Life Museums

The United Sanitary Chemical Co., a Baltimore-based operation since 1930, will donate a sign that it has used for advertising for the past 43 years to the Baltimore City Life Museums during a ceremony tomorrow at the museum.Made of neon and porcelain enamel, the sign originally featured a flashing figure whose mop moved back and forth.It has hung near the northeast corner of Howard Street and North Avenue for 33 years.Triangle Sign Co., creator of the sign, has agreed to deliver it to the City Life Museums' warehouse so it can be restored and eventually displayed.

Delta, in Southern York County, Pennsylvania, will soon be the place to be for Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad fans when the Old Line Museum continues its tradition of bringing this famous and well-loved rail line back to life and all of its former glory each Sunday in June by photographs, memorabilia and tales of years gone bye. This will be the 38th year the museum has so honored this famous short line. Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Month, as it is known to its many loyal followers, began in the Peach Bottom Rail Way Station on Bond Street in Delta, Pa., in 1976, the year that the Old Line Museum was founded.

|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.

The crowds and the noise, the live chickens at Yankelove's Poultry, the bagels at Wartzman's and the cream cheese at Smelkinson's, the sidewalk fruit stands and pickle barrels ... they've all vanished from East Lombard Street, once the heart of Jewish East Baltimore. All that remains is a trio of delicatessens - Lenny's, Weiss' and Attman's - and, just off Lombard on Lloyd Street, B'nai Israel, the sole surviving active synagogue, and the Jewish Museum of Maryland. But all the memories, and a happy reunion of former East Lombard Street regulars, converged on the museum yesterday.

ANYONE WHO WONDERS why the Maryland Historical Society may merge with the financially troubled Baltimore City Life Museums should visit exhibits the two institutions have created for the 200th anniversary of the city's incorporation. They complement one another.The City Life Museums' Bicentennial Homecoming Center at 33 South Front Street opens today. It celebrates the hundreds of thousands of people who came to Baltimore in search of a better life. The main emphasis is on immigration. Baltimore, after all, was the second largest point of entry between the 1860s and 1917.

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 OPENING of the Morton K. Blaustein Center transforms the City Life Museums -- including the Carroll Mansion, 1840 House and Center for Urban Archaeology -- into a single outstanding attraction near the Inner Harbor and the soon-to-be Port Discovery Children's Museum.This is a major experience, costing substantial admission and requiring substantial time. It will inspire comparison to similar venues like the Museum of the City of New York, the City of London Museum and the Carnavalet in Paris.

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.

Battered by debts, competition and lack of city funds, Baltimore's City Life Museums will shut down indefinitely today as officials look for some way to save Charm City's repositories of history.Trustees of the eight museums, which feature exhibits on such Baltimore staples as Formstone, painted window screens and White Tower diner counters, said yesterday that they hope the closings will be only temporary and that the collection can be preserved."The museum determined that planning to achieve its mission can best be accomplished if the facilities are temporarily closed to the public," Board of Trustees Chairman Francis A. Contino said in a written statement.

FRANKLY, we don't understand what the fuss is all about. No knights in armor emerged last year to save the bankrupt City Life Museums; yet panic seems to be rising now because Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke is seeking other uses for the vacant buildings.Some organizations have informally expressed an interest in taking over parts of the former City Life main campus on Front Street, which includes the nearly unused Morton K. Blaustein exhibition center, the Carroll Mansion, 1840 House and the Center for Urban Archaeology.

From a secluded garden in downtown Baltimore, shaded by four ailanthus trees, there's hardly any sense of the high-rise office buildings several blocks away or the traffic whizzing by on the Jones Falls Expressway. The garden once bordered the estate owned in the early 19th century by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Much later, it became part of the Baltimore City Life Museums campus, a public attraction that told the story of Baltimore's history before the museums closed abruptly in 1997.

A 6-by-6-foot yellowing photograph, mounted on sturdy cardboard, sold three times yesterday at Baltimore's first Heritage and Museum Yard Sale, only to come back from the parking lot each time because it didn't fit in any vehicle. The circa 1940 image of railworkers leaving the Mount Clare shop finally went to a Fells Point antiques dealer, when sale organizers offered to deliver it, rather than return it to storage.

