In 1926, sculptor Edmond Romulus Amateis, the American son of a noted Italian artist, won the juried competition to carve two prominently placed works outside the entrance to the then-new War Memorial Building across from City Hall. Amateis’ winning design called for a pair of mythological seahorses with scaly backbones and long aquatic tails, representing “the might of America crossing the seas in aid of its allies.”

The two stone seahorses, which incorporate eagles and ospreys as well as the city’s and state’s coat of arms, were completed in time for the dedication at War Memorial Plaza the following year. Most likely unbeknownst to Amateis is that in the very stone he used are fossils of actual sea creatures—still visible in the foundations of his epic sculptures.

“Do you see those tiny white knobs?” asks Sam Glasscock, an ocean geologist and environmental scientist, leading a small Geology Tour of Baltimore’s Building and Monuments on a recent brisk afternoon.

“Those are the fossils of crinoids. What we commonly call sea lilies,” he says, pointing to small, round, pencil-eraser-sized circles, literally all over the statue’s base. “That part that you see is the end of their tentacle, which was once attached to their bony head and the sea floor. It’s like the stem of a flower—they look more like plants, which is how they got their name.”

On the south-facing side of the seahorse closest to East Fayette Street, there are other visible “trace fossils” in the limestone. These longer, curved lines in the base are not fossils of a sea organism itself, but evidence of marine “worms” that once passed through the rock when it was softer sediment. All this limestone, he notes, was formed some 300 million years ago in what is today Indiana, back when the Hoosier State was covered by a shallow ocean that flourished with marine life.

Glasscock, who grew up in Missouri, began leading the tours on behalf of the Natural History Society of Maryland a little more than a year ago, not long after moving here for a position with the Environmental Protection Agency. Much of the backstory of Baltimore’s downtown buildings came from an old state Department of Natural Resources pamphlet that he’d picked up from another Natural History Society fossil fan. After some site visits, he organized a 12-stop, 1.5-mile stroll that begins at the currently shuttered Gallery Mall across from the Inner Harbor.

If you think the mall and Harborplace pavilions now seem of another era, consider that the red granite covering The Gallery exterior was imported from Taivassalo, Finland, and the Precambrian Age. It’s more than 544 million years old and was formed from the cooling of molten magma. Stop two is the corner of Calvert and Lombard streets at the TransAmerica Building, whose exterior, plaza-level side walls are covered with travertine, a type of freshwater limestone. The TransAmerica’s limestone came from the Middle East, but travertine is also still found in Italy, where it’s been quarried since Roman times for use as building and ornamental stone, including for parts of the Roman Colosseum.

Walking east, Glasscock highlights the 1885-built Mercantile Trust & Deposit Company Building, whose extensive trim is made of late Triassic age Seneca Red sandstone—quarried near the C&O Canal in Maryland—and at least 210 million years old. It’s the same stone used to build the iconic Smithsonian Castle in D.C. City Hall, of course, is another stop. It’s faced with Baltimore County’s own Cockeysville Marble—the same stone used to construct Baltimore’s Washington Monument. In front of City Hall, tour-goers learn, the Monument to Negro Heroes of the United States has a base of dark gray, fine-grained Canadian granite. The oldest building granite in the city, however, wraps around Baltimore Police Department Headquarters at President and East Fayette.

“It’s about 3.6 billion years old,” says Glasscock, gesturing toward the polished, gray and pink Morton gneiss, also known as Rainbow Gneiss. It was birthed in Morton, Minnesota, “just” a billion years after the Earth was formed. It’s one of the oldest rocks in North America.

Baltimore’s buildings and monuments, in other words, don’t just tell the history of the city and its people, but the history of the planet.

After the tour, back in front of Amateis’ mythological seahorses, Glasscock is asked what he thinks will be found hundreds of millions of years down the road that would reveal clues to our current geological epoch, the Anthropocene era. He doesn’t hesitate.

“Plastic.”

Wheel of Time

August 15, 2015
North Market Street, Frederick

“My strategy is to stay on the far right and not die,” says 58-year-old Nick Ackermann, smiling beneath a bushy mustache and protective headgear that resembles a brimless pith helmet.

