Charm City

THIS COLUMN has, through the years, accepted the challenges of settling disputes among the natives concerning the origins of local legends and lore.Some examples: Was there really an elephant at the zoo that played "St. Louis Blues" on the harmonica? (Yes, Minnie in 1946, and you could look it up.) Did a prisoner dig a tunnel out of his city jail cell down and under and up onto Preston Street and walk free? (Yes, "Tunnel Joe" Holmes, in 1951.) How did Charm City get its name? That is the story we take up today.

Baltimore is a good place for recent college graduates to settle down, according to a report released Thursday by major job- and apartment-hunting websites. Charm City has the right combination of entry-level job inventory, average entry-level salary and average monthly rent to rank 10th on a list of the best cities for new grads. The list was put together by the classified websites Careerbuilder.com and Apartments.com, which used their employment and rental listings to calculate the rankings.

Sun columnist Marta Mossburg, relatively new to Maryland, has a solution for all of our problems ("Baltimore: the view from 2021," March 16). Cut taxes and all will be well. Sure, the taxes in Baltimore are high. Baltimore is the home of many non-profits that don't pay property taxes. They are institutions that benefit the whole state. How do you solve that problem? Texas and Florida don't have income taxes and have far greater financial problems than Maryland. Maryland is number one in education while Florida and Texas are near the bottom.

As a resident of the Inner Harbor, I was shocked to read the details surrounding the St. Patrick's Day "mayhem" ("St. Patrick's Day violence exceeded initial reports, police dispatch tapes show," May 13). I appreciate The Sun report and Peter Hermann 's excellent investigative journalism. Your front page story, accompanied by extensive play-by-play transcripts, was impressive. Also, I'm grateful Maryland's Public Information Act makes it possible to finally learn the details. Perhaps our city government would rather have had the whole sorry matter swept under the carpet.

I read with interest your feature about Baltimore workers and former citizens moving to Pennsylvania ( "Md. transplants seen as helping to drive growth of York County, Pa.," March 22). I wish you would write about the city dwellers and home owners like me. We occasionally see stories about high-end rehab buyers in the Real Estate section, people who are living in neighborhoods like Patterson Park, Butchers Hill, Federal Hill and Canton. But what about the rest of us who bought in the 1990s?

I drove to Baltimore on Labor Day weekend, parked in the lot of the Dollar General at Washington Boulevard and Martin Luther King Boulevard and went into the store. The sign in the lot said "vehicles parked illegally and non-permitted vehicles will be towed. " This is not too clear, but I figured that since I was a store customer it must not be illegal. I crossed Martin Luther King Boulevard and soon found that I was in the middle of the American Le Mans auto race. This was rather interesting so I stayed for a while and watched.

Just when I thought Baltimore couldn't become less charming, it manages to do so. I've never seen a place that works so hard to ruin what's attractive and fun. To me, Honfest and all associated with it represent quintessential camp. Now the word "Hon" and vaguely associated merchandise have become restricted items ("'Hon' flap flares again as festival time nears," June 4). And we let this happen! Citizens of Baltimore — you should be ashamed! When someone goes to such length to destroy a cute happening that makes Baltimore a fun place to visit, I'm disgusted.

As a resident of the Inner Harbor, I was shocked to read the details surrounding the St. Patrick's Day "mayhem" ("St. Patrick's Day violence exceeded initial reports, police dispatch tapes show," May 13). I appreciate The Sun report and Peter Hermann 's excellent investigative journalism. Your front page story, accompanied by extensive play-by-play transcripts, was impressive. Also, I'm grateful Maryland's Public Information Act makes it possible to finally learn the details. Perhaps our city government would rather have had the whole sorry matter swept under the carpet.

Let's face it. Baltimore is ripe for satirizing. We've probably got more offbeat people, more distinctive edifices, more colorful history and habits per block than any metropolitan area in the country. Oh yeah, and some crime. The folks at Second City Theatricals, a wing of the venerable Chicago-based Second City enterprise, burrowed earlier this season into our little world, with all of its carefully demarcated neighborhoods. The material they gathered from the experience has been fashioned into a customized show that has settled into Center Stage for a long, no doubt profitable, run. "The Second City Does Baltimore" may be a little long for its own good, and may hit some obvious targets in, well, obvious ways, but there is an awful lot of fresh and very funny stuff here.

