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

Located in the private and highly desirable Residences of Caves Valley Golf Club, 11315 John Carroll Road is one of Baltimore County’s finest; a stunning, custom designed and built stone and stucco traditional home. Expertly conceived and meticulously constructed with every amenity, the highest quality, materials, craftmanship and updated systems, this incomparable home pleases at every turn. A marble foyer entry leads into the main level featuring a great room, banquet-size dining room, gourmet kitchen with breakfast area, screened porch with cooking center, study, game room and a truly brilliant mahogany library where readers can peruse the extensive built-ins for just the right volume to read by the fireplace before taking the spiral staircase to play billiards on the lower level.

The sumptuous first floor primary suite includes a private hall entry, resort-like marble spa bath and two dressing rooms. Three large en-suite bedrooms fill the second level, including one with French doors overlooking the gorgeous rolling hills of Caves Valley. The extensive lower level includes the aforementioned billiard room and wet bar, a game room, indoor driving range/putting green, recreation room, exercise room, bonus/guest room and a bath.

Sweeping patios out the back of the home overlook a masterful example of landscape design. Extensive stone garden walls and professional landscaping surround the exterior of the home, accenting the covered flagstone porches and the large flagstone patio at the back of the home. Garden steps lead down from this serene setting to an additional patio as well as to a two-level fishpond with a connecting waterfall and look out over the 17^th hole of these picturesque golf course greens. A 24-hour manned gatehouse provides additional privacy to this quiet oasis in the highly coveted Caves Valley Golf Course community. Flawlessly crafted and designed and meticulously maintained, 11315 John Carroll Road boasts an exquisite home in a tremendous setting.

For more information, and to view other listings, click here:

It’s a conundrum: Do you go to college to study what you love or land a career?

For many students and families planning for or applying to college, this question weighs heavily—especially with the existing economic uncertainty. But administrators from colleges in the Baltimore region say it’s not a matter of one versus another, and they’re finding ways to help future and existing students carve out paths to meaningful lives and careers.

“It’s absolutely a myth that students need to know their major when they apply,” says Katherine Cole, the vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). “Most majors don’t correlate directly with a career, and roughly 80 percent of undergrads nationwide end up changing their majors.”

To help students find the right fit, UMBC offers freshman seminars that integrate personality and strength tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Seminars also teach students about the multiple avenues they can take to arrive at the same career—a concept that Cole calls “parallel pathways.” This means, for example, that students interested in law school might take the traditional route by majoring in political science. Or they might enjoy analytical thinking and major in something like sociology, or plan to pursue environmental law and study marine biology or environmental science.

Towson University (TU) offers a similar two-credit Personal Life and Career Planning course, which teaches students about existing and emerging careers, while helping them dive deep into self-exploration to determine who they are as individuals. “We want students to major in something that matters to them personally, and we tell them their major doesn’t dictate their career,” says Lorie Logan-Bennett, the assistant vice president of career services at TU.

At the same time, TU urges students to take advantage of the university’s experiential learning opportunities that let them “build skills by doing real-world work, while deciding what they like or dislike in a career,” says Logan-Bennett. Opportunities range from for-credit, in-person internships off campus to remote projects known as “micro internships,” made possible by TU’s partnership with the Chicago-based company Parker Dewey.

“Micro internships are time-delineated projects that students can take on without quitting their part-time jobs or giving up other obligations,” Logan-Bennett explains. For instance, a company in California might hire a student to compile or analyze data in a spreadsheet or synthesize research for a report. Students work on projects for a designated period and gain experience they can then use to bolster their résumés.

At Johns Hopkins University (JHU), too, opportunities abound in experiential learning, with programs and resources guiding students through the arduous process of identifying and honing values, interests, and goals. In addition to having access to a robust career center, Hopkins Hire, students benefit from the school’s innovative Life Design Lab (LDL), which, “takes an iterative, problem-solving approach to life- and career-planning,” explains Matthew Golden, LDL’s executive director. “The process involves doing research and coming up with a hypothesis based on your interests, talking to people, getting experience in that area, and then doing it all over again, building on what you’ve learned about yourself and that particular kind of work.”

The key, Golden says, is for students to keep an open mind as they follow their curiosity and determine or refine what they want—a process he hopes will stay with them forever.

LDL works closely with Hopkins Hire, JHU’s career center, which launched the DEI Collective to boost internship access for students from underrepresented communities. “In the past, unpaid internships were more common, and this created a disparity gap,” given that some students needed to earn money from part-time jobs and couldn’t sacrifice a paycheck to work as an intern, explains the executive director of Hopkins Hire, Alia Poonawala. “But through the DEI Collective, we require companies to pay students a minimum of $15 an hour,” eliminating the need to forego meaningful work experience.

As application deadlines near, and students and families weigh college options in the Baltimore area, remember that support exists to help you figure out and fine-tune your education, career, and life plans. “The key is to spend your time in college taking advantage of those supports and experiential learning opportunities,” even if you have a concrete path, says Logan-Bennett at TU.

Don’t worry about the lack of a clear-cut career connection to your major, advises Cole of UMBC. The liberal arts get a bad reputation, but, “we hear from employers all the time, whether it’s NASA or the NSA, that the soft skills students gain from a liberal arts degree are exactly what they look for in employees,” she says. “Academics make the individual disciplines, but the reality is that real life—and real work—are interdisciplinary.” And the college major is just one small piece of a larger puzzle.

If you are looking for the perfect fit for your college experience, look no further than Baltimore’s annual guide of regional academic institutions. Here is a roundup of what’s happening on area campuses.

BOWIE STATE UNIVERSITY
Bowie State University in Prince George’s County began with a mission to provide educational opportunities for Black citizens and, more than a century after opening, has consistently ranked among the best HBCUs in the country, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as specialty certificates and doctoral programs. It also has a solid reputation for being one of the best values around.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 5,381
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 18:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $8,753 in-state, $19,544 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 87 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Criminal Justice, Radio and Television Broadcasting Technology/Technician, Psychology, Biology, Computer/Information Technology, Child Development, Nursing, and Sociology

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 57 undergraduate, graduate, and certificate degrees. It’s been rated in the Top 50 Best HBCUs in the Nation (College Consensus), the Top 5 Best Value Online Schools in Maryland (Online School Center), and No. 7 Best Colleges in Maryland by Salary Score (GradReports).

In 2022, CSU received two large-scale federal education grants, including a $3.7-million Teacher Quality Partnership grant from the U.S. Department of Education to increase teacher diversity, while boosting student success in high-needs urban and rural schools across Maryland. CSU also recently created the Freddie Gray Student Success Scholarship, which is available to graduates of Carver Vocational-Technical High School, where Gray was a student.

Coppin 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: 2,108 undergraduates, 240 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 0:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $6,904 in-state, $13,560 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 54 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Business, Biology, Education, Criminal Justice, Rehabilitation Counseling

FROSTBURG STATE UNIVERSITY
For those who want to escape to the Appalachian Mountains while still benefitting from the low cost of in-state tuition, Frostburg State University in Western Maryland offers more than 100 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs, as well as miles of wilderness areas nearby to explore. On that note, its online M.S. in Recreation & Parks Management is ranked the No. 2 most affordable program in the U.S. by GetEducated.com.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,677
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 14:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $9,804 in-state, $24,684 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 86 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Economics, Nursing, Business Administration and Management

GOUCHER COLLEGE
A private, liberal arts college spanning 287 wooded acres in Towson, Goucher College takes pride in its close-knit community and leadership in global education. One hundred percent of Goucher students study abroad, and the college offers more than 60 flexible programs around the world for students to develop international experience.

Goucher has continually ranked among U.S. News & World Report’s best and most innovative national liberal arts colleges. Goucher ranked in the top four percent of all public and private colleges nationwide for its impact on social mobility, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

In the last few years, Goucher began exciting partnerships with other schools, such as Johns Hopkins University, Loyola University, Middlebury College, 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-percent discount on tuition.

Also of note: Goucher’s unique First-Year Village, which opened between 2016 and 2018, offers a unique space for 450 first-year students to live, work, and socialize. It features a sound-proof study room and communal spaces for students to cook, learn, and interact on each floor.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,100 undergraduate students, 900 graduate students
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $48,200
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 82 percent
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 point of pride is its financial aid program, which covers 100 percent 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.

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

It also announced new efforts 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: 6,331 undergraduates, 22,559 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $59,128 for Peabody Institute, $60,480 for the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 10.9 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Computer Science, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neuroscience, Economics, Public Health Studies, International Studies

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY MARYLAND
This private, Jesuit institution offers undergraduate and graduate programs on a beautiful urban campus strewn across 81 acres 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, and the school currently ranks fourth in “Best Regional Universities in the North,” according to U.S. News & World Report.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,822 undergraduates, 1,460 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $53,430
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 84 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Journalism, Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, English Language and Literature, Engineering and Education

MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART (MICA)
Located in the heart of Baltimore, MICA is the oldest continuously degree-granting college of art and design in the nation. According to U.S. News & World Report, it ranks among one of the top schools for its fine arts, graphic design, painting, drawing, and sculpture programs. MICA also offers graduate-level degree programs including Master of Fine Art, Master of Business Administration Art, and Master of Professional Studies. According to its website, MICA offers, “education and experience that will prepare you to be a creative leader in the 21st century.”

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 3,500
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 8:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $51,870 undergraduate
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 90 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Graphic Design, Illustration, Multimedia, Painting, Sculpture, Fine Arts, and Photography

McDANIEL COLLEGE
Founded in 1867, 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. A recent addition to McDaniel’s curriculum is a National Security Fellows Program that provides students with knowledge, skills, and experience in national security, along with the ability to specialize in an area of interest, such as interstate conflict, intrastate political violence, cybersecurity, ethics, and human rights.

The school also recently launched a new STEM Center to serve as a physical hub to support students studying the sciences. Equipped with adaptive workspaces and collaborative technology, the STEM Center hosts workshops focused on both the professional world and course-specific content, along with tutoring services and a study environment for students.

McDaniel earned a spot as the top-ranked Maryland institution on U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Value Schools” list among regional universities in the North for academic quality and affordability. The college also ranked as one of the “Best Regional Universities in the North” in their “Best Colleges” rankings for 2022-2023.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,681 undergraduates, 1,208 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 13:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $46,336
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 87 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Kinesiology, Business Administration, Psychology, Biology, Political Science, International Studies

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The largest of Maryland’s HBCUs, 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. Recently, Morgan launched the state’s first bachelor of science degree in cloud computing. 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: 7,034 undergraduates, 1,435 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $8,008 for in-state and $18,480 for out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 87 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Civil Engineering, Communications Engineering, Business Administration and Management, Social Work, Biology/Biological Sciences, Architecture, Finance, Psychology, Sociology

MOUNT SAINT MARY’S UNIVERSITY
Located in rural, mountainous Emmitsburg on a massive 1,500-acre campus, “The Mount” is America’s second-oldest Catholic university. It offers more than 80 undergraduate majors, minors, concentrations, and special programs grounded in a Catholic liberal arts tradition, and several bachelor’s/master’s combinations in partnership with other universities. It’s a degree that pays: The Mount ranks in the top 10 percent of colleges and universities nationwide in terms of the long-term earnings for a four-year college degree. As an extra bonus, the school offers a rich NCAA division I athletic program.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,570
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 12:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $44,330
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 82 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Social Sciences, Computer and Information Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Psychology, Communication, Journalism, Education, Family and Consumer Sciences/Human Sciences, and Health Professions

NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY
A private, Catholic liberal arts university in northern Baltimore, Notre Dame of Maryland University offers programs ranging from undergraduate to doctoral degrees, 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: 807 undergraduate students, 1,377 graduate and professional students
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 7:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $39,250
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 86.5 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Nursing, Education, Biology, Art Therapy, Pharmacy

ST. MARY’S COLLEGE OF MARYLAND
A state institution founded in 1840, St. Mary’s College of Maryland was recently ranked among the best public liberal arts colleges by Money magazine. Located on 361 acres in rural Southern Maryland, it is also know for having one of the lowest student-to-faculty ratios in the U.S. While its waterfront campus in historic St. Mary’s has the feel of a private institution, it offers all the affordability, accessibility, and diversity of a public school.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,526
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $15,184 in-state, $31,260 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 77 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Social Sciences, Psychology, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, English Language and Literature/Letters, Visual and Performing Arts, Computer and Information Sciences, History, Mathematics and Statistics, Foreign Languages, Literature, and Linguistics

SALISBURY UNIVERSITY
For those who want to be close to the ocean, Salisbury University offers undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs at its campus in Salisbury, about a 40-minute drive from Ocean City. In 2020, Money magazine named it one of “America’s Best Colleges.” A public institution, Salisbury is a NCAA Division III Capital Athletic Conference school.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,695
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 14:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $10,396 in-state, $20,872 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 86 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Management, Marketing, Education, Communication, Journalism, Psychology, Public Administration and Social Service Professions, Health Professions, Parks, Recreation, Leisure, Fitness, and Kinesiology, Social Sciences, Computer and Information Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences

STEVENSON UNIVERSITY
Stevenson University is a liberal arts school on a suburban campus in Baltimore County. It offers bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and preprofessional programs, as well as its Bachelor’s to Master’s option, which allows students to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree in five years. The school is growing, having recently opened a 117-acre recreational and athletic hub on its Owings Mills campus.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 2,979
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 15:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $38,738
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 91 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Health Professions, Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Computer and Information Sciences, Education, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts, Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting and Related Protective Services, Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies, and Legal Professions and Studies

TOWSON UNIVERSITY
One of the largest public universities in the state, Towson University offers more than 110 undergraduate majors, 47 master’s degrees, six doctoral programs, and 36 graduate certificates. The university 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-square-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. Towson also 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 and 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 and the wider community to Towson for enriching performing arts, music, and visual art programs.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 18,730 undergraduates, 3,187 graduates
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 16:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $10,818 in-state, $26,820 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 88 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business Administration, Education, Nursing, Exercise Science, Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF BALTIMORE
The University of Baltimore is situated in Mount Vernon, a Baltimore neighborhood rich in art, architecture, and history. UB has gained a solid reputation for its law and business programs, but it offers a wide spectrum of undergraduate and graduate degrees and doctoral programs, with an intense focus on connecting students to community and jobs, ensuring a sustainable career path post-graduation.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,605 undergraduate
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 11:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $9,506 in-state, $22,956 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 89 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Business, Forensic Science and Technology, Animation/ Video Graphics/Special Effects, Healthcare Management, Criminal Science, Digital Communication and Multimedia/Media, Psychology, Political Science and Government, Human Services, Information Science

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
The University of Maryland, Baltimore is the state’s only public law, health, and human services university. Located in downtown Baltimore, it offers 90 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 more than 1,000 people in nearly three dozen life science companies, university-based startups, and bioscience industry leaders like BD, Illumina, Catalent, and Pharmaron. With more than 250,000 square feet of lab and office space, the BioPark has been named an Outstanding University Research Park of the Year by the Association for University Research Parks. It’s located in the heart of the university’s medical campus.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 6,931
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 student population 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, with NASA announcing a major award of $72 million over three years, from 2021 to 2024, 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 more than 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: 10,625 undergraduate students, 3,366 graduate students
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 17:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $12,606 in-state, $28,370 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 69 percent POPULAR
AREAS OF STUDY: Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Visual and Performing Arts

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, EASTERN SHORE
The University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES), the State’s Historically Black 1890 Land Grant Institution, is a teaching, research, and doctoral institution that nurtures and launches leaders in a student-centered environment. Located on over 1,000 acres in Princess Anne, UMES was ranked among one of the top HBCU’s by U.S. News & World Report in 2020. It is home to many unique programs and partnerships in health sciences, agricultural and environmental sciences, and renewable energy research and implementation, including a novel, three-year accelerated Pharmacy program and the UMES Coastal Ecology Teaching and Research Center, which plays a significant role in the diversification of the workforce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,812
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 10:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $8,724 in-state, $16,467 out-of-state
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 81 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Aviation Science, Agriculture, Environmental Science, Applied Design, Kinesiology, Education

WASHINGTON COLLEGE
Founded in 1782, Washington College became the first college chartered after the American Revolution. This small, liberal arts school is based on a bucolic campus in Chestertown and offers more than 50 academic programs, small class settings, and a rich study abroad program. Recent news on campus includes the receipt of a gift of over $2 million to endow merit-based scholarships.

SIZE OF STUDENT BODY: 1,026
STUDENT TO FACULTY RATIO: 9:1
ANNUAL TUITION: $50,842
ACCEPTANCE RATE: 70 percent
POPULAR AREAS OF STUDY: Social Sciences, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Business, Management, Marketing, Psychology, Physical Sciences, English Language and Literature/Letters, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Visual and Performing Arts, Communication, Journalism, and Computer and Information Sciences

Cited tuition costs may exclude room and board, books, and other fees.

