“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” — Thomas Wolfe, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’
In 2012, I mustered my courage and moved to New York City chasing after a dream. But by 2020, my big city adventure came to a chaotic end. I returned to Baltimore dejected around the time the Pandemic started. The city I returned to was a letdown for many reasons. Seven years have passed and I’m still coping with that letdown.
In the years I was away Baltimore hadn’t thrived. The Freddie Gray riots of 2015 were scary to behold from afar. From then onward, the sociocultural fabric of the city has slowly decayed. Toxic racial tension is palpable in Baltimore even to this day. To be honest, the city these days feels unsafer than it did back in ’10.
The city’s art scene has also sadly declined. Artscape–once considered the biggest outdoor festival in America (the image in this post is from Artscape circa 2010)–is now a muted two-day event set in the backyard of City Hall. The Maryland Film Festival got its Parkway Theater but the annual event comes and goes with little fanfare or nationwide relevance. The CAMM filmmaker collective at the Patterson theater–a favorite hangout of mine back in the aughts–died a good while ago. The artsy Charles St corridor is now quieter than I remembered. Many of the old hangouts, eateries and bars are gone. The Brewer’s Art in Mount Vernon died ignominiously over a year ago. And the ‘gayborhood’ has vastly disappeared, with the gay bars long razed and replaced with commercial fixtures and gentrified apartment buildings. With each passing year, I hear about yet another sad closing.
Some vestiges of that era are still around. I hear that Mondo Baltimore still lives–nowadays at the Ottobar–but it now feels like a tv series that has run for too many years long after the original premise and creators have moved on.
For the past seven years, I’ve lived here, but yet I don’t feel like I live here. I rarely attend local events and I often feel like a stranger in a place I don’t belong in. I don’t know if I have a future here. I’m now middle-aged and feel stuck here. In a positive note, I do have a good job these days that keeps me motivated to move forward. Perhaps a new golden era of Baltimore is yet to come for me. But its true how that saying goes: ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’
