Mount Vernon Place

This week I read Beyond the White Marble Steps: A Look at Baltimore Neighborhoods. I borrowed this book from the Langsdale Library. The book itself had little information about Baltimore’s marble steps, but it did include some candid photos and interesting information about Mount Royal Place. I found the following definition in the book:
Stoop-sitting: “Describes the activity of sitting on the front steps of one’s row house with or without a favorite beverage, and conversing with neighbors and passers-by” (Rehbein, 51).
According to Rehbein, Baltimorean’s spent many a summer night’s stoop-sitting in the city.
The book did provide a little history of the Washington Monument. As I mentioned in a previous blog, The Washington Monument was cut from the same marble most stoops in Baltimore city were made from, coming from the same quarry in Cockeysville.
The monument was built on land that was donated by John Eager Howard. The book failed to describe who Howard was and just exactly what his significance to Baltimore was. According to Wikipedia.org, John Eager Howard was an American soldier and politician from Maryland. He was born in 1752 and died in 1827 in Baltimore County, yet Howard County, not Baltimore, was named after him (Wikipedia).

Beyond the White Marble Steps: A Look at Baltimore Neighborhoods, by Leslie Rehbein and Kate E. Peterson.