May 2009 Issue by Urbanite LLC

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contents

may 2009 issue no. 59

features 38 the invisible city: a treasury of tales from hidden baltimore

see the smallest alley, taste the strangest soup, visit the secret societies, hear the missing music, and meet the most powerful man you’ve never heard of.

48 the departed

in west baltimore, a 15-year-old boy is shot and killed—another unsolved crime in a city that has endured decades of chronically high homicide rates. when murder becomes an epidemic, where does all the grief go? by martha thomas

departments 9 editor’s note

notes from the underground

11 what you’re saying future farmers

13 what you’re writing

classified: what the ducks know, miss sassy and fun, and breaking the taboo

17 corkboard

this month: sock creature of the universe, a local food guru, and building with cans

18 the goods: a special summer shopping guide 31 baltimore observed life after death

mount auburn cemetery, emerging from the undergrowth

this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com: recipe: chef curtis eargle of the maryland club reveals the recipe for frosted crab soup blog: anne haddad follows the maryland film festival book excerpt: read a chapter from arlando jones’ eager street

on the air: radio: urbanite on the marc steiner show, weaa 88.9 fm

by rafael alvarez

35 the art of war

a game pioneer’s date with history by greg rienzi

37 home away from home

a haven for children in crisis by christine grillo

52 space: heart of stone

the rocky road of a long-neglected mansion by greg hanscom

55 the drawing board

reimagining a canton park

59 eat/drink: pony time

maryland’s original whiskey gets another shot by clinton macsherry

may 14: more on rye whiskey and preakness day cocktails may 20: martha thomas on death and grief in the city may 27: the pratt library’s david donovan plays mencken’s lost music

on the cover:

art by brian payne

63 reviewed: grano pasta bar and abbey burger bistro 65 the feed: this month in eating 67 art/culture: the audacity of mope a few words in defense of melancholy by andrew reiner

plus: libido meets love, a new way to buy local music, and this month’s cultural calendar

82 eye to eye: urbanite’s creative director, alex castro, on christian benefiel w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

Issue 59: May 2009 Publisher Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com Creative Director Alex Castro General Manager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com

Rediscover your

Editor-in-Chief David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com Managing Editor Marianne K. Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com

natural beauty

Senior Editor Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com Literary Editor Susan McCallum-Smith literaryeditor@urbanitebaltimore.com Proofreader Robin T. Reid Contributing Writers Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Clinton Macsherry, Tracey Middlekauff, Richard O’Mara, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Sharon Tregaskis, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac Editorial Intern Andrew Zaleski

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Design/Production Manager Lisa Van Horn Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com Traffi c Production Coordinator Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com Production Interns Shelby Silvernell, Tasha Treadwell Senior Account Executives Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R . Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com Lois Windsor Lois@urbanitebaltimore.com Account Executive Rachel Bloom Rachel@urbanitebaltimore.com Advertising Sales Assistant Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com

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Advertising/Editorial/Business Ofﬁ ces P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050; Fax: 410-243-2115 www.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission by Urbanite is prohibited. Copyright 2009, Urbanite LLC. All rights reserved. Urbanite (ISSN 1556-8105) is a free publication distributed widely in the Baltimore metropolitan area. To suggest a drop location for the magazine, please contact us at 410-243-2050. Postmaster: Send address changes to Urbanite Subscriptions, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211.

editor’s note

photo by Will Kirk

photo by Tasha Treadwell

contributors By day, Christine Grillo is a senior writer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she writes and edits articles on topics ranging from AIDS to Zimbabwe. At other times, she is a fiction writer, and her fiction has appeared in Urbanite, Southern Review, and LIT, among other journals. She has been a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. For this issue, she wrote about the Ark, a preschool for homeless children in East Baltimore (p. 37). Despite the children’s desperate situations, “I was kind of surprised by how much they seemed like normal typical kids, which made me think that kids are really resilient,” she says. Greg Rienzi was born in Yonkers, New York, and moved to Baltimore in the late 1990s. His writing has appeared in the Connecticut Post, Howard County Times, Boss Magazine, and Johns Hopkins Magazine, among other publications. He currently writes for Johns Hopkins University publications and teaches journalism at Towson University. His profile of game pioneer Charles S. Roberts (p. 35), he says, was inspired by his Aunt Peggy and Uncle Mike, who kept a weathered Avalon Hill board game under their coffee table at their house in Yonkers when he was growing up. Rienzi lives in Parkville with his wife and two children.

In Ian McEwan’s Cold War novel

The Innocent, a hard-drinking CIA man holds forth on his theory of human evolution in a Berlin bar. The CIA man, Bob Glass, is involved in a wonky mid-1950s plan to tunnel deep into the city’s Soviet sector to tap into Russian telephone communications, and he is a strong believer in the power of secrets. Think of our cave-dwelling human ancestors, Glass says, who lived in packs and languished without language for millions of years. “But what happens when someone goes off on his own for a moment’s privacy?” he asks. “When he sees a leopard coming, he knows something the others don’t. And he knows they don’t know. He has something they don’t, he has a secret, and this is the beginning of his individuality, of his consciousness. If he wants to share his secret … then he’s going to need to invent language. From there grows the possibility of culture. “Secrecy,” he concludes, “made us possible.” Alas, the CIA man’s faith in the unknowable leads him astray, in fiction as in life. The amazing tunnel—a real (and still partially classified) project—gets built, at enormous expense. Months later, the Russians discover it and make much hay of the deviousness and trickery of the West. But (spoiler alert!) the Reds have a secret of their own: They’ve known about the spy tunnel all along. A British mole tipped them off long before construction began. The new International Spy Museum down in Washington, D.C., has a nifty exhibit on the Berlin tunnel, which is indeed an impressive monument to the power of secrets, or at least the folly of trying to keep them. Longtime CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton popularized the term “wilderness of mirrors” to describe this feedback loop of disinformation and half-truths that the great powers generated during their Cold War standoff. But it’s an irresistible metaphor for all manner of human undertakings: We all hide things; we all tell stories about ourselves that aren’t strictly true. And we all love wandering in this forest, looking for something that the rest of us don’t know. Welcome, then, to the Invisible City, this month’s trip into the mysteries of Baltimore. A host of writers and photographers offer their takes on hidden phenomena, undisclosed locations, and shadowy characters in town—see page 38 to begin your tour. But it’s safe to say that we have barely scratched the surface. Drop us a line and share your best Baltimore secrets. Keep an eye out for the ones that are hiding in plain sight. If we citizens often marvel at the overfamiliar small-world clannishness of life here, it’s worth remembering that Baltimore is full of strangers, too—the unseen, the unknowable, the forgotten. Martha Thomas’ feature story, “The Departed” (p. 48), opens a window on one such invisible world, following the death of a 15-year-old boy to reveal how entire communities—the families, friends, and neighbors of victims of violence—cope with an epidemic not of murder but of grief itself, an all-but-ignored side effect of Baltimore’s storied homicide rate. The lesson here—future spies take note—is that some of the most important secrets aren’t very secret at all. No tunnel required. —David Dudley

Does this thing go any faster? Coming Next Month: Speed, mobility, and the art of getting around www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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An Evening with Henry Cho. A special event at The Spear Center to kick off the 2009 season. May 15 LakeFest: A weekend of free events at the Columbia lakefront for the entire family. June 12- 14 Sue Ellen Thompson. Two time Pulitzer Prize nominee speaks about “Poetry as Autobiography.” June 15 Chicago City Limits. NYC’s longest running comedy revue! June 16 California Guitar Trio. A whirlwind of instrumental styles. June 18 Ballet Hispanico. Magnetic energy and vivacious choreography. June 20 Laura Lippman. The Wilde Lake High School graduate and former Baltimore Sun reporter reads from her work. June 23 The Smothers Brothers. Their cutting-edge humor still resonates today. June 25

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urbanite may 09

Barrage. This year’s Festival Finale is a high octane ﬁddle fest! June 27

photo by Chris Rebbert

what you’re saying

Left Hungry Before accepting Vandana Shiva’s beliefs (“Keynote,” April), we should reflect on Hansel and Gretel. Their story is a product of traditional European agricultural societies that practiced the ideas promoted by Shiva. Europeans once farmed by hand, using only organic fertilizers and human-powered tools. Europe was also a land stalked by famine and accompanying horrors such as cannibalism and the abandonment of children (as reflected by Hansel and Gretel’s tale). Tragically, traditional agriculture proved unable to produce enough food to feed everyone. Fortunately, European agricultural technology advanced. Using oil-fueled machinery, food production was not only improved but also secured, and famine was vanquished. Today the idea of abandoning children is anathema, and stories from such cultures are now fodder for children’s entertainment. Industrial agriculture was forced upon no one; it out-competed traditional agricultural techniques in a marketplace fatigued from food insecurity. This too is India’s story, where dependence on traditional agriculture allowed the specter of famine to haunt that nation. History has shown that industrial agriculture, in part, gave us the societies we enjoy today. Uninformed nostalgia often causes us to pine for the “old-fashioned,” and we forget the reasons (they were inadequate, they failed) our ancestors jettisoned their antique

ways. In recognizing their wisdom, we come to understand that the reuse and recycling of history’s rubbish is counterproductive and harmful to our progress. —Matthew Hood, Halethorpe Another Tax Plan At the same meeting in which Mr. Stephen Walters presented his plan to the city council (“The One-Percenter,” December), I presented my “One State, One Rate” proposal that would greatly reduce the tax rate without reducing revenues. My premise is simple: There is one state of Maryland; there should be one state tax rate, far below the city’s current rate, with all the proceeds going into one fund. Assuming the revenue would be distributed to the counties and city on a per-capita basis and a rate set to equal the current statewide revenues, the city would receive greater revenues than it does now.

by Amy Lundy’s remark that Homewood and Evergreen houses “are our primary concern.” Is it because they are in a more desirable, fashionable, and affluent part of the city? The Hopkins medical school, university, and hospital have grown since their humble beginnings to world-renowned prominence. The status attached to the Hopkins name stands out above all the rest, and it appears that they have the inflated egos to go along with it. I wonder how the rest of world would feel if they knew what was happening to the beautiful historic home of the Hopkins namesake, benefactor, and founding father. —Judith Mann, Fells Point Correction In the April “Green Guide,” we misidentified Federal Hill boutique Ladybugs and Fireflies as a children’s consignment store. As of last May, the store sells new toys and books for children and ’tweens. Urbanite regrets the error.

—Bill Marker, Baltimore Haunted Mansion I was saddened to read about the deplorable condition of the Clifton Mansion (“Disorder in the House,” December) and the lack of support from the Johns Hopkins University and medical school communities. I was struck

We want to hear what you’re saying. E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

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Announcing the Calypso® System: the world’s first GPS for the Body ® — here today at BWMC. Few medical advances can be termed a quantum leap forward in our ongoing fight against cancer. The new Calypso® 4D Localization System™ is one of them, and it’s available right now at The Tate Cancer Center at BWMC...the only hospital in Maryland to have this amazing technology. What makes the Calypso System so important? The prostate, like many organs in the body is never in a state of complete rest, but moves in small increments even during radiation treatment. Now, using revolutionary miniature Beacon® electromagnetic transponders, our radiation oncologists can target cancerous cells like never before, as they work to maximize effective treatment and minimize harmful side-effects. If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, ask your doctor about this new treatment option. We believe you’ll find that advances like the Calypso System at BWMC are right on target.

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what you’re writing

classified

We had been planning

and I’d been packing for weeks, and finally my moving day was here. This eternally single, childless, commitment-phobic city girl is moving to a place with grass, private schools, and SUVs. No more living out of a suitcase. A new life for us together officially. A strangely different life for me raising these kids whom I only just met a year or so ago. Louie and his brood—”my ducks,” I call them in my head. They talk about their mom sometimes, but rarely. After she died and they came to live with Lou, I thought our love affair was over. But then all five us fell in love with each other, so here we are. “Instant family,” my friends say. “Soccer mom,” they call me. “You can come and stay with us when you can’t hear yourself think.” Funny. They weren’t kidding. It’s busy, but good. I think about their real mom all the time and what she’s missing. It’s hard to fathom. As a family, we never discuss her actual death. It’s a secret. Was it an accident, suicide, murder? What my ducks know, they won’t say. —name withheld

Judy said, “I don’t think it’s going to work out with Reggie. He’s a nice guy, and he’s sensitive and all that, but he won’t stop looking at other women.” “Don’t worry,” I said. “You and Reggie are a great match.” But Judy’s insecurity grew. Then she told me, “He wants an open relationship. What the hell does that mean?” “Give it time,” I said. Reggie had a way of riling Judy up and then calming her down. He always told her how much he loved her. Then he’d sigh, blink his long eyelashes in slow motion, and she’d melt in his arms. Judy was under a powerful spell. “Reggie’s so handsome,” she said over and over. “He used to be shy and pimply, skinny too. But look at him now. I don’t think he’s dated much. Can you imagine? With that chest and arms ...” One day, I saw Reggie flirting with someone else. Judy, it’s time to break up. This guy is stringing you along. But I knew she didn’t want to hear the truth. Sooner or later, she’d figure it out on her own.

I hadn’t seen Judy in a while, and I wondered how it had ended with Reggie—what had finally pushed her to stop seeing that creep. I called her. Judy huffed, “In his car, I found a paper, open to the personals. It was covered with circles. Can you imagine? Miss sassy and fun circled in blue, Miss sweet and spicy circled in red. For each circle, I slapped him hard. Miss passionate, Miss ﬂirtatious, Miss accommodating. Accommodating? I slapped him twice. If it wasn’t for Reggie’s beautiful blue eyes, I’d dump him in a second.” —Rick Shelley teaches mosaic-making at the Creative Alliance and the American Visionary Art Museum. He writes quirky stories about growing up in Baltimore.

“OMFG,” I think.

My stepdad’s fists pound into my cheek. He is angry with my mother. He doesn’t feel that he has the control or power, and abuse is his only form of communication. I silently plead, “OMFG. Make it stop. Make it stop.”

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My mother and I escape in the middle of the night to a family friend’s. This is not our first flight from home, and it will not be our last. I miss school for a week. My mother lies that I am sick. I feel no emotions during this week. It’s easier to be emotionally sterile than angry or sad. I am not allowed to tell anyone of my issues at home, nor am I brave enough to violate the sacred law of the Asian culture: Do not bring shame on my family. Shame for airing out my family’s dirty secrets. Shame on my mother for letting this happen. And yet, no shame on my stepfather for being a villain. Later, members of our church find about the latest beating. “Tell me,” says one man. “You beat your wife—that is wrong in itself. But beating a child? How could you do that?” There is no remorse or apology on his face. He simply replies, “Her face got in the way of my hand.” Shame on me? No, sir. Shame on you. ■

Nobody wants to feel like this....

—name withheld. The author volunteers with Becky’s Fund, a domestic violence awareness and prevention nonprofit.

“What You’re Writing” is the place for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only previously unpublished, nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Submissions should be typed (and if you cannot type, please print clearly). Only one submission per topic, please. Send your essay to Urbanite, P.O. Box 50158, Baltimore, MD 21211 or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanitebaltimore.com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned. Topic

Deadline

Publication

Heat Tall Tale Hard Lesson

May 6, 2009 July 2009 June 8, 2009 Aug 2009 July 14, 2009 Sept 2009

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....at Antwerpen everyone’s a winner. Visit Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America in one night with Young Audiences! Take a culinary and artistic journey across the globe from North American urban dance, to storytelling in ancient China. Tour the world while supporting arts education in Maryland schools and communities. To purchase tickets and peruse the online auction, please visit www.yamd.org. For more information on Taste the Arts IV, contact YA at 410-837-7577. Sponsorship and advertising available. When Saturday, June 13, 2009 ~ 7 - 11 p.m. Where CenTerSTAGe ~ 700 n. Calvert St. Baltimore, MD 21202 CoST $80 per person. Ask about educator and group ticket discounts. 2009 MArylAnD ArTS eDuCATion honoreeS James L. Tucker, Jr., Coordinator of Fine Arts for the Maryland State Department of education’s Division of instruction; Ssuuna, African Dancer and Drummer; and the Phoenix Center and Stoneleigh Elementary evenT SponSorS Coale/pripstein, Geico, Saul ewing, Wachovia, BlueStone, Charm City Catering, Dogwood Gourmet, Kumari, parfections, Tahaina’s, Tapas Teatro

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corkboard

Kinetic Sculpture Race

May 2, 10 a.m.

For the eleventh year in a row, otherwise sane citizens devote themselves to the construction of human-powered works of art, then propel them around the city on an 8-hour, 15-mile race through and over the mud, sand, water, and pavement of the Inner Harbor. Prizes such as “Worst Honorable Mention” and the intriguingly named “Sock Creature of the Universe” are awarded at the end. Race spectators are encouraged to don their own bizarre get-ups.

Race begins at the American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Hwy. www.kineticbaltimore.com

Buying into Baltimore

May 9, 9 a.m.–2 p.m.

The spring installment of Live Baltimore’s Buying into Baltimore event takes prospective homeowners around neighborhoods and into houses in the western half of the city. It includes information sessions and meetings with real estate professionals and neighborhood organizations. If you buy a house in the area, you may qualify for a $3,000 grant to be put toward a down payment or closing costs. Join up with a group bus tour or drive yourself.

