November 2006 Issue by Urbanite LLC

november

B A LT I M O R E ’ S

C U R I O U S

2006

F O R

issue no. 29

the race thing

why BALTIMOREANS don’t talk about it

coming clean our national obsession with online confessionals modern makeover inside the living classrooms’ latest buildingS moveable feast a new take on free-range farming

urbanite november 06

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

People describe Taste as a great place to enjoy impeccable food in a low-key atmosphere. People describe Taste as (Andplace now, to some of a great enjoy the atmosphere impeccable food in is a even lower key.) low-key atmosphere.

a lighter side to taste

winedown winedown winedown Taste introduces winedown, our new lite a lighter side to taste a lighter side to taste fare menu of smaller portions and more mid-tier wines, to relish on our patio, at the bar or in our new bistro space.

(And describe now, some ofas People Taste the atmosphere is a great place to enjoy even lowerfood key.)in a impeccable

taste taste

low-key atmosphere.

Taste introduces winedown, our new lite Taste introduces winedown, our new lite fare menu of smaller portions and and moremore fare menu of smaller portions mid-tier wines, to relish on our at at mid-tier wines, to relish on patio, our patio, the bar in our space.space. theorbar or innew ourbistro new bistro

(And now, some of the atmosphere is even lower key.)

upscale food ...unpretentious everything else

BELVEDERE

SQUARE

— In Belvedere Square at York Road and Northern Parkway —

upscale food ...unpretentious everything else

UPSCALE FOOD ...unpretentious everything else

excellence in real estate

the henslee dailey team

bolton hill historic frick mansion 7BR/6BA, 5700 sq. ft., former B&B with all the trimmings--pier mirrors, marble mantels, pocket doors, 5-car garage, and the list goes on! Minutes to MARC Train & 95.

anne henslee

jessica dailey

ahenslee@cbmove.com

jdailey@cbmove.com

410.967.2652

443.838.8204

COldWell BanKeR Residential BROKeRaGe roland park at wyndhurst station 410.433.7800 owned and operated by nrt incorporated

urbanite november 06

roland park

grande dame of roland park 7BR/4+BA, Stucco Colonial Estate with three-seaason porch, in-ground pool and 2-car garage on private wooded lot adjacent to Baltimore Country Club open space. RE ALTOR

EQUAL HOUSING

OPPORTUNITY

New Destinations BENJAMIN LOVELL SHOES CITY SPORTS DRIFTWOOD HANDBAGS AND THE CITY HARBOR NEWS NOUVEAU CONTEMPORARY GOODS SPA SANTÉ

Great Favorites

Harbor& East Harbor Point ELEVEN SQUARE CITY BLOCKS designated and designed to become the

center of activity for the Baltimore/Washington region. Retail Shops. Residences. Hotels. Offices. Tourism. Entertainment. It’s the urban experience reinvigorated and redefined. Be part of this truly one-of-a-kind experience and tap into the vibrancy of the east coast’s boldest new neighborhood.

BIN 604 CHIU’S SUSHI CINDY WOLF’S CHARLESTON CINGULAR WIRELESS COURTYARD BY MARRIOTT FLEMINGS PRIME STEAKHOUSE & WINE BAR GAINES McHALE ANTIQUES & HOME GRILLE 700 THE HARBOR BANK OF MARYLAND HARBOR CLEANERS HARBOR EAST DENTAL HARBOR EAST MARINA JAMES JOYCE IRISH PUB & RESTAURANT KOSMOS LOUNGE MARRIOTT WATERFRONT THE OCEANAIRE SEAFOOD ROOM PAD PAZO THE PROMENADE AT HARBOR EAST RIGANO’S ROY’S SOUTH MOON UNDER SPINNAKER BAY TACO FIESTA THE URBAN ADVENTURE CO. THE VUE WATERFRONT DELI WHOLE FOODS MARKET

Coming Soon

ARHAUS FOUR SEASONS HOTEL AND PRIVATE RESIDENCES LANDMARK THEATRES LEBANESE TAVERNA

Eat. Drink. Dine. Live. Shop. Play. Stay.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

RHTM-2006-0029

9/26/06

12:26 PM

Page 1

ÂŠ2006 Authorized Mercedes-Benz Dealers

Reisterstown Road in Owings Mills

1.800.503.6170

R&H Motor Cars

GET Have you booked your Holiday Party? Early bookings receive Special Rewards! Holiday Gift Cards now available.

“Voted one of the 80 Great New Restaurants from Buenos Aires to Zurich.” Conde Nast Traveler, “A Global Guide, 2005 Hot List”; April 2005

“Voted one of the 50 Best Restaurants in Baltimore." Baltimore Magazine, “50 Best Restaurants”; February 2006

ed! Restaurant Row at Market Place 614 Water Street Baltimore www.BlueSeaGrill.com || 410.837.7300 Complimentary Valet Parking

Live Beautifully. A N E W W C I® T O W E R R E S I D E N C E

Luxury Two- and Three-Bedroom Tower Residences Overlooking Lake Kittamaqundi from the $600s to over $2 million Proposed Amenities: 12,000-square-feet Amenity Level with Club Room, Billiards, Fitness Center, Private Theatre, Guest Suites, Business Center and Private Dining Room, plus Indoor Golf Simulator, Concierge, First-Floor Retail Establishments, Rooftop Pool and Spa

A WCI Tower Residence ®

Welcome Center & Beautifully Decorated Model Residence Open Daily 10215 Wincopin Circle • Columbia, Maryland 21044 • (410) 772-1234 • (866) WCI-3735 • theplazawci.com OBTAIN THE PROPERTY REPORT REQUIRED BY FEDERAL LAW AND READ IT BEFORE SIGNING ANYTHING. NO FEDERAL AGENCY HAS JUDGED THE MERITS OR VALUE, IF ANY, OF THIS PROPERTY.

The Experience Is Everything.

This is an artist’s rendering only, and based on current development plans which are subject to change without notice. Pricing subject to change without notice. No guarantee is made that the facilities or features depicted will be built, or if built, will be of the same type, size or nature depicted. The developer expressly reserves the right to make any modifications, revisions, and changes it deems desirable in its sole and absolute discretion or as may be required by law or government bodies. Scenes may include artists’ renderings, and may be of locations or activities not on the property. All renderings, designs and other depictions are based on current development plans, are for the purpose of illustration only, and are subject to change without notice. This ad does not constitute an offer to sell real estate in any jurisdiction where prior registration or other qualification is required and further information cannot be provided (unless we have already complied with such requirements). MHBR No. 4761 “We are pledged to the letter and spirit of U.S. policy for the achievement of Equal Housing Opportunity throughout the Nation. We encourage and support an affirmative advertising and marketing program in which there are no barriers to obtaining housing because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin.”

urbanite november 06

f e a t u r e s november 2006 issue no. 29

Baltimore artist Brian Payne quickly took the photograph that is the heart of this image while driving down I-95. He created the image by hand with wax, paint, and an old piece of red paper, and then scanned it in to his computer for reproduction. Payne’s work can be viewed at www. brianpayne.net.

cover illustration by Brian Payne

november’s cover:

60 the elephant in the city

why we don’t talk about race in baltimore by matthew a. crenson

people often say that baltimore is two cities: one black and one white. while we may confer about this perceived racial divide privately, we rarely have a frank civic discourse. award-wining author and historian matthew a. crenson revisits his own childhood and the days following brown v. board of education to reﬂect on why we don’t openly discuss race in baltimore.

64 alone at the table

growing up smart, ambitious, and black in baltimore b y r. d a r r y l f o x w o r t h

foxworth grew up in northwest baltimore with what barack obama calls a natural aptitude for schooling. he managed to avoid the prescribed fate of many young black males. more than anything, he wanted to not become a black boy statistic.

66 out, damned spot!

web confessionals and the allure of admission by kerr houston

you type a few thoughts, and click on “post.” you wait. someone responds. your existence in a broader community has been temporarily validated. and perhaps, if you happen to have been excruciatingly honest, and if your words have fallen on a generous ear, you may even feel absolved.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

GIVE LOVE!

NOW OPEN!

ABOUT FACES Gift Certificates

ABOUT FACES Baltimore at Canton Crossing

AboutFacesDaySpa.com

s the season changes and the leaves begin to turn,

get your fresh new look for Fall. For a total transformation, schedule a cut and color along with a personalized makeup application.

( Take

time out of your busy schedule to

relax your mind, renew your body, and rejuvenate your spirit. Whether you spend an hour with us, or an entire day, our mission is to make your every visit a beautiful experience.

(

BALTIMORE

TOWSON

TIMONIUM

PIKESVILLE

At Canton Crossing 1501 South Clinton Street

The Shops at Kenilworth 800 Kenilworth Drive

At The MAC 110 West Timonium Road

Festival at Woodholme 1809 Reisterstown Road

410.675.0099

410.828.8666

410.560.6600

410.602.0888

A BOUT F ACES D AY S PA.COM 10

urbanite november 06

departments november 2006 issue no. 29

21 what you’re saying

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

25 what you’re writing

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

29 corkboard

six not-to-miss events around town

31 have you heard ...

people, places, and things you should know about

37 food: a moveable feast

local organic-poultry farmers raise healthier, better-tasting chickens by putting their operation on wheels joan jacobson

41 baltimore observed: rhetoric or reality 37

does baltimore really have a white-collar housing crunch? joan jacobson

47 encounter: a boy and his car

spray paint and bumper stickers are one twentysomething’s way of speaking out jason tinney

52 space: history repeating

architecture firm ziger/snead honors the past and the present with a skillful, modern design on the fells point waterfront amanda kolson hurley

69 poetry: sunday, in the cold will holman

73 sustainable city: take it from the top

a plant-covered roof is just the beginning for a green-thinking car dealer donna m. owens

77 out there: a second chance

live the life you’ve always wanted in the online community called second life angela davids

81 recommended

books, bands, exhibits, and more

93 resources

further reading on topics covered in this issue

98 eye to eye

a closing thought, curated by art director alex castro

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Baltimore’s Most

imore’Extraordinary s Most Addresses. ary Addresses. Magniﬁcent Model Open! $25,000 toward Options!*

Mays Chapel North in Timonium

8-story luxury condominium residence with exquisite lobby entry, elevators and in-building parking. All within walking distance of Graul’s market, Prestigious, gated community villa townhomes café, salon, pharmacy, dining of andluxury physician’s ofﬁces. 1with mile2-car fromgarages I-83.

Prestigious, gated community of luxury villa townhomes with 2-car garages and up to 4,800 s.f. of living space with full luxury features. Located in desirable Falls Rd. corridor 2 miles from Greenspring Station and 2 miles from Mount Washington Village with easy access to I-83 and 695.

I-83 N. to Exit 17 (Padonia Rd. W). Go 1 mile to right on Roundwood Rd.Free to Sales I building #12240. RecCenter Roominside and RoundWood Lower LevelRidge Full Bath for aatLimited Weekdays, 9-5. Weekends, 12-5. 410-252-3797. MHBR 4663. Time.* Baltimore’s Most Breathtaking Decorated Model!

Finished Lower Level with Full Bath Included* Baltimore’s Most Breathtaking Decorated Model!

From City: I-83 N. to Exit 10A (Northern Pkwy.) to left on Falls Rd. 2 miles to left on Newstead Lane. From County: I-83 S. to Exit 23B (Falls Rd.) to left at signal at Falls Rd. 2 miles to right$25,000 on Newstead Lane. Appointments, telephone 410-821-0383.toward MHBR Options 3722.

& Finished Lower Level Included!* $20,000 toward Options!* Mays Chapel North in Timonium

Dunloy low $700s Rodgers from Forgethe in Towson Area

$20,000 toward Options & Special Financing Available!*

Rodgers Forge in Towson Area

Rodgers Choice from the $450s

appointments in an established neighborhood with a town’n country feel. Final Opportunity! Near Towson business district and university, dining, shopping, schools Special Incentives for Immediate Occupancy! and downtown Baltimore.

Brick-front garage townhomes with three ﬁnished levels and luxury appointments in an established neighborhood with a town’n country feel. Near Towson business district and university, dining, shopping, schools and downtown Baltimore.

I-695 to Charles St. to left on Bellona to Stevenson Lane. Weekdays, 9-5. Weekends, 12-5. 410-377-6896. MHBR 3732.

Sales conducted from RoundWood Ridge. Directions/hours above. Stunning Model Open! 410-252-3797. MHBR 2015.

From City: I-83 N. to Exit 10A (Northern Pkwy.) to left on Falls Rd. 2 miles to left on Newstead Lane. From County: I-83 S. to Exit 23B (Falls Rd.) to left at signal at Falls Rd. 2 miles to right on Newstead Lane. Weekdays, 9-5. Weekends, 12-5. 410-821-0383. MHBR 3722.

Rodgers Choice from the $450s

Prestigious, gated community with prime homesites backing to woodlands still available. Villa-style townhomes with 3 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, up to 4,000 s.f. ofﬁliving Brick-frontgarage garageand townhomes with three nishedspace. levels and luxury

elcome

Historic Rockland near Brooklandville

Rockland Ridge from $799,900

and up to 4,800 s.f. of living space with full luxury features. Located in desirable Falls Rd. corridor 2 miles from Greenspring Station and 2 miles Exciting New Open Floorplan with Great Room! from Mount Washington Village with easy access to I-83 and 695.

(on selected homesites)

Historic Rockland Brooklandville RoundWood Ridge near III from the $330s

Rockland Ridge from $799,900

$75,000 toward Options!*

*Available for a limited time only with use of recommended lender and title company. Not valid on prior contracts. Builder reserves the right to make changes without prior notice. Renderings depicted for illustrative purposes only. For full details, see yourKeelty.com sales representative. urbanite november 06

Brokers Welcome

Stunning Model Open! Final Section Now Selling.

Our community’s

excellence.

Your professional advantage.

Excellent Example:

“

12.1—URBANITE—6 x 11.25

My Johns Hopkins graduate degree program fits right into my work week.”

Ravi Khanna, M.S., is a graduate of our Computer Science Program, and a Software Engineer with ViaSat, Inc.

Top students and instructors all around you, helping to move you forward.

A wide range of programs, each with a rich depth of engineering courses.

A Johns Hopkins University master’s degree or certificate that can advance your career.

Evening and Saturday classes at conveniently located centers.

”

By Ariel Dorfman Directed by Lillian Groag Now through Nov 26th The Pearlstone Theater

Tickets: $10– $60

www.centerstage.org

410.332.0033

Join Us!

Aberdeen • Baltimore • Elkridge • Laurel • Rockville • Southern MD • Washington, DC • Online

For more information about our graduate programs: www.epp.jhu.edu/masters epp@jhu.edu 1.800.548.3647

“

We’re going to put him on trial, Gerardo, this doctor. Right here. Today. You and me.

See the last five plays for only $50.

Where excellence surrounds you

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Urbanite Issue 29 November 2006 Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth A. Evitts Elizabeth@urbanitebaltimore.com Guest Editor George Baca Executive Editor Heather Harris Heather@urbanitebaltimore.com Editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com Copy Editor Angela Davids/Alter Communications Contributing Editors William J. Evitts Joan Jacobson Susan McCallum-Smith Contributing Writer Jason Tinney Contributing Photographer Gail Burton Art Director Alex Castro

Culturally Hip & Wildly FREE! FREE Admission Starting October 1 It doesn’t cost a thing to enjoy the exquisite artworks and ambiance of our lovely galleries. And to celebrate, we’re adding late hours that make our diverse collections more accessible than ever. Check us out on the web or just swing by. Because we couldn’t be more free.

H O U R S Wednesday - Sunday 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. And open until 8 p.m. on Fridays

Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffic/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer Jason Okutake Web Coordinator George Teaford Administrative Assistant Catrina Cusimano Senior Account Executive Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives Rebekah Oates Rebekah@urbanitebaltimore.com Bill Rush Bill@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Interns Christina Bittinger Sheri J. Booker La Kaye Mbah David Meinrath Saaret E. Yoseph Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to the editor-in-chief (no phone calls, please) including SASE. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year.

www.thewalters.org 600 N. Charles St.

Baltimore, MD 21201

Made possible by generous gifts from the City of Baltimore and Baltimore County with additional support from Anne Arundel County and T. Rowe Price Associates Foundation, Inc. Special thanks to Free Fall Baltimore media sponsors: The Baltimore Sun, Maryland Public Television, WBAL-TV, 92Q-FM, Magic 95.9-FM, WYPR-FM, and Mission Media.

urbanite november 06

410-547-9000

freefallbaltimore.com

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2006, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved. Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. If you know of a location that urbanites frequent and would recommend placing the magazine there, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211.

editor’s note

quotes

no one gossips about other people's secret virtues .

The last question we want to ask is why all of us allow things to remain as they do? To quote Pogo, perhaps "we have met the enemy and he is us." Perhaps part of the blame resides with us as citizens, with our own capacity for self-delusion and with what we regard as meaningful or important.

—Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, mathematician, and author

i don’t have HBO at home, so I’m a season behind on The Wire. Netflix finally started sending Season 3 about a month ago. Even though someone already spilled the major plot development to me by accident, I’m still riveted. Why do I love The Wire? It’s well written, well acted, skillfully conceived. But more than anything, it’s honest. It’s brilliant and brutal, funny and sad, and it speaks the truth. It talks about our city in ways that few can, or do. You learn something from The Wire. And it makes you think. On the other hand, while planning the city’s new branding campaign last spring, San Francisco-based firm Landor Associates quickly identified the award-winning series as a problem. The advertising agency told city officials that Baltimore had a perception problem and The Wire was, in part, to blame. Baltimore, they seemed to be saying, needed to stop talking about its problems in order to sell itself to the outside world. But the truth is, we’ve been trying to hide these problems all along. We’re pretty good at ignoring what’s going on around us, or rather, we’re very good at not talking about what’s going on. Baltimore is often said to be two cities, one black and one white. These spheres do not interact the way that they could or should. It’s the pervasive duality of our day-to-day lives here. We tacitly accept it as the norm, and like most norms it sinks below our perceptions, becoming the constant background hum we no longer hear. The result is a stunning silence in a city that prides itself, with reason, on being earthy, unpretentious, and “real.” David Simon and Edward Burns, creators of The Wire, first wrote about this duality in The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. They described that jarring juxtaposition between the faltering innercity neighborhoods and the cheery tourism of the Inner Harbor. A gunfight breaks out on New Year’s Eve while “twenty blocks east, there are thousands milling around Inner Harbor promenades and downtown hotel lobbies, watching fireworks of a different kind in the night sky.” But far beyond the drug corners and tourism centers, the duality persists on multiple levels throughout the community. This issue, freelance journalist R. Darryl Foxworth writes about what it’s like to navigate that divide as a black man in Baltimore (p. 64). Meanwhile, writer and political scientist Matthew A. Crenson has been exploring why Baltimoreans have never talked openly about race (p. 60). Why have we adopted this taboo, and what does this silence do to us? Guest Editor George Baca challenges us to think beyond dualistic terms—beyond black and white, rich and poor, right and left. We live in a polarized society, Baca says, where shades of gray are an endangered species. But it is in those gray areas where the truth often lives. Move beyond stereotype and polarization, and we may begin to have a real dialogue. That’s the brilliance of The Wire. It took a television show to stimulate an honest conversation about crime, drugs, politics, and education in this city. But please, whatever you do, don’t tell me what happens in Season 4.

photo by Sam Holden

—David Simon, creator of The Wire

—Elizabeth A. Evitts

every explicit duality is an implicit unity . —Alan Watts, British philosopher, writer, speaker, and expert in comparative religion

a fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue . —Cornel West, American author and Princeton professor of religion and African-American studies

if you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. —Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-born poet, artist, and writer

i hope you have not been leading a double life , pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. that would be hypocrisy . —Oscar Wilde, Irish writer and playwright

Coming Next Month Guest Editor P. M. Forni on “Civility”

we confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them. —Gerald Brenan, British writer

Common courtesy feels like a dated notion, but a kind www.urbanitebaltimore.com act can still change your entire day. If manners matter, hearing nuns' confessions what is it, exactly, that we owe each other?

is like being stoned to death with popcorn. —Fulton J. Sheen, American television preacher

Irresistible!

10749 falls road

˚˚

the gatehouse at green spring station 410-823-5545 bijouxjewels.com mon thru sat 10 – 5:30

Hours:

A portion of every sale is donated to the Johns Hopkins Center for Pediatric Oncology. Urbanite Nov 06.final.indd 1

we look great from every angle

9/20/06 3:27:44 PM

S: YE XE R TA 46 PE ARS! 8 YE $1 2 - R 10 1 $8 FO

Old friends...

1714 Park Avenue, Bolton Hill, Baltimore, 21217

Affordable and inspiring urban living!

SALON GIOVANNA voted “Baltimore’s Best Salon” - 2006

-New Beauty Magazine

hair skin care

nail care massage

6071 falls rd., mt. washington

410.377.2700

salongiovanna.com

urbanite november 06

...meet new friends. presented by:

• 51 NEW condominiums in a c.1879 landmark ... Old Friends School • Historically unique architectural details • Sophisticated interior appointment • High ceilings and tremendous natural light • Wood floors throughout • Granite and stainless steel kitchens • Light rail and MARC a mere few blocks • Tranquil on the park setting • Adjacent to Mount Vernon and the cultural district • Parking available • Pet friendly • Historic Tax Credit Approved = LOW TAXES

OPEN

SAT, SUN, WED, THURS: 12-4 FRI: 5-8

Offered from $169,000 - $399,000 main (410) 675-5500 direct (410) 522-6315

boltonparkcondos.com

contributors

behind this issue with guest editor george baca

Baltimore native R. Darryl Foxworth is “a mild-mannered college student by day, iconoclastic freelance writer by night.” Foxworth, a graduate of Baltimore City’s public schools, was inspired to write the essay “Alone at the Table” (p. 64) in response to horrifying statistics regarding the plight of young black men. “I feel powerless to do anything on a macro level,” he says. “But in writing, in publishing, I’m at least able to tap into an audience that is otherwise out of my reach.” His cultural features, essays, and commentaries have appeared in Baltimore’s City Paper, The Baltimore Sun, LiP magazine (where he is associate editor), and the Metro US newspapers, as well as numerous online publications. He resides in upper Northwest Baltimore and is working on a collection of short stories and essays.

George Baca earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and is an assistant professor of anthropology and Africana studies at Goucher College. He is also a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of the South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the role of racism in nationalism. Baca is the editor of Nationalism’s Bloody Terrain: Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition and coeditor of Ethnographies, Histories and Power: Critically Engaging the Intersections of Culture and Political Economy. He is currently ﬁnishing a manuscript, Conjuring Crisis, on the politics of racism in the post-segregation era.

photo by Bruce Weller Photography

courtesy of R. Darryl Foxworth

R. Darryl Foxworth

courtesy of Kerr Houston

Kerr Houston For this month’s issue, Kerr Houston wrote about confessional websites (p. 66) on which people can make a public declaration of guilt or wrongdoing, much like the confessional of Catholic tradition. But, says Houston, “while religious systems have long provided one avenue for the confession of sins, or trespasses, there’s now an entire secular industry that offers a working alternative. Reality TV, politicians’ apologies, deeply personal works on the bestseller racks: We seem to want a wide variety of fora in which to air our sins and slights—and to witness the confessions of others.” Houston has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 2002. His primary specialty is late medieval and Renaissance Italian painting; he has also written on the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Spike Lee and on contemporary language usage.

courtesy of Donna M. Owens

Donna M. Owens “I’ve done indoor rock climbing before, so I don’t lack a sense of adventure. But this climb made me a wee bit nervous,” says Donna M. Owens of her assignment to investigate the green roof of the Northwest Honda dealership, located twenty-five feet above the ground and accessible only by a skinny metal ladder (p. 73). The Baltimore native has fifteen years of experience reporting and producing for print, television, radio, and Internet media outlets nationwide. She has received accolades for both her journalism and her volunteer work with youth, including writing workshops for high school students. A longtime poet, she is currently at work on a novel and a screenplay.

self-portrait

Jay Parkinson For this issue, self-taught photographer Jay Parkinson photographed Adam Fassbender, the owner of the “Free Speech” car, who is profiled in “Encounter” (p. 47). Parkinson began taking photos while living in New York City, and he spends much of his time searching Baltimore for interesting scenes and people to capture. His specialty is “portrait photography with a pseudofashion flair,” he says, which he uses to capture “the beautifully odd.” His favorite photographers include Alec Soth and Bill Henson. A Saint Louis, Missouri, native who now lives in Mount Vernon, Parkinson plans to pursue formal photography education in the future.

hen Baltimoreans talk about the city’s embarrassing murder rate, failing public schools, and dearth of well-paying jobs, the issue of racial inequality hovers. But despite the omnipresence of racial disparities, actually invoking the topic of race often makes people nervous. It is interpreted as impolite, which leads many of us to view racism as a taboo subject. Nevertheless, we talk about race and racism all the time. It’s the way we talk about it that is the problem. Take a drive through Roland Park, Guilford, and more recently, the downtown neighborhoods of Canton and Federal Hill, and you will find thriving white neighborhoods. While wealth spreads in newly gentrified areas, a violent underground drug economy sprawls through huge swaths of East and West Baltimore. Drug corners, boarded-up buildings, and crumbling infrastructure—both social and physical—plague black neighborhoods such as Upton, Clifton Park, and Sandtown-Winchester. But harsh contrasts expressed in purely racial terms mask much more than they reveal. Rather than describing racial problems, dualistic “black and white” language reflects the way that racism simplifies the world into good and evil, privileged and disadvantaged, dominant and subordinate. The term “white flight” typifies the inadequacies of racially dualistic language in understanding urban politics. Many black leaders and middle-class whites share the view that the rising crime and poverty rates in Baltimore through the 1980s and 1990s resulted from whites leaving the city. Such a view, however enticing, ignores the political decisions that encouraged manufacturers to leave the city and the federal government to divert money to the suburbs and curtail spending on social programs. Responding to the worsening social conditions that followed, many Baltimoreans fled. However, not all those who stayed were black, and not all who left were white. Baltimore’s wealthiest white residents remained in the plush surroundings of neighborhoods like Guilford, Roland Park, and Mount Washington. Powerful blacks fled West Baltimore for middle-class neighborhoods, as well as prestigious Ashburton, known as the “Gold Coast” of black Baltimore. Instead of leaving Baltimore, upper-class blacks and whites fled the public schools, safely placing their children in prestigious private schools like Bryn Mawr, Friends, Park, and Gilman. Unable to afford private schools, and not shielded by exclusive neighborhoods, working-class blacks and whites faced failing social programs and rising crime head-on. Eventually, many working-class blacks headed up the Liberty Road corridor searching for a more suitable environment to raise their children, while their white counterparts left for places like Havre de Grace and White Marsh. To understand Baltimore’s problems in a humane way, we must resist the seductiveness of racial language—in both its patronizing liberal and demonizing conservative forms—to explain complex political and economic realities. Understanding our city’s urban problems requires we examine racial issues in relationship to public policy, class power, and economics. Such a perspective will reveal likenesses between racial groups as well as diversity within.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Rented

CANTON LOFT 1 Bedroom 1½ Bath $1550/month Preferred LiveBaltimore Agent

B U Y.

