In the week since my Connolly's column was published, my phone has rung off the hook, and my e-mail basket went into meltdown.
Robert I. Cottom, owner and publisher of the Chesapeake Book Co. and a Roland Park resident, wrote to say that he and his wife, Barb, had many happy memories of summer evenings at Connolly's.
"I can never forget how cold their air-conditioning was, or those 22-ounce tall glasses of frosted Bud and the saucy waitresses. Forcing Connolly's out amounted to a crime against civility," he wrote.
"One evening some young, toney and ignorant Washingtonians sat next to us. Clearly out of place in Connolly's. They looked around and gazed upon our steamed crabs with an expression that said, 'How disgustingly provincial,'" Cottom recalled.
"The waitress came over, in her Fifties retro black dress, and they asked what was fresh?
"The waitress tapped her foot, cracked her gum and without looking up from her pad dismissed all pretension with a flat, 'It's ALL fresh, hon.'"
Risselle Rosenthal Fleisher, who lives in nearby Scarlett Place, was also a customer.
"I used to go to Connolly's, not every week like Mayor [ William Donald] Schaefer and his mother, but from time to time. As I recall, everything there was fried," Fleisher said in an e-mail.
"Even so, I was sad at the time to hear that it had closed. It was really one of the last of those faded entities in a class with a 55-year-old former prom queen and the like," she wrote.
Connolly's inadvertently became a wedding backdrop for Jim and Marianne Eddins, former Baltimoreans who now own and operate Perdido Vineyards Winery in Perdido, Ala.
Eddins and his soon-to-be wife, who both worked at International Business Machines in Baltimore at the time, accompanied by their best man, Joe Byrnes, got hitched in a noontime City Hall ceremony in 1968.
"After the brief wedding, my new bride, Marianne, and I invited Joe Byrnes to have a seafood platter at Connolly's. It was a special meal to us, and then we returned to work at IBM," he wrote in an e-mail.
"For 40 years, it has become our special wedding anniversary tradition to seek out a small seafood restaurant wherever we are that day for a seafood platter and the memories of dining at Connolly's." he wrote.
Even though Connolly's is gone, Eddins added, "the memories, sounds and smells of the old waterfront remain.
"The night life in the harbor was accented with the sounds and lights of traffic, the U.S. Coast Guard patrol boats, the welders in the shipyard striking arcs, the aroma of McCormick Spice Co. and trucks unloading produce."
He concluded: "Along with a glass of wine, it was a romantic place to spend a summer evening."
Mark Chalkley, an instructor at Baltimore City Community College, moved to Baltimore in 1984.
