Exploring Uptown

Ricky the owner of Towson’s Fresh Fresh Seafood has had a hard time adjusting to the ever growing downtown Towson. “The growing of the Towson area is having a great impact on the local community in a negative way,” said Ricky. Business may not be particularly booming anymore but Fresh Fresh Seafood still delivers a down home feel to this fast paced growing area.

 

The smell of the brand new doughnut shop on York Road fills the sidewalk. Fresh dough, chocolate chips, and a hint of cinnamon sugar engulf the street. It’s very subtle because on this street there are food places everywhere, but once you open the door to Fractured Prune you immediately can smell the baking of the donuts.

 

The Towson Tobacco Market has been a convenience store in Downtown Towson for a while, but it’s been pretty overlooked because of the 7-11 right across the street. Overlooked yes but the workers in the stores have been looking and observing every weekend. Cashier Rajesh Kumar has worked at the market for eight months and he’s seen the very best that a weekend uptown has to offer. “Lots of drunk people dancing. That’s what they do they dance,” said Rajesh.

 

All around Uptown you could find fliers for the Charm City Roller Girls. This is a competition of some of the best roller derby teams around hosted by the Charm City Roller girls. The sign is from five years ago, so why it’s still hanging up is a good question but it is.

Scott Calvert

Having Scott Calvert come speak to our class was very inspiring for me. My favorite part was when he told us about some of his favorite feature and news stories. It was cool to have him tell us about all of his travels, and the stories he’s written around the world. The story he spoke to us about with the teenagers in Africa really touched me because the way he spoke about it made the teenagers seem so relatable. When he talked to us about how usually reporting and interviewing are pretty easy for him I kind of disagreed because when I try to get people to talk about themselves they always seem very hesitant and usually decide to avoid being the center of attention. Scott said when he’s trying to find story ideas he reads other publications, and looks around to see what is going on in the world that could be interesting. He said he doesn’t mind writing profile stories but that those aren’t his favorites. I really enjoyed having him come to class because I feel I learned a lot from his experiences.

Pets Allowed

“Pets Allowed” seemed to me like an exposé of people who use and abuse the ability to have Emotional Support Animals. I like how in this story the author went out and performed experiments. The author went in detail about how you can get an Emotional Support Animal and to me that was very interesting, it gave a new view to this story. The only thing I didn’t like about the story was how long it was. She conducted the research pretty much by just going out and testing what it’s like to have an ESA. I think she wrote this story in first person so that we could get a taste of how to do this for ourselves.