Visitors Center

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."

By year-end, the head of the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association hopes to break ground on a $4 million, state-of-the-art visitors center designed to tackle a longtime goal of tourism officials -- getting people to stay longer."

GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- Gettysburg National Military Park officials like to ask visitors a riddle: What is visible from all but one place in the 5,989-acre park?The answer: The privately owned 309-foot National Tower at Gettysburg, on the Baltimore Pike approaching the borough line. The structure can be seen from anywhere except the tower top itself.For years the federal government has wanted to tear the structure down, saying it detracts from the visitor's experience at the battlefield, where historians say the tide of the Civil War turned in favor of the Union.

Like mourners at a funeral, friends and neighbors gathered at the Robert Long House Museum in Fells Point yesterday to share hugs and regrets after a morning fire tore through the second floor of the historic building.The one-alarm fire charred the second-floor offices of the house, built in 1765, and the oldest existing residence in Baltimore. The first-floor museum sustained water damage but, for the most part, was in good shape.The Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill and Fells Point, which purchased the house in the early 1970s, was in the midst of a project that would have linked the house with a new visitors center next door and a maritime museum.

The Gettysburg battlefield will undergo a large-scale restoration with the demolition of the aging visitors' center, which sits on the ground where soldiers fought the three-day battle that changed the course of the Civil War.In an announcement expected today, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt will lay out a plan to make the land look as it did when about 163,000 Union and Confederate soldiers met in bloody conflict July 1-3, 1863. Fences will be erected and wooded areas restored at the site, the center of the Union line on the last two days.

GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- There's another war raging on the rolling terrain where Pickett's Charge, the deadliest and most horrific encounter in the three-day Civil War battle of Gettysburg, occurred in July 1863. This one is between a small town and the Washington bureaucracy and the forces of commercialism and preservation.Causing the commotion are plans for a visitors center to accommodate crowds of 1.7 million annually at the 5,900-acre Gettysburg National Military Park and the adjacent National Cemetery where President Lincoln gave his immortal address.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN said of Gettysburg, Pa., 135 years ago, "The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract."Too bad some didn't listen.Structures added in and around the historic Civil War battleground have detracted from it. The 310-foot-tall National Tower, for example, looms like a mutated Erector Set near the cemetery where Lincoln gave his enduring address.The "Cyclorama" center, the circular home of Paul Philipoteaux's 356-foot painting of the conflict, was poorly located by the National Park Service 40 years ago on a significant slice of the battlefield.

Leno's looking for 'guest stars'If you've ever dreamed of being Jay Leno's guest on "The Tonight Show," now's your chance. At NBC Experience, which recently opened at NBC headquarters in New York, visitors can participate in everything from a studio tour -- given since 1933 -- to reading the first script from Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater" or being the center of attention in Leno's world.The 20,000-square-foot television attraction has interactive stages where, along with Leno, visitors can be videotaped chatting with Conan O'Brien, helping Al Roker with a weather forecast and joining Bob Costas for a sports report.

Harbor visitor center has served city, needs prominent siteAlthough it was exciting to read about plans for a new Constellation visitors center in the Inner Harbor, "Visitors center design approved," (June 25) I write to remind readers that, for several years, the much-maligned building now slated for removal has served the Inner Harbor as the real visitors center.While the Constellation has been in dry dock, it was the place visitors came to get their bearings. On summer weekends, they came by the thousands for information on hotels and restaurants, bus schedules and ball games and for restrooms and wheelchair rentals.

MANASSAS, Va. -- This battlefield, like so many, is almost tangibly serene.On a sunny morning, the music of insects and birds is more evident than the intrusive drone of distant highway traffic.Visitors walk these grounds in respectful silence, as if walking through a church. They read the historic markers and monuments and try to imagine what it was like.But no matter how hard you try, it is impossible to conjure up the thunder and shouting, smoke, horror and death that violated this place not once, but twice.

He flew through the air like a modern-day Mary Poppins or a balloon in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Over Harborplace, over the Baltimore Visitor Center, a 7-foot-2-inch bronze statue of William Donald Schaefer was lifted by crane and touched down on the west shore of the Inner Harbor Thursday in preparation for its official unveiling on Monday, Schaefer's 88th birthday. Sculptor Rodney Carroll fashioned a harness that he used to carefully position the 1,100-pound statue onto a marble slab bearing dates noting Schaefer's years of service as City Council member, mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland and state comptroller - 52 years in all. The statue and surrounding garden, on city-owned property between the Light Street Pavilion of Harborplace and the visitors center, are a gift to the city from construction magnate Willard Hackerman.

A few times a week, Lenwood M. Ivey leaves his small office on the ninth floor of the Equitable Building and strolls the two blocks to the city Finance Department to sign checks drawn up by a city clerk. As president of the Baltimore City Foundation, he puts his name behind several million dollars each year for programs that the city identifies as worthy. The foundation - a private nonprofit formed in 1981 to raise money, primarily to benefit city programs for the underprivileged - helps pay for projects such as a summer jobs program for youths, funeral expenses for homicide victims and home smoke alarms for the needy.

Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and leader of the underground railroad, might finally be getting long-awaited recognition. The state approved yesterday a $208,000 purchase of 20 acres on the Eastern Shore to create a visitors center and educational complex devoted to the woman who led many slaves to freedom. The Tubman center, which could cost more than $12 million, will be on Route 335 near Key Wallace Drive in Dorchester County, near where Tubman was a slave before escaping. Gov. Martin O'Malley led the Board of Public Works in approving the project.

Baltimore's Fort McHenry should have a new visitors center in time for the bicentennial anniversary of the War of 1812, with the help of an $11 million federal grant, officials announced yesterday. The money -- included in a recently approved transportation bill -- is expected to help complete decades of planning to replace a building that National Park Service officials believed was too small and limited from the time it opened in 1964. "This is really a very exciting day. We've been working for this for a long time," said Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, who helped secure the funding.

Amid cheers from state, county and postal officials, Sykesville formally opened its visitors center and the first-of-its-kind satellite post office in a reconstructed railroad tower. To mark the inaugural celebration last week, the post office, operating on the first floor of the building, issued commemorative cancellations on postcards picturing the Old Main Line Visitor Station. "This retail outlet, under contract to the Postal Service, provides us a flexible means to maintain a postal presence in this community," said Gordon Seabury, district manager of marketing for the Baltimore area.

The Board of Estimates approved yesterday the awarding of a $3.5 million contract for the long-delayed Baltimore Visitors Center, clearing the way to break ground on the project this month. "The greatest beneficiaries of the visitors center will be the attractions outside the Inner Harbor," said Andrew B. Frank, executive vice president of Baltimore Development Corp., the city's economic development agency. "Imagine the potential for 15 million people to be exposed to the latest exhibit at the Walters or the expansion planned for the Great Blacks in Wax [Museum]

The long-delayed visitors center planned for the west shore of the Inner Harbor is likely to miss most of another tourist season after a setback yesterday that will force the project to be rebid. The Board of Estimates rejected three bids because they did not properly document an intent to comply with minority participation requirements, said Andrew B. Frank, executive vice president of Baltimore Development Corp., the city's economic development agency. A fourth bid was rejected because it was over budget, Frank said.

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."

Baltimore still is a year away from getting a new master plan for the Inner Harbor, but one important element already is falling into place. The city's Design Advisory Panel has approved preliminary plans for a $4.6 million visitors center that will be constructed on the west shore of the Inner Harbor, just south of the Light Street pavilion of Harborplace. Drawings by Design Collective Inc., the architect, show a glass pavilion containing exhibit space, a small theater and staff offices.

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.