The Chop Leaves the City

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Last week we listed our house for sale.

It’s not that we’re leaving Maryland- not yet, anyway. It’s not that we’re struggling to meet the payments. It’s not that owning a house is too much to manage in terms of maintenance and we want to downsize. It’s not that we’re starting a family or anything like that. And it’s not, as we’d hoped when we bought it that we’re trading in our modest starter house for a much nicer one in a better neighborhood.

For us, the decision to sell is entirely a sociopolitical one. We don’t want to live in Baltimore City anymore. While identity politics were in full swing and the city was busy voting for Pugh, Young, Pratt and Mosby (who are bumbling incompetents at best and criminals at worst) we were busy voting with our wallet and our feet. We’re giving up home ownership in the city voluntarily to go rent an apartment in Towson, two miles above the city line and an entire world away.

This is the part of these kind of posts where we’re supposed to give a long list of reasons why Baltimore City is a civil and political disaster. We could give you in links the career highlights of the politicians we just mentioned, and there are some doozies in those highlights to be sure.

We could conjure a very long list of Baltimore’s social problems but we’re not going to do that. Anyone who’s lived in Baltimore City for more than a month is acutely aware of virtually all those problems, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone anywhere who thinks things are going just great in Baltimore. Besides, a year ago- even before the rioting, we wrote extensively about the city’s problems and the difficulties we’ve faced living here on a permanent basis as a home-owning, middle aged, middle class adult. In more than twelve months since, the state of the city, and the state of our neighborhood in particular has declined even further.

This is the part where we’re meant to link extensively to recent news articles on various topics so that you can see it’s not just our imagination. The way these things work, we’d be sure to put the most horrific and impossible phrases in the hyperlink text, so that they jump out on the page in red and you can see piece by piece the violence and trauma and pathos that goes on in Baltimore every day. Off the top of our head maybe we’d mention the home invasions of the elderly, the bands of machete and shotgun wielding thieves (separate bands of thieves, you understand… one with machetes and another with shotguns!), the little girls under ten shot on their front porches a block or two away from our own porch, and the alarmingly high number of homeowners who have shitwater rising up out of toilets and flooding their basements regularly here. We’re not going to do that either. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of trauma, and a lot of very literal shit. Take our word for it.

Another necessary part of this essay is the one where we run the numbers. In a different set of hyperlinks we could show you the census data which say that Baltimore is still losing population. We could highlight the affordability crisis by comparing rents and home values to income, and we could do the old compare-and-contrast that certain media outlets love which show inequality increasing and all sorts of social and economic disparities in very tight quarters on a map. We could write reams on the property tax rate and how those taxes are pissed away freely on things like casinos and auto races and light festivals… And shiny new mini cities for the rich like Harbor Point and Port Covington. We could even cite some projections to back up our opinion that the way to fix inequality is not to add more cloistered rich people to go alongside the huge concentrations of poverty. But it’s tiresome. By this point in the essay you’re probably done clicking links anyway.

Even if we cited all those numbers they wouldn’t do much good. We’re just going to say it plainly: crime is up. We don’t want to hear what anyone has to say about national statistics on violent crime: we don’t live all over America- we live in Baltimore Maryland USA where crime is UP. We don’t want to hear about what crime was in the 1990’s either. We remember the 90’s thank you very much, and we are no longer living in them. We live in 2016 when crime is UP. And we definitely don’t want to parse out the differences between major and minor crimes or talk about arrest rates or any of that. The kinds of crimes that are really fucking scary and traumatic and serious are UP. Just today there were two separate domestic disputes that spilled into the street on our block. One went unreported. We called 911 on the other and no cops ever showed.

They’re even inventing new kinds of violent crime in Baltimore now. Our whole life we never heard of bump-and-rob carjackings. Now they’re commonplace. Phone snatches? Never happened until a few years ago. Besides, there’s just no way of knowing how much crime is out there. People only call the cops for a fraction of crimes, and the cops only bother to file reports in a fraction of those, just as we were reminded yet again today.

Finally there’s the part where we breathlessly list off all the positive qualities about Baltimore. Nope. Startups, Tech, luxury apartments, fancy restaurants, the JFX Farmers’ Market, Johns Hopkins & MICA, nightlife… these are all more trouble than they’re worth. We still like being able to bike to the ballpark, but honestly we liked it a lot more when a ticket cost half what it does now and bicycling was safer.

