Who ♥ Baltimore?(The Talk of the Town)(Baltimore, Maryland)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-APR-08

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COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Baltimore--famous for its harbor, its crab cakes, and its drug trade. Many know it as Charm City, although it's gone by other names: Monument City, Mobtown, Salty Balty, the City of Firsts (first American umbrella factory, first dental college), Balti-Sore (after the syphilis outbreak of 1996-97). Its official motto used to be "The City That Reads," until graffiti artists, perhaps aware that Baltimore led the country in out-of-wedlock teen pregnancies, redubbed it "The City That Breeds." So the mayor offered an alternative: "The Greatest City in America."

Baltimore is now the setting of two Broadway musicals--"Cry-Baby," which opens this week, at the Marquis, and...

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