Conventional Wisdom: Last Thoughts on Baltimore (Patreon)

2017 marks the first year Otakon takes place in the heart of Washington DC rather than Baltimore, and that’s a pretty big deal. When any convention leaves from the setting you’re used to for a new one, it’s going to change your overall experience, even if you’re a hermit who never leaves the convention center like me. When Animazement left the Sheraton Imperial, which was tucked away in (at the time) the big stretch of nothing out past the airport, for new Convention Center right in the heart of Raleigh, many saw it as the end of an era: the death of Animazement as a little by-fans, for-fans gathering and the birth of a big, corporate, cosmopolitan event (never mind that the previous several Animazements had ALREADY clearly outgrown the “little fan get together” vibe). While I never went to MAGFest at the Alexandria Hilton, I’m told that its move to the huge, luxurious Gaylord in the immaculately developed National Harbor marked the spiritual end of THAT event’s days as a drunken party and the dawn of something more serious and structured. Even Anime USA, while not an epoch-changer like the previous two, had a much different vibe in the overgrown mall that was Crystal City than it now does in the leafy hipster spawning ground of Northwest DC. And now Otakon is moving as well. I’ve started writing this before the con, so I can’t really say how things will change just yet (I’m sure the comics will cover that subject quite well), but it IS making me good and nostalgic for the con’s previous hometown, Baltimore. As we’ve all seen that these Patreon blogs are 75% nostalgic ramblings, let’s get started!

Granted, Otakon didn’t start in Baltomore. It actually started out in Pennsylvania, hopping around Maryland and Virgina (at the Crystal City Hyatt, where every major convention on the Eastern seaboard is required by law to happen at least ONCE) but finally putting down roots in Baltimore in 1999. My first Otakon wasn’t until 2008, so by that point those roots ran DEEP. Heck, they even started using a crab as one of their mascots. And I have to confess, Otakon is the only reason I’ve ever actually set foot in Baltimore. The closest I’ve ever come to visiting the place on non-Otabusiness was seeing it briefly out the window of a bus on the way to Boston. And honestly, unless some other convention in the area gets big enough to draw me up there, I can’t imagine I’ll ever have any reason to return now that Otakon’s left.

So what kind of memories do I have of Baltimore? Probably nine years of the inside of the Convention Center, right? Well, not exactly. Hard as it is to imagine now, back when I first started attending non-Animazement conventions, I actually did venture out beyond the hotel and do touristy stuff. I even ate food that I hadn’t brought with me in a cooler! It was WEIRD. So I do have a few memories of Baltimore the actual city… sort of. An obvious side effect of only going to Baltimore for Otakon means that the only part of Baltimore I ever really saw was the Inner Harbor. For those of you who’ve never been, the Inner Harbor is Baltimore’s tourist trap: the immaculately polished, heavily policed, family eatery infested, officially designated Nice Part Of Town. Plenty of people drive down there, get their nice Orioles souvenirs, and drive back home again without ever glimpsing the “real” city. But my first Otakon? Oh, I got me a BIG meaty taste of the Real Baltimore that year. Most years I stayed at one of the hotels right across the street from the Convention Center, but this first year we had a room in a Radisson several blocks north. I’m not even sure if the hotel’s still in business anymore, it’s certainly not by Radisson if it is. Either way, it was old as dirt by the time we stayed there, and not in the cool “Oh, isn’t this HISTORICAL!” kind of old. Our room was creaky and too small and weirdly laid out and friends claimed that they found a severed human toe in theirs. No, really, that’s not me making up some outlandish punchline, that apparently actually happened. Anyway, this hotel was far enough North that it was juuuust outside that “pour money into this until it’s presentable” bubble. I don’t know what the buildings surrounding the hotel were, just that they looked like they’d been a big deal once, but were presently closed. Traffic barriers and plywood windows abounded. Oh, and I ended up wandering even deeper into Downtown thanks to this being the days before I had an iPhone to tell me where the ATM was. I spent nearly an hour zigzagging all over the streets of Baltimore in the sweltering August heat, taking in all the sights. And by sights I mean pawn shops, hair salons with five layers of bulletproof gates, and places where you can get checks cashed at 3am. Don’t worry, this isn’t gonna turn into a big “Baltimore is a ghetto hellhole” joke. It’s nothing I didn’t see plenty of in late80s/early 90s Atlanta. White it’s true that I would never again venture into the deepest, sweatiest depths of the city again, that’s mostly because it just seemed BORING. I’d come to watch anime and play with robot puppets, what do I care about a place to get your hair did?

