Construction on the Battle Monument began on September 12, 1815, a year to the day after Baltimore soundly defeated the British in the War of 1812, and the monument endures as a commemoration of the attack by land at North Point and by sea at Fort McHenry. In addition to serving as the official emblem for the City of Baltimore on the city flag, the work is extraordinary in the history of American monument building for a number of reasons. Architecturally, it is considered to be the first Egyptian structure in the United States with a base, designed by French-born architect Maximilian Godefroy, to look like an Egyptian sarcophagus. The base sits on 18 layers of marble, symbolizing the 18 states that then belonged to the Union. The main column is of Roman design and depicts a fasces: a bundle of rods held together with bands in a symbol of unity. In an age when the United States had few public monuments at and when war memorials focused on generals and commanders, the Battle Monument stood out for its focus on the common soldier recognizing all 39 of the fallen soldiers, regardless of their rank, in a ribbon of names spiraling up the central shaft. Italian sculptor Antonio Capellano created Lady Baltimore — one of the oldest monumental sculptures in the country. She wears a crown of victory on her head and holds a laurel wreath in her raised hand as a symbol of victory over the British. In her lowered hand, she holds a ship's rudder as a testament to Baltimore's nautical role in the war. Both arms are now prosthetics after having been blown off in storms. Both also were created by well-known Baltimore artists. The raised hand with the wreath is the work of Hans Schuler, and the lowered hand with the rudder is by Rueben Kramer. The same year that the monument was adopted as Baltimore's emblem, it also helped give rise to the city's nickname as "The Monumental City." In 1827, President Adams visited Baltimore and stayed at a nearby hotel. The Battle Monument had been completed and work was underway for the nation's first public monument to President Washington in "Howards Woods," soon to become the Mt. Vernon neighborhood. At a dinner with dignitaries and veterans from the war, President Adams gave the final toast of the evening: "Baltimore, the Monumental City: may the days of her safety be as prosperous and happy as the days of her danger have been trying and triumphant!" Baltimore's new monuments made an impression on the President, and enough to spark a name that has lasted nearly 200 years.
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High on a hill at 811 West Lanvale Street, behind a chain link fence and past the overgrown yard, is the grand Upton – an architectural treasure by one of Baltimore's earliest architects that has witnessed nearly 200 years of change in the Upton neighborhood that shares the building's name. In the 1830s, Baltimore lawyer David Stewart hired architect Robert Carey Long, Jr. – or so we think, no confirmation of Long as the architect has survived – to design his country villa. R. Carey (as he liked to call himself) was one of Baltimore's first professionally trained architects designing the Lloyd Street Synagogue (now part of the Jewish Museum of Maryland), the Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott City, and the main gate of Green Mount Cemetery among more than 80 buildings across the country. Son of a Baltimore merchant who armed seven schooners and two brigantines as privateers during the Revolutionary War, Stewart became a prominent local lawyer and got involved in politics, serving a brief month as a US Senator in 1849.
The mansion is widely recognized as the last surviving Greek Revival country house in Baltimore. It remains secluded in urban West Baltimore, sitting high above the neighboring buildings and surrounded by brick and stone walls. In the mid-nineteenth century, you would have seen a grand porch with Doric columns and ironwork bearing the Stewart family crest. Inside the building, you could have observed more than a dozen marble and onyx fireplaces, a main entrance hall, a curved oak staircase, and a banquet room that was so large it has since been divided into multiple rooms. David Stewart enjoyed entertaining guests in his mansion and hosted lavish, indulgent parties there so frequently that he developed gout.
After Stewart's death in 1858, the house was purchased by the Dammann family, who owned the house for so many generations that it became known as "the old Dammann mansion." The family left in 1901, and the house found itself empty for the first time, but not the last. The mansion's next owner, musician Robert Young, took a cue from David Stewart and used the spacious and opulent mansion to host "several brilliant social affairs where hundreds of guests moved about in the spacious rooms." Young would be the last owner to use the building as a home, and his time there was short-lived – he found the house too drafty and abandoned after less than 3 years.
The commercial life of the Upton mansion began in 1930 when one of Baltimore's first radio stations, WCAO, moved into the building. Extensive alterations were made to accommodate WCAO – tall twin radio towers were installed at the edge of the property, walls were torn down and rooms partitioned off to create studios and equipment rooms. The next commercial venture in Upton came in 1947, when WCAO sold it to the Baltimore Institute of Musical Arts. Founded by Dr. J. Leslie Jones, the school was originally opened with the intentions of creating a parallel program to that offered at Peabody, a renowned music school not open to African American students at the time, and at its height in the early 1950s had over 300 students. The school eventually closed in the mid-1950s after desegregation granted black students equal access to public music schools. In 1957, the Baltimore City School System moved in to the building and used it first as the special education "Upton School for Trainable Children No. 303," and then the headquarters for Baltimore City Public School's Home and Hospital Services program. Unfortunately, Upton has sat empty since BCPS left in 2006.
Upton has a rich cultural legacy that extends beyond its use as a social hot spot, a radio station, and a school. In the 1960s, the mansion was chosen as the community namesake during an urban renewal project going on in the neighborhood at the time. As a physical landmark of the neighborhood for more than a century, the Upton mansion's name was intended to serve as "the symbol of a physical and human renewal in West Baltimore."
Despite its presence on the National Register of Historic Places and the Baltimore Landmark List, the city-owned building remains empty and unmaintained in west Baltimore. In 2009, Preservation Maryland included in on a list of the state's most endangered historic places, and the building is threatened by vandalism and neglect. Today, the mansion awaits a new owner, someone willing to restore the beautiful building to its historic potential.
The Harlem Park Theatre was originally built as a church for a congregation that had outgrown the size of their existing building. Construction on this Romanesque-style building on Gilmore Street began in the summer of 1902. The building had a Port Deposit granite edifice and was considered aesthetically modern at the time of construction, designed to be an ornament in the neighborhood.
The new Methodist Episcopal Church was a short-lived venture marred by two destructive fires that led to its eventual abandonment. On December 22, 1908, the building was almost destroyed in a fire. Repairs were completed to the point where the congregation could continue to use the building until a more severe fire in 1924. On April 3, a fire destroyed the church, and the building was abandoned. This was also the period when the demographics of the neighborhood were shifting from predominately white to predominately African American. The Methodist Episcopal Church was a predominately white congregation, so the change in demographics may have influenced the decision to abandon the church.
In 1928, the title for the church was officially transferred to Emanuel M. Davidove and Harry H. Goldberg, who resold the property to their company the Fidelity Amusement Corporation, formed for the purpose of building "a 1,500 seat motion picture theatre for Negroes to be known as Harlem Theatre." The company hired architect Theodore Wells Pietsch, a notable Baltimore architect who also designed Eastern High School and the Broadway Pier. Pietsch took the property's history into consideration when designing the new building: the theatre was made fireproof through the use of steel and concrete, and a fire extinguishing system was also included in the building's design.
Like the church it replaced, the theater was designed as an ornament and a spectacle. The building's decorative theme, inspired by Spanish architecture, was considered the most elaborate on the East Coast, and the theatre was promoted as "the best illuminated building in Baltimore." The bright, decorative facade included a 65-foot marquee with 900 50-watt light bulbs to illuminate the sidewalk underneath, as well as "tremendous electric signs" around the marquee and a forty-foot high sign that could be seen from two miles away.
The opening weekend for the theatre in October 1932, is notable because of the significant celebratory events planned to mark the grand opening. The theatre was introduced "in a blaze of glory," in a grand opening that drew crowds of 5,000 to 8,000 people. The jubilant scene was described by a journalist:
"The blazing marquee studded with a thousand lights made the entire square take a semblance of Broadway glamour. The marquees illuminated the entire Harlem Square which was crowded with those who lined the sidewalk unable to gain admittance."
A parade was held in tribute to Theodore Wells Pietsch and the construction of the theatre. The parade was both photographed and filmed, and the resulting film was shown at the theatre the next week.
After a successful opening, the theatre remained open for nearly forty years. Baltimore citizens remember the theatre with "cavernous three-story high ceiling, a balcony, carpeted floors and thick cushioned seats" and "œcelestial ceiling with twinkling electrical stars and projected clouds that floated over movie-goers' heads." There are also records of community events, such as a free "Movie Jamboree" in 1968 for the children of Baltimore workers donated by the theatre's then-manager Edward Grot, and midnight shows to raise money for the local YMCA. However, the theatre remained segregated throughout is existence and went into decline by the late 1960s.
