Café Hon and the Remington Wal-Mart

I love Café Hon. It's been years since I was inside, but I love the idea of it. I love the idea that a place has come to represent a character of a neighborhood (or at least a part of it). Hampden has come to be defined by many negative things over the years. There's racism and heroin and violence and neck tattoos, and there's even a guy who has it all in one: a guy with a Swastika neck tattoo.

But beyond that, Hampden is officially the Hon neighborhood. Café Hon represents a particular and peculiar sub-culture that people love to celebrate. Standing at the center of 36th Street, it is also a part of The Avenue, a street city planners study because of its unique independent stores.

Now, being a part of a unique street and leading the Hon movement is one thing, but mix that with being a Big-Business, Ehrlich-Loving, Me-First Republican, and you get a very strange op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.

Denise Whiting, the owner of Café Hon, is writing in praise of the planned Remington Wal-mart. It's not easy to find much logic in her argument, as most of it revolves around strange nostalgia ("I remember going downtown to the department stores. Some of my fondest shopping memories were trips to the Hutzler's lunch counter"), incoherent tech-speak ("We are just nanoseconds away from our thoughts being twittered away into cyberspace before we actually think them"), and wishful thinking ("[Wal-Mart can] meet the everyday needs of local consumers and can complement our unique Hampden retail offerings").

But here's the sad part. It's one thing to be a Big Business Republican who can't say no to box stores. It's perfectly fine for anyone to say, as she does, "I support development in the city of Baltimore. It's smart business." But it's another thing to lobby against your neighbors when you have nothing to lose from the development.

In one decaying American city after another, it has been proven that Wal-Mart does not complement local retail offerings. One unique retail area after another has gone under, making way for chain-stores. And while store after store will shut down because owners will not be able to compete with Wal-Mart, there will be others who will not be affected. The Café will not be affected, and might actually gain some Wal-Mart customers who want the Hon experience. But while the Wal-Mart Whiting is lobbying for may bring some new faces into her Café, it might also destroy the character of the neighborhood when gift stores, clothes stores, and book stores are forced to shut down.

It's one thing to lobby for development--it's another to cynically lobby against your neighbors. It might be interesting to see how Whiting reacts if Starbucks ever tries to open one branch next door to Café Hon, and another one across the street. My guess is that she won't find the two Cafés complementing her own.