It’s no secret that Baltimore is to thank for many of the inventions that have influenced the modern world. Here, we round up four of the coolest creations that the city takes credit for—and some of the local businesses keeping the tradition alive today.

LINOTYPE

In 1884, German-born inventor and Baltimorean Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the linotype, a machine that quickly set complete lines of type and revolutionized printing forever. In the first decade of its use, American news- paper readership shot from 3.6 million to more than 33 million.

→ BRICKHOUSE BOOKS
Though we’re well past the days of the linotype, Maryland’s oldest continuously operating small press (since 1970) embraces modern technology to print batches of poetry, fiction, drama, and artistic nonfiction from a wide range of voices.

→ BLACK CLASSIC PRESS
In 1978, W. Paul Coates started a press company in his basement, and it remains as one of the oldest independently owned black publishers in the United States. The legacy printer publishes and reissues works from African-American thinkers such as Walter Mosley and W.E.B. Du Bois.

BIKES

Baltimore became the birthplace of the American bicycle in 1818, when a local piano maker named James Stewart created his own take on the European velocipede. Bicycles, which originally had pedals on the front wheel, have evolved from the velocipede to the high-wheel bikes of the 19th century to the modern version seen on city streets today.

→ BALTIMORE BICYCLE WORKS
This dedicated worker-owned bicycle shop in Station North offers attentive customer service, repairs, and a selection of reliable bikes and parts, hop- ing to bring the joy of biking back to its birthplace.

→ JOE’S BIKE SHOP
Joe Traill, owner of Joe’s Bike Shop, fell in love with bikes at a young age and worked as both a bike messenger and a repairman before becoming the owner of one of Baltimore’s favorite bike repair shops.

RYE WHISKEY

In the early 19th century, Baltimore earned national recognition for the inven- tion and distillation of this tasty liquor. The rye whiskey industry boomed until Prohibition brought production to a halt, but, luckily for local rye lovers, it has enjoyed a full-blown renaissance in the Old Line State thanks to area distilleries.

→ SAGAMORE SPIRIT
In 2017, Sagamore Spirit, co-founded by Under Armour mogul Kevin Plank, helped resurrect Maryland’s rye whiskey industry with its signature sipper proofed with limestone water from an area horse farm. The distillery’s headquarters in Port Covington hosts tours, workshops, and events dedicated to teaching visitors about the local history of the spirit as well as the practice of whiskey production.

→ BALTIMORE SPIRITS CO.
Housed in Medfield’s Union Collective and founded by three Baltimore natives in 2015, the Baltimore Spirits Company uses modern distillation techniques to create their own version of the old-world spirit. While the popular spot also distills liquors such as gin and brandy, the Epoch Rye has remained its calling card.

ICE CREAM FACTORY

In 1851, Baltimore milk dealer Jacob Fussell took over a dairy business that sold a frozen blend of milk, eggs, and sugar, and not long after, he opened the nation’s first ice cream factory. Fussell’s mass production of the sweet treat made making ice cream affordable and turned it into the phenomenon the world knows and loves.

→ THE CHARMERY
Since the Charmery opened its flagship store in Hampden in 2013, this beloved creamery has expanded to two addition- al locations and has its own factory in Union Collective. Known for out-of-the box flavors such as Old Bay Caramel and Cheese and Crackers, this fan-favorite brand is definitely keeping Baltimore’s ice cream legacy alive.

→ TAHARKA BROTHERS ICE CREAM

This socially conscious ice cream business uses its delicious flavors, now served out of Broadway Market, as well as tons of local restaurants and grocery stores, as a vehicle to bring people together to discuss social change in the city and beyond.

When Casey McKeel began roasting coffee, she started with a drum roaster attached to a backyard grill behind her Waverly home. She’d grown up in the business. Her mother ran a café in her native Michigan and, as an undergraduate, she’d studied the impact of the coffee trade on communities where coffee is farmed and produced. In 2012, McKeel, who’d moved here two years earlier, launched Thread Coffee determined to build a democratically run, environmentally sustainable, fair and transparent trade operation.

A year later, Thread forged a relationship with Red Emma’s, the city’s ever-expanding worker-cooperative bookstore, café, and venue—then in its original basement location on St. Paul Street. “That was before Red Emma’s moved to Station North, but it was looking for a larger space,” McKeel recalls. “We thought, ‘Why not share resources? We could roast in-house there and split a portion of the rent and licensing.”

