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Mount Vernon Sketches
I had occasion to stroll the blocks south of Mount Vernon place recently, and it's not Don Swann's old neighborhood any more. Ted's Music Shop is but a shell of its former glory. You can actually see through the show window to the back of the shop. The Buttery, arguable Baltimore's most egregious greasy spoon, has been obliterated. A side street is home to "Sasha's Silver Sacs," which offers delivery of expensive gourmet bag lunches. A peek in the door reveals a less-than-sanitary-looking operation that doesn't smell any too appetizing either.
On Charles Street, a man makes his way downhill towards Centre on a Segway scooter, making progress at approximately the pace of a 95-year-old using a walker. That's $6,000 well-spent.
Bus stop benches and street side waste cans are solidly bolted to the sidewalk. A hokey cart man, wearing the red uniform vest of the Mt. Vernon Improvement Association, along with an ID badge, empties the contents of a waste can into his cart, removes the cart's plastic liner, and after knotting it, stacks it with three others that sit next to the curb. So we are providing expensive trash cans in which pedestrians deposit their waste, only to have a city employee remove it and put it on to the street...
A couple walks south on Charles, while the man, with broad gestures and a thick Russian accent, describes what he wants for lunch: "fried eggs, nice big piece hot sausage, American cheese, on a hoagy-roll." Take that, Sasha: the melting pot still simmers.
There's a "Zen clothing store" in the old Louie's Bookstore Cafe Space, and across the street an Aromatherapy Bar. The latter offers a "fifteen-minute seated massage," which I must someday investigate to see whether it bears any resemblance to a lap dance, which is also a seated massage, after all.
Even in this busy commercial block--just south of the Walters Art Museum (their motto: "no longer just a gallery.") and the Peabody Conservatory of Music, now under the ubiquitous management of Johns Hopkins University--are vacant store fronts. Some show signs of having been vacant for a decade or more.
First Unitarian Church offers an upcoming sermon that sounds vaguely perverted: "Being different together." And as might be expected, it will be interprete for the deaf.
On the east side of the Orleans Street viaduct, Old Town Mall is largely deserted and given over to the rats and roaches. A sign at the corner of Franklin and Gay advertises Sports Mart—the Ultimate in Footwear & Clothing. That tiny electrical supply store still stands, overshadowed by a billboard that truly is a sign of the times: Am I the Daddy? DNA Paternity Testing; BRT Laboratories, 400 West Franklin. The backs of several passing MTA buses bear advertisements for bail bondsmen.
Peggy has been shopping the annual half-price sale at Beadazzled, and afterward we walk two doors east to the Koffee Therapy coffee house/art gallery/internet cafe/ and live music performance space. We step inside for a jolt of caffeine, and kill an hour chatting with a woman she has met at the Beadazzled store. The cafe owners seem a refreshingly unpretentious pair.