Artist Jim Sanborn’s first public sculpture, the Patapsco River Project was created as part of the Baltimore Sculpture Symposium sponsored by the city and administered by the Department of Housing and Community Development during the summer of 1977. Four artists were commissioned to each create gateway pieces for the city. The only other surviving gateway piece from the symposium is the Atlantic Blue Roller Column by Dominick Cea on Russell Street. This early work reveals Sanborn's long-standing interest in Mayan culture, the temples of Guatemala in particular. Abstract and horizontal, the work stands at the far edge of an open field directly fronting the Patapsco River, extending almost 80 feet along the water’s edge. Ten pyramidal shapes are aligned symmetrically, five on either side of an opening that contains a pool and allows a view of the river. In the pool, there is a grate made of aluminum. Light streams through the open space and is reflected on the grate and in the pool. Resting on top of the flattened pyramids made of concrete is one continuous lintel of weathering steel. The lintel carries four more pyramidal shapes, again symmetrically placed, two on each side of the central opening, and again flattened. The Department of Housing and Community Development assisted the artists at every turn, providing honoraria, materials, equipment, and assistants. For Patapsco River Project, Curtis Steel contributed between 12,000 and 15,000 pounds of Mayari-R steel, the city contributed and poured the concrete, and Edward Renneburg & Sons sheared the steel for free. Sanborn estimates that it might have cost him $100,000 to assemble the piece independently. Since 1977, Sanborn's sculpture has been displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His best known commission is an enigmatic cryptographic sculpture, entitled Kryptos, that was unveiled at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia on November 3, 1990. In 1977, the concrete was bright white, the steel was a beautiful velvety brown, and the grass was green and lush. Unfortunately, very little maintenance has taken place since the work was first installed and few people are aware of the work or Sanborn's national reputation. Despite the neglect, the silhouette of the piece was and still is impressive today.
This sculpture is depicts Glory, an allegorical figure that looks in this sculpture like an angel, holding up a dying Confederate soldier in one arm while raising the laurel crown of Victory in the other. The dying soldier holds a battle flag. Underneath, the inscription states “Gloria Victis,” meaning “Glory to the Vanquished.” The Maryland Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy funded the construction of this monument. It was sculpted by F. Wellington Ruckstuhl (also spelled Ruckstull), a French-born sculptor based in New York. It is located in a wide median on Mount Royal Avenue near Mosher Street in Bolton Hill. The inscriptions on the monument are the following:
Inscription on front of base: GLORIA VICTIS/ TO THE/ SOLDIERS AND SAILORS/ OF MARYLAND/ IN THE SERVICE OF THE/ CONFEDERATE STATES/ OF AMERICA/ 1861-1865.The Latin phrase on the base is "Deo Vindice, " meaning "Under God, Our Vindicator." The Italian phrase on the base, "Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine" is Maryland's state motto, "Strong deeds and gentle words," although the direct translation is "Manly deeds, womanly words." This monument bears a striking resemblance to two of Ruckstuhl's other sculptures - one Union, one Confederate. The Union Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1896) in Major Mark Park in Queens, New York, features the solitary Glory holding the laurel crown. The Confederate Monument (1903) in Salisbury, North Carolina is almost an exact replica of Baltimore's Confederate Soldier's and Sailors Monument, except that the dying soldier is holding a gun instead of a flag.On base, right side: DEO VINDICE
On base, left side: FATTI MASCHII/ PAROLE FEMINE
On base, back side: GLORY/ STANDS BESIDE/ OUR GRIEF/ ERECTED BY/ THE MARYLAND DAUGHTERS/ OF THE/ CONFEDERACY/ FEBRUARY 1903
On October 13, 1935, William “Little Willie” Adams and Victorine Quille were married at Saint Peter Claver Catholic Church. The young businessman and the school teacher each came from different backgrounds. William Adams, originally of Zebulon, North Carolina, arrived in Baltimore at age fifteen. Over the next six years, Adams worked his way up from running numbers and cutting sail cloth into rags at a shop on Caroline Street to owning three businesses (a bicycle shop, candy store, and barbershop). Victorine Adams grew up in a working-class family in Baltimore. She graduated from what is now Frederick Douglass High School and enrolled in the teacher training course at Coppin Normal School (now Coppin State University). Shortly after completing the two-year training course and beginning work as a teacher, Victorine met William Adams. The pair married in 1935 and, soon thereafter, William and Victorine emerged as an influential couple in the political, social, and economic spheres of Black Baltimore. They owned several businesses along Pennsylvania Avenue (including Club Casino and the Charm Centre) and made loans to Black business owners throughout the city in the 1940s and 1950s. But they also started to use their money and connections to push for political change. In 1946, Victorine founded the Colored Women’s Democratic Campaign Committee of Maryland (CWDCC) to interest Black women in politics and increase their participation in the social, civic, and economic development of the city. The CWDCC’s home base was the basement of the Adams family home on Carlisle Avenue in the neighborhood of Hanlon Park. When they moved to Hanlon Park in July 1949, the couple were the first Black residents in the community—most of their neighbors were white and Jewish. The basement served as the headquarters for many voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns, as Victorine trained volunteers how to vote using an instructional model table-top voting machine from the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation of Jamestown, New York. The couple helped many successful Black politicians win office in their campaign to diversify Maryland politics: Harry A. Cole to the Maryland State Senate in 1955; Verda Welcome to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1962; and Parren Mitchell to the United States Congress in 1970. Their home also served as the base for subsequent successful political campaigns by Victorine. She won her own seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1966 and became the first Black woman to serve on the Baltimore City Council after a successful race in 1967. The Adamses continued to be involved in Baltimore politics and philanthropy throughout their lives, whether they were fundraising for the now-defunct Provident Hospital or supporting the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Foundation, which awarded scholarships to Black residents of Baltimore City for undergraduate studies in business-related fields. Their Hanlon Park home sold shortly after Victorine died in 2006. William moved to an apartment at Roland Park Place where he died in 2011.Â
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The Appold- Faust Brothers Building at 307-309 West Baltimore Street is one of a handful of surviving cast-iron fronted buildings in Baltimore and one of the only structures in the city that can boast two iron facades on front and back.
The building's first owner, George J. Appold, a prominent entrepreneur and owner of Appold and Sons (the city's leading tannery and leather dealer), commissioned builder Benjamin F. Bennet to construct this Italianate structure in 1870. Appold advertised the space as suitable for any business requiring space, light, and an independent entrance on Baltimore Street. With its Corinthian columns, arched windows, and graceful segmented bays, the building was an elegant addition to the area and remains one of the finest examples of iron façade construction in Baltimore.
