Last weekend’s Fells Point Fun Festival didn’t get much news coverage, naturally, due to a thoughtless lack of shootings. As they say in the journalism biz, if it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead. Nope, not much to report from the foot of Broadway except uncountable tens of thousands of people having a nice time in each other’s company.
Remember when everybody used to do that all the time in the city of Baltimore?
For years, we had the Baltimore City Fair, which helped heal so many wounds after the riots of 1968 and continued the recovery for the next quarter century. And there were neighborhood festivals and ethnic festivals and, thankfully, we still have Artscape.
We used to think of these festivals as outdoor group therapy sessions.
Artscape’s still with us, drawing hundreds of thousands of people over a summer weekend every year down there in the heart of two college campuses, the University of Baltimore and the Maryland Institute College of Art.
And the Fells Point gathering is still here, just past its half-century birthday, down there in the heart of so much Bawlamer maritime and immigration history, and so much historic funkiness.
But the other festivals have mostly breathed their last or gotten so little media coverage that they seem to have little impact outside their immediate precincts.
What a shame, what a shame.
The weekend’s Fells Point Festival was, as usual, good for the heart. The restaurants all had outdoor seating, and the shops had outdoor displays, and there were arts and crafts all over the place.
But the nicest thing, as always, was the sheer collection of people. They were smiling, they were relaxed, they were out of their houses and away from their TV sets and nobody was staring at hand-held electronic devices.
There was too much good stuff going on right in front of their eyes, including the sheer, timeless joy of people-watching.
We need such times. The city of Baltimore in particular needs such times, because so much other time is spent worrying about its problems that we overlook its biggest asset: its living, breathing, unique collection of neighborhoods.
In his remarkable new book, “Baltimore: A Political History,” Matthew A. Crenson writes, “The size of Boston’s population is not much different from Baltimore’s. It has 105 neighborhoods. Denver, 78; Memphis, 70; Oklahoma City, 25.
“Baltimore has 300. Even Chicago, the so-called City of Neighborhoods, with three times the land area and four times the population of Baltimore, has only 245 neighborhoods.”
And what do all these neighborhoods represent? A sense of “quirky,” Crenson writes.
Yes! Quirky! Each neighborhood with its own idiosyncratic nature, each with its own soul – and each with its own unique reasons to show off.
We used to celebrate such neighborhood with festivals, and it felt really good. We enjoy being around each other. The City Fair taught us this back in the post-riot years, and it helped heal a damaged city. It set such an example that countless festivals followed.
Why did we let them slip away?
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Top photo: Artscape 2016 main stage (Handout photo courtesy Baltimore Office of Promotion & Arts)
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