MY PARENTS MOVED to Baltimore from the Bronx before I was born. I learned to talk from them. Their kind of talk marked me indelibly as a foreigner in Baltimore, where the local accent was practically a whole different language. This and my family connections in New York prevented me from becoming fully Baltimorean.
At age 20, I left for Chicago, where I soon began to have repeated dreams about various Baltimore street intersections. Much later, I learned what the dreams may have meant. Urban geographer Robert Sack writes that the sense of place usually lies below the level of conscious thought so long as you occupy your place. By remaining subconscious, it serves a practical purpose. Place-bound inhabitants can concentrate more fully on going about their business because they need not think much about where they are while going about. Sack adds, however, that the sense of place rises into consciousness once you leave your place or lose it.1 That, apparently, is why my dreams of Baltimore emerged when I reached Chicago. I had discovered my sense of place.
The sense of place, of course, is not just a dream. Students of placehood frequently describe it as “the personality of a location,”2 and the connection between place and personality has deep roots. Just over a century ago, Edward Hungerford published The Personality of American Cities.3 Hungerford spent most of his career riding and writing about railroads (including a two-volume history of the Baltimore & Ohio). His travels from town to town may have sharpened his perception of intercity differences, from which he composed distinct urban personalities. Hungerford never explained what it meant for cities to have personalities, but he was convinced that they did. The conviction persists among people who fill out online questionnaires to find the city whose personality best matches their own.4
Urban sociologists have attempted to identify the mechanisms by which cities acquire and maintain distinctive characters or traditions—approximations of Hungerford’s urban personalities. Stated simply, they suggest that the past constrains the present. Past events and decisions foreclose some avenues of development and send cities down progressively narrower channels toward their current circumstances.5
History, in other words, endows places with personalities. Human geographer Yi-fu Tuan maintains that the ownership of a particular history distinguishes meaningful place from featureless space. Space, writes Tuan, is “that which allows movement.” Place emerges when movement is suspended and we come to rest: “place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.”6 Pause allows for the passage of time, and inhabiting a space over time endows it with a history, which transforms mere space or location into a distinctive place. A philosopher, Edward S. Casey, offers a different formulation. Our consciousness of place, he argues, precedes our awareness of space, and we experience a place not as a pause in movement but precisely by moving around in it. Our purposive movements carry us through a succession of places that leave their impressions on us even as we invest them with meaning and memory. This is approximately how we experience a city—as a connected succession of places. In Casey’s rendition, “places gather.” They “gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts.”7
Still, for Casey and Tuan, the particularity of place remains peculiarly abstract. They are not unusual. Theorists of urbanism discuss the particularity of place without concentrating on any place in particular. The sense of place is essential to our experience of cities, but its particularity is an inconvenient distraction for any enterprise that seeks theoretical generalizations about cities or explanations of urban life at large. Recent movements in urban history, sociology, and political science have all tended to marginalize placehood.8
The particularity of local politics is all but dismissed. Restrictions imposed by state and federal governments constrain cities from above, as do the requirements that come with intergovernmental grants-in-aid. Variability among cities is further limited by their competition with one another for corporate and individual taxpayers, jobs, and capital investment. Significant deviations in tax rates, subsidies, and policies tend to diminish as cities jockey with one another to offer inducements to current and prospective residents that can match those available in other towns.9
In spite of these constraints on the variability of urban politics, it was the political particularities of Baltimore that became compelling for me after I woke from my dreams of its intersections and found myself in Chicago. Chicago showed that what I had barely noticed or understood about Baltimore was distinctive and meaningful. Racial struggle was harsh and aggressive in Chicago, but strangely subdued in Baltimore, even though African Americans made up a much larger portion of its population. As an undergraduate in Baltimore, I had written a research paper on neighborhood Democratic clubs. When I tried to do the same in Chicago, I was asked whether I had been cleared by city hall.
