Built in 1873 by the Maryland Baptist Union Association for black Baptists in south Baltimore, Leadenhall Baptist Church has long been a center of activism and source of strength for African Americans in south Baltimore and the Sharp Leadenhall neighborhood. The church was designed, built and furnished by the firm of Joseph Thomas and Son. Established 1820, the company manufactured building materials along with church, bank and office furniture. Many notable community leaders from Sharp Leadenhall, including Mildred Rae Moon and Martha Roach, were members of the congregation, leading the fight to preserve the neighborhood from demolition for highway construction in the 1960s and 1970s. The church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
By the time of the Civil War,the Thomas firm operated the largest steam turning mill works in the South at Park, Clay and Lexington Streets. The fire of 1873, which destroyed much of what is now the Retail District, began in the Thomas plant.
Today, Leadenhall Baptist Church continues to play an important role in neighborhood life, holding recreational and academic programs for neighborhood children and supporting community residents. However, similar to other churches in the community, many congregants live outside the neighborhood, and commute back for services on Sundays.
The Southern District Police Station at the corner of East Ostend and Patapsco streets was constructed in 1896. The building was designed by local architect Jackson Coale Gott. Born in 1829, Gott established his own firm in 1863, joined the American Institute of Architects in 1871. His works include the Maryland Penitentiary completed in 1894, two years before the police station. For close to a century, the building served as a police station complete with holding cells and a courtroom until the station closed in 1980.
In 1999, the building was given new life when it was bought and renovated by the South Baltimore Learning Center (SBLC). The police station still holds its original floors, a jail cell, and even bullet holes in the former shooting gallery. In their historic building turned state-of-the-art learning center, SBLC educates over a thousand adults each year with a variety of adult education and related life-skills training focusing on adult literacy and helping students achieve a Maryland High School Diploma.
Just a few blocks away from the Peabody, stretching along Calvert Street between Madison and Monument Streets, stands another massive Italian palace, built for another educational institution.
The patron here was the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order. Visitors can see arched windows with elaborate moldings and a heavy Italianate cornice unifying the northern half, containing St. Ignatius Church (designed by Louis L. Long and completed in 1856) with the southern (designed by O’Connor and Delaney of New York and finished in 1899). Besides the parish church, this huge red brick palace housed Loyola College and Loyola High School until they split into two separate institutions and moved away in 1922.
Since the mid-1970s, the long vacant southern section has been imaginatively re-used for two theaters designed by James Grieves and the firm of Ziger, Hoopes, and Snead for the Center Stage repertory theater.
1621 Bolton Street is the childhood home of Walter Sondheim, Jr.: a local business executive and civic leader who is best known for his role as president of the Baltimore City School Board as the city first sought to put an end to racially segregated school following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In their decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In contrast to many southern school districts, Sondheim led the school board to immediately respond to the ruling with a new policy that, at least officially, allowed white and black students to attend any school regardless of their race. Leaders in Baltimore’s African American community had lobbied for more resources for the city’s black students as far back as the 1860s. In 1867, for example, the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People successfully petitioned the city to provide funds for the education of black children. And, in 1882, Everett J. Waring, Reverend Harvey Johnson, and others succeeded in pushing the school board to establish the first “colored” high school for black students, which went on to become the school we know today as Frederick Douglas High School. In the early 1950s, Baltimore’s NAACP and Urban League began advocating to integrate Polytechnic Institute, particularly the school’s elite engineering program. Their efforts culminated in a contentious hearing at the school board in 1952 where among others, Thurgood Marshall battled against the Poly Alumni Association and others to integrate the school. With Walter Sondheim as the chair, board members voted five to three to integrate, and fifteen African American students entered the program at Poly that fall. Despite this victory, attempts to integrate Baltimore’s all-female Western High School and Mergenthaler School of Printing (better known locally as “Mervo”) failed in 1953. Efforts of challenging these decisions were put on hold as Marshall and others from the NAACP knew the case from Topeka, Kansas, Brown v. Board of Education, would be heading to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the unanimous Brown decision came out in May 1954, Baltimore already had years of advocacy and attention to the issue of desegregation. While Baltimore did not experience the violence that desegregation sparked in other cities, the city never successfully integrated its schools. In the fall of 1954, six white students enrolled in formerly all-black schools and sixteen hundred black students enrolled in formerly all-white schools. By 1960, African American students became the majority in the school system. In 1961, 75% of the city’s schools were either 90% black or 90% white. In 1973, the U.S. Office of Civil Rights threatened to withhold federal funds charging that the city was not doing enough to integrate the schools.