This was hardly the first collaborative project for Red Emma’s, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this month. By the time Thread Coffee began its association with Red Emma’s, named for the turn-of-the-century immigrant, anarchist, and writer Emma Goldman, they had already spun off the collectively managed 2640 Space—the still-thriving destination for grassroots political and cultural events—in partnership with St. John’s United Methodist Church. And they had assisted in the launch of the city’s only worker-owned and democratically operated bike shop—Baltimore Bicycle Works. Thread Coffee was in a good hands.

Five years after incubating with Red Emma’s, Thread moved into its own roasting space and café inside the Open Works building in 2017. The same year, Food and Wine named them Maryland’s “Best Coffee.”

“We got to see how Red Emma’s functioned from the inside as a worker-cooperative, how they developed consensus around decision-making,” McKeel says. “That was a crucial learning experience.”

In today’s Amazon-dominated, e-sales-driven book industry, if Red Emma’s had done nothing else beyond survive for the past decade and a half, it would be a remarkable achievement. Instead, it has evolved into a community hub and indispensable institution, hosting nationally renowned writers, activists, artists, and educators. They’ve organized the Radical Bookfair Pavilion, part of the Baltimore Book Festival, for more than a decade, attracting the likes of Amy Goodman, Amiri Baraka, and Ralph Nader.

They were the first to publish New York Times best-selling Baltimore author D. Watkins in print, putting his viral essay “Too Poor for Pop Culture” together with other work into a zine format. They’ve provided a platform for acclaimed local photographer Devin Allen and the city’s award-winning youth poets from DewMore. Last summer, they moved back to Mount Vernon into a 9,000-square-foot building on Cathedral Street that once served as home to a jazz club run by Baltimore legend Ethel Ennis. In the process, they’ve grown from a handful of worker-owners to a payroll of almost 30 people, all making a sustainable wage.

But the thing those at Red Emma’s are probably most proud of, co-founder John Duda says, is the something they’re less known for: how their inclusive, non-hierarchical project has helped spark and support a whole movement of worker cooperatives in Baltimore. “When we started, there was zero local guidance and zero local support for anyone trying to imagine how to own and run a business democratically,” Duda says. “We found ourselves not only figuring things out as we went along, but fielding lots of demand from people trying to follow in our footsteps.”

Beyond launching 2640, working with Thread, and their early advising role with Baltimore Bicycle Works, which recently opened a second shop in Belvedere Square, the Red Emma’s team has helped beloved ice cream makers Taharka Brothers in their ongoing shift to employee-ownership. They’ve assisted the immigrant women at the Mera Kitchen Collective—who hold pop-up events around the city and sell their international dishes at JFX Farmer’s Market—as well as the returning citizens at Core Staffing and the vegan food activists at Greener Kitchen.

In turn, those experiences, along with their own struggles raising capital from traditional banks, helped those at Red Emma’s understand the key role of cooperative-friendly finance. Eventually, it all led to the formation of the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), which has now gone on to deploy close to $700,000 in “non-extractive” loans—loans paid back as a percentage of profits—to local worker cooperatives. When Duda and fellow Red Emma’s co-founder Kate Khatib (they married in 2015) arrived in Baltimore in 2003 to pursue PhDs in Intellectual History at Johns Hopkins University, they hadn’t thought about becoming, much less bankrolling, a new breed of entrepreneur. That’s what has happened, however.

“I think we got increasingly serious about the business the longer we were around, and as people started to take us more seriously,” chuckles Khatib after a recent packed house for a Q&A with D. Watkins and Baltimore Beat editor Lisa Snowden-McCray. “I can’t say we saw this coming or it was planned,” adds Khatib, who works half-time at Red Emma’s while also serving as BRED’s executive director.

“Probably half of us thought Red Emma’s would last a year on St. Paul Street and then we’d go on to something else.”

BRED’s first loan, $15,000 to Taharka Brothers, helped them get their famously neon pink ice cream truck repaired in time for the summer of 2016. A second loan enabled them to open their new scoop shop at the renovated Broadway Market. Another loan helped Thread finance a larger capacity coffee roaster to meet growing demand. BRED loans also allowed The Greener Kitchen to purchase equipment for a production facility and rental kitchen, and assisted Core Staffing with working capital to better serve its members.

“Red Emma’s is the poster child for worker-owned businesses, and we turned to them and BRED during what was a tumultuous time for us,” says Sean Smeeton, a Taharka Brothers co-founder. “We had an offer from an investor, but they wanted 51 percent of the business and control of the decision-making process. We didn’t want that. We wanted to empower the young black men that work for Taharka to become entrepreneurs.”

