photo by flickr user nickhall

Welcome to that magical time of year when the noun ‘holiday’ can be used as an adjective to modify any event, product, or activity, regardless of its relevance to any historical or current holy day. It may not feel much like December––so much as an interminable pre-dawn shower with no hot water when the power’s out––but I’ll help get you into a holiday mood (see?) with a few timely recommendations:

1.    Christ Lutheran Church in the Inner Harbor (701 S. Charles Street) continues its Bach concert series with a performance on Sunday, December 6 at 4:00 p.m. The piece of the day will be the Second Cantata from the Christmas Oratorio. The show is free. Besides, you look like you could use a little culture.

2.    The Central Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Mount Vernon (400 Cathedral Street) is holding a massive used book sale this weekend from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Sunday. Hardbacks go for a fifty cents. That should give you some notion of the pricing. CDs and DVDs will also be sold. It is harder to think of an easier way to support a better cause in the next seventy-two hours. I’m going with this one.

3.    Miracle on 34th Street is, in addition to being the title of a celebrated and somewhat stale Christmas movie, a stubborn Hampden tradition. The residents of the strip of 34th street that runs from Chesnut Avenue to Keswick Road have for the past sixty-odd years celebrated the coming of the Messiah with massive and garish displays of electrical might in their front yards. Think of the most excessive, parodic arrangement of Christmas lights you’ve ever encountered. Now imagine a laser pointer fired at the surface of the sun. That’s basically the difference between what you’re imagining and what this is. It is tasteless; it may even be sacrilegious. But it’s definitely worth the trip. The spectacle runs through December 31.

In what preliminary holiday rituals will you participate this week?

Photo by flickr user shadowstorm

It looks like the bad news was a near-miss. Kind of like when you’ve just almost been t-boned going through a fresh green light and then get the shudders and want to tell someone, but there isn’t anything to tell. Well, remember the B&O building in the Inner Harbor (2 N. Charles Street)?

As of July 30th, the old 1906 headquarters of the B&O Railroad houses not only an upscale brasserie but also the most expensive new hotel in Baltimore. The Hotel Monaco Baltimore is currently open for business, and the business is luxurious––some examples being the Tiffany windows, marble floors, in-house dry-cleaning, wireless internet, and personal trainers on hand.

On August 5, not a week after the Monaco opened, Baltimore circuit Judge Evelyn Omega Cannon issued an order for a mechanic’s lien on the B&O building and sent attorneys scrambling to arrange an auction sale of the property. The order followed a suit against Baltimore and Charles Associates filed by the J.F. Johnson Lumber Co. The lumber company claims not to have received compensation for materials and services rendered in the renovation of the building.

Thankfully for Baltimore’s fancy-hotel enthusiasts, however, the Hotel Monaco won’t face the auction block in the foreseeable future. An attorney for Baltimore and Charles Associates is filing an appeal and has made clear that the threat of auction is just that––a threat. Wrong place, wrong time, right animal-print bathrobes, apparently. The dispute between the builders and the building owners likely won’t be resolved any time soon, but in theory at least, it won’t derail down the opulence train.

What gratifyingly outlandish services have you encountered at the Hotel Monaco Baltimore?

Photo by flickr user brett_gullborg.

Two hundred thirty-three years ago, some guys declared some stuff, so this week, it’s your civic duty to make merry. Among the festivities:

1. The Inner Harbor will host the city’s biggest and most crowded celebration starting at 4:30 p.m. with a live a cappella performance by Reverb and continuing into the evening with more music from Electric Brigade and, of course, a massive display of patriotic firepower at 9:30 p.m. If you don’t feel like squeezing through a sea of sweaty human flesh, I’d recommend schlepping a blanket and a flask up Federal Hill and watching in comfort from there.

2. those of a more diurnal inclination can enjoy a more educational Independence Day at Fort McHenry from noon to 4:30 p.m. in and around the fort. It’ll cost you $7 to get in, unless you’re under sixteen in which case it’ll cost whoever drives you there $7 to get in. The big show at 3:00 p.m. will be the public recitation of a certain historical document beginning with “When in the Course of human events…”

3. From July 3 through July 5, the African American Heritage Festival will take over the M&T Bank Stadium B and C Lots Downtown (1101 Russell Street). General admission is $5, and children under 13 get in free. Attractions include a step show, a spelling bee, a poetry slam, a 5K run, daily live musical performances, and dozens of resources for health education and community development. The main stage, which is ticketed separately (admission runs $40 to $80), will feature Teena Marie, En Vogue, Anita Barker, and Tony! Toni! Toné!.

Where will you be when our freedom turns another year older?

Photo by flickr user elh70.

