Discuss - KunstlerCast #104: Virtual Tour of Baltimore - Part 1

[Duncan]

KunstlerCast #104: Virtual Tour of Baltimore - Part 1
A Poster Child of Contracting Cities

Released: March 25, 2010

James Howard Kunstler sometimes thinks of Baltimore, Maryland as the poster child for how cities are going to contract in this country and around the world as we enter into a new energy era. In many ways, Kunstler says Baltimore is a very damaged city, but there are some parts of it that are quite interesting fun and heartening. During this episode, JHK gives a virtual tour of B'more using Google Street view. Before zooming in, however, he takes a moment to appreciate the geography of the Cheasapeak Bay system and to discuss the history and possible future of shipping in that region.

Direct Download:
KunstlerCast_104.mp3
(27 MB | 42:20 mins.)

NOTE: YOU MUST VISIT THIS PAGE FOR THE GOOGLE STREET VIEW WINDOWS: http://kunstlercast.com/shows/KunstlerCast_104_Virtual_Tour_Baltimore_Part_1.html

Sponsor:



Support for this program comes from the Congress for the New Urbanism, the nation's leading forum dedicated to advancing urbanism and promoting alternatives to sprawl. CNU's 18th annual Congress,"New Urbanism: Prescription for Healthy Places" will be held in Atlanta,  May 19 - 22, organized with help from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It will feature 90 plus sessions, tours, and immersive experiences with world's leading thinkers and builders of good urbanism, and prominent researchers into the health impacts of how places are built, including the CD's Dr. Howard Frumkin, co-author of "Urban Sprawl and Public Health."  Register today, at: www.cnu18.org

[noodles]

no hipsters?

[JW]

Great episode, I look forward to next week's part II

I visited Baltimore a few years ago and stayed in a hotel at Mt. Vernon Square, it is a beautiful neighborhood and public space (I'd say among the top in the country) but that whole neighborhood seems unfortunately very dead. It seems like it could be so much more with that great historic urban fabric, public square/monument, institutions (art museum & music school) and its general location.

One would think Charles Street near the Mt. Vernon Square would be a thriving retail and restaurant street with sidewalk activity going late into the night, something like South Street in Philadelphia or Newbury Street in Boston.

Also Charles Street screams to be a two-way street again, that one way traffic flow I think ruins the prominence of the monument and probably also hurts the retail on Charles. Traffic on Charles Street should be slow and two-way and not a couplet designed to move traffic fast through the neighborhood. I saw that there is a plan for a Portland-style streetcar, though unfortunately it is planned to reinforce the 1950s-era one way Charles Street traffic configuration. Video rendering of Charles Street streetcar http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0i8bibLZv8

Baltimore has so much potential and could be on par with other great urban pedestrian-oriented American cities like Boston, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia. For starters they could begin with a dramatically improved transit system. I recall Baltimore has some truely run down places, it sounds like you guys are going to check out Howard Street next week, I look forward to hearing about that.

Will the KunstlerCast being going to or reporting from CNU 18?

[Spendy]

It's a little unfortunate that Jim couldn't see more parts of the city. He's mistaken at a couple points where he says, "if you only travel a couple more blocks, you're in a bad part of town."

He spent a lot of time right around the harbor, which is not necessarily classic Baltimore. A lot of it was put up during the housing boom to cash in, and a lot of the commercial development was done during the 70s/80's/90s as part of the harbor revitilization, and looks a lot like a lot of touristy parts of the country (Cheesecake Factory, ESPNZone, etc.)

There are parts further away from downtown, like the neighborhood of Roland Park, originally built as suburbs, and possibly summer homes, around the turn of the century. Streetview:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=roland+park+baltimore&sll=39.290385,-76.612189&sspn=0.389005,0.591888&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Roland+Park,+Baltimore,+Maryland&ll=39.351456,-76.631956&spn=0.024292,0.036993&z=15&layer=c&cbll=39.351281,-76.631957&panoid=frDEVRF09s9CSL9Ga82W7A&cbp=12,97.76,,0,-3.56

There are other, less busy, row home sections of Baltimore which have yards, and are near parks (zoom out on the street view to see the proximity to the park):

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=3740+Beech+Ave,+Baltimore,+MD+21211&sll=39.290385,-76.612189&sspn=0.389005,0.591888&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=3740+Beech+Ave,+Baltimore,+Maryland+21211&z=16&layer=c&cbll=39.334154,-76.626946&panoid=yYZLVVUL-MRl6qKgM0xznA&cbp=12,334.45,,0,5.73

Those neighborhoods are walking distance to organic commercial districts with merchants that fight hard to keep national chains out, and are able to get by without "missing teeth" parking lots. Stroll down this street of mixed retail/residence. . .

