“I dreamed I was sitting on a bench, in Baltimore, facing the tumbling fountain in Harlem Park, beside a woman who wore a veil. I had come there with her. She was somebody I knew well. But I had suddenly forgotten who she was. I couldn’t see her face because of the long black veil.
I thought that if I said something to her I would recognize her voice when she answered. But I was very embarrassed and was a long time finding anything to say. Finally I asked her if she knew a man named Carroll T. Harris.
She answered me, but the roar and swish of the tumbling fountain smothered her voice, and I could hear nothing.
Fire engines went out Edmondson Avenue. She left me to run after them. As she cried, “Fire! Fire!” I recognized her voice then and knew who she was, and knew she was someone important to me. I ran after her, but it was too late. She and the fire engines were gone."
- Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
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| Image from the archives of the Maryland Historical Society |
The Harlem Park fountain is no longer there, the half of the park where it stood was redeveloped in 1963 as part of a revitalization project. According to the Sun archives, it was built in the late 1890s, paid for by the people whose house were on the square. When Hammett describes it as "tumbling," he is likely referring to an unintended property of the fountain. When it was turned on, rather than the steady waterspout in the center of the pool the park creators intended, it spurted water at regular intervals, shooting up 30 or 40 feet, then falling back to the pool. Apparently it was fairly noisy, but they liked the effect, so it stayed. A Sun staffer in 1908 put it this way: "Instead of behaving like an orderly Baltimorean, the new offspring of the Park Commissioners was cutting up the capers of a French ballet girl. It was horribly incorrect, but it was pretty."
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