Photo Essay: America's First Black History Wax Museum

Sure, you could cozy up to a wax figure of Barack Obama at Madame Tussaud's in New York City, San Francisco, or Washington, DC, but the best place to see our former president in wax is at the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore.



It's not that it's the best likeness of #44 there is—but this wax museum, the first of its kind in the country when it was founded in 1983, is way beyond anything that those "major" tourist attractions have to offer.



You see, the story of the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum actually goes back more than 5000 years to ancient Egypt (then known as Kemet)—which is when and where the tradition of memorializing important figures in statue form began (usually bronze, gold, and copper). And so the collection of this wax museum also starts then and there with Imhotep, the presumed architect of the Egyptian pyramids.



Inside this 10,000-square-foot former firehouse, Ethiopia is represented with a depiction of the Queen of Sheba, Makeda; Mali has its place with the builder of Timbuktu, Askia the Great.



Then South Africa circa the late 18th and early 19th centuries gets its due with Chaka Zulu.



It's critical to start the narrative there, not only for its own historical significance. Perhaps more importantly, it provides a stark contrast with the next chapter of the story, with later Africans being exported as goods, sold off at auction, and lynched.



The museum unapologetically portrays the plight of the African slave, who was often forced to dance even while shackled, who was force-fed...



...and who suffered such inconceivable indignities.



Therefore, the slave ship section of the museum is a horror show—but in order for it to be truthful, it has to be.



Of course, children weren't exempt from the inhumane treatment—and therefore they're not left out of the museum, either.



Particularly disturbing is the story of a pygmy boy named Otabenga (not the little guy pictured above), who was captured in his native Congo and brought to the U.S. for the 1904 World's Fair, eventually ending up on display as a "race specimen" at the Bronx Zoo. Just over 10 years later, despite being granted his freedom, he killed himself.



And while you can't tell the story of freeing the slaves without mentioning the Underground Railroad and its lead "conductor," Harriet Tubman (whose wax figure was one of the museum's first)...



...or Dred Scott, who tried to sue for his freedom...



...there was also the lesser-known but no less intriguing Henry "Box" Brown, the master escape artist who shipped himself in a box to Philly to escape slavery.



But when the Emancipation Proclamation finally came about in 1863, the resulting abolition of slavery came up short in terms of ensuring the wellbeing of the freed slaves.



As no one would hire them at a fair wage, they ended up essentially in a different form of slavery, known as sharecropping.



And because they could claim no ownership of the land, black sharecroppers were relegated to the lowest economic rung and struggled to survive.



Some freed slaves moves out West for a better opportunity—so many, in fact, that the West has more all-black towns (mostly found between 1840 and 1890) than any other region in the country.



Some settled into leadership roles earlier than others...



...founding schools...



...churches...



...and fraternal orders.



Thankfully, the museum equally celebrates unsung heroes of black history, like A. Phillip Randolph and the pioneering Pullman porters...



...as well as local Baltimore heroes and heroines like Mary Carter Smith...



...Thelma Banks-Cox...



...Bishop Reverend John R. Bryant of Baltimore's African Methodist Church...



...and Freeman Hrabowski, president of The University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 1992.



There are the military leaders, like Tuskegee Airman General Daniel "Chappie" James, Jr....



...artists like James Hubert "Eubie" Blake, an accomplished jazz musician and composer...



...the black literati, like poets Phillis Wheatley and Langston Hughes and novelists and essayists Richard Wright and James Baldwin...



...and broadcasters like "Aunt" Pauline Wells Lewis, who spent a half-century bringing gospel music to the masses via her radio show (and paved the way for singers like Mahalia Jackson, who's also been immortalized in wax at the museum).



In fact, many of the Civil Rights leaders of the time used their art to spread their message, perhaps through songs like "Lift Every Voice and Sing," written by James Weldon Johnson.



Others protested through their actions.



Of course, you might expect to find a wax statue of Rosa Parks at this museum, given her own groundbreaking act of defiance, but you'll also find a depiction of the well-honored and awarded NAACP executive Mildred Bond Roxborough.



The nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, the NAACP is also represented in the museum by statues of Earl Theodore Shinhoster, Whitney M. Young, Jr., and Kweisi Mfume.



Meanwhile, William Hartley Hayling, MD (whose statue is one of the more recent additions to the museum) founded the 100 Black Men of America...