SELL.

I N V E S T.

HELEN L.DELLHEIM Office: 410-235-4100 Cell: 410-258-4136 www.premierbaltimorehomes.com

Let us create an amazing taste you’ll remember! We are the experts when it comes to making your event a success!

Serving our clients for over 11 years G&G’s Creative Catering is also home of the

Picnics, Crab Feasts, Concessions, Holiday Parties, Corporate Events, Graduation Parties, Rehearsal Dinners, Anniversary Parties, and Wedding Receptions

presents

“The Crab Den”

Hours of Operation: Monday–Sunday Opens at 11 a.m.

$20.00 All-U-Can-Eat Crabs! OPEN MONDAY–FRIDAY: 4:30 P.M. – CLOSE SATURDAY & SUNDAY: NOON - CLOSE

1528 E. Joppa Rd. Towson, MD. 21286 Phone (410) 823-5050 | Fax (410) 823-5113 www.gandgcatering.com Just off Beltway exit 29/Loch Raven Blvd. Next to Gardiner’s Furniture

For information, or to request our corporate or party menu’s, please contact our business office @ (410) 823-5050

urbanite november 06

up Move right in and get entives.* c in g in s lo c in 0 0 ,0 30 to $

Live

ree Sett n in le b a SB yD rece ece ER h ive m ber our om Pac car31, kag e. 2 free e in 00 or M c 6a livi lu T othe A bus des: a ng pac nd kag fr p r ca e. r-fre ass for ee Ligh t Ra e op 1 ye il ar a tion s. nd

Move right into M illrace Condos at Clipper Mill, a tru ly colorful community with unde niable character. Live within the wooded Jo nes Falls Valley, close to everything yo u love and need in the city: eclectic shops & eateries, the light rail & I-83 and of cour se, the park. Plus, yo u’ll have every moder n convenience inside & out, like 9’ ce ilings and designer lig hting, Verizon ﬁber op tics (FIOS), secure parking and Baltimore ’s most remarkable co mmunity pool. Granite , stainless steel & hardwood availab le on select residence s. Talk about immedia te gratiﬁcation. From the upper $200 ’s. Stop by our Sales Center or call 410-24 3-1292.

il clipperm

lliving.c

*Offer available for a limited time only. Must use preferred lender and title company to qualify. Contingent on lender policy. MHBR # 4533 SALES BY BUILDERS 1ST CHOICE.

NEW FLOOR PLANS WITH SUN ROOMS, DINING ROOMS, DECKS AND PATIOS JUST RELEASED! Just a quick spin to nightlife.

Find yourself in a stylish, fully renovated condominium, thoughtfully accented with truly surprising contemporary features, such as granite counters, stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, decorative columns and molding, and bay windows. Nestled in the historic Rodgers Forge community, Rodgers Forge Condominiums is just a quick spin to Rodgers Forge Elementary, eclectic shopping and dining, downtown Baltimore, local parks, and hospitals. One+Den and Two Bedroom Condominiums | Priced From $218,900 | Up to $19,000 Seller Contribution* Models Open Daily 11-6 | Call 410-377-5700 | www.rodgersforgecondo.com

Sales by Builder’s 1st Choice, Seller’s Agent

Directions: From I-695, Baltimore Beltway, take exit 25 to Charles Street. Follow Charles Street south and turn left onto Bellona Avenue (Route 134),to the Sales Center at the corner of Bellona Avenue and Rodgers Forge Road.

Developer: Rodgers Forge Apartments Realty Company, a MD LP

Prices deemed accurate at time of printing and are subject to change without notice. *Seller Contribution for a limited time and is subject to purchaser using seller’s Preferred Lender and Title Company.

what you’re saying

update

Your Space We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Submissions should include your name, address, and daytime phone number; letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Baby Free, and Free to Be Me Finally! Nancy Rome is taking the lid off of an unspoken subject (“By Chance or By Choice,” September). Luckily, thirteen years ago I met a man with matching viewpoints. We don’t want to get married and we don’t want children. The reasons may be economical, political, or just the missing “parental gene.” We do enjoy watching family and friends wed and multiply and we are not antichildren, just “anti” our own. The social stigma is certainly something to be reckoned with and needs to be exposed. We are viewed by some as sad, weird, lonely, irresponsible, or just downright useless. As a friend of my mother’s once said, upon learning of my choice to remain childless, “Well, what are you going to do?” To which I replied, “Whatever we want.” Thank you, Ms. Rome, and good luck with your endeavors.

not to have children, our society may produce fewer naturally intelligent individuals to lead the world. A message to intelligent women not considering children: We are responsible for creating society for the future. Your genes could produce offspring that make great scientific discoveries, lead political revolutions, or create timeless poetry. Women shouldn’t underestimate their power on the future. —Beatrix Grundy is a Baltimore blogger. She says she enjoys playing the devil’s advocate and arguing for argument’s sake.

Quotable Katherine On your editorial page (in the “Quotes” column) in the August issue, you included a quotation from Katherine Mansfield about “place.” Could you give me the source or reference for this?

—Elizabeth O. P. Booth —Karen Kingsley now lives in Baltimore after moving from New Orleans, her home of twenty-ﬁve years. Baby Einstein I’m concerned about the idea of more and more women making the decision to go “childfree.” This may be a crude observation, but if more intelligent, well-educated, high-earning women and their intelligent, well-educated, high-earning partners choose

From the editors: Karen didn’t need us after all: Through her own resourcefulness, she found the quote in The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection, edited by C. K. Stead, on page 256. It was included in a letter that Katherine Mansﬁeld wrote to her friend Ida Baker on March 7, 1922.

In June, AuthorsBookshop.com was profiled in our “Have You Heard” department. Since that time, the independent book distribution website has been noticed by someone much more prominent than we: film and TV director Stephen Gyllenhaal, father of actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal and husband of screenwriter Naomi Foner. Gyllenhaal’s first book of poetry, Claptrap: Notes from Hollywood, published in June by indie publisher Cantarabooks, was made available to the public exclusively via Baltimore-based Authors Bookshop.com. Gyllenhaal was turned on to the site by the owner of Cantarabooks, Cantara Christopher, who has listed three other titles at the site (and plans to list two more before the end of the year). Cantarabooks is a spirited small press whose tagline is “Beating our tiny fists on the big hairy chest of the corporate publishing world.” “I had talked with Stephen as far back as last December about the advantages and disadvantages of listing with the (in my opinion) overcrowded sites, like Amazon and Barnes and Noble—in particular, how hard it would be to make his title stand out,” says Christopher. “Since he heads a Director’s Guild of America committee that was especially formed to explore alternate ways of distributing small indie films, he recognized the parallel problems that small indie publishers faced with distribution.” The book will be made available through Small Press Distribution in the coming months, but AuthorsBookshop.com will continue to be the primary place to purchase Claptrap online. —Marianne Amoss

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

1200 N. Charles Street Baltimore. MD 410.837.9999

sammy’s trattoria

“No one goes hungry at Sammy’s Trattoria” –Elizabeth Large, Baltimore Sun

Where the rags are the riches

100% FINANCING Primary Residence - 2nd Home Investment Properties

No MINIMUM Income No MAXIMUM Debt CLOSING COSTS PAID By SELLER 3-6% closing help allowed

LOCK IN INTEREST RATES 6 MONTHS - 2 YEARS

Vintage new & used designer handbags, shoes, clothing, & accessories Mention this ad for 10% off your purchase

CONDO LOANS Warrantable and non-warrantable allowed

2441 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, (410) 366-RAGS / (410) 366-7247

New Home Construction to Perm Loans Use appraised value at time of delivery

QUICK CLOSE - 10 DAYS In-house underwriting

LOCAL LENDER 24/7 SERVICE Evenings and weekends On-site applications Closings - at home or in office

Some restrictions - call for same day pre-qualification

Patricia Ebbert 800-345-0229 ext 234

301-602-3057 (cell)

pebbert@fidelityandtrust.com

urbanite november 06

Clipper ClipperMill MillLiving. Living. Ahh, Ahh,the thepeace peaceand and quiet quietofofcity citylife. life.

The TheAssembly AssemblyApartments ApartmentsatatClipper ClipperMill Millare are between betweenHampden Hampden&&Woodberry, Woodberry,right rightnext nexttotothe the park. park.You’re You’realso alsoclose closetotofun funshops shops&&restaurants, restaurants, your yourfavorite favoritehangouts, hangouts,Light LightRail Rail&&I-83. I-83.Walk Walk inside insideand andyou’d you’dnever neverknow knowthis thisplace placeused usedtoto make makelarge largemachinery machinery(“Assembly,” (“Assembly,”get getit?). it?). Picture Picture2-story 2-storylofts loftswith witharched archedwindows windowsand and lots lotsofofnatural naturallight. light.There’s There’seven evena apool poolthat that

ww ww

c coom m

flows flowsthrough throughstone stoneruins. ruins.And Andyes, yes,a astream stream actually actuallyruns runsthrough throughthe thebasement. basement.

w .w as.a s. ntnt s. ssesm e em blbyal partrmtme yapa

410-243-2929 410-243-2929 LEASING BY WALLACE H. CAMPBELL & CO., INC. LEASING BY WALLACE H. CAMPBELL & CO., INC. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

urbanite november 06

what you’re writing

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

Topic

Deadline

Publication

Saturday Night What You Believe But Can’t Prove Second Chance Laughter Possession

Nov 10, 2006 Dec 15, 2006 Jan 19, 2007 Feb 16, 2007 Mar 16, 2007

Feb 2007 Mar 2007 Apr 2007 May 2007 June 2007

osati nan Conklin-R photo by Bren

I left Memphis to go to college several states away. My boyfriend and I kept our relationship going long distance. On paper we looked perfect. He was deaf, so naturally he never called. Instead, we talked online. Once, he told me about a practical joke he’d devised; he would use a fake e-mail address to contact friends, to see how they would respond. I decided to do the same. Except that I didn’t just create a fake e-mail address, I created a fake person. No longer was I a freshman at a large university in Washington, D.C., but a freshman at a small liberal-arts college in New York. No longer did I study art, now, I sang. No longer was I Lauren; now I was “Sadie.” I contacted my boyfriend as Sadie, concocting a story about finding his profile online. Sadie had never been to Tennessee before. Did they really tip cows there? Is it true that Elvis is still alive? He answered Sadie’s questions happily and methodically. Sadie, I’d decided, should be in a relationship. She told him all about it. She’d had a crush on a girl from class, but her courage had drained whenever she’d encountered her. Then, one night at a party, after a few beers and some karaoke, they were mak-

ing out in the cloakroom. She was elated and in love. Then she asked if he was in a relationship. He didn’t talk about me. He didn’t even talk about girls. He called America Online “America Gayline.” He told her he was gay. My heart sank; I e-mailed him, revealing my true self. Then, I waited for him to come online. It wasn’t long. Afterwards, he TTYed his mother, told her to get online, and came out to her too. We continued dating. I don’t know why except that I thought I was in love, and he assured me that he did actually like me. When we finally broke up, the experience was painful and cathartic. We’re still close friends, and friends with each other’s boyfriends. —Lauren Silberman lives in Baltimore and is working on her ﬁrst novel.

My mother has become the duchess of duplicity. An artist by nature, she has taken to sketching reality for my father, a man sinking deeper daily into the quicksand of Alzheimer’s disease. With masterful deviousness, she throws out lifelines to her spouse of sixty-five years, as he struggles for w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Traditions Inc.

Antique & Quality Used Furniture 5604 York Road Baltimore, MD 21212 410.435.8300

Visit our 25,000 sq. ft. showroom Tues-Sat 11-5pm, Sun. 1-5 We Buy Estates

LIVE LARGE IN FELLS POINT FROM THE HIGH $100’S

MODELS OPEN: 511 S. BOND STREET SALES BY BUILDERS 1 ST CHOICE, SELLER’S AGENT

urbanite november 06

410-34-CONDO

DEVELOPED BY

[AB] GOTHAM BANKS

P S 2 5 C O N D O . C O M

glimmers of familiarity. When he asks about the dog, put to sleep eight months ago, she says, “Oh, she’s at the vet’s.” When he asks for the keys to his truck, she says, “The engine is dead. A mechanic is coming tomorrow to look at it.” When he asks, “Where’s Bill?” she tells him his only brother is in New Orleans, even though Bill passed away two Decembers ago. Queries about his father, dead now for half a century, are met the same way. “Your father is in Columbia,” she says. It is because of love that she draws a comforting cloak of deceit over the truth. It wasn’t always so. Initially, she had given honest replies. “The dog is dead. Your brother is dead. You’re not allowed to drive because you have a brain disease. Your father died fifty years ago.” However, because his memory was so badly shredded, he would pose the same questions daily, repeatedly, relentlessly. Each truthful answer was a sledgehammer blow on a fragile, dissolving soul—a brutal cycle of pain and grief. Seeing such devastation inflicted over and over again was unbearable. So, now my mother paints a prettier picture for the man with so many questions. Like a stage manager using costumes, make-up, props, and scenery, she creates an illusion that transports my father to a gentler, more reassuring place. He has become her child, and like any good mother, she will sustain

him and protect him by doing whatever it takes, right up to the final scene. —Mary Helen Grasso is a media specialist/teacher at Grange Elementary School in Baltimore County, wife of Mark, mother of Eliot and Alison, and a proud member of the Seay family.

I’d fantasized about getting married for as long as I can remember. And it was finally happening. “Will you marry me?” he asked at 6 a.m. Sleepily, I responded, “Yes.” Later I awoke with a foggy memory. Had I dreamt it, or was it true? I called him up. “Did you propose to me this morning?” He had! He proposed in August. The engagement party was in November. The wedding was scheduled for the twenty-eighth day of December. I wanted a Christmas wedding. Where? Who? How many? So many questions to be answered: Could I find my father in time for my nuptials? Should we get married in Baltimore or Florida? Who would be the bridesmaids? The bridesmaids’ dresses were a bargain. Hecht’s was having a fifty percent off sale on discounted gowns. Because I couldn’t find five matches for women of various sizes, I compromised. Two bridesmaids would wear one style of dress, and the

other two another. The maid of honor would choose her own gown. This happy compromise was a sign that all was well. Everything moved according to plan. My wedding day arrived. My family traveled a thousand miles to be there. It was a Sunday evening; snow covered the ground, the night air was crisp and stars glistened in the sky. Everyone was in their assigned places and it was time for me to make my grand entrance. Three hundred people stood up as Grandpa Charles walked me down the isle. Four hundred more had gathered to join us by the time the Rev. Markson pronounced us the Rev. and Mrs. Betterson. Suddenly, the wedding and reception were over. I was excited, exhausted, and numbed all at the same time. The chauffeur drove us to our hotel. We crossed the threshold of our honeymoon suite and stood hand in hand. Silence filled the room. It took me five years to articulate what I discovered at that instant. It had all been just a charade. ■ —Latonia Valincia is a local community college assistant professor, and a storyteller, poet, and playwright who lives in Owings Mills with her son and her computer.

start your day

rosina gourmet Sandwich Shop

BEFORE

Robert R. Gisriel, AIA Residential Architect

e Catering Company

AFTER

Redesign and additions to existing homes a specialty.

2819 O’Donnell St., baltimore, md (410) 675-9300

Water St S Gay St

410-625-0392 rrgisriel@msn.com

Entrance on Water St

baltimore, md (410) 244-1885 South St

Robert R. Gisriel Design Corp.

105 W. Hughes St. Balto, MD 21230

301 Water St.,

Commerce

Good design & buildable plans make construction more affordable.

E Lombard

E Pratt St

w w w. rosinagourm et. com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Best of Baltimore 2006

designer clothing & denim in the heart of federal hill

1018 S. Charles Street Federal Hill M - F 12 - 7, S & S 10 - 7

You may always have Paris,

but we have remaindered & overstocked books & CDs at up to 90% off list price 5 24.9 8 $4.9

0 17.095 $12.

5 25.9 8 $6.9

0 24.0 8 $3.9

5911 York Road Baltimore, MD 21212 410-464-2701 Sun.-Thurs. 10 AM to 8 PM Fri.-Sat. 10 AM to 9 PM Across from the Senator Theatre

DĂŚdalus Books 0 75.098 $29. 28

urbanite november 06

warehouse outlet 9645 gerwig lane columbia, md 21046 open 10-7 every day 410-309-2730

salebooks.com

CORKBOARD CORK THE REAL CSI Get out your magnifying glass and rubber gloves. Visible Proofs is an exploration of the meanings and uses of forensic medicine, highlighting the struggles of criminologists, doctors, and others to produce “visible proofs” that help solve crimes.

Making Peace

Learn how to make peace, not war, at the “Peacemaking in the Home, School, and Community” conference. More than thirty workshops and presentations will be held; speaking at the conference are Colman McCarthy, director of the Center for Teaching Peace, and David J. Smith, senior program officer of the U. S. Institute of Peace.

National Library of Medicine 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda Through Feb 16, 2008 Free; guided tours available upon request 301-594-1947 www.nlm.nih.gov

Friends School of Baltimore 5114 North Charles Street Nov 11, 8 a.m.–5 p.m. General admission $70, students $35 443-703-2590 www.stonyrunfriends.org/peacemakingconference

This Is the Creative Alliance on Steel During November, a series of events centers on the city’s steel industry and its workers. Stainless: Families of Steel, a photo essay by Baltimore photographer J. M. Giordano, documents the effect of the industry on the city’s families. On November 18, some of the photographed workers and Community College of Baltimore County Director of Labor Studies Bill Barry will discuss the experience of living with the steel industry; the documentary One Voice on Bethlehem Steel will also be shown.

3134 Eastern Avenue Exhibition Nov 4–Dec 16; panel discussion and screening Nov 18, 3–5 p.m. Free; advance registration recommended 410-276-1651 www.creativealliance.org

FAL L F I L M S This year, Towson University’s annual fall film series, presented by the department of electronic media and film, focuses on art and artists. The series began in September and runs through December 11. In November, films include Blade Runner, I Shot Andy Warhol, In the Realms of the Unreal, and Rivers and Tides. Each film is introduced by a Towson faculty member, and a short discussion follows.

Towson University, 8000 York Road Van Bokkelen Hall Auditorium Every Monday night, 7:30 p.m. Free 410-704-6055 towson.edu/emf

Are you lonesome tonight? Lithuanian Hall, 851–3 Hollins Street Dec 1 and 2, 7 p.m.–2 a.m. General admission $50 in advance, $60 at the door (if still available); tables can be reserved by mail at $75/chair (see website for address; advance purchase recommended) 410-494-9558 www.nightof100elvises.com

Then go to the thirteenth annual Night of 100 Elvises! As always, Elvis tribute artists and bands will perform Elvis hits all night long, with no song duplicated. Drinks and a Southern-style buffet are on the house.

St u d e n t D e b u t Othello and Iago, an original work conceived and directed by Baltimore School for the Arts senior Christopher R. Stevenson, debuts at the Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center. The piece, based on Shakespeare’s Othello, is a combination of short story, poetry, music, and movement. It features an all African-American cast.

847 North Howard Street Nov 17–18, 8 p.m. Free; call for reservations 410-225-3130 www.eubieblake.org

Photo credits from top to bottom: courtesy of the University of Glasgow; pattern by Lisa Macfarlane; photo by J. M. Giordano; © Drx | Dreamstime.com; photo by Sam Holden; photo by Darrin Keith Bastﬁ eld

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

With our healthy, eco-friendly focus, bluehouse is your natural choice for home furnishings and design, housewares, mattresses, and renovation materials, such as wood flooring and low-VOC paint. Just ask Baltimore magazine, who gave us their “Best of Baltimore” award for “Best Use of Recycled Materials,” or CityPaper, who made us part of their “Best Organic Lifestyle Shopping Extravaganza” – both in our first year! And as the holiday season fast approaches, please keep in mind that bluehouse is also your source for beautiful and stylish gifts that are better for the planet and better for your loved ones. That makes you look better, too.

Better living. Better giving. Stylish home furnishings for every room Gorgeous flooring, carpeting, and paints Great gifts for the holidays and all occasions

Parking Garage

S. CAROLINE ST.

S. EDEN ST.

S. CENTRAL AVE.

EASTERN AVE.

FLEET ST. Whole Foods

bluehouse (1407 Fleet)

1407 Fleet Street, Inner Harbor East www bluehouseLIFE com

urbanite november 06

410 276 1180

have you heard . . .

edited by marianne amoss

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Skate Shop … Baltimore is now home to another one-of-a-kind skate shop: Pramus East Coast Skate Board Co., which opened in April. The pride of Pramus is its commitment to local East Coast skate companies: Eighty-five percent of their products are East Coast labels like Shut, 5boro, Zoo York, and Ecko. The shop’s owners (a skater and a graphic designer) design the Pramus line of T-shirts and skateboards, which are printed by Mobtown Tees in Lansdowne and by Chapman Skateboards in Babylon, New York. They are committed to promoting the culture of

skating (and not just selling the goods), which also includes snowboarding and music; to that end, the shop hosted their first “ArtSkate” (a skating and music event) held during this year’s Artscape. Pramus also carries local music and skate videos. Open Tues–Thurs 11:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m., Fri–Sun 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m. 1323 North Calvert Street; 410-2446199; www.pramus.com. —Hellin Kay

Pop Culture Museum … Walking through Geppi’s Entertainment Museum brings up a mix of nostalgia, excitement, and awe. The 16,000-square-foot museum is filled to the brim with about 8,000 toys, comic books, posters, and memorabilia dating from 1754 to the present. The items in the collection are all original, many handmade, and include everything from the first Action Comics Superman comic book, to Howdy Doody marionettes, to a vinyl domed lunchbox sporting images of Barbie and her friend Midge. The museum was founded by Stephen A. Geppi, who owns almost everything displayed there; Geppi is president and CEO of Diamond Comic Distributors (the world’s

largest English-language comics distributor) and owner of Baltimore magazine. The museum, which opened in September, is arranged chronologically and features a scavenger hunt and several interactive exhibits; guided tours are available. In the future, the museum will host classes and lectures (see the website for details). This collection drives home the fact that pop culture items can capture the times in a way that few forms of media can. 301 West Camden Street; 410-625-7060; www.geppismuseum.com. —Marianne Amoss

photo by Lisa Macfarlane

Market … Since its move from Hampden to the Baltimore Broom Machine Factory in Remington earlier this year, Mill Valley Garden Center & Farmers’ Market has become much more than a place to buy garden supplies and good-for-you groceries. Owners Cheryl Wade and Dave Aronson continue to keep things fresh by holding social events and adding vendors. Vendor Gracie’s Gotcha Ginger recently began selling hot lunches made from locally grown and raised ingredients on Thursdays and Fridays. The rotating menu allows visitors to enjoy herb-crusted fish and ginger lemonade one day, and

chicken and garlic string beans the next. Gracie’s also participates in Caribbean Pirate Night with the Whiskey Island Pirate Shop (another vendor at the market to offer zesty eats and musical entertainment every Friday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. With events like this, Wade reinforces the social function the market serves in the neighborhood, and creates, as she says, “a sense of place.” Open Thurs–Sun 8 a.m.–4 p.m. 2800 Sisson Street; 410-889-6842; www. mill-valley.net. —Alissa Faden

A R C H ITEC TU R E IN TE R IOR D ES IGN MA S TE R PLA N N IN G H ISTOR IC AR C H ITEC TU R E

1104 Kenilworth Drive, Suite 500 Towson, MD 21204 p: 410-337-2886 f: 410-337-2974 135 West Patrick Street, Suite 200 Frederick, MD 21701 p: 301-668-8677 f: 301-668-8664 www.rubeling.com

I N T E G R I T Y. C R E A T I V I T Y. R E L I A B I L I T Y. I N N O V A T I O N . w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Mary Anne Dresler Certified Public Accountant

Business & Individual Tax & Accounting Services

Office: 410.235.3200 Email: mad@smart.net

Office Hours by Appointment. Member AICPA and Maryland Society of Accountants

Doracon Contracting, Inc. 3500 East Biddle Street Baltimore, MD 21213

p: 410.558.0600 f: 410.558.0602 rlipscomb@doracon.com

Ronald H. Lipscomb President

Call Countrywide’s® newest Branch in Canton for your home loan.

