The Phoenix Shot Tower, also known as the Old Baltimore Shot Tower, is a red brick shot tower, 234.25 feet (71.40 m) tall, located near the downtown, Jonestown (also known later as Old Town), and Little Italy communities of East Baltimore, in Maryland. When it was completed in 1828 it was the tallest structure in the United States. The tower was originally known as the "Phoenix Shot Tower", then the "Merchants' Shot Tower", and now is also sometimes called the "Old Baltimore Shot Tower". It was designated a National Historic Landmark on November 11, 1971.
The Shot Tower lends its name to the nearby Shot Tower/Market Place station on the Baltimore "Metro" subway system's northeast line constructed in the mid-1980s on a spur line from downtown/Charles Center station to the Johns Hopkins Hospital medical complex on Broadway which was added to the main subway "Metro" line constructed in the early 1980s from downtown/Charles Center to the northwest suburbs in Owings Mills in surrounding Baltimore County.
Read more about Phoenix Shot Tower: Design, Production, History
Famous quotes containing the words phoenix, shot and/or tower:
“Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do what’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Don’t sell the bearskin until you have shot the bear.”
—Swedish proverb, trans. by Verne Moberg.
“Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)