B A LT I M O R E ’ S
september
F O R
C U R I O U S
2006 issue no. 27
renovation redux
the green approach to the rowhouse rehab
flight club
meet baltimore’s pigeon racers
owning cyberspace
ellen lupton on why net neutrality matters
the marriage mission
the push to get baltimoreans to tie the knot
Urba Urbanite nite
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urbanite september 06
Z Z
Fanta Fanta
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contents
23 what you’re writing 27 corkboard 29 have you heard … edited by marianne amoss
23
33 food: meat and greet mary k. zajac
37 baltimore observed: flight club freeman rogers
43 encounter: a home-going to remember meshelle
46 space: the greenhab elizabeth a. evitts
37
52 taking the long view william j. evitts
58 marriage works. or does it? heather harris
62 by chance or by choice nancy rome
64 fiction: definition christine grillo
71 sustainable city: lego diplomacy
52
nicky penttila
75 out there: internet under threat ellen lupton
79 in review 85 what i’m reading susan mccallum-smith
93 resources 98 eye to eye
58
cover note: Marc Alain created this month’s cover, a collage inspired by the issue’s theme.
© 2005 Campaign For Our Children, Inc.
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Urbanite Issue 27 September 2006
Beautiful, Affordable Hawaii
A New Voice For Educational Choice
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Learn about joining a school community that offers:
General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com
• A family and community centered environment
Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth A. Evitts Elizabeth@urbanitebaltimore.com
• Project-based curriculum
Guest Editor Stephanie Coontz
• Stimulating enrichment activities 27 N. Lakewood Ave. Baltimore, MD 21224 410.558.1230 tel 410.558.1003 fax www.pppcs.org Hablamos español.
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Executive Editor Heather Harris Heather@urbanitebaltimore.com Assistant 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
Sheraton Maui Resort
Travel & Cruises
Publisher Tracy Ward Durkin Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com
Art Director Alex Castro
The mission of Patterson Park Charter School is to develop well-educated, community-minded children by providing high-quality communitybased education that capitalizes on the diversity of nearby neighborhoods and uses the resources of Patterson Park. In partnership with Imagine Schools.
Production Manager Lisa Macfarlane Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffi c/Production Coordinator Bellee Gossett Bellee@urbanitebaltimore.com Designer Jason Okutake Senior Account Executives Keri Haas Keri@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executives Darrel Butler Darrel@urbanitebaltimore.com Bill Rush Bill@urbanitebaltimore.com Marketing Kathleen Dragovich Kathleen@urbanitebaltimore.com Sales and Marketing Assistant Ally Oshinsky Interns Angela Bain Catrina Cusimano Meghana Kulkarni Briana Lee Saryn Levy Carlye Rosenthal George Teaford Founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offi ces 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. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2006, by 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.
10
urbanite september 06
editor’s note
quotes
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family. —Anthony Brandt
photo by Sam Holden
need one.
This month marks my second anniversary as the full-time editor-in-chief of Urbanite, and looking back, I am amazed with how far we’ve come. When I started, the magazine was in its inaugural year under the direction of new owner and publisher Tracy Ward Durkin and art director Alex Castro. Tracy had purchased the title the year prior from Laurel Harris Durenberger, who had founded and helmed the spirited neighborhood publication for twelve years. At that time, the new version of Urbanite was bimonthly with just thirty-two pages and a distribution of 20,000. There were only a handful of us working out of the tiny offices we rented at the back of a larger office space. It was there that we concepted the look and the content for a new full-color monthly version of the publication. From the very first moment we met to talk about the future and potential of a magazine like Urbanite, I knew that I had stumbled into something special. That September, in the thick of planning for the launch of the new design, we hosted our first booth at the Baltimore Book Festival. I remember thinking: Give me a sign. Is this thing going to fly? I walked out of my Mount Vernon apartment into a torrential downpour, the remnants of Hurricane Ivan. Tracy stood, soaking wet, under our tented booth, which was losing the battle with the heavy wind. Magazines were floating away down the street. Not the sign I wanted. But just as the thought entered my head, my cell phone rang and Carl Dennis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who I had ventured to ask to be a part of the first monthly issue, told me a poem was in the mail. To this day I continue to be amazed by the talented local and national writers and artists who collaborate with us each month. In January 2005, that first monthly issue hit the streets. We held our breath. (We may have even crossed our fingers.) But in our hearts, we all believed that this was something that readers would love: a smart magazine with a balance of reportage and literary writing; a magazine that used Baltimore as the lab for studying the world. And all of it packaged in the eye-catching design of Alex Castro. It caught on. Over the subsequent year, our small Urbanite family started to grow along with the number of pages in our book. We were soon bursting at the seams of our rented offices (I dubbed it the Urbanite Clown Car) and we moved into our own space. Now, two years later, we are one hundred pages with 60,000 issues distributed throughout Maryland each month and a regional readership well over 100,000. In addition to the more than 550 locations that carry the magazine, we also now have new red and yellow street boxes scattered around town. The escalating success of this magazine comes from the creativity, hard work, and time of a very dedicated staff and core of talented freelance contributors. But it also comes from you. You are as much a part of this Urbanite family as any one of us, and your input makes this publication special. You have made our What You’re Writing department, which publishes personal essays from readers, one of the most popular sections of the magazine. And with our newly designed website, which launched last month, you can also contribute to the ongoing dialogue about Baltimore through our Urbanite Cafe (www.urbanite baltimore.com). This month, for the third year in a row, we will be hosting a booth at the Baltimore Book Festival (Sept. 29–Oct. 1). We hope you’ll come out and say hello. We’ll be there rain or shine. —Elizabeth A. Evitts
coming next month:
—Jane Howard, American author
An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship. —Spanish proverb
Happiness is having a large,
loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
—George Burns, American comedian and actor
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness. —Nancy Freeman-Mitford, British novelist and biographer
Friends are God’s apology for relations. —Hugh Kingsmill, British writer and journalist
Families are about love overcoming emotional torture. —Matt Groening, American cartoonist and creator of The Simpsons
Gues Editor Guest Matthew Crenson: Democracy Derailed: Democr Why are we so disconnected from our government?
She got her good looks from her father. He’s a plastic surgeon. —Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx, American comedian
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contributors
behind this issue
courtesy of Nancy Rome
photo by Jackie Hicks
photo by Angela Bain
Catrina Cusimano Catrina Cusimano is one of two summer editorial interns at Urbanite. She graduated in May 2006 from Towson University with bachelor of science degrees in both English and mass communication. Cusimano is interested in magazine journalism and writing creative nonfiction. Her passion is film, especially old cinema, and her favorite directors are David Lynch and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Cusimano lives in Middle River with her pets: a snake and a frog. She wrote about the return visit to Baltimore of Aqeela Sherrills, a past Urbanite guest editor, for Update, and about T-shirt company Tea and Crumpets for Have You Heard.
Heather Harris Heather Harris, a Columbia native, joined the Urbanite editorial team as the executive editor in January. She earned a bachelor of science in psychology and a bachelor of arts in sociology from Geneva College in Pennsylvania, and worked for ten years as a social worker before returning to school and earning an MFA in nonfiction writing from Goucher College. “All the stories that interest me are about power dynamics,” says Harris. “My research for this month’s article on the ‘Marriage Works’ media campaign fascinated me for that reason.” Harris lives in Fells Point with her husband and two cats.
Meshelle Meshelle is a stand-up comedian, actor, humorist, mental health advocate, and writer. She earned a bachelor of science degree in psychology from Bowie State University and is currently on a leave-ofabsence as a doctoral student in the College of Education’s school psychology program at Temple University. Meshelle has appeared on Black Entertainment Television’s Comicview and Teen Summit, and in Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The 90-Year Journey of the NAACP, a syndicated special that aired on NBC and CBS. She is also a regular contributor to Heart and Soul magazine and The Flywire magazine, and appears on ABC 2’s weekly Saturday night entertainment show, Baltimore 2 Night, hosted by Steve Rouse. Meshelle lives in Bolton Hill with her husband, two daughters, and dog. She wrote about her experience of the traditional African-American home-going ceremony for Encounter.
Nancy Rome Documentary filmmaker Nancy Rome was born in Baltimore and spent many summers in Wyoming working as a wrangler. She earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature from Middlebury College in Vermont, and began a doctorate in English Literature at Oxford. Her first foray into journalism was as an intern at The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and since then she has collaborated on many documentaries covering a wide range of topics from liberal arts education at the turn of the twentyfirst century to a post-9/11 look at the extremes of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. She also worked on a film for Channel Four (London) about the sexual abuse crisis and cover-up in the Catholic Church. Her current project is a documentary called Without Children: By Chance or By Choice and a book on the same subject; her feature article addresses this issue.
A professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Stephanie Coontz is the go-to expert on family change. The award-winning author has penned five books on the subject, including her 2005 release Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which earned a nod as a Washington Post notable book. She has appeared on programs from Oprah Winfrey to Crossfire, and is the marriage consultant to Ladies Home Journal. Coontz serves as director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. For a full biography, visit www.stephaniecoontz.com.
O
photo by Roy Rodgers
photo by Angela Bain
with guest editor stephanie coontz
ne hundred fifty years ago, anyone purchasing a magazine called Urbanite that included articles on the changing family would have known exactly what to expect. There would certainly be a story about a rural girl who rejected the suitor her family approved and ran off with a city slicker. Another story might trace the woes of parents left broken-hearted and impoverished when their children refused to help out in the family business and fled to the city to pursue their own selfish goals. Readers could shiver at tales of the anarchy resulting from the breakdown of traditional patriarchal families and social hierarchies, or weep at the tragedies that ensued when men and women left the protected small towns where everyone kept a watchful eye on their neighbors’ behavior. During the mid-nineteenth century, the rise of impersonal labor markets and an emerging urban culture challenged old ways of organizing social life, personal morality, and age and gender relations. These changes brought new problems for many Americans, and by the end of the nineteenth century, growing fears of social breakdown led to campaigns to turn back the clock. A “Social Purity” movement tried to restrain the new independence of youth by establishing reformatories for teens who engaged in sex or frequented pool halls. Defenders of the traditional family mounted a last-ditch effort against woman suffrage, insisting that women be kept at home. Some reformers even removed impoverished urban children from their parents and sent them to work (for free) on rural farms. Of course, these campaigns were doomed. The underpinnings of the old family order were irrevocably eroded. Also, many of the practices that had sustained the old social order had permitted terrible abuses, and no one knew how to revive the desirable parts without resurrecting the injustices. Gradually, new values, habits, and institutions did emerge. Intense commitments to people’s “own” nuclear families supplanted older obligations to community and distant kin. The child-centered marriage became central, culminating in the 1950s Leave it to Beaver family model. In the past three decades, however, we have experienced another transformation of family systems, as the pattern of early, lifelong marriage and male-breadwinner families has eroded. This month’s feature articles address the challenge of figuring out what family values and behaviors we can or should retain and what ones must change in order to conform to new realities. Unfortunately, many of our social institutions, political programs, and even our emotional expectations of interpersonal relationships are out of sync with those realities. Most employment routines, family policies, and even school schedules in America are still organized on the outmoded assumption that every family has someone available full-time to take care of home life while someone else earns the money. But as William Evitts argues in his article, the male breadwinner of the 1950s was a short-lived historical aberration. Similarly, our model for relationships is based on the centrality of child-rearing, even though that activity occupies a much smaller proportion of people’s lives than ever before in human history. The extension of the life span means that many people will spend more time caring for aging parents than raising children. Yet, as Nancy Rome points out in her article, we treat childless individuals as though they don’t have families, and we are ambivalent about women who are not mothers. Finally, we have few ways of helping people build responsible relationships outside marriage. As Heather Harris reports, many people fear that unless we get everyone married we will be forever doomed to high rates of poverty and child neglect. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage, and alternatives to marriage are not going to disappear. Those who focus all their attention on promoting marriage may end up neglecting the social supports equally needed by people who are single, divorced, or cohabiting. We should certainly do whatever we can to sustain and improve marriage and parenting. But like our predecessors 150 years ago, we need to think creatively about where we can shore up the older marriage system and where we must develop new ways to both meet the needs and reward the contributions of adults and children who live outside the idealized married-couple-with-children family model.
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urbanite september 06
what you’re saying
july 2006
B A L T I M O R E
issue no. 25
Your Space
The New Urban Economy
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; they may be edited for length and clarity.
Baltimore’s Biotech Revolution
Say Bye-Bye to BGE
Your home’s energy alternative
Will Your Vote Count? The Diebold debate
The Golden Days of Little League Fifty years in South Baltimore
Waste Away
An Even-Better Baltimore
Thanks for the interesting article on the idea of zero waste (“Waste Not,” June). In addition to the writer’s suggestions on how to minimize one’s waste output, may I add composting? My wife and I have been surprised by how little garbage we are sending away since we began composting just this spring. Although we live in the city, it has been easier than we anticipated and we have not encountered pests or rodents.
Thank you for drawing attention in the June issue to Baltimore City’s ongoing efforts to become a greener, more sustainable city (“Linking the Green”). The past has taught us that we cannot afford to neglect the environmental movement and banish it to the fringes of our politics and policies. Instead, the effects of our decisions on the local ecosystem must be considered in our city’s planning, building, and development practices to avoid future public health crises and wasteful public spending. From our city’s policies on parks to energy conservation to waste management, a vital and necessary process of change is underway to make Baltimore the city of tomorrow today. Indeed, just recently, Baltimore City was named the eleventhmost sustainable U.S. city by SustainLane’s 2006 U.S. city rankings, a nationwide study that measured the fifty largest cities in America on essential quality-oflife and economic factors that affect personal sustainability (www.sustainlane.com/article/845). The survey touted Baltimore as “A port town reinventing itself ... quietly becoming one of the nation’s leaders in sustainability.” Of course, there is a lot more the city can do to become more sustainable. One is to implement the recommendations outlined in the Green Building Task Force’s April 2006 report, including the creation of an Office of Sustainability to coordinate, manage, and enhance the city’s green building, recycling, and development programs and initiatives.
—Michael and Gianene Plakosh are Baltimore natives who both work in the restaurant industry.
Making Time for Play I am writing in regards to the June article “All Work and No Play” by Nicky Penttila. We live in a society that does not practice incorporating play and leisure. Play and leisure activities have many benefits for individuals, such as relaxation, enjoyment, and contentment. These benefits can result in positive outcomes for children and adults, and can allow them to gain control of their lives. By having that control, people can achieve psychological well-being and life satisfaction. —Kimberly Pretlow is a graduate student in occupational therapy at Towson University. She lives in Baltimore.
Another is to ban harmful products such as Styrofoam, which, as anyone here can acknowledge, litter the streets and waterways of our great city. On June 5, 2006, I introduced Bill 06-0449, “Food Establishments—Polystyrene Products,” which would ban the use of Styrofoam in food service establishments. Contrary to media reports, environmental pioneers have created alternatives that are eco-friendly from their very beginnings, utilizing organic materials to perform the same functions as Styrofoam products. A third thing the city can do to become a more sustainable city is to make a commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012, and therefore help Baltimore City comply with the Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush administration has failed to commit to. The city should also re-think the way it manages its recycling program both for residents and commercial entities, especially restaurants and bars. Just as citizens need to be inspired by government leaders, public officials need to be inspired by citizen groups promoting innovative solutions to improve people’s lives. This city’s not quite a “sustainable” city just yet, but it’s well on its way. I applaud your efforts to help us establish a collective commitment to sustainable living in Baltimore City. —Jim Kraft is a Baltimore City councilman in the First District.
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urbanite september 06
what you’re saying Urbanite’s editorial team recently visited the BelairEdison neighborhood and met with community members. Out of that meeting came this letter from a Belair-Edison resident.
What I Like about Belair-Edison I like that as busy as Belair Road is during the day, it’s quiet and peaceful at night. I like the sweet songs the birds sing when I wake up in the morning and a fantastic view of the park to go along with them. I like the colorful bloom of azalea bushes all over Belair-Edison in early spring. I like the beautiful butterflies that flutter around me when I tend my garden. I like that I live within five minutes of interstates 895 and 95 and fifteen minutes from downtown and several malls. I also like that if the Beltway or tunnels are backed up, I can drive through the city to get to work. I like the diversity of the neighborhood and options to choose among a variety of restaurants,
photo by Matthew Mitchell
update
supermarkets, churches, schools, and nearby farmers’ markets. I like that we have the Belair-Edison Community Association, Belair-Edison Neighborhoods, Inc. (BENI), and the Belair-Edison Healthy Community Coalition, and that all three organizations together and independently work for the good of the neighborhood. I like that my neighbors are friendly and considerate and that we look out for each other. I like that whether I’m tending my garden, walking through the neighborhood, or standing at the bus stop, most people will speak to me or have a kind word to say. I like why I own two houses in Belair-Edison. The first house is a duplex that I purchased with my mother because she could no longer afford to live on her own. When I was ready to purchase a second home, I wanted one that would provide me with the same quality as the first, but would allow me to still help her financially. I looked in other Baltimore City, Catonsville, and Woodlawn neighborhoods but couldn’t find the quality, affordability, and all the aforementioned amenities that I found in my BelairEdison home. The folks at BENI saw my need and
found me an unbelievably lovely second home. Mom and I rent out the upstairs apartment of the first home, which helps pay her living expenses. And I’m only a block away, where I can still look out for her. I like that by becoming a volunteer in BelairEdison I was opened to new opportunities of learning to write grants, losing my fear of speaking in public, learning how to use Microsoft Office, and brainstorming ideas that helped make a difference in my community. That’s what I like about Belair-Edison. —Anditria Dailey works as a mainframe systems programmer for the Social Security Administration.