One of the benefits of living in the city is proximity to a variety of religious traditions. Baltimore, in particular, has a proud history of tolerance, though the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 only applied to Christians… and even then got nixed by Oliver Cromwell. But! Since then, our religious heritage has been plentiful and heterogeneous. In fact, there are far too many places of worship and religious study even to give a representative sampling, but here is a very small selection of the city’s spiritual loci:

1. Old Otterbein United Methodist Church in the Inner Harbor (112 W. Conway Street), built in 1785, is the oldest church building in Baltimore. It’s also the origin of the United Brethen in Christ. Worship services are Sundays at 11:00 a.m.

2. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Mount Vernon (409 Cathedral Street) is the oldest Catholic Cathedral in America. It may also have the longest name in America. Originally built between 1806 and 1821, the Basilica was recently restored and, whatever your religious inclinations, is a breathtaking example of the architectural mastery of Henry Latrobe. Mass is celebrated there twice or more daily.

3. The Lloyd Street Synagogue in the Inner Harbor (15 Lloyd Street), built in 1845 and renovated in 1876, is the oldest synagogue in Maryland. Now in the possession of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the synagogue, which over the years has also housed Catholic and Eastern Orthodox congregations, is open for tours at 1:00 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. (Hours may be restricted this summer due to construction.)

4. The B’nai Israel Synagogue, also in the Inner Harbor (27 Lloyd Street), was built in 1876 and is the oldest Orthodox synagogue in continuous use in Baltimore. B’nai Israel is also owned by the Jewish Museum, though it has services Fridays after sundown and at additional times throughout the weekend.

5. The Masjid ul Haqq Downtown (514 Islamic Way) is the oldest place of worship for Muslims in Baltimore. Originally called Temple No. 6 and operated by the Nation of Islam, the space was renamed and rededicated shortly after the death of Elijah Muhammad. The Masjid is now operated by Sunni Orthodox Muslims and is open for Salat five times daily.

6. There are dozens of Hindu, Buddhist, Pantheist, and Theist meetings, gatherings, and social events in Baltimore––far too many to mention, so I’ll just add this last note for those of you who take your timor mortis black: the Baltimore Secular Humanists don’t have a static location, but they do meet regularly. Their next meeting will be at noon on July 12 at the Orient Restaurant in Towson (319 York Road). They will be discussing an interview with Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University.

Where do you go to get right with whatever you get right with?

photo by flickr user unreliable narrator

If you’ve been jonesing for a new historically significant place to eat, you’re about to get your fix. This July, the B&O American Brasserie will open in the old B&O building in the Inner Harbor (2 N. Charles Street) as the first step to reintroducing the building as a Hotel Monaco (the first Kimpton Hotel in the city) later this year. The restaurant, whose name literally means “Baltimore and Ohio American French Brewery,” will have a full bar, some serious pizza ovens, a Franco-Italian-Spanish à la carte menu, and… breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The building, which was built in 1906  as the headquarters of the B&O Railroad, will continue to look the same (stately, posh) from the outside. Following the $60 million renovation, however, roughly a third of its 220,500 square feet will be dedicated to office space, while the top seven floors will house the Hotel Monaco’s 202 swanky rooms and suites. Right now, the hotel’s grand opening is scheduled for August 3, 2009.

The whole arrangement looks to be schmancy as all get-out, featuring such perks and details as in-room yoga accessories, hosted wine tasting in the “grand living room lobby,” complimentary shoeshine, and “companion goldfish” provided upon request. For most Baltimoreans, though, le Brasserie will be our only exposure to the vivisected B&O building. And for fans of Family Ties, that means one more spot for stalking beloved father-figure Michael Gross aka Steven Keaton. The actor will apparently be doing pro bono work as the first ever official spokesman for the B&O Railroad Museum. Gross is descended from old-time railroaders and is an enthusiastic collector of railroad memorabilia.

Photo by flickr user realmofreals

Occasionally it’s nice to be reminded of the good that big corporations can accomplish by way of their corporate bigness. Two years ago, ground broke on a new Fairfield Inn and Suites in the Inner Harbor (101 President Street) on the site of the old Baltimore Brewing Company. Aside from the usual fanfare that accompanies any expansion of Marriott’s bargain brand, there was some additional to-do over the Brewer’s Park location due to the company’s plans for not-yet-mandatory greenness. This summer the Fairfield Inn and Suites at President and Lombard will open as Baltimore’s first LEED-certified hotel.

LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an adaptable metric devised by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to accredit buildings at any and all stages of construction, use, and renovation. Greenness is a quality the categorical validity of which we’ve gradually come to accept as a culture, but if it is to have application beyond the realms of the Giving Tree and the Lorax, we need to recognize that it is not an innate quality like, say, redness, but rather a relative quality, like relevance. (Berkeleyites, relax.) As a yardstick for such things, LEED does an excellent job. It assesses not simply the PR friendliness of the building’s recycling program, but also its basic contextual soundness through evaluations of things like water and energy use, CO2 emissions, efficiency of materials, and structural compactness. Among other accomplishments, the Inner Harbor hotel has earned points for drawing power from the wind and the sun as well as incorporating signs, bricks, and storage tanks from the old brewery.

