Kosovo, MD…

I’ve had the opportunity twice in the last few days to drive through East Baltimore. Usually I try to keep it to the interstates and give the city a wide berth, but sometimes getting right down in it is unavoidable. Since I was there, I couldn’t help but look around a bit… and what I saw was night and day. On one hand, Johns Hopkins seems to be in a constant state of construction, buying up the rotting and decayed properties around it and expanding in every direction. Fifty years from now, they may have single handedly cleaned up that section of the city. That might well be the hospital’s greatest contribution to the state.

On the other hand, the drive into Druid Hill Park and the Maryland Zoo is a bit like taking a tour of Kosovo circa 1999. With what looked like bombed out and burned down houses and buildings outnumbering active residences and businesses on nearly every block, well, one wonders if it would’t be better to draw some lessons from Detroit and move in with bulldozers, level the ground, and start again. I generally ignore local Baltimore politics because it tends to be so ridiculous, but it seems that what we were seeing yesterday is the working definition of a failed city. Surely there’s a better approach to managing a state’s largest urban area than letting it collapse under its own weight. It’s a stark reminder of what happens when people stop caring about their surroundings and when local government throws up its hands and opts to hope for the best instead of actually doing anything.

There are some truly incredible examples of late Victorian architecture hiding in plain site down there, but they’ve been well and truly overwhelmed by the decay around them. Most are likely too far gone to do anything more than salvage the bits and pieces in advance of the wrecking ball. It’s a shame, really. Baltimore use to be one of America’s great cities. Now, once you’re outside the designated tourist zones or the neighborhoods that have tenaciously hung on or the ones that have been revived, it looks more like a war zone than a first world city.