The Sage and His City

Baltimore is generally considered by Easterners to be a dull and depressing place, a sort of coastal Scranton. It is in fact a city of great, albeit provincial, charm, despite its brown and badly bruised areas, like the soft spots on an apple. The Penn Central tracks approach the city from the north in a circumspect curve, as though guided by some overweening flight controller. If you are sitting on the right side of the car, your first warning of the approaching metropolis comes when the track- side factories begin to yield to parallel rows of two-story brick houses exposing their wooden rumps to Amtrak passengers. Then the flat topography begins to bulge, and the little houses, bristling with chimney pots and trimmed with white Maryland marble, go tumbling over the swells that seem as endless as an Iowa cornfield.

Even the rebuilt parts of the city belong somehow to an era when the phrase “border state” had real political, architectural, cultural, and culinary significance. The streets are narrow, with melting curbstones, and as swept as a suburban driveway; the marble stoops as scrubbed as the federal buildings forty miles away. As in London or Belfast, the windows in the slum districts have the high polish of determined gentility and, most of them, fresh linen curtains.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Baltimore is generally considered by Easterners to be a dull and depressing place, a sort of coastal Scranton. It is in fact a city of great, albeit provincial, charm, despite its brown and badly bruised areas, like the soft spots on an apple. The Penn Central tracks approach the city from the north in a circumspect curve, as though guided by some overweening flight controller. If you are sitting on the right side of the car, your first warning of the approaching metropolis comes when the track- side factories begin to yield to parallel rows of two-story brick houses exposing their wooden rumps to Amtrak passengers. Then the flat topography begins to bulge, and the little houses, bristling with chimney pots and trimmed with white Maryland marble, go tumbling over the swells that seem as endless as an Iowa cornfield.

Even the rebuilt parts of the city belong somehow to an era when the phrase “border state” had real political, architectural, cultural, and culinary significance. The streets are narrow, with melting curbstones, and as swept as a suburban driveway; the marble stoops as scrubbed as the federal buildings forty miles away. As in London or Belfast, the windows in the slum districts have the high polish of determined gentility and, most of them, fresh linen curtains.