Continental Divide: Baltimoreans Becoming Missoulians

By Sutton R. Stokes, 3-14-08

	Caption: Hmmm... maybe Baltimore and Montana aren't so different after all.

Last week, Amy and I finally closed on the new house over by Westside Park. We won’t be moving in for another week or so, but we’ve already met our neighbors. By one of those happy coincidences that are so common in a small city like Missoula, they turned out to be friends of a friend, and he invited us all over to his house a few weeks ago for venison and introductions. It was nice to meet some actual residents of the Westside, because they were able to confirm many of our so-far good but mostly second-hand impressions of the neighborhood.

The day after meeting our neighbors, Amy and I were driving out on some errands and found ourselves bordering on giddy as we talked about the prospect of living in a neighborhood where we might actually have some things in common with the people around us. That’ll be a new one after eight years in Baltimore, a city where, I have to admit, I never felt entirely at home, despite my family having roots in that area going back about twelve generations, and despite the great friends we made there.

It occurred to me once that Baltimore is at least two different cities, simultaneously occupying the same physical space, with all the awkwardness and tension that implies. There is the Baltimore that is a mid-size east-coast metropolis, conveniently located along the I-95 corridor, an easy drive to D.C. and an up-and-coming place to do business, make and enjoy art and afford splendid old homes at bargain prices.

And there is the Baltimore that is more like a village nation-state, home to the descendants of generations of poor people who rarely leave their neighborhoods, much less the city itself. This Baltimore has its own dialect and a distinct culture, warped and dented by crushing poverty, absent opportunity, readily available drugs and a murder rate more than seven times the national rate.

The relationship between the two cities’ residents is, shall we say, wary. The young professionals moving into the Baltimore that is in the midst of resuscitating itself resent the crime and ugliness that still blights so many neighborhoods (even if it takes some of them a while to admit it), while the poorer residents are understandably at least as resentful of an urban revival that doesn’t look like it includes them.

The defining characteristic of Baltimore is the porousness of its neighborhood boundaries, which is why I’m talking about two cities on top of each other rather than “the good part” and “the bad part” of town. At any moment, at just about any point in Baltimore, one can be standing in the first city — perhaps strolling the waterfront in Fells Point early on a Sunday morning, or pulling up in front of the Creative Alliance arts center in Highlandtown, or admiring a garden by one of the “painted lady” row houses in Charles Village — only to see the second city flicker through. A harried mother passing by will give her toddler a tooth-rattling swat on the rear and scream at him to “shut the fuck up”; it will not be clear whether the man stretched out on the sidewalk next to a pool of vomit is dead or only resting; a con artist will approach, announcing “I’m not a thief, murderer or rapist,” and launch into one of the cookie-cutter tales of woe that each one of these fellows seems to think he made up himself.

That’s not to say there aren’t some unequivocally “bad” neighborhoods, too. On some blocks, including those around the city’s ancient, castle-walled Greenmount Cemetery, where my family’s burial plot contains headstones dating to the 1700s, more than half the houses stand empty, boarded up, many of them scarred by fire, as though in the aftermath of an invasion. The streetlights are burned out or stolen, and the only nighttime illumination, other than the headlights of passing cars on god knows what errand, is the sickly yellow light from the armored window of a liquor store or Chinese carry-out, the only commercial establishment for blocks and blocks.

When I first moved to Baltimore, fresh from a series of suburban wastelands (oxymoron?) near Miami, I loved the stimulation of city life, even “the bad parts.” I hate the way so many people are ready to write off the urban poor, as if their misfortunes are entirely their own fault, as if we are not still watching the consequences of both the 300 years of slavery that made this country possible and the openly racist federal housing policies of the 1950s and 1960s that gave birth to the suburbs we know today. It has always struck me as ironic that so many of the people who want to crow about “personal responsibility” [1] are often unwilling to acknowledge the advantages so many of us enjoy on the very uneven playing field that still exists in America today. [2] Living in Baltimore — confronted on a daily basis with the part of America in which people lead worse lives than they would in some third-world countries and where the phrase “American Dream” has the ring of a cruel joke — at least meant I wasn’t one of the people with their heads in the sand.

But it wore me out after a while. The knowledge that there were so many people leading lives of such desperate deprivation elsewhere in Baltimore, even as I enjoyed Afghan food at the Helmand or hribi dip at Ze Mean Bean, even as I queued for tickets at Everyman Theater, even as I took in the harbor sights from a water taxi or my old sailboat, gradually began to give me the distinct sensation of sitting on a veranda somewhere tropical and hot, wearing a white linen suit, sipping a lime rickey and hoping that “the trouble” holds off for a few more nights at least.

To put this another way, while I wasn’t afraid, exactly — although life in a crime-plagued city like Baltimore requires a constant low-grade watchfulness that can be tiring after a while — I did begin to feel more and more worn down by the stark divide between my quality of life and that of the people, especially children, living only a few blocks away from me. I’d love to be one of the heroes with the guts to stick around and work to change all of that, but I guess I’m not, which — though it feels like an admission of defeat — at least means I’m being honest with myself. I just want to live someplace where I feel like I belong, and when you live in two cities at the same time, it is hard to feel at home in either one.

So I have high hopes for Missoula, which has its problems but still feels much more like an intact community than Baltimore did. (It should — it’s had it a lot easier over the years.) A few weeks after we met our neighbors, Amy and I dropped in on the Westside/Northside Neighborhood Council meeting, where we found an impressive range of people — from blue collar to professional, from babes in arms to the elderly — who were listening to the presentations and thoughtfully discussing the issues facing their neighborhood. And just a few days ago, I drove by the house, and it looks like the playground across the street has finally reopened (it had been closed for months due to a safety problem).

I’m looking for omens these days, so I’m just going to go ahead and take that as a good one.

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1I’m all in favor of “personal responsibility,” and I actually agree that inner-city poverty and certain aspects of our current social safety net generate pathologies such that some people feel encouraged to see themselves as victims and dependents. But I’m also in favor of looking out for the weakest among us (“there but for the grace…”, etc.), and if you think that’s best accomplished by making as much money as you can and avoiding paying taxes in order to allegedly boost the economy, all I can say is “how convenient for you.” Can you truthfully say that you have examined the precepts of this economic theory as critically as you would examine the precepts of one that suggested society would benefit best if you, say, built a bonfire out of twenty-dollar bills each Friday afternoon? In other words, have you ever been willing to be proved wrong on this? I’m not saying you are wrong, although there are of course those who do say so — I don’t know. I’m just saying that a true skeptic might find it beyond coincidental to learn that the best thing the rich can do for their country turns out to be “keep getting richer.” That’s all.

2 Disagree if you want, but I’m afraid I’m not too interested in listening to your objections that America is a land of equality and opportunity unless you’ve, say, spent a few days in an inner-city elementary school. Without equal educational opportunities from the earliest grades, there is simply no chance of social equality, and America simply does not offer equal educational opportunities to all of its children. Period. (Just to further stoke the comment fires, no, vouchers are not the answer.)

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.