To date, OGH has accumulated lots of film footage documenting our project as it’s being realized in Oliver. Seeing rough cuts of what our film crew has thus far collected, I felt compelled to look for other examples (outside of ”The Wire”) of “Historic Baltimore Cinema” to compare and contrast. The internet proved a fruitful resource, and I had to share this fascinating sample I found from the 1950′s “documenting” a plan in which municipal agencies and citizen groups cooperated in a neighborhood renewal plan to raise housing standards– more specifically, it follows a middle-aged white woman walking alone through the rough-and-tumble slums of 1950′s Baltimore, before moving on to a dramatized reenactment of predatory landlords on trial, to the dilemma of neighborhood child “Bobby” getting stuck in a pipe. Who needs Lassie when you’ve got community cooperativeness and spirit?

The clip’s a bit long, unquestionably biased and staged, and the dubbing is hysterically bad– but in spite of all that (or perhaps because of it), it’s completely worth a gander.

(Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Inc.– “The Baltimore Plan”, 1953)