May 2011

G R E E N I N G D O W N T O W N · C R A F T B R E W R E V I VA L · F I L M F E S T T I M E ! m ay 2 011 i s s u e n o. 8 3

Special section STARTUPS IN THE CITY

Queen of Arts How the director of a marble-halled museum became local artists’ fiercest champion

LAST CHANCE! CLOSES MAY 15 Generously sponsored by The Rouse Company Foundation Media sponsor City Paper Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchased as the gift of Mr. and Mrs. James S. Riepe, Sparks, Maryland, in Honor of Arnold L. Lehman, Director, 1979‑1997, BMA 1999.535. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

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6 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

this month

#83 May 2011

features 32

departments 53

11

The Great Appreciator

about the cover: Illustration by Peter Yuill

9 13

by Michael Yockel Doreen Bolger wants to save the Baltimore Museum of Art and win some respect for local artists. Can she do both at the same time?

17 19

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

—— baltimore observed 23 Greening Downtown

by Brennen Jensen Can we tear out buildings to make way for parks?

25 Urbanite Online 27 Urbanite Project 29 Voices

—— fiction 49 This Woman

by Christine Grillo

—— 61

food + drink

39

57 Hip Hops

by Brennen Jensen Baltimore’s craft beer revival

Press Start web extras

more online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com Cara Ober on Baltimore: Open City A conversation with “gypsy brewer” Brian Strumke

on the air

Urbanite on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 fm May 18: Daniel D’Oca and Tracy Ward on Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge May 24: Doreen Bolger on the state of the arts in Baltimore Podcast: Sam Holmes and Fanon Hill on the Black Male Identity Project: bit.ly/blackmaleidentity

by Christianna McCausland The Baltimore region has everything it needs to be an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Here’s why it isn’t—and what we can do about it.

53 The Missing Piece

by Deborah K. Dietsch The Fitzgerald mends a hole in the urban fabric.

——

cents

space

61 Dining Reviews 63 Wine & Spirits

—— 23

arts + culture 65 The Power of Pictures

by Donna M. Owens A bold community arts initiative tackles the persistent stereotypes of black boys and men.

67 Music 69 Film 69 Theater

—— 71 The Scene —— 78 Eye to Eye Urbanite #83 may 2011 7

DiD you know that:

issue 83: may 2011 publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com

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

general manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-in-chief Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com assistant editor Rebecca Messner Rebecca@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-at-large David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com online editors food/drink: Tracey Middlekauff Tracey@urbanitebaltimore.com arts/culture: Cara Ober Cara@urbanitebaltimore.com

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

proofreader Marianne Amoss contributing writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Heather Dewar, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Michelle Gienow, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Robin T. Reid, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac editorial interns Elizabeth Cole, Breena Siegel art director Peter Yuill production manager Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com staff photographer J.M. Giordano Joe@urbanitebaltimore.com

You are invited to attend a Free Seminar: “Aging grAceFullY” on Thursday, May 12, 6p.m.

Space limited. First time attendees only, please. rSVP: 410.486.3400

production interns Angela Ahn, Amie Bingaman, Elizabeth Cole, Ed Gallagher

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

senior account executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Amy Sicard Amy@urbanitebaltimore.com account executive Joe McMonagle JoeM@urbanitebaltimore.com advertising sales/events coordinator Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com advertising/sales/marketing interns Alex Braslavsky, Maggie Pringle

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

jane of some trades Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com creative director emeritus Alex Castro founder Laurel Harris Durenberger —

410.486.3400 | 1.800.847.0296 1838 Greene Tree roAD, SuITe 370 | BAlTIMore, MD 21208 FOUNDRY MED SPA & LASER CENTER AT STUDIO 921 921 E. FORT AVENUE, FEDERAL HILL/LOCUST POINT, FREE PARKING 410-783-7727

www.FACIAl-PlASTICSurGery.CoM 8 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, md 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily share 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 2011, Urbanite llc. All rights reserved.

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

Urbanite is a certified Minority Business Enterprise.

bottom photo by AKW; top photo BY Amie Bingaman; photo of greg hanscom by j.m. giordano

contributors

editor’s note

Deborah K. Dietsch is a freelance writer who specializes in covering architecture, art, and design. She is currently writing the script for a film on the midcentury modernist architect Victor Lundy. Trained as an architect, Dietsch is a former member of Baltimore’s Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel. “The Right Side of the Tracks” (p. 53); about the new mixed-use development called the Fitzgerald, is her first story for Urbanite. “Serving on UDARP put me in touch with all the new development in the city,” she says. “I noticed the Fitzgerald being completed while driving on I-83. Its contemporary design is a refreshing change from all the brick architecture in Baltimore.”

Donna M. Owens is an award-winning print, television, radio, and web journalist who has written for such publications as O, the Oprah Magazine; the Miami Herald; the Chicago Tribune; and the Baltimore Sun; and NPR, AOL, and MSNBC.com. A native Baltimorean, she’s worked as a producer and investigative reporter for CBS and NBC television stations nationwide.

In “The Power of Pictures” (p. 65), Owens, who has often covered diversity issues, writes about a pioneering community arts project that seeks to shatter the stereotypes of black boys and men. “One day, I hope we won’t need campaigns to remind people that African American men are among the many diverse groups who helped build this country and continue to contribute in their workplaces, churches, and communities,” she says.

Greg Hanscom

on an early spring evening, warm light spilled from the open door of a gallery in the heart of Baltimore’s Station North arts district.

People mingled on the sidewalk while inside, a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd ogled the creations of local art student and artists. Then a West Baltimore drum corps thundered through, parting the crowd with a line of spangly dancers. Wha? It was the opening night of Baltimore: Open City, an exhibition masterminded by urban designer and curator Daniel D’Oca, a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The goal: use art to open doors between neighborhoods and communities that are traditionally walled off from each other.

From all outward appearances, the exhibition seemed to be doing just that: It was a diverse crowd, at least by Baltimore standards. But one of the works in the gallery revealed that the group was not a neat crosssection of society. The work was a giant, Plexiglass puzzle, a map of the city, carved up into its two-hundred-some-odd neighborhoods. Called “Pieces of Baltimore,” it was the creation of MICA student Carey Chiaia and alum Ingrid Burrington. Over the course of the evening, a rotating cast of puzzlers cycled through, and by closing time, all of the waterfront neighborhoods had fallen into place, along with most of South Baltimore and a swath stretching north from Downtown to the county line. Much of East and West Baltimore, however, lay in unresolved ruins. The crowd apparently lacked an intimate understanding of something close to half of the city.

In this issue of Urbanite, we shine a light on the city’s creative com munity and efforts to build a diverse audience for the arts—both for art’s sake, and for the community at large. In “The Great Appreciator” (p. 32), Michael Yockel writes about Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Mu seum of Art, and her efforts to win credence for local artists while keeping the institution that she leads relevant and alive. In “The Power of Pictures” (p. 65), Donna M. Owens tells of a groundbreaking project that aims to bring the arts to those parts of Baltimore that were not well represented at the opening on North Avenue that spring night, and while doing so, help beat back some of the stereotypes that haunt black boys and men.

Urbanite has jumped into the fray as well with Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge, a collaboration with MICA, D center Baltimore, the Maryland Transportation Administration, and the Baltimore City Depart ment of Transportation. The MTA is putting up $10,000 in prize money for projects that use the construction phase of the Red Line to create a more open, inclusive city. Find more information, along with a stack of inspiring ideas, in Rebecca Messner’s story “Outside the Lines” (p. 27).

Baltimore has a long way to go if we’re going to meet the challenge put forth by the Baltimore: Open City exhibition. But the project suggests that it can be done, and that the arts have the power to push us in that direc tion if we’re willing to get out of our boxes and engage with neighbors we hardly know.

The Open City exhibition is up through May 15. To read a full review by Urbanite’s online arts and culture editor, Cara Ober, go to bit.ly/urbanite opencity. The deadline for submissions for Urbanite Project 2011:Open City Challenge is June 3. Details at www.urbaniteproject.com.

Coming next month

who are the real monsters?

A trip through the juvenile justice system offers a glimpse of our divided thinking about young criminals—and suggests a way out.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 9

TuTTie’s Place

presents a

(Liberty Heights Ave. & N. Hilton St.)

Meditation Walk and Festival An event to benefit the youth of TuTTie’s Place, a residential wellness center for disconnected youth.

PS-2011 FL Urbanite 3-28_r2.qxd

1/4/70

Saturday, June 4 , 2011 at Hanlon Park 10:00 am – 6:00 pm Come and experience the spiritual laws and universal principles that support the expression of health and wholeness in our bodies. When you register for this meditative walk, you and your sponsors are one step closer to healing the world.

For more information on vendor opportunities, sponsorships, registrations to walk, please contact Brenda Campbell at campbell.tuttiesplace@yahoo.com or 410 277-9170. Visit www.tuttiesplace.org 8:51 PM Page 1

We invite you to visit your child’s future. Friday, May 13.

TAKE A FIRST LOOK First-year Kindergarten to Grade 12 Friday, May 13, 8:45-10:30am RSVP 410-339-4130 admission@parkschool.net

MEET THE EDUCATORS dedicated to teaching children how to think, not what to think.

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TOUR THE CAMPUS

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? · can the bay be saved · green ing the ghet to urba n home stea ding no. 82 issue a p r il 2 011

special

GREEN CITY urba sustainable living in the

n ecosystem

STOP THIS TRAIN …

I’m 37 years old and keep abreast of current events through print media, NPR, and occasionally the Internet. Despite the fact that I have, by choice, never had a Facebook or Twitter account, I know my way around a computer and certainly wouldn’t consider myself to be a Luddite. However, I find Urbanite’s new practice of filling up the “What You’re Saying” section with tweets and Facebook posts to be completely unnerving. The section used to be comprised of insightful comments from readers about previous articles and issues, and now most of that has been replaced with stream of consciousness snippets from social media outlets, the tone of which remind me of notes being passed between students in class.

In the spirit of a return to slower, more deliberate conversation, I’m sitting in my 90-year-old house, using a ball-point pen to write this on a yellow sheet of gregg-ruled paper in a steno pad. I’ll be placing this letter into an envelope with a stamp, and it will most likely make it’s way to you via the proverbial slow boat to China. Perhaps you’ll receive it in several weeks ... Oh, who am I kidding? I’ll just e-mail it.

—Brigitte Jacobson

RISING WATERS Re: “The Bay Comes Calling,” April ’11 Urbanite: Since the breathlessly predicted [anthropogenic global warming]-generated rise in sea levels has yet to happen, your picture of a flooded house is nothing more than a scare tactic of the sort that has become all too familiar.

How fatuous.

—Mark Twang

What planet do you live on Mark Twang where you think a rise in sea level “has yet to happen”? I live on the Eastern Shore. Those islands have disappeared. Those houses have crumbled and fallen into the water. The photo isn’t a scare tactic; it is a reality.

—Kathleen

what you’re saying

HIGHER LEARNING SECTION

RED LINE RUNAROUND Re: “On the Line,” April ’11 Urbanite: I was deeply disappointed to see that Urbanite has apparently decided to take an uncritical view of the Red Line’s proposed route through Southeast Baltimore. Many city dwellers, myself included, have lamented Baltimore’s transit deficiencies for decades. But some of us have also been around long enough to recall the repeated struggles—dating back at least to the legend-worthy 1970s fight against “The Road”—to prevent the construction of barriers dividing the community from the waterfront.

Make no mistake: a surface Red Line along the length of Boston Street will do precisely that.

Moreover, I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of why, from an urban planning standpoint, a Boston Street route is superior to a more direct shot to Hopkins Bayview along Eastern Avenue or Fleet Street. Either of the latter options would serve a greater number and greater diversity of city residents and rev up the long-flagging Eastern Avenue corridor.

Readers have come to rely on Urbanite for explorations of community development and the urban environment that look beyond received wisdom, not just a kick-ass wine-andspirits column. Don’t let us down.

—Clinton Macsherry The author isUrbanite’s former wine and spirits colum nist. (We jest!)

The Red Line will be more of a headache after construction. It will be an obsolete system, incapable of carrying the number of people who will need to use transit in the future. It will also isolate the communities north and south of Edmondson Ave., making it more difficult to cross. It will not only make auto congestion worse, it will make connecting bus service slower. It doesn’t even connect to the Metro. The SAACs are really just window dressing. The MTA has not acted in good faith as their project was pre-determined.

“You’re making scars on the landscape, but ultimately the city will be healed.” Really? I don’t think the Ditch healed the city, nor MLK Blvd, nor the extension of Howard Street, nor the World War II-era housing projects and countless other dubious projects touted to make the city better. Transit can be a great blessing, but it’s all in the planning, design, and implementation.

—Cro-Magnon

The east-west corridor is your best bet for replacing existing poor transit options, accommodating new expected growth, and supporting middle-class growth along the way. An eastward Metro extension would simply extend a system that has no positive community contribution and would actually

be more expensive for what you get (tunneling for a short segment versus tunnel and rail supported by federal dollars to transform the Greater Baltimore community). Red Line will work.

—safari ninja

THE GREAT HOMESTEADING DEBATE Re. “By Their Compost Heaps Ye Shall Know Them,” April ’11 Urbanite: Despite having served for a long time as role models (however, NOT the original Urban Homesteaders), the Dervaes family has outraged others in the urban homestead movement by laying trademark claim to the words “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading.”

They have gotten Facebook to shut down two active homesteading communities comprised of people who had been using those pages as the main source of communication between farmers, producers, and consumers. The family has also sent a “cease and desist” type letter to the publisher and authors of a book about urban homesteading. Their actions are antithetical to the sense of community that urban homesteading stands for.

—Sandor Says

It is a shame that people have to pick apart someone who is doing so much good. The [Dervaes] family were the ones who made the first successful urban homestead of such a remarkable scale whereby they are almost totally self sufficient. If it hadn’t been for them, many others would not even have attempted to try the lifestyle out.

—gerry

I just want to congratulate the Free Farm, Celine [Manekin], and Denzel [Mitchell] on what they are doing! I am seriously considering relocating to be closer to family in the Toledo/ Detroit area, and setting up an urban homesteading community with some other folks is near and dear to my heart, hopes, and goals. In many ways, the dire ecological prognosis for the planet can be embraced as an opportunity to recalibrate our definitions of success and “The Good Life.”

—Karen

Join the conversation. Follow us on Facebook (and use the “Suggest Urbanite” button to recommend us to friends) and Twitter (@UrbaniteMD).

E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211.

Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 11

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what you’re writing DiCaprio.

“I didn’t want to have sex with him, but I couldn’t stop him,” she whispered.

“Wow,” Angie replied. “Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking, why do they tell us to wait until we’re married to have sex? You know, um, I mean, I don’t think I wanna wait.” She told us about her latest crush: the Spanish-speaking foreign exchange student at her school.

I just stood there, watching Deb cry and Angie blabber. Then Angie grabbed my hand. “We gotta go, youth is gonna start. See ya, Deb!” I let her drag me to church where we went through the normal round of songs and games, and I wondered if any of us knew what it meant to grow up the way Deb did.

—Ruth Craine lives and works in Baltimore. Traveling, cooking, and spending time with loved ones are among her interests. She feels alive when she writes.

illustration by angela ahn

when i was 11, my dad met the woman

“i love you,” I mumbled to Tammy as

i went to church on Wednesday

she clambered into the sandbox next to me. She looked up and squinted in my general direction.

“Huh?” she said, crushing the sand castle I had painstakingly modeled after the Death Star.

I smiled sheepishly and shrugged.

“You heard what I said. I know you did ’cause you looked at me after I said it.”

Tammy rolled her eyes, flicked a blonde pigtail off her shoulder, and adjusted her overalls.

I stole a quick glance to make sure that none of my compatriots had heard my noogie-worthy confession. When I looked back, Tammy had already stood up and was making a move toward Tim’s tricycle.

I jumped up to grab her by the arm. She gave my sandy hand a look that could have stopped the recess bell.

“OK, I did hear you, but my mom says that I have to get married to a rich man who can buy me jewelry and a car and a nice wedding cake,” Tammy scolded me, wagging her finger at me like my mother.

Before I could even express my confusion, she had joined Tim on his bike. I stared after her, rubbing my shoes deeper in the sand. She didn’t even look back. I figured she’d come back, if not after recess, for sure after our nap. She didn’t. I stole Tim’s Oreos at lunch.

night, just like every other Wednesday since I’d turned thirteen. The teen program hadn’t started yet, so I met up with Angie. “What do you wanna do?” she said. I still couldn’t believe a senior wanted anything to do with me. At a loss for words, I shrugged and pointed to the convenience store.

We bought our blue Slurpees and walked across the street to Deb’s house. Deb hadn’t been around much lately. It seemed she was a little too focused on Marcus, her younger brother’s friend.

He was tall and lanky, with scraggly, dirty blond hair. Marcus was this poor neighborhood’s version of Leonardo DiCaprio. Cool and seductive.

He made us nervous, but we all wanted to be near him. Seemed like Deb had all the luck.

Deb sat on her bed, legs crossed. I felt Deb was more my friend than Angie’s, but Angie, being older and cooler and all, took the lead. “What’s up, Deb? You going to come with us tonight?” she asked.

Deb looked down. She twiddled her thumbs and began to shake. “Marcus was here yesterday, when my parents were gone. He said he wanted to have sex. I told him no, but he just smiled and jumped on top of me. I, I …” her voice cracked, faded into silence for a moment. “I said ‘Stop, Marcus, stop please!’ He laughed and pulled down his pants.”

Deb was in tears, my eyes were welling up fast, and Angie was looking around at the posters on the wall. Marcus did look eerily like Leo

—Henry Coll lives in Towson and is a freshman at the University of Baltimore. He likes to write short fiction.

who would become my stepmother. Our family doubled in size with a drive down to the county courthouse.

