Developers want to demolish the Art Deco McCrory's Building. (Photo by Elizabeth Suman)

story by JOAN JACOBSON, photos by ELIZABETH SUMAN

Some of the finest examples of historic preservation in Baltimore are on the rickety west side of downtown, right where the city may need them most.

There’s the ornate, wedding-white Stewarts Department store (now Catholic Relief Services headquarters), the flagship Hecht Company building on Howard Street and the regal, neoclassical BG&E building on Lexington Street (now both luxury apartments). Then there’s the Hippodrome Theatre on North Eutaw Street, that masterpiece of urban rejuvenation.

But just steps away, local preservationists are frustrated by what they see: one square block of empty, largely historic buildings, waiting for a city-designated developer who wants to destroy many of them to build modern retail buildings. Among the threatened buildings are some great examples of Art Deco architecture and some even older buildings — structures that survived the Baltimore fire of 1904.

McCrory's tilework detail. (Photo by Elizabeth Suman)

For five years, an out-of-town developer, calling itself Lexington Square Partners, has submitted plans that call for bulldozing most of the buildings along the south side of the 200 block of W. Lexington Street, as well as the blocks of Howard Street, Park Avenue and Fayette Street that adjoin it, known as the Superblock.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

((Inside: our research-rich SUPERBLOCK SLIDESHOW))
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John Waters and Costas Grimaldis at the opening, 1/20/10 (Photo by Elizabeth Suman)

By ELIZABETH SUMAN

In a new photography exhibit at Grimaldis Gallery (his first art show in Baltimore since 2002), John Waters juxtaposes images of the Palace of  Versailles with shots of the Versailles apartment complex in Towson, comparing the real deal in France with its suburban counterpart. Why? One reason, he told the Brew, is because the building makes him laugh.

The exhibit features a smorgasbord of photographs and sculptures Waters began creating as early as 1992, many of which comment on what Waters knows best: film.  A conversation with Waters opens up new layers of meaning in a show that can appear completely random without context.  One piece has a chillingly ironic connection to terrorism. Another elicits what is probably, it’s safe to say, one of the most exuberant and profound soliloquies  ever triggered by the title of an anal porn movie.

Here’s our Q & A. . . . . .

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