I'm loving Friday because I had a good day yesterday with my bi-weekly tutoring in the a.m. These prisoners try so hard that the two hours goes really fast. I had worried about that but despite their status, they pay attention and work so hard, you are rooting for them.
Afterward, I went up to the edge of Baltimore, the area of dumps and all sorts of toxic waste landfills to take some pictures. You know you don't want to go down the road marked Quarantine Road. There is an area of the city called Fairfield and I suppose in a far far distant past (Civil War era?) it might have been a fair field with a view of the growing city to the north. But in the days I first saw it, it was a nearly abandoned group of houses literally in the shadow of BP gas storage tanks. People still lived there.
Located in the southeastern portion of the city, Fairfield is a heavy industrial area housing petroleum firms, chemical plants, trucking depots, asphalt manufacturing facilities and a number of other industrial and service companies. Within the boundaries of Fairfield are two small communities--Old Fairfield and Wagners Point; and located just outside are two other neighborhoods--Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. EPA records 1996
Apparently this area was bustling in the 1940s with both a shipyard and a steelworks.
Many of the workers had been recruited from the mining regions of the south, and their descendents still lived in the area in the 80s though the jobs were long gone.
I would love to know more about this area and see pictures as I first saw it. Today? Only the two churches remain and the place has the feel of the ghosts who lived, worked and died there.
So loving Friday that only ghosts remain in this toxic area and a flashback to the days when we just didn't know what the price was for so many of those 'good' jobs.