John Faust, a German immigrant and shoe manufacturing pioneer bought the building from George Appold in 1875 for $78,000. Faust soon demolished two buildings behind the structure and added a cast iron-front on Redwood Street as the entrance warehouse for his shoe factory. Faust was the first shoe manufacturer south of the Mason Dixon line to use machinery to craft shoes.
Though the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 threatened the building it emerged unscathed—together with its neighbors on the south side of Baltimore Street. The building has still seen its fair share of fire and destruction. Just three years after the Great Baltimore Fire, the Baltimore Sun reported that the structure (which at the time housed two local auction firms—Grotjan, Lobe & Co. and Lobe, Winkler & Co.) experienced a fire that caused $95,000 worth of damage, injured 15 people, and killed Baltimore fireman Tillerman Gill, who perished when a poorly constructed portion of the top floor, collapsed.
The owners repaired the building and, in 1908, the Baltimore Shoe House, proudly known as "The Fair and Square House" moved in. Israel Levenstein, a Russian Jewish immigrant who founded the firm in 1895 had welcomed partner Joseph Lubin into the business in that same year. The firm sold shoes and boots in the Mid-Atlantic and the South, and as far west as Texas and Oklahoma. After workers had gone home on a brisk October night in 1911 the Appold-Faust Building once again caught fire. The fire began in the basement and though over $20,000 worth of merchandise was lost, the automatic fire-alarm box in the building alerted the fire department in time and the building itself suffered only light damage.
Various shoe wholesalers and a host of merchants (including Hochschild Kohn, who used it as a warehouse in the 1920s) occupied this site in the early years of the twentieth century. From 1941 to the 1970s, a riding store called The Trading Post operated out of the building and in 2006 it was sold to Faust Brothers, LLC and rehabilitated as office space.
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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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 story of Hampden’s name can be traced back to St. Mary’s Community Center. Originally established as St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, the congregation started meeting in Hampden in the 1850s. Under the leadership of Henry Mankin this congregation petitioned the Diocese of Maryland for a new Episcopal church for his neighborhood, which was accepted in 1854. Mankin also named the neighborhood in honor of John Hampden, an English politician. Mankin admired him for the stand he took on taxation of the American colonies. Prior to American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were among those who referenced John Hampden to justify their cause.
The congregation’s original location was at Falls Road and 36th Street. However in 1858 the city needed this location for a reservoir, and along with the surrounding properties, condemned the original location. Today the reservoir is no longer in use and is now part of Roosevelt Park. Without a location to meet the congreation went a year without services. On May 31, 1860 construction began on a new church on Roland Ave.
At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, St. Mary’s first reverend left to become a chaplain for the Union Army, yet he did not resign his commission. He reported in 1863 that the church was burned down, but not before the carpeting had been stolen. In addtion Union soldiers camped on what is today Union Ave and stole the wooden fence for firewood. While the Federal Government did compensate the parish in a settlement, it was not enough for it to continue its work. The parish nearly closed. It was not until 1872, after the first reverend resigned, that a new rector was elected. A year later the congregation was able to raise the funds to lay a new cornerstone to rebuild the church where the structure stands today.
St. Mary’s operated as a church until 1999. It evolved into the St. Mary’s Community Center in 2002. Today the Baltimore Shakespeare Factory performs in the center’s Great Hall. This company recreates as closely as is possible the staging conditions, spirit, and atmosphere created by Shakespeare’s theatre company during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Hampden Hall was an important part of Baltimore even before the neighborhood of Hampden was a part of Baltimore. Six years before Hampden was incorporated into Baltimore City, Hampden Hall was constructed as a meeting hall for Civil War veterans in 1882. It was later used as a town hall and a venue for dances and concerts, among other events. Later as Baltimore City moved into the Progressive Age (1890-1920), Hampden Hall also changed with the times.
The Progressive Age is marked, in part, with an increase in commercialization. Baltimore businessman Theodore Cavacos, who owned a pharmacy that operated in Hampden Hall, bought the building in 1913. He expanded the hall by building storefronts along 36th Street. The Cavacos family owned the building until 2004. In 1975, the family worked with artist Bob Hieronimus and the city of Baltimore to create a large mural on the north side of the building that celebrates Hampden and two Medal of Honor winners, Lieutenant Milton Ricketts and Private First Class Carl Sheridan, from the neighborhood.
Lieutenant Ricketts was awarded his Medal of Honor for his service in the Navy in the Pacific Theater of World War II. While serving on the U.S.S. Yorktown in the Battle of the Coral Sea on May 8, 1942, a bomb exploded directly beneath Ricketts and mortally wounded him. However, before he died, he was able dampen the fire. This courageous action undoubtedly prevented the rapid spread of the fire to other parts of the ship.
Private First Class Sheridan won his Medal of Honor for his service in an attack on the Frezenberg Castle in Germany on November 26, 1944. With complete disregard for his own safety, he blasted a hole through a heavily-fortified door. Sheridan charged into the gaping entrance and was killed by the enemy fire that met him. The Sheridan-Hood Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3065 in Hampden was founded in 1945 and is named in memory of Carl Sheridan.
In the Progressive Age (1890-1920), movie theaters were a new and popular form of entertainment. They were being built all over Baltimore, and Hampden was no different. In 1908, Marion Pearce and Philip Scheck (who already owned six theatres) opened the Ideal Theatre as a nickelodeon. Small and simple theaters, nickelodeons charged a five-cent, or a nickel, admission fee.
In 1920, Baltimore City Delegate George D. Iverson sponsored legislation to repeal the law that required theaters to be closed on Sunday. However, the owners of the Ideal Theater opposed this legislation because they thought opening on Sunday would hurt their Saturday and Monday receipts. In 1922, Julius Goodman bought the theater for $18,000. In 1960, Schwarber Theaters bought the theater from the Goodman family. The last movie shown at the Ideal was PT 109 starring Cliff Robertson as a young John F. Kennedy, Jr. Released in September 1963, it was shown two months before Kennedy’s assassination.
After the Ideal closed, the building was leased to the Salvation Army. During this time the Stratis family purchased it and rehabbed it. They leased it to Woodward's, an antiques gallery and auction theater, which moved out in March 2014. Currently, the Ideal Theatre is a live music and performing arts venue. Most recently, it hosted the Ministry of Swing, which offered different kinds of dance and movement classes.
