The first time I went to Ellicott City, it took about 10 minutes for the place to charm me. Now, it takes about 30 seconds for anybody with a heart to find it aching over the devastation there.
I was fresh out of college the first time I went there. I’d found full-time work at a newspaper that’s now long since vanished, called The Baltimore News-American, whose editors assigned me to their Howard County bureau, located on the town’s Main Street.
This was 50 years ago, and what charmed me then continued to charm me right up until the massive flooding that destroyed so much of Main Street, the weekend before last.
There’s a timelessness about the place. Those stone walls along Main Street might have been there since the ‘50s – the 1850s, or the 1750s, or forever. The little shops and the restaurants there are independently owned, not a bland chain operation in sight. They’re hip, they’re funky – but they have an old-time feel about them, too, that seems to pre-date the modern technological era.
My first morning there, in that winter of 1968, I spotted out-houses behind homes on upper Main Street. They seem to have vanished over the years. But it wouldn’t surprise me if a few remain. (Never mind the specific nature of an out-house, it’s the timelessness I’m talking about.)
I was part of a two-person News-American bureau back then, first with a fellow named Larry Lewis, then with a woman named Jean Strohl. We had to fill an entire broad sheet newspaper page – five days a week – with news.
This gave us a big problem: there wasn’t enough news in Howard County. The biggest story back then was the creation of a new town, out there along Route 29, they were calling Columbia.
But, Ellicott City? The biggest news – and there wasn’t much of it – came out of the police station and courthouse, located just above today’s flooded area. And, even there, the pickings were slim.
But now the entire country’s seen the news from Main Street, and it’s just awful.
It’s awful because so many people have worked so hard, since the devastation of 2016, to patch things back together. It’s awful because so much work, and so much money, and so much time will have to be spent before we see a full recovery.
And it’s awful because, in the modern era, when so many things come and go so swiftly, and so much of the world has such a bland, shopping-mall sameness to it, Ellicott City and Main Street has always felt like a sweet throwback.
And how many times can you bring back the past?
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.
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