Branches of Baltimore History

Transcript of an appraisal of two pieces by Edward Berge. (pronounced “Ber-gee” apparently)

[Source]

APPRAISER: Right, Edward Berge. And he was born in Baltimore and he studied here at the Rinehart School and he later became a teacher at the Maryland Institute. These pieces, I would probably date from the 1920s or so.

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: He was trained in a more classical tradition. You know, the beginning of the 20th century, there was a lot of avant-garde work going on, but he chose this traditional path. And that’s exemplified in this wonderful nude that’s beautifully observed and beautifully modeled. What he’s really known for are his fountains. This is actually his most famous piece. It’s called “Wildflower,” and he did a whole series of these pieces based on different flowers. I once had one that was called “Poppies.” There’s another one with “Iris.”

GUEST: Oh.

While listening to the BMA monument tour, I discovered that it is none other than Lady Baltimore whose statue sits atop the Battle Monument downtown. That is, she is meant to be an allegorical representation of the city itself. Here’s a great picture of her holding aloft a wreath.

Also did a little sleuthing around the subject and it turns out that there used to be four more Lady Baltimore adorning the St. Paul Street bridge over the Jones Falls/expressway. In 1960, the ladies were removed and languished in storage for 16 years. Two of the ladies have found new homes in Cylburn Arboretum. A third sits in a park where Lennox Street meets Mt. Royal Terrace. Interestingly, the last one was sent to Ireland by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick Society, a fraternal organization in Baltimore City. I wonder what would happen if these four statues were reunited with their sister atop the Battle Monument?

Three of the mp3 links on the BMA’s monument tour are broken. Through some careful internet sleuthing, I figured out the problem: bad URL’s. Here are the correct URL’s to track down the three missing files.

1. Jackson & Lee
2. Union Soldiers & Sailors
3. Confederate Soldiers & Sailors

I had never heard this bit of history when the Polish Katyn Memorial was first installed in 2000.

The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact of 1939 not only secured a mutual bargain not to attack one another, it also contained a secret protocol in which Hitler and Stalin would carve up Poland and then deliver the Baltic states to the Soviet Union. When the Soviets moved into eastern Poland they rounded up and shot over 20,000 Polish citizens. Some were POWs others were lawyers, doctors, and businessman. Since Poland’s conscription policy at the time required all non-exempted college graduates to serve in the reserve officer corps, the Soviets were able to eliminate a large segment of the Polish intelligentsia that could pose a threat to their control of their portion of Poland. The prisoners were shot and buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest.

1. Interestingly, if you look at the Google Street View for the location of the Pope John Paul II memorial, you’ll see an empty space covered in grass. Evidently the area was indexed before the groundbreaking ceremony in April of 2008.
2. In addition to the statue of Cardinal Gibbons, Baltimore also has another marker dedicated to him in War Memorial Plaza. Additional information and coordinates available at HMdb. Baltimore’s HL Mencken wrote of Gibbons, “More presidents than one sought the counsel of Cardinal Gibbons: he was a man of the highest sagacity, a politician in the best sense, and there is no record that he ever led the Church into a bog or up a blind alley. He had Rome against him often, but he always won in the end, for he was always right.”

Alongside our extensive cartographic information, historical and place descriptions, MonumentCity.org will also be unveiling full mp3 self-guided tours for each of Baltimore’s over ninety monuments. In the meantime, you can check out the BMA’s podcast featuring fourteen monuments:

Tour 14 of Baltimore’s monuments—from the iconic Washington Monument in Mt. Vernon to the lesser-known bust of Wagner in Druid Hill Park—in this free, self-guided podcast tour. Discover some of Baltimore’s most intriguing monuments through the voices of local artists, authors, curators, and historians. Simply download the podcast to your personal digital audio player, print out your map (pdf), and explore!

1. Thurgood Marshall
2. Babe Ruth
3. Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr
4. Christopher Columbus (Inner Harbor/Harbor East)
5. Pope John Paul II
6. James Cardinal Gibbons

There is a statue from 1984 on the east side of the Inner Harbor, one in Druid Hill Park, and the Columbus Obelisk up on Harford Road.

Interesting bit of information I uncovered while researching Mayor D’Alesandro’s monument:

Speaker Pelosi’s father, the late US congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., of Maryland, was known as a Roosevelt Democrat. What is not widely known is that D’Alesandro broke ranks with president Franklin D. Roosevelt on the issues of rescuing Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish State.

D’Alesandro was one of the congressional supporters of the Bergson Group, a maverick Jewish political action committee that challenged the Roosevelt administration’s policies on the Jewish refugee issue during the Holocaust, and later lobbied against British control of Palestine.

Shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr (who oddly enough lacks a monument here in town), rioting broke out on the streets of Baltimore City. A Baltimore City police history page has more details:

When rioting did break out on Saturday, April 6, the Governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew, called out thousands of National Guard troops and 500 Maryland State Police to quell the disturbance. When it was determined that the state forces could not control the riot, Agnew requested Federal troops from President Lyndon B. Johnson.

By Sunday evening, 5000 paratroopers, combat engineers, and artillerymen from the XVIII Airborne Corps in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, specially trained in riot control tactics, including sniper school, were on the streets of Baltimore with fixed bayonets, and equipped with chemical (CS) disperser backpacks. Two days later, they were joined by a Light Infantry Brigade from Fort Benning, Georgia. With all the police and troops on the streets, things began to calm down. The FBI reported that H. Rap Brown was in Baltimore driving a Ford Mustang with Broward County, Florida tags, and was assembling large groups of angry protesters and agitating them to escalate the rioting. In several instances, these disturbances were rapidly quelled through the skillful use of bayonets and chemical dispersers by the XVIII Airborne units. That unit did not fire a single round of ammunition and arrested more than 3,000 detainees, who were identified, tagged with bracelets, and delivered in cattle trucks to the Baltimore police precincts.