For 50 years, the Hampden and Ideal Theaters operated within a few doors of each other in the 900 block of 36th Street in Hampden. Julius Goodman, who ran the Ideal for many years, described the competition: “Well, we were friendly competitors. We split the product right down the middle. We had Metro and Warner Bros. and RKO; they were our basic majors. They had Paramount, Fox, and Columbia. And we had two minors, but they were very, very profitable; one was Republic Pictures who and Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and also John Wayne who made one or two pictures a year – I think the Sands of Iwo Jima was a Republic Picture, if I’m not mistaken – and Moongram Pictures with the Bowery Boys. So we split the product.”
The original Hampden Theater emerged in 1911 when Charles A. Hicks bought a tin shop for $1,500 and converted it into a theater. Like the Ideal, the Hampden Theater was a 21-day theater which means it would show movies 21 days after opening downtown. In April 1918 a series of patriotic meetings in support of the Third Liberty Loan (bonds sold to cover the expense of World War I) were held in several Baltimore theaters, including the Hampden. In 1926, architect George Schmidt designed a $70,000 updated theater. It was the only theater in Baltimore to feature a Gottfried Organ. The theater continued operating until 1976 when it was sold to local baker Bernard Breighner, who closed it 1978. Breighner converted the building into a mall and opened it in 1981. The mall has since closed and currently the old theatre is a commercial building that hosts a restaurant and yoga studio.
In 2013, the Baltimore Love Project painted its iconic mural on the front of the Hampden Theater.
In 1819, wealthy French merchant Louis Pascault, the Marquis de Poleon, constructed a row of eight houses on Lexington Street that now remain as the one of the earliest examples of the Baltimore rowhouse. Born in France, Pascault later moved to the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti). By the late 1780s, nearly 500,000 enslaved Africans labored at plantations on the island producing nearly half of the world's sugar and more than half of the world's coffee. In 1791, free blacks and enslaved people rose in revolt and Pascault joined thousands of white refugees fleeing the island for cities in the United States.
Pascault settled at Chatsworth, a large country mansion on Saratoga Street between Pine and Green, and profited from the quickly growing city's booming trade. After the city expanded in 1816, Pascault, together with carpenter and master builder Rezin Wight and merchant William Lorman, commissioned William F. Small to design this elegant row of Federal style houses adjacent to his estate. The dwellings soon attracted a host of wealthy residents, earning the row the distinction of being highlighted in an 1833 guidebook to Baltimore - the only row noted on the map.
The row soon became home to some of Baltimore's wealthiest families and remained a prestigious address for decades. Columbus O'Donnell, who was president of Baltimore's Gas and Light Company in the mid-nineteenth century and a director of the B & O Railroad (1839-1847) lived here with his wife, Eleanor, who was Louis Pascault's daughter. O'Donnell's mother, Sarah Chew Elliott O'Donnell, whose portrait hangs in Washington's National Gallery, lived in this row during the early 1820s. Her husband and Columbus' father, was John O'Donnell, a wealthy merchant and politician who had a momentous impact on Baltimore's international trade, particularly with China and Asia as a whole, and the man for whom Baltimore's O'Donnell Square is named.
By the 1970s, the iconic homes fell into disrepair. Using funds procured under the College Housing Loan Program, the University of Maryland, Baltimore, purchased the row in 1978 and renovated the historic buildings, transforming them into offices and student housing.
with research support from This story was created in partnership with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Department of History, Public History Track.
Pine Street Station, the handsome, slate-roofed High Victorian Gothic building was built between 1877 and 1878 and designed by architect Francis E. Davis. The red brick structure, which is trimmed with painted bluestone lintels and adorned with ornate pressed metal roof finials and hip ridges, served as a court and jail for the area west of Lexington Market from 1878 to 1951. Originally built to protect the area's growing number of banks and police the often raucous blocks of theaters and taverns around Lexington Market, the station underwent a major transformation in the mid-twentieth century.
In 1952, the station became Baltimore's Bureau of Aid and Prevention and was officially renamed "Pine Street Station," a name that city residents had already used for years. During its tenure as the Bureau of Aid and Prevention (BAP), the increasingly run-down brick building served as a refuge for homeless women and orphan children and housed a police boys club. Though Pine Street made a safe haven for the city's disenfranchised while operating as the BAP and, according to an article in the Afro-American, the cells were tidied up and painted gray and peach to better suit its new residents, the Baltimore Sun later criticized the station for its practice of locking young people up with hardened female criminals and for a staff that did not have adequate training to work with children.
Though all manner of prisoners landed in Pine Street over the years, the tumult of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s brought a new sort of inmate to the station: local female college students. Continuing its tradition of serving as a women's jail, city police often brought young women from Morgan State, Goucher College, and Johns Hopkins University to Pine Street after mass arrests during the 1950s and 60s civil rights demonstrations in Baltimore. Pine Street Station shut its doors in 1971 and sat vacant for twenty years while a planned extension of I-70 threatened the structure with demolition. Local preservation groups saved the building thanks to efforts that halted the highway at Leakin Park just outside of the city. In 1991, the University of Maryland acquired the building from Baltimore City and it currently houses the university's security department.
James Mosher Elementary (#144) was built in 1933. The original brick structure, facing Wheeler Avenue, was constructed in simple Art Deco style. In an era of segregation, it was designated a “white” school; children still were required to travel outside the neighborhood for junior high and high school. In the early 1950s, Baltimore school officials were described as stunned by the scale and pace of racial change on the west side. A September 1952, Sun article reported a spokesperson as saying that “Baltimore never has known anything such as the population shift within the summer months.” The reporter went on to write:
“The ingress of Negro home owners and dwellers in hitherto white neighborhoods in northwest and northeast Baltimore during the summer months has presented a problem which is bound to perplex the School Board until some kind of relief can be obtained either through construction of new facilities or through the use of portables.”School #144 was specifically identified as one of several schools where there had been “tremendous turnover” from white to black. By 1953 James Mosher–by then designated officially as a “colored” school–was reported to be tremendously overcrowded. In 1954, immediately following the Supreme Court ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional, Baltimore public schools became the first formerly segregated major urban system to adopt a desegregation policy. The change had little practical effect on schools already virtually all-black, like James Mosher. In 1955 a much-needed addition was completed along Mosher Street in contemporary architectural style. By then school enrollment had surpassed 900, up from less than 400 a few years earlier. Two new schools, built nearby in the 1960s, provided further evidence of the dramatic growth in the area’s school-age population. In 1960, Calverton Junior High was constructed on the western edge of the neighborhood. The massive complex housed four nearly self-contained units, each conceived as a “school within a school.” In 1963, Lafayette Elementary School was built, also on the west side. It closed as a standard elementary school in 2003 and reopened as the Empowerment Academy, a public charter school.
