from craftsteak to heavy seas
fall arts guide
the vanishing grocery store
september 2012  no. 99
seven ways
to bring healthy food to Baltimore
URBANITE PROJECT 2012 also inside
The Missing: Can Baltimore schools find a better way to keep kids in class?
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this month
#99 September 2012
features
34
32 keynote The Firestarter by Michael Corbin Education activist Jonathan Kozol on standardized testing, vouchers, and the “calamity of inner city schools” about the cover:
34
Illustration by Kristian Bjørnard;
feature The Missing
“My first direction for our ‘healthy food’ issue was an apple being revealed from an orange peel, but it just so happens that that idea was already used for an older Urbanite cover. Instead, I thought I’d go for something more ‘graphic design-y.’ What is more design-y than a freak apple-orange hybrid, you ask? A big green silhouette of the city covered in circles and text, of course! Fill those circles with excerpts from the Urbanite Project 2012: Healthy Food Challenge finalists, and there you go, you have yourself a cover. As circles are arguably the best elementary geometric shape at a designer’s disposal, I also made use of them throughout the Fall Arts Guide. This is known in the biz as ‘consistency.’”
by Anne Haddad Can Baltimore schools find a better way to keep kids in class?
43 urbanite project 2012 Healthy Food Challenge Finalists Seven ways to bring healthy food to Baltimore
25
departments 9 11 15 19 21 ——
Editor’s Note What You’re Saying What You’re Writing Don’t Miss The Goods
baltimore observed
25
The Vanishing Grocery Store
by Peter Beilenson, MD, MPH, and Patrick A. McGuire In a city of food deserts, where have all the supermarkets gone?
29 Education 59
—— food + drink 53
Heavy Hitter
by Martha Thomas Matt Seeber is hoping to change the way people see the humble alehouse.
on the air
Urbanite on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM September 8: Truancy in Baltimore schools September 12: Peter Beilenson, MD, MPH, and Patrick A. McGuire on their new book, Tapping Into The Wire September 27: Urbanite Project 2012: Healthy Food Challenge Finalists
56 Dining Review 57 Wine & Spirits
—— arts + culture 59
Fall Arts Guide
by Urbanite Staff A filmmaker, a musician, a dancer, a couple of artists, a MICA provost, and a BRO tell you what you should check out this fall.
—— 70 Eye to Eye Urbanite #99 september 2012 7
issue 99: september 2012 publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com executive editor Rebecca Messner Rebecca@urbanitebaltimore.com guest editor Marianne Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com digital media editors Cassie Paton Cassie@urbanitebaltimore.com Andrew Zaleski Andrew@urbanitebaltimore.com editor-at-large David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com online editors food/drink: Tracey Middlekauff Tracey@urbanitebaltimore.com arts/culture: Cara Ober Cara@urbanitebaltimore.com, proofreader Marianne Amoss contributing writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Heather Dewar, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Michelle Gienow, Clinton Macsherry, Richard O’Mara, Robin T. Reid, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Baynard Woods, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac
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editorial interns Lawrence Burney, Rebecca Kirkman, Anna Walsh production manager Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com graphic designer Kristian Bjørnard production intern Vanessa Reyes staff photographer J.M. Giordano Joe@urbanitebaltimore.com photographer intern Leah Daniels senior account executive Freda Ferguson Freda@urbanitebaltimore.com sales marketing associate Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com sales/marketing intern Laura Klipp bookkeeper/distribution coordinator Michelle Miller Michelle@urbanitebaltimore.com creative director emeritus Alex Castro founder Laurel Harris Durenberger — Advertising/Editorial/Business Offices 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, md 21211 phone: 410-243-2050; fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily share the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2012, Urbanite llc. All rights reserved. Urbanite (issn 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, md 21211. Urbanite is a certified Minority Business Enterprise.
bottom, Middle and Rebecca Messner Photo by Leah Daniels; top photo courtesy of Horizon Foundation
contributors Dr. Peter Beilenson is currently the Howard County Health Officer, where he has been charged by County Executive Ken Ulman with developing the model public health program in the state. Prior to this, Dr. Beilenson served from 1992 to 2005 as the Baltimore City Health Commissioner, where he implemented a large-scale needle exchange program and a successful childhood vaccine initiative and dramatically expanded and enhanced the drug treatment system in the city. Dr. Beilenson resides with his wife, Chris, and his two youngest children in the Cedarcroft neighborhood of Baltimore City. An excerpt from his book Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis appears on page 25.
Originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, photography intern Leah Daniels has an undergraduate degree in art education from Marywood University. She is now working toward an MFA in photographic and electronic media at Maryland Institute College of Art. Daniels says her Urbanite internship has encouraged her to learn more about her new city and its residents: “I was honestly drawn to Urbanite’s focus on local trends, people, and events, but I was especially drawn to their intense focus on giving local artists exposure.” Daniels’ portraits of members of the local arts and culture scene appear on page 59; her photography also appears in The Goods and the Food & Drink section (p. 21 and 56).
Editorial intern Anna Walsh is a senior at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she’s majoring in professional writing and minoring in history. A Howard County native, she studied abroad last semester in Prague, where she wrote for an online classical arts magazine. At CMU’s student newspaper, The Tartan, she serves as copy editor and staff writer, among other roles. For this issue, Walsh contributed research to the arts guide (p. 59) and wrote Don’t Miss and The Goods (p. 19 and 21). Walsh says she’s a longtime fan of Urbanite; she even interned in Urbanite’s sales/marketing department as a high school senior. “So when I decided that I wanted to intern in Maryland this summer, Urbanite was naturally one of my first choices.”
editor’s note
Rebecca messner
when we launched Urbanite Project 2012: Healthy Food Challenge back in March, we posed this question to the masses: How can we make Baltimore healthier? We overwhelmed you with depressing statistics (Forty percent of the city is overweight or obese! A full 1/3 of the population is on food stamps! Twenty percent of all city land is a food desert!), and then asked for your brain-shatteringly innovative ideas. Of the fifty-four submissions we received, no two looked alike. Aesthetically, some are extra impressive, with fancy graphic design and printing that give away a familiarity with RFPs (or requests for proposals, which are often used to guide design competitions). Others more closely resemble science fair projects—cut-and-pasted, hand-drawn photos printed on printer paper. And to the credit of our jury—which included Baltimore Food Policy Director Holly Freishtat; Land of Kush founder Gregory Brown; Dogwood Restaurant founder Galen Sampson; Jeremy Gunderson, communications manager of the Maryland Highway Safety Office; and Jennifer Goold, executive director of the Neighborhood Design Center—the finalists (on p. 43) strike the perfect balance between creativity and practicality. These are ideas that will actually make an impact on the food landscape of Baltimore. One proposal harnesses the rich cultural traditions of recent refugees to reclaim an empty lot as an urban garden. Another highlights a partnership between an existing urban farm and its neighboring corner store. One repurposes an old school bus to create a culinary classroom on wheels. Thanks to a generous grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, our cover story, “The Missing,” (p. 34) by Anne Haddad, also focuses on solving a complex problem from the ground up. The story takes a hard look at chronic absence in city schools. Who’s to blame for the attendance problem—the student that gave up on school, or the school that gave up on the student? Haddad meets people who are trying to break this cycle of academic failure, like Deidre Reeder, who, after struggling with truancy herself in high school, now makes it her personal goal to make sure every kid at Franklin Square Elementary-Middle School can get to class, even if it means driving to pick them up herself. To add some national perspective to this issue, Urbanite contributor Michael Corbin interviews urban education expert Jonathan Kozol, whose latest book, Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children In America , explores the impact of education long after graduation. September’s return to the classroom means it’s also time for our annual Fall Arts Guide (p. 59). This year, we decided to hand the power of curation to Baltimore’s real scene setters: We asked some of this town’s most influential artists to tell us what they’re looking forward to this fall—and what you shouldn’t miss. And our own influential artist, Cara Ober, gives you an inside look at the new Contemporary Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Elsewhere in this issue, we return to the issue of food deserts. In an excerpt from their new book, Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis on page 25, Peter Beilenson and Patrick A. McGuire tell the true story of the Super Pride supermarket chain. Once the largest African Americanowned supermarket chain in the country, it went out of business more than a decade ago, leaving abandoned shells of grocery stores in its wake—and likely contributing to this city’s food desert problem. Like truancy, and any other major issue affecting Baltimore, food deserts won’t disappear overnight. But by shedding light on innovative ideas like these, we hope to see—and be a part of—the positive progress that makes lasting change.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 9
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what you’re saying Dan Deacon’s america aug ust 2012
Mak ing sense of the farM
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no. 98
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Laugh out loud Re: “On the Spot,” August issue i recently read the article by Marianne Amoss regarding her experience with the Baltimore Improv Group. I noticed that she mentioned there are smaller standalone troupes in Baltimore that are unaffiliated with BIG. I run one of them. Drop Three has been around since 2007, when we were formed after the Early Monday Morning Show improv troupe disbanded after a successful eight-year run. One of the beautiful things about improv is that it is such an open art form. For instance, Drop Three is a short form improv troupe, and we also often have sketches in our shows so that we are more of a combination of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Saturday Night Live . If Ms. Amoss would be interested we would love to show her another side of improv and show how one of those small standalone troupes works to carve out our own niche without having a staff to help market and promote. Basically, we would be interested in showing how the other half lives. —Ron Burr is founder and director of Drop Three.
You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman Re: “A Woman’s Hair is Like Her Helmet,” July issue, about natural, African American hair:
style guide Re: “Press Etiquette,” the feature article from the August 7 Arts & Culture e-zine
i loved reading the article on natural hair. Thinking about it, I realized that most of my friends have been spending time and money every month for years to hide the gray in their hair, and we haven’t even hit (gasp) 40 yet. Since the photographer Glenford Nunex mentioned it is “a portrait project first. And it’s a natural hair project second,” I hope that in his effort to “switch the game up,” he features gray hair. As I survey the gray that is making its appearance on my head, I know that soon, I too will have to make the decision: Cover the grey and participate in our culture’s lust for youthfulness, or go natural and see what happens next.
cara, thank you! I have immense respect and appreciation for your journalist talents. Nowadays, with the decrease in local reporters, it is harder to get press coverage and is sometimes a requirement in grant applications. Local bloggers help fill the gap left by newspapers. Keep on keepin’ on!
—Rachel Rock Palermo
—Anna Fine Foer
wow, I’m going to have to print this and pin it on my studio wall, awesome guidelines! Thank you Cara Ober! —Sherwood Matthew
law and order Re: Michael Corbin’s August 8 blog post, “Democracy and Punishment” powerful RT @UrbaniteMD: To acknowledge the humanity of a criminal is to admit his or her humanity exists at all. —@jonahshai
Join the conversation. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@UrbaniteMD). E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. Urbanite #99 september 2012 11
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the morning sun
what you’re writing
awakens me. I remember that I have the bed to myself, so I give all four limbs a good stretch. I hear my husband at the back door, then his rhythmic stamp on the stairs. “It’s me,” he calls as he enters the bedroom. Then, with a peck on my cheek, “Ready for our walk?” I smile and nod. After twenty-seven years and no children, my husband and I inhabit “his and hers” houses across the street from each other. He prefers to dwell in the cool quiet of his basement, without heat or refrigeration, beside his yoga mat and writing tablet and trash art. I prefer all the modern conveniences and like to crank up the radio every now and then. It’s hard to explain our unconventional relationship to family and friends. We spend a great deal of time apart and perhaps for that very reason, our times together are rich and meaningful. The morning walks are pre-arranged, but sometimes we unexpectedly (and delightfully) meet on the street. Conversation is our collaborative project. Over a cup of coffee or a bottle of wine, we recount stories from the week and neighborhood anecdotes, offer each other our political analysis and social commentary, and conjure up old memories, mellowed by time. All that shared history is a deep aquifer, a plentiful source of laughter, tears, and intimacy.
companionship
—Cindy Hartzler-Miller lives in East Baltimore Midway, where she and her husband bought the “his and hers” houses for less than $35,000 (total)! She spends her time growing vegetables and tu toring neighborhood children.
my parents traveled through their retirement as if they were joined at the hip. They went everywhere together, and not just for the obvious activities: store, church, social events, meals. I found it incredible that except for the times Dad escaped to his garden, they were usually in the same room together, even when that room was the bathroom. Then life changed. When Dad’s “memory problems” could no longer be explained away as aging, we had to face that fact that he had full-blown Alzheimer’s disease. He ended up in the Alzheimer’s unit of their retirement facility, with Mom remaining in their apartment. Each day she visited him, rolling her walker through the breezeway to the locked green door in the adjoining building. Usually he was happy to see her, and most of the time he knew her. But then a wheelchair-
bound fellow resident took a shine to my father. Dad was not physically disabled in any way, and he cut a handsome figure. She proposed to him. He, at least, had the presence of mind to refuse. “I told her I was already married,” he said to Mom, who looked stricken. I had to remind myself and other family members that this was incredibly painful for Mom even as we found it amusing. Still I noticed that during some of our visits he was a bit distant, looking out his bedroom door into the common room where the “girlfriend” was sitting. One day, he talked with us for awhile, then said rather formally, “Thank you all for coming, but I have to get back out there.” He then left us sitting in his small room, looking at each other. “I think we have lost him,” Mom said sadly. As we went into the common room to say goodbye, I saw that Dad was seated next to his girlfriend. He stood when Mom moved to kiss him goodbye, taking his left hand in hers. That is when I saw that the girlfriend still had a firm grip on Dad’s right hand, capturing him between their two worlds. Mom did not seem to notice. She was the owner of the rich history of their mostly forgotten past while this girlfriend provided the new companionship in this increasingly slippery present. —Although she has been writing since age 7, Linda Allman made her living as a software
developer. Retirement has given her more time to write.
i was first diagnosed
with clinical depression when I was 37. It was kind of like being diagnosed with blackness or maleness at 37; I can’t remember a day without any of the above. Since at least the third grade I’ve searched people’s faces to confirm how much more contented they are with their lives. I’m an incessant daydreamer. I grieve for food. I’m keenly attuned to insecurities—he slightly tents his shirt when it’s windy (like me); she says “or whatever it’s called” to obscure her geeky fluency. I’m consumed with predictions of my personal hell—an eternity spent uncertain if I belong in the sullenness circle or the fraud circle of the underworld. So when the therapist specified, “Feelings of guilt or worthlessness, restlessness of thought, indecisiveness, anxiety ...” I duh-smacked my forehead. I can’t remember a day without any of the above. How did I make it to almost 40 years old undiagnosed? I’ve seen therapists over the years but inconsistently and without loyalty. I’m highfunctioning; no one is privy to how emotionally drunk I am almost always. I’m witty, charming, articulate, and caught smiling more than anything else. I have a fairly stable work history and enough accomplishments for make-do success. Still, I’m never without my shadow whispering sweet do-nothings in my ear (in a throaty woman’s voice). I’ve worried that resolving my depression could leave me humorless and unappealing like some outdated stand-up comedian. I’m fairly certain my head will feel hollow without all the regular banter. I’m also pretty sure I’d miss the companionship. —Mark Riding lives in Baltimore with his smart wife, two beaming children, and a Lhasa-Poo puppy, Biggie Smalls. He is documenting his experiences with clinical depression for a collec tion of essays.
