Turning back time at the Owl Bar
Digging through our damp and musty archives, I came across an intriguing piece about the Owl Bar in the Belvedere (1 E. Chase St.) written by my esteemed colleague Fred Rasmussen.
I've always felt the Owl Bar has a timeless quality to it. And judging from this 37-year-old photo, it doesn't look like the place has changed much in several decades.
Fred's story explains how the Owl Bar came to be called the Owl Bar and gives an interesting look at the place through history. Here it is:
The Belvedere has always been a sentimental favorite where the city's elite gathered in its bar to celebrate life over a well-mixed drink or cold draft beer.
John Dorsey, former Sun restaurant and art critic, once wrote that the Owl Bar is the kind of place that you could return to in 20 years and see the "same people sitting there." ...
The Belvedere has loomed with its distinctive mansard roof and great chimneys over Baltimore for more than 100 years. It has survived numerous ownership changes. It was, after its closing in 1971, briefly a college dorm, and managed to escape the wrecking ball when the late Baltimore businessman Victor Frenkil purchased it in 1976.
When what is now the Owl Bar opened in 1903, it was called the Bar Room and later the Falstaff Room, and what is remarkable is that so much of the original room with its Germanic overtones, leaded-glass windows, dark-stained carved wooden benches and herringbone brickwork, remains. Even the chandeliers sans their original plaster or papier mache elves still illuminate the room.
"Where else could one find chandeliers with little men sitting on them, thus creating the impression that one was even drunker than one was?" wrote the late R. H. Gardner, longtime Sun drama and movie critic.
In her 1986 book, The Belvedere And the Man Who Saved It, Kristin Helberg says no one knows when the two blinking owls -- named Sherry Belle and John Eager Howard -- made the bar their rookery. Through the years, they have vanished and returned several times.
Sherry Belle, who disappeared on Dec. 3, 1933, and was presumed to have been carried off by some reveler celebrating the end of Prohibition, mysteriously returned in the early 1950s, none the worse for wear.
Gardner, also a habitue of the Owl Bar, recalled bending "an elbow with some of the most notorious lushes in the Free State."
In a story at the time of the hotel's closing, Gardner wrote, "There is not a table in the lounge or a stool at the bar that I have not occupied. For, apart from the relaxed atmosphere and tasteful decor that made it one of the pleasanter pubs on the East Coast, the Belvedere offered the most bountiful martini in Baltimore. One was enough to brighten the gloomiest day, two was a sure ticket to insensibility."
(The Owl Bar in 1971, top, and in 1910, bottom. Photos from Sun archives)
I've been The Baltimore Sun's nightlife and local entertainment reporter for a couple years, and it's surprising how much the scene has grown in that time. Most of Baltimore's bars and clubs are unpretentious places with fairly cheap drinks and plenty of character. I like dancing and think this city needs more clubs, but nothing beats having a cold, locally brewed beer with friends in a comfortably full corner bar.
