Photojournalist Martha Cooper has always been fearless, indefatigable, and intuitive. Now in her 80s, she is best known for her documentation of New York City’s graffiti culture of the 1970s and 1980s and, specifically, the 1984 book she co-authored, Subway Art, which became a foundational text for street art globally.

Twenty years ago, casting about for a project, she came home to Baltimore. She knew the city well. Growing up, she had been influenced by her father, who ran Cooper’s Camera Mart on Harford Road with his brother, and her mother, a Western High School English and journalism teacher. Initially, she considered the rowhouse communities of East Baltimore for her project, partly because she was taken with screen painting. (With degrees in art and anthropology, documenting subgroups has been a lifelong interest.)

Her cousin Sally, however, suggested the neighborhood where their great-grandmother and great-grandfather, rabbi Benjamin Szold, settled after emigrating from Austria-Hungary in the 1850s. In her ancestors’ once-upon-a-time stomping grounds in Southwest Baltimore—aka Sowebo—she found inspiration in children jumping up and down on a discarded mattress and kids kicking around a tin can on the streets of the struggling community.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, right, that’s the kind of place I’m looking for,’” recalls Cooper before a recent showing of some of that work from 2006-2016 at Zella’s Pizzeria on Hollins Street. “I didn’t spend much time looking elsewhere and then I went to this real estate agent who showed me [former City Paper photographer] John Ellsberry’s tiny little rowhouse on South Carrollton Avenue, which he had renovated nicely. I’m like, ‘Great. I’m going to buy this house and I’m going to do this project.’”

She introduced herself and her intentions at the annual Sowebo Arts & Musical Festival by offering free portraits in front of a public mural painted by artist Adam Stab (see above). And soon she began carrying her camera everywhere.

The working-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood surrounding historic Hollins Market has been targeted by real estate speculators for decades. But gentrification has yet to take a firm hold. Cooper notes she never had an incident in her years prowling for pictures, but she did lose money when she resold her home.

Baltimore author and Hollins Market resident Baynard Woods curated the new exhibition at Zella’s, titled “Sowebo Streets,” which also includes neighborhood portraits from an array of local photographers like Shae McCoy, Wendel Patrick, Christian Thomas, Josh Sisk, Myles Michelin, Joshua Kittle, Cheryl Kinion, Jack Radcliffe, Mark Stephen Bugnaski, Patrick Harnett, Bridget Cimino, Dan Van Allen, and Woods.

“I live down the street and get my packages delivered here, everyone does,” Woods says. The exhibition closes April 30. (Hopes to bring the show to this year’s Sowebo Art and Music Festival in late May did not pan out.) “Zella’s owners are great. They’re immigrants. I wanted to do it for the neighborhood.”

It’s a show in a pizzeria and not Paris, which someone else of her stature might dismiss, but not Cooper, adds Woods. “Martha? Right away, she said, ‘Yes.’”

Cooper is also the subject of the 2019 award-winning documentary Martha: A Picture Story, which is available to stream and includes her Sowebo experience and work.

“It was hard to describe immediately, but I what I was getting was pictures of everyday life in the streets,” Cooper says. “Simple things. Card playing. There was graffiti, a skate park, and an arabbers’ stable in the neighborhood, which was always good to photograph. Somebody kept pigeons and pigeon flying has been another interest.

“I also have a bunch of sidewalk pool scenes, one with a big inflatable sliding board in a tight alley,” she adds with a contagious smile. “I mean, I could do a whole zine of sidewalk pools.”

After a 2012 artist residency in South Africa, Cooper paired some Sowebo images with uncannily similar photos taken in the Soweto township, one of the centers of the anti-apartheid movement. The resulting photo essay, “Soweto/Sowebo,” features almost interchangeable images of cookouts, storefronts, children playing, rolling tires down the street, beat-up cars—even vegetables and fruits being sold from horse-drawn carts.

“There is a picture that I never thought was particularly anything, Baltimore kids riding in the back of a pickup truck, and it was in this small show I had in Johannesburg,” Cooper recalls. “And that was the picture people commented on because they were so surprised that white people would ride in the back of a pickup truck.

“To me, it was just two [similar] pictures. But a friend overheard those comments from the groups of Black South Africans standing around and talking about the photos. It was just the similarities of everyday life. But maybe when you put those two photos together, you find something universal. People overcoming their circumstances.”

This article first appeared in our May 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

After placing Harry Houdini in a straitjacket, binding his legs, and hanging him upside down from a cornice of the old Sun Building, the Baltimore Police Department boasted that their handiwork would be the first to hold the cagey escape artist. Officers George Baudel and James Moncks had pulled the straitjacket extra tight, tugging it twice before fastening its leather strap. From there, they buckled the sleeves of the suit, securing his sheathed arms across his chest.

“Run me up as high as you want,” Houdini told the officers, dismissing their braggadocio. “It’s immaterial to me.”

The legendary performer’s famous 1916 appearance in Baltimore, 110 years ago this month, drew an estimated 50,000 people to one of downtown’s busiest intersections. The crowd, which began arriving two hours before the lunchtime show, crammed the streets, windows, and rooftops, bringing traffic to a halt.

To the onlookers’ delight and BPD’s dismay, Houdini—wriggling like a hooked marlin—contorted himself from the confinement in little more than three minutes. He tossed the straitjacket to his fans below and took a dangling bow, while still strung high above the crush of spectators.

Ever the promoter, Houdini’s public exploit was intended to hype his appearance that week in the city. At West Franklin Street’s Maryland Theatre, Houdini promised to unveil his famous “Chinese Water Torture Cell.” He also challenged carpenters, locksmiths, and craftsmen to construct something from which he could not extricate himself.

Houdini’s greatest trick may have been his own reinvention, however. He was born Erik Weisz in Budapest. Not, as he often claimed, in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father briefly served as rabbi to a local congregation before losing his appointment and falling into poverty. Harry Handcuff Houdini—the name he used when registering for the draft in 1918—was inspired by French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, whom he admired.

Though he rarely attended synagogue and his wife, Bess, was Catholic (“I am always afraid,” she said, explaining why she never watched him perform), he never tried to escape his Jewish heritage. During World War I, he formed the Rabbis’ Sons Theatrical Benevolent Association with Irving Berlin and Al Jolson.

Houdini’s last performance in Baltimore took place on Nov. 9, 1925. At the Academy of Music on Howard Street, he once again thrilled audiences with his water-torture escape as well as his career-capping “Three Shows in One” exhibition, which included illusions, more escape acts, and the exposure of fraudulent psychics—a personal crusade. The show’s equipment filled a 60-foot railcar.

Symbolically, Houdini’s performances represented self-liberation in a country of immigrants, many of whom had also changed their names to assimilate and sought freedom of one type or another—political, economic, psychological—from their past.

The most enduring stage performer of his time, Houdini died on Halloween 1926—from an inflammation of his abdomen lining following an appendectomy. (He did not die in his wife’s arms after nearly drowning during an underwater escape, as portrayed in the 1953 Tony Curtis film.) He was also no stranger to Baltimore or Maryland, appearing nearly 100 times in the state during his career.

“Houdini’s own story, combined with his public persona, embodied the ability to escape from individual limits, limits of all kinds,” says Spencer Horsman, the magician/owner of Illusions Magic Bar, who recreated Houdini’s famous straitjacket escape high above the Federal Hill venue at its opening 20 years ago. “What’s his quote? ‘My brain is the key that sets me free.’ He was an artist, a storyteller, a powerful imaginative force who transcended confinement. That’s why we remember him.”

This article first appeared in our April 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

Fifteen-year-old Mike Sparaco and his buddy, Bill Wheatley, had made plans to meet two girls for miniature golf on Sunday, May 8, 1966. Instead, they got stood up. Not a great feeling, but it happens. On the teenagers’ dejected walk home, however, a greater fate—there is no other word for it—intervened.

While cutting through the parking lot at Memorial Stadium, a roar erupted, causing them both to glance up. Suddenly, fans in the top row of the bleachers began yelling and gesturing toward them.

“We thought, ‘What’s going on?’” Sparaco recalled in a 2016 interview with The Sun. “Bill said, ‘Maybe somebody hit one out.’ I said, ‘Great, maybe we’ll get a new baseball and play with it.’”

The first car he peaked under was a white Cadillac and there was the ball, almost but not quite in reach. “No sooner had I crawled under to get it than all these people came running over. A guy with a transistor radio shouted, ‘Frank Robinson just hit that!’”

Robinson’s blast, off Cleveland’s Louis Tiant, who had tossed three straight shutouts to start the season, was like a scene from The Natural. Departing Memorial Stadium high above the leftfield line, the tiny sphere cleared the Colts’ press box before bouncing over a fence and rolling to a stop 540 feet from home plate.

The Orioles needed to sweep that day’s twin bill to vault into a first-place tie with Cleveland. Buoyed by 11,000 youngsters on hand for Safety Patrol Day, a record crowd of 49,516 watched the O’s take the opener, 8-2, behind Robinson’s first home run of the day.

Paced by his epic first-inning salvo off Tiant, they won again, 8-3, in the second contest. The feat so inspired the city that the team’s booster club, the Orioles Advocates, commemorated it. During a pregame ceremony a week later, they raised an orange flag with black lettering at the spot where the ball exited the park. It simply read “HERE” and flew until the O’s final season on 33rd Street.

More importantly, the moonshot put the American League—and Baltimore, then a Colts town—on notice that the O’s, known for their pitching and defense, were now a potent offensive force as well.

The O’s had acquired the veteran slugger in the offseason from Cincinnati, where Reds’ owner Bill DeWitt described Robinson as “not a young 30” after the deal. The words haunted DeWitt, who would sell the team at year’s end, and lit a fire in Robinson. He smashed a home run in each of his first three games in his new uniform. Still, this one was different.

As Robinson jogged to right field to start the next inning, public-address man Bill LeFevre announced the HR was the first ever hit completely out of Memorial Stadium. During a nearly minute-long standing ovation, Robinson tipped his cap several times.

The moment went beyond baseball. Not only had he spent a decade in Cincinnati before being told to pack his bags, he and his wife, Barbara, had confronted prejudice in buying a house in Baltimore, their adopted, racially diverse, but segregated city.

On the 50th anniversary of the mythic blast, Robinson called the ovation a seminal moment in his career. Hearing the cheering, the slugger told The Sun, “I felt like I really belonged in Baltimore.”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer.

“Bad trades are part of baseball—now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake?”—Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon’s character) in Bull Durham.

In early December 1965, when baseball news typically sprinkled the sports section like light snow, the Orioles and Reds announced a swap that would rank among the most consequential in the history of professional sports. So much so that, like Boston’s short-sighted sale of a certain larger-than-life Pigtown native to the Yankees, it became a part of baseball lore.

In Cincinnati, DeWitt framed it as forward-looking. Milt Pappas had won 16 games in ’63 and ’64 for the O’s. He was 26 and the team’s all-time winningest pitcher. The Orioles threw in Jack Baldschun, a solid reliever, and untested outfielder Dick Simpson. Suffice to say, none played up to the Reds’ hopes.

Robinson belonged in another class altogether. With guys named Mays, Mantle, Aaron, and Clemente. He had won Rookie-of-the-Year honors, an MVP trophy, and carried Cincinnati to the ’61 pennant. The year prior to the trade, in an era dominated by pitching, he mashed 33 homers and drove in 113 runs. DeWitt, however, a devotee of former Brooklyn Dodger GM Branch Rickey, believed “it was better to trade a player a year early than a year late.” He also maintained his club needed pitching, which was true. Left unmentioned was DeWitt’s contentious relationship with his star.

In Baltimore, the reaction was jubilation.

“Cannons at the four corners!” Harry Dalton, the O’s director of player personnel, shouted upon completing the deal, referring to the power-packed foursome of first baseman Boog Powell, third baseman Brooks Robinson, left fielder Curt Blefary, and the new slugger in right.

Considered one of the sharpest baseball executives ever, Dalton understood how Robinson would impact the O’s lineup. Batting behind him, Brooks and Boog drove in 209 runs. Behind them, Blefary added 23 home runs and another 64 RBIs. Frank? He won the Triple Crown (.316, 49 HRs, 122 RBI) and the MVP—the only player to win the award in both leagues until Shohei Ohtani accomplished the feat in 2024.

The Orioles took the pennant by a landslide nine games. Then, in one of the most dominating World Series performances ever, the O’s swept the favored Los Angeles Dodgers. Robinson drilled a first-inning HR in the opener out west. Then another in the series-clincher here.

“Sometimes, you can point to one incident in a season as a big one,” veteran O’s reliever Moe Drabowsky recalled  to longtime Sun sportswriter John Eisenberg. “To me, when Frank hit that ball out of the stadium off Tiant, it galvanized the whole team. It was like, ‘We’re going to be tough to beat this year.’”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer. He leaned over home plate and defied pitchers to throw inside. Hit 198 times in his career, he gained a reputation for dusting himself off and getting his revenge with a retaliatory home run. (Don Drysdale, who Robinson homered off in his first at bat of the ’66 Series, was a familiar nemesis.)

Even at 51 in an old-timers’ game, after being accidentally knocked down by former big-league pitcher Jim Bibby, Robinson dug back in and put one over the fence. Similarly, Robinson was a menace on the basepaths, breaking up double plays like a linebacker. Early in his career, a hard, spikes-up slide into third base led to a scrap with Braves’ Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews, who blackened his eye with a right cross. Robinson had to leave the field, but, true to form, returned for the second game of the doubleheader and responded with a home run and decisive catch.

He had played in segregated environments in Utah and South Carolina in the minor leagues, places where he wasn’t allowed to eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as his white teammates. Those experiences and others may have hardened his exterior as a young ballplayer.

But, raised in hardscrabble Oakland, California, he was never a go-along-to-get-along type. Neither, coincidentally, were two guys he played ball with growing up—Bill Russell, who became the first Black head coach in the NBA in 1966—and Curt Flood, the Black centerfielder who challenged baseball’s reserve clause and set the stage for free agency in the 1970s.

Robinson, of course, would become baseball’s first Black manager with Cleveland in 1975—and win AL manager of the year honors for helming the O’s 1989 “Why Not?” run. One thing Robinson let his new teammates know was that he didn’t believe in fraternizing with the enemy. The O’s were a little too congenial for his liking.

“If somebody was talking on the field with one of the opposing players, Frank would say, ‘Why do you go out and talk to those guys when in five minutes, you’re going want to kick their butt?’” Powell says. “‘Take them out for dinner after the game. They’re not your friends on the field.’ And he was right and we stuck to that.”

Robinson, who did not lack for a sense of humor despite his fierceness between the lines, also instituted and served as the presiding judge of the team’s Kangaroo Court. With a mop over his head and a broom handle as his gavel, Robinson dispensed fines for mental errors and botched routine plays.

“We only did it after games we won so there’d be no hard feelings. If you threw to the wrong base, it cost you a dollar,” Powell says. “It wasn’t the dollar. It was that someone was paying attention [to your mistake] and you knew it. That was the edge Frank brought to the team.”

“What did Frank mean to the Baltimore Orioles franchise?” Jim Palmer mused, phoning into a MASN show shortly after his ex-teammate passed in 2019. “He put us on the map.”

In fact, Drabowsky’s prediction that the O’s would be “tough to beat” in ’66 after Robinson’s parking lot shot proved an understatement. During Frank Robinson’s playing career in Baltimore, the O’s were the best team in pro sports and maybe the best baseball club ever.

From 1966 to 1971, they won 100 games three times, captured four pennants, and took a second World Series in 1970. (Not incidentally, Drabowsky, who tossed 6-plus innings of scoreless relief in Game 1 of the ’66 Series, played a significant role on several of those clubs.)