By the mid-1970s, the Harlem Theatre was closed. In 1975, it was purchased by Reverend Raymond Kelley, Jr. with the intention of turning it into the Harlem Park Community Baptist Church. Refurbishment included replacement of theatre seats with pews, and removal of the marquee. On July 6, 1975, the new church was dedicated. The building continues to be used by the congregation of the Harlem Park Community Baptist Church today.
Built in 1938, the Howard Street Bridge is nearly 1,000 feet long with two steel arches spanning the Jones Falls Valley. This award winning bridge (voted one of the most beautiful by the American Institute of Steel Construction in 1939) was designed by the J.E. Greiner Company, the firm established by one of the nation's foremost bridge builders John Edwin Greiner. Born in Delaware, Greiner got his start designing and building bridges for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad until 1908 when he set himself up as a consulting engineer. The story of the bridge and the extension of Howard Street to North Avenue begins years earlier when local business leaders first began to imagine Howard Street as a major route across the Jones Falls.
The proposal to extend Howard Street north started to build support in 1923 with the organization of the Howard Street Association but without any funding the idea languished for over a decade. Finally in the late 1930s, thanks to a $32,000,000 investment in Baltimore's New Deal work relief programs, construction began. The first steel girders for the bridge swung into place around midnight on December 16, 1937 to "avoid tangling traffic on the Baltimore and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland and Pennsylvania railroads" whose tracks ran along the valley below. Baltimore Mayor Howard W. Jackson presided over a ground-breaking ceremony on July 15, 1937 throwing the first shovel of dirt with a spade after the "motor shovel" they had waiting unexpectedly broke down.
At a cost of $1,350,000, construction on the road extension by the Philadelphia-based Kaufman Construction Company moved quickly and by January 12, 1939, Mayor Jackson was back on Howard Street, joined by representatives from the Public Works Administration and local civic and neighborhood associations. Stretched across Howard Street near the Richmond Market (now part of Maryland General Hospital) was a ribbon, which Jackson cut then planned to "enter his automobile and drive along the extensive and over the bridge spanning Jones Falls... followed by a cavalcade of cars containing Federal and city officials and members of the Howard Street and Mount Royal Protective Associations."
The bridge caught the interest of another Baltimore Mayor one fall morning in 1974 when Mayor William Donald Schaefer drove down Howard Street and was "struck by how rusty and run-down it looked," immediately asking his Committee on Arts and Culture if they could "do something about freshening it up." The committee came up with a proposal to give the bridge a new name "Gateway to Baltimore" and a bold new color scheme worked out with assistance from Don Duncan, an artist employed by the Baltimore City Department of Planning. Fights with neighborhood residents over the color selection broke out eventually resolving with a new red paint job in the early 1980s.
Work began anew on creating a more colorful Howard Street Bridge (along with over a dozen other bridges over the Jones Falls) in the late 1980s when local artist and MICA graduate Stan Edmister conceived of the "Painted Bridges" project to create a "gateway of color" from the suburbs to downtown with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Baltimore Municipal Art Society. For the 15 years, city bridge painters followed Edmister's scheme painting the bridges with industrial oranges, yellows and rusty browns. Edmister explained the colors, noting, "I think the colors I choose blend with an urban environment. They make some comment about Baltimore being a postindustrial town." Mayor Martin O'Malley objected to the color selection in 2004, preferring a Kelly green but lost out to Edmister's proposal in an online poll.
Occupying a busy corner at Charles and North, the magnificent Parkway Theater entertained audiences in Central Baltimore for decades with everything from vaudeville and silent movies to nightly live radio productions. Although abandoned for over a decade, the Parkway Theater is poised for renewal as developers vie for the chance to remake the handsome Italian Renaissance building for new crowds of Baltimore theater-goers.
Built in 1915, the Parkway was closely modeled on London's West End Theatre, later known as the Rialto, located near Leicester Square with shared features like the interior's rich ornamental plasterwork in a Louis XIV style. The architect, Oliver Birkhead Wight, was born in Baltimore County and designed a number of theaters around the city: the New Theater (now demolished) on Lexington Street, the Howard Theater around the corner on Howard Street, and the McHenry Theater on Light Street in Federal Hill.
Originally envisioned by owner Henry Webb's Northern Amusement Company as a 1100-seat vaudeville house, the theater added a movie projector even before they opened, screening "Zaza" starring leading Broadway actress Pauline Frederick for opening night on October 23, 1915. An early account of the theater remarked, "The lights radiating from the roof of the building as well as from the brilliantly lighted entrance, make an appreciable addition to the illuminations of North avenue which is fast becoming a nightly recreational center for the residents of the northern part of the city."
Loew's Theatres Incorporated bought the business in 1926, one of the scores of theaters across the Midwest and East Coast purchased by entrepreneur Marcus Loew as he grew his Cincinnati-based chain across the country. The new owners extensively remodeled the theater and replaced the original Moller Organ (Op. 1962, II/32) with a Wurlitzer theater organ. Loew's staged a grand re-opening along with the downtown Century Theater that they acquired and re-opened at the same time as the Parkway.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, a group produced a nightly live radio program at the Parkway entitled "Nocturne" featuring poetry readings interspersed with musical selections on the organ. Morris Mechanic, a local theater operator who opened the Center Theater down the street in 1939, purchased the Parkway and closed the doors in 1952. Many thought that this might be the end of the Parkway, by then one of the oldest theaters in Baltimore City, and Morris Mechanic suggested that the building might be turned into offices.
Fortunately, the theater changed hands a few more times, spending a season or two as a live theater, before finally reopening with a new name — "5 West" — in 1956. With an eclectic mix of old movies, foreign films, and live performances, 5 West continued through the mid-1970s when it closed for good. Despite a handful of attempts to reuse the building in the 1980s and 1990s, the Parkway was closed from 1998 through 2017. In 2017, the Parkway reopened as The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway—a complex of three theaters and the headquarters for the Maryland Film Festival.
Mill No. 1 sits on the site of Laurel Mill, a late 18th-century flour mill originally owned by prominent businessman and abolitionist Elisha Tyson. In 1849, the newly chartered Mount Vernon Company built a textile mill on the site. Mill No. 1 stood at the threshold of a burgeoning textile empire that would control most of the world’s cotton duck production, a heavy canvas used primarily for ship sails.
The textile mill and neighboring village Stone Hill shared a close relationship well into the 20th century. Residents renting company-owned housing in Stone Hill were required to be employed in the mill to live there. The mill's bell called workers to the factory floor for their twelve hour shifts. Mill boss David Carroll lived in a mansion at the top of the hill overlooking the village and mill his wealth built. The extant mansion later became the Florence Crittenton Home.
In the mid-1800s, about 400 men, women and children—some as young as eight years old—worked in and lived next to the mills. The company expanded in 1853 with the construction of Mill No. 3 across the street. In 1855, the Mt. Vernon Company controlled six mills in the Jones Falls Valley from Mt. Washington to Remington, and established adjoining villages that would grow into the neighborhoods of Hampden and Woodberry. When Mill No. 1 burned in 1873, it was replaced with the larger factory that stands on this site today. Inside the mills, the cotton looms made a lot of noise, and dust from the cotton was always in the air. Excess cotton had to be swept off the floor and cleaned off the looms to prevent fire. Workers heard the constant loud humming of the looms and breathed in the cotton dust. An entire paycheck could go to rent for the company houses and toward groceries purchased from the company store.
In 1899, area mills merged to form the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, at the time the world’s foremost manufacturer of cotton duck, with mills from South Carolina to Connecticut, and a board of directors based out of New York City. By 1915, the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company broke apart and was reformed as Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Mills, which controlled mills in Hampden and Woodberry, South Carolina, and Alabama, and employed about 2,200 workers locally. Production boomed during World War I and workers leveraged demand to gain a 10 percent wage increase, a reduced 55 hour work week, and cleaner facilities.
