Baltimore Public Works Museum

The Baltimore Public Works Museum was located at 751 Eastern Avenue, Pier 7 of the Inner Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland. This museum provided a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how a large city provides public works utility services to its citizens. Exhibits also explained street lighting, road maintenance, and trash removal. An outdoor sculpture called Streetscape was an intricate model of a network of phone lines, street lights, storm drains and pipes for water, gas, and sewage disposal. The building housing this display is an operating sewage pumping station built in 1912.

The museum opened in 1982 and is operated under the auspices of the Baltimore Department of Public Works. On February 3, 2010, the city announced that the museum would close immediately due to budget constraints.

Famous quotes containing the words baltimore, public, works and/or museum:

    There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    Public morning diversions were the last dissipating habit she obtained; but when that was accomplished, her time was squandered away, the power of reflection was lost, [and] her ideas were all centered in dress, drums, routs, operas, masquerades, and every kind of public diversion. Visionary schemes of pleasure were continually present to her imagination, and her brain was whirled about by such a dizziness that she might properly be said to labor under the distemper called the vertigo.
    Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)

    ‘Tis too plain that with the material power the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment. Works and days were offered us, and we took works.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    A rat eats, then leaves its droppings.
    Hawaiian saying no. 85, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)