We offer fast Up-Front Approvals and local experts with the power to say “YES” to your loan David Groom

Branch Manager 3600 O’Donnell St, Ste 150 (410) 563-5911 David_Groom@Countrywide.com www.Davegroommortgages.com Mary Gallion- Production Associate

EQUAL HOUSING

OPPORTUNITY

urbanite november 06

have you heard . . .

photo by Caprice

Since opening up Dogma: Life, With Your Pet in June, owners Virginia Byrnes and Scott Stanton have met a lot of fun characters, like the Maltese who loved to try on clothes and the pup who wandered in alone one day, perhaps attracted by the aroma of gourmet biscuits. Because the duo felt pet products for the design-oriented were hard to find, they decided to angle in on that market, offering everything from beds made with classy prints to award-winning cat scratchers to fashion collars and leashes. The shop carries fun things for the pet fanatic (like costumes, Dog- and Cat-Opoly, and portraits that can be custom-made), as well as basics

like bowls and food. For those too-big-for-thebathtub dogs, Dogma has self-service grooming stations, complete with a large metal tub, towels, and driers, for $15; professional grooming is also available. And every Friday from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., the shop hosts a Yappy Hour, at which owners can nibble on complimentary snacks while they and their dogs get to know their neighbors and, perhaps, plan their next doggie birthday party at Dogma. The Shops at Brewers Hill, at Conkling and Boston Streets; 410-276-3410.; www. dogmaforpets.com. —M. A.

Winery … As the holiday season approaches, taking day trips out of the city for a breather can be just what the doctor ordered. Fridays Creek Winery is just far enough away to feel like a true escape, and close enough to work as an easy day trip. Named after a nearby stream, the winery opened its doors to the public in August. It is a family-owned operation housed in a former tobacco barn in Calvert County that dates from the 1920s. Where tobacco was once hung to dry, framed art now hangs; where livestock were once housed, large oak barrels of wine now

stand. Visitors are welcome to sample any of the thirteen wines currently available. “My dad grew up a farmer,” says Frank Cleary Jr. of the family’s decision to go into the wine industry, “and he wanted to get back to his roots.” Informal tours are conducted during the weekend, and the grounds are available for private events. Open Thurs–Mon 11 a.m.–5 p.m. 3485 Chaneyville Road in Owings; 410-286-WINE; www.fridayscreek.com.

photo © Elenathewise | Dreamstime.com

Pet Store …

—M. A.

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Art Blog … When writer Joseph Smith went on the city’s 2005 Open Studio Tour, he was inspired by the artists’ workspaces and by seeing their art in that context. He partnered with longtime friend Michael Cantor, photographer and owner of Salamander Books in Hampden, to find a way to bring that studio-visit experience to a broader audience. In May, they launched BaltimoreInterview.com, a blog comprised of monthly profiles of Baltimore artists, penned by Smith, and portraits of the artists,

shot by Cantor. “There are a lot of really committed creative people in Baltimore, and there’s not a lot that showcases them,” says Cantor. So far, the blog has featured Heidi Neff, Jason Hughes (who the duo visited at a gallery, not in his studio), Nikc Miller, Wasyl Palijczuk, and Christine Sajecki. Go to www. baltimoreinterview.blogspot.com to see who gets profiled this month. —M. A.

Remember When

you were part of the club?

11 West Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore | 410.539.6914 | www.engineersclubofbaltimore.org w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

a v s y , n o u e a t v c h i e g We e k it home. a m u o y Spaciously sleek with the coolest amenities in town. From the up per $200â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.

Bra

nd new Condo miniums wi t h Imagin Visit our ation Sales Galle

at 1205 N. Ch arles St ry Lower Level. 1 ., 0am-5 For appointments cal pm. l

4 43 - 5 7 3 - 4 4 4 9

MHbr # 4941 SaleS by McWilliaMS|ballard.

Furnished Model Now Open

VILLAGE LOFTS

New Condominiums in the Heart of Charles Village

Welcome to Village Lofts, new condominiums in the heart of Baltimore’s favorite neighborhood. From the upper $300’s. • Move in late 2006. • Spacious, beautiful homes with city views, private balconies, and gourmet kitchens. • Private garage parking • Starbucks, Chipotle, Coldstone Creamery, Cloud 9 and University Gourmet at your doorstep. • Walk to BMA, Johns Hopkins and Union Memorial. • Call 410.243.0324 for more information.

village lofts village-lofts.com

smart living in the heart of charles village 3201 st paul street baltimore maryland 410.243.0324 MHBR # 4591 SALES BY BUILDERS 1ST CHOICE.

A little Naughty...Very Nice!

Baltimore’s Premiere Up-Scale Nightclub can be your Ultimate Holiday Party Destination! Special Rewards for booking your Holiday Party early. Holiday Gift Cards now available. • Seating for up to 250 guests • Custom food menus • Premium light and sound system • 5’ wide flat panel televisions • Special air filtration system • An elegant, 58’ custom made bar • Valet parking available

Restaurant Row At Market Place || 600 Water Street, Baltimore (Above Ruth’s Chris Steak House) 410.468.0022 || www.havanaclub-baltimore.com || Valet Parking Available

urbanite november 06

food

by joan jacobson

photography by gail burton

A Moveable Feast Local organic-poultry farmers raise healthier, better-tasting chickens by putting their operation on wheels

Above: Twice a day, Homer Walden moves his portable pens or “chicken tractors” to fresh locations on the Greenspring Valley field where his birds graze al fresco.

On a sunny Sunday morning, peculiar peeping sounds emanate from the garage at the Towson home of Homer Walden and his wife, Dru Peters. Walden opens the door and proudly inspects one hundred 2-week-old chicks hopping in a bin of sawdust. The chicks have come here by mail from Webster City, Iowa. Their next—and last—trip will take them to live on a pristine five-acre pasture in the Greenspring Valley where a generous landowner lets Walden experiment with his novel “portable pens,” also known as “chicken tractors.” In their state-of-the-art poultry pens, they’ll get their first taste of grass and bugs as part of Walden’s and Peters’ fledgling organic-poultry business called Sunnyside Farm. Walden, a cabinet-maker, loves to design, build, and grow things. He even built a cold frame (a miniature greenhouse) against the sunny side of his house so his family can brush snow off the glass and eat lettuce year-round. Peters works for Prentice Hall as a publisher’s representative and has a keen interest in the biology of their endeavor, or as she puts it, the “interaction between the chicken and the ground.” Arriving at the farm with his newest batch of chicks, Walden drives to a field where fourteen shallow boxes dot the landscape. Immense trees block the noise from the nearby beltway, and swallows swoop overhead. He empties the chicks into their new pens and happy pecking begins.

“They love grass,” says Walden, who also feeds them corn, soybeans, and kelp. Walden’s pens are eight feet by ten feet, with a partial roof to shade the chickens from sun and rain. The pens have no bottoms so the chicks can easily eat grass and bugs. Wheels are mounted on two sides so that Walden and Peters (or their son and daughter) can regularly pull each pen to a fresh plot of grass as the chicks walk along. Walden designed and built this clever vehicle for his chickens and turkeys so they have a constant supply of fresh grass to eat while scratching their manure into the ground to naturally fertilize the land. (Walden estimates his chickens and turkeys drop thirty tons of manure on the field from April to November, resulting in luxuriant green patches of fertilized grass.) Compared to other portable pens, Walden’s chicken tractors are larger, more sleekly designed, and easier to move, but the most significant difference between Walden and other farmers who employ this method is that he moves his pens more often (twice daily) to prevent any bacteria or other pathogens from contaminating the birds. “We think we’re a couple of steps above organic,” he says. Champions of small-scale organic-poultry farming have been battling large poultry businesses in recent years to make sure the definition of organic includes “outdoor access.” In 2002, the National w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

peace

Friends

equality

community

truth

simplicity

School of Baltimore

Since 1784

A stimulating and thoughtful academic community where individual differences are celebrated and students learn to think critically and question assumptions in a coeducational environment enriched by Quaker values.

Imagine... Informational Tours for parents of students entering Pre-K through grade 5:

Call 410-649-3211

to schedule an appointment. 5114 N. Charles Street • Baltimore, MD 21210 • www.friendsbalt.org

What a way to celebrate the fall season! g is Thanksgivin Thursday, rd November 23

To order, please call or visit:

410-545-0515

231 E. Baltimore St. Suite 102 Baltimore, MD 21202

www.ediblearrangements.com

Save $5

on your order when you mention this ad.

*Offer valid on select products. Cannot be combined with any other offers. Offer code must be used when placing the order. Excluding Holidays. Offer expires 11/30/06 Code: BURB1130

urbanite november 06

Mt. Washington 1330 Smith Ave. 410-532-6700

Take the Hassle Out of the Holidays

1106 N CHARLES ST (410) 547-6925 WWW.THEBREWERSART.COM

Harbor East 1001 Fleet St. 410-528-1640

www.wholefoods.com

Apple Blossom™

INNOVATIVE CUISINE AND HOUSEMADE BEERS IN AN OPULENT SETTING

an old fashioned neighborhood grocery store,organic farmers market, gourmet specialty shop, European bakery, and supermarket all rolled into one. We are Whole Foods Market the leading natural foods grocer in the country and we are right in your neighborhood!

Beginning in November, please visit our Annual Holiday Table where you may sample delicious holiday favorites, pick up great recipes & tips, & place your order for a Holiday Dinner from our extensive menu. Select a fresh Free-Range Turkey, Pumpkin Pie, or order an entire Ready-to-Serve meal for your holiday table! What could be easier?

Free Parking! at both locations

Dru Peters supplements the chickens’ and turkeys’ diet of fresh grass and insects with corn, soybeans, and kelp.

Organic Standards Board, which advises the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, recommended that “organically managed poultry must have access to outdoors” and that bare surfaces “other than soil” do not meet organic standards. In an article that

same year, entitled “Organic Still Means Humane,” the Humane Society of the United States reported that large-scale poultry producers unsuccessfully lobbied the board to label their poultry “organic” when the birds are kept in “factory-style confinement.” Walden and Peters have been experimenting with their brand of responsible poultry farming for three years now. They sell fifty chickens and fifteen dozen eggs a week out of their garage. This year they are also raising fifty turkeys. In the pens, the birds are segregated by type. There is a group of Rhode Island Reds, handsome rusty-brown chickens. In another pen are Araucana Americana, a black, brown and tan chicken with green legs, which lays green, blue, and purple eggs. The noisiest birds are the turkeys. They are a bronzebreasted heirloom type. Though Walden and Peters are optimistic about their business’s future, it has not been without setbacks. In early July they lost three hundred chickens that drowned during heavy rains that flooded the field. They lost nearly one hundred turkey chicks at the post office last year when well-meaning postal workers put them near an air conditioner, not knowing the chill would kill them. They have also lost more than one hundred chickens to foxes that come around the pens “looking over the menu,” says Walden. He has since built a “fox apron” of wood and metal tubing to deter animals from digging under the pens to get to the birds. The life of the chickens that survive is brief. In eight weeks they will be ready for slaughter. Walden uses a technique that he believes is the most humane: holding each chicken upside down to quiet it, he puts a “cone” around the neck before cutting

two arteries so it will bleed quickly. He acknowledges, “I’m taking a life.” The result of Walden’s and Peters’ demanding work is a chicken that tastes unmistakably fresh. “You open a bag after it’s been frozen and it smells of fresh grass,” says Peters. Their eggs are especially tender and make mass-produced eggs literally pale in comparison. (A taste test by this reporter revealed that a scrambled Sunnyside Farm egg had a fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth texture, a robust flavor, and a brilliant orange coloring, while a mass-produced egg was dull in both color and flavor, with a slimy texture.) Walden and Peters also say their eggs make a fantastic crème brulee, which relies heavily on egg yolks. The “bigger picture” of their poultry experiment, they say, is to be environmentally sensitive and to “contribute to the overall health of consumers,” says Peters. Walden dreams of one day convincing Eastern Shore sod farmers to let him build larger versions of his “chicken tractors” on their sod farms, which would eliminate their need for chemical fertilizers. “We don’t want to be land owners, we want to be land users,” Walden says. “We want to be good stewards.” ■ —Joan Jacobson is a regular contributor and contributing editor for Urbanite. She also spent twenty-eight years reporting for Baltimore’s Sun and Evening Sun. To inquire about ordering eggs year-round, turkey for Thanksgiving, or chicken starting next June, call 410-823-0170 or e-mail Dru Peters at Drupeters@ yahoo.com.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

BALTIMORE OPERA COMPANY MICHAEL HARRISON, GENERAL DIRECTOR presents

BY GIUSEPPE VERDI

A new production by Roberto Oswald and Anibal Lapiz.

Open Year Round for Lunch & Dinner

Sunday Brunch

includes Mimosas & Bloody Marys from 11:00am - 3:00pm,

Happy Hour Specials Mon-Fri from 4:00pm - 7:00pm

Drink & Food Specials everyday!

Our menu has something for everyone! Plenty of FREE Parking! Beautiful waterfront setting in a casual atmosphere Visit our website for menu & directions

2 6 0 0 In sul ator Drive Baltimore, MD 2 1 2 3 0 (410) 347-4123 www.ni ck sfis h hous e.com 40

urbanite november 06

November 11, 15, 17, 19, 2006 King Nebuchadnezzar's enslavement of the Hebrews inspired some of Verdi's most moving music, particularly the beloved “Va, Pensiero”. Starring: Mark Rucker, Adrienne Dugger, Carlo Scibelli; Christian Badea (c); Roberto Oswald (d). AT T H E LY R I C O P E R A H O U S E W I T H E N G L I S H S U RT I T L E S P R O J E C T E D A B O V E T H E S TA G E

Tickets available from $45. CALL 410.727.6000 or visit

www.baltimoreopera.com

Opera. It ’s Better Than You Think. It Has To Be.

by joan jacobson

photo by Helen Sampson

baltimore observed

Rhetoric or Reality Does Baltimore really have a white-collar housing crunch?

When the nation’s housing boom washed onto Baltimore’s shores a few years ago, housing prices jumped like no time in recent memory. Waterfront neighborhoods like Canton and Federal Hill were already getting too expensive for many whitecollar workers. But then an improbable real estate phenomenon occurred: Housing prices skyrocketed in once-working-class communities like Hampden, Patterson Park, and Locust Point. Has Baltimore become a victim of its own success? Are the very middle-class people who city leaders want to lure here being priced out? Or are we simply failing to look beyond the boundaries of a few trendy communities to Baltimore’s many other healthy—but still affordable—neighborhoods? A recent report to the Baltimore City Council on housing affordability began with a provocative quote from Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour sports apparel: “Housing costs are outrageous in Baltimore. If you have a family, you can’t afford to live in the city and make less than $75,000,” stated Plank in the report that was released in July. “Getting a professional to move here is prohibitive.” Plank, through a spokeswoman, declined to discuss his quote for this article, but others did. “That’s patently ridiculous,” says Joseph T. “Jody” Landers III, executive vice president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors. Landers, a city resident and former city councilman, set out to debunk the notion that a worker

making $75,000 can’t afford a home in a decent Baltimore neighborhood. He began with the annual salaries of many professional jobs listed in the same report that quoted Plank. It noted that one-third of Baltimore’s workforce earns between $57,750 and $72,188 a year. Their occupations include teacher, school counselor, police officer, physician assistant, insurance claims adjuster, mechanical engineer, database administrator, and high school principal. The report concluded that people with these salaries can afford homes ranging from $176,189 to $220,237. And where can these homes be found? Landers turned to his computer’s real estate database for the answers. He searched for listings with a sales price of $176,189 or less, using the lower end of the whitecollar workforce’s salary range. “There are so many that it’s not even telling me how many there are,” he says. Next he altered the search, asking for homes priced from $100,000 to $176,189. “I still have more than five hundred listings,” he said. “They’re scattered all over the place,” he adds, ticking off neighborhoods like Patterson Park, Washington Village, Fells Point, Hamilton, Lakeland, Butchers Hill, Highlandtown, Morrell Park, Northwood, and Belair-Edison. “If I expanded this figure to the $220,000 purchase price, I’d have tons of listings,” says Landers. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Now Open! BALTIMORE’S newest theatre tr e of Baltimor e Tob y’s Dinner T hea oby Thea heatr tre Baltimore The musical adaptation of the perennial holiday favorite that captures all the joy and laughter of the original film classic. Our hero, George, finds himself in a predicament and is on the brink of ruin. He is about to end it all when he is caught by an angel and given a rare chance to see what life would be like without him.

RESTAURANT, BAR & LOUNGE

Nov 10, 2006 thru Jan 14, 2007

2007 Season Subscriptions on sale now!

410-649-1660 or 1-866-99TOBYS Located in the Best Western Hotel & Conference Center 5625 O’Donnell Street Baltimore, MD 21224

ww.tobysdinnertheatre.com

the Terrace at Tatin outdoor fall dining

Experience bryn mawr

I’m ready for where life takes me next.

The Bryn Mawr School

BEST imore of balt

Great Minds. Strong Hearts. Bold Voices. 109 W. Melrose Ave.-Baltimore, MD 21210-410-323-8800

Urbanite Nov 06

www.brynmawrschool.org

Voted BEST New Restaurant — Baltimore Magazine 2006 Outside Dining on the Terrace | Lunch & Dinner Happy Hour & Lite Fare | Brick Oven Pizzas Complimentary Parking 4 4 3 . 2 7 8 . 9 110 | WWW.BRASSERIETATIN.COM 105 WEST 39TH STREET, BALTIMORE

urbanite november 06

photo by Mitro Hood

Vanessa López and her 7-year-old daughter, Aszana, in the living room of their Belair-Edison home

“Somehow because you’ve got these hot neighborhoods like Canton and Federal Hill … this myth has developed that there are no affordable houses in the city, and it’s just not true,” Landers says. “A lot of very livable neighborhoods have decent affordable housing. “There’s an impression that housing prices are keeping middle-class people out of the city, but the middle class is leaving the city because of crime … because of problems in education. There are lots of desirable neighborhoods. You’ve got to contend with those issues and overcome them in people’s minds.” When asked if he thought some white homebuyers are reluctant to look in racially integrated or predominantly African-American neighborhoods, he said, “I don’t buy into that. It cuts across race. The city is losing middle-income families, black and white, because of schools and crime.” Others promoting city living see evidence that the housing boom is making some previously marginal neighborhoods stronger. “This picture of a lack of affordability may be challenging people to live a few blocks from where they like, or to rehab a house [they might not have previously considered renovating]. It’s good for the city,” says Mark Sissman, a former city deputy hous-

ing commissioner who is now president of Healthy Neighborhoods, Inc. “I think we’re seeing a new generation of people moving to Baltimore. They are not constrained by neighborhood borders. People come with a map and

There’s an impression that housing prices are keeping middle-class people out of the city, but the middle class is leaving the city because of crime, because of problems in education. You’ve got to contend with those issues and overcome them in people’s minds. say, ‘I’m going to work in Washington. I’m willing to walk twenty to twenty-five minutes to the MARC station.’ Walk? Baltimoreans don’t walk. All of a sudden Reservoir Hill is attractive,” he says.

Still, there may be a reluctance by some employers to recommend that their new employees buy homes beyond the high-profile neighborhoods downtown and along the waterfront. Diane Posko works for a health care provider in South Baltimore and has had some prospective employees turn down Baltimore jobs because of housing prices, she says. One health care manager from Denver turned down an $80,000 job because of the high sale prices, says Posko, who suggested the manager look in Federal Hill, Canton, Harbor East, and Mount Vernon. “That’s the area where I would want to live,” says Posko, who lives in Anne Arundel County. “I didn’t want her to come out of her house to have boards up and trash on the ground,” she says. The recruit was also concerned with finding a school for her two teenage sons. When she combined the high price of housing with the difficulty finding schools, she turned down the job, says Posko. Other employees recruited from Ohio moved into 700-square-foot apartments in Federal Hill, she says. Posko says she is unfamiliar with other Baltimore neighborhoods to recommend and had never heard of Live Baltimore, a nonprofit organization that promotes city living and operates an extensive website of two hundred Baltimore neighborhoods w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Baltimore Clayworks

Mt. Washington Spa

A Baltimore Spa with a Meditterranean touch. Introducing a European cellulite program that works. Customized facials and massages. Featuring Valmont, Cellcosmet, Somme Institute, Spa Jet and Kerastase.

Get into a giving mood with the Holiday Jazz event on Friday, November 17th, featuring a live jazz band, refreshments, and the opportunity to preview and shop 200 handmade works from the Winterfest 2006 exhibition before it officially opens on November 18th. Order your tickets now!

1600 Kelly Ave. Spa: (410) 664-3400 Salon: (410) 664-4610

5707 Smith Ave. (410) 578-1919 www.baltimoreclayworks.org

Buono

Phoenix Real Estate

Fine dining in a casual atmosphere. Specializing in seafood, steak, veal, pasta and chicken dishes. Weekly specials including Shrimp Night and Lobster Night. Semiprivate room available for large parties or business lunches. Open 7 days a week .

Specializing in residential and commercial real estate. Bill Sherwood Broker New Location 5614 Newbury St. (410) 999-6090 www.phoenix-rei.com

1501 Sulgrave Ave. (410) 466-3884 www.buonoristorante.com

The Desert Cafe

Savetta’s Psychic Reading

Past Present Future Available for parties and private gatherings. Specializing in Chakra Healing, Tarot Card, Palm, and Crystal readings. November Special – $10 Readings.

Offering extraordinary Mediterranean cuisine and homemade desserts for lunch and dinner. Sample our mixed array of hummus, gyros and kabobs while watching belly dancing (fresh seafood on weekends). Finish your meal with a homemade baklava cheesecake among so many others. Visit us!

1621 Sulgrave Ave. (410) 664-9154

1605-07 Sulgrave Ave. (410) 367-5808 www.thedesertcafe.com

Something Else

Europa International Salon

A true full service salon. Our international staff prides itself on its understanding of proper, artful color and highlights application. If you’re looking for a different look, we know today’s styles - the look you want.

A fun eclectic mix of special occasion clothing and a large assortment of sweaters, coats, Flax Linens, jewelry, accessories, Mexican folk art, Frida and chatzkas, and many gifts from around the world. Open Monday - Friday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. Saturday 10:30 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Open Tuesday - Saturday 5701 Newbury St. (410) 367-1111

1611 Sulgrave Ave. (410) 542-0444

The Shops of

Mt. Washington Village www.mtwashingtonvillage.com

*On the Light Rail

Directions: Take exit 10A (Northern Parkway-East) off I-83 to Falls Rd. Turn left on Falls Rd. Turn left on Kelly Ave.

urbanite november 06

photo by Helen Sampson

This home in Pigtown is one of the many listings uncovered by Landers.

a fifty percent discount on the mortgage. When she first saw her house, it was not in good shape. But López and her 7-year-old daughter, Aszana, were thrilled to see stained-glass windows intact. She also saw other positive things about the house—which had been a vacant house foreclosed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. López, who is Dominican-American, says she particularly likes living in Belair-Edison for its racial mix. “I wanted a neighborhood that is diverse. I like that my neighbors are Caucasian and have been here thirteen years. It means they are committed.” López, who is from New York City, is an art teacher at Roland Park Elementary-Middle School and makes between $40,000 and $50,000 a year. She found house hunting in Baltimore difficult, but not prohibitive. “People like us live on the outskirts of Hampden. You can’t live in Hampden any more,” she says. When she began looking, she “could not have afforded any more than $100,000.” The house was for sale for $63,000, and because of the fifty percent off program for teachers she got it for $31,000, but it needed another $45,000 of renovations, including a new kitchen, refinished floors, and newly painted walls. Her total price was $93,000 with the renovations. “The park is across the street. I love it. I like the size of the house,” she says. “To me it feels like a responsible house. It’s not obnoxiously big. I like that it’s in a neighborhood on the cusp of change.” ■ —Contributing Editor Joan Jacobson wrote about affordable housing programs in the October issue of Urbanite.

CL PR OS IC E O IN U G T

with links to home-buying programs, city crime statistics, neighborhood leaders, and school listings. Tracy Gosson, Live Baltimore’s executive director says, “The number one thing we’re selling is quality of life.” And the quality of life here, she says, “is exceptional. The end goal is affordability.” She suggests Plank’s perspective “may be a little skewed” because he lives outside the city in the Greenspring Valley. While the city’s sales prices have soared in

recent years, Baltimore’s housing boom pales compared to the metropolitan area that includes the wealthier suburbs. Median housing prices in the Baltimore region went from $128,000 in 2000 to $255,000 in 2005. In the city, prices went from $65,000 to $120,000 during the same period. This hasn’t deterred several neighborhoods from maintaining their reputation as a place where working people of modest incomes can still afford to purchase a home. One of the most aggressive communities attracting homebuyers is Belair-Edison in Northeast Baltimore with about 6,400 homes, most of them sturdy, two-story rowhouses. Belair-Edison Neighborhoods, Inc. connects potential residents with government loan programs, as well as Healthy Neighborhood’s affordable bank loan programs and free architectural advice. But even with four hundred of its homes nicely situated along Herring Run Park, Belair-Edison didn’t see its long-stagnant housing prices make an about-face until 2004. Almost overnight the community went from a place straining to enhance property values—and trying to curb white flight—to a neighborhood with working-class homeowners who could not afford to buy their own houses today. “Now whites are moving back in,” says Barbara Aylesworth, executive director of Belair-Edison Neighborhoods, Inc. But it wasn’t just change in the housing market that enhanced the community. “We went through an attitude change,” she says. Community leaders began consciously working on the neighborhood’s morale and self image with social activities, such as block parties and movies in the park. One of the new homeowners lured there is Vanessa López, who found her house on Chesterfield Avenue just as prices were climbing. She feels lucky that she was able to use a federal program that helps teachers buy their first homes at

ld so

Baltimore’s newest Fashionable, affordable address

67 condominiums with distinctive floor plans in a historic building with contemporary finishes State tax credits available from $24K to $52K

Sophisticated

Sales by Cindy Conklin, Bob Merbler, Shana Witman and Andrea Griffin

Five year phase-in on Baltimore City real estate taxes

Office: 410-727-3720 . Cell: 443-629-0162

$10-15K closing cost contribution

www.live1211.com

Garage parking available Free 42” flat screen TV

Open Every Sunday 1-4 and by Appointment

The Residences at 1211 Light Street

EQUAL HOUSING

OPPORTUNITY

Conklin & Merbler

RE A LTO R

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Historic Hampden Hall

Baltimore’s Best Kept Secret

Hampden with Harbor View

1728 N. Charles St. 410 528 0174 www.thedepot.us

Historic Hampden Hall, a former veteran’s meeting hall that looms above the shops at the Southeast corner of 36th Street and Roland Ave. has been converted into 14 loft style apartments

da n ce the the dance ight ht aw away... ay... nnig Thursday: Miss Kitty presents juice w/ the legendary teddy douglas Friday: 80’s retro party

• Restored historic details exposed brick, wood beams, and large windows – lots of light!

