The Paper Moon Diner in Remington arguably has the best blueberry pancakes in Baltimore City.
And it was the blueberry pancakes (sans powdered sugar), along with the addictive duck bacon that summoned me back to the eatery last Sunday for a very late breakfast.
Years ago the restaurant was the choice of the late night, early morning clubbers, because it was open 24 hours; after a night of partying, it was a favorite pit stop to refuel and debrief with friends. So, Paper Moon with its eclectic (and bizarre) decor, tasty comfort food and insomniac hours of operation, consistently attracted the party people, various practitioners of “the life” as well as the garden variety weirdos Baltimore is infamous for.
Sean Yoes (Courtesy Photo)
Nowadays, Paper Moon seems to attract a more mainstream clientele including, tourists, curious millennials and the ubiquitous Baltimore hipster (especially in neighborhoods like Remington).
Last Sunday, as I ate my blueberry pancakes with my companion, we were exposed to two fascinating conversations engaged by two pairs of women; one Black the other White. To be clear, the conversations weren’t very compelling independent of each other, they were remarkable because they were juxtaposed to each other.
My friend sat closest to the young White women. She couldn’t hear precisely every word of their dialogue, but what she did hear apparently was about to make her, “head explode.” The inane babble of two millennial women — something about a roommate’s transgression of leaving a door unlocked, among other trivial matters — didn’t seem to go down well with my friend’s arugula salad. But, on a breezy Sunday afternoon, perhaps it is appropriate for a conversation between two 20-somethings to be light and airy.
However, the dialogue between the two young Black women was decidedly heavier and infinitely more ominous. One of the women talked about, “a lot of shootings,” in her neighborhood, “but, only a few people got killed.” The other woman divulged matter of factly, that her brother had been jailed for murder, before she began to dig back into her meal.
Two sets of women, approximately the same age, apparently living in the same city, but seemingly worlds apart.
The divergent life experiences of these young women are in many ways the embodiment of Baltimore, a tale of two cities; rich and poor, Black and White, privileged and imperiled, gentrified and blighted.
The reality is victims of the most inferior Baltimore City Public Schools are rarely White. Targets of police intimidation, brutality and profiling are almost exclusively Black. The big money beneficiaries of Baltimore City Government largess, especially when it comes to downtown development, (see Port Covington and Harbor East), are all White. The names on, “the murder list,” the victims of homicide in 2017 (167 and counting as of June 28) are almost all Black.
In 1911, Baltimore Mayor J. Barry Mahool crafted an ordinance to prevent, “conflict and ill feeling between the White and Colored races in Baltimore City, and promoting the general welfare of the city by providing…separate blocks by White and Colored people for residences, churches and schools,” stated Mahool’s ordinance, the first segregation law aimed specifically at Blacks in the United States.
Indeed, Baltimore “invented” legal residential segregation and the city remains one of the most segregated cities in America more than 100 years later.
In 2017, tools like gentrification, big money development, failing public schools (still) and law enforcement (still), have helped the city erect even higher walls around Black and White neighborhoods and the experiences of Black and White Baltimore almost always seem wildly disconnected and inequitable.
This despite the fact we can eat a late breakfast in the same restaurant on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Sean Yoes is the AFRO’s Baltimore editor and host and executive producer of, “First Edition,” which airs Monday through Friday, 5-7 p.m. on WEAA, 88.9.