Thursday’s first-look construction tour of the site is already sold out, so you’ll have to wait until doors open in July. Then you and your sweetie can splurge on an environmentally responsible night of anonymous local romance. Or just stroll by and gawk.
What new green scenes have you noticed around Baltimore lately?

photo by ok_morpheus

Here’s a new toy for use in supplementing your real estate-driven daydreams. It’s a web site called walkscore.com, and it’s more or less easy to use once you get past the initially counterintuitive layout. Why, pray tell, should you care about a walk score, whatever that means? Well, I had fun typing in addresses of places I live, have lived, might live, or comically would never want to live, and basking in the instantaneous feedback the site gave me on their relative walkability. (Side note: is it too early to declare a moratorium on the suffix ‘-ability?’)

More pertinent to you and your well-being, Baltimore’s own Federal Hill recently ranked #59 on walkscore.com’s list of highly pedestrian-friendly American neighborhoods. Not impressed? Well, the ranking is out of 2508 neighborhoods, which means that if we considered this range as representative of 50 tiers of quality, Fed Hill would be resting easy at the top of tier 49. More to the point, out of the 138 neighborhoods deemed “Walkers’ Paradises,” Charm Town got three––FH, Fell’s Point, and the Inner Harbor. These are neighborhoods that ranked at least 90 out of 100 on the web site’s scale of walking convenience. The Big Apple, predictably, got 38, and San Francisco and D.C. also snapped up leonine shares. So we did pretty good, all things considered.

Besides, once you’ve gotten past the whole my-neighborhood-could-whip-your-neighborhood aspect of the list, you can check out the site’s shockingly decipherable, color-coded map of Baltimore, with neighborhood breakdowns and lists of all the lovely places to which one can walk, according to distance. One last caveat: if you’re anything like me, you’ll be delighted to stumble upon all the neat stuff buried in this site, but then when you attempt to replicate your discoveries for the benefit of a friend, you’ll find the site’s labyrinthine structure to be a real pain. Like any good drug, the first time is a blast; after that, complications arise.

Where’s your favorite place to walk in Baltimore?

But maybe it’s another kind of green you’re thinking of. While most of the city’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are scheduled for next week, you can get a jump on your Irish pride at the Eighth Annual Irish Stroll this Saturday (March 7). For $10 (or $7 with two canned food donations) you can mosey between 11 participating bars from 1 – 9 p.m., enjoying drink and food specials along the way.

If you prefer a less alcohol-sodden celebration, make your way to the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s central branch in Mount Vernon (400 Cathedral Street) on Saturday at noon for a W.B. Yeats poetry discussion led by local poet Erik Kestler.

Gardens and shamrocks are normal. The 2009 FortFest, a national conference that bills itself as “a weekend of anomalous phenomena!” is decidedly not. Topics of discussion include UFO invisibility, freemasonry, the Atlantis of the Occultists, “the seven vowels,” and other sensible things like that. The ever-innovative American Visionary Arts Museum (800 Key Highway) hosts Saturday’s events, and on Sunday the conference moves to the Days Inn Inner Harbor (100 Hopkins Place).

Things aren’t looking good for Edwin Hale’s Canton Crossing, either. Once touted as “the biggest single residential development in recent memory,” the project has been running into difficulties as of late. Recently, Hale defaulted on a $10 million loan taken out to finance the waterfront venture.

So are these worrisome events merely temporary setbacks, or are they signs of things to come? We’ve decided to be cautiously hopeful; after all, though some projects are floundering, some seem to be making the best of a bad economy. Turner Development’s Silo Point condos in Locust Point (pictured to the left) are selling well for the market, a representative tells us; 50 of the building’s 222 units are under contract so far. And there are no plans to delay or scale back the Westport Waterfront, Turner’s next big project. Plus, as Baltimore Grows recently noted, Forbes just named Baltimore one of the top-10 cities for job growth in 2009.

So while the economic slowdown is definitely making itself felt downtown, the sky isn’t falling. Which projects do you think have the best chance of being completed?

That may change if developer David Cordish can have his way. You know Cordish Co. as the company that built the ESPN Zone and Power Plant Live. Now they want to buy the three-story malls that house shops and restaurants around the Inner Harbor.

Chicago-based General Growth Properties Inc. has put Harborplace and the Gallery, two of Baltimore’s most prominent retail sites, on the market to raise capital to pay down debt. Cordish has approached General about buying the properties, but he is worried about the amount of debt General Growth is carrying on them. For now he is staying on the sidelines.

The Baltimore Business Journal quotes Cordish as saying, “They’ve got too much debt. It’s just so complicated with the debt on it. Those, honestly, we could turn around in our sleep, but that isn’t the issue. The complexity is they are interwoven into a company.”

If Cordish can extricate Harborplace and the Gallery from the larger company, we may just finally get something more to attract the home folks. Stay tuned.

If you live in Baltimore, what kind of new development would it take to entice you into the Inner Harbor on a regular basis?

Photo by Justin Wong