Mondo Baltimore

“Is this wig yours?” says an attractive young man working in our hotel holding up something fuzzy he has fished from the gutter outside. It most certainly is not, we say… after close inspection. Welcome to Baltimore where nuts is on every menu.

“So, whatever are you going to do with yourself in Baltimore for three days?” asks a friend, very high up at the Smithsonian in Washington DC as he tours us round the spectacular galleries of the Museum of American Art and the National Gallery just days before our excursion. “Drink?” I reply. It’s always my fall-back.

Besides, John Waters, director of trash classics like Pink Flamingos and Hairspray (the original, not the musical) and Baltimore’s favourite son always said that his idea of fun was “being back home in Baltimore drinking in scary bars.” And if it’s good enough for John Waters…

Just half an hour on a train from DC – and you can’t even get from Muswell Hill to the West End in half an hour back in London – Baltimore has a little of the grandeur of Washington, but grandeur is not what we’re here for. The station is all Gilded Age loveliness with Victorian stained glass in the ceiling and a palatial feel that stations really don’t bother with anymore while there are still monolithic buildings like The Belvedere, once the grandest hotel in town now apartments, albeit with The Owl speakeasy, where the eyes of the owls indicated police imminence, still in place.

If you move in, you are obliged to sign an agreement saying that you will seriously fuck your house up with tacky Christmas lights when the time is right

Even our hotel, Ulysses, is impressive: a turn-of-the-last century beauty conceived as apartments for respectable bachelors, it languished as offices until two years ago when the Ash group gave it a shake up and reimagined it in true Baltimore style as a quirky affair that comes over somewhere between a 20s cruise liner and a bordello. Art Deco scarlet lacquer in the Ash Bar, four-poster beds with canopies in the rooms, naughtiness on the faces of all who work there.

And in case you ever thought they had taken themselves a little too seriously (the greatest crime you can commit in Baltimore, where even a huge “Fuuuuuuuuuck Trump!” bit of graffiti on an underpass is cute and quirky), look out for the John Waters references like the flamingos holding up the bedside cabinets, the leopard print carpeting and the pink lacquered antique wardrobes.

And that is the defining spirit of Baltimore, it turns out: an over-the-top love of kitsch, enjoyment of trash and comedy at all times. Yes, the 19^th century mansions around the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon, where the mega-rich used to live, are impressive, and there’s a very decent neo-classical art museum. And there’s the de rigeur high-rise downtown area and even an old-school cobbled harbour where Edgar Allen Poe was last spotted before going missing, but for the real Baltimore, you head to Hampden, ten minutes in a taxi past huge mills that no one knows what to do with anymore.

It’s sitting in the Golden West, a kitschy bar-restaurant on Hampden’s main drag, that Chino, known locally as “the boy with the blue beard” (even though it’s more lavender today and he’s spiced things up with gold-leaf freckles on his cheeks), explains Baltimore. “If you like something, you enjoy it and you keep it out on display,” he says, sweeping his arm around a room that is crammed with art (which may be priceless, may be junk), fairy lights, bits of old car, street signs, gonks…

He points us to the shops along this stretch, places like Parisian Flea, crammed with essentials from antique jewellery and caps saying “What the fuck are you looking at?” through old copies of Edmund White’s hard-to-come-by Genet to stuff that looks like it’s been found in the gutter next to that wig. Chino has told us to hang around until after dark because, this being Christmas, we need to see 34^th Street, where, if you move in, you are obliged to sign an agreement saying that you will seriously fuck your house up with tacky Christmas lights when the time is right. And the official term for such lights – even in municipal literature – is “tacky lights”.

While we’re waiting to take in said lights, we dive into a dive bar a few doors down from Golden West where Kim, who only works Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and who keeps dog treats behind the bar so that every pooch in town stops in to say hello, presides. In fact, it was Kim, outside feeding dogs while punters waited to get served, who ushered us in to begin with. Every bit a John Waters character, with her gravelly voice dissing Drew Barrymore on the TV screen and howling with apparently alcohol-free laughter at most everything anyone ever says, Kim is Baltimore.

Some dance, even though it’s only 3pm and barely any of the serious drinking has been done yet

While serving the drunks and ne’er do wells up at the bar – I include myself – when she finds out that one of us is from Manchester, she takes a dollar out of her own tip jar and goes to put Lisa Stansfield on the neon jukebox, at which the whole bar joins in a chorus of “been around the world and I, I, I…” Some dance, even though it’s only 3pm and barely any of the serious drinking has been done yet.

“Bars have always been a big part of Baltimore,” says John Waters, “and the good ones have no irony about them. They’re not ‘faux’ anything. They’re real and alarming.” We don’t find Kim or her bar alarming – not after a few drinks anyway – but she and it are definitely the real deal.

Not that Baltimore is all about bars. There’s The Duchess (right across from Kim’s by the way, so, you know, turn up early…), a beautiful English-style pub/restaurant that seems to open when it likes. The owner, the famous Tony Foreman, tours the two-room space lined with art and beautiful woods apparently designed to look like a traditional boozer, but which comes over more as a Soho House offshoot, quipping that if he dies trying to make this a success, at least he has the wooden box to go out in. It was actually a success before it opened its doors by the way, partly due to a menu of food Tony “knows nothing about”, a Baltimore-hectic affair with a main thrust of Japanese but with some Hawaiian thrown in, Brussels sprouts alongside lotus root with fish ‘n’ chips, even Spam.

But it’s this embracing of fun and (we shudder at the word) authenticity that has made Baltimore – home of The Wire, remember, though we saw none of that sort of thing – the one-off it truly is. Take the American Visionary Art Museum (pictured top), where it seems anything will do. Crammed with everything from a huge rotating statue of John Waters’ muse Divine through an immense mirror-mosaic fallen angel by Andrew Logan to, well, some tat like a giant collection of Pez dispensers, it’s unmissable. Even the gift shop – a favourite of John Waters – eschews art books and poster racks for buckets of badges and some random postcards someone probably found in a drawer.

Back at Ulysses, we have an hour to kill before our train and so we head to that beautiful, red-lacquered Ash Bar with our suitcases. “Oh, it’s closed,” says some girl with huge hair who is talking to a cleaner, pulling down the corners of her mouth into a sad face. “You’re looking for a drink, right?” We nod. “Then follow me!” C

 

Ulysses, 2 E Read Street, Baltimore, MD 21202
+001 443-682-8578, ash.world

We flew to Washington DC  with Virgin Atlantic, virginatlantic.com
captialregionusa.org; baltimore.org