Tours start at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute High School 1400 W. Cold Spring Ln. Free 410-637-3750 Pre-register at www.livebaltimore. com/bib

Michael Pollan

May 16, 7 p.m.

Baltimore Green Works opens its new Sustainable Speaker Series with local-food guru Michael Pollan, author of the oft-quoted Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Copies of Pollan’s books are available for sale, along with food (local, we presume) provided by restaurants participating in Slow Food Baltimore’s “Eat in Season Challenge.”

Central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St. Free, but reservations required. Tickets to private reception at 5:30 p.m. $35 http://baltimoregreenworks.com

CANstruction

May 16–25

The national design/build competition CANstruction challenges architects, engineers, and designers to build large, sculptural structures completely out of full cans of food. Baltimore’s contest takes over Harborplace and the Gallery. Judging and an awards ceremony occur at 5 p.m. on May 16; the public can view the structures until May 25, after which the canned goods are donated to the Maryland Food Bank. Last year’s event helped feed 50,000 people.

Harborplace and the Gallery Calvert and Pratt sts. www.canstruction.org

Balticon

May 22–25

Memorial Day weekend isn’t just the unofficial beginning of summer—it’s also the Maryland Regional Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, fondly dubbed Balticon. A thousand sci-fi, fantasy, and anime fans are expected to take in gaming events, writers’ and costume workshops, a masquerade, and more. Among this year’s guests of honor is Charles Stross, multiple nominee for the Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest prize. The “ghost of honor” is Edgar Allan Poe, who’s being honored all year with events across the city.

Marriott Hunt Valley 245 Shawan Rd. $60 adults, $30 children 6–12 www.balticon.org

Baltimore Herb Festival

May 23, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Get your herb on at the annual Herb Festival in Leakin Park. This year, the herb of honor is the Bay Laurel, an aromatic plant that was formed into laurel wreaths in ancient Greece and whose leaves are a staple in modern kitchens. Tour the park’s Crimea Mansion, ride the wee steam trains, and buy plants and home-and-garden wares. There’s also an herb-inspired lunch and live music.

Leakin Park 1900 Eagle Dr. $5 adults, children younger than 12 free www.baltimoreherbfestival.com

Photo credits from top to bottom: photo by Tom Jones, www.kineticbaltimore.com; no credit; no credit; photo by J. Brough Schamp; photo by Patti Kinlock; © Only_alone | Dreamstime.com

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

Easy, elegant, perfect: Even if maxi dresses weren’t this season’s hot hemline, this green cotton stunner from Frenzii would still be to die for. $120 at Form, 1115 W. 36th St., 410-889-3116, formtheboutique.com.

Nothing screams spring like this hot pink Kate Spade bag. Bag: $345 at The Pink Crab, 7701 Bellona Ave., 410-823-8544, thepinkcrab. com. Bouquet (roses, germinis, fritillaria, and tulips): $250 at The Dutch Connection, two locations: Belvedere Square (515 E. Belvedere Ave., 410-4677882) and Harbor East (509 S. Exeter St., 410-528-7296), thedutchconnection.us.

HOT GOODS

Shop local for the best summer stuff by Tracey Middlekauff

photography by brion mccarthy

Ready or not, here it comes: the heat, that is. But as the mild promise of spring abruptly gives way to the ripe, sticky air of Baltimore’s summer, you don’t have to look far to find the proper accessories. Local retailers stand ready to provide everything you need to amuse, distract, nourish, adorn, and clothe yourself through the long, hot months ahead. Explore the many possibilities of the season—picnics, beach weekends, backyard soirees, strolls in the warm summer night—in style with our special spring/summer edition of “The Goods.”

urbanite may 09

A well-tailored seersucker suit, accented with a pink silk tie and foulard, has the power to transform even the most ardent devotee of casual Fridays into a gentleman. Polo/Ralph Lauren suit ($1,445), tie ($115), and foulard ($70), all at Samuel Parker Clothier, Lake Falls Village, 6080 Falls Rd., 410-3720078, samuelparker.com.

Bright blue earrings from Double Happiness dress up an evening gown or jeans and a T-shirt with equal aplomb. $121 at Shine Collective, 1007 A W. 36th St., 410-366-6100, shopshinecollective.com.

That deconstructed heel, that rich turquoise, that leg-flattering shape. It’s enough to drive any serious shoe diva to distraction. “Bella” by Irregular Choice, $144.99 at Ma Petite Shoe, 832 W. 36th St., 410-235-3442, mapetiteshoe.com.

It’s juicy. It’s sweet. And it’s purple. Patent leather Badgely Mischka bag, $485 at Handbags in the City, two locations: Harbor East (840 Aliceanna St., 410528-1443) and Mount Washington (5614 Newbury St., 410-601-0096), handbagsinthecity.com.

These 1914 French mother-of-pearl opera glasses are ideal for people watching, and they’re so very Edith Wharton. $325 at Antique Row Stalls, 809 N. Howard St., 410-728-6363, antiquerowstalls.com. The Baltimore Symphony store carries new opera glasses in black, white, or red for $44.95 a pair. Call 410-783-8160 for hours.

This lipstick is infused with champagne for extra kissability. Use the jeweled compacts to make sure you paint inside the lines. Compacts, $5 each; Drop Dead Red by Too Faced, $18, both at Kiss N’ Make-up, 827 W. 36th St., 410-467-KISS, kissnmakeup.netfirms.com.

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The sailboat motif says it much better than a Hawaiian shirt ever could, and the silk and linen fabric keeps you cool. Polo/Ralph Lauren shirt, $125, Samuel Parker Clothier.

Seersucker—thebreathable,classic, quintessentially summer fabric— works wonders on a teeny bikini. Pink and green Lilly Pulitzer bikini, $148 at The Pink Crab.

Yes, the world really does look better through rose-colored glasses. Lilly Pulitzer glasses, $180 at The Pink Crab.

You could carry something other than wine and cheese in this snazzy picnic basket, but why? Bahamas Wine and Cheese Cooler, $48; Yellow + Blue Torrontes Cafayate, $12, and 2007 Petalos Bierzo, $26, at Mt. Washington Wine Company, 1340-E Smith Ave., 410-435-7410, mtwashingtonwine.com.

These portable water bowls attach to your dog’s leash, and they’re recyclable to boot. $12 at Pretentious Pooch, 1017 Cathedral St., 443-524-7777, pretentiouspooch.com.

This sumptuous silk sarong from Gujarat, India, does triple duty as a beach cover-up, shawl, or head wrap. $92 at Spirit India Boutique, 3549 Chestnut Ave., 410-261-5563, spiritindiaboutique.com.

Lug your towels in something a little unexpected this year. This adorable bag from Dumpling Dynasty will take you from beach to brunch all season long. $24 at Milagro, 1005 W. 36th St., 410-235-3800.

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A portion of sales from this camp shirt is donated to the Garden of Hope & Courage dedicated to lives changed by breast cancer.

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Embossed glass tea-light stars— available in amber, clear, purple, red, and blue—add an ethereal touch to any yard after sundown. $21 each at Spirit India Boutique. Leave the shorts-and-T-shirt ensemble in the drawer and don this chic striped maxi dress from Jenny Han. Pair it with a chunky necklace like this one from local artist Christy Zuccarini, who uses repurposed vintage parts in her jewelry creations. Dress $202, necklace $79, both at Shine Collective.

Does a hot dog cooked on a baseballshaped grill taste more like summer? Portable baseball grill, $56.50 at Stebbins Anderson, The Shops at Kenilworth, 802 Kenilworth Dr., 410823-6600, stebbinsanderson.com. Any adult or child who doesn’t enjoy a good game of Rubber Horse Shoes or Pin the Tail on the Donkey has clearly lost the lust for life. $14.95 and $10.95 respectively, at Hometown Girl, 1001 W. 36th St., 410-662-4438, celebratebaltimore.com.

If all dads were cool enough to man the grill in these plaid slip-ons, there would be a massive reduction in the global population of humiliated teenage girls. These eco-friendly Simple Shoes are made of organic and recycled materials. $59.99 at Ma Petite Shoe.

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Replace the regular plastic cooler with this industrial-chic cast-iron pot—then convert it into a garden planter. $195 at Second Chance, 1645 Warner St., 410385-1101, secondchanceinc.org. Locally brewed Clipper City’s Hang Ten ($7.99 for a four-pack) and Oxford Organic Raspberry Wheat ($8.99 for a six-pack) and Wild Goose Brewery’s IPA ($8.49 for a six-pack) at Wine Underground, 4400 Evans Chapel Rd., 410-467-1615, wineunderground.us.

This vintage-inspired metal chair offers a comfortable perch from which to enjoy a classic cocktail. Also available in silver/ natural metal finish. $145 at Red Tree, 921 W. 36th St., 410-3663456, redtreebaltimore.com.

The handmade bells from India are thought to offer protection from evil. Perhaps they will keep unwanted guests at bay. $27 at Spirit India Boutique.

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CENTERSTAGE

has never been afraid of a challenge. Known for its imaginative takes on new and classic plays, the theater has been shaking things up on stage for its entire 46year history. Now, in the middle of a global economic meltdown and the most challenging funding environment in its history, CENTERSTAGE is putting that reputation for smart, bold thinking to work by re-imagining its entire season structureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;redistributing its resources over a wider variety of productions, events, and theatrical styles. The new season reflects the masterful balance of adventure and pragmatism that distinguishes both CENTERSTAGE and Artistic Director Irene Lewis.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD ANDERSON

Above (clockwise from top): Natalie Venetia Belcon and Robert Montano in Fabulation or, The Re-education of Undine; Michael Braun, Kate Turnbull, Keri Setaro, and Garrett Neergaard in The Matchmaker; and Andrew Weems and Deborah Hedwall in Whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Special adVerTiSing SecTion

“THEATRICAL TAPAS”

Artistic Director Irene Lewis and Resident Dramaturg Gavin Witt talk about the challenges and opportunities that have led them to create a new and different kind of season at CENTERSTAGE INTERVIEW BY CARRIE OLEYNIK

Irene Lewis, CENTERSTAGE’s Artistic Director since 1992, first considered developing a more varied programming lineup more than a year ago, with the notion of implementing the plan over two or three years. But not long after the conversation started with her resident artistic team, the global economic crisis—and CENTERSTAGE’s history of strictly balanced budgets—required a radical revision of the theater’s production budget. Out of financial necessity, Lewis proposed quickly taking the season in a new artistic direction. Q: The 2009–10 Season will be a departure from your usual six-play format. It will feature four full-length productions, two fully produced one-hour plays, three concert-style readings, and a recurring cabaret series, plus a “holiday” show. How did you go about developing this unusual array of work? Lewis: We don’t ask, “What do they want to see?” Instead we ask, “What do we want to work on?” and hope for a following. It’s terribly important that the programming interests Gavin and me and the rest of the dramaturgs, because if we can’t communicate our enthusiasm and we don’t love what we’re working on, there’s really no point. But we are also trying to give the same quality experience that we have always given, even with reduced resources. So after much consideration—including a board retreat and consultation with some leading artists kind enough to share their ideas—I came up with this new model. It has some of everything, with a range of styles and forms in different formats. We’re trying new things, like a wonderful series of musical cabarets, and will have three readings that will be highly transparent— we’re inviting the audience in from the first reading right through the process. [British playwright] Kwame KweiArmah, one of our Associate Artists, gave us the idea to try one-hour plays. That’s when we started to think about people coming by, maybe on their way home from work, to sample a shorter theatrical experience. Witt: We did a considerable survey. Thousands of responses were virtually

unanimous in stating that people were eager to try these new formats, like coming to a one-act play or an evening of shorts. These are not going to be a huge commitment. When the show’s out, you can go have dinner or a drink with friends, or go home. You can either start your evening or end your day with it. They were also highly encouraging about the idea of having expanded choice, to curate their own experience more directly. There isn’t a Mainstage/second stage hierarchy here—just many tiers of different styles of expression. We talk about it as theatrical tapas— the idea of samplings of varied styles and scales. Q: Irene, you generally go back and forth to New York. How does that inform the work brought to the theater? Lewis: A lot of the work for this theater is done in New York, where I also have a home. For instance, I’ll meet with a playwright, or I’ll go see her show; I hold auditions there, and meet with designers, most of whom live or are based there. My husband lives and works there. When I came to CENTERSTAGE as acting artistic director, I hadn’t planned to stay. But it’s kind of a seductive institution; very few people leave CENTERSTAGE. The artist is central here. Another attraction for me was its enlightened board, which is very sensitive to and respectful of artistic impulses.

Special adVerTiSing SecTion

Witt: As Irene said, the artist is central to everything we do. At the same time, we’re lucky: Baltimore audiences are incredibly literate, word hungry, and passionate about challenging material, which in turn has allowed us to pursue what we are passionate about as an artistic team. We challenge ourselves, and they respond. We have an incredibly diverse audience base to play to, which means we have a wider range of options in selecting material. Q: How does working within a tighter budget affect your artistic decisions? Lewis: When I saw the set budgets [for next year], for example, they were not the kinds of budgets we are used to. So I thought, “How do you get something creative within a different scope?” As with the season in general, what I don’t want to do is just offer a watered-down, thinned-out version of our usual. One of my ideas is to try a “unit set,” one basic design consistent through the season. That is, you see the set of the first show, then when you come to the second show you see a piece of the set from the first show. And maybe you realize there are elements of coming shows as well. As the season progresses, you peel away, and you can see different parts of the set in front of you.

Q: The cabaret series will be a first for audiences at CENTERSTAGE. Where did that idea come from? Lewis: Debbie Chinn, our new managing director, invited some of us to a dinner at her house. E. Faye Butler, an Associate Artist who performed in this season’s Caroline, or Change, and Ken Roberson, a choreographer and director who’s been a frequent collaborator, started to talk about a cabaret, out of enthusiasm for the idea and a passionate commitment to CENTERSTAGE as an institution. E. Faye said she would help us wrap our minds around it, and a few months later, she did. She suggested starting small, and growing slowly. So, at first it’s going to be four weekends spread out through the year. That could be her singing Rodgers and Hammerstein standards, or Tracie Thoms coming to do a more contemporary set, or Charlotte Cohen singing Gershwin. And you could have an MC, maybe a local celebrity, which would be fun. And we’re going to reconfigure The Head Theater into an intimate, cabaret-style setting, with a bar and a fabulous array of wines and beers. Witt: The idea of the Cabarets is that they’re not all the same kind of thing. It could be rock opera, or jazz standards, or something else entirely. Something that continues to explore and expand the way we experience what it means to come to live theater.

Santaland Diaries at the holidays—again featuring an Associate Artist, Robert Dorfman. Out of the two Short Work slots, one will be a three-actor version of Cyrano de Bergerac, a fun and different type of theatrical experience. We’re still reading a selection of options for the other slot at this point, but I expect to offer some very current writers with a variety of perspectives. Witt: Ultimately, the filter is the same for all of these: Can we come up with a diverse selection of material that is all of the highest quality, that surprises and challenges us and audiences, and that offers questions instead of answers? Q: How will the new season impact the future creative direction of CENTERSTAGE? Lewis: I think change is healthy. Risk is healthy. Theater is a living organism, so what doesn’t work, you change. The signature of CENTERSTAGE is quality. And with the new season, you will get that—and what I hope will be an interesting range of theatrical choices. Witt: The new model begins to build and expand a structure that we hope we’ll be able to explore more down the road. It also starts to accustom us to more logistical and artistic flexibility, building a range of exploration that’s even wider and more exciting and more stimulating for us all.

Q: Can you share some highlights of the 2009–10 Season? Lewis: Downstairs in The Pearlstone Theater, we have four shows: Longtime CENTERSTAGE actor Larry O’Dwyer will play Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; Around the World in 80 Days with the Lookingglass Theatre Company from Chicago; the American premiere of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Let There Be Love; and August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with E. Faye Butler. The idea is that these will be the most substantial offerings, and feature some of our Associate Artists. We have many choices for the concert readings. I’d like for them to represent different cultures, to have an international flavor representing the best new writing. Many performers have voiced interest in the Cabarets, but I think for the first year we are going to concentrate on those who have been here, who the audience knows, and then we’ll branch out. We are adding David Sedaris’ very funny piece The

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

On Stage Box Office Member Services Plan Your Visit Support About us

By John Ford Directed by Irene Lewis The Pearlstone Theater

Mar 11–Apr 5 BUY TICKETS learn more

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Upcoming Events: Mar 11 – Apr 5 Mar 30 – Apr 5 Apr 24 – May 24

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‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

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> Cinema and Stage: or sex and blood…

First Look: The Cobbler By Bryan Delaney

Souvenir

By Stephen Temperley Directed by Vivian Temperley

> Auction in Photos… > MORE

23rd Annual Gala for CENTERSTAGE! Saturday, May 9th!

Video: Hip-Hop Dancing with WaWa Snipe

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore video trailer

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COMING NEXT: Souvenir

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WHAT’S NEW: Applications still accepted for CENTERSTAGE Summer Intensive.

—B Daily

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ON STAGE AND ONLINE CENTERSTAGE’s fresh face on the Web

The structure of the season isn’t the only thing that’s changing at CENTERSTAGE. This spring, the theater will launch a brand new website, full of behind-thescenes information and interactive tools to connect artists and audiences. Keep watching www.centerstage.org for the spring 2009 unveiling.

