I spent a recent afternoon with three actors from The Wire, HBO's acclaimed series now entering its fifth and final season: Dominic West, who plays a raffish detective; Andre Royo, the show's heroin-addicted informant; and Michael Kenneth Williams, who inhabits the gay gangster Omar. The Wire, set in inner-city Baltimore, has attracted superlatives from critics and cultish fans ready for new ways of thinking beyond the usual good-guy/bad-guy dynamic. It teaches you how to think like a gangbanger, a rogue cop, a backslapping city hall backstabber. The tension lies in discovering whether reform can lead to rescue—with the city itself as the victim.

Violence abuts opulence in Baltimore, with one of its toughest neighborhoods, Govans, next to one of its grandest, Guilford. From the time I was ten until my mid-thirties, my family lived in what used to be my grandparents' house, on the border of these oddly situated enclaves. For decades, I've heard talk of the city's imminent rehabilitation—that with some revival of the pros-perity suggested in the Olmsted-designed shingled haven of Roland Park or the maple-shaded rambles of horsey Ruxton, maybe this northernmost city of the South could see a return to the kind of heyday it enjoyed as a world-class steel-manufacturing, ship-building port in the first half of the 20th century.

A few months after the series finale wrapped, West, Royo, and Williams were happy to be reunited in Manhattan. Each of them had known what a poor neighborhood felt like before taking on their roles—even West, a rugged Brit with a creased grin. "I'm from Sheffield, the northern part of England, all concrete high-rises and miserable weather," he says. "On the surface, Baltimore looks so nice." Beneath that surface, though, is something else. When producers gave Williams, who grew up in Brooklyn, his first tour of the city, it seemed very human-scale and appealing. (Omar grew up in the same tumultuous Edmondson Village environs where my parents passed a Pleasantville childhood in the forties.) "At face value, driving down the block, you can't see the bad," Williams says, his bright eyes widening above a long scar across his cheek. "I didn't have a clue until I started looking for Omar. I had to go look for him, and then I was like, 'O.K. Now I see it.'"

Bronx-born Royo was surprised at the intensity. "There was an essence of no hope in these neighborhoods," he says, rising to make his point with frenetic hands and a brainy swagger. "In the Bronx, we had a time when the junkies would come out—6:00 P.M., it'd be junkie hour. And Baltimore, 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., they just walk around. When I was in full makeup as a junkie, I'd walk by these six-year-old kids and see if I could scare them. They were like, 'You look like my uncle, man. Beat it.'"