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Mister Baltimore Sheds A Tear for the old Thames Street Rope Shop
Compared to Mr. Baltimore – who, in the words of his tomato-skinning Polish grandmother from Binney Street, is an “agitator” – I am a moderate man.
Still, as a true son of the Costume Jewel on the Patapsco, there are some offenses that, as Mr. B might say, "Get me all steamed up like a hard crab."
We could start with the morons shoving submarine sandwiches in their mouths as they walk down the street, dropping trash and leftovers along the way. That’s just ignorant. Other folks ought to know better.
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of good things going on in Crabtown these days and Mr. Baltimore and I will introduce you to a few of them today – most spectacularly the re-opening of the fabled Patterson Theater in Highlandtown as a cultural arts center.
As the big, black and white sign at the corner of Central Avenue and East Lombard Street – the gateway to what is left of Corned Beef Row – proclaims, there are many reasons to BELIEVE in Baltimore.
[A stunningly candid counter-campaign has sprung up around the BELIEVE movement - sort of the way that the Sundance Film Festival spawned the Slamdance Festival - with the more urgent message for Baltimoreans to BEHAVE.]
But first, a little griping set to a funereal dirge for the spectacular facade of the original Horn & Horn cafeteria on The Block and the loss of Memorial Stadium, which will always make me sick.
Why is it?
Why , even when the rare Baltimore building is being saved, do developers trip over themselves trying to outrun the past? And like Mr. Baltimore – who just returned from a quick trip to South America on a tanker – I sometimes blow my top before I know what I’m talking about.
Case in Fells Point: The new maritime museum that opened last week in the old horse-drawn trolley barn turned rope shop turned seafaring junk shop turned coffee joint turned art movie house at 1724 Thames Street, across the cobblestones from the city Recreation Pier.
While it’s great to see the Preservation Society for Federal Hill and Fells Point join the Maryland Historical Society in honoring the seafaring past of the 18th century neighborhood from which Baltimore evolved, I wonder . . .
Did they include glimpses of Miss Corral’s Spanish restaurant and seamen’s rooming house that sent the aroma of paella and chorizo and flan into the 800 block of South Broadway?
[They didn’t – the exhibits focus on shipbuilding and end at about 1840 - so here’s a glimpse from someone who knew the nice lady.]
“I remember Miss Corral standing in the restaurant in her black dress,” said Herman Schwartz, 70, who grew up in his family’s drapery shop on South Broadway, just a block away from the restaurant. “She made the greatest homemade rolls . . . we called’em Spanish rolls, little brown rolls . . . My mom used to bring them into the store real hot and you’d melt a quarter pound of butter over them . . . it was great.”
Like everything else, says Schwartz, who moved Broadway Drapery to Woodberry about six years ago, “. . . it was a different world back then.
“To get a feel for that neighborhood, you have to understand what people like my mother were like. In the winter time, she’d keep the store open until 10 o’clock at night. She said the people coming home from St. Stanislaus needed a well-lit corner to be safer.”
A different world, indeed, when St. Stan’s is only active when it “portrays” a sanctuary on the HBO cop drama THE WIRE and the good teachers at Mother Seton Academy next door try to acquire he church’s old gymnasium for their students before a developer grabs it.
And why, oh why, did the Preservation Society blast the old bricks clean of lettering that for nearly 70-years proclaimed: CANVAS, METALS, IRON, CORK, ANCHORS, CHAIN . . .
What could be more maritime than that?
My old man – whose first date with Mom was at the Patterson Theater followed by pizza across the street at Matthew’s - met Mooney in the late 1950s when he joined the Baker-Whiteley Towing Company, whose tugs docked across Thames Street from the rope shop.
[It was at Baker-Whitely, where he sailed as an engineer, that Dad became bunkies with Mr. Baltimore’s Pop, a like-able Thames Street deck-hand named Jerome. Through their friendship – and swimming parties with other waterfront characters named Moonshot and Hercules and Mr. Hollingsworth – is how I got mixed-up with Mr. B at a young age. We went on summer vacations with the other tugboat families to Ocean City and Piney Point when the Orioles were in the World Series every year, playing catch in the street and circling under fly balls, pretending to be Paul Blair.