Of all the time we spent growing up together as kids, it’s the car rides I remember the most.

They brought us closer together. The four of us grew restless and angry in the back seat of my father’s Corolla. All the suppressed anger we felt toward our parents and their respective divorces was redirected toward each other when crammed into a small space. Invisible lines were drawn on the seat upholstery that we dared each other to cross. We jammed elbows into each other’s sides and knocked knees. We hit, kicked, and hollered until my dad yelled, “Don’t make me pull this car over!”

When we weren’t fighting out of circumstance, we chose to inflict pain on each other in game. Punch buggy. It kept us focused and alert while sharpening our survival skills. It was imperative for each of us to spot any Volkswagen Bugs on the road before the others, so as to avoid a fierce blow to the shoulder. The boys always threw the hardest punches. That’s what brothers are for.

On a recent business trip to Alabama, I drove by a used VW dealer and was reminded of those games and the bruises. Old VW Bugs, of every color available in a crayon box, were parked on a grass hill, flanked by a row of faded VW buses.

It was a hippie’s Mecca and a childhood dream for me. With a sighting like that, I could have turned all my siblings black and blue.

—Linda Siemon McLean is a communications specialist for a government contractor on Aberdeen Proving Ground. She has a master’s in professional writing from Towson University.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 13

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4/19/11 10:33:59 AM

one hazy july morning five years ago, I grew 2 whole inches in six hours.

I awoke that day just as the first fat rays of sunlight began to ooze through a small, barely curtained window. From where I lay, I could see the heat simmering between skyscrapers like hot frying oil, curling around thick plumes of smog that rose from smokestacks on the distant horizon. It had been a seemingly eternal and disorienting slumber. A failed attempt at rolling over to dangle my sun-kissed, freckled feet off the edge of the bed—a bed, I slowly realized with confusion, which was not my own—instantly jogged my memory. The lights. The tubes. An icy, cold, stainless-steel operating table against my cheek.

Only 24 hours prior, my spine, as S-shaped and windy as a country road, was straightened, vertebrae by vertebrae, and fastened with bits of hardware—nuts, bolts, bars, and bone—to correct the scoliosis that had evaded the watchful eyes and careful hands of standard middleschool nurse checkups until high school, when the pain began.

So while that summer dawn might have been the start of an easily forgettable day to many, for me, it was the day I took my first unbalanced and infantile steps, walking barefoot down a cold linoleum hospital floor, seeing the world for the first time from a dizzying new birds-eye perspective. With each half-inch shuffle, every synapse and nerve in my body burned white-hot like the sparklers I had waved only a few evenings prior beneath a fireworked sky bleeding red, white, and blue.

TasTe & experience DownTown BalTimore.

Soft-Shell Crab Celebration

May 23–30

Celebrate soft-shell crabs with traditional and innovative recipes using this Maryland delicacy at participating Dine Downtown Baltimore restaurants.

Make your reservations

today!

Visit DineDowntownBaltimore.com for a list of participating restaurants and menus.

—Maddie Thomas is a recent college graduate and freelance journalist based in Baltimore.

“What You’re Writing”

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

Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com.

Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic Deadline Publication Water May 9, 2011 July 2011 Road Trip June 6, 2011 August 2011 Fresh July 11, 2011 September 2011

Find convenient and low cost parking at many Baltimore City garages on evenings and weekends, at www.DowntownBaltMap.com. Park once and ride the Charm City Circulator for free. www.CharmCityCirculator.com.

An Initiative of Downtown Partnership of Baltimore

Urbanite #83 may 2011 15

Difficult to Glamorize

by Emily Mason, Jackie Riccio, & Jamie Wehr

Through Friday, May 27 Showroom & Gallery 1501 St. Paul Street, Suite 116 Exhibitions at case[werks] Showroom & Gallery are free to the public. To make an appointment to visit, please call the gallery at 1.800.810.2852.

Presented by:

Whose Life?

by Leah Jennings

16 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

don’t miss images (clockwise from top left): Photo by Jim McCue, Maryland Jockey Club; © 2010 Oxford University Press; © Maryland Zoo 2010; Photo by Lynley Bernstein; Photo by Daniel Bedell; photo © Claire Stefani

5

1

6

2

3

4

1 May 4, 4 p.m.

3 May 15, 6–10:30 P.M.

5 May 21

arts/culture

Arts/culture

COMMUNITY

In To Everything There is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song, author Allan M. Winkler writes about Seeger’s commitment to social justice in America. Hear Winkler speak about the great folk singer on May 4 at the University of Maryland Baltimore County for “Sing Out! Pete Seeger and American Reform.” All together now …

For the Windup Space’s anniversary celebration, upright bass master Michael Formanek presents a double bill of his avant-garde jazz projects, beginning with the Michael Formanek Quartet, featuring Tim Berne, Jacob Sachs, and Gerald Cleaver, which later morphs into Michael Formanek’s Unintended Consonance, adding John Dierker’s clarinet and Susan Alcorn’s pedal steel guitar.

Having weathered bankruptcy and alcohol regulations, Pimlico Race Course will once again host the Preakness Stakes, now in its 136th year. Grammy-winning artists Bruno Mars and Train will keep infielders happy as fourteen horses race to get one step closer to the Triple Crown.

Free Albin O. Kuhn Library 1000 Hilltop Rd. 410-455-2916 www.umbc.edu/socsforum

2 May 8, 1 p.m.

$15 12 W. North Ave. 410-244-8855 www.thewindupspace.com

4 May 15, 7–9 p.m.

arts/culture

community

Celebrate Mother’s Day at the Walters Art Museum with “The Virgin Mary and Other Migrant Mothers,” a performance by Emmynominated ellen cherry. The Baltimorebased songstress will sing selections from her cross-genre album inspired by women’s history, (New) Years, and songs that reflect on images of the Virgin Mary and Dorthea Lange’s photograph, “Migrant Mother.”

Meet Baltimoreans at the North Avenue Market on May 15 to celebrate the closing of the brainchild of MICA’s Exhibition Development Seminar, Baltimore: Open City.

The weeks-long exhibition featured workshops, art installations, and lectures aiming to explore the ways in which Baltimore can overcome its stratifying struggles with housing discrimination, bad public transportation, and an uneven distribution of wealth.

Free 600 N. Charles St. 410-547-9000 www.thewalters.org

Free 16 W. North Ave. www.opencitybaltimore.com

$40 infield admission 5201 Park Heights Ave. 410-542-9400 www.preakness.com

6 May 28–29, 1–7 p.m.

Food/Drink

Spend Memorial Day weekend drinking with the animals. (No, we don’t mean your inlaws.) Hear music from the Kelly Bell Band and Fools & Horses as you sample beer, local wine, and food at the Maryland Zoo’s “Brew at the Zoo and Wine, Too!” $40, members $25, under 21/designated drivers $20, under 21/designated driver members $5 Druid Hill Park 410-396-7102 www.marylandzoo.org

For more events, see the Scene on page 71.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 17

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18 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

the goods

what ’s new in style, shopping, & beyond

Fill-Up Glass

elizabeth cole

Photos (clockwise from left): Photo by Rachel Brand; courtesy of pureglassbottle.com; courtesy of Alfresco Home

You know you should ditch your plastic water bottle, but steel-flavored water isn’t really your thing, and the mason jars you carry around keep breaking in your backpack. Enter Baltimore-based environmental chemist Walt Himelstein and his Pure Glass Bottles (www.pureglassbottle.com). These shatter-resistant, 17.5- and 25-ounce bottles ($20) have a BPA-free, messresistant plastic coating and can hold hot and cold liquids. 17.5-ounce bottles found locally at Trovh (921 W. 36th St.; 410-366-3456; www.trohv.com).

unique antiques

breena siegel

Rachel Brand and Katie Wagoner, proprietors of Charms City Company (www.charmscitycompany.com), create jewelry that’s imbued with an appreciation for the antique, repurposing salvaged keys, keyholes, chains, and compasses. Their nautical brass necklace with tiny binoculars on a 16-inch chain is the perfect accessory for your next seaside adventure. Available online and at Double Dutch (3616 Falls Rd.; 410-554-0055; www. doubledutchboutique.com) and Whimsy Boutique (1033 S. Charles St.; 410-234-0204; www.whimsyboutique.com).

The Great Outdoors

breena siegel Brighten up your green gardens with outdoor furniture like this blood orange garden bistro set ($429), also available in chocolate, lime, and blue from Bazenky’s Furniture (917 Middle River Rd; 410-8826300; www.bazenskys.com). Looking for something a little more neutral for your patio? The store—in Baltimore since 1970—also carries outdoor furniture in cool summer shades from Telescope, Windward, and Suncoast.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 19

Women prefer their men in Italian dressing.

MAGNETIC VASE Voted Baltimore’s Best Mens’ Clothing Store for 2 Consecutive Years by Baltimore Magazine.

WHEN ENTERTAINING / USE THESE MYSTERIOUS / ALMOST MAGICAL / VASES TO DECORATE YOUR TABLE. A SET OF FIVE / GOLD OR SILVER CAN BE PLACED IN A LINE / OR BE CREATIVE…CREATE A DESIGN OF YOUR OWN. INSTANT DISCUSSION AND GREAT CONVERSATION.

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the goods

Naturally Smooth

Photos (clockwise from left): Photo by Martin Klimek for Chevrolet; photo by John Bildahl; Courtesy of peterborobasket.com

elizabeth cole Looking for an eco-friendly way to get your skin ready for bathing suit season? Robert Benzinger developed Eco-Armour (www. eco-armour.com) in his Annapolis home to prevent razor burn and to prolong the life of his razor. The liquid shaving foam—in scents like Eucamint and Pomango—is 86 percent organic, and the main ingredient is sustainably harvested witch hazel. Get it online or in Annapolis at Candles Off Main (2017 Renard Ct.; 410-990-0664; www. candlesoffmain.com) and Sun and Earth (1933 West St.; 410-266-6862).

Electric Slide

breena siegel

After years of hype, the electric car has finally landed in Maryland: Our state is one of the first retail launch markets for the Chevy Volt ($32,780).

Test-drive it at Ourisman Chevrolet in Marlow Heights (440 Branch Ave.; 877-600-0039) and Bowie (16610 Governor Bridge Rd.; 866-732-0682; www.ourismanchevrolet.com).

Basket Case

elizabeth cole Tote your groceries home in style with these wooden bike baskets, handmade by the Peterboro Basket Company (www. peterborobasket.com) in New Hampshire.

They can be found at Light Street Cycles (1124 Light St.; 410-685-2234; www. lightstcycles.com) and Joe’s Bike Shop in Fells Point (723-B S. Broadway; 443-8693435; www.mtwashingtonbikes.com). Is your furry friend worried he’ll miss out on the action? The company also makes pet carriers.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 21

We never run low on irony in Baltimore. Or restaurants that serve local grass-fed beef, merchants that carry housemade pickles and pâté, or markets that sell unbelievable goods from local farms. And don’t forget Berger cookies. It’s foodie heaven around here.

The next time you wander under I-83 with a cup of Zeke’s and a bag of kale, do it as a homeowner. City home prices are historically low and interest rates are, too. Live Baltimore can match you with homebuying incentives, renovation information, neighborhoods, and more.

If you’ve ever told yourself, “Someday I’ll own my own place,” get in touch. Because someday is now.

SomedayBaltimore.com

Downtown Baltimore

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100 Harborview Drive 1400 Lancaster Aliceanna at Fells Point Canal Street Malt House Federal Place McHenry Point Pierhomes at Harborview Pierside at Harborview PS25 Condo Rombro Lofts The Ritz-Carlton Residences St. Paul at Chase Scarlet Place Condos

Downtown offers convenient access to employment, culture, dining, shopping, and entertainment.

For additional information about living options in Downtown Baltimore, visit www.GoDowntownBaltimore.com

22 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

www.GoDowntownBaltimore.com

Silo Point Ten14 N. Charles Street Condos The Towers at Harborcourt Twelve09 North Charles The Yards of Federal Hill

baltimore observed

Renderinds & Photos by Mahan Rykiel Associates

feature / urbanite online / urbanite project / voices

The Greening of

Downtown An ambitious new proposal aims to tear out buildings to make way for parks. Could it ever work?

By Brennen Jensen

Nothing but Flowers: The Downtown Partnership of Baltimore’s “2011 Open Space Master Plan” illustrates the way to cover concrete with green space.

P

reston Gardens has been called many things over the near-century that its patches of lawn and serpentine stairways have graced Downtown. Named for its creator, mayor James Howard Preston, the slender greenway where St. Paul Street divides between Centre and Lexington Streets was nicknamed “Preston’s Folly” for the somewhat shady way its namesake came up with the $1.2 million

to pay for it. Over the years, boosters of the park, which was first conceived by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., have romantically called it our “sunken gardens” and the “tilted greensward.”

Those cheery monikers might have been fitting during its midcentury heyday, when it was a popular picnic spot for office workers. Not so much in later decades, when it served mainly as Urbanite #83 may 2011 23

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feature / urbanite online baltimore observed a night spot for vagrants. Although area stakeholders have since cleaned up the worst of its overgrowth and refuse, city transportation planner-cum-blogger Gerald Neily recently dubbed it a “glorified median strip,” choked as it is in a noose of ever-thickening traffic.

Call it what you will, when the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, the nonprofit focused on boosting the urban core, unveiled its “2011 Open Space Master Plan” earlier this year, Preston Gardens—Downtown’s first designated “open space”—was there, re-imagined for the 21st century. Plans call for a multi-million-dollar makeover to make the gardens a focal point of activity, rather than orphaned greenery best viewed from a car or office window.

“Many of these office buildings don’t have water views, so the next best thing is to create great green spaces for them,” says Partnership president Kirby Fowler. Then there are the 40,000-orso folks who now call the downtown area home and need a place to walk the dog, push the stroller, or simply connect with the earth. (See “Silver Lining,” March ’11 Urbanite.)

The Partnership’s nearly 200-page open space plan, described by Fowler as “a blueprint that will govern our actions for the next ten to twenty years,” is most dramatic when envisioning spaces created out of whole cloth, such the proposal to create Baltimore’s answer to Chicago’s Millennium Park in space left vacant by the First Mariner Arena and its adjacent parking deck. Likewise, the plans consider replacing the western shed of Lexington Market with park space and open-air stalls. But since Preston Gardens already exists as open space, it may be first in line for a redoing. Indeed, Downtown Partnership learns in a month if it will be awarded a $3.5 million federal grant aimed at addressing Preston’s failing infrastructure and current-day design shortcomings.

Still, reviving Preston Gardens will be no easy task. This kind of park plan faces numerous hurdles, including difficulties accessing the park across lanes of busy traffic, and finding funds for upkeep and to sponsor events. The story of Preston Gardens reveals the greater challenges faced by such “greening” projects in cities across the country—and a hint, as well, of the obstacles that lie before the Partnership in its broader greening efforts.

Baltimore is hardly alone in its efforts to “green” its urban core. The push for more city parks is visible from Atlanta to Seattle, according to Peter Harnik, author of Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities and director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land, a national conservation group based in San Francisco. “More and more people have lived in a suburban-type situation and have gotten used to a lot of greenery but now also want the vitality and walkability of a downtown,” he says. “That means either fixing up the old parks or creating new ones.”

Harnik considers New York City “ahead of the

curve” in the business of creating urban parks, with a hundred new park projects on the drawing board. But he cautions that the singular nature of the nation’s largest city and its healthier economy relative to other cities keeps it from being a tested template for the movement. By and large, urban parks, with their need for quality design and intensive maintenance, can swamp city budgets and require corporate, federal, and philanthropic support. “You have to cobble funding together from a variety of different sources,” Harnik says. “There’s not one single model out there for paying for these parks.”

The Downtown Partnership has already committed $200,000 to Preston Gardens. Last year, the group installed new lighting, trimmed trees, and hired a dedicated park steward to perform daily maintenance and groundskeeping. To fund maintenance over the long haul for some of its green projects, the Partnership has made several proposals, including instituting “tax increment financing,” or TIFs, whereby the city would issue bonds based on an expected increase in property taxes a given project will create. They are a relatively new way to pay for parks, and Harnik says his group is currently studying their effectiveness.

The plans for Preston are fairly sweeping and include removing the sole northbound lane of St. Paul Place and its street parking to increase the size of the upper, western edge of the park; replacing the solid stone fence along the sidewalk with an open balustrade to increase visibility; and adding a sidewalk along the eastern edge of the park to boost pedestrian appeal. The partnership has also started programming events there, such as “Poetry in Preston,” a monthly, lunchtime poetry reading with refreshments.

“People don’t go to the park now because it’s not all that interesting,” Fowler says. “We want to have flowers blooming again and the grass looking green and more events like we’re starting to have there. Let’s get it looking beautiful and see if it attracts people or not. I think it will.”

Whether such a renaissance can be sustained is another question. In 2000, then-mayor Martin O’Malley was on hand for a park rededication ceremony aimed at kick-starting a rebirth at Preston Gardens. City budget cuts soon intervened, leaving the place largely on life support.

Of course, much has changed in the last decade.

The downtown area’s population has jumped by roughly 5,000 people, for starters. Still, parks in the urban core are something of a quandary.

“I don’t think there is an easy silver bullet for what makes urban parks thrive,” Harnik says.

“St. Louis recently created a $30 million sculpture park downtown and we are still waiting to see if it works.”

—Brennen Jensen is an Urbanite contributing writer.