it was the autumn of 2000. The Ravens were beginning their triumphant march to the Super Bowl, and I was nearing the end of my stay at a “halfway” recovery house in Upper Fells Point. A year out of jail and close to twoand-a-half years clean and deeply involved with Urbanite #99 september 2012 15
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what you’re writing NA in East Baltimore, I had worked my way from a dorm-type room with a communal bathroom down the hall to a semi-private two-man “suite” with an attached bathroom that I currently had all to myself. I had progressed from initial restrictions requiring that I be accompanied by another resident when leaving the house to go to meetings or check in with Parole and Probation to being one of those accompanying the newer residents and even having “overnight” privileges. I had followed all the rules and suggestions and was awaiting a room of my own in a “¾-way” house with only three other residents, no house manager and no curfew, and no restrictions other than staying clean, doing my fair share of chores and maintenance, and keep on working the program I was working. Occasionally being singled out as the example to follow was a new experience and embarrassing at times. From where I had been and what I had been doing, these were huge leaps and bounds. The one thing I was missing that kept me from being completely content with the way my life was progressing was the lack of someone to share it with. I began doing what both the literature of the program stated and what my sponsor and those with many years of recovery (as opposed to merely clean time) said I should do. I began to pray on it, declaring my gratitude for the changes in my life and the things I did have while asking
God to help me find SOMEONE to share my life and my space with. I was so, so tired of waking up alone. I asked simply for SOMEONE to wake up next to me. It was the morning of the day I was to move into the “¾-way” house, and I knew as I woke up and before I opened my eyes that something about that morning was different, that I would no longer be alone. As I made the transition to consciousness I sensed a presence. I opened my eyes and saw a lump in the bed next to mine, across the 2-foot aisle between the beds. I grabbed for my glasses, and as my vision cleared the pale white lump in the next bed came into focus ... It was a 45-year-old pale and pasty white, flabby ass of a 6-foot-tall white male named George. As a heterosexual man, at that moment in time I realized three things: One: Sometimes God gives us what we wish for. Two: He/She has a wicked sense of humor. Three: Details matter! Be very specific. —Dave Cluster writes a column for City Paper called “Homelesscide—Life on the Street.” He also enjoys reading science fiction, writing poetry, and spending time with his daughter and grandchildren.
“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only previously unpublished, nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Only one submission per topic, please. Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to What YoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Submissions should be shorter than 400 words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned. Topic Deadline Publication Out of Breath Sept. 10, 2012 Nov. 2012 Warming Up Oct. 8, 2012 Dec. 2012 Letting Go Nov. 12, 2012 Jan. 2013
Urbanite #99 september 2012 17
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Fort ave. Federal Hill Corner bar/rest.- 3792 sq. ft. len Parrish 410.688.0981 cell $499,900
don’t miss images (clockwise from top left, no credit; photo by Edwin Remsberg; © Volodymyrkrasyuk | Dreamstime.com; No credit; photo by Hans van der Linden; photo of Beth Hylton, courtesy of Everyman Theatre
4
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1 August 29–October 7
3 September 7, 7 p.m.
5 September 22, 10 A.M.
Theater
visual arts
Community
Soldiers aren’t the only ones who suffer in war, as the play Time Stands Still deftly illustrates. Photographer Sarah (played Beth Hylton, pictured) recovers from injuries she received while on assignment in Iraq, while her journalist boyfriend, James, tends to her, grappling with his own guilt for having left her alone in the midst of war.
Johanna Drucker is an author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Hear her lecture Speaking Signs: Writing in/on the Urban Landscape at Load of Fun Gallery, followed by an additional retrospective presentation on the September 8 called Reading Signs: Mapping the Space(s) and Place(s) of Writing.
$32–$50, students $10 on Sundays Everyman Theatre 1727 N. Charles St. 410-752-2208 www.everymantheatre.org
Free Load of Fun Gallery 120 W. North Ave. www.loadoffun.net
Explore the bittersweet morsel’s biological side at The Science of Chocolate: From Trees to Your Stomach, part of the Saturday Morning Science Series at Towson University’s Hackerman Academy of Mathematics and Science. Dr. James Saunders, a retired Towson professor and USDA employee who has traveled the world studying chocolate’s DNA fingerprints, will lead the program.
2 September 5, 7:30 p.m. Music
Bill Orcutt got his start in the ’90s noise rock band Harry Pussy, but lately he’s been making his mark as an experimental solo guitarist who combines a barbaric yawp of vocals over a flurry of notes. On Wednesday, he’s deviating from his usual solitude and pairing up with percussionist Chris Corsano, who has performed as a touring drummer for Björk and has released multiple solo recordings, the most recent being Cut (Hot Cars Warp, 2012). $10 The Windup Space 12 W. North Ave. 410-244-8855 www.thewindupspace.com
4 September 20, 7 p.m. Community
This Constitution Day, Maryland Institute College of Art and the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland will host a symposium to debate the freedoms of assembly and free speech. WYPR producer Aaron Henkin will moderate a panel made up of scholars, activists, and artists (among them Cornel West, pictured) that will discuss, among other ideas, the ways in which assemblies of people can change the way society thinks about abstract political issues. Free Brown Center’s Falvey Hall 1301 W. Mt. Royal Ave. 410-669-9200 www.mica.edu
Free Towson University Smith Hall, 326 8000 York Rd., Towson 410-704-3659 www.events.towson.edu
6 September 28–30 Literature
Authors, bibliophiles, casual readers, and booksellers alike gather in Mount Vernon to celebrate their passion for the written word during the 17th annual Baltimore Book Festival. The festivities won’t be limited to print, however: Center Stage will host fifty theatrical events throughout the weekend, and local musicians will provide the soundtrack to the festival with live performances. Free 600 N. Charles St. www.baltimorebookfestival.com
Urbanite #99 september 2012 19
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20 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
the goods
what ’s new in style, shopping & beyond by anna walsh and j.m. Giordano
off the wall
Maryland artist Candy Cummings didn’t complete her degree at art school, but that hasn’t stopped her from becoming a visual artist. Several of her sculptures, made of materials like antique vacuum tubes, oven knobs, and computer circuit boards, were recently on display in the American Visionary Art Museum exhibit All Things Round: Galaxies, Eyeballs & Karma. The exhibit closes September 2, but other examples of Cummings’ art are available in the museum’s store, Sideshow (800 Key Hwy.; 443-872-4926; www.sideshowbaltimore.com), for $50 to $55.
my dream house
Photos by Leah Daniels
The Guiette House, a modern structure built by famed architect Le Corbusier in 1926, may be located in Antwerp, but the Baltimore Museum of Art’s shop (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443-573-1844; www.artbma.org) makes it possible for you to explore the house every day, albeit at a much smaller scale. The store offers a model of the house ($295) that’s just shy of 2 feet tall and is made of unfinished basswood, so it can be stained or painted. For a slightly more practical example of modern architecture, the shop also sells a fish aquarium ($40) that lets your goldfish live in style.
incredible egg
Easter eggs in the Russian court were a far more extravagant affair than their contemporary dyed counterparts. From 1885 to 1917, the Russian court commissioned the House of Fabergé’s master craftsmen to construct elaborate, bejewelled, “Imperial” Easter eggs. Only forty-two Imperial eggs still exist; one—the Rose Trellis Egg—is in the collection at the Walters Art Museum (600 N. Charles St.; 410-547-9000; www.thewalters.org) since 1930. About a year ago, the Walters created a line of products celebrating the egg’s green-and-pink pattern, including a music box replica of the egg ($144.95) and a tote bag ($49.95) printed with the egg’s floral pattern.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 21
Arts & Ideas Sudbury School
celebrates
Open House Dates: September 8 • October 6 • November 10 September 6, 2012, 6-11 pm
Democracy begins at school.
POWER PLANT LIVE!
34 Market Place, Baltimore, MD
Ages 5-18 • www.aisudbury.com
BaltimoreFashionAlliance.org
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.
My School
For information about our K-12 college preparatory program or to register for an open house, please call us at 410-581-4719 or visit us online at www.mcdonogh.org. Open House Dates:
CREATE A MEMORABLE EVENT Without Breaking the Budget
Grades K-4 9:00 a.m. Tuesday, October 9 Thursday, October 25 Wednesday, November 14 Grades 5-8 Sunday, October 21 at 1:00 p.m.
McDonogh
Grades 9-12 Sunday, October 21 at 3:30 p.m. Visiting Day for Kindergarten–First Grade Saturday, November 10 at 9:30 a.m.
www.santonis.com 4854 Butler Road, Glyndon, MD 21071
410.833.6610 22 Urbanite september 7-24.indd 12012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
7/23/12 3:44 PM
the goods
Becky Lawson 65 Walters Art Museum docent
Becky Lawson has been a docent at the Walters since 2005, after retiring from the information field. At the museum, docents give tours to school children, who use the tours as part of their curriculum. Lawson’s favorite piece to focus on is the Assyrian Winged Genius from the ninth century B.C.
necklace Lionette Gito $210
photo by J.M. Giordano
—J.M.G.
vase Chulucanas Pottery from Peru Lines and Curves Trumpet Vase $64.95
dress Moulin Rouge Dress with bead and fringe trim $400
Styling by Fresh! Boutique (10749 Falls Rd. #102, Lutherville-Timonium, MD 21093; 443-901-0097; www.freshbaltimore.com)
shoes model’s own
Urbanite #99 september 2012 23
Inspiring the best in every boy. IT sTARTs AT THE BOYS’ LATIN sCHOOL OF MARYLAnD
Where do you want your son to be in Fall 2013? Open HOuse – October 21 11am in the Iglehart Center, Grades K–12, Parents & Students For more information, please call 410.377.5192 x1137 or email admissions@boyslatinmd.com 822 West Lake Avenue Baltimore, MD 21210
www.boyslatinmd.com
At Waldorf, students develop critical thinking, creativity, and social intelligence through a rich liberal arts curriculum Find out more about the Waldorf School of Baltimore Join us for our Sunday Open House Child care provided if needed, register by phone Pre-K to grade 8: November 11th at 2 pm Saturday Mini-Mornings: Sample a Class Enjoy a fun morning of activities and creative play led by experienced Waldorf teachers. October 13th at 9:30 am November 3rd at 9:30 am Register online, email admissions@twsb.org or call Pat Whitehead (410) 367-6808 ext 202.
waldorfschoolofbaltimore.org 24 WSBseptember 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Urbanite Ad Sept. 2012.indd 1
6/21/12 1:36:25 PM
baltimore observed urbanite project / education
The nishing Va
Grocery
Store
editor’s note:
Throughout our coverage of food access issues through Urbanite Project 2012: Healthy Food Challenge, we’ve paid special attention to the so-called food deserts in Baltimore City. Food deserts, as defined by the city’s Food Policy Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, are areas that, among other criteria, aren’t within walking distance of supermarkets. They make up 20 percent of Baltimore City’s land. Early on, the question arose—where have all the supermarkets gone? Surely this city, which once housed nearly a million people, didn’t always have such holes. Peter Beilenson, who served as Baltimore City’s health commissioner from 1992 to 2005 (and is currently the health commissioner of Howard County), provides answers in his new book, Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis, out this from Johns Hopkins University Press and co-authored by longtime journalist Patrick A. McGuire. The book provides parallels between the real Baltimore and the Baltimore depicted in David Simon’s now-classic TV show The Wire. In the following excerpt, Beilenson and McGuire shed light on Super Pride, which once was the largest African American-owned supermarket chain in the country and has been out of business for more than a decade.
In this city of food deserts, where have all the supermarkets gone? By Peter L. Beilenson, MD, MPH and Patrick A. McGuire
At one time one of the seven most populous cities in the country, Baltimore boasted a population of nearly a million in its heyday in 1950. But since then, the city’s size and its industrial base have been in decline. Baltimore once was a major manufacturing center; many of those industries have since moved out, leaving service industries as the main source of employment. Unfortunately, many of the jobs in the service sector are quite low paying. This, combined with a relatively high unemployment rate, resulted in a very large impoverished population. This poverty, in turn, is associated with myriad health problems—from high rates of infant mortality, AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, and teen pregnancy to low rates of access to health care. And, of course, there is drug addiction. During my tenure during two different mayoral administrations, I came to understand how the changing face of public health was not simply a matter of philosophical debate among academicians. Certainly the issue of addiction in Baltimore and the violence spawned by drug dealers building their empires brought me face to face with social and environmental issues of public health that commissioners of a bygone era never had to confront. But more often than not, these newer problems did not present themselves in a tidy package marked “Warning: New Paradigm Ahead.”
Find Your Voice at Mercy.
open house Calvert School provides a unique, hybrid environment that gives students the best of both a single-sex and coeducational experience, helping all children excel. We understand the different ways in which boys and girls learn and develop, both academically and socially.
The best of both worlds to prepare for the real world.
november 3, 201 2 , 12–3 pm for more information, call 410.433.8880
Come visit us during one of our “Considering Calvert” days from 9:00 A.M. – 11:00 A.M. Wednesday, October 17 Thursday, November 15 Thursday, November 29 RSVP: 410-243-6054 ext. 106
An independent lower and middle school for boys and girls. • 105 Tuscany Road, Baltimore, MD 21210 • www.calvertschoolmd.org
26 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
1 3 0 0 E A S T N O RT H E R N PA R K WAY B A LT I M O R E M A R Y L A N D 2 1 2 3 9 W W W. M E R C Y H I G H S C H O O L . C O M
urbanite project baltimore observed
Closed for business: When the Super Pride supermarkets closed in the late 1990s, a few were never replaced, leaving empty shells of markets behind—including this one in Middle-East, a neighborhood that is now a food desert.
