I park in a neighborhood adjacent to the university where I work. It’s a tony neighborhood, with houses that are worth a million or more. My university has negotiated a number of agreements with the neighborhood in order to diminish the hassle of having so many college kids in the vicinty. The college kids are not allowed to park in the neighborhood, for example.

Such agreements do not apply to university’s faculty, of course. So we faculty park wherever we can, as long as we observe the city’s signage. But there’s one guy in the neighborhood who thinks otherwise. And every day he finds my car and puts a warning under my windshield. The warning, on a full sheet of typing paper, reads:

“To whom it may concern: If you insist on parking here, your automobile will be ticketed and towed at your own expense. The Guilford Committee & The Loyola Campus Police.”

I know this guy is an idiot. Still, every day, as I approach my car, I get a little anxious — because I don’t want to see that piece of paper under my windshield. I don’t want to have to pull it out from under the wiper blade. I don’t want to think about this guy peering out his window (with satisfaction) as I sigh and, yet again, toss his note – which hasn’t varied in two years — onto the floor of my car. Life is too short for this kind of petty harassment.

I found the guy staring at my car one afternoon. As I approached, he retreated to his yard, across the street. As I had suspected, he is a retiree — a man of middling stature, with silver hair and close-cropped silver beard. He was wearing a buttoned-down shirt, blue blue jeans, and white running shoes. I said, “Is there a problem?”

He said, “You’re not supposed to park there.”

I said, “It’s a city street. If you want to prohibit parking across the street from your house, then petition the city for no parking signs.”

He said, “You’re not supposed to park there.”

I said, “I’d love to control the parking in front of my house, just a mile from here, but, guess what, I don’t have the authority — these are city streets. Anybody can park here.”

This went on for a while longer and ended with me not quite shouting, “Stop leaving notes on my windshield!”

I know that nobody is going to tow my car from this street. I am, in fact, parking in front of a municipal pump house, beside the reservoir. I know that the university is not going to say a word about faculty parking in this, or any, neighborhood. Ever. I know that this guy is not going to slash my tires. Still, as I encounter his note every day, I understand the kind of little irritations that might drive an otherwise reasonable person to shoot a neighbor.

The irritating element here is that the guy wants what he wants. There’s no logic involved. He’s not demented, he just has no life. Maybe he’s frustrated by the multitude of things he can’t change, including his social security payments. And here, across the street from his front yard, is something he thinks he can or should control.

I like to believe that, with the exception of the mentally ill, all of us in the tribe of humanity are reasonable — that, given a chance, most of us will do the right thing. But Mr. Parking Patrol embodies a kind of narcissism that thoroughly corrodes civility because his selfishness defies reason. More irritating is the fact that the man is lying: 1) He does not represent the Guilford Committee. There is no such committee. 2) He cannot speak for the university I work for. And 3) nobody but the Baltimore City police can tow from these streets. I am sure that if, in a court of law, he were confronted with his lies, he would insist that they were justified, viz: a tax-paying American has every right to expect that he can gaze out his picture window and enjoy an unobstructed view of the municipal pump house.

I have thought about saving all of this man’s notes until I had a pile of them, then dumping them in his yard or just inside his storm door. But see what’s become of me? I’ve been drawn into the ugly little puddle of his life. Okay, it’s funny. I laugh about it every day. But just in case, one day, I stop laughing and do something drastic, like dump a truckload of No Parking signs on Mr. Patrol’s front yard and end up doing sixty hours of community service, picking litter from the shoulder of I-95, you’ll know why.

Tags: Baltimore City, parking

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Jill and I went to the state fair with our friend Tim this week. Maryland’s state fair — at the Timonium fair grounds, in a Baltimore City suburb — is modest in comparison to the big bruisers in the Midwest. Like other east coast fairs, Maryland’s midway — with overpriced food stalls and dizzying rides — dominates and you’d think that’s all it’s about. But, remember, the fair was — and still is — all about the farmers’ harvest, an occasion to show off their good work.

