By Rafael Alvarez, David Dudley, John Ellsberry, Lionel Foster, Richard O’Mara, C. Fraser Smith, and Michael Yockel


photo by J.M. Giordano


Spend any length of time in Baltimore and you will happen upon the uncanny—stranger-than-fiction characters, hidden places, scraps of half-forgotten lore too flat-out odd to live anywhere else. From Edgar Allan Poe’s still-puzzling last hours to the exact formula for the bittersweet chocolate sauce once served at now-vanished Maison Marconi, there are mysteries here unlikely ever to be laid to rest. Instead, they accrete over the generations, coral-reef style, as new curiosities pile up upon the old. To take a measure of the unseen forces at work in our midst, we asked a handful of local scribes to peer down into the city that lurks just beneath the surface. Here’s what they saw.



The Narrowest Alley in Baltimore

Near the Safeway in Canton—along the 1000 block of Binney Street, where Roberts Packing House once stood and my mother played with bushel baskets as her mother skinned tomatoes and snipped beans during the last depression—stands the most narrow of all alleys in Baltimore. It’s just wide enough for a skinny Catholic school kid to walk with a modest Easter basket. Yet somehow the heavyset Polish women were able to drag a garden hose through it out to the street to squirt down the gutters. And the drunks stumbling home from Aggie Silk’s gin mill didn’t have to reach out very far to find something to hold on to.

Later, during middle-of-the-workday dates with women unfamiliar with the manifold warrens of Crabtown, I would treat them to snowballs and lead them through the alley by the hand to peek over the cinderblock wall behind 2729 Dillon Street and say, “That’s where my mother used to take a summer bath in a washtub back when FDR was king …”

—Rafael Alvarez




Waltzing With Henry
At the Pratt Library, David Donovan searches for H.L. Mencken’s lost chords.

Starting in 1904, the legendary newspaperman Henry Louis Mencken presided over an assembly of musicians, mostly amateurs, that came to be called the Saturday Night Club. They usually played classical music, leaning toward the Germanic, as did Mencken. After the music came the beer, the food, and the conversation, all assuring decades of success for the weekly gathering.

The club disbanded in 1950, owing to Mencken’s failing health. The sound of its ensemble, the sometimes brilliant chatter of its members, disappeared with all the beer and schnitzel they consumed. Its last member, Peabody Conservatory composer Louis Cheslock, who was also the club diarist, died in 1981.

So what do we have to recall the activities of this assembly of accomplished men? Cheslock’s memoir, for one; a peculiar Herald Shield, the club’s symbol, for another. And the music they played, which has intrigued David Donovan for nearly two decades.

Donovan, a library associate at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, has undertaken to explore the fifty-four boxes of sheet music, printed scores, and manuscripts that had been slowly disintegrating through the decades in the deepest, dimmest chambers of the Pratt. They had been donated by the surviving members of the club in 1951, displayed briefly, then entombed.

Donovan is a birdlike man, skinny, big-eyed, slightly bowed at the shoulders, with a small smile that tends to ignite a similar response from anybody he aims it at. He’s also a serious musician (seven years a bassoonist in the U.S. Army’s Continental Army Band) and a collector of more than four thousand discs; he appears with other music experts on the WBJC program Face the Music. He first learned of the blue boxes lurking in a locked cage in the library’s lowest stacks in 1991 and has been intrigued by them ever since. “I’m trying to get a feel for the dynamic of the club through the music they played,” he says. This material, he adds, is not all weighty stuff. “It contains lighter novelty pieces, dances.”

He says he has discovered original music composed by club members—“music that has only been played in the club, and which nobody in the outside world has heard.” To Donovan, the club was “a secret society,” and the scores it left behind provide a glimpse of its hidden ways. And he wants to hear it live. “I have a good eye, but not much of an inner ear. I can read it, but I need someone to play it for me.”

To that end, Donovan is planning, with Edward Polochick and the Concert Artists of Baltimore, to hold a performance of the Saturday Night Club’s music at some point in the future. (The library also is exhibiting some of the music, along with Cheslock’s diary, this August through September 12, Mencken Day.)

