Several years ago, David Swartz stumbled across an archival story from The Baltimore Sun recounting a brawl between his great grandfather, furrier James Swartz, and a customer who had come into his store to buy a coat for his wife. “The article said there was a disagreement and then an assault,” recounts David. “It said that James Swartz was arrested and the other man was taken out in an ambulance . . . so I guess we know who won.” Sitting by his son’s side, inside the stylish Lutherville-Timonium showroom of Mano Swartz, company president Richard Swartz smiles proudly at the story—not just because David, 23, joined the fifth-generation family business last fall, but because Richard loves family lore.

“There is a thread of strength that runs through many of my family’s stories,” says Richard, his voice thick with a Baltimore accent, the result of living here for most of his 53 years. “Hard times make you strong—hard has wiped out a lot of businesses, but it’s about your interaction with those obstacles that can make you strong.”

Indeed, the “fighting furrier” story is an apt metaphor for a family business—founded in 1889—that, despite the odds and the obstacles, still survives. Through the years, Mano Swartz has battled its way through the Great Depression (James Swartz lost part of the family fortune during that time), two recessions (the 1992 recession led to the business closing for a year), civil-rights opposition (in the ’50s, the store opened its doors to African-Americans—leading to an eventual death threat against James), and, of course, the wrath of animal-rights activists, who question the morality of wearing fur and try to make people feel threatened for choosing to wear it. (Who could forget Vogue’s fur-wearing editor Anna Wintour having a dead raccoon lobbed on her plate during a luncheon at The Four Seasons hotel?)

But 123 years since its founding, Mano Swartz is still going strong, selling upwards of 500 coats a year, remodeling between 600 and 800 coats (a “Mano makeover” they call it), and storing thousands of fur items—including a leopard rug given to James by his friend Winston Churchill—in a climate-controlled warehouse located several miles from the showroom.

Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Gov. William Donald Schaefer, and Colt’s Quarterback Johnny Unitas have all been Mano loyalists. (“When I gave Johnny Unitas a price for a coat, he went into a huddle with his wife,” cracks Richard. “Here’s a guy who invented strategy.”) And although the heyday for traditional, full-length furs was back in the glamorous Dynasty era of the ’80s, Mano Swartz, one of four fur retailers remaining in Baltimore (down from 50 or 60, according to Richard), isn’t going away any time soon.

Swartz’s story is a classic tale of survival of the fittest that begins in the late 19th century in Hungary where “Papa”—the original Mano Swartz , that is—worked as a forester (a modern-day park ranger) in Kishvarda, a small city in the northeast.

“My great-grandfather lived in a typical European place where 100 families had all the money, and there was no middle class,” says Richard, who relishes recounting his family’s colorful history. “The government said, ‘What are we going to do with all these [poor] people?’ So they put them in the military for life.”
To escape a lifetime of military service, Mano immigrated to New York City.

“He pursued what he knew well—animals,” says Richard. Like many other Jewish immigrants of the time, he got into the fur business, but he was an entrepreneur and pursued other avenues as well. Family legend has it that at one point, “Papa” headed to Colorado to capitalize on the California Gold Rush, entertaining the miners with his own “dance hall” (i.e. brothel) and even staging a bull fight, but the evening before the event, the animal escaped, so Mano, who had already collected his money, fled back to New York where he continued to work in fur. He eventually headed to Baltimore where he opened his eponymous store, Mano Swartz Furs, and later married Dina Saks (of the Saks Fifth Avenue family).

For decades, Mano Swartz Furs was a Baltimore City fixture, first on Lexington Street and later on Howard Street before moving to York Road in Towson in 1976, The Village of Cross Keys in 1992, and finally to Falls Road in 2006. In the ensuing years, Mano groomed his son, James (who, in turn, groomed his son Mano II, who groomed son, Richard) to take over the business. Entrepreneurship was in the family genes.

“My grandfather [James] was way ahead of his time,” says Richard. “He created the Veteran’s Day sale in Baltimore after the Second World War and offered anyone with honorable discharge papers 10 percent off. There was no discounting in retail back then—this was not done. In one day, he sold 150 coats!”

On a hot summer’s day, when fur is the farthest thing from anyone’s mind (unless you’re a Swartz, that is), Richard reflects on how his small family business (with only seven employees these days) has lasted for more than a century.
“Much of why we have flourished is due to our founding fathers,” explains Richard, noting the early adversity they faced. “My grandfather used to say that if it hadn’t been for the [Great] Depression, he would have been a millionaire many times over. But going through that added an element of conservatism, and, as a result, we never over expanded as so many businesses do once they are successful. Through the years, we have focused on getter better not bigger. And what could be timelier today?”

The family also cites consistency as a key to the company’s success.

“[There’s a certain way] way we answer the phone,” explains David, describing his very detailed training protocol. “This is how you present a coat to the customer after dropping off a delivery. This is how you greet customers and this is how you inspect a coat.”

Chimes in Richard: “We’ve had so many challenges through the years. We are ahead of other boutiques today because we’ve already had to face all these challenges.”

So, for instance, in the late ’90s, when business got tough because of changing tastes and trends, it occurred to Richard that many people had shelled out substantial sums for fur coats that were no longer in style. What if Mano Swartz took those coats and restyled them for contemporary tastes? And with that, the “Mano makeover” was born.
“Why does one business survive and another doesn’t?” asks Richard rhetorically. “It comes down to, how good are they are replacing lost sales? For us, what’s really driven our business is making over coats.”

And when the fur protests became heated in the ’80s, with the founding of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Swartz family took a balanced approach. “Our position all the way through has been that we embrace the freedom to choose not to be involved in furs,” says Richard. “But we also want respect for people who choose to wear fur.”

The naysayers, Richard claims, have quieted down because “they realize that the fur business is completely in sync with nature . . . It’s a renewable resource and all the products are bio-degradable and used responsibly. The protesters have moved on—9/11 changed things. After that, terrorizing people wasn’t okay anymore.”
David adds some trademark family humor to the dialogue. “There’s a joke in our industry that goes, ‘Why do people care about people wearing fur and not about people wearing leather?'” he says, pausing before he answers. “It’s easier to fight old women than bikers.”

Every year, when the mercury drops, the fur—from gloves to shearlings, vests, and coats—flies out of cold-storage and off the racks at Mano’s showroom. In 2011, U.S. fur retail volume hit $1.34 billion, a 3.4 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Fur Information Council of America (FICA). And while Richard doesn’t sell and tell, refusing to discuss profits, he does say that while sales peaked in the 1980s, they “are very steady and strong now—enough [for us] to eat steak every night.”

Richard’s wife, Debbie, also works for the family business (until recently, so did the late, great Teddy, a black miniature poodle who increased the cuteness quotient on the sales floor). A former curator at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the down-to-earth Debbie—whose primary adornment is a tape measure around her neck—designs, edits, and curates the collection.

“If anyone ever told me I’d be married to a furrier and living below the Mason-Dixon line, I would have laughed,” says Debbie, who hails from New England and works with high-end fur designers such as Prabal Gurung to create exclusive designs. With Feng Shui in mind, Debbie also designed the elegant, well-appointed showroom that includes a pair of antique benches from the swan boats in the Boston Common and the original, stainless-steel vault door from the Lexington Street store. “My goal was to have small collections with some things in the back so you can really see the merchandise and appreciate it,” says Debbie. “I didn’t want, as Salieri [Mozart’s rival] said, ‘Too many notes.'”
While there are still floor-length minks for sale (with price tags ranging between $3,000 and $15,000), this is not your grandmother’s closet. In the showroom, merchandise runs the gamut—from fingerless fur-trimmed gloves and trendy boot toppers (for as little as $99) to chic fur pillows and Debbie’s own line of stylish handmade handbags. Fur is also used in more creative and unexpected ways—a cashmere cape with sable trim or a silver fox scarf that’s been dyed a deep burgundy.

“Mano Swartz has been a retail innovator,” explains Keith Kaplan, executive director of FICA. “[They] continually evolve their retail concept to reflect changing consumer tastes and fur and fashion trends.”

In early fall, longtime Lutherville customer Bernie Cook arrives at the store to pick up her beaver jacket which Debbie has refashioned into a vest. “The winters have been so warm, I wasn’t wearing it,” says Cook as she tries on her reversible silk-lined vest, which she proclaims is “perfect.” After a consultation with Debbie, Cook decides to add to her ever-growing fur collection (one coat, two jackets, two “Mano make-over” vests, among other pieces) and asks Debbie to design a chic French tam with the leftover fur scraps from her jacket. “I’ve never bought a fur anywhere else,” says Cook.

Cook’s first coat was an unexpected purchase. Thirty years ago, unbeknownst to her, Cook’s daughter had dropped out of college.

“When I found out, I went to Chiapparelli’s which was then in Towson, ordered a scotch, told them to save it for me, and went across the street to put $10 down on my first fur—a mink coat,” recalls Cook. “I came back and bought it the next day from the money I was saving on tuition.” Cook has been a customer ever since (and, five years ago, that mink was restyled into a reversible raincoat). “I bought my first coat from Richard’s father,” says Cook. “They’ve always been so great. I love coming here.”

Richard, Debbie, and David know they have a family legacy to live up to. “Richard’s great grandfather used to say, ‘It takes 100 years to grow a tree, and it takes one day to cut it down,'” says Debbie. “We never take our customers for granted. I think he would have been pleased to see that we are still living up to that standard.”

It’s Friday morning rush hour at The Park School of Baltimore, as sunlight—and students—stream into the lower-school lobby. With the school day about to begin, the mood is something akin to “rope drop” (or opening hour) at Disney World, as an eager crowd of students waits for the clock to strike 8:10 a.m., the time they are first allowed down the hallway into their classrooms. To bide time, two students play a game of one-handed catch; another student helps second-grade teacher Deborah Silverman fill bags for the monthly Viva House food donations; still other students inch down the hallway while Patti Steinberg, administrative assistant and ad hoc keeper of the gate, holds the crowd at bay. “I always have my crew of kids who ask, ‘How much longer?’” laughs Steinberg.

Third-grader Leo Meltzer has the morning shift down to a science. “We get excited about the day,” he explains, smiling. “We are supposed to walk down the halls, but sometimes we run. I usually fast walk to get to my class.”

From her room, third-grade teacher Ann Starer, has witnessed the early morning stampede for her past 13 years at the Brooklandville school nestled on 100 acres just off Old Court Road. “Some people try to hold them back,” says Starer, “but I see it as beautiful. They are literally racing and bursting into the rooms. They can’t wait to get there.”

Kids who love school so much they need to be contained from rushing to class? That’s one for the books, and somewhere, Hans Froelicher Sr.—who co-founded the school 100 years ago—is surely smiling.

From the outset, The Park School took a revolutionary approach to education, distinguishing itself from other area independent schools with an emphasis not only on reading, writing, and arithmetic, but on a style of joyful learning that’s still tangible in the school’s storied halls.
“Former headmaster Parvin Sharpless likes to tell a story about a father who came to talk to him, [concerned] about his son,” says upper-school principal Kevin Coll. “The student was having a great experience, so Parvin tried to get at what the problem was. The father said, ‘I just have to tell you, I’m suspicious. Every day my child is eager to go to school.’”

By contrast, a century ago, the traditional approach to education emphasized that “children needed to be made to learn,” writes Jean Thompson Sharpless, author of The Park School of Baltimore: The First Seventy-Five Years (and Sharpless’s wife). But The Park School took a page from a burgeoning Progressive Movement of education—where, in the words of school archivist Michelle Feller-Kopman, “Learning was not forced, but a happy process.”

When it first opened on September 30, 1912—then located in a private mansion across the street from Druid Hill Park (hence the name)—The Park School was one of just a few progressive schools in the country. It was built as a reaction to political corruption (then-Mayor James Preston favored the spoils system) and a lowering of educational standards in the Baltimore public schools, as well as the anti-Semitism prevalent at the time.

“Park was founded because of exclusionary practices in Baltimore,” explains Feller-Kopman. “Jews and Gentile parents were unhappy with the school system, and they started to look elsewhere, but the Jewish parents didn’t have [many] alternatives in Baltimore.”

The school was formed by raising $100,000 in 10 days from stock certificates and through a meeting held at the all-Jewish private club for men, The Phoenix Club. It was there that they ironed out the final details of the mission of Park School, “a co-educational institution . . . which will absolutely ignore religion, leaving that strictly to the home training,” according to a March 26, 1912 article in The Baltimore Sun.
“We were pushing social barriers,” says director of upper-school admissions Ruthie Sachs Kalvar, who graduated from Park in 1985. “For Jews and Gentiles to be educated together was a really progressive notion for Baltimore back then.”

Decades later, in June of 1954, Park made Baltimore history again: Under mounting pressure from the student body, the board voted to “receive application from any family suitable in interest or ambition,” making Park the first independent school in Baltimore to admit African-American students as well. (Though Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in public schools in May 1954, the law did not apply to private schools.)

Veteran Park history teacher and lacrosse coach Stephen “Lucky” Mallonee, who attended Park’s kindergarten in 1949 and graduated in 1962, reminisces about those tumultuous times. “I don’t recall the students having any problem here,” says Mallonee. “But I do remember a bunch of Park students eating at [The White Coffee Pot] with Wilhelma Garner, one of the first African-American students on campus. The story goes that the waitress came over and said, ‘We don’t serve black people,’ and she said, ‘I’m not black, I’m Hawaiian.’ At the end of the meal, the waitress came over and said, ‘You’re the first Hawaiian we’ve ever served.’ And Willie said, ‘There will be more.’”

Pick a random day of the week to visit, and it’s hard not to notice that, true to Park’s roots, the school is still breaking new ground. It’s visible in the surrounding woods, where the school became one of the first in the country to include a student-designed Outward Bound–style challenge course; in the parking lot, where students in an automotive physics class drive a moped they’ve refurbished; and the hallways, where students seem to spill out and do everything from study plant life in the Arctic for an upcoming school trip to play the guitar.
Indeed, it’s in the classes and hallways of Park that the school’s educational ideals truly flourish.

“It is not untrue that you will find kids lying in the hallways when you walk by,” says Pete Hilsee, director of communications. “But they’re not talking about SpongeBob. They’re talking politics, science, and math. They’re collaborating, they’re speaking in groups, and looking at primary sources.” Upper-school English teacher Howard Berkowitz puts it another way: “We’ve given these kids freedom . . . If you put limits on kids then they hit those limits and that’s it. They own their education here. It’s not imposed [on them].”

Dan Paradis became headmaster at Park in 2008, in part, he says, because “Park is known as an academic powerhouse.” He used to bristle at the widely-held notion that students “run the school.” After all, that’s his job. But now he’s proud students play such a strong role. “Student voices matter at Park.,” he says.

Senior Abi Colbert-Sangree concurs. “I feel like I can have an impact at Park,” she says. Case in point: When Colbert-Sangree attended a student diversity conference last January, she learned about gender diversity, which inspired her (and others) to create a gender-neutral bathroom. “A population of kids at Park do not feel safe, due to their gender identity,” says Colbert-Sangree. “We thought that a simple way to improve their school life would be to convert a bathroom at Park to an ‘anybody’s bathroom.’” Colbert-Sangree and her cohorts met with teachers, wrote petitions and letters, and attended school faculty meetings to help make their plan a reality. The result: a men’s bathroom was converted to a gender-neutral bathroom this summer.

Senior Hannah Block echoes Colbert-Sangree’s sentiments. “I switched from Owings Mills High School my junior year,” says Block, “because I wasn’t getting the education I wanted. I love how involved we get at Park, I love that our teachers ask us what homework seems appropriate at the end of a class, I love that we are asked what we think.”

Alix Spiegel (Class of ’89), an award-winning NPR science reporter and founding producer of This American Life, is one of many in a long list of accomplished Park graduates (among them: Tom Rothman, CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment, theoretical physicist Edward Witten, who invented superstring theory, and Manfred Guttmacher, the first forensic psychiatrist in the country and key witness at the Jack Ruby trial).

Spiegel says she remains indebted to the school she attended for 13 years. “They value critical thinking and individuality and that’s what has carried with me,” she says. “The intellectual curiosity that Park encouraged has helped me in my current job. They cultivated the sense that we live in this really interesting world that is full of possibility, and that has stuck with me to this day.”

Still, despite its roster of famous graduates, not all students are so anxious to get out there and make their mark on the world: “At Park, I’m excited to go to class and for all the things we do,” says Block. “I’ve asked my mom if I can fail this year so I can stay for another year! I’m not sure they’d like that, but I know I would.”se

Marc Broady, a young, dapper employee of the city school system, visited The Center Club for the first time in 2008 to support a friend participating in a Baltimore magazine “Top Singles” event. He was so impressed by the upscale club that he decided to join. He liked the idea of belonging to a private bar and restaurant, and the many opportunities to network with influential club members. As Broady took in the panoramic view from the club’s 16th floor that evening, he had little knowledge of The Center Club’s history—that the club’s founding members played a crucial role in creating a vibrant downtown and tourist attraction. Broady, now 32, also knew nothing of his own family’s pivotal role in making The Center Club the first private business club in Baltimore to accept African-Americans and Jews.

When Broady told his aunt about joining the club, she gave him some surprising news: “I think your grandfather was the first black member.”

And, indeed, Broady’s grandfather, the late Judge Robert B. Watts, was the first African-American to join The Center Club shortly after it opened 50 years ago in 1962. As one of the city’s first African-American judges, he had worked alongside Thurgood Marshall as a civil-rights lawyer. He was a universally well-liked man, making him an ideal candidate to integrate the new club.

It was a time when many Baltimore restaurants and movie theaters were still segregated and when the city’s venerable private men’s clubs, like the Merchant’s Club and the Maryland Club, banned Jews and permitted blacks only if they worked as waiters.

Today, The Center Club is preparing to celebrate its anniversary with a week of events, leading up to a gala on November 3, to thank its members “for 50 years of diversity.” And Marc Broady’s legacy will be part of it. He is one of The Center Club’s Young Members Committee, recruiting new members and finding ways to keep the club vibrant.

The story of The Center Club begins with a man named Clarence W. Miles. He had a dream for revitalizing the city long before Walter Sondheim became the dean of Baltimore civic leaders, before William Donald Schaefer became the four-term, do-it-now mayor, and before James W. Rouse was hailed an urban visionary.

Miles founded the law firm of Miles & Stockbridge and was the first president of the Baltimore Orioles after he brought the team to town in 1953. He was a tenacious civic leader who helped found the University of Baltimore and got the Civic Center built. He persuaded complacent business leaders to form the Greater Baltimore Committee in 1955 to begin reviving downtown’s Charles Center.

Then came the idea for a new private downtown business club, where Baltimore leaders in business, law, and government could meet on common ground, no matter their race or religion.

Up until then, African-Americans and Jews were shut out of the city’s power circles.

“People who ran the Maryland Club ran the city,” recalls Gilbert Sandler, a Center Club member and longtime Baltimore writer and historian. “That was where the power really was.”

Miles joined six other men to incorporate the new Center Club on May 10, 1962. “I was personally convinced that a certain amount of controversy would arise because it was so widely rumored in business circles that the club’s membership would be racially non-discriminatory,” Miles wrote in his memoir Eight Busy Decades: The Life & Times of Clarence W. Miles, co-edited by The Sun columnist Jacques Kelly in 1986.

In practice, the new club’s policy meant that Jews would be accepted immediately. (In fact, one of the seven founders was Joseph Meyerhoff, the real-estate developer and Jewish philanthropist.) When to invite African-Americans to the club, though, was a trickier decision.

The club needed an infusion of cash from as many new members as possible, but Miles knew that some people would drop out if they knew they would be dining with African-Americans.

Of the club’s founders, only one is still living. Truman Semans ran the investment-banking firm of Robert Garrett and Sons in 1962 and is now vice chairman of Brown Advisory.

“I don’t want to say we were great do-gooders or revolutionaries, but it was important,” he says. “The city was becoming less segregated.”

There was one particular member of the board of governors whose opinion held great weight: Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, president of The Johns Hopkins University and adviser to U.S. presidents (including his older brother, Dwight D. Eisenhower), who strongly urged the club’s board of governors to invite African-Americans to join, says Howard Miller, The Center Club’s current president.

Whether pressure from Eisenhower led to the first African-American’s application for membership by the spring of 1963 is not known, but Watts’s application was sent in April to Robert Weinberg, a member of the club’s board of governors and a partner of the Weinberg and Green law firm. After Weinberg’s death in 1995, the document was archived with his other files in The Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Once Watts was accepted, other prominent members of the African-American community began joining, including Martin Jenkins, president of Morgan State College; attorneys George L. Russell and Larry Gibson; Afro-American newspaper executive Kenneth O. Wilson; and Henry G. Parks Jr., chief executive officer of H.G. Parks and a member of the Baltimore City Council.

