EAT

Dec. 6: Heritage Smokehouse Feast

Union Craft Brewing, 1700 W. 41st St. $75.

Although we still miss the locally sourced lamb chops and steak cuts from now-closed Parts & Labor, former head chef and butcher George Marsh is keeping its spirit alive through his new venture, Heritage Smokehouse. In preparation for the restaurant’s opening in early 2020, the Heritage team is serving up this feast of epic proportions at Union Craft Brewing, with everything from smoked pork belly and spare ribs to pig heads and kielbasa. This meat-lover’s dream also includes sides like local vegetables and suggested beer pairings from Union’s tasting team.

DRINK

Dec. 7: Mahaffey’s Pub Winter Wonderland Party

Mahaffey’s Pub, 2706 Dillon St. 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Free.

Mahaffey’s Pub is a longtime Canton staple for its no-frills attitude, drink specials, and annual all-day holiday block party. Bring the kiddos early for pictures with Santa, face-painting, and a toy drive for the Saint Francis Neighborhood Center, and then stick around for snacks by Snake Hill Food Truck. But the main attraction of the party is what will keep you warm all day: Flying Dog beers as well as spiked hot cocoa and apple cider.

SEE

Dec. 8: Holiday Pagoda Lighting

Patterson Park, 27 S. Patterson Park Ave. 4:30-8:30 p.m. Free.

Watch as the stars and snowflakes that decorate the Pagoda turn on during the fifth annual lighting at Patterson Park. Bring the whole family to the park to meet Santa and other holiday characters, squeeze in some holiday shopping with local gift vendors, or donate to the toy drive. Plus, this much-anticipated community kick-off doesn’t end once the park’s centerpiece is lit, but instead, welcomes locals to stay into the evening with tons of food trucks and live music to keep the celebration going.

HEAR

Dec. 6: Save Your Soul with DJs Baby Alcatraz and Rob Macy

Lithuanian Hall, 851 Hollins St. 8-11 p.m. $6.

Let’s face it: This is a stressful time of the year. Between last-minute holiday shopping and work performance reviews, we could all use an excuse to let loose and dance the stress away. Luckily, one of the city’s most beloved dance parties returns this Friday with an all-out vinyl shindig hosted by famed local DJs Baby Alcatraz and Rob Macy. Boogie down to a mix of Motown hits, funk breaks, big-beat blues, girl groups, swinging instrumentals, and (almost) every other genre at this monthly get-down.

DO

Dec. 6: R. House’s 3rd Birthday Bash

R.House, 301 W. 29th St. 6 p.m.-12 a.m. Free.

This weekend marks the third anniversary of Remington’s favorite food hall, and to celebrate, the theme of its all-night birthday party is, well, three. While the family-friendly activities like face-painting, balloon animals, and a scavenger hunt run until 9 p.m., the neighborhood favorite bartenders at R. Bar will be slinging $3 cocktails, boilermakers, and select beers and wines all night long. During the “adult swim” portion of the party, knock back a few edible glitter-infused Jello shots and take a turn at the microphone for a few celebratory rounds of karaoke.

Blast From the Past

May 8, 2016
33rd Street

Fifty years ago today, Frank Robinson launched a home run off Luis Tiant that not only cleared the left field wall but 50 rows of seats, landing in Memorial Stadium’s parking lot. The only HR ever knocked completely out of the park in the Orioles’ history on 33rd Street, the titanic shot was considered such a momentous feat that Robinson received a minute-long standing ovation, and a week later, a flag reading “HERE” was placed atop the bleachers to mark the spot where the ball sailed from the park.

Memorial Stadium, of course, was torn down after the team moved to Camden Yards. However, a popular rec field has since replaced it, with home plate and left field closely aligned to the old diamond’s configurations. So, on this windy afternoon, local resident Mark Melonas is hosting a second flag raising to commemorate the golden anniversary of Robinson’s epic blast. The replica “HERE” flag that Melonas commissioned is even made by the same company that produced the original.

“I wasn’t born yet in 1966, which was also Frank’s first year with the Orioles. But my dad, who was 17 then, told me how much he meant to Baltimore,” says Melonas, 41, a furniture maker. Robinson, later Major League Baseball’s first black manager, led the O’s to their first World Series title that same year, delivering a 410-foot homer in the series-clinching 1-0 win at Memorial Stadium.

