starynyte

Remedy for artists’ headache
City OKs financing to convert Bromo tower into studios
By Jill Rosen
Sun reporter
Originally published August 17, 2006

Under the blue glow of Baltimore’s castle-like tower where people once promoted headache powder, creative types will soon be making art.

The long-discussed plan to convert downtown’s signature Bromo Seltzer Tower into studios for artists advanced yesterday as city officials approved a financing plan for the $1.9 million project.

In a city where affordable, dependable workspace fills as quickly as it opens, artists reacted enthusiastically to news that the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower could open by March.

The idea of working in what has to be the quirkiest leg of Baltimore’s skyline only adds to the appeal.

“Are you kidding? That visibility and that type of high-profile space?” asked Anthony Walker, a marble sculptor who owns Gallery ID8 near Fells Point. “I’d kill for space in that.”

Painter Jordan Faye Block, part-owner of Locust Point’s Gallery Imperato, said she’d be first in line to apply for space.

“I love old Baltimore and I love buildings that are well-made and have character and persona,” she said. “That always serves as inspiration.”

Though the idea for the tower conversion emerged years ago, setbacks dogged the project.

Its initial benefactor backed out in 2004. Then last year after new donors, arts advocates Sylvia and Eddie Brown, stepped in with a $500,000 gift to set things back on track, planners realized they’d have to rework the design around fire department communications antennas.

But yesterday, all systems were go as the Board of Estimates approved contributing the city-owned building and spending $650,000 toward the renovation and studio operating expenses.

Officials said construction would begin within weeks and the finished studios could be revealed at a ribbon-cutting by March 1.

Baltimore’s Office of Promotion and the Arts will manage the studios, which will fill 13 floors of the tower. Artists will have to apply for the space, but officials say they’re seeking a variety of talents – from painters to writers, seasoned to just starting out.

On the tower’s first two levels, plans involve opening a gallery and a coffee shop.

Bill Gilmore, the office’s director, said private studios are not the goal, but rather space where the public is welcomed in regularly to mingle with the creators.

“We want people to get inside and see what it’s like,” Gilmore said.

Proponents of the city’s longtime push to redevelop the west side are as encouraged as the artists by the prospect of the studios.

M.J. “Jay” Brodie, president of the Baltimore Development Corp., said the studios will help bring vibrancy to the city’s west side.

“These artists will be out there on the street, adding to the Baltimore creative class,” Brodie said. “It’s the spirit and activity they will bring.”

Mark Pollak, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Door, volunteered to handle the legal paperwork for the studio conversion pro bono, eager to revive a city landmark, particularly one that could lure people west of downtown.

“It’s somewhat iconic in nature,” he said of the tower. “It’s really important to have this very visible symbol cleaned up and renovated.”

Jed Dodds, artist director for Highlandtown’s Creative Alliance at the Patterson, said artists, particularly Baltimore’s artists, will be drawn to the tower, whose story is almost an homage to eccentricity.

“It’s been on the kind of strange journey that Baltimore’s community seems to really celebrate,” Dodds said.

The founder of Bromo Seltzer, an effervescent headache remedy, commissioned the tower to complement his factory after a trip to Italy where he became smitten with a 13th-century Florentine watch tower.

Finished in 1911, in its early years the 15-story clock-top edifice at Lombard and Eutaw streets was not only an architectural anomaly, but Baltimore’s tallest building.

Through the years, however, modern skyscrapers bested the tower in height and a beloved medicine bottle that once spun on its top was removed for fear it was damaging the structure.

Eventually blue lights were installed to make up for the loss of the spinning bottle and city arts officials took up residence inside in the 1970s.

The building has been vacant and deteriorating since they moved out in 2002.

“It’s a funky-shaped building with great visibility, a lot of history and a good vibe,” Dodds said. “I think artists will definitely appreciate it.”

Rowland Fontz tells a story about his childhood in South Baltimore, six-plus decades ago. Saying his nightly prayers, he’d look out his tiny bedroom window at the Bromo Seltzer Tower, in those days topped by a 51-foot-high blue bottle ablaze with 596 light bulbs. Young Rowland was convinced that the skyline spectacle was a conduit for his prayers. “I thought,” he says, “it was something like the stars in heaven.”