Baltimore activists have a long history of fighting discrimination and segregation in the city’s public establishments. In the years after World War II, the NAACP and their allies worked to end segregated seating at Ford’s Theatre on Fayette Street and drew national attention to the fight for equal rights in Baltimore. Ford's Theatre opened in 1871. It was built by John T. Ford, a Baltimore native, and the owner of the Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. infamous as the site of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Like many other theatres in downtown Baltimore, Ford's enforced a strict policy of racially segregated seating. As early as 1947, Baltimore’s branch of the NAACP began picketing the theatre. At that time, NAACP executive secretary Addison Pinkney stated that the protest had gone on for ”the entire season” and “reduced the average attendance to less than one-half capacity of [the] building.” Unfortunately, theatre management was resistant to changing their discriminatory policies. Protests continued for five years with national and international stars joining the fight. In 1948, celebrated singer and Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson walked a picket line in front of the theatre. In 1951, Basil Rathbone, the British actor famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, declared: “You may depend on my taking a firm stand of disapproval of the segregated theatre in Baltimore and to inform any management to whom I may in future contract myself and the case of any play in which I play.” By 1950, the protests were hurting the theatre’s bottom line. The theatre, which was operated by United Booking Office Inc. of New York, leased the building from Baltimore theatre mogul Morris Mechanic. By 1950, United Booking Office reported that Ford’s, once one of the most prosperous theatres in the nation, had its box office receipts cut almost in half, attributing the decline to the NAACP protest and to the poor selection of plays. In 1952, the protest gained another strong ally: Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin. Speaking in early 1952 at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, McKeldin declared that he wanted Ford’s opened to African Americans because they had been “needlessly affronted” by its policies. “We are going to walk together,” he said. “I am an optimist, and we must win. We are going to stop this evil thing.” On February 1, 1952, Ford’s dropped its segregation policies and was finally open to all. In 1964, the Sun recalled, "Almost every theatrical star from the last century has played there, from James W. Wallack and Maude Adams to Katharine Cornell, and the building has gained a reputation for everything from cats on stage to deer in the balcony and bats in the dressing rooms." Unfortunately, neither theatrical or Civil Rights history could save the three-story theatre from the wrecking ball. The building was torn down in 1964 to make way for the parking garage that stands on the site today.
Douglas Memorial Community Church was built is 1857 for the Madison Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. The building boasts a grand Greek Revival design by architect Thomas Balbirnie with a sanctuary that seats a thousand people and an “undercroft” designed to hold six hundred.
In 1925, the congregation of the Douglass Memorial Community Church split off from the established Bethel A.M.E. Church on Druid Hill Avenue and acquired the building on Madison Avenue. In July 1949, Dr. Marion C. Bascom became a senior pastor at the church; a position he continued to hold up until his retirement in March 1995. Before his death in 2012, Pastor Bascom had dedicated his life to activism including everything from participating in the protests at Gwynn Oak Park to leading efforts to create new affordable housing in the Upton neighborhood. Speaking about his involvement in a July 4, 1963, protest at Gwynn Oak, Pastor Bascom explained:
“I am the one who said all along I will not go to jail, but I will help others who go. But this morning I said to myself, I have nothing to lose but my chains. So if I do not preach at my pulpit Sunday morning, it might be the most eloquent sermon I ever preached.”
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 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.
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.