The scene looking out from the opposite direction of yesterday’s shot.  The alms house is situated on top of a hill overlooking the valley and, though it’s impossible to make out from this distance, the quarry I mentioned in yesterday’s post is right in the middle of that valley.

We’re moving out of Baltimore today and into Baltimore County.  If you are from out of state, you should know that those are two completely distinct jurisdictions. The city of Baltimore is not a part of Baltimore county or of any other county.  This building was originally built in 1872 as the third alms house for Baltimore county, the first two being just down the road a bit.   Today it houses the county historical society.

I used to remember this place as where my mother would go when she needed to identify an unknown kind of plant.  This sounds strange, but the reason why you would bring your plants here is because it was also home to the horticultural extension, (now just called the University of Maryland Extension) which is a community outreach program allowing citizens of the state to use the agricultural knowledge base of the school.

One more interesting piece of information about this building is that it was made from stone quarried on the premises.  That sounds strange too.  However, less than a mile from this place is a productive stone quarry that still operates to this day.

Lexington market has been around in one form or another since 1782.  This much you can gather from the sign on the door.  In 1782 it was an open air market and it wasn’t until the 19th century that the vendors of Lexington Market would find themselves under one roof.  The building you see today was built after a fire burned the market down in the 50’s.  The giant building, which extends over a city block, may not see the same volume of customers as it did many years ago when, for most of the neighborhood and much of the city, it was a primary source of meals and of groceries.  However, it still remains a popular place to buy foods of a common and of a unique nature.

In fact the neighborhood surrounding the market is next in line for a facelift.  While much of it is owned and used by the University of Maryland Medical school and various other medical organizations, much of the neighborhood’s retail economy was shut down decades ago.  It’s difficult to say what the result of new building in the area will be, but the odds are that Lexington Market will still be there at the end of it.

If you guessed that yesterday’s picture was the exterior of the Charles Theater, you were correct.  Once a streetcar engine shop, it was converted to a theater in the ’30’s.  The original complex also included a bowling alley and dance hall which are long gone.  With the struggles of the Senator, the Charles is now solidly Baltimore’s premiere independent movie house and is one of the few places left to experience movies as they were shown almost a century ago.

A housekeeping note from MDP:  You may have noticed the non-stop flow of spam to the site.  How couldn’t you.  To keep spam at a minimum, we’re limiting comment posts so that only those people who have previously commented on the site will be able to see their comments right away.  Unfortunately, that means that if you haven’t written a comment before, it will go into a queue to be moderated.  I will do my best to look through the queue and sort out the meaningful comments from the spam.  This will hopefully be only a temporary measure.  As always, I hope you know how much your visits to the site are appreciated and how much your comments have been appreciated as well.

This building, formerly an engine shop for the Baltimore City Passenger Railway streetcar company now serves another use as one of the city’s most beloved attracti0ns.     I can’t show the whole building right now or you’d know the answer before it is posted tomorrow.

Here’s the counterpart to last Friday’s shot of the Legg Mason Building.  From the same corner with an angle to the right, you can see this building: The current Bank of America Building.  I’ve previously talked about this building, but I feel that it’s one of those significant parts of the landscape that deserve a second post.

Here’s a shot looking 180 degrees from the picture of the clipper mill sign last week. What you find is the former London Fog headquarters and the Woodberry light rail station.   Like it’s neighbors this building has been converted into mixed use space.  The M on the lower for Meadow Mill (the building/complex’s new name) took the place of the L for London Fog.

What’s Missing?  From this perspective you might mistake Baltimore’s (and Maryland’s) tallest building for another building of similar design: the world trade center in Baltimore.   While they look very similar from three sides, you can usually tell the difference because the world trade center is a five sided building. In fact, it’s the world’s tallest five  sided building.  So that means that this must be the FORMER Legg mason building / USF&G building.   What’s missing?  The Legg Mason sign on top of the building is what’s missing.   Considering the skyline’s loss of the Maryland National sign and the Alex.Brown sign, a 500 foot tall invading monster would have a much harder time getting around modern Baltimore than they would have had in 1995.

