Mount Vernon Place

So much for typecasting. Days before her Baltimore appearance, you call the actress who played flighty Ginger on Gilligan's Island and while you don't expect her to be preening before the hypnotized skipper, she still could throw you a wink, a nod, a saucy turn of phrase. "I'm just looking at the Iranian president answering questions. Oh, it's heavy duty. Man, I really wanted to see this," says Tina Louise on the phone from her New York apartment. If you go Tina Louise will be reading her children's book, When I Grow Up, at the Baltimore Book Festival today at 1 p.m. at the Storytelling Tent in the west park of Mount Vernon Place.

The 36th annual lighting of the Washington Monument is scheduled for tonight in Mount Vernon Place, in the 600 block of N. Charles St. A holiday village with food and crafts vendors will open in the west park about 5:30 p.m., with stage entertainment at 6 p.m. The lights on the monument are scheduled to be turned on just before 7 p.m. by Mayor Sheila Dixon and Bart Scott of the Ravens, with fireworks to follow.

This week150 years ago in The SunJan. 17: THE POST-OFFICE-- This important agency of the public convenience must be efficiently conducted, or no system that legislation can devise will be attended with success. No rates of postage, low and uniform as they may be, will satisfy the public without the great essential elements of the departments, security and dispatch.100 years ago in The SunJan. 19: A meeting of representative men of Baltimore was held last night at the home of Mr. Theodore Marburg, 14 West Mount Vernon Place, to organize the Municipal Art Society, the object of which is to foster art in all its branches in this community.

H. Lee Hirsche, a Baltimore artist whose fanciful and $l whimsical watercraft sculptures incorporated a variety of materials, died Nov. 27 of a stroke at a hospital in Westerly, R.I. He was 71.Mr. Hirsche (pronounced "Hershey"), a resident of Mount Vernon Place, was stricken while visiting Block Island, R.I., with his family.In a review this year of a local exhibition of Mr. Hirsche's works, Sun art critic John Dorsey wrote, "Lee Hirsche makes ship models, but no one should think Titanic.

THE THIRD annual Baltimore Book Festival takes place tomorrow and Sunday in Mount Vernon Place amid feelings of satisfaction: The number of local publishing houses keeps increasing and two big bookstores will open here shortly.When Barnes & Noble's megastore opens Oct. 6 in the Power Plant at the Inner Harbor, Baltimore will finally hit the mainstream of contemporary book merchandising.A city which has never had a shortage of first-rate writers will finally have a first-rate book store. (A rival megastore, operated by the locally owned independent Bibelot chain, is scheduled to open later this year at the American Can complex in Canton.

The same men who watched the walls of North Baltimore's Boumi Temple rise 39 years ago stood by yesterday as a demolition crew started razing the fraternal order's old home.Just as a light rain let up at 8 a.m., a Potts and Callahan grapple's mechanical claws chewed up the first steel beams and concrete chunks from the former Shriner potentate's office in the 4900 block of N. Charles St., purchased by Loyola College as the site of a $20 million recreation center."It's hard to see it go," said Frank Stewart, a former Boumi Temple potentate who now lives in Timonium.

Theodora Hanslowe, whose friends call her Teddy, returns Tuesday to her alma mater, Peabody Conservatory of Music, for a preview of her New York recital debut.Hanslowe, an award-winning mezzo, made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1994 as Rosina in "The Barber of Seville."For her Weill Recital Hall program later this spring, she has chosen songs by Henry Purcell, Arnold Schoenberg, Francis Poulenc and George Gershwin, and the second cycle of "Liederkreis" to poems of Joseph Eichendorff by Robert Schumann.

Jamie Hunt steps out of the shadow of the Washington Monument and into the warm, bright September sun like an explorer about to cross the Sahara on foot.He's the Indiana Jones of the Baltimore Book Festival. The director of the Mount Vernon Cultural District, Hunt leads the Great Book Hoof, which may not be as exciting as the search for the Temple of Doom, but it's a lot more literate. And you don't usually have to contend with any snakes.The Book Hoof is the literary tour Hunt leads each year at the book festival, which opens for the third year on Saturday and runs through Sunday, all around the base of the monument at Mount Vernon Place.

IT'S BILLED as the "hottest ticket in town," but it's also one of Baltimore's most important preservation events.The Great Fire Ball is a black-tie gala held every year to commemorate Baltimore's rebirth from the Great Fire of 1904, which destroyed much of the downtown business district.Set this year at 9 p.m. March 8, the event is also the primary fund-raiser for the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion at 11 W. Mount Vernon Place, the largest and most expensive townhouse constructed in Baltimore.The historic mansion is actually three large residences that were combined in the 1800s.

Trim and impeccably groomed, Geri Broccolino is perched on the edge of an ivory love seat in her pink and blue sitting room describing her first Flower Mart. Fresh rum buns, pressing crowds, lumpy crab cakes are all recalled, and with each image, Broccolino laughs. "It was sheer beauty."What Broccolino doesn't mention is the sweat and toil involved in turning Baltimore's annual homage to spring into an aromatic, picturesque festival that ages well in memory. She doesn't mention it, though she knows all about the work involved.

