Visitors Center

When Baltimore's tourism ambassadors announced plans last week to create a new visitors information center near the Inner RTC Harbor, they did so with a sense of urgency.Since early 1990, the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association has run a 2,000-square-foot visitors center on the first floor of the Marsh & McLennan Building at Pratt and Howard streets. But the lease there will expire late next year, and the city has no replacement lined up.The convention association has been allowed to rent space in the Marsh & McLennan building for $1 a year under a five-year agreement with Stone & Associates, the local firm selected by the city in the 1980s to recycle the cast-iron-fronted building.

Anne Arundel County, including Annapolis, led the state in tourism dollars in 2011, according to a report by the travel research company Tourism Economics, the local visitors bureau said this week. The Annapolis & Anne Arundel County Conference and Visitors Bureau said that according to the report, nearly 5.6 million visitors to Annapolis and the county spent nearly $3.2 billion, a 7.2 percent increase over the $3 billion generated in 2010. The sum represents transportation, food, hotel and other spending.

IF YOU HAVEN'T seen the U.S. Capitol for awhile, a trip there now will be quite a shock. The view from the east side, where the Supreme Court sits, has been almost completely obscured. Wooden barriers hide earth-movers digging a hole three-fourths the size of the Capitol itself. The ostensible purpose of this massive, three-year construction project, which could cost taxpayers as much as $1 billion, is to create a visitors center that will make a tour of the Capitol "more accessible, comfortable, secure and informative for all."

Singing workshop The Sons of the Severn Barbershop Chorus will sponsor a free multiweek workshop for men who want to become better choral singers, beginning March 21 at Trinity United Methodist Church, 1300 West St. in Annapolis. Course includes instruction on proper posture, breathing, resonance and diction. Sessions will take place from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursdays. Final session will include an opportunity to perform with the chorus in front of family and friends. All course materials, including sheet music, will be provided.

A planned visitors center on Otter Point Creek in Edgewood has gotten a go-ahead from federal officials, who have earmarked $600,000 to build it."It's a tremendous asset, environmentally, for Harford County," said Bob Staab, director of the county Department of Recreation and Parks. "It's important for people's knowledge."The center will be used to educate Harford and upper Chesapeake Bay residents about the bay and its estuaries, said Dr. Torrey C. Brown, secretary of the state Department of Natural Resources.

More tourists and day-trippers flocking to Annapolis could park their cars and walk to the harbor under a proposal to open a visitors center in a historic house next to the Gotts Court &L Garage.In a move that could ease downtown traffic congestion, a committee has targeted a Colonial-era house in the first block of West Street for the visitors center. The house backs onto the 540-space garage under construction behind the Arundel Center.The chalk brick house, leased until recently by Gaines McHale Antiques Ltd., is ideally suited because it is within steps of Church Circle, said Charles Lamb, a retired architect and co-chairman of the city's Visitors Center Committee.

WASHINGTON -- At one point, it sounded like a good idea -- an underground visitors center designed to make the Capitol more hospitable to the hordes of tourists tramping through each year.But its price tag -- $71 million -- is causing indigestion among many lawmakers, wary of triggering a new wave of public fury targeted at Congress and its supposedly high-living ways."I don't hear any of my constituents demanding a new visitors center," said Representative Dan Glickman, D-Kan., author of a Nov. 1 letter signed by 49 of his colleagues opposing the new facility.

No more indecision. No more trailers. Baltimore has settled on a site for a permanent visitors center, and the glassy pavilion should open its doors to the Inner Harbor for the 2003 tourist season. Architects at Design Collective Inc. outlined to a city design panel yesterday their vision for a center on the grassy knoll just south of Harborplace's Light Street Pavilion. Eventually, the city will redo the entire stretch on the west bank of the harbor as a park. The see-through, boxlike center will invite tourists inside to collect information on the Inner Harbor and other Baltimore attractions.

We have PSINet Stadium. Could we handle a PSINet Constellation Pier on the Inner Harbor?The Constellation Foundation has enlisted the Baltimore Ravens' sales and marketing team to help find a corporate sponsor to donate $1 million to the old warship in exchange for the right to bolt its name to the ship's Visitors Center on Pier 1."We believe this naming opportunity offers significant marketing value," said foundation Chairwoman Gail Shawe. "The recent Ravens deal with PSINet demonstrates their expertise and we are confident they will be equally successful on behalf of the Constellation Foundation."

THE EMOTIONAL PULL of Gettysburg, which is about to celebrate the 136th anniversary of the epochal battle, is immense. Civil War sites in Western Maryland, from Carroll County to Hagerstown, hope to capitalize on the pilgrims drawn to Gettysburg 30 or 40 miles away. So it's difficult to buy the argument of merchants in the Pennsylvania town that they'll be hurt if the National Park Service builds a planned $40 million visitors center a half-mile farther from the town's business district by 2003.