But before we end this post and start packing up boxes we want to tell you what the last straw was: it was the murder of Robert Ponsi.

Ponsi, 29, was riding his bicycle home from work in January when six kids ran up to his bike and stabbed him to death in a robbery. As a city resident, one who did not confine himself to the White L, Ponsi was street smart enough to recognize what was happening to him. He got off his bike and made a heroic attempt to fight off his attackers, but even at six on one these pieces of shit were too cowardly to fight and one pulled a knife and stabbed him. At nine o’clock. He laid bleeding in pain in a hospital until 4 am when he died.

This murder was right around the corner from our house. We had been chased by a gang of kids a block away from the spot where Ponsi was killed shortly before it happened. It’s not a stretch to say that could have been us. Two weeks ago we attended a public safety meeting specifically on the topic of gangs of teenagers attacking cyclists. It was highly discouraging to say the least. In the two years since we wrote about the problem in this post, it is safe to say it’s gotten worse. Not only could Ponsi have been us, but the same thing could yet happen to us at any time. After all, three of those very same attackers are still not arrested- still hanging around the neighborhood. Presumably they’re still enrolled in high schools, and are showing up to class and sitting next to good kids. Maybe your kids.

We’ve also heard it said more than a little in public that a murder like this should not garner more interest or concern than any other murder and that this one has been picked up by the media because of white Baltimoreans’ own racism. We call bullshit on that. The fact is that all murders are not created equal. Some victims are targeted because of choices they’ve made in life. Some victims, like McKenzie Elliott, are not targeted at all but are just a chaotic sort of tragedy. But Robert Ponsi was targeted because a bunch of violent scumbags thought he’d make a good victim. That’s both more terrifying and more outrageous than most murders and it’s not racism to say so.

There are also people in this town who would blame us personally for abandoning it, and for not fighting harder and doing more to make our neighborhood a better place. Perhaps they themselves should volunteer to head up the years long boondoggle it takes just to close one problem bar in this neighborhood, and personally risk the sort of threats and harassment one comes in for when one does volunteer for something like that.

Let’s pause to take a look inside some Waverly community meetings. CityPaper columnist Kate Drabinski did just that at a Waverly safety forum…

“The first 28 minutes (I timed it) were for the public officials to tell themselves and all of us what a great job they’ve been doing. [The mayor] SRB told us how hard she’s been listening and how much change she’s been making. She gently chided the City Council members in attendance about not yet calling for her vote to increase funding for rec centers, as if we were all going to quickly forget about the ones that have closed under her watch. There was some ego stroking for the lieutenants and commanders and lieutenant commanders, gentle laughs shared among these city officials as we all sat in our chairs, waiting for our turn to ask questions.

A man who called 911 to report a burglary in progress asked why no one every picked up the phone. A 79-year-old woman from Ednor Gardens asked if after three or four years of calling the Department of Public Works, the police, the mayor’s office, her city councilmember, could crews finally come clean up the mess on her street made after a repaving effort. A man from up York Road asked if, when the cops bring their tactical vehicle to the neighborhood, they could maybe think about the unsafety they bring to the blocks around said tactical vehicle. A woman complained about the time somebody in the city set up a floodlight outside her house that shined into her kid’s bedroom, and no city agency would agree that they’d done it, so it took days to find someone to turn it off. Won’t happen again, she was promised.”

In a subsequent column about a different Waverly meeting Drabinski paints a picture of a gathering that is equally exasperating and ineffective. It’s hard to get past eye rolling phrases like ‘enforced poverty,’ ‘mass incarceration’ or ‘the violence of civic abandonment.’ Look, this isn’t goddamn Gilmor Homes or the deepest ghetto. People choose to live here. We chose to live in this neighborhood, and presumably Drabinski did too. But anyway if you can get past her decrying Capitalism and harkening back to Slavery you get to the point of the meeting where attendees voice the opinion that we need to raise each others’ kids and cook each other spaghetti.

It’s entirely possible that one of the very same people voicing those opinions was Thomascine Greene, the mother of the kid charged with doing the stabbing in the Ponsi case. The Sun profiled Greene shortly after Ponsi was killed, and we had quite a few issues with the way the whole thing was portrayed.

