This Saturday last, my friend and neighbor Jacques Kelly dedicated his column in The Sun to his amusing habit of walking Baltimore’s alleys. I’ve been doing the same thing for years. A city’s alleys can provide a wealth of interesting information.
Scarlett O’Hara once famously learned that "eavesdroppers often learn highly entertaining and instructive things." Alley walking is to eavesdropping as movies are to radio.
I learned the pastime not in my native Balto, but in the drowsier clime of Richmond. A city possessed of lovely and elegant residential neighborhoods, Richmond provides one of the nation’s most hospitable pedestrian scenes. Its beautiful streets are full of gracious houses, from Monument Avenue’s gigantic palaces to the cozy little rowhouses of Mulberry street. Every house in that city seems to have been built with domestic charm in mind. Richmonders are therefore justly house-proud. What one can see from the street is invariably well-decorated and well-manicured, and thus beautiful but not necessarily informative.
In an old city, the backs of houses are not always as lovely as the facades. There may be a pretty garden or a spacious back porch, but never is that porch quite so grandiose as the one in front. The bricks and marble and carved wooden curlicues are saved for the street front; the back of the house is reserved for the prosaic virtues of family, privacy, and laundry.
Even patrician Richmond dirties its clothes and has garbage to throw away, so after I spent my first months in the city marvelling at its immaculate front porches graced with wicker summer furniture, I moved into the alleys and began to inspect the truth behind the facades.
Upon returning to the frumpier regime of Baltimore–a city not without elegance, but more imbued with Teutonic efficiency than Richmond–I resumed the same habit. It’s fun to stroll Baltimore’s "social streets" --Charles, St. Paul, Maryland and Calvert–and peer through parlor windows at the stylishly-turned-out rooms within. For the record, Richmonders are rather more exhibitionist; the grand houses of Monument and Grove avenues are more likely to have their blinds raised at night than those of St. Paul and Calvert. In Baltimore just as in Richmond, one learns from the alley immensely more than from the street.
What you see in a city backyard tells you who the person is. What you see from the front windows tells you what the person wants you to think he is. The front of my house will tell you that I am rather pissily formal, that I am fond of cut-crystal vases, and that I like music but (if you listen) that I play the piano rather badly. The back of the house, on the other hand, tells you that I like homemade pies (if there’s one cooling on the window ledge), that I am obsessed with roses (the garden is full of them), that I think landscaping is a foolish extravagance (since none has been evidently employed back there), that I like mint juleps (since the only herb that is growing really well is mint), that I have cats (since there is always a bag of poop gravel waiting for trash pickup), that I am too cheap to operate an electric dryer (since there is invariably a line of wash drying in the breeze), and if you examine the aforementioned laundry, that I went to William and Mary (there are always W&M and Sigma Phi Epsilon t-shirts in my wash), that I prefer snowy-white boxer-briefs (somebody always does take note of that sort of thing) and that I’m still, after twelve years, divesting myself of the bizarre things that the previous occupants left in the house.
In my travels I have also learned: That the perfectly respectable old lady down the street who never left the house without a hat and gloves liked her bourbon even more than I do mine; that the seemingly-respectable Hopkins students two doors up had some VERY bizarre tastes in pornography, that the delicately beautiful female nursing student down the street wears Army-issue boxer shorts, that the burly cop on the other side of the block either wears NO underwear or is too modest to dry it on the line, and that one of the tenants in a nearby apartment is secretly harboring a covey of pigeons.
The beauty of any city is measured in the face of its residential streets, but the reality is usually seen on the back of the outfit. This is better than any psychoanalysis–whatever you see in the alley is the sometimes pleasant, sometimes grim, but always entertaining reality of a neighborhood.