We have a rich literary history; in fact, Baltimore’s old motto “The City That Reads” may as well have been “The City That Writes”—Frederick Douglass, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, H.L. Mencken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Dos Passos, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, John Barth, Madison Smartt Bell, Stephen Dixon, Laura Lippman, Alice McDermott, and Anne Tyler all have lived and/or written in Baltimore.
I have never felt at home anywhere, which is why I have always wanted to leave. When I graduated from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the mid-1990s, I came back to East Baltimore to live with my grandparents for a few months and apply to graduate schools. I had always viewed myself as a transient, an outsider. I wanted to go to graduate school in New Mexico. I saw myself in DC or New York or San Francisco after that. Not here, with the duckpin bowling, the hons, The Record and Tape Traders in Dundalk that had way too many used Ace of Base CDs, the now-defunct Baltimore Sign Company on Haven Street, where I and two St. Mary’s alum proofed grocery signs and deleted, much to our pain, the serial commas.
And then I fell in love. First with a girl, then with the city of Baltimore. Neither one was love at first site. Both grew on me, in a familiar and easy way that I, in my early twenties, viewed with disdain and suspicion. Although I eventually broke up with the girl after 11 years, it’s been 20 years and I’m still in Charm City—first in Canton, now in Butcher’s Hill.
Baltimore is warm but pleasant...I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.― F. Scott Fitzgerald"Fitzgerald's famous quote about Baltimore might convey a town of Southern Gothic leanings to outsiders, but as a Baltimorean, I think it means that you can stroll through a neighborhood of stately, preserved brownstones while watching a rat leisurely cross the sidewalk. Or visit the Patterson Park Observatory (called the Pagoda by locals because its Victorian design is often mistaken for Asian) and throw away a box of fried chicken someone left behind on its steps. Like an imperfect gemstone, Baltimore’s real value lies in it being one of a kind. Established in the 18th century as part of the tobacco trade, Baltimore has always been known as a gritty harbor full of wharf rats and stevedores, a place where the newspaper would just as likely be used for fish-wrap as for reading."