Robin Carter, EBDI's Director of Operations and Asset Management, and I sat down yesterday to discuss her crew helping me with greening projects, but we quickly sidetracked to the bigger picture, including the moving picture (yes, read that both ways) she saw, too - except hers was a double feature, with two boys on bikes.
I meditated on this today in my garden, reveling in tufts of green emerging from plants requiring savage pruning to make them grow again.
26 April 2008
22 April 2008
Happy Earth Day
We're suddenly in the embrace of all things green, and certainly, our impending green rehabs could not be more timely. I sit here at this desk, excited and impatient, building a little more of the foundation each day, frustrated that there's no time to blog - and my head couldn't be more full. But I can't let Earth Day go by without some commentary, so here are links to two pieces I wrote in December (before I was an EBDI employee) in Steamed Female, one of my two (sorely neglected) other blogs:
http://steamedfemale.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-un-green-was-my-valley.html
http://steamedfemale.blogspot.com/2007/12/urban-fields-of-green.html
http://steamedfemale.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-un-green-was-my-valley.html
http://steamedfemale.blogspot.com/2007/12/urban-fields-of-green.html
11 April 2008
The Opposite of Cecil B. DeMille
Tidying my desk at 6 PM, I thought about what seemed like a cast of thousands paving, planting, and potchkying (Yiddish for puttering) all week long in anticipation of today's Hopkins' life sciences building dedication. The tent overflowed with hundreds upon hundreds of attendees who heard rousing speeches and humble expressions of thanks. It was a lovely event, yet I wanted to end today blogging about something else. But what?
Still pondering, I got in my truck parked out back, and a few seconds later reached the front of the building on Ashland Avenue, where a beaming boy, riding the most unusual red, green, and yellow bicycle, pedaled east in front of me on the days-old sidewalk bordering the equally fresh and immaculately landscaped parking lot. It was as if this child, enjoying the warm Friday afternoon in a thoroughly decent, clean, and safe place, was sent to star in a video just for me. Pass the popcorn - I want to see it again and again.
Still pondering, I got in my truck parked out back, and a few seconds later reached the front of the building on Ashland Avenue, where a beaming boy, riding the most unusual red, green, and yellow bicycle, pedaled east in front of me on the days-old sidewalk bordering the equally fresh and immaculately landscaped parking lot. It was as if this child, enjoying the warm Friday afternoon in a thoroughly decent, clean, and safe place, was sent to star in a video just for me. Pass the popcorn - I want to see it again and again.
A Walk In The Park
That's not how one might have described a stroll through the EBDI footprint for the last number of decades - until yesterday.
For the past week, in final preparation for today's biotech building opening, our neighborhood has swarmed with a gargantuan amount of activity. Huge muddy parcels have almost instantly become landscaped parking lots and planting beds now teem with blooming daffodils and deep chocolate mulch. Years of planning and laying infrastructure funneled down to this seemingly instant payoff.
With the huge construction vehicles all but gone, I was greeted to work yesterday with a clear path and the almost sound of silence. Rolls of sod, stacked with beautiful precision, formed a low wall along Ashland Avenue. A tent resembling a mini-Pier Six loomed ahead. Workers were absolutely everywhere. What a happy way to begin my day.
I stepped outside a few hours later, completely startled by the newly-laid lush living carpet and tall blooming cherry trees that implausibly emerged from the earth. It was just like a movie set, except that this set will not be struck at today's end. This is the New East Side.
For the past week, in final preparation for today's biotech building opening, our neighborhood has swarmed with a gargantuan amount of activity. Huge muddy parcels have almost instantly become landscaped parking lots and planting beds now teem with blooming daffodils and deep chocolate mulch. Years of planning and laying infrastructure funneled down to this seemingly instant payoff.
With the huge construction vehicles all but gone, I was greeted to work yesterday with a clear path and the almost sound of silence. Rolls of sod, stacked with beautiful precision, formed a low wall along Ashland Avenue. A tent resembling a mini-Pier Six loomed ahead. Workers were absolutely everywhere. What a happy way to begin my day.
I stepped outside a few hours later, completely startled by the newly-laid lush living carpet and tall blooming cherry trees that implausibly emerged from the earth. It was just like a movie set, except that this set will not be struck at today's end. This is the New East Side.
08 April 2008
Mending Our Quilt
A glimpse of East Baltimore from the roof of the vacant, splendid Art Deco, six-story Highlandtown Middle School reinforces the well-loved notion of our city as a patchwork quilt of neighborhoods, as compelling from above as it is at street level. From on high, it's all sprawling, colorful geometry; on the ground, a familiar, comforting vernacular, even in areas disquieted with dysfunction.
