BALTIMORE
Each visit to Baltimore used to put me in a bad mood. Enormous, gloomy, it salutes to you with smoke from the industrial chimneys, twines around with the layers of highways, and you, insignificant in your car amid others are sucked in. Crowded grey buildings hang over the streets filled with the cars; the despondent inhabitants swarming between them. The hum of traffic gives the illusion of a busy city; the hasty movement of people in their daily ritual. The city, sitting on the Atlantic coastline seems to vacuum in all the darkness around it.
Maybe it’s an exaggeration, but when I found Edgar Allan Poe’s grave in the graveyard of one of the old churches in the center of city, I understood the roots of his mysterious creativity. Only in such an obscure place could someone be able to write such dismal stories.
Even though beautiful places can still be discovered in Baltimore, for me it’s a city that we lost.
Comments from classmates:
Kitty writes: Well written, Lena. I remember Baltimore in the 50's and 60's and only some of it had inner-city gloom. Even then it had the potential of being over-crowed and depressing.
Jean writes: Lena, this is a compelling piece. You have used powerful verbs: salutes, twines, sucked in, vacuum in, etc, that add to the gloomy atmosphere. Well done!
Renee writes: Lena,
You are dead on in your description. Being Irish immigrants, my grandfather and his family grew up in Baltimore. The stories they tell me of the pride that neighbors took in cleaning their stoops (porches) and looking after one another is completely lost on me when I see the city as it is now. For years, people have tried to revitalize it in vain. I do enjoy visitng Fells Point and The Inner Harbor, but that's as far as I go. It truly has become a 'lost' city, as you say.