At the height of the Great Famine in 1847, some 1,500 Irish tenant farmers and their families were evicted from their land and made to walk 165 kilometers along the Royal Canal from County Roscommon to Dublin. Among them were 366 men, women, and children—mostly children, in fact—from the village of Ballykilcline, which was in the 13th year of a rent strike against the British Crown.

The Queen’s calvary and police “tumbled” their thatched homes, dispatching them en masse to Liverpool and then New York as part of a forced migration scheme to steal their farms. Officials had labeled the Ballykilcline families “troublemakers,” as neighboring tenants, many of whom had lost loved ones to starvation and famine disease, also began refusing to pay their rent.

Today, their sorrowful trek is marked by 30 pairs of bronze shoe sculptures on the National Famine Way walking trail from County Roscommon to Dublin. (The small bronze statues were cast from a child’s weathered shoes, later discovered by a farmer in a ruined 19th-century cottage.)

In a twist of fate, many of these Ballykilcline survivors would end up in Baltimore County, where they would establish an Irish community with the unlikely name of Texas around a promising quarry and the burgeoning North Central Railway line.

The crystalline, blue-white dolomite marble quarried by some of these Irish workers would eventually be used in the construction of the Washington Monument in D.C., the porticoes of the U.S. Capitol, City Hall, and, poignantly, the spires atop St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. If you live in a 100-year-old rowhouse, your marble stoop may have been quarried by these Ballykilcline refugees—or their descendants.

Similarly, Texas marble helped the Irish arrivals build the quarry adjacent St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church between 1850 and 1852. Some of their headstones, indicating the year of their birth in Roscommon County, can be found in the cemetery behind the still-thriving church.

How exactly the village, which has all but disappeared, like several other former industrial and mill towns in Baltimore County—including Ashland, Oregon, Gunpowder, and Warren—got the name Texas remains a question. The best guess is it originates from volunteers who left the nascent village in 1846—the year before the Ballykilcline migrants arrived—to fight in the Mexican War. When they returned, they named the town Texas, initially New Texas, because it apparently reminded them of the Lone Star State.

By 1895, the Irish were well established, with the formerly evicted families able to buy small plots of land and houses made affordable by ground rents.

“Everyone’s heard of the ‘No Irish Need Apply’ signs,” says Cassie Kilroy Thompson, a local public historian of Roscommon descent. “In Texas, it went the other way: ‘Only Irish Need Apply.’”

In March of that year, The Sun ran a detailed description of St. Patrick’s Day festivities in Baltimore County, including close-knit Texas, entitled “Ireland Forever!” (Éirinn go Brách in Irish). The 1940 Census listed Texas with a population of 494, including 111 dwellings, three farms, eights businesses, one school, two churches, one public building, two industrial plants, one cemetery, and one amusement park.

But by then, mechanization was reducing the need for quarry workers, and the land around the quarries became more valuable for commercial development. In 1951, the Texas post office closed, with mail going through increasingly sprawling Cockeysville, which eventually subsumed Texas entirely. Outside of the church, cemetery, and quarry—operated now by Martin Marietta—few markers remain. A notable exception is Padonia Road, named for Richard Padian, one of the Ballykilcline rent strike leaders and among the first to make his way to Baltimore County with his wife, Mary, and their four children.

The secular heart of Texas—McDermott’s “Don’t Worry About It” Tavern, down the street from St. Joseph’s on Church Lane—held on until 1991. That’s when former quarryman, professional boxer, and longtime owner of the legendary tavern, James McDermott, finally  sold his bar to make way for the Light Rail. Known as the “Unofficial Mayor of Texas,” he once said the reason he didn’t sell the place and retire earlier was that, as a lifelong bachelor who lived above the bar, he never had to worry about being lonely.

“All I have to do is walk down the steps,” he said in an interview, “and I’m with all my friends.”

Interestingly, St. Joseph’s, like many Catholic churches, again has a large immigrant congregation—with numerous Mexican and Central American families among its 7,000 members.

Even so, those congregations (including those founded by Irish refugees) occasionally need a reminder of the Christian principle of “welcoming the stranger.”

“We try to make the connection this has always been an immigrant church,” says Msgr. Richard Hilgartner. “The marble for the new sanctuary arch is coming from the old quarry.”

Less than two years ago, Kelly Madigan, a former deputy state prosecutor, was appointed to a newly created position that would make her Baltimore County’s first-ever inspector general. As if starting a government agency solo in the middle of a pandemic wasn’t hard enough, Madigan, 44, was also piloting an office created to shine a light on issues that some county employees and elected officials would rather stay in the dark. Despite the obstacles, she’s now expanding her team, increasing their efforts, and working to bring more transparency to local government.

How would you describe the challenges of doing a job that’s never existed before, particularly when it involves scrutinizing local government?
It has been a real challenge for a variety of reasons. To create a brand-new government agency—Baltimore County hasn’t had a new government agency for a long time—that’s always going to be a learning curve…It’s an agency whose mission is to point out fraud, waste, and misconduct. It’s not necessarily a popular position, and sometimes it’s not well-received. So, there have been some growing pains, but I’m really proud of the agency.

How would you describe the level of push-back you’ve received from elected officials over your office’s investigations?
Well, there has been pushback. I’m trying not to take it personally because there is a kind of natural tension. Because part of our role is to point out when someone’s not following policy or procedure or when something’s not appropriate…But I have faith in the process. We treat each and every employee respectfully. I try very hard to be fair to everyone, and when we draft the reports, the reports are factual. They’re not my opinion as to whether something was good or bad. There it is, what the law says, what the facts say. Period.

Which investigations do you think best represent your work?
I think each report is important, and I’m proud of them, and they’re all different. Some identify lots of money [owed to the county]…But our office has also done really important reports where there’s not a dollar-value associated. For example, we did a report this past July about a prominent developer who wanted to build a tennis court in their backyard, and they received preferential treatment. That report is just as important as a report about [purchase cards] or monies not being recovered by Baltimore County for rec and parks.

If you could make one change that would make your job easier, what would it be?
I think it’s really important that the office, as a new office, as an independent office, has access to our own independent counsel…Right now, the county attorney represents the office. And the county attorney also represents the county executive and all other members of the administration…It would help me be more effective with my job to have another person sitting down with the county attorney, talking about the nuances of the statute.

Superbly sited on one of Baltimore County’s most bucolic and sought-after lanes, at the confluence of Mantua Mill Road and Green Road, this exquisite stone 5-plus bedroom estate farm at 14111 Green Road is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to own one of the finest, most iconic equestrian farms in the region. Owning both banks of a long stretch of the Western Run and Deadman’s Run with picturesque swimming holds and storybook hideaways for picnics and fishing, Goose Green Farm enjoys breathtaking, gently rolling grounds with miles of protected open views and riding trails.

Designed circa 1948 by Charles Nes Jr., the manor house beautifully integrates updated elements with classic, elegant style. An oversized entry door opens into the foyer with a powder room and flows into the adjoining living spaces. A deep-cased portal leads to the living room with a woodburning fireplace and French doors to a covered porch, taking in the surrounding beauty. French doors from the foyer open into the den, which is accented by a stone wall and built-ins, also with access to the covered porch. The adjacent library features a woodburning fireplace, built-in bookcases, a concealed wet bar, and French doors to the adjoining sunroom. With heated floors and two walls of windows including French doors to the patio, this space is an ideal retreat to relax and enjoy the breathtaking scenery encircling the home. French doors open from the sunroom to the dining room, awash in natural light from a triple window. Swinging doors lead into the gourmet kitchen, updated by Cox Kitchens and featuring custom cabinetry, granite counters, professional grade appliances, a charming breakfast area accented by a stone wall, and access to the kitchen hall, mud room (with indoor dog kennel), and laundry room. A beautiful, spacious family room with two walls of custom built-in bookcases and a bath complete this level.

A private hall from the upstairs landing leads to the primary suite with a woodburning fireplace, built-ins, adjoining bath, dressing room, and French doors to an expansive IPE roof deck, taking in miles of rolling hills and pastures. An additional primary suite also enjoys an attached bath, dressing room, built-ins, and French doors to the deck. Three additional en suite bedrooms complete the second level. The lower level includes a recreation room with built-ins and a bar.

A drive-through lattice work porte-cochere flanked by breezeways leads to the Butler stone estate home as well as to the adjacent three-car garage boasting an upstairs apartment with a vaulted living room, kitchen area, bedroom, and bath.

Designed to match the main house, the nearby pool house (2016) sits to one end of the 50’ fenced-in pool. Guests can relax in the shade of the covered porch while others splash about or enjoy the beautiful indoor living spaces, including a large great room with fireplace and built-ins, a kitchen, exercise room, and a bath.

Slightly separated from the main house, a lovely 18^th century stone guest cottage enjoys a living room with vintage pine flooring and an oversized fireplace, a kitchen, laundry/mud room, three upper-level bedrooms and a bath as well as a nearby two-car garage and garden shed.

Spectacular panoramas surround the cottage including a wonderful view of the large riding ring, updated with EFT footing. The expansive farm complex just beyond includes three professional grade barns (2006 and 2008) with over 20 stalls, one with a silo observatory and all with tack rooms and wash stalls, an Amish built tractor palace/garage/workshop (2008), six run-in sheds, 83 acres with new, Centaur five-board fencing, and a sporting clay facility. The surrounding fields and meadows include extensive stretches along both banks of the Western Run and Deadman’s Run. Professionally designed gardens and grounds create landscapes begging to be captured on canvas by a master’s brush. Beautifully maintained and impeccably updated, this fabled 183-plus acre equestrian retreat is a rare opportunity to own one of the finest properties in Baltimore County!

For more information, and to view other listings, click here:

This is the perfect moment to shake off winter and get back out with friends and family. With its convenient location, Baltimore County is an ideal destination for travelers from afar or those who want to explore something new in their own town.

Life sure has had its ups and downs in recent years, but one thing has stayed the same: Baltimore County is a lively home to a wide array of activities to suit any interest. Our parks, restaurants, shops, recreational areas, and golf courses are open for everyone to safely enjoy.

In the following pages we provide you with information that is sure to inspire your next outing. Cuisine connoisseurs will appreciate a taste of all that we have to offer, from farm-fresh produce to world-class restaurants and wine from locally grown grapes.

We offer charming main streets for strolling, the perfect way to shop small. For families looking to reconnect, Baltimore County has outdoor adventure, arts, athletic, and recreational activities that will surely entice even the most reluctant in the family to put down that device and enjoy some fresh air.

It’s time to get back to play again. Whether you’re ready to pick up the game of golf, want to return to open air concerts, or are looking for a way to amp up your fitness practice (paddle pilates, anyone?), let Baltimore County welcome you with all we have to offer.

The construction of the Milton Inn dates to the mid-18th century and it began its life as a coach stop for local Quakers. It is still a haven of hospitality in Baltimore County, only now it welcomes diners with discerning palates from all around the region.

“OUR LONG-TIME CLIENTS AND OUR NEW NEIGHBORS HAVE BEEN SO ENTHUSIASTIC. ALSO IT’S NOT HALF BAD FOR A CITY BOY LIKE ME TO GET TO ENJOY THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRYSIDE OF NORTHERN BALTIMORE COUNTY EVERYDAY. ” — TONY FOREMAN

The announcement that the Foreman-Wolf Group were going to reopen The Milton Inn— its first restaurant in the county—created a shockwave of culinary joy.

Foreman-Wolf refreshed the historic building’s interiors and kitchen, opening the restaurant in 2021 under the guidance of chef and coowner, Chris Scanga. Today, The Milton Inn offers cuisine focused on the Southwest of France showcasing fresh, seasonal ingredients from over two dozen of the mid-Atlantic’s finest farms and purveyors.

Looking to taste more of what Baltimore County offers? Try these delectable destinations:

THE TILLERY, OWINGS MILLS
Dine in on classic American fare and craft beverages or enjoy sitting outside, perhaps around the firepit.
thetilleryowingsmills.com

PERENNIAL, TOWSON
Enjoy Chef Jay Rohlfing’s innovative, seasonally-inspired menu and a “robust cocktail program,” right in the heart of Towson.
perennialtowson.com

LA FOOD MARKETA, PIKESVILLE
Chefs Chad Gauss and Johntay Bedingfield bring the same quality of its sister restaurant in the city, The Food Market, to Quarry Lake.
lafoodmarketa.com

SUNSET COVE, MIDDLE RIVER
This beach bar and restaurant with its perfect waterfront view is the place to enjoy long, warm summer days and evenings.
sunsetcovemd.com

THE HUB, CATONSVILLE
This food hall features cuisine from multiple vendors so you can sample everything from Korean street food to all things hot pot goodness. There’s even a Montessori-inspired kids play area.
thehubfoodcourt.com

BOORDY VINEYARDS, HYDES
Enjoy everything from a tour of the vineyard to food truck cuisine and farmers’ markets, all with a sip of wine from one of the county’s oldest vintners.
boordy.com

Catonsville became Baltimore County’s first state-recognized Arts and Entertainment District in 2020. The award was given by the Maryland State Arts Council, and it is easy to see why. Catonsville is home to a host of live music venues and shops—and places like Bill’s Music House and Appalachian Bluegrass Shoppe that are both shops and live music destinations. Perhaps it’s no surprise the Maryland General Assembly dubbed it, “Music City, Maryland.”

But there’s more to Catonsville than just great music, and many of its charms are best explored on foot with a leisurely stroll down Frederick Avenue. Here you will find enticing places to shop small, such as locally owned antique shops, boutiques, and artisan food markets. And whether you need a restorative jolt of caffeine or a delicious meal to recharge during your saunter, Catonsville features coffee shops and restaurants to suit all tastes.

With Catonsville leading the way, Baltimore County is sure to continue its growth as a recognized center of arts and entertainment.

Looking for more places to stroll and shop local? Be sure to visit the county’s retail hubs:

TOWSON: The county seat features small shops, boutiques, and great restaurants.

HUNT VALLEY: While the energetic town center is Hunt Valley’s heart, don’t miss the small shops, garden centers, and markets along York Road.

REISTERSTOWN: From one end of Main Street to another you can pick up kids clothes at The Elephant’s Trunk, enjoy a coffee at Reister’s Daughter, and get ice cream, salon styling, and more in between

Do you have an aspiring golfer in your household or do you want to share your love of the game with a young person? The Fox Hollow Training Center (FHTC) in Timonium is the perfect place to start—or to get a seasonal refresher.

Golf is a sport a child can learn now and play for a lifetime. Since it’s noncontact, it’s a great way to exercise with less likelihood of injury.

At FHTC, children learn the game from trained professionals and are introduced to important life skills like integrity, sportmanship, and self-control.

The facilities at FHTC are top notch, including 60 hitting stations, three lighted putting greens, and practice bunkers. FHTC is routinely ranked nationally as a Top 50 Driving Range
by the Golf Range Association of America.

Now is the time to get in the swing of things, with special offers like professional instruction at reduced rates for juniors and reduced and/or complimentary access to any of Baltimore County Golf’s five courses for golfers 17 and under. Or take advantage of one of FHTC’s summer camps.

baltimoregolfing.com

Baltimore County has countless places to get out and connect with friends and family.
Here are just a few:

CROMWELL VALLEY PARK, PARKVILLE
Just minutes from Towson, this park encompasses 460 acres of stream valley and upland habitat, a combination that makes it perfect for birding. The nature center offers many programs or simply enjoy its hiking trails.
cromwellvalleypark.org

MARSHY POINT NATURE CENTER, CHASE
Sitting within a 3,000-acre nature preserve on the Upper Chesapeake, Marshy Point offers innnovative programs and exhibits for visitors, hiking trails, and Baltimore County’s first water trail for kayaking or canoeing!
marshypoint.org

BENGIES DRIVE-IN THEATRE, MIDDLE RIVER
Recapture a bygone era at Maryland’s only remaining drive-in theatre. Featuring the “biggest movie theatre screen in the USA,” Bengies is a great spot to enjoy the latest blockbuster.
bengies.com

PRIGEL FAMILY CREAMERY, GLEN ARM
At the scenic Prigel Creamery enjoy a scoop of chocolate peanut butter, caramel pretzel, or even a choose-your-own ice cream sandwich, while the farm’s dairy cows graze happily in their pastures. P.S.: They serve way more than ice cream!
prigelfamilycreamery.com

HAMPTON NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, TOWSON
In 1790, Hampton was perhaps the largest home in America. Today, the architecturally significant home and surrounding site offer a chance to explore and gain a deeper understanding of the complex history of our nation.
nps.gov/hamp

There’s no better way to spend a hot, humid summer day than lazing down the Gunpowder River in a tube. The always cool and shaded river winds its way by pastures and woodlands, meandering parallel to the NCR hike and bike trail. Tubing is the antidote for harried lives.

The Monkton Bike shop, housed in the historic Monkton village, offers tubes for rent for kids and adults. It has also marked two tubing routes accessible by foot. Simply walk north on the NCR trail and look for the blue tree markers to find the path where you put in at the river. When you coast under the Monkton Road bridge you’ve reached the end of your float.