First of all, Greene is described as an activist. We’re going to call bullshit on that, too. Attending a few community meetings only makes one an activist in the most general sense of the word. The article doesn’t cite anything she’s done beyond going to meetings, although we imagine it would’ve had there been any more substantial activism to cite. The Waverly Improvement Association is pretty ineffective, weak and small. Hell, we’ve been to civic meetings ourselves, haven’t we? Did we not march and protest too? If Greene is an activist she’s no more of one than the Chop or anyone else you’d care to name. We also want to say that especially in the last year there’s been a sort of holy righteousness associated with activism here in Baltimore. It’s all bullshit. Calling someone an activist doesn’t magically imbue them with grace and righteousness.

We also noticed that the article says Greene is 66. So if she’s actually the boy’s mother that would mean she was 50 when she had him. We think this is unlikely and we believe she’s probably his grandmother. So it seems likely that the boy’s mother/father are not present, possibly having some serious problems of their own. But even if Thomascine Greene didn’t fail as a parent with the boy’s mother/father she certainly failed with him. Her quotes in that article like “It’s not hard for me to wrap my head around it” and “My eyes don’t go around corners” make us hit the ceiling every time we read them. Here’s someone who shows up at meeting to bitch and moan about “why won’t they do anything for these kids?” but she herself is in charge of one of those kids and strikes us as a lazy failure of a parent.

If she or anyone else thinks we’re going to make the world a better place by volunteering to cook her spaghetti and raise her son, who’d just as soon kill us as look at us, she’s wrong.

Look, we live here in the neighborhood. That YMCA she mentions is pretty nice and there’s a brand new library nearby. Greene says that programs at the Y are too hard to access. That’s bullshit. We’ve been a member of that Y. It’s right there. The programs are scheduled and published well in advance. They do their level best to make it inclusive, especially during after-school hours. If her kid wasn’t using the Y it’s because she was too goddamn lazy to walk over there and enroll him in something. This neighborhood may not be the best, but again it’s not Gilmor Homes or something. You can walk to a lot of shit from here and what you can’t walk to is a short bus ride away. The whole city and large parts of the county are easy to access.

Ms Greene would have you believe that her son wanted to steal Ponsi’s bike because there’s nothing else for him to do. If Prince Greene had wanted a bicycle he should have walked himself down Guilford avenue to BYKE collective which exists solely to let kids earn free bikes and teach them how to maintain them. He could have looked into Jam Squad, Velocipede, or Baltimore Youth Cycling or any of several other groups. If Ms Greene wanted something for her kid to do she should have taken it on herself to go find these things which are out there and are accessible and are trying to reach kids exactly like hers.

There are plenty of families in Ednor Gardens and Waverly whose kids are not out robbing and murdering people so we really don’t want to hear about how she’s way down in the poverty hole. Another kid arrested in that attack lives in Ednor Gardens which means his house and block are probably nicer than our own, in Waverly.

There was much made at the time about Prince Greene’s former involvement in a debate club. He was generally portrayed in a way that, frankly, black children rarely are in crime stories. But we suspect that portrayal may have been misleading. We heard it said online by a kid who knew Greene that he was involved in debate only briefly, and lost interest in school around age 13 or 14. A 12 year old in a too-big tie and a shiny pair of hush puppies was not the same kid lying in wait for Ponsi at the corner of Venable Avenue. That article said he was in the sixth grade at Loyola Blakefield. Do you know what tuition is at Loyola Blakefield? It’s twenty thousand fucking dollars a year. The idea that this kid had no resources, lived in dire poverty and couldn’t have helped getting caught up by the streets just doesn’t hold water.

We don’t know what happened in Prince Greene’s life between the time he was in debate club at a fancy county private school and the night he killed Ponsi. We’re not going to speculate on the events of his life. But if Thomasine Greene had been a better parent, had forced her kid to stay involved in debate club at whatever school he attended last year, and checked his homework every night and known his friends and who he was running with he might be in school right now and not jail. Whatever it is that leads a kid to make these choices it is sad, but we don’t know or particularly care what was going on in Prince Greene’s life. We’re just glad he’s been arrested and charged.

We say all this because it’s too easy to believe the media narrative. It’s too easy take the blame off of criminals because they’re young. It’s too easy to shake your head and wring your hands and pretend a kid like that doesn’t know he’s doing wrong by stealing and stabbing and that he had no choice.

But when you’re on the ground in Waverly, when you’ve put your life’s savings into a house just off Greenmount, one of the hardest and oldest racial dividing lines in all of America, when you’re hyperaware of absolutely everything that goes on around you real life doesn’t always match the media narratives. We wish life weren’t that way but wishing doesn’t make it so.

