A Lovely Place, a Fighting Place, a Charmer
A part of Belt's City Anthology Series, a unique take on Charm City through the eyes of those who live there every day.To many outsiders, Baltimore--sometimes derisively called "Mobtown" or "Bodymore"--is a city famous for its poverty and violence, twin ills that have been compounded by decades of racial segregation and the loss of manufacturing jobs. But that portrait has only given us a skewed view of a truly unique and diverse American city, the place that produced Babe Ruth, Elijah Cummings, Nancy Pelosi, Edgar Allan Poe, John Waters, and Thurgood Marshall, and a city that's completely its own. In the over thirty-five essays, poems, and short stories collected here, the authors take an unfiltered look at the ins and outs of Baltimore's past and present. You'll hear about the first time an umbrella appeared in the Inner Harbor, nineteenth-century grave robbers, and the city's history with redlining and blockbusting. But you'll also get a deeper sense of what life is like in Baltim