Saturday: 80’s, 90’s & music from today

• Each loft apartment is unique with its own charm and character

Open Wednesday-Sunday late happy hour, 9:00-10:30 p.m. $1 drafts & rail

• On site parking • Bedroom balconies with view of Baltimore’s skyline

Located in the charles street cultural district

410-235-7891

Preller Properties www.HampdenHall.com

We’re on a mission to strengthen and revitalize the Baltimore neighborhoods that we share. Let’s do it together. We're a not-for-profit real estate lender committed to providing flexible loan options and exceptional services to home buyers and real estate developers.

120 E. Baltimore St. | Suite 1350 | Baltimore, MD 21202

DAILY LUNCH & DINNER SPECIALS Join us for Sunday Brunch 11am - 3pm

Live Irish Music four nights a week! Texas hold’em every Monday at 7pm 21 North Eutaw Street (across from the Hippodrome) 410.837.2100 Mon - Sun 11am - 1:30am

urbanite november 06

Private Dining Rooms available in the old Bank Vault & Managers Office

Now Taking Bookings for Holiday Parties

encounter

by jason tinney

photography by jay parkinson

A Boy and His Car Spray paint and bumper stickers are one twentysomething’s way of speaking out

Above: Adam Fassbender uses his car to encourage people to live more deliberately.

Adam Fassbender’s 1989 Ford Escort station wagon doesn’t have a muffler. It’s also missing a hubcap and is overdue for an emissions test. The passengerside window has been smashed and replaced with a piece of plastic. The bumper is cracked, and the antenna has been bent and twisted into a zigzag pattern. Oh, and on the hood of this battered car is a spray-painted proclamation: Take back your life. This is the story of an American boy and his American car. You’ll know the car if you see it. It can often be spotted in Fells Point, parked on Broadway. Sections of the car’s original robin’s egg blue color have been spray painted pink, but over the years the elements have dulled the pink to a soft white hue, giving the car the appearance of tri-color cotton candy. And then there is the homemade protest signage written in red and black spray paint—No WTO (World Trade Organization), No Aggressively Recruiting Misled Youth (No A.R.M.Y.), The Revolution Starts Now, Anarchy, and the aforementioned Take back your life. There are also bumper stickers: Vegetarians Taste Better, and Beef—It’s What’s Rotting in Your Colon. There’s even a defiant Mr. T sticker,

pitying the poor fool that rides up too close on that cracked bumper. But forget about the car for a moment. If you were to see Adam standing on the street, say on a Sunday afternoon—dreadlocks dripping from underneath a brown bandana, baggy shorts and ratty T-shirt promoting a hard-core punk band called Propagandhi—and if you were to judge a book by its cover, as we often do, you’d probably come to some generalizations about this 20-year-old kid from Arbutus. Here’s what you really need to know about Adam. Despite the bravado of his opinionated car, he’s a shy, soft-spoken rabble-rouser. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. He’s also a vegetarian, but he says he won’t hassle you if you eat meat. Adam’s uncle gave him the car when he was 16. At 17, fleeing a troubled home life, Adam began living independently and supporting himself. At 18, Adam spray painted his first message onto the hood of his car: Take back your life. At 19, Adam and some friends staged a ten-week peaceful protest across the street from the Army recruiting headquarters on Frederick Road in Catonsville. The protest was in

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

09.16.06

James W. Rouse

Community Service Day

THANK YOU for making our 6th Annual Community Service Day a success !

AJO Concrete Construction, Inc. ARC Construction Services Advanced Masonry All Landscape Supply Ashley Custom Homes Atwater's Ayers/Saint/Gross, Inc. Baldwin Building Consultants Beatty Harvey & Associates LLP Bobby's Pottys Bogan's Plumbing Brock Tool Company Canton Station Carroll Tree Service Carson & Grey City of Baltimore - Dept. of Recreation and Parks Colbert Matz Rosenfelt, Inc. D&S Drywall Inc. D.A. Drenner Concrete, Inc. Dance Brothers Development Design Group Inc. DLA Piper US LLP

Donna's Dunkin' Donuts Duron Paints and Wallcoverings E.R. Bacon Development, LLC. EA Engineering Science & Technology Inc. Ecological Restoration & Management, Inc. Eddie's Market European Landscape & Design, Inc. Fleet Electric, Inc. Frankford Market G. Krug & Son Gallagher Evelius & Jones LLP Geo-Technology Associates, Inc. Gower Thompson, Inc. Louis J. Grasmick Lumber, Inc. Grass Roots Landscaping, LLC Ground Covers Unlimited Harvest Table Hollands Organic Products Honeywell International, Inc. H&S Properties Development Corporation Hull Street Blues

J.A. Rice K&K Adams, Inc. Kooper's Kovacs, Whitney & Associates, Inc. L&J Construction Services, Inc. Lafarge North America, Inc. Ligon & Ligon Mahan Rykiel Associates, Inc. Maxalea MECUMohawk Concrete Monumental Millwork Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers National Lumber Co. Neighborhood Design Center Neuner Masonry Co. Oak Construction One Eyed Mike's Overall, Inc. Outside Unlimited PSI Contracting PAZO ProCo Enterprises The Red Head Companies

Residential Title & Escrow Co. RFC, Inc. Rocky Run Tap & Grill Rummel, Klepper & Kahl, LLP Ryan's Daughter STV Sandtown Habitat for Humanity Severn Graphics Shemins Nursery Signs Now Sterling & Sterling, Inc. Sunbelt Rentals Talbert Building Supply Architectural Team, Inc. Topfield Constructors, Inc. Victor Stanley, Inc Waste Management Weiner & Weltchek Wozny/Barbar & Associates, Inc.

Live downtown, work downtown...

Dial a Downtown Doctor

Marsha J. Brown, M.D. 410-837-2006

Jeffrey D. Gaber, M.D. 410-986-4400

Janet M. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Mahony, M.D. 410-951-7920

Internal Medicine Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

Internal Medicine and Geriatrics 341 N. Calvert Street Suite 300

Internal Medicine Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

Chi-Shiang Chen, M.D. 410-332-8484

Michele Martin-Jones, M.D. 410-332-4726

Thaw Poon, M.D. 410-332-9423

Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Medicine and Critical Care Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

Family Practice Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

Internal Medicine Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

Chintan A. Desai, M.D. 410-332-8484

Joel D. Meshulam, M.D. 410-659-7041

Michael P. Zimring, M.D. 410-332-1616

Internal Medicine Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

Internal Medicine and Geriatrics Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

Internal Medicine Mercy Medical Center Professional Office Building 301 St. Paul Place

urbanite november 06

Now accepting new patients. Please call for an appointment.

Valet and discount patient parking available.

response to what they felt was the targeting of unwitting teenagers to join the military, hence the No Aggressively Recruiting Misled Youth. On a rainy Wednesday morning late in August, I hitch a ride with Adam into Baltimore City. We leave his apartment in Catonsville a little after 7 a.m. and cruise down Wilkens Avenue. The car roars and rattles, tacking another mile onto the 240,000 already driven. In front of me, on the dashboard, is a shrine to poultry—plastic chickens and rooster figurines and a cereal bowl featuring Cornelius, the famed green spokes-rooster for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. I have to ask. “I just happen to like chickens,” he tells me. “I think they are pretty cool animals, and they got a bad name for being scared. A rooster will really tear you apart if he has the chance.” Adam shifts from third to fourth gear as we merge onto 95 North, filing in with other commuters crawling into the city. I ask him about why he began writing on his car. “I started thinking that I could use it as an extension of my character, I guess—the way I felt about things. I felt that I could use it as a bulletin board. Companies can advertise, you know—put stuff up for people to see—why can’t I?” What about Take back your life? “That’s about people going along with the way things are and not thinking for themselves.” He

adds, “My message right now: More awareness. Individual thought and not believing everything that’s on Fox News.” He isn’t under the delusion that his car is going to change the world. It’s just his two cents. We make our way down Pratt Street, heading for Fells Point. Parades of umbrellas march across crosswalks at intersections—the windshield wipers waving back and fourth as we wait for red lights to turn green. Adam tells me that people rarely hassle him about the car. He had his tires slashed once, but

Now, and someone will ask me what revolution I’m talking about. I just say, ‘The revolution of life. You gotta change things. You gotta get things started.’” Adam’s revolution started when he began working at the Kennedy Krieger School in Baltimore City, which specializes in the education of students with developmental disabilities. That’s where we’re heading this morning. Adam is beginning his second school year as a program aid—he’ll be teaching his first math tutorial class this fall—and today is the students’ first day. He’s eager to get back to working with them. He says he “loves” working at Kennedy Krieger and credits the job with providing some needed stability and direction in his life. “If something is bothering me outside of work, just looking at the kids and seeing how carefree they can be and how they don’t let things bother them inspires me and keeps me from getting down. They’re just focused on now. They just kinda let the breeze blow.” Adam drops me off at my car and heads up Broadway flashing a smile and a wave, exhaust fumes sputtering just beneath Mr. T’s nose. I stand there looking at my car, wondering if it has anything to say. ■

My message right now: More awareness. Individual thought and not believing everything that’s on Fox News. so did other cars on the street. Someone recently smashed the passenger-side window, but he doesn’t know for certain that his car was “targeted,” and he doesn’t assume that it was. For the most part, he says, people simply read the car. “Once in a while, I’ll be stopped at a light,” he says. “The side of the car says, The Revolution Starts

—Jason Tinney is a local freelance writer and a regular contributor to Urbanite.

Metro Baltimore’s only source for Vespa® and Piaggio® scooters.

Columbia

Less ss FUELL …

More FUN!

For a limited time at Vespa Columbia...

Get a

FREE T-Shirt

N o w O ff ering S pa Ser v i ces & Waxi n g

just for taking a test ride on a Vespa!

“Best New S al on , C i ty Paper 2006” “Bes t Sc a lp M e s s a ge , B a l ti mo re M a g a z i n e 2 0 0 6 ”

“ B e s t H a i r s t y l i s t , J ill Sell, City Pap er 2 0 0 4 ”

410. 3 2 7 .1 3 0 0

Visit Vespa Columbia today and check out all our hot Italian models. Be sure to ask about rider training g and home delivery y too. ®

This offer is available only to riders who are at least 18 years old and possess a valid motorcycle license. Particpants must also agree to our terms and conditions for test 10720 Guilford Rd • Columbia-Jessup, MD rides and sign an Operator Agreement. TOLL Don’t have a motorcycle license? FREE It may be easier to get one than you think. Please visit our web site or ©Piaggio 2006. Piaggio® and Vespa® are US and worldwide registered trademarks of the Piaggio Group of Companies. Obey local traffic safety laws and always wear a helmet, appropriate eyewear and proper apparel. contact us for more details.

Columbia

www.alphastu di obal ti m ore. com

lo c a te d in hist o r i c fe l l s p o i n t 817 s o uth b o n d s t re e t b al t i m ore , md 2 1 2 3 1

vespacolumbia.com

100% Cotton T-Shirts come in both Men’s & Women’s sizes!

877-743-3269

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

OK L

IS BAY

BRO

Is local business part of what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood?

UR T C / YN

Top 10 Reasons to buy local: 1. Keep money in the neighborhood 2. Embrace what makes us different. Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods. ART, BOOKS, GIFTS BC1

3. Get better service

HL1 P3 G4

4. Buy what you want, not what someone wants you to buy.

FH9 F10 FH12 FH13 F12 F15 G9 FH16

5. Create more good jobs

FH18 FH21

Art-Hookup Avenue Framing and Art BMR Art Sculpture-Studios Deadalus Books & Music Edible Chesapeake Magazine (Baltimore C Lucinda Gallery Maja Mud and Metal (Hampden) My Flower Box Pandora’s Box Pearl O'Dell Giftware Robert McClintock Gallery Simply Noted The Book Escape Vanessa's Vintage Treasures Zelda Zen CLOTHES AND ACCESORIES

6. Invest in the community

W1 G10 FH3 FH4

7. Support community groups

Poster Design: SHELLEYLLC.COM Web Site Design: substance151.com

F5 F6 W4 FH5 HL11 W11

8. Help out the environment 9. Put your taxes to good use 10. Show the country we believe in Baltimore

FH7 F8

BALTIMORE BUY LOCAL WEEK:

W12 W13 W14 G14 BE11 G6

December 2–9, 2006

W18 BE12 HL17 G8 HL19

www.buylocalbaltimore.com urbanite november 06

Blackstone Men's Wear Cloud 9 Clothing Co. (Canton) Dan Brothers Shoes Dolce Vita Fashion Attic Felix Designer Custom Tailors First Place Clothing Company Holly G Jacob's Sportswear Kids-Go-Round Ladybugs and Fireflies La Jeans Boutique Last Connect Ma Petite Shoe (Hampden) Magic Men's Wear Magic Town Matava Too Mofetti Clothing Oh! Said Rose (Hampden) Raw Sugar Red Shed Rob's Clothing Sneaky Feet Sweet Papaya Vice Versa Clothing Company

DINING, FOOD, WINE BC2 F3 G3

City)

BE3 BE13 F19 G3 HL2

HL4 FH24 BC3 F24 G3 HL7 HL8 BE8 P5 BC4 G15 W5 W7 HL9 HL10 BE4 G3 P8 W10 F7 HL12 F9 BC5 W15 G3 HL13

895 Grill & Carry Out Arcos Restaurant Atwater's Austin Grill (Canton) Baltimore Eats, Inc. (Baltimore City) Belair Food Mart Belair-Edison Arcade Bluebird Artisanal Coffee Roasters (Baltimore City) bluehouse Bon Bon's Ice Cream Boordy Vineyards (Hydes, MD) Brewer's Hill Pub & Grill Calvert's Gift Farm (Sparks, MD) Carma's Café (Baltimore City) Carlos O'Charlie's Chesapeake Wine Company (Canton) Corks Restaurant Dogwood Deli (Hampden) Dreams Inn Duclaw’s Earth’s Essence Eastern House Restaurant Elsie's Delights Erdman Carryout Evelyn's Coffeehouse and Cafe Fred and Margies’ Restaurant Getrude's Restaurant @ BMA (Baltimore City) Grand Cru Green's Carry Out Harry's Liquor High Grounds Hoehn's Bakery Hummingbird Caribbean Café Ikan Seafood Jigg's Tavern John’s Place Kalis Court Kiss Cafe (Canton) La Sirenita II Restaurant Latte Da Cafe Li’l Maria’s Restaurant Mama Lucia Market Bakery Matthew's Pizza

HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM HL14 G3 HL15 BC6 F11 G3 F14 BC7 G12 BE5 F16 FH22 G6 F17 W19

HL18 G3 P12 W20 F18 F1

FH19

Mercado Latino Los Compadres Mt. Washington Wine Company (Baltimore City) Neopol Savory Smokery North Pole Ice Cream Company O’Brady’s Bar One Eyed Mikes Pasticcio Italian Cafe (Canton) Planet Produce Ray Lewis's Full Moon BBQ (Canton) Restaurante El Trovador Road Runner Ryan's Daughter Irish Pub Shopping Cart Shuckers Spoons Coffee House and Restaurant Springfield Farm (Sparks, MD) Taste Restaurant Teavolve Thai Restaurant The Brewer's Art (Baltimore City) The Health Concern (Towson) The Markets at Highlandtown The Peanut Shoppe The Wine Source (Hampden) The Yabba Pot Cafe Thir-Tea-First Street Cafe & Tea Room Timothy Dean Bistro True Restaurant Two Oceans Seafood (Stevenson, MD) Tuscarora Organic Growers Co-op (Hustontown, PA) Vineyard Wine and Spirits Woodhall Wine Cellars (Parkton, MD) JEWELRY

W3 BE9 W6 FH11 FH17

Chil's Jewelry, LLC Diamonds and Divas Greenmount Loan & Jewelry Company Lakein’s Jewelers of Hamilton (Baltimore City) Morstein's Jewelers The Gilded Peach HEALTH, WELNESS, BEAUTY

FH1

Alease's Nails & Cosmetics Babylon Nails (Canton)

G1 W2

BE1 FH8 G4 BE14 HL16 F13 BC8 BC9 BE10 BE7 BE6 FH23

Black Essentials Blackwell's Barbershop Boston Street Dentistry (Canton) Brocato's Studio of Hair Design (Canton) Electric Rays Tanning Salon (Canton) Hair Vysions Life Smells Good Linda Beam, LCSW-C (Baltimore City) Lynne Brick's Health and Fitness Club More More Beauty and Dollar Pandora's Salon Pure Skin Day Spa Ritchie Pharmacy Sunspot Tanning Salon The Counseling Center (Baltimore City) Ultimate Performance Victoria Eisner, M.A., ADTR, NCC (Baltimore City) Vixxen Salon Weekend Cutz Wellness (Lutherville, MD) Zoeco

F1 P1 P2

HL5 HL6 BC12 F22 HL20 FH10

BC10 F19 G11 BC11

FH6 P7 G7 FH15 F21 F17 G5

CHOW Baby! (Hampden) City Pet Center Doggie Depot Everhart Animal Hospital Fell's Point Pet Center Lucky 3 Dog Grooming Lucky Lucy’s Canine Cafe RETAIL

F2 F4 FH2

W8 W9

BC13

BC15 P6

PETS

HOME AND GARDEN Ashley Homes (Baltimore City) Baltimore Garden Company, LLC. (Baltimore City) Bay Area Antiques bluehouse Bratt Décor Brooklyn Hardware East Coast Organics (Baltimore City) John Gutierrez Studio (Baltimore City) Healthy Home Arts (Towson, MD) Home on the Harbor Housewerk's Mill Valley Garden Center, Inc. (Baltimore City) Nouveau Contemporary Goods, Inc. Shofer's Furniture Structural Systems Su Casa The Dutch Connection (Baltimore City) The House Downtown

Admiral Fell Inn Babe Ruth Museum Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum

BC16 F23 BE2 F20

Amuse Toys Broadway Bicycle Cross Street Tobacco Equilibrium (Baltimore City) Hamilton Vaccuum (Baltimore City) Herman's Discount Holy Land Lovelyarns (Hampden) Wiskey Island Pirate Shop (Hampden) Your Lettering Center

BC17 P10 W1 W17 FH14 G2 P11

NON-PROFITS/COMMUNITY SERVICES Clean Energy Partnership (Silverspring, MD) GreenSitesUnited.com (Baltimore City) Herring Run Watershed Association (Baltimore City) Lutheran Immigration Services (Baltimore City) Progressive Maryland (Silverspring, MD) SERVICES BC14

HL3

BC18 G13 BC19 BC20 FH20

Arundel Federal Savings Bank Betterworld Telecom, LLC. (Reston, VA) Bird River Design (Baltimore City) Brennan + Company Architects (Baltimore City) Building Connections (Lexington, MD) Canton Kitchens Center for a Livable Future (Baltimore City) Chesapeake Wind and Solar (Columbia, MD) Cho Benn Holback and Associates (Baltimore City) Cove One Hour Cleaners Enviro Center (Jessup, MD)

English on Site (Baltimore City) Flexprint Graphics Foxglove Communications (Timonium, MD) Fraternity Federal Savings and Loan Gabrielli Design Studio (Baltimore City) Gonce Funeral Services Graphic Imaging, Inc. (Baltimore City) Healthy Planet, LLC ITF Consulting (Washington, DC) K & T Wireless Kroiz Architecture Law Office of Terry J. Harris (Baltimore City) Luke Works (Baltimore City) Magnum Construction Marks, Thomas Architects (Baltimore City) McCully-Polyniak Funeral Service Mr. Nifty Cleaners Natural Zing, LLC. (Mount Airy, MD) New City Real Estate and Development No Limit Communications Patrick Sutton Home Penza Associates Architects Provident Bank (Baltimore City) Results One Reality Safe Harbors Travel Group (Canton) Shelley Design and Marketing (Baltimore City) Stone Cove Realty Techlab Photo Imaging Terralogos Green Home Services (Hampden) Whay’s Auto Services Wills Printing WindCurrent (Stevenson, MD) WORK Printing and Graphics, Inc.

Brought to you by; Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance www.csballiance.org

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

urbanite november 06

photo by Alain Jaramillo

s p a c e

by amanda kolson hurley

History Repeating

photo by Alain Jaramillo

courtesy of Living Classrooms Foundation

Architecture firm Ziger/Snead honors the past and the present with a skillful, modern design on the Fells Point waterfront

Opposite page: The architects created a glass loggia in the warehouse structure by retaining the original brick facade and inserting a glass box within, allowing clear water views from this third floor perch. Above left: A fire nearly destroyed the brick warehouse, which was built in 1810. Above right: The newly restored exterior includes shutters fabricated by students of the Living Classrooms.

“It’s very honest,” says architect Steve Ziger as I squint up at the parallelogram, a ribbon of warm brick wrapped around cool glass. Over the next couple of hours, as Ziger leads me on a tour of the new Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park located at Caroline and Thames Streets in Fells Point, that word comes up a lot. Exposed ductwork? An honest feature, he says. Industrial floor gratings used as deck railings? Those are honest, too. Ziger, partner in the Baltimore City firm Ziger/ Snead—known for bold designs like the crystalline Brown Center at the Maryland Institute College of Art—assures me that this honesty is not just an

aesthetic. With his design for the park’s new building, he wanted to reveal how buildings are made, how craftsmen take raw materials and carve or join them into useful, beautiful forms. After all, hands-on learning is at the heart of what his client does. His client is the Living Classrooms Foundation, a nonprofit group that runs education and job-skills programs for city youth emphasizing practical, realworld experience. The group started planning for the park in the early 1990s, says President and CEO James Piper Bond. “We wanted to honor Frederick Douglass and the eleven years he spent in Baltimore,” Bond explains. “We also wanted to honor

Isaac Myers and the other African Americans who came together to start the first black-owned shipyard in the country.” Myers, an obscure figure compared to Douglass, nevertheless played a key role in nineteenth-century Baltimore’s commercial life. A prominent businessman and labor leader, in 1866 he helped found, with fourteen other entrepreneurs, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company, located only yards from the park site. Besides its strong associations with maritime and black history, the site had another draw for Living Classrooms: a large, handsome brick warehouse

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Where holiday shopping and your everyday needs meet. And have lunch.

Shop, eat and enjoy.

Ann Taylor Loft Chico’s ® Dulaney Liquors Lopresti’s Hair Cutting Mail Boxes Etc.® Omaha Steaks ® Pasta Mista Professional Vision KaBloom ® Florist Razorback’s Restaurant Smoothie King ® Starbucks Coffee ® Super Fresh Susquehanna Bank Record & Tape Traders Storehouse Furniture Via Waye Travel & Cruises Dulaney Valley Rd. at Fairmount Ave. (Across from Towson Town Center)

Convenient Free Parking www.DulaneyPlaza.com

urbanite november 06

photo by Alain Jaramillo

A view of the new Living Classrooms campus, looking east. A glass walkway connects the new building on the left to the restored warehouse on the right. The brick plaza, which has access to the water, includes a pattern in white concrete, a reference to the foundations of other buildings that once stood on this site.

from 1810, the oldest surviving industrial building on Baltimore’s waterfront. A decade ago, however, its survival looked doubtful. A fire in 1993 had destroyed the roof and caused the third story to collapse into the second. By 1999, “it was about to fall down,” recalls Joe Cellucci, an associate with Ziger/ Snead and the project manager for the project. That same year, Living Classrooms acquired the site from Baltimore City for $1. Stabilizing the warehouse was the first, urgent task. Because it was nearly a ruin, the architects replaced the crumbling bricks with thirty thousand bricks from a recently demolished building of the same vintage, a cannery in Little Italy that was built in the 1850s. With the warehouse stabilized, the architects could begin to unfold their whole vision: a campus

centered on the restored warehouse and a brand new—but separate—addition, the two connected by a glass walkway and set in a brick plaza with access to the waterfront. “They came up with a concept to have an addition that, like the historic building, uses brick and large timbers,” says Bond, “and the historic building is still the centerpiece.” “They were very aware of the location,” adds Dianne Swann-Wright, the park’s curator, “and worked really hard to take advantage of the water views.” The warehouse, distinctive for its stepped front and rounded corners, now houses a shipbuilding workshop and museum exhibits (including an early 1800s canoe that was carved by slaves in Maryland in the African tradition). Inside the historic building,

Ziger and Cellucci point out the original columns and beams, many of them charred from the fire. These were planed down only as much as necessary and kept in place. The heart-pine floors were made from the building’s old floor joists. Not only are such measures ecologically sound and historically sensitive, they helped Ziger/Snead stick to a tight budget: $9.5 million for both the rehabbed warehouse and the new addition. Other costs, such as building a marine railway for pulling ships in, brought the total to $14 million, which Living Classrooms raised from private donors, the city of Baltimore, and the state of Maryland. The new addition is devoted to classroom and meeting space, with a student-run gift shop and, eventually, a cafe overlooking the water. It stands at

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Canton Waterfront

Canton Near Water

Amazing home on the end of the North Shore Pier has it all! Incredible water view from every room, Gourmet kitchen w/ Viking, custom baths w/ granite, vessel sink & TV’s, multiple balconies, gated 2-car parking, surround wiring, 2 way FP in Master & master bath, 3rd level terrace & walk in closets. This is the ultimate city home w/great water views, parking & security! Visit baltimoreshowcase.com for virtual tour.

