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The Peabody Bookshop and Beer Stube was a fixture in the Mount Vernon section of Baltimore, Maryland for over 50 years.
There was a crowded, dusty bookshop in front, and a crowded room in the back where customers could get beer and a sandwich. There was a piano on one wall, mounted animal heads, wooden tables carved with the names of patrons. At 10:00 PM, Dantini the Magnificent would do his 15-minute magic show. [1]
The bookshop also served as an art gallery for local artists. [2]
Located at 913 N. Charles Street, the Peabody was within walking distance of the Walters Art Gallery, the George Peabody Library, the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore's Washington Monument, and the Brexton Hotel.
Brothers Hugo and Siegfried Weisberger, Austrian immigrants, started the bookshop in 1922, during Prohibition. Siegfried became sole owner in 1931, when Hugo died. [3]
This was an early example of a bookshop with its own beer bar, and possibly the very first such in the US. [4]
Weisberger abandoned the Peabody in 1954, convinced by long time patron H. L. Mencken, that the "Age of the Boob" had arrived, and people were no longer interested in "books and ideals and culture. They only want dollars." [5]
When Siegfried walked away from "100,000 volumes nobody wants to read", the news was covered across the nation, from Detroit to Phoenix, Arizona; Wilmington, Delaware to Santa Cruz, California. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
The Peabody didn't stay closed. It reopened under the ownership of Paul P. Adler and Irving Mindess, later in 1954, and remained popular with students from the University of Maryland [12]
The oft-married Rose Boyajian Smith Pettus Hayes took ownership of the shop in 1957 and ran it until she died in 1986. [1]
Rose added a second bar upstairs, [13] and was active in preserving other Baltimore properties, [14] [15] including revitalizing the Brexton Hotel [16] In the 70's the Peabody hosted Saturday film festivals. [17]
In 1979, the Peabody suffered the loss of two long-time performers: singer–violinist Max Rathje who knew every regular's favorite song, and Vincent Cierkes, popularly known as “Dantini the Magnificent." [18]
The shop closed not long after Rose's death.
The building at 913 North Charles Street was demolished in 1997, to make way for a parking lot. [19]
Natalie Standiford based Carmichael's Bookshop, in "How to Say Goodbye in Robot" [20] on the Peabody Bookshop. [21]
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial," also gained him attention.
The Enoch Pratt Free Library is the free public library system of Baltimore, Maryland. Its Central Library and office headquarters are located on 400 Cathedral Street (southbound) and occupy the northeastern three quarters of a city block bounded by West Franklin Street to the north, Cathedral Street to the east, West Mulberry Street to the south, and Park Avenue (northbound) to the west. Located on historic Cathedral Hill, north of downtown, the library is also in the Mount Vernon-Belvedere-Mount Royal neighborhood and cultural and historic district.
The Baltimore Sun is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in Maryland and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries.
Mount Vernon is a neighborhood immediately north of downtown Baltimore, Maryland. Designated a National Historic Landmark District and a city Cultural District, it is one of the city's oldest neighborhoods and originally was home to the city's wealthiest and most fashionable families. The name derives from the Mount Vernon home of George Washington; the original Washington Monument, a massive pillar commenced in 1815 to commemorate the first president of the United States, is the defining feature of the neighborhood.
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Baltimore is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, as well as the 30th most populous city in the United States, with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was designated an independent city by the Constitution of Maryland in 1851, and today is the largest independent city in the United States. As of 2017, the population of the Baltimore metropolitan area was estimated to be just under 2.802 million, making it the 21st largest metropolitan area in the country. Baltimore is located about 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Washington, D.C., making it a principal city in the Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area (CSA), the third-largest CSA in the nation, with a calculated 2018 population of 9,797,063.
Charles Henry Grasty was a well-known American newspaper operator who at one time controlled The News an afternoon paper begun in 1871 and later The Sun of Baltimore, a morning major daily newspaper, co-founded 1837 by Arunah Shepherdson Abell, William Moseley Swain and recently joined by Grasty with a companion afternoon edition entitled The Evening Sun in 1910. Grasty was named among the great American newspaper publishers and owners, such as James Gordon Bennett, Benjamin Day, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Grasty owned the Evening News, which had been founded in the early 1870s and utilized the new illustrative technology of using woodcuts illustrations plates to show pictures spread across its pages before the advent of reprinting photographs directly on newspaper pages. During Grasty's tenure The News built its elaborate tall headquarters and printing plant with a corner clock tower on the southwest corner of East Baltimore and South Streets directly across the street from The Sun's older architectural landmark "Sun Iron Building" of 1851, on the southwest corner, constructed of newly popular cast iron architecture style and supposedly fireproof and an early version of a tall commercial office building that gained increasing popularity in American big cities known as the skyscraper. Grasty ran The News for a number of years greatly increasing its circulation and cultural and civic impact on the city as its leading afternoon paper and later sold it prior to briefly acquiring the Minnesota Dispatch and the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the Upper Midwest in separate transactions then later divesting these newspapers to return again to Maryland to seek ownership of The Sun with a syndicate of wealthy backers. Grasty was also one of the developers of the new northern suburban Roland Park community in the early 1890s by the Roland Park Company development firm, said to be an early innovation in community planning, including planned shopping centers and other aspects of the community prior to being offered for sale and development.
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Peabody Book Shop and Beer Stube, the real-life inspiration for Carmichael's Book Shop (the Peabody is now, sadly, closed)
Coordinates: 39°18′01″N76°36′56″W / 39.3002962°N 76.6155467°W