Could Elvis live again, at Nacho Mama's, in Canton?

     Now that the big pink flamingo is going back up at Cafe Hon  (the city roughly halved their $800 permit fee, owner Denise Whiting announced yesterday) some other business owners are hoping to use a similar approach and get a similar break.

     “I’m going to send a nice polite letter to (Baltimore Mayor) Sheila Dixon and say ‘Elvis is public art’ and ought to be allowed to return,” said Patrick “Scunny” McCusker, an owner of Nacho Mama’s in Canton, where a six-foot-tall wooden Elvis stood for almost 16 years until it fell to the city’s recent bout of code enforcement.

     McCusker said yesterday that he’ll note in his letter that more than 5,000 people signed a petition to bring the Elvis avatar (which he says bears an odd resemblance to Conan O’Brien) back to the street outside his Canton bar-and-restaurant. If the mayor is not moved by his gentle entreaties, said McCusker, who has consulted his attorney, he will turn to the Baltimore Public Art Commission and plead his statue’s case there.

     While McCusker’s reaction to the news out of Hampden was congratulatory (“good for her, it was flippin’ ridiculous what they were doing to her”),  hostile commenters on The Baltimore Sun website were, literally, incendiary.

     “She is a thorn in Hamden (sic) and has to move,” one wrote. “Hopefully someone will engulf with gasoline and set on fire her flamingo if its put up before mischif (sic) night.” (Also, we might add: sick!)

     As reported previously in the Brew, there’s been a very heated pro&con reaction to the flamingo, largely because the bird carries a lot of symbolic baggage on its spindly leg.

     Along with giving Whiting a break on the “minor privilege” fee she was being charged for the towering bird (made from wire-and-bedsheet and attached to a fire escape for seven years) the city gave her another concession. They agreed to put a sign on the Jones Falls Expressway (I-83) directing people to Hampden, she said. In return, Whiting agreed to pay the reduced fee and drop her public protest and put the bird back up.

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Tochterman's pays $93.80 for its fish sign. (Photo courtesy www.RoadsideArchitecture.com)

      McCusker never got an opportunity to pay a fee for the Elvis statue: the city said it impeded the public right-of-way and would have to come down or be removed at his expense. In his view, it was the same kind of short-sighted, letter-of-the-law enforcement that was used against the Hon flamingo.

     “The heart and soul of the city are small neighborhoods with quirky places like ours that are different, not corporate,” he said. “I’m really glad that Denise was able to remind the powers-that-be about that.”

     Like Cafe Hon, Nacho Mama’s has gone for years without paying a fee on its kitsch-in-the-public-right-of-way. So how do those who have been paying feel about Whiting getting a special discount?  Tony Tochterman, of Tochterman’s Fishing Tackle, on Eastern Avenue, thinks it’s fair, under the circumstances.

     “Because they (the city) have been allowing it for all this time, I think it isn’t fair for them to come along now and charge her for it — the horse is already out of the barn door,” said Tochterman, who said they have been paying the annual “minor privilege” fee on their neon leaping fish sign for the past 40 years, at least. City officials recognized that fact by giving Whiting a break and essentially grandfathering the flamingo in, he said.

     Tochterman said they pay $93. 80 a year for the sign over the sidewalk and $98.40 a year for the store’s bow window.

    The Hon flamingo “is not something I’d put up on my building,” he said, but it ought to be left alone because it’s the kind of odd thing that makes the city what it is.

     “It’s Baltimore, we do strange things in Baltimore,” he said. “People come from the ‘burbs and complain about the bars. Well there’ve been bars here since the 1700s. Same things with the rats. It’s a city, what did you expect?”

Two O'clock Club sign also dangles out over the sidewalk. (Photo from www.RoadsideArchitecture.com)

Photos of the signs at Tochterman Fishing Tackle and the Two O’clock Club by Debra Jane Seltzer, courtesy
www.RoadsideArchitecture.com .