Beautiful Ruins

by MIKITA BROTTMAN

Beneath an overpass at the junction of Lafayette Street and Payson Park lies the body of a dead cat strewn with dogwood blossom. Nearby is a rusting green car with no tires, its trunk pried half-open with a fence post. All around, the abandoned houses are engulfed by nightshade and jimsonweed. Their archaic scaffolding of cable lines, distribution transformers, and junction boxes is overgrown with cat’s claw and sumac. Moss grows on utility poles. Tangles of creepers hang from power lines, curtains descending on the world.

The United Nations defines a “slum” as “a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor, and lacking in tenure security.” In his book Slums: The History of a Global Injustice, Australian historian Alan Mayne claims the word pathologizes poverty and racism, and obscures the different social, economic, and cultural conditions of the communities on which the term is imposed. “Slum,” Mayne argues, is always an insult, an exonym. Slums are where other people live. He’d like to see the word eliminated from common use, but admits it’s “a forlorn argument,” and that other terms—favela, barrio, ghetto, tenement district, shanty town—are equally stigmatizing.

Slums are usually overpopulated, but the slum neighborhoods in Baltimore, as in other former industrial cities (St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland), are derelict and semi-abandoned, the result not of urban growth but of population decline. These slum districts are right in the heart of the city, but they’re mostly empty. In Baltimore, the parks, greenways, and hiking trails are all much busier. The slums are abandoned rather than overpopulated, but “slum” is still the right word. It has a phonic connection with “slump,” and an etymological link to “slumber.” (Originally, it meant a cheap room for the night.) These neighborhoods are in a slumber so deep that it looks like a coma. They are quiet and calm, like death, as Henry James observed in June 1904, when he arrived in Baltimore late in the afternoon and found the city streets deserted. “In its apparently vacant condition, it affected me as a sort of perversely cheerful little city of the dead,” he wrote in The American Scene. “And from the dead, naturally, comes no friction.”

West and East Baltimore both have run-down areas, but on the west side the houses are larger, the streets flatter and leafier, the redevelopment less intrusive. Harlem Park and its adjacent neighborhoods, Lexington and Franklin Square, were once stately and genteel. Now, most of the buildings here are boarded up, but vestiges of grandeur remain in the broad streets, three-story mansions, grand brick rowhouses with elaborate facades, stone churches, and tree-lined squares. In the 2010 census, half the properties in Harlem Park were vacant; now, the vacancy rate is much higher. Industries relocate. Crime increases. People move away. Razing houses is complicated, expensive, and difficult, especially when there are people still living nearby.

Not far away, on the other side of the mile-long concrete canyon known as the “Highway to Nowhere,” you can see how things used to be. The streets surrounding Union Square, including Hollins Street—the former home of H. L. Mencken—are lined with well-kept, elegant Federal houses. “The Hollins Street neighborhood is slowly going downhill, and in the course of time it is bound to be a slum,” wrote Mencken in his diary, on July 27, 1941. The areas nearby have definitely fallen on hard times in the fifty years since Mencken’s death, but Union Square remains elegant and dignified, with homes selling for upwards of half a million dollars.

A few blocks away from Union Square, vacant homes are being razed, but thousands remain standing. Some have trees growing through their caved-in roofs. Others are propped up by wooden scaffolding, like dead bodies in nineteenth-century photographs. Some aren’t boarded up at all, so from the front, you can’t tell whether they’re inhabited or derelict. It’s in the backyards that signs of life appear: dog igloos, hacked power lines, overflowing trash cans, barbecue grills. Now and then, you see homes kept up with pleasure and pride, yards that contain colorful awnings, pots of geraniums, bird feeders, wind chimes.

Once, at the yard of a derelict house in an otherwise abandoned slum, I saw a long line of bleached white handkerchiefs hanging out to dry in the sun.

The detritus of human habitation is pretty consistent: Footwear. Christmas decorations. Upholstery springs. Children’s toys. Hubcaps. Milk crates. Hair weaves. Aluminum cans. Empty bottles. Used diapers. Egg cartons. Unopened mail. Bullet caps. But I find unusual items, too: the nameplate from a doctor’s office; boxes of Zoloft samples, long out-of-date; a duck decoy; polaroid photographs of a topless girl; a 1986 calendar from the Herbert E. Nutter Funeral Parlor. 

