At the northeast corner of Charles and Read Streets stands the beautiful Latrobe Apartment House. The name for the building comes from the original Latrobe House, built just after the Civil War and torn down in 1911 to make way for the new apartment building.
When John H.B. Latrobe built his home in Mt. Vernon in the 1860s, development had only recently started to migrate north from the fashionable area around the Washington Monument. John's son– future seven-term Baltimore mayor Ferdinand Latrobe–moved into the house with his wife Louisa Sherlock Swann, the daughter of Thomas Swann (a former Mayor of Baltimore and Governor of Maryland). Right next door to the Latrobe House was another 1860s mansion built by the family of Clinton L. Riggs, who moved to Baltimore as a young child. After Latrobe's death in 1911, Riggs decided to purchase the home and tear it down, along with his own family home, to build a modern nine-story apartment house.
Architects Glidden & Friz designed the building in an early Italian Renaissance style. According to the Baltimore Sun, it was "fitted with many of the latest conveniences" with "many quarters especially designed for bachelors." Edward Glidden had already made his mark in Mt. Vernon with the Washington Apartments on Mt. Vernon Place and the Rochambeau at Charles and Franklin (demolished in 2006). His partner Clyde Friz was just starting to develop the reputation that within the next few years would make him one of Baltimore's best-known Beaux Arts architects, with buildings like the Standard Oil Building on St. Paul Street (1922), the Scottish Rite Temple (1930), and the Enoch Pratt Free Library (1933).
Like many historic apartment buildings, the Latrobe Building experienced notable changes over the years, first converted to medical offices and then converted partially back to residences in the 1970s. The Latrobe Building underwent an expensive $3.5 million renovation supervised by architects Cochran Stephenson & Donkervoet in the 1980s and now serves as offices to many Baltimore non-profit organizations.
At the southwest corner of Chase and St. Paul in November 1912, the Algonquin Building Company completed a modern ten-story apartment house that neatly complements the historic 1903 Belvedere Hotel down the block. Architect William Nolting, of Wyatt & Nolting, evidently liked the building so much he moved in and lived there for nearly twenty years. The Algonquin Building Company was organized by Webb & White, a partnership of George R. Webb, a Baltimore capitalist who helped to consolidate the city's many street railway companies, and Theophilus White, a successful executive in the new telephone industry. The partnership purchased the building lot on Chase Street from General Francis E. Waters, a local lumberman and financier. Designed by architects Wyatt & Nolting and built by J. Henry Smith & Sons Company at a cost of $200,000, the new building was nine stories high with terra cotta details on the first three floors. Each floor contained two "large housekeeping apartments and two bachelor suites." The firm of Wyatt & Nolting began in 1887, a partnership of Baltimore native James B.N. Wyatt and William G. Nolting. The partnership also designed the Walbert apartments just up the street at Charles and Lafayette. Nolting not only designed the Algonquin but became one of its first residents, living in apartment E-8 from 1917 through 1936. After his death in 1940, the Baltimore Sun devoted an editorial to expressing regret for his passing, describing Nolting as "one of the very small group of architects–small nationally as well as locally–who by main strength lifted American architecture out of the doldrums in which it had rested during the latter part of the nineteenth century and gave it new vitality." In the 1940s, the building converted its apartments to doctors' offices and became known as the Medical Arts Building. In 2015, after several years of vacancy, the building reopened with fifty-six new market-rate apartments. Waldon Studio Architects converted the original luxury apartments into smaller, energy-efficient units with a design that sought to comply with current codes while preserving original historic details.
First established in 1857, the Maryland Club started in a residence designed by Robert Mills on the northeast corner of Franklin and Cathedral streets and many of the Club's members lived in the area around Mount Vernon Place. At the start of the Civil War in 1861, many members of the Club sympathized with the Confederacy and Unionist members resigned, including Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, the President of the group. Eventually shut down by Union military officials in Baltimore, the building re-opened in 1864 as "Freedman's Rest," offices for the new Freedmen's Bureau and a place to offer support to any "sick, helpless and needy" former enslaved people.