While the club’s leadership understood the importance of racial integration, their attitude did not necessarily extend toward women. As the founders discussed their non-discrimination policy, there was no talk about asking women to join, Semans says. But members’ wives and female guests were welcomed, with one caveat: At lunchtime, women were segregated in a separate dining room in the club’s first home at One Charles Center. The main dining room was considered sacred ground for men to conduct business and dine without female companionship. For dinner, however, the main dining room was open to women.

Meyerhoff, who was the club’s president from 1964-74, worried that most women would spend too much time at lunch and monopolize the tables. “Dad was concerned there wouldn’t be enough tables for the men,” says his son, Harvey (Bud) Meyerhoff.

This rule caught some members’ wives by surprise. Betty Lewison was taken aback when she was steered away from the main dining room. She and her husband, Dr. Edward Lewison, were charter members of the club. Dr. Lewison, who died in 2008, was an internationally known breast-cancer surgeon who founded The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s breast clinic.

They joined the club “because it was going to be open to everyone,” Betty Lewison says. “We approved of the idea. It was an honorific thing to belong to The Center Club at the beginning.”

When the couple went to the club for their first lunch, “It became apparent that we had to lunch at the informal dining room because I was a woman and was not allowed in the formal dining room . . . if someone tells me I’m no longer an equal person, I see red,” says Lewison, still miffed 50 years later.

She went home, cut up her membership card, and never went back for lunch until women were treated the same as the men at the club.

By 1971, the club was accepting individual women as members. Baltimore businesswoman Ruth Shaw, who was designing and manufacturing women’s tennis clothing from a one-room studio on Howard Street, needed a place to meet business associates for lunch, so she joined.

“I went in, and they said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t allow women in the dining room.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I went to the bar and was told I was not allowed in the bar. I’m paying the same amount but have no use of all the facilities,” she says. “I was taken aback. I asked for my money back, and they refused.”

That April, Shaw filed suit against The Center Club with the help of local lawyer Elsbeth Levy Bothe. Judge Kenneth C. Proctor (a former Center Club member) ruled against them, noting that the case “is not a civil-rights or women’s-liberation case” because The Center Club was a private organization, according to an article in The Sun.

Shaw went on to operate the Ruth Shaw clothing boutique in the Village of Cross Keys for 35 years. Bothe would serve as a Baltimore Circuit Court judge for 18 years.

The ladies dining room was finally abolished in the mid-1970s after a Center Club officer visiting a similar club in Los Angeles discovered women eating in the main dining room at lunch with no apparent disruption to their male counterparts. It wouldn’t be long before the club banned women from wearing pantsuits. But that, too, would pass, as would the exclusively male leadership at the club.

Many Center Club charter members were also founding members of the Greater Baltimore Committee, considered in its time to be a progressive business group for spearheading the city’s downtown renewal. They were instrumental in building Baltimore’s first truly modern office tower, completed the same year The Center Club was founded, and designed by the internationally known architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

At 24 stories, the tower went up at the corner of North Charles and Lexington Streets. The sleek design attracted The Center Club’s leaders, who chose to locate the club on the top floor of what was called One Charles Center. In the club’s early years, The Center Club’s dining room was often teeming with businessmen at lunchtime. “In those days, there were six major banks, and almost every loan officer belonged to The Center Club. We might have had 20 members from Equitable, 35 members from Maryland National,” says Miller.

“If somebody wanted to borrow money, even if you lived in Towson, or on Liberty Road, you came downtown. If you came downtown at 11 in the morning, the loan officer would bring you to The Center Club for lunch. You could tell who was borrowing money by who was eating lunch at The Center Club.”

The Center Club soon became known for its restaurant and expertly prepared food. It’s still a place where diners can order a dish that’s not on the menu without fazing the chef and where signature dishes come from recipes that are decades old. The service is stellar, too. A charming maître d’ remembers your name and doesn’t seat you too close to your business competitors, or your boss. He never asks if you prefer plain water to Pellegrino. He remembers.

John Warnack, the club’s COO, calls this talent “the hospitality gene.” “We start over every day,” he says. “There is the pressure of sustained consistency—or a level of hospitality—from the food, the way we answer the phone, the way we have someone’s coat waiting for them.”

The current chef, Robert Bannon, upholds long-held culinary traditions as the keeper of many Center Club dishes, like the Maryland crab soup he’s been cooking for 15 years. He learned it from the previous chef, who made it for 30 years.

Likewise, the recipe for the club’s crab cakes (ordered by more than half the diners daily) never changes. Banquet chef Wolfgang Wolff has been making them consistently for 16 years with 15 pounds of jumbo-lump crabmeat each day.

Ethel Berney, whose late husband, Hamburger’s department store executive Robert Berney, was a charter member, fondly remembers the gourmet food she found nowhere else in Baltimore. The original menu included items like kangaroo-tail soup and baba au rhum.

“They always made you feel more welcome than they should have,” she says of the staff.

Today’s club, now located on Light Street with sweeping views of the Inner Harbor, has 2,000 members and has evolved from an exclusive men’s luncheon venue to a club with a variety of special “intraclubs” for members who want to brush up on their Spanish, hear guest speakers with expertise on Baltimore history or the evolution of women executives, or take tango lessons. There are also popular wine tastings, fashion shows, and happy hours.

In 2003, the club elected Phyllis Brotman its first woman president. Brotman, CEO of Image Dynamics, a public-relations firm, led an effort to transform the club—both physically and socially—with a $2.7 million renovation to the main 15th floor.

Now, The Center Club’s future is in the hands of young members like Broady, who has already brought in several new members from diverse backgrounds to join the club. He also hopes to recruit nonprofit leaders to network with business executives who have access to private donations for charitable causes.

But more than anything, he wants to focus on the original mission of The Center Club as a place where people of all backgrounds feel comfortable.

“I would like to continue that charge,” he says.

This article was adapted from a book by Joan Jacobson, commissioned by The Center Club for its 50th anniversary.

Mark Schmidt, who keeps a pair of binoculars on his file cabinet, jokes that he has “the best view of the harbor in the city.”

On a recent afternoon, his sunny water’s-edge office offers the perfect vantage point. But the 22-year Port of Baltimore veteran isn’t admiring tall ships or checking for pretty girls aboard the water taxis. As manager of the Seagirt Marine Terminal, he’s focused on seven 110-foot cranes—and the dozens of truck drivers and longshoremen swarming around them—that are simultaneously loading three massive container ships eventually headed for China, the Middle East, and South America.

“The best view, except for the noise,” says Schmidt, with a smile, as he glances over to an Evergreen Line ship scheduled for 1,355 “moves”—container loads and discharges—during its 13 hours in port. “And maybe the heat”—July and August temperatures reach toward 110 degrees off the concrete here.

“That’s the ‘spreader,'” says Schmidt, pointing to a crane’s monstrous steel claw as it plucks a 40-foot container from a flatbed.

Trucks line up three deep as crane operators, seated in sky-high cabs with joysticks in the armrests, lift and lower one giant metal box after another. Aboard the ships, the length of three football fields, longshoremen lash the outgoing cargo to the deck and make sure each corner “shoe” of the containers, stacked four high, is locked into place.

The energetic Schmidt seems the ultimate problem-solver as he fields constant calls from longshoremen and drivers. (“Is it okay to ‘boom down’ the crane for repairs?;” “Can I drive my truck in?;” “Is the new construction guy on the visitor’s list?”)

But the height of his career may be just unfolding: being a key player in the construction of the new 50-foot-deep berth—one of just two on the East Coast—designed to accommodate the super-sized ships expected to arrive via the expanded Panama Canal in 2014.

But that project is just one of the reasons that the trading world is starting to sit up and take notice of a massive facility that most Baltimoreans are barely aware of.

It wasn’t that long ago—your grandfather remembers—that Baltimoreans understood that their port was the region’s most important economic hub. They even made a local TV series about it in the ’50s, The Port that Built a City. (Okay, granted, with only three fuzzy, black-and-white channels, your choices were The Ed Sullivan Show and I Love Lucy.)

But somewhere along the way, the relevancy of the port seemed to wane in the public consciousness. Maybe smoke got in our eyes from heavy industries like cars and steel and spices, or maybe it was the smell of ether from a rising health-care scene.

But if you thought the port went the way of the rotary telephone, think again. Gradually, then suddenly, it’s regained its status as an economic juggernaut. And if six degrees of separation works (it’s probably closer to four in Smalltimore), then you’re likely connected to someone who works there: There are 40,000 people at work directly or indirectly because of the port.

Rebounding since its decline in the 1980s, when Baltimore began losing business to other ports, notably Norfolk and New York, the port saw a 15-percent increase last year in cargo handled, the largest increase of any major U.S. port.

Baltimore also now ranks as the top U.S. importer/exporter of automobiles. In 2011, Baltimore also ranked first—among all 360 U.S. ports—for handling farm and construction equipment, imported forest products, imported sugar, imported gypsum, and imported iron ore, according to the Maryland Port Administration (MPA). And the port ranked second nationally for exported coal, imported salt, and imported aluminum. But it’s not just about cargo: Even the cruise business is booming, setting sail with a quarter-million passengers last year, a Baltimore record.

If, however, there’s one symbol of the broad public and private efforts to ensure the 300-year-old Port of Baltimore thrives for a fourth century, it was the sight of four massive 1,700-ton cranes—manufactured in Shanghai and 40 stories when fully erected—ducking beneath the Francis Scott Key Bridge in mid-June on their way to the new Seagirt berth.

“The Seagirt private-public partnership was the first of its kind; two major financial publications named it the logistics project of the year,” MPA executive director James White says. “We couldn’t have done it without a commitment to the long-term success of the port. We want to maintain the business we have, and, at the same time, grow the port.”

Seemingly, all of Baltimore’s oldest institutions trace their roots to the port. It was Jamestown’s Capt. John Smith who led the first European expedition into the upper Chesapeake Bay, mapping the harbor’s Patapsco River basin, among other local waterways, in 1608. Ninety-eight years later, the Maryland Colonial Assembly named Locust Point the official entry port for the tobacco trade with England—predating the incorporation of Baltimore City by two decades.

In 1730, English Quaker and carpenter William Fell purchased a marshy piece of land on the shores of the Patapsco. The deep water there soon provided anchorage for shipping vessels and, later, Fells Point became a shipbuilding hub, notable for its renowned Baltimore clippers.

“Shipping out tobacco, wheat flour, in the 1700s, that was the beginning,” says Helen Delich Bentley, a former Maryland congresswoman, former chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, and co-author of The Great Port of Baltimore: Its First 300 Years, 1706 to 2006.

If you took a time machine back 150 years, you’d recognize some of the names during roll call at the monthly Moose club meeting:

They’re the fat cats who got rich on the port, including Johns Hopkins and George Peabody, who were traders, as well as William Walters of The Walters Art Museum family, notes Bentley. The McDonogh School was established by John McDonogh, who was in the shipping business, Patterson Park bears the name of William Patterson, who’d started shipping wheat to England, and Enoch Pratt—who left his money to build the library system—was a trader, too. And our ethnic neighborhoods, like Little Italy, were built by immigrants arriving at the port, the second busiest U.S. entry point at one time after Ellis Island.

A number of port businesses from those early days remain ongoing enterprises, notes Bentley, who started as a port reporter for The Baltimore Sun during World War II and also hosted The Port That Built a City, beginning in 1950.

Domino Sugar, for example, opened its Baltimore harbor refinery in 1922. Proving business is still sweet, it received its largest shipment of raw sugar ever of 95 million pounds—taking two weeks to unload—earlier this spring.

Founded in 1889, McCormick & Company built its “House of McCormick” at the harbor in 1921. In 1927, W. G. N. Rukert, a tough, charismatic entrepreneur known as “Cap Rukert,” convinced McCormick to sell him Jackson’s Wharf.

A stevedoring and warehousing company, Rukert Terminals now handles metals, ores, alloys, and other dry bulk and cargo. In a good year, Rukert’s handles 1.5 million tons of cargo. And during winter storms, thank Rukert for making sure you don’t slide off the road and find yourself in a snow drift: More than 600 trucks per day pull tons of salt from Rukert’s warehouses for delivery to icy roads.

Percy Cox, a labor foreman with the International Longshoremen’s Association 333, started working in 1963 when there were two longshoreman locals—a black one and a white one.

“This is a hustling job, always has been,” says Cox, an African-American. He recalls standing in line in West Baltimore in those days, hoping to be picked for a day’s job. “Back then, if you didn’t work hard, when you’d go down to the union hall, they’d tell you not to come back.

“There’s always been ups and downs here,” he continues. “Some weeks, you’d check in with your badge and then turn right around and check out with your badge, not moving a thing.”

Kenneth Powell, another longtime ILA member, has ridden the same roller coaster. He says the early ’90s were the worst personally, when the port looked like it might never fully rebound. “I was starving to death,” Powell says. “I had to get a part-time job at the post office.”

Today, however, with “ro-ro” volume—roll-on, roll-off cargo like cars, trucks, tractors, and front loaders—at record levels, Cox and Powell are plenty busy. “Right now, you could work everyday if you have seniority,” Cox says.

But it was not that long ago that another series of factors threatened the port’s future as one of the city and state’s leading economic engines. Management-labor issues, as well as a poor labor reputation at the time, combined to take a further toll on the port’s business.

As the city struggled with the loss of its manufacturing base, particularly on the southeast side of town at places like Bethlehem Steel, General Motors, and Martin Aircraft, hopes dimmed for the port as a source of good-paying blue-collar jobs.

“Baltimore’s [port] reputation in those days was that it wouldn’t work in the rain,” Bentley says, alluding to the critical cost of delays—companies pay thousands of dollars per hour in fuel, docking fees, and wages to operate their ships.

“In 1988, Gov. [William Donald] Schaefer got so agitated [about labor difficulties] that he was ready to shut down the port and turn it over to developers.” Port, business, and labor officials finally agreed to sit down. “We began mediation on Nov. 22 of that year and we ran every day—except for Christmas—until Jan. 8, 1989. Since then, there’s been no labor strife.”

New labor agreements didn’t change the course of the port overnight, but set the stage for a business model in the mid-1990s that’s driving the port’s current success.

“We looked at our geographic advantage [8 million people in the Baltimore-Washington area and the nearest Atlantic port to the Midwest], and looked to a more diversified operation,” says port director White. “We’re closest to the automobile manufacturers, the farm-equipment manufacturers, like Caterpillar, Case, and John Deere, and started to develop that market. We had to make decisions about taking down dilapidated warehouses or rehabilitating them. But at the same time, we needed to keep an eye on the container business. We knew we had a great facility at Seagirt.”

At about 10 a.m. on a recent Friday at the Dundalk site, NYK line Port Capt. Scott Senko reports ILA workers have driven 350 cars aboard in the past three hours. If that sounds like a low-tech way to load ships, it is.

But low-tech is good news, in this case: Automobile, farm, and construction-equipment operations are especially significant because they translate into jobs. And the Dundalk Marine Terminal, a former airfield, includes acres needed for the storage of thousands of vehicles, another sector where we’ve gained a clear advantage over other ports.

Over 24 hours, more than 1,900 cars—many Toyota Avalons and Sequoias built at Midwestern plants heading for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait ports—squeeze onto the ship, a floating, 12-deck parking garage with ramps, orange cones, and a 12-mph speed limit, capable of stowing up to 3,500 vehicles. Ceiling heights beneath the deck adjust for farm and construction equipment. During loading, an enormous—and loud—ventilation system sucks carbon monoxide out while blowing fresh air in.

Bob Cooke, who came down to the port for a summer job after graduating from Mount Saint Joseph 33 years ago, plays a Noah-like role on Dundalk’s steamy, sun-baked lot, checking his “bible,” as he calls his manifest, for how many cars, make and model, to send onboard as he coordinates traffic.

“The number of cars we load on a ship in a single day would’ve taken three weeks in the past,” he says, referring to old “hoist” operations. He says his wife worries about melanoma, but he can’t imagine life at a cubicle desk. “I like being outside—I’d be like an animal stuck in an office,” he says. “When I’m off, I like to fish and hunt. It’s just who I am.”

Winter at the port can be a trip, too. “It’s been so cold with those things [ventilation fans] sucking the snow in,” port captain Senko says. “Inside the ship, it doesn’t melt—we’ve had drifts in here.”

It’s another world at the Port of Baltimore since the bad old days of a recalcitrant union and the ineffective management of the 1980s.

Senko and Doug Wolfe, general manager for Ceres Marine Terminals, a private stevedore company unloading Senko’s company’s vessel, highlight the port and union’s concentration on performance, and monthly meetings that bring together port, business, and labor leaders to address safety, quality, and efficiency concerns.

Wolfe says Baltimore’s moving times are among the nation’s best. But the port’s turnaround did not all pop at once, White acknowledges.

“Back in 1996, we said we wanted to be number one in automobiles, and that didn’t happen until last year. But that was the turning point, 1996.” Similarly, a concerted effort was eventually made to go after cruise business.

“In 1996, we probably had a dozen cruises leaving the port, that’s it,” White says. This year, it’s 100. “We knew we had a great market and we asked them [the cruise lines] what they needed. We didn’t have our cruise terminal then—we had an ad-hoc warehouse at Dundalk. We had to get people away from the cargo, and relocated our cruise terminal to South Locust Point and did more dredging. Now, we had a new asset to sell and we stayed after it. We went to the cruise lines and said, ‘We’re going to build a facility—help us build it.’ We thought they’d want the Taj Mahal, but no, they wanted something bare bones, very functional.”

The cruise lines, White learned, just want passengers to board quickly, without hassle, so they can get cracking spending their money on the ships.

It looks like clear sailing for now, but the port will always have to look over its shoulder to stay competitive with ports such as Philadelphia, Wilmington, and even Fort Lauderdale.

The New York Harbor and the Port of Miami are moving forward with their 50-foot berth plans (though the Big Apple has some low-bridge issues); Charleston and Savannah, among others, are studying the viability of similar efforts. Baltimore and Norfolk’s early advantage receiving Panamax ships won’t last forever.

But more vexing is a unique Baltimore disability that relates to getting the mega ships’ 14,000 TEUs (that’s Twenty-foot Equivalent Units to you landlubbers, the size of a single cargo container) onto local freight trains. The reason is a bottleneck dating to the 1895 construction of the Howard Street Tunnel: It’s not tall enough for today’s freight trains, which double-stack containers. For that reason, says Ports America Chesapeake president and CEO Mark Montgomery, 99 percent of containers moving at the port come and go by truck instead of rail—something that needs to change.

But, hey, this is America, so just fix it, right? Well, not so fast. If you remember the hour-long nightmare on the Jones Falls Expressway every day for a month last spring, when the city closed lanes to patch up the highway’s soft underbelly, then get out your abacus and calculate this: The cost of that highway repair was $2 million. To address the Howard Street Tunnel problem, a job that would mean tearing up light-rail wiring above the tunnel and city sewers below, multiply that times 500, not just in money, but in time, traffic jams, and general aggravation. That’s right, $1 billion, at a minimum.

CSX owns the Howard Street Tunnel and, with the MPA and state, is now proposing a transfer station, which would allow adding a second cargo container atop freight trains after they pass beneath Howard Street. Once completed, it would link to the $850 million National Gateway project, a public-private partnership that will create a double-stack rail corridor between Mid-Atlantic ports and the Midwest.

But construction of a transfer station in Elkridge, Jessup, or other suburban sites appears stalled. In April, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake pressed CSX to seek an appropriate Baltimore City site, saying the project’s delay was “threatening one of Baltimore’s strongest pillars of economic growth and job creation.”

Other issues on the horizon include upcoming union contract negotiations and finding money and land for ongoing maintenance dredging. And when it comes to harbor-floor mud laced with a century of heavy metals and other pollutants, there’s a NIMBY attitude toward having it dumped anywhere near a residential area. Environmentalists, in any case, fear that where ever it is dumped, it will leach into the bay.

Coke Point, near the former Bethlehem Steel plant at Sparrows Point, has been proposed as a site to replace the recently closed Hart-Miller Island dredging depository at the mouth of the Middle River. Potentially, 25-30 years down the road, a Coke Point dredging facility could convert to another marine terminal, but a Maryland Department of the Environment report calls the 2,300-acre Sparrows Point steelmaking area “perhaps the most complex environmental clean-up site in the Chesapeake Watershed.”

While people like Ports America Chesapeake’s Montgomery are convinced that the $105 million Seagirt construction project to accommodate the huge Panamax ships is coming at a perfect time, there are some who doubt the Panama connection will be an instant panacea.