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baltimore observed a l s o i n b a lt i m o r e o b s e r v e d :

35 The Art of War

37 Home Away from Home The Ark helps struggling homeless children catch up

photo by Michael Northrup

The founder of the Avalon Hill game company reflects on fifty years of wargaming

Graveyard shift: Prison laborers outfitted with machetes have helped clear overgrown Mount Auburn Cemetery, the city’s first African American burial ground.

p r e s e r vat i o n

Life after Death The names speak from gravestones across a gnarled hilltop like characters in a blues opera: Emanuel Snell, husband of the young Ruby. Maggie Valentine. Bessie Mae Hythe. Almeater Watson, who met his Maker on July 13, 1962. Have you yet to encounter a soul named Almeater? If not for months of hard labor by inmates wielding machetes as though the corner of Annapolis Road and Waterview Avenue were the Amazon, one might have searched the grounds of Mount Auburn Cemetery for days without encountering Mr. Watson or hundreds of his subterranean neighbors. The

oldest African American burial ground in the metropolitan area and a National Register of Historic Places landmark, this Westport graveyard—originally known as the “City of the Dead for Colored People”—is the final resting place for a host of celebrated black Baltimoreans, from slaves who took northbound rides to freedom on the Underground Railroad to Afro-American newspaper founder John Henry Murphy. Mount Auburn has also been, for decades, a botanical nightmare, its tombstones enveloped in a wild morass of timber, trash, rampant overgrowth, and tangled vines as thick as hawser line. The fence around the cemetery was cut, rusting to pieces, and falling down. Dogs and rodents scavenged unhindered for God knows what, roots had pushed some coffins up toward the sod, and security was nonexistent. In the match between Mother Nature and the Sharp Street United Methodist Church, which has owned Mount Auburn

since the cemetery’s founding in 1868, nature had long been declared the victor. The congregation didn’t have the funds to put more than a dent in maintaining the nearly 33-acre grounds, long relying on volunteers to “bring lawn equipment,” as a sign on a graveyard shed suggested. “I’ve cut a lot of grass, and I’ve cut down a lot of trees,” says Clarence Wayman, a member of the Mount Auburn board of directors and the man in charge of the current landscaping project—a job so long overdue he expects it to cost some $2 million. The work started last September, when a truckload of short-timers from a Department of Corrections boot camp in Jessup began showing up at Mount Auburn with machetes and an unarmed guard. The prison labor is gratis, part of a public service program instituted by Maryland Secretary of Public Safety and Corrections Gary D. Maynard. The outreach includes work at military cemeteries w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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baltimore observed

photo by Michael Northrup

Groundskeepers: Cornelius Woodson, director of the Department of Corrections program that sends inmates to work on public service projects, admires his prisoners’ handiwork at Mount Auburn.

in Crownsville, Garrison Forest, and Cheltenham, as well as planting trees and general neighborhood cleanup. Asked if unrestrained prisoners brandishing 2-foot machete blades should give the public pause, Cornelius Woodson, the director of the inmate program, compares them to similar inmates—those on good behavior not long from release—working in kitchens with knives. “Our inmates are bringing the cemetery back to life,” he says, with neither pun nor irony. “These guys are minimum-security inmates without much time left on their sentence. We believe they are trustworthy.” Apparently so does the Sharp Street congregation, established between Pratt and Lombard streets in 1787 as the first African American Methodist church in Baltimore. Sharp Street’s Rev. Douglas Sands, father of current pastor Rev. Dellyne Hinton, bought most of the machetes that help expedite the seemingly endless bushwacking. On the church’s “Mount Auburn Day” in November, inmates were invited to church and received certificates of appreciation. Some of the prisoners’ families received gifts from the church at Christmas. Since work began, Sharp Street’s Wayman has been trying to locate his kin—Caroline County cousins several times removed named Bessie and Arthur Chapman, buried some half-century ago and now lost in the weeds. But so far they have eluded him. “I hoped I might just stumble upon them,” Wayman says. Soon perhaps—after a commercial landscaping firm is brought in. “First we had to clear the land,” Wayman says. “Then we’ll go to grading and stump grinding. When all of that’s done, we’ll have to find the money to fix the fence.” This summer, volunteers from Morgan State University are joining the rescue effort. Students from the schools of engineering and architectural design will research cemetery records and use sonar to help align markers with the proper graves. It won’t be foolproof—

for that there would have to be exhumation— but it will be a big step in the right direction. Right now, the most impressive and easily accessed grave at Mount Auburn is that of Joe Gans, the “Old Master” who held the world lightweight boxing title from 1902 through 1904 and again from 1906 to 1908. Just inside the main Waterview Avenue entrance at the corner of Nevada Street, Gans’ marker was restored in 2005 by the International Boxing Hall of Fame, to which the Baltimorean was inducted in 1990. It’s a monument worthy of a champion lauded by boxing historian Nat Fleischer as the greatest lightweight of all time. Not so with Anthony L. Brown, born in 1953 and deceased a mere nineteen years later. Tony Brown was one of the great Dunbar High School basketball players and a member of the Poets’ 1971–72 team, which went undefeated in his senior year. He received offers from most of the major basketball colleges in the country, including UCLA, only to be stabbed to death by a girlfriend before choosing a school. He is buried beneath a couple of short two-by-fours nailed into a cross, painted white and inscribed in black marker: Anthony L. Brown, 11.18.53 – 03.28.72 – Better Known as ‘Tony the Tiger.’ Dunbar Basketball Star. Below the newly cleared ground, entwined with Tony and Almeater and Bessie and the rest of these very quiet Baltimoreans of color, lie Mount Auburn’s annual enemies: the deep roots of honeysuckle, poison ivy, thistle, small trees, and other assorted brush, all waiting for the warming earth to send forth new growth and reclaim their territory. “Spring beats death,” Thomas Wolfe once wrote, a seasonal verity that Mount Auburn will try to defy this year. Workers from the Maryland Department of Agriculture have applied a cascade of herbicide to beat back the brush. Soon, says Woodson, “You’ll be able to tell it’s a cemetery again.” ■ —Rafael Alvarez

A little more than a week after the Baltimore Examiner published its final edition in February, Examiner reporters Stephen Janis and Luke Broadwater were back on the beat, firing off dispatches via Investigative Voice (www.investigativevoice.com), a Web-only news site launched with former Examiner assistant managing editor Regina Holmes. The Voice emerges as the feistier cousin of other local news sites: punchy tales of mayhem and municipal malfeasance, with screaming tab-style headlines and a mile-wide populist streak. No sports, no lifestyle, no horoscope. “We’re not out to recreate a newspaper online,” says Janis (an Urbanite contributor in April 2008). “We focus on watchdog stuff.” The Voice aims to be supported by both advertising and donations: All content is free, but a $99 annual “virtual subscription” gets you a T-shirt and a twice-a-year book compilation of top stories.

u p d at e

A Tabloid is Reborn

Robbing Peter to Pay the Power Company With Marylanders howling about sky-high energy bills this winter, Gov. Martin O’Malley dug into the budget and produced $70 million in rate relief. But he also eliminated potential green-collar jobs. The money comes from the sale of “carbon credits” created under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a ten-state cap-and-trade program designed to reduce power plant emissions. Among other things, that money was intended to weatherize homes of low- and middle-income families, contributing to O’Malley’s goal of slashing electricity use by 15 percent by 2015 (see “Baltimore Unplugged,” September ’08). “This is the wrong pot of money,” says Johanna Neumann, state director of the Maryland Public Interest Research Group. “It’s taking money away from families that need those energy improvements most.” On the bright side, officials estimate that Maryland will get $173 million in federal stimulus money over eighteen months for green-collar jobs.

Shopping on the Hoof This summer, Baltimore’s embattled arabbers can park their horse-and-cart operations and let the customers come to them. Starting May 3, arabbers can sell produce from local farms in Legends Park, at Fremont Avenue and Laurens Street near Pennsylvania Avenue. Other vendors are to sell plants, crafts, and cheeses, and gospel choirs will sing in the afternoon. “We want to give the people at [the farmers’ market in] Waverly a run for their money,” says Linda Richardson, executive director of the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative. The market runs 9 a.m.–3 p.m. every Sunday through the end of October. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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Chairman of the board: Game inventor Charles S. Roberts, whose pioneering company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, takes little notice of any acclaim that comes his way. “I would rather be known for something I had set out to do,” he says. “This just happened.”

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The Art of War Each spring throughout the early 1980s, the full roster of every Major League Baseball team showed up at my house in Yonkers, New York. No caterer or valet parking needed; the players arrived on 8-by-11-inch perforated sheets in an envelope addressed from Baltimore. These were the player cards for a new season of Statis Pro Baseball, a board game from the Avalon Hill Game Co. Enraptured, I would delicately tear each player off the sheets, careful not to mangle Eddie Murray, Dave Winfield, or that obscure utility infielder from the Tigers. Avalon Hill, self-billed as the first and largest strategy and war-game publisher in the world, rarely cut corners on details: Some of their games notoriously took hours just to set up. The company—founded and once based in Baltimore, now a division of the toy goliath Hasbro—recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, a milestone that came as a surprise to founder Charles S. Roberts. “Is Hasbro doing anything?” Roberts asked me in a raspy but potent voice when I contacted him. Well, I told him, it designed a nice logo to mark the occasion. “Really? It didn’t dawn on me, the anniversary.” To be fair, Roberts and Avalon separated a lifetime ago and only came together by accident. As he likes to say, he never intended to be the father of board wargaming. Roberts, 79, grew up in Catonsville, the son of a B&O railroad man. His father dissuaded him from a career in railroading, so Roberts planned for either a life in the military

or in journalism. After a few years of enlisted service, he joined a National Guard infantry regiment in 1952 and applied for a tour of duty in Korea. To “practice for war,” he decided to supplement field training with the principles of combat played out on a board. With no such games available, he made one on his own. War games had always held a fascination: During his school days, Roberts and his friends improvised their own military games, which he vaguely recalls involved moving pins and needles on a map of fictional countries. So, out of his apartment, he designed the map boards and rules for what would become Tactics, a war game that introduced features that would become industry standards. As Roberts toiled away on Tactics, the Korean War subsided and the Army suspended competitive tours. He considered U.S. Army Ranger School, but the two-week jungle tour “made his hair curl.” When the Air Force rejected him for failing the hearing test, he turned to a writing career. In 1954, Roberts published Tactics under the corporate name Avalon Game Co., a reference to the nearby town of Avalon, and sold about two thousand copies via mail order. “I found game design interesting, and I knew a thing or two about marketing,” Roberts says. “I didn’t start out to build a board game business. Fate just led me to that point in my life.” He hired a staff and in 1958 launched the company, renamed Avalon Hill after a lastminute spat with another firm. The inaugural line of games, all designed by Roberts, included Gettysburg, the railroad game Dispatcher, and Tactics II, which improved on the original’s basic game design. Avalon Hill popular-

ized game boards with hex (hexagonal) grids and superimposed terrain maps that allowed for realistic movement. With the assistance of game developer Tommy Shaw, a longtime friend, Roberts added more war and “civilian” games, including Verdict, Le Mans, Air Empire, and then Baseball and Football Strategy. He’s most proud of Management, a corporate strategy game he designed that would be used for years in many college-level business courses. Hit by a recession, Avalon Hill began to falter in 1961. By 1963, deeply in debt, Roberts handed the company over to one of his creditors, Eric Dott of Monarch Services. “I was going broke,” he says. “And I had a wife and family I had to consider. I opted for a corporate career and in those first six months made more money that I ever had at Avalon Hill.” Under Dott, Avalon Hill flourished into a major game developer. In its heyday—roughly the mid- to late-1970s—the company published such popular games as Outdoor Survival, Panzer Blitz, Squad Leader, and the Statis Pro sports line. In those leisurely pre-video game days, playing one of these titles was a deliberate, almost novelistic experience. Avalon Hill rule booklets, especially for later games such as Advanced Squad Leader, were multiplechapter tomes full of complex game play details and historical arcana. One game might last days or weeks. But the rise of the computer game industry in the 1980s devastated tactical game publishers; in 1998, Eric Dott and his son, Jack, sold what remained of Avalon Hill to Hasbro for $6 million. Following his departure from Avalon Hill, Roberts held positions in the publishing and advertising industries. In 1973, he founded Barnard, Roberts & Co., a small press in Halethorpe that specializes in railroad history. Roberts—the great-great-nephew of former B&O Railroad president Thomas Swann—writes or co-writes many of its books, including the Triumph series that chronicles the history of the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads. Roberts may have left the gaming industry more than four decades ago, but his legacy is secure: In 1974, a group of enthusiasts established, with Roberts’ reluctant consent, the Charles S. Roberts Awards, which are given annually for excellence in historical wargaming. Roberts takes little notice of the acclaim. “I would rather be known for something I had set out to do. This just happened,” he says. Still, he’s been tempted a few times to return to gaming; he’s toyed with a few concepts, including a “project” that remains somewhere in storage. He pauses and smiles. “I do read that board games are coming back.” ■ —Greg Rienzi w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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Lesson learned: Nancy Newman applies thirty-plus years of experience as a social worker to directing the Ark, a preschool for homeless children.

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Home Away from Home It looks and sounds like any preschool. Coats spill out of cubbies, giraffe posters paper the walls, and 4-year-olds squabble over Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. But the Ark is not like other preschools; when class is over, most of its pupils go home to a shelter. The Ark is a unique program that operates under the umbrella of Episcopal Community Services of Maryland. Located on Fayette Street in East Baltimore, the school was founded in 1990 as a haven for children in crisis. While some pupils are enrolled so their

parents can join recovery programs, most are homeless. “Our kids are in chronic poverty situations,” says Nancy Newman, the program’s director. “We’re working with people who live right on the edge.” A licensed clinical social worker with more than thirty years of experience, Newman has worked with high school dropouts and as a social worker with the Kennedy Krieger Family Center. In the five years since she assumed directorship of the Ark, Newman has had the program accredited, raised the teaching staff standards, and joined forces with Head Start, the federal program that delivers educational services to low-income children and provides the Ark with an additional teacher. The program can enroll up to twenty children at one time and is usually full. As children move through the homelessness cycle, the turnover rate is high; over the course of a year, the Ark enrolls about seventy-five pupils. They come from situations involving domestic violence, drugs, or extreme poverty. Many show gaps in their knowledge base and delays in language development. They often have difficulty trusting people and sharing. And sometimes, the children arrive at school exhausted: In some shelters, everyone sleeps in one large room, and when one person doesn’t have a good night—a coughing fit, for example, or a pulled fire alarm—no one has a good night.

baltimore observed But Newman stands by her pupils’ capacity to catch up: “Their delays have nothing to do with potential.” Katelyn* points to a picture of Big Ben that figured in a unit on London, and she and Newman discuss the picture. (“We do a lot of talking here,” Newman says. College-age volunteers play an essential role, chatting oneon-one with the children—and getting them to talk back.) Next to the Big Ben poster are Chinese characters painted by the children. One of their teachers, Sandy Lee, a first-generation Chinese-American, introduced the students to chopsticks; they practiced with cotton balls and yarn, orange wedges and pretzels. What drives Newman is her belief in her pupils and society’s collective obligation to them. “These children deserve the best,” she says. “We want to help them catch up and move on.” ■ —Christine Grillo *The child’s name has been changed. Each month, Urbanite profiles people and programs that are transforming the city, one block at a time. To nominate a transformer, e-mail editor@urbanitebaltimore.com.

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Close quarters: Is this Canton passageway the city’s narrowest alley?

The Invisible City I N S I D E T H E M Y S T E R I E S O F B A LT I M O R E BY RAFAEL ALVAREZ, DAVID DUDLEY, JOHN ELLSBERRY, LIONEL FOSTER, RICHARD O’MARA, C. FRASER SMITH, AND MICHAEL YOCKEL

photo by J.M. Giordano

Spend any length of time in Baltimore and you will happen upon the uncanny—stranger-thanfiction characters, hidden places, scraps of halfforgotten lore too flat-out odd to live anywhere else. From Edgar Allan Poe’s still-puzzling last hours to the exact formula for the bittersweet chocolate sauce once served at now-vanished Maison Marconi, there are mysteries here unlikely ever to be laid to rest. Instead, they accrete over the generations, coral-reef style, as new curiosities pile up upon the old. To take a measure of the unseen forces at work in our midst, we asked a handful of local scribes to peer down into the city that lurks just beneath the surface. Here’s what they saw.

urbanite may 09

Waltzing With Henry At the Pratt Library, David Donovan searches for H.L. Mencken’s lost chords.