3000sqft+ luxury town home w/covered parking! Spa like living w/ 62x14 Master Suite w/ 8ft balcony & massive master bath! Beautiful tiger wood HW’s throughout, 21x14 designer kitchen w/ everything, steel open riser stairs w/ acrylic, translucent treads. Dual zoned HVAC, 20x15 rooftop deck, 10ft ceilings, this house would have sold for over 850k+ last year, offered this year at $759,000. Still time to customize!

2327 Boston Street #16

1222 Highland Ave. S

Fells Point

Canton Cove Water view

Three magnificent stories of SPACE, SPACE, SPACE! 4 BR, 4.5 BA, roof top deck with great city views. Large kitchen, separate dining room with tray ceiling & architectural columns. Beautiful cathedral ceilings, hardwoods and skylights. Third floor is huge master suite w/ bedroom, 2 baths and sitting room or 2BR, 2BA. Offered at $515,000. Visit baltimoreshowcase.com.

Enjoy the luxury of CANTON COVE. A fabulous location close to restaurants, shopping, I-95 and 895. 3 bedroom 2.5 bath condominium with den and breakfast area with hardwood floors, track lighting, custom closets, black out shades, and large balcony with water view! Approximately 2200 square feet. Dynamic view of the city completes this exciting lifestyle! Offered at $630,000.

Butchers Hill 2 Car Garage

3303 Elliott Street

Great big renovated house with 3 car parking, 4BR, 3FB, EOG, tree lined, Gourmet kitchen w/ island, maple HW’s throughout, built-ins, wetbar, wine cooler, close to park,2 rooftop decks, single spine steel open riser stairs, 2 zoned HVAC, exposed brick throughout, stained glass lvn room windows, 3 FPs (not working), 3 entrances, courtyard, full bath on each flr. 2 attics. Visit baltimoreshowcase.com.

Newly Constructed 3 lvl garage THs in great Canton location, close to water, the square & dog park. Classic design w/ modern touches. This 5 unit project is under way & should be ready for delivery 11/15/2006. 3 interior units 16ft wide & End units to be 20ft wide. Contact Ron for floor plans & list of finishes. New construction tax credit available for this project.. Starting at $635,000 with 10K towards closing. Visit baltimoreshowcase.com

107 Ann Street

2022 East Pratt Street

Canton Water View 2335 Boston Street #5

Welcome to North Shore and experience the ultimate urban lifestyle! Sophisticated colonial 4 story TH with relaxing water view, 2-car garage, 4BR,including penthouse master suite with walk-in closets, balcony and soaking tub, 2.5 baths, granite counters in large kitchen. Nestled on the edge of Fells Point and Canton,. Offered at $685,000-100K REDUCTION! Visit baltimoreshowcase.com.

2901 Boston Street Unit 321

Canton

The Promenade at Hopkins Overlook

Located one block from Johns Hopkins Medical Campus and two blocks from the newly developed 40 acre bio-tech research park. Empire homes, builder of quality homes and well designed communities throughout Maryland is building 20+ newly built town homes. Empire offers upgraded “standard” features & allows buyers to upgrade & customize each home. Visit baltimoreshowcase. com for a map of homes & a list of finishes. Starting in the 300s.

photo by Alain Jaramillo

When designing this space, which will be used as the Living Classrooms’ boat-building shop, the architects reused the original joists from the warehouse. “We left the memory of the fire by leaving some of the charred wood in this design,” Steve Ziger says. The arched entryway is new masonry crafted to match the original brickwork.

a rakish angle to the warehouse, on the footprint of a prior building. This was not accidental: “The siting had everything to do with history,” says Ziger, who in his work uses archaeological allusions to bridge present and past. So in the plaza, for instance, a white-concrete pattern outlines the foundations of other buildings that once stood on the site. “It’s about being rooted in the past while being contemporary,” Ziger says. Together, the buildings set up an appealing counterpoint between new and old, traditional and modern. The interplay is subtler than it may first appear. One might think the new building—an

angular brick shell containing a glass box—was a radical departure from its Federal-style companion. But look closely. In the facade of the old warehouse, there are five bays; the dramatic vertical cut-outs at the front of the new structure are effectively modern bays—and again, there are five of them. Also, the seemingly old-fashioned shutters on the warehouse have an unusual sheen. They’re made of lead-coated copper, a material picked up in the frame of the glass enclosure next door. Such details, besides a general sympathy in scale and the modest way the addition steps back from her older sister, as if to show her off, create

a dialogue between the buildings. They act out in physical terms the conversations about history that Swann-Wright hopes visitors will have, now that the park is open. “We’re privileged to tell a story that can’t be told authentically anywhere else,” she says. “I call the buildings here ‘teachers and reminders.’ We want people to leave here and say, ‘I didn’t know that.’ It’s an empowering site.” ■ —Amanda Kolson Hurley is the associate editor of Preservation magazine in Washington, D.C.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

SaSa'sSpa_OpeiningAds_FIN:SaSa_OpeiningAd_6thV_Urb

A Holistic Day Spa

OPENING IN NOVEMBER!

.In Baltimore’s Cultural District

Sutton Place, 1111 Park Ave Bolton Hill, MD 21201

410.383.SaSa www.SaSasSpa.com

It’s tim aSaf ied! e to get S 58

urbanite november 06

CONTEMPORARY LIVING AT REISTERSTOWN ROAD AND THE BELTWAY GRAND LOBBY WITH 24 HOUR CONCIERGE ELEVATOR BUILDING INCLUDED GARAGE PARKING ROOFTOP POOL LIGHTED TENNIS COURTS STATE-OF-THE-ART FITNESS CENTER THE GALLERY CLUB GOURMET KITCHENS WITH STAINLESS STEEL APPLIANCES AND GRANITE COUNTER TOPS

SO MUCH FOR MINIMALISM

NINE-FOOT CEILINGS GAS FIREPLACES HARDWOOD FLOORS BALCONIES AND TERRACES

I M M E D I AT E D E L I V E R I E S TWO & THREE BEDROOM CONDOMINIUM RESIDENCES FROM $309,900

(410) 602-0080 W W W. T H E G A L L E R YATA VA L O N . C O M Sales Gallery Open Daily 11 am - 6 pm Directions: From I-695 West, take Exit 20 (MD Rt. 140) and go north 1 mile on Reisterstown Rd. urn left onto Avalon Way, to a right on Iron Horse Lane to our Sales Center and Models on the left. Prices subject to change without notice.

Sales by McWilliams | Ballard, Seller’s Agent

The Elephant

urbanite november 06

in the City B y

M at th e w

i ll u s trations

A. b y

Cre nso n b ri a n

Why we don’t talk about race in Baltimore

payne

I heard about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education while listening to the car radio from the back seat of my father’s ’49 Studebaker. I was 11 and just finishing the sixth grade at a legally segregated elementary school in Baltimore. I thought that the court’s decision would take effect right away. It was, after all, supreme. I was unaware that the justices would hold the Brown case over for a year so that they could consider arguments about its implementation. The Baltimore Board of School Commissioners, however, acted more quickly than the court. Three days after the announcement of the Brown decision, Board President Walter Sondheim convened the commissioners to consider how they should respond to the ruling. Exactly two weeks later, the board voted unanimously to desegregate the city’s schools when they reopened in September 1954. The decision took about three minutes, and there was no public discussion. A week after that, the board members voted, again unanimously, to approve the desegregation plan that the school superintendent had drawn up at their direction. My expectations about the speed of the integration process turned out to be roughly accurate. In September, I would be attending a racially integrated, citywide junior high school named, ironically, the Robert E. Lee School. Under the freedom-of-choice plan approved by the school board, the number of black students attending formerly white schools in September was not large. But they were concentrated in a relatively small number of schools, and several black children started with me at Robert E. Lee. We never talked about race. Neither did the teachers. In fact, I never heard anyone discuss the racial integration of our school with the students—no teacher, no principal or vice-principal, no counselor. No one tried to explain to us what was happening or why. The city at large was almost as quiet as my teachers on the subject of school integration. It was so quiet that one segregationist expressed his puzzlement at the absence of debate in a letter to The Baltimore Sun. “Somewhere in this town of ours,” he wrote, “there must be others with the urge to voice the opinion.” For four and a half months, however, Baltimore did nothing but congratulate itself—quietly. Then, in white, working-class Pigtown, about thirty women picketed the neighborhood elementary school to protest its integration. A much larger crowd—mostly students—gathered at Southern High School. Fistfights broke out, and there were several arrests. But the protests lasted for only three days and affected only about three percent of the school population. In a statement that would later be echoed by public officials in the deeper South to dismiss integrationists, Southern’s principal blamed the segregationist disturbances on “agitators” who had spread false rumors about conditions at his school by telephone. Nineteen civic and religious organizations announced their support for the school board’s decision to desegregate voluntarily. A Superior Court judge threw out a suit challenging the desegregation of the city schools. The city’s police commissioner delivered a televised statement in which he warned that the picketing of schools might constitute a misdemeanor under a state law prohibiting disruption of classes, and that inciting children to boycott their classes was also a crime.

The protests evaporated, and for the time being the debate about school integration in Baltimore was over. Prolonged discussion would have suggested uncertainty and encouraged resistance. Saying as little as possible was the conscious policy of the superintendent of schools. According to a subsequent review of school integration, sponsored by city and state human-relations commissions, the superintendent “and his administrative staff, backed by the Board of School Commissioners, believed firmly that the less said in advance about integration the better, since talking about it would focus attention on presumed problems and create the impression that difficulties were anticipated.” In the schools themselves, integration would be carried out “by ‘doing what comes naturally,’ so that children would look upon it as a natural and normal development and hence nothing over which to become excited or disturbed.” The silence that I encountered at Robert E. Lee was not just one school’s response to integration. It was not just an accident. It was the intentional response of the school system. The school board’s early and abrupt compliance with the Brown decision had been intended to minimize political conflict on the issue of race and foreclose public discussion of school integration. School officials might find it convenient to pursue strategies that stifled public conflict about education, but the acquiescence of Baltimoreans in general could not be taken for granted. Thousands of white Southerners had migrated to the city during World War II to work in defense plants, and many whites who were native Baltimoreans shared southerners’ segregationist views. The city, after all, had named one of its public schools after Robert E. Lee. For the most part, however, Baltimoreans made little or no trouble for their leaders. The muffling of racial conflict was not just a matter of elite convenience but widespread political convention.

Racially Reticent City African Americans have been a majority in Baltimore since the mid-1970s. But it was 1987 before the city elected a black mayor, and race was not an issue in the campaign, because both of the leading candidates were black. Only in 1995 did black representatives become a majority of the city council. They still hold a majority of the seats, but the mayor (as of press time) is once again a white man. If race had been a polarizing issue in city politics, the African-American majority would surely have risen up to claim its share of Baltimore’s government sooner than it did, and held it longer. But racial politics has been unexpectedly muted in Baltimore, a fact that puzzled the only black mayor that the city ever elected. Shortly before leaving office in 1999, Mayor Kurt Schmoke complained that Baltimore was a “city where issues of race continue to be important, but they are issues that no one wants to talk about. It’s almost as though people would like to ignore the fact that race continues to be a significant factor determining the quality of life in the city and the metropolitan area.” Since Schmoke had been mayor of the city for twelve years, one might well ask what kept him from disrupting the culture of avoidance that has generally prevented the race issue from rising high on Baltimore’s political agenda. Schmoke himself conceded that he tried to avoid making race a subject of city w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Gardens of Faith Limited Space Available 5 Years Financing Avaiable Personal Planning

5598 Trumps Mill Rd. Baltimore, MD 21206 Call for your Consultation (410) 668-1086

Companion & Single Crypts Glass Front & Standard Niches Cemetary/Masouleam Plans

you can make your wishes known today 62

urbanite november 06

politics. And as Schmoke suggested, Baltimoreans’ capacity to ignore the fact of race is striking. The city is hardly innocent of racial discrimination. It has a history of legally sanctioned segregation, and when it lost the force of law, segregation retained the force of habit. In the aftermath of the Brown decision, whites abandoned public education for the suburbs or private schools. Today the public school population in Baltimore City is eighty-eight percent African American. There are scarcely any stable, integrated neighborhoods. Nothing about the present circumstances of Baltimore seems to explain why its deep racial divisions do not figure more prominently as political divisions. There is no reason to believe that Baltimoreans are less prone to racial antagonism than the residents of other big cities, but those antagonisms seldom come to roost on the city’s political agenda. Racial animosities have occasionally surfaced in local politics, but they do so only briefly and without much noise. When political candidates try to make racial appeals, they usually do so indirectly and cautiously, as when a black mayoral candidate in 1999 urged African-American residents to “vote for a man who looks like you do.” Mayor Schmoke’s bumper stickers in his 1995 reelection campaign were red, black, and green—the colors of black nationalism. Though he said almost nothing about race in his campaign, whites accused him of playing the race card, and the Baltimore AfroAmerican took offense at Schmoke’s belated discovery of the race issue. Schmoke himself later expressed regret about the design of the stickers. Baltimoreans have delicate sensibilities when it comes to the politics of color. I didn’t discover just how delicate until I left the city to go to graduate school in Chicago, where I found that the discussion of race was loud, public, and raw. When I arrived in 1963, black Chicagoans were engaged in a full-scale ground offensive against the school superintendent, Benjamin C. Willis. They charged that he was blocking the racial integration of the schools by installing temporary trailers (“Willis Wagons”) to handle overcrowding at mostly black schools instead of moving the students into avail-

able spaces in mostly white schools. Almost every week an intense black activist named Al Raby would lead a protest march into the Loop to tie up rush-hour traffic. I had never seen anything like that in Baltimore. Four years later I moved to Boston. “Southie” had not yet been brought to a boil by court-ordered busing, but you could feel it coming. Baltimoreans harbor prejudices, some of them just as poisonous as the ones I encountered in Boston, but unlike Bostonians, most Baltimoreans don’t insist on telling you about them. Why are we like this? Why don’t we scream at one another about race like people in other cities? Should we congratulate ourselves for being so non-confrontational? Probably not. The avoidance of race as a subject of public recrimination was invented long before we were around to take credit for it.

Border Town In 1840, wealthy British social reformer James Silk Buckingham made an extended tour of the United States, which included a month’s stay in Baltimore. He found that Baltimoreans did not defend slavery as residents of New York and other cities did. They tolerated a variety of opinions on matters of race, but also exhibited a marked reticence on the subject. “In all our intercourse with the people of Baltimore,” Buckingham wrote, “and we were continually out in society, we heard less about slaves and slavery than in any other town we had yet visited.” Polite discussion within Baltimore’s antebellum “society” reflected its position on the margin between North and South. Its merchant class included gentlemen from Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, where slavery was an established institutional presence. But during the Revolution, Quaker businessmen had emigrated from Philadelphia, where the British occupation had become an inconvenience to commerce, and they relocated in Baltimore, where their sons and grandsons made fortunes. Others were already here, taking advantage of Baltimore’s rapidly growing economy. Quaker abolitionists and proslavery patricians coexisted in Baltimore’s elite, socializing and doing business with one another. Among

Clockwise from bottom left: A scene from an integrated classroom; Thurgood Marshall; and picketers in front of Ford’s Theater on West Fayette Street

illustration by Brian Payne

photos courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society

continued on page 85

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

urbanite november 06

alone at the table

G r o w i n g u p s m a rt, a m b i t i o u s , a n d b l a c k i n B a lt i m o r e By

D a rr y l

F o x w o rt h

The deepening plight of black men has finally—if only briefly—been recognized by the press and academicians. Several disturbing trends have been uncovered by recent studies and news reports: 72 percent of black male high school dropouts in their twenties are jobless; more than half of all black men residing in inner cities fail to complete high school; 60 percent of black male high school dropouts have served jail time by their mid-thirties; 50 percent of black men in their twenties lacking a college education are jobless; only 25 percent of black males ages 18 to 24 attend college; and black male high school dropouts in their late twenties are more likely to be behind bars (34 percent) than working (30 percent). Sadly, such frightening statistics fail to surprise me, and in Baltimore—a city mired in violence, drugs, and failing schools—the black male high school dropout rate has been as high as 76 percent in recent years, well above the national average of 50 percent for inner-city black males. But I’ve managed to avoid the prescribed fate of many young black males. I have what Barack Obama calls a natural aptitude for schooling, which served me well during my many bouts of indifference. While it seems that black boys are underrepresented in gifted or advanced academic programs, I had been enrolled in such programs during much of my academic career. Growing up in Northwest Baltimore, high expectations were heaped upon me that seemed well within reach. I was always a star pupil, garnering honor-roll recognition most every semester and receiving a bounty of academic awards—including the Student of the Year trophy in my sixth-grade year of middle school. My test scores were always exceedingly high and my academic pedigree was such that I gained entrance into Roland Park Middle School and City College—this was critical considering the dire state of most Baltimore City public schools. I aspired to Harvard or Yale; perhaps I’d study business or law as an

p h o t o gr a p h y

b y

m ar sh a l l

c l a r k e

undergraduate and then attend law school after a stint at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship—how many black boys in Baltimore dream like that? And while I was often lackadaisical in my academic endeavors, doing just enough to appease my teachers and relying mostly on my natural gifts, I worked quite hard to ensure my place at the next level. I captained the lacrosse team, won debate tournaments, took demanding classes, and did everything I could to stand out when it came time to apply for college. I was never concerned with academic excellence, which was often achievable with minimal effort; I was busy accumulating points as if life were a game of winners and losers, and becoming upwardly mobile. Instead of reading James Joyce, I read U.S. News & World Report, gaining insights into what qualities upper-tier universities wanted in their students, and uncovering “Hidden Ivies” with a reputation of propelling one’s trajectory. After all, I had been working towards that goal since I was 6 or 7, around the time I was identified as a so-called smart kid. More than anything, I didn’t want to be a black boy statistic. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who taunted me for wearing khakis during middle school—one of the guys I just knew was destined for jail time or premature death. I wanted to be their antithesis. After high school, I began my episodic college career at a prestigious Southeastern university known for its homogenous student body—white, Southern, and privileged—strenuous academics coupled with affection for Greek life and partying, and endless networking possibilities. As one of, say, nine black males in the entering class, I managed to immerse myself in white, upper-class culture, finding my niche as the popular, nonthreatening, black lacrosse player. I had been lobotomized. I lasted less than a year before I made my less-than-triumphant return to Baltimore. It had been a year of great self-reflection. By most measures I was on the fast track to success, but at what cost? The white majority was intrigued by my very presence; I was exotic. The precious few blacks gave me critical—and hypocritical—stares. There was tension in both directions; I could appease neither side. I was an alien in two privileged worlds— continued on page 87

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

urbanite november 06

Out, Damned Spot! Web confessionals and the allure of admission BY KERR HOUSTON I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y G R E G H O U S T O N

hink, for a moment, of a computer as a glossy, modern variation on the traditional confessional. Sure, the setting may be different—perhaps an office cubicle, instead of a dusky church aisle—but in at least a few ways, there’s a rough parallel. You approach a screen, you go through a quick set of traditionbound steps, and you are quickly reminded of how long it has been since you last went through this: You last logged in at 8:47 p.m. a week ago. What follows? Well, that clearly depends upon you, but if you are like an increasing number of users, you might well begin to voice what has been on your mind of late. You type a few thoughts, and click on “Post.” You wait. And then someone, visible only faintly as a grainy avatar or an opaque online name, responds. You take in the words that come from beyond and you know, as you do, that your own words have been heard, and your existence in a broader community temporarily validated. And perhaps, if you happen to have been excruciatingly honest, and if your words have fallen on a generous ear, you may even feel absolved. At least, that’s the logic that apparently underlies what has recently become a range of popular confessional websites. The most popular metaphors for the Internet, to be sure, remain ones that accent connectedness: web, net, superhighway. But it’s clear that a number of users also think of the Net as an appropriate arena for the airing of peccadilloes, secrets, and personal difficulties. Hence the popularity of sites such as The Confessional, a British online forum, and Daily Confession, which airily claims to be the “world’s largest online confessional.” Hence, too, Group Hug, which has hosted more than 440,000 online confessions since its inception in 2003, and E-admit, which offers a search function that allows a viewer to find confessions related to the theme of his or her choice. And none of these even qualifies as the leader in the field: That honor would have to go to PostSecret, a gallery of private thoughts and deeds written on postcards, which is run out of Germantown. PostSecret has won two Webby awards and five Bloggies, making it, arguably, the most decorated blog of 2006.

ith hundreds of online confessions appearing on these venues every day, it’s hardly surprising that the spilled secrets vary considerably, ranging from endearingly trivial to downright sinister. Some of them startle with their abruptness, as when a user of The Confessional writes, without any introductory context, that “I have lied on my c.v. and to work colleagues for years about how I started my working career.” Some confess without necessarily implying remorse. One entry states, simply, that “ugly people bother me.” And a look at NotProud, which organizes its confessions under

the headings of the seven deadly sins, reveals this, under envy: “I want to be more famous than my girlfriend. Right now I’m not and I always feel inadequate.” Sexual transgressions, revenge fantasies, feelings of abandonment—you can pick your genre. It’s a virtual given that some user, somewhere, has posted a related confession. Not that any of this is necessarily new. On the contrary, the urge to confess publicly is ancient, and its roots wind back at least as far as Augustine’s celebrated Confessions, written in the fourth century, in which the eminent bishop recounted his youthful sins and a persistent sense of temptation. In 1215, confession was institutionalized by the Roman Catholic Church, which insisted that all parishioners confess to their priest at least annually, and thus emphasized its own centrality in the process of forgiveness. English Protestants, in turn, reduced the clergy’s role in the process of confession but retained the basic practice, which was recast as a private, and frequently written, self-inquiry—an idea still visible, centuries later, in Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which the day’s headings (“16 cigarettes, 5 alcohol units …”) serve as terse confessions of excess. But why, exactly, all this confessing? Generally, Western confessions have been explained in terms of a few relatively basic reasons: a desire for reconciliation, an interest in self-examination, and the guiding hope that others might learn from one’s example. As the literary historian Terrence Doody has put it, confession can be seen as the “attempt of an individual to identify himself, to explain his nature to the audience who represents the kind of community he needs to exist in and confirm him.” It answers, in other words, a fundamentally social need. And, at the same time, it helps to foster that same need. Michel Foucault, the eminent French theoretician, once argued that the long history of confession has yielded a system in which “each person has the duty to know who he is, that is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires.” In other words, we don’t confess only because we think we need to; we confess because we are expected to. Or, at least, we do so in certain contexts. When the stakes are high, however, things can change rather radically. According to a 2005 article in Scientiﬁc American Mind, only forty-two percent of American police interrogations yield confessions. That’s considerably fewer than in England, where the figure stands at nearly sixty percent, or Japan, where a whopping ninety percent of police interrogations end in confessions. Certainly, there are both institutional and social factors at work here; for instance, Japanese police are relatively unfettered by legal restraints, and Japanese social norms emphasize the acceptance of personal responsibility and the public reintegration of the individual. Still, the bottom line is worth marking: In the pressured glare of the interrogation room, American criminal suspects tend to avoid, rather than embrace, confession. continued on page 89 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Randolph B. Capone, M.D., Director

The Baltimore Center for Facial Plastic Surgery, LLC Board certified. • Johns Hopkins trained.

LLC

Cosmetic

CARE

worthy of the privilege

Practice limited exclusively to plastic surgery of the face. Premiere services include: • Rhinoplasty • Facelift • Necklift • Eyelid Correction • Threadlift • Injectables

• Protective & Corrective Skin Care • Laser Hair Removal • Hair Restoration • Lip Enhancement • Ear Correction

6535 North Charles Street • Pavilion North, Suite 250 • Baltimore, MD 21204 410-828-4123 • 877-828-4123 (toll free) • 410-828-4124 (fax) • BaltimoreFaces.com

urbanite november 06

poetry

by will holman

Sunday, In the Cold

photo courtesy of Will Holman

Dinnertime, liquor store closed ’cause nothing in this goddamn town is open on Sunday, doors bracing against coming snow. No one spoke, cobwebs cornering dust, plastic bags whipping the sidewalk, cars trudging through slush like the rest of us. Will Holman grew up in Towson and now studies architecture at Virginia Tech. Upon graduation, he plans to pursue a professional license to practice architecture. In his spare time, Holman builds furniture out of corrugated cardboard and tennis balls. His poems have appeared in recent issues of such journals as Gumball Poetry, Collision, Manorborn, The Woove, and Brush Mountain Review.

I don’t recall what year I quit wishing for snow. Maybe we won’t have to go in tomorrow, salt trucks shaving away at hopes that were already small enough. We spent the night counting snowflakes caputured by streetlights, TV drifted over with static, signals scraping roughshod over antennas. I ran hands through hair, washed the glasses in lukewarm water and rolled down my sleeves; I cut my hair, shaved in lukewarm water and shed my sleeves ’cause nothing in this goddamn town is open on Sunday.

