dawson firebombing,” says BUILD lead organizer Rob English. EBDI was holding community meetings around East Baltimore, and everyone was talking about the biotech park. “Doug told us, ‘This is our moment. This is our opportunity to make this development work for all of East Baltimore.’”

The Casey Foundation gave BUILD a grant to hire the nonprofit Reinvestment Fund, or TRF, which uses a computer model to predict where real estate markets are most likely to catch fire with the right investment spark. “You start where the market is most ready. You build a market and then attach it to the next market,” says Sean Closkey, president of TRF Development Partners Baltimore LLC, the partnership between TRF and BUILD that is doing the redevelopment work.

This model succeeded in Patterson Park, and Closkey is confident that the same principles can apply to Oliver. He points to Philadelphia, where TRF and its partners have used the University of Pennsylvania as a nucleus for a major urban revitalization effort. TRF has invested close to $100 million in West Philadelphia, funding everything from new and rehabbed homes to stores, restaurants, and charter schools. The result, says Closkey, is a dramatically improved quality of life for the residents there.

Bishop Miles says his two sons, ages 33 and 39, are already lining up to live in New Oliver, and there are many more. From Oliver, BUILD plans to move south to Patterson Park and northwest to Charles Village, working one real estate market at a time. “This is just the start of a complete, citywide strategy for rebuilding neighborhoods,” he says.

the “strength” from which it portends to build. Historically, Hopkins has been viewed with suspicion by many in East Baltimore: Some longtime residents call the hospital “the slaughterhouse” and tell tales of medical experimentation on neighborhood residents. The distrust has only deepened as EBDI has set to work clearing the way for the biotech park. Some nine hundred residents have been relocated during Phase I. More will be moved for Phase II. EBDI has given residents relatively generous buyout packages, and several dozen have moved back into recently completed workforce and senior housing, but to those in Oliver, most of these people seem to have disappeared.

BUILD’s Rob English says that the New Oliver development is designed to Dawson Family Safe fit into the existing community: “This is about Haven Center director strengthening the neighPam Carter says the drug borhood for the residents that are there.” But the dealers treat the house change will be dramatic. with respect. They even The BUILD-TRF development partnership now usher the kids safely controls two hundred of the across the street when four hundred houses and lots in the six square blocks they arrive after school. in southeastern Oliver. It will rehab forty-seven of its houses and tear down the rest to make way for seventy-five new ones. “The land has been poisoned by vacant homes,” says English. “We need to preserve the homes that can be saved, then clear the clutter. We’ve got to prepare the land.”

Some residents insist that BUILD, allied with Hopkins, is ushering out low-income residents to make way for well-to-do newcomers. In Oliver, continued on page 105

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Can an innovative anti-violence program rewrite the code of the streets?

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urbanite may 08

Murder, Interrupted B y

m at

e d e l s o n

p h o t o g r ap h y

by

jef ferso n

ste e l e

some days, words mean nothing.

Loud and clear: Mark Cannady leads a Safe Streets “shooting response” in McElderry Park.

“If anything comes back to me, that’s on you,” the dealer named Jon-Jon* had warned his girlfriend. She was planning to help steal another guy’s hidden drug stash. Jon-Jon didn’t want to get mixed up in any of that action. He walked away. Left the block.

It didn’t matter. Minutes later, Jon-Jon realized it was on him.

The other dude, Snaz, seeing his stash gone, had asked a few questions.

Somebody mentioned Jon-Jon’s girlfriend. Snaz figured Jon-Jon was behind the heist, so he gave Jon-Jon a call. But he didn’t mention being ripped off; he just asked Jon-Jon if he could buy some smack from him. And when Jon-Jon showed up, bags in hand, Snaz grabbed them and ran.

Staring down at his empty hands, Jon-Jon saw red. He didn’t know Snaz had come after him in retaliation. All he knew was that now he’d been robbed, and in his world, that led to only one thought.

I’m ready to kill him.

It was the code of the street. The same code that kept him alive and respected.

Only this time Jon-Jon changed the code. He reached for his cell, dialed a number, and stopped a bloodbath.

These days, in this neighborhood, words mean everything.

in a second floor office on monument street in the McElderry Park neighborhood, a half-dozen outreach workers gather on a March afternoon. Garbed in black-and-orange hats that read “Safe Streets,” they are preparing to walk the block until way into the wee hours, trying to *The names in this intervention were changed to protect identities. 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 8

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accomplish what a parade of policing strategies have failed to do for the last twenty years: stem the epidemic of shootings and murders plaguing the city.

The program is known as CeaseFire in its native city of Chicago, and it’s the brainchild of Dr. Gary Slutkin, a onetime World Health Organization infectious disease specialist who spent years in Africa working on outreach programs aimed at lowering another epidemic—HIV/AIDS. Slutkin reasoned that violence, like any other unhealthy behavior, can be fought by changing social norms. When he applied his epidemic outreach model to inner-city shootings beginning in 2000, the results were spectacular: on average, a 69 percent drop in shootings in twelve different Chicago hotspots.

Slutkin’s approach has been exported to Newark, Kansas City, and Baltimore, where it operates under the Safe Streets name. Funded by the Federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and administered by a partnership between the city health department’s Office of Youth Violence Prevention and the Living Classrooms Foundation, the Safe Streets program in McElderry operates on a simple premise: Take ex-offenders who have turned their lives around and put them back on the streets. Only this time, they’ve been trained as mediators to use their survival instincts and relationships to sense trouble brewing and intervene before it can escalate.

In a small back office upstairs, one of the outreach workers sits with a client. In truth, the relationship they share is much closer. Jon-Jon, the young dealer who got ripped off, looks with a mixture of awe and appreciation at Tard Carter, the man who was on the other end of his frantic call that night. Carter is more like a big brother—he’s been looking out for Jon-Jon for years, long before Safe Streets started last June and Carter recruited him as a client.

The kid reminds Carter, who’s 31 years old, of his former self: street smart and street successful. Intense. Quiet. Respected. No bullshit. Jon-Jon doesn’t deal for kicks, but to eat: He has to support four siblings, his mother, and a niece. The same way Carter and most of his fellow mediators had to hustle as youngsters.

Carter knows the odds are against the young man surviving the streets, just as they were against him. He ticks off the milestones, one finger at a time. “16. 18. 21. 25. 30. On each one of those birthdays I cried,” he says. “I’d beaten the statistics.” Carter, who served time on drug possession charges, says that he always wanted to find a way to help, even as he was hustling. In Safe Streets, he has found a more productive application for his skills.

The program trains its mediators in objective thinking: looking only at the facts of a situation, as opposed to making hostile assumptions that can lead to dangerous conclusions and feed the kind of street paranoia that fuels violence. “[Carter] taught me how to look at things from different points of view,” says Jon-Jon. “Don’t go with the first instinct. Ask, ‘Why is this happening? What’s going on?’”

The young man pauses, thinking back on what went down. “[Carter] got me right that night,” he says. And then he resumes the tale of what happened that evening, a few blocks away from Safe Streets’ offices.

what carter heard from jon-jon over

the phone about the drug rip-off didn’t quite add up. He knew the young man well, knew he wasn’t afraid to fight if it was warranted. “I know he’s no punk, no chump,” says Carter. He sensed something was missing from the story, and it was: Jon-Jon hadn’t mentioned his girlfriend’s plan to act as a lookout when Snaz’s stash was taken. Because Jon-Jon had left the street before that rip-off took place, it still hadn’t occurred to him that Snaz had come for payback. Carter, acting as a mediator, was about to wade into a dispute with only half the facts.

“Let’s see what’s going on,” said Carter, walking around the area with JonJon in tow. No Snaz. So he called one of Snaz’s people and told him to let Snaz know he wanted to meet and settle the beef.

Minutes later, Snaz rode up on his bike. To Carter, he was a familiar face, a dude who liked to cop a tough-guy attitude. With the street swarming with the curious, the nasty, and the affiliated, Carter’s first task was to get Jon-Jon and Snaz away from the onlookers for a little one-on-one, so no one would act out for the crowd. “Snaz is looking me in the eye, he’s respecting me, but he keeps saying ‘Look, yo, somebody took my stuff,’” Carter recalls. “I’m not believing him, but I still swallowed it.” Carter told Jon-Jon to do the same.

For a moment, Carter’s old street instincts warred with his new role as he addressed Snaz, who insisted on sticking to a story that, unbeknownst to Carter, was true. “I told him, ‘You’re acting all tough and stuff. I’m talking to you. What I’m feeling, I don’t want to talk to you. I want to hurt you. The next person that comes around ain’t gonna talk to you.’”

Snaz considered. As far as he was concerned, he got the drugs back, so they were all square. As for Jon-Jon, he followed Carter’s lead. Both sides agreed to let the beef slide. It wasn’t exactly a touch-feely mediation, but it worked.

For about ten minutes.

After the three men emerged from their powwow, they were engulfed by onlookers. Carter could see some of Jon-Jon’s family joining the crowd. He knew what was coming. The “I was wilding when I family would go after Snaz was young, 21. I was in for payback. As far as they were concerned, the beef a fog,” says Jermaine wasn’t settled. Jon-Jon’s Lewis, an outreach uncle, one of Carter’s old acquaintances, was particworker. “These kids see ularly worked up. He went us, they see what’s on the up to the house where Snaz was hanging and called other side of that fog.” him out.

Snaz was confused.

“We took care of that. It’s over,” he told the uncle, who in turn looked back at Jon-Jon. “You get your money back?” he asked.

Carter knew both the answer—no—and what the uncle’s reaction was going to be. He quickly laid his hand on the uncle, whose fists were about to come hammering down.

“Oh, no, no. Don’t do that,” Carter said.

“Huh? What’s up?”

“For me. Don’t do that.”

Looking his old friend Carter in the eye, the uncle’s hands dropped, about the same time Snaz pulled a knife and a cell phone. He dialed his posse and within minutes everyone was there: The streets were thick with shouts and anger and Carter found himself a lone voice of reason, talking, cajoling, using every bit of savvy and intuition at his disposal to buy seconds.

Carter purchased just enough. One of Snaz’s friends suddenly jumped out of the crowd and pleaded with both parties. “Look! I’ll give you the money for it!” He looked at the potential combatants one at a time and waved his offer like a talisman. “He ain’t gotta do nothing,” he said, pointing at Jon-Jon. “And he ain’t gotta do nothing,” he said, pointing at Snaz. “I will do it.”

And he did, walking up respectfully to Jon-Jon’s mother and handing her a handful of cash for the drugs that were stolen from her son. With that, the conflict was over.

Carter was grateful but still mindful. He wanted all sides to leave with their dignity intact and with an awareness that a peaceful resolution had just occurred. The code had just been rewritten. He slowly walked up to the peacemaker, shook his hand so everyone could see, and said, “That was some cool shit, yo. Good thing.” Then he got Jon-Jon and Snaz to shake hands.

Later, sitting in the Safe Streets office, Jon-Jon reflects on the intervention. “That let me know that you can be bigger than the situation,” he says.

“Don’t let nothing get you so mad that you want to do something that you know is going to turn out to be stupid. You’re supposed to do something in this situation, ’cause everyone does something in the situation. If you don’t, people look at you differently. It’s how the ’hood thinks. But it made me realize you don’t have to care how nobody looks at you. At the end of the day, I had more than he took. I was still living.”

early indications are that safe streets

is having an impact. In the three years prior to the arrival of Safe Streets East, post 221—a roughly twelve-square-block area bounded by Patterson Park Avenue, Monument, Fayette, and Linwood Street—saw twenty-five shootings

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and nine homicides. It was, in police parlance, a “hot area.” After Safe Streets opened its doors, things cooled off. There was a six-month stretch with no shootings and no homicides, according to police records. The program was so promising that a second post in neighboring Ellwood Park was added in February. Overall, after nine months of operation in Post 221, there have been more than two dozen mediations. There have been six shootings, no deaths.