To be clear, the Orioles were a very good baseball team before Robinson came over. They finished third in the 10 team AL in ’64 and ’65. And they didn’t just have “cannons at the corners” in ’66. They had Hall of Famers at third in Brooks and at short in Luis Aparicio. And future All-Stars Paul Blair and Davey Johnson stepping into full-time roles in center and at second.

The O’s themselves weren’t sure they needed Frank Robinson. A fourth future Hall of Famer, 20-year-old Jim Palmer, was set to join 23-year-old standout Dave McNally in the rotation.

“When the trade was announced, I was sorry to see Milt go,” Powell recalls from Florida as the 2026 preseason gets underway. “He was a friend, teammate, and a genuinely good pitcher.”

Indeed, Pappas finished with 209 career victories. “I respected Frank, we all did,” Powell says. “But we didn’t know Frank.”

The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Robinson had carried a rep in Cincinnati as a difficult guy. That changed quickly. As far as his new teammates were concerned, it was love at first sight. Robinson later commented the city might not have been ready for him, a reference to the housing bias, “but the Orioles were.”

“The day he arrived at spring training, he hit one after another into the palm trees,” Powell says. “I still remember telling Etch [catcher Andy Etchebarren], standing next to me, ‘We’ve taken a step up.’ Frank fit in right from the start. We liked the way he was and didn’t want him to be anyone other than who he was.”

Robinson’s issues with the Reds management stemmed from racial prejudice, salary disputes, and his outspoken personality. Pete Rose later said the club gave him grief for becoming too friendly with Robinson and Vada Pinson, another Black ballplayer. When fans and the Cincinnati media gave Robinson a hard time during the ’65 slump, it convinced DeWitt he could move him without too much blowback.

Meanwhile, Baltimore Afro-American Hall of Fame baseball writer Sam Lacy, civil rights groups, and Black fans had pushed the O’s for years to sign Black players. For their part, the Orioles acknowledged they hoped Robinson would appeal to the city’s “Negro” community.

The team’s leader when he arrived was the guy whose last name he shared. Brooks Robinson’s soft-spoken modesty and civility endeared him to everyone—never more so than when Frank Robinson joined the club.

A six-time All-Star, Brooks had earned his own MVP in 1964. The addition of another superstar, a Black slugger who’d been labeled “a troublemaker” by his previous club, could’ve potentially disrupted the team’s chemistry. But while Frank dealt with remnants of legal segregation in Baltimore, his acceptance in the O’s clubhouse was a non issue. (On the cusp of the World Series, Mayor Theodore McKeldin appealed to bar owners to ignore state law allowing them to ban Black residents: “I find it a distasteful piece of irony that I must make this plea in light of the fact that without Frank Robinson, a person who could be excluded by such business, we would probably have no World Series.”)

In his 1988 autobiography, Extra Innings, Frank said race relations on those Orioles teams were unlike any other club he played for. Brooks and Frank dressed next to each other for the entirety of their six years together in Baltimore, setting the tone for the team. The pair became known as the “Robinson Brothers” and after their playing careers, made a Lite Beer commercial playing off their names and similarities, clarifying, however, “we are not identical twins.”

The images of Brooks and Frank—one from Little Rock, Arkansas, the site of pitched segregation battles, the other from the birthplace of the Black Panthers—standing shoulder to shoulder, hitting in tandem in the heart of O’s batting order spoke volumes during the Civil Rights era.

“I suspect Brooks was the key reason why, for the first time in my 14 years of professional baseball, Black players and white players had drinks together and meals together when we were on the road,” he wrote. “Not every single night, but two or three times on most road trips. None of the players really invited me, Paul Blair, or Sam Bowens to join them. But Brooks might ask me where I was going after a game, and not knowing the restaurants in most American cities, I might say I wasn’t sure. Then Brooks would say something like, ‘Well, Boog, Jerry [Adair], Curt, and I are going over to this restaurant.’”

Winning helps, and Orioles fans responded in kind, embracing the club as never before. The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Jim Melonas, whose son, Mark, raised a replica HERE flag at the old Memorial Stadium site—now a recreational field—on the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s home run, grew up in Hamilton. He had started his freshman year at the University of Maryland when the O’s met the Dodgers. He and his friends squeezed into a VW Beetle to greet the team at then-Friendship Airport after they won the first two games in L.A. Then they followed the team to Memorial Stadium.

“Somehow, we got stuck between two of their buses, and were waved into the team parking lot,” Melonas, who went on to a career in business, enthusiastically recalls. “We ended up helping carry some of the players’ bags. It was one of the best moments of my life.”

Though there was an encore. Days later, a girlfriend invited him to Game Four. Her father had an extra ticket. “Frank Robinson’s home run sailed two rows over our heads in left field.”

“Do I remember Frank Robinson coming to Baltimore?” asks Rev. Alvin Hathaway, who grew up with Elijah Cummings in West Baltimore and recently led the restoration of Thurgood Marshall’s elementary school. “I was at City College High School from 1966 to 1969. Those were the Orioles’ hottest years. I worked at Memorial Stadium part-time. Not only do I remember Frank Robinson, I was selling popcorn when Louis Tiant threw that ball that he knocked out of the park.”

Hathaway highlights how accessible Robinson was, as well as the city’s other pro athletes. “You’d see him and his wife, Barbara, at Cross Keys, around town. They were a regal couple. That era of sports figures were community-minded people. He embodied it.”

Hathaway also notes Baltimore was a Colts’ town prior to ’66 in the city’s white—and Black communities. For good reason. “They won championships, and had personalities like Lenny Moore, Jim Parker, Willie Richardson, John Mackey, Lenny Lyles. When Frank came in, this was a homerun guy, and you coupled him with Paul Blair, and things started to shift in terms of African Americans being attentive to the team.”

Academics were important at City College, but so were sports, Hathaway continues, adding he worked 15 to 20 ballgames at Memorial Stadium a year. He carried popcorn because it was light.

“I wanted to see the game,” he says. “I was on left field side when Frank stepped in against Tiant, who came up with that big windup. It was tense already when he threw that pitch, and man, and the next thing, all you heard was ‘pop!’ Everybody turned their head. I dropped my tray. I couldn’t believe how hard he had hit that ball. I still can’t.”

This article first appeared in our April 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

When Jill Orlov was a University of Virginia student, a friend randomly asked one day if she’d accompany her to the architectural school. Not for any academic purpose. Her friend hoped to set up a guy she knew in the architecture program with their suitemate.

“So, she’s talking to him about fixing him up with our girlfriend, and meanwhile I’m fascinated by these meticulously built models and miniature fragments of buildings,” Orlov recalls. “I am in heaven.”

She soon switched her major to architecture. It just turned out, many years later, it wasn’t architecture that was calling. It was those meticulous miniature models.

Orlov worked as a “real architect” at small firms for a decade. Then she left that job and moved on to a property conditions company where she spent nearly another 10 years inspecting the structure of buildings and their various systems—electrical, plumbing, heating and air, et al. “Both were kind of soul-sucking jobs,” she admits.

Finally, after years of casting about for a creative outlet, a Maryland Institute College of Art welding class provided a needed spark.

“I had taken glassblowing, pottery, woodworking classes, furniture making, I tried everything,” she says. “None of them were something I wanted to stay with, like when you fall in love with a certain art. It wasn’t until I took welding that that happened.”

Specifically, that certain art became metal sculpture. Very small metal sculpture. Now based out of Hampden’s Mill Centre—their next open studio tour is April 11—Orlov builds tiny spaces, both real and imaginary, often incorporating cinematic or literary backstories. Her materials are found objects made of steel, brass, and sterling silver and she employs classic welding and silver soldering techniques.

Her solo exhibition at the Museum of Miniatures in Tucson, Arizona—“Borrowed Time/Borrowed Books”—reinterpreted libraries, yes, actual libraries, from the classic films Wings of Desire, Fahrenheit 451, All the President’s Men, The Time Machine, and The Breakfast Club—plus a memorable episode from The Twilight Zone, “Time Enough at Last.” She has also reimagined Julia Child’s TV kitchen, The Brady Bunch’s living room and staircase, and Archie and Edith’s sitting room from All in the Family.

“The museum invited me to put together an exhibit, and I started thinking of things that meant a lot to me,” recalls Orlov amid the blowtorches, gas tanks, ban saw, and drill press in her first-floor studio. “I’ve always loved the texture of books. To me, in making those library spaces and the tiny books, there was something both visual, that was related to the films, and literary.”

Other pieces have been shown at The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.—as part of a group exhibition titled “Small Stories”—as well as the American Visionary Art Museum, the New York Studio School, the Fuller Craft Museum, Towson University’s Center for the Arts Gallery, and School 33 and the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower.

In December, she was also one of 70 artists working in miniature from around the world profiled for the fine art hardcover, “L’art du minuscule,” from the esteemed French publisher, Gallimard. One current project is a collaboration with several incarcerated artists who she has connected with in recent years. Another is a work commissioned by painter Michael Owen, who created Baltimore’s ubiquitous L-O-V-E murals several years ago. He has since moved to California and asked Orlov to recreate his old Highlandtown studio here.

Her most memorable commission, however, came via Benny Blanco, the 11-time Grammy Award-nominated music producer, who might be best known as Selena Gomez’s husband. Rather than have the Recording Industry Association of America present the standard, full-scale gold and platinum album awards in recognition of his work, Blanco thought it would be fun and subversive to have them made in miniature and give them to his collaborators. Now, superstars such as Halsey, Ed Sheeran, and DJ Khalid each own one of her tiny, framed album awards—small enough to present in an ALTOIDS tin—complete with attached magnifying glass for reading the inscription.

“We are so used to being the scale against which we measure everything else,” Orlov says. “I like playing with confusion of that scale.”

That Orlov loved making dollhouses as a girl is not surprising. And often there is a sense of nostalgia or whimsy with miniatures. Her metal sculptures are a bit edgier, however, glancing backward through a more dystopian lens. They also possess an interactive dimension, inevitably inviting greater scrutiny from the viewer.

“Because I use found objects, I like when people look at things and they have to push their minds to think, ‘Where did that object come from?’” Orlov says with a hint of a mischievousness. “The objects look familiar, but they’re used differently, and that becomes another way to engage people. I think people like that puzzle.”

As a teenager, Cory McCray’s life was on a trajectory familiar to far too many Baltimore young men. Expelled from several city schools, he twice faced adult gun and drug distribution charges before he turned 18—eventually resulting in a 10-month confinement at the Victor Cullen Center juvenile facility in Western Maryland.

McCray’s mother worked multiple jobs, trying to distance her son and family from the pitfalls of the inner city. But when he was sentenced to detention, he was unable to envision a different path for himself, only seeing the streets  and increasingly long prison terms in his future. He told his mother to give him up on him. (She did not.)

Now 43, a married father of four, and northeast Baltimore’s elected representative in the state senate, McCray shares his journey in The Apprenticeship That Saved My Life. In this candid and engaging memoir, McCray recounts how a phone call from his mother to the Maryland Department of Labor—requesting a list of every licensed apprenticeship in the state—unexpectedly changed his course.

Violent crime, thankfully, has taken a sharp downturn over the past three years. But there’s still a lack of economic opportunity for young men, particularly young Black men. Was that the prompt for this book?
I visit schools once or twice a week…so they can meet someone who looks like them and can speak to their [circumstances] and their potential. But as you get older, you think, “How can I add value? How can I scale impact?” I thought this book was the appropriate next step to lean in on this apprenticeship conversation. It’s something that I can leave with them.

At 18, you were accepted into a five-year apprenticeship program with the International Brotherhood of Electricians. It quickly proved life-changing because it paid solid wages while you learned on the job. You bought a house two years later.
When I found out about the apprenticeship, I was blown away. How did I live in this city all my life and no one told me about this opportunity? The other thing is, if you don’t see it, you can’t believe it. I didn’t have electricians in my universe.

One thing that comes across is there are steps for acceptance into an internship program that those born in upper middle class ZIP codes may take for granted.
I still remember being in a school and asking, “If you were senator for a day, what’s one thing you would change about your school?” A young man gets up and says he would have driver’s ed at his school. I just stood for a second and thought about everything it took me to even apply for the apprenticeship. I had to be at least 18, have a high school diploma or GED, one year of algebra—and a driver’s license.

We took those same young people to Annapolis, put together a bill, testified before the House, testified before the Senate, watched the governor sign that bill, and now there is a $2-million appropriation inside of the State Department of Education for high schools with a poverty level of at least 40 percent for a [driver’s ed] grant they can apply for.

It could go without saying your backstory is different than most in the General Assembly.
I do see through a different lens. When I looked at [ex-offender] voting rights, and I’m a data person, I looked at two ZIP codes when we were debating the issue where only 10 people were on parole or probation. In the ZIP code I represent, there are 937. When you look at that correlation or that disparity from one ZIP code to another—it makes a difference in how you view other pressing issues—food security, housing, vacancies. Also, having bookstores and things of that nature because the buying power isn’t in that neighborhood.

Did you ever feel hesitant about sharing your story?
So, not all my colleagues know my background. When we were debating juvenile justice, one colleague said to me young people in the juvenile system didn’t grow up like me or don’t get see the world the way my son does. I wanted to say I’m probably the most qualified person to be in this conversation, but people who’ve only seen me in the last 10-15 years assume that to get to this position, you had to go a certain direction or go a certain pathway.

But I need to have transparent conversations with young people…I was at Jessup [Correctional Institution] and Cheltenham [Youth Detention Center] recently. Adults also need understanding and to feel like they have a chance. I have to let people know I’ve been at the bottom, too.

“Both of my parents were eclectic music lovers, but my father really loved all kinds of music, from boleros to all the famous salseros—Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, El Gran Combo—to Michael Jackson, Rick Astley, and Hall and Oates,” says Christina Delgado, the founder of Tola’s Room, the northeastern Baltimore rowhouse museum dedicated to her Puerto Rican heritage.

“My dad was born in New York in 1954 to Puerto Rican-native parents and he came of age in the 1970s when salsa became a thing. Music has always been a connective thing in our family and to our heritage, like food, like language,” she continues. “When he died, he had all this stuff, including his vinyl records, which meant so much to him and so to me, too. But dealing with the trauma, I paid for an additional year of storage until I could handle going through it.”

In the years following her father’s 2013 death, Delgado began creating Tola’s Room as an art therapy project out of her Belair-Edison home. Named for her now-14-year-old daughter, the three-story space pays homage to their shared Puerto Rican and Nuyorican roots through family photographs and artifacts—including her father’s record collection—plus exhibitions, workshops, and collaborations that foster connection and understanding of the Puerto Rican diaspora.

An educator and community organizer by profession, Delgado has curated parties like a Sangria Sunday brunch, a La Bodega vendor event, a Noche Buena Night Market, a summer En Verano party, and a Navidad Borikén holiday celebration—all tied to personally or traditionally significant dates. (Borikén is the indigenous Taino name for Puerto Rico.)

A January exhibition timed to close out the Christmas season and Día de los Reyes (Three Kings Day), was scheduled to feature art and film installations, and musical performances. Booked for February is a Bad Bunny Super Bowl half-time party at Baltimore Soundstage.

The NFL’s selection of the Puerto Rican superstar, an outspoken critic of Donald Trump’s ICE policies, irritated the president, but Delgado notes Bad Bunny is a cultural icon—and a resource.

“He educates people, including myself, about the island’s musical legacy and history, and through his music keeps it alive.”

On most Sundays, the museum is open for guided tours, with Delgado highlighting the history and untold stories of Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Her ongoing Bmore Boricuas Project gathers local stories and documents Baltimore’s often-overlooked Puerto Rican community, which dates to the 1800s.

Delgado herself arrived here after growing up in New York, attending Virginia Commonwealth University, and then briefly living in D.C. With its tight-knit, distinct neighborhoods, Baltimore reminded her more of her New York upbringing than Washington.

