I was grateful there was coffee, and that the corporate buses were well-heated. A retired local steelworker named Lawrence Knachel was also on board, staring out a window. Knowing the whole place was being sold off and shuttered for good, he told me that he couldn’t stay away. “I came here in 1962, right out of Kenwood High School, into an apprentice program,” he said. “We had 27 softball teams. Shipping side used to play the steel side after work.”
Later, inside a drafty repair shop, another former steelworker, who labored inside the hot tin mill for 39 years, manned a security post, earning a few last, non-union wages before the place was completely barren. A Midwestern manufacturing rep asked him what had caused the plant’s closure. The ex-steelworker gave the question some thought and shook his head inside a yellow hard hat. “Everyone has a different reason,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you, though, the other day I got home, and my wife was crying: ‘My grandfather worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘My dad worked there all those years, you worked there all those years, and now you’re [there] shutting it all down.’”
I can’t speak for anyone else, but there was nowhere on the Earth I’d have rather been that morning.
Same thing when I grabbed a stool at the counter for the last shift at the Bel-Loc Diner in Parkville, whose regular customers over the years had included Colts and Orioles legends like Johnny Unitas and Luis Aparicio. “We’re like a lot of the waitresses,” said one longtime patron, sharing a booth and final breakfast with his wife and sister-and-in-law, both of whom grew up down the street from the Bel-Loc. “We don’t know where we are going to go now.”
I felt that way when I ventured to the legendary East Baltimore basketball court known as The Dome to catch a summer high school tournament. The annual event had recently been renamed after a promising 6-foot-8 forward John Crowder, who should’ve been playing, but had been fatally shot three years earlier. One of his childhood friends won the tourney MVP. And I felt that way, too—nowhere on Earth I’d rather have been—when I met a real-life Rosie the Riveter who’d moved up from a North Carolina farm at 19 to make planes for the war and then never left Baltimore. And when I rode along with a 50-something-year-old cyclist who delivered Meals on Wheels lunches and dinners by bike, and the time I hung out for an afternoon with Vander Pearson, the decades-long owner of Pearson’s Florist at the corner of North Charles Street and North Avenue, which earned its 15 minutes of fame on The Wire. (Baltimore native, former rowhouse neighbor, and CityLit founder Gregg Wilhelm described my pursuits here as a kind of “narrative archeology” and I like that concept.)
On and on. For a decade now, I’ve observed this city, its past and present, up close. From the inside out. It’s been my beat, and my not-so-secret-indulgence. As I’ve continued, somehow I still find these stories, or they find me, every few weeks. I’m often burned out, overwhelmed with deadlines, teaching, and my own life, and then someone shares the ordinary, yet intimate details of their life, and my internal pilot light flickers on again. Suddenly, there comes the need to understand their story more fully, deeply, and then synthesize and translate it for others. For me, too. And maybe them. In the process, each time, I learn more about this city, which I call my spiritual home, myself, and my life as well. How do you express gratitude for people who open up themselves and their lives to you like that? (For the record, I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, next door to the original Bethlehem Steel mill, and coming to Baltimore in my early 20s there was an immediate sense I belonged here.)
In this collection are short, personal encounters with the likes of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, and Hall-of-Fame pitcher Jim Palmer. My favorite vignettes, however, take place around people and places few have probably never heard of, like the graffiti artist Nether working on a desolate street like North Bruce in West Baltimore; city native James Reid, who created the statue of Billie Holiday in Upton, and Marvin Thorpe II, who, along with his father, since deceased, taught an estimated 15,000 kids, nearly all black (and therefore six times more likely to drown), to swim at their backyard pool in Windsor Mill.
Each story was published in some form over a 10-year period in Baltimore magazine. Some have been expanded. Others were culled from longer stories. Many have been reworked and updated. Nearly all are told in a real time, fly-on-the-wall reporting style. None are tied to any kind of breaking news. None of the stories were assigned to me. All began with feeling that there might be something fun or unexpected—or simply someone interesting—where I was headed. These adventures, and that’s what they usually felt like, were my chances to explore the cracks and crannies of Baltimore and the people who live here and have lived here.
Most of the stories began as part of a regular monthly series I took over when I came to Baltimore magazine after Urbanite folded. At the time, there was a section in Baltimore magazine called The Chatter, which generally included a couple of short pieces each month, largely built around popular happenings in the city—the opening of a casino or a celebrity appearance. I saw The Chatter as an opportunity to go a bit off the grid. Spend time with a pigeon racer from Linthicum, for example. A taxidermist, a sign painter, and the squeegee kids. And sure, every once in a while, an Elvis impersonator, former Pimlico jockey, ex-Playboy bunny, and Miss Hon contestant. Along the way I got to see “the Duchess” in action—Hoehn Bakery’s 1927-built brick-oven hearth—watch a group of black girls from Baltimore meet Michelle Obama, witness the Orioles play a game before an empty stadium, march 10 miles with anti-violence protestors from one end of North Avenue to the other, and run 26.2 miles around the city as part of the Baltimore Marathon.
Together, these vignettes became something akin to a jigsaw puzzle, each new piece making the picture of Baltimore and us inhabitants—a little clearer and a little more complex at the same time. They are about the intrinsic character of the city, its sense of place, and the meaning people give to it.
After about five years in the original Chatter format, I’d begun to feel like it was time to break out into something new. Initially, we added a photo and an extra column. Later, we changed the format to its current form—from three very short vignettes to a single, longer piece, which allowed me to go deeper into stories. We also moved it to the back page of the magazine. We changed the name, too, from The Chatter to You Are Here, a nod to the in-the-moment feel of these vignettes.
To me, these stories are more akin to micro-nonfiction than anything in traditional journalism. Although, unlike micro-nonfiction, these are not memoirs or essays but simply short stories about other people’s lives, people deeply connected to this city like I am.
My friend and former Baltimore Sun reporter and author Rafael Alvarez once said, “No matter what they put up in this town, it was built upon something that makes for a better story: Burke’s beneath the chicken fat of a Royal Farms at Light and Lombard; orthodox synagogues and the bones of organ grinder monkeys beneath the new restaurants of Little Italy, heavy metals in the soil beneath Harbor East.”
Mary Rizzo, an American Studies Ph.D. and past co-editor of The Public Historian journal, once told me that while every city claims to be a “city of neighborhoods,” Baltimore actually is. Partly, that’s because it remains a largely an insular place, and out of such insular places come eccentric characters, Billie Holiday and William Donald Schaeffer to name two, and particular culture obsessions, such as duckpin bowling, painted screens, and roller skating at the Shake & Bake recreation center.
If nothing else, I think this decade’s worth collection proves both Alvarez’s and Rizzo’s words ring as true as ever.
“[A single story] makes recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different, rather than how we are similar...