Before anyone suggests that Philip Logan is against housing developments, it is interesting to note that the Oxford-based architect is the first to suggest that the developer of the subdivision planned for Bellevue should build many more homes than the 14 he is seeking permits for this historic community. In fact, Philip argues that the best number is 30.

There are, of course, a few stipulations to that recommendation. Still, it gives ample evidence that Logan sees the Bellevue project as more of an opportunity than a problem at this planning stage.

While it is true that the New York City and Oxford-based architect has some significant concerns about what the current blueprint looks like for the waterfront site, Philip makes the case that with simple, relatively modest changes to the existing concept, the town, the new homeowners, and most importantly, the developer and their return on investment, would all benefit by embracing the unique history of Bellevue with its design.

In the second and last series – the first with Dr. Dennis De Shields – Philip talks about what makes good subdivisions and how such important design features as porches and public access to the waterfront can have a dramatically positive impact on keeping this small hamlet a true community rather than the dangers of separating the haves from the have nots by thoughtless architecture.

Last week, we talked to Philip at the Water’s Edge Museum in Oxford about the Bellevue project.

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. 

Perhaps the only way that most visitors to Talbot County might remember the town of Bellevue is because it is one of two destinations using the famed Oxford-Bellevue ferry. For eight months out of the year, locals and tourists gather across from the Robert Morris Inn to take the brief crossing over the Tred Avon River to the tiny hamlet several times a day to take in some of the most iconic images of the Mid-Shore’s waterscapes and boat traffic. And while most passengers quickly jump back into their cars and drive off to St. Michaels, they do notice, at least for a few moments, that Bellevue has a real sense of place.

For Dr. Dennis De Shields, Bellevue is more than a brief encounter. It is the ancestral home of his father’s family. While Dr. De Shields, a self-described “army brat,” followed his father’s career as a high-ranking colonel, it always seemed to him that Bellevue was his family’s real home. With the free run of the town during long summer breaks and enjoying the almost endless extent of family relations and friendships, Dennis bonded with the town, its people, and culture as his own.

The proof is that devotion can be seen when De Shields, and his wife Mary, also a physician, decided to move their young family to Bellevue over a decade ago to provide their children with a real sense of place rather than the cold indifference of American suburbia. And since that time, Dennis has not only taken a leadership role in the community, he and his father have devoted countless volunteer hours preparing for a special African-American museum to be built in the heart of the town using his grandmother’s collection of artifacts, art, and images to tell the story of this remarkable place.

When the Spy published Dr. De Shields’ opinion piece expressing his concerns about a future housing development, we thought it would be a good time to chat with him about the special meaning and history of Bellevue, and its importance for the Black community of the Mid-Shore. In our interview from last week at the Water’s Edge Museum, where the artist Ruth Starr Rose’s painting of one of his ancestors playing the guitar in the background, Dennis talks about his unique history with the town and also his concerns and suggestions regarding plans for 14 new luxury homes to be built soon.  

This video is approximately six minutes in length. In Part Two, which will be published on June 2, the Spy chats with architect Philip Logan about how sub-divisions can be designed to build on a town’s culture and community.

The year 2022 marks a special anniversary for the Mid-Shore’s Women & Girls Fund. For two decades, the WGF, under the watchful eye of its funder, Alice Ryan, and its diligent board members, have invested in some of the region’s most deserving charities to support and empower women and girls.

Over the next twelve months, the Spy will highlight some of the many organizations that the Women & Girls Fund has helped. Strategically using their limited resources to target programs typically overlooked by traditional philanthropists or government grants, the WGF board has found innovative ways to leverage their modest contributions for the most impact.

We start our series with Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Caroline County. Dedicated to supporting and promoting court-appointed volunteer advocacy for abused and neglected children to find a safe home for them to thrive, CASA of Caroline has played a key role in doing just that.