On the museum’s second floor, through newspapers and other accounts, Delgado highlights some of the first examples of Puerto Rican migration to Baltimore, including an influx of medical students to the city and the creation of a Latino club at the University of Maryland and then-Baltimore Medical College in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries.

Also chronicled, the signing of Puerto Rican baseball players by the Baltimore Elite Giants—the city’s Negro League team—and the story of longtime Puerto Rican activist Jose Ruiz. Former Mayor William Donald Schaefer appointed Ruiz the city’s first Hispanic liaison in 1979, a decade that witnessed an influx of Latino migrants into southeast Baltimore that continues to this day.

The museum highlights, too, the 2020 election of the city’s first council person of Latin descent, Puerto Rican native Odette Ramos, coincidentally two years after Tola’s Room opened. In recent years, several Puerto Rican eateries have opened as well—The Empanada Lady downtown, Owls Corner Café in Mount Vernon, the food truck Lote 787 in Old Goucher, and Bodega & Vino in Locust Point.

The nod to her daughter in naming the museum is more than a mere sweet gesture for Delgado. Her beloved father, Edwin, who suffered from alcohol abuse, spent his career as a computer programmer for the City of New York after a proud stint in the U.S. Army. (Her mother also served and is pictured in uniform in the museum.) He died unexpectedly in Baltimore, in front of Delgado, after coming to town for his granddaughter’s first birthday.

She says the work she’s done in developing the museum has helped her to get past that grief. Asking her mother, aunts, cousins, and friends about her father, and about their own lives and Puerto Rican heritage, has built a sustaining community.

“We have similar stories as the diaspora of the archipelago,” she says. “I’m learning things in this journey, in this shared history, and in other narratives, that enable me to understand my dad better.

“I came to see it like he chose to die with me,” she continues, pausing to wipe away a tear in her living room near some photographs of her and her father. “That weighs on me, in a loving way, but it also weighs in a heavy way.”

“When John asked me to play Jesus, I was taking so much acid at the time, I thought I was Jesus,” George Figgs, with a mischievous grin, tells the audience after a recent Maryland Film Festival showing of Multiple Maniacs, John Waters’ first talking feature.

Screened in its original 16mm format, the 1970 black comedy holds up surprisingly well. An irreverent, profane commentary on the hippies vs. straights battles of its day—think Woke Left vs. MAGA—the guerrilla film satirizes middlebrow suburbia, sanctimonious politics, and, especially, the sexual mores of the Catholic Church. (“I thank God I was raised Catholic,” Waters once said, “so sex will always be dirty.”)

Figgs, now 78 and pictured above at Beyond Video, actually attended seminary for a year before finding his calling as a Waters’ ensemble Dreamlander.

“Multiple Maniacs is my favorite of John’s films and not because I’m Jesus,” continues Figgs, who acted in 10 of Waters’ movies. “It’s because I participated [while dying on the cross] in one of high-water marks of blasphemy in cinema history.” For those who have not had the pleasure, that “high-water mark” would be Mink Stole’s notorious “rosary job” on Divine in a church pew.

Figgs first met Waters and the other future Dreamlanders, including Susan Lowe and Mary Vivian Pierce—also on hand after the Maniacs screening—at Martick’s restaurant and downtown art-house theaters. They soon shifted to Pete’s Bar in Fells Point, described as “a wino bar” by Waters, with several Dreamlanders moving into a co-op known as the Hollywood Bakery next door.

For his part, Figgs maintained a 20-year, psychedelic folk career amid his Dreamlander roles, cutting a record and touring with T-Bone Walker. He performed at venues like Greenwich Village’s Cafe Wha? while residing at the artist-haven Hotel Albert—where The Mamas & the Papas penned “California Dreamin’.” In fact, we have Figgs to thank for singing and playing “The Streets of Baltimore”—possibly the best song ever about the city—to Gram Parsons, who helped make it famous.

Movies, however, remained Figgs’ first love, if not as an actor, as a curator. In the 1980s, he became a projectionist, handling the rushes for several Hollywood films shot here (see our January cover story, on newsstands now). In 1991, he returned to Fells Point and opened the beloved Orpheum Cinema on the second floor of a converted stable, screening an eclectic mix of noir, B-films, and foreign, cult, and underground classics. For a period, he drove a cab to support the theater, a 10-year mission he calls “the best thing I did in my life.”

To this day, he still helps curate a film series at Motor House. La Strada, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, El Topo, The King of Marvin Gardens, Nostalgia, and The Wizard of Oz, which he first saw in its Technicolor re-release as a kid in Hampden, are on his all-time personal best list.

“My backstory is my mother had a nervous breakdown, and the babysitter next door took me to the movies and left me there,” explains Figgs of his lifelong obsession with film.

“I was in the movies daily at the tender age of 6. It was ‘Lorenzian imprinting,’” he says, referencing scientist Konrad Lorenz’s discovery that geese would bond with and follow the first thing they saw after hatching, often him. “It became my mother. At The Hampden and The Ideal in the ’50s, I saw all the westerns, all the gangster pictures, all the film noirs. It was the regular fare for neighborhood theaters then.

“For that feeling of being enveloped, that transcendent experience, you have to be in a theater,” Figgs says. “It has to be bigger than you, and you have to share that experience with other people.”

First Day Hikes began on a hunch by a Massachusetts park ranger back in 1992 that a New Year’s Day renewal stroll might just draw a few visitors to his park in the winter. Some 380 people showed up at Blue Hills State Reservation for the inaugural First Day Hikes—an annual walk in the woods now held in all 50 states.

The First Day Hikes movement reached Maryland on New Year’s Day 2012, with 560 people participating at 17 state parks that winter. It proved to be just the beginning.

Today, with New Year’s Day events at more than 30 state parks, Maryland’s First Day Hikes—both ranger-led and self-guided—attract almost 5,000 people each year.

Such is their popularity that First Day Hikes aren’t limited to hikes anymore. In 2023, Rosaryville State Park in Prince George’s County hosted a ranger-guided, three-mile BYOH (Bring Your Own Horse) trail ride.

There’s also more to First Day Hikes than a little exercise and communion with nature—local history-focused walks are offered, as well. Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park, one of the smallest parks in the state system, has in the past partnered with Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on a history hike. Cunningham Falls State Park has offered a self-guided hike to the Catoctin Furnace and the African-American cemetery there, the final resting place of many of the former enslaved and free Black furnace workers between the 1770s and 1840s.

Another hike, at Gathland State Park, has traversed the Appalachian Trail from Crampton’s Gap to Brownsville Pass, a location that played a major role in the 1862 Civil War Battle of South Mountain.

The coffee, hot cocoa, s’mores, and post-hike campfires offered at some of the venues organized by local volunteers—the various park “friends” groups—are an attraction all their own. Specific kid- and dog-friendly hiking options have been added at many state parks, too.

In other words, whether it’s a trek to see the wild horses on the beach at Assateague or a sunset hike at Washington Monument State Park in Washington County, there is something for everyone, including those with strollers or accessibility concerns.

Close to home, check out North Point State Park, which typically offers two First Day Hikes; Gunpowder Falls State Park and Patapsco Valley State Park, which host several events; and the Soldiers Delight Natural Environmental Area in Owings Mills.

But don’t be afraid to venture farther afield. Elk Neck State Park in North East offers spectacular views of the upper Chesapeake Bay and winter wildlife, including songbirds, hawks, and geese. Though perhaps not quite as early as January 1, when it really gets cold in the region, enormous blocks of ice form in the Bay beneath Elk Neck lighthouse. Similarly, the massive icicles that dangle alongside the tumbling water at Cunningham Falls and Swallow Falls state parks are worth a winter’s drive.

“One of the great things about the First Day Hikes is that we get new visitors, old visitors, and everything in between,” says Ranger Melissa Boyle Acuti, chief of interpretation for the Maryland Park Service, who happily received snowshoes as a gift one year to enable her winter hikes during visits to Western Maryland’s state parks. “We get people who say, ‘I just heard about it this year,’ and then with others it’s, ‘We do this hike every year.’ But we also get people that say, ‘I try to find a new one to hike every year.’”

Check the Maryland Department of Natural Resources website for the complete list of this year’s Last Day and First Day Hikes, but here are a few nearby highlights.

North Point State Park
What better way to greet the first sunrise of the year than with a walk past North Point’s ancient Black Marsh and views of the Chesapeake Bay? This flat 2.5-mile trail follows an old trolley line through the woods and past the remnants of a small power station, but the trail can also get wet—so appropriate hiking shoes or boots are recommended.  North Point offers excellent opportunities for bird-watching and leashed pets are welcome, too. Parking Lot A. 8400 North Point Rd., Edgemere. 11 a.m. $3-5 park admission. 

Patapsco Valley State Park: Avalon Area Adaptive Hike
If you sleep in New Year’s Day, don’t worry. Embark on this two-mile trek that steps off at 1 p.m. Hikers of all skillsets (including little ones in strollers and leashed furry friends) are invited to explore the beauty of the River Road Trail in the Orange Grove Area. Shelter 106. 5120 South St., Halethorpe. 1 p.m. 

Sandy Point State Park
Join rangers for a two-mile loop along the Sandy Point’s Chesapeake Bay coastline and through the park’s Blue Crab trail. This hike is mostly flat and includes sidewalks, gravel roads, and dirt paths. Participants are encouraged to wear weather-appropriate footwear and clothing and to bring water. Leashed dogs are welcome, but the trail is not recommended for mobility chairs or strollers. 1100 E. College Pkwy., Annapolis. 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. $3 park admission. 

Fair Hill Natural Resources Management Area
One of the more vigorous First Day Hikes (five miles with the option to take a three-mile shortcut), this ranger-led walk will take hikers along Fair Hill’s historic green trail and part of the blue trail, traversing hayfields and upland and bottomland hardwood forests along Christiana Creek. There are some steeper sections, so expect a roughly two-and-a-half-hour trek on this healthy hike. Upper Covered Bridge Lot, Black Bridge Road. 300 Tawes Drive, Elkton. 10 a.m. 

Gunpowder Falls State Park: Torrey C. Brown Rail Trail
The NCR-Hereford Volunteer Association will lead a guided, 15.5-mile round trip bicycle ride from Monkton along the historic route of the Northern Central Railway. Take in views of the Little Falls, Beetree Run, and local geological formations as you pedal the well-maintained trail’s gentle grade. Bring your own bike, helmet, water, and snacks. 1820 Monkton Rd, Monkton. 1:30 p.m. 

Baltimore-based journalist Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian, has spent the past decade covering national politics. Just 32 years old, his work has always transcended traditional political journalism, combining history, theory, reporting, and analysis to unpack the issues of the day.

His first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, published by Penguin Random House, makes a bold assertion. On the cusp of the country’s 250th anniversary, Nwanevu examines and reframes the institutions and practices that, in theory, are upholding American democracy, and argues that the U.S. Constitution is not the solution to our dysfunction, but its cause.

He notes that, at the time of its drafting, critics of the Constitution argued the Founders had created a president akin to an elected king. And since then, the president’s powers have only increased—right up to the exponential expansion undertaken by the current occupant of the White House.

Here, Nwanevu sits down with us to explore the book’s research and analysis.

You highlight that Thomas Jefferson himself believed that even the best constitution was likely only good for about 20 years. Essentially, it was up to each generation or two to reform their government as new challenges and better ideas emerged.
So, I think there’s something odd about our relationship with the founders in this respect, people like Jefferson. We revere their wisdom and insight, they’re very intelligent people, but they also made mistakes in creating the institutions that they did. They had very different ideas, of course, about who belongs to this country and who deserves political rights than we do. To change the system that they set up, that’s our right, it’s our prerogative.

Certainly, we know more about how to govern than they did. They were just starting out the government in this country. We’ve now had over two centuries of experience. We’ve also seen democratic governments around the world pop up that we can draw from. We have political science as a discipline that was not around in 1787 in any kind of serious form.

Most are familiar with our antidemocratic issues—the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the disproportionate representation in the U.S. Senate, the lifetime-termed Supreme Court, etc. When did you conclude these aren’t bugs, but features of the Constitution?
I remember the 2000 election, Bush winning despite losing the popular vote, and I sort of absorbed this vicarious anger and retained a basic sense of unfairness. Then, that’s how Trump wins in 2016 and it many ways it became more difficult to ignore.

He stayed in office despite U.S. senators representing the majority of the American population voting to remove him from office at both impeachment trials. He was able to build the conservative majority on the court that’s going to be in place for perhaps many, many years…If you can win power despite most Americans not supporting your candidates or your agenda, I think that creates an incentive to move further to the political extremes.

You point to three pillars of a functioning democracy—political equality, responsiveness, and majority rule—all places where we are currently failing. You also touch on the amount of money in politics and the growing wealth inequality gap—not as separate concerns, but issues that compound this dysfunction.
That’s right. I mean, there are certain parts of the country, because of the Electoral College, that matter more in federal politics than others. How often do presidential candidates come to Baltimore or Maryland? Look at how many parts of this country are ignored or marginalized or abused, as we see in Los Angeles, as we see in Chicago [with ICE raids and sending in of National Guard units from other states]. That’s all a function of the fact that some places, and their voters, matter much more than others. If we care about democracy, that’s not tenable.

I think people who read this book will see our government in a different light and maybe embrace the idea that an effective democracy doesn’t end division. It provides an equitable means of resolving conflict.
America is a large and diverse country, and this naturally produces a lot of differences. This is why it is necessary to have to a good political system. People think the political environment is difficult now; I promise you, it was not better in 1925 or 1825. We had race riots and political violence that far outstrip what we’re facing now. The Ku Klux Klan was lynching people. Union members were getting shot. We have had a chaotic political history.

Do you have a favorite quote from a Founding Father?
Thomas Paine certainly had a way of cutting through the noise. My favorite from Thomas Paine is the one that I end the book with. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Chris Singleton’s career in radio got its accidental start in 1983, during his junior year at Kent County High School. He was in class when the school’s radio station, on air at the time, began having issues with the intercom system between its studios and put out an SOS, asking if anyone in the vo-tech electronics program could come to the rescue.

“Today, they call it the ‘Digital Electronics,’ but then they referred to it as Radio and TV Repair. You graduate, and you’re expected to work in a TV repair shop, back when they had those things,” recalls Singleton, Kent County High class of ’84, with a smile, sitting in WKHS’s main studio.

“A component in the power supply, a thing called a diode, which converts AC to DC voltage, went bad. I still remember. And I robbed one out of a television set, because we had tons of TV sets. I said, ‘I think this will work,’ and I popped it in and sure enough, it came right on. Once I fixed the intercom, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a real radio station.’”

Singleton, pictured above with students Lynden Saunders and Adrean Johnson, was, is, right. WKHS, 90.5 on your FM dial, is not just some small, in-house-only school station. Founded in 1974—Elton John’s “Rocket Man” was the first song they ever played—it remains one of the most powerful high school stations in the country and the only high school station in the state.

For those unfamiliar, its 17,500-watt signal stretches from the Eastern Shore to Southern Maryland to Baltimore and Wilmington. For his part, Singleton did not take a job at a radio and TV repair shop after graduation, instead earning a degree in Electronics Engineering Technology from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

In the middle of a successful career, mostly in Washington, D.C. commercial radio, he took on the duties of station engineer three decades ago, a part-time role. He became WKHS’s full-time station manager and student instructor in 2008.

The facilities, which include a greeting area and multiple production rooms, are almost entirely supported by donations, local business sponsorships, and spring and fall fundraising drives. A secondary studio, it’s hoped, will soon start hosting musicians and bands—think NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts or World Café out of Philadelphia’s WXPN, whose 24-hour programming WKHS sometimes shares to fill out its eclectic mix of student-read news, student-led music hours, and evening DJ shows, hosted by volunteer adults in the community.

