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Hometown Boy Journeys Through a Less-Traveled Baltimore
 | | ArtToday.com | | A 19th-century schooner docks near Fells Point's cobblestone streets. |
"Keep going until you see the Domino Sugars sign down by the water. If you got eyes, you can't miss it."
- Directions to Baltimore
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Hop in, let's ride around.
Baltimore is my town as it was my father's town before me, and I am going to show you around.
Whether you've just landed at Harborplace on a bus trip, grew up here and moved away or, like so many of us, never left, there are secrets to be learned
about the Queen City of the Patapsco.
Some of them can be looked up at the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Cathedral Street, the temple of books across from the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother Church of Roman Catholicism in the United States.
Among its goodies, the Pratt holds a lock of Edgar Allan Poe's dark and wavy hair. At the Basilica, you can glean the history of the Church in Baltimore in every crevice.
But not all cherries can be plucked from a book or a shrine.
To gather up the rest, I will eavesdrop for you, peek in row house windows and walk down the alleys looking for ripe figs growing through a fence made of twisted wire. And then try to tell you what it means.
"Baltimore is increasingly a place of emblems," says the author Tom Nugent, who covered the city he calls "Crabtown" for decades before disappearing into the wilds of Michigan. "Everything there - a gate, a window - seems to point to some larger mystery, a secret you can't fully articulate but can participate in if you learn how.
"Look in the window of a Korean laundry on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Highlandtown, and there's a cat slumbering on the ledge inside," says Nugent, who chased a constellation of emblems in the years he lived near Patterson Park and then off of Harford Road. "Wait until the cat's head swivels and your eyes meet. In the design of that moment, you'll recognize something that says: 'I point the way!'"
And it's all side-by-side with the historic - Fort McHenry; the fabulous - the American Visionary Art Museum on Key Highway; and the ridiculous - coming down the sidewalk now in bedroom slippers and a house coat.
Just the other day, I heard this gem over a cup of coffee at the 24-hour-a-day Sip & Bite diner on the Canton waterfront. "I hate bread," said the lady, picking at a Greek salad. "The only time I'll eat bread is when they bring a basket of it in a restaurant. Don't give me no sandwich. I'll just eat the lunch meat on a plate."
Pure Baltimore, at once quirky, inexplicable, charming.
Right now, I'm sitting on the curb at the foot of Broadway, where the end of the road meets the harbor at Thames Street in Fells Point, where the Domino Sugars sign glows cigarette-ember orange every night across the channel in Locust Point.
 | | ArtToday.com | | A tugboat works the harbor, now dominated by yachts and sailboats. |
Before me, a tugboat is tying up at the Recreation Pier, and I think of my father, who showed up here every day for more than 30 years as an engineer for the old Baker-Whitely towing company. To my left stands the shell of Karcz's Café, a former stag bar from the early days of the last century, a place of dark, heavy wood and saloon tables where Mom and Dad would take us on Friday nights and have a few drinks while we visited the family who lived there, the fabled Garayoas.
Karcz's is vacant again. Ever since our friends sold 805 South Broadway some 30 years ago when a highway was scheduled to flatten Fells Point, a series of absurd business ventures - including a wave-forsaken surf shop - have failed there. A few blocks behind me, revelers are spending up to $5 a bottle for boutique beers in fancy-pants joints that used to be boarding houses for seamen from around the world.
My Baltimore history began in a Spanish seamen's club when my namesake grandfather landed here from Galicia in the mid-1920s, got drunk and missed the ship.
No Statue of Liberty. No Ellis Island. Just a lifetime of building ships for Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point.
I speak reverently of old-timers, people whose lives taught me to spot characters in every corner of Crabtown. And because every generation sends a hero up the pop charts, it is not long before an heir to Mister Diz and Ted the Clown stops by the curb to chat.
Mattie Nadol, a young 36, is a suburban kid who came of age in the 1980s and more or less raised himself in Fells Point after leaving home at age 17 upon the death of his mother. "Who knows about taste? But if I was going to tell people what to do in Baltimore, I'd start right here in Fells Point and begin looking at the historical stuff," says Nadol, a waiter who is set to
become a first-time homeowner near Our Lady of Pompei in Highlandtown, right around the corner from DiPasquales, a world-class Italian deli. "I show people history, and it’s not always pleasant."
Nadol points toward downtown and says: "There's no plaque there, but you can walk to the Fallsway above Pratt Street and see where the first Civil War deaths happened - four Union soldiers and 13 locals.
 | | ArtToday.com | | Children play on a cannon at the historic, star-shaped Fort McHenry. |
"And when I was a little kid, you could go over near Brown's Wharf [in Fells Point] and still see the manacles where they locked up slaves coming off the ships. That way, nobody would get offended, and the merchants could walk down Broadway to see what they wanted to buy. Up until about three years ago, I could still go over there and find the bolts."
If they're not already in somebody's basement, the missing bolts will likely be on display at the newest jewel rising in the Inner Harbor, the Reginald F. Lewis Maryland Museum of African-American History and Culture. Covering some 350 years, the $33 million museum is heavily subsidized by a foundation named in honor of Lewis, the 50-year-old chairman and CEO of TLC Beatrice International at the time of his death in 1993. The museum is scheduled to open in 2003.
Maybe I'll see you watching heavy machinery at the construction site, right near the corner of Pratt and President streets, just north of Little Italy.
Until then, in the time it takes to click your mouse to Maryland.com, all of Crabtown can be yours.
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Rafael Alvarez is the author of Hometown Boy, a book of newspaper pieces from The (Baltimore) Sun, and Orlo and Leini, a collection of short stories.
Other Stories by Rafael Alvarez
Mister Baltimore Goes to the Movies
Mr. Baltimore's Night on the Town
Pilgrims Flock to Shrine of Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes
More...
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