In 1967, the Baltimore Afro-American called the home in the 2500 block of Harlem Avenue "a typical slice of Baltimore:"
"The 2500 block of Harlem Avenue is a microcosm of middle-class Baltimore. . . . A visit to the neighborhood on a late summer afternoon caught the block in a typical setting. The tall, majestic greystone Union Memorial Church dominates the northwest corner of Harlem and Warwick Avenues. The row homes are separated from the tree-lined streets by carefully tended shrubbery and small neatly trimmed plots of lawn..." "Warren Peck, at 2507, is an arts and crafts teacher for the Department of Education... He has lived in the area since 1952 when he was discharged from the Army [as a World War II and Korean War veteran] ... Like most of the residents in the block, he is a native Baltimorean... He worked as a Pullman porter for several years before he was drafted into the army, and later returned to the railroad. “There was good money in those days,” Mr. Peck maintains. As a matter of fact, it was primarily money saved up from his railroad work that enabled him to buy the home in 1952, he said. He paid $11,500 for the house when the neighborhood was undergoing a racial change... Mr. Peck is one of 11 teachers living in the 2500 block of Harlem Ave. Among the residents are at least two ministers, a nurse, two proprietors of beauty salons, three Social Security Administration employees, and a number of retired persons."The article reported the statements of one of the only two white residents who remained on the block in 1967:
"Miss Julia Knoerr has lived with her two bachelor brothers there since 1926: 'The real estate people used to call me all the time, but I settled them–I made it clear that I didn’t intend to move anywhere. . . . I thought it was silly the way people began to move out [in the early 1950s], but some people will complain about anything.' . . . Contrary to claims of opponents of fair housing who say property value drops when integration comes, Miss Knoerr believes that property values have improved in the block over the past 15 years. 'Everybody takes more interest in keeping their places nicer than people used to,' she noted.”Dr. J. Welfred Holmes, a Morgan State College (now University) professor of English lived at 2559 Harlem Ave. from the early 1950s to his death in 1968. The obituary in the Sun noted that he had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, then taught at several historically black colleges before coming to Morgan in 1946. One of the co-founders of the Evergreen Protective Association, he also was active in Baltimore Neighborhoods, Inc. (a fair housing advocacy group) and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Today, the parking lot of the West Baltimore MARC Station and the concrete highway lanes to the east dominate this site, symbols both of the weight of the past and prospects for the future. In the 1970s major demolition occurred in the corridor to the east to build the first leg in a proposed East-West expressway, envisioned as the eastern extension of Interstate 70. The route was to proceed west along a corridor directly through the Greater Rosemont communities and continue on through the heart of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park. African American residents in this section of the city fought the road plan under the banner of RAM (Relocation Action Movement). The organization joined with city-wide expressway opponents under the umbrella of MAD (the Movement Against Destruction), a coalition that cut across lines of race, class, and differing interests in opposition to various sections of the proposed expressway system. In the late 1960s, the city condemned hundreds of houses along the corridor to the west of this site for the proposed highway. However, mounting protests initially forced the decision to designate an alternate route and eventually to abandon the section through Greater Rosemont and the parks to the west altogether. Soon, the one-mile stretch of expressway that was completed with such controversy and such cost—economic as well as social—was being called “The Road to Nowhere.” To the west of the station, between Franklin Street and Edmondson Avenue stand 880 houses condemned by Baltimore officials for the proposed construction of the East-West Expressway in the late 1960s, little more than a decade after African Americans had seized the opportunity to acquire homes in neighborhoods formerly closed to them. Witnessing the process immediately to the east where condemnation already had occurred (and demolition was imminent) for the artery to be built between Franklin and Mulberry Streets, Greater Rosemont residents became active in the Relocation Action Movement, which united with others opposing various sections of the proposed expressway system across the city under the banner of MAD. In April 1968, civil disturbances convulsed the city in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., adding to the general climate of heightened social tension between Baltimore’s citizens and its officials. For RAM, the highway threat was a civil rights issue. As an example, when the group’s proposal for an underground roadway to spare residences was rejected on the grounds that it would be too expensive, a member exclaimed, “It always has been expensive to operate a segregated society.” James Dilts, in a series of articles in the Sun that year, decried the logic of the expressway plan, which he believed amounted to destroying parts of the city and harming its residents, even as it promised to improve the city. Late in 1968, mounting opposition to the Greater Rosemont route led Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, III, to propose an alternative that would bypass the affected neighborhoods by following a route along the railroad line to the south. However, the following year, when the city announced a plan to sell the formerly condemned houses back to their original owners, only half took up the offer, the remainder having decided to move out for good. A 1970 Sun article referred to Rosemont as “a once stable middle-class Negro community which was devastated by plans to build the East-West Expressway through its core.”
The Columbus Monument is a forty-four foot tall brick and cement obelisk standing in a small park at Harford Road and Walther Boulevard. The monument to Christopher Columbus was erected by French consul, Charles Francis Adrian le Paulmier Chevalier d'Anmour, in 1792, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas.
After discovering that the newly created United States had no monuments dedicated to Columbus, the Chevalier decided to erect a monument to commemorate the Italian explorer and colonizer. The base of the monument was incised with the words “Sacred to the memory of Chris. Columbus, Octob. XII, MDCCVIIIC.” The work was unveiled on August 3, 1792, to honor the date the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria set sail from Palos, Spain then more formally dedicated two months later on October 12th. It remained the only monument dedicated to Columbus in America for another sixty years.
225 years later, in the middle of the night in late August 2017, a small group of unnamed protestors smashed a sledgehammer into the base of the obelisk breaking the incised stone panels. The event was recorded and shared on YouTube on August 21, 2017. Coming less than a week after protestors poured paint over the Key Monument on Eutaw Place, the video explained that “tearing down monuments” is linked to “tearing down systems” that maintain white supremacy.
Historians, activists, and indigenous people in North and South America have long rejected efforts to honor Columbus as a national hero. As early as 1977, participants in a UN-sponsored conference on discrimination against indigenous peoples in the Americas discussed replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. A statue of Christopher Columbus statue outside Union Station in Washington, DC splashed with red paint in an act of protest back in 1991.
In Baltimore, the controversy was perhaps more unexpected. Perhaps because the monument was located on private property—Villa Belmont, located at the present-day intersection of Harford Road and North Avenue—it was half-forgotten more than once. In the 1880s, a local historian felt compelled to debunk a popular rumor that the obelisk memorialized a horse named “Columbus” instead of the man. When the monument was relocated to Harford Road in 1963 it was replaced by an expanded Sears Roebuck Company parking lot.