“Oh my God, I loved being a DJ when I was a student,” says alum Sam Sessa, the director of events and community engagement for WTMD and WYPR, and former host of “Baltimore Hit Parade.” “I had the cringiest host name. I was ‘DJ Sam the Man, on the air on WKHS.’ I was so full of myself. My intro song was Eminem’s ‘My Name Is.’”

Cringy alias or not, the experience got Sessa his first professional gig and changed his career when WTMD called and asked the former Baltimore Sun music and features reporter if he’d be interested in hosting a show.

Of course, he also still tunes in to his alma mater’s signal. “Have you listened when the kids are reading the news?” he asks. “It’s really hard to read the news out loud, and getting that experience is something you keep your whole life, but it’s tough, man. It’s really tough. They’re so endearing. You’re listening to them read the latest sports and news and you’re rooting for them.”

Singleton notes the station receives more emails and phone calls from the Baltimore area, Harford County, and Western Shore than from the Eastern Shore because of the higher population density on this side of the Bay. But he adds WKHS is more tight-knit family than corporate media entity. (Sometimes even a literal family; Sessa’s mother preceded him as a WKHS DJ and Singleton’s son currently has a show.)

The broader station community includes not just past and present students, but the local adult DJs and longtime listeners, most of whom reside relatively close to its powerful signal.

“One listener in Caroline County, which is south of us, not too far down the road, called in about a year ago and said, ‘I want a portion of my estate in my will to go toward the station because that’s how committed I am to it,’” Singleton shares, adding the man has been tuning in since WKHS’s infancy. “He said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a terminal disease or anything. It may not happen right away, but I’m meeting with my lawyer to do this, and I’d like to know, are there any legal issues on your end to consider?’

“We talked through that, and I thought it was just a wonderful gesture. And, I’m genuinely happy to report, he still calls in from time to time with song requests.”

Born in part from the climate-change protests at museums here and abroad, the Baltimore Museum of Art launched an ambitious collection of environmentally driven initiatives in 2024. Taking its title, Turn Again to the Earth, from the writing of environmental activist Rachel Carson, the ongoing series finds it themes in “the realities and repercussions of climate change [that] have become part of our daily discourse and experiences,” as BMA director Asma Naeem explained in announcing the effort.

Among the highlights to date was The New York Times-acclaimed Black Earth Rising exhibition, guest curated by London-born writer Ekow Eshun, which explored the relationship between race, colonialism, and the climate crisis.

Opening recently and running through early 2026 are three new exhibitions that are a part of the Turn Again to the Earth series— “Deconstructing Nature: Environmental Transformation in the Lucas Collection,” “Engaging the Elements: Poetry in Nature,” and “The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea.”

As Carson writes in her titular work: “In these troubled times it is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.”

We recently caught up with BMA chief curator Kevin Tervala to explore the series’ highlights and its overall mission.

One thing I’ve come to appreciate over the past year is the challenging nature of these exhibitions—and the realization that art can be beautiful, powerful, and disconcerting at the same time.
There is an experience [of art] that is just beauty. There is so much depth in Matisse when we look for it, but his work is also pleasing to the eye. Beautiful colors. A great sense of composition. You may find his work rich and beautiful and stunning, but his paintings are not meant to make you a bit “scared,” which is what [you’re talking about].

There is this concept art historians talk about regarding landscape and nature representations called “the sublime,” which is that feeling you get when you stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and it’s beautiful, it’s awe-inspiring, and it’s a little terrifying.

That’s a perfect description of the wheatfield burn photograph (above) by Larry Schwarm in the “Engaging the Elements: Poetry in Nature” exhibition.
I think that photo is so alluring precisely because it hits that right note of beauty and terror at the same time.

Somewhat similarly, I like Richard Misrach’s stunning, all-blue image of California’s strange Salton Sea, which went from resort area to health hazard to ghost town. What is one of your highlights?
I love the pairing of contemporary artist Stacy Lynn Waddell, whose work we acquired for the collection, and an artist’s work who inspired her, Winslow Homer. They’re both depicting, separated by a century, the after-effect of a hurricane. This beautiful watercolor from Homer is showing the brilliance you get after a storm goes through, the sun is shining. But there’s destruction. She’s thinking about the perspective of enslaved folks living in the Caribbean during this time, the impact of the hurricane [on their lives], and the transformation of the land. They’re thinking about the same things and depicting them in very different ways.

On a different note, the renderings of the Seine River and River Thames at the start of 19th-century industrialization in the accompanying “Deconstructing Nature” show are timely. Those long-polluted waterways are now being reclaimed and made possible for swimming.
In every chart about pollution or the Industrial Revolution, you have a line on a graph that’s hovering toward the bottom and then, at the late part of the 19th century, spikes up. So do urban populations. It’s the rise of cities. It’s a pivotal moment in European history, in world history, and artists are capturing that.

Let’s discuss the third, new show, “The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea.” It’s a centuries-spanning exhibition of ceramics, textiles, wood-cuts, watercolors—even large-scale photographs—but everything seems to communicate an intrinsically human, one might say spiritual, connection to the earth.
The intro text for the exhibition starts, if I’m remembering correctly, with a quote from a 4th-century landscape painter from China who is saying, to understand and to depict the natural world, you must fuse your mind into it. You must become one with the landscape you’re representing.

It’s what we wanted to do with this exhibition. We wanted to showcase other alternatives, ways of being [in the world]. The society we live in right now, it doesn’t have to be the world we live in, in the future. You can imagine new possibilities or you can look elsewhere and see how other places and other people have done it.

The Nov. 1, 1965 issue of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, an influential Washington newsletter of the period, carried a story headlined, “A Priest Tells How Our Bombers Razed His Church and Killed His People.”

From a Saigon hospital bed, a French priest recounted U.S. planes destroying his Vietnam village in devastating detail. Fleeing with surviving women and children, Father Currien “buried as best I could the bodies of my faithful…seven of them completely torn to bits. I had to abandon some wounded and dying.”

Sitting in their Govans kitchen the next day, Norman Morrison and his wife, Anne, read the interview with the priest. Quakers troubled by the war’s atrocities, both were already active in the nascent anti-war movement, demonstrating, writing letters, and refusing to pay federal taxes.

Norman, a former seminarian with a deep social conscience, hadn’t been feeling well that morning as it was. He had slept in before informing the Stony Run Friends Meeting where he served as executive secretary that he wouldn’t be in that day. Instead, he spent the hours before lunch with Anne preparing notes for a New Testament class he was to present the following week.

“What can we do that we haven’t done,” he asked his wife over French onion soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

The conversation turned to more pleasant topics, including plans for Christmas. Then, out of the blue, Anne Morrison Welsh would recall in her memoir, Held in the Light: Norman Morrison’s Sacrifice for Peace and His Family’s Journey of Healing, he asked what she’d do if anything happened to him.

That afternoon, she picked up the couple’s two oldest children at school. When she left, her husband’s head was buried in his class notes while their 11-month-old, Emily, napped. By the time she had returned home and began making dinner, Norman was dead.

The 31-year-old father of three had driven to The Pentagon, poured kerosene over himself, and lit himself on fire—beneath Secretary of Defense John McNamara’s window, it turned out. Only at the last minute, according to eyewitnesses, had her husband safely set his baby daughter aside.

Accompanied by two friends, Anne drove to the Fort Myer clinic that served The Pentagon. She gathered the unharmed Emily (Norman had left extra bottles, diapers, and a blanket in the car he borrowed). She declined speak to the press, but released a statement expressing her husband’s concern over the suffering caused by the war and that his action was a protest against U.S. involvement.

Inside Norman’s clothing, investigators discovered an invitation to a Quaker meeting with “How Can We Prevent World War III” handwritten on the back and a second note to himself: “As we go stronger materially, we get weaker morally. Few would disagree.”

Norman’s self-immolation echoed those of Buddhist monks in Vietnam and 82-year-old peace activist Alice Herz’s similar sacrifice in Detroit nine months earlier.

The startling action by someone who seemed like an average American made international news and shook the consciousness of the country. It also vexed those who knew him, caused others to question its morality and efficacy—and shattered his family.

The day after her husband died, Anne received a letter which he had mailed en route to D.C.

Dearest Anne, please don’t condemn me…I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown, as clearly as I was shown that Friday night in August 1955, that you would be my wife…

The letter did not help Anne, who described a curtain of grief descending around her. Politically, she would learn many years later, the protest had made a profound impact on at least one person at The Pentagon.

“I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even my family. I knew [they] shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war,” McNamara admitted in his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He also acknowledged his doubts about the war began that same month.

Healing for Anne and their daughters (their son died of cancer at 16) did not come until 1999, when they accepted an invitation to Vietnam. The unimaginable protest had been a beacon of hope for the North Vietnamese, who issued a stamp and named a street in her husband’s honor after his sacrifice. Poets penned works in commemoration and schoolchildren learned his name, which remained alive in Vietnamese hearts decades after his passing.

“I was in my bunker in the jungle that night when news of Morrison’s death in America came over Liberation Radio,” a former North Vietnamese soldier turned Hanoi University linguistics professor told Anne, after quietly approaching her during her visit. “I just sat there and cried. That someone in America cared enough about us that he would give up his life…”

“We’re joined at the hip at this point,” says John Heyn, referring to Jeff Krulik, co-director of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the definitive document of ’80s teen metal culture—big hair, spandex, mullets, V-8 engines, cheap beer, and homegrown weed.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary next year and recently screened as part of the Motor House’s “Movie Monday” programming, Heavy Metal Parking Lot’s legion of admirers have included Nirvana, Cameron Crowe, and Sofia Coppola. After receiving an early copy of the videotape, John Waters sent Heyn and Krulik a postcard with a cheeky compliment, writing, “Thanks for letting me see it. It gave me the creeps.”

For anyone unfamiliar with the cult classic, the entire 16-minute doc was shot in the parking lot, as the title suggests, of the old Capital Centre in Landover before a Judas Priest concert in 1986.

Part cinema vérité, part guerrilla filmmaking, the origin story goes like this: The two aspiring directors had been spitballing short documentary ideas around subcultures for about a year when Heyn pitched shooting the local metal fandom.

“We were into punk and new wave, and 10 years older than most of the people who ended up in the film, but I’d been to Hammerjacks once or twice and at least knew something about the scene,” says Heyn, a Pikesville native, name-checking Baltimore’s legendary hard rock venue.  “I heard the show announced on the radio and circled the date.”

Krulik, who worked at a cable-access station in Bowie, brought the equipment. The result was a raw, pre-smartphone moment in time capturing wasted fans expressing their enthusiasm for sex, drugs, domestic beer, and heavy metal.

The film’s “characters,” an apt description of the tailgating ensemble cast, included a young lady yelling “Party!” who became known as “Glen Burnie Girl”; the “DC 101 guy,” Graham “Like a Gram of Dope” Owens; and the black-and-white-Spandex-clad “Zebraman,” whose rant against punk, Madonna, and pop became something of a metal manifesto.

What else Heavy Metal Parking Lot was, or is, remains difficult to elucidate. It’s been referred to as both the “seminal anthropological study of beer-swilling teenage metalheads” and “one of the greatest rock documentaries ever,” but it was edited from only two hours of shooting.

Basically, Heyn and Krulik lugged their camera around the Cap Centre parking lot until the doors opened, and recorded whatever looked interesting and whomever engaged them. They did not go to the show. Nor did they prepare any type of questions or script, which turned out to be unnecessary. Their subjects saw the big camera and naturally responded with, disconcerting at times, revelry.

The film eventually found cult fame after a worn copy unexpectedly landed in a bin at the influential L.A. video store, Mondo A-Go-Go. From there, old-school word-of-mouth made it go viral.

Heyn and Krulik went on to careers in the audio-visual world and continued to make docs—including Neil Diamond Parking Lot in 1998. After HMPL was posted to YouTube, they also got to know their “stars” through social media and anniversary events, typically organized by DJs and music festivals. That proved rewarding—and a relief—in that the kids for the most part had turned out just fine, becoming office managers, contractors, parents, etc. and in one case, a Hasidic luthier.

“It’s been a roller-coaster ride,” Krulik says. And still, they don’t want to get off. The two men hold out hope Heavy Metal Parking Lot’s legacy will not just continue, but expand into new arenas.

“It could be a Broadway musical,” Heyn says. “We got a script together. Why not?”

“We had a hammerhead shark on the rod and we’re fighting it, and it’s toward the end of the day and I’m thinking once we get him in, we’re going home,” recalls Capt. Mark Sampson, who has run a charter fishing service out of Ocean City for four decades, of a particularly memorable 2020 boat trip. “And then I look across water on the other side of the boat, and I see this dark shadow and it’s trucking. I said, ‘Hey guys, I think we got a mako coming in.’ It kept coming and coming and I was like, ‘Man, it looks really big.’ Suddenly, I realize it’s no mako. It is a huge shark.”

A shark so big, in fact, that Sampson and the crew scurried to pull in the boat’s fishing lines and chum—the tuna carcasses hanging over the side.

“It’s a great white and we don’t want to accidentally hook it. We’d never get it onboard.”

Naturally, just as the tuna is getting hoisted from the water, the great white—at 15 feet, still one of two biggest Sampson has seen in his nearly half-century career—opened its massive jaws and attempted to take a chomp. The great white’s teeth grazed the tuna, and in the iPhone video that later went viral, it also appeared interested in taking a chunk out of the vessel.

“It did give us this wonderful photo op,” Sampson continues with a chuckle. “Whites can get curious around a boat, more than other sharks, and it circled us a few times. In the video, you can hear one of our crew saying, ‘Don’t take a bite out of the boat. Don’t take a bite out of the boat.’ It swam so close to the bow, it allowed us to reach over and stick it with a tag.”

A U.S. Coast Guard licensed captain and fishing guide since 1986, Sampson is also an instructor, marine animal rescue volunteer, outdoors writer, author (Modern Sharking), and longtime participant in NOAA’s Cooperative Shark Tagging Program, which utilizes citizen scientists to track the highly migratory and, in some cases, endangered species.

For several years, he also worked with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources on a hook study—with the idea, ultimately successful, of identifying safer hooks for catching and releasing sharks.

Growing up in Northern Virginia, Sampson caught the fishing bug during summers at his parents’ place in Ocean City and began working at local marinas in high school. Not surprisingly, he chose to attend nearby Salisbury University.

By coincidence, he was working on a charter boat between his sophomore and junior years at Salisbury when a fellow crew member told him about a new, bestselling novel called Jaws, which Sampson, already fascinated by the large sea creatures, immediately bought and devoured.

The next year—exactly 50 summers ago—he saw the blockbuster movie when it hit O.C.’s big screens.

“I still remember the eerie, weird feeling when I walked out on the dock that night afterwards,” he says while bringing back a recent Ocean City charter outing on his boat, Fish Finder. “Not fear exactly, but the water suddenly seemed much more mysterious and sinister.”

While the book and movie launched the careers of Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg, it also launched a national shark obsession and sport fishing frenzy, which led to the decimation of shark populations. Both the author and director have since expressed regret about their misleading portrayals of sharks—they don’t target human beings, for example.

Benchley eventually became involved in shark conservation efforts,
telling the Los Angeles Times, “Knowing what I know now, I could never write that book today.”

Sampson also admits regrets about his participation in the trophy hunting culture of the ’70s and early ’80s. He notes sharks have existed for 400 million years, surviving mass extinctions, and we are their biggest threat—not the other way around. And they remain overfished
for their dorsal fins. (Shark fin soup is a traditional Chinese delicacy.)

Like Bentley, his focus in recent decades has been on conservation and sustainable fishing, including his advocacy of catch-and-release best practices.

Like most fishing tales, many of Sampson’s memorable experiences revolve around the ones that got away. As if it happened yesterday, he recalls fishing out from Ocean City in the 1980s with a friend, Dick Arnold, who’d hooked what they estimated was a 350-pound mako shark on a light 16-pound test line.

