BEYOND THOUGHT and greater than reason, I am a preservationist.
When I see wrecking balls cracking the hides of buildings whose likes we will not see again -- the old Horn & Horn on The Block torn down for a parking garage or the current crime at Redwood and Light streets -- a spirit older than my 42 years cries out at the stupidity.
The desire to save people and things, be it my grandmother's dented spaghetti pots from the Depression or the ice-eating homeless man named Bruce who lives behind The Sun's building, is keen and often overwhelming.
Nostalgia, as any literate Greek flipping eggs in Baltimore can tell you, comes from nostos, a longing for home so strong it can lead to a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia.
The home I long for has sheltered all of us, and it was here, it seems, just the other day ...
I don't know how to fix stuff that breaks the way the dead and gone old-timers from the city's factory days once did: a broken handle riveted to a sauce pan or wire twisted between the legs of a wobbly chair to keep it tight and straight.
But I dream a lot; save nickels to buy any rowhouse within a fig's throw of my own and try to honor local customs and architecture slain by the greed that hides behind expedience and progress.
Which brings us to the Grand Theater off the corner of Eastern Avenue and Conkling Street in the heart of the Highlandtown shopping district. For years, I hoped that the long-vacant Grand, built in 1913 on the site of a German slaughterhouse, would become the Senator Theatre of the east side. Alas ...
Recently, the City Council passed legislation to acquire all but one property on the east side of the 500 block of S. Conkling St. To make way for a state-of-the-art regional branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the grease-stained cottage that was the Little Tavern, the Phyllis Beauty Salon and a few other remnants are set to tumble with the Grand.
Naturally, the one building so ugly that it should be torn down, the suburban-styled Carrollton Bank at Conkling and Fleet streets, gets to stay.
After years of covering public protests to keep neighborhood branches of the Pratt open, I find it odd to be criticizing a move to add a jewel to the library's crown. Still, I must side with nearly 1,000 of my neighbors who have signed a petition of the Grand Theater Preservation League asking Pratt chief Carla Hayden to incorporate the building into the design of the new library.
