Good Morning Baltimore!

Today I was in Baltimore for some training and had the opportunity to visit the old Customs House, which is an architectural jewel from the early 1900s.  I took some pictures of the paintings and other pretty things in what was once the great hall where ship captains would come to present their manifests and declare their cargo, which I promise to put up soon (tomorrow), so check this space again.  Tonight, however, I need to catch up on some sleep.

On a slightly related note, when I mentioned that I would be spending the day in Baltimore, one friend remarked "Don't get shot!"  I didn't, but today someone else did.  What's particularly disconcerting is that on our way to the customs house we saw helicopters hovering over a neighborhood off to the east - I'm almost certain that this is what they were watching.  Creepy!

EDIT (Saturday): Here are the pictures from the Customs House that I promised.

The Baltimore Customs House is a large building from the early 1900s (under construction from 1903 to 1907) in fine Beaux-Arts style.  In the early 1900s the United States was beginning to wake up to its role as a great power, and so all along the East Coast monumental customs houses like this one were constructed, so as to impress the European captains who would put in with goods from Europe.  The great powers of Europe had at the time a tendency (which some believe European nations still possess) to look down on the United States as provincial and backward.  Beautiful customs houses was one way the US attempted to remedy that (another was hosting massive public events like the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, more commonly know as the Chicago World's Fair).

Most of the Customs House is now office space (it is no longer used as a customs house - that stuff goes on at the sea- and airport - but the main receiving hall, where those captains would come to declare what they had on their ships, has been preserved, although it was carpeted at some point).  Nevertheless, it is gorgeous.

Stepping through the tall, hardwood doors, the first thing that strikes you is the monumental scale of the room.  With the ceiling easily forty feet above the floor, this room was obviously designed to impress.  And because the ceiling is so high up curiosity naturally gets the better of you, so you look up...

...and see this...

...and this (click it to enlarge if it's not clear).  This is the central portion of the mural which is partially visible in the photo above this one.  All the painting was done by Francis David Millet, who (I was told) also did the paintings in the Wisconsin State Capitol, although I can find no corroboration of this assertion.  Millet was a talented Classicist and was friends with Augustus Saint-Gaudens (known as a sculptor).  Reading through his Wikipedia entry suggests that he was quite an interesting guy, apart from being a talented painter.  As I browsed, I came across this photo of Millet in his studio:

Guess what he's painting?  That's right - the ceiling for the Customs House!

Painting is not the only interesting feature in this jewel box of a room.  There's excellent Beaux-Arts metalwork reminiscent of the monumental style in banks that existed around the same time:

There's also exquisite plasterwork and molding surrounding those paintings, the likes of which you don't often see in this country:

Now, all this beauty has to be tempered with a bit of tragedy - isn't that always the case - and although you'd think that this room being closed to the public and unused is tragedy is enough, there's another unpleasant twist of fate associated with this room.  Millet wasn't active for much longer after he painted this room.  Why?  Because he was on the Titanic when it sank in 1912, and was one of the 1,517 people who drowned as a result.  And look what he put above the door that leads to the rest of the Customs House:

Look familiar?  It does look like the Titanic, doesn't it.  But if you were paying attention to my chronology, you have by now realized that although it appears to be the Titanic, it can't be, because the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, and this building was finished in 1907.  It's not the Titanic, but it's another ill-fated ocean liner much like it.  Clever readers will know that several ships fit that description, among them Titanic's sister ship, Britanic, but it didn't exist before 1907 either.  It is in fact the Lusitania, which at the time of the painting was the largest ship in the world, and a pinnacle of engineering.  Millet had painted ships throughout history all around the room (you can see two of them at the top of the picture), ending with the most modern example, Lusitania, above this door.  What's tragic is that Millet died aboard a similar ship in 1912, and three years later Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland and sank in just eighteen minutes, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 passengers and crew.  This was one of the factors which eventually dragged the United States into war against some of the very European powers the Customs House had been built to impress.

Funny how these things happen, isn't it?