Correction In the August Behind This Issue, we stated that guest editor Stephen A. Goldsmith works with the Enterprise Foundation. The foundation changed its name in January 2006 to Enterprise Community Partners, Inc.
by catrina cusimano
In June, Aqeela Sherrills, guest editor of Urbanite’s October 2005 “Health and the City” issue, returned to Baltimore. He came at the request of the Urban Leadership Institute and Johns Hopkins University to participate in a community forum addressing drug-related gang violence in the city. “I read an article about him and thought he would be a perfect fit,” says LaMarr Darnell Shields, CEO of the Urban Leadership Institute. “Aqeela set the stage for the discussion.” During his stay, Sherrills spoke on 92Q FM and Channel 2 news, and addressed an audience at a juvenile detention facility. Sherrills’ message emphasizes forgiveness and compassion as essential tactics in confronting violence. “Today there is a revolt against civil society,” says Sherrills. “People need amnesty from violence, the violence that is perpetrated against them and the violence that they in turn perpetrate.” This philosophy had been paramount at the Community Self-Determination Institute (CSDI), an organization Sherrills and his brother founded
in their crusade against violence in Watts, the neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles where they grew up. CSDI partnered with, and was funded through, the Los Angeles County Probation Department, as well as the state of California. In recent months, however, CSDI has ceased operations. “Law enforcement justifies their budget based upon the amount of violence in the community,” Sherrills says. “They consistently undermined communitybased strategy.” Sherrills’ current projects include work with Watts Records and Asylum Entertainment for Black Entertainment Television. Sherrills is also an acting consultant for a documentary film on the personal effects of gangs, which is being directed by Lords of Dogtown writer Stacy Peralta. Sherrills’ long-term attention is on a town in South America. In collaboration with a few associates, Sherrills is seeking to establish a sustainable community in the village of Diogo de Bahia, Brazil, where he is currently working with the area youth. Sherrills plans to eventually relocate to Diogo de Bahia.
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what you’re writing
Topic
Deadline
Publication
Grace City Life Saturday Night What You Believe But Can’t Prove Second Chance
Sept 25, 2006 Oct 13, 2006 Nov 10, 2006 Dec 15, 2006 Jan 19, 2007
Dec 2006 Jan 2007 Feb 2007 Mar 2007 Apr 2007
Fragments of Rumi #5 by Saralyn Rosenfield
“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. 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.
C O M M I T M E NT VVhen I met
Cheryl in the capital, I was already covered with a layer of red dust that slowly mingled with sweat as the sun came into its full dry-season force. We hadn’t seen each other in a few weeks, and despite the cramped quarters in the sagging vehicle, we spent much of the time playing a little game we liked to call “Normalcy Check.” We had both been in Cameroon longer than a year and a half. Some things that had become “normal” to us weren’t so “normal” to most Americans. A coffin sitting by the side of the road, public officials blatantly taking bribes, a nearby cholera outbreak, our students bringing machetes to school to do manual labor—these things are now “normal.” “You are going to miss this crazy place,” said Cheryl. “I think I only really enjoy it fifty percent of the time,” I replied. Yet for every day that I long for anonymity, I am also grateful and flattered by the undeserved attention and affection poured out to me by Cameroonians. While I hate being called la blanche, I love knowing those few words in the native tongue, which cause the person I am bargaining with to pause and realize I am not a tourist and that they can’t play the standard “white man” tricks on me. It’s true that my village can rarely be located on a map (when I have found it, it is always misspelled or misplaced). It’s true that a shower more often than
not means a cold bucket of water. It’s true that I’ve sobbed at wakes for children and grandparents alike, and that everything of any value has been stolen from me at one point or another. I complain. I cry. I dream about lattes and phad thai and walking down a street without being hissed at. Yet I stay. I stay because I love the blaring African music and people dancing in the streets. I stay because I made a commitment to my students, my friends, and my neighbors. I stay because I am still learning. I stay because as much as I miss home, I will miss here more. I stay because I need to finish. Enjoying it fifty percent of the time isn’t much, but it’s enough. —Felice Cleveland spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in rural Cameroon.
I VVas almost 17. After mental
journeys into the world of pre-calculus or Spanish, my muscles yearned for more. I raced on my bike down the main street, dipping in and out of pools of streetlight and into the dark interior of the neighborhood where dogs and crickets called. The grid of my square-shaped neighborhood eventually became too rigid and I’d break free into the rainy suburban night. A cold stripe of mud continually renewed itself on the back of my white shirt.
I wove in and around the dismal parking lots of strip malls to the soft waves of traffic noise, often failing to see approaching cars in the dark until their headlights shone like wild eyes in front of me. I joined a gym. The grainy photo on my membership card flashed briefly on the computer screen when I swiped in. Two lopsided pigtails bordering a round, shiny face served as a reminder of my old life of inactivity and sugar addiction. Eventually softness gave way to muscle and roundness to angles. A jawbone emerged, cheekbones, a hint of dimples. Gym mirrors reflected, as the months passed, a victory. Baggy white T-shirts transformed into clothes that stretched, molded, fit. The absence of sugar in my diet made natural foods sweeter. Saying no to ice cream, candy, and even the customary carrot cake on my seventeenth birthday gave me a sense of empowerment and, most of all, control. I had been humiliated in the past when my mother had scooped out seconds for my eager and skinny brother and flatly denied them to me because I “didn’t need it.” Now I scorned her cooking; her rich lasagnas and whole-milk hot chocolate were not part of “the plan.” Eventually “the plan” backfired. A classmate, who had been teasing me for weeks, waved a sandwich bag of soft chocolate-chip cookies under my nose. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I stuffed each cookie into my mouth, washing away all the w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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commitment, the restraint, and most of all, the intense hunger. —Addoley Dzegede grew up in suburban South Florida. Since moving to Baltimore in 2001, she vows never to return to the suburban way of life.
I’m on the bus heading home,
passing through neighborhoods lined with laundromats and buildings boarded up with graffitied plywood. Halfway through the ride, I become annoyed by a baby’s constant whining. I’m about to shoot him a dirty look when I realize he has no legs and is dangling helplessly between the bony knees of his drugged-up mother, whose lolling head exposes the whites of her rolled-back eyeballs. The baby’s two little nubs kick frantically as he slowly slips from his mother’s lap. Other passengers nearby just shrug their shoulders. I pull the yellow cable and get up to leave. The bus screeches to a halt. As I pass, I instinctively set the baby straight on his mother’s lap so he won’t fall. She wakes up, sees me hovering over her, and spits out, “Whatchya lookin’ at?” “Ain’t nobody looking at you, crazy lady. Go back to sleep so you can make that run tonight.” “Mindya damn business!” Classmates always respond the same way to details about my daily commute to college—an hour or so each way from south Baltimore courtesy of the MTA: “Wow, that’s gotta suck.” “It’s really not that bad,” I reply. “And I don’t mind saving five thousand dollars a year, either.” “But if you had the money, wouldn’t you live on campus? I mean, don’t you mind having to ride the bus everyday?” “Not really.” I decide not to bother with an explanation. To be honest, saving money is just one of the reasons I choose to commute, the opportunity to ride the bus is the other. I love where I live. I love the ride home— passing by the cemetery, the sub shop, the playground, and those trash cans with the BELIEVE stickers on them. Beneath Baltimore’s rough urban exterior lie the politeness and simplicity of an old southern town. It’s hard to hate a stumbling drunk man, annoying the heck out of you with his rancid odor, who says, “Pardon me” when he steps on the back of your shoes. I plan on staying here a little while longer, even if it takes me an hour to get to school in the morning, and an hour to get back. Even if some of the things I see are heartbreaking. Even if it means riding the bus. —Soraya Abuelhiga is a writing and photography major at Loyola College in Maryland.
I first saVV
Miss K. in the spring of my junior year of high school. We met in the main branch of the Pack Library in Asheville, North Carolina. I was overwhelmed by her depth, intimidated by her complex nature, and mystified by her beauty. She was heavy, something I’d always found appealing, if daunting. Our affair, which spanned over a decade, lasted longer than many of my other relationships.
Though instinctually drawn to her, I chose to push her away because I knew I was too young to give her what she needed. We met for the second time at a friend’s house in college, and that night, I took her home with me. We lay in bed together, restless and curious. Over and over I explored her, giving her my complete attention. Moments turned into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into days. But then my interest in her waned; I was incapable of the monogamy she demanded. Miraculously, she was as patient as she was demanding, and waited for me to return. We met again, many times, sometimes secretly—during family vacations or on rainy days in shoddy apartments shared with myriad roommates. Still, we were never able to pick up precisely where we had left off. Through our entangled liaison, a thrilling, frustrating cycle, I could not give her my full attention. A timeless, classic beauty, Anna K. was the woman I longed to become. A little over a year ago, while perusing the classics at the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, I bumped into Miss K. again. It had been years since I’d seen her, yet she had not aged a bit. Indeed, she looked more svelte than I remembered. This time would be different. I devoted nearly all of my spare time to her. I spent workdays thinking only about our next meeting, finding comfort knowing she was waiting for me. Weeks turned into months. My commitment was more fulfilling than the recurring love affairs I’d had with her for so many years. In early June 2005, I finally put Anna K. behind me. And now, just over a year after our affair finally ended, she sits on my nightstand amidst the multitudes, some of which are collecting dust, some of which are not. I’m back to my promiscuous ways, carrying on with at least half a dozen books at once, but none of them are as special as Anna Karenina. —Tamara Gabai lives, and reads, in Baltimore.
A loVV thudding bass line
erupts as I open the apartment door. A snare drum skitters around a loop, and repeats, pauses, then repeats. His voice, synthesized beyond recognition, floats over the beat and the pace picks up. I set my heavy equipment down with a thud just as the music crashes to a halt. Loud swearing comes from the back of the apartment. The bass line begins again. It’s Saturday night and I’ve just gotten home from shooting somebody else’s wedding—ten hours on my feet, with a drunken bride screeching, “Photographer Girl, come take my picture!” There is no ring on my finger. At the back of our tiny apartment, the closetsized room we both share as an “office” glows indigo from two computers. A kind of heart monitor keeps pace to the beat on the screen. His back is to me and his headphones are on. He takes a swig of beer and pushes a button that starts the drum sequence all over again. “I’m home,” I yell. He jumps. “Hey, how was it?” He turns the music down but keeps an eye on the lines of the screen. “Hell.”
“There’s a glass of wine on the counter for you.” He turns back to the wiggling screens. “It’s 1 a.m., I just want to sleep.” Later, I pull the pillow over my head as I feel the low thud find its way into the bedroom. On Monday evening I get home from a long day teaching girls who already have so much more than I do. I open the door to the same thumping bass line. This time, more sounds dance around and duck in and out of the beat. I go into the kitchen hoping he remembered to defrost something, anything, for dinner. The counter is empty. The sink is full of dishes. Later that night the neighbors complain about the noise. Our arguments sound like this: “You never …” “You always …” “Why can’t you …” “When is it my turn?” They build up to the same crescendo, and then sizzle out. We scrape enough money together to fly down to Miami to hand out fliers and demos to anyone willing to take one, at the music industry’s biggest conference. I manage to secure a loan to buy a small house with a room just for music. We cover the walls in spongy black foam to trap the sound. In here, the music envelopes you. I swallow the thud and have an extra heartbeat. Eventually it is my turn. I go to art school and get a degree that I probably don’t need. I teach parttime and spend afternoons in the makeshift studio he sets up for me in the basement, hammering metal until my fingertips go numb. In this, our new bigger house, we have space to shut a door and be alone. There are no neighbors to complain about the noise. This is our second year with matching rings. I don’t hear him come home; the hissing of my torch muffles his footsteps. There is nothing for dinner as usual, only piles of dirty laundry that I meant to get to. He sighs and kicks off his shiny black shoes, unbuttons his wrinkle-free striped shirt, and sits down at another computer for the second time today. The beat stutters, trips, and then gets a hold of itself. It builds and builds; each layer of sound slips and slides, and then tangles together. It recedes down to just one repeated thumping, and goes on and on and on … —Sherry Insley is a photographer living in Charm City with a menagerie of rescued animals (and a very patient husband).
w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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l sailing vess teams of abo ut twenty-five els—propelled by th drummer an d fight song— at each have their own return to the bor for the b Inner Hariannual Drago n Boat Races benefit Cath . Proceeds olic Charitie s. September 9 7:30 a.m.–6 p .m. 410-625-8478 Free for view ers www.return ofthedragon s.org
ael Muniak
Dragon B oat Races The large, co lorfu
High Zero Festival Experimental and improvised-music artists from Baltimore and beyond collaborate and perform during this two-week music extravaganza. Various installations, workshops, and performances take place September 7 through September 20 at venues around the city. Live performances: September 14–17 The Theatre Project 45 West Preston Street Individual concert $12, seniors/students $8; festival pass $40 443-414-5414 www.highzero.org
hairstyles and kick off Behold the hippest new lHAIR-Edison Back-toBe the school year at the includes food vendors, School Festival, which ts and screenings, face live bands, health exhibi s, a fashion show, a hair painting, balloon artist rs, as well as a Belairshow, and craft vendo ewalk Sale. Area children Edison Main Street Sid school supplies. who attend receive free ng lot of Susquehanna 3301 Belair Road (parki Bank) September 9 w at 1:30 p.m.) Noon–4 p.m. (hair sho Free 410-485-8422 www.belair-edison.org
Park Robert E. Lee ake Avenue L d an ctober 24 Falls Road mber 5 to O te ep S m o fr Tuesdays 8:30 a.m. tml 410-664-5151 irdclub.org/schedule.h b re o www.baltim
L om ba by Judy
oretum Cylburn Arb ring Avenue sp ctober 22 4915 Green mber 3 to O te ep S m o fr Sundays 8:30 a.m.
photo
igrating gh the dent and m d Club throu Observe resi ir B ark. re o m ti e Bal bert E. Lee P walks with th urn Arboretum and Ro ylb culars. grounds of C e; bring bino m co el w s er ird Beginning b
rdi
alks W d r i B weekly birds on free
courtesy of Baltim ore Offi ce of Promo
ers Serie oris ore Speak im lt a B l es Lovell, D dy a u m n Ja n , a n t a T rs fi y enne The e Am Robert F. K ironotables lik d n n a re , o ll e im w lt Ba e env lin Po odwin, Co s such as th spirit. o ic G p s to rn a ss e u K disc the human others, to ment, and Jr., among in a rt te n e and ment, arts Hall Symphony Meyerhoff t e e pril 17) edral Str ber 26 to A ows lectures 1212 Cath m te p e S (from period foll Dates vary nd answer on (tickets to india n io st e u bscripti 8 p.m.; q for series su $255–$385 s not available) re vidual lectu 0 0 0 -8 3 8 -7 410 rsseries.org orespeake im lt a .b w w w
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Enjoy the last days of summ er and the lit eleventh ann erary arts at ual Baltimor th e Book Festiv features mor al. The free ev e e than 225 n en at t io nal and loca readings, cook l au ing demonst rations, live m thors, poetry than seventy usic, and mor -five exhibitor e s and bookse include Hill llers. Special Harper, Kevin guests Clash, Taylor Phillips, and Branch, Jose Sebastian Ju ph C. nger. 600 block of North Charle s Street September 29 –October 1 Friday 5 p.m .–9 p.m., Satu rday and Sun 1-877-BALT day 11 a.m.– IMORE 7 p.m. www.baltim orebookfestiv al.com
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urbanite september 06
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Biodegradable Dishware … Summer is coming to a close, but there’s still plenty of warm weather and green grass for picnicking and cookouts. Instead of adding to already full landfills, consider the latest in disposable, biodegradable food service items—cups, plates, bowls, utensils, and even trash bags made from renewable resources like corn, sugarcane, and potatoes. Fiber waste remaining after the extraction of juice from sugarcane can be molded into food service dishware; starch from corn and potatoes is used to make products
photo by Mélanie Baillairgé of Madame Edgar Inc.
donuts and pancakes, to heads of lettuce and bananas (part of her soon-to-be-released fruit series), to tissues and tampons (one of her best sellers). They all sport big eyes and expressive little mouths—some sad, some happy. Kenney believes adults get excited about her work because “it gives them an excuse to think like a kid, if only for a minute,” she says. She calls her venture a dream job and says, “Creating has always been a big part of who I am.” Go to www. mypapercrane.com. —Alissa Faden
Paperie … “It’s all about customization, and paper as an accessory,” says Rachelle Harper, owner of Chellé Paperie. The Colorado native who moved to Baltimore in 1998 opened the first Chellé Paperie in Canton as a design studio. After two years, she decided to expand the business to include retail and reopened in Hampden under the same name in June. Customers can design invitations and stationery from scratch, building from the paper samples Harper stocks in the store; these can then be printed by letterpress, thermography, or flat printing. Also
that are normally made from plastic and Styrofoam. These items can biodegrade completely in a relatively short time; they are an environmentally friendly alternative to standard food service items, which are made from petrochemicals and do not degrade. Available at many online retailers, including www. biodegradablestore.com and www.worldcentric.org. —M.A.
available are large sheets of decorative paper that can be purchased whole or cut down to a specific size. Chellé Paperie also offers a unique line of cards and is the sole retailer in Maryland of the well-designed, chic Russell+Hazel organizers. Open Mon–Fri 10 a.m.–7 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.–6 p.m., closed Sundays. Consultations by appointment. 851 West 36th Street; 410-366-6333; www.chellepaperie.com. —Marianne Amoss
photo by © Judy | dreamstime.com
photo by Angela Bain
Handmade … There’s something charming about a loaf of bread with a cheerful smile—made out of bright red thread. Entrepreneur Heidi Kenney, originally from Frederick, brings inanimate objects to life. She invents, sews, and sells whimsical stuffed creatures with personality under the name My Paper Crane. This stay-at-home mom with pink-dyed hair runs her business while caring for her two young boys, who inspire her to see the world through a child’s eyes. Kenney classifies her creations as “plush;” they are more soft sculptures than toys, and they make unique gifts. Her cartoon-like creations range from
edited by marianne amoss
Have you heard of something new and interesting happening in your neighborhood? E-mail us at HaveYouHeard@urbanitebaltimore.com. If we use your idea for a future Have You Heard, we’ll send you a $100 gift certificate toward a purchase from Pella Windows & Doors, redeemable at their Timonium location (9 West Aylesbury, Suite J; 410-560-1800). Go to www.kc-pella.com for more information.
Cockeysville, 10015 York Rd. (410) 628-8001 • Baltimore, 2500 Boston St. (410) 522-0353 www.coldstonecreamery.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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Family Mitzvah Day 2006
Looking for a Synagogue that Feels like Home? 2501 Eutaw Place in historic Reservoir Hill just north of downtown Baltimore
Beth Am is a place where…
• A diverse, dynamic membership is committed to supporting its historic building and city neighborhood • Congregants and visitors enjoy provocative Shabbat discussions in an informal setting • Families with young children feel welcome and included • Young professionals gather for services and social programs
7/27/06
Who knew the Walters Art Museum had so much for families? • free hands-on art activities • interactive family tours • family guides to the collection • special audio tours • art-themed birthday parties for children ages 4 to 10 Open free of charge on Saturdays from 10 a.m.–Noon.
