Many of the
houses in this section are instead the former homes of fashionables who
have moved to other quarters of the city--handsome old homesteads with
here and there a lovely, though battered, doorway sadly reminiscent of
an earlier elegance. So, also, red brick permeates the prosperous
suburbs, such as Roland Park and Guilford, where, in a sweetly rolling
country which lends itself to the arrangement of graceful winding roads
and softly contoured plantings, stand quantities of pleasing homes,
lately built, many of them colonial houses of red brick. Indeed, it
struck us that the only parts of Baltimore in which red brick was not
the dominant note were the downtown business section and Mount Vernon
Place.
Mount Vernon Place is the center of Baltimore. Everything begins there,
including Baedeker, who, in his little red book, gives it the asterisk
of his approval, says that it "suggests Paris in its tasteful monuments
and surrounding buildings," and recommends the view from the top of the
Washington Monument.
This monument, standing upon an eminence at the point where Charles and
Monument Streets would cross each other were not their courses
interrupted by the pleasing parked space of Mount Vernon Place, is a
gray stone column, surmounted by a figure of Washington--or, rather, by
the point of a lightning rod under which the figure stands.
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