Shirtless, Powell cartwheels across the finish line.
“He’s been training for three months, in heels, on a treadmill,” Cruz says, begrudgingly, as Powell, a choreographer who ran high school track, gathers his awards.
The winner nods affirmatively, appearing slightly embarrassed.
“With ankle weights,” Cruz adds.
Nearby, Stanley, who takes a very respectable fourth, remains out of breath. “I’m going to be 43 years old,” he says. “I’m ready for a drink for Crissakes.”
Patterson Park
North Linwood Avenue
June 10, 2013
31. Water Cure
Two-dozen curious environmentalists, taking a bike tour of something described as the Harris Creek Watershed, stop pedaling, and pull up in front of the Patterson Park branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Their tires come to a rest over several large, metal stormwater grates.
They’ve already visited the Real Food Farm on the grounds of Lake Clifton High School, where they were told the watershed’s headwaters begin. They’ve stopped and perused Duncan Street’s Miracle Farm, built on a vacant block in East Baltimore. They’ve ridden south past the Baltimore Recycling Center, Collington Square Park, the Reggie Lewis Memorial Basketball Courts, and bustling but trash-strewn Frank C. Bocek Park.
However, there’s been no sign—visible or otherwise—of Harris Creek.
Not until a whiff of putrid air emanating from the aforementioned storm grates smacks Joy Goodie, atop her bike, square in the nostrils. “Oh, it smells bad,” blurts Goodie, turning her head just before the stench hits everyone else, including her husband and two kids. “It’s repugnant.”
“That’s Harris Creek,” deadpans Leanna Wetmore, program coordinator with Banner Neighborhoods and a tour volunteer with organizer Ben Peterson. Wetmore notes the creek now runs entirely beneath the city, long ago co-opted into the massive underground storm-water system. “The water’s visible if you look down there,” Wetmore adds as a few brave souls take a peek. “When there’s a really big storm, the drains back up and flood this whole area. It can move cars parked here.”
Hard to imagine today, but Maryland Historical Society paintings from the late 1800s actually show boats sailing on the creek through Patterson Park to Canton and the harbor.
Peterson explains to the group—still slightly stunned by the odorous discovery of Harris Creek—that the city’s century-old sewage pipes (some made of wood) run parallel to equally antiquated stormwater pipes. When the outdated sewage lines inevitably bust, raw waste flows into the stormwater lines, entering the harbor untreated. And when thundershowers just as inevitably overwhelm the stormwater system, trash and chemical pollutants from streets, rooftops, and pavement get whisked downstream.
Of course, it’s not just buried Harris Creek that is regularly debased, but the Jones Falls, Gwynns Falls, Middle Branch and Patapsco River, among other harbor tributaries. At the tour’s end, where Harris Creek empties into the harbor, not far from Canton’s Waterfront Park, where residents in days long gone swam and crabbed and local clergy dunked their flock in full-immersion baptisms, frustrated activist Raymond Bahr calls healing the harbor, “mission impossible.”
By coincidence, the morning following the Harris Creek bike tour, the Waterfront Partnership releases the most comprehensive report ever on the harbor’s water quality. The grade: C-. Those who compiled the report, however, admit the harbor was scored on a large curve. The C- indicated that the harbor’s overall water quality was acceptable only 40 percent of the time; a score of 50 would’ve been considered a mid-range “C,” indicating that water quality met acceptable standards on half of the days.
“As it was, in our system, the grade was just percentage points above a D+,” says Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper Tina Meyers, who assisted in compiling the report card. “If you used high-school grades, it would be F’s all the way from zero to 60 percent.”
Middle East
North Collington Avenue
June 22, 2013
32. Pilgrimage
Folklorist Elaine Eff struggles momentarily with the karaoke machine that’s serving as her microphone and speaker. The bus tour she’s leading, the Painted Screen Pilgrimage, is sold out. She passes out maps.
“We’re are in the heart of Highlandtown,” she says, “going to the Lourdes of Painted Screens.”
Heading down Eastern Avenue, Effs points to examples in several rowhouse windows and screen doors—including a glorious image of Patterson Park’s pagoda, drawing “oohs and aahs” from inside the bus. She provides brief neighborhood histories as well, ultimately reaching the birthplace of the painted screen: East Baltimore’s St. Wenceslaus community.
Here, across from the Italianate church, in a neighborhood once known as Little Bohemia, Czech immigrant and butcher William Oktavec painted the first screen window, 100 years ago, advertising his produce and meats. A few door away, mother and homemaker Emma Schott saw Oktavec’s handiwork and a light bulb went off.
“You mean, my husband can sit inside in his underwear, drink a beer, read the newspaper, and no one walking by can see him?” Eff says, mock-imitating Schott. Eff is highlighting, of course, the sidewalk proximity of rowhouse living rooms and the practicality of the screen art before air conditioning.
Oktavec painted Schott a red mill alongside a stream, and soon enough, everyone on the block wanted a painted screen.
The tour also weaves past the former McElderry Park rowhome of Johnny Eck, a legendary “half-man” circus and sideshow performer who became an Oktavec screen painting protégé; then Canton, where a number of original screen paintings remain.
“There’s one my great uncle did,” says Troy Richardson, along for the ride, pointing to a lighthouse image in a window. Richardson’s grandfather Ted and great uncle Ben both became screen painters in the folk art’s 1940s and 1950s Formstone heyday.
Earlier, the Creative Alliance showed Eff’s 30-minute documentary, The Screen Painters. In the film, William Oktavek Jr., whose brother, Richard, and nephew, John, carried on the family tradition and whose works are part of a revival in Highlandtown, talks about his butcher-turned-artist dad and the rowhouse folk art medium he launched.
“What I like about it, is what I like about Baltimore,” Oktavec says. “It’s like Babe Ruth and baseball—that things like this can exist here and endure.”
Downtown
West Pratt Street
July 1, 2013
33. Setting Precedent
In the garage beneath the downtown law offices of Shapiro Sher Guinot & Sandler, Larry Gibson lifts a piece of luggage loaded with hardcover copies of his award-winning book, Young Thurgood, from his trunk. He intends to wheel the heavy bag up Charles Street to the city courthouse for a book signing with local bar association members. But first, the 71-year-old Gibson chats with a parking attendant, who wants the attorney to present his book to his church.
“I’m saving the last day in June for you,” says Gibson, nodding. “Let’s get it confirmed. The calendar’s filling up.”
By his count, Gibson has done 44 signings since the book’s release last December. Walking north past the Hotel Monaco, he stops and notes that this is the old headquarters of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—the company name still engraved over the archway—for which the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and his father once worked as dining-car waiters.
Weaving through traffic, Gibson, without hint of resentment, recalls his own experiences