Often, in this part of town, you’ll find a narrow, paved alley running through the middle of the block. These central alleys were designed to create more housing lots; many are too narrow for motor traffic. Some are flanked by smaller, deeper houses, like the shotgun houses farther south; others by small industrial buildings. Some are called alleys, like Forney Alley and Chalk Alley in Harlem Park; others have no name. Some are called lanes, courts, or streets. Some of them, like Bruce Street (north to south) and Vine Street (east to west), run for almost two miles, although not without interruptions. They disappear here and there to make way for new structures, razed buildings, and other changes in the landscape, reappearing a couple of blocks farther down the road. A few of them are “paper alleys”—they appear on a map, but on the ground, they’re derelict and inaccessible. A few have been abandoned so recently that Google Street View still considers them legitimate roads, and if you follow them, the moving camera leads you into a wasteland labelled with the name of a lane or avenue. Here in the undergrowth, you can sometimes find evidence (a stop sign, an old pay phone) that these ruins, not so long ago, used to be a street.

Walking down these long, narrow alleyways, you pass rusting fire escapes, painted brick walls covered with foxglove and Boston ivy, buildings with boarded-up masonry windows, rusting barbed wire, walls whose peeling layers of paint reveal their archaeology of ownership. Milk cartons, intended for basketball practice, are nailed to utility posts. On the roofs of decrepit buildings sit arched chimney caps. Vacant lots are dotted with cornflowers and clover.

You can see the backyards of rowhouses from the alleyways behind them. Unlike the narrow alley streets that run through each block, which have names and appear on maps, these back alleys are unnamed, and can’t be explored on Google Street View. They were built for utility access, just wide enough for coal delivery trucks and trash collection vehicles. Under them run the sewers; above hang layers of mostly dormant power, phone, and cable lines tangled up with vegetation. This is the rowhouse’s backstage, used for storage, deliveries, and trash disposal. Some backyards originally contained an outdoor privy. The street’s social life would have taken place out front, on the stoop, which was kept neat and clean. In The American Scene, Henry James describes Baltimore’s “repeated vistas of little brick-faced and protrusively door-stepped houses.”

In some of the more prosperous and populated neighborhoods, residents have initiated a “gating and greening” project, making these back alleys into a shared community space, but it’s more common for them to decline than to be restored. In the slums, many are inaccessible, used as dumping grounds for the neighborhood’s trash. Others peter out into cracked concrete paths leading down dark, overgrown canyons of elderberry and honeysuckle.  

The distinction between neighborhood and slum is as nebulous and artificial as the distinction between plant and weed. Ferns, mosses, ivy, grass, and pennywort are all non-blooming, tough, fast-spreading green plants, but they’re not considered weeds. Some weeds have beautiful blooms: violets, daisies, dog roses, bluebells, morning glory. Some of the plants we now call weeds were originally introduced as ornamental flowers. In other cases, flowering plants like loosestrife and ghetto palm have escaped cultivation and naturalized themselves, becoming “noxious invasive species,” like black rats or feral pigs.

As part of an urban renewal project in 1961, the central alleyways in thirty Harlem Park blocks were torn down and replaced with inner block parks. It was a misguided initiative. Residents were used to socializing on their front steps and porches; the parks were ill-lit and couldn’t be seen or accessed from the surrounding houses, so people were reluctant to let their children play there. These parks soon became a problem. Avoided by local residents, they were used for illicit activities: drug deals, prostitution, the sale of alcohol and cigarettes. There was also confusion over which city agency was responsible for their upkeep. Most of them were razed in slum clearance initiatives, but fourteen remain, if you can find them.

In the last half-century, many revitalization projects have been announced, started, sometimes even completed, all promising to “preserve Harlem Park’s rich history” and “build a bright future.” The most recent initiative, in 2018, proposed turning the inner block parks into little utopias: an art hub, a wetlands site, a sports zone, a music venue, an urban farm and farmer’s market, a biopark. Architects’ fantasies depict healthy youngsters cycling around a lake, couples jogging together, families picnicking and shopping, a hot-air balloon floating overhead.

On the ground, nature has reasserted its dominion. Basketball courts, picnic tables, and community gardens—some installed less than two years ago—are already abandoned, overgrown with morning glory, evening primrose, pepperweed, and devil’s trumpet. Around them, you can see the open bowels of buildings—furnaces, fuse boxes, toilets, and water tanks. Rats stroll across the painted asphalt of what was once a children’s playground. Weeds can break through concrete, bring down buildings. Nothing can compete with the forces of atrophy and decay.   

Knotweed knows nothing of poverty. These slums are memento mori, reminding us that soon, we too will become cheat grass, vetch, jimsonweed, and burdock.