Museum

Always, there were those lovely old country estates and gracious manor taverns with roaring fireplaces, but in the old days fine dining was associated with the city. Not so anymore. Now, there are more compelling reasons than ever for diners to cross county lines for a good meal. The 50 best county restaurants in Howard County, Anne Arundel County and Baltimore County is a mix of the old and the new, destinations for special occasions and joints for Monday night suppers, the chef-driven and crowd-pleasing.

An exhibit at the Johns Hopkins Evergreen House that was thrown into doubt this week is back on, but without two artworks at the crux of a dispute between the artist and the curator. The two large pieces in question — one depicting a cross, the other a mosaic of the word "Jew" — were offered as part of an outdoor exhibit by Fells Point artist Loring Cornish called "In Each Other's Shoes," to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington.

Baltimoreans who zip up to New York for a weekend often package theater, dining and shopping. Here's a suggestion for the style- and budget-minded: Look, don't shop. A taste for fashion can be satisfied with specialized collections in the city's museums. A sample of clothes and trimmings to be seen in weeks to come:THE MUSEUM OF THE FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, Seventh Avenue and 27th Street. Hours: Noon to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Free. (212) 760-7642.

The Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum has been taking the Glenn L. Martin Company rocket age history on the road to Harford County. Thanks to support from the Dresher Foundation, the museum is offering its outreach STEM education program "From Sand Dunes to the Moon" to third grade classes at Harford County elementary schools. This interactive activity celebrating flight and Maryland's contribution to the pioneering days of manned space exploration is designed to launch excitement for aerospace possibilities as it inspires students to explore the future of aviation while they discover and learn to appreciate the technological wonders of the past.

One afternoon in 1959, I came home from high school to find my mother in tears. "I have bad news," she said. "Mario Lanza died today." I, too, burst into tears, mourning the end of the golden voice that had made Mario Lanza's movies so popular and that had crowned him as the Enrico Caruso of the 1950s. When he died in Rome, he was 38 years old. Flash forward to several months ago. I made my first visit to Philadelphia. There, I discovered not only the Mario Lanza Museum, but also the Mario Lanza Institute, Mario Lanza Park, Mario Lanza mural and Mario Lanza's birthplace.

Mission: To preserve and demonstrate the rural arts and crafts of the 1880-1920 period through educational programs and tours of the museum site, a once-working Harford County farm near the banks of the Susquehanna River in Havre de Grace. The turn-of-the-century farmhouse includes a formal sitting room and a kitchen with a wood-burning stove and icebox. The nearby shops and barn feature craft demonstrations and numerous displays, including tools, milking machines, spinning wheels and looms, as well as carriages, sleighs and other horse-drawn vehicles.

If you long to read copies of old, hard-to-find Jet magazines, or to admire a stamp collection featuring black Americans, visit today's open house at the Howard County Center of African-American Culture in Town Center.The open house, marking the museum's official reopening, takes place from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the 1,900-square-foot museum at One Commerce Center.Regular museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.In October, the museum moved from 10 Corporate Center, near the American Cafe, to nearby One Commerce Center, because it didn't have enough money to stay in the previous location, said Wylene Burch, the museum's founder and director.

When the new Orioles stadium at Camden Yards is inaugurated next year, Babe Ruth's birthplace will be only a fly-ball away. A museum consisting of four row houses has operated at 212-218 Emory Street since 1974, commemorating the great slugger's roots in Baltimore and his career with the New York Yankees.As exhibits have increased and word has gotten around about the museum, the number of visitors has zoomed. Close to 35,000 fans paid homage to the Babe last year. That number is likely to triple at the very least when the Orioles move to the new downtown ballpark.

THE NATIONAL Endowment of the Arts has eliminated five established arts endowment grant programs, including one that specifically provides money for museums to purchase the work of living American artists.Museum directors across the country and working artists say that the museum-purchase program had, in fits and starts over the last 20 years, become one of the most important mechanisms by which predominantly emerging artists reached the crucial plateau of making their first sales to legitimate museum collections.

