Baltimore’s unique farmers market culture is one of the many reasons we’re lucky to call the area home. Not only do the seasonal pop-up events make Maryland-grown goods accessible to all (many, including the big Baltimore Farmers Market beneath the JFX, accept SNAP and WIC benefits), they’re also a means of fostering community.

A mid-morning stroll around the tents is the perfect opportunity to meet your neighbors, find your new favorite weekend treat, and chat with the purveyors who are directly responsible for filling your fridge. Perhaps the best part? You walk away—full totes in hand, ready for the week ahead—knowing that you supported local.

As the weather gets warmer, consult our ultimate roundup of the region’s best farmers markets—complete with dates, times, and vendor details—to plan out your next haul.

32nd Street Farmers Market

Saturdays, year-round. Corner of E. 32nd & Barclay Sts. 7 a.m.–12 p.m.

This fan-favorite Saturday morning gathering in Waverly is one of few markets that operates year-round, but it always welcomes a few new faces just in time for the spring season. Be sure to pick up staples from the region’s best growers and makers, like treats from La Bohemia Bakery, kombucha from Hex Ferments, meats from Liberty Delight Farms, and produce from the Farm Alliance of Baltimore. 

Baltimore Farmers Market

Sundays through Dec. 20. Corner of Holliday and Saratoga Sts. 7 a.m.-12 p.m. 

The city’s massive farmers market under I-83 returns for its 49th season with a full lineup of farmers, food businesses, and artisans (think: local clothing line Love More Bmore and homegrown sticker queen Erin Dayhaw) booked every weekend through December. Come for market classics such as fruit from Agriberry Farm, funghi from The Mushroom Stand, and Migues Mini donuts. (Be sure to line up early for that last one!)

Back again this year, the market is offering quiet shopping hours from 7-9:30 a.m. to provide a sensory-friendly environment for those preferring a laid-back shopping experience. Then, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, expect the regular hustle and bustle to resume rain or shine.

BMI Farmers Market

Saturdays, May 16-Nov 21. 1415 Key Hwy. 9 a.m.-1 p.m.

A stroll around the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s open-air market in South Baltimore, with its iconic view of the Domino Sugar sign, is an ideal way to start the weekend. The vendor list for this year is still being finalized, but expect plenty of Maryland-grown produce, oven-fresh bread, bright flowers, ready-to-eat treats, and artisan creations.

Catonsville Farmers Market

Every Wednesday starting 5/6: 9 a.m.-12 p.m. (Check Facebook for weekly updates.) 5820 Edmondson Ave., Catonsville.

This community get-together has been a staple in Catonsville since 2002. Stop by the Christian Temple on Edmondson Avenue for eggs, meats, vegetables, perennial flowers, and handmade breads and pastries. Participating purveyors rotate frequently (check Facebook for weekly lineups) but have included well-knowns like Broom’s Bloom Dairy and Andy’s Eggs and Poultry.

Fells Point Farmers Market

Saturdays through April 25: 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. May 2-Dec. 19.: 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Corner of Broadway & Thames Sts.

Grabbing a Zeke’s Coffee to sip while you wander around this Broadway Square fixture is a Saturday morning well-spent, if you ask us. Local farmers and regional vendors fill the brick plaza, touting everything from produce and pickles to local honey and smoked fish. Expect favorite faces like Albright Farms, Cane Collective, and Soul Smoked BBQ.

Govans Farmers Market

Wednesdays, June-November. 5104 York Rd. 3-6 p.m. 

This vibrant Northeast Baltimore market serves a number of surrounding neighborhoods—which lack access to community grocery stores—with its mid-week gatherings in the safety department parking lot of Loyola University’s Evergreen Campus. Make it a destination for fresh produce and herbs from local growers such as Parkton’s Oxbow Farm and White Hall’s Stoecker Farms. Other treats include fresh-pressed juices and lemonades, baked goods, and food truck fare.

Hereford Farmers Market

Saturdays, May 9-November 21. 17301 York Road, Parkton. 9 a.m.-12 p.m.

Head north to Hereford High School in the rolling hills of Monkton for finds such as fresh produce from Tommy’s Peppers and artisan bread from Bowbread. There are also guest vendors, grab-and-go eats, and local bands to look forward to every weekend.

Mt. Washington Farmers Market

Sundays through Nov. 23. 2101 West Rogers Ave. 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

This market’s mission is to bring together producers and artists from within a 100-mile radius of Baltimore City. Spend your Sundays mingling with small businesses in the historic area, browsing everything from fresh coffee and honey to handmade pasta and artisanal breads. Previous participants have included Dear Globe Coffee Roasters, Bmore Poultry and Plants, and BMore Pasta.

Overlea Farmers Market

Every other Saturday, June 6-October 24. (See specific dates, here.) St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church. 8 W. Overlea Ave. 8:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Celebrating its 11-year anniversary this season, this small market in Northeast Baltimore provides its tight-knit community with fresh produce and protein throughout the warm-weather months. Every other Saturday, support local growers with the purchase of baked goods, coffee, local honey, jams, and olive oils. There’s also special activity table for kiddos to get in on the fun, too.

Pikesville Farmers Market

Tuesdays, May 5-November 24. Pikesville Armory. 640 Reisterstown Rd. 2-6 p.m.

Now settled at its new home at the Pikesville Armory, this annual market organized by the Greater Baltimore Chamber of Commerce sells everything from fruits and veggies to meat, eggs, dairy, bread, and hot prepared foods. Extra goodies include jams, jellies, honey, and pastries. The new setting is perfect for picnics, so bring a blanket and stay a while to enjoy your finds on the lawn.

Pratt Street Market

Thursdays, May-October. Corner of Pratt & Light Sts. 11 a.m.-2 p.m. 

Downtown Partnership’s weekly lunch market at Pratt & Light Street Plaza is a great way for commuters (and remote workers!) to spend their break outside, taking in the skyline views. Expect a rotating lineup of food trucks, plus farm-fresh stands and artisans hawking their scratch-made goods.

Reisterstown Farmers Market

Sundays, June 7-September 27. 120 Main Street, Reisterstown. 9 a.m.-1 p.m.

Head to Franklin Middle School to support sustainable agriculture by stocking up on local fruits, veggies, and flowers at this weekly pop-up shop. Plus, look out for new additions to your beer and wine fridge, handcrafted jewelry from local makers, and natural wellness products.

Towson Farmers Market

Thursdays, June 4-Nov. 19. Allegheny & Washington Aves. 10:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Located in the heart of downtown Towson, this veteran market is a county favorite for its host of local farmers and food trucks throughout the summer and fall. Shoppers can expect fresh produce, scratch-made goods, and plenty of tasty lunch-break options.

Additional reporting by Mia Resnicow and Brenny Tichy

In 1913, when Anna C. and Henry A. Schenk purchased a lot from the C. Mueller Building Company on Fait Avenue in what was then Baltimore County’s Highlandtown, they looked forward to having a new home, for themselves and their future children. The Schenks couldn’t have imagined that, 112 years later, family members would continue to live in that very same dwelling, in an area of Baltimore City now known as Brewers Hill.

In July of 1976, Mary Lou Hennigan, née Schenk, purchased the home from her two aunts and an uncle, who had inherited the residence when their mother—Hennigan’s grandmother, Anna—died. (Hennigan’s mother, Mary Matthew, had predeceased her own mother, Anna, so the remaining children became the owners.)

“The C. Mueller Building Company was developing consecutive blocks of two-story brick rowhouses in the area—noted for their Classical Revival style. The building company built high-quality, affordable homes for working-class immigrant communities at that time. Each house had a stylish stained-glass transom above the door and the first-floor window,” reads Hennigan, 76, from paperwork left by her grandparents.

“I grew up here, and my children grew up here,” she says. “It’s just a nice place.”

Hennigan, who has spent nearly all her life in the home, found out about the Baltimore Centennial Homes Program when she was talking with a neighbor.

“We were talking about the age of the houses, and she mentioned the program,” says Hennigan, who raised two sons in the home and still lives there with her husband, John. “I saw that a neighbor up the street from us had a plaque saying their home was a Centennial one, and I just thought it was a neat thing to do.”

After Hennigan interviewed with someone at Baltimore Heritage, which runs the program, and provided the necessary documents, her home was accepted. Members from the organization hung the plaque on the outside of her home in 2018. It reads: Centennial Home. Schenk, Matthew, and Hennigan family. Brewers Hill. Baltimore City since 1913. Designated 2018.

Hennigan couldn’t be prouder. “It makes me feel good. I like the neighborhood,” she says. “I think it was nice that the house stayed in the family, because not many do.”

LITTLE OLD LADIES
According to Johns Hopkins (yes, that’s his real name), the executive director of Baltimore Heritage, the Baltimore Centennial Homes Program started because of good old-fashioned door-knocking.

When Jim Kraft was running for the District 1 city council seat in the early 2000s, he was going door-to-door in neighborhoods such as Brewers Hill, Butchers Hill, Fells Point, Canton, and others in the district. Hopkins says the two would often cross paths.

“After he got elected, he said to me, ‘When I was running, I would go knocking on doors and talk to people. A lot of those who answered were proverbial little old ladies who would tell me that their families had been in their house for 100 years. Is there any way we can say thank-you to them? Their families have been part of the anchors of their neighborhoods for literally a century.’”

Hopkins thought Kraft’s idea sounded cool. But he admits he had no idea whether a program existed nationally that honored families in this way.

The Baltimore Heritage staff began digging and discovered that a number of states have what are called Centennial Farm Programs—they acknowledge farms that have been in the same family for more than 100 years—but they couldn’t find anything equivalent being done in a city.

“We decided to take that concept and apply it to an urban neighborhood. That’s how the Baltimore Centennial Homes Program began,” says Hopkins. “One of Baltimore’s greatest assets is its historic communities. It’s not only the buildings, but really the people. That strong sense of neighborhood connection for generations is something that sets Baltimore apart, and our program is one way to help boost that.”

THE FIRST HONOREE
John Pente of Little Italy was the owner of the first home honored by the program. Along with being a Little Italy fixture, Pente was famous for allowing neighborhood organizers to put a film projector in his third-floor bedroom window, which started the Annual Little Italy Film Festival, held on Friday nights in the summer in the private parking lot of Da Mimmo restaurant.

It was especially fitting that Pente was given the Centennial plaque during his own 100th birthday year—and right before one of the movies.

Although the program now has 18 homes that have been recognized, Pente was special because he is, to date, the only person who actually lived in the honored home for 100 years—barring the time he served in the military. Pente passed away in July 2010.

So far, the home that is known to be owned the longest by the same family is that owned by the Crane and Buccheri families in Hollins Market. The house was purchased by Walter J. and Mary Crane in 1891, so that’s 134 years.

In the past, Baltimore Heritage would install a plaque on the family’s house. During COVID, the price skyrocketed from $200 to $700, which is out of the nonprofit’s price range. Hopkins says they give certificates, and if the family purchases the plaque, they will install it.

“We’d love to have a sponsor so that we can buy them for people again,” says Hopkins wistfully.

GET WITH THE PROGRAM
The rules for the Baltimore Centennial Homes Program are pretty simple. Your house needs to have been owned and lived in continuously for at least 100 years by people within the same family. You don’t get credit for owning the home and renting it to someone else—unless that person is a relative.

Eligible family members to own the home include children, siblings, nephews and nieces, cousins, stepchildren, adopted children, and spouses.

“We think of the word family as a big idea. If you’re family, you’re family,” Hopkins says.

But you also have to prove it. Baltimore Heritage will interview people applying, but the owner also needs to submit documentation that is proof of ownership, including deeds, tax records, copies of sales documents, census data, and other documents that show both ownership as well as dates of ownership.

CONTINUING A LEGACY
On Hollen Road in the Bellona-Gittings neighborhood, the last name Bauer has been well-known for more than 100 years. In 1897, Fred C. Bauer founded the Fred C. Bauer Florist. He purchased a home at 188 Hollen Road in 1911, while he operated his business and raised a family. In 1927, his son and daughter-in-law, William F. and Edyth C. Bauer, took over ownership of the home until 1986, when their granddaughter, Linda, became the owner.

At one point, five of the 10 homes on Hollen Road were owned by members of the Bauer family. Thelma Bauer and her nephew, Frederick Sisson, ran the flower shop until they closed the business when Bauer was 90.

Upon Linda’s death in 2022, she left the home to her niece, Lindsey Bauer, 46, and her wife, Marannie Rawls-Philippe, 43. The couple was so thrilled to keep the tradition going that, in June of 2024, they uprooted their lives and moved to Baltimore from New Haven, Connecticut, where they had been living for 14 years, with their two sons, Lucien, 11, and Etienne, 6. Their home became part of the Baltimore Centennial Homes Program in December of that year.