At the time, it would’ve been a world record. Arnold fought the fish for 11 hours—no one else could touch the rod—as Sampson manuevered the boat, chasing after the elusive mako. Then the line finally broke.

“People always ask what was the longest you ever fought a fish and that was it,” Sampson says. “And I remember when the line broke. Of course, I thought Dick was going be disappointed, cussing and swearing, and blaming this or that, and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘I’m just glad it’s over.’”

“Today, we get a chance to be absolutely still for a half-hour,” meditation leader Maria Broom says softly as she purifies the ritual homa fire offerings—dried cow dung, ghee, herbs—sending up gentle gray smoke from a copper vessel. “We’re going to go inside ourselves.”

As an older man in dreadlocks plays a flute, Broom repeats a simple mantra. Eventually, she asks the two dozen or so people seated on yoga mats inside a circle of stones at Leakin Park to think of one thing that has been bothering them lately.

“Now, as you take a deep breath in, think about that one thing that’s been on your mind,” she says, “and when you slowly exhale, let it leave your body with your breath.”

Closer to Leakin Park’s entrance, parents and kids wait their turn for a ride on miniature replica trains. A decades long tradition, it’s the biggest attraction at the park’s Second Sunday celebrations. There are also activities sponsored by the Natural History Society of Maryland and the Carrie Murray Nature Center here. But the vibe is quieter down the hill, beneath the old-growth trees.

After the 30-minute meditation session ends, most people don’t seem ready to leave, instead chatting with each other or approaching Broom, a Baltimore actress best known for her role as Marla Daniels, the ambitious, political spouse of a high-ranking police department official in The Wire.

Later, Broom sighs when asked about those who only know Leakin Park through its Wire or Serial podcast reputation—as a place where bodies get dumped. Would they be surprised if they visited in person on this sunny afternoon?

“Oh, that’s the past,” she responds with a smile. “Not on anyone’s mind today.”

Often misrepresented and chronically underfunded, the Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park area, which stretches along the West Baltimore city line, is the second-largest urban woodland park in the country. At the moment, there is a study underway to designate the more than 1,200 contiguous acres a city-state “partnership park” to empower appropriate stewardship, ranger staffing, trail maintenance, and the like.

Legislation signed by Gov. Wes Moore created an advisory committee, which has until Dec. 1 to compile a report on the viability of adding the park to the state Department of Natural Resources umbrella. Currently, Baltimore City remains the only Maryland jurisdiction without a state park.

“It becomes a destination with proper oversight and development,” says Michael CrossBarnet, executive director of Friends of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park. “It’s touching Baltimore County. It’s within 20 minutes of where 1.5 million people live, and it could be an engine for growth in West Baltimore, the way Patterson Park has been for Southeast Baltimore.”

Historically, Leakin Park and Gwynns Falls—a 25-mile stream flowing from Reisterstown into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River—has been underappreciated even by many in the surrounding community. But certainly not all.

“I grew up nearby, in a multi-generational household, which means it was a bit crowded,” ElaSita Carpenter says with a laugh. “Some of my earliest memories are at the park with my late father, Antonio, one of the first naturalists at the City Department of Parks and Recreation. I used to run through the fields with my brother, up the big hill at Winans Meadow, and then back through the woods.”

Her father would later design and build a Hopi labyrinth at the park, while Carpenter (pictured right, with her mother, above) went on to earn a PhD at the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources. (Her dissertation focused on bat activity in Baltimore, and yes, there’s quite a bit of it—six different species in Leakin Park alone.)

Not only does the labyrinth remain in great shape, so does a nearby magnolia grove that Carpenter’s father, a former Friends board member, recalled to life.

“When my husband discovered the magnolias, about 10 years ago, that was it for me, because once they bloom, it’s magical,” says Brenda Pinckney-Carpenter, sitting near the labyrinth’s entrance following the meditation session. “He rescued them from these overgrown vines; they were petering out. The following spring, however, the buds popped. If we get a warm April now, they burst and it’s the flowers that come out first, before the leaves are on the trees. In a good year, you can see them from the road, and if you step off the road for a minute, you can smell them coming up from their tiny valley. It’s intoxicating.

“Now, when I see vines growing, I go snatch them up,” she continues. “I think, ‘No, we’re not having that. We’re preserving the magnolias.’ So, it’s my job now. I’m the protector of the trees.

The sheer expanse of Murray Kempton’s career is difficult to wrap one’s head around. A former H.L. Mencken copyboy and Johns Hopkins News-Letter editor-in-chief, he eventually plied his trade as a columnist in New York. Writing from the 1930s through the 1990s, Kempton chronicled Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Big Apple of Trump and Giuliani, and seemingly everything in-between.

And now his columns are assembled in a new anthology. In Going Around: Selected Journalism, Maryland native, writer, and historical researcher Andrew Holter brings forth an edited collection of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s work that feels as vital as the day it was written.

The epitome of a shoe-leather reporter, Kempton never learned to drive, typically moving from self-assignment to self-assignment by bicycle. But what he also brought was observation, perspective, moral clarity, and a literary eye to topics that remain as relevant as ever—subjects including white nationalism, police brutality, free speech, and the all-too-recognizable traits of authoritarians and their sycophantic enablers. Interested in some of the source material for recent films like The Trial of the Chicago 7, Oppenheimer, The Apprentice, and Conclave? It’s in this collection.

Below, we chat with Holter about Kempton’s upbringing in Baltimore, coverage of noteworthy Baltimoreans (from H.L Mencken to Tupac Shakur), and his unique writing style.

Granted, Kempton spent his career in New York. At the same time, he’s Baltimore born and raised—and completely forgotten here.
I found him while searching the 1930s and Nazi sympathy in Baltimore, particularly among German-American gentiles, for a City Paper piece in 2017. I’m a German American gentile from Maryland, so I was interested in that cultural history. I started looking into the atmosphere at Johns Hopkins in the ’30s, where Kempton went, and discovered his childhood home at Preston and Guilford was on my block. His family had been Confederate exiles, the people who were supposed to have run the Confederate States of America, and came to Baltimore after the Civil War. It was that cohort, that milieu in Mount Vernon, who were responsible for the Confederate statues that were taken down.

Kempton makes a name covering the Civil Rights movement. Coming from Baltimore provided a perspective his Northern colleagues didn’t possess, correct?
He [grew] up in this bizarre, hermetic world of privilege in Mount Vernon, but it was a privilege he called “shabby gentility.” Not true upper crust, but part of that society. His mother was a widow, and she was the only one of his school friends’ mothers who had a job. She worked at Hutzler’s. His family had a Black servant, and it was the Jim Crow era in Baltimore, but at Hopkins he fell in love with jazz and that world on Pennsylvania Avenue. He absorbs all of that and the quite radical ideas [percolating] on college campuses in the ’30s, and that gave him this different consciousness about social and racial inequality that he maintained for the rest of his life.

The breadth and depth of his experience, knowledge, and writing just staggers.
He’s the only writer who could write about H.L. Mencken and write about Tupac Shakur with first-hand insight, which is insane. He didn’t know Tupac personally, but he knew Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother [and former Black Panther], who lived on Greenmount Avenue briefly.

There’s an old line that I like about journalism being the first draft of history. This is the experience reading this book.
It feels like he knew everybody. One way to read this book is as an alternate history of the 20th century, through this particular path that Kempton took through it.

He obviously grew up reading Mencken, this towering newspaper columnist and national figure.
Mencken was the example of the shoe-leather reporter who becomes the brilliant cultural critic. He’s out reporting when he’s like 16, looking at murders every day, cutting his teeth, and then he also edited a literary magazine, publishing Theodore Dreiser, Zora Neale Hurston, and these people. That model, of the reporter who is also an intellectual, was really important. And then also Mencken’s sense of humor, which is totally there in Kempton.

There is also a dedication to craft.
I think he is one of the great unsung stylists. The most common criticism, from Tom Wolfe, was that he was “baroque.” His sentences could be challenging, but they were also entertaining. Personally, I would rather read something like that than something very plain, and it’s part of what makes Kempton worth reading. People don’t really write like he did anymore.

Kevin Marshall did not have a hobby before he stumbled upon the night herons nesting a block and a half from his rowhouse. Not really.

“Well, living in Fells Point, it’s easy to get into the ‘hobby’ of watching whatever sports are on TV while you’re drinking,” the 36-year old mortgage under-writer deadpans. “Growing up, I played soccer, so I watched that. I got into baseball once I moved here and started watching baseball. I was hitting the end of that cycle, kind of aging out, when I started getting into the birds, so it was a nice, smooth transition,” he adds, with a self-deprecating smile.

The colony of night herons at Thames Street Park, which Marshall first took interest in two years ago, are not the regular sort of birds you typically find in a dense urban environment. They’re squat and thick, more like the size and shape of an NFL football, but cloudy white, with a distinctive black crown and blue-black back feathers.

Which is not to say there isn’t a diversity of birds in the city. According to the Audubon Society, there are more than 40 resident species just in Patterson Park. A bald eagle was spotted there last year. Two peregrine falcons, “Boh” and “Barb,” famously nest atop the 100 Light Street skyscraper. Among other unique waterfowl, the odd great blue heron gets photographed from time to time at Stony Run and Herring Run Park.

Night herons settling in and starting families in a pocket park are different, however. They’re noisy and loud, for one thing, but certainly not songbirds. At first screech, the squawk of Thames Street night herons could be mistaken for that of a dog which has gotten its paw stepped on. The park is a popular destination for leashed local canines—as well as moms and dads and strollers and soccer balls. But it’s somehow worse than that.

“People will say they sound like monkeys or banshees,” Marshall says, looking up at the canopy of Japanese elms after one such outburst, not even requiring his binoculars to spot the culprit. Some 80 birds this spring—38 monogamous male and female pairs and two bachelors—have either rehabbed or built new nests.

“I’d describe it as ‘prehistoric,’” he says of their cacophony. Most of the chatter, Marshall notes, is between couples as they take turns gathering food, repairing the nest, incubating the eggs, etc.

Meanwhile, despite the dissonance—or maybe in a small way because of it—a flock of night heron admirers has sprouted around Thames Street. Marshall’s Instagram page (@thamesstreetnightherons), which he started last year, now has 700 followers.

Also, each spring, random Fells Point residents on their morning perambulations have rescued injured heron hatchlings who’ve fallen from their nest to the packed gravel path below—with the good Samaritans driving the fallen baby birds to Phoenix Wildlife Center for rehabilitation.

To that end, Marshall has been working with another night heron lover on a grant proposal to replace some of the park’s packed gravel that runs beneath many Thames Street trees with native plants—thereby softening the landing for plummeting hatchings.

This spring, he also co-hosted the first two Saturday morning tours of the Thames Street rookery with the Baltimore Bird Club and Phoenix Wildlife Center. Marshall, in fact, has become a citizen scientist himself. He has a notebook full of maps, data, sketches, and observations regarding the arrival of each pair of birds, the location of their nests, and the number of chicks.

Unfortunately, first-year mortality rate is high, 60-70 percent. However, if they survive past three years, adults can live for more than 20 years. Once the young ones learn to fly, the night herons generally decamp elsewhere around the southeast side of the harbor, typically in places with good trees and access to the water, like Canton’s Boston Street Pier Park.

On one recent, pleasant evening, Marshall showed another Thames Street night heron volunteer what he tracked and how, before he headed out of town for a week. (Full circle moment: Het met the volunteer after his birding talk at a Fells Point bar earlier this year.)

“I’m going on a trip this weekend to Wisconsin for a migration; I have a college friend who lives out there,” Marshall explains. “I’ve got a Canon R7 camera with a telephoto lens and all that, which I’m taking with me to hopefully get some sweet shots. Photography was something I was interested in, but never got into until the birds, but yeah, I fell in love with it, too, so…two hobbies now, I guess.”

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson has established herself as one of this city’s best writers. Crossing genres from narrative nonfiction to cultural criticism, short fiction, and memoir with signature intelligence and grace, her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post Magazine, The Southern Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Baltimore magazine, among other publications.

In 2018, Dickinson was a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and in 2023, she became
the first literary artist in Maryland to win the Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize from the Baker Artist Awards.

In Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free, Dickinson puts her well-honed research skills and elegant prose into service to bring the extraordinary, if somewhat forgotten, Frederick-born designer to life.

This is more than a book about fashion, however. Through McCardell’s rise in the male-dominated New York fashion industry, Dickinson explores the evolving role of women in the workplace—the changes and challenges of the midcentury period—and her groundbreaking designs, which would ultimately become known as “the American Look.”

My grandmothers were Claire McCardell’s age. They worked so-called “pink-collar” jobs—bank secretary and cafeteria manager. They were creative, outdoorsy, and raised families, too. I felt like McCardell was designing for women like them.
When we hear the term “sportswear” today, we have on our modern filter, which translates to “athleisure”—like yoga pants. But the experience of your grandmothers describes the need for clothes that you could move in, clothes that you could work in. “Sportswear” became this catch-all term for essentially what became American fashion, like what Claire invented. There were these very practical considerations that became so interesting to me because they were as much about women’s autonomy as they were about women’s fashion.

How do you describe her design breakthrough?
One, she democratized design. She brought a form-meets-function thoughtfulness to design for women who didn’t have access to it. Previously, only women who were wealthy could afford really well-made clothes, primarily French haute couture. What Claire also saw was a need for a different kind of design that forefronted a woman’s true body. So, there wasn’t all this boning and corsets and structure. And she wanted to put it in American department stores and make it affordable and make it basically “ready to wear.” That didn’t exist.

Right. There is that Calvin Klein quote toward the end of the book, “She really invented sportswear, which is this country’s major contribution to fashion.”
The one place where Claire McCardell has never been forgotten is in the fashion-design field. Much of what we wear today came from her brilliant brain. The mix-and-match separate. She didn’t invent the idea of a wrap dress, but she pioneered the modern version of the wrap dress. She gave us ballet flats. Her inventions remain integral to our lives, even if her name is no longer associated with them.

One thing I love that you highlight is how her work takes place alongside the Modernist movement.
I see her very much in conversation with other Modernists. Painters like Georgia O’Keefe, architects like Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright. Industrial design is being invented. The Abstract Expressionism movement will take root later in female artists like Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Krasner, the “Ninth Street” women. This was a magical moment in New York.

It’s funny, being a women’s fashion designer, how much she was influenced by growing up in rural Frederick and tree climbing, swimming, and skiing with her older brothers.
Claire McCardell was a rare designer who thought about the woman’s experience. She wasn’t worried about the male gaze or the societal gaze. Dior, who I write about, was very much about objectifying women, how they looked to the outside world, how they looked to men. She was concerned about a woman’s own experience and how she felt wearing the clothes, and what she did in those clothes.

Having three brothers absolutely informed her thinking. Not only about the design of clothes, but also the gendered nature of that design. She questioned why her brothers had pants with pockets, and she was trying to climb a tree in a dress and stockings.

As we make our way through another sweltering summer, check out these fun swimming spots (many of which are free!) to cool off in the area’s many rivers and streams while experiencing a new neck of the woods.