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=36th+street+baltimore&sll=39.35129,-76.631956&sspn=0.024424,0.036993&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=W+36th+St,+Baltimore,+Maryland&ll=39.331202,-76.630701&spn=0.012149,0.018497&z=16&layer=c&cbll=39.331196,-76.630829&panoid=quMx2dRE0zrYMUc-WRYAbg&cbp=12,354.81,,0,1.31

One thing that might not have been made apparent to Jim is that Baltimore has become a little bit of a bed room community for people who work in DC, or the northern suburbs of DC (which contains defense and health contractors, NASA, NSA, etc.). For the most part, it's cheaper than living in many of the DC burbs, or definitely DC itself. They're actively trying to revitalize (with some success, and some comic failure) the area around the train station that runs into DC.

Also, Jim would have missed parks such as Druid Hill and Patterson. . .classic turn of the century parks, pretty well utilized.

Anyway, that's a little more info. Thanks for the podcast. Thanks for doing one on Baltimore that was honest, and not overly negative.

[Note from Moderator: Fixed one of your hyperlinks]

[Duncan]

It's a little unfortunate that Jim couldn't see more parts of the city. He's mistaken at a couple points where he says, "if you only travel a couple more blocks, you're in a bad part of town."

We'll be exploring other parts of Baltimore next week. Also, I don't think he was being literal when he said a couple more blocks.

[Cedar]

when i hear Baltimore i think of Randy Newman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rcSb8LgPQc&feature=related

[marcszar]

We'll be exploring other parts of Baltimore next week. Also, I don't think he was being literal when he said a couple more blocks.

I don't know if Jim was speaking literally or not, but he is quite accurate when he implied that good neighborhoods are just a stone's throw from really bad ones. I'm not a native "Baltimoron" but whenever I visit the city I definitely get the impression (and every Baltimorean I've met has agreed) that, although you can generalize wide sections of the city as either "good" or "bad," the city is actually composed of a patchwork of really good and really bad neighborhoods that stand uncomfortably close to each other. From the Baltimore City Paper:

"...The city's welcoming aspects and its ominous aspects often exist side by side with each other, sometimes separated by a mere block or two. Baltimore is, as the local cliché goes, a city of neighborhoods, and while certain large generalizations hold true—large swathes of the east and west sides are struggling and blighted, while North Baltimore and the areas ringing the harbor are home to many of the city's toniest enclaves—individual districts can vary wildly. Mostly white neighborhoods abut mostly black neighborhoods, which adjoin comfortably (or uncomfortably) mixed neighborhoods. The housing stock varies from mansions, new or old, to classic middle-class Baltimore red brick/marble steps rowhouses to blocks of boarded-up vacants, sometimes within steps of each other. You can spend a morning browsing local organic produce and baked goods at one of the weekend farmer's markets only to stumble into an open-air drug market a very short aimless meander later..."

People who live in large cities that are well-segregated into poor and rich areas might have a difficult time understanding how Baltimore's good and bad neighborhoods are so unusually close to each other, so I'll leave it to some native Baltimoreans to explain:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=18114714&postcount=39
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=18540290&postcount=59
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=18549042&postcount=60
These posts are from this thread: http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=566732

I sometimes wonder if this odd adjacency between very good and very bad neighborhoods is responsible for Baltimore's high crime. Of course, if you're not involved in the drug trade your chances of being a victim of violent crime drops considerably. But a while back I read an interesting article on the extreme crime in Chicago's old Cabrini-Green high rise housing projects (I wish I remember what the name of the magazine/journal was and who the author was but I don't). The article posited that a lot of the violence in Cabrini-Green was due to the fact that it was so close to Chicago's wealthy Lincoln Park and Gold Coast neighborhoods and that the violence was the result of a lot of gangs trying to control the lucrative drug market for the Gold Coast (a lot of rich kids from the Gold Coast would indirectly get their drugs from Cabrini-Green). That is to say, easy access to a wealthy "market" eager for illegal drugs made the Cabrini-Green projects more violent than they normally would be (I still think that Cabrini-Green's Corbusian towers-in-the-park were miserable failures and that their architecture directly contributed to the crime). But I think that the article's position could be applied to Baltimore as well: the violent neighborhoods are violent because a lot of people are trying to control "market share" to the nearby wealthy neighborhoods (full of rich kids with an incessant demand for drugs). I think if Baltimore was like other big cities where poor and rich are concentrated in homogeneous districts there would be less violence, or at least it would be confined to more limited areas.

