TontoKowalski {l Wrote}:Dick Rosenthal {l Wrote}:I’d take a day drinking my way from Federal Hill through Inner Harbor through Little Italy and Fells Point and ending in Canton over both places. Sure, there is a good chance of dying 12 hours into a jag that ends in Canton or at the very least ending up drinking bootleg vodka in the basement of the Polish Home Club or worse, being shanghaied into going to Dundalk to drink in some horrible Billytown bar where the bar doesn’t close for the night until there is a stabbing, but there is something noble in the endeavor and more authentic than LA or the new and improved Boston.
This is beautiful - and you even mentioned Dundock, home of The Shit Plant, where sometimes the olive oil factory springs a leak and and oil floods the streets, where a rainfall that doesn't submerge the pilings in Fells still somehow puts half of the shittiest peninsula in the world underwater. That Polish club is a fantastic place, there's also Dnipro (Ukrainian) on O'Donnell St, just if you want to hit all the shitty eastern European cultural dumps in a night. If you do it Halloween week, you can hit the Lithuanian Hall and take in The Night of 100 Elvises.
While you're at it, ponder the great tragedy of this life that that blossom-nosed homunculus Wayne (Mahaffey's) outlived the decent and upstanding Scunny (Mamas on the Half Shell). RIP Scunny, you were an outstanding human being.
I'll tell you what, if you make it on this odyssey around the corner to Little Italy (Germano's is my favorite place there - don't ever trust an Italian place that charges more than $14 for a puttanesca and half the places there do for some damn reason) and into Fells, you'll make it to Canton provided you don't do something like stagger past Captain James down Aliceanna, get propped, and pick a fight with a pimp. With Chubbys closed, this is the only risk I can think of these days.
I have a police blotter somewhere describing a stabbing in Dundock, at a bar, executed by (and I quote that shining beacon of journalism, The Sun) 'a local woman known only as Peaches'. She had been coming to the bar every day for years and no one knew her real name - just Peaches. One of my first Dundock experiences was watching a morbidly obese woman wearing spandex and a denim jacket with a Loony Tunes iron-on push a stroller full of beer out of a liquor store while her kid trailed behind her, in the middle of a weekday. A friend of mine is an artist, actually from Dundock, and a few years ago he circulated among friends a comic book called 'Dundalk Fairy Tales'; I don't remember all of them, because 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, lit dahn yer weave' had me helpless with tears of laughter.
Dick, I may have to perform this unholy march and report back to you with the results. Once things normalize.
I have made this journey once and it was beautiful. When I was in law school at the FLS diploma mill I was befriended by a classmate that I called Lord Baltimore. He was an exceedingly nice guy who became positively murderous if he was blind drunk and then provoked. Three weeks into our mutual law school careers he smashed the grandson of a former Governor of New York in the side of a head/face with a metal napkin dispenser in an Upper West Side pizza place because the Governor's grandson--who was both a Regis and Georgetown grad (read into that what you will)--talked shit about Lord Baltimore's alma mater, Mount Saint Mary's. I believe that Lord Baltimore was not expelled because said Governor's grandkid was a first rate dick and may have thrown a first feeble punch--he would quit law school a couple of weeks later.
Lord Baltimore had been a rarity in Baltimore, a white kid hoops star at Mount St. Joe's who originally went to a midwestern basketball power. He hated pretty much everything about the school and the Midwest in general and ended up transferring to Mount Saint Mary's to play for the legendary Jim Phelan and the Mounties who had just gone D1. He ended up in the Midwest because someone had given money to his Dad, a Canton bucket head who drove a truck and collected gambling debts for the Corbi Family.