The streetside mediations are only the beginning of a dialogue that’s equal parts passion, commitment, redemption, and opportunity. Five nights a week, Safe Streets’ nine full-time and two part-time paid outreach workers walk the streets, responding to potential violence and offering a more peaceable way out to gang members, dealers, and their soldiers. Between them there isn’t a player on the street in McElderry Park they don’t know, or can’t find out about with a call or two to their network. This friend-of-a-friend grapevine is an invaluable resource. On the intervention side, it gets outreach workers where they need to be in minutes. Once there, it turns would-be combatants into future clients. Seeing a familiar face, someone who understands their life, is the difference between discussion and dismissal. “To have this job, you have to be respected by the shooters, by the killers,” says Jermaine Lewis, 34, an outreach worker. “In the streets, shooters don’t talk to people they consider clowns.”

The conversation pretty much comes down to “What do you need?” The answer might be a G.E.D., a job, drug addiction counseling, or a host of other services. The outreach workers are also trained as case managers, which accounts for about half their work. The client relationship is intense, calling for four face-to-face visits a month and numerous facilitations, such as providing transportation to meet with a parole officer or access city services.

Recruiting isn’t easy, given suspicion of anything that reeks of an official “program.” It often takes weeks or months to convince young men to stop in.

“We’re trying to foster a situation where they can come in as clients on their time,” says Safe Streets East Program Director Leon Faruq (who was also a participant in the 2008 Urbanite Project). “We identify people. Sometimes, a young boy, he’s still trying to prove himself. Over time, we engage him in a respectful way. You want to say something to express your concern. He’s not a client yet, but he begins to soften, become more and more receptive.”

In the staff ’s opinion, people are more receptive because this is a public health program, not a police initiative. There are no identifying records in case files; anonymity is zealously guarded. “As soon as you’re attached to the police, nobody is going to come,” says Safe Streets East Violence Prevention Coordinator Jerrod Lewis, 35. “We might get people cutting school, but we’re not going to get the killers. The program would be ineffective.”

But perhaps the greatest lure is the workers themselves. In a neighborhood bereft of hope, they are recognized as something almost no one sees around here, and certainly not on the streets: a future.

For many of the twenty-seven years he did in prison on a murder rap, Leon Faruq had dreamed of being able to show young men that there was something on the other side of 21 besides a grave. Much of his initial work dealt with prisoner reentry, but he was also looking for a way to inculcate hope into the streets. With three college degrees to his credit, Faruq understood that education could help people reconstruct their lives. In Safe Streets, Faruq found a program that matched his mindset, a place that offered both new skills and new thinking. “It’s a mission for me,” he quietly admits. “I see it as a revolution. The frontier of the mind.”

Each member of the team receives an intensive forty hours of initial outreach training that capitalizes and expands on their natural communication and survival skills. “We gravitated to Leon because we already knew the streets, been in the streets, lived the streets. At one point in time we loved the streets,” says Micah Mitchell, a former dealer who rose through the ranks before doing time. “What Leon did was put structure to the passion we had for the streets. We also had a passion for change: This program brought out the capabilities we didn’t realize we had.”

At 27, Mitchell is one of the youngest members of the Safe Streets team.

Most, like Carter, are in their 30s. In other words, they’re OGs—original gangstas, in street slang—which lends them a certain respect among BGs, or baby gangstas. “I was wilding when I was young, 21. I was in a fog,” says Jermaine Lewis. “These kids see us, they see what’s on the other side of that fog. They say, ‘I really can come out of this madness without having to kill. While keeping my respect.’”

Tard Carter bluntly sums up the desperation for viable role models this way. “How do you expect a young black man from the ghetto to be a man

when he don’t know what a man is? He sees a drug dealer, a contract killer, a dope fiend, a crackhead. That’s men? They have hair on their face. They are males. But are they men?”

The Safe Streets team members, some legally working for the first time, can be the face of the future. “We become a shining light,” says Micah Mitchell. “[They think,] ‘They came from where we are now.’”

the procession of forty staff, neighbors,

and supporters is marching into the sunset on McElderry Street, chanting in response with Safe Streets’ Jerrod Lewis, who is on a bullhorn.

“WHAT DO WE WANT?” he asks the throng.

“STOP THE SHOOTING!” they answer.

“WHEN DO WE WANT IT?” “NOW!” Over and over the voices echo off the rowhouses as the crowd makes its way over to North Curley Street, up to Monument, across to Robinson, and back down to McElderry, to the scene of a shooting a few days earlier.

These street rallies—“shooting response” is the technical term—are part of Safe Streets’ program for getting their message heard. This includes reaching out to local clergy, engaging area businesses for support, holding celebratory barbecues marking “no shooting” milestones, even utilizing large billboard ads. “We’re going to put baby pictures on billboards that say ‘Don’t shoot. I want to grow up,’” says Jerrod Lewis. While his younger brother, Jermaine, focuses on recruiting clients, Jerrod interacts with community leaders, ministers, and local businesses. “We’re treating these murders and shootings like an epidemic. Like a stop-smoking campaign. They made it uncool to smoke. It’s going to be real uncool to commit an act or harm another person by shooting.”

Judging by the response to the march, the community is ready. As they hear Jerrod’s bullhorn, neighbors rush to their doors and windows, fearing the worst. When they catch a glimpse of the bright orange Safe Streets signs, the anxiety melts from their faces. “Safe Streets?” asks one woman. “Praise the Lord!” A knot of young men hanging out on their stoop quiets as the march passes by.

Clearly, this program and these people are hitting a nerve in an area desperate for calm. “To me, it’s as if the neighborhood feels as if somebody finally listened, and that life is being cared for in a way that it hasn’t been cared for before,” says Pastor Karen Brau, who has worked in the neighborhood since 1996 at Amazing Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church. “That has a long-term powerful quality.”

Pastor Brau’s not the only one to notice. City Hall has set aside a $1 million to expand the Safe Streets initiative, which now operates in two posts in East Baltimore, with another program coming on line in the Southwest this spring. Dr. LaShawn McIver, Safe Streets director in the Baltimore City Health Department, says they’re looking for an additional $1 million from public and private sources.

In the meantime, the buzz keeps building. “I get phone calls on a weekly basis from community groups that want to see it in their area. The word is definitely getting out,” says McIver, who is awaiting the program’s first official statistical report, due in December. “There’s a lot riding on the success of the sites we have now.”

A quick fix for a bleeding city? No. It’s slow work: one neighborhood, one street, one individual at a time. But, as Jermaine Lewis told one of his clients, he’s in it for the long haul. “I told him something my mother always told me: ‘Success is falling seven times and getting up eight. Falling nine times and getting up ten.’ As long as you’re in the fight, I’m good.” ■ —Mat Edelson is a frequent contributor to Urbanite.

For more resources and information on preventing violence in your community or neighborhood, go to 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 8

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Can where you advertise be as important as the ad itself ?

www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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by kathleen hellen

poetry

Eight —for the Dawsons, Darrell Baltimore, October 2002

Some murders surface off the tourist promenade. They float like strange velella in the bloat of Giant jellies. Outlines of a city’s fate in chalk where rock fish tangle up with Styrofoam and half-smoked cigarettes, with mothers’ sons in six degrees of syphilis, HIV.

photo by Jason Okutake

More glass than ass arrested, booked at Central Booking where the rip-rap deviates. who got shot in Druid Park? whose throat was cut? North Avenue and Longwood, hearses double-park. Mourners mute as pit bulls with their throats slit, shut.

Balloons and flowers now where hot dogs boiled Kathleen Hellen’s work has appeared in Natural Bridge, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, RUNES, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. She has won the Washington Square Review, James Still, and Thomas Merton poetry prizes, and received individual artist grants from the state and the city. Hellen is an editor for the Baltimore Review.

summer evenings when the deals went south, where they lit the Dawsons’ house. Killed the seven. No witnesses protected.

No belief in signs that read: Believe.

In what, the darrells ask? Drive-bys in the choke. Slums spun into gold for other folk. The dead raise themselves.

Web extra: Read a conversation with the poet at www.urbanitebaltimore.com.

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space

Cop Shop

By Marianne Amoss Photography by Jason Okutake

S

Above: The former Northern District Police Station in Wyman Park was designed by Baltimore architect Henry F. Brauns and finished in 1899. It’s been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2001.

Opposite page, left: The ceiling of one of the carriage houses had to be lowered ten feet to make heating and cooling the space possible.

Middle: Even the hallways boast shining wood paneling and floors and an abundance of natural light.

Right: Keyser retained many of the building’s original details, like this sign hanging on an exterior door. He also repointed all the exterior brick.

Six years and millions of dollars later, Stan Keyser is just about finished with his painstaking restoration of the former Northern District Police Station

tan Keyser doesn’t do anything halfway. If you ask him for a look at his latest project, the Hampden Village Centre, prepare for a comprehensive guided tour that eats up the better part of an afternoon. But it’s worth it. The nearly 30,000-squarefoot former Northern District Police Station, which comprises a main building plus former stables, hay lofts, and carriage houses, is a magnificent red-brick structure dating from 1899, with two turret-like structures on the corners, gables edged with weathered copper, and large, single-pane windows that let sunlight pour in. (There are even two small, creepy jail cells still in the basement.) Keyser has carved out a complex of office suites of varying sizes, according to what his tenants want; his own office will be located in one of the carriage houses. It doesn’t feel like your run-of-the-mill office building renovation— and that’s exactly what Keyser was after.

“I started getting interested in historic renovation and restoration in the ’60s because I was dumbfounded that the planners and the powers of the great cities of America were tearing down whole blocks of beautiful buildings to build roads,” says the historic restoration developer, who specializes in mixed-use projects and has renovated more than forty properties, including the Queen Anne Belvedere apartments in Mount Vernon. “Someone’s got to preserve this craftsmanship.”

And to do that right, Keyser believes, takes time—six years, in the case of the Village Centre, which Keyser and his business partner, Wendy Blair, purchased in 2002 for $225,000. Keyser believes that, until it was sold, the structure had the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating police station in the country. He was smitten the first time he laid eyes on it. “I fell in love.”

His goal from the start was to complete a meticulous restoration that would pay tribute to the building’s singular beauty and storied past. For instance, he had the first-floor mantelpiece removed from the wall with dental tools for restoration. He replaced rotted and missing pine, now unavailable, with expensive cypress wood because it was the closest grain match. And there isn’t an inch of new drywall in the place—all the plaster walls were repaired in kind.

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space Keyser’s attention to detail, however, didn’t help keep the project on schedule. Neither did the many unpleasant discoveries he made. Several buried oil and gas tanks lurked in the rear courtyard, and inside the building he found layers of lead paint, rotten walls and ceilings, and a nonfunctioning electrical system. As Keyser scrambled to find additional financing to deal with these surprises, he ended up adding several million dollars out of his own pocket to the funds and loans he received from the city and the Baltimore Development Corporation, he says, pitching the project $3 million over its original $5.5 million budget. “It truly is a money pit,” he says.

“Hopefully I make this function for another hundred years until another crazy guy decides it’s time to restore again.”

The community of Wyman Park has kept a sharp eye on Keyser’s travails. Long interested in the building (they formed a task force in 1999 to oversee its fate), neighborhood residents became frustrated by a perceived lack of activity on the site at times, the long-overdue delivery, and various nuisances, like the cutting down of trees for as-yet-undelivered streetscaping. Now that the building is open and its first tenants—the Community Law Center and U.S. Lacrosse—have moved in, the neighbors are only partly mollified.

