Finding Our Happy Places in Baltimore

Joe Squared pizza

This August marks my third anniversary of living in Baltimore. After five years in New York, the streets of Mount Vernon seemed positively pastoral. In place of modernist skyscrapers and mobile phone ads plastered to ever-present scaffolding, there were green parks, fountains and the muted melody of a flute being played by an open window. Instead of elbowing through crowds, I started strolling, looking at gorgeous antique houses that anybody, even me, could afford.  I would even say I found my Happy Place, although not using the Happy Detector the tourism department concocted.

If we made a Happy Map of our neighborhood for eating and drinking purposes, it could consist of:

1. Howard’s of Mount Vernon offers inexpensive, thoughtfully prepared salads, sandwiches and a few dynamite dinner plates like fish n’ chips. Even the salad dressings are made from scratch and served up with a friendly smile from people who know us by name (naturally, they live nearby and visit the same dog parks). We could eat here every day, and for a while, until we got a/c, we basically did. We sat with a bottle of white wine (BYOB until their liquor license comes through) with the blind Fox and ate grilled ham and cheese and the Howard’s Salad–strawberries, feta, walnuts and local veggies–for less than $15.

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In the Garden of Good and Buggy

Midway through a muggy Maryland summer it dawned on me that under certain circumstances our dirty city could become a veritable Edan. Standing amidst 7-foot tall sunflowers, the wide leaves of squash plants, and tomato plants dripping with plump red fruit I realized Baltimore has untold natural resources in its rich soil, soaking rains and brow-beating summer sunshine.

While flies, bees and mosquitoes buzzed about my legs, I stood grinning at lavender, beets, peppers and purple blossoms. We had barely pulled a weed in months and the plot’s watering barrel was nearly empty.

Actually, I didn’t do much at all to make this tiny plot on Pratt Street blossom. The digging, hoeing, planting, and weeding was done by a dogged group of 10 kids ages 5 to 11: The Wolfe Street Academy Garden Club (Baltimore’s other untold resources: seriously great kids).

In March, the plot–maybe 11 feet by 20 feet in size –was covered in weeds, recovering from being flattened by months of snowfall. Broken bottles, cigarette butts, and rocks littered the plot. Where three row houses were bulldozed in the 1980s, glass still glittered through many layers of dirt.

The boys helped Marissa, a nursing student with a green thumb, to dig furrows to demarcate planting areas from walking areas, which we would later fill with mulch. Marissa discovered the idea to create furrows while gardening at East Baltimore’s Participation Park, which offers free classes on growing things. Later I learned from a man at Participation Park –gardening to a thumping reggae beat from his truck–how to sift rocks and debris out of soil using screens.

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Scenes from a Massive Street Party: Artscape 2010

Amazing riff on Monopoly about Speculation in Central Baltimore by a student called Cary at MICA

Artscape was the usual blur of thousands of sweaty strangers moving like a sticky stream of molasses up and down sun-baked streets. People drank giant strawberry daiquiris out of foot-long plastic cups a la Senior Frogs, expensive iced lemonade, or milk from sippy cups, in the case of the babies (babies love Artscape). Oozing rather than easing down the road were fashion-forward teens, “art cars” freaks, adorable independent artists hawking irresistibly cool knick knacks, and fearless mohawked boys biking against all odds through this mess of humanity.

We have posted photos below of the crowd which was eclectic and peace-loving. It was a great weekend for Baltimore.

One neat addition to the festival this year was a kind of trade fair in the garage opposite the Charles Theatre, featuring community projects like a Center for a Livable Future-affiliated food dessert study and a mural project inspired by the history of Baltimore.  Also in the garage was a table of artwork exploring current events.

“Baltimore is still a frontier,” said a MICA graduate showing off her contribution to Artscape, a jigsaw puzzle depicting Baltimore, its pieces composed of neighborhoods and parks. She described what it was like to spend four years in a city changing rapidly. The “Central Baltimore Game of Speculation”, created by another MICA grad named Cary, was inspired by the wildly fluxuating rent and real estate climate around Baltimore, specifically near MICA.