When walking through the livestock barns and watching the earnest farmers proudly grooming their prize pigs, sheep, and cows, it’s easy to get nostalgic about farming. 80% of Americans now live in cities. But for 300-plus years — from the founding of the colonial settlements until 1950 — farming was the heart of America. If we include Native Americans, we could say thousands of years.

Our farming past persists in the structure of our school year — which lets kids loose for three months only because they used to have to work on the farm. The driving age in most states is low (permits at 16) because teenagers had to drive tractors on their farms. Thanksgiving is a farmer’s holiday. Many of our most iconic images, like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” are of the farm. And we still use expressions like “couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn,” even though most of us haven’t seen a barn except in passing, off the freeway.



Only 1/4 of America’s two million farms are now family operations. And every week, 330 farmers leave their land. Corporate farms dominate, thanks to government subsidies that privilege large operations over small. If you want to support family farms, start by frequenting your local farmers’ market. To learn more about family farms, visit Sustainable Table.

I was amazed to see 4Hers at our state fair. I didn’t imagine that kids still joined this old-fashioned organization, whose motto is I Pledge my Head to clearer thinking, my Heart to greater loyalty,my Hands to larger service, and my Health to better living, for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

Our 4Hers were holding a fashion show to display the clothes they had made. This include a few boys too. As a hip teenager, I would have mocked kids in 4H as “hayseeds” and “hicks.” But now I stand in awe of their competence and self-sufficiency.

The youngsters who were taking care of the livestock were similarly inspiring. When I was a kid, I could hardly find time to feed my cat. These kids are taking care of one-ton cows and herds of sheep. You can see in the way they handle the livestock that they love and respect their animals. But you see too that these kids are rooted in ways that we city folk are not: they know that animals are food and raw material. They give these animals their best in the knowledge that these animals will give their all in return. That’s an honest approach to life.

The pre-teen cowgirls broke my heart. Talk about competence and true grit! As they galloped through their routines in the dirt ring, they appeared strong and confident and destined for good things. But I fear for them because their older counterparts on the midway –the teens who dress like ho’s and center their lives around pleasing men — forecast what awaits them. Mary Pipher got it right in “Revising Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls“: we live in a “girl-poisoning culture.” I’ll spare you my rant but it’s clear that, once girls reach a certain age, their options fall away. Good bye, cow girls.

Jill and I wanted to try the bumper cars but the line was a quarter mile long. As I watched the carnies work, I wondered what becomes of them when the fair season is over. Speaking of which: the best essay you’ll ever read about state fairs — and carnies — is the late David Foster Wallace’s Ticket to the Fair. Wallace got it right in every way and he’s hilarious.

Our state fair is neither large enough nor diverse enough to encourage repeated visits but this year’s did give me a nudge to consider visiting one of the legendary fairs — Iowa or Kansas or Nebraska. Places where the farmer is still a common sight and the broadside of a barn is something we can find easily. Click here for more photos

Tags: Baltimore City, David Foster Wallace, Maryland, Reviving Ophelia, state fair

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The sale price of Baltimore’s Bauerschmidt mansion has been reduced to a paltry $590K. One of Baltimore city’s grand town houses, it went on the market for $1.2 million last year. It’s 10,000 square feet of gorgeous Victorian built in about 1880 for the man who was one of Baltimore’s most prosperous brewers (back when the city had about 100 breweries and plenty of Germans to promote them). So some call it the Brewer’s mansion. Sad thing is, nobody wants to live where the Brew-meister’s mansion now stands. This is the dilemma of American architecture, exemplified more notably by other rustbelt cities like Detroit and Cleveland. The once-grand neighborhoods are not so grand any more.