For more information contact Henry Feller, Executive Director:
To learn more about our family activities, please visit us at www.thewalters.org.
410.523.2446 | B ETHAM BALTI M O R E.O R G
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
ACT
Everyman Theatre presents
Opus BY MICHAEL HOLLINGER BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON PREMIERE
September 6–October 15, 2006 Directed by JOHN VREEKE Karl Kippola, left, and Kyle Prue. Photos by Stan Barouh.
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five musicians, one quartet, and a make-or-break performance
For tickets, 410.752.2208 or www.everymantheatre.org
urbanite september 06
600 N. Charles St. | Baltimore, MD 410-547-9000 | thewalters.org
REACT
Mascot illustration by Brian Ralph
3:57 PM
Restaurant …. It’s a bit of a surprise to see crab shumai and paella on the same menu—but at new restaurant Nasu Blanca, it works. Baltimore natives and chefs David and Vanessa Sherman and sous chef Christian Ciscle have combined Japanese and Spanish cuisine into one thoughtfully crafted menu that maintains a strict separation between the two styles of food. Before returning to Baltimore, Sherman traveled extensively through Spain and cooked Spanish cuisine on the West Coast (The Thirsty Bear in San Francisco) and Japanese on the East Coast (Bond St in New York City). Nasu Blanca’s entrees include a kobe filet accompanied by spicy tuna tempura and miso
actual labor, thereby enabling bikers to become self-sufficient. To cover their operating costs, Velocipede asks for a donation of time or money in return for the use of their facilities and tools. The group, which is working toward nonprofit status, aims to hold workshops and clinics and establish permanent hours; check the website for up-to-date information. 4 West Lanvale Street; www.velocipedebikeproject.org. —M. A.
T-shirts and More … When Baltimore natives Mike McNeive, Dustin Pfeifer, and Chris Walbert began turning out Tshirts a year ago, they didn’t know that in a short time they would be filling Internet orders for customers as far away as England and Spain. Affectionately named Tea and Crumpets, the company’s eye-catching and lighthearted designs are now cropping up locally at street festivals and at Hampden’s Shine Collective. McNeive, who along with Pfeifer does most of the T-shirt designing and screenprinting, prides himself on the company’s DIY approach: The trio, who refer to themselves as the Brothers Crump, are developing their Internetbased, interactive art collective with an eye toward building a sense of community and sparking conver-
mustard, and seared scallops served with edamame succotash and a mint vinaigrette. The sake and allSpanish wine list is one-of-a-kind in Baltimore: The sakes are refined and affordable (with a few pricey names that are well worth it), as are the flavorful and fruity whites and the hearty reds. Although the menu is upscale, there is no official dress code and there are plenty of affordable delights. Open Tues–Sat 5:30 p.m.–10:30 p.m. 1036 East Fort Avenue; 410-9629890; www.nasublanca.com.
sation. To that end, website visitors can both observe and participate: Peruse the latest line of shirts, listen to tracks by regional bands in the “Crump mix tape,” and see the work of featured artists, like jewelry designer Eileen Josephine, whose earrings whisper elegance and scream indie rock. Or, participate by submitting photos of yourself in one of their T-shirts, or post comments about current designs. Tea and Crumpets’ new line of apparel, accessories, and art is for sale this fall at the Fells Point Festival on October 7 and 8 and online at www.teaandcrumpets.org and www.beautifuldecay.com. —Catrina Cusimano
photo by Angela Bain
photo by Mike McNeive
Bike Project … Biking is one of the most efficient and environmentally friendly ways to get around, but dealing with breakdowns and mechanical problems can be daunting. The Velocipede Bike Project, which opened in June in a garage in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District, aims to help bikers help themselves. The project, which is run by a collective of bike-minded people, provides tools, workspace, and expertise on bike maintenance and repair. It’s like the old adage “Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime”—the group provides everything but the
logo by Michael Muniak
have you heard . . .
—Hellin Kay
Baltimore’s Club for Professionals. MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PERKS!
11 West Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore | 410.539.6914 | www.esb.org w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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food
by mary k. zajac
photography by gail burton
Meat and Greet Get to know Baltimore’s last German sausage maker
Above: Lothar and Sonya Weber behind the counter at Bikert’s Meats, which has been making traditional German sausage since 1964.
Lothar Weber is talking about pork. Quietly, seriously, with the authority of the science teacher he once was, he explains that pork in the United States is not like that of his native Germany. The reasons why are numerous, he reckons, his grey eyes reflecting a wry matter-of-factness, and his language revealing the scientific knowledge of a man who trained for a career as a biologist and not as the last German sausage maker in the Baltimore area. Hormones, antibiotics, and the treatment of the animals affect the quality of American meat. “It’s called PSE meat,” he says with disdain. PSE stands for pale, soft, and exudative, a term used to describe muscle that has too much fluid. At slaughter, “the animals get stressed,” Weber explains, “and it causes their muscle structure to get watery.” This exuding of fluid in the carcass results in meat that is less juicy and less flavorful. Pork is important to a sausage maker like Weber who, with his wife Sonya, owns Binkert’s Meats in Rosedale, the German meat market started by Sonya’s father, Egon Binkert, in 1964. Nearly all of Binkert’s products, from bratwurst to bacon, are made from pork. It is the Webers’ insistence on high quality and traditional recipes that make Binkert’s a legend in Baltimore sausage circles
and in the German-speaking schools and embassies in the D.C. area that make up ninety percent of their wholesale business. Binkert’s is the only German sausage maker left in town, a fact made more remarkable given the thousands of German immigrants who entered the United States in the last two centuries through Baltimore and made the city their home. Attend the Christkindlmarkt, the annual Christmas craft festival held at Zion Lutheran Church on Lexington Street near City Hall, known for its worship services in German, and you’re certain to see members of the hospitality committee grilling Binkert’s bratwursts in the garden. “It’s the only authentic German meat place,” says Louis Rill, the church bookkeeper. German delis like Mueller’s or The Old World Delicatessen sell meat made by Binkert’s, Rill explains. Weber speculates Binkert’s longevity is due to its stringent quality control. “There have been many other German sausage makers in Baltimore,” he points out, “but only we still exist.” Binkert’s has changed very little since Egon Binkert moved his facilities from Middle River to Rosedale in 1979. Located at 8805 Philadelphia Road, the neat brick building that houses both retail w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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Friends
peace
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.
Open House
for parents and students entering grades six through twelve: Sunday, October 22 • 2 pm
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
an old fashioned neighborhood grocery store, organic farmers market, gourmet specialty shop, European bakery, & supermarket all rolled into one. We are Whole Foods Market® the leading natural foods grocer in the country & we are right in your neighborhood! Harbor East 1001 Fleet St. 410-528-1640
Mt. Washington 1330 Smith Ave. 410-532-6700
www.wholefoods.com
Feature of the Month Pickle Day September 19th
What’s the Big Dill?
Visit either Whole Foods Market location on the 19th & receive one of our new insulated “pickle” lunch bags while supplies last. Perfect for back to school! quantities are limited - one per customer please
Free Parking! at both locations
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and plant operations sits behind a stretch of hedge, invisible from the road, save a small sign with the image of a smiling young woman in Black Forest costume. The sweet smell of woodsmoke and cured salamis permeates Binkert’s brown-paneled retail room, and a photocopied product price sheet lists available cold cuts, salamis, and sausages, their names an amalgam of tongue-curling sounds of languid vowels and crisp consonants: bratwurst and debreziner, landjaeger and knackwurst. Slabs of stripy bacon hang behind the counter. In a large display case, pale, mild-tasting weisswursts made of veal lay next to pinkish bologna and the wine-colored blutwurst that gets its hue from animal blood. Along with investing in new, high-tech German machinery, this retail case is one of the few changes the Webers have made to the business in the six years they have owned it since Egon’s retirement at age 81, says Sonya Weber, a slender strawberry blonde fashionably turned out in jeans and silver ballet slippers. The business was almost entirely wholesale during Egon’s days. Previously, Sonya explains, customers placed orders at the cash register and made small talk while one of the employees went into the meat locker to fetch the requested item. A customer, an older man wearing a T-shirt featuring one of Disney’s seven dwarves, approaches the counter. “Morning, Grumpy,” Sonya calls out, referring to the character on his shirt.
“My grandchildren gave this to me,” he grumbles good-naturedly. “They got it right. Pound of bratwurst, please.” “We’re very conscientious about our raw materials,” Sonya continues. Their pork comes from Country View Family Farms, a small subdivision of Hatfield Foods that buys high-quality, hormone-free, antibiotic-free hogs often from Amish and Menno-
Binkert’s is the only German sausage maker left in town, a fact made more remarkable given the thousands of German immigrants who entered the United States in the last two centuries through Baltimore and made the city their home. nite farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The Webers also stick to the same recipes and methods that Egon used. Today Lothar is making landjaeger, a Swiss-style smoked sausage known for its pleasantly chewy
texture and smoky aroma. Weber stands over the chopper, a large stainless bowl that could almost pass for a roulette wheel if not for the whirling blade he sharpens every morning. Both the sharpness of the blade and the temperature of the meat being chopped are crucial to the sausage-making process. If the meat gets too warm, Weber explains, “I get a poor quality product. The meat stays too loose; it doesn’t form. You want it to be firm.” To make landjaeger, cuts of beef, garlic, and a lactic acid starter are mixed together in the chopper before being fed into the stuffer, the machine that forces the meat mixture into lengths of tender hog casings. The landjaeger are then put in a sweat box, a metal closet that simulates a humid atmosphere. There they ferment and firm up for twenty-four hours before spending an additional two days in the smoker stoked with hardwood sawdust Weber gets from a local mill in exchange for sausage. Landjaeger is smoked, not cooked, and Weber proclaims it to have an excellent shelf life (though he can barely keep this popular item stocked on the shelves). The sausage, he says, gets better with age. “The best I had was in the glove compartment for three years,” he says without a trace of sarcasm. ■ —Mary K. Zajac is a freelance journalist living in Baltimore. Her essays about food regularly appear in publications like Style magazine. This is her first article for Urbanite.
“When I come up the main drive, I can’t believe this is my school.” – Katie, Grade 7
McDonogh School in Owings Mills offers a challenging curriculum and the support of the entire McDonogh family—innovative teachers, caring advisors, involved parents, and truly remarkable peers. For information about our K-12 college preparatory program or to register for an open house, please call us at 410-581-4719. Visit us on the Web at www.mcdonogh.org. Open House Dates Grades K-4 9:00-11:00 a.m. Thursday, October 5 & Tuesday, October 17 (For Fall 2007 applicants only) Wednesday, November 1 Tuesday, December 5 Grades 5-8 12:00-2:00 p.m. Sunday, October 22 Grades 9-12 2:30-4:30 p.m. Sunday, October 22
The Urbanite 7-26.indd 1
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extraordinary by Zagat 2006
518 N. Charles Street | Baltimore, MD 21201 | 410 727 1800 | ixia-online.com
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baltimore observed
by freeman rogers
photography by jay parkinson
Flight Club Pigeon racing, a sport with prestigious international competitions, has a small but sturdy local following
Above: Local pigeon-racer Fran Weber proudly displays the portrait of one of his winning birds.
A wall of shelves in Fran Weber’s living room is crowded from floor to ceiling with trophies, each of which is crowned not with the golfer or tennis player you’d expect to find in the suburban home of an affable 69-year-old retiree, but with a pigeon in flight. “I’ve won something like five hundred of those,” says Weber. “And this,” he says pointing proudly to one of several portrait-style photographs of pigeons hanging on the walls, “is the bird I won my first race with, in 1957.” Weber is one of the Baltimore area’s dwindling number of pigeon fanciers who raise and race homing pigeons. About 150 birds live behind his Glen Burnie house in four spotless, latticed-lined lofts, the largest of which is forty-six feet long and ten feet wide and resembles a small house. Weber’s racers are a far cry from the scavengers you see pecking through city trashcans: They’re muscular and shiny and beautiful, and they have pedigrees. Weber has traveled as far as Belgium to purchase them. “The good ones have personalities, just like people,” he says. “These are my race horses.” He estimates he spends at least thirty hours a week maintaining the lofts and feeding and training the pigeons. Weber’s childhood friend and fifty-year rival, Richard Singer, 68, says he’s one of the best fanciers
around: “You’ve got to be serious about this sport to do it, but Frannie’s one of the ones who’s dedicated his life to pigeons.” Weber says, “It is a lot a work if you want to be successful. I’ve been though seventeen women, and have been very good to all of them. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I get proper rest and I have a nice house, but women don’t want fifty percent of my time. They want one-hundred percent.” Like many area fanciers, Weber and Singer started racing pigeons when they were children. (They both grew up off of Fort Avenue in South Baltimore.) “Back then, you couldn’t walk a block in the city without seeing a pigeon coop,” says Singer, a retired planner in engineering who now lives in Pasadena. “There were ten or twelve pigeon racing clubs in Baltimore.” Now, there are only two official clubs in the city. The Baltimore Pigeon Fanciers Social Club, of which Weber and Singer are members, is a fiftyplus-member organization that was formed in the mid-1990s when a handful of shrinking clubs started meeting together in Curtis Bay. (Singer is vice-president of the South Baltimore Social Club, which is one of three smaller clubs within The Baltimore Pigeon Fanciers Social Club.) The forty-plus-member w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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Requires oil.
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Thursday, October 12, 2006 6:30 to 10 pm Evergreen Carriage House 4545 N. Charles St., Baltimore
ViVa italia! Red, White & Evergreen A Celebration of Art, Wine, and Food, co-hosted and sponsored by The Wine Source of Hampden. Come discover the tastes of Piedmont, Sicily, and a dozen other Italian regions! Sample fine wines expertly paired with regional Italian foods from some of Baltimore’s hippest chefs, enjoy live musical entertainment, and bid on premium items in live and silent auctions. Proceeds benefit Evergreen’s visual arts programs.
$65 in advance, reservations limited. Museum members enjoy a $5 discount. Call or visit Bob’s BMW today and take a test ride.
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For reservations and more info: call 410.516.0341 visit www.jhu.edu/historichouses
co-host/sponsor
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media partners Mt. Royal Printing - print sponsor
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design sponsor
Above and left: This house is for the birds: Weber’s pigeons at home in their pristine Glen Burnie coop.
Hamilton Homing Pigeon Club, which formed in 1933, has been holding weekly meetings since 1957, but club president Nick Trapani, 78, says club races bring in only a fraction of the two hundred or three hundred fanciers they used to draw: “Most of us are my age now,” he says. “You don’t get many young people anymore.”
Weber’s racers are a far cry from the scavengers you see pecking through city trashcans: They’re muscular and shiny and beautiful, and they have pedigrees. Both clubs hold a series of weekly races twice a year: In the fall season, fanciers race birds that are less than a year old; in the spring season, they race older birds. The night before a race, a few dozen fanciers show up at the clubhouse toting as many as twenty pigeons, which are loaded into a large truck and driven as far away as Atlanta. The next morning, the birds are released together. Their homing instincts kick in immediately, and they circle once or twice and hightail it to their respective lofts at speeds that often exceed sixty
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urb_towerhill_september.pdf
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5:36:16 PM
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10 Contemporary Luxury Town Homes in the heart of Locust Point Priced from the high $500’s 2600 square feet / 2 car garage
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CINDY CONKLIN A development of
BOB MERBLER
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Construction by
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TOUR OPEN HOMES THROUGHOUT BALTIMORE CITY NEIGHBORHOODS and receive $3,000* towards your new home. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16th • 10am - 2pm Baltimore City College High School 3220 The Alameda at 33rd Street JOIN US for our Buying into Baltimore Home-Buying Fair
Visit our Home Center
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Visit www.LiveBaltimore.com/hb/bibeast for details and to pre-register!
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Meet expert real estate agents & lenders and buy I Love City Life merchandise. Mon.–Sat., 9:00am – 5:00pm (410) 637-3750 www.LiveBaltimore.com
Live Baltimore Home Center • 343 N. Charles Street
miles per hour. Since each loft is in a different location, fanciers determine winners by calculating each bird’s average speed in yards-per-minute: The modern system uses GPS, computer scanners, and microchips attached to pigeons’ legs. There are several theories that explain how the birds find their way home. Some fanciers believe they use electromagnetic fields; others credit their keen eyesight and hearing. Says Hamilton Club race secretary Bill Hohman, a 56-year-old superintendent for the City of Baltimore: “Nobody knows for sure how they do it. If I knew I’d quit my job.” Winners of local club races receive only trophies and bragging rights, but the Vegas Classic race, to which fanciers all over the country send young birds several months in advance, pays out $100,000, and the winner of the granddaddy of all pigeon races in South Africa nets a cool million.
Well-trained pigeons can fly all day without stopping, covering five hundred miles in twelve
Their homing instincts kick in immediately, and they circle once or twice and hightail it to their respective lofts at speeds that often exceed sixty miles per hour. hours under optimal weather and wind conditions. One of the sport’s main challenges is
convincing them to go all out. To that end, many fanciers deprive their birds of food before race-day; others fly mother birds that are eager to get back to their eggs or their chicks. Weber prefers a system called “widowhood.” He separates his male birds from their mates at the beginning of the season; then, the day before the race, he “teases” them by reuniting the pairs “just long enough to kiss.” That way, each male flies home the next day with his girlfriend on his mind. “I motivate them with sex,” Weber deadpans. “It’s the best way. Like I said, pigeons are like people.” ■ —Freeman Rogers has written for a variety of publications, including the Oxford American, the Chattahoochee Review, and The Sewanee Theological Review. He is a contributing editor of Smartish Pace, a poetry journal in Baltimore.
