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Sep. 3rd, 2007 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupI can't really write a full update on our brief trip to Baltimore of two weeks ago... feels like two years ago... only being there for two days or so, we found a couple of new surreal places to add to the list (though neither of them existed when we were there). Oddly, both are pools.
One of the old mills near our old neighborhood burned down while we were there and was vacant for a while. It got turned into yuppie townhouses and offices with new urbanist design principles yadda yadda. But you have to admit that the pool cleverly encapsulates the ancient-yet-postmodern sense of living among ruins:
This nicely captured one of the other phenomena we saw in Baltimore: lots of new housing built a stone's throw away from rows of old townhouses, in this case, the nice neighborhood of Woodberry. In a city of, what, three hundred thousand empty townhouses, to see all these new yuppie condos that look exactly like townhouses is pretty damn disturbing.
The other pool was in Druid Hill Park. We got lost trying to find the "old windy back road" that they really closed a number of years ago, but stumbled upon something out of the Aztec Empire (pictures swiped from some other guy since I haven't yet uploaded from our camera):
Upon inspection this turned out to be a carefully maintained memorial -- this having been the "second pool" in the days of segregation. Nice idea, but the whole tableau of a clean and well-maintained pool -- diving boards and all -- filled with freshly mowed sod is really closer to something from a postapocalyptic nightmare, I think.
So it's good to know that Baltimore is still a fertile source of dream material.
One of the old mills near our old neighborhood burned down while we were there and was vacant for a while. It got turned into yuppie townhouses and offices with new urbanist design principles yadda yadda. But you have to admit that the pool cleverly encapsulates the ancient-yet-postmodern sense of living among ruins:
This nicely captured one of the other phenomena we saw in Baltimore: lots of new housing built a stone's throw away from rows of old townhouses, in this case, the nice neighborhood of Woodberry. In a city of, what, three hundred thousand empty townhouses, to see all these new yuppie condos that look exactly like townhouses is pretty damn disturbing.
The other pool was in Druid Hill Park. We got lost trying to find the "old windy back road" that they really closed a number of years ago, but stumbled upon something out of the Aztec Empire (pictures swiped from some other guy since I haven't yet uploaded from our camera):
Upon inspection this turned out to be a carefully maintained memorial -- this having been the "second pool" in the days of segregation. Nice idea, but the whole tableau of a clean and well-maintained pool -- diving boards and all -- filled with freshly mowed sod is really closer to something from a postapocalyptic nightmare, I think.
So it's good to know that Baltimore is still a fertile source of dream material.
