Lady Baltimore.

Baltimore is a city that went crazy for civic monuments, and you find them in all sorts of places. When you find one of these old monuments in a neighborhood that’s going to seed, the effect can be almost overwhelmingly symbolic, concentrating all of the history, squalor, and hope of Baltimore into a big carved stone.

For a while, I thought that Baltimore’s Washington Monument did this best. Last fall, a van careened into the iron fence surrounding the monument, and now this grand monument in a historic neighborhood has fifteen feet of unsightly chain-link fence covering the gap. (It’s possible that this will get fixed soon.)

But walking to work this morning, I wandered by a Lady Baltimore statue, and I think this one really gets it. The Monument City blog describes it:

The Lady Baltimore loosely holds a sledgehammer in her right hand, while a shield, with the Battle Monument on it’s front, rests to her left. An anchor, gear, anvil and steam engine are represented around the base of the sculpture. Situated in a small park at the foot of Druid Hill, the statue sits inside the well-maintained Mount Royal Terrace Park. A plaque adorns the front of the structure, listing the Commissioner and Engineer of the Saint Paul Street bridge.

A few things:

• So there’s symbols for the major industries: shipping, health, manufacturing, etc.
• The statue’s nose is broken off.
• The plaque has been removed. Presumably, it was stolen and sold for scrap.
• The nearby houses are beautiful, but they’re starting to fall apart .
• The park is gorgeous—the roses are in bloom—but the noise of the nearby interstate highway is constant. In this park, you can feel viscerally the problems of city expressways.
• At one point, a nearby hillside must have had a view down the valley toward the Jones Falls River, but, as I just mentioned, I-83 is in the way now.

As I described this scenario to some colleagues, a lifelong Baltimore resident told me I was totally wrong about this monument’s adequacy as a symbol of Baltimore. He argued that the appropriate symbol is actually Ravens Stadium, which represents power and year-to-year dominance. I leave it to the reader to judge.