Built in 1928-1929, Levering Hall is named in honor of Eugene Levering, a local banker. Levering, who served as a trustee for Johns Hopkins University from 1898 to 1928, donated the funds to build a YMCA on land provided by Johns Hopkins University.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Levering Hall on the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University served as an important site of interracial Civil Rights organizing and activism. In 1953, Chester Wickwire accepted a position as the executive secretary of the campus YMCA and the chaplain for the university. At Levering Hall, Wickwire provided “a haven for liberals on an otherwise conservative campus” and ran “ran various student life programs such as concerts, dances, and movie screenings while simultaneously organizing political discussions about civil rights, pacifism, the Cold War, and Vietnam.” Wickwire himself was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement and helped support student activists.
In a 2006 oral history, Wickwire described the culture of discrimination and how, beginning in 1959, he sought to “change Hopkins, desegregate it” by organizing performances by jazz and rock musicians that appealed to interracial audiences including Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, Joan Baez, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Mothers of Invention. In his efforts to end segregation on the Hopkins campus, Wickwire recalled: “Jazz helped us.”
Johns Hopkins University students and faculty played a variety of roles in local Civil Rights activism. In the late 1960s, Dr. Peter Rossi, from the Johns Hopkins University Social Relations Department and Rev. Chester Wickwire both joined the largely white Baltimore Committee for Political Freedom “formed because of fear that the local police were planning to assassinate Black Panther Party leaders in the city”. Students from Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College, and Morgan State College participated in the Emergency Rehabilitation Assistance Project (ERAP) of the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). According to Rhonda Williams, the organizers of ERAP were “hoping to build an ‘interracial movement’ by galvanizing poor people at the grassroots around issues such as housing, schools, medical care, and food insecurity.”
In 1969, Johns Hopkins University purchased the building from the YMCA and remodeled the building as a student union. Today, the building includes the offices of the Center for Social Concern founded in 1992 to promote student volunteerism and community engagement.
The first true brownstone building in Baltimore, today’s Grace & St. Peter’s Church opened its doors in 1852 as Grace Church on Park Avenue in Mount Vernon. Architecturally, it was the first church built of stone in the city and with stained glass and floor tiles imported from England, the majestic interior of this Gothic Episcopal church, designed by architect J. Crawford Neilson, harkens directly back to its Anglican origins.
In 1912, Grace Church combined with St. Peter’s, then on the edge of today’s Bolton Hill neighborhood, merging high-church and low-church traditions in a single congregation. By the 1920s, what once was a place of worship mainly for prominent Baltimore families, including the nearby Garrett family of B&O Railroad fortune, had begun to change. The church at that time created a church school for Chinese immigrants who worshiped alongside many African American families who had moved to the neighborhood.
Today, the church embraces both Anglican and Western Catholic traditions and its Park Avenue complex includes a magnificent rectory and houses the Wilkes School for children per-kindergarten through fifth grade. Please
The Severn Teackle Wallis Statue by French sculptor Laurent-Honoré Marqueste was dedicated on January 9, 1906 in the south square of Mount Vernon Place in front of the new building of the Walters Art Gallery. Today, the statue stands in the east park facing Saint Paul Street.
Wallis was born in Baltimore to a wealthy slaveholding family in 1816. He trained to become a lawyer as a young man and joined the bar in 1837. At the start of the Civil War in 1861, Wallis was elected to the Maryland State Legislature but, on September 12, he was arrested by Union troops due to his support for the secession of Southern states. Wallis was held at Fort Monroe along with several other elected officials from Baltimore for fourteen months before his release.
In 1900, six years after Wallis' death, the city's Municipal Art Society launched a campaign to erect new statues of both Wallis and John Eager Howard. S. Davies Warfield, a railroad executive and banker, originally proposed the idea of the Wallis statue and chaired the committee to direct the project. At the recommendation of George A. Lucas, a Parisian art critic and former Baltimorean, the committee selected French sculptor Laurent-Honoré Marqueste. Warfield collected photographs and items of clothing owned by Wallis then sent the materials to Paris as a source for the sculptor's design. At the dedication in January 1906, Mayor E. Clay Timanus accepted the statue on the city's behalf and Arthur George Brown delivered an address recalling Wallis as an "ideal Baltimorean."
By 1919, however, the city had decided to relocate the Wallis statue to the park's east square to make way for a monument to Revolutionary war hero Marquis de Lafayette. One resident wrote to the Sun the protest the move, presenting Wallis as "one of the greatest legal figures Maryland ever produced,” who should not be relegated to an “obscure piece of lawn.” Despite the critics, the statue moved east to join the George Peabody Statue in the east square of Mount Vernon Place where it continues to sit today.
The Maryland Institute College of Art was chartered on January 10, 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts. Within months, the new school began offering classes and other programs at "The Athenaeum," a lecture hall at the southwest corner of Lexington and Saint Paul Streets. Unfortunately, the Athenaeum was destroyed by a fire in 1835 and the Maryland Institute stopped offering programs for twelve years.
The “New Maryland Institute” reorganized in 1847 and, two years later, established the Night School of Design to meet the growing city's demand for skilled technical artists and designers. In October 1851, the school moved to the new Center Market building on Baltimore Street. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Maryland Institute boasted over one thousand students and a new mission (adopted in 1879): “diffusing a knowledge of art… fostering original talent… and laying a permanent foundation for a genuine school of high art in Baltimore.”
Even as the students and the curriculum changed and adapted through the end of the nineteenth century, the Maryland Institute continued to occupy the Center Market. Then, on Sunday, February 7, 1904 a fire broke out on Redwood Street and spread across downtown. The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 burned for thirty hours and destroyed over fifteen hundred buildings—including the home of the Maryland Institute.
With help from local businesses, alumni, and faculty, the Institute started working to rebuild. Michael Jenkins, a member of the wealthy family that had supported the construction of Corpus Christi Church on Mount Royal Avenue, offered the Institute a place to build a new School of Art and Design next door to the church. The State of Maryland and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie contributed funding and a national competition awarded the commission to architects Pell & Corbett of New York City. Inspired by the architecture of Venice's Grand Canal, the building features ornate Renaissance Revival details and large blocks of Beaver Dam marble from nearby Cockeysville. The cornerstone was laid on November 22, 1905 and the Institute's Main Building opened for students in 1907.
In 1959, the school adopted a new name, the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and, over the past few decades, the campus has grown to include a converted train station, an old firehouse, and a former factory. Today, MICA's Main Building is a beautiful reminder of the school's long history making it the oldest continuously degree-granting college of art in the nation.
Built in 1922, the former Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch No. 19 at 606 South Ann Street was one of a large number of branch libraries that opened in the early twentieth century. Between 1908 and 1920, the Pratt Library opened a new branch every sixteen months including new libraries in Hamilton and Mount Washington. The building boom was supported by a 1907 gift from Andrew Carnegie and by the generosity of local residents and community organizations who donated land and funds to support their construction. In 1920, Baltimore City acquired a lot on Ann Street donated by the Children's Playground Association and William Hooper Grafflin, a Baltimore native, banker, and board member of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Local architect William W. Emmart put together a design and the contract for construction was awarded to R.B. Mason in May 1921. By June 1922, the new Branch No. 19 was open. During the early decades of the library's operation, a large number of the patrons were European immigrants, especially from Poland. The population of Polish immigrants in Baltimore grew quickly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reaching over twenty-three thousand people by 1893. A large share of these residents lived in southeast Baltimore, earning Eastern Avenue the reputation as Baltimore's "Polish Wall Street." After the Pratt began offering "book lists" of suggested readings in 1934, a patron at Branch No. 19, Mrs. Charles D. Sadowski, worked with Miss Sara Siebert, branch librarian, to assemble a list of Polish-language books on the history and culture of Poland along with any English novels translated into Polish. The history of immigration in southeast Baltimore is woven together with the history of maritime industry. For example, in December 1941 at the beginning of World War II, more than fifty members of the National Maritime Union walked from their hall at 1700 Fleet Street to register as volunteers for civil defense activities. Some of the volunteers were unable to write in English but the branch librarian Miss Annabelle Collins helped in "filling out their blanks." The war effort also inspired residents to turn the library's back yard into a "Victory Garden." By the 1950s, the Fell's Point Improvement Association began regular meetings at the library and, in the 1970s, the librarians at Branch No. 19 began offering a growing variety of programming for patrons. For example, on June 1, 1974, the library hosted a "family fun festival" with "rock groups, movies, a puppet show, storytelling games, a mahic show contests, and a bake sale." On December 22, 1975, the library invited neighbors to join a free "Community Christmas Party" with seasonal movies, tree decorating, and caroling. Budget troubles for the Enoch Pratt Free Library system in the early 1980s led to a month-long closure for what was then known as the Fell's Point Library Center in 1981. The library declared the large back yard "off-limits" to patrons because they could not afford to maintain or restore the area. Fortunately, residents pitched in to sustain and support the branch. In spring 1985, a neighborhood group, the Owners' Restoring and Renovating Association, secured a $2,500 matching grant from the city's Neighborhood Incentive Program. They planed to plant new flowers and trees and install tables and benches. When other library visitors learned about the plan, they donated even more time and money to raise over $6,000. The community celebrated the new "reading garden" with a dedication on May 17, 1986. By 2001, however, years of inadequate funding led the Enoch Pratt Free Library to announce a plan to close five small branches—including the Fell's Point Center. In August 2001, just two weeks before the branches were set to close, then Mayor Martin O'Malley announced that the city had agreed to keep four of the five branches open through partnerships with local nonprofit organizations. The Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center would move into the former Branch No. 19 and turn it into "a center for immigrants to learn language, assimilation and job skills." According to the Baltimore Sun, Clinton Roby, treasurer of Friends of the Fell's Point Branch, was glad the city avoided selling the building to a private investor, remarking, "We were worried the city was going to take the highest bidder. I'm just glad it's not going to be taken away from the community." In 2018, after fifteen years of service as the Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center, the former library is again in need of repairs and improvements. Flooding in the basement is a regular concern. Roof leaks have damaged the interior and forced EBLO to move programs out of the building. Residents, local elected officials, and EBLO staff are working together to seek funding for repairs and return the building back into use as a resource for the community.
