You will be seen
Other Smalltimore vignettes smack more of claustrophobia than romance. "If you ever dated anybody in Baltimore and decide to go anywhere, Hampden or Fells Point, the odds were very high you would either run into them or the former significant other of the person you are now dating or the former significant other's current significant other, and tension would ensue," says the now-married Moreno.
In the mid-1970s, Vanessa White had a "really, really, really good friend who was going with this really, really, really nice girl. We thought she was wonderful," says White, owner of Vanessa's Vintage Treasures in South Baltimore.
One evening, White's friend and his buddies ventured to The Block. In one show bar, "There's this beautiful girl sitting in the [revolving] champagne glass," White says, replaying that fateful night. "When it turns around, it's his girlfriend. He had no idea. She had one leg kicked up in the air, one shoe on and one shoe off."
White's friend never returned to The Block, or to his girlfriend.
As well as people, property has a way of reappearing in the lives of longtime Baltimoreans and linking them to one another. As a young child, Gabriel Kroiz lived in the Marlborough Apartments in Bolton Hill, where his father was the building manager. As a newly minted architect, Kroiz found himself working on a renovation of the Marlborough. Years later, his wife, Mina Cheon, was part of a team that created a virtual tour of the Cone sisters' apartments in the Marlborough for the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Every road somehow crosses the Marlborough," Kroiz says.
Smalltimore isn't confined to city limits. Once, on a New York City street, Charles Village resident Lisa Simeone had no sooner invoked John Waters' name than she nearly collided with the filmmaker. It was "totally cosmic," the host of NPR's World of Opera says.
Smalltimore, as well, is as much about the past as it is the present. As they conducted oral histories with previous residents of the once-thriving community along Pennsylvania Avenue, Willie and Zelma Ragsdale struck Smalltimore gold. Again and again, interview subjects told the couple: "`If you wanted to meet anybody, you just came to Mosher and Pennsylvania Avenue. At that corner, that person will walk by it some time, because if you had to go to the bank or the drugstore or the market, you went by that corner."
