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 Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 811 Cathedral Street

In the 1920s and 1930s, Emmanuel Episcopal hosted the Maryland Poetry Society, which brought cutting-edge poets to culturally conservative Baltimore. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who embodied the liberated woman of the time, gave frequent readings here. Poet and socialist Carl Sandburg spoke of poetry’s new embrace of the “brutal onrush of modern life” and chided the audience for being “terribly respectable.” In 1933, T.S. Eliot himself lectured on modernism in poetry, advising the audience that while modern poems might seem obscure, it was “largely a matter of getting used to it.”

By the time writer and filmmaker John Waters was hanging out in Mount Vernon in the 1960s, the neighborhood was long past “respectable.” The celebrated “Pope of Trash” premiered his early films here, including Mondo Trasho, his first full-length feature, in 1969.