The Maryland Penitentiary on Eager Street was completed in 1897, as part of a national prison building boom prompted by reform efforts. The building was designed by architect Jackson C. Gott.
Gott served as one of eight founding members of Baltimore’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1870. He designed the Masonic Temple and Eastern Pumping Station in Baltimore, as well as Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in Westminster.
For the Penitentiary, Gott’s Romanesque Revival design and his choice of heavy Port Deposit granite created a landmark whose appearance truly reflects its somber purpose.
The Canton Branch is one of four branch libraries, all designed by local architect Charles L. Carson, built by the Enoch Pratt Free Library in 1886. It stands alone, however, as the first to open and the only one of the original branch locations still in use as a library.
The branch library wasn't the first reading room to open in Canton. In 1879, Rev. J. Wynne Jones, a recent graduate from the Princeton seminary and pastor at Abbott Presbyterian Church, established the Workingmen's Institute at the corner of Ellwood Avenue and Elliott Street. The Institute maintained an impressive library: fifteen hundred books and over one hundred subscriptions to magazines and newspapers. As a trustee of the Workingmen's Institute, Enoch Pratt, according to later biographers, "realized the wonderful good that the small library was doing in this community and was convinced that such a service might be established for the benefit of every community. Enlarging upon this idea, Pratt planned with the city for a library system."
On February 15, 1886, two hundred and fifty people, including Enoch Pratt himself, crowded into the library reading room to hear Rev. Jones share the history of the Workingmen's Institute and the importance of the library to Canton Resident. Jones enjoyed the honor of being the first to borrow a book—a collection of poems by Sidney Lanier—from the nearly nine thousand books found on the library shelves. In 1923, a large addition replaced the small backyard and flower garden behind the building. Near busy factories and blocks of handsome rowhouses, the Canton Branch had, in 1924, the highest circulation of any of the city's libraries.
Unfortunately, by the 1970s, the building's red brick exterior was painted white with gray trim and was surrounded by a bleak chain-link fence. As the library's centennial approached, Tom Canoles and members of the Canton Improvement Association organized to preserve the building. They received grants from the Maryland Historical Trust and Baltimore City, along with donations from waterfront developers, to restore the original brick, install a handsome wrought iron fence, and improve access with a new ramp and lift.
The Friends of the Canton Library, formed in February 1993, has continued to support and enhance the facilities and services of the library over the past fifteen years. The Friends helped organize a 125th birthday celebration for the branch in 2011 and raised $275,000 for a four-year, $2.9 million restoration completed just in time for the building's 130th anniversary in 2016. The group continues to organize regular programming on the people and history of Canton.
The Seminary Chapel at the St. Mary's Spiritual Center is a historic gem. Completed in 1808, the chapel was designed by Maximilian Godefroy, the architect of many historically important structures in Baltimore including the Battle Monument and First Unitarian Church. Godefroy boasted that the chapel was the first Gothic building in the United States. The great hoop shape of the interior is similar to the interior of the chapel at Versailles, and its use of Georgian details reflects the complexities of early American architecture.
Hampden Falls, now known as Round Falls, was once part of a dam servicing Rock Mill. Completed in the early nineteenth century and rebuilt several times, it became a popular subject for local artists.
The mill was razed in 1930 by Baltimore City as part of flood control efforts along the Jones Falls but the dam remained. In 2001, Baltimore-area developers Bill Struever and Ted Rouse led efforts to build a stairway and platform from which to view the falls.
On February 6, 1968, the city paid $1,850 to buy four vacant, vandalized rowhouses on Emory Street—an unusual birthday celebration for famed Baltimore native Babe Ruth. Exactly seventy-three years earlier, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, Jr. was born at 216 Emory Street to George Ruth, Sr. and Katherine Schamberger. Katherine's parents leased the three-story rowhouse but George and Katherine didn't stay there long, moving first to Goodyear Street and then into an apartment above George's saloon on West Camden Street. In 1902, when Ruth was just seven years old, he was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory located at the southwestern edge of the city on Wilkens Avenue. Ruth went on to baseball fame, playing for the Orioles, the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Yankees and earning the nickname the "Sultan of Swat," before his retirement in 1935. His family's old house on Emory Street followed a more humble course. In 1960, some locals proposed disassembling 216 Emory Street and relocating it to Memory Stadium. "Sooner or later, the urban rebuilders are likely to call Emory street run-down or the area useful for nonresidential construction and that will be the end of Pius Schamberger's house," the Sun speculated in 1961. The newspaper had good reason for their prediction; Saint Mary's School, where Ruth first learned to play baseball, was torn earlier that same year. In 1967, the building's owner recieved a court order to repair or raze the building. But when the owner scheduled the demolition for December 10, local residents protested and the city stepped in. On November 18, Mayor McKeldin put a stop to the demolition, saying "To allow such a building to pass from the Baltimore scene is to allow an important part of our past to go unrecognized." Next February, the Mayor's Committee for the Preservation of Babe Ruth's Birthplace purchased the block with donations from committee members and the membership of Junior Orioles. While some members of committee worried about the location in a "run-down area" and proposed relocating the building to Memorial Stadium, preserving the building in place eventually won out. In July 1974, the "Babe Ruth Shrine" opened as a national museum with exhibits on the life and times of Babe Ruth. After Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992, museum attendance soared to over sixty thousand people every year. In 2015, the museum undertook a major restoration to create a new entrance on the Dover Street side block, improve bathrooms, and add an elevator making the museum more accessible to all visitors.
The Billie Holiday Monument on Pennsylvania Avenue commemorates the life and legacy of the famed "Lady Day" who was born as Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore on April 7, 1915. Billie Holiday's childhood was difficult. Both of her parents were teenagers when she was born. In 1925, a ten-year-old Holiday was raped by an older neighbor and was sent to The House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic penal institution (sometimes known as a "reform school") for Black girls. Holiday was held there for two years. After her release in 1927, she moved to New York City with her mother. As a teenager, Billie began singing for tips in bars and brothels but soon found opportunities to sing with accomplished jazz musicians including Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. She returned to Baltimore as a touring musician playing at clubs and restaurants along Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately, after struggles with addiction and a sustained campaign of harassment by law enforcement, Holiday died on July 17, 1959 at age 44 and was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Raymond's Cemetery in New York City. Planning for a statue in Baltimore began around 1971 as part of the urban renewal redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue and the surrounding Upton neighborhood. The original plans included both a statue and a drug treatment center in Holiday's honor but while plans for the center were dropped the Upton Planning Council continued to push for the sculpture. In 1977, Baltimore commissioned thirty-seven-year-old Black sculptor James Earl Reid to design the monument. A North Carolina native, Reid recieved a master’s degree in sculpture from the University of Maryland College Park in 1970 and stayed at the school as a professor. Unfortunately, by 1983, rising costs of materials due to inflation led to a legal dispute between Reid and the city over payment and delays. The $113,000 eight-foot six-inch high bronze sculpture was unveiled on top of a cement pedestal in 1985 but Reid skipped the ceremony. Reid's original vision was finally realized in July 2009 when the city found $76,000 to replace the simple pedastal with 20,000-pound solid granite base with incised text and sculptural panels. Inspired by one of Holliday's most famous performances, the haunting anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit," one of the two panels depicts a lynching. The other, inspired by the song "God Bless the Child," includes the image of a black child with an umbilical cord still attached in a visual reference to the rope used in the hanging. At the re-dedication in 2009, Reid celebrated the completion of the work and the life of Billie Holliday explaining, "She gave such a rich credibility to the experiences of black people and the black artist."