“We were told to never set foot on North Avenue when I arrived as a freshman even at midday” she said behind thick black-rimmed glasses. “This year at orientation, they told them that’s where they should go at night to hang out.” The speculators have pounced on local real estate, raising rents, but buildings still loom abandoned and gutted along the Avenue.

Parasols were essential companions to ward off the torrid summer sun

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Urban History and Art Get all Mixed Up

In a city with some 30,000 vacant rowhouses and lots one sometimes get the feeling that we’re scuttling around an empty shell of a city that was once great. It can be a thrilling feeling, like when you’re up in Floristree with musicians making a lot of noise in an industrial building that was abandoned to the rats and termites –and now has been reclaimed by young, energetic artists with a passion to carve out a vibrant arts culture. Mostly it’s depressing and creepy to wander a block away from home and find rows of unwanted houses and tarred lots with weeds poking up through the cracks. Because usually, you only have to walk a couple blocks before you find one that looks like this.

The city looks ready to tackle the vacants with some new legislation slapping fines on negligent landlords. In the meantime, creative Charm City citizens like the H&H building artists become inspired by the richness of Baltimore history. Using urban life as a muse, they have taken to empty walls, lots, buildings and trails to tell stories. Here are several neat projects we’ve noted in the past couple of days.

During the 25th annual Sowebo Arts Festival this past Sunday, MICA graduate and longtime Baltimore resident Michael Owen was busy on a ladder painting four silhouetted hands that spell LOVE onto a wall opposite Hollins Market. The mural is to be one of 20–two are up elsewhere in Baltimore–in Charm City to inspire acts of kindness and love between residents. Some say it’s cheesy, but we loved the mural’s simple, graphic appeal, which is markedly different than the colorful back-to-Africa motifs on most city murals. In fact, we bought a t-shirt to support future mural-paintings (you could say, “I put in for the right pinky tip”).

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Gray Lady Scoffs at Baltimore Arts?

The Baltimore Chop reported this morning that the New York Times “dump[ed]” on Baltimore yet again. The Gray Lady had the audacity to point out that adding a third arts district in the boarded-up Howard Street corridor is fiscally risky and may not yield immediate results–measurable by, at the very least, fewer vacant buildings.

We perked up (being a bit foggy-brained this Friday morning) at this bit of the Chop’s post:

… the New York Times is looking down its nose at us again. They seem to see Baltimore as little more than a source for so-so regional cuisine, a great inspiration for campy Broadway musicals, and a crummy baseball team for the sweeping.

This time around they’re making us out to be a bungling, artless money-pit who is stuck in the Schmoke era and wants to copy Manhattan. We really, really wish the Times would mind their own fucking business a little more, and publish these cheap, quickie drive-by stories about Baltimore a little less.

And they include links to said (sad) articles which do tend to be reported via a helicopter ride in and out of Baltimore (would a Times reporter deign to take Bolt?). However, I would argue that the Times review of that Eastern Shore-inspired Greenwich village restaurant made it sounds pretentious, bland and overpriced, which is reason for a poor review: Maryland, especially in context of Manhattan’s West Village, is none of those things.

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Cheesy and Delightful

At a meeting earlier this week I found myself staring enviously at my coworker’s American grilled cheese sandwich. There is something about the way yolk-orange cheese glooms between toast that brings to mind ski trips and happiness. It may be 86 degrees outside this afternoon, but I bet Grilled Cheese & Company in Catonsville is doing a brisk business. In fact, I believe I heard that Brian’s cousin is celebrating his anniversary there. Will he go for a Crabby Melt with Old Bay, or an upscale BLT with aged cheddar and diced tomatoes? Will she try a pressed sandwich with Whole Milk Mozzarella with hand pinched Italian sausage and marinara sauce?

Who, bar a lactose phobe, could shun a mascarpone  cheese and chocolate chip sweet?

