A Year in Reading: Nick Moran
Nine years living in this beautiful city and I’m qualified to say: there’s no better place to read in Baltimore than beside the bay window at the end of the bar in Mt. Royal Tavern. They call it the Dirt Church because it’s a dank dive with a ceiling painted like the Sistine Chapel. The pours are holy, alright. One of the daytime regulars wears a mask at all times except for when she’s sipping, which reminds me of people on oxygen who still smoke cigarettes. It’s the kind of place where you really get Ray Midge’s beer protocols in Charles Portis’s Dog of the South: “I drank from the side of the mug that a left-handed person would use, in the belief that fewer mouths had been on that side.”
But, the light of that bay window! The way you can’t really see the TV from that end of the bar!
