Monument City Blog

I’ve been tracing the cause and path of the Great Fire of 1904.  I had thought of creating a map of the area of the blaze, comparing pictures from then and now.  This great website has already done all of this and much more, plotting the stages of the fire as it rolled north, east, and south through downtown.  The event was apparently caused by an explosion at the Hurst Company building, the blast occurring at 10:55 on an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning.  Due to extreme winds and very narrow streets the flames were able to jump entire city blocks, leaving some areas untouched amidst the devastation.  10 buildings survived the fire including the Union Trust Company (or Jefferson Building) at the corner of Charles and Fayette Streets.  The structure’s windows had been blown out by nearby attempted preventative dynamiting, leaving the building vulnerable.  The inside burned completely out but the steel frame survived and the building is still in use today.  The picture below shows the old Post Office, City Hall and the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse just at the edge of the fire’s devastation zone.  A last and sudden change in the direction of the wind towards the south saved the historic buildings from destruction.

The Edgar Allan Poe grave monument is located at W Fayette Street & N Greene Street inside the Westminster Burying Grounds.  Designed by Baltimore architect George A. Frederick, the memorial was commissioned in 1874, 25 years after the author’s death.  Poe was originally buried (with no headstone) in the back of the graveyard with his grandfather, grandmother and older brother.  In 1875, after an upswell of community support for the writer, Poe’s body was moved to its current location with a monument unveiling ceremony attended by relatives, fans and the poet Walt Whitman.  Eventually Virginia and Mariah Clemm Poe were interred along with him.  In 1913 a second headstone was placed in the Poe family lot marking the spot of Edgar Allan’s initial entombment.

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“Others who signed on to the memorial as “supporters” admitted later that they had little knowledge of any darker side to aesthetic realism and its founder.

“I have to confess I don’t really know much about him or his work,” said Steven R. David, associate dean of academic affairs for Johns Hopkins University, who also agreed to be listed as a supporter of the memorial after checking out the foundation’s Web site.

“I probably should have looked into it further. There is a kind of bandwagon effect — you see the governor and the mayor signing on to something and you say, ‘Sure, I’ll sign on, too.’”

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As a commissioned artis for the exhibit “Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square” in Mount Vernon Park, Rebecca Nagle created the community art project “New Outfits”.  New Outfits placed decorative cloaks made by communities in Baltimore over the monuments in the parks of Mount Vernon Place.  These decorative cloaks temporarilly re-dressed the monument of General Lafayette, George Peabody, Severn Teackle Wallis, Roger B Taney and John Eager Howard.  New Outfits were made in workshops by diverse groups of Baltimore community centers and resident groups, in which the artist, Rebecca Nagle, acted as an educator and facilitator.  New Outfits gives people access to the power that the monuments symbolize.

A Johnny Unitas statue stands outside of The Ravens M&T Bank Stadium.  It was dedicated in 2002 and is the creation of artist Frederick Kail.  The 14-foot tall monument weighs over 2000 pounds.

The 150 year anniversary of Charm City was held in 1880. Not to be confused with the city’s incorporation, which took place in 1797, the celebration marked the 1730 founding of Baltimore Town. The Sesquicentennial featured a giant obelisk at the corner of Howard and Lombard Streets.  The temporary monument was constructed out of wood and covered with plaster adorned with Egyptian hieroglyphics, according to the Tormey family website.

Monuments in Baltimore by Edward Berge:

• Chapin Harris
• On the Trail
• Latrobe (with J. Maxwell Miller)
• George Armistead (Ft McHenry)
• Col. William Watson
• Sea Urchin – JHU
• Sea Urchin – Mt Vernon (enlargement by son, Henry Berge)
• Servicemen’s Memorial at Belair Road and Shannon Drive
• Thomas Gordon Hayes Statue (City Hall)

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The Taney Arrest Warrant is a recent conjectural controversy in Abraham Lincoln scholarship. The standard version of the story avers that in late May or early June 1861 President Lincoln secretly ordered an arrest warrant for Roger B. Taney, the circuit-riding Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, but abandoned the proposal. The arrest order is said to have been in response to Taney’s Circuit Judge ruling in Ex parte Merryman, which found Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to be unconstitutional.

The main details of the story come from a single document written in the 1880s.

A great link I wanted to hang onto for later. Currently doing research on some of the Washington Memorial-area monuments. So far, I’ve completed Lafayette and Peabody and am about to write up Taney.

Link: History of the Washington Monument and Mount Vernon and Washington Places

I was riding by the Pope John Paul II Memorial and Prayer Garden, just south of the Washington Monument, yesterday.   I noticed a gentleman cleaning the sculpture with Butcher’s Wax.  I stopped and asked him a few questions about the process.  He told me that by cleaning a statue and applying the wax once a year, an outdoor bronze cast can be easily maintained.