But ever in its greensward heart,
From head to foot we pour
The homage of our love of it—
Dear Charles street, Baltimore!
Charles Street—Baltimore
You are standing in Mount Vernon square, the very heart of Charles street. It is a little open place, shaped like a Maltese cross rather than a real square or oblong, with a modern apartment house looming up upon it, whose façades of French Renaissance give a slightly Parisian touch to that corner of the square. To the rest of it, bordered with sober, old-time mansions there is nothing Parisian, unless you stand apart and gaze at the Monument, which sends its great shaft some two hundred feet up into the air. There are such columns in Paris.
It is the Monument that dominates Mount Vernon square, that adds variety to the vistas up and down through Charles street. For eighty years it has stood there, straight and true; for eighty years General Washington has looked down into the gardens of Charles street, upon the children who are playing there, the folk coming home at night. It is the most dominating thing in Baltimore, which has never acquired the sky-scraper habit, and because of it we have always known Baltimore as the Monumental City.
*****
Now turn from the modern Baltimore—right down this street which runs madly off the sharp hill of Mount Vernon square. Charles street, with all of its shops and gentle gayety, is quickly left behind. At the foot of the hill runs St. Paul street and it is a busy and a somewhat sordid way. But at St. Paul street rises Calvert station and since you are to see so many great railroad stations before you are done with the cities of America, take a second look at this. Calvert station is not great. It is not magnificent. It is not imposing. It is old, very, very old—as far as we know the oldest of all the important stations that are still in use today. From its smoky trainshed the trains have been going up the Northern Central toward Harrisburg and the Susquehanna country—the farther lands beyond—since 1848. And that trainshed, with its stout-pegged wooden-trussed roof held aloft on two rows of solid stone pillars, seems good for another sixty-five years.