...and Mary McLeod Bethune, a former sharecropper, went on to found the National Council of Negro Women.



Of course, among the freedom fighters were also the prize fighters—as well as other star athletes—like Joe Lewis, Jackie Robinson, and Jesse Owens.



But the "greatness" of these blacks in wax isn't always quite so clear-cut—as in the case of Haile Selassi, former emperor of Ethiopia, who the Rastafari of Jamaica worship as the second coming of God (or, the Messiah) but whose infringements against human rights have drawn wide criticism.

We hear those more complicated stories less often than those of, say, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, or Nelson Mandela (all of whom have been recreated in wax for this museum as well).

But none of the pieces of black history—whether slavery or apartheid, segregation or Black Power—can really exist on its own in a vacuum. Each person and each era is so intricately tied to all of the rest.

Then again, you can't really convey 4000 years' worth of humanity in just one museum (or only in wax)—no matter how well it's been curated and how good the dioramas are.

And that means that there are a lot of prominent figures that are missing from it (though many athletes and entertainers were intentionally omitted, under the assumption that people already know who they are and what they've contributed).

But the collection continues to grow, so hopefully more locals and visitors alike will be compelled to venture over to North Avenue on the east side of town, an area that may seem unsavory to some (including my Uber driver) but is definitely "in transition," and for the better.

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Lights on Miracle Hill: Putting the Christ Back in Christmas

It's the most obvious thing to do for Christmas, and I can't believe I'd never seen it before.

In fact, it was just this year that I discovered "Lights on Miracle Hill" at City Blessing Church in Walnut, CA, which gives some of the most elaborate residential and commercial lighting displays a run for their money.

For all the houses that synchronize their holiday lighting displays to any variety of jingles and jangles—enough to compete in or even win a reality TV competition—why is there only one church in Southern California that's actually gotten into the game?

Are there others I don't know about? (Yes, there's one in Sacramento and others in Washington State and Oklahoma, but where are my SoCal Christians at?)



But of course something like this should be hosted by and at a church.



Of course there should be crosses, along with the glittering trees and snowflakes and poinsettias and snowballs.



And of course that church should use the opportunity to collect donations...



...share some scriptures and parables...



...invite people to come check out a service sometime...



...and offer some photo opps at a nativity scene in a recreation of Bethlehem.



Everybody else has taken the Christ out of Christmas. And as much as I'm a stickler for the separation of church and state, Christmas is a church holiday that's been commandeered and commoditized by secular sectarians.



After all, if you've got a "Miracle Hill," you might as well light it up for all those down below to see.



Go tell it on the mountain (or, the hill, as it were). And wish every single person who comes a "Merry Christmas," regardless of their faith (or, in my case, lack thereof).

Merry Sunday Night, Merry Monday Eve, Merry Winter's Night, Merry December 24, Merry Everything.

As for me, I'll take all the blessings they got—at Christmastime and all year long.



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Photo Essay: The Hangover Cure Clock Tower Gets Its Tick-Tock Back

Every city has a beacon—something that acts as a kind of "North Star" to guide your way home (or to wherever it is that you're going).

In Syracuse, it was the MONY tower.

At Colgate, it was the chapel.

In New York City, it's the Chrysler Building for me—though, for others, I'm sure it's the Empire State Building or the Freedom Tower, Statue of Liberty, or Brooklyn Bridge.

In LA, the Hollywood sign and Griffith Observatory.

In Pripyat, it's the ferris wheel.

In Vegas, it's the Stratosphere.

And in Baltimore, it's the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower.

When I first visited Baltimore for work in November 2015, the clock tower was the first local attraction or architectural site of interest that I asked my new boss about. After spending nearly two weeks in town looking up at that thing, mostly at night when LED lights illuminate it in blue and purple, I became utterly romanced by it.



When I returned to Baltimore in November 2016, I stayed in a hotel with a view directly across from the Bromo tower. I watched its facade transition from the muted tones of sunrise to the violet glow of bedtime.



And this December, I found myself at that very same hotel, peering out of the window at that very same tower, under the pallor of snow and the lumens of the morning after.



The crown had been draped under some restoration effort—but looking at it from afar, even at somewhat eye level, just wouldn't suffice. I had to get inside the tower, up the tower, and into the clock room.