Bauer first found out about the program through a next-door neighbor, who had heard about it on WYPR. Her dad, William Bauer III, passed away in 2011, two years before her eldest son was born. Although he was raised in Towson, he often came back to the neighborhood to visit his grandparents and other relatives.

“My kids don’t know their grandfather on the Bauer side. So, part of the reason my wife and I decided to move here is because of that legacy. This is where my great-grandparents lived for 60 years of their lives, and it was where my grandfather grew up,” she says. “It pains me that my children didn’t get to know my dad. But at least they can play in the same places where he did as a child growing up.”

And it’s even more than that. “I want my children to know the importance of this home,” says Bauer. “Even though our ancestors are no longer with us, the legacy still lives on.”

On a cloudy morning in April, Yul Foster steps out of a shed in his backyard with a pigeon in each hand. These delicate gray birds are the best in Foster’s loft, giving him the strongest chance at winning in the competitive flying season that starts in a few weeks.

His sweatshirt flecked with pigeon droppings, Foster explains that the pair of sisters he’s holding grew up in the same nest last year and only like to fly as a pair, which poses a problem, because it takes at least three pigeons to make a “kit” that flies together for competition.

“They’re in sync with each other,” he says. “They got the same pattern, the same wing beat.”

Foster cradles the pigeons gently, their feet dangling between his fingers and their wings tucked under his thumbs. They’re a dusky color that pigeon men call “dun,” sort of a faded version of the classic city pigeon you see pecking at crumbs on the sidewalk. Today he’s chosen a third young bird to try and keep up with the sisters in a training flight.

Shortly before noon, all three take off together, their powerful wings pulling them in big, looping circles over Foster’s rowhouse in Allendale. Foster stands in the center of his yard, his head tilted skyward. For the next few hours, we stand there together, our necks aching as the birds soar a thousand feet above us.

This is the life of a pigeon man—an increasingly rare breed in Baltimore these days, though their lofts once dotted alleys all across the city. Decades ago, Baltimore’s pigeon fanciers could take their pick of social clubs with dozens of members. Kids who were interested in pigeons hung around one of the feed stores in the city and eavesdropped on the older men to pick up pointers, and homing pigeon race results sometimes made the sports pages.

These days, a handful of small pigeon clubs are trying to keep the sport alive as it is battered by a resurgence of predatory birds, rising prices, and lack of interest from the next generation.

Foster, 63, is the central timer in a local pigeon club, so he organizes the flying schedule and trains his birds when he’s not working 12-hour shifts as a patient-care technician. He devotes precious weekends to the 80 pigeons in his loft and fellow members of the Baltimore United Tippler Club. But he’s not exactly optimistic when I ask about the future of the sport.

“We diehard pigeon guys, we don’t want to give up,” he says. “We want to hang in there just as long as we possibly can and keep going with it, because if it’s not us, there are no more younger people coming into the sport to keep it going.”

“WE DIEHARD PIGEON GUYS, WE DON’T WANT TO GIVE UP.”

Growing up near Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1970s, it seemed everybody in the neighborhood had pigeons, Foster tells me. At 11 years old, he and friends began catching wild pigeons around Monument Street and keeping the birds in whatever they could find: first, a hollowed-out television set with a fan grate stuck on the front, then wooden fruit baskets from Northeast Market. Once, his mother caught him keeping pigeons in his bedroom.

“I was pigeon crazy,” Foster says.

He built something resembling a real coop when he was 13, after thieves came through and stole his pigeons out of a shoddy structure he’d been using to house them. (Pigeon theft was once a huge problem, fanciers tell me, though the issue sometimes resolved itself when perpetrators let their new pigeons out to fly and the birds followed their homing instinct back to their real owner’s yard.)

Foster studied books about pigeons at the Patterson Park library and used the money he made delivering The Baltimore Sun to buy birds from the famous old feed store at Fleet and South Ann streets in Fells Point. You could get a good starter pigeon for $2.50.

“It has to be in your blood,” Foster says. “It’s been with me since I was a little boy.”

Baltimore was well-known for its pigeon culture, and the pigeon men here were seen as experts in the sport, says August Hohman, who races birds out of a loft at his brother’s house in Baltimore County. Hohman’s father and uncles were pigeon men in Baltimore as far back as the 1930s, raising birds on Patterson Park Avenue. One of his uncles was the race secretary for the Monumental City Concourse Association, once the largest club in the city. That same uncle served in World War II and helped care for military carrier pigeons. Now 61, he still flies racing “homers” and keeps a variety of other pigeons with his brother.

Hohman and Foster, who grew up in the same neighborhood and have known each other since they were boys, often get together to “pigeon mumble,” the term for when pigeon guys get together to talk shop.

Hohman’s racing homers, as the name suggests, are trained to get back to their home loft as quickly as possible, sometimes flying hundreds of miles in just a few hours. On a race day, pigeons from different lofts are all released together from the same location—often in Virginia or further south, since race distances can range from 100 to 600 miles—and fly home, where an electronic clock records what time they got back.

Pigeons are incredible athletes, with lightweight bodies and prominent breast muscles that allow them to fly for hours at a time, sometimes reaching 60 miles per hour, without stopping. But it’s their ability to find home that has made them useful to humans for millennia.

Pigeons delivered the results of the first Olympic games in 776 B.C.E.; they helped Paul Julius Reuter establish his news service in 1850; and they saved hundreds of lives in World War I and World War II by flying messages through gunfire when radios failed.

The pigeon’s homing instinct has been sharpened over thousands of years of selective breeding, explains Verner Bingman, a professor at Bowling Green State University who studies animal navigation.

“Any bird is a good navigator,” he says. “What makes homing pigeons special is the depth of their fidelity to their loft.”

Pigeons are so attached to home they sleep on the same perch in their loft each night. And a good pigeon man knows where to find each of the birds in his coop, even in the dark.

How pigeons find home is a tougher question. It’s generally agreed that pigeons can identify directions, like north and south, using the position of the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field, according to Bingman. But to find home from the middle of nowhere, you also need to be able to figure out your position relative to where you want to go.

While there’s disagreement among experts about how pigeons do this, research has convinced Bingman that they parse different smells in the atmosphere to determine where they are and how to travel toward home. That smell “map” gets pigeons close enough to home that they can rely on a sophisticated visual map of the landscape surrounding their loft that they build over many flights.

The local, visual map allows Hohman’s pigeons to fly the distance from the former Key Bridge to his brother’s house in Rosedale in 20 minutes, for example. The smell map is how they find their way back to Baltimore during a race from Georgia.

“IT HAS TO BE IN YOUR BLOOD. IT’S BEEN WITH ME SINCE I WAS A LITTLE BOY.”

An hour into the training flight in April, Foster’s young pigeons are flying well. The sisters are sticking together and the third bird is staying with them, though starting to falter. It’s a good showing for their first flight of the year, Foster says.

“That’s the job as a trainer,” he tells me. “I have to get a third bird that’s on the same page as them.”

Foster’s focus has always been tipplers, a breed of pigeons slightly smaller than racing homers, whose primary strength is endurance—the duration they stay in the air—rather than distance or speed. Instead of racing home from hundreds of miles away, tipplers stay in the airspace near their loft and fly for up to nine or 10 hours or more while their owner and a contest judge watch from the ground below.

Suddenly, Foster sees something: “That’s the falcon,” he says, pointing at a fast-moving bird. “See him? That’s a predator.”

The falcon is heading in the same direction we last saw the sisters flying. “It might be going at them.”

There’s nothing he can do. And we can’t see the sisters. Hoping to at least bring home the third pigeon that broke off from the others, Foster releases a “dropper,” a plump white pigeon that the other birds have been trained to associate with feeding time. Once a tippler lands, it must be back in its loft within an hour or its flying time won’t qualify; the dropper signals it’s time to eat, encouraging the tippler to get home quickly.

We watch as the dropper and the third pigeon slowly make their way back to the loft, keeping half an eye on the sky for the sisters.

Peregrine falcons and Cooper’s hawks are the main threats to pigeons in the sky, and they are more abundant now than in recent decades, thanks, in large part, to the banning of the pesticide DDT in 1970s. But in raw numbers, there aren’t many falcons flying over Baltimore. Most likely, just a handful.

Still, predators are on the mind of every pigeon fancier who lets his birds out to fly. Some lose dozens of birds each season, which might explain why pigeon men talk about the local falcons like familiar antagonists.

Pigeon men see other new obstacles to the sport as well: The city began requiring pigeon coop permits in 2007 and  limits the number of birds a fancier can keep to 125. There are also no feed stores in the city anymore, so pigeon men have to look elsewhere for the specialty supplies they use to keep their birds healthy.

Greg Campbell, the secretary of the Baltimore United Tippler Club, has tried to fill that gap by starting monthly Swap and Sell meetups near the entrance to the Baltimore Cemetery on North Avenue. Known as “Soup,” because of his last name, and also “the Professor,” because of his deep knowledge of pigeons, Campbell often wears multiple pieces of BUTC merch, including a hat with three pigeons on it that reads “Brotherhood, Featherhood.” There are also “Sisterhood, Featherhood” hats for women, he assures me.

Campbell talks with local pigeon men to gauge their needs and develop feed blends for their birds. Pigeons love dried peas, and their feed might also include safflower, wheat, or soybeans. Pigeon men carefully look after their birds’ health, giving them probiotics, administering vaccinations, and inspecting their droppings for signs of illness.

Despite a rep as “rats with wings,” pigeons are no dirtier than any other wild animal, and some studies have found they are resistant to avian flu.

Campbell’s loft in Lauraville is intensely organized. His pigeons are separated by lineage so that he can carefully choose the backgrounds of the birds he wants to breed. Some of his birds are descended from the loft of Harry Shannon, a celebrated Irish tippler man who died in 2019.

Like most pigeon men, Campbell knows the lineage of each bird going back generations (some still use notebooks to track family trees, while others now use specialty apps). He sells birds to other fanciers for $50 or more, depending on their breeding.

After a tour of Campbell’s loft, he sets up metal folding chairs in his driveway and we settle in to watch the tipplers he released that morning. Other guys stop by over the course of the morning to pigeon mumble, including talking a little trash and rehashing old pigeon-related grievances.

“It’s like being around a bunch of fathers,” says Clavon Smith, who at 40 is one of the youngest members of the BUTC. “They’re very knowledgeable. They keep you humble.”

Smith is trying to use social media to raise awareness of the sport today. He produces YouTube videos to promote BUTC, document Baltimore’s pigeon community, and teach others how he works with his birds. The club’s YouTube presence is a sign that even older pigeon men can adapt to newer times, Campbell says, and will leave a record of pigeon culture for the future.

“We might not be here no more, but somebody can look back years from now and see what these guys been doing.”

Across town in Curtis Bay, members of the Baltimore Pigeon Fanciers Social Club still host races and bird auctions in likely the last physical clubhouse for pigeon men in the city. Years ago, the club’s 70 or so members used the building as a social hall, complete with a bar and a kitchen that served burgers, shrimp, and crab cakes.

Now the bar sits empty, the walls covered in pictures of winning pigeons and the fanciers of the 1920s and ’30s, who stood next to their lofts in suits and hats for the photos. The club’s 20 members mostly stick to the garage now, where they meet to load birds for races.

On a Saturday in May, 91-year-old Ed Seitz was pleased to see one of his birds win a 150-mile race from Virginia, flying home at more than 60 miles per hour. Seitz has tried to get young people involved in the sport, but the technology now used to track homing pigeon races can be cost prohibitive. Kids today also have more activities vying for their attention than these men did as children.

“Back then, it’s all we had,” Seitz says.

That morning’s auction only lasted a few minutes, with most of the young birds selling for $35 or so. They’re still babies, with yellow down poking from under their adult feathers, and they let out shrill, indignant peeps instead of the coos of a more mature bird. The pigeon men assess each bird’s frame and lineage before deciding how much to shell out. One particularly good bird sells for $75.

Seitz, the elder statesman here, credits his longevity to his pigeons—though he noted, at 91, he is actually the second-oldest club member. The birds helped him stay active and got him through difficult times, including the death of his first wife.

“I think the pigeons have kept me going,” he says.

By the time I left Foster’s yard on that cool April training day, we had not seen the sisters in flight for more than an hour. Meanwhile, Foster kept shaking a small can of pigeon feed to tempt the dropper and the third pigeon back into the loft. He was concerned about the sisters, his two best birds, who seemed increasingly unlikely to come home.

“In this sport, you can’t have favorites,” he tells me sagely. “They’re the ones that break your heart.”

I go home, but only after making Foster promise he will text me if the missing birds come back. Throughout my interviews for this story, pigeon men have been gently encouraging me to buy a few birds of my own and get back into fancying. (I raised a small flock of pigeons as a teenager in my backyard in Pennsylvania.) But that night, it becomes clear that I don’t have the strength to be a pigeon man.