As we continue to celebrate the 133 birthday of the Johns Hopkins university, it seemed only right to supplement Monday’s picture with this one of two of the university’s most famous points: the Keyser/upper Quad and Gilman Hall, named after the University’s first president.  Gilman Hall is currently undergoing a significant renovation so this picture from the outside will have to do for now.

Just a block or so away from yesterday’s post is this set of antennas.  In fact this area is referred to as “TV Hill”  because all but one of the major networks in town has an outpost here at this highpoint.   Newscasters in town will frequently refer to TV Hill, saying, “the weather here on TV Hill is ____,”  or “I’m reporting from outside the studio here on TV hill.”   There’s also a very visible sign on the hill that is visible from I-83 with the call letters for WBAL  Of course, the antennas which are visible for miles around would also be a good clue as to what goes on around this hill.

On sunday morning there was a fire in Baltimore near the clipper mill complex.  I had no idea there had been a fire earlier as I was driving through the area on my way to other MDP posts, even though a road had been blocked off and that made it inconvenient for me to get back to the main streets.    In fact, I took this picture without realizing just how relevant it was.   The clipper mill community is a conglomeration of former industrial buildings that have slowly and partially been renovated into living spaces and small retail establishments and other spaces given vague titles like, ”space for artisans.”   

The location is hard to beat, being near the highway and light rail, but isolated enough to give a sense of community.  The only detractor is the lack of residents.  The building that caught on fire was in fact vacant, and the clipper mill revitalization project went bankrupt last year.  Hope is not lost, and the neighborhood is still growing, just slowly.

I spent a good deal of time yesterday wandering around Baltimore finding pictures for the website.  I ended up at Johns Hopkins, where I came across a poster saying that February 22nd was “Commemoration Day.”  Back at home on the internet I found out that 2/22 was the day that the university was founded in 1876.  This is a picture looking south at the campus’ Wyman Quad, just before sunset

Gustav Brunn was a german immigrant to Baltimore, who in 1939 started to sell a spice blend that would later come to be known as Old Bay.  According to the Old Bay website, his store was on market pl, across from the fish market, which would put it somewhere in the modern day powerplant live area.    I’ll see if I can track down the real location for a future post. 

Gustav’s blend has taken over the hearts of Marylanders in the last 70 years.   When I was 12 years old,   I was amazed to see the stuff poured over everything and to see middle schoolers fighting to get the last bag of Crab Chips, the special chip which at the time was flavored with old bay.  (now with some sort of generic seasoning)  

Though they recruit ‘em young, the obsession with the 12 herbs and spices of old bay is present across the full lifespan of an average Marylander.  My company cafateria has a big bin of it in the condiment rack that needs to be replaced about once a week.  I even find myself using it with my daily pretzel at work. (some of you might know that I also love pretzels)    A big hit at a favorite night spot 40 miles south of Baltimore in Silver Spring: the quarry house tavern is the tater tots with old bay.  At the soft shell crab festival in Crisfield, Old Bay was plentiful.   I even noticed it sitting prominently at a popular establishment in Cumberland.  

My boss used it as ammunition to make fun of Virginians the other day as they eat their crabs without the necessary seasoning.   (Not that anyone needs that much ammunition becasue Virginia’s poor road signage is sufficient to ridicule the state.)

I’ve even gone so far as to use it for a barbeque rub.   One day I was thinking that it has all the key ingredients: heat, garlic, salt, paprika.  That’s what every barbeque rub starts with.   However, I can tell you that after more than 12 hours of smoking, much of the spice flavor mellows out: except for the celery salt.   It was after that day that I noticed the first ingredient in Old Bay is in fact Celery Salt: perfect for crabs, not so much for pork butts. 

The spices are no longer manufactured in a retail space downtown, the bottom of every bin says it is packed in Hunt Valley, MD, though the spices as they have historically been, are likely sourced from around the world.

This title is somewhat self explanitory.   You can tell that these people were out at the begining of the storm as it barely reaches their shins.