“The interior is very nice, but it should be—it’s taken him so long,” says Kathleen Talty, president of the Wyman Park Community Association and co-chair of the task force.

For his part, Keyser is unrepentant. “I’m not going to let this building be done before it’s right,” he says. “Taking a couple million out of one’s pocket proves that.” And now that the project is so close to being finished, with the last phases scheduled to be completed this spring and the building 70 percent leased, he thinks everything will blow over. “Today will become history tomorrow. This too will pass,” he says.

“Hopefully I make this functional for another hundred years until another crazy guy decides it’s time to restore again.” ■ —Marianne Amoss is Urbanite’s managing editor.

Man about town: Stan Keyser shows off the lobby of the Hampden Village Centre. He has been restoring and renovating properties for more than thirty years. “I can walk into an old building and tell you what it’s going to look like when it’s finished, within 10 to 15 percent of cost, and whether I should walk away or stand there,” he says. 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 8

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Eleven thousand, nine hundred, and forty-six to go: The volunteer ravioli makers of St. Leo’s—Paulette Lato, Josephine Platerote, Theresa Gabriele, and Gigi Matarozzo (left to right)—display their handiwork.

Pillow Talk

Let’s roll: It’s ravioli-making season at St. Leo’s

By Mary K. Zajac

Photography by Gail Burton

Interlocking her fingers as if in prayer, Nancy Menefee gently cups and presses around the cheesefilled pillows that bulge from the length of dough before her. “If you don’t get the air out, they’ll explode,” she explains, stepping beside me to demonstrate.

“You’ll get boiled ricotta.”

This is my first time making ravioli, but Menefee, a dark-haired woman in shiny gold earrings and a green apron, is an expert. After cutting the ravioli into squares, she then expertly trims and crimps the edges with a fork, tines curved upwards to avoid punctures.

For three weeks in February, the basement of St. Leo’s School is transformed into the equivalent of a high-volume Italian restaurant as it prepares for one of two biannual ravioli dinners the church hosts as fundraisers in March and November. Walking into this Little Italy parish school on a raviolimaking Saturday is a bit like being thrown into the prep line on an episode of Top Chef, except that everyone is genial and happy to go home at the end of the afternoon. Women and men in aprons lean over a flour-covered table, folding and cutting dough, transferring neatly crimped ravioli squares to cornmeal-dusted metal trays. Shouted requests (“Tray!” “Dough!”) punctuate the air already humming with parish chatter and the metallic grind of two industrial-size mixers. From a stereo speaker, Frank Sinatra pleads for luck to be a lady.

Several men, including 95-year-old Donde Bruni, pat pasta dough into small rectangles before running the dough through metal rollers that stretch it into long, pliable sheets. Next, they take the sheets, draped over outstretched arms, to the tables, where

volunteers work assembly-line style, squeezing dollops of cheese from pastry bags onto the dough, folding the dough over the cheese to make a pillow, pressing out the air, and cutting the dough pillows into ravioli. Although I’m sorely tempted, sampling is discouraged.

It’s easy to dismiss church suppers as quaint, old-timey affairs, but there’s nothing quaint about feeding two thousand people on one Sunday afternoon. Preparation for the event consumes several weekends: Three weeks prior to the meal, one parishioner mixes batter for pizzelle cookies that volunteers bake at home; two Saturdays before, twelve thousand ravioli are made, plus tomato sauce and meatballs the day before the dinner. And on Sunday itself, everyone pitches in to cook, serve, spin the roulette wheel, and tend bar for the thousand people who line up to sit down and eat (another thousand meals are sold as carry-out). This year, it took 105 volunteers to do this.

More than just a fundraiser, however, the dinner serves as an example of how a community sustains itself. Like a bread starter that stays alive with the addition of flour and water, St. Leo’s needs new (and younger) hands to maintain the parish and its traditions. While some city churches, like Zion Lutheran Church or St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, still boast festivals and ethnic dinners, others, like Sacred Heart of Jesus in Highlandtown, have had to cancel annual dinners for lack of volunteers to do the hard work of making homemade food for a crowd.

St. Leo’s—a bulwark of tradition in fast-changing Little Italy—hopes to avoid this fate by moving the preparation days to the weekend to accommodate 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 8

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the schedules of working people and by urging more of its parishioners to participate. “The more experienced ones, they’re starting to slow down,” says Sharon Esposito, St. Leo’s longtime volunteer coordinator. “We need to bring the younger people in.”

There are indeed some fresh faces in the basement this Saturday. At one table, newcomer Ashley Marzzacco, 25, crimps ravioli folded by Philomena Abruzzese, 80. This is Marzzacco’s first time making ravioli for her new parish, while Abruzzese has been doing this since childhood, when her mother allowed her to peel garlic for sauce. Both women say they volunteer in order to help the parish, but both allow that the whole process is as much pleasure as it is work.

This has always been true, stresses Abruzzese.

“It used to be so much fun,” she says of the years when she and her sister-in-law would leave their families at home to go make ravioli at the church.

“We talked about our husbands and how rotten they were. We talked about how rotten our kids were.

We never told them how much fun we had when we went home.”

Marzzacco, who recently moved to Baltimore from Pennsylvania to take a job at Kennedy Krieger, says that the storytelling was as much of a draw for her as learning the skill of ravioli-making. “It was great for me as someone who is away from home,” she says, “because I was able to briefly be a part of a loud Italian family here in Baltimore.”

For their part, the veteran volunteers welcome the new hands. “I think it’s wonderful, beautiful,” reflects Josephine Platerote, Abruzzese’s sister-in-law.

“One of these days we’re not going to be here and we need the young people to take over.”

Although she works alone making the pasta dough, 89-year-old Lucy Pompa welcomes observers as she cracks eggs, adds flour by the five-pound bagful, and measures oil with a teacup, the way she was taught. “That’s about two tablespoons,” she estimates as she pours it into the mixer. “I’m always glad to show people how to do it.”

Later at our table, Abruzzese complains that the dough is too thick. “Tell them to run it again,” she commands, and I take the piece back to be run through the pasta rollers once more. I watch as the golden dough emerges thinner, almost translucent.

“You need to learn,” says Josephine Giorgilli, 82, watching me observe the process. “The only way you’re going to learn is be nosy.”

By noon, everyone is wearing flour as we break for a lunch of homemade minestrone soup and grilled sausages (Italian, of course). But soon Esposito musters the volunteers for one last round of pasta making. “Twenty more trays,” she shouts. “That’s all we need. C’mon, girls, let’s go!”

We return to the task, folding and squeezing and crimping quickly now. “We’re on a roll,” says Marzzacco. “I’m loving this.” ■ —Mary K. Zajac wrote about Darker Than Blue Cafe in the February Urbanite.

Cheese Ravioli with Meatballs and Sauce Cook ravioli in boiling, salted water 3 to 5 minutes or until done. Serve with your favorite red sauce.

Meatballs:

Dough: 2­–3 cups flour 4 eggs ¼ cup water 2 tbs canola oil Mix eggs, water, and oil together in a heavy-duty mixer on medium speed.

Stop mixer and add flour in small batches, beating on low speed until you get a very smooth dough.

Filling: 16 oz ricotta 1 tsp pepper ½ tsp oregano 1 egg 1 cup grated Parmesan Mix all filling ingredients together in a large bowl.

Working on a floured surface, divide dough and pat into small discs approximately 5 inches in diameter. Feed pasta through the rollers of a pasta machine, per the machine’s instructions.

You should have a two-foot-long, six-inch-wide length of dough.

Starting at one end of the dough, place a tablespoonful of cheese mixture at two-inch intervals down the middle of the dough. Fold the long end of the side of the dough nearest you over the cheese mixture. Cup your hands around each cheese mound and press the air out of each pillow.

Using a pizza wheel cutter or a sharp knife, cut each pillow into individual ravioli, trimming the ends as necessary. Using the tines of a fork, crimp the three edges of the ravioli to seal the dough.

1 lb ground round or ground chuck 1 lb ground pork 2 eggs ½ medium onion, finely diced cup Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese 2 slices of good-quality bread, crusts trimmed cup milk Salt and pepper to taste

Put bread and milk in a small saucepan over low heat. When bread has absorbed all of the milk, mash the bread to a pulp with a fork. Remove from heat and allow to cool completely.

When bread has cooled, mix all ingredients together gently with your hands in a large bowl.

Form into small balls, 1 ½ to 2 inches in diameter.

To cook, brown meatballs in olive oil in a medium-hot skillet. Alternately, boil meatballs into a pot for 2 to 3 minutes or bake for 20 to 25 minutes in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven.

Sauce: 1 small onion 5 or 6 cloves ¼ cup olive oil 3 cloves garlic, minced 2 6-ounce cans tomato paste 1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes or

tomato puree ½ cup Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese 1 tsp oregano 1 tsp basil Salt and pepper to taste Stud the onion with the cloves (like you might do a ham). Heat oil in a heavy pot, add minced garlic, and sauté until garlic is golden.

Carefully add the tomato paste, plus six tomato-paste cans of water. Stir carefully, as it is prone to splatter.

Add the can of crushed tomatoes or tomato puree and the onion. Stir. Gradually mix in cheese and spices. (Sharon advises, “Don’t add too much [at one time] because you can really mess the sauce up. Just take your time.”)

Add cooked meatballs (or Italian sausage, if you like) to the mixture. Stir very gently.

Cook partially covered at a low simmer for about 2 to 2 ½ hours, stirring every half hour.

Serve with ravioli.

—Recipe by Sharon Esposito, adapted by Mary K. Zajac 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 8

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Night of the Cookers

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Judging by number of upscale Southern-style eateries around town, Baltimore appears to be leaning conspicuously toward the warmer end of its famous middle temperment these days.

(Blame climate change, perhaps.) Night of the Cookers, the latest outpost from Cornbread Nation, has a name that might evoke, unappetizingly, the living dead, but it’s actually lifted from a 1965 jazz album—the live summit of hard-bop trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan.

This handsomely restored Howard Street eatery is a satellite office of sorts—the original Night of the Cookers is in Brooklyn—and the opening chef was the peripatetic Memphian Josh Hill, who’s also cooked at the Owl Bar, Red Star, and Tabrizi’s. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Hill announced he was leaving Night of the Cookers in mid-April.) Antique Row is lonely real estate for fine dining (there’s also a Cookers take-out next door that serves during the lunch hours), but on a weekend evening, as a jazz trio takes its place by the bar and the dining rooms fill with a sharp-dressed crowd, the effect is both soul-

ful and sophisticated: part down-home Sunday supper, part uptown Saturday night.

The bill of fare Hill devised here focuses on big-hearted, plush interpretations of regional standards. “Our menu isn’t subtle,” a server proclaims, and she’s right. The offerings range from sweet Memphis-style barbecue and lots of fried stuff (catfish, chicken, green tomatoes) to gumbo, po’ boys, and more refined Creole-style dishes. Shrimp and grits get a restrained treatment, with a simple white wine sauce studded with leeks and bacon. More typically over-thetop is cream-sauced crawfish ravioli with smokyhot shards of andouille: It’s heart-stoppingly rich. A basket of cake-like cornbread seems like it could double as dessert, until you get an actual dessert: bubbly apple crisp in a hot castiron pan, crumbly crust afloat on a syrupy sea of apple goop. It’s worthy of a Southern grandma with a taste for sweet excess. (Dinner Tues–Sun, brunch Sun. 885 N. Howard St.; 410-383-2093.)

reviewed

EAT/DRINK

—David Dudley

Pile it on: blackened tuna at Night of the Cookers

Vin laced with maple syrup to a spare plate arrayed with slices of nearly raw seared tuna. It can be fun, especially with the four accompanying wines, but you’re hostage to Paternotte’s whims and his larder. So if you’re not in the mood for a parade of tapas-style dishes, you may find yourself hankering for one of the offerings you passed up from the regular menu, which moves easily from the comfort of hangar steak and couscousbased mac-and-cheese fritters to briny oysters on the half-shell or the sharp tang of Mediterraneanstyle whole branzino with lemon and capers.

