bike tour, the Waterfront Partnership releases the most comprehensive report ever on the harbor’s water quality. The grade: C-. Those who compiled the report, however, admit the harbor was scored on a large curve. The C- indicated that the harbor’s overall water quality was acceptable only 40 percent of the time; a score of 50 would’ve been considered a mid-range “C,” indicating that water quality met acceptable standards on half of the days.
“As it was, in our system, the grade was just percentage points above a D+,” says Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper Tina Meyers, who assisted in compiling the report card. “If you used high-school grades, it would be F’s all the way from zero to 60 percent.”
Middle East
North Collington Avenue
June 22, 2013
32. Pilgrimage
Folklorist Elaine Eff struggles momentarily with the karaoke machine that’s serving as her microphone and speaker. The bus tour she’s leading, the Painted Screen Pilgrimage, is sold out. She passes out maps.
“We’re are in the heart of Highlandtown,” she says, “going to the Lourdes of Painted Screens.”
Heading down Eastern Avenue, Effs points to examples in several rowhouse windows and screen doors—including a glorious image of Patterson Park’s pagoda, drawing “oohs and aahs” from inside the bus. She provides brief neighborhood histories as well, ultimately reaching the birthplace of the painted screen: East Baltimore’s St. Wenceslaus community.
Here, across from the Italianate church, in a neighborhood once known as Little Bohemia, Czech immigrant and butcher William Oktavec painted the first screen window, 100 years ago, advertising his produce and meats. A few door away, mother and homemaker Emma Schott saw Oktavec’s handiwork and a light bulb went off.
“You mean, my husband can sit inside in his underwear, drink a beer, read the newspaper, and no one walking by can see him?” Eff says, mock-imitating Schott. Eff is highlighting, of course, the sidewalk proximity of rowhouse living rooms and the practicality of the screen art before air conditioning.
Oktavec painted Schott a red mill alongside a stream, and soon enough, everyone on the block wanted a painted screen.
The tour also weaves past the former McElderry Park rowhome of Johnny Eck, a legendary “half-man” circus and sideshow performer who became an Oktavec screen painting protégé; then Canton, where a number of original screen paintings remain.
“There’s one my great uncle did,” says Troy Richardson, along for the ride, pointing to a lighthouse image in a window. Richardson’s grandfather Ted and great uncle Ben both became screen painters in the folk art’s 1940s and 1950s Formstone heyday.
Earlier, the Creative Alliance showed Eff’s 30-minute documentary, The Screen Painters. In the film, William Oktavek Jr., whose brother, Richard, and nephew, John, carried on the family tradition and whose works are part of a revival in Highlandtown, talks about his butcher-turned-artist dad and the rowhouse folk art medium he launched.
“What I like about it, is what I like about Baltimore,” Oktavec says. “It’s like Babe Ruth and baseball—that things like this can exist here and endure.”
Downtown
West Pratt Street
July 1, 2013
33. Setting Precedent
In the garage beneath the downtown law offices of Shapiro Sher Guinot & Sandler, Larry Gibson lifts a piece of luggage loaded with hardcover copies of his award-winning book, Young Thurgood, from his trunk. He intends to wheel the heavy bag up Charles Street to the city courthouse for a book signing with local bar association members. But first, the 71-year-old Gibson chats with a parking attendant, who wants the attorney to present his book to his church.
“I’m saving the last day in June for you,” says Gibson, nodding. “Let’s get it confirmed. The calendar’s filling up.”
By his count, Gibson has done 44 signings since the book’s release last December. Walking north past the Hotel Monaco, he stops and notes that this is the old headquarters of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—the company name still engraved over the archway—for which the future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and his father once worked as dining-car waiters.
Weaving through traffic, Gibson, without hint of resentment, recalls his own experiences growing up in segregated Baltimore, such as getting kicked out of a recreation center with his older brother and cousin. “We were leading both the Ping-Pong and pool tournaments,” he says, laughing. “That’s what made me mad.” He talks about setting pins at Stoneleigh’s duckpin lanes—“where I wasn’t allowed to roll a ball”—and working on a bakery truck as a teenager. “We made deliveries to places, like Highlandtown, that I didn’t know existed, and I thought I knew every neighborhood in Baltimore,” Gibson says, with another laugh. “We also delivered different kinds of bread, like pumpernickel, that I’d never seen.
“Before I went to work in the Carter Administration, for a background check, they asked for all my addresses, and I realized we moved every 18 months,” he continues. “Of course, I’d only known all the black neighborhoods.”
In 1956, however—two years after Marshall, a Baltimore native, won the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision—Gibson entered City College high school. Voted the storied institution’s first African-American class officer, he moved on to Howard University, becoming a student civil-rights leader, motivated, he says, by a basic desire to “fully participate” in life. After Columbia Law School, he was the first “negro,” as the Baltimore News-American reported, appointed to clerk for a federal judge in Maryland in 1967.
And then Gibson clerked for Venable, Baetjer & Howard, one of the state’s two biggest law firms. His goal at the time was to buy his parents, a janitor and a cook, a house. He recalls that period now, before his presentation in the courthouse’s Barr Library, where he spent long hours researching cases as a Venable clerk—and where he was diligently working when he learned Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.
With Baltimore convulsed in riots following King’s assassination, Gibson instead decided to join the city’s top black law firm, Brown, Allen, Watts, Murphy & Russell, and immediately set out to elect the first black leaders—including two of those partners listed above—to citywide offices. Quickly developing a reputation as a high-energy, no-holds-barred, grassroots organizer, Gibson served as campaign manager for Joseph Howard, who became the first black judge on the Baltimore City Supreme Bench and the first African-American to win a citywide seat in the fall of 1968—just seven months after King’s death. In the next election cycle, Gibson directed the campaigns of Milton Allen, the first African-American elected Baltimore State’s Attorney—and the first to hold a chief prosecutor’s position in a major U.S. city—and William Murphy, who won a Municipal Court judgeship. Paul Chester, whose campaign Gibson also directed, became the first African-American circuit-court clerk the same year, 1970.
Finally, the young organizer and his law firm supported Parren Mitchell, who became the first African-American from Maryland elected to Congress in 1970. In two years, the color of Baltimore’s political landscape had begun a transformation.
“I had every intention of working for Venable; there was an expectation that I would. But then Martin Luther King was shot and I’m thinking, ‘Why am I going to work for the establishment?’” Gibson says. “And I changed my mind.”
