Was just wondering if you had any comment on this article from amren/salon on Baltimore and gentrification. I'm one of those new readers who found you thru Taki's and this article was written by a self proclaimed "gifted Baltimore writer" which made me want to ask your take on same (being the only "gifted Baltimore writer" I know of). I enjoy all of your nonfiction posts very much.
Lewis Wade
Impressions
I’m glad you like the writing Lewis. I’m certainly not gifted—just hard working—which is the only option when you are dyslexic, brain-damaged and still getting monthly concussions. I’m trying to get better at it—the writing, not the concussions.
Black History Bulldozed for Another Starbucks: Against the New Baltimore
D. Watkins, Salon, March 23, 2015
Mister Watkins writes of a meeting with ‘suits’ in Hamden in the same article he complains about black history being bulldozed for another Starbucks. These white bread developers were tapping him as a source on black culture in Baltimore.
Interestingly enough he is an East Baltimore black and the West Baltimore neighborhood of Hamden where he met these guys is a traditional white working class stronghold, where upscale folks have moved in next to white trash as a form of security against black predation.
For more check out this piece from last year The Gears In The Insanity Box.
Let me paint with a broader brush.
Gentrification in East and West Baltimore
Mister Watkin’s neighborhood was all white in my grandparent’s day. His grandparents generation drove the white none-ethnic whites out of East Baltimore and turned it into the war zone in which he describes coming of age. Of course—even when we come of age in hell—we miss it when God bulldozes it for his yuppie friends. We primates form habitat attachments, a legacy of our arboreal roots I would say.
The corner he describes driving past on Wolfe Street is the same corner where I once watched Stick, a white crack head who was a sometime pimp, illegal debt collector, carnival barker, whore house barker and auctioneer, auction off his entire paycheck between two rival drug gangs in 1994.
Ironically, since Johns Hopkins is the only going concern in Baltimore, and employ vast numbers of local blacks at excellent pay rates and the best benefits outside of a federal job, that famous hospital has spearheaded gentrification in East Baltimore. Their doctors and nurses need to live somewhere.
A friend of mine who is a doctor, was running through Mister Watkins neighborhood after a blizzard in 2001 or 2002. A tri-athlete, he was jogging in the snow from hospital to hospital to give care to poor blacks. He ran by a group of blacks and two of them attacked him, one with a knife. He disarmed the knife man and beat him down, tossed the knife, and continued on running—he also being an MMA fighter—down the street to the white cop sitting in his cruiser, who had not done a thing. He complained to the cop and the cop told him to get lost.
Incidents such as this and the brain death of a Hopkins employee beaten into a coma by three blacks drove the hospital to proactive measures. They decided to fix the community. In the 90s the area surrounding the hospital was more violent than West Baltimore, which is the biggest black ghetto in Maryland. I interviewed a black security guard from Hopkins who had to deal with gangbangers coming into the emergency room blazing away to finish off a shooting victim. When the City Paper used to report crime the dots on the city murder map were so thick around Hopkins that it looked like an inkblot test. The ‘Hopkins corridor’ was given its own police task force. But still, after The Paterson Park Boyz’ continued to randomly shoot, stab and beat whites—including Hopkins employees—the hospital started buying up drug markets and rehabbing them for their staff. This is covered in Season 4-5 of HBO’s The Wire.
Mister Watkins seems to miss the urban despair that the beneficiary of East Baltimore blacks is eradicating through buying up the burnt out wasteland through which the #13 and #15 buses wind their way among more vacant than occupied houses.
Elsewhere in East Baltimore the tough Italian, Polish, Ukrainian and Greeks living on and to the east of Eastern Avenue never gave an inch to the blacks—did not flee like the indigenous whites. They have now been all but moved out of Highlandtown, Greek Town, Canton, Fells Point and Little Italy by gentrification projects and Latino immigration. The yuppies want Latinos cooking in the Italian restaurants they invest in in little Italy. I saw this two months ago—it was hilarious. A famous Italian restaurant owned by a white bread couple and staffed by Salvadorans!
In Little Italy my Uncle Fred—past 70—was attacked by some of Mister Watkins’ people while walking with my Aunt Patsy. Unk laid one out and the rest fled. Other new upscale whites—not so tough as Unk—panic and scream to the mayor when they get attacked by blacks, so the black female mayor details her hardest ass black cops to go lay down the law and the retired ghetto boys get misty about the pacification of the trash blown ghetto where they used to ‘run through hos,’ ‘take a nigga down’ and ‘tax dat ass.’
