by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com

For more than a decade city officials have “come to the community” with development proposals and assured the community—regular folks like you and me who lack degrees in urban planning and traffic engineering—that there would be no problem with traffic and congestionas a result of building these millions of square feet of mixed office, retail and residential. The community has replied “baloney,” but the city officials have approved the developments anyway.
The community has

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com

The Canton Library is 121 years old, and it is beginning to show its age. The heat and air conditioning is creaky, the front door sticks, the building doesn’t even come close to meeting Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, the lighting does not illuminate much and the plaster will need patching after the roof leaks are attended to.

Don’t worry, though. Carla D. Hayden, Director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, called the Canton Library

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com

The Friends of the Canton Library cleared $1,400 on its book sale. This proves a couple of things—Cantonites love to support their library (lots of people just said keep the change), and people love cheap books.

I scored a couple of trash books for the beach—a mystery and a rather lurid-looking (I hope you can tell a book by its cover) romance, and while helping sort books last week for the sale I made the

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com

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May is the beginning of the period called When It’s Even More Impossible to Park in Canton. There are one or two festivals a month in Patterson Park, and the rest of the time there are various league sports, bicycle races, foot races and giant pink poodle races. It’s a great time of year if you don’t have to park your car.

Hundreds

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com

Ah, Spring! At last!
The sun is warm, the breeze soft. It’s time to get out on our steps and reacquaint ourselves with our neighbors, plant a few flowers, take the dog out for longer walks and complain about the ice cream trucks.
I have nothing against commerce. Ice cream is great stuff when the temperature is 80 and above. Everybody likes ice cream—in fact I bet you would be hauled to the

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com

Saturday, the last day of the Highlandtown Branch of the Pratt Library, was “nice and steady all day,” said branch manager Anne Stepney. There were a couple of teenagers pecking away on the computers and a couple of adults browsing the stacks, so there was plenty of time to chat.
The tiny Highlandtown Branch—the only one smaller was the Washington Village Branch—consistently ranked second or third citywide in circulation per square foot, a stat

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com
Now that it’s warming up a little bit and the sun is shining occasionally, we humans (homo sapiens Highlandtownidae) are poking our heads out of our buff brick rowhouses and noticing that annual sign of spring—it really reeks around here.

The manure smell from the pelletizer at Back River Waste Water Treatment Plant that graced us over the holidays is gone, but the deposits our dogs have been leaving all winter in parks and

How good it was to see the veterans of the Road Fight at the Creative Alliance Sunday, the saviors of the heart of Baltimore 40 years ago. There was a whole lot of hugging and handshaking in the lobby.

For those who are not familiar with the Road Fight, the City of Baltimore, tempted by $200 million in federal highway finance, announced in the early 1960s that it would build a highway and interchanges cutting right through the city. The