When Foster texts to let me know that the sisters never returned, I burst into tears.

“Please don’t feel bad,” he writes. “It’s part of our sport.”

This is why many people quit. But, Foster reminds me, there are also moments—almost miracles—that keep pigeon men coming back. The next morning, another text pops up on my phone. It’s a photo of one of the missing pigeons standing quiet on top of Foster’s loft, waiting to be let inside.

We’ll never know what she went through in the sky over Baltimore, or what happened to her sister, but she’s back.

She found her way home.

he phrase “the new normal” has been thrown around since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and as America struggles to define—and design—what that is exactly, colleges are paving the way for what it might look like.

After the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, colleges and universities throughout the Baltimore region began to find their groove as they moved into the 2021-2022 school year. Coronavirus safety committees had been erected, new mandates put in place, safety protocols implemented—everything from vaccine requirements to temperature checks to quarantine procedures and wastewater testing that can pinpoint a COVID infection before anyone is symptomatic.

By some counts, colleges may very well be the safest places to live and work.

“Just following simple rules of wearing face masks and social distancing, using wastewater management and testing when we need to, we have, in many ways, been able to return to normal life,” says Goucher College President Kent Devereaux. “Full athletics, student clubs, dining in the dining hall, use of the library—everything that you’d normally have, we’ve been able to return to.”

Despite the challenges and anxieties faced by students, staff, and faculty alike, some unexpected silver linings have emerged.

“It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

The widespread adoption of technology across college campuses has proven to provide more flexibility, efficiency, and innovation—and even accessibility, in some cases. Counseling sessions, for example, began to be conducted remotely during the pandemic and many students found that they preferred it to in-person sessions. Students who cannot, for whatever reason, make it to an in-person class can now study from anywhere.

Challenging times, combined with advances in technology and the general acceptance of it, have also brought more cooperation and collaboration among schools. It’s becoming more common, for example, for schools that offer complementary programs to partner with one another to offer students an educational pathway to continue studies in their chosen areas. That may mean a discounted tuition rate, a transfer of class credits, or an internship through a partner school.

Maybe most importantly though, schools, at their best, foster an environment where students are supported, expand who they are, and connect with like-minded people. At a time when gathering together is not always safe, being in a community has become even more precious, and students have found new ways to connect.

OCA Mocha, a coffeehouse in Arbutus founded by University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) students, is one example of how effective a gathering place can be at a time when people are craving human connection. What started as a class assignment—to design a community center of some sort—has become a gathering place not just for UMBC students and alumni, but the Arbutus community at large.

“We’ve heard a lot of stories from people who are extremely grateful to have this space,” says Michael Berardi, UMBC class of 2019 and co-founder and general manager of OCA Mocha, which stands for Opportunities for Community Alliances. The coffee shop includes a stage, a community room, and an art gallery, employs UMBC students and alumni, and provides internship opportunities for current UMBC students.

“We have local groups and organizations that meet regularly in our community space and are grateful to not have to meet in someone’s living room or church basement,” says Berardi. “We see a lot of connections being made. It’s just incredible to watch how it’s grown into the vision that we, as a group of students, had.”

We checked in with colleges and universities throughout the region to find out what’s new and what campus life and classes look like, two years into the pandemic.

COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
A historically Black institution founded in 1900, Coppin State University is situated in the heart of Baltimore City in the Mondawmin neighborhood. Part of the University System of Maryland in Baltimore, the school offers 32 undergraduate and 11 graduate degrees, along with nine certificate programs and one doctorate degree. It’s been rated No. 4 Best HBCU in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Program (Online School Center), and No. 17 Best Value in the Nation (College Consensus).

In the summer of 2021, CSU announced its Student Debt Relief Initiative, which clears roughly $1 million in student balances and provided a $1,200 credit to every student enrolled in the fall 2021 semester. CSU also created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin also takes esports (competitive video gaming) seriously. In the fall of 2021, Coppin became the first HBCU to open a building on campus exclusively devoted to esports. The Premier Esports Lab opened in September with a guest appearance from Grammy-nominated artist Cordae.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,383 undergraduates, 341 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $6,809 in-state, $13,334 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 40%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, and Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

DICKINSON COLLEGE
Founded in 1783, Dickinson College is a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a suburban campus that spans 144 acres. The school offers 41 undergraduate degrees within 17 fields of study.

It’s been rated as one of the best schools in the country for its sustainability efforts, which include an 80-acre, USDA-certified organic farm. Princeton Review rated it No. 2 in the Top 50 Green Colleges, and it was rated No. 2 in Overall Top Performers among baccalaureate institutions in the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s “Sustainable Campus Index” in 2019 and 2020.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,345
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $58,708
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 52%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: International Business, Economics, Political Science & Government, International Relations & National Security, General Psychology

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
Gettysburg College, a private, liberal arts school, sits on 225 acres adjacent to the historical Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. Many of the buildings on campus are historically significant, so it’s no wonder that it draws students interested in studying history.

The school offers 65 academic programs, more than 120 campus clubs and organizations, and 800 events on campus each year, plus more than 100 study-abroad opportunities open to students.

Its Majestic Theater serves as a venue for the greater Gettysburg community, hosting national acts as well as performances by the school’s Sunderman Conservatory of Music students.

It’s ranked No. 12 for “students who study the most” by the Princeton Review, which also ranked Gettysburg College’s dining hall No. 9 in the country for best campus food.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,600
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $59,960
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 56%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Political Science, Economics, Health Sciences, Organization and Management Studies, History, Psychology

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college in Towson, Goucher College prides itself on its close-knit community.

Goucher was extremely proactive when it came to COVID-19 precautions, being the first in the state to implement wastewater testing, which is able to isolate COVID infections by dorm.

Also of note: The college recently opened two new residence halls as part of the school’s First-Year Village. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the school is committed to sustainability.

Most recently, Goucher has begun exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, and more to come, to provide a pathway for students to continue their education beyond Goucher. For instance, their 4+1 MBA Program allows students to earn an advanced business degree through Loyola via a “Fast Track” admission process, and at a 15% discount on tuition.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,000
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 79%
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Psychology, International Relations, Economics, Political Science, Business Administration

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) offers nine academic divisions and hundreds of courses of study, with campuses spread throughout Baltimore, including the Peabody Institute, a music and dance conservatory in Mount Vernon. Its main Homewood campus is located on North Charles Street.

The prestigious, world-renowned university has a strong reputation for its public health and medical studies and has been compared to Ivy League schools.

One of its points of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100% of calculated need for every admitted student, without loans. This means JHU works with families to calculate what they can afford to contribute toward the total cost of attendance—including meals, books, travel, and other expenses—and JHU covers the rest with grants that don’t need to be repaid.

This school year, JHU added two new minors: Latin American Studies and Writing Seminars.

It also announced new efforts this year to move toward a broader, more flexible undergraduate educational experience that will include a required first-year seminar and the streamlining of major requirements to allow for greater intellectual exploration.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,333 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 6:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $56,313 for Peabody Institute, $58,720 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 9%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus in northern Baltimore City. Education at Loyola is based in the Jesuit tradition of scholarship cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Loyola is known for its academic rigor while helping students lead purposeful lives. Seventy percent of students study abroad. It currently ranks fourth in best universities in the North region according to U.S. News & World Report.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,787 undergraduates, 1,353 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 80%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education.

McDANIEL COLLEGE
McDaniel College sits in a bucolic setting near Westminster in Carroll County. The private, four-year liberal arts college offers more than 70 undergraduate programs of study and more than 20 graduate programs. McDaniel’s most recent addition to its curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security as well as the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

Also new this year, McDaniel appointed an inaugural associate provost for equity and belonging who provides vision and leadership to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and works in collaboration with the provost to co-lead the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion administrative committee, and guides the Bias Education Response Support Team.

The school also launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. It hosts workshops and other events while also supplying online and hybrid support.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,757 undergraduates, 1,324 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Morgan is a public institution founded in 1867. It is situated in northeast Baltimore. As a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution, Morgan provides instruction to a multiethnic, multiracial, multinational student body and offers more than 140 academic programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, Morgan fulfills its mission to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment through intense community level study and pioneering solutions.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,270 undergraduates, 1,364 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 73%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs from undergraduate through PhD, as well as Maryland’s only women’s college. It recently launched the first master’s of art degree in Art Therapy program in the state.
The beautiful, wooded campus is just steps from the bustling downtown Baltimore culture. With values rooted in Catholicism, the school focuses on service to others and social responsibility.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 783
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $39,675
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 60 undergraduate majors and continues to draw students from other states, though it remains part of the University System of Maryland.

Its campus continues to expand, with a huge new dining hall, a 23,000-foot recreation and fitness facility with an indoor swimming pool, and its 5,200-seat arena for sporting events and concerts. In 2021, it opened its new Science Complex, the largest academic building on campus at 320,000 square feet.

In September, Towson opened its StarTUp at the Armory, a space for startups and new businesses to engage with the broader community and larger businesses. It serves as a home to Towson’s entrepreneurship programs, as well as student competitions and events.

While Towson remains the largest supplier of medical professionals and educators in the state, the university has also built a strong reputation for its College of Fine Arts and Communication, as well as its Asian Arts & Culture Center, both of which bring students into the wider community and the Baltimore community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 17,907 undergraduates, 2,949 graduates
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $7,100 in-state, $22,152 out-of-state
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
University of Maryland, Baltimore is Maryland’s only public health, law, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 86 degree and certificate programs through its six nationally ranked professional schools—dentistry, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work—and an interdisciplinary graduate school.

The school’s 14-acre BioPark is Baltimore’s biggest biotechnology cluster, employing 1,000 people, and remains on the cutting edge of new drugs, treatments, and medical devices.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 7,244
• ANNUAL TUITION: Varies by school
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE COUNTY
University of Maryland, Baltimore County educates a campus of more than 10,000 students in programs spanning the arts, engineering, information technology, humanities, sciences, preprofessional studies, and social sciences. Located on the edge of Baltimore County, it allows easy access into the city and all the conveniences of suburban life and housing. It also offers plenty of opportunities for study abroad.

In the fall of 2021, UMBC opened the Center for Well-Being, a new two-story complex that houses Retriever Integrated Health, Student Conduct and Community Standards, and i3b’s Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being. UMBC’s already significant NASA partnerships have continued to grow. In October, NASA announced a major award of $72 million over three years for the new Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research II center. UMBC is leading the national consortium and will receive over $38 million. The GESTAR II consortium will support over 120 researchers, creating extensive opportunities for breakthroughs in Earth and atmospheric science research, and providing major opportunities for students to conduct research and be mentored by NASA scientists and engineers.

• SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 13,638
• STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
• ANNUAL TUITION: $12,280 in-state, $28,470 out-of-state
• ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81%
• POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

Cited tuition costs exclude room and board and books.

[Editor’s Note: This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. An earlier version of this story, which ran in our November 2021 issue, previously appeared online.] 

Baltimore’s 190th homicide victim this year was a 64-year-old man named Vaseles Nettles. He was shot on July 19 in Forest Park, a Northwest neighbor- hood lined with single-family homes, blocks away from where many wealthier Black professionals call home. Like so many killings in Baltimore, where violence spiked in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray and has remained high, Nettles’ death attracted brief media attention before quickly fading from the news.

That said, just as police found the man’s body, the City Council considered its latest strategy in beating back the steady pace of killings and shootings: cash rewards for any information that could lead to an arrest, through a bill introduced by Councilperson Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer. “Right now the clearance rate is under 50 percent,” Schleifer says, “so you have over a 50 percent chance in Baltimore of getting away with murder.”

That Schleifer would propose cash rewards, a strategy that has limited evidence of success behind it, speaks to the city leadership’s state of desperation to tamp down violence: People are willing to try something, anything, to stop the city’s record-setting pace of homicides—more than 250 by the end of September.

Caught in the middle of the fight is new mayor Brandon Scott, the 37-year-old former council president and longtime supporter of violence interruption programs, who successfully campaigned for the city’s top job on a platform that emphasized “reimagining” public safety to rely less on police.

On the right are old, entrenched rivals like Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who told a local Fox television station reporter earlier this year that the only way for the state to help “would be to declare martial law.” Former prosecutor Thiru Vignarajah, who ran against Scott for mayor in 2020, took to Twitter to launch a salvo at Scott for what he called the failed public safety plan. There is also pressure coming from small-business owners.

But the pressure coming from the mayor’s left flank, his own base, may be the greatest threat to the still-early days of his leadership. In Baltimore, political lines are drawn in shades of blue, separating moderate Democrats, progressives, and those farther left.

