Over the weekend, a demolition crew turned One, a chic night club for most of the last decade, into a pile of brick, broken cinderblock and sand. If you're of a certain age and missed One's run as a nightclub, you will know this location, at Guilford Avenue and Saratoga Street, as House of Welsh Corner. Instead of big dance floors and theatrically-lighted bars stocked with Dom Perignon, you'll think of a classic Baltimore tavern that served sizzling steaks on metal plates and Maryland whiskey at a bar without stools.

If you're of a certain age, or paid attention to local history, you might also appreciate a story associated with this tough, old corner of the city. It was the location of what I'd call "communications heroics" from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, and you might even join with me in suggesting that the next developer of this real estate, along with the Communications Workers of America, put up a small plaque so that those heroics might be remembered.

Three rowhouses, built in the 1830s, made up the House of Welsh. It opened around 1900 and, by the time it closed nearly a century later, it was said to have the city's oldest liquor license. In his obituary for the tavern in 1998, my Sun colleague Jacques Kelly wrote that the House of Welsh sat "out the back door of City Hall and attracted politicians, lobbyists, bookmakers, lawyers, policemen, judges and reporters who wanted plain, tasty food served in an unhurried manner." I once saw a home movie of the elevated train tracks that carried street cars over Guilford Avenue, between Biddle Street and House of Welsh Corner, until 1950. The bar was males-only and whites-only until the 1960s.

It's what happened in 1904 that gets the plaque.

Fire broke out on Feb. 7 and destroyed most of Baltimore's business district, burning through hundreds of buildings sitting on roughly 140 acres between what's now the area of the city's downtown arena on the west and the Jones Falls on the east, between Fayette Street to the north and the harbor to the south.

As the fire approached their offices, Western Union and postal workers took to the streets with their telegraph instruments to wire news of the disaster to the rest of the world. George P. Oslin's book, The Story of Telecommunications, reports that telegraph workers connected their instruments to wires cut from overhead poles and fired off Morse Code messages from the sidewalks.

But the fire soon forced them to retreat further north. About 100 operators from Baltimore's main Western Union office and reporters from the Associated Press bureau in another building moved to a Western Union branch office, according to Mr. Oslin's account. They worked there until midnight, when the approaching fire again forced them to retreat. By dawn, many of them had moved to the third floor of the House of Welsh.

The tavern had a lone copper wire connected to the main telegraph lines. For the next three days and nights, about 35 telegraph operators sent off reporters' accounts of the fire.

I used to hear this story every time I went to the House of Welsh with fellow reporters. There used to be a reminder of the tavern's role in the fire story — a newspaper front page with the headline, "Baltimore's Awful Calamity."

Over the years, Formstone covered most of the exterior walls of the House of Welsh, which used to advertise, in big white letters against a black background, "steaks, chops, seafood" and "Black Bottle" Maryland rye whiskey. Then, after the sale in 1998 and more than a million bucks in investment by new owners, it was transformed into One. From late 2002 until earlier this year, the big gray mass of a building at Guilford and Saratoga was part of Baltimore's upscale, downtown mega-club scene.

Now it's not only closed, it's gone — and with it the ghost of the House of Welsh and those anonymous telegraph operators and reporters who, with soot on their mustaches, kept the lines open and told the rest of the world about Baltimore's great disaster. Some attention ought to be paid — at least a small plaque affixed to whatever comes next to House of Welsh Corner.

Dan Rodricks' column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. He is host of Midday on WYPR-FM. His email address is dan.rodricks@baltsun.com