Baltimore’s Best Kept Secret 1728 N. Charles St. 410 528 0174 www.thedepot.us
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Located in the charles street cultural district
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1909
Historic Hampden Hall Hampden with a harbor view
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• Restored historic details exposed brick, wood beams, and large windows – lots of light! • Each loft apartment is unique with its own charm and character • On site parking • Bedroom balconies with view of Baltimore’s skyline
Mt. Washington Mill | 1340 Smith Ave | 410-433-1616 Federal Hill | 1014 S. Charles St | 410-234-1331 www.homeontheharbor.com
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
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Preller Properties www.HampdenHall.com
Thursday, June 22, 2006 20:26 Magenta Black Yellow Cyan
DAILY LUNCH & DINNER SPECIALS Join us for Sunday Brunch 11am - 3pm
21 North Eutaw Street (across from the Hippodrome) 410.837.2100 Mon - Sun 11am - 1:30am
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Live Irish Music four nights a week! Texas hold’em every Thursday at 7pm Private Dining Rooms available in the old Bank Vault & Managers Office
encounter
by meshelle
photography by michael northrup
A Home-Going to Remember A Northwest Baltimore community loses one of its own and celebrates his life
Above: Home-going ceremonies, unlike typical memorial services, seek to rejoice in the life and afterlife of a loved one.
I’m sitting in my grandmother’s urbanized Southern Baptist church. The scene is straight out of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, except that it’s set in one of Baltimore’s largest Northwest communities, Park Heights. I’m here for Uncle Larry’s home-going service, which is the born-again African American equivalent of the Jewish shivah. Uncle Larry was 56 years young; a gifted man who attended Baltimore City College and worked as an engineer. I wait for the service to begin as my family, a hodge-podge of intellectuals, entrepreneurs, philosophers, felons, and believers, trickles in. Among the family and friends are former menaces turned uniform-clad civil servants with just enough time to show their respects alongside the childhood friends and foes. Six of Uncle Larry’s eight remaining siblings are there, along with nearly twenty of the more than forty nieces and nephews, and a host of miscellaneous attendees from the old neighborhood. There’s Fat Danny, who managed to lose an eye twenty-seven years ago in a stabbing, and Cleveland, one of the functional brothers (meaning a tax-paying, law-abiding husband and father, and citizen in good standing) of the rival Johnson family. Cleveland Johnson was a gem among the bandits and bad-asses that made up the Johnson clan. His version of the last time they all sang on the corner with Uncle Larry, sharing some Wild Irish Rose (which is akin to 10W-40 motor oil with a splash of red Kool-Aid), sparks the innocent nostalgia of life in the 1970s on Baltimore’s west side for AfricanAmerican boys who dared to become men. “Man!” he says. “I remember when we all caught our first charge together!” Translation: the day they
became first-time offenders. Uncle Larry had convinced them to sell counterfeit bus passes created by his younger brother, Isaac, to the school kids to make some quick money. The scam was off to a grand start until one of the kids attempted to double the price and sell it to a teacher. The novice kid flipped on Uncle Larry, Cleveland, Piggy, and Wormy when given an opportunity for clemency. Piggy was the first street soldier to succumb to the inevitabilities of a dream deferred and a bout with the disease of addiction. Wormy, another handsome street philosopher willing to share his take on the paradoxes of Baltimore’s west side and its east-side sibling, was the second to fall prey to addiction. At the mention of their names, those present rear back and rub their brows. As the unofficial salutations progress, the church leaders begin the service with greetings and song. Mother Brown, an ordained minister, stands to offer prayer. She sings at times in some spiritualistic language that only the Levites would understand and moves into a bit of a blues-intonation. “We know … that brother Larry … is in a better place … and we long to be there in that great-gettingup morning, by and by, when the wicked will cease from troubling and we will study war no more!” My mom’s white coworkers, who from the onset appeared to be fish out of water, open their eyes and peek a few times during the prayer, not quite sure if and when it ends. Next, my older sister and I, the oldest grandchildren, render the traditional and anticipated medley of songs. My sister sings “Amazing Grace” in its original melody and chorus, as she is a traditionalist. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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In contrast, I remix “His Eye Is on The Sparrow” a cappella in hopes of taking the celebration to the next level. “I sing … I said … I sing … because I’m happy … Y’all don’t hear me … I sing because Uncle Larry is free … my God’s eye … is on the sparrow-w-w-w … and I know He’s watching over Uncle Larry and me!” A thunderous praise sweeps through the church as it seems to click unanimously that this is a celebration and not a cemetery! I take my seat, and the choir rises and begins to lull us all into a catatonic stupor with a rendition of “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” I am sitting a stone’s throw away, and I cannot understand them. Are the microphones on? I wonder if the sopranos were unable to take a day off from work. The chariot swings so low we all miss the ride home. After the choir and the reading of notes and cards, Mother Brown asks if anyone from the family wishes to speak. One of the five remaining brothers walks to the pulpit in a slow and deliberate stride: Uncle Isaac. A robust man standing six-foot-one, fighting his fifties, neat, yet informally attired, proclaims, “God took one of us and brought one back home stronger than ever!” Time stands still; all is quiet. I can hear the eyelids batting on one of the white friends who is perplexed and abandoning all effort to mask it. In a Southern drawl with intentionally exaggerated diction, Uncle Isaac, looking like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, lifts his right hand while clutching the cordless microphone and says, “On this day, Momma, I am moving back to live with you!” He passes the microphone
back to Mother Brown as effortlessly as he received it and walks casually to his seat. Wait a minute, did this guy who has been M.I.A. for more than a decade and has five children and a wife just claim room and board at my granny’s peaceful home? The deafening silence persists. My mother closes her eyes tightly, as if she is wishing away a bad a dream. Aunt BoBo, the youngest and most outspoken of the nine, starts shaking her head and breathing as if convulsing or hyperventilating. Auntie Bill just crosses her arms as if to say, “Over my dead body!” But Granny? Granny starts shouting, “Thank you, Lord! You are a good God!” The Martin Luther King Jr.-esque (circa 1967) pastor then stands to eulogize Uncle Larry. Cleancut, poised, fit, and articulate, the thirty-something African-American man in crisp shirt and tie, tastefully tailored robe, and freshly polished shoes indicates his goal of brevity with a handkerchief in his left hand and a firm whisper. “I won’t be before long, I promise to wrap this up for you in seven minutes, as that is the number of completion, can I get an Amen!” This is it, finally a voice of reason and conviction; this is what the family needs, words of consolation. “Ya see … I had the brother for three years … ahh … and this dear family … had him for over half a century … and a-l-l I can say … ahh … is that God is in control … of life … ahh … and death … ahh … and a-l-l- things … ahh … in between!” He pauses. “Is there anyone that does not know Him?” Typically this is the beginning cadence for the invitation to salvation through Jesus Christ, but
somehow, with the help of the choir, I zoned out, and now I think he’s talking about Uncle Larry. The pastor gives the invitation, “Is there anyone who wants to know Him for yourself?” Is he going to open the casket and introduce people to my uncle? I am enraged, and also wondering why I am the only family member who is disturbed. I decide this has gone too far and I jump out of my seat. I realize that all eyes are on me at about the same moment I realize my mistake. How can I remedy the embarrassment? Every stereotypical (heavy on the stereotype) African American church service has to have a person running around in an outward praise of God, sharing the goodness of a life serving and loving Jesus. “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!” I say as I circle the church. The Six Feet Under choir members begin falling like dominoes. Granny declares, “Have your way, Lord! Have your way!” and no one seems to realize the absurdity of my attempt to save face. The flat-footed organist begins to play rapid fire. The seven minutes become seventeen, and the celebration is on full blast. The white friends continue to be dumbfounded, as lost as white people on Park Heights and Woodland being petitioned for a “hack”(a ride in a car with a stranger for a determined cash amount, solicited by flapping one’s hand in a bent wrist motion). They watch as we dance like David and celebrate the life of an engineer turned street soldier and his victory in crossing over. This is a Foreman Family send-off. A home-going indeed. ■
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space
by elizabeth a. evitts
The Greenhab
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urbanite september 06
photo by Eric Salsbery
“I hate plain vanilla.” It’s a sweltering summer day and architect Gabriel Kroiz makes this bold statement while navigating the sun-bleached concrete alleyways behind Eastern Avenue. Kroiz isn’t talking about ice cream; he’s referring to the typical Baltimore rowhouse rehab, or what is commonly known as The Gut. “Everyone sees a shell,” Kroiz says of Baltimore’s prevalent renovation trend to clean out an interior and start from scratch. “There’s certainly an advantage to that. You can modernize the floor plan.” But when Kroiz, founder and principal of Kroiz Architecture, purchased a dilapidated alley house on Winterling Court near his Fells Point home and office, he was determined to do something different. “I’m not satisfied with the plain-vanilla result you generally get with these rehabs,” he says. Kroiz, who has been a devotee of sustainable materials throughout his fifteen-year career, decided to use this project to develop an environmental rowhouse prototype, incorporating the latest in ecoproducts and thinking. Kroiz understands that sustainability is more than just fixtures and furniture; it’s also a philosophy. His self-dubbed “greenhab” incorporates the key elements of sustainability—it uses an existing building and site; it makes efficient use of energy, water, and other resources; and it uses recycled and other sustainable materials in its construction. Normally when entering a new rehab, the astringent smell of fresh paint hits the nose, but when walking through the front door of Kroiz’s greenhab, visitors are welcomed with a pleasant whiff of wheat. The place actually smells natural, an effect of the newly installed walls that are constructed from wheatboard, a nontoxic particleboard made from wheat stalk agricultural byproduct. While wheatboard costs more than basic drywall, Kroiz notes that it doesn’t require the additional expense of mudding, sanding, and painting, and it will age well with the home. Kroiz makes excellent use of the interior square footage, a mere 725 square feet. He reconfigured the original floor plan, moving the only bathroom— which had been located in a cinderblock addition at the back of the house—to the second floor next to the bedroom. This opened up the back of the house to natural daylight, which floods in through new glass French doors that open onto a landscaped patio. The uncomplicated, open floor plan includes a living room, a kitchen, and a back den or dining area on the first floor; and a bedroom, bathroom, and laundry area/closet on the second floor. “Spaces can be very simple and flexible, allowing people to
photo by Ethan Cook
photograph by Eric Salsbery
In a town rife with run-of-the-mill rowhouse renovations, architect Gabriel Kroiz offers an inspiring alternative
Above: A translucent screen adds light to the economically sized bathroom. Left: Kroiz makes excellent use of a small interior by incorporating creative design elements—like the sliding screen—to define living areas in this open floor plan.
figure out how to use them and rearrange them,” Kroiz says of the layout. “By having that simple floor plan, I could really put my energy into the building materials.” The materials, like bamboo flooring and concrete, tie together to create a warm and natural interior. Mark Melonas of Luke Works hand-trawled the concrete counters in the kitchen and created the wheatboard cabinets, while Dave Parker (formerly of Nlightn Design) fabricated the counter’s metal work. Kroiz exposed the cinderblock in the back of the house, which reflects the stone-like quality of the concrete in the kitchen. “Red brick is such a dominant presence in Baltimore, and I didn’t jump to the conclusion that I should expose it,” Kroiz says. “I think the gray goes with the whole palate of the house.” Heavily influenced by his design work in South Korea, where living space is at a premium, Kroiz put the small interior to good use. In the kitchen, a food preparation area can be transformed into a wet w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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DIY Greenhab 1
photo by Eric Salsbery
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Kroiz exposed structural beams in the second-floor bedroom and added a skylight. The hanging light fixture is made from a stainless-steel gutter.
bar when company comes over by sliding a shojiinspired “screen” made from eco-friendly Homasote across the appliances. The same screen hides the hot water heater, skillfully tucked under the stairs, which were designed by Kroiz and made from construction-grade yellow pine from Walbrook Mill and Lumber Company and electrical conduit for the railing. Upstairs, Kroiz continues the space-saving design features by creating a “wet” bathroom or “shower room,” where the shower is attached to the wall and open to the rest of the room. What looks like expensive stone flooring is really just basic tile from The Home Depot installed polished-side down to look more natural. In the center of the upstairs level, Kroiz exposed a few wood beams in the ceiling and added a skylight. He designed his own light fixtures, including an ingeniously simple pendant ceiling lamp, which he created from a galvanized rain gutter attached to wire, with a fluorescent bulb cradled inside. The appliances throughout the house are spacesaving and energy-efficient, like the one-piece washer/dryer by LG Electronics. “You put the clothes in, press the button, take them out, and they’re done,” Kroiz says. Kroiz proves that efficiency, economy, and thoughtful use of materials can transform even the smallest space into a stylish and functional dwelling. Even the choice of the house is noteworthy. The modest alley house is an endangered building type in Baltimore, having been destroyed over the years to make way for larger development. A truly sustainable city, Kroiz understands, is one that incorporates a variety of living options. “The development template today is bigger and bigger and bigger,” Kroiz says. “An alley house works very well for one or two people. It’s reasonably priced and gives you a mix of incomes within a block, which makes for a more interesting neighborhood.” As for the growing market for sustainable living and building materials, Kroiz says that “the world is catching on. Baltimore hasn’t quite gotten it yet—we don’t have enough competitive contractors. But at some point, we will. Enough people will put these pieces together.” ■ —Elizabeth A. Evitts is Urbanite’s Editor-in-Chief.
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Architect Gabriel Kroiz helps you put the pieces together for your own sustainable home projects 1. Lighting “I am not as interested in light fixtures as much as I am interested in putting light where it needs to be,” Kroiz says. The architect created inexpensive and stylish mood lighting along the stairwell by installing Coroplast, a translucent corrugated plastic, and placing fluorescent lighting behind. 2. Ceiling Kroiz created a unique look with off-the-shelf materials by installing a basic channel system and then placing gypsum board (unpainted drywall) finished with clear coat into the slats. 3. Sliding Screen The screen is constructed out of Homasote, a fiberboard product made from recycled newspaper. The product is available in a number of finishes. (800-257-9491 ext. 1500; www. homasote.com)
4. Appliances The appliances, like the LG Electronics all-inone washer/dryer, range in price from $600 to $1,200 and are all compact and energy-efficient. Kroiz purchased them online at Compact Appliance. (1-800-297-6076; www.compact appliance.com) 5. Walls and Kitchen Cabinets Wheatboard is formaldehyde- and emissionfree, and it is now offered in an increasing number of finishes like white, black, and cherry veneer. Kroiz used a product made by PrimeBoard, which is available at The Home Depot. (701-642-1152; www.primeboard.com) 6. Floors Kroiz purchased the bamboo flooring on the first level from Alter Ego, a company that specializes in sustainable building materials. On the second floor, he clicked together fatigue mats, which use no glue, can be replaced as needed, and are fully recyclable and reuseable. (443-498-0144; www.alter-e.com) —E. A. E.
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Cross Keys offers a selection of dining fare for breakfast, lunch, dinner ... and in between – Donna’s Coffee Bar Café, Crossroads Restaurant, Truffles Tea, and — Cross Keys offers a& selection of dining fare for breakfast, lunch, dinner...&and in between Crepe du JourRestaurant, (seasonally). Outdoor for Donnaʼs Coffee Bar & Café, Crossroads Truffles & Tea, andseating Crepe duavailable Jour (seasonally). al fresco dining. 410-323-1000 Outdoor seating is available for al fresco dining. 410-323-1000
Taking the Long View by William J. Evitts
Illustrations by Warren Linn
America’s families are changing— what else is new? 52
urbanite september 06
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n 1973 PBS aired a twelve-part series documenting An American Family. Businessman Bill Loud, wife/homemaker Pat, and their five children lived in prototypical suburban comfort in Santa Barbara, California. They should have been the reification of the Brady Bunch, or Donna Reed’s fictional family brought to life. Instead, by the final episode, Bill and Pat were headed for divorce court and their most singular son, Lance, had come out as the first avowedly gay man featured on television. Writing in Newsweek, an alarmed Shana Alexander denounced the Louds as “affluent zombies.” The New York Times’ Ann Roiphe called Lance a “Goya-esque emotional dwarf.” Though they tuned in by the millions to this pioneering reality show, Americans were clearly not ready to face the reality that the American family is not the simple, nuclear nest we idolize. But then, it never has been. As the phrase “family values” gets bandied about, as the culture at large struggles with what defines a family, it is worth remembering that the American family has constantly changed in structure, function, and value, and at any given historical moment had a variety of forms. Social forces, like increasing individualism and material abundance, have been reshaping the typical American family for centuries.