Scott rose to power by tying these factions together with a central promise: to reform the Baltimore Police Department, an agency under federal consent decree, while shifting police resources to other agencies to combat the drivers of violence. Baltimore spends more per capita on policing than any major city in the country, far outpacing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and it was Scott’s pledge to make sweeping change that won over far-left voters.

His allies actively pushed the mayor to continue making cuts to the police budget, reductions he successfully lobbied for as City Council president last year. But when budget deliberations came in 2021, and Scott proposed increasing the police budget by $28 million, those same supporters became outspoken critics of the mayor.

“The mayor is no longer an ally,” Rob Ferrell, senior organizer with Organizing Black, a part of the Campaign for Justice, Safety and Jobs, says bluntly. “He is the target.”

Scott has been in office only since December. Much of his strategy to make Baltimore a safer city—growing local community-based violence interruption groups; training the entire city staff in trauma-informed care; making every agency responsible for creating a plan to address public health and violence—is in its infancy. As the homicide tally rises, and the political attacks ramp up, criticism of the mayor has the potential to make it harder for him to get the support and resources he needs to fulfill his long-term promises in the next budget cycle.

Each spring, Baltimore residents engage in a populist tradition through which they can sound off on the city budget. It’s called Taxpayers’ Night. Even as COVID-19 vaccines were rolling out, this year’s Taxpayers’ Night was virtual. And without the crowds, the chanting, the finger-pointing, the messy parts of democracy-making can sometimes lack its dramatic flair. Still, even without the usual booming voices bouncing off the marble at the city’s traditional War Memorial building setting, the rage over this year’s police budget increase spilled from more than 80 computer screens.

“It should not be possible for a moral mayor to claim he embraces the best highest possible use of precious and scarce revenue…while increasing the budget,” said Melissa Schober, a Baltimore resident, parent, and activist. She ended her spoken remarks, saying, “I regret my vote for you, Mr. Mayor.”

The mayor’s proposal to add $28 million to the police budget made supporters wonder whether they had been played. “The question for the mayor is, did you really want to [defund]?” says Ralikh Hayes, deputy director of Organizing Black, a group tied to the Movement for Black Lives. “Or was this a talking point to get votes?”

Candidate Scott’s push to defund came in a watershed year for policing and public safety, after the national uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Now that Mayor Scott has to govern, he’s left to make the case that his views and plans haven’t changed. He just needs time, he says. He says he still wants to change Baltimore from a city that relies on law enforcement into one that offers sufficient public services to address poverty, structural racism, insufficient housing, addiction, and joblessness.

That degree of change can’t happen in a single budget, he adds, but over the course of several years. “I have been consistent that reimagining public safety and the budget would not be overnight work,” Scott says.

Scott’s allies in City Hall, even those who support the idea of defunding the police, took their cues from the mayor that this was not going to be a year when the Baltimore Police Department budget would be pared back.

“I have a relationship with a mayor [Scott] who’s in a hard position,” says City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey, a consistent Baltimore Police Department critic and generally considered the 15-member council’s most progressive member.

Baltimore’s 2021-22 budget cut overall spending for services, including city public schools, while increasing police spending—and, activists note, not investing enough in sectors that could address the root causes of violence. The section of City Hall responsible for growing the violence interruption programs central to Scott’s own vision for reducing crime received a $6 million bump, but the money came mostly from state and federal grants. In justifying the proposed increases to the police budget, Scott said they were necessary to cover the city’s pension obligations and increased healthcare costs for the 2021-22 fiscal year.

Of course, Scott has another authority to answer to, beyond the electorate. Looming over any proposed cut to police spending is the 2017 federal consent decree enacted after the death of Freddie Gray prompted by a federal investigation into the department. It found that police officers were sweeping corners and engaging in racial targeting, excessive force, stop-and-frisk arrests that violated some residents’ constitutional rights. The court order requires the city to retrain its officers, upgrade its computer systems, and maintain a certain level of police presence on the streets. The oversight from the consent decree monitoring team alone costs $1.5 million each year. The Police Department’s compliance bureau costs another $38 million annually.

Critics of City Hall argue that the consent decree, and the politics around wrangling enough votes to reduce police spending, are just cover for an administration that isn’t truly committed to overhauling public safety. “You would have to be a radical and bold dude to say [expletive] the consent decree,” Ferrell says. “We now know who [Brandon Scott] is. And going against the consent decree, that’s not who he is.”

But consent decree monitor Judge James K. Bredar has warned against making drastic changes to the Police Department while it’s under the federal court order. Too severe a cut to the department could trigger legal action by the judge. “The court can levy fines against your city and you’re forced to pay,” Councilmember Zeke Cohen says.

Scott has consistently supported the reforms the consent decree calls for. This summer he met with President Joe Biden, who also supports federal interventions in local policing. “We are fully committed to the consent decree,” Scott says, “and that comes with responsibilities that we have to fund.”

Former Mayor Sheila Dixon, who was forced to resign from the office in 2010 and then also ran against Scott in 2020, knows firsthand how hard it is to balance the impulse to use police to reduce violence, and the understanding that the long-term fight against crime is about addressing social problems. Scott’s problem is not execution, she said, but communication.

While Scott says he’s been clear and realistic, Dixon says he has failed to convey the limits he would face. “I don’t make a promise I don’t keep,” she says, referring to Scott’s close work with the defund movement. “I am not going to bullshit people. Brandon knew the budget.”

As spring gave way to summer, violence in the city ratcheted up even more. Nine homicides occurred during Memorial Day weekend. By the following weekend, the largely white, affluent Fells Point neighborhood saw two separate shootings that left three men injured. The incident sparked calls from the vocal business class to demand the mayor, top city prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, and the Police Department crack down on violence and petty crimes.

Since COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed, there have been large informal gatherings in the neighborhood. Business owners have reported open-air drug sales, and in a letter signed by 37 Fells Point business owners, they claimed a “culture of lawlessness” has contributed to violence. The business owners threatened to place their taxes in escrow to punish the city if it didn’t act quickly.

The city responded by hosting a virtual meeting days after the Fells Point shooting, for which 700 people logged on to hear how the Scott administration would address the recent shootings and nuisance violations. Suggestions filled the comment section of the online gathering. Could the city “constitutionally” use stop-and-frisk? Could it set up mobile metal detectors?

Some blamed the consent decree for not allowing the police to be as tough on crime as they believed was necessary. When the comments got hot, the city disabled the chat function. But that didn’t cool the conversation. People went analog, holding up pieces of paper in front of their webcams. They asked, “Where is the mayor?”

“COPS DON’T STOP CRIME,” SAYS ROB FERRELL WITH ORGANIZING BLACK. “THEY RESPOND TO CRIME.”

Scott’s absence (he had another engagement) enraged many on the call. His supporters weren’t upset that he had missed the meeting, but that the city had agreed to host it.

The city’s response to the Fells Point violence ultimately involved more policing. Starting June 12, Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison delivered an expansion of patrols across the city. In Fells Point, the surge came with more cops on foot and in cars and helicopters. State Police and the Baltimore Sheriff’s Department also helped. In other hot spots, like Pennsylvania Avenue, in the heart of the Black community of West Baltimore, cops camped out by intersections.

But even with more police, shots were fired in Fells Point in the early morning hours of June 13. Just hours earlier, Tavon Jenkins was shot and killed blocks away from where cops had set up additional posts in West Baltimore. The incidents only intensified calls from Scott’s base that relying on police wasn’t working. “Cops don’t stop crime,” Ferrell says. “They respond to crime.”

On July 1, Safe Streets violence interrupter Kenyell Wilson was gunned down near the Cherry Hill neighborhood where he worked. Safe Streets had just celebrated a year without a single homicide at its site in Cherry Hill. Wilson’s death marked the second killing of a Safe Streets violence interrupter this year. Dante Barksdale, a close ally of the mayor, was killed in East Baltimore in January.

Scott reasserted his support for groups like Safe Streets in slowing violence in the city, but also vowed to use every resource available through the Police Department to solve Wilson’s killing.

After weeks of heated debate about the future of public safety in Baltimore, on July 23 Scott rolled out what he called a “comprehensive violence prevention plan” that would fulfill his “commitment to deliver a holistic, comprehensive approach to combat gun violence.” Scott said that community members got to shape the 32-page plan by participating in 36 listening sessions.

Highlights include the increased funding for Safe Streets. There’s also “expanded investment” in the nonprofit Roca, which focuses on interventions with at-risk youth and young adults; the city’s seven hospital-based violence intervention partnerships; and several other organizations. The plan will use American Rescue Plan Act money. Still, the city has not made a fiscal commitment to the plan beyond the federal dollars being spent this year.

The plan also calls for holding gun traffickers and straw purchasers accountable, something Scott had previously traveled to the White House to discuss, along with other crime prevention strategies, amid rising homicide rates in many cities. Additionally, it calls for expanded services to gunshot survivors, victims of domestic abuse, and people reentering society after incarceration.

“For the first time, Baltimore residents were asked what they wanted to see in a public safety strategy, and they spoke up,” said Scott in releasing the plan this July.

Overall, the plan appeared, temporarily, to quell some fears among Baltimore activists. They said—at least on social media—that Scott had not abandoned his pledge. Whether he’s ultimately successful in transforming a city known for its past mass incarceration policies and corrupt police force into a model of policing reform remains to be seen. It likely hinges on whether he reaches his stated goal of reducing shootings by 15 percent over the next five years. The city will certainly be watching.

Visit the Baltimore City and Baltimore County Board of Elections websites for more information. 

In the days since the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man who died after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer in Minneapolis last Monday, an outpouring of outrage and grief has swept the United States—from every corner of the internet to large protests in the midst of a global pandemic in dozens of cities across the country, including the streets of Baltimore.

It’s an all too familiar scene, coming on the heels of other deeply disturbing, high-profile killings of black Americans like Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and just one month after the five-year anniversary of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

From personal anecdotes to documentary footage, here are some of the responses coming out of Baltimore, as well as ways to get involved.

WAYS TO GET INVOLVED

Following Saturday’s protests in downtown Baltimore, a youth-led “Love from Baltimore to Minneapolis” demonstration will take plan on Monday, June 1, in the name of “justice for George Floyd and all victims of state violence [in] solidarity with the Minneapolis Uprising,” with a 3:30 p.m. assembly on the corner of Sharp and Pratt streets.

There are many organizations currently accepting donations such as the Official George Floyd Memorial Fund; the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which works to provide bail for jailed protesters; the Minnesota-based Black Visions Collective, a black, trans, and queer-led social justice organization; Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp that provides resources for black and brown youth; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the American Civil Liberties Union; and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others.

Local restaurants and businesses are also finding ways to get involved by fundraising for local and national organizations and non-profits. Today, Sunday, May 31, Fells Point’s Cocinas Luchadoras taco spot is donating 10 percent of all sales to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. Old Goucher’s Larder restaurant is now featuring a special waste-free duck and vegetable dish with proceeds from all orders benefitting the Minnesota Freedom Fund, as well, in addition to matching all donations submitted through their website. Motzi Bread is matching all sales of its $5 Pay It Forward loaves for donations to Reclaim The Block, a Minneapolis organization that advocates for police reform, as well as Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a Baltimore collective that works toward inclusive public policy.

Today, Charles Village’s Get Shredded Vintage shop will also be donating 25 percent of online sales to the Baltimore Action Legal Team’s community bail fund for people imprisoned under minor offenses. This week, the Remington-based B. Willow plant shop will also donate all gratuity and 10 percent of sales to the Baltimore Action Legal Team, while the Greedy Reads book store is also donating 15 percent of all sales to D.C.’s Antiracist Research & Policy Center and the Baltimore Brew.

Debra E. Hettleman’s goal is to be so successful that she’ll work herself out of a job.

She’s CEO of Building STEPS, a program that’s been in Baltimore for
20 years and identifies about 100 high school juniors annually from 15 Baltimore City public schools who have an interest
in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). It provides field trips, workshops, seminars, summer programs, in-person visits, and other resources as students apply to and attend college, then enter the workforce.

“I’d like Building STEPS to not be necessary,” Hettleman says. “I would like our education system to be so strong that the kids would get all the exposure and support they need through school.” But until we live in that world, she sees the program as “a replicable model propelling students across the country to college and career success.”

“For many reasons, our students may have barriers to doing this,” Hettleman says. “We have a case where a student lives in foster care, and between applying to college and August registration, they moved. They left their paperwork at the original foster house. So, they’re thinking, ‘Now what do I do? I guess I’m not going to go because I don’t have the paperwork.’ But we’re constantly following up. We know when a problem comes up, and we can help the student navigate it.”

Building STEPS students stay in Maryland, allowing team representatives
to visit, forward them care packages, and send them a weekly video of college or professional development tips. As students progress, they receive advice on workplace dynamics, timeliness, workplace body language, how to make small talk, and other soft skills that might not have been available to them in high school.

