Monday is Rib Night at the Mount Vernon Stable & Saloon, but I’m more often there on Tuesday for Steak Night. Look for the guy with the brown hair, beard gone white, way up in the window.

As I chew my 12-ounce New York strip ($13.95 with two sides), I have a prime view of the Parking Management Inc. (PMI) surface lot where 906, 908, 910, and 912 North Charles Street used to be.

What the heck could succeed there now, assuming you could get it built? An Apple store? A high-end cheese shop?

Who knows? Charles was Baltimore’s 42nd Street, “where the underworld can meet the elite,” but the elite skipped out on Mount Vernon when grandpa was a boy.

The ships of the city’s old cultural fleet — the Peabody Institute, Walters Art Museum, Center Stage, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore School for the Arts, Maryland Historical Society — remain anchored there, near the Washington Monument.

Other hardy perennials such as the Maryland Club (“In the Squash and Fitness area, All White attire must be worn”) continue to occupy their splendid piles.

There’s the Mount Vernon Club, also known as Tiffany-Fisher House, 1842, architect unknown. There’s the Engineers Club in the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion, Stanford White, 1884, with additions by John Russell Pope. And there’s the Romanesque structure housing the Maryland Club, by Josias Pennington, 1892.

The name Mount Vernon is itself a tribute to the taciturn general, who stands larger than life on the 178-foot Doric column (Melville gives the monument a shout-out in Moby-Dick). Our neighborhood StairMaster will reopen next year.

Till then, please have a seat in one of the four rectangular squares and take in the babies, dogs, music students, Walters employees, vagrants, wedding parties, television crews (filming Veep and House of Cards), Circulator riders and other habitués.



Elegant – and on Economic Life Support

If Mt. Vernon feels faded in a familiar way, it is. It’s a Dupont Circle scene with a similar history: the neighborhood declined and became hippified, then turned into the city’s gayborhood (my word of the month), less so now.

But unlike Dupont, Mount Vernon has defied gentrification. Though many are glad that the fight to restrict building heights in this historic district was successful, most would also welcome more investment and a rise in property values.

I was ecstatic to find that rents were so much lower than in D.C. Entire rowhouses in Mount Vernon can be purchased with what you’d spend on a one-bedroom condo in Dupont (if I only had savings or credit or a wealthy Aunt Agatha). But as much as it’s Charm City at its charmiest, Mount Vernon is on economic life support.

We just came through the Great Recession, I know. Things were much worse in the ’90s, I know. People have been saying Mount Vernon is a lost cause for 50 years, I know. This is Baltimore, Hon. BELIEVE.

The Stable (run by Lorraine Yagjian, whose husband Peter died in 2009) is planning some kind of 30th anniversary bash next month. It seems to be doing okay, thanks to a reasonably priced, something-for-everyone menu and late hours on weekends (though not as late as Never on Sunday, a few doors down, where the wee hours are a show in themselves).

With its decor of architectural castoffs and theater props (Royal Tenenbaum: “Where’s my javelina?”), it is an island of Mount Vernon stability.

Family-owned restaurants rarely last more than one generation. Some of the most prized in Mount Vernon and other neighborhoods have thrown in the cloth napkin over the past 30 years. But there are still plenty, including a few destination restaurants such as Qayum (brother of Hamid) Karzai’s Helmand, 806 North Charles, always packed.

Those Missing Front Teeth

The PMI lot I stare into from my table at the Stable would be bad enough if it were the only one, but it’s not. So many asphalt rectangles where great buildings used to be: looking left, there’s a giant one on the corner of Charles and Read, next to the Helmand. Out of sight to the right is another monster (about 50 spots, plus 10 for Zipcars) on the corner of Eager.

In fact, these are tiny principalities in the 67-year-old PMI empire, whose ruler, Kingdon Gould, III, is the great-great-grandson of Erie Railway robber baron Jay Gould. (I encourage you to read all about KGIII’s astounding family on Wikipedia.)

Who needs railroads when you’ve got parking lots! The PMI lot at Charles and Eager charges a flat rate of $11.50 after 5 p.m. Doing the math here: $11.50 x 50 spaces x 2 nights x 52 weeks = $59,800 per year just from the weekend clubbers.

There have been signs – white, hand-lettered public notices – that PMI wants to build on the corner lots, but I haven’t heard any asphalt cracking. (It’s been saying the same thing since at least 2011.)

Needless to say, there are other parking barons in Mount Vernon. There’s 926 North Charles, a gap in a corniced row of six (now five) houses, the driveway for a Central Parking expanse that faces a long fence on Cathedral Street.

Just north of the Stable’s next-door neighbor, Kumari, is the vast swath of parking for the Maryland Club, a gated lot that takes up about half of the block.

Demolished History

This lot embraces the spot where the fabled Peabody Beer Stube once was – 913 North Charles. The emptiness there is especially painful for those who remember the watering hole when it was full of life with sailors, soldiers, students, professors, “a wayward judge or two,” and generations of journalists.

That’s how writer Carl Schoettler recalled the Peabody in 1997 when the building was being demolished.

With its piano, fireplace and various stuffed wild animal heads on the wall, Schoettler wrote, “It hovered somewhere between a Black Forest inn and a Viennese cafe.”

South of the Stable is yet another lot, this one run by Jetset Parking with about 25 spots.

People who work for nonprofits in the green-tinged Latrobe Building – at nine stories a Mount Vernon skyscraper – park there during the day. (Edward H. Glidden, 1912. Read the plaque.)

At night, in all kinds of weather, a guy stands out in Charles Street flagging down the nightclub crowd, who can park until 5 a.m. or sobriety, whichever comes first, for the price of a spinach pie at Never’s.



Attention, Young Landlords

After much pondering and weighing of options, I’ve concluded that property-owners in Mt. Vernon face these basic choices:

Choice A: Maintain and pay taxes on buildings well over 100 years old while renting to undercapitalized retailers and college students.

Choice B: Tear the buildings down (if they let you), pave over, pay as little as possible in property taxes, lobby against higher parking-fee taxes, and count your money as the cars roll in.

Choice C: Tear them down (if they let you) and borrow millions to build something, Lord knows what, that could conceivably provide an after-tax return on your investment.

Choice D: Unload them and get out of [insert hater’s nickname for Baltimore] before it’s too late.

Choice E: Sit tight. Eventually the city or some other sucker will pay a king’s ransom to be rid of you.

These are not the kinds of choices that promise a short-term turnaround. I hope I’ll be proved wrong.

______________________________

Richard Selden, who lives in Mount Vernon, is principal of Sand Fiddler Marketing, a consulting firm for cultural organizations. Before that, he was director of marketing and communications for the Peabody Institute. He blogs at The Sidelong Scrawl.

