Tag: Downtown

Stop by the Baltimore Farmers’ Market for our new Looking Up Downtown tour

Did you know that there are hundreds of lions peering down on unsuspecting pedestrians on Calvert Street, that a piece of the Berlin Wall is now embedded in a downtown church, and that an unexploded bomb from the War of 1812 is perched along the sidewalk on Redwood Street? There are even a pair of 15th century squirrels gathering nuts on a doorway that is an exact copy of a door at the Basilica di Sant’ Andrea in Mantua, Italy by 15th Century Renaissance father Leon Alberti.

Whether its every day for work or occasionally for jury duty, most of us walk the streets of downtown Baltimore without realizing the wealth of grotesques, carvings, and statuary that abounds throughout the core of downtown. With help from Baltimore historians Fred Shoken, Wayne Schaumburg, and Matthew Mosca, we’ve put together a tour to explore the architecture, serious and whimsical, and the wonderful history in our city center. From noble lions and hellish fiends, from neo-Egyptian sphinxes and squirrels of Renaissance Italy, we bet you’ll be as amazed as we were to learn about the veritable menagerie of wildlife downtown.

Please join us this Sunday as we host the first in our new Looking Up Downtown tour series. If you can’t join us this Sunday, we’ll be offering the tour on the first and third Sunday of each month from August through November. So grab your shopping bag for the Farmers’ Market and your walking shoes for the tour and get ready to be surprised at how much is going on downtown above our very heads.

Looking Up Downtown Walking Tour

Sunday, July 29, 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Baltimore Farmers’ Market – Meet at the southeast corner of the market (Gay Street and Saratoga Street)
Tours ongoing every first and third Sunday from August through September.
$5 for adults. Children under 16 are free!
RSVP online today!

Photo: Luminous Intervention at Read’s Drug Store

Read's Drug Store, Luminous Intervention
Luminous Interventions

We were excited to partner with Greenpants and Luminous Interventions at the Transmodern Festival last week on a tour of Downtown’s West Side. Our walk featured building-sized light and video projections during the tour animated the stories of historic sites along Howard Street. Find more images of the projections from Luminous Interventions.

Secretary of Interior Salazar Focuses on Women’s History in Baltimore

Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar at the Maryland Women's Heritage Center

On Tuesday, the Secretary of the Department of Interior Ken Salazar celebrated Women’s History Month with an appearance in downtown Baltimore at the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center, just one week before Baltimore Heritage’s Behind the Scenes Tour there (Saturday March 31, 2-3 pm).  Joined by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Judge and First Lady Katie O’Malley, Secretary Salazar noted a serious underrepresentation of historic sites associated with women’s history, and articulated a vision for getting more of these places designated as National Historic Landmarks and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  In one example, the Secretary noted that of the country’s National Historic Landmarks, a designation that the Department of Interior bestows on buildings with the highest level of national significance, only 4% are places with significance to women’s heritage.

As the Secretary of the Department of Interior, Mr. Salazar oversees numerous agencies that are responsible for heritage sites, including the National Park Service that manages the National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark program.  In his vision for the near future, Secretary Salazar said that as the National Park Service gears up to celebrate its centennial anniversary in 2016, he is committed to launching a national dialogue over women’s heritage sites to create a blue print for how to bring these to a higher level of prominence and visibility.

Citing Maryland as a national leader in the role of state governments to promote women’s heritage, the Secretary also said that he is committed to more full federal funding for State Historic Preservation Offices as a way to  make sure that smaller places and ones with more local significance also receive assistance.

Baltimore Heritage will wrap up Women’s History Month with a tour of the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center on Saturday, March 31.  The tour is from 2-3 pm at the Center: 39 West Lexington Street, in the historic former BG&E Building.  The cost is $10.  Register online today.

Behind the Scenes Tour: Maryland Women’s Heritage Center

Linda Shevitz

Did you know that March is Women’s History Month? What better way to celebrate than by visiting the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center located in the historic 1916 Baltimore Gas and Electric Company building on Lexington Street? We hope you can join us.

Tour Details
Maryland Women’s Heritage Center | 39 W. Lexington Street (corner of Lexington & Liberty Sts.), Baltimore, MD 21201
Saturday, March 31st | 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
$10 members | $20 non-members

RSVP for the tour today!

Edith Houghton Hooker

The Maryland Women’s History Center is the first comprehensive state-based women’s history center and museum of its kind in the nation. For our tour, a docent from the Center will guide us through exhibits on Maryland women “firsts,” unsung heroines, and the suffrage movement in Maryland. The Center’s location at the BG&E building is more than fitting. In the early 1900s, a suffrage pioneer named Edith Houghton Hooker staged a major rally for giving women the vote outside the building at Lexington and Liberty Streets. Ms. Hooker had come from Buffalo to Baltimore as one of the first women accepted into the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 1909, she established the Just Government League of Maryland, a local affiliate of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and edited and published Maryland Suffrage News from 1912 through the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. In addition to the history of the suffrage movement, we will be among the first to see the Center’s newest exhibit on Maryland women in science and technology.