Of course, Fontz says with a practiced wry smile, he didn’t know then that he’d end up the keeper of that Baltimore landmark’s clock, maintaining the tower’s timepiece—and the one in City Hall’s dome too. “They call me the Clock Man,” he concludes.

I met the 76-year-old several months ago, working on a piece about Federal Hill’s old McHenry Theater (Charmed Life, March 13). Interviewing Fontz, who was an usher at the erstwhile movie house, I learned about his current job. Devoted as Charmed Life is to telling Baltimore’s untold stories, there’s a kind of unwritten code that obvious civic icons like the Bromo Seltzer Tower are off-limits (this column’s logo notwithstanding). But Fontz’s story was hard to resist.

After weeks of badgering, Fontz agreed to meet me at the tower. He arrives in a blue suit, blue tie, and black loafers, his white hair carefully combed back like spun sugar. A self-described “horologist—one who studies clocks,” he’s worked on the Bromo Seltzer and City Hall clocks for 30 years on a city contract—which he initially obtained, he says, because he was the only bidder.

Before that, he built pipe organs, apprenticing at a large factory in Vermont. He hoped that “through osmosis” he’d become a musician, his true desire, “but I didn’t have the talent to play well,” he says. “But I had mechanical talent, so I went in a different direction.” After completing the apprenticeship, he returned home to run his own organ shop, whose handiwork can be seen and heard in several local churches, including St. James Frances in Riviera Beach, St. Paul Lutheran in Glen Burnie, St. Paul Lutheran in Aberdeen, and Douglas Memorial in Baltimore.

Despite their size and age (the Bromo Seltzer clock is 91 years old, City Hall’s 133), Fontz says maintaining the city’s two grand timepieces is relatively easy compared to outfitting a church with a new organ. “It’s not really complicated,” he says. “It’s just really challenging because of the precision. Other than that, it’s a very simple mechanism.”

Guest in tow, Fontz ascends in the Bromo building’s hand-operated elevator, then opens a padlocked door and climbs a steep steel staircase that rises in blackness until it reaches the frosted light seeping from the clock chamber. To a first-time visitor, entering the vault, surrounded on all four sides by 24-foot-high clock faces, is enchanting, like stumbling into something out of Lewis Carroll. But spying the avocado-sized electric motor powering the Bromo’s innards is kind of a letdown.

Fontz explains that when he first got here the clock ran on gravity, winding itself via a weight-and-pulley system that now stands idle and frozen. Five years after he took the job, thieves broke into the clock tower and stole the works’ brass and copper fittings. Fontz rebuilt the parts, but the city opted for the hassle-free electric motor.

Still, there’s work that needs doing. Keeping the tower’s signature feature running like clockwork means keeping a careful eye on the weather, for one thing; ice, snow, and moisture can slow down the clock hands’ upswing, When that happens, Fontz has to climb a ladder to adjust a counterweight on the drive shafts. Since the Orioles moved to Camden Yards, TV cameras have zeroed in on the clock, putting pressure on Fontz to be punctual. “For any reason it’s wrong, we got to get right on it, because within the hour the city will get 20 complaints about it,” he says.

But being the Clock Man has its perks, chief among them the exclusive vantage points. At City Hall, the clock is housed in small bell chamber at the top of the dome that, according to Fontz, not even the mayor has been in. At the Bromo Seltzer Tower, it’s the view. Downtown may have taller buildings, but there’s nothing like taking in the expanse of the city from the tower’s open-air crown, peeking out between the turrets—the ultimate skybox.

From this lofty perch, Fontz envisions one more addition to Baltimore’s skyline landmarks—one that fuses his technical mastery with his long-ago dream of making music and would reacquaint Baltimore with its “singular, unique honor . . . of being the birthplace of the national anthem.”

Much as he may care for his clocks, Fontz only gets really passionate as he talks about his design for the “National Anthem Memorial Tower,” a 25-story rocket-shaped tower looming beside the Inner Harbor from which “The Star-Spangled Banner” would emanate daily. Calling upon all his organ-making expertise, Fontz would outfit the tower with enough bells, chimes, harps, glockenspiels, and other tone-making devices to play the anthem at least 31 different ways, so that no version would sound more than once a month.

