Outside of B-More, you probably have never heard of the Park Heights community in northwest Baltimore. Well, its where I was born and raised and pretty much still love near.
Park Heights is a long main street that basically runs from the more hoodish areas below Northern Parkway (where I grew up), and houses more lower-income blacks, Caribeans and other immigrants, then runs into a middle-class section of blacks, Russians, and Latinos (where I currently reside), then goes even further into it gets into the more affluent section of custom-built and million dollar homes on large acres of land (that I'm assuming are mostly whites).
I grew up below Belvedere Ave, near Pimlico Race Course (I could hear the announcer from my bedroom window) but moved further up with my family in the middle of my teens. But despite Park Heights' negative reputation for high crime and drup violence, I'm happy to say I had a very happy childhood but parents who sheltered me from what was going on around me. I was never what you call disadvantaged.
I'm not at all ashamed to admit I grew up in what some would percieve as such a poor area because I like to believe I beat the odds and am proof that your external environment doesn't necessarily have to dictate your ultimate fate, especially when there are two good parents there showing you that you can and will do better.
So that's where I'm from. And not to get all Jenny From the Block on you, but no matter how far I go (and I plan on going far), inside I'm still that little, pony-tailed, brown-skinned girl from Park Heights.
Park Heights
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