City Life

The recent robbery of two women at the Roland Park Shopping Center created a media stir. Although I have lived in Roland Park most of my life, I am always surprised by how some occurrences that go with little mention in other neighborhoods create citywide attention if they happen in Roland Park. Not that a robbery of two city restaurant-goers, one a senior citizen, should go unnoticed. If all robberies received the attention of the recent one in Roland Park, perhaps more criminals would be caught.

How was your Valentine's Day? If it was, well, complicated, the Family Research Council, a conservative, Christian advocacy group in Washington, D.C., would probably not be surprised. Last month, the FRC's Marriage and Religion Research Institute released its third annual Index of Family Belonging and Rejection. The index reports the percentage of 17-year-olds who have been raised in households headed by two married, biological parents. According to MARRI, fewer than half (45 percent)

AS the excitement over the deal to save the Baltimore City Life Museums' collection fades away, the mayor and the Maryland Historical Society should rethink one important point.While it's great that at least a third of the museum's 20,000 objects that interpreted Baltimore's history and culture will be saved and exhibited by the historical society, they did not represent the best of City Life's legacy and mission.The 'Irsay Room'Many of the objects the media and historical society executive director Dennis Fiori is pleased to have saved -- such as tire planters and a bathroom door from a now-defunct local restaurant labeled the ''Bob Irsay Room'' -- offer little more than kitsch appeal.

Over the last 10 years leaders from the private, public and nonprofit sectors have begun to transform Baltimore's approach to its future. Traditional public subsidies have given way to strategic investments and tough decisions, using market-based techniques to reform our schools, rebuild our population, and make our neighborhoods safe, clean, green and vibrant. Now, the General Assembly must do its part to strengthen the city's future by passing legislation to reshape how the city makes improvements to its public school buildings.

STUTTGART, Germany -- By the tens of thousands, from late morning to the icy darkness of the early winter nights, Germans have been flocking this month into the center-city blocks of Stuttgart, visiting the 250 elaborate stalls set up for Europe's biggest and perhaps grandest Christmas festival.For the children there are puppet shows, wooden toys, candies and gingerbread houses, miniature steam-train rides, and vivid images of Christmas light and cheer. Adults in search of gifts can find delightfully carved figures, jewelry and pottery, beeswax candles, painted and stained glass.

|TC IN THE WAKE of the Baltimore City Life Museums unexpected closing last Saturday, much, of course, will be lost. For the few brave staffers who weathered a year of indecision and layoffs caused by a $2.5 million debt it means succumbing to unemployment without notice.For Baltimoreans, it means that we no longer will be able to enjoy exhibits filled with icons associated with the city: blue crabs, rowhouses, street peddlers, white marble steps, the Shot Tower, the 1958 Colts, the cultural renaissance of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In a last gasp to stay alive, City Life Museums has laid off several employees and further reduced hours in hopes of slowing the mounting multimillion-dollar debt that will force the institution to shut down unless the city agrees to a bailout.The Baltimore museum laid off seven people and reduced the hours of another person this week, leaving 19 full-time staff members.The Shot Tower on Fayette Street is closed indefinitely.The nine-site museum also will open the H. L. Mencken House in Union Square from noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays only.

Seeking an entrepreneurial approach for the 1990s, one of Baltimore's premier cultural institutions has severed a 62-year-old tie with the city government and transformed itself into an independent, nonprofit corporation.The Baltimore City Life Museums, which operates seven museums owned by the city, last year quietly became a private entity governed by a 30-member board of trustees.Its 30 employees have been transferred from the city payroll and now work for Baltimore City Life Museums Inc. The board's new president is Frank P. Bramble, chief executive officer of MNC Financial Inc.The change took effect July 1 but was not immediately announced.

THE FISCAL crunch that threatens to close the Baltimore City Life Museums shows that there are just too many local history museums with overlapping focus. The philanthropic and business communities simply cannot support all of them. For years, some experts have been predicting mergers and consolidations.The Maryland Historical Society has scheduled a meeting Wednesday to explore whether it can help ease the City Life Museums' crisis. The society is particularly concerned that if City Life is forced to sell its collection of paintings by Rembrandt Peale, the works should remain in Maryland.

THE MARYLAND Historical Society is the big winner in the liquidation of the Baltimore City Life Museums, which was forced to padlock its doors June 21.It will add to the society's collection 58 paintings by members of the Rembrandt Peale family, thus becoming the biggest repository of Peale art anywhere. The historical society will also acquire and display in its Mount Vernon buildings the rest of the City Life memorabilia.That's the good news. The bad news is that the future of various City Life buildings is uncertain -- the Shot Tower, H. L. Mencken's rowhouse, the Peale Museum, Carroll Mansion and a renovated iron building named just last year in honor of the late Morton K. Blaustein.