It was then—almost 50 years ago—that I began to collect material for this book about the political history of Baltimore, though at the time I had no idea that there would ever be a book. Local politics seemed especially expressive of the particularity of place. Political institutions provide an arena of engagement for the entire population of a town, and virtually every aspect of place and population is a potential candidate for the local political agenda—class, race, ethnicity, religion, recreation, location, water, fire, air, and garbage. While politics helps to define place, place is also essential to politics. It is the common ground for collective deliberation and cooperation, the “foundation for public life.”10
My awareness of Baltimore’s particularity advanced when I left Chicago to spend a year just across the Charles River from Boston, and then a year in Washington, DC. Once I returned to Baltimore, I noticed that local conversations frequently turned toward the puzzling hold that the town seemed to exercise over its residents—people like me. Still later, I looked for explicit indicators of Baltimore’s distinctive status. Wikipedia, for example, provides a list of neighborhoods for almost every major city in the United States. Because neighborhood identities are imprecise, their enumeration is necessarily uncertain, as is Wikipedia. But Baltimore’s status as an outlier is so pronounced that it overcomes imprecision. The size of Boston’s population, for example, is not much different from Baltimore’s. It has 105 neighborhoods. Milwaukee, Memphis, Denver, and Oklahoma City are also similar in size to Baltimore. According to Wikipedia, Milwaukee has 50 neighborhoods; Denver, 78; Memphis, 70; Oklahoma City, 25. Baltimore has 300. Even Chicago, the so-called City of Neighborhoods,11 with three times the land area and four times the population of Baltimore, has only 245 neighborhoods.
Baltimore has often been described as “quirky”—usually by outsiders. Baltimoreans, who live with the quirks every day, are less likely to comment on them. In a Google experiment of questionable scientific status, I paired the word “quirky” with the names of 20 randomly chosen American cities in a search to find out whether Baltimore was linked with “quirky” more frequently than other towns. Baltimore finished second after New York, but not by much. At 2.84 million matches with “quirky,” it was only 80,000 quirks (about 6 percent) shy of New York. Atlanta was next after Baltimore, with over 200,000 fewer “quirky” citations.12 Baltimore’s 300 neighborhoods may figure in its quirkiness by offering a multiplicity of arenas for the development of eccentricity. Or perhaps the quirkiness of Baltimoreans prevents them from living together in anything less than 300 neighborhoods.
New York’s leadership in reports of quirkiness is hardly surprising. With more than 10 times the population of Baltimore, it has more to be quirky with and quirky about.13 On a quirk per capita basis, Baltimore would clearly come out far ahead of New York. But since scarcely any two quirks are alike, it is impossible to say exactly what this measure means. It does suggest, however, that Baltimore is a highly unusual city, perhaps exceptional.
Baltimore’s 300 neighborhoods and its millions of quirks are likely symptoms of urban underdevelopment. The centralizing tendencies that operate to consolidate institutions and cultures in other cities have remained relatively feeble in Baltimore—probably a sign that other cities have achieved concentrations of wealth and political power far greater than Baltimore’s. Baltimore has had no Mayor Daley, Robert Moses, Tammany, or Boss Tweed; no Rockefellers, Wanamakers, Wrigleys, Mellons, or Marshall Fields; no Bill Gates.
It follows that one of the city’s essential personality traits is a municipal inferiority complex. This extends even to the urban elite. In 2004, Mayor Martin O’Malley complained that “the culture of failure has crept into many circles of our city . . . I don’t know whether it’s attributable to the loss of manufacturing, or the drug epidemic . . . Some of Baltimore’s leading citizens don’t understand it, but they are often the leading spokespeople for that culture of failure.”14 By itself, of course, the “culture of failure” is hardly unique. Cleveland, Newark, and other victims of deindustrialization and disinvestment must harbor similar sentiments of civic self-deprecation. Baltimore, however, is notable for its embrace of failure.
Thirty years before Mayor O’Malley decried the culture of failure, Russell Baker, who grew up in Baltimore and began his journalistic career at the Baltimore Sun, described his hometown as the “city of losers.” James Bready, one of Baker’s colleagues on the newspaper, offered his own assessment of Baltimore’s status: “Of the five big cities in the Eastern megalopolis . . . we are the smallest. We don’t have as much history, we don’t have as many ancestors, we don’t have as much money. We are an innocent city. We never surrendered to the success dream. We are a city where people don’t think they are very bright.” He was not complaining. Baker notes that Bready seemed to enjoy his enumeration of Baltimore’s shortcomings. Like him, Baker finds that there is something to be said for losers. Baltimoreans’ experience of failure has made them generally tolerant of human failings, moral and otherwise. They recognize sin as an elemental constituent of the human condition. The result, says Baker, is that they are not given to moralistic crusades. Theirs is a “permissive” city,15 where 300 quirky neighborhoods can coexist in relative peace.