The Gunpowder is generally tranquil and often shallow enough to walk and splash in, making it a perfect outing even with young kids.

Looking for more outdoor adventures?
Here are a few destinations to add to your summer bucket list:

LOCH RAVEN RESERVOIR
The protected woodlands around the reservoir feature 60 miles of hiking trails while its calm waters are perfect for kayaking.
baltimorecountymd.gov/departments/environment/watersheds/lrmain.html

NCR (TORREY C. BROWN) TRAIL
Whether you’re a runner, walker, or biker, the nearly 20 miles of trail following the meandering path of the former Northern Central Railway (NCR) offers optimal conditions. Just look out for tubers sharing the path on hot summer days!
dnr.maryland.gov/publiclands/pages/central/tcb.aspx

B’MORE SUP
Interested in paddle pilates? Or a board excursion with your pup? Whether you simply want to try staying upright in a begininers paddle board class or you’re ready for yogaflo on your board, the three locations of B’More SUP are here to help.
baltimoresup.com

ROCKY POINT GOLF COURSE
Go for par—which is 72, by the way—on this exceptional course set in meandering natural wetlands, the only waterfront course on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
baltimoregolfing.com/course/rocky-point

PATAPSCO VALLEY STATE PARK
There are 200 miles of hiking trails inside the park’s more than 16,000 acres. See for yourself why the park is nationally recognized for its trail system and scenic beauty.
dnr.maryland.gov/publiclands/pages/central/patapsco.aspx

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.

ue and Thom Rinker, age 74 and 75 respectively, were feeling very isolated in their condo in Baltimore County. “We were ready for a change,” says Sue.
“My mother had lived at a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) for 20 years and some of our friends had moved to that type of community. We really liked what a CCRC offered.”

According to seniorliving.org, a CCRC (also known as a Life Plan Community) delivers independent living and an amenity-rich lifestyle with access to onsite, higher-level care should a resident’s medical needs progress. The levels of care usually include independent, assisted, memory care, and skilled nursing as well as rehabilitation therapy on the campus. This continuum of care ensures residents that they have the comfort of remaining in the place they call home and the peace of mind that comes from knowing their future care is figured out.

“We wanted a CCRC so our two children who live in the area wouldn’t be burdened with our future healthcare,” Sue continues. “But for now, we are healthy and wanted lots of great amenities.” The Rinkers, who live at Blakehurst in Towson, say that it’s like living at a five-star resort.

Robin Somers, CEO of Broadmead, a Life Plan Community in Cockeysville, says, “Today we are seeing many of our residents coming in younger. Rather than in their 80s, they come in their 70s.”

Elizabeth O’Conner, director of marketing and sales at Blakehurst, adds that not only are residents younger, “they are very active.”

Without the drudgery of home maintenance, doing daily chores like cleaning and meal planning, and even trying to get the COVID-19 vaccine booster, there’s time for residents to be physically active and explore myriad intellectual and cultural opportunities. But for those who prefer to spend time alone or with a few friends, there’s that too.

A fitness center ranks high on must-have lists for incoming residents. In many CCRCs, residents will find state-of-the-art equipment, classes including yoga, tai chi, and aerobics, and a heated pool. Sometimes there’s even a juice bar and a spa for manicures, pedicures, and massages. Parker Williamson, 81, is an avid sailor who lives at BayWoods of Annapolis, a waterfront community. He says, “I exercise every other day, but don’t like group classes, so the personal trainer worked up a routine just for me.”

“Today’s residents want individualization,” remarks Somers.

Sharon Krulak, 79, is a new resident at Blakehurst. She’s also an artist who works in mixed-media. When the Krulaks were looking at Blakehurst, she told O’Connor, “I need a room to do my art. And they made it happen.”

At Broadmead, two residents who were trained and experienced beekeepers had a conversation with the Broadmead executive director, and the Broadmead Apiary was established in 2013. Today, there is a group of six residents who are involved. Throughout the year they inspect the beehives, feed the bees sugar syrup, and harvest the honey into jars for sale.

Usually, CCRCs have councils, committees, and their own governing body where residents can make things happen. “At Blakehurst we have 43 residential-run committees,” says Sue Rinker. “Thom is on the residents’ board and I’m on the refurbishing and jigsaw committees.”

CCRCs have concerts, guest speakers, and some arrange continuing education through Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (university-based education specifically for people 50 and older) or nearby universities. At Broadmead, they recognize artists within their community and in the greater Baltimore vicinity by having exhibits, programs, and educational outreach. This April, the Broadmead Art Council will host an exhibit of the works of Herman Maril, a Baltimore native known for painting seascapes, interiors, and landscapes. These exhibits and lectures will be open to the greater community.

Other amenities usually include endless clubs, beautiful walking trails, gardens where residents can plant vegetables and flowers, a movie theater, a library, woodworking, a beauty salon and barber shop, card and poker rooms, billiards, bocce, and a resident computer and business center. Some communities have a croquet court, a putting green, and pickleball. As most CCRCs welcome your four-legged family members, there are even dog parks. And in keeping with making life effortless, some places will deliver your incoming packages right to your door. The list of concierge services goes on, including scheduled transportation to grocery stores, shops and more. At Edenwald, a CCRC in Towson, a bus transports residents to cultural events and attractions like the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Meyerhoff, a string quartet at Shriver Hall, and plays.

Cuisine plays an important part in daily life. The number of dining venues depends on the CCRC and so do the plans they offer. Many have a grill, café, bar, and outdoor dining. CCRCs pride themselves on having an excellent chef, offering plenty of choices on the menu, high quality ingredients, and dining experiences resembling a great restaurant.

In this area, all CCRCs are close to vibrant cities—Annapolis, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. As Parker Williamson, resident at BayWoods, says with a laugh, “What’s great is we can visit Baltimore and D.C. and take advantage of all they have to offer, but we don’t have to live there.”

The Guide to Regional Continuing Care Facilities & Senior Resources

ASBURY METHODIST VILLAGE
201 Russell Ave.
Gaithersburg, MD 20877
(301) 216-4001
asbury.org/asbury-methodist-village

ASBURY-SOLOMONS ISLAND
11100 Asbury Circle
Solomons, MD 20688
(410) 394-3000
asbury.org/asbury-solomons

BAYLEIGH CHASE
501 Dutchmans Lane
Easton, MD 21601
(410) 657-4900
actsretirement.org/communities/maryland/bayleigh-chase-easton

BAYWOODS OF ANNAPOLIS
7101 Bay Front Drive
Annapolis, MD 21403
(410) 268-9222
baywoodsofannapolis.com

BEDFORD COURT
3701 International Drive
Silver Spring, MD 20906
(301) 598-2900
sunriseseniorliving.com/communities/bedford

BLAKEHURST
1055 W. Joppa Road
Towson, MD 21204
(410) 296-2900
blakehurstlcs.com

BRIGHTVIEW SENIOR LIVING
Multiple locations
(888) 566-8854
brightviewseniorliving.com

BROADMEAD
13801 York Road
Cockeysville, MD 21030
(410) 527-1900
www.broadmead.org

BROOKE GROVE
18100 Slade School Road
Sandy Spring, MD 20860
(301) 924-2811
www.bgf.org

BUCKINGHAM’S CHOICE
3200 Baker Circle
Adamstown, MD 21710
(301) 804-2159
actsretirement.org/communities/maryland/buckinghams-choice-adamstown

CARROLL LUTHERAN VILLAGE
300 St. Luke Circle
Westminster, MD 21158
(410) 848-0090
clvillage.org

CHARLESTOWN RETIREMENT COMMUNITY
715 Maiden Choice Lane
Catonsville, MD 21228
(410) 405-7683
ericksonseniorliving.com/charlestown

COLLINGTON EPISCOPAL LIFE CARE COMMUNITY
10450 Lottsford Road
Mitchellville, MD 20721
(301) 925-9610
collington.kendal.org

EDENWALD
800 Southerly Road
Towson, MD 21286
(410) 339-6000
edenwald.org

ELIZABETH COONEY CARE NETWORK
1107 Kenilworth Drive, Ste. 200
Towson, MD 21204
(410) 323-1700
Elizabethcooneyagency.com

FAHRNEY-KEEDY
8507 Mapleville Road
Boonsboro, MD 21713-1818
(301) 733-6284
fkhv.org

FAIRHAVEN
7200 Third Ave.
Sykesville, MD 21784
(410) 892-1946
actsretirement.org/communities/maryland/fairhaven-sykesville

FRIENDS HOUSE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY
17340 Quaker Lane
Sandy Spring, MD 20860
(301) 924-5100
friendshouse.com

GINGER COVE ANNAPOLIS LIFE CARE
4000 River Crescent Drive
Annapolis, MD 21401
(410) 266-7300
gingercove.com

GLEN MEADOWS RETIREMENT COMMUNITY
11630 Glen Arm Road
Glen Arm, MD 21057
(410) 592-5310
presbyterianseniorliving.org/glen-meadows-retirement-community

GOODWILL RETIREMENT VILLAGE
891 Dorsey Hotel Road
Grantsville, MD 21536
(301) 895-5194
goodwillhome.org

HARMONY AT WALDORF
11239 Berry Road
Waldorf, MD 20603
(240) 270-2759
harmonyseniorservices.com/senior-living/md/waldorf/berry-road

HERON POINT OF CHESTERTOWN
501 Campus Ave.
Chestertown, MD 21620
(443) 214-3605
actsretirement.org/communities/maryland/heron-point-of-chestertown

HOMEWOOD AT FREDERICK
7407 Willow Road
Frederick, MD 21702
(301) 644-5600
homewoodfrederick.com

HOMEWOOD AT WILLIAMSPORT
16505 Virginia Ave.
Williamsport, MD 21795
(301) 582-1472
homewoodwilliamsport.com

INGLESIDE AT KING FARM
701 King Farm Blvd.
Rockville, Maryland 20850
(240) 557-8791
inglesideonline.org/ingleside-king-farm

LEISURE CARE: THE LANDING OF SILVER SPRINGS
13908 New Hampshire Ave.
Silver Spring, MD 20904
(301) 388-7700
leisurecare.com/our-communities/landing-of-silver-spring

LUTHERAN VILLAGE AT MILLER’S GRANT
9000 Fathers Legacy
Ellicott City, MD 21042
(410) 465-2005
millersgrant.org

MAPLEWOOD PARK PLACE
9707 Old Georgetown Road
Bethesda, MD 20814
(301) 571-7444
maplewoodparkplace.com

MARYLAND MASONIC HOMES
300 International Circle
Cockeysville, MD 21030
(410) 527-1111
mdmasonichomes.com

MERCY RIDGE
2525 Pot Spring Road
Timonium, MD 21093
(410) 561-0200
mercyridge.com

NORTH OAKS
725 Mount Wilson Lane
Pikesville, MD 21208
(410) 484-7300
northoaksseniorliving.com

RIDERWOOD VILLAGE
3140 Gracefield Road
Silver Spring, MD 20904
(301) 701-4076
ericksonseniorliving.com/riderwood

ROLAND PARK PLACE
830 W. 40th St.
Baltimore, MD 21211
(410) 243-5700
rolandparkplace.org

THE RESIDENCES AT VANTAGE POINT
5400 Vantage Point Road
Columbia, MD 21044
(410) 964-5454
vantagepointresidences.org

OAK CREST VILLAGE
8800 Walther Blvd.
Parkville, MD 21234
(410) 405-7419
ericksonseniorliving.com/oak-crest

ORTHOPAEDIC ASSOCIATES OF CENTRAL MARYLAND
Six locations in the area
(410) 644-1880
mdbonedocs.com

RECORD STREET HOME–HOME OF THE AGED
115 Record St.
Frederick, MD 21701
(301) 663-6822
recordstreethome.org

THE VILLAGE AT AUGSBURG
6811 Campfield Road
Baltimore, MD 21207
(410) 834-4143
thevillageataugsburg.org

THE VILLAGE AT ROCKVILLE
9701 Veirs Drive
Rockville, MD 20850
(301) 424-9560
thevillageatrockville.org

WECARE
1852 Reisterstown Road
Pikesville, MD 21208
(410) 602-3993
wecarepds.com

WILLOW VALLEY
600 Willow Valley Sq.
Lancaster, PA 17602
(717) 464-6800
willowvalleycommunities.org

John Olszewski Jr. was seeking a comeback. For four years, he’d served as chairman of Baltimore County’s delegation in Annapolis. Then, in 2014, looking to move up to the state Senate, he lost to Republican newcomer Johnny Ray Salling, which suddenly made him a former politician at the tender age of 32.

The same night, Larry Hogan, who like Salling had never held elected office, upset then Lt. Governor Anthony Brown at the top of the GOP ticket. One question that emerged in Baltimore County was whether Olszewski had simply been swept up in the GOP’s “red wave” or whether some of his votes had alienated the increasingly conservative voters in his heavily blue-collar district.

He’d cast what many considered the deciding vote in favor of same-sex marriage in 2012. He voted to allow undocumented students to attend state colleges at in-state tuition rates and raise the Maryland minimum wage. He’d also sponsored a bill, which later became law, mandating paid sick leave. Some of [those votes] were very controversial for his district,” the late House Speaker Michael Busch told the Baltimore Sun later, “and it did catch up to him in the next election.”

“It was a very hard loss,” Olszewski admits. “I grew up in Eastern Baltimore County. I went to high school here, taught here, and still live here.”

Nonetheless, he quickly picked himself up after the tough defeat. He and his wife had a daughter almost a year to the day after the loss, and that helped keep things in perspective. A year after she was born, he created an advocacy group called “Better Baltimore County” that he used to discuss community needs with residents across the county. He also finished his PhD in Public Policy at UMBC—his dissertation, which seems particularly relevant at the moment, centered on making data-driven policy decisions.

Recharged and recommitted, he was the first candidate to get into the 2018 Baltimore County Executive race. On primary day that summer, his last stop was at the busiest intersection in Dundalk, Wise Avenue and Merritt Boulevard, where the 6-foot-6 Olszewski held up an umbrella in the rain and waved to honking voters. As the polls closed, he headed to nearby Key Brewing to see if he still had a political future.

A Sun/University of Baltimore poll released just days before the start of early voting had placed him running a distant third in the Democratic primary behind longtime state Sen. Jim Brochin and former County Council Chairwoman Vicki Almond. But as Brochin and Almond began trading barbs in the final weeks, Olszewski stayed out of the fray. The speculation on the ground was that he was benefiting from the crossfire between the two favored candidates. To what degree was anybody’s guess, however, as he pulled a couple of tables together for his team at the Dundalk brew pub that evening.

“The very first precincts that came in were from Owings Mills, which was supposed to be Vicki’s area, and those numbers were good, a positive early sign,” Olszewski recalls. “At that we point we thought, ‘Well, this might be a long, interesting night.’” That long, interesting night lasted nearly a month. Once the initial tally was finished, less than 1,000 votes separated the three hopefuls. Olszewski was fewer than 10 votes ahead. Brochin, the runner-up, petitioned for a recount, which didn’t conclude until July 14—and widened Olszewski’s lead to 17.

“The difference was nine people’s votes,” Olszewski says, alluding to the fact that if nine people had cast their ballot for Brochin instead of him, the 18-vote swing would’ve meant another loss. “Do I think about who those nine people were?” he says during a recent “district day” visit and walk through downtown Arbutus. “All the time.”

Olszewski had run as the progressive Democrat in the primary. He stood by his record in the General Assembly, and made clear that his vote against the assault weapons ban, a nod to his conservative district at the time, had been a mistake. He was the only candidate to call for legislation to address housing discrimination in the county and the legal action brought by the Baltimore County chapter of the NAACP, residents, and housing advocates.

Winning a three-way primary by 17 votes hardly seemed a mandate to push a progressive agenda in the general election, but Olszewski, who taught in the county public school system for seven years, ran on raising teacher salaries and universal pre-kindergarten that November against Republican Al Redmer, a former state insurance commissioner. His platform included improving mass transit, bike, and pedestrian access, as well as addressing the county’s sustainability and climate change efforts. He said he’d bring county government into the 21st century and put the county budget online.

Olszewski captured a convincing 57 percent of the vote even as Hogan, who strongly endorsed Redmer, cruised to another big win at the top of the ticket—and in Baltimore County, specifically.

The question that night around Olszewski was a very different one than four years earlier. Broadly: How did a progressive candidate for county executive garner such a resounding win in a jurisdiction that Hogan has twice carried by big numbers?

For starters, Olszewski comes off as a likeable, practical-minded candidate. Whatever their policy differences—and they are profound—both Hogan and Olszewski are happy warriors on the campaign trail. Most importantly, he’d spent his time on the sidelines solidifying and building relationships in every nook and cranny of the county. So that was enough to get him elected three years ago.

But now, as re-election looms next year, a new question emerges: How has Olszewski done implementing and selling his progressive agenda in the third-largest county in Maryland, a sprawling jurisdiction with pockets of deep red voters and a population bigger than four states? The short answer: There was a lot of talk in Democratic party circles about Olszewski running for governor in 2022 before he decided this summer to seek re-election.

