Peale Museum

After being closed to the public for nearly two decades, a new day may be dawning for the Peale Museum on Holliday Street if its planned restoration as the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture comes to fruition. "I think it has lots of significance to Baltimore. It had been the city's first City Hall, an African-American school and where gas illumination was used by a company that eventually became BGE," said Walter Schamu, a partner in the firm of Schamu, Machowski, Grego Architects, which prepared restoration plans with consulting architect James T. Wollon Jr. "It's a handsome building that can be saved and given a new life," said Schamu.

After being closed to the public for nearly two decades, a new day may be dawning for the Peale Museum on Holliday Street if its planned restoration as the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture comes to fruition. "I think it has lots of significance to Baltimore. It had been the city's first City Hall, an African-American school and where gas illumination was used by a company that eventually became BGE," said Walter Schamu, a partner in the firm of Schamu, Machowski, Grego Architects, which prepared restoration plans with consulting architect James T. Wollon Jr. "It's a handsome building that can be saved and given a new life," said Schamu.

Who exactly was Henry W. Miles, a Baltimore commercial painter who left behind a delightful legacy of handmade miniature carriages, wagons, horsecars and buses?Curators at the Peale Museum are seeking the life story of the elusive gentleman-artisan who died in Baltimore in 1936. For nearly 60 years, the man must have spent his evenings and free time laboriously carving replicas of the vehicles he'd seen around town -- the old horsecars that rumbled past Franklin Square (Fayette and Carey streets)

The helmet looks much the way it did when Morris Hunt wore it into a burning building on Leadenhall Street in the summer of 1965. He managed to get out, but he didn't survive. His daughter, Drue Jenkins, came to the Baltimore Fire Museum in the old station of Engine 6 on Gay Street, lifted the helmet off a shelf and put it on her head. She was just 2 years old when her father died, she said, and the helmet is "all I have left of him. " On Saturday, Jenkins and others came to the museum for Old-Timers Day, not just to reminisce about the station built in 1853 — it still has a hayloft from the days of horse-drawn engines — but to worry that the exhibition was the last.

THE DEMISE of the ambitious but overextended Baltimore City Life Museums is about to become final. The last caretakers of its collections, padlocked since June 21, are being terminated. What started in 1931 as the Municipal Museum of the City of Baltimore is about to go out of business.Museums die so infrequently that few in Baltimore have a clear idea about what comes next. What, for example, will now happen to the privatized museums' eight sites?The likely answer is that those sites -- ranging from the Carroll Mansion and 1840 House to the Shot Tower and H.L. Mencken House -- will revert back to city control.

IT WAS THE FIRST building in the United States constructed as a public museum. It was one of the first structures in America that used gas for lights. It served for more than four decades as Baltimore's City Hall. It later became the first public school in Baltimore for African-Americans.Now the historic Peale Museum at 225 N. Holliday St. is about to have a new use -- but exactly what that might be is unclear.Construction crews had been scheduled this month to begin converting the 1814 building to office space for employees of the Housing Authority of Baltimore City.

...TC Hung Liu's presence in Baltimore brings us more than her own exhibit, "Can-ton: The Baltimore Series." Because of her work here, three portraits by the great early American painter Charles Willson Peale, all associated with the city but never before shown publicly in Baltimore, are on view as part of an exhibit at the Peale Museum.They are portraits of the family of Capt. John O'Donnell, who initiated Baltimore's trade with China in 1785 and gave the name Canton to the part of East Baltimore that has borne it ever since.

Seeking to avoid overspending their annual operating budget, directors of the Baltimore City Life Museums have eliminated six of their 46 positions and shortened visiting hours at the Peale Museum.Five employees were let go last week, including the Director of Interpretation, a curator position; the head of the Museum Resource Center; and three building management employees, according to marketing and public relations coordinator Jamie Hunt.In addition, the museum's director of institutional advancement, Steve Himmelrich, has left the staff to start his own public relations business and will not be replaced.

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.

History settled long ago into a comfortable residency at Baltimore's Peale Museum.The Federal-style Holliday Street building, just north of City Hall, indeed feels like the oldest building constructed as a museum in the Western Hemisphere.It's one of Baltimore's glories, a cabinet of curiosities full of oddments and surprises, every day and Sunday-only objects, the rare and the common, always reflecting the city's history.The Peale Museum's latest offering is a new show entitled "Mermaids, Mummies & Mastodons: The Evolution of the American Museum."

