A Beautiful Ghetto

Preston Ball

Professor Ellis

EN387

10 April 2018

True Beauty

I remember the first time I visited Loyola like it was yesterday. It was not just my first visit to Loyola but also to Baltimore. My visit was just a few months after the death of Freddie Gray had rocked the city, and images and videos of riots had been all over the national news. As a result, I did not have a very positive view of Baltimore, however I was being recruited to play for the golf team at Loyola and I decided to visit anyway. One moment in particular is etched into my head from that first visit. It was a rainy, cloudy night as my Mom and I drove into the city. I looked out the passenger side window as we got on I-83 headed north. As I watched building after building pass by, one stood out. The side of it read, “Drop the gun or pick a room.” I was stunned. I could not imagine what city would erect a jail so close to a major highway and then put writing on it as if the jail were actually a billboard.

What I saw when I visited Loyola was a beautiful area with a beautiful campus, surrounded by quaint and charming homes. It was not anything like the Baltimore I imagined. As I looked through the pages of David Allen’s book “A Beautiful Ghetto” I saw the Baltimore I imagined. It struck me that there is a fundamental difference between the Baltimore that I experience every day and the Baltimore that impoverished people of color face. They face living areas like on page 81, with boarded up windows, bent street signs, with an armored military reconnaissance vehicle parked on the road, not to mention the soldiers, dressed in camouflaged uniforms, surveilling the area. Other pictures, such as the ones of men jumping on and breaking the windshield of a police car also serve to demonstrate the danger and injustice present in those communities.

The Uprising section shows the anger of a community which has been treated unfairly. However, the Ghetto section truly captures the beauty of even the most impoverished parts of Baltimore. On page 32, kids play and swing on an old, metal bar, with the backdrop of a crumbling concrete wall. Those kids, even in spite of their circumstance, still have fun. Similarly, the very first picture in the book, is of children swinging on playground swings. I cannot help but think back to all the fun times I had as a child playing on the playground, swinging on the swings and hanging out with my friends. In that way, I am truly no different than those impoverished children in Allen’s book.

I as reflect on the images in “A Beautiful Ghetto” I have an immense appreciation and admiration for Allen. He took images of a community which the whole country deems ugly and the riots which gave that same community so much negative media coverage, and demonstrated the beauty which everyone had overlooked.