The Narrowest Alley in Baltimore Near the Safeway in Canton—along the 1000 block of Binney Street, where Roberts Packing House once stood and my mother played with bushel baskets as her mother skinned tomatoes and snipped beans during the last depression—stands the most narrow of all alleys in Baltimore. It’s just wide enough for a skinny Catholic school kid to walk with a modest Easter basket. Yet somehow the heavyset Polish women were able to drag a garden hose through it out to the street to squirt down the gutters. And the drunks stumbling home from Aggie Silk’s gin mill didn’t have to reach out very far to find something to hold on to. Later, during middle-of-the-workday dates with women unfamiliar with the manifold warrens of Crabtown, I would treat them to snowballs and lead them through the alley by the hand to peek over the cinderblock wall behind 2729 Dillon Street and say, “That’s where my mother used to take a summer bath in a washtub back when FDR was king …”

Starting in 1904, the legendary newspaperman Henry Louis Mencken presided over an assembly of musicians, mostly amateurs, that came to be called the Saturday Night Club. They usually played classical music, leaning toward the Germanic, as did Mencken. After the music came the beer, the food, and the conversation, all assuring decades of success for the weekly gathering. The club disbanded in 1950, owing to Mencken’s failing health. The sound of its ensemble, the sometimes brilliant chatter of its members, disappeared with all the beer and schnitzel they consumed. Its last member, Peabody Conservatory composer Louis Cheslock, who was also the club diarist, died in 1981. So what do we have to recall the activities of this assembly of accomplished men? Cheslock’s memoir, for one; a peculiar Herald Shield, the club’s symbol, for another. And the music they played, which has intrigued David Donovan for nearly two decades. Donovan, a library associate at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, has undertaken to explore the fifty-four boxes of sheet music, printed scores, and manuscripts that had been slowly disintegrating through the decades in the deepest, dimmest chambers of the Pratt. They had been donated by the surviving members of the club in 1951, displayed briefly, then entombed. Donovan is a birdlike man, skinny, big-eyed, slightly bowed at the shoulders, with a small smile that tends to ignite a similar response from anybody he aims it at. He’s also a serious musician (seven years a bassoonist in the U.S. Army’s Continental Army Band) and a collector of more than four thousand discs; he appears with other music experts on the WBJC program Face the Music. He first learned of the blue boxes lurking in a locked cage in the library’s lowest stacks in 1991 and has been intrigued by them ever since. “I’m trying to get a feel for the dynamic of the club through the music they played,” he says. This material, he adds, is not all weighty stuff. “It contains lighter novelty pieces, dances.” He says he has discovered original music composed by club members— “music that has only been played in the club, and which nobody in the outside world has heard.” To Donovan, the club was “a secret society,” and the scores it left behind provide a glimpse of its hidden ways. And he wants to hear it live. “I have a good eye, but not much of an inner ear. I can read it, but I need someone to play it for me.” To that end, Donovan is planning, with Edward Polochick and the Concert Artists of Baltimore, to hold a performance of the Saturday Night Club’s music at some point in the future. (The library also is exhibiting some of the music, along with Cheslock’s diary, this August through September 12, Mencken Day.) Among the six hundred or so pieces of music in the collection (Brahms, Beethoven, and other familiars), Donovan has encountered Nocturne from Songs of the City by Theo Hemberger, its lyrics originally written by Mencken as poems. Hemberger, the conductor of the Germania Maennerchor (one of the many German singing troupes in Baltimore during the era), also wrote a symphony in E flat for the club. Gustav Strube, the Baltimore Symphony’s first conductor, turned in a foxtrot. Cheslock composed The Vodka Waltz and dedicated it to the club, decorating the sheet music with caricatures of its members. Adolph

—Rafael Alvarez

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

He hears the music: Pratt librarian David Donovan with scores from the Saturday Night Club, H.L. Mencken’s informal society of music-and-beer enthusiasts. Behind him, the club’s “Herald Shield.”

Torovsky, conductor of the Naval Academy Band, produced half a dozen pieces, including May Dreams Waltz, a title some playful club vandal scratched out and changed to Mae West Dreams Waltz. (They were like that, some of them: Donovan found a copy of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King similarly renamed In the Hell of the Beer King.) The original material is in the romantic vein, Donovan says. “They are tonal, like Schubert, very pretty, not dissonant. “The music talks to me,” he continues. “When I pick up a piece that hasn’t been used for so many years, you can see how they changed it. They skipped entire pages. Take Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ [from Strauss’ opera Salome]. Well, they might have cut a couple of veils out of it,” he laughs. “Maybe they wanted to get to the food, the beer, the conversation.” That the club dealt so cavalierly with the canon might suggest disrespect. But Mencken was knowledgeable and strongly opinionated about music: He forcefully insisted that the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, by itself, turned serious music in a new direction. He learned to play piano as a child, and though no prodigy, he was diligent. Later, he wrote waltzes, marches, and the score for a musical comedy; as an adult he published lyrics for such popular songs as “That’s His Business” (1900) and “The End of it All” (1904). Music also influenced Mencken’s writing: The “strain of the musician,” literary critic Edmund Wilson said, enabled Mencken to transfer his musical ideas into extraordinary prose. But the Saturday Night Club was a pleasure club, not a gymnasium for the perfection of the tonal art; good food and beer with

urbanite may 09

friends (especially during the “pestilence” of Prohibition) were surely its rewards. Mencken himself suggested as much in a filmed interview by Sun journalist Donald Kirkley in 1948. H.L. was uncommonly humble in recalling his musical role: “I played second piano. I’m not good enough to play the other [first piano],” he said, adding, “I never practice, don’t want to acquire a technique. It’s foolish for an amateur to get too good … It becomes an obsession … I want music for pleasure.” The primacy of this pursuit is evident on the club’s Herald Shield. Donated to the club in 1939 and displayed on a wall in the Pratt’s Mencken Room, the shield offers a clue to Mencken’s exalted role in the club, as it manifests his theory about the Eroica. Four quadrants are separated by a cross of linked sausages. The upper left displays a violin and bow over the first line of music from the Beethoven symphony. At dead center is inscribed the date 1905, the 100th anniversary of its riotous debut in Vienna. Painted on the shield’s upper right is a lobster, beneath that a large pretzel and two turnips, and in the lower left, a seidel overflowing with beer. So, which of these activities—the music making, the eating, the beer drinking—was paramount? “The music!” Donovan’s confident: “It brought them together.” —Richard O’Mara

On the air: Hear more on this story on the Marc Steiner Show, May 27, on WEAA 88.9 FM.

Little Murders

photo by Corinne May Botz

You can lead a crime scene investigator to a corpse, but you can’t make him or her think. In fact, the utility of the gee-whiz gizmos wielded by glamourpuss techs on TV shows like CSI depends entirely on whether the homicide detectives poking around a stiff know what to look for—and how to look for it—in the first place. For the past sixty-plus years, the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death have aided cops in developing the sleuthing skills necessary to solving apparent murders. These eighteen meticulously crafted dioramas of actual death scenes, tucked away on the third floor of the downtown offices of Maryland’s chief medical examiner, were conceived, designed, and painstakingly fabricated in the 1940s and 1950s by Frances Glessner Lee, who in 1936 endowed a legal medicine department at Harvard University to advance the then-fledgling field of forensic pathology. The dollhouse-like tableaux, constructed on a 1-inch-to-1-foot scale, depict in excruciating detail the gritty components of real-life murder, suicide, and accidental-death cases: tiny corpses, stabbed, shot, and hanging from ropes; blood pooled and splattered; appliances, food, and furniture resting undisturbed, in disarray, or, to the trained eye, almost imperceptibly askew. In naming her creations, Lee invoked a police dictum: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.” In 1945, Harvard launched biannual, weeklong seminars in crime scene investigation led by Lee, who, with other experts, trained police officers from around the nation by using her dioramas as teaching devices. In 1967, not long after Lee died, Harvard shuttered its Department of Legal Medicine, and one of its former professors, Russell Fisher, then Maryland’s chief medical examiner, secured the Nutshells for his office. They’ve resided here on permanent loan ever since, and, though not open to the general public, continue to fulfill their original educational function as part of twice-yearly seminars. Dollhouse of the doomed: A miniature murder scene from the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

—Michael Yockel

photo by Tasha Treadwell

Strange Brew The Maryland Club, granddaddy of Baltimore’s private social clubs, offers membership by invitation only, which means most of us have never set foot in the place. This is the magnificent marble pile on Eager Street, a Romanesque redoubt for what used to be called “men of station.” It’s the nation’s second-oldest social club, founded in 1857 by Jerome Bonaparte, son of the younger brother of that better-known Bonaparte, Napoleon. Inside, it’s all oaken beams, roaring fireplaces, and glassy-eyed game mounted on the walls. On the menu, there’s no sign of its storied specialty, terrapin stew, once a hallmark of Maryland cuisine. The state reptile is endangered these days, and the club’s legendary basement turtle paddock, where the live animals were kept before their date with the stewpot, has been converted into an exercise room. But, look—here’s something even more mysterious: “Frosted Crab Soup.” What the hell? In a city of many crab soups, Frosted Crab Soup is unlike any other. It’s a thickish chilled concoction, pink-hued from its tomato base. Flakes of backfin swim around beneath the surface; on top, a squiggle of what seems to be sour cream. (Is this, perhaps, the “frosting”?) It tastes genteel, rich, ancient. A Google search reveals almost nothing of this dish’s provenance; in 2005, a Helen Heisler of Baltimore inquired about Frosted Crab to the Baltimore Sun’s recipe finder, to no avail. What manner of regional specialty is so obscure that it escapes even the all-seeing eye of the Googleplex? Ask this of Maryland Club’s executive chef, Curtis Eargle, and you can almost hear him roll his eyes over the phone. “I hate it,” he begins. The In the pink: Frosted Crab Soup at the Hopkins Club, one of a handful of private clubs serving this local original. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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recipe was passed to him from his predecessor, Wilfred Paul Crowninshield, who led the kitchen at the Maryland Club from 1979 to 1989. The secret ingredient: “Campbell’s Tomato Soup,” Eargle says. “That’s why I hate it.” A longtime Maryland Club member, Stuart Christhilf, remembers Chef Paul as an innovative character—Finnish, generously mustachioed, and “a tremendous maker of soups of all kinds,” particularly cold fruit soups, which are popular in Scandinavia. Paul’s original Frosted Crab was tangier than the current version, Christhilf says—more Old Bay seasoning, maybe? Still, it remains an untouchable menu standard. “I’d be fired if I took it off,” Eargle says. He goes through 6 gallons a week in the winter, maybe triple

that in the summer. In the insular ecosystem of private-club cuisine, Frosted Crab is popular enough to have expanded its range incrementally—you can find it on the menu at the Hopkins Club and the Towson Golf and Country Club, and the Elkridge Club has a version, Eargle says. But he is certain that the Maryland Club is its birthplace and native habitat. So, why is it called “frosted”? “Because it’s cold.” —David Dudley Web extra: Go to www.urbanitebaltimore.com for the Maryland Club’s Frosted Crab Soup recipe.

Delete

childrens’ free lunch and everything before it with my cursor, and pressed delete. Like a director re-casting a film, I replaced her with a former factory worker from Westport who worked his way up a Perkins Homes is a drab bunker-style public housing project along hospital food chain from customer service representative to surgical what might now be considered the edge of Harbor East. Two Asian technician and, finally, registered nurse via two fast-track training fusion restaurants, a boutique bowling alley, and a studio of personal programs. My RN made it, but my bet was that, short of some mirafitness instructors share a building just yards from Perkins. If there cle, Ms. Johnson never would. With a keystroke, she disappeared. were a line between the haves and have-nots in this city, this would be Until now. the place to look for it. The irony is that Ms. Johnson and her flock of children looked Last year, while working on a story about an effort to bolster the a lot like my family did twenty years ago. I spent my early years in ranks of African Americans in Baltimore’s middle-income brackets, I East Baltimore, fighting similar odds, and only got out because cast about looking for a human face to put on the issue of poverty and dozens of people, schools, and programs decided not to look away, unemployment. So I headed to Perkins Homes and found Tracy John- discard an application, or press delete. son (I’m changing her name here), a mother of three and grandmother I didn’t create generational poverty, nor did I underfund the few of eight who had lived in or near Perkins her entire life. programs I’ve ever heard of that were meant to do something about Ms. Johnson was over 40 and had only been formally employed for it. But I can make it all worse by making it invisible. a total of two years. Now she babysat the eight children who played in the courtyard. At noon the kids, none older than 10, were led across —Lionel Foster the street to the recreation center for a free lunch. I asked Ms. Johnson if she’d ever eaten at any of the many nearby restaurants—Little Italy is even closer than Harbor East. She said no. We talked about how different life could be for people just down the street, and I asked what she thought about her grandchildren’s prospects for the future. She said very simply, “I have no idea.” My editor was impressed; she thought Ms. Johnson illustrated the depths of Baltimore’s economic divisions movingly. In fact, she did so too well: her exclusion from the economic life around her was so complete, the editor worried, that no effort to retain or attract middle-class blacks seemed to hold out much hope for her. So, as I wrote a second draft, I thought about Ms. Johnson sitting in her lawn chair, highlighted the Looking for, and losing, the unseen Baltimorean

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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Lincoln Slept Here On April 18, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln dined, socialized with local dignitaries, and retired for the evening at 702 Cathedral Street, the stately Mount Vernon Place mansion of banker and Union diehard William J. Albert. Old Abe had been in town to deliver a speech, now known as “The Baltimore Address,” for the dedication of the Baltimore Sanitary Fair (a fundraising event for Union soldiers) at what was then the Maryland Institute. The Albert property was later owned by the Church of Christ, Scientist and is now home to the publishing company Agora Inc. Today, the Lincoln bedroom is still fairly intact, with its red marble fireplace and tall shuttered windows, but the appointments have clearly changed; furnished with a few computer desks, the room offers no hint that anyone of note ever slept there. —John Ellsberry Honest Abe: In1864, the sixteenth president dined and spent the night in this Mount Vernon Place mansion.

The Searchers The agenda and the atmosphere sound congenial, collegial, and, perhaps, to an observer unacquainted with fictional English detective Sherlock Holmes, a trifle cuckoo. Four times each year, the members of the Six Napoleons of Baltimore, an all-male bastion of local Sherlockian enthusiasts, convene at Squire’s restaurant in Dundalk for a) cocktails, b) dinner, featuring toasts to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, c) a postprandial announcement of recent mentions of Holmes in the media, d) a presentation—a talk, slideshow, or paper—by a would-be Six Napoleon applying for admission into the club, and, finally, e) a group-participation quiz concerning minutiae from the four novels and fifty-six short stories in the Holmes canon. In effect and in practice, the Six Napoleons—they appropriated Doyle’s Holmes story “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” for their name—celebrate, honor, and scrutinize all aspects of the detective whom they sometimes refer to as “The Master.” Founded in 1946 by a half-dozen Baltimore Holmesophiles, the club has welcomed more than 250 members during its existence, among them prominent attorneys, doctors, judges, bankers, and journalists. There are currently about twenty-five active members. The head Napoleon is dubbed the “Gasogene” (the Victorian-era term for the seltzer bottle that was a fixture in Holmes’ apartment), and the group is governed by what member William Hyder, a retired Sun reporter and copy editor, terms “a shadowy body called The Committee.” The Napoleons emerge from the fog annually for a Holmes seminar, open to the public, on a Saturday

each November at the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Central branch. This year marks the 7th such gathering. “There’s such an air of reality about the character [of Holmes],” says Hyder, spokesperson for The Committee. “Although we can’t pretend that Sherlock Holmes is alive, there’s no reason we can’t say that he did live and assume that the adventures really happened. It’s something that you get hooked on.” —M.Y.

Clued in: William Hyder, Sherlock Holmes aﬁcionado and member of the shadowy Six Napoleons. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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The Man to See Is Judge Edgar Silver the most powerful man you’ve never heard of? In the spring of 1984, Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Edgar Silver got a call from Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., iconic chief lobbyist for the NAACP. Could we talk some time today? Mitchell asked. They met almost furtively on the street near the courthouse and Mitchell’s office in the Tremont Hotel. Mitchell wanted to discuss a matter of importance to Baltimore’s black community—a political matter, not something a judge should be involved with. Bishop Robinson, a black Baltimore cop, was in the running for police commissioner, the top job on the city force, and trying to get the attention of Mayor William Donald Schaefer. Could the judge help? Silver said he thought the mayor was committed to the incumbent, Frank Battaglia. But Mitchell kept at him: He’d been told, he said, that the judge was close to Irvin Kovens, Mayor Schaefer’s chief fundraiser and political godfather. Silver knew the growing black electorate of Baltimore had to be served. The kind of patronage consideration Mitchell was seeking was overdue. Silver said he would do what he could. Several months later, the judge sat in an auditorium full of dignitaries waiting for Robinson’s investiture when someone beckoned him to the stage. Robinson, a tall and unsmiling man of military bearing, wanted Judge Silver to swear him in. All but unknown outside political circles, Edgar Silver was for decades the “man to see” in Maryland politics. Using only his engaging personality and a well-tended constellation of friends, the lowprofile jurist exerted a comparatively benign influence in patronage matters, rivaling that of the city’s rough-hewn political bosses. He was a put-together man, someone who could get the important par-

ties moving together in the same direction. Silver is now 85, but people within the political world of Maryland still call him by his first name, Edgar, or simply by his title. “You’ve got your Judge Smith or your Judge Murphy,” Kevin O’Keeffe, a lawyer who worked as a lobbyist for the city, tells me. “But there’s only one ‘The Judge.’” Silver’s father was a tailor who immigrated from Austria; his Polish-born mother worked rolling cigars. He grew up poor. And political. Politics offered something he wanted: stature, the thrill of doing something important for people who might face the kind of need his family faced, and, perhaps, a taste of the power he saw around him. He was raised in a mini Democratic clubhouse in the neighborhood around Auchentoroly Terrace near Druid Hill Park (7th precinct, 13th ward, 4th councilmanic district). He loved the subtle, inside game; the wink and the nod; the blue smoke and mirrors. It was to become his life. “It’s a great business,” he used to tell people of politics. “And you don’t have to have an inventory.” Silver went through the political chairs, winning a seat in the House of Delegates in 1954 by defeating a score of others, including a youthful William Donald Schaefer. Soon after that election, Silver went to Kovens, who had been saying he needed a gentile to run in the southern part of the increasingly Jewish 5th councilmanic district in Northwest Baltimore. Take a look at this guy Schaefer, Silver told the usually scowling, cigar-smoking Kovens. Schaefer was clean-cut guy, a lawyer, an Army veteran—just what Kovens had been looking for. Kovens told Silver to send him around. Thus began a storied political career and the renaissance of a city. Silver is a slight balding man, possessed of a mirthful smile suggesting an element of irony, or a recollection of how connections— his—made things happen. His circle of friends included luminaries from various power centers in the city: Peter Angelos, principal owner of the Orioles; Senate President Mike Miller; Cardinal William Keeler, now retired; and generations of political leaders. In the words of one of his admirers, Silver had a gift for “creating atmospheres”—putting the right man or woman together with a job or judgeship or issue. The judge got a special thrill out of convincing a powerful leader that something that leader didn’t like had to happen anyway. For example: A four-term mayor, Schaefer never wanted to leave City Hall. But Kovens wanted him to run for governor in 1986—he didn’t think the cerebral Ben Cardin (now a U.S. Senator) could beat Maryland’s charismatic attorney general, Steve Sachs, another Democrat. continued on page 78

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

urbanite may 09

Darlene Bass doesn’t know who killed her son, or why. All she knows is that he needed a proper burial.