The Club re-opened following the Civil War and prospered along with the economic success of Baltimore merchants and industrialists. The group purchased a vacant lot at Charles and Eager Streets, and hired architect, Josias Pennington of the firm Baldwin and Pennington, to design a new building. The new club house features heavy blocks of white marble from Baltimore County in a Romanesque style. The new Maryland Club opened on New Year's Day, 1892 and has a center of activity through the present.
Designed by architect Edward L. Palmer, Jr. in 1925, the handsome Roland Park Apartments, now known as the Roland Park Condominium, is a significant example of Beaux Arts architecture in North Baltimore. The building was erected by the M.A. Long Company, owned by the same M.A. Long who served as President of the Roland Park Apartments Company. The garage, originally known as the "Roland Park Stables," was designed by architects Wyatt & Nolting in 1903.
Baltimore native Edward Livingston Palmer, Jr. was born in 1877, graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1899 and went on to receive a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1903. Palmer returned to Baltimore and by June 1907, he had become an architect for The Roland Park Company. In this position he contributed to the design and development of Homeland, Roland Park, and Guilford. Roland Park Apartments was converted to condominiums in 1980.
Dedicated on December 4, 1870, Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church stands as a monument both to George Brown, whose wife Isabella McLanahan Brown supported the construction of the church in his memory, and the generations of Baltimoreans who have worshipped, performed music, and more in this treasured architectural landmark. While many early congregations left Bolton Hill, Brown Memorial has endured and invested in the preservation of the historic church with a $1.8 million restoration from 2001 to 2003.
George Brown was the son of investment firm founder Alexander Brown, a businessman and civic leader who according to an 1873 account by local historian George Washington Howard, "regarded religion as preeminent above all other things and loved his church with all the ardor of his noble nature." After his death in 1859, his wife Isabella McLanahan Brown made a gift of $150,000 to construct and furnish the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church.
The architects were Nathaniel Henry Hutton and John Murdoch, who were among the 18 charter members of the Baltimore Chapter of the AIA. They created a Gothic Revival masterpiece with numerous stained glass windows by artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Murdoch was both a neighbor to the church, living at 1527 Bolton Street, and his funeral was held at the church after his death in 1923.
On April 19, 1861, just one week after the attack on Fort Sumter by Confederate forces marked the beginning of the Civil War, a train carrying Union volunteers with the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment pulled into the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad's President Street Station. At the time, railroad cars traveling south of Baltimore had to be pulled by horses along Pratt Street to Camden Station on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to the west. However, a mob of Southern sympathizers started to attack the train cars and forced the Union troops to get out and start marching through the city streets.
The mob continued their attack with bricks, paving stones, and pistols, leading the Union troops to respond by firing into the crowd, starting a violent skirmish that left four soldiers and twelve civilians dead, 36 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians wounded, along with the loss of much of the regiment’s equipment. One of the soldiers killed, Corporal Sumner Needham of Company I, is often considered to be the first Union casualty of the war.
President Street Station, where the infamous Pratt Street Riot began, was built in 1850 as the Baltimore terminus of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. Largely replaced in 1873 by Union Station (now known as Penn Station) which connected the Pennsylvania Railroad and Western Maryland Railway, President Street Station continued to serve a limited number of passenger trains through 1911, later serving as a freight station and then warehouse. By 1970, a fire had destroyed the train shed leaving only the head house. In the 1990s, President Street Station started a new life as the Baltimore Civil War Museum.
Though the Baltimore Sun heralded the structure at the southeast corner of Howard and Lexington as an Art Deco design icon from the time of its construction in 1934, this building's role as an early and vital witness to a historic, but long over-looked Civil Rights sit-in makes the Read's Drug Store building truly noteworthy. Five years before the better known Greensboro, South Carolina sit-in protests at Woolworth's, students and citizens made civil rights history on this spot.
William Read started his Read's Drug Store chain at this corner, but the current building, designed by prominent Baltimore architects Smith & May, was built by Arthur Nattans bought the business from Read in 1899. Nattans grew the Read's chain to over forty locations by the early 1930s and planned the downtown location as a flagship store - a modern and well-appointed building, detailed with ornate terra cotta panels depicting sailing ships and chromed railing with swimming dolphins on the interior balcony elements commemorating the 300th anniversary of founding of the Maryland colony.