Watch on this statue!
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The origins of this two-story frame church on Jefferson Avenue began in 1861 when a group of Black Baltimore County residents established the Saint James African Union First Colored Methodist Protestant Church. Today, the church is known as the St. James African Union Methodist Protestant Church and the building has stood on this site for over a century. Saint James is the second-oldest church operating in Towson and the oldest of the area’s Black congregations.
The original church members lived in East Towson—a small settlement founded by Black men and women who were held in slavery on Hampton estate before their emancipation in Maryland in 1864. Before the community had a dedicated church for worship, they held services in the homes of congregation members James Garrett and Frank and Ida Scovens. On October 17, 1881, the church building opened and for twenty-five years members gathered for regular worship in a modest one-story building. In 1906, a growing membership led to the addition of a second story to the building.
Immediately to the right of the church building sits a 173-year-old church bell—a relic from a church originally located in Govans. Today, Govans is a neighborhood in north Baltimore City that initially developed as a crossroads on the York-town Turnpike (built in 1810 to connect Baltimore to York, Pennsylvania). Cast in 1845, the bell was donated to the Govans church in 1875. For some period, the bell was used not only to remind worshipers of services but also to notify residents about the departure of the trolley cars on York Road.
For the members of St. James Church, the bell is an iconic symbol of the church’s long history of 10:00 am services—led for over two decades by Reverend Joseph McManus. Rev. McManus presided over the church from 1961 to 1983. Every Sunday morning, he rang the bell twelve times in reference to the twelve tribes of Israel.
The church was temporarily renamed the St. James Methodist Community Church in the 1980s, but the church has since reverted to being called St. James A.U.M.P. Church. The building and congregation still holds services today under current Pastor Osborne Robinson, Jr.
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Constructed in 1908, Lutherville Colored School No. 24 is a simple two-room schoolhouse located on School Lane. Today, the building operates as a small museum of Maryland’s Black history and the appropriately named School Lane is a dead-end street located just a short distance away from a large highway interchange. From 1909 when the school first opened up until 1955, Black students enrolled in grades one through seven walked from nearby homes on Railroad and Seminary Avenues. Students came from Texas, Beaver Dam, Cockeysville, Riderwood, Ruxton, Brightside and Bare Hills, for their first seven years of education in Baltimore County’s racially segregated public schools.
The first three grades met in one room while, grades four through seven met in the second, larger room of the school. One teacher, Ms. Bea, taught the first three grades and two others, Mrs. Ross and Mr. Harris, taught grades four through seven. But the Lutherville school, like segregated schools throughout Baltimore and Maryland, was not only segregated but also inadequately funded.
The county school board paid Black teachers and administrators, including principal Roland Harris (who later served in World War II) and Mrs. Arabella Ross (who replaced Harris as principal), less than white teachers and administrators doing the same work. The school couldn’t afford updated teaching materials. The building lacked bathrooms forcing students and staff to rely on an outhouse year-round. Without enough space for social activities inside the school, extracurricular activities took place at the nearby Edgewood United Methodist Church.
In the early twentieth century, Black students graduating from the Lutherville school had few options to continue their education beyond seventh grade. In 1926, the county government operated six high schools for White students but offered no public high school for Black students. Black households in the county could send their children to Douglass High School in the city but were required to pay transportation costs and tuition totaling over $150 a year. Fifty students paid the fees and made the trip that year but, in 1927, the county instituted an examination for Black students that cut the number of eligible students down to just twelve.
Black parents pushed back immediately with over three hundred people joining a rally organized by the County-Wide Parent-Teacher Association of Baltimore County held in Towson—but the discriminatory policy persisted. The construction of the county’s first Black high school in Towson (named after George Washington Carver) in 1939 provided a closer option but some students continued to take the test and pay out-of-district tuition to attend Booker T. Washington Junior High and Frederick Douglass High School in west Baltimore.
Lutherville Colored School closed in 1955 and the county officially desegregated public schools in 1956, allowing Black students in Lutherville to attend the historically white Lutherville Elementary on York Road. In 1994, Arthur and Helen Chapman purchased the property and converted it into a museum that continues to occupy the building today.
John Stuban moved from New York City to Baltimore, Maryland in 1987 and settled in a small rowhouse on Tyson Street. That same year, a group of New York City activists founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The new organization focused on bringing new visibility to AIDS and HIV through disruptive direct action. Since 1981, the number of known AIDS cases had grown from 234 to over forty thousand. Despite the growing crisis, President Ronald Reagan did not even acknowledge the existence of the disease until 1985 and didn't hold a press conference on the topic until 1987. ACT UP criticized the lack of action by the federal government by staging “die-ins,” where protestor laid on the ground wearing t-shirts with the words “Silence=Death” and blocking roads until they were bodily removed by law enforcement. John Stuban brought this same approach to AIDS activism to Baltimore when he helped found a local chapter in 1990. Together with other local activists, Stuban picketed the mayor's home and delivered a coffin to City Hall. A group of ACT UP protestors chained themselves to front doors of the city health department offices. They disrupted a Board of Estimates meeting seeking a promise from the mayor to consider complaints about Baltimore's AIDS programs and distributed condoms to students at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Stuban also sat on the mayor's AIDS advisory committee, the executive committee of the Greater Baltimore HIV Planning Council, and served as the president of the local chapter of the People with AIDS Coalition. In 1994, Stuban died of AIDS at age thirty-eight. In his obituary the Sun described him as "outspoken, uncompromising, and unrelenting in his efforts to pressure local public officials to provide more AIDS care and to demand a fair share of money for AIDS-related research." Garey Lambert, a friend, projectionist at the Charles Theater, editor for the Baltimore Alternative gay newspaper, and founder of AIDS Action Baltimore, explained the importance of Stuban's efforts:
He made AIDS visible. He was an inspiration. He was upfront and in your face. He was the guy with the conscience, the guy who kept community scrutiny going on and on, and without that, there would be nothing done.Even after his death, the work continued. Over two hundred people attended Stuban's memorial service at Emmanuel Episcopal Church at Cathedral and Read Streets. After the service ended, many of the mourners marched to city hall where they placed an empty coffin on the steps of city hall to memorialize Stuban's death and demand action on behalf of the thousands of people still living with AIDS.
