While the scattered incidents of civil unrest that accompanied the Baltimore Uprising made for dramatic media images, it was the background, not the foreground, of those photographs that truly told the story. The Sandtown neighborhood is a landscape of concentrated abandonment; its blocks upon blocks of vacant and abandoned housing have become a ubiquitous reminder of the national failure to support urban neighborhoods and Baltimore’s legacy of discriminatory housing policy. These forces combined to lock African American communities across the city into a decades-long cycle of divestment and abandonment.