Like many downtown lunch counters in the early 1950s, the Read's chain maintained a strict policy of racial segregation. Discontent with the widespread policies of segregation and discrimination downtown led the Baltimore chapter of the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) to start a campaign to end segregation at lunch counters on Lexington Street from Kresge's at Park Avenue to McCrory's right next door to Read's. At the same time, students from Morgan State University began working to desegregate the Read's Drug Store's Northwood Shopping Center location, just outside of Morgan's campus.
On January 20, 1955, CORE and Morgan state joined forces and a group of student activists from Morgan staged simultaneous "sit-in" demonstrations at the Howard & Lexington and Northwood Read's locations. According to an article in the Baltimore Afro American, an unnamed Read's official called Morgan State and pleaded with the school to call the protests off because the stores were losing business. School leaders and protesters held firm and within hours a Read's official announced that Read's Drug Store would end segregated lunch counters across all of their establishments. The front page headline for the Afro American on January 22 read, "Now serve all," with the announcement directly from Read's Drug Stores President Arthur Nattans Sr., "We will serve all customers throughout our entire stores, including the fountains, and this becomes effective immediately." Five years before the iconic Woolworth's sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Baltimore's Morgan State students and CORE activists led one of the first successful student-led sit-in protests in the nation.
For such a small park, this green block on John Street has had a large impact on the history of Bolton Hill. In the early 1950s, a group of local residents organized to establish the park, one of the first "vest pocket" urban parks in the country. Dedicated in 1955, the park was maintained by the Village Garden Club, now the Bolton Hill Garden Club, which took on the work of maintaining plantings and fencing. The Club started an annual spring plant sale, which continues to this day, to help pay for the upkeep of the park, joining the club's traditional Christmas Greens sale, which included decorations at the Women's Hospital on Lafayette Avenue. The residents involved in the creation of the park built on their efforts and began advocating more broadly for the Mt. Royal area to be designated one of the city's first urban renewal areas under the Federal Housing Act of 1954. Their small success on John Street led to transformative changes across the area in the 1960s and 1970s with the demolition of many rowhouses and alley houses to make way for new high-rise apartment buildings and modern townhouse developments.
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232 West Lanvale has a neat appearance that belies its age as the oldest house in Bolton Hill. Amazingly, it reportedly looks almost exactly the same today as it did when built in 1848. Originally part of a group of three Italianate houses facing towards downtown Baltimore, the home offered a country retreat to early northwest Baltimore residents. The owners added the bay window on Bolton Street 25 years after the house was built, salvaged from Charles Howard's mansion (where Francis Scott Key died) after the building was torn down to make way for the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church. One of the longest residents in the house, Dr. William Henry Howell, rented the home for forty years as he taught medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Howell is best remembered for his discovery of the anti-coagulant heparin.
By the 1960s, the charming cottage had attracted its own literary community, including Maryland poet and scholar William F. Stead, who died there in 1967 at the age of 82. Stead was a friend of T.S. Eliot, William Yeats, and many other British poets thanks to decades spent living in England. His host at the home was Mrs. Edward C. Venable (nee Nancy Howard De Ford), a Maryland native, descendant of both John Eager Howard and Francis Scott Key, and a published poet and author. She married her husband, himself a well-known writer, in 1924 and the pair spent every summer in France returning to Lanvale Street in the fall. Among Mrs. Venable's friends was Tennessee Williams, who patterned one of his stage heroines after her: Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer.
While 1311 Bolton Street is best known today as the former location for the Bolton Street Synagogue, the story of this handsome stone building begins back in 1875 as the Reformed Episcopal Church of the Redeemer. This former church was converted to a residence in 2005 thanks to a three year creative reuse project by the current owners. Designing kitchens, bathrooms and living spaces in this magnificent and unconventional building meant working with stained glass windows, high ceilings, and spaces that were meant originally for public worship.
The cornerstone laying ceremony in October 1875 was attended by Bishop George David Cummings, who founded the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1873. The architect hired for the building, Charles Cassell, was a native of Portsmouth, Virginia who trained as a naval architect and arrived in Baltimore not long after the Civil War. Cassell, who helped found the Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1870, also designed the former Stewart's Department Store on Howard Street, the Stafford Hotel in Mt. Vernon, and the chapel at the University of Virginia.