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

Uniting Artists From A rts/Culture Baltimore: Open City is a new exhibition designed to explore the city from social, economic, and historical perspectives, focusing especially on issues of separation. bit.ly/urbaniteopencity Band Aid From A rts/Culture With “Climate Peace,” a Japan benefit at the Windup Space, Baltimore’s indie arts and music crowd once again demonstrates that it is about more than just art for arts sake. bit.ly/urbaniteclimatepeace

If You Cook It, They Will Come From Food/Drink New concession choices at Oriole Park make baseball in Baltimore a whole lot tastier. bit.ly/urbanitebaseballfood New Kid in Town From Food/Drink B&O American Brasserie’s new executive chef puts his personal stamp on the spring menu. bit.ly/urbanitebochef top PHOTO courtesy of MICA (photo by Christopher Myers ’94); bottom photo by TRACEY MIDDLEKAUFF

Urbanite #83 may 2011 25

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

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26 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

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The proposed Red Line is a 14.5-mile, light rail transit line that will run west-east from Woodlawn through downtown Baltimore, Fells Point, and Canton to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center Campus. Its construction could dramatically disrupt city life with noise, dust, traffic snarls, and more.

We think we can take advantage of this period to create a unique, vibrant, productive urban space.

What do you think?

To learn more, go to www.urbaniteproject.com

urbanite project baltimore observed Color block: Residents fill in a community map at the the 2010 Boundary Block Party

Photo by Rebecca Nagle

Outside the Lines

The construction phase of the Red Line offers a chance to draw a divided city together—if we’re creative about how we use it.

by Rebecca Messner

O

n May 7, residents of the West Baltimore neighborhoods of Upton, Sandtown, Druid Heights, Bolton Hill, and Madison Park will come together for the annual Boundary Block Party. Like they have for the past three years, neighbors from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds will bond over free food, children’s choir performances, park bench decorating, and break dancing lessons.

The party is the work of Rebecca Nagle, a selfdescribed “radical performance artist by night, community organizer by day.” She started it in 2008 while living on Eutaw Place, the dividing line between Bolton Hill and both Madison Park and Upton. “It was driving me crazy,” she says.

“There aren’t very many integrated spaces in the area. People don’t have spaces to get to know each other. What you get is a lot of fear, stereotypes, and misperceptions among residents on both sides.”

The goal of the block party, she says, “was to create a more open and unified community.”

Last summer, community leaders formed the No Boundaries Coalition to sustain cross-boundary partnerships throughout the year. The coalition’s mission: “Deconstructing boundaries, reconstructing community.”

The Boundary Block Party neatly captures the spirit that drives Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge. Launched in March, the challenge aims to help a string of neighborhoods weather the storm brought by an estimated five years of construction on the Red Line, an east-

west train that will cut across the city. Urbanite, along with the Maryland Institute College of Art, D center Baltimore, the Maryland Transit Administration, and the Baltimore City Department of Transportation, is offering up $10,000 in prize money, plus a chance to bring these ideas to life, constructing something that will have a lasting impact on the fabric of the city. (See “On the Line,” April ’11 Urbanite.)

“I think there’s real opportunity at a construction site,” says Daniel D’Oca, the MICA professor who is curating the current citywide Baltimore: Open City exhibition, and an organizer of Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge.

“Things are up in the air. Your everyday rhythms are different. There’s a way to leverage that to create something positive.”

D’Oca is no stranger to this kind of thing.

With his New York-based architecture firm, Interboro Partners, D’Oca took a development site in the Hudson Square neighborhood of Manhattan that would have sat vacant for five years while the developer obtained construction permits and turned it into a temporary tree nursery.

Afterward, the trees were planted throughout the city.

Also in New York, where it seems there’s a building covered in scaffolding at all times, the Urbancanvas Design Competition challenged artists to create temporary protective structures at construction sites. The winning artists covered buildings with vibrant, multicolored graphics and giant, serene photos of clouds and

trees.

Of course, construction does more than just create eyesores—it can also be bad for business.

The city of Minneapolis, during construction of its own $1 billion light rail project, developed a loan program that gave money to business owners who lost revenue as a result of construction.

The city of Seattle found a more creative, less expensive solution during the recent construction of its new light rail line. Seattle Sound Transit set up a “lunch bus” that took transportation buffs (and skeptics) on tours of construction sites, stopping for lunch at local restaurants to help boost business.

Then there is the challenge of getting residents acclimatized to using public transit— something that can both help reduce traffic congestion during construction and help the transit project succeed once it is built. That may not be as difficult as it sounds. Last November, Latitude Research and Next American City magazine conducted a study showing that people will wait for a bus rather than hopping in the car if they know when the bus is coming.

Smartphone apps now allow passengers to get up-to-the-minute information on their transit options—a feature in use locally by the Charm City Circulator buses. Almost half of the winning apps in New York’s BigApps competition this year had to do with transportation—including Roadify, which relies on crowdsourced information to provide transit service updates.

Other cities have tricked people into doing the right thing. In Sweden, epicenter of urban harmony (and great pop music!), Volkswagen introduced its “Fun Theory” in 2009. How can you get people to stop speeding? Start recycling?

The answer: Make it fun. The Speed Camera Lottery tracked each passing car’s speed. Cars driving over the limit were issued a fine, which was pooled in a pot. Cars obeying the limit were entered into a lottery to win some of that pot.

During the experiment, the average speed fell 22 percent. When a recycling bin was turned into a video game with flashing lights and sound effects, more than two hundred people dropped in their bottles in on a single evening.

From block parties to light-up recycle bins, D’Oca thinks that if we manage to use the construction phase of the Red Line to create something positive, it will ultimately make Baltimore a better place. “If you’re going to have a city that’s not separated by walls, you’re going to need better public transportation,” he says. “If we can get it right, if we can create good memories during construction, maybe people will get behind [the Red Line] and realize how important public transportation is.”

Got a great idea for Red Line construction mitigation?

Enter Urbanite Project 2011: Open City Challenge. For information, go to www.urbaniteproject.com. Deadline for submissions is June 3.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 27

Urbanite Blue Water Half Page H_May 2011:Layout 3

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Check availability, pricing and more at www.bluewaterbaltimore.org or call 410-254-1577.

Blue Water Baltimore is a new organization created through the merger of five prominent watershed and water advocacy organizations. Blue Water Baltimore works across the metro region to restore and protect our streams, rivers and harbor through restoration, education and advocacy efforts.

28 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Voices Making Waves

during that debate that convinced you that public radio could be more “ fair and balanced” ? ig : In the early part of the debate I really began to wonder …

Somebody told us about a talk show about Wisconsin. They said, basically there was nobody representing the right’s point of view.

That’s a mistake. That’s not who we are.

Radio producer Ira Glass on his early days in Baltimore, public radio bias, and why he doesn’t use Twitter Interview by Greg Hanscom

Photo by Nancy Updike

But in the end, when we actually got hard statistical information from somebody who had both studied what is on the public radio news shows and then reviewed all the other studies, what he showed was that in every measurable way—that is, the story selection, the experts that are turned to—there is no bias on these shows. I came out of that feeling very gratified.

I

ra Glass, the host and executive producer of the public radio program This American Life, comes to Baltimore May 3. He’ll show a few episodes of the television show he and his crew produced for Showtime a few years back— “It’s my favorite thing to do on stage,” he says— and help raise money for the local workforce training organization Civic Works. He recently took a little time out of his very busy schedule to talk to Urbanite. urb : I did an informal poll and asked people, “Where do you think Ira Glass is from? ” The results were evenly split between Chicago and New York. ig: Suburban Baltimore didn’t even get a mention?

I grew up in Baltimore County … I went to Milford Mill High School. Graduated in ’77. My first job in radio was at WFBR 1300 AM. I was a joke writer for Johnny Walker, sort of an early proto shock jock. He was their morning drive guy for years. He was a Baltimore institution.

URB: Your dad was also a radio guy. ig:

Well, for a couple of years when he was in college. It’s a shame that I’m the one who ended up in radio, ’cause he’s the one who has the voice for it.

Radio International— ig:

—NPR’s arch rival. They are mortal enemies, like Superman and Lex Luthor.

urb:

How did that come about?

ig: First, I should say that although NPR and PRI are arch enemies in some formal sense, actually people get along just fine … But what happened was that I had started producing [This American Life] at the local public radio station in Chicago … WBEZ. Once we were up and running, the idea was, it would go national. I had always assumed that since I had started working for NPR when I was 19, and since I knew everyone there, that that would be the distributor. But I think that in a way, weirdly, the fact that I was the kid who used to come in on the train from Baltimore every day from the time when I was a teenager—I think people saw me as just, “Well, that’s just the former intern.”

There was also a sense from some of the executives that had to make the decision that they just didn’t like—or get—the show. It didn’t sound like the other public radio shows. There was a sense of, like, “When’s the adult going to show up to be the voice of the show? When are you going to get your Robert Siegel? ”

urb: You spent seventeen years with National

Public Radio, but after all those years with NPR, This American Life ends up being distributed by Public

urb:

You recently jumped into the public radio funding fight. Was there anything that was said

Where I do feel like I got something out of it is hearing our conservative listeners talk about hearing the things that make them wince. I think that there are things we could do to make it so that those conservative listeners don’t have to wince. urb: Do you know that you have more than 17,000 Twitter followers? ig:

I don’t have a Twitter account.

urb:

There is a Twitter account, and it has your name and your picture on it, and it has 17,000 followers. And whoever it is has only tweeted three times. It’s not you?

ig : No. If I tweeted, I would do it more than three times. urb:

Is there something about the 140-character limit that you can’t get excited about?

ig: No, it’s just the opposite. I really love Twitter, but I just don’t have the time. We know all these comedians who have done things for the show who have amazing Twitter accounts. I feel jealous when I see their tweets. I think, “Oh, you have time to think.”

For information on Glass’s May 3 appearance, go to www.civicworks.com. This American Life confirmed that the @IraGlass Twitter account is “a bootleg.” The staff tweets at @thisamerlife. (Urbanite tweets, too.

Our handle: @UrbaniteMD.)

Urbanite #83 may 2011 29

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2011 – Beyond

AIABALTIMORE

Art, Underground: Doreen Bolger takes in Katherine Tzu-Lan’s Filigree Series at Sub-Basement Studios.

THE GRE AT

Doreen Bolger wants to save the Baltimore Museum of Art and win respect for local artists. Can she do both at the same time?

By Michael Yockel Photography by J.M. Giordano

APPRECIATOR

A

bit before 7: 00 on a blustery weeknight in early February, Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, breezes into a cavernous gallery space at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, nearly 45 minutes after she’d planned to arrive. She was delayed by glacial traffic on I-95, a bus that stopped directly in front of her car to discharge a passel of pokey passengers, and, once she finally reached the Catonsville campus, a peripatetic

on-foot search in the dark for the gallery amid the school’s forest of tightly clustered, look-alike, red-brick structures.

“Every time I come here,” she says with mild bemusement, “it seems like [UMBC president] Freeman Hrabowski has tossed up yet another new building.”

Dressed head to toe in black except for a strikingly patterned cream-colored silk scarf tied neatly around her neck, Bolger makes her way efficiently through the crowd gathered for an exhibition of the video and photography projects of UMBC graduate students. She alternately peers over her

wire-rimmed glasses to study the work and chats with an array of atendees, including two of the spotlighted artists—videomaker Andy Hayleck, whose luminous Mutum screens in a tiny viewing room, and photographer Jill Fannon, whose series of vividly colored images, entitled BubbleTongueRemix, conjure both domestic bliss and torture.

Listening attentively, gesturing animatedly with her hands, and throwing back her head of iridescent gray hair as she laughs, Bolger seems genuinely engaged with each

launched her blog, “Art-Full Life,” on the Baltimore Sun’s website.

Her embrace of Baltimore’s arts and artists has not gone unnoticed by members of the city’s cultural cognoscenti. Baltimore multimedia and performance artist Joyce Scott, whose expansive 2000 Kickin’ It With the Old Masters exhibition filled several galleries at the BMA, sees Bolger as something of an iconoclast, or, at the very least, a mold-breaker. “You hear all the time about museum directors not being involved with local art

thinking that I would become a museum director. I always thought that I would be a curator.”

The turning point came in the early 1990s. Bolger’s curatorial duties consumed and engrossed her throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Then, during her time at the Amon Carter Museum, after publishing two dozen books, book chapters, essays, and articles, she says, “I began to think, ‘I could keep doing this, and this is fun, but do we need that many more books on American art history?’”

“She’s very visible. She’s become extremely aware of what’s happening, and that’s very different than most [museum] directors.”

Baltimore multimedia and performance artist Joyce Scott, on Bolger

person she encounters. She radiates an unselfconscious intensity, the embodiment of the everyone’sfavorite-aunt syndrome. Huddling with a member of the UMBC faculty, she discusses what she considers the area’s burgeoning arts scene: “I always say, ‘I wasn’t smart enough to be born here, but at least I was smart enough to come here.’”

Equal parts advocate, cheerleader, and evangelist, Bolger, 62, has assumed a determinedly activist role in Baltimore’s art world, bringing locals’ work into the BMA, an institution not historically renowned for its warm embrace of city artists; speaking about the social, cultural, and economic importance of the arts and the creative class; blogging about Baltimore’s varied arts community; and prowling the greater metro area to see the work of living, breathing artists.

She is restless and relentless.

Upon departing UMBC this evening, for instance, she drives straight to Maryland Art Place downtown for the opening of a photography show, then to Pigtown’s gritty Gallery 788 for a packed opening featuring the work of a handful of young unknowns, and finally to Metro Gallery in Station North. Bolger has made such recon missions into Baltimore galleries—from the white-walled to the hole-in-thewall—since she landed at the BMA thirteen years ago. But her outings have increased in recent years, especially since 2009, when she

and artists—what I call the ‘ivory tower’ mentality—in this city and elsewhere,” Scott says. “But she’s always out there at art openings, at the theater. She’s very visible. She’s become extremely aware of what’s happening, and that’s very different than most [museum] directors.”

Taken collectively, Bolger’s nocturnal gallery crawls, her blog, her civic lectures, and her inclusion of Baltimore-area artists in BMA exhibitions serve to further her quest to make the museum relevant to a new generation of art appreciators and artists. By doing this, she hopes to ensure the BMA’s longterm future while simultaneously elevating the visibility of the local arts community. To date, however, Bolger’s vision, while universally lauded, has yet to pay measurable dividends.

T

he BMA represents Bolger’s first directorship of a major urban museum, although she arrived here with a formidable resume, including a PhD in art history from the City University of New York and curatorial work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum. Before coming to the BMA, she spent four years as director of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, but, she says, “I never went into this

34 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Increasingly, she had begun to contemplate the forces that threatened the survival of the institutions she served. “The great collecting institutions were reaching a period where they were going to face challenges in terms of audiences and funding and preserving core values,” Bolger recalls. “[I realized I needed to be] more concerned about something bigger and broader that would preserve the great art that I loved.”

Her mission became helping to ensure those institutions’ continued relevancy. Her central tenet: “to engage museums more with communities.”

Bolger took the top position at RISD’s museum, and while she now allows that she enjoyed her time there, she gradually realized that she wanted to be at a museum that was engaged with a larger urban community. She signed on as BMA director in February 1998, succeeding Arnold Lehman, who had led the museum for eighteen years.

One of Bolger’s first undertakings at the BMA was the Joyce Scott exhibition in 2000, a collaboration with Maryland Institute College of Art. She says the partnership felt “natural” after her time at RISD— “where I was surrounded by artists and art students.”

It made a big splash. “If you go back before Doreen came, the Baltimore Museum of Art under its previous leadership had no engagement, so to speak, with the arts

community here in Baltimore,” says longtime MICA president Fred Lazarus. Lazarus calls the Joyce Scott show “a really risky endeavor. The nature of the work was controversial, focusing on local artists, and a partnership with MICA. All of these were things that, traditionally, in a museum setting, were controversial at best. But she took the lead on it. And that was the beginning of what’s been a long pattern for her of engaging local artists in lots of different ways.”

Throughout her directorship, Bolger has imprinted local outreach onto the BMA’s DNA. “It has been so important to Doreen to make the museum more engaged with the community,” says Jay Fisher, a BMA curator who has worked under three different directors during his thirty-five years at the museum.

Bolger consistent ly spea rheads efforts to exhibit local and regional artists’ work, including annual shows featuring finalists for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize and the winners of the Baker Artist Awards. Additionally, the BMA has invited local artists to create site-specific installations within and without its walls. In 2005, Richard Cleaver’s 9-foot-tall tabernacle-esque amalgam of more than one hundred hand-painted ceramic figures occupied the museum’s outdoor Latrobe Spring House. That same year, Piper Shepard reinterpreted works from the BMA’s textile collection with a pair of installations, one of which covered f loor-toceiling windows in the museum’s lobby with a curtain wall consisting of nine muslin panels.

More broadly, Baltimore artists—and, sometimes, just plain local folks—regularly contribute work to BMA shows that spotlight national and international artists.

The 2009–2010 exhibit Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon, for example, also featured Baltimore Inspired

by Poe, works by local teaching artists and city residents; and 2008’s Looking Through the Lens: Photography 1900–1960 encompassed Looking Now: BMA Digital Photography Project, wherein nineteen local photographers responded to the mothership exhibition with their own images. (Urbanite collaborated on the latter project.)

B

Delicate progress: Bolger stands with Andy Holtin’s laser-cut paper crane sculpture, The World As We Know It, part of his exhibition at Gallery Four on Franklin Street.

olger, who is divorced with two grown children— Maggie, a theater/ performance artist, and Rusty, a n i n d i e -r o c k guitarist—lives in a Lower Charles Village rowhouse that brims with artwork. She moved there from Roland Park five years into her tenure at the BMA after having experienced something of an epiphany: “I had begun to feel that it was hard for me to advocate for the BMA and its surrounding neighborhoods if I lived somewhere else,” she recalls.