The Spy recently sat down with Amy Horne, the director of outreach at CASA of Caroline, who also happens to be the daughter of the late Talbot County Circuit Court Judge William Horne, who founded CASA in Talbot County, to talk about the program and the special challenges women and their children have in America’s court system.

We also chatted briefly with Women & Girls Fund board member Martha Kendall, who has been a strong supporter of the organization, on how careful the WGF is in selecting its grantees and why CASA of Caroline was such a worthy recipient.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Women & Girls Fund please go here. For information about CASA of Caroline County please go here.

On May 7, the Bookplate bookstore and Retriever Bar will continue their Authors & Oysters series of author events as they host father and son journalists Peter and Evan Osnos.

For almost 20 years, Peter Osnos wrote for The Washington Post as a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, joined Random House in 1984 as a senior editor, and founded PublicAffairs where he has edited or published countless authors from President Jimmy Carter to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He is the editor of a recently released book of biographical essays: George Soros: A Life in Full.

Son Evan Osnos is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and National Book Award Winner for his 2014 Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith based on his eight years in China. His Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury is a mirror held up to a fractured American landscape, a country that has become more unrecognizable the two decades between 9/11 and the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capital.

The Spy recently talked with Evan about Wildland and the craft of journalism reflected in his investigation into what happened to America in the last twenty years—by approaching it the way he observed China, as a foreign correspondent.

Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury offers an extraordinary gallery of individuals existing in the vacuum of their own American experience in Greenwich, Connecticut, Chicago, Illinois, and Clarksburg West Virginia, along with the legal and policy changes that have led to what sometimes feels like an intractable quagmire of polarized factions. But there is hope, Osnos says, and he’ll be talking about it with his father at the Retriever Bar on May 7.

The conversation starts with a reference to former Chestertown resident Richard Ben Cramer, Pulitzer Prize author of What It Takes: the Way to the Whitehouse, and the effort good journalism requires to accurately portray their subjects.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length.

The Retriever is located at 337 ½ High Street, in Chestertown, Maryland. For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or contact@thebookplate.net. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. Save the date for the next Authors & Oysters event with Kate Albus on May 11th.

Almost from the day the Spy started in 2009, we have been fascinated by the impact of certain philanthropists on our small communities of the Mid-Shore. From marinas in Chestertown to culinary investments in Easton or revitalizing the tiny downtown of Trappe, these highly successful people have invested real capital into the hearts and bones of these sometimes struggling communities.

The common word used for these folks are “angel” investors, someone who appears out of nowhere and decides, against serious conventional wisdom, to provide major bucks for what they perceive to the greatest needs in a community.

For John and Janice Wyatt, that great investment opportunity in Dorchester County has been to increase the reading skills of young children significantly. 

After a successful career as a serial entrepreneur based out of Fairfax, Virginia, and with the very lucrative sale of his sixth business, John and Janice began fulfilling their genuine passion for philanthropic investment. John, growing up in his native Australia, became forever grateful for that country’s investment in public education. So he was stunned to see how the United States, for all its mighty resources, had failed in giving its children “a fair go,” the OZ term for a fair chance. 

With that in mind, the couple formed the John and Janice Wyatt Foundation. It started to apply an entrepreneurial approach to early childhood education. And they also wanted to focus their work on three unique communities. First in their home community of Fairfax County, secondly to the far more rural town of Winchester in the western part of the state, and finally to Dorchester County, where they had bought a second home in 2015.

And over the last few years, the Wyatt Foundation has made it one of their principal objectives to triple the reading test scores for young children in Dorchester. After the Wyatts’ due diligence in studying the challenges, the hiring of former Mace’s Lane Middle School principal Jymil Thompson, and affiliating itself with the national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, this radical new approach kicked off last month. 

In his Spy interview, John talks about the nucleus of the Wyatt Foundation, his rationale in making Dorchester a priority, and how he and Janice will be measuring success over the next few years. 

