… today. For ten years it’s been an upscale seafood restaurant, Backfin Blues. They were closed when we walked by this afternoon, but UD noticed people in there, preparing for the dinner crowd, and asked if she could look around. They were glad to oblige. The manager said he knew that the place, fifty years ago, was a department store, but didn’t know it was called Rapoport’s.
This YouTube includes a shot of the front of the building – unchanged since my grandfather’s day.
UD instantly recalled the place – long, dark, narrow, with low ceilings… It hadn’t changed. Hadn’t been allowed (Historic Register) to change. An outside seating area with views of the train tracks and the river had been added, but that was the only truly new thing. The first floor balcony on which wee UD sat chatting with her grandfather was exactly the same, but with outdoor seating.
We had lunch outside at a place directly across the street from my grandfather’s old store, so I was able to gaze at the place at my leisure, recalling its massive sunny kitchen and dining room on the third floor. The manager said the floors above the place remain private apartments.
The broad beautiful Susquehanna shimmered in the background of all of this.
Loud obnoxious bikers stormed through town in groups of five and six every few minutes, reminding me what misery they brought to Key West when I lived there.
We had encounters with old-timers and new. I pushed open the door of an old Methodist church and was greeted by its groundskeeper, who showed us its unusual windows. He gave me the phone number of his aunt Audrey for more history of the town. A well-heeled character who recently bought one of the pricey riverside condos in town told me about his amazing views, but also about the frustration of living in a town that “should be like Ellicott City, but is just going nowhere.” It’s true that the endless nothingness of the Tome School/Bainbridge Naval Training Center ruins, plus the bad condition of many of the town’s historic buildings (lots of them empty and long on the market), gives Port Deposit a town that time forgot air. But the sheer trippiness of its location – one long architecturally distinguished street with massive cliffs instead of backyards on one side, and the Susquehanna River on the other – makes you excited to be there. Mr UD loved it.
