Drier Than Expected

Things turned out drier than expected this past weekend at Fells Point after the scheduled Fun Fest was cancelled because of the threat of flooding in low lying waterfront areas. Better safe than sorry, but happy the predicted flooding did not occur. The nice looking tugs shown here are out of Yonges Island, South Carolina, where things were really, really bad in the flooding department. Rain causing disaster conditions in the Carolinas. For them it was a good weekend to be in Baltimore.

The Washington Monument in Baltimore's Mount Vernon Square

                July 4th 2015 marked the 200th anniversary of  laying the cornerstone for the nation's
                                        first monument dedicated to George Washington.

                          The monument was reopened to the public after an extensive refurbishing.

                                                        That is Lafayette riding point.

Work Car and the Dreamer at the Magic Mirror on the Wall

                           Some are workers. Some are dreamers. Even at the Streetcar Museum.
           

The Urban Zoo

Druid Hill Christmas

Christmas at the Rawlings Conservatory in Druid Hill Park

                                                       This building is a Baltimore gem.

The south wing is currently set up with a Christmas display, which includes an antique floor model cabinet radio playing a radio broadcast of "It's a Wonderful Life," with the voices of the movie's cast, starring Jimmy Stewart.

Urban Walk in Bolton Hill Today

Big Bromo - Bigger Than Big Ben

Its clockface dial diameters are twenty four feet,  a foot wider than Big Ben in London. Meet Big Bromo, the Emerson Tower, built in Baltimore by Isaac Emerson, the inventor of Bromo Seltzer.

                             The clockwork gears and brass pendulum shaft going through the floor.

Lake Roland, Winter Walk

Took a walk at Lake Roland yesterday with my brother Mark. The weather kept the crowd down. Along the western shore there is still a section of the abandoned Western Maryland RR Green Spring Branch. On inspection it appears that the rail shown below was rolled at Maryland Steel, Sparrows Point, MD, a hundred years ago in 1914. Maryland Steel was at the time a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel. It was absorbed into Bethlehem Steel in 1916. More photos from our walk can bee seen at this link.

+ Marks the Spot for Garnets in Leakin Park

After my earlier expedition, last July, to Leakin Park in search of garnets, I returned on December 28th, with expert help from my geology guru, Ira. He knew what to look for, and he knew that garnets can appear in ways I did not recognize. The schist garnets in Leakin Park are often very small and even the larger ones are very dark in color, almost black, due to iron in their chemical makeup. After we spoted the best examples of garnets, I noticed that someone had previously marked the spot with a cross or + sign on the boulder where we found garnets. Look closely at the photo and you will see the + carved into the face of the rock, which Ira is standing next to. So, treasure hunters and rock hounds, there is your clue

Tourmaline Schorl on Quartz

Baltimore Rocks!

Yes, Baltimore does rock, but there is no verb in the title. Talking about geology here. Went this evening to a talk by geologist Ira May at the Loch Raven Branch of the Baltimore County Library. It was an excellent presentation about geology and the history of mining in Baltimore County. Learned a lot about copper mining in Mount Washington (Bare Hills) under Smith Avenue, chromium mining at Soldiers Delight (those stunted scrub oak and pine trees are because of magnesium in the soil). and limestone mining at Cockeysville, aka Texas, Maryland. And who knew that Leakin Park has an outcropping of schist (often associated with granite) that is studded with visible red garnets. Hey, schist happens. Isaac Tyson, Jr., of Baltimore held a virtual world monopoly on chromium in the nineteenth century thanks to his chromium mines at Soldiers Delight in Baltimore County and other mines in Pennsylvania. Motivation for several hikes and photo opportunities, which I will document here in the future.

Woodpeckers, Herons, Bottles and Bricks

What you won't see here is a woodpecker. They were too high in the greenwood to be seen. But you should have heard them this morning along the Patapsco river between the Daniels dam and the Davis tunnel. They are thriving there. Eight o'clock must be the breakfast hour for pecker heads. They were hammering away all around me on both sides of the river for an entire hour. Then it stopped. Breakfast over. Things got quiet as a church on Tuesday morning.

This Great Blue Heron, which I stalked in both directions of my hike was a slow eater in comparison to the wood knockers. Ol' Blue was just patiently standing, strutting and strolling in the shallow river for at least two and a half hours, with an ocassional short flight to a new spot. The shallow, slow moving Patapsco must be a near perfect habitat for slow, patient, wading herons.

Even slower and more patient than herons are bottles and brick that have waited in the dirt a hundred years for me to find them. I returned today to the spot I wrote about on May 6th.  This time I looked more closely at the old bottles and bricks I noticed on my first visit. I found five antique beer bottles, all with their necks broken off. Three were from the Baltimore brewery, Gottlieb Bauernschmidt Straus (GBS), which existed from 1901 to 1920. The other two were from the Globe Brewery, that both preceded and succeeded GBS. All were embossed bottles. You can see cleaned up examples of them here as, # 11 and # 1. And a history of The Globe Brewing Company here. Based on the company history and the bottle designs I believe my previous guess that they are from circa 1906 is pretty accurate.

 

At this site I saw plain unmarked red clay building bricks and two kinds of white fire bricks stamped with a name. One was stamped or impressed with SAVAGE and the other with UNION. I believe they were likely manufactured by The Savage Fire Brick Company of Keystone Junction in Somerset County, PA. You can actually see illustrations of these two brick with the embossed names in the company's 1899 catalog. Again confirming my estimated dating of the site to the first decade of the twentieth century.

Steam Tug Baltimore

This historic 1906 vessel looks like a mother ship nursing the dinghies nestled against her side.

Gun Control

One good reason Maryland did not secede during the Civil War was that Union troops occupied the high ground of Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore harbor. Gun control from the back end of the gun. Same kind of control the guy with gun a has when you get held up.

Think Hammett Never Wrote About Baltimore?

Think again. For Baltimore, Dashiell Hammett, who learned the detective trade in the local Pinkerton office, created the anti-Bond before there was a Bond. In The Assistant Murderer we meet Rush - Alec Rush, the world's ugliest detective. A man with a bulldog's face, a croaking voice, the body and moves of a bear, and a golden smile. Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!

Hammett's favorite among his five novels was The Glass Key, set in an unnamed east coast city. If the city isn't Baltimore and it's train station Mount Royal Station, I'll eat my fedora.

For a Baltimore short story homage to Hammett here's
A Bad Day at the Office.

A Walk in the Park

Went for a walk in Baltimore's Leakin Park on Sunday. Didn't trip over any bodies. Did see a deer near the scene of the photo. That's a wetlands boardwalk, so I could cross dry shod over damp but holy ground. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards away, the Nature Center was burglarized over the weekend by...two enterprising local youths. http://tinyurl.com/2dwhtdy