“Charles Village is not only close to the BMA but also a perfect launching pad for visits to art events in Station North and the West Side.”

She launches herself frequently.

An omnivorous consumer with ecumenical tastes, Bolger beams out her enthusiasms via her blog,

weighing in, on average, four times each month with detailed, empathetic posts, offering not critical assessments per se, but informed observations sprinkled with interpretation and analysis. A sampling of recent subject matter: Michael Farley’s dumpster-diving treasure trove of found art at Annex Theater and Gallery; Noel Freibert’s ominous, gargantuan skull composed of garbage-packed paper bags at Open Space; Heather Joi’s elegant, sheathed-in-virtual-darkness dance performance at Cyclops; and Ilya Popenko’s disturbing, large-scale, photographic portraits of men at Metro Gallery; plus shows at Creative Alliance, Normal’s Red Room, 14Karat Cabaret, Gallery Four, the Windup Space, MICA, Gormley Gallery, Fifth Dimension, School 33, the Transmodern Festival, and, glancingly, the BMA, among dozens of other venues.

Taking pains to showcase lesserknown galleries, Bolger uses “ArtFull Life” as a forum to convey to readers “how dynamic and exciting an arts community we have here in Baltimore,” she explains, “how much there is to see and do, and how wonderful it would be for people to take the time in their busy lives to step into some of these different spaces and see what the artists are doing.

“The blog has kind of put a public face on what I was doing routinely,” she adds. “I always say that showing up counts.”

“When Doreen attends an event, she is focusing all of her attention wherever she is and is always interested in talking to the artists and meeting everyone she can,” says Shaun Flynn, an artist and cofounder of the Floristree space in the West Side’s H&H Arts Building.

“When an artist is mentioned in her

blog, it is a special form of recognition from the top of the food chain here.”

As an adjunct to her blogging efforts, Bolger preaches the gospel of the city’s creative class from a variety of civic pulpits. (In the recent past, she has mounted a Power Point presentation with commentary for the Charles Street Development Corporation, Johns Hopkins University’s Community Conversations series, and MICA’s board of directors.) In her stump speech, she rattles off the definitive characteristics of the emerging generation of artists: They are more “transdisciplinary,” for one, “moving across different visual arts and media, engaging in the production of music and video.” They are more “cooperative,” for another, as they work in collectives or with partners. And they’re more willing to venture outside the garret, Urbanite #83 may 2011 35

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“serving as curators, where they’re both artists and curators, or artists working as curators. They bring a very different perspective than my generation, which was trained really exclusively in art history and museum practice.”

As for how the quality of art produced here measures up nationally, Bolger sees no instructive point in such idle speculation, choosing instead to emphasize the local arts community’s innate vitality. “What I really like about artists in Baltimore is that they are such good citizens,” she says. “They’re so engaged with the city and with all the different communities of the city, teaching at rec centers and libraries and on street corners, and really engaging people in producing art on terms that interest a broad public. I think that this is a generation that is very socially conscious— conscious of the importance of good causes, of changing the world, of being social activists.

“Baltimore has kind of an intimacy about it, sort of a cabaret feel more than a large auditorium feel; it’s both city and small town in its character,” she continues. “Maybe because of the scale of Baltimore, they [artists] have a higher profile and they have an even higher profile in being change agents here than they would in a city like New York. Here, their role becomes intensified. It’s a little hotbed, an incubator for change and art coming together at the same time—it’s a very interesting time.”

Baltimore’s “cabaret feel,” its “intimacy,” its small-town-in-a-bigcity quality may account for the fact that seldom is heard a discouraging word regarding Bolger’s BMA stewardship. Correction: Never is heard is a discouraging word, at least publicly.

Even if a person might quibble with some of the BMA’s curatorial choices—how, say, the Old Masters rarely kick it with anyone at the BMA these days—no one seems willing to step forward to criticize Bolger. Not only does she sit at the apex of the local art-scene “food chain,” but she also has demonstrated a remarkable acumen in conducting herself politically, both as museum director and as indefatigable Baltimore arts evangelist.

People like her. They really like her.

“There was a fair amount of

“I really believe in the talent we have here …”

Doreen Bolger on the local art scene

national buzzmeisters, who for years have lavished attention on the city’s indie music scene, have withheld anointing Baltimore’s visual arts community in a similar fashion.

Bolger is unfazed. “I really believe in the talent we have here,” she says. “There are significant artists working in virtually every medium.

Have these artists been recognized yet? Maybe not. But why? Some of them are just young, and it hasn’t happened yet.”

Still, she adds, before Baltimore can appreciably advance artistically, it needs “a few key pieces to fall into place,” notably “critical writing, in print and online; venues—nonprofit, DIY, and commercial—that match the scale of artists working in our community; and collectors brave enough to get involved and buy in their own backyard.”

O

internal turmoil when she first came here, but that seems to have gone away and would have been normal for that kind of change of administration,” says Gary Kachadourian, who served as visual arts coordinator for the Baltimore Office of Promotion and Arts from 1987 to 2010 and as coordinator of exhibitions at Artscape from 1991 to 2010. “The BMA hasn’t been generating much negativity lately.

When running an organization the size of the BMA, there are always things that could be complained about, but for most of those things, at least related to the running of the museum, the only people that would be aware are administrative professionals. Maybe we’ve just entered a new age of positivism.”

Meanwhile, the BMA’s blockbuster shows of the past several years—Warhol, Pissarro, French drawings, Rodin—have generated scant national coverage, with the notable exception of a laudatory New York Times story about the 2007 Matisse: Painter as Sculptor exhibition. Be that as it may,

ver the course of her thirteen years in Baltimore, B ol ge r h a s quietly—consciously and unconsciously—embedded herself into the city’s arts community.

Her gallery crawls, she says, teach her about young people and what they’re looking for in an arts experience. “It gives me inspiration about ways that we can connect the BMA to those trends,” she says, “and allows me to rethink some of the things we do at the BMA.” Here, too, the results seem to elude metrics. According to BMA Director of Communications Anne Mannix, since October 2006, when the museum flung open its doors to free admission for all except blockbuster shows, the BMA has enjoyed an “enormous” increase in “family program participation,” with anecdotal evidence also suggesting a spike in visits from “artists, students, and other young people.”

From a strict numbers-crunching perspective, however, Bolger’s gallery-space barnstorming, relentless advocacy, and push to partner with local universities and arts groups has not demonstrably altered the museum’s attendance, which has fluctuated between an annual (fiscal year) high of 290,000 in 1999–2000 to a low of 206,000 in 2008–2009. Membership figures,

available for only the past five fiscal years, span a range from 7,617 (2005-2006) to 5,853 (2008–2009).

In contrast, Lehman, Bolger’s predecessor, built a significant endowment virtually from scratch, more than doubled attendance, substantially expanded gallery space, and dramatically enhanced the museum’s contemporary collection. Of course, Bolger has had to contend with the sour economy and increasingly digitally fixated society—forces that have shaken both marble-pillared cultural institutions and smaller galleries.

Keenly aware of the omnipresent challenges of operating a cultural leviathan, Bolger nonetheless professes faith in the sustainability of urban institutions such as the BMA. And she has poured considerable time and resources into the museum itself. Not long after her arrival, she tackled renovation of the BMA’s Cone Wing, transforming it into a permanent showcase for the museum’s modernist holdings. Shortly thereafter, she directed a similar facelift to its Jacobs Wing of European art from the 15th through the 19th centuries. And just this spring the BMA embarked upon the first phase of a three-year overhaul of its West Wing for contemporary art.

Perhaps not surprisingly, when asked about the museum’s future, Bolger circles back to the importance of today’s BMA “connecting with the next generation of creators, thinkers, and visitors,” citing as precedent sisters Etta and Claribel Cone’s prescient purchases of works by Matisse and Picasso in the early years of the 20th century “when they were not yet fully established artists.”

And she points out the fact that the BMA opened its imposing main building in 1929, coinciding with the outset of the Great Depression.

“Despite that challenge,” Bolger says, “the museum built a world-class collection and welcomed the community through good times and bad, always keeping an eye on the future. I am confident that, even in the current economic climate, the BMA will prevail and thrive.”

—A Baltimore native and former editor of City Paper, Michael Yockel is a contributing writer to Urbanite.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 37

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I

By Christianna McCausland

n 2009 Karl and Vicki Gumtow were looking for a place to put their cybersecurity startup, CyberPoint, LLC. They looked at Columbia and Annapolis Junction, where a lot of other local tech security firms are based. Then they looked out the window of their condominium in Harbor East. “We really wanted to build something different and break the mold of what was being done in our industry, and being in Baltimore is unique for a business like ours,” Karl explains. “A lot of young people are focused in cybersecurity, so we wanted to create an environment that would attract young, talented people.”

Using their own money and funding secured through trusted relationships that Karl, 43, cultivated over his years Urbanite #83 may 2011 39

Start me up: Karl and Vicki Gumtow built CyberPoint, LLC, from the ground up, increasing staff in their Inner Harbor office from five in 2009 to fifty-seven today.

of work in commercial and federal security enterprises, the Gumtows invested heavily and quickly in infrastructure, moving the company from their home to a plush waterfront office adjacent to the National Aquarium in Baltimore in January 2010. “We took the whole floor and had seats for seventy, though there were five or six of us at the time,” Karl remembers.

Despite naysayers who prognosticate that businesses cannot entice outside talent to live and work in Baltimore, CyberPoint did just that.

Today, the company employs fifty-seven, offering services such as digital forensics and malicious code analysis—helping companies fend off computer attacks, for example, or find out whodunit and what was taken if there’s been a security breach. 20 percent of the staff was lured from out of state, and today, one in five of the company’s employees calls Baltimore City home. Karl is particularly proud of that last figure, calling these staffers “educated, talented people who are living here and contributing to their community.”

Business pioneers like the Gumtows matter in this town. Entrepreneurship is the engine that drives innovation and job growth. “If we want to grow our economy, we need to do everything we 40 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

can to make sure what we innovate here stays here,” says Christian Johansson, secretary of the Department of Business and Economic Development, which promotes new and existing business development in the area. He cites a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation showing that nationwide, between 1977 and 2005, existing firms lost an average of one million jobs each year, while new firms added an average of three million annually. “Clearly, entrepreneurship is at the center of job creation and innovation.”

Startups’ power to attract fresh, young talent also boosts local restaurants, shops, cultural institutions, and schools. In short, startups create a stronger community both financially and socially.

On paper, Baltimore looks like it should be a seething cauldron of entrepreneurial activity.

Maryland, which has one of the highest concentrations of highly educated people in the country, ranks second in research and development intensity (a ratio of R&D expenditures to gross domestic product). Baltimore City is home to some of the state’s largest research institutions, and almost every university in the area offers an MBA program. The BaltimoreWashington region is home base for a number

of major venture capital firms. And we have an abundance of business incubators whose sole purpose is to get small businesses off the ground.

So why does the seething cauldron feel more like a tepid bath? Some would say it’s a matter of money. But some of Baltimore’s lackluster startup culture may have more to do with the baggage it carries as both an old-school manufacturing city and a snooty center of academia.

As a community, Baltimore simply lacks the proactive chutzpah. There are signs, however, that we are about to get into the game.

T

here are some very real barriers to entrepreneurial activity, of course, and access to cash is at the top of the list. Local banks and credit unions say they have money to lend, but the economy has been tough on everyone, making even venture capitalists—notorious for risk -taking—a little cautious. Since 2007, the amount of money venture capital firms have raised has decreased 66 percent nationally. This could indicate a long-term right-sizing of the capital market, but for now it equates to a funding challenge.

“It’s going to be very difficult for the venture

cents funds to raise capital, at least in the short run,” says Ashton Newhall, co-founder of Greenspring Associates, an Owings Mills-based firm that manages $2 billion. Venture capital is in Newhall’s blood: His father, Chuck Newhall, co-founded NEA, the big daddy of local venture firms. Newhall says that in this economically challenged era, venture funders are looking harder at the viability of investments and the likely timeline of returns. “It’s not that venture capitalists aren’t willing to take risks,” he says. “There’s a greater attempt to quantify and understand the risk.”

Help may be on the way. President Obama has expressed his desire to help startups by expanding small business loan programs, investing in women-owned businesses, and boosting business incubators, which offer services such as discounted, flexible office space and marketing assistance.

Governor O’Malley’s proposed InvestMaryland program would pump $100 million into startups using tax revenues from insurance companies. In the meantime, however, entrepreneurs are left to negotiate deals with an often scattered community of private and government funders.

To get a sense for just how complicated this can be, look no further than CSA Medical, a local startup based in the Emerging Technology Center, a business incubator focused on growing early-stage technology and biotechnology companies in Baltimore City. Company CFO Steven Schaefer explains that CSA Medical was built on technology developed at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. CSA licensed the technology and turned it into a product called Spray Cryotherapy, which can be used to prevent and treat cancer. To get the enterprise started, CSA got a small loan from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation, known as TEDCO. The Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPs) program gave the company a grant to facilitate vital clinical research. A biomedical incubator in Cleveland also made a strategic investment. And that was just the beginning. To make the leap to a commercially viable product, Schaefer had to raise $22 million from a scattered group of socalled angel investors—affluent people who pony up their own cash to invest in young companies.

Since Spray Cryotherapy reached the market in 2007, it has landed in eighty healthcare centers across the country. A recent round of fundraising brought in an additional $10 million, which will position the company for more growth. But getting the cash was hard. “It’s very challenging to deal with a disaggregated angel community,” Schaefer states. “It’s like organizing butterflies.”

Of course, this kind of hustle has always been part of getting a business up and running. And even without InvestMaryland or more federal

money, Newhall says there is money available to those who make a compelling-enough argument. “I think the best companies, no matter where they are located, find the capital or the capital finds them,” he says. “There are plenty of [investors] in this market area and outside this market area looking for opportunities.”

Ultimately, turning Baltimore into a hotbed of successful startups may have less to do with money and more to do with an attitude adjustment. The fact is, it takes more than a better bicycle to build a business. You need to have a strong network from which to draw funding, staff, and advice. You need a convincing sales pitch, busi-

There is plenty of activity outside of academia as well. Local entrepreneur Monica Beeman is regional director for Funding Universe, a national group that connects entrepreneurs to angel investors. Through Funding Universe, Beeman runs a program called CrowdPitch, which she describes as “American Idol meets Shark Tank,” in which small companies pitch their ideas to a crowd that votes using play money. Winners get prizes such as access to space in the Emerging Technology Center, financial consulting, and other services.

Beeman is also working with local partners to launch Startup City, a twelve-week program to put companies on a viable path to growth.

There’s also a “Startup Weekend” in the offing.

“There’s so much capital here,” says Beeman.

“There are so many angel investors in this area looking for opportunities.

A lot of [the challenge] is CSA Medical’s founder and CFO Steven Schaefer finding it. That’s where I come in, connecting entrepreneurs to resources.”

Asked about local success stories, local enness acumen, and a local business community trepreneurs often point to information techthat values and supports startups. Putting these nology. Unlike biomedical and pharmaceutical pieces together in a fragmented entrepreneurial commercialization, which can take years and environment is the region’s next big challenge. multiple influxes of capital before a product ever ew people understand the chalsees consumer daylight, IT products can get to lenge and the opportunities betmarket quickly. Baltimore has already seen sucter than Aris Melissaratos. The cess in Advertising.com, co-founded by the local former head of Department of Scott Ferber in 1998 and sold to AOL in 2004 Business and Economic Developfor $435 million. Members of that leadership ment, Melissaratos is now a special advisor to team have spun off their own ventures here in the president of Johns Hopkins University. His Baltimore, including Millennial Media, a mobile challenge: to entice some of Baltimore’s highestadvertising company that raised $65 million in funding over the past five years and grew to rung academics to embrace entrepreneurship. more than 100 employees in 2010, and TidalTV, A lot of talent in the region has traditionally stayed ensconced in the ivory tower of academia an online video advertising company that reportor gravitated to top-dollar jobs in the government edly scored $15 million from venture capitalists. sector. And given the volume of research institu“The commercial applications for IT-related technologies are limitless,” says Tom Sadowski, tions in the Baltimore region, there’s surprisingly president and CEO of the Economic Alliance little spinoff into the business sector (“technolof Greater Baltimore, which markets this reogy transfer” in business lingo). Consider, for gion as a place to do business and invest. “I example, that while Hopkins conducts $1.6 bilthink we’re on the cusp of a tremendous wave lion of research annually, in the ten years prior to of activity fueled by IT and cybersecurity.”

Melissaratos’s arrival, it spawned an average of During 2001–2008, while nationwide IT emjust four companies a year. “There was always an ployment fell by 17.1 percent, Maryland IT ememphasis on research excellence, and anything ployment rose by 3.3 percent, according to the that smacked of commercialization was too maDepartment of Business and Economic Develterialistic for the faculty,” Melissaratos explains. opment. The state has one of the highest conBut this is beginning to change. The univercentrations of technology jobs in the country, sity now has training programs like Vine and with approximately 10 percent of jobs classiVentures, a boot camp (featuring a fair amount fied as technology related. Approximately half of wine-drinking—thus the “vine”) for researchof those jobs are related to information techers on how to start companies, as well as “speed nology, telecommunications, and engineering. dating” that pairs management and finance The Baltimore region has all the makings of experts with researchers. The programs seem a great startup town. There’s brains in its acato be getting some results. In 2007, the year Medemic institutions and laboratories and brawn lissaratos accepted his post, there were twelve in its physical resources, like the port, airport, business spin-offs from Hopkins, and each and proximity to major metropolitan hubs. All subsequent year they’ve averaged ten spin-offs.