As might be expected in a city of 300 neighborhoods, there are other views about Baltimore’s response to its internal disjointedness. Stephen Hunter, a Baltimore resident and Pulitzer Prize–winning movie critic for the Washington Post (after 20 years of not winning a Pulitzer at the Sun), sees the city’s cultural fragmentation as a source of trouble. “The first thing to understand about Baltimore,” he writes, “is that hostility is somehow encoded into the Zeitgeist, like a rogue strain of DNA. It’s not that there’s no there there, as too many Washingtonians believe. Rather it’s that there’s too many theres there and they all hate one another.” When William Manchester was a reporter in Baltimore during the 1950s, he wrote a novel that gave voice to similar hostility—City of Anger—in which a thinly disguised version of Baltimore is wracked by racial, class, and cultural resentments. Baltimore’s anger may also flow from its status as the city of losers. “Think of Baltimore as the second brother,” writes Stephen Hunter, “eternally resentful of the attention his older sibling was born into. Or think of it as a deposed prince virulently anguished over what could have been if something hadn’t been stolen from him.”16
Though it is difficult to imagine Baltimore as princely, there may be truth in both the hostile and tolerant versions of the city. In a town with as many subcultural niches as Baltimore, some may be tolerant and others hostile. For the same reason, David Simon (Homicide and The Wire), Barry Levinson (Diner and Liberty Heights), and John Waters (Pink Flamingos and Hairspray) have been able to spin wildly different stories about Baltimore. “We are writing about different Baltimores,” says Simon, “and they are all credible in their own way.” The production designer who has worked for all three filmmakers concurs. Different as they are, he says, every one of the disparate trio portrays “True Baltimore.”17
“True Baltimore” is complicated. The city of 300 residential enclaves is also reported to have approximately 300 drug gangs, most with territories embracing only a few square blocks. Hostilities across this intricate cobweb of contested boundaries have helped to give the city of intimate urban villages one of the highest homicide rates in the country.18
“True Baltimore” is also resolutely parochial. “She is not cosmopolitan,” wrote Edward Hungerford, “and she is proud of that.”19 As a border city, Baltimore has occupied the embattled front line in sectional hostilities. Its residents may have embraced parochialism to insulate themselves from the larger national conflicts that threatened to crush their city. But persistent provincialism may also help Baltimoreans to avoid discomfiting comparisons with places more successful or favorably endowed, and to turn their attentions inward so that they can accept their city as it is.
H. L. Mencken cultivated an appreciation of Baltimore’s backwardness. He detested boosterism and railed against expensive ventures in urban development—skyscrapers, for example. “Wasting millions on such follies,” he wrote in 1934, “is simply not Baltimorish. Every enterprise of the sort is a kind of confession that Baltimore is inferior to New York and should hump itself to catch up. No true Baltimorean believes that. He accepts the difference between a provincial capital and a national metropolis as natural and inevitable, and he sees no reason why any effort should be made to hide it. He lives in Baltimore because he prefers Baltimore. One of its greatest charms, in his eyes, is that it is not New York.”20
No doubt, some Baltimoreans will point with pride to post-Mencken feats of downtown development, waterfront renaissance, and resulting triumphs of tourism as evidence that the city is no longer Mencken’s provincial town. But John Waters sides with Mencken: “No one’s making a movie about Harbor Place or the aquarium, and no one’s going to. The extremes of Baltimore is why people like it, and it took a long time for the city to recognize that. When I grew up, Baltimore had an inferiority complex the way Cleveland and Pittsburgh still do, but once we embraced and exaggerated the things that we used to hide, then people felt good about the city.” Baltimoreans, in other words, are proud of their inferiority complex. In an address at a local Chamber of Commerce dinner, Waters urged municipal leaders to abandon their promotional slogans and recognize the essential truth about Baltimore: “This is the strangest, coolest, most peculiar city in America.” He suggested that the city’s slogan should be “Come to Baltimore and be shocked!”21 Of course, no city official has followed up on his suggestion. Nor are there many cities, however, where John Waters would be the keynote speaker at a Chamber of Commerce dinner.
Baltimore is not just different from other cities. Every city is different from every other city. Baltimore is eccentric. It may provide a unique vantage point from which to observe what other cities have in common. Its history also offers a moving picture of the process by which cities become different from one another and develop their own distinctive “personalities.” But the attempt to generalize from Baltimore’s experience to cities at large may obscure one of the town’s essential features—its particularity.