Darius Wilmore, Taharka Brothers’ creative director, adds Red Emma’s did a lot more than facilitate a loan, assisting in the technical work of restructuring the business. In particular, Khatib and Ro McIntyre, another former Red Emma’s worker-owner and BRED co-founder, “spent so much time at our building in Clipper Mill, guiding us, they practically worked here part-time,” Wilmore says. (“We did it for the ice cream,” McIntyre jokes later, “which is great.”)

As Red Emma’s has become a model for local cooperatives and others around the country—Firestorm Books & Coffee in Asheville, North Carolina, and Wooden Shoe Books and Records in Philadelphia, to name two—the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy has provided a template for a national network of similar loan funds, called Seed Commons. Baltimore is not alone in seeing its worker cooperative ecosystem grow in recent years. Cities including New York, Madison, Minneapolis, Oakland, Berkeley, Austin, and Cleveland have also begun to integrate worker cooperative support into their economic development strategies. (Briefly defined: Worker-owned co-ops are values-based enterprises that prioritize worker and community benefit. Workers are represented in leadership and manage the day-to-day through various management structures.)

“We turned to Red Emma’s and BRED during . . . a tumultuous time for us.”

In fact, the City of Baltimore recently awarded a potentially significant $47,000 Community Catalyst Grant to BRED to pilot a worker-cooperative “conversion” pipeline. That grant, operated in concert with the Baltimore Development Corporation, is designed to assist retiring business owners in transitioning ownership, if so inclined, to their employees. The “silver tsunami” of Baby Boomer retirements could cost Baltimore thousands of jobs if the children of those business owners, for example, don’t wish to take over those enterprises.

Given the cooperative ecosystem here, Duda says, owners may begin to realize that it’s becoming easier to retire “through an exit to workplace democracy” and more satisfying, in terms of their legacy, than selling to an equity fund that may kill off the business. Again, it’s not just Baltimore. Recognizing the possible dissolution of millions of small businesses, Congress in 2018 passed the Main Street Ownership Act to smooth the finance of business sales to employees. (Pointing to their own legacy, Red Emma’s will help host the biennial three-day Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy, presented by the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, at the University of Baltimore School of Law in mid-October.)

“Cooperatives take a while to get going, but the process of converting existing businesses should be a faster,” says Kristin Dawson, of the quasi-public Baltimore Development Corporation. Dawson and others note marginalized, low-income groups, often including immigrants, women, minorities, and the queer community—in other words, those without access to traditional capital—stand to benefit from the cooperative financing model.

Not that anyone expects to get rich from working at a cooperative. Baltimore Bicycle Works founder Josh Keogh’s salary was roughly $35,000 before he left after nine years for a position at the Arts & Ideas Sudbury School. The job came with health benefits, however, and given the seasonal nature of the business, 10 weeks vacation. “It’s a normal bike shop in a lot of ways, except all decisions are made in an open and transparent way, and we didn’t have the seasonal ups and downs of hiring people and then laying them off,” Keogh says. Nor should anyone believe working in a cooperative business is easier than working in a more typically structured business. Building consensus around decision-making is, by nature, a cumbersome process.

That said, studies show co-ops are often more productive than traditional enterprises. Equally important, they can prove transformative for work-owners. Whitney Jones, who’s been in the front of the house at Red Emma’s for three years, didn’t believe being part owner of a successful business was even a possibility for her.

“I grew up a black and trans woman in Baltimore, and there are a lot things, like the opportunity to run a business and grow that Red Emma’s offered, you are locked out of, especially because I’d been homeless at points in my life,” Jones says. “Working here, because people know it’s a safe space, now I have a chance to be a resource for other girls who may be struggling.

“I don’t have plans to go anywhere,” Jones adds. “I’m invested, and when I invest in something, it means I intend to be in for the long haul.”

Not By The Numbers

Preston Street
September 16

“I know the next performer  because he’s staying at my house—we’re volunteer-run,” host M.C. Schmidt tells the packed house at the 19th-annual High Zero festival before introducing improvisational guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui. “He’s from Beirut and so today, I explained Juggalos,” Schmidt continues, referencing fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse, who had recently made headlines.

One of the largest experimental music festivals in the U.S., High Zero was launched by John Berndt and a cadre of enthusiasts who began hosting shows at Normal’s Books and Records in the ’90s. As in the past, the four-day festival attracts some of the world’s finest experimental musicians, including Sehnaoui, who doesn’t pick his guitar—which sits across his legs—but taps it, like a percussion instrument, with small metal mallets to build shimmering vibrations.