Photo by J.M. GIORDANO

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F

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cents it needs is a little magic to happen. “If we could complement the assets of the area with a culture that nurtures entrepreneurship and innovation,” says Sadowski, “there’s no bounds to the economic potential of our market.”

S

o what’s keeping that magic at bay?

Karl Gumtow of CyberPoint says downtown could certainly be more conducive to business. He would like to see more security around the Inner Harbor, for example, so his staff can work late and not be nervous walking the several blocks to the parking garage at night. Some decent space to grow would also help. As CyberPoint has filled up its current offices, the company has looked all over downtown for a larger space. While there’s lots of commercial space, it’s outdated or not contiguous, Gumtow says. Then there’s hiring: There are plenty of jobs available, he says, but not enough qualified butts to fill the seats.

This brings us back to the challenge of making Baltimore an attractive place for fresh, young talent to work and live. When it comes to fostering entrepreneurship, “everyone puts access to capital at the top of the list. Second on the list is access to teams,” says Jill Sorensen, who teaches social entrepreneurship and business ethics at Hopkins’ Carey School of Business. “I wouldn’t tend to think of Baltimore as the place to go for that talent, people that have led startup companies in particular.

Baltimore is not a hotbed of startup CEOs.” Sorensen, who is also executive director of the Baltimore-Washington Electric Vehicle Initiative, a nonprofit formed in 2007 to condition the market for electric vehicles, says that the area’s scattering of business incubators and resources may actually be a hindrance. “Sometimes when you have too many of something, it’s just as complicated as not having enough,” she says. “Greater Baltimore Committee, MDBio, [a division of Tech Council of Maryland], TEDCO, thirty incubators—when does an entrepreneur go to any one of these or none at all? When we have too many entities, we can trip over one another and potentially detract from a message.”

And the reality is that even when companies do get off the ground in Baltimore, they often end up leaving for other parts of the state or country, where the money and management pool is deeper. A recent Hopkins spin-off, the biologics company Amplimmune, ended up based in Montgomery County, for example. “Hopkins is a global institution,” Melissaratos says matter-of-factly. “Our startups go everywhere.”

Still, Melissaratos and other local boosters are bullish about Baltimore’s future. “I am more optimistic than most because I’ve watched this region grow dramatically in that area [entrepreneurship] over the last twenty years,” Melissaratos says. “Just look at the makeup of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council,” which promotes business and technology, helping build networks

between businesspeople and potential resources.

“You’ll see a lot of CEOs of small companies [at Council events] … I think we’ve grown a core of entrepreneurs, primarily in the technology arena.”

Another local entrepreneur who is working to build networks and hang on to talent is David Troy, founder of Baltimore Angels, which has five deals to its credit and two in the pipeline— all are technology companies; one is Baltimorebased, three are based in the D.C.-metro area, and one is based in New York. (see “Keys to the City,” March ’11 Urbanite.) Troy says the group is about more than just investing: “I think a key thing we can be doing now is encouraging people to stay put in Baltimore, not reflexively leaving for Silicon Valley or Boston or New York—to help to grow the community we have here.”

CSA Medical’s Schaefer is likewise committed to growing his business in the Baltimore region. “I’m a Marylander, I want to see this happen here,” he says. Some of his funders asked him to move the company, he says, but “I want it to succeed here. I see this as a huge opportunity for economic development in Maryland, and it could be a tremendous example to others.”

—Chrisitianna McCausland is an award-winning freelancer who writes about topics including newsmakers, business trends, and homestyles. Visit her at www.christiannawrites.com

Entrepreneur’s ToolKit Thinking of starting a business? Here are a few local resources to help get your idea off the ground.

Business Incubators/Resources The Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (MTech) at the University of Maryland offers courses to high school and college students and regional business startups. The institute also offers mentoring and research grants, and sponsors competitions. (92 Stadium Park Dr., Ste. 2120, College Park; 301-405-3906; www.mtech.umd.edu) The Small Business Resource Center helps entrepreneurs with everything from preparing business plans to finding insurance for their employees. The center, which is free to the public, has a PC-based business library with literature and videos. (Mon–Fri 9 a.m.–4 p.m.; 1101 E. 33rd St., Ste. C307; 443-451-7160; www. sbrcbaltimore.com) The TowsonGlobal Business Incubator at Towson University offers resources such as office facilities, business counseling, and workshops for “early-stage” companies based in Maryland and foreign operations looking to start Maryland branches. (7801 York Rd., Ste. 342; 410-769-6449; www.towsonglobal.com) Think Big Baltimore will take place on July 13 at Towson University, featuring speakers Yanik Silver of Maverick Business Adventures, Brian La Gette of Big

City Farms, and city planner-turned-mayoral candidate Otis Rolley. (8000 York Rd,; 410205-9596; www.thinkbigbaltimore.com) StartupDigest.com is a weekly email resource for startups in forty cities, including Baltimore. (www. startupdigest.com)

Federal/State Programs Maryland Technology Development Corp (TEDCO), was established in 1998 by the Maryland General Assembly to bring innovative technology into the marketplace, and to help assist small businesses. (5565 Sterrett Pl., Ste. 214, Columbia; 410-740-9442; www. marylandtedco.org)

For information on more incubators in Maryland, visit bit.ly/marylandincubators.

For information on other federal and state programs, visit bit.ly/fedstateprograms.

Angel Investment Funds Baltimore Angels offers funding for IT companies in the Baltimore/Washington/Annapolis metropolitan area. (www.baltimoreangels.org)

Community Banks/Credit Unions Many local banks and credit unions offer small business and startup loans. Here is a partial list of institutions that have a specific focus in this area:

The University of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship’s Capital Access Network provides start-up companies in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Delaware with funding, mentoring, and business coaching. (2518 Van Munching Hall, College Park; 301-405-9545; www. rhsmith.umd.edu/dingman/programs/CAN)

The Harbor Bank of Maryland (Main office 25 W. Fayette St.; 410-528-1801; www.theharborbank.com)

Novak Biddle Venture Partners in Bethesda, with more than $580 million under management, offers equity financing and assistance to new information technology companies. (7501 Wisconsin Ave., Ste. 1380-E; 240-497-1910; www.novakbiddle.com)

BB&T (1-800-226-5228; www.bbt.com) M&T (1-800-724-2440; www.mtb.com) SECU (410-487-7328; visit www.secumd.com) Point Breeze Credit Union (2 Philadelphia Ct; 410584-7228; www.pbcu.com) Mid-Atlantic Financial Partners (4831 Cordell Ave., Bethesda; 301-944-1799; www.midatlanticfp.com)

Urbanite #83 may 2011 43

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spe c i al a d vert is in g s ec t ion

Generating

GoodWill

for All by robin t. reid

Marge Thomas is president and CEO of Goodwill of the Chesapeake Inc.

The array of services that Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake Inc. offers is as varied as the merchandise found in its stores. Job training, temporary staff services, computer recycling—these are some of the programs that fall under the nonprofit’s mission to prepare people to secure and retain employment, and lead successful, independent lives.

That mission is not too far from what Goodwill founder Edgar J. Helms had in mind in 1902. A Methodist minister in a poor section of Boston, he started collecting bags of used clothing in the city’s wealthy sections to disperse throughout his neighborhood.

But he soon realized that charity was not enough; what the poor needed was a chance to earn a decent living. So he started teaching them how to fix up the things he collected; cobblers repaired shoes, tailors and seamstresses mended clothing.

Seventeen years later, Helms’s program came to Baltimore, an appropriate place since the American Methodist Episcopal Church was established here in 1784.

Goodwill eventually spun off four agencies in Maryland: Frederick, Hagerstown, suburban Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, which as Goodwill of the Chesapeake includes

Howard, Anne Arundel, and Harford counties and the Eastern Shore.

Marge Thomas has been president and chief executive officer for Goodwill of the Chesapeake for almost eighteen years. During that period, she’s seen the organization’s programs change to meet the demands of a new economy.

“Unlike the early days of Goodwill, we have become a throw-away society,” she explained. “We just buy new items rather than having old ones repaired. Now we use the proceeds from our retail sales to train people in marketable skills from basic literacy to entering the high-demand medical field.”

Sales of donated items still figure prominently in Goodwill. “Some $26 million of the $44 million total we made last year came from our twenty-six stores,” Thomas said. “If things don’t sell in stores, they go to our salvage stores, where you buy by the pound. If they don’t sell there, we work with salvage dealers, and a lot of what they sell goes to South America and poorer countries.

“We’re actually one of the oldest recyclers around,” she continued. “We have a partnership with Dell in which we recycle computers for them. And we’ll be selling books on Amazon and other sites by summertime.”

The revenue from retail sales helps pay for Goodwill’s other programs. Clients, as people who enroll in the programs are called, can learn office skills, such as data entry, Microsoft Word, and DOS. Other programs teach skills necessary for working in hotels and restaurants or as nursing assistants. And of course, working in the Goodwill stores is on-the-job training for the retail industry.

“We’re teaching job readiness to introduce people to work and what they’re going to be exposed to in that area,” Thomas said. “For custodial training, we have a lot of federal contracts; our trainees clean three buildings at Social Security and a hundred buildings at Fort Meade. And 75 percent of them must be severely disabled, meaning they have mental illness issues, learning disabilities, or are deaf, blind, or physically disabled.”

In addition to helping people with disabilities, Goodwill helps find employment for another segment of the population that often has trouble succeeding; former prison inmates.

“We go into state jails and promote the idea that when you come out, you go to Goodwill. We have partnerships with groups that help you find housing, rehab, benefits, and jobs,” Thomas said.

Which inmate Goodwill works with depends on the person, not the crime, she added. When the program started years ago, Thomas and other staffers interviewed a Urbanite #83 may 2011 45

spec ia l a d v e rt is i n g s e c t i o n

convicted murderer and a convicted car thief.

“We decided we’d hire the murderer, because he showed genuine remorse; the car thief showed no such thing.”

One way that Goodwill has successfully found work for ex-offenders is through its temp agency, which helps all of the organization’s clients. The temp service started about twelve years ago and now works with state and private employers.

“Many, many ex-offenders get hired for fulltime jobs this way because employers can try them out,” Thomas said. “There’s no fee if a company hires a person permanently, because that’s what we want to see happen.”

As much as the organization wants to find good employers for its clients, it has worked to be one as well. Several years ago, that did not seem to be the case, Thomas said.

“We were having some high turnover; people were leaving for only 50 cents more an hour,” she recalled. “So we started new programs and made more concerted efforts to listen … We’re doing everything we can think of to make it a better place to work.”

Some of the new programs are: * Vehicles for Change – employees can purchase reconditioned cars for about $600. * Tuition reimbursement – employees can be reimbursed for 75 percent of the class’s cost. And the class does not have to specifically apply to the job anymore.

Underwater basket-weaving? Go for it. * Financial wellness – two case managers are available to discuss any financial matter with employees, from savings accounts to avoiding foreclosure—all confidentially. * STARRBUCKS – employees who are recognized for going above and beyond their daily tasks can accumulate points toward gift certificates, gas cards, or time off with pay. * Wellness – employees can get help quitting smoking or losing weight. And flu shots are available.

With these improvements in place, Thomas believes that Goodwill has realized how to make sure its employees get the same careful treatment as its clients. And she also believes things are running well enough now that she can retire.

“I started with Goodwill in 1974, in human resources,” the Milwaukee native said. “I became an executive in 1980 when I moved to Goodwill in Hagerstown. I also worked in Mobile, Alabama, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Then I came here in 1994.

“The biggest issue for this job really is to be in tune with what your community needs.

You listen, you look, you do community needs assessments,” she explained. “You talk to the different leaders in the community, you get the division of labor’s statistics, and you work with a variety of government agencies and other community service providers.”

46 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Gregory Washington learned his computer skills at Goodwill.

Gregory Washington needed some good news. It was the winter of 2010, and he’d just been released from the Wicomico County Jail, where he’d been serving time for stealing something worth less than $300. He was hoping to return to the Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake’s computer class that he’d been taking before a probation violation sent him back to jail.

To Washington, the class was his ticket to a better life.

The folks at Goodwill understood that, and after discussing the matter, they called the 55-year-old ex-offender with the good news. Within days, Washington was back at the Lower Shore Career Development Center in Salisbury, picking up where he’d left off to learn the fine points of Microsoft Office— with a dose of workplace skills mixed in. And he thrived.

“Up until 2008, I’d never touched a computer,” Washington explained. “I’d been digging ditches, working backhoes, and cutting trees, all manual labor. My mother had been given a computer. As soon as I put my fingers on that keyboard, things took off from there.”

Knowing about Washington’s interest in computers, a friend of his mother’s told him about Goodwill’s twelve-week computer and clerical skills class. “I was a complete dummy,” he recalled. “But I had the initiative.

So during the class, I learned how to manage a computer safely. I learned how to take

apart a hard drive and replace it and reformat it.”

While taking the class, Washington signed up through Goodwill with the federal Senior Aide Program, which helps people older than 55 find part-time jobs to get both work experience and income. His first assignment was a perfect match for his computer skills: a computer instructor for MAC (Maintaining Active Citizens), a nonprofit that works with seniors in Salisbury. The class he taught, Generations Online, used a curriculum developed by the federal government. He taught anywhere from three to eight students at a time.

One of those students began coming to MAC exclusively to learn from him. “He had had a brain aneurism, and he couldn’t do much,” Washington recalled. “He loved playing tennis and bowling, so I found him two programs he could use to play online. I taught him to work with the mouse and how to find the icons.

He never missed a session. His wife was so thrilled that he could do this.”

When the teaching stint ended, Goodwill helped Washington get work at the Wicomico County library. He shelved books there for about three months. And then Goodwill hired him to be the morning receptionist.

“I love it,” he said. “I like being able to go to a workplace dressed up nice. I like an office setting. Now I’m getting to use my mind. I love helping people, and that’s what Goodwill helps me to do.”

Goodwill is also helping him continue his education; the organization is paying for an online tutoring program so he can improve his math skills enough to enroll in Wor-Wic Community College. He wants to get his degree and a full-time job. “I was in college after I left the army in 1975,” he explained.

“After two semesters, I had to drop out to go to work.”

Clearly his enthusiasm for education is paying off. Last May, Washington was Goodwill’s graduate of the year for the Chesapeake region.

Washington credits Goodwill with turning his life around. “I’ve never had anyone help me like they have before. I was a street person, I did drugs, I did all the wrong things,” he said. “The people of Goodwill laid aside what I had been, and they recognized what I was trying to be. They showed me how not to look at myself in the manner I had been. I took from society in my previous life and gave nothing back. Now I am.”

Photos by David Rehor

spe c i al a d vert is in g s ec t ion

Keeping busy and earning good money are making Anthony Brown a very happy employee. The 24-year-old is a member of the cleaning crew that Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake oversees for the Social Security Administration’s offices in Woodlawn. He’s been keeping those offices tidy for two years now, dressed in a neat blue work shirt, black or blue jeans, and tennis shoes. “You can’t wear a hat,” he adds, citing the workplace rules.

Brown got his job through AbilityOne, a federal program that employs people with severe disabilities in federal agencies. At Social Security, at least 75 percent of the custodial staff is in the program, either because of physical or learning disabilities.

Goodwill oversees training and management of 104 of those staff members.

“They taught me to vacuum, to do trash, dust, buff floors,” Brown said. “Sometimes I clean the loading dock or sweep outside.

I like working in an office, I like the people, and I get paid a lot.”

That enthusiasm and good work has helped Brown reach the top of the program’s pay scale, $14.49 an hour. That’s almost 40 percent more of the $10.49 he made when he started.

Back then, Brown was in Baltimore Transition Connections, a program the Baltimore City school system has for students with learning disabilities between 18 and 21 years old. His counselor there matched him with Goodwill in the summer of 2008. He then went through a psychiatric profile and security checks. Once those were completed satisfactorily, he could enter the Social Security offices.

“He was kind of shy when he first came here,” recalled Denise Howard-Johnson, one of the Goodwill job coaches at Social Security. “The building is huge; when people are rushing through the halls to get to meetings, you can feel like a salmon swimming upstream. It can be intimidating.”

With the encouragement and support of Goodwill staff, Brown began to slowly emerge from his shell and ask the questions he needed to better do his job. In a short period of time, he went from only being able to collect trash to cleaning offices and polishing floors.

Anthony Brown’s good work has helped him reach the top of his pay scale in two years.

Training custodial employees like Brown takes six months. But the first test of how much they’ve learned occurs after thirty days.

“It’s a time test,” Howard-Johnson explained. “They’ll go to an area by themselves and clean, and a supervisor starts a stopwatch. Once the trainee says they’re done, the supervisor comes back and checks. He or she points out anything the trainee may have missed, and they try again with the stopwatch. This goes on until the job is done. How long it takes them determines their pay. They’re tested every six months; their time can go up or down.

“Anthony is one of the people I know who’s never lost any ground,” she added. “He wants to be seen as doing a good job. He’s eager to please. I know one time I talked to him about something on the job and later passed him in the hall. He said, ‘I’m doing good, I’m doing good.’ And I replied, ‘You weren’t doing bad!’”

Goodwill’s on-the-job training is designed to last for two years, with the goal of making grads competitive with nondisabled peers.

In Brown’s case, however, he would not be able to earn the amount he earns now in the open market. So he will remain with Social Security.

“He now cleans in the area where the managers of Social Security are, so it’s an important place,” Howard-Johnson said. “And they love him. At Christmas time, they give him gifts. He’s one of our stars.”

“It’s my first job,” Brown said. “It’s nice working here.”

About Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake Inc.: Address: 222 E. Redwood St., Baltimore, MD 21202 Telephone: 410-837-1800 Website: www.goodwillches.org Established: 1919 Territory: Baltimore City and County, Howard, Anne Arundel counties, and Maryland’s counties on the Eastern Shore Number of clients assisted in 2010: 17,189 Number of permanent hires in 2010: 2,141 IncomE: $43,369,740 Sample of employerS: Social Security Administration, U.S. Army, Hilton Worldwide, J.W. Marriott International Inc.

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fiction This Woman

Illustration by Peter Yuill

By Christine Grillo

T

his woman combs for lice. This

onto her hands as they try to stay alive. This woman,

woman combs her son’s head for

washing out lice, loses count.

lice in September when he brings

This woman combs her daughter’s head for lice and an-

home the outbreak notice, and

swers her daughter’s teary question: “Why are you mad

she puts each louse in a plastic

at me?” with “Do I seem angry?” This woman, having

bag, which she re-opens and re-

combed for lice for hours, gets an eye-strain headache,

seals each time, until she has

and she asks her husband to comb her own head for lice,

done this so often—because he is

but he finds nothing, and she knows that he’s botched

so infested—that she takes him outside and cuts his hair

the search, because what are the chances that she is un-

so short and with so little skill that he looks like one of

blighted? She, who most nights shares a pillow with the

those children, shorn and hungry, from a long-ago shtetl.

daughter who sleepwalks into their bed in the wee hours

This woman, who treats earaches with olive oil, sore

fleeing the creatures in her dreams?

throats with honey, and fever with scallion soup, sends

This woman throws away the useless plastic comb and

her husband to the drug store for the strongest pesticide

buys a strong, steel nit-comb. This woman’s husband,

he can find to put on the boy’s head. This woman combs

who’s useless at finding nits, tries to be clever—“This

for lice with the plastic comb that comes with the pes-

place is lousy with lice,” he says—and she congratu-

ticide and then puts the boy in the bathtub, applies the

lates him on his wordplay. This woman combs her chil-

product, and watches the insects jump from his head

dren for lice every other day, triumphant—or so she

Urbanite #83 may 2011 49

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fiction

Christine Grillo’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, Utne Reader, LIT, and other journals. She’s a senior writer and associate editor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins master’s program in creative writing, and a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She and her three children have been lice-free for more than a year now and are very much enjoying their remission.

thinks—against the dirty louse, pulling from the

woman combs for lice during blizzards, and when her

teeth only scabs and dandruff and wood chips from

neighbor asks how she spends her snow days, she tells

the playground. This woman who combs for lice, one

her nit-picking. “Tell me about it,” says the neighbor.

October morning when she’s already late for work, lin-

“Husbands never load the dishwasher right, do they?”

gers in the first-grade classroom and watches the chil-

This woman realizes that her children provide the

dren read together, watches how they sit scrunched

perfect habitat for lice: clean heads, dry scalps, thick

closely together on the carpet in threes and fours,

hair. She lets them go unwashed for as long as she can

leaning over one shared book, their wild heads touch-

stand it, because the greasy-haired children seem im-

ing for the length of the story. This woman braces her-

pervious to infestation.

self for more lice. She knows one thing—lice are very

This woman combs her own hair for lice late at

resilient. This woman combs for lice two weeks later

night, when everyone is asleep, when the house is

when another case hits fourth grade, and she mar-

quiet; she lights a citrus-scented candle and, after-

vels over the lives of the childless, profoundly naïve

wards, massages grape-seed oil into her cheeks and

about the trials of childrearing. This woman combs

neck. This woman has had lice twice herself, and ev-

her son’s head for lice and kisses his sweaty, bare neck.

ery time she combs her own hair for lice she’s morti-

This woman combs for lice while her children watch

fied, terrified, by how much hair comes out; it’s not

a movie on a school night. This woman combs for lice

chemo. Two of her friends have just started chemo.

and is reminded of the monkey-house mother gorillas

This woman combs for lice through April, replacing

that spend their days pulling nits from their baby’s fur

soapy water with vinegar-water, which wrinkles her

as the humans look on, amused.

fingers into elderliness.

This woman realizes that the lice have developed

This woman combs her husband’s hair for lice

a resistance to the pesticide, so she tries tea tree oil,

and realizes that he looks forward to it—he puts on

olive oil, mayonnaise. But the potions are unreliable.

a Velvet Underground disc and dims the lights, but

The only thing that works, this woman realizes, is to

one can’t have dim lights when one is combing for lice.

search with a fine-toothed steel comb.

This woman combs for lice every week, as do all the

This woman combs for lice in the head of her best

mothers and grandmothers of children who go to that

friend’s little girl in November, who is spending the

school, and she wonders why none of the husbands

night, maybe several nights, as her parents approach

can see nits. This woman combs for lice with her ar-

their divorce. This woman combs for lice and dips

senal—a white bowl, vinegar, a badass comb—and she

the lousy comb—ceaselessly, it seems—into soapy

thinks that the mother gorillas have a sensible system

water, which is supposed to loosen the nits. This

of plucking and eating any eggs or bugs that they find.

woman who combs for lice admits that she can’t see

This woman combs for lice while her best friend, the

close-up anymore and buys reading glasses. It is time

imminent divorcee, joins a gym, gets a new look, and

for reading glasses. Through December this woman

dates. This woman’s husband comments that her best

continues to comb for lice and rues the growing-out

friend is looking hot. This woman comes to associ-

of her son’s hair, but she doesn’t shear him because

ate the smell of vinegar with pestilence. This woman

she wants his head to be warm in winter. This woman

longs for warm days, so the coats, hats, and scarves

marvels at the laundry she must do because of the

can be de-loused and put away. This woman combs

lice—not only sheets and pillowcases, but also the

for lice through the end of the school year, hoping

pillows themselves, duvets, coats, hats, scarves—and

that summer will bring a return to life as she knew

crams all of her children’s soft toys into plastic bags

it. This woman combs, and combs, and combs, look-

that she stashes in the cellar. The children may for-

ing down on all their heads, never looking up. This

get about the toys; they are growing up quickly. This

woman combs for lice.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 51

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space

Patchwork property: The Fitzgerald’s front entrance on Mount Royal Avenue lies between Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill.

The Missing Piece The Fitzgerald sets out to close a gap in the city’s urban fabric.

G

iven all the hurdles that had to be cleared, it is a wonder the $78 million mixed-use development called the Fitzgera ld was built at a ll.

From the outset, the building—which takes its name from F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who once lived nearby—proved to be a daunting undertaking. The University of Baltimore wanted to transform a Midtown parking lot into a place that both generated income for the

By Deborah K. Dietsch

university and “contributed to the economic revitalization of the city,” says Steve Cassard, the university’s vice president of facilities management and capital planning. If it worked, the structure would close a gap in the urban fabric, connecting the neighborhoods of Bolton Hill and Mount Vernon. But that was a big “if.”

The university solicited ideas from three developers, and in 2005, selected the Bozzuto Group’s proposal to build and manage a complex of apartments, retail, and a large parking garage. The developer managed to pull together Urbanite #83 may 2011 53

This side of paradise: The Fitzgerald features such amenities as a comfortably outfitted clubroom with a bar, billiards, and a movie theater; an outdoor pool; a parking garage; and quick access to transportation hubs like Penn Station and the light rail.

the necessary funding, with assistance from former Baltimore Ravens defensive end Michael McCrary, among others—but the deal nearly fell through when the economy tanked. “We closed the deal in September 2008, the week that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy,” recalls Jeff Kayce, Bozzuto’s development manager.

“The project might not have happened if we had waited any longer.”

The troubles didn’t end there. Before construction could begin, the 4.6-acre site, once home to a tiretreading plant and a rail yard, had to be emptied of industrial waste.

At the same time, the plan faced scrutiny from not only the usual city agencies and neighborhood groups, but also from the board of regents governing Maryland’s university system. If that wasn’t enough, the site presented numerous design challenges for the architects, a team from the local firm Design Collective. The irregularly shaped parcel lies adjacent to a light rail line and Interstate 83, and between the angular, glass façade of the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Brown Center and more traditional brick and stone buildings of Mount Vernon. Numerous functional demands,

54 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

including the parking, retail, apartments, and a swimming pool, also challenged the architects’ ability to find a coherent design solution.

To help design the collective, Bozzuto engaged Baltimore architect Steve Ziger of Ziger/Snead, the firm responsible for the Brown Center, to collaborate on the design of the building’s massing and exterior.

F

or tunately for ever yone, the stakeholders proved to be adventurous. “We were pleasantly surprised by how the university, community, and developer

were so open to contemporary design,” says Design Collective partner Rich Burns. “They wanted us to think outside the box.”

Taking its architectural cues from the location, Design Collective set the 275 apartments into a u-shaped block with a wing in the middle to create two internal courtyards. The shape of the building follows the geometries of two street grids that come together at the intersection of Oliver Street and Mount Royal Avenue. Storefronts (now occupied by a Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks, and coming soon, a Two Boots pizza restaurant)

space

“We closed the deal in September 2008, the week that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.”

Jeff Kayce, Bozzuto’s development manager

extend next to the sidewalks to attract foot traffic. To mark the entrance to the apartments, the architects split open the structure, nestling the front door between the two splayed wings. The gap is spanned by a glass bridge with views of the clock tower rising from the historic Mount Royal train station to the southwest.

“The forms and the massing are slightly skewed to evoke something exploding and moving,” says Burns.

“We didn’t want the architecture to be static because the site isn’t static.

We wanted to celebrate the movement of the pedestrians, vehicles,

and light rail around the site.”

Inside the block, the two courtyards house the swimming pool and an outdoor fireplace. Residents have access to amenities such as a movie theater, a fitness area, a bar, a billiards table, and a business center. The apartment market is still recovering from the recession, but 85 percent of the units are already leased at monthly rents ranging from $1,415 for a 569-square-foot efficiency to $2,595 for a 1,411-square-foot unit with two bedrooms and a den. “The residents range from g raduate st udents to you ng

professionals, D.C. commuters, and empty nesters,” says Kayce.

The Fitzgerald is also one of the greenest residential buildings in the city, designed to achieve a LEED Silver rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. The building was constructed with local and recycled materials, and 70 percent of its electricity is purchased from renewable sources. Apartments are outfitted with Energy Star appliances and low-flow plumbing fixtures. And in March, Bozzuto opened two electric vehicle charging stations in the parking garage abutting the apartments at the rear of the property.

That parking garage is the only part of the project that disappoints in terms of design. The architects made an effort to disguise its bulk by wrapping one side with apartments, but much of its bland, concrete shell looms above Interstate 83. Drivers on the highway deserve a better view—at least more of the articulated architecture evident along the streets. Still, the garage provides a convenient spot for the unviversity and community to park hundreds of cars, even though the light rail stop and Penn Station are within an easy walk of the artfully designed front door.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 55

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food + drink

feature / dining reviews / wine + spirits

Hip Hops

F

Photo by J.m. Giordano

Forget about that one-eyed interloper.

Local craft brews are making a comeback.

Natty who?

Bawlmer Craft Beers founder John O’Melia rounds out the grownig number of craft brewers in Charm City.

olks who love beer would be envious of Hugh Sisson’s office setup. The desk used by the founder and managing partner of Clipper City Brewing in Halethorpe is perched but a dozen feet away from a bar where taps offer up an array of his Heavy Seas ales and lagers.

It would be short work for him to slip over and pull a pint of Peg Leg Stout or fill a mug with homegrown marzen.

But when a reporter sat down with Sisson recently, the interview was regularly interrupted, not by trips to the tap handles, but by an endlessly ringing telephone. Running the state’s second largest brewery is a tireless task. “A whole lot of people look at this as exciting—they’re BRENNEN JENSEN excited about beer and brennen jensen is a writer for its authenticity,” Sis- contributing urbanite. son says. “But when you try and transition that into a successful commercial operation, it’s a challenge.”

He should now. Sisson is a suds survivor, a pioneer in Maryland’s microbrew movement who birthed the city’s first brewpub back in 1989 when he installed beermaking equipment in his family-owned Federal Hill bar, Sisson’s. This was barely two years after he worked with state legislators

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Photos (clockwise from left): Courtesy of Flying Dog Brewery; Courtesy of Pratt Street Ale house; Design by mission media; Photo by Corey Tallrico; courtesy duclaw brewing company; elizabeth cole

to tweak Prohibition-era laws to allow brewpubs and microbreweries to legally operate in the state.

Since that time, a cavalcade of micro and craft brewers have come and gone in this historically beer-soaked region, including Oxford Class (1988–1998), DeGroens (1989–2005), Brimstone (1994–1997), Champion Billiards/Looking Class Brewery (1996–2006), Globe (1997–1999), and Capital City (1997–2007). Farther afield, Frederick Brewing made a national splash in the late 1990s with its hemp-seed-flavored Hempen Ale, rumored to be a favorite tipple of President Bill Clinton. (Perhaps he didn’t swallow?) Alas, despite merging with Eastern Shore brewer Wild Goose, Frederick could never get out from under the debt amassed after erecting an $8 million brewery.

Even Sisson’s brewpub dried up in 2005 once new owners shifted the focus from brewing to bivalves. But to hear him tell it today, business has never been better. “The craft beer industry is healthy as hell,” he says. “We did have some attrition in the 1990s and early 2000s, but most of that was understandable—a Darwinian correction.”

Sisson left his eponymous pub in 1994 to launch Clipper City Brewing and expand his brewing capability. His brews are now sold in more than twenty states, and last year he rebranded his liquid line of twenty-four different brews under the less Baltimore-centric Heavy Seas moniker. He hopes to brew 35,000 barrels of beer this year, and if he makes good on plans to add new fermenting tanks this summer, his tucked-in-an-industrial-park brewery’s output potential rises toward 40,000 barrels.

Nationally, craft brew sales grew by 12 percent last year, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group. There are now more breweries in this country—1,759, the association says—than at any point in more than a century. In Maryland, brewery production jumped 41 percent last year to nearly 1.5 million gallons, according to taxing data compiled by the Comptroller’s office. Flying Dog, a Colorado brewer that bought and relocated into the Frederick Brewing facility in 2006, is the state’s largest brewery, capable of producing 100,000 barrels a year all by itself.

“Just because there is not necessarily the same number of breweries [as] there were ten years ago doesn’t mean the industry is in decline,” says Britishborn Stephen Jones, who’s been brewing Anglo-style beers at Oliver Breweries within the Pratt Street Ale House (formerly the Wharf Rat) for more than a decade. Oliver’s production grew 16 percent last year to some 1,400 barrels, and the kegged offerings are sold as far away as Northern Virginia.

Jones says the award-winning Stillwater Artisanal Ales, run by Baltimore brewer Brian Strumke, who lacks a brewery of is own, is pumping energy into the local suds scene. Strumke, sometimes referred to as a “gypsy brewer,” makes beer both in Europe and right up the road in Westminster’s DOG Brewing Co. The Raven Special Lager is another local brew without a brewery of its own, although that may be changing.

Locapour

feature food + Drink

Maryland’s brewed offerings run the gamut from sludge-dark stouts to primrose pilsners.

Here’s a liquid Whitman’s Sampler, with suggestions on when to imbibe.

Flying Dog Coffee Stout Flying Dog Brewery, Frederick

potent potable is perhaps best sipped by two from a single glass.

Zoinks! It’s a double espresso shot dropped into a pint of Guinness: big, powerful, choco-coffee taste, creamy texture, with boozy notes in the finish thanks to its 8.9-percent-alcohol rating.

Quaff this brew during a blizzard and just watch the snow pile up. The coffee could energize you to eventually clean off the car, while the judgment–blurring alcohol might lead you to simply kick the chair out of your neighbor’s parking spot.

This tasty veddy, British, copper-hued, creamy-headed, malty-meets-hoppy ale might make you forget the English tried to sack Baltimore in 1814. Drink this one while watching BBC America, cricket finals on ESPN4, or Dick Van Dyke garbling a cockney accent on the DVD of Mary Poppins.

Heavy Seas Loose Cannon Clipper City Brewing, Halethorpe

Resurrection The Brewers Art, Baltimore

Craft brewers seem locked in a “bitter” war to out-hop one another. Every day some new Double Plus Mega Extra IPA shows up in the chill case. Loose Cannon fires into this hops battle, but very deftly. This golden ale brings bite but also citrus notes and a clean finish. A good choice when firing up the grill, as its artfully assertive flavor can stand up to smoky barbecued fare.

This Abbey-style beer put Belgium on the map for many Baltimoreans.

The reddish, malty, this-side-ofsweet brew goes well with conversations among close friends. Just check the candlelit nooks at Brewer’s chummy brick rathskeller. A side of garlic fries doesn’t hurt either.

Oliver’s ESB Oliver Breweries/Pratt Street Ale House, Baltimore

Misery Du Claw, various suburban locations

Saison Darkly Stillwater Artisanal Ales, Baltimore

The curious name of this dark “wheat wine” must refer to your physical state the morning after you tipple too much of this potent, 10-percent-alcohol brew that carries the distinct flavor of cotton candy. A brew this saccharine should be shared with a sweetie (or a potential sweetie), and not just so that its alcohol kick can speed courting along—this

OK, post-tasting we’ve come to understand that Baltimore’s “gypsy brewer” Brian Strumke makes this one in Belgium. There’s a lot going on in this tart-then-spicy ale with floral notes and a hint of peat on the finish. It’s a contemplative brew, perhaps best savored on an Indian summer afternoon after raking the leaves.

Stephen Demczuk, who started brewing Raven in Germany in 1997 and has contracted Clipper City to brew it since 1998, has very preliminary plans to build a brewpub inside the old Haussner’s Restaurant in Highlandtown.