Among the six hundred or so pieces of music in the collection (Brahms, Beethoven, and other familiars), Donovan has encountered Nocturne from Songs of the City by Theo Hemberger, its lyrics originally written by Mencken as poems. Hemberger, the conductor of the Germania Maennerchor (one of the many German singing troupes in Baltimore during the era), also wrote a symphony in E flat for the club. Gustav Strube, the Baltimore Symphony’s first conductor, turned in a foxtrot. Cheslock composed The Vodka Waltz and dedicated it to the club, decorating the sheet music with caricatures of its members. Adolph Torovsky, conductor of the Naval Academy Band, produced half a dozen pieces, including May Dreams Waltz, a title some playful club vandal scratched out and changed to Mae West Dreams Waltz.

(They were like that, some of them: Donovan found a copy of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King similarly renamed In the Hell of the Beer King.)


He hears the music: Pratt librarian David Donovan with scores from the Saturday Night Club, H.L. Mencken’s informal society of music-and-beer enthusiasts. Behind him, the club’s “Herald Shield.” | photo by J.M. Giordano


The original material is in the romantic vein, Donovan says. “They are tonal, like Schubert, very pretty, not dissonant.
“The music talks to me,” he continues. “When I pick up a piece that hasn’t been used for so many years, you can see how they changed it. They skipped entire pages. Take Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ [from Strauss’ opera Salome]. Well, they might have cut a couple of veils out of it,” he laughs. “Maybe they wanted to get to the food, the beer, the conversation.”

That the club dealt so cavalierly with the canon might suggest disrespect. But Mencken was knowledgeable and strongly opinionated about music: He forcefully insisted that the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, by itself, turned serious music in a new direction. He learned to play piano as a child, and though no prodigy, he was diligent. Later, he wrote waltzes, marches, and the score for a musical comedy; as an adult he published lyrics for such popular songs as “That’s His Business” (1900) and “The End of it All” (1904). Music also influenced Mencken’s writing: The “strain of the musician,” literary critic Edmund Wilson said, enabled Mencken to transfer his musical ideas into extraordinary prose.

But the Saturday Night Club was a pleasure club, not a gymnasium for the perfection of the tonal art; good food and beer with friends (especially during the “pestilence” of Prohibition) were surely its rewards. Mencken himself suggested as much in a filmed interview by Sun journalist Donald Kirkley in 1948. H.L. was uncommonly humble in recalling his musical role: “I played second piano. I’m not good enough to play the other [first piano],” he said, adding, “I never practice, don’t want to acquire a technique. It’s foolish for an amateur to get too good … It becomes an obsession … I want music for pleasure.”

The primacy of this pursuit is evident on the club’s Herald Shield. Donated to the club in 1939 and displayed on a wall in the Pratt’s Mencken Room, the shield offers a clue to Mencken’s exalted role in the club, as it manifests his theory about the Eroica. Four quadrants are separated by a cross of linked sausages. The upper left displays a violin and bow over the first line of music from the Beethoven symphony. At dead center is inscribed the date 1905, the 100th anniversary of its riotous debut in Vienna. Painted on the shield’s upper right is a lobster, beneath that a large pretzel and two turnips, and in the lower left, a seidel overflowing with beer.

So, which of these activities—the music making, the eating, the beer drinking—was paramount?

“The music!”  Donovan’s confident: “It brought them together.”

—Richard O’Mara

On the air: Hear more on this story on the Marc Steiner Show, May 27, on WEAA 88.9 FM.





Little Murders


Dollhouse of the doomed: A miniature murder scene from the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. | photo by Corinne May Botz


You can lead a crime scene investigator to a corpse, but you can’t make him or her think. In fact, the utility of the gee-whiz gizmos wielded by glamour-puss techs on TV shows like CSI depends entirely on whether the homicide detectives poking around a stiff know what to look for—and how to look for it—in the first place.