From the settlement of Jamestown and Plymouth Rock until roughly 1820,
American families were large and they dominated the individuals within them. Parents presumed to veto or arrange marriages. Children were often apprenticed by their parents or sent to live with more fortunate families. In eighteenth century Kent County, Maryland, for example, one John Dabb in a typical move agreed to “bind over [his] Daughter Sarah Dabb unto Mr. Morgan Williams and his wife” for four years to be their servant. Bridal dowries were part of a system that made marriage less a function of personal passion than a business deal between families. When a Philadelphia mother in 1730 tried to marry her daughter to young Benjamin Franklin, he “let her know that [he] expected as much money with their daughter as would pay off [his] remaining debt for the printing house.” The mother protested they didn’t have that much, and Franklin suggested she mortgage the house. Finally, the girl’s family disapproved the marriage on the grounds that printing was a high-risk business. Franklin moved on. Families were regularly torn apart and reassembled by death and remarriage. The results could be complicated. Eighteenth-century Virginian Martha Wayles had seven half-sisters and three half-brothers thanks to her father’s three wives (who all died) plus his dalliance with a slave woman named Hemings. Martha herself was widowed in her early twenties. She married a second time, to planter Thomas Jefferson, bringing with her a number of slaves including a half-sister, the famed Sally Hemings. Strong DNA evidence affirms that after Martha’s death Sally became Jefferson’s mistress and bore him a secret, unacknowledged family. As America expanded in the nineteenth century, individuals took more control. The perceptive Alexis de Tocqueville, in his 1830s classic Democracy in America, observed: “In America the family, in the Roman and aristocratic signification of the word, does not exist. All that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first years of childhood … But as soon as the young American approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day; master of his thoughts, he is soon master of his conduct. In America there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence; at the close of boyhood the man appears and begins to trace out his own path.” Although children are a considerable debit for today’s family (costing about $185,000 for a modest-income family to raise a child to the age of eighteen), nineteenth-century families counted children as economic assets. Most Americans farmed. The family was the unit of production. A witness described a New England farm family dinner in 1858: “A kettle of soap-grease is stewing upon the stove, and the fumes of this, mingled with those that were generated by boiling the cabbage which we see upon the table, and by perspiring men in shirt-sleeves, and by boots that have forgotten or do not
care where they have been, make the air anything but agreeable to those who are not accustomed to it. This is the place where the family live[s]. They cook everything here for themselves and their hogs. They eat every meal here. They sit here every evening. … Man and woman, sons and daughters, live, in the belief that work is the great thing ...” The modern family emerged in the 1800s. Personal affection now motivated marriage. Wives began to focus more exclusively on the home (though they still had large social networks of other women). Raising the children became more central to family life. These families were smaller than their sprawling colonial counterparts. By 1900 the family hearth was idealized. Business and politics belonged in the outside world, which was competitive and sharp and sometimes necessarily cruel. Altruism, kindness, and softness were found only in the bosom of family, an other-worldly haven of peace and accord where commerce did not intrude. But even as this dream peaked, modernism undid it. The twentieth-century world of urbanization, privacy, mobility, affluence, technology, and ever-increasing individualism further dispersed the family. Daughters struck out for economic independence as sons had in the previous century. Extended families made a brief, partial comeback during the Great Depression as poverty forced folks to huddle together, sharing lodging, meals, and common expenses. After living for several years with relatives in New Jersey, for example, young Russell Baker, his widowed mother, and his sister, Doris, moved to a two-room flat on West Lombard Street above a Lithuanian tailor whose front room doubled as overflow space for a funeral parlor. Into this flat also came Uncle Charlie, who watched the house and kids as Mrs. Baker was out selling magazines door-to-door, and Uncle Hal, who slept on the couch. Here Russ and Doris were briefly reunited with their youngest sister, Audrey, who had been adopted as a baby by relatives in Virginia years before, when economic hard times and the death of their father forced the Bakers to abandon the family farm. Government policy and law at all levels has always backed the family, supporting marriage and parental rights while discouraging divorce and women’s independence. But when World War II mustered millions of men into the military, America needed women to leave the family for gritty warindustry jobs. The result was a deliberate, calculated campaign to reshape our values. “We can do it!” proclaimed the famous government poster with the bandana-wearing woman flexing a most unconventional bicep. Norman Rockwell, who immortalized so many “traditional” images of American families, painted a brawny-but-beautiful lass in overalls cradling a rivet gun. Her lunch pail read “Rosie.” Postwar, however, women were herded back to the house with some difficulty. The level of female employment remained high, even as the American family hit boom times. The 1950s (a social period that runs several years into the 1960s, actually) are, for many today, the baseline of “family.” The huge babyboom contingent was raised in this milieu. The new medium of television imprinted the Cleavers, Nelsons, and Andersons (of Father Knows Best) indelibly on the national consciousness. This happy home-owning crew with their solvable problems was the very definition of “family.” In truth, of course, they were a historical anomaly. From World War II until 1950, the age of marriage and the percentage of women remaining childless or unmarried fell to a one-hundred-year low. The birth rate soared, reversing an eighty-year downward trend. And subterranean unhappiness with the dominant domestic relationships was about to explode. In 1963’s The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan did not create the discontents that fed modern feminism; she simply gave them voice. As secretary of her fifteenth reunion class at Smith College in 1957, Friedan asked more than the usual questions on the traditional “catching up” survey. She found in the replies an outpouring of anger and dismay, an existential resistance to the role of women, especially within families. Friedan recognized that dismay as her own, and started to write. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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urbanite september 06
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Conservatives claim “radical feminists” trashed the family by luring women astray. But as many point out, women were steadily expanding their roles, becoming more educated, and generally kicking over the traces long before feminist spokespersons made that fait accompli into a movement. At any particular historic moment, it is valuable to realize that the reigning ideal of family was largely reserved for whites of the middle or upper classes. African-American slaves, cut off from African kinship patterns, cobbled together makeshift families that law didn’t recognize. Victorian homes often depended on domestic help, an arrangement limited to those who could afford it and that unhinged the family life of the poor (often immigrant) families who supplied that essential labor. Consumer goods that benefited the family, like inexpensive machine-loomed fabrics, came from a factory system exploiting young women and children. Today, most Americans will experience a variety of family types over the course of a lifetime. Half of first marriages and about sixty percent of second ones end in divorce. Twice as many children today will see their parents divorce than in 1963, and more than half of all children will spend at least some time in a single-parent household. With marriage age rising and divorce more frequent, men and women on average spend more than half their lives unmarried, and more of their lives alone. Sex, marriage, and childrearing are increasingly separated. The number of gay mothers and fathers raising children in America is more than two million and climbing. Handwringers worried about the demise of the modern, nuclear family tend to emphasize that the family is a fundamental engine driving society. But more often, really, families are shaped by outside forces—economics, women’s roles, attitudes towards children, class, ethnicity, tradition, demographics, material conditions, and the values by which we measure individual worth. Families reflect the state of things, like coal-mine canaries alerting us to changes in the atmosphere. Those trying to create a repair by
directly changing the family itself are missing the point; they’re attacking a symptom instead of understanding the cause. A lot of contemporary concern about families arises from comparing today with that mythologized 1950s baseline. Those plagued by such worries should reflect on the fact that almost every American generation for more than two hundred years has fretted over the changes in family they saw in their lifetime. And, as they say of the weather, if you don’t like what “family” is today, just wait a minute.
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nd what of the Louds, the anti-Bradys whose story caused such a furor? Television exposure made them momentary celebrities, which some of them enjoyed and others didn’t. Lance said, “Television ate my family,” but he was the most insouciant about newfound fame. When PBS station WNET in New York City rebroadcast the documentary in 1990, Lance was pleased, Pat and the youngest sons were distraught, and father Bill and the daughters said they didn’t care. Lance had a career in photography, cultural journalism, and music (a ten-year band gig with The Mumps). After years of hard living and a methamphetamine addiction, he contracted HIV and died in 2001 of type C hepatitis. A new documentary about his last days brought the Louds back to public attention in 2002. Bill was saddened by Lance’s death and regretted that he hadn’t been more tuned in to his “sensitive” son. Pat, who returned to Southern California in 1987 after residing in England, reunited with Bill and they are living together now in Los Angeles. Like families everywhere, of every conceivable description and composition, they kept going. —Contributing Editor William J. Evitts is an American historian with three books and numerous articles to his credit. He also teaches in the Johns Hopkins University Master of Liberal Arts program.
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Marriage Works. Or Does It? BY
HE ATHE R
HA R R I S
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s it fair to say …” “Probably not.” “Is it fair to say that you want kids to trust you, to believe you when you tell them that marriage works?” “No,” he says. “I ask them to believe the facts, the fact that married people earn more money and their kids do better in school.”
T
he man who hopes that the children of Baltimore City will believe is Harold “Hal” Donofrio, president and CEO of Campaign for Our Children, the nonprofit advertising agency that created the “Marriage Works” campaign. You’ve probably seen the billboards: a couple on their wedding day, beaming in white gown and black tuxedo; Married people earn more money; Kids of married parents do better in school; Married people enjoy better health; and always the tagline: Marriage Works.
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Campaign for Our Children began in 1987. Donofrio, already a wellestablished advertising executive in Baltimore, was approached by a local coalition interested in addressing the very high rate of teen pregnancy in the city. He agreed to work with them, set up the nonprofit, and for the past two decades he and his agency have been waging a major media war on minors having children. You’ve probably seen these billboards as well: Virgin: Teach your kids it’s not a dirty word; I don’t give it up, and I’m not giving in; Talk with your kids about sex. Everyone else is. The “Marriage Works” campaign, according to Donofrio, was the logical next step in the effort to reduce births to unmarried teen mothers. “I am a practical man, a business man. I have an economic axe to grind. We could not continue to support the epidemic [teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth] situation we were seeing in 1987 in Baltimore,” he says. “If we were in Hitler’s Germany, we would sterilize a generation and focus education on very young children to break the cycle. But we’re not. We’re more civilized than that.
photo by Jason Okutake
A P R O - M A R R I A G E C A M PA I G N P O P S A L O T O F Q U E S T I O N S B U T P R O V I D E S F E W A N S W E R S
“It was a personal decision to move on to marriage,” says Donofrio, who believes that people who expect to marry will use better judgment regarding their sexual activity as teens. “Prevention over cure,” he adds, referring to his goal of preventing out-of-wedlock births instead of “curing” families with welfare dollars after the crisis has occurred. Donofrio’s marriage-focused directive is actually part of a larger national trend. The “Marriage Works” campaign and other public service initiatives like it have become increasingly common, particularly in lowincome communities. The question is: Is it reasonable to suggest marriage as the solution to social and economic problems? And if it is, are media campaigns the way to do it?
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arriage-promotion initiatives had their genesis in the welfare reform efforts of the 104th Congress in 1996. The act, referred to as the
“Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,” declared marriage a major weapon in the war on poverty. It states, “The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children.” In section 912 of this legislation, money is allotted to “provide abstinence education, and at the option of the State, where appropriate, mentoring, counseling, and adult supervision to promote abstinence from sexual activity, with a focus on those groups which are most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock.” According to the legislation, the education will teach that “abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage [is] the expected standard for all school age children,” and “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.” In 2003, these initiatives were revisited by the w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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community. We’re trying to move an entire system. I view our message as tilling the field, getting it ready to plant.” Joseph Jones, founder, president and CEO of Baltimore’s Center for Fathers, Family, and Workforce Development, and a Campaign for Our Children board member, believes the media campaign is useful in helping him encourage his clients to take care of themselves and their families. Jones himself grew up in a broken home and spent seventeen years on the streets of Baltimore addicted to drugs. He fathered one child out-ofwedlock before getting off drugs and into a career working with the at-risk residents of Baltimore City. On May 5, 2004, Jones testified before the Senate subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy. He told the senators that four factors contribute to a healthy marriage: “Work that provides you with a sense of pride and purpose; freedom from the demons of alcohol and drugs; ability to communicate and respect your partner; and a community that values marriage.” Two years later, he continues to work toward the public consensus. “The community needs to buy in, in order for individual stories to change,” he says. “We’re trying to keep the system out, to teach two young people to learn to stick together. But,” he adds candidly, “the research outcomes will not be known for five years.”
courtesy of Campaign for Our Children
Congress and reaffirmed, cementing the political and financial support of marriage as the ideal family structure. Not surprisingly, this shift in welfare policy has been accompanied by significant debate and disagreement. According to a 2002 report called Let Them Eat Wedding Rings, by Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, “The Heritage Foundation recommends spending at least ten percent of federal welfare funds (about $1.5 billion per year) to promote marriage,” including media advertising campaigns. The report goes on to say, “The diversion of funds from poverty-fighting programs (such as job training or food stamps) into pro-marriage media campaigns and incentives eclipses the real needs of Americans in poverty.” Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Solot-Miller paper is its analysis of other industrialized countries and the “marriage-poverty link.” The report states, “The country-to-country comparisons … show how little correlation there is between marriage rates and child poverty, and between births to unmarried parents and child poverty … Sweden’s child poverty rate is seven times lower than the rate in the U.S., despite the fact that the majority of babies there are born to unmarried parents. “Despite [the] high rate of marriage (and remarriage) [in the U.S.], our percentage of children in poverty is the second highest of the 21 countries considered. It is four to six times higher than the countries with the lowest marriage rates.”
© 2005 Campaign For Our Children, Inc.
One of the “Marriage Works” billboards developed by Baltimore-based Campaign for Our Children
All the studies that support and dispute Congress’ legislation look at correlations, not causes. Correlations are things that happen together; causes are things that make other things happen. “Here’s how you could easily establish cause,” says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist and author at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Council on Contemporary Families, regarding the difficulty in determining marriage’s benefits. “Take a random sample in the U.S. and assign half of them to marry and prohibit the other half from marrying, and then study them. But since you can’t do that, it’s very hard to say.” Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage and this issue’s guest editor, tends to agree. “People are thinking of a very simplistic solution that rushes people into marriages. When we can get people into good marriages, that’s a reasonable thing and a good benefit, but marriage is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges of poverty or rearing healthy children.” Proponents of the government’s marriage initiatives agree that billboards are not going to fix the problems of poverty and broken families; they also agree that more research is important. “People have unreasonable expectations for a media campaign,” says Bronwyn Mayden, a social worker and former executive director at Campaign for Our Children. “Our goal is to get a conversation going in the
According to Diann Dawson, director of the Office of Regional Operations at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, this situation is typical as social policies are developed. “You don’t always wait for the final results to begin to implement a public policy,” she says. “Every major social policy change comes with tensions and disagreements. We need more research, but the correlations are pretty persuasive. And it would be foolish not to recognize the power of the media to change behavior.”
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he battles over policy, funding, research, and intervention will no doubt go on for many years, but what is going on in the communities, and in the families, that are the focus of these healthy marriage initiatives? Amber and Paul are in the Baltimore Building Strong Families program, a program that provides relationship-skills training and practical services to encourage couples to commit to each other and to their children. Paul is 22 and Amber is 23; they have three boys between them, ages 2, 1, and 1 month old. The two older boys are from Paul’s previous relationship. continued on page 87
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By Chance or By Choice s what it mean s e r lo p x e r e k a A local filmm in a child-centric culture s to be childles
“No, no, I don't have any …” Why is this question always asked? It takes my breath away, yet why do I feel the impulse to apologize for my reply? Vague and embarrassed, whoever has asked me looks over my shoulder for someone else to talk to, someone with whom they have more in common—someone with children. Ten years ago, and an ocean away in Oxford, England, my husband and I were expecting our first child. On November 5—Guy Fawkes Day, an evening of bonfires, sparklers, and family parties—we found ourselves on the top floor of the John Radcliffe Hospital, struggling to make sense of our doctor’s words. I had gone into labor that morning after my water broke. On the way to the hospital the contractions stopped; I felt no movement. A sickening worry crept over me. When we reached the hospital, I was frantic to find someone to listen for a heartbeat. Later, my husband said that he knew he had lost both of us when the doctor found only one: mine. We had to go through labor and delivery, more devastating for my husband than for me—being an old jock, I was glad to have something physical to do. Blindsided by severe oxytocin-induced contractions, I accepted an epidural in the eleventh hour. The delivery was normal; everything was normal, except that our daughter was dead. November 5 had been my due date. Our OB/GYN was devastated. He said he’d never seen such a healthy pregnancy, and that at 37, I was in better shape than any of his patients in their twenties. Throughout the nine months I had felt bionic, as though I was one of the lucky few who should always be pregnant. I had exercised everyday, eaten the requisite organic, anti-oxidant-laden diet, slept well, napped frequently, and finally allowed myself a bit of champagne in the ninth month. Nothing had prepared us for this. The tests and autopsy revealed nothing; she had died the night before I went into labor, leaving no evidence, no clues of any kind. It was a fluke, the doctor said, an accident. There was a statistic we hadn’t known: About one in one hundred births in the world’s developed countries are stillbirths. We also hadn’t known that upwards of eighty percent of marriages fail after a child is lost. Three years later we were divorced. Since that time, I have learned more statistics. Across the globe, birthrates in the richest nations remain low or are on the decline. Although the United States has one of the highest birthrates in the developed world, it hovers at or just below the natural population replacement level of 2.1
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By Nancy Ro
births per woman required to sustain the country’s economic engine. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2000 that only forty-five percent of married couples had children under the age of 18, reflecting a steady decline from fifty-nine percent in 1960. According to the 2004 U.S. census, the overall number of childless women from 15 to 44 years old (married or not) is 44.6 percent, up from 35.1 percent in 1976. And the higher a woman’s income level, the less likely she is to have children at all. Forty-nine percent of women with annual family incomes over $100,000 are childless. Women without children are a growing phenomenon. Yet after living with the loss of a child, and now having chosen a future without one, I see that our culture is not sufficiently prepared to know what to do with women who are not mothers. We don’t fit into any of society’s convenient boxes: We’re not soccer moms, or yummy mummies. We are also not necessarily career obsessed or anti-family. Our days are simply filled with a different rhythm. I don’t spend mornings in carpool lines. Children don’t tug at my clothes and beg for attention. I don’t leave my cell phone on during films or dinner parties in case the babysitter needs me. I am not exhausted all the time. I travel. I read books—lots of them—the newspaper, and occasionally a whole New Yorker. As a documentary filmmaker, I have collaborated on projects covering a wide range of subjects, many of which could be perceived as political or religious taboos. In 2002, after reflecting on my own experience, I realized that it was time to start a dialogue about this unspoken topic. I began working on a documentary, which is still in the making, about how our culture and society view those who are childless. I started interviewing women who are not mothers, either by chance or by choice; I am collecting stories not only for those who have lost children, but for the growing number of people who don’t want, and never intend to have, any. My explorations reveal the flip side of our child-centered culture. These women want to tell their stories, but it is never easy; some prefer to leave painful memories untouched, while others seek some avenue of comfort from those who also have no children. They feel like, and are often treated as, second-class citizens, bombarded daily by headlines declaring our national obsession with motherhood: “The Bump Watch,” speculating when stars like Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Lopez will join the motherhood club; “Celebrity Babies,” seeking the elusive Suri Cruise; and “The Ultimate Hollywood Accessory: A New Baby,” as popularized by Brangelina. My interviews with women confirmed the accuracy of other articles in newspapers and magazines from the New York Times to Vogue, about the