That’s how highly regarded he is and the clout he now carries.

“HE HAS WHAT EVERYONE SAYS THEY’RE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR—AUTHENTICITY.”

“The Democratic candidates for governor are going need to do well in Baltimore County next year,” says Mileah Kromer, a professor of political science at Goucher College, and a friend of Olszewski’s after sitting on his dissertation committee. “And they’re all going to want his endorsement.”

To fully understand Olszewski, you have to know he still makes his home in the place he grew up. He graduated from Sparrows Point High School in 2000 and lives nearby in Millers Island. His formal political education got an early start. He served as the student representative to the county school board as a teenager. It began outside of school early, too. He grew up in the shadow of what was once the world’s largest steel mill and saw firsthand the detrimental effects that the mill’s closure had on friends and family.

“I remember when the blast furnace was still going and what the shedding of those good-paying jobs, good health benefits, and good pensions did to the community,” Olszewski says. “I’d grown up hearing steelworkers tell their stories and their pride in making steel. I grew up hearing about the local history around the War of 1812. The Fourth of July was important in Dundalk, too, and there was always this close relationship to the water and the Bay for people here. And then I witnessed this slow-motion decline [when Bethlehem Steel was sold and then shuttered]. The American Dream became a dream deferred for many people. That’s what I want to turn around.”

Following high school, he stayed in the county, attending Goucher College, where he graduated with a bachelor’s in political science and American studies. He began teaching at Patapsco High School and Center for the Arts, also in Dundalk, a year prior to his first election in 2006. He’s got two brothers. One is a Baltimore County police offcer; the other works in code enforcement for the county (his employment predates Olszewski’s election). The local roots run deep, in other words.

“He has what you can’t teach,” says former County Executive Don Mohler, himself a former educator. “He has what everyone says they’re always looking for—authenticity. I think in terms of being ‘progressive,’ what Johnny is doing is modernizing county government, which needed to be done. It’s like turning a battleship around.”

Three years into his first term, Olszewski’s achievements are already compelling. Transformational, really, for Baltimore County and more remarkable given the COVID-19 pandemic. Two years ago, he fulfilled a major commitment and passed the HOME Act, long overdue legislation that will prevent landlords from discriminating based on a tenant’s source of income, namely a federal housing voucher, commonly referred to as Section 8. Early this year, he signed legislation creating the County’s first dedicated department of housing. Olszewski also followed through on several good government items—getting public campaign financing enacted, creating an Office of Ethics and Accountability, and publishing the county’s budget online. He also appointed Baltimore County’s first-ever chief sustainability officer.

Despite his progressive bonafides, Olszewski has worked across the aisle as well. In 2019, Olszewski passed legislation with bipartisan support that requires gun retailers to install security systems to protect their inventory from potential burglaries. This summer, he finally got the decade-in-the-planning Towson Loop moving with federal grant support. It’s a free public bus service that will link the core of Towson’s downtown with nearby attractions and large employers.

Not that it’s been easy. It took three years for the Olszewski administration to settle a high-profile wrongful death lawsuit that it inherited, which stemmed from the police shooting of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines in 2016. There have been other struggles and controversies—his tacit support of a curfew for “unsupervised youth” at the White Marsh Mall, for example. His administration’s support for the Red Maple affordable housing project in East Towson has garnered, not unsurprisingly, community pushback. School overcrowding remains front and center. So, too, do issues of poverty and homelessness, which can be less outwardly visible in the county.

The homicide total this year surpassed last year’s total by July. And changing the complacent culture of Baltimore County government has not exactly been smooth sailing: This spring, several council members slammed the efforts of his new inspector general, Kelly Madigan, after one of her reports was deeply critical of a politically connected, now former deputy director of at the Department of Economic and Workforce Development.

Initially, Olszewski caved to council pressure and sought legislation to create a council-led oversight board for the inspector general’s office. Then, when activists and a national watchdog group raised red flags and about the politics at play and the potential conflicts in the council overseeing the inspector general’s work, Olszewski reconsidered. Instead, he set up a work group to study the best path forward as far as the makeup and responsibilities of the oversight board. It was a disconcerting, if brief, step back in terms of a commitment to accountability.

The COVID pandemic, of course, demanded immediate action, and Olszewski and the County received kudos for its vaccination rollout, which included a mass site in partnership with the state at the at the fairgrounds. County mask mandates and COVID-related closures and occupancy limits have essentially aligned with state mandates, occasionally prompting protests.

Before all that, however, Olszewski faced an $81-million budget shortfall when he was sworn into office in December 2018, which would’ve demanded deep cuts to county services. In response, Olszewski pushed for and passed Baltimore County’s first income tax increase in nearly 30 years—no small political feat—as well as a new tax on residents’ cell- phone service. Notably, that first partisan fight out of the gate did not prevent Olszewski and the council from working together in bi-partisan fashion moving forward. “I did vote against the housing policy legislation and the income tax bill,” Marks says. “With him, however, it’s just a very cordial relationship.”

One other potentially fraught bill that Olszewski introduced was police reform legislation that banned chokeholds, prevented cops with records of misconduct elsewhere from serving in the police department, and required additional implicit bias and de-escalation training. That was approved, to Marks’ point, with a 6-1 bipartisan vote. “I think the biggest reasons he is successful is that he builds the right kinds of political relationships and when he picks his battles, frankly, he’s prepared,” Marks says. “He’s very smart, let’s not forget that, and he’s accomplished a lot already. I’m the youngest council member and he’s 10 years younger than me.”

Many outside observers expected Olszewski to run for governor, but ultimately his decision to stick around did not surprise those who know him well. Mohler believes a large part just comes from his desire to do right by the place he’s always called home. “He’s a Baltimore County guy,” Mohler says. “I think he wants to make a lasting impact.”

Olszewski pretty much says the same thing.

“If I get a second term, a lot of it will be about building on things we’ve started. We’ve still got work to do with transportation, sustainability, and schools.” He also recognizes, whether it’s a future run for governor or congressional seat, time is on his side. “Sometimes, the best way to get your next job is to do the one you have as well as you can.”

When Varada Maulkhan, the teenage daughter of immigrants from the South American country Guyana, first walked the grounds of Caves Valley Golf Club a few years ago, she observed what most visitors do about the private, picturesque property in the Baltimore County hills. “It’s gorgeous,” Maulkhan says. “It’s always been gorgeous.”

As she strolled the carefully manicured, low-cut fairways of the championship 18-hole course—routed along what were once the heavy woods and farmland of a tobacco plantation—a peaceful silence was only broken by birds singing in the towering hardwood trees, the satisfying thwack of golf clubs hitting balls, and the hushed tones of conversation inside the club’s fences. She hit drives, irons, and putts on the same challenging ground where multiple American presidents—like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush—and hundreds of business leaders and golf icons, like the late Arnold Palmer, have played since the luxurious club opened in 1991.

Safe to say, Caves Valley’s 962 acres northwest of the city—rarely seen and stunningly secluded despite being 25 minutes from downtown—are about as exclusive as it gets in Baltimore, or anywhere.

Annual dues for the roughly 550 members, which include notable locals such as Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr. and Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, as well as national figures like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, run in the tens of thousands. Even Obama, a member, pays the fee. Unless you can afford it, know someone who does, or live in one of the two dozen multi-million-dollar homes on the property, the chances of getting past the security gate next to the oak trees on Park Heights Avenue are as low as hitting a hole-in-one.

But it is possible, as the 18-year-old Maulkhan—who graduated with straight- As from Catonsville High this spring—has demonstrated.

She first played on the course in a regional nine-hole junior golf event that she qualified for through the First Tee – Greater Baltimore, a nonprofit organization that introduces kids of all backgrounds at a very low cost to what’s traditionally a rich, white, male-dominated game. The Caves Valley Golf Club Foundation, the club’s charitable arm, is one of the local First Tee chapter’s primary funders, donating six figures annually.

Maulkhan got turned onto golf in second grade, at the age of 7, after her father, Kris, a regular weekend golfer, heard about First Tee, which runs youth programming at city courses such as Clifton Park and Forest Park in West Baltimore. “I went to my first lesson,” she says, “and ever since then we’ve been going to First Tee.”

Maulkhan has become a good golfer, though she was never going to get a college scholarship for playing. But that’s not the entire point of First Tee. As part of its youth development programming, the organization also runs a caddie academy. And that’s the second way Maulkhan got access to Caves Valley and, ultimately, much more than she ever imagined. Through the academy, Maulkhan started caddying as a part-time job, mostly at Greenspring Valley Hunt Club and Baltimore Country Club, and on a few occasions on the tree-lined fairways at Caves Valley, where golf carts aren’t recommended.

Practically, a caddie is a frequently overlooked grunt-work job of the golf world. The everyday duties include lugging strangers’ heavy golf bags up and down hills as they play 18 holes over four hours; telling a golfer how far it is to the green; finding lost balls in tall grass, sand, or behind trees; raking bunkers; being a good companion (but knowing when to stay quiet, too); and getting paid for the time and miles of work.

It’s physically demanding and a significant time commitment, especially for a teen who could easily spend an equivalent number of hours hanging out with her friends instead. But the rewards of making more than 100 loops, as the caddies call them, over the last couple of years have been well worth it, as far as Maulkhan is concerned. And not just because she’s gotten more comfortable in social situations and made some extra spending money.

This fall, Maulkhan is going to college—at the University of Maryland—on a full ride, all because of her days as a caddie. She is the First Tee – Greater Baltimore’s first-ever student to receive an Evans Scholarship, offered to high school-age caddies with enough loops, good grades, strong character, and a financial need. Tuition and housing are paid for four years.

It’s a relatively little-known opportunity (at least around these parts), but that should change soon, thanks to a prestigious golf tournament coming to town that will shine a spotlight on the Evans Scholarship—and on Baltimore.

From August 26 to 29, Caves Valley will open its typically closed gates to the paying public as it hosts the nationally televised BMW Championship, the first PGA Tournament in Baltimore in nearly 60 years. (The practice rounds, starting on August 24, will also be accessible to the public.) The world’s top 70 men’s players will compete, and during the tournament’s run, Maulkhan’s story will be prominently featured, right up there with the narrative about pro stars like Under Armour-sponsored athlete Jordan Spieth and 51-year-old Phil Mickelson. “She’s going to have a busy week,” First Tee – Greater Baltimore executive director Matt Bassler says, noting that a youth clinic and other promotional events are being planned. “We’ve tried to get an Evans Scholar for years.”

“IT CHANGES THE TRAJECTORY OF A YOUNG PERSON’S LIFE FOREVER. IT DID MINE.”

In certain parts of the golf world, especially the Midwest—where the Western Golf Association (WGA) has mostly hosted the BMW Championship (previously called the Western Open) for decades—achieving a college pathway via an Evans Scholarship is a well-known aspiration. Around here, not so much. As of this spring, there were just six active Evans Scholars from Maryland, and the last one chosen from the Baltimore area was Timonium native and former Dulaney golfer Samantha Lannon, who just graduated from Ohio State. “I thought once I got it, it would set off a wave,” Lannon says, “but for the three years after, there was still no one.”

That was one big part of the equation when BMW, the WGA, and the PGA Tour chose Caves Valley to host this year’s tournament. All of the proceeds from the annual BMW Championship—more than $36 million since 2007—go to benefit the nonprofit Evans Scholars Foundation, created by Midwesterner Charles “Chick” Evans Jr., the celebrated former U.S. amateur player, in 1930.

Since then, the Evans Scholars Foundation has paid for the full tuition and housing for more than 11,000 high-achieving caddies. Total cost covered: $435 million. The footprint today includes students at 19 different four-year colleges, including nearly every Big Ten school. There are also 17 Evans Houses, program-owned homes where all the scholarship winners at a particular school live together.

Tournament organizers want to spread the word about the Evans Scholars program in new markets and boost fundraising via ticket sales and sponsorships. (As of press time, it has already worked, as the tournament was on pace to sell 40 percent more tickets than it did in 2019 at Medinah Country Club near Chicago.)

While host cities reap the benefits of tourism spending and national exposure, BMW Tournament profits also go to help fund programs such as the WGA’s Caddie Academy, held each summer at golf clubs in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle, which draws students from feeder outlets like First Tee. This year, more than 90 percent of the roughly 120 kids in the academy are minorities, and 75 percent are girls.

“Part of our growth program is to showcase the scholarship,” says WGA executive and BMW Championship tournament director Vince Pellegrino, himself a past Evans Scholarship recipient. “Outside of what the championship does to showcase the best players in the world, to promote the charitable mission to the greater Baltimore area is very important to us. It’s real. It’s about giving kids an opportunity who might not otherwise have a chance to go to college. It changes the trajectory of a young person’s life forever. It did mine.”

The opportunity is now closer than ever. As part of the agreement that brings the BMW Championship to Baltimore, the Caves Valley Foundation has donated $2 million to the WGA to buy and renovate a house in College Park that will be the program’s 18th Evans House. It’s three blocks from campus on College Avenue. If all goes well, Maulkhan, along with Becca Lannon of Timonium—Samantha’s younger sister, who is also going to Maryland with a full ride thanks to the Evans program—will be among the first residents by their junior years.

Steve Fader, the CEO of MileOne Autogroup, became chairman of the Caves Valley Golf Club in 2011. He’s one of the fortunate ones to live in the hills of the remote property and says, “I feel blessed every time I drive through those gates.” When I meet him in the Caves clubhouse one morning, he’s polished (wearing a navy blue BMW Championship polo beneath a sport coat), gracious (insisting we eat—a delicious, fresh, chef-cooked breakfast sandwich), and explains just how passionate he is about golf, while noting that he wasn’t always into the game.

Growing up in Randallstown, the first time he ever saw a golf course was on campus at Western Maryland, now McDaniel College.

“I didn’t know anybody that played golf,” he says, sitting at a dining table, within eyeshot of a fully stocked bar and a practice putting green outside. But his college roommate happened to be captain of the men’s golf team. “And that was it,” he says. He was hooked. After going to law school in Southern California and at University of Baltimore, Fader—whose father worked at Howard Uniform Company and later became a partner in Heritage Automotive—joined Woodholme Country Club in the early 1980s. He became a member at Caves in 1996.

Those were still the early days at Caves, which had opened five years earlier, following years of planning. The idea was the brainchild of former Monumental Life Insurance CEO Leslie Disharoon, the club’s first chairman. When Caves Valley was first conceived, the city was still reeling from the Colts’ departure, there was fear the Orioles would leave, too, and Camden Yards hadn’t yet been built. “The outlook for the future of Baltimore, in spite of the Inner Harbor, was not great,” Disharoon told The Baltimore Sun in 2017.

Along with other business leaders, Disharoon, who now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, sought to create a golfer’s paradise (no pools or screaming kids) that could help attract new business—and talented people from all over the world—to the area. The founders were also committed to Caves Valley being free of the kind of race, gender, or religious discrimination that has often been a blemish on private golf clubs.

“The founders were dreamers,” says Dennis Satyshur, who was hired as the head pro at Caves Valley when it opened 31 years ago and is retiring this year. “A national golf club in Baltimore is ambitious. It’s not Palm Beach or Palm Springs. This was coming out of the ground from nothing, and they were saying, we’re going to have a great caddie program, we’re going to host national championships, we’re going to be a part of economic development and bring people to Maryland that wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“THE FOUNDERS WERE DREAMERS…A NATIONAL GOLF CLUB IN BALTIMORE IS AMBITIOUS.”

Make no mistake: Even with a promise of inclusiveness, there’s a strong air of exclusivity that comes with high-priced memberships, initiation fees, and things like a red-coat policy for members (comparable to the green jackets of Augusta National, home of the Masters). Caves is not a public course that anyone can simply play for a reasonable rate, like Pine Ridge or Mount Pleasant, which hosted the last PGA Tour event in Baltimore in 1962, the Eastern Open.

Noted golf-course architect Tom Fazio designed Caves Valley to be a world-class venue. Since opening, it has hosted men’s and women’s NCAA championships, a U.S. Senior Open in 2002, and the LPGA’s 2014 International Crown. But none of those tournaments carry the cachet of the BMW. It was five years ago that Fader, who owns two local BMW dealerships, first pitched the idea of Caves hosting the championship to a BMW executive while playing a round on the course. The tournament is the second round of the FedEx Cup, pro golf’s version of the NFL playoffs, and as such, the field of entrants is about half the number of a typical PGA Tour event.

“I thought our campus was set up well for that,” Fader says. “That started the journey, where I was told, ‘We should start talking about that.’ It was a long and at times arduous adventure.”

Baltimore was attractive to the WGA—the tournament organizer—because it was an East Coast, urban town, fitting in perfectly with its emphasis on deliberately diversifying the game and spreading the word about the Evans Scholars program in new markets. The same idea goes for next year, when the BMW Championship will be held in Wilmington, Delaware, or in 2018, when the tournament was played outside Philadelphia.

