One a Day, the 200th of the Year
The Alameda is a wide, tree-lined street. The 1890s were the era of the City Beautiful Movement and in 1893 the landscape architect firm, Olmsted Brothers, was engaged to survey the city of Baltimore and make recommendations. The Alameda was one of several boulevards built during this time period to connect parks. It runs through the neighborhood of Coldstream-Homestead-Montabello. CHM is by no means a wealthy neighborhood, but it is not the sort of neighborhood that is associated with urban dysfunction. Predominately African-American and working class, it’s the sort of neighborhood that is often forgotten in discussions of our cities that reduce everyone to caricatures.
Yesterday, the Alameda sadly was home to the 200th homicide of the year in the city of Baltimore. The police have not released the identity of the victim. The Baltimore Sun called it part of a “wave of killings the likes of which hasn’t been seen in four decades.” When the loss of population Baltimore has experienced over the past 40 years is taken into account, it may be a wave of killings the likes of which have never been seen. The month of August has averaged one killing a day. This rate has not let up. Since the death on the Alameda, the was another shooting victim on the other side of town, on McCullough Street.
This does not take into account the shooting victims who are injured but not killed. In the same article in the Baltimore Sun:
Three other people were injured in two shootings early Monday morning. At about 12:35 a.m., officers found a 29-year-old man shot multiple times and a 19-year-old woman shot in the abdomen on the 1300 block of N. Carey St. in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, police said.
At 3:40 a.m., officers responded to the 500 block of N. Bouldin St. in the Ellwood Park/Monument neighborhood, where a 24-year-old man was found shot in his abdomen.
fojap 
One of the only cities worse than my home town of Chicago in terms of homicides and shootings. Very sad. Very frustrating.
It’s especially frustrating since it had been on an upswing until this year. There’s been a decline in unemployment and other, mainly positive, indicators.
I feel like I don’t understand why Chicago is so bad, but then I’ve only ever been to the touristy areas. I took a couple of tours sponsored by the AIA.
It’s the West Side of Chicago, the projects into which the City pours poor blacks, where the gun violence is astronomically high. Because it takes place in such areas, it doesn’t really get huge national media attention. Hell, it barely gets any here unless a baby or small kid happens to get killed in the cross fire of a gun battle. Not at all a good situation.
The call Baltimore “Smalltimore” because everyone knows everyone, or so it seems sometimes. The neighborhoods are very small and the violence definitely bleeds over from one neighborhood to the next. My sister’s company opened a second office in the city a few years ago and she said she’s shocked at the numbers of funerals she’s gone to, mostly the children of co-workers. Some people were probably into questionable things, but far too many were collateral damage.
Yeah. That’s the biggest tragedy of this kind of violence.