When we travel, Jill and I make a point of visiting those neighborhoods and gawking at what’s left of the once-grand. The Brewer’s Mansion is exceptional in that it has never been altered, never cut up into apartments or messed with in any way. It even has the original call box for the servants (wired to 30 rooms). The property includes a carriage house, a lovely porte cochere, two rear porches, and a brick wall around the back yard. We could trade our house for this one easily enough but we’d also trade away Charles Village, the hip, diverse neighborhood we live in. In exchange, we’d take on a crime-beleaguered, drug-riddled neighborhood and become prisoners in our own house. You’ve heard stories like that, I’m sure. Actually, this may be an unfair characterization of a neighborhood that has many other grand houses occupied by intrepid urban rehabbers. In any case, it pains us to think about what might become of this mansion, but we’re not brave enough or crazy enough to go for it. Maybe you know somebody who is.

Tags: architecture, Baltimore City, Brewer's mansion, Charles Village, Victorian

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I need a one-day liquor license for a fund-raiser I’m doing in Baltimore next week (Baltimore’s Literary Cabaret). Someone told me it’s easy to get: “Just go downtown and pay fifty bucks. It’ll take an hour, tops.”  He didn’t say where downtown, though I assumed it’d be at or near Baltimore City Hall.

I approach City Hall and its environs with great hesitation, if not fear. Civil servants — those underpaid, under-appreciated form-scribblers and data-shovelers who have seen too much of the public and, as a result, don’t really want to hear about your problems, no matter how special you think your case may be — these people scare me. They seem like weary participants of a psychology lab experiment gone wrong. You know, like that experiment that proved anybody could be a tyrant and torturer if given the chance? This is an unfair generalization, I know, but it’s how I feel.

So: despite my best intentions to keep a good attitude, I had a sinking feeling as I approached the crowded counter at the Liquor Board yesterday. My first misgiving came when I saw an announcement taped to the wall: “As of May 1, all one-day licenses must be obtained 10 days in advance of the event. No exceptions.” When I’d phoned the Liquor Board earlier, a man told me that I had to come in today because of this rule. But he’d said nothing about it being a new rule that would start on May 1. It was only April 28. “You come in today you just made it in time,” he said. But he was wrong, wasn’t he? It wasn’t May 1 yet, so the rule didn’t apply, did it? But I wasn’t about to argue.

I’ve noticed that most civilians are ingratingly self-effacing, even shy, when interacting with clerks at city offices for fear of incurring the wrath of the bureaucracy. We submit ourselves to these clerks as a lost five-year-old would submit himself to a store manager or a police officer, our opened hands outstretched, palms up, our eyes begging for mercy.

I didn’t have very long to wait until I was escorted to the desk of a Ms. Robinson, a middle-aged woman with close-cut hair and big eyeglasses. I’m sure she’s somebody’s happy grandma. She looked at my yellow form and said, “I can’t do anything with this.” Before I could reply, she looked at my other piece of paper. It was the official stationery I’d brought with the tax exempt number of the non-profit I serve.

Ms. Robinson said, “What’s this number?”

“That’s my tax exempt number,” I said.

“I don’t know that,” she said.

“But that’s what it is,’ I said. “The man said that’s all I needed.”

“What man?” she asked.

“The man I talked to on the phone.” Why hadn’t I thought to ask his name?

Ms. Robinson said: “No, sir, you need a letter from the IRS.”

“A letter from the IRS?”

“That says you are tax exempt.”

“Where would I get such a letter?” I asked. “My event is in 10 days.”

Ms. Robinson shook her head in dismay. “You should have that letter already if you are tax exempt.”

It occurred to me that I could call AWP headquarters and have them fax me the IRS letter right away. So I asked Ms. Robinson to write down her fax number.

“This sheet,” she said of my yellow form, “I can’t do anything with because you don’t have a zoning permit.”

“Zoning permit?” I hated that all I could do was echo everything she said.

“All you got on this form is an address.” She pointed. “I don’t know how it’s zoned.”

