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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Albert Knight, who patented Formstone and resurfaced the face of Baltimore with the faux stone façade in the 1940s and 1950, had shuttered his company years before Robinson Agresott arrived in Charm City. The Formstone fad—John Waters’ “polyester of brick”—began to fade along with Knight’s patent rights by the late ’50s and he had turned his concrete inclinations to building bomb shelters.

In his stead, smaller companies, knock-off brands with names like Permastone, Romanstone, and Modern Stone, continued the rowhouse makeovers, but by the time Agresott immigrated from Colombia in the mid-1970s, tastes had done a 180.

“People had started coming to this vision, that these rowhomes in Federal Hill and Fells Point, many built in the late 1800s, should look historical, realistic,” says Agresott. “Authentic,” he adds with a smile, finding the right word in his second language as he climbs off some scaffolding.

On this late summer afternoon, the 76-year-old puts his crowbar down and takes a break from pulling the heavier-than-they-look slabs of concrete from a recently sold Upper Fells rowhouse.

“Removing the Formstone and repointing the brick, it was becoming a big business, and I got hooked in. That was 1977. I’ve been doing this ever since.” He even appeared, briefly, removing Formstone in the Baltimore documentary short Little Castles, directed by Skizz Cyzyk, in 1998 (at the 21:30 mark).

Agresott had previously spent three years in Baltimore as a petty officer on a Colombian Navy vessel docked here for an extended stay. He and shipmates played softball and soccer against local Coast Guard and company teams, and he got to meet one of his baseball idols, Brooks Robinson, who had played winter ball in Colombia.

He fell in love with the city, and a young woman. He’d hoped to return to both after his discharge, only to learn once he’d made his way back to Baltimore that his girlfriend had a new boyfriend. (Her mother, who felt bad, briefly put him up.) Shortly after, he stumbled into his life’s work and, of course, met another young woman, to whom he’s still happily married and raised four children with in their Federal Hill rowhouse.

At the moment, neither Agresott nor his wife, who works at Boog’s BBQ at Camden Yards, have plans to retire. “Why? To sit at home?”

In the Navy, he had worked in the electrical department, “but because of the language barrier, I couldn’t do that in Baltimore,” says the lean Agresott, who moves like he could still play shortstop, shrugging in an Orioles T-shirt. “I took to this. I enjoy making the homes look beautiful. People say, ‘You’re not a bricklayer, you’re an artist,’ which makes me feel good. Come back when I’m done. You’ll see.”

Moored at a desolate former Canton grain pier, the NS Savannah looks like an ordinary cruise ship upon approach. Well, except for the giant atomic “whirl”—the familiar representation of electrons orbiting a nucleus—splashed across its port side entrance.

Inside, the world’s first nuclear-powered commercial liner, christened in 1959, appears to be a mash-up of Star Trek on sea and Mad Men on vacation. There is a sunny deck and swimming pool, 75-seat midcentury modern dining room (including mini-atomic symbols on the dinnerware sets), and a retro cocktail lounge that doubled as a movie theater but also could’ve doubled as a James Bond set. Close your eyes and you can almost hear Sean Connery ordering a martini “shaken, not stirred.”

Launched by President Eisenhower with great fanfare to promote his Cold War-era Atoms for Peace Program, the ship possessed no weapons, but was powered by a very real nuclear reactor, which sat in the bow’s hull, just a stroll from the ship’s staterooms.

It propelled the Savannah through the Panama Canal, to Seattle’s World’s Fair and to European ports for over a decade without ever needing to refuel. Its nuclear-powered engine required a highly trained crew, but provided a near limitless source of energy. The amount of uranium fuel that the ship spent over its passenger-and cargo carrying lifetime could fit in a small gift box.

Today, however, following the removal and disposal of its reactor in 2022, the ship is heading for decommission while the Navy looks for a buyer to purchase the nearly 600-foot vessel as a historic preservation project and maritime museum.

To that end, volunteer docents began leading public tours of the remarkably preserved, back-to-the-future ship last year, which includes visits to the analog engine and technicolor control rooms.

As part of its mission, the Savannah was built for curious visitors on its globe-trotting voyages. “Does anyone want to push the scram?” guide Matthew Roof asks a lively group on a recent afternoon, barely getting his sentence out before a couple of hands go up. “It’s the, ‘Oh shoot!’ emergency shut off button,” he explains.

According to one story, Enrico Fermi, a Manhattan Project member, created the clever “scram” (Safety Control Rod Axe Man) acronym. The stop-sign red button is disconnected, of course, but that doesn’t seem to dim anyone’s enthusiasm.

Later, after visiting the ship’s barbershop, beauty salon, and health physics laboratory, intended to monitor the effects of the nuclear reactor on the crew, Roof points out the c. 1960 Raytheon Radarange microwave in the Savannah’s kitchen.

“Standing next to this,” he says, of the refrigerator-sized microwave, “you would’ve received 3-4 times more radiation than anything released from the nuclear reactor.”

“Authenticity is in the tiniest of details,” says makeup artist Debi Young. “I’d just done Watchman with Jean Smart, where she had played a sharply dressed FBI special agent. And now for Mare of Easttown [the acclaimed HBO series], I wanted to do broken capillaries on her face and give her a little rosacea. And she’s like, ‘Can you give me dishpan hands?’ She had to become this Pennsylvania grandma.”

“If her character went to a party or an event, she had to look like she did her own makeup,” continues Young, with a smile from her Owings Mills home. (She’s seated, in the photo above, next to her daughter-in-law, who is also a makeup artist.) She’s clearly pleased the elegant Emmy-winning actress was almost unrecognizable from role to role. “Not the same person, right?”

Young, herself a four-time Emmy nominee and NAACP Image Award-winning makeup artist and makeup department head, recently wrapped a forthcoming musical co-produced by Pharrell Williams. She has worked on films and television series, including Shirley, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, Jackie, True Detective, Treme, and The Wire.

She got her start, of all places, in the Baltimore Police Department—between shifts fielding emergency calls. On break in the ladies’ room, Young, whose positive vibes exude from every pore, did her colleagues’ makeup and noticed they felt better about themselves afterward. (Actor Wendell Pierce, who she worked with on The Wire and Treme, called her his “therapist” in one interview and said sitting in Young’s makeup chair “brings a calm to your day.”)

The BPD ladies’ room sessions gave her sense of gratification and after her second son was born, she withdrew her pension contributions and quit to pursue an aesthetician’s license. A client who hosted a local television show asked Young to do her makeup in exchange for a screen credit, and soon she was on the set of NBC’s hit, Homicide: Life on the Street.

Of course, the author of the book that led to the TV series turned up during filming. Young recognized David Simon as the same reporter who used to come into her BPD communications department, looking for police reports. “It’s crazy how things overlap,” she says.

It is not the only part of Young’s life and career that overlaps. Years later, she met Ngozi Olandu Young—her future daughter-in-law but then a Morgan State student—working behind the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom in Towson Town Center. Impressed with her patience and attention to detail, she mentored and eventually hired her as an assistant on The Wire, throwing her into the deep end.

“My first episode? ‘Hamsterdam.’ Where I had to do 183 extras and make them look down and out while they’re buying and using drugs and everything,” Olandu Young recalls. “I was on Google trying to research what drug addicts look like. I talked to my dad, a psychiatrist who helped people with drug and alcohol abuse issues.”

Olandu has gone on to her own Emmy-nominated career and, among major TV and film efforts, just wrapped Spike Lee’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low.

While working on The Wire and other projects, Young has become something of an expert on blood—its coagulation, hues, and the various color stains it leaves, depending on circumstance. Same with dirt. “Dirt and mud from different parts of the country have their own textures and colors and you have to get that right,” she says. However, the artistry, which also includes using prosthetics, is about creating characters.

“If you are a sweaty drunk, you’re going to be a sweaty drunk when you get up out of my chair,” Young says. “I have my idea of what a character should look like as I read the script, making my notes. I also know the cast is arriving with that character in them already and I need to hear how they see themselves. I take what they say, how I see it, and what the vision is of the writer or the director and try to make it a collaborative effort.”

While growing up, Young’s father had a barbershop on Edmonson Avenue. The Harlem Theater was around the corner and her mom, a nursing assistant, worked weekends. So on Saturdays, her father would drop Young and her siblings off at the cinema while he cut hair.

“We would watch two or three movies and come back [to the barbershop]. I was always pouring his tonics and lotions in my hand, practicing on people, just as I was playing with my mother’s makeup on her vanity,” Young recalls. “I still remember when I was nine or 10, he said to me, ‘Your name is going be on credits like that,’ pointing to the television. I said, ‘What are credits?’ And he told me those are the names of all the people who worked on the movie to make the movie.”

“Memorial Stadium? Oh my God. I’m not sure how I would put it. I loved that place. It was home.”

From 1968 to 1974, Linda Warehime Butcher was a Memorial Stadium fixture along with Brooks and Boog, American League pennants, Earl Weaver’s tantrums, and PA announcer Rex Barney calling out, “Give that fan a contract.”

As authentically Bawlmer as Esskay hot dogs and Natty Boh—National Brewing Company president Jerold Hoffberger owned the team in those days—she landed a “job” at 11 years old sweeping off the bases between innings with a big straw broom.

“I was so nervous that first day,” recalls the now-68-year-old lifelong O’s fan. “I don’t know how many people were there, maybe 30,000. I was shy and pretty introverted, and afraid I was going to trip over a base or something.”

Instead, the blonde schoolgirl discovered a previously unknown gift for hijinks. Running from base to base in reverse order—starting at third, closest to the Orioles’ dugout, then to home, the pitcher’s mound, first, second, and back to third—she didn’t just sweep the bases, but began sweeping the dirt from the O’s cleats as she scampered past them in the middle of the fifth inning, drawing cheers.

Pretty soon, she started swatting opposing third-base coaches as she ran back to her seat down the left-field line, where the self-described tomboy scooped up foul balls during play as Major League Baseball’s first ball girl.