Demand for cotton duck dropped immediately after the war, and management cut wages by one-third and increased hours. Tensions within the company culminated in a 1923 strike, when 600 workers voted to reject the offer of a 54-hour work week and 7.5 percent pay increase and demanded a 48-hour work week with a 25 percent pay increase. Despite support from local clergy and the Textile Workers Union of America, the workers were forced by necessity to return to the mills. The company began to sell off its housing and move its operations to Alabama and South Carolina where labor was cheaper and less organized. During the Great Depression, many mill workers were laid off. Many went on welfare. Others, however, refused to go on welfare, and searched for additional jobs to support themselves. At this time most workers made between five and seven dollars per week and worked ten hours a day.
World War II created new demand for canvas. Tarps, rope, netting, mailbags, tents, and stuffing (made from cotton bits called ‘shoddy’) were all in demand from the military. Synthetic fabrics, which required bricking up the mill's windows to control humidity levels, emerged as new products. Many people from the South came to work in the mills at this time. After the war, production declined, never to regain its earlier levels. The Mount Vernon Company finally closed its Baltimore mills and moved all operations to North Carolina in 1972.
Some industry persisted in the mill buildings. Life-Like Products, a maker of model train sets and styrofoam coolers, was one. The international textile firm Rockland Industries, with origins upstream, used Mill No. 3 to store its textile supply after the Mount Vernon Company left. In 2013, Mill No. 1 was redeveloped by developer Terra Nova Ventures and now includes apartments, office space, a restaurant, and an event venue. Although they no longer function as mills, these buildings continue to serve as places of housing, food, and work within Hampden.
A survivor that has endured decades of abandonment, the 1914 Lebow Building is an impressive example of early twentieth century industrial architecture that is just starting a new future as the Baltimore Design School. While it takes its popular name from the Lebow Brothers Clothing factory that occupied the building from the 1950s through 1985, the Lebow Building actually shares a common history with the Copycat Building next door and the artist-owned Cork Factory – all three were built by Baltimore's Crown Cork & Seal Company.
Founded by prolific inventor William Painter in 1892, the Crown Cork & Seal Company centralized their operations on the 1500 block of Guilford Avenue in a new Romensque six-story warehouse in May 1897. William Painter died in 1906 but the business continued to grow and the Lebow Building was built in 1914 to serve as a machine shop. The design by architect Otto G. Simonson featured vast expanses of glass – windows made up nearly 75% of the exterior facade – and a unique ventilation system. Simonson had arrived in Baltimore in 1904 to work as the superintendent for the construction of the U.S. Custom House located at South Gay and East Lombard Streets. Born in Dresden, Germany, Simonson immigrated to Hartford, Connecticut at age 21 and worked for many years in the office of supervising architect of U.S. Treasury Department in the early 1880s, eventually becoming the superintendent of construction of public buildings.
The builder, Herbert West, had supervised the construction of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York before moving his architectural career to Baltimore in the aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 to focus on developing fireproof buildings. West became a leader in the local architectural community and helped to develop city building codes as president of the Building Congress and Exchange of Baltimore.
By the 1920s, the Crown Cork & Seal Company provided a full half of the world's supply of bottle caps. Between two and three hundred people worked at the machine shop and employees benefited from amenities including an outdoor rooftop recreation area for ladies and a separate area for men in the building's courtyard. In 1930, however, the company began to consolidate operations at their 35-acre factory complex in Highlandtown.
In 1950, the machine shop was leased to Lebow Brothers Clothing Company – a preeminent manufacturer of men's clothing at the time and especially well-known for their coats and suits. In 1982, private developer Abraham Zion purchased both the company and the building. However, Lebow Clothing ceased manufacturing and the building was shuttered in 1985.
In 2013, the abandoned building was transformed into the Baltimore Design School. The school focuses on creating a collaborative and progressive educational environment. The former loading dock is now an outdoor performance space for fashion shows. Salvaged equipment from the clothing factory is exhibited in the former freight elevator to honor the building’s previous life. The project met the Secretary of Interior Standards for historic preservation and received state and federal tax credits and is a LEED Silver certified green building.
Touted as "modern market in the country," and now considered an early prototype for suburban shopping centers, the North Avenue Market opened in 1928 with twelve retail stores and twenty-two lane bowling alley on the second floor at a cost of $1,850,000.The site of the market between Charles Street and Maryland Avenue had originally been the site of two country houses (including one used by Confederate General Robert E. Lee) but thanks the rapid development of north Baltimore in the early twentieth century the new market drew in fifty thousand visitors on its opening day and soon attracted more than two hundred grocery vendors.
After WWII, however, as many industrial businesses began to leave the area, the market began to decline and only thirty of the stalls were occupied when a destructive six-alarm fire in August 1968 shut down a portion of the market and led to substantial changes for the building. The fire, which started in the Woodlawn Lunch stall, was so hot that it cracked glass display cases and caused canned food to explode. A crowd of eight hundred residents gathered to watch the fire, tragically including elderly market manager, George Horshoff, suffered a heart attack and collapsed while viewing the damage and died shortly after. Two of the main factors in the extensive destruction caused by the fire were a lack of a sprinkler system and the sheet metal window guards, which obstructed fire fighters trying to enter the building.
After the fire, the market was purchased by James and Carolyn Frenkil, owners of the Center City, Inc., development company, who planned to reopen a portion of the market over the next six years and sold the northern portion of the building to be developed into high-rise senior citizen housing. The northern portion of the market was razed to accommodate the seventeen-story retirement home. The remaining part of the building was turned into a supermarket which opened in 1974.
Despite efforts to rejuvenate the building or redevelop any of the property, the heart of the building was closed off and vacant for nearly forty years following the fire. In 2008, a $1 million project for the building was launched to restore the building as an "arts-focused mix of shops, eateries, and offices." The rehabilitation process for the property is still ongoing, but has been successful so far. In 2012 the continued rehabilitation project for the market was awarded grant money from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development as well as from the Central Baltimore Partnership. The newest plans for the space include new paint, addition lighting, and re-opening exterior windows that were covered decades ago.
Penn Station is a unique combination of a classic Beaux-Arts architectural design from architect Kenneth Mackenzie Murchison and a functional, adaptable train station that serves as the eighth busiest station in the United States. Originally known as the Union Station, named for the Union of northern and southern railroads that came together at the station, this 1911 ornate granite, terracotta, and cast iron building is the third structure to exist on the site. In 1873, the Northern Central Railway built the first station on this site, a wooden structure, replaced in 1886 by a hulking Victorian brick structure. After critics declared the station overcrowded, uncomfortable, dangerous, and unsuitable for Baltimore's booming passenger traffic, the building was torn down in 1910 to be replaced by a new modern station. The architect, Kenneth Mackenzie Murchison, had extensive experience creating railroad stations around the nation and brought a stylish Beaux-Arts style to the job. Murchison's design incorporated an innovative waiting area illuminated by three large domed skylights directly connected to the boarding platforms. The Pennsylvania Railway Company took over the station in the 1920s and renamed it Pennsylvania Station to match the other Penn Stations along the line. The building deteriorated over the years and during World War II blackout paint was applied to the skylight and windows. This remained through the early 1980s, when a $5 million facelift restored the mosaic flooring, glazed wall tile, marble detailing, and the windows. In 2015, the station served more than 993,721 Amtrak passengers and even more MARC train commuters.
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On August 15, 1814, almost exactly one month before the Battle of Baltimore and the bombing of Ft. McHenry in the War of 1812, Rembrandt Peale opened "Peale's Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Paintings" on Holliday Street in downtown Baltimore. Designed by noted Baltimore architect Robert Carey Long, the building is the first purpose-built museum in the western hemisphere. Taking after a natural history museum that his father, Charles Wilson Peale, started in Philadelphia in 1786, Rembrandt Peale displayed collections of fossils and other specimens, as well as portraits of many of the country's founding fathers that his family had painted. As the British made plans to attack and the War of 1812 was on the city's threshold, portraits of the Revolutionary War heroes were highly popular, and Peale was able to charge 25 cents for admission. In September of 1814, Baltimore turned back the British invasion on land and sea, providing a critical turning point in the war and likely sparing the city from destruction. The British, after all, had burned the nation's capital just a few miles south after Washington fell the month before. The Peale Museum capitalized on patriotic fervor, and put a number of bombs and shells that were collected from the failed British bombardment on display. In doing this, Peale became the first person to display samples of Britain's firepower, which of course Francis Scott Key immortalized as the bombs bursting in air in the Star Spangled Banner. Some years later, in 1830, Peale's museum was still capitalizing on the War of 1812 when they displayed the original flag that flew over Ft. McHenry, borrowed from a willing Mrs. Louisa Armistead, the widow of Lt. Colonel George Armistead. Lt. Colonel Armistead commanded Ft. McHenry during the war and reportedly ordered an extra large flag to fly at the Fort as a pointed challenge to the British. From its earliest days embracing Baltimore's war effort, the Peale Museum has been intertwined with the city's history. The building served as a museum from 1814 until 1830. It then became the Baltimore City Hall until 1875 when the current city hall building was erected. After 1875, the museum had various uses, including as the Colored School Number 1 for African American children, and then in 1931, it returned to its origins as a museum, becoming the "Municipal Museum of Baltimore." Fittingly, the Municipal Museum focused on Baltimore City history. In 1985, the museum underwent a physical renovation and was reborn as the center of the "City Life Museums." With exhibits on Baltimore's historic gems, such as the H.L. Mencken House and Phoenix Shot Tower, to the rowhouses and front steps that help define working class life in Baltimore, the City Life Museums lasted until 1997 when the enterprise closed. Today, the Peale Museum is empty and awaiting the next chapter in its long and storied service to Baltimore.
