I spent a lot of time in Baltimore in the mid 80’s, it seemed like the city was trying to re- vitalize into a place where people wanted to live and work. I’m guessing that all changed.
When white hostages weren’t permitted to leave a major league baseball game until police could ensure their safe evacuation, the scales fell from everybody’s eyes - it is a dangerous place (especially for whites), like post-colonial Congo. In the day of cellphones, there was no way to sweep that incident under the carpet; masses of people basically held in the stadium after the game.
I worked for a period of time with a guy who’d grown up in Baltimore in the 1960s and 1970s. He could talk for an entire hour about the ‘charm’ of the city, the Orioles, and local cuisine...in the OLD days. Then he’d come to the 1990s, when the city was starting to dissolve. It no longer functioned....drug use was escalating, and there weren’t enough cops to protect people. In some ways, it’s become a mini-Detroit.