Hofstra University shipping expert Jean-Paul Rodrigue says it remains to be seen if ports like Baltimore can gain a substantial bump in container business from the rush to build 50-foot-deep berths.

“The Panamax ships may come or they may not, it’s too early to tell,” Rodrigue says, adding that the mega-ships passing through the canal may decide to unload at Panama’s Port of Colon, or a number of other Caribbean ports, transferring their cargo to smaller ships for travel up the Atlantic. Rodrigue sees some, but limited, potential for Baltimore.

But Montgomery sees a huge upside at Seagirt, and growth in cargo that might include new distribution centers not only in the city, but also in Harford and Cecil Counties. Baltimore County sees potential, too: A Sparrows Point Partnership committee to study port-related opportunities was announced by Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamentez in June.

Right now, Montgomery says, Baltimore is grabbing just 650,000 TEUs out of 3.1 million TEUs of cargo bound for Maryland on an annual basis—meaning after they’re unloaded elsewhere and sent by truck or rail. He agrees with the mayor that the key is CSX. “We could grab the bulk of the Maryland freight with big-ship economics,” Montgomery says. “We need to finalize a suitable site for the intermodal transfer facility and go get this business.

“We can grow organically, without doing too much, three percent a year,” Montgomery says of the port. “But as a citizen of Maryland, and also because it’s my job, I want us to do better. These are real jobs.”

Port Authority

Jobs: 40,040 jobs in Maryland are generated by port activity. 14,630 of those represent direct employment generated by cargo and vessel activities at the port, including railroads, trucking companies, terminal operators, cargo handling, manufacturing, towing, pilots, ocean carriers, and agents.

14,470 are what the MPA calls “induced jobs,” or those supported by the local purchases of goods and services by direct employees. These jobs—including sales clerks, mechanics, teachers, and government employees—would be lost in the short term if the direct jobs were lost.

10,940 are indirect jobs, or those supported by the business purchases of the employers who create the direct jobs. These include those who provide office supplies and equipment, utilities, communications, repairs, and legal and financial services.

In addition, 68,300 other jobs in Maryland are directly related to activities at the port, including those at manufacturing firms, distributers, coal mines, and automobile dealers who ship through Baltimore.

Broader Economic Impact:The most recent numbers, from 2010, show the Port of Baltimore was responsible for $3 billion in personal wage and salary income, generated $1.7 billion in business revenues, $1 billion in local purchases, and $304 million in state, county, and municipal tax revenues.

In 1831, 22-year-old Enoch Pratt, a former Boston hardware store clerk, moved to Baltimore, launching a wholesale hardware business at 29 S. Charles Street. Proving a successful merchant, he expanded his business interests to iron and coal, as well as horseshoe and nail manufacturing. A decade and a half later, Pratt built a family home at Monument Street and Park Avenue, walking to work and to Sunday services at the First Unitarian Church, past the location where the 125-year-old Central Library that bears his name stands today.

“Mr. Pratt was a frugal man,” says Wesley Wilson, chief of the Central Library/State Library Resource Center. “He was known to pick up nails from the street as he walked, knowing well the effort that went into making them.”

Frugal, perhaps, but generous and progressive-minded, as well.

In 1882, Pratt presented an endowment of $1,058,333 to the mayor of Baltimore and the City Council for the purpose of building the city’s first—and one of the nation’s first—public libraries.

“My library,” said Pratt, “shall be for all, rich and poor, without distinction of race or color, who, when properly accredited, can take out books if they will handle them carefully and return them.”

The Central Library, then on Mulberry Street, opened January 5, 1886, and the first four branches—including the Canton branch, still in operation—followed within the next three months.

In 1927, by a 3 to 1 margin, Baltimore voters approved a loan for a larger Central Library at its current Cathedral Street location across from the Baltimore Basilica. Building began four years later, and was completed despite the Great Depression.

Overseen by director Joseph Wheeler, the new library’s construction incorporated Pratt’s egalitarian mission, creating a street-level, department store model ahead of its time. In 1943, the library’s outreach effort expanded with the introduction of a horse-drawn book-wagon service. In 1953, children’s films were added.

Today, the Central Library’s reach has expanded exponentially, serving as both Maryland’s state library and a major urban lending institution. It’s a research home for Baltimore writers and filmmakers, from Barry Levinson to David Simon, as well as a center for job seekers. There’s a WiFi cafe, chess tables, and a wealth of material for amateur genealogists. Programming includes everything from GED classes to discussions with best-selling authors.

Of course, nothing is changing faster than the delivery system—or “container,” as Pratt CEO Carla Hayden puts it—of the library’s core product: books. At the forefront of library and information services, the Pratt has long offered e-book downloads, and this fall, will become one of a handful of libraries lending e-book readers.

With all this in mind on the Pratt’s 125th anniversary, Baltimore magazine spent a week behind the scenes at one of the city’s most cherished institutions—visited by 1.7 million people annually—to find out just what it takes to keep such a sprawling and efficient system in place. Short answer? A lot.

The Vault

March 16, 11 a.m.
Hidden Treasures

Behind the locked glass doors where the staff works on the second floor of the Central Library, chief Wesley Wilson turns an enormous combination lock on a bank-style vault—like something from an 1870s-era Western. Pulling the door open, he reveals a trove of literary treasures, many from Baltimore’s famous writers.

There’s a Paris letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to H. L. Mencken, thanking the “Sage of Baltimore,” for reading the The Great Gatsby. Mencken’s diaries are here, as are several first-edition classics from his personal collection, including James Joyce’s Ulysses. There’s also the original copy of a library-contest-winning rap by Tupac Shakur, plus a CD of Shakur’s “The Eastside Crew,” performed while the aspiring rapper was studying at the nearby Baltimore School for the Arts.

A first edition copy of Virginia’s Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday, sits next to John Updike-signed novels. From the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, there’s a lock each of his and his wife’s hair, as well as a piece of his coffin.

One of the library’s more unique possessions stems from a discovery several years ago in the library itself. It’s a Megillah scroll, telling the story of Esther, completed in 1429 by a Persian scribe.

“It was located in our special collection’s uncatalogued stack, in a false book,” Wilson explains, pulling apart a small square that appears at first to be an actual book binding, but is actually the opening to a space where the scroll was stored. “It was left to us as part of a personal collection from a Baltimore Jewish family.”

The Wheel

March 18, 12:30 p.m.
An Answer to Every Question

Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and scattered six-inch thick tomes, four reference librarians sit at desks organized in a square configuration, facing each other. Plugged into computers and phones, the librarians answer questions from Baltimore, the state of Maryland, and, literally, the world—as they come in via telephone, e-mail, chat, and text message.

In the center of the desks, within arm’s reach of each librarian, spins what’s affectionately referred to as “The Wheel.” Completed in 1969, The Wheel, is a welded, seven-foot-tall, circular bookshelf, stacked with 800 reference titles, including The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Facts About the States, The Baseball Timeline, and Larousse Gastronomique, a leading culinary resource first published in 1938.

Queries come from students and academics, and most are part of rigorous research, but people also regularly call for crossword puzzle help, last night’s winning lottery numbers, or an Orioles score.

Other queries are even stranger.

“Someone once asked, ‘Where do people go when they’re dead?’ Another asked, ‘Am I my cat’s mother?'” recalls library professional assistant Maggie Murphy, explaining all questions are taken seriously and provided the most credible answer found. “With the person who asked if they were their cat’s mother, we quoted a biology textbook that stated a cat is the product of two cats, and therefore she couldn’t possibly be the cat’s mother.” Psychologically or socially, Murphy noted, there may be a different answer.

A fresh query arrives asking if Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets, included a movement for Pluto—de-planeted several years ago by the International Astronomical Union. Murphy shared with her client that Holst penned the suite between 1914 and 1916, before Pluto received planetary status.

Medical and legal queries are common: But Sonia Alcántara-Antoine, information services manager, cautions that those queries also point to the limited nature of the reference librarian’s role.

“As librarians we can’t give medical or legal advice,” she says. “We can cite medical or legal text, but we can’t interpret. We can’t go there.”

Graphic Jack’s Studio

March 18, 1:30 p.m.
A Window into the Art

“Everybody calls me ‘Graphic Jack,'” says Jack Young, extending a hand to a studio visitor. Behind him in his third-floor domain are life-size cutouts from Boris Karloff’s The Bride of Frankenstein. There’s also a Styrofoam black raven posing on a table, a nearly life-size installation of Rosa Park’s iconic Montgomery bus—complete with functioning headlights—plus mannequins, a gumball machine, an inflatable penguin (a gift from Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk), frames, easels, scissors, and pencils.

Among other things, Young designs and installs the eight-foot-tall mini-billboards that fill the Pratt’s giant windows on Cathedral Street, which preview upcoming events. For example, when Obama campaign manager David Plouffe came in September to discuss his book, The Audacity to Win, Young gave him Shepard Fairey’s iconic two-color Obama poster treatment.

To promote the library’s annual Black & White Party this year, Young combined Cary Grant’s stark image from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest with a James Bond motif—in glamorous black, white, and red.

Whether it’s former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, professional wrestler Chris Jericho, or an author presenting a book about the Haitian crisis, Young starts with research, seeking to develop a compelling image linked to the subject. He sketches concepts, typically on the first random piece of paper he gets his hands on, before moving to the computer.

“The first thing to consider is that people may not know the author, so the question is, visually, how do I let a lot of people know instantly who this person is that’s coming to Baltimore?” Young says. “In terms of text, 14 words is generally the limit. Cathedral Street gets a lot of traffic and it’s got to be read by someone driving by.”

Young also works on graphics for Pratt brochures, in-house exhibits, and library partners, such as the CityLit Project. One memorable work included a super-enlarged—20-foot by 13-foot—bird’s eye view of Baltimore City from a 1869 map. The map was placed on the floor of the library’s main hall and visitors walked and knelt on it, exploring where their home, church, or office stands today.

But it’s the windows the MICA graduate views as his calling.

“We redid the front and side windows about a year ago, and modified the lighting system,” Young says. “I consider the Basilica across the street our competition for people’s attention. These windows really need to pop.”

Plouffe asked for four copies of his oversize poster. Pelosi requested that hers be sent to her after her appearance. Practically everyone does the same.

“I’ve got a lot of work, I’m always running behind, very behind—and I’ve almost fallen off the ladder [installing posters],” Graphic Jack says, “but I love my job.”

Wheeler Auditorium

March 20, 2 p.m.
Highlandtown Girl Returns

“Hi everybody! Hello! Hi! How are you?” Sen. Barbara Mikulski says, bounding into the Central Library’s Wheeler Auditorium. “Hi Charlie! Hi kids!” And, then to a woman, “Are you the lady who e-mailed me?”

Mikulski’s appearance coincides with Women’s History Month. The previous day, the Pratt hosted an International Women’s History Month Literary Festival, with female writers from Trinidad, Iran, India, and the U.S. The Senator is here to give a talk called, “Women of the Senate: Making History, Changing History.”

Mikulski recalls a phone call from a Library of Congress staffer who informed her last summer that, if she won reelection, she’d be the longest serving woman in the history of the Senate. The Library of Congress needed “artifacts” from Mikulski’s career, and naturally, she put them in touch with the Pratt.

“In 1886, Enoch Pratt established the branch at O’Donnell Street and Elwood Avenue—that was my branch as a little girl going to the Sacred Heart of Jesus School,” Mikulski says. “That library card was my ticket, my window to the world.”

“To me, walking down to the Enoch Pratt was a big deal,” the 74-year-old continues, recalling how books transported her to different worlds. “I went to Switzerland and had a girlfriend named Heidi. I had a horse named Black Beauty.

“And Nancy Drew mystery novels,” she adds with a laugh, “helped prepare me for my Homeland Security and FBI oversight committee assignments.”

Landing a U.S. Senator for Women’s History Month is no small feat, but for coordinator of public programs Judy Cooper, it’s par for the course. Since being recruited from the Prince George’s library system 13 years ago, she’s transformed the library into a must-stop venue for writers. The fun ones, too.

Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk made a memorable visit—tossing inflatable autographed penguins to a standing-room crowd. Ben Mezrich, The Social Network author, has been here, too.

On the heels of Barack Obama’s election, Bill Ayers’s visit created a barrage of nasty phone calls and e-mails, as well as a small protest at the library when he and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, came to discuss their book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy.

“We’ve invited Bill O’Reilly in the past, and we’re trying to get [Republican Senator] Scott Brown,” says Cooper, highlighting the library’s nonpartisan efforts.

Scheduled for April 26, the rapper Prodigy, who recently published a memoir, was expected to pack the place.

“The events are free and we don’t pay most of these authors,” Cooper says. “They want to come here.”

Bindery Department

March 18, 12:30 p.m.
The Secret of Wheat Flour Paste

Upstairs in a quiet room filled with medieval-looking devices, book conservator Martha Edgerton readies a memorabilia scrapbook kept by H. L. Mencken for repair. The spine is torn at the edge and the text block broken, requiring sewing.

Nearby, Baltimore’s 200th Anniversary, 1729-1929, a print and photo collection, rests loose from its broken binder. “It needs a new cover,” Edgerton says. “It’s beyond repair.”

The older books hold up better than newer books, she says. The natural-fiber paper used before the early and mid-1800s, she explains, is almost fabric-like and lasts longer than wood-pulp paper.

“It’s an inferior product that’s used today,” Edgerton says, lifting a compilation of newspapers from the 1830s still close to their original color. “The acid content breaks everything down quicker. These newspapers look better than a Baltimore Sun that’s several days old.”

Book and letterpresses, decades old—and a guillotine-esque machine for slicing boards into book covers—sit on benches as volunteers tend to the careful work of preserving the library’s assets.

There’s newer technology, too: an ultrasonic welder for polyester encapsulation, which protects paper between pieces of chemically inert, clear plastic sheathing—safer than lamination. But the Old World techniques—the antique “Property of the Enoch Pratt Free Library” stamping machine and the homemade wheat-flour recipe for paste—serve as reminders of a timeless art.

“We wouldn’t want to use synthetic glue—it’s permanent,” Edgerton says. “It can’t be undone if the book is damaged in the future. The wheat-flour recipe can be reversed with water if necessary.”

Shipping and Receiving

March 16, 9:30 a.m.
Moving Pages

Loaded by 8 a.m., Enoch Pratt vans are making their way across the state, toting book bins that will eventually arrive in Bethesda, Cumberland, the Eastern Shore, and even the city’s jail. Now, Wendy Allen, the Pratt’s resource delivery manager, and her team begin filling new computerized orders, placing materials in 80 separate bins marked CECL, CARO, AACO, and HARF, among others, for tomorrow’s deliveries.

In Frederick, someone’s requested The Three Little Witches Storybook, which was located in a Harford County branch and sent here to be forwarded to the Frederick branch. A Montgomery County request for mystery/cookbook Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Crime was located in Howard County and also will leave tomorrow. Roughly 66,000 items are shipped monthly through the Pratt—the hub of the state library system.

The logistics seem daunting—the shipping office is broken down into requests from the two-dozen Baltimore City branches, the bookmobile, and the statewide county runs—but there’s a system.

A Pratt truck loaded with books for the Queen Anne’s branch, for example, meets one from the Eastern Shore just over the Bay Bridge each morning, and they exchange payloads. Likewise, a Pratt truck covering Frederick County meets and swaps orders with one from Western Maryland, which then heads to Allegheny, Washington, and Garrett Counties.

On one shelf sits a volume of Michie’s Annotated Code of Maryland, headed to the Baltimore City Detention Center library on East Eager Street.

“It’s not true that [prisoners] only ask for legal books,” says Barbara Collins, a supervisor in the shipping office, on the job for 33 years. “They ask for everything, the same books as everybody else.”

Material Selections

March 18, 9 a.m.
Creating a Virtual Library

In an office down a long, narrow hallway on the second floor, Sarah Kuperman, who works in the collections management department, flips through an industry catalogue of book reviews. She’s looking for potential nonfiction additions for the Pratt system.

Kuperman chooses which, and how many, new $24.95 titles the library needs—and can afford—to stay current. For the past decade, she’s overseen the selection of business, science, and technology books, as well as tomes on philosophy and most of the world’s religions.

The two-inch-thick industry guides help. Kuperman also relies on The New York Times bestseller lists, among other sources. Like everyone, she wishes she had more time to read all the books she selects.

“I try to stay within the amount of money given by my boss,” says Kuperman, who is working with a budget of about $15,000 a year for a specific project. “It’s a whopping sum for a public library. The entire system has a budget of about $2 million a year for new materials.”

At her computer, Kuperman begins sifting through data from Overdrive, the library’s vendor for e-books and downloadable audios. This is where everything is changing, and the rules still evolving.

Audio downloads, available through the Pratt since 2006, have increased 12-fold. And now e-books are transforming publishing—and libraries. On her screen, Kuperman can see which e-books are being downloaded at each branch, and where e-books are on hold.

Technically, publishers could easily offer unlimited downloads of their titles. However, they limit the number of times each purchase of an e-book by the library can be downloaded by borrowers—simulating the number of times each hardcover can be borrowed, for example, in a given year.

At the moment, Kuperman needs to order more downloads of The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown. Currently, the Pratt consortium owns 18 downloadable copies, 14 of which are out, with 36 holds at various institutions.

Contrary to stereotype, older readers have been among the early adopters of this new technology—because of the adjustable font. The most popular e-books from the Pratt reflect an older clientele’s interests: a historical novel by Ken Follett, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, and The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler.

Kuperman wishes more people knew about the library’s e-books. She also says “digital” seems like a quaint word today.

“I want to use ‘virtual library,'” she says.

Main Hall

March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day), 10 a.m. to noon
The Footnotes

In a city known for early morning lines outside its methadone clinics, there’s another line that forms every morning—on the sidewalk in front of the Pratt. Close to 50 people gather, waiting to get into the stacks, begin research, borrow a DVD, and use the public computers, including four terminals dedicated to job hunting.

There’s also coffee and free Wi-Fi in the cafe.

Some come early for chess matches with two-foot-tall knights and bishops on the library’s black-and-white-checked floorboard.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and Enoch Pratt CEO Carla Hayden takes in the scene in the main hall from upstairs. Three of her staff members, a guitarist, a violinist, and a mandolin player, occasionally known as the Footnotes, are performing Irish music for library visitors. Hayden descends the stairs to pass out cookies.

Hayden, who missed Barack and Michelle Obama’s wedding (they were her neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park) to accept the Pratt position in July of 1993, has kept the institution at the forefront of library science for nearly two decades. She won the National Librarian of the Year award in 1995, vocally opposed the Patriot Act’s intrusion into public libraries, and earlier this year, was named a member of both the National Museum and Library Services Board and the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities.

St. Patrick’s Day was as good a day as she can recall at the library.

“We’re sitting in the Edgar Allan Poe Room and I hear music coming from the Central Hall, and its three staff members playing Irish music,” Hayden says. “There’s 30 to 40 chairs down there filled with senior citizens, younger adults, and some African-American kids listening to somebody on our staff playing guitar. There’s a mother with three little girls down in front, and a Hispanic women, who has a child with her—and books.”

“The diversity of the people was amazing,” Hayden continues. “And I thought, ‘That’s what this is about. That’s what this library’s mission has always been about.'”

Mention the much-ballyhooed renaissance of Baltimore’s downtown, and what names come to mind? The guess here is that in most any roomful of random Baltimoreans, the two names most likely to pop up are those of politician William Donald Schaefer and developer James Rouse.

This is fair enough, as far as it goes. As Mayor in the 1970’s, Schaefer pushed the Inner Harbor project forward with a highly effective, always entertaining mix of political wiles and manic boosterism. He was in charge that day in 1976 when a fleet of tall ships sailed into the harbor, drawing throngs of tourists to a city that never realized before that such a thing might be possible.

Rouse earned his renaissance stripes a little later. When the shopping and dining pavilions designed by his Rouse Company opened on the Inner Harbor in 1980, they transformed the development from a playground for locals into an international model for the redevelopment of urban waterfronts that would inspire the likes of Barcelona, Belfast, and Sydney to turn their old port districts into tourist destinations.

But while Schaefer and Rouse did their fair share, their names don’t come close to telling the whole story of the renaissance. For that fuller tale, there’s no better source to turn to than Martin Millspaugh.

Millspaugh has been in the thick of downtown redevelopment issues for the last five decades. In the 1950’s, he covered downtown issues for The Evening Sun. Then, after a stint working on urban renewal issues for the federal government, he signed on in 1960 to help lead the redevelopment effort. Today, Millspaugh is playing the role of historian; he’s making a documentary film for the nonprofit Urban Land Institute about the renaissance.

Ask him to broach this topic, and the two-hour discussion that ensues will touch on dozens of names well worth remembering: J. Jefferson Miller, David Wallace, Hunter Moss, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., Theodore McKeldin, Robert Embry Jr., and more.

