Oh, Baltimore

©2015 by John LaTorre

Google’s Streetview service is, for me, the most addictive thing on the Internet. When coupled with a browser’s ability to search for any information on the places I encounter, it guarantees that I’ll spend the next few hours in front of the computer screen as I cybernetically navigate streets I used to travel every day.

But these trips down memory lane are not always pleasant. Neighborhoods change. Landmarks disappear. For instance, I noticed something else while prowling my old neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, with Google Streetview. There’s a monument to Johns Hopkins on the grounds of the university named after him. The monument, at the western end of Thirty-third Street, shows two nude bronze figures seated on marble thrones, a male and a female, representing Knowledge (the university) and Healing (the Johns Hopkins Hospital). Or at least it used to. Apparently the female figure is gone. That is a shame, because the Hopkins fraternity boys used to polish the lady’s bare breasts with loving care when I was a student there in the sixties. On a good sunny day, it was said, you could see them gleam from a half a mile away. I don’t usually condone tampering with public statuary, but I must say that I sympathized with those lads; if their social life was anything like mine as a student, polishing up those boobs was probably as close to intimacy with the female form as they ever got. I sincerely hope that the lady is temporarily absent, undergoing restoration, and that she will soon be back in all her shining glory. (I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that those college men were also responsible for slipping rolls of toilet paper under the left hand of the copy of Rodin’s Thinker that stood outside the Baltimore Museum of Art, just adjacent to the Hopkins campus. Look at the statue with an unjaundiced eye, and you’ll see why.)

When I moved to Baltimore in 1966 to attend college, it was the first American city I’d lived in as an adult. It was a different place then, and each time I visit it, there seems to be a little more that’s slipped away from me. Gertrude Stein once famously remarked of her home town of Oakland, California, that “there’s no there there.”  She didn’t mean that there was nothing there of consequence, as has been thought; she meant that the Oakland of her past no longer existed. She couldn’t go back there, because “there” wasn’t there anymore. That’s kind of how I feel about Baltimore.

I recently heard that Obrycki’s crab house had closed down after more than a half a century. A crab house was a special kind of restaurant, where you’d sit at long tables covered in newspaper. You were expected to make a mess, and you did. The steamed crabs were brought out and your pleasant job was to dissect them, extract the meat, and leave a mound of shell fragments on the table. You’d wash the food down with pitchers of National Bohemian beer, a local beer that was specially formulated to be the perfect complement to crab meat, or so I was told. There are still plenty of places you can get steamed crabs, I’m sure, but do any of them have the ambience of the authentic crab house experience?

Another restaurant that passed from the scene was a Chinese restaurant called Mee Jun Low’s, on Mulberry Street. You walked up a flight of stairs to find a big room, which was divided into two sections: a kitchen area, where wizened Asian men cooked food in enormous woks with the economy of motion that comes from years of doing the same thing over and over, and a dining area with a dozen tables or so. A waist-high barrier separated the two areas. There was only one waitress. She was the only Caucasian on the staff, and her name was Irene. She’d take your order and sing it out to the kitchen staff, who would repeat the order and have it cooking before she had time to take the next one. The whole place had an aura of pandemonium under light control, and it was a great favorite with the college crowd and what in future years would be called Young Urban Professionals.

And then there was Haussner’s, a German restaurant on Eastern Avenue that my wife and I would visit when we had a little money. They were famous for their crab cakes and desserts, as well as the fine art that hung from their walls, an art collection that any museum would have been proud to own. And there were other restaurants whose name I don’t remember, such as the cafeteria on Baltimore Street just a block or two from my office, with its steam tables and stainless steel trays, a favorite with downtown workers who didn’t have much to spend on lunch. It was also on the second floor, the first floor being all offices and storefronts on that block. I think the first floor was a stationery store … or was that down the block? And there was a little shack at the foot of Broadway (where Broadway Square is now) where you could get the best crab cakes in town, even better than Haussner’s to my mind.

It’s odd that the things that spring to mind most readily are foods. There used to be a local hamburger chain called Gino’s. It served the Gino Giant, which looked like a Big Mac but was far tastier. I found out later that their “secret sauce” was Thousand Island dressing. They’d use fresh potatoes for their French fries, too. The owners built the chain up to over three hundred restaurants and then sold it to Marriott’s, who never figured out how to run it properly. The chain is all gone now, although there are a few restaurants in the region that are trying to revive its menu.