Through a stroke of good luck and perfect timing, Polly and Terry Smith became residents of Federal Hill six years ago. "We were wandering around town one day and saw the 'For Sale' sign on this house," Polly Smith remembered of the spacious, end-of-group home she now shares with her husband, Terry. "I lived in other cities before, and I have always loved city life. " Just as the couple thought there was no way they could afford the three-story brick home, they were approached by an interested party prepared to buy their Dulaney Valley Colonial home on Loch Raven Reservoir should they ever wish to sell.

Recently, I attended a crowded meeting in which the citizens of Patterson Park roasted and grilled the City Health Department and the Parks and Recreation Department for their plans to install 96 parking spaces in Patterson Park ("Rawlings-Blake calls for park study group," Oct. 3). The plans sounded as if they were conceived by suburbanites who are afraid of cities at night and would never live in Baltimore. All of their assumptions about city life and the reverence we have for Patterson Park were completely un-informed.

Baltimoreans who witnessed his odyssey unfold will remember the first 12 years of the 21st century as the Michael Phelps era. If you mark the life of this community by our shared experiences and our heroic figures — the sources of civic pride that keep us from despairing and sinking into the Patapsco — there's no getting around Phelps. Some might prefer to call it the Ray Lewis era because of the way that larger-than-life linebacker and his Ravens so dominated the region's sports scene, winning a Super Bowl in January 2001 and then giving us hope for another Lombardi Trophy in almost every season since.

If you're used to watching an Orioles game in the quiet of a family room, then watching one at Camden Yards can be unsettling - fellow fans yelling in your ears, maybe dropping a profanity here and there. If you rarely walk on city sidewalks full of people, it can be a strange experience, especially if there are panhandlers or mentally ill wanderers in your path. If you're almost always with people who look like you, then being in a diverse crowd can be weird, even frightening. It was always thus, but never more so than in the last few decades in the United States.

Whether they live in Baltimore or its suburbs, whether they're here every day, once in a blue moon or never at all, everyone has an opinion, everyone has prejudices, everyone constructs their own reality about the city. For some, it's a dangerous urban "hell hole" with a deserving "Third World profile. " No talk-radio bigot used those cruel and racially charged terms. Two college professors, one from Johns Hopkins and one from Loyola, did - and in a 2008 essay that affirmed in a national publication what television viewers had seen for years in the prime-time entertainment that exploited Baltimore's complex human problems: poverty, ignorance, violent crime, drug addiction.

Forgive me for probably being in the minority on this issue, but I just wish the Baltimore Grand Prix would spin its wheels elsewhere ("New Grand Prix woes," April 17). It seems that the ability to corral capable, supposedly responsible people to run this race is somewhat elusive. In a perverse way, it makes me happy every time the race hits another roadblock. It's truly beginning to feel like this event is not a good fit for our fine city. I have personally been an opponent from the first time I heard about the city making a serious attempt to bring an IndyCar Series race here.

The city's quirky collection of marble steps, Formstone and television sets that have been mothballed since the closing of the Baltimore City Life Museums last summer won new life yesterday under a bailout by another museum and $2 million from the city.The Maryland Historical Society will take over the City Life collection as early as next year under a deal that keeps the artifacts in the public eye while leaving historic landmarks such as the H. L. Mencken House with an uncertain future.

Nancy Brennan, executive director of City Life Museums for the past 12 years, is leaving Baltimore to take a job to start a museum in Bermuda that will exhibit the island's early settlements, its maritime archaeology and the evolution of diving.Yesterday, Ms. Brennan, whose love of diving goes back 20 years, said, "I've been given a very unusual opportunity to work in an area that I've been interested in as an avocation."City Life Museums' board announced yesterday that Ms. Brennan will be replaced by Assistant Director John W. Durel.

I was jumped last Friday night. Around 11 p.m., while reaching for my keys to enter my apartment building, I was grabbed from behind, hit in the face, thrown to the ground and punched repeatedly a few feet from my door. My teenage assailants surprisingly made no effort to take anything from me and ran off laughing as I gathered my bearings and staggered inside. Though I had a fat lip, a bruised cheek and a pounding headache, my encounter left me with no lasting scars. Instead, my experience put me in a reflective mood.

In Sunday's column, I mentioned the shifting of what we consider downtown Baltimore from the old central business district to the city-within-a-city, Harbor East, created by "the Bread Man. " John Paterakis, who made a fortune baking hamburger buns for McDonald's, invested in the old industrial parcels between the Inner Harbor and Fells Point. His investment, sweetened with tax breaks and other incentives from the city, has paid off big-time, and even those of us who ridiculed the long-gone Schmoke administration's decision to give millions to a millionaire have to acknowledge it. But Harbor East today is hardly the quaint, three-story townhouse neighborhood Mr. Paterakis had originally envisioned and pitched to nearby communities.