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In October 1987, the members of University-Birkwood Association celebrated nearly fifteen years of work on a former parking lot turned green space on Barclay Street. Earlier that year, the small civic organization joined the friendly competition to win recognition as one of Baltimore's "Best Neighborhoods" in the city's fifth annual contest. Like many good stories, the history of this park lay hidden beneath the surface, as the group observed:
"Looking at it today, no one would guess that the little pocket park at Barclay and Birkwood Streets was once a vacant paved lot of little use to local residents. Beneath the cover of green grass and many spring flowering trees, it's hard to believe there still lies a hard asphalt surface."Over forty years earlier, on December 18, 1945, a small group of residents established the University-Birkwood Association, Inc. paid George A. Cook, a local builder and developer, and his wife Jeannette five dollars for the oddly shaped lot. The property came with a catch—the Association was prohibited from building any structure on the lot for twenty years. Instead, they turned the vacant land into a profitable investment by paving it over with asphalt and charging people who worked nearby to park their cars. The original agreement against building on the lot expired in 1965 but, by the early 1970s, members of the association had a different approach in mind. In April 1971, the Waverly Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library had moved from a small building at 1443 Gorsuch Avenue to a modern cast-concrete structure at the corner of E. 33rd and Barclay Streets. The library was located on the former site of the BellTel building and, unfortunately for the University-Birkwood Association, Bell System employees had made up a large share of the paying customers for their parking lot. In 1974, the Association's board of directors decided that the lot could better serve the neighborhood in a new way—and voted to convert the parking lot into "green space." Limited funds for the new open space (and the uncertain prospect of paying property taxes on the lot without no revenue from parking fees) encouraged a creative approach. The Association sold shares to neighborhood residents interested in supporting the planned improvements. Proceeds went to purchase trees, bulbs, grass seed, and fertilizer. Between 1975 and 1978, members dug over thirty holes through the old asphalt to make room for new trees and flower beds. Association shareholders and volunteers spread mulch and seeded the ground creating a verdant lawn still enjoyed by local children. People walking or driving past likely enjoyed the springtime view when, according to the 1987 contest nomination, "daffodils bloom on the bank along Barclay Street and the flowering cherry and plum trees burst into color." Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, around twenty households participated in the University-Birkwood Association's efforts to maintain the lot by pruning, weeding, and mulching during "work days" each spring and fall—and spending countless hours every summer helping with mowing the grass. “The Oakenshawe Green Space is the neighbors,” explained Laurie Feinberg. Feinberg, an Oakenshawe resident since 1987, gained a new appreciation for the green space after having children in 1991, recalling, "There is a whole generation of kids that essentially grew up playing the green space." In August 1993, the Association board converted the corporation into a new nonprofit organization—Oakenshaw Greenspace, Inc. Beyond the day-to-day tasks of cleaning up litter and dog waste, the group won a grant from the Parks & People Foundation to bulldoze parts of the original parking lot and replace the old asphalt with more grass. In early 2018, the group decided to donate the property to Baltimore Greenspace—an environmental land trust dedicated to preserving communities’ open spaces and forest patches as spaces for recreation, civic engagement, and community revitalization. At forty-four years old, the Oakenshaw Green Space is the oldest of any of the properties donated to the land trust in their ten-year history. Fortunately, the donation ensures that neighbors can expect many more years of trees, flowers, and community gatherings on Barclay Street.
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Tochterman’s ostensibly sells fishing tackle but owners Tony and Dee Tochterman—the third generation of the Tochterman family to run this Eastern Avenue institution—are part of a hundred year long history of customer service that few other businesses could match. In the mid-1990s, a customer came into the shop carrying a gift certificate he found in his late father’s desk—dating all the way back to 1947. Tony honored it anyway. Tony even recalled sending fishing rods to a customer in Nicaragua (a delivery that had to be carried on horseback for the last few miles of the trip). Tochterman’s Fishing Tackle got started on February 8, 1916, when Baltimore fishmonger Thomas Tochtermann, brought a load of leftover peeler crabs and spoiled fish from the Fish Market by the harbor to his house at 1925 Eastern Avenue. While the fish wasn’t good enough to cook for dinner, local fishermen heading to the harbor were happy to buy it for bait. Soon, people passing by on the Eastern Avenue trolley line started stopping by the house regularly to buy bait and home-made crab cakes from Anna Tochtermann, Thomas’ wife. Anna managed the shop during the day while Thomas worked at the fish market. The business thrived and Tochtermann’s son, Thomas, Jr. or Tommy, took over in 1936. Thomas’ own son, Tony, started working at the shop in 1958—when he was just three and a half years old. In the 1980s, Tony took over and, along with his wife and business partner, Dee Taylor, continues to run the shop today. Tommy hasn’t left entirely, however. After his father’s death in 1998, Tony installed a small container of his father’s ashes near the front of the store in a display case featuring vintage fishing reels and a signed baseball from famed Boston Red Sox player (and Tochterman’s customer) Ted Williams. Dee and Tony live right across the street from the store which has lured in customers with a classic neon sign of a jumping large-mouth bass since the 1930s. The store sells over seven hundred different reels and is packed full of fishing rods. In addition to bunker chum (ground Menhaden fish), chicken necks, and clam snouts, the store's live bait offerings include night crawlers, and the ever-popular bloodworms.
The bloodworms are a prized bait for sport fishing in the United States and Europe and, among Dee’s many contributions to the business, is maintaining the shop’s stock of bloodworms that she orders from diggers in Maine and Canada. Known to customers as the “Worm Lady,” Dee counts each delivery by hand and washes the thousands of worms in salt-water (shipped in to match the salinity of their native habitat). Her painstaking work is appreciated, as fishing aficionados go out of their way to get their bait and gear at Tochterman’s. This business has always been an integral part of the lives of the family for three generations—and touched the lives of countless people heading to the water prepared with the best fishing tackle and advice in Baltimore.
Like the countless seeds the Meyer Seed Company has sold over the past hundred years, the story of this long-running legacy business starts with water. Before he held a seed bucket or a watering can, the company’s founder, John F. Meyer, worked as a sailor, eventually becoming first officer of the schooner Katie J. Irelan. On September 22, 1897, on a voyage carrying scrap iron from Baltimore to Wilmington, North Carolina, a severe storm swamped the ship. Another ship struggling through the storm spotted the Katie J. Irelan in distress and rescued Meyer and his crewmates less than two hours before the 708-ton ship sank into the ocean. Meyer retired from sailing the next year. Later, Meyer fondly recalled the eleven years he spent on the “adventurous yet hard life” at sea before he “drifted back to Baltimore and decided to stick to dry land.” Meyer started selling seeds for the long-established Bolgiano Seed Company at the northeast corner of Pratt and Light Streets. In September 1910, he partnered with German immigrant G.W. Stisser to form the Meyer-Stisser Seed Company initially located at 32 Light Street. After the end of World War I, Stisser returned to Germany so, in 1921, Meyer bought out his interest in the business. By 1927, the business boasted a proud motto: “Sterling quality, courteous treatment and punctuality.” Meyer’s assistant, Webster Hurst, Sr., bought out Meyer (but kept the name) in the 1930s. Today, three successive generations of the Hurst family have continued to run the company and devote their lives to selling seeds. Apparently, the seed business is as much about cultivating people as plants. At least two of the current employees have been with the company for over thirty years. Charles Pearre, a former employee, worked for over fifty years selling and developing seeds. In addition, there are even customers who have bought Meyer Seed for multiple generations. Meyer Seed is now located in a nondescript warehouse on Caroline Street between Harbor East and Fells Point. Stepping inside, however, offers a rare sight—hundreds of varieties of seeds displayed in big banks of wooden drawers and long rows of bins used by countless customers over the decades.The company’s wide variety of seeds for sale has helped Meyer Seed compete with “big box” stores that don’t offer nearly the same range of options for gardeners. Meyer Seed has been around long enough to see some of their seeds rise and fall in popularity. After the “Long John” melon was developed in Anne Arundel, County, Meyer Seed was the first company to start selling the melon’s seeds in 1930. But, in the decades after World War II, very few farmers or gardeners planted what are now known as “heirloom” plant varieties like the Long John melon. Fortunately, in 2004, David Pendergrass of the New Hope Seed Company in Tennessee learned of the long defunct melon and obtained some starter seeds from the USDA. The plants grew and Pendergrass reintroduced the melon to the world in 2007. Whether it’s seeds for heirloom melons or cutting edge organic gardening seeds, for over one hundred years, Meyer Seed remains at the center of Baltimore’s seed world.
