Sports

Baltimore celebrates another birthday this weekend while Poe's Magic Theatre fills the Lord Baltimore Hotel with stage magic, ghost stories, comedy, and a busy downtown full of summer events.

This weekend brings five events to Poe’s Magic Theatre and the Lord Baltimore Hotel, three Orioles home games, a major arena concert, Baltimore Restaurant Week, live music around downtown, and a Sunday festival at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

Baltimore's relationship with magic goes back to 1787, when an Italian showman named Falconi set up shop at the Old Theater and charged 75 cents a seat to watch things that were inexplicable, and probably weren't. A crowd of 50,000 showed up on a Tuesday afternoon in 1916 to watch Houdini possibly fall from a building downtown. He didn't fall. Baltimore has been like this for a long time.