Sensing which coaches and umpires were game, she coaxed more than a few into playing along. A Red Sox coach pulled out a water pistol and squirted her one game. She soaked him back the next night. A Cleveland coach once sneakily planted a fake mouse on third base, causing Butcher to scream when she came by and knock it halfway home. She kissed an Angel’s coach on the cheek, who promptly fell flat on his backside. A Royals coach once greeted her by doffing his cap and offering a bouquet of flowers that he’d hidden behind his back.

“Jay Mazzone [the O’s batboy who had lost both his hands in a fire at two years old and famously did his job with metal hooks] was in on it,” she notes. “I was in shock. It was touching.”

When Butcher describes the “Old Grey Lady,” as Memorial Stadium was affectionately known, as home, she means it (almost) literally. Her father, a Baltimore police lieutenant, directed traffic. Her three brothers were all on the grounds crew. Her mother came to every game

The gig lasted until she graduated from Overlea High in 1974 and needed a full-time job. Along the way, she landed in Sports Illustrated and the 1970 World Series program—a series during which she smacked umpire Emmett Ashford on the rear before a nationally televised audience. She attended team parades and functions and made appearances on two of television’s most popular shows, To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line?

Today, a bat autographed by the 1970 championship club and a World Series ring that her parents purchased for her 13th birthday  remain cherished mementos—as do so many photographs.

“I went to Opening Day a few years ago and Boog Powell remembered me—it’d been nearly 50 years—and he signed an old photograph of us that I had,” Butcher recalls. “He seemed like a giant, a gentle giant, when I was a girl. But other than [former ace and longtime O’s color man] Jim Palmer, there aren’t many links left between Camden Yards and Memorial Stadium.

“Well, except for Clancy,” the O’s beer vendor who started when he was 15 and is now in his 50th year, she adds. “He was there.”

For almost a half-century, retired ironworker Butch Henry has lived with a reminder of his two years building the Francis Scott Key Bridge—namely, his own bridge work.

“I was 300 feet up and a bolt got sheared off a beam,” Henry, 79, recalls. “I don’t know if a wave came by, but something caused the crane to move as we were fastening the beam and it hit me in the mouth. Four of us were up there and I started to fall forward. The guys grabbed me. A friend found my teeth 40 feet down in the section below.”

Bloody mouth and all, Henry walked himself off the bridge. He returned the next week still missing his front teeth. Later, he took a job with the state, doing road maintenance on the Key Bridge.

On the morning of March 26, the first image he saw after turning on the television was the bridge collapsing. “It brought tears to my eyes,” he says. “The guys up there that night that lost their lives—my heart broke on that.”

Six immigrants from Central America and Mexico, repairing pot-holes on the bridge, died after the container ship Dali lost power and crashed into a supporting pier. Four of the men were fathers and several were related. They were Miguel Luna, a 19-year Maryland resident and father of three; Maynor Suazo Sandoval, a 17-year U.S. resident and father of two; José Mynor López; Dorlian Castillo Cabrera; Alejandro Hernández Fuentes; and Carlos Hernández.

More immigrants no doubt will rebuild the bridge named for the lawyer, poet, Marylander, and slave-owner who penned “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he witnessed bombs bursting in air over the nearby waters during the British attack of Fort McHenry.

Ben Womer, a retired steelworker who had founded the Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society, led the campaign to name the bridge. Each Memorial Day weekend, the Coast Guard places a stars-and-stripes-painted buoy near the spot Key is believed to have been inspired to write what would become the national anthem.

Pastor Terry Turbin, a former carpenters union member, still recalls the freezing winter he spent working on the massive project.

“At the time, it was just a job—$8.10 an hour, I’m feeding my wife, I’m paying my bills—and the older guys are looking out for you, which got me through,” says Turbin, whose Sonshine Fellowship Church sits up the road from the entrance to the bridge. “Then, the years pass, and each time I’d drive over it with the grandkids, I’d point, ‘Right down there was where I was working.’ “People keep asking me, ‘Have you gone to see what’s left?’ And I tell them, ‘No, I ain’t got the heart to go look at that.’”

As with others who physically built the bridge, Buddy Cefalu, 75, feels like a part of his life is suddenly gone. He joined Ironworkers Local 16 as an apprentice two weeks after returning from Vietnam in July 1969.

“It was the third-longest truss bridge in the world when it was built, just the site of the arch was a symbol of industrial strength,” Cefalu says while sharing old photos of himself and fellow “cowboys of the sky” at work on the bridge. “It was a monument to the working-class people of the area, the last vestige of an era when generations worked at Bethlehem Steel, General Motors, and Lever Brothers.

“I just hope I live long enough to see it rebuilt and the first car go across.”

One day at the Islamic school near her village in northern Afghanistan, Soraya Hosseini made friends with a new girl, “my mosque-mate,” who soon told the inquisitive Soraya that she also attended a public school.

“She just said, ‘You can come with me,’” Soraya recalls, sitting in an empty, six-floor classroom of the University of Baltimore School of Law. “I later followed her to the school, and she told me that her mom was a teacher. For me, that was shocking. I’d never heard of a woman teacher. I never heard of public schools.”

Soraya’s father, a farmer, and mother, a homemaker, did not read or write, and none of her four older siblings ever attended public school. Her Kunduz Province village didn’t even have a public school until 2003-2004, after U.S. troops had dislodged the Taliban, the fourth-year evening law student explains.

When she confided to a sister that she’d started going to school with her friend, she was told she must not let anyone find out. Her uncle, a fundamentalist with multiple wives, would kill her if he learned. A sympathetic village woman sewed her a uniform, which she carried in a bag to and from classes. Pencils and books stayed at school, a practice that continued for a half-dozen years.

“Girls, and there were only a few, had to graduate by 14. That’s when they are supposed to get married.”

To avoid that fate—her mother was wed at 13—Soraya moved to Kabul to help her sister and husband with their small children. But with an ulterior motive. Away from her village, she continued her education, studying and later teaching law, while also advocating on behalf of oppressed women, including some imprisoned over “moral” crimes.

Tragically, during a brief return to her village in late 2015, a rocket destroyed her family’s house, killing her father. The attack, she believes, was directed by the Taliban because she’d gone to school and worked with U.S. humanitarian groups. Recognizing she had to flee her country, she arrived at Dulles in January 2017 with a temporary visa, little money, and a few words of English. (Her name has been changed in this story out of fear of further retribution. Soraya has not had contact with her family since leaving Afghanistan.) When she asked an airport taxi driver to take her to the asylum office, he drove her to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration field office in Baltimore.

“It was such a long drive, I thought I’d been kidnapped,” she says, wiping away tears before smiling in disbelief at the journey to the place she now calls home.

Today, more than 500 Afghan refugees live in Baltimore, almost all resettled by the International Rescue Committee since 2022 and the end of the 20-year war.

When Soraya came, there was no Afghan diaspora community, however. Turned away at the asylum office, which does not accept walk-ins, she spent months in homeless shelters. Eventually, she was introduced to several local nuns, who offered temporary accommodations at their convent.

“People began to ask if I was going to become a nun because I was living with them,” says Soraya, a practicing Muslim. “They were wonderful.”

They put her in touch with the Asylee Women Enterprise, a Catholic-associated Baltimore nonprofit that helps asylum seekers, foreign-born survivors of human trafficking, and other forced migrants rebuild their lives. They connected her to the University of Dayton, where she initially earned a master’s degree in law before landing a city government job and applying to UBalt. This year, she became the first recipient of a UBalt scholarship established by lobbyist Bruce Bereano and his son, Judge Bryon Bereano, a UBalt law grad.

She’ll take the Maryland bar exam in July.

Meanwhile, she has served as interpreter for recent Afghan immigrants and has her share of “Smalltimore” moments as well. “I’m still in touch with the nuns, but everywhere you go in Baltimore, you see people you know.”

Soraya acknowledges bouts of depression, particularly when obstacles have seemed overwhelming. But she also sees negative portrayals of Baltimore and believes there’s hope in her story.

“I love Baltimore and I love that it’s diverse,” she says. “It’s a beautiful place and it has a lot of people who are really kind. I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

When asked if there have been any new developments beyond graduation plans, she adjusts her head scarf and smiles again.

“I bought a car. I’m the first in my family to drive now, too.”

I have not any intentions of moving the goddamn team. If I did, I will tell you about it, but I’m staying here.”—Baltimore Colts owner Robert Irsay, Jan. 20, 1984

Terri Ricigliano’s two kids were not yet two years old when her husband, Sun sports cartoonist Mike Ricigliano, built a larger-than-life papier mâché dummy of Baltimore public enemy No. 1—Colts owner Robert Irsay—in their two-bedroom Cockeysville apartment.

“For whatever reason, they weren’t scared of it,” she says of her then-infant and toddler. “They seemed to like it. We were on the first floor and had sliding glass doors and I’d sit him in a chair at night like he was watching TV when ‘Ricig,’ that’s what I call him like everyone else, was at work. Sometimes, people stopped by, and I’d have to explain the whole story.”

The whole story is this: The Orioles won the 1983 World Series just as the Riciglianos arrived from Buffalo. The citywide euphoria they witnessed was short-lived, however. Five months later, the Chicago-born Irsay, who had sold his Midwestern heating and air-conditioning company to buy the Colts 12 years earlier, packed the franchise into Mayflower moving trucks. He snuck the beloved team out of town under the cover of a late-night winter squall on March 28, 1984—40 years ago this month.

“To move here and immediately see another carpetbagging owner at work, it raised your blood pressure,” says Ricigliano, explaining the inspiration behind the dummy—and its subsequent trip to Philadelphia that fall for an early season game between the now, shockingly, Indianapolis Colts and Eagles. “His head definitely has a caricature quality, but it did in person, too,” Ricigliano adds, laughing. “It looks real because I painted its skin and put on costume hair. I got him one of those light blue suits, which Irsay wore a lot, and white patent leather shoes, which he also wore, from a Goodwill. Then, I stuffed fake money into his pocket.”

Irsay had long since destroyed the organization, turning a franchise that hadn’t had a losing season in 15 years into a perennial loser, alienating players, coaches, and fans alike by sticking his nose into football decisions. He also fabricated stories about growing up in poverty and his non-existent college football and World War II combat careers. In fact, he made his fortune after driving his own father, who’d given him a leg up in heating and air-conditioning contracting, out of business.

