This piece by Tim Kreider is pretty fabulous.
It includes John Waters’ great line: “NYC is full of normal people who think they’re crazy; Baltimore is full of crazy people who think they’re normal.”
And “Bananas & hardware for sale at the bar” actually only narrows things down to a half-dozen locations. I still use the hair clippers I bought at a bar on Eastern Ave 15 years ago. But I realized that bars sold hardware because there were no hardware stores selling hardware.
And: “White Baltimore, which, if mapped, would look like a tenuous network of interconnected nodes laid over the terra incognita where the majority of the city’s inhabitants lived their lives. That other Baltimore, hungry and disenfranchised and heavily armed, written off by politicians, pushed around by the cops and called animals on the Internet, was always a block away.”
And finally: “Even though NYC is where I belong now, I still feel at home in Baltimore in a way I will never feel anywhere else.”