Eze Jackson \\ Hip HOP Artist

"I love Baltimore and I have these spots, and McKeldin Square is a place I used to go also as a child and jump in the water. Back in the day you used to be able to stand in the water. Jump in the water and stay by the waterfalls.(...) So as a man, standing there and knowing the magnitude of what we were trying to do, that was special moment for me."

Anna Apicella \\ Ballet teacher

"Me in my little pink skates, I was flying all over the place! I had no idea that skating at McKeldin Square would be so fabulous! I laughed myself silly."

"I can tell you that McKeldin Square, without the ice rink, is so open and refreshing. You hear the splashing of the water when the fountain is no, you watch people getting their picture taken because in front of the fountain because its pretty, and then you look around, you see the beautiful Baltimore sky, you smell the harbor, you smell the food coming from harbor place, you hear the flags flapping, and cars driving by. So that when you put an ice rink in the middle, the backdrop would have been so pictoresque if the fountain would have been turned on. I'm really going to miss the chance to see that, because it's no longer there."

Fred ScharmEn \\ architect

How can Baltimore become visionary again, and how can we, as a city, build and design things without designing the past, but instead, how we want the City to be? … Public spaces need to consider who is invited into them.

David Rocah \\ ACLU Lawyer

"At some level the whole country is supposed to be a free speech zone, that's what the first amendment is supposed to protect. But it's not quite that simple."

Evan Lori Mahone \\ Artist

"We had news that the “hashtag free speech bus” was supposed to show up in Baltimore. This thing was not a free-speech bus, it was obviously a hate bus. What it was was a big orange double-decker bus that was touring the East Coast and it had the message: Boys are boys, girls or girls, it's biology. As a response to this thing coming to Baltimore we wanted to show up and show that you're not going to come to our city and just spout your hate message, telling us that we don't exist, that I don't exist. So we chose Mckeldin square as a place to meet. Because first off it's like the free speech zone, so that fits nicely with the free speech bus. It was just like having a very visible and public space for trans people in the middle of the city, where we could just be very visible."

Sheila Dixon \\ politician

It’s not so much what was explicitly said as much as listening to the emotion, the anger and frustration that makes people give up their Saturday to go and protest their concerns. With Occupy, “there was a message and a point that they were trying to make to get people to wake up and see the need for wages, health care and so many basic fundamental things that we all need.”

Valerie Maynard \\ sculptor

"Because I couldn't afford to move back to New York, I moved to Baltimore, and what I would do in the evenings is, I would walk the harbor. I remember the fountain and the square, but I remember the harbor when they were first building it. I don't know if they really had a good idea of what they were doing or really knew what they were doing, and I guess it was new, what you call "cutting edge", to open up the harbor that way for people to relax in and just be there."

Michael Anthony Farley
Ryan Mitchell

"We lived in McKelding fountain for like a month, off and on, which was surprisingly cozy and fun. We created our own sort of very flashy theatrical campy camp, that had kind a broad range of diversity in a lot of ways and we organized a lot of performative actions and things like that. We tried to do we tried to make it fun, to incorporate art elements, and not be completely serious. I think the interesting thing about that space in that context is that it's so complex and multi-level. We could be encamped at the base of the dry winter fountain, while other people were having a meeting up inside of the fountain on a bridge or something. I will forever treasure the time at Occupy."

Lexie Mountain \\ occupy artist

"Mckeldin Fountain was a really interesting backdrop for it, because it felt kind of like you're being embraced by this object, this fountain and it would kind of protect you from having to really look at the glare of the inner harbor."

"There was something about the way that the fountain itself looked, its architecture almost literally looked like the top of the city."

Megan Flynn \\ urban designer

"At that point we had been marching from 5 to maybe it was 8 o'clock. And the police had sort of decided, invisibly, arbitrarily, that it was time for everybody to go home. It wasn't a specific time, there wasn't an end time, nothing had happened, there was no escalation that had happened, it was just sort of somehow: time to go home. I had a big sign that said: Dear white people, what are we going to do about our legacy of violence?”

"So he physically turned me around and I must have dropped my sign, because I know that it was on the ground, but I don't remember letting go. After I was arrested and after I was sitting in the car, sort of like watching everybody on the other side of the glass, I saw my friend pick up the poster and start holding it, as sort of like picking up the work after someone else leaves off. And we made eye contact and I was like: You got me? She's like: yeah, I got you."

Spilly Spilliadis \\ hula Hoop Performer

"When you went into Occupy, you started to get a sense of human organization. There was a very organic sense of structure."

"All my life people have been jumping in and playing in the fountain and always throwing pennies in. One fun thing that happened, there were skateboarders, they were part of the occupy movement and living there, and when we brought the hoops they started doing things with the hoops and the skateboards and they did pretty amazing things."

Ada Pinkston \\ Artist

"We projected a large scale image onto the fountain that was a memorial for people that have been victims of, or survivors of police violence in Baltimore. One of the reasons why we wanted to do that, is because those types of experiences aren't necessarily recognized by people in the jet freighters establishment that decide what gets memorialized and what does not."

"If you think about the concept of the portrait, too, it's like it's very specific in art history. And then we kind of flipped it on its head by one, projecting it, but then, two, really making people see the urgency of the situation here, which is that some people are getting murdered by people that are supposed to protect them."

Ashley Molese \\ Arts ACTIVIST

"Just being there and being present in McKeldin square introduced me to several, especially young people between the ages I'd say 15 and 20, who use that space for all sorts of social endeavors. I met some really fascinating people. I had this sort of friend group, but they came from all over the city and all over the county and they would actually take the light rail just to meet up at Mckeldin square, based on whatever that social outlet was the fountain."

"It has these social strata around it, where people are coming in to use that space, because they don't have other social meeting places, at least not ones that are sort of commercial with expectations to spend money. Especially in the inner harbor. So for me, having that open public space is a really important thing to maintain and I just hope that the next sort of generation of what Mckeldin square becomes is still able to host that."