I was awaiting a bus home one evening in the summer of 2008 when a movie crew commandeered Mount Vernon Place. Dressing room trailers and vintage automobiles turned Charles Street into 1953. I never got to see the star, Renee Zellweger, that evening, but recently I caught up with the finished product, entitled "My One and Only." The film producers selected Baltimore to shoot that film, but the story placed the action in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and points west. While watching their work, I got swept up in trying to link the story line with the actual Baltimore landmark or location.

Ah, spring in Baltimore. I used to think it had arrived when I saw the first lacrosse stick of the season, or maybe when the first tulips sprouted in Sherwood Gardens. But now I think I've identified the ultimate sign that spring has sprung in these parts: People start squabbling over Mount Vernon Place's lovely green squares and just how to enjoy them without, um, actually walking all over them. On Thursday, the city threw up a virtual keep-off-the-grass sign on Mount Vernon's west park, forcing WTMD radio station to cancel its First Thursday concert that evening.

Not all landmarks are beautiful. For more than 90 years, what is now a fire-blackened, gutted building at the northwest corner of Charles Street and North Avenue has been a rusty anchor of this intersection. Never a beauty, it seemed in need of paint, a new roof and a better reputation. But even as it rests, due for demolition, it deserves to have its life story told. Some people call it Goldbloom's, after a popular apparel shop that occupied the ground floor for decades. I grew up hearing it called the Hotel Chateau but never knew of any rooms being rented there.

A long-vacant basement coffee shop near Mount Vernon's Washington Monument could become a 7-Eleven convenience store over the objections of community activists, who are enlisting city support to buy the spot as a tourist information center. The former Buttery restaurant, at the southeast corner of Charles and Centre streets, faces the Washington Monument, Walters Art Museum and Peabody Institute. Negotiations are under way with its owner and a convenience store operator to open a 24-hour-a-day retail operation, which under zoning rules is a permitted use. "I'd rather have a 7-Eleven in my own backyard than on Mount Vernon Place," said R. Paul Warren, a Park Avenue resident who is vice president of the Mount Vernon-Belvedere Improvement Association.

Two women blocked from ordination as United Methodist ministers because one is a married lesbian and the other disagrees with church rules on gay rights received "extraordinary ordination" in Baltimore yesterday. Organizers said it was the first such action by dissenters hoping to change Methodist policies toward gays. Neither woman will be eligible for assignments to lead Methodist churches under existing policies, but they both believe their new credentials will make them eligible for other jobs within the church, or as ministers in other denominations.

Some of the state's most spectacular gardens will be on display over the next three weekends as part of the 2008 Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today, the public can visit 11 sites in Kent County, including Eastern Shore plantation homes and 19th-century townhouses in Chestertown. Tomorrow, the tour comes to Baltimore's Mount Vernon district from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and includes Washington Monument and Four Parks, the Knabe House, 4 East Madison Inn, Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, Asbury House, the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion and a restored 19th-century home on West Mount Vernon Place.

There are mornings when I say to myself, do I really need another Flower Mart? Then I get my walking shoes on, pace down Charles Street, bless the lack of traffic (streets closed) and wind up in the right mood. Call it the Flowermart effect. Are there people who come out only three times a year for these annual festivals? I saw people yesterday morning around the Washington Monument who show up only for Flower Mart, the Christmas lighting of the monument and maybe the September book festival.

To those who insist the exhibition installed in Mount Vernon Place by students at the Maryland Institute College of Art is not really art, I can only say that all art is about ideas, particularly the art of today. In the past, art was easy to recognize because it almost always took the form of an image: The Venus de Milo is a representation of ideal beauty, just as a Raphael Madonna encodes a complex religious theology. These images are beautiful to look at, but we understand them most deeply in terms of the ideas they represent.

Carpenter Mike Cutsail and a colleague stood outside their work van on North Charles Street yesterday and gawked at the procession passing before them. Roughly 40 to 50 people, some in costume - like the man wearing a plastic top hat with daffodils sprouting from it - were sweeping past them, maneuvering push brooms and mini piles of trash. Musicians followed along, keeping the pace. "We're just wondering what the hell they're doing," Cutsail said. "It's not every day you see a bunch of people sweeping in the streets."

The saga of the golden fence -- the contentious artwork that blocked access to Mount Vernon Place in an attempt to make people see the historic park anew -- started coming to an early end this week after vandals removed bolts from several of its sections, making it unstable. A team of Maryland Institute College of Art students, faculty and staff took down the fence surrounding the east and west quadrants of the park Thursday. They plan to remove the rest, as scheduled, today. The opening act for a nine-work exhibition by MICA students, the fence went up March 17 and met with harsh criticism from perturbed parkgoers, dog walkers and a City Council member who objected to the exhibit blocking access to the park, a National Historic Landmark District.