“That’s one of the amazing things to me about this subject,” Millspaugh says. “Whenever some obstacle loomed up ahead, it seemed like the right person just came along out of the woodwork and took care of it. The cumulative force of people getting together to accomplish something important like this, that’s a powerful thing.”

The story Millspaugh spins unfolds in three chapters. The first opens a couple of days after Christmas 1954, when news broke that the historic O’Neill’s department store was about to shut its doors. Even today, Millspaugh adopts a wistful tone when recalling this turn of events.

“I remember so well going there with my mother when I was a kid,” Millspaugh says. “It was kind of like the Saks Fifth Avenue of Baltimore, a place that people just revered.”

The demise of O’Neill’s struck Baltimore like a sharp slap in the face. It forced civic leaders to take a hard look at the reality of the damage the new postwar economy was doing to downtown. The suburbs were booming, taking middle- and upper-income families out of the city—and away from downtown’s stores and services.

Baltimore’s port was dying. The shipping industry was now using a new generation of container ships too big to maneuver in the cramped Inner Harbor. As a result, the waterfront warehouses that had served Baltimore so well for centuries were fast becoming obsolete.

The situation with office space wasn’t much better. Only one new office building had gone up downtown since the 1920’s. Vacancy rates were at 25 percent and climbing in some places. In the five short years between 1952 and 1957, the assessed value of downtown real estate dropped 10 percent.

“It was such a desperate time, and there was so little hope,” Millspaugh says. “But looking back, it sort of helps to explain why Baltimore was able to accomplish what it did before so many other cities. We were so far behind that we ended up ahead of them. We didn’t have any choice but to try something dramatic.”

“Jeff” Miller, the executive vice president at Hecht’s and a leader of the Retail Merchants Association, convened an emergency meeting of department store owners in the wake of the O’Neill’s closing. He convinced them to launch a new Committee for Downtown and to provide $150,000 in seed money to get it off the ground. The then-fledgling Greater Baltimore Committee soon tossed another $75,000 to the pot.

By Millspaugh’s calculation, that $225,000 adds up in today’s dollars to $1.5 million. That was enough to assemble a planning team headed by Hunter Moss, chair of the GBC’s Planning Council, and David Wallace, a Philadelphia-based city planner.

“David was able to bring in a real blue-ribbon group of young designers,” Millspaugh recalls. “The first thing they did was make a very smart strategic decision. Instead of trying to fix all of downtown, they decided to focus on just one project, something big enough to make a difference but small enough to actually achieve within a relatively short time frame.”

The target they selected was the 33 acres between Charles, Liberty, Saratoga, and Lombard streets. This stretch represented downtown at its worst, Millspaugh explains. He describes it as a “valley of depression” separating the still-healthy financial district to the south and east from the Howard Street corridor to the west that still boasted three popular department stores.

The Charles Center redevelopment plan was unveiled in March of 1958. It called for tearing 85 percent of the site down to the ground, leaving just five old buildings standing. It envisioned a mixed-use development featuring retail, hotel, residential, and office developments interspersed with public plazas and pedestrian skywalks.

“Everyone saw that it was a good plan, but there was still a lot of pessimism at that point,” Millspaugh says. “People would say, ‘We love it! It’s beautiful! But it’ll never happen. This is Baltimore, and things like this don’t get done here.'”

Viewed by today’s standard of civic undertakings, what happened next is difficult to fathom—a mad rush of commitment, unanimity, and selflessness among civic leaders in support of the project. Businessman Isaac Hamburger publicly endorsed a plan that demolished the building that housed his family’s clothing store, a building he’d just spent a small fortune remodeling. Elected city officials raised nary a peep of objection to a plan that demolished a public parking structure that was pretty much brand new. City leaders dangled a princely salary in front of Miller to take on the job of heading up the project; he told them to drop the salary to $1 a year.

In June, Governor McKeldin put Charles Center on the agenda of a special session of the state legislature and pushed the necessary legislation through at breakneck speed. In November, voters overwhelmingly approved $25 million in bond issues to finance acquisition and demolition costs. In March of 1959—one short, frantic year after it was proposed—the City Council and Mayor D’Alesandro signed off on the plan.

The rights to develop the first lot in Charles Center went to the Chicago-based Metropolitan Structures. Designed by the world-renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, One Charles Center was located on the site of the old O’Neill’s department store. It was still going up when Millspaugh signed on to become deputy general manager of the Charles Center project in 1960.

“We had three buildings finished and six others committed by 1963,” Millspaugh says. “We proved to the skeptics that we could do this.” The next year, the Charles Center project picked up the first of what would eventually become a slew of urban design and revitalization awards.

The success of Charles Center was an indispensable step on the road to the Inner Harbor. In fact, Moss and Wallace (along with local leaders) had considered tackling the waterfront first, instead of Charles Center. But sheer logistics scared them off: How long might it take to assemble a workable redevelopment site out of a mishmash of nearly 1,000 small parcels owned variously by the city, the state, the federal government, and private companies?

The second chapter of the renaissance story opens in 1963, when McKeldin—who by this point had left the governor’s mansion and gotten himself elected mayor—decided that the time had come at last to see whether Baltimore could make something of its waterfront. He called Wallace back from Philadelphia. He had Miller and Millspaugh head up a new entity called Charles Center–Inner Harbor Management, Inc. Later, city housing commissioner Robert Embry Jr. came aboard to oversee the initiative.

The Inner Harbor Master Plan they developed was ready in 1964; the first project was completed in 1967. But the logistics were difficult. The first phase of the plan called for office and retail construction along Pratt Street, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the state’s board of public works approved construction of the proposed World Trade Center. Next up came the reconstruction of bulkheads and the development of parkland and a public promenade on the water; that was completed in 1973.

This is the point when the charismatic Schaefer and his Office of Promotion started going into overdrive. They launched a series of gimmicky “Sunny Sunday” celebrations on the water, and they moved the city fair down to the harbor. Soon enough, the Maryland Science Center was going up on the harbor, and plans to build an aquarium had been announced.

“But I have to tell you, that was all the Inner Harbor was ever supposed to be,” Millspaugh says. “It was planned as a playground for Baltimoreans, and it never occurred to anyone back then that Baltimore could be a successful tourist attraction. It might look in hindsight like it all unfolded in a logical progression, but no one involved in planning it saw it unfolding that way.”

And so the third chapter of the renaissance story brings us full circle, to the bicentennial summer of 1976 and the arrival of those tall ships—and all the out-of-towners who came to gawk at them. Next came the National Aquarium, the Rouse-designed pavilions, the Hyatt Regency, and more—much, much more than anyone involved in planning the project ever really envisioned.

Millspaugh breaks out a map of downtown and runs a finger out toward what was then an industrial wasteland east of the Inner Harbor, below Little Italy—the area now known as Harbor East. “Sometimes we used joke about how that was going to turn into Baltimore’s Gold Coast someday,” Millspaugh says. “Then somebody in the room would say, ‘Yeah, right,’ and we’d all laugh at how ridiculous we sounded.”

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Why It Matters

• As the city’s center—including its outmoded, rotting piers—began to empty and decay, a group of visionary civic leaders worked to build a new downtown.

• Two projects (Charles Center and Harborplace) gave Baltimore’s commercial heart a new base upon which it eventually built a glittering Inner Harbor that continues to be the city’s celebrated public centerpiece.

In the midst of the red-brick canyons of UMBC’s suburban Baltimore campus stands an elegant sculptural tableau consisting of three polished granite benches and a life-sized bronze statue, all arranged in a tight circle. The statue depicts Baltimore businessman/public servant extraordinaire Walter Sondheim Jr. wearing a suit, a bow tie, and a smile, while each of the benches has been inscribed with a notable Sondheimism—words that, oddly, resonate with the same sort of plain, direct wisdom found in Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book.

“Try to understand someone else’s position and not assume you know what’s best for others.”
“Respect personal and intellectual honesty. It is so much simpler to be honest and fair. It is much more complicated to be dishonest.”
“Do the best you can and drop arrogance at the door. When you go in to give advice, be willing to let someone else take the credit.”

Tellingly, the Sondheim statue’s right index finger points toward that last aphorism. Sondheim, who died this past February at age 98, not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. He spent the majority of his years as a living embodiment of his own adages, always pondering what he thought was best for Baltimore—and never, it seems, putting the needs or ego of Walter Sondheim Jr. ahead of the challenges facing his hometown.

Sondheim provided nearly an entire lifetime of public service that touched on virtually every aspect of civic life, notably education, housing, and, particularly, economic development. Dust the city’s various public and private institutions for fingerprints, and you’ll find Sondheim’s.

“He taught us the meaning of the word citizen, and the importance of believing in ourselves,” observes UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III, who helped preside over the 2005 dedication of the Sondheim sculpture and benches, as well as the ceremonies renaming the school’s social sciences building Janet and Walter Sondheim Hall. “It was evident that he considered it both a privilege and an obligation to contribute to the city.”

In Zelig-like fashion, Sondheim was present for a handful of Baltimore’s most significant events in the second half of the 20th century—most prominently, the desegregation of public schools in 1954, and the urban renewal renaissance that culminated with the extensive waterfront development of the Inner Harbor in the 1970’s and 1980’s. But unlike Zelig, Sondheim was no mere mute witness, but rather an active participant, unobtrusively midwiving social, economic, and cultural transformation.

He functioned as what The Walt Disney Company terms an “Imagineer,” a behind-the-scenes wizard deftly weaving together the related strands of master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management, and research development. Except that Sondheim wasn’t devising whiz-bang technology for animated feature films or grandiose amusement parks—he was handcrafting a city.

According to Martin Millspaugh, former president, chief executive, and chairman of the Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Corporation Inc., Sondheim advised “mayors and boards and organizations in so many different facets of the city’s life. You couldn’t list one particular thing [as being the most important] as much as say he was there and guided what happened—and so much of it was successful.”

The list of leadership roles he held is nearly too much to believe: chairman of the Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management Corporation. President of the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners. Chairman of the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Commission. Director of the Baltimore Urban League. Senior adviser to the Greater Baltimore Committee. Over the course of more than 60 years, Walter Sondheim served in all of these capacities, not forgetting board positions with a bevy of foundations, hospitals, businesses, and universities.

“He was uniquely public-spirited in terms of being interested in and involved with the issues that affected the city—public policy issues,” states Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation and former commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development. “And all this occurred primarily after he retired; but even before he retired, his waking hours were devoted to issues involving public policy questions. It’s hard to find a comparable example of that.”

Born in Baltimore on July 25, 1908, and raised in Bolton Hill, Walter Sondheim Jr. went to the Park School, before graduating from Pennsylvania’s Haverford College in 1929. Soon afterward, he joined Hochschild, Kohn, where his father held an executive position; he married Janet Blum—a professional dancer—in 1934; and retired from the department store in 1970 as senior vice president and treasurer (he also served as a Navy lieutenant in World War II). By that time, Sondheim already had compiled an impressive resume in public service.

Appointed to the city’s school board in 1948, he rose to become its president, and, in 1954, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Sondheim steered his board colleagues into implementing the desegregation of Baltimore’s public schools quickly and without rancor, making Baltimore the first school district south of the Mason-Dixon Line to do so.

“That took real leadership,” says Ed Orser, professor of American Studies at UMBC and an authority on Baltimore history. “Admittedly, the immediate [actions] were rather modest, but nevertheless the step was symbolically quite significant.”

Three years later, Sondheim signed on as chairman of the newly created Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Authority, beginning a half-century odyssey of remaking the cityscape with a thoughtful purposefulness. While Millspaugh and J. Jefferson Miller Jr. oversaw the initial foray into the city’s transformation with the ambitious development of Charles Center beginning in 1958, Sondheim concentrated on a handful of satellite urban renewal projects: the University of Maryland’s downtown campus, Camden Industrial Park, Harlem Park, Broadway, and Mount Royal Plaza, among others.

“A revitalized downtown cannot exist as an oasis in a desert of blight,” Sondheim told business leaders in 1963. “It must be supported by well-housed middle-income city dwellers who are urbanites by choice. . . . Keeping good citizens in the inner city, and re-attracting those who have had enough of lawn mowers and long trips to downtown, is possible only as the city regains its former glamour and desirability. Bringing about this change in areas of housing, as well as of culture and of industry, finance, and commerce, is a major goal of Baltimore’s urban renewal program.

“Strong political leadership, coupled with strong citizen and business leadership, is the only combination that can insure Baltimore’s future as an outstanding example of the revitalized American city.”

Some of the commission’s renewal projects thrived; others foundered. All the while, Sondheim eyed the redevelopment mother lode: the Inner Harbor. “Here is an area that has excited the imagination of architects and planners for many years,” Sondheim noted in that 1963 speech. “It is perhaps our outstanding physical asset. Everyone wants to do something about developing the inner harbor.”

And so in 1970 he migrated to Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management, staying for 19 years (15 as chairman) while accepting only $1 a year as salary. On his watch, he facilitated the makeover of Baltimore’s waterfront from derelict wharves into a commercial/cultural engine by refereeing the push-pull between city government and private developers: Up sprang Harborplace, the Maryland Science Center, and a handful of luxury hotels. Hardly a puppet master, Sondheim instead quietly built consensus between sundry stakeholders to advance projects from conception to completion, abetted by his benign nature and reputation for integrity.

“He was certainly laid back,” recalls Millspaugh. “He didn’t push himself or his ideas forward. He was there when people would say, ‘Walter, what’s your advice?’ He wasn’t really retiring—he was very much a strong person, but not putting anything forward until it was needed.”

Adds Embry, “He was very much behind the scenes. He was not quoted in the newspaper or writing letters to the editor. He was very selfless; there was no question that he was trying to benefit himself in any way, financially or in any other respect. He was very knowledgeable in the sense that he had spent many years involved in these issues, so knew about their history and could put them in context. He was very smart, very intelligent, very articulate, and very non-threatening. And as he grew older, he was more venerated. Thus, the more he did, the more he was respected. There wasn’t anybody else that occupied the position that he did.”

After stepping down from his Charles Center-Inner Harbor post in 1989, Sondheim continued to monitor urban renewal as a senior adviser at the Greater Baltimore Committee, and, in 1991, at the behest of then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer, he chaired a panel that studied school performance, a group informally known as the Sondheim Commission. Its subsequent report established a template for what would morph into the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, and served as a model for the national No Child Left Behind initiative.

Without fanfare, Sondheim created an awesome legacy. Perhaps more than any single individual, he innately understood—intuited, really—Baltimore’s potential, its possibilities, and he worked assiduously to bring them to fruition.

“He wore his coat of influence very lightly,” points out UMBC’s Hrabowski. “It was so clear that his emphasis was on making a difference and not on himself—not about ego, not about turf, not about getting credit.

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Why It Matters

• After a career at a legendary city department store, Walter Sondheim Jr. became the city’s strongest advocate, best strategist, and wisest sage.
• Sondheim’s canny diplomacy and unwavering vision helped unite city leaders to fight economic ills and undo social injustices.

There is a pig in Tio Pepe’s kitchen and it smells great. The pig has been gutted, slit belly to throat so that it can lie flat in the roasting pan. Its teeth are bared, its ears singed black and crispy at the tips. Its skin has reached a deep shade of bronze, but it is the meat inside that is the real treat—the rich odor of roast pork wafts up from the pan, which is coated in a layer of drippings mixed with water that will later be reduced into a sauce.

“Once a day, every day, we do the whole pig,” says Don Emilio, as the staff at this long-lived Spanish restaurant sometimes call its chef and co-owner. His real name is Emiliano Sanz, and he is the cousin of original chef/owner Pedro Sanz. He has been working at the restaurant for 37 years now, and took over the kitchen after Pedro Sanz’s death in 1989. At the time, some customers held their breath, wondering if Tio’s could withstand the loss of its most visible and beloved icon, wondering if the place would change irreparably.

They needn’t have worried. Tucked into its improbable basement location for almost 40 years now, Tio Pepe remains utterly intact, from snout to tail.

When the magazine staff first began planning this year’s Food Issue, we thought of profiling a Baltimore landmark restaurant, one that’s lodged in the city’s consciousness as part of its history and culture. Tio Pepe sprang instantly to mind. For one thing, it’s about the only place left in that category. Haussner’s, Marconi’s, The Chesapeake, Peerce’s—one by one, each has closed. The Prime Rib, which is often mentioned in the same sentence with Tio’s in local conversations about old-school restaurants, is part of a chain (albeit a very small, fairly local one) and is actually younger than Tio Pepe, which opened in 1968.

Also, people are still going to Tio’s—if you want reservations for prime hours on a Saturday night, you had better call two weeks ahead of time. Given its status as the last of Baltimore’s culinary old guard, and our own hundred-year anniversary, Tio Pepe’s seemed like a natural choice for the issue.

Plus ça change: As part of that anniversary, the staff had been looking through back issues of the magazine, searching for scrapbook-worthy articles. And as I flipped through the 1985 issues, there it was: “A Day in the Life of Tio Pepe.”

The article is something of a relic, the writing unrepentantly gushy and without any effort to maintain objectivity. Pedro Sanz, who was still in charge of the kitchen then, is characterized as some sort of culinary saint, with toque in place of halo. At one point, his eyes are actually described as twinkling.

Much of the article, however, is as accurate today as it was 22 years ago. The kitchen layout remains the same: a narrow corridor separating cold-side prep (where salads and desserts are assembled) from the hot side, which holds the Vulcan stoves, the ovens, and the gigantic steamer used to cook some 100 pounds of green beans each night. Many of the employees mentioned in the article are still working the same positions. Suckling pig is still a featured item on the menu.

But other facts have changed. In 1985, Tio Pepe was ranked Number One in our list of Best Restaurants—a position it had held since 1980, when we began printing such a feature. “The dynasty continues,” the editors wrote. “De Tio Pepe, non est disputandum.”

In 2005, that dynasty collapsed: That was the first year Tio Pepe did not appear in Best Restaurants. Our critic found serious problems with the service, and the food seemed unimaginative compared to what was being served at newer restaurants around town.

It wasn’t an easy decision for us to make. I know this because, for the past seven years, I have been the editor in charge of Best Restaurants. I remember the debate. I didn’t grow up in Baltimore; to me, Tio Pepe is just one restaurant among many. But I knew its reputation, and knew it would ruffle feathers.

Ruffled feathers doesn’t describe it; think more Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Letters poured in, chastising us for taking Baltimore’s most beloved restaurant off the list. And then there were the phone calls—angry, angry phone calls. Some people told me flat-out I should be fired; others stuck with pointedly asking me where I was from. Subscriptions were cancelled.

No restaurant has provoked such fury from our readers. No restaurant has been such a thorn in my side.

And now I am standing in its kitchen.

BUT WHEN I ARRIVE AT THE RESTAURANT around 10 a.m. on a late-summer Friday, Emiliano Sanz is all smiles as he shows off that suckling pig. The mood here is industrious but relaxed; lunch is still a couple of hours away, and these days, it’s not much of an ordeal, anyway. Twenty years ago, when that last article was written, Tio’s was mobbed by its Friday lunch crowd; chefs made a massive platter of seafood salad at the beginning of the shift, to be served from a cart, and it would be decimated by 2 p.m. Nowadays, though, there are only a handful of tables at lunch—most of them on the large side, celebrations of some sort. If you want seafood salad, it will be made to order in the kitchen.

A sous chef—there are three or four working right now—diligently spoons a dark golden sauce through a metal strainer into a cylindrical container, where it will join 21 others in a steam tray on the counter. The sauces and soups form a spectrum of browns, from the warm ochre of this bisque sauce to the deep purply brown of the black-bean soup and the bright russet of the tomato sauce. There is truffle sauce and lemon sauce, onion soup and green sauce. At night, another nine sauces will squeeze into the steam bath as well: creamy champagne sauce, rich veal demiglaze.

Emiliano is busy chopping whole chickens into sections; a sous chef does the same with a box of beef tenderloins. In an era of portion control and pre-cut ingredients, Tio’s keeps it old school. “Maybe I’m too old-fashioned,” admits Emiliano, a stocky, animated man whose thinning gray hair is concealed by a mesh chef’s toque. “I just think it’s better to cut things yourself.”

Their knives slice through as if bone and meat were warm butter. The one the man slicing tenderloins wields is roughly the length of my forearm. They are sent out to be sharpened professionally every other week, but Emiliano says staff has to hand-sharpen them after about three days of use. The restaurant will go through approximately two cases of beef tenderloin tonight, says Emiliano; each case holds some 80 to 85 pounds of beef.

At 10:55, the first man in a red blazer comes in. These are the headwaiters. Tio Pepe’s service has three tiers: Headwaiters who take orders and answer customer questions, runners (blue blazers) who bring food from the kitchen to the table, and bussers (gold blazers) who clear plates and refill water. Servers work in teams of three, with one of each.