“They’re looking at the golf course and the locale, have they been there before, is it a good golf community, and will they embrace the event?” Fader says.

Thanks to his car dealerships, Fader already had a built-in relationship with title sponsor BMW. But that doesn’t mean Caves was a sure thing, primarily because the course, while already at a national competition level, still needed to be made even more challenging for the top 70 players in the world. Caves would have to commit to upgrades. “The tour ultimately has the responsibility to approve any venue,” Fader says.

In February 2020, after negotiations were finalized, Caves Valley was officially announced as the 2021 BMW Championship host. In the 18 months since, the club has spent millions of dollars renovating their prized course. They replaced every single sand bunker to incorporate the latest bunker technology, added roughly 500 yards of length and eight new tee boxes for the pros, renovated and upgraded an artificial stream, and installed a new irrigation system with 2,800 individually programmable sprinkler heads. (Handy in late August in Baltimore.)

It’s important to remember that, as much as golf can offer a heartwarming story like Maulkhan’s, pro golf is big business. This year’s BMW Championship will pay out roughly $9.5 million in prize money. Jon Rahm, last year’s winner, earned more than $1.7 million, and television pays big-time to air and stream the action six hours per day. Tournament organizers also sold out corporate hospitality for this year’s event so quickly that they needed to add more capacity, which changing COVID restrictions allowed. The BMW Championship typically brings around $30 million of economic impact to its host area, according to Pellegrino. But when Fader talks about Caves hosting the tournament, what he’s most enthused about is the opportunity to showcase Baltimore on a national stage and share uplifting stories about the city he loves. He can’t wait to see the broadcast on NBC and Golf Channel, six hours each day, beautiful drone shots of the club and surroundings included. “It’s like having the Preakness four straight days,” Fader says. “It’s a great story for Baltimore.”

“IT’S LIKE HAVING PREAKNESS FOUR STRAIGHT DAYS. IT’S A GREAT STORY FOR BALTIMORE.”

At least 10,000 fans will be allowed on the sprawling property each day, perhaps more with looser COVID restrictions, in an open-air, social distancing-friendly event. They can experience for themselves the oasis cut into the woods, the steep hills, tall trees, the birds, and the world’s top 70 men’s golfers competing among them.

“It’s one of those unique courses that’s tucked in a beautiful place in the country,” says Jordan Spieth, who estimates he’s played the course maybe 10 times while in town over the years visiting Under Armour headquarters. “You just feel like you’re away from everything. It’s peaceful golf. But certainly, that may not be the case when we’ve got a lot of fans and the pressure of a FedEx Cup playoff event for us.”

If any of the Caves members wear their red jackets, you can be sure they’ll stand out in the crowd. Less prominent, but no less significant, will be the current, former, and maybe future caddies walking the property, too. Some will also be watching on TV, like Lannon, the Evans Scholar. An aspiring veterinarian, she just started her first year at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg, Virginia.

“I’m super excited about [the tournament], but I don’t think I’ll be able to make it back home,” she says, adding that she’s played the course, too. Four years ago, a gracious member invited her for a “victory lap,” she says, after she landed her scholarship.

In late February, when Maulkhan got the letter informing her she’d been awarded an Evans Scholarship to Maryland, she first thought the envelope contained another potential teenage milestone—a credit card. Her father had just gotten his new card, with benefits for eating at restaurants, a few days earlier in similar, thick, 8.5-by-11-inch packaging. The envelope before her now looked the same and had her name on it. “It was a really fancy envelope, the same exact size as my dad’s,” she says, “When I opened it, it was a big shock.”

Her mom, Sandy, working at home (for M&T Bank) in another room, thought something might be wrong when she heard her daughter screaming. Nope. It was pure excitement. “It was kind of like, ‘I need to get everyone here now so they can see,’” Maulkhan says.

That night, her father, who never went to college and got her started with First Tee, paid for a celebratory dinner—on his credit card. Varada could pay him back later.

In 2012, Mark S. Foster president and CEO of Second Chance, got a phone call not unlike many he receives. Someone was tearing down a house and wanted to know if Foster’s nonprofit architectural salvage warehouse wanted to salvage it.

The home, in York, Pennsylvania, was under construction and projected to cost $20 million to complete, but less than halfway through the project, the owner was hit hard by the recession and forced to sell. The new owner wanted the house removed so he could subdivide the property.

“A part of the roof was on and all the doors and windows were in place, they just hadn’t finished the inside,” Foster recalls. “We salvaged that entire structure, brought it back to our warehouse and hoped to sell it to people, but the caliber of the product was so high—solid mahogany doors with really high-end hardware—it wasn’t what our customers at the time were looking for.”

Foster’s staff deconstructs buildings and homes, salvages usable materials, and sells those and other donated items at its 200,000-square-foot retail center. The organization began in 2001 and now oversees about 250 teardowns a year. In addition to its mission to reuse materials and keep them out of landfills, Second Chance is also a job center, training employees in marketable hard skills like deconstruction, warehousing, and sales, and soft skills like customer service that are key to professionalism.

Second Chance’s original mission was to save architecturally valuable items in the city from the wrecking ball, but, “As time progressed, donors would ask us to take the cabinets or the appliances, too,” Foster says.

Second Chance took it all, from furniture to floorboards. The result is a warehouse that is a treasure trove of salvaged items: radiators and rare antiques, insulation and Belgian block pavers, mantels and boxes of nails, piles of bathroom tile and framed art- work, chandeliers and doorknobs. It’s like stumbling on a buried treasure for home designers.

Yet, its abundance can be overwhelming and it can be hard to parse the true treasures from the merely practical. Foster looked at the high-end windows and doors from the ill-fated Pennsylvania mansion and an idea emerged to build a concept house that would showcase the best of the best from the Second Chance warehouse and become a platform to share the organization’s mission.

Foster purchased a two-story, 1,600-square-foot home in the Hampton neighborhood of Baltimore County, deconstructed it to the foundation (salvaging the chimney), then proceeded with his wife, Mary Blake, to design an 8,200-square-foot house around the door and window package from the Pennsylvania home. Everything short of the home’s framing and a few bits of bathroom hardware—bought at cost—is Second Chance salvage.

“Sometimes people need to see how things come together,” says Foster. “We wanted to use the concept house as a place to show what you can do, to be a living example, and to give people an opportunity to be introduced to our people and our program.”

“Now we have 10 different types of flooring in a home, not stacked up in a warehouse,” he says.

Foster says they purposely did not use an architect or a team of advisors.

“We want to show that anyone can do this,” he says. “We were not in a hurry to complete the project. What mattered was that it reflects our organization and the care we took in carefully curating each piece and its placement.”

The project took six years to complete. While it indeed shows what can be done with salvaged materials and a little imagination, it’s also a fine bit of marketing for Second Chance. But it’s more than the sum of its many parts—like any home with historic materials, it’s a place of stories.

“The cherry floors in one of the rooms upstairs came from [actress] Anne Ban- croft’s house in Queenstown,” says Foster. “There’s going to be a hundred stories like that in the house, and it’s fun to share that with people who are interested and motivated by a piece’s provenance.”

A massive 6-foot-by-15-foot island made of pine beams, for example, dominates the kitchen. It’s a focal point close to Foster’s heart, as the wood was reclaimed from the former Maryland Chemical Company building, which was across the street from Second Chance’s first retail location (now the site of the Horseshoe Casino).

There’s a bedroom with a bed nestled into a recessed lumber nook made of Cypress from a Monkton mushroom farm, and the back staircase dates from 1902 and came from a home in New Jersey.

Foster hopes the concept house shows not just the caliber of the salvaged materials, but the creative ways in which materials can be used. He points to a hallway in the home’s basement. Nearly 15 years ago, someone donated 180,000 linear square feet of moulding to Second Chance. Attached vertically to the hall’s walls, it looks almost like multi-finish wallpaper. The floating, backlit ceiling in the same hall is actually doors. (The same doors are used in their traditional form in the master bathroom and dressing room.)

As a wine enthusiast, Foster says the wine cellar is one of his favorite rooms. It has racks from three separate projects, including some donated by the Inner Harbor Marriott, and provides storage for 2,400 bottles. He also likes the master bathroom, complete with its luxurious reclaimed steam shower.

After purchasing the original home, Foster sold it back to Second Chance, which developed it. Eventually, when the time is right, the home will be sold and Foster wants to move on to new concept houses. He’s interested in tiny houses, or maybe a houseboat.

Although there were a few events held at the concept house, the pandemic put a halt to many of Foster’s plans. He hopes to conduct appointment-only open houses, and is considering other ways to get people through the home’s doors—which are, of course, also salvaged.

“We want to get people in so they can experience the quality of the workmanship in older materials,” says Foster. “It’s true that they don’t make it like they used to.”

Tucked away on a horse farm in Reisterstown, just northeast of Butler, Maryland, you’ll find rolling hills, acres of crops, and two brothers-in-law with a passion for brewing.

Four years ago, farmer Justin Harrison and pharmacist Craig Bryant combined their skillsets and love of beer to create the cleverly named Farmacy Brewing, which officially made its debut in early September.

The duo was able to make their vision a reality thanks to a 2012 Maryland General Assembly law that created the state’s farm brewing license. Since then, nearly 25 farm breweries have opened in Maryland.

After originally conceiving the idea of running their own farm facility, Harrison and Bryant spent the last four years going through the process of obtaining the license, as well as the trial and error that enviably comes with brewing. They also spent time learning from other brewers in Maryland and beyond, including The Brewer’s Art, Burley Oak Brewing Co., and Scratch Brewing Co. in Ava, Illinois.

Now that they’ve finally obtained all of the proper permits, the owners have begun brewing each of their beers with at least one ingredient—from beets and blueberries to ginger and spicebush—that comes directly from the surrounding farm.

“Above and beyond anything else, we’ve been able to try and capture what the purpose of the [2012] bill was,” Harrison says. “Both of us come from farming backgrounds, and we’ve gone on and developed our skillsets in a different way. Now we’ve come together and brought the whole package with it. People come here, and hopefully have a great experience, but we also get to teach you a bit about our farming practice.”

Owners Justin Harrison (left) and Craig Bryant (right) at Farmacy Brewing. —Sarah Kloepple

Visitors will likely hear horses in the distance while enjoying a pint in the taproom. —Farmacy Brewing

Farmacy resides on Harrison’s family farm, Willowdale, which his grandfather purchased in the 1960s as a hobby farm. “Everyone still had an offsite job,” Harrison explains. Years later, his dad, Michael, chose to focus the farm on horses after he went to vet school in Florida and returned to Maryland to begin accumulating brood stock (horses suitable for breeding). He still operates his equine veterinary practice on the grounds.

Now, brewery visitors will likely pass by grazing horses on their way to the taproom, or hear them neigh in the distance through the open barn doors while enjoying a pint. Farmacy’s taproom is even located in a former horse barn that has been reconfigured to house the brewery’s 3.5-barrel system—from which Bryant and Harrison marry a beer style with Willowdale’s bounty.

The draft menu will likely change weekly, but standout releases have included the Show Me Gucci, a juicy IPA with gooseberries and red currants from the fields, as well as the Ginger Table Beer, a light Belgian-style table brew with ginger roots. The owners also recently began pouring their Triple Thai, a triple-hopped, Belgian-style beer made with Thai basil.

“We often brainstorm and think, ‘This style would probably go well with this ingredient,’” Bryant says. “For example, Justin has chocolate mint right now, and I thought that’d go well with a stout.” Adds Harrison: “A smaller system allows us to brew quickly and have that variety.”

That attention to detail, and the surrounding atmosphere of Willowdale, are sure to remind visitors that beer isn’t just about manufacturing. (Mid-interview, Harrison and Bryant throw around ideas for their next brews and rave about a certain yeast strain cultured from old Norwegian farm house breweries.)

“Beer is absolutely an agricultural product,” Harrison says. “For us here, we’ve put an exclamation point on it.”

When planning a visit to Farmacy, know that a few snacks are sold onsite, but outside food is allowed and encouraged. A few TVs are in the taproom, ready to air Ravens games. Live music, from local guitarists to banjo players, is also booked each weekend through the end of the year. The taproom is now open Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m., Saturdays noon to 8 p.m., and Sundays noon to 6 p.m.

Farmacy is also kid-friendly—it’s a family-run brewery, after all.

“I can’t believe what we talked about four years ago is now reality,” Harrison says. “It’s fun when you make something, put everything into it and then pour off a sample pour. But both of us are also competitive, and we’re always thinking about what we can do to change the beer to make it better next time. It’s that drive that’s exciting.”

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.

When George Schlossnagle and his wife, Pei Wu, embarked on the renovation of their Baltimore County historic landmark home, Mt. Welcome Retreat, one of the first steps was to pull up and replace the ground-level floors. Beneath them, they found original, rough-hewn logs from the home’s construction 218 years ago.

“It seemed criminal to cover them up,” says Schlossnagle.

But the window is more than just a conversation piece: It’s a metaphor for a renovation that blends authentic historic preservation with modern life.

Mt. Welcome Retreat, located in the western Baltimore County town of Granite, was built in 1800 by Alexander Walters, owner of the quarry that gives the area its name. In 1835, Walters gifted the house to his daughter on the occasion of her marriage, and she and her husband enlarged the house into what can still be seen today—a five-bay-wide, center-hall Federal-style home built into a shallow hillside.

By the time Schlossnagle and Wu bought the house in 2016, it included two one-story additions from the 1950s and 1970s, one on either side of the historic structure. The home’s interiors were dark and dated. But the couple saw what made the house special: original doors, hardware, center-hall chandelier, and a burled wood staircase. Huge 12-over-12 and 6-over-6 windows take in beautiful views of a pond and barn.

“The house had really good bones, and it’s a gorgeous property,” says Schlossnagle.

“We have always loved old homes and dreamed of renovating one,” adds Wu.

The 13-acre property afforded the couple and their two children, ages 11 and 14, a bucolic retreat for themselves and their menagerie of animals, which includes two llamas, four goats, several barn cats, and a clutch of chickens. Having recently seen another home in Granite renovated by Brennan + Company, the couple knew they wanted to use that team to bring their new home into the 21st century. Smithouse Construction helped execute the often tricky contracting.

“George and Pei love to spend time in the kitchen and were really big on connection, so the entire ground level needed to be open,” explains Lili Mundroff, project manager with Brennan + Company. “But from a historical perspective, it was important to retain the character you get from a sequence of rooms.”

“Baltimore County Landmark status is the most restrictive, with both interiors and exteriors requiring review and approval,” adds Brennan, who, as the chair of the Baltimore County Landmarks Preservation Commission, brought invaluable expertise to the project.

Brennan says the commission prefers new structures be kept distinct from the historic, so the design removed the previous additions and replaced them with new, two-story additions separated from the house by “hyphens.”

“These little ‘hyphens,’ the offset pieces, differentiate the historic block of the house from the new work,” he explains. “And the materials needed to be subtly consistent with what might have been there.”

Wood siding was the approved material for the new additions, one of which adds a guest suite, exercise room, and laundry room, the other a master suite with a large kitchen below. The kitchen was non-negotiable for Wu.

“The kitchen had to be large and livable,” she says, “because I spend 80 percent of my waking hours there.”

The cobalt blue in the cabinetry is her favorite color, while the white subway tile backsplash is evocative of the time she and Schlossnagle lived in Westchester County, New York. A huge 5-by-10-foot island topped in soapstone is a perfect spot for both meal prep and homework, while the large bay window is the right size to frame a farm table.

The large kitchen provided space for a bar for Schlossnagle, who likes to mix drinks. Trees that fell on the property were milled and used to build it, as well as the benches in the mudroom. To give the floors a period, distressed look, the couple installed new, unfinished pine planks.

“We came in with the kids with hammers and chains [to make the floors look distressed] and let them tear it up for about an hour,” says Schlossnagle. Then they went through the laborious process of rubbing the floors down with iron acetate before scraping it away.

Wu and Schlossnagle not only maintained the original integrity of the historic home, they also burnished it by removing dated wallpaper and paneling. Their children have beautifully appointed bedrooms (though covered in all the stuff one would expect of a modern teen and tween) and share a modernized bathroom, the floor of which is inlaid with pennies collected by their daughter. However, the house needed better flow between the family spaces on the ground level, and an “open plan” rarely flies with historic committees.

“The big task was getting the steel beam in there to open up the historic kitchen to make it a bigger family room,” says Brennan.

The Landmark Commission approved the room’s opening and use of the massive beam, which is clad in wood inlay milled from the property’s trees.

“When we talked to [the Landmark Commission] they had seen renovated farmhouses where you lose the character of the house when you open everything up, so leaving some of the stone and using reclaimed wood from the site was part of the language of keeping in the historic character,” Mundroff says.

From the exterior, Mt. Welcome Retreat looks more in keeping with its period now than it did prior to its renovation. Inside, the interiors are sensitive to the home’s long history, but in no way period in their décor.

“Our kids are active—anything too classic or historic wouldn’t have worked for us,” says Wu. “We use every space in the house and consider it to be functional.”

