Carvings in stone

On a recent summer's day workmen were busy on the scaffolding around the USF&G building downtown at Light and Lombard streets.

Their job, perched high above the doors at the second-story level, was to change the name on the building from United States Fidelity & Guaranty to Legg Mason.

That job was not as easy as it might sound: United States Fidelity & Guaranty is incised, letter by letter, deep into the stonework, each as much as two inches.

In 1971, when the architects and the builders carved the letters USF&G into the stone, it must never have entered their minds that only 26 years later they would have to erase it all and start all over. Being men of an earlier generation, they thought the building would be in the company's name forever.

Forever, these days does not mean what it used to mean.

For example, NationsBank was engaged in removing the name Maryland National from the building at the southwest corner of Charles and Lombard. It was only yesterday that Maryland National was busy at the same site erasing Equitable Trust, a name that was also deeply incised into the stone of the building.

Will Equitable Trust ever be expunged from our view? Years after the last branch closed, the name remains incised over the door of the Munsey Building at Calvert and Fayette and on the building now housing Health Care for the Homeless on Park Avenue.

There are, alas, too many examples.

Deep into the stone above the door at 105 N. Charles Street is S. and N. Katz. The empty store has had any number of tenants over the years since S. and N. Katz moved out, but their name remains -- the letters, if not the tenancy, indestructible and testament to the faith of another time.

Take the building that occupies the better part of the west side of the 200 block N. Howard Street. Into the black marble over the door was inscribed Hutzler Bros & Co., recalling the grand era when department stores (Hochschild's, Stewart's) were the royalty of retailing. Hutzler's is gone; the building is occupied by business offices.

Then, there is 405 N. Charles. A restaurant is there now, even though Bowen and King (which moved next door) is in the stonework above the door.

For that matter, although incised letters clearly spell out the name above the door, there is no Schulte-United (its tobacco and notions stores used to be all over Baltimore) at 215 W. Lexington St.: the building now houses City Zone, Beauty Club and One Price Clothing.

No Baltimore City College at Howard and Centre -- it is Chesapeake Commons condominiums; no McDowell's at 341 N. Charles St. (vacant); no McHenry Theatre at 1000 S. Light St. -- it closed in 1971 and MaiThai Restaurant fills the space today.

The building at 29 S. Paca is now a University of Maryland facility, but it was a clothing factory owned by (the sign carved into the stonework two stories up reveals) Strouse and Bros. -- now long gone. The sign-in-stone has outlived the company -- and its former competitors such as Grief, Schoenman, and Lebow, too.

In another case, a painted sign seems to have miraculously donethe work of an incised-in-stone sign, on the west wall of the 12-story building in the northwest corner of Baltimore and Liberty.

Painted in 1912, it reads, Baltimore Bargain House, which in its day was the largest wholesaler (pots, pans, dry goods, notions -- everything that could be peddled door to door or sold over a counter) in the entire South.

A history of that era makes clear that it was the crowds of out-of-town buyers visiting the Baltimore Bargain House that kept Baltimore's big hotels going (Emerson, Southern, Lord Baltimore) and also fueled the Old Bay Line and other coastal steamship lines to and from Norfolk, Richmond and cities all over the Carolinas and Georgia.

Today, one entrance leads into Gage Clothes, the other into the Maryland State Department of Education. The business closed (as American Wholesalers) in the 1950s.

Richard C. Donkervoet, chairman of the Baltimore-based architectural firm of Cochran, Stephenson & Donkervoet, Inc., has long been part of Baltimore's changing building and architectural scene. He explains:

"The idea of incising, or precasting, the owner's name in concrete or marble or whatever, was an attempt to say, in form and material and technique, that the company is sound, solid, and is forever. That's what the old Savings Bank of Baltimore [now First Union] had in mind when it built that building at Baltimore and Charles to look like a Greek temple. Antiquity, classicism, permanence."

About that building's rolling change in names: Jim Dilts, who with John Dorsey wrote "A Guide to Baltimore Architecture," says the name changed several times during the brief period they were writing their book.

This phenomenon is a retelling of the story of our lives -- what happened to our generation during these years of breathtaking change in the urban landscape and the suburban mindset.

It is a commentary, too, of the different views of life -- those days against these days. You don't see names set permanently into buildings anymore. The architects and the entrepreneurs know better.

We live our lives in short takes. The "in" location (where you live, where you work, where you shop) is "out" in the wink of a developer's eye, just as quickly as we can call the moving van. Most everybody, those who haven't moved and those who have, lament history's harsh lesson.

Today, a retailer moves into a shopping center and signs a five- or 10-year lease, sending a message of impermanence.

But a quarter-century ago, the city was the center and the heartbeat of the region. When a business was established and built its home, the owners took the time and expense to chisel the name into a wall for the ages, sending a message that they intended to stay in business and in Baltimore City forever.

They must have believed it, they carved it in stone.

Mr. Donkervoet, asked if he were designing a building in Baltimore City today, would he still have the name incised in concrete or marble, replied:

"Sure. Things will change, permanence will become a way of life again in Baltimore."

Let's see that hope in stone.