Save the grazing for Vin’s signature “World’s Tiniest Dessert Menu,” with its selection of $2 treats—crème brulée, chocolate ganache cake, and a tempura banana split. As the weather warms, the action moves to the less-formal Grove, an outdoor deck surrounded by a privacy fence to blunt the hubbub of traffic crawling towards the mall—a reminder that, yes, this is still Towson after all. (Dinner nightly. 1 E. Joppa Rd., Towson; 410-337-0797; www.vinbaltimore.com.)

—Martha Thomas

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Christopher Paternotte, the former Kali’s Court chef also responsible for small-plate spin-off Mezze, opened this prodigious wine bar in the old Hutzler’s department store building to much fanfare two years ago. The premise was that the Baltimore native was bringing big-city sophistication to the Towson traffic circle. Indeed, the restaurant’s mid-century modernist interior, with its dark wood paneling that seems to sprout wine bottles, has a sort of Hollywood Golden Age feel: You can picture glamorous patrons in evening dress on the sumptuous red tufted banquettes.

The menu boasts such vintage items as escargot, Cobb salad, and lobster thermidor, and the extensive wine list includes nearly twenty kinds of champagne, ranging from $44 to $375 per bottle.

But the chef, while indulging his patrons’ retro cravings for cheesy mashed potatoes and creamed spinach, is deft with more up-to-date flavors, adding pickled radish and lotus chips to tuna tartare and sharp gorgonzola to lobster ravioli. His ever-changing tasting menu may, on a given night, veer from a lump of fois gras and poached egg balanced on a slice of smoked ham

Wine guy: Vin chef Christopher Paternotte

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 8

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Just Call Me Mike: A Journey from Actor to Activist Sunday, May 25, 3 p.m.

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reflections on his path from fame to progressive activism in his bestselling memoir, Just Call Me

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Licking the Boot The rise and fall of the Super-Tuscans

courtesy of www.acwwoodcuts.com

By Clinton Macsherry

Over the years, Italians have become a magnet for unflattering stereotypes. That’s probably because the rest of us are so jealous that they get to live in Italy.

Consider public corruption, widely held to be endemic to Italian society. (Here in Bilk-you-more, we know nothing, nothing! about such sleaziness.

Or are we copping a nolo contendere?) Few people bother to question this generalization anymore, and I can’t say it’s unjustified.

But it obscures a larger and more complicated picture: Italians have a profound ambivalence toward systems. They construct baroque regulations and impenetrable bureaucracies, only to develop ever-craftier ways of circumventing them. In a country that was politically fragmented for centuries, and where many of the sixty-odd post war governments have had the lifespan of a fruit fly, you can understand how a yearning for order might coexist with an abiding suspicion of authority.

This dialectic spills over into Italy’s wine culture—and what a vast, unruly, magnificent culture it is. In Vino Italiano (Clarkson Potter, 2002), Joseph Bastianich and David Lynch guesstimate that around 850 grape varieties are cultivated in the country, but they readily concede “no one knows for sure how many there are.” Italy produces 1.3 billion gallons of wine annually (trailing only France by a small margin) in a dizzying array of styles and— most of the time—in keeping with a kaleidoscope of local traditions.

Since the 1960s, Italy has attempted to preserve those traditions, and impose some structure

on its wine industry, through a system of Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) zones, each with their own geographic boundaries, permitted grapes, and winemaking regimens. Theoretically, the stricter Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG) zones have tighter enforcement and hence more cachet. But many observers discount the distinction.

In Tuscany, where Chianti and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano were among the earliest DOCs, the system left out a number of high-quality winemakers and sparked rebellion among the disgruntled.

Their wines became known as “Super-Tuscans.”

First came Sassicaia, made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc grown near the Tuscan coast, far outside the central sectors where customary Sangiovese-based blends claimed official DOC recognition. Introduced in 1968 and humbly labeled vino di tavola, or table wine, Sassicaia quickly became the darling of critics and collectors. Its reputation—and its price— have grown steadily since. If you ponied up $48 for a bottle of the 1985 on release, it could fetch $2000 today.

Sassicaia was quickly followed by a host of other Super-Tuscans, many of which were denied DOC status (or rejected it on their own) due not to geography but to their makers’ defiance of the hidebound blending formulas and barrel-aging techniques the system demanded. Soon even traditional vintners saw the marketability of going renegade and added Super-Tuscan bottlings to their portfolios. One historic Brunello di Montalcino estate called its Super-Tuscan “Ateo” (or “atheist”) to flip the bird at DOC dogma.

Italy’s wine authorities bounced back with relaxed DOC regulations, additional zones, and a loose new classification (Indicazione Geografica Tipica, or IGT) designed to reel the Super-Tuscans back into some sort of structure. It worked, to an extent. Sassicaia, for example, was granted its own DOC status in 1994.

But in other ways, the wines became victims of their own success. Precisely because the term existed outside the system, lesser producers could call their $10 quaffs Super-Tuscans with impunity. And so they did. Maybe it still sounds good, but today the term has become essentially meaningless.

Even Ateo has found religion. Since 2000, it has been bottled under the free-wheeling Sant’Antimo DOC classification. Ciacci Piccolomini d’Aragona Ateo 2003 ($30, 14 percent alcohol), a velvety purple blend of Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, offers a seductive nose of blackberry jam and dark cherry with a whiff of sandalwood. Medium-bodied, with refreshing acidity, its roasted fruit and dark tea palate reflect the scorching 2003 vintage. Ateo has the fragrance, depth, and flavor intensity you should demand at this price. But it was a much better deal (about $24, even less with a coupon) in its pre-DOC days.

You can’t beat the system every time. ■ 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 8

wine & spirits

EAT/DRINK

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journal

David Dudley on Carmina Burana

Martha Thomas on “Art” and A New Brain

art/culture

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Literary editor Susan McCallum-Smith goes native

Smile!

Seeing family history in black and white

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My wife has her family pictures on the walls by her side of our bed. The pictures are of people long gone, but it’s not a memorial wall. She says it’s like having friendly company.

There are studies of her mother and grandmother, wearing poignant expressions. There are photos of her uncles in their Borsalino hats with their walking sticks. Some were taken in studios furnished with ersatz classical backgrounds: columns, pediments, twining vines, like theater props.

The pictures are all black and white, and almost nobody on the wall smiles. The smile wasn’t expected when these photos were taken.

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 8

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urbanite may 08

In The Frenzy of Renown, his study of fame, Leo Braudy writes, “In old documentaries the people being interviewed often regard the camera with wary hostility. It was an intrusion into their sense of self.”

No longer. It would take a supercomputer to calculate how many times a day somebody in our country says “Smile!” Or is asked to. Everybody is socialized to the camera early on—my 5-year-old grandson, for instance. Say “Smile,” and his face assumes the position.

Not everybody accepts the unquestioned benignity of the smile. Smiles can reveal fear, contempt, condescension, malice, pain, embarrassment; the smirk is a smile. A Baltimore documentary photographer named Jana Kopelentova Rehak spent two years interviewing and photographing the people who live on a single block in Hampden. To get what she wanted, she had to talk them out of their smiles.

It wasn’t easy. “They like to see themselves looking happy,” she says. “Even as little children, when in front of a camera they are told to smile.”

Rehak’s father and grandfather were professional photographers in a town near Prague. “Czechs

But today the camera doesn’t permit boredom; it declines to grant the sadder, less comfortable experiences their natural place in life. don’t smile as much as we do here,” she observes.

“Americans are professional smilers.”

The people in my wife’s collection peer out from a time long before recreational photography, spurred by improvements in the camera and the magic of modern marketing, turned us into manic smilers.

These were 19th century people. They had their own notions about how they wanted to be seen, especially in photographs and portraits—images meant to endure. When the camera fixed its eye upon them they met it with all the gravitas they could muster. It would have been as difficult to talk them into smiling as it was for Rehak to persuade her subjects not to. (Another reason people in old pictures avoided smiling: bad teeth. Modern dentistry has contributed to the ascendancy of the smile.)

A more recent picture among the collection shows my wife’s younger sister, Clara, with her new husband, Oscar. They are both smiling. This picture is in color, taken on their wedding day. They felt like smiling; they were in love. Their smiles were those Daniel McNeill, who published a study of physiognomy in 1998 titled The Face, calls the “true smile,” which expresses genuine delight and conceals nothing. The true smile is brief, usually shorter than four seconds. “But false smiles often linger on,” he writes, “like awkward guests after a party.”

Noticing my interest in her photos, my wife bought me one of those big frames with spaces cut in the matte to display photographs of different sizes, so that I could make my own gallery. I pulled my

photo © Orff-Zentrum, Munich; courtesy of the Ameican Orff-Schulwerk Association

art/culture

Medieval times: German composer Carl Orff, of Carmina Burana fame

music Going Gothic The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs Carmina Burana, May 1­–4

Even if you don’t know Carl Orff from Karl Rove, you know Camina Burana, the German composer’s one-hit wonder of a cantata. Or at least you know its two-minute opening movement, “O Fortuna,” which has been borrowed by many a heavy metal band and TV commercial. A thunderclap of timpani, a frenzied whirl of glockenspiel, a thousand voices wailing in Latin over a lumbering Godzilla beat—it’s one of the most instantly recognizable choral works around, and its infectious barbarianrampage aesthetic has long made it go-to orc-attack music for Hollywood moviemakers.

(King Arthur and friends gallop around to it memorably in John Boorman’s film Excalibur.)

Carmina Burana sounds convincingly medieval, and the twenty-five songs in the hour-long cycle are indeed based on 13th century poems written by randy goliards—ne’erdo-well monks who wrote satiric verses about love, lust, drunkenness, and other secular pleasures. But the mock-Gothic music is pure 20th century. Influenced by Stravinsky, Munichborn Orff composed it in 1936, on the eve of World War II, and the cantata is considered the best classical work to come out of Nazi Ger-

many. While Orff was not a party member (and, indeed, the Nazis were said to have frowned upon the work’s earthy origins), there’s still a kind of spooky fascist grandeur to the music itself: It’s propulsive, simple, irresistibly rhythmic, and catchy as all get-out.

Critics have tended to be cool to crowdpleasing Carmina. “The most basic means are pressed into service to generate effects of wild abandon,” sniffs the Grove Dictionary of Music.

But BSO music director Marin Alsop is an unabashed fan: She conducted the Bournemouth Symphony in a well-received recording released on the Naxos label in 2007, and Orff ’s outsized icon feels like a good match. “It’s a spectacle,” she told NPR’s Scott Simon in 2006. “It’s about extremes and excess.” Alsop will marshal a crowd of more than two hundred musicians and singers, including the Baltimore Choral Arts Society and the Peabody Children’s Choir, when she rattles the windows of Meyerhoff Symphony Hall on May 1, 2, and 4, with a performance at Strathmore on May 3. Release the hounds!

—David Dudley w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 8

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art/culture

Say cheese: The author’s grandmother and cousin, 1940s

mother’s old family album from the closet, where it had rested unexamined for years. As expected, I met with few smiles in the pages up front, among the pictures taken in the 1930s and early 1940s. I was a grumpy toddler. My brothers, Jack and Edward, also looked glum more often than not. Smiles began to appear as I paged forward through the years. The last pictures my mother put in the album were taken in the 1980s, all color, everybody smiling: We all looked alike.

