City Life

Kenneth N. Harris Sr. could have very easily taken a different path. He could have been like so many other children of 16-year-old single mothers in Baltimore's forgotten neighborhoods, and taken the route that eschews education and accomplishment for the lure of streets ruled by violence played out amid a cancerous drug epidemic. He could have spurned responsibility, assumed the mantle of a victim of limited opportunities, and fallen in with the crowd that wallows in nihilism. But he did not. And so he did not allow us the luxury of ignoring his murder, as we do so many other acts of violence that are more commonplace than we wish to acknowledge.

New York in July, hot and breezy, the smell of pizza and coffee in the air, and on the subway one is surrounded by women in light summer dresses, the bare shoulders of elegant, young, urban women whose shoulders tell you they never toted barges or lifted bales, never laid eyes on a barge or a bale except for someone barging into their office and giving them a baleful look. They are swanning along through their 20s, and I love to look at them while observing the No Staring rule, five seconds max - but five seconds of a beautiful New York woman burns an image on your retina that will see you through the miseries of the city.

One of Baltimore's most distinctive buildings is hunting for a tenant. The four-story Fava Building in Jonestown, featuring a cast-iron facade salvaged from an 1869 warehouse, has been largely vacant since Gardel's Restaurant and Supper Club went out of business last fall. It formerly housed the Baltimore City Life Museums. A private entity, the 1840s Corp., owns the building at 33 Front St. and last year opened the 1840s Carrollton Inn, a 13-room, $2 million bed-and-breakfast inside three other former City Life buildings on the block.

From a secluded garden in downtown Baltimore, shaded by four ailanthus trees, there's hardly any sense of the high-rise office buildings several blocks away or the traffic whizzing by on the Jones Falls Expressway. The garden once bordered the estate owned in the early 19th century by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Much later, it became part of the Baltimore City Life Museums campus, a public attraction that told the story of Baltimore's history before the museums closed abruptly in 1997.

The only sure things in Baltimore are crime and taxes. But since all of our local candidates are focusing on crime, I wanted to take a moment to cry out into the urban wilderness about taxes. Like migrating birds, it seems as if every three years Baltimoreans can be seen climbing up to their rooftops to protest inflated assessments, only to go back into their nests to mournfully mull their situation. But unlike the recent past, where the patience to bear heavy tax burdens was sustained by the promise of ever-increasing home values, I fear the fortitude of taxpaying families in Baltimore is waning.

I grew up in Baltimore, and I live in Baltimore, yet I encounter my city most vividly on HBO. Sunday nights at 10 o'clock I sit in my living room, eat popcorn, and watch David Simon's critically exalted drama, The Wire. Like other fans, I can't wait for the fifth season to begin - hopefully this fall. Watching The Wire in Baltimore is surely different from watching it in Des Moines, Iowa, but not because its world feels like home. The violent, drug-saturated streets of West Baltimore that the series dissects with unsparing brilliance are about three miles from my house, but they might as well be 3,000.

Nothing bursts the New Urbanite bubble like a little burrito smell. Lots of yuppies who grew up on quiet cul-de-sacs have moved to lively cities, where they can walk to restaurants and cafes. Sometimes, they discover, they don't even have to leave their apartments to get a whiff of what's cooking. That was the case at Village Lofts, a 68-condo development near the Johns Hopkins University featuring granite countertops, designer lighting and the unmistakable aroma of Chipotle, the restaurant on the ground floor.

I would like to keep the Christopher Clarke story alive for another day, and this time with the photographs from his funeral. The deaths of young men in Baltimore come and go like flashes of intermittent gunfire on some dark, distant battlefront. But we should pay attention to this one. We should not let it go. We should not shake our heads and quickly turn the page. We should talk to the boy's mother. We should look at the photographs. We should be outraged by the senseless death of Christopher Clarke on Tuesday, March 13 -- at least as outraged as many were over the arrest, the same day, of a 7-year-old for riding a dirt bike.

Mayor Sheila Dixon made sure she covered all the bases: a safe city, clean streets, improved schools, an end to homelessness, green spaces, workforce housing, balanced growth and high-wage jobs. Each and every item is on her mayoral agenda. But she was candid yesterday about the challenge facing her, and equally as candid about the imperative for Baltimoreans to unite in common purpose to change those things that undermine this city. It needed to be said, because if Ms. Dixon is going to tackle the ills of city life, she needs the community with her. Ms. Dixon, a native of Baltimore, has known its pain and problems personally; her brother died of drug-related AIDS.

Baltimoreans face the lowest life expectancy of almost any jurisdiction in America, according to a new study by the Harvard School of Public Health. City residents can expect to live 68.6 years on average, the study found. That is worse than in all but a handful of counties in South Dakota that include impoverished Indian reservations, and there has been little improvement since a study published in 1997. Longevity in Baltimore is much lower than in affluent Montgomery County, where it was 81.3 years, eighth-highest in the nation and trailing seven Colorado counties only fractionally.