Overnight, all four of Baltimore's monuments connected to the Confederacy and white supremacy were swiftly taken down. First, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue (recently splattered with red paint and tagged with "Fuck Trump") and the Roger B. Taney Monument in...
⬆︎ Baltimore Bloc Baltimore came out in a big way for a rally-turned-impromptu-march in solidarity with Charlottesville. On Sunday, about a thousand people took to the streets of Charles Village following a rally at Wyman Park Dell near the Lee-Jackson Monument. Organized by Baltimore Bloc, the...
Between Pratt Street and the waters of the Inner Harbor lie three beams recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York. The marble base on which they rest bears memory to the 68 Marylanders whose lives ended there on Sept. 11, 2001. I never knew those people, but I watched them...
Outside Dovecote Café in Reservoir Hill, Isabel Antreasian is in the middle of a sale. She hands a brown lunch bag to a man who had driven up in a truck marked with the Baltimore City seal. Her "store" is parked next to her: a red, three-tiered cart on wheels attached to a bicycle. It's stocked...
On a Tuesday morning last Spring, Judge Mark Scurti took the bench at the District Court for Baltimore City before dozens of defendants summoned to small claims court: Some navigated the crowded courtroom with canes, some with partners and fussing children in tow, and others alone. Many were in...
Carmelo Anthony adds to his Charm City legacy as host of The Basketball Tournament
Putting together the country’s largest free arts festival seems a formidable undertaking to say the least, and hats off to the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts for pulling it off year after year. That said, there is room for improvement—case in point, the themes. This year, it’s “Camp Artscape:...
While violence elsewhere captures national attention, Baltimore City's violence continues at record levels. Aside from the murders, there were also 18 non-fatal shootings this week, including a triple-shooting on Sunday. Tuesday, Aug. 8 1:21 a.m. Tyrese Davis, a 15-year-old African-American boy,...
⬆︎ Erricka Bridgeford Bridgeford, the public face of Baltimore Ceasefire, had a lot on her plate this weekend, but she handled it with grace. She said what needed to be said—focusing on community, trauma, and joy—rather than what was "supposed" to be said, showed up at the spot of the first homicide...
The murder-per-day pace continues despite the best efforts of community mediators and police. Four people were shot at noon on Aug. 2 at the intersection of Broadway and Eager Street. One 30-year-old man was in such bad shape that homicide was notified, although since then there has been no update....
I'd like to talk a little bit about the enthusiasm with which you seemed to greet the changes made to the new police station. I saw you last week when I went to tour the Western District. You bustled along next to me as we gathered into repainted corners, and waved makeshift fans in the hot, overcrowded...
Another week for Baltimore at the one-murder-per-day pace. Oldest victim: 97. There were also 18 non-fatal shootings this week and 12 gun arrests. Monday, July 17 7:00 p.m. Maurice Finney, a 22-year-old African-American man of the 800 block of Stoll Street, was on the 3200 block of W. Baltimore...
⬆︎ Artscape Though the sun didn't always cooperate and the weather was kind of gross when it did (see below), another Artscape has come and gone, bringing together thousands of Baltimoreans to enjoy art, games, food, drinks, music, and much more. Credit to BOPA for picking two great headliners...
Four murders a week, for Baltimore, is actually an improvement over the normal pace. And it's just luck: There were 20 non-fatal shootings reported last week, including one to which homicide detectives were called, another in which a man was shot in the throat, and one that police encountered because...
On this week’s episode Marc Steiner talks to co-host Baynard Woods and City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg about their experiences at the racist rally in Charlottesville. Democracy in Crisis is a weekly podcast hosted by Baynard Woods and Marc Steiner, produced and engineered by Calvin Perry for...
A school of golden fish swims across the ground floor windows of the 2 East Wells apartment complex, luring diners to Minnow (2 E. Wells St., [443] 759-6537, minnowbaltimore.com), the latest culinary venture by Ben and Jake Lefenfeld, the brothers behind Meadow Mill's La Cuchara. The theme here...More
A quick history lesson: The line of particularly colonial looking structures that sit on the first uphill block of Old Columbia Pike just off Main Street in Ellicott City is locally known as "Taylor's Row." While the neighboring Tonge Row once served as rowhomes for 19th century millworkers, these...
I'm smoking a bougie apartment complex on the edge of the city with hella amenities; I'm smoking a charming supporting character with a mysterious past from an '80s soap opera; I'm smoking a third-tier metal band signed to Metal Blade that opened for Fates Warning in 1986; I'm smoking Gray Haven,...
'Pennsylvania Avenue Hustle,' off Todd Marcus' upcoming album, "On These Streets," an album powered by living and working in Sandtown-Winchester, is a manic tune that opens with foreboding cymbals and a running saxophone, and then dives into a frenzied, buoyant piano solo, soon sprinting, even...