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While few remember the slogan of the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Company—"If you keep late hours for Society's sake Bromo-Seltzer will cure that headache"—the iconic Bromo-Seltzer Tower has been a Baltimore landmark since its construction in 1911.
While few remember the slogan of the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Company—"If you keep late hours for Society's sake Bromo-Seltzer will cure that headache"—the iconic Bromo-Seltzer Tower has been a Baltimore landmark since its construction in 1911. At fifteen stories, the tower made the Bromo-Seltzer factory the tallest building in the city. The tower boasted a four-dial gravity clock that was the largest in the world (bigger, even, than London's Big Ben) and an illuminated, rotating 51-foot blue steel bottle. The iconic design immediately secured the tower's spot as a favorite of city residents and visitors alike. Ship captains traveling up the bay reportedly used the bottle as a beacon to guide them toward the Light Street docks and the removal of the blue bottle in 1936 is still a sore point with many Baltimoreans. The tower was built by Captain Isaac Emerson, a chemist, and inventor of the headache remedy and alleged hangover cure, Bromo-Seltzer. Emerson was a wealthy and well-regarded Baltimorean, known as a generous philanthropist and world traveler. He had been a lieutenant in the Navy during the Spanish-American war and a post-war visit to Florence's tower on the Palazzo Vecchio provided the inspiration for the design of this tower created by local architect Joseph Evans Sperry. Though the factory was torn down in 1969, the 289-foot tower survived several threats of demolition and in 2007 philanthropists Eddie and Sylvia Brown worked with Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts to transform the structure into 33 artists' studios. The tower is open once a month for public 91Ƶ and while much has changed visitors can still ride the 1911 Otis elevator to the clock room on the 15th floor and view the still-functioning clock works.
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One of the largest businesses on the West Side in the early twentieth century the Baltimore Bargain House—a mail-order wholesale business that employed over a thousand people and earned profits in the millions that grew to become the fourth largest wholesalers in the county. Driven by the devotion of Jewish Lithuanian immigrant Jacob Epstein, the Baltimore Bargain House became a hub for Southern Jewish merchants and a local business community. When firm's grand showroom at West Baltimore and North Liberty Streets opened in 1911, a crowd of 500 local businessmen, the Mayor of Baltimore, and the Governor of Maryland all attended the dedication. After spending years himself as an itinerant peddler, traveling throughout Western Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Jacob Epstein first opened a small wholesale store in Baltimore in 1881. Epstein focused his attention on the American South, working specifically with Jewish peddlers and merchants. In the early 1900s, Epstein treated hundreds of merchants to annual visits to Baltimore to restock and view new merchandise. Arriving from North Carolina, Tennessee, and across the South, these merchants helped grow a successful and extensive business in Baltimore. Between 1881 and 1929 the Baltimore Bargain House was one of the most significant businesses in Baltimore, with gross sales over $34 million in 1921 alone, comparable to over $410 million today. To operate the Baltimore Bargain House, Epstein also built a local community of employees, which included over 1,600 people. The workforce was relatively diverse, comprising of immigrants from various countries as well as industry experts from across the nation. Many workers remained employed at the Baltimore Bargain House for decades. Although remarkable for his considerable business acumen and the success of the Baltimore Bargain House, the business' founder, Jacob Epstein was also well known for his extensive charitable donations to local Jewish groups and to institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art.
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The Key Monument on Eutaw Place is a grand reminder of how Baltimoreans have kept the memory of the Battle of Baltimore and the War of 1812 alive over two hundred years. Francis Scott Key was a Maryland lawyer and slaveholder who was on board the British vessel HMS Tonnant during the evening of September 13 and morning September 14, 1814, as part of a delegation to try to negotiate the release of prisoners. Key was stuck on board the British vessel to helplessly watch as the British Navy shelled Fort McHenry and Baltimore throughout the night.
At dawn, Key saw the Stars and Stripes still flying over the fort. That morning, the unsuccessful British allowed Key to return to shore, and on the return trip, he wrote a poem describing his experience the night before. The poem was quickly published in two Baltimore papers on September 20, 1814, and days later the owner of a Baltimore music store, Thomas Carr of the Carr Music Store, put the words and music together in print under the title "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Before his death in 1907, Baltimore resident Charles Marburg gave $25,000 to his brother Theodore to commission a monument to his favorite poet, Francis Scott Key. Theodore selected French sculptor Marius Jean Antonin Mercie known for monumental sculptures of Robert E. Lee (1890) in Richmond, Virginia, and General Lafayette (1891) in the District of Columbia. The Key Monument was added to Eutaw Place in 1911.
The monument was restored in 1999 after a multi-year fundraising campaign by local residents. In September 2017, the monument was spray painted with the words "Racist Anthem" and splashed with red paint to highlight Key's legacy as a slaveholder. The city quickly restored the monument.
When Samuel Posner moved his successful dry goods business to the corner of Lexington and Howard, architect Charles E. Cassell's gorgeous and ornate white Renaissance Revival building—complete with roaring lions and majestic wreaths and fluted columns—made a grand addition to the growing row of department store "palaces" on Howard Street in 1899.
The building played a prominent role in Baltimore's turn-of-the-century transition from smaller, specialized retailers to large, purpose-built department stores. Like many department stores across the country, Stewart's strove to provide a wide range of high quality goods to America's rising middle class and lured customers with its open layout, enticing displays, large plate glass windows, and by being, among other things, the first Howard Street store to install air conditioning in 1931.
Though the Stewart's name, etched in block letters at the building's crest, is still visible today, the store's ownership history is a bit less permanent. Within little over a year of the store's opening, The Baltimore Sun reported that Samuel Posner had sold the business to Louis Stewart and the Associated Merchants' Company (AMC), most likely as a result of financial difficulties resulting from high construction costs. Louis Stewart's turn at the helm of store was brief, too: in 1916 Stewart's was absorbed into a new firm, the Associated Dry Goods corporation (ADG), which consolidated several major U.S. retailing chains, including Lord & Taylor and J. McCreery's.
Many Baltimoreans have fond memories of shopping at Stewarts and recall making day-long excursions to the store. Stewart's, according to local columnist, Jacques Kelly, had "...an excellent men's furnishing department – ties and sweaters" and a wonderful selection of "... china and silver" and "yard good (dressmaking materials)." A high-class store with an elegant interior, Stewart's boasted two restaurants—the Georgian Tea Room and Cook Works—both popular with shoppers, as were the delicious vanilla marshmallow treats sold at the store's candy counter.
Stewart's opened their first suburban outlet on York Road in Towson in 1953 and several other suburban stores shortly thereafter. When the flagship store at Howard and Lexington closed in 1979, Stewart's held a week-long closing sale that brought in thousands of bargain-hungry shoppers. Stewart's was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and in 2007 Catholic Relief Services opened their offices in the first floor of the building.
