I'm still digesting Wednesday night's housing and relocation subcommittee meeting re: if/how to bring up to code the houses owned by those preservation block occupants who do not want to relocate, not even possibly next door to one of our ever-closer-to-reality green rehabs. The discussion was dense and difficult, and at times surprisingly tender. There were tears - mine - and someone else's (doesn't matter who) - as talk turned towards the notion of home, as opposed to house.
Home is where you grew up. It's the dining room table your friends and family crowd around for birthdays and holidays and Scrabble. Home is getting knocked over by the fragrance of a chicken roasting in October or roses tumbling over the trellis in May.
Home is pride in an unbroken familial chain of ownership. It's the hug you feel crossing the threshold after a bad day. And if you're lucky, home is where you're comfortable, safe, and loved.
House is the envelope, the four walls - Patterson Park vernacular and regimented or Reservoir Hill drop-dead over-the-top - it doesn't matter. It's just the vessel.
In 1985, I had to sell the home in which I lived and grew up. Though I endured the worst days of my life there, I also had the comfort of some memories so precious and beautiful that the house remained a refuge. Despite all mental preparations and the Victorian awaiting in Charles Village, Menlo Drive felt ripped from me and settlement ground to a half-hour halt as I desperately worked to collect myself. But I mentally moved on almost as soon as taking up residence in that circa 1887 frame house. Then after 14 years - and a wrenching goodbye to my roses in a driving thunderstorm - I moved on again.
In the past nine years, I've learned a lot about pitching things, both material and mental, in order to make way for other things and I know I could give up this fabulous (OK, maybe one day after a lot more work) Bolton Hill house for a shanty - as long as there's a place for my Grandma's dining room table, around which I've had and still have the best times of my life, and I'm lucky enough to be going someplace where I'm comfortable, safe, and loved.
And today, as residents - both those who must relocate, as well as those on preservation blocks - toured houses rehabbed by our short-listed general contractors to get a sense of what our rehabs might look like, even folks who an hour earlier remained dead-set against moving were eager to sign the green dotted line. I actually heard several musing about where to put their dining room tables. When one gentleman leaned out the second story front window of his favorite floor plan house and called below to his wife "We're home," my tears flowed again.
31 May 2008
20 May 2008
Right of Return
I've been rung up repeatedly, even visited (unannounced), in the past two weeks by displaced residents wanting to move back to EBDI-land. Most were homeowners and purchased houses elsewhere with their relocation benefits - in some cases, much closer to their places of employment. It's not stunning to me that they want to "come home," as so many of them put it. I'm a typical Cancerian - home is and has been everything to me, even in pre-Bolton Hill days, when issues beyond my building envelope challenged my patience, safety, and investment.
Each call, each visit, is yet another affirmation that burning down the forest was the only solution to saving the trees. Yes, as a preservationist, I occasionally speak euphemistically about demolition on a scale still a bit unfathomable - for reasons obvious, and also because I did not watch it - but each caller and visitor has given me the same subset of answers when asked how he or she feels when passing by the site of his or her former domicile - that it was sacrificed in the name of progress.
Many relocatees moved on to houses far more comfortable, and I can say this in the context of living within construction sites for the past twenty-five years (what can I say? - I take my time when hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of rehabilitation dollars), of having too many moments when a brand new house - or any house other than mine - seemed the only verifiable route to sanity and a room finished enough to buy a couch or hang a picture or cease apologizing. So it is truly humbling and gratifying to hear from folks who believe, thanks in part to EBDI, that you can come home again.
Each call, each visit, is yet another affirmation that burning down the forest was the only solution to saving the trees. Yes, as a preservationist, I occasionally speak euphemistically about demolition on a scale still a bit unfathomable - for reasons obvious, and also because I did not watch it - but each caller and visitor has given me the same subset of answers when asked how he or she feels when passing by the site of his or her former domicile - that it was sacrificed in the name of progress.
Many relocatees moved on to houses far more comfortable, and I can say this in the context of living within construction sites for the past twenty-five years (what can I say? - I take my time when hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of rehabilitation dollars), of having too many moments when a brand new house - or any house other than mine - seemed the only verifiable route to sanity and a room finished enough to buy a couch or hang a picture or cease apologizing. So it is truly humbling and gratifying to hear from folks who believe, thanks in part to EBDI, that you can come home again.
Urban Fields of Green
Autumn adventures beyond Baltimore City limits took me to areas I assumed were somehow protected and would always remain pristine - shocking me with vista after vista sullied with inappropriate, poorly designed, cheaply constructed, non-contextual, cardboard crap. On those journeys north, I encountered very early to mid-morning unbroken lines of traffic resembling nothing short of a mass evacuation into Baltimore City.
All the newfangled light bulbs, high-tech solar hot water systems, and single-stream recycling can never stamp out the carbon footprint resulting from the plowing under of farm after farm and the aftermath of this ultimate form of anti-green violence.
Developers seek a blank page, but that's also available in the center of Baltimore City - witness more-fabulous-by-the-minute Harbor East; modular housing construction in the Oliver neighborhood; the in-progress restoration of the city's most fanciful Victorian brickpile, the American Brewery; and, of course, EBDI's on-going, staggering transformation within our piano - with an eye to jump the piano in the not-too-distant future.