Anyway, great show Duncan and Jim! I don't know how many times Jim's been to Baltimore, but he seems to know a lot about it. The comments on formstone and on the typology of the ubiquitous Baltimore rowhouse were spot on. I remember in one of Jim's old book reviews (might have been this one), he briefly mentioned how Baltimore and Philadelphia were unique 19th century cities because they so eagerly adopted the rowhouse as the basic building block of the city while other cities (i.e.- New York) preferred to fill their streets with tenements, apartment buildings, or single-family houses. Does Jim discuss in further detail the weird infatuation Baltimore has with the rowhouse in the next podcast? I call it an infatuation because Baltimore, unlike most other postwar American cities, continued building rowhouses on its suburban fringes well into the 1950s, and possibly even into the early 1960s (Of course housing construction shifted to single-family houses by the 1960s as it did everywhere else in America). Baltimore is really interesting because, unlike any other American city (except for Philly perhaps), you can find suburban-style neighborhoods with winding streets and cul-de-sacs on the fringes of Baltimore that are lined with rowhouses! (albeit crappy-looking 1950s-style rowhouses that are nowhere near as pleasant-looking as those in the city core). Baltimore has vast suburbs with single-family houses too, but it's one of the few cities I've seen that has large, car-dependent, suburban-style neighborhoods composed of rowhouses. See here, for example. (It looks really weird when a line of rowhouses tries to bend with the curve of a suburban street - the developers ended up breaking the rowhouses into blocks of five or six rather than employing a curving "street wall" as is typical of older B'more rowhouse neighborhoods).

[Sprawlwerks]

Wow, Baltimore has an impressive urban fabric!  I've looked at the real estate prices of Federal Hill, and it's quite pricey (300k for a few modest 3 bedroom apts and 1.5 million for 4 bedroom apts near the park!).  Is that area filled with lots of old money?  How do those people afford the apartments in such a city with low median incomes and such high crime rates?  Perhaps independently wealthy people are so desperate to reside in such a tight urban fabric that they are willing to live in such modest and expensive dwellings in such a high crime city?  Imagine if a higher proportion of cities in the US were built with moderately dense populations, pedestrian friendly streets, and good public transportation.  Those pockets of urbanity wouldn't be as expensive as the few pockets of urbanity that people flock to today. 

[Spendy]

I'll follow up on a couple points from earlier.

It's definitely true that in some parts of Baltimore, bad and good neighborhood basically abut. But, it doesn't feel like some parts of New York (used to?) feel where it could go good-bad-good-creepy-good as you strolled down an avenue. There are definitely wide swaths where you just won't go east of a certain street until the city limits, or conversely, if you're centralized, you could basically walk from 25th street to Pennsylvania and not hit a bad neighborhood. Of course this means the more buffered you are, the more money you pay to live.

To Sprawlwerks. . .like I mentioned before, the median incomes might be low, but a lot of people work in DC and Suburban DC where median incomes are not low. Also, don't discount that the housing bubble hasn't completely unwound in Baltimore yet. There are neighborhoods that appreciated 200%. Prices still have a ways to fall, or a long time to stagnate, depending how you want to look at it.

I, too, was impressed with some of Jim's knowledge, like on the Formstone. THere's actually a documentary called "Little Castles" that focuses on Baltimore formstone. . . http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0356826/

[Andy R]

One more thing Baltimore has going for it - half decent land-use planning in the surrounding counties, preventing the type of exurban sprawl you see south of DC, around Atlnata, California (as illustrated in the thread "From bucolic bliss to 'gated ghetto' ")

Having a rural area within 15 miles of a downtown is unusual for American cities, and I think it adds to the urban quality of life.

I will say that the TV show "The Wire" - pretty accurate depiction of what goes on in certain areas of town - and they are not isolated pockets either - this shit spills over into surrounding neighborhoods quite often. Interracial crime is prevalent in these otherwise "safe" neighborhoods, but the newscasts tend to gloss over this as much as possible, and the police know whose tax dollars pay their salary, so it is an open secret that resources go where crime shouldn't be happening.

The War on Drugs has left quite a few scars on Baltimore and until we wise up about fighting unwinnable wars, the problem will continue to detract from what could otherwise be a world-class place to call home.