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And every night when I'd come home with every muscle sore, she'd drag me through the streets of Baltimore . .
— Gram Parsons

By Rafael Alvarez

It is my intention — not today and maybe not tomorrow, but before I die — to drive down every street in the City of Baltimore. In the spirit of my hometown, where two out of every three residents are afflicted with various degrees of A.R.D. (Ain’t Right Disorder), I will drive down some of the one-way streets the wrong way while looking at other drivers like THEY have a problem.

There are more than a thousand thoroughfares in Crabtown, from Abbotston Street on the edge of Clifton Park in East Baltimore to Yosemite Avenue south of Pimlico racetrack. (There don’t seem to be any streets in Baltimore that begin with Z, although far northeastern Baltimore County has Zelda Court, which may or may not be named for Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent some time in the vicinity.)

The newest street name in town is St. Crispins Lane, named for the 3rd century martyr and patron saint of shoemakers and leather works. In May, the City Council bestowed the title on a previously unnamed alley connected to St. Georges Road between Roland Avenue and Falls Road. (Cobblers in the area include Eugene’s Shoe Repair at 516 West Cold Spring Lane, and Salamone & Sons at 5008 Lawndale Avenue off Wyndhurst.)

One of my favorite stories about local arteries involves a former newspaper colleague from Calvert Street named Gerry Shields, now covering Capitol Hill for the Advocate of Baton Rouge, La.

Newly landed from the City of Brotherly Love, Shields was covering City Hall and trying to find a street mentioned by an aide to then-Council President Lawrence Bell.

To the best Shields could fathom (Philadelphia being the provincial patois closest to the one spoken here) the aide had directed him to “Uncle Charlie Terrace.”

Being the new guy on the city desk, Shields labored in silent frustration with the ADC Street Map and the “criss cross” directory, the only tools — along with a working phone — a reporter needed before the Internet.

“I didn't have the gumption to ask anybody,” said Shields. “When the aide said she lived on Uncle Charley Terrace I pretended I knew what she was talking about so I wouldn’t look like an idiot.”

What she was talking about was Auchentoroly Terrace, a short stretch of historic and architecturally significant homes — including a pair of 19th century mansions — on the southwest side of Druid Hill Park.

First owned by an Anglo immigrant named Buchanan four decades before the American Revolution, the area was named — so says a dusty biography — for the gentleman’s ancestral Scottish manse: Auchentorolie.

Somewhere along the line, officials changed the “ie” to a “y” just like you can have an Uncle Charlie and also have an Uncle Charley.

Outside of firemen, sanitation workers and well-scrubbed Mormon missionaries, few have traveled more miles of local road than the photographer Jim Burger and the pride of Hamilton, Billy Driscoll, a friend of the little man.

Burger’s keen eye caught the original name for 23rd Street on a slab of marble set in a building at the corner of North Charles: Shirk Street.

“Look for it on MapQuest or program it into your GPS and you’ll come up empty,” Burger said of the chiseled landmark, one of about a dozen or so remaining in town, including Brown (now 22nd Street) and Winan’s Terrace, barely legible near Broadway and Fayette.

As for Driscoll, his compass points toward the industrial waterfront of far southeast Baltimore.

Because he grew up in an age where a boy’s imagination was molded by the purple prose of the king of purple sage and pulchritude (see Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women, Thomas Pauly, University of Illinois Press), Driscoll is fond of the western-tinged syllables of Poncabird Pass.

The short block by the Lever Brothers plant is home to the Poncabird Pub and within walking distance of the Night Shift, where women named Heaven do Olga Korbut impersonations without their clothes on.

So taken with Poncabird Pass is Driscoll that he penned an ode in homage:

Afore Free Haitians came to Fells
And prior to Poe’s written word
There came a visage to Baltimore’s shore
‘Twas the magnificent Poncabird

Her flight was of the sparrow
Swift and gay and free
Her fiery plumes were dazzling red
From crested crown to knee

Long revered by the Susquehannocks
For aphrodisial powers and taste
Gone by the time Captain Smith and crew
Made the Chesapeake a base

Amid the canopy of cranes and bridges
Near Rappolla’s potholed view
In memory now, her song rings out
Coo-coo, coo-coo, coo-coo . . .

[Editor's Note: Poncabird Pass takes its name from Ponca Street and Holabird Avenue in East Baltimore. Olga Korbut is a Soviet-born gymnast who won gold and silver medals in the 1972 and 1976 Olympics for the former USSR; she now lives in Scottsdale, Ariz.]

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THE ALLEY HOUSE QUIZ

Answer to last week’s question: The immortal who shares the same initials as Edgar Allan Poe is Elvis Aron (just one “a,” that’s how the Tupelo birth certificate reads) Presley.

The free lunch at Enrico’s on South Haven Street was won (and graciously declined) by Wayne Countryman, former Baltimore Sun copy editor now toiling for the Daily Record.

This week’s question: Who can explain the origins of the name SCRABBLE ALLEY, a dead end that runs down from Charles Street toward St. Paul in front of Mercy Hospital?

As is custom, use of the Internet is considered cheating and the winner gets lunch with a bunch of aging newspapermen at Enrico’s.