“I’d compare the vitriol here to the feeling we had in Buffalo for Bills owner Ralph Wilson, who didn’t live there and wouldn’t spend any money,” Ricigliano says. (When O.J. Simpson’s agent told Wilson during negotiations that his client could make the Bills a championship contender, Wilson shot back: “What good would a championship do me? All that means is everybody wants a raise.”)

On Oct. 14, 1984, several thousand Baltimore fans, many donning “Irsay Sucks” caps, rode buses up I-95 to curse Irsay in person on the Colts’ first return East. Meanwhile, Ricigliano and his wife piled the replica Irsay into their coincidentally named Colt Vista. Turned away at multiple stadium entrances, the Riciglianos were only allowed in after the daughter of the Eagles owner, a team VP, intervened. She told them they needed to buy an additional nosebleed seat for their sidekick.

After the Eagles won 16-7, photos of Ricigliano and his Irsay caricature went viral, appearing in newspapers around the country and Newsweek magazine. During the game, Baltimore fans laughed and posed for pictures with the dummy—and offered money to punch it.

Upon return, the dummy became something of a local celebrity, joining WBAL sportscaster Chris Thomas to make weekend football picks. An irreverent wit, Thomas mocked and hurled insults at the doll, which “replied” through edited tapes of inebriated public statements from the real Irsay. Over the holidays that year, the papier mâché Irsay became a regular presence at Baltimore parades, where it was generally pelted with whatever refuse happened to be nearby.

After the ’84 season, Schaefer’s Pub in Towson bid $1,400 in a charity auction for the dummy. Later, when the Bay Café opened, it moved to Canton. The dummy fared no better in the bars than on parade, however—not all wounds heal.

“I got called to repair it a few times, but it’s chicken wire and eventually there was nothing left of the body,” Ricigliano, now 72, says. “The head remains. Since the Bay Café closed, it’s sat behind the bar at Nacho Mama’s. It was a great adventure for us. I do wonder sometimes if the younger crowd there even knows who it is.”

[Editor’s Note 10/8/24: Join us in congratulating contributing photojournalist J.M. Giordano, whose portrait of Yvonne Freeman (above) has been named a finalist for the Smithsonian’s Outwin 2025: American Portrait Today prize. His piece will hang with works from 35 other finalists in the National Portrait Gallery from May 2025 through March 2026. The exhibit will then travel to museums across the country through 2027.] 

A retired Easton police officer, Yvonne Freeman so loved growing up on the close-knit “Hill”—apparently named for its ever-so-slight incline up from the Tred Avon River—she began leading walking tours after The Hill historical project launched, which was roughly a decade ago.

Spurred by condemnation and demolition, residents and members of the nonprofit Historic Easton began researching the community’s history. Archaeologists, first from the University of Maryland, and now also privately contracted by the Academy Art Museum, soon began uncovering a rich and unexpected story, dating back to the late 18th century.

In 2012, archaeologists broke ground around a house occupied in 1879 by John Green, a Black Civil War veteran, and his wife, Eliza. That brief excavation recovered two military uniform buttons dating to Green’s service in the U.S. Colored Troops, boosting efforts to save the home. Subsequent residents included relatives of sergeant and buffalo soldier William Gardner, whose discharge papers had previously been discovered in the home.

To date, archaeologists have explored five sites, including the neighborhood’s historic Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and former Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church, where Frederick Douglass spoke at the 1878 dedication. On the site of what is now the Talbot County Women’s Club, the lives and roles of enslaved and free Black domestic servants and cooks have been examined. Morgan State professor of architecture and historic preservation Dale Green, whose own family roots extend to the community, estimates more than 400 free Black individuals lived in the neighborhood by 1790.

Meanwhile, on two grassy lots that continue to be explored, archaeologists have uncovered foundational walls and artifacts from the home of James Freeman, Easton’s first recorded Black landowner, and his wife, Henny. The couple built a house and barn for livestock, as well as a large kitchen vegetable garden. They added a second house on their land—property now under the auspices of the Academy Art Museum of Easton—which they rented to a tenant named Hercules.

On a recent morning dig, archaeologist Jay Lunze displays an unearthed, hand-painted creamware fragment and cast-iron button, both circa 1790.

“This was a middle-class family,” Lunze says. “There are things here that would’ve come from Europe, plates used for entertaining, that you had to order, or at least pick up at a local store. It shows us the history of Black families on the Eastern Shore, at least some, is more complex than the common stereotype.”

A few years ago, researchers informed Yvonne Freeman that she was a descendant of Henny and James, who raised nine children on the Talbot Lane site. Her childhood home, in fact, sits around the corner. One of the Freemans’ sons was named Garrison—her father’s middle name.

“I just want this story about my family told, because as the generations come by on the walking tours, someone like me might come by and be like, ‘I could be related.’ Or they might decide to research their own family story,” Freeman says. “But you know the best thing they found in the dig? A clay marble. The archaeologist put it in my hand. He says, ‘How does it feel to hold something from an ancestor?’

“That was amazing. When I do tours for schoolkids, I tell them about playing marbles with my brother and his friends. We played for keeps. I was a tomboy, and I was good, too. My brother’s friends didn’t want to play with me.”

“The first tag I did was with a marker on the side door of John’s Quality Bakery at Fairmont and Kenwood. I had a red El Marko, and just wrote my name and it wasn’t big and I was nervous and scribbled it on real quick,” recalls Chris Stain. “But then I felt all kinds of things at once and a rush of adrenaline. The first thing I did with spray paint was up the block from where I lived. I had one of those old Testors cans that you use for painting model cars, and I wrote my name on the corner house. In a very juvenile sense, I felt immortal, and this great sense of purpose like I’d arrived at something.”

All of 11 years old, Stain had arrived at his life’s work. In high school, he learned printmaking before shifting his technique toward stenciling. Self-taught, he also moved toward paperwork and public murals, which he’s done all over the world. His efforts have been shouted out in publications from Graffiti World to The New York Times and shown in galleries from Baltimore and New York to Berlin, London, and Amsterdam.

Now 50, with two children, he’s a member of the United Scenic Artists Local 829 in New York. With down time due to the actors’ and writers’ strikes (he’d been making sets for an HBO revival of Pretty Little Liars), he’s currently working on a commissioned proposal for CFG Bank Arena.

Earlier this summer, Stain put a collection of ’80s skateboarding and graffiti images into a limited edition, 4×6-inch photo album project titled Highlandtown Refugee. But his larger, still-in-development plan is a book chronicling the early history of graffiti in Baltimore, which he saw explode firsthand.

Baltimore’s first graffiti artist, according to Stain, was not a style writer in the usual sense, but an older Black worker, reportedly employed by either Bethlehem Steel or the city, who went by BEAU.

“He wrote with marking pens, which steelworkers used to identify pieces of steel, that look like tubes of toothpaste,” Stain says, adding that at least one BEAU tag remains visible. “He was not part of any movement like the teenagers in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Then a guy who went by REVOLT came from Manhattan to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art and he wrote on things that got attention, as did several kids who attended the Baltimore Experimental High School,” which tended to attract independent, creative, and dysfunctional students in equal measure. “One kid’s tag was CUBA. Another wrote DILLINGER. They were all part of the punk scene at a club everyone called The Loft.”

The first time graffiti really hit Stain, he was walking to school at St. Elizabeth’s. In the alley behind the bakery where he grabbed pizza rolls to take for lunch, a massive, colorful tag had suddenly appeared. “I went to class but kept thinking about it. A few days later, on a school building, I saw another big graffiti piece and I thought, ‘What is this? Who did it? Why is it popping up?’”

That summer of 1984, the movie Beat Street, about a break-dancer, a graffiti writer, and a hip-hop DJ in the Bronx, offered an explanation. Just a sixth-grader, Stain realized hip-hop culture had made it to Baltimore because he’d seen older kids trying to break-dance. He remembers leaving the since-demolished Grand Theatre in Highlandtown and racing home to draw graffiti lettering from the movie. “I played soccer. I rode bikes. I skateboarded. Nothing affected me like seeing that artistic expression being done by other kids.”

In his research, Stain, who was arrested at 11, 16, and, yes, 39 for tagging, has found police photographs of local graffiti from that era. Following in the footsteps of Philadelphia, Baltimore eventually launched some mural initiatives as part of its anti-vandalism efforts and Stain later contributed to the city’s acclaimed 2012 Open Walls project (see opening image, which shows Stain on the right with artist Billy Mode).

“It’s not in the public’s best interest to have kids writing graffiti and painting on people’s property. But sociologically there is a reason why kids do the things that they do,” Stain says. “At the heart of it, it’s a need to be heard, to be seen. It can seem perverted because what you’re doing is seen as defacing other people’s property, but it’s also the world we live in and that’s what I’m trying to figure out by putting the book together: how somebody survives with all the madness that’s going on around them.”

When he was growing up, says Stain, whose father got laid off from Western Electric, forcing the family to move, a kid could make more money selling drugs and guns in Patterson Park than some of their parents made.

“Some people turn to alcohol and drugs, some people turn to sports, some people turn to art as a means of survival,” he continues. “I got lucky. I don’t know how else to describe it. I never thought art would be a career. I figured I’d get a construction or blue-collar job and art would just be my hobby, the thing that kept me getting up every day.”

Above: A collection of early ’80s graffiti pieces from PLAD, DILLINGER, and TRASH 1. —Courtesy of Chris Stain.

Inside the warm, front-room performance space at Four Hour Day Lutherie, Nora Miller raises and lowers her right arm to keep time.

Around her, two dozen singers—there are tenor, bass, alto, and treble sections—sit and face each other in what’s called the “hollow square” in the distinctly American hymnal tradition known as shape-note singing. They hold a songbook, The Sacred Harp, first printed in 1841.

And let this feeble body fail, And let it faint or die; My soul shall quit this mournful vale, And soar to worlds on high. (chorus) And I’ll sing hallelujah, And you’ll sing hallelujah, And we’ll sing halleujah, When we arrive at home.

In college in upstate New York, Miller had participated in choir for a semester. But that was the end of her musical life until someone in her long-standing Dungeons & Dragons game mentioned her shape-note singing group a couple of times in random conversation.