“I was sitting in left field that day,” recalls Mark’s dad, Jim Melonas, now 67. “It flew two rows over my head.”

Love of Country

May 15, 2016
Beason Street

The wooden trunk on the floor of this three-story, red-brick boarding house—once a way station for turn-of-the-century newcomers to America known as the Immigration House—reveals much of the building’s history.

Gold lettering on the trunk—one of the artifacts on exhibit at the new Baltimore Immigration Museum, which is hosting an open house this afternoon—reads “Bremen-Baltimore Sept. 25 Dampfer [steamship] Rhein.” It’s a telling inscription pointing to the historic Atlantic route that carried 1.2 million German and Eastern European immigrants to Locust Point between the Civil War and World War I.

Above the trunk, a black and white photograph shows a young man with a bushy mustache, a cap, and an overcoat sitting amid baggage shortly after arrival.

The culmination of years of work by Nicholas Fessenden, a former Friends School history teacher, and his wife, Brigitte, a German-born preservation expert, the budding museum documents Baltimore’s immigration saga, which has been largely overshadowed by New York’s Ellis Island. On this day, a steady stream of Locust Point residents stop by, as well as others interested in learning more about their city and possibly their family’s back-story.

“I’m German on my mother’s side,” says Frank Tewey, whose ancestors lived nearby. “My great-grandmother’s family told her, ‘Never marry a sailor, they all leave.’” But she did—another German immigrant named Gerhardt—and, indeed, he left, heading home to Deutschland to claim a small inheritance. He returned, however.

“My great-grandfather joined the German navy in order to come back and then jumped ship to be with my great-grandmother,” Tewey continues. “Good thing he did. One of their future children, my grandmother, had 63 grandkids when she died.”

Love Shack

June 3, 2016
Hollins Street

Behind the DJ booth, a pair of turntables, and stacks of metal record suitcases, Fred Schneider digs through his 45-rpm collection, handing old-school vinyl selections to host Rob Macy. It’s cramped and hot, and the packed house inside the Lithuanian Hall is twisting and shouting to some of the best—and rarest—greasy rock and roll, Motown, R&B, funk, and soul ever made.

Macy concentrates momentarily as he lowers the needle onto “You’ve Got My Soul on Fire,” and then nods and grins as he lifts off his headphones. “This is sick,” he says, referring to Edwin Starr’s 1973 single.

By midnight, the air is so heavy with perspiration that women are lifting the matted hair from their necks and pinning it atop their head even as they keep moving. It’s mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings, but more than a few Gen Xers have come to see Schneider, the famous party-chasing frontman for the new wave B-52s, who broke out in the late ’70s and early ’80s with hits like “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho.”

The vintage recordings behind the first-Friday-of-every-month Save Your Soul dance party—launched two decades ago—are both an homage to the music Schneider loved as a teenager and the organizing principle behind his retro, bouffant-sporting band.

“Word apparently got to Fred that Baltimore had one of the top soul dance parties on the East Coast,” Macy says. “So we invited him and he was game. He’d bought some records and he wanted a place to play ’em.”

As the evening turned to the wee hours of the morning, the 65-year-old singer, who doesn’t appear to have slowed much, hit the dance floor more and more.

“I was showing them all how to boogaloo and shing-a-ling,” says Schneider, who still manages to convey a certain intoxicating blend of Southern-influenced civility and randy mischievousness when he smiles.

“It helped that I was a little bit tipsy.”

Graceland

December 5, 2015
Hollins Street

The walls in the upstairs Jungle Room are draped in velvet leopard print, matching the snug dresses on a few of the bouffant-sporting women hitting the dance floor as Rob Kilgore belts out a cover of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” one of the King of Rock and Roll’s early hits:

“Well lawdy, lawdy, lawdy
Miss Clawdy Girl,
you sure look good to me . . .”