In Looking Through the Lens: Photography 1900–1960, currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art, you can see 150 pictures by such artists as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Man Ray, Ilse Bing, and others from around the world. Nearly all are in black and white. When I see these pictures, then look back on those in my album, I feel I must have been born and raised in a black-and-white world, a place (if a life can be considered a place) of stark contrast, both mysterious and unequivocal.

My memories are in black and white; my dreams are in black and white. Like a smile, strong color in a picture, especially a picture of a face, is, to me, like makeup, more concealing than revealing. I’ve always felt this way, though I’ve not been able to explain to myself why.

I asked the curator of the BMA show, Rena Hoisington, about this distinction, and she listed two of what she considered the aesthetic advantages of black-and-white photography over color. “It offers greater tonal range,” she said, “and can get incredible play of contrast.”

The pictures in my collection, of course, are not artful. But a few do make a forceful impression, a power I’m sure that can be felt only by me. One taken in the 1940s shows my grandmother, Sarah Lordon, in a flowered housedress. She holds my cousin Carl in her left arm; he is about 3. With her

Head case: William Finn’s autobiographical musical recounts a near-fatal brain malady.

theater Artistic License “Art” at Everyman Theatre, May 21–June 29 A New Brain at Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, through May 18 When Yasmina Reza’s play “Art” was produced in London in the mid 1990s, passionate discussions about what constitutes art were the order of the day. After all, it came on the heels of Charles Saatchi’s Young British Artists show, which featured Damien Hirst’s controversial dead shark in formaldehyde. In “Art”, close friendships are put to the test when the character Serge buys an outrageously expensive whiteon-white painting. Chain link fences in Mount Vernon notwithstanding, contemporary local audiences tend not to get as worked up over art, but according to director Jeremy Skidmore, the tension that arises between friends with clashing opinions is especially relevant in an election year. In “Art”, an esoteric discussion of the meaning of art escalates into an examination of values. “It may bring to mind the contest between Clinton and Obama,” says Skidmore.

Now 31, Skidmore saw the original London production and recalls finding it refreshingly “character- and dialogue-driven” at a time when many playwrights preferred a clipped cinematic style. “In the last year,” he says, “playwrights have started moving away from cinematic-ness and are getting back to long scenes and great dialogue between real people.” The director is clearly comfortable with both the traditional

unity of time-place-action found in “Art” and with more avant-garde styles: Last year at Virginia’s Signature Theatre, he directed Crave, by the controversial British playwright Sarah Kane, who frequently dispensed with plot and character.

The former artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s Theater Alliance, Skidmore is also directing David Hare’s caustic Stuff Happens at the Olney Theatre, June 18 to July 20, which will run concurrently with “Art”.

William Finn’s A New Brain celebrates “the healing power of art,” according to director and choreographer David Gregory.

Finn, who created Falsettos, the early-1990s musical about a married man’s coming out of the closet, wrote this similarly autobiographical 1998 musical about his experience with arteriovenous malformation, a massing of blood vessels in the brain. Gregory, who once worked as a trauma technician in the emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is well equipped to style this tale of how a man’s brush with death affects his relationships, career, and dreams. “I’m using the medical setting and environment to tell the story,” he says.

—Martha Thomas 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 8

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art/culture right arm she presses a cat to her breast. She gazes straight into the lens with a look she might have turned on an arabber trying to sell her overripe cantaloupes. Carl looks unhappy, the cat miserable. In another photo, her husband Charles sits on a kitchen chair in our backyard in the summer of 1931. He’s in a white shirt and suspenders, his hands resting in his lap; the sky is ivory white. He looks faintly expectant, as if waiting for his tea. My Uncle Abby, standing behind him, looks patient. Abby appears again, thirteen years later, in a khaki and olive drab uniform by a stairwell in Europe four months after wading ashore on D-Day, obviously relieved.

I had approached the task of curating my own family photography exhibition enterprise eagerly, almost with the buoyancy I knew as a child when we went off to stay a week in my Uncle Jim’s bungalow in the pines down near the Jersey shore. The pictures, I hoped, would recall the child’s pleasures and limitless expectations, maybe even bring back the smell of those trees.

But that didn’t happen. The pictures were impenetrable. The people, confined to the minute dimensions of those black-and-white boxes, were static and dull, without a spark of life. I saw my uncles and aunts, my parents, brothers, grandparents, cousins; their images fading, as memories do, into the fog of time. They made me think of the images found in old frames in used furniture shops, that diaspora of anonymous souls flung to the winds by indifferent relatives, or left behind by families that simply went extinct.

Occasionally in these old photos of mine you find a weak smile, though not many. This is not because we were an inordinately reticent or unexpressive family. These lives, at least what I recall of them, were not invariably unhappy, even though they were lived without the inventory of entertainments available today. We had our joyful moments, and now and then we were bored. But today the camera doesn’t permit boredom; it declines to grant the sadder, less comfortable experiences their natural place in life. It admits only happiness, or a facsimile of it. Back then, during the years reflected in these black-and-white images, we were not yet ready to surrender to unremitting felicity, nor to smile in an effort to seed false messages in our posterity. When asked to engage the camera we did so, but held back much of ourselves.

A thought came to me, a revelation of the obvious, perhaps, but revivifying: These were the people who inhabited the vanished city of my youth.

These are the faces they turned to me, day in, day out, smiling or not smiling, stern or questioning, puzzled or full of ignorant certitude, faces bearing expressions formed by the sentiment of the moment.

That’s the way I knew them, through their great variety of expression, so unlike the unreadable beaming faces of today.

Jana Kopelentova Rehak said that smiles can be used as masks, and are, more often than we realize. But not in my album: No masks there. These are true faces. ■

Trigger happy: Murdaland offers a modern take on crime.

journal Hard Boiled Murdaland: Crime Fiction for the 21st Century The fiction journal Murdaland specializes in “dark tales for tawdry times,” as its back cover says. Founded in 2007 by Baltimore writer Cort McMeel, the journal takes a 21st-century approach to the crime short story: Forget the trenchcoat-wearing, cigarette-smoking private eye made famous by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The world of Murdaland is murkier, more ambiguous—from the morality of the characters down to the definition of what makes a crime story.

Editor-in-Chief Michael Langnas, who has taken the helm with assistant editor Sean O’Kane while McMeel writes a book, says the journal is a home for both literary crime fiction and literary fiction that contains crime—books and stories that might not be shelved in the crime section of a bookstore, such as those of Flannery O’Connor or Charles Bukowski. “We’ll be liberal with what constitutes a crime story,” says Langnas, who hails from Pittsburgh, “but give us dark, well-written fiction set in a credible sociological milieu the writer knows, and psychologically believable characters. No one [has to be] too cool.

No one even has to be too sympathetic.”

The second installment of Murdaland (which, Langnas says, was named before McMeel was aware of the Wire connection), came out this past December and contains tales by both national and local writers, including Baltimore’s Rupert Wondolowski, co-owner of Normals Books and Records in Waverly. There’s also an anonymous report from the battlefields of Iraq and an excerpt from Don Carpenter’s out-of-

print 1966 novel Hard Rain Falling, which, Langnas says, adheres to the Murdaland code.

Reading these stories is like nursing a shot of whiskey at a dive bar while your fellow patrons trade tales and maybe punches. There’s the murderer-for-hire Roachkiller of the eponymous story by Rafael Narvaez, fresh out of prison and doing everything he can to keep his loyal grandmother safe. There’s Aunt Ivy in Scott Phillips’ “The Emerson, 1950,” on a crazed hunt to see her dead-and-buried cat one last time and get back the candlesticks her neighbors stole.

But the most haunting character is Vivian in Harry Hunsicker’s story “Vivian and Bobby Ray,” who suffers from apotemnophilia, the medical term for a person with a fetish for being an amputee. She and her companion Bobby Ray burgle convenience stores and bars to pay for her surgery; in the meantime, she simulates the impending amputation as best she can: “‘We got three thousand and twenty-seven dollars,’ Vivian said. She was on the bed, naked, with her left leg bound again, calf to thigh. Light from the ancient Magnavox that they’d bought from the pawn shop next door flickered across the room, the sound down low. Oprah was on, talking to some fat chick with orange hair.”

—Marianne Amoss Murdaland is printed once or twice a year.

For a listing of where you can buy the journal, go to www.murdalandmagazine.com.

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art/culture

Let’s Get Lost

Pondering the art of finding our way at the Walters’ “Maps” exhibition

courtesy of the Newberry Library

B y gr e g hanscom

Above: Inuit kayakers once used this carving to navigate the coast of Greenland.

“ Where are we going?”

It was an unsettling question, coming as it was from the driver of the vehicle in which I was riding. I was sitting in the backseat of a Jeep, hurtling through West Baltimore en route to a park along the Gwynns Falls. Or so I thought. “I thought you knew,” said the driver’s girlfriend, sitting in the passenger seat, fiddling with her handheld satellite navigation unit. What followed was a hair-raising dodge-andweave as we tacked generally west (the direction I was pretty sure the Gwynns Falls lay) while the girlfriend searched madly for the address of the park.

In the end, we did the unthinkable: We consulted a map—the kind printed on paper. We found an intersection that was a block from our destination, plugged it into the navigator, and the robot did the rest. The day was saved.

Satellite navigation systems, fast becoming standard dashboard equipment, may be the logical end point of cartographic evolution in our automotive society. Maps have become little more than a means of finding our way from one place to the next in our cars—so much so that “a road map very likely is what most Americans mean when they use the word map,” writes historian James R. Akerman

in the book Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, which accompanies the exhibit of the same name at the Walters Art Museum. Satellite navigation systems take this to the next level by dispensing with the paper map altogether. You just drive, and the computer tells you what to do next. No need to know where you are—just where you need to be.

For a map freak such as myself, contemplating the disappearance of maps from our everyday lives is a little depressing. But then, once we free maps of the duty of leading us around the nation’s highways and byways, we might just remember that great maps tell us far more than where we are and where we’re headed.

For proof, go no farther than the Walters show, the long-awaited sequel to the Baltimore Museum of Art’s great 1952 exhibition “The World Encompassed.” The show, a collaboration with Chicago’s Field Museum and Newberry Library, includes a rubbing of a stone-carved map of Mount Hua that dates from Ming dynasty China; three maps created by Leonardo da Vinci on loan from Queen Elizabeth II (“Bless her cotton socks,” says Will Noel, the Walters’ U.K.-born maps curator.); and John Mitchell’s 1755 map of the British and French land claims in North 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 8

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art/culture art On Your Mark

courtesy of the Newberry Library

“Notes on Monumentality” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, through May 25 “Baltimore Ink: Patterns on Bodies” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, May 31

Wrong turn: A 1905 Photo-Auto Guide gives turn-by-turn driving directions.

America, which was used in the Treaty of Paris to negotiate boundaries for the newly established United States; just to name a few.

The most interesting maps in the exhibit are not necessarily the most beautiful. Instead, they’re the ones that will get you lost in great stories. A map of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition across North America, made by Clark himself in 1811, chronicles their epic tale of exploration.

It charts the Indian tribes the party met along the way, as well as rivers, lakes, and hot springs, and the mountains that made their journey so difficult.

There’s a copy of William Smith’s 1815 map of the geologic strata underlying England and Wales.

By tracing the patterns of bedrock and fossils, Smith showed that the earth had developed over millions of years. His work provided the timetable that, a few decades later, would buoy up Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

“In terms of finding our place in the world, this one probably takes the biscuit,” says Noel.

