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Mr. Baltimore Haunts Gotham City
When the summer ended, I made my way to New York City to knock on some doors in the literary world, walk the streets of Manhattan with a notebook in my pocket and get the hell away from Mr. Baltimore.
 | | In Baltimore, wise men honor miracles with gold, frankincense, myrrh. and Old Bay. |
After a week in Ocean City, a Halloween in which he insisted in giving out complimentary tins of Old Bay instead of candy and a long Thanksgiving harangue at the Eastern House about how next year we could turn our stretch of Highlandtown into 34th Street in Hampden, I had to get away.
I figured the one place on Earth he’d never find me – besides some dot.com yuppie lounge on Boston Street – would be the Big Apple, Gotham City, the Land of Manhattoes belted round by wharves, the home of the hated Yankees.
Everything that Charm City is not.
"Baltimore is a place where the people seem to have more time for each other," says Bill Grossman, a lifelong New Yorker and assistant conductor on the Broadway show “Cats" from 1985 until the show closed in 2002. “You don't get a sense that there's this big metropolis lording over you."
Metropolis?
Try being lorded over by a Ritalin-deprived half-wit with a half-dozen cups of Daily Grind coffee in him.
Walking down 20th Street toward Union Square not long ago, jingling a pocketful of trivia after visiting the Teddy Roosevelt Birthplace – the Brazilians un-poetically renamed the River of Doubt “Rio Roosevelt" after Teddy explored it in 1914 - I chomped a hot dog on the street and whistling through the red hots: “He’ll never find me here . . ."
 | | Mr. Baltimore gets off the bus at the Port Authority bus terminal after a 3 hour ride from the Baltimore Travel Plaza on O’Donnell Street near Highlandtown |
Silly me.
Washing the dog down with a cheap bottle of water from a street vendor, I spot the Baltimore Colts gym bag across the park and before you can say “Artie Donovan," he’s on me like a cheap suit.
Curses, foiled again.
“Thought I’d find you here," he says, gesturing to all the raggedy protestors in the park and before I could ask him how the hell he trapped me, he starts in right away with: “Let me tell you about a real Big Apple."
I slump down on the closest bench and get a five-minute info-merical on Lisa Anne and her hand-dipped caramel apples back home on North Charles Street.
“Best in Bawlmer or New York," he says. “Big fat Granny Smith’s – tart like putting your tongue on the end of one of them nine volt batteries, the square ones? - dipped in caramel and chocolate and nuts . . ."
 | | A Caramel Apple |
“But how . . . how did you . . .?"
“Your mother told me. And I figured if I sat here watching these wing nuts whoop and holler and carry-on, you’d be coming along soon enough."
Mr. Baltimore grins that stupid, “I’m two steps ahead of you, bunky" grin of his and if he was capable of pronouncing ‘viola!, " he would.
With trepidation: “How long you staying?"
“Until I’ve had my fun."
“Okay, Johnny Appleseed," I say, picking up his bag and heading for the subway. “Let’s go. I need a strong shot of something."
From Union Square, we take the L train to Brooklyn and in the station – near a woman selling DVDs of movies that just hit the theater that day and a guy playing one of those three-string Japanese shamisen – I spot bluesman Robert Ross handing out anti-war leaflets and whistling the "Fixin' to Die Rag."
 | | Ross plays genuine Delta blues at hospitals, prisons and nursing homes to make people feel better. |
Ross, who in a quarter- century of blues has shared a stage with everyone from J.B. Hutto to Lightnin’ Hopkins and the great Johnny Winter, asks when he might get a gig “down South" with the Baltimore Blues Society and Mr. Baltimore says he’ll work on it.
“I know some people," he says.
Ross flashes us a peace sign and we get on the train where Mr. B tries to bait the locals with his old school Orioles’ cartoon cap, but there isn’t a soul in Gotham paying a bit of attention to him.
We get off at the Graham Avenue stop – an old Italian neighborhood between Williamsburg and Green Point that seems to be more than halfway gentrified by artists and young professionals. It is said to be the setting for the Johnny Depp mobster film, Donnie Brasco.
I’d been staying there with Peter Walsh, an artist and co-founder of the Baltimore Arts journal LINK who moved from Mobtown to Gotham about five years ago.
 | | The Orioles’ first home game of 2004 is Monday, April 5 against Boston at Camden Yards. |
[For my dollar, Walsh’s greatest artistic triumph took place in 2000 when he schlepped two bushels of live blue crabs from the Mercy High School parking lot to Manhattan and steamed them atop a Wall Street office building.
The lucky guests as this unlikely feast were artists, writers, musicians and film-makers from around the world, all of them learning to eat a crab steamed the local way; digging into tasty back-fin and an exchange of cultures that otherwise would not have happened beyond the Chesapeake.]
Across the street from Walsh’s apartment stands the Capri Caffe, the kingdom of Joe Rinaldi, who year after year is honored as the man who makes the best iced coffee in all of New York City.
Not coffee with a few ice cubes in it – I know, it’s hard to get your mind around that idea in winter – but strong, rich coffee turned into ice granules, like a coffee Slurpee.
 | | Regina Monfort | | "I am more handsome than Al Pacino – forget about it!" |
Fabulous stuff, and he has the awards from various New York newspapers tacked around the shop to prove it.
“Kind of like Mugsy’s back on Fawn Street," said Mr. B, settling into one of Joe’s chairs – nice chairs made of wicker covered in plastic the colors of the Italian flag. “Except Mugsy don’t serve coffee like this."
Except that Joe is just a bit more personable than Mugsy Mugavero. Joe Rinaldi, in fact, is a sweetheart.
And his fans know that his coffee shop – with Sinatra on the stereo and dusty Tom Jones 33 rpm record albums for sale – is more authentic than much of what passes for New York’s Little Italy on Mulberry Street over in lower Manhattan.
“I come from a town called Buonabitacolo in Salerno," says Joe, 63, serving up a couple of double-espressos to me and my bunky from Baltimore. “I left Italy at age 13 when my mother remarried and we moved to Argentina. Then in 1965 I came here to visit relatives. I never left."
Joe’s first job in the neighborhood was as a custom tailor making vests for a tuxedo factory.
“I was reading so much about America back then – Life, Look, the Readers Digest," he said. “I was very sad to leave Italy, but I was in love with this country before came here."
 | | Mr. Baltimore pretends he's at the Grand Central Station oyster bar. |
He was apprenticed to be a barber, his grandfather’s profession – “such a beautiful trade, you get to pass the time with people . . . and I never saw a barber starve" – but a spat with his mentor soured him.
So he serves coffee and plays Sinatra and Dino – throwing in Jimmy Durante from time to time, “a very humble man," says Joe – and makes friends with folks who wander in like me and Mr. Baltimore and French-born photographer Regina Monfort.
And the oldtimers from the neighborhood sit at the tables – out on the sidewalk in nice weather – watch the world go by and make declarations.
“As long as you’re living today, don’t worry about it."
“Living today!" smiled Mr. Baltimore over his coffee cup, finding a small patch of New York to his liking. “Ain’t we living today? Ain’t it?"
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Visit other Baltimore neighborhoods: AlvarezFiction.com
Other Stories by Rafael Alvarez
Mister Baltimore Goes to the Movies
Mr. Baltimore's Night on the Town
A Hometown Boy Celebrates The Less-Traveled Baltimore
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