I don’t know why anyone in Europe would want to travel to the United States right now, or during the next four years, but few in Baltimore are likely to complain about France’s oldest daily newspaper promoting a visit to the Queen City of the Patapsco Drainage Basin.
Le Figaro, with more than 350,000 subscribers, recently urged its readers to “travel to Baltimore, soon to be the most desirable destination in the United States.”
Wait. What?
That prediction, published as Le Figaro’s “big story,” would shock a lot of people around here, and not just the usual naysayers who seem to delight in Baltimore’s problems.
But Le Figaro’s correspondent apparently saw big possibilities in the city’s future.
The story, cheerfully informative as travel writing tends to be, is a free-form meander through the city, from Cherry Hill to Chestnut Hill, Remington and Hampden. You might call the style journalisme vérité, a breezy effort to capture the feel of everyday life in Baltimore. The writer and photographer drifted wherever locals suggested, and not the usual tourist spots.
The photos are particularly kind to the city; you won’t find any vacant rowhouses or abandoned storefronts in the slide show that accompanies the story.
The city’s official promoters should be pleased with the spread. Le Figaro highlights Baltimore’s restaurants, its arts scene and the ambitions of activists and entrepreneurs to create a healthier environment for its citizens. All good.
But I should point out a fallacy in the newspaper’s summation of the story: Baltimore has not been “long shunned by travelers.”
Visit Baltimore, the city’s official promotional agency, says more than 27 million people came here for overnight and day trips in 2023, the most recent year reported on the VB website. That represents a rebound since the pandemic. Twenty-seven million is a far cry from “long shunned by travelers.”
And Baltimore-as-tourist-destination goes back 45 years.
The story in Le Figaro seems to argue that the city is going through a renaissance again — we had one when Harborplace first opened in 1980 — but that statement is more assertion than fact.
I’m not sure what would mark a renaissance, and, as BmoreArt executive director Cara Ober astutely points out in a Substack essay, that term has been hammered into cliche over the years.
Perhaps “renaissance” is in the eye of the beholder, a matter of Baltimore merely beating a visitor’s expectations. I’m not surprised that someone new to the city would be delighted, even charmed, by what they find here.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Baltimore’s first big pop in the global press. In 1975, National Geographic magazine, printed around the world and read by millions, published a 27-page feature on the city. The writer, Fred Kline, had been wowed. He described the gap between public perception of Baltimore as a tough, old blue-collar city and the reality of a northern city with southern charm and a bigger embrace of culture than snobs passing through might expect.
“An undiscovered city, prejudged by motorists passing its industrial outskirts at 50 miles an hour,” Kline wrote. “But now I’ve been to Baltimore and what surprises greeted me! Having wandered her neighborhoods and met her people, having been touched by the doughty spirit of the city, I know that what I first saw was just a tattered overcoat — only one aspect of a city whose singular character, charm, and yes, even beauty, have made those early impressions fade like a mirage.”
I remember being surprised at Kline’s use of an exclamation point in that passage. His reporting made me want to get to Baltimore to see what all his crowing was about. I arrived the following year to start my job with The Sun.
Ultimately, I came to see the National Geographic story as primarily a travel piece, a particular brand of feature story that accentuates the positives in a place and opens eyes to new or uncommon destinations.
Same with the spread in Le Figaro. You won’t see photographs of the blight along West Pratt Street in the newspaper’s “grand reportage.”
It’s endlessly interesting to learn how visitors react to Baltimore, what they see here. The outsider view, good or bad, is always revealing — about the city and about the person rendering the opinion.
For a Baltimorean, travel pieces like the one Le Figaro published evoke pride as well as skepticism. For every positive, we locals can counter with a negative. Such is the nature of being a Baltimorean: You spend a lot of time at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, waiting and hoping for the day when most of the traffic flows steadily to the good, and the city shows real, sustainable progress in population growth, in career opportunities, in the education of its children and the health of its citizens, in the general quality of life.
That would mark a real renaissance.
