Casey Jenkins, Owner of Darker Than Blue Cafe. Photo by Steve Ruark.

Courtesy Bmore Media – Waverly is best known as a place to buy fresh raspberries and yellow corn Saturday mornings.

But Main Street Hats Owner Clyde Davis-El reminds us that it’s also a neighborhood where customers come as far away as upstate New York and Atlanta to buy fedoras and Panamas. Davis-El is just one of the neighborhood’s business owners who are counting on leaders to revitalize the neighborhood so it is known as a place to shop and dine, and not just the 32^nd St. Farmers Market. Read More →

If you’re an optimist, you might see it this way:  the Johns Hopkins-spearheaded Homewood Community Partners Initiative (HCPI) will leverage the university’s power to transform the neighborhoods surrounding the school (officially designated as Abell, Barclay, Charles North, Charles Village, Greenmount West, Harwood, Oakenshawe, Old Goucher, Remington, Wyman Park, and parts of Waverly) with safer streets, more restaurants, better schools, and fewer boarded up houses. And if you’re a pessimist, this is Hopkins’ bold plan to extend its domain over increasingly large swaths of Baltimore.
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Go local, right? Tell that to a bee. Those tiny creatures will travel up to five miles to collect just the right pollen to bring back to the hive. They’ll even bypass plants and flowers closer to home in order to find pollen that offers the exact nutrients they’re looking for. Sure, five miles might not seem like much, but it’s the equivalent of a human traveling 3,885 miles for a few sandwich fixings. We’re pretty sure we did that math correctly. Anyway…

The point is, regardless of how labor intensive the honey-making or how far flung the pollen-collecting, if our buzzing little friends make their home in Baltimore, we’re calling that honey local. Extremely local. One small and newish apiary operating within the city limits is Oak Hill Honey. The hives live right in the middle of Baltimore City, at two separate locations. The honey is harvested and packaged by beekeeper Dane Nester, an artist also engaged in the urban farming and local food movements here in the city. Though Oak Hill Honey is still a fairly small operation, you can pick up some of its sweetness at local farm stands and markets.

Oak Hill Honey is available at the Waverly Farmer’s Market, Hidden Harvest Farm, and at Milk & Honey. For more information, visit www.oakhillhoney.com.

The four sculptures in the extensively landscaped courtyard behind the Giant Supermarket in Waverly each presents a different one-word message to those who stop and look. Peace. Trust. Honesty. Integrity.

These words reflect the core values of Marian House, a 30-year-old nonprofit that has helped more than 1,000 women put their lives back together. Read More →

Summer should be a time of fun and exploration, but often many children are left without the nutrition they need because the end of school means the end of school meals. According to the USDA, more than 21 million children lose access to free or reduced-cost meals once the school year ends. To make sure children in the Waverlies and Upton/Druid Heights neighborhoods have food year-round, the Y of Central Maryland is offering free healthy meals and snacks through its summer food program, made possible by a $10,000 grant from the Walmart Foundation.

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A couple weeks ago, blogger Tim De Chant posted an article pointing out the correlation between amount of tree cover in urban neighborhoods and income. It may seem like a no-brainer that wealthier neighborhoods boast larger trees and more overall, but it’s a tighter correlation than you may think. De Chant referenced a study that “found that for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent.”

Apart from neighborhoods that are being blitzed with gentrification, tree cover ought to reveal a neighborhood’s per capita income  with a fair amount of precision, given the right algorithm. (Don’t look at me; I’m not figuring it out.)

Anyway, De Chant reasoned that income inequality might be seen “from space.” He grabbed screenshots from Google Earth to compare tree cover in different neighborhoods within a city. The pictures are pretty interesting. He didn’t include Baltimore, so I went and grabbed a couple of my own images. I found the most stunning difference between planned neighborhood Guilford and nearby Waverly in North Baltimore. Read More →

The transit through a hydrogen-alpha telescope. iPhone Photo by Monica Lopossay.

There’s no way our 14-month-old son Asher will remember the experience, but my wife and I took him to see the transit of Venus, anyway. The thought of him confronting me about it later (“Dad, if you love me, why did you let me miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event?”) was just too much to bear.

So we got a small crew together (me, Asher, my wife Melanie, and our photographer-friend Monica) and headed to the east end of Lake Montebello with plenty of time and waited for clouds to pass and for local astronomy enthusiast Herman Heyn to set up his bulky telescope.

Monica told us that a few of her friends planned to watch the transit from a rooftop staring through their camera’s telephoto lens (but according to a post-transit text message, “the sun is too bright” for that). Read More →

2004's transit

You want to talk about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? How about a transit of Venus — when the blue planet takes about six hours to cross in front of the Sun? It’s happening on June 5 at 6:04 p.m. And it’s not going to happen again until 2117. (Technically, it’s more of a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as TOVs occur in pairs eight years apart — so, yeah, there was one in 2004, but whatever, you missed that and now this is your only chance!)

Herman Heyn, Baltimore’s “street corner astronomer” occasionally seen in Fells Point or Charles Village offering passersby telescopic glimpses of various celestial sights, will be at the east end of Lake Montebello in northeast Baltimore with a special Sun telescope so anyone who wants to can view the astronomical rarity without causing damage to their eyes.

Heyn encourages spectators to show up early because, according to Heyn’s website, “the most exciting part of a TOV is when Venus first appears on the edge of the Sun.”