We’ve been a crime victim multiple times in Baltimore City. We’ve had many friends who have been victims of crimes. It’s not all abstract statistics and it’s not all drug dealers getting what they had coming. In the last four years alone we’ve had half a dozen friends who were victims of serious violent crimes up to and including murder and attempted murder. Some of them were attacked by gangs of teenagers. Not a week goes by that we don’t scroll through our Twitter feed and see that someone we follow has been a crime victim… and we can think of at least 3 recent instances where the same people were victims of two separate crimes. When you live in this city it is not a question of whether you’ll be a crime victim, it’s a question of when and how severe your next victimization will be. We’ve had to watch our back every single time we step out of the house since the day we moved in here and we’re fucking tired of it.

Baltimore, and Waverly, could have given Prince Greene a better life than the one he ended up with. But it can’t give us the kind of life we’ve worked hard to build and know that we deserve for ourselves. We’re going to take the first step toward living that life in Baltimore County.

Baltimore’s Mac and Cheese Weekend a Stunning Success

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If there is one thing at which this blog excels it is the grand unilateral declaration. We’ve got our finger in the wind of the Zeitgeist over here or something. The Chop is like the Shingy of Greenmount Avenue, you understand. So when we make a formal proclamation of current trends it is not done lightly, but in all the deliberate gravity you would expect from a part-time local blog.

With this in mind, we are here to tell you this Monday, the 22nd of February in the Year of Our Lord two thousand sixteen that Baltimore’s inane and vapid fascination with all things bacon is officially over. Gone are the days of the bacon bloody mary and the maple bacon ice cream and all the rest of it. As with sushi and pizza and nachos and pho and pickles and breakfast-for-dinner before it, every food trend must come to an end, and often that end is the result of an upstart dish coming at the king to vie for diners’ attention.

It’s become clear to us that the dish most in fashion at the moment is, much like Fashion itself, something both timeless and ever-changing. With only two basic ingredients but literally thousands of variations, the ability to be both wholesome and familiar as well as inventive and unique at once, it took a longtime favorite with universal appeal to knock bacon off its greasy throne. We’re talking, of course, about everyone’s old (new) favorite… Mac and Cheese.

On Saturday we headed over to PEP Foods’ Vegan Mac & Cheese Smackdown and perhaps smackdown is the right word because we were nothing less than gobsmacked by the turnout and enthusiasm of the crowd in attendance. Take a look at this line of people…

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That’s not all of the people, mind you, it’s just what fits in the frame of this photo. In addition to this line which is two blocks long there are also a few hundred inside the building, and many more yet to join the back of the line. When we heard this event might draw 500 people we thought ‘How the hell are they going to get 500 people to come to West Baltimore to eat macaroni?’ But apparently vegans are better networkers and promoters than we’ve given them credit for because there were by our own estimation nearly 1000 people there to sample vegan mac.

The last time we personally attended a mac and cheese cook-off was at Honfest and if we’re being honest, that one left a lot to be desired. It only drew three or four entrants, and ten bucks didn’t get you much in the way of samples. Not so with Saturday’s event. PEP’s website had the count of entrants at a whopping 28 different recipes. Look at all this mac…

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Both individual chefs and virtually all of Baltimore’s big names in Veg cooking like Red Emma’s, Land of Kush, One World Cafe, et al were on hand to compete, and mac fans who hung around all afternoon were rewarded with the encouragement to “eat until there’s no more mac left!” That’s how you run an event, ladies and gentlemen, and it stood in stark contrast to a festival for a certain salted and cured meat which went very poorly two years ago. Another contrast is that while that crummy bacon festival was run by a promoter for a profit, this one was a fundraiser to help PEP open their commercial kitchen in West Baltimore. We’ve got to say, there’s been a lot of talk of food hubs and food halls and what have you around town lately, but after coming out to this weekend’s event and seeing how well it went, and having a look at PEP Foods’ website we’re convinced they’re the real deal- the kind of folks who not only deserve community support, but also give it right back in an effort to create a virtuous circle. There’s been a lot of anxiety and disappointment in this city lately, and some good people serving up delicious comfort food is particularly welcome for 2016.

In the end it’s not important whose recipe was the best gluten free or the best oven-baked, or even the best overall. We came away from the Smackdown with a real sense of positivity and encouragement for a change, and as far as we’re concerned everyone involved is a winner.