So, yeah. After that first excursion, I was pretty resolute about only wasting my time and sweat walking around the Inner Harbor area. At best, I can recall two or three trips over to a Subway or 7 Eleven a few blocks away, and even stopped being an option once I realized that there would never, EVER be a time those roads weren’t under construction. Seriously, I don’t think I EVER hoofed it around Baltimore without having to navigate at least one street that was in the process of being torn up.  I think a few of those scaffolds and temporary wooden sidewalks should be historic landmarks themselves. Anyway, doing all my wandering around in the Inner Harbor.  That’s what the whole place was deliberately engineered for, obviously. Heck, the even had those big cement skywalk things that… um… I don’t think I ever saw anyone actually use. The most traffic I actually remember seeing on those things was people using them for photoshoots… because nobody else would bother them. Not that I was actually venturing out to see the aquarium of some old ships or… um… Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Naw, when I said I did “touristy things” back in the day, I mainly meant going to get fast food in vaguely tourist-oriented locations, like all the shopping centers.  I’m enough of a child of the 80s that the mere physical existence of a mall gets me nostalgic in highly obnoxious ways, which is clearly what this blog post runs on anyway, so let’s roll!

The biggest and nicest of the bunch that I ever actually went to seemed to be Harborplace: that big thing by the water, on the other side of that big outdoor fountain. It was all shiny and nice and covered in thick goopy layers of early 90s. If I‘m remembering correctly, I think this was the first one I ever went inside. I really hope it was, because that would mean it set an early precedent for my not giving a crap about non-convention-related local amenities. One night, a bunch of my roommates invited me along to one of the generic family restaurants in the place, don’t ask me which, because it didn’t have time to make much of an impression. The Otakon crowds were bogging service down so badly that I ended up bailing to avoid running late for a photoshoot before anyone even had a chance to order. And thus, YEARS of cooking ramen bowls under a coffee maker began! Up above that shopping mecca is another mall that… MIGHT be owned by the same people? It’s called The Gallery at Harborplace but is across the street and doesn’t really look like the other buildings. Its way more pastel and marble and natural light and big leafy plants dangling all over everything. Oh, and a few garish crab statues that look like they wandered in from some tacky seafood shack. Asthetics bloggers everywhere weep over the incongruity. This is also one of those Urban Malls that’s stacked twenty vertigo-inducing levels on top of itself to save space. I actually wound up visiting this place a lot over the years, as the food court ended up being a frequent meet-up point for various gathers. Ahh, hanging out in a mall food court in cosplay. Good times.  Of course, I still never once actually bought anything at any of the real stores, had to save money for the Dealers Room, right? I don’t think I ever even visited the food court except for when a get together demanded it. If I was absolutely GOING to get food that didn’t come from my own luggage, it was going to come from the third option: the food court in the Bank of America building across from the con.

I gotta camp out on this little food court/mini mall/whatever one for a second, because it really is the kind of thing I love beyond all reason. There’s always the chance that they’ve spruced it up now, but every time I was there, it felt like I’d stepped into a time capsule from the year 1980. Not the bright, Mami Vice, vaporwave 80s mind you, but the eeeeaaaaarly 80s that hadn’t realized the 70s were over yet. You know, brown on brown with wood paneling all over everything. Even on my very last trip to Baltimore in 2016, this little cubby of restaurants and sad convenience stores still looked like twenty-five years had utterly passed it by. Plain white walls, huge blocky wood trim on things, and tables that could very possibly be older than I am; objectively speaking it’s ugly as sin, but I still love it. Oh, and that pizza place wasn’t bad either. I quit actually eating there early on, both cos I’m poor and since the Otakon crowds absolutely DEMOLISHED the place every year, but it was probably the closest non-con food option in walking range, and a fairly decent one at that. And even when I was only wandering in to use the ATM, I always likes that little visit to The Food Court That Time Forgot.

