Rafael Alvarez talks Crabtown, USA

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A recent news item isn’t making Rafael Alvarez happy.

Baltimore‘s decision to grant a $100,000 forgivable loan to Amazon so the company can shuttle employees to its Broening Highway fulfillment center has Alvarez steamed. As a newspaper reporter, writer for the acclaimed HBO drama “The Wire” and author of nine books, he has specialized in covering the working people of this city in an age of post-industrial decline.

“Mayor [William Donald] Schaefer is spinning in his grave. It’s ridiculous,” Alvarez said.

Despite frustration with city leaders and the managed decline of Charm City, Alvarez still deeply loves Baltimore. His family has called it home for three generations. That love shows in the title of his most recent book, “Crabtown, USA; Essays & Observations,” a collection of articles published in various publications over the years with connecting vignettes taken from working journals he’s kept for the past 40 years.

During a telephone interview Thursday, Alvarez discussed a variety of topics ranging from his inspiration for writing to why he initially didn’t think Harbor Place was such a great idea. A condensed and lightly edited version of that conversation follows.

TDR: Tell me about “Crabtown, USA.”

Alvarez: Well it’s interesting in that I would say the bulk of it were stories written for publications, print publications that no longer exist. You know, I’m sort of a grinder when it comes to journalism. I like to say, “No job is too small.” And I’ve written about everything, you name it, from a mailbox at the corner of Ann and Thames streets where the old stevedores and tugboat men used to hangout, and lean on that mailbox and tell stories — and all those guys are dead, but the mailbox is still there — to one of my favorite places to write about, G&A Coney Island Hot Dogs in Highlandtown; to obituaries of regular folks, the kind of stuff I really care about — the average Baltimorean who lived life, to good purpose, and not to any great accolades, but was able to go to their grave having lived a good and decent life.

I try to find a home for these — all my journalistic orphans — I’ve gathered them all together in a book called “Crabtown, USA” brought out by the same publishers in Texas who published my last collection of short stories called “Tales from the Holy Land.” So this is my ninth book and all nine are about one subject, the city of Baltimore.

So what is it about Baltimore, whether it be your journalism or your fiction, that inspires you to write?

First and foremost, it’s home. Many, many stories have been written about “quirky Baltimore,” “eccentric Baltimore,” “charming, violent, dangerous, yet somehow intimate Baltimore.” But the only thing that makes it special to me is I’m third generation, and I write these stories in the basement of a little row house in Greektown where my family has lived since 1935. I write stories about spaghetti in the basement where my Italian grandmother made spaghetti. I would like to think you could take a true artist and plop them down in Cleveland; or St. Louis; or Seattle; or Anywhere, USA. People from the really small towns seem to need to leave and feel the need to go to New York, or L.A., or Chicago. But Baltimore is big enough I never felt the need to leave or the desire to leave.

Also, events conspired in a way that led me to stay here much longer than many people who do have artistic ambition. I went to college here in my own backyard, commuted to Loyola (University Maryland), married a girl from Dundalk who is also an author, and then when I was still a teenager got a job at The Baltimore Sun, which at the time was a major metropolitan daily, much different than it is today. Although I will say The Sun does great investigative work, it does good work in police and government, but in the old days they did it times 10. So I got paid to write about the city of Baltimore for over 20 years. I got paid to study the thing I loved best as a city desk reporter for The Baltimore Sun. By the age of 40-45, and I looked back, and I had accumulated this body of work all about this one subject, and it seemed smart to continue to invest in that subject, and that’s what I’ve done.

What are some of the ways, during your time working here, that the city has changed?

It’s broken in ways that it was never broken before. That’s in large part due to the closing of places like Bethlehem Steel and GM. The fact that the city of Baltimore is going to lend Amazon $100,000 to start a shuttle service for a company where GM used to build cars, for a company that is one of the most successful companies in the United States…on the site on the old GM [plant] on Broening Highway, and we’re going to loan them $100,000? Mayor [William Donald] Schaefer is spinning in his grave. It’s ridiculous. There is, to some degree, a reflection on the country at large, in which the middle is continuing to evaporate. I think leadership [in Baltimore] is at the lowest it’s been in many, many years.

Just the idea that they’re bringing gangs to the table, in light of whatever verdicts may or may not come out for the six officers on trial for Freddie Gray’s death — maybe that’s smart. Maybe that’s a progressive point of view. But just the idea that the criminal element now has enough cache that they can be a voice at the table never would’ve occurred as recently as the 80’s. I’m not saying beating the crap out of the populace to quote unquote keep them in line is the right way to go about it either. But we now have a crime problem that is so big that they’re asking gang leaders to join in some form of détente and that’s a sad commentary.

As the title of your previous book (“The Holy Land”) shows, you really have a deep affection for East Baltimore. I know a lot of that has to do with familial ties for you. But is there anything particular, beyond the family ties, that really draws you to East Baltimore?

Yeah, the fact that it’s a port city is really important to me. The fact that I can daydream about all the different people from all over the world who have come to Baltimore since before there was a United States. The fact that the English settled in Fells Point and named one of the streets Shakespeare Street, I find that to be very cool. This is still a great port city. Thank god for the importation of foreign automobiles, which is what the port is based on right now. Then I can daydream and say, “Oh yeah, we’re right up there with all the other great ports of the world” in which you get a mix of cultures because of diversity and cross-pollination. My grandfather came to Baltimore on a ship back in the 1920s. You get a goulash that they don’t in Abilene, Kansas or other landlocked places in the country.

Do you have any thoughts [about how] the city has gone about with development of so many mixed-use areas along the harbor, and the way we’ve seen more traditional neighborhoods decline?

Well, traditional neighborhoods decline when everyday people stop having children in the city. What I have thoughts on, again, the evaporation of the working to the middle, leaving behind the poor and the wealthy. My good friend Rosalia Scalia, who is a great writer out of Little Italy, was [in] the last class to graduate from St. Leo’s, which was the parish school there, the church is still there, and that was around 1971. When the middle stops sending their kids to public schools you’re going to see a decrease in traditional neighborhoods.

When I was a young kid, just writing for the City Paper in the late 70’s when it was first started, I was against Harbor Place. I liked that in-between period when it was no longer rotting piers but it wasn’t a shopping center yet. It was all this green space, and in my naive little heart I thought it should stay that way. Now, as much as I’m against greed and unregulated capitalism, I think just about any business that Baltimore can attract is better than nothing. In the same breath I can say I’m very [angry at] the city of Baltimore is loaning Amazon $100,000 to subsidize their in-house carpool.