Baltimore Heritage Internship, Part 3: Bolivar in Bedford Square

Bolivar in Bedford Square In my daily Baltimore City life, I spend a lot of time wondering how and why things are where they are. Working with Baltimore Heritage, Inc., has given me the opportunity to dig for the answer to one of these questions. I must have noticed the statue on N. Charles Street first about 10 years ago. I’d probably driven past it a thousand times, but this time I was walking up Charles Street past the mansions of Guilford, and it’s presence struck me, the realistic but unfamiliar face, and the military regalia on the metal bust. The description on the pedestal before was unexpected, “Simón Bolivar, 1783-1830, Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia.” But it said nothing about when it had been placed there, or why. What was Bolivar, the “George Washington of South America” doing in tiny park in a wealthy residential neighborhood? I thought of him as a South American revolutionary figure unrelated to Old Baltimore’s past. I would wonder about it occasionally when I passed it by. When I started my internship at Baltimore Heritage, Molly Ricks, my supervisor, had a list of possible sites for me to write about, but also encouraged me to suggest some of my own. I had a few to list, and we decided that I’d start with the Bolivar bust, as it seemed like an interesting and perhaps not too complicated assignment. And I really did want to know how he turned up where he did. It turned out that so did others. I shared my question on social media and got a surprising number of responses, mostly from people who lived in Charles Village but went running in that neighborhood and had jogged by it, also wondering. I began to look for the answer. The responses I got on social media, while interesting, turned out to be dead ends. A friend who used to be the Editor of the sadly departed free weekly, The City Paper, remembered one of the regular contributors writing about the very same question. But it was so long ago he didn’t have a copy. And when The Baltimore Sun bought The City Paper just to close it down, they took down all of the content that had been online. He’d try to reach the author, but it was a long shot. And he never was able to reach him. An acquaintance posted that he’d been there on the day of the dedication, and that it was there because some embassy staff lived in one of the houses right behind the park, and he’d been on his paper route. But he had no other information but for this over 50 year old, perhaps not completely accurate memory, and nothing I found in my research backed that up. But there wasn’t much of anything to find about the location. All I learned looking in all of the right places (I think!) was that it was there simply because there was room for it there. Perhaps there was a special reason, but I could find no evidence that there was. What was interesting was the why of it being in Baltimore at all, not the where of the site where it was placed. And that was what I wrote my post about: https://explore.baltimoreheritage.org/items/show/707