You know what? I gotta back up and retract some of that bit about never going to the touristy places. See, while most years I stayed in either the Days in or Holiday Inn right across from the Convention Center (oddly, I never managed to room at either the Hilton or the Hyatt that directly hosted convention events), there WAS one year where I stayed at a Hampton Inn on the other side of Oriole Stadium, right at the heart of baseball country. Say, did you know that Babe Ruth was born in Baltimore and got his start playing for The Orioles? *coughtheMinorLeagueversioncough* Well, you’ll know it if you go wandering around by the stadium, since it’s written on something every five feet or so. I never actually went to the Babe Ruth museum or any of the other baseball things, but I might as well have. Even the hotel was a straight up baseball shrine, with bats and gloves and memorabilia all over every inch of the tiny lobby. What’s more, the whole rest of that block seemed to be given over to sports bars, filled with tanked up dude bro sports types. So, you know, you can imagine how great most of the cosplaying congers felt having to walk through that crowd over and over. I never had any particularly BAD encounters with any of the sports fans, the closest exception being the one guy who wanted to know if all those rumors about weird fetish orgies going on at the con were true. And even he wasn’t, like, malicious about it; dude just wanted some closure on the issue. It was certainly less awkward than the one time I was walking to the Days Inn and was aggressively rapped at by a group of 14 year olds (…looking back at the previous sentence, I kind of wish there were more to that story).

But all of this is dancing around the fact that, whenever I traveled to Baltimore, I spent the overwhelming majority of the weekend cooped up in one very large building. Let’s talk about the Convention Center a bit. Now, I’m writing this part after getting back from Washington, so I can actually do a little compare/contrast between venues. Obviously, the new place is MUCH better suited to an event of Otakon’s size, but part of me genuinely likes the BCC better. I mean, yeah, it’s old and outdated and utterly incapable of meeting Otakon’s needs anymore, but I still like the look and feel of the place. Remember that ran about how much I like that old food court? Well, the BCC is sort of that in a far grander scale. Everything’s all white and blocky and featureless, horribly old-fashioned as far as interior design goes, but I really do like that. The convention spaces in the Hilton are much more colorful and elaborate and, well, BUSY, and I’m not a huge fan of that as a convention environment. I mean, come on. It’s an ANIME CONVENTION. The people alone are more colorful and elaborate and busy than the human brain can adequately process. I really prefer having the backdrop behind all this craziness be as plain as possible, if only to avoid making the sensory overload any worse. Also, and I know this is one of the stupider things I’ve said all week, I miss how direct all the halls are compared to newer convention centers. The Washington one really does a number on the feet due to all the ups and down and windy turns required to get any place, and the Raleigh Convention Center, while smaller, is even more disorienting. I know, I know, there’s a bunch of perfectly good reasons they’re designed that way: it help with crowd flow, it makes it easier to use just part of the facilities, it looks cooler, whatever. And yes, I know that constantly funneling everybody down the same hall is part of the reason Otakon’s crowd problems got so bad in the first place. I don’t care. I’m a simple man and I get lost really easily, so a big, simple layout like the BCC’s works for me on a practical level as well as an aesthetic one.

But yeah, even I can freely admit that it was time for Otakon to move. Every year the elevators broke down a little faster, the bathrooms got a little grosser, and everything seemed to sag and crack juuust a little bit more. To be blunt, the whole of Baltimore just seemed, well, TIRED that last Otakon. Any large city is constantly fighting a losing battle against entropy, but Baltimore just seemed even more beat down than usual that year. Maybe I just had “The End Of An Era” on my mind all weekend, so everything seemed a little bit gloomier than usual, but things really did seem extra run down. The city was in the process of tearing down the skywalks, rendering most of them an ugly pile of debris and construction equipment. Those restaurants directly across from the convention center were conspicuously closed (though I think there’s a Chipotle there now) and there’s nothing like a big “FOR RENT” sign staring you in the face to make you concerned for the future. The Gallery mall was covered in construction too, whole floors completely covered up with ugly scaffolding. Even the big outdoor fountain was walled off for construction, which I’m sure THRILLED all the cosplayers who planned of taking pictures in front of it. All in all, the whole place just felt worn out. That’s a pretty sad note to go out on, and I’m sure anyone who actually LIVES in Baltimore will take exception to me saying it, but that’s what I felt like the whole time. That one food court didn’t feel any different, though. That place will probably outlive us all.

I don’t wanna end on a downer, though, so let’s see if I can scrape together some random nice memories of Baltimore. Well, one year I stumbled onto a Toynbee tile on the street in front of the Hilton. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen one in person, so that was pretty cool. And… um… that other Bank of America building always reminded me of the tower from Ghostbusters. That was pretty funny, right? …man, this one ended with a whimper. I gotta come up with something big and dramatic for the next blog.