B y

Mar tha

Phot ographs

T h o m a s

Christ o p h er

M yer s

The Departed

elvon Reshad Butts

was laid to rest on October 31, more than three weeks after the shots were fired near his home on McHenry Street, less than a month before his 16th birthday. The chapel at the Joseph H. Brown Jr. Funeral Home seats about 350, and it was nearly full. Several of Delvon’s friends were there, some boys in suits, others in street attire with baggy pants and thick gold jewelry. Delvon’s girlfriend, 18-year-old Laketa, had her own entourage, who helped her stay on her feet as she approached the burnished metal coffin. Delvon’s mother, Darlene Bass, was surrounded by seven of her nine living siblings and their sons, daughters, and grandchildren; she sat in the front row, bone thin and rigid in a blue suit that seemed as ill fitting and unplanned as her state of mourning. A few feet away: her 15-year-old son, hair braided in neat cornrows that lay against a white satin pillow, his long fingers clasped across his chest. Delvon was dressed in a A death in the family: At the funeral of 15-year-old Delvon Butts, oldest brother Darnell Turner (with glasses) supports grieving sister Ashley Hooper (center). w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

Buried secrets: A state program helps pay injury and funeral expenses for victims of violence, up to $5,000 per case. Last year, almost $1 million in claims were paid to bury Maryland’s homicide victims. The program allowed Delvon’s mother, Darlene Bass, to arrange for her son’s interment at Mount Zion Cemetery. “He was going to get buried nice,” she says. “Whatever we had to do.”

blue sportcoat and tie, with brand-new jeans concealed by the foot panel of the half-couch coffin. Darlene had been on her way upstairs when she heard the gunfire. She expected Delvon to walk through the door at any moment. “I touched my angel”—she gestures to the charm at her neck—“and I said, ‘God, don’t let that be my son.’” Darlene has five children. Her eldest, Darnell, is 33; the youngest is 12-year-old Demonte, who mostly lives with his father. Danielle, 32, is incarcerated, Darlene says. Delvon lived with his mother and his older sister, Ashley Hooper, 25, and her three little boys. Their home is on a treeless street of West Baltimore rowhouses, many of them boarded-up. “He was a sweet child,” she says. “I would never question God, but I keep asking myself, Why Delvon? He didn’t bother nobody. He didn’t get into trouble.” Delvon had been expelled from Hamilton Middle School the year before; the student support dean at Hamilton recalls that he was carrying a knife. But Rodna Thompson, Delvon’s teacher in sixth and seventh grade, had the impression that he “really truly wanted to learn.” If Delvon was disrespectful, she says, “he’d come back and apologize. He was a good kid at heart.” Delvon was shot at about 9:30 on a Monday night. He slumped over the handlebars of his bicycle on Smallwood Avenue, around the corner from his house. Two bullets from a shooter—still

urbanite may 09

unknown—pierced his lower back and his thigh. Another man, 31year-old Ronald Adams, was also shot twice in the legs as he sat on a nearby stoop waiting for his girlfriend. Adams had been released from jail ten days earlier; he doesn’t think the shots were meant for him—“I’m a loner and I wasn’t messing with anyone,” he says. Was Delvon the intended target? The police still don’t have a definitive answer. “Most of our victims and suspects have prior violent criminal records,” offers Baltimore City police spokesman Donny Moses. “But on occasion, it does occur where an innocent bystander gets caught up in the crossfire.” Darlene’s boyfriend, Wayne Humbert, raced into the house, shouting to call 911. Darlene froze. “I didn’t want to go out there and see my son like that,” she says. “I tried to call my sisters but I couldn’t remember the phone numbers. They all got mixed up in my head.” An ambulance took Delvon to the Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Hospital. Ashley, who works the night shift at the Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville, left work to see her younger brother at the hospital. “He was hooked to all these tubes, and they was saying he got shot in his back,” she recalls. Delvon briefly regained consciousness, then slipped into a coma. Delvon remained on a respirator until October 19, when his lungs collapsed. Doctors attempted surgery, Ashley says, but failed to save him. The doctors told her that if Delvon had lived, he probably would have been paralyzed. When he died, she said, “my heart broke into a million pieces.” Ashley considered Delvon her best

friend. “He was a child who had a smile on his face no matter what the situation.” When Darlene heard of her son’s death, she says, “I just cried and cried.” And then she thought: “What am I going to do? I don’t have insurance on my child.” The issue of how to bury her murdered son was more than a passing concern amid the larger tragedy of his death: Delvon’s family wanted to send him home properly. “He was going to get buried nice,” Darlene says. “Whatever we had to do.” Darlene and her siblings know what funerals entail: They have been to plenty. A nephew was shot five years ago while sitting in his car. A sister, Cynthia, died of cancer about five years ago. Their parents have passed—their mother in 1979, her father in 1998. They have buried people from the neighborhood, members of the church community, friends of relatives, people they barely knew. In black Baltimore, funerals “are as common as watching a basketball game on television,” says Annette March-Grier, vice president of community relations and a bereavement counselor for her family’s 52-year-old March Funeral Homes. African Americans, she says, attend funerals not only to acknowledge a loss, but also to stay in touch with the community. “Often the story draws us. If it’s a tragic loss, there’s a desire to see how people are coping and who is there for them.” Ronald Barrett, a professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles who has researched both African American funeral traditions and youth violence in American cities, points to “a well-known fact in the deathcare industry”: black Americans “tend to invest more time, energy, and resources in funerals.” Barrett, who’s working on a forthcoming book on African American mourning rituals, lived in Baltimore when he attended Morgan State University and later was a consultant to the mayor’s office on the issue of youth violence. He notes that when a life is troubled or when someone is lost to violence, a lavish funeral may be even more

of a sine qua non. “It’s a way people can reconcile, or put a finishing touch on a complicated life.” Like random shots on the streets, funeral expenses can hit family members unexpectedly. And some urban funeral homes have reported an alarming trend, says Barrett: Young boys and teenagers imagining, and preparing for, their own services. “It’s disturbing, but it’s not surprising when you have the level of chronic death in a community like West Baltimore—or in Chicago, or Detroit, or New Orleans.” he says. “Any city where kids are overwhelmed by violent tragic loss, you see them contemplating their own funerals.” Socalled “pre-need arrangements” are popular in the deathcare industry, but they are “usually something that people do in their golden years,” Barrett says. “In most other places, these kids would be planning for the prom.” March-Grier is all too familiar with youths who don’t expect to live long. “They’ll say if they died, they’d want it to be like this.” A registered nurse, March-Grier has run support groups in schools for several years. Recently, she helped launch an outreach program called Roberta’s House, which provides bereavement counseling for families of school-age children who have experienced loss. In Baltimore, large extended families are concentrated in neighborhoods that have endured generations of violence; children grow up steeped in death and dying, a kind of epidemic of unchecked grief born of the city’s chronically high homicide rate. “Every child I speak to has a sense of fear that they might die the same type of death,” March-Grier says. “They wonder who’s going to be next.”

Chanell Banks scanned photos of her cousin to have printed on tote bags and buttons. Ashley had Delvon’s name tattooed across her forearms. Her three little boys wore white shirts with their uncle’s likeness and the dates of his birth and death.

Like most victims of homicide, Delvon was autopsied at the medical examiner’s office on Pratt Street before being transported to the Joseph H. Brown Jr. Funeral Home on the corner of Fulton Avenue and Reisterstown Road. There, he was slid into a refrigeration unit while family members—Darlene, her sisters and brother, and their Aunt Sheila—figured out how they would pay for the service. The funeral and burial at Mount Zion continued on page 78

Last rites: Delvon’s cousins and friends (left) and nephew (right) pay their final respects. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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Rock solid: Industrialist James Tyson’s home, now known as the Stone Mansion, sits in Coldspring Newtown. Vacant for many years, the building received a $1.2 million facelift from historical developers Azola & Associates. Kirsten Azola (right) sits in her renovated basement office, next to a milk trough once cooled by spring water.

Heart of Stone

making over a long-neglected civil war-era mansion By greg hansCoM

PhotograPhy By anne guMMerson

here’s a building in the Coldspring Newtown neighborhood, just down Greenspring Avenue from Sinai Hospital, that is so monumentally out of place it’s possible to drive by without even seeing it. There, in the midst of the modernist condos and vinyl-sided townhouses, stands a stout Civil War-era mansion hewn of thick brown and gray stone. Its current owners—Baltimore historical developers Azola & Associates—simply call it the Stone Mansion. To make sense of this place, rewind about 150 years, to a time when these hills were topped by the country estates of Baltimore’s industrial titans. Just up the road, Jesse Tyson was using his portion of the family manufacturing fortune to build his mansion at Cylburn. His younger brother, James Wood Tyson, was doing his best to keep up with him. James built the Stone Mansion in 1866, and while it was more subdued than his big brother’s French Second Empire edifice, it wasn’t too shabby, either. Two and a half stories high and capped with arched dor-

mers and a cupola, James’ house was built of rough-hewn fieldstone in the Renaissance Revival style. He called it “Ruscombe,” which according to family lore means “brown hill.” (The Azolas call the house the Stone Mansion to distinguish it from a later building many know today as the Ruscombe Mansion, which houses a holistic community health center and lies a hundred or so yards to the south.) The Tyson family fortunes fell, and so did the mansion’s. Over the following century and a half, the mansion would serve variously as a retirement home, a school for Jewish girls, and the Baltimore Waldorf school. Linoleum floors and drop ceilings hid much of the historic features. When the Waldorfians moved out in 1997, the city slapped some plywood up over the soon-shattered windows and doors but otherwise left the place to rot. “All of the pipes froze and exploded,” says Tony Azola, the 34-year-old vice president of Azola & Associates. By 2004, when the Azolas discovered the place, it was owned by the city and inhabited by a band of ruffians and a black vulture.

The former was said to rob nearby houses and retreat to the derelict mansion, where the latter added to the haunted-house pall that kept anyone else from venturing near. Azola & Associates, a construction and renovation firm founded and still headed by Tony’s father, Martin, made its name on historic restoration projects in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Azola clan has recently handled makeovers on such city landmarks as the Bromo Seltzer Tower (see Urbanite, Oct. 2007) and the Railway Express building next to Penn Station (see Urbanite, April 2008). The Stone Mansion was just the sort of project the family loved: It was a disaster. Aside from

Underground movement: The mansion’s basement was soaking in 3 feet of water when Azola &Associates bought the property from the city in 2006. Used as a workshop during the renovation, the cool, stone-walled space is now the company’s headquarters.

its rough cast of tenants, the house had been overtaken by vines, and the basement was flooded with 3 feet of water. Two years and $1.2 million later, the mansion has been returned to something close to its former glory, with high ceilings, restored architectural moldings, and the original pocket shutters that fold into the elaborate window trim. The first floor houses several small offices, a shared meeting space, and the Springarden Café, a tiny hole-in-thewall where you can get a cup of coffee and a bagel for $2. The airy offices on the second floor are still for rent, but the attic, the vulture’s former haunt, is now inhabited by the

Jones Falls Watershed Association and the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper. The most striking space in the building, however, is the basement, which has been exhumed from its watery grave and turned into the Azola & Associates offices. “I don’t think anyone saw this as a viable place to locate an office,” Tony says. During the renovation, it served as a workshop. But a brick floor, fresh woodwork, and ample lighting have turned the catacombs into an inviting, if somewhat chilly, workspace. Imagine having an office in a wine cellar, minus the barrels of fermenting grape juice. It is there that Tony, parents Marty and

Lone, sister Kirsten, and occasionally brother Mat (who usually runs the company’s California operations) make plans for their current renovation project: an exterior restoration of the long-decrepit Maryland Building at the Maryland Zoo, one of only two surviving structures from the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia. Asked about the family’s almost-obsessive focus on rehabbing historic structures, Tony says that’s where their passion lies. “The most difficult projects,” he says, “are the ones we find most fun.” ■ —Greg Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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Got an idea about how to build a better city? Draw us a picture.

space

rendering courtesy of Josh Kilrain

The Drawing Board

On the Waterfront

Reimagining an historic canton park

The accessibility and success of Baltimore’s waterfront is due largely to the promenade—a nearly uninterrupted 8-mile brick walkway from Canton to Fort McHenry—and the open space along it. But beyond the Inner Harbor, some of this valuable park space is in need of some attention. Harris Creek Park, located on Boston Street in Canton, is one such site. Named after the creek that runs underground from Patterson Park to the bay, it is also where the keel of the frigate USS Constellation, predecessor of the ship now moored in the Inner Harbor, was laid down in 1794. It’s one of the few public parks adjacent to the promenade, but seems to be used mainly as a pass-through for dog walkers. We propose transforming Harris Creek Park into an inviting place where neighbors and visitors can sit and watch the sun set over the harbor or admire the Domino Sugars sign across the water. Our plan includes:

• Planting trees to provide shade on the promenade and buffer traffic noise from Boston Street, as well as low-maintenance, drought-tolerant, native species of plants along the water’s edge.

• Replacing the current unkempt garden with a stepped lawn, one end of which could become an outdoor museum featuring industrial waterfront artifacts. The other end could include a new boardwalk, with shade structure and swings, that would connect to an existing pier (which might become a future water taxi stop). • Installing a waterwheel recycling mechanism. • Creating a floating wetlands grass installation to serve as a model for sustainable water quality improvement practices. The Department of Recreation and Parks has agreed to plant street trees and clean up the garden, but the balance of the plan is awaiting Rec and Parks approval. If everything goes as planned, Harris Creek Park could become a shining jewel in the necklace of public spaces formed by Baltimore’s waterfront promenade. ■

photos by Aisha M. Khan

Shore thing: Under-utilized Harris Creek Park gets a fresh look with an outdoor museum and a stepped lawn.

a group of designers from the promenade committee of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore put together this proposal to redesign harris Creek Park. the group was headed by board member David W. Benn (pictured at right), a principal with Cho Benn holback + associates. landscape architect Josh Kilrain (pictured at left), an associate with hord Coplan Macht, and architectural designers Ben Crabtree and anne M. Dutton (not pictured), both with Cho Benn holback, teamed up to design the project.