Beaver Dam Swimming Club
Nestled on a 30-acre complex, this freshwater quarry is not to be missed by rope-swing aficionados. 10820 Beaver Dam Road, Cockeysville

Hammerman Beach (Gunpowder Falls State Park)
Located in Gunpowder Falls State Park, this area—equipped with lifeguards on duty—includes 1,500 feet of beach for daytime swimming on the banks of the Gunpowder. 7200 Graces Quarters Road, Middle River

Hart-Miller Island State Park
This 1,110-acre island is located in Baltimore County where the Middle River meets the Chesapeake Bay. Mouth of the Middle River, Essex 

Mayo Beach Park
Pack up a cooler and spend the day lounging on the sand at this Anne Arundel County beach, which is free to visit (with an online reservation) Memorial Day through Labor Day. 4150 Honeysuckle Drive, Edgewater 

North Point State Park
North Point features beautiful views of the Chesapeake Bay and includes a waterfront that is open to swimmers and waders. 8400 North Point Road, Edgemere

Patapsco Valley State Park
There are many reasons to visit the gem of Central Maryland, including hiking, mountain biking, camping, bird watching, and picnicking. But swimming—or more accurately, dipping—in the cool waters of the Patapsco River sometimes gets forgotten. 8020 Baltimore National Pike, Ellicott City

Rocky Point Park and Beach
The 375-acre park sits at the mouth of the Back and Middle rivers and is open year-round for fishing, boating, and picnicking from sunrise to sunset—and for swimming at the beach from Memorial Day to Labor Day, when lifeguards are on duty. 2200 Rocky Point Road, Essex

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Updated June 2025. Fact-checking by Alana McCarthy Light

The City Fair launched in 1970 on a shoestring budget, run out of a vacant furniture building at Charles and Franklin streets. Office equipment included desks cast off from the school system. Naysayers, including the mayor, thought the whole idea naïve. Who would attend a three-day, county-style fair in downtown Baltimore two years after the ’68 riots? It turned out, 350,000 people that inaugural year. Nearly double the following September. Soon a million visitors.

“Bob Embry [then-Housing and Community Development director] invited Hope Quackenbush and me, who worked for him, to lunch to brainstorm something to bring people downtown,” PR maven Sandy Hillman remembers. “We came up with a civic celebration that would get city neighborhoods together in the same space at the same time. Tommy D’Alesandro, the mayor, was not convinced this was a good idea on the heels of the riots. Don Schaefer was the City Council president then and so we went to him. He loved it.”

Ultimately, the City Fair withered after being displaced by Harborplace. But it served as proof of concept for the Farmers Market, which Hillman got going in 1977, and Artscape, five years later. The 1970 fair also brought fireworks back to the Inner Harbor for the first time, reportedly, since 1781, when 50,000 Baltimoreans climbed Federal Hill to celebrate Maryland joining the United States.

The 1970s was a gritty, challenging time, of course. The fair’s opening acts often reflected, one might say, the era’s “nothing to lose” attitude. In 1972, The Great Zacchini, known as the Human Cannonball, was shot 200 feet over the Inner Harbor. In 1973, 68-year-old Karl Wallenda, pictured above, walked—and did a headstand—on a six-story, high-wire strung from the mast of the USS Constellation. In 1979, Doug Jones, a 26-year-old “Culligan Man” from Carroll County, climbed a 165-foot ladder and dove into 25 feet of water.

The true spirit of the fair, however, was its sense of togetherness. On its very first Saturday night, a late storm whipped through, toppling numerous booths.

“The next morning, people from different neighborhoods, across racial and demographic lines, helped each other,” remembers Bob Hillman, Sandy’s husband, and the City Fair’s first chair. “That rebuilding had a tremendous psychological effect, not only among the mix-and-match participants involved in the clean-up, but with everyone. It was an incredible statement about what a city can be.”

The annual fair didn’t include just carnival rides, local food, and off-the-wall stunts, but top-notch entertainment like Baltimore’s first lady of jazz, Ethel Ennis, and a certain Douglass High alum named Cab Calloway.

Rolling with unexpected weather issues, as well as scheduling snafus, is inevitably part of such event planning. The Glenn Miller Orchestra, booked as the closing act in 1971, for example, got lost on their way to perform. That prompted quick-thinking Sandy Hillman to divert the Orioles’ team bus, which was headed back to Baltimore from then-Friendship International Airport (now BWI) to the fair. The team had clinched the AL East title with a weekend sweep in Cleveland.

“They arrived as the band finally got there and had begun playing,” Bob Hillman recounts with a wry laugh. “The Orioles come out on the stage, and the place goes wild. Afterward, Jim Palmer, who had no idea that there was even thing called the City Fair, comes up to Sandy and says, ‘It’s amazing you got this all together for us in a couple of hours.’”

Hundreds of Baltimoreans gathered at Casa de Maryland’s Welcome Center on Pulaski Highway for a noon street march through Southeast Baltimore Wednesday to voice opposition and outrage against recent ICE raids in the city.

Carrying signs with messages like “ICE Out of Baltimore,” “Keep Families Whole,” and “My Family Didn’t Come Through Ellis Island the Right Way—They Just Showed Up,” protestors marched to a nearby Royal Farms and then a Hazlo International Food grocery store, where immigrants have been picked up and detained by ICE agents in recent days.

Along the way, numerous cars and trucks honked in support of the marchers, with residents and local store employees coming out to applaud and record the demonstration.

The grassroots action came amid a sharp increase in immigration raids around the country, in line with the new, ICE-led Trump Administration plan, known as “Operation At Large,” which is designed to boost arrests of unauthorized immigrants. According to reporting from NBC News, the plan includes utilizing more than 5,000 federal law enforcement personnel and up to 21,000 National Guard troops.

In the wake of the uptick, marches have emerged in cities including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Las Vegas, and, notably, Los Angeles—where protestors have clashed with ICE agents and law enforcement. 

Now 35 and a small business owner, Missael Garcia—a former CASA organizer and a volunteer at Wednesday’s demonstration—came to Baltimore from Mexico when he was 12. The Patterson High School graduate and Greektown resident said those in the city’s immigrant community have become fearful of even leaving their homes to take care of basic responsibilities, like going to work, getting their children to school, and buying food.

“What’s been happening with the ICE raids has people very afraid,” Garcia said. “We can’t sit around and not do anything about it any longer. We must come out, like today, and support our community in any way we can. The time to just sit and watch what’s going on is over.”

Pastor Steve Holt of the Church of the Guardian Angel in Remington reiterated Garcia’s words, noting the tradition of support for immigrants in his faith and others. Currently, he said, immigrant members of his church have become hesitant to simply visit the church’s food pantry.

“The Christian and Hebrew faiths have a lot to say about ‘welcoming the stranger,’” Holt added. “It’s part of what we are called to do as Christians. Jesus was a refugee in Egypt.”

Earlier this week, neighbors around the intersection of East Baltimore and Ellwood—not far from the Casa’s Welcome Center—witnessed ICE arrests of two individuals and tried to block their vehicles from leaving with the detainees.

Southeast Councilman Mark Parker joined Wednesday’s protest along with Councilwoman Odette Ramos, the first Latina elected to City Council. A local pastor who is fluent in Spanish, Parker said ever since the Trump Administration ordered ICE to ramp up arrests two weeks ago, his office has been receiving daily calls about raids and detentions in his district.

He also said no one knows exactly how many individuals have been detained by ICE officers in Baltimore, but that the uptick in ICE raids and arrests has worsened the already difficult conditions at the downtown Baltimore ICE field office.

“Only lawyers and clergy are allowed to visit, and I’ve visited once,” Parker said. “There are no showers there, no beds, no food service—they just grab bags of food from Costco—and now it’s overcrowded,” Parker said. “It’s awful.”

The large turnout Wednesday was surprising given that it was the middle of a weekday. Those who came and marched did so to express opposition to the Trump Administration arrests of non-criminal, undocumented individuals, many of whom now face the likelihood of deportation and separation from their family without due process.

“It’s a matter of standing up for the dignity of others,” said Rabbi Miriam Liebman with Jews United for Justice. “We cannot fix everything, and we cannot finish everything, but we have to show up.”

Johns Hopkins University professor Martha S. Jones is one of the country’s leading historians and public intellectuals. In Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), she chronicled how free Black residents in Baltimore asserted their citizenship rights, ultimately helping enshrine the principle that all persons born in the United States are citizens. Her 2020 book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, won The Los Angeles Times book prize in history.

Jones’ newest book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, tackles a more personal history, however. She investigates five generations of her own lineage, from rural Kentucky to small-town North Carolina to the Long Island suburbs where she grew up, each generation complicated by an ever-evolving color line. With painstaking archival research and graceful prose, Jones blends a legacy of enslavement, passing, Jim Crow, and colorism into a complex portrait of an American family over time in an all-too-often racist land and legal system.

There are people in this book, like your great-great-grandmother Isabella, whose stories I don’t think I’ll ever forget. As an enslaved woman, she gives birth to nine children by the man who owned her. Then, after the Civil War, she has the courage to go to court for child support.
My goodness, right? Isabella endured that hell, if I could put it that way, and she still had the presence of mind to get a complaint written out and take it to the Freedmen’s Bureau. And when she got no satisfaction, she had to find a way to raise her children. When we visit with our ancestors, they challenge us to learn, to understand them, and to live with them. I thought, if she could do that, I surely could learn her story and tell it in a fuller way than she ever was able to, at least on paper.

The anecdote about the college classmate who questions your right, because of your light skin, to be in a Black Studies course becomes more resonate as the memoir moves along.
He may have taught me something [about identity]. He certainly did about how I was going to hear a version of that question again and again across my lifetime. As a scholar of Black Studies, I could give a whole semester of lectures on how to answer that question. A family memoir is another one way to answer that question. The crux of it for me was how personal, how intimate it was, and only later I learned how to think of [race and color] in sociological terms, legal terms, and historical terms. In that moment, the searing part is how personal it feels.

Still, a memoir is a such departure from your previous books.
I had tried to write a family story like a historian, with some objectivity, with some distance, with historiographic questions in mind. I was holding back too much. The example of memoirists, novelists, and poets reminded me there are other ways of writing that let you put yourself and your imagination on the page.

The thing that really opens up the book for a broader understanding of race and color in this country is this legacy of so-called “mixed marriages,” segregation, and the societal rules around “whiteness.” Your parents’ marriage was not the first such marriage in your family.
The story of Mary Jones [a great-great-grandmother, who had lived as a white woman and married a free man of color in 1827], I had heard, but I hadn’t taken it seriously or I hadn’t really thought about what it meant to live by those terms. Then, to appreciate that her story opens up stories of many families, certainly where they lived in Central North Carolina, is humbling. They wrestled with the same questions about not fitting in, culturally and legally, into a nation that had tried to draw this indelible color line between so-called Black people or colored people, and so-called white people.

The current White House administration is banning books and has tried to erase certain stories. Have you considered how timely it is to bring forth these lives and stories that most people would’ve believed were not even knowable?
It’s a strong juxtaposition, right? There’s an insistence, which I hope the book makes, that we can learn and know a lot more than we think. The archives are not generous, but they give up more than they maybe were ever intended to give up, if we work them deliberately. The book absolutely sits for the proposition that there are still stories to tell and that these are American stories.

Thomas Broadus Jr. never knew his namesake father. He was two years old—the first-born twin of two sets of twins born to Thomas and Estelle Broadus—when his father, a U.S. Army private from Pittsburgh was shot in the back by a white Baltimore police officer in 1942.

His mother, distraught by the slaying her entire life, never remarried. She rarely spoke of her husband, who had been stationed in a segregated unit at nearby Fort Meade, Maryland, when he was killed. She did not keep photographs of him in their home and never told her four children—even after they matured into adults—about the circumstances surrounding his wrongful death.

“You knew not to ask my mother questions about my father and, if you did, she would not answer them,” says the 85-year-old Broadus, who still lives in Pittsburgh and has one living sibling, a younger sister. “My grandad, who died when I was about 17, was real close to my dad. He didn’t talk about how he died, either.”

But three weeks ago, some 83 years after his father’s death, the retired Pittsburgh bus driver received a letter from the National Archives and Records Administration and a note from the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board of the United States government. They had recently voted to release more than 300 pages of federal investigative files related to the homicide, including documents from the Department of Justice, the Office of the U.S. Attorney General, the War Department, the U.S. Attorney for Maryland, and the Baltimore Police Department, including eyewitness statements, as well as real-time press clippings from The Afro-American and The Baltimore Sun.

Per standard practice, the Review Board mailed hard copies to Broadus before the file was made public—one of 15 such civil rights “cold cases” made public since this past December.

Established by Congress with the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018, but languishing for years for political reasons, the Review Board’s growing number of releases includes other Black servicemen, as well. As in the incident involving Thomas Broadus, Black soldiers from northern cities stationed in the American South during World War II all too often had to deal with hostile local law enforcement and a biased legal system.

After no one was held to account for the 1944 killing of a Black U.S. Army private from New York in Louisiana, Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall, then special counsel to the NAACP, told U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle that attacks against Black servicemen were on the rise.

“These attacks are continuing to destroy the morale of our soldiers and sailors,” wrote Marshall, who would come close to his own lynching at the hands of a vigilante mob two years later in Columbia, Tennessee. At the time, in its response to inquiries from both Marshall and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who also pressed the U.S. Attorney General, the Department of Justice determined it could not pursue federal charges in the homicides of Black servicemembers—because there was no federal statute against killing service members. 

Overall, there could be 5,000 to 10,000 investigative files from various unresolved civil rights-era cold cases. No one is certain. Not even the Review Board. The records that have been released—like the fatal police beating of a 46-year-old Alabama mother-of-eight in 1945, and the shootings of a New York Army private who, like Broadus, was unarmed—are, of course, painful for the surviving family members and their descendants to absorb.

“My father’s records, they are very thick files,” says Broadus, reached by phone recently at the home he shares with his wife, and just back from an errand with his great-granddaughter. “That cop shot him in the back as he was trying to run and get away from him. Then he kicked my father when he fell between the curb and a car.”

“And you know what I can’t understand?” he continues, his voice rising with emotion. “How can it be that my mom wasn’t never, never compensated for this? She had four kids with a man in the U.S. Army. She worked day and night to buy us food, to buy us clothes, to pay the rent all those years. I went to work when I was 14 or 15 years old to help out, but how much money can you make at that age? My mom did that, and she kept all this inside her all those years.”

Late Saturday night on Jan. 31, 1942, several cabs refused to pick up U.S. Army Pvt. Thomas Broadus and his companions, two fellow servicemen and two local women, along the West Baltimore entertainment district known as “The Avenue.”

Louis Armstrong was in town for the weekend, and it should have been a memorable night. After a couple of drinks at a club known as “The Spot,” the soldiers eventually hailed a lift from an unlicensed “jitney.” But before they could get in, a white police officer across the street intervened. He ordered them to wait for one of the city’s white-owned, Sun Company taxis.

The group walked away, but Broadus—described as neither drunk nor quarrelsome later by his fellow soldiers—lagged behind. He got into an argument with Ofc. Edward Bender, after Broadus, according to one of his fellow servicemen, said licensed taxi drivers “acted like they didn’t want to ride colored people.” Another witness overheard Broadus also tell the officer that he “wanted a colored cab and had a right to spend his money with whomever he chose.”

Accounts vary on how the physical altercation between the Army private and city cop began. Several witnesses reported Bender hit Broadus with his baton while Broadus still had his hands in his pockets. It was the last day of January. Others, including Bender, said Broadus seized hold of the officer first.

Though there is little dispute about what unfolded next.

A brawl ensued as the men took each other to the ground multiple times. According to a later military report, Broadus managed to “[get] possession of the policeman’s nightstick” during the struggle, landing blows about Bender’s head and arms before a crowd intervened and attempted to break up the fight. As Broadus pulled away and tried to flee, Bender grabbed his service revolver and fired, striking the 26-year-old in the back.

Witnesses said a wounded Broadus attempted to take cover beneath a parked car, but Bender approached and shot him again. When a bystander sought permission to take Broadus for medical attention, Bender arrested him for interfering. A Provident Hospital medical report backed up the witnesses who said Bender fired two rounds at Broadus. It found two gunshot wounds, both entering through Broadus’ back, with one bullet still lodged on the right side of his chest. He was formally pronounced dead at 1:30 a.m.

Twelve days afterward, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney filed an unlawful homicide charge against Bender, who had killed another unarmed Black man under questionable circumstances less than two years earlier. On February 25, a grand jury, which had heard several, but not all eyewitness statements, indicted Bender and referred the case to criminal court. Bail was set at $2,500 and he was released on his own recognizance.

