Mount Vernon Literary Tour: Visitors and Drinkers

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at Belvedere Hotel, 1 East Chase Street Transcript: The Belvedere opened in 1903 and instantly became Baltimore’s most prestigious hotel. Ten U.S. Presidents, one Queen of Rumania, and writers from Mark Twain to Clare Boothe Luce stayed here. F. Scott Fitzgerald held his daughter’s sweet 16 party here. Novelist Henry James—author of such classics as Turn of the Screw, Washington Square, and Daisy Miller—visited in 1905 while researching his travel book, The American Scene. Mount Vernon’s houses, he wrote, “suggested rows of quiet old ladies seated, with their toes tucked up on uniform footstools.” Visit the ground-floor Owl Bar, whose enigmatic owls have watched over patrons for generations. Fitzgerald drank here with his friend H.L. Mencken, though Mencken began to have second thoughts, noting in 1934 that Fitzgerald “is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance.” Photos of the Belvedere’s famous guests line the walls leading to the bar.