This is the cannon that sits outside of the Concord Point lighthouse in Havre De Grace.   It’s plaque tells the story of the man who, until captured,  held the battery there against the British in the war of 1812. For those unfamiliar with the geography of Havre De Grace, it sits at the mouth of the Susquehanna river, where it meets the Chesapeake. 

A full size picture of the plaque on the cannon follows:

Returning to the site of a previous post, today we have the Kensington Marc station surrounded by snow.

While working from home yesterday (the only good part of this snowstorm), I found this inquisitive little guy perched on my windowsill, apparently fascinated with the spreadsheet I was working on.   He looks nothing like an oriole.  So what’s with the title of the post?

I have been accused on many occasions of mistaking a robin for an oriole, something that seems odd based on the picture above and my other reference point. Fortunately, just a minute later, one of his friends, a true oriole impostor, showed up at my window.  See below, and you might understand why, from a distance, they can sometimes be difficult to differentiate.

Today’s photo comes from corresponding photographer Shelly, who brings us this picture of some iced over lines connecting to a house that already has a downed line sitting right outside of it.

Today we are stepping away from the snow pictures.  This is a picture of an engine from the now defunct Baltimore and Annapolis Railroad.  This particular engine now sits outside the B&O railroad museum.  The Baltimore and Annapolis Railroad was a short line running passengers and freight from Annapolis to just south of Baltimore where it connected with the B&O line to come into Baltimore.  There’s little I can tell you from my own knowledge, and though somewhat rare for me to do, I’m going to fully recommend that you visit the B&A Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_and_Annapolis_Railroad it’s full of the history of the railroad, including a list of surviving stations.  I also find it interesting that much of the line is now part of the light rail line, and another part of the line is currently a popular rail-trail leading south from BWI.

Like yesterday’s photo, this one came from close to my home because, without power, without heat, and without the ability to move my car, there were limited options this weekend.   Did you notice the odd part of this scene?  That tree still has it’s leaves. They all died but never fell off.   In fact looking at the same tree this morning, there were many leaves on the ground around it.  Turns out the only thing that can make them fall off is a big heap of heavy snow.

The MDP photoquarters was one of the many (some reports have said upwards of 190k) places that lost power over the weekend.   In the middle of the powerless day and a half, as the snow just stopped falling and the sun was just setting, lower temperatures began to move in, bringing with them clear skies and  this photo opportunity.  

An explaination of today’s title:

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Baltimore area weather reporting, during storms of this magnitude, school districts can usually be closed or delayed at the county level.  However, there is frequently a caveat for the Hereford zone, a massive chunk of northern Baltimore county serviced by a single high school.

Forgetting your own birthday is really a terrible thing.  Thanks CharlieB for remembering the website’s second anniversary which actually took place yesterday.   So, in what is a bit of a tradition, I’m posting that picture which went up on February 4th, 2008 (actually just really late in the night on sunday 2/3) as the first official MDP post, with some minor changes from last year, and the year before.

This building is the Center for Learning and Technology on the Bowie State campus.    I didn’t know much about it when I took the picture, but the new looking building was intriguing so I took it’s picture and resarched it later.  There’s nothing terribly interesting that came up about the building but I did find an article with a nice summary of it:

http://schooldesigns.com/Project-Details.aspx?Project_ID=913

When the weather was “warm” the other week, I went out and found many people doing whatever they could outside.   The roads were crammed with bikers.  Sidewalks and trails had runners.  Horse stables had plenty of riders.    Of course, horses don’t go away when the weather gets cold like a bike or a pair of running shoes and people come to see their horses every day.  However, it seemed like there were a lot of people cramming the stable for a chance to take an extended ride when it was warm.   Now, that said, this horse wasn’t in the mood to cooperate.   His curiosity had brought him close enough to see what might be in her hand.

The moon has been doing some pretty unusual stuff lately. I took today’s picture a week ago, above the bridge featured in Friday’s picture.  At that time it was still a half moon. Nothing too unusual about that, right?  Except that I took the picture at 1 PM, in the middle of the day.