I thought: Holy shit, what have I gotten into? I’m renting an art gallery for the event. Is the place even zoned for public use? Does the place have to be inspected? Am I going to get the place shut down?

“You got to go over to the Zoning Board and get a permit,” Ms. Robinson instructed. She wrote down the address. I drew a deep breath, glanced at the clock: I had two hours before closing.

I stepped away from the desk and opened my phone to find the number of AWP headquarters. I hate my phone because the screen is the size of a saltine cracker and the download time is interminable and I can never find anything on the screen once I’ve downloaded a web page anyway. The phone numbers I needed were contained in emails, not in my “contacts” folder — that’s the way I run my messy life, never anything where it should be. I couldn’t get my email client to open. Then I realized I had AWP stationery in my hand–and there was the phone number I needed as part of the letterhead. Ah, serendipity! Or was it synchronicity? I phoned AWP but nobody was in, so I left a message.

The Zoning Board was two blocks away. When I arrived I was relieved to see that there was no line. A pleasant Admin. Assistant gave me a form to fill out. I decided that I could spend the afternoon collecting forms. This one asked for all kinds of information I didn’t have. As I tried again to access my email via my phone, the AA told me I couldn’t do phone work in the office. This seemed to be the case in every city office: cell phone use prohibited in this office! I wondered why. It wasn’t like an airplane. The AA said I had to get another office to stamp the form anyway before I could hand it back to her.

So I went to that other office, which looked like a DMV waiting area, with its cordoned lines and clerk stalls. I borrowed a pen from a clerk at the nearest counter. She and her co-worker were chatting about their mutual friend’s amazing cupcakes, which  look like miniature wedding cakes.

I stared at my Zoning form. It asked for the name of the building’s owner. I couldn’t remember his last name. It asked for the square footage. I had overheard somebody saying that the Zoning Board will charge your event according to square footage you’re using. This gave me pause. The form asked for more phone numbers I didn’t have.There’s phone email and there’s regular email. I needed regular but it takes up so much bandwidth I couldn’t pull it in. Did I mention that I hate my phone?

I filled in a few lines of my form in a gesure of wishful thinking then handed it to one of the cupcake clerks. She said, “You’ve still got to fill out these lines. And then this section that describes your event.” Then she turned to her co-worker, “The description with the square footage is all that counts, right?” I returned to the end of the counter and made up names and phone numbers for all of the lines, anything to complete the form. I figured all the city wanted was my money, not accurate information. Was I wrong? When I handed the completed form back to the cupcake clerk, she glanced at it, then stamped it. Then I returned to the other Zoning office, where an assessor took my form and directed me to return to the DMV room again, where I sat at a clerk’s stall and received my Zoning Permit bill: $25. A note in her stall said: “No curbing permits will be issued in Baltimore City. Basements may continue to be lowered using the underpinning method.” Perfect, I thought.

After paying my Zoning bill, I returned to the Liquor Board two blocks away. My detour had taken less than an hour. At this point, I asked myself, When did governments start regulating the consumption of alcohol? Is it unreasonable? Is it a scam? Later, a little research told me that governments big and small, local and national, have been regulating or attempting to regulate alcohol for as long as there has been alcohol — for millennia — because humans are determined to get high on the stuff. So, asking the question, “Who says the government can tell me what to serve and where?” will get you nowhere. If your local government can tell you where to park, it can tell you where you can and cannot drink.

When I inquired after my fax at the Liquor Board front desk, the clerk (another middle-aged woman, not Ms. Robinson) said, “Why’d you need something faxed?” After I explained that I needed the official IRS tax-exempt corporation verification letter, she said, “You didn’t need that.” I shrugged whatever. The crackerjack AWP staff had indeed fired the fax over. As I waited for the clerk to process the paper, the other clerk behind the counter — a guy with sly humor — said, “You still here?” I nodded and he chuckled.

Ten minutes later, the other clerk said my documents we in order. Then I handed her my Zoning Permit receipt. She said, “That’s not a Zoning Permit.”