“No one gave it a second thought until that movie Cold Mountain came out and she was like, ‘I gotta go to L.A. and do all this stuff for the Oscars and we were like, ‘What? What are you talking about?’”

The Civil War-period film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Music, featured characters played by Nicole Kidman and Jude Law singing hymns in the shape-note tradition in their North Carolina church. Miller’s friend performed in the choir at the award show.

“So we paid a little bit more attention to what this singing was and I saw the movie and thought, ‘Oh, this looks kind of fun,’ and she took me to a singing. From day one, I was hooked.”

Fast forward two decades. Miller, with assistance from her husband, Joel, leads the last Thursday of every month a cappella (“in the style of the chapel,” in Italian) shape-note sing at Four Hour Day Lutherie. Considered a bit of a subculture perhaps today—participants and venues naturally change over time, not unlike in, say, the D&D world—shape-note singing has a steeped history. Some believe the shape-note singing in Protestant colonial New England churches to be the first “popular” and oldest written music in the U.S.

The shape-note method, designed to teach non-music reading congregants how to sight-sing Christian hymns together (and fill the pews), first appeared in 1801 in a book called The Easy Instructor.

As still performed today, it uses four syllables to cover the seven notes of the scale and gives each a distinctive sheet notation: a triangle for fa, an oval for sol, a rectangle for la, and a diamond for mi. Developed in the late 17th century, shape-note singing soon moved south and west along the frontier.

Raucous at times, haunting at others, shape-note singing can come across as an indecipherable wall of sound at first because of its polyphonic harmony singing. It is intended for participation, not for audiences or recording. It is also an undeniably communal, and often transcendent, experience, according to practitioners.

Sometimes called “sacred harp” singing after the enduring songbook—the term is a nod to the human voice—it remains an unbroken tradition in parts of the South. The two oldest surviving shape-note singing conventions are the Chattahoochee Musical Convention, founded in Georgia in 1852, and the East Texas Sacred Harp Convention, which began in 1855.

Meanwhile, since the release of Cold Mountain in 2003 and the excellent if limited-distribution documentary, Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp, in 2006, more people across the country have become aware of the tradition.

There were all-day singings in Washington, D.C., and Berryville, Virginia, this spring, for example. Philadelphia hosts regular sings. A new group is starting in Easton, Maryland. Groups have also popped up in Germany, England, Ireland, France, Canada, Poland, and the Netherlands.

Given that church attendance continues to wither, it’s a compelling phenomenon that many—and all are welcome—are finding fellowship and meaning in singing the old hymns.

“I would not call myself any particular religion at this point, and maybe it’s a little much, but I don’t think you can sing these words and not have a spiritual experience,” says Miller, a Baltimore school teacher, who was raised Catholic. “If you don’t believe the stories in the Bible are real, there’s still this way that they are symbolic and that humans are trying to explain the human experience, right? For me, it’s very much that kind of thing. You can’t pretend bad things aren’t gonna happen to you and we’re not all about to break and headed towards death.

“It’s interesting because some people may take the words literally, as what’s in The Sacred Harp is the word of God. But even as I sit down next to people and we’re looking at these words in different ways, we are probably having a similar experience. That’s pretty cool.”

As thousands of fans are making their way to Camden Yards to see the Orioles take on the Cincinnati Reds, a dozen and a half bicyclists gather in nearby St. Mary’s Park for an evening ride. Not surprisingly, the conversation turns to someone’s new bicycle lights, a recent 50-mile jaunt posted on the popular bike app Strava, a planned dinner stop at the New Seasoned Mariner along Bear Creek, and the old-school hip-hop coming from bicycle-pinned speakers.

The discussion briefly changes to another recreational activity about to become legal in three days—one or two riders may or may not have arrived after imbibing a certain herb—and then someone makes a crack about the weird transition of hopping off a bicycle and immediately getting behind the wheel of a car. “I nearly drove onto the sidewalk to park once—like I was locking up my bike.”

“Biking will mess you up,” acknowledges Shaka Pitts, the leader of the Wednesday night “Do the Bike Thing” ride. “I’ve caught myself as a backseat passenger in a car saying, ‘Car left! Car back!’—like I’m on a ride. Once, I walked the Maryland Avenue bike lane up to Baltimore Bicycle Works. Not the sidewalk. In the bike lane. Didn’t even realize it.”

Pitts grew up in Brooklyn, New York. It shows, too, not just in the name of his organization, but his general City That Never Sleeps pace. He’s been biking just five years, but in fact, before launching “Do the Bike Thing,” he co-founded the Baltimore-based advocacy group Black People Ride Bikes in 2019. That was just a year after he got back on a bike for the first time since he was a teenager. Before all this, in 2010, Pitts, who works by day as a communications associate for the Baltimore County Register of Wills, founded Pit Fights Battle League, one of the longest ongoing hip-hop events in the city.

It was Pitts’ background running track, however, that led him to both Maryland and bicycling—albeit circuitously. After a scholarship to Norfolk State, he ran competitively in the Army before ending up at Fort Meade. His track experience later led to an informal coaching role, which convinced him (for better or worse) that he should start running competitively again, so he entered a national master’s race. A hamstring pull before the event persuaded the former sprinter to buy a bicycle to maintain his fitness while he recovered.

For Pitts, who bike-commutes from Seton Hill to his job in Towson, “bicycling meant freedom.” He began riding to Loch Raven Reservoir, Fort Armistead, and Washington, D.C., and all points in between. “It was the ability to be wherever I want in this city within an hour, and that’s just going 10 miles an hour.” He naturally gravitated to helping others do the same.

Biking also became an unexpected “social equalizer,” Pitts says. “I’ve been Black all my life and the one thing that has made non-Black people comfortable with me is being on a bike. No one has ever jumped from me when I pulled up on a bike. Never. For some reason the bike gives off a peaceful, non-threatening vibe. A bike can bring all kinds of people together, regardless of their nationality or background. I hang out with this gay couple that rides. Never in my life would I be hanging out with these beautiful people without this.”

Not that life off the bike is not ugly from time to time. A few days before the June bike ride to Bear Creek, Pitts stopped in on a break from work to buy pistachios at Towson Wines & Spirits. An everyday exchange—the owner ignored Pitts after he had patiently inquired about where to place his credit card—ended with the owner spewing a racial epithet and then doubling down on it.

Pitts, who recorded the episode on his phone, later organized a protest in front of the store, essentially shutting down the business for a day.

“Maybe he’s a grumpy old man having a bad day, but he says that [racial epithet] while he sees I have my phone out, recording,” Pitts says, “Then says, ‘Did you get that?’ He assumes he has power and so he can do this, which he knows is going hurt me, and I’m someone who has no power, and therefore he’ll suffer no consequences because he never has.”

Instead, the episode went viral on local social media and the subsequent protest with artists and activists from Pitts’ hip-hop community was covered by multiple news outlets. It also garnered support from neighboring businesses, who said they’d no longer patronize the store.

“Organizing the protest, it’s not stepping out of my box,” Pitts says. “I bring in other people, I lateral things off. It’s the same thing I do in the hip-hop world, it’s the same thing I’m doing in the biking community. I’m just trying to fill a void.”

“The first one that caught my eye, and I didn’t know it was the only African-American one in Baltimore, was Lenny’s House of Natural in Poppleton,” recalls Lashelle Bynum, flipping through her photography collection of fading “ghost signs” which adorn many older and often neglected buildings in the city.  “I knew that’s where Oprah got her hair done when she was here,” says the 63-year-old recently retired state administrative specialist.

Lenny Clay, owner of Lenny’s House of Natural, and once dubbed the “Mayor of Poppleton” by former Mayor Kurt Schmoke, also cropped the hair of Baltimore’s leading Black sports figures, preachers, and politicians, including former Bullets star Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, Rev. Vernon Dobson, and former Congressman Elijah Cummings.

“It was the nostalgia,” says Bynum of her instinct to shoot the building. “I thought it was fascinating. And then I interviewed Lenny about the history of the shop and found out that, actually, the sign was put up for a movie, The Meteor Man, they were shooting in the neighborhood. But that was the catalyst.”

Over the past 20 years, Bynum estimates she has found and photographed close to 200 local ghost signs. Or as she describes it, they’ve found her. Most of the mural-sized painted signs she’s shot—outside of a handful that were repainted as part of renovation projects, like the Cloud Mattress advertisement along I-83 or the BAGBY FURNITURE CO. lettering in Harbor East—are decades older than the retro advert outside the former location of Lenny’s.

According to Bynum’s research, five companies—Globe, Park, Chevery, Prichett, and Morgan—produced the bulk of the colorful and larger-than-life signs, which date back to Depression-era Baltimore. In fact, the most famous ghost sign in Baltimore is the faded, blocked-lettered VOTE AGAINST PROHIBITION at the intersection off South Broadway in that historical hotbed of hooch, Fells Point. Coincidentally, not far away, just up Central Avenue, one of the more visible ghost signs advertises the services of JOSEPH KAVANAGH CO. PRACTICAL COPPERSMITH, a family-run operation that began designing and building distilling equipment in 1866, and then turned to bootlegging during Prohibition.

Nicknamed “wall dogs” back in the day, the craftsmen who created the signs were skilled artists who worked from scaled drawings—not unlike today’s public artists—and whose biggest challenge was making sure the lettering appeared level even when the wall was not. Some would tote perforated paper outlines up the scaffolding with them, using chalk or powdered charcoal to create a series of dots that they could then connect with paint, which was mixed with linseed oil, varnish, and occasionally gasoline.

Generally, it took only a few hours to dry and, depending on exposure to the sun, some held up longer than others. Because of its high asbestos content, white paint tended to deteriorate more slowly. It also seems more noticeable after a rain, which is how the moniker “ghost” sign arose.

Although she has no formal training as a photographer, Bynum has been interested in the city’s urban landscape, architecture, and the visual arts as long as she can remember, going back to collaging as a young girl at her mother’s dining room table in Edmondson Village. In recent years, she’s exhibited her photographs of Baltimore’s fading signs at the Enoch Pratt Free Library downtown, the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, and the Arena Players theater.