“Oops, I forgot to have children” phenomenon. Large numbers of women in their thirties and forties, who had either not met the right partner or were involved in their careers, had thought they’d “get around to it,” only to discover that time had run out, and fertility treatments have success rates that decrease dramatically as a woman ages. Devastated by the idea that they may have blown their chances for motherhood, they feel guilty because they had been enjoying their life as it was, on the assumption that they would be able to have a child later when they wanted one. They now find themselves frustrated and disappointed, and a little sheepish, feeling they have to apologize for their choice. Others are embarrassed to admit that if they had wanted a child, they might have remembered to do something about it. And then there is the silent minority: women who deliberately chose not to have children. Often they don’t admit openly to having made such a decision for fear that they will be judged as selfish or unnatural, or unfeminine, or even un-American. Accurate data on the percentage of women making this choice is unknown; however, the National Center of Health and Statistics confirms that 6.6 percent of women in 1995 declared themselves voluntarily childless, up from 2.4 percent in 1982. The term “childfree” has entered our vocabulary to reflect this lifestyle, and differentiate those who chose not to have children from those who had wanted children but have been unable to have them. Parents are rarely questioned about their reasons for choosing parenthood (or having parenthood choose them); however, those who choose the opposite often find themselves required, at one time or another, to defend their decision. When I interview people for my film, my first question is, “How is it that you don’t have children?” One woman said that it would be selfish of her to have her own when so many children already in the world need her help. Others say they don’t have the “motherhood gene” and without that overwhelming desire, it would be irresponsible to have a child simply because society expected it of them. Several women have careers they enjoy and stopping to have a family was a choice they didn’t want to make—foreseeing the tremendous difficulties of juggling responsible parenting with a demanding job. Having experienced an
unhappy or abusive childhood also turns many away from parenthood, and a few women who had been the eldest child in their own families and helped to raise their siblings, felt they had already “been there, done that.” The replies to my question are numerous and varied. However, sometimes the simple answer is that they didn’t want children. Just as there is a mysterious visceral urge that propels some to have children, there is also a contradictory and equally visceral urge that propels others not to. As I interview people for this project, I realize I am deliberately walking into a minefield. I’m treading on the often raw emotions of a silent but growing minority who feel marginalized because they have not chosen (or perhaps have not been able) to do what is expected of them. Many are also irritated by the assumption that they don’t like kids or are incapable of loving and supporting the children of siblings and friends. If we believe that being a parent is the toughest job in the world, then why do we also believe that everyone should do it? Can we respect not only those who cannot have children, but also those who make a personal choice not to take that well-traveled path? Of course people turn the questions back on me. When asked what happened after that Guy Fawkes night in England, I say that we named our daughter Frances, after my mother, and that she is buried in a tiny village near Oxford. I tell them I take big bunches of tiny white roses and rosemary to her grave whenever I can. I also tell them that I love my friends’ children, and all my nieces and nephews, and I spend as much time with them as I possibly can. My life is hardly childless. And I explain why, after having lost a child by chance, I am now remaining childless by choice. After the divorce, there was no chance of my having a child unless I chose the sperm-donor route. But I didn’t want an anonymous child, nor have I ever felt ready to adopt. Even more, I believed then, and still do, that it is selfish and unfair to intentionally raise a child alone. After six years, I met someone who already had children and didn’t want more. I chose to agree. I may end up regretting my decision. We’ll see. Talk to me again in ten years. ■
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fiction
Definition b y p hot og ra ph y
F
c h r i s t i n e by
j a c qu e l i n e
irst of all, ophthalmologists are surgeons; they’re doctors with M.D.s, and they can cut your eyes. They make the most money. Then there are optometrists—also doctors, but not with an M.D., and there’s no cutting. It used to be that optometrists were Jewish, and men, but now there are plenty of women. Also, Asians. Last—opticians. They grind lenses for eyeglasses, and, being grinders, not doctors, the money they make is not much. I give this information now, instead of later, because it could be important in a certain moment, and I’ll forget to mention it. Gloria, my sister, is an optometrist. She works at the Wal-Mart Vision Center in a part of Baltimore that’s not so nice. Highway ramps everywhere. Rowhouses, chain link fences, sullen dogs and people. The waterfronts are still dingy; poor people still live near them. You see industrial park after industrial park. She—Gloria—said to me once that “park” in this context is misleading. That is such an understatement. It’s not easy to explain, exactly, the things that happen, especially when they happen to you. Or even when they happen near you. I remember it was Michael’s idea to go to Gloria at the Wal-Mart. Michael’s our brother. He was shipping out in August and he needed new glasses, and he said he was through with Army doctors. Assholes, all of them. They never took his stress seriously—not the twitching that woke him at night, not the migraines, not the black and white spots before his eyes. Gloria does our eye exams for free. In the car, I said something to Michael about the gratis eye exam. That was what we argued about first. He had questions—angry questions—about the word gratis. What does gratis mean? Why use gratis when I mean free? How did I learn it? When I told him the word was from the Latin, forget it. He had a fit. Why would I use a Latin word that means exactly the same thing as the English word? I hit the steering wheel with both my hands, raised them in the air. My fingertips grazed the felt ceiling. It was too much. He is, often, too much. “Enough with the questions,” I yelled. I’d taught high school English for seven years before my children were born, so it shouldn’t have surprised him that I knew some Latin words. And then I had to hit the brakes hard to avoid rear-ending the car in front of me. That was our second argument: Michael yelling at me for my bad driving. “You could’ve killed us,” he shouted. “You could’ve killed them.” He pointed out the windshield. “You drive a car and you act like it’s no big deal, but it is a big deal because you could kill innocent people.” He got very hot about it. He stuttered a little, cracked his neck a few times, shook a twitch out of his left arm. And he wouldn’t look at me. We drove with no words at all until I parked. In the parking lot, there were trees with blossoms in full color. They were crape myrtles—the bright pink, not the white—and I said that I love
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crape myrtles, and then it started again. How did I know they were crape myrtles? Did I ever study trees? It’s hard to know how you know things. How did I know crape myrtles? I didn’t want to have words with him over trees; he’d be shipping out soon. But still, he kept asking questions like that, right into the heart of Wal-Mart. It wasn’t much, the Vision Center. Wedged between the Photo Drop-Off and Electronics, it was only a wall, plus a little. But the wall was the main thing. On it there were shelves of contact lens products. Rows of eyeglass frames. Chains for hanging eyeglasses around your neck. Near the door to my sister’s office stood a lazy, rotating display case of tinted lenses, for people who wanted to see the world in certain shades. I loved those lenses— round, curved, full moons in rose, blue, yellow, gray. One stool at the optician’s counter was empty; the other held a customer trying on glasses. Him, I remember well. He was fat, in a Santa way. Also, there was the tracheostomy; he spoke using a talkbox that he held to the hole in his neck. Now—some more terms. The trachea is the windpipe. A tracheotomy is an operation in which a surgeon cuts a hole in the windpipe; with the hole, air makes a safer, surer passage to the lungs. The hole itself is a tracheostomy. The patient with a tracheostomy is lucky because he can breathe; unlucky, because the air never reaches the voice box—the larynx— where it would mingle with words. No air, no sound. The customer held a talkbox to his neck, but talkbox is not the right term. Some people call it an artificial larynx. It brings air to the voice box, and in this way, the words have voice. The optician, a twiggy girl with black hair, called him Mr. Del Toro. Several times she asked him to repeat himself, and he didn’t seem to mind. Then she looked past him and asked if she could help us. Michael read her name tag. He said “Good morning” to her and used her name, Fatima, which he said like this: “fa-TEE-ma.” I called her “FAT-ih-ma” and told her we were there to see Gloria. She didn’t correct either one of us about her name. She only said that Gloria was dealing with a patient. I saw them, walking into my sister’s dark office. The patient wore a Wal-Mart apron and had a haircut like my mother’s, but she was younger than the hair. As the door closed, she blew a kiss to Mr. Del Toro, and he winked at her through empty frames. Michael and I stood and waited. With Michael, there is no small talk. He doesn’t know how to do it. His left wrist started to twitch, and then he stilled it. After a while, he said, “My punishment, for being the smart guy in the squad? They made me the RTO.” I didn’t know that term. He told me the RTO is the radio-telephone
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operator, and the radio-telephone weighs thirty-five pounds. He has to carry it everywhere they go, which means he carries thirty-five pounds more than the other guys. “It’s an antiquated piece of crap.” When he said “crap,” beads of spit flew from his lips. I wanted to be clear. “You’re the smartest guy on your squad?” “That’s not saying much,” he said. “So it’s an honor, then, to be the RTO?” “No, it’s a punishment. It’s always a punishment.” He wouldn’t look at me; something like shame came over him. I told him it was an important job, telling everybody what’s happening. “I carry that thing on my back,” he said. “Thirty-five pounds. And also my water, my food, my clothes, my weapons.” Still, I insisted, an honor. “Rosella,” he said. He sounded like our father. “How many miles have you marched across a desert?” I tried for a blank stare; I remember trying for that. “With sand flies in your clothes?” he continued. “With fifty-five pounds on your back? How many miles, Rose?” I asked him why, if he was the lifeline, was he in the line of fire? Why was he carrying weapons and shooting at the enemy? His look changed from anger to pity. “Rosella,” he said, again. A one-word sentence. “You want to think that I’m special or something, because, like, I’m your little brother. But you’re wrong.” I told him to stop talking to me like I was a child. Maybe I used the used the word condescend, because he got pissed off. He turned away from me, steaming, like he was about to take another fit. He tensed his fingers. He stretched his neck. His left eyelid twitched. He wanted to walk away from me, but there was nowhere to go. Taking a step back, he bumped into Mr. Del Toro, who dropped his talkbox on the
floor. He gave Michael a look to kill him. Michael picked up the talkbox, put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Sorry, man, really sorry.” Mr. Del Toro took the talkbox and turned his attention to Fatima. Michael scanned the saline solutions and re-wetting drops stacked on the wall. I tried to picture him on the radio-telephone, sending news of a horror. Would he use the Army codes, the jargon? Or, in the thickness of the fight, just plain words? Christ. My little brother Michael, calling in the war. Gloria’s office door opened. The patient walked out slowly. As Gloria followed, we could see her gentle face had turned to stone; her rosy skin was white. Everybody knew that something was wrong. Then her patient spun around and pointed her finger in Gloria’s face. “But you’re not a real doctor, are you?” she said. Gloria started to speak, but the lady came up into her face, very close. “You shut up,” the lady said. She said it again, louder. “YOU SHUT UP.” Mr. Del Toro came off his stool and rushed to her side, holding the talkbox against the hole in his throat. “What’s the matter, baby?” he asked. “That little girl says I have multiple sclerosis.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Michael tense up. His stance changed. He became alert. Watching. Ready. Gloria used her calm voice, but I could see clouds over her. She was very polite and called her patient Mrs. Del Toro and told her that nothing was a hundred percent. By all means, she should go to her family doctor and get tested. “Shut up, bitch,” said Mrs. Del Toro, her finger still in Gloria’s face. Then Michael stepped between them. He put his body between Gloria and the Del Toros. He used the palm of his hand to push the woman’s finger away from Gloria’s face. “That’s enough, now,” he said. He looked at her Wal-Mart name tag. “That’s enough now, Lydia.” continued on page 89
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A little Naughty...Very Nice! 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 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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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 . . .
911W. 36th Street • 410-889-0952 • www.dogwoodfoods.com
doubledutch boutique. moder n lines & indie designs apparel & accessories
dou b ledutch 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.
3616 Falls Road • 410-554-0055
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
Heavens to Betsy.
Treat yourself to a unique shopping experience in a newly renovated Victorian rowhouse. Soaps and candles with old-fashioned fragrances and handmade jewelry with vintage findings. A nostalgic environment perfect for small parties, bridal showers, book club meetings and more.
3602 Elm Avenue • 410-366-1530
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. 68
3555 Chestnut Ave • 410-662-9090 urbanite september 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 West 36th Street • 410-235-3442 • www.mapetiteshoe.com
Milagro.
Bringing you the best from around the globe; Mexican mirrors, Moroccan pottery, clothing from Nepal to spice up your wardrobe, jewelry and accessories. Art for you and your home culturally blended.
1005 West 36th Street • 410-235-3800
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. Offers breakfast and lunch in its new Café along with the old favorite fresh baked goods. Open M-F 6 to 6, Saturday 7-5.
Chestnut and 34th St. • 410-235-8852
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
Paradiso. An antique lover’s dream. Blending Old World elegance with vintage modern style. Exquisitive 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. Coming Fall 2006! 921 W. 36th Street • www.redtreebaltimore.com
The Pearl Gallery. The Pearl Gallery has been the place to go for unique decor and gift items. Specializing in Chinese antiques that range from gorgeous furnishings to carved wooden figures and stone statues. 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 s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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urbanite september 06
sustainable city
by nicky penttila
Lego Diplomacy How colored blocks are helping Maryland prepare for the local population boom
“Could I trade you?” Kirby Fowler, president of Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, held out some white Lego blocks toward Fern Dannis of the Maryland Association of Realtors. “Yes,” she said, “We need a lot more yellow in the city.” Hundreds of planners, developers, community activists, and politicians were not too old to play with blocks this summer. They had been invited to participate in Reality Check Plus, an exercise in mapping out how the state should deal with the explosive population and job growth it expects in the coming years. The “game” is to figure out where and how Maryland should distribute development over the next twenty-five years. Maryland is now the fifth most densely populated state, and it is growing. In the central Maryland region, which includes Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford, Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties, the headcount will swell by twenty percent—likely averaging roughly 27,600 people each year—and will reach five million by 2030, according to the state’s Department of Planning. Employment also is on the rise, from 1.4 million workers in 1969, to 2.5 million in 2001 to more than 3 million expected in the 2020s. With these changes come escalating development and serious questions over land use. “Fighting development has become a national pastime,”
says Edward McMahon, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., a national nonprofit devoted to research and education on land-use policy and practice. “Growth and change are inevitable, but the destruction of community character and natural resources that too often accompany growth is not. The real issue is not whether communities will grow, but how.” The problems arise, he notes, when a community doesn’t reach consensus on what kind of development it wants. That’s where the Reality Check Plus people come in. Reality Check is a “visioning” exercise, where the Legos stand in for people, housing, and jobs expected in the region. Participants are divided into groups of ten with diverse professions represented. Each group must decide how to grow and where, then place the plastic bricks on regional maps to reflect their consensus. The exercise is meant to make tangible the sheer amount of change that is coming to Maryland and to emphasize the urgent need for collaborative planning. The process is also meant to create communication across disciplines and to help people realize that seemingly at-odds professionals—like environmentalists and commercial developers—actually do agree on many things. Fueled by successful cooperation, the exercises’ organizers hope people continue to work together to make these first-draft ideas into solid landuse policies. Dru Schmidt-Perkins of 1000 Friends of Maryland is a cochair of the state’s Reality Check project, along with Christopher Kurz of Linden Associates and the Urban Land Institute’s Baltimore District Council and Dr. Gerrit Knaap of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at the University of Maryland. This triumvirate of statewide cochairs partnered with some 150 nonprofit, community, and private-sector groups that helped sponsor the series of four regional events, held during May and June. The combined sessions gathered more than 700 participants. The Central Maryland exercise was held at the Baltimore Convention Center on a sunny Friday in June. Businesspeople, civic activists and leaders, academics, and many planning and development professionals spent the day indoors wrestling with the region’s future. To represent the expected 409,000 new households, players had 200 white and 50 yellow Legos. The yellow Legos represented the twenty percent of housing designated “affordable.” For the 582,000 new jobs, 250 blue blocks. The ten participants at Table 20, including Fowler and Dannis, decided that jobs would drive their planning, and housing would follow jobs. They lay their blue Legos down on the map first and followed with the white and yellow plastic bricks. Most other tables used a more organic approach, laying down all colors region by region, mindful of saving the state’s remaining natural land and open w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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Page 1
Left: The participants at Table 20 trade Legos and map the region.
photo by Jason Okutake
Below: “We need a lot more yellow in the city,” one participant said about affordable housing.
photo by Jason Okutake
space and paying attention to which regions most desperately needed more jobs. While a few used the opportunity for some political networking, most took their task seriously. They also took the advice of Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who’d welcomed them that day with the plea to “put the blocks back in the city of Baltimore.” The city has the infrastructure to support hundreds of thousands more and the capacity to improve on it, he said. That matched one of the guiding principles articulated at nearly each table before blocking-in began: Fill in where services already exist.
Fighting development has become a national pastime. Another common theme: the need for affordable housing—or, “We need more yellows” in Legospeak. Schmidt-Perkins believes that signifies a giant shift in the debate. Not long ago, few people talked about affordable housing, which seemed to be defined in people’s heads as poor-people housing. But now that teachers, accountants, and nurses can’t afford to live in such places as Silver Spring and Columbia, the talk of more affordable housing has risen to the top. But the biggest common theme—and likely the most tangled issue—was transit. Most of the players assumed the Inter County Connector would be available, as well as the proposed red light rail line (running east-west) and an extension of the continued on page 91 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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PS-2006-0021
7/25/06
2:41 PM
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urbanite september 06
A Sense of Accomplishment
www.glenelg.org
by ellen lupton
illustration by Ruby Miller and Rainer Matzko-Sangster
out there
Internet Under Threat Ellen Lupton explains why we need to maintain net neutrality
In recent months, the term “network neutrality” has appeared with escalating frequency, both in the media and in Congress. What, exactly, does this term mean? And why should you care? Net neutrality is the idea that all traffic on the Internet is more or less equal. Proponents of net neutrality believe that the Web should be equally accessible to all users. A big company with a major Web site—such as Amazon—should not be able to pay its service provider—say, Verizon—for a faster connection (and thus a superior product for its potential customers) than that available to smaller companies. The Web should not have a special “fast lane” for high-paying corporate clients, and a slow lane for the everyday blogger, the mom-and-pop start-up, or the independent magazine. Furthermore, service providers shouldn’t be able to block access to sites they don’t like, or downgrade service to companies that compete with their best friends or favored business partners. Let’s say Verizon makes a deal with Wonder Muffin Inc. to guarantee them the world’s fastest, smoothest Internet connection, while giving a smaller competitor (let’s call it Thunder Muffin Ltd.) a slower connection and thus weaker services for its customers. Proponents of net neutrality consider this practice an abuse of the Internet as
a public “information highway” on which anyone can drive. Consider the physical roadways. When Wonder Muffin and Thunder Muffin load their shrinkwrapped treats onto ten-wheeler trucks each morning and ship them to grocery stores around the region, their drivers have access to all the same roads—indeed, they use the same roads we all travel as we go about our daily business. If Wonder Muffin was permitted to pay a little extra to use a special road, they would keep their product fresher by getting it to stores faster, gaining a market advantage. Verizon, Comcast, Bell South, and other telecoms have so far resisted the move to limit how they sell their services. An amendment designed to protect net neutrality was defeated June 28 in the U.S. Senate. The telecoms argue that because they are building the infrastructure needed to deliver Web content via broadband connections, they have the right to sell different grades of service to different customers. Advocates of net neutrality think that’s wrong. A huge company should, of course, pay for its portion of services, just as Wonder Muffin will pay more tolls and taxes for using I-95 than a smaller bakery with fewer trucks. But both companies should have access to the same basic quality of service.