A few blocks from my apartment on North Calvert Street was the B&M Sub Shop, in back of a basement convenience store. They’d take a fresh loaf of Italian bread, hollow it out, pack the cavity with meat balls and marinara sauce, and use a piece of the discarded bread to plug the top of it. It was the best meatball submarine I’ve ever tasted. Of course, I was hungrier then, and hunger makes the best sauce.

There were also the White Castle and the White Tower, two separate (and bitterly rival) chains selling identical tiny hamburgers you’d buy by the bag. One of them – I can’t remember which – had a restaurant on Greenmount Avenue and Gorsuch. It was within easy walking distance of Johns Hopkins and was open all night long. I made that walk many a time, both when I was an insomniac student and later on, when I lived in Charles Village. Neither chain operates in Baltimore now, although White Castle still does a brisk business in the Midwest and even sells its “sliders” in supermarkets nationwide. Maybe they taste as good as the ones I used to buy, as long as you eat them at three in the morning.

That neighborhood was once a working-class community. By 1966, it was past its best years but still had supermarkets, garment shops, a Woolworth’s, movie theaters, surplus stores, several bars, and a news-stand that was open twenty-four hours a day and stocked newspapers from all over the country. When we’d be looking for apartments or cars, we’d go down on Saturday night and buy the “bulldog” edition of the Baltimore Sunday Sun. Then we’d call up the advertisers in the classified ads, thereby getting the jump on all the people who waited until Sunday to pick up the Sunday paper. That kiosk is gone now, along with most of those businesses, and many of the storefronts are boarded up or begging for tenants.

There are so many places that don’t exist anymore – not only the businesses, but the structures themselves. In 1971, some friends and I started a print shop in the basement of a row house on West 25^th Street. There’s now a CVS pharmacy where that block of row houses used to be. The little house on Susquehanna Avenue in Towson that my wife and I rented in 1973 was torn down years ago. When I went by there twenty years ago, all that was left was a set of concrete steps that connected our front porch with the sidewalk in front of the house, steps I would ascend every day after walking home from the bus stop down the street. Now there’s a new brick building on the site, occupied by Chesapeake Teleservices. There are concrete steps in front of it that look an awful lot like those steps I walked up years ago, but they are probably as new as the building.

What I remember most about that trip in 1994 was getting lost in downtown Baltimore, only a few blocks away from where I used to work on Baltimore and South Streets. When I moved to the city in 1966, most of the buildings that were built downtown in the early years of the twentieth century were still there. It was then that Baltimore undertook a massive urban renewal project, leveling most of the buildings around the harbor to create Charles Center and the new Inner Harbor area.  A few years later, much of the area south of City Hall was also demolished, including Baltimore’s famous fish market, where you could park your car all day for a quarter. Near the fish market was Baltimore’s infamous “Block,” which once extended several blocks and comprised nightclubs, burlesque halls and porn shops, a haven for sailors who berthed in Baltimore. By 1994, almost all of that was gone, except for a few strip clubs.

None of the above will make much sense to those who were never part of Baltimore’s scene, except for those who seek parallels in their own lives – spaces that have changed, buildings that were demolished to make way for other buildings, landmarks that have been obliterated. It’s the same in every city. A year before my father died, I drove him around downtown Syracuse and had him point out locations that he used to know … the school he went to, his first job as a machinist, the Franklin automobile factory … now largely vacant lots or abandoned buildings. And there have been numerous books on the metamorphosis of cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris. These were once cities with a full spectrum of working classes, but they’ve become residences, playgrounds and workspaces for the affluent, while those in the service industries that support them have to live far out of town.

There is a Baltimore in my memories that is far different from the real one in Maryland. It is a city frozen in time, a day long past. Maybe if I’d been living in Baltimore for the last forty years, the changes there wouldn’t have seemed so glaring, or so extensive. There would still be a “there” there. Maybe there’s still a “there” there, and all I’d have to do is walk its streets again, and visit the landmarks that still stand, and smell the grass being mowed in Wyman Park, and hear the bells of the neighborhood churches. I’m sorry, Google, but I just can’t do that with Streetview.