Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore
Madison Smartt Bell, Crown Publishers, 2007

Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore, Madison Smartt Bell,

Crown Publishers, 2007

The premise of all the Crown Journeys books is that an author with local ties – not necessarily an author with experience in travel writing – writes a travelogue about a particular locale. The journeys are made, for the most part, on foot, hence the books’ subtitles, A Walk through … or something similar. The fact that the books are written by writers who don’t normally write travel journalism probably explains why most of them avoid at all costs spending any time writing about the aspects of their locales that you would expect to make it into the tourism board’s literature. These writers don’t want to be seen as tourists; they are locals, after all, and they know what makes their cities tick. 

Madison Smartt Bell, author of the novel All Souls’ Rising, has done the walking treatment on Baltimore (not his hometown, but his current home) in Charm City. His addition to the Crown Journeys series is a bit heavier on the walking than many of the series’ other entries, and it’s a bit more determined to steer clear of the more famous – and, regrettably, more interesting – parts of town. 

    Bell tackles the problem of selling Baltimore with a nod to the city’s infamously unstable character. One of the country’s most historic cities, it is also one of America’s most troubled, with a high crime rate and a tendency toward social and economic setbacks. This is a city with two sides, one proud and admirable, the other a bit downtrodden and worse for wear. Bell’s task is to take us on a walk through town and explain to us how one city can justifiably deserve both reputations.

The first walk Bell takes us on is one of the best in any of the Crown Journeys books, a straightforward stroll that makes a subtle yet important point. Bell begins by stepping out his front door in the suburban fringe of north Baltimore and simply heads south down Greenmount Avenue, a street that will eventually take him to the heart of the downtown. As he moves south, the city around him changes, becoming more desolate and forbidding. He stops at bars in which he is held in a sort of air-lock for inspection before being allowed inside, an extreme security measure that underscores the fact that, just by walking a couple of miles, he has passed from suburbia into one of Baltimore’s most violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Eventually he emerges on the other side, in the city’s revitalized downtown, where he steps into a club housed in a renovated industrial building. The establishment is an Argentinian supper and dance club owned by a couple of doctors; it is trendy and chic, frequented by hipsters who love to tango. That a walk more or less straight down a single street has led him from his own innocuous front door to this self-consciously upscale venue, passing through a no-man’s-land of poverty in between, says a lot about the condition of America’s cities.

The problem is, the same could be said about nearly any American city, and Bell does little to differentiate Baltimore from any other town of a similar size. He strolls with friends and hangs out in his usual haunts: bars, blues clubs, more bars. But by staying in mundane Baltimore he shows us mostly what we could find anywhere. There are bars and blues clubs on every corner of every city, and the people inside Bell’s bars and blues clubs don’t seem to have an especially interesting only-in-Baltimore character about them, unlike, say, the quirky individuals in Feet on the Street, Roy Blount Jr.’s stroll through New Orleans.

Nor is Bell’s method of presenting Baltimore as journalistically compelling as, say, Never a City So Real, Alex Kotlowitz’s traipse through Chicago. Where Kotlowitz sought out colorful characters in order to expose Chicago’s seedy-but-lovable underbelly, Bell generally just rambles, both physically and verbally. He notes nearly every historic building he passes and expounds on its significance, and he’s clearly done lots of research. But his historical digressions are dry and tangential, and they are a poor substitute for the details of a journey in which something actually happens. 

This is not to say that Bell is an unpleasant travel companion. His style is smooth and amiable, and it’s easy to follow him from street to street, block to block. It’s just that one gets the sense that we’re not getting anywhere by following him, and that we’re not going to find much of interest if we ever do get where we’re going. The Crown Journeys books are often not particularly successful at making a reader want to visit the places they document, but Charm City in particular is probably not going to increase Baltimore’s tourism revenue by a significant amount.