Port Covington

[bet your life that your sweet wife is gonna catch more fish than you...]

Way back when in the not-as-chilly month of October, Dana and I went on a bike ride from (Hampden/Butcher's Hill to) downtown to Port Covington, the little V-shaped peninsula-ish strip south of Federal Hill, where the Hanover Street Bridge connects mainland Baltimore to the wilds of Brooklyn, Cherry Hill and Curtis Bay over the Middle Branch of the Patapsco. There's a Wal-Mart there, and the Baltimore Sun's printing facility, but mostly it's pretty barren.

We went mostly because the Middle Branch is allegedly the next (or maybe last?) big strip of waterfront property to be developed in the city, with all sorts of potential for that gospel idea that Bmore pols are looking for these days, referred-to alternately as Mixed Use, Live Where Work, Live Shop Work Play Eat, or First Floor Retail. Personally, I've not written a lot about Port Covington at my day job, but that just might be because it's so far down the city's wish list that not a lot is going to happen there in the next decade.

What we found was, there are some folks that prefer it that way.


[weeds]

The above is what the mouth of the Middle Branch looks like over the mess of weeds and chain-link at that very bottom tip of Port Covington. It's absolutely overgrown and filthy, with trash everywhere, but clear evidence that partying/bonfiring had been going on. It also looked like it ought to take about two seconds to bulldoze all the overgrowth and nonsense standing in the way of someone paving over paradise for a condo tower or whatever. But when we went further down to the water, we found a little square cement patio ("We could play foursquare here!" Dana said, predictably) with evidence of picknicking, and beyond that, a strip of riprap where we found this fellow:


[i'ma gon' fishin' too...]

This guy said his name was James, and he was fishing with grass shrimp bait for rockfish and bass. He told us he'd caught 45-inchers on this site before, which struck me as a slightly frightening prospect because of how close to, and bound-in by industrial pollution sites Port Covington is. He added that over the years the fish have dwindled, but he still fishes every Saturday. How postmodern, I thought -- the 21st century hobo, fishing outside the Wal-Mart.

What struck me mainly about Port Covington was not that it was such a terrible use of potentially beautiful waterfront property but that it was such a recent terrible use of waterfront property. Putting a remote, car-access-only big box retailer next to a big newspaper printing facility, all in a completely unwelcoming office park makes no sense to me in this day and age, and I think both buildings were built in the last 30 years. First of all, where's the market for the Wal Mart coming from? Across the bridge? Federal Hill? Second, aren't we in the age of What A Water View Can Do? In Baltimore especially, I'd expect this sort of parcel of land, if it was indeed bare and not occupied by troublesome factories or brownfields to be snatched up and developed as a people place shortly after the Inner Harbor was.

Anyway, that's what's happening slightly to the north in the southern part of Riverside, another stop on our bike ride. Except there's no water view (only a CSX rail yard). Cool place though.

The following buildings were side by side, and I shot them because the one on the right (which is where it appeared on the street) is the type of building that I really go for -- inornate, elegant, simple red-brick factory type deals that are built to last and full of character (KB would say -- "It's just a building, Robbie"), while the one staring it in the face across the street is a god-awful example of spaceship-from-hell modern low-budg architecture. The one on the right is luxury condos (obviously) while the one of the left was, I believe, a medical center. I don't get why developers, at least in this town, see no value in contextualizing architecture, especially in a place where you're trying to attract skilled or innovative workers and people with money, to live and work there. Doesn't anyone have any taste?


[a study in contrastualization]

To the west of these monsters, we've got the building that I recently learned is David Simon's favorite in building in Baltimore, for really predictable, pinko commie reasons about how it represents blue-collar workers undivorced from their product and its means of production (could he be any more obvious a Marxist?), the Pabst Castle. This is a dope building, I think, not because it evokes the dignity of Scotland or whatever Simon said, but because it looks so German to me, like a Gingerbread House in the Black Forest. And what could possibly go better with the whole ethos of PBR? It's a hipster beer, and hipsters long to return to their childhood fantasies of castles and forts and sweet-n-spicy cookies...



[the castle]


[the sign]

And finally, here's a picture of my bike, which I've dubbed Icey Smoove, because I really like my bike. It's a Belgian-made Flandria from the 80s that MacGruder Bernstein gave me this summer, and it's DOPE:


[icey smoove]

Coming up next, the little-known South Baltimore barbecue place where Dana and I ate!