A perfect example of the unfolding of a seemingly simple, old-fashioned public health problem that was just the tip of a very big iceberg was my involvement in the case of the Super Pride grocery chain. The story begins in 1970 when Charles Thurgood Burns, a successful Baltimore businessman and relative of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, bought a bankrupt supermarket called Super Jet, at East Chase and North Patterson streets in east Baltimore. A graduate of the historically black Morgan State University where he played football, Burns renamed the store Super Pride. By the time he died in 1991, he had converted that one store into seven, the largest black-owned supermarket chain in the country with yearly revenue in excess of $40 million. One of the health department’s many roles is to inspect all food establishments in the city, large and small. In 1999, one of our health inspectors temporarily closed down the Super Pride store in the Pimlico area of Baltimore for selling meat at improper temperatures and for multiple other hygiene violations. One store is not such a big issue but a couple of weeks later when we closed another Super Pride branch for similar hygiene and food handling problems, the media had a field day with it. It led to community concern and scattered protests about the quality of food being sold in predominantly poor, black communities. I called the CEO of Super Pride to discuss what efforts he was undertaking to avoid further problems. He told me he was doing everything possible, including hiring a quality control chief and increasing training of his employees and inspections of his stores. Fairly satisfied by his response, I then checked with our food control staff to make sure we were inspecting
other supermarket chains as vigorously, that we weren’t unfairly targeting Super Pride. I was assured that that was not the case. In the ensuing weeks, I started randomly checking different Super Pride stores myself during my travels through the city. I would check for rodent infestation (by looking in freestanding displays—a common nesting site for mice), I’d ask to see meat storage areas, and I’d check to make sure frozen food was actually frozen. I did find a few problems and pointed them out to the store managers. Unfortunately, a few weeks later a third Super Pride store was closed for the same type of violations. This time, I called the CEO into my office for an emergency meeting. I told him that this publicity had to be terrible for his business, not to mention that the violations were serious public health hazards. Finally, with great frustration, he told me his big problem: He simply could not find and keep an adequate workforce. Grocery store work is actually rather complicated. One needs to know proper handling procedures for a variety of foods and to be aware of the need to rotate stock and of the need to remove certain products by their pull dates. The CEO told me that he could not attract enough qualified applicants for the jobs he had available. The applicants he did attract almost universally had the same problem: drug addiction. Of the thirty most recent applicants for jobs in his supermarkets, he told me, twenty-seven tested positive on their drug tests. Shortly after, with revenues at his stores continuing a rapid decline due in large part to the publicity surrounding the three closures, Super Pride went out of business. Reasons given publicly had to do with the competitive
nature of the grocery business. Although few knew it, what once had been not only the largest black-owned supermarket chain in the country but also the sole supermarket chain serving large parts of Baltimore City was yet another casualty of the city’s drug epidemic. Substance abuse affects not only the people involved in the drug culture but, in a case like Super Pride, anyone who buys something from a supermarket. Beyond hurting people it undermines the economic condition of a city like Baltimore. Businesses looking to relocate don’t seriously consider our city because they are afraid they will have trouble finding a drugfree, productive workforce. This turns out to be a reasonable fear. The Wire aptly conveys across its five seasons the utter failure of society’s institutions to live up to their charge to safeguard the public and to provide basic human services. If it weren’t for the telling, close-up look at the lives led by the characters on The Wire—from cop to drug dealer to single mother to addict to school kid to politician to murderer—and the absolute sense that these glimpses are based on life on the real streets, it would be easy to say that the key failure illustrated in this series is a lax attitude toward crime and criminals by the criminal justice system. But not when we see in so many episodes the sad likes of Johnny and Bubbles pushing their supermarket shopping cart filled with scrap steel and a cast-iron radiator—although never with groceries. And while one may argue that illegal drugs is the fault of criminals and a problem for the criminal justice system to solve, it’s pretty hard to arrest your way out of a case of food poisoning.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 27
Discover
Glenelg Country School. An independent, college preparatory Pre-K3 through grade 12 school located in Howard County.
Discover the greatness for yourself. And for your child.
Oct. 19th
Nov. 15th
(In school, Grades 6 -12)
(In school, all grades)
8:30 – 12:00 p.m.
Nov. 6th
8:30 – 12:00 p.m. (In school, Grades Pre-K3 -5)
9:00 a.m.
Dec. 5th 9:00 a.m.
Baltimore Lab School provides an exceptional academic experience for bright students with learning differences and ADHD. Summer Program also offered
(In school, all grades)
12793 Folly Quarter Rd. • Ellicott City, MD 21042 410.531.8600 • www.glenelg.org/discover
2220 St. Paul Street Baltimore, MD 21218 410-261-5500
www.baltimorelabschool.org
ROLAND PARK COUNTRY SCHOOL
Open House To be fluent in the
LANGUAGE of SUCCESS, it helps to expand your
VOCABULARY.
All are welcome.
October 28, 2012 at 1:30 pm 5204 Roland Avenue Baltimore, MD 21210
410.323.5500 www.rpcs.org All-girls education, K–12. Preschool for girls and boys. 28 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
education baltimore observed
Eastern Promises Can a new school turn around an East Baltimore neighborhood? It worked in Philadelphia.
Rendering courtesy of Rogers Marvel Architects
by Brennen jensen, with additional reporting by Alex vuocola for next american city
Baltimore City’s newest public school will boast a sleek 7-acre campus, an innovative flexibleclassroom layout, and a price tag of $43 million. But perhaps the most eye-popping thing about Elmer A. Henderson: A Johns Hopkins Partnership School, slated to open in fall 2013, will be the impact it could have on its neighborhood. Formerly known as the East Baltimore Community School, Henderson-Hopkins is a key ingredient in East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI), the ambitious—oftimes contentious— decade-long effort to reshape the 88-acre area north of Johns Hopkins University’s East Baltimore medical campus, a neighborhood called Middle East. EBDI is a complex undertaking: The original vision called for a million-square-foot biotech park and a battery of labs, offices, housing, and retail. The struggling economy put the brakes on some of those elements, and controversy has stalked the project recently, with ex-residents complaining about the developers’ heav yhanded tactics, lawmakers objecting to the lack of minority-owned contractors involved in construction, and much concern over the project’s labyrinthine financing and slow progress. The June groundbreaking of the new school, which will be run in partnership with the Johns Hopkins School of Education and Morgan State University’s School of Education and Urban Studies, offered a chance to hit reset. EBDI and Hopkins officials hope that Henderson-Hopkins can serve as this reinvented neighborhood’s heart and soul—a force that knits together displaced residents, new professionals, and the medical campus in their midst. “You build neighborhoods around institutions that matter,” says EBDI president Christopher Shea. “And nothing matters more than a quality public education.” In essence, EBDI is borrowing a page from the classic suburban-developer playbook: using an amenity-packed school as a lure for middle-class families. There’s an urban model for this arrangement right up I-95—the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School in West Philadelphia. Penn Alexander, as the school is known, is a glassy, state-of-theart K–8 academy perched at the western edge of Penn’s campus, in a part of town long synonymous with decaying Victorian homes, intergenerational poverty, and struggling schools. But Penn Alexander boasts gaudy test scores and has families clamoring for slots; the Learning First Alliance—a network of education-
based organizations—calls it an “exemplar” for Philadelphia public schools. It was formed in1998 with the help of the University of Pennsylvania, which now subsidizes $1,330 per student. Established through an agreement between the university, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and the School District of Philadelphia, the school was explicitly designed to promote “urban renewal” (Penn’s phrasing). It’s a gentler incarnation of earlier institutional efforts to spark the languishing neighborhoods surrounding the university. Henderson-Hopkins is charged with a similar goal, says David Andrews, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Education. “This is a very parallel type of model: a very high performing school as an anchor for redeveloping a community.” Indeed, property values in the Penn Alexander enrollment zone have tripled since the school opened, according to the Penn Institute for Urban Research. Along the way, the neighborhood’s demographics have changed dramatically: The number of African American students living in the zone has dropped by 61 percent, while the population of white students has more than doubled, according to an analysis of 2000 and 2010 Census data by PlanPhilly, an online news source affiliated with PennPraxis, the clinical arm of PennDesign, the university’s design school. The changes have left Penn Alexander with a very different student body than most neighboring schools. In the 2011–2012 school year, 48 percent of its students were defined by the school district as “economically disadvantaged,” district data shows. By comparison, nearly 90 percent of students from public schools Henry C. Lea Elementary School and Woodrow Wilson Middle School come from low-income families. Will Henderson-Hopkins be as powerful an engine of gentrification? It’s worth noting that the parallels aren’t perfect. The area around Penn was “substantially more stable” than Middle East was, says EBDI’s Shea. “[West Philadelphia] was a neighborhood that already had
a healthy share of university employees, professional and otherwise. This is a neighborhood that had none of that, and we had to create from whole cloth to support rebuilding of the neighborhood.” With EBDI’s zone largely emptied of former residents, there aren’t enough families now to fill Henderson-Hopkins’ unbuilt classrooms. (Since fall 2009, the school has operated out of a temporary structure on Wolfe Street that serves about 230 students; the new campus will enroll approximately 540 students, plus 180 younger children in an adjoining early childcare center.) Once the project is complete, Andrews estimates that 70 percent of students will come from area residents, with the rest drawn from university faculty and staff. Shea explains the enrollment strategy in more detail: “[Henderson-Hopkins] acts as a neighborhood school. So the first priority is you live in the neighborhood. Second priority you are a child of someone who works in the neighborhood, be it Hopkins, be it Kennedy Krieger, be it EBDI or the corner store. Third priority would be a lottery for kids in the surrounding neighborhood catchment area.” Back in Philadelphia, Penn Alexander’s popularity could offer a glimpse of East Baltimore’s future. In 2011, the Philadelphia school district announced that some of Penn Alexander’s lower grades were at capacity and that children living in the catchment zone could be sent to much lower-performing schools nearby. The reaction was dramatic, with hundreds of residents protesting. Neighborhood email lists carried stories from parents mulling their options if children are denied spots in the coveted school. “There is this huge differential between the education available on one side of the street and what there is on the other side,” says Patrick Kerkstra, a journalist who wrote extensively about the school’s impact on West Philly for PlanPhilly. Still, he’s considering moving into the catchment are for Penn Alexander. He has a daughter to think about. Urbanite #99 september 2012 29
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
SHOPPING SPECIAL
Downtown
Baltimore There are a few things that are intrinsically Baltimore. It is the smell of Old Bay, purple Fridays, cold Natty Bohs on an outdoor deck. Downtown is home to the best nightlife and attractions, and has quickly become the culinary capital of the region. With an abundant mix of national retailers and independent boutiques, retail is making its mark on Downtown as well. Search hundreds of Downtown retailers and services all in one place at GoDowntownBaltimore.com.
Doll House Boutique
Fire & Ice Harborplace, 201 E. Pratt Street
AMARYLLIS
830 Aliceanna Street
525 N. Charles Street
H&M
301 Light Street
RIAL EXCHANGE WOMEN’S INDUST arles Street 333 N. Ch
D
H LORING CORNIS
et reet Stre rd St ward Howa N. Ho 81 8177 N.
owntown Baltimore is a vibrant urban center with award-winning dining, exciting entertainment and great shopping, including a healthy mix of unique boutiques as well as popular large retailers. With 41,390 residents, 113,400 employees, 19,000 students, and 11.4 million visitors annually, retailers have a number of reasons to be excited about calling Downtown Baltimore home. Lately, shoppers have lots of things to be excited about too. With a mix of both trendy, unique independent shops along with national retailers like J. Crew and Nine West, Downtown Baltimore is quickly becoming a shopping destination.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
DISCOVER DOWNTOWN
STYLE McLain Wiesdan
A Flavor storm hit Harborplace this summer when McCormick World of Flavors opened in the Light Street Pavilion. This 3,800 square feet of spice marks the first retail location for this flavorful, local company.
1013 Cathedral Street
Royal Razor, an Operation: Storefront grantee of Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, will open at 304 W. Baltimore Street. The barbershop will offer a modern grooming space with expertise in the time-honored art of barbering.
GIAN MARC
517 N. Charle O s Street
BEST OF LUCK CANDY & GIFTS 60 1 E. Pratt Street
THE GALLER
200 E. Pratt St Y reet
Pop Physique, an exercise system that incorporates ballet barre techniques, will open this month at 339 N. Charles Street. The fitness and lifestyle concept has additional locations in California and Florida. Harbor East has added to its impressive list of upscale retail tenants with recent openings of apparel giants Anthropogie and J. Crew. Also coming soon are make-up haven Mac Cosmetics and yoga super-store Lululemon Athletica.
ORIST FLEUR DE LIS FLSt et reet Stre ty erty Liber N. Lib 22 2266 N.
NS STAR WON FASHIO eet 515 Cathedral Str
When we talk about retail, we mostly talk about what stores are great for shopping. But in 2012, it is important for us to talk about so much more. Retail is what fills up storefronts; retail creates jobs; retail adds tourism appeal; and thus retail helps keep the economic ball of Downtown rolling. Small businesses and big businesses, cohesively blending together on the same streets, creates a vibrant and eccentric shopping atmosphere.
CURIOSITY
t 1033 S. Charles Stree
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Firestarter Education activist Jonathan Kozol on standardized testing, vouchers, and the “calamity of inner city schools” by Michael Corbin
photo by Marshall Clarke
Jonathan Kozol has been chronicling the crisis of urban public education since 1967 and the publication of Death at an Early Age, based on his year teaching in the Boston Public Schools. It won the National Book Award. In his many other books, including the 1991 Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools and the 2005 Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol has maintained a fiercely consistent line of attack on the forces that have conspired over the past half-century to isolate the schooling of children of low-income families from that of their more economically privileged peers. His new book is Fire In The Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among The Poorest Children In America.