Kung Fu Kenny, the 5-foot-5 giant and hip-hop's resident Vitruvian Man, awoke from his sleep to deliver us his fourth studio album back in April—"DAMN.," a proper follow-up to put detractors of 2015's "To Pimp A Butterfly" back in their cocoons. "DAMN." is a 14-track, 55-minute cathartic therapy...
Jason Isbell's "The Nashville Sound" is the summer soundtrack for those of us who fled small towns because of the sexism or the racism or the lack of opportunities, only to see all of those things amplified with the election of Donald Trump, rendering our hometowns almost hostile to our very existence....
City Paper’s Big Music Issue I’ll level with you: This year’s Music Issue is a rip-off of the New York Times’ feature “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going,” a very neat thing that paper has done over the past two years, offering up some great song recommendations and music writing along...
On Horse Lords' cover of 'Stay on It,' a composition from noted '70s and '80s New York composer Julius Eastman who innately bridged disco and classical music, drummer Sam Haberman aggrandizes the rhythmic punctuation latent in Eastman while Andrew Bernstein's wailing sax feels like vicarious liberation—the...
By the time Robert Altman has dumped '50s leftover Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) into the '70s, the utopian dreams of the '60s are on the last legs of their own long goodbye. Hippie communalism has given way to new age self-help. The discourse of civil rights is being co-opted by institutions...More
"Damn, where'd you come from," a man who just walked out of the Baltimore City Detention Center back in early June asked as he filled a plate with pit beef, watermelon, and vegetables and then—"Thank y'all, bless y'all." "We're doing like Jesus did," activist and chef Duane "Shorty" Davis, who...
Few things are as satisfying as a slow-motion shot of a bladed weapon cutting through a hanging pig carcass—the scccclk sound that comes as steel carves through flesh. This revelation comes via "Forged in Fire," History Channel's competitive reality show in which bladesmiths try to make the sharpest...
1. I have a scratchy stick-and-poke on my arm that reads, "they drew first blood, not me." It's what John Rambo (played with Marlon Brando-esque mumbling aplomb by Sylvester Stallone) says toward the end of the 1982 movie "First Blood," once he has been chased into the woods by longhair-hating...
The Sondheim finalists, reviewed—and inching toward an art practice based in resistance
Gloria Garrett is moving her hands. She is moving her arms in wide circles. She is pacing, gesticulating, dancing, and talking. Gloria Garrett talks loudly: "Those dolls are made from old sheets! You cover them with wax paper and then iron them. That wreath is made from a hanger. This is the picture...
In his essay 'Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,' James Baldwin writes about how the "American ideal" of sexuality and masculinity "has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies" and other such archetypes, resulting in "an ideal so paralytically...
A line spirals out from the fountain and wraps around the interior perimeter of the "Brutalist donut" that is the Hirshhorn Museum, spilling out onto the plaza beside the National Mall. Several hundred visitors are here—foreign tour groups, art students, tourists with selfie sticks, families with...
I. The river Amazon is a river. It is an extremely long and voluminous river. Passing through areas of bio-diversity, it is a good name for a company which sells books and diverse other products, this river. -Leontia Flynn, 'Jeff Bezos names Amazon,' from the collection "Relentless: Poems by Jeff...
Visual Merchandising: "The Ground" takes on origins, labor, commerce, and legacy at the Hutzler Brothers Palace Visual Merchandising "The Ground" takes on origins, labor, commerce, and legacy at the Hutzler Brothers Palace by Rebekah Kirkman I.The river Amazon is a river. It is an extremely long...
Think about the light that illuminates your community and how it makes you feel. When you see red and blue flashing lights, do you feel calm or anxiety? Do the light poles in your neighborhood bear blue flashing surveillance cameras? Have you noticed these cameras as you drive through other communities?...
Artist duo Daniel Wickerham and Malcolm Lomax were all of six years old when Odell's closed in 1992. The North Avenue dance club, opened in 1976 by Odell Brock, became Baltimore's legendary hot spot of the disco and house music eras. Brock hired DJ Wayne Davis to keep the dance floor moving, and...
The 2017 Fiction and Poetry Issue Edited by Rebekah Kirkman Saida Agostini Olu Butterfly Woods Janea Kelly Charlie Jay Anna K. Crooks Suzanne Doogan Sharea Harris Grace Davis Maya Martinez Alain Ginsberg Lily Herman Caitlin Goldblatt jessica hudgins Ellen Paul Aurora Engle-Pratt celeste doaks Evan...
Much as the Parisian bourgeoisie of the late-19th century lived in an era of the novel, we are living in an era of the rock 'n' roll memoir. In the past six months alone we've gotten self-penned accounts by Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Johnny Marr, Maurice White, Phil Collins (his sadly...
Rich Swann's first memory of pro wrestling is a vivid one: He was 5 years old and watching "Power Rangers" when his older brother came home from basketball and turned the TV to "Monday Night Raw," the flagship program of the WWE—then WWF. "There's Bret Hart with the jacket, the awesome pink lights,...