drinking a quart of the Johnny Jump Up.”
More than 400 people fill Tall Cedars Hall in the Putty Hill Shopping Center for the 54th Annual Sobriety Show, organized by the Baltimore Intergroup Council of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s a low budget affair—$1 admission—pizza, hot dogs, meatball subs, soda, and homemade cakes. Kids dance and run around the edges of the hall while the crowd, clearly enjoying a good time, banters at intermission and generously applauds favorite performers. The amateur acts—following months of rehearsals—vary from earnest to cool, including a killer cover of The Chantays’ surf guitar classic “Pipeline”—to over-the-top. In a towering blue Marge Simpson wig, Shelley C. croons Patsy Cline’s iconic “Crazy.”
“Look at everyone laughing and smiling,” says Joe P., an old-timer, sober 33 years since following a former drinking buddy into AA. “Now imagine if there was an open bar here, with these people drinking. They’d need the National Guard to break up the place.”
Pigtown
Carroll Park
June 9, 2013
29. Tour Dem Parks, Hon!
“You just rode under the oldest railroad bridge in North America,” says Ed Orser, who literally wrote the book on the Gwynns Falls, to two-dozen bicyclists touring Charm City’s parks, mill valleys, and streams. Pedaling past the granite B&O bridge, listening to the “falling” stream, Orser stops at Winan Meadows, named after Thomas Winans, who made a fortune building Russia’s first railroad and put his estate here.
“Where you’re standing right now would’ve been a four or six-lane highway if people hadn’t fought to preserve this area,” Orser says. “Route 70 ends not far from here. It’s 2,000 miles the other way to Utah and plans called for it to go downtown and meet I-95.”
Approaching a picturesque small dam in historic Dickeyville, several riders get off their bikes for photos, shocked they’re still within city limits. “I’m flabbergasted,” a young woman tells two friends.
The 25-mile tour, organized by Eli Pousson, Baltimore Heritage’s director of preservation and outreach, is a sub-event of the annual Tour Dem Parks, Hon! ride, which has attracted a record 1,300 participants this morning. The ride loops through 745-acre Druid Hill Park and the Jones Falls Trail, later heading towards Federal Hill.
Of course, it isn’t all parks and streams in Charm City.
Stopped at a traffic light on East Baltimore’s once notorious and now simply downtrodden red light district, Pousson notes that nearby St. Vincent de Paul’s once held a regular 2:30 a.m. Mass for the printers and strippers who both pulled late shifts in the neighborhood.
“I’ve wanted to organize a vaudeville and burlesque bike tour for a year and a half,” Pousson says, glancing dejectedly around “The Block.” “But sometimes those things look better on paper than they do in reality.”
Mount Vernon
North Charles Street
June 15, 2013
30. Pump It Up
Crowds cram Charles Street’s sidewalk in Mount Vernon, straining for a better vantage. The 2013 Baltimore Pride Parade just ended and now Segway-driving city police are clearing the street for annual High Heel race. At stake: a two-foot trophy, $1,100 in prizes, gift certificates, and Champagne.
“Payless,” says Greg Mazzeo, explaining where he found size-11 black heels. “I’m wearing ugly black socks so they’re snug and I can run.” Chuck Stanley jokes his pumps came from “Sal-vay”—aka the Salvation Army. “Painted them red to match my shorts.”
The race is short, Read Street to Eager Street, but tough—a dead uphill sprint, including some jostling elbows before the pack separates. Jay Cruz, who has won previously, accidentally gets smacked in the face early. However, his good friend, Steven Powell, in brown pumps beneath coordinated camouflage pants, breaks free and wins going away.
Shirtless, Powell cartwheels across the finish line.
“He’s been training for three months, in heels, on a treadmill,” Cruz says, begrudgingly, as Powell, a choreographer who ran high school track, gathers his awards.
The winner nods affirmatively, appearing slightly embarrassed.
“With ankle weights,” Cruz adds.
Nearby, Stanley, who takes a very respectable fourth, remains out of breath. “I’m going to be 43 years old,” he says. “I’m ready for a drink for Crissakes.”
Patterson Park
North Linwood Avenue
June 10, 2013
31. Water Cure
Two-dozen curious environmentalists, taking a bike tour of something described as the Harris Creek Watershed, stop pedaling, and pull up in front of the Patterson Park branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Their tires come to a rest over several large, metal stormwater grates.
They’ve already visited the Real Food Farm on the grounds of Lake Clifton High School, where they were told the watershed’s headwaters begin. They’ve stopped and perused Duncan Street’s Miracle Farm, built on a vacant block in East Baltimore. They’ve ridden south past the Baltimore Recycling Center, Collington Square Park, the Reggie Lewis Memorial Basketball Courts, and bustling but trash-strewn Frank C. Bocek Park.
However, there’s been no sign—visible or otherwise—of Harris Creek.
Not until a whiff of putrid air emanating from the aforementioned storm grates smacks Joy Goodie, atop her bike, square in the nostrils. “Oh, it smells bad,” blurts Goodie, turning her head just before the stench hits everyone else, including her husband and two kids. “It’s repugnant.”
“That’s Harris Creek,” deadpans Leanna Wetmore, program coordinator with Banner Neighborhoods and a tour volunteer with organizer Ben Peterson. Wetmore notes the creek now runs entirely beneath the city, long ago co-opted into the massive underground storm-water system. “The water’s visible if you look down there,” Wetmore adds as a few brave souls take a peek. “When there’s a really big storm, the drains back up and flood this whole area. It can move cars parked here.”
Hard to imagine today, but Maryland Historical Society paintings from the late 1800s actually show boats sailing on the creek through Patterson Park to Canton and the harbor.
Peterson explains to the group—still slightly stunned by the odorous discovery of Harris Creek—that the city’s century-old sewage pipes (some made of wood) run parallel to equally antiquated stormwater pipes. When the outdated sewage lines inevitably bust, raw waste flows into the stormwater lines, entering the harbor untreated. And when thundershowers just as inevitably overwhelm the stormwater system, trash and chemical pollutants from streets, rooftops, and pavement get whisked downstream.
Of course, it’s not just buried Harris Creek that is regularly debased, but the Jones Falls, Gwynns Falls, Middle Branch and Patapsco River, among other harbor tributaries. At the tour’s end, where Harris Creek empties into the harbor, not far from Canton’s Waterfront Park, where residents in days long gone swam and crabbed and local clergy dunked their flock in full-immersion baptisms, frustrated