A handful of different churches and community organizations occupied the building from the 1930s through the 1980s. Finally, in 1986 the Bolton Street Synagogue was founded in Bolton Hill as an unaffiliated synagogue serving Baltimore's diverse Jewish community. The synagogue remained in Bolton Hill for 17 years before moving to Cold Spring Lane in 2003. The building found its new use in 2005 and remains a landmark to the long history of churches and creative adaptive reuse in Bolton Hill.
An icon on Eutaw Place, the former Temple Oheb Shalom is a reminder of the vibrant Jewish community that thrived in the late nineteenth century in what were then Baltimore's expanding northwest suburbs. Built in 1892, architect Joseph Evans Sperry modeled the Eutaw Place Temple after the Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy. Since 1960, the building is home to the Prince Hall Grand Lodge that has boasted such notable members as Thurgood Marshall and Eubie Blake.
A small group of twenty-one young German Jews established the Oheb Shalom congregation in 1853 to provide an alternative to the Orthodox Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (1830) and the Reform Har Sinai (1846). The congregation moved to Eutaw Place in 1892 and remained through their 1960 when they moved into a midcentury modern synagogue on Park Heights Avenue in Pikesville and completed the move to in 1960. Temple Oheb Shalom has played a significant role in American Jewish life through the history of the rabbis and cantors who have led the congregation, most notably Rabbi Benjamin Szold who led Oheb Shalom through 1892 and whose daughter, Henrietta Szold, was the founder of Hadassah.
In 1960, Temple Oheb Shalom left Eutaw Place for Pikesville and the Prince Hall Grand Lodge, under the leadership of Samuel T. Daniels, purchased the building. Among the members of The Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Maryland are Baltimore-born Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and James Hubert "Eubie" Blake, one of the most significant figures in early-20th-century African American music. In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the lodge to campaign on behalf of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The Maryland Women's Hospital, now known as the Robert and Jany Meyerhoff House for the Maryland Institute College of Art, was a pioneering medical institution in the late nineteenth century that remained a landmark in Bolton Hill through the 1960s.
When the hospital first opened at John and Lafayette in the early 1880s, it was only the second women's hospital in the nation. The hospital closed in the 1960s when the institution combined with the Presbyterian Eye, Ear and Throat Charity Hospital to form the Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson. In 2001, MICA renovated and rehabilitated the building as a dormitory for over 200 students, along with dining facilities, art studios and more.
Born in Central City, Colorado, on November 9, 1871, Florence Rena Sabin, M.D. (1871-1953) was the youngest daughter of a mining engineer. After her mother's death from sepsis, Florence and her sister moved first to Chicago, then to stay with her paternal grandparents in Vermont.
She earned a bachelor's degree in 1893 from Smith College, then went to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she became the first female graduate. She returned to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine a few years later on a research fellowship. She started teaching in the Department of Anatomy in 1902, with a promotion to associate professor in 1905 and finally full professor of embryology and histology in 1917, becoming the first female full professor at the college.
She introduced techniques for staining living cells and played an important role in the reform of Colorado's health laws. Her statue still stands in the U.S. Capitol.
Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1858, Howard Atwood Kelly attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1877 and his M.D. in 1882. In 1889, he became the first professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins University launching a 30-year career at the school.
Kelly is remembered—along with William Osler, Professor of Medicine, William Stewart Halsted, Professor of Surgery, and William H. Welch, Professor of Pathology—as one of the "Big Four" founding professors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was called a "wizard of the operating room" and was an early user of radium to treat cancer.
Born near Cleveland, Ohio, in 1857, John Jacob Abel received a Ph.B. (Bachelor of Philosophy) from the University of Michigan in 1883 and his M.D. from Strasbourg in 1888. In 1893, after further training from Henry Newell Martin of the Johns Hopkins University and at various European University, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine recruited Abel to start a department of pharmacology becoming first full-time professor of pharmacology in the United States.
Among the most notable legacies of Abel's work is his research on adrenalin, insulin, and an apparatus that is widely regarded as a forerunner of the artificial kidney.
The Hebrew Orphan Asylum appears like a grand castle on a hill with rows Victorian Romanesque arched windows and turrets at every corner. The unique design is a credit to the architectural partnership of Lupus & Roby - composed