But wait, there’s more! If 28 different versions of vegan mac and cheese isn’t good enough for you, there was even another mac and cheese cook-off last night to benefit Moveable Feast. We don’t know much about it beside what’s on the Facebook event page, but apparently it’s the third annual version of the event which has outgrown the confines of both Liam Flynn’s and Blue Pit, and was held this weekend at Peabody Heights Brewery with somewhere between 100-200 attendees.

Safe to say that in Baltimore 2016 is the year of the Mac.

Walking on Sunshine, Playing With Fire

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Everyone is familiar with the bizarre urban practice of shoe tossing, the dangling of old shoes, usually sneakers from overhead wires. No one seems to know the full story behind it, and like so many urban legends there probably is no full story to know. Most of what we think we know about it is total bullshit.

But there is one thing about shoe tossing that we do know for sure: it’s ugly and stupid and it seems to happen much more often in crummy neighborhoods like ours than in more expensive neighborhoods like Canton or Roland Park. Like other elements of the urban experience some people may romanticize shoe tossing, but when you have to live with it every day it’s not so cute. Shoe tossing is just litter- litter in the sky that can’t be picked up, that stays there for years and just gets uglier as time passes. One of the best ways to tell a nice neighborhood from a garbage neighborhood is to ask oneself literally, “Am I surrounded by garbage?”

The Chop is intimately familiar with what it’s like to live around tossed shoes, as there was a pair dangling in the alley behind the Chophouse when we moved in. Being a seaman by trade, we’re very much accustomed to lines and ropes that wear out in the elements and need to be replaced. If a 9″ hawser needs to be end-for-ended twice a year, these laces should rot in the weather and the shoes should fall down sooner or later, right? Wrong.

As one of the hoodrats in this documentary boasts, the pair of shoes he tossed in his neighborhood hung there for nearly twenty years. Twenty years!!! They’re probably still hanging there today.

With every year that’s passed, this pair of shoes in our alley has bugged us more and more. Every time we’re out picking up litter or sweeping up leaves in the alley it doesn’t matter how hard we work: the place will still look trashy with these shoes hanging there. It’s insidious. When your neighbor turns his backyard into a trash pile at least you can call the city and they’ll eventually clean it up. No one is coming to cut down shoes off a line. Not 311, not Verizon, BGE, Comcast… no one cares.

In six years of living under these shoes we’ve finally reached the point of exasperation. We went to Home Depot to see about renting one of these to possibly cut them down, but all it got us was a nice lecture from the tool rental guy about how overhead wires are dangerous and we should leave them alone and live with them. Or call the utility. Consider it a mark of the Chop’s maturity that we stood there, deep in the county suburbs in a big box store, and nodded silently and said “Okay, yeah, you’re right.” to this dopey fool who doesn’t have to live in a garbage neighborhood and thinks that any utility would bother to come retrieve a pair of shoes.

We just became even more determined. We brought out the ladder. Reached up there with a man-helper and an old paint roller, just to see if we could reach. We could, but all we could really do was get the roller frame tangled up. The shoes weren’t moving.

We climbed down. We paced the alley. We cussed. Duct taping a knife on there or something wasn’t gonna work.

Eventually the answer came to us. Get some paper. Crumple it up and tape it to the end of the stick. Climb up the ladder. Light the paper on fire. Torch the laces.

It worked.

It was so simple we should have thought of it five years ago. Take if from the Chop- if you’ve got the ghost of old shoes haunting your neighborhood, you can kill it with fire.

Robicelli’s Bakery- Don’t Believe the Hype

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We had never heard of Robicelli’s Bakery until a couple of weeks ago when Gothamist published an article about its owners’ plan to close their NYC retail location and move to Baltimore to open a new one.

The premise of that piece was that New York City is too expensive and places too many onerous restrictions on small business owners so the Robicellis set their sights on the greener grass of Maryland. We were initially a little skeptical about such a dubious premise, but we didn’t think much of it and promptly forgot the whole thing. It didn’t seem like a story worth telling, really. Some people are going to maybe open a bakery somewhere in the city at some point in the future… so what?

Well, apparently this little ole blog was just about the only site on the whole world wide web that didn’t think this news was worthy of publication. All of a sudden the Robicellis are seemingly everywhere in the media including (but not limited to) Eater, Brooklyn Magazine, Mashable, Zagat, City Paper, and The Sun. Except, of course, it’s not all of a sudden.

