A Bit of Baltimore You are here: Museum complex offers a basic sketch of city life through the ages. It will be popular with tourists and kids, but don’t expect an in-depth study.

On the second floor of the Blaustein City Life Exhibition Center, opening tomorrow, you’re met by a sign overhead that announces “I Am the City” — the title of the building’s core exhibit on Baltimore history. Not far into the exhibit, on the wall to your right is the text of a small segment on archaeology, titled “Fragments of City Life.”

That title would be a better one for the exhibit as a whole, and even for the center as a whole, for it well describes what this new addition to Baltimore’s museum scene offers its visitors: fragments, bits and pieces, a soupcon of this and a smidgen of that, all packaged handsomely and cleverly to give visitors two things — a pleasant experience and the idea that they’re taking an in-depth look at the city. But they really aren’t.

On its own terms, the project must be called a success, for it will no doubt do just what those who developed it want it to do. It will work just fine as a tourist attraction. As a kind of introduction to Baltimore, the center points visitors toward other attractions. And, it will entertain school children and provide adult Baltimoreans with mainly nostalgic glimpses of the city’s people and places. All the while, it’s careful not to go too deeply into the subjects of other present and even future museums, such as industry or transportation.

The exhibitions housed in the 30,000-square-foot expansion touch upon many pieces of Baltimore’s history — neighborhoods, parks, ethnic and racial history, retailing, the port, immigration, transportation, population growth, philanthropy, sports, food and so on. It does so using many museum techniques, from room settings, cases of artifacts and written texts to audio, video and live performance. All of this succeeds in keeping viewers’ senses stimulated, in keeping them unbored — but also essentially unchallenged.

What it doesn’t do — what serious-minded museum-goers will seek in vain — is provide the real substance of the subjects upon which it touches.

Instead, keeping in mind the shrunken attention span of the television age, the exhibits bombard those who come through with so many bits of information that they think they’re getting a lot more than they actually do.

And they thus perfectly express the method of their creation. Brought into being over 10 years, they were developed by the project’s staff, headed by John W. Durel (now executive director of the Baltimore City Life Museums), with input from academic historians, civic leaders and the public (garnered from interviews, round table discussions, focus groups, oral history sessions and the like).

“These are not curator-ego-driven exhibitions,” Mr. Durel has said. “Each of the five exhibitions was creatively shaped in communications and conversations with the public.” In all, more than 1,500 people were involved in the development of the museum’s exhibitions, and it shows.

Significant shortcoming

“I Am the City,” spread over an entire floor and expected to remain up for as much as 10 years, offers visitors their main experience. The first large segment is “City by the Water” (late 18th to mid-19th century). The setting is a market near the harbor in about 1830. The subjects touched on here include markets, the port, Frederick Douglass, Johns Hopkins and other Baltimore philanthropists, the free black community in Baltimore before the Civil War, silversmith Samuel Kirk and the artisan and apprentice system. Missing is any real sense of the substance of most of these subjects. There might have been a good explanation of how the market system grew and flourished in Baltimore, and has lasted to the present day, or of how the harbor and the port evolved over the years and the centuries. But there isn’t.

Next we have “City of Neighborhoods” (mid-19th to mid-20th century). Here are three of artist Stewart White’s seven wonderful murals, which are the best thing about the whole center. They picture a melange of parks (Mount Vernon Place, Druid Hill Park and Patterson Park) about 1900, a modest neighborhood of about the same time and Pennsylvania Avenue of the 1940s-1950s.

There are also re-created house facades (including white marble steps, of course) and furnished interiors, photographs of sections of the city accompanied by one-paragraph descriptions, and introductions to important figures including educator Henrietta Szold, builder James Keelty, journalists H. L. Mencken and Carl Murphy, and those who need no introduction — Babe Ruth, Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway. Actors will re-create the flavor of life on Pennsylvania Avenue in its heyday, and, if the brief segment presented at the press preview is a good indication, that will be fun. But if we want to learn anything of significance about, say, how Baltimore’s park system grew, or much about any particular neighborhood, we will have to go elsewhere.