A year or so I ago, I wrote this post about the bridge carrying the Georgetown Branch Trail over Rock Creek.    The other day I thought it would be a cool idea to take a picture from the top of the bridge with the same new wide angle lens I used to take the linden oak picture.

In Ilchester, MD, a small town on the Patapsco river, you will find many traces of many things of historical interest. I was lured there by the ruins of a few old buildings sitting on the cliffs above the river that I found on some internet maps.  However I was too late a they were long since demolished.   In fact, going back to the internet, I found that it depended on which map service you used weather you saw the ruins still or not.  (actually on bing maps you can see them on certain angles of bird’s eye but not on others)

The town holds more intrigue though.  It is located at the end of the main area of Patapsco Valley State Park, in fact the main trail that extends through this park ends at a pedestrian bridge just south of this one.   That pedestrian bridge is built on the foundations of the original Patterson Viaduct, which carried the B&O main line, our country’s first 11 miles of railroad, from Mt. Claire to Ellicott City.  When that bridge washed out, the tracks were moved north about 100 yards, forcing them to travel through a tunnel and then crossing at the location of today’s picture.  I have pictures of that pedestrian bridge but they are trapped on my film camera right now.  We’ll get to it eventually.

Here’s one more shot of the Navy Pier Fire in Solomons.  I really liked this picutre from the start with the sunset and the smoke together.  You can just make out the shadows of people standing on the fishing pier observing the fire.

Today’s picture comes to us thanks to Chris C. who was an eyewitness to last winter’s fire at the Navy Pier in Solomons.   The wooden pier burned for hours.  Above you can see the view from just south of the Governor Thomas Johnson bridge.  We have a close up below in which you can see to the right that there’s a ship docked at the pier.   That boat,which caught on fire but was not destroyed,was later towed to the open water.      

Today we return to the subject of a post from a year ago, the Linden Oak, which is the tallest and oldest white oak tree in Maryland.  I had the chance to return to the tree this weekend, this time armed with the proper wide angle lens to capture the entire tree.   Unlike my last visit, it’s now winter, and without all the greenery of other trees, it’s easier to see the expanse of the Linden Oak.

This slug of iron is a reminder of a time when the economics of iron production where based on a much smaller scale and when it was feasable, if given raw materials near the surface of the earth, a source of water, and a source of fire, to build an iron plant.  

In the early days or our state’s iron production, transportation by horse or by river were limiting factors in the use of a furnace’s product.   The results of these factors were a number of blast furnaces producing iron around Maryland.   Of course in southern Maryland the existance of slave labor in early years added to this economic equation. However, furnaces, including the Patuxent Iron Works, remained in business long after slavery ended as the demand for iron couldn’t be fulfilled otherwise.  

New technologies would make some furnaces obsolete while others became more important, slowly reducing the number of producers.  Finally, when transportation costs were low enough to justify the use of efficient, large scaled iron plants in place of local ones, most local furnaces shut down. 

This picture of iron from the Patuxent Iron Works comes to us from the Calvert Maritime Museum, but the Patuxent Iron works were located along the river in both Prince George’s and Anne Arundel counties.

As part of MDP’s continuing efforts to photograph its way up and down the C&O canal, here is what’s left of lock 33 and it’s keeper’s house, located just north of the bridge to Harper’s Ferry.

This satellite dish is on the grounds of Capitol College, a school largely dedicated to technology related fields.  Their campus in Prince Georges county contains quite a few academic buildings, like the new one in the background here, and five dorm buildings.  The majority of students at the college are correspondents. (which I’m told is an out of date term and should be replaced with ”enrolled online”)  I’d think it would be nice to know as a student online that there’s a very nice and extremely up to date campus out there to visit.

Here’s a shot from inside the patuxent reasearch reguge’s visitor center.  Each of these lighted glass displays contains a diarama featuring birds or other wildlife that the refuge has worked with or which is endangered.  I thought that these displays were very well thought out and informational. The entire area was also extremely asthetically pleasing with these lighted columns in the otherwise dark room.   There are a few older exhibits there as well as many geared towards children.

