April 9, 2004
Baltimore's Upper Fells Point: Worst of all worlds
When living in a generally poor Northeastern city such as this, one might reasonably expect to have one of two possible constellations of problems in your neighborhood.
Maybe you're in a rough area, with drug dealers on the corner, pit bulls owning the park, and so many car break-ins that you just leave a taped shopping bag in the window to avoid your third call to the insurance company in a few months.
(Not just our sedan, but many others in the neighborhood wear paper-bag windows, and sometimes my walks take place through a sea of shattered, celadon-green safety glass.)
Or you might be a bit luckier and live in a Yuppified district, where higher home values have driven out the hookers and hillbillies (who actually can be far more intriguing individuals). But in this case parking becomes impossible, with each 15-foot-wide rowhouse needing spaces for two SUVs. Your once private roof deck is ringed by others, with satellite dishes set up exactly to block your water view and chimes hung by those who have never read letters to "Dear Abby" by neighbors driven insane by those who crave quiet.
In an improving neighborhood, some rowhouses become home to three or four twenty-something girls and their rotating boyfriends, chewing up most of the block's parking spaces, and oblivious to how their drunken revelry at 2 a.m. Sunday morning travels undiminished into your rowhouse bedroom.
Welcome to Upper Fells Point, Baltimore's eastside neighborhood with the worst of both worlds.
The neighborhood that first enthralled me when I arrived in Baltimore in January 1987 seems quite tarnished now. Despite constant rehabbing in these parts, and the more than doubling of our house value, life often feels crowded and mean.
The drug corner
Walking our two shelties the two blocks to the nearest park crystalizes the problem. The walk has turned into a virtual gauntlet. A drug gang arrives each evening at the corner store at Ann and Pratt streets, slinging bicycles over the entry steps and loitering with pit bulls under the benevolent eye of the Sri Lankan shopkeepers.
DeWitt, Erika and their crew of dealers arrived exactly two years ago. We had a flurry of calling the police on them, but I think everyone eventually realized that the shopkeepers want their trade and are the crux of the problem. And the more we called police, the more the kids' most hard-core friends arrived to make trouble.
I know one neighbor who just left Ann Street because of the constant "transients" the store attracts and is much happier on her quiet street in Canton.
If I steer clear of that corner, I must cross one-way Pratt street outside of a crosswalk and in the blind spot of turning drivers.
Dog poop
One block up Ann Street, an unleashed dog with Yuppie owners (new) on the north side of the street charged us on Wednesday night. The south side has long has Jake, another frequently unleashed dog. We can now walk in the street I suppose, or take Regester Street, strewn with broken glass.
I pick up after my dogs once at the park, stepping carefully around giant piles of turds left by apparently 95 percent of the other dog owners. For this trouble, I was visited today by Animal Control, with a complaint that I (!) don't pick up after my dogs. I showed the officer my stack of plastic bags sitting right beside the front door and demanded to know who reported that I didn't pick up after my dogs.
Oh ... the complaint is anonymous. Hmmm, do you think it could possibly be a drug dealer, or one of their sympathizers?
The drug kids operate with complete impunity, and their cohorts work the system to load petty irritants on the taxpayer.
The neighborhood is now packed with unleashed dogs (and snapping leashed pit bulls) making every walk tense.
Rehabbers
Adding insult to the injury of petty and/or criminal neighbors are the rehabbers, including the flaming jackass who did the property next door and rammed a new roof deck against our chimney with no gap whatsoever. The inspector made him cover the side of the (flammable wooden) deck with a sheet of metal. So much for our water view. How the new neighbors are supposed to stain and waterproof their wood, jammed against our brick wall, is a mystery.
Our rehabbers, including out-of-town dilettantes who read somewhere that property investment was the next big thing after the dot.com collapse, take up parking spaces with their waste containers, spray acid everywhere when they clean brick, and make our neighborhoods filthy, dirty, gravelly messes. Supposedly this should eventually improve Fells Point, but it is a painful process when you have so much substandard housing stock that rehabbing looks like a 30-year permanent condition.
Some of our neighbors point to our increasing property values. What happens when you simply decide you don't like where you live very much any more?
Yuppies
I moved to Baltimore with a mind to exploring it like a foreign country, and was amazed by my early encounters with neighbors including Crazie Margie, Crazy Bob (you can see a certain nickname pattern developing ...), Cissy the porch-sitter with the foghorn voice, her nefarious and delinquent grandsons Karl and Bonzo, and Melvin with his safety pin holding his coat together and his "I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up" ballcap.
Now, our neighbors are people from ... Montgomery County, Maryland, where I'm from. Nothing against that, except that one redeeming feature of being in a discordant area is a few laughs from the colorful characters. Now all these characters have moved, to Pennsylvania and Ohio, no doubt after careful investigation into various Social Service entitlements.
Let me distinguish between yuppies, who are big into catalogs of home furnishings, and homesteaders, also young professionals but with a certain toughness and realism about real life in the city. I would put my neighbors Blaire and Linda into the homesteaders category.
What's left for us homesteaders? A yuppie suburb, with more crime!
- posted by jbelliveau at 4:53 PM in The Neighborhood