I totally agree with the "Readers Respond" letter from Roz Ellis Heid, responding to the city's idea of possibly selling, leasing, or maintaining 15 historic City landmarks ("City eyeing sale of 15 sites," March 21). As Ms. Heid, Baltimore Heritage Executive Director Johns Hopkins and The Sun article note, a number of volunteer groups, including Friends of Orianda House (Crimea Mansion), Baltimore City Historical Society (Peale Museum), and the Roland Water Tower Preservation Campaign have invested money and thousands of hours to preserve and restore these historic landmarks.

We are nearing the 14th anniversary of the closing of the Peale Museum, when Baltimore became one of the few historic cities in the world without its own history center. Also lost to the public - although carefully preserved by the Maryland Historical Society - was the entire treasury of local history formerly displayed and accessible at the Peale, which was rightly regarded as "Baltimore's Smithsonian. " The good news is that MayorStephanie Rawlings-Blakerecently announced that her administration intends to give greater recognition to Baltimore history as a critical element of its economic development and cultural enrichment strategy.

It is the clearest sign of the direction historic preservation may be going: Even a building called Government House, a 19th-century mansion in Baltimore's Midtown neighborhood, is now in private hands. While some history buffs were horrified to learn last week that cash-strapped Baltimore is considering the sale or lease of 15 other historic properties — prompting fears that "For Sale By Owner" signs would sprout on such icons as the Shot Tower and the War Memorial Building — preservationists say that, increasingly, this is what cities and states must do to save them.

As a member of Friends of President Station and a neighborhood resident who has worked tirelessly with many others to create the Baltimore Civil War Museum, I'm incredulous this historic building is now on the "neglected" list ("City eyeing sale of 15 sites," March 21). It's a unique museum/education venue not far from City Hall. It might behoove our local movers and shakers to stroll down to the harbor and have a look. The Civil War Museum is hardly neglected. Hundreds visit each month, admire the artifacts we've gathered over the years, watch a film, enjoy a personalized, guided tour and then shop for National Park's sanctioned Civil War souvenirs.

Ruth Garbis, a homemaker who enjoyed writing poetry, died July 18 of heart failure at Stella Maris Hospice. She was 91. Born Ruth Rochkind in Baltimore, the daughter of a Russian immigrant father and Baltimore-born mother, she spent her early years on West North Avenue. During the Depression, she moved with her family to Richmond, Va., and worked in her parents' grocery store and luncheonette. It was while living in Richmond that Mrs. Garbis developed her lifelong commitment to civil rights, when she gave up her seat on a streetcar to an elderly African-American woman, engendering the wrath of the motorman.

Faced with a tight budget, Baltimore officials have told the curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House to draw up a plan for self sufficiency, one that nevermore depends on city funds — though it is not entirely clear whether that's possible. This news is dark, dire and woeful, but it is not unexpected. Since the City Life Museums folded in 1997, Baltimore has had a handful of historic venues — such as the Peale Museum and the H.L. Mencken House — that have either gone dark or maintained only sporadic hours.

Julia Eleanor Jones, 82, a longtime Baltimorean who worked at the Peale Museum and found her life's thrill flying small planes, died July 17 in Wooster, Ohio, from complications related to Alzheimer's disease."

David McIntyre, a retired Baltimore Museum of Art official who gave a major art collection to the Peale Museum, died March 15 of heart disease at Broadmead. He was 81.The former Charles Village resident joined the museum staff in 1960 as registrar and in 1964 was promoted to assistant director of administration, a position he held until he retired in 1975.Mr. McIntyre was a companion for many years of the nationally known abstract artist Keith Martin, who was described as an "old master of modern art."

The recent closure of the Baltimore Public Works Museum reminds me of the financially fragile nature of our quirky little shrines to Baltimore's historic past. I spent many a Sunday afternoon on Holliday Street at the old Peale Museum, which closed nearly 14 years ago and remains vacant today. The old No. 8 streetcar passed the Peale on Holliday Street, near City Hall and Zion Lutheran Church. As an 8-year-old, I was fascinated by one of its pictures, then regarded as part of the cultural legacy of the city of Baltimore.