Culture
The Private Lives of Vacant Homes
An art installation celebrates the spirit of boarded-up blocks of Baltimore and Japan.
This post is part of a CityLab series on wastelands, and what we squander, discard, and fritter away.
Tens of thousands of vacant rowhouses are scattered across the city of Baltimore, which is ramping up a new campaign to demolish them. The Washington Post recently chronicled the razing of an entire block of North Bradford Street in East Baltimore, in a neighborhood bordered by renovated homes and a new public school operated by Johns Hopkins. The city, Steve Hendrix wrote, “is spending millions of dollars tearing out blighted pieces of itself in the hope that, like a pruned tree, the rest of the city will bloom.”