Where is Baltimore?

In Sleepless in Seattle, Meg Ryan's character, Annie Reed, lives in Baltimore and works for the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Jonah, the son of Tom Hanks'recently widowed character Sam, tries to play matchmaker between his father and Annie but they live in Seattle, Washington on the other side of continental USA.

The Mason Dixon Line

Baltimore is the largest city in Maryland but not its capital city which is Annapolis. Maryland's unusual shape can be explained by its borders being delineated partly by geography and partly by the Mason-Dixon line. In the early 18th Century a dispute arose between the Penn family of Pennsylvania and the Calvert family of Maryland over the border between the two colonies and this dispute sparked a war in 1730. King George II negotiated a cease-fire in 1738 after which two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, delineated the official border. The Mason-Dixon line would become a symbolic dividing line between the North and the South during the American Civil War.

Baltimore Maryland

Baltimore city is situated on the Patapsco River, an arm of Chesapeake Bay. During the War of 1812, the British raided towns along the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. The British unsuccessfully tried to capture the port of Baltimore by bombarding Fort McHenry, Baltimore's main defensive structure. The battle lasted over 24 hours and Francis Scott Key, a native of Frederick Maryland, witnessed the assault from a British ship and was inspired to write the Star Spangled Banner, the National Anthem of the United States.

Baltimore City Limits

The border of Baltimore city is shown on this map by an olive green line.
Baltimore is officially divided into nine geographical regions but locals usually divide the city between East and West using Charles Street (I-83 highway) as the dividing line and between North and South using Baltimore Street as the dividing line. Some areas are principally upper-middle class suburbia, others are home to young urban professionals and yet others are poor socio-economically disadvantaged areas blighted by violence and the drug trade.

Baltimore for the tourist - upbeat and optimistic

This tourism video gives a comprehensive guide to Baltimore for the tourist and shows a vibrant, exciting, festive city filled with historic and cultural sights. For many visitors to Baltimore this video will be an authentic representation of the city. But there are other different representations of the city that are discussed in earlier postings that more closely represent the truth of the city for the residents of Baltimore.

An optimistic view of Baltimore is represented by the following video featuring an ostensibly middle class, white divorced resident.

Baltimore ghetto

How you experience living in Baltimore depends upon your socio-economic status, your race, your education and where you live. In 2007, the estimated median household income was $36,949 in Baltimore compared with $68,080 in Maryland as a whole; estimated per capita income was $21,887 compared with $33,743; 20% of residents were living in poverty, this was represented by 12.8% White non-Hispanics and 23.7% Black residents. The racial makeup of Baltimore is 64.3% Black and 31% White non-Hispanics. Drug addiction is the major problem affecting Baltimore's residents either directly or indirectly.

The Wire: Caricature of David Simon : The New Yorker

The Wire is a television series that focuses on the dystopia of Baltimore and in particular West Baltimore which was once home to many middle to upper class African Americans who have since migrated to other areas of the city. West Baltimore is now home to socio-economically disadvantaged African Americans and like East Baltimore is known for its high crime rates.
David Simon is adamant that The Wire is dissent. "It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right." It is a story about the "decline of the American empire."

The Wire - learning to play chess

In this clip from The Wire, D'Angelo Barksdale teaches Wallace and Broadus to play chess by equating the pieces on the board to the players in the drug trade.

Bloody Baltimore

The Wire, especially the first season, is a social commentary about the failure of the War on Drugs, a term coined by Chief Domestic Advisor to Richard Nixon, John Ehrlichman. It was never supposed to be an effective social or public health policy. It was only meant to be a political solution for Nixon to combat anti-war protesters. Succesive Presidents either wholeheartedly adopted the so-called war or never had the political will to declare it a failure. See Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure by Dan Baum (1996).

David Simon speaks at USC Gould Law School

David Simon at Loyola University Baltimore

David Simon and the cast of the Wire talk about Baltimore

John Waters' Baltimore

John Waters: "You know the Governor hates The Wire he really hated the show... thought it made Baltimore look bad. I told him I've seen maps in Japan that people have of the worst corner in Baltimore. You know not everyone likes tall ships. I hate the tall ships."

Mayor Sheila Dixon discusses The Wire

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood

The Corner is where West Fayette Street meets Monroe Street in West Baltimore. The book traces a year in the life of the inner-city drug trade while giving an insight into the disintegration of one family in particular. Although based on real people it reads like fiction, a piece of literature verite. In 1942, William McCullough moved to Baltimore with $1.40 in his pocket and raised six children out of poverty by taking a series of labouring jobs. But heroin started flooding the streets in the seventies and by the nineties Baltimore had the highest rate of intravenous drug use in the United States. One by one each of his children fall victim to addiction.

Are we going to win this War on Drugs? No Comment

Fat Curt - The Corner

We are introduced affectionately to Fat Curt at the beginning of The Corner: A Year in the life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood "His fattened, needle-scarred hands will never again see the bottom of a trouser pocket; his forearms are swollen leather; his bloated legs mass up from the concrete. But then obese limbs converge on a withered torso: At the heart of the man, Fat Curt is fat no more." We learn in the epilogue that after attempts at sobriety, Curt collapsed for the last time and died of liver failure on 9 June 1997.

