The House that Mencken Built

(City Paper) ... To read “Happy Days” in Baltimore is a disorienting experience. Mencken brings the city, especially Hollins market, to such vivid life that to walk out into the actual city of the present feels both familiar and uncanny. It is almost like science fiction. He writes of his father’s cigar shop, the saloons, the African-American culture in the alleys, the Arrabers, the police, the country house in Mount Washington, and everything is at once familiar and different. As Mencken wrote in 1925, “the old charm, in fact, still survives, despite the boomers, despite the street-wideners, despite the forward-lookers, despite all the other dull frauds who try to destroy it.” Continued