To submit an idea for The Drawing Board, e-mail editor@urbanitebaltimore.com. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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SUSTAINABLE SPEAKER SERIES

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urbanite may 09

www.brasserie10south.com 410.528.8994

61 Recipe

The Horsey Hilltop

eat/dr ink

63 Reviewed

Grano and Abbey Burger Bistro

The Feed

This month in eating

Pony Time A Triple Crown salute to Marylandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original whiskey By clinton macsherry photography by steve buchanan

itting the exacta with Street Sense and Hard Spun in the Kentucky Derby two years ago stoked my fantasy of becoming a full-time railbird. I have neither the luck nor the math skills to succeed in handicapping, but horse racing appeals to my fondness for cocktail lore and local history. So it bugs me that Baltimore gets short shrift in Triple Crown season. The derby and its signature mint julep make our Pimlico-based counterparts seem like also-rans.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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urbanite may 09

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ey’s death, the distillery shifted to corn-based whiskey, and the brand declined. Prohibition spelled its end. Outerbridge Horsey’s great-grandson, an architect of the same name based in Washington, D.C. (and a distant cousin of mine), recalls a rare taste. “My father was given a full unopened bottle by a collector,” the younger Horsey says, “and sadly died before opening it.” The bottle made it all the way to his wedding several years ago. “My mother decided that the rehearsal dinner was a good occasion to open it, and so we all had a shot,” he says. “It was delicious, like brandy, after all those years. That was the end of that, but I still have the empty bottle.” In Baltimore, rye producers thrived into the 20th century. Several clustered downtown, in an area north of City Hall near the Jones Falls; others operated in Pigtown and Highlandtown and in suburbs from Cockeysville to Dundalk. Few survived Prohibition. Pikesville Maryland Rye, the final holdout, was last produced in Lansdowne in 1972; Pikesville Supreme Rye is now made in (sigh) Bardstown, Kentucky. We have ourselves to blame for the thing that’s most second-tier about the second jewel of the Triple Crown: The black-eyed Susan, “traditional” cocktail of the Preakness, is as ersatz as the posies draped over the winning horse. (The state flower doesn’t bloom for another month; the blanket’s made from yellow daisies, their centers painted black.) As writer Eric Mills reported in a 2001 article in Baltimore magazine, the cocktail was invented as a vodka-and-rum concoction in 1973, largely to sell souvenir glasses for the Preakness’ centennial. The drink has mutated ever since, sometimes catering to beverageindustry sponsors. I’ve found at least five separate recipes. In 2001, Pimlico was making the clubhouse version with bourbon. With the black-eyed Susan hopelessly compromised, rye may provide the only means of re-staking some claim to tradition. Thankfully, some new craft ryes have hit the shelves to augment the slim down-market pickings. Like small-batch bourbons, these ryes can get pricey—a 23-year-old Rittenhouse costs $150—but there’s a decent selection in the $20 to $50 range. Most hail from Kentucky, sad to say. This may not be the best time to launch a local micro-distillery, but one can dream. With its spicy, peppery, sometimes grassy flavors, rye may be an acquired taste. By law, a whiskey labeled “straight rye” must contain a minimum of 51 percent rye distillate, although many of the newer bottles contain considerably more. Even blended at the legal threshold, rye’s character can prove pretty assertive. It’s neither as sweet as bourbon nor as smoky as Scotch, but defining rye by what it isn’t does it an injustice. Some tasters draw

eat/drink a parallel between the contrasting tastes of breads made from wheat, corn, and rye, which sounds simplistic but rings true: Rye has an edge that, for aficionados, elevates it above other whiskeys. Russell’s Reserve Rye ($30, 90 proof), a 6-year-old, shows medium amber. Its mellow but heady caramel-apple aroma carries notes of herbs and bark. Leaner and drier than bourbon, it’s pleasantly hot, with peppery, toffee-tinged flavors and a long, walnut-y finish. I sip it with two or three ice cubes—a bit of ice melt seems to expand the flavor. Ice is the only adulteration my whiskey usually sees, so it may seem presumptuous to propose a new Preakness cocktail. Then again, the current bar is set pretty low. I have history on my side, plus an unshakeable conviction: Don’t screw around too much with good booze. ■ —Clinton Macsherry writes about wine and spirits every month in Urbanite.

On the air: Hear more on Maryland rye on the Marc Steiner Show, May 14, on WEAA 88.9 FM.

The Horsey Hilltop Many cocktails mask the liquor they include. The ingredients here complement the nature of rye. Bitters pump up the herbal aromatics, brown sugar accents the whiskey’s savory-sweet profile, while the lemon juice highlights the tanginess of rye and adds a squirt of freshness. Somehow, the Horsey Hilltop reminds me of gingerbread.

recipe

Racing in Maryland predates the sport’s arrival in Kentucky, if only by dint of colonial migration. Although tracks in New Orleans and Saratoga Springs can claim a longer history, Pimlico Race Course was laid out in 1870, and the first Preakness Stakes (so-named for a champion horse) was run in 1873—two years before the opening of Churchill Downs and the inaugural Kentucky Derby. In 1938, the year “Old Hilltop” hosted the historic match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral, folks in the Bluegrass State had nothing more important to do than make the mint julep the official libation of the derby. Nothing against the julep, which traces back to the “gulab” (or rosewater) of the medieval Persians. I happen to think muddled mint and sugar are better served by the addition of rum, soda, and lime and turned into a mojito, but that’s me. If Kentuckians want to hawk a vehicle for their vaunted bourbon, fine. But they should know that the first mint juleps were served in the Mid-Atlantic, and they were made with rye. Rye was the original whiskey of early America. The grain and the spirit were especially prevalent in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Distillation gave Revolutionary-era farmers a means of converting grain into a less perishable and more portable market commodity. Currency was scarce, so whiskey also served as barter. The suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion, a 1794 uprising by farmer-distillers in Western Pennsylvania over the imposition of a federal whiskey tax, chased whiskey-makers to frontier areas like Kentucky, farther from federal control. There, corn became the distiller’s grain of choice, and bourbon was born. The whiskey tax was effectively repealed in the early 1800s, and rye lived on in Maryland. Former Evening Sun editorial writer James H. Bready crafted an authoritative article on the subject for the Maryland Historical Magazine in 1990 and donated his collection of nearly seven hundred bottles and other rye memorabilia to the state archives. As Bready notes, Maryland rye enjoyed a national reputation. One of the most famous examples was produced in Frederick County by a distinctively named gentleman and politico, Outerbridge Horsey (1819–1902). Old Horsey Very Fine Rye Whiskey was a determinedly upscale product, made from imported Irish grain using techniques Horsey studied in Scotland. Horsey also had a nifty marketing gimmick: aging at sea. Since the days of the notorious “Triangle Trade” of slaves, molasses, and rum, the constant sloshing of liquor in ship-borne barrels was thought to benefit aging. Horsey took the concept to an extreme, shipping his barrels around Cape Horn to San Francisco and then back to Baltimore by rail, with the whiskey’s name displayed on the train cars. After Hors-

2 oz. straight rye ¼ tsp. brown sugar ½ tsp. fresh lemon juice Ice cubes Bitters Lemon peel In a cocktail shaker or tall glass, combine the brown sugar and lemon juice. Swirl or stir until sugar dissolves. Add the rye and a few ice cubes. Swirl or stir again. Add a dash or two of bitters. Pour into a short glass. Twist a lemon peel over the drink, rub the peel around the rim, and drop into the glass. Repeat judiciously. —C.M. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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We have delicious all natural chocolates, decadent desserts, beautiful fresh flowers, thoughtful gifts and everything you need for moms and moms-to-be, to make their day special.Talk to our catering liaison to order a special brunch or Mother’s Day meal. Stop by and check us out!

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Using your noodle: Gino Troia’s Grano is a back-tobasics pasta bar.

One-year-old Grano boasts a concept—tiny diner-style eatery turning out double-quick pastas on the cheap—that couldn’t be more timely. Troubled times demand ample carbohydrates. The Hampden noodle bar is the brainchild of longtime Neapolitan restaurateur Gino Troia, known for his family’s namesake Towson restaurant, Café Troia. This is a vastly more stripped-down affair: a room with a stove, basically. You order a halfpound of starch (seven kinds are available, but gnocci is $2 extra), pair it with one of the ten sauce options, and Gino himself (or one of his apprentice noodle-wranglers) simmers the two together into a finished dish. If a wobbly little table is free, sit down and eat (bring your own wine); if not, Gino boxes it up and you take it home. There’s limited delivery, too. In spirit, the Grano effect is pure trattoria—basic but soulful Italian food in no-frills, no-tablecloth surroundings. A chalkboard offers a few daily specials—a soup and an appetizer—and there are a few simple salads, including a nicely turned out Caesar. Order bruschetta here, and it will be both pronounced and prepared correctly: ultra-crusty wedges of thick-sliced bread (artisanal loaves

from an Italian bakery in the Bronx, according to Troia) sopping in fruity olive oil, fresh tomatoes, fresh basil, and whopping hunks of garlic. But the main event here is pasta. Spaghetti carbonara offers an unrefined take on the Roman specialty, heavy on the smoky shards of pancetta; the eggs are clumpy rather than creamy, and the dish tastes oilier than strictly necessary. Better is the Bolognese, rich with long-cooked, finely minced ground beef, or the deliriously creamy gorgonzolawalnut. Troia’s puttanesca is seriously rustic, with whole olives and capers swimming around the anchovy-scented tomatoes, and his pesto is bright and herby. All the sauces are available to go by the half-pint, if you’d rather boil your own pasta. Want more protein? Toss a few $2 meatballs in there, and don’t forget a house-made cannoli. Grano isn’t exactly a replacement for a night out in Little Italy, but you can get fed for a fraction of the price, and there’s never been a better time to bury your head in a comforting mound of noodles. (Lunch and dinner daily. 1031 W. 36th St.; 443-869-3429; www.granopastabarus.com)

reviewed

eat/drink

Grano

—David Dudley

Tucked into a brick mews near Cross Street Market, the Abbey Burger Bistro is much more bar than bistro. There are a dozen beers on tap (sixty-four in bottles) and a profusion of flat-screen TVs strategically suspended so everyone has a view, whether they want one or not. A waiter may introduce himself as “one of the bartenders,” as if to duck responsibility for the haphazard service. The simple menu, however, does have serious food, and some surprises. The beef is local, from Roseda Farms, and it’s the kind you can comfortably ask for rare and juicy, its flavor rich even without a dousing of ketchup. For a more extravagant condiment, try two fat lumps of foie gras squished between burger and bun. The burgers here are unapolegetically for carnivores (veggie offerings are limited to a mash-up of grated vegetables spiced with cumin, like a throwback to Moosewood days, and a marinated portobello mushroom sandwich). There’s also a smallish, strong-flavored lamb patty (semi-local, from the Shenandoah Valley), oozing fat, as well as bison, chicken, or turkey burgers. The choice of species is complicated by the dizzying variety of toppings on the Ab-

bey’s “build-a-burger” checklist (distributed with miniature pencils, like a sushi menu). You could go crazy mixing and matching: crabmeat, fried egg, avocado, herb yogurt, peanut butter. Much of this, frankly, is stuff that has no business sitting on a burger. And then there are the cheeses: Lincolnshire cheddar; bleu cheese from Point Reyes, California; Wisconsin Manchego. There’s little here for light eaters, though you could forgo the bun (or English muffin, or toast, or pita) and have your meat presented on a lettuce wrap. An iceberg salad aims for tradition with thick wedges dressed in a mild bleu cheese and topped with bacon, frizzled shallots, and cherry tomatoes; a chopped salad is loaded with crab and avocado. But those who consider a burger topped with foie gras the zenith of cuisine will likely appreciate a milkshake on the side—especially if it’s one made with Berger cookies and vanilla ice cream, spiked with Stoli vodka and Godiva liqueur. (Lunch Tues–Sun, dinner daily. 1041 Marshall St.; 443-453-9698; www. abbeyburgerbistro.com)

photo by La Kaye Mbah

Abbey Burger Bistro

Where’s the beef?: Creative toppings dominate at Abbey Burger Bistro

—Martha Thomas w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

STEINER’S

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courtesy of BUGS

the feed

eat/drink

This Month in Eating Compiled by Martha Thomas BUGS Farmers Market Students from Johnston Square Elementary, Dunbar Middle, and the Crossroads School have been working hard to produce plant seedlings, granola, artwork, and more for the annual BUGS Farmers’ Market. BUGS—Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students— is run by the Living Classrooms Foundation and teaches kids to grow and cook fresh foods, compost, and wield a kitchen knife. This year, BUGS will be a regular vendor at the Harbor East Farmers’ Market. 10 a.m.–1 p.m.

May 2 Living Classrooms Foundation East Harbor Campus 802 S. Caroline St. 410-685-0295 www.livingclassrooms.org

Garlic Mustard Challenge At the annual Garlic Mustard Challenge in Patapsco State Park, the leafy, white-blossomed plant has shown up in potato salad, deviled eggs, and cake. But the Friends of Patapsco Valley and Heritage Greenway, sponsor of the event, uses the edible weed as a means to discuss invasives—renegade species that crowd out native plants. After two hours of yanking the plant from the park (last year’s event yielded more than a ton), there are old-fashioned picnic games, a scavenger hunt, and, of course, the cook-off. 1 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

May 3 Patapsco Valley State Park, Ellicott City 410-480-0824 www.patapscoheritagegreenway. org

Kitchen Party Fifteen years ago, members of the Women’s Housing Coalition met in a kitchen to brainstorm about a fundraiser and decided to name their event after that ever-popular room. “At parties, people always gravitate to the kitchen,” says Joann Levy, executive director of the organization that provides housing and supportive services to women. This year’s event features chefs from such local restaurants as Dogwood, Sascha’s, and Ixia, plus music by the Paul Snyder Trio. 6 p.m.–9 p.m. $65; $50 is tax-deductible.

May 11 B&O Railroad Museum 901 W. Pratt St. 410-235-5782 www.womenshousing.org

Chestertown Tea Party FESTIVAL Every year, Chestertown memorializes its own 1774 Tea Party by tossing bundles marked “tea” from the British schooner replica Sultana into the Chester River. There’s also a parade, a 5K run, music and dancing, and the chance to dunk a town leader in the annual “Toss the Tory” event. If cocktails are more your cup of tea, go for the Friday night kick-off cocktail party (6 p.m., $20).

May 23–25 High Street area www.chestertownteaparty.com

Wine and Herb Festival Boordy Vineyards kicks off summer with its 11th annual weekend-long bash showcasing local food, historical preparations, and, of course, wine. Snack on food from such local purveyors as Monkton’s Gunpowder Bison and Arbutus-based Keyes Creamery, take a vineyard wagon ride, and learn how to pair wine and food, Colonial-style. 1 p.m.–5 p.m. $15 adults; $5 children.

May 30–31 Boordy Vineyards, Hydes 410-592-5015 www.boordy.com

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

Your generation explored new worlds. We’ll explore new ways to help you live better.

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art/culture

The Audacity of Mope What’s wrong with melancholy? When I think of Barack Obama’s inaugural address, I am reminded of Katherine Hepburn. Every morning, even in winter, the indomitable Yankee star dove into the Block Island Sound—a tonic, she said, for vim and “vigah.” That was what the nascent president’s words felt like on that brisk January day as he spoke of a “sapping of [national] confidence” and a “nagging fear that

BY ANDREW REINER

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN E. SIMONUTTI

69 FILM

75 BOOK

71 MUSIC

77 THE SCENE

Anne Haddad on the Maryland Film Festival Marianne K. Amoss on the music of Roman Kuebler

73 THEATER

Martha Thomas on Living Openly and Notoriously

Andrew Zaleski on Eager Street This month’s cultural highlights

2009 Speaker Series: Greening Your Home

www.columbiafestival.com

May 21 Practical Steps for Reducing Your Carbon Footprint Jeff Blankman, Sunnyside Solar Please register by calling 443-738-9200. Fee: $6.00 ($10.00 for non-members)

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summer 2009 session from June 19 to august 1 register noW! 410-659-8100, ext. 1130

Music and Dance Programs for All Ages Private and Group Classes, Beginner to Advanced Summer Camps in Voice, Strings, and Dance Peabody Children’s Chorus 2009-2010 Auditions Scheduling Appointments NOW for June 2009

Box Ofﬁce Opens April 30, 2009

music Downtown Baltimore, Towson, and Annapolis campuses, Howard County locations  children’s chorus Towson campus and Howard County locations  dance Downtown Baltimore and Towson campuses View online catalog at www.peabody.jhu.edu/prep

uUrbanite0509_thirdpg.indd r b a n i t e m a y 019

Columbia Festival of the Arts 5575 Sterrett Place, Suite 280 Columbia, Maryland 21044 410-715-3044