There are all kinds of bands inside the packed Lithuanian Hall, covering nearly the entirety of Elvis Presley’s blues/country/rockabilly catalog on three floors. There are also enough Elvis impersonators—this is the 22nd annual Night of 100 Elvises, after all—to match every incarnation (Young Elvis, Comeback Elvis, U.S. Army Private Elvis, Bloated Elvis, etc.) of the singer several times over. Although, sometimes it’s difficult to tell the fans dressed up in homage to their idol apart from the professional tribute artists.

All through the night—which benefits Johns Hopkins Children’s Center—there are hula girls performing on the main theater stage, a nod to the icon’s Blue Hawaii period. Downstairs, near the Viva Las Vegas Lounge, the King’s Kitchen Menu features Elvis-inspired favorites, including, naturally, fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

“I have older sisters; I was weaned on Elvis,” says Kilgore. “In fact, in 1972, I visited a girlfriend in Memphis and went to Graceland with her. Elvis was asleep—it was 2:30 in the afternoon—so we couldn’t go in the house. His uncle Vester gave us a tour of the grounds in Elvis’s Ford Bronco instead.”

Ola Belle

December 2, 2015
Falls Road

Caleb Stine, dressed in work boots and a plaid shirt, puts down his guitar for a moment, picks up a fiddle, and begins tapping his toes. “I learned how to play this tune from a recording by a Kentucky fiddler named Art Stamper,” Stine tells the three-dozen bluegrass fans squeezed into The Ivy Bookshop for his informal performance and a reading by Tim Newby from his new book, Bluegrass in Baltimore: The Hard Drivin’ Sound and Its Legacy.

Newby recounts the story of legendary singer and banjo player Ola Belle Reed, the Ashe County, NC, transplant who helped introduce Southern mountain music, first to rural Maryland and then to Baltimore. Ola, brother Alex Campbell, and husband “Bud” Reed built a stage at their New River Ranch in Rising Sun that would eventually host Loretta Lynn, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, the Carter Family, and Johnny Cash.

In fact, as Newby says, the term “bluegrass”—to distinguish the new, faster, more intricate musical genre from traditional country or simpler “hillbilly” music—is first found in print in 1957 on the liner notes to American Banjo: Three-Finger and Scruggs Style, recorded by Mike Seeger in Baltimore. “The music changed some when it moved to the city,” says Newby. “It’s great today to see the Charm City Folk & Bluegrass Festival, which keeps growing, and a new generation of musicians picking up on that legacy.”

“I knew Baltimore was the birthplace of painted screens and Formstone, I didn’t know it was the home of bluegrass,” laughs store co-owner Ed Berlin as he hands commemorative mugs to Newby and Stine. “I do know something, however, about the family-owned company, Homer Laughlin, over 100 years old, that makes these pottery cups: Their clay comes from the Ohio River area—same place that music comes from.”

Points of Light

December 1, 2015
Riverside Drive

Driving past jersey barriers and heavy rail tracks, dozens of families—many including a member who spent his or her working life down here—eventually reach a warehouse terminal at the southeast end of Sparrows Point. The property is largely desolate now, and certainly it is compared to Bethlehem Steel’s glory days on “the Point.” But one tradition of the shuttered plant continues—the lighting of the “Star of Bethlehem.”

Handcrafted in 1978 by local steelworkers, the 1.5-ton star spans some 28 feet. It shone from atop the mill’s massive, 320-foot-high “L” blast furnace until the huge steel plant was demolished in January 2015, but was saved by the site’s new owners, Tradepoint Atlantic. Its placement high on a warehouse this evening is temporary until a permanent home is found, Tradepoint Atlantic CEO Michael Moore explains to the crowd, who are reminiscing over coffee and donuts before the countdown.

“I thought I’d come down and see a few friends,” says Virgil Hare, watching the lighting of the star, which is visible from the Key Bridge, with his friend and sister. “I started working for Bethlehem Steel after graduating from Dundalk High School in 1965—45 years—probably 55, if you count all the overtime,” he laughs.

Moore talks about the star, created when hope still remained for an already declining steel industry, symbolizing his company’s hopes for attracting new businesses to the 3,100-acre grounds.

Hare would like to see that, too, of course. He also acknowledges lingering frustration over the steel industry’s demise, in part, at least, from foreign competition. “I remember when that star was made,” Hare says. “From angled iron—‘Canada’—stamped right on it.”