One eye winks down at you from a giant neon face, an American beer mascot who has watched over this Brewers Hill skyline since 1936. The National Brewing Company was founded in Baltimore in 1885 and became one of the major regional brewers of the mid-Atlantic, its National Bohemian Beer marketed with the slogan Land of Pleasant Living, taken from a Chesapeake Bay tourism campaign. The company created the Mr. Boh mascot for advertising in the late 1930s — a cheerful, winking Bohemian with an enormous handlebar mustache — and the character became so deeply embedded in Baltimore culture that it transcended its commercial origins.
The neon Mr. Boh sign on the former National Brewing Company building in the Brewers Hill neighborhood became a Baltimore landmark; the company eventually moved its brewing operations out of state, but the sign stayed. Baltimore's brewing history is deep: the city had dozens of breweries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many founded by German immigrants who brought Central European brewing traditions with them. The majority closed during Prohibition or in the consolidation of the mid-twentieth century.
National Bohemian survived but was eventually acquired by a series of large companies. The beer is now brewed in North Carolina, but Mr. Boh watches over Baltimore from his tower, an icon of a city's attachment to its own mythology.