3/26/2009 1:44:21 PM

art/culture courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories

America’s decline is inevitable.” I don’t think Shenk, the stranglehold that despair and I was the only one who flinched at such stark sadness had over Lincoln sharpened his observations. President Obama concluded the reasoning and helped him navigate one of speech by saying that we faced a “winter of the most traumatizing eras in American hardship” and that we needed to “brave once history. No one observed this more closely more the icy currents and endure what storms than William Herndon, Lincoln’s longmay come,” a sentiment and metaphor that time friend and law partner, whom Shenk surely had Kate grinning up in heaven. quotes in his book. As we are a people who prefer warm Even when in the midst of a “melanclimes and wearing flip-flops year-round, cholic fit,” as people in the 19th century such chilly allusions didn’t sit well with many called them, Lincoln “crushed the unreal Americans. After all, we voted for Obama’s … the hollow, and the sham,” Herndon campaign slogan “Yes, we can,” not the new observed. “Everything came to him in its addendum “but it’s going to be really, really precise shape and color.” difficult.” The president took a lot of heat Today we’d just call the man defor his dour outlook from the media and the pressed and get him a Zoloft. But “melanlikes of ex-President Bill Clinton. So when he cholic” is a better term. It’s true that the delivered his first nationally televised press two overlap (historically, both afflictions conference on February 23, the new president fell under the ancient Greek headings thawed his rhetoric and slathered it with a melas and khole, or “black bile,” one of bit of bottle tan, reminding us that “Those the four bodily humours), but there is one qualities that have made America the greatimportant difference. According to psyest force of progress and prosperity in human chiatrist Peter D. Kramer, author of Listenhistory we still possess in ing to Prozac, melancholics ample measure.” happiness, like all aren’t paralyzed by their Something was lost mental and emotional dysvices, is a ﬁne thing function: “[M]elancholics, when the president acquiesced to the nation’s climacthey have limited in moderation, but though tic majority. It felt as if he energy, use their energy traded his better judgment when pursued to well; they tend to work for the sake of jumping on hard in a focused area, do addictive extremes great things, and derive the pursuit-of-happiness bandwagon that hounds us pleasure from their it robs us of the little at every turn with self-help accomplishments. Much books, reality shows, and critical objectivity of the insight and creative dating sites filled with people achievement of the human and survival sensi- race is due to the disconwho see the glass half-full. We can’t escape this gospel bilities that desper- tent, guilt, and critical eye of positive psychology, this of dysthymics.” ate times require. insistent demand to “follow This notion flies in the our bliss.” (Talk about a misface of the popular conappropriation of a perfectly good mantra. But ceptions we have of melancholics—the that’s a whole other essay.) Happiness, like all mopey Hamlet type mooning over a lost vices, is a fine thing in moderation, but when something or other, apathetic, listless, pursued to extremes it robs us of the critiuseless. That’s part of the profile, but the cal objectivity and survival sensibilities that typical melancholic also has an actively desperate times require. What we could really suspicious mind, that Lincoln eye. This benefit from is a good, bracing dose of the was the kid from school who drove us very thing that we fear most: melancholy. crazy with Chicken Little proclamations, While President Obama has all the makthe heavy-lidded brooder who raised his ings of a melancholy guru, he, and we, should hand and said, “Yes, but …” As it turns consider taking notes from the playbook of out, these glass-half-empty types are usuhis ideological and spiritual mentor, Abraham ally correct. Shenk relays the oft-cited Lincoln. The sixteenth president holds two study that coined the term “depresdistinctions: Not only was he the best writer sive realism,” in which researchers Lyn ever to call the White House home, but no Abramson and Lauren Alloy discovered other president in this country’s past had a that people with depression or depressive deeper dysthymic streak. dispositions see the world more objecAs a young, unmarried attorney, he spent tively than the rest of us. countless days with his head in his heads, As Shenk observes, this was what bemoaning how he would never amount to Herndon saw in Lincoln, and it’s what his anything. As Joshua Wolf Shenk documents contemporary Herman Melville depicted in his 2005 book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, once in his novel Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities: Lincoln became president and his life became “The intensest light of reason … cannot “richer and more satisfying, his melancholy shed such blazonings upon the deeper exerted a stronger pull.” Ironically, argues truths in man, as will sometimes proceed

Global approach: This year’s Maryland Film Festival includes lots of foreign ﬂicks, such as the 2008 South Korean film Treeless Mountain.

film

Take Eleven

The Maryland Film Festival, May 7–10

Even regulars who have watched the Maryland Film Festival become more popular every one of its eleven years might be surprised at how it has grown. Apparently, the most passionate cinephiles in Baltimore blocked off their calendars and bought up the all-access passes faster than ever this year. “I don’t know what it was, but something happened,” festival director and founder Jed Dietz said in early April. “There was just a critical mass we reached.” So arrive early to buy individual tickets from the tent across from the Charles Theatre, where most films will be screened. (Purchase advance tickets at www.mdfilmfest.com.) Among this year’s highlights is a host of international offerings. Five years ago, Dietz said, “international” would have meant Western Europe, but this year’s festival includes films from Egypt, South Korea, and Rwanda. And some (good) things never change: John Waters presents a film on Friday night, as he has since the festival’s inception. As usual, it’s a film that even Dietz had never heard of. Love Songs (2007, Christophe Honoré) is a gay/bisexual musical that has been compared to the 1964 French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but as Jean-Luc Godard might have filmed it. Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Umbrellas star Catherine Deneuve, co-stars. The festival always has several selections for music lovers. This year, the Massachusettsbased Alloy Orchestra accompanies Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera, using Vertov’s notes on the original score. While the live music is reason enough to attend, this film stands on its own cinematographic merits. Dietz and his staff plan to continue building the full schedule right down to the wire, adding screenings even after the festival has begun, so check for the latest updates online. —Anne Haddad Web extra: Anne Haddad liveblogs the MFF at www.urbanitebaltimore.com. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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art/culture

photo by Natasha Tylea

from his own profoundest gloom. Utter darkness is then his light, and cat-like he distinctly see all objects through a medium which is more blindness to common vision.” Melville understood a paradox: The encroaching darkness extends, not limits, the melancholic’s inner horizon. Anyone who has ever appreciated an Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper painting knows this. Wyeth’s winter-paletted landscapes and Hopper’s spare rooms, occupied by distracted people who share the space in body only, speak to the beauty of ephemerality, the perfect moment that will never occur the same way twice. Unlike those of us who busy our ears and eyes, the melancholic sinks into such moments, appreciating them all the more for their withering perfection. This may also be why so many people want to slap melancholics around and tell them to get over it. Americans are a peripatetic, productive lot and don’t gladly suffer those whose approach to life threatens to gum up the works. In the dreamy, lingering gaze of the melancholic we see an intimacy with truths about isolation and mortality that we’d rather avoid. This is why pining—one of the melancholic’s favorite pastimes—unnerves us so: It dwells too comfortably in the gray void, the “both/and,” as Eric G. Wilson calls it in his recent book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. Pining accepts the idea that life is open to possibility, that there are no absolutes. Wilson writes that melancholy “pushes against the easy either/or of the status quo.” This creates an inner tension, the grain of sand inside the oyster shell that motivates the melancholic to rise above the banality of existence. You see this in cartoon kids with wise-beyond-their-years issues, from Peanuts and South Park to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Realizing that life as is just doesn’t cut it, the characters create alternative realities that better fit with their own worldviews. It’s a mindset that reveals melancholics—in defiance of how most of us perceive them— as people who dwell in hope. Because they understand exactly how bad things are, they can change them for the better. This is why Charlie Brown keeps lining up to kick the football that we know Lucy’s going to yank away; this is why Linus continues his pumpkin-patch vigil when even he knows, deep in that dysthymic heart of his, that the Great Pumpkin isn’t showing up. As they brood and muse on their unrealized hopes at the brick wall, they imagine better ways of being. We could learn a lot from the likes of these egg-headed malcontents— namely that a sturdy wall on which to rest our heads and a few implausible dreams will take us a long way in tough times. ■

Home grown: Subscribers to local musician Roman Kuebler’s website, Every7th.com, pay $1 per month for original music, videos, and more.

music

Pay to Play

Every7th.com, created and run by Roman Kuebler

Maybe you’ve heard of CSAs, or community-supported agriculture programs, which provide city-dwellers with regular shares of fresh produce, from area farms (see Urbanite, April ’09). Now local-music fixture Roman Kuebler is trying to adapt that subscription model to a very different commodity with a website called Every7th.com. Here’s how it works: For $1 per month, Kuebler’s subscribers get access to two original songs (the files are loaded on the seventh of every month—hence the site’s name), performed by Kuebler and a rotating cast of his musician friends, including Chris Laun of Egg Babies Orchestra and Chris Meyers of Water School. Mixed in with the music are blog entries that detail the backstory of that month’s songs, a video, original artwork, and photos of the recording process. Think of it as a homegrown indie-rock twist on the micropayment trend: Subscribers don’t just purchase a song, a la Apple’s iTunes music store; in small increments, they’re buying in to Kuebler and his personal brand of

music-making. “Part of the experience [for the subscriber] is being involved in the process from start to finish,” he says. “The songs are not the end-all of what the site’s about.” Some songs are new, fresh-cut tunes; others are castoffs and unused takes from the many bands Kuebler has produced, managed, and played with in his twelve-year music career, including the Oranges Band and Roads to Space Travel. In addition to continuing to lead the Oranges, he’s currently playing bass in the indie-pop four-piece Impossible Hair, who just released their first album, What is the Secret of Impossible Hair? An experienced producer/engineer, Kuebler was also a coowner of the Talking Head Club back when the local-music breeding ground was located downtown on Davis Street, so he’s well qualified to be a digital one-man band. “Making music and getting it out to people is this process that has a hundred steps, and I’ve been involved in every step, all the time.” Kuebler’s new material has a strippeddown, lo-fi sound (it’s recorded in his basement studio in his Silver Spring house), but it’s the same tuneful jangle-pop that fans of the Oranges Band know and love. Kuebler calls it “my kind of quirky rock”: harmonyladen vocals, big hooks, and snappy lyrics. “I want to branch out and do other styles,” he says, “but I feel like even when I’ve tried to do that in the past, it still pretty much sounds like everything I’ve done.” Every7th’s biggest hurdle may be that people aren’t sure exactly what a “person-toperson” music site is. Kuebler’s done his best to explain his M.O., but he says he’d hoped that more than the hundred current subscribers would have signed up by now. (The first tracks went up in June 2008.) Still, he’s feeling positive. “All the people involved seem to be really enjoying the experience,” he says. “It’s meant to kind of be this thing that you take on your own time.” Is a new generation of similar D.I.Y artist/promoter/distributors on the horizon? Kuebler isn’t quite ready to herald the death of the traditional record label distribution model. “I don’t think that the music industry will ever be solely dominated by individuals … partially because I think there’s too much money to be made by people who aren’t musicians who know how to take a musician’s music and sell more of it than he does. Part of the point of the site is to give another option, open up the field of play.” —Marianne K. Amoss

—Andrew Reiner wrote about Colonial Williamsburg in the February Urbanite. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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Although she’s known to those of a certain age as the eccentric mother of Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains it All, Elizabeth Hess herself has plenty to say. Her one-woman show, Living Openly and Notoriously, presented for the first time as a trilogy at Theatre Project, is a chance for Hess to unravel her complicated past—rewoven here as a passionate and vibrant tapestry. The daughter of a Mennonite minister who ran a mission church in decidedly unsinful Toronto, Hess had a childhood filled with confusing contradictions: A principle of her faith, for example, was nonconformity, “but that meant you have to think the way they think,” she points out. The three pieces, which can be seen individually (parts one, two, and three are performed on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, respectively) or as a whole (on Saturday), trace Hess’ life from blossoming sexuality and experiments with drugs, through a midlife emotional breakdown, to the final episode, where libido and love reach harmonic convergence. Hess wasn’t drawn to the solo format initially (“it’s either stand-up comedy or the actor asking the audience to play therapist”), but she says the three- or four-person play she initially

Stripped bare: Elizabeth Hess explores her own past in her one-woman show.

t h e at e r

Life Story

Living Openly and Notoriously at the Theatre Project, April 30–May 3 and May 7–10

art/culture envisioned to tell her story didn’t seem like the right fit. “When I began to focus on the inner landscape, the piece came alive,” she says. Hess met Anne Fulwiler, Theatre Project’s producing director, while appearing in the Center Stage production of Ah, Wilderness! two years ago, and Fulwiler offered to present Living Openly. Hess describes the Preston Street space as “an inspiring venue where I’ll be able to explore the resonance of the piece and its impact on an audience.” Says Fulwiler of Hess: “She doesn’t candycoat the sex or the drugs on her journey to break free from her repressive upbringing.” But she says it’s just the kind of production Theatre Project thrives on. “Ultimately it’s about reaching a place of artistic freedom.” —Martha Thomas

For tickets, call 410-752-8558 or go to www.theatreproject.org.

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book

Corner Boy Conﬁdential

Eager Street: A Life on the Corner and Behind Bars by Arlando “Tray” Jones (Apprentice House, 2009)

When he was 6 or 7 years old, Arlando “Tray” Jones started stealing pairs of underwear and socks and selling them on the street for pocket money. At 12, he and a friend split a pound of marijuana and went into business dealing bags of weed around Eager and Durham streets in East Baltimore. At 13, he endured his first stint in a cell, earning a stay at the Maryland Training School for Boys for shooting a guy named Mouse in the neck. Through his early teens, Jones rose as a player in the corner’s drug hierarchy, accumulating wealth, jewelry, women, and respect. But by 16, he was serving a life sentence for murder, beginning the process of atoning for a childhood lost to criminality. In Eager Street: A Life on the Corner and Behind Bars, Jones traces that fallen adolescence in East Baltimore’s drug underworld of the early 1980s. “The moment I decided to participate in the illegal narcotic trade, I was participating in my very own death. I just did not understand it at the time,” Jones writes. “I simply wanted to be a big nigga on the block—instead of an inconsequential, unnoticed, frightened little boy. I wanted to stand out in the crowd and be recognized as popular and worthy of attention and affection— and love.” For the reader interested in the nuts and bolts of the narcotics trade and the street code by which its participants live, Eager Street revels in the gritty, profane, and sometimes grimly amusing details. Intimidation and murder are the tools of the trade; no slight goes unpunished. “Every other day

someone was shooting at me or I was shooting at someone,” he reports. When a rival crew encroaches on their territory, Jones and his associates rain bullets on them, killing two. Days later, he dodges a reprisal attack and crashes his boss’ bullet-riddled Cadillac. “Freak bitches” prowl the streets, casually trading sex for drugs. Dealers toss around $15,000 wads of cash, peeling off and passing out $100 bills like children would baseball cards. “The neighborhood was embracing us. The girls were adoring us, and the police took notice of us, although they did not bother us. We were empowered. We belonged to something that awarded us esteem. From my life’s perspective, it was better to be a drug dealer than not to be.” Amid this mayhem, it’s easy to forget that the perpetrator was, after all, barely a teenager. But Jones also invites readers into the psyche of an attention-starved child who found refuge in the notoriety and cash drug dealing bestowed upon him. On the corner, Tray was utterly alone, free to determine his own moral constitution and convinced that selling drugs was the only way to live. His family history is unflinchingly depicted. There’s the father he never knew—killed by police, Jones says—and the inattentive, alcoholabusing mother who was barely involved in her son’s life. “When my mother died in the spring of ’79 (or was it ’78?), I received the news as if a stranger had died.” His Aunt Kim, addicted to heroin, supplied what little guidance Jones received, but it was far from enough. “For the most part, I was left alone, to commit my vices,” he writes. “The only time I received parenting was when my actions came to the attention of school officials or the police.” In a letter from prison (incarcerated since 1985, Jones is currently serving his sentence in state prison in Jessup), Jones says that he can’t help but wonder why society abandons or ignores children who act the way he once did. “If I wasn’t a child abandoned by society, then there’s no such thing,” he states. “Societal institutions (i.e. churches, juvenile justice facilities, schools, etc.) let me believe that my best course in life was that of a drugpusher and murderer. I was allowed to believe, sans significant challenge, that it was okay for me to be a street level drug-dealer. Someone should’ve told me that I was worth far more than the value I attributed to myself.” Eager Street serves as both catharsis and testament to Jones’ journey of transformation; in prison, Jones earned a G.E.D. and then a bachelor’s degree in Applied Psychology

from Coppin State University. And, he writes in the book, he has matured emotionally: “I became a man in the Penitentiary. I wasn’t afraid to open my heart to permit myself to love and be loved.” Still, reformed or not, Jones isn’t exactly a softy. In this unabashed, unapologetic truecrime memoir, one gets the sense that Tray, the brash young hustler who once ruled Eager Street, is still alive, and still in the game. “I don’t know if I’m more the victim or the victimizer,” Jones admits. “That is for the person who reads my story to decide.” —Andrew Zaleski is an Urbanite editorial intern.

An excerpt from Eager Street The punch landed squarely on Mr. Waters’ chin; the impact knocked him to the floor. He looked up at me with pure rage and hatred. I responded in kind. I kicked him in the face before he could recover, and pounded him with an assortment of uncoordinated blows. I felt such relief pouring from me as Mr. Waters laid there totally unable to defend himself from my awesome attack. Someone grabbed me from behind and locked my neck into a painful choke hold. I felt myself grasping for air, but none was forthcoming. I began to grow light-headed, and then I saw Mr. Waters pick himself up and come toward me. I saw him draw back his fist, but the vise-like grip around my neck prevented me from defending myself. The first blow caught me in the mouth. I could taste the blood pouring in and a profound hatred permeating my soul. I lost consciousness, and when I awoke I was lying on a concrete floor, in a very cold and dark cell in the isolation unit of the administration building. My entire body ached severely, and my lips and eye were swollen. I gathered consciousness and sat up on the bare mattress in the cell. I placed my head in my hand and cried for the very first time in my life. I was in excruciating emotional and physical pain. I wanted to die. I wanted to be with my mother and father—resting in peace.

