Baltimore Crabs
If you build something, someone will come.
by Meredith Pinault
Did you ever say a really bizarre thing and think no one in the history of Man has ever strung together an identical combination of words? Three of my recent unique sentence configurations: "Excuse me, I found this half-empty pint of Smirnoff and a plastic bag full of unused CVS lipsticks in the fitting room"..."I'm gonna make you tweet like a cardinal"....and "I genuinely enjoyed my trip to Baltimore." (Not to give Baltimore any credit, though; when I'm visiting with old friends, I could be in an Iraqi oil field and still have a ball.)
Baltimore is a city so singular in its pleasures that its entire tourism souvenir industry is built around crabs. Don't get me wrong, crabs are great. While personally I question the wisdom of consuming the bottom-feeding species of our Earth’s pollutant-rich waters and have curtailed my intake of shellfish, I cannot dispute that Spider maki is a truly divine culinary concoction that mandates crabs as homage-worthy. But “crabs” has less savory connotations... should a city notorious for its sky-high STD rates really make its unofficial mascot the crab?
We arrived at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor via automobile with middling traffic and only a few glimpses of the city’s EPA Superfund sites and industrial bleakness from the highway. It was a cold, dreary Saturday afternoon. The Inner Harbor seemed concrete and gray. Homeless people lined the sidewalk, asking for money in lunatic ways. "Don't you know I'm the Candy Man?" one man chanted, while another repeatedly slurred "Got a quarter, got a dime, got a penny..." in a ruined voice. In the top tourist destination of Baltimore, I feared vaguely for my safety.
We fled to a restaurant, then poked around a glitzy mall packed with the trusty stores we all know and love: Banana Republic, Victoria's Secret, The Gap. A generic copy of every mall in the country, with the exception of the Baltimore-themed souvenir shops, packed with crab paraphernalia. By nature, crabs look pissed and hostile. Truly it is a symbol of Baltimore.
Ah, Baltimore. Like all old American cities, something notable happened there, once. During the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key penned "The Star-Spangled Banner" while watching American forces repel a British naval attack. Then absolutely nothing happened until John Waters used his beloved city's cultural irrelevance and general decay as the backdrop of his cinematic assaults on greater American sensibilities.
In the '80s, Baltimore got serious about revitalization, and built itself an Aquarium. Over the course of several decades, a string of small-time attractions like the USS Constellation and the Maritime Museum along with scores of upscale retail stores and eateries sprang up around the Aquarium, and the Inner Harbor was born as a genuine tourist destination, proof that Baltimore wasn't all that bad despite its top-of-the-chart rates of crime, drug use, and STDs. The Inner Harbor gave Baltimore the bold confidence to market itself as "Charm City."
And what choice does Baltimore have but to trump its charms, as charmless as they are? With America's steady progression to a service-based economy, no industry becomes more important to a city than tourism. Not only does it give jobs to workers displaced by the erosion of urban industry, it gives a city an aura, a soul, a unifying cause for pride. So Baltimore wants to charm you into getting crabs. Its existence depends on it.
--January, 2006