Founded in 1863 by German immigrants Ludwig Hilgartner and Gottfried Schimpf, Hilgartner Stone has made some of the nation’s finest stonework for over one hundred and fifty years. Of course, the company has made a unique mark on both Baltimore’s sculpture and architecture during that time. The company’s work can be found at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Greenmount Cemetery, Walters Art Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art, the Baltimore War Memorial—along with other major landmarks. The company’s most widely used product, however, may also be one of the most humble: the city’s iconic marble steps. Born in Hessen, Germany in 1832, Ludwig H. Hilgartner immigrated to the United States at age nineteen in 1851. Hilgartner found work as a stone-cutter and, in 1863, worked with stonemason Gottfried Schimpf to form a new stone company, Schimpf and Hilgartner. By 1870, the company maintained an office on Lexington Street in downtown Baltimore and a busy workshop at the southwest corner of Pine and Mulberry Streets. Just a few years later, in 1873, Hilgartner bought out Schimpf. By the next decade, Hilgartner’s two sons were learning the business as apprentices and eventually joined the firm, changing the name to L. Hilgartner and Sons. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hilgartner’s thirty horsepower stone-cutting engine turned Baltimore County marble into thousands of steps to supply the city’s building boom. The company grew over the years to such an extent that by 1910, it opened a branch office in Chicago. Hilgartner even added a marble purchasing agency in Carrara, Italy and a workshop in Los Angeles to feed the demand created by new aqueduct projects and a burgeoning movie business in California. The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s hit Hilgartner hard. The company was able to survive thanks to business from the Dupont Company, which had plenty of money and did a lot of building, taking advantage of cheaper prices for labor and materials at the time. All the same, the company had to layoff a substantial portion of its workforce and close some of its factories. Hilgartner continued to shrink until 1971 when the firm was sold. Once the largest finisher of slab marble in the U.S., Hilgartner had shrunk to just seven employees. Over the last thirty years, the firm has slowly come back to life. Though much of Hilgartner’s stone work has been on a grand scale, some of its smallest works are marble door stops. Probably made with scrap marble, they were popular at the turn of the last century. They made a brief resurgence in 1976 when Hilgartner offered them at the Baltimore City Fair, where the company set up a booth to showcase its work. The City Fair, begun in 1970, was held for 21 years as a venue to showcase Baltimore’s neighborhoods and institutions. The small door stops were so popular that Hilgartner started receiving orders for them to commemorate weddings, births, and other special occasions. The company’s current owner, Tom Doyle, purchased the firm in 1986 and led the business to grow and take on large projects again. One of Hilgartner’s recent projects was the conversion the former Maryland Masonic Grand Lodge on Charles Street into “The Grand” event venue. When they started on the project, Hilgarten’s masons were surprised to find a room elaborately decorated with a wide array of marble. A little research revealed that the room began in the early twentieth century as a Hilgartner showroom that promoted the company’s offerings. Today, the room is back in operation as one of the most extravagantly decorated ladies rooms visitors are likely ever to see. Good fortune has played no small part in keeping Hilgartner Stone alive for over 150 years. If it wasn’t for a move from downtown to south Baltimore in the early years of the twentieth century, the business would have burned down with the rest of the heart of Baltimore during the 1904 fire. Since it became one of the few stone companies still in business after the fire, it flourished during the rebuilding. In addition to restoring stone in old buildings, such as St. Ignatius Church on Calvert Street, today Hilgartner also does plenty of new construction like a chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and a new floor under a dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. The company left its long-time home on Sharp Street in 1975 to move to 101 W. Cross Street, and, in 2016, moved again to the current location on Severn Street.
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In 1914, Luigi DiPasquale, Sr., an Italian immigrant to Baltimore, established a small corner store on Claremont Street stocking groceries and household goods for residents in the developing Highlandtown neighborhood. Over a century later, the business has kept up with the changing tastes of local shoppers. Now owned by Joe DiPasquale, the store on Gough Street is now a unique marketplace that draws shoppers from across the region seeking imported and locally produced Italian food. Early on, the DiPasquale family butchered chickens and goats to offer fresh meat and produced household products, such as homemade bleach. Of course, Luigi, also known as Louie Moore, DiPasquale also played an active role in the community—organizing a band along with Larry DiMartino at Our Lady of Pompei church (established in 1923). In the 1940s, a growing number of Italian immigrants moved from Little Italy to Highlandtown as commercial development of the downtown area expanded. In the 1980s, the shop’s current owner, Joe DiPasquale, took an extended trip to Italy, where he travelled the length of the country, fell in love with the country and, most importantly, the traditional foods. Joe’s wife family had only recently immigrated to the United States in the 1970s and he credits them as an influence. After his close study of authentic Italian cooking, Joe DiPasquale always orders the finest ingredients and foods he can find, whether it is imported or domestic. For example, while the Nutella hazelnut spread is produced in the United States, Joe noticed that the Italian-manufactured version offered a better flavor—so the store only stocks the imported option. In 1988, DiPasquale’s expanded in a move from their original location on Claremont Street to the current site on Gough Street one block away. The business installed ovens to bake their own bread. In recent years, DiPasquale’s prepared foods have been featured on the Food Network’s “Diner, Dives, and Drive-Ins” and on the Travel Channel’s “Zimmern List.” The television fame brought an overwhelming influx of patrons. For weeks, lines of customers looking to buy lasagne and arancini di riso (deep fried balls of rice and meat) stretched out the door.
*As of 2022, Dipasquale's is no longer operating out of this building, but it is still in business in other locations in Baltimore
A family-owned business has been around since 1868, Budeke’s paint products have been delivered via police car, motorcycle, bicycle, and roller skates, not to mention more conventional commercial trucks. The long-time Broadway location in Fells Point was gutted by fire in September 2018.
Budeke's Paint operated in the same storefront on Broadway from 1870 up until 2018. Unfortunately, in the early morning hours of September 7, 2018 a fire broke out on the first floor and grew into a four-alarm blaze that destroyed the stock, a collection of documents and ephemera, and the building’s interior. Fortunately, the fire caused no injuries and the business has continued operations at its Timonium location. During Budeke’s long history, its paint has been used by institutions as diverse as Johns Hopkins Hospital, Bethlehem Steel, McCormick & Co, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Local governments, including Baltimore City and County, have used Budeke’s products in municipal buildings including City Hall. George H. Budeke was born in 1846 in Hamilton, North Carolina, to a family of German immigrants. He moved to Baltimore in 1859, a year after his father’s death, and became an errand-boy at a dry goods store before moving on to manage two paint stores. Budeke founded his company in 1868 just three years after the end of the Civil War. The business has stayed in the family through five generations. Upon the death of George H., the business passed to his son, George M. Budeke, in 1909. It then passed to a son-in-law, George Gardner, who took over in 1956. Gardner passed the business on to his own son-in-law, Louis V. Koerber, in 1969. Finally, the current owner, L. Bryan Koerber, took over the business from his own father in 1996. While most customers buy pre-mixed paint today, Budeke's originally sold the essential ingredients separately—turpentine, white or red lead, and a variety of earthen pigments—that contractors used to mix their own paints. Different ratios of the components determined whether painters used the mixture as primer or a top coat. Budeke obtained its stock regionally, including from a number of small pigment grinders who turned raw minerals into various colors out of their shops on Russell Street (near where the Horseshoe Casino now stands). In those days, lead was commonly used as the hiding agent in paint to ensure the pigment covered over the surface that was being painted, but fell out of use due to its toxicity. Lead paint was eventually banned in the United States in the 1970s and replaced with product that uses titanium dioxide instead. The fire at the original location of Budeke’s destroyed more than a few of old buildings. It also wiped out much of the history of the business. A room on the second floor of its Fells Point shop was a little museum containing artifacts relating to its decades of operation. One noteworthy item on display was a bill from September 10, 1888, for an order by Baltimore’s health department, which consisted of a long list of items totaling $11.92. The corresponding cancelled check for this order, dated September 17, 1888, was found during renovations of City Hall in the 1970s. The contractor who was charged with disposing of old files reviewed some of what he had and realized the businesses still existed and might want the old paperwork. After presenting the old check to the shop on Broadway, Budeke's staff gave the contractor a gallon of paint for his trouble.
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Faidley’s is as much about the people as the seafood. Whether gathered around the store’s raw bar at one of the stand-up tables near the busy line of workers making crab cakes, customers are often feel like they’re simply sharing a meal with old friends. Faidley’s started out at Lexington Market in 1886 when John and Flossie Faidley combined their seafood stall with the adjoining business to form Smith & Faidley’s seafood. John’s son, Edward took over the business before World War II, and, 1948, John W. Faidley, Jr. joined him and changed the name of the company to John W. Faidley’s seafood. A major fire at Lexington Market that same year forced the business to move to the Lexington Market garage but Faidley’s was one of the first establishments to return to the new Lexington Marker in 1952. The idea of selling prepared foods at the stall originated around this time, reportedly after customers smelled a fish sandwich John, Jr. was making for himself—and asked if they could buy one. In 1966, the Liquor Board gave Faidley’s a liquor license making it the first bar in the long history of Lexington Market. John W. Faidley applied for the license after he and his regular customer agreed that “it just isn’t right” to eat crabcakes and steam crabs with no beer to drink. Over the past twenty years, Faidley’s has won international renown for its crab cakes. The current recipe was created in 1987 by Nancy Faidley Devine, John’s daughter. That was the same year she resumed working at the “family firm” where her husband Bill Devine had worked since he finished a term of military service in 1964. Not long after, food critics started making their way to Lexington Market and featuring Faidley’s in national publications including the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, and USA Today. Baltimore Magazine gave Faidley’s the “Best Crab Cake” award so many times the magazine had to retire the category. Faidley’s even worked with Old Bay to prepare crab cakes for astronauts on the space shuttle. Unfortunately, NASA officials cancelled their order at the last minute over worries that oil might escape from the crab cake under zero gravity conditions. The future of Faidley’s Seafood looks just as promising as the past. Damye Devine Hahn, Nancy and Bill’s daughter, is now an integral part of the business and is keeping up Faidley’s fresh seafood and out-of-this-world crab cakes.
