Talking to Myself, #8: Hamburgers
The truth is, I was raised just outside Baltimore. Yet, when I say where I’m from, I claim Baltimore. This upsets some, but, the other truth is, whether I claim it or not, Baltimore always claimed me.
I never had a connection to place. Where I lived was just where I lived. It held no significance to me. At best, it held a degree of cultural weight: I was a Jewish kid and so was damn near everybody else.
I would go into the city on occasion. A show, a game, a celebratory dinner, even an embarrassingly basic day out with a girlfriend. But, it was when my dad brought me with him to work as a kid that something stirred in me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I needed more of it. The feel of the street under my feet, the smell of the hot cement, the noise of life, and the history of all that this place has ever been.
It held me.
He worked on Fayette & Charles. For lunch, because of an unshakable appreciation for chicken nuggets, we’d walk to the McDonald’s under the sign for the old Hamburgers Department Store, for those that remember vintage Fayette. Under the sign, taking cover from the sun or rain or life itself, there would always be people. Some, it appeared to my young brain, might have been living under that sign, and often, but not always, they would ask passersby for a little spare change. I was a sheltered suburbs kid, I didn’t really know from that. That’s not to say that I was unfamiliar with the existence of a person not having permanent housing — I was, but that’s all I was…familiar. So what my dad did in those moments would end up laying the foundation for whatever race and class sensibility I would eventually end up with. And, every time, without fail, he’d come out of that McDonald's with three meals: one for me, one for him, and one for the person we had just met.
Some may read that story and accuse me of poverty voyeurism — that all too common refrain of a privileged kid in an underprivileged city experiencing someone else’s poverty on the absolute surface and desperately squeezing out every drop of self-validating feel-good juice they can muster.
But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t entertainment. If anything, it felt like kinship; the way the conversation played out between my dad and that person. I didn’t understand why, nor did I understand why any of the other work-a-day moments with my dad downtown were so viscerally impactful. I was too young to appreciate what I would come to learn was the real reason this place had a hold on me.
My dad was born in lower Park Heights, by Pimlico. My mom was raised a few blocks north of the Plaza. My dad’s dad was raised over west, my dad’s mom over east. Poor Jews. My great grandmother ran numbers for old time gangsters. Cops would show up at her door and she would eat the paper bets she took. A pro. My grandfather — half salesman, half hack — met my grandmother giving her a ride to work down to the still-standing Super Linens in Fells Point. She was pretty, so he cut her a discount.
Working-class Baltimore is in my DNA. It’s in my dad’s too. You can tell the difference between someone engaging a stranger on the street out of guilt-induced obligation or privilege pity versus a shared love of personhood and placehood. And while my parents raised me just outside the city — for all the too-typical raise-a-family-outside-the-city reasons — whenever my dad and I talk about Baltimore, he perks up in his seat and his eyes widen.
And yet, what Baltimore is… is lost on too many.
Baltimore is a blue-collar jazz town with more cultural significance in one intersection than most of the surrounding counties combined. Baltimore is not a night out or a weekend getaway. It’s not “near Philly” or “near DC”. It’s Baltimore.
Yet, because, for too many, Baltimore is for the taking, Baltimore is in crisis. It’s been in crisis for over a century. It’s been in crisis so long that entire generations have lived and died within the crisis. And we wonder why our own neighbors have trouble seeing Baltimore for what it is, and why it is.
The boarded-up blocks, the corner drug shops, the 13-year-olds hustling with squeegees, the shootouts in broad daylight — a sickness foisted upon Baltimore, not one endemic to it. Show me a problem plaguing Baltimore and I’ll show you a bank executive betting on failure, a predatory landlord raking in late fees, a developer signing lucrative City Hall contracts, a public official swimming in kickbacks, and a sociopathic police commander relishing in the thought of how many Black kids he wants thrown up against a wall today.
Underneath Baltimore’s surface is a history of condition. Condition forged in perpetual survival. And when a collective brain is in a constant state of fight, it gets sick and it gets tired. When we get sick and tired, we lash out, we say and do things we don’t mean, and we hurt the people around us.
Baltimore is sick and tired, but doesn’t deserve to be. Its poorest communities get routinely dragged through the mud in what amounts to victim blaming of the highest order, while its richest communities get routinely celebrated for — let’s be crystal clear — not being poor.
Except they are poor. Poor of connection and poor of culture. Baltimore will never claim them. No matter how many blocks they convert or how many shiny new storefronts they muscle into existence, they will never be part of this place.
Nor should they get to be.
Baltimore is a blue-collar jazz town. If that ain’t you, find another place to call home.
