It was one of those slightly disorienting, out-of-context scenes, a business breakfast held in a failed nightclub. Developers, lawyers and other be-suited downtown execs helped themselves to coffee and pastries at a bar still lined with top-shelf vodkas and whiskeys, then hovered around the dance floor waiting not for the DJ but the mayor.
Sheila Dixon's talk at the Downtown Partnership breakfast on Thursday seemed a mismatch of message and setting. Not that it didn't feature the expected bizspeak - the word "maximize" figured prominently - or applause lines about focusing on road repairs and public transit that were tailored to a crowd dominated by commuting 9-to-5'ers.
But she seemed most impassioned not when speaking about concrete and buses but when she suddenly turned to youth and personal responsibility, or the lack thereof. It was Sheila as the city's mother as much as Dixon as the city's mayor.
"It's not our responsibility to take care of you," she said, not so much to the crowd in front of her but to the city as large. "It's your responsibility."
It was something she returned to after her talk, given as part of the Partnership's annual "State of Downtown" assessment, when I asked her about my particular state-of-downtown issue.
As someone who for more than 20 years has not just worked but lived within the one-mile radius of downtown that the Partnership assesses every year, count me among those both alarmed and enraged by two recent incidents that hit close to home.
First, there were the teenagers who rampaged through the Inner Harbor one Saturday night in April, a melee in which two youths were stabbed and some Harborplace businesses were worried enough to close early or encourage their customers not to leave until police got the situation under control. And even more frightening, last weekend, there were the two people who separately were jumped by groups of young people as they walked in the Midtown-Belvedere area. One victim was so viciously beaten he suffered a concussion and doesn't even remember the attack in which he lost several teeth and now needs surgery.
Those are both areas that have been among the safest in the city. I'm pretty sure I have never felt worried walking, even alone, even at night, around the harbor or Midtown-Belvedere (which actually is just north of that one-mile-radius district).
