Ambulating with the Amiable Baltimoreans

On the first day of my first newspaper job, in Baltimore, the city editor handed me a bag of nickels. “Go see if people are getting their money’s worth from the parking meters,” he said. I learned that the meters gave motorists a bonus, sometimes five minutes extra on an hour. Nowhere in the city did I find the little red flags popping up before their time. Operating on the man-bites-dog principle of what constitutes news, I knew I had a story, for the evidence clearly rebutted the city editor’s cynical expectations.

“Not bad for a cub,” he said, and put my story on the front page.

It was a pleasant, slightly inspiring day. I sat on white marble steps scrubbed so diligently by women in housedresses that their glare could dim the Taj Majal. I ate liver and onions in a greasy spoon in West Baltimore, listened to patrons complain about the Orioles, and watched the meter wind down through the window. In Fells Point I fed the meter by Helen’s Bar, while inside I sat with the eponymous owner, who told me what she liked about her neighborhood, this waterfront place at Broadway and Thames (pronounced as spelled) where she had spent all her life.

In addition to listening to her fabulous nickel jukebox (lots of songs by the Ink Spots, and I had lots of nickels), she said she liked it when the crewmen off the tugboats moored outside her place spilled in: they were giant hirsute children, many of them from the dense gullies of West Virginia’s mountains. She liked their chatter, their lazy way of talking.

To them Helen’s place was a small pocket of high civilization, and they were both tamed and animated while there by the glitter of the bottles, the gleam of the brass rail on the bar, and the images of themselves in the smoky back-bar mirrors. They liked trinkets, such as the bottle of banana liquor with the ballet dancer inside. I observed one of them repeatedly winding up the dancer in his bottle, and staring intently into it, mesmerized as she twirled round and round in the amber fluid, illuminated by a teardrop of light that had entered from the bar. I wondered if they ever drank the stuff.

Leaning forward in her rocker toward the window, Helen pointed to the upper story of a building at the corner of Broadway and Shakespeare. “I was born there, right up there, top floor,” she said, where the painted sign on the windowless wall read Vote Against Prohibition.

Those were the years just before Fells Point began its slow ascendancy from a bleak harborside skid row, rich in maritime history, but with more drunks in it than it needed, toward what it is today: a slowly churning mixture of bohemian musicians and other artists; a bustling market; shops selling T-shirts and bricks painted to look like little row houses; oddball enterprises, such as a hardware store that sells books; brightly painted restaurants run by Hispanics; and a growing cohort of the well-off living in punctilious rehabilitated houses, who, though enjoying the cachet of living in a faintly tenderloin neighborhood, would have the place evolve into something resembling Washington’s Georgetown: quaint, quiet, clean, rich, boring.

Helen complained about the cute bars and restaurants opening all around her even then, but she liked the idea that some old houses were being restored. There were also, in fact, fewer drunks about. The mission house on the east side of the plaza was losing its mission. Someone had installed a brass plaque on the curb across from Helen’s, with the dedication To the Last Wino.

A decade or more later, in the mid-eighties, Madison Smartt Bell brought his high-caliber literary talent to Baltimore. The plaque on the curb is gone; Helen is dead, as is her bar; and it’s unlikely that any local newspaper dispatches reporters to cover parking meters. The old...