Naked girls, cheap sex and cops looking blindly into The Block's many sticky pleasure dens have enticed tourists and bums to sit side by side and grasp for the jiggling titties all around like candy on Halloween. The girls practically enter the stage naked and bobbing along to foul music such as Linkin Park or Disturbed. Baltimore has watched and heard about these strippers taking a little extra to give one desperate or curious guy some action on the side. The cops have holed up right next to the clubs parking their cruisers at 500 E. Baltimore St yet only a few fairly minor liquor license violations are prosecuted each year.
When I sat all by myself in at the Midway Bar, a classic hook up joint on The Block with posters of famous pin-up girls circling the entire room pressed up right under the graying drop ceiling, the only patrons during that hour were shaky mumbling men paying with mixed change and exiting with fifths of Mad Dog in small paper bags. The bartender took only the fewest minutes possible to grab me a beer from the refridgerator and speed walk back to her game of electronic poker pushed against the back wall. Every few minutes or so she would yell, "Goddamnit!," or "Shit!" as she lost a round. I certainly didn't blame her for getting a little excitement into her shift of emptiness and boredom. The bar was so clean, despite nips and cracks in every surface that I would have consumed my beer on the floor instead of the creaky red plastic bar stool. Rather than the traditional smell of stale smoke the entire bar reeked of Lysol and the original scent Mr. Clean. My favorite part of my hour at the Midway was when an obvious regular entered and stood at the very front of the bar by the smoky windows. The bartender almost materialized in front of him from the back of the room and had a conversation so quickly and full of
Bawlmore english I missed everything that was said besides, "You know Shorty, tell him to c'mere." The tall and lanky black man, while holding onto his drooping pants, did a turn to his left out the door and within the minute had dragged a big black man about 300 pounds to the doorway. The second that man reached the doorway the bartender began screaming, "What the fuck you fucking asshole....(garbled angry things)!" Over her screaming the big man, now shuffling side to side in the middle of the sidewalk added, "Shut up you stupid bitch. I hate your voice, that fucking voice drives me fucking crazy...(garbled angry things)" In his defense she did have a voice similar to fingernails on a chalkboard and a pissed off harpie. The screaming lasted for less than a minute, the big man stalked off to his club having already scooted back to the edge of the sidewalk looking like the Midway had contracted some contagious virus. The bartender immediately attended to her customer in a very professional manner. No one on the street fliched during the screaming match, no one looked or stepped around the big yelling man. Since I was the only one in the echoing bar I was torn as to whether I should stare like a bug eyed freak or become really interested in the wet label on my Yungeling. I chose the former and gawked liked a Japanese tourist at Disneyland.
I had parked my car right in front of the club Lust dead center in the middle of the decaying 400 block of Baltimore Street. It was only 5 pm and the street was obviously filled only with strippers getting off shift or getting ready to start and men walking tightly against the buildings groping like moles in the bright sunlight. Here and there the men in drooping jeans and massive XXXL t-shirts would fumble to holler at a woman as she skirted by them. They tended to go for the women in poured on jeans and a shirt that covered everthing above their belly button and just below the nipples. Not a single girl responded to the wavering mating calls. Baltimore Street, being a major city thoroughfare filled every light cycle with crowded minivans, beaten up Honda Accords carrying a blank eyed guy in a wrinkled white shirt and tie or vibrating hunks of metal alternating between cargo of guys in huge white t-shirts and gold grills or girls singing along to Beyonce or Rihanna. The same pattern followed the hundreds of cars idling at the lights. The people inside, including the curious children, never turned an eye to the huge and flashing Hustler Club or the stripper that ran by me while crossing the street wearing a long ripped t-shirt and 7 inch clear heels full sideboob visible. In the light, her make-up looked quite terrifying in its quantity and blue eyeshadow reaching into the eyebrows. Not a head turned or a finger pointed at the spectacle I was witnessing. Even as I got in my car and a homeless man, hot in his many layers, pulled his pants off and took a t-shirt out of his boxer briefs so very brief that the holes revealed all but the precious frontal bit so close to my car he could have leaned on the hood for support. Not a look. The Block was so full of screaming and stripping and bad make-up that no one took a gander. Baltimore has made it invisible. Yeah, Yeah, a little block right? A little piece of garbage next to the cops that they can keep quiet. True. It hasn't really caused a racket in Baltimore. It brought us fame and tourists from the 1900's through the 1970's when "urban renewal" swiped a lot of the clubs. It's not the morality that matters it is the fact that Baltimore allows this decaying block of prostitution and drugs to exist in direct violation of the laws the city is trying to impose. It sits blocks away from City Hall and
on the same block as the
Central District Police Station. We can keep it contained, sure, or we can fix it up and make a downtown that reflects the words Dixon and
Bealefeld and the rest speak.
Since the inception of The Block the city has been spreading a positive buzz while the club owners ran things their own way. Even during the "urban renewal" project in the 1970's, after the devastating race riots of 1968, while the city was buying up clubs on The Block to make room for change and speaking loudly "about cleaning up the city" the
Baltimore Sun was publishing articles oozing nostaligia for the clubs and bars. "Baltimore Street in the Roaring '20's produced a night-blooming hybridization of bookmakers and congressmen, prostitutes and society debutantes." stated an article titled, "An Affectionate History, of The Block," publised in 1979 by the
Baltimore Sun.
The statement above failed to recognize that the reason The Block succeeded so broadly during the 1920's was the fact that it completely ignored the rules of Prohibition.
Govenor Albert Ritchie defyed the Federal imposition of Prohibition leading Baltimore to become the 2nd wettest city in the country next to New York City. However, The Block lead the rest in defying the laws of Prohibition and held the title for defying the rest of Baltimore and U.S. laws as well. For the
Sun to publish such strange articles during a time when the city was slowly eliminating The Block is still very mysterious. There is so much information available that could support the idea that the city was one: being paid by rich Jewish club owners, often reffered to as "The Jewish Mafia" and two: absolutely fine with the corruption and lawlessness on The Block because it existed within very controlled circumstances.
Baltimore, being both Northern and Southern in its nature exists an enigmatic environment encompassing an attitude of government and people that accepts just about any type of person or place. It is able to forget those things lacking taste or couth and in many ways embraces the seedier aspects of the city. Of all those articles and books written about Baltimore throughout the 20th and 21st century the majority emphasize the invisible city of Baltimore that lives within its own rules and accepts and embraces corruption and hookers just a few block shy of City Hall.
I like to say that I am researching the underground history of Baltimore until I realized that Baltimore doesn't have an underground because it's never cared so much to create one.
