Industrial Exchange

Mission: To provide women in financial need with an avenue to earn income through the sale of quality, handmade goods and to preserve the historic building at Charles and Pleasant streets, which has been home to the organization since 1887. To support its mission, the Woman's Industrial Exchange, founded in 1880, operates a tearoom, bakery and gift shop. The nonprofit organization is one of 30 such exchanges still in operation throughout the nation.Latest accomplishments: After nearly going out of business in 1997, the exchange last year met its fund-raising goal of $150,000 through individual donations, a doll-house raffle and corporate and foundation support.

Hedy Hill, a stockbroker who led a successful effort to save the Woman's Industrial Exchange in the late 1990s, died of complications from an infection Sunday at Manor Care Ruxton. The Timonium resident was 69. Born Margaret Hedy van Reuth in Baltimore and raised in the Belvedere Square area, she was the daughter of Arthur van Reuth, an engineer, and the former Margaret Opitz, a volunteer. She was a 1960 Eastern High School graduate and earned a degree in business at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was a member of the Kappa Delta sorority.

Wilhelmina Godwin, who wrapped cupcakes and sold baby sweaters until she was 91, died Wednesday of heart failure at Golden Age Nursing Home in Woodbine. The Rodgers Forge resident was 93. A sales clerk, greeter and venerable presence at the Woman's Industrial Exchange for nearly 40 years, Miss Godwin kept a guest book of celebrities who visited the downtown Baltimore tearoom and shop, many of whom she invited via personal notes she delivered to the Mechanic Theatre's stage door. She scanned the city's newspapers for visiting theatrical celebrities and wrote them invitations to lunch at the exchange.

The author and filmmaker Nora Ephron, who died Tuesday night, had a famous love affair with food. Ephron was the maven who knew where to get the best coffee cake, cappuccino and smoked salmon in New York City. She didn't just back into the idea of making the (kind of) Julia Child biopic, "Julia & Julia," her last movie. The movies Ephron made are full of food-love. There's Meg Ryan's "high-maintenance, dressing-on-the-side instructions to waiters in"When Harry Met Sally" -- I just want it the way I want it. " That same movie, of course, is responsible for one of the most famous restaurant scenes in movie history, set in Katz's Delicatessen.  A cookbook writer is the heroine of "Heartburn," the movie version of Ephron's novel into which she threaded some of her own favorite recipes.

A FEW MONTHS ago, I received that dreaded mint green slip, the summons to appear at the courthouse for jury duty. Everything in life is timing; and the idea of appearing at 8:15 a.m. at Lexington and St. Paul in December held no appeal. So I made the best of it, packed my unaddressed Christmas cards and a book for the day of waiting. A trip to the city courthouse points out the aftermath of all the city's crime news constantly before your eyes. It is a downer of all downers - to see young men being led around in shackles while their grandmothers sit crying on the oak benches in the corridors is not my recipe for an uplifting day. But maybe a hard dose of reality at this time of the year is not such a bad idea.

Carrie Margaret Geraghty, whose 75 years as a waitress in downtown Baltimore included a quarter-century at Charles Street's Woman's Industrial Exchange, died of an infection Friday at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Towson resident was 95. Asked to fill in for two weeks at the landmark exchange in the summer of 1972, she stayed on and continued serving chicken salad platters and charlotte russe desserts for lunch for the next 25 years. She retired two months' shy of her 90th birthday. Born in Baltimore, Carrie Willback was raised on Aiken Street and attended St. John's Parochial School.

DUE TO HISTORIC demand, tuna rarebit is making a comeback. As is chicken jelly with deviled eggs, and floating island.These dishes were once crowd-pleasers at the tearoom of the Woman's Industrial Exchange at 333 N. Charles St. in downtown Baltimore. And they are being resurrected during the week of April 6 as part of the institution's anniversary of its 116th year of operation.The idea, according to Diane Coleman, executive director of the exchange, is to fill the tearoom's 121 seats by offering lunchtime customers a taste of the past.

The Woman's Industrial Exchange's cook releases one of her guarded secrets: "I put a little pinch of sugar in everything, even the shrimp salad."It's a sweetness that spills all over the exchange, in the taste of her yeast rolls, the miniature roses on the smocked girls' dresses or the kindly manners of the tearoom's waitress corps.It is the plain and reassuring cooking of Dorothea Day Wilson that beckons a following back and back again to the exchange, which will reopen today at Charles and Pleasant streets after being closed for a month.