Eighteen years of Building STEPS alumni, the first of whom are now in their mid-thirties and many of whom have gone on to find STEM careers in Maryland, now offer internships and other opportunities to current Building STEPS students, creating something of a self-sustaining support system.

The program’s 20th anniversary last year gave graduates the chance to reflect, with one writing to Hettleman, “Building STEPS helped me see outside the four walls of high schools and set me up with tools for college.”

Another wrote, “Having exposure to different aspects of the sciences was awesome and made me want to pursue a PhD.”

“I couldn’t write that,” Hettleman says. “That’s the whole purpose, right there. They stick with us, and we stick with them.”

In April, 19-year-old Deleicea Greene was crowned this year’s Baltimore City Youth Poet Laureate, becoming the fifth local student to hold the coveted title. We asked the Woodlawn High School alum to share the poem “What If…,” which she created based on the idea that everyone can create their own heaven. “No one knows what truly makes an individual happy and content,” Greene says. “So anybody—more specifically a black boy from Baltimore—can already have their heaven without having to die.”

What If…

What if another black boy from Baltimore was murdered by the police
his body still
his white tee bloody
his True Religion jeans soaked in deep red
His Freddie Gray New Balances stained
his soul is no immortal
and drifts
until he reaches heaven

but what is his heaven?

when he arrives do they play Lor Scoota
instead of gospel hymns?
Do the Angels wear “RIP insert black boys’ name”
on the back of their wings?

Does God have straight hair and blue eyes
or
does he rock a cruddy and fronts?

What if
His heaven was a chicken box
salt pepper ketchup and a half and half

On the heels of a Washington Post report on House Republicans’ plans for a policy conference at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront in September—an event the president traditionally attends and addresses—and an invitation from Rep. Elijah Cummings, there is rising speculation surrounding whether President Trump will visit Baltimore in the coming months.

By this point, the president’s attacks against Baltimore City and Rep. Elijah Cummings have been well documented. The latest development came this weekend, when Cummings declared at the opening of the McCullough Street Nature Play Space in West Baltimore that the president was welcome to visit. “Do not just criticize us,” he said. “But come to Baltimore and I promise you, you will be welcomed.” Whether Trump will heed Cummings’ invitation remains to be seen.

“One of the reasons why people are critical of the president for doing what he’s doing is when the President of the United States speaks negatively of a city, it has a huge effect,” says Greg Kline, co-founder of Red Maryland, a conservative media network. “It sends a message far and wide. I think he’s very likely to go [to Baltimore], if nothing else to avoid someone like Congressman Cummings saying he’s afraid to go there.”

Despite Washington, D.C. being a short commute away, the president has never made an appearance in Baltimore since being elected. (Last December, plans for him to visit Rev. Donté Hickman of Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore were scrapped at the last minute.) He did, however, visit during his campaign, holding a rally that was attended by both protesters and supporters at the Baltimore Convention Center.

After the events of the past week, there were those who felt compelled to share their love for the city by posting photos of their favorite spots on social media. And as Towson University history professor Richard Vatz puts it, there is a stark divide between Republicans who defended the president, and Democrats who find his tweets offensive. This chasm is a marker for how a potential visit might play out.

Goucher associate professor of political science Mileah Kromer notes that the optics of such a visit could hinge on just how the administration anticipates the reception in Baltimore. “If the administration believe they’re going to be met with overwhelming protests, there’s certainly a chance he would cancel,” she says.

There is a hope, perhaps, that if the president does visit Baltimore, whether it be in September or earlier to meet with Cummings, he might be exposed to all the positive things that the city has to offer.

Richmond Davis, who ran against Cummings in the 2018 midterm election as the Republican nominee for Congress, says he hopes that a potential speech by Trump in Baltimore could look past the vitriol and instead highlight the plight of urban areas. It could be an opportunity, he believes, to address—perhaps more tactfully–the problems that the city faces.

“I would hope he would realize that there’s more than just the trash-strewn areas that were featured on Fox News,” he says. “That is the responsibility and obligation of the president—to expose himself to as many points of view and observe as much of this country as he can.”

In the same small, former basketball gym on Pennsylvania Avenue that a pair of uncles first dragged him to at age 8 after seeing him fighting on a Sandtown street—and where he’s since thrown millions of more punches with gloves on, sweated off pounds of weight, and honed his boxing skills, mostly with only his coaches and other fighters watching—Gervonta Davis bounced around the ring last week at Upton Boxing Center, the spotlight fully on him.

A giant promotional banner hung from the ceiling, bearing the pertinent information for all to see—Gervonta Davis vs. Ricardo Nunez, alongside their giant likenesses, Saturday, July 27, Royal Farms Arena, Live on Showtime. The eyes and smartphones of a couple hundred fans and the media in attendance, fanning themselves to keep cool in a crowded room warmer than the West Baltimore air outside, tracked Davis’ steps and shadow jabs during a public workout.

“This right here,” said Calvin Ford, the real life inspiration behind the character, Cutty, from The Wire. He’s a former drug dealer turned neighborhood do-gooder who runs the gym and has coached and mentored Davis since he showed up at the front door 16 years ago, “This is what we dreamed about.”

It’s a story worthy of a book—or another HBO show. As we wrote in this December 2016 story, as a tiny kid, Davis often slept on the floor of his drug-addicted parents’ house in possibly the roughest neighborhood in Baltimore City before going into foster care. He “came from nothing,” says Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe. And, excuse the hyperbole, “he’s made himself into something.”

Now 24, and with a one-year-old daughter of his own, the 5-foot-6, 130-pound spark plug is about to host the homecoming championship fight of his childhood and young adult dreams, before an expected sold-out, 12,000 person crowd Saturday night at downtown Royal Farms Arena. It’s a show, he says, that’s he’s long waited to star in. Over the last six years as a pro—in a career that’s taken him to London, Los Angeles, and New York—Davis has compiled a 21-0 record with 20 knockouts. In January 2017, when he won the IBF junior lightweight title, he became Baltimore’s first world champion since Hasim Rahman in 2001.

Davis’ super featherweight bout against Nunez, a 25-year-old challenger from Panama with a 21-2 career record, marks the first championship boxing match in the city in more than 80 years. The last time being when Harry Jeffra won in 1940 at Carlin’s Park. It comes in a venue that, in a previous life, hosted six Sugar Ray Robinson fights.

It’s also Showtime’s first-ever boxing broadcast from Baltimore, and the undercard is filled with other local fighters who Davis hand-picked to show off—including super lightweight Malik Hawkins (15-0) and 19-year-old super featherweight Malik Warren making his pro debut. They’ve all known each other for years, and have trained together again the last two months—sparring at Upton and taking three-mile runs along North Avenue.

“My brothers,” Davis said. “I’m not fighting alone. We’re all fighting together.”

Think what you want about the violent, gladiator-like nature of the sport we’re talking about (and, yes, a pro boxer just this week sadly died from injuries sustained in the ring), but boxing has been Davis’ refuge, and it provided the platform for a tale of triumph in a city that is on pace for 300-plus homicides for the fifth consecutive year. “We used to be young,” Ford says, “sitting down talking about these times. Now we’re actually in the mix of it.”

And, Saturday, if even only for one night, Davis said he wants to be a “crime stopper,” like Patterson High basketball player Aquille Carr was once known. “It was like they shut down the whole city to watch him,” Davis said. He’s on his way. Mayor Jack Young just presented “Tank” a golden key to the city this week, and Ellerbe said this event won’t be Davis’ last here.

So, what should we expect? As he’s shown in the past, Davis is capable of quick knockouts with his ferocious left fist, but it sounds like he wants to give the crowd its money’s worth. “I always want to give the fans a great performance,” he said on a conference call promoting the event. “That’s my job when I step in the ring, not just try to go in there and look for a knockout, but try to give [the fans] excitement. Give them what they paid their money for.”

He’s a headliner, sure, who “very soon will be the biggest star in the sport,” Ellerbe said. “That’s where we’re guiding him.” But to simply talk about these good times foolishly overlooks the climb it took to get here. Davis’ young eyes have seen tragedy.

“All of them got killed,” he says of the fighters—Angelo Ward, Ronald “Rock” Gibbs, Ford’s son, Qaadir—he once looked up to for inspiration. And danger lurks. Four private security guards watched over last week’s public workout, and a personal guard was never more than a few feet away from Davis. As he finished up a few interviews toward the night’s end, his guard closed a fist, signaling it was time to leave.

Although he says he wants to be a role model, Davis is still admittedly maturing himself. Just in February, he was arrested for an alleged fight at a Northern Virginia mall, news that made TMZ.

“I’m getting older and wiser,” he said. And there’s an endless stream of social media posts, at times showing off the things he’s spent his money on, and the combative barbs he trades with potential future opponents that might give off the wrong impression. “But deep down Tank has a tremendous heart,” Ellerbe said in the middle of the Upton ring, shortly before Davis presented 100 free tickets to Saturday’s fight to local foster children. If all goes according to plan, this is just the start of his star turn, or at least the next few chapters of the story.

“It’s amazing coming home,” Davis said. “I always believed if I was in arm’s reach of a kid, it would mean more than doing it from away. I want to show them anything is possible. I came from the same projects, the same block.”

I recently realized that my husband never saw where I grew up. So, together, we drove up to White Hall, taking the scenic route up York Road, and once Sparks was in our rearview mirror, he began to marvel at the rolling hills and beautiful farmhouses. We turned right onto Monkton Road, and then northeast onto Big Falls, and Rob wondered aloud how long the commute must have been to my high school in Towson. Still 10 minutes out, the lines in the road disappeared (along with our service), and he started to panic: “Megan, did the state government even know where you lived?”

Sure, we were far out, but my father wanted to fulfill his lifelong goal of owning a farm. Not one that we farmed, mind you, but a farm nonetheless. It was magical and fun and approximately three light years away from my academic and social lives. Growing up, my seven siblings and I spent our time moderately unsupervised, roaming the land by foot and four-wheeler. We’d hike through the woods, hide in the corn fields, and shoot each other with paintballs. Afternoons were spent helping our dad build bonfires so high they required us to stand on the hutch of a pickup truck for the final tier, and we screamed in delight when it was finally lit, exploding into the night with the help of a little gasoline.

I remember being duct-taped into a white suit and sent up in a cherry picker alongside a beekeeper to assist her in removing hives from the eaves of our house, and I spent many nights sleeping on the soft rubber cover to our pool, treating it like a hillbilly waterbed. It was a wonderful, sometimes dangerous, absolutely unique way to grow up. It was also, I would come to find, not for me.

My disdain for country life began late in high school, when I started keeping a bag of essentials in my car for weeknight sleepovers at friends’ houses. Yes, the country was idyllic, but I wanted very much to just be closer to civilization, and not have to factor a 50-minute commute into my schedule. Towson gave me a taste of city life, where I got see a glimpse of the hustle and bustle and create an exciting social life—and I craved more.

As a result, I’m the odd city mouse (or black sheep, if you’d prefer a rural metaphor) of my family, who almost exclusively continue to live far from the city limits. As it turns out, I’m not alone. As people my age continue to turn away from these comforts and rear their children downtown, it raises the question: Why do people some people yearn for city life? Is the desire to live in the city encoded in our DNA, or do we pick it up as we go along?

Yes, the country life was idyllic, but I wanted very much to be closer to civilization.

As much as I’m a champion for Baltimore, let’s get some hard truths out of the way. According to recent census figures, Baltimore City lost 7,346 people, or 1.2 percent of its population, from July 2017-July 2018. That decline is the biggest the city has experienced since 2001 and also marks the fourth year in a row in which its population has fallen.

If these numbers are enough to make you run for the Baltimore County hills, consider the fact that there are still many millennials and empty-nesters opting for city life. And of these millennials, some of us—gasp—are even choosing to stay once our kids are born.

“We say residents have an ‘urban gene’,” says Annie Milli, the executive director of Live Baltimore, who cites an American Community Survey that found from 2010-2017, nearly 14,000 people between 25-34, and just over 10,000 between 65-74, became residents of Baltimore City. “Maybe they feel tougher, or less phased, by the imperfections of the city. For others, it’s rooted in a connection to arts and culture, or a desire to tap into their open-mindedness in a diverse setting.”

That’s all well and good—and very true, of course—but when you have a young family, moving out of the city has some real practical benefits that you just can’t ignore. Of course, one of the biggest motivating factors is the breadth of education options in the surrounding counties. Not to mention, cheaper property taxes, easy and free parking, a private lawn, and less noise and congestion.

So why do some of us remain stubborn and work around these hurdles to settle in a busy metropolis? As it turns out, this craving for city life can be explained on an even deeper level. Sociologically, homo sapiens have become conditioned to an urban lifestyle.