Erected in 1879 as an investment property for Arunah Shepherdson Abell, founder of The Baltimore Sun, the Abell Building was designed by famed Baltimore architect George Frederick—architect for Baltimore's City Hall, Hollins Market, and the Old Baltimore City College. Abell spared no expense in constructing the cast-iron framed, masonry façade building and worked to ensure that tenants included multiple, prominent businesses. Though the building quickly became known for its lavish construction, its ornate exterior belied the hard reality that workers within its walls faced. The corner of West Baltimore and Eutaw Streets made an ideal location for local industry along a main streetcar line, just a few blocks from a B&O Railroad station and close to the Baltimore harbor. The grandeur of the building's construction, its two hydraulic elevators, and its imposing size invited immediate recognition and praise in local and national publications. In late nineteenth century Baltimore, as across the country, most skilled professions had declined as craftsmen were replaced by machines that could produce more goods more quickly. Wages for the masses of largely immigrant, unskilled workers who came to cities like Baltimore seeking work in industries remained low and working conditions were unregulated and woefully unsafe. One of the industries that attracted thousands of workers to Baltimore was the clothing or needle trade. In the years following the Civil War, demand for ready-to-wear garments skyrocketed and Baltimore's garment district boomed in response. Strouse Brothers, one of Baltimore's largest clothing manufacturers operated out of this building in the late nineteenth century and was a prominent player in Baltimore's growing needle trade. Strouse ran what was then called an "inside shop"—a multistory factory outfitted with new machines and the latest in manufacturing technology—where workers (largely women) worked long hours to keep the factory's machines running, often earning barely enough to survive. While larger clothing manufacturers escaped the criticism directed to sweatshops by local reformers, producers like Strouse, even when unionized (the United Garment Workers organized in Baltimore in the 1890s), often sent piecework out to sweated workers in small shops or set up their own small, outside sweatshops to avoid paying higher wages or complying with worker demands for better conditions and shorter hours. When the clothing industry slumped after WWI, many of the gains achieved by Baltimore's garment unions eroded as the pursuit of ever-shrinking profits led many manufacturers to once again increase their reliance on sweatshops. Despite the fact that union strikes eventually brought new gains, Baltimore's once thriving garment trade was in sharp decline by the 1930s. Though there are still a small number of women sewing coats and uniforms in various downtown clothing shops, Baltimore's days as a center of ready-to-wear garment production are long gone. Luckily, this handsome brick building weathered the decline of the garment industry and years of neglect. PMC property group acquired the building in 2005 and it now houses well-appointed apartments that feature high ceilings, large windows, and a bit of Baltimore history.
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Davidge Hall, on the University of Maryland Medical School Campus, is the oldest medical facility building in the nation. The red brick structure is named after the school's founder and first dean, John Beale Davidge. It was designed by architect Robert Carey Long, Sr. Constructed in 1812 on land purchased from Revolutionary War Hero John Eager Howard, the building was near the western edge of the growing city of Baltimore and offered medical students and teachers an excellent view of the harbor. In 1814, observers reportedly witnessed from the building's white-columned porch the "bombs bursting in air" during the British attack of Fort McHenry. Although large by early nineteenth century standards, this beautifully restored Classical Revival style building was by no means luxuriously outfitted. Heated by gas stoves close to the ceiling, Davidge Hall was cold, dark, and dank in the winter, frequently filled with noxious odors from the primitive embalming that took place in the anatomy lab and reeked of fumes from chemical experiments performed in the lower lecture hall. Though the practice of medicine has changed and improved over the years and the building has been updated, Davidge Hall has retained many original details and remains an iconic part of the medical school campus. Astoundingly, all of the nearly 20,000 students educated by the University of Maryland School of Medicine to date have passed through this exquisite building's doors. In 1974, Davidge Hall was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1997, the U.S. Department of the Interior named the building a National Historic Landmark. The building is currently used for special events and houses a collection of medical artifacts, including paintings, antique medical instruments, and a mummified human.
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Constructed in 1882, the Orchard Street United Methodist Church is one of the oldest standing structures built by a Black congregation in Baltimore. The church was established by Trueman Pratt, a free Black man who was born into slavery in Anne Arundel County, came to Baltimore, and began organizing prayer meetings at his home on Pierce Street in 1825. According to some sources, Pratt was originally held by General John Eager Howard and sold several times before he purchased his own freedom. The church formally organized in 1837 and, in 1839, Trueman, together with fellow free blacks Cyrus Moore and Basil Hall, leased the grounds at the corner of Orchard Street and what was then called Elder Alley and the church appeared as "Orchard Chapel," in a 1842 Baltimore business directory. The congregation paid $80.50 annually to Kirkpatrick Ewing, a Pennsylvanian who owned the property. The first building went up in 1838 followed by additions in 1853 and 1865 to accommodate a growing congregation. After the end of the Civil War, a great number of recently emancipated Black Marylanders from rural counties on the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland moved to Baltimore and many lived in the area around the church. One such individual was the Reverend Samuel Green, a Dorchester County native, who had been imprisoned five years in the state penitentiary for possessing the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Green moved to Baltimore in the early 1870s in order to work for the burgeoning Centenary Biblical Institute (now Morgan State University) and worshipped at Orchard Street until his death in 1877. By the time founder Trueman Pratt died in 1877—allegedly reaching over one hundred years of age—the congregation had clearly outgrown their building and began making plans to build a new church. In 1882, a Baltimore architect named Frank E. Davis was tasked with constructing the new facility on the same location. The church, renamed the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church, was finished that December at an approximate cost of $27,000. Thousands of Baltimoreans came out for the laying of the corner-stone, including numerous prominent ministers from the region. A contemporary newspaper account refered to the finished building as the "foremost colored house of worship in the state." The church developed into an important civic institution for the African American community, often hosting conferences related to politics and education. The Colored Maryland Literary Union, the Washington Methodist Episcopal Conference, and reunions of United States Colored Troops met at Orchard Street over the years. Teddy Roosevelt even took to the pulpit in advance of the 1912 election in order to warn black voters against accepting bribes by "unscrupulous white men." The church remained in operation until the congregation relocated in 1972. Unfortunately, within a year, a fire and recurring vandalism nearly led to the structure being demolished by the city. Recognizing its historical significance, community groups mobilized to save the church. Several preservation organizations, including the Maryland Commission on Negro History and Culture, sought to document its story. Local historians succeed in listing the building on the National Register of Historic places in 1975. During the research process no evidence was recovered to support rumors of Underground Railroad activity, though church members may well have participated in that movement. Efforts to restore the church and establish a museum of black history in the state repeatedly stalled throughout the next 15 years. Orchard Street finally received the necessary backing when the Baltimore Urban League decided to move its offices there in 1992. The organization funded much of the restoration, which has returned the aged structure to its former grandeur.
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Erected high on a hill above the Gunpowder River Valley, Perry Hall Mansion dominated life in northeastern Baltimore County in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Built in the 1770s by Harry Dorsey Gough, Perry Hall was named after the family castle near Birmingham England. The sixteen-room home, the seat of a vast plantation, soon became one of the leading houses in colonial Maryland. The mansion, considered a “sister” house to near by Hampton Mansion, turned from a house of raucous parties to a place of more reserved pleasure as Gough and his wife, Prudence, became ardent supporters of the early Methodist movement that had strong roots in Maryland.
Gough became a distinguished planter, a member of Maryland’s House of Delegates, and on the board of one of Maryland’s first orphanages. After Gough’s death in 1808, the mansion remained in the family for nearly fifty years. It was sold to a group of investors in 1852 that carved the plantation into lots for houses, many of which went to German immigrants. By 2001, the estate had dwindled to four acres and the house was sold to Baltimore County for use as a museum and community center. The County completed the first stage of restoration in 2004, and exterior restoration won an award from the Preservation Alliance of Baltimore County as an “outstanding public project.” The Friends are continuing with the restoration of this stately home.
In 1863, the Baltimore City Council approved a $300,000 loan to construct a billion gallon capacity reservoir in the newly established Druid Hill Park. Though the new city waterworks project from Lake Roland to the Mount Royal Reservoir on the Jones Falls had just been completed, it had become apparent that the city’s water problems were far from solved.
Having an abundance of natural springs and deep ravines, Druid Park seemed to be the perfect site for a new reservoir. In addition to providing suitable drinking water, this reservoir was also meant to enhance the beauty of the newly created park, accompanying its ancient oak trees bearing noble names such as “The Sentinel,” “King of the Forrest,” and “Tent Oak.”
A deep ravine formed by a stream that traveled southeast from the boat lake toward the Jones Falls was selected as the site for the new reservoir. Civil engineer Robert Martin developed plans and constructed a giant wall of mud that became the largest earthen dam in America (at that time). Steam excavators were used for the first time in the city to move 500,000 cubic yards of earth. The dam itself consisted of a water tight clay core, or puddle wall, surrounded by steep banks of soil, and was supported by a stone wall laid in cement running the entire length of the dam. Earthen banks were laid in thin layers and pressed by horse drawn rollers.