Previously a volunteer and now a board member at Baltimore Heritage, she also presented to the Baltimore Architecture Foundation in March. The first photograph of a ghost sign that she sold was of the well-preserved vertical ad for K&L DRY GIN—tagline “BUY WITH CONFIDENCE”—near Hanover and West Ostend streets in South Baltimore.

The most vivid ghost sign in the city, however, is pictured with Bynum above, advertising both CUBANOLA 5¢ CIGARS and N. FAULSTICH CARRIAGE & WAGON BUILDER at East Fayette and Duncan streets. That sign had remained hidden for decades, and thus out of the sun, before it was rediscovered five years ago after a rusty section of metal siding fell off the vacant building. Over its various iterations, the building had served as the home of a carriage and wagon maker, a furniture warehouse, and, finally, a Pentecostal church.

“I don’t know why I am so fascinated with them exactly,” says Bynum, who hopes to pull her photographs and research into a coffee-table book. “It’s not something I can put into words, other than it gives me a feeling of a simpler time.”

She thinks about it some more and says she appreciates the moment of discovery of a ghost sign, a kind of merging of the past and present when time seems to momentarily stop. Today, she says, a lot of people drive everywhere or walk around “looking at their smart phones, barely noticing the world around them.”

“Bring it in, bring it in!” yells Daryl Fletcher, banging his stick against the boards inside the Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro rink at Patterson Park. “Look, we got the defense tightened up now,” the defenseman says, imploring his teammates between periods. “We gotta to keep it tight. We gotta keep it tight.”

This year marks the 20th season that the Baltimore Banners ice hockey program has been pulling together kids from the nearby neighborhood known as “Down Da Hill” to play an otherwise unfamiliar sport in East Baltimore. Fletcher, who now also plays football at Sussex County (N.J.) Community College, started playing ice hockey when he was seven. “Fourteen years,” he says later. “Most of my life.”

Their fourth annual match against the Baltimore Sentinels, a team of police, firefighters, and first responders, didn’t go as well as it did last year when the Banners won on a last-second goal and piled on each other like they’d won the Stanley Cup. They rallied several times but ultimately lost 6-4.

“I’m competitive,” Fletcher says. “Not going to lie. It was disappointing. But we never hung our heads. We never quit.”

A retired architect, 79-year-old Noel Acton started the program after helping a friend watch some local kids during a bowling party and then learning that several of the boys were headed to the rink the next day. Seeing their enthusiasm, he began shuttling a few back and forth, and eventually realized that a hockey team could become something more—a means of bonding amid the pain and potential dangers of East Baltimore.

Acton, who never played hockey himself—“I’m not very coordinated,” he says with a laugh—started the Tender Bridge nonprofit, which runs two teams, the teenage and young adult Banners, and the younger Junior Banners. In season, they practice or play twice a week. Off-season, it’s street or roller hockey and sometimes mountain biking and sailing, which was Acton’s sport.

“My wife, who has passed, and I never had kids and I just enjoy being with these guys so much,” Acton says. “When you get to see where they are living and their home situations, it’s nice to see them feeling better about themselves. We get them their own boat and they learn to sail a mile and half to Hart-Miller Island themselves.”

Acton and his coaches work with roughly 40 kids, keeping in close contact with the players year-round and year after year, building trust, affection, long-term relationships, and familial-like commitments to one another.

Last June, the NHL gave Acton its Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award. (A former Boston Bruin winger, O’Ree became the league’s first Black player in 1958, despite having lost vision in one eye after a puck struck him in the face. He’s served as the NHL’s Diversity Ambassador for the past 25 years and is in the Hockey Hall of Fame.)

“The NHL award was a surprise and the recognition helped with the fundraising,” says Action. “I do wish ‘Peanut’ and ‘Abe’ were here to see it.” In September 2021, the Banners lost two longtime players, Davon “Peanut” Barnes, 20, and Abraham “Abe” Ludd, 22, to gun violence in the 3000 block of East Monument Street—less than a mile from the rink where they played. One of the team’s best players, Barnes had been living with Acton before the shooting and had been driving Acton’s car the night he was shot. The players’ numbers, 14 and 7, respectively, have since been retired and hang above the rink.

One of the things that encourages Acton the most, he says, is watching older and former players assist the program’s younger players. Fletcher, for example, now helps coach the Junior Banners.

On a high-profile note, Carolina Panther tight end Ian Thomas and several of his teammates wore Banners jerseys to a game at M&T Bank Stadium last season as part of a fundraising effort. Thomas had joined shortly before his parents died, one year apart from one another. He later gave up hockey to focus on football, but he’s remained involved—and introduced two of his cousins, including the Banners’ standout goalkeeper, Naleli Danso, to the program. Danso’s father, Antoine Green, now serves as chairman of the Tender Bridge and an official scorekeeper on game day.

In fact, last year the Banners honored Danso, a transgender athlete, with the team’s first annual Courage Award. She’s been with the team since 2012.

“This year [after she’d begun transitioning], I brought in rainbow ‘pride’ tape for my goalie stick,” Danso says. “I didn’t know how I was going to be accepted, but then a couple of the guys asked for the tape and put it on their stick. One of them surprised me, too—like the last person on the team I thought would do that. Someone I figured was maybe anti-gay. In Baltimore, it’s not easy with the image you have to put out. I said, ‘You?’ He said, ‘Hey, I’m not doing it for me. I’m doing it to support you.’”

“I once heard Quincy Jones tell an interviewer when he had an idea, he got it down as fast he could,” architect Jerome Gray says, opening a palm-sized watercolor set across the street from The 501, a midcentury modern apartment building on the edge of Seton Hill. “If it was 3 a.m. and he needed the best bass player in LA, he’d bring him to the studio tired, drunk, hungover, whatever. Better if they were tired because they wouldn’t overthink anything. You’re just capturing the essence.”

With that, Gray counts The 501’s front-facing windows and dashes off the frame of the building in a few pencil strokes. He immediately begins adding color—the pale blue sky absorbed in the building’s white facade, the midday sun reflected in its glass, its rust-orange accents. He chats through the entire exercise, which lasts just minutes. Then he walks to the corner, takes in the new perspective, and does it again, this time without an outline, only watercolor.

In a previous iteration, The 501 was owned by The Hardest Working Man in Show Business and named the James Brown Motor Inn. Opened in 1964, it mostly served a white business crowd before Brown purchased it for $5,000,000 in 1970. An FBI raid and developing “reputation for rowdiness” at the inn’s nightclub soon forced Brown to sell.

As Gray notes on his popular Instagram feed, where he posts brief histories alongside his watercolors, The 501 was designed by Baltimorean David Harrison, who also did Dolfield Plaza and Brooklyn’s Patapsco Theatre, which today has been repurposed into a church.

Over ensuing lunch breaks, Gray returns to Seton Hill, capturing the former home of a candy company and a furniture store owned by a man who also operated an illegal saloon during Prohibition. Many of his subjects are familiar—Camden Yards, the city’s gothic cathedrals, the American Visionary Art Museum, and the Art Deco Senator Theatre (pictured above), designed by John Jacob Zink, who studied at the Maryland Institute and did the iconic Patterson Theater as well. Everything is fair game and the watercolors that get the most engagement are often the fading, occasionally vacant wonders most of us pass by without noticing, including the 1870-built Home of the Friendless building on Druid Hill Avenue.

Since 2016, Gray has posted 3,300 sketches. “I’d gone into business for myself and it wasn’t ‘going’ yet, and my wife told me I needed to get out of the house,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Didn’t you used to draw?’”

Most of his works depict Baltimore’s built environment, although there are sketches of D.C., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland—“a city with great architecture”—and Detroit, his hometown. Emulating an older brother who drew, Gray got good with a pencil at a young age and excelled in the architecture program at Detroit’s legendary Cass Technical High School, whose notable alumni include John DeLorean and Diana Ross.

“I was in a good-size class of Black kids, if you can imagine this in the 1970s and 1980s, who were put through the wringer,” he says. “My best friends were in the program, and we were all going be architects. Lo and behold, three of us became architects. The fourth one became an engineer.”

Completely unplanned, his watercolors garnered attention from local architects, historians, and preservationists and became a career boon, leading to exhibitions and commissions. Gray gave the keynote address for the 2019 Doors Open weekend sponsored by the American Institute of Architects-Baltimore and joined the Baltimore City Historical Society board. He now regularly presents on urban architecture and history.

Are there buildings he wants to get to? “Always,” he says, naming WEBB’s old radio studio, which James Brown also owned, in West Baltimore’s Fairmount neighborhood. He also wants to check out the views from Johnston Square on the east side.

“The one I want to do, but can’t, is the Mechanic Theatre, which was demolished. There are good reasons to knock down buildings, but there was no reason to demolish the Mechanic. It was designed by an important American modernist architect, John Johansen, whose work in other places is celebrated. The Mechanic was an amazing exercise in broken-form concrete. It was this complex, broad-shouldered, tough building that was honest to what it was—a concrete building. It was corrupted over its time, but it should’ve been loved. Instead, we still have a big hole in the middle of the city eight years later.”

(Gray warns not to get him started about McKeldin Fountain, another brutalist landmark demolished with support from the Downtown Partnership.)

“One of the significant things about modernism, which is about the only architecture movement people don’t seem to like, is brutalism,” Gray explains. “You may not like it, but it played with form and depth and shadow and light better than just about anything. I think what people like [in my sketches] is the color and the contrasts, but that’s the thing, the architect’s vision, I’m trying to communicate.”

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.”

“I started working when I was 15. Came from a poor family and quit school to help out,” says 71-year-old Walter Hardesty, by way of explaining why tonight is his last shift at the Midway, the one bar on this stretch—halfway, appropriately, between Commerce and Gay streets—without a stripper pole and stage. “My first job on The Block was washing dishes across the street at Crazy John’s. Then I became a line cook. Eventually I started tending bar. My knees just can’t take standing up all night anymore. By the time I leave [after cleaning up and counting the money], it’ll be 6 or 7 in the morning.”