For the past sixty-plus years, the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death have aided cops in developing the sleuthing skills necessary to solving apparent murders. These eighteen meticulously crafted dioramas of actual death scenes, tucked away on the third floor of the downtown offices of Maryland’s chief medical examiner, were conceived, designed, and painstakingly fabricated in the 1940s and 1950s by Frances Glessner Lee, who in 1936 endowed a legal medicine department at Harvard University to advance the then-fledgling field of forensic pathology. The dollhouse-like tableaux, constructed on a 1-inch-to-1-foot scale, depict in excruciating detail the gritty components of real-life murder, suicide, and accidental-death cases: tiny corpses, stabbed, shot, and hanging from ropes; blood pooled and splattered; appliances, food, and furniture resting undisturbed, in disarray, or, to the trained eye, almost imperceptibly askew. In naming her creations, Lee invoked a police dictum: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.” 

In 1945, Harvard launched biannual, weeklong seminars in crime scene investigation led by Lee, who, with other experts, trained police officers from around the nation by using her dioramas as teaching devices. In 1967, not long after Lee died, Harvard shuttered its Department of Legal Medicine, and one of its former professors, Russell Fisher, then Maryland’s chief medical examiner, secured the Nutshells for his office. They’ve resided here on permanent loan ever since, and, though not open to the general public, continue to fulfill their original educational function as part of twice-yearly seminars.

—Michael Yockel





Strange Brew


In the pink: Frosted Crab Soup at the Hopkins Club, one of a handful of private clubs serving this local original. | photo by Tasha Treadwell


The Maryland Club, granddaddy of Baltimore’s private social clubs, offers membership by invitation only, which means most of us have never set foot in the place. This is the magnificent marble pile on Eager Street, a Romanesque redoubt for what used to be called “men of station.” It’s the nation’s second-oldest social club, founded in 1857 by Jerome Bonaparte, son of the younger brother of that better-known Bonaparte, Napoleon. Inside, it’s all oaken beams, roaring fireplaces, and glassy-eyed game mounted on the walls. On the menu, there’s no sign of its storied specialty, terrapin stew, once a hallmark of Maryland cuisine. The state reptile is endangered these days, and the club’s legendary basement turtle paddock, where the live animals were kept before their date with the stewpot, has been converted into an exercise room. But, look—here’s something even more mysterious: “Frosted Crab Soup.” What the hell?

In a city of many crab soups, Frosted Crab Soup is unlike any other. It’s a thickish chilled concoction, pink-hued from its tomato base. Flakes of backfin swim around beneath the surface; on top, a squiggle of what seems to be sour cream. (Is this, perhaps, the “frosting”?) It tastes genteel, rich, ancient. A Google search reveals almost nothing of this dish’s provenance; in 2005, a Helen Heisler of Baltimore inquired about Frosted Crab to the Baltimore Sun’s recipe finder, to no avail. What manner of regional specialty is so obscure that it escapes even the all-seeing eye of the Googleplex?

Ask this of Maryland Club’s executive chef, Curtis Eargle, and you can almost hear him roll his eyes over the phone. “I hate it,” he begins. The recipe was passed to him from his predecessor, Wilfred Paul Crowninshield, who led the kitchen at the Maryland Club from 1979 to 1989. The secret ingredient: “Campbell’s Tomato Soup,” Eargle says. “That’s why I hate it.”

A longtime Maryland Club member, Stuart Christhilf, remembers Chef Paul as an innovative character—Finnish, generously mustachioed, and “a tremendous maker of soups of all kinds,” particularly cold fruit soups, which are popular in Scandinavia. Paul’s original Frosted Crab was tangier than the current version, Christhilf says—more Old Bay seasoning, maybe? Still, it remains an untouchable menu standard. “I’d be fired if I took it off,” Eargle says. He goes through 6 gallons a week in the winter, maybe triple that in the summer. In the insular ecosystem of private-club cuisine, Frosted Crab is popular enough to have expanded its range incrementally—you can find it on the menu at the Hopkins Club and the Towson Golf and Country Club, and the Elkridge Club has a version, Eargle says. But he is certain that the Maryland Club is its birthplace and native habitat. So, why is it called “frosted”?

