Prowling the backstreets of Baltimore
BALTIMORE—I have a friend whose grandfather started driving the school bus for Woodlawn, Ark., when he was 13 or 14 years old. On a field trip to Star City, a boy about the same age got off the bus and looked around.
“Who would have thought the world was so big?”
I think the same thing that the boy from Woodlawn said out loud every time I leave Arkansas, which isn’t often.
Arkansas people are used to big spaces, especially if we come from the southeast side of the state’s diagonal. I’m sure the boy from Woodlawn had seen some big spaces. No, what strikes us as big when we leave Arkansas and come to large cities is the number and variety of people, their living quarters, their business places, even their burying places.
I’m writing once again from Baltimore, a great old port city with Southern manners and Yankee vigor. The manners survive even if the vigor has waned. Baltimore was, like Little Rock and many other American cities, subjected to the abuses of the 20th century: freeways, urban renewal, destruction in the name of speed, convenience, progress.
And Baltimore took it hard. A glance at crime rates will tell you that much, though a glance at crime heat maps will tell you more. On foot in this city, I have moved from one beautiful old pocket to another with caution. On my way back to the Mount Vernon neighborhood (up on a hill) from Fell’s Point (down on the harbor), a kind young man intervened. “Excuse me, ma’am, are you lost?” He insisted I move a few blocks west to continue my journey north.
I can’t call the young man a stranger because there are no strangers in Baltimore. We’re still in the Christmas season, and new friends of the old friend I am visiting have thrown open the doors to their row houses. Everyone is eager to share personal history and local knowledge and to find connections.
An archaeologist walked into the neighborhood bottle shop and tap room and told us he’d rebuilt an antique cropduster at Woodson, Ark. (known to Southern folklorists as a haunted place) and flown it, at short intervals, to Baltimore. His photos and notes from the trip were published in The Atlantic.
“What’s the name of Mark who has restaurants in Little Rock?” “Abernathy.”
“Love that place. What’s it …” “Loca Luna.”
“Great restaurant.”
“I know.”
Everything is just right in my friend’s parlor. Good proportions and mellow sunlight abound. A person could write a novel longhand in this room, with people coming and going and chatting the whole time.
The view is all red brick and restraint, except for the automobiles speeding downhill and south. Speeds are higher and property values diminished to our east and north because of the Jones Falls Expressway, which covers up a waterway, Jones Falls, once a great avenue and source of power for commerce.
Automotive speed has wreaked havoc upon Baltimore, but this city is the original spot for two kinds of speed in communications and transport.
On Aug. 28, 1830, the Tom Thumb steam locomotive raced a horse-drawn Baltimore and Ohio Railroad car. Most of you probably have had a moment while working in a spreadsheet when you realize that you could have made the calculations faster by hand. Or you have been waiting in an airport and realized that you could have driven faster to your destination. Or you have been stuck in auto traffic and realized that you could have walked faster. It’s the technology vs. time paradox. So it went with the race. The steam engine failed and the horse won.
Nevertheless, steam-driven locomotives of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened up migration from one eastern port city to the middle west. Feel free to correct me, but I suppose it was the most important event in westward migration since the opening of the Cumberland Gap and the Erie Canal.
If you send or read text messages (if you “text”; horrid verb), you’re already close to the other kind of speed that Baltimore gave us. “What Hath God Wrought” was the biblical text suggested by prescient Annie G. Ellsworth, daughter of Patent Commissioner Henry L. Ellsworth, who was present in the U.S. Capitol when Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message. That message was received at the Baltimore and Ohio station on Pratt Street in Baltimore.
Recently I walked to the B&O station, now a museum. It was closed, but the neighborhood is pure Baltimore. Across from Hollins Market, a lady caught me checking out her new baking cooperative. It’s not open yet, but she asked me in for coffee and told me all about the place and her plans.
I asked her the prettiest route to the B&O station, and she all but took me by the arm and led me to the street where the arabbers keep their barn. (The arabbers are longtime Baltimore produce vendors who operate from horse-drawn carts.)
Narrow street, wonderful little row houses, total disrepair. Horses behind a fence, duck in the road, pig on the sidewalk. I found the past. (Also a window sign, vulgar but apt. One of the words, concerning neighborhood denizens who might be interested in drugs, was biblical, but I don’t think we can print it here.)
Speaking of 19th-century forms of transportation, I’m about to depart my friend’s parlor and walk to the Amtrak station. It’s a two-day journey home, and can be done for about three times the cost of flying and a quarter of the speed. But you get to see the country. And, hey, what a country.
But I miss you all. And I want to come home.