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Recession Dispatch from…Baltimore

BALTIMORE—Richard Friedman wrote in the New York Times a few weeks ago that while it may take a few weeks for anti-depressants to start working, the “side effects, like sexual dysfunction, are often immediate.” Whether or not this is a metaphor for the stimulus package, it is a fact that many Baltimoreans, mostly suburban, mostly with their children in private schools, are suffering. They started swallowing Cymbalta, Effexor, and Celexa somewhere around Christmas and, two months into their visits to the Ruxton Pharmacy, the situation, both nationally and in Baltimore, couldn’t be worse.

Geographically speaking, Baltimore is a bit like the solar system. At its center is the white-hot engine of the Inner Harbor. Visitors know it as home to the National Aquarium and the Rouse Company-designed waterside mall-attraction called Harborplace. It’s also where T. Rowe Price, Legg Mason, and Constellation Energy are headquartered. First in planetary orbit around the tourist draws of the harbor are, as with the solar system itself, the lifeless and singed inner planets of Mercury and Venus: an urban wasteland of alternately torched row houses, locally known as the “hole in the doughnut.” Four miles beyond these scorched orbs, hot with gunfire, orbits Earth: the pleasant districts of landscaped Guilford and leafy Homeland. Further out, beyond the asteroid-like barrier of the city’s beltway, circle the real giants: Greenspring Valley, Hunt Valley, and Sparks. For 15 years the sun’s rays had been bathing these enclaves of hulking homes with bright light, heated pools, and Land Rovers.

But when Constellation Energy choked, grinding to a sickening halt in a matter of a few days last September, the city’s sun sputtered and went gassy. Consto, as it’s locally called, has been shrinking every day since. Baltimore’s other sun—The Baltimore Sun—has been collapsing at the same rate. Today the newspaper is the size of a penny trader and printed on paper that comes apart in your hands. Word around the Inner Harbor has it that sometime this month Constellation will shed 900 jobs. That could mean 900 large houses on the market and twice that number of private school tuitions lost. Word farther out in Hunt Cup country is that the independent schools have started shedding faculty in anticipation of plague-times enrollments come September. One of the more prominent girls’ schools just completed a set of rowing tanks as part of a major expansion. They may be dry soon: Johns Hopkins has scuttled its rowing program; other university and club crews can’t be far behind. A new shell costs like a BMW 5-series, and those are sitting in the lot of the Towson dealership, their dull coats flat beneath the late-winter gunmetal skies.

“Hit the bid,” say the Consto power traders when talking about local real estate. Ignore how dismal the offer for your bloated Hunt Valley house may be and taste it: “B’more is the next Detroit,” they predict.

People who have lived in Baltimore long enough can remember when there were only two decent restaurants in the entire city. The Laurence Hall Fowler-designed mansions of  Guilford were fixer-uppers for brave Venable, Baetjer lawyers and freshly minted Johns Hopkins internists. Real Baltimoreans, meaning generations of, can remember the riots of ’68, when downtown burned. Baltimore came back eventually, following the loss of its football and basketball teams, the crass redevelopment of its core, and the near-complete flight of its tax base to the outer planets. Now everything that Baltimore gained back over 40 long years appears to be crumbling. Even the Orioles, once perennial contenders in a visionary ballpark, are a basement team who can’t come up with a major league pitching rotation and now play before exhibition-sized crowds. The sky-pie plan to renovate the crack-vial clutter on the West Side is sputtering. Schemes to turn Central Baltimore (the “hole in the doughnut”) into an arts district are forgotten.

This month, the Baltimore Opera folded. Locals are wondering whether the city cultural institutions can surviveon the philanthropy of the last few Baltimorean foundations that are left: Old-school family funds that date from railroad days. For 15 years they were nearly forgotten, because in the go-go times, even the most obscure charity could send out fat and stiff invites to a fundraiser sponsored by the troika of T. Rowe Price, Legg Mason, and Constellation. As the slip of tissue floated to the floor between your feet, you marveled over how much, exactly, a table of ten might cost you for Terrier Rescue. Then again, T. Rowe, Legg, and Consto weren’t the only sponsors: the old Balto names were there, too. Only smaller.

Last weekend the sun shone for what seemed like the first time all month. The mega-Wegman’s supermarket in Hunt Valley, whose glossy fruit, beluga caviar, and black truffles drew theme-park level crowds when it opened a few years ago, was moderately busy. The women seemed to have combed their hair. The men – Baltimore men, like their avian counterparts, display the color – wore their fuchsia sweaters and green pants. There were some legs on display and some signs that, through the anaphrodisiac winter, the women, at least, had not relinquished their memberships to the Maryland Athletic Club. There was some flirting, a little romance in the paper goods aisle.

For a moment, in the parking lot, looking down over the McCormick Spice plant, it seemed as if possibly the malaise had been only seasonal. Maybe the drugs would be suspended. Maybe, off their meds, the men would take some women to dinner. Maybe they would get into Smyth Jewelers on York Road and buy a little hardware. March is the start of the forsythia and dogwood in Baltimore. Soon the tulips will be up in Sherwood Gardens. It is mating season for the higher mammals in Central Maryland. Maybe things will get going again.

Tristan Davies teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

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