The Press and Media page on the Robicelli’s website is enormous. Not only have they got a lot of press citations but when we look at the page we can’t help but call to mind one word: slick. But of course it’s slick. The whole site is, really. That shouldn’t be a surprise because when you click over to the about us page the first line identifies Allison Robicelli as a ‘PR director.’

That they need a PR professional working for them is pretty obvious. After all, these are people with a wholesale business and a cookbook to sell and another forthcoming. It’s less clear whether they are contracted with a PR firm or whether Allison really does do it all herself and if so what sort of training she has in that line. But the Gothamist article bemoans that the couple was working 70 hours a week. It seems to us that between their myriad social media feeds, giving interviews, writing a cookbook, appearing on the Food Network etc etc that virtually none of those 70 hours are Ma and Pa slaving over hot ovens in the family bakeshop as they would like the rest of us to believe.

The Robicellis are crying poverty to Gothamist, even saying publicly that they’ve cut their own salaries to pay staff. But this doesn’t square with what she’s told Brooklyn Magazine saying the couple just landed a major distributor and that their business catering weddings is booming. Besides, one simply doesn’t undertake a major relocation and start a new venture with no money. They’ve got the bucks. And if they don’t have the bucks they’ve got the financing.

The Couple complains that staff costs are rising, but as the Mashable article points out, NYC restaurants are having trouble attracting talented staff because they want to keep pay low! So these people come to Baltimore where they can pay employees as little as possible. There’s no chance they come to town and start pay at the $15 an hour that fast food employees are getting in NYC. Meanwhile, Allison had this to say to Mashable:

“Robicelli says teaching her staff business and management skills is not only important to their careers, but that it benefits her business as well and allows her to delegate major responsibilities”

So what she’s saying in effect is that she wants to pay her employees less and make them do more; saddle them with major responsibilities that are likely outside their job descriptions. As a union member, this does not sit well with us. What Robicelli and everyone else involved with the Mashable article fails to realize is that not every employee wants to own a business one day. Your own dream is not universal. But every employee does want an honest day’s pay for a full day’s work. The scourge of ‘shift pay’ and the underbelly of the Baltimore restaurant scene is seedy enough as it is. Perhaps Allison would better understand this if she were truly of the working class and not of the mercantile class. You can’t be Labor while you’re Management.

All the while the Robicellis are holding themselves up as ‘jobs creators’ for the city to the Sun. Our city has no shortage of low-wage, no-benefit service industry jobs but since Allison Robicelli wants to “make jobs, make people smile” we’re guessing they’ll let employees keep their tattoos uncovered and wear a Wye Oak t-shirt to work, which you sure can’t do at any other gimmicky dessert place like that great Casino-Jobs-Creator the Mallow Bar. (Oh wait… the Mallow Bar closed down after 6 months so we guess you CAN wear a band t-shirt to the unemployment line.)

Anyway, slogging through the rest of this Gothamist piece Allison complains about the utility ConEd being an expensive monopoly and calls it a ‘kicker’ of why they’re closing, as if BGE here in Baltimore weren’t also an expensive monopoly- one that is actively pursuing another giant rate increase in Annapolis. She then complains about other official red tape:

City agencies and the hurdles many businesses must leap over are another source of frustration. “We’ve gotten a bunch of fines from the Department of Sanitation because on alternate sides parking day, all the cars on the block double park in front of our shop. When that happens, nobody can get out and clean the garbage 18-inches from the curb so then Sanitation comes and they give a ticket to every single business on the block. All of us.”

The culture of fining small businesses and attaching expensive requirements for permitting and other work can make owners feel as though they’re ATMs for the city, from what some call excessive policing of restaurants by the DOH to the installation of a hand sink that cost the couple $10,000 after acquiring and hiring the necessary permits and persons to get the work done up to city code. “If you see some guy having an ice cream cart in front of his shop? Huge permit! Outdoor seating? Huge permit! If you decide you just want to have a bench in front of your store but somebody decides to pull it out a little bit so it’s a little bit over 18-inches off the front? Fine! Massive fine!”