Fortunately, I'd taken an extra Saturday on my business trip specifically for tourism and made a beeline over to the Bromo Arts and Entertainment Dstrict and, as its centerpiece, what was originally known as The Emerson Tower.



It was built in 1911 by Captain Isaac Emerson, a Baltimore chemist who'd invented Bromo-Seltzer for headaches and hangovers in 1880 and, seven years later, founded the Emerson Drug pharmaceutical company.



Considering the fact that Baltimore had been not only a big drinking town before Prohibition but also a big producer of booze (behind Kentucky and Pennsylvania), anything that claimed to cure hangover headaches—even just a fizzy antacid combined with the same painkiller as found in Tylenol and a little citric acid.



Of course, Bromo-Seltzer got its name from a more nefarious ingredient that was outlawed in 1975 and removed from the hangover cure: sodium bromide, a toxic sedative that poisoned a few too many of its users.



But that wasn't so unusual back then. Doctors often prescribed chemicals as healing agents (hence why pharmacists were called "chemists"). People used cocaine for wakefulness. Others took morphine to ease the pain after a boo-boo. No big deal.



As well as Bromo-Seltzer may have worked, the key to its success wasn't any kind of secret ingredient or patented formula. In fact, anybody could've made the exact same product with the exact same recipe—but it was Captain Emerson who made a pharmaceutical fortune off of it.



Where Bromo-Seltzer really excelled was in its branding—and a lot of that had to do with those cobalt blue bottles that made the brand jump right off the shelf. That blue glass was so key to the success of Bromo-Seltzer that Emerson eventually cornered the market on the manufacture of it by creating the Maryland Glass Corporation. As a result, he controlled 90 percent of the cobalt blue glass that was produced (also used in bottles of Noxema and Vick's Vapo Rub) in the U.S.



That's why the tower was once topped by a 51-foot, illuminated, revolving replica of a blue-glass bottle of Bromo Seltzer—that is, until it caused so much structural damage that it had to be removed in 1936.



With 15 floors (16, including the clock room), it was the tallest structure in Baltimore until 1923—considered, in fact, to be more of a skyscraper than just a clock tower, even though Baltimore's tallest today clocks in at 40 stories.



To get up to the top, you can ride up the circa 1911 manually controlled Otis elevator, whose track record is reportedly more reliable than its more modern counterpart.



It will take you up to the 15th floor, where you can view the swinging pendulum that drives the clock and climb a ship's ladder one flight up to the clock room.



Up there on the 16th floor, you're in the midst of the world's largest, four-faced, pendulum-driven clock (even bigger than Big Ben, though this one doesn't chime, much to the relief of the hungover consumers of Bromo-Seltzer)...



...with the sunlight streaming through the translucent white glass of the 24-foot clock dials.



It turned out to be the perfect time to visit—and well worth the weight—because it was just this year that the clock was restored to its original, gravity-driven mechanisms after having been electrified in 1975 and subsequently run by motor. (That means the clocks once again "tick" and "tock," just as they were always supposed to.)



The clock was originally designed by the Connecticut-based Seth Thomas Clock Company (also famous for its work on the clock at Grand Central Terminal). Its mechanisms, recently tuned up by Balzer Family Clock Works, bear the stamped date of June 16, 1911 and the serial number 1664.



But among the first pieces of the clocks to be restored were the hands of the clocks. The original wooden ones, which had been frozen in the 9 o'clock position for a couple of years, were taken down in 2015 and put on display in the clock room.



They were replaced by brand new ones that hopefully won't get stuck—but any hands of a clock, especially wooden ones, aren't necessarily permanent fixtures. You can expect to have to change them out every few decades (or at least once a century, which doesn't seem that bad).



To be honest, it's a major victory that any part of the Bromo-Seltzer complex remains today, after it spent so many years neglected and abandoned.



The factory may be gone (replaced by the fire station that currently occupies the ground floor), and the offices may have been converted into artist studios, but that clock on the 16th floor and that collection of blue bottles one floor down (on loan from and curated by collector Ernest Dimler) act as a living museum for the early days of Baltimore industry and innovation.

And even though the Bromo-Seltzer Arts Tower was meant to mimic the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy (with four clocks facing out instead of just one), it's hard to imagine the Baltimore skyline without it.

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