“Humans evolved to live optimally in large groups of 30 to 60 people,” says Daniel Swann, a visiting associate professor in Goucher College’s Sociology and Anthropology Department. “That is about the number of people an individual can look out for and care about, and so you see tighter-knit communities in small city neighborhoods over sprawling suburban ones.”

That mindset is what brought Magda Mydlo-Garcia and Raul Garcia Leal to Mt. Vernon. Mydlo-Garcia grew up in a city in northeast Poland, and her husband was raised in Monterrey, Mexico, a city with more than 1.2 million residents. After stints around the world and birth of their son, Axel, the family moved here for her work. They were initially in a bit of a geographical Goldilocks situation (Fells Point was too loud; Harford County too homogenized). But they found that Mt. Vernon, so far, is just right.

“After moving to the U.S., we settled in the suburbs, which was very different from any experience we had previously,” Mydlo-Garcia says. “We quickly realized that we couldn’t move without a car, the cultural scene is basically non-existent, and architecturally there were cookie-cutter houses everywhere. For us, it was a real culture shock. Moving to the city brought us back to the lifestyle that we missed and enjoyed so much.”

The same goes for Kate Diehn, a physician who works in Hunt Valley but chooses to live in Wyman Park with her husband, James, and son, Henry. She points out that, while many of her friends have fled to the suburbs, she feels like her family has the best of both worlds with green spaces, walkability, and a smaller townhouse that’s great for meeting new people. “Living in a rowhome gives you the opportunity to get to know so many of your neighbors,” Diehn says. “Plus, we’re able to walk to The Avenue, The Rotunda, Hopkins’ campus, and Charles Village. It’s nice being a two-block walk home from dinner when toddler-mania sets in.”

“Moving to the city brought us back to the lifestyle that we enjoyed so much.”

Diehn does mention noise and crime as obvious drawbacks to city living, and Mydlo-Garcia wishes their son had more space closer to ride his bike or play. But the diversity and access to great restaurants, cultural institutions, and close proximity to Axel’s school win out. And as you may have guessed, I’m with her. My annoying high-school commute certainly contributed to my draw to civilization. But I also love that my toddlers walk almost everywhere they go, seeing neighbors, shop owners, and friends along the way. I’m proud that my son can point out which building I work in, and I think it’s so cool that our typical weekend wandering our neighborhood exposes our kids to art, international food, and ethnic diversity.

“We are so fortunate to have very warm neighbors of all different ages and backgrounds that say hi to Henry as he walks by,” Diehn says. “He is in such an important development stage during which we are trying to expose him to as many different experiences as possible.”

Though most of my family is confused by my unnatural love for city life, I was surprised to find out that my brother Robby is now giving it a whirl. He and his fiancée, Julia Elliot, shocked and delighted me when they bought a home just over the city line in Lake Walker.

Their home was initially meant to be lived in just long enough to update it into an income property, but the city, as it turns out, was able to sink its claws into more than one Isennock sibling. Undoing everything I thought I knew, on a recent phone call, he chatted happily about where he lives, and how they just got back from enjoying a glass of wine with some neighbors a few doors down. “We’ve made really good friends here, and everything is so close,” he said. This, coming from the man who used to double-park his pickup truck outside my house because my neighborhood “made him claustrophobic” and he needed to know he could leave when he wanted.

That neighborly bond my brother and his wife have experienced is a common reason for people to stay put in the city for a little longer, if not forever—especially in one like Baltimore. “Baltimore is a city of small, idiosyncratic neighborhoods,” Swann says. “And while you won’t know everyone in the entire city, you’re likely to know most people in your neighborhood.”

Though it will surprise you to learn I don’t have “PhD” after my name like Professor Swann, as a 13-year city veteran, I concur. One of the best things about our life here is the people. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say, the proximity to people. Many close friends live within blocks of us, and our social circle has continued to grow more diverse and meaningful. Just last week, another mom with a toddler walked by my front door as I was walking in, and within minutes we’d exchanged numbers and made plans.

This urban life we’ve created is a choice we’ve been lucky enough to make, and one I hope our kids appreciate. While they won’t grow up off the grid (given the taxes we pay, I’m pretty sure the government is well aware of our existence) with bonfires and corn fields, they’ll have Afghan food and world-class museums and an inclusive community—
all right outside our front door.

Shortly before the ransomware attack that has plagued Baltimore’s city government, Bill Henry, councilman for Baltimore City’s 4th District, was helping shepherd a piece of rezoning legislation. The planning department has protocols in place where it doesn’t print out conditions until it’s time for a commission hearing. When the attack hit, no one in the department was able to access their email, and things grounded to a halt.

“[The attack] has resulted in everybody having to do even more work to try to accomplish the same objective as we’ve always been trying to do,” Henry says. “It’s added time and extra work to the same problem solving.” In this case, Henry had to contact the developer directly to get the information he needed, a workaround that just isn’t possible for every scenario.

As it stands, government officials are unable to send and receive email, and the city’s digital systems—which ordinarily help facilitate real estate transactions, parking tickets, and other municipal functions—are all offline. This has forced the implementation of workarounds, with a manual system for property transactions in place. The city is encouraging people to set aside the money they would normally pay on a bill so that they have it readily available to pay when systems are back online. In total, the city is working to ensure that interactions with local governments are as seamless as is possible given the circumstances.

“The overarching goal is: How do we minimize the inconvenience that they’re going to experience off of this?’” says Lester Davis, a spokesman for Mayor Jack Young. “The departments of finance, law, public works, transportation have all been working diligently to try to minimize disruptions.”

An attack like the one Baltimore has faced is debilitating—it effectively puts the city at somewhat of a standstill. Henry also notes that it comes in a transitional period in top leadership positions, as those in charge are faced with a crisis while adjusting to their new roles.

And, while the mechanisms to try to stop some of the bleeding are in place now, the total damage is still being calculated and won’t be fully realized in the near future. “I think it’s going to be difficult to know exactly how to assess the damage here,” says David Troy, CEO of 410 Labs. “It’s going to turn out to be a bigger deal than we can imagine.”

Troy has decades of experience in technology and design, and understands what an attack like this means to the processes and firmware of the city. He says that, in order for things to return to a semblance of normalcy, it’s going to take an effort from the ground up.

“Regardless of whether we pay the ransom or not, we still have to go through this process of tearing everything down and putting it back online,” Troy says. “In many cases, that’s also going to mean getting new software versions. In situations where we can’t get updated versions, those need to be assessed to see whether or not they pose a substantial risk, and we have to look at how to mitigate those risks.”

The city’s efforts to circumvent the issue have not all gone swimmingly, either. In an attempt to have some form of online communication, some departments created Gmail accounts to establish a new channel. The issue there, though, is that Google charges a fee for what it deems business accounts, so they were briefly shut down. The misunderstanding was resolved, but it was another mark on what has been a difficult several weeks.

Troy has his own suspicions as to what caused the attack, speculating it might have been a situation where phishing was involved, in which someone unwittingly clicks on something they shouldn’t have and hackers can tamper with city functions. But he also cites apathy and human nature as elements at play. If a system is working and humming along, people don’t feel the need to update its infrastructure.

He is also wary of what will become of the records being taken manually while systems are offline; they’ll need to be inputted, too. It’s another example of the complete butterfly effect something like this can cause, which also includes an increased workload for the people trying to keep the city running in the face of adversity.

While it has not yet been determined what exactly did cause the attack, new reports suggest that the software used to carry it out could have originated from the NSA, where it was leaked and co-opted by hackers. If this is in fact the case, the city could seek federal funding to help in system recovery efforts.

“We have folks who come in an hour before their 12-hour shift starts to receive training [on alternative workarounds], meeting regularly to assess throughout the day what’s going on and to learn,” Davis says. “It’s a huge testament to the power of teamwork.”

If anything, things are going back to how they used to be in city government before the advent of the internet. People paying for utilities by writing checks, meter maids filling out parking tickets by hand, and inter-government communication is totally offline for the moment.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what it was like pre-internet,” says Henry, who was working in City Hall 25 years ago. “We largely communicated by landline phone calls, by memo when it was complex, and we communicated in person more. That’s one of the things we are seeing more of now also. Now, that’s also an alternative.”

It’s a cliche, but life goes on—in the case of the city, it has to, lest the backlog get to a point where things become untenable. As the city works to get its systems updated, more secure, and back online, that’s all they really can do. If there is any silver lining at all that can be taken from all of this, it’s that these disruptions are going to force a massive overhaul of the city’s systems in many different phases.

“The city is still functioning, it’s still moving, babies are being born, buses are running like clockwork,” Davis says. “We really appreciate the patience that folks have shown.”

Talk about the ultimate come up. From street performing with snare drums in downtown Baltimore to making appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Timothy Fletcher and Malik Perry have been living the dream.

Today life got even sweeter for the pair when DeGeneres announced that Fletcher and Perry, alongside construction cousins John Colaneri and Anthony Carrino from HGTV, would be the feature of her new web series The Build Up.

The six-part series will follow Fletcher and Perry, better known as A1 Chops, as they work to rebuild parts of Baltimore. In the nearly minute-and-a-half trailer, the group can be seen putting up a community mural, updating the music room in their old high school, and performing at M&T Bank Stadium at a Ravens game.

“This is so sweet that you do this,” Degeneres says in the promo. “You back to your high school to an after school program to help kids. Because you guys give back so much, this is what this show is about.”

The duo began drumming in high school and decided to take their talents to the streets of Baltimore performing songs with complex drum tricks and popular dance moves. Ever since their performance of singer Ciara’s “Level Up” challenge went viral and landed them on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, A1 Chops has been trying to give back to the community they credit for their success.

“I love the community so much,” Fletcher said. “I want to do anything I can to give back—it sends chills through my body, I just cannot wait.”

The web series will debut on ellentube and YouTube on January 30.

On Tuesday, Governor Larry Hogan announced that he will be implementing several new initiatives to target violent crime in Baltimore City, citing the increasing violence as “completely unacceptable.” Hogan plans to open a Violent Crime Joint Operations Center in the city that will have 200 “strike force” officers from 16 federal and local agencies to fight crime and gangs.

“Citizens across the state are outraged by the daily headlines of this rampant gang violence,” Hogan said at the press conference. “They don’t feel safe in their own neighborhoods . . . They’re crying out for somebody to do something to stop these killings.”

For the last four years, the city has exceeded more than 300 homicides. Hogan said that “enough is enough” and that he will use every resource available to curb the amount of violence in Baltimore, including providing additional funding to the Baltimore Police Department for signing bonuses to attract more recruits, as well as $50 million to fund every request received from victim service providers across the state.

“All of these efforts won’t be enough if we can’t keep these repeat offenders off the streets,” he said. “According to the BPD, 60 percent of those convicted of gun crimes in Baltimore City do not serve any real time and are released back onto the streets to commit violent felonies again and again. This is completely unacceptable.”

The governor will fund the expansion of Project Exile, a federal program that targets repeat offenders and have them charged under federal laws and courts that may lead to longer sentences. Hogan also said he would introduce legislation at Maryland’s General Assembly session, which begins today, that would increase the mandatory minimum sentence for repeat gun offenders.

“The federal mandatory sentences are 10 years. If we can process them on federal gun crimes and federal courts, we can put them in jail rather than a slap on the wrist with Baltimore City judges and without mandatory sentences with prosecutions here in the city,” Hogan said. “They are not enough prosecutors to handle all these cases, and we ask them, ‘How could they do more of them,’ and they said they need more manpower, so we’re paying for them.”

Hogan believes that there has been too much focus on the misconduct of the BPD and not enough on the violent criminals plaguing the city, pointing the finger at the consent decree that was implemented in 2017.

He also said that permanent leadership is vital to make this all work expressing his frustration at the vacancy of the position for the past seven months. This comes just one day after Mayor Catherine Pugh announced New Orleans Superintendent Michael Harrison as commissioner-designate.

“There’s been a whole lot of focus on the consent decree, that’s all people have been talking about,” Hogan said. “I think it’s out of balance. We’re going to focus on getting the criminals off the street.”

President Donald Trump was scheduled to make the short trip up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway on Wednesday at the invitation of Rev. Donté Hickman of Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore. But, according to a spokesman from Rep. Elijah Cummings office, the meeting that was scheduled to take place at the church will now happen at the White House—whose officials say the cancellation was due to a scheduling conflict.

“The president will still meet with a number of stakeholders, including several from Baltimore,” reads a statement issued by the White House on Monday morning. “And provide remarks on the opportunity zone and urban revitalization initiative, highlighting the administration’s agenda to expand the economic boom to all Americans, especially those in distressed communities—both rural and urban.”

Trump was supposed to be meeting with Hickman, as well as other clergy members and elected officials, in Baltimore to discuss federal funding to revitalize the suffering communities in the city. Hickman, who has been working to redevelop East Baltimore for the past decade, says that his master plan entered its third phase earlier this year. The plan includes the rebuild of the $16 million Mary Harvin Transformation Center with senior housing and workforce training, which was a target of arson in the Baltimore Uprising in 2015.

