Bon Secours Shadowing: Fill & Download for Free

Representing for the West Side, so to speak... I was born in Bon Secours Hospital and went to Thomas Jefferson Elementary. As a child my father was a Baltimore City cop. Then we moved out to Woodlawn. Always right at the trailing edge of white flight. Throughout the '90's I lived on Park, about 6 blocks from Murphy Homes, which was across Rt. 40 (the main east west corridor) from Lexington Terrace. These were the high rise projects, and Lexington Terrace was the model for the one the character Avon Barksdale came up in. They demolished Lexington Terrace in '96, and Murphy Homes in '99. I was in the crowd watching the Murphy Homes demolition. I lived on the edge of Mt. Vernon, a neighborhood that's part of the DMZ that runs South to North from the harbor. It's bounded to the west by Martin Luther King, and to the east by the Fallsway. If you cross Martin Luther King you're on the west side and you better know what you're doing. If you cross the Fallsway, your on the east side, and you better know what you're doing. Not that it never spills over. I remember a big news story in the 90's about some folks who had come down from New York City to see a show at Center Stage, a theater right on the edge of the Fallsway, who were killed. Apparently they wanted the mugger to wait while they took their driver's licenses and stuff out of their wallets and purses. They didn't know where they were. That's what everybody said about it. "They didn't know where they were." In Baltimore it's important to know where you are. I heard a lot of gunfire, and had to draw mine once. Part of the reason we never had any real problems with the "Mafia" was because our individual neighborhoods always did their own thing. There's Little Italy just east of the harbor, but then a few blocks of projects and across Broadway you're into the Polish neighborhood shown in the series. That area's real Hispanic now.Baltimore is a great city, very diverse, majority black. The reason for the crime is the same as in many other cities like Detroit. We're a blue collar town, and the jobs went away. The series addressed the abandonment of the port. When I was a child, the McCormick and Company factory was right down on the harbor. If you've never heard of McCormick and Company, go look in your spice rack. The ships would come in and off load, and you never knew what it was going to smell like. Some days it would smell like pepper, or cinnamon, or other spices. The Chesapeake Bay watermen once provided a significant percentage of the worlds oysters. We had a GM plant. We had Sparrows Point. Sparrows Point was the largest steel mill in the world in the mid 20th century. The Golden Gate Bridge was built with our steel. But it all went away. For years the city government has been pretending that we can make a living relying on higher education, with schools like Johns Hopkins, MICA, and Loyola, healthcare, with hospitals like, again, Johns Hopkins, and our famous R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, which is part of the University of Maryland Hospital. Incidentally, Cowley invented Shock Trauma/Life Flight. He came back from WWII and developed his concept of the Golden Hour, got the state to buy him a couple of helicopters, and the rest is history. We've also been renting out the downtown spaces left empty to banks and insurance companies. It's a sad joke. Baltimore is full of good hard working people who have no jobs, because there aren't any.I only saw some of "The Wire" recently myself. I left the city (and the country) in 2000 and returned to the area in '09. Is it "accurate"? It's as accurate as you can make a TV show, and still keep it entertaining. It's an hour long drama series, so it presents little slices of the most compelling aspects of life in Mob Town. Why Mob Town? Well... we have a tendency to riot. The fancy condos Stringer Bell was trying to build were on Howard Street (at least that's where they shot it). That part of Howard Street was trashed during the '68 MLK Riots, and it still shows the damage. The first blood spilled during the Civil War was spilled in Baltimore when rioters attacked a group of Massachusetts troops heading for D.C. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_riot_of_1861 ) Anyway, I'd say it's accurate as far as it goes, but as Baltimore rapper A$AP Ant observed, in real life, "“City go harder than ‘The Wire... That’s all I’m gonna say. You see dangerous things, but it’s 10 times worser than that. But it gives you a glimpse of what Baltimore is." He went on to say in the same interview that things are getting better in some areas. http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.28941/title.a-ap-ant-says-baltimore-is-harder-than-the-wire-/ How accurate can a war movie be? How accurate was Apollo 13? Pretty accurate, but a pale shadow of reality.We just need work. Real work. Industry. Imagine the courage, intelligence, and hard work put into building these criminal organizations turned to the other side. We can't all sit behind a desk, because we all don't want to sit behind a desk.