(https://culanth.org/) Log In (/login) | Contact Us (mailto:culanth@culanth.org) | Join SCA (http://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Landing.aspx? ItemNumber=20711&&navItemNumber=587) Search Curtis on the Bay: Failed Development and the Mythology of Trump by Chloe Ahmann This article is part of the series Crisis of Liberalism (/fieldsights/989-crisis-of-liberalism) There’s a mythology around Donald Trump in late industrial Baltimore. Angel, a thirty-six-year-old white woman, was the first to bring it up. As we sat on her concrete stoop in the disintegrating town of Curtis Bay last March, overlooking the mountain of coal that commandeers the sky, she kicked a can and said: When we were teenagers, we used to sit here all the time and talk about how Donald Trump was supposed to take over our neighborhood. It was some kind of rumor. He was supposed to tear down all the factories and build up condos on the water. So for many years—and I still hear it—people have said he’s going to build up Curtis Bay. And we were going to become Curtis on the Bay. Did [my aunt] Norma ever tell you about that? We’ve definitely all had serious conversations about it many times, just sitting out here imagining what the bay was going to look like. We were finally going to become a part of the [inner] harbor—our community was going to be, like, fancy. 1 Curtis Bay hasn’t been “fancy” for some time. Once a thriving waterfront hamlet where Baltimore’s elite traveled to escape the vicissitudes of city life, today the town feels like an uneasy remainder—one of many spaces struggling to exist in a system that has spit the American working class out of a good life many believe their sacrifice created. In Curtis Bay, there are at least two hundred years of precedent for this claim, capped by four decades of infrastructural deterioration and the telltale signs of urban disinvestment. For five generations, Curtis Bay has been marked by what some call “failed development,” (https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2013/04/22/a-bwi-worker-speaks-out-about-failed-development-hurts-him/) development that promotes the prosperity of profiteers at local citizens’ expense. (https://typhoon- production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/image_attachment/image_attachment/2830/Image_1.jpg) The mountain of coal that commandeers the sky. Photo by Chloe Ahmann.