Soon after the monument moved to northeast Baltimore, the city’s Columbus Day Parade (an annual tradition since the erection of the 1892 Columbus Monument in Druid Hill Park) followed. But the parade moved again in 1977 first to East Baltimore and then to the Inner Harbor after a third monument to Christopher Columbus was erected on Eastern Avenue near Little Italy in 1984. Even if the parade has moved on, however, the complicated legacy of the monument and the commemoration of Christopher Columbus remains.
The Mount Royal Reservoir was once an essential element within an extensive system of waterworks built to deliver clean drinking water to a growing, thirsty city. In 1857, the Baltimore City Council passed an ordinance to provide additional water to Baltimore City and soon started construction on a $1.3 million system of dams, conduits and reservoirs along the Jones Falls—the more affordable option when compared to a $2.1 million plan for diverting water from the Gunpower Falls. In 1858, what was formerly called Swann Lake was dammed up to become what we now know as Lake Roland. A massive conduit was built connecting it to the Hampden Reservoir. Finally, a conduit was excavated going south to the Mount Royal Reservoir just north of the city boundary and the waterworks were fully operational by 1862. By 1863, just over half of the city’s 38,881 buildings received water that was delivered from the Mount Royal Reservoir. The site of the Mount Royal Reservoir lay just west of the Northern Central Railroad tracks on the former site of the Mount Royal Mill property. The reservoir featured a large central fountain, similar to the one in present day Druid Lake, that shot a stream of water bubbling high into the air. Even before construction was complete, however, Baltimore residents discovered that this new source was once again insufficient for the growing population of the city and the large number of Federal troops stationed in Baltimore or passing through during the Civil War. During hot and dry periods of the summer the system would run short of supply and the Water Department’s response was to try to cut down demand by raising the price of water. The city’s poor living in low-lying neighborhoods and forced to use backyard pumps, were hit the hardest by the water-borne diseases that spread as a result. Sewage from cesspools leached into neighborhood wells and polluted the springs of the city, increasing the demand for clean water from the mains. Severe droughts from 1869 through 1872 finally forced the city to seriously consider the Gunpowder as a permanent water source. In 1910, the Mount Royal Reservoir was abandoned by the City Water Department and transferred to the Parks Department. In 1924 the City Park Board demolished the reservoir and removed 50,000 cubic feet of earth, turning the site into parkland. In 1959, the property was cut in two by the entrance to the new Jones Falls Expressway off of North Avenue. Today, you can still see the monumental entrance posts to Druid Park that stand at the base of the reservoir’s original location as you drive past on North Avenue.
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Only long-time residents of Baltimore can remember the Hampden Reservoir, buried since 1960 under debris from the construction of the Jones Falls Expressway and used as Roosevelt Park. The Hampden Reservoir was completed in 1861 three years after construction began at a cost of $206,643.50 by John W. Maxwell and Company. The reservoir was part of a system of improvements along the Jones Falls, including Lake Roland and the Mt. Royal Reservoir, to deliver a new supply of fresh water to Baltimore residents. The Hampden Reservoir remained in operation until 1915, when the municipal water supply was reconstructed once again, and the polluted 40,000,000 gallon reservoir was reduced to a neighborhood ornament. In 1930 it was drained and cleaned, and the pipes were cut off entirely from the city water system to prevent any contamination through seepage. Though the city threatened to drain it for years, Hampden residents managed to block all proposals for more than forty years.
In 1960 the Bureau of Water Supply began draining the reservoir without announcement. The city then revealed plans to fill the muddy pit and turn it into a Department of Aviation heliport. Neighborhood residents, led by Rev. Werner from the nearby Hampden Methodist Church (now known as the United Methodist Church), responded with an immediate outcry. The irate citizens protested that helicopters would be a major disturbance to the school, recreation center, and churches in the immediate proximity. Werner called the ordeal “an infringement on our territorial rights without due recourse to a public hearing.” Eventually the city retracted its proposal for the heliport. The draining did continue, however, as the city conveniently had an arrangement with the contractors excavating the new Jones Falls Expressway nearby. In exchange for a local site to dump the excavated soil, the city would receive a discount on the cost of that stretch of highway. So it was settled, the mud from the Jones Falls Expressway filled the giant hole, and the reservoir has been largely forgotten.
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.
The Washington Monument in the elegant Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland was the first architectural monument planned to honor George Washington. In 1815, a statue was designed by Robert Mills, who also designed the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Construction began in 1815 and was completed by 1829. The 178 foot doric column holds a ground-floor museum offering information about Washington as well as construction of the monument. Climbing the 228 steps to the top provides an excellent view of the city from the historic neighborhood where it is located. Its neighbors include the Peabody Institute. The monument, which was constructed of white marble from Cockeysville, rises 178 feet and consists of three main elements: a low, rectangular base containing a museum; a plain, unfluted column; and, atop the column, a standing figure of Washington. By the time of the monument's completion in 1829, financial constraints had forced a series of design compromises which simplified the monument.
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Harlem Park started as one of the largest squares in West Baltimore, 9 Âľ acres, more than double the size of Franklin, Lafayette, or Union Square. The grounds of the park and much of the land around it had originally belonged to Dr. Thomas Edmondson.
Dr. Thomas Edmondson was born in 1808 as the son of a prosperous local merchant and graduated in medicine from the University of Maryland in 1834. He never practiced medicine and instead focused on art and horticulture, building a grand mansion and greenhouses on a hill now bounded by Edmondson Avenue, Harlem, Fulton and Mount. Dr. Edmondson died in 1856 and his estate presented a section of the property to the City of Baltimore on November 11, 1867 as a gift for the creation of a public park or square.
The city passed an ordinance accepting the gift in February 1868 and improvements on the park soon began. The engineer and general superintendent for Druid Hill Park, August Paul, prepared a plan for the grounds with "Beds and mounds of exotic and native flowers, the most difficult of cultivation" laid out in patterns of "stars, diamonds, Maltese crosses, hearts, ovals, circles, and semicircles, each one of great artistic beauty and of remarkably accurate outline." Another account described a "group of willows that encircled a gurgling spring at the eastern end of the grounds... a white mulberry tree that was a delight to the neighborhood, and a great flowering tree of the lobelia family, abundant in the Hawaiian Islands."
The park was dedicated in 1876, as an asset to the increasingly developed blocks around the park and up to Fulton Avenue. The Harlem Stage Coach Company incorporated in February 1878 to run a line of omnibus coaches from Fulton Avenue to Edmondson Avenue before turning south at Harlem Park. One of the directors of the enterprise was Joseph Cone, who became a tremendously active rowhouse builder in West Baltimore during the 1870s and 1880s, putting up hundreds of rowhouses each year with then modern amenities such as gaslights, hot water, central heating, and door bells. Cone pioneered the financing strategy of "advance credit" where home-owners could pay for their properties piecemeal providing the builder with capital for putting up yet more houses.