In the section “City and Suburbs,” the part devoted to downtown (complete with a real White Tower diner), touches on the subject of integration in the 1950s and 1960s. But there is almost no discussion of the history of retailing in Baltimore and how it contributed to the city’s economy.

We can also look at a suburban mini-living room with vinyl furniture and a television set playing moments from local television programs of the 1950s. But we won’t discover much about what was good and bad with suburbia (for instance, planning vs. sprawl).

No exhibit, of course, could begin to probe effectively a half or even a quarter of all this exhibit brings up. That’s just the point: Instead of trying to deal with some aspects of the city in a reasonably substantive way, this exhibit attempts to deal with the city’s entire history in a once-over-lightly fashion. It’s enjoyable, it’s well produced and it leaves you unsatisfied.

Of the four other exhibits, the most successful may be the opening show in the third floor’s “Community Gallery.” It profiles the Jonestown neighborhood, where the Baltimore City Life Museums is located, through photographs and murals created by young people, and a video featuring residents’ comments. Though it doesn’t look quite as professional as the other exhibits, it does try to look closer at a specific part of town.

Next door to this, “Nipper’s Neighborhood” (named after the dog RCA used as its advertising logo, which will be exhibited in the museum) offers a hands-on exhibit (suitable for school tours) of a mini-neighborhood of the 1920s-1930s period. With its re-creation of a period kitchen, attic, grocery store, school room and so on, it will be fun for kids and nostalgic for older people — at least those in their 50s and above who, like me, will remember the old stove, toaster and other relics of bygone days. But it’s generic; except for a few local touches (white marble steps again) it might be a neighborhood anywhere.

The third exhibit on this floor, “Collecting Baltimore,” is a gallery devoted to a standard presentation of artifacts collected by the City Life Museums, from a Hendler’s ice cream sign to models of the Patterson Park Pagoda and Pennsylvania (originally called Union) Station to an early 19th-century desk.

The labels here are notable, expanding from the piece itself to discuss related subjects. The scattered approach here, featuring as many different kinds of things as possible, is fine for an inaugural exhibit; future ones will no doubt focus on one or another aspect of the collection.

Promoting the city

The first floor offers the most public-driven exhibit of all: “What Makes Baltimore Bawlamer?” It contains four segments devoted to four symbols of the city chosen after interviews with 400 to 500 people. They are crabs, white marble steps (and rowhouses), the Inner Harbor and the Orioles (and sports).

In the Inner Harbor segment, a picture of the harbor serves as backdrop to a picture of former Mayor William Donald Schaefer taking a 1981 dip in the seal pool of the under-construction National Aquarium. He had vowed to take the plunge if the aquarium wasn’t finished by the promised date, and when it wasn’t, he did.

The much-photographed event, we are informed, gained Baltimore publicity that helped promote the city.

How appropriate that the event be featured in this museum building, which as a whole works to promote rather than to really study the city. With its interactive elements (push a button and hear a voice, touch a screen and see a display, talk to a costumed interpreter), its colorful murals, its multitude of stimuli and its skimming-the-surface approach, the center will surely be popular.

And it must be acknowledged that we have reached a time when museums must increasingly take the popularity of what they present into account as a matter of economic reality. Mr. Durel has noted that “earned income is increasingly important, because we can’t depend on government and wealthy individuals as much,” and that “museums have to be more businesslike and respond to the needs of their customers.”

But even if one were inclined to grant the overall approach here, does the whole center have to be that way? What it cries out for is a place where aspects of the city’s life can be examined in real depth.

At any rate, it must be said that, given the direction they chose, Mr. Durel and all the rest who worked so long and hard with him to realize this project have done an effective job. Neither their seriousness nor their professionalism is being questioned here. What’s being questioned is the direction.

If what we have here represents contemporary museum exhibition philosophy, the future looks populist indeed.

Pub Date: 4/11/96