I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, next door to the original Bethlehem Steel mill, and coming to Baltimore in my early 20s there was an immediate sense I belonged here.)
In this collection are short, personal encounters with the likes of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, and Hall-of-Fame pitcher Jim Palmer. My favorite vignettes, however, take place around people and places few have probably never heard of, like the graffiti artist Nether working on a desolate street like North Bruce in West Baltimore; city native James Reid, who created the statue of Billie Holiday in Upton, and Marvin Thorpe II, who, along with his father, since deceased, taught an estimated 15,000 kids, nearly all black (and therefore six times more likely to drown), to swim at their backyard pool in Windsor Mill.
Each story was published in some form over a 10-year period in Baltimore magazine. Some have been expanded. Others were culled from longer stories. Many have been reworked and updated. Nearly all are told in a real time, fly-on-the-wall reporting style. None are tied to any kind of breaking news. None of the stories were assigned to me. All began with feeling that there might be something fun or unexpected—or simply someone interesting—where I was headed. These adventures, and that’s what they usually felt like, were my chances to explore the cracks and crannies of Baltimore and the people who live here and have lived here.
Most of the stories began as part of a regular monthly series I took over when I came to Baltimore magazine after Urbanite folded. At the time, there was a section in Baltimore magazine called The Chatter, which generally included a couple of short pieces each month, largely built around popular happenings in the city—the opening of a casino or a celebrity appearance. I saw The Chatter as an opportunity to go a bit off the grid. Spend time with a pigeon racer from Linthicum, for example. A taxidermist, a sign painter, and the squeegee kids. And sure, every once in a while, an Elvis impersonator, former Pimlico jockey, ex-Playboy bunny, and Miss Hon contestant. Along the way I got to see “the Duchess” in action—Hoehn Bakery’s 1927-built brick-oven hearth—watch a group of black girls from Baltimore meet Michelle Obama, witness the Orioles play a game before an empty stadium, march 10 miles with anti-violence protestors from one end of North Avenue to the other, and run 26.2 miles around the city as part of the Baltimore Marathon.
Together, these vignettes became something akin to a jigsaw puzzle, each new piece making the picture of Baltimore and us inhabitants—a little clearer and a little more complex at the same time. They are about the intrinsic character of the city, its sense of place, and the meaning people give to it.
After about five years in the original Chatter format, I’d begun to feel like it was time to break out into something new. Initially, we added a photo and an extra column. Later, we changed the format to its current form—from three very short vignettes to a single, longer piece, which allowed me to go deeper into stories. We also moved it to the back page of the magazine. We changed the name, too, from The Chatter to You Are Here, a nod to the in-the-moment feel of these vignettes.
To me, these stories are more akin to micro-nonfiction than anything in traditional journalism. Although, unlike micro-nonfiction, these are not memoirs or essays but simply short stories about other people’s lives, people deeply connected to this city like I am.
My friend and former Baltimore Sun reporter and author Rafael Alvarez once said, “No matter what they put up in this town, it was built upon something that makes for a better story: Burke’s beneath the chicken fat of a Royal Farms at Light and Lombard; orthodox synagogues and the bones of organ grinder monkeys beneath the new restaurants of Little Italy, heavy metals in the soil beneath Harbor East.”
Mary Rizzo, an American Studies Ph.D. and past co-editor of The Public Historian journal, once told me that while every city claims to be a “city of neighborhoods,” Baltimore actually is. Partly, that’s because it remains a largely an insular place, and out of such insular places come eccentric characters, Billie Holiday and William Donald Schaeffer to name two, and particular culture obsessions, such as duckpin bowling, painted screens, and roller skating at the Shake & Bake recreation center.
If nothing else, I think this decade’s worth collection proves both Alvarez’s and Rizzo’s words ring as true as ever.
“[A single story] makes recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different, rather than how we are similar... I’ve often thought it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person, without engaging with all of the stories of that place or that person.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author
Lauraville
Hampnett Avenue
June 12, 2008
1. The Polaroid Guy
Jim Lucio opens a shoe box, searches, and then pulls out a photo he took nearly two decades ago. It’s a Polaroid of a teenage girl wearing an orange bikini, floating atop a blue swimming pool, her white legs and arms splaying casually as she looks up at the camera.
At a glimpse, it’s simply a youthful summer snapshot. Hold the picture a second longer and it becomes evident it’s also a terrific portrait, an expressive subject framed at a quirky angle, compellingly composed, saturated with color. Time has not faded the image—the sunlight still glimmers in the water around the girl—or the memory.
“That’s my cousin Lisa from 1990 at a country club in Carmel Valley we used to sneak into to go swimming on hot days,” Lucio says, 39, with a smile in his Lauraville home studio. “I do like the fact you can tell it’s mine, that same qualities in my pictures today are there early on.”
Last spring, Lucio, a former City Paper graphic designer and the co-owner of Flux Studios gallery, assembled a bunch of his Baltimore portraits in a self-published coffee-table collection called MONDO DEFEKTO: The Polaroid Photography of Jim Lucio. (Defekto is a moniker he uses on Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website.)
“Basically, [the self-published book] has been a marketing tool to get a ‘real’ book deal,” he explains. “I made a hundred, numbered them and sold them for $50.” And he actually sold a few, too. “It did help add to my non-existent income” he laughs, “and paid a couple months of the mortgage.”
Getting a “real” book deal is becoming more urgent for one simple reason: The film that’s made pictures magically appear for 60 years is about to disappear itself.
Lucio was initially drawn to Polaroid film as a teenager because he was impatient—he didn’t want to wait a week for his film to develop (this, of course, was before the dawn of digital cameras). Later, he became attached to the rich quality of the color and the unique intimacy between subject and artist that Polaroids encourage.
Embraced over the years by artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Maplethorpe, David Hockney and Chuck Close, Polaroid stopped manufacturing cameras two years ago. When they announced in February it was shuttering film production as well, websites such as SavePolaroid.com popped up, organizing online petitions and letter-writing campaigns, trying to convince another company to buy the rights to the patented chemical emulsion process.
Twenty years after he started taking his instant portraits, Lucio’s recognized as “the Polaroid guy” around Baltimore for his cool, yet intimate close-ups of pals, hipsters, curious strangers, Jesus freaks, tattooed super heroes, punks, addicts (including a friend who since died of an overdose), naked wrestlers, masked misfits, musicians, magicians, Roller Girls, bartenders, bike messengers, trapeze artists, and transvestites.
“Jim relates to everybody, he spends time with them and they open up to him,” says photographer Josh Sisk, a friend who has been published