“You can love the history of the home and love what makes the home unique without trying to imitate it,” adds Schlossnagle. “Sometimes trying to be hyper in-period can come across a little fake.”

Brennan says this idea is reflective of the zeitgeist in historic preservation.

“There’s a new attitude that the great old houses are just that, but they are also containers that you live differently in now,” he says. “You respect the old building, but then you insert things into it to make it come alive.”

The historic fan-shaped transom window over Mt. Welcome Retreat’s front door has its original glass with its etched names and dates—believed to mark the nuptials of the home’s previous tenants. In their way, Wu and Schlossnagle have written themselves into the home’s history, too.

The world’s largest internet retailer has officially opened its second massive fulfillment center in the Baltimore area—this one on the former site of the world’s largest steel mill at Sparrows Point.

The first box picked and packed—a Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit game—was shipped to a customer in Hershey, Pennsylvania, last Saturday morning.

With floor space the size of 14 football fields at 855,000 square feet, the new facility will eventually employ more than 1,500 “Amazonians.”

“The building is 90 percent complete and products started arriving last week,” Rachel Lightly, an Amazon communication manager, told Baltimore magazine during a tour last weekend, noting that the building also contains some 14 miles of conveyor belts.

Also inside: Four floors that can store up to 20 million products and 22 loading dock shoots that can reach into and fill the backs of 22 tractor-trailers simultaneously.

Ramping up hiring for the new fulfillment center as the holiday season approaches, Amazon announced several days ago it will increase, effective November 1, its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees. The Amazon distribution center on Broening Highway, on the former site of a General Motors plant, which employs more than 3,000 people, opened in 2015. Another distribution center opened in Cecil County in 2017.

“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, and the world’s richest man, said in a press release. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.” In doing so, however, Amazon will phase out bonus and stock awards for its hourly employees.

The Montgomery County Council is the only Maryland jurisdiction to pass a $15 minimum wage bill to date. The minimum hourly rate there increased to $12.25 for large employers this summer and will move incrementally to $15 an hour for large employers by 2022 and for mid-size and smaller employers in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

The Baltimore City Council passed a $15 minimum wage bill last year, but it was later vetoed by Mayor Catherine Pugh. The state minimum wage rose by mandate to $10.10 in July.

In making their announcement, Amazon said their public policy team would also start advocating for an increase in the federal minimum wage.

“We will be working to gain Congressional support for an increase in the federal minimum wage. The current rate of $7.25 was set nearly a decade ago,” said Jay Carney, senior vice president of Amazon Global Corporate Affairs. “We intend to advocate for a minimum wage increase that will have a profound impact on the lives of tens of millions of people and families across this country.”

To help offset the minimum wage increase at Amazon, however, warehouse workers will no longer be eligible to receive monthly bonuses and stock options. Those changes could cause some more long-term workers to earn less money.

The opening of a second massive Amazon distribution center in the Baltimore area marks a key moment in the redevelopment of the former home of Bethlehem Steel, which once employed more than 30,000 workers in Southeast Baltimore County.

The 3,250-acre site, now owned by Tradepoint Atlantic, has been transitioning into an intermodal logistics hub with rail, major highway, and deepwater port access. In May, the company acquired the 150-acre Sparrows Point shipyard, which was built in 1887 and was owned by Bethlehem Steel for most of the last century.

Other current tenants at old Bethlehem Steel site include FedEx Ground, Under Armour, Harley Davidson of Baltimore, Pasha Automotive Services, Atlantic Forest Products, Access World, Netherlands-based logistics company C. Steinweg, global building products company Lafarge Holcim, and urban agricultural company Gotham Greens.

At full build-out, Tradepoint Atlantic projects to generate 11,000 permanent jobs.

Earlier this summer, Tradepoint Atlantic officials announced they were seeking $150 million in Baltimore County TIF (tax-incremental financing) help for water, sewage, and roads infrastructure projects.

So far, Tradepoint Atlantic and its tenants have either received or are expected to receive “more than $60 million in grants, tax breaks and other assistance from the county, state and federal governments,” according to reporting by The Baltimore Sun.

Meanwhile, Montgomery County remains in the running, among 20 other sites, for Amazon’s H2Q project, which is expected to employ 50,000 people.

Gov. Larry Hogan put together a $5 billion tax break and infrastructure package to lure Amazon’s second headquarters to the state. That decision is expected by the end of the year.

As the ferris wheel lights flicker off around 9 p.m. and the last visitors head back to their cars with plush prizes, half-empty bags of popcorn, and a day’s worth of memories, 12-year-old Kailyn Donahue’s favorite part of the Maryland State Fair will just be beginning. Although she will have been at the fairgrounds since that morning—giving tours of the animal exhibits, displaying her pastel and pencil drawings, and tending to her goat and sheep—the Baltimore County middle schooler will be wide awake as she leads her lamb, Duffy, back to the Cow Palace for the night.

Surrounded by dozens of other barnyard animals and their teenage caretakers, Kailyn will tuck him into his pen with plenty of fresh water and feed, lock the gate behind her, and drag her cot to where her friends will have made a makeshift slumber party a few feet away. They will stay up whispering until the sun peeks through the slats of the wooden roof, finally falling asleep side-by-side to the snores and snorts of their animals.

A short distance away, Kailyn’s mother, Karen Donahue, will play chaperone and smile as she watches her oldest daughter create the same sort of friendships she made 20-some years ago when she herself exhibited at the fair. Karen’s parents even met there, at the Dairy Judging Pavilion in 1959, and they haven’t missed one of Kailyn’s state fair events since she began showing her animals at 8 years old.

“Most of the families that show animals here have been doing it as long as my family has, so our parents and our grandparents know each other,” says Kailyn, who is the president of the Chestnut Ridge 4-H Club in Cockeysville. “It’s like a little family, and the fair is our reunion.”

Its size and scope have increased since the inaugural festivities more than a century ago, but the rural traditions and family-centric values on which the Maryland State Fair was founded have stood the test of time. While attractions such as deep-fried food, amusement rides, and concert series have been added along the way to draw modern crowds, the fair continues to be a highly anticipated annual celebration of the state’s agricultural community, one that connects generations of Marylanders through its nostalgic spirit.

It all started 140 years ago, in September 1878, when more than 5,000 people flocked to Ridgeley’s Woods near Lutherville-Timonium for a one-day “out-of-door show” for local farmers. Here, they could display and sell their livestock, as well as their fruits, vegetables, and dairy goods, while also connecting with other growers. It was a surprising success, leading a group of local businessmen to turn the one-off into an annual event, and on a crisp autumn day the following year, visitors flooded the fair’s new-and-improved location on York Road, where it still stands today, to browse local livestock, play carnival games, and watch horse racing on the just-constructed half-mile track.

Over the next few decades, the fair flourished as its leaders continued to increase the number of acres and attractions with the goal of making it “the biggest and greatest fair south of New York.” There were a few financial hardships and changes in ownership along the way, but by 1943, when the fair went on a three-year hiatus during World War II, it had already become a beloved tradition for both the city folk, who came to see everything from pig races to husband-calling contests, and the farmers, who spent months preparing their animals for the annual exhibitions. Even former President Dwight D. Eisenhower frequently entered his Black Angus cattle into competitions during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Maryland State Fair rose to national prominence as new, prestigious, high-stakes animal exhibitions drew entrants from across the country. To this day, young exhibitors travel from near and far to present their prized livestock in its competitive shows run by nationally and internationally renowned judges. After months of sunrise feedings, mucked stalls, and vet visits, it’s an opportunity to showcase their hard work with other 4-H Club members who share the same passion for farm life.

That sentiment rings true for Kailyn, who is a rising eighth grader at Pine Grove Middle School on Old Harford Road. “We live closer to the city, so people from school just don’t understand,” she says. “It’s cool to be able to go somewhere where I can talk with people about my animals and sewing and it’s not weird because they do the same things.”

On top of that, it affords farm families a little holiday. Maryland State Fair president Donna Myers started showing Guernsey cattle some 50 years ago, when she was 8 years old, and remembers the “12 Best Days of Summer” as some of her family’s only time away from their working dairy farm in Montgomery County.

“The fair was our vacation,” says Myers. “We loved to eat fair food, have fun with our friends, and show our animals.” Years later, she and her husband, Jason, raised two daughters on their own 159-acre dairy farm in New Windsor, and this year, during Myers’ first fair as president, their daughter Kelly and their three grandchildren will carry on the family pastime, showing dairy cattle, beef steers, and heifers.

The fair has long acted as a way to unite and celebrate the country’s nascent and lifelong farmers, but fair officials have also recognized a growing gap between visitors and knowledge of state agriculture. As far back as 1973, Board of Directors member George Wills stated, “There is a crisis in farming and agriculture today because people don’t understand it—can’t identify with it.” Fast-forward a few decades, and today’s fair is still facing similar challenges. Although agriculture is the top commercial industry in the state, the number of Maryland farms decreased by the hundreds over the past decade, reflecting a downward trend that has affected some 12,000 farms nationwide.

Myers notes that the average person is a few generations removed from living or working on a farm. With less firsthand knowledge, the fair can act as an important vehicle for informing visitors of the benefits of local food production, such as keeping farmland open and active, preserving rural spaces, and investing in small-town communities. “This next generation isn’t going to have that connection, so it’s our job to show them how it’s done,” says Myers. “They need to understand how vital it is that we continue to provide space for farming and support for local food growers.”

To that end, the Maryland State Fair has continued to increase agricultural awareness and engage a growing number of visitors from nearby cities by expanding its hands-on learning experiences. From interacting with baby ducks to sampling perfectly red strawberries and running their fingers over hand-sewn quilts, fairgoers can learn about agriculture from the farmers and makers who fill the exhibits and pens with their work.

One promising turn of events: The farm-to-table movement has helped the fair and its programming, according to Maryland State Fair CEO Andy Cashman. These days, “people want to know where their food comes from, and it wasn’t like that when I was growing up at the fair,” he says. “People want to be educated about it. They want to know where their food and clothing comes from, how it’s made, and they are more committed to buying and shopping locally.”

Of course, while the animals and exhibitions might have once been the main event, many fairgoers still frequent the end-of-summer celebration for another aspect: the Midway. Since the days when the merry-go-round was one of its main attractions, the Maryland State Fair has entertained guests of all ages with hundreds of games, rides, and fried eats each year. While a few classics have remained for decades—the Ferris wheel, the giant swings, the adjacent Maryland Foods Pavilion—fair leaders spend the months leading up to opening day finding new ways to draw visitors to the fairgrounds.

“The traditional aspects of the fair are very important to us, but we need to keep up with what people want to see and do,” says Cashman. “We’re constantly trying to see what works and what doesn’t work. We go out on the end of a limb and try new things each year without being afraid of change.”

In 1918, that meant dropping 500 letters addressed to fair exhibitors from the sky in its first-ever airmail delivery. Eight years ago, it was a live performance by a shaggy-haired, 16-year-old Justin Bieber. This year, the all-new Live! ON TRACK concert series, featuring rising country artists Chase Bryant and Chris Lane, as well as throwback rock band Smash Mouth, will span four days so visitors can hear live music between spinning on The Cliff Hanger and watching Thoroughbred horses round the now-historic track. Thanks to the 2016 decision by Governor Larry Hogan to start public schools after Labor Day, the fair saw its third-best attendance on record in 2017 with more than 555,800 visitors, and fair officials hope to match or grow that number during this year’s event.

This month, when the gates open on August 23 and the “12 Best Days of Summer” begin again, new and returning visitors will walk the same grounds as generations of fairgoers have before them, gathering to see animals, ride the Ferris wheel, fill their bellies with deep-fried Oreos, and become another page in this next chapter of the fair’s rich history.

Kailyn, Karen, and the rest of the Donahue clan will be in tow, as they have been for the past three generations with their sheep and goats. And of course, Cashman will be there, too, and he knows why they all come back, as he has only missed one fair since he began exhibiting sheep, beef cattle, and pigs in 1969.

“I think it’s Maryland’s biggest family,” he says. “There’s things that you can do and see here that you can’t anywhere else; you can smell and taste and learn what makes this state special. To me, it’s one of the best places in the world.”

Two-term Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz, among the leading candidates in this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, died suddenly early this morning at University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center following a heart attack.

The 60-year-old Kamenetz was asleep at his Owings Mills home when he awoke at about 2 a.m. and complained of feeling ill, according to a statement from Baltimore County. Kamenetz was transported by the Garrison Fire Station’s Medic 19 to the St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, where doctors pronounced him dead at 3:22 a.m.

He is survived by his wife, Jill, and the couple’s two sons, aged 16 and 14.

Additional details regarding Kamenetz’s death are expected to be provided at a briefing today at the Public Safety Building in Towson.

County Administrative Officer Fred Homan will assume the county executive role until the Baltimore County Council votes on an acting executive to serve out the remainder of Kamenetz’s term.

One of seven Democrats in a crowded primary field, Kamenetz had been a vigorous campaigner since joining the field last fall. Wednesday night, Kamenetz participated in a candidate forum in Bowie State College in Prince George’s County. Tuesday night, Kamenetz was in Baltimore for the Baltimore teachers’ union town hall. On Sunday, he and running mate Valerie Ervin knocked on doors in Montgomery County.

Congressman C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, a former Baltimore County Executive, knew Kamenetz well and had endorsed his bid for governor.

“I’ll have more to say once I have been able to process the devastating news of Kevin Kamenetz’s passing last night,” Ruppersberger said in a statement posted to his Facebook page. “Kevin was a friend to me, to Baltimore County and to Maryland. My heart is broken for his wife, Jill, and their two sons.”

Ruppersberger’s reaction to the unexpected news was echoed by political leaders across the state. In Annapolis, Gov. Larry Hogan ordered the state flag to fly at half-staff in honor Kamenetz’s public service.

“The First Lady and I are shocked and grieved by the sudden passing of Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz,” Hogan said in a statement. “Our prayers go out to his family and many loved ones this morning.”

Kamenetz served 16 years as a Baltimore County council member prior becoming county executive.

Among his achievements as county executive, Kamenetz prioritized the revitalization of downtown Towson, pushed to renovate aging schools, and led the effort to transform Sparrows Point—once home to Bethlehem Steel—into the massive, ongoing redevelopment project known as Tradepoint Atlantic. In the process, Kamenetz never raised taxes, adding to his viability as a potential Democratic challenger to Hogan.

Kamenetz had been a supporter of Baltimore City’s effort to build the east-west Red Line transit line and the city’s pitch to land Amazon.

“Kevin was an ardent supporter of Baltimore City, who was a regular in our restaurants, cultural venues and at our major team games,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said in a press release. “I considered him a friend and colleague, and admired him for his commitment to pursuing the best interests of Baltimore County residents, even while advocating for all Marylanders in his pursuit to be governor. Our hearts go out to his wife Jill and their two sons, and the many who cherished his friendship, easy smile, and determined spirit.”

The son of a Lochearn pharmacist, Kamenetz attended the Gilman School, earned an undergraduate degree from The Johns Hopkins University and law degree from the University of Baltimore, and had some of the deepest local roots of any area politician.

Kamenetz was one of only three Democratic candidates—along with Prince Georges County Executive Rushern Baker and Montgomery County State Senator Rich Madaleno—with legislative experience. Kamenetz, according to most polling, was running third in the Democratic gubernatorial primary—scheduled for June 26—behind Baker and former NAACP president and CEO Ben Jealous.

“I’m incredibly saddened to learn of the passing of Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz,” Jealous said in a statement. “He dedicated his life to public service, to making a difference—and he helped to move Maryland forward. My sincerest thoughts and prayers are with Jill and their two sons.”

When most brewers open their first facility, they have high hopes of eventually seeing their beers on taps and shelves throughout the state. For Rich Mak, however, becoming a big-name brand has never been the goal.

“We’re not trying to be the next Dogfish Head or Heavy Seas,” says Mak, who plans to open Balt County Brewing (BCB) in Hunt Valley this February. “There are already plenty of people who make great beer in cans and bottles. It’s pretty crowded real estate.”

Instead of going the distribution route, Mak is more focused on creating a hangout for beer lovers in Northern Baltimore County. In 2015, he and his family moved to Mays Chapel from Chattanooga, Tennessee when his wife accepted a job with the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Soon after getting to know the area, Mak—a longtime homebrewer—began to see that it was lacking in craft beer offerings, with Duclaw and Red Brick Station being the only nearby options.

“I was really sadly disappointed,” he says. “There are a lot of people in the Timonium, Cockeysville, and Hunt Valley areas. And they love craft beer, but they’re not going to schlep into the city to get it.”

To fill the void, Mak dreamed up BCB—a facility that will occupy a 12,000-square-foot warehouse inside a Hunt Valley industrial park off of Beaver Dam Road. The space will have 14 fermenters, and three independent brewing systems including one 25-gallon pilot system, a two-barrel system for smaller experimental beers, and a seven-barrel system that can brew up to 217 gallons.