With its aura of being displaced from an earlier time, the Abell Room of the 117-year-old Woman's Industrial Exchange seems the ideal place for a talk on family history and genealogy.The Abell Room has the look of being decorated by a turn-of-the-century Baltimore eccentric, with the ceiling unaccountably covered with wallpaper patterned with Eastern song birds, a gallery of photographs of generations of working women and a portrait of an early president watching over it all from above a townhouse mantel.

The waitresses at the Woman's Industrial Exchange will start serving their trademark chicken salad and tomato aspic lunches again Aug. 4 after a reorganization of the nonprofit institution's board and the kickoff of a campaign to rescue the financially ailing landmark.Using the theme, "Our damsel is in distress," the 115-year-old tearoom and fancy handmade goods workshop will appeal for cash contributions and increased patronage of its restaurant. The exchange, at Charles and Pleasant streets, is tended by a staff of waitresses who wear pastel uniforms and voluminous white aprons.

The historic lunchroom at the Woman's Industrial Exchange reopened Tuesday. It is now called the Woman's Industrial Kitchen, and it's operated by Irene Smith, owner of the popular Souper Freaks food truck. The downtown luncheon room, famous for its chicken salad, tomato aspic and starched-apron waitresses, had it rough in the past decade, closing and reopening under a string of outside operators, some of whom tried to run it like in the old days, some who didn't. Smith has restored the lunchroom, if not literally, then in spirit.

Jack and Zach Food has opened in the lower-level Woman's Industrial Exchange where Sofi's Crepes was until recently. Jack is Jack Neill, 22, and Zachary is Zachary Schoettler, 21. They are alarmingly young. Baltimore natives, Neill and Schoettler met while attending the Baltimore School for the Arts, where they were in the visual arts program. Jack and Zach Food doubles a cafe and a commissary/sales outlet for the guys' pickled vegetables, sausages and vegetable patties, which they've been selling at area farmers' markets.

The Woman's Industrial Exchange, famous for its tomato aspic and its no-nonsense waitresses, will reopen in November under the no-nonsense management of food truck owner Irene Smith, who says she is determined to honor the tearoom's traditions that Baltimore held so dear. "The tomato aspic is already on the menu," said Smith, "along with chicken salad. " Smith, who has made her culinary mark with her popular food truck, the Souper Freak, plans to open the day after Thanksgiving, and she hopes to ride the retail wave through Christmas.

The Dogwood Cafe 333 N. Charles St., 410-962-8560. Hours: 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. Monday-Friday Eating a locally grown lunch from a brown bag has become easier for downtown dwellers now that the Dogwood Cafe has taken over the food operations of the Woman's Industrial Exchange on North Charles Street. It is open only on weekdays and only for lunch. While the restaurant, which officially opened this month, is still adding features, customers can order soup, sandwiches and salads as takeout fare or order food at the counter, then sit at the few tables in the rear of the building.

Her glass of champagne stood next to a platter laden with chocolate treats and miniature cupcakes as Shari Rolando turned toward the oval stand-alone mirror and surveyed the ivory gown. She swished to her left and then right, stepped away and walked back up, examining the dress with a square neckline and bodice beadwork. "I think I like the other one better," Rolando said to her friend Filipa Goarmon. It was the seventh or eighth gown the Middle River resident tried on yesterday afternoon in a large upstairs room of the Woman's Industrial Exchange, searching for the one that screamed "perfect" for her October wedding in Chicago.

The chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission regularly consulted with a utility industry lobbyist on how to keep an electricity deregulation plan on track in the face of a huge rate increase, e-mails obtained yesterday by The Sun show. The messages from February 2005 show how lobbyist Carville B. Collins and Public Service Commission Chairman Kenneth D. Schisler shared sensitive strategy and discussed personnel decisions within the agency. The messages raise questions about the independence of an agency charged with regulating prices set by power companies.

Folks who know and love it cherish the anachronisms of Baltimore's Woman's Industrial Exchange: The ladies' lunches, the hand-crafted baby items, the suggestions of a kinder, gentler way of life. Making the 19th-century nonprofit a vibrant part of the 21st century, however, has proven challenging. How do you freshen the fare without sacrificing the charm of the original recipe? After closing for 11 months, the North Charles Street institution opened its doors again this week, much the better for its extensive kitchen and lunch room renovation.

The final lunch patrons arrived hungry, in search of those elusive yeasty rolls, the waitresses attired in aprons with big bows and of course, the tomato aspic they'd known since the days when Charles Street had two-way traffic. They were emphatic that Charles and Pleasant streets' bastion of old-style cooking needs to reopen. Roslyn DuPree, the restaurateur who had operated the Woman's Industrial Exchange's tea room since late 2003, withdrew this week after noting declining patronage.