Travel + Leisure Calls Baltimore 'Coolest City on East Coast'

Now we’re talking: Never mind that full-of-baloney study last week that declared Baltimore the 11th most stressful American city. Now there’s a national magazine piece headlining us as “the Coolest City on the East Coast.”

Last week’s dreary study, done by a four-year old outfit called WalletHub, based its findings on raw statistics such as work hours, personal debt load and suicide rates.

The upbeat new story, in Travel + Leisure Magazine, tells its 4.8 million readers, “There’s much more to Charm City than what you’ve seen on ‘The Wire.’ Even as racial tensions make headlines in this famously blue-collar town on the Chesapeake, slick waterfront projects and farm-to-table dining have arrived along with a new, younger generation of residents set on building the city they want to live in.”

The writer, David Amsden, looks beyond statistics to find the city’s soulful core. Amsden grew up in the D.C. suburbs and discovered Baltimore in his adolescence. He came for the Orioles. And the steamed crabs and Natty Boh.

“And in Baltimore’s salty fortitude,” he writes, “I discovered my love of cities.”

Cities aren’t always pretty, they aren’t always clean, and if you venture into the wrong neighborhoods they aren’t always safe. But they’re the truest reflection of the American mix – of races and religions, certainly, but also the great mix of ideas, of the newest cutting-edge thinking, and of the importance of people finding common ground because they live and work in such close proximity.

Amsden finds potential even in the city’s grubbiest areas. He loves cobble-stone Fells Point, but notes, “I only had to walk a few minutes before coming across a block of stately homes standing vacant and crumbling.”

But “such dereliction is a reminder of Baltimore’s appeal – its affordability, its character, its potential.”

Look, those of us who live in the Baltimore area know the city’s flaws. They get plenty of publicity. But there are neighborhoods that are absolutely blossoming, and young people who have moved in brimming with commitment, and a sense of energy you don’t find out in the sticks.

Check out the Travel + Leisure piece. It’ll make you feel a little bit better about the old home town than a bunch of raw statistics ever will.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).