Beat Diaspora: Beats, Buses, Bricks

White tourist: “Excuse me, can you tell me where the Poe House is?”

Black woman, on front steps of row house: “Poe house? Look around you, every house ’round here is a po’ house.”

–The Wire

The unintended irony of slang and dialect.  In 1940, the city of Baltimore nearly tore down the Poe House to build the Poe Homes, the city’s oldest remaining public housing.  This remarkably comprehensive history of West Baltimore past/present/&future explains that the motivation for the Poe Homes was the influx of southern black migrants during the city’s wartime industrial boom.

Of course, as season two of The Wire will just as quickly point out, that boom became a bust a long time ago.  Now, the Poe house occupies an awkward position.  It is the locus classicus for the ultimate Baltimore author (recent northeast corridor debates aside), the one who bequeathed the name of the no-longer-Super-Bowl-contending Ravens, losing the day before his 200th birthday — and the occasion for my visit that same day.  Yet, to be blunt, it is located squarely in a neighborhood most white Baltimoreans (whether city dwellers or suburbanites) conscientiously avoid.

A fellow Wire devotee/Poe seeker reports on the House’s message machine, which strenuously declares, “Do not, by absolutely any means, walk to the Poe House!  No, seriously, don’t.  We know you think you can, but you cannot.  Stop it.“  They evidently change it, as it currently announces, “The Poe House is not walking distance from the Inner Harbor, the Convention Center, or Camden Yards.  It is not walking distance.  Drive, or take a cab.”

Such blunt assertions are shockingly disheartening to me as someone who believes in the easy freedom of urban space, where density permits walking, where as a pedestrian you can encounter the city at its most vital level, the street.  Most importantly, the message machine tells a boldface lie.  The Poe House is a scant mile from Camden Yards, arguably the city’s biggest attraction, but because it’s a mile in the “wrong” direction, it’s not walkable.  It is a mile from Camden Yards to the Flag House, but since that walk takes place squarely inside Baltimore’s “Green Zone” Inner Harbor, I doubt anyone will tell you that it isn’t walkable.

For the record, I drove, although I did have an 11-year-old in tow.  If I had my druthers, I would have walked one way and taken the bus the other (cf earlier experiments in Baltimore public transportation).  From what I observed, the warning may be outdated now, as the University of Maryland Medical Center has not so subtly crept across the downtown/West Baltimore divider of MLK Boulevard.  Still, while there’s nothing to fear about a public housing project, the scene isn’t so pretty across the street.

The popo protecting the Poe House from the po’?  Language games aside, that the Poe House looks out over a trash-strewn vacant lot and boarded up rowhouses neatly encapsulates Baltimore’s paradoxical trajectories.  On the one hand, the Poe House is precisely the right kind of attraction for the city.  It is quirky (the tiniest rowhouse you have ever seen) but historical, drawing on Baltimore’s rich past as an admittedly once great American city.  In a city where the price is right — cue creative class –  for writers, artists, and musicians, the Poe House is a tremendous symbol that could link past to present.  On the other hand, as of yet the CC hasn’t been enough to reverse Baltimore’s declining population trends, and certainly haven’t proliferated outside of a handful of neighborhoods to have ripple effects on the economy and housing stock of, say, the rest of Amity Street across from the Poe House.

Unfortunately, as a trip to the Poe House confirms, Baltimore is far from reclaiming the mantle it proclaims on its benches, and in many key aspects, shares unfortunate traits with Poe’s ultimate resting place (which I should add is not by the House, but rather in a cemetery close enough to Lexington Market and on the “right” side of MLK Boulevard, so it, surely, is walkable).

Tags: baltimore, demographics, development, fear, landmark, monument, poe, post-industrial, public space, security, urban space, west baltimore

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 12:46 am and is filed under America, cities, lit, race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.