Even though Connolly's Pier 5 Pratt Street seafood house served up its last crab cake platter in 1991, Baltimoreans near and far still fondly recall the old, no-frills restaurant and wish that such a place still existed.
In the week since my Connolly's column was published, my phone has rung off the hook, and my e-mail basket went into meltdown.
Folks anxious to talk about the loss of the rattletrap seafood venue that defied the march of time and Inner Harbor development were more than willing to share a few memories of long-ago meals there.
Robert I. Cottom, owner and publisher of the Chesapeake Book Co. and a Roland Park resident, wrote to say that he and his wife, Barb, had many happy memories of summer evenings at Connolly's.
"I can never forget how cold their air-conditioning was, or those 22-ounce tall glasses of frosted Bud and the saucy waitresses. Forcing Connolly's out amounted to a crime against civility," he wrote.
"One evening some young, toney and ignorant Washingtonians sat next to us. Clearly out of place in Connolly's. They looked around and gazed upon our steamed crabs with an expression that said, 'How disgustingly provincial,' " Cottom recalled.
"The waitress came over, in her Fifties retro black dress, and they asked what was fresh?
"The waitress tapped her foot, cracked her gum and without looking up from her pad dismissed all pretension with a flat, 'It's ALL fresh, hon.' "
Risselle Rosenthal Fleisher, who lives in nearby Scarlett Place, was also a customer.
"I used to go to Connolly's, not every week like Mayor [William Donald] Schaefer and his mother, but from time to time. As I recall, everything there was fried," Fleisher said in an e-mail.
"Even so, I was sad at the time to hear that it had closed. It was really one of the last of those faded entities in a class with a 55-year-old former prom queen and the like," she wrote.
Connolly's inadvertently became a wedding backdrop for Jim and Marianne Eddins, former Baltimoreans who now own and operate Perdido Vineyards Winery in Perdido, Ala.
Eddins and his soon-to-be wife, who both worked at International Business Machines in Baltimore at the time, accompanied by their best man, Joe Byrnes, got hitched in a noontime City Hall ceremony in 1968.
"After the brief wedding, my new bride, Marianne, and I invited Joe Byrnes to have a seafood platter at Connolly's. It was a special meal to us, and then we returned to work at IBM," he wrote in an e-mail.
