Agora Financial in Mt. Vernon
The show CBS Sunday Morning w/Charles Osgood sent a camera crew and producer to Baltimore from their DC bureau on Tuesday. They’re doing a story on the American love affair with debt. They were trying to get me to take a pretty hard position on the build up of debt…it wasn’t hard to do. Who knows how they’ll skew the message.
But what was more interesting was their interest in our campus here in Baltimore. “We are dogged by dead men,” we write in the opening of a chapter we affectionately titled The Road To Hell in the Empire of Debt, “it is in Baltimore, Maryland, where the ghosts haunt us the most. In our very own office, according to the local history buffs, Woodrow Wilson got together with the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Theodore Marburg on the of the grandest wish lists of all time – The League of Nations.”
“You’re proud of that?” the producer who conducted the interview asked. They had set up a makeshift studio in the library of the old Marburg mansion – the very room in which the first draft of the League of Nations was reputedly penned.
Watch the entire piece: CBS Sunday Morning
Earlier this week, we were interviewed by the Baltimore Sun because of our presence in these buildings in Mt. Vernon. We’ve apparently had an impact on the job growth in downtown Baltimore.
The neighborhood has come a long way, certainly. Back in 1995, when we first moved into the Marburg Mansion, the gentleman who was moving out, a doctor retiring from his practice, was mugged at gunpoint on the steps at 1:00 p.m., broad daylight.
Anyway, these buildings make for entertaining conversation at cocktail parties.
Here’s what we put in the company newsletter after the Baltimore Sun piece was published:
“Agora Inc. was featured in a front-page news story in the Baltimore Sun for its contribution to the job renaissance underway in downtown Baltimore. Our own Addison Wiggin, of Agora Financial, explained that the neighborhood definitely seems more vibrant than it used to when we moved in a decade ago.
“About 30 minutes after this article hit the newsstands, the mayor’s office called. They’ve posted the article on their site. Of course, it’s a campaign year, so would we expect anything less? Baltimore is, however, being singled out for being a real world example of what’s called: New Urbanism. An architectural movement that stresses ‘mixed use urban renewal’ in direct response to suburban sprawl.”