URBANITE: Fire in the Ashes is a very personal description of your relationships with the kids and families you first met and wrote about in Rachel and Her Children (1988) and Amazing Grace (1995). Now we see these kids as adults. How comparatively important was the variable of “school” in the shaping of those lives? — jk: This is at the essence of the book. The schools these children attended, to me, are the single greatest force in making their future lives as difficult as they were. Apart from the abysmal poverty, and apart from all the social problems that accompany extreme poverty, these separate and unequal schools left these kids at a terrible disadvantage. The schools were a decisive factor. The kids I write about who were able to have these glorious victories, those who got into better schools—it was usually though someone’s intervention. They were the beneficiaries of exceptionality and very high selectivity. Why this girl and not this other one? A good society cannot be based on the accident
Keynote
“
Any way you slice it, charter schools represent a narrowing of the borders of civic virtue. The hundred parents in that school will fight for the hundred kids in that school, and no longer do they feel that they have to fight for all the children in the city.
of selectivity or philanthropic intervention. This holds true not just for these lucky kids who got into these unusually good boarding schools, but is also true of the kids making it to the very few slots that are available to one of these heavily promoted charter schools. We cheer for those kids that are success stories, but it is just not the way to run a school system in a democracy. There just will never be enough avenues of exit to compensate for the millions who are left behind. The thing too is that the problems in the schools are as bad now as they were then when I began writing about these kids’ lives in the late ’80s. I know it’s unfashionable to say it, but it’s the elephant in the china shop: These schools are every bit as separate and unequal as they were the era of Plessy v. Ferguson. It’s as if Dr. King never lived and Brown v. Board had never been handed down. U: You have said elsewhere that “the ‘niche’ effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.” Can you say more about charter schools? — jk: The media likes to point to the super school, the one that has a principal who went to Yale and has extra money coming in from foundations and other donors, the one that practices a subtle selectivity that can counsel certain students and their families out. Any way you slice it, charter schools represent a narrowing of the borders of civic virtue. The hundred parents in that school will fight for the hundred kids in that school, and no longer do they feel that they have to fight for all the children in the city. The reason charters are so appealing to political leaders is that they can point to five or six isolated schools and reporters can visit those same schools and see the kids passing their tests and ask why the rest of the district can’t be like that. It’s easy then to blame the teachers at those other schools. Charter schools also tend to be non-union schools. Whether intended or not, this is a rather blatant form of union busting.
U: Most of the kids you write about didn’t experience the full implementation of No Child Left Behind, the federal legislation requiring proficiency in reading and math of all students by 2014 as measured on standardized tests … — jk: It pops up in the book. Beginning in the 1990s in New York the whole testing regime, with the punitive attitude toward teachers and this notion that anything worth learning can be measured with a number. There was an interesting recent article in the New York Times about states being granted waivers from [No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top] legislation. Without attributing any intentional deceit to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this is really a triumph of shifting the executioner from Washington to the state capitals. And here is why: One condition for being granted a waiver, a state has to promise that it will put into effect equally severe standards and examinations at the state level. Another condition is not only will children continue to be judged primarily by the numbers on these exams, but their teachers will be penalized or rewarded based on how high they can pump the test scores. Thousands and thousands of teachers are going to be forced to teach to the test under the waivers. It’s not a progressive gesture; it’s regressive. The ultimate thing about the waivers—it’s almost comical in its lunatic implications—is that if a state will agree to these provisions, it will be freed from the demand that every child be proficient by 2014. This is hilarious because they are exempting the states from the goal that was crazy in the first place. No one ever believed that was going to happen. They were never going to have every child in America proficient. And certainly they were never going to have a vast number of poor, black, and other minority kids proficient, so long as we run an apartheid education system in America. It’s the oldest failed experiment in American social and educational history. It didn’t work in 1896 [when Plessy v. Ferguson was decided]. It didn’t work in 1936, the year I was born. It didn’t work anytime in the century just past, and it’s not going to work in the century ahead. If our schools were at least separate and equal we could claim we were living up to Plessy v. Ferguson—but we are not. This is more important than the testing agenda. The whole testing regime would never have come about except for the calamity of inner city schools.
”
U: In the book you write about observing patterns where often the life chances of the boys who came out of the homeless shelters and impoverished, segregated communities were very different from the girls. — jk: The more tragic stories in the book are where an older boy was in a family who was homeless and [he] had younger female siblings. The girls were usually a nest of innocence. The boys all ended up with terrible destinies. I’m not sure why, but the girls just face less peer pressure to be tough, and they seem to be able to hold themselves together better. I think also it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The stereotype is that the black or Latino male is essentially irresponsible, reckless, an absent or dangerous father, whereas the mother is a more noble soul and worthy of our compassion and respect. Society so demonizes these black and Latino boys and young men that maybe these young people just live up to that stereotype.
U: Doesn’t Fire in the Ashes, along with your other work, presuppose a certain capacity for empathy from the reader for the lives you write about? — jk: First of all, what I look for is not just empathy, but empathy that turns into action, political behavior, voting choices, advocacy. I can’t tell you how many times I’m in New York, and I get trapped at a fancy dinner party filled with influential people. I will always hear something like, “At least all the people in this room care.” And I will think: I’m glad they care, but what they mean is that all they plan to do is care. Yes, I do believe there is a huge untapped wealth of elemental decency amongst the ordinary people of America, from one coast to another. I see it. I think that there is a great deal more actionable empathy and goodness in this nation than we see reflected in the people who hold high political office in our state governments and at the federal level. Perhaps it’s just a hangover from the Judeo-Christian values that my mom and dad infused in me when I was a very little boy. I still think this is a good country with good people, not just a saving remnant. But with a few exceptions it simply has not been reflected in government at any level.
The Missing Can Baltimore’s schools find a better way to keep kids in class? By Anne Haddad
things went downhill fast when De’Lass Troy Reid started ninth grade. He’d done OK at Chinquapin Middle School, he remembers; he had a foster mother who reminded him that it was important to go to school every day and to get good grades. Now he was in a different foster home across the city, in Curtis Bay. And he was in high school.
34 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
“Stuff got harder,” Troy says of his first weeks at Benjamin Franklin High School. “And it was more classes.” He didn’t go to all of them every day. Before the semester was over, he had moved to yet another foster home, this one in Northeast Baltimore. And when he transferred to Lake Clifton High School, he took with him his habit of skipping class. It was a big place, and he felt that he could get away with it. “All I did was walk the halls,” he says, or walk back home. His new foster mother didn’t lecture him about it. By the end of the semester, he was failing every one of his classes. And the staff at Lake Clifton was increasingly frustrated. “I got put out,” is how Troy puts it. He wasn’t expelled, but he was asked to leave, which didn’t exactly make him want to go back.
It was at this point that Troy could very well have become a statistic. In the Baltimore City Public School System, a little more than 16.3 percent of elementary and middle school students missed more than twenty school days during the 2010–2011 school year. That’s the threshold of “chronic absence,” the point at which achievement drops and the risk of dropping out of school entirely goes way up. By high school, the number of students chronically absent climbed to 42.2 percent. Most of the chronically absent students aren’t playing hooky, or playing at all. They’re often sitting at home, at the mercy of dysfunction: No one is waking them up in time for school, or their asthma is uncontrolled, or they’re anxious about facing a bully or a teacher who, they’re convinced, has it in for them. Many, like Troy, are moving from foster home to foster home, school to school.
Others miss school because they’re raising children of their own. McQuan Jones, a tenth-grader at Reginald F. Lewis High School, had some excused absences last year for doctor visits—but they were for his infant daughter. Excused or not, however, every day a student misses school just adds to the struggle to keep up with classes. Add poverty to this mix—in Baltimore City schools, more than 80 percent of students come from low-income households—and the problem expands to include a constellation of challenges: lack of transportation, lack of supervision at home, even lack of a washing machine to keep uniforms clean. Attendance can’t be viewed in isolation from other social issues, such as families that are torn apart by domestic violence or mothers and fathers whose drug addiction has eclipsed their parenting duties.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 35
Baltimore city students absent more than 20 days 2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
Elementary School
13.8%
14.4%
16.0%
15.6%
14.4%
13.7%
Middle School
35.4%
34.9%
34.7%
37.1%
36.8%
35.1%
High School
53.1%
50.4%
52.1%
48.4%
49.7%
42.1%
“There are a thousand reasons why kids miss school,” says Sue Fothergill, director of the Baltimore Student Attendance Campaign, which grew out of the Baltimore City Student Attendance Work Group. The city schools and mayor’s office formed the work group in 2008 to engage a broad network of educators, researchers, and community agencies as partners to find effective ways to boost school attendance. The work group and the campaign have been funded primarily by Open Society Institute-Baltimore. Chronic absence—which includes excused absence—is gaining attention from educators and youth advocates as a precondition that tends to propel students into a cycle of academic failure: truancy, suspension, dropping out. It’s the first symptom of a serious disease, and it often goes ignored by school systems. “Baltimore is one of the first cities nationally to look at chronic absence, in addition to truancy,” says Phyllis Jordan, a vice president at the Hatcher Group who is handling communications for Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to promote awareness of the importance of school attendance. It is one of the partners working with the Baltimore Student Attendance Campaign. On its website, www.attendanceworks.org, the organization notes about Baltimore: “In a way, it is uniquely positioned, with both a substantial absenteeism problem and easy access to the right data and research resources to draw on. Maryland is one the few states that requires schools and districts to report on how many students are chronically absent each year.” Those numbers reveal a stark connection between absence—whether excused or not—and performance. Students who were chronically absent were less likely to score in the “proficient” or “advanced” levels for the Maryland School Assessments. For example, 66.9 percent of students who missed fewer than twenty days of school for the year scored proficient or advanced in math and 69.9 percent scored at that level for reading. Among students who missed twenty or more days, only 44.8 percent were proficient or advanced in math and 53 percent in reading.
36 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
But the complexity of the absenteeism problem, and the fact that it goes so deep into the child’s life outside of school, means that finding a solution isn’t easy. Especially when students and parents don’t appreciate the impact of missing class until the damage is done. franklin square elementary middle school in West Baltimore serves an overwhelmingly low-income population: Principal Terry Patton says that fully 98 percent of the students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch. But its average daily attendance rate is a stellar 96 percent, rivaling city schools with more wealthy demographics. Credit for that number goes in part to Deidre Reeder, the school’s cheerful but persistent attendance monitor. Reeder’s job: follow up daily on every student who isn’t in school and whose parent didn’t call in that morning to say why. She checks attendance three times a day. Some students come in late, but most will stop in the office to let her know they arrived, lest she get on the horn to their parents. Reeder calls the parents or guardians of any child who isn’t accounted for on any given day. If the child doesn’t have a uniform, she’ll find one. If he or she doesn’t have a ride, she will pick the child up. Reeder approaches students and parents with good cheer rather than a truantofficer strong-arm approach. “I tell them, ‘You don’t want to see my smiling face at your door, do you?’ I think it’s the way you talk to them. If you respect them, they respect you back,” Reeder says. “I tell them, ‘I’m no better than you.’” It’s true: Back when Reeder, now 35 and a mother of two, was in school, her mother let her make that call whether to go to school each morning. “By the time I was in ninth grade, I was pretty much on my own,” Reeder says. The wake-up call came in eleventh grade, when she failed English. Her teacher was the first adult to tell her plainly, “It’s because you hardly ever showed up.” No one had ever linked attendance with grades for her, and it never occurred to her. Reeder spent her senior year taking night and Saturday classes to graduate on time. Her plans for college were put on hold when she had
statistics from www.mdreportcard.org
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
13.7%
14.0%
12.4%
11.3%
13.9%
16.3%
32.6%
33.7%
27.0%
18.6%
17.5%
16.4%
42.6%
43.5%
42.1%
42.0%
41.9%
42.2%
her first child, but she’s taking online college classes now and plans to transfer to Coppin State University to earn a bachelor’s degree in education. Reeder’s own children and the three teenage siblings she is raising have near-perfect attendance. The effects of missing class begin early, according to researcher Faith Connolly, PhD, executive director of the Baltimore Education Research Consortium, or BERC—a partnership of Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, and Baltimore City Public Schools. Research led by Connolly starting in 2006 revealed patterns that could guide schools as they figure out the best way to prevent chronic absence and its effects. Children who were chronically absent in kindergarten, they found, were most often the ones who didn’t attend a preschool. They also analyzed data for a cohort of students who graduated—or not—in 2007 and determined that chronic absence in sixth grade was the single biggest predictor that a student would not go on to graduate. “In middle school, [chronic absence] is used mostly as a measure of disengagement,” Connolly says. Since then, Baltimore’s middle-school absence numbers have dramatically improved: Chronic absence in city middle schools was at 27 percent in the 2007–2008 school year, compared to 16.4 percent now. Such numbers are getting more attention now, Connolly says. The Baltimore Student Attendance Work Group efforts led to the practice of making an individual school’s attendance data more readily accessible for principals on their “dashboard” when they sign in at their computers every morning. Franklin Square, says Fothergill, has met the issue head-on. “I’ve been to Franklin Square three times, and every time I go, there’s something
else they’re doing,” she says. “They have attendance boards up, and they give monthly prizes for good attendance.” It’s paid off, says Reeder: Since she’s been on the job, Franklin Square has never had to refer a parent to the authorities for truancy. in 2011, more than 400 students in Baltimore were charged in Baltimore City District Court with truancy, with the court holding their parents responsible for that. To go to that level, a student would have to miss 20 percent of his or her school days with unexcused absences, for starters. Some of those parents went to jail. “That’s entirely the wrong way to go about it,” says Barbara Babb, associate professor of law and director of the Center for Families, Children and the Courts (CFCC) at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “You have school systems coming down on the parents and it’s antagonistic, and it doesn’t offer the parents or the children any help.” In 2005, Babb started the Truancy Court Program, or TCP, working with elementary and middle schools in the city that agreed to participate. It’s a strictly voluntary program. Parents and students get an invitation, not a summons. The judges who volunteer to work with the students in a particular school are not convicting or sentencing parents. The program is unique: Most other truancy programs are run by either the school system or the judicial system, not law schools. “Everything we do here is non-punitive,” Babb says. “The law is intervening in people’s lives in a way that makes their lives better, not worse. We have one-on-one problem-solving sessions in which the judge and the truancy court program try to work with the student and parent. Sometimes, the problem could be as simple as not having an alarm clock or not having transportation.” More than 1,000 students have participated in TCP, and about 75 percent graduated from the program. The average reduction in unexcused absences was 71 percent in the fall 2011 session. “We’re intervening earlier than a court program would,” Babb says. “Part of our mission is keeping parents out of court.”
Urbanite #99 september 2012 37
2012
maritimeMagic Benefiting youth served by Living Classrooms Foundation
September 28, 2012 - 7p.m. Living Classrooms’ Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park, 1417 Thames Street, Fells Point
Food and beverages provided by over 60 of the area’s best restaurants and caterers • Music by March Fourth Marching Band • Auction held ONLINE from Sept. 19th to Oct. 5th at www.biddingforgood.com/maritimemagic
For more information or to purchase tickets: 410.685.0295 x.209 or visit www.livingclassrooms.org SPONSORS: Admiral Merritt Properties Vice-Admiral The Stephen and Renee Bisciotti Foundation Commander Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, Sylvan/Laureate Foundation, Stifel Nicolaus Captain Baltimore Business Journal, M&T Bank, Schochor, Federico and Staton, P.A., Sterling Partners, Webb/Mason First Mate Armada, Baltimore Magazine, Cashmere Interiors, City Paper, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Kelly & Associates Insurance Group, Philadelphia Insurance Companies, Morgan Stanley, PNC Bank, Neuberger, Quinn, Gielen, Rubin & Gibber, P.A., r2integrated, SmartCEO, Style Magazine, SunTrust, The Daily Record, The Wairehouse, Urbanite, WBFF Fox 45, Wells Fargo, WNST and Brian Billick, WTMD
38 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Looking up: To help boost his attenndance in middle school, Robert Sawyer, left, received valuable mentoring from former Baltimore Colts lineman Anthony “Bubba” Green, right, through the Truancy Court Program.
