The Examiner‘s opinion page sometimes paints a grim picture of Baltimore. My all-time favorite television show “The Wire” doesn’t do the city any favors either. And the new musical version of “Hairspray” — I mean, come on.
We have our problems. The streets are dirty, you can buy drugs on every corner in some neighborhoods, and our mayor is, in my opinion, a crook. People on the bus give you long-winded descriptions — unasked — of their battles with narcotics, and you can practically walk on top of the sludge in the Inner Harbor. Working behind the scenes on the opinion pages here, I’ve seen the dark underbelly of Baltimore, and sometimes it is difficult to remember that Baltimore is not the sum of its negatives.
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There’s another side to Baltimore. The side people forget about. The Little Italy men and their bocce ball games. The friendly shop owners in Highlandtown’s Greek town — the things that tourists rarely see and half of Baltimore’s residents don’t know about.
It isn’t Baltimore’s problems that define its character. It’s the people. Baltimore, like so much of America, is made up of immigrants, communities of whom carved their little slices out of the city. My own people are the Polish immigrants. My great-grandfather owned the only Polish printing shop in Baltimore and printed all of the area’s Polish church bulletins. My family goes to Ostrowski’s to buy kielbasa from women who remember “the Janocha twins” — my late Great Aunt Connie and my grandmother.
Those are the things that make Baltimore unique. I’m young, but I’ve spent four years in rural Pennsylvania, several years in Towson, six months in Paris and almost a year in Hyattsville. I’ve visited countless cities and towns, but when I come home to Baltimore, I feel like I can breathe.
I remember walking through Baltimore with a friend back when I was in high school. He said I seemed to know everyone — the magic shop owners, the Cross Street Market vendors, the men who owned Dan Brothers shoe store. That is my Baltimore.
Drugs, gangs, corruption — those things are all Baltimore too. But my point is that they are not all that Baltimore is. We have so much going for us — so much history — and all most people see are the negatives.
It’s time to look at the positives. If ever there was a time the citizens of Baltimore needed a pick-me-up it’s now. I know I could use one. I just saw all of my co-workers get laid off — people with children and mortgages and slim job prospects. I am watching the newspaper I have grown to love, a paper that truly exemplified the spirit of Baltimore, close its doors.
When I was a little girl, I dreamed of working at for the Sunpaper. I even remember the first story I ever read — a story about live-culture yogurt. Yogurt, I informed all of my friends the next day, is alive. None of us ate yogurt for at least a week. Thinking back, I probably didn’t absorb the gist of the article the way the writer intended.
When I grew older, I knew I couldn’t take an internship at the Sun without experience. The Examiner, I thought, would be an OK place to start on my way to the Sun.
I was constantly defending The Examiner to friends and family members who didn’t think anything tabloid-shaped, colorful and in competition with the Sunpaper could be a real paper. They were wrong. I came back a year later to be the paper’s graduate fellow — its first and last.
With The Examiner leaving, Baltimore is losing local reporting that was truly valuable to the community. And while I didn’t always agree with what we had to say on the opinion page — my Baltimore upbringing didn’t quite cover the values of the conservative right — I always learned a great deal in writing it.
I wish we weren’t leaving, but we are. What’s important is that we remember The Examiner. And maybe, with The Examiner’s precedent, a newspaper like us will come back one day.
Aleksandra Robinson is a graduate journalism student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and The Baltimore Examiner opinion page fellow. E-mail her at [email protected].
