It's the first Sunday in December, and an eclectic crowd gathers for the 23rd annual Mayor's Christmas Parade. Pale women with jet-black fingernails and hair, weary young mothers in sweat shirts and jeans, yuppie parents toting bundled babies, grizzled men in blue-collar garb jam the sidewalks in anticipation.
On the corner, members of the Barnburners Social Club grill free hot dogs for neighborhood kids. An interracial couple holding hands saunters along the parade route.
This is happening in Hampden. Not the old Hampden, not the new Hampden. The Hampden that is undergoing a halting, but surprising metamorphosis.
While no one was watching, this isolated, working-class Baltimore community of some 6,780 homes, long reviled as an enclave of white intolerance, has become a cheap, convenient and safe destination for gays, artists, new merchants, young families, among them even a few African-Americans.
The transformation has taken place quietly, without headlines or fanfare. Seasonal visitors just passing through to see the spectacle of lights on W. 34th Street could miss it entirely. "One reason it's so successful, nobody's tried to analyze it or change it," says community activist Cheryl Wade, a Hampden resident for 12 years. "It's just a natural progression."
The story could be told through the neighborhood's food alone: At the New System Bakery, new proprietor David L. Knox -- probably the first African-American to own a business on W. 36th Street -- is adding broccoli-cheese bread and tropical pudding cupcakes to the bakery's traditional raisin bread and potato rolls.
Around the corner at Showalter's Saloon on Chestnut, Gary Showalter, born and bred in Hampden, grills portobello mushrooms in the kitchen while regulars huddle at the bar.
Meanwhile, Denise Whiting at Cafe Hon serves meatloaf to savvy city denizens and day trippers who have sauntered over from the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Johns Hopkins University campus and other points beyond Hampden's narrow side streets, hills and hollows. Soon, Frazier's Restaurant & Tap Room, a Hampden institution, will open a steakhouse on the 36th Street site of the old Ye-Eat Shoppe.
Of course, Hampden's no Georgetown. It's not even Federal Hill. And it probably never will be. It is still isolated geographically and emotionally from the rest of Baltimore. A place where many )) residents descend from the multitudes who once worked in the adjacent Woodberry mills.
