I Love Charm City Anyway.
In the summer of 1974, someone in Baltimore said, “Fuck it, you know what this city needs? A brand-spanking-new nickname.”
This was fairly optimistic. They went for it anyway.
Baltimore was rapidly losing residents, losing industry, and generally losing its grip on the national conversation about itself. The city was struggling, and the people responsible for convincing tourists to visit were running out of ways to make Baltimore sound like a sweet vacay spot.
So, naturally, they decided to call it Charm City. I could kiss them. That’s some absolutely adorable branding.
The original idea was actually pretty damn sweet. Tourists would receive charm bracelets and collect little charms as they visited different attractions around Baltimore. Unfortunately, the bracelets turned out to be way too expensive for a city already clinging to life. Needless to say, the promotion never quite materialized as intended.
But the name? Oh, the name stuck like gum on hot asphalt.
So Baltimore’s most enduring piece of marketing came out of a campaign that couldn’t afford its own merchandise. Tell me that isn’t the most Baltimore thing you’ve ever heard of.
I think whoever came up with that name understood something about this city that even they might not have been able to articulate. So, I’ve decided to try my hand at that about fifty short years later.
Charm is a funny word. It’s a word one might use on the Zillow page of a house in less-than-ideal condition. It doesn’t necessarily mean beautiful. It certainly doesn’t mean perfect. Charm is something a little harder to define, something that makes a person, or a place, compelling in ways that don’t always make sense on paper.
A city can be beautiful without being charming. It can be wealthy without being charming. It can be clean, safe, modern, impeccably designed, and about as interesting as modern corporate design or the color greige.
Baltimore, though? Yeah, we never really had that problem. No one is going to accuse us of giving off greige energy.
I’ve fallen in love with a lot of things in my life.
I’ve fallen in love with questionable men. I’ve fallen in love with songs until they stopped sounding like music and started sounding like memories. I’ve fallen in love with stories until they became entire worlds I could disappear into. I’ve fallen in love with bizarre snack plates I saw on the internet. But I have never fallen in love with anything quite like Baltimore. Believe me, I’ve tried explaining it.
Whenever I tell someone who isn’t from here that Baltimore is where I’m from, and that I very much love it, I get some variation of the same question.
“Oh, Baltimore? Like The Wire?”
My absolute least favorite thing about that question is that I can’t exactly say no.
Because, well, yeah.
Like The Wire.
That Baltimore exists.
That isn’t the whole picture. That’s one slice of the massive, eclectic fruit pie that is Baltimore City. While I appreciate your familiarity with our local cuisine, I’d really prefer you didn’t judge the entire pie based on one particularly depressing and grim piece of it.
Especially when there’s so much more on the table.
To be clear, I’m not interested in pretending Baltimore doesn’t have problems. It has some enormous fucking problems. Problems that have persisted for generations, that have cost people their homes, their livelihoods, their safety, and even their lives. I don’t intend on ignoring that to turn this into a total circle jerk. That’s real. That’s part of the fruit pie, too.
There is no charming way to discuss concentrated poverty. There is no adorable little anecdote that makes segregation acceptable. There is no amount of Old Bay that makes decades of institutional failure something we can stomach.
Baltimore has had more than its fair share of all three. At its population peak in 1950, Baltimore was home to nearly a million people. Today, that number is closer to 570,000. That’s hundreds of thousands of people. Gone.
The reasons are complicated, but they’re not particularly mysterious. Industrial decline, suburbanization, discriminatory housing policies, job losses, and decades of disinvestment all contributed to a city that, in some neighborhoods, became increasingly difficult to live in.
When people leave a city? They leave things behind.
Businesses. Schools. Churches. Memories. Houses. So many fucking houses.
If you’ve spent any time in Baltimore, you know the sight. Beautiful old rowhouses standing shoulder to shoulder, interrupted by one with boarded windows, a collapsing roof, or a front door nobody has opened in years.