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Creative Screen Tour

How do we love the Creative Alliance of Baltimore. Where else could we catch a bluegrass band called Smooth Grass, a burlesque show called Hell Cats, and a Painted Screen tour in one week? How would we even know there is a Painted Screen Society of Baltimore? The CA site describes the screen tour like this:

Be the first to take the “Painted Screens Pilgrimage” to see Southeast Baltimore’s authentic treasures up close. Elaine Eff, folklorist and painted screens’ authority, gives a personalized guide on a tour bus with stops from Little Bohemia to Fells Point. Start off with breakfast and screening of The Screen Painter to see how it all began. Tour begins and ends at The Patterson.

Elizabeth Suman from the Baltimore Brew notes that the screens are beautiful but serve another purpose, especially in hot, sticky Bawlmer summers: “The screens allowed people to see out, but not in, granting homes a measure of privacy from passersby on the street.” She notes that a Czech grocer invented screen painting in 1913 to advertise his wares, while letting the harbor breeze flow in to prevent said produce from rotting.

For members this tour is $30, for non-members it is $35.

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Festival Frenzy Weekend

We didn’t get in to Putty Hill, but we did stalk director Matt Porterfield from Friday night openings at the Charles, to Saturday’s Creative Alliance kegger in the Film Fest parking lot/green room, and up to the Beach House orgy of skinny pants and character spectacles (figuratively, and the coke bottle kind) in Charles Village. It was not that we intentionally shadowed the chronicler of North East Baltimore (naturally, he was clad in uber-tight jeans and philosophic glasses). It was that we were obsessed this weekend with scouring the streets of Baltimore for festivals, filmic and verdant alike.

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Putty Hill Maryland Premiere Tonight

Last night we screened seven shorts at MICA’s Brown Center as the kickoff for the Maryland Film Festival.  Brian loved The Late Mr. Mokun Williams, inspired by the ubiquitous-to-Junk-mail query, I am a Nigerian prince, would you let me deposit 4 million dollars in your bank account?  Director Kenneth Price is also responsible for Bust Out! (think Andy Samberg and friends before Lonely Island hit SNL, jumping out of couches).

Loop Loop and Voice on the Line were my two favorites. Voice on the Line was a collage of 1950 clips of telephone operators set to a charming narrative about a Communist-era spy game by Kelly Sears. Loop Loop was a mind-bending collage of 1000 film images shot on trains and buses in Vietnam. The clips were arranged in film-reel like vertical lines one on top of the other, and they swayed back and forth, getting larger or smaller. The director would light on one image, like a woman carrying a ceremonial flame or a group of bicycles at a traffic light. Then the reel would slide backwards as if you were sucked back in time. The program informed us that it was meant to recall the fleeting and unsorted nature of memory. Anyway, it was fascinating. I told the director, a tall Montreal resident named Patrick Bergeron, that he should consider shooting on the Indian railways next.

Tonight we are headed to view the Maryland premiere of Putty Hill, a film set in North East Baltimore neighborhood known to many here but few in Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, Berlin or Lisbon, all places the film has screened prior to arriving on a screen in Charm City. The buzz is feverish, and we are worried about getting a ticket, especially after the goofy morning show coverage of Matt Porterfield’s film.

PUTTY HILL TRAILER (FINAL UP-REZ) from Matt Porterfield on Vimeo.

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Hot Sun, Old Stuff

A Stop & Swap stand invited people to exchange used clothing on May Day in Mt. Vernon

Warm spring temperatures bring May flowers and pre-summer cleaning binges. You’ll notice when card tables start springing up on sidewalks covered with dogeared books, mismatched plates, and incomplete jigsaw puzzles. There is a lot of sweating out the day on plastic yard chairs, under large floppy hats. In Mount Vernon, a MICA student took the yard sale idea to the next level, setting up a Stop & Swap stand across from Donna’s. It was a free store of wrinkled button down shirts and size-32 slacks. You were invited to Stop and drop off your old stuff too, but you had to write your name and an estimated date when you bought the item. I left a 1960s blazer with pink buttons and wrote “Halloween 2008, Melanie Daniels, The Birds.”

Up at the Hopkins Homewood “beach”, students set up tables with Old Stuff like Hairspray-pink spike heels and expensive coffee machines.

And the multi-family yard sale the following day on Guilford promised to be a doozy.

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