“It is time that we realize that we cannot continue to normalize violence, poverty and murder,” Hickman said in a Facebook post Sunday afternoon. “We cannot wait for the administration we like or elect to take bold faith steps together towards investment opportunities. If we fail, we will fail trying and God will bless our faithfulness. Whatever vitriol we have for this presidential administration should be manifested in our determination to do what we can to restore our broken city.”

Hickman’s hope for the visit was to encourage Trump to initiate the opportunity zone investment—a Republican-backed tax initiative that will place investment capital into struggling communities by offering a substantial tax break—in East Baltimore neighborhoods. The U.S. Treasury estimates that this opportunity zone program will inject $100 billion in private capital in areas where the poverty rate averages 32 percent.

Critics believe the costs will outweigh the benefits and force poor people from their neighborhoods. But Hickman has stated publicly that this initiative is a way to jumpstart the development of affordable housing, grocery stores, and improve public safety and education in the area. To date, 42 zones in Baltimore City including Port Covington, Poppleton, Perkins Homes, and Park Heights are already scheduled to receive assistance for redevelopment through the opportunity zone initiative.

“Focus on what really matters for our city going forward,” Hickman said in a Facebook post. “Faith-based institutions can lead the effort and partner with other institutions to obtain the public and private dollars necessary to revitalize our city through restoring people and rebuilding properties. I know it’s difficult for many, but don’t get distracted. It’s our communities and we have the power to maintain and sustain them.”

What exactly does it mean to be woke? The urban dictionary defines it “as being aware of the social, and political environments regarding all demographics and socio-economic standings.” For the second year in a row, Essence magazine is using the term as inspiration for their “Woke 100 Women” and Baltimore’s own mayor Catherine Pugh has made the list.   

“Being woke is to be focused, to be attentive, to recognize your purpose,” Pugh says in the article. “What matters is that we create a society that is more equal and more just.”

The May issue—with Kerry Washington on the cover—will be available on April 27 and it includes a list of women who are “proven change agents, shape-shifters, and power players” across the world. Pugh is among a list of women who represents a wide spectrum of distinction from #MeToo movement founder Tarana Burke to Emmy-award winner Lena Waithe. 

In addition to Mayor Pugh, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Bladensburg, MD Mayor Takisha D. James, Edmonston, MD Mayor Tracy Farrish Gant, Colmar Manor, MD Mayor Sadara Barrow, and North Brentwood, MD Mayor Petrella Robinson made the list as well.

“From corporate women shattering glass ceilings to the countless women dismantling white supremacy,” the article reads. “These women consistently leave their mark on the on their respective communities and industries.”

In recent months, there has been a trend around the country of young people taking matters into their own hands. Most notably, the students of Parkland, Florida, led the charge for harsher gun laws and students from around the country joined in solidarity for the March For Our Lives rally.

Similarly, in Baltimore, students are looking for platforms to express how the state of the country and the city have affected their lives. Mayor Catherine Pugh and her team at CharmTV—the city’s news station that launched in 2014—came up with the idea for a television program featuring Baltimore youth. 

The Avenue will be solely run and operated by Baltimore City high school students under the direction of CharmTV’s general manager Tonia Lee and will debut on April 21 at 11 a.m. The 30-minute show will discuss topics chosen by students, including violence in Baltimore, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, as well as lighter topics like fashion and entertainment.

“There was clearly a void of platforms for young people to talk about what’s going on in the world,” Lee said. “We really felt like bringing this type of concept, particularly to Baltimore, was a tremendous way to further engagement and allow young people in this city to really express their views.”

The program will feature in-studio interviews, news packages, and roundtable discussions. It will air on Saturdays at 11 a.m. and will re-air on Saturdays at 2 p.m. and Mondays and Wednesdays at 7 p.m.

Run by six students with two of them hosting and the other four splitting various production roles, the show put students through auditions and casting calls in order to be selected. Lee says that this is considered work-study and the plan is to recast the students each year to open up the opportunity to other young people in the city who have an interest in broadcast journalism. In addition to discussing relevant news topics, the students will also be trained in all aspects in media production, pre-production, writing, shooting, and, editing.

“I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to engage our young people in the city,” Lee said. “We can not only reach young people, but also provide them with skills that they could viably use moving forward in their careers.”

Baltimore School for the Arts senior Kyla Jackson and Kamari James, a senior at the Seed School of Maryland, are The Avenue’s current hosts. Jackson, who will be studying broadcast journalism in the fall at Drexel University, says she’s excited to have the opportunity to share her views with not just other youth, but everyone in Baltimore. 

“This type of programming is important because we really need to have something for the youth to share their opinions,” she said. “We are going to talk about a lot of things that people wouldn’t expect. We always hear about people dying, but we want to talk about the survivors in the city.” 

An aspiring filmmaker, James loves that the entire show is youth-led and says the show has taught him about accountability. He’s proud of the work that he and his fellow production team have developed.

“We’re all bringing fresh ideas to the table,” he said. “We’ve all heard about the different conflicts in Baltimore told from an adult’s perspective, but it’s not really heard from youth, the people who are going through it the most.”

On Friday morning, Mayor Catherine Pugh announced that she would be replacing Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis with 30-year BPD Deputy Commissioner Darryl D. DeSousa effective immediately. Pugh asserted that the crime in Baltimore needs to be eradicated at faster and Davis is simply not getting the job done.

DeSousa will assume the responsibilities for the police department immediately as the city’s 40th police commissioner, and following appropriate measures, his appointment will be made permanent.   

“My decision is because I’m impatient,” Mayor Pugh said at a press conference Friday morning. “And we need to get these numbers down now. The fact is, we are not achieving the pace of progress that our residents have every right to expect in the weeks since we ended what was nearly a record year for homicides in the City of Baltimore. As such, I have concluded that a change in leadership is needed at police headquarters.”

Commissioner Davis, who was made aware of his dismissal Friday morning, was appointed to his position in 2015 after then Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired Commissioner Anthony Batts in the wake of rioting that flooded the city’s streets during the Baltimore Uprising.

“I am grateful to Commissioner Davis for all that he has done to implement the initiatives underway to address violent crime at its root causes,” Pugh said. “I speak for the entire community in expressing our admiration and gratitude for his service to Baltimore and for his leadership of the women and men who put their lives on the line to serve and protect our citizens.”

DeSousa, a New York City native, came to Baltimore in 1983 to attend Morgan State University and joined the Baltimore Police Department in 1988. Since joining the force, he’s held many positions with the department over the years, including Area Commander of the Neighborhood Patrol Division, and Chief of Patrol. He was appointed Deputy Police Commissioner in 2015.

“I am deeply honored by the Mayor’s confidence in me at this critical time in the life of our city,” DeSousa said. “Baltimore has long been my home and I’ve spent my career on its streets and in its neighborhoods to address problems and bring about solutions that are meaningful for the people we serve. I am committed to this important work more than ever and look forward to validating the trust of Mayor Pugh, my fellow officers, and most importantly, the citizens of Baltimore each and every day.”

Commissioner-Designate DeSousa has already begun working in his new position. As of 9 a.m. Friday, a new initiative that places uniformed police officers on the streets hourly has unrolled. The officers have been placed in strategic locations with high violence and will patrol the areas until midnight. The patrol-focused DeSousa assures that this type of “proactive constitutional policing” will help to accelerate the reduction of violence around the city.

“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” he said. “Violence reduction is the first priority, the second priority, and the third priority. We are focused on the repeat offenders and the trigger pullers—we know who they are and we’re coming after them.”

Mayor Catherine Pugh announced today that the City of Baltimore would be partnering with Roca—an anti-violence, nonprofit program based in Massachusetts—to connect with high-risk young adults by finding jobs and keeping them out of jail as part of her plan to reduce crime.

“We believe the approach to violence is holistic,” Pugh said at today’s press conference. “As we continue to look at the best practices among the nation, this is one of them. This will head the city in the right direction.”

For nearly 30 years, Roca has helped thousands of young men between the ages of 17 and 24 to transform their lives. Roca’s philosophy is that, with positive relationships, job training, and education, at-risk young adults can change their behavior “to disrupt the cycle of poverty and incarceration.” The CEO and founder of Roca, Baltimore native Molly Baldwin, began this program in hopes of working with a demographic that she says is being left out and believes that “the timing makes sense” for this to be instituted in the city. 

“They are a small group that causes a huge impact,” Baldwin said. “We are here to work with those young people who are not yet ready to show up and be the productive citizens they should be.”

The mayor’s office has been working with Baldwin and her team for the past five years to bring the program to Baltimore. Roca’s unique approach, which they call “relentless outreach,” uses data to target individuals with high recidivism and dropout rates—providing them with two years of intensive services and relationship building, as well as two years of follow-up and evaluation.

“This is data-driven and focused for those most at risk for violence,” said Drew Vetter, who heads the Mayor’s Office Of Criminal Justice. “It is something that is proven to work and we are optimistic that it will be successful here in our city.”

In Baltimore, the four-year interventional program will partner with local organizations like Baltimore Safe Streets and the Baltimore Police Department to develop the best practices. Baldwin has even gone so far as to temporarily live in Baltimore to get the program off the ground.

“We know that change is possible,” she said. “It’s an enormous responsibility to work with people at this level, but we believe that even the highest-risk young people belong, and that each one of them can succeed. And we have the data to show that.” 

As Baldwin affirmed, the data speaks volumes. Of the more than 850 participants in 2017, 84 percent had no new arrests. The program shows similar results in job retention with 76 percent of participants maintaining employment for at least three months. But this programming doesn’t come cheap and will cost the city $17 million.

Mayor Pugh is currently seeking funding from the state but is still awaiting response for her request to finalize a four-year funding plan for Roca. In a press conference last week, Governor Larry Hogan said he did not consider educational and job training programs to be part of an immediate crime fighting strategy. 

Philanthropic groups like Harry and Jeanette Weinberg, the Annie Casey Foundation, and the Abell Foundation have pledged to step in a pay for a portion of the program. The Baltimore-based money management firm T. Rowe Price Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University, and BGE are also among companies in the private sector stepping up to fund the program.

In Baltimore, juvenile crime rates follow an overall pattern in the city and violent crime has surged since the 2015 riots with homicide rates surpassing 300 for the third consecutive year. Data from the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services show overall juvenile arrests in Baltimore are down 11 percent, but are up in certain neighborhoods.

“It’s so tragic,” Baldwin said. “It’s heartbreaking, but we have a lot to learn. We’re going to dig in over the next few months and look at what interventional efforts work best in Baltimore that will effect change.”

On Wednesday, Sagamore Development announced that global investment firm Goldman Sachs would commit $233 million to the Port Covington redevelopment. The 235-acre, mixed-use project on Baltimore’s waterfront is a move that Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group (UIG) has been eyeing since 2016.

“This is not only an opportunity to invest in infrastructure and lay down the framework for what will be millions of square feet and dozens of buildings, said managing director for Goldman Sachs UIG Margaret Anadu, “but do so in a way that’s really going to benefit Baltimore residents.”

The $660 million tax increment funding (TIF) that Sagamore received last year from the city is cited as a key factor in the UIG’s decision to invest. Anadu said the TIF signified the project was supported by the city and displayed strong public-private partnerships 

“With the approval of the TIF, that said the city and state were behind this,” she said. “Then you have Sagamore as the quarterback—they are relentless.”

A key factor in the collaboration between the private and public sectors was the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) signed last year between Sagamore, the city, and SB7—an organization that represents the South Baltimore communities of Brooklyn, Cherry Hill, Curtis Bay, Lakeland, Mt. Winans, Westport, and Port Covington. The agreement ensures that the communities in South Baltimore continue to thrive culturally, economically, educationally, and socially during the 20-year redevelopment process of Port Covington.

The $233 million investment will uphold the promise made in the CBA to invest in infrastructure—roads, utilities, and parks for the community—during all phases of the project. Goldman Sachs said they wouldn’t play a huge role in the planning process beyond the monetary impact.

“We will have a voice in the direction of the project,” Anadu said. “But we will primarily serve as investors, leaving day to day on-the-ground execution to the Sagamore team.”

Plank Industries CEO, Tom Geddes, said the project would bring thousands of new jobs to the city, nearly 1.5 million square feet of office and retail space, a 200-room hotel, and apartments.

Of the 235 acres, a portion will remain untouched during the redevelopment, and that includes Under Armour’s 50-acre headquarters, as well as City Garage, Nick’s Fish House, Sagamore Spirit Distillery, and the newly opened Rye Street Tavern. 

“You won’t see a lot of activity on the site over the next 12-18 months,” Geddes says. “But there will be a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes work on planning and design going on getting the site shovel ready.”

