News-Letter

Media Credit: Matt Hansen [Click to enlarge]

A city is the sum of many places. Some are distinguishable by their geography, but most seem separate only because we imagine them to be so.

In Baltimore, the quintessential city of neighborhoods, a sense of community can form around a street, or even a single block. A Saturday morning walk from Hopkins to the Waverly Farmers Market might seem like a trek between two neighborhoods, but a trip actually takes you through three. Abell Avenue, a placid street between Guilford and Barclay Avenues, identifies itself as its own village. Its residents, many of whom are artists, occupy a sliver of homes that separate Hopkins-dominated blocks to the west and the storefronts of Greenmount Avenue on the east. Walk south and you will also cross the communities of Barclay and Harwood.

These distinctions may seem arbitrary to students who are not native to Baltimore. But it is equally natural for us to do the same. The lines we draw are imaginary, but for us the reality of these boundaries is that they help explain experiences and perceptions. St. Paul and Charles Streets form the commercial section of our neighborhood. Charles Street, itself, is the main artery that links Homewood to other reference points in the city, including the Inner Harbor. A Hopkins student might imagine it as its own section of Baltimore.

Greenmount, while just a stone's throw from campus, seems very different. Hopkins students flock to its restaurants, but the street's mix of urban clothing stores and pawnshops creates the feel of an inner-city environment. Perhaps the blue lights, or even what we see in the class and skin color of pedestrians, creates a sense of otherness that, for some, is hard to escape. To explain this feeling of difference, we separate it, in our imagination, with a line.

Neighborhood boundaries have a deep history in Baltimore, and some of the distinctions we draw today reflect divisions that city fathers made in the past. For example, stand on Charles Street in Mount Vernon, and walk east. An expressway cuts through this area, marking the boundary between Baltimore's cultural district and a new part of town. Blue lights and boarded up rowhouses across the highway evoke a sense of fear mixed with otherness, which gives rise to the image of the East Baltimore ghetto. We have all probably imagined our own picture of this place -- seemingly vast and impenetrable for those on the outside.

Planners might not have built the highway to reinforce a sense of difference, but they chose its location with this belief in mind. The Jones Falls Expressway is built over what was once an actual stream. And since the late 19th century, the "other" bank of this waterway marked the beginning of another city: a mostly black, poor and run-down one.

Cities began to undertake major renewal programs in the 1930s with the goal of preventing the expansion of decaying neighborhoods into affluent ones. They tried to contain not just physical symptoms of blight, but also what they believed to be behavioral aspects of poverty. Planners and politicians alike thought that from poverty grew behavioral problems, which they came to associate with African Americans. As a result, they built public housing and infrastructure, like highways, to cordon off black ghettos. Planners saw otherness in these neighborhoods and developed cities to reinforce physical and racial boundaries.

The boundaries that politics drew in Baltimore are not hard to miss. They're also not difficult for those zoned into the ghetto to forget. I worked last summer with the city's public schools in areas like East Baltimore, where I had believed that I could never set foot. One of my assignments took me to a beautiful park sadly overrun with drug dealers and prostitutes. Even as I worked alongside members of the community, the park's usual occupants and I seemed to follow an unspoken pact: we would not cross paths or trade stares. The differences that separated us seemed inescapable.

The dual nature of neighborhood boundaries is that they serve to designate the space a community inhabits as much as they segregate a city. It is hard to believe that we can do away with these divisions altogether, because they help shape beliefs of identity and difference that help us mark a sense of place where we feel that we belong.

Yet it is possible to use these distinctions without perpetuating segregation as Baltimore's planners once did. The lines we draw are imaginary, and they differ with each individual's perspectives and experiences. As such, they're not permanent, even though they can prove to be self-fulfilling.

A way to appreciate our imagination of the city as an amalgam of distinct places is to put our assumptions of division to the test. Interacting with the city's spaces and people, and learning how others perceive the same environment, will give us a better chance as residents of Baltimore to understand the feelings of belonging and difference that we have today.

Eric Roberts is a junior history major from New York City. He is a former employee of the Baltimore Mayor's Office of Community Investment.

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