The heat seems to have broken a little bit, and I’m sitting at the computer listening somewhat unhappily to music brought to me via ’net at RealAudio™ or ® or whatever. I am, as a matter of fact, listening to one of my favorite songs: “Oriental Love Dreams,” a big hit in ’24. If I would simply bother to get up and find the record, wind up the Grafonola and play the damned thing, it would play just fine and would sound good. I’m trying to be Up To Date though, and so I am cursed with frequent little farts in the music as my ISP tries to decode exactly what the hell I’m playing. Yes, Virginia, sometimes the old way is better.

Today’s issue of the Unpaper — Light for None — informs Baltimoreans that our city’s only five-star hotel is for sale. Is this supposed to bode ill for the city? It might, if it weren’t for the fact that the “five star hotel” is a piece of crap.

When I noticed the article, I was surprised to learn that we even had a five star hotel. These days, the five-star designation is rarely given to hotels in any city that isn’t New York, Washington, or Los Angeles. Older and more elegant cities, with older and more elegant hotels, rarely rate. At that, I remained surprised because in my mind there is only one decent hotel left in Baltimore.

The Hotel Lord Baltimore was never, despite its lofty title, the city’s most fashionable. Oh, yes, it’s a big and rather grand hotel. It was built in 1928 and as such embodies as much of the Jazz Age as ever affected the Maryland Metropolis, which had been reluctant enough to enter the twentieth century at all, much less the era of Flaming Youth. The Lord Baltimore is beautiful and makes some concessions to Art Moderne, but is for all practical purposes a Georgian skyscraper. The largest hotel in the State when it opened, it was always trumped by the very snooty Belvedere, the very entertaining Kernan’s, the affordably gracious Southern and the bombastically elegant Emerson.

Somehow, the Lord Balto outlasted all of the hotels that had once shoved it into the background and remains open. It is not, however, our “five-star hotel.” It is still being shoved into the background by more fashionable hotels.

I understand and appreciate the mentality that once ignored the Lord Baltimore. It was too flashy and too modern for Baltimore. I am terrified by the mentality that ignores it now.

Our current “five star hotel” is a hideous piece of mid-’80s crap along the harbor. I realize that out-of-towners do not cherish the mistrust of the harbor that Baltimoreans do, but do they really want to stay in an oversized Days Inn when they get here? The Harbor Court is a miserable thing. It features some of the ugliest architecture in town — one of my friends refers to it as the “Zipper Building,” a concept that I would describe if not for the fact that it would take me six paragraphs to do so. I hate wasting column space on something I hate, so I’ll just let you all imagine how awful the thing is. While the Lord Baltimore has a larger-than-life marble staircase sweeping between its Baltimore street entrance, its Hanover street-level lobby, and its mezzanine ballrooms, the Harbor Court Hotel has this creepy weird spiral staircase that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. Worse, the creepy weird spiral staircase was obviously built with components purchased at Home Depot.

I could probably forgive the crap architecture. Considering hotels objectively, Baltimore’s have never really been that beautiful. Richmond always trumped Baltimore in hotel architecture; the Belvedere and the Emerson were the most grandiose, but were never the sort of place that would knock your socks off. There were a lot of very nice hotels here, but nothing that would shock and amaze, aesthetically.

But then, that’s not Baltimorean style. We do not like to shock and amaze because — well, it’s shocking, and our local art form is doing everything precisely the way it’s been done since Christ was a corporal.

Our other local art form is superlative food. The Harbor Court does not have it. I have eaten there and it’s indigestible. We do not go in for “tall food” here. We favor Maryland fried chicken, stuffed hams, panned oysters, Imperial crab, and roast duck. We also like homemade ice creams, red velvet cake and Lady Baltimore cake, and fruit comports. While we do love the unfashionable iceberg lettuce we whoop it up with a lot of good fresh (in summer) or preserved (in winter) vegetables from the endlessly fruitful Eastern Shore of Maryland.

The Harbor Court thinks that it is absolutely A La Mode because it offers entrees that take an entire paragraph to describe and yet remain absolutely inedible. It does not elect to fry anything and yet has the audacity to tell its guests that it has “real Baltimore crabcakes.” If those things are crabcakes at all, much less Baltimorean, I am the Chinese Emperor. Sticking a branch of rosemary into an undercooked piece of pork roast makes it fashionable, but doesn’t make it good.

Charles Dickens once famously visited the United States and hated every last second of it, excepting his visit to Baltimore. He stayed at Barnum’s City Hotel — an old rattletrap that was torn down for the beautiful “new” Court House in 1895. Upon his visit he enjoyed an “enchanted julep” and decreed Baltimore the “gastronomic metropolis of the world.” It still is, but these days you have to go to a private dinner party to learn about it.

I am happy that the nasty place is for sale. I hope that some nice normal Baltimorean will buy it, tear it down and offer the public a real hotel again — one that will show visitors what food and hospitality really are. Perhaps they could reconstruct the old Hotel Rennert. That unlovely edifice once upon a time stood at Liberty and Saratoga. A hallmark of the Spiky Victorian school of architecture, only a sadist could have found beauty in its crenellated and tortured brownstone facade, but the entire United States and most of Europe recognized it as one of the premier homes of edible art.

It will be a beautiful day for Baltimore and the world when the Harbor Court, with its tacky staircase and “Roti of Pork en Croustade with bla bla bla, dusted with a touch of bla bla bla, sauce of bla, and finished with bla bla” is replaced once and for all with a real Baltimorean hostelry — no matter how ugly — that will serve the following prix-fixe menu:

Oysters Chesapeake (with Virginia Bacon)

Chilled Cream of Celery Soup, with Sippets or Virginia Peanut Soup
Planked Rock Fish Crab Flake Maryland
Terrapin en Casserole

Roman Punch

Roast Canvasback Duck
with
Washington County Apple and Walnut Stuffing

Stuffed Ham, St. Mary’s County style
Roast Frederick County Pork
Pennsylvanian Creamed Chicken with Cream Waffles

Vegetable Selections — Fresh from All Maryland
Haricot Beans, Summer Squash, Butter and Lima beans, fried Green Tomatoes, Hanover Tomatoes, Anne Arundel corn

Mehlspeise
Lady Baltimore, Red Velvet, Johann-Strauss-Torte, Linzertorte, Baltimore Peach Cake

Suss-Speise
Tipsy Squire, Macedoine of Maryland melons and strawberries, Whiskey ice-cream

Now, simply think of all this served to you on the snowy linens and sparkling napery of a gracious old household, by a waiter who pointedly does not say something like, “Hi, I’m Joe and I’ll like be your waiter tonight” — or, indeed, says nothing at all — and you will get the idea of real food.

San Francisco would wet itself in confusion and terror.