Now interestingly enough, I have another friend from Charm City who is also commonly referred to as Lord Baltimore. As luck would have it the 2nd Lord Baltimore attended a fine Jesuit institution with a cousin of mine and parlayed his family's very successful business (I won't mention the name so as to avoid rocketcarring him) into a porn empire that he runs out of mansion on what used to be an old money horse farm in the area northeast of Caves Valley and southwest of Cockeysville--I think its called Worthington. He casts Baltimore area strippers interspersed with coeds from Towson, UMBC and the occasional girl from Loyola along with a couple of "name stars". He apparently makes a lot of money in this venture and is using some of his profits to set up a state of the art pot farm out past Hagerstown that will open when Maryland gets around to legalizing marijuana for recreational use. He also has a picture of himself with a very dead Johnny Unitas--he apparently was dating the girl whose family owned the funeral home where Johnny was prepared for his funeral and he went in when they were setting him up for the wake (Unitas was in a suit, sitting in chair in preparation of being placed in his casket and Lord Baltimore the 2nd is in a suit sitting next to him with an insane grin on his face--which in fairness is his default expression.
Now, getting back to the 1st Lord Baltimore, after he graduated from the diploma mill, he returned to Baltimore and started out as an associate at Venable before parlaying that job into a non-legal gig at Legg Mason, where he remains today. In any case, he did well for himself and purchased a couple of very nice adjoining brownstone-style row houses on Federal Hill and connected them and fashioned them into something of a party house in the early 2000s. He also obtained some very sweet Ravens' season tickets and some of us would occasionally jump on the Metroliner (I lived in Manhattan in those days) and head down to Baltimore for a game.
Now, in one instance, I ended up heading down on a Friday night because Lord Baltimore was having a house party of some sort. It was an excellent party, but as the Ravens' game was not until Sunday, it left me with a Saturday to spend in Charm City. The day started in ordinary enough fashion with some lunch and a few drinks at Mother's, which has become a cliche at this point, but back then was as good a place to start as any in Federal Hill. We wended our way through a couple of other places on Federal Hill--there was a very good whiskey bar that has since closed--before finding ourselves in the Inner Harbor. We were tossed out of the Rusty Scupper for a relatively minor transgression--there was no violence, but perhaps a bit of profanity--before we staggered over to Little Italy where we ate dinner at some mobbed up mom and pop where the owner was an associate with Lord Baltimore's father. The food was excellent and cheap and fortified us as we entered Fells Point. We hit The Horse and began on the road to ruin. It only took about ten minutes for us to get kicked out of Max's and after Lord Baltimore violently assaulted a pirate statue and a bouncer in front of the Admiral's Cup or some fucking place like it we found ourselves exiled from the Point and returned to Lord Baltimore's neighborhood of Canton. We started off in some place that looked like it came out of a scene in Eastern Promises--except it was Poles, Lithuanians and Ukranians instead of Russians. There was another bar that shared space with a Polish Butcher Shop where we ran into Lord Baltimore's Dad who eyed me suspiciously and remarked that "Irish and Italian kids from Fordham always work for the FBI", but he eventually must have been assuaged and it was then that I was invited to join him and Lord Baltimore at the Polish Home Club. At the PHC we were joined by one of Lord Baltimore's father's associates--a younger specimen of bucket head mob muscle who would soon be out of work (the Corbi's were taken down as collateral damage by a Gambino family rat). He invited Lord Baltimore and I to join him at a bar in Dundalk that was open despite it being well past closing time. Lord Baltimore's father did not approve and Lord Baltimore was sentient enough to recognize that it was folly and when we left the PHC instead of getting into the cab for Dundalk, he threw up on the sidewalk, tossed me the keys to the Federal Hill house and stumbled off to his parents nearby apartment.
Some things are better left forgotten, so I will not comment on what I witnessed and experienced in Dundalk other than to say that the girl who drove me back to Lord Baltimore's place in Federal Hill shortly after sunrise was younger than 25, worked as a stripper and had at least two kids at that point judging from the child seats in the back of the car. Fortunately, she passed out in the driver's seat of her car within one minute of arriving in front of Lord Baltimore's home. I abandoned her, went into the house and went to sleep. Lord Baltimore arrived home at Noon and when we went out to pregame shortly thereafter in the lead up to the 4 pm kickoff, the young stripper Mom was still passed out in her car. When we got home after the game so I could pick up my stuff before heading g to the train station, she was gone, but there was a copious amount of vomit on the street right where her driver's side door would have opened.