We went to Baltimore this weekend, Nettie and I, to visit friends and break the monotony of a long car journey from East Hampton to Washington to Charlottesville, Va., and back — heavy, boring traffic all up and down the boring New Jersey Turnpike. I do not recommend the crinkle-cut cheese fries at the Maryland Travel House Plaza rest stop in Aberdeen.
Baltimore is a splendid city, both northern and southern, and both pleasing and surprising — from the perspective of someone raised on Long Island — for the near emptiness of its streets. “I can’t believe there are no cars!” Nettie, who is 18, kept exclaiming. “Where are all the people?”
Of course, Baltimore feels semi-deserted because it was built to accommodate more citizens, in offices and houses, than live or work there today. We admired the grand municipal edifices and apartment houses in gray marble from the Cockeysville mines (“It looks like Paris,” exclaimed Nettie) and turned our curious eyes down the blocks and blocks of row houses — many blocks of blank-faced houses with windows boarded up, scraped clean of their old facade ornaments and so much as a blade of grass, looking like they might spontaneously burn down any minute, and many other blocks of pretty, Federal-era brick with neat roses out front, and flowering trees, the cherry blossoms already over but the magnolia in full May bloom on Saturday afternoon.
On Sunday morning we walked along sunny, quiet streets, seeing few other pedestrians (other than the woman sleeping on her back on a stoop near a church and a vagrant — can we still say “vagrant”? — rooting vigorously through a dumpster) as we wended down a hill to a bustling farmers market underneath a highway overpass. The walk took us past a police headquarters and the former headquarters of The Baltimore Sun, landing us suddenly in a vibrant community scene of market stalls and music. The clientele of this market — buying fried-mushroom sandwiches and seedlings of tarragon and basil — was much more racially diverse than you’d chance upon in the farmers markets of the Hamptons. A volunteer comes each week with a few dozen hula hoops, to keep the kiddies entertained while their parents buy kombucha and Maryland soft-shell crabs. The children of Baltimore are champion hula-hoopers.
Despite the depopulation and the urban blight, and the rats, Baltimore does have a very particular and piquant charm. I understand why the Baltimore Promotional Council in 1974 decided to rebrand it as Charm City. I enjoyed the chicken Kabuli at the Helmand restaurant in Mount Vernon so much that I want to move right in and eat chicken Kabuli every night, taking up residence among the tasteful Afghan carpets, white tablecloths, and the calm diners, who mostly looked like college professors or the sorts of grown-ups who work for NPR.
The only crowd we saw at all was the absolute mob of art students and artsy middle-aged people (piano teachers, owners of small antique stores) who turned out to see a sold-out screening of the original 1979 Ridley Scott “Alien” on Friday evening. The cinema auditorium was jammed with them. (I can report that the art kids are wearing “jorts.” Ironic jean shorts, the unbecoming, pale-denim kind that hit an inch or two above the kneecap. Great suffering Jesus, as my late dad used to say. Jorts!) We did not run into John Waters at the art-house movie theater, to my slight disappointment. Outside, the face of a multistory parking garage had been adorned with a block-long neon installation, neon shapes of leaves and waves that pulsated and undulated in purple, pink, and green in changing patterns as the long, snaking line of art-house movie patrons chatted politely and made mild, good-humored jokes with strangers.
The pleasantness of a depopulated city brought back some questions that had occupied my mind to a considerable degree three decades ago, when I lived in the stunning and stupefying city of Budapest, smog-clogged as it was with heavy storm clouds of black diesel exhaust and cigarette fumes, the walls of the gracious Art Nouveau apartment buildings blackened with soot and pockmarked, like the pitted cheeks of a pox survivor, by the Soviet bullets of 1956.
These questions were: What is the ideal level of population density to most please and satisfy the human spirit? How many people are too many?
Mark my words, says the curmudgeon: There is going to be some sort of research and progress made in the coming decades of this century — if civilization survives and we live to see them — that informs us about how many neighbors human beings need to feel both comfortably sociable and sufficiently important (that is, non-anonymous) in our chosen community. We aren’t there yet, in terms of research about population density and human happiness, although it is obvious that the numbers are out of whack — infrastructure versus residential-population-wise — here in East Hampton right now.
My Budapest years were 1993 and 1994, when the Hungarian capital was home to around two million people, perhaps four times the population of Baltimore today, but, in a strangely parallel way, economic forces of decline gave Budapest a depopulated and calmly strolling feeling in some quarters that felt similar to Baltimore’s; industrial systems and political ideologies died hard in both cities. You’d wander a sunny Budapest avenue in April, dodging dog doo and pausing to buy a posy of tiny purple violets from a bent and toothless old lady in a shawl (not a “babushka,” but a “néni,” an auntie), and feel none of the press and bustle and irritation of Manhattan or Sag Harbor. There was room to breathe in as much tobacco smoke as you liked. You could walk at your own pace, not the crowd’s; you could even stop in your tracks and stand there like a dolt, right in the middle of the sidewalk, to listen as someone unseen in an apartment above played the melodramatic opening of “Zigeunerweisen” — a tune melancholy and devastating — on the violin near an open casement window. You’d stumble across a poet friend drinking brandy in the early afternoon at a small, round table in a kavehaz.
On Sunday afternoon, after a quick stopover at the cute little Ivy Bookshop housed in the narthex of a Victorian Gothic Methodist church near the George Washington statue in Mount Vernon Park, Nettie and I wedged ourselves back into the Honda, which was packed to airless capacity with the contents of her dorm room, and drove north as the sun set on her freshman year of college. We listened to chapters seven and eight of “Midnight Rising,” a book on tape about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and thought out loud about the enduring legacy of slavery on the cities of the East Coast. We bought a latte, mostly milk, at the Joyce Kilmer Travel Plaza on the Jersey Turnpike at New Brunswick; I do not recommend.