Sehnaoui’s set is followed by a five-person improvisational effort, featuring nationally acclaimed Baltimore composer Dan Deacon, who has reconfigured a piano to play robotically from his laptop. Joining Deacon are a Maine-based voice artist (not a singer) with the nom de guerre Id M Theft Able, Japanese guitar player Kazuhisa Uchhashi, New York drummer Eli Keszler, and Baltimore dancer Lynn Price. Their strange sounds, along with Able’s disquieting vocals and Price’s, at times, fraught movement, create something that resonates like an aurally dark dream. 

“I feel like my unconscious is going to be messed up for a week,” an audience member whispers afterward. 

Following a brief intermission, Chicago cellist Tomeka Reid and London pianist Tania Chen produce some of the most beautiful and weighted music of the evening, albeit with Chen occasionally banging away at her instrument in frenetic passion with different parts of her body.

Not every set clicks, acknowledges saxophonist Andrew Bernstein. When it does, however, the result can be revelatory. “I can’t describe it,” Bernstein says. “Experimental music doesn’t really translate into language. I guess the best way to put it is that it gives sound to things we don’t have words for.”

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Get It Together

Putty Hill Avenue
September 10

The giant inflatable guitar at the entrance to the Putty Hill Shopping Center is hard to miss, as is the sea of baby boomers, in a mix of Ravens gear and throwback concert T-shirts, dancing in the parking lot to a cover of “Something in the Air” by 1969 one-hit wonder Thunderclap Newman.

We’ve got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here, and you
know it’s right.

Welcome to Parkville’s fifth-annual Stanstock, the brainchild of 62-year-old former saxophone player Stan Gibson, whose previous claim to fame was sharing a stage with John Denver in 1971 on WBAL’s Kerby Scott Show. For the past two days and nights, hundreds of middle-aged Baltimore rockers have been partying and reminiscing inside McAvoy’s Sports Bar & Grill—and outside in the lot-turned-concert-venue—to tunes from popular local bands of decades past.

“Stan could play the sax like you never heard before in your life,” says former bandmate Ronnie Malvaso, standing next to Gibson during a break. “When he kicked in, we wanted to stop and listen.”

Because of a neurological birth defect that eventually forced him into a wheelchair, Gibson had to give up playing as a relatively young man. Struggling in recent years simply to attend live music events and nearly paralyzed today, Gibson started a Facebook page—Baltimore Bands from the 70’s 80’s 90’s—to keep in touch with his musician pals and friends. That effort morphed into Stanstock, which has hosted, among others, old-school Baltimore favorites such as Crack the Sky, Face Dancer, and the Rayvns.

Not that everyone here was a hard-rock fan back in the day. “We were disco queens,” laughs Debbie Mowry, swaying alongside 60-something girlfriends.

The groups play for free, Gibson notes, with net proceeds—more than $55,000 over the first four years—going to charity.  

“My family told me doing this would kill me,” says Gibson, strugglng to speak audibly. “But it’s what keeps me going.”

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One-Track Mind

Falls Road
September 11

Two years after graduating from the Maryland Institute of College of Art in 2011, Cary Gray hopped on a unicycle and took off for South America, attempting to break the world record for the longest trip ever on a single-wheel, pedal machine.

“I did, too,” Gray recalls before his talk this afternoon at Baltimore Bicycle Works. “I’d broken the record when I got to Columbia [with the help of a kayak] and was going to double it by reaching Argentina when my bag—with my GoPro, GPS, passport, and witness signatures to prove to Guinness I’d set a new record—were stolen. I couldn’t document what I’d done.

“I flew home. I had to let it go.”

Along the way, he tells the small crowd of bike-camping soon-to-bes that the Mexican people, in particular, were hospitable. “So friendly, I was overwhelmed. Aggressively friendly.” He adds, however, he did briefly fear for his life once in Mexico when an armed farmer approached him while he was camping. “He was protecting his property; it was an area with a lot of drug trafficking,” he says. “The unicycle diffused a couple of situations.”

Since those initial 11,000-plus miles, he’s ridden an additional 10,000 miles through 30 states and 11 countries, planning to tackle other unicycling records now. At 28, he admits his parents wonder when he will begin a “real” career. Gray insists he already has, self-publishing a children’s book, Luno!, which he illustrated with his feet for fun, and a non-fiction e-book for adults called The Naked Unicyclist, which chronicles his tire punctures, bouts of extreme dehydration, and food poisoning, along with other mishaps and joys. “The title is a metaphor,” Gray says, with a smile. “It’s about being vulnerable and open to the world.”

Someone asks if he felt like quitting. 

“Yeah. And I did. Several times.” Gray responds. “Usually when I was cold, wet, tired, and hungry in the middle of nowhere. The problem was that I still had to get somewhere dry, get somewhere to eat. Then I’d feel better and forget I had quit.”