Harlem Park was substantially diminished in the early 1960s, with the construction of a $5,300,000 school complex, designed by architects Taylor & Fisher, resulting in the demolition of homes and businesses along the northern edge of the park. The school also took the eastern half of the park to turn it into a school yard. The remaining square endures as a quiet green space still used by West Baltimore residents.
As early as the 1840s, a small oasis of green known as Perkins' Spring became a popular destination at the edge of the rapidly growing city. The park's unique value to local residents came from the fresh-water spring that poured out at a rate of 60 gallons a minute. One resident later recalled how their neighbors carried water away "by the barrel in the '80′s, especially when heavy rains flooded and polluted the normal supplies." In 1853, the city purchased a small triangle of land around the spring from the estate of Dr. Joseph Perkins bounded by Ogston Street, George Street, and Myrtle Avenue. The city hoped to protect the spring from development and preserve it as an amenity for a soaring population on the west side of Baltimore. City officials soon improved the new park with a brick enclosure and a cast iron Moorish-style canopy over the spring.
Mayor Joshua Van Sant appointed an official park keeper who lived in a frame house by the park's Myrtle Avenue entrance. The grounds were soon planted with hundreds of flowers of every shape, size and color, coleus and petunias the most common, all grown in the park's greenhouse built in 1887 and arranged in decorative patterns and designs.
Like many West Baltimore neighborhoods, the area around the park was primarily occupied by white households at its beginning but by the late nineteenth century, the city's black community had started to settle in the area. For example, in 1880, a church built by a German evangelical congregation facing the park at the corner of George and Ogston Streets became home to an African American congregation that soon established the Perkins Square Baptist Church. By the 1920s, Baltimore's black residents used the park for every day relaxation and special entertainment. On one warm June evening in 1922, over 3,000 black Baltimoreans crowded into the park to hear the Colored City Band, established by A. Jack Thomas, performing a selection of popular marches and operas.
In the decades after WWII, city leaders decried poor housing conditions in the neighborhoods around the park and resolved to address the situation through the construction of the new high-rise George B. Murphy Homes. Beginning with a ground-breaking ceremony at the corner of Myrtle and George Streets in December 1961, 758 housing units including four 14-story towers on a 13-acre site were built, surrounding Perkins Square on all sides. The complex opened to great acclaim on New Year's Eve 1963 but by the early 1970s, the housing project had already started to experience challenges. By the 1990s, Murphy Homes became known for crime and violence and plans moved forward for its demolition. Finally in 1999 on a bright July morning, 375 pounds of dynamite brought the towers to the ground. The park and the historic gazebo remain at the center of Heritage Crossing, a $53 million mixed-income development, still offering a restful bit of green for West Baltimore.
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.
Built in 1890, Public School No. 32, now better known as home to the Baltimore Montessori School, is a rare historic community school building, one of scores built in the late 19th century to support the city's rapidly growing population.
Like most school buildings at the time, Public School 32 was designed by the Baltimore Inspector of Buildings J. Theodore Oster, who served in the position from 1884 through 1896. The building shares a number of features that can still be found on old school buildings throughout the city, such as the double stair (one stair for girls and one for boys) along with the tower above. Born in Maryland in 1844, Oster had followed his father, Jacob Oster, to work as a carpenter and draftsman in their firm J. Oster & Son and rose to his position after serving as assistant building inspector in the early 1880s.
Contractor James B. Yeatman broke ground for the new building on Guilford Avenue in Feburary 1890 with the plan to have the building ready for students by the fall. The building had a front of pressed brick with with brown sandstone trim and included six class-rooms, two clock-rooms and a teachers' room on each floor. 1890 eventually set a new record for the Baltimore public school system with a total of 11 new school buildings completed thanks to the availability of "special funds for the purchase of sites and the erection of school-houses"Âť provided by a building loan to the city of $400,000 in 1888 and 1892.
When the building opened that fall, Catherine S. Thompson became one of the teachers and went on to become the longest serving educator at the school remaining through her retirement as principal in 1926. A graduate of Eastern High School at the southeast corner of Alsquith and Orleans, Thompson began her career in education at the age of 17 in School No. 6 in East Baltimore. Thompson became the head of the school in 1905 and remained there for over 20 years. She lived nearby at 1601 Calvert Street and after her death on December 5, 1937 she was buried in Greenmount Cemetery, just a few blocks east of the school where she worked for years.
When the nearby Benjamin Banneker Elementary School, previously known as Colored School No. 113, closed in the early 1960s with the continued desegregation of the Baltimore City public school system, the school expanded with the addition of a large new building just to the south on Guilford. Designed by the firm of Wheeler, Bonn, Shockey and Associates, the new building was designed to contain, "14 classrooms, 2 kindergartens, 330-seat auditorium, gymnasium, cafeteria, health suite, library, instructional materials center, administrative offices, and utility rooms" at a cost of a $962,000. The school took on the name Mildred Monroe in 1980, to honor a long time custodian at the building and a friend of many students.
After the school closed in 2001, it served as a homeless shelter and then as a location for the fourth season of The Wire on HBO, highlighting the challenges of Baltimore's public school system. In the past few years, both buildings have taken on new life as the home to the Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School.
The Centre Theatre opened on a February evening in 1939 with a Hollywood-style opening as "a thousand invited guest walked through the glare of spotlights while newsreel photographs turned their cranks and candid camera fans sniped from the sidelines." Crowds poured in to the theatre and turned to the circular proscenium covered with gold leaf and illuminated by hundreds of lights for a preview showing of "Tail Spin."
The $400,000 building (a transformation of an earlier auto dealership) was not just a theatre but included a whole complex with the WFBR radio station and studios, a branch bank office for the Equitable Trust Company, and a garage. Owner Morris A. Mechanic was born in Poland on December 21, 1904 and emigrated to Baltimore with his parents as a child. In 1929, Mechanic worked as the principal at a Hebrew School on West North Avenue and owned a chocolate shop downtown, when he decided to purchase the New Theatre as a real estate investment. The New Theatre's "box-office bonanza" success during a showing of "Sunny Side Up" encouraged him to stick with the theatre business for the rest of his life, owning dozens of theaters over the years before his death of a heart attack in July 1966.
