RIOT Squad Running’s
Devan Clapp (left) and
Rob Jackson in Baltimore’s
Ramblewood neighbourhood
It’s a transition area between the largest city in the eastern
US state of Maryland and the suburbs of Baltimore County,
which lie just a few miles north. The quiet streets have
postage-stamp lawns.
This neighbourhood, like every other Baltimore
neighbourhood where Clapp’s family has lived in the last
hundred years, was predominantly white, before it wasn’t. He
talks of how, in the 1980s, the skin colour of his mother and
father, godmother and brother drove their white neighbours
up and over to the what he calls the ‘more-welcoming’ side
of the county line.
‘When I was younger, the neighbourhood was pretty much
50 per cent white and 50 per cent black. As a youngster I
didn’t know it was happening, but now I look back and they’re
all gone,’ says the 39-year-old.
There are a few other areas in Baltimore with the same
low crime rate and enviable housing stability as Clapp’s
neighborhood. However, most of those places have seen
heavy development and investment – bike lanes, tidy parks,
and running paths. Ramblewood looks as it did 30 – maybe
even 50 – years ago.
‘I’m standing outside now and looking at the alley, the
streets and the pavement. It just doesn’t scream “I want to go
for a run,”’ says Clapp. It’s not that he’s against running those
streets around his home – he often logs a few evening miles
in the neighbourhood. But in his part of the city, designated
running paths are nonexistent and the closest runnable park
is three miles away.
Even so, Clapp’s neighbourhood is better than many in the
notoriously troubled city. There are neighbourhoods where
sedentary lives are bred from childhood; places left in the
margins of the city while resources pour into the already-
aff luent blocks. Those historically overlooked areas are large
swaths of the city that are predominantly black and have
been torn apart by decades of failed political leadership,
corruption and blatant segregation.
To run in them is to find yourself immersed in HBO’s
seminal drama series The Wire, to run past addicts and
drug-pushing corner boys calling out the street names for
their wares. Running past side alleys, you see enormous rats
dart out from piles of broken household appliances, soiled
clothing and all manner of how-on-earth-did-that-get-there
detritus. These are areas where you don’t run up behind
someone without announcing yourself – ‘Good morning!
Runner coming up behind you’ – or moving into the street;
if not for your own safety, then as a courtesy to pedestrians
on edge about theirs.
To run in those areas is also to run out of them within just
a couple of blocks, through an invisible wall that turns into
white Baltimore – a place that is surely separate and distinctly
not equal in job opportunities, infrastructure and education.
Running in Baltimore traces the blueprints of divisions
that have stood for a century. Here, for now at least, running
breaks no boundaries.ERUNNING TO UNITE
SEPTEMBER 2019 RUNNERSWORLD.COM/UK 063DEVAN CLAPP
STANDS OUTSIDE
HIS HOUSE IN THE
RAMBLEWOOD
NEIGHBOURHOOD
OF BALTIMORE.