NASA is launching a rocket from Wallops Island, Va., Tuesday to test technology for future missions, and it could be visible in the early evening sky. Scientists will fire a payload 80 miles above the Earth and, at two different points, release two different types of vapor trails. Such vapors are used in other missions to study atmospheric patterns. The  mission will be shown live on Ustream  beginning at 4:30 p.m. at http://www.ustream.com/channel/nasa-wallops, and the flight center's visitors center will also be open.

Baltimore's Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, site of a key battle in the War of 1812 and birthplace of "The Star Spangled Banner," will be in the spotlight during many of the Star Spangled Sailabration events June 13 to 19. Officials say they expect 20,000 or more people to visit the star-shaped fort on each of two days, June 16 and 17, for shows by the Blue Angels and for fireworks and a concert on the evening of June 16....

Eastern Shore readers -- and anyone with a computer -- can watch five rockets being launched 65 miles into the atmosphere Wednesday night into Thursday morning. NASA is planning to hold a launch between midnight and 1:30 a.m. at the Wallops Island facility in Virginia, just south of the Maryland line. The visitors center there will open at 10 p.m. Wednesday for spectators. The rockets are being used to study the winds of the jet stream. Once the rockets reach the intended height, they will release milky white clouds that scientists will be able to see from space.

Ever since Tina Cappetta Orcutt and her family moved to Maryland last summer, she says, her 9-year-old son Adam has been paying close attention to Maryland license plates, especially the commemorative tags that tout the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. "He'll go, there's another Fort McHenry fan!" whenever he spots one of the red-white-and-blue plates featuring the Star-spangled Banner and the fort, Cappetta Orcutt says. "I don't correct him. " Cappetta Orcutt recently became superintendent of Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, one of Baltimore's best-known attractions and the scene of the battle in 1814 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became the national anthem.

Wildlife Visitor Center in Laurel hosts Film Festival The National Wildlife Conservation Film Festival runs Nov. 4-6 in the Aldo Leopold Auditorium at the National Wildlife Visitor Center at Patuxent Research Refuge, 10901 Scarlet Tanager Loop. The festival offers more than 20 short and feature natural history and wildlife documentary films representing nations across the globe. Films are screened in a two-hour series, with each series showing from two to five films. Friday's films shown between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday showings begin at 10 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. Cost for each series is $8 per adult and $6 for students and seniors.

Harriet Tubman was one tough lady. She escaped slavery, fleeing an Eastern Shore plantation. She was a leader in the Underground Railroad, traveling at night under the North Star — probably along the Choptank River — hiding at safe houses along the path to freedom. During the Civil War, she saw duty as a spy, assisting Union forces that raided plantations and freed slaves along the Combahee River in South Carolina. Tubman played an outsized role in American history, a contribution that is recently (and belatedly)

Tourism officials are looking into renovating the failed Hall of Exploration at the Columbus Center for use as Baltimore's visitors center at the suggestion of the mayor and a University of Maryland official. "We are exploring from a feasibility standpoint how we can convert that space into a functioning visitors center and maintain the important programming elements we need," said Carroll R. Armstrong, president and chief executive officer of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association.

Last year, 3,500 people passed through the Baltimore Area Visitors Center during January and February. This year, that many stopped in during the three-day weekend that ended Monday.The difference is partly a result of the visitors center's new location: the two-story Constellation building on the Inner Harbor promenade, just south of the Pratt Street pavilion of Harborplace.With the warship Constellation closed for repairs, the Constellation Foundation allowed the visitors center to move into the first-floor space previously occupied by the ship's gift shop and orientation gallery.

Warm temperatures and clear skies brought weekend crowds to the new $15 million visitor center at Fort McHenry, temporary home to an original draft of "The Star-Spangled Banner. " Among the popular new attractions are the draft of the poem by Francis Scott Key that became the national anthem, on loan from the Maryland Historical Society until June 14, Flag Day. A new film, which uses graphics and re-enactments to show viewers about the War of 1812, Baltimore's role in it and how Key came to write the first few lines of the national anthem, is another upgrade that proved popular among visitors.

We mean no disrespect to John Hanson, a Colonial-era planter from Charles County whom most Marylanders haven't heard of, much less most Americans. He was a dedicated champion of American liberty from Great Britain and served in a variety of political posts during the Revolution and its aftermath, culminating in a one-year term as the first president of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. But the idea of replacing him as one of Maryland's two representatives in the U.S. Capitol's Hall of Statuary with Harriet Tubman is a good one. Hanson shares Maryland's allotment of two statues with Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and arguably the most important figure in the state during the era. No one is considering him for removal from the hall.