{american cuisine with mediterranean flavors} restaurants | bar | lounge

D a ily b a r sp eci a ls a nd l ive m u s ic! Available for private functions suc h as corporate events, holidays, par ties, and banquets. } Bo ok your holiday par ties in advance } Gift cer tificates available

31 main street, reisterstown, md 21136 } 410.517.3939 } www.mic hosrestaurant.com

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Botani . Fresh botanical goods. From funky cut flowers, plants and herbs to all-natural candles, soaps, aromatherapy and eco-friendly stationery. Come in, make an arrangement and cut your own soap!! 846 W. 36th Street• 410-889-4025 * flowers@botani846.com

breathe books.

From Chakras to Shamans, music to meditation, bodywork to Buddhism - gifts, books and over 25 events a month for your mind, body and spirit. See our classes and workshops at www.breathebooks.com. Open Tues - Sat 11-7 ; Sun 12-5

810 W. 36th Street • 410-235-READ

Chellé Paperie.

Fine paper products and custom stationery design. At Chellé Paperie, we give paper personality. Sparkling personality. Your personality. From invitations to announcements to holiday cards, we invite you to indulge in self expression.

851 W. 36th Street • 410-366-6333

Dogwood Deli. Delicious, sustainable cuisine with a local and seasonal focus. Includes smoothie and juice bar, artisanal sandwiches, locally made ice cream and “gourmet to go” meals. coming soon . . .

moder n lines & indie designs apparel & accessories

dou b ledutch BOUTIQUE

911 W. 36th Street • 410-889-0952 • www.dogwooddeli.com

doubledutch boutique.

Modern lines and indie designs, showcasing emerging designers through an inspired mix of clothing, jewelry, handbags and other darling notions. Come visit us at the “top” of the Avenue. “Best reason to shop in Baltimore” –Baltimore Magazine, 2006. “Best Women’s Clothing Store” –City Paper, 2006.

3616 Falls Road • 410-554-0055 • www.doubledutchboutique.com

410.554.0055 info@doubledutchboutique.com 3616 Falls Rd. at the Avenue in Hampden

Golden West Cafe. “Green chile, green chile, green chile! A million New Mexicans can’t be wrong.” Open Wed.-Mon. 9am-10pm, Bar open till midnight. Closed Tuesdays. 1105 W. 36th Street • 410 889-8891

ReNew Day Spa.

Rejuvenate the Body. Refresh the Mind. Respect the Earth. Personalized skincare, massage, nail care, and pre/post-natal/infant services. Incorporating Eastern and Western methods, using organic products in an eco-friendly environment. Opening Fall 2006.

843 W. 36th Street • www.renewdayspa21211.com

Holy Frijoles.

Simple but substantial mexican fare. A menu with variety. We use only the finest chicken breasts and flank steaks and prepare our salsas fresh daily.

908 W. 36th Street • 410-235-2326

Hometown Girl.

Celebrating Baltimore urban life for twenty-five years! Browse our wonderful selection of Baltimore books, art, apparel and foods...enjoy hand-dipped ice cream sundaes, shakes and espresso drinks in our “Parlor of Sweets.”

1001 W. 36th Street at Roland Ave.• 410-662-GIFT • www.celebratebaltimore.com

In Watermelon Sugar. Specializing in unique

products for your home, bath, and body. Scents for every palette. Colorful aprons, frames, furniture, cards and more.

3555 Chestnut Ave • 410-662-9090 urbanite november 06

Ma Petite Shoe .

Artisanal chocolate from around the world and European shoe designs. Voted “Baltimore’s Best Shoe Store” and “Baltimore’s Best Chocolate Gifts.” Specializing in unusual savory and spiced chocolates! Open 7 days a week!

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

Milagro.

Great new things for fall and winter from all around the globe. Clothing from Nepal. Pottery from Colombia and Bulgaria. Jewelry from Mexico, India, and Baltimore. Come see what’s here!

1005 W. 36th Street • 410-235-3800 • milagrobaltimore@yahoo.com

Mud and Metal. Features handmade functional fine crafts from local and nationally known artists including ceramics, metalwork, jewelry, glass, paper and fiber. 1121 W. 36th Street • 410-467-8698 • www.mudandmetal.com

New System Bakery & Café. Offers breakfast and lunch in its new café along with the old favorite fresh baked goods. Call to order your holiday cakes today! Open M-F 6 to 6, Saturday 7-5. Chestnut and W. 34th St. • 410-235-8852 • www.newsystembakery.com

Discover

ampden

Oh! Said Rose.

Unabashedly girly gear. Voted “Baltimore’s Best Jewelry” and “Baltimore’s Best Place to Splurge” for our flirty clothing designs, accessories and gifts. Home of the Hampden Charm School. Open 7 days a week.

840 W. 36th Street • 410-235-5170 • www.ohsaidrose.com

Paradiso. An antique lover’s dream. Blending Old World elegance with vintage modern style. Exquisite period furnishings, fine craft, decorative arts, jewelry, gifts. Open Fri-Sat. 11-6, Sun. 11-4 or by appointment. 1015 W. 36th St.• 410-243-1317

Red Tree. Home furnishings and artistic goods from around the world and around the corner. From furniture to jewelry, wall art to handbags, you’ll find a variety of creatively designed goods. Now Open! 921 W. 36th Street • 410-366-3456 • www.redtreebaltimore.com

The Pearl Gallery. An affordable luxe destination shop filled with the newest–hottest–latest accessories. Gifts from around the world. Asian antiques and jewelry for any occasion. Shop our Christmas store for your holiday treasures. Visit online at www.thepearlgallery.com 826 W. 36th Street • 410-467-2260

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Urbanite_InvestorsUnit#5A3F.pdf

7/31/06

4:43:48 PM

a piano bar in historic mt. vernon open 4pm-1am, monday thru saturday, closed sundays

225 west read street 2 1/2 blocks off charles st. 410.225.0188

F I N E H O M E S , T H E F O U N D AT I O N O F Y O U R P O RT F O L I O

RESIDENTIAL BROKERAGE

Roland Park at 312 Wyndhurst Ave. Baltimore, MD 21210

Homeland

5315 Springlake Way $975,000

Guilford

207 Chancery Road $785,000

direct: 410-900-1404 office: 410-433-7800 kbatterton@cbmove.com www.kbatterton.com

call me for a courtesy home market analysis today!

Seafood

CMY

The Finest

Flown in Fresh

Every Day !

THE OCEANAIRE ®

Seafood Room

801 Aliceanna St. Baltimore, MD • 443/872-0000 Valet Parking Available after 5 p.m.

www.theoceanaire.com

urbanite november 06

sustainable city

by donna m. owens

photography by la kaye mbah

Take It from the Top A plant-covered roof is just the beginning for a green-thinking car dealer

Above: A close-up of the 28,500-square-foot green roof at Northwest Honda. The roof uses sedum plants, which are hardy and survive wind, drought, and frost.

Ed Dreiband claims to be afraid of heights, yet here he is, some twenty-five feet up, standing on the roof of his newly built Northwest Honda dealership in Owings Mills, looking like the king of the world. From this vantage point high above busy Reisterstown Road, Dreiband can survey all 28,500 square feet of the building’s innovative “green roof,” made of living, growing plants. The green roof is the centerpiece of Northwest Honda’s eco-friendly auto facility, which opened in August. “The plants have grown some since my last visit,” says Dreiband, who led this reporter on a semi-perilous climb up a narrow, indoor ladder, before opening a steel hatch that leads onto the roof. Dreiband walks gingerly, careful not to tread upon neatly manicured rows of tiny plants—some 57,000 in all—that nearly cover the roof. “They don’t really require much work,” Dreiband explains. “When it rains, they’re watered. That’s what’s so great about this—the environmental benefits and the practicality.” Green roofs are vegetated covers where growing plants replace traditional roofing materials. Experts like Garth Rockcastle, dean of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park, say they’re gaining favor as a smart, sustainable design trend. “For the past fifteen years [in college architecture programs] there’s been an evolution in terms of teaching more ‘green’ concepts,” says Rockcastle. “Today, it’s considered standard.”

The need and the demand for eco-friendly construction have increased due to factors such as global warming, higher rates of air and water pollution, and a growing population. Green roofs can help lessen urban development and suburban sprawl issues, while creating environmental, economic, and aesthetic benefits. Environmentally, the myriad benefits include reduced effects on the ozone, fewer toxins in drinking water, and improved air quality. While green roofs usually entail higher initial costs, their economic advantages typically include decreased energy usage and utility costs (particularly in heating and cooling). Among the aesthetic benefits are visually pleasing native and naturalized plant communities. Dreiband says he first read about eco-friendly construction in USA Today and Ward’s DealerBusiness, a trade publication for car dealers. He and his wife, Ina, also own BMW and Suzuki dealerships, all along the 9700 block of Reisterstown Road. “When we began working on the new building, I asked our architect about it,” says the 62-year-old accountant turned car dealer, whose two sons Josh and Danny help him manage a team of two hundred. “We found out that we could do it, and went from there.” Architects Peter Powell and Rob Gordon of Beck, Powell & Parsons in Towson designed the new $12 million facility, set on four acres that formerly housed Baltimore County police department offices. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

(410) 235-7979

T o u c h , S m e l l , F e e l , l i v e ..

Essential Oils and Diffusers Fragrant Waters â&#x20AC;&#x153;Touchâ&#x20AC;? Essential Body Bars Hand Crafted candles Hand-Loomed Middle-Eastern Peasant Floor Coverings Flower Remedies Art & Furnishings by Annapolis Artist Ross Holtz Acupuncture Massage

The

T r u ly e n l i g h T e n e d S e e k o n ly T h e S i m p l e S T T r u T h S

F i r e W aT e r m e Ta l e a r T h W o o d

720 W. 36th Street, Hampden, MD 21211

www.zensa b ar.com

urbanite november 06

(The land was purchased from the county in 2001 and the groundbreaking occurred in January 2006.) The new building replaces the old Northwest Honda site across the street (which will be used to expand the family’s BMW dealership), and is designed to preserve energy and utilize recycled materials in a variety of ways. “[Dreiband] has always had an interest in energy conservation, both as an environmental concern and a cost-saving measure,” says Powell. “We’d done residential and commercial [green] buildings, but never a green roof on a commercial building. It was an exciting project.” The results are impressive. The sprawling 40,000-square-foot dealership is painted white with cool blue accents, giving it a light, airy feel. It can accommodate up to five hundred cars. The building has eighty-seven energysaving insulated glass panels, and its main heating source comes from furnaces that use recycled oil from cars. Throughout the building, automatic sensors turn lights on and off as people enter and exit rooms; meanwhile, exterior lights are controlled by so-called “photoeyes” that turn lights on based on the percentage of available light, and turn them off based on time clocks to reduce unnecessary usage. To service cars, there are twenty-nine vehicle bays in the service center, and the dealership’s on-premise carwash recycles water between washes—about 2,500 to 3,000 gallons daily. As for the building’s green roof—which actually has what architect Rob Gordon describes as a “thermo-plastic polyolefin membrane (TPO) roof ” underneath to keep the interior of the build-

ing dry—it is a blend of both form and function. For starters, the green roof extends the life of a traditional roof, according to the lead architects, who collaborated on the project with landscape architect Thomas J. Hoff (who secured the approval from Baltimore County to install the green roof), various engineers, builders, county officials, and others. Having multiple layers protects the TPO roofing membrane from ultraviolet rays, wind, and the extremes of temperature fluctuations. “The green roof keeps the TPO cooler, and this reduces the ‘heat island effect’ of a black roof, which would otherwise contribute to global warming,” explains Powell. The green roof also meets the county’s required storm water management system requirements, says Robert Alexander Wirth, a professional engineer and manager of storm water engineering for the county’s Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management. “When you disturb more than five thousand square feet [of land], you are required to address storm water management,” he explains. “Because of site constraints, such as clay soil under the ground, they had to come up with an alternative storm water practice. There’s a whole menu of items you can choose—from a storm water retention pond to underground facilities. They chose to do this green roof.” Wirth says according to the plans submitted to the county, estimates were that the roof would cost a little under $400,000. A green roof typically has drought-tolerant plants (in this case, most are a hardy species known as sedum in six different varieties) that help reduce,

Zingles

“ I N T I M AT E SURROUNDINGS”

filter, and cool storm water run-off. That in turn can protect sewer systems and watersheds, and help prevent potentially hazardous levels of toxins from entering waterways such as the Chesapeake Bay and affecting food sources like fish. While Dreiband says safety and insurance issues preclude the public and customers from going up to the roof, the project has garnered positive attention for the dealership. Besides being what Wirth called “unique” in Baltimore County, it may also be the first Honda operation nationwide with such design elements, according to company officials in Torrance, California. “It is certainly one of the first to incorporate so many environmental facility features into the overall design philosophy of the dealership,” says Chris Martin, a spokesman for American Honda Motor Co., Inc. “We’re thrilled about the new building and the chance to operate in an environmentally conscious manner,” says Dreiband, who resists labeling himself an “environmentalist.” “I can’t take care of the whole world, but this makes me feel good. I have grandchildren, and many of the people on my team have children. We want to leave them a healthy environment. We only have one earth. We all share it.” ■

“ECLECTIC SELECTION”

November 18, 2006, 7–9:30 p.m., $20 Gather with other wine-minded singles in our wine cellar for a night of tasting, food, and of course, fun! Check our website for upcoming events.

Wedding and Party Planning Available

www.wineunderground.us

6 / % & 3 ( 3 0 6 / %

PLEASE MAKE RESERVATIONS FOR ALL EVENTS. 410-467-1615 4400 EVANS CHAPEL RD. BALTIMORE, MD 21211 20% off cases of wine straight or mixed.

R C

STR

UC TI

LOMBARD C O U R T

AT FELLS POINT Model Home Opening Soon! Garage Townhome Residences from the $500’s Visit us at 1704 E. Lombard St. in Baltimore 443-677-8821 Open from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm daily or at www.RuppertObrien.com/Lombard Lombard Court

HIStorIC FELLS PoINt

PattErSoN ParK

Over 50% Sold... Don’t Miss Out! MBHR #3420

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

PS-2006-0036

9/26/06

11:28 AM

Page 1

> SERVICE GUARANTEED.

> TRUST EARNED.

The Monarch Project teaches the interdisciplinary > Rich & Doug Lamkin, realtors Cells : 410-419-2615 & 443-414-5762

lessons of scientific observation, data collection, the mathematics of symmetry, natural camouflage, and presentation of findings…

> Listing at 4.75%

> Providing full and professional service at a discount rate

> Get results with the Lamkin Team

…in kindergarten.

2252 LAKE DR. PASADENA, MD

PARK

$679,900

2425 Old Court Road • Baltimore, MD 21208 • 410-339-4130 • www.parkschool.net

Prime Property; 4 BR’S incl. 1 on Main LVL• Encl. Patio w/Picture Window • Ex Large LR w/Wood Burning FP Adds Warm Cozy Touch • Sep. Kitchen and Din.Room • Big Rear and FRT Yards • Driveway and Carport Provide PKG for Several Vehicles • Very Soild BRK Home with Plenty of Room • Movve Right in or Redesign to Taste • SEP BLDG and Attic for Stor. • Great Community!

Full Renovation, Top to Bottom • Crown Molding • Recessed Lighting, Built-In Bookcases, Archway between Living and Dining Room, 8x8 Breakfast Room, Wall to Wall Carpet in Upper Level, Rear Bedroom Features 8x8 Deck, 30x18 Finished Basement Includes Half Bath • Work Done with Pride • No Corners Cut • A TRUE GEM!

Sense

the difference

1829 29th St. BALTIMORE, MD

Baltimore’s Best Wine Bar 2005, Top 25 Brunches 2006 ~Baltimore Magazine

$155,000

• • • •

9634 Deereco Road Timonium, MD 21093 Office: 410-561-0004 www. advancerealtyusa.com

Learn to think

urbanite november 06

Brunch on Sundays (11:00-4:00) Lunch, Tuesday-Friday Dinner 7 days a week Wine Shop open 7 days a week

921 East Fort Ave., Baltimore, MD 21230 at the Foundry on Fort • Phone: 410.244.6166 • www.the-wine-market.com

Westminster, Maryland • www.mcdaniel.edu

out there

by angela davids

A Second Chance Live the life you’ve always wanted in the online community called Second Life

Above: By selecting a first name of her choice and a last name from the list of surnames provided, Angela Undercity was born.

I gave up on video games in elementary school, having been officially recognized by students and faculty as the best Pac-Man player in the entire fourth grade. Never again, I proclaimed, would I enter a digital world. By late high school I had sworn off dating any more boys who played role-playing games. I’d taken a backseat to Dungeons and Dragons one time too many. So why now, fifteen years later, am I so interested in an Internet-based virtual world called Second Life? Unlike Pac-Man, there isn’t a specific objective to meet. The purpose is simply to exist. As the character you create navigates the different realms of Second Life, you can buy land, build a house, meet new people, and do just about anything you can do in your first life—even make money. More than 885,000 residents have joined this online society since it began in 2003, and as I write this, more than $516,000 has changed hands in Second Life on this single day alone. That’s more than fifteen million U.S. dollars per month, which is the equivalent of three billion Linden dollars (the currency of Second Life). Now let me emphasize: This is not Monopoly money. You do not acquire it by pathetically whining, “I’m sooo thirsty, Sis. Can you get me a soda?” and then sneaking a few large bills

from the bank while she’s not looking. Linden dollars (which you can buy or earn) are exchanged for U.S. dollars. If you sell a product or service, or land, or real estate, or any other commodity, you can earn a profit. Or, take a loss. When you register for a basic account, you automatically get 250 Linden dollars (L$250). If you register for a premium account for $72 a year, you get L$1,000 plus a weekly stipend of L$400. Somewhere in between these two extremes is an additional basic account for $9.95. (How sad is that? Even your second life sucks, so you have to buy a new you yet again?) You can also purchase land for a monthly maintenance fee ranging from $5 to $195. Don’t believe it’s real? A West Chester, Pennsylvania, lawyer certainly does. He is suing Linden Research (the San Francisco-based owner of Second Life) for $8,000 restitution after the company shut down his account following an auction of virtual land that he acquired well below market value. Market value? Market value! It’s fake land, people. Or is it? People are building businesses on this land—and while some of these businesses are virtual, some bend into reality. A quick look at job postings reveals opportunities for a cocktail waitress, an event coordinator, and a newspaper writer. Send a

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

CMY

urbanite november 06

Angela Undercity visits the Luna Oaks Mall.

resume and cover letter (seriously), and Linden dollars are yours to earn. Perfect for a workaholic like me! Before I jumped head-on into Second Life, I read several blogs and message boards, and the Second Life website (secondlife.com). Even so, I still floundered quite a bit once I was inside. I wandered aimlessly until I noticed a tab that read “Search,”

then I clicked on “Popular Places,” which provided me with a list of places and images. Hmmm. Plenty of “mature” locales to visit, plus a college, a welcome center, and several dance and jazz clubs. Let’s party! But wait! I was still just the generic prefabricated avatar I had picked during my registration. I couldn’t be seen in pseudo-public like that! I rightclicked on my avatar and “appearance” popped up as

a choice. The options for every aspect of an avatar’s appearance are unlimited—I could even select the chubbiness of my cheeks. Now a digitized diva, I teleported to one of the dance clubs. The music was good (a mash-up of Nine Inch Nails and 50 Cent) and there were maybe twenty other people there. But, I had an entire world to explore … Click … Click … Click. I looked up from the computer, stretched my arms, and painfully realized that four hours of my “first life” were gone. For others, the line between their two lives is much more blurred. For instance, Jerry Paffendorf, 24, is a futurist in residence with The Electric Sheep Company, a consulting firm that helps organizations find ways to use virtual worlds to achieve their business, educational, and marketing goals. (The Electric Sheep Company is the leading provider of professional services for Second Life.) “I’m pleasantly surprised, although it was the plan all along, that I’m now earning my living working in Second Life,” Paffendorf says. “I’m one of those active futurists who doesn’t just watch where things are going, but likes to get their hands dirty and help shape what’s next.” So for Paffendorf (aka SNOOPYbrown Zamboni), his first life isn’t much different than his second. The biggest difference? “I definitely dance more and better in Second Life than I do in real life!” he says. continued on page 91

Find Your Pace . . .

William Carroll wcarroll@cbmove.com 410-978-3093

Find More Space . . .

Find YOUR Place in the City . . .

Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage 312 Wyndhurst Avenue 410-433-7800 (O) w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

One day, I will travel the world singing Italian arias. Today I am a vocalist studying music at Carroll Community College. My teachers at Carroll know me by name, and they understand my dream. With their help, I am moving closer to realizing my ambition. Jamie Lippy | Class of 2007 | Carroll Community College

urb_towerhill_september.pdf

7/27/06

5:36:16 PM 075-A07 7/06

CMY

YOUR

HOLIDAY GIFT HEADQUARTERS. Warm the heart of the city lover in your life with toasty and tasty treats!

Give them a wonderful acrylic mug filled with holiday candy and support a great organization at the same time!

From your boss to fido, they all love city life just like you! Select from our I Love City Life gifts—travel mugs, dog collar and leashes, caps, coasters, and MORE! Call, visit or purchase on-line today.

Live Baltimore Home Center | 343 N. Charles Street | Monday–Saturday, 9:00am–5:00pm | (410) 637-3750 | www.LiveBaltimore.com

urbanite november 06

photo of Two If By Sea by Jason Okutake

recommended

Music

By Robbie Whelan

Tragically iPod-less and old-fashioned, I tend to make a lot of mix CDs, which I blast in my car or listen to while I sit on the back porch and read. Lately the mixes I’m making have been filled with garage rock from The Things, doowop by The Clovers, and psychedelia from King Biscuit Entertainers— stuff downloaded from MP3 blogs, mostly, run by audiophiles much more dedicated to the search than I. On their new album, Safety, the well-groomed Baltimore quartet Two If By Sea is trafficking a different kind of vintage. Like gloom-rockers Interpol, their peers in aesthetic, they’re channeling the dark ’80s post-punk of Bauhaus and Joy Division. The first track on the new disc, “Safety (a),” with its rhythmic train sounds and cello continuo, is misleading: A solid chunk of Safety is the same disco-rock beats and layered, symmetrical guitar lines of their debut album, Translations. The strings only return on “White Zin on Ice,” which is as close as these boys get to symphonic pop, but lead singer Chris Cowan’s vocal range is so limited that the actual melody of the song is lost. “All the Reasons to Leave,” the album’s strongest song, is very Cure-ish, but Cowan’s plea for reconciliation doesn’t convince like Robert Smith’s wrenching yelp does. Many of the other cuts blend together under TIBS’s despair, rinse, repeat formula. A recent “mix album” from local MC Wordsmith fares better. Statements and Stipulations has plenty of local-boy “here to save the rap race” posturing, but his flow— full of overstuffed mouthfuls, discussions about diction, and heavy punch lines—is tight. And his beats, organized by frenetic producers Capish, Strada, and DJ DFC around well-picked soul samples and string sections dripping with significance, are hot. On “Countdown,” Capish makes Wordsmith sound like Field Mob, with cruise-tempo Dirty South production, while the next cut, “Rappers Symposium,” sounds like a Kanye West track. The versatility on this record is what makes it, like the Baltimore scene in general, so satisfying.

ART

By Kerr Houston

courtesy of the Walters Art Museum

Medieval liturgy can seem, at first glance, remote and unfamiliar. Take a closer look, though, and it’s wonderfully relevant. For instance, the focus of the medieval Mass was the moment the priest raised the host and intoned, Hoc est enim corpus meum, meaning “This is my body.” The phrase accompanied the transformation of bread into the body of Christ; it also gave rise, through a linguistic perversion, to our hocus-pocus. Beginning this month, the Walters Art Museum is displaying its collection of medieval missals,

illustrated manuscripts that included texts needed to say Mass, in an exhibit called For This Is My Body: The Medieval Missal. This is no small deal, as the Walters’ collection is one of the best in the world. Spanning six centuries, many of the examples feature lavish illustrations; the exhibit also includes several liturgical objects and a short film. For a reminder of the connections between past and present, visit the concurrently reopened Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, just down Cathedral Street.

MAGAZINE

By Michael Paulson

Heeb magazine styles itself as “The New Jew Review” and that same ironic style pervades the entire magazine. This intermittently published periodical offers a potent mix of pop culture and politics, ideally suited for that cadre of Generation X Jews raised on Schoolhouse Rock who now diligently TiVo Entourage. (In fact, a Star of David-wearing, martiniswilling Jeremy Piven graces the cover of a recent issue.) The magazine’s ethos is iconoclastic and irreverent; past issues have been titled “The Money

Issue,” “The Guilt Issue” … see a pattern? In addition to the requisite shtick humor, this slick production has its glossy finger on juicy morsels: interviews with Al Franken and Sarah Silverman, articles dissecting the Republican Jewish Coalition, an examination of current Jewish humor. Of course, you don’t have to be a member of the tribe to enjoy Heeb, and its appeal crosses over to a healthy chunk of the urban hipster-intelligentsia. As the editors would say, read Heeb because it’ll make your mother happy.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

CMY

Custom Cabinetry Millwork

.. .. .

Kitchen Library Study Built-in Furniture Closet

The Best

No one knows Baltimore better. No one loves this city more.

Just

Got

Better!

NOW 2 convenient locations in

FELLS POINT & MIDTOWN to serve you!