When Robert Sawyer Jr.’s parents got a letter from school inviting them to a meeting about the Truancy Court Program, a few weeks into Robert’s fifth grade year, they were taken aback. His mother, Anna Sawyer, remembers asking her son, “Is there something you’re not telling me?” Robert had attended Violetville Elementary and Middle School since pre-K. He was always good kid who got mostly B’s and even made the honor roll sometimes. But he also had missed more than fifteen days of school during fourth grade. By the middle of September in his fifth grade year, and he had already missed at least six days. He would wake up and say, “Mom, I don’t feel well. My stomach really hurts. Can I stay home from school?” Sometimes it was his head that hurt. He wasn’t faking, Robert says. He recalls feeling bad. It may have been caused by stress. The more school he missed, the more stress it caused, especially with his father, Robert Sr., who became even more concerned with the all-too-common aches. Anna Sawyer knew some of the aches were from stress at home and at school, where other children had been bullying him. Robert agreed to participate in the Truancy Court program for fifthgrade but still missed thirty-two days of school during that year. He didn’t get to “graduate” from the program and attend the dinner for the kids and their parents, hosted by Baltimore City District Court Judge Catherine Curran O’Malley, wife of Governor Martin O’Malley and a TCP volunteer judge. Still, Robert told Anthony “Bubba” Green, the TCP staff member who works with Violetville and four other schools as a facilitator, that he wanted to try again. “Robert said to Mr. Green, ‘I’m coming back next year—and I’m graduating next year,” Anna recalls. “He said it with conviction.” Green, a former Baltimore Colts lineman, has been working with youth as a coach and mentor since a knee injury cut short his football career
in 1981. He started volunteering with TCP in 2006, not long after the death of his 14-year-old daughter, Deanna, who was killed in a electrical accident at a softball game at Druid Hill Park. After the tragedy, Green campaigned for stricter state regulations to improve maintenance of underground power lines. “I wouldn’t be here talking to you today if I wasn’t able to turn something negative that happened to my family into something positive,” Green says. He shares his story with students to drive home his simple message: that while they may face obstacles they can’t control, it’s ultimately up to them to make the right decisions. That was a message that resonated with Robert. “He talked about the ABC’s,” Robert recalls. “Attitude, behavior, and communication. He talked with us about setting goals.” Sixth grade turned out to be the year that Robert achieved his goals. He graduated from the Truancy Court Program and went to the dinner in Annapolis, where he was asked to speak to the group about what he did in the previous nine months: He was elected student body president (beating out eighthgraders); performed the lead role in a play put on by the TCP’s ancillary program, “Kids and Theater”; led the school soccer team to the championship game; and even got to present the weather report for “Weather Kid Wednesday” on Fox TV, having been nominated by Judge David Young, his mentor through TCP. He finished the school year with just twelve absences and brought up his grades to a B-plus. His goals for seventh grade include getting re-elected as student body president and getting better food in the cafeteria. (A salad bar, he says, would be awesome.) after de’lass troy reid was asked to leave Lake Clifton High, his new foster mother and his caseworker sent him to a smaller school, Reginald F. Lewis High. He noticed a difference right away. “You know everybody here,” Troy says. Lewis High has made great strides in confronting its attendance problems. In 2010, when current principal Barney Wilson arrived, the average Urbanite #99 september 2012 39
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“You wouldn’t want to come to school, either,” says Lewis High Principal Barney Wilson. “The restrooms were locked. There was a metal detector at the door. Students were treated like criminals. Almost like animals. That’s not the way to treat a child.”
daily attendance at Reginald Lewis was 63.6 percent, meaning that on any given day, if a teacher introduced new material, almost half the class wouldn’t be there to get it. Lewis was also on the state’s “persistently dangerous” list. “If you looked at your transcripts and you didn’t pass your classes, you wouldn’t want to come to school, either,” Wilson recalls. “The restrooms were locked. There was a metal detector at the door. Students were treated like criminals. Almost like animals. That’s not the way to treat a child. They needed to know that the staff cared about them.” Wilson, an electrical engineer and former community college administrator, had served as principal at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, one of the city’s most academically selective schools, in 2004. He was also a Poly alumnus—one of several in his family. So when Baltimore City school CEO Andrés Alonso reassigned Wilson to Reginald Lewis in 2010, saying he needed his best principals to be in the most challenging schools, Wilson took on the challenge with mixed feelings. Poly often rejects applicants who have spotty attendance records; students can attend Lewis without competing over attendance and achievement. Still, Wilson gamely set about rescuing Lewis High, taking cues not only from what he’d accomplished at Poly but also from his new school’s namesake. Reginald F. Lewis was a Baltimore native, Harvard Law School graduate, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who died in 1993, leaving a legacy that includes an international law center at Harvard and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African-American History and Culture. “I read the book about Reginald Lewis, and what I really got was that he was a man of love,” Wilson says. “What Reginald Lewis High School was missing was hope and love. They really needed a father figure.” In the spirit of “Poly Pride,” his former school’s motto, Wilson instituted “Lewis Love.” He tells the kids “I love you.” In exactly those words. He found partners willing to show some love, in the form of resources— Verizon signed on and sponsored the conversion of a bus into a mobile learning lab with tablets and other technology, as well as tutors to help students prepare for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Just as he did at Poly, Wilson has his students at Lewis take the SAT in ninth grade, giving
them familiarity with the test to ensure a higher score when the results go to colleges. “The problem is that adults have different expectations” for schools they deem hopeless, Wilson said. “I expect whatever is happening at Poly to happen at Reginald Lewis.” Wilson also set high standards and expectations for classroom management and instruction, placing an emphasis on order. Head of hall monitors Anthony Knox keeps order in the school by nipping any fights in the bud and taking all the parties into a room and talk it out. And Wilson picks a theme for each year. His theme the first year was “focus and discipline.” The second year, the theme was “finish what you start.” This year, the theme is “dominate.” “What that means is we want the students to dominate academically, to dominate in sports,” Wilson says. “We want to win.” And like Patton at Franklin Square Elementary Middle, Wilson hired staff to focus on attendance, including Marc Davis, half of whose salary is funded by the high school’s partner, YMCA of Central Maryland. “[Davis] is a difference-maker, because he cares,” Wilson says. “He talks straight with the students. We have a team of people [who cover attendance]. So if you’re not showing up, you’re ignoring our calls, we’re going to come to your house, talk to the guy on the street and ask around for you, and we’re going to find you and bring you to school.” By 2012, average daily attendance went up to 85.1 percent. Not as high as Poly’s 95-plus percent average, but Wilson is shooting for nothing less. The school had 169 suspensions in 2009, the year before Wilson became principal. That figure went down to 92 his first year and 16 his second year. For Troy, Lewis provided a learning environment that managed gradually to pull him back to class. His first semester was a washout—he earned zero credits. He improved in the second semester but not enough to earn a spot on the school’s track team. He had to bring up his grades to join the team. And the only way to do that was to go to school. That provided enough motivation. He attended summer school at Lewis to catch up academically. And the boy who had missed more than fifty days of school during the year went nearly every day in the summer.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 41
Cool Jazz | Cold Drinks | Great Food
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(410) 602-1440
Saturday, Sept. 22, 2012, Noon–5pm Nick’s Fish House
2600 Insulator Drive, Baltimore, MD 21230
Trash Bash 2012 offers guests a unique, casual
experience with:
• grille, pasta, veggie fare and more by Nick’s • beer, wine, and a signature cocktail • live music • waterfront views • silent auction • Blue Water Baltimore keepsake • complimentary boat slips at Nick’s marina for select sponsors • and most of all, FUN!
Proceeds raised from the event will allow us to measurably improve the quality of Baltimore’s waters. Many thanks to our generous sponsors:
or visit: www.pharmasiteresearch.com BioHabitat l Stormwater Maintenance LLC Straughan Environmental l Mission Media Best Management Products Inc. l Clean Currents Niles, Barton & Wilmer, LLP l Saul Ewing l Weyrich, Cronin & Sorra Terra Nova Ventures l Flanigan Consulting l Ecologix Group, Inc. Baltimore Port Alliance l Association of Maryland Pilots McAllister Towing of Baltimore l St. Mary’s Episcopal Church Alan M. Jonas, M.D., Principal Investigator • Robert B. Lehman, M.D., Sub-Investigator
42 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Tickets: $60 in advance $65 at the door www.bluewaterbaltimore.org/trash-bash
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The Urbanite Project
Healthy Food Challenge
This March, we launched Urbanite Project 2012: Healthy Food Challenge—an open call for ideas to solve one of Baltimore’s most pressing problems. Food insecurity, we’ve learned, affects a staggering percentage of this city’s population. One-third of all Baltimore City residents accept federal nutrition benefits, such as food stamps. Roughly two-thirds of the city’s adults (and nearly 40 percent of all high school students) are overweight or obese. One in four school-age children lives in a food desert. But lest we get bogged down in the facts, let’s remember there’s hope for change. And never has that been clearer than from the quality of creative ideas we received in
the fifty-four submissions. We asked you to specifically address the barriers to healthy food access in food deserts. Although it proved nearly impossible to pick the best ones, an all-star jury of local chefs, policy makers, urban planning experts, and architects chose six finalists, whose proposals are printed on the following pages. Congratulations to them—and to our People’s Choice Award winner, too. By the way, 3,830 of you voted for our People’s Choice Award. This is obviously an issue we, as a city, really care about. For more information on the winners of Urbanite Project 2012: Healthy Food Challenge, visit www.urbanitebaltimore.com.
Urbanite Project 2012: Healthy Food Challenge is made possible with support from the Baltimore City Health Department, the Maryland Department of Agriculture, Stratford University, and United Way of Central Maryland. Urbanite #99 september 2012 43
urbanite project finalists
Mobile Farmers Market Redux team
Lauren P. Adams is a graphic designer and adjunct professor at Maryland Institute College of Art. Tyler Brown, Zach Chissell, and Ben Myers are the farm manager, project manager, and mobile market coordinator for Real Food Farm.
1
real food farm’s mobile farmers market travels to neighborhood communities surrounding Clifton Park in Northeast Baltimore. Offering pesticide-free local produce grown in Clifton Park, the Mobile Market already offers a solution to many of Baltimore’s food access issues. However, seven suggestions could make the truck even more effective, alleviating healthy food access issues in the area.
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Real Food Farm Map
Megaphone Announcements
Seeds and Seedlings
Give-and-Take Compost
The farm serves the Mobile Market by growing fruits and vegetables, aggregating and storing food, composting waste into fertile soil, and saving seeds and growing seedlings. The fact that these services come directly from the neighborhood, a physical space for social interaction and learning, contributes to community investment in the Market.
Famous Baltimore celebrities will record messages encouraging residents to stop at the truck. Similar to an ice cream truck, the messages will draw more customers. Who wouldn’t think a little more seriously about eating their kale if Ray Rice said so?
Most people aren’t aware that individuals can use their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to purchase seeds and seedlings. Finding places that accept SNAP and sell these products is also difficult, but the Mobile Farmers Market will provide the resources for true food security—affordably growing your own food.
Seeds and seedlings need soil, so the Mobile Market will continue to close the food security loop in the neighborhood by collecting compostable material and turning it into finished compost. Participants will keep track with a punch-card for savings on compost or veggies.
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5
6
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Bulk Foods Orders
Cooking Demos and Samples
Semi-Prepared Frozen Foods
Aggregated Farm Products
Fresh vegetables from the farm are an important starting point for a meal, but a family needs a wide variety of food products to complete it. The Mobile Market will partner with an area food co-op and take orders for bulk foods like whole wheat flour and other grains, providing better savings on healthy products and further alleviating transportation issues.
Some local, organic produce is less commonly known, like bok choy, and often it comes with the stigma of being unaffordable. The Mobile Market will feature cooking demonstrations using ingredients for sale and affordable, simple meal recipes. Samples of prepared food will highlight the food potential of fresh produce.
Some days you just don’t have time to cook a full meal, but you still want healthy, tasty food. Semi-prepared frozen foods will be prepared by students at REACH! Partnership High School in their industrial kitchen. These foods will be oven- or pan-ready so the preparation time of produce is minimal.
Urban farms provide an important part of a community’s food security and identity, but they can’t satisfy a neighborhood’s entire fruit or vegetable needs. Real Food Farm will continue to partner with other area farms to increase the diversity of products, like fresh fruit.
44 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
finalists urbanite project
The Snack wagon team
Sarah Hope put herself through school by working in the food industry. She holds a masters degree in landscape architecture and currently works for the Baltimore Department of Recreation and Parks.
In a nutshell … This mobile food truck, outfitted with a full commercial kitchen, can provide a much higher caliber of culinary arts classes on a rotating basis for up to ten schools with one part-time instructor. Housing up to twenty children and two adults, these classes can travel to local community gardens, farms, grocery stores, or farmers markets to educate children about where their food comes from and how to prepare it.
Expanded uses … Following the model used in Hartford, Connecticut, the Snack Wagon could be used as a hip way of distributing free or low cost meals to school children at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. By creating a school system currency, children participating in the program could sell their creations to their peers, providing healthy food options while educating others about the program. The Snack Wagon could be rented to local entrepreneurs looking to start their own business but lacking the means to jump in and purchase their own truck or open their own restaurant. In this way, the vehicle could support its own existence.
Feasibility … A standard size school bus and industrial kitchen equipment could both be purchased on consignment or donated. Cost to outfit could range from $50,000 to $200,000 depending on quality and age. Remaining costs would include a salary for a food educator and money to purchase ingredients and gas.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 45
urbanite project finalists
Health is a recipe comprised of two ingredients: Diet and Exercise
The Loop team
Sarah Hope
Description The proposal uses the open space corridor of the existing railroad track as an armature for the design of an 8-mile bike path and community food system. The proposed land use plan creates a sustainable system for food production, processing, and distribution, while promoting active outdoor recreation. This agrocentric route fuses Baltimore’s established interests in urban agriculture and cycling to create a healthfocused identity for Baltimore citizens that addresses both diet and exercise.
