She told me they’d have bought them at Smyth, the jewelry store. I consulted Kindall Rende (who was born and raised in Baltimore) when I needed to send the Cones out to buy new dishes. The one in the book is a composite of all the amazing record stores that used to exist. I went online and looked at the record stores that were in Baltimore in 1975. I had never seen Little Tavern where they sell burgers “by the bagful,” but there are a lot of photos and written memories of it on the internet.
In just living in Roland Park, the history was handed over: the good and the shameful.Īre all the places in the book real? Eddie’s is, of course, but what about the restaurant they love, The Little Tavern? And the record store that plays such an important role?
My girls went to RPCS and we belonged to the Roland Park Pool. And, of course, everyone loves to talk about the Olmsted brothers, the fact that Roland Park was one of the first planned developments in the U.S., and that the little shopping strip where Petit Louis is, is the first “strip mall,” in America. The Cone family in the novel would have been one of the first Jewish families in Roland Park. Since we are a Jewish family, no shortage of people let us know that until the mid-70’s people of color and Jewish people were not allowed into the neighborhood. There was stuff I researched, but most of the Roland Park stuff was handed to me by people through years after I bought a home there. Cone is a medical doctor - if she knew that he is actually a Jewish psychiatrist who has invited a famous drug addict client to come to his house for a personalized rehab program, she never would have allowed Mary Jane to take the job. Her very conservative mother is under the impression that Dr. Her protagonist, Mary Jane, is a 14-year-old Roland Park Country School student who gets a summer job babysitting for the Cones, a family a few blocks over. Mary Jane is her first book to dig in and explore the Baltimore setting… particularly the leafy corner of it that is Roland Park.
Her inspiration for some of the details of the fictional Ruxton Academy in her previous book, The Trouble With Lexie, came from the area private schools she sent her daughters to in those years.
Her latest, Mary Jane, returns to that period, but this time in Roland Park, where Blau arrived in the early aughts. Jessica Anya Blau has been delivering summer reads to her fans since her 2008 debut, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, which was set in the author’s native Southern California in the 1970s.
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