“I know,” I said, “it’s a receipt for the permit — which has been approved. They say the permit will be ready in a day or two.”

“I can’t issue you a liquor license without a zoning permit,” she said.

I looked at her over the tops of my eyeglasses, one of those Come-on-now-let’s-work-together looks. I said, “If I don’t get my liquor permit today, you people aren’t going to give it to me later.” I pointed to the new May 1 regulation.

She raised one eyebrow, nodded her head in agreement, then pulled over a date/time stamp and gave my form the mark. “There you go,” she said. “Now you’re on record. You can bring this back the day OF your event and you’ll still get your permit.”

I thanked her and was grateful to get away. When I returned to my car and its expired meter, I expected to find a ticket on the windshield, but there was none.

Tags: Baltimore City, City Hall, IRS, Liquor Board, Literary Cabaret

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Jill and I took a field trip to Baltimore’s most toxic industrial area, Wagner’s Point. This was Jill’s idea. She is fascinated with gross things, dangerous places, and old buildings. I share this fascination. Wagner’s Point is one of several muddy stretches of marshland extending like flattened fingers from Baltimore’s harbor shoreline. This one happens to contain a ghost town. In the late 1990s, Baltimore City started buying out the Wagner’s Point residents–ostensibly for the expansion of the Patapsco waste water treatment. In actuality, these people were suffering from cancer rates and other diseases far exceeding the national average.

The hundred-year-old neighborhood—270 residents in a six-block area—was a pocket of houses in the midst of a smelly, smoky, oily industrial waste land, which is home to 10 chemical plants, several oil refineries and storage depots, scrap metal dump sites, and industrial waste recycling outfits, among others things. Many of the residents didn’t want to move but the City declared imminent domain, no doubt to spare itself future lawsuits. It was much cheaper to buy out the residents than pay their future medical bills.

The residents didn’t get a bad deal. They received above-market value for their houses, a relocation fee, and a guaranteed low mortgage on any house elsewhere. So, it was a happy ending, more or less. Jill and I found the neighborhood. The City leveled it. You’d never know there had been a neighborhood here. Here’s a link to a City Paper article about the last inhabitants before they were pushed out: Wagner’s Point

We drove lots of places we weren’t supposed to drive, including the CSX , where a bulldozer was bucketing batches of coal into a processor for train shipping. The freight-container derricks looked like towering monsters from War of the Worlds. A security guard drove up to us in his pickup and asked what we were doing. I had my camera aimed at the mountain of coal. I said, “We’re just tourists taking pictures.” He told us to leave. Jill spied a black limo farther down the muddy road, next to the warehouse. “Russian mafia,” she joked. Who would drive a limo to a coal processing site?

Among the other things we saw in the farthest reaches of Baltimore’s industrial shoreline: a mountain of salt for winter roadways, orange and black hills of chewed up scrap metals, a medical wastes dump whose trucks announce, “chemotheraputic infectious waste,” streets named “Chemical Road” and “Quarantine Road,” and the sky-scraper tall incinerator stack of the BGE plant. We tried to get into the city landfill but the guy at the gate wouldn’t let us. “I just want a photo,” I said. He said, “No photos allowed.”

Don’t tell me not to take a photo of property my hard-earned tax dollars pay for. No, sir. Jill and I drove around back and took some photos from a rise behind the chainlink fence, which was topped with razor wire. Landills, you should know, are lined with heavy black plastic so that all that toxic rot doesn’t leach into the soil. Landfills start as huge bowls scooped from a hillside and lined with what looks like one big black garbage bag. A landfill is also a gull’s paradise. And the gulls lend the landfill a decorous whitewash, waves of them winging up and down across the garbage as they avoid the oncoming bulldozers.

Link to a video of the Ore Pier

Tags: Baltimore City, garbage, ghost town, landfill, Wagner's Point

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