“Because it’s cold.”

—David Dudley


Frosted Crab Soup
Serves 8

1 can Campbell’s Tomato Soup
10 oz. tomato juice
1 cup    sour cream
Pinch of Old Bay Seasoning
Juice of ½ lemon
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
Dash of Tabasco sauce
1 cup    half-and-half

8 oz. jumbo lump crabmeat
Fresh dill

Combine all soup ingredients and blend well. Chill for 4 hours.

Serve with crabmeat and garnish with the dill.

—Recipe courtesy of Chef Curtis Eargle of the Maryland Club.




Delete
Looking for, and losing, the unseen Baltimorean


photo by Robert McPeak


Perkins Homes is a drab bunker-style public housing project along what might now be considered the edge of Harbor East. Two Asian fusion restaurants, a boutique bowling alley, and a studio of personal fitness instructors share a building just yards from Perkins. If there were a line between the haves and have-nots in this city, this would be the place to look for it.

Last year, while working on a story about an effort to bolster the ranks of African Americans in Baltimore’s middle-income brackets, I cast about looking for a human face to put on the issue of poverty and unemployment. So I headed to Perkins Homes and found Tracy Johnson (I’m changing her name here), a mother of three and grandmother of eight who had lived in or near Perkins her entire life.

Ms. Johnson was over 40 and had only been formally employed for a total of two years. Now she babysat the eight children who played in the courtyard. At noon the kids, none older than 10, were led across the street to the recreation center for a free lunch. I asked Ms. Johnson if she’d ever eaten at any of the many nearby restaurants—Little Italy is even closer than Harbor East. She said no. We talked about how different life could be for people just down the street, and I asked what she thought about her grandchildren’s prospects for the future. She said very simply, “I have no idea.”

My editor was impressed; she thought Ms. Johnson illustrated the depths of Baltimore’s economic divisions movingly. In fact, she did so too well: her exclusion from the economic life around her was so complete, the editor worried, that no effort to retain or attract middle-class blacks seemed to hold out much hope for her.

So, as I wrote a second draft, I thought about Ms. Johnson sitting in her lawn chair, highlighted the childrens’ free lunch and everything before it with my cursor, and pressed delete. Like a director re-casting a film, I replaced her with a former factory worker from Westport who worked his way up a hospital food chain from customer service representative to surgical technician and, finally, registered nurse via two fast-track training programs. My RN made it, but my bet was that, short of some miracle, Ms. Johnson never would. With a keystroke, she disappeared.

Until now.

The irony is that Ms. Johnson and her flock of children looked a lot like my family did twenty years ago. I spent my early years in East Baltimore, fighting similar odds, and only got out because dozens of people, schools, and programs decided not to look away, discard an application, or press delete.

I didn’t create generational poverty, nor did I underfund the few programs I’ve ever heard of that were meant to do something about it. But I can make it all worse by making it invisible.

—Lionel Foster





Lincoln Slept Here


Honest Abe: In1864, the sixteenth president dined and spent the night in this Mount Vernon Place mansion. | photo by John Ellsberry

On April 18, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln dined, socialized with local dignitaries, and retired for the evening at 702 Cathedral Street, the stately Mount Vernon Place mansion of banker and Union diehard William J. Albert. Old Abe had been in town to deliver a speech, now known as “The Baltimore Address,” for the dedication of the Baltimore Sanitary Fair (a fundraising event for Union soldiers) at what was then the Maryland Institute. The Albert property was later owned by the Church of Christ, Scientist and is now home to the publishing company Agora Inc. Today, the Lincoln bedroom is still fairly intact, with its red marble fireplace and tall shuttered windows, but the appointments have clearly changed; furnished with a few computer desks, the room offers no hint that anyone of note ever slept there.

