City’s Statues Are Easy On Taxpayer’s Pocketbook

That’s Because Experts Advise Against Even So Much As A Face-Wash For Monuments-Up-keep, Consequently, Is Definitely Negligible

Baltimore’s statues are tough babies. They don’t get their faces washed from one year’s end to the next. They don’t get any grooming at all. They just stand out there in the weather – when they are standing statues – and take it.

Some of them sit.

Conversation with James Vincent Kelly, secretary to the Park Board, which is responsible for the statues’ condition, leaes the impression that there probably is no element of life in the Monumental City which is less expensive to the taxpayers or which gives those who govern the city less concern than the monuments that give Baltimore its informal name.

True of All Statues

This is equally true of all statues, whether one speaks of the sixteen-foot high stone George Washington who has been standing for 119 years on the top of Washington Monument in Mount Vernon Place, of the bronze George Peabody, Roger B. Taney or Severn Teakle Wallis, who looks sternly out of metal eyes from the green spots around the Washington Monument.

John Eager Howard has been riding his charger in the same neighborhood, looking up Charles street for lo, these many years with practically no attention at all; likewise the Marquis Lafayette, who looks constantly like he should catch up with Howard, but never does.