She conveniently ignores that all of those ‘hurdles’ are present and often persistent in Baltimore. We have parking restrictions for street cleaning. You need a permit for outdoor seating. We like our restaurants’ employees to wash their hands in a proper sink and not pile up garbage willy-nilly in front of their stores. There are minor privilege fees for ‘a little bench’ on the sidewalk. Baltimoreans hate double parkers as much as everyone else does. Etc etc etc. If she thinks this city is a place where you can just hang your shingle and do whatever the hell you please she’s in for some disappointment.

The Robicellis, described in the press as ‘Brooklyn’s biggest boosters’ seem very eager indeed to bring their unbridled civic enthusiasm to Baltimore, describing the city in absolutely glowing terms when asked about their visits here. They would have done well to become familiar with someone like Michael Marx, who arrived on a similar wave of optimism and was a successful restauranteur here owning three places over the course of the last 16 years. Marx recently ran screaming from the city’s small business scene for many of the very reasons Robicelli cites above. As he told the Sun this Summer:

“I was one of the [city’s] biggest cheerleaders,” he said. “I came [to Baltimore] from Philadelphia. I chose Baltimore back in 1999. ‘There’s great opportunity here,’ I thought.”

He said the hardest part of dealing with the city was the lack of communication among the different agencies. “It’s never easier. It never got any easier,” Marx said. “Sixteen years of doing it, and it’s the same ineffective system.”

But if you don’t believe him ask any of the other scores of small businesses that have opened to fanfare and quietly closed in the last few years. Ask Anisha Jagtap whose Puffs and Pastries on the Avenue in Hampden was a very close analogue to Robicelli’s Bakery until it went out of business. Ask Chazz Palminteri, who came singing the city’s praises on a big PR blitz and flopped on his face in one of the biggest most prime restaurant spaces around. Ask Michael Mina who did the very same thing with Pabu and Lamill. As a Baltimore native, we’re understandably a little salty about New Yorkers ‘Columbusing’ the city and telling us how great they just found out it is when we’ve been living here our whole life. Hell, we’re looking forward to moving out of it, because as the Robicelli’s are about to personally find out choosing a safe neighborhood and putting your kids through school and generally being a middle aged person in Baltimore is really fucking hard work and exhausting unless you have a ton of dough, which we suspect the Robicelli’s do.

We would go on to argue that perhaps the best thing Baltimore does have going for it is that it is not New York City. The very same Gothamist article we’ve been talking about points an accusing finger squarely at luxury developers, and the Robicelli’s wistfully talk about how much they loved the New York of the olden days of 15-20 years ago and how the city they loved is gone. But in the Sun the truth comes out: it was ‘a developer’ who made them an offer to move here. The ‘kicker’ wasn’t ConEd or anything else to do with NYC. They’re being lured here by the cold cash of commercial real estate, probably by one of the usual suspects like Bozzuto or Beatty or Paterakis, who knows a thing or two about baking himself. And they want to pass this off as a love for the city and its so-called Authenticity. Bullshit.

As far as the good old days of pre-Giuliani NYC go, we’ve heard that song and dance before. These people have said publicly that they think they can reclaim some lost Gotham in Baltimore, but the city the Chop grew up loving is gone too, and Gentrification is strangling out the last of it.

With every 10 Light or Anthem House or Rotunda that goes up, and there are scores of them, we see higher and higher rents and more of the Manhattanization of the city. But that Manhattanization isn’t just reflected in $3500 rents and a fleet of Ubers crawling around the harbor, our city leaders are ecstatic about an actual rebranding with names like Ceriello, Season’s, Two Boots, Paulie Gee’s, and Dinosaur Barbecue going up on signs all over town. The mayor even cut the goddamn ribbon at a Shake Shack. They sell Yankee gear outside Camden Yards every time the planefuls of pinstripes land at BWI.

No, we don’t want to live in New York, or a miniature provincial version of it. We’re quite happy with our homegrown businesses. We suspect these itinerant bakers think they can come to town and be a big fish in a small pond. Perhaps they can. They certainly have the PR acumen to do it, and our media outlets have already demonstrated a willingness to refer to them as ‘beloved’ and print whatever they have to say absolutely uncritically. But their schtick steps directly on the toes of places like The Charmery and Diablo Doughnuts. Every Nutella lasagna they sell is one less cake sold by Duff Goldman or one less pie from Rodney Henry. Market share is a zero sum game, especially in little old Baltimore.