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Open House
Notre Dame Preparatory School
Saturday, October 21, 2006 11 a.m.–1 p.m. Upper School 2:30–4 :30 p.m. Middle School
For more information, call 410-825-0590 or visit www.notredameprep.com GIRLS • GRADES 6–12 • INDEPENDENT, CATHOLIC, COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL
Sponsored by the School Sisters of Notre Dame
“The people here have brought out the best in me and shown me all I’m capable of doing.” – Jimmy Feketie, Grade 12 –
Open HOuse sunday, October 22 at 11:30 a.m.
LOwer scHOOL VIsITIng Days 8:15-9:30 a.m., november 9, December 14, January 11
THe BOys’ L aTIn scHOOL OF MaryL anD 8 2 2 We s t L a k e A v e n u e
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Baltimore, Maryland 21210
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K ~12 F O u n De D I n 18 4 4
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
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For information contact
G E N E RO D R I G U E Z 76
urbanite september 06
Office: 410-814-2447
Cell: 410-456-8760 Email: genesells@mris.com
illustration by Jay Miller
Net neutrality gives everyone equal access to the same technology.
The Internet is still a place where innovation can take place from the bottom up. Flickr.com, one of the world’s most active and innovative picturesharing sites, began as a two-person startup. Could Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake have created something so huge if their Internet access had been inferior to that of established hitters like Shutterfly or Kodak’s Ofoto? Meanwhile, huge entities such as Yahoo, Google, and Amazon became dominant by creating original services and by constantly responding to change. These very companies (who might be expected to enjoy using their big bucks to buy better service) are supporters of the net neutrality bill. They view the Internet as a public space where free speech and free competition deserve protection.
A libertarian breeze blows through the net neutrality movement, whose followers don’t fall into expected left/right political camps. They include the
The net neutrality movement includes the progressive advocacy engine MoveOn.org as well as conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition of America and Gun Owners of America. progressive advocacy engine MoveOn.org as well as conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition of
Find Your Pace . . .
Find More Space . . .
SURROUNDINGS”
—Ellen Lupton is graduate director for graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art and curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. You can read more of her thoughts on culture and design by visiting her blog design-your-life.org.
Find YOUR Place in the City . . .
William Carroll wcarroll@cbmove.com 410-978-3093
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage 312 Wyndhurst Avenue 410-433-7800
“ I N T I M AT E
America and Gun Owners of America. These unlikely bedfellows belong to SaveTheInternet.com, a consortium of net-neutrality supporters. They believe, along with countless concerned individuals, that the Internet is a public resource. Taxpayer dollars built it, and corporations shouldn’t control its destiny. The Internet is an open frontier, where every muffinmaker should have a chance to duke it out. To learn more, visit www.savetheinternet.com. ■
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• The Lab School methodology successfully educates intelligent children with learning differences. • Give your child the chance to experience Sally L. Smith’s Academic Club MethodologyTM and approach. • Prepare your child for the future. Over 90 percent of students educated by The Lab School go on to our country’s finest colleges and universities. Call Diane Potts at 410-735-0034 to arrange a visit to learn more about this rigorous scholastic, arts-based, multi-sensory program. ®
Baltimore Lab: a division of The Lab School of Washington 2220 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 www. labschool.org
Celebrating 45 years of women making a difference.
410-433-8880
www.mercyhighschool.com 1300 East Northern Parkway • Baltimore, MD 21239-1998
“Caribbean Pirate Night”
Starting September 22 every Friday night this fall is
Join us from 4-8 pm for feasting and fun featuring Maryland’s harvest prepared with Caribbean/Cajun Flair!
Mill Valley Garden & Farmer’s Market | , | -- | .-.
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urbanite september 06
7/26/06 9:09:42 AM
in review
NONFICTION The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home Karrie Jacobs; illustrations by Gary Panter Viking, 2006
LITERARY JOURNAL Barrelhouse Issue Three Barrelhouse, 2006
Barrelhouse, a new literary journal out of the Washington D.C., area, makes a big claim: it is “a literary magazine that bridges the gap between serious art and pop culture.” Let there be no mistake—that’s quite a large gap to bridge. On one side we have Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Cunningham, and Toni
Karrie Jacobs, founding editor of hip home-design magazine Dwell and a former guest editor of Urbanite, crisscrosses the United States in her VW convertible on a beguiling—and possibly quixotic— mission: to find a well-constructed, smartly designed, not-tiny house in a town she doesn’t hate. Oh, and for $100,000. If this house doesn’t exist, Jacobs figures she’ll find the right architect to build it for her. It’s a fun ride that Jacobs takes us on, from a hippie house-building camp in Vermont, to a subdivision of tire-and-dirt “earthships” outside Taos, New Mexico, to a modernist gem in a rundown neighborhood of Austin, Texas. Along the way, she meets renegade architects who think outside the (drab, vinyl-sided) box, creating sleek and livable houses at an affordable price. There is Rocio Romero, who built a house for her mother in Chile on a budget of $30,000, a house that she is recreating as a kit from her studio in Perryville, Missouri. There are the Anderson brothers, Peter and Mark, whose zebra-striped house with a rolling roof on Fox Island, Washington, sends a shiver down Jacobs’ spine with its monumental looks, spacious feel, and “extraordinary grace.” Of all the cool prototypes here, my favorite is Brett Zamore’s hybrid of two Southern vernacular forms, the shotgun (a narrow house with rooms laid in a row, back to front) and the dogtrot (a house with a central breezeway) fused into (what else?) the “shot-trot.” While he dreams up ways to bring great architecture to the masses, Zamore freelances for a conventional homebuilder. This sideline—which
some might consider heresy—gives him insight into why companies build dull houses: because even when packed with goodies like Viking ranges, they’re cheap and easy. Cheaper and easier than prefab, as many of the architects Jacobs meets have come to realize, the process of wood framing is so familiar to contractors and inspectors that anything else runs into logistical problems. Besides, if the quality of a new commercially built house leaves something to be desired, the builder can just add a little decorative trim or Spanish roof tiles for “curb appeal.” It will cost the builder far less than the clean look of modernism, which, with its lack of ornament, allows no room for error, especially when the parts of the house are prefabricated off-site. So, after putting 14,000 miles on her Volkswagen, does Jacobs find her perfect $100,000 house? Well, yes. And no. In the book’s conclusion she admits, with strained nonchalance, that she did buy a place in the midst of her journey: a studio apartment in Brooklyn. She still intends to build the Perfect House—a perfect A-frame—in the Catskills someday. I do not question Jacobs’ commitment to the ideal of high-quality housing for all, because it rings true on every page, and indeed helps make her such good company through most of the book. But as for her personal quest, Jacobs oversells it.
Morrison, while Stephen King and Anne Rice kick back with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Britney Spears on the opposite shore. The founding editors of Barrelhouse—Dave Housley, Mike Ingram, Joe Killiany, and Aaron Pease—have generated a not-so-new formula: The material in their journal is insightful while being sufficiently hip enough to make you believe that, yes, perhaps we can productively connect these dueling realms. Other journals (most are short-lived online mags) have tried this before, but Barrelhouse’s professional presentation and the quality of its material separate it from the rest of the bunch. A biannual journal, it features various genres of work (fiction, poetry, and art, as well as essays about popular culture) that the editors promise will be a “bonanza of Barrelhousey goodness.” Artwork is interspersed with the writing; the opening image of the latest issue, a black-and-white photograph of a young woman whose skin is decorated with ladybugs, is a startling but lovely way for the reader to enter the issue. The fiction in this issue is absorbing. In “Dot Dot Dot,” J. Chris Rock portrays a failing marriage with a protagonist who frets much but acts little. Edward Hardy’s “Car Seat” is an especially suspenseful tale of a weary young father who, while driving around town on a snowy night in a desperate attempt to lull his baby to sleep, encounters unexpected danger.
Some of the pieces challenge categorization and push the lines that define genres, like “Billets Doux,” by Wendy Wimmer, a short story told in snapshots of e-mail messages and BlackBerry screens; and the “Illustrated Story,” a regular feature in which an artist is asked to illustrate one of the stories from the Barrelhouse website. The most appealing piece in the issue is the essay “American Idolatry” by Dale Bridges, a hilarious but scathing perspective on American Idol as representative of all that’s wrong in the music industry today. Interviews with writer George Saunders and journalist and pop-culture guru Chuck Klosterman are both insightful and fun, and the poetry in this issue challenges any reader to dislike it: Who would, after all, not be enchanted by a quartet of poems inspired by Ed Asner? A lot of literary journals today complain that they cannot support themselves, that people are too busy reading John Grisham and watching The Apprentice to support and enjoy “good literature.” Despite being one of the newer journals on the scene, Barrelhouse—which delivers perceptive writing and art in a well-designed format—is unlikely to face that problem.
—Amanda Kolson Hurley is associate editor of Preservation magazine.
—Susan Muaddi Darraj is the managing editor of The Baltimore Review.
w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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urbanite september 06
in review
FICTION After This Alice McDermott Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
Untitled (Ricas y Famosas) by Daniela Rossell, courtesy of Greene Naftali Inc.
Sidestep the bluster surrounding the recent New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last twenty-five years, and surrender to the quiet mastery of Alice McDermott’s After This. Inexplicably missing from the aforementioned debate, this consummate prose stylist continues her eloquent distillation of the everyday in her new novel, which chronicles the ups and downs of a Long Island family from the late 1940s to the Vietnam War.
EXHIBIT Girls’ Night Out Contemporary Museum 410-783-5720 www.contemporary.org Accompanying catalog available at the museum
Girls’ Night Out is largely concerned with the image of women, fashioned by women. The curators— Contemporary Museum Executive Director Irene Hofmann and Orange County Museum of Art Deputy Director of Programs and Chief Curator Elizabeth Armstrong—have assembled an international and intergenerational group of
Spinsterish Mary sneaks out of her office to avoid strident, clingy Pauline, her colleague in the typing pool. She lunches alone at a diner sitting next to a stranger (“handsome enough”), and contemplates, like a pragmatic Virginia Woolf, the difficulty of simply getting through the hours. “And here she was past thirty, just out of church (a candle lit every lunch hour, still, although the war was over), and yearning now with every inch of herself to put her hand to the worn buckle at a stranger’s waist, a palm to his smooth belly.” Mary believes she might resign herself to the single life if only she could learn to suffocate desire and keep loneliness at bay. Fate surprises Mary, however, for she marries John Keane, that handsome-enough stranger. Together they have four children—children often babysat by the tart, maudlin, unmarried Pauline, still trailing in Mary’s wake, year after year, like seaweed snarled around an ankle, the two women bound together not by choice but by “habit and circumstance, obligation and guilt.” After Pauline’s visits to the Keanes, she returns to her solitary flat, to “the most terrible hours of any week, made worse now by the days she had spent in the busy household: the hours after sunset on a Sunday night, all her own usefulness temporarily extinguished, and the terror that good clothes, perfect stitches, the pursuit of just the right buttons usually kept at bay edging closer to the surface of things …” Pauline—condemned to sit down with her morsels of fancy-work, as it were—lives a life Mary narrowly missed by randomly choosing one diner stool over another. The Keane children ask their mother: Why do we have to put up with ‘Auntie’ Pauline? Because there is no merit, Mary tells them, in loving only the lovable.
The Keane marriage reveals the compromises made for companionship. “It was a balancing act, to hold off quarrel and worry, the coming years, the coming months, even tomorrow morning for just whatever time it took to finish a sandwich, to drink the coffee while it was still hot. Careful now.” The couple sees their flaws reflected in their children and hold grudges though they know they shouldn’t, human nature dictating that “fourteen years was no time at all in the life of an I told you so.” All the characteristics of McDermott’s prose sparkle here: the repetitions, the asides, the Irish rhythm of her sentences, her concern with the contradictory demands of the Catholic faith and modern life. Her narratives never charge ahead in a linear fashion; rather, they eddy like mountain streams, spiraling forward (after this comes that) and swirling back (before that came this). Her characters are more talkative than in her other works, though the ripples caused by their gestures and glances are often enough. After This is classic McDermott: a complement to her National Book Award winner Charming Billy, less singular than her tour-de-force At Weddings and Wakes, and more accessible than her experimental Child of My Heart. It celebrates the gift of existence while recognizing that real life is rarely extraordinary in the conventional sense, and rarely do we live the life we planned. Robert Frost once stated he could sum up everything that he learned about life in three words: “It goes on.” In After This, McDermott sieves the poetry from life’s relentless flow.
photographers and video artists, one that extends the institution’s interest in presenting contemporary art that cross-pollinates with the world of ideas— tracing the recent history of women wresting control of, say, not only the camera but the voyeur’s gaze, and revealing a good deal about modern notions of femininity in the process. Hofmann notes that the show’s “straightforward and unburdened” imagery suggests that sitting before a female photographer is different than posing for a man. Rineke Dijkstra, best known for her “bathing” portraits of teenaged girls on the beach, is represented here primarily by the piece The Buzzclub, Liverpool, England/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, Netherlands, a remarkable video that has the Dutch artist setting up her video camera in underage clubs in the titular cities and approaching patrons with a simple, “Will you dance for me?” Katy Grannan’s modus operandi is to place classified ads in small-town, blue-collar newspapers identifying herself as a female photographer and stating that she seeks “people for portraits.” From the self-selected pool of applicants, the artist chose young men and women who often elected to sit unclothed for the photographs. Grannan is able to use her trustworthiness to elicit an uncanny openness from her subjects, a Diane Arbus-like directness without the taint of the tawdry that often haunts Arbus’ work.
Perhaps it is the exhibition’s birthplace—it was organized by Hofmann and Armstrong when Hofmann was curator of contemporary art at the Orange County Museum of Art and has since traveled to five other galleries before landing in Baltimore—but the show is a terrific illustration of how the fine arts can reflect or presage bigger trends in pop culture. Programming on MTV, particularly shows aimed at young women, shares aesthetic DNA with several artists in Girls’ Night Out. The portraits and self-portraits that populate the Contemporary’s walls bring to mind MTV’s clean-looking, supersaturated Laguna Beach, providing a pleasant mix of highfalutin issues of gender married with popular examinations of feminine beauty, fame, image, and identity. Photographer Daniela Rossell’s brilliant documents of Mexico City’s nouveau riche underline this by illustrating the excess that feeds My Super Sweet 16, the aforementioned cable network’s offering that showcases teens demanding (and receiving) birthday parties that soar into the middle six-figures. Girls’ Night Out confidently harnesses the voyeur’s gaze, demonstrating the potent marriage of fine arts and popular culture.
—Susan McCallum-Smith is Urbanite’s literary editor.
—Bill Sebring is senior editor of Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m s e p t e m b e r 0 6
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Canton Waterfront
1400 Lancaster, Penthouse 1002
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.
Make this luxury penthouse with beautiful water view in Inner Harbor East your city getaway! 1800+ sqft, 2BR, 2.5BA, Master bath with marble tile and vanity, walk in closets, 2 balconies, floor to ceiling windows, tile floors, custom kitchen with granite countertops & stainless steel appliances, fireplace, 2 secure parking spaces & 24hour security. Visit baltimoreshowcase.com for virtual tour.
Fells Point
704 Milton
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.
This home Features high-end appliances, sought-after location, smart design & fine finishes. Luxury living at its best! 3500sqft+, heavy duty elevator, 2 Mstrs, 10ft ceil, 2 car garage, tray ceilings, attention to detail, cntrl vac, premium intercom, high-end baths, wood floors & large decks. Buyer pays transfers, 5 year tax credit! 4 units available - Visit baltimoreshowcase.com for virtual tour.
Canton
808 Glover Street
3303 Elliott Street
Exquisite & grand 3 level Canton oasis ready for you to make home! Enter to a sunken Living room w/ built-ins, rich moldings, wainscoting & a designer’s touch! The gourmet kitchen is entertainers dream w/ glazed cabinets, stainless, granite & a dumbwaiter w/ service to the 3rd level wet bar, entertainment area. Enjoy the 2 tier decks w/ private hot-tub & great city views. Visit baltimoreshoecase.com for virtual tour.
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 650k. Visit baltimoreshowcase.com
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 walkin closets, balcony and soaking tub, 2.5 baths, granite counters in large kitchen. Nestled on the edge of Fells Point and Canton,. Offered at $779,000. Visit baltimoreshowcase.com.
urbanite september 06
Canton
107 Ann Street
Canton
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Inner Harbor East
2327 Boston Street #16
Canton Cove Waterfront 2901 Boston Street, Unit 316
Zen-like Canton waterfront residence with a panorama that will not fail to impress. Distinctive by design 18ft walls of glass & 2 expansive balconies provide an awe-inspiring residence perfect for your exciting lifestyle. Enjoy your privacy w/24hr front desk/security. Storage unit & 2 private parking spaces included (1 garage space). Additional storage & studio unit available.
what i’m reading
W
hen Tobias Wolff confessed in his smashing 1989 childhood memoir This Boy’s Life that “the subject of bicycles turned us into enemies,” my heart leapt with empathy over his “bicycle-less” condition, inflicted on him by a heartless mother. My father promised me a bicycle for my tenth birthday. On my seventh, eighth, and ninth birthdays, I greeted other gifts with the lukewarm applause reserved for warm-up acts. By the time I crossed into double-digits, however, he’d decided that I’d outgrow a new bike too fast and offered instead my big brother’s old racer, despite the fact I couldn’t reach the pedals and the saddle threatened to delay puberty indefinitely. My brother and my dad were serious cyclists—all bulging calves, spandex, and chamois-leather-clad bums—whereas I aspired to wheelie to The Sweetie Shop and back, not win the Tour de France. Periodically my husband offers to buy me one, but I always (stoically) refuse. It’s an old grievance that sits comfortably on me after all these years—I’m loathe to part with it. Wolff ’s single-minded pursuit of scout badges also earned my admiration. I lasted only four weeks as a Brownie before being thrown out for insubordination. I’d expected an endless round of pow-wows and sausages (and, like Wolff, I admit to having been beguiled by the uniform, with its subtle Fascisti styling) but all I seemed to do was perpetually bandage Wendy MacIntyre’s left elbow. Talking of scouts, I doubt Scout in 1960’s To Kill a Mockingbird had a bike, but she did have Atticus Finch for a pa and I bet he’d have bought
by susan mccallum-smith
her a beaut if it hadn’t been the Depression. Harper Lee’s first book is so darned good (and gets better with every subsequent read) that she never bothered writing a second. (I admire someone who knows to quit when she’s ahead.) Scout’s plucky predecessor Huck Finn is another kid in britches worth spending time with at regular intervals. The social satire and gleeful exuberance of Mark Twain’s 1884 classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain irresistible and relevant. To see the world through a child’s eyes requires the adult writer to substantially change his or her approach to the craft, which often results in sharper, more authentic storytelling. Kids usually treat sentences as carriers of information rather than opportunities for showing off; therefore, adult authors writing from the point of view of a child tend to adopt straightforward speech patterns (subject–verb–object) and to employ the imaginative metaphors used by kids, whose descriptive powers haven’t yet been polluted by cliché. Furthermore, the recognition of the tendency of youngsters to be absolutely “in the moment,” combined with their obsession with plot, ensures frequent dialogue-heavy scenes that unfold at a rapid clip. My emergency read at the moment, should a book by a grown-up about grown-ups prove too yawningly self-absorbed and soporific, is 1995’s The Golden Compass, the first novel in Philip Pullman’s young-adult trilogy His Dark Materials, where I can be assured that something will happen next.