Hyper Local Food Distribution team
Kimberly Gudzune, MD, MPH, is a clinician-investigator whose research focuses on preventing and treating obesity and cardiovascular disease. Yung sang Cheah is a masters student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Claire Welsh, MPH, is the program coordinator for B’More Healthy: Communities for Kids. Joel Gittelsohn, PhD, is a professor of nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Definition A food system includes all processes involved in keeping us fed: growing, harvesting, processing (transforming or changing), packaging, transporting, marketing, consuming, and disposing of food and food packages.
Background Many low-income neighborhoods have few grocery stores, resulting in residents’ poor access to healthy foods. Our team has created prior programs that have increased residents’ access to fresh fruits and vegetables by using point of purchase promotion materials in corner stores to increase purchasing of fresh produce. Storeowners have challenges in stocking produce after these programs end, due to wholesalers’ high prices and lack of proper produce storage.
Goals and Objectives Our goal is to address barriers to affordable, healthy food for Baltimore City residents, including a lack of healthy food at nearby stores and limited knowledge about which foods are healthiest and how to prepare them. We will achieve our goal by partnering local urban farms with local corner stores to create a hyper-local, sustainable distribution network for fresh produce (Figure 1), as well as using a social marketing campaign to advertise this hyper-local produce and provide educational materials on food preparation. We anticipate that the distribution and sale of fresh produce from urban farms at corner stores will be feasible, acceptable, sustainable, and cost-neutral.
46 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
finalists urbanite project B e n e fi t s PHYSICAL HEALTH/ Provides food stability and infrastructure needed to promote healthy eating and living habits to Baltimore’s identified food deserts.
HISTORY/ The trail design will highlight Baltimore’s industrial history as a railroad powerhouse while providing access to many unique areas.
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH/ The plan analyzes existing urban typologies to best locate uses along the rail. A phased development plan restores damaged land for future use, while minimizing dumping.
BEAUTY/ The trail provides vast open green spaces spotted with more structured landscapes and includes sweeping views of Baltimore’s cemeteries, which include views down to the harbor. Each section allows a user to easily identify their location on the loop.
SOCIAL HEALTH/ Unites neighborhoods and provides common areas to socialize in a relaxing park-like environment. ECONOMIC HEALTH/ New production means new jobs,
new business, and new investment. MOBILITY/ A continuous bike path provides a quick method of transportation that is accessible to all despite age or income and provides a low impact method of exercise that’s fun and easy. CONNECTION/ The loop connects many up and coming neighborhoods to Penn Station and the free Circulator bus, increasing access to higher paying jobs. INCREASED OPEN SPACE AND VALUE/ Properties along the rail corridor have historically been undervalued and in many cases are already vacant. This allows for larger swaths of open space to be developed at a lower price. EXERCISE/ The path forms one 28.2 mile trail network by connecting Herring Run Path to the Jones Falls Trail and Druid Hill Park.
Design We will link two farms in Baltimore City with two corner stores in their neighborhoods to create a hyper-local distribution network for fresh produce (Figure 2). All parties have agreed to participate. Based upon initial conversations with farmers and storeowners, we propose that farmers will distribute fresh produce to their designated store once a week beginning in August. We will combine this new hyper-local produce distribution network with a social marketing campaign that will include:
M e th o d o f S e le c tio n a n d A n a lysis First, the study investigated existing food deserts and looked for possible solutions that address both diet and exercise. Site selection was then based on the available open space corridor, established interest in urban agriculture, and ability to connect existing trails, farms, and community gardens. The study mapped and overlaid available urban agriculture sites, school locations, and farmers market locations onto existing food desert maps to determine need. It then addressed existing zoning and vacancy to determine future zoning. The selected open space was quantified by its history, topography, impervious surface percentages, past documented locations of hazardous waste, size of the site, and distance from residential areas to determine best use. The proposal locates uses strategically to maximize efficiency.
· Exterior signs for each store to alert customers that they carry fresh produce from the farm. · Advertising at the farms’ weekly farm stands and community events that these stores sell their produce seven days a week. · Point of purchase promotional materials including shelf labels and healthy recipe brochures highlighting how to prepare the available fresh produce items (Figure 3).
Figure 2
Figure 3
Project Neighborhoods
Point of purchase materials to promote products
Recipes
Banner
Shelf Labels
Evaluation We will perform in-depth interviews with the farmers and storeowners throughout the project. These interviews will help us understand how both parties perceive the urban farm-corner store partnership, including satisfaction, challenges, and sustainability, and their role in addressing healthy food access in the neighborhood. We have developed semi-structured interview guides for this purpose. We will assess feasibility by understanding and overcoming challenges perceived by farmers and storeowners. We will evaluate acceptability by assessing farmers’ and storeowners’ satisfaction with the project. We will determine sustainability by establishing whether farmers and storeowners plan to continue the project in the next growing season. We will collect produce distribution and sales data throughout the project from both farmers and storeowners. We will evaluate the impact on costs by calculating profit margins for both the farm and corner store, in which we will compare corner store owner produce costs and profits between pre and final project months. Significance We believe that an urban farm-corner store partnership will create a sustainable distribution network for fresh produce in Baltimore City, especially in communities with poor access to healthy foods.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 47
urbanite project finalists
The Karesa Bari Community Garden team
Anna Wherry, Kaetan Vyas, Jared Katz, and Bridget Harkness are undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins University.
a f f i l i at e s
Goodnow Community Center Regional Management, Inc. Frankford Improvement Association The International Rescue Committee (IRC) Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) The Johns Hopkins University Center for Leadership Education Baltimore City Office of Sustainability Frankford Residents
By uniting pre-existing organizations we seek to solve a multifaceted problem with a single solution: to expand a community garden that incorporates both local and refugee residents of the Frankford neighborhood in order to address food security, grow community relations, and preserve cultural traditions. Our idea first took seed after observing the success of the Karesa Bari garden implemented by a group of Bhutanese refugees at the Goodnow Community Center in Frankford. The garden aimed to give the refugees an opportunity to use skill sets from their agricultural backgrounds. Additionally, it provided them with fresh foods that they were not otherwise able to obtain in the area where they lived. We seek to build upon this success in the following ways: A. It has been brought to our attention that Baltimore Gas and Electric owns a vacant lot in the Frankford neighborhood. The lot is within walking distance of the complex where many of Baltimore’s refugees currently live and is thus an ideal location for urban agriculture. BGE has offered to make the lot accessible for the purpose of improving the Frankford community. B. A garden proposal on the BGE land was brought to Frankford residents. Residents voiced that the abandoned lot is felt to be a major hazard to their quality of life. A garden, it was soon determined, could help eliminate many of the residents’ primary concerns—notably trash and the resulting rat problems. The solution, it seems, is quite elegant. By working together the refugees can maintain their previous ways of life as well as help to improve the community where they now live. By giving Frankford and its refugee community an opportunity to work together, we hope to build community relations, provide a productive green space, and eliminate health hazards.
Your Ride to the Farmers Market team
Katrina Brooks is community relations/youth coordinator for the Center for Adolescent Health. Trevor Arnett is the center’s research and communications specialist. Niesha Walls and Graham Blake are Youth Advisory Committee leaders. The Youth Advisory Committee (YAC) of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Adolescent Health (CAH) is a functioning advisory committee that informs Center research practices and programs in partnership with partners and community members throughout Baltimore City. We are East Baltimore residents; the majority of us reside in oneparent households and grandparent-led households. We understand [that, like some of us,] many of our peers are being raised in East Baltimore communities that lack proper access to farmers markets. These households are left to pay the high price of low quality foods at high prices. Shopping options for families without personal transportation are extremely limited in our community. Our families eat fast food or carry-out meals at least three to four times weekly. Most of us reside in households that receive some form of food stamp assistance, WIC, or Social Security income and free or reduced lunch. 48 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
finalists urbanite project Issue: Cultural Preservation Many of Frankford’s refugees were involved in agricultural pursuits in their home countries and are now struggling to preserve their cultures within Baltimore’s urban environment. One man spoke to his concerns in an interview: “We want to pass our farming traditions on to our children who never experienced Bhutan, but it is difficult. This city is killing our culture.”
Issue: Food Insecurity Over one-third of Baltimore City consists of food deserts. According to a 2009 study, the Frankford neighborhood boasts a higher fast food restaurant density than the city average. Additionally, Frankford has higher average traveling times to the nearest supermarket via both car and foot—the nearest supermarket is a 19-minute walk.
Issue: Residential Environment Residents living adjacent to empty lots have complained of the hazards that the lots attract. They complain of rodents and trash; in a community meeting one resident complained, “There are rats so big that I am afraid to go out at night.” The residents are frustrated with the amount of energy they have expended time and again to alleviate these problems, with little success.
Issue: Community Relations A large number of refugees in Baltimore City are relocated by the IRC to the Frankford area, yet a significant portion of the preexisting Frankford community is unaware of this. Additionally, what relationships do exist are strained. “There is some tension between the refugees and the Baltimoreans … that is something we need to focus on …” pointed out Amy Harmon, an English as a Second Language teacher at Baltimore City Community College.
To directly address the East Baltimore food desert experience in our community, we propose an idea that addresses access to three of the city’s large farmers markets—Waverly32nd Street Farmers Market, City Farmers Market (under I-83), and Fells Point—by providing transportation through a partnership with Johns Hopkins University (JHU). The existing Johns Hopkins Shuttle service would provide four JHU shuttles designated for increasing access for East Baltimore residents (see map) to the three area farmers markets on weekends, with shuttles running every half hour for pick-up and delivery from 7:00 a.m. to noon each Saturday and Sunday (except holidays) from May to December annually. YAC members and adult mentor volunteers would like to serve as hosts and greeters on shuttles, helping residents safely board and disembark shuttles. Shoppers would receive reusable shopping bags donated by volunteers in an effort to decrease plastic bag use and waste. Shuttle trips would allow students valuable contact with elders and community members to help build strong community relationships. Shuttles would leave at 7:00 a.m. from at least one location that is safe and easily identifiable for seniors, our target population. Shuttles vary from an average of twenty seats on smaller mini-buses to forty-five seat buses. The boarding location, The Door, is a faith-based organization that has served families in East Baltimore for over twenty-five years. Located at 219 N. Chester Street, 21231, The Door is surrounded by senior homeowners, church members, and volunteers. The location provides a safe place for residents to wait for shuttles, and kids can benefit from the Saturday morning programming at The Door. Urbanite #99 september 2012 49
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PEOPLE's choice urbanite project
People’s Choice
City Hearth team
Lynn Khuu is a graduate of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently an intern architect at Bennett Frank McCarthy Architects in Silver Spring.
As you are heading home on a warm summer day, you decide to stop at CityHearth to pick a few fresh tomatoes and catch a glimpse of the day’s specials. Upon entering, you are greeted by the aroma of freshly baked bread. Vibrant colors of local produce and freshly prepared meals line the counters of the marketplace. Making your way to the garden, you see children excitedly learning how to care for and harvest the garden vegetables. Meanwhile, a friend has volunteered to teach a community cooking class upstairs, and locals are joyfully preparing a meal with fresh produce from the garden. In little time, they all share in the meal at the community table and some friendly conversation. A typical day at CityHearth.
Many memories and bonds are shared over food. CityHearth, a community kitchen and learning center, responds to this tradition by rejuvenating the cultures and traditions of food and cooking. Its program is aimed at bringing the community together to support and promote healthier lifestyles, providing access to both nutritional nourishment and educational opportunities. Nestled among a neighborhood of schools and within walking distance of the Perkins Homes and Douglass Homes communities, CityHearth’s proposed location on S. Eden and E. Baltimore streets offers a viable place for afterschool activities and access to fresh meals and produce for Baltimore’s residents. With the support and sponsorship of local community groups, school systems, and businesses, the community has the opportunity to promote healthy lifestyles and embrace the diversity of cultures through food. The community kitchen will benefit its sponsors as an extension of teaching, research, and marketing opportunities as well as meet the physical and social needs of the community’s residents.
The program of CityHearth offers a central meeting place that combines the needs for a market place, learning center, and practices of healthy and sustainable living. The on-site garden and marketplace support local farming, reducing cost and the need for transport over long distances while nurturing an appreciation of farm-to-table. A library and kitchen classrooms offer educational experiences and hobbies for students after school and adults alike. Businesses have the opportunity to reach out to the community through special events or classes. Ultimately, the community is offered a choice for healthier living and a place to share in and enjoy the cultures of food that connect us all.
P rogram : Marketplace & Bakery — with flexible indoor-outdoor space for farmers’ markets Café Food & Nutrition Library Standard Classrooms Office Space Children’s Kitchen Classroom Kitchen Classrooms (4) Dining & Lounge Areas Surrounding Central Hearth Outdoor Terraces & Courtyards Greenhouse Vegetable & Fruit Garden
Urbanite #99 september 2012 51
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food + drink
feature / dining review / wine + spirits
Heavy Hitter Matt Seeber is hoping to change the way people see the humble alehouse. By Martha Thomas, photography by Leah daniels
back in 2005, Matt Seeber bribed his girlfriend, Stacey Shipe, to move to Las Vegas. He had a pretty good gig at the time, running Craftsteak, the pricey steakhouse at the MGM Grand hotel launched by his celebrity boss and mentor Tom Colicchio (also known as the chief judge on Bravo’s Top Chef ). When he tried to talk Shipe into moving to Sin City, she mentioned that she liked Mini Coopers. “Done,” said the boyfriend. Urbanite #99 september 2012 53
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feature food + Drink If you can’t stand the heat: In Vegas, where Seeber ran Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Craftseak, eaters are more swayed by “smoke and mirrors,” he says. “But that shit doesn’t fly here— [Baltimoreans] are more grounded.”
