The Disappeared

Many years ago I lived in a third world country. It was only for a time, but time long enough that I lived with confidence. I walked with intent, had a routine, conversed comfortably with rickshaw drivers and gave directions to tourists. The city was a place of madness. Of beauty and filth and color. And to escape the noise and smog, I often found myself in a three story shop on the far east side of MG Road.

A glass window stretched across the top two stories of the building, and inside lived the color without the pollution of the streets: papers and fabrics, glass bottles, so many over-stimulating elements. I spent time browsing, appreciating the quiet, sitting at a cart in front of the building, writing and drinking chai, meeting friends. In 2010 I returned to the city, flip flopping my way anxiously down the road wearing the same backpack, moving quickly to get to the building embedded in my brain. I arrived at the corner and went too far east — doubling back, confused. I crossed the road to the south and turned back to get a more contextual view. Was my directional off? Memory gone?

The concrete building stood — but barely. The glass façade was shattered and rough shards hung from a single-nailed piece of plywood. The interior darkened, marble steps cracked — no chai seller or step sitting. The store was no longer, vacant, neglected, broken. And I cried. Right then and there in the road — because something I once loved so deeply about a place was left to rot. It was uncared for, and the neglect of something I once considered beautiful had broken my heart, and I projected so much of my sadness onto the city which couldn’t seem to get its act together.

It is this same sadness I’ve found the past several weeks as the crimes and killings in the City of Baltimore have permeated my twitter feed and exhausted my usual defensive stand on my hometown. It’s something far from my world of understanding and I can’t put together why no one has realized that what we are doing in the world of safety and preservation of place isn’t working.

In writing this weeks’ entry, I tried to correlate the brokenness with something from the past. Something that was once broken, but is, for the most part, no longer. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Patterson Park was overrun with the bad things — the violence, graffiti, drugs, and vandalism. It began after World War II when families left urban areas for the American suburban dream, and neglect was reflected in broken and shattered park buildings. The Conservatory was the first to go, razed in 1948 under the premise of making sure nobody got hurt from all its broken windows. In 1970 and 1972, arsonists burned the bathhouse and the music hall. The Casino would burn in 1978.

The turnaround happened when locals started to give a damn. In 1993, the community joined forces with the Maryland Department of Recreation and Parks. Together they pioneered a $10 million capital improvement project master plan for the park and matched the formal requests with sweat equity. Between 2000-2005, over 500 trees were planted in the park. Regular park clean up days and organizations have made the space more defensible, allocating responsibility and setting out an achievable strategy to produce a positive place. Yes, there are still prostitutes, assaults, and crimes, but there are also families, picnics, and playgrounds. The kicker here is that the community worked to defend the park, whereas in my third world country, few people on the street could afford the goods inside, so the fight to save the store simply didn’t exist. The store had gotten into my soul as a refuge, but was simply another obstruction in the daily lives of others.

I’m also left to wonder about this past week’s 300 Man March. On July 5^th, over 600 men walked ten miles across North Avenue and back in protest and awareness of the recent violence in Baltimore. I consider myself to be pretty up to date on Baltimore happenings, but also know my world is fairly insular. I didn’t hear anything about the 300 Man March until it was already in progress. I don’t know where advertising happened or how, so I can only imagine it reached the target population it was aiming for in the communities most ravaged by crime and violence this past few months.

I don’t know enough about the crime world to know if these 600 people can or will make a difference in the overall crime rate. In truth, I’m not sure if fixing behavior and fixing a place work the same way. You can’t weed out the bad and replant the good in people — at least, not in a few choice hours on a Saturday morning. All we can do, I suppose, is hope that the optimism is infectious, and hope the side effects of awareness are enough to stop that soul crushing feeling of finding something you once loved broken down and taken away.