The caller on the phone posed a simple enough question: What is the historic significance of Howard Street to downtown Baltimore?
The inquiry came from David Stein, an official of the Downtown Partnership, the group that promotes the city's business core.
The question would have had an obvious answer only a few years ago, when a walk along Howard Street would have supplied all the responses. Before the shopping mall and the middle class' evacuation of Baltimore, the street was the place where you met your friends, bought your bedsheets and saw Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady."
It was the retail and entertainment center of Baltimore, the closest thing to the heart of the city. Is there a Baltimorean over the age of 35 who can't remember the days of five competing department stores? Or the tangle of taxicabs and buses? And the smell of hot dogs grilling at the lunch counters of what seemed like a dozen dime stores on Lexington Street, the busiest cross street to intersect the Big H main stem.
Mr. Stein's question is valid, given how quickly a way of commercial life has disintegrated, how fast this once essential thoroughfare became a dinosaur, a memory of childhood Christmas seasons.
To walk past the boarded windows and empty buildings today will not give much indication of how this street once teemed with life and purpose. Here was not the place for today's aimless, time-wasting recreational shopping. Howard Street was a complex urban system where you could have a wig made and a corset repaired.
It wasn't pretentious, laid out with fancy street trees or cast-iron benches. It had work-a-day streetlights, police call boxes, traffic signals, trolley poles and trash cans. And it had people.
I didn't realize it at the time. I got in on maybe the last great Christmas selling throng the street had. It was late in the holiday selling season of 1969.
I made a last-minute trip to Howard Street to buy just one more gift. The first floor of Hutzler's department store was wall-to-wall people. It was so packed with humanity the place was uncomfortable, humid and frantic.
I slipped out a revolving door as fast as I could. The outsidshow windows were full of mechanical displays of twirling
angels, laughing Santas and hard-working elves. Everyone carried a paper shopping bag. More travelers boarded the transit buses that afternoon than passengers take the Howard Street ** light rail line today in a week. It was a scene that would disappear with each passing Christmas.
Initially the department stores announced they would be leaving Howard Street in favor of trading at suburban locations. Hochschild Kohn, the first to give up, departed in 1977. Others followed. But soon we realized it wasn't Howard Street that was hurting Baltimore's retail giants. All of Baltimore's locally owned department stores were history by the 1990s.
The significance of Howard Street? It changed block by block. The south end, near the old Baltimore and Ohio railroad's Camden Station, was home to Baltimore's garment manufacturing district. Many of the aging loft warehouses survive; those converted to apartments have fared better than much of the street.
The Baltimore Arena, which made its 1962 debut as the Civic Center, gave Baltimoreans their looks at the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Judy Garland, the Temptations, Elvis Presley and a long line of ice shows and circuses.
You wouldn't starve on Howard Street. Along the way (between Camden Station and Read Street) were popular lunchrooms like Kruger's and Thompson's, a big delicatessen named Awrach & Perl, the Oriole cafeteria (locally owned) and several branches of Bickford's, the national cafeteria chain.
There was also the Virginia Dare tea room and its gilded sweets counter, soda fountains in the Read's drug store chain (at Lexington, and another at Franklin), Otto Schellhase's restaurant and Dunlap's Oyster House. This is not counting all the food offered at the department stores, their dining rooms and counters, plus many other small operations.
It had banks -- the Provident, Commonwealth and Calvert. For sports there was the Recreation Bowling Lanes, once the largest bowling alley in Baltimore. In addition to the B&O; stations (Camden and Mount Royal), there was Greyhound bus service at Centre Street.
If Baltimore ever had a theater district, it was at Howard and Franklin. Here were the old Academy of Music, Maryland and Auditorium. It is hard to think that composers Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert staged world premieres in Baltimore, at Howard Street playhouses.
It also makes you cringe to recall that the 4,000-seat Stanley movie house, the mate of Philadelphia's Mastbaum, once stood along here. Like so many 1920s movie places, its site became a parking lot.
The northern end of Howard Street is its least changed, Baltimore's curiosity cabinet known as Antique Row. It too has been beset by depressing vacancies.
What was the significance of Howard Street? It was the place where paths crossed and recrossed. And you never forgot about it.