Baltimore Legacy Project: A City of Neighborhoods

It was Imam Earl El Amin who first described Baltimore to me as a city of neighborhoods in a Baltimore Legacy Project interview. The phrase lingered, not as a slogan but as a fact. Baltimore’s civic identity has long been organized not around a singular downtown gravity, but around its blocks, its stoops and its schools. Neighborhoods here are not merely places to live; they are inheritances. Each carries its own culture, its own codes, its own pride—often extending as far as one’s high school allegiance.

Baltimore was not always narrated through the vocabulary of “The Corner, Homicide”; “The Wire”; or “We Own This City.” Pastor Ebony Harvin’s family was one of the first families to move to Cherry Hill right after World War II and remembers a Baltimore in which community life was intact and visible—when stoops were scrubbed clean and children moved freely through the day. “I didn’t even know it was the projects,” she recalls, “because it was always clean.” James Timpson –who attended school in Park Heights, echoes that memory with characteristic plainness: “People really had a sense of pride in their blocks.”

Others describe a similar ecology of care. Erricka Bridgeford, whose parents were from Cherry Hill and Park Heights, recalls the dense social fabric of an era when responsibility for children was shared and belonging was assumed. “Everybody’s parents were everybody’s parents in the neighborhood,” she says. Vernon Horton –was also born and raised in Baltimore City and remembers, “We could go outside and just play all day long… the community kept watch over us.”

If there is one thing Baltimore has never been, it is singular. As the artist Earnest Shaw puts it, “There has never, ever been one Baltimore.” Yet this multiplicity has rarely been a source of anxiety for those who live here. Community care—improvised, durable, and deeply local—has traveled across blocks and generations. Ray Kelly—lived on both Druid Hill Ave and then North Avenue as a child and shares “Every community is different, but the care, the culture… is the same throughout Baltimore.”

Baltimoreans will tell you that the problem has never been the difference between neighborhoods. The problem is inequity. The central question is whether they are treated with dignity, fairness, and equal opportunity. On that count, the historical answer is a resounding no. 

Disinvestment in Baltimore is not a recent failure of will or policy; it is designed, deliberate, and generational.  Segregation laws, restrictive covenants, redlining, and the infamous Highway to Nowhere systematically confined Black Baltimoreans to certain areas while stripping those same areas of resources and opportunities for wealth-building. Entire African American neighborhoods in Old West Baltimore—Upton, Sandtown-Winchester, Harlem Park—were not incidental outcomes of history but products of policy.

Decades of disinvestment produced deteriorating housing, shuttered businesses, food deserts, and unequal access to public resources. While whiter and wealthier neighborhoods received consistent investment, majority-Black neighborhoods were left to manage scarcity as a condition of daily life. Libraries, grocery stores, recreation centers—each absence compounded the last.

A 2020 Urban Institute study found that majority-Black neighborhoods in Baltimore received three times less investment than white neighborhoods between 2004 and 2016. The Washington Post later reported that “the Baltimore Families cornered into subprime loans descended from the same families who’d been denied homeownership — and the chance to build wealth — two generations earlier.” 

These communities were targeted, not inherently broken.

There is a direct and well-documented connection between systemic neglect and crime and violence. As Seymour Chambers, historian at the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge in Baltimore, put it succinctly: “People don’t just wake up and say, I’m gonna commit crimes.” Crime is not a spontaneous moral failure but a response to sustained structural abandonment.

Popular television narratives about Baltimore rarely focus on the conditions that created the crime, drugs  and poverty. These shows rather focus on sensationalizing the effect, rather than highlighting the cause. They tend to excise the conditions that produced them, offering instead a version of Baltimore that is consumable, dramatic, and misleading. In doing so, they substitute context with pathology—transforming systemic harm into personal defect and rendering Black communities responsible for injuries long inflicted upon them. 

Beyond the headlines. This is y-OUR Baltimore. This is y-OUR Legacy.