Day Shift 271
129. Winds of Change 273
130. Portraits in Courage 275
131. Last Meal 277
132. Almost Famous 279
133. The Two Dominics 281
134. Statue of Liberty 283
135. Cake and a Snake 285
136. Back to the Future 287
137. Pulp Nonfiction 289
138. Irish Eyes 291
139. Kill Joy 293
140. Lot of Music 295
141. Spinning Wheel 297
142. Tomorrowland 299
143. Found Art 302
144. Homeland 304
145. Spontaneous Beauty 306
146. City by the Bay 309
147. Well Suited 311
148. Sing It Now 313
149. Water, Water Everywhere 316
150. Rolling With It 319
151. Learning to Fly 322
152. Outside Help 324
153. Survival Skills 326
154. Moving Images 329
155. Ramblin’ Man 332
156. Lost and Found 335
157. Corner Petaler 338
158. Bootleg Bunch 341
159. World Café 344
160. Palace Intrigue 347
161. Pop Goes the . . . 350
162. Brush With Life 353
163. The Bid and The Kid 356
164. Eyes of the Law 359
165. Coming Clean 362
166. Writing on the Wall 365
167. Time Machine 368
168. Heavy Metal 371
169. The Last Autoworker in Baltimore 374
170. The Life of Reilly 380
171. Picture This 383
Acknowledgements 386
About the Author 387
Introduction
A few weeks after reading that the former Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point would be scrapped for parts, I learned Hilco Trading, the liquidator who had purchased the massive ghost town in a bankruptcy sale, was offering bus tours for prospective buyers. Diligent, curious reporter that I am, I signed up and went on the first available date, which turned out to be a frigid, January Monday morning.
I didn’t intend to buy anything. Generally, I have little need for cranes, industrial machinery, and 200-ton transport trucks. I didn’t tell Hilco or anyone I was writing a story. Did not know that I would, but since I’m a senior editor at Baltimore magazine, I stuck a notebook in my back pocket. I only knew that I wanted to roam around the grounds of the once-greatest steel mill in the world and try to get a feel for the place—what it had been and what it had meant to the those who made the steel that built the Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, and our own Bay Bridge and a thousand other iconic American structures. I hoped—a hunch, I guess—that I might come across an old union guy who’d spent his working life alongside the legendary, 32-story L Blast Furnace and wanted one last look at the place. Representatives from a small Colorado steel manufacturer were on the bus when I got there. So was an executive from a Japanese steelmaker.
I was grateful there was coffee, and that the corporate buses were well-heated. A retired local steelworker named Lawrence Knachel was also on board, staring out a window. Knowing the whole place was being sold off and shuttered for good, he told me that he couldn’t stay away. “I came here in 1962, right out of Kenwood High School, into an apprentice program,” he said. “We had 27 softball teams. Shipping side used to play the steel side after work.”
Later, inside a drafty repair shop, another former steelworker, who labored inside the hot tin mill for 39 years, manned a security post, earning a few last, non-union wages before the place was completely barren. A Midwestern manufacturing rep asked him what had caused the plant’s closure. The ex-steelworker gave the question some thought and shook his head inside a yellow hard hat. “Everyone has a different reason,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you, though, the other day I got home, and my wife was crying: ‘My grandfather worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘My dad worked there all those years, you worked there all those years, and now you’re [there] shutting it all down.’”
I can’t speak for anyone else, but there was nowhere on the Earth I’d have rather been that morning.
Same thing when I grabbed a stool at the counter for the last shift at the Bel-Loc Diner in Parkville, whose regular customers over the years had included Colts and Orioles legends like Johnny Unitas and Luis Aparicio. “We’re like a lot of the waitresses,” said one longtime patron, sharing a booth and final breakfast with his wife and sister-and-in-law, both of whom grew up down the street from the Bel-Loc. “We don’t know where we are going to go now.”
I felt that way when I ventured to the legendary East Baltimore basketball court known as The Dome to catch a summer high school tournament. The annual event had recently been renamed after a promising 6-foot-8 forward John Crowder, who should’ve been playing, but had been fatally shot three years earlier. One of his childhood friends won the tourney MVP. And I felt that way, too—nowhere on Earth I’d rather have been—when I met a real-life Rosie the Riveter who’d moved up from a North Carolina farm at 19 to make planes for the war and then never left Baltimore. And when I rode along with a 50-something-year-old cyclist who delivered Meals on Wheels lunches and dinners by bike, and the time I hung out for an afternoon with Vander Pearson, the decades-long owner of Pearson’s Florist at the corner of North Charles Street and North Avenue, which earned its 15 minutes of fame on The Wire. (Baltimore native, former rowhouse neighbor, and CityLit founder Gregg Wilhelm described my pursuits here as a kind of “narrative archeology” and I like that concept.)
On and on. For a decade now, I’ve observed this city, its past and present, up close. From the inside out. It’s been my beat, and my not-so-secret-indulgence. As I’ve continued, somehow I still find these stories, or they find me, every few weeks. I’m often burned out, overwhelmed with deadlines, teaching, and my own life, and then someone shares the ordinary, yet intimate details of their life, and my internal pilot light flickers on again. Suddenly, there comes the need to understand their story more fully, deeply, and then synthesize and translate it for others. For me, too. And maybe them. In the process, each time, I learn more about this city, which I call my spiritual home, myself, and my life as well.