Crazy John’s is still across the street, serving scrapple, eggs, burgers, and fries all night on the weekends. The iconic Midway, however, is being retired this late summer evening along with Hardesty, who became irreplaceable over his decades-long career here.

Dive bars may be nice places to visit, but working at one can take its toll. Owner Jim Brandt, whose mother, Vicki, tended bar at the Midway for 35 years, currently pulls the day shift. He says he’s had enough, too. “I’ve got my own health issues,” he shrugs. “I’m ready to sell it.”

Although there are no scantily clad dancers peeling their clothes for tips, the Midway is unequivocally a part of The Block’s culture. Ringing the entire establishment’s throwback wood paneling is its famous collection of 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s glamour shots, including young women from The Block’s burlesque heyday, the unmistakable Blaze Starr among them. Like most of The Block’s bars of that era, the Midway has a colorful, if checkered past. Not as bad as others, perhaps.

But go back to, say, the early and mid ’60s, and the Midway’s liquor license—along with since-departed red-light district bars like Club Tahiti, 704 Show Bar, and Mickey’s Mix-Up—was occasionally suspended for permitting solicitation. “For anyone to say that he was not aware of what was going on down there is hypocritical,” the liquor board chairman said of the bust. “Everyone knew what was going on.”

More common was Midway’s association with numbers running and what the newspapers used to call “the rackets.” In 1961, a grand jury approved subpoenas for the business records of 26 bars, including the Midway, among others on The Block. In 1977, the liquor board found an illegal lottery, run by a fellow named Benjamin “Big Nose Benny” Fooksman, operating out of the Midway.

Not that all the old stories are negative. Former Sun columnist Michael Olesker once recalled legendary Midway bouncer Joe Finazzo knocking out a bully who was harassing a couple of female patrons, not once but twice in the same night, each time with a single blow. A former prizefighter, Finazzo was a gentlemanly 71 at the time. Meanwhile, situated above the Midway all these years has been Tattoo Charlie’s. Opened in 1938 by Charles Geizer, it catered to inebriated sailors on leave and is believed to be one of the longest continuously operating tattoo parlors in the U.S.

It is remarkable that while politicians have been attempting to shut down The Block for decades, the Midway has remained, essentially its neighborhood bar. It’s the place where dancers, doormen, shift workers, servers, and bartenders, whose schedules were not 9-5, would come for cocktails and comradery.

Like The Block itself, it became a Baltimore institution simply by surviving. (In 1994, Gov. William Donald Schaefer authorized a massive Block raid, which resulted in more than 50 arrests, half of which were quickly dropped. The same year, Mayor Kurt Schmoke signed legislation designed to “clean up” The Block, expressing his hope it’d all be gone in 10 years. Earlier this year, state Sen. Bill Ferguson put forward a plan that would’ve established a 10 p.m. curfew for bars on The Block. Bar owners and others pushed back. It failed.)

None of that is on the minds of regulars at Hardesty’s send-off, however, which includes two people who actually have glamour shots up on the wall. One is “Mama” Jackie, one of the first Black women to dance on The Block in the 1970s and something of a mother figure to younger women who earn a living on The Block now.

The other is Hardesty himself, in stunning drag, also in a professional shot from the 1970s—which he takes down and holds up to the jaw-dropping amazement of the regulars on hand, who never would’ve guessed in a million years that the almost-50-year-old photo was anything other than that of another Block beauty.

“Let me tell you what makes this place special and what makes Walter, in particular, special,” Mama says, smiling and taking a seat across the bar from Hardesty after bringing a cake for the occasion. “Walter treats everyone with respect. He always has. That is all there is to it. When you’re here, you’re not judged by what you do, but by who you are. That’s the way it’s always been.”

Photojournalist and Baltimore contributor J.M. Giordano documented The Midway’s final nights of service at the end of July.

“The closing of the Midway is devastating to The Block,” Giordano says. “Dancers, ‘runners,’ house moms, dealers, and even other bartenders felt at home at the Midway between shifts. It was a safe place where dancers and sex workers looked after each other and where they could talk to Walt, the last bartender in the bar’s long history.

“For this series, I thought the only way to really capture the humanity of the place was to snap in black and white. I was reunited with my bestie, Ilford 3200 ISO film, which has been invaluable in all of my night work. The Midway was a place where if they didn’t know you, you didn’t take photos. I’m honored that I was allowed to take these, a visual eulogy for a place and time that will never be again.”

Below, Giordano captures the energy of the hallowed bar’s final hours.

Forty years ago, Muggsy Bogues, with his best friend Reggie Williams and the rest of the Dunbar High Poets, played the Camden High Panthers and the No. 1 player in the country, Billy Thompson. Dunbar was Baltimore renown, but in the pre-cable, pre-internet era, not nationally visible, and when the 5-foot-3 point guard took the floor, the packed New Jersey house heckled the diminutive playmaker. Even the opposing players got into it.

“When we took the court, they were laughing at me, saying, ‘Why is this little kid playing against us?’” Bogues recalls. “They called me the water boy. Coach [Bob] Wade pulled me in and said, ‘Little man, you okay?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘Coach, we’re about to have a party.’”

At one point, Bogues made steals on three straight possessions, sparking the Poets to a 29-point halftime lead and a blowout win. Afterward, he received a standing ovation and in the newspaper the next day, Camden’s coach called Bogues, who scored 15 points and whose quickness and aggressiveness had set the tempo at both ends of the floor, “phenomenal.”

“Kevin Walls [Camden’s other star] thought it was going to be an easy day for him. But that would just be the journey,” Bogues says. “People had their perception, but for me, it was always about not believing what was coming out of folks’ mouth and not taking it to heart. The dramatic experience that I went through early, getting shot when I was a kid, changed my mindset more than anything. My dad being incarcerated, too. Words were the least of my worries. I’d learned to be in control of how I felt about myself. No one else.”

That 1981-82 Dunbar team went undefeated and repeated the feat the next season. Incredibly, Bogues, Williams, and Reggie Lewis were all later drafted in the first round of the 1987 NBA Draft. Teammate David Wingate, a year ahead of those three, was already playing with Philadelphia, making it four from Dunbar’s ’81-’82 squad to reach “The League.”

In his new memoir, Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball, Bogues recounts how Wade forced his charges to hold bricks in their hands during calisthenics and defense drills, and that his nickname originated from pickup games in tough East Baltimore. It was bestowed for his ability to snatch the ball from opponents, a “mugging.” He didn’t appreciate it at first, given its connotation, but as a fan of the coincidentally named East Side Kids reruns on TV, he learned to embrace it.

“Their leader [played by the similarly small but scrappy Leo Gorcey] was named ‘Muggs.’ I liked that. A nickname means you’re someone in neighborhood and I wanted to be the leader of my guys, too.”

In his book, Bogues recalls the fun Charlotte squads of the mid-’90s. He also recalls starring in Space Jam with Michael Jordan, the current owner of Hornets, where the popular Bogues serves as a team ambassador. At 57, he says the memoir “is about relationships.”

Among those relationships are the bonds with his rec center mentors, his teammates at every step, including Lewis, the former Celtic star who died at 27 of a congenital heart disorder, and a close older brother, who struggled with addiction, as did his father. There is his first basketball rival, his older sister Sherron, who starred at Dunbar ahead of him, and his mother, both now deceased like his father—the book includes an entire chapter titled “Grief”—and his wife, Kim. The couple divorced and then, 10 years after separating, remarried in 2015.

They met during a Dunbar alumni game when Bogues was home on break from Wake Forest. Kim attended with a girlfriend who was dating one of his former teammates, but to this day, they have very different memories of their meeting. His wife claims she’d never heard of him and he still doesn’t believe her. She didn’t care that he was short, Bogues adds with a chuckle; she tells people she walked out on their first date because “my head was too big.”

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys. Painted wings and giants’ rings make way for other toys . . . Oh! Puff the magic dragon.

Sitting next to Zeke’s Coffee stand, the street musician known as Merdalf puts down his guitar as he finishes the Peter, Paul and Mary folk classic about the loss of childhood innocence and an ageless dragon. He reaches into his case and glances up toward a wide-eyed little boy and his mother, who is pushing a younger daughter in a stroller around the Waverly farmers’ market. “How about a balloon?” he asks with a grin, now reaching for a small hand pump. “Let me get you a balloon.”

The sun is smiling on the 69-year-old busker this morning, but the previous weekend, an unexpected spring snow had curtailed his typical three-to-four-hour set.

“I lasted two songs. My fingers couldn’t move,” he explains. “I’m here every Saturday no matter what, though. I play the JFX farmers’ market on Sundays, too, but this is year-round and it’s different, you know? It’s a neighborhood thing. You see the same folks every week. There are people here I’ve known go from single, to married, to having kids, to I’m performing for their kids. A few children, I’ve even taught how to play. Someone called me the Mayor of Waverly and sometimes I feel like that.”

The softhearted Mayor of Waverly’s all-ages playlist includes Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, and Beatles’ tunes like “Hey Jude,” “Yesterday,” and “With a Little Help From My Friends,” which he first heard growing up in rural England. “Easy songs,” he says. Others, he’s penned himself since he began coming to the popular market here about a dozen years ago.

Not that he was given the key to the city right away. At first, since he had no permit, the manager of the farmers’ market told him he could only play on the sidewalk. He hadn’t been performing long at that point, having just learned to play guitar when he was in his early 50s at a drug rehab for veterans. He’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the VA hospital at Perry Point years before and this wasn’t his first trip to rehab.

“My girlfriend had dumped me and she was not taking me back,” he recalls. “And a guy who is in rehab with me, he looks at me and says, ‘Take this guitar, man. You’re already writing poetry,’ and he showed me some chords. Then I wrote a song called, ‘All My Life.’”

Born in Baltimore, Steven Johnson spent most of his childhood overseas, where his serviceman father, with whom he had a very difficult relationship, was stationed. Moving back to Baltimore for his last year of high school in the early ’70s proved a culture shock, including experiencing racism unlike anything he’d gone through in England. He left school and joined the Navy, but was honorably discharged after 15 months when both parties agreed it was for the best. It was a challenging coming of age. (His stage name is a mashup of Merlin and Gandalf, reflecting his childhood fascination with King Arthur and alchemy, in his case, turning pain and sorrow into song.)

