Tag Archives: victorian

Kosovo, MD…

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I’ve had the opportunity twice in the last few days to drive through East Baltimore. Usually I try to keep it to the interstates and give the city a wide berth, but sometimes getting right down in it is unavoidable. Since I was there, I couldn’t help but look around a bit… and what I saw was night and day. On one hand, Johns Hopkins seems to be in a constant state of construction, buying up the rotting and decayed properties around it and expanding in every direction. Fifty years from now, they may have single handedly cleaned up that section of the city. That might well be the hospital’s greatest contribution to the state.

N. Patterson Park Ave, 1700 blk - (C) Charm City Vacancy

N. Patterson Park Ave, 1700 blk – (C) Charm City Vacancy

On the other hand, the drive into Druid Hill Park and the Maryland Zoo is a bit like taking a tour of Kosovo circa 1999. With what looked like bombed out and burned down houses and buildings outnumbering active residences and businesses on nearly every block, well, one wonders if it would’t be better to draw some lessons from Detroit and move in with bulldozers, level the ground, and start again. I generally ignore local Baltimore politics because it tends to be so ridiculous, but it seems that what we were seeing yesterday is the working definition of a failed city. Surely there’s a better approach to managing a state’s largest urban area than letting it collapse under its own weight. It’s a stark reminder of what happens when people stop caring about their surroundings and when local government throws up its hands and opts to hope for the best instead of actually doing anything.

There are some truly incredible examples of late Victorian architecture hiding in plain site down there, but they’ve been well and truly overwhelmed by the decay around them. Most are likely too far gone to do anything more than salvage the bits and pieces in advance of the wrecking ball. It’s a shame, really. Baltimore use to be one of America’s great cities. Now, once you’re outside the designated tourist zones or the neighborhoods that have tenaciously hung on or the ones that have been revived, it looks more like a war zone than a first world city.

Lust in my heart…

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Again. Being with me on a Saturday morning down here is a bit like being on a grail quest. I’ve convinced myself that the perfect old house is out there, somewhere, taunting me just over the horizon with it’s agonizingly French accent. It takes a leap of faith to make an offer on a house. Making an offer on a house in a state when I don’t yet technically have a job is more like taking a header into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. Yet somehow I think it’s what I am about to do.

This house was the second of three I visited today and was the only one that was ever really in the running. I could go into several long diatribes about the evil things people do to old houses, but that will wait for another night.

Suffice to say that the pictures don’t come close to doing justice to this place. At 106 years old, she was built when Victoria sat the throne of the British Empire and William McKinley was President of the United States, gutted in the last five years with all major electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems replaced, 2000 square feet put under fresh roof, floors refinished, original trim restored… and for sale at the asking price of $135,000 in a sleepy Southern town of 10,000 (more on the town will follow).

I’m plotting and planning… with a healthy dose of self-doubt and second guessing… the path that wends its way through giving up my seldom visited apartment, moving a substantial amount of “stuff” into dad’s basement and setting up temporary quarters in his guest room to use when I’m required to be in Washington, and finally arrives at buying a house in commuting distance of a job I might actually be assigned to three months from now.

It all sounds perfectly mad and if I weren’t living it, I would probably think I had finally gone ‘round the bend. I’ve had incredible luck with finding places to hang my hat in the past…. Sweet Jesus, I hope it holds for one more round.

You can’t see it, but I’m knocking on wood out here, folks. 😉