The two had a pretty good life out there. “We lived the Vegas lifestyle, the house with the pool,” he says. And as the chef of a popular restaurant, Seeber says, he got the royal treatment. “You have a lot of access. I don’t think I ever paid for a drink or a meal in a restaurant.” The whole thing might lead you to wonder what Seeber, who took his first job with Colicchio in 1994 at the wildly popular and theninnovative Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan, is doing in the compact kitchen of the Heavy Seas Alehouse, in the back of a former tack factory that more recently housed a couple of ill-fated restaurants, in a neighborhood that hovers on the outskirts of trendy Harbor East. The move back to Baltimore was inevitable, says Seeber. When Shipe, now his wife, was accepted to a graduate program in social work at the University of Maryland, it was her turn to choose the city. Plus, they had a baby boy. Seeber didn’t have any trouble finding a job here. A New York contact introduced him to a local investor involved in a start-up who was looking for a chef. Mike Morris, principal at Cana Development, had been talking with Patrick Dahlgren about opening an alehouse to feature beer made by Dahlgren’s stepfather, Hugh Sisson. Dahlgren and Morris hope their concept will expand to become, if not quite a chain, a collection of boutique restaurants that bear the Heavy Seas imprint. Their second location is planned for somewhere in the D.C.-northern Virginia region, and Morris says they plan to open a handful in the next three to five years. But as chef behind the venture, Morris says, Seeber “wasn’t a cheap date.” Morris and Dahlgren offered him a partnership, so Seeber, as a part owner, will be executive chef for any future Heavy Seas franchises. Morris says that for someone like Seeber, the Heavy Seas deal “is the best of both worlds. He’s got the freedom of ownership, plus sophisticated people to manage all the things you don’t want to deal with as executive chef.” Along with Seeber’s “impressive pedigree,” says Morris, “he happens to be a huge beer aficionado; the guy is the perfect fit.”
Seeber’s concordance in Baltimore goes beyond his ability to craft a good burger or quaff a good IPA. He arrived without fanfare and has taken his time to get to know the town. Though he was recently lauded as “best new chef” by Baltimore magazine, thus far, he’s mostly kept a low profile. He’s taking his time, he says, to get to know the Baltimore dining audience, which is decidedly different from Las Vegas. “The lifespan of a tourist in Vegas is about three days,” says Seeber—and a restaurant is lucky to snag a meal on the itinerary. In Baltimore, he says, he’s got to build a regular clientele, people who will return again and again. Along with its value-driven sensibility, says Seeber, Baltimore isn’t easily wowed by “esoteric ingredients.” Las Vegas, he says, “is a lot of smoke and mirrors, but that shit doesn’t fly here—people are more grounded.” seeber, lanky and youthful, his hair shorn short on a hot summer day, leans in to get a better look at the greens poking from the soil at Big City Farms, a curious collection of hoop houses installed on an asphalt parking lot at the edge of the Hanover Street Bridge. “I didn’t realize how much basil you’ve got,” he tells Alex Persful, the farm’s president. “I can probably come up with some ideas.” Persful has already planted a Seeber favorite, bronze fennel, a decorative green with a sharp licorice flavor, and today the chef needs more purslane, a succulent garnish in many of his salads. Seeking out fresh produce is nothing new to the chef, who lived in Indiana for his middle school years, where the family had a 7-acre farm and he participated in 4-H. One of five kids, he remembers his mother’s big family meals. “That had a lot to do with the direction I’ve taken” as a chef, he says. When he began working with Colicchio in the 1990s, farmers from upstate and New Jersey had begun to cart fresh produce to Union Square, a few blocks away from Gramercy Tavern, on weekends. “On a Saturday, we would go down to the market and bring back what we needed on a hand truck,” recalls Seeber.
“It wasn’t really talked about,” Seeber says of the local foods used at the restaurant. “It’s just the way it was. Now ten years later, you look back and realize we were doing it all along.” Seeber worked with Colicchio on other projects, like the short-lived Bid restaurant in the basement of Sotheby’s auction house on the Upper East Side. The restaurant, which opened on September 10, 2001 (“killer timing,” Seeber notes), was dismissively compared to “the dining room of the best hotel in Cedar Rapids” by the New York Times’ William Grimes, who nevertheless called out Seeber, noting: “his reverence for ingredients, his ability to coax big flavors from them and his judicious hand in combining flavors reflect the influence of Tom Colicchio.” When Gramercy Tavern opened in 1994, it was known for its “rustic” foods—at the time code for local, farm-grown ingredients like heirloom vegetables and meats—praised for their freshness and authenticity, long before the so-called farm to table movement took hold. Colicchio, the young chef behind the venture, seemed to be on to something, evidenced by the immediate popularity of the place. Colicchio went on to open Craft restaurant in Manhattan, and his brand has grown to Craftsteak and ’wichcraft sandwich shops. His latest restaurant is Riverpark, on Manhattan’s East Side, and he’s also behind the Lot on Tap, a beer garden beneath High Line Park. In the meantime, he’s become a household name to those who watch Top Chef. The menu at Heavy Seas may be far less ambitious than the Las Vegas Craftsteak, where a Wagyu dinner goes for $140 per person. But Seeber seems to be living up to Grimes’ assessment, with his mixed menu of such bar standards as an Angus beef burger, Caesar salad, and mussels, with beer-infused recipes like the Peg Leg glazed short rib and lager mignonette to accompany the daily oyster selection. Heavy Seas seems to get a lot of things right. Seeber looks to Colicchio and the chef’s front-of-the-house partner, Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group has been behind many of New York’s most popular and successful restaurants. With Gramercy Tavern, Seeber says, “Tom and Danny were able to change the way people think about a tavern,” introducing the idea of high quality ingredients and techniques to simple foods. “Those two nailed that restaurant. Why can’t we do the same thing for an alehouse?” Urbanite #99 september 2012 55
food + Drink dining review
Kettle Hill by Tracey Middlekauff
Named as it is after a battle in the Spanish American War in which Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders emerged victorious, it’s no wonder that the menu at Kettle Hill is replete with so many signifiers of manliness. There are hefty charcuterie trays, dry aged steaks, classic American salads (the wedge), and, of course, plenty of meat and pork dishes. The seasonings err on the side of boldness, and the servings are unfailingly generous. The meltingly soft Truck Patch Farms braised pork shoulder dish, for instance, does not stop with only one pork iteration on the plate. Instead, a side of savory bread pudding comes studded with chunks of smoky Andouille, and the mound of greens are rife with juicy lardons. The dish is lightened somewhat with a slightly sweet apple sauce (not the chunky baby food variety, but an actual sauce of apples) that cuts through all of that intense porkiness. And pork is not confined to entrees here: A fried green tomato small plate is made more mighty with the addition of pulled pork in a sticky, subtly spicy demi glace with hints of sweet maple. The grits in the shrimp and grits are thick, creamy, and almost risotto-like but teeter everso-slightly on the edge of being overwhelmingly smoky. Andouille lovers, however, will find nothing to complain about. And kudos to the
kitchen for serving the shrimp with the heads still on. Make sure to reward this largesse by sucking out their sweet brains. All this is not to say that the kitchen can’t cook meatless and pescetarian dishes. The corn and tomato croquettes, while disarmingly large, are nonetheless delicately crispy on the outside and redolent of summer on the inside. A pastramismoked salmon plate is pleasantly and aggressively peppery, while the sweet blue fin tuna tartar is well balanced with a Meyer lemon oil and smoked paprika remoulade. Crab cakes are large, happily lacking in filler and mostly unadorned. Kettle Hill uses many local farmers and suppliers, but it is, refreshingly, not self-righteously farm-to-table. Chesapeake crab, Shenandoah lamb chops, Truck Patch Farms pork, and Gionnone Farms chicken coexist happily on the menu with avocado, lemon, and California artichokes. The Americana decor is also not over-the-top; yes, the interior is elegantly rustic, with oversize vintage photos of Teddy Roosevelt, copper lamps hanging at the pass in the open kitchen, dark leather banquettes, and checkerboard table tops, but the walls are not festooned with burlap sacks. There are no artfully arranged piles of hay. If there is one thing lacking it is that the beer selection, while certainly not bad, is not as extensive as one might expect. There is a respectable selection of local (Flying Dog, Brewer’s Art),
Bros who lunch: Named for a famous battle in the Spanish American War, Kettle Hill claims a distinctly masculine sensibility.
56 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
regional (Angry Orchard), and national (Stella Artois, Blue Moon) draught beers and a smattering of canned and bottled beers, but there’s nothing surprising on the list. The cocktail list, however, is more thoughtful, with a good number of signature drinks like the robust Guinness-andbourbon Buffalo Soldier or the Virginious Affair, a surprisingly feminine sip of jasmine-infused Blue Coat gin, fresh white peach juice, agave nectar, and Prosecco, perfect for those who crave respite from the deluge of manliness (Lunch and dinner Tues–Sun, brunch Sun. 32 Market Pl.; 443-682-8007; www.kettle-hill.com.)
Our Grape State
Old-Line wine cures the end-ofsummertime blues. By Clinton Macsherry
Self-diagnosis suggests that the melancholia permeating my Septembers stems from childhood, specifically my rueful reentries into scholasticism. Summer doesn’t technically end when the calendar flips from August, but don’t try selling that to any pupil I know. Although I haven’t gone “back to school” in decades, September still packs a residual downer, like a month of Mondays. Self-medication takes the form of long weekends in Ocean City, stretching summer into
left photo by Leah Daniels; right photo by Clinton Macsherry
wine + spirits food + Drink
what’s arguably the finest beach time of the year. September’s ocean stays warm, its light slants gorgeously, and its nights grow cool and quiet enough for open w indows. The so-ca l led “shoulder season,” no longer a secret among recovering school kids, can draw sizable crowds. Even so, traffic calms, music softens, and the mellower vibe becomes almost palpable. All this makes September prime time for exploring what has evolved from a Boardwalk-Fries-and-BigGulp town into a pretty good food-and-wine destination. Including the adjoining areas of Berlin, Bishopville, and Fenwick Island, greater Ocean City boasts more than a dozen restaurants that usually deliver on their finedining ambitions. You’ll find interesting wines in bunches of unexpected places. LiqIndian summer: Relish the season’s last days at uid Assets at 94th Street Berlin’s new all-Maryland wine bar. pioneered the wine-bistroinside-a-package-store concept in Maryland. A few years ago, on the now they don’t sell outside their own tasting shelves of a Coastal Highway shop unassumrooms.” ingly named Late Nite Liquors, I was astounded Such limitations hampered Everett’s forto find all five of Bordeaux’s celebrated “first mer employer, Great Shoals Winery in nearby growths” in vintages dating back to the 1980s. Princess Anne, and spurred her “to think outA great addition to the beach’s—and the side that box. Berlin’s a walking town, with state’s—wine scene opened this summer in tourists from all over and enough local foot Berlin, whose small-town charm has made it traffic to make this successful. Wine trails a draw for movie producers (Tuck Everlastare hot, agri-tourism is really growing, but ing, Runaway Bride) as well as tourists. The people might not be able to visit all the indiMaryland Wine Bar at Berlin, brainchild of vidual tasting rooms. This is my opportunity owner Deborah Everett, occupies a cozy space to introduce them to the fine wines Maryland on Main Street. A wall-sized bottle rack sits has to offer.” across from an eight-stool bar laminated with With an all-Maryland cheese plate, Everett poured me a glass of bubbly ($9) and labels from state wineries. A window seat flight of Eastern Shore wines ($10 for three peers across the street to a boutique, a chic 2-ounce samples). Great Shoals Sparkling Italian restaurant, and an antique store. By all accounts, this is the only bar anywhere servVidal 2011 ($27, 12.5 percent alcohol) shines ing exclusively Maryland wines. “My husband clear, pale gold, with a persistent mousse and always says I’ve had a million ideas,” Everett steady bead. Aromas of white blossoms, fresh jokes, “and this was the first good one.” bread, and grapefruit zest lead to a mediumbodied palate of semi-ripe melon, mineral The merit of Everett’s idea may once have water, and apple skin. My favorite wine of been doubtful, but she now uncorks evidence to contrary. Her inventory represents nearly half the flight, the St. Michael’s Winery “Island of Maryland’s fifty-six wineries, with twenty or Belle” Sangiovese 2010 ($20, 12.26 percent so offered by the glass on a rotating basis and alcohol), shows dusky ruby, with a nose of spiced cherry and sweet tobacco. Darker the rest available by bottle for enjoyment on- or cherry and leather flavors finish with notes off-premises. (She also offers mini-tastes of any of orange peel and turned earth. Not that open bottle for $1.) “The list continues to grow,” I need encouragement, but the Maryland Everett says. “We’d like to have everybody on Wine Bar may have me stretching summer board, but there’ll be exceptions. Some very small wineries have limited production, and for out a lot longer. Urbanite #99 september 2012 57
Corner Quartet
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58 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
art + culture fall arts guide
A filmmaker, a musician, a dancer, a couple of artists, a MICA provost, and a BRO tell you what you should check out this fall.
by Marianne Amoss, rebecca kirkman, rebecca messner, and anna walsh
S S Miranda Pfeiffer Age: 23 Neighborhood: Downtown
Occupation: Visual artist and animator What are you most excited about this fall? The third installment of the local film series Spiral Cinema. This year, curators Max Guy and Neil Sanzgiri’s theme is “The Human Condition”: how cinema influences our understanding of the self. They’re planning to show great films like Space is the Place, Il Pianeta Azzurro, and The End of Evangelion. Each film will be screened in an alternative theater space in Baltimore City that somehow emphasizes the film. For more information: www.spiralcinema.tumblr.com. What would you like to see more of in Baltimore? Roller coasters designed by artists, food trucks everywhere, and more places to swim.