“Best Yoga” – City Paper, ‘04-’05

“Baltimore’s Best Yoga Studio” – Baltimore Magazine, ‘06

Featuring Hot, Astanga Beginner and Community Yoga

MIDTOWN 107 E. Preston 410.234.8967 KITCHEN DESIGNED BY MANIFOLD

2010 Clipper Park Rd. Baltimore, MD 21211 410-243-1045 www.artisaninteriors.us

urbanite november 06

900 W. 36th Street Baltimore, MD 21211 (410) 889-3191 FAX (410) 889-3192

FELLS POINT 901 Fell St. 410.276.YOGA www.charmcityyoga.com

Drop-in classes $1 off with this ad

recommended

fiction

By Susan McCallum-Smith

A recent physical exam revealed that my glucose level had spiked. The doctor attributed it to my Marie-Antoinesque fondness for cake, but I’m convinced the culprit was Marisha Pessl’s precocious first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006), which I’d been reading in the waiting room. The adventures of geeky teenage detective Blue van Meer barrel along, the literary equivalent of a pre-schooler on a sugar-high; I should have draped my copy over a clothesline and thwacked it with a carpet-beater until all its superfluous adjectives, adverbs, and Capital Letters puffed into the ozone like confectioner’s dust. It’s scrumptious in small bites, though, a decadent delight. But in coming years, Pessl may look back on her rococo debut and wish her editor had sharpened her blade. Bruce Chatwin need have no regrets in that department; The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) is a marvel of economy and an homage to decapitation. His re-imagining of the life of the last Brazilian slave tycoon is an enthralling fable about a reluctant sadomasochist, told as if by a dry, jaded anthropologist. Chatwin’s novella illustrates the power of crisp sentences anchored by strong verbs, and it packs a tremendous visual punch—a psalm-playing barrel organ and skittish greyhounds appease an insane African king; Amazonian warriors schlep around in hand-me-downs from a Rossini opera production; a billiard table surfs ashore astride three canoes lashed together. By presenting such extraordinary events with a lack of sentimentality or gratuitousness, Chatwin owes a considerable debt to magical-realism. Mexican author Juan Rulfo is credited with fathering this predominantly Latin-American

literary style with the publication of his 1955 novella Pedro Páramo, although it could be argued that Kafka and Gogol had gotten there before him. A young man seeking his father journeys to a village inhabited by both the living and the dead, yet every character is presented to the reader without differentiation; in magical-realism, the physical and metaphysical words coexist in complete harmony. Rulfo’s novel, and the works of his successors, capture a quintessential South American trait: “lo real maravilloso,” a sense of every-day reality as an amazement. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for his ability to celebrate the extraordinary of the ordinary. His Odes to Common Things (1994) leaves me joyfully giddy, a feeling that can’t be blamed entirely on my B12 deficiency. The Bulfinch Press edition includes charming pencil sketches and English and Spanish text so the bilingual among you can test the mettle of the translation. Among the humble things enrapturing Neruda are: a table and a tomato, a pair of socks and a box of tea, some bread, some spoons, and a dog. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” begins One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the renowned magical-realist novel written by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. As the aptly named Francine Prose remarks in Reading Like a Writer (2006), García Márquez’s first line (one of literature’s most famous openings) not only captures a reader’s imagination, but provides students of the craft with a master class in using a flashback and a

flash-forward in a single sentence. Prose shares excerpts from García Márquez and Rulfo, and many other gifted authors, to teach the skills and stress the benefits of careful reading, making her new nonfiction release a perfect addition to the bookshelves of those who love books and those who aspire to write to them. Moderation is a fatal thing—nothing succeeds like excess, commented Oscar Wilde, and I find to my surprise that I’ve recommended six books this month. The doctor also tested my eyesight; read less, she said. ■

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS T H E TOW N S AT F E L L S P O I N T UPSCALE URBAN L I V I N G AT I T S F I N E S T

www.thetownsatfellspoint.com B U I L D E R T O P AY F I R S T 2 YEARS OF BGE BILL

developed by: S1B Fleet Street Developments, LLC

For information contact

G E N E RO D R I G U E Z

Office: 410-814-2447

Cell: 410-456-8760 Email: genesells@mris.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

team one

3600 O’Donnell St. Baltimore, MD 21224 Office 410-814-2401 Cell 443-277-7614 Ariginbalt@aol.com

team oneC

confident . professional . contemporary

234 holliday street unit 405 . $479,000 This New York City Style loft makes city living a dream! High ceilings, exposed brick, maple floors, stainless appliances, huge windows and an open floor plan make this the ultimate in urban upscale living!

Contact: Jessica Underwood 443-610-3610

216 west monument street . starting at $179,000 10 Unit Condo building! Over 50% sold out! 10 year historic tax credit, corian counters, stainless appliances, original hardwoods, working fire places! Only steps from the light rail!

Contact: Erin Fallon 410-218-7548

premier waterfront pier home . inquire Very rare end of group with 3 balconies elegant kitchen, oversized baths, hardwoods and more make this water front city living at it’s best!

Contact: Jessica Underwood 443-610-3610 443-610-3610

1130 hamburg Three story complete renovation in one of the hottest neighborhoods, Washington Village. Home features a one car garage, gourmet kitchen, sunroom/family room with skylites, hardwood throughout, rooftop deck with amaing views, 3rd floor is the master suite, and so much more. 5 yr. Tax credit!

Contact: Erin Fallon 410-218-7548

Development Opportunities 801 clinton street, hot canton! . $2,399,000 10 finished town home lots. 2700+ sq. ft.! Permitted & ready to build!

307 eaton street, 1 blk to canton! . $1,399,000 17 subdivided record plat town home lots.

several other land deals available. Contact: Ari Gerzowski 443-277-7614 2046 Fountain Street, Canton Only $349,900 . 826 Milton Ave, Canton Only $319,900 . 2834 Hudson, Canton w/ parking! Only $459,900

WORKING TO BE BALTIMORE’S PREFERRED LENDER The Richard Early Team Richard Early Direct 301-332-2184 themtgman@msn.com

fast decisions . creative programs . common sense underwriting 84

We prefer to look at your mortgage experience as the start of your financial plan! urbanite november 06

guaranteed Rate Inc. Mid Atlantic Division

The Elephant in the City continued from page 63

Baltimoreans who were “out in society,” there was one subject that could not bear discussion. When issues of race and slavery arose, polite citizens of the city probably changed the subject. That was why Buckingham heard so little talk of slavery, and Baltimoreans have been changing the subject ever since. Baltimore’s location just below the Mason-Dixon Line has made it a place where white Northerners lived with white Southerners. In the past, the political and cultural differences between the two groups may have been more acutely felt than they are today. As a boy growing up in one of the city’s white neighborhoods, I was expected to declare my loyalty to either the Union or the Confederacy. The distinction occasionally became a cause—or an excuse—for fistfights and rock-throwing. But our elders managed to accommodate such differences without open conflict or public comment. It was the traditional way in which Baltimore’s grown-ups handled the issue of race. Even the Quaker abolitionists toned down their expressed principles because they had to get along with proslavery business colleagues in a border town. The Quakers joined other emancipationists to form the Maryland Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1789. But the society had disbanded by 1800, and Baltimore abolitionists’ attempts to revive it in 1807 failed when some of the town’s most prominent Quakers declined to take part. But in 1816, the abolitionists regrouped and formed a Protection Society. Its purpose was not to free the slaves, but to prevent free black people from falling into the hands of slavers. Its members might continue in private to hold to abolitionist principles, but in public at least they adjusted their aims to accommodate the sensibilities of slaveholders. The complexities of life in a border town only begin to explain why white Baltimoreans tend to tiptoe around the race issue. In his study of race relations in post-Civil War Louisville, for example, historian George C. Wright found little reluctance to talk about race. The city’s ex-Confederate patricians did not hesitate to instruct their ex-slaves about the black place in local society and the kind of conduct needed for black Louisvillians to “succeed.” When a black resident tried to cross the boundaries set by whites, things could get nasty or even violent. But Louisville generally avoided the harshness of race relations further south. It practiced “polite racism.” Baltimore’s racism is not so much polite as passive-aggressive. If whites keep quiet about race, they provide fewer occasions for blacks to talk about it, at least in public. But some of the impediments that deter Baltimore’s African Americans from making a public issue of race probably have little to do with white people.

nineteenth Century Black Capital From 1810 to the Civil War, Baltimore was home to the largest concentration of free black people in the United States. In 1860, before Lincoln had freed a single slave, more than ninety percent of the city’s black population was free. Free black people achieved a critical mass in Baltimore at such an early date that they enjoyed a long head start over black communities elsewhere in which to construct their own collective life. Blacks had their own churches, private schools, social clubs, charitable institutions, and fraternal organizations, and eventually they would have their own labor unions, banks, business firms, and newspapers. The scale and depth of black civic community was a distinct asset in some respects. Black organizations, for example, were the principal source of help for the destitute ex-slaves and the sick and wounded black veterans who poured into the city after the Civil War. But the black community’s organizational density could also be a liability. Organization meant division. The city’s African Americans belonged to different churches, different fraternal organizations, and different political coalitions. In such a well-organized black community, whose members were divided by religious denomination, policy preferences, and political interest, it was not clear whether anyone could claim to speak for the race as a whole. Black Baltimore’s organizational complexity gave it many constitu-

encies and lots of leaders. Unless they achieved unity, it would be difficult to raise the issue of race in a coherent way. Whites, of course, could have solved that problem. A concerted white campaign of public racism might have unified blacks. In Baltimore, however, whites consistently tried to sidestep frank and public discussion of racial divisions. Instead of responding to white Baltimore, black Baltimore has often responded to racial provocations beyond the city limits—the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, a lynching on the Eastern Shore in 1935, the state legislature’s attempts to suppress the black vote in the early twentieth century, or the recent statewide election campaigns for governor and U.S. Senate. If Baltimore’s African Americans had arrived in a giant wave of migrants, as they did in many northern cities in the twentieth century, uprooted from home communities and disconnected from one another, they would have had only their race in common. Appeals to race would have been the most promising means to mobilize them as voters. But the wellestablished and many-stranded connections that tied black Baltimoreans together through churches, fraternal groups, labor organizations, and social clubs allowed their leaders to call them to the polls on the basis of direct or indirect acquaintance, not color. This made it possible for black politicians to form alliances with white politicians, deliver black votes to white candidates, and get government patronage in return. The most notable beneficiary of such arrangements was Jack Pollack, the white political boss who continued to elect white candidates from his district long after it had an African-American majority. Political alliances with whites made it even more difficult for black politicians to present a united front. In 1971, for example, black candidates would make their first bid for the mayor’s office, following the election of the city’s first black judge, Joseph C. Howard, in 1968. Black Baltimore’s turn seemed within reach, especially after the incumbent mayor, Thomas D’Alesandro III, announced that he would not seek reelection. But the city’s African-American activists were unable to unify behind a single candidate. They divided between George Russell, the city solicitor, and Clarence Mitchell III, a state senator and son of the NAACP’s Washington lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell Jr., nephew of Congressman Parren Mitchell, son and grandson of revered leaders of the city’s NAACP branch. Russell had significant white support. Mitchell had his own political organization and dynastic resources. The two candidates divided the black vote, giving the Democratic nomination and the mayoralty to William Donald Schaefer, who would continue in office until 1987. If Baltimore had been better able to make a political issue of race and segregation, different people would have been winning its elections, and different people would have been running the city for the last thirty-five years. Would they have made it a different kind of place? Maybe not. Today the cities where people screamed at one another about race seem no better off than we are when it comes to segregation, discrimination, and poverty—and no worse off. But I sometimes wonder whether personal relationships between black people and white people are more guarded in Baltimore than in those other cities. And now that high-rise public housing is gone and mixed-income developments are appearing and succeeding, now that couples and singles are moving into the city from the suburbs and out of town, now that new experimental and charter schools are raising test scores (however slowly), now that both major parties are competing for the black vote, is it possible that we may get a second shot at racial integration? A long shot, perhaps, but one that will not materialize at all unless Baltimore is willing to recognize that patterns of segregation and inequality are collective problems and will not give way to private, “quiet” solutions. We may even be better prepared than other cities to take advantage of our new opportunities. We haven’t really screamed at one another yet. Maybe we can discuss this without shouting. ■ —Matthew A. Crenson teaches political science at Johns Hopkins University and is the coauthor, with Benjamin Ginsberg, of the forthcoming book Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Located In Historic Federal Hill 46 East Cross St. Baltimore, MD 21230 410-625-2424 Demetrius Nickens

The

Nickens Group, Inc. Home Ownership is within reach

Mortgage Consultant Phone: 410.962.1055 Fax: 443.628.9154

.. .. .. .

specializing in:

home equity lines of credit refinancing 125% over equity loans first time home buyers zero credit score programs bad credit / bankruptcy closing in less than 14 days

2123 Maryland Ave., Suite 301, Baltimore, MD. 212118 mica cs urbanite 8/26/06

8/21/06

8:53 AM

www.premiermtgbalt.com

A Unique Boutique Filled to the Brim with Beautiful Handcrafted Jewelry VOTED BALTIMORE’S BEST “FUNKY JEWELRY”

•Specializing in Bridal Party Jewelry & Tiaras •Featuring an extensive line of VOTIVO candles, soaps & other amazing personal & home items • ARTWORK by Local Artists: Crystal Moll Prints Kelly Ames Hand Painted Glassware, Jennifer Hubbard Portraits

Page 1

Connect with your inner artist keep ahead of your ever-changing world

At MICA, one of the country’s leading colleges of art and design, the Division of Continuing Studies offers a wide array of courses, workshops, and certificate programs that nurture creativity and encourage personal exploration. Fine arts programs inspire adults to develop their artistic abilities and bring fresh ideas to life, from painting and drawing to jewelry-making and ceramics. Professional development programs keep design professionals at the forefront of industry trends in graphic design, illustration, new media, and more. The Certificate in Creative Entrepreneurship, partnering with University of Baltimore, provides business tools for arts-based entrepreneurs. Contemplate…Create!, a collaboration with The Walters Art Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art, offers access to the experts with guided museum tours and studio time with MICA instructors.

urbanite november 06

View a full course listing at www.mica.edu Call 410.225.2219 to request a catalog

MICA

Maryland Institute College of Art

Division of Continuing Studies

Where life is a work in progress

Alone at the Table continued from page 65

one white, the other black—and the discomfort agitated me, forcing me to reexamine my place. I had desired upper-class status for so much of my life, but I had been chasing the wrong thing. It is ironic that I simultaneously lost and discovered myself in the very same place. I returned home and finally took notice of the atrocities facing my peers. For eighteen years I had blinders on, ignoring the harsh realities that afflicted many of my childhood schoolmates and their families, as I was only concerned with personal accomplishment. How I could have ignored such devastation for so long, I’m not sure, though I suspect it is a peculiar disease that blinds a great number of us. I used to be angry with the young black “thugs”—the very same thugs that attacked me on my way home from school years ago. Why me? I’d ask, as if I didn’t know the answer. Here I was, dressed in khakis and a buttondown shirt, easy pickings for derelict young black boys on their way to a life of crime and despair. And I hated them. I hated them for supposedly looking like me—the popular joke among white people is that all black men look the same—and for acting so very degenerate. I didn’t much care that these boys were likely fatherless sons, the products of broken homes, ravaged neighborhoods, and dilapidated schools. I had considered all these things, but it meant nothing to me: I just wanted them to stop making me look bad, so that I was no longer feared or despised or thought inferior, and I vowed never to be like “them.” I was tired of them bringing me down. What explains this period of black self-loathing? Psychological, sociological, and anecdotal explanations come up short, and I can’t claim to know the answer. I do know that I was as motivated to succeed by my desire to dispel stereotypes as I was by my caring, supportive parents—my mother, Kim, who would share with me her love of Langston Hughes and try in earnest to convince me to put forth maximum effort in my academic endeavors, and my stepfather, Michael, a man I’ve always known as Dad and who continues to sacrifice his body, laboring intensely to provide for his family.

% 75 1. EE! F

In retrospect, I had a “privileged” upbringing. I come from a workingclass, two-parent home. Both of my parents were employed—each often carried a second job—and I never went without, which is much more than can be said of many kids growing up in Baltimore: 22 percent of kids living in Baltimore are without either parent in the workforce; 66 percent reside in single-parent homes; and 35 percent live in poverty. Each of these figures is drastically higher than the national average. Observing my parents’ current efforts to maximize the potential of my baby sisters—twins who have just entered the often tumultuous middle school years—brings forth childhood memories, like the many times my mother gently admonished me for my indolent study habits, or her many words of encouragement; while my parents were always proud of my accomplishments, they knew that I wasn’t giving it quite my all. And so my heart now aches each moment I contemplate the plight of my peers. Those discontented, disconnected black boys grow to be unemployed or underemployed, undereducated and incarcerated black men. They became black boy statistics. I cringe each time I recognize a name from a local news broadcast—it’s a boy I knew from childhood; he’s been shot or he’s shot someone. Even many of the so-called smart black boys have had their lives derailed by turns at crime or drug use or adolescent fatherhood. Even I, the golden black boy, the one people expected so much of, the one who expected so much of himself, had his life derailed momentarily. My first foray into college life was a disaster. But now that I’m overachieving again, high achievement no longer satisfies me. I don’t know if I can ever be satisfied by personal accomplishment now that the blinders have been removed. No matter how many plaudits I receive or articles I publish, or how much pride my family members feel because of me, none of it can overshadow the fact that so many black boys and young black men are unable to join me. It gets burdensome sitting alone at the table. ■

Mona Stout

personal real estate services

Are you ready to buy or sell a home? Look no further.

.. .

Personal quality service Selling & buying homes Free market analysis

Platinum Mona Stout 7826 Wise Avenue Baltimore, MD 21222 Office Cell Fax Email

410-285-HOME (4663) ext:302 443-904-8452 410-285-5533 rstout@hsplatinum.com

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

BilligAttenUrb2

9/7/06

12:39 PM

Page 1

Irish Charities

we look great from every angle

of Maryland presents Sometimes,The More Attention A Property Needs The More Attention It Gets. At our auctions, fixer-uppers bring bidders out of the woodwork. Your less-than-perfect real estate is sure to benefit from our vast audience of do-it-yourself buyers. Which is just one more reason to come to the people who've been creating good relationships and great auctions for more than 85 years. With a customized program of service that includes everything from marketing to cleaning and preparing a property for auction, we take good care of you. Because like your property -- the more attention you need, the more attention you get.

Irish Festival

baltimore, Maryland November 10-12, 2006

16 East Fayette St., Baltimore, MD 21202 Phone: (410) 752-8440 Visit our website: www.ajbillig.com Email: info@ajbillig.com

Maryland State Fairgrounds Timonium, Maryland

AmuseUrbanite.pdf

.. ..

-new beauty magazine

9/27/06

nail care massage

6071 falls rd., mt. washington

410.377.2700 salongiovanna.com

4:39:35 PM

To agesys for 0-10 6

Cultural Workshops Irish Story Tellers and Children’s area

Featuring:

voted “Baltimore’s Best Salon” - 2006

hair skin care

NEW location

Traditional Irish Food Irish beer Irish Vendors Dance Troupes Live Music

SALON GIOVANNA

Have a seat...

Your Style- Our Expertise We’ll transform your living spaces from Ordinary to Extraordinary C

of fell’s point award winning toys from around the world

Ronan Kavanagh Barley juice

CMY

Voted Baltimore’s Best Toy Store! Join our mailing list & receive special offers

Interior Design/Space Planning Room Redesign in less than one day Color/Paint Coordinating

www.amusetoys.com

David Munnelly for more info visit

irishfestival.com 88

urbanite november 06

1623 Thames Street Baltimore, MD 21201

410 • 342 • 5000

Furniture and Acessories Custom window and floor treatment

Call for a complimentary in-home consultation

410-628-0037 www.chrysalisredesign.com We accept Visa & Mastercard

Out, Damned Spot! continued from page 67

All of which is worth noting, because in other contexts, Americans enthusiastically confess to a vast range of private thoughts and misbehaviors. In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the idea of an eminently public confession is uniquely American; at the very least, its ties to America date back as far as the first Thanksgiving. By the late 1600s, American Puritans had begun to depart from the English model of written introspection by promoting shared, spoken declarations of sin and temptation. From the point of view of English observers, such a public airing of dirty laundry often seemed distasteful, which is why Thomas de Quincey, in his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, admitted that “nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers, or scars … .” In America, though, it seems to be the very opposite of revolting, hence the emphatic subtitles on The Jerry Springer Show (“I’m in love with my best friend’s husband!”) or the so-called confessional booths central to so many reality shows. Personal confessions stand at the heart of our national tradition, and our public entertainment. It’s no surprise, then, to find them scattered across the Web, where you can send your confession to a self-proclaimed pope through a site called The Pope’s Confessional Booth, or scroll through lists of professions of sexual excess on The Confession Booth, a self-identified “experiment in anonymity.” To a certain extent, of course, online sites simply answer the same old needs. Users seem to seek to ease the burden of a guilty conscience, or to subject their misdeeds to a degree of self-scrutiny. At the same time, however, you could also argue that the emergence of Web confessionals implies a loss of faith in more traditional avenues. Doody is helpful here, as he has argued—before the advent of the Internet, in fact—that each confessor “must create his own audience because he usually feels that no available institution, no system or myth, no class structure, profession, locale, or family quite accommodates his full sense of his individuality.” When clergy and diary fail to satisfy, the Web suggests another possibility.

nd yet, Web confessions are not necessarily like other confessions. It’s one thing to confess in a shadowy aisle or in the back of a pub to a dalliance; it’s surely another to post a permanent reference to that dalliance on a website. Part of the difference lies in the irrevocable overlap of public and published; posted confessions remain public indefinitely, as a private diary entry or an uttered sentence never can. Relatedly, there’s the thrill of publication that seems to motivate so much Web prose: The Web confessor is, by nature, also an author. And, finally, there’s an unimaginably vast potential audience. Whispering a secret to the village priest is a delimited action; posting the secret on the Web means that many millions of readers— including, say, the boyfriend you cheated on—could read it. As a result, part of the allure of the online confession would seem to be exhibitionistic, and in fact several of the sites stress the breadth of the potential audience. Daily Confession, for instance, exhorts users to “tell the whole world what you did (or didn’t do).” The logic, it seems, is simple and exponential in nature. Confessions that are posted in the public sphere of the Internet take courage that more private whispers, however awful in nature, never did. Of course, one could say that the opposite is just as true—that online confessions are revelations that are made to everybody but the one person who might want or need to hear the imparted information. But that has always been an aspect of confessions, which seek a personal rehabilitation without the cost of complete disclosure. And, in this light, an Internet confession can enact a rather impressive expiation. Instead of a quiet, passing absolution, those who post their confessions online often receive an evolving chorus of responses. These can vary considerably, from gentle forgiveness or vocal support to powerful criticisms and catty remarks. But the resulting comments always at least imply the existence of a sort of community. One might be excused, or one might be condemned, but the responses to a post—assuming that they do in fact follow; many confessions are sim-

ply ignored—subtly resituate a confession, so that it is not merely a reference to a specific deed, but also the beginning of a collective rumination. It’s hard not to wonder, though, who these respondents are, and why they choose to spend their time reading confessions. Of the million or so users who visit NotProud each month, for example, the vast majority come to peruse the confessions of others, rather than to do their own confessing. Part of the draw must be simply voyeuristic; reading some of the posted confessions isn’t really that different from peering into the neighbor’s bedroom after dark. But there also seems to be a therapeutic aspect to the process, as even a cursory survey of posted confessions can quickly imply that one’s own sins are tame by comparison. Reading Group Hug post 290556982 about a sudden sexual affair with a cousin has a way of making the package of Twinkies that you ate for breakfast seem rather insignificant. Precisely because many of the online confessions involve such dramatic material, though, it can be easy to wonder about the honesty of the some of the admissions. Scrolling through these sites can be a bit like reading a bunch of John Cheever’s stories in one sitting: Can my neighbors, you wonder, really be so fucked up? Well, maybe—but maybe not. Since most online confessions are clothed in anonymity (and unbound by any meaningful ceremony), there is no real social cost involved in posting them, and so the predictable result is a steady stream of posts that can seem more wishful than regretful. With no weighty deterrent—without the cool gaze of the confessor on the subsequent Sunday—the incentive to stick to the truth is surely lessened. And so one often gets the sense that something other than the nominal subject at hand is actually being explored. It’s not the purported intensity of the boyfriend’s libido, in other words, that is the revelation; rather, it may be the taboo urge to discuss sex in a public arena. Or it may be, one sometimes suspects, the frisson that comes from pretending that one is a college co-ed with a boyfriend, rather than a grown man with a laptop. Murder will out, Chaucer’s prioress tells us, but even imagined murders reveal all sorts of other motivations and compulsions. Perhaps in order to offset these complexities, most of the sites that host online confessions opt for a severe and understated look, with little imagery and few linked options. Instead of eye-popping graphics, they instead present a solid white background, against which the lists of admissions emerge with a startling directness and seeming inevitability. The result is an unmediated and grave simplicity: The sins may have been sloppy in real life, but here they are neatened, arranged in obedient columns, and rendered in a handsome sans-serif font. The content, then, may be desperate, but the surface is coolly pleasant and invariably proper. PostSecret would seem to be the exception that proves the rule. In a sense, it’s not very different from most of the sites, as it employs a similarly minimalist aesthetic. But in this case the restrained look is only a means of offsetting the stunning variety of decorated cards that have trickled into a mailbox in Germantown. Drawings, photographs, collages. Each is different, and each bears a trace of the creative process. The explicit revelations announced by the cards can be very affecting: “My mom doesn’t know how much I love her,” reads one, “because I’m always so mean when she calls.” And the combinations of image and text can also be jarring. But underlying the effect of each of the confessions on PostSecret is a quieter realization: that these cards (many of which are ravishingly beautiful) are not merely off-the-cuff comments, or quickly typed revelations. Instead, they took work. Admittedly, all confessions take some sort of work: the work that leads to the sense that one has failed, or the work that leads to the courage to tell. But the unique tone and the deserved popularity of PostSecret result, I think, from something rather unusual: the visible conjunction of art and life. These cards, like the people who mail them in, are fragile things—the visible result of choices that are perhaps not always true, but that nevertheless demand to be accounted for. And while the cards come to form a permanent record— PostSecret recently published a collection of examples in book form—the makers of the cards, interestingly, remain works in progress. And so while the Internet may be usurping a process that has traditionally involved personal interaction, it is also teaching us, all over again, that raw human contact can be utterly compelling. ■ w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

��

Bring this ad in for 50% off the joining fee or for a FREE workout!

