We’re not talking about the monstrosities downtown. And, really, we’re not even talking about the cool old stuff everybody knows—the Belvedere, the Bromo-Seltzer Tower—worthy of admiration though they are.
We’re talking about the touches—odd, obscure, pretty, utilitarian, nostalgic, sometimes even spectacular—that you can’t see from the highways or you might miss when careening down the major thoroughfares. We’re talking about the bay windows and corner-house turrets in Charles Village; the fading near-mansions on Gwynn Falls Parkway; the stately rowhouses and gorgeous apartment buildings on Reservoir Hill and around the Washington Monument, and the squat shipbuilders’ and steelworkers’ homes in East and South Baltimore. There’s glowering City College, Mount Vernon’s soaring Gothic spires, East Baltimore’s Orthodox churches, the whiff of grandeur in the crumbling old theaters near Lexington Market and of failure in the rotting, rusting industrial hulks on the various waterfronts. There are unexpected little oddities—stained glass on houses on Abell Avenue, French Quarterish ironwork around Union Square, a golden-onion-topped clock tower at the First National Bank at Howard and Madison, the bizarre stone water tower down in Curtis Bay.
Seeing these buildings, you want to know their past, or imagine pasts for them: Who decided to put that there? Who were these houses, this neighborhood, built for—rich or poor, black or white, capital or labor? They tell stories. It’s the look of a city to be lived in, rather than gloried in.