Our paths diverged – me toward the used book stores on 25th Street and Mr. B down to the piers like our fathers – but the friendship has endured into the era when many of the tugboat men, including Mr. Jerome, have passed on, and our beloved Birds rarely finish above fourth. ]
“Mooney was an old man when I went down to the boats in ’57, he lived near St. Casimir’s ” recalled my father. “He bought any kind of junk rope and junk metal – the scaled was right there when you walked in - but his biggest business was using old rope to make fenders for the boats.
“Engineers didn’t go in there much, but Jerome and the other deck-hands would go in and rummage through the junk and get what they needed for the boats, mostly rope. The front of the shop was wide open with a big scale where a guy would drive his truck of metal or rope in and Mooney would weigh it and pay him off. Many a piece of rope was stolen off of ships and sold in Mooney’s.”
While the old floor scale seems to be safe – the interior of the museum building is protected by the Maryland Historical Trust – the peeling letters proclaiming rope and canvas have been scrubbed away.
“That lettering wasn’t the original [rope shop] lettering,” said Jonathan Lessem, project architect for the Ziger-Snead firm which handled the restoration. “We have a photograph from 1935 that shows the recent lettering was someone’s attempt to copy the original – same text, but not in the right place or the right order. So we felt pretty safe that we weren’t removing historic paint. It was a poor imitation.
“We have another picture from 1912 and in that photo there’s no lettering on the building at all,” said Lessem, adding that all of the cleaned-up brick is original from the mid-19th century except for a slender, vertical line on the left hand side of the building.
“We removed the machine cut brick that was put in when they bricked up the entry for the Orpheum theater,” said Lessem. “The rest we just repointed.”
The late and lamented Orpheum Cinema is our link between Mooney’s rope shop and the Patterson Arts Center. And George Figgs – the pride of pre-artsy Hamden and as true a son of Baltimore as Mr. B – IS the Orpheum eternal.
Several years he stopped showing films on the second-floor of the rope shop, where patrons sat on seats taken from the old Clover Theater, Figgs has re-emerged with a Wednesday night series of classics at the Patterson.
A painter, blues guitarist, film historian and self-taught Poe scholar, Figgs swears to the following tale of a rope shop phantom.
“In 1990 we were building the Orpehem [above the rope shop] and had moved in the seats from the Clover Theater on the Block. The seats had been stashed on the fourth-floor of the 2 O’Clock club in this sea of Twilight Zone, 1930s carnival gear . . . it looked like three carnivals had crashed and died right there . . . we used the old rope shop elevator to get the chairs upstairs . . . the rope was as thick as my wrist, all dry rotted, but it held . . .
“About a week later,” said Figgs, “I was working by myself and it was about 106 degrees up there. I’m dripping with sweat and grime and hanging drywall on top of a ladder . . . sort of hanging off the ladder and dramatizing the moment.
“There was nothing downstairs and the back was locked, you couldn’t get up unless you used that elevator . . . and I hear something: ‘Who’s that?’ And I see a glimpse of a figure with a white blousey shirt on and loud checked pants, like some sort of green and white, rolling across the floor, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder.
“I got down off the ladder and start yelling: ‘Hello! Hello!’ and the elevator was still down and the door was still locked. Nobody had a chance to get away from me. I looked for that guy for ten minutes. It was a very weird kind of jokester energy going around in that heat.”
Now, says Figgs, the energy of the Orpheum is a traveling “movie museum” of films he will show at the Patterson as well as the Charles Theater and special programs at colleges. This past month, the Orpheum screened a series of Busby Berkley musicals at the Patterson on Wednesday nights for a cool five bucks.
The Wednesday series continues at the Patterson through the end of July before moving to the Charles with silent films accompanied by live music. Maybe someone will unearth archival footage of old Fells Point for him to screen, something with a building in the 1700 block of Thames Street that proclaims: MOONEY’S ROPE SHOP.
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Visit other Baltimore neighborhoods: AlvarezFiction.com
Other Stories by Rafael Alvarez
Mister Baltimore Goes to the Movies
Mr. Baltimore's Night on the Town
A Hometown Boy Celebrates The Less-Traveled Baltimore
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