“There’s this running joke in the brewery world that everyone uses a 15-barrel system,” Mak says, with a laugh. “For some reason that’s the magic number when you’re starting a brewery. But when you brew that much, it may sit there for a month and a half before you move through it all.”

At the helm of the small-batch facility will be head brewer Jim Wagner, formerly of DuClaw Brewing. Mak partnered with Wagner through a connection in his Lutherville home-brewing club, The Brewtherville Labs. He says that Wagner’s experience, combined with his creativity, make him the perfect fit for a smaller operation.

“He was with DuClaw for a long time,” Mak says. “And yeah, they’ve done some outside-of-the-box stuff, but they really focus on their flagship beers. When you’re making 60 barrels in one shot, you don’t get to experiment much.”

The brewery’s 25 taps will be filled with signature releases including the M2 Imperial New England Pale Ale, End of Summer Dark Mexican lager, Soul Reed Chocolate Double Rye porter, and the Paw Paw New England India pale ale—a collaboration with Deep Run Paw Paw Orchard in Westminster which was well-received at Baltimore Beer Week’s ChiliBrew competition last October. Although the beer won’t be distributed, Mak has purchased a canning line so that patrons can occasionally take their favorite brews to-go.

In addition to a traditional bar, the taproom will boast a serve-yourself beer wall in order to make the atmosphere friendly to novices and knowledgeable beer lovers alike. Drinkers can start a tab, and use the technology to taste as many brews as they want in pours as little as one tenth of an ounce. Mak says that the system encourages sampling in an setting where newbies feel less intimidated.

“It scratches a lot of itches in the world of craft beer,” he says. “Sometimes breweries aren’t really inclusive, and we want to break those barriers down.”

In keeping with the inclusive feel, the taproom will also be family-friendly. Mak plans to feature indoor bocce courts, corn hole boards, big-screens for sports viewing, and even a fountain soda machine for kids. He has also hired an executive chef, Culinary Institute of America alum David Madgeberger, to run BCB’s own on-site food truck. The truck will offer classic bites (think wings, burgers, and gourmet salads), and source seasonal ingredients from One Straw Farm in White Hall.

Aside from partnering with other local businesses (he’s even in talks with One Straw Farm about launching a produce stand on the property), Mak says he’s most excited for BCB to become a new go-to spot.

“When people around here say, ‘Hey let’s go grab a bite to eat and a beer,’ I don’t want them to have even one millisecond of hesitation,” he says. “I want it to be almost like a reflex.”

The misting rain and overcast skies felt a little more Dublin than Baltimore on Wednesday morning, which was fitting as local media gathered to get a first look of the new Guinness Open Gate Brewery & Barrel House. Located at the Diageo headquarters in between Halethorpe and Relay, the site will be the first Guinness brewery on U.S. soil in 60 years.

While the entire operation won’t be complete until spring 2018, head of Open Gate Brewery Andrew Beebe announced that a test taproom will be open to the public in late October to give guests an idea of what the brewery is making on its two-barrel pilot system.

“This is an incredible project two years in the making and it’s now really starting to take off,” he said. “The test taproom will be a great way to say hello and give the community a first taste of our beer.”

Guinness has already hired two brewers, Peter Wiens of Stone Brewing in San Diego and Hollie Stephenson from Highland Brewery in Asheville. The duo is anxious to start brewing on the pilot system in the next couple of days to make their twist on the Guinness Blonde Ale, as well as an American-style IPA, and a sweet porter.

“The first beer I bought when I turned 21 was a Guinness,” said Wiens. “And when I first met my wife, I told her one of the things I always wanted to do was work for Guinness. So this has been a dream 20 years in the making for me.”

The brewers said that they are looking forward to joining the growing beer community in Baltimore and already confirmed plans to make a collaboration beer with Heavy Seas, which is less than two miles down the road.

“I actually lived in the D.C. area seven years ago and that was before the Baltimore beer scene blew up,” Stephenson said. “Coming back and seeing this vibrant brewery community has been really exciting. I have been hitting up all the local spots and everyone has been super welcoming.”

The test taproom, which will offer flights and pints to visiting patrons, is just the very first step in the large-scale Open Gate Brewery. Plans for the project also include a 22,000-square-foot customer experience center, where guests can see the brewing process, experience tours and tastings, shop in a retail space, and even dine in a full-scale restaurant featuring upscale pub food.

“Guests will be able to see what we’re making in our 10-hectoliter system, as well as what we’re barrel aging,” Beebe said. “And on the third floor will be our restaurant. When you think about Guinness history, you think seafood, crabs, and oysters—so Maryland is the perfect place.”

Additional brewery elements will include a building with a 100-hectoliter system, which will initially pump out Blonde Ale, and a high-speed packaging line. There will also be a massive grass field (in the shape of a Guinness pint glass, no less) where outdoor events and concerts will take place.

The entire $50-million construction project, which is set to open in late spring 2018, will provide 70 manufacturing and hospitality jobs in the community. The team has already been meeting with local neighborhood associations in Relay and Arbutus, who have been excited about job creation and economic impact, though have shared a few grumbles about traffic.

“People have been incredibly positive so far,” said site director Erin Lauer. “They had a lot of questions about jobs since this has been a site of industry since 1933. They are excited that it’s going to remain a place for manufacturing.”

Though Guinness is a massive international brand with a presence in nearly 50 countries, the brewery is anxious to have a hyper-local approach—already planning events at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore and a possible pairing dinner at Dylan’s Oyster Cellar.

“I am a Baltimore native and couldn’t be more excited to have this project in my backyard,” says Guinness brewery ambassador Ryan Wagner (who also happens to be the Orioles announcer at Camden Yards). “It’s my job to get out in the community and introduce us to the neighbors. I’m really excited to add an American chapter to a book that’s 250 years old.”

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.”

A two-toned pink kitchen, dark rooms, and a foyer with cracked, pink-swirled marble floors are generally not strong selling points for a house. But Arlene Bekman liked that this particular home was in a gated community and on one floor so she could age in place easily.

Luckily, the 68-year-old retired assistant principal has an eye for potential, plus a team of professionals on speed-dial who she knew could help her transform the house from dark and dingy to contemporary and bright. So she bought it, stained carpets and all, and embarked on a 10-month renovation.

“The house was very dated, cluttered, and closed,” says Bekman. “I wanted it to be relaxed and open, a place where you don’t feel like you can’t sit on the chairs.”

Unlike the pink kitchen, which screamed 1970s, she wanted something timeless and airy. When she bought the one-level house, the kitchen, living room, and dining room were each separate spaces with little natural light. So she called Penza Bailey Architects, with whom she’d worked in the past, knowing they had no compunction about knocking out a few walls.

“The house had nice bones, but it didn’t meet Arlene’s aesthetic,” says Jeff Penza. “She’s always been very contemporary, and, with this project, she seemed to want to go even more modern.”

Sure enough, the solution was to start knocking things down. Dated built-ins in the dining room, for example, were demolished in exchange for a simple floating shelf. Then there were the walls.

“We cut them away, leaving behind only what was structurally required,” says Dwayne Van Horn, the project manager and designer for Penza Bailey. Arnold Wallenstein, president of Artisan Renovations, helped execute a design that also introduced new windows into a clerestory that brings more natural light into the living area. Exterior metal sliding doors were replaced with swinging doors. In the kitchen, the architects reorganized the entire layout, placing electrical appliances against a wall and inserting plumbing into a new island.

With the dust now cleared, the kitchen, living room, and dining room remain separate, yet still relate very closely.

That new, oversized island, with its granite waterfall edge that stretches to the floor, became a visual anchor in the kitchen. “We thought about how this island could define the space,” says Penza. “It also presents something to the living room that’s not just cabinets.”

To refine the look, Bekman found the perfect interior designer practically next door in the form of neighbor Jackie Martin, principal of Jackie Martin Designs. Martin designed the kitchen backsplash’s interlocking pattern, which was executed in limestone, and the open shelving on either side of the range hood to maintain the open feeling Bekman envisioned.

“Arlene’s dictate was that she wanted the home to be contemporary, but not slickly done with a lot of shiny surfaces,” says Martin. “She wanted neutrals with a little bit of color.”

Martin’s design relies heavily on grays and browns. A large, gray sectional and oversized ottoman in the living room make this a comfortable space for Bekman to watch her smart TV or relax with her four grandchildren when they visit. A large piece of artwork from Renaissance Fine Arts, Chloe by Anke Schofield and Luis Garcia-Nerey, “provides the exclamation point” to the otherwise neutral room, says Martin.

Bekman says she wanted a fresh start in this home, so most furnishings are new, picked up at Shofer’s Furniture. Martin particularly likes the color-blocked side chairs in the dining room “because they add personality.” Thanks to the home’s open floor plan, the dining room gets plenty of use, so Martin selected an indoor-outdoor rug and chairs in faux leather, making it easy to clean up behind grandchildren.

Old carpeting and broken tile floors were replaced with wide-plank oak floors treated with a pickled finish. In the foyer, new doors allow more light into the home, and a large chandelier from Jones Lighting drops down, giving scale to the high ceiling. Martin also used a striking wall covering by Phillip Jeffries to create interest in the space. Made of hemp, it features a hand-studded custom pattern.

Unique wall coverings are a hallmark of this project. In the master suite, Martin asked the wallpaper installer to cut into rectangles the pale beige paper, which has white rubbed into the faux-bois pattern. They were then applied in a pattern like a parquet floor. In the den, Artstar Custom Paintworks painted the walls and window trim a jade green lacquer.

A powder room is always a great canvas for a touch of whimsy in a home, but the previous owners took that too far with bright orange walls in a room with a low ceiling. Martin used rectilinear shapes—which appear throughout the home and give it a calm, contemporary look—such as the wall-to-wall soapstone counter set with a basalt sink. Horizontal rectangular tiles on the walls create the illusion of height. Wallpaper and a narrow strip of mirrors on the ceiling make the room seem taller and brighter.

The master bathroom presented more of a challenge: A vaulted ceiling with a clerestory window brought in natural light, but it could also wreak havoc on the bathroom’s reflective surface. The lighting plan became very important.

“Trying to put in recessed lighting would make too much glare,” says Van Horn. “A large pendant light in the vaulted space makes the room glow and brings the scale down, too, introducing a nice architectural lighting element.”

Now the bathroom is a mixture of natural and high-gloss elements, like leathered marble on the walls and floors and a lacquered wood vanity. Subtle touches give the room its distinctly modern feel, like the vertical mirror inset flush with the marble, and faucets that stream directly from the mirror into square basins.

“The intent was to make something contemporary, but that could allow Arlene to age in place,” adds Penza, noting that the glass shower is wheelchair-accessible and all the clearances are designed for accessibility.

What began as a compartmentalized and dated home was transformed into an open and flowing one, with bright, warm, and contemporary spaces that Bekman can enjoy for years. Hers is a home not only about style, but lifestyle.

At 7:43 a.m., on a clear, otherwise picture-perfect morning, the first day of October, Baltimore County Vice Narcotics and Gang Enforcement Team officers—in full tactical gear with weapons drawn—begin yelling and pounding on the front door of a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, two-and-a-quarter acre brick home on Manor Road in Phoenix. If they’re not up already, families in this bucolic neighborhood will be soon, trying to get their kids off to school. One next-door neighbor comes outside, concerned that there’s been some sort of medical emergency.

“Police with a search warrant!” the officers bellow. “Open the door! Police with a search warrant! Open the door!”

The home’s windows are open—it had been that kind of breezy, autumn sleeping weather the night before—but there’s no response from inside the house. And now the police, having announced their presence, break through the door with a battering ram. Just inside, standing in the living room near one of the two sofas, officers immediately identify 50-year-old commercial insurance broker Francis “Chip” Carnes. But initially, they are unable to locate the target of their search warrant—Carnes’s fiancée, attorney Jill Swerdlin—though they do locate her 8-year-old son in an upstairs bedroom.

Eventually, police discover Swerdlin in the basement of the $370,000 home, near a washbasin—there’s a Ziploc-type baggie with white residue atop the sink’s drain. Handcuffed and brought upstairs, Swerdlin, still in a long nightshirt, is told to sit in the living room across from Carnes, also in handcuffs, where both are read their rights per Miranda. That’s when Det. Douglas Kriete, a thickly built, goateed, ponytailed, 31-year police veteran, asks the couple if there is anything illegal in the house. Carnes, again, not the target named in the warrant, tells Kriete that there may be “some old smoking devices”—the words from the police report—meaning crack pipes, in the bedroom. Swerdlin concurs, according to the same police report, adding that there are guns in the basement inside a safe near where she was found by police.

None of this, however, is why the police are here.

A self-described “Jewish mother of two kids” from a prominent Baltimore County family of attorneys, Swerdlin, 47, was the focus of a five-month investigation and grand jury indictment, with prosecutors alleging that she was the center of a “hub and spoke” conspiracy to distribute illegal prescription drugs. The indictment alleges Swerdlin, a former public defender in private criminal defense practice for the past five years, provided legal services in exchange for illegal prescription drugs; possessed and distributed controlled substances, including oxycodone; conspired to distribute illegal prescription drugs; and—this was the kicker that sparked media attention when she was arrested—smuggled illegal prescription drugs into the Baltimore County Detention Center.

But while being questioned, Swerdlin initially refuses to talk about her role in obtaining or exchanging illegal prescription drugs, according to police. Only when Kriete threatens to end the interview and simply take her away, he testifies later, does Swerdlin open up to his more obliging, younger partner—the “good cop/bad cop” routine. Once her son has been fed breakfast and walked to the bus stop at the end of driveway, Swerdlin, who would certainly be expected to understand what’s she’s agreeing to do, appears to come clean.

This is what she wrote:

“In 2009 I was in a serious car accident and due to my injuries I was prescribed oxycodone. After approximately a year my dr. discontinued my prescription. I was still in pain and addicted to oxycodone so I purchased them from people who were selling them for money. I have given other people pills who needed them and I have asked other people close to me to get them for me. I am ashamed about my behavior especially because I am an officer of the court and have been a professional for 23 years.”

Then, potentially damaging, in terms of legal consequences—Swerdlin also participates in a written Q & A. In response to detectives’ questioning, she affirms, among other things, that she involved her 28-year-old legal assistant (charged with possession and intent to distribute) in oxycodone exchanges and that she brought, on one occasion, illegal prescription drugs to a client jailed at the Baltimore County Detention Center to increase her fee. She gives up the names of 11 people from whom she received oxycodone pills, including former clients with violent histories. And when detectives also ask if she provided oxycodone to her 20-year-old son Brett, who has pled guilty to one count of possession of a controlled and dangerous substance in an arrest related to the investigation, she writes, “Yes.”

TOWSON-BASED CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY JILL SWERDLIN AFTER HER ARREST ON PRESCRIPTION DRUG DISTRIBUTION CHARGES

That would seem like case closed. Police take “green dot,” pre-paid debit cards from the house, confiscate a cellphone, planner, and receipt book as evidence—as well as a couple of pills, more baggies, vials, and paraphernalia. End of the story; except it’s not. Seven months later, in a Baltimore County Circuit Court criminal motions hearing this past May 16, Swerdlin—tall, slim, in a conservative black dress, sweater, and heels—claims her civil rights were violated by officers and that a quid pro quo offer was made by detectives.

Fidgeting, shooting glances back at Carnes (who was eventually charged with possession of cocaine and paraphernalia) from the defense table—and told at one point to “sit still” by Judge Timothy L. Martin—an understandably anxious Swerdlin and her attorney argue that her statement, particularly that less sympathetic Q & A, should be thrown out. In the meantime, the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland has sought an injunction to stop Swerdlin from practicing, alleging professional misconduct in a civil suit, including misleading clients about her ability to influence judges, and accepting money for legal services and then failing to provide those services. Swerdlin and Carnes also face a forfeiture suit regarding the shotguns (essentially Carnes’s hunting rifles) located in the Manor Road house because of the proximity to alleged illegal narcotics.

Then there are other personal things to contend with: Her Pikesville townhouse is in foreclosure; there are contract and tort claims being brought against her by two former clients; plus, family issues—her son Brett is living in a North Carolina recovery house, while his father, her first ex-husband, has stopped talking to her. Swerdlin, who agreed to be interviewed for this story even as she faces a plea hearing in mid-June, says she’s been clean and sober ever since her arrest and subsequent treatment, but it’s a lot for anyone deal with, let alone someone trying to recover from drug addiction.

But there’s still the broader question. How exactly does all this suddenly happen to a former St. Paul’s School mom with no previous criminal record? Why, for example, do Baltimore County police and addiction specialists say they aren’t surprised anymore that an upscale lawyer, following a doctor’s prescription for pain medication (at least initially), finds herself hustling pills from convicted drug dealers? Just how bad is the prescription painkiller problem in the suburbs?

If the stereotype persists that somehow this country’s drug problem is an inner city, “urban” crisis—read: low-income, poorly educated blacks or Latinos using crack cocaine or heroin—it’s time to put an end to that notion. And if the belief persists that soaring prescription opiate abuse in the U.S. is somehow relegated to Appalachia or some other poverty-stricken region where unemployed white people live—it’s time to put that notion to bed, too.

