EDWARD NORTON in Baltimore
Reprinted without permission
In his first film, Edward Norton astonished audiences with his portrayal of a seemingly naive country boy battling dual personalities in 1996’s Primal Fear, co-starring Richard Gere. When the performance won Norton best supporting actor nominations at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor, as well as comparisons to a young Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, the big question was, "Who is Edward Norton?" But being unknown suited Norton just fine. "Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he’s playing," Norton has said. However, Norton is happy to tell all about one particular subject: his hometown of Baltimore, where his roots run deep. The grandson of famed real estate developer James Rouse, who developed Baltimore’s Harborplace complex as well as the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, 31-year-old Norton grew up in the Baltimore suburb of Columbia, the oldest son of an attorney father and a schoolteacher mom. At age 5, he was captivated by a performance of Cinderella and he has wanted to be an actor ever since. He graduated from Yale, then moved to Japan, where he worked briefly for The Enterprise Foundation, which was founded by his grandfather to develop low-income housing internationally. He then moved to stage productions in New York. After his breakout role in Primal Fear, he won starring roles in Everyone Says I Love You, The People vs. Larry Flynt, American History X (for which he won a second Oscar nod), Fight Club, and Keeping the Faith, which he both directed and starred in. This month, Norton teams up with Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando to play an aggressive thief seeking his first big payday in The Score. But before you catch his fireworks on the big screen, spend the Fourth of July weekend with him in his hometown of Baltimore, the city where "The Star-Spangled Banner" was born.
FRIDAY
"I think it’s fun to stay at The Admiral Fell Inn or the Inn at Henderson’s Wharf, both small, traditional waterfront inns. They’re in Fells Point, which is full of old taverns and bars and seafood restaurants. It’s a really great place to walk around - kind of dynamic, with old cobblestone streets. If you want to stay someplace more modern, the new Marriott right on the harbor is pretty fantastic, especially if you can get rooms high up on the waterside. They have tremendous views of the harbor, the Inner Harbor, Fort McHenry, and all of downtown Baltimore. For the uninitiated, however, I would definitely recommend The Admiral Fell Inn or the Inn at Henderson’s Wharf because they’re much more the flavor of old Baltimore."
DINNER
"Spike & Charlie’s is a really famous steakhouse. It’s just a good restaurant. My uncle used to work at Martick’s, a very interesting, eclectic little French restaurant."
NIGHTLIFE
"Pick up a paper and see what’s playing at Center Stage, one of the really great regional theaters. When I was growing up, it was run by a guy who later went on to run the Yale drama school. It’s a tremendous theater. I grew up seeing everything from Shakespeare to really contemporary, avant-garde stuff there."
SATURDAY
HOW TO LOOK LIKE A LOCAL
"You’ll see a lot of what I call Southern preppy. You’ll see the madras shirts and the docksiders and penny loafers. It definitely has sort of a Southern inflection, with a particularly Baltimore spin. There’s lots of funky-colored madras jackets and even people with shorts and sports jackets. Baltimore’s pretty laid-back, pretty casual, and it’s hot in the summer. So people don’t stand on ceremony. Going to the ballgame or going out and about, people will be dressed for the heat."
BRUNCH
"I usually go to the American Visionary Art Museum in the morning. There’s a restaurant on the top floor called the Joy America Cafe. It’s a great place for brunch, with a big view of the harbor. It’s a whacked menu - just a delicious, stuff-yourself breakfast menu. You’ll quiver with joy when you look at that menu; it’s so great for the brunch aficionado. Then, you walk around the museum and work it off. That’s a great morning."
MUST-DO
"One of my highest ‘musts’ is the American Visionary Art Museum. I’ve tried so many times to explain this museum to people, and at the end of the day, I end up just taking them there. I’ve never taken anyone there who hasn’t walked away saying it was their favorite, most inspiring museum. The best I can say is that it’s a museum on visionary artists who are working outside the academy in a way. Everything from people in mental institutions to people who did their work through sort of a divine inspiration, without training. It’s one of the most remarkable collections you’ll ever see. I just finished a film (Death to Smoochy) with Robin Williams, and he collects some of the same artists they display."
SIGHTS
"Any weekend in Baltimore should include strolling around the Inner Harbor or, even better, strolling around in a U and then taking a water taxi or one of the paddle boats you can rent in and around the harbor. Baltimore has a very dynamic harbor environment. The city is situated sort of in the northwest corner of the Chesapeake Bay, and when you first enter off the bay, it’s kind of a big, wide mouth of a harbor. As you come inland it narrows, into almost a serpent’s tongue. I remember as a kid, there was literally a garbage dump and junkyard on the harbor. In the late ’70s, they started the redevelopment plan of the Inner Harbor. They built the big marketplace called Harborplace. They built the National Aquarium in Baltimore, an enormous edifice whose design has been emulated a lot of places. It’s a terrific place for kids. There’s also the Maryland Science Center, and those projects sort of radiated outward to the redevelopment of downtown Baltimore. It’s been a 20- or 25-year project of the rebirth of downtown Baltimore."
SHOPPING
"The old defunct Power Plant has been renovated into an enormous multiuse facility. There’s an ESPN Zone and a big Barnes & Noble. The Harborplace is great in the summer. There are always music and cultural festivals. It’s teeming with people. And in the center of it all are two pavilions that have a lot of eclectic little stores and open raw bars and markets. It’s a great, festive atmosphere. Across the street is The Gallery, which has great shopping and high-end stores."
