The Mayfair Theatre

I just edited and posted a set of images of the 1880-built Mayfair Theatre in Baltimore. It's one of the earlier performance venues I've seen in person, there are relatively few 19th century examples left in the USA. It currently stands abandoned, and in serious disrepair. The Cinema Treasures website says that the roof collapsed in the 1990s, and it's immediately apparent that the building suffers from decades of neglect.

The architectural sculpture has lost none of its beauty over the hundred and twenty year span that it's looked out on Howard Street. The laughing and crying satyrs of comeday and drama are accompanied by other symbols of creativity and music. The facade in general is a grand European revival one. I don't know these styles very well, but it looks Italianate perhaps, with those round third-floor windows.

It was entirely coincidental that the Mayfair was standing right next to the parking lot where my girlfriend and I stowed our car while we were in Baltimore, and I'm really glad I happened on her.




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I've uploaded 50 pictures from Westminster Burial Ground!





Westminster Burial Yard had its first interment in 1788. As a traditional 18th century burial yard, it seems very out of place in the modern world.

A small churchyard surrounding in the middle of an urban area, graves and crypts are strewn haphazardly around within the walled confines. A brick walking path wanders between and among plots. In one place, it narrows to perhaps two feet, squeezing between structures. At another, one monument stone juts halfway across the path, and another is embedded in the middle of the walk.

Around the back, an extension of the church has been built on raised columns, holding it some four feet off the ground. Underneath it are yet more gravestones next to another crypt, all with metal pipes and a dark brick cieling running just overhead.

Westminster is most famous for being the burial place of Edgar Allen Poe, famous poet and author of short stories.

More photos ( behind the cut. )

Numbers!

I finally posted ads looking to sell my old car, Perseverance the Swift, today and within hours I had three inquiries. One person is going to come look at it tomorrow. I asked for $200. Maybe I could get more, but considering I only paid $350 and it was drivable at that point, I think I'll be happy with another $200 to put toward a nice bad-weather bicycle.

I did a bunch of money calculation last night. It's a little funky putting a budget together when my income is so variable. My paycheck from the archives depends on how many hours I put in. I get large infusions sporadically through the year thanks to financial aid disbursement. And I have a big tax return I just got in. So I used Quicken to help me make a spreadsheet of monthly expenditures for each of my large categories by month from one year ago, then got a monthly average for those categories to base a budget on. Having all that data together assuages my control-needy brain. I think I can probably stand to spend a little less on eating out, and that shouldn't be hard if I'm conscious.

I also created a spreadsheet with all the data from my car log book. I think I must be missing an oil change or two, and there's a little haziness on exact gas usage due to other folks having used the car from time to time. Nevertheless, it looks like my operating cost is probably around 50 cents per mile. Pretty good! And not attainable without having a mechanic friend who makes repairs tremendously more economical. Thank you Juan! My gas mileage, on the other hand, is not so good. I'm averaging something like 18 to 20 MPG on fill ups. Compared to the mid 40s I got with the aforementioned Swift, that's just painful. It wasn't the car I would have chosen, but it's the one that presented itself to me, and I'm making do. That said, I'm thinking seriously about trying to trade it with someone on Craigslist or possibly sell it and find something more in line with my preferences. Those preferences being small, ideally a hatchback, preferably Asian, and with a stick-shift.

I think I'm going to use my first student loan disbursement this coming year to pay off the last $2000 or so on my Michigan student loan, then dedicate that loan payment to a virtual savings account with an eye toward a more economical automobile.

I'm truly surprised that my car's operating cost is only four or so times that of my bike, and that the gap would be even less with a more economical car. I thought the gap was even smaller until I realized I'd forgotten to include the nearly $500 I paid for insurance on it this year. Columbia the Lumina has eaten about $3300 and drunk around 300 gallons of fuel over 7500 miles. Carting those humans and all their stuff around is hungry and thirsty work!

Ooh, and here's one more fun figure: I have biked about 2552 miles since I bought the car. That means I have done fully a third as much cycling as driving, and have done just about a quarter of my overall travel for the last 12 months by bike. How cool is that?