Mosque No. 6, the predecessor of the Masjid Ul-Haqq, first moved into their present building on Wilson Street around 1958. The two-story brick building had most recently housed a automotive garage but it dated back to the 1870s and operated as part of P. Bradley’s Livery Stables up through the early 1900s. By the 1920s, new owners converted the stables into a garage and service station. As Black residents moved into rowhouses along Division Street, Druid Hill Avenue, McCulloh Street, and Madison Avenue the business changed as well. By 1938, the business then known as Jack’s Garage had a Black manager, William Goodwin. That same year, Chandler V. Wynn acquired the business. A North Carolina native, Wynn moved to Baltimore and graduated from Morgan State College in 1931. Wynn was just one of thousands of African Americans moving from North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore to seek new opportunities in Baltimore in 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In Baltimore, along with New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the migration coincided with a rise of new Black religious movements—including the Nation of Islam founded by Georgia-native Wallace Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Michigan in 1930. Elijah Muhammad became the leader of the Nation of Islam in 1934. Around 1935, Muhammad helped establish a temple in Washington, D.C. making it the fourth temple after Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The growth of the movement slowed after Elijah Muhammad’s arrest for resisting the draft and spent four years in prison from 1942 to 1946. Baltimore’s mosque was established the same year as Muhammad’s release and grew quickly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1957, the congregation, then led by Minister Isaiah Karriem, was formally designated Temple No. 6 (later known as Mosque Six) and bought their building on Wilson Street the next year. Since the end of World War II, the garage had seen use as the Maryland School of Camera Repairs and as a warehouse for the Gelco Corporation, a distributor for aluminum storm windows, doors, and awnings. In 1958, Malcolm X came to Baltimore to speak and help the nascent temple to raise money and adapt their new building to their needs. On Sunday, June 26, 1960, Elijah Muhammad spoke at Mosque Six before a crowd of nearly one thousand people packed into the building’s main auditorium while another five hundred listened to the speech over a public address system downstairs, and several hundred stood or sat outside the building listening the to speech over outdoor loud speakers. Within weeks, Minister Isaiah Karriem launched a fundraising campaign seeking $60,000 for the addition of a “gymnasium-recreation center” at the rear of the 300-seat temple. Karriem made the case for the planned addition of a modern athletic facility, saying:
The only way to end juvenile delinquency is to get children in off the streets. We feel that this is a step in that direction.By 1960, the facility included a business bureau, cafeteria, kitchen, auditorium and minister’s study. According to the AFRO, the “spic and span” cafeteria seated one hundred diners and the “spotless” kitchen, directed by Sister Stella X, was “equipped with modern facilities and utensils.” Throughout this period, members of the Nation of Islam were subject to close surveillance by the FBI. In January 1972, members of the mosque confronted two FBI agents in an apartment across the street from the mosque where they had set up for surveillance. When the agents drew their guns, the members called the police who, unaware of the identity of the two men, arrested them both. Undeterred, the mosque continued to grow during the 1960s. Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975 marked the beginning of a new chapter with significant changes in the community’s approach to religious practice. In 1976, the mosque was renamed Masjid Muhammad. Members welcomed Muhammad Ali for a visit to the mosque in 1980 and to a second visit in 1982. In 1994, Masjid Muhammad became Masjid Al Haqq and, in 2003, members worked with the Baltimore Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation to list the building as a local historic landmark.
The Woodberry Factory and Park Mill were built near the site of an eighteenth-century gristmill. An active industrial area for nearly two centuries, buildings here have been replaced and repurposed to meet changing demands for production of everything from textiles and netting in the nineteenth century to rubber tires and ice cream cones in the twentieth century.
John Payne, in his comprehensive 1798 tome, A New and Complete System of Universal Geography, noted the flouring mills along the Jones Falls near Baltimore. At the time, wealthy abolitionist Elisha Tyson owned two of the ten documented mills: one at the location of what is now Mill No. 1, and another in Woodberry. The Woodberry mill is described as a "handsome three story building, the first of stone and the other two of brick" that "can grind at least eighty-thousand bushels a year." Tyson's Woodberry gristmill sold to Horatio Gambrill, David Carroll, and their associates who expanded the structure into a textile mill they called the Woodberry Factory. It was the partnership’s second venture in the area after buying and converting Whitehall gristmill (just south of their new factory) for textile production in 1839. The mills manufactured cotton duck, a fabric primarily used for ship sails during a time when clipper sailing ships dominated local trade. Through the low cost of raw cotton cultivated with enslaved labor and an ability to attract workers despite lower wages than competing mills in the North, the mills along the Jones Falls cornered the market. Their largest buyers were in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. They also found markets overseas in British provinces, South America, and England. The Woodberry Factory was a purely functional building: a long, three story building designed to maximize daylight and accommodate the machinery powered by horizontal line shafts. A clerestory roof provided more light. Each floor housed machinery for a different step in the manufacturing process. A central stair tower was topped with a dome shaped bell tower. The bell rang on a schedule to call nearby workers to the factory for their shifts. The new textile mills required a large workforce and this large workforce needed homes. To this end, owners erected mill villages close to their factories. Woodberry began as a string of Gothic Revival duplexes built of locally quarried stone and resembling country cottages. The homes included yards for growing produce, raising livestock, and planting flower beds. Gambrill erected a church in the village. A school was also built, although it was common for children of mill workers to drop out early to work in the mills and help support their families. In 1850, an all-in-one general store, post-office, and social hall was constructed near the railroad tracks. Additional structures went up as operations grew and new technologies emerged. When the factory started using steam power in 1846, a boiler house was built on the side facing the Jones Falls. The factory acquired a fire engine some time before 1854; a shrewd acquisition considering the tendency for factories full of “cotton-flyings” (or fuzz) to catch fire and burn. The most significant addition to the site was Park Mill, built in 1855 to produce seine netting for fishing boats. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the mills in the Jones Falls Valley were brought under a national textile conglomerate, the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Mills. In the 1920s, the company began shuttering the mills in favor of its plants in the South. The Woodberry Factory was sold to Frank G. Schenuit Rubber Co. in 1924. In 1929, a six-alarm fire destroyed the building. Residents across the tracks had to evacuate their homes and the blaze was large enough to attract a reported crowd of 10,000 people. Schenuit manufactured truck and automobile tires, and later manufactured aircraft tires for the military during World War II. The company became dependent on government contracts and nearly went bankrupt after the war. By the 1960s, the company began expanding into the home and garden industry by buying out smaller manufacturers that made wheelbarrows, industrial wood products, lawn equipment, exercise equipment, and lawn and patio furniture. By the 1970s, Schenuit had moved out of the tire business. In 1972, after Hurricane Agnes, Schenuit sold the Woodberry plant to McCreary Tire and Rubber Company. McCreary closed down just three years later when the company laid off all of the plant’s three hundred workers. Park Mill sold in 1925, and over the next four decades, the mill was used by a variety of companies including the Commercial Envelope Company and Bes-Cone, an ice-cream cone manufacturing company established by Mitchell Glassner, who invented one of the early machines for that purpose. Today, Park Mill is leased to a number of small businesses. The Schenuit factory remains empty after yet another fire, one of the only major industrial buildings in the Jones Falls Valley awaiting redevelopment.
East Baltimore's "I Am An American Day" parade is captured in a unique 1981 news program from WJZ-TV and a book of documentary photographs showing the people and places of East Baltimore in the late 1970s. The book collected photos from the East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project which was inspired after the photographer and creator of the project Linda attended the parade in 1975.