It may never be known for sure whether the Colony 7 Motel off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway was ever used by spies trying to eavesdrop on the nearby National Security Agency.But the super-secret code-breaking agency apparently thought it was possible. A couple of years ago it used some taxpayers' money to buy the motel and erase a possible security risk.The motel complex, located on Route 32, has now been reopened as the National Cryptological Museum. While NSA itself remains shrouded in mystery, the museum chronicles the historical development of codes from the Middle Ages to a recent Cray high-speed computer that contained no fewer than 45 miles of wires.

For the past 158 years, art historians thought that the painter Richard Caton Woodville, the James Dean of his generation, had completed just 19 paintings before he died of a morphine overdose in 1855 at age 30. Now, we know that there were 20. Joy Heyrman, deputy director of development for the Walters Art Museum, recently learned about what very well may be first oil painting that the artist ever created. It's an 1844 portrait of a childhood friend, the surgeon and investigator Stedman R. Tilghman.

One of the ironies of the art world is that for all its important holdings the Baltimore Museum of Art is laying off 14 people in order to balance its budget (" Baltimore Museum of Art lays off 14," April 9). Yet right over the city line, in Towson, the federal government is funding the construction of a new museum to house a collection of unknown value - the artifacts of the Ridgley family of Hampton. To make matters worse, the site chosen for the building is in an area of running streams and granite deposits.

Citing numerous accounts of neighborhood disturbances, the Baltimore Board of Liquor License Commissioners ruled not to renew the license of the Museum Restaurant and Lounge in Mount Vernon after four hours of deliberation Thursday night. Liquor board chairman Steve Fogleman said management of the Museum - which set up in the former Brass Elephant space - presented the business as an “upscale restaurant” when applying for the license, but it was in reality a nightclub. He refuted Museum owner Walter Webb's claims from earlier this month that Webb had been unfairly targeted because he is one of the few African American business owners in Mount Vernon.

Don't be alarmed if you hear steam whistles and other loud noises on Saturday, May 4 - they will be emanating from the Fire Museum of Maryland's 36th annual Steam Show . Along with the steam fire engine demonstrations, the show features Dalmatians and draft horses, demonstrations of late-1800s horse-drawn fire engines and rides in an 1899 hose wagon. There will be firefighting contests for the kids, steam engine models to examine and a magician performing inside the museum.

Mavis S. "Sherry" Sheedy, a retired Baltimore public schools art teacher and longtime museum docent, died April 4 of congestive heart failure at Carroll Hospital Center in Westminster. The Reisterstown resident was 74. The daughter of a civil engineer and a registered nurse, Mavis Sherron Grantham was born and raised in Whitney, Texas, where she graduated in 1956 from Whitney High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1960 in Spanish from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and later earned a master's degree in art education from Towson University.

It's April showers, dear readers, But things to do are stacking up. The Susquehanna Museum of Havre de Grace at the Lock House reopens April 13 (Saturday), 1-5 p.m. for the season. Free admission. Contact 410-939-5780, email: lockhousemuseum@gmail.com or visit their site at http://www.thelockhousemuseum.org. A bargain meal! The Boy Scout Troop 967 will prepare its spaghetti dinner and bake sale for April 13 (Saturday), 4-7 p.m. at the Havre de Grace United Methodist Church, Congress and Union Avenue, adults $7, seniors $6, children $4. Eat in or carryout.

In the arts community, they sometimes jokingly refer to Black History Month as "black hysterical month," because of the mad scramble to find black art and presenters to be part of the annual celebration.But at the Baltimore Museum of Art, officials expend a lot of energy to avoid the annual February rush."At our museum at least, focusing on the African-American community's history and origins is not isolated to Black History Month," says Brenda Richardson, BMA's deputy director for art. "We try to have events celebrating black culture throughout the year."

Frances T. Kidder, a former real estate saleswoman, museum docent and world traveler, died Thursday from a stroke at the Blakehurst retirement community in Towson. She was 96. The daughter of Bayard Turnbull, a prominent Baltimore architect, and Margaret Carroll Turnbull, an educator, the former Frances Litchfield Turnbull was born in Baltimore. She was a direct descendant of 18th-century Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, who also was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Needlework expert Kathleen Franetovich will be at Hays House Museum in Bel Air from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 14 to talk about schoolgirl samplers, decorative needlework created by young girls in Early America. For more than 120 years in Maryland, from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, needlework was considered an indispensable subject in a young girl's education. Girls as young as 6 labored over their samplers as a means of teaching them the rudiments of reading and writing.