Here Be Dragons: A Gentrified Tale

Going out of state for college creates a nostalgia for all things Baltimore. For months I crave the food, noise, and people I have known for two decades while I am away studying in a secluded suburb. Nothing can calm my hunger for four wings, Western fries, and a medium half and half. Every winter, when I return to this charmed place I take it all in.

Looking around I see things that will never change. There will always be kids in khaki pants waiting on buses that take way too long. There will always be grandmothers in line at gas station windows to buy one too many lottery tickets. Yet, amidst the never-changing there is something new here. Stores and people I have never seen before clutter my landscape. Hidden among the sidewalks and potholes there is something new here…

Riding down North Avenue it becomes so much clearer. The project apartments I used to call home are no more. My childhood memories of parking lot games and hopscotch turned to rumble and ash. My elementary school—where I learned to read—is no longer standing. There is a new school there. It has no colorful mural outside its door. The yellow pillars where my mother took our annual First Day of School are gone. So much has changed.

I want to cry. It is like someone took a battering ram to my childhood while my back was turned. Sadly, however, I do not cry. Instead, I imagine myself painting a warning label on the side of a rowhome. The sign would have a simple message: here be dragons.

Baltimore is not undiscovered. We have known her beauty for decades before your cashless businesses arrived. I know no city more beautiful and know community more resilient than my own.