Down on Main Street

"It's probably the most powerful image of my entire life."

Jonathan Herman, late of Queens and Baltimore, Mayor from 1985 to 2009 of the 3,500 residents of Sykesville, Maryland, is recalling the coruscating moment when he really came to understand the big picture of small-town life, when he stopped asking himself, "Why do I live where I live?"

"It was around Christmas several years ago, and I was working on this house I'd bought and was renovating on Upland Road in Roland Park," says Herman, 45, by day a portrait artist and owner of a small historic-renovation company. It had been a renovation project that brought him to Sykesville in 1985, but the life-long urbanite hadn't planned to settle in the little Carroll County town.

 

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