I went downtown over the weekend and felt like weeping with happiness for the much-maligned city of Baltimore, as thousands gathered here for the annual Flower Mart.
It felt like a massive outdoor group therapy session.
If a handful more people had somehow squeezed themselves in, the entire Mount Vernon area around the 600 block of North Charles Street would have collapsed deep into its cobblestones from the sheer weight of it all, with the ancient George Washington Monument high above kvelling at the sight of it.
I wanted to holler at all those people who have curled themselves into the fetal position all these years, in the extended shadow of the Freddie Gray disturbances and turned the phrase, “I don’t go downtown anymore,” into their trembling little mantra.
They should have been there over the weekend so they could see what they’re missing.
They would have seen the endless lines for food and drink and flowers, and felt the warmth of so many strangers packing the area and wallowed in the gentle vibe.
Are you listening, all you folks out in suburbia who think the city’s beyond redemption? Are you happy, missing out on all the great restaurants and bars and theaters, and all the cool waterfront areas?
Have you paid no attention at all to the latest crime statistics, which really were scary for all those years when the town’s homicide rate topped 300 annually?
We now learn there were four homicides in the city over the entire month of April. That’s not a misprint, it’s four. And 33 over the first four months of the year. Another non-misprint.
Is that great? No, it’s still too many. But we’re not headed for 300 either.
Am I saying there’s nothing to fear anywhere inside city limits? Of course not. Like any large American city, Baltimore consists of more than one city. There are neighborhoods blossoming, and others you want to avoid.
But it adds up to a place abundant with life, if we’ll take part in it.
This is a city that has always found rejuvenation in its street festivals, whether it’s the Flower Mart, Artscape, the old City Fairs, or any of neighborhood and ethnic fairs staged here across the decades.
We like it when lots of us gather in one place and get reminded that our fellow residents look like pretty nice people.
When we came out of four days and nights of street riots in 1968, it was a couple of years before the first City Fair got itself off the ground. Many said it would never work, that Blacks and Whites still felt antagonistic in the extended pain of the Martin Luther King assassination.
But that first fair drew hundreds of thousands of people and sent a signal: it was safe to come downtown again.
That was the start of what we used to call the first modern Baltimore renaissance.
We’ve had a few since then, and we’ve had setbacks, too. The anger that filled West Baltimore’s streets after the death of young Freddie Gray planted a decade of fear into thousands of suburban souls.
And not for the first time, either.
In mid-May 1970, a bunch of teenage punks ran through the Flower Mart, knocking over displays, destroying others, and frightening all those trying to enjoy the afternoon.
There were some who wanted to terminate the Flower Mart right there and never mind its glad history dating back to 1911. Then-Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III was furious, as was reflected in the eight-column headline that ran atop The News American’s front page. It became a legendary newspaper gaffe. Read it carefully, for this is precisely what it said:
“Mayor Assails ‘Criminals’
Who Disrupt Pubic Affairs.”
The paper’s composing room left out the “l” in what should have been “Public.”
Everybody managed to survive the error; more importantly, the Flower Mart survived the trouble that provoked such a mistake.
That’s life in the big city. We have our troubles, but we move on. Downtown’s a great place to be, if only we give it a chance. If you doubt that, you should have been there over the weekend, when the Flower Mart was so crowded, you wanted to weep with happiness for the old town.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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