$1,690,000
108 Ridgewood Road, Roland Park
7 bedroom(s), 6 bathroom(s)




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Hot House: Butchers Hill Townhouse by Cynthia McIntyre

Big Fish Q & A with New Walters Executive Director Julia Alexander by Betsy Boyd

Hopkins Identity Crisis by Rachel Monroe

House of Cards Casting Call in Bel Air by Rachel Monroe

Agave Watch 2013: Rare Plant to Bloom at Rawlings Conservatory by Rachel Monroe by Rachel Monroe

Enjoy the first of the Belvedere Square Concert Series with music by The Crawdaddies, whose music combines Louisiana’s cajun, zydeco and blues sounds with the North East’s rock, Americana and ska influences to create a unique sound all its own. The square will be open for food, drink and browsing. Join the fun!

One of the most gratifying and amazing things about writing this blog is the people whom I have met through it, not to mention some of the adventures I’ve had. One of those amazing things started almost a year ago, when I received an e-mail from a fellow blogger, telling me that he would be visiting Baltimore and that he’d like to get together.

So I threw a small party for him and his partner, and we all got along famously. We drank. We talked. We laughed. We ate. We drank, talked, laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a brilliant evening, just full of love and admiration. So now I am headed up his way this weekend, and the timing is quite fortuitous.

The house where I will be staying has just been published in Architectural Digest. And Boy, is it gorgeous!Simply incredibly gorgeous. I haunted the shops until the June issue of Architectural Digest arrived and then tore through it in the check-out line. Read More →

Okay. We admit it. What caught our eye (and hooked us) re: this event was of course the picture posted next to it in the Baltimore Fun Guide. Demi Moore. Patrick Swayze. That scene. Does your memory really need further jogging? If you’ve ever imagined that maybe you could somehow fit into that picture, but wouldn’t know where to begin, Date Night at Baltimore Clayworks is probably a pretty good (and safe) place to start. After all—that scene in Ghost? Super sexy. Getting clay all over the place, becoming frustrated with your partner, your work of art, and yourself? Not so much. So, as with many things, a little guidance from the pros probably wouldn’t hurt. Read More →

Every spring, the Homewood Museum at Johns Hopkins University hosts An Evening of Traditional Beverages on the lawn of the museum’s grounds. Each year there is drink theme — everything from whiskey to champagne to last year’s theme of punch (boy, that was a FUN parTAY!) This year’s theme is Fruitful Brews.

Just to give you a little background…Homewood is the 1801 country house of Charles and Harriet Carroll and one of few surviving examples of Baltimore’s Federal Period architecture. This was a time when the City of Baltimore was a major boom town. The creation of a retreat for summer’s use was really the very beginning of the concept of “the suburbs”, which would be followed 100 years later by nearby developments such as Roland Park, Homeland and Guilford. At the time Homewood was built, the area around the house was quite rural and the site included a 130 acre working farm with two vegetable gardens, as well as an orchard of apples, peaches and pears. The farm and original orchards were the inspiration for this year’s Evening of Traditional Beverages: Fruitful Brews and also for the reestablishment of a small orchard that would have provided fruit for the table, for livestock and for delicious fermented beverages! Read More →

Sagamore Farm. All photos by Krista Smith.

Tomorrow, the 138th Preakness Stakes, or the “Freakness” as it is sometimes affectionately known in Baltimore, will run at the Pimlico Race Course.

Whether you find yourself at the race sipping Black-Eyed Susans and wearing a pink taffeta dress that matches the flower on your hat, or funneling malt liquor and wearing black denim shorts that match the tattoo on your abdomen, you will be participating in the long Maryland tradition of thoroughbred horse racing. It’s a tradition that owes much of its rich history, and maybe even a bit of its optimistic future, to the pragmatism of Margaret Emerson Vanderbilt.

Margaret’s first son, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, was born in 1912. Mrs. Vanderbilt was hopeful that her boy would grow up to be a businessman and she had good reason to be bullish. Men on both sides of Alfred’s family had built huge companies (Bromo-Seltzer on her side and the New York Central Railroad on her husband’s side). Now widowed, Margaret was one of the wealthiest people in America…and this was “Gatsby” America, which we all now know (thanks, Baz) was the real deal.

Alfred, as it turned out, had other interests (such a thankless job, the parenting). “Since the first time I went to the races at Pimlico at the age of 9,” Mr. Vanderbilt once said, ”I have had this wonderful feeling about racing. I don’t go to the races because I just love horses. It’s like the person who goes to the circus and falls in love with the whole show, not just the elephants.”

Vanderbilt’s racing silk design on the stalls in the original stable.

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In the fight against obesity, many cities and states have begun asking restaurants to prominently post the calorie count of each menu item. The idea is that once you know how many calories are in that order super-size fries, you’ll think twice about scarfing them down. But, according to two Johns Hopkins public health researchers, calorie-posting doesn’t actually do that much — and so they’ve come up with a better way.
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Baltimore Country Club