The Parentals Go To Baltimore, Part 3: History

Interesting stuff about The Star Spangled Banner.

Fort McHenry

I have a Patton moment at the Flag house.


On shabbos we davened at a lovely minyan in a building that is part of the Baltimore Jewish Museum. The shul is within easy walking distance from the Inner Harbor and I highly recommend it. Bnai Israel If you go, make sure to get introduced the the charming woman who spearheaded the effort to get the building restored to the excellent condition it is in now.

I took these pictures when we went on the Heritage Walk on Friday.

The Parentals Go To Baltimore, Part 2: Architecture

The old houses are very narrow. (You pay taxes based on the width of your house.)

I have lots of pictures of beautiful buildings. If anyone is interested, ask for the link.

There were some interesting examples of buildings trying to be taller than other buildings.
For example, the Shot Tower was, at one, time the tallest structure in the US at 215 ft. 9 inches.

But when taller building started going up, amazingly, the shot tower also "grew". 20 ft in this plaque:


and another 12 feet in this article.

The moral of this story is: Don't believe everything you read. If you want to know how tall a building/structure really is, bring your trig tables and a ruler. By the way, google Shot Tower. Interesting stuff.


Here was another interesting effect of a building trying to be tall. It looked like an optical illusion.

The Parentals Go To Baltimore, Part 1: Fire

First of all, I would like to set the record straight. It wasn't us who set off the fire alarm at 5:00am Friday morning. Really. And to the guy who came down to the lobby in his underwear: come on - how long would it have taken you to put on a pair of pants? Even if it wasn't a false alarm.



The hotel staff provided coffee and an odd assortment of pastries to make up for having woken us up practically in the middle of the night and for not being able to turn the alarm off for hours.


I think the danish on the bottom shelf were Pesachdick.

So maybe we wouldn't have gotten such an early start otherwise, but we now we know how picturesque Baltimore is at dawn.



An interesting Baltimore Fact: After the 1904 fire (nothing to do with us) , many bricks were reused. You can see many blackened bricks in buildings all over downtown.

This was hanging out near Fort McHenry while we were there.


The 4th of July fireworks display in the Inner Harbor was very nice. No pictures however, since we staked out a spot while it was still shabbos. So if you want to get your fireworks fix, go to this site: