Artifacts

Visitors will come face to face with artifacts salvaged from three terrorist attack sites at the 9/11 Memorial of Maryland, which is scheduled for completion at Baltimore's Inner Harbor shoreline in September. Mangled columns from the north tower of New York's World Trade Center, damaged limestone from the Pentagon and an as-yet undetermined remembrance from a field in Shanksville, Pa., will be incorporated in the memorial to those who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. The $2 million memorial, whose design was unveiled Wednesday during a meeting of the Baltimore Public Art Commission, will pay tribute to the 63 Marylanders killed in the attacks.

One of the ironies of the art world is that for all its important holdings the Baltimore Museum of Art is laying off 14 people in order to balance its budget (" Baltimore Museum of Art lays off 14," April 9). Yet right over the city line, in Towson, the federal government is funding the construction of a new museum to house a collection of unknown value - the artifacts of the Ridgley family of Hampton. To make matters worse, the site chosen for the building is in an area of running streams and granite deposits.

In the days and months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Smithsonian Institution collected small artifacts from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the field where Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. A firefighter's helmet, a bit of metal, a dusty briefcase, a stairwell sign - everyday items that now bear the great weight of memory. The collection of 140 objects became an exhibit, "September 11: Bearing Witness to History," which went on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington last Sept.

Artifact Coffee, Amy and Spike Gjerdes' follow-up to their acclaimed Woodberry Kitchen , has been growing on me. In the span of eight days, I had two of my favorite restaurant entrees of the past year at Artifact Coffee. The first night was a 12-hour braised pork shoulder with rigatoni, tossed with roasted turnips in a pesto made from sharp-flavored ramps, the early spring vegetable sometimes called wild garlic. Another night was a sublime stew of chicken, carrots, parsnips and kohlrabi bathed in red wine.

CHICAGO -- A federal appeals court panel in Chicago has upheld the conviction of a southern Indiana man accused of selling artifacts looted from an ancient American Indian burial mound.A three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal law that prohibits illegal trafficking in artifacts was intended to protect archaeological sites on private property as well as those on land owned by the federal government or by Indian tribes.The ruling last week is significant because it was the first time a federal appeals court panel had addressed the issue.

If you've visited Roy's Clock Shop in Hampstead, you've heard the great chimes bonging from the forest of grandfather clocks, or been charmed by the latest beer-drinker's cuckoo, in which wooden men in lederhosen tip a brew on the hour.Each visit is an adventure into the art of decorated timekeeping in porcelain, veneer and brass.New at Roy's is a collection of artifacts of military conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.Items are for sale by Steve Ashe, whose father, LeRoy, has passed the store to him.On a visit, you'll likely find Steve's niece, Kari Criswell, delicately cleaning the brass flywheels of an old clock in her tiny workshop to the left of the front door.

There's another big auction of Kennedy stuff brewing in New York and this time many of the items are from Robert White, the master collector from Catonsville who worked long and hard to build one of the largest private collections of JFK artifacts anywhere. White said for years he wouldn't sell his Camelot artifacts, but now he has agreed to offer at least some of them to bidders at a two-day auction scheduled for mid-March.White is the major contributor to the auction, which will feature more than 500 items, many of them personal possessions of JFK. White's items include some things he acquired through a bequest of Evelyn Lincoln, the late president's longtime personal secretary whom White befriended.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. -- Five years after Navy divers pulled it from the seas off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the massive cast-iron propeller of the USS Monitor is nearing the end of the conservation process and being prepared for public display at the Mariners' Museum. So, too, are dozens of pieces of machinery associated with the famous Civil War ship's steam engine, which was recovered in 2001, and numerous personal artifacts rescued from the inside of the gun turret after it was retrieved in 2002.

ROME -- With a proposed settlement from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in hand, Italian authorities are escalating their demands for the return of allegedly looted antiquities from other American museums. The day after receiving the Met's offer to return 20 disputed antiquities in exchange for long-term loans, Italian Minister of Culture Rocco Buttiglione said that his government would pursue a combination of expanding investigations, the offer of negotiations and the threat of legal action in its pursuit of stolen artifacts.

WASHINGTON -- The painful evidence of Abraham Lincoln's assassination -- from scraps of towel stained with his blood to pressed flowers from his coffin -- have been put on display for the first time in decades in the newly remodeled museum in Ford's Theater.Using material earlier thought too gruesome to display, the U.S. Park Service this summer replaced a display chronicling Lincoln's rise from rail splitter to president with a chilling examination of his assassination and its aftermath.

The DNA of a battle that helped turn the tide of a war going horribly wrong for America lay buried just six inches below the surface in a Kent County cornfield. For nearly two centuries, the musket balls, canister shot and other artifacts from intense fighting at Caulk's Field waited to tell the story of a sweltering August night in 1814, when militiamen sprang a trap on a British raiding party bent on destruction. How did the citizen-soldiers best their battle-tested foes at Caulk's Field?

Artifact Coffee , the side project from the Woodberry Kitchen , will begin dinner service on Wednesday. The $29.50 dinner is available on a first-come, first-served basis, from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday; and 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The dinner is BYOB, and they're not taking reservations. The weekly fixed-price menu will be posted on the Artifact website . The opening week menu is a salad with young romaine, buttermilk dressing and radish; roasted Rettland chicken, ramp butter noodles, roasted turnips and their greens and bay leaf carrots; and apple dumpling with fresh cream ice cream.

Remember the gourmet cafe? That was what they called those places that put chutney on your turkey sandwich. They've come back, but we don't call them gourmet anymore. Artifact Coffee, the new project from the Woodberry Kitchen , lies just across the Light Rail tracks in Hampden. The cafe, which opened in June, is a partnership between Spike Gjerde and Allie Caran, Woodberry's head barista, who is Artifact's general manager. Caran's efforts to bring a serious coffee program to Woodberry have been widely praised.

Baltimore has its baseball all-stars and its beer all-stars, too, with names like Loose Cannon, Resurrection and Snake Dog. Come to think of it, those would make pretty good baseball nicknames. The city has always enjoyed its baseball and its beer, preferably at the same time, and you won't find a more entertaining guide to Baltimore's beer-baseball connections than "Baltimore Beer: A Satisfying History of Charm City Brewing, the new book by longtime Baltimore Sun writer Rob Kasper.

A geographical blessing we in Maryland share is our proximity to our nation's capital. Regardless of politics,Washington, D.C., is a majestic city whose stature in national and world history is on par with the likes of London, Rome, Tokyo, Madrid, Alexandria and Constantinople. A key reason for its standing, in addition to the moral and economic strength of the nation behind it, is that it serves as more than a political capital. It also is home to a repositories of publicly-accessible documents and artifacts that are arguably the greatest collection of human knowledge ever compiled.

Artifact Coffee opens, officially on Monday. The new seven-day a week casual stop-in for breakfast, lunch and early dinner is from Amy and Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen. Located across the Light Rail tracks from Woodberry, in the restored Union Mills complex, Artifact Coffee was up and running this weekend for a "soft opening. " Artifact Coffee is more than coffee. A Morning Kitchen menu features egg sandwiches, fruit cups and steel-cut oatmeal with candied pecans, dried fruit and cream and pullman toast, grilled corn bread, toasted English muffin or a split biscuit with Five Seeds honey and homemade jam The Day Kitchen menu, available all day -- has soups, salads and sandwiches like a bacon, Tennessee green tomato, lettuce on pullman toast or peanut butter and jam on pullman bread, a loaf made for sandwiches and toasting that the French call pan de mi e. Dinner options will change daily and will be single plate suppers, including housemade pastas, braised meats and stews.

Q: What's the best way to start collecting American-Indian art and artifacts?A: With so many tribes and so much material available, it's important to choose one area, such as baskets or beadwork, learn it well and specialize, advises dealer Marcy Burns, P.O. Box 181, Glenside, Pa. 19038, (215) 576-1559. Start by reading books and visiting museums, she adds.A notable new exhibition, "The Flag in American Indian Art," at the New York State Historical Association in Cooperstown, N.Y., includes over 100 artifacts from two private collections.

A Baltimore dentist and his mother have been charged with breaking into a ghost town building in rural Montana and carting off irreplaceable artifacts, including an antique gold scale dating back at least a century.Sherman H. Deveas 3rd, 38, of Ellicott City, and Marjorie Deveas, 59, were arrested in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on Tuesday. They were scheduled to be transported to the jail in Beaverhead County, Mont., last night. Bail has been set at $25,000 bail apiece, law enforcement officials said.

Spike Gjerde and the Woodberry Kitchen team have released some more information about its forthcoming Artifact Coffee project, which they plan to have open in June. Allie Caran, the head barista at Woodberry Kitchen, and Gjerde's partner on the project, will be general manager general manager for the cafe, which will serve seasonal, direct trade coffee, manually brewed to order. The cafe will run with a single-page menu, divided up into morning kitchen (pastries), day kitchen (soups, salads and sandwiches)

Spike Gjerde and the Woodberry Kitchen team have released some more information about its forthcoming Artifact Coffee project, which they plan to have open in June. Allie Caran, the head barista at Woodberry Kitchen, and Gjerde's partner on the project, will be general manager general manager for the cafe, which will serve seasonal, direct trade coffee, manually brewed to order. The cafe will run with a single-page menu, divided up into morning kitchen (pastries), day kitchen (soups, salads and sandwiches)