Baltimore- the City that Keeps Breaking My Heart
For the record, I was born in Richmond, Virginia, raised in adjacent Henrico County and now make my home in Virginia Beach. Save for four glorious months spent as an exchange student in London, Virginia is and always has been my home.
Yet, for reasons of ancestry and the many cousins who live there, I always regarded Baltimore as a “second” hometown and felt an affection towards the city as though it were my own. Although I never knew my paternal grandparents, we would frequently travel up I-95 to see my mother’s parents, who lived in a house my grandfather built near the intersection of York Road and East Cold Spring Lane. From my earliest memories, I remember being pushed in a stroller around the Guilford Reservoir which to my young eyes appeared to be a large swimming pool surrounded by a high wrought iron fence. Occasionally, I would walk with my grandmother from her house in Kernewood down to York Road and shop with her- that was back when streetcar tracks went down the middle of that north-south artery.
I was a rabid Baltimore Colts fan from the time I knew what a football was, and my father would take me each December to Memorial Stadium to see my heroes- Johnny Unitas, Mike Curtis and company- ply their trade on the muddied field that was their home. In the spring and summer, I would follow the Baltimore Orioles and their great teams of the 1960s and 1970s- the golden age of Orioles baseball and came to the youthful conclusion that Memorial Stadium was indeed heaven on earth.
The first time Baltimore broke my heart, was when the heavily favored Colts lost to the New York Jets in the biggest upset in NFL history- that was January 1969. I cried and cried, not unusual for a ten-year-old. Later that same year, the Orioles lost the World Series against the New York Mets, again breaking my heart. (1970 would bring a World Series championship to the Orioles and the Colts would be on their way to winning Super Bowl V the following January, making me the happiest kid in all of America.)
Later in the decade, following my grandfather’s passing, someone broke into their home and knocked my grandmother out cold, while stealing her valuables in a robbery that was never solved. At the time, it occurred to me that something dreadful was taking place in Baltimore that I never saw coming.
My father had spent much of his childhood in a rowhouse on Clifton Avenue, and worked to support his family at an Amoco filling station located at Gwynn Oak Junction. My mother- a native of Highlandtown, grew up in another rowhouse at the corner of Boarman Avenue and Pimlico Road- a stone throw’s away from the famed racecourse that was home to the Preakness Stakes. Both of them bemoaned what happened to their once-thriving neighborhoods, and that was back in the 1970s!
Once I attained adulthood, the City of Baltimore continued to break my heart. After my grandmother passed away in February of 1983, my beloved Colts left Baltimore in March of 1984- a travesty of greed and poor ownership that I have never fully gotten over. It was later that year, while attending an Orioles game at Memorial Stadium, I happened by the house that my grandfather had built only to find its first story windows festooned with wrought iron barricades and its windows covered on the inside with newspaper. The homes in which my parents had grown up were also in dilapidated condition, and no amount of urban renewal- Charles Center, Harborplace, and revitalized Fells Point ever stretched to northwest Baltimore.
The riots which followed the death of Freddie Grey actually took place on the streets where my father had once worked to support his family. I was glad he was no longer alive to see what had become of the city he once loved, and I began to feel that my “home away from home” was disappearing before my very own eyes.
The ensuing decades would witness the wrecking ball that leveled Memorial Stadium, the closure of shops once visited by me and my grandmother, and a fundamental change in the overall psyche of a town that once was regarded with deep pride and civic appreciation.
The locations I have referenced in this missive are all located in the seventh congressional district represented by Elijah Cummings (D-MD) for the last twenty-three years, and I can say without reservation that his representation has done nothing for those areas of a city that my family once knew as home…
…and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the biggest heartbreak of all.
-Drew Nickell, 31 July 2019
© 2019 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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