Help us find Annie
Paging Winston Smith
The Baltimore renaissance begins to wear a bit thin as you drive north of Fayette Street, and by the time you're all the way to North Avenue, you find yourself back in the Dark Ages.
As you go through Baltimore's worst neighborhoods, many of which seem to comprise only unpopulated/wrecked/boarded houses, the one bright spot is a blue strobe light atop the occasional lamp post. Beneath the strobe is a box containing a video surveillance camera. The whole is emblazoned with the city police department's name and insignia, along with the motto, "Believe." How Orwellian.
Scarcely a block from the Hippodrome Theatre, ballyhooed as an example of the current mayor's successful rehabilitation of city culture, stands the Mayfair Theatre. This place is a contemporary of the "Hipp," with an equally colorful history, but it stands not only abandoned but with the building's roof nearly rotted away to nothing. Seems to me that before you spend five million tax dollars to refurbish one historic theatre, you ought at least to do an inventory of the others, and make certain they will still be structurally sound when the next rehab opportunity comes along.