Homicide Life on the Streets

The Inner Harbor subway station - MIND THE GAP

In this episode, Detective Pembleton, with the help of Detective Bayliss, investigates whether or not a man, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, has fallen or was pushed off the platform of the Inner Harbor subway station pinning him between the platform and the train, or whether he was pushed. The episode shows scenes in and around Downtown Baltimore, including the harbour and Federal Hill as Detectives Lewis and Falsone, search for the victim's girlfriend so that she can say goodbye.



In the foreword to the 2006 edition of the book Homide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Richard Price describes David Simon’s portrayal of Baltimore as a war story in which the “theatre of engagement stretches from the devastated rowhouses of East and West Baltimore to the halls of the state legislature in Annapolis” and as a “realpolitik examination of a municipality in the midst of a slow-motion riot.” He credits him with illuminating the patterns within the chaos. “Baltimore, in fact, is Chaos Theory incarnate.” He likens Simon’s perceptiveness to Edith Wharton’s saying that if she “came back from the dead, developed a bent for municipal power brokers, cops, crackheads and reportage, and didn’t really care what she wore to the office, she’s probably look a little like David Simon.”

Baltimore v New York

In this scene, from a cross-over episode between Homicide and Law and Order, Detective Logan brings an extradited prisoner, played by native Baltimorean John Waters, from New York to Baltimore and hands him over to Detective Pembleton. An exchange ensues comparing New York to Baltimore. Pembleton has only been living in Baltimore for ten years, having grown up in New York, and yet he defends his adopted city like the native Waters. This exchange is reminiscent of the criticism leveled against New York by native Baltimorean, journalist and social commentator, H. L. Mencken in the essay Totentanz in the series Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924). "Compare [Washington Square] to Mt Vernon Square in Baltimore: the difference is that between a charwoman and a grand lady."

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler's Baltimore is different from the sharp edges of David Simon's. It is predominantly White, predominantly middle class, predominantly suburban but her characters are not unscathed by life. Life is fragile and fleeting and her characters employ different methods to deal with this.
In Saint Maybe, the principal character Ian has to deal with the suicide of his older brother Danny that results directly from Ian's revelations about Danny's wife. The picture perfect life of the Bedlow family is not as perfect on the inside.

"On Waverly Street, everybody knew everybody else. It was only one short block, after all-a narrow strip of patched and repatched pavement, bracketed between a high stone cemetery wall at one end and the commercial clutter of Govans Road at the other. The trees were elderly maples with lumpy, bulbous trunks. The squat clapboard houses seemed mostly front porch.
And each house had its own particular role to play. Number Nine, for instance, was foreign. A constantly shifting assortment of Middle Eastern graduate students came and went, attending Johns Hopkins, and the scent of exotic spices drifted from their kitchen every evening at suppertime. Number Six was referred to as the newlyweds', although the Crains had been married two years now and were beginning to look a bit worn around the edges. And Number Eight was the Bedloe family. They were never just the Bedloes, but the Bedloe family, Waverly Street's version of the ideal, apple-pie household: two amiable parents, three good-looking children, a dog, a cat, a scattering of goldfish."

The Accidental Tourist

In The Accidental Tourist, Macon and Sarah's marriage falls apart after their only son, twelve year old Ethan, is shot in the head in a burger joint his second night away at camp. Macon Leary, like his brothers, Charles and Porter, and sister Rose, and like their grandparents who had raised them, had always lived a buttoned-down existence, using order and routine to ensure that nothing unexpected happened.
"There was something about the smell of a roasting Idaho that was so cozy, and also, well, conservative, was the way Macon put it to himself. He thought back on years and years of winter evenings: the kitichen windows black outside, the corners furry with gathering darkness, the four of them seated at the chipped enamel table meticulously filling scooped-out potato skins with butter. You let the butter melt in the skins while you mashed and seasoned the floury insides; the skins were saved till last. It was almost a ritual. He recalled that once, during one of their mother's longer absences, her friend Eliza had served them what she called potato boats-restuffed, not a bit like the genuine article. The children, with pinched, fastidious expressions, had emptied the stuffing and proceeded as usual with the skins, pretending to overlook her mistake."


In this scene Sarah tells Macon she is leaving him and he reacts in the typical uber-sensible Leary manner.

In an out-of-character move, Macon begins to date and then moves in with Muriel, a single mother who lives in a poor neighbourhood of Baltimore with her son Alexander. In the end, it is this out-of-character move that ultimately saves him.

Nina Simone and Randy Newman sing Baltimore

The song Baltimore was written by Randy Newman and is track 8 on his 1977 Album Little Criminals. It has been covered by Nina Simone and The Tamlins.



Beat-up little seagull
On a marble stair
Tryin' to find the ocean
Lookin' everywhere

Hard times in the city
In a hard town by the sea
Ain't nowhere to run to
There ain't nothin' here for free

Hooker on the corner
Waitin' for a train
Drunk lyin' on the sidewalk
Sleepin' in the rain

And they hide their faces
And they hide their eyes
'cause the city's dyin'
And they don't know why

Oh, Baltimore
Man, it's hard just to live
Oh, Baltimore
Man, it's hard just to live, just to live

Get my sister Sandy
And my little brother Ray
Buy a big old wagon
Gonna haul us all away

Livin' in the country
Where the mountain's high
Never comin' back here
'til the day I die

Oh, Baltimore
Man, it's hard just to live
Oh, Baltimore
Man, it's hard just to live, just to live

Good Morning Baltimore

This song from the musical Hairspray is a stylized representation of a 1960s White working-class Baltimore.

John Water on Hairspray

Twenties Dance: The Baltimore