The first "I Am An American Day" parade in Baltimore started at Thirty-third Street and The Alameda on May 17, 1942. The event (and similar marches and rallies across the country) was promoted by the Hearst Corporation, then owner and publisher of the Baltimore News American newspaper, as a way to celebrate the U.S. Constitution. Some accounts suggest the initial idea for "I Am An American Day" came from Arthur Pine, head of a New York public relations firm, after he was asked to promote a new song, “I Am An American,” by Gary Gordon. In 1940, William Randolph Hearst succeeded in pushing the U.S. Congress to name the third Sunday in May as “I Am An American Day” as a way to recognize immigrants who had received U.S. citizenship. The date was moved to September 17 in 1952 and, in 2004, an amendment by Senator Robert Byrd led congress to rename the event from “I Am An American Day” to “Constitution Day.” In Baltimore, the annual parade moved to the streets around Patterson Park and quickly began to draw thousands of participants. The 1944 march saw an estimated 23,000 people. The next year, around 75,000 people came out to see 100 groups of marchers along with 50 "bands and drum, fife and bugle corps" By the 1970s, the parade had steady attendance from church groups, veterans organizations, and politicians developed into what the Baltimore Sun writer Liz Atwood later called "an opportunity for Baltimoreans to show their pride in being Americans." By the mid-1990s, the parade followed a naturalization ceremony for new citizens. Over the years, special guests at the parade included actors from popular soap operas and Hollywood movies. Huge crowds gathered for the route to watch and hear local high school marching bands and out-of-town draws like the Philadelphia Mummers Quaker City String Band. At the parade's height, the event drew over 300,000 people and lasted four hours or more. In 1975, Maryland Institute College of Art photography professor Linda G. Rich was among the crowd. According to the Maryland Historical Society, Rich was new to Baltimore and was "struck not only by the patriotic display of the celebration but by the unique characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood: the rows of clean, white marble steps, the vibrant painted screens, the window displays full of religious and patriotic iconography." The next year, Rich, along with her students Joan Clark Netherwood and Elinor B. Cahn started what became the four-year-long East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project that captured over 10,000 photographs capturing the area's strong sense of community and unique identity. Southeast Baltimore has changed in radical ways since the 1970s and the "I Am An American Day" parade changed as well. Unfortunately, in 1993, the city's effort to raise fees for the event led parade organizers to threaten to move the event away from Highlandtown and Patterson Park. Edwin F. Hale, Sr., then chairman of Baltimore Bancorp, wrote a check to cover that year's extra expenses but, in 1994, no other benefactor came forward and organizers moved the event to Dundalk in southeastern Baltimore County where it continues to be held through at least 2014.
The little-known history of Baltimore's Interstate 395 (I-395) and Martin Luther King Boulevard, Jr. Boulevard offers a reminder of the years of contentious planning efforts that ended with the construction of these roadways in the early 1980s. I-395, known as Cal Ripken Way since 2008, is a little over one mile long and connects the northbound lanes of I-95 to Howard and Camden Streets near the southern end of downtown Baltimore. Originally known as Harbor City Boulevard, Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard was before it was renamed in honor of the famed civil rights activist in 1982. The Sun reported on the opening of both new highways in early December of that same year:
An early Christmas presents awaits motorists commuting to downtown Baltimore from the south. Today, three major segments of new highway open near Interstate 95, alleviating years of traffic congestion in the always busy and now-revitalized areas of South and Southwest Baltimore. Commuters used to the morning backup at the Russell street off-ramp from I-95 can opt for I-395, an $82 million northbound spur that will take them straight to Howard Street just west of the Convention Center. Those wishing to go farther north can select te 2.3-mile stretch on the Harbor City Boulevard, a direct route to the University of Maryland professional schools, the State Office Building complex near Bolton Hill, the new Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and the Lyric. The new boulevard cost $67 million.While debates over a building a "bypass" road encircling the city's commercial downtown dated back to the 1950s or earlier, the most influential plan for Baltimore's highway system, known as 3-A, was created in 1969 by the Design Concept Team. The city established the team three years earlier in an effort to restart stalled highway building efforts. Anti-highway activists continued to fight the proposal through the 1980s leading the city to convert the proposed boulevard from a sunken highway to the at-grade route used today. In March 1980, the Sun reported on the experience of Emily Makauskas and her neighbors on the "stately 800 block Hollins Street" who fought to change the plans and "saved their block." The city planned to line the boulevard with "small parks, bicycle paths, brick sidewalks and trees" but an article in April noted that the improvements "may not placate some area homesteaders who are concerned about the road's affect on their neighborhoods." In June 1982, as the road built by James Julian, Inc. neared completion, reporter Charles V. Flowers celebrated the new views of public and private housing developments visible from Harbor City Boulevard. Flowers explained that the area "once contained what were slums as depressing as any in Baltimore" but now "a walk along the boulevard should convince Baltimoreans that the city is upgrading itself in sections other than the Inner Harbor." William K. Hellman, the city's transportation coordinator, shared his satisfaction with the highway in November, remarking:
The boulevard is a collector and distributor road, and will do two things. It will move people in and out of downtown more efficiently and it will get traffic that need not be in the downtown area to go around it... it will be a perfect route for people going to the baseball games at Memorial Stadium. They won't have to go up Charles street until they're north of downtown.The original name of Harbor City Boulevard was a submission to a contest sponsored by then Mayor William Donald Schaefer. Schaefer initially opposed efforts to rename the road after Martin Luther King, Jr. citing the cost of producing new signs. The renaming campaign ultimately won out thanks to the advocacy of state delegate Isaiah "Ike" Dixon, Jr. Dixon had first introduced similar legislation to rename the Jones Falls Expressway after King a full eleven years earlier. This successful effort was supported by city council member and civil rights activist Victorine Q. Adams who introduced the name change before the City Council. Over thirty years later, few drivers likely recall the divisions over the name and the highways are considered a fixture of the busy urban lanscape.
For over sixty years, tall broadcasting towers have stood high above the old homes in Baltimore’s Woodberry neighborhood. The two tallest towers now standing on Television Hill beam out the signals of four television stations and three radio stations across the city and surrounding area. A third smaller tower relays municipal police, fire and rescue personnel communications. Of course, this area wasn’t always called TV Hill. It may be hard to believe but there wasn’t always television. Before test patterns and Saturday morning cartoons, the area was known as Malden Hill. In the summer of 1948, only twenty thousand or so Baltimore families (and only one in ten households in the United States) owned televisions. The first two stations in the city— WMAR-TV and WBAL-TV—offered fuzzy reception at best for most local viewers. By the end of 1948, however, WAAM–TV (Channel 13), owned by Baltimore businessmen and Brothers Ben and Herman Cohen, had started construction on a new station and new transmission tower. The station picked Malden Hill, 334 feet above the surrounding landscape, to give their signal a better chance of reaching Baltimore televisions. With this advantage, the station's new 530-foot tower stood 864 feet above sea level and WAAM–TV had the first television studio in Baltimore designed specifically for this still new technology. On November 1, 1948, the station went on the air and the next day stayed on the air for twenty-three hours straight covering incumbent Democrat Harry S. Truman surprise win over Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election. Flash forward nine years and WAAM-TV had changed both call letters and ownership. In May 1957, the station sold to Westinghouse Broadcasting Company and was renamed WJZ-TV. The competing WBAL-TV’s studios and broadcast tower had already relocated to Malden Hill several years earlier. Still, despite being home to two of Baltimore’s three television stations, only a few folks called it TV Hill until 1958 when a new tower began to rise. TV reception could be a bit tricky in those pre-cable and satellite days of rooftop antennas or set top “rabbit ears.” WJZ and WBAL chose the elevated ground in Woodberry for their transmitter towers as a partial solution, but broadcast engineers knew that even higher towers could improve both reception and station coverage. Though air traffic concerns imposed an upper limti on how high a station could build, both stations had room to grow.
But neither WJZ nor WBAL could afford the expense of a new tower on their own, especially when the stations sought to go as high as the law allowed. The solution was a partnership between the neighboring stations to build one gigantic tower topped with two separate transmitter masts. When Baltimore’s oldest TV station, WMAR, heard of this plan, station managers decided they wanted in. WMAR worried that if viewers could get two stations by pointing their antennas in one direction they wouldn’t bother making adjustments to tune in to WMAR—especially if their broadcast looked worse than the competition coming from the new tower. Baltimore’s three TV stations struck a unique deal to share one gigantic tower, a tower topped with three separate transmitter masts, a first at the time. The stations would all have improved coverage and picture quality at a cost they couldn’t have borne alone. Baltimore area television viewers could take a “set it and forget it” approach to their antennas. Construction began in October of 1958 and continued through the spring. In 1997, Fred Rasmussen recalled on the history of the tower for the Baltimore Sun describing the 500 tons of nickel-chrome alloy steel used to build a structure covered with 2 1/2 tons of paint. The tower was stabilized by guy-wires made from three miles of steel wire rope anchored by 33-foot square concrete slabs buried 16 feet deep. Together the tower base and cable anchors required a remarkable 2,250 tons of concrete. Finally, in a ceremony on August 9, 1959, Governor J. Millard Tawes joined station managers to throw the switch and turn on the broadcast. At the time of its completion, the giant $1.125 million “candelabra tower” on what was then known to everyeone as TV Hill, was the tallest free-standing broadcast tower in the United States. A 270-foot addition in 1964 brought the top to 1315 feet above sea level. Today, however, the tower isn’t even the tallest in the neighborhood. A second tower completed on a nearby hill in 1987 by Cunningham Communications holds that honor, at 1,549 feet above sea level. The newer tower is a single mast structure, and though both hills and the three towers they support are now collectively known as TV Hill, there’s still only one candelabra tower.
