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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Mrs. Park, the widowed Korean lady who did my laundry, has disappeared, her shop shuttered since September, the store emptied, a “closed” sign in the window. For nearly 20 years, ever since I moved to Baltimore, I’ve been taking my laundry to her. Even after I moved out of the neighborhood, I kept going to her because she did good work, she was pleasant, and I’m a loyal customer.

Every time I went in, she’d grin and say, “Oh, best customer!” Then she’d ask me how I was. Then: “Your wife….?” And she’d nod knowingly, her eyebrows raised in expectation of the good news I never delivered. She seemed desperately hopeful that Jill and I would have a baby. For a woman of her generation (she’s about 75), children–the family–are everything. She would tell me about her grown children and her grandchildren. I’d ooo! and ah! at her snapshots.

Jill and I chose not to have children for many reasons. We don’t regret that decision. Still, I didn’t want to disappoint Mrs. Park, and so I didn’t tell her that Jill and I would never have a baby, that we’ve put our energies and interests elsewhere. It just seemed easier not to get into it. As a result, I’m afraid that Mrs. Park pitied me, thinking, Poor man! What is life without children?

Mrs. Park was in very good health, wiry and quick-moving. I doubt that she has fallen ill or worse. Seven years ago, somebody robbed her in the shop, then shoved her to the floor. She was lucky she broke no bones. I thought for sure she’d retire after that. But she came back the next week, angry at the robber and determined to stay put. On his way out, the robber had wrenched the door off its hinges. It was never the same after that. Each time I walked into the shop, I noticed how the door wouldn’t shut right and I wondered if Mrs. Park thought of the robber when she struggled to shut the now-stubborn door.

Last September, she announced that her daughter and husband had invited her to stay with them in Colorado for a month. She had visited her children many times (she has a son in California) and, on several occasions, had closed the store for as long as two weeks. But she had never cleared out the store, as she was doing this time. I wondered if her daughter had asked her to do this, if this was a scheme to disengage her mother from her beloved business. I imagined that, once Mrs. Park was in Colorado, her daughter would convince her to stay–for the sake of the grandchildren. How could grandma resist?

Mrs. Park betrayed no suspicions of her own. She promised that she’d return on Oct. 14 to resume business. But October came and went and the store remained closed. I drove by every week for two months and then, finally, I admitted to myself that my Korean friend was not returning. Her daughter’s plan had worked. No doubt, Mrs. Park has a nice room in her daughter’s house–and her daughter has a 24/7 baby-sitter, not to mention an energetic seamstress and homemaker. Am I being uncharitable?

I must confess, I worried about Mrs. Park. How long could she have kept on in that little shop? Her two grandchildren will keep her plenty busy. She’ll cook for the family and treat them to traditional delights and everyone’s life will be richer for it. And, at last, Mrs. Park will have better things to worry about than whether or not her customers have children of their own.

Tags: Baltimore City, family, mothers

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Every year the City calls me in for jury duty. But, because I’m very liberal and over-educated, nobody picks me for a jury. Still, they call me and I come. I know many people who are never called in. It’s like a lottery.

This year, I showed up at the court house door dutifully at 8:25 A.M. on the appointed day. Nobody was waiting to enter at the security scanning station. As I stepped up, the Sheriff’s deputy on duty—a short woman of middle age—issued commands like a drill sergeant: “Move up. Put your bags on the conveyor. Remove all metal objects, coins, possessions. Place them on the conveyor.”

I complied.

I’m a compliant guy. Most of us are. We’ve spent too much time in the TSA lines. We’ve become cowlike in our submission, shuffling through the cordoned chutes of security.

“Take off your belt!” the deputy said loudly. Maybe I wasn’t moving fast enough for her. But nobody stood behind or ahead of me. I had already put my bags on the conveyor. “Take OFF your belt!” Now she was shouting.

I said, “Take it easy.”

“Don’t YOU tell me to take it EASY!” she snapped. “Take OFF your belt!”

It was as if she were telling an armed-and-dangerous perp to Get OUT of the CAR.

Confused and a little frightened, I did as she demanded. Then I put my belt on the scanner’s conveyor, where I thought she wanted it.

“DON’T put your belt there!” she shouted. “I didn’t TELL you to put it there!” She snatched up my belt and handed it back to me. By this time I had taken off my coat because I thought she wanted my coat on the conveyor belt.

“I didn’t TELL you to take OFF your coat!” she shouted. ” Put your coat ON!”

I must have stared at her as I would have stared at an oncoming train. Mind you, on a normal day, I’d still be in bed, dreaming of running barefoot through a field of sunflowers.

“Put your coat ON!” she shouted. “PUT your coat ON!”

I did as she commanded. Then, in frustration and disgust, I dropped my belt into the plastic box she held.

“That’s IT!” she announced. “He’s got an ATTITUDE!” Her fellow officer behind the deck just stared. Maybe everybody was frightened of the deputy. Now the deputy turned to me: “You’re not coming in this way. YOU go around to Saint Paul Street!”

“What?” I stuttered.

“Around to SAINT Paul STREET!” she shouted.

I recalled the time that Mr. Altman kicked me out of fourth grade music class because I was singing our “tra-la-la” chorus derisively. He was a big man, a slob and a bully. He insulted us routinely by giving us the most insipid, infantile songs to sing. I loathed him. “WHO was that?” he demanded after silencing us. “WHO was singing like THAT?” Then his rodent eyes met mine. I felt my face burning. Did a cruel smile tug at Mr. Altman’s chapped lips? “You, Tanner, OUT!”

The deputy heaped my bags and my belt into my open hands and commanded: “Around the block, to the SAINT PAUL entrance!”

Amazed and befuddled, I walked past another officer who shook his head in disbelief (he looked frightened too), I pushed through the huge court house doors, then nearly tripped on the big step down. Another man was walking in. He must have seen my shaken expression. “You all right?” he asked with concern. I couldn’t look at him. I only nodded and waved an okay, my head resounding with a Kafkaesque chorus of tra la las.

Tags: Baltimore City, Kafka

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