The exhibit also includes a map of a London neighborhood created by physician John Snow in 1855. The map shows a cluster of black rectangles— coffins, representing people killed by cholera. Working against conventional wisdom that held that the disease spread through “miasma,” or bad air, Snow showed that the outbreak was clustered around a water pump. The pump was shut down, the disease was stopped in its tracks, and epidemiology took a giant leap forward.

Another aspect that sets this exhibit apart is its effort to “stretch your idea of ‘mapness,’” to quote

historian Robert W. Karrow Jr. in the accompanying book. An Inuit carving used by sea-going kayakers to navigate the coast of Greenland will make you want to break the case so you can run your fingers over its polished wood surface. Cosmological diagrams chart the spiritual worlds of Buddhists and Hindus. And then there are maps of imaginary worlds, including a sketch J.R.R. Tolkien made of Thror’s Map of the Lonely Mountain, and renderings of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz. A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood is here, too, replete with Piglet’s House, Eeyore’s Gloomy Place, and Where the Woozle Wasn’t.

And if that’s not enough to convince you that Noel and his collaborators had a twinkle in their eyes when they created this show, there’s one last item I’ll mention. It’s two pages from H. Sargent Michaels’ 1905 Photo-Auto Guide that illustrate, with photographs and arrows, the route from Chicago to Rockford, Illinois. The turn-by-turn directions are, in principle, exactly the same as today’s dashboardmounted satellite navigation systems. “Ten years ago, it would have been cute,” says Noel. “Today, it’s MapQuest.” ■

“Maps: Finding Our Place in the World” will be on exhibit through June 8. For information on this and the rest of the city-wide Festival of Maps, go to www.thewalters.org and click on the Maps icon.

“I am interested in monuments as a kind of urban decoration,” says Mark Alice Durant, guest curator for the Baltimore Museum of Art’s experimental rotating exhibition space, Front Room.

Durant’s exhibition, “Notes on Monumentality,” features the work of twenty-two artists spanning various media and time periods, two-thirds of which were plucked directly from the vaults of the BMA’s permanent collection. “It was a great opportunity to present works trans-historically,” says Durant, “so we can see how attitudes towards the monumental shift and change depending on the culture’s attitude towards its history.”

Baltimore artist Deirtra Thompson’s video Monument features grainy black-and-white footage of cheerleaders. Only one minute in length and playing on a loop, the video shows members of the squad lifted into the air over and over again in an endless choreographed routine that becomes, as Durant puts it, “everything that a monument is not—ephemeral, flickering, and insubstantial.” Thompson’s video from 2006 is juxtaposed with more historical and literal odes to the monument, as in Philip Galle’s fanciful 16th century engravings of ancient statuary. On view until May 25, “Notes on Monumentality” re-contextualizes notions of the monument, a nice complement to the nickname John Quincy Adams bestowed upon Baltimore—“the Monumental City.”

If you’re looking for an edgier urban decoration, don’t miss the BMA’s special event “Baltimore Ink: Patterns on Bodies,” presented in conjunction with the last installment of “Meditations on African Art: Pattern.” “We wanted to tie the historical perspective of patterning on the body with one that was contemporary,” says BMA deputy director of education Anne Manning, who helped organize the Baltimore Ink event.

On the evening of May 31, tattoo artists, authors, and the editor of Skin & Ink magazine will lead a discussion on tattoo culture, culminating in a runway show and after-party that will be sure to shed new light on the role of body adornment and pattern in contemporary society.

—Ding Ren

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books Return of the Native

art/culture

illustration by Ellen Forney

by susan mccallum-smith

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, 2008) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown and Company, 2007) The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins (Simon & Schuster, 2007)

B

efore the Europeans arrived, it was said that if you knelt and placed your ear against the soil of the North American West, you would hear the buffalo herds on their migrations across the plains of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota, and Minnesota. In 1885, Louis Riel, a charismatic but possibly loopy Canadian rebel, led a failed uprising to secure an independent Michif nation encompassing this territory, for his people, the Métis, descendents of marriages between native tribes and French, Scottish, and English explorers and trappers. After his capture, Riel was executed for high treason by the Canadian government.

More than one hundred and thirty years later, the spirit of Riel and the thwarted aspirations of indigenous North Americans haunt the small town of Pluto, North Dakota, the setting of The Plague of Doves, the new novel by Louise Erdrich.

In 1911, members of a local white family are discovered murdered in their homestead, and Pluto’s townspeople, blinded by revenge, lynch several Indians innocent of the crime. Over the years, whites and Métis and Ojibwe from the neighboring reservation met, and mixed, and married; now, the town’s present-day descendents are a tangled blend of the perpetrators and victims of these long-ago crimes.

Erdrich is a respected and worthy chronicler of the everyday lives of the First Nations and the Métis. In her clear, sensual, story-within-a-story style, she unravels these tragic lineages via many voices, through “tales of extravagant encounter”: a brokenhearted man who drowns himself in two feet of water; a woman who is transformed by her kidnapping; a snake-handler who uses her gifts to outwit a cult run by her charismatic Métis husband, reminiscent

of the prophesizing Riel; and Evelina, named for Riel’s first love, whose grandfather, the adorable old rascal, Mooshum, had witnessed the events of 1911.

“Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood,” comments the local judge about Pluto’s history.

Despite the town’s decline, hope survives in Pluto, though it’s in short supply on the Spokane Indian reservation that serves as the setting for Sherman Alexie’s terrific young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, where his punchy style is superbly complemented by Ellen Forney’s illustrations.

Fourteen-year-old Junior suffers more than his fair share of disadvantages. Other kids on the “rez” call him “Globe” and “Orbit” because of his enlarged skull—a physical deformity caused by an infant illness. He also suffers seizures and has an undernourished frame and eyesight requiring thick plastic Indian Health Service-issued glasses.

Isosceles triangles, however, make Junior “feel hormonal,” and his humor and curiosity blossom in his cartooning, which helps him navigate the reefs of alcoholism, poverty, and despair on the rez: “I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats,” he says.

A teacher, recognizing Junior’s potential, tells him to leave as soon as he can. “Son,” he says, “you’re going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation.” Junior takes his advice and transfers to the nearest “white” school, risking not just the wrath of his community, but also that of Rowdy, his one and only friend, with whom, Junior has calculated, he’s spent, like, forty thousand hours.

“What was I doing at Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, making me the only other Indian in town?” Junior asks of his new school. “I didn’t deserve to be there. I knew it; all of those kids knew it.

Indians don’t deserve shit.” Sometimes his parents remember to pick him up, sometimes they forget, and sometimes they can’t afford the gas, so Junior hitches or walks the twenty-two miles home at the end of each day. Life improves once he meets Gordy, a geek who gets boners from reading. “Well, I don’t mean boner in the sexual sense,” Gordy clarifies. “But you should approach each book—you should approach life—with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.” (I like this kid.)

Knock-you-down-ain’t-never-getting-up tragic things happen to Junior, but he has Heart (worthy of a capital H), parents who love him, and, most of all, Hope. Alexie doesn’t sugarcoat the spiral of lethargy and addiction endemic to many First Nation reservations simply because the book is aimed at a teenage audience. The Part-Time Diary is a refreshing anecdote to all those schmaltzy clichés about needing only to look inside ourselves to be free. Bullshit, responds Alexie; sometimes the answer is to run away as far and as fast as you can.

Alexie’s book provides a blunt reminder of the modern reality of indigenous life compared to our romanticized image of the “noble savage” whose beautiful Hopi pots and Navajo rugs we covet (OK, I covet), and whose wise, enigmatic features we imagine, based, most likely, on the photographs of one man, Edward S. Curtis.

“They are beautiful to look at. But they’re lies,” says Marianne, the protagonist of Marianne Wiggins’ astonishing novel, The Shadow Catcher, a fictionalized account of a Curtis biographer and of Curtis’ relationship with his wife, Clara. “They’re propaganda … bought and paid for by Big Business.” Marianne sits in a Los Angeles restaurant with movie executives anxious both to option her Curtis biography and to airbrush out any complexity that contradicts his enduring image as the dashing, empathetic chronicler of a threatened people.

By big business, Marianne stresses to her unresponsive lunch dates, she means J.P. Morgan and Union Pacific, the same railroad that bulldozed indigenous land. And although Curtis’ photographs, with those beautiful sepia tones and atmospheric teepees, look as if they were taken in the mid-1800s, they are, in fact, artifacts of the early 20th century.

Curtis paid a fee to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to work inside the reservations “after they’d all been neutralized, confined in high-security encampments … deprived of their livelihoods, forced into the manufacture of ‘Indian-ized’ tourist junk, their children forcibly assimilated into Christian schools.”

The Shadow Catcher dips into stories about Curtis’ wife Clara and her erstwhile husband, Edward, and although these sections are intriguing, it is in the modern-day meditations of Marianne that Wiggins’ writing swoops, hurtles, and shines. Marianne composes a hymn to the American road and the myth of the West: “the great promise … that if we load the TV in the truck and move just three states over we can start anew.”

She ponders the blasé ironies caused by our disassociation from our ancestors’ complicity in the subjugation of Native Americans. “The American road is an Indian nation,” she writes. “FIREBIRD. CHEROKEE. MUSTANG. WINNEBAGO. Is there any other country in the world that appropriates the names of clans for cars?”

At several stages, Marianne attempts to classify the sound of America, deciding at one point that it’s the sound of a train, “the siren’s sound of the iron road, a haunting whistle.” But in the final pages of this remarkable book, she reconsiders and reaches a more fitting conclusion: “Before the Train, the grasslands teemed with herds of buffalo so thick and mythic in their numbers it was said that when they ran they ran as thunder raining on the earth … maybe that’s the sound I think I hear inside a train, the sound of animals, a sound the living earth once made, a plaint, the sound of history’s demand to be remembered.” ■ 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 8

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Through a Glass, Darkly continued from page 51

and blood-stained tale of a hotly pursued mob snitch—before cooling their heels at the apartment.

The quartet followed the Sowers beating with a weeklong crime spree.

Eric, acting in concert with Ramos, held a gun to the head of Martin’s nextdoor neighbor and stole her purse with $300 inside. Three days after that, around the corner on Fagley Street, Jeter and Martin pistol-whipped a tattoo artist whom Martin had ostensibly hired, stealing $200, a cell phone, and tattoo equipment.

By the end of the week, detectives in Baltimore County had tracked down the car seen in gas station videotapes, locating it outside the Dundalk apartment. A search warrant served in the building led to the discovery of Zach Sowers’ watch and wallet, along with a backpack of tattoo equipment. City police brought each of the defendants in for questioning.

“Some were remorseful, but others had no emotion at all,” says city robbery detective Phil Lassahn, one of several investigators who cracked the Sowers case. “And I found that strange.” Ramos laughed upon hearing Martin’s first name and denied any involvement in the beating or knowledge of the other suspects.

Earlier, in an interview room, Lassahn showed the other three pictures of Zach Sowers’ bloodied, swollen head. They confessed to being there, adding that Ramos, whom they called “Blue,” had done the beating, which Eric labeled a “scraping.” Eric was the first to finger Ramos. “He just got a problem,” he told Lassahn. “He’s violent.”

for years, a multitude of charities,

city and state agencies, university researchers, foundations, and facets of the justice system have studied conditions in neighborhoods like the ones in which Eric Price and his three accomplices grew up. Ostensible solutions to violence among the young have been tried, tested, and dumped because of lack of funding or written off as ineffective as arrests and acts of violence have piled up. For those whose job it is to search for solutions—to reach the Erics and Trayvons and save those whom they might injure or kill—there is a massive sample to work with.

