Cleanliness in Late 1970s East Baltimore
East Baltimore is famous for its row fronts. Imagine a line of row houses, all next to each other, each containing a set of marble stairs extending from the front door. The street, sidewalk, and back alley are pristine. It’s a Saturday, and you see a group of neighbors sitting together on a marble stoop, chatting about life. The woman living in the house next door is meticulously polishing her outside windows as she listens in on the conversation, every so often adding her two-sense. This was a common scene in East Baltimore in the late 1970s.
Presentation and cleanliness were two important values during this time. Though East Baltimore was in a state of change, certain aspects of life endured. As Frank Krajewski remarked, “the neighborhoods don’t change, but the people do”. There was a sense of pride in keeping the neighborhood clean, which also meant keeping one’s own house clean. For example, Mary Kiyawn comments that when one looks outside, one does not find homes falling apart. She emphasizes that people do their best to keep their homes clean and well-kept, and the members of the community do the same for their neighborhood, as “that’s what makes you feel better”.
Cleaning was an integral part of upkeep, but it also served as a social activity for many East Baltimore residents. Sam Moss recounts that mothers or daughters would clean the marble steps as an afternoon activity, and when the evening came, people would sit on the steps. Estelle Figinski, a resident who seldom visits her neighbors’ houses and could be described as reserved, used cleaning as a means of socialization with others in the community. “In cold weather it’s very sad because we don’t see nobody unless we come out. We don’t bump into each other… unless we wash our step, or wash the window… Then we see [a neighbor] washing the step, then we go out to wash it so we can talk to the neighbor. And that’s the way we see one another in the wintertime.”
A clean sidewalk was of the utmost importance, and people opposed trees being planted in front of their houses out of fear that nature would make the sidewalk harder to clean. James Bready accounts that “the mentality that washes the marble stoop also sweeps the sidewalk.”
Bready further describes how people in East Baltimore liked things paved solid. Resident Mary Kujawa even payed $53 to have the alley outside her house cemented. One day, when a boy was walking his dog, the dog made a mess in the alley. Mary asked the boy to pick up after the dog, threatening to call the police if he did not. When the child’s father heard of this, he took the dog to the same alley and let the dog mess in the alley “for spite”. Another man down the street asked him to clean it up and he refused. Mary, having enough, told the man she was about to call the police when the man finally picked up the dog mess. The family with the dog eventually ended up moving because they said the neighborhood was too strict for them.
Though some new residents had difficulty acclimating to the cleanliness norms of East Baltimore, population change due to revitalization challenged those norms. This impacted the residents that were already inhabiting East Baltimore. Eddie Rich Siekjerski had a negative view on certain newcomers that did not meet what were considered to be up to cleanliness standards in East Baltimore. Apart from not meeting these standards, Siekjerski also commented on how new residents from out of town often lived together in tight quarters: “fourteen, fifteen people, strangers, all living in one house.”
While residents may have had good intentions, “cleanliness” may have been a racial separator. Though never directly mentioned in any interviews that have been examined by the Interdisciplinary CoLab Team, it is important to mention that Baltimore had a history of racial segregation. As East Baltimore was predominantly a white section of the city, mostly comprised of working class people, cleanliness may have been a coded word to signify a white neighborhood. Rat Film: The History of Baltimore Told Through a Unique Lens is a documentary highlighting the history of racism and racial segregation in Baltimore. The film used the lens of rats to explore historical imaginaries of cleanliness. “Slum districts” typically referred to black neighborhoods with deteriorating conditions and trash. One resident who worked for the city government at the time of the making of the film commented, “that’s where you’re gonna find a rat: in the places where most uneducated people are, the ones who have the [least] resources” (0:33:50). It is likely that many of the same neighborhoods that have trash and rats in them today are the same as those in the late 1970s due to redlining, a process that restricted racial movement which was in place before the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project began.
Today, if you peruse the same streets in East Baltimore as were documented in the late 1970s, you will get a sense that people like to keep their houses and alleyways clean. There was, however, a higher level of emphasis put on keeping the neighborhood clean in the late 1970s. Though a place can change and adapt over time, some essence of its history lives on.
Reference List
All personal accounts were taken from Series 3, Box 6, Folder 6 from the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project Collection.
Roch-Decter, Riel, Sebastian Pardo, Theo Anthony, Dan Deacon, Matt Fouse, and Maureen Jones. 2019. Rat Film. : The History of Baltimore Told through a Unique Lens. Memory. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=cat01476a&AN=umdbc.006100419&site=eds-live&scope=site.