Over the next several months, we'll be bringing back favorite posts from our archives. Today, DBFA Founder, Rebecca Gershenson Smith, pictured above hanging out after church at Old St. Paul's on Charles Street downtown with her husband Ian and their three children, Lilian, Adeline, and Alistair, shares what downtown Baltimore meant to her family.
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Moving to Baltimore wasn't exactly my choice.
When my husband visited during his residency interview at Johns Hopkins in 2003, he called to check in. “I know you won’t believe me, but I actually think you’d really like it here. There are these great neighborhoods down by the water with historic homes that people are renovating. Coffee shops, quirky restaurants. It’s very ‘you.’”
I wasn’t so sure. And when he matched at Hopkins a few months later, I spent the day crying. My associations with Baltimore, formed by popular media and a few brief visits as a teenager, were far from glowing.
But Baltimore-bound it was. During a whirlwind week of househunting, we toted our fourteen-month-old old from Pikesville to Cedarcroft to Hampden in search of our new residence. It wasn’t a difficult choice. We chose a cozy rowhouse in Upper Fells Point, sold by its original wood floors, multiple fireplaces, closed floor plan, proximity to Hopkins, and above all the quaint, highly walkable surrounding area. We noticed there weren’t many children around. But we didn’t mind going against the grain and figured it would be fine.
Six years later, I’m happy to say that it’s more than fine. Since then, I’ve grown to love Baltimore as my home and treasure my downtown neighborhood for the same reasons that others do—the walkability, the sense of community and connectedness, the endless activity, the extensive network of friends and playmates within a 3-block radius of our house.
But what is most meaningful to me is the way living here has shaped my character and that of my children in lasting and permanent ways that I would not have predicted.
The transition from tree-lined, affluent, midwestern Ann Arbor (our most recent, if temporary, home) was not easy in the beginning and involved a degree of culture shock. I remember spending the first few months in my new house staring at the accumulating litter on my street in disbelief. I finally called the city and asked, “Umm, doesn’t someone come pick this up?” Well, not so much.
The communities I’d lived in during my adult life—Austin, Ann Arbor—were progressive and had their acts together. This brought a high quality of life that I very much appreciated. But I’m not sure how much I grew as a person in either location. And while I had made occasional, limited attempts at volunteerism, I struggled to find a way to get outside myself and my family.
In Baltimore, one doesn’t have to look far for substantive ways to make an impact. It would be easy to take a cynical viewpoint toward this, but I’ve found the city an awesomely empowering place to live. It’s a city that has given me the opportunity to learn something as small as how to organize neighbors to clean up the street and as large as how to start a new charter school. The learning process has been exhilarating, and I’ve made so many dear friends along the way. It’s hard for me to envision having had the same opportunities anywhere else.
And I know I’m not alone in this. I look around, and I see parents who have founded schools and preschools, organized T-ball leagues and Halloween parades, planted trees and reclaimed parks, hosted teas and fundraisers to support neighborhood schools, started local businesses, served on boards of community organizations and community-based nonprofits. What are we collectively teaching our kids by our actions in this respect? Whatever it is, I think it’s good.
A friend who lives in a suburb outside a different metro area—and who had spent her twenties living in the center of some great American cities—remarked to me recently, “You know I don’t LIKE living here. I’m just here for my kids. If it weren’t for them, I’d be somewhere else.” Suburbs have some things to offer kids, to be sure—good schools, relative safety, room to roam. I get it. (And I also get that there are suburbanites who like their neighborhoods as much as I do mine.)
And I’ll be honest and say my husband and I didn’t choose the city for the benefit of our children. We thought we’d love living here and that it would be a neutral influence on them. But what I’ve found is that they’ve benefited as much or more than we have, and far more than if we had chosen to live elsewhere.
I now have three children (ages 7, 4, and 3 months), but I always experience the pluses and minuses of city life through the eyes of my eldest because, naturally, she gets to experience everything first. When she was a toddler, I loved how just a walk around the block involved such varied sights, sounds, and fodder for learning and conversation—chat with an elderly neighbor, play hopscotch with another child, observe the pigeons, pet someone’s dog, watch an ambulance or fire truck or taxicab fly by.
As she’s gotten older, this phenomenon has been enhanced in the best of ways. The sights she sees in our neighborhood have sparked great conversations about community, civic responsibility, homelessness, immigration, poverty, even drug addiction (the lessons of which I hope will resurface when she’s 15). Friends who live in more homogenous neighborhoods sometimes talk about it as “living in a bubble” or “living under the dome.” When I hear this, I’m so grateful that my children’s view of the world is more expansive than this, and I believe they are coming to understand some of the world’s harsher realities in a much deeper way because they’re outside their front door rather than in a removed locale.
The result is not that my children lack innocence. Instead, I look at my seven-year-old, and I see her bringing simplicity, compassion, and acceptance to those who are different from her. I like who she’s becoming, and I’m seeing her younger sister follow in her footsteps.
I sometimes interview kids applying to college at my alma mater. It’s someone else’s job, in an admissions committee miles away, to size up who they are on paper—grades, test scores, the resume of activities and honors. I get to consider them as people—in just an hour, to ask the question, “Is this someone I would have liked to hear from in history class, or to talk with about music, politics, and pop culture in the dorm hallway at 1am?” So I think about this with my own kids, and I know that by the time they leave my house, I want them not only to be bright, happy, kind, and able to be successful as they define it—but also people of depth, understanding, and interest. People who have ideas—big ideas—and who know how to put them to work. In the eighteen years that they are mine, I want their life’s experiences to be rich and colorful enough to lead their lives in interesting and significant directions. Living in downtown Baltimore is giving them this in spades.
Sometimes Ian and I talk about what might have been. What if we had stayed in Ann Arbor for his residency, as I had hoped? Or what if we’d bought that cute little house for sale in North Baltimore instead? Both scenarios are unimaginable to us. The last six years would have been utterly boring and predictable in comparison. We wouldn’t be the same people that we are now, nor would our kids. Our children are better for having lived here. And I would absolutely say the same for myself.
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Rebecca Gershenson Smith is the founder of the Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance. She lives in Upper Fells Point with her husband Ian and their three children, Lilian (7), Adeline (4), and Alistair (3 months).
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There are countless reasons we've all chosen to raise our families in downtown Baltimore, but sometimes we may need to be reminded. If you would like to share why YOU stay, either leave a link to your own blog post in the comments or email us your contribution to be posted on the DBFA Blog.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 
more riding on the question of where to live. We knew where our hearts were, but we had a kid now, it was time to listen to our heads. 
Deciding to stay can be a tough decision. If you are considering it and would like to talk with other parents in the area, let us know—email info@dbfam.org. DBFA and its network of veteran downtown parents would love to answer any questions you may have. 
