Domino Sugar to donate, sell pieces of old sign
Pieces of Baltimore’s beloved old “Domino Sugars” sign, which is being replaced, will be donated — and some could be put up for sale.
Domino Sugar will donate the 5-foottall dot on the “i” to the nearby Baltimore Museum of Industry, which plans to install it in a corner of its Decker Gallery, in front of an east-facing wall of windows that looks out on the refinery.
“We’re delighted and honored to receive such an iconic piece of local history,” museum spokeswoman Claire Mullins said.
The 31-foot-tall “D” was “most affected by rust and is not salvageable,” the sugar importer posted on Facebook.
The pieces of that letter will be turned into souvenirs for the 500 refinery workers, and Domino hopes to make some available for sale at the Museum of Industry to support the museum. Details on how many pieces could be sold, the sizes and the price were not immediately available.
Anderson Industrial Contracting, the company taking down the old sign, will get the “a.”
The remaining letters and the border will be donated to Second Chance Inc., a nonprofit that trains unemployed Baltimore residents to deconstruct buildings and homes and salvage usable materials in its 250,000-square-foot Ridgely Street warehouse.
Once they arrive on flatbed trucks at Second Chance, entire letters and pieces of the border will eventually be available for sale, said president and CEO Mark Foster. It’s not clear when that will be.
Putting them up in a house or garage could prove challenging. The letters
headed to Second Chance range in height from the 22-foot “g” to the relatively smaller 12-foot “u,” “r,” and “s.” Those who want a smaller piece might be better off buying part of the border, Foster said.
“How to price it, we have no idea,” he said.
The Second Chance warehouse is home to other local landmarks, including the old Bel Loc Diner sign, the “i” from the PSINet sign on the Ravens stadium before M&T Bank bought the naming rights, and the hardwood basketball baselines from Maryland’s Cole Field House.
Foster said he is excited by the prospect of “sharing of the legacy of the Domino Sugars sign.”
So is Domino.
“We are happy these historic pieces will be more closely accessible to the public,” the company said in its Facebook post.
The 120-by-70-foot sign, a Baltimore fixture that has cast its red neon glow across the Inner Harbor since 1951, was retired March 1. As of Thursday, only the dot on the “i” and the letters “n” and “o” remained, leaving the word “no” on the refinery rooftop, rendering it a ready-made Baltimore meme.
The sign will be replaced over the next few months with an LED-powered replica, which the company hopes will look exactly the same when it lights up for the first time on the night of the Fourth of July.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — On the one-year anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s death, the slain Black woman’s family continued their call for justice as hundreds of demonstrators gathered Saturday in downtown Louisville.
“Eyes are on Louisville, Kentucky, today so let’s show America what community looks like,” said
Taylor’s aunt, Bianca Austin, who wore her niece’s emergency medical technician jacket.
Austin spoke from a stage set up in Jefferson Square Park, which became an impromptu hub for protesters during months of demonstrations last summer.
Flanked by two handpainted murals of Taylor, activists repeated calls to charge the police officers who killed the Black woman during a raid at her apartment. The crowd shouted Taylor’s name and “No justice, no peace” as they gathered near an outdoor memorial that includes a mural, posters, artwork and other mementos honoring Taylor’s life.
Taylor’s family then led the protesters on an afternoon march past City Hall.
Taylor’s front door was breached by Louisville officers as part of a drug raid in the early morning hours of March 13, 2020. Her boyfriend fired his gun once, saying later that he feared an intruder was entering the apartment. One officer was struck, and he and two other officers fired 32 shots into the apartment, striking Taylor five times.
Taylor’s death initially flew under the media radar, as the COVID-19 crisis shut down society, but George Floyd’s death in Minnesota and the release of a chilling 911 call from Taylor’s boyfriend in late May sparked interest in the case.
A grand jury indicted one officer on wanton endangerment charges in September for shooting into a neighbor’s apartment, but no officers were charged in connection with Taylor’s death.
Police had a no-knock warrant but said they knocked and announced their presence before entering Taylor’s apartment, a claim some witnesses have disputed. No drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Spacewalking astronauts had to take extra safety precautions Saturday after possibly getting toxic ammonia on their suits from the International Space Station’s external cooling system.
Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins had no trouble removing and venting a couple of old jumper cables to remove any ammonia still lingering in the lines. But so much ammonia spewed out of the first hose that Mission Control worried some of the frozen white flakes might have gotten on their suits.
Hopkins was surprised at the amount of ammonia unleashed into the vacuum of space.
“Oh yeah, look at that go. Did you see that?” he asked flight controllers. “There’s more than I thought.”
Even though the stream of ammonia was directed away from the astronauts and the space station, Hopkins said some icy crystals may have contacted his helmet. As a result, Mission Control said it was going to “be conservative” and require inspections.
The astronauts’ first suit check found nothing amiss.
“Looks clean,” Hopkins called down.
NASA did not want any ammonia getting inside the space station and contaminating the cabin atmosphere. The astronauts used long tools to vent the hoses and stayed clear of the nozzles, to reduce the risk of ammonia contact.
Once the ammonia hoses were emptied, the astronauts moved one of them to a more central location near the NASA hatch, in case it’s needed on the opposite end of the station. The ammonia jumper cables were
added years ago following a cooling system leak.
As the nearly sevenhour spacewalk drew to a close, Mission Control said the astronauts had already spent enough time in the sunlight to bake off any ammonia residue from their suits.
Indeed, once Glover and Hopkins were back inside, their crewmates said they could smell no ammonia but still wore gloves while handling the suits.
The hose work should have been completed during a spacewalk a week ago, but was put off along with other odd jobs when power upgrades took longer than expected.
Saturday’s other chores included: replacing an antenna for helmet cameras, rerouting ethernet cables, tightening connections on a European experiment platform, and installing a metal ring on the hatch thermal cover.
Eager to get these station improvements done before the astronauts head home this spring, Mission Control ordered up the bonus spacewalk for Glover and
Hopkins, who launched last November on SpaceX. They teamed up for back-to-back spacewalks 1 ½ months ago and were happy to chalk up another.
“It was a good day,” Glover said once back inside.
Although most of their efforts paid off, there were a few snags.
The spacewalk got started nearly an hour late, so the men could replace the communication caps beneath their helmets in order to hear properly. A few hours later, Glover’s right eye started watering. The irritation soon passed, but later affected his left eye.
Then as Glover wrapped up his work, a bolt came apart and floated away along with the washers, becoming the latest pieces of space junk.
“Sorry about that,” Glover said. “No, no, it’s not your fault,” Mission Control assured him.
It was the sixth spacewalk — and, barring an emergency, the last — for this U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew of seven. All but one was led by NASA.