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Why we called it ‘Charm City’.

TIM KREIDER [New York Times] — H. L. Mencken once wrote that Baltimore was known up and down the East Coast for the excellence of its food, the pulchritude of its women and the genteel charm of its domestic life — all of which, sadly, reads like a joke now. Like Sodom and Hiroshima, it is a city best known for its destruction. The Baltimore where I reeled around drunkenly for years, and got hassled by the cops exactly once — for impersonating a deity — was White Baltimore, which, if mapped, would look like a tenuous network of interconnected nodes laid over the terra incognita where the majority of the city’s inhabitants lived their lives. That other Baltimore, hungry and disenfranchised and heavily armed, written off by politicians, pushed around by the cops and called animals on the Internet, was always a block away.

Ever since I left more than a decade ago, I’ve followed my home city’s decline from afar through the bizarre and disturbing news items that emanate from it (a burglar’s hand lopped off with a katana) and the increasingly crazed denial of its official slogans (“The Greatest City in America”). I still get nostalgic watching episodes of “The Wire” when I see real locations that look like sets from a postapocalyptic movie, scenes of off-duty cops vomiting on the sidewalks outside bars at 2 a.m., totally unremarked upon by passers-by, or hear the shrill nasal twang of an authentic Baltimore accent, apparently irreproducible by actors from anywhere else.

Maybe the city I miss is just the city of my youth, or the city of drunkenness. Ernest Hemingway famously described Paris as “a moveable feast”; Baltimore is more like a permanent hangover. Once you have lived there, you will never be entirely sober again.


Continued on “My own private Baltimore” at the New York Times | More Chronicle & Notices.

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