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. For more information about The John and Janice Wyatt Foundation please go here.

When one thinks about the Women & Girls Fund, and what they have accomplished during their twenty years of existence, it is quite understandable to notice a tear in one’s eye. For two decades, the Fund has dedicated itself to supporting some of the Mid-Shore’s most innovative and successful programs to not only lift women and girls but empower them for a brighter future.

Behind this remarkable story is the Women & Girls Fund founder Alice Ryan. With the help of friends and a passion to find a way to support women and girls at a time when resources were few and far between, Alice worked with the Mid-Shore Community Foundation to form this unique organization in 2002.

And now with a history of over $800,000 in grants and a $1 million endowment, the Fund has become one of the Mid-Shore’s most respected philanthropic organizations. Beyond their direct support, the Fund has taken seriously the task of working with their beneficiaries to become stronger, more independent organizations and at the same time have developed creative ways to nurture a new generation of women philoinatioposits.

In light of these extraordinary accomplishments, the Spy will be working with the Women & Girls Fund board members over the next year to put a well deserved spotlight on the causes they support and the special women leaders that lead those efforts.

We begin this “Twenty Years and Counting” series with founder Alice Ryan. Last week, we sat with Alice at the Fund’s offices in the Bullitt House in Easton to understand her original motivation in starting the program, what the Fund has accomplished over the last twenty years, and her hopes for the Women & Girls Fund as it enters its next twenty years of existence.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Women & Girls Fund please go here.

One of the inevitable questions that every artist will be asked in the years to come is what impact the Covid pandemic had on their work.

This traumatic health crisis has dramatically changed the lives of all humans, but it seems to have had an enormous impact on artists in particular. Unexpectedly forced to retreat from daily routines, many found that this involuntary isolation opened a creative door which moved them into totally new directions.

That has certainly been the case with Stephen Haynes. The well-known Plein Air artist, who has been represented by the Trippe Gallery in Easton for many years, found himself far removed from his professional duties as a commercial creative director over the last two years. And like many, he began consuming countless hours of podcasts and websites with this newly found idle time.

And it was during this time that Haynes stumbled on a website entitled, “This Person Does Not Exist.”

Using the power of a warehouse full of computers, and a software program using artificial intelligence, the website creates photographic images of faces that were entirely the product of computation. In short, none of these people ever lived on this planet.

Beyond the fact that he found himself totally amazed at the results, Stephen started to envision another possible step for these artificial souls. In due course he started to doing portraits based on these images.

But it didn’t end there. In the artist’s mind, he could see yet another step where his portraits would be reduced to pixels again, and feed back into the same computers that had created the first image and using an entirely new algorithm produce another series of endless new faces.

The Spy caught up with Stephen via Zoom last week to hear more about his Portraits of People That Don’t Exist project.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Stephen Haynes please go here. For the Trippe Gallery please go here.

Over the last three years, Trappe Town Council member Brian Schmidt has had a first-row seat, or some would say, on the frontlines of an ongoing debate about the Lakeside residential community development on the east side of Rt. 50 in that small town. First, as part of the town’s Planning Commission and then as an elected member of the town council, Brian not only participated in legislative conservations about the project but also unwittingly became a modest expert in wastewater treatment plants and their technology along the way.

Brian’s intense dive into wastewater treatment is, he says, a simple extension of his approach to business challenges in general after almost two decades of running a successful catering business. But it’s clear from the Spy’s interview with Brian earlier this week that the real motivation is his long history and love for Trappe itself.

Born and raised in Talbot County with grandparents and summertime memories in Trappe well before he and his wife decided to raise their family there, Brian Schmidt takes his role of stewardship of the town and its future very seriously.

And because of those reasons, it’s safe to say that he’s more than troubled by some of the misunderstandings surrounding the development and the thoughtful role the Town of Trappe has played to ensure his community’s environmental integrity.

This video is approximately nineteen minutes in length.