In Baltimore, what’s left behind often tells the loudest story.

When I’m feeling drained, I return to Southwest Baltimore to recharge. It’s a curious thing—to seek renewal among abandoned blocks and vacant lots—but something in these places restores what the rest of life takes away.

On one of these drives through West Baltimore, Patrick Joust and I wound our way through Harlem Park and ended up between two mostly empty lots. In one stood the Chop Suey take-out—a lone survivor of what had once been a full row of homes, now mostly demolished. Across the street, in a grassy vacant lot, stood the tree.

It’s a mulberry, I think—thirty feet tall, with three distinct trunks reaching upward before converging. Its shape tells its own story. It must have started growing inside one of the abandoned houses, maybe sprouting from a gutter or a collapsed roof, weaving down through the broken structure, roots wrapping around pipes and bricks as it pushed toward the light. When the houses were finally torn down, the demolition crews left the tree—maybe because it was too much trouble, maybe because someone decided to let it be.

You can still see bricks jutting out of its branches. Pipes peek through in places where the tree grew around them. The roots snake across the surface of the lot before disappearing into soil that once sat beneath basement floors. Some of the limbs reach upward at strange angles, shaped by the outlines of missing second-story windows and doors—spaces where people once lived, now empty air.

I find myself visiting the tree every few weeks. There’s something remarkable about it. Its twisted trunks rise from the grass with a quiet defiance that feels distinctly Baltimorean.

When people come to town and ask me to show them the sights, I bring them to the tree.

Sometimes, Patrick and I will message each other and ask if the tree is still standing.

To me, the tree feels like Baltimore distilled—growing through the cracks left behind by systems that failed it, finding a way to survive anyway, carrying a strange, rough beauty in the way it adapted.

What endures isn't always what we expect. The homes, built solidly and meant to last generations, have crumbled. Yet this tree, an accident in the wrong place at the wrong time, has become the landmark. It reminds me that what survives isn’t always what was planned—it’s what found a way.

An update: a few weeks ago, I wrote about coming home empty-handed after spending a week trying to photograph a powder blue car.

I’m happy to say that on Sunday, it returned—with a friend.

Good things don’t come to those who wait, exactly. They come to those who show up again and again, driving (literally) their families crazy in the search for a powder blue unicorn.

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