“These things stay with you, so I wrote a song called, ‘Heal Myself.’ I’m going to help myself so I can sleep at night. I’m going to heal myself. So love can come along. So many songs are cathartic and some of the songs are happy playful songs. Some songs I write are message songs.”

Since he began playing and performing, life has stabilized, he says. Years of therapy, meditation, and spiritual and philosophical readings have helped, too. A few years ago, he performed at the Creative Alliance’s Night of 1,000 Dylans—“All Along the Watchtower” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” remain two of his favorites to perform. He’s recorded a CD with a Baltimore producer and has been featured in a couple of local TV commercials. He also performs elsewhere from time to time, including along The Avenue in Hampden and York Road in Towson.

“To tell you the truth, if you had caught me 15 years ago and said then I was going to be playing guitar and making money at it—and I don’t do it for the money, that’s not important—I would have called you crazy. I had no thought that I was going to do this. No aspirations. I’ve just been following the thread since that day in rehab. You know what I mean? You follow the thread. You just keep following it.”

In the streets of Baltimore, it’s a familiar, if sometimes forgotten, sound: the gentle clang of bells and clump-clump-clump of hoofs beating the pavement.

Yeah, bananas, cantaloupes, and watermelons. Sweet potatoes and collard greens. Sweet apples and oranges.

Heard less frequently than in the past, the historic singsong of the city’s arabbers has never stopped ringing out. This spring and summer, however, the vendors’ mission to bring healthy fare to underserved communities became more urgent amid stay-at-home orders and fraught trips—often by bus in low-income neighborhoods—to the grocery store. It’s a mission that’s also expanded in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Free fruit, free vegetables, free masks,” arabber Todd “Greedy” Cornish calls out on a recent Wednesday afternoon as he, along with 22-year-old fellow arabber Shauna Chaney, leads a horse and colorful wooden cart onto West Lombard Street. “Got some information in there,” Cornish continues, handing out a bag of groceries, which also include cans of soup, bread, and other staples, to a couple of appreciative senior women. “Make sure you pass it on.”

In April, through a partnership between the Arabber Preservation Society and Food Rescue Baltimore, arabbers began passing out bags of free groceries in several of the city’s food deserts, occasionally offering bouquets of flowers as well, along with protective cloth masks and public-health handouts about the need for social distancing.

Long neglected in terms of public-health outreach and infrastructure, the majority Black neighborhoods that arabbers generally serve have been on the front lines of the ongoing COVID-19 battle. African Americans make up 31 percent of state residents, but account for nearly half of all coronavirus deaths in Maryland.

As the outbreak spread to Baltimore, the City Health Department posted educational fliers and warnings on their social media channels. But trying to dispel myths and rumors about the virus, and get accurate information into people’s hands, remains an issue.

“Some people have been taking it seriously, some not,” says Levar Mullens, a Safe Streets worker who also manages the stable. “It’s about educating people.”

“Arabbers are the perfect messenger. They’re one of the most trusted institutions in the Black community,” says Preservation Society vice-president Holden Warren, who has relief experience combatting Ebola in Liberia and initiated the coordination efforts. “Who better to give away food, give away masks? We’ve got gloves and Purell and some bleach to keep things clean on our end.”

The Carlton Street Stable, which dates back to the 1850s, is one of three remaining arabber stables in the city and believed to be the oldest continuously operating livery stable in the country.

Owned and run for decades by a man named Buddy Kratz, a generous Southwest Baltimore native, merchant, and horse trader, it was the home base for more than 40 wagons in its mid-20th-century heyday, when arabbers peddled ice, wood, coal, and produce to customers summoned by their street cries. Kratz’s interest in horses, and by necessity, wagons, led to a relationship with the Pennsylvania Amish, who continue to provide horses and repair the carts’ old-school wooden wheels to this day.

In March, the Maryland State Arts Council awarded the Arabber Preservation Society a Creativity Grant that will fund the digital restoration of a 1976, 16-mm film documentary on the arabbers for screening at the Parkway Theatre. The last of their kind in the U.S., even then Baltimore’s arabbers were both struggling for survival and viewed as a potential solution to the city’s ever-expanding food deserts. Those concerns, stark when the film was shot, stand out in greater relief today.

“What is Baltimore without the arabbers?” says Chaney, in between feeding, petting, and chatting up the dozen horses inside the stable, tucked between Pratt and Lombard streets, not far from Hollins Market. “We do this every day,” she continues later, referring to the care of the horses and yard full of chickens and goats, a bird coop, and stray cats. “This is a break from the stress of living in Baltimore. It’s a fun thing,” she says. “This is a loving experience.”

Our monthly news-and-events column “The Chatter” has been redesigned and rechristened “You Are Here” with bolder photos but the same local character and charm. For the first installment, senior editor Ron Cassie visited the Shot Tower, an arm-wrestling competition, and the annual Nun Run.

A Tall Tale

East Fayette Street
September 4, 2016

“Two towns formed to make Baltimore,” guide Marsha Wight Wise says as Baltimore Heritage’s tour of Jonestown—one of those towns—gets underway at the Baltimore Farmers’ Market. “Mr. David Jones, a Quaker, was the first settler in 1661 and built a mill. In 1745, Jonestown merged with Baltimore Town—then just a village near the Inner Harbor. But since it was named after Lord Baltimore and because royalty always gets its way,” Wise adds, “the Baltimore name won out.”

The tour, highlighting Jonestown’s often overlooked treasures, passes several of the city’s prominent examples of cast-iron-fronted buildings, including an old food emporium that’s been readapted into a 7-Eleven. It also visits St. Vincent de Paul, celebrating its 175th anniversary, and Zion Lutheran Church, whose congregation predates the Revolutionary War. The highlight, however, is the trip inside the iconic Shot Tower here—a Baltimore landmark since 1828. In fact, the 215-foot edifice and its estimated 1.1 million bricks remained the tallest structure in the U.S. for almost two decades.

Shot was made by pouring molten lead through a colander and dropping it straight down the open-air shaft. As the droplets fell, gravity spun the lead into spheres before they splashed into a water-filled barrel, where they cooled and solidified. Musket balls from the tower were likely used by Union soldiers during the Civil War, and were sold to local hunters until 1892 when new methods and the price of lead made the operation obsolete. Forty years ago, the tower—in one of the city’s first acts of preservation—opened to the public.

“The world’s only remaining working shot tower is in Riga, Latvia,” says Matt Hood, program assistant with Carroll Museums, which oversees Baltimore’s tower. “I don’t speak Russian, or Latvian, but basically what they told me was, ‘Shot still flies in the Third World.’ That, and they get the occasional call from a Saudi prince who wants to go hunting in Pakistan and doesn’t mind paying a 3,000-percent markup.”

Sisters in Arms

York Road
September 3, 2016

Beyond the Ferris wheel and funnel cake, there’s a compelling array of events on the outskirts of the Maryland State Fair’s midway. For example, a newborn calf is gently pulled from its mother’s womb at the appropriately named Cow Palace birthing center this afternoon. (“I’m not licking my baby,” a wary pregnant woman quips as the calf falls to the ground and its mother begins the natural cleaning process.) There’s also a variety of country-strong contests, including chain saw carving, mechanical bull riding—and the annual state arm-wrestling championships.

A variation of a game with hard to discern roots (some say Native-American; others say ancient Greece), “modern” arm wrestling gained popularity in barrooms before becoming a popular televised sport in the ’70s and ’80s. In fact, Steve Simons, the organizer of today’s tournament, quit his investment banking job to launch a professional circuit in the sport’s early years. “I’ve known a few of these guys for 30 years,” Simons says, gesturing toward the still buff, 63-year-old J.R. Hostler, a former horse trainer, who wins the men’s light-heavyweight division.

In the women’s open division, a pair of blond, solidly built sisters from Bel Air—Jessica Coleman, 33, and Christy Coleman, 32—meet for the second year in the finals. “I usually don’t tell people my secret, but I’ve been an auto mechanic for 13 years,” says Jessica, who outmuscles her younger sis. “Lifting heavy things, turning wrenches—that’s every day.” Christy, she adds with a smile, does body repair.

The sibling rivalry between the “Irish twins,” as the women describe themselves, makes for an entertaining match, but not Simons’ favorite pairing ever.

“The all-time dream finals was a Hell’s Angel versus a Methodist minister—our first year in the Deep South after taking the sport out of California,” recalls Simons. “The preacher won, too.”

Godspeed

North Charles Street
September 10, 2016

“Let’s do it again,” shouts fitness instructor Roxana Feenster, as ’80s new wave blares from the steps of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. She’s warming up 800 joggers and power walkers—including a goodly number of priests, seminarians, and Catholic sisters in full habit and running shoes—for this morning’s 5K and 1-mile fun walk.

“Easy to start,” Feenster shouts again. ‘Easy, easy. Four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”

The Oriole Bird and Archbishop William Lori are also on hand, pumping up participants for the third annual Nun Run, which supports Catonsville’s Little Sisters of the Poor and St. Martin’s Home, where the women serve seniors with limited resources.

Founded in Baltimore in 1869, Little Sisters—in the midst of a $25 million overhaul of St. Martin’s—provides 24/7 care, including skilled nursing. While the nuns haven’t specifically trained for the run, they all do quite a bit of walking on the campus grounds as part of their daily duties, Sister Lawrence Mary assures. And the long-sleeve habits are not as hot as they appear, she adds. “They’re white; they reflect the sun. And we’re used to them, of course.”

After completing her 1-mile power walk, Sister Cecilia Mary grabs a bottle of water and happily collapses into a chair beneath a shade tree. “This is the first time I’ve been able to do this,” she smiles. “I had a knee replacement last year.” She politely declines to give her age when asked—“Oh, we’re ageless,” she smiles—but mentions she recently celebrated 50 years with her order after growing up in Detroit.

“I’m a big baseball fan,” she adds, needling another participant wearing a bright orange O’s T-shirt. “You do know that the Tigers beat the Orioles last night, right?”

