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A Tale of Two Cities
The cherry trees are in full bloom in DC.
It's so beautiful that it's obscene.
Today the weather is warm, overcast, and windy, and the falling cherry petals are like swirling snow. This afternoon while walking home from work I was crying, it was so gorgeous.
People complain about how district "gardening budgets" contribute to the high city taxes, but honestly bros every penny is so totally worth it.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore...
Probably my favorite scene in The Wire is in the third season when the police go to Stringer Bell's apartment and find that it is really, really nice inside. To me, this parallels the scene in the pilot episode when Kima goes home after a hard day on the grimy streets and in the grimy station to her gorgeous apartment and her lovely wife.
For various reasons I've been spending a lot of time in Baltimore recently, and every time I go up there I'm amazed at how incredibly shitty the urban environment is. What's crazy about the city is that, unlike a rustbelt disaster zone like Detroit, a lot of totally "normal" middle-class people live in Baltimore. Like, you'll visit someone's apartment, and regardless of their race or age or socioeconomic status the space will look like it would in an apartment in Austin or Seattle or Atlanta or any other comparably wealthy city in the United States.
I write this as someone who has lived in multiple shitty apartments in Philadelphia, where the appearance of interior spaces tends to reflect the appearance of exterior spaces. In other words, if a building in Philadelphia looks like garbage on the outside, then it's more than likely going to be garbage on the inside. In Baltimore, though, everything looks like garbage on the outside.
For whatever reason, it tends to snow a bit more in Baltimore than it does in DC, but the two cities really aren't that far apart; around lunchtime it only takes about forty-five minutes to drive from the urban center of DC to the urban center of Baltimore. Why is it, then, that the streets of DC are lined with cherry trees so painfully beautiful they make me weep while the streets of Baltimore are literally falling apart?
I'm aware of how complicated the answer is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and blame capitalism as a guiding ideology of public policy. Don't get me wrong, there are many neighborhoods in and around DC that could use much more help than they're getting, and I would gladly chop down every cherry tree in the greater metro area if it meant that no one had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go stand in line at a food bank. Still, there's a lot to be said for the public redistribution of wealth, especially when the effects of said redistribution make such an obvious difference on even the most superficial visual level of people's lives.
It's so beautiful that it's obscene.
Today the weather is warm, overcast, and windy, and the falling cherry petals are like swirling snow. This afternoon while walking home from work I was crying, it was so gorgeous.
People complain about how district "gardening budgets" contribute to the high city taxes, but honestly bros every penny is so totally worth it.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore...
Probably my favorite scene in The Wire is in the third season when the police go to Stringer Bell's apartment and find that it is really, really nice inside. To me, this parallels the scene in the pilot episode when Kima goes home after a hard day on the grimy streets and in the grimy station to her gorgeous apartment and her lovely wife.
For various reasons I've been spending a lot of time in Baltimore recently, and every time I go up there I'm amazed at how incredibly shitty the urban environment is. What's crazy about the city is that, unlike a rustbelt disaster zone like Detroit, a lot of totally "normal" middle-class people live in Baltimore. Like, you'll visit someone's apartment, and regardless of their race or age or socioeconomic status the space will look like it would in an apartment in Austin or Seattle or Atlanta or any other comparably wealthy city in the United States.
I write this as someone who has lived in multiple shitty apartments in Philadelphia, where the appearance of interior spaces tends to reflect the appearance of exterior spaces. In other words, if a building in Philadelphia looks like garbage on the outside, then it's more than likely going to be garbage on the inside. In Baltimore, though, everything looks like garbage on the outside.
For whatever reason, it tends to snow a bit more in Baltimore than it does in DC, but the two cities really aren't that far apart; around lunchtime it only takes about forty-five minutes to drive from the urban center of DC to the urban center of Baltimore. Why is it, then, that the streets of DC are lined with cherry trees so painfully beautiful they make me weep while the streets of Baltimore are literally falling apart?
I'm aware of how complicated the answer is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and blame capitalism as a guiding ideology of public policy. Don't get me wrong, there are many neighborhoods in and around DC that could use much more help than they're getting, and I would gladly chop down every cherry tree in the greater metro area if it meant that no one had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go stand in line at a food bank. Still, there's a lot to be said for the public redistribution of wealth, especially when the effects of said redistribution make such an obvious difference on even the most superficial visual level of people's lives.