Last year, more than eight thousand juveniles were detained or arrested in Baltimore City, most often for assault or drug charges. More than 90 percent were black and eight in ten were male. In a given year, dozens are charged with crimes as adults, usually for more serious offenses. As with Eric Price, the roles of victim and perpetrator can almost seem interchangeable at times—a victim later victimizes others. Baltimore children are eight times more likely to die from homicide as are kids nationwide, with black kids six times more likely to be murdered here than white children, according to a study released in February by the city health department. From 2002 to March of this year, 172 city teens 18 or younger were victims of homicide, and hundreds of others had been shot.

Violence can come to the fore all too quickly in the young and poor.

“Ethnographic studies show that many urban young men believe you have to be willing to be violent to be a man,” says Daniel Webster, associate director for research at the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. Those trends reach down into the world of juveniles—and often beyond the city’s drug economy. In a surprising number of instances, kids go at each other for petty things—misheard conversations, somebody eyeing someone else’s girlfriend, a battle on the basketball court.

At the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, academics practice a multi-faceted approach that involves helping public agencies develop policies geared toward reaching kids and young adults who are more likely to become violent, or to be in harm’s way. Webster and others are evaluating the effectiveness of Operation Safe Kids, a city-run program designed to help identify high-risk youth who have committed offenses common among homicide victims and offenders, including ones involving guns, drug dealing, and violence. The evaluation will determine whether the fiveyear-old program reduces the numbers and types of offenses committed by its 100 teenagers, and whether it could become a model for a larger program here or elsewhere.

Such programs are part of a relatively new wave of strategies to defuse youth violence—ones that reflect a fatigue many researchers have when

dealing with the politics of the issue. “So much of what is done currently, whether it is on the law enforcement/criminal justice side of things or the prevention side of things, are politically expedient ‘strategies’ that don’t work,” says Webster. “We need smart, evidence-based criminal justice policies and smart, evidence-based early prevention and rehabilitation.”

Webster and others hope that a study now being performed jointly by the city, state, and Hopkins’ School of Public Health might offer more insight into who might become violent and why—and how agencies can intervene before a young person becomes either a source or a victim of violence. Informally called the “youth trajectories project,” the study taps a state law that allows the health department to collect information from the police, the school system, and state social services and juvenile services departments on kids who might be at risk of ending up on either end of violent situations.

Several indicators, such as early truancy and abuse and neglect in the home, have already been used to predict behavior. A preliminary (and not yet confirmed) analysis shows that two in three victims of violence in Baltimore have had criminal histories, says Caroline Fichtenberg, chief epidemiologist with the city health department and a research scientist at the School of Public Health. Fichtenberg’s task is to collect data on five hundred homicide and shooting victims who were attacked from 2002 to 2007, as well as 140 perpetrators, then compare the data with that of the general youth population. Upon being presented with the results, health officials could look for red flags common among victims and violent youths, then develop a way to find and target at-risk kids and create a “toolkit” of services for them.

“If we can find potentially violent kids earlier, like after one instance, we can point them toward a wider array of services,” including a combination of educational help and mental health and substance abuse counseling, says Fichtenberg. “If the city knows who is at highest risk early enough in their lives, there is a much higher likelihood that services and programs might be effective.”

The results of that project, due to be published this summer, could help find kids like Eric Price—a teen with a history of behavioral problems, lead poisoning, truancy, and victimization, but who still ended up under the radar.

anna knew something was wrong after

not hearing from Zach for over sixteen hours. She rushed home on the Saturday after the attack. By Sunday, cops and friends had put two and two together. The unidentified man found beaten into silence was a “John Doe” case at Johns Hopkins Hospital. At first, Anna walked right by his hospital room after glancing in—she couldn’t recognize him.

As police rounded up the quartet of suspects, Anna couldn’t believe that these four youths could be angry enough to do this to her husband.

“They reminded me of some of the kids on The Wire,” she says.

She also pledged that the assailants would somehow come to pay for what they did.

The public role of the wife seeking justice was at first thrust upon her, as people sent along prayers and wishes to the website—www.zachsowers. com—that friends had set up. Friends also sold T-shirts decorated with the image of a thin man spinning records, an homage to Zach as well as a way to help pay for his staggering medical bills. Anna, her friends, and bar and restaurant owners in Canton and elsewhere held “neighbors’ night out” events to raise money and the awareness of crime.

But as the months dragged on and Zach’s condition went through several cycles of worsening and stabilizing, Anna became “activized.” The photogenic, 28-year-old Asian-American woman morphed from victim to crusader, out to turn the crime that silenced her husband into a call for change. While she says she supports finding public-health interventions that help stop people before they hurt someone, the focus of her efforts is on the sentencing side: When juveniles commit violent crimes, they need to be subject to laws with teeth, and punishments that fit the horrifying nature of the crime, like the one four teens inflicted upon her husband. “I want criminals to think twice before they kick the shit out of someone,” she says.

Anna and her aides-de-camp wrote letters to newspapers and sought out public officials for meetings, some of which became tense and pointed.

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Jessamy, the city state’s attorney, to strengthen her approach toward prosecution—without much success in both cases, she says.

Prosecutors say they had solid reasons for pursuing the plea deal that left three of the four Sowers assailants eligible for parole in four years.

Among other wounds, Sowers incurred something doctors call “diffuse axonal injury” in his brain, the result of microscopic damage to nerves. Magnetic resonance images revealed no blotches of deadened neural activity in the brain to point to, no medical “smoking gun” that would sway a jury.

What’s more, the neighbor who reported the crime couldn’t pick Ramos out of a police lineup, and police lifted only one Ramos fingerprint from the roof of the Sentra. Prosecutors say that an attempted murder charge against Ramos could have petered out in a jury room.

But the deal deprived Anna Sowers of the full jury trial she dearly hoped for. “I wanted to make sure my voice was heard,” she says. “At the very least I wanted a judge and jury to hear what they’d done to him.”

Instead, Anna could only make a victim impact statement in court last December during a sentencing hearing, after the plea deal was accepted.

Screaming at the four defendants through tears, she called them “monsters.” One of the parents walked out, to Anna’s consternation. “I wasn’t nice,” she says defiantly.

Four months after the sentencing, the full implications of the plea deal became clear: Even though Zach Sowers died from his injuries, none of his assailants can be tried for murder.

Public outrage over the sentences—coupled with rising 2007 homicide rates and a city gripped with fresh unease over crime and safety—fueled interest in the case. On www.zachsowers.com, Anna has received messages of support from across the country. Talk show hosts and columnists thumping agendas on swift justice and stronger sentences frequently referenced the Sowers case, often asking Anna for thoughts on the court system. A lawyer in Towson took up a civil suit against the four attackers, unsolicited and pro bono.

Anna’s campaign included working to convince the state legislature and Governor Martin O’Malley’s office to enact a “Zach’s Law.” As yet undefined, the law could involve anything from making juvenile criminal records public to enabling prosecutors to hold parents accountable for their children’s crimes. Or it could become part of laws designed to guarantee the impartiality of jurors in places like Baltimore, where a fear of payback and a distrust of police can taint cases. Or it could allow prosecutors to slap murder charges on defendants who put their victims into comas.

Researchers who study youth violence are skeptical that making stronger laws against juveniles who maim or murder tougher, or treating them as adults in the court system, would be effective at deterring juvenile crime.

Indeed, harsher sentencing may only serve to create ex-offenders who, when they eventually return to the community after incarceration, are even more dangerous. “There have been numerous studies of policies to transfer juvenile offenders into adult systems,” says Webster. “Unequivocally, this has had harmful effects on the juveniles transferred. They are targeted for sexual and other violence in the prisons, get little help or rehabilitation, and re-offend at higher rates than otherwise similar youth who have not been transferred [to the adult justice system].”

Beyond their call for get-tough legislation, Anna and her allies have also sought other ways of addressing crime in Baltimore, courting local African American leaders—a group they dubbed the “Black TwentyFive”—in hopes of encouraging them to speak up against violence and the “stop-snitching” mentality that has silenced witnesses and hamstrung the courts. Among others, Kweisi Mfume, the former congressman and NAACP president, has expressed sympathy for her and her positions, Anna says.

But people aren’t exactly jumping on the Black Twenty-Five bandwagon.

The reasons have a lot to do with the breach in race and class that defines this city—and the conflicting views on whether we should try to reach kids before they go wrong, or spend more energy and money locking them up earlier and for longer.

Several black leaders contacted by Sowers and her confidants have bristled at suggestions that the African American community doesn’t already have a regular conversation about violence. The vast bulk of the city’s victims are black, they point out. “I’ve been going to vigils for thirty years,” says Melvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the NAACP’s Baltimore chapter.

Cheatham sat with Sowers during several court hearings to offer support.

“Some years, there are seventy to eighty [vigils]. People who get involved with this issue anew do it because something happened to them, but there’s nothing new about it all. I understand her passion about this and I’m glad she’s getting some attention paid to the issue, but you can’t put African Americans on a guilt trip about this and expect them to join you.”

Others continue to talk with Anna Sowers to see if there is a common cause—some concrete steps—they can take up together. Heber Brown, a Baptist minister and first vice president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a powerful group of metropolitan religious leaders, suggested that she and her collaborators “traffic a bit in black Baltimore,” he says.

“I got a sense they didn’t have a lot of contact with people in the street.”

He also suggested they work with the family of Isaiah Simmons, a black 17-year-old who was killed while being held at a juvenile facility in Carroll County. But once Anna found out that Simmons had once been arrested for armed robbery, she refused to get involved with Simmons’ family. “That’s what happened to Zach,” she says.

Although he understands her reluctance, Brown saw the meeting as a way for Sowers to bridge the gap. “There is a bit of a disconnect there,” he says. “I appreciate her strength, but if all it took for crime to stop was to take twenty-five black leaders and have them say, ‘Stop it!,’ it would have happened ages ago.”

in the state penitentiary in hagerstown,

Eric Price is in lockdown twenty-three hours a day for his own protection, his mother says. Sometime between his first statement to police in June and another in November, Eric said, Ramos and others singled him out for naming names. He was a snitch, in other words, and was paying the price for violating the code.

Back home in East Baltimore, Latricia Reed worries about the safety of her other children. In addition to the people who would punish her family because of her son’s willingness to testify against a co-defendant, Reed is afraid of those who have vilified them because of her son’s crime. Since Zach Sowers’ death in March, the phone rings. Sometimes, people leave threatening messages.

She had been a good parent, she says. She lost her jobs while gathering documents that she hoped would keep Eric from prison. “My other kids did well without a father, so it ain’t that. I tried to lock him in the house for his own good. The influences the kids got out here now, the peer pressure they’re under is incredible. Everybody wants to be bigger than what they are,” she says before shaking her head. “I don’t know what it is.”

A few blocks away, Anna Sowers will work to finish up her MBA at the Carey School this summer. Several friends moved away shortly after the incident, including Bobby Byrd, who fled south to the suburbs. Her brother left Canton to return to Frederick. “I hated living there,” Will Cheng says.

“I just needed to leave so bad.” He’d like to persuade his sister to get out of town, but for now Anna lives in the same house she shared with Zach, taking classes in krav maga, an Israeli form of self-defense, and raising funds for the Zach Sowers Brain Trauma Research Fund, which was recently formed at Johns Hopkins. She has already begun to distance herself a bit from some of the thornier aspects of her advocacy, including the concept of the Black Twenty-Five. “There are others who will keep it going,” she says.

Zach, who was due to get his MS in information technology from Carey this summer, had made plans with Anna for after graduation—plans she will honor as faithfully as the act of wearing Zach’s wedding ring on a string around her neck. Baltimore was never going to be a part of their future. “We were looking to live in other cities, like San Francisco,” Anna says. After taking her degree, she’ll search for work while applying to law schools—a notion that appealed to her only after dealing with a justice system that has been so ineffective. Perhaps, she reasons, she can improve it from the inside.