When completed in 1871, the dam supported a reservoir that covered 55 acres, reached a depth of 94 feet (averaging 30 feet), and sat at an elevation 217 feet above mid-tide. Towering over the surrounding park at a height of 119 feet, the dam was 750 feet long, with a width of 600 feet at the base tapering up to 60 feet at the top.
The resulting body of water had been known during the first half of its construction as Lake Chapman, after Unionist Mayor and head of the Water Board at the time, John Lee Chapman (1811-1880). Since much of Chapman’s tenure as mayor was characterized by the bitter partisan feuding of the Civil War period, it came as little surprise when his Democratic successor, Robert T. Banks (1822-1901), and the City Council voted unanimously to change the name to Druid Lake just four months after he left office in early 1868.
Over 140 years later the dam still holds strong, and in 1971 it was named a National Historic Civil Engineering landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
On an auspicious afternoon in late September 1903, a crowd of Baltimoreans converged onto the intersection of Mount Royal Avenue and Lanvale Street to witness the unveiling of the William H. Watson monument. The monument, erected by the Maryland Association of Veterans of the Mexican War, honored Marylanders who lost their lives during the U.S.-Mexican War.
Taking place on the fifty-seventh anniversary of Lieutenant Colonel Watson’s death during the Battle of Monterey, spectators watched as aged survivors of the war took their places on the grandstand. Meanwhile, they also laid eyes on the over ten-foot statue, draped in the flag that had shrouded Watson’s corpse as it left Mexico. The most symbolic moment came when Watson’s last surviving child, Monterey Watson Iglehart, walked towards her father’s likeness and unveiled the statue. The unveiling by Iglehart, born on the day her father died, was the highlight of a ceremony that included speeches from U.S.-Mexican War veterans, politicians, and other dignitaries.
Given U.S. activity in the Caribbean at the time, and the monument’s connection to the U.S.-Mexican War, the memorial presented a counterpoint to the overall anti-imperialist sentiment that existed in Baltimore. By highlighting the valor and honor of Baltimore’s U.S.-Mexican War heroes, the public viewed the veterans as heroes of a conflict which greatly benefited the United States, as opposed to participants in an unjustifiable land grab. Thus, the monument served to legitimize the United States’ imperialist endeavors of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The monument, created by sculptor Edward Berge, was originally located at Lanvale Street and Mount Royal Avenue. In 1930, the monument was moved to Reservoir Hill—what was then the entrance to Druid Hill Park—because of a planned extension of Howard Street. Today, the monument blends into the scenery of west Baltimore. The war that it commemorates has faded from memory.
The 14 West Hamilton Street Club, a group of Baltimoreans who enjoy good company, lively conversation, and decent meals, formed in 1925. Young Princeton graduates in the city, eager to continue the traditions of the campus eating club, and several additional members of the venerable Baltimore Club who enjoyed special events with speakers joined forces that year and obtained quarters on this narrow old thoroughfare, which runs for just a few blocks east and west, above Franklin Street and south of Centre, a short distance from Mount Vernon Place. The club grew slowly but confidently. It kept few records and still prides itself on having no officers and as few rules as possible. First occupying a carriage house at 9 West Hamilton Street, then a townhouse at no. 16, the club in 1936 purchased no. 14—the center building of a set of five designed and built by Robert Cary Long, Sr., probably before 1820—and has been there ever since.
The club continues, as originally it did, to draw members from journalism, architecture, medicine, the law, the arts, and scholarship. Founding and early members included, as examples, a juvenile court judge and head of Baltimore social services, Thomas J. S. Waxter; Dr. I. Ridgeway Trimble, a Baltimore native and Johns Hopkins Medical School graduate; the Haverford College star athlete and Harvard-trained member of the Baltimore bar, James Carey III; D. K. Este Fisher, a prominent Baltimore architect; former judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals William L. Henderson; a Cornell University graduate and physician, William F. Rienhoff Jr.; Hamilton Owens, editor of the Evening Sun; the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Sun cartoonist Edmund Duffy and other newspaper editors and writers, among them John W. Owens, Gerald W. Johnson, Frederic C. Nelson, Louis Azrael, William Manchester, and Robin Harriss; the Johns Hopkins research scientist and amateur musician Raymond Pearl; a Peabody concert pianist, Frank Bibb; George Boas, a distinguished Johns Hopkins University philosopher; Sidney Painter, renowned Johns Hopkins medievalist; a University of Maryland Law School dean, Robert H. Freeman; the writer/historian Hulbert Footner; Wilbur H. Hunter, director of the Peale Museum; John Dos Passos and Ogden Nash; and a succession of heads of the Johns Hopkins Medical School—Lewis Weed, Alan M. Chesney, Thomas B. Turner (who celebrated his one-hundredth birthday at the club in 2002), and Philip Bard. Gilbert Chinard, a student of French history and culture at Johns Hopkins, expounded on the delights of French cooking before taking a faculty position at Princeton. The editorial page editor and food critic at the Sunpapers, Philip M. Wagner, established Boordy Vineyards, the first successful vineyard in modern-day Maryland. William W. Woollcott, a free spirit and wit who worked for the family chemical company, once observed, "Here I am, the only businessman in the club, surrounded by parasites." In all, members have shared intellectual curiosity, irreverence, and a devotion to those fine things that deans of liberal arts colleges remind us to cherish—truth, justice, and beauty.
At mid-twentieth century, a Sunpapers columnist and early club member, Francis F. Beirne, published a volume entitled The Amiable Baltimoreans, in which he sketched a portrait of the club. Early in World War II, he reported, a member had explained to a guest that, at Hamilton Street, anyone was entitled to say anything he wanted and talk for as long as he wished, although no one had to listen. The visitor, Lord Lothian, announced that he knew of such a place at home—the House of Lords.
H. H. Walker Lewis, lawyer and anointed club scribe, wrote a delightful history of the club on its fiftieth anniversary in 1975. Not long afterward the club departed long practice and admitted women. To capture the story of that decision and the searching it inspired, Bradford McE. Jacobs, an Evening Sun editorial page editor, contributed a mock-heroic codicil to Walker’s history entitled "A Chronicle of a Certain Episode Which Occurred at Fourteen West Hamilton Street."
The iconic Baltimore & Ohio Warehouse at Camden Yards is an icon of Baltimore's industrial heritage and a unique example of creativity in historic preservation and adaptive reuse. Construction on the warehouse started in 1899. Architect E. Francis Baldwin likely served as the architect having designed warehouses for the B&O at Locust Point in 1879-80 and at Henderson's Wharf in Fell's Point in 1898. When a five-story addition was completed next to Camden Station in 1905, the narrow fifty-one-foot wide warehouse squeezed into the busy railyard by stretching four full blocks along South Eutaw Street. The company boasted that the facility could hold one thousand carloads of freight at once.
The warehouse remained in use through the 1960s but was largely abandoned by the 1970s, in favor of new single-story facilities. By the 1980s, the structure was threatened with demolition to make way for a new stadium. 91Ƶ and Maryland State Senator Jack Lapides led an effort to fight for the preservation of the warehouse and the rehabilitation of Camden Station. Leadership from the Maryland Stadium Authority responded and, with support from the Baltimore Orioles, architects Helmuth, Obata & Kassabaum and RTKL Associates transformed the vacant warehouse into the star attraction of the new stadium complex.
Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992 and the ballpark has remained a much-loved landmark ever since. The warehouse is now home to team offices and a private club for the Orioles. In 1993, the building even caught a long ball—a 445-foot shot by Ken Griffey, Jr. on July 12, 1993 during the 1993 All Star Game Home Run Derby—marked with a small bronze plaque matched by those on Eutaw Street for the occasions when a player has hit a ball out of the park.