Time Out of Mind

East Lafayette Avenue
October 22, 2016

The metal letters nailed on the wooden door read simply: “HANS SCHULER—SCULPTOR.” “I’ve walked past it so many times and have always been curious about what’s inside,” says a visitor, ducking into the 110-year-old ivy-covered brick and sky-lit atelier.

“We get that a lot,” chuckles Francesca Schuler Guerin, the granddaughter of Hans Schuler, an Alsace-Lorraine immigrant known as Baltimore’s “monument maker” for his classical works across the city. An accomplished sculptor in her own right, Guerin is leading a rare tour of the Schuler School of Fine Arts, founded here in 1959 by her parents—Schuler’s son, also named Hans, and her mother, Ann Didusch Schuler.

Schuler’s works include five pieces in the Walters Art Museum collection, most notably a sculpture of Ariadne, the distraught daughter of the mythological Greek king Minos, which won him a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1901. His outdoor works include the renowned Meditation and Memory pieces at Green Mount Cemetery, the 18-foot statue of Martin Luther at Lake Montebello, and the giant relief of Gen. Casimir Pulaski at the entrance to Patterson Park.

At the moment, a half-dozen students—surrounded by original scale models of Schuler’s sculptures—are quietly painting and sculpting clay in the day-lit studio, as others practice the basic drawing techniques that serve as the foundation of the school’s traditional curriculum. Students here learn to grind their own pigments in the manner of the old masters. In fact, the school was started as a protest against the modernist movement sweeping the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art, where Hans and Ann taught and the elder Schuler served as director from 1925-1951.

Despite the changing times, the school survives, buoyed by a commitment to what Schuler once described as “pure art” that has remained steadfast through succeeding generations. “I read an art magazine story about how the practice of teaching ‘cast’ drawing [charcoal studies of plaster busts] has been recently ‘rediscovered,’” Guerin says. “We’ve always taught cast drawing. It’s not like somebody’s discovered the Incas or something.”

Homeward Bound

Greenmount Avenue
October 10, 2016

“I counted on the first 60 miles wearing her down, but it didn’t help,” laughs Erek Barron, a Prince George’s County state delegate, as he jogs into the Greenmount Avenue offices of Community Mediation Maryland behind a surprisingly fresh Lorig Charkoudian. “She can run.”

Charkoudian, co-founder of the nonprofit, which offers free mediation services to prison inmates, their families, and others, had just completed a two-day, 70-mile run from Hagerstown to Baltimore to raise awareness about the benefits of reentry services. She was joined by supporters along her trek—symbolic of the journey thousands make each year as they return from Hagerstown’s penitentiaries—and by Barron, a key legislator behind Maryland’s recent Justice Reinvestment Act, who ran the final 10 miles with her.

Charkoudian picked up a gaggle of runners as she reached the Baltimore Museum of Art and then was greeted by balloons and cheers as she led the way across 33rd Street. Later, glancing at a 10-foot map hung in the nonprofit’s hallway to chart her progress, she notes her southeastern route appears misleading. “It looks downhill, but I can assure you it wasn’t,” she says, running her finger toward the Appalachian Mountains.

Among those meeting Charkoudian were Barbara Doran and her daughter, Rita, who went through multiple family mediation sessions with Doran’s son, Ricky, who has been incarcerated for much of the past 13 years. “I didn’t know what we were going to do with him when he got out,” says Barbara, choking up. “We had lost trust.” Rita, 22, adds she grew up without her brother around. “Basically, we didn’t have a relationship.”

“The sessions were his idea. He learned about them [while incarcerated],” Barbara says. “They’ve made a big impact on all our lives. And my son isn’t even home yet.”

Visiting Hours

St. Paul Street
October 22, 2016

Charlie Murphy taps the brakes of his road bike as he heads down St. Paul Street, slowing to allow the three-dozen bicyclists trailing behind to keep pace during the blustery morning start of the Doors Open Baltimore Bike Tour. With more than 50 distinctive buildings accessible to the public today, the third annual Doors Open project—organized by the Baltimore Architecture Foundation and the Baltimore branch of the American Institute of Architects—offers a free opportunity to peak inside some of the most historic sites in the city.

Led by Murphy, a Bikemore board member, and Zach Chissel, founder of Two Wheel Tuesday—a weekly bike-to-work event—the ride includes stops such as the Arabber Preservation Society in Sandtown, the new Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum in Bolton Hill, the Eubie Blake Cultural Center on Howard Street, Open Works in Greenmount West, and Lovely Lane United Methodist Church on St. Paul Street, before wrapping up at the Peabody Heights Brewery situated at the former home of old Oriole Park in Waverly.

The oldest building on the cue sheet is the first—the Lovely Lane church, which broke ground in the late 1800s, almost a century after its original meeting house hosted the famous Christmas Conference that established the first Methodist denomination in the U.S. Designed with an oval sanctuary for better acoustics, the church still has its original organ and oak seats. But it is best known for its nearly 200-foot tower—with massive windows that are lit in the shape of a cross each evening—and in the dome above the pulpit, a heavenly fresco depicting the stars in their exact position on the night of the church’s dedication on Nov. 6, 1887.

“It’s a great place to preach, but if you’re boring, you’ll know right away,” says the Rev. Travis Knoll. “Everybody starts looking up.”

Mourning After

Lemmon Street
November 5, 2016

Inside the Hollins Market rowhouse once owned by James and Sarah Feeley, there’s a bottle of Jameson whiskey, playing cards, a pipe, and loose tobacco sitting on the table next to the door. Standing against the living room wall, there’s a Catholic priest in a black cassock—well, a mannequin in a priest’s cassock. And, laying on a wooden slab alongside the living room wall, there’s a smaller mannequin covered in lace, with rosary beads in hand, surrounded by candles and representing the Feeleys’ son, William, who died 12 days before St. Patrick’s Day in 1876.

“It wasn’t unusual for people to have 10 or 11 children and five that died,” says Cecilia Wright, an Irish wake expert, presenting this morning at the Feeleys’ restored home, which today serves as part of the Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum. “Several of the Feeleys’ children died.”

Later, there will be a tour of tucked-away St. Peter’s Cemetery in West Baltimore, the 22-acre resting place of many early Irish immigrants, including the ancestors of some of those in attendance today. (Philip Berrigan, a World War II veteran and priest who famously protested the Vietnam War, is one of the more well-known Irish Catholics buried at St. Peter’s.) But at the moment, Wright is explaining the traditions and superstitions of wakes brought by the Irish to the U.S. and Baltimore, where so many worked for the nearby B&O Railroad, as James Feeley did.

Someone had to sit with the body for three days, for example, literally on watch to see if the deceased “awakened,” which is how the term wake originated. Candles were placed at the head, feet, and sides of body, Wright notes, to ward off evil spirits. Windows were opened to allow the soul to depart for heaven and then closed to prevent the spirit from returning.

Not all Irish wakes were the same, however. The death of a child was a much more somber occasion than the passing of a beloved older relative who had lived a full life—one worth celebrating with three days of song, food, games, contests of strength, and serious drinking. “It wasn’t considered a good wake if at least one fight didn’t break out,” says Wright.

A few people at the small but packed museum recall the authentic Irish wakes of their own Baltimore neighborhoods, which admittedly seem somewhat surreal in hindsight. “I don’t remember any funeral homes in those days—the living room was the funeral parlor—and the body was carried straight to the cemetery,” says Jackie Waltemeyer. Her cousin, Thelma Graziano (whose parents were Irish), remembers that Irish families put funeral wreaths on their door when someone in the house died. “Even when I got married and moved into my own home, my Irish mother would never allow me to put even a Christmas wreath on the front door,” says Graziano, who grew up in Northeast Baltimore. “She hated seeing any kind of wreath on a door her whole life.”

Luke McCusker, director of the museum, heard tales of his family’s Irish wakes from his father.

“He still tells the story of playing and hiding beneath the sawhorses in the living room as a boy,” McCusker says with a wry smile, shaking his head. “While my great-grandmother was laying on a board above his head.”

All Hallow’s Eve

Linwood Avenue
October 29, 2016

On a warm Saturday night, exquisite, sombrero-clad Día de los Muertos skeletons on stilts are bouncing through a packed Patterson Park, leading a quarter-mile-long parade propelled by mariachi music up front and West Baltimore marching bands in the rear.

The 17th Great Halloween Lantern Parade & Festival, organized by the Creative Alliance, is a mashup of cultures this year. It’s both an American Halloween costume party and a Mexican Día de los Muertos, aka Day of the Dead, celebration.

The nearly all-day event in heavily Latino Southeast Baltimore began with Lantern and Day of the Dead altar-making workshops—including assistance from Artesans Mexicanas, an arts collective of local immigrant women—as well as hayrides and a kids’ costume contest. The parade, meanwhile, is a wild moving scene of glow-in-the-dark floats, monsters, music, Baltimore-area schoolchildren, and piñata bashing.

Also on hand: plenty of food trucks (one appropriately offering crab cake tacos), American and native-Mexican crafters, plus a beer garden.

Later, as the parade wraps up, the mariachi band Rey Azteca—two trumpets, two violins, and two guitars—takes to the outdoor stage, accompanied by brightly dressed Mexican folk dancers. After several numbers and shouts of, “Otro! Otro!” (“Another! Another!”), the band returns for an encore, performing “México Lindo y Querido,” a famous mariachi and ranchero ode to the old country.

In front of the stage sits a massive altar of marigolds, candles, fruit, bread, decorated skulls, and framed photographs of departed loved ones.

Día de los Muertos is really much different than Halloween, says Erika Torres, watching Rey Azteca perform with her godson and 77-year-old mother, an immigrant from a town outside of Mexico City who is wearing a traditional handmade dress for the occasion. “In Mexico, it lasts three days and it’s very spiritual,” Torres explains. “It’s a time to pray and talk with our family members who have passed, but remain alive in our hearts.”

Fells Point-based painter and sculptor Ignacio Herrera, like others here, describes Día de los Muertos as a religious mix of Aztec and Catholic influences and rituals. The holiday is not just a remembrance of lost loved ones, he says, but also that death is a part of life and God is close at hand.

“The Aztecs used to play games and fight to death,” Herrera says. “It was believed that the real winners were those who died because they got to go be with God.”