What's New In Baltimore? - Baltimore, MD

Baltimore is a rough city to navigate, with its downtown overrun by impoverished and dangerous neighborhoods and drivers who possess about as much value for human life as a drone strike. It seems to be one of those cities where every few years someone starts a rumor that it’s on the rise and cool things are happening, but that generally just means they finally got a Crate & Barrel and there weren’t any homicides in the gentrified (read: white) neighborhoods.

We began the afternoon in what we now believe might be Baltimore’s only livable neighborhood, made popular by Baltimore’s flashiest son John Waters and his attraction to several of its book and record stores. Even the hip area seemed to attract a strange crowd of derelict meth-heads, the types one would be inclined to see manning the water-gun game at the county fair, instead roaming the streets in the middle of the day. The neighborhood, while an oasis, was still nothing out of the ordinary. An overpriced vintage shop here, a record store there, a tattoo parlor around the corner, and plenty of yoga studios.

When we attempted to visit Billie Holiday’s former residence, we were averted after realizing it was now a housing project in a neighborhood where we didn’t even feel safe inside our car. From the street, there was no indication that the building was of any historical or cultural significance - no sign, no plaque - so we just kept driving.

We paid our respects to Edgar Allan Poe, whose grave still garners flowers and love notes 164 years after his death. Buried just inside the entrance to the cemetery, next to his bride Virginia Clemm, what was once a quiet graveyard is now surrounded by the stench of diesel exhaust, the wailing of sirens at the nearby medical center, and all sunlight blocked by the towering office buildings. It seems something of a dishonor for the American master of horror, suspense, and all things gothic, but at the time of his death, the church was the centerpiece of the city, which itself was built around it. We circled through the surrounding graves, some dating back to the early 1700s, worn and weathered from the years. The cemetery ended up being our small moment of calm that day, edging out the noise of downtown, interrupted only when we spotted a bum napping on top of a headstone and decided it was time to leave.

We followed signs for Poe’s Baltimore home only to discover that the building is now surrounded by housing projects and across the street from a vacant lot, the kind of place to dump off a body...or at least a duffel bag of spare parts. We chalked it up to another instance of incredibly poor city planning, but it still left us feeling like The Wire might actually be a more accurate representation of this sad city than any local government official would like to admit. Baltimore’s piss-poor job preserving and marketing what could be an immense source of tourism makes one wonder if the people running the city even care about drawing visitors, a nearly insane notion after visiting places like New Orleans and Williamsburg that thrive on it. The home of America’s first truly great writer, whose works defined an entire genre of literature, is smack in the center of the kind of neighborhood one can hear described in a Bobby Womack song.

Poe's Baltimore home.

Across the street from Poe's Baltimore home.

The Inner Harbor, Baltimore’s most well-known tourist destination, seemed more like a giant waterfront mall than something actually worthy of an entire afternoon. It is something we are noticing with an increased frequency that exists in cities such as this, where the token “place to go” is little more than a glorified shopping mall, the place where you can buy some artifact proving that yes, indeed, you did go to Baltimore and spent too much money on a stupid little lime green shirt illustrating that fact. We opted to avoid the hordes of Vacation Families™ and shot down to Annapolis to stuff our faces with crab, which seemed like a much better way to spend the evening.

Maybe everyone just has a different idea of what vacation is than we do. This is starting to become a problem.