For more than 85 years, the large sign atop the Stieff Silver Building has spelled out the name of a company once synonymous with Baltimore. The movement of the Stieff Company from downtown to the bucolic neighborhood of Hampden mirrored the changes that Baltimore and many other cities experienced during the twentieth century. The Kirk-Stieff Company was the oldest silversmith firm in the country when the factory closed its doors in 1999, marking the end of a tradition that had flourished in Baltimore since the early nineteenth century. Entrepreneur Charles Clinton Stieff founded the company in 1892 at 110 W. Fayette Street. After several name changes, the Stieff Company became a major player in the silver manufacturing business. In 1894, Stieff opened a showroom at 17 N. Liberty Street near the Howard Street shopping district, which turned Stieff into a familiar name for generations of Baltimoreans. Watch our Five Minute Histories video on this site! Charles C. Stieff’s son Gideon took over in 1914 around the same time automobiles were changing the pace of city life. A few years later, a trip to Druid Hill Park would forever change the face of Stieff Silver. Gideon and his future wife Claire were enjoying an outing at the park when she pointed out a plot of land that she thought would suit the company’s plans for a new factory. They were looking at the mill village of Hampden, just across the Jones Falls from the park. Although the city annexed this community in 1888, it still remained relatively isolated well into the twentieth century. This sylvan streetcar suburb attracted the Stieffs, who marketed the new building’s “out-of-the-congested district” location with unlimited parking to appeal to shoppers in the mid-twentieth century. The Stieff Company purchased the land from Mount Vernon Mill in 1922 and broke ground on the project in 1924. Production began at the Hampden location in 1925 and was so successful, the company decided to double the size of the factory in 1929. They might have reconsidered the addition had they been able to predict the Great Depression, but the company managed to hang on during the difficult economic times of the 1930s. A degree of stability was established in 1939 when Stieff signed a contract to reproduce silver for Colonial Williamsburg. During World War II, when the federal government took control of the nation’s silver supply, the company made surgical equipment and aluminum ice trays to remain solvent. They began working with pewter in the 1950s, which quickly became the majority of their business. Demand for silver and pewter was high in the postwar period when the company opened a retail store on the 200 block of N. Howard Street and, in 1970, built a large addition to the Hampden factory. They purchased S. Kirk and Son, another Baltimore silversmith firm that had been in the business since 1815, and assumed the name Kirk-Stieff in 1979. The company, like many other industries in Baltimore and across the U.S., faced serious challenges in the 1980s and 1990s. The Howard Street showroom closed in 1981, adding yet another vacant storefront to the once bustling commercial center. The Kirk-Stieff Company ceased operations in January 1999. Local developers Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse bought the building for $1.5 million in 2000. After investing $13.2 million to renovate the interior into office space, several nonprofit groups moved to the Wyman Park Drive location in 2002. Although its occupants have changed, the large electric sign atop the Stieff Silver Building remains an icon for many Baltimoreans.
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In the late 1970s, Mayor William Donald Schaefer proposed the creation of a museum to tell the story of Baltimore industry across two centuries of American history. Even before they the new museum found a building, Baltimore City officials organized an exhibit at the Baltimore Convention Center, and put up a display about the museum-to-be during the Baltimore City Fair. Roger B. White, a young city employee hired under the Comprehensive Employment Training Act, led the search to find an appropriate location, acquire collections, and recruit private donors. White found a Platt & Company oyster cannery building on the 1400 block of Key Highway and began the process of turning the old factory into a museum. Once one of eighty canneries operating around Baltimore’s harbor, Platt & Company on Key Highway was one of the last canneries left. The museum developed exhibits on three major periods of Baltimore’s industrial growth: 1790-1830, 1870-1900, and 1920 up through the 1970s. White acquired equipment from the American Brewery and furnishings from the local Read’s Drug Store chain. In November 1981, after years of preparation, the doors opened to the public at the renovated oyster cannery reborn as the Baltimore Museum of Industry. By December, Baltimore City had awarded the museum $25,000 to pay for the cost of school field trips and, in 1984, the city decided to purchase the site. The museum originally leased the building for around $25,000 a year but, after the property sold to Baltimore City, the rent climbed to $85,000. The museum organized a corporate membership drive in order to cover the rising rent. At the same time, the museum sought to triple the amount of space in the facility while adding a pier and waterfront improvements. In 1996, with only half of the renovation complete, Alonzo Decker Jr., former Black & Decker chief executive, donated $1 million to the fund. With this single donation, the museum surpassed its' $3.5 million goal and finished the renovation. For his gift, the Museum inscribed Decker’s name on the wall of the main gallery. Today, the museum thrives as an immersive experience of permanent and temporary exhibits that detail and demonstrate the industrial history of Baltimore. The exhibits include machinery from a cannery, garment loft, machine shop, pharmacy and print shop and the collections include around a million artifacts. With a pier and waterfront area, the museum often hosts weddings and corporate events as well.
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In 1942, after taking a powerful loss during the early years of the Great Depression, the Hochschild Kohn & Co. Department Store was finally ready to expand. An anchor for this planned growth was their brand-new warehouse at 520 Park Avenue that housed all of the sundry items that the department store offered.
Founded in 1897 by Max Hochschild and brothers Benno and Louis Kohn, Hochschild Kohn was the first of Baltimore’s big department stores to expand beyond the downtown shopping district of Howard and Lexington Streets. The company established its first suburban store in Edmondson Village (1947), then another on York Road and E. Belvedere Avenue (1948). It eventually had stores in Towson, Harford Mall, and beyond.
The warehouse on Park Avenue is a massive building of reinforced concrete. More impressive than the building’s size is that it got built at all. In 1942, the United States had just entered World War II and the federal government strictly rationed building materials, including the concrete and steel the building needed. Company records indicate that it took vice president Walter Sondheim (who went on to lead the integration of Baltimore’s school system after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 among many other civic contributions) pleading with the U.S. War Department that the building justified an allocation of construction materials as it would serve as a distribution center. Sondheim’s persuasion worked, and the building opened and operated as a warehouse and furniture showroom until 1983.
In 1983, the Bank of Baltimore purchased the building and converted it into offices. In 2014, the building underwent another conversion when Marks, Thomas Architects, Kinsley Construction, and The Time Group transformed the building into 171 apartment units with commercial space on the ground floor.
Today, the one-time furniture showroom and department store warehouse that defied war time rationing is now a hub of activity at the edge of the Mount Vernon neighborhood.
Alfred G. Vanderbilt once said of Pimlico that it is “more than a dirt track bounded by four streets. It is an accepted American institution, devoted to the best interests of a great sport, graced by time, respected for its honorable past.”
Opened in 1870, Pimlico Racetrack is also Baltimore through and through. Engineered by General John Ellicott for the Maryland Jockey Club, the track was built after Governor Oden Bowie out-bid the rival Saratoga, New York racing club to host a special race by pledging to build a model track in Baltimore.
The track has been going strong ever since, even surviving an anti-gambling movement in 1910 when Congress carved out Maryland and Kentucky from a national prohibition on horse racing.
Although a devastating fire destroyed the old clubhouse in 1966, the seven furlong track, stables for a thousand horses, and even the new grandstands at Pimlico today still hold loads of Baltimore history and stories.
Built in 1921, Pool No. 2 in Druid Hill Park served the recreational and competitive swimming needs of over 100,000 Black residents Baltimore. Pool No. 2 measured just 100’ x 105’ (half the size of whites-only Pool No. 1), but proved so popular that the swimmers had to be admitted in shifts. In 1953, a young Black boy swimming with friends in the Patapsco River accidentally drowned. The tragedy revealed the difficult circumstances for many Black residents looking for a place to swim in Baltimore. The boy lived near Clifton Park but swam in a dangerous river due to his exclusion from the park’s whites-only pool. In response, the NAACP started a new push to make all of Baltimore's municipal pools open to all races. When the City Parks Board refused to desegregate, the NAACP filed a lawsuit and eventually won on appeal. On June 23, 1956, at the start of the summer season, Baltimore pools opened as desegregated facilities for the first time. Over 100 African Americans tested the waters in previously white-only Pool No. 1 but only a single white person swam in Pool. No. 2. Pool No. 2 closed the next year and remained largely abandoned up until 1999. That year, Baltimore artist Joyce J. Scott won a commission to turn Pool No. 2 into a memorial. In creating her installation, Scott asked herself, “How do we make this area useful and beautiful, and harken back to the pool era?” The results combined architectural elements and aquatic symbolism with abstract, colorful painted designs on the pavement around the pool. The designs and interpretive signage have weathered in the years since but Pool No. 2 remained an important destination to explore the Civil Rights history of Druid Hill Park and Baltimore's pools. Watch our on this site!
