At This Point

In terms of generating attention, I want to hand out flyers on UMBC’s campus to ensure that students are informed about our event. I would also want to involve the UMBC webpage as well as the myumbc ticker. I would also want to take advantage of the open spaces on campus such as academic row where the Chick Fil A and Starbucks are in terms of advertising on campus either by posting ourselves there and creating a scene (with maybe music and flyers), the space in front of the library and also the Erickson field area. Advertising in the Commons would work to our benefit as well. For the donations of food from local vendors, I would prefer for us to go to the community beforehand and get acquainted with residents. This would allow us to familiarize ourselves with possible resources and people. The establishments that Rachel and I were able to visit had generally inviting atmospheres and the people appeared to be positively responsive to our presence with greetings and their overall demeanors.  At this point I still feel a bit detached from the event only because I feel that it is split down the middle with Art and History and with my expertise not necessarily residing within each of the two. But I do believe that I can still be valuable and contribute to either one. My grouping is now within the Art sector and I feel that our groups are wonderfully engaged and will incorporate each and everyone of us effectively. I see so much fun ahead of us!

1970 to 1980 and Demographics.

For my decade of 1970-1980, I was able to find a few articles in the archives of the Baltimore Sun. My findings for included obituaries, political campaign activity, industrial testing, a memorial pieces, demographic concern, and wedding announcements. The industrial testing articles spoke about the pollution in bodies of water that affected the water supply that was distributed to the neighboring communities. The memorial pieces consisted of a dedication to a retired Baltimore City policeman who had died of a heart attack and a member of the National Guard. The article on demographic concern referenced population movements between Baltimore City and Baltimore County, speaking of possible causes. The wedding announcements talked about brides to be and the tie to Brooklyn and Curtis Bay was that their families were from those areas.

The more recent publications referenced the movie filming of “XXX:State of the Union” which came to Baltimore City , political activity amongst communities and government officials and political activists’ working on facilitating community relations. The article about the movie spoke about how part of the city had to be shut down to accommodate filming and the article about community relationships spoke about the Chemical Industry Council of Maryland placing billboards throughout the city to "improve community outreach".

In relation to demographics and census data, I was able to find listings for both Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. Each chart contained valuable data with reference to population, ethnicity, income, age and all other viable pieces of information. I have both pdf’s printed out for reference.

Source for Demographics:

“Baltimore City NSA Demographic Profiles” Census 2000 data.

 <http://censusprofile.bnia.org/>

Rachel and I Visit The Community.

In terms of public relations and advertising, it appears as though there are several avenues available to our disposal within the community. The most viable, preliminarily in my opinion would be the bars. These appear to be attractive locations for getting the word out there. It is possible that the patrons within these establishments routinely visit and would easily see whatever advertisements we were to leave there on display.

Another thing that we noticed was that the people that we ran into appeared friendly.   This was a positive and led us to believe that we would not run into as many roadblocks as we had anticipated. Related to roadblocks though, we’d noticed that a few places were shut down or may have modified store hours, which were not on display for us to see, so we can only infer that they were not operating.

We were able to visit five establishments, two of them giving us their menus for us to contact them: Shirley’s Sunny Side Restaurant and Ultimate Pizza and Wings. After visiting the places that we were able to and generally scoping out the landscape, we decided the best way to interact with the community members to give them a feel for who we are and what we are about would be to go as a bigger group later in the day to visit these bars. It would be a great opportunity to interact with them in a laid back setting to meet common ground.