Baltimore: The Port City Behind the Mythology

Baltimore is a working port city that has been having a conversation with its own decline and reinvention for fifty years. The Inner Harbor, where tourists go, was a derelict waterfront in the nineteen sixties. The redevelopment of the Inner Harbor in the nineteen seventies and eighties was one of the most widely imitated urban waterfront projects in the country: remove the industrial uses, build an aquarium and festival marketplace, let the tourism economy fill the gap.

The gap did not fill evenly. The neighborhoods west and east of the Inner Harbor, which had sustained the industrial labor force that made the port work, did not benefit from the festival economy in the same way. Baltimore in the nineteen eighties and nineties became a central geography of the crack cocaine epidemic and the deindustrialization story simultaneously.

David Simon documented this, in the Baltimore Sun and then in the television series The Wire, as specifically and directly as any journalism about an American city has documented its subject. The Fort McHenry Tunnel, which carries Interstate Ninety-Five under the Baltimore Harbor, was completed in nineteen eighty-five. It closed the last gap in Interstate Ninety-Five.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge, the span that crossed the Patapsco River further south, collapsed in March of twenty twenty-four when a container ship lost power and struck one of its supports. Six workers on the bridge died. The channel was blocked for weeks.

The Susquehannock people held the Chesapeake Bay region for centuries. The name Chesapeake is Algonquian in origin, meaning a great shellfish bay.