Business is booming at the Midtown brewpub Brewer’s Art, pretty much as it has been since its doors opened fifteen years ago. Some 2,000 barrels a year flow from the Charles Street townhouse that Esquire magazine declared “The Best Bar in America” in 2009. Co-owner Volcker Stewart says brewing operations have now maxed out.

There’s no more room to expand.

Brewer’s Art made a splash last year when it released its trademark Resurrection Ale in cans.

Contract-brewed in Philadelphia, the canned goods sell briskly. In addition to being greener (they’re kighhter, and thus require less fuel to ship), cans are better at fending off beer’s mortal enemies—light and air—while liners within modern cans separate metal and brew. “Cans are the wave of the future,” Stewart says. “I think 12-ounce bottles will disappear over time.”

Also debuting in local chill cases last year

were bottles of Amber’s Ale and Formstone Ale, offerings from the city’s newest brewery, Bawlmer Craft Beers. Launched by an erstwhile waterplant engineer, the brewery is housed within Highlandtown’s sprawling and historic Crown Cork and Seal complex—appropriate, considering that Crown was the company that invented the modern bottle cap.

Balwmer founder, brewer, and chief bottle washer John O’Melia, who has been at it fulltime since 2007, knows well the difficulties of the brewing trade. Still, he has a business plan that has him making a go of it by churning out some 5,000 cases a month. Two more beers are in the pipeline as well: Downey Ocean pale ale and Crabby Abbey, a Belgian-style brew.

“It’s required three times as much time, work, and money as I expected,” O’Melia says of the business. “But it’s been ten times as much fun.”

Read an interview with Stillwater Artisanal Ales “gypsy brewer” Brian Strumke at bit.ly/ gypsybrewer.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 59

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dining reviews food + Drink bar in a persistently transitional neighborhood. Bistro Rx seems determined to treat both conditions. And beginning with the wine and beer selections—which offer elixirs for just about any pain—the place pretty much succeeds.

Opened last fall by the folks behind Mahaffey’s in Canton, Bistro Rx seems to beckon both younger families from the blocks around Patterson Park as well as prowling revelers and those looking for a bite to eat before or after an event Delicious perscription: Bistro Rx in Patterson Park promises “the cure for the common meal.” at the nearby Creative Alliance.

The minor tweaks that discern the restaurant from its predecessors Parkside and Three—namely newly painted indigo walls, a more casual atmosphere (and prices to match,

by MARTHA THOMAS including a kids’ menu), invigorated emphasis istro Rx appropriated its name from the moon artisanal beer, and creative wine selections— saic Rx symbol on the triangle-shaped stoop may just augur robust health for this new at East Baltimore and South Linwood Streets, incarnation. near the northeast corner of Patterson Park. The Much of the menu is straight-up pub food: There’s a juicy angus beef burger (and one restaurant, in a space that was once a pharmacy, slightly less juicy made with ground bison), a promises “the cure for the common meal.” grilled Caesar, chicken wings that come with Common, of course, is a relative descriptor. celery and three different dips (buffalo, sweet Some dine out to escape the ordinary, while and spicy, and gorgonzola), and two types others seek comfort—especially at a corner

photos by: Bistro Rx: Elizabeth Cole; Chef’s mac: Amie Bingaman

Bistro Rx B

Chef Mac’s

By Michelle Gienow

W

hen a new eatery comes to Baltimore these days, the proprietors seem to always make a beeline for Hamilton/Lauraville and the bustling Harford Road dining corridor. The most recent arrival is Chef Mac’s and All That Blues, which started as a farmer’s market stall at the neighborhood’s Tuesday market. The restaurant occupied a small storefront just down the street on Harford Road before December’s takeover of the roomy space vacated (to great local lament) by the closing of Parkside Fine Food & Spirits last summer.

Owner Maclonza Lee was born in Louisiana and has worked his way through the restaurant industry in kitchens as diverse as Missouri barbecue joints and the United States Army food service. Chef Mac now serves up his native Louisiana cuisine in his dream setting, a combined dining room and jazz/blues music venue.

Fridays and Saturdays after 7 p.m. are “All That Blues” nights, when local music acts like Carl Filipiak and Charles “Big Daddy” Stallings compete to draw the crowd’s attention away from a generously provisioned buffet of Creole and southern specialties. At $25 per person for both dinner and show, it’s one of the best deals in Baltimore. (For the time being, Chef Mac’s is

of flatbreads. The entrée list includes airline chicken atop butternut squash risotto, blackened shrimp with grits, and a flat iron steak with fries—but here, the steak comes topped with gorgonzola demi-glace, and the fries are done in truffle oil.

There’s a nice balance between regular old comfort food, like a pulled pork sandwich with thick strands of barbecued pork on a chewy roll, and skirmishes outside the box, such as a special of plump seared scallops on creamy asparagus risotto with a dollop of slightly peppery cranberry mostarda on top. You can also get a bowl of rice noodles with shredded marinated beef, fresh cilantro, and, unfortunately, far too much soy sauce.

If there’s a something-for-everyone theme here, it’s certainly epitomized in the singularly decadent dessert: the deep-fried Twinkie. For both those old enough to remember its iconic role in the Harvey Milk murder trial and those whose parents wouldn’t dream of keeping the things around (even if they do last for seven years), it’s a must-try. The dessert, crisp around the edges like funnel cake at the fair, comes with a swirl of strawberry sauce and a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream—and may just send you scurrying to the pharmacy for cholesterol meds. (Dinner daily; lunch Sat; brunch Sun. 2901 E. Baltimore St.; 410-276-0820; www.bistrorx.net)

BYOB, and regulars in the know happily show up toting their ow n beer-filled coolers, all the better to settle in for the five-hour buffet and music experience.)

One recent Friday bu f fet i nc lude d a n ever-changing, all-youcan-eat roster of Cajun dishes such as seafood gumbo, steamed shrimp and snow crab legs, and fried crawfish tails with Secret’s in the sauce: The barbecue chicken at Chef Mac’s is among the Chef Mac’s legendary restaurant’s specialties. remoulade sauce. (And if that remoulade is not yet legendary, then it to be missed, however, are traditional Louisiana certainly deserves to become so.) The kitchen dishes like seafood gumbo, crawfish étouffeé, or also displayed a deft hand with Deep South an exquisite jambalaya that balances the weight classics like a decadent, creamy mac and cheese, of smoked andouille sausage and deep spice flaperfectly handled catfish filets whose sweet vors with the ocean-y lightness of shrimp, everyfreshness offset an earthy base note, and smoky thing elevated by the chunky, magical tomato gravy. Of course, on Blues Night, after burning stewed okra with tomatoes that delivered a c ayenne-powered punch. Squares of buttery, a few calories rocking out to the evening’s musilightly sweet cornbread were on hand and neccal entertainment, diners might even have room essary to calm that culinary fire. for homemade desserts like peach cobbler and Chef Mac’s regular menu includes very reapecan pie. (Lunch Tues-Sun; dinner Tues-Thurs; sonably priced sandwiches, plus a locally (as in, $25 blues buffet Fri-Sat; closed Mon. 4709 HarfGreater Lauraville) celebrated beef brisket. Not ord Rd; 410-319-6227; www.chefmacs.com) Urbanite #83 may 2011 61

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wine + spirits food + Drink

Grape Escape Island wines far from mainstream

By Clinton Macsherry

F

or an island that served as a Mediterranean stepping stone for millennia, Sardinia lies pretty far off the beaten path. Occupied but arguably never quite dominated by the seafaring Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, and Spaniards, among others, Sardinia possesses a somewhat mysterious interior (literally and figuratively) that both incorporates and transcends invading influences. A part of Italy since the 18th century, the island retains a character far more distinct from the mainland than Sicily, its offshore neighbor to the southeast. Today, notwithstanding the yacht-set enclave known as Costa Smerelda and a few seaside package-tour destinations for sun-starved northern Europeans, much of Sardinia has a depopulated, otherworldly vibe. That feeling gets amplified by seemingly omnipresent nuraghi, prehistoric conical stone structures about whose builders little is known. More than seven thousand nuraghi dot a landscape only slightly larger than New Jersey.

It’s not much of a stretch to draw some parallels to Sardinia’s winescape, with its obscure, enigmatic blend of ancient and contemporary, external and native. While not quite perhaps an oenological Galapagos, the island quietly boasts an array of indigenous or uniquely evolved grape varieties and wine types. For many years, viticulturalists posited Iberian origins for Sardinian vines, presumably transplanted during the four centuries of Spanish rule that ended in the early 18th century. While Spanish inflections remain perceptible in wines like the sherry-styled Vernaccia di Oristano, recent genetic studies turn that theory on its head. The widely planted Cannonau grape (known as Garnacha in Spain and Grenache elsewhere) now appears to have ancient roots in Sardinia, making it perhaps the oldest red wine grape variety in the world. Cannonau and other Sardinian varieties may well have been taken from the island, not brought to it. And new archaeological findings indicate that Sardinian winemaking dates back at least to 1200 B.C. According to one current hypothesis, Sardinia may prove to have been the cradle of Mediterranean wine culture.

Before reclaiming their birthright, Sardinian winemakers have generations of disrespect to overcome. Most references dismiss the island’s wine industry, noting its post-World War II history of bulk production and its reliance on grape varieties given little love in other regions. Cannonau/Grenache, with one or two exceptions, plays a starring role nowhere else; Carignano, Sardinia’s other major red grape, runs “high in photo BY steve estvanik | © bigstockphoto.com

Viticulture vacation: Sardinian grape varietals pack a flavorful punch, from fruity reds to crisp, rich whites.

everything … but finesse and charm,” as the Oxford Companion to Wine puts it, and faces periodic eradication campaigns in France. And yet, in Sardinia’s often torrid summer climate, both grapes can produce the plump, richly fruited wines many modern consumers crave. Dark and garnet-hued, Argiolas “Costera” Cannonau di Sardegna 2002 (current 2008 vintage $18.50, 14 percent alcohol) offers a sunny noseful of plums, joined by sweet red berries on the palate. Medium-framed and juicy, with light tannins, it dangles a toe in over-ripeness but never takes the plunge. Cantina Santadi “Grotta Rossa” Carignano del Sulcis 2001(current 2008 vintage $16, 13.5 percent alcohol) shows an inky purple, with a bit of a brownish cast. Pretty berry pie and red plum aromas come with a whiff of shoe leather. Medium- to full-bodied, not thick but jammy, its plum skin and slightly raisined flavors find some balancing acidity before turning a trifle hot on the finish.

Sardinia’s leading white grape, Vermentino, remains little known and rarely grown elsewhere. It typically combines luscious fruit with minerality and a telltale note of wild herbs. Natale Verga Vermentino di Sardegna 2009 ($9, 12.5 percent alcohol) pours clear, pale gold, with scents of rainwater, uncut melon, and dune grass. Buxom and oily textured, its mango and green apple flavors finish with notes of salt and gravel. Seafood lovers have no idea what they’re missing. But that’s just fine. We’ll keep Sardinia our little secret.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 63

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

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

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

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

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

arts + Culture

feature / music / film / theater

The Power of Pictures

By Donna M. Owens

photos by: J.M. GIORDANO

G

Who am I? Sam Holmes and Fanon Hill seek to give voices to black boys and men through art.

A bold community arts initiative takes on the persistent stereotypes of black boys and men.

rowing up in Park Heights in the 1960s, life for Koli Tengella was “no crystal stair,” as the famed Langston Hughes poem puts it. His father left early and was later murdered.

Tengella suffered physical and sexual abuse. His family struggled with alcoholism, addiction, and incarceration.

Yet today Tengella, 48, is thriving. An actor, stand-up comic, and a theater arts teacher in the city’s public school system, the newlywed was recently awarded an Open Society Institute-Baltimore fellowship to form youth acting troupes.

What made the difference?

“Reclaiming African culture, embracing the arts, and the Enoch Pratt public library saved my life,” Tengella says. “I could escape when I was being beaten and abused. I could go there [to the library], crack a book, and see images of me, and African people doing great things.”

Tengella now sits on the advisory board of a bold new initiative in Baltimore called the Black Male Identity Project. The campaign aims to use the arts to create more positive imagery, ideas, and narratives around black boys and men who are barraged with negative stereotypes. The goal is to

Urbanite #83 may 2011 65

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Feature / Music arts + culture foster dialogue both inside and outside the African American community that will expand horizons.

“There’s an African proverb that says, ‘Until lions tell their tale, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,’” says Fanon Hill, one of the project’s co-directors and a community organizer who also runs a nonprofit for youth with his wife.

“In Baltimore City, the underground economy and other deviants are glorified,” he says. What’s missing are the equally real, positive stories of smart black boys who are graduating from high school and attending college; of black men who are responsible fathers, happily married, and hardworking. And so on.

These are the stories that the Black Male Identity Project aims to tell, through a variety of artistic and other outlets. Over the next nine months, the campaign will feature free performances, workshops, art exhibitions, and celebrations— from a big bash in June at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum to neighborhood block parties in Cherry Hill and Harlem Park. There will be art exhibits at venues like Morgan State University and the Eubie Blake Center, and discussions at barbershops across the city.

The centerpiece of the project is an eyecatching website, www.morethan28days.com, which references the twenty-eight days of February—Black History Month. The site will be a forum for people to chat, view and share images, and read and post uplifting stories. For those without Internet access, there will be designated “community champions” who will collect art and scan and upload it to the website. To spread the word, expect a blend of old and new media, ranging from posters (such as the one that appeared in Urbanite’s March issue) to social media such as Twitter (@BlackMaleID). Meanwhile, a team of high school and college-aged “youth provocateurs” will do street organizing and grassroots outreach.

The initiative also aims to provide food for thought for folks who may not think any of this pertains to them. Peter Bruun, project coordinator and a founding director of Art on Purpose— the community arts organization that spearheaded this campaign—says white, privileged, suburbanites often have “a tremendously skewed and inaccurate perception” of what people are like in the city. “I’m endlessly shocked by the misperceptions, because I’m here, working in neighborhoods with blacks, whites, Hispanics, other immigrants,” he says. “I recognize the thread of common humanity that runs through it all,” said Bruun. “Those of ostensible privilege do not, and they miss out.”

The project has drawn support from movers and shakers across Baltimore’s civic, religious, and philanthropic spectrum, many of whom gathered at an official launch party in March at the 99-yearold Arch Social Club on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Somebody has told our boys a lie,” said LaMarr Darnell Shields, co-founder of the Urban Leadership Institute in a speech. “They believe what they see on TV, what they hear on all these [radio] stations—it’s time to change the images

of black and brown boys.”

African American men should be leading the charge, he says. “It’s time to stop playing games.

We need our men to step up to the plate.”

Funding for the project has come largely from the New York City-based Open Society Foundations and its Campaign for Black Male Achievement, which provided a $125,000 grant. The Maryland State Arts Council, the Maryland Humanities Council, the Cohen Opportunity Fund at The Associated, and other groups have also lent financial support. “If the campaign is successful in Baltimore, we may expand it nationally,” says Sam Holmes, an artist and educator who shares co-director duties with Hill.

Yet can art really make a difference when it comes to combating the vexing issues impacting African American boys and men?

Perhaps, but that’s not all that’s needed, say some in the trenches.

“While I support anything that is going to tackle these challenges, I’ve seen millions of dollars thrown at initiatives over the last twenty-five years,” says Kevin Powell, a nationally known activist based in Brooklyn who edited The Black Male Handbook and does extensive work around this issue across the country. “People get excited, but we don’t need any more think tanks, reports, and campaigns that come and go without practical solutions and tangible results.”

Powell, who has done outreach work in Baltimore, is careful not to disparage the new project and its creators. Yet he believes that long-term solutions can best be achieved through mentoring programs that pair black boys with black male professionals, expanding educational opportunities—“including vocational training, because college is not for everyone”—and jobs and small businesses incubators. “People are not gonna put their guns down unless they have something to live for: jobs, affordable housing, and a basic quality of life,” he says.

While the team behind the Black Male Identity Project know they can’t solve every issue impacting black men with a singular campaign, they believe the power of creative expression should not be underestimated.

“Art humanizes the dehumanized and has always corroborated the African American experience,” says Hill. “It allows for authentic self expression, and breathing room to see and be seen.”

And ultimately, the idea of changing images and thus potentially changing minds, is a great place to start.

“If people have low expectations of you, it’s hard for you to dream. And if you don’t dream, it’s hard to achieve,” U.S. Representative Elijah E. Cummings said at the kickoff, where he shared that a 6th grade counselor once scoffed at his dreams of becoming a lawyer. “I see this program as one that will help elevate that whole expectation thing, so that we will have generations of African American males who will take their families in an upward cycle. We can’t afford to let this not be successful.”

The Slow Burn Civilian by Wye Oak (Merge Records, 2011)

By Baynard Woods

A

t one time, Baltimore indie-rockers Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack thought of their two-piece band as a side project, a temporary fix until they could get a full band together. With the release of their fourth album, Civilian, Wye Oak proves just how big a small band can be.

Like their previous work, many of the angstfilled songs on Civilian are constructed around slow builds and dramatic transitions, but here, the sonic and emotional impact goes beyond anything Wye Oak has done before. Wasner sings with a haunted pathos, ranging from melancholic awe to soaring fury. Her guitar, sometimes gently picked, erupts a moment later into the distorted maelstrom of Crazy Horse-era Neil Young before leveling out into the fuzzy chops of punk and metal. As the melodies swoon, Stack holds everything together with driving percussion and intricate layers of sonic texture.

“It was always a struggle to represent the songs how we wanted them live,” says Stack, who beats on the drum kit with one hand and plays the keyboard with the other when the duo performs for an audience. “But on this album, the gap has been closed. If we wanted to put in five guitar parts in the studio, we could do it.”

