The City, In Repose

One of the pleasant side benefits of my travels - even now, in these lean economic moments - is time to myself, completely. I love to visit my friends... but I love best that time visiting them also means time to myself, usually exploring.

Baltimore by night is, like most urban landscapes, a different beast from the city by day; more different than others, I suspect, because the separations in and around the city are more pronounced. Other northeastern cities experienced "white flight," but for most the effect was reversed, in whole or at least in part, from about the eighties until probably just before the foreclosure crisis became pronounced.

For a variety of economic, social and probably political reasons, Baltimore's divides were, and are, more long lasting. Downtown is drivable and easy to park, and as much as there was commercial redevelopment (we pioneered rebuilding of the inner harbor areas and historic districts with Harborplace), the white suburbanites never really saw the city as more than an occasional destination for dinner or the arts. Or the place to commute to for work.

The net effect is that, on a late Sunday night... things get pretty deserted.

Baltimore is often perceived - and I usually share the notion - as the lesser sister of the northeast's big cities. Wherever you look - north to Philly, south to DC, or further to New York or Boston - Baltimore is easily overshadowed, outgunned (except, perhaps, in actual guns), overmatched. Yet, walking around last night, I was reminded how much affection I have for the place, how it served, fondly, as my training ground to living an urban gay existence.  Baltimore may be smaller, scrappier, but I realize, now, how it instilled a sense of working class practicality: it's a city of few illusions, and less about dreams than more about doing what needs to get done... which is good grounding for the airy dreamer I can be.

As much as I tried to escape my past - it's so very American - and where I came from, Baltimore, especially alone, at night, always welcomes me back - whether as the eager overconfident kid who needed life's lessons slapped into him, or the New York urban sophisticate who needed to remember where he came from, or lately, the prodigal son, returned home to where he will always find a place to be.

Baltimore by night is beautiful, artificial, calm and dangerous, all at once; It's where I learned to see, and appreciate, the concrete canyons; to appreciate the architecture of hundreds of years crashing upon one another, racing heedlessly towards the new. It's learning to live with, and love, all the things about the place I came from that made me who I am, the maddening things I wish our society could be... and the realities of what we are, and are not. In Baltimore, I am nothing if not a nice white kid from the burbs... and yet, nowhere do I see more clearly what it is to be part of the black minority.

From J's centrally located flat, the back window provides a stunning panoramic view of Baltimore, in all its glory, contradictions, and grit. Glowing at night, as cities do, lying in repose, awaiting to rise once more. And it will.

Comments

[Jennifer]

I loved this post! The photo is gorgeous-so urban!! Your very poetic word choices and sentence structure gave me much joy while reading, I felt that I was snuggling in a down filled chaise reading instead of on a hard plastic subway seat!