The “Charm City” dominates Chesapeake Bay and its waterfront recapitulates America’s urban transformation. From a Roman Catholic colonial refuge, Baltimore became a mercantile port, guarded by Ft McHenry (where Francis Scott Key composed the “Star-Spangled Banner”). Industrial and commercial use took over in the nineteenth century giving way in the late twentieth century to a new inner-harbor festival marketplace, hotels, cultural attractions and sports facilities, including the neo-traditional Camden Yards (home of baseball’s Orioles). Yet critics worry that this recreation zone, like splendid old suburbs, such as Roland Park, and the verdant campus of the Johns Hopkins University or its renowned Hospital and Medical School, does not reflect the problems of race and poverty that have plagued the modern city. Its population has dropped to 641,468 (2000 estimate), although the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, encompassing rural towns, suburbs and planned communities like Columbia, Maryland, has become the fourth largest in the country (7,285,846).

Despite a series of dynamic mayors, including Donald Schaefer and Kurt Schmoke, analyst David Rusk has used the city as a case study of the need for shared metropolitan taxation and planning. Half the city’s neighborhoods are poor, incomes represent only 59 percent of suburban averages and the burdens of both poverty and an inadequate tax base fall hardest on a black urban majority (Baltimore Unbound, 1996).

Perhaps Baltimore’s cultural reflections find a balance among past glories and contemporary dilemmas. John Waters, for example, has produced remarkably individualistic films that explore race, sex, aesthetics and neighborhood in the postwar city. Barry Levinson has also dealt with neighborhood and nostalgia in films like his Jewish family epic Avalon (1990), while observing the gritty reality of center city in the ABS series Homicide (1993–9).