However, without disclosing its reasons, the grand jury reversed its decision and rescinded the charges several days later. Bender, who had been treated for injuries at the city’s downtown, white-only Maryland General Hospital, was off the hook and reinstated. (Now known as the University of Maryland Medical Center, the hospital remained segregated until 1963, a year prior to the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited race-based discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs.)

The shooting of the soldier galvanized the Black Baltimore community’s struggle around segregation and racial justice. Far from an isolated incident, Broadus’ death—in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue on a Saturday night, one of the centers of Black culture in the U.S. at the time—marked the 10th killing of a Black citizen by white city officers over the preceding three years. The Afro newspaper described West Baltimore as “a tinderbox.”

That April, as the Maryland General Assembly wound down, NAACP chapter founder Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson and Afro publisher Carl Murphy organized a Citizen’s Committee for Justice protest, and more than 2,000 demonstrators marched in Annapolis in response to what was described as the city’s “wave of police brutality.” Some protesters said they had walked the entire 25 miles from Baltimore to the state capitol. Among other demands, protestors called for the dismissal of Police Commissioner Robert Stanton and the hiring of Black officers in the city. (The Broadus shooting took place mere blocks from where Freddie Gray was killed by police in 2015, and the center of that subsequent uprising some 70-plus years later.)

Governor Herbert O’Conor responded by establishing the “Commission to Study Problems Affecting the Negro Population.” In its report the following spring, the commission concluded Bender “was in no danger when he fired the fatal shot, for the soldier was then in full flight; and even if we accept the officer’s account of the episode, the soldier’s only offense was an assault upon an officer and for this grade of offense the killing of a fugitive to prevent his escape was not justified in law.”

The commission also wrote that the City State’s Attorney could not explain the rationale behind the grand jury’s sudden change of heart—nor why his office failed to bring the Broadus case to another grand jury.

Nonetheless, efforts to convince the City State’s Attorney to reopen the case were not successful. As revealed in a letter contained in the newly released files, the U.S. Department of Justice subsequently decided not to take up the case in 1943, stating that too much time had passed, and that pursuit of the case was unlikely to result in a successful prosecution. The U.S. Attorney for Maryland, in another letter contained in the files, said they concurred with the DOJ’s conclusion. In December 1943, less than two years after the shooting, the file was closed.

Bender, who was transferred to another beat, would eventually be promoted to sergeant.

The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board work is currently mandated to sunset no later than January 2027, as set out in the original legislation. Given that its four board members were not nominated until 2021 and approved until 2022, recently, bills were introduced in Congress by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to extend that sunset date to 2031.

“Family members appreciate the public release of the records, which often provide answers to longstanding questions,” says Margaret Burnham, co-chair of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board and the founder of Northeastern University’s Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project. “Many also ask, given the passage of time, what else might be done to acknowledge the harms they endured.”

As the Review Board has noted, six months before the United States joined the allies in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt recognized that discrimination and segregation would hinder the coming war effort. Issued in June of 1941—just seven months before Broadus’ death—Executive Order 8802 banned federal government and defense industry discrimination “because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”

The order created an investigative agency to field complaints, commonly known as the Fair Employment Practices Committee. But, particularly in the South, historians generally regarded it as a toothless and ineffectual body. The order did little to protect Black enlisted men, who were typically relegated to segregated units, with limited opportunity for advancement. The National Archives states: “When assigned to bases in the South, these troops had to navigate segregation laws dictating their behavior off-base, as well.”

Northeastern’s Burnham, who is 80 and began her renowned civil rights career with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, points out that Broadus’ case is significant for several reasons—which is why the Review Board prioritized his files’ release.

“First, it’s a soldier, who is trying to make his way around town, off duty, but nevertheless battling the Jim Crow transportation system that African-American soldiers all over the country had to contend with,” she says. “This is not a bus or a train, but it reflects the same segregated transportation systems that we had in major cities, including Baltimore. While not a Deep South city, it is certainly still in the South, and for that reason I think it’s reflective of the challenges that soldiers faced navigating Jim Crow. Secondly, it’s particularly significant because it spurred a historic protest movement. That makes it clear that the killing of Broadus resonated with African Americans in Baltimore as a major civil rights issue.”

Burnham adds that many of the cold cases—not all involve homicides, some include assault, kidnapping, or other acts of violence—were not broadly known at the time by the American public. But there was often at least some coverage in the African-American newspapers of the period, she notes. Not only the Afro in Baltimore, which followed the Broadus case closely, but the Chicago Defender and Amsterdam News in New York, which also had national audiences informing the larger Black community.

“Even though in some of these Deep South cases, where there were no local reporters or local newspapers [covering a case],” she says, “the information about these cases would often get out through the national African-American newspapers.”

Following the Broadus shooting, for example, a Pittsburgh woman wrote to President Roosevelt—her thoughtful, handwritten letter is part of his War Department investigation file—highlighting the plight of Black servicemen. In addition to the Broadus case, she mentioned an incident earlier that month on Jan. 10, 1942, later referred to as the Lee Street Massacre, when at least 10, possibly up to 15, Black servicemen were killed by civilian and military law enforcement in Louisiana.

“Yes, our men are full of patriotism, American negroe [sic] soldiers, only to meet death because they are negroes before they reach the battlefields. And what do they get? Nothing,” wrote Estella Washington. “There are offices in the Army that the negroe can never hold. In defending America, if there is a hero his name is never called.”

She signed the last page, “A true and loyal American citizen,” and asked for a response.

The reply to her letter, as with most, was a perfunctory note that their concerns had been received. The War Department’s letter to Estella Washington, however, included a denial that any Black soldiers had been killed in the Louisiana event and an assurance that the officer who shot Broadus was being prosecuted by the civilian criminal court in Baltimore.

Eight decades later, the U.S. Army private’s son says that “it is never too late to do the right thing” and that getting some formal recognition and justice for his father’s wrongful death is “very important.”

“When I learned about all that happened to my dad, I thought about my mother, who was in her 20s,” Broadus says. “She didn’t know who to go to. She didn’t know what lawyer to contact, or anything like that.”

He adds that he would like someone, anyone, to contact him—a representative from the City of Baltimore, the Baltimore City Police Department, the United States Army. Or a lawyer.

“Somebody should call here and tell me something,” he says.

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[Editor’s Note 9/2025: Since we originally ran this story in May, a local civil rights attorney has reached out to Mr. Broadus.]

“Before I moved away from Baltimore, I didn’t realize that other cities do not have their own enchanted rowhouses of puppetry,” joked musician Eric Voboril in a short documentary about Hollins Street’s Black Cherry Puppet Theater that came out several years ago.

Michael Lamason, Black Cherry’s 68-year-old executive director, had never attended a puppet show—much less performed with a marionette—when he founded the original troupe with Corliss Cavalieri, Bill Haas, Rick Weiss, and Michael Richardson in the summer of 1980. They were just college kids at MICA and needed jobs and got creative.

Hired by legendary recreation and parks director Virginia Baker, who had been appointed by Mayor William Donald Schaefer to direct a special office he named Adventures in Fun (can we bring that back?), the motley collection of printmakers and painters put on 107 shows for city kids over school break that year.

Decades before YouTube, they taught themselves how to build sets, props, and puppets from Pratt library books, earning $6 an hour for their troubles.

“A small fortune in those days,” Lamason says with a smile in the theater’s Geppetto-like workshop as he stands and manipulates the knees, elbows, and face of a Jack and the Beanstalk marionette he’s been working on. “We were up all night before our first performance, still making everything we needed. No rehearsal, I just went and did the show. I thought it was a mess, but you dance a marionette in front of an audience and nobody has a clue how you’re doing it. They just see you doing this magic on the stage and there’s a suspension of disbelief. They’re transfixed.”

Far from mere child’s play, the ancient Greeks interpreted the Iliad and the Odyssey with puppets. In the Middle Ages, string puppets were used to depict biblical stories, with the Virgin Mary often a central figure (marionette in French means “little Mary”). And in the 18th century, leading composers like Haydn created adult operas specifically for marionettes.

Now in its 45th year, the nonprofit Black Cherry theater has presented thousands of shows and workshops at schools and festivals throughout the city, state, and region. Housed across the street from historic Hollins Market in side-by-side rowhomes, purchased for a grand total of $12,000 in the mid-1990s when crack cocaine was tearing at the fabric of its Sowebo neighborhood, Black Cherry’s central mission—and Lamason’s, too—remains performance.

Its quarterly Puppet Slamwich series for adults features tales and marionettes; ventriloquist dolls; and finger, hand, sock, stick, and shadow puppets of every imaginable variety. The 50-seat black box theater also hosts a variety of musical guests throughout the year, from folk to jazz and classical performers.

The puppet slams, which attract a mix of artist applicants from near and far, always include a musical guest as well, selling out within days of their ticket release. At a recent Slamwich, for example, the first performer was Matt Muirhead, an artist better known for his sci-fi Baltimore landscapes. He used a sock monkey named “Holly” to help tell a nonlinear narrative against a scrolling backdrop that included several of his paintings.

Muirhead was followed by Carmen Houston-Ludlam, a 27-year-old woman from southern Anne Arundel County with Down syndrome, who performed a ventriloquist act with a mermaid, cracking up the crowd with her hand puppet’s irreverent jokes about its shoe fetish and waterbed.

Lindsey Ball, an artist and past National Puppetry Festival coordinator from Chicago, used a toy-sized theater, a crankie, shadow puppets, and recorded voice-over to share a moving personal story that also honored the struggles of those in the LGBTQ+ community who came before her.

“I’ve always wanted to come to Baltimore and be a part of a Black Cherry show,” Ball said later. “The city’s support here for such a labor of love is amazing.”

After intermission and a musical interlude from a banjo, fiddle, and guitar combo, Houston Ludlam, still in the sparkling black dress that she performed in, slid into a folding chair with some popcorn to watch the rest of the show alongside her parents. Seated next to her in the back row, an audience member quietly congratulated her on her flawless performance as the second half began.

“I’ve been practicing for three years, but only in front of my friends and family,” she whispered back, beaming. “This was my first time on stage. My knees were nervous when I started. But only my knees.”

The demonstration at City Hall overflowed its expansive grass plaza. Protestors wearing hoodies in honor of Trayvon Martin and carrying signs that read “I Can’t Breathe”—the last words of Eric Garner—stretched to the War Memorial Building. Some of the crowd, which had marched from Gilmor Homes, dispersed after the planned rally. Others headed to Camden Yards.

“That’s where all the police were stationed to make sure we didn’t mess up the game,” recalls Devin Allen, then just a year older than Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old from West Baltimore who had succumbed to injuries suffered in police custody six days earlier.

A self-taught, independent photographer still new to documenting protests, Allen had friends who, like Gray, lived in the sprawling Gilmor public-housing complex. He, too, had once been arrested and been given a so-called “rough ride,” and he knew one of young women screaming out in the viral video of Gray’s arrest.

As protestors pushed past the ballpark’s outdoor bars, both Orioles and visiting Red Sox fans began taunting them—laughing, and throwing food and drinks.

“It became this clash of Black protestors, 17, 18 years old, early 20s, and fans calling us the N-word and monkeys—stuff these young guys never  heard directed at them from white lips,” Allen says. “It was like the last drop in a bucket that overflows. Fights break out. Windows are smashed. The police cars blocking everyone in get stomped.”

To save space on the small 8-gigabyte memory cards he could afford, Allen picked his shots. At one point, he saw a young man with a red bandana covering his face throw something at a line of riot gear-clad police.

“I was about to take a picture right then, but let him run toward me instead,” Allen says. “I’m thinking in that moment, and I’m not thinking. It’s muscle memory. It’s instinct. I snap the picture. I look down at the image and now I’ve got to go—the police are charging, and I hop over this gate.”

He’d been documenting and uploading to social media all day and posted the image to Twitter and Instagram. While everything was still unfolding, he wrote, “We are sick & tired.”

He shot until the sun went down and woke up with more than 10,000 new followers. The BBC called the next morning to interview him about police brutality and the city’s protests. Allen had been covering all the events following Gray’s arrest and subsequent death for a week. However, he chose not to photograph Gray’s funeral two days after the confrontation at Camden Yards.

“I’d lost too many friends. To me, it would’ve been disrespectful.”

Nor did Allen shoot the destruction that followed. “Photographers, TV cameras were coming to Baltimore, with everyone focused on the CVS that was burning” at the busy intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues, he says. “I knew people in that area, and in the Mondawmin community where things started when Frederick Douglass High students got out of school that day and the system shut down their buses. I lived, and still live, five minutes away. I needed to check on my friends. I tell people I mentor that being a good photographer is sometimes about the pictures you don’t take.”

That night, Allen went to work at the group home where he helped supervise individuals with developmental disabilities. The next morning, his phone blew up with calls from a blocked number, which turned out to be Time magazine.

His photo of the young guy in the red bandana would soon be on its the cover.

“I think people forget that the protests began before Freddie Gray passed,” says Allen, reflecting on one of the most momentous events in the city’s history after a recent discussion of Black voices in the media at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. He notes that the initial demonstrations were not that large. Mostly, they involved Gray’s family and friends, people from his Sandtown-Winchester community, and others from the People’s Power Assembly gathering in front of the Western District Police Station.

“The week he died, they started getting bigger and bigger,” Allen continues. “That whole of 2015 and into the summer of 2016 was a depressing period in a lot of ways, but activists, people in the community, we dubbed it the Baltimore Uprising. That wasn’t outsiders. That was us. It didn’t become ‘the riots.’ We in the city, we wanted to shape and own our narrative and not have others do that for us, or to us.”

In fact, what made Allen most proud of his Time cover was not the affirmation of his budding talent. He was only the third amateur photographer to ever land the then-92-year-old magazine’s front page. Nor was it the money. He admittedly knew nothing of copyrights and fee scales. What mattered was that his pictures, which were also featured inside the magazine, had not been reframed to fit some pre-existing reputation of his hometown. (See: The Wire.)

“I only wanted the work­—real imagery from real Baltimore, from the ground up—to get out into the world and it did.”

At the same time, as soon as the news broke on social media that an amateur West Baltimore photographer had snagged the cover of Time, professional documentary photographers and journalists started posting things like “you’ll never hear from him again” and “he’s going to disappear.” Some shared the sentiment to him face to face.

Instead, the magazine interviewed him and shared more of his photos for its LightBox blog. Allen followed that up with a Time photo essay called “The Heart of the City,” which put flesh on the Baltimore that he knew with intimate portraits from Gilmor Homes, Sandtown-Winchester, and Pennsylvania Avenue.

In July 2015, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum hosted his first solo exhibition. In August 2015, Under Armour hired him to shoot NBA star and brand ambassador Steph Curry on a trip to Asia—Allen’s first trip outside the U.S. Though he normally shoots in black-and-white, Allen switched to color for that campaign as opportunities and his photography continued to evolve. He visited Japan, China, and the Philippines, and Austria, as well, where he shot a Syrian refugee camp filled with families trying to get to Germany.

“I ONLY WANTED REAL IMAGERY FROM REAL BALTIMORE TO GET OUT INTO THE WORLD AND IT DID.”

By the end of the whirlwind year, his work had been featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with additional exhibitions in Washington, D.C., and New York.

Along the way, he also managed to launch a youth program, giving out free cameras and teaching photography to city kids with little connection to art. And when Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons learned of the GoFundMe page that Allen had put together to support the project, he wrote him a check for $20,000.

A singular Baltimore career was just getting started.

In 2017, Allen’s first hardcover book, A Beautiful Ghetto, with an introduction from his close friend, the Baltimore writer D. Watkins, was published and subsequently nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His third hardcover book, Devin Allen: Baltimore, supported through the Gordon Parks Foundation and a Steidl Book Prize grant, is due out this spring, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Uprising.