The interior of the Centre Theatre featured a mural symbolizing entertainment and captioned, "Man works by day; night is for romance." by R. McGill Mackall, a MICA-trained Baltimore native who painted 53 large public murals in the city over his career. The design by Philadelphia architect Armand Carroll, described by the Sun as "conservatively modern" with decoration "intended to soothe rather than startle the spectator," won an award for "architectural attainment" from the Baltimore Association of Commerce as the best "Retail Commercial Building" built in 1939. When the theatre opened, Mechanic had an office on the second floor with a window "fitted with special glass... invisible from the theatre, the window permits anyone in the office to see the picture on the screen."
Morris Mechanic closed the theatre, later known as the Film Centre Theatre, on April 16, 1959, after the Equitable Trust Company announced plans to enlarge the complex and move their operations department into the building early in 1960. The bank planned to add a third story and "special dust-free areas... to create the exact atmospheric conditions required for the most efficient use of highly sensitive automated electronic equipment." One example offered for this new equipment included a $55,000 sorting machine that sorted checks and other documents at a rate of 1,000 a minute guided by "magnetic ink" rather than "the familiar punch card holes." The radio station and the bank remained through the 1990s before the theater was turned into a church. Unfortunately, without the resources for essential maintenance the building deteriorated significantly and was mostly abandoned for a decade.
In 2011, Jubilee Baltimore acquired the building at auction for $93,000 and started working to redevelop the sadly neglected site. In partnership with Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Institution College of Art (MICA), along with support from the American Communities Trust and TRF, Jubilee Baltimore restored the exterior back to its original appearance, lit up the marquee, and transformed the interior into offices and community space for film screenings, music, classrooms, galleries, and more. The Centre Theater reopened to the public in 2015.
The Morgan Millwork Company, now known as the MICA Graduate Studio Center, is a product of Baltimore's once vibrant industrial development and a clear reflection of how industry has struggled in Baltimore over the past 50 years. J. Earl Morgan together with his cousin, Albert T. Morgan, incorporated the Morgan Company in Osh Kosh, Wisconsin in 1889, building on an enterprise first established by their fathers in 1868 to manufacture processed lumber and shingles. Here in Baltimore, J. Earl Morgan partnered with Charles A. Hanscom to start a Baltimore office for the Morgan Millwork Company in 1910. Within a few years, they purchased a property from Frank Ehlen on the south side of North Avenue just west of Maryland Avenue with the plan to construct a "sales distributing plant" for $60,000.
The Morgan Millwork Company remained on West North Avenue for nearly 60 years, selling and distributing a range of building products produced by Morgan Millwork, Andersen Window-all, Armstrong Cork and others, to contractors, lumber yards and building supply firms. In 1971, the company announced their plans to move from North Avenue to a new 90,000 square foot office in Baltimore County in a 1,000-acre industrial complex known as Chesapeake Park, developed by the Martin-Marietta Corporation.
Next to take over the building, was Max Rubin Industries, a Baltimore clothing manufacturer established by Max Rubin — a unique character with a personal passion for poetry and a reputation for employing people with disabilities. Over the years, Rubin wrote over three thousand poems on such varied topics as the 1952 Baltimore transit strike and the historic old Otterbein Church (located across the street from one of his factories) gaining him recognition as the Poet Laureate of Baltimore in 1947. His business grew from a modest start in the 1920s with a small chain of stores in West Virginia and Pennsylvania before he moved to Baltimore in the 1930s. By the 1970s had become one of the city's oldest clothing manufacturers. Regrettably, the loss of a large government contract and the challenges of the late 1970s recession brought an end to the business in 1983. On Christmas Day, a small classified ad appeared announcing an auction to sell of all the sewing machines, cutting tables and clothes presses at West North Avenue on January 9, 1983.
Even as Baltimore's struggling textile industry continued to slide, in 1984 this building again found a use as a factory for Jos. A. Bank Clothiers to produce suit coats at the rate of 5,000 a week. Jos. A. Bank has deep Baltimore roots, dating back to 1905 when 11-year old Joseph A. Bank got a job working for his grandfather, Charles Bank, cutting trousers in the family owned factory. The firm continued to produce clothes at Baltimore factories until they ended all production in the United States in the mid-1990s.
For the past fifteen years, the building has been occupied as studios for students at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The building is currently undergoing a transformation into a hub for MICA's graduate study programs with renovations led by architects Cho Benn Holback + Associates to create shared galleries, a lecture hall, meeting rooms, work and fabrication space, café, and painting, mixed-media and photography studios.
"Huge and, alas! we must say ungainly," is how the Baltimore Sun described The Severn in 1907. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972, few locals would still dismiss the grand Severn Apartment House as an intrusion on Mt. Vernon Place, but in the 1890s the construction of the building created a real controversy among Mount Vernon's wealthy residents.
Baltimore builder Joseph M. Cone and architect Charles E. Cassell unveiled plans for a new ten-story apartment house in September 1895 at the northeast corner of Mt. Vernon Place and Cathedral Street. The new building would rise to a height of 122 feet, just 7 feet shy of the 1894 Hotel Stafford, a Richardsonian Romanesque landmark around the corner facing the north garden of Washington Place. Known as "The Severn," the proposed apartment house included twenty apartment suites for families and nine bachelor apartments, along with a drug store and a kitchen for room service.
The corner had been occupied by a beautiful townhouse first built as the home of Chancellor John Johnson, Jr., a notable Baltimore lawyer (whose portrait still hangs at the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse) and brother of well-known Maryland politician Reverdy Johnson. One of the last owners, Henry W. Rogers was a well-established real estate investor and, after his death in 1901, his son, himself a well known real-estate agent, sold the property to Joseph Cone.
Neighbors objected to the prospect of replacing the old house with the still unfamiliar form of an apartment house. Building came to a stop in the fall of 1895 as a group of area residents approached Joseph Cone to try to buy back the property. Their effort ultimately failed when they could not raise the necessary amount to buy out the builder. However, the Severn did motivate residents to successfully lobby the state legislature to pass a bill prohibiting development in Mt. Vernon taller than seventy feet.
By the 1970s, when The Severn was designated a National Historic Landmark, Mt. Vernon was not quite as grand as it had been in the past and the apartment building sold to developer Caswell J. Caplan for the modest sum of $250,000. Over the next several years, Caplan worked to modernize the apartments, preserving the original wood floors and tile while renovating the kitchens and other elements. The Severn continues to be owned by members of the Caplan family and is now appreciated more than scorned as one of Mt. Vernon's grandest historic apartment houses.