The prospects of this new investment have Mayor Catherine Pugh optimistic about the new partnership and what it means for the city’s residents. 

“This investment, especially from such a prominent partner as Goldman Sachs, means more jobs, more opportunity and more economic growth for Baltimore City,” she said in a statement. “Investors are seeing what we already know about Baltimore—we’re a city on the rise, and an economic hub with a strong, diverse workforce.”

This move comes as Sagamore is in the process of drafting a proposal to Amazon to move a second headquarters to the Port Covington development. Last week, the online retail giant released a statement requesting bids for the new location by October 19. If selected, it would bring 50,000 new jobs and a $5 billion investment in office space to Baltimore.

“We think Port Covington would be a phenomenal location for Amazon,” Geddes said. “Having the vote of confidence of an institution like Goldman Sachs is nothing but helpful.”

Geddes is hopeful that the new partnership represents progress for Port Covington and delivers on the commitment made to bring outside investments to the city.

“We could not be happier that we have Goldman Sachs as our partner,” Geddes said. “It was important to us to find an equity partner that shared our common vision for urban economic growth, job creation, and local workforce development here in Baltimore City.”

Herds of people flocked to Wyman Park this afternoon to snap a photo of the stone block that once housed the Lee-Jackson Confederate monument. Now all that remains is the memory of what was, and an adjacent 400-pound sculpture by artist Pablo Machioli, of a pregnant Black woman with her fist raised in an expression of protest.

Shortly before midnight, crews hired by the city removed the statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on Wyman Park Drive, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors in Bolton Hill, Confederate Women near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus, and Roger B. Taney in Mt. Vernon from the stone slabs they’ve rested on for decades.

The removal comes on the heels of Monday’s city council unanimous vote to immediately destroy the statues, as proposed by Councilman Brandon M. Scott. In a statement on Tuesday, Governor Larry Hogan also ordered the immediate removal of the Taney statue in front of the state house in Annapolis stating, “It’s the right thing to do.”

In an effort to prevent future protest and vandalizing of the monuments, Pugh invoked her rights as mayor to “protect her city” and proceeded with the removal despite not receiving the approval of the Maryland Historical Trust Easement Committee.

“I thought there’s enough speeches being made,” she said in Wednesday’s press conference. “I’m not a person that takes a long time to get things done. Get it done.”

This afternoon, crowds at Wyman Park had a mix of relief, closure, anger, and appreciation in reaction to the absent statue. A young mother with her two children stood at the base of the pedestal with reflective stares as she explained the significance of the statue and its removal. 

Clarinda Harriss, a 78-year-old Baltimore native and ancestor of Confederate soldiers, wrote a letter to Mayor Pugh and the city of Baltimore showing her appreciation for the removal, recalling a significant childhood memory at the Lee-Jackson monument.

“Sixty-nine years ago, when I was nine years old, I was dressed up in a yellow, polka dot dress and led up to the pedestal of the Lee-Jackson memorial to place a bunch of yellow roses there during the monument’s dedication,” Harriss says in the letter. “Today, I place roses on the pedestal in in praise of the city of Baltimore for its wise and discreet action last night in removing the statue. It was necessary . . . I am proud of Baltimore today.”

Pugh said that she did not know where the statues were moved to or where they would end up, but suggested that plaques should be installed to describe “what was there and why it was removed.”

*Update following the August 14 Baltimore City Council meeting: Councilman Brandon M. Scott introduced a measure to have all Confederate-era monuments throughout the city destroyed. The council unanimously voted to adopt Scott’s resolution calling for the immediate destruction of the monuments.

“We should not have these here for public display,” Scott said during the meeting. “We should not move them somewhere else for public display because it is still disrespectful.”

Despite the decision made by the city council members, Mayor Catherine Pugh is still taking the necessary steps to remove and relocate the statues to Confederate cemeteries in Hagerstown and Scotland, Maryland. 

This past weekend, violent clashes at a white nationalist rally to protest the removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia ended with three deaths and 19 people injured. Baltimore is no stranger to this issue and the events further ignited local residents in the effort to cut ties with the city’s Confederate roots.

In an effort organized by Baltimore Bloc, more than 1,000 people marched in a peaceful protest from Wyman Park to Charles Village and back on Sunday to denounce the violence and bigotry represented in Charlottesville, as well as protest various Confederate monuments throughout the city.

Mayor Catherine Pugh said that she has reached out to contractors to have the monuments of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on Wyman Park Drive, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors in Bolton Hill, Confederate Women near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus, and Roger B. Taney in Mt. Vernon removed.

“It is my intention to move forward with the removal of Baltimore City’s Confederate statues,” Mayor Pugh said in a statement. “I have read the recommendations of the task force set up by the previous administration which were reported in January 2016.”

The recommendations made by seven commissioners, appointed by former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, was a 34-page report detailing the history of each statue, concluding that two of the monuments—the Lee-Jackson statue and Taney bust—should be removed instead of destroyed.  The commission also voted to keep, but add context to, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors and Confederate Women’s monuments.

Councilman Brandon M. Scott has also called for the Confederate-era memorials to be destroyed. He plans to introduce new legislation at today’s city council meeting for the immediate destruction of the monuments.

“There’s no need to even discuss whether we should have a Confederate monument in the city of Baltimore,” Scott said. “Why are we honoring traitors? They should have never been erected. We should destroy them now.”

Before Rawlings-Blake left office last year, signage was placed at the Confederate monument sites stating, in part, that the memorials were “part of a propaganda campaign of national pro-Confederate organizations to perpetuate the beliefs of white supremacy, falsify history, and support segregation and racial intimidation.”

Opponents of the monuments’ removal include the Maryland chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Zebelean and SCV member last year referred to the local and national effort to remove Confederate statues as “a veritable tsunami of anti-Confederate vitriol . . . In Baltimore, the mayor plans for a commission to advise her on what to do with the Confederate monuments, most of which have been there for more than a century.”

For its part, the national chapter of the SCV denounced the actions of the white supremacist groups in Charlottesville this past weekend. “I condemn in the strongest possible way the actions, words, and beliefs of the KKK and white supremacist groups,” said SCV’s chaplain-in-chief. “These groups are filled with hatred and bigotry. They do not represent in any way true Southern heritage.”

As for Baltimore, Mayor Pugh has suggested taking steps beyond what the original monument commission recommended, although her plans come with a substantial price tag. After meeting with Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, who removed four Confederate monuments in May, Pugh learned that the cost for re locating four statues totaled $2.1 million, which included the actual removal, police overtime, and storage cost.

“I have taken steps to appoint a working group to lead the process for removing the confederate monuments,” she said. “I am adding two members from the private sector to help us with the fundraising. Anyone wishing to contribute can forward their contribution to the Baltimore City Foundation/Confederate Monument Removal.”

Pugh has also formally requested approval from the Maryland Historical Trust Easement Committee to remove the Lee-Jackson monument, as well as identify Confederate cemeteries in Maryland that would be willing to accept the monuments upon removal. She plans to provide a public update after receiving reports from the task force and contractors. At that time, she will also announce a timeline for the removal of the monuments.

“A decision will be made at an appropriate time,” her spokesman, Anthony McCarthy, said in a statement. “She wants to do what serves the best interests of the citizens of Baltimore.”

The Baltimore AFRAM festival, formally known as the African-American Heritage Festival, is now in its 41st year and will kick off at Druid Hill Park on August 12. Since 1976, the free festival has been a weekend filled with family fun, food, and performances from nationally acclaimed artists, but this year’s event will be much different.

Mayor Catherine Pugh made an announcement in May that provided minimal details regarding the event, but disclosed that the traditionally two-day event at Camden Yards had been reduced to a 10-hour celebration at Druid Hill Park.

“AFRAM started in Druid Hill Park,” said the mayor’s director of communications Anthony McCarthy in an email. “It seemed a more appropriate venue given this year’s focus.”

Unlike other local events like Pride and Artscape, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BoPA) has no role in AFRAM—the mayor’s office handles all planning and promotion.

Under former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the annual event was organized by greiBO Entertainment and boasted a large budget of more than $500,000 that supplied days of entertainment from nationally acclaimed acts. However, greiBO’s contract ended in December placing full responsibility on Mayor Pugh, who plans to reduce the costs while focusing on making this year’s event “a local celebration” featuring all regional entertainment, vendors, and city agencies.

“In a city that’s mostly African American, the African-American festival is the only one to be dwindled down to save money,” a Facebook user commented. “What sense does that make? What does it say to our children about who and what this city values?”

Although Pugh’s Facebook page has been overflowing with opposition for her decisions, some understand her vision and are pleased with the changes.

“I love that AFRAM is back in the community! Druid Hill Park is perfect for family, it offers a lush green environment and easy access to the people who live in Baltimore,” one resident commented. “Bringing AFRAM back into the city reminds our young people of the rich heritage they have, placing the celebration right in their neighborhood. Great choice Mayor Pugh.”

Another person echoed similar thoughts: “Maybe she wants to redirect the trillions of dollars that were spent at Camden Yards and bring it back to the community. I believe that there is a method to this madness.”

Amidst the backlash and concerns with the new location—current reconstruction, lack of parking, and minimal access to public transportation—the mayor’s office released the less than star-studded artist lineup for the event on August 8. In a shift from recent years with acts like Common and Fantasia, this year’s main stage will feature local artists like singer London Savoy and Baltimore rappers YBS Skola and Tate Kobang.

The celebration, albeit different, will remain the same in many ways—there will still be a health pavilion with free health screenings, an innovation village, a kids’ village with games and face painting, and the Enoch Pratt Free Library book mobile and employment center.

“AFRAM is more than a festival,” Pugh said in a promo video. “It is celebration of African-American life, music, and culture.”

Mayor Catherine Pugh, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, and Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz joined a host of national dignitaries by signing the “We Are Still In” pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emission in Maryland as detailed in the Paris climate change agreement.

The coalition, led by philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, is an “open letter to the international community” from local and national leaders declaring to continue the fight against global warming. This comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s June 1 announcement to remove the United States from the agreement of 194 nations to work to hold the warming to below 2 degrees Celsius.

President Trump argues that the deal, as is, “hamstrings” the U.S. and said he plans to pursue renegotiation in an effort to make things “fair” for the country.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to the United States and its citizens, the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accords or a really entirely new transaction, on terms that are fair to the United States,” Trump said at a press conference.

As of June 9, there are 178 cities and counties, 272 colleges and universities, and more than 1,300 private companies that have committed to “working together to take forceful action and to ensure that the U.S. remains a global leader in reducing emissions.”

The U.S. is the second largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, and now joins Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries refusing to commit to the agreement. Although there is no penalty for withdrawing, the details of the agreement signed in 2015 by President Barack Obama, says that the earliest any country is eligible to withdraw is November 2020.

Among the list of private companies joining the “We Are Still In” pledge is Under Armour. One day after Trump’s announcement, CEO Kevin Plank released a statement asserting his disappointment with the decision.

“Climate change is real and must be taken seriously by our business community, our customers, our neighbors, and our elected officials,” he said. “Sustainability has always been part of our DNA: it’s integral to how we live and work and is essential to our environment. As a business leader concerned with creating American jobs, I disagree with the decision to exit the Paris accord.”

The impact on local jobs is also something that concerns Carl Simon, the interim executive director at environmental nonprofit Blue Water Baltimore. 

“The economic future of Baltimore is supported, strengthened, and enhanced by focusing on the rapidly growing renewable energy sector,” he explained. “There are thousands of jobs that could be, and are being, created due to strong environmental policies.”

He also added that climate change is an especially oppressing issue for a coastal city like Baltimore.

“Factually, the rate of flooding here is increased due to climate change,” he said. “Science shows the Inner Harbor, Dundalk, and other coastal parts of Baltimore flood more than they used to due to manmade climate change.”

Mayor Pugh said that Baltimore City would adopt a Climate Action Plan and Disaster Preparedness Plan that will focus on lowering the city’s impact on the environment.

“Our diverse natural ecosystems, including the Chesapeake Bay, are in serious jeopardy, yet remain the lifeblood of our region and the viability of our communities,” she said in a statement. “My endorsement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including goal thirteen, which specifically addresses climate action related to greenhouse gas reduction, recognizes the complexity of these challenges. As a city we cannot ignore the urgency of these issues.”

Kamenetz said he has been proactively taking steps to conserve energy in Baltimore County, converting traffic signals to LED bulbs, and using GPS routing programs for county fleet vehicles to reduce carbon emissions. He’d like to see the powers that be follow suit.

“I’m disturbed by Trump, but even more disturbed that Governor Hogan continues to remain silent,” he said. “I appreciate that he has accepted the general assembly initiatives to reduce energy, but by supporting the alliance, it would strengthen the commitment.”