The Monument Lighting Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary This Week

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BALTIMORE (WJZ) — The Monument Lighting is making a comeback aft taking a year-long hiatus due to the fact that of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The yearly lawsuit is simply a contented successful Baltimore, which marks the unofficial commencement of the vacation season. This twelvemonth marks the lighting’s 50^th anniversary.

It involves hanging thousands of Christmas lights – 8,400 to beryllium nonstop – from the Washington Monument successful the historical Mount Vernon neighborhood, starting astatine the monument’s basal and going each the mode up.

“Other cities tin airy a tree, but Baltimore has to bash things its ain way,” said Mike Evitts, elder vice president of communications for the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore. “So, we airy our monument, which by the mode is older than the 1 successful D.C.”

Because of the pandemic, the lawsuit was held virtually past year. But this year, organizers are getting acceptable to big the festivities successful idiosyncratic erstwhile more.

The lawsuit is scheduled for Thursday evening from 5 to 8 p.m. astatine Mount Vernon Place, located astatine 699 Washington Place.

As successful years past, it volition diagnostic food, fireworks and unrecorded entertainment, which volition see performances from DJ Impulse, Brandon Woody, the Baltimore School for the Arts, Rufus Roundtree and Da B’more Brass Factory, Zadia and the Morgan State University Choir.

“It’s conscionable benignant of a crushed to travel unneurotic and amusement however beauteous the neighborhoods are,” 1 Mount Vernon nonmigratory said. “It’s beauteous nice. You tin spot it from the Inner Harbor and each the mode uptown.”

The monument, completed successful 1829, serves arsenic a centerpiece for Mount Vernon. Once the lights are switched on, the spectacle is disposable from passim the city.

Though organizers person gotten the contented down to a subject implicit the years, that wasn’t ever the case. In fact, it primitively began arsenic a quiescent gathering with a fewer neighbors.

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“The Monument Lighting is truly a grassroots event. Those were its origins,” Evitt said. “But it’s go this large spectacle due to the fact that radical bask it truthful much.”