Two other worthy modern additions to the oeuvre of adults writing from the point of view of children are Roddy Doyle’s 1993 tragicomedy Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and the terrific new release Black Swan Green by David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame. Both books chart the disintegration of a family from the point of view of a child, a clear-eyed witness to the often baffling and contradictory behavior of adults. The specificity of their settings (Ireland in the 1960s and England during the Falklands War, respectively) adds considerable depth and character without hindering their universal appeal; we all remember the fear of being different, the casual cruelty of friends, the daily trial of the classroom, the tribulation of first love. Although both these books are hilarious, we can’t help but filter the unfolding events through a scrim of melancholy because we are more worldly than their innocent and unsuspecting protagonists. Why is it so difficult to write of our adult selves in the same honest way that we can write about childhood? As we age, do we become more wily and evasive? Does the clarity of our perceptions become muddied by habit, cynicism, and regret? I guess it’s easier to admit to feeling dazed and confused as a child, than to admit to feeling dazed and confused this morning. ■ —Susan McCallum-Smith is Urbanite’s literary editor.
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Marriage Works continued from page 61
A staff person from Baltimore Building Strong Families saw them walking down the streets of Baltimore City. Amber was pregnant. The staff person pulled over, jumped out of his car, and went over to talk to them about the program. “You don’t do that in the ‘hood,” Paul laughs. “But that was a blessing.” Amber and Paul are planning to move to Atlanta in this month. They’re working on lining up good jobs and getting ready for a fresh start. “We always talk about getting married,” Paul says. “We talk about when we’re going to do it. But we want to be financially stable first—jobs, cars.” “Our grandparents were okay getting married and living with family,” Amber says. “We want our own place. Right now we’re living with his mother. We’re tired of living with other people. If the kids mess the place up, I want it to be our place.” Regarding the obstacles to getting married, Paul says, “The jobs are harder to work out than the relationship. If you’ve got kids, you’ve got to have a job. That’s your main responsibility. But I’m going to propose before the end of the year.” Both agree they never thought they’d get married to anyone. Amber says, “My friend just got married. She’s 25. It’s going good. But you can’t say what will happen in the long run.” Amber pauses. “We met, and I was like ‘This is someone I could be with for the rest of my life. Why not try it? If it doesn’t go right …’” She shrugs. “We always find a way to work situations out,” Paul says. “[Baltimore Building Strong Families] is teaching us how to work it out if the bad things happen.”
“The diversion of funds from poverty-fighting programs (such as job training or food stamps) into pro-marriage media campaigns and incentives eclipses the real needs of Americans in poverty.” Amber agrees. “It helps us in the long run to know how to talk to each other. Instead of saying ‘Get that,’ like I was his mother, now I say ‘Can you get that?’” “Being married,” Paul says, “is like you all are one person. You’re looking out for each other; you’re not going anywhere. I told her, ‘I’ve got to see you every morning.’” “My grandparents seemed to have a good marriage,” Amber says. “I lived with them until they passed away. They looked out for each other. If one couldn’t do it, the other one was there.” She hesitates. “You get more respect married. If he got sick, and I went to the hospital, they might not tell me as much because I’m not the wife.” Amber and Paul look at the “Marriage Works” material and consider the information about increased health and earnings and success for the children. “How can you say married people live longer?” Amber asks. “Anybody could go today or tomorrow.” Angela, another Baltimore resident, is 25 years old. She got pregnant with her daughter after dating Frank for a few months. Three and a half years later, she and Frank are living together and committed to each other, but they have no plans to marry. “When I got pregnant, there was pressure from family to get married,” she says. “We felt then as we do now that it wasn’t a necessary step to make our family work.”
Angela had worked at daycare centers and as a nanny. She was comfortable around children but unprepared for how hard motherhood initially was. “I had postpartum depression, and I didn’t know it. Frank got pushed to the side and had an affair. When my daughter was 8 months old, she and I moved out.” Angela and Frank did get back together. “It’s something we’re still working on,” she says. “He’s still there dealing with it, and I’m still there dealing with it. The affair wasn’t my fault or my responsibility, but I understand why he did what he did. It made me take a look at what I was doing to my life. I wanted everything to be so perfect for my daughter, because she didn’t ask to be here. I still don’t know what’s right for my daughter and Frank and me, but we’ll keep trying until we figure it out. Marriage won’t fix it.” Angela says that marriage always seems like the next step, “something you do when you hit a dull spot,” she says. “If I ever get married, it will be us saying, ‘No matter who he becomes, no matter who she becomes, we’ll be together.’ In theory, I want marriage for myself. Of course I want to be in a place where I feel that I can accept another person fully. But marriage won’t provide something in a relationship that wasn’t already there. “Frank feels like we are already married, and I guess I feel the same way. But we’re not because I can’t make that commitment for a lifetime, and I don’t think he can either. We’re still learning how to communicate. It would mean more to me if he acknowledged how far we’ve come than if he proposed.” Angela thinks about the “Marriage Works” campaign. “[Politicians] haven’t been able to do much about poverty and AIDS. So they’re like, ‘Let’s try this.’ Plus it has a nice religious spin. People like to believe in a fairytale to get them through the day. Instead of addressing poverty, just get married and it will be okay. But it just presents a new set of problems. They should talk about what marriage is. ‘Marriage Works’ doesn’t address all the underlying issues. There are too many issues to promote it as a safe haven. It’s like ‘Really? This is what you’ve gone to? You’re trying to fix it all with this? Okay. Good luck.’”
P
aul and Amber and Angela and Frank reflect a general shift in how we think about marriage in this country. “Fifty years ago,” Cherlin says, “you got married very early and then did the other things to make yourself an adult. Now you do everything else first and marriage last. Marriage used to be the foundation of being an adult; now it’s the capstone, the last brick in place. Both the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy have postponed marriage, but the wealthy have also postponed having kids; the low-income population has not. The model they see is to have their kids soon and get married much later, if ever.” Since there are many more questions than answers at this point about what this shift means, and careful, reasonable people are coming to dramatically different conclusions, the best course seems to be more research. Cherlin, a skeptic when it comes to marriage promotion, supports funding marriage-promotion studies. “You randomly offer services to half of married couples who, say, come in for family planning advice. You work really hard to design a relationshipskills class in a way that makes a difference. Then you come back in a year or two and see if the couples are still married. That’s expensive to do on a large scale, but I think it’s worth doing.” Cherlin stops and thinks. “What I don’t think is worth doing is billboards and advertising campaigns and school education programs. We don’t know if marriage promotion works, but it is worth spending some money to find out.” ■
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Girls Boarding and Day School Grades 9-12 Now offering the
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Definition continued from page 67 Mr. Del Toro grabbed Michael’s arm and pulled it. Michael bumped into the display of tinted lenses, and the lenses fell, scattering across the floor. Perfect blots of color clattered across the dull linoleum. Michael pulled his arm out of Mr. Del Toro’s grip. Mr. Del Toro turned his hand into a fist and tried to punch him. But Michael blocked the punch with his own hand. “Relax,” he said, “relax, man.” By now, Fatima had lifted the phone. “Put it down, Fa-TEE-ma,” he said. “Don’t call security.” He still held Mr. Del Toro’s fist in his hand. “We don’t need security, Fa-TEE-ma. We’re all right here. Aren’t we, man? Aren’t we all right?” Slowly, he lowered his own hand and Mr. Del Toro’s. Fatima put down the phone. Lydia slumped to the floor and cried. “She sees that disease in my eyes.” “Corazon,” her husband said, and he slumped down beside her. “She’s not a real doctor.” Lydia looked around wildly. “Baby, I can’t see,” she said. He put his talkbox on the floor, then put his arms around her, his fat Santa arms. He said nothing, just held her. Gloria kneeled down and opened up her hand to reveal a contact lens case. “You can’t see,” she told Lydia, “because you forgot to put your lenses back in.” As Lydia tried to put in her lenses, her hand trembled so much she couldn’t do it. So Gloria did it for her—the three of them kneeling on the floor, passersby stepping around them. Gloria’s fingers were soft, and pink, scrubbed clean. When she held the lens on her fingertip against the light, her skin was almost translucent. She put the lens on Lydia’s eye, easy. She did it again with the other. Michael helped Fatima pick up the tinted lenses. I didn’t know what to do. I watched, the only person standing, and Michael looked up at me.
STILL LOOKING
FOR A SCHOOL AS UNIQUE AS YOUR CHILD? COME VISIT THE
“The thing I didn’t tell you,” he said, “is the radio invites death.” I don’t remember what I said. He carried on: “If you were the enemy, who would you aim for? We call the radio the death-stick.” Death-stick can mean a few things. It can mean cigarette. It can refer to a certain kind of steel-tipped hammer. Also, apparently, it is the radio-telephone in war. The Del Toros left. Gloria stood up and smoothed out her pants. It was the saddest thing, the way she smoothed out her pants. Michael put his arms around her. He didn’t say much, only called her “Sis,” and said, “It’s your job.” He kept his arms around her until her storm passed. I should have done that, but she’s the tender one, and he’s the sentimental one. I’m something else. Instead, I sat down with Fatima and picked up the last lens. I don’t remember the color exactly. I held it in my palm and looked at it, how the light hit it, how it curved, how it tinted the skin of my palm. The rim was hard and crisp, definite. The lens was not heavy; it was very, very light. Since then, I’ve tried to picture Michael—over there, in the war—but I can’t. I can’t picture him in a desert—can’t picture him marching, can’t picture him inviting death. I don’t understand how he’s supposed to be both in the war and radio it in. I have no idea what a radio-telephone looks like. All I know is how that tinted lens felt in my palm. I know it exactly. ■ —Christine Grillo lives and teaches in Baltimore.“Definition” is one of twelve stories in a collection tentatively titled Thanksgiving and Other Meals. Recently, other stories from the collection have been published in The Southern Review and LIT.
Celebrating the Student: A Waldorf High School for Baltimore SEPTEMBER 16 TH -17 TH
A n i n - d e p t h i n t r o d u c t i o n to Waldorf High School Education for prospective parents and students. (see website for details)
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7/17/06 12:27:31 PM
Lego Diplomacy continued from page 73
photo by Mitro Hood
Below and right: On a sunny day this summer, many of Baltimore’s civic and business leaders met indoors at the Baltimore Convention Center to plan for Maryland’s projected growth.
Washington metro’s green line to BWI (a stop on Baltimore’s light rail). They hoped that MARC could be expanded and better connected with light rail and with Baltimore’s and D.C.’s local routes. All are necessary, all are in deep dispute, and none is far off the blueprint yet. And roads, the sessions showed, aren’t the answer. In all the regional exercises, “no one ever said we need another highway,” says SchmidtPerkins. “Generally, each table avoided sprawl, and all of the tables placed significant density in areas of existing infrastructure,” says Bryce Turner of ULI-Baltimore and a cochair of the Central Maryland Region’s event. The true test will be whether they will now play as well with each other on real-world land-use and zoning issues. “For so long we’ve been fighting each other,” Schmidt-Perkins told the players at the Central Maryland session. “It’s been a huge time-sink and we don’t have a lot to show for it.” The price of failure? More of the same—a steady sprawl into the state’s green spaces and farmland, with the potential to erode more of the watershed that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. The event organizers will now take the combined vision of the hundreds of planners-for-a-day and translate it into planning policy. In the coming months, they will do outreach to county officials and city council members, whose sparse attendance suggested they might not have realized that land issues will be on the agenda for many residents
in the next elections. They’ll also seek the buy-in of thousands more, especially local and neighborhood leaders, who weren’t as much in evidence at the critical Central Maryland exercise. They may hold additional mini-events at churches or with other social and neighborhood groups to get more people at the grassroots level on-board. Later this month, Reality Check Plus will release its Blueprint for a Prosperous Maryland, summarizing the results from all four exercises, distilling the consensus on planning principles, and offering participants’ suggestions for potential tools and incentives that could help realize this vision. “We need to get significant consensus, keep expanding our reach, get people involved, fired up, and making a difference,” says Turner. “We need a wide mix of people who, now that they are involved, want to do more. It’s not easy, but it’s growing more and more critical. And these events show consensus can actually happen.” Realizing that the participants across the table are people too, and that you agree with them more than you disagree with them, is an important first step. As is the idea that to make a workable state, you may have to trade some of your Legos. ■
photo by Mitro Hood
The price of failure? More of the same—a steady sprawl into the state’s green spaces and farmland, with the potential to erode more of the watershed that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay.
—Nicky Penttila, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, is now at work on her second novel.
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Start with us today. www.KathyMerz.com Long & Foster Real Estate 1210 Light Street Baltimore MD 21230 Office: 410-727-4644
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Page 1
resources
Humor Book for Those Who Hesitate to Procreate by author Ellen Metter and illustrator Loretta Gomez (Browser Press, 2001).
62 By Chance or By Choice Some recent books about living without children are: Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children by Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Miramax Books, 2002); Women Without Children: Nurturing Lives by Yvonne Marie Vissing (Rutgers University Press, 2002); The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today by Madelyn Cain (Perseus Books Group, 2002); and Cheerfully Childless: The
71 Lego Diplomacy Search for “Reality Check” on the website for the Urban Land Institute (www.uli.org) for more information about the program and how it is being used around the country. The website for Maryland’s Reality Check Plus (www.realitycheckmaryland.org) contains state and federal statistics on how Maryland is expected to grow in the next thirty or so years. That website will publish the Reality Check Blueprint for a Prosperous Maryland, which is “a comprehensive report on the results of the statewide visioning effort, the implications of Maryland’s growth, and potential implementation tools.” The report will be released September 26.
85 What I’m Reading Our literary editor included the following books in this month’s column: This Boy’s Life: A Memoir by Tobias Wolff (Grove Press, 1989); To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (originally published in 1960, reprint by HarperCollins, 1993); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (originally published in 1884, reprint by Penguin Classics, 2002); The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (originally published in 1995, reprint by Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1996); Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha By Roddy Doyle (originally published in 1993, reprint by Penguin, 1995); and Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Random House, 2006).
photo by Ethan Cook
33 Meat and Greet Binkert’s meats can be found at Mueller’s Delicatessen (7207 Harford Road; 410-444-4860), The Old World Delicatessen (9828 Liberty Road; 410655-5157), and, of course, at Binkert’s Meats (8805 Philadelphia Road; 410-687-5959). Writer Mary K. Zajac suggests some other authentic ethnic sausage-makers in Baltimore. Krakus Deli (1737 Fleet Street; 410-732-7533) offers six varieties of Polish kielbasa. Mastellone Deli & Wine Shop in Parkville (7212 Harford Road; 410-444-5433), now owned by DiPasquale’s Italian Marketplace (3700 Gough Street; 410-276-6787), sells the same spicy and mild Italian salsiccia it did when Andrea and Margaret Mastellone owned the business. And you can find house-made longanisa mexicana, a spicy Mexican sausage traditionally served with eggs and beans, at La Guadalupana Tienda y Restaurante (500 South Wolfe Street, 410-276-2700).
To read about this greenhab in Fells Point, see page 46.
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we look great from every angle
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Kerry Dunnington
urbanite marketplace
Private Home Caterer Menu and Recipe Developer
construction to enhance the value and beauty of your home...
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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. Walbrook Mill & Lumber Co 2636 W. North Ave 410 462-2200 www.walbrooklumber.com
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MIM
On Fire!
Contemporary enameling showcasing 40 artists.
Juried by Linda Darty Open Reception: A Potluck Dinner & Slide Presentation with the artist, Linda Darty, Saturday, September 9, 7:30 pm.
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Feed Your Heart 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. Women’s Growth Center Since 1973 5209 York Road #B12 410-532-2GROW (2476) By Appointment Only
Bikram Yoga
THE ORIGINAL “HOT YOGA” Beginners Welcome in All Classes New Students: $20 for One Week of Classes VOTED “BEST YOGA STUDIO” By Baltimore Magazine 2003.
Yorktowne Plaza Shopping Center 40 Cranbrook Road in Cockeysville
410-683-YOGA www.bikramyogabaltimore.com
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.
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NEOPOL Baltimore’s ONLY smokery, specializing in smoked seafood and meats, savory cheese pies, gourmet foods, smoked seasoning salts and chef’s supplies. Belvedere Square Marketplace, 529 E. Belvedere Square
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Buy premium quality seafood DIRECT FROM THE MANUFACTURER!
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Explore the art of children’s story writing, fiction writing, or memoir. For info, times, & reservations call (410) 444-4440 or visit www.redcanoe.bz 4337 Harford Rd. Baltimore, MD 21214
Framing in Baltimore for over 20 years.
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The Center for Italian Studies
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eye to eye
John Ruppert’s chain link sculptures have an organic presence that makes this very unnatural material seem as though it has grown effortlessly out of its environment. The artist feels that “context is critical to these sculptures. In an outdoor setting, the sculptures act as a monitor of the surroundings; interacting with each other and the various weather and light conditions.”
Valley Orbs
—Alex Castro
aluminum and steel chain link fabric, stainless
John Ruppert Fields Sculpture Park at Omi International Arts Center, NY 2004 to present steel, and zip ties 12 ft x 11 ft x 11 ft (each)
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