LUNCH
"If you’ve never been to Maryland, I definitely recommend having the ‘crab experience.’ I’ve had arguments all of my life with people from the Gulf Coast of Louisiana about who’s got the better crabs. I would say you will arguably never have a better seafood experience than in Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay. The way the crabs are prepared is completely unique to Maryland. L.P. Steamer’s is probably the best place. It’s on the other side of the harbor on the Fort McHenry side. They’ll spread newspaper on the table and give you a mallet, and then they’ll bring out the crabs with the spicy Old Bay seasoning on them. If you don’t know how to eat hard-shell crabs, they’ll come out and show you how to work your way through one."
FIREWORKS
"Baltimore is a great place to be on the Fourth of July. There are always fireworks in the harbor, which will be plastered with boats, and people will be on every roof. I really think that the tradition of rockets and explosions and everything on the Fourth of July comes from Francis Scott Key writing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ after the Battle of 1814 at Fort McHenry. Not far from there is the Francis Scott Key Bridge over one of the extensions of the harbor."
CULTURE
"I can hear [avant-garde Baltimore director] John Waters yelling in my ear, saying, ‘You’re telling them all of the straight places. Tell them some of the eclectic.’ In the old days, I might have said you could walk along old Baltimore Street, the old adult theater, porn district. But they’ve pretty much cleaned that up. There’s the Edgar Allan Poe grave site. He died in Baltimore. It never ceases to amaze me that our football team was actually named after an Edgar Allan Poe poem, ‘The Raven.’ You can walk to Poe’s grave. If you have a literary bent and you want to put a rose on his grave, you can."
DINNER
"Atlantic is one of the nicer restaurants. It’s in the old American Can Company factory, one of the old renovated harbor-side industrial factories. It’s just a great place to eat really delicious seafood. One of the things Baltimore is obviously famous for is seafood from off the Chesapeake Bay, and you’ll never get fresher or better seafood than at the Atlantic."
NOSTALGIA
"If you’re a movie fan, don’t miss seeing a show at The Senator Theatre, one of the last remaining art-deco movie palaces left in the Maryland/Virginia area. I would rate it up there with the Ziegfeld in New York and Mann’s Chinese Theatre in L.A. as one of my favorite, favorite places to see a movie. It’s a 20-minute cab ride from downtown. Whenever I have a movie, I take it back to Baltimore and do a benefit première at The Senator. It is a 900-seat theater with a gigantic screen and a phenomenal sound system. It’s still family-owned. We’re hoping that it’s about to be given historic landmark preservation status. Some of the films I’ve done haven’t been appropriate to invite the hometown crowd out to for a benefit, but I guess I’ve done four or five big benefits there."
NIGHTLIFE
"We almost always go out to Fells Point. You never do it by heading toward one place. You just stroll along and head into any likely bar. That’s the fun of it. You can walk around and just sort of barhop. You’ll see the new and the old. There’s a place called Bertha’s, which is really funny. Sometimes they have live jazz combos there. There’s a good bar. And you can obviously get good mussels there."
SUNDAY
SPORTS
"My number one thing to do would be to get tickets to an Orioles game at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. You have to understand: I grew up in a family of rabid Orioles fans. We probably went to 30 or 40 games a summer from the time I was 8 years old on, and we had season tickets all my life. My mother was one of the only women I ever knew who actually did the Orioles spring training fantasy camp. So our family bled black and orange. When they announced they were going to move to a stadium downtown, a lot of my family members were horrified because they were sure it would be one of these terrible new modern stadiums. Miracle of miracles, they happened to get this wonderful, brilliant group of architects, who went around studying all of the great old parks in America before designing Camden Yards. It is such a gorgeous, almost miracle of a stadium that it could be argued that the whole trend in modern baseball stadiums toward smaller, more beautiful parks - from the new one in Cleveland to the one in Arlington, Texas - has been specifically modeled after the success of Camden Yards. Sitting anywhere in the stadium out through center field, you have a view of downtown Baltimore. I remember the first time my grandfather went into the park, he practically cried because it reminded him so much of going to the ballparks of his youth. It has an almost hallowed feel to it."
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SIDEBAR of EN article: ONE GREAT DAY "I saw Cal Ripken Jr.’s rookie game in 1982 with my whole family. Then my brother and I were at both of the games at Camden Yards when he tied and broke Lou Gehrig’s record for the consecutive game streak — 2, 130 and 2,131. He got a 28-minute standing ovation, one of the longest applause moments I’ve ever been involved in. The next day, everybody’s hands were all bruised and sore. It was one of those transcendent moments. He had been such a part of Baltimore life for such a long time and is so representative of the simple working-class work ethic. His father was a coach and manager for the Orioles. Cal has stayed with the Orioles throughout his career and broke the record that most people said would never, ever be broken. It’s about getting up every day and going to work, even if you’re feeling lousy. The quiet nobility of that particular feat is an appealing one. I work in Hollywood, where you script these things to come out better than they do in life. But you couldn’t have scripted this better. Because in the game he hit a home run in his first at-bat after breaking the record to give the go-ahead run. And then the last two outs of the ballgame were both hard-hit balls to him at shortstop. You just sat there holding your head because you couldn’t believe that the forces in the universe were letting things fall so perfectly on that evening. It was just one of those transcendent moments in a lifetime of sports watching."
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