On being a city person, part 2: Baltimore
(continued from the previous post)
My mother and I moved to Baltimore when I was four. We lived in Hampden, which had not yet been become artsy-bohemian and was still very blue-collar. I learned my new terrain street by street: first, our block with its steep slope and the tree that blew down in a huge storm when I was six. Then, intersecting it, 36th Street, or the Avenue as people called it, home of the five-and-ten where I clandestinely bought my first tube of lipstick and the bakery with the dusty wedding cake always on display in the window. (The five-and-ten is gone, but the bakery is still there today.)
Then sycamore-lined Roland Avenue, which went north past the fire station and the Roland Water Tower, a local landmark. There was Roosevelt Park off at one end of the neighborhood, and Falls Road running by it. There was our local branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library,* a modestly neo-classical brick building that looked grand to my eyes and is still the blueprint for most of my library-themed dreams. At least half the credit for my bibliophile tendencies goes to the children’s librarian there, an unfailingly kind woman who would always greet me with "Amanda! Have you read this yet?" and who knew me from the time I was old enough to read until we moved out of the neighborhood nine years after we first arrived.
Then there were were the blocks where my school friends lived ("I’m going to Debbie’s house," "to Angela’s house," all rowhouses that looked more or less like the other houses but which we distinguished by our friends’ names). And there was the astonishing block of 34th Street where in the winter everyone competed to see who could could cram the most Christmas decorations per square foot on their property. This was the block where any given house might have a glowing plastic Santa complete with elves, sleigh, and reindeer on the porch roof; a creche surrounded by glowing plastic snowmen and more Santas on the lawn; strings of multicolored lights covering every vertical surface of the house itself; and electric candles and wreaths in the windows for good measure. They still do it to this day, and it’s now a tourist attraction.
We had no car, but there were two supermarkets within walking distance and you could get downtown on the bus. I walked to my elementary school, which wasn’t far. Most of my classmates lived nearby and did the same. A crossing guard stood watch over the busiest intersection on 36th Street during the times of day we all were en route to and from school.
It was not an idyllic place, or a politically progressive one; the streets were dirty and the sidewalks sprouted dandelions, a fair number of our neighbors were on welfare, the old lady next door had filled every corner of her house with junk, and people flew the confederate flag from their car antennas. Once I saw a pro-KKK bumper sticker on someone’s car in an alley. Once, just after graduating from fifth grade, I told a kid from my school that I was going to a magnet middle school outside the neighborhood, and she said "You’d better be careful. There’s a lot of black people there, and they’ll steal your lunch money." I remember staring at her with my mouth flapping open in shock. So we were not living amongst urban lefty-types, and that was a source of stress to my staunchly Democratic mother; I’d be idealizing my old neighborhood out of all recognition if I elided that out of the picture.
Those who say Hampden is small-townish, a kind of self-contained village, are right. But the appeal of Baltimore is also in its neighborhood-ness, its air of being made up of a bunch of such villages jumbled up against each other and overlapping at the edges. You can watch the texture of life varying from block to block, with certain constants (rowhouses with white marble steps, for instance) remaining in place. As I grew up, my mental map expanded to include other places, some grander, some poorer: the train station, the ravine-y park around Johns Hopkins University, Washington Monument and the turn-of-the-century mansions along Charles Street, the long blighted stretch of Howard Street, the waterfront, Lexington Market, The (infamous) Block with all the decaying strip clubs, the Walters Art Museum.
This would be where the conclusion would go if there were one, but I find, after all this, that there isn’t any. Just that all subsequent cities I’ve lived in or visited have struck a chord that might never have sounded if I’d grown up in a suburb with nowhere to go except miles away by car. Gritty and sad as Baltimore can be, it shaped me. I have a hard time imagining myself not living in cities, and thus it seems like a no-brainer to me that amenities like transportation and schools and libraries should be available to the public and shared by everyone. And that other people in all their singularity and freakishness should always be nearby, and that my life isn’t detachable from theirs, even when I’m wandering in perfect anonymous contentment along one of the streets I so often return to (as I return to the library) in my dreams.
(Plus, my neighborhood, for all its reactionariness, has always inspired John Waters. Which I like to think of as contributing to my fondness for the campy and the surreal.)
There, that’s what I wanted to say. And I’m having a fit of nostalgia for my home town now.
* Which just won an award for its virtual reference service! I didn’t know that before Googling it. Hurrah for the Pratt!
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