“I’ve decided to see where fate will take me,” she says. She thinks about the freeness of her college years, thinks she can be happy again. “I look forward to going someplace where no one knows who Anna Sowers is, where I can start over.” ■

—Michael Anft is a senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine and a frequent contributor to Urbanite.

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Raising Oliver continued from page 63 “BUILD is a dirty word,” says Pully, the career firefighter who is now president of the decades-old Oliver Community Association. “They’re from the outside.”

Some residents have come to distrust even the local ministers. In the words of one, “They say they doin’ it in the name of God. They doin’ it in the name of that almighty dollar.”

Community Association Executive Director Nina Harper insists that her organization and BUILD are partners in “one effort.” But she acknowledges that her membership would like to see resources go to the northeastern corner of the neighborhood—farther from the biotech park—where the majority of the remaining residents live. In 2002, the Oliver Economic Development Corporation, which Harper also directs, renovated six houses on North Caroline Street. The Community Association is now working on its own redevelopment plan for the neighborhood—a plan that is much slower moving than BUILD’s and seems more closely tied to the dreams of the community’s older residents.

“There is a heart in Oliver, and that heart is pumping,” says Mary Cooper, an active member of the community association who lives in the neighborhood with her daughter—not far from her own mother, longtime resident Mary Ballard. “We know how it was, and how it could be again. We would like to bring this community back to its glory.”

Rev. Keene understands that by joining BUILD, he broke ranks with the community association—his mother helped found the association and was its president for two decades. The community association is tied to the East Baltimore political establishment, he says, while BUILD has roots on the west side, and takes a citywide approach that makes some residents uncomfortable. “There are people who are married to the community association, and that’s fine. There are so many things that they do well,” says Keene. “But they receive their funding from the city, and so they kind of have to work within the city’s plan of action. Whereas at BUILD, we make our own plan.”

Recent research lends credibility to locals’ concerns about the New Oliver development, however. History has shown that clearing out large chunks of a neighborhood can shake the community and send shockwaves through sur-

rounding neighborhoods, says Mindy Fullilove, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University who wrote the 2005 book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It. “If you have good design and you rebuild quickly, you can head off the damage,” she says. But more often than not, new development contrasts with the old, she says, creating a fault line that makes the old residents feel unwelcome, and ultimately destabilizes the community.

“You have to work at multiple levels of scale,” says Fullilove. “On the block level, you have to do infill and help people work together. On the neighborhood level, you have to reconnect neighborhoods across borders. At the level of the city, you have to stabilize the underlying causes—in Baltimore, the city has to be working on the problem of jobs.”

BUILD tries to do that, with tireless community organizing and after-school and summer-job programs for city youth. The Oliver Community Association also works on multiple fronts, fighting crime and putting parolees to work picking up trash. And in generous moments, BUILD’s critics acknowledge that there’s room for many approaches in Oliver. “We all want to see Oliver revitalized; we just disagree on how you go about doing it,” says Pully. But within that disagreement is a paradox: In Oliver, one group is trying to recreate a glorified past. The other is trying to build on a future that has not yet arrived.

on a windy winter afternoon on east preston

Street, Hopkins seems a long way off through the fog. But on the corner of Patterson and Eden streets, the old Dawson rowhouse rings with the voices of children.

After the fire, Rev. Dr. Iris Tucker, then at Knox Presbyterian, held an afterschool program to help Oliver kids cope with the horror of living in a neighborhood where a family could be burned to death for speaking out against the drug trade.

A Friday afternoon pizza party turned into a weekly gathering sponsored by the churches, the elementary school, and the police, she says. The city set up spotlights in the street in front of the Dawson house, lighting up the late-autumn evenings so that children felt safe playing hopscotch. The kids drew pictures and wrote the Dawson children’s names on the sidewalk. “They did a lot of things to keep those children’s memories alive,” says Tucker. “I believe it was very therapeutic.”

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Tucker began talking with Mayor O’Malley and other city and state officials about turning the house into a sanctuary for neighborhood kids. They understood just how deep the problems in Oliver ran: News stories referred to arsonist Darrell Brooks simply as “a drug dealer,” but he was also a neighborhood kid; he lived across Eden Street from the Dawsons.

The rowhouse was renovated with city and state funding, and the Dawson Family Safe Haven Center opened last March. Each weekday afternoon, knots of kids walk from nearby elementary schools to the center to practice computer skills and do homework. On Tuesdays, there are Spanish classes; on Thursdays, photography lessons. Today is Wednesday, game day, but before letting them loose in the computer lab, Raschid Smith, one of the center’s program coordinators, asks each to do a report for Black History Month. Asked about her report, an 11-year-old girl eagerly reads aloud from a webpage about ophthalmologist Patricia Bath. The boy sitting next to her researches the famous Hopkins pediatric neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson.

Across the room, a boy who has finished his report plays a game called “Pimp My Ride,” pasting flaming orange quarter panels on a Corvette.

The walls of the Dawson Center are decorated with portraits of upstanding citizens with ties to Baltimore—Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, UMBC basketball star Keith Booth, Congressman Elijah Cummings—alongside biographies written by the children. Center Director Pam Carter wants to give these kids the sense that they have options—that sense that Mary Ballard, Lawrence Pully, and Rev. Keene remember from the 1950s and ’60s. She wants to create a “Dawson Annex” in the nearby Oliver Multipurpose Building, where teenagers can learn construction skills and culinary arts.

In the center’s stairway, another portrait hangs on the wall, this one of Angela Dawson. She looks like a formidable woman. Dawson had another daughter, Kisha, who was 16 at the time of the fire and not living at home.

Carter says Kisha came by on opening day. Her two young children fingerpainted while she walked the house, recalling whose bedroom was where.

Have things in Oliver improved since the fire? “It’s better,” Carter says, measuring her words, “but we still need some help.” She gestures out the front window to the blue light that flashes over a police camera on the far side of Preston Street. “They sold more drugs under that camera than they

did before the police put it up,” she says. “They smart. They know nobody’s watching that camera.”

Still, she says the drug dealers treat the Dawson Center with respect. They even usher the kids safely across the street when they arrive after school.

it ’ s four o ’ clock on a friday afternoon,

and around the city, people are hitting the roads, hoping to get out of town ahead of the rush hour traffic. Like a great heart, the city is pumping its people out.

Watching the traffic on Preston Street are three men sitting on a dirty marble stoop. The ragtag trio peppers the air with laughter, then one of them stands and limps across the street, bending when he gets to the far curb to tie his shoelace.

Having accomplished the task, he tries to stand, but is either too inebriated or too weak to right himself. He turns back to his shoe, pretending to work on the lace.

Suddenly, a child’s voice rises above the rush of passing cars. A boy who couldn’t yet be 5 years old marches down the sidewalk, belting out the old civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” He’s singing into a cell phone, and he knows every word. His mother, beaming, pushes a baby in a stroller next to him. The young family walks by, headed west. They cross Central Avenue, then Harford, then pass out of sight.

Back on the curb, the man finally manages to rise. He turns and hobbles back across the street, dodging cars, and drops onto the stoop with his friends. The three of them collapse against the steps and have a good laugh. ■ —Greg

Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor.

Photographer Ellis Marsalis captures scenes from Oliver at www.urbanite baltimore.com.

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NEOPOL Baltimore’s ONLY smokery, specializing in smoked seafood and meats, savory cheese pies, gourmet foods, smoked seasoning salts and chef’s supplies.

Quality Custom Interior Painting, specializing in faux, decorative, Murals, painted furniture, and art.

Belvedere Square Marketplace, 529 E. Belvedere Square

“Obscuring the line between art and decorative painting”

410-433-7700

Residental/Commercial

410 • 243 • 4182

www.geministudiospainting.com

TURN A NEW PAGE WITH THE PRATT CONTEMPORARIES The Pratt Contemporaries is a new group of young and dynamic cosmopolitans who support and seek awareness of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Members receive exclusive access to Baltimore’s lively literary and social scene.

COME CHECK US OUT! For more information about membership and events contact Sharon Connell at (410) 396-5282 or sconnell@prattlibrary.org

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London’s Boutique

BCBG • BCBGirls • MAX AZRiA French Connections • BuFFALo Jeans AND MORE...

Store Hours 11AM - 6PM MON - SAT 318 CHARLES ST. BALTIMORE, MD • 21201 STORE # 410.244.1288 FAX # 410.244.1588

Acme

D E C K C O. C U S T O M B U I LT

$17 sq. ft. footers + stairs priced separately

(410) 440-0330 by: www.VolatileProperties.com

The sex toy store you’ve been waiting for!

Where sex is celebrated and everyone is welcome.

Distinctive Homes and Additions

927 W. 36th Street, Hampden We are near the corner of 36th and Roland. The entrance is in the parking lot off Roland, under Sprout. Look for the red awning!

Designed and Built One at a Time.

410.559.0000 x121 www.AshleyHomes.com MHBR No: 126

EHO

410.467.2632 www.sugartheshop.com

MHIC No: 39601

al! rb appe y your cu Increase ecial 10% off an d Sp Early Bir s until April 15th Service

Ayres Inc.

Certified Master Gardener Since 2000

$10 - $20 Mowing Flower/Vegetable bedding Weed and Brush removal Bulb/Plantings/Mulching Aeration/Seeding/Mowing

Marvin Ayres 410.485.2389 ayresinclandscaping@gmail.com

breathe books From Chakras to Shamans, Music to Meditation, Zafus and Zabutons—gifts, books and over 30 events a month for your mind, body and spirit. Baltimore’s only New Age bookstore!

See our classes and workshops at www.breathebooks.com.

Open: Mon - Sat 11-7 pm | Sun 12-5 pm 810 W. 36th Street | 410-235-READ

No matter who you are, no matter where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.

First United Church, UCC Worship: Sunday 10:45 am Holy Communion celebrated the first Sunday of each month www.firstuniteducc.com St. Sebastian Independent Catholic Church Mass: Sunday 4:30 pm & Wednesday 7:00 pm www.saintsebastiancatholic.com

Rev. David B.G. Flaherty: Pastor 1728 Eastern Ave., Balto., MD 21231

443.691.9800

Roastery & Retail Shop

creating i-candee

Open Tuesday thru Sunday

jewelry classes, beading circle jewelry gallery, beading parties jewelry shows and OH YEA BEADS!!!!

Fresh, locally roasted coffee, loose leaf teas and brewing accessories.

34 East Lanvale Street Baltimore, MD 21202 (443) 527-7006

www.beadalicious.biz

3003 Montebello Terrace Baltimore, MD 21214 443-992-4388 www.zekescoffee.com

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eye to eye

There is a visual poetry in this work that comes from the actual interweaving of two contrasting elements. Random or intentional, the final object conveys more than a simple juxtaposition might.

Baltimore artist Lesly Deschler Canossi has been collecting images made by photojournalists and travel photographers since she was a child. Recently, while working abroad, she was particularly provoked, as she says, “by heartbreaking images of a world in strife sandwiched between ads for oil companies, diamonds, and banks. It evoked a sense of dread, and something ruptured in me. I found myself weaving pages of news publications such as the International Herald Tribune and Italy’s L’espresso magazine. The action of weaving each publication into itself was perhaps an attempt to control what seemed out of control.”

She is in the midst of weaving all 218 pages of L’espresso and says her dream is to someday attack the New York Times Sunday edition.

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Lesly Deschler Canossi The News About Africa #2 L’espresso magazine weave 2007 Final photographic print, 20 x 24 in.

Final object weave 218 pages