The wait staff starts up on prep work. One man carefully arranges chrysanthemums and carnations in tiny vases, brushing open the petals to make the blooms look fuller. Another whittles candles to fit into a brass light fixture. Two headwaiters chop yellow apples and oranges for the sangria. They’ve already set up the liquids they’ll need: 12 three-liter boxes of red wine, seven boxes of white, five large bottles of brandy, 16 of triple sec.

“That’ll all be gone at the end of the night,” says one waiter, gesturing with his knife.

The waiter is named Michael Link and he jokes that, with 20 years in the job, “I’m the new kid.” I ask him what’s changed at Tio’s over the years. He shrugs, still chopping fruit. “The prices have gone up with inflation,” he says. “That’s about it.”

Link is notable as one of the very few—perhaps the only—staff members for whom Spanish is not his native language. Other members of the staff come from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, the Dominican Republic . . . and, of course, Spain.

This is the origin of Tio Pepe: Long ago, in the bleak years that followed the Spanish Civil War, there was a small town outside of Madrid called Cascajares, where unemployment and poverty had reached crushing proportions, just as they had everywhere else in Spain’s rural countryside. And so the young men of the village began moving to the city, just as young men were doing throughout the country. The first Cascajaran to do so wound up finding work in a restaurant—he wasn’t a chef by trade, but a job was a job. And he invited a cousin to come work with him. And that cousin invited another cousin. And so on. Eventually, this town of some 500 inhabitants came to lay claim to 50 or 60 chefs. (Today, many of them gather each August for a weekend-long festival.) One of those chefs was Pedro Sanz, who went to work with relatives at a Madrid restaurant when he was 13; he, in turn, invited Emiliano to work with him when Emiliano turned that same age. Then Pedro visited New York for the 1964 World’s Fair and decided to stay in the United States. The elder Sanz worked for a while at the now-defunct Peter Lucas restaurant in Roland Park, where people quickly began telling each other about the talented Spaniards working in the kitchen. When Pedro decided to open his own place in a subterranean spot on Franklin Street, his new fans followed him. And so, after a few years, did Emiliano.

The man who tells me this whole story is Miguel Sanz, Pedro’s nephew. (He and Emiliano are related, but distantly—Sanz is evidently a common last name in Cascajares.) Miguel is a quiet, gracious man who frequently hesitates before speaking, as if trying to find the most carefully worded response he can to any question. He was finishing up a master’s degree in engineering at Johns Hopkins when his uncle Pedro passed away; he wound up never using that degree, instead taking over as co-owner and general manager of the restaurant. “Things happen,” he says with a slight smile.

Miguel takes me on a tour of the restaurant. A series of expansions have created a warren of small interconnecting rooms whose individual sizes mask the restaurant’s true scale. The Spanish art on the walls is the same that hung there when the place first opened. Those walls themselves are spotlessly white; Miguel says they repaint a room each week, rotating through all of them. I gaze at the wall before us, the lines of its individual stones softened to blurry suggestions; there must be 40 coats of paint on there, I comment. “Oh, more than that,” says Miguel, sounding surprised that I would guess so low.

After the tour, we stand at the small, dark bar by the front door, waiting for the lunch crowd, such as it is. “You have to compare it to before they opened Harborplace,” says Miguel. “It’s probably half of what it was then. Harborplace was a killer for our lunch business here.”

Indeed, Tio Pepe has never depended on foot traffic; it is a destination restaurant. But now that the downtown crowd can walk to plenty of restaurants, there’s no need for them to drive up to Franklin Street, much less scour the streets for parking.

As if to confirm that, a group of a half-dozen women in their sixties come in, apologizing to the one member of their party who’s been waiting for them. “We were here at 12, but we had a hard time parking,” one explains.

“I got here early, so I went shopping at the Women’s Exchange,” says another.

“What’s the Women’s Exchange?” asks a third woman, and the gasps that follow her question are the gasps that Baltimore tends to emit whenever one of its institutions is not properly recognized: shocked, indignant, even mildly insulted.

Back in the kitchen, Don Emilio is gaily hacking the roast pig into entrée-sized portions with a gigantic cleaver. He and I chat about adapting Spanish cuisine for local ingredients, and about that out-of-towner’s rite of passage: our first softshell crabs. “I never saw till I came to Baltimore,” he tells me, but we both agree that the spider-shaped delicacies are surprisingly good.

Don Emilio is irrepressible. He wants me to sample or at least witness everything in his kitchen. Before long I am sniffing his tin of imported saffron. (A one-ounce tin lasts him a week, which may not seem like much until you realize that saffron easily goes for $1,000 a pound.) But it is hot and I am worried that I am distracting him from his duties, so I wander back to the bar, where maitre d’ Pedro Gutierrez is minding the door. Gutierrez, who is from Madrid, has worked here for 15 years; the other maitre d’, Francisco “Paco” Lobos, has been here since the place opened. He is currently on vacation with a regular customer; they are attending the annual chefs’ festival in Cascajares.

I ask Gutierrez if customers try to speak Spanish with him. “Yes,” he says. “Some people like to say things in Spanish. You know, they may only know one or two things, but they’ll say, ‘Hola.'”

Not two minutes later, a group of five men in their 60’s to 80’s walk in. “Hola,” says the first to Gutierrez, smiling.

“Como está?” asks the next.

The men file past and sit at a round table in one of the larger dining rooms. There is an empty chair, so I ask if I can sit and ask them a few questions. The Boys (“no, no—the Friday Boys,” one of them quickly amends) have been coming here for Friday lunch since 1976, back when they all worked in the same law firm. One is now a retired judge; a few of them still practice law, but they all make a point of coming here for their weekly lunch. They are only too happy to tell me stories of Tio Pepe past: the nights when the waiters would set Irish coffees on the floor in a line and set the whiskey in them on fire; the times Pedro Sanz would make them entirely new dishes, simply because they’d already eaten everything on the written menu; the time one of them was given three months to live, and after a miraculously successful surgery, held his survival party in one of the restaurant’s back rooms.

They order cold artichokes and fried potato puffs, gazpacho soup and fried shrimp. And what will I have? Originally I had not planned to eat anything—ethically speaking, it’s not good to accept gifts from story subjects. But I’m hungry, and the whole restaurant smells so potently of garlic, that I rationalize a bowl of gazpacho.

“Here, you have to try these,” says one of the Friday Boys, spooning a few fried potato puffs onto my plate. They aren’t on the menu, but they are nevertheless immensely popular. It’s easy to see why: crispy and feathery, these hollow pillows of sliced potato manage to taste both fried and light at the same time. The garlicky gazpacho, when it comes, is refreshingly cool, the perfect soup for a hot summer day.

The Friday Boys are reminiscing about what Baltimore’s dining scene was like when Tio Pepe first opened. “There weren’t any ethnic restaurants—not many, anyway,” says the retired judge. “There were some Greek places in Greektown, and German food in Highlandtown, but people didn’t usually travel to them.”

“There were a few good restaurants,” says another. “Marconi’s and The Chesapeake and Haussner’s.”

I ask why Tio Pepe is still in business when those places aren’t.

“The food is good,” says one.

“Well, the food was good at the other places, too,” argues another. The debate is by turns lawyerly and smart-alecky. Then the entrées show up.

Michael Link, who happens to be our server, tells me, “Chef Emilio asked you be sent this with his compliments.” It is the largest softshell crab I have ever seen, lightly battered and coated in sliced almonds, with a ramekin of rich lemon-garlic sauce for dipping. I take a bite. So much for journalistic integrity.

Minutes later, as I am happily chomping on what easily has to be a day’s worth of caloric intake, a well-dressed woman comes up behind me. Her whisper in my ear is so intense, I instinctively cringe: “I don’t care what anyone says, this is one of Baltimore’s best restaurants, and has been for 30 years,” she tells me, her eyes drilling into mine. I gulp and nod.

Meanwhile, the eldest of the Friday Boys—dapper in his pale suit and red-and-yellow bow-tie—has left the table to chat with two African-American gentlemen at a corner table. He brings them back to say hello: One is Dr. Levi Watkins, the first African-American chief resident of cardiac surgery at Hopkins. The other is Homer Favor, a former director of Morgan State University.

“He didn’t want to come today,” says Dr. Watkins, nodding at Favor. “But I told him, ‘The Judges will be looking for us.'”

Dr. Watkins and Favor tell me about some of the famous guests they have brought to Tio Pepe: Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Rosa Parks. “I saw [Yankees superstar] Derek Jeter here,” he mentions.

“In his rookie season,” agrees a Friday Boy.

“With his parents,” finishes another.

This is about the time when Link shows up with complimentary plates of Tio Pepe’s famous pine nut roll, a dish which had not impressed me during my only other meal at the restaurant, when I’d been checking it out for Best Restaurants—on that anonymous visit, it had been stale and dry. This time, though, it is fresh and delicate, the creamy custard and moist sponge cake creating one soft, comforting indulgence—it’s no almond beignet with lavender ice cream (to cite one of my favorite desserts that I’ve had in this town), but you’d be thrilled if your grandmother made some for you. The Friday Boys diligently spoon freshly whipped sweet cream on top of my slice. “They have the best whipped cream here,” says one. I cannot argue with him.

Lunch is over—both at my table and in the restaurant. Everyone takes a small break, Don Emilio sitting down for some sautéed chicken with a few other staffers.

THINGS DON’T PICK UP AGAIN until after 5. When I go back to the kitchen, Don Emilio wants to show me his lobsters—big, blue-shelled beauties that are destined to be boiled with celery, bay leaves, thyme, and peppercorns, then topped with shrimp, crabmeat, and champagne sauce. The result is Lobster Emiliano (though I later hear customers call it “Three Two One,” in honor of its shellfish trifecta), a dish that, once again, isn’t on the menu but is nevertheless ordered constantly. Don Emilio estimates that 30 percent of his orders can be off the menu.

Speaking of which, he wants me to try his potato puffs. I try to protest, but he is already in action. Here is the secret: Each slice of potato must be fried once in hot oil, then fried again in even hotter oil, and then flash-fried for about five seconds right before being served. Don Emilio does not use a thermometer to gauge the oil’s heat: “After this many years, you know.”

We chat a bit more about the supremacy of Spanish ham over all other varieties, about whether or not Tio Pepe will serve the highly prized Ibérico ham when it starts getting imported into this country next year (probably not—at $50 to $150 a pound, it will probably be too expensive for customers here), about his commute from his home in Perry Hall.

Jose Guzman, the mustachioed evening sous chef, calls out orders from handwritten checks in his sonorous voice: “Gambas para dos, paella, y Langosto Emiliano!”

“You see?” says Don Emilio happily. “It’s not on the menu, but they order all the time!”

By the time you read this, this scene will be a thing of the past; after many years of prodding, Tio Pepe is switching to a computerized ordering system.

It’s interesting to watch the orders. More than any other restaurant whose kitchen I’ve observed, Tio Pepe gets entire tables ordering the same thing: three orders of shrimp with garlic, three of chicken with crab, three of snails. Blue-jacketed runners lift trays with six, seven, eight heavy dishes stacked on top. You can see them wince with the effort. I wonder if this is why, with the exception of one lunchtime bartender, the entire staff is male.

Miguel Sanz, who has by now slipped into a suit jacket, offers another reason. “We do get women applying—and we’ve had women work in the kitchen before, or as bartenders—but they apply to be waiters,” he says, meaning headwaiters. “In all the time I’ve been working here, I think maybe three waiters have retired—one moved back to Spain, one retired, and . . . oh, I guess maybe two. If we do get an opening, we promote from within.” Women, he says, aren’t interested in a place where they’d have to wait a decade to get a shot at the best-paying positions.

Meanwhile, the house is filling up. By far the most common table type seems to be parents with their grown children. At one such grouping, diners pass around a plate of potato puffs. “We’ve been coming here since we moved to Baltimore—what, 14 years ago?” says a vivacious twentysomething blonde in a tasteful black-and-white blazer. Her parents agree. Her mother, elegantly dressed in black with a classic pearl choker, calls it “a special restaurant for a special occasion.”

The blonde daughter calls “the puffy fries” a favorite dish. “I think you told us about the puffy fries,” she says to her brother-in-law, a native Baltimorean.

“I think my grandparents first got me started on the puffy fries,” he says.

A hand-painted pitcher of sangria sits on almost every table. I ask Miguel if they ever go missing or get broken. “Both,” he says, smiling. “Sometimes, you have to tell a party who’s had a little too much sangria, ‘Can you please give us the pitcher?'”

Sangria breeds laughter, and the restaurant is now boomingly loud. A customer shows Pedro Gutierrez a photo of the 200-pound halibut his sister caught on a recent trip to Alaska; soon after, an older man asks the maitre d’ if he’s seen a man named Solomon. Gutierrez considers for a moment. “Not recently,” he says.

I slip back into the kitchen, which is now full of energy and the crash of pans onto burners. Suddenly, Don Emilio is beside me. “Here is a little tapa,” he says with a smile, handing me a plate of Spanish ham.

Back at the bar, the bartender is pouring drinks. Margaritas are popular, as are Coronas with lime. “I guess people see the Spanish, and get confused,” says a waiter with a grin.

I ask Miguel about Tio Pepe’s future. He mentions the restaurant’s 40th anniversary, coming in 2008. “I guess we’ll have to do something,” he says casually.

But beyond that? He’s already told me he doubts either of his children will want to take the place over. “To tell the truth, I haven’t even sat myself down to think about it,” he says. “I guess I’d like to see if we can make it to the 50th birthday. Past that, God will decide.”

But then his mouth quirks in that faint smile of his, and he adds, “Remember, we come from a place where there’s a restaurant in Madrid that’s been around since the 17th century.”

“I WASN’T ALLOWED HERE till I could respect it—when I was 16, 17,” says Marc Hassan, who is here with his brother and parents tonight. His parents have retired to Florida, but make a point of coming here every time they visit their old hometown.

I am coming to respect Tio Pepe myself. The dining rooms, which once struck me as dowdy and claustrophobic, now seem cozy and charmingly Old World. I’m beginning to understand the comfort of knowing you’ll be getting the exact same dish your grandparents used to order when you were a child. Even the haughty waiters seem to have softened—after all, if I’d been doing a job for 30 years, I’d probably stop feeling the need to prove myself to every fresh face who came by. Plus, it’s obvious that the restaurant’s regulars feel pampered.

But, much as it may pain me to say so—and, as the night wears on and the Tio’s stories pile up on each other with the dense sweetness of freshly whipped cream, the pain becomes almost physical—there are certain facts that cannot be denied. The food is heavy and old-fashioned. The staff is all-male. That velvet matador cape has faded from black to gray. And (Sanzes forgive me, but it’s true) at least one of the waiters has very obviously notdry-cleaned his jacket for a very, very long time. I guess what I am trying to say is: The past is a lot of fun to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

As the restaurant’s night winds to a close around 10:30, I head back to the kitchen, where, sure enough, Don Emilio has made me a to-go package with enough paella and gambas al ajillo to feed a family of four. The man has been here since 7:30 a.m.; he works double shifts like this at least four times a week; he is still wearing his chef’s toque. I ask him if he’s ever thought of moving back to Spain. “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “Everything in my life is here.”

As for the future of Tio Pepe, his answer is cryptically elliptical. “I’m 61,” he says. “I’ve trained all these guys. They know very good how to do things here.”

Then he turns to load my case of food into my arms. “This will be very good, you can heat it up,” he says, smiling at me.

I am a serious, professional journalist, so I will not tell you that his eyes twinkled. My objectivity cannot be bought with a few thin slices of ham or a reef’s worth of shellfish. It cannot be bullied by a city’s protective love. I am not that easily swayed.

I think it is more accurate to say his eyes shone.

William Donald Schaefer, the Michelangelo of Baltimore’s renaissance, first ran for public office under the guidance of Alvie Unglesbie, an earnest but thoroughly unschooled friend from the local neighborhood improvement association. The two of them stepped blithely into a political world owned by Irv Kovens and Jack Pollack.

Those men controlled a citywide network of political clubs regimented into precinct captains, precinct executives, and runners, all eager to show how well they were protecting home turf. A torrent of cash—”walk-around money,” they called it—kept the soldiers focused. Anyone who ran for anything without their blessing was in it for the exercise.
Schaefer’s name appeared on the House of Delegates ballot as Schaefer, William D., yet another handicap. If anyone knew him at all in those days, they knew him as Don.
Still, he thought he had a respectable résumé. He was a vestryman at the Bishop Cummins Memorial Reformed Episcopal Church near his parents’ home on Edgewood Street in West Baltimore. He was a WWII veteran, a member of both the Montfaucon Post American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. And he belonged to the Mystic Circle Lodge #104, A. F. & A. M.
He lost big.
Schaefer, William D. ran 13th in a field of 27. He tried again in 1954, finishing seventh, just outside the six-person winner’s circle. Schaefer loved Alvie, but he knew he needed more—namely, Kovens or Pollack. When Kovens or Pollack “took” you on his ballot in those days, everything changed. Schaefer rejected Pollack, whose manner and reputation offended him. Schaefer had watched the big man at Sunday meetings of the city Democrats who convened in the old Emerson Hotel. “He looked like a bird of prey—and then he would start to quote Shakespeare,” Schaefer told me years ago while I was writing his political biography. Pollack had been implicated in a murder (never convicted—or tried; he had friends in the court house).
So Schaefer turned his attention to Kovens. As it turns out, he had an advocate: Edgar Silver, a Pollack man who had gone over to Kovens (and who was among the throng that had beaten Schaefer in 1950). Silver had always been one of those political players who loved putting people together, making things happen, creating atmospheres. He knew Kovens was in the market for a council candidate to run in the 5th district.
“You ought to take a look at this guy I know,” Silver said to Kovens. “He ran for the House of Delegates. Clean-cut, hard-working.”
So Kovens walked up to Schaefer during one of those Sunday meetings.