At the Purple Moose Saloon in Ocean City there is a wall with row after row of these purple stuffed moose.   In my quest for something Purple in support of the Ravens tomorrow I was sort of unimpressed with my first try at a purple picture.  I wanted to visit to the Washington monument in Baltimore, assuming that it would be awash with a gaudy display of Raven’s purple.  When I arrived, I found that it had a purple light, but it was literally a single purple light and the single light looked odd when the rest of the monument was bathed in white.   So luckily there was purple moose that had escaped from the wall at the saloon in Ocean City to be a part of MDP’s participation in purple Friday.  Next Friday we’ll get real fancy!   

Just a note: MDP is taking off for MLK day, but will be back on Tuesday.

This is the observation car from the Capitol limited, one of the more popular trains of the B&O railroad, which ran on the line from DC to Chicago.  

I thought this was a neat post since, throughout the last two years, we’ve taken pictures of many of the stations along the MD portion of this line, and in fact yesterday’s picture of the bridge to Harper’s ferry would be the last place this train would pass in MD.     Here are some of the other places along the line that we’ve stopped:

Silver Spring (where it first enters MD)

Kensignton (next stop down the line)

Dickerson (mid-way)

Harper’s Ferry Tunnel

Though, largely just a namesake, Amtrak still operates a train called the Capitol Limited between DC and Chicago.

This outrigging belongs to the previously pictured railroad bridge between Harper’s Ferry and MD.  I am a fan of the picutre becasue it shows the masss of wires that used to be needed for communication across the river at key points.  I’m also interested becasue there are no more insulators on that post.   Typically those little posts would all have a glass insulator sitting on top of them.  The wires would then wrap around the insulator, preventing their contact with each other and with the support structure.    You see a lot of these insulators for sale in antique shops and other places.   So when I see this I have to wonder if some collector made his way out there to pluck the insulators off of each of those posts so that they could earn themselves a dollar or two a piece.

I thought the patterns in this pile of rocks would make a good picture.  These are actually part of a retaining wall in Centennial Park in Howard county.   Originally I wanted to do another post today about Howard County.  I wanted to have a picture related to their declaration last week in praise of Willis McGahee.   The county executive had announced that last Friday was dedicated to the Raven’s running back and that in Howard County it would be referred to as  “McGahee Dayhee.”   Of course, there was no physical evidence left of this declaration and that made it very hard to photograph.  So I just thought I’d celebrate (though a few days late) with any sort of Ho Co picture and I’ll leave it up to you if you can find a clever metaphor between this picture and football.

This is the seminary building commonly referred to as the “Japanese Pagoda”  like all of the free standing architecturally varied houses at the seminary, this building housed one of the sororities of the school.   This building was one of the first to be refurbished and was in fact repaired largely by a team of volunters prior to the current effort by developers to refurbish the seminary into condos and apartments.

When I was at the wildlife refuge last weekend,  I thought I should take advantage of being near Bowie and get some photos of places I’ve been meaning to visit.  One of those was Bowie State. (the other was the Bowie railroad museum, which had closed by the time I got there, so look for that one sometime in the future)

I really liked the view of the sky and the sign that this picture offered, though it says little about the college itself. 

Bowie State is actually the oldest of the historically black colleges in Maryland, though it was founded in Baltimore.  The school, like many in the mid 1800’s went through a few changes in names as well as in focus, becoming a teaching school through the mid 20th century, when it began to rapidly change curriculm and to become the larger university that it is today.

It’s hard for me to resist the opportunity to post a railroad related picture.  This crossing was the first thing I pictured on my snowy photo hunt.    A train had crossed just two minutes prior, but already the silver top of the tracks had been covered with a new layer of snow.

During our big snow storm I ventured out for an hour or so armed with my film camera to see what I could find.  You probably could have guessed this, but my first thought was to head to the seminary.    I just got scans of the film I used there so it’s time to share.    

