Bell - Charm City: a Walk Through Baltimore

Charm City

Contents

For Eric, Glenn, Laura, Jack, and Allison Dickinson (the invisible walker)it was a treat to take this trip with you.

Charm City

INTRODUCTION

: A Walk Through Baltimorenow, what should be plugged into that blank? The city where I live has had a number of nicknames over the yearscenturies, that is. A couple of centuries, anyways. My daughter and her friends sometimes call the place B-more, which might have some value as a functional punBe More! Or maybe not.

In the early nineteenth century, some people began to call Baltimore the Monumental City, for reasons we'll come to in due course. Early in the Civil War, it earned the moniker Mobtown (explanation tk; just read on). It's been called Crabtown (obvious) and Nickel Town (don't ask me why). In the 1980s, it was dubbed Tiny-town, by the mother of all free alternative listingsbased weeklies, the Baltimore City Paper (founded 1977); this epithet was a satirical reaction to Baltimore's sudden burst of affectionate self-regard, which took place under the leadership of beloved, diminutive Mayor William Donald Schaefer, a period during which practically all public benches were emblazoned with slogans prominently featuring the phrase Mayor William Donald Schaefer, which may have struck the early CP editors as a bit much. Post-Schaefer mayors really did need to paint something else on all those benches, and so began a fitful effort to rechristen Baltimore The City that Readsa phrase that also adapted itself well to satire: The City that Breeds, The City that Bleeds, The City that Reads... at a Third-Grade Level.

Then there's Charm City, an appellation that has stuck tighter than most, to the point that some people assume and believe that Baltimore was already called Charm City back in the days when H. L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe walked this patch of earth. Not so. In 1974, Mayor Schaefer commissioned adman Bill Evans to come up with... something. Some kind of Baltimore-based gimmick that might appeal to tourists. Evans didn't see much when he first looked around, a few years before the redevelopment of the Inner Harbor put momentum into what became known as a Baltimore Renaissance. Decaying wharves, rats, and hoboes, Evans reminisced years later. That was downtown Baltimore. It was pretty bad.

Up came Evans with a scheme wherein tourists on a treasure hunt among Baltimore's then-viable attractions (e.g., Memorial Stadium, home of the Orioles baseball team) would be rewarded at every stop with... a charm bracelet. Yeah. Signs went up all over town: Smile, you're in Baltimore. The charm offensive opened in July 1974, ten days into a garbage collection strike that left mounds of stinking rubbish all over the streets, and which spread to jail guards, sewage workers, a sizable chunk of the Baltimore police force, and also to the keepers of the Baltimore Zoo. Enhanced by a 110-degree heat wave, looting and arson broke out downtown. State troopers were called in. At the zoo, the feeding of smaller animals to the larger carnivores was narrowly averted.

Charming!

But wait. This episode, with all its grotesque irony, alongside the outcome that the zoo animals didn't really eat each other and not too many people really got hurt, turns into a classic Baltimore thing. Weird, sometimes disturbingly so, but once you had come out safe on the far side of it, maybe kinda wonderful, too. Only in Baltimore... And over the next few years more and more people began to notice that most Baltimore rats didn't have rabies and most Baltimore hoboes wouldn't actually hurt you and that among other choices along the eastern seaboard (at a time when citizens of Boston, New York, or D.C. had to pay a much higher price for a much higher level of urban stress and suffering) Baltimore was an affordable and unexpectedly appealing place to live. There followed a genuine Baltimore Renaissance, which owed a lot (joking aside) to the leadership of the Schaefer administration.

The bracelets vanished, but Charm City hung on... because in the end, it's sort of accurate. Baltimore had decided to embrace its peculiarities, in the way that a family learns to cherish the oddities of its more peculiar members. In the later work of John Waters, it becomes more and more obvious that the grotesquerie his films portray is really very amiable at heart. Charming eccentricity (charming on the surface, at least) is the raw material for so many Anne Tyler novels. Beneath the surface there's Poe's dark side with all the horrors it has to offerbut Poe was a comedy writer, too, though most people don't remember that. Moreover, Baltimore waitresses of a certain age really do still sometimes call you Hon.

Charm City, then. Why not?

IN THE FALL of 2005, I served as an alternate juror on a trial in the court of the Honorable John Glynn. I'm not going to claim I wanted to be there, but it was a more interesting case than manya cop-shooting (nonfatal) with enough odd wrinkles that the trial ended with a hung jury. Some aspects of the case struck me as possibly newsworthy, and I got to know the judge a little by asking him questions after the case had concluded. Judge Glynn, who presides over a dispiritingly infinite number of criminal cases, writes a thing or two from time to timeto relieve his feelings, I suppose (a motive he shares with most other writers, including me).

From the parking lot of The Rotunda, a shopping center near where I live in North Baltimore, I can see the skyline of downtown Baltimore, several miles to the south, Judge Glynn wrote in March 2006. This is a very small place. If a track traced the boundary of the city, a world-class runner could circle town in less than three hours. Nevertheless, quite a few criminals manage to squeeze themselves within our borders. When one of these criminals happens to be caught, he appears before one of the five judges who try serious felonies in The Circuit Court for Baltimore City. I am one of those judges.

Each day brings to my courtroom a fresh set of these criminals.... The innocent are rarely found outside the nursery, and even more rarely in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. Examples follow, lots of them. They are weird to the point of being disturbing, and a lot of people don't come out safe on the other side.

Here we have, one might say, a rather uncharmed view of Baltimore, though it comes from a Baltimore native, born and bred. Judge Glynn is looking at a very small place with a lot of suffering jammed into it. Oddly, most law-abiding citizens of Baltimore don't feel all that much pressure from crimethey don't feel besieged in the way that (to pick one example) law-abiding New Yorkers felt besieged in the 1970s. Many or most of... us (I guess that's what I'm trying to say here) are as comfortable as people anywhere else in the United States in consuming Baltimore's criminal culture as entertainment on hit shows like Homicide and The Wire (wonderful, intensely realistic shows which I have enjoyed watching myself ). The reason for this oddity, I am reasonably sure, is that the criminals who endlessly stream through court-rooms like Judge Glynn'sthey who have made Balti-more number two for murder in major U.S. cities, right behind Detroitprey almost exclusively on each other. This underclass lives in a parallel universe, cheek by jowl with Charm City ...yet scarcely touching it, somehow.