“I want to see you,” he said. It must have sounded like an order.
“All right, yes sir,” Schaefer replied.
They met that night at Kovens’s house. As the Jewish leader of a mostly Jewish delegation to City Hall, Kovens wanted a non-Jew to run in the mostly Protestant southern precincts of the 5th. He thought he’d found his man.
Though Schaefer’s future was on the line during that first meeting at the boss’s house, he dared to give the imperious and impatient Kovens his terms. Kovens could have the political stuff, the little jobs, and the small favors. But Schaefer’s vote would be his own. He would vote the way he thought best. He just wanted the boss to know.
“He must have been laughing himself to death,” Schaefer said, recalling the moment years later.
The story gains credence from the boss himself. Edgar Silver recalls that Kovens called him the next day. “That’s a strange guy you’ve got there,” Kovens said. “He said he wouldn’t do anything he wouldn’t be proud of in church.”
Thus did William Donald Schaefer enter political life in Baltimore—and the state of Maryland—as Irv Kovens’s designated gentile. It was a fateful and fortuitous union.
“The word came down,” recalls state Senator George W. Della Jr., the son of a former senate president who had been beaten by a Kovens man. “All of a sudden doors opened.”
With Kovens backing him, Schaefer grew strong in the northern reaches of the 5th. They, too, had gotten the word.
“William Donald, William Donald,” the faithful chanted as they campaigned for him.
In time, everyone in Maryland would know him as William Donald Schaefer or Don or, most famously, Willie Don. He was the 5th District team’s top vote-getter in 1955. Name recognition was never a problem after that.
Kovens once observed that his team had some of the smartest, most talented politicians in the city. It was true. Neither he nor Pollack sent seat-warmers to the City Council. Determined as they were to control the political landscape, they felt accountable to their constituencies. They wanted talented people to represent them. And now, Kovens—though he could hardly have expected it—had given Baltimore and Maryland one of its most important and colorful political leaders.
Shy but nervy, Schaefer broke in at a time when machine politics had reached their high point in Baltimore. And his patron, Kovens, was the prime engine. Over the years, Kovens developed a kind of mocking affection for Schaefer, laughing at his election-year nerves. Knowing that outcomes were never in doubt for the machine, he chuckled at Schaefer’s moaning, “I’m-going-to-lose” approach to every campaign. Kovens called him “Shaky.” Schaefer, reverentially, called Kovens “Mr. Kovens” or “Big Chief.”
He marveled at Kovens’s aura.
“People came up to him like a honey pot,” Schaefer recalled. “He knew everyone. I’d walk along behind him. He’d be smoking his cigar and flicking the ashes back in my face. I didn’t care.”
Schaefer knew people would think he had sold his soul in exchange for Kovens’s backing. So he insisted over and over that Kovens had never asked him for anything. There was a hint of protesting too much in this, but no one ever proved otherwise.
What’s more, the relationship was not quite as one-sided as one might think. “Kovens blessed him, but he needed Schaefer as much as Schaefer needed him,” says Gene Raynor, Schaefer’s friend and former city and state elections chief.
In time, Schaefer would amass political cachet that exceeded the power of both Kovens and Pollack, nurturing support that gave him constituencies, both in the Democratic clubhouses and the network of community organizations that were then becoming more influential in the city.
“He was one of the first local politicians who ingratiated himself to the citizens associations,” explains former Mayor Thomas A. D’Alesandro III. “And they were very, very appreciative. He was building a new base of support in the precincts.”
As Schaefer amassed his own power and his career gathered momentum, there were those who said he didn’t need the boss anymore. He didn’t agree and he never shunned the man who got him started.
Kovens rewarded Schaefer’s loyalty in 1971, when he came back to Baltimore from Florida to help his protégé win the mayoralty. The political clubs had begun to slip by then. Big government had taken over the social welfare work which was once the exclusive province of the clubs—and television had begun to replace the legions of campaign workers.
“When TV came along, all of a sudden I’m in your living room. That ripped the old organizations apart,” says D’Alesandro. Political support of the sort D’Alesandro cultivated was less important after TV.
Kovens’s power, which had strong ties to the business community, continued to grow. He could raise the money for Shaky and Shaky could win with his broad array of supporters in the black, white, ethnic, and upper-class neighborhoods of the city.
“Schaefer developed a situation where he was a step [removed] from the political manipulations,” D’Alesandro says. “He left that to Kovens.”
After Schaefer became Mayor, it was Kovens who kept the City Council in line. Schaefer was free to think about the big picture and to find talented lieutenants who could make the big ideas happen. With Kovens lining up the votes for Schaefer’s building projects, Schaefer waved the wand of urban—and psychological—renewal over Baltimore’s marble steps, transforming the city into a tourist destination with a splendid waterside marketplace.
Kovens had built the platform. Schaefer became the personification of Baltimore, discovering in the process that he was something of an actor. He mugged it like Bert Lahr or Charlie Chaplin, dressed up like H. L. Mencken. He put Baltimore on the national and even the world map—famously donning an orange and yellow Victorian swimsuit and jumping into the new aquarium’s seal pool with the seals—to give a smokestack and steel town new panache. He instinctively seemed to know the right facial expressions and poses—whatever the event demanded.
“He was like the Wizard of Oz,” says Senator Della Jr. “He gave the city heart. He gave it courage.”
City Hall was his home. He had no other life. He always worked late.
U. S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, once Schaefer’s colleague in the City Council, says he could co-opt you—or “vaporize” you. She had been elected to block a highway then planned through various city neighborhoods. Schaefer wanted the project to proceed.
“He said, ‘Barb, you’re a great lady but I’m going to have to roll you,'” Mikulski recalls. “‘You kept your promise to the neighborhood. But you’re just a council lady.'” She lost her first effort to stop the road 17-to-3, but prevailed later, and Schaefer credited her with recognizing a potential disaster. The highway would have defaced the city.
“I didn’t see it. But she did,” he said, looking back this year.
“The amazing thing about him,” says Senator Della Jr., “I mean, he had Kovens—but he had this uncanny ability of surrounding himself with very talented people the likes of which haven’t gathered since.”
Uncanny, too, was the renaissance chemistry stirred in Kovens’s 5th Ward clubhouse. Another of its stalwarts, Marvin Mandel, rose to the governor’s office. He was there when Schaefer became the Mayor. Kovens would send emissaries to Annapolis with specific messages: Don needs a convention center. Don needs a World Trade Center. Don needs a subway. And Mandel would deliver. These buildings were, in a sense, monuments to the value of bosses and machines.
“Kovens, Mandel, Schaefer, and the Democratic Party were in perfect harmony. It all came together. It was just fortuitous for the city,” says Frank DeFilippo, a newspaper columnist, commentator, and former Mandel press secretary.
With Kovens’s backing, Schaefer never lost a race. In the 50 years that followed that first conversation, Schaefer ran for and was elected to the Baltimore City Council four times, president of the council once, mayor four times, governor of Maryland twice, and the state’s comptroller of the treasury twice. Had Kovens not died in 1989, Schaefer might well have served until the day he himself died—always and happily being little “Shaky” to Irv Kovens’s “Big Chief.”

Why it matters

• After running for the House of Delegates and losing twice, William Donald Schaefer teamed up with kingmaker Irv “Big Chief” Kovens

• With Kovens in Schaefer’s corner, a political dynasty was born, changing Baltimore forever

It’s been 20 years since William Burroughs dubbed John Waters “the Pope of Trash.” And it wasn’t long before it spawned other similarly spirited, press-ready titles: “the Sultan of Sleaze,” “the Prince of Puke,” and “the Duke of Dirt” among them. They were certainly well deserved, as anyone who’s seen Pink Flamingoscan attest, but those oft-repeated phrases no longer seem applicable. If they do, you haven’t been paying close attention to Waters’s career.

Waters has become something of a ubiquitous—and welcome—presence on the cultural landscape. On any given day, he might be speaking at Oxford, exhibiting his artwork at The Andy Warhol Museum, kibitzing with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, starring in his own TV series, releasing a CD, taking the Tony Awards by storm, writing a piece for The New York Times book review, or recording a DVD commentary for The Little Mermaid. He may even be working on a new film project of his own.

“I’ve always wanted to sell out,” Waters wrote in his 1986 book Crackpot, “but no one wanted to buy me.”

That’s no longer true, as Waters has reinvented himself and diversified in ways that broadened his mainstream appeal and won him new fans in niche markets other than indie cinema. As Middle America sings along to Hairspray, the Musical, the contemporary art world embraces Waters as a fine artist. As a result, the trashy sobriquets no longer fit and come across as simplistic, even quaint.

Waters has turned himself into something much more sophisticated and engaging.

And Baltimore’s bad seed has morphed into a bankable brand name around the world.

How did that happen? And what future business prospects does Waters have in mind? Getting into opera, or opening a reform school, perhaps? Don’t laugh. Stranger things have already happened.

Doesn’t it feel fabulous to be home again?

—Divine, Flamingos Forever screenplay

Waters works in the upstairs office of his North Baltimore home. Books are everywhere—mostly art and culture, fiction, true crime, and biographies—on shelves and stacked in neat piles. A magazine rack in the corner holds many of the 160 publications he receives in the mail: Entertainment Weekly, Variety, Jet, Cooking Light, Metropolitan Home, Artforum, Butt, and a host of others.

Items from Waters’s extensive collection of fake food have been placed discreetly around the room. On a low shelf, for instance, a dish of plastic chocolates sits beside a framed photo of Edith Massey, the actress who won cult fame appearing in Waters’s early movies.

A corkboard displays an assortment of eye-catching ephemera and photos. Amidst snapshots of Waters with various celebrities—including Leonardo DiCaprio, Björk, and Henry Kissinger—there’s an ID badge from the Cannes Film Festival, an autographed picture of Don Knotts, and a “BE EVIL” Believe-style bumper sticker.

Waters sits at a desk with a laptop computer, telephone, legal pads, pens and pencils, toothpick dispenser, adding machine, and a fake cup of coffee (complete with red plastic stirrer). Dressed in a black-and-white striped pullover shirt and gray pants, Waters looks like a stylish convict. Known for being fashion-forward, he has a penchant for striped socks, flashy footwear, and sports jackets that are, as he says, “ripped, but ripped well, by Japanese designers.”

Although Waters keeps an apartment in Greenwich Village and practically lives in airports, Baltimore remains the center of his universe, which he makes instantly clear. “This is my main place,” he says, tucking one leg under the other. “It’s certainly my home. Whenever I have to think of an idea, I come here.”

Up at 6:15 each morning, he gets an early start. “In the morning, I write or think up something every day—from eight o’clock to noon,” he says. “I sell it in the afternoon.”

A productive day might also include learning lines for a guest spot on a TV show, doing press interviews, preparing for a lecture, and fielding numerous phone calls. “I have business appointments just like everyone else,” he says.

Waters will be the first person to tell you that, for years, he’s been “selling Baltimore.” In fact, there are few artists more closely associated with a single locale, and Waters’s relationship to his hometown invites highfalutin comparisons to Faulkner’s Mississippi or Dickens’s London. And no film director has endorsed or validated a city as Waters has with Baltimore. Even Woody Allen eventually made films outside New York, though that city, like London, hardly lacked for artistic validation.

That’s why the Faulkner comparison may be most apt. Like Mississippi, Baltimore is considered something of a cultural backwater that mostly gets ignored by tastemakers and trendsetters. So when Waters descends on a neighborhood like Highlandtown and points his camera at the Formstone façades and beehive hairdos and captures the local dialect, it comes across as exotic in other parts of the country. And as the nation becomes increasingly homogenized, such hyper-regionalism (especially in Waters’s early films) seems all the more distinctive and real.

Critic Gary Indiana has written that “[Waters’s depiction of Baltimore] may now be more authentic than the ‘big’ cultures of New York or Los Angeles, where fewer and fewer genuine local identities survive the many cycles of gentrification.”

When Waters took an A&E film crew to one of his favorite blocks in Hampden a few years ago, one of the locals came out of his house dressed in leopard print pajamas to see what the fuss was about. Because the guy looked like he’d stepped out of Pat Moran’s casting office and was, as Waters recalls, “playing with himself the whole time,” the crew thought the director had put him up to it. He hadn’t. “It was so amazing,” says Waters. “It showed that you can come to Baltimore and see that my films are really true—they’re part documentary of how I see Baltimore.” But the city is changing. “The Baltimore I make films about is vanishing,” says Waters. “But that’s not so surprising.”

The recent demise of a favorite movie theater is a case in point. “I’m really upset The Earle [an adult theater on Belair Road] closed,” he says, with a sly smile. “All this stuff about The Senator possibly closing—how come nobody was out there when The Earle closed? I was out of town when it happened, but I went and took pictures of it. It’s a church already.

“And I saw what went on there—talk about sacraments. I saw a lot of things turned into a lot of things in there.”

He shakes his head. Other favorites are gone, as well: the Wee Wee Hours, an after hours bar in Fells Point; Hutzler’s department store, downtown; The Atlantis, a male strip club near Central Booking; Cap’n Jack’s, a thrift shop at Charles Street and North Avenue; the Timonium Drive-In, and numerous others.

Still, he doesn’t seem particularly resentful of the changes and development around town. “What is called the Yuppification of Baltimore is good for the city,” he says. “Otherwise, it would just be empty. I’m not against any of that, but fancy Baltimore offends me a little bit. Pretentious Baltimore really gets on my nerves. I think, ‘Oh, please.’ Hipster Baltimore, I’m all for. I think Hampden is becoming what Fells Point should have become. There’s still an uneasy mix there.

“But I love that people in Baltimore have a sense of humor about the city, and they don’t want to leave. They don’t understand why anyone would leave. That is heartwarming to me. I’m not saying it has to stay poor, or it has to stay redneck, but it has to have a sense of humor about itself to be appealing to me.”

But if Waters’s Baltimore is fading, he has no intention of vanishing along with it. While remaining fiercely loyal to his hometown, he’s been branching out into other careers that are less about Baltimore and more about an ever-evolving artistic persona.

It is a very minor cult right now, but one that is growing and growing.

—Divine, Pink Flamingos

This summer, Waters seems to be popping up everywhere. His Court TV series, Til Death Do Us Part, continues with new episodes; the film of his stand-up show, This Filthy World, comes out on DVD this month; “John Waters Presents Movies That Will Corrupt You,” a series he put together for here!, a gay and lesbian cable channel, will be rebroadcast throughout the summer; and “Eliminate,” an art show he curated for Provincetown’s Albert Merola Gallery opens June 15.

“John never stops creating,” says Christine Vachon, the producer of Waters’s latest film, A Dirty Shame. “He goes where the ideas are, and what he does doesn’t feel false or opportunistic in any way.”

“He is a real student of culture,” notes Marianne Boesky, who shows Waters’s artwork at her New York gallery. “Because of that, he’s able to communicate with many different kinds of people.”

“John is always doing something different,” says publicist Steven Trachtenbroit, who worked on the promotion of last winter’s A Date With John Waters CD. “Plus, he really likes his work and that shows in everything he does.”

Waters will also be in the new Hairspray movie—based on the musical inspired by his 1988 film—that opens nationwide next month. Although Waters didn’t direct the new film—which was shot in Toronto instead of Baltimore and stars John Travolta and Queen Latifah—he makes a cameo as “the flasher.”

“It was weird going to Canada and seeing a $75 million version of my movie,” says Waters, who spent just $2.7 million making the original film. “It was weird seeing Highlandtown built in Canada. Seeing the fake Baltimore always makes me laugh. It looks like Essex, in a way. And that’s all right, because Essex and Highlandtown are the same world. It looked pretty good to me.”

Advance screenings have already created a buzz, making Hairspray one of the most anticipated movies of the summer. “Everyone in Hollywood is talking about it right now,” says Vachon, who is currently shopping Waters’s next project, which the director describes as “a terribly wonderful children’s Christmas adventure called Fruitcake.”

“We don’t have the money yet, but we’re working on it,” says Waters. “The budget is $7-9 million, which is a lot for an independent film. But if the new Hairspray is a hit—who knows—maybe we’ll get this new movie financed easier. Not everything goes smoothly, and luckily, I have a lot of other things I do.”

From experience, he knows the value of having a second (or third) job. In the early 1980’s, Waters’s film career was stalled. He was hoping to make a sequel to Pink Flamingos, called Flamingos Forever, and wasn’t getting any takers. In fact, between 1981 and 1988, he didn’t make a movie.

“So I tried to use what I had,” he says. “I turned myself into a marketable product, and then I had fun with it, and it became a business.”

Waters stepped from behind the camera and presented a fuller, more nuanced version of himself to the world. He wasn’t selling a twisted vision of Baltimore so much as he was selling himself as a humorist and pop culture personality. At a time when he was unable to make a film, he actually widened his audience by expanding into other fields.

He’d been doing a stand-up act at colleges across the country, but its reach was somewhat limited. “So I wrote books,” says Waters, noting that the two volumes he produced during this period, Crackpot and Shock Value, have never gone out of print. “I also worked as a journalist when I couldn’t get the movies made. In fact, I still have my Rolling Stone press card.”

He wrote for a variety of publications about subjects that both expanded and deepened the public’s perception of him. He gave a personalized tour of Los Angeles to Rolling Stone readers, named 101 things he hated (the list included Amish people, apples, and The Hobbit) in National Lampoon, advised Newsweek readers on how to be juvenile delinquents, profiled Pia Zadora for American Film, and professed his love for “The Buddy Deane Show” in Baltimore.

These pieces were bundled with a few previously unpublished essays in Crackpot, which earned rave reviews for its author: “a very funny commentator” (Playboy), “a uniquely observant humorist” (Chicago Tribune), and “a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Miss Manners” (Los Angeles Times).

Shock Value, an offbeat memoir, was similarly lauded. Like the essays, it had a distinct edge—one chapter was titled “Why I Love Violence”—but its overall tone was affable, its wit droll, and Waters came across as immensely likeable. Writer Fran Lebowitz, like many others, was impressed and found the book “funny, informative, and suffused with boyish charm.”

A new John Waters was emerging, one that could simultaneously appeal to cult film buffs and play well on David Letterman.

Boise, Idaho, here we come!

—Divine, Pink Flamingos

When Waters finally got financing for his next film, it wasn’t for a Pink Flamingos sequel or some other midnight-movie fare. The only time he attempted to repeat himself, he was stymied, and the project never got off the ground. So he refined and reinvented himself again, and the next movie was “shocking” in an entirely different way—it was a family film, with a PG rating.

“When I wrote Hairspray, I certainly never thought I was trying to be mainstream,” recalls Waters. “It just happened accidentally.”

Hairspray was both a departure and a surprise hit, though it was hardly a blockbuster by Hollywood standards. About a perky and plump teenager pining for integration in the early-1960’s, it grossed close to $10 million (says Variety), launched Ricki Lake’s career, and showcased Divine as an actor with legitimate commercial appeal. It was subversive enough that it didn’t completely alienate Waters’s core audience, but it was commercial enough to play at the local mall.

The ascendance of indie film didn’t hurt, either. With directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, and Gus Van Sant citing Waters as an inspiration, the one-time Pope became something of a patron saint.

A more lenient culture and the proliferation of cable TV and video rentals also conspired to make Waters more palatable and accessible in the long term. Early in his career, Waters focused on celebrity worship, sexuality, and sleaze, topics that eventually migrated from the tabloids to the mainstream media. Waters, and his trademark pencil-thin mustache went with them.

“So many kids tell me, ‘My parents showed me your movies,'” he says. “It’s the exact opposite of when I was younger when parents called the police about my movies. Times have really changed, but I don’t know if I’ve changed all that much. I’ve had to change to keep going, but if you look at my last film, A Dirty Shame, it’s not that astoundingly different from the early films.

“Pink Flamingos was shown recently on the Sundance Channel, uncut. I don’t even know how that could be. Someone called and wanted to know if they could blur the blowjob scene. I said, ‘Yes, fine. You can do that.’ They didn’t! They forgot or something, and it was shown uncut.

“I look in the cable guide and sometimes five or six of my movies are playing on TV that month. That’s amazing to me. Female Trouble plays on the Independent Film Channel all the time. That surprises me. Pecker regularly plays on television and actually found its audience through TV. Serial Mom has played on Lifetime on Mother’s Day.”

Flipping through the cable stations, viewers might also catch Waters appearing in films such as Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild or Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, or maybe on a rerun of The Simpsons.

Waters appeared in a 1997 Simpsons episode, “Homer’s Phobia,” as John, the owner of a pop culture memorabilia shop. In the episode, Homer learns something about John that changes his perception of the shop owner.

Homer: That John is the greatest guy in the world. We’ve gotta have him and his wife over for drinks sometime.
Marge: Hmm, I don’t think he’s married, Homer.
Homer: Oh, a swinging bachelor, eh? Well, there’s lots of foxy ladies out there.
Marge: Homer, didn’t John seem a little . . . festive to you?
Homer: Couldn’t agree more, happy as a clam.
Marge: He prefers the company of men.
Homer: Who doesn’t?
Marge: Homer, listen carefully. John is a ho . . . mo . . .
Homer: Right
Marge: . . . sexual.
Homer: AAAAHHHHH!

Homer then fears that John might be influencing his son. He asks Bart, “He didn’t give you gay, did he?” To counter any such influence, he takes Bart to a steel mill—where all the steel workers turn out to be gay.

Such unabashed, over-the-top discussions and depictions of sexuality could have been straight out of a Waters film. In the not-so-distant past, they would have been midnight movie material, but here it was on prime time TV. The episode even won an Emmy Award.

“More people have seen that than all my movies put together,” says Waters. “And there are people who only know me from seeing me on The Simpsons.”

Waters later landed in an even more unlikely venue, Broadway, with similar, award-winning results. The musical version of Hairspray, with Waters on-board as a consultant, opened at the Neil Simon Theatre in August 2002 and quickly became a favorite of audiences and critics alike. It won eight Tony Awards, seven Drama Desk Awards, and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for “Best Musical.” It also won a Grammy Award for “Best Musical Show Album.”

A touring version of the show has been criss-crossing the country, taking Waters’s brand of subversive humor and offbeat worldview deep into the Heartland.

Last month, it even played for two nights at the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts in Boise, Idaho.

Is that all you want, money?

—Divine, Flamingos Forever screenplay

Hairspray, the Musical provides Waters with what he jokingly refers to as “the only passive income I’ve ever received. I’ve been very nicely paid for that.”

Otherwise, he says, “Everything in my career has been incredibly gradual. Nothing has happened overnight. I never made that much money on the early movies. And with both Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos, there were music rights issues. When they were re-released, fees had to be paid for all the music. For Pink Flamingos, it was approximately $500,000, so I doubt I’ll ever see another penny from that movie—but at least it can be released.

“I wasn’t able to buy a house until I made Cry-Baby, which is a Hollywood movie. On the Hollywood movies, I make a good salary, but I never see anything after that. I get residuals from the writers and directors guilds, but you can’t live on that. Basically, the early films paid my rent, and the Hollywood films allowed me to buy my house. And I paid a mortgage just like everybody else.”

He politely demurs when asked about income figures. “That’s between me and the IRS,” he says, “but I’ve made less from the movies than you probably think. Still, I’m not complaining.”

But Waters doesn’t hesitate to say what he spends his money on: books and contemporary art. A quick tour of the house confirms this. In just about every room, books are stacked in neat piles and lined on shelves. Many of them, especially in the living room, are art books—coffee table books on the work of Larry Clark, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Carl Andre, Cy Twombly, and many others. Original art by Fischli/Weiss, Mike Kelley, Roy Lichtenstein, Christopher Wool, and Peter Hujar are hung in the living room.

Much of the art is provocative. “The art I like best makes me mad first,” says Waters. “All contemporary art should make you mad. Otherwise, what’s the point? I like things that are original, and original is usually never easy to like. It’s not about decoration. It’s not about pretty. Most people should hate contemporary art. It hates you.”

He points out a small Jess von der Ahe painting in the hallway. An abstract piece comprised mostly of gold and red flecked spirals and circles, it would hardly seem to qualify as outrageous—that is, until you learn that the artist paints with her own menstrual blood.

In the office upstairs, there’s a small jewelry box holding three clear capsules filled with gold filings. It’s a conceptual piece by O. Tobias Wong. Waters explains: “You’re supposed to take the pills, and your turds will have glitter in them—they’ll be sparkling. I love it. I think of it as being for the really rich.”

When asked if you’re supposed to photograph the results as documentation, Waters shakes his head. “No, I think it’s more of a private moment,” he says. “The artist told me that most people who take the pills actually forget to look. Talk about disposable income! Ah, the sins of capitalism.”

The most shocking piece in the house is hidden away, where most folks will never see it. In the third floor guest room, he swings open the door to what looks like a walk-in closet. Inside, it looks like a mad bomber’s lair; it’s actually an installation by Gregory Green. “It’s the only piece the artist has ever done in a private home in the United States,” Waters notes, obviously pleased with the results. “It took him a week to do it. Isn’t it great?”

I think if I concentrated, I might be able to work up some sort of minor miracle.

—Divine, Flamingos Forever screenplay

Waters’s passion for contemporary art extends beyond collecting. In fact, for the past ten years, he’s been creating and exhibiting fine art of his own and circulating in the upper echelon of that world. None of his own work hangs in his house.

But Waters’s art has been shown in galleries throughout the U.S.—including the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore—and across Europe. Much of his work is comprised of film stills he creates by photographing images off a TV screen, though he also does collage, sculpture, and mixed-media installations.

A one-man show, “Change of Life,” opened at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004 and traveled to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. The Village Voicecalled it “the work of a true American original.”

One of his pieces—a print he designed at Baltimore’s Globe Poster—even made the cover of Artforummagazine.

According to Marianne Boesky, his limited edition prints sell for $3,500, while one-of-a-kind pieces fetch as much as $35,000. “We’ve had great success with John,” says Boesky. “He has a cult following of people who are fans of his film work, but, more impressively, he has a strong collector following as a conceptual artist. He is not just a famous filmmaker trying to make art, because, as he knows, his celebrity won’t get him anything in the art world.”

Boesky and Waters both credit his previous dealer, Colin DeLand, with helping him overcome that celebrity. When in New York, it’s not uncommon for Waters to visit dozens of art galleries in a single day. Back in the 1990’s, DeLand’s American Fine Arts gallery in SoHo was a particular favorite, and during one visit, DeLand, who was highly regarded in contemporary art circles for his discerning taste, asked Waters if he created artwork of his own. As it turned out, Waters had been doing the photo work—or “little movies,” as he calls them—and had a body of work finished.

Not long after, DeLand became Waters’s dealer. “Colin was so respected as being the real thing as an art dealer,” says Waters, “that he neutralized most of those fears that I was a celebrity coming into the art world, because that is the worst possible thing you can be. That’s why I’ve kept my art career completely separate. It’s been very important for me to do that.”

When he wants to work on art, Waters gets in his gray Buick LeSabre and drives to an art studio he keeps in Hampden. Housed in a nondescript brick building off the beaten path, it’s a tidy, sprawling space with wall-to-wall carpeting, a few Persian rugs, long wooden tables on which he can work, and eye-catching items scattered around the room—including stacks of Nest and Parkett magazines, a Girls of Dundalk calendar, a box of Farrah Fawcett doll heads, the “Gertie” painting (which was pictured in Shock Value), a photo of James Brown, and a Campbell’s soup can print.

Waters has just started working on a Fall 2008 show at the Boesky Gallery. “I just started making a list of ideas for it,” he says. “It really does take that long to get together a whole new show.”

Far from being daunted, he seems strangely unencumbered by the whole thing. It might be tempting to chalk it up to the fact that he’s just cool, but it’s obviously more than that. There’s something peculiarly liberating about his art career. “It’s a relief to not have to pretend that I’m appealing to everybody,” notes Waters. “In the movie business, you have to do that no matter what. When you go to sell a movie, you basically say it’s going to cross over and everyone’s going to love it. In the art world, you can be subtle, impenetrable, and harder to get—that’s actually considered a good thing.

“Art isn’t for everybody, whereas when you do a movie you’re trying to get everybody to buy a ticket. In the art world, you aren’t trying to get everybody to buy a ticket. As a matter of fact, if everyone bought a ticket, it would be terrible.”

In my maturity, in my autumn years, if you will, I have decided to . . . live like all world leaders: financially secure, surrounded by zombie worship, and bathed in the constant glare of publicity.

—Divine, Flamingos Forever screenplay

At 61, Waters shows no signs of slowing down. “I don’t feel that different than 30,” he says.

And he’s hardly lacking for future projects. Cry-Baby follows Hairspray to Broadway next year, and Pink Flamingos is being optioned as an opera. Waters mentions possibly writing a follow-up to Shock Value, or putting together another themed CD collection like the Christmas and Valentine’s Day compilations he’s already done. He could organize his papers, which are housed at Wesleyan University’s Cinema Archive (along with the archives of Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini, and Frank Capra). And there’s the new film, of course.

This summer, he also plans to write an entirely new stand-up show. “If I do, I can take it to the colleges, and I’ve visited hundreds of them,” he says. “But do I really want to visit all those colleges again? But that’s the thing—I can always do it. I have contingency plans. If I have the new act ready, I can do that, which is nice to know.

“Or maybe I’ll retire and open a reform school. I taught in prison in the 1980’s, so I know people in corrections. I was approached to start a private reform school for rich delinquents in the corrections system. I want to do it, but I said, ‘When will I have the time?’ They said I’d only have to do a master class and talk other people into coming there. We were talking about taking fire-starters because no one else will. No child left behind. This is in the talking stages—the John Waters reform school. I could be good at it.”

When asked if he ever worries about money, Waters gasps. “Oh my God, yes,” he says. “I think anyone in show business is lying to you—even people who are incredibly wealthy—if they say they don’t think it could be over in one day. This business is built on insecurity. As far as the banks are concerned, I don’t have a job. I don’t have a guaranteed weekly paycheck. You always think it could stop.

“But I’m always optimistic. I don’t believe in higher powers, but I do believe in the basic goodness of people. That’s about as spiritual as I get. As far as my enthusiasm and my excitement for being interested in things and caring about life, I still feel like I’m Gabby Hayes shot out of a cannon.”

It’s been 20 years since William Burroughs dubbed John Waters “the Pope of Trash.” And it wasn’t long before it spawned other similarly spirited, press-ready titles: “the Sultan of Sleaze,” “the Prince of Puke,” and “the Duke of Dirt” among them. They were certainly well deserved, as anyone who’s seen
Pink Flamingoscan attest, but those oft-repeated phrases no longer seem applicable. If they do, you haven’t been paying close attention to Waters’s career.
Waters has become something of a ubiquitous—and welcome—presence on the cultural landscape. On any given day, he might be speaking at Oxford, exhibiting his artwork at The Andy Warhol Museum, kibitzing with Jon Stewart on
The Daily Show, starring in his own TV series, releasing a CD, taking the Tony Awards by storm, writing a piece forThe New York Timesbook review, or recording a DVD commentary forThe Little Mermaid. He may even be working on a new film project of his own.
“I’ve always wanted to sell out,” Waters wrote in his 1986 book
Crackpot, “but no one wanted to buy me.”
That’s no longer true, as Waters has reinvented himself and diversified in ways that broadened his mainstream appeal and won him new fans in niche markets other than indie cinema. As Middle America sings along to
Hairspray, the Musical, the contemporary art world embraces Waters as a fine artist. As a result, the trashy sobriquets no longer fit and come across as simplistic, even quaint.
Waters has turned himself into something much more sophisticated and engaging.

And Baltimore’s bad seed has morphed into a bankable brand name around the world.

How did that happen? And what future business prospects does Waters have in mind? Getting into opera, or opening a reform school, perhaps? Don’t laugh. Stranger things have already happened.

Doesn’t it feel fabulous to be home again?
—Divine,
Flamingos Foreverscreenplay

Waters works in the upstairs office of his North Baltimore home. Books are everywhere—mostly art and culture, fiction, true crime, and biographies—on shelves and stacked in neat piles. A magazine rack in the corner holds many of the 160 publications he receives in the mail:
Entertainment Weekly,Variety,Jet,Cooking Light,Metropolitan Home,Artforum,Butt, and a host of others.
Items from Waters’s extensive collection of fake food have been placed discreetly around the room. On a low shelf, for instance, a dish of plastic chocolates sits beside a framed photo of Edith Massey, the actress who won cult fame appearing in Waters’s early movies.

A corkboard displays an assortment of eye-catching ephemera and photos. Amidst snapshots of Waters with various celebrities—including Leonardo DiCaprio, Björk, and Henry Kissinger—there’s an ID badge from the Cannes Film Festival, an autographed picture of Don Knotts, and a “BE EVIL” Believe-style bumper sticker.

Waters sits at a desk with a laptop computer, telephone, legal pads, pens and pencils, toothpick dispenser, adding machine, and a fake cup of coffee (complete with red plastic stirrer). Dressed in a black-and-white striped pullover shirt and gray pants, Waters looks like a stylish convict. Known for being fashion-forward, he has a penchant for striped socks, flashy footwear, and sports jackets that are, as he says, “ripped, but ripped well, by Japanese designers.”

Although Waters keeps an apartment in Greenwich Village and practically lives in airports, Baltimore remains the center of his universe, which he makes instantly clear. “This is my main place,” he says, tucking one leg under the other. “It’s certainly my home. Whenever I have to think of an idea, I come here.”

Up at 6:15 each morning, he gets an early start. “In the morning, I write or think up something every day—from eight o’clock to noon,” he says. “I sell it in the afternoon.”

A productive day might also include learning lines for a guest spot on a TV show, doing press interviews, preparing for a lecture, and fielding numerous phone calls. “I have business appointments just like everyone else,” he says.

Waters will be the first person to tell you that, for years, he’s been “selling Baltimore.” In fact, there are few artists more closely associated with a single locale, and Waters’s relationship to his hometown invites highfalutin comparisons to Faulkner’s Mississippi or Dickens’s London. And no film director has endorsed or validated a city as Waters has with Baltimore. Even Woody Allen eventually made films outside New York, though that city, like London, hardly lacked for artistic validation.

That’s why the Faulkner comparison may be most apt. Like Mississippi, Baltimore is considered something of a cultural backwater that mostly gets ignored by tastemakers and trendsetters. So when Waters descends on a neighborhood like Highlandtown and points his camera at the Formstone façades and beehive hairdos and captures the local dialect, it comes across as exotic in other parts of the country. And as the nation becomes increasingly homogenized, such hyper-regionalism (especially in Waters’s early films) seems all the more distinctive and real.

Critic Gary Indiana has written that “[Waters’s depiction of Baltimore] may now be more authentic than the ‘big’ cultures of New York or Los Angeles, where fewer and fewer genuine local identities survive the many cycles of gentrification.”

When Waters took an A&E film crew to one of his favorite blocks in Hampden a few years ago, one of the locals came out of his house dressed in leopard print pajamas to see what the fuss was about. Because the guy looked like he’d stepped out of Pat Moran’s casting office and was, as Waters recalls, “playing with himself the whole time,” the crew thought the director had put him up to it. He hadn’t. “It was so amazing,” says Waters. “It showed that you can come to Baltimore and see that my films are really true—they’re part documentary of how I see Baltimore.” But the city is changing. “The Baltimore I make films about is vanishing,” says Waters. “But that’s not so surprising.”

The recent demise of a favorite movie theater is a case in point. “I’m really upset The Earle [an adult theater on Belair Road] closed,” he says, with a sly smile. “All this stuff about The Senator possibly closing—how come nobody was out there when The Earle closed? I was out of town when it happened, but I went and took pictures of it. It’s a church already.

“And I saw what went on there—talk about sacraments. I saw a lot of things turned into a lot of things in there.”

He shakes his head. Other favorites are gone, as well: the Wee Wee Hours, an after hours bar in Fells Point; Hutzler’s department store, downtown; The Atlantis, a male strip club near Central Booking; Cap’n Jack’s, a thrift shop at Charles Street and North Avenue; the Timonium Drive-In, and numerous others.

Still, he doesn’t seem particularly resentful of the changes and development around town. “What is called the Yuppification of Baltimore is good for the city,” he says. “Otherwise, it would just be empty. I’m not against any of that, but fancy Baltimore offends me a little bit. Pretentious Baltimore really gets on my nerves. I think, ‘Oh, please.’ Hipster Baltimore, I’m all for. I think Hampden is becoming what Fells Point should have become. There’s still an uneasy mix there.

“But I love that people in Baltimore have a sense of humor about the city, and they don’t want to leave. They don’t understand why anyone would leave. That is heartwarming to me. I’m not saying it has to stay poor, or it has to stay redneck, but it has to have a sense of humor about itself to be appealing to me.”

But if Waters’s Baltimore is fading, he has no intention of vanishing along with it. While remaining fiercely loyal to his hometown, he’s been branching out into other careers that are less about Baltimore and more about an ever-evolving artistic persona.

It is a very minor cult right now, but one that is growing and growing.
—Divine,
Pink Flamingos

This summer, Waters seems to be popping up everywhere. His Court TV series,
Til Death Do Us Part, continues with new episodes; the film of his stand-up show,This Filthy World, comes out on DVD this month; “John Waters Presents Movies That Will Corrupt You,” a series he put together for here!, a gay and lesbian cable channel, will be rebroadcast throughout the summer; and “Eliminate,” an art show he curated for Provincetown’s Albert Merola Gallery opens June 15.
“John never stops creating,” says Christine Vachon, the producer of Waters’s latest film,
A Dirty Shame. “He goes where the ideas are, and what he does doesn’t feel false or opportunistic in any way.”
“He is a real student of culture,” notes Marianne Boesky, who shows Waters’s artwork at her New York gallery. “Because of that, he’s able to communicate with many different kinds of people.”

“John is always doing something different,” says publicist Steven Trachtenbroit, who worked on the promotion of last winter’s
A Date With John WatersCD. “Plus, he really likes his work and that shows in everything he does.”
Waters will also be in the new
Hairspraymovie—based on the musical inspired by his 1988 film—that opens nationwide next month. Although Waters didn’t direct the new film—which was shot in Toronto instead of Baltimore and stars John Travolta and Queen Latifah—he makes a cameo as “the flasher.”
“It was weird going to Canada and seeing a $75 million version of my movie,” says Waters, who spent just $2.7 million making the original film. “It was weird seeing Highlandtown built in Canada. Seeing the fake Baltimore always makes me laugh. It looks like Essex, in a way. And that’s all right, because Essex and Highlandtown are the same world. It looked pretty good to me.”

Advance screenings have already created a buzz, making
Hairsprayone of the most anticipated movies of the summer. “Everyone in Hollywood is talking about it right now,” says Vachon, who is currently shopping Waters’s next project, which the director describes as “a terribly wonderful children’s Christmas adventure calledFruitcake.”
“We don’t have the money yet, but we’re working on it,” says Waters. “The budget is $7-9 million, which is a lot for an independent film. But if the new
Hairsprayis a hit—who knows—maybe we’ll get this new movie financed easier. Not everything goes smoothly, and luckily, I have a lot of other things I do.”
From experience, he knows the value of having a second (or third) job. In the early 1980’s, Waters’s film career was stalled. He was hoping to make a sequel to
Pink Flamingos, calledFlamingos Forever, and wasn’t getting any takers. In fact, between 1981 and 1988, he didn’t make a movie.
“So I tried to use what I had,” he says. “I turned myself into a marketable product, and then I had fun with it, and it became a business.”

Waters stepped from behind the camera and presented a fuller, more nuanced version of himself to the world. He wasn’t selling a twisted vision of Baltimore so much as he was selling himself as a humorist and pop culture personality. At a time when he was unable to make a film, he actually widened his audience by expanding into other fields.

He’d been doing a stand-up act at colleges across the country, but its reach was somewhat limited. “So I wrote books,” says Waters, noting that the two volumes he produced during this period,
CrackpotandShock Value, have never gone out of print. “I also worked as a journalist when I couldn’t get the movies made. In fact, I still have myRolling Stonepress card.”
He wrote for a variety of publications about subjects that both expanded and deepened the public’s perception of him. He gave a personalized tour of Los Angeles to
Rolling Stonereaders, named 101 things he hated (the list included Amish people, apples, andThe Hobbit) inNational Lampoon, advisedNewsweekreaders on how to be juvenile delinquents, profiled Pia Zadora forAmerican Film, and professed his love for “The Buddy Deane Show” inBaltimore.
These pieces were bundled with a few previously unpublished essays in
Crackpot, which earned rave reviews for its author: “a very funny commentator” (Playboy), “a uniquely observant humorist” (Chicago Tribune), and “a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Miss Manners” (Los Angeles Times).
ShockValue, an offbeat memoir, was similarly lauded. Like the essays, it had a distinct edge—one chapter was titled “Why I Love Violence”—but its overall tone was affable, its wit droll, and Waters came across as immensely likeable. Writer Fran Lebowitz, like many others, was impressed and found the book “funny, informative, and suffused with boyish charm.”
A new John Waters was emerging, one that could simultaneously appeal to cult film buffs
andplay well on David Letterman.

Boise, Idaho, here we come!

—Divine,
Pink Flamingos

When Waters finally got financing for his next film, it wasn’t for a
Pink Flamingossequel or some other midnight-movie fare. The only time he attempted to repeat himself, he was stymied, and the project never got off the ground. So he refined and reinvented himself again, and the next movie was “shocking” in an entirely different way—it was a family film, with a PG rating.
“When I wrote
Hairspray, I certainly never thought I was trying to be mainstream,” recalls Waters. “It just happened accidentally.”
Hairspraywas both a departure and a surprise hit, though it was hardly a blockbuster by Hollywood standards. About a perky and plump teenager pining for integration in the early-1960’s, it grossed close to $10 million (saysVariety), launched Ricki Lake’s career, and showcased Divine as an actor with legitimate commercial appeal. It was subversive enough that it didn’t completely alienate Waters’s core audience, but it was commercial enough to play at the local mall.
The ascendance of indie film didn’t hurt, either. With directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, and Gus Van Sant citing Waters as an inspiration, the one-time Pope became something of a patron saint.

A more lenient culture and the proliferation of cable TV and video rentals also conspired to make Waters more palatable and accessible in the long term. Early in his career, Waters focused on celebrity worship, sexuality, and sleaze, topics that eventually migrated from the tabloids to the mainstream media. Waters, and his trademark pencil-thin mustache went with them.

“So many kids tell me, ‘My parents showed me your movies,'” he says. “It’s the exact opposite of when I was younger when parents called the police about my movies. Times have really changed, but I don’t know if I’ve changed all that much. I’ve had to change to keep going, but if you look at my last film,
A Dirty Shame, it’s not that astoundingly different from the early films.
”
Pink Flamingoswas shown recently on the Sundance Channel, uncut. I don’t even know how that could be. Someone called and wanted to know if they could blur the blowjob scene. I said, ‘Yes, fine. You can do that.’ They didn’t! They forgot or something, and it was shown uncut.
“I look in the cable guide and sometimes five or six of my movies are playing on TV that month. That’s amazing to me.
Female Troubleplays on the Independent Film Channel all the time. That surprises me.Peckerregularly plays on television and actually found its audience through TV.Serial Momhas played on Lifetime on Mother’s Day.”
Flipping through the cable stations, viewers might also catch Waters appearing in films such as Jonathan Demme’s
Something Wildor Woody Allen’sSweet and Lowdown, or maybe on a rerun ofThe Simpsons.
Waters appeared in a 1997
Simpsonsepisode, “Homer’s Phobia,” as John, the owner of a pop culture memorabilia shop. In the episode, Homer learns something about John that changes his perception of the shop owner.

Homer:That John is the greatest guy in the world. We’ve gotta have him and his
wife over for drinks sometime.

Marge:Hmm, I don’t think he’s married, Homer.

Homer:Oh, a swinging bachelor, eh? Well, there’s lots of foxy ladies out there.

Marge:Homer, didn’t John seem a little . . . festive to you?

Homer:Couldn’t agree more, happy as a clam.

