This one’s for all those folks out in suburbia who have repeated the same unfortunate mantra – “I don’t go downtown anymore,” they say — ever since the Freddie Gray troubles of 2015 and all the enduring emotional shadows.
Memo to all of you: You’re cheating yourselves out of the sweet pleasures of your own hometown.
You want to focus on the latest report of a carjacking? I want to focus on all those new buildings going up downtown, and all the people finding jobs in the midst of it, and all of the thousands of people who came this weekend to Fells Point for the annual neighborhood festival.
The big gathering was just one more reminder of the city’s delights. It’s more than just thousands of people gathered for food and drink and arts and crafts, and strolling about in one of Baltimore’s most storied neighborhoods.
The festival always feels like a kind of outdoor group therapy. We need reminders that we like being around each other, and that we have a bunch of neighborhoods filled with history and charm and uniqueness.
The city of Baltimore is more than the sum of its municipal rap sheet.
Fells Point has always felt like Baltimore’s attic, a place with funky shops and unanticipated touches pulled from the past. There’s still a sense of that, though the area’s definitely modernizing, you’d better get there fast if you’re looking for traces of the last century when it was home to so many European immigrants, and so many of them were shouting across the aisles in a dozen different languages from their food stalls at the old Broadway Markets.
If you haven’t been down there for a while, you’re in for a surprise. The old stalls are gone from the northern-most market, replaced by more upscale ethnic eateries. And the lower market’s now a restaurant, The Choptank. There’s outdoor seating at both places, and they were doing lovely business over the weekend.
Those markets go back a couple of centuries. They came in long before people had the big corporate grocery stores to do their food shopping, and they held on for a very long time. It’s a miracle that they lasted as long as they did – and maybe a testament to people’s nostalgia for an earlier time.
But times, and tastes, change. The old immigrants have yielded to a young, upscale crowd, and tourists, too. Over the weekend, there were lots of young couples all over Fells Point, many pushing baby strollers (not a great idea on cobblestone streets).
I went down there Saturday, by myself because my wife was off visiting the grandchildren, and then I took her down on Sunday when she returned. We were equally charmed.
By the way, there wasn’t a trace of menace anywhere. There were just tens of thousands of people who realize we can’t define our lives, and our perceptions of our home town, by isolated cases of aberrant behavior.
As for those who still say they’ll never go downtown again — Too bad, too bad. You’re missing a nice time. You’re missing a city that still has so much to offer.
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).
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