The Zell Motor Car Company Showroom on East Mount Royal Avenue was built in 1909 and expanded in 1915. The design, by local architect Edward H. Glidden, remains a unique reminder of Baltimore’s early automotive history and the changing face of Mount Royal Avenue.
The story of the Zell Motor Car Company starts in 1902 when Arthur Stanley Zell established the business—the first automobile distributor in Maryland started by one of the first people in Maryland to own a car. Before joining the automotive industry, Zell drove in early automobile races winning a number of records on the East Coast. As a member of the Baltimore Automobile Dealers’ Association, Zell helped to organize the first automobile show in Baltimore in 1906. He also served as a founding member of the Maryland Automobile Trade Association and, at his farm at Riverwood, he raised Guernsey cattle, Jersey Duroc hogs, and show dogs. Plans for the firm’s modern showroom on Mount Royal Avenue first appeared in December 1908 when trade publication "The Automobile" reported that the Zell Motor Car Company had solicited plans for a three-story garage about 50 feet deep by 100 feet wide. The design boasted a large open fireplace (a new feature for showrooms borrowed from examples in Paris), a large electric elevator to carry cars between floors, and a special room for chauffeurs with a “telephone connection” to let owners “be in touch with their drivers at all times.” The structure, erected by the Baltimore Ferro Concrete Company, cost around $40,000 to build. The Baltimore Sun observed on December 22:
The rapid success of the Zell Motorcar Company in the sale of the Peerless and Chalmers-Detroit motorcars since its incorporation last August has compelled it to seek larger and permanent quarters, its present temporary location at 1010 Morton street being totally insufficient.The building’s architect, 35-year-old Edward H. Glidden (1873-1924), brought the same tasteful design sensibility he applied to a growing number of apartment houses in the city’s growing northern suburbs: Earl Court (1903), the Winona (1903), the Rochambeau (1905; demolished 2006), the Washington (1905-6), the Marlborough (1906), and the Wentworth (1908). Not limited to apartments, the architect’s designs also included the National Marine Bank (1904) and the Seventh Baptist Church (1905) on North Avenue. Gildden’s later commissions, often with his partner Clyde Nelson Friz, included the Latrobe (1911; Glidden & Friz), the Esplanade (1911-12; Glidden & Friz), Calvert Court (1915), and Tudor Hall/Essex Arms (1910, with Friz; 1922), Furness House (1917), and the Forest Theater (1918-19). The French precedent for the grand fireplace at the Zell Motor Car Company showroom are likely based on Glidden’s studies in Paris around 1908 to 1912. Zell hired Glidden again in early 1914 to expand and improve the showroom on Mount Royal Avenue, according to a February 9, 1914 mention in Industrial World noting that Gildden had “drawn up plans covering the same general design and character of building as their present one.” The business thrived as the local dealer for the Packard—an independent automaker based in Detroit that specialized in high-priced luxury automobiles. The Zell Motor Car Company also operated a service facility nearby (set back from North Avenue on Whitelock Street at Woodbrook Avenue) from around 1901 up until Packard stopped manufacturing automobiles in the late 1950s. The service facility is better known for the last few decades as the location of Greenwood Towing. Dealerships and service stations on Mount Royal Avenue, Charles Street and North Avenue flourished in the 1920s, endured through the Great Depression in the 1930s and still continued after World War II. Nearby dealers to the Zell Motor Company included Backus Ford, Weiss Ford, Chesapeake Cadillac, and Oriole Pontiac. Unfortunately for the Zell Motor Car Company, whose founder had died in 1935, the end of Packard’s automobile production in 1956 marked the end of their operation. Like other landmarks on Mount Royal Avenue, such as the conversion of Mount Royal Station into studios for MICA in 1968, the automotive showroom turned into offices and remains in use today. In 2015, the sign above the building’s Mount Royal Avenue entrance reads “The Towne Building” and the structure is up for sale.
On a blustery winter day in December 1987, a small crowd of spectators gathered around the Field House at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). They had assembled for the unveiling of a life-size bronze sculpture of the young university’s mascot. The Retriever statue, aka the True Grit statue, currently located in the plaza in front of the Retriever Activities Center (RAC) continues to stand as a reminder of the student body’s pride in their university.
The Retriever was chosen as the school mascot in 1966 by the first class of UMBC. A competition was held and forty different suggestions were presented. After a university-wide vote, administrators selected the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, a dog breed native to Maryland, as the school’s official mascot. The Retriever has since gone on to become the name of the student newspaper, yearbook, and athletic teams.
In 1986, Alumna Paulette Raye, philosophy major and self-proclaimed dog-lover, was commissioned by UMBC administrators to construct a statue for the school’s 20th anniversary, based on the university’s beloved mascot. Raye took several studio art classes during her time at UMBC, even earning three credits towards her degree, for creating the life-size bronze model of the Retriever. Raye’s “conception was that the dog should represent the study body—alert, intelligent, eager to learn and friendly.” To capture this “alertness,” Raye designed a statue of True Grit that would stand upright and gaze straight ahead with his ears cocked.
Raye worked on the statue for almost two years, using a local five year old Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Nitty Gritty as her model. True Grit was the name of Nitty Gritty’s father, and in an interview with UMBC Magazine Raye recalled that she wasn’t exactly sure “why the mascot received that name [True Grit instead of Nitty Gritty]… other than it sounded bold and strong—like the [school’s] team.” Nitty Gritty later had the honor of pulling a black cloth off the statue of himself at the statue’s inauguration.
During the unveiling ceremony on December 7, 1987, UMBC Chancellor Michael Hooker instituted a new tradition for the young university: rubbing True Grit’s nose for good luck. At the unveiling, Hooker remarked, “Tradition is exceedingly important. We used to be young [but] we are adults now. It is appropriate that we begin a new tradition.” Since its unveiling, the Retriever statue has remained a beloved campus landmark, often greeting students with a student newspaper in its mouth or bedecked with a cap and gown during graduation. Students continue to stop by during finals to rub True Grit’s nose, now discolored due to almost thirty years of UMBC students and faculty taking part in a campus-wide tradition.
More than a century before UMBC situated itself on Hilltop Circle another educational institution formed here; its mission was to advance the reformation of a poor lot of "indigent boys" from Baltimore.
The Baltimore Manual Labor School for indigent boys, also known as the Arbutus Farm School, was established in 1841. The school emerged from of a larger social movement developing in urban Victorian society at the time. Amidst the energetic fervor of the Second Great Awakening, white, middle-class Americans began actively participating in a reform movement to change the lives of the poor, inner-city population. Industrialization in the early nineteenth century brought extreme population growth to urban centers. In Baltimore, the population grew six fold between the years of 1820 and 1860. Specialized private and federal institutions formed to battle a rise in young people living in poverty. They began working to relocate children from what they saw as unpromising home environments to more positive atmospheres. The school provided a, “Free Boarding School for indigent boys, mostly sons of poor widows who are unable to feed, clothe, and train their boys during the years that they should be acquiring an education, to enable each to attain a position of self support.” The School opened its doors in 1841 with fifteen “destitute and orphaned boy[s].” By 1843, the Baltimore Manual Labor School had taken into its care a total of forty-two children. By applying the boys to a rigorous program centered primarily on physical labor, the school intended to mold the character of these young men, while at the same time supplying them with applicable work skills, effectively generating productive members of society. In 1893, directors of the Baltimore Manual Labor School wrote:
“the best occupation we can train our boys up to, is that of a farmer. It is perhaps almost the only calling which is not overcrowded, and the one most likely to produce an honorable and independent livelihood for the boys who have no capital, but health and energy.”The types of farm work included tending to the orchards, vegetable gardens, green houses and livestock. The boys attended educational classes including writing, reading and math. They also attended the Catonsville Methodist Church on Sundays and engaged in daily religious exercises. However, education and religion took a backseat to manual labor which required of a six hour daily shift from each child, even for young boys. The school admitted boys as young as five. In 1922, Spring Grove Hospital purchased the land following a devastating fire in 1916. The Stabler family owned the property and helped to run the school. Family patriarch Edmund Stabler held the position of superintendent from 1884 to 1904. Interestingly, the hospital used the farmland for a patient agricultural rehabilitation program. The state incorporated this and adjacent tracts of land in the early 1960’s in order to create UMBC. The Stabler home was used by Dr. Albin O. Kuhn, UMBC’s first Chancellor, during the construction of the campus and the Albin O. Kuhn Library now occupies the site where the home stood.