The Washington Spectator/The WashBalt Syndrome
Doherty, Carroll
THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR THE WASHBALT SYNDROME by Carroll Doherty. During the (ahem) slower moments of the Democratic National Convention last July, my desperate search for counter-programming led...
...There was no talk of making a foray into Georgetown, or of getting a job with a government agency...
...But despite the losing records, Baltimoreans likely would have embraced Williams more warmly had he not dropped broad hints, soon after he purchased the team in 1979, that he wanted to move it to Washington...
...is equivalent to a ride down the aptly named Security Boulevard...
...More Washingtonians, seeking relief from the District's absurd housing market, have moved to the Baltimore area...
...Not a film classic, to be sure, but it has a wonderful ambiance, as the critics say...
...in 1988, the team that bore his imprint set records for futility...
...An estimated one-quarter of the Orioles' attendance comes from the Washington metropolitan area...
...W ashington has already had quite an impact, mostly negative, on Baltimore...
...There was always an awareness that, for Williams as for most Washingtonians, having the home team forty miles away leaves a great deal to be desired...
...Maybe it's because when I turn on the local news I rarely hear any native "Bawlamer" accents...
...law firms that I see at Memorial Stadium: collars turned up, sunglasses with strings, arriving in $40,000 cars...
...At the same time, it transformed the area into a one-company town, a miniature version of the federal enclave...
...More Baltimoreans than ever make the daily commute south to fill the ranks of the ever-growing federal, and quasi-governmental, work force...
...No mention at all was made of Washington, the federal government, even the Redskins...
...So why do I feel a sense of loss...
...Maybe it's the crowd of summer associates from D.C...
...The boosterish, jaycee types from Baltimore will tell you that regionalization has been for the good, that Washingtonians who visit and move to the city spend lots of money, and that the feds and consulting firms provide lots of needed jobs to Baltimore residents...
...Baltimore became an acceptable place for Washingtonians to visit after their baseball team left town, and it emerged into something more stylish after the Rouse Company built the Inner Harbor complex...
...And with the decline of so many traditional Baltimore industries during the past twenty years (shipbuilding, steel, and so on), new entrants to the job market naturally began to look south, either to the government or to the consulting firms that line the Washington Beltway...
...The notion of Baltimore as a city apart, independent from Washington, exists only in memory or fiction...
...What a native of the city noticed most, besides the neighborhood locations, was that the young, fairly typical, middle-class men depicted in the film worked and entertained themselves solely in Baltimore...
...Williams was a decent, honorable man (rare qualities in a longtime political insider), but Baltimore baseball fans will probably remember him as the man who presided over the dismantling of one of the proudest franchises in the game...
...The universe of these men ended at the city's southern border...
...And after all, Edward Bennett Williams did make good on his promise to keep the Orioles in town (although he rather shabbily removed the name "Baltimore" from the team's marketing campaigns...
...Nevertheless, when the team began to sag in the mid-eighties he intervened in classic Washington fashion, spending money hand-over-fist for quick fixes, while giving little consideration to the team's long-term prospects...
...Worth and San Jose (like Baltimore, subsections of "supercities") also might be in the shadow of glitzier neighbors, at least they don't have the federal government to contend with...
...USA Today is excited too, as it usually is, naming "WashBalt" one of its emerging "supercities," urban areas linked by expressways...
...With wages lower in Baltimore, Washingtonians find that steals abound...
...And while Ft...
...Appropriately enough, the station was running the movie Diner, director Barry Levinson's charming portrait of Baltimore, circa 1960...
...The sense of bureaucratic vertigo one feels passing through Washington's Federal Triangle at four p.m...
...Planners are excited over that prospect, because the entire region would then be eligible for, what else, expanded federal subsidies...
...Naturally, tourists find it preferable to ancient Lexington Market, a rough-and-tumble place where you can still find most, of the parts of a pig on display, a mart that has changed very little in 150 years...
...The completion of 1-95, which cut travel time between the two cities, brought the entire federal government closer...
...The sprawl along 1-95 has made the suburbs surrounding the cities contiguous...
...If the trend continues, clerks from Social Security and other middle-class Baltimoreans could eventually find themselves priced out of parts of their own market...
...There is the mammoth Social Security Administration, which moved its headquarters to Woodlawn, in Baltimore County just over the city line, in the early 1960s...
...fiercely provincial Baltimore of Diner, the designation will be a confirmation of a sad new reality...
...Indistinguishable from other waterfront malls Rouse has constructed in Boston, New York, and Norfolk, the Inner Harbor gives visitors the illusion they are in a seaside market, without subjecting them to any unpleasant smells...
...if you asked them about Washington, they might think you were talking about the state...
...Unquestionably, it provided an economic shot in the arm to west Baltimore...
...Most of all, it's probably that chipper description of "WashBalt" from the trend-spotting department of USA Today: "Call it a megalopolis, call it an urban region—call it a peek into the 21st century...
...During the (ahem) slower moments of the Democratic National Convention last July, my desperate search for counter-programming led me to a small, independent station in Baltimore...
...The boys of Diner—a mix of entrepreneurs, salesmen, heirs to family businesses—probably would be GSers, or gray-collar computer programmers, in an updated version of the movie...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988...
...According to city planners, the Census Bureau will, by the middle of the next decade, declare that Baltimore and Washington make up one metropolitan area...
...They are not just everyday ball fans from Laurel either, but certified inside-thebeltway celebrities like Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, Oliver North and Brendan Sullivan, and the ubiquitous George Will...
...But for those of us who remember the Carroll Doherty is a free-lance journalist living in Washington...
...S till, the main attraction for Washingtonians is major league baseball...
...And until he died in August, the owner of the Orioles was a member of the pantheon of permanent Washington—lawyer, lobbyist, and perennial bipartisan board appointee Edward Bennett Williams...
...As Baltimore's economy has become more service-oriented, so it has become more dependent on Washington...
...And after losing two major league sports franchises in the past fifteen years (one to Washington), Baltimoreans have developed a healthy skepticism—an Orioles spokesman described it as "paranoia"—concerning the intentions of team owners...
...In 1983, the team that he largely inherited won the World Series...
...Such a scenario would be incredible today...
...Although he pledged, after much public outcry, that he would never move the franchise, the city had difficulties trusting the absentee owner...
...Perhaps worse than the long arm of the bureaucracy, however, has been the onset of Baltimore chic, the discovery of "quaint" sections of the city by the upwardly mobile set from D.C...
...The former part-owner of the Redskins at least was candid enough to admit that he was no baseball man, once commenting, "Inever dreamed I'd be in a business where, if you lose sixty-two times a year, you'd be considered a howling success...
...Fells Point, Federal Hill, and older, close-in suburbs like Catonsville are seeing an influx of lawyers, journalists, and lobbyists who just want to find a "placeto fix up...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