Marge:He prefers the company of men.

Homer:Who doesn’t?

Marge:Homer, listen carefully. John is a ho . . . mo . . .

Homer:Right

Marge:. . . sexual.

Homer:AAAAHHHHH!

Homer then fears that John might be influencing his son. He asks Bart, “He didn’t give you gay, did he?” To counter any such influence, he takes Bart to a steel mill—where all the steel workers turn out to be gay.

Such unabashed, over-the-top discussions and depictions of sexuality could have been straight out of a Waters film. In the not-so-distant past, they would have been midnight movie material, but here it was on prime time TV. The episode even won an Emmy Award.

“More people have seen that than all my movies put together,” says Waters. “And there are people who
onlyknow me from seeing me onThe Simpsons.”
Waters later landed in an even more unlikely venue, Broadway, with similar, award-winning results. The musical version of
Hairspray, with Waters on-board as a consultant, opened at the Neil Simon Theatre in August 2002 and quickly became a favorite of audiences and critics alike. It won eight Tony Awards, seven Drama Desk Awards, and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for “Best Musical.” It also won a Grammy Award for “Best Musical Show Album.”
A touring version of the show has been criss-crossing the country, taking Waters’s brand of subversive humor and offbeat worldview deep into the Heartland.

Last month, it even played for two nights at the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts in Boise, Idaho.

Is that all you want, money?

—Divine,
Flamingos Foreverscreenplay

Hairspray, the Musicalprovides Waters with what he jokingly refers to as “the only passive income I’ve ever received. I’ve been very nicely paid for that.”
Otherwise, he says, “Everything in my career has been incredibly gradual. Nothing has happened overnight. I never made that much money on the early movies. And with both
Female TroubleandPink Flamingos, there were music rights issues. When they were re-released, fees had to be paid for all the music. ForPink Flamingos, it was approximately $500,000, so I doubt I’ll ever see another penny from that movie—but at least it can be released.
“I wasn’t able to buy a house until I made
Cry-Baby, which is a Hollywood movie. On the Hollywood movies, I make a good salary, but I never see anything after that. I get residuals from the writers and directors guilds, but you can’t live on that. Basically, the early films paid my rent, and the Hollywood films allowed me to buy my house. And I paid a mortgage just like everybody else.”
He politely demurs when asked about income figures. “That’s between me and the IRS,” he says, “but I’ve made less from the movies than you probably think. Still, I’m not complaining.”

But Waters doesn’t hesitate to say what he spends his money on: books and contemporary art. A quick tour of the house confirms this. In just about every room, books are stacked in neat piles and lined on shelves. Many of them, especially in the living room, are art books—coffee table books on the work of Larry Clark, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Carl Andre, Cy Twombly, and many others. Original art by Fischli/Weiss, Mike Kelley, Roy Lichtenstein, Christopher Wool, and Peter Hujar are hung in the living room.

Much of the art is provocative. “The art I like best makes me mad first,” says Waters. “All contemporary art should make you mad. Otherwise, what’s the point? I like things that are original, and original is usually never easy to like. It’s not about decoration. It’s not about pretty. Most people
shouldhate contemporary art. It hates you.”
He points out a small Jess von der Ahe painting in the hallway. An abstract piece comprised mostly of gold and red flecked spirals and circles, it would hardly seem to qualify as outrageous—that is, until you learn that the artist paints with her own menstrual blood.

In the office upstairs, there’s a small jewelry box holding three clear capsules filled with gold filings. It’s a conceptual piece by O. Tobias Wong. Waters explains: “You’re supposed to take the pills, and your turds will have glitter in them—they’ll be sparkling. I love it. I think of it as being for the really rich.”

When asked if you’re supposed to photograph the results as documentation, Waters shakes his head. “No, I think it’s more of a private moment,” he says. “The artist told me that most people who take the pills actually forget to look. Talk about disposable income! Ah, the sins of capitalism.”

The most shocking piece in the house is hidden away, where most folks will never see it. In the third floor guest room, he swings open the door to what looks like a walk-in closet. Inside, it looks like a mad bomber’s lair; it’s actually an installation by Gregory Green. “It’s the only piece the artist has ever done in a private home in the United States,” Waters notes, obviously pleased with the results. “It took him a week to do it. Isn’t it great?”

I think if I concentrated, I might be able to work up some sort of minor miracle.

—Divine,
Flamingos Foreverscreenplay

Waters’s passion for contemporary art extends beyond collecting. In fact, for the past ten years, he’s been creating and exhibiting fine art of his own and circulating in the upper echelon of that world. None of his own work hangs in his house.

But Waters’s art has been shown in galleries throughout the U.S.—including the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore—and across Europe. Much of his work is comprised of film stills he creates by photographing images off a TV screen, though he also does collage, sculpture, and mixed-media installations.

A one-man show, “Change of Life,” opened at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004 and traveled to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Orange County Museum of Art in California, and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.
The Village Voicecalled it “the work of a true American original.”
One of his pieces—a print he designed at Baltimore’s Globe Poster—even made the cover of
Artforummagazine.
According to Marianne Boesky, his limited edition prints sell for $3,500, while one-of-a-kind pieces fetch as much as $35,000. “We’ve had great success with John,” says Boesky. “He has a cult following of people who are fans of his film work, but, more impressively, he has a strong collector following as a conceptual artist. He is not just a famous filmmaker trying to make art, because, as he knows, his celebrity won’t get him anything in the art world.”

Boesky and Waters both credit his previous dealer, Colin DeLand, with helping him overcome that celebrity. When in New York, it’s not uncommon for Waters to visit dozens of art galleries in a single day. Back in the 1990’s, DeLand’s American Fine Arts gallery in SoHo was a particular favorite, and during one visit, DeLand, who was highly regarded in contemporary art circles for his discerning taste, asked Waters if he created artwork of his own. As it turned out, Waters had been doing the photo work—or “little movies,” as he calls them—and had a body of work finished.

Not long after, DeLand became Waters’s dealer. “Colin was so respected as being the real thing as an art dealer,” says Waters, “that he neutralized most of those fears that I was a celebrity coming into the art world, because that is the worst possible thing you can be. That’s why I’ve kept my art career
completelyseparate. It’s been very important for me to do that.”
When he wants to work on art, Waters gets in his gray Buick LeSabre and drives to an art studio he keeps in Hampden. Housed in a nondescript brick building off the beaten path, it’s a tidy, sprawling space with wall-to-wall carpeting, a few Persian rugs, long wooden tables on which he can work, and eye-catching items scattered around the room—including stacks of
NestandParkettmagazines, a Girls of Dundalk calendar, a box of Farrah Fawcett doll heads, the “Gertie” painting (which was pictured inShock Value), a photo of James Brown, and a Campbell’s soup can print.
Waters has just started working on a Fall 2008 show at the Boesky Gallery. “I just started making a list of ideas for it,” he says. “It really does take that long to get together a whole new show.”

Far from being daunted, he seems strangely unencumbered by the whole thing. It might be tempting to chalk it up to the fact that he’s just cool, but it’s obviously more than that. There’s something peculiarly liberating about his art career. “It’s a relief to not have to pretend that I’m appealing to everybody,” notes Waters. “In the movie business, you have to do that no matter what. When you go to sell a movie, you basically say it’s going to cross over and everyone’s going to love it. In the art world, you can be subtle, impenetrable, and harder to get—that’s actually considered a good thing.

“Art isn’t for everybody, whereas when you do a movie you’re trying to get everybody to buy a ticket. In the art world, you aren’t trying to get everybody to buy a ticket. As a matter of fact, if everyone bought a ticket, it would be terrible.”

In my maturity, in my autumn years, if you will, I have decided to . . . live like all
world leaders: financially secure, surrounded by zombie worship, and bathed in

the constant glare of publicity.

—Divine,
Flamingos Foreverscreenplay

At 61, Waters shows no signs of slowing down. “I don’t feel that different than 30,” he says.

And he’s hardly lacking for future projects.
Cry-BabyfollowsHairsprayto Broadway next year, andPink Flamingosis being optioned as an opera. Waters mentions possibly writing a follow-up toShock Value, or putting together another themed CD collection like the Christmas and Valentine’s Day compilations he’s already done. He could organize his papers, which are housed at Wesleyan University’s Cinema Archive (along with the archives of Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini, and Frank Capra). And there’s the new film, of course.
This summer, he also plans to write an entirely new stand-up show. “If I do, I can take it to the colleges, and I’ve visited hundreds of them,” he says. “But do I really want to visit all those colleges again? But that’s the thing—I
canalways do it. I have contingency plans. If I have the new act ready, I can do that, which is nice to know.
“Or maybe I’ll retire and open a reform school. I taught in prison in the 1980’s, so I know people in corrections. I was approached to start a private reform school for rich delinquents in the corrections system. I want to do it, but I said, ‘When will I have the time?’ They said I’d only have to do a master class and talk other people into coming there. We were talking about taking fire-starters because no one else will. No child left behind. This is in the talking stages—the John Waters reform school. I could be good at it.”

When asked if he ever worries about money, Waters gasps. “Oh my God, yes,” he says. “I think anyone in show business is lying to you—even people who are incredibly wealthy—if they say they don’t think it could be over in one day. This business is built on insecurity. As far as the banks are concerned, I don’t have a job. I don’t have a guaranteed weekly paycheck. You always think it could stop.

“But I’m always optimistic. I don’t believe in higher powers, but I do believe in the basic goodness of people. That’s about as spiritual as I get. As far as my enthusiasm and my excitement for being interested in things and caring about life, I still feel like I’m Gabby Hayes shot out of a cannon.”

At 7:15 on a Wednesday morning, Bobby Cicero makes his way down Bank Street, between Conkling and Eaton, in Highlandtown. Balancing a cardboard take-out tray packed tight with coffee and a half dozen egg sandwiches, he stops at the door of a nondescript warehouse and fishes keys from his pants pocket.

A faint smell of ink wafts through the air and intensifies as Cicero pulls open the door. When he steps inside and turns on the lights, the office walls practically explode with color. From floor to ceiling, they are covered with bright, gaudy posters advertising soul revues, hip-hop extravaganzas, carnivals, gospel revivals, college homecomings, political campaigns, and swap meets. Welcome to Globe Poster, a Baltimore institution and one of the most celebrated poster companies in the world.

Cicero walks behind the counter, where a “100% Down On All Purchases, No Checks” sign states the firm’s billing policy. He unwraps a sandwich and sorts through a pile of paperwork. There is a fax for an Italian festival poster, as well as recent orders for DJ Hollywood Breeze and the Krazy Praise “Gospel Go-Go for God.”

The phone rings. “Hey, how are you?” Cicero says, as if greeting an old friend. He extracts a few paper-clipped pages from the pile of papers. “Yeah, I have it right here. . . Do you want it to read, Family Fun Carnival? . . Do you need this in Spanish, too? . . . I can fix it, no problem. . . I’ll dress it up. . . Let me get this in the works. . . I’ll have it for you, don’t worry.”

He returns the phone to its cradle. “It’s carnival season,” he says, knowing the seasonal work will keep him busy for the next few months.

Like the caller, many others will come looking for the classic Globe treatment—big, bold letters over splashes of Day-Glo color (orange, green, and red are the most popular) on a heavy stock that can withstand most weather conditions. “A lot of customers ask, ‘Why does it have to be so big and bold?'” Cicero explains between bites. “Well, if you’re trying to reach people driving past at 40 miles per hour, it has to be big and bold. That’s basically been our philosophy for all these years.”

Over the next hour, a half-dozen pressmen come through the door—each one is offered an egg sandwich—followed by various members of the Cicero family who take up positions around the shop. Bobby is the shop foreman, and he oversees the press work in the back; his brother, Frank, works out front, dealing with customers and sketching designs on notebook paper; Frank’s wife, Debbie, answers the phones and keeps the books; and Frank and Bobby’s brother, Joey, does the shipping and handling. Their father, Joe Sr., has been working at Globe since 1935, and although he’s officially retired, he comes in most days to help out. “They gave me a retirement party,” he’s fond of saying, “but I fooled them and came to work the next day.”

In Joe Sr.’s office, a copy of The Art of Rock sits on the desk. A gorgeous coffee-table book published by Abbeville Press, it features classic concert posters dating back to the 1950s.Globe is well represented, and

Joe Sr.’s copy has Post-Its bookmarking examples of the company’s best work. Of the Globe designs pictured, there’s an eye-popping 1957 “Biggest Show of Stars” poster for an early rock-and-roll revue featuring Chuck Berry, the Crickets, and Fats Domino; a poster for James Brown at the Apollo that promises “a show for the entire family”; and one for Ike and Tina Turner that, with flames surrounding sultry shots of Tina and the Ikettes, is decidedly less wholesome. “Tina Turner used to phone in orders herself,” says Joe Sr., pointing to the page. “She’d be on tour and call in to order posters for upcoming shows.”

Looking over his shoulder, Frank adds that lots of soul stars used to do the same thing. “I’d talk to people like Solomon Burke all the time,” he says, referring to the 1960s R&B great, “and dad will tell you that bandleaders like Count Basie used to stop into the shop when they were in town. They were good customers for us.”

“You weren’t a star until Frank and the people at Globe put your picture on a poster,” says Burke, when asked about the company. “Those were the good old days, when Globe printed thousands of posters for me.”

“I used to ride around with a stack of [Globe Posters] in my trunk,” recalls Ike Turner. “I used them for all our shows in the early days.”

“The posters gave you a little pride,” B.B. King has said. “You might be driving through by yourself and sneak a look at them and smile. Sometimes you would be passing through a town—let’s say Atlanta—and you would be stopping at a service station in one of the suburbs for fuel and directions. Someone would say, ‘Hey, you’re B.B. King! Hey, fellows, that’s B.B. King; I just saw his poster!'”

Now, those same posters, if you can find them, are worth thousands of dollars.With Globe’s now-iconic style inexorably linked to the glory days of R&B, and with deep-pocketed Boomers spiking demand for music memorabilia, vintage Globes are hot items. Old Globe posters, staple holes and all, have been auctioned at Sotheby’s and purchased for display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. And the Rhythm and Blues Foundation recently called about acquiring some old posters. “It’s shocking,” says Bobby. “Who would have figured that our posters would be valuable someday? After all, they were made to look good hanging from telephone poles.”

Globe Poster was founded during a card game in 1929. As Joe Sr. tells it, Norman Goldstein, a wealthy New Yorker, and Harry Shapiro, whose family owned a printing business in Texas, were both at the table that night in Philadelphia. At some point during the game, Shapiro proposed going into business together, and Goldstein took to the idea. When the question arose about where the new company would be located, they took a map of the East Coast and randomly folded it. When it was reopened, the crease was on Baltimore. “So they started out in Baltimore,” Joe Sr. says, with a knowing smile and nod of the head.

The new company set up shop in the Smith Building on South Hanover Street with three letter presses and a cutter—”that we still use,” Frank notes. Despite fallout from the Depression, Globe prospered by printing for burlesque houses, vaudeville performers, movie theaters, and carnivals.

Joe Sr. was recently married and looking for work in the fall of 1935. The son of a Sicilian shoemaker, he’d grown up in South Baltimore, the fourth of six children. He knew about an opening at Globe, where his brother-in-law worked, and inquired about the job. “I started the next day,” he recalls, “cleaning and putting away type.”

He went on to perform virtually every job in the shop, and by the time Harry Shapiro’s brother, Norman, took over in 1954, Joe was foreman of the pressroom and the father of three young sons. He unfailingly refers to his old boss as “Mr. Shuh-pie-ro” and says it didn’t take them long to establish an excellent on-the-job rapport. “For twenty years, I was his right-hand man,” says Joe.

When Shapiro retired in 1975, he sold Globe to Joe. By then, the company had moved to the Candler Building at Market Place, and the younger Ciceros—who’d worked summers at the plant during their high school years—had struck out on their own. Joey became an accountant, Frank was a social worker, and Bobby worked at Black & Decker. But by the end of 1976, they’d all joined their father at Globe, full-time.

Since then, Globe has relocated twice; first, to a brick building on Byrd Street (that was also home to the National Federation of the Blind) in South Baltimore, and three years ago, to its present Bank Street address. Except for the hulking presses, which weigh as much as 13 tons a piece, the Ciceros moved everything themselves. “It practically killed us,” says 58-year-old Frank, during a tour of the print shop. “We’re not getting any younger, you know.”

With the presses whirring, a huge overhead exhaust fan humming, and a radio blaring the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” he practically shouts to be heard. He points out an in-house promotional poster from the 1970s that was used to drum up business at print conventions and expos.With eye-catching panache, it promises “fast service and low prices” for a variety of posters, including “circus, rodeos, hell drivers, races, concerts, and bumpers.” When it’s noted that the phone number listed on the poster is still Globe’s number, Frank is unfazed. “That was a Mulberry number,” he says. “Mulberry five.We’ve had that number for at least fifty years.”

He walks past a few offset presses, the aforementioned paper cutter, a pair of Heidelberg numbering machines (for tickets), and a paint-splattered “clam shell”(for screen print work) that brings to mind paintings by de Kooning or Pollock. A pair of Miehle letter presses, dating back to 1907, quietly await repair. A five-gallon bucket of fluorescent orange ink sits beside a table with a pile of red shop rags on it. A bright green “O’Malley for Mayor” sign hangs on a nearby wall, along with recent concert posters forWillie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine, and Beck.

When asked how Globe’s distinctive style evolved, Frank and Bobby head for the composing room, where yards of hand-cut wood type are stored on shelves. This alcove used to be the domain of Harry Knorr, who designed posters at Globe for almost 50 years. When asked if any single person is responsible for the Globe “look,” Frank and Bobby respond in unison. “Harry,” they say, nodding in agreement.

In the mid-1950s, Globe began putting fluorescent inks behind its type, and Knorr started using multiple colors to highlight and define various parts of a poster. That’s one reason why Globe was such a good match for those old soul revues; it could draw attention to all the artists on a multi-act bill, and the music was bright and vibrant, just like the poster hyping it.

It was also common for Knorr to create custom letters reinforcing that vibe. “If it looks kind of weird, that was Harry,” says Frank.

And if the pressure of being creative during tight production schedules ever got to Knorr, he never let on. The Ciceros remember him pacing calmly, with a six-ounce Coke bottle in one hand, a pencil in the other, and a head full of ideas. “We’d be running around trying to get everything printed, and he’d be back here in his own world,” says Bobby. “He was always looking away, thinking. Then all of a sudden, he’d start sketching on a piece of paper, cardboard, anything. He had that sort of artistic temperament.”

Knorr’s design would be transferred to a block that was handrouted and cut to size by a woodworker making about $40 a week. The custom block was then incorporated into an overall design that also included more traditional block type. A nearby shelf holds various wood cuts created by Knorr, blocks with things like “Air Show,” “Fireworks,” “Farm Fair,” “Outdoor Frolic,” “Fish Fry,” “Jamboree,” and “Show Girls” cut into them.

Although his designs were fairly sophisticated for the Eisenhower era, Knorr never forgot that Globe posters were more utilitarian than artistic, and he passed that on to his disciples. “Harry always said that you should be able to read a poster in three seconds,” says Frank. “I think that’s true, and that’s how I judge our posters.”

It may not seem like much has changed since Knorr retired in the late-1970s, but Globe has actually proved to be quite versatile on the business front. The firm switched over from letter-press to offset printing in 1988, the year it began designing posters on a Macintosh computer. It also began printing just about anything, and over the years, the list has swelled to include restaurant menus, FBI shooting range targets, directional signs for real estate developers, spiral notebooks, ties, scarves, and T-shirts.

But more than anything else, it’s the Ciceros’ strong sense of family that shepherds Globe through the tough times. Lately, health problems have threatened the company’s existence, but always, the family pulls together to make the best of it. When Globe’s longtime secretary Barbara Carson (a cousin of the Ciceros’) suffered a stroke in 1998, everyone pitched in to make up for her absence. Debbie worked extra hours, and it wasn’t uncommon for Bobby to take a computer home at night to catch up on paperwork.

And when Frank fell ill from kidney failure in December of 2000, Bobby stepped forward to donate a kidney to his brother, who looks remarkably well these days. “It’s hard,” says Bobby, “but thank God we get to work with people we love and care about. You know, I think that sense of family also spills over to the other guys who work here. That’s the way we like it.”

Glancing around the shop, Bobby suddenly seems a bit antsy. Frank has left to tend to a customer at the front counter, Joey has been wrapping orders that need to be shipped, and Joe Sr. walks past on his way to the paper cutter. “I don’t want to seem rude,” Bobby says, “but I have a job to run.”With that, he tucks a shop rag into his pocket and hustles away, stepping in time to the mechanized rhythm of the presses.