Sometimes it’s just one.
Sometimes it’s the whole block.
Baltimore has spent decades trying to figure out what the hell to do about them.
In the 1970s, the city famously experimented with selling abandoned houses for a dollar. The original program actually succeeded in several neighborhoods, largely because buyers were offered affordable rehabilitation loans and substantial support. Later efforts to recreate that success ran into a rather significant problem.
A house can cost one dollar and still be too expensive to own.
A dollar doesn’t buy a new roof. It doesn’t replace the wiring, fix the plumbing, or repair the foundation. And when the house next door is also abandoned? And the one beside that is abandoned? Well, the finished home just might not be worth what you spent fixing it.
Imagine buying a house for a dollar, spending a hundred thousand dollars making it livable, and discovering that you’ve somehow lost money. That’s fucking earth-shattering.
Congratulations!
You’re a Baltimore homeowner!
Party down!
You’re ruined!
The city tried other approaches. Vacants to Value sought to get abandoned properties back into use through enforcement, sales, and redevelopment incentives. Some neighborhoods truly benefited. Others barely changed. Investors found opportunities where aspiring homeowners couldn’t, and in many places the number of houses becoming vacant continued to outpace the number being restored.
The city demolished dangerous properties, too. Sometimes that was necessary. Sometimes it left empty lots where homes had stood for more than a century.
Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that any of this is good. It isn’t.
There’s history lost that we can never, ever get back.
People deserve safe homes. Children deserve neighborhoods where abandoned buildings aren’t hazards they have to account for. Families deserve functioning infrastructure, nearby grocery stores, and the opportunity to build some kind of future without having to leave the place they grew up.
Baltimore has repeatedly failed to provide those things to far too many of its residents.
But… there is something important buried in the history of those failed and partially successful attempts to rebuild.
You cannot save a neighborhood by fixing one house and ignoring everything around it.
A city isn’t a collection of buildings.
It’s the people who live inside them.
It’s the lives they build there.
It’s the relationship between one block and the next. It’s the businesses, the schools, the parks, the families, the opportunities, the things that make somewhere worth staying.
Baltimore is more than the sum of its parts.
Sometimes I think we’ve spent so much time trying to repair the parts that we’ve forgotten to consider the whole.
But the whole is still there.
Oh, is it ever fucking there.
Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods that seem determined to have their own personalities, whether anyone asked them to or not. They’ll do it in spite of us.
It’s the marble steps and painted screens. The rowhouses and Formstone. The old churches, the corner stores, the markets, the people who have lived on the same block long enough to remember when everyone else lived there, too.
It’s the Arabbers bringing horse-drawn produce carts through city streets.
It’s the history of Pennsylvania Avenue, where Black musicians and audiences helped make Baltimore an important part of American jazz culture.
It’s Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, and generations of artists whose contributions to this city cannot be measured by the circumstances they were born into.
It’s John Waters, who somehow made Baltimore’s weirdness into an entire artistic movement and changed art history forever.
It’s the Domino Sugar sign glowing over the harbor.
It’s Camden Yards.
It’s the Orioles.
It’s the Ravens.
Good God, it’s the fucking Ravens.
Baltimoreans have managed to form a deeply emotional relationship with a football team named after a poem written by a man who died here more than 175 years ago.
These are the lives we build here.
It’s a first date at the Walters Art Museum that led to a marriage on the steps of the courthouse.
It’s some damn good crab cakes after a divorce has been finalized. Right outside of that very same courthouse.
It’s laughing on your front porch with your friends on the first warm day of spring.
It’s stiletto heels trying to survive the cobblestone hell of Fells Point.
If you don’t think that’s a little romantic? I genuinely don’t know what to tell you.
There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about this place.
We’re proud of our history. We’re protective of our neighborhoods. We have very specific opinions about crab cakes, football, and which parts of Maryland count as Baltimore.
We can complain about our city all day long, but God help the outsider who joins in.