Julie Gochar - Realtor

��

“Unlocking the mysteries of real estate.” Obsidian Realty 2509 Saint Paul Street, Suite 4 Baltimore, Maryland 21218 410.243.7520 / obsidianrealty.com

��

COSMETOLOGY “A Beautiful Career”

.. ..................................... Baltimore Studio of Hair Design

318 N. Howard St., Baltimore, MD 410-539-1935

THE PEOPLE VS.

KING DAVID

Theory & Practical 1500 Hours of Training

Maryland Beauty Academy

152 Chartley Dr., Reisterstown, MD 410-517-0442

Maryland Beauty Academy of Essex

505 Eastern Blvd., Baltimore, MD 410-686-4477

7/17/06 12:27:31 PM

Sunday, December 17 • 10 a.m. - 1 p.m.

Our graduates are working in some of the finest salons in the area. Full-time + Part-time Financial Aid for those who qualify

BALTIMORE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Urbanite ad_2.indd 1

www.baltimorestudio.net

Presiding over the trial: The Honorable Judge Ellen M. Heller Defense Attorney: Nathan Feinstein, Esquire Prosecuting Attorney: Adam Rosenberg, Esquire

ing David is one of Judaism’s great heroes; however, at BHU, he will face a jury for the following charges: adultery and murder. This mock trial will explore King David’s “guilt” or “innocence” as the jurors and spectators grapple with the issues of morality, duty, faith and the responsibility of public leadership. The day will begin with jury registration, followed by text study with BHU faculty members Dr. Barry Gittlen and Dr. Susanna Garfein to prepare the panel for the trial. The jurors will then enter the courtroom for a mock trial with prominent local leaders arguing the case before Judge Ellen Heller. And then YOU, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, shall cast your votes! Schedule: 10:00 a.m 10:30 a.m.

THE NEWLY POLISHED KIRK STIEFF BUILDING SHINES BRIGHT IN BALTIMORE CITY’S HAMPDEN NEIGHBORHOOD FLEXIBLE FLOOR PLANS • UNIQUE DESIGN • EASY ACCESS TO I-83 FOR LEASING INFORMATION CALL (443) 573-4000

DEVELOPED BY

STRUEVER BROS. ECCLES & ROUSE, INC. WWW. SBER.COM

urbanite november 06

11:00 a.m. 12:15 p.m.

Jury registration with breakfast Jury briefing– text study Trial Jury verdict

For more information, call Elaine Eckstein at 410-578-6905 or email eeckstein@bhu.edu Supported by: The Associated

A Second Chance continued from page 79 Tim Allen, 31, (aka FlipperPA Peregrine) is one of Second Life’s most active residents (“Flip” is also affiliated with The Electric Sheep Company). “I was expecting to just check out Second Life for a week, to see how virtual-world technology had improved over a few years,” he says. “Here we are three years later, and I have sold a virtual company and run two Second Life conventions.” Allen says he’s very much the same person whether in-world (as it’s called) or out, though his avatar is a younger version of himself with a look “similar to mine during college,” he says. Then consider Timothy Moenk (aka Lyre Calliope), living in Second Life as the opposite gender. “Unlike many other avatars, Lyre is not a role I play but an idealized version and female extension of myself,” writes Moenk on his blog. “Others like me view their avatar as an extension of themselves and act no differently towards others than they would in physical space. I have also met people who share the identity of a single avatar, and individuals who orchestrate multiple avatars at once as a deliberate exploration of self. Each of these is a valid way in which to express identity in a virtual medium, and each of these is a window into what it is to be human.” Of course, part of the human experience is lost in a virtual world. Avatars are programmed to show the emotions you choose, but you won’t catch an unconscious nose-twitch or an involuntary flushing of the cheeks. A connection is lost, on scales both personal and universal. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote in the April/May issue of Seed magazine that virtual worlds are keeping us from exploring the universe, and perhaps keeping the universe from discovering us. While pondering why extraterrestrial life has not yet found life on Earth, Miller writes, “The aliens … get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtualreality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.” I begin to wonder what the human race could accomplish if it were channeling its brainpower into the natural world instead of virtual ones. It was easy to get lost in Second Life for hours; that’s true. But I barely have time to live my first life, so I won’t be visiting often. Still, I won’t be ignoring Second Life completely, now that I know it’s there. I fell in love with the Internet when it was nothing more than white text on a black screen, and like the original World Wide Web, the 3-D Web and its virtual worlds are infinite. Now, if I could just get my avatar to look less like me and more like Pac-Man. ■ —Angela Davids has written for thirty publications, both local and national. She is Urbanite’s copy editor.

100% unique

the boutiques, restaurants and market at belvedere square— proof there is no such thing as the person who has everything. see for yourself this holiday season. it’s shopping unlike any other place in baltimore. Bratt Décor Cloud 9 Clothing Daedalus Books & Music The Dutch Connection Egyptian Pizza Grand Cru Greg’s Bagels The House Downtown Lynne Brick’s Women’s Health and Fitness Matava Too The Medicine Shoppe Nouveau Contemporary Goods Raw Sugar Ryan’s Daughter Simply Noted

Starbucks Sweet Papaya Taste Techlab Photo Imaging Tuesday Morning Belvedere Square Market * Atwater’s * Bon Bon’s Ice Cream * Ceriello Fine Foods * Earth’s Essence * Ikan Seafood & Sushi * Market Bakery * Neopol Savory Smokery * The Peanut Shoppe * Planet Produce

don’t miss midnight merriment friday, nov. 24th all stores open ’til midnight. live music, champagne shopping, discounts and more.

www.belvederesquare.com Located at the corner of Belvedere Avenue and York Road, adjacent to the Senator Theatre. 410-464-9773

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Dial a Downtown Doctor

(l-r) Drs. Strain, Lynch, Sabundayo and Tagle

Thomas J. Lynch, m.d., Francis X. Strain, m.d., R. Paul Sabundayo, m.d. and Arnel M. Tagle, m.d. All physicians are Board CertiďŹ ed in Internal Medicine. Drs. Lynch, Strain, Sabundayo and Tagle are located in the Professional OďŹ&#x192;ce Building on the campus of Mercy Medical Center at 301 St. Paul Place in the downtown business district. Valet and discount patient parking available.

Insist on the Mercy Seal of Physician Quality

Now accepting new patients - Please call for an appointment

410-659-0808

urbanite november 06

resources

and individuals find ways to use virtual worlds— like Second Life—to achieve business, educational, and marketing goals. Nonresidents of Second Life can find out more about the virtual world’s inhabitants by viewing some of their profiles at slprofiles. com. To keep up on the latest developments in Second Life, see The Second Life Herald (www. secondlifeherald.com), whose tagline is “Always Fairly Unbalanced.” 64 Alone at the Table

81 Recommended Music: Two If By Sea plays on November 18 at The Talking Head Club (203 East Davis Street; 410962-5588; www.talkingheadclub.com). See their website (www.twoifbysea.org) for details. For more information on Wordsmith, go to www.wordsmith music.com. Art: For This Is My Body: The Medieval Missal at The Walters Art Museum (600 North Charles Street; 410547-9000; www.thewalters.org) runs Nov 4, 2006–Jan 28, 2007. Magazine: Heeb magazine (www.heebmagazine. com) is available at Atomic Books (1100 West 36th Street; 410-662-4444; www.atomicbooks.com).

77 A Second Chance

photo by Gail Burton

For further reading about the topics covered in R. Darryl Foxworth’s essay, check out the books Black Males Left Behind edited by Ronald B. Mincy, Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men by Peter Edelman, Harry J. Holzer, and Paul Offner, and Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. The Washington Post’s yearlong “Being a Black Man” series, which explores what it means to be a black man in today’s society, can be found at www.washingtonpost. com/wp-srv/metro/interactives/blackmen/black men.html. A March 2006 New York Times article called “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn” explores the recent statistics about the situation faced by black men (to read the article, go to www. nytimes.com and search for the title).

For more information on chicken tractors, see page 37.

Linden Lab (lindenlab.com) is the creator of Second Life; you can learn more about and join Second Life through its website. The Electric Sheep Company (www.electricsheepcompany.com) helps businesses

Holiday Party...Babalu Grill? Early bookings receive Special Rewards! Now booking Holiday dinner & lunch parties. Holiday Gift Cards Available

Restaurant Row at Market Place || 32 Market Place, Baltimore 410.234.9898 || www.BabaluGrill.com

Complimentary Valet Parking

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

Feed Your Heart

The Center for Italian Studies

Women’s Growth Center is a small, non-profit collective of therapists. We offer individual, couples, family, and group therapy for women and men, empowerment workshops and professional development.

School of Language, Literature, and Culture

urbanite marketplace

Non-credit courses of Italian LANGUAGE (beginner to advanced levels), LITERATURE, CULTURE (Dante, Italian Cities, Films, Italian Cuisine). New: Italian for Children. To receive a brochure call 410-235-0006 www.centerforitalianstudies.it

Women’s Growth Center Since 1973 5209 York Road #B12 410-532-2GROW (2476) By Appointment Only

Courses are offered all year round. In Roland Park area. Free parking.

Bikram Yoga

THE ORIGINAL “HOT YOGA”

Fixed Rates as low as 5.5% Up to $10,000 toward closing

Beginners Welcome in All Classes New Students: $20 for One Week of Classes

purchase, refinance, & renovation loans

VOTED “BEST YOGA STUDIO” By Baltimore Magazine 2003.

Yorktowne Plaza Shopping Center 40 Cranbrook Road in Cockeysville

410-683-YOGA www.bikramyogabaltimore.com

Bookstore Café Coffee Books Food Community For info, times, & reservations call (410) 444-4440 or visit www.redcanoe.bz 4337 Harford Rd. Baltimore, MD 21214

Stuart Epstein

Carrollton Mortgage Services, Inc.

Branch Manager (410) 491-0200 sepstein@carrolltonbank.com

A Subsidiary of Carrollton Bank

Complete Internet Solutions for Home or Business

1st Time Buyer Imperfect Credit Good Credit

Dialup • DSL • Web Hosting Co-location • Voice/Data T-1's Quantum Internet Services, Inc.

2975B Manchester Rd., Manchester, MD 21102

1-888-889-inet www.qis.net

Karen D. Dapp, Mortgage Banker

Atlantic Home Equity 170 Lakefront Drive Hunt Valley, MD 21030 office 888.683.7001 cell 443.604.4740 fax 410.771.0480 email kdapp@mtglender.net 11401.16.2 LisaCio 1/31/06 7:54 AM Page 1 Serving MD, PA, VA, DC, DE

Lisa Ciofani

Please Say You Saw It In The Real Estate Book - Vol. 16, No. 1 - Page 25

ABR, GRI

410-960-4555

“We’re on it” Are you?

Sp ecializin g in Co n t ain er Gard en s & Urb an L an d scap in g

Are you in on the Secret?

Commercial & Residential Design - Installation - Maintenance

RENOVATED HOME - W/CANTON TOUCHES!! HARDWOOD FLRS/MARBLE & CERAMIC IN BATHS/GRANITE COUNTERS/ FRONT PORTCH/NEW WINDOWS/ AC/ FINISHED BSMNT W/WALKOUT STAIR!! DON’T MISS THIS HOME!!

PROPERTY IS A SHELL... ASK ABOUT THE RENOVATION LOAN!

WONDERFUL END OF GROUP W/LARGE BACK LOT & PARKING FOR 3 CARS!! READY FOR YOU TO CALL HOME!

www.baltimoregarden.com

www.buildingbaltimore.com

4007 Falls Road Baltimore, MD 21211 410-366-9001 BEAUTIFUL REHAB!! 2bd/2bth on a great street!! Exposed brick/ Hardwood floors/Detailed lighting & trim/ Deck—Steps from Patterson Park & Canton

TRADITIONAL BRICK FRONT HOME IN CANTON/STEPS FROM THE SQUARE & PATTERSON PARK—MANY DETAILS/ CALL LISA FOR A SHOWING APPT...

CHARMING HOME AT PATTERSON PARK!! MANY UPDATES/ HARDWOOD FLOORS W/OPEN FLOOR PLAN!!

Visit my Website: www.homesdatabase.com/honlisac Register with me to view some of Baltimore’s Best Properties!

Functional Fitness Integrative Therapy is a studio that specializes in providing physical therapy for personal wellness, weight management and management of joint pain.

CUSTOM RENOVATION!

812 S. East Avenue

Physical Therapy. Personal Training. Wellness Coaching. 336 N. Charles Street,Lower Level Baltimore, MD 21201 Phone:410-837-0440 Fax:410-837-3600 Email:sdavid@ffit.net w w w. f f i t . n e t

urbanite november 06

75-76

410-6

In the Heart of Canton! LOOKING OUT FOR YOU!

Call for a private showing!

Lisa F. Ciofani, ABR, GRI “Don’t end your day in a house end it in a home”

410-675-7653 cell 410-960-4555 2212 Boston Street Baltimore, MD 21231

MILL CENTRE A community for creative work. Studios and offices available.

Certified Iyengar & Hatha Yoga Meditation–Workshops–Retreats Nationally Registered Teacher Training

Burgers, Salads, Wraps,

Artists Open House November 18 & 19, 12 - 5 p.m.

Pastries, Soups

Day, Evening & Weekend Classes ✹ First Class free for first time yoga students

The Shops at Kenilworth

3000 Chestnut Avenue Baltimore, MD 21211 410-366-4998 kgelbard@millcentre.com

Towson, MD

12 A West Aylesbury Rd. Timonium, MD 410 308 9950 • syoga.com

410-828-5559

Buy premium quality seafood DIRECT FROM THE MANUFACTURER!

ANTIQUE FRAMES

• Crab Meat • Fish & Shrimp • Crab Cakes • Seafood Soups • Seafood Entrees & Appetizers ... and MORE!

Chocolate cafe & Tea Lounge

FRAMING BALTIMORE WITH ATTENTION TO DETAIL

Fine Swiss Chocolate Premium Estate Loose Tea

Joseph Lehn 222 W. Read Street Baltimore, MD 21201 410-336-6741 fram.art@verizon.net www.jlehnframes.com By Appointment or Chance

Open Monday - Friday 11am – 6pm, Saturday 11am – 4pm Phillips HQ – Locust Point 1215 E. Fort Avenue (443) 263 – 1314

We will customize the perfect gifts & packaging to suit your company’s or your special occasion needs. 62 village square – The Shops at Cross Keys Baltimore, MD 21210 410.532.8500

full circle

Walbrook Mill & Lumber Baltimore City’s most complete building material source. Supplying Baltimore’s builders & remodelers since 1918. Historic millwork, lumber, doors, windows, hardware we have it all. Special orders gladly accepted. Free delivery. WE KNOW RENOVATION.

Framing in Baltimore for over 20 years.

410.528.1868 www.fullcirclephoto.com 33 East 21st Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Walbrook Mill & Lumber Co 2636 W. North Ave 410 462-2200 www.walbrooklumber.com

conservation framing, printing & gallery

Full Circle.indd 4

TEMPS TEMP-TO-PERM PERMANENT FULL-TIME PART-TIME

CUSTOM BUILDERS

Staffing Clerical through Executive

Homes & Home Sites Available In:

TASHA LINTON Mortgage Consultant I will provide a friendly, affordable and simple solution for any home financing needs!

Jacksonville • Mt.Washington Owings Mills • Lake Falls Morrell Park • Violetteville • Fells Point Hampden • Federal Hill Pikesville • Woodberry

Guaranteed the lowest Permanent placement fees.

STAFFING

7/21/06 10:35:41 AM

MBE & WBE Certiﬁed Members of the Better Business Bureau Phone 410-308-9050

410-559-0000

Fax 410-308-9055 www.allproplacement.com jobs@allproplacement.com

info@ashleyhomes.com w w w. a s h l e y h o m e s . c o m

Cell 443.992.0783 Fax 410.771.0480 Toll Free 866-855-0783

tasha@mtglender.net 170 Lakefront Drive Hunt Valley, MD 21030

Small business support Elliot Zulver's

Taylor Rental Party Plus The most complete party rental store in the Baltimore area. Tents, tables, chairs, linens, place settings, grilles, moonbounces and more... With an experienced sales staff, planning your party is a snap. 1 Beaver Court Cockeysville, Maryland 21030 www.PartyPlusRentals.com 410-771-1997

Computer Harbor Small Business and Home User support center

Networking Point of Sale Customer Management Small Business Accounting Repair Data Recovery Virus Removal Training and Web Pages 1123 Light Street Historic Federal Hill Baltimore, MD 21230 (410) 576-1118 g.obrien@computerharbor.com

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

MIM

COBBER’S PUB & CAFE

Unique Gifts! Jo-Ann Aiken, Owner

3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 130 Baltimore, MD 21211 (410) 662-6623 www.madeinmetal.net

Cobber’s is a place where good people can enjoy great food and some cold amber fluid with some friends. 1218 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21201 (410) 727-0713

CITY LIMITS SPORTS BAR HOURS

Sunday - Friday 4 p.m. - 2 a.m. Saturday 11 a.m. - 2 a.m. www.citylimitssportsbar.com

1700 E. Fort Avenue Baltimore, MD 21230 410-244-8084

“fashion with style” MON-WED-FRI TUE THUR SAT

11:00 AM-5:30 PM 11:00 AM-6:00 PM 11:00 AM-7:30 PM 10:00 AM-5:00 PM

4002 Roland Avenue Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone 410-235-4140

Don’t Mess with Tex-Mex! Sample items from our authentic Tex-Mex menu. Enjoy Classic Margaritas, Sangrias and Cerveza! Located at 1003 N. Charles Street in Mt. Vernon 410 752-3333

NEOPOL Baltimore’s ONLY smokery, specializing in smoked seafood and meats, savory cheese pies, gourmet foods, smoked seasoning salts and chef’s supplies. Belvedere Square Marketplace, 529 E. Belvedere Square

Fabrics Furniture Decorative Accessories Art & Design 3555 Chestnut Avenue Baltimore, Maryland 21211 410 662 9090

1026 S. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21230 Phone 410.752.3810 Fax 410.752.0639 ccscorks@aol.com www.corksrestaurant.com

410-433-7700

Kerry Dunnington Private Home Caterer Menu and Recipe Developer Traveling Culinary Demonstrationist Food Columnist Author of This Book Cooks

www.thisbookcooks.com 410-243-3508 napsack8@cs.com

ALL DAY... AND ALL NIGHT Coffee Bar & Pastries Breakfast Brunch & Lunch Dinner Small Plates MARTINIS & FROZEN DRINKS Free Internet

101A 2400 Boston Street Baltimore, MD 410 327 9889

urbanite november 06

Baltimore Hottest Entertainment Complex Hi-Tech Industrial Dancefloor Video Bar Distinguished Pub 1001/1003 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21201 410.752.7133

Water-Front Dining, Open-Air Deck & Plenty of Parking

8 E Preston Street Baltimore, MD 21202 410.244.1020

Come In and Drink with Us!

HOURS Monday - Thrusday: 4 p.m. - 12 a.m. Friday - Saturday: 11:30 a.m. - 2 a.m. Sunday: 11 a.m. - 12 a.m.

www.littlehavanas.com 1325 Key Highway Baltimore, MD 21230 410-837-9903

410-534-BEER www.bartenderbaltimore.com

2218 Boston Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21231

Stebbins Anderson

OWN IT.

THEN MAKE IT YOUR OWN.

The Purchase & Renovate Loan Our Purchase and Renovate program offers ﬁnancing that enables you to immediately turn the house you just bought into the home you always wanted.

We carry a full line of Vera Bradley accessories including lamps, luggage, glassware & stationary Largest selection of Vera Bradley inventory in Baltimore The Shops at Kenilworth . 802 Kenilworth Drive Towson . 410-823-6600

A s e As o n of C e l e b r At io n

150 years o music for the worLd

Join us in celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Peabody Institute! FREE Events in November include:

Built-in savings make improvements more affordable: • More Money

• Single-Close Simplicity

• Lower Monthly Payments • Flexibility • Speed

Contact me today for a complimentary consultation. 1118 Light Street, Suite B, Baltimore, MD 21230 Ofﬁce: 410-244-3383 Fax: 410-962-0491 beth.x.wexler@wellsfargo.com www.wfhm.com/beth-wexler The information is accurate as of date of printing and is subject to change without notice. Wells Fargo Home Mortgage is a division of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. All Rights Reserved.

BETH WEXLER

RENOVATION SPECIALIST HOME MORTGAGE CONSULTANT

friday, november 3, 2006 – 8:00 pm

INSTITUTE

of the johns Hopkins University

ReseRve youR fRee T i c k e T s T o d ay ! Peabody box office 410-659-8100, ext. 2 for a comPlete listing of events, visit www.Peabody.jhu.edu/events

Elegy, by Peabody alumnus, Michael Hersch, opens this diverse program of the Peabody concert orchestra that includes Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 and Stravinsky’ The Firebird Suite. wednesday, november 8, 2006 – 7:30 pm Peabody chamber winds performs works by Clark McAlister, Guy Woolfenden and Louis Spohr.

Knoll | Vitra | Alessi | Moroso | Kartell

november 16, 2006 – 7:30 pm o n l y Free Fall Baltimore is made possible by a grant from Mayor Martin O’Malley and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.

Fun for the festivities ...

Love, loyalty, despair – and above all forgiveness – entangle the young characters in Peabody opera theatre’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

Functional year round

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o r e . c o m

Urbanite seeks an ADVERTISING SALES ASSISTANT/BOOKKEEPER The successful candidate must be organized, detail-oriented, have excellent communication skills, and be able to multi-task, meet deadlines, and work well under pressure. Bookkeeping experience is a must. Experience in Quickbooks and Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint is required. Urbanite is a customer-focused and forwardthinking company that rewards hard work, innovation, and teamwork. EOE.

Parrot Corkscrew

by Alessandro Mendini Send cover letter with salary requirements and resume to: Tracy W. Durkin, Publisher Urbanite 2002 Clipper Park Road, 4th Flr. Baltimore, MD 21211 Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com

No phone calls, please

Its easy to spot this tropical barhand hanging on a glass by his beak when a bottle needs opening. A foil cutter is tucked neatly in its green, blue, or black plumage. Think hostess gift. in historic Mt. Washington Mill next to Whole Foods 1340 Smith Ave | Baltimore MD 21209 410-433-1616 www.homeontheharbor.com

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6

eye to eye

Family Portrait Marc Alain 2006 Lambda print 20 x 24 inches www.marcalainportfolio.com

Could anything be more fun than hometown spirits as seen by a spirited Baltimore-bred artist? Marc Alain’s work has been an integral part of Urbanite’s visual look for almost two years. He has always surprised us and kept us reflecting about the interrelatedness of the written and the visual. More than just illustrations, his work often becomes a visual essay: a complexity of form and meaning. But this? Here is a “photograph,” a warm satire of some of Baltimore’s defining characters. It also is a tribute to “Watersworld,” that crazy, dirty world we Baltimoreans relish and carry deep in our communal psyche.

In composing this multi-layered image, the artist first photographed four figures in a festive environment. He then used two people as models for the faces: John Waters and Divine are “played” by the same person, as are the two kids behind them. The baby played itself. As in the artist’s other works, I find myself looking at the details. What is going on here or, rather, in the artist’s mind? What is this event? That tear? The multiple mustaches? The sparkling ring? Of course! It is a wedding, but oh boy, what a nuptial! And is that the shadow of the film strip on the edge of the picture?  —Alex Castro

AIRBAGS SAVE LIVES. ALL-WHEEL DRIVE SAVES AIRBAGS. IT’S WHAT MAKES A SUBARU, A SUBARU. THE ALL-WHEEL DRIVE 2006

SUBARU B9 TRIBECA LIMITED SALE PRICE

29,299

LEASE PAYMENT

OR $

399

PER MONTH

NHTSA �� HIGHEST GOVERNMENT CRASH TEST RATING*

23 mpg HIGHWAY FULL POWER, LEATHER, MOONROOF, 5 PASSENGER, NAVIGATION Price excludes tax, tags & freight, includes all rebates and incentives. 36 month Subaru lease based on 10,000 miles per year. $399 per month for 36 months, $1999 Down. Does not require a security deposit. Tribeca: EPA fuel economy estimate 22 City/ 23Highway, actual mileage may vary.

Remember All Roads Lead To PENN! THE ALL WHEEL DRIVE SUBARU B9 TRIBECA comes with a 250-HP boxer engine and highest possible NHTSA crash test rating*. It is the progressive SUV that offers dynamic styling & engaging driveability with real-life versatility to perform with the lives of urban active drivers. *Based on NHTSA 40-mph offset frontal crash test, 31-mph side impact test, and 20-mph rear impact test. The ABC’s of Safety: Air bags. Buckle up. Children in backseat.

subaru.com

North Point Blvd. & Kane St., I-95, Exit 59, Eastern Avenue or I-895 Exit 12 Lombard Street

410-633-9000

Toll Free 1-800-736-1296 • www.pennsubaru.com RETAIL SERVICE HOURS: M-F 7 am - 6 pm Sat. 8 am - 3 pm w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m n o v e m b e r 0 6