Web extra: Read the rest of this chapter from Eager Street at www.urbanite baltimore.com.

w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 0 9

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4/8/09 3:24:16 PM

t h e s c e n e : m ay Record Masters

Sit in on an open recording session with the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, which is ending its twenty-sixth season with a new classical music-label Naxos CD and a positive outlook; after canceling two shows, the orchestra says its finances have stabilized and that it’s planning for next season. They will perform 18th- and 19th-century German composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister’s Viola Concertos in D major and B-flat major, featuring Victoria Chiang on viola. May 6 at 7:30 p.m., at Goucher College’s Kraushaar Auditorium. (1021 Dulaney Valley Rd.; 410337-6289; www.thebco.org) JAZZ

Shore Sounds

Cambridge’s historic main street is the site of the fifth annual Groove City Jazz and Blues Festival, featuring performances by Baltimore’s Baker Award-winning saxophonist, Carl Grubbs; blues musician Deanna Bogart; roots rockers the Junkyard Saints; and half a dozen others. Plus, there’s food, drink, kids’ activities, and a festival-eve party featuring D.C. blues musician Jimmy Cole at Jimmie and Sook’s Raw Bar and Grill at 421 Race Street. May 9, 1 p.m.–8 p.m. (410-228-0020; www.cambridgemain street.com) MUSIC/COMEDY

Mock ’n’ Roll

The trio that brought you This is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, Best in Show, and other great mockumentaries—Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer—give a special performance of the tunes featured in their movies at the Lyric. May 12 at 8 p.m. For tickets, call 410-

547-SEAT. (140 W. Mt. Royal Ave.; www. lyricoperahouse.com) THEATER

Go, Johnny, Go

Fells Point Corner Theatre performs the musical Johnny Guitar, based on the 1954 Western starring Joan Crawford as a saloonkeeper named Vienna. The stage version was named 2004’s best Off-Broadway musical. May 8–June 7. (251 S. Ann St.; 410-2767837; www.fpct.org)

Al Fresco

The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company acts out the dramas and tragedies of the Bard and others among the ruins of the Patapsco Female Institute at 3691 Sarah’s Lane in Ellicott City. Their summer season opens with Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, June 5–27, and continues with Twelfth Night, June 26–July 19. Go to www.chesapeake shakespeare.com for tickets and information on the complete season.

photography

Street View

Hail to the Queen

JT Waldman’s Megillat Esther is a 2005 graphic interpretation of the story of Esther, a Jewish queen of the Persian Empire who, according to the Hebrew Bible, prevented genocide of the Jewish people. (The Jewish holiday Purim celebrates their deliverance.) View Waldman’s original illustrations in Drawing on Tradition at the Jewish Museum of Maryland through July 26. (15 Lloyd St.; 410-732-6400; www.jewish museummd.org)

FILM

Final Cut

Ingmar Bergman’s last film, 2003’s Saraband, wraps up the series Close-ups: Psychoanalysts Look at Film at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Like the Swedish director’s 1973 Scenes from a Marriage, Saraband was originally filmed for television and deals with themes of family, love, and death. A discussion follows.

One Man’s Trash

San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers spent four months learning about

May 15 at 7:30 p.m. For tickets, contact the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis at 410-792-8060 or www. bwanalysis.org. (10 Art Museum Dr.) WORKSHOP

Get Handy

Learn a new skill at the third annual D.I.Y. Fest. Workshops include easy home repairs, humane stray cat-trapping techniques, and methods for—gulp—skinning animals and making the skins into useful clothing or material. There’s also a marketplace of ’zines, jewelry, and more. May 9 at 2640. (2640 St. Paul St.; www.diyfest.org) LITERARY

Four Baltimore photographers—Ken Royster, Ellis Marsalis III, Michela Caudill, and Elizabeth Barbush—train their lenses on fast-changing East Baltimore in East Side Stories: Portraits of a Baltimore Neighborhood, Then and Now. The exhibit’s 100 images trace the East Side’s demographic shifts over the last century and show how current redevelopment is once again re-drawing the face of the neighborhood. Through July 26 at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. (830 E. Pratt St; 443-263-1812; www.africanamerican culture.org)

VISUAL ART

School 33 devotes every square inch of its gallery space to Masked. Twelve renowned female artists, including Ledelle Moe, Iona Rozeal Brown, and Athena Tacha (a detail of her Wine Spines Shield appears at right), explore secrecy, identity, and disclosure through photography, sculpture, drawings, and performance. May 8–June 27. The opening is on May 9; a gallery talk with curator Joan Weber is on May 23. (1427 Light St.; 410-396-4641; www.school33.org) Compiled by Marianne K. Amoss

Baltimore’s mills and textile industry, then partnered with students from Maryland Institute College of Art to make art that captures Baltimore’s industrial past. Their photography, video, and site-specific installations, titled The Reverse Ark, were created with locally sourced, discarded material such as clothing and floorboards from abandoned rowhouses. Also on exhibit are environment-themed exhibits by photographer Soledad Salamé and sculptor and installation artist Hugh Pocock. Through August 22. (100 W. Centre St.; 410-7835720; www.contemporary.org)

courtesy of the Marsha Mateyka Gallery

CLASSICAL MUSIC

art/culture

Cast Away

On May 3 at 3 p.m., Davy Rothbart, founder of Found magazine, stops by Atomic Books with his brother, Peter, to hype the newest Found book-length anthology, Requiem for a Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Found Items from Around the World. Davy will share stories from the book while Peter sings songs with lyrics based on found notes. (3620 Falls Rd.; 410662-4444; www.atomicbooks.com)

Walk of Fame

The Maryland Humanities Council’s Literary Mount Vernon Walking Tour is a guided jaunt around the neighborhood where some famous Baltimore literati— from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein to Tupac Shakur and Emily Post—lived, worked, and studied. May 9. (410-685-0095; www.mdhc.org)

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The Invisible City continued from page 47 Sachs, as U.S. Attorney, had made life miserable for some of Kovens’ friends. Still, Schaefer hesitated. Enter Silver, a judge by then. He made all the arguments. But Schaefer demurred. Finally, Silver said: OK, don’t run. I’m sure you’ll have a great time as mayor with Steve Sachs as governor. Schaefer spun around. What? He knew, as Silver did, that political life was changing for him. There was a new rising star in city politics: Baltimore City State’s Attorney Kurt Schmoke. Schaefer had done well against black candidates before, but Schmoke—bright, Ivy League-educated, and well organized—was probably an irresistible force. Schaefer relented and agreed to enter the governor’s race. A few months later, Maryland voters validated Silver’s gubernatorial choice. Baltimore got its first elected black mayor. The Judge had helped both men. There were those judges—among them Silver’s superiors in the state’s court system—who looked askance at all these political activities. Silver was not a by-the-book sort of guy, but he’s famous for lecturing young lawyers on their responsibility to the law. “Be a lawyer first,” he tells them. Translation: Whatever else you’re doing, stay focused on the law. At the same time, he thought that if sketchy people were in the way of a solution to some problem, he would deal with them. “He just thought it was better to be an insider than someone who was outside waving his fist,” Schmoke says today.

The Departed continued from page 51 Cemetery would cost close to $6,000—less than the industry average of about $7,000, but far more than this family could afford. The funeral home is owned by sister and brother Charlene Brown Baldwin and Joseph H. Brown III. Their great-grandfather Isaiah was a cabinetmaker on Montgomery Street in South Baltimore, and he owned a horse and livery wagon—thereby fulfilling the two main requirements for the undertaking trade in the late 19th century. His sons, Isaiah Jr. and Roland Brown, continued the funeral business from their home in the Otterbein neighborhood of South Baltimore. Joseph Jr., son of Roland’s sister, Thelma (who had conveniently married a man also named Brown), took over the business in 1973 and moved to West Baltimore Street near Bon Secours Hospital. In 1995, Joseph III and Charlene Baldwin once again moved, to their current space on Fulton Avenue. The 16,000-squarefoot facility has two chapels and seven viewing rooms, handling about four hundred funerals a year. Of those, says Brown, only three or four are for white people. Last March, Brown was planning on breaking ground for a $2.5 million crematorium facility, along with a landscaped courtyard for cremation ceremonies. But the credit crash temporarily froze the funding, and the plan has been scaled down. Nationally, cremations are increasingly common, but the practice has been slow to catch on in the African American community. “When you talk to black folks about cremation,” says Charleton McIlwain, author of Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual, and Family Ecology, “they can’t really put their finger on it. They say, ‘It just doesn’t seem right.’” Brown thinks that’s going to change. “If someone has a $10,000 life insurance policy, they’re not going to use it on a funeral if they have a $1,500 BGE bill,” he says. The economy “will drive people to cremation—even black people. It’s the direction of the industry.”

urbanite may 09

Judge John Glynn, a former people’s advocate at the Public Service Commission and now a circuit court judge, says he was attracted by Silver’s pragmatism. “I noticed that he was a guy who sought solutions that everyone could live with,” Glynn says. “It wasn’t just process with him. Edgar could work out almost anything. He was very good at it.” Congressman Elijah Cummings says Silver was like a father to him: The judge helped Cummings perfect his lawyering skills and served as a sounding board when he thought of running for Congress. “We spent hours talking about it,” Cummings says. “He thought I should run. He knew people I did not know. It was very significant for me as an African American.” These days, Silver doesn’t get to Annapolis as much as he used to. Maybe he’d make it for the final night this year, he tells me, but maybe not. Which does not mean he’s out of the game. He goes to his office in Towson every day, making and fielding calls until mid-afternoon, when he’s off to a physical therapy session. He had a pretty severe health challenge last year, but he’s back at the old stand. Silver tells me about a young African American woman lawyer who wants to be a judge. He’s helping her, of course. He’s sure she has the right stuff. “I told her ‘You’re the Michelle of Maryland,’” he says, referring to the new First Lady. Based on his track record, expect this candidate to have “your honor” added to her name in short order. ■ —C. Fraser Smith

Delvon’s family, despite its financial challenges, never considered cremation, so his body remained at the funeral home for nearly two weeks before Brown did the embalming: The policy, Brown says, is “to know where the money is coming from” before beginning work. Gwen Branch, Darlene’s oldest sister, was surprised by Charlene Brown Baldwin’s cool, businesslike insistence on payment up front. Joseph Brown Jr., who died in 2000, had made the arrangements for Gwen and Darlene’s parents and grandparents. “He used to come to the house,” Branch recalls. She remembers the funeral director’s kids, Charlene and “Joey,” from around their South Baltimore neighborhood. But Brown has memories of his own. “My father used to say, ‘If I had all the money people owed me, I could retire very well.’” A funeral home is, after all, a business—in the United States, an $11 billion business annually. And funeral directors must walk a thin line between their role as businesspeople and ad hoc grief counselors. “If I feel sorry for someone and try to work it out,” Brown says, “I’ll end up in court trying to get paid. I become this money-grubbing undertaker, and everyone’s looking at me like I should have buried their mother for free.” Delvon’s family needed help. Darlene relies on food stamps and Medicaid; Ashley works for an hourly wage. Neither has a credit card. Ashley had already taken a loan from Charlestown to move from northeast Baltimore to the small house on McHenry, but her employers agreed to extend another $600 advance, which would be deducted from her paycheck, $50 every other week. Someone at the hospital told the family about the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, part of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Director Robin Woolford says that the board disburses about $6 million to 1,700 claimants each year, half in Baltimore City. Most claims are for injuries sustained in crimes and are only awarded after the board determines the victim

was not involved in criminal activity at the time (though money is often given to those with criminal records). Last year the state paid almost $1 million in funeral expenses, with a statutory maximum of $5,000 per case. The claim for Delvon Butts was submitted on October 21, Woolford says, and it was approved a week later. When the the state faxed out a pre-approval letter promising reimbursement, Joe Brown could get to work. Brown had been itching to get started on Delvon. He takes pride in making sure the departed—or “loved ones,” in the trade— look as good as possible when they are seen for the last time. Homicide victims can be a challenge: There may be stab or bullet wounds; an autopsied corpse is often sewn up with crude stitches that resemble those on a leather baseball. Brown boasts about once sculpting a new clay jaw for a man whose throat cancer had eaten away the bone. Another time, he made sure that a teenager who was found badly decomposed, a month dead after a brutal beating, looked ready to go to her junior prom. Delvon didn’t require such interventions: His wounds were easily concealed. When the Chromatec Red embalming fluid flows into the arteries, the ashen skin takes on a warm hue, the flesh plumps out. Like a painter who renders a figure with primary colors before laying the skin tones on top, Brown tries to create a form that, while disarmingly still, seems somehow filled with life. After the embalming, family members could finally set the date and time of the service. A program was printed, with a note to Delvon from Ashley and a poem written by his brothers Darnell and Demonte: You’ve gone, you’ve left us; why did you go away? We’ve tried to figure out what we could’ve done that day.

A glossy color insert had photos of Delvon, a big boy wearing baggy white shorts and a T-shirt, posing with his mother and his young nephews. Chanell Banks scanned photos of her cousin to have printed on tote bags and buttons. Ashley had Delvon’s name tattooed across her forearm, and her three little boys wore white Tshirts with their uncle’s likeness and the dates of his birth and death. Such accessories are common, says March-Grier. “The hottest thing lately is to have a person’s name tattooed,” she says. “Secondgraders collect obituaries in binders, children wear T-shirts with photographs of the deceased. It’s a way of showing grief through signs and symbols.” The role of Roberta’s House, which is modeled on a program in Pittsburgh, is to find other, more positive symbols. March-Grier describes an exercise in which mourners smash clay pots, paint the shards, and then re-assemble them. Finally, “they will plant a plant to represent new life,” she says. One day before the ceremony, 16-year-old Deshira Ricks came to the funeral home to braid her cousin’s hair in neat cornrows. His face had been dabbed with dark pancake makeup; a little blush added color to his cheeks. His fingernails had been cleaned and trimmed. He was ready. The Reverend Raymond G. Wilson, associate minister for Shiloh Christian Community Church in southwest Baltimore, has known Darlene’s family for more than forty-five years. He was asked to deliver the eulogy for Delvon. Five years ago, he made a similar speech for Delvon’s 19-year-old cousin, also killed by gunshot. Wilson guesses that he’s eulogized more than a hundred young men between the ages of 15 and 25. “Very few die of natural causes,” he says dryly. “For a lot of these kids, there’s a sense of inevitability. They don’t expect to live beyond 25.” Wilson took a couple of courses in psychology at the Maryland

Baptist School of Religion in Lynchburg, Virginia, and he likes to use them—not just as a preacher, but in his day job as a traffic investigator for Baltimore City. He ends up encountering a lot of kids on the streets who think he’s a cop because of his city-issued Cavalier. “They knock on the window and ask, ‘Are you the man?’ And I say, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, I could be.’” Wilson remembers Delvon as “a likeable kid,” but one who didn’t have much structure: “He led a free life.” In his eulogy, the minister took the opportunity to caution others. God, he said, “needed Delvon to open the eyes and ears of somebody God loves … whatever it takes to get your attention.” Wilson’s talk was punctuated by murmurs and frequent shouts of agreement from congregants. “It’s time,” he shouted, “to put your house in order.” While he’s preaching, Wilson likes to study the faces in the audience. At Delvon’s funeral, “there was one young man with a serious look on his face,” Wilson recalls. “He was sitting three or four rows behind the family, and he kept his attention on me.” That young man, Wilson says, “could be the one I was talking to.” He’s been waiting for the boy to show up at church. Throughout the service, family members rose to share their memories of Delvon’s too-short life. A cousin recalled his constant smile; others described how he loved to dance in the living room with his young nephews, how he liked video games, how he helped out around the house. For those who attended his funeral, this is how Delvon will be remembered. After the service, a line of perhaps forty cars snaked across West Baltimore to Mount Zion Cemetery, following two funeral home Cadillacs. It was a warm Halloween day, and the sun shone bright. The long procession ran red lights, tapping horns as the cars negotiated intersections. Along the way, they passed a small boy—maybe 9 or 10 years old—dressed in a Spiderman costume, mask and all, furiously pedaling his bike. At the cemetery, Delvon’s older brother, uncles, and cousins carried the gleaming blue coffin to a tent set up near the edge of the grass. Rev. Wilson led a final prayer. When it ended, Charlene Brown Baldwin briskly moved things along, reminding all gathered that the service was now complete and offering each guest a flower from the arrangement of powder-blue and white carnations on top of the casket. Months after the funeral, Darlene and Ashley sit inside the house on McHenry Street. There are photos of Delvon on the otherwise bare walls; sympathy cards remain on top of the TV cabinet. While Darlene has gained back some weight and looks healthier than she did at the funeral, she says she is still waiting for approval from medical assistance to see a doctor for depression. When she speaks of her lost son, her face becomes strained as tears gather. Sometimes, she just stops talking and stares straight ahead. Ashley, who prays for her brother every day, puts her hand on her mother’s back to comfort her. “So many guys I grew up with didn’t even make it to 25. Didn’t even make it to 18,” she says. She’s worried about her little boys. The uncle of her youngest son, Tavian, was killed on the streets recently, she says. The little boy is a year old. He has already attended two funerals for his young uncles. ■ —Martha Thomas is an Urbanite contributing writer.

On the air: Hear more on this story on the Marc Steiner Show, May 20, on WEAA 88.9 FM.

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Ribs surrounding a lung, expansion and compression, freedom and restraint: All of these come to mind as one looks at this new work by Christian Benefiel, an artist who has recently moved back to Baltimore. What clues do we get from the title of the work, Hatchet Piece? The roughly broken and assembled strips of common building material imply an inner stress, a tension that is unresolved and, remarkably, intensified once the blower is at work. The artist has said that it is from a new series of work “examining contemporary building and manufacturing materials and practice.” Interested in the relationship between craft and the common practice of building, he notes that “everyone from the manufacturer [to] the builder [to] the consumer is disconnected from the products they are associated with. ... We are building a stockpile of crap that nobody wants anymore.” The essence and meaning lying behind his work—work that uses those same characterless materials—does seem to go beyond his stated focus by alluding to much more universal and accessible subjects. This thing, this sculpture, struggles to breathe, to be free, to scream itself into life. —Alex Castro

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