©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 25th
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.