One developer friend refers to large-scale rehabilitation and build-from-scratch projects as urban farming, and with tens of thousands of vacant buildings and lots, there's no shortage of opportunities. The recent challenge of trying to find a reasonably safe walking/biking route between my house in Bolton Hill and my job at EBDI - all of two miles, past some abandoned rows similar to Bolton Hill, save for the dearth of people to love them - made me realize the need to insure we go beyond developing random parcels to farming the ribbons in between so the city can grow more quickly back together.
When - not if - the scarcity of energy pushes and freezes a gallon of gas north of five dollars, commuters fighting their way into the City of Baltimore and armies of developers will recognize that acres of abandonment are the next green pastures.
All the newfangled light bulbs, high-tech solar hot water systems, and single-stream recycling can never stamp out the carbon footprint resulting from the plowing under of farm after farm and the aftermath of this ultimate form of anti-green violence.
Developers seek a blank page, but that's also available in the center of Baltimore City - witness more-fabulous-by-the-minute Harbor East; modular housing construction in the Oliver neighborhood; the in-progress restoration of the city's most fanciful Victorian brickpile, the American Brewery; and, of course, EBDI's on-going, staggering transformation within our piano - with an eye to jump the piano in the not-too-distant future.
One developer friend refers to large-scale rehabilitation and build-from-scratch projects as urban farming, and with tens of thousands of vacant buildings and lots, there's no shortage of opportunities. The recent challenge of trying to find a reasonably safe walking/biking route between my house in Bolton Hill and my job at EBDI - all of two miles, past some abandoned rows similar to Bolton Hill, save for the dearth of people to love them - made me realize the need to insure we go beyond developing random parcels to farming the ribbons in between so the city can grow more quickly back together.
When - not if - the scarcity of energy pushes and freezes a gallon of gas north of five dollars, commuters fighting their way into the City of Baltimore and armies of developers will recognize that acres of abandonment are the next green pastures.
07 May 2008
You Can't Currently Get There From Here
Scheduling a recent truck repair proved problematic, not for the lack of a good mechanic, but the impossibility of finding a realistically safe walking/biking route between Bolton Hill and EBDI-land.
It's exactly two miles from my front door to our rehabs, but a smidge less than half of that traverses areas of intense abandonment, including Oliver, with a reported 44% of the buildings blocked or boarded and a much higher percentage blighted. My morning jolt's provided not by Woodworker's Espresso, but an unpleasant change of scenery as Mount Vernon's cozy Biddle Street crosses Fallsway. In my prior job with Baltimore Housing, I regularly walked through here, but I nonetheless psychically exhale as I slip east into our footprint - my other home, my other safe harbor.
Our rehabs are, of course, but a small part of EBDI’s $1.8 billion, 88 acre redevelopment – no, make that, re-imagination, of our swath of East Baltimore. And EBDI is driving other development. M.J. “Jay” Brodie, president of the Baltimore Development Corporation, noting that “EBDI is not just a dream now,” has launched another attempt to revive Oldtown Mall. New modular houses are being erected at Caroline and Preston Streets and a rehabbed house in the 1500 block of Biddle Street is on the market for $205,000. Response to our RFP for a general contractor was intense and I have received numerous, almost panicked calls from prospective buyers asking how to assume a spot on the waiting list for one of these classic, yet ready-for-the-future, homes. Odd to say, but for EBDI, there’s a silver lining in the energy and housing crises.
Still, I’m impatient for the healing in my native city to fan out further and faster.
At the end of the workday, I ride home west on Preston Street, past some rows grand and identical to Bolton Hill, save for a heartbreaking dearth of humans to love them. Eutaw Place's (former) Temple Oheb Shalom looms large; home is such a comforting sight that it's almost a guilty ache.
It's exactly two miles from my front door to our rehabs, but a smidge less than half of that traverses areas of intense abandonment, including Oliver, with a reported 44% of the buildings blocked or boarded and a much higher percentage blighted. My morning jolt's provided not by Woodworker's Espresso, but an unpleasant change of scenery as Mount Vernon's cozy Biddle Street crosses Fallsway. In my prior job with Baltimore Housing, I regularly walked through here, but I nonetheless psychically exhale as I slip east into our footprint - my other home, my other safe harbor.
Our rehabs are, of course, but a small part of EBDI’s $1.8 billion, 88 acre redevelopment – no, make that, re-imagination, of our swath of East Baltimore. And EBDI is driving other development. M.J. “Jay” Brodie, president of the Baltimore Development Corporation, noting that “EBDI is not just a dream now,” has launched another attempt to revive Oldtown Mall. New modular houses are being erected at Caroline and Preston Streets and a rehabbed house in the 1500 block of Biddle Street is on the market for $205,000. Response to our RFP for a general contractor was intense and I have received numerous, almost panicked calls from prospective buyers asking how to assume a spot on the waiting list for one of these classic, yet ready-for-the-future, homes. Odd to say, but for EBDI, there’s a silver lining in the energy and housing crises.
Still, I’m impatient for the healing in my native city to fan out further and faster.
At the end of the workday, I ride home west on Preston Street, past some rows grand and identical to Bolton Hill, save for a heartbreaking dearth of humans to love them. Eutaw Place's (former) Temple Oheb Shalom looms large; home is such a comforting sight that it's almost a guilty ache.
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