Martick’s Restaurant Francais on Mulberry Street is a place of fond memories where Baltimore enjoyed fine food, lively music, and art for nearly a century. The once-famous restaurant started in 1917 as a small grocery store established by Harry and Florence Martick, both Jewish Polish immigrants. The Federal style corner building is even older—dating back to at least 1852—and the Martick family continued to live above the shop raising a family of five children. Following the end of Prohibition, the store (which may have already been operating as an illegal speakeasy) turned into a bar later known as Martick’s Tyson Street Tavern. After Harry’s death in the the 1940s, Florence’s five children pitched in to keep the business going. Morris Martick turned the family bar into a unique institution reportedly attracting what journalist Alan Feiler called “a mix of artists, musicians, journalists, working Joes and assorted self-styled bohemians, beats and hipsters” in the 1940s. But, by the 1960s, Morris Martrick was ready for a change. After a failed run for state legislature, Morris traveled to France where he studied French cooking and attracted a chef. Returning to Baltimore, he renovated and re-opened the bar as Martick’s Restaurant Francais in 1970. The restaurant’s reputation grew eventually attracting celebrity guests that include Baltimore-born filmmaker John Waters, actor Nicolas Cage and actress Barbara Hershey. The restaurant closed in 2008 and Morris Martrick passed away in 2011 at eighty-eight years old.
Artist Jim Sanborn’s first public sculpture, the Patapsco River Project was created as part of the Baltimore Sculpture Symposium sponsored by the city and administered by the Department of Housing and Community Development during the summer of 1977. Four artists were commissioned to each create gateway pieces for the city. The only other surviving gateway piece from the symposium is the Atlantic Blue Roller Column by Dominick Cea on Russell Street. This early work reveals Sanborn's long-standing interest in Mayan culture, the temples of Guatemala in particular. Abstract and horizontal, the work stands at the far edge of an open field directly fronting the Patapsco River, extending almost 80 feet along the water’s edge. Ten pyramidal shapes are aligned symmetrically, five on either side of an opening that contains a pool and allows a view of the river. In the pool, there is a grate made of aluminum. Light streams through the open space and is reflected on the grate and in the pool. Resting on top of the flattened pyramids made of concrete is one continuous lintel of weathering steel. The lintel carries four more pyramidal shapes, again symmetrically placed, two on each side of the central opening, and again flattened. The Department of Housing and Community Development assisted the artists at every turn, providing honoraria, materials, equipment, and assistants. For Patapsco River Project, Curtis Steel contributed between 12,000 and 15,000 pounds of Mayari-R steel, the city contributed and poured the concrete, and Edward Renneburg & Sons sheared the steel for free. Sanborn estimates that it might have cost him $100,000 to assemble the piece independently. Since 1977, Sanborn's sculpture has been displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His best known commission is an enigmatic cryptographic sculpture, entitled Kryptos, that was unveiled at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia on November 3, 1990. In 1977, the concrete was bright white, the steel was a beautiful velvety brown, and the grass was green and lush. Unfortunately, very little maintenance has taken place since the work was first installed and few people are aware of the work or Sanborn's national reputation. Despite the neglect, the silhouette of the piece was and still is impressive today.
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The handsome Victorian on Elkridge’s Main Street now known as the Brumbaugh House was built around 1870 and began serving as a doctor's office in the nineteenth century. The home’s most famous resident, Dr. Benjamin Bruce Brumbaugh, started his own sixty-year-long career working and living at the house in 1919. Dr. Brumbaugh served thousands of Elkridge residents over the decades and the house continues to tell his story today. Since 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society has operated the house as a small museum to share the long history of medical care in their community. Born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Brumbaugh graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School with degrees in both pharmacy and medicine. When the United States entered World War I, Brumbaugh enlisted as a doctor for the U.S. Army. He was stationed at Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County where three infantry divisions trained before deployment to Europe. Brumbaugh tended to many of the 400,000 servicemen who passed through Fort Meade during the war. After his discharge the military at the war’s end in 1918, a former advisor from the University of Maryland shared the news that Elkridge needed a temporary doctor. The town’s regular practitioner Dr. Ericson had suffered a stroke and was unable to work. When his predecessor passed away two months later, Dr. Brumbaugh took over the practice permanently. For nearly fifty years, Brumbaugh worked alongside his wife, Miriam Smith, who was herself a doctor’s daughter up until her death in 1958. Over much of that time, Dr. Brumbaugh charged just $2 for an office visit or $3 for a house call. Over the years, Dr. Brumbaugh (or Dr. B as many of his patients called him) became something of a local celebrity with an office full of patients from the early morning to late evening. He did not raised his fees until 1969—but then it only went up by a dollar. In a 1970 Sun interview, Brumbaugh explained:
“I’d rather treat them for free of charge than have them think I’m overcharging. I was never out for the almighty dollar. I work just to keep alive, not for what I can get out of it.”That same year, the community recognized his fifty years of service to the Elkridge community. Nearly four hundred neighbors and long-time patients pooled $3,900 in donations to buy the doctor a brand-new Mercury sedan. Howard County even changed the name of a road off Main Street to Brumbaugh Street in his honor. Dr. Brumbaugh served three generations of Elkridge residents and continued working until he was ninety years old. By one resident’s estimation, he brought “thousands” of Elkridge babies into the world. Dr. Brumbaugh never kept count but reportedly delivered ten children for one family alone. There are many area residents who still proudly call themselves “Brumbaugh Babies.” The year after Dr. Brumbaugh’s death in 1985, the Elkridge Heritage Society and local Rotary Club bought the home to preserve the doctor’s office and waiting room. A group of volunteer residents helped turn the second floor into an apartment to help pay the mortgage on the new local history museum. Fortunately, their efforts have preserved Doctor B’s story for residents and visitors to continue to appreciate today.
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In April 1942, less than six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a group of Elkridge residents established a new volunteer fire department. The new fire department was one of many initiatives in U.S. cities and towns encouraged by the Office of Civilian Defense at the outset of World War II. Elkridge residents worried that their town’s location between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, as well as the town’s proximity to several wartime industrial sites, made them a possible target for an aerial bombardment. The founding of the department was a grassroots effort from the beginning. A group of local women led the initial fundraising campaign. The B&O Railroad Company donated the fire bell. Using second-hand parts and donated equipment, volunteers took a dilapidated 1934 Brockway Ford (dilapidated from years sitting idle in a cow pasture) and transformed it into a fully operational fire truck for just $500. Operating out of a one-bay garage in a former Ford Automobile dealership, the first few road tests for the new truck did not go smoothly. A tire blew out on the first trip and the engine dropped a rod on its second trip. Nonetheless, the volunteers managed to get the truck fully operational just seven months after the formation of the department. The volunteers named the truck “Daisy.” The Federal Civilian Defense Organization officially recognized the department as part of national preparedness and declared Daisy the “best homemade fire truck in America.” The volunteers’ efforts were even dramatized and broadcast live on a national NBC radio show. It was a challenge to fully staff the department during World War II because so many local men were fighting overseas. To compensate, the department struck a deal with the local high school. The school agreed to allow the older boys who maintained at least a C grade average to skip class in order to help fight fires. While only men and boys were allowed to fight fires, women volunteered as dispatchers during the department’s first few years. Women volunteered on the ambulance from the beginning and, in the early 1970s, the department changed policies to allow women to enlist as firefighters as well. The original building underwent several renovations over the last seventy-five years. The fire hall on Old Washington Road was renovated and expanded in 1948. Today, the Elkridge V.F.D. operates out of a new, larger location, built to accommodate the growing needs of the community. Built in 2014, the new facility on Rowanberry Drive encompasses more than thirty-five thousand square feet, houses twenty-three firefighters—both paid and volunteer—and cost more than sixteen million dollars. The department’s original building is currently being repurposed as a community center.