—John Ellsberry





The Searchers


Clued in: William Hyder, Sherlock Holmes aficionado and member of the shadowy Six Napoleons. | photo by J.M. Giordano


The agenda and the atmosphere sound congenial, collegial, and, perhaps, to an observer unacquainted with fictional English detective Sherlock Holmes, a trifle cuckoo. Four times each year, the members of the Six Napoleons of Baltimore, an all-male bastion of local Sherlockian enthusiasts, convene at Squire’s restaurant in Dundalk for a) cocktails, b) dinner, featuring toasts to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, c) a postprandial announcement of recent mentions of Holmes in the media, d) a presentation—a talk, slideshow, or paper—by a would-be Six Napoleon applying for admission into the club, and, finally, e) a group-participation quiz concerning minutiae from the four novels and fifty-six short stories in the Holmes canon. In effect and in practice, the Six Napoleons—they appropriated Doyle’s Holmes story “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” for their name—celebrate, honor, and scrutinize all aspects of the detective whom they sometimes refer to as “The Master.”

Founded in 1946 by a half-dozen Baltimore Holmesophiles, the club has welcomed more than 250 members during its existence, among them prominent attorneys, doctors, judges, bankers, and journalists. There are currently about twenty-five active members. The head Napoleon is dubbed the “Gasogene” (the Victorian-era term for the seltzer bottle that was a fixture in Holmes’ apartment), and the group is governed by what member William Hyder, a retired Sun reporter and copy editor, terms “a shadowy body called The Committee.” The Napoleons emerge from the fog annually for a Holmes seminar, open to the public, on a Saturday each November at the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s central branch. This year marks the thirtieth such gathering.

“There’s such an air of reality about the character [of Holmes],” says Hyder, spokesperson for The Committee. “Although we can’t pretend that Sherlock Holmes is alive, there’s no reason we can’t say that he did live and assume that the adventures really happened. It’s something that you get hooked on.”          

—Michael Yockel         





The Man to See
Is Judge Edgar Silver the most powerful man you’ve never heard of?


photo by J.M. Giordano

In the spring of 1984, Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Edgar Silver got a call from Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., iconic chief lobbyist for the NAACP. Could we talk some time today? Mitchell asked.

They met almost furtively on the street near the courthouse and Mitchell’s office in the Tremont Hotel. Mitchell wanted to discuss a matter of importance to Baltimore’s black community—a political matter, not something a judge should be involved with. Bishop Robinson, a black Baltimore cop, was in the running for police commissioner, the top job on the city force, and trying to get the attention of Mayor William Donald Schaefer. Could the judge help?

Silver said he thought the mayor was committed to the incumbent, Frank Battaglia. But Mitchell kept at him: He’d been told, he said, that the judge was close to Irvin Kovens, Mayor Schaefer’s chief fundraiser and political godfather.

Silver knew the growing black electorate of Baltimore had to be served. The kind of patronage consideration Mitchell was seeking was overdue. Silver said he would do what he could.

Several months later, the judge sat in an auditorium full of dignitaries waiting for Robinson’s investiture when someone beckoned him to the stage. Robinson, a tall and unsmiling man of military bearing, wanted Judge Silver to swear him in.

All but unknown outside political circles, Edgar Silver was for decades the “man to see” in Maryland politics. Using only his engaging personality and a well-tended constellation of friends, the low-profile jurist exerted a comparatively benign influence in patronage matters, rivaling that of the city’s rough-hewn political bosses. He was a put-together man, someone who could get the important parties moving together in the same direction.

Silver is now 85, but people within the political world of Maryland still call him by his first name, Edgar, or simply by his title. “You’ve got your Judge Smith or your Judge Murphy,” Kevin O’Keeffe, a lawyer who worked as a lobbyist for the city, tells me. “But there’s only one ‘The Judge.’”

Silver’s father was a tailor who immigrated from Austria; his Polish-born mother worked rolling cigars. He grew up poor. And political. Politics offered something he wanted: stature, the thrill of doing something important for people who might face the kind of need his family faced, and, perhaps, a taste of the power he saw around him.

He was raised in a mini Democratic clubhouse in the neighborhood around Auchentoroly Terrace near Druid Hill Park (7th precinct, 13th ward, 4th councilmanic district). He loved the subtle, inside game; the wink and the nod; the blue smoke and mirrors. It was to become his life. “It’s a great business,” he used to tell people of politics. “And you don’t have to have an inventory.”

