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Mister Baltimore Goes to the Movies
 | | Billy Driscoll | MISTER BALTIMORE |
I’m a block north of Penn Station in Tapas Teatro - the immensely popular Spanish restaurant 1711 North Charles Street - talking about “2001: A Space Odyssey” with Mister Baltimore.
We’ve just seen Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece on the big screen next door at the Charles Theater, the same stage where the great Muddy Waters sang the blues just a few years before his death in the early 1980s.
Mister Baltimore, a hard-head in the best of circumstances, is adamant.
“It’s about a circle,” he says, digging into roasted potatoes with cilantro sour cream and washing it down with a gulp of water. “They’re saying that when you get to the end - the end of your life, the end of the rainbow, Christ, maybe even the end of Clinton Street - you start all over again.”
How do you talk to a guy like this?
“I could be wrong, Mr. B.,” I say, sipping sangria. “But it seems to me that it’s about God versus technology. That no matter how advanced we become, machines are never going to put us on a level with God.”
“Who don't know that?” he says, chomping a tentacle of grilled calamari. The fiery squid sets his mouth ablaze and he knocks over his glass of water while sputtering: “The trippy part near the end was cool.”
Long I have long suffered to school my old friend in the finer things. For just as long, he has he returned the favor by not letting me forget where I came from.
After high school, I moved out of East Baltimore into the world of art and books and recently returned after many years in Paris and Madrid and Bombay. Mister Baltimore stayed behind to work on what is left of the industrial waterfront and sent me postcards about the old neighborhood with pictures of the Shot Tower on the front.
He takes me around to the best snowball stands in town - keep your eye out this summer for John and Libby’s on Hudson Street in Canton - and I treat him to places like Teatro Tapas where a couple of mouthfuls of food is served on saucers at $5.95 a helping.
 | | Billy Driscoll | | The Charles Theatre |
Mister Baltimore finds it a little silly - for as much money as we’re spending on tid-bits, he says, two people could eat “a right good lunch” at Lexington Market - but he’s a sport who’ll try anything once. Especially in his own backyard.
As always, Teatro is loud and crowded in the best Spanish dining tradition, the way Tio Pepe on Franklin Street is always a catacomb of fiestas. Because the weather is rough, there won’t be sidewalk tables until Spring and we are packed in like so many grilled sardines in Galicia.
I am enjoying a plate of Spanish sausage - chorizo - and a simple salad. The sausage reminds me of the traditional rings my brother grinds for our family every Christmas; chorizo made with Spanish sherry and sweet paprika that I serve with small spinach and potato omelettes when I have special guests, the same ones that Mister Baltimore throws on a grill in the summertime and shovels into his mouth like Esskay hot dogs.
He clears his palate with my glass of water, spears my last chorizo and says the Charles Theater reminds him of the Camden Yards ballpark.
“All that brick and them exposed steel beams,” he says. “New, but old.”
The Charles and Teatro Tapas are housed in a Beaux-Arts building designed 111 years ago to store cable cars and the generators that made them run. Then it was a streetcar barn and then it was a bus barn and somewhere along the line it housed the Maryland Library for the Blind and the fabled Famous Ballroom, home of the still thriving Left Bank Jazz Society.
In 1939, the era that still endures when you walk into Mister Baltimore’s eastside rowhouse, the Times Theater opened on the site as the city’s first all-newsreel house. Imagine having to go to the movies to watch CNN in black and white.
Re-named the Charles near the end of the second Eisenhower Administration, the theater became a revival house in 1979 and remained a single-screen until expanding to five-screens in 1999.
The original auditorium still has 485 seats - what Baltimore’s champion of cinema George Figgs calls “the mother theater that give birth to a litter of smaller screens - has hardly been altered.
“Its funny how movie theaters are built into old car barns in Baltimore,” says Figgs, who ran a repertory house called the Orpheum on Thames Street in Fells Point from 1991 to 1999 and now screens films at the Walters Art Gallery in the city’s Mount Vernon neighborhood.
Figgs says that the Orpheum used to be a car barn back before the Civil War when local buses were dragged by mules and loves the irony that the building the Charles is in served the same purpose uptown.
“I have an extreme love for the Charles that goes way back to when I was a projectionist there,” he says. “And now it’s been reinvented as an art film mall in a very positive sense, in the ancient Roman sense of the word.”
Mister Baltimore loves the Charles Theater because it reminds him of the movie houses of his youth as he loves the brick streets of Greektown because they remind him of his grandparents as he loves the flan we are now enjoying for dessert because the caramel and custard treat reminds him of the ones Agnes Garayoa used to make in her South Broadway kitchen when he was a little kid.
He’ll be with me at noon on Saturday the 15th of this month to see Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” for a mere five dollars, just a nickel more than it costs for a charming plate of roasted eggplant at Teatro.
“Now there’s a movie,” he says, more at home with the past than the future like so many of his neighbors.
He says the Orpheum was “a real nice joint” and Georgie Figgs is a world-class character if ever there was one, but he’d rather remember the old building - soon to be open as a maritime museum - when it was a rope shop run by an old rumpot named Mooney.
Mister Baltimore has always been older than his years and on drizzly days down at the end of Clinton Street, where tugboats churn past Fort McHenry in the February fog, he says he feels like his soul had sailed around the world for a century or two before it found him here in Crabtown.
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Visit other Baltimore neighborhoods: AlvarezFiction.com
Other Stories by Rafael Alvarez
Mr. Baltimore's Night on the Town
A Hometown Boy Celebrates The Less-Traveled Baltimore
Pilgrims Flock to Shrine of Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes
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