I still wonder if my statement to the interviewers at Baltimore Housing, apropos to nothing - that I never met a house I didn't like - helped or hurt me, though I suppose it couldn't have hurt too much, because I was hired as the asset manager. But there was little I could do about row after row in decline, except tell myself these faded ladies, even the ones practically beaten to death during the riots and beyond, were merely in repose. I had to wait my whole professional life, until now, to do something significant about it.
Sort of. Truth be told, much of the worst of the worst were already gone by the time I landed here. It was the only thing to do. Most were not built to last; with no footers and party walls one brick thick, no reasonable amount of money could secure their future long-term. The riots had not ruined these particular houses, but more so time and gravity.
These houses and their residents were an integral puzzle piece of this neighborhood and they are missed and will never be forgotten. We'll honor them by building well-considered, energy-efficient, and appropriate structures sure to be filled with a lively mix of residents, merchants, and workers from all walks of life. But handsome, functional buildings - new or perfectly restored - are besides the point for some unless filled with people intent on building on the community still extant within the EBDI footprint.
The bird's eye view will remain captivating, thanks to restoration of the old, exemplary design of the new, and the diagonal trajectory of Gay Street that forever insures East Baltimore's crazy quilt template. It's a perfect metaphor for the history we make every day as we zig and zag into our future.
I still wonder if my statement to the interviewers at Baltimore Housing, apropos to nothing - that I never met a house I didn't like - helped or hurt me, though I suppose it couldn't have hurt too much, because I was hired as the asset manager. But there was little I could do about row after row in decline, except tell myself these faded ladies, even the ones practically beaten to death during the riots and beyond, were merely in repose. I had to wait my whole professional life, until now, to do something significant about it.
Sort of. Truth be told, much of the worst of the worst were already gone by the time I landed here. It was the only thing to do. Most were not built to last; with no footers and party walls one brick thick, no reasonable amount of money could secure their future long-term. The riots had not ruined these particular houses, but more so time and gravity.
These houses and their residents were an integral puzzle piece of this neighborhood and they are missed and will never be forgotten. We'll honor them by building well-considered, energy-efficient, and appropriate structures sure to be filled with a lively mix of residents, merchants, and workers from all walks of life. But handsome, functional buildings - new or perfectly restored - are besides the point for some unless filled with people intent on building on the community still extant within the EBDI footprint.
The bird's eye view will remain captivating, thanks to restoration of the old, exemplary design of the new, and the diagonal trajectory of Gay Street that forever insures East Baltimore's crazy quilt template. It's a perfect metaphor for the history we make every day as we zig and zag into our future.
04 April 2008
I Have A Dream
Baltimore's collective heart and spirit was broken forty years ago today with the assassination of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the rioting it touched off. Seared into my mind is the surreal presence of National Guard tanks patroling eerily silent Reisterstown Road, just up from my parents' idyllic Menlo Drive home. In the very safe distance, the sky was dark with smoke, but the wind carried air thick with the smell of destruction. I was eight years old and in the third grade, but already a voracious reader of the Baltimore Sun's morning and evening editions, and I was glued to the TV news. My parents told me not to venture beyond the front porch. I thought the world was ending.
But, of course, I had no idea that for many Baltimoreans and their neighborhoods, some already battered, it was or would be damn near close.
Swaths of the city were all but left for dead in the years following the riots. All but - but the lights never totally went dark. I wondered what made some people stay on blocks where only a few lights shone. As the city's asset manager, I met plenty of citizens with the means to move, but stay they did, and do. Familiarity and faith in the future, they said, and say.
I'm curious about the inordinate attention paid to the riots on this particular anniversary. Maybe it's that even amid the stalled boom, rehab continues apace. Washingtonians are still discovering us and hopefully BRAC refugees are on track to do so, too. We're not about to loosen the grip on our hard-won self-confidence. In the immortal, misquoted, and therefore parodied words of Sally Fields' 1985 Oscar acceptance speech, "You like me. You really, really like me." In civil rights parlance, our eyes are still on the prize.
Maybe it's just coincidence, but the Hebrew sages declared forty as the minimum age for wisdom and spiritual maturity. The Hebrew word for soul is comprised of the letters that also form the number forty. Noah and his ark withstood trial by flood for forty days and forty nights and Moses took up residence on Mount Sinai for the same length of time. And so close to Passover, we remember that his followers wandered in the desert for forty years.
Whatever the reason for this year's focus on what forever altered our social, psychic, and physical landscapes, I am moved beyond belief (think about those words) to be a partner with the residents still remaining within the EBDI footprint. I will in large degree measure my success by the number who choose to relocate to the classic rowhouses that together we are making green and new for that future in which they have placed their faith.