Gentrification in South and Northeast Baltimore
In South Baltimore where gentrification came in big to an old settlement of white trash descended from West Virginians who came to Baltimore on the CSX railroad to work at Domino Sugar and the Marine Terminals [see Season 2 of The Wire], almost every working class white has been driven out. Laura Lipman, who is probably our most gifted Baltimore writer, has written a story about this. ‘What You Can’t Fake’
With the blacks burning out their own neighborhoods in gang wars and chasing the whites north into Harford County, by the mid 1990s it began to make sense to moneyed whites to move back into the white trash enclaves that had held out against the blacks—such as Hamden and South Baltimore [SOBO].
By 2005 the average individual income in SOBO was $102,000. I knew a dozen people who had bought large row homes for between $10k and 40k only to sell for $300k. Those houses are now going for $4-500k. What are a retired janitor and diner waitress going to do with the house his parents left them, which now costs $10k in taxes a year? Three generation households that had been paid off since the 1950s now had annual tax rates in excess of the original purchase price! So all of the old time whites that gave the place its character have moved over to Brooklyn across the Patapsco River, having sold their houses to young professionals working in Washington D.C. SOBO is now a D.C. bedroom community, not the same place. Black youths from Cherry Hill and West Baltimore have been mugging and stabbing the soft new locals, both white and Latino, and bugging out on BMX bikes.
I have a friend who decries SOBOs loss of character weekly. When I go back down there to visit friends I find them gone and am unable to afford a beer in the bar where I used to eat breakfast after working all night next to guys that rode the rails into Baltimore from West Virginia after WWII.
It’s not a black thing.
The moneyed elites—mostly white—are subsidizing section eight housing for blacks in the surrounding areas, ghettoizing former mixed neighborhoods and driving down property values and making the streets unsafe. It is how the rich send the poor after the middle class, so that they can then buy up the real estate abandoned by the ravenous poor who follow the dollar stores until they hit a Wal-Mart and then sink down roots. In the mean time they rent to the middle class whites who now flee to the county—having escaped a devalued house with no equity with which to finance another purchase—so that their children will not be beaten and robbed every day.
It is an airborne yuppie invasion that is happening in my neighborhood of Hamilton in the Northeast. I’m fine with it. Those yuppie babes are fine to look at and their men soft as ice cream and very unlikely to chase me through the streets with rocks, knives and guns like the black boys from East Baltimore that Mister Watkins grew up with did. If you read my books The Logic of Steel and When You’re Food, keep in mind that many of those stories came from violent encounters with the criminals that Mister Watkins ran with, and ‘brawled with.’ I feel for the kid. But he might very well have been one of those thugs that hunted, threatened and attacked me when I was walking through his neighborhood to my night job, just trying to support my wife and kids humping freight in a supermarket.
I’d be glad to speak with him, and interested to learn some more about his life in the crumbling ruins that we shared for some time without even knowing it.
Below Are Books Containing Hundreds of Baltimore Tales
When You're Food
Predation
Lesser Angels of Our Nature
Taboo You
Menthol Rampage
Don't Get Boned
Alienation Nation
Narco Night Train
The Streets Have Eyes
Panhandler Nation
How the Ghetto Got My Soul
The Ghetto Grocer
Chinks in the Machine
The Logic of Steel
The Logic of Force
The Fighting Edge
Best make sure your kids get WELL educated so they are not among the ravenous poor.
Nice to hear from you Maureen.
Just remember that all poor are not ravenous. For instance, I am counted among the nearly extinct 'serene poor,' who are effectively much more impoverished than the 'ravenous political poor' who earn between 700 and 1,000 per month in cash, credit and discounts per child, for not marrying the guy that knocked them up. The serene poor do not serve the government as a threat to the middle class and are therefore not encouraged to exist.
Next White Wednesday is Fried Chicken Corn Field, which traces a piece of Maryland land from pre-colonial to post-apocalyptic times.
See you there Darling.
Thank you very much for the great response. I have taken the liberty of sending the above to Mister Watkins via twitter as I thought he should see your invitation.
I appreciated the opportunity Lewis.
I would enjoy meeting another Baltimore writer who does not try and flee as soon as I open my mouth. I cannot even gain entry into writers workshops, and even two of my coworkers who also write literally recoil from my subject matter as if I'm some kind of fiend. Mister Watkins seems to be made of more durable stuff.
A friend of mine read his article where it was reposted and told me she was horrified by the hateful responses Mister Watkins received there. I said, "Why would you even read comments on these sites. Its a pit of negativity. These are the kind of people that throw beer cups at pro wrestlers."
I find myself fortunate to have thoughtful readers commenting on this site. I have only deleted comments from women seeking companionship on this site, never refusing to post any other type of comment. I think that says a lot for our readership. We have a lot of readers that believe in racial separatism and others that are fed up with black American violence. But I do not recall any of our readers denying that blacks were human or adopting a tone indicative of that belief.
Take care Lewis.