For one thing, there are always other seemingly non-dangerous people around, in the restaurants, bars, the Meyerhoff and other nightlife venues, something that often is the only thing that makes one neighborhood safer than an adjacent one. (I remember once leaving an Orioles game early and walking home alone through the Otterbein - which at night is as shadowy and still as adjacent Federal Hill is lit up and hopping - and having a very concerned police officer pull up in his cruiser to ask me if I knew where I was and why I was walking around alone.)
The Harbor and Midtown have always seemed quite the urban gifts - something we get in return for putting up with the parking problems and crowds that descend on what downtown residents think of as "our" neighborhoods. They are lively and interesting and, most of all, walkable.
"This is unacceptable," Dixon told me when I asked about last weekend's beatings, which might have involved patrons of a bottle club, Suite Ultralounge, in the basement of the Belvedere Hotel. "People who live in that area deserve to walk in that area."
The city's liquor board stripped the Ultralounge of its bottle license in November, a month after two people were shot and one stabbed in a fight that started in the club, but it remains open as its owner appeals the revocation in Circuit Court.
Dixon said the incidents tell her "we have a problem with our young people ...being irresponsible." She wondered what kids were doing out that late to begin with, or, more to the point, what their parents were or weren't doing about keeping them at home, or at least in line.
"People want us to take care of their kids," she said.
I think it's interesting that Dixon lately has added a fourth goal to her old cleaner-greener-healthier mantra: safer. She noted all the usual measures that her administration would be taking, including increasing police patrols, using surveillance cameras and, in the Ultralounge case, looking at any zoning changes that could force the club to close.
But she also talked about plunging deeper, to the root of the problem, which is how she ended up in the whole personal responsibility thing. It's a subject she returned to Friday, during a meeting with The Baltimore Sun's editorial board, when she said she wants to focus on getting Baltimoreans to become more self-sufficient rather than constantly turning to the government to raise their kids or put a roof over their heads.
"What is it we can do," she said, about "four, five generations of people in public housing ... or three, four generations in addiction."
It's a "tough, tough challenge" to break such cycles, she acknowledged, and obviously not one that will happen as immediately as putting more cops on the street or closing down a problem club.
In the meantime, since I live in Federal Hill (and was previously a Mount Vernon resident), I have a certain proprietary interest in the nearby Harbor and Midtown areas. Since some kids apparently haven't learned the number one parental rule when you go to someone else's house, let me enlighten: If you can't behave, you have to go home.
