Baltimore

Baltimore is rarely a city that makes it onto the “Top 10 Sweetest Places In The World” sort of lists. To be honest, this isn’t surprising. I just spent two days in the city visiting my grandfather, and I have to say that every time I go I am amazed out how extraordinarily uninteresting the city is.

According to city-data.com, Baltimore ranks as the 38th least safe city in the United States. This is remarkable for a city that’s less than an hour’s drive from the capital of the country. You wouldn’t believe this if you were in the downtown metropolitan area, but if you happen to be driving from said downtown area to Baltimore Washington International airport, you can either drive through what is essentially a ghetto, or you can take a two hour detour.

A Brief History

Baltimore is a very old city, which is confusing to me because the old east-coast cities like Boston, Philidelphia and New York have a habit of being very interesting places. Baltimore is not interesting. Though Baltimore was technically founded in 1706 as a place for trading tobacco, the city proper wasn’t really built until the mid 1720’s. As it was the largest port south of New York for a long time, it was a convenient place for sugar growers in the Caribbean to store produce that may or may not end up being shipped over to Europe.

Strategically, Baltimore was a moderately important place. The city’s fort, Fort McHenry, commands the Chesapeake bay, which juts into mainland Maryland and is a really great place for invading armies to sail through if they want to make landfall near D.C. Unfortunately, when Baltimore’s founders chose its location they were thinking more of finance than of strategy.While Fort McHenry was being unsuccessfully bombarded by the British during the war of 1812 and Francis Scott Key was scrawling out the patriotic poem that would later become our national anthem, Washington D.C. was literally on fire.

General Robert Ross of the British army had landed south of D.C. and Baltimore, marched north, burned a bunch of important buildings in D.C., then he went on to assault Baltimore. Not that it’s Baltimore’s fault that the nation’s capital was burned, but it’s pretty dumb that a great place like D.C. got burned and Baltimore didn’t.

Actually, in 1904, Baltimore did burn, in what is referred to as the “Great Fire of Baltimore.” To this day, historians aren’t sure whether it’s called “great” because of its scale or because everyone thought it was fantastic that Baltimore was being burned to the ground.

Modern Baltimore…

…sucks. My theory is that since Baltimore is no longer an overwhelmingly useful financial and strategic location, it’s been overshadowed by its more exciting neighbors Philidelphia and D.C. It’s not all bad, though. We had a nice dinner in a Baltimore neighborhood known as Ruxton. Ruxton used to be a separate town, but as Baltimore grew, it eventually consumed Ruxton. The dinner was fine, but I was a little perturbed to learn (from my grandfather — a reliable source) that there was no train station in Ruxton because its obscenely wealthy inhabitants (viz. Nichole Kidman) had decided it would bring too many troublemakers.

Not that I blame them. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: I was perturbed because I can’t imagine living somewhere where the mere addition of a train station could conceivably cause criminals and general miscreants to take over. So if you’re planning a family vacation in the near future, please don’t go to Baltimore. There are many wonderful and interesting places to visit in the United States; Baltimore just isn’t one of them.