Your first sentence shows how biased you are. I only skimmed through the rest of the article. If you are this biased, how can your opinion on anything else be trusted? You are a hack, admit it and move on.
Agreed! The anti-Trump bias at the beginning has no place in the article. Just another uber Democrat writer at a far-left publication that has no ability to see past their insulated political lens or appeal to people outside of the extreme left.
Meow!
You’re expecting journalism, that’s not what this is. This is a fluff piece, entertainment, debatably. But not for nothing: Trump hates Baltimore, he said it straight up during his first term, apparently because we have democratically-elected liberal running the place (not running it especially well, but that’s another story). But really, read the room: Trump is engaged in fascist warfare on our entire way of life. Everyone knows tariffs will cause big inflation – he is literally the only person who actually seems to believe it will be a good thing. And forcing people who have been legitimately working remote, for decades, back into government offices is just idiotic and belies a subterfuge to just force hundreds of thousands of civil servants – who help make this country actually function – into retirement. It’s so obvious that Trump and Elon Musk have an agreement: Musk bought him the election, so Trump is now letting Musk run the country like he’s run Twitter (which is a shadow of its former self) – as if a social media company and the world’s largest economy are at all comparable. And the obsession with transgenderism is just deranged – it’s a population of maybe half a percent, and none of them ever harmed anyone. And why, exactly, is DEI such a horrible thing? “Destroying the country” – how does diversity destroy? Diversity makes us stronger, more resilient.
I cancelled The Baltimore Sun due to the new ownership. I’m so happy that Dan is now with The Fishbowl, and I can continue to read his articles.
So great to see Dan Rodrick’s writing in print/pixel again, especially with such a smart and beautiful piece! More, please!!
Did they mention that you can’t find a street covered with litter. What about child criminals and endless carjackings. Did they cover all of the closed businesses all over the city. Did they mention all of the corrupt politicians or that the police aren’t allowed to do their jobs anymore. The city is a dumpster fire and all of the liberal residents are turning a blind eye to it.
This makes me laugh.
No we’re not, but we can’t get anyone competent elected, maybe because no one with their right mind would ever want to try to govern this place, it’s so devastated by decades of racism, redlining, low expectations by its majority demographic, and funding-neglect by the State of Maryland and the federal government.
I drove up Fulton Ave. last month from Russell Street to the Zoo for no particular reason. I was stunned by the dilapidation. We need teams like Evan and Keith to help Baltimore restore itself. Look what they did for a Detroit neighborhood.
https://www.hgtv.com/shows/bargain-block
PS: Yes, we can talk about me writing for you.
What you Maga folks need to understand again is that Trump is going to poison America’s well once again. Especially if he raises tariffs very soon then people around the world won’t be able to afford vacations to cheap destinations like charm city. Great article but the reality with Baltimore nowadays is that it’s just not safe enough for tourists or ironically even locals to enjoy without being a victim of some sort of crime. Problem with Baltimore is that it’s not the same nostalgic one we all love to talk about anymore. Primarily because there’s not enough cops on the street like on every corner keeping everyone safe. Baltimore with its panhandlers, squeegee kids, and small-time criminals, will continue to keep Baltimore from being an attractive tourist destination.
100% truth.
This article smells like the Potomac at low tide.
Unfortunately, all that most people know about B’more is “The Wire” and what they can see from I-95 or the Amtrak. But train tracks and interstate highways seldom run through the more attractive areas of any city. Have you ever arrived in San Francisco by train? You would never guess that you were arriving at “the City by the Bay”. JJH
As someone who was born raised, and still lives in Baltimore, and both of my parents were raised in Baltimore, I see the potential Baltimore has. Unfortunately, it will never be realized with the current leaders. Brandon Scott is the worst Mayor in my lifetime, and I go back to the Schaeffer era. With people like Ryan Dorsey on the City Council, there is not much hope there either ( He actually said people do not come into the City because there are too many cars). There are good areas of the city, but the carjackings, assaults, high property taxes and water bills, along with the abysmal school system, will keep people from moving in, investing, opening businesses, and even visiting the City. Until we get new leadership, nothing will change.