Also, check out my latest review from El Papel de la Ciudad.

Andy Friedman @ El Rancho Grande

[country]

Sunday night, after the Steelers-Ravens TRIUMPH, I popped by my neighborhood coffeehouse, El Rancho Grande, to catch the better part of Andy Friedman and the Other Failures' set, played before about a dozen people from the corner of the corner of the hole in the wall. It was worth it.

This band is basically what I aspire to sound like in music -- very much rooted in a classic country tradition, complete with swingy beats and some very impressive telecaster lead playing overtop of a bare-bones rhythm section, but with a decidedly modern feel, lyrically. Hell, Friedman doesn't even have that great of a voice, but it's mediocre in the same way Ryan Adams's or Mac McCaughey's is--sort of abrasive and bleak, but suited to songs about failed road trips and stupid love affairs. Everything he played, as far as I could tell, was within the most basic of folk-song or 12-bar-blues formats, but the vibe was darker and more lo-fi than your average independent public radio equivalent. It reminded me of this Pittsburgh band I love called The Working Poor much more than, say, Langhorne Slim.

I can't say I got the names of any of Andy's songs, but he was handing out free copies of a two-song EP called Idaho, which was a really cool idea, and both songs on it, the title track and "Road-Tripping Daddy" are cool examples of the above description. Don't have too much more to say about it, because I haven't had the chance yet to really sit down and study this stuff. Plus I only have two songs plus Myspace.

Also notable is that Andy Friedman is a regular illustrator for such big-name pubs as the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, (look at his work here) and he was selling some awesome music-related prints at the show. I bought this one of Levon Helm, but I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with it yet (hang it? give it as a gift?):

A Tale of Two Reubens

[Jay's]


[Tremont's]

For my money, the best cultural reference to the Reuben sandwich, which is, besides the Primanti’s Pastrami & Cheese, the greatest sandwich of all time (and definitely the greatest widely-known standard sandwich form out there) comes from the movie Quiz Show.

Richard Goodwin, the kind-faced FCC investigator played by Rob Morrow, and quite obviously a Jew, is eating a Reuben in Charles Van Doren’s country club dining room. Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), who is being fed the correct answers to the questions on a carefully-orchestrated TV quiz show, is the subject of Goodwin’s investigation into fraud in TV.

The tension between them is palpable, down to their very physically opposing appearances, but Goodwin breaks it by quipping, between mouthfuls, of the restaurant -- “they have the sandwich but there doesn't seem to be any Reubens.” It’s maybe the best veiled joke about anti-Semitism I’ve heard in a film, but I bring it up just for the purpose of pointing out—Hey, that’s always the way it goes, isn’t it? It’s how I imagine Italian guys feel when they try to get pizza in a place like Baltimore. The product is there, but where the hell is the schlemiel what’s supposed to have invented it, huh?

A few weeks ago I was covering the design competition for the University of Baltimore’s new law school building (at the UB student center, of course), listening to all these world-class architects like Moshe Safdie and Dominque Perrault, and it was all really interesting, but MAN was I hung over. A not-so-frequently-seen old friend had been in town the night before, we’d gone to trivia night at Max’s, yadda yadda yadda, I drank a lot. On a weeknight. So sue me.

My prescription, which worked amazingly well, was to go to Jay’s Carryout on Charles Street, and eat a big plate of grease, and when I saw the Reuben on the menu, I said why not? This was a surprisingly passable sandwich (it’s the top one in the photos), with not too oily corned beef and tart, probably store-brought Russian dressing. The best part about it was the kraut, though, which definitely was not canned, although I can’t imagine a grease hole like Jay’s making its own cabbage products. Boar’s Head, maybe? The main problem with it, however, and what kept it from being good, was the lack of what Henry Hong would call “uniform meat distribution.” This specimen did not have it. I was choking on monster-size bites of corned with very little of anything else in them, and dammit, I didn’t like it.

Then, a few days ago, I decided to test a theory put forth by my colleague “Brendarita” Kearney, that the Reuben at the Tremont Grand hotel’s deli, which is right next to our office, is the best sandwich in the city. Now I have to admit, this was a good sandwich. It was crisply toasted, not limp and damp like a lot of Reubens, and it had some fine quality meat in it. My qualm was with the kraut. Way too briny, not enough pure vegetable flavor. And it cost me like $7.95, and for that kind of money, why am I not eating an Attman’s Nosh on Rye?

Who knows? Not me.