Along the jagged coast of the Chesapeake Bay, African-American slaves once paddled dugout canoes to fish, visit family and, on dark nights, row to safe houses on the Underground Railroad. Yesterday, a canoe thought to have been made by Maryland slaves went on a different type of journey - it was lifted by crane into a new museum in Fells Point that celebrates the contributions of African-Americans to maritime industry. The canoe, which historians estimate to be between 150 and 200 years old, had nearly disintegrated before being discovered by a man in Talbot County.

What's shaking at museums these days? Just about everything. At the Lincoln museum in Springfield, Ill., the floor trembles and cannons belch smoke in the theater while in the library wispy holographic ghosts haunt the artifacts. At the Pirate Soul museum in Key West, Fla., visitors experience the sounds and tumult of a high-seas battle after being menaced by an animatronic Blackbeard. At the "Cosmic Collisions" show at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, guests feel the simulated jolt of a meteorite hitting Earth 65 million years ago. The biggest kaboom you hear in these places isn't from artillery or space rocks.

FOR YEARS, a tiny group of history buffs and railroad enthusiasts campaigned for the preservation of President Street Station. And for good reason. The Civil War's first casualties occurred in the vicinity of that landmark terminal near Little Italy. And even before the current station was built in 1849, Frederick Douglass and others boarded northbound trains at the location in their escape from slavery. For the past three years, Friends of the President Street Station have operated a small museum in the restored building.

Joanne, Hurst and John Hessey were aware that the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 had started in their great-great-grandfather's dry goods business, but they knew little else about the blaze that destroyed nearly all of downtown over two days. But after attending a tour and lecture on the historic fire sponsored yesterday by the Fire Museum of Maryland, they were more enlightened about the fire -- and less embarrassed about their family's role in it. Among other things, the three siblings learned that the fire was probably started by a passer-by who flicked a cigar or cigarette through a hole in a sidewalk grate used for underground loading, and not by negligence of an employee of John E. Hurst & Co. "At first, you feel, 'Don't tell anybody you're related because it started there,' " Joanne Hessey, a 49-year-old financial analyst, said of the fire.

The Urban Landscape column Jan. 27 about the Baltimore City Life Museums contained incorrect information about the late Morton K. Blaustein, former president of the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation. Mr. Blaustein, who died in 1990, was the brother-in-law of David Hirschhorn, the foundation's current president.The Sun regrets the errors.A leader in the effort to create a full-fledged "Museum Row" on the east side of downtown Baltimore will be commemorated in a $5.8 million exhibition center to be built starting this spring.

Baltimore City Life Museums were christened a dozen years ago, in the midst of downtown's celebrated renaissance, a testament to the city's rich history and the sense of optimism over its future.The museums closed June 20, quietly and abruptly, in the year of Baltimore's bicentennial, a victim of apathy and management miscues in a civic landscape of increased competition for attention and money.As city leaders and museum officials began assessing City Life's prospects, they and others took stock of what went wrong at the nine-museum repository of important and quirky artifacts of Baltimore's past.

Baltimore is selling part of the dormant City Life Museum properties to a Baltimore County couple who plan to open a 15-room bed-and-breakfast, a restaurant, an art gallery and a 180-car garage on the downtown site.The city will keep ownership of the Carroll Mansion and Shot Tower and return them to their former status as revered historical museums, averting a bitter battle over the future of the sites with historians and preservationists, including state Comptroller William Donald Schaefer.

He may be Maryland's new comptroller in Annapolis, but William Donald Schaefer has wasted little time letting everyone know his heart is still in Baltimore.On Monday, moments after he was sworn in before a cheering crowd in the State House, Schaefer called for the state to take over the Baltimore Convention Center.Yesterday, even as he began scrutinizing state contracts, Schaefer had his staff prepare a letter urging Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke not to sell some of Baltimore's most treasured historical properties that made up the failed City Life Museums.