The Marlborough Apartments is an eleven-story landmark well-known for its architecture and as the home to the famous Baltimore art-collecting Cone Sisters. Before the construction of the Marlborough, the property was the site of a large mansion owned by the wealthy Popplein family. In 1880, only three years after Eutaw Place was extended up to North Avenue, Nicholas Popplein commissioned a massive 24-room brick mansion on Eutaw Place. Popplein was a wealthy paint manufacturer and a local leader in the area's development who owned Eutaw Place from McMechen all the way to Laurens Street. Unfortunately, Popplein died at home in 1885, shortly after construction of the new mansion was complete. His estate sold the mansion in the spring of 1901 to Dr. Thomas Shearer, a local specialist in homeopathy. An adjoining lot at the corner of Eutaw Place and Wilson Street sold to William Cochran in 1905. The two proposed to combine their investments and construct the Marlborough Apartment House, designed by architect Edward Glidden. Glidden designed an eleven-story apartment house, the largest in the city at the time. It was 141 feet wide on Eutaw Place and extended 130 feet back along Wilson Street. One of the first new buildings in Baltimore to be completely wired for electricity, the Marlborough even featured a rooftop garden. Among the 96 suites, a few apartments included as many as ten rooms. Among the many wealthy locals who moved in during the first few years were Dr. Claribel Cone (1864-1929) on the sixth floor and Miss Etta Cone (1870-1949) on the eighth. The sisters were born to Herman and Helen Cone, a German-Jewish family who immigrated to Baltimore in 1871. The family's wholesale grocery business, H. Cone and Sons, prospered and the sisters' older brothers relocated to Greensboro, North Carolina, where they started a successful textile business. While inheritances from their parents kept them comfortable, the profits from their brother's mills during WWI grew their wealth considerably. Etta was the first to start purchasing art, in 1898. She met both Picasso and Matisse while visiting friends Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris, and was inspired to become Matisse's life-long patron. Claribel was a more experimental art buyer who sought out avant-garde works at high prices, like Matisse's Blue Nude for 120,760 francs. Eventually, the sisters covered nearly every space on every wall in their apartments with their collection. After Etta's death in 1949, the Cone Collection was donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. It included over 3,000 works, 500 of which are by Matisse, with an estimated value of one billion dollars. The decades following the Cone Sisters were not kind the Marlborough. Absentee owners allowed the building to deteriorate severely by the early 1970s. A substantial renovation that converted the building apartments started in 1973.
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The Washington Apartment House at the northwest corner of Charles Street and Mt. Vernon Place is a one of the finest Beaux Arts apartment houses in Baltimore. After the controversial construction of The Severn in 1895, many Mt. Vernon residents were suspicious of new "skyscrapers." Just a month after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, the Baltimore Municipal Arts Society successfully pushed the Maryland State Legislature to pass an "Anti-Skyscraper Bill" prohibiting the construction of any building (other than churches) over seventy feet high within one block of the Washington Monument. William F. Cochran, the developer of the Washington Apartments, built right up to the limit of 70 feet before suing to erect an 8 foot addition. His lawsuit failed, reinforcing the restriction that became known as Maryland's first zoning law and was one of the earliest zoning laws in the United States.
William Cochran was born to privilege–his grandfather, Alexander Smith, had amassed a fortune as a carpet manufacturer in Yonkers, New York. Cochran moved to Baltimore in 1902 after marrying Annie Lorraine Gill. Despite his comfortable position among the local high society, he found his personal wealth troubling, explaining in an address on the "Passing of the Idle Rich" at Westminster Church, "The joy of having abundance is terribly mitigated when one is confronted with the sight of and appeals from people living under the opposite conditions. It seems all wrong."
While Cochran was vocal about his socialist ideals, he also sympathized with in the wealthy Mt. Vernon residents who sought to control the character of their neighborhood's development. He explained his purchase of the property at 700 Washington Place, remarking, "A strong desire of property holders on Mt. Vernon Place to control the kind of building to be erected on this site led me to purchase it to prevent anyone from building a skyscraper." Cochran bought the vacant mansion, built for Edward McDonald Greenway in 1835, in April 1905 for $160,000 and soon starting planning for a modern apartment house that could meet with approval from the neighbors.
The architect Cochran selected for the job was Edward H. Glidden, a Cleveland native, who arrived in Baltimore around the same time as Cochran. Glidden had already started a career that led him to become one of the city's foremost architects for apartment buildings with projects including the Stork Apartment House (1903) at Park and Monument, the Marlborough Apartments (1906) on Eutaw Place, Homewood Apartments (1910) at Charles and 31st Street, The Latrobe, Canterbury Hall and Tudor Hall Apartments. Glidden even lived at Homewood Apartments at the time of his death in 1924.
Washington Apartments went up quickly in 1906 at a cost of $300,000. Its six stories included 28 luxurious apartments and 29 rooms for servants. Measuring 69 feet and 8 inches tall, the building stood just under the recently instituted 70-foot height limit. Less than a year after completion, however, Cochran sought a permit application to build one more story, eight feet tall and set back twenty feet, to contain additional rooms for servants. The permit was denied and Cochran went to court, lost, then lost again on appeal in June 1908 with an important decision that affirmed the ability of the city to regulate building heights.
The Walbert building stands out in the Station North skyline with a bright coat of paint and rich Beaux Arts details.
The story of this landmark begins in 1907, when Charles J. Bonaparte—a great-nephew to Emperor Napoleon I of France, a prominent local lawyer and, at the time, attorney general under President Theodore Roosevelt—first announced plans for the building.
Acting as the trustee for the Walter R. Abell estate, which owned the property, Bonaparte commissioned the construction of an eight-story fireproof apartment house at the northwest corner of Charles Street and Lafayette Avenue. Working from a design by Baltimore architects Wyatt & Nolting, builder James Stewart & Co. soon completed the building at a cost of $190,000, with a fire-proof steel frame, pressed brick, and ornamental terra cotta details. The first floor featured several offices, designed for physicians or dentists, along with a large dining room. The largest and most luxurious apartments in the new building rented for as much as $900 or $1,000 per year (equivalent to over $23,000 today).
Baltimore native James B.N. Wyatt and William G. Nolting organized their partnership of Wyatt & Nolting in 1887. Wyatt was a close neighbor to The Walbert since 1876, when he designed and built a home for himself and his mother at Maryland and North Avenue across from the contemporary MICA Graduate Studio building. Charles Bonaparte also commissioned the firm to design his own home–Bella Vista–built in 1896 in Baltimore County. Wyatt & Nolting went on from the Walbert to design the Algonquin Apartments at St. Paul and Chase in 1914, along with scores of other projects across the city.
The Walbert was later converted into an office building and remained in the ownership of Crane and Crane for years while falling into some disrepair. Fortunately, the building underwent a substantial renovation in the mid-1980s through a partnership led by Howard Brown of David S. Brown Enterprises and it remains in good condition today.