Posted on 06/08/2009 5:08:47 PM PDT by FromLori
If anything, The Wire makes it seem better than it is.
We recently had the chance to visit Baltimore, Maryland to see a baseball game. And though the stadium is very nice, we came off thinking that in a sense the HBO show The Wire, actually makes Baltimore seem better than it really is. Because if you watched The Wire, you might conclude that all the messed up parts were confined to some section of the city, rather than the whole thing itself. But it's really all pretty miserable. We regret not putting it on our list of depressing cities.
Even downtown by day is pretty sad, given the prominence of once-glorious money manager Legg Mason (LM). And then at night it's just kind of miserable.
Anyway, we're not the only ones with no interest in The Charm City.
peHUB posts a copy of a letter to the editor from New Enterprise Ventures, a VC firm that's moving out of Baltimore. This part is particularly rich:
Our decision was a result of the high level of crime in our neighborhood. Over the last several years, many of our cars have been broken into resulting in very expensive repairs, our employees have been robbed at gun point, drug needles and used condoms have been left on our front stoop, and psychotic homeless people have menaced our employees and threatened to kill them. We have voiced our frustrations to the local community leaders and police, but the environment has only worsened. The recent local beatings by roving teenagers during the day in this neighborhood, the raucous club in the basement of the Belvedere, and other gang violence throughout the city reinforces the appropriateness of New Enterprise Associates’ decision to move in order to protect its employees.
Yeesh!
All joking aside, it really is tragic, since on the surface there's no reason the city needed to be that bad. It's got a beautiful spot on the water, in what should be a successful Eastern Seaboard state. And unlike Detroit, it wasn't married to a single industry that got absolutely gutted over the past several years. Why do we keep losing our cities? It's an embarrassment.
“While Baltimore is a mess, downtown is not sad if you stay out of the bad areas. The food options are fun; but then I try to leave once it gets dark.”
The federal hill area, the inner harbor, fells point, canton, and joppa road in the north, and around Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, and Hopkins hospital, and Bolton Hill, are all pretty liveable.
“If you park more than a few blocks from the main street (Eutaw?) it can get pretty dicey.”
The main drag is Pratt and there are a lot of decent neighborhood in baltimore. And a lot of really scary bad ones too.
I like John’s Hopkins/Hamden area too. And it is spelled Canton not Caton.
Because the feral bastards copulating and populating them are not "normal" or "equal" human beings. Yet they are granted the vote, thus electing their "own" - while being subsidized by the productive citizens they prey upon.
In the entire world, it would be difficult to name a major city with a majority black population that is not dangerous, corrupt and overly dependent on outsiders to exist.
Obama is already proving he is NOT the exception to the rule.
Thanks for the correction. Maybe my inability to remember streets is why I get screwed up there all the time.
You made the claim it’s about crime and not race. I beg to differ.
Those of us living it know better.
Whites are not preying on anyone in any numbers that matter.
I would buy this except blacks are also preying on blacks.
You made the claim it’s about crime and not race. I beg to differ.
Those of us living it know better.
Whites are not preying on anyone in any numbers that matter.
I would buy this except blacks are also preying on blacks.
Thanks for sideways slipping in one sentence of truth.
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the Plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader - the barbarians enter Rome.... Mine was a lovely world till the parasites took over.
Robert Heinlein
That guy was a crook.
Thanks for sideways slipping in one sentence of truth.
Trav, I didnt slip anything in. The issues of barbarians in our cities is not just a race issue...although it is a huge factor. We live in a barbarian-driven world.
You forgot all-you-can-eat restaurants to get fat in, but those are more of a class thing (lower/lower middle class blacks and Hispanics love those places as well).
It amazes me how similar exurban whites are to lower-middle class minorities in terms of certain areas of cultural tastes (chain restaurants, big portions of food, big trucks, big box stores, obsession with sports, church, etc.). Where I live in Queens, the only people you see at the local Applebees and Uno restaurants are hispanics, middle easterners, and blacks, even though it is still largely a white area (local whites preferring independent places).
There are narrow corridors of the city proper that are good (up Charles St to Johns Hopkins/museum area, e.g.). Unfortunately, they are too small to really count compared to the 90% that isn’t.
It was once a great city, as my mother could attest. 1968 happened.
Actually, not just Johns Hopkins. Baltimore is still the center of the medical universe. You can’t get better than being really ill here.
The good side to the crime is that I guess Hopkins and MD and all the others get lots of practice treating potentially mortal injuries.
Little Italy. And now we have a street named after her.
She was just acquited, although I think something is still pending.
We live pretty close in, in a 50+ year old neighborhood that has held together quite well. By that I mean most of the homes are original and have been refurbished, only a couple have been torn down and new ones built on the lots.
Ditto New York City. The closer to Manhattan you are, the more expensive the real estate. Housing in Astoria (Queens) and Greenpoint (Brooklyn) is more expensive than exurbia or all but the most upscale of suburbs. The poor have basically been pushed to the outskirts of the Bronx or SE Brooklyn, far from the center of things. In this sense, NYC fits the model of Paris (wealthy folks in the center, with the poor in the outskirts.
I grew up in the Baltimore suburbs, and it saddens me to see how it has been allowed to decline.
LOL
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