![]() ![]() ![]() Northwood Shopping Center, its stores, restaurants and movie theater, was the scene of persistent and intransigent segregation, and years upon years of protests and demonstrations against it, before the invisible, seemingly impenetrable walls surrounding the strip finally came down. ![]() This is about the daily ritual, the all-but-unnoticed creep of racism in which African Americans in these United States endured constant and repeated slights and indignities so painfully commonplace as to be shrugged off numbly, routine in their own drudgery. Those chapters hark back to a time, not that long ago, when travel in a parallel universe – one Black, one white - was the reality, rather than a mere political invention endorsed by the paranoid and delusional.įorget the past’s most egregious offenses – fire hoses and dogs and beatings and burnings and murders. What makes that site worthy of note is a series of chapters that likely would not be included among the most charming pages of this Southern City of Charm’s history. Meanwhile, the real action seemed to be going on unnoticed about 4½ miles northeast of the downtown, up around the corner from Morgan State University.Īll the market hoopla and media handwringing occurred the same week that work continued in earnest to tear down the whole of an actual landmark – though not world famous by any means - the Northwood Shopping Center. In fact, this is all part of the city’s latest plan for revamping the old space into an improved new space, as the planners like to call most anything. It’s not as if the historic market in its entirety were being torn down and the remaining empty lot paved over in its stead. The town’s hipsters lamented the loss on social media.īut the structure being demolished, over there on the west side of what used to be the city’s central business district, only opened in 1982, when William Donald Schaefer was still mayor. In Baltimore, where not a tremendous lot seems to be reinvented, much of late has been made of the demolition of the Lexington Market Arcade, a relatively recent addition to what is reportedly the nation’s oldest public market, dating to 1782. Things are “repurposed.” (New verbs are created out of thin air.) Whole cities reinvent themselves. The building housing the theater itself was situated physically behind the actual shopping strip, with entry through the lobby from the promenade. Going, going…The brick-walled, 1,000-seat Northwood Theatre was the last structure in the shopping center to be torn down. ![]()
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