The collection is essentially an early retrospective of Allen’s career from Steidl, one of the most prestigious publishers of fine-art photobooks in the world. The book includes portraits, images of protests, and scenes of city street life from 2014 to 2023, including a few from Allen’s January show at Charles Street’s Galerie Myrtis, which represents him, and many never published before.

“There’s a trust and there’s a collaboration going on between Devin and his subjects,” says Peter Kunhardt Jr., executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation, which made Allen its inaugural fellow in 2017. A self-taught photographer whose career continues to inspire Allen, Parks is considered perhaps the greatest Black photographer of the 20th century. “That’s also why Gordon Parks was so successful, because he was able to capture moments that were quite personal and complicated, and he was able to make sure that his subjects trusted him, and it’s very clear that Devin has that same skill.”

One of the projects Allen is currently working on is a series around his maternal grandmother, Doris, who let him put his first camera on her Best Buy credit card. She was, coincidentally, his first introduction into photography. The family’s informal documentarian, his grandmother had been snapping photos on Christmas morning, at Easter, during July 4th cookouts, for his entire life, always keeping a camera in her vicinity. Allen’s mother, Gail, typically wrote the captions.

Now suffering from dementia, Doris attended every show and gallery talk when his career took off. Allen, who has been renovating her home, has since come across dozens of his grandmother’s pictures, including some from her Douglass High graduation and wedding. She kept everything, he learned, including magazine and newspaper clippings of all of his work, which he found in a large Ziploc bag.

Baltimore, Allen says, is a city that can be beautiful, big-hearted, and close-knit, i.e. “Smalltimore,” and he considers himself fortunate to grow up where and when he did, and certainly with the family he had. He rode bikes as a kid, took karate lessons to be like a Ninja Turtle, and played Little League baseball.

But it’s also a city that leaves scars, and he witnessed and experienced plenty of pain and trauma as a child growing up through Baltimore’s AIDS and crack epidemics.

“I was blessed where I had a good mom, a good grandmother, an active uncle, and I had aunts in my life,” says Allen, whose disarming smile and affable nature belie the seriousness and intentionality of his work. “But that’s not the same for a lot of my peers growing up.”

He mentions a friend who lost both parents to heroin overdoses. Another who had to raise his little brothers and sisters. He estimates he’s lost 20 friends to gun violence, adding he’s had friends who have killed other friends.

“Baltimore is one of those places where sometimes you grow up with a chip on your shoulder from going through so much pain and so many trials and tribulations,” he says. People will be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe a person did this and did that.’ But you don’t know what that person might have been through. That’s one of the things when you’re dealing with people like Freddie Gray [who suffered lead paint poisoning as a child] and others in the community. They got their own traumas, and during the Uprising, all that pain was released at one time.”

When he says that photography saved his life, he means it literally. Two years before the events of 2015, Allen lost his two of his closest friends to gun violence over the same weekend. One was shot seven times in front of a family member’s home. The other was killed outside of a store the next day. If Allen, who had hustled and sold drugs as a teenager and knew his way around the city’s street corners, hadn’t been shooting photographs that afternoon, he most likely would’ve been with him.

He had been shot at himself before, but after the birth of his daughter, recognized he needed to change. His mother helped him get him a job “pushing paper” at Transamerica. Not surprisingly, he found it boring, and when the life insurance company laid him off after three years, it proved a turning point.

A self-described “follower” in school, he first tried expressing himself through poetry (“I was terrible”) and spoken-word (“I hated performing”), but nonetheless found a supportive arts community in the Hollins Market district. When he later borrowed a buddy’s Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot, he realized he’d finally found his medium (“he had to ask for it back”).

Many of the friends he grew up with didn’t understand his passion for art and dismissed his efforts to become a photographer. They told him he was too old, the window for getting into an art institute or a school like Maryland Institute College of Art had closed. Not his grandmother, however.

“The name of her series is, She Saw Me Coming,” Allen says.

ALLEN’S WORK GOES AGAINST STEREOTYPES AND CELEBRATES THE DAY-TO-DAY BLACK EXPERIENCE, AND ITS TRADITIONS AND CULTURE.

D. Watkins, the Baltimore native and New York Times bestselling author of books like The Cook Up, The Beast Side, and Black Boy Smile, knew Allen before he became a photographer, when Allen and his crew were known for throwing popular parties on the city’s west side. He says one thing that people often forget is that Allen had begun garnering social media attention in Baltimore’s Black community for his photos and portraits before the Freddie Gray protests and Time cover.

“That photograph was not some lucky, random shot,” Watkins says. “A rank amateur could not have done that. He just wasn’t published.”

Allen had sent samples of his work to The Baltimore Sun and had never gotten as much as a reply. The former City Paper had at least sent a note back when they turned his work down.

“Devin will say, ‘My career was built on the broken back of Freddie Gray.’” Watkins says. “I challenge him on that. I don’t believe that.”

To Watkins, his longtime friend’s decade-long rise in the art world has been unique and sustained, because Allen, who admittedly considered moving to New York to further his career early on, remained committed to his community.

“He’s a success in the art world, but he’s not a guy from the art world, he’s a guy from the street,” Watkins says. “He moves like how we move outside. He talks to people, he asks questions, he doesn’t project any pretension. He doesn’t think he invented the camera—he loves the skill set and he loves what he’s able to do, but he respects people more.”

Watkins adds that when an artist, filmmaker, writer, or journalist is telling stories of places of struggle or people dealing with hardship, it is always a delicate matter. Many writers and artists don’t have any accountability to those people, and some get locked into the accolades or awards they want to win.

“I’ve been to galas with Devin where you look left and you see Usher, you look right and see Chelsea Clinton, you turn around and you bump into Gayle King,” he says. “That’s not who he is or why he does what he does. I’ve seen Devin at one of the New York events on Tuesday, and Thursday he’s back in Park Heights, at Gilmor Homes, over Whitelock, in those spaces shooting pictures or talking at a middle school.”

Myrtis Bedolla is the founder of Galerie Myrtis in Station North, which has represented Allen since 2022. The mission of her gallery supports the subjects and themes of his work, she says, providing a space and platform for its social, cultural, and political concerns. In turn, his work serves as a vehicle for discourse and discussions in the Black community.

She still remembers “the rawness” of Allen’s Time cover the first time she saw it. “I think we all felt the weight of what that image portrayed given Freddie Gray’s death,” says Bedolla. “But his photography was never solely about the Uprising and protest. Sometimes we need to look through his lens and voice for things, experiences, that are a bit more complicated.”

Allen’s work goes against stereotypes and celebrates the day-to-day Black experience, and its traditions and culture, she continues.

“Those stories and that imagery are also important,” says Bedolla. “It’s also important for Black children to see themselves portrayed in those positive images, too.”

To his credit, Allen has had the city’s youth in mind since he first had the opportunity to make an impact in their lives. Over the past decade, he’s given away more than 500 cameras and has visited more schools, taught more workshops, and mentored more students than can be counted. He says most people would be surprised by the number of kids who grow up in the inner city who have few photographs, unlike he did, simply of themselves and their families.

For his exhibition titled The Textures of Us at Galerie Myrtis earlier this year, Allen invited two of his mentees to participate with him, gladly yielding the stage to them during the show’s closing reception.

Photographer Joe Giordano, a Baltimore contributor and instructor at the Baltimore School for the Arts, says he’s taught several students who received their first camera from Allen. (Giordano, who shot the Uprising for the City Paper, shares an exhibition with Allen this month at the Creative Alliance.)

“Some kids are more comfortable with their phones,” Allen says. “So, when I give them a camera, it’s just like, all right, let me show you. But what I am trying to do is help them tell their story and own their truth.

“Everything that was happening in Baltimore 10 years ago, I was able to show the honest story. When I look back at some of the headlines or how they talked about Freddie Gray or how people were calling us thugs and these other things—through my imagery, you see it in a different light. It’s about speaking up for yourself. When I’m teaching, it’s more the history of photography, the importance of Black photographers and telling Black stories, and why we need to tell these stories. The technical stuff comes on the back end.”

“It’s funny,” Watkins says of Allen and his journey. “These kids, many people in the city, they know Devin because he has been in their neighborhood, to their school. And so, when he is on television, or they follow his Instagram and see good things happen for him or the awards he receives, they root for him.

“To me, that’s the part that is special. He’s not a politician, or a bigwig businessman, or even an NBA star, and I can name 10 of those from Baltimore. His story is powerful for people. He’s the guy from the trenches that picked up a camera and made it big.”

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A sharp cultural critic, Colette Shade has written for such zeitgeisty publications as Teen Vogue, Interview, The New Republic, The Baffler, The Nation, Current Affairs, Jezebel, and Gawker. She first gathered national attention for her viral essay, “‘Baltimore Is a Shithole’: Undisturbed Peace at the Maryland Hunt Cup,” in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray.

A decade later, the Towson resident’s first book, Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was), has been receiving rave reviews from the likes of The New York Times and NPR.

A coming-of-age story in the Y2K era—essentially the decade between the rise of the dot-com bubble and the 2008 economic collapse—How the 2000s Became Everything touches on Shade’s youthful cultural touch-stones, including chat rooms, AOL instant messaging, MTV, Paris Hilton, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

But more to the point of this often darkly funny collection of essays, she deftly interrogates the period’s omnipresent techno-optimism and how the utopian dreams of the early digital age instead became a dystopian, neoliberal reality for the Millennial generation, the first reported to be worse off than their parents.

How did this project get started?
I first got into this period in 2017, 2018. I was going through a tough time in my personal life, trying to figure out my career. I was also feeling despair about Trump having just been elected for the first time, and despair about climate change. I have family in the Bay Area, which I write about in the book, and there had been a couple of increasingly bad wildfire seasons there. I found myself looking back to my late elementary, middle, and high school years when I’m coming into awareness of the world. I had one idea of how the world would be, and it was so very different than the way it turned out.

At the same time, one way that I was dealing with problems in my life was looking at these nostalgia Instagram accounts that had scans of 1999 issues of Seventeen magazine, or Teen People, or Delia’s catalogs, or screenshots from Dawson’s Creek. This was a real escape for me.

The book may surprise some. It’s more tough history lesson than feel-good sentimental journey.
The original title was Y2K Essays on Puberty, Politics, and Popular Culture. This is a book that is interested in looking back, celebrating some aspects of the Y2K era, critiquing other aspects, and then taking both that critique and that celebration and looking at how it affects our present moment. I’ll give you a good example. I talked about this bestselling book called Dow 36,000, which came out in 1999, and had this preposterous argument that the stock market would triple in value within a couple of years—and this came out a few months before the dot-com bubble burst. The book’s co-author is now a prominent figure in the Trump administration.

Not that this collection is without irony and laughs. I’d forgotten about Mikhail Gorbachev doing a Pizza Hut commercial in 1998.
The plot of it is great. This young guy is saying, “Hey, it was great that Gorbachev opened up the Soviet Union because it allowed us to have more freedom and democracy.” Then you have this old man who says, yes, but it brought chaos, and they’re getting into this big argument over recent Soviet history. Then, Gorbachev walks in with his granddaughter, and it’s like, “Let’s all eat pizza together.” They agree to put their political differences aside and just agree that Pizza Hut is great, which, well, Pizza Hut is great.

But it’s a perfect distillation of this Y2K-era psychology of the 1990s and the 2000s. You had Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist, making this argument that no two countries that had a McDonald’s would ever go to war against each other. That’s just preposterous. Both Ukraine and Russia, for example, have had McDonald’s.

Exactly. The internet age is taking hold of pop culture, but it’s coinciding with globalism and a long neoliberal political turn that leads to the 2008 economic collapse and issues still unfolding today.
There was this psychological dream state that people were in between the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble collapse. You can see it in movies, in media headlines, and in the pop culture, and I very much use the pop culture in my own personal memories as a way to make sense of it for myself…Then what happened in 2008 just destroyed the social fabric and the lives of people who previously had been doing well. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, and I couldn’t find a job after I graduated, which is not something I had been raised to believe was possible for me.

“How did I become director of the Apostleship of the Sea?” Andrew Middleton asks. “My wife had a consignment shop next door to the ministry in the Dundalk Village shopping center and Monsignor FitzGerald, who was a good fisherman, had befriended her.

Whenever Monsignor FitzGerald saw me in the shop, he’d ask me to help carry a box of supplies or something in,” he continues with a good-natured laugh. “Which was, you know, setting the hook: ‘Would you be interested in volunteering one day a week?’ That became two days. Somehow, it turned into three days. He slowly reeled me in.”

Part logistics hub, part chapel, and part internet café, Apostleship of the Sea provides outreach to 12,000 foreign  seafarers a year, many of whom use its Wi-Fi to Skype or video call far-flung family.

Volunteer van drivers also offer seamen, typically docked anywhere from 12 hours to a day or two, the chance to run errands, refill prescriptions—attend religious services if so inclined—and shop for themselves or loved ones at American stores like Best Buy. As Middleton notes, sailing the world on four- to nine-month contracts can be a lonely life, with missed holidays, weddings, children’s birthdays, and the funerals of parents.

A longtime Navy chaplain, Monsignor John FitzGerald established the nonprofit in 2003 after returning to the Archdiocese of Baltimore. It is part of an international organization with roots stretching back to Scotland in the 1920s, and a tradition of outreach to foreign sailors that dates back even further in Baltimore. (The Apostleship of the Sea has since moved to the former rectory of St. Rita’s parish in Dundalk. FitzGerald passed away two years ago at age 82.)

In fact, the day prior to the tragic crash of the Dali container ship into the Key Bridge, Middleton had driven the ship’s captain and one of its crew members over the bridge on the way to the big-box stores in Glen Burnie. An Apostleship of the Sea volunteer had also taken other Dali crew members to the Arundel Mills Mall.

In the still-dark early morning hours of March 26, Middleton exchanged text messages with the men to make sure that they and everyone on board were physically okay, unhurt.

“It was surreal obviously. In just an afternoon, you feel like you get to know the guys a bit,” Middleton says.

Of the 21 seamen aboard the Dali, nearly all were Indian, a group which included a handful of Catholics. The Dali management company reached out to Middleton to see if his organization could visit the crew, now stranded in the middle of the Patapsco. Middleton quickly said yes and asked if taking Mass to the Catholic seaman was a possibility as well.

“Bishop Adam Parker from the Archdiocese had expressed an interest in visiting with the crew and they were gracious enough to allow us to go to the ship [see photo of Middleton climbing a rope ladder from a tugboat up the side of the Dali, above]. We delivered care packages and spent about four hours with the entire crew. Or at least the crew that were available and weren’t assisting salvage workers and investigators that day.”

Middleton has also stayed in contact with Dali crew members, who are required to remain in Baltimore until the legal issues around the crash are resolved.

That the May 1 visit coincided with the annual Catholic Feast of St. Joseph the Worker was not lost on Bishop Parker, Middleton, or the men.

Afterward, Parker told the Catholic Review that five weeks following the tragic bridge collapse, which killed six Latino immigrant road workers, the Dali crew was still feeling deep anguish over the incident. The body of the fifth Key Bridge worker was recovered the same day as Middleton and Parker’s visit. The sixth and final body was pulled from the water one week later.

Before he began the religious service for the Catholic crew members, the bishop told the men that he was offering the  Mass for them and their families back home, and for the highway workers who lost their lives, placing a list of the names of the fallen workers on the makeshift altar. Afterward, a crew member asked for the list, so he could continue to pray for those who died.

“It meant a lot to him to know the names of the people and to be able to pray for them,” Parker said. “That moment is something that I will never forget.”

One of the engineers onboard lamented to the bishop that if the ship’s power had failed only five minutes later, the Dali would have been clear of the bridge. The captain eventually asked Middleton if the entangled bridge was the same one that they had ridden across roughly 12 hours before.

“I told him it was.”