Evening holiday strolls in Baltimore
Who needs any coaxing to get out on a December night to compare two neighborhood holiday experiences? One was along Hampden’s 36th Street and the other was in Harbor Point adjacent to Harbor East downtown.
What I really wanted was an old-fashioned night stroll, one reminding me of a Christmas season visit along Howard Street in the old days. That is a tall order.
Maybe there were thoughts of somehow replicating a little of the excitement of Lexington Street, but that neighborhood is today in the middle of a protracted remake. Let’s await the opening of the new Lexington Market in 2022 and reserve judgement.
What is open for business with a galaxy of bright lights is Harbor Point, accessible over a bridge at the foot of Central Avenue in East Baltimore. This is the new Baltimore, sleek and polished.
This year the spot named Central Plaza (roughly between Harbor East’s International Circle and Fells Point) is glowing. It can be a revelation. Many Baltimore residents have not discovered this place because the reconstruction of Central Avenue dragged on for so long.
But this totally rebuilt location, once the busy Allied Signal industrial plant, is worth a long look. There’s a certain magic to lights
over the harbor and the newly recrafted Domino Sugars sign.
Some skeptics might say you don’t know you’re in Baltimore here. That may be so because you’re not surrounded by rowhouses. This a grownup downtown, offices buildings mixed with apartments, hotels, stores and restaurants.
It all looks good, inviting and tempting. But there’s more to Baltimore than along the Patapsco River. For the 1900 experience, Hampden is ready.
Night arrives early these days and the strings of lights along the old wooden porches of Hampden and Remington, its adjacent neighborhood, dispel any December gloom. While the harbor has the wow factor, Hampden is vintage and reassuring.
Strollers ambled along the sidewalks of 36th Street in a way reminiscent of old films on Turner Classic Movies. More than a few exited restaurants after a couple of egg nogs, or so it seemed. Some illegally parked cars and dashed into an ice cream shop for a quick scoop.
Also reassuring on a walk along 36th Street and nearby Falls Road, is the realization you are not alone. The shops and their windows were small and seemed in scale with a Baltimore pocketbook.
This may be a selling season, but one antique shop placed a selection of unwanted vinyl albums (think Ray Conniff Singers and pianist Roger Williams) next to a lamppost for the pickings.
If Harbor Point was constructed on the site of an old industrial plant, 36th Street has some fascinating antecedents as well. There is an old Hampden surviving here, a classic neighborhood shopping street not to be confused with downtown Baltimore.
Perhaps the architectural outlines remain of the New System Bakery that endured long beyond the time that many neighborhood, single-location shops did. People who didn’t like fruitcake ate those made here. Plates of New System Christmas cookies evaporated at a gathering.
But most of all, it was just walk in the doors and catch the scent of a real bakery. Before long your eyes had taken control and there’d be boxes of rye bread, sticky buns with nuts and raisin buns under your arm.
There also was the scent of the bakery itself mixing with the aroma of the Christmas trees being sold at the corner of Roland Avenue. This was a heady December perfume.
A walk along 36th Street’s time-cracked sidewalks provides a reminder of how things change, not always as anticipated. What was once a very plain shoe store, the kind that sold sensible shoes suitable for a Sunday Methodist church service, is now a cooking academy, well lighted and crowded with enthusiastic learners brandishing sharp knives and handing French cookware.