Jenna Bush Hager was asked why she and her husband wanted to live in a row house in the Baltimore area. She replied, “It’s all because of Weirddave and GingerOfTheNorth. They’ve always been our role models. They have a perfect marriage and a perfect house. We want to live just like them.”
Wendell, we’re NOT throwing a party this Spring. Give it up.
Jenna worked at a charter school and not a DC public school.
Charter schools are public schools.
Yeah, you can’t even see the goddamn Bromo Seltzer tower from the stands anymore. It sucks. One of the reasons they faced the ballpark in that direction, and left the end open, was to give the fans a view of the city. Now you get a view of a Hilton, and not the type that wears short skirts and no underwear.
Quite frankly, if Jenna and Hubby are the biggest threat to Baltimore’s well-being, a Golden Age is about to begin, and Don Schaeffer can die in peace…
But the hijack on Bawlmer quality-of-environment is delightful… I see my brother’s right and some things are unchanged from my decade there…
C’mon, Hon, it’s Baltimore. It’s tradition!
Next you’ll be telling me that you suspect several blocks of old-school ghetto around Johns Hopkins Hospital didn’t just get spontaneously raptured away, and the Hopkins Trustees had something to do with it…
The punchline being, you probably are still almost as likely to get mugged as when the neighborhood was all funky. The question former denizens of that area are all asking ourselves now is: when the heck did students become able to maintain these lifestyles? Are we that old? Or are these all just venues for yuppies to try to pick up college chicks/boiz?
Oh, yeah, this one’s brilliant. $400K for this location?? They started putzing about in that general neighborhood in the 90s… even then I knew this was not a Great Idea.
Well, thank Og for small mercies…
They can pave over the Rotunda when they can get past my Maginot Line made of Berger Cookies and Nattie Boh cans. Who the hell thought it needed improving? Where the hell are Hopkins students going to get groceries? Not fucking EDDIE’S, that’s for sure. Super*Fresh is overpriced and another half-mile down the road (which matters when you’re walking from one of the still-fairly-cheap places on University). I guess they’d probably bulldoze the indie movie theater in there, too, and replace it with a Cinemark or whatever-the-fuck.
Are they going to put a TGI Friday’s in where the Paper Moon is?
Maybe buy out Pete’s Grill and put up a Denny’s? Can you imagine a goddamned Denny’s on Greenmount Ave?
Maybe buy out Holy Frijoles and put in a Chevy’s or (shudder) an Across the Border.
That would be Old-Bay-in-my-Eyes, crumbled-crab-shells-up-my-ass perfect.
Ugh. Fuck developers and their notion of “progress.” I say any business with fewer than five locations – and no national franchising agreement – should get a “small business” tax break on their rent and/or mortgage payments. Hell, scale the tax break with number of locations. If you can afford to put a second Paper Moon Diner up somewhere else in B’More, you can pay the slightly higher tax rate on the new place.
(Yes, I realize Eddie’s is a small business and Giant isn’t, but Eddie’s charges more than even Whole Foods does. It’s criminal.)
TGIFridays? Denny’s? No way. They’re going to put a Starbuck’s in each of those places. 
Not sure how long it’s been since you’ve been in the neighborhood, but plenty of Hopkins students now seem to get their groceries at the relatively new Giant on 33rd Street, just east of Greenmount. It’s just a few blocks from where i live, and is really handy. We tend to get a lot of our groceries at Trader Joe’s in Towson, but it’s nice having a supermarket right around the corner when you need it.
Also, the Hopkins shuttle vans will drop students off and pick them up from the Giant after 5 p.m., so they don’t have to walk over scary Greenmount Avenue all by themselves. 
Hopkins students get a discount card that gives them a 10% discount at the Charles Village Eddies. It doesn’t exactly make the place cheap, but it does bring the price down enough to justify shopping there if you only have a few items and don’t want to trek further from campus.
When I was a freshman, our class president promised that he’d get the J-Card accepted as legal tender at local businesses and we’d no longer be beholden to the foodservice company. The first card readers went in a few weeks after I graduated. 
Does it also function as a discount card? That’s pretty freakin’ sweet.
I don’t remember any Giant near Greenmount, either. There was one beat-to-hell Safeway, and you didn’t want any of the “fresh” fruits or vegetables they were selling anyway. I could chalk this progress up to development, I guess… but it’s more fun to wish painful venereal disease on the greedy bastards who have ruined Baltimore’s residential market by deciding that every rowhouse is now a “luxury townhome”.