Which brings us to the final thing that just bugs us about these people. Not only are they doing the ‘fun-loving hipsters selling pricey desserts’ routine, which has already been done to death locally and reached its peak right around the time that food trucks started multiplying, but they’re doing it so much worse than all the people we just named. One glance at the Robicelli’s menu and social media feeds reveals them to be a couple of Hipster Guy Fieris (and as we all know Guy also came to town on a shining wave of PR recently). What else are we supposed to think of people who put prosciutto on a wedding cake or chicken on a cupcake? Sorry, but we couldn’t be less interested in shelling out $65 for a 10″ eggnog cake, even if it’s served to us personally by someone like Matt Robicelli who eats tacos on the toilet, has a celebrity chef’s name tattooed on his arm and lets Baltimore bums act as crossing guards for his kids.

Bottom line- we think these two are a couple of phonies. The Robicellis may brand themselves as “working class pastry” but when they get to Baltimore it’ll become clear pretty quickly where they fall in our city’s class strata and that working class people aren’t buying $30 pies. The real working class will be getting their Tastykakes and Little Debbies and shit at the supermarket, just like they always have.

2015 Holiday Happenings in Baltimore

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December is well nigh in Charm City and it is the most Christmassy time of the year. Of course, Santa’s not the only one making a list- writers and bloggers in all corners of the Internet are busily tapping out their suggestions for making merry during the holiday season, and since we here at the Baltimore Chop love a good yuletide as much as the next blogger we thought we’d share a little about what we’ll be up to this holiday season.

Thursday, December 3. The Lighting of the Washington Monument kicks off the start of the season this Thursday. Ever since we started arriving by bike this event has been a joy to attend. Not having to worry about traffic or parking makes our holiday season all blessed- no stressed. This year’s lighting includes a beer garden open from 4:00 until 8:00 and as you already know the Chop loves a beer garden. Between the warm temperatures and the newly renovated monument this year promises to be a lighting par excellence.

Sunday, December 6. The Mayor’s Annual Christmas Parade hits Hampden again this year. We’ve never bothered with it before but since 2015 will be our last chance to show up drunk and boo at SRB as she floats over the litter and potholes of Falls Road we’re inclined to take it. Word is that she didn’t even bother to show up last year, and this year she’ll probably try to weasel out as well, but hopefully she’ll at least send a deputy mayor for us to boo. Did you know that Baltimore has four deputy mayors? That’s what the city website tells us. Maybe they’ll all show up. That’s a lot of booing!

Saturday, December 12. It’s become something of a Christmas tradition for the Charm City Craft Mafia’s Holiday Heap and the MICA Art Market to be held on the same day, and that tradition continues this year on the twelfth. We love it, because it’s so easy to shop at both with just one trip and this year those with an extra long gifting list can also extend the trip with a visit to the Women’s Industrial Exchange which is now featuring gifts from local artists every weekend in December. For those who can’t make a shopping trip that Saturday Baltimore Magazine has a full roundup of area craft markets.

Sunday, December 13. Speedy Ortiz/Beauty Pill at Metro Gallery. The holidays aren’t all elves and Krampus and trips to the mall. On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me two tickets to see a real goldilocks of a show. Why Goldilocks? Because we have here a pair of bands who are right now in their prime, doing better and better work all the time and who by rights should be bigger than the Metro Gallery at this point, but can still slide right in there for a $12 show. Goldilocks too because as we approach middle age and are seeing more and more reunion shows on our radar it’s nice to be able to go see some very current post-punk bands who are playing adult music for adults without being all stuffy about it.

This show is also a fundraiser for the Girls Rock Camp Foundation. Nothing says ‘adult’ like going to a show and getting a receipt for a donation before the year’s end so you can itemize your taxes, so dig deep this holiday season.

Thursday, December 31. For once, your humble Chop finds himself spending Cuffing Season in the company of a beautiful woman, so our normal NYE routine of sitting on the porch with a fifth of armagnac and listening to the police scanner at midnight just ain’t gonna cut it. Nope, this time around we’re going all-out to celebrate the end of a pretty tough year at Baltimore Social’s Shades and Suits NYE Party. Kevin Plank and the folks at the shiny new City Garage are pretty bullish on Baltimore’s future. It’s so bright, in fact, that we all get to wear shades. With a buffet and premium open bar included in the ticket price, we’re hoping some of that unbridled optimism will rub off on us in the new year.

If you’re still making plans take note: early bird pricing ends today! Click on Missiontix.com now to save $10 on each ticket before regular pricing takes effect tomorrow.