Nearby, two-dozen-plus fellow penny-farthing enthusiasts—many, like Ackermann, in tweed and knickers—climb atop 4-foot tall bicycles, preparing for the 4th annual Frederick Clustered Spires High Wheel Race, the only U.S. competition of its kind. Fittingly, a barbershop quartet performs “The Star-Spangled Banner” just prior to the blast of the starter’s horn, which sends the riders scurrying around the .4-mile circuit, ringed with 5,000 spectators.

Proving Ackermann’s point about the danger inherent in navigating a race while mounted on turn-of-the-century-style bikes, there’s a pretty good crash two-thirds of the way through the event.

Ultimately, Angela Long, a senior V.P., mom of two, and avid cyclist, racing in heels no less (“The extra inches to help me climb up,” she says) takes the women’s competition. And Eric Cameron, an Air Force biomedical engineer and runner, takes the men’s title, falling just a lap short of the one-hour course record. A novice who just turned 42, Cameron watched last year from a local pub and jumped at the chance to compete when a friend’s husband, who owns a high-wheeler, suffered an injury this summer.

“I guess now we’ll have to buy him one,” his wife Jill says, standing next to him afterward. “Maybe for his birthday.”

“Or my mid-life crisis,” says Cameron, still breathing hard.

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String Theory

July 25, 2015
Eastern Avenue

“Does anybody know what ukulele means in Hawaiian?” Victoria Vox asks the packed beginner’s workshop at the Creative Alliance. Several hands shoot up. “Jumping flea—that’s right,” says Vox, explaining how 19th-century Hawaiians marveled at the quick fingerboarding of migrant Portuguese sugar-cane workers on their native country’s compact instrument. Which, of course, Hawaiians soon made their own, substituting catgut for traditional steel strings. “I’m pretty sure they just got tired of the cuts and blood from those steel strings,” laughs Vox.

The host of the all-day, second annual Charm City Ukulele Festival, Vox, a Baltimore transplant who has graced the cover of Ukulele magazine and tours extensively, is leading three of the seven uke classes—there’s also a Hula workshop—and performing at tonight’s show.

Other ukulelists this evening include Hawaiian-native Glen Hirabayashi, who performs regularly in the region with The Aloha Boys, and Louisa Hall, a Northern Virginia-based songwriter who often infuses her cheerful strumming and pleasing tenor with darker lyrics. Her set includes numbers such as “Irrational Fears,” “Internet Love Song”—a disturbing chronicle of online dating experiences—and “Missed Connections,” an upbeat tune in which she stalks a stranger getting off the D.C. Metro.

“I was attracted to the ukulele because it’s portable fun, but I get creepy and obsessive, too,” Hall says, adding that her musical training consists mostly of singing in the car and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. “I often describe myself as ‘aggressively jolly.’”

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Tiny Love Songs

August 9, 2015
Belair Road

The volunteer-run Natural History Society of Maryland, which is hard to miss given the replica dinosaur out front, has its unusual collection of taxidermied wildlife, pressed butterflies, and sea turtle skulls on public display this afternoon. But today’s main attraction is a presentation by entomologist Cathy Stragar called Summer’s Singing Insects, about the katydids, crickets, and cicadas that make up the season’s outdoor chorus.

Stragar, who works at the Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab at the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, explains that many insects make music by a process known as stridulation—or rubbing body parts together at incredibly fast speeds. A male cricket, for example, uses one wing as a plane and the other as a scraper/bow, playing to attract female partners.

Cicadas, however, use a different method, popping an abdominal noisemaker called a tymbal, which can produce sounds over 100 decibels. “Males close their ears to literally prevent them from going deaf,” she says.

Some grasshoppers, on the other hand, emit supersonic sounds that humans can’t hear.

As part of the lecture, the first in a bimonthly series at the Natural History Society, Stragar plays recordings of crickets and cicadas. She notes the local varieties of each as the small but rapt audience nods in recognition of certain familiar chirps and whistles.

“Recently, Jurassic-era cricket sounds were re-created,” Stragar continues, adding that paleontologists have reconstructed the fossil wing structures of the modern crickets’ ancestors. “These tell us a lot about what the world sounded like during that period,” she says, hitting the play button on her laptop. “These are 165-million-year-old songs.”