Now, plenty of cities have local pride. Most of us have been to Philly.
Baltimore, though?
Baltimore has this particular way of turning even its most mundane civic problems into something uniquely, unmistakably Baltimore.
I mean, shit, just look at the harbor.
For most of my life, the idea of voluntarily getting into the Inner Harbor was something you suggested to a person you didn’t particularly like.
I distinctly remember a viral video of some young people swimming in the harbor back in 2017 or so. We shared it amongst each other and screamed.
The harbor was polluted. Everybody knew the harbor was fucking polluted. It had spent generations collecting the consequences of industrial activity, sewage, stormwater runoff, and everything else an urban watershed could throw at it.
The water was practically a local punchline.
So Baltimore decided to clean it.
Not all at once, of course. That would be way too convenient.
The effort took years. Community organizations, scientists, environmental advocates, public agencies, volunteers, and businesses began working toward something that sounded almost comically ambitious.
A swimmable, fishable Baltimore Harbor.
And one of the ways we decided to accomplish that was by building a giant, water-powered machine to collect garbage.
Then we gave it googly eyes.
Because of course we did.
His name is Mr. Trash Wheel.
He lives in the harbor, eats garbage, and we love our strange little cryptid.
We celebrate his birthday every year, for fuck’s sake.
That’s our boy.
Baltimore managed to take a piece of environmental infrastructure and give it a face, a name, a personality, a fucking birthday, and an entire extended family.
Other cities might have commissioned a sleek public-awareness campaign about the importance of responsible waste management.
Ha. Not us, baby.
No.
We made a garbage monster.
And we fucking love him.
Underneath the enormous googly eyes is a genuinely remarkable project. Since 2014, Baltimore’s Trash Wheels have intercepted enormous quantities of litter before it could spread through the harbor. The collected garbage has also helped environmental advocates understand what was entering the water and push for ways to reduce it.
Meanwhile, the city and its partners have worked to repair sewer infrastructure, monitor water quality, restore habitat, and address pollution at its sources.
These things are neither cheap nor particularly glamorous.
Nobody wants to stand around admiring a repaired sewer line.
But they matter.
In June of 2024, something fucking extraordinary happened.
More than 150 people voluntarily jumped into Baltimore Harbor.
On purpose.
For fun.
No one forced them.
It was the first organized public harbor swim in more than forty years, the culmination of a restoration effort that had taken well over a decade.
Over two years later, I’m happy to report that none of them have grown an extra limb. Which is nice.
Now, before anyone gets too excited, that doesn’t mean you should wander down to the Inner Harbor tomorrow afternoon and throw yourself into the water. Swimming conditions still depend on things like rainfall, bacteria levels, boat traffic, and where exactly you intend to get in.
The harbor is not magically fixed.
But that’s almost what makes the achievement so remarkable.
It doesn’t have to be.
Not to be better.
Not to be worth restoring.
Not to become something people can imagine enjoying again.
The restoration hasn’t stopped at making the water cleaner.
In 2024, the National Aquarium opened Harbor Wetland, a floating recreation of the tidal marsh habitat that once existed along Baltimore’s waterfront.
More than 32,000 native plants were installed to help bring a little piece of the Chesapeake ecosystem back into the city.
During its first year, community scientists documented 139 species of wildlife and plants around the wetland.
Fish. Birds. Insects. Muskrats.
River otters.
An otter!
In the Baltimore Harbor!
I cannot possibly express how much I love that.
Put that little guy on a shirt.
Maybe with Mr. Trash Wheel?
I’m open to suggestions.
An otter doesn’t know anything about Baltimore’s reputation!
An otter hasn’t watched The Wire. It doesn’t know about the vacant houses or the population decline or the decades of questionable urban planning.
It’s an otter. It found somewhere it could live, or at least visit, and it showed up.
That feels like a much more compelling argument for the future of this city than any corny tourism campaign I’ve ever seen.
