Ross Douthat is a tolerable New York Times op-ed columnist—as I’ve noted previously, he’s wishy-washy, a putative conservative and writes like he’s 82 instead of his 46—which admittedly isn’t saying much since he shares space, and perhaps converses with, Crazy Men like Nicholas Kristof, David French and Jamelle Bouie. I don’t often, if ever, wade into Douthat’s prose when he gets into the quicksand of religion, but his May 30th entry, “The Best News in America,” struck me as abnormally sloppy. Douthat says he lived in Baltimore “for a brief time just before the Great Recession, when the city seemed like a great experiment in gentrifying can-do.” I resided in the city at that time, and he’s mostly all wet. Always be wary of writers bandying about the term “great experiment,” although at least Douthat didn’t, unlike his paper’s editorial board, refer to the entire country as a “grand experiment.”
The “best news” he summons is the drop in homicide rates not only in Baltimore, but across the country, and that’s hard to argue with (excepting Chicago, always), even if the drop of murders from might be skewed from cops not traversing dangerous beats and the continuation of the local media’s irrelevance. Last century, The Baltimore Sun assigned several reporters to police precincts. Most notable was Sun reporter David Simon’s year-long (1988) embedment with cops that led to his book (Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets) and TV show The Wire (what outsiders mention first about Baltimore, especially now that John Waters is absurdly unable to make new films from a lack of financing).
Douthat: “In 2008, the end of what I remember as Baltimore’s halcyon days, there were 234 murders in the city. By 2019, there were 348. In 2025, there were just 133.” Except in isolated circles, such as a more vibrant (as opposed to dormant) music scene, which my son Nicky was part of, playing solo and in bands, attending Dan Deacon and Animal Collective shows, and the Wham City-run Whartscape festival each summer for five years, those “halcyon days” had long passed. It wasn’t just the Great Recession, but a continuing trend toward a generic city: wake up in the Inner Harbor’s Renaissance Hotel, and you might wonder where you are. There may be fewer murders in 2026, but this is a faltering city, with a population of less than 600,000, stymied by another corrupt city government, and a growing number of people “experiencing homelessness,” as ABC News referred to the knife-attacker at New York City’s Penn Station earlier this month.
Take a drive around various neighborhoods in Baltimore, and what you’ll see is boarded-up retail outlets (unfilled for years), “for sale” signs, and long lines at drug clinics. I can’t count how many dumpy “nail salons’ I see. The Inner Harbor, which did revitalize the city in the late-1970s and early-1980s, after a long period of flight after the 1968 MLK riots, is called a “danger zone” today. There’s no leader like Mayor William Donald Schaefer, who in conjunction with developer James Rouse created Harborplace (built in just 18 months; compared to the Key Bridge, collapsed in 2024 with reconstruction alleged to be completed in 2030), and, against the odds, enticed people who’d fled to Baltimore County back to the city.
The affordable housing was a draw for young people (often twentysomething developers) starting out, who in turn fixed up vacant housing, and started a 15-year period when the city once again had innovative restaurants and retail outlets that emphasized the peculiar, but wonderful, idiosyncrasies of Baltimore. “A city of neighborhoods” was one of the slogans brandished by Schaefer p.r. department, and despite the corniness it wasn’t inaccurate.
After selling my City Paper in 1987 (started in ’77) I moved to New York to start another weekly, New York Press, which I sold in 2002. Lower Manhattan was still in a shambles after 9/11, and my wife and I decided to move to Baltimore in 2023. We bought a house, our sons liked the city, but it was clear to me, unlike Douthat, that the “halcyon days” were finished.
The accompanying picture is of a barmaid, Betty, at the Rendezvous Lounge on 25th St, just one of so many bars in Baltimore (probably wrong, but back then I thought the city had almost as many such establishments per capita as all U.S. cities, excluding Milwaukee). Jennifer Bishop (who took the photo) and I went to see Betty and her crew every morning at seven a.m. to see night-shift workers off the clock and, I guess, a few standard drunks. I nursed a bottom-shelf tequila and orange juice cocktail (Jen stuck to tomato juice) to blend in, and then wrote a story about it for City Paper.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Twelve people killed in bombing at Belfast’s Le Mon restaurant; Freddie Laker is knighted; German terrorist Astrid Proll arrested in London; Laurence Fox is born and Sandy Denny dies; Atlanta Braves finish in last place in N.L. West at 69-93; Goose Gossage is Rolaid Relief Man of the Year; Bob Forsch throws a no-hitter for the Cardinals; The Buddy Holly Story is released; The Coachmen are formed; Chic’s “Le Freak” is a hit; Edward Said’s Orientalism is published; and Donald Coburn wins the Drama Pulitzer Prize.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023