The band gained critical acclaim in February, when NPR’s website live-streamed the first set of its huge headlining tour, including a successful stop at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. “I don’t know if it’s the slow burn of having done 150 shows a year for the past three years, or if it’s this record, but this tour has been amazing,” Stack muses via cell phone while shuttling to the next show through “very rural Idaho.”

Some songs on Civilian demand the listener’s undivided attention: With its sunny synth line and shimmering guitar, “The Alter” skirts the edge of the current surf-rock and girl-group trends, without ever succumbing to mere fashion. Other songs drift a bit toward the background but still add to the atmosphere of the whole. Whether you listen to the album or see the live show, the songs on Civilian will probably linger in your head longer than Wye Oak ever intended to be a band.

Urbanite #83 may 2011 67

Feeling better,

but not where you want to be?

No one chooses to have depression. But every day, people choose to do something about it. And for many, it means taking an antidepressant. But for some, this may not always be enough. Low mood and loss of interest are just a few of the common symptoms that can continue to stay with you – even while you’re treating depression. If you’re experiencing unresolved symptoms, it maybe time to consider additional options.

The Depression Outreach Study is evaluating an investigational drug that’s intended to be taken with your current antidepressant (SSRI), to see if it helps to lessen any ongoing symptoms of depression.

All eligible study participants will receive investigational study drugs, coverage for their current prescription antidepressant, and studyrelated care at no cost. If you’re at least 18 years old, have been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), and are taking a prescription antidepressant, you may be eligible to participate.

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Film / theater arts + culture

Bottom photo by Tiffany Manning; Top image courtesy of MD Film Festival

T

Home-schooled: Hari Leigh stars as Kirsten in Baltimore filmmaker Josh Slates’s Small Pond, about the American Midwest.

Reel Time Maryland Film Festival, May 5–8

by Breena SIEGEL

True Life

Crumbs: A Possibly True Story at Theatre Project May 5–15 Pygmalion at the Everyman Theatre, May 17–June 19

By Martha Thomas

A

his year’s Maryland Film Festival is bringing out the big guns. Festival-goers can catch lovable Oscar speech-maker Luke Matheny’s live-action short, God of Love; 2010 Cannes Festival favorites Poetry and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; and Todd Rohal’s The Catechism Cataclysm, straight out of Sundance.

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry will be attending, along with John Waters, whose much-anticipated pick of the festival this year is Domaine, a French film about a gay teen’s relationship with his alcoholic aunt.

On the local front, three directors connected to Baltimore through varying degrees present films that explore the ever-expanding theme of home. Baltimore-based filmmaker Ramona Diaz’s The Learning is a cinema vérité portrayal of four female Filipino teachers invited by the city of Baltimore to teach in its public schools. When the women leave their homes and families in the Philippines for a more economically stable livelihood in America, they discover, as Diaz remarks, that “Home is where you can make a living.”

Michael Tully wrote, directed, and stars as Cornelius Rawlings in Septien, about a man who returns home to his creepily eccentric family’s farm outside Nashville after eighteen years of estrangement. As a result, he unearths some dark secrets and a host of odd characters: Wilbur, a

farmhand, spends his nights in a tractor tire, and Red “Rooster” Rippington, a plumber, keeps an underage girl as a pet. Tully, originally from central Maryland and a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, showed his last feature film, Cocaine Angels, at the festival in 2006.

First-time director Josh Slates, now based in Baltimore, used his hometown of Columbia, Missouri, as a backdrop for Small Pond, about Kirsten, an under-motivated recent college graduate living with her parents. When asked why he chose Columbia for his setting, Slates says, “I really wanted to make a movie about the American Midwest that was fundamentally different from anything I’d seen in recent independent cinema.” The film, while acknowledging the simplicity of the Midwestern small town, ultimately makes a case for it as a special part of the American landscape.

Diaz, Tully, and Slates will all appear at the festival, which kicks off May 5 in and around the Charles Theatre and the Station North Arts District. Sample from fifty feature films and seventy-five shorts in the categories of narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental.

Purchase tickets in advance through www.md-filmfest. com, at Maryland Institute College of Art on opening night, and at the box office beginning Friday, May 6.

united against the Man, this theme—which has taken on some relevance of late—does arise. “Wherever you work, someone wants you to fit into a mold,” he says, whether it’s on a fast track in business—or sweeping crumbs in a bread factory.

l Letson, who developed his one-man show, Summer in Sanctuary, at Theatre Project in Shaping another human is the theme of the George Bernard 2008, returns with another autobiographical piece. This one, Crumbs: Shaw classic, Pygmalion, a play A Possibly True Story, is a departure Art imitating life: Al Letson pulls material for his plays, including Crumbs, at the Everyman made famous by its musical version, My Fair Lady. It’s the for the rap poet and monologuist. Theatre, from the “extraordinary experiences” of his own life.

For starters, the play has a cast of story of Henry Higgins (played nine. And while there’s a guy named Al Letson is charged with spying on a supervisor who is

by Everyman veteran Kyle Prue), a professor in Crumbs, he’s played by someone else. (The suspected of sexual misconduct. But the bigof linguistics who, on a wager with his buddy, real Letson has been busy performing Sumger crime, from the management’s point of view, takes in the waifish Eliza Dolittle to make a lady mer in Sanctuary—about working with at-risk Letson learns, may be the supervisor’s support of her. Eliza, of course, is not a thing to be easily youth at a Florida community center—at the for fellow workers against the boss. The play molded, and the professor winds up facing his own deficits, mainly his cold, cold heart. Withoff-Broadway Abingdon Theater in New York.) deals with racism, classism, and homophobia, a out the music, Shaw’s arch wit and social comLetson, who was raised in suburban affluence volatile mix that Letson is able to temper with he compares to the Cosbys, takes much of his his nuanced, insightful storyline. “Sure, it comes mentary shine through. from real life, but it’s a play,” says the playwright. material from what he calls the “extraordinary experiences I’ve been thrown into.” Crumbs is “I’m concerned with the truth, but not the literal Crumbs, 410-539-3091, www.theatreproject.org based on a job he had working a ten-hour gravetruth.”

Pygmalion, 410-752-2208, yard shift as an undercover investigator in a And while Letson says he didn’t write the www.everymantheatre.org bread factory. Hired to sweep the floor, Letson play to hammer on the old story of workers Urbanite #83 may 2011 69

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N o u v e a u C o n t e m p o r a r y G o o d s • S u n Tr u s t B a n k • Te c h L a b P h o t o D i g i t a l I m a g i n g • Tu e s d a y M o r n i n g • M a r k e t / E a t e r i e s : A t w a t e r s • B o n B o n ’s I c e C r e a m • C e r i e l l o F i n e I t a l i a n F o o d s • E a r t h ’s E s s e n c e S m o o t h i e s • G r e g ’s

S h o p s / S e r v i c e s : B e l v e d e r e P h a r m a c y • D a e d a l u s B o o k s a n d M u s i c • T h e D u t c h C o n n e c t i o n • T h e H o u s e D o w n t o w n • L y n n e B r i c k ’ s Wo m e n ’s H e a l t h & F i t n e s s • M a t a v a To o •

B a g e l s • I k a n S u s h i & S e a fo o d • M a r ke t B a ke r y • N e o p o l S avo r y S m o ke r y • T h e Pe a nu t S h o p p e • P l a n e t P ro d u c e • P l o u g h b oy S o u p s • S u b w ay • T C B Y • R e s t a u r a n t s / C a fe s : C r u s h •

the scene

this month’s happenings ARTS/CULTURE LITER ATURE Poet Laureate Billy Collins, master of insight into daily domestic life, speaks on May 4 at McDaniel College in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the school’s B. Christopher Bothe Poetry Lecture. (2 College Hall, Westminster; 410-857-2290; www.mcdaniel.edu) The pencil-moustached king of Baltimore kitsch chronicles his weird and wonderful life in his memoir, Role Models. If you missed him last year when the book came out in hardcover, catch John Waters at Atomic Books on May 14, signing copies, now in paperback. (3620 Falls Rd.; 410-662-4444; \www.atomicbooks.com)

photo by MaxMilli

MUSIC International Jazz Hall of Fame inductee Junior Mance has played his blues piano with such legends as Dinah Washington and Dizzy Gillespie. On May 1, he performs for the Baltimore Chamber Jazz Society’s annual Jazz Masters Concert at the Baltimore Museum of Art. (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443-573-1818; www. baltimorechamberjazz.org) Fill your monthly indie quota early at the Sweetlife Festival on May 1 at Merriweather Post Pavillion. The lineup this year includes the Strokes, Girl Talk, Lupe Fiasco, and Ra Ra Riot. Signature eco-friendly food will be provided by festival sponsor Sweetgreen. (10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia; 410715-5550; www.sweetlifefestival.com)

Gary Thomas, director of jazz studies at the Peabody Institute, leads the Peabody Improvisation and Multimedia Ensemble for its final performance of the season on May 5. The ensemble, which includes strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion, and voices, also makes ample use of multimedia technologies such as computers and video. (East Hall, 1 E. Mt. Vernon Pl.; 410-234-4500; www.peabody.jhu.edu) Mezzo-soprano Theodora Hanslowe and tenor Simon O’Neill perform Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on May 6 and 8. The program begins with Felix Mendelssohn’s Italian, which he wrote after an enchanting visit to Italy in 1831. (1212 Cathedral St.; 410-783-8000; www. bsomusic.org)

THEATER Time to rekindle your undying crush on the Fonz. The Columbia Center for Theatrical Arts takes you back to Milwaukee circa 1959 for Happy Days, their spring fundraiser on May 16 at Toby’s Dinner Theatre of Columbia. The event, which will include a performance of Happy Days, the musical, will raise money to support the organization’s outreach efforts to under-resourced communities.

(5900 Symphony Woods Rd., Columbia; 410-381-0700; www.cctarts.com) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable, about ethical uncertainty in a 1960s Catholic school, will leave you with doubts of your own. At Spotlighters Theatre starting May 13 (817 St. Paul St.; 410-752-1225; www.spotlighters.org) The season of outdoor concerts is upon us. WTMD’s First Thursdays return to Mount Vernon on May 5 with the springy sounds of April Smith and the Great Picture Show, along with the Damnwells and Harper Blynn. (W. Mount Vernon Park; 410-704-8936; www.wtmd.org)

VISUAL ART Visit the studios and facilities of MICA’s graduate programs at the MICA Masters Benefit Art Sale on May 14.

Proceeds from the sale, which includes a reception, will support scholarships for MICA grad students. (1301 W. Mount Royal Ave.; 410-669-9200; www.mica.edu) Artist Suzanne Herbert-Forton’s mixedmedia artwork is rooted in storytelling and inspired by anonymous artisans of the Middle Ages. See it at Ceramics

and Embroidery at the Chesapeake Arts Center through May 27. (194 Hammonds Ln., Brooklyn Park; 410-636-6597; www.chesapeakearts.org) The Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory puts its plants in the background on May 15 as it welcomes nineteen local artists to display their work for Art Under Glass: The Great Outdoors.

The exhibition and sale is preceded by a brunch with the artists. (3100 Swan Dr.; 410-398-0008; www.baltimoreconserva tory.org) To create the 654 Show, the Crystal Moll Gallery put six artists to work on location in five neighborhoods for four weeks in April. See the results at the opening reception on May 5. (1030 S. Charles St.; 410-952-2843; www.crystalmollgallery.com)

COMMUNITY We’re just over half a year away from the Baltimore Marathon—gear up with the Maryland Half Marathon on May 15, benefiting the University of Maryland Marlene and Steward Greenebaum Cancer Center. (Maple Lawn, Clarksville; 410-308-1870; www.mdhalfmarathon.com)

Check out the new line of urban fashion from House of Descai on May 1 at Doll House Boutique. Stick around afterward to meet the designers amidst wine, music, and desserts. Proceeds benefit relief efforts in Japan. For more information, email Kevin Branch at mrkbranch@gmail. com. (525 N. Charles St.; 443-874-7900; www.descai.com)

Urbanite #83 may 2011 71

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The Harlan’s took advantage of a Maryland state grant program and with the help of Greenspring Energy, had a photovoltaic solar system and a solar hot water heater installed. And today, these systems are utilizing sunlight to generate about 35 percent of the energy needed and used by the household, allowing the family to save money each month and live in a more environmentally friendly and “green” manner.

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the scene On May 26 at the Windup Space, the idea-happy people behind the Ignite Baltimore speakers series brings you Ignite for a Better Baltimore, which will feature the usual array of five-minute presentations, this time with a focus on making our city better. A special networking session will connect you with like-minded people who care about Charm City. (12 W. North Ave.; 410-2448855; www.thewindupspace.com)

FOOD/DRINK We all know that chicken soup can do wonders for a bad cold, but what about mole, curry, and goulash? On May 2 the Tai Sophia Institute’s lecture “Medicinal Foods from Around the Globe” sheds light on how herbs and spices from all corners of the world can help bring you back to health. (7750 Montpelier Rd., Laurel; 410-888-9048; www.tai.edu) Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland promises that if you let them feed you for an evening, they’ll feed thousands of the elderly and disabled for weeks

afterward. Chefs from Clementine, Dangerously Delicious Pies, and La Scala Ristorante will work their magic at the 19th annual Culinary Extravaganza on May 2. (Lord Baltimore Radisson Hotel, 2 W. Baltimore St.; 410-558-0932; www. mealsonwheelsmd.org/culinary) Wine in the Woods returns this year to Symphony Woods in Columbia May 21–22. Sample wines and foods from throughout the Mid-Atlantic while grooving to live music under a canopy of leafy trees. Ah, spring. Urbanite is a sponsor of this event. (5950 Symphony Woods Rd., Columbia; 410-313-7275; www. wineinthewoods.com) Learn how to class up your next barbecue at BBQ Wines, a tasting of big reds on May 26 at Bin 604. Wine experts will help you find the perfect pairing for grilled meats; the flavor of summer.

(604 S. Exeter St.; 410-576-0444; www. bin604.com)

GREEN/SUSTAINABLE Catholic Charities of Baltimore hosts a plant sale May 2–5 to benefit Gallagher Services for People with Developmental

Disabilities. The sale takes place at the organization’s Shamrock Gardens greenhouse, which houses more than fifteen thousand plants and serves as the site for therapeutic gardening for patients. (2520 Pot Spring Rd., Lutherville-Timonium; 410-252-4005; www.catholiccharities-md.org) In 1911, the Women’s Civic League joined the Home Garden Committee to bring the best of spring’s blooms to Mount Vernon Square, and Flowermart was born. This year, the event returns for its 100th anniversary on May 6–7, with plenty of musical and arts entertainment.

(Washington Monument; 410-323-0022; www.flowermart.org) Find everything you need to green your home at the Solar and Wind Expo, May 13–15 at the Timonium Fairgrounds.

Browse exhibits and talk to experts about how to save money and reduce your carbon footprint and hear a keynote address on the past, present, and future of the electric car (2200 York Rd.; 410439-1577; www.thesolarandwindexpo.com)

HOME/DESIGN The BSO takes on suites of a different style May 7-30 for Symphonic Suites at the Ritz Carlton Residences. For the annual Decorators’ Show House benefit, twenty-five designers showcase their skills in two luxury condos. Proceeds benefit the BSO’s educational programs. (801 Key Hwy.; 410-783-8000; www.bsomusic.org) On May 18, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curator of European sculpture and decorative arts, Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, will discuss the restoration of the 18thcentury Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts, part of the Evergreen Museum’s House Beautiful lecture series. (4545 N. Charles St.; 410-5160341; www.museums.jhu.edu/evergreen)

STYLE/SHOPPING Vendors offer “everything and the kitchen sink” at the Station North Flea Market on May 7. (100 Block of W. North Ave.; 410-962-7075; www.loadoffun.net/loadoffun/ fleamarket)

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An evening of remarkable music drawn The MTA Red Line Project Team and community members of the Station Area Advisory Committees (SAAC) cordially invite you to an information Open House in your community. Stay involved in the latest Red Line planning!

Saturday May 7th

Wednesday May 11th

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eye to eye

who are these women? On the left, a petite woman exudes sweet congeniality, her smile wide and head tilted to the side. On the right, a woman with wild, dark hair and red lips glares at the camera, her arms crossed confrontationally. The women couldn’t appear to be more different. Why are they side by side? And why do they bear the same tattoo?

Closer inspection reveals the two women are actually one and the same: Yaqui Maria. But which one is the real Yaqui Maria? Is it possible that both versions are equally authentic?

Baltimore artist Sarada Conaway’s recent work is a series of makeovers.

Unlike the makeovers in glossy fashion magazines, however, these are not intended to beautify the models. Rather, Conaway’s dress-up sessions are designed to emphasize certain personal traits or to cara ober reveal hidden aspects of her subjects’ identities. “I try not to push anyone into a look,” Conaway says. cara ober is urbanite’s online arts/culture editor. to receive “I like letting the model guide the transformation.” her weekly e-zine, go to bit.ly/ For some, the transformation happens spontaneezinesignup. ously. Others require specialized research, including expert help with makeup and wardrobe choices.

In many of these works, it is difficult to ascertain the genuine look from the constructed one, though as a viewer, it is easy make assumptions. (I’m betting the woman on the left is the real Yaqui Maria.) Conaway’s makeovers challenge our assumptions of what is “normal” and what is exotic.

They prove that one’s personal appearance can be a fluid and articulate expression of self—and that even one’s everyday appearance involves a degree of artificiality.

78 may 2011 www.urbanitebaltimore.com

Sarada Conaway Yaqui Maria 2010 performance and digital photography 16 x 24 in. each

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