Silver went through the political chairs, winning a seat in the House of Delegates in 1954 by defeating a score of others, including a youthful William Donald Schaefer. Soon after that election, Silver went to Kovens, who had been saying he needed a gentile to run in the southern part of the increasingly Jewish 5th councilmanic district in Northwest Baltimore. Take a look at this guy Schaefer, Silver told the usually scowling, cigar-smoking Kovens. Schaefer was clean-cut guy, a lawyer, an Army veteran—just what Kovens had been looking for. Kovens told Silver to send him around. Thus began a storied political career and the renaissance of a city.

Silver is a slight balding man, possessed of a mirthful smile suggesting an element of irony, or a recollection of how connections—his—made things happen. His circle of friends included luminaries from various power centers in the city: Peter Angelos, principal owner of the Orioles; Senate President Mike Miller; Cardinal William Keeler, now retired; and generations of political leaders. In the words of one of his admirers, Silver had a gift for “creating atmospheres”—putting the right man or woman together with a job or judgeship or issue.

The judge got a special thrill out of convincing a powerful leader that something that leader didn’t like had to happen anyway. For example: A four-term mayor, Schaefer never wanted to leave City Hall. But Kovens wanted him to run for governor in 1986—he didn’t think the cerebral Ben Cardin (now a U.S. Senator) could beat Maryland’s charismatic attorney general, Steve Sachs, another Democrat.

Sachs, as U.S. Attorney, had made life miserable for some of Kovens’ friends. Still, Schaefer hesitated.

Enter Silver, a judge by then. He made all the arguments. But Schaefer demurred. Finally, Silver said: OK, don’t run. I’m sure you’ll have a great time as mayor with Steve Sachs as governor.

Schaefer spun around. What?

He knew, as Silver did, that political life was changing for him. There was a new rising star in city politics: Baltimore City State’s Attorney Kurt Schmoke. Schaefer had done well against black candidates before, but Schmoke—bright, Ivy League-educated, and well organized—was probably an irresistible force. Schaefer relented and agreed to enter the governor’s race.

A few months later, Maryland voters validated Silver’s gubernatorial choice. Baltimore got its first elected black mayor. The Judge had helped both men.

There were those judges—among them Silver’s superiors in the state’s court system—who looked askance at all these political activities. Silver was not a by-the-book sort of guy, but he’s famous for lecturing young lawyers on their responsibility to the law. “Be a lawyer first,” he tells them. Translation: Whatever else you’re doing, stay focused on the law.

At the same time, he thought that if sketchy people were in the way of a solution to some problem, he would deal with them. “He just thought it was better to be an insider than someone who was outside waving his fist,” Schmoke says today.

Judge John Glynn, a former people’s advocate at the Public Service Commission and now a circuit court judge, says he was attracted by Silver’s pragmatism. “I noticed that he was a guy who sought solutions that everyone could live with,” Glynn says. “It wasn’t just process with him. Edgar could work out almost anything. He was very good at it.”

Congressman Elijah Cummings says Silver was like a father to him: The judge helped Cummings perfect his lawyering skills and served as a sounding board when he thought of running for Congress. “We spent hours talking about it,” Cummings says. “He thought I should run. He knew people I did not know. It was very significant for me as an African American.”

These days, Silver doesn’t get to Annapolis as much as he used to. Maybe he’d make it for the final night this year, he tells me, but maybe not. Which does not mean he’s out of the game. He goes to his office in Towson every day, making and fielding calls until mid-afternoon, when he’s off to a physical therapy session. He had a pretty severe health challenge last year, but he’s back at the old stand.

Silver tells me about a young African American woman lawyer who wants to be a judge. He’s helping her, of course. He’s sure she has the right stuff.

“I told her ‘You’re the Michelle of Maryland,’” he says, referring to the new First Lady. Based on his track record, expect this candidate to have “your honor” added to her name in short order.

—C. Fraser Smith





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