Urbanite #99 september 2012 59
art + culture fall arts guide
Tiffany DeFoe Age: 37 Neighborhood: The H&H Building, downtown Occupation: Risk analyst and saxophonist What’s going on for you this fall? I’m playing with Lafayette Gilchrist and the New Volcanoes on September 29 at the Windup Space. What are you most excited about this fall? Asimina Chremos. She’s a dancer based in Philadelphia who got to know some of the experimental musicians in Baltimore through the High Zero Festival (happening this year September 17–23). Every month she’s going to dance alongside musicians from the Baltimore improvisational scene. She regards the performance as a relationship that she’s exploring with the musician she’s performing with. A lot of what I love about Baltimore is that it’s a community of people who have developed very close relationships—there’s a bleed-over of friendships and working relationships. Asimina’s doing this series in part because she was inspired by the relationships she’s built up with people in Baltimore over the years. For more information: www.asiminachremos.com
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place The Baltimore Museum of Art’s new contemporary wing is warm and inviting. By Cara Ober
60 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
When the Baltimore Museum of Art shuttered its Contemporary Wing for sweeping renovations in January 2011, art lovers suffered serious withdrawal. Where else in town can you see the works by masters of contemporary art like Frankenthaler, Eliasson, or Guston in person? Although there was no better spot in Baltimore to experience the most significant art of our time, the Contemporary Wing was not without its problems. Compared to the cozy Cone Collection next door, where visitors of all ages buzz around colorful Matisses and interactive displays, this section of the museum seemed separate and aloof. Like many of its monumental works, the 34,000-foot space was intimidating—both physically and intellectually, as modern art can often be minimal and cold. Blocked off by heavy doors of dark glass, one of the biggest challenges was getting people to even enter the gallery.
fall arts guide art + culture
Lily Susskind Age: 26 Neighborhood: The Effervescent Dance Collective rehearses near Lexington Market. I lindy hop dance in Pigtown and Sandtown. In the past four years I’ve lived in Charles Village, Barclay, Remington, Hampden, and now I’m moving to Waverly. Hopefully permanently. Occupation: Server at the Food Market. Best bosses ever. Also founder of the Effervescent Dance Collective. What projects do you have going on this fall? Effervescent has a show, Butter Knife, on September 7 and 8 at the Coward Shoe building. We’re doing two shows a night, 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., with the requisite dance party to follow each night. What else are you excited about for fall? Reservoir Hill Fest on September 15. My friend Dan Samuels is organizing a really funky, soulful set of music with his own bands J. Pope and Funk Friday and Brooks Long and the Mad Dog No Good, as well as Bosley, who has assembled a new funky-fresh Motown band. Also on the bill are the world country soul of Jahiti, the Malian singer Amadou Kouyate, and Shook—’80s pop electro-funk. For more information: bit.ly/ResHillFest2012
After a nearly two-year renovation, the newly designed Contemporary Wing opens on November 17 as a warm and dynamic space, with a number of new opportunities and options for engagement, including classes, lectures, and interactive works of art. Although the proportion and sizes of the rooms in the modern wing will remain the same, the walls, floors, and lighting have been transformed. “It’s a massive attempt to humanize the galleries, to make them more intimate and exciting to explore,” explains BMA Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman. “One of the biggest transformations is in lighting. Before, we had a uniform system of cold, fluorescent lights, which were too harsh for exhibiting works on paper. We now have a full track system, so we can alter the lighting to make it appropriate to the artwork. It is now far more comfortable to be in galleries, much warmer—people will feel the difference even if they can’t put their finger on exactly what is changed.” In order to create a more enticing path from modernism into the contemporary wing, those heavy doors have been removed, and internationally known artist Sarah Oppenheimer was commissioned to create an architectural installation that physically connects the two areas by cutting through walls and using mirrors to extend the view back and forth. Additional changes to the space include the removal of two columns to create a clear line of sight through the whole gallery; a commitment to rotate exhibits, including works on paper, every four to six months; and a black box theater space, soundproofed for moving-image art or work that requires sensitive lighting. Besides the Oppenheimer piece, the museum has made a dozen new acquisitions by top-notch contemporary artists from across the globe, including a sound installation by recent Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz, a mixed media sculpture by Sarah Sze, and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (bicycle shower), an interactive work that was originally part of The Land, an experimental exhibition space and working farm in Thailand. Baltimore-based street artist Gaia is contributing a site-specific intervention to the museum’s series of inaugural rotating exhibits in an interior gallery, a series of portraits equally informed by the Remington community surrounding the museum and the Cone Collection’s Woman with Mango by Gauguin. The project is only the initial part of a $24.5 million renovation, including improvements to the American and African collections, which should be finished during the museum’s 100th birthday in 2014.
Re:districting Will a new Arts & Entertainment District unseat the local art scene? By Christianna McCausland
On July 1, Baltimore got a new arts and entertainment district, bringing its total, which also includes the Station North Arts & Entertainment District and Ha! in Highlandtown, to three. The Bromo Tower Arts and Entertainment District sits on 117 acres on the west side among art assets like Current Gallery and Artists Cooperative, the Bromo-Seltzer Artist Studios, Arena Players, the Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center, Baltimore School for the Arts, and the Hippodrome Theatre. Everyman Theater, previously located in the Station North district, will relocate here this fall. The designation, oft touted as an economic development tool as much as artistic altruism, will hopefully push the long-anticipated west side redevelopment toward success. Yet the question remains: Can the city sustain three arts districts?
Urbanite #99 september 2012 61
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fall arts guide art + culture
Jimmy Joe Roche Age: 30 Neighborhood: Waverly Occupation: Digital video production instructor in the Johns Hopkins Film and Media Department What do you have going on this fall? I’m working on new sculptures for my upcoming two-man show in the summer of 2013 at the Baltimore Museum of Art with artist Nathaniel Mellor. What are you most excited about this fall? Pete Cullen ’s new body of painting. Pete’s work is so multifaceted—beautiful and subtle use of light—domesticity, roots, the history of the South, and the sublime all swirl together. Baltimore is a complex mix of north and south, and it’s a place where you can still feel a mystic primeval energy fluxing. Pete’s images have a kind of meeting of the north and south—and share Baltimore’s sublime energy right on the peripheral buzzing with potential. What would you like to see more of in Baltimore? I’d like to see more bike lanes and more consideration for bicyclists, especially by the bus drivers and cabs who sometimes I think actually want to watch me die. For more information: www.petecullenart.com
When the restored Hippodrome theatre opened in 2004 as the FranceMerrick Performing Arts Center, it was to be the jewel in the west side’s crown. Despite the district’s success at drawing 350,000 visitors a year, it has yet to maximize the potential of the thousands of people who come to University of Maryland Medical Center and professional schools daily. Employees, patients, students, theatergoers—all come for a purpose then flee homeward. “I’m not worried about marketing and promotion but crime and grime issues,” says Jeff Daniel, president of the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center and an advocate for the Bromo district. “I have to believe if we create a better ‘streetmosphere’ and bring in better retail, we’re going to draw people out.” Daniel thinks the area is at a tipping point, noting the new Panera Bread; a committed partner in Jay Perman, president of University of Maryland, Baltimore; and commitments by the city to tackle the eyesore that is Lexington Market. The District is maximizing this momentum, hiring an executive director by year’s end who can promote the entire neighborhood—a position that ups the likelihood of the district’s success. Daniel says the district isn’t doing anything now that it hasn’t been doing for years. “Selling tickets, fundraising—we were doing that anyway, and we weren’t going away. With or without the designation we were making a significant impact on the city. So from a cannibalization standpoint, it’s a nonstarter,” he says. “We have the focus of the mayor, the focus of our abutters, we have a new theater opening. This is the time to take advantage of this—not in a year.” Maryland was one of the first states in the country to recognize A&E districts when it started its program more than ten years ago. It now has twenty. Districts get three main benefits: a state income tax exemption for artists who create and sell work within district boundaries, property tax credits for redevelopment, and abatement of the admission/amusement tax. According to Pamela Dunne, program director for arts and entertainment districts at the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC), “We have found that the arts are a strong economic driver. When the districts are successful, they bring communities together and create very vibrant places.”
Jared Margulies Age: 26 Neighborhood: Charles Village Occupation: PhD student in geography and Grand Vizier of Rock Wizardry for the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) What are you most excited for this fall? I love the WORMS reading series because until I was tipped off to its existence a little over a year ago, I didn’t realize what wonderful prose and poetry could be found here in Baltimore. Everyone talks about how music in the past five or so years has really put Baltimore “back on the map,” but I think there is a very overlooked and real renaissance in theater, dance, and other art forms, albeit without the Pitchfork hype. Although the writing scene in Baltimore still strikes me as a small community, I’ve been consistently impressed by the high quality of work presented at WORMS. For more information: www.wormsbaltimore.blogspot.com
Urbanite #99 september 2012 63
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fall arts guide art + culture
Graham Coreil-Allen Age: 30 Neighborhood: Waverly Occupation: Professional artist and director of operations at Charm City Cakes What are you most excited for this fall? Co-directed by Michael Benevento, Monique Crabb, and Andrew Liang, Current Gallery’s backyard public space continues to host an exciting array of performances and projects, including live music, theater, film screenings, and participatory art installation. Facing Howard Street just south of Franklin, with its backyard abutting Tyson Alley, Current’s home since 2010 is situated squarely between nearby art spaces at the H&H and Maryland Art Place’s Saratoga digs. The backyard adds to the urban theater of downtown Baltimore with events that are visually and aurally accessible to diverse pedestrian audiences, including artists, commuters, club kids, shady characters, and curious neighbors. For more information: www.currentspace.com When Station North got its designation ten years ago it had the Charles Theatre and artists residing in the Copy Cat building, but the area—especially North Avenue—was a dead zone. Now that street is home to Liam Flynn’s Ale House, the Windup Space, Single Carrot Theatre, and a new Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) building, among other success stories. There’s power as a district, like the ability to woo developers with tax incentives and foster collaborations across artistic entities. Being a district gave Station North a voice to advocate for development projects like the City Arts building and to join forces with neighborhood groups to turn plans for a homeless shelter into a Montessori School. No doubt its district status also aided this year’s expansion of Artscape into the neighborhood. Maryland is unique in that its districts must have pre-existing cultural activity to be considered for designation. This drew the attention of researcher Mark J. Stern, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies “natural districts,” places where cultural activities were already clustered. Together with colleagues, Stern studied Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Stern says districts face a “Goldilocks problem”; They’re either too cold or too hot. Getting them just right is a challenge. When research wrapped in July, he came away optimistic. “Initially, we were concerned that Station North might be ‘too hot,’” Stern explains in an email. “We were concerned that the real estate market would take off and drive out both older residents and artists ... However, our analysis shows that while the area is attracting new residents with higher educational attainment, it’s not losing residents with less education.” Ben Stone, Station North’s executive director, is diplomatic about the new Bromo district. Still, there’s reason to wonder if a successful Bromo district will become the 800-pound artistic gorilla in the city, sucking resources from its edgier compatriots. Stone sleeps soundly knowing supporters like MICA aren’t likely to move allegiance out of the neighborhood. “There’s always a fear that the more arts districts you have the more you’ll compete over funding,” he says, “but the reality is the city and state don’t really give us any funding. Most of the funders here are interested because they’re already in this area.”
Ray Allen Age: 66 Neighborhood: Tuscany-Canterbury Occupation: Vice president for academic affairs and provost at Maryland Institute College of Art What are you most excited about this fall? The Baltimore Classical Guitar Society 25th Anniversary Concert Season. I think that this is a little hidden jewel in Baltimore. I just love the idea of shining a spotlight on that as something that is really classy. I know it’s esoteric, but it’s wonderful that a city as small as Baltimore can support something that refined. What makes Baltimore a good arts town? I think that small size is an important factor for young and emerging artists. This is a town they feel like they can affect. They can make a difference. For more information: www.bcgs.org
Urbanite #99 september 2012 65
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Baltimore’s premier bicycle tour offers 5 routes from 12 - 65 miles where riders can tour historic sites. After, come celebrate with music, local exhibitors, and lunch!
Larry’s Ride, September 22, 2012 Spring Meadow Farm
Enjoy 13 to 65 miles of Baltimore’s scenic views and rolling hills! Runners and walkers can take part in the 3, 6 mile route. Afterwards, riders and runners return to the farm for barbeque, kid’s activities, music, a market, and more!
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fall arts guide art + culture
$
441.8M
2008–2010 GDP supported by arts districts
Jobs 4,862
Jobs 2,759
$
Jobs
117M
1,296
$ 112M
$
8.8M
All Maryland
Hagerstown
Jobs 104
$
Jobs 86
7.7M
Station North
Ha!
Providence, RI
A Maryland State Arts Council-commissioned fiscal impact study of 2008–2010 found arts districts in Maryland in total supported 4,862 jobs and $441.8 million in total state GDP. The Hagerstown district, with goods and services output around $117 million and 1,296 jobs created, is the most flush, followed by Silver Spring. Station North’s output was $8.8 million and 104 jobs created, while Ha!, the arts district in Highlandtown, accumulated $7.7 million and 86 jobs. Another comparable east coast city, Providence, RI, had an output around $112 million and about 2,759 jobs created.
Baltimore’s third district on the east side in Highlandtown, known as Ha!, is the sleeper of the A&E scene. It doesn’t have the advantage of big supporters like MICA, and because it’s residential in nature it lacks warehouse space for large galleries and performance venues. It doesn’t have a funded executive director. Still, artists live and create in its rowhouses, recent pop-up galleries have been popular, and events like the Halloween Lantern Parade & Festival improved the reputation of Patterson Park. Notably, the neighborhood is no longer hemorrhaging residents. Margaret Footner, executive director of the Creative Alliance, perhaps Ha!’s greatest asset, explains that “the work we’re doing in community outreach and neighborhood building through the arts is subtle, and it is a little quieter and ongoing.” Stern notes that while Highlandtown doesn’t look like it will become a regional economic engine, “there’s no denying that the arts and culture have been an essential element in the revitalization of Patterson Park.” Stone sees the new Bromo district as a potential bridge between Station North and Ha! and hopes the new designation will make all three districts stronger in the long run. “I try to look at things like this as being a positive opportunity rather than a challenge,” says Stone. “With two arts districts, there wasn’t much synergy, perhaps because they’re too far away from each other. With a third, somewhat in between, it’s more likely we’ll work together to advocate for funding and to do group events.” “Even though the [Baltimore] districts are close, they’re different in their content,” says Dunne. The hope is three distinct personalities will make for more complement than competition. “We know from our interviews that people in the existing districts worry that the west side district might grow by taking assets from them,” says Stern. “But our general feeling is that more is more when it comes to the social and community benefits of cultural engagement.”
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Photo by Michael Cantor
Urbanite #99 september 2012 69
eye to eye
one foggy evening in towson, photographter Joseph Hyde captures a barren ginkgo tree in front of an office building. The subject, at first glance, seems romantic, with its glowing, velvety light and crisply silhouetted branches. However, the photo’s title, Corporate Assasin, reveals its true meaning. The image is actually an epic battle between nature and the manmade world, pitting that which is organic against a corporate behemoth. From Hyde’s vantage point, the giant, menacing building rises out of the darkness in diagcara ober onal stripes. The tree, just a spindly little sapling, confronts the cara ober is urbanite’s online architecture valiantly. It fills the entire frame with a natural arts/culture editor. to receive barrier of its sharp, barbed branches. The corporate building is her weekly e-zine, go to bit.ly/ezinesignup. fragmented into hundreds of jagged shapes that glow against sharp, dark outlines like stained glass. Hyde deliberately works within the largely obsolete tradition of black-andwhite landscape photography in order to present his frankly modern and often subversive vision. He imbues his landscapes with personal statements about modern relationships, current events, and even politics. “My landscape photographs provoke something that allows me to reflect on the significant events of my past, consider the trajectory of the present state of affairs, and contemplate the possibilities of both my future and those of close acquaintance to me,” says the photographer. Where most people see the ordinary—a tree, an office building—Hyde sees the possibility of a lone rebel, standing up to a larger, corrupting power.
70 september 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Joseph Hyde Corporate Assassin (2005) Ultrachrome print 11” × 14”