Never before have I been so sad. Baltimore has been known for some time as Charm City, but the recent controversy over the "Hon" trademark has brought out the less than charming side of many people ( "Demonstrators protest 'Hon' trademark," Dec. 20). Whether you agree or not about the subject, there should be outrage over the use of the social websites to demean and degrade another human being. Most of these people were not interested in facts, they just used the anonymity of their keyboard to pound out words of hate.

This is a tale about Baltimore beer barons, the owner of the Washington Senators, a silver bullet, and how the Orioles got to Baltimore. Now, with the O's generating a buzz as they fight for first place in the American League East and prepare to meet the Washington Nationals for a weekend series in D.C., it seems like a good time to spin it. I heard it some years ago when Dawson Farber Jr., a former executive at National Brewing Company who...

I believe to this day that I accepted the job I was offered at the Evening Sun in 1981 because of the Bromo Seltzer clock. The route from the airport took us right past the downtown tower that (at the time) still defined the Charm City skyline, and I was immediately taken by it. It was retro. It was kitschy. And it seemed real. Just like Baltimore in 1981. Although I'd come to town for an interview at the morning paper, Bob Keller, then the editor of the afternoon paper, was clever enough to snatch me up at the airport.

Joe Queenan is nobody's Mr. Nice Guy. But the deliciously cutting columnist has a soft side for, of all things, Baltimore. In fact in the Wall Street Journal, Queenan rides like a white knight to the city's defense after what he sees as slight after slight from Hollywood. Exhibit A: John Cusack movie "The Raven. " "In the new film "The Raven," innocent people - some of them really nice, innocent people - find themselves buried alive, or garroted, or sliced in half by a pendulum, or missing a tongue, with no reason why such misfortune has befallen them," he writes.

If you're looking for a great new alter ego, try joining Charm City Roller Girls. That's what Silver Spring native Lily Bradford did after frequently attending their events. "I had been living in Baltimore for a few years, and felt disengaged from the city," she said. "I decided to put myself outside my comfort zone and challenge myself to learning a new skill set late in life. " The Bolton Hill resident rolls on two local teams - during the home-team season, she's with the Mobtown Mods fighting for the Donaghy Cup, and right now she's hitting the road with Female Trouble.

Some of the top senior basketball talent in Baltimore will be in action Sunday at the Charm City Senior Classic at St. Frances. The "Unsigned" game, scheduled for 4:30 p.m., features Patterson's Shakir Brown and Dunbar's Evan Singletary on the East squad, while the West will be led by Calvert Hall's Denzell Richardson and Justin Beck and several others. The "Signed" game, set for a 6:15 p.m. tip, includes an East roster featuring St. Frances' Daquan Cook (UNLV)

Peabody Heights Brewery, formerly called Charm City Brewing Company, has signed a lease this month for a bottling plant near Waverly , in the Abell neighborhood. The lease puts it one step closer to becoming the first large-scale brewery to open within city limits in over 30 years. Spearheaded by Stephen Demczuk, owner of Baltimore-Washington Beer Works, and entrepreneur J. Hollis Albert, the brewery expects to be open for business as early as May, though Demczuk says a June launch is more likely.  Peabody will have a 30-barrel brewhouse that its owners hope will eventually produce 40,000 barrels a year of several kinds of beers already made by some of Baltimore's microbrewers.

The Baltimore Grand Prix races into town Labor Day weekend, and we're already planning our city's sporting future. We're curious: What's the next sporting event that should randomly come to Baltimore? The Summer Redneck Games. Yes, these actually exist. And yes, toilet seats are involved. -   Luke Broadwater, managing editor,  b Solo synchronized swimming championships. It's a real sport, in that it was an Olympic event. If that's enough to make it count.

Here's betting the folks who tagged Baltimore as "Charm City" never imagined this. The Baltimore Charm, the newest entry in the two-year-old Lingerie Football League ("Real Fantasy Football," according to its website), will be holding tryouts this weekend at 1st Mariner Arena . As if the poor Orioles didn't already have enough competition. The 10-team league, which grew out of the pay-per-view Lingerie Bowls that have been a Super Bowl halftime staple since 2004, sports seven-player on-field teams.

There's a holiday or something coming up. So we asked, "What's your favorite thing to do on St. Patrick's Day?" Sampling the finest in Irish cuisine, such as poor man's food and blood pudding. Yes, those are the actual names of actual Irish dishes. Luke Broadwater, reporter, The Baltimore Sun Drink to the stereotypes of my ancestors. Anne Tallent, editor, b Meet in the Street at Claddagh's. Kristen and the Noise - my favorite cover band from my days at Delaware - performs on Saturday, and as always, there will be a tent so rain plays no factor.