Of course, the harbor is still only one part of Baltimore. And it’s a part of Baltimore that has historically received an enormous amount of attention and investment compared with some of the neighborhoods farther inland.
We shouldn’t confuse a cleaner waterfront with a city that’s solved its problems.
There are still houses sitting empty.
Still families struggling.
Still neighborhoods waiting for the kind of investment that other neighborhoods have enjoyed for decades.
And the violence? The violence is real, too.
Baltimore recorded 133 homicides in 2025, a dramatic decline from previous years and its lowest total in decades.
That is progress worth acknowledging.
It is also 133 people who did not get to come home. Those truths don’t cancel each other out.
Neither do the people who stayed, the people who left, the neighborhoods that recovered, or the neighborhoods still waiting for someone to care enough to try.
I think that’s what frustrates me when people insist on discussing Baltimore exclusively through the lens of its failures.
They’re not necessarily wrong.
They just stop looking too soon.
They see a vacant house and don’t see the family living next door.
They see a crime statistic and don’t see the neighborhood organizing around the people affected by it.
They see a polluted harbor and don’t see the years of work being done to restore it.
They see The Wire.
They think they’ve seen Baltimore.
Baltimore is not a television show.
It’s not a statistic.
It’s not a rehabilitation project, a sports franchise, a collection of historic buildings, or a particularly unfortunate entry on a list of America’s most dangerous cities.
It’s all of those things, and thousands more.
It’s a city full of people who are not merely characters in the story of its decline.
They’re living their lives.
They’re making art. Opening businesses. Raising children. Going to work. Coming home. Painting their houses. Going to football games. Cooking dinner. Falling in love.
They’re doing what people do. And some of them are trying, very hard, to make the place they call home a little better than they found it.
Anyway, she comes.
Any way she is.
Anyway and any way.
Usually, when we say we love something anyway, we’re acknowledging that there are reasons we perhaps shouldn’t.
I know what people say about Baltimore.
I know what the statistics say.
I know what the abandoned houses look like.
I know that some of the city’s most serious problems cannot be solved with a clever advertising campaign, a new development project, or a garbage-eating machine with enormous cartoon eyes.
I know.
I love her anyway. I love her any way she is.
I don’t think that means quite what it sounds like.
Because loving something doesn’t mean being satisfied with it.
It doesn’t mean overlooking suffering or explaining away failure. It doesn’t mean accepting things that ought to change, or treating someone else’s hardship as a charming little imperfection in the place you happen to adore.
Sometimes loving something means being angry about what has happened to it.
Sometimes it means demanding better.
Sometimes it means refusing to abandon it simply because it has become difficult.
Baltimore has been called a lot of things over the years.
Dangerous.
Dirty.
Dying.
Home of the 2013 Super Bowl champions.
Weird.
Charm City.
That last one started as a marketing campaign, an attempt to convince people that this struggling old industrial town was worth visiting.
I don’t know if the people responsible for that campaign could have imagined what their little nickname would eventually mean to the people who came to love it.
Maybe they simply needed something nice to put on a brochure.
Maybe they knew something the rest of us are still figuring out.
But more than fifty years later, I think they stumbled onto exactly the right word.
Because I don’t love Baltimore for being perfect.
I don’t even love Baltimore for getting better, although I hope with everything I’ve got that it continues to.
I love the beautiful parts.
I love the ridiculous parts.
I love the old parts, the new parts, and the parts that don’t seem to know what they want to be yet.
I refuse to believe that the parts still struggling somehow make the rest of it less real.
Baltimore is more than the sum of her parts.
She always has been.
Whatever happens next, whatever she becomes, whatever comes back and whatever we lose along the way, I hope we keep finding reasons to believe in her.
A house gets another chance.
A neighborhood gets another chance.
A harbor gets another chance.
An otter shows up.
Anyway, she comes.
Any way she is.
I love Charm City anyway.