One good way to get a handle on the extent of the prescription drug problem is to look at the hard data on accidental overdoses.

In 2010, prescription drugs killed more than 22,100 people in the U.S.—triple the number from a decade ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—and more than twice that of cocaine and heroin combined. What’s more, opiate pill addiction is now being blamed for reversing an earlier decline in heroin-related overdoses. Two years ago, the Maryland Department of Health reported that heroin-related overdoses had begun to spike again, and they linked the uptick to prescription opiate use that eventually becomes heroin use when the addict can no longer find or afford prescription opiates.

Most dramatically, recent studies show that for the first-time, more deaths are attributed to drug overdoses than car accidents or gun violence. But still think someone from Swerdlin’s demographic is an atypical drug addict or that it’s largely a teenage problem? According to the CDC, prescription drug overdose rates are highest, by far, among whites when compared to African-Americans or Latinos, and also highest among those aged 35-54—with both rates continuing to climb. Prescription overdose death rates among women, in particular, have reached unprecedented levels, increasing 400 percent from 1999 to 2010.

“This cuts across all boundaries, all levels of society,” says Mike Gimbel, Baltimore County’s former “drug czar” for 25 years. “And it is a huge problem in the private schools. But when teenagers start experimenting with pills today, they usually begin in their parents’ bathroom cabinet.”

And yet all of this is still a fairly recent development. It wasn’t that long ago, in 2006, that the Baltimore County Police Department first deemed it necessary to create a new narcotics unit, the pharmaceutical drug diversion team, specifically to tackle the crisis of the illegal distribution of prescription pills. That first unit only had two officers. Today, the unit is managed by a corporal and a sergeant, who oversee five detectives. In 2013, the unit made 305 arrests, including 168 for felonies, many including violent offenses, and they executed 52 search-and-seizure warrants like the one that brought them to Manor Road—far surpassing the numbers for any other illegal drugs.

Baltimore County police sergeant Bruce Vaughn notes this was all accomplished despite the unit’s having to overcome greater obstacles than other narcotic units, because they’re going after a black market for drugs that are legal when prescribed correctly. Also, HIPAA privacy laws can bog down background investigative work. “These can be complicated cases,” Sgt. Vaughn says. “Like investigating financial crimes.”

According to law enforcement, prescription drugs have become a driver of criminal activity because so much money is involved. The going rate is now $30 for a single 30 mg pill, compared to, say, $10 for a small amount of heroin—and that, for all intents and purposes, prescription drugs have become street drugs. They’re often trafficked by the same people who sell heroin, coke, and marijuana, often violent offenders. The former client Swerdlin allegedly smuggled drugs to inside prison is there on armed robbery charges. He has also been charged with attempted murder in the past. In fact, a number of those initially charged in the indictment with Swerdlin have been found guilty of distributing other drugs previously. Four are former clients and a couple have faced armed robbery and firearm charges.

“We could use five more detectives,” Kriete says. “The prescription drugs take up more than triple [the time] of anything else we deal with.”

Gimbel, himself a longtime recovering heroin addict from Pikesville, calls prescription painkiller drugs like OxyContin “heroin in a bottle” and says that 80 percent of the calls he receives today from families seeking help for a loved one are related to prescription drug abuse. “It used to be 5 percent.” He says anyone taking these powerful pain medications every day for 30 days will begin to build a tolerance—inevitably suffer withdrawal symptoms—and that it should be protocol for every patient to go through a medically supervised detoxification program. “Look, this stuff isn’t coming from Central America, Columbia, Peru, or Southeast Asia,” Gimbel continues. “It’s doctors that are prescribing this stuff.”

Once addicted, he and other recovering addicts say, all bets are off.

“You cross every line that you think you’ll never cross,” says Linda Y., a former Johns Hopkins nurse who was fired for shooting up pain medication intended for patients in the bathroom at work. (She asked to remain anonymous in accordance with 12-step tradition.) The assumption is that a lawyer or nurse, or any suburban professional for that matter, lives two lives once they become an addict, but that’s not true, Linda says. “It’s one life,” she says. “It all revolves around getting what you need.”

She adds that the problem of prescription drug abuse is particularly acute in the world of health care providers given the access that doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others have to medication—and notes that 12-step meetings in the Roland Park, Rodgers Forge, and Homewood areas are frequented by individuals in those industries. Linda went through a three-year, Maryland Board of Nursing discipline and rehabilitation program, including treatment and drug screens, to earn back full practicing credentials, adding, “I wish it had been five years like it is today. I needed it. It really helped me.”

Bob D., a 49-year-old lawyer who went through treatment for prescription drug addiction at Father Martin’s Ashley’s two-year pain recovery program in Havre de Grace, was initially prescribed medication for a rare neurological condition. But ultimately, the “cure” for his pain became worse than the underlying problem. He hid his addiction as long as possible, “doctor shopping” (going from one doctor to the next, hoping each would authorize a new prescription) and keeping the true number of pills he was taking from his neurologist and partner. “I was obsessed with my ’scripts,” he says. “I started with a pill every day like I was picking up my morning coffee. It was three or four years of a living hell.”

In fact, one of the things Bob says he learned at Father Martin’s Ashley was that drugs used to treat chronic pain, like oxycodone and hydrocodone, are not only addictive and potentially deadly—“my greatest fear was that I would forget how many I took and not wake up one morning”—but often don’t work long-term for chronic conditions. And these drugs can actually create a change in the neurological system where people develop hyperalgesia and become far more sensitive to pain than when they started out on these drugs. Today, Bob follows a routine he began at Father Martin’s Ashley that includes A.A. meetings, meditation, prayer, deep-stretching exercises, and some yoga to treat both his addiction and chronic pain. He reports he’s begun playing tennis again for the first time in years.

Ground up and snorted, or injected, which some abusers do, prescription pain pills can mimic the high of heroin, but even in pill form, opiates can create a false sense of euphoria and well-being, which is part of their insidious nature, says Dr. Carol Bowman, a Father Martin’s Ashley addiction specialist. “An injury sends a message to the brain. The medication, however, blocks the neuroreceptors and sends those signals away—but it also blocks all pain signals,” Bowman says. “It doesn’t distinguish if it’s anxiety, depression, or physical pain.” She adds that it doesn’t take long, either, for the drugs to confuse the brain’s normal “feel-good” chemical processes. “When they stop being taken, they suppress the brain’s natural production of dopamaine, our natural reward system, which also begins another downward spiral.”

Gimbel—who says he’s seen weekend warriors with knee and back injuries get hooked—believes there’s also a deeper societal component underlying the problem. “Everyone who gets admitted to the hospital today is asked to assess themselves for pain on a scale of zero to 10—that wasn’t always the case,” he says. “The target is always zero with the pharmaceutical companies pushing their products, so doctors try to get everyone down to zero. It’s like no one is supposed to experience pain anymore. It’s, ‘Here take a pill.’”

“And of course, all of this is just treating the symptoms,” Bowman adds, “not the actual causes of the original pain, which is what we should be examining.”

It’s this dual track—the physiological and psychological—that makes addiction, and treating addiction, tricky to fully understand, says Dr. Michael Fingerhood, director of the division of Chemical Dependency at Bayview Medical Center. There is a genetic component to addiction that makes some people more susceptible; there is a “phenomenological” component (i.e., stressful events or periods); and there’s the purely physiological aspect (the physical cravings)—particularly with the powerful round of painkiller drugs that were introduced en masse a little more than a decade ago.

“These are not your mother’s Valium or a drink after work: ‘Tough day, I think I’ll have a Percocet.’ But people think they are because they’re prescribed,” Fingerhood says. “I’m not surprised at all that people get to a place where they don’t know who they are anymore and can’t ask for help. Prescription drug addiction is the elephant in the room. It’s the epidemic no one talks about.”

A few days after her mid-May criminal motions hearing, outside a bustling Panera Bread cafe in the Hunt Valley Towne Centre shopping complex, Swerdlin—calmer than she appeared in court, dressed in a sleeveless white blouse, her hair colored a darker hue than in her smiling mug shot—recalls the car accident that ultimately led to her addiction, and to her journey from defense attorney to defendant. She’ll never forget the date; it was her 44th birthday, Jan. 6, 2009.

“I was leaving the Baltimore County courthouse, headed for Wabash Avenue, and it was raining. I was going about 5 mph on Allegheny [Avenue], trying to see, my view was obstructed, and I got T-boned,” she says. “My BMW was totaled, and I was taken to the hospital.” Police reports aren’t clear about who was at fault, but Swerdlin says the young driver of the other car was speeding. Her car did a 180-degree spin, and though she was wearing her seat belt, her face smashed against the empty passenger seat, badly damaging an eye socket and fracturing her cheek. “Of course, when I left the hospital,” she says, “I had the prescription for oxycodone.”

Her doctor cut off her prescription approximately a year later. But she says she needed oral surgery, which led to another prescription. She also says that she hit up friends and family members from time to time for pills, telling them that she didn’t feel well for one reason or another. “I didn’t go the doctor route [doctor shopping] and didn’t want to go through insurance,” she says, adding that she was “professionally, ethically, morally too proud” to have that on her medical records. Instead, she says, she found it easier to get what she needed from clients she was representing, who had been accused of drug dealing.

“Being a criminal defense attorney made it accessible,” Swerdlin says. “I started taking on clients who were drug clients. I started getting a good reputation from defending drug dealers, trying to get them into drug rehab and drug court, and I got to where I was making good money dealing with high-level people.”

She was eventually taking “five to seven” pills a day, starting first thing in the morning, then spread throughout the day, and “not eating lunch for years” while she hurried to track down pills, argue her cases, and make it to school to pick up her youngest son.

She also says that her addiction was “at low level for a long time, probably until six months to a year” before her arrest and “then it went from zero to 60 in a hurry.” She says that she was able to keep her use and behavior a secret from those closest to her, and that Carnes “had no idea” why the police broke into the house last fall.

Court records, police testimony, and allegations from other clients suggest life began getting unmanageable for Swerdlin before last fall, however. For starters, it was not long after her accident in 2009 that her name began to regularly appear as a defendant. Initially, it was for minor things. In 2010, there was a contempt charge that was dropped. Then there were a number of traffic violations, starting in 2011—driving with an expired tag, failing to produce a vehicle registration card, and later driving with a suspended license and other charges. Also, in 2011, her condo association sued for late fees. There’s the foreclosure that begins in 2011. And, Baltimore County police say she popped up on their “radar” in January 2012—a year before she says her addiction become serious—as part of a separate and still ongoing investigation (although Swerdlin is not accused of running any sort of major drug ring).

The first claims of professional misconduct, including that she took money in return for legal services not provided, date back to the fall of 2012. But most of the seven allegations, all of which Swerdlin denies, occurred more recently, in 2013. Baltimore County assistant state’s attorney Jason League, who is prosecuting the Swerdlin case, notes that she continued to represent drug clients even after her arrest until the Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland filed an injunction.

Her testimony at her criminal motions hearing also differed substantially from that of the four police officers called to the witness stand. She testified that she believed her house was being robbed and under attack, possibly from a disgruntled former client, when police pounded on her door. She says she heard, “Get down, this is a robbery,” not “Police with a search warrant! Open the door!” She also says that she was in the basement near the washbasin when found by police because she was trying to run from the house to get help. Taken with her allegation that male officers helped her get dressed—and not the female officer who was called to the scene—and claims that a quid pro quo was offered (that police told her they would not arrest her fiancé and she’d receive a better deal if she agreed to the Q & A), Judge Martin said in court that he did not find her testimony “terribly credible.”

Of course, disputes in court over the facts aren’t uncommon. At the same time, Swerdlin seems to be walking what could look like a fine line to a jury at the moment: admitting to addiction and obtaining and using illegal prescription drugs while declaring herself not guilty of the most serious crimes of which she is accused.

“I’m an addict,” Swerdlin says. “But I’m not guilty with what they are charging me.”

She also says in the interview at Panera Bread that the Baltimore County police only found a single piece of paraphernalia, a spoon owned by her 20-year-old son, in the search of her and Carnes’s home. (Reached by phone, her son would not comment.) But, according to police reports, four burnt pipes were found, and it was Carnes who was charged with possession, not her oldest son—who lived in her Pikesville townhome at the time. Nonetheless, she suggests that charges against Carnes will be dismissed if she accepts a plea.

As far as the allegations that she took payments in return for legal services not provided—in one case a judge has already ruled in favor of the plaintiff—or other accusations that she implied that she could influence judges, Swerdlin says, “Once people found out what happened to me,” referring to her arrest, “they started coming out of the woodwork, looking for money.”

And finally, she also claims she is being unfairly targeted by law enforcement officials because of her “elevated status” as an attorney. “I’m not being treated like everyone else,” she says. “The state is trying to make an example of me.”

Meanwhile, even as Swerdlin maintains she’s being unfairly treated by law enforcement and prosecutors, she weaves 12-step lingo into the conversation, speaking about taking things “one day a time.”

After being bailed out of jail by Carnes, she entered the Kolmac Clinic’s intensive outpatient program on the campus of Sheppard Pratt. She’s says she goes to A.A. meetings on a daily basis and that it was her 12-step sponsor who was with her all day at her criminal motions hearing.

She says that she believes in God and that everything happens for a reason, and if she had to go through this to become an example for others—a cautionary tale, as it were—so be it.

She admits that her arrest has been “devastating,” but that she has also gotten a great deal of support, receiving, she says, more than 200 messages and e-mails from friends, family, and colleagues. She does admit that she “lied to judges, lied to people, and lied to people that could’ve probably helped me.”

And whatever the outcome of her legal case, successful recovery from addiction remains a fraught road for anyone, requiring life-long care, as with other chronic diseases, such as diabetes, to which addiction treatment and recovery is often compared. Studies show that the majority of those in recovery do relapse, often requiring additional treatment. Fingerhood, the Bayview addiction specialist, estimates that about half of those seeking treatment for opiate addiction and also receiving drugs such as buprenorphine or methadone to stave off cravings, are able to attain “sustainable abstinence”—defined as one year clean and sober. Without medication help, he says, “It’s about 10 percent.”

As her nearly two-hour interview is concluding, Swerdlin says her sponsor tells her that it will take the same length of time off drugs, as on them, before she will even begin to feel like her self again, and she acknowledges that jail is a possibility. “I’ve never been in trouble and hopefully the 43 years before my addiction [will] all be considered,” she says. “I’m happy that my two children have good fathers. If I have to go to jail and do time, then I will do what I have to do.”

She intimates, however, that plea negotiations are imminent, and that disbarment with the possibility of applying for reinstatement five or so years down the line is a more likely scenario than a prison sentence.

If necessary, she says, she will re-invent herself.

“Who knows?” she says. “Maybe I’ll write a book about this one day if I lose my license.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story will appear in our July 2014 issue, on newsstands later this month.

UPDATE (June 15, 5 p.m.):

Towson-based attorney Jill Swerdlin pled guilty to three charges this afternoon in Baltimore County Circuit Court related to the above story and faces jail time and disbarment, per her plea agreement with the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office.

Swerdlin pled guilty to the distribution of buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid addiction, and the distribution of a controlled dangerous substance to a client incarcerated at the Baltimore County Detention Center. She also pled guilty to conspiracy to possess oxycodone.

The sentencing agreement, which will not be officially disposed until the end of July, calls for a maximum 5-year prison sentence for Swerdlin, with all but 18 months suspended. Swerdlin will not be eligible for home detention during her 18-month sentence, but will eligible for work release and may apply for parole. She also consented to disbarment as part of her plea.

Other plea agreement stipulations include three years of parole and probation, drug treatment, and random urinalysis.

Also as part of the deal, Swerdlin, a criminal defense attorney, agreed to meet with prosecutors and Baltimore County Detention Center officials to reveal everything she knows about drug smuggling efforts at the jail. Jason League, assistant state’s attorney for Baltimore County and lead prosecutor on the case, said changes have already been made since Swerdlin’s arrest to improve security at the jail.

According to the plea terms, Swerdlin may also seek to modify her sentence—essentially seek a probation before judgment final disposition—if she successfully completes all of her required stipulations, enabling her, potentially, to regain her law license down the road.

Three others indicted in the Swerdlin conspiracy case have already pled guilty and a fourth is expected to plea guilty next week, according to prosecutors. Six other people charged in the conspiracy still have their cases open.

“She’s different than just an addict because she had access to clients who were in a holding facility, and, as an officer of the court, she was abusing that access by smuggling drugs into prison,” League said afterwards. “Smuggling contraband into prison goes far beyond just that one client—many of the people there have drug problems and for them this is gold. So that becomes a huge problem and obviously, we have an obligation to uphold the integrity of our jails.”

League added that the broad prescription drug investigation that began in January of 2012, and led to Swerdlin’s arrest, remains ongoing.

Update: This article has been updated to contain a sponsored link from recovery.org.