Urban Discoveries Baltimore

Autumn is upon us, Baltimore, and like the middle age it so often represents in poetry, the season is rich with (charming, doomed) attempts to outrun Time’s winged chariots. This week, we’ve got two new seasonal rites and one adolescent one. Compensatory details below:

1.    The first and hopefully annual Baltimore Beer Week taps its inaugural keg at 6:00 p.m. Thursday, October 8, on the USS Constellation (literally!) in the Inner Harbor (Pier 1). This christening event will be only the first of numerous beery goings-on during the week, among which is the immediately-post-christening fête at the Pratt Street Ale House also (more broadly) in the Inner Harbor (206 W. Pratt Street) from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 pm. $10 at the door gets you a beer, a pint glass, and access to the buffet. BYO driver.

2.    These guys we have mentioned before, and the time has now come to mention them with gravity. The Baltimore Rock Opera Society of painstakingly flippant acronyms will finally release their first creation, “Gründlehämmer,” to the public Friday, October 2 through Sunday October 4 at a time cockily not even specified on their poster. One might assume that 8:00 p.m., the universal starting time of plays, might apply to this production, but then one might misjudge the popular-doing-things-oneself-movement-generated popularity of said production. Show up early as all get-out. Say 6:30 p.m. At the 2640 space on St. Paul (wild guess… 2640 St. Paul Street).

3.    Finally and most venerably, the Fell’s Point Fun Festival (Fleet Street and Broadway, etc.) is probably getting its lands in order as you read this post. It starts at 11:00 a.m. the morning of Saturday, October 3 and closes down for the night at 7:00 p.m. Same thing Sunday. This festival has been going up and down in Fells Point for over forty years, so you can expect a little more sophistication than your partially-baked neighborhood ‘festival’ may have offered. The food is real food, not just funnel cake and supply-and-demand-augmented corn dogs. The music––there are three independent stages as well as La Plaza Hispana––is actual music. And the tradition is authentic: the Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill and Fell’s Point was founded not coincidentally over forty years ago in response to an insidious (worthy of a Curtis Armstrong movie) plot to construct an interstate highway, which protest was so successful that in place of such a highway we now have a festival celebrating, among other things, the non-existence of such a highway. So there. Admission is free. Delicious food is not.

In what autumnal rituals will you participate this week?

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