Volume 44, Number 20 · December 18, 1997
West of Downtown
By Michael Massing
The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
by David Simon, by Edward Burns
Broadway Books, 543 pp., $27.50
Anyone interested in seeing at first hand the contradictions of urban America today would do well to visit Baltimore. Once the prototype of an aging industrial city, Baltimore has done much to reinvent itself. During the 1960s, when I was growing up there, its only visitors seemed to be motorists making a wrong turn off I-95 on their way to New York or Washington. Now tourists make special trips to see Baltimore's Inner Harbor, with its seafood restaurants, grand convention center, and National Aquarium, which, topped by a glass pyramid, juts dramatically into the water. The nearby Orioles Park at Camden Yards, a faux-antique brick-and-girder stadium, attracts baseball fans from around the country, and a new stadium is now going up next to it to house the Ravens (the football team named in honor of Edgar Allan Poe, who died in Baltimore). The city's efforts to revitalize its downtown have been so successful that it now receives a steady stream of city planning experts seeking ideas for their own hometowns.
Review, 4768 words
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