I had just visited Frederick a couple of days ago.
My parents and I were on a road trip and were looking for an area with settled down for the night. Frederick happened to be the closest 'large' city in our area and was located far away enough from the D.C. area so that its hotel rates were probably cheaper (in our minds, anyway). It looked like a good place to get a bite and some shuteye.
Our preference for hotel was a Fairfied Inn and Suites because we had just stayed in one the previous night and it had cost us a half the Marriott points that the previous-previous night's Courtyard did. To our luck, the lodging signs at the side of I-370 indicated that there was a Fairfield at the next exit. Unfortunately, the Fairfield was almost full, didn't accept our points, and was charging a ridiculous rate that night (which couldn't be used to earn points).
We had to find another hotel, but we first debated whether to eat in this area or not. The Fairfield was located on a strip mall-type area with what seemed like a lot of stores and restaurants. During the previous night, we had great luck finding a place to eat on the Harrisonburg, VA strip mall (at a Waffle House, which changed my views on Waffle Houses because I had eaten at two crappier ones up in PA before). No such luck here. See, next to the Fairfield hotel area (along with a Courtyard and a Hilton family hotel) was one of those modern shopping malls.
I've seen one of these malls before in
Saucon Valley, PA, and I know they are pure evil. They are designed to be outdoors shopping-outlet type experience rather than the traditional giant indoor malls, or basically a sanitized small-town experience complete with a fancy-looking movie theater to book. So I knew that the food in these malls would be shit. There was a TGI Fridays, a PF Changs, and IHOP, an "Italian" restaurant, and other similarly bland Americanized casual and fast-food restaurants. I immediately said that we should get the hell out of here.
We got on to the I-370 and I-70 and decided to look for a hotel first. We passed by an exit sign that proclaimed "Downtown Frederick". Seeing no strip malls and the like nearby where we could find something decent to eat, I decided that we should take a look at this city to see if anything was there.
In preparing for this trip, I had agonized over where we should visit. I wanted to visit a city in PA, MD, DE, or VA, since we were going to visit some relatives in the DC area. As I panned over my Google maps screen, every city that seemed to interest me turned out to have red flags. And by red flags, I mean crime. Wilmington, DE. Harrisburg, PA. York, PA (that one I sort of heard of via hearsay). Not good places to bring my parents to for a good walk.* I ended up choosing Roanoke, VA after seeing another photo thread on SSP. Unfortunately, we ended up not making it to Roanoke at all because time constraints.
Downtown Frederick, I'm happy to say, turned out to be a fantastic alternative. Of course, we were prepared for the worst for what was then an unknown city to us. This was a city after all, and it seems like many inner cities in the Mid-Atlantic have a problem with crime and gang activity. We were apprehensive as we passed by some scrappy looking brick townhouses and a bail bonds establishment. But to my eye, the townhouses didn't look too bad, and there were a lot of signs beckoning us to see and eat at the downtown area. As we drove down Market Street, we were greeted by a pleasant nightlife of couples strolling down the street hand-in-hand, busy restaurants, and restaurant patrons sitting in outside. My parents, who need to be convinced to step into a strange city, were convinced.
We walked up and down Market Street for 30 minutes before settling down in a Spanish restaurant. We were only in the city for a couple of hours at night, but the experience convinced us that it was a city that we could legitimately visit and explore on a future trip.
* Ironically enough, we ended up in what I regard as the worst of the lot: Baltimore. My mother loved the spicy steamed crabs when we visited the city 12 years ago. So we decided to go back to Lexington Market where we had bought the crabs back then. Unfortunately, it was Sunday and the market was closed. So was just about everything else in the general vicinity. The streets were almost deserted, with a handful of a suspect-looking local stragglers walking around and a few police cruisers circling around the streets. The city genuinely looked like it was on a mandated curfew, and this was only a few blocks from the Inner Harbor and noontime on Sunday.
For the sake of the city, I do hope that the city was this way because everybody was at church on Sunday mornings.