Not a single murder this week.
                                                                              That’s not the Baltimore I know and love.
                                                                               —Det. Meldrick Lewis, Homicide: Life on the Street

I’LL BE HONEST FROM THE OUTSET: I HATED BALTIMORE. I hated Baltimore the day my family and I moved to the city, and I learned to hate it a little bit more each passing day. Charm City. Right. I read once where that name for Baltimore supposedly originated. I don’t recall now, and I really don’t care. I found little that was charming in the city. Like I said, I hated the city the day we arrived and I hated the city the day we left.

There may be some good points about the city but what good points there are, are drowned by the bad points. I tried. I honestly did. We moved out of Washington because the crime rate had simply gotten out of hand after the crack epidemic hit the city and because rents were far lower in Baltimore. I had started a new job. Several of the people with whom I worked lived in Baltimore and so brought the Baltimore Sun with them to read. When I first looked at the rental section of the paper, I thought the prices must have been a misprint. They were not. So, we moved. I liked living in Washington, but sometimes you just have to yield to the logic of the situation and moving to Baltimore with its lower housing costs and away from the street violence that was running rampant in Washington just seemed the logical thing to do.

I tried. I really tried. I thought that there must be some great hidden urban treasure or bit of charm that was just lying in wait to be discovered. We took trips to the Inner Harbor, joined the Science Museum, took an active interest in the schools our children were attending, took classes at the city’s community college, found a church, found another church, I volunteered with a child advocacy group, signed my son up for baseball, tried to make the city feel like home. We visited Fort McHenry and my kids loved to run through the grass and feel the spray from the harbor and watch the ocean-going ships.

So what happened? We moved out of the District of Columbia to escape the crime and violence that accompanied the incredible infusion of crack cocaine into the city. Right. You can run, but you can’t hide. The drugs moved in right next door after not even a year.

The schools were impossible. Imagine the worst movie about an inner city school you’ve ever seen then make it ten times worse. That was my daughter’s third grade class the day I visited. The teacher tried. No one listened. Most of the kids were talking amongst themselves or just getting up and wandering about. One boy started out the door. I stopped him; he looked at me like I was the crazy one. I was so depressed when the class left to go to lunch that all I could do was sit there and stare out the window.

Then there’s that blasted slogan: The City that Reads! Right. The city that has the highest illiteracy rate of any metropolitan area in the United States and they decide to attack that statistic by adopting a slogan. Baltimore: The City that Reads. It was everywhere: on city stationary, on TV ads, in the schools, on billboards, on buses, on bus benches, on park benches, on library material. Right. No programs to teach people to read, but that slogan was everywhere from 1987 on. Baltimore, the City that Reads, except after five and on the weekends. The city was hurting for money so it started closing the public libraries after five and weekends. When’s the time anyone working or going to school might be able to go to the library? Why, late afternoon and on weekends. Right, the city that reads except then.

More like the city that breeds, with the highest teenaged pregnancy rate in the country, and the city that bleeds, with the steady increase in homicides.

Shopping downtown was impossible. Even ignoring the traffic, salespeople were just plain rude. No smiles. No, can I help you? No, thank you. Just rude. My wife and I refused to shop downtown after a few experiences like that.

My wife and I attended the city’s community college. The city finally decided it no longer had the money to operate the school so the state assumed that responsibility. My wife and I each received a letter from some state official explaining the transition and pledging that the school would become more efficient and more cost effective. Right. The letter, on a standard-sized 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, was folded once over and stuck into a large manila envelope for mailing. Not only did the school pay the extra postage for an oversized envelope, but it also couldn’t take advantage of bulk mail rates that would have been available had the letters gone out in standard envelopes. We got two of these letters at our house, one addressed to me and one to my wife.

Some good things happened. The people that moved in next to us (on the other side from where the drug dealers would eventually move) had a son the same age as our son. Our sons became inseparable, more like brothers than friends. My wife found a job that she liked out in Ellicott City. We got this really weird cat from some lady in Columbia. I volunteered in the library of my oldest daughter’s middle school. The school was a shambles, not physically, but because the teachers, try as they might, just could not maintain order conducive to teaching. The librarian was a marvelous woman, nearing retirement, who gave me meaningful things to do those few hours a week I was there, and who explained all the little things going on at the school, and who made sure that I was able to leave the library and go watch the band play whenever my oldest daughter was playing her clarinet. I celebrated my 36th birthday.
 

THE FAMILY	MY 36TH B-DAY

By the late spring of 1992, we had had enough. The open air drug market that had been a little over a mile away was right out on the corner across from our house that warm spring night in early June when we packed up the rented truck and prepared to head south and back to Florida from hence we’d come in the mid- 1980s. Even then, it seemed like the city was harassing us, not willing to let us escape its clutches. First, as we made our way down I-95 toward Washington, my wife realized that she had left her purse in the house while making the last walk through to ascertain that nothing had been left behind. An hour’s delay while that was rectified. Finally back on the road, we were still southbound on I-95 a short ways north of Richmond when the rented truck developed a flat tire. We had to wait for the rental company to get a technician to us. That was an hour’s delay, but at least we didn’t have to unload the back of the truck to get the tire replaced.

I’ve been back to Baltimore twice since leaving there in 1992, both times on our way to visit my wife’s family in New York. We made short visits, the first time to drive through the old neighborhood and the second time to visit the train museum on Pratt Street. It’s a nice museum. I don’t think the visit was worth what they charged, but I brought back a nice coffee cup for my collection.

I was a fan of Homicide: Life on the Street, however. NBC cancelled the show last season after airing it since 1993. What can you expect? After all, these are the same people who cancelled Star Trek. There’s no reasoning with people like that. I wrote a little remembrance of the show.
 
 

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