“It would be equal to the Eiffel Tower,” he says. “Not to that scale, but it would be an identifiable city landmark on a national and international basis.”

Going through yellowing clippings and a photo of a scale model, Fontz sketches a vision of Independence Day at the waterfront, the fireworks complemented by the great ringing of the tower. “Silence would fall over the harbor,” he says in a dramatic hush, raising his hands like he’s conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. “Then they would play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” He describes strobe lights flashing from the tower as a historically correct 13-star U.S. flag rises out of the top.

Fontz formed a nonprofit, What So Proudly We Hail Inc., to pursue the monument, and spent years lobbying the city for help, but to no avail. He acknowledges in an almost embarrassed tone that he hasn’t bothered to press his case to City Hall’s current occupant. “I lost the fire,” he says.

But as he stands over the city describing the July 4 of his dreams, there’s no doubt that Fontz can see his tower standing there in the haze of spent fireworks, as clearly as he once gazed at the Bromo Seltzer Tower during his evening prayers. “I still have a dream,” he says, “and dreams can be like magic sometimes.”

By Charles Cohen

http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=2376

Starynyte’s Story of the Timekeeper

While visiting the tower for photos to advertise the new studio spaces, I got to meet Mr. Fontz. He was there being photographed by a professional photographer, and they allowed me to take a photo of him as well. He joked with my boss and I about it being very dark up the stairs to the cupola, and if we weren’t back in 5 minutes he would know why. LOL Once I stepped out the door into the cupola I was entranced by it’s magnificence. It’s quite a romantic place with the view of the city, cool breeze blowing, and a private get away from the bustling city below. I imagine Mr. Fontz has had his fantasies of taking a sweetheart up there for some romancing of his own. No romance for me while up there, I was a photo taking fool! Climbing the several flights of stairs up, sweating bullets and dirty hands from the rusted handrails was well worth the view from the top.

The tower was completed in 1911 and has been a Baltimore landmark ever since. The tower was designed by Joseph Evans Sperry and built by Captain Isaac Emerson, the inventor of Bromo-Seltzer. It was patterned after the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy.

The tower was originally topped with a 51-foot revolving replica of the blue Bromo-Seltzer bottle, which was illuminated by 596 lights and could be seen from 20 miles away. The four clock faces are all still working; however, the bottle had to be removed in 1936 due to structural concerns.

Spears / Votta & Associates, Inc. (SVA) worked closely with Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) and Grenald Associates to design a new facade lighting system for the historic Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Tower. The existing exterior lighting on this Baltimore landmark had deteriorated to a point where it was unusable. The design objective was to light the upper portion of the exterior of the structure from all sides, to illuminate the clock faces on all sides, and to recreate the feel of the original blue Bromo-Seltzer bottle which once adorned the top of the structure.

Illuminating the facade was a difficult task due to the building’s location on the corner of Eutaw and Lombard Streets, with a fire station situated tight on the north and east sides. Lighting for the south and west facades was accomplished through poles located across the streets and tied into the street lighting system. Lighting for the north and east facades was only possible through a coordinated effort with the fire department allowing roof mounted floodlights for which SVA designed custom supports. The clock faces are lit internally.

The most distinguishing feature of this lighting project is the blue glow that appears from the cupola atop the tower. SVA accomplished this effect through the application of lighting principles not generally addressed by the lighting design community: paint the interior surfaces at the top of the tower “Bromo-Seltzer” blue, and reflect white light off of the blue surfaces. This simple solution has the added benefit of not only working at night, but also allowing the “Bromo-Seltzer” blue to shine during daylight hours as well.

The clock, made by renowned clock maker Seth Thomas, was installed in 1911 on completion of the tower, which was begun in 1907. The four clock faces are 25 feet in diameter and boast an inner and outer glass dial. The inner glass dial is 18 feet in diameter and marks the hours with Roman numerals, while the outer seven feet of the glass dial marks the hours with the twelve letters of the name “Bromo-Seltzer.” The clock mechanism, originally weight driven, is now powered and regulated by a 1/8-horsepower, three-phase electric motor. The minute hands weigh 175 pounds, the hour hands weigh 125 pounds, and the pendulum inside the clock weighs 600 pounds.