But, of course, I had no idea that for many Baltimoreans and their neighborhoods, some already battered, it was or would be damn near close.
Swaths of the city were all but left for dead in the years following the riots. All but - but the lights never totally went dark. I wondered what made some people stay on blocks where only a few lights shone. As the city's asset manager, I met plenty of citizens with the means to move, but stay they did, and do. Familiarity and faith in the future, they said, and say.
I'm curious about the inordinate attention paid to the riots on this particular anniversary. Maybe it's that even amid the stalled boom, rehab continues apace. Washingtonians are still discovering us and hopefully BRAC refugees are on track to do so, too. We're not about to loosen the grip on our hard-won self-confidence. In the immortal, misquoted, and therefore parodied words of Sally Fields' 1985 Oscar acceptance speech, "You like me. You really, really like me." In civil rights parlance, our eyes are still on the prize.
Maybe it's just coincidence, but the Hebrew sages declared forty as the minimum age for wisdom and spiritual maturity. The Hebrew word for soul is comprised of the letters that also form the number forty. Noah and his ark withstood trial by flood for forty days and forty nights and Moses took up residence on Mount Sinai for the same length of time. And so close to Passover, we remember that his followers wandered in the desert for forty years.
Whatever the reason for this year's focus on what forever altered our social, psychic, and physical landscapes, I am moved beyond belief (think about those words) to be a partner with the residents still remaining within the EBDI footprint. I will in large degree measure my success by the number who choose to relocate to the classic rowhouses that together we are making green and new for that future in which they have placed their faith.
03 April 2008
Who We Are
I had planned to begin this blog yesterday on Maryland's Arbor Day; we're about to make history with our green rehabs and the symbolism was irresistible. I knew what I wanted to say, but I hadn't come up with a blog title, or should I say it hadn't come down - and I invite you to interpret that however you like - I'm not religious, but I'm full of faith.
Since commencing my responsibilities on Saint Patrick's Day (yes, more green) as the Director of Housing Programs for East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI), I've thought about little else than the profound task in front of me and how grateful I am to have it. I turned in too tired last night to obsess that the admittedly limited amount of time spent conjuring a blog title yielded no fruit.
My first thought upon awakening this morning, more than half an hour early at 3:57 AM, was that an apt description of the EBDI footprint, which not so long ago might have been "decaying East Baltimore" or "grim East Baltimore" or "dangerous East Baltimore" is now more accurately "changing East Baltimore." But changing could only be used as an adjective here because we're also employing it as a verb: we are changing East Baltimore.
EBDI is just a part of the "we" - the guiding hand making sure we're all holding hands. Certainly, the residents - both the relocatees and the ones still residing on the preservation blocks - bore and bear a hard-to-imagine burden. I never lose sight that hundreds of family homes became rubble and that uncertainty in places still reigns - but I think not for too much longer, possible only because of the extraordinary commitment, investment, and vision of the balance of the "we" - the Johns Hopkins Institutions, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Goldseker Foundation, the Greater Baltimore Committee, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, the City of Baltimore, Baltimore Housing, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, and others.
The reasons are infinite for what took so long and why it's taking so long, but my spiritual side never fails to inform me that things happen when they're supposed to. The beginning of my blog is a day late, but it's not a dollar short.
Since commencing my responsibilities on Saint Patrick's Day (yes, more green) as the Director of Housing Programs for East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI), I've thought about little else than the profound task in front of me and how grateful I am to have it. I turned in too tired last night to obsess that the admittedly limited amount of time spent conjuring a blog title yielded no fruit.
My first thought upon awakening this morning, more than half an hour early at 3:57 AM, was that an apt description of the EBDI footprint, which not so long ago might have been "decaying East Baltimore" or "grim East Baltimore" or "dangerous East Baltimore" is now more accurately "changing East Baltimore." But changing could only be used as an adjective here because we're also employing it as a verb: we are changing East Baltimore.
EBDI is just a part of the "we" - the guiding hand making sure we're all holding hands. Certainly, the residents - both the relocatees and the ones still residing on the preservation blocks - bore and bear a hard-to-imagine burden. I never lose sight that hundreds of family homes became rubble and that uncertainty in places still reigns - but I think not for too much longer, possible only because of the extraordinary commitment, investment, and vision of the balance of the "we" - the Johns Hopkins Institutions, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Goldseker Foundation, the Greater Baltimore Committee, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, the City of Baltimore, Baltimore Housing, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, and others.
The reasons are infinite for what took so long and why it's taking so long, but my spiritual side never fails to inform me that things happen when they're supposed to. The beginning of my blog is a day late, but it's not a dollar short.
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