 You can tell that it’s still snowing in this picture.  To take it, I actually ended up holding an umbrella in one hand and the camera in the other hand.   I was limited in where I could take a picture because the snow covered all of the walkways, which made the hilly seminary a bit tough to navigate. 

  You might remember this picture of the seminary’s windmill from last week.  The building, like many of the others there,  looks better in the snow.  One goiung there for the first time might not have even been able to tell what was abandoned and what wasn’t.   The snow covered many wounds.

You’ve probably noticed that the site looks different today.  MDP has taken on a new look for the new year.   We’ve moved all the archives and categories to the right side, allowing larger pictures to fit in the page. 

You can see that yesterdays picture below has been re-posted in the new larger format, and today’s picture is also posted in the new format.  

We’ve also changed the color to a refreshing white. 

What might interest many of you is that there are new anti spam procedures in place so that the majority of the site’s grammar errors will be in the body of the posts as opposed to being in the comments from odd spammers. 

In the upgrade, we’ve temporarily lost the ability to show the comments and posts all on the front page.  However, you can click on the underlined “comment”  link below to read the comments and to leave one of your own.

About today’s picture:

Today’s picture is also from the National Wildlife Refuge.  This picture looks out over Cash Lake, (I don’t have to tell you that it’s not a natural lake as we know that there are none in MD)  which is one of the more scenic and more visited areas of the refuge.  During this time of year half of the trails around the lake are shut down to prevent people from interfering with the migration of birds to the lake.   I was armed with a zoom lens to help overcome this problem, but I wasn’t armed with the right clothing to be out there for too long.  In the Spring, MDP will be back to see the rest of the lake.

If you’ve ever travelled down the B-W parkway or looked at map of what’s between Baltimore and Washington, you may have noticed the National Wildlife Refuge.  The refuge is one of five within the state of Maryland.  However, it’s unique as one of the largest forested areas in the region.  It offers protection to a number of different species of wildlife that are native to the area, but it also serves as a location for the fish and wildlife service to bring threatened species from other parts of the country to see if they will thrive.  The Patuxent site is also the only wildlife refuge dedicated to wildlife research in addition to it’s natural role as conservator.

Today’s picture looks out on of the many lakes on the grounds.  On Saturday, when MDP travelled to the refuge, the weather was so inhospitable that I didn’t get to venture far enough on any trails to picture any good wildlife.   What you see here is the refuge’s “Bayscape,” a demonstration of the program encouraging residents to landscape their homes with native plants and species.

It looks (at least out my window right now) like the year is going to end with a bit of snow.   I’m hoping that it won’t be overpowering so that MDP can make a field trip out to some sites of historic importance.

You can probably guess where this windmill without its blades comes from:  the national park seminary.  Yesterday I thought I had found another cool abandoned site for MDP pictures but it had sadly been torn down.   The hunt goes on though.  

The other day I was looking on google maps, as I do almost every day, for a faster way to get out of my office.   I noticed on one map that there was a tiny little grey area on the side of a highway offramp called Dorsey cemetery.  The Dorsey family was one of the most prominent families in Howard and county during the colonial period.  So it didn’t suprise me that they had a family cemetery in what seemed like an awkward place. 

What suprised me was the proximity of the cemetery to what I thought was an office complex.   I knew they were building nearby and I knew that this cemetery might have been in the way of that building.   

So I checked out the scene.  It turns out that the cemetery is today surrounded on three sides by parking lots and on one side by an offramp.    As you can see above, it is fairly well isolated from most lines of sight to the new construction around it.    However, as you can see below, it’s very close to a brand new building   

Here’s a final Christmas shot from Hampden:  a sleigh of crabs made from recycled metal parts and tools. 

Hope you all had a wonderful Holiday.  I’m assuming that a sleigh of crabs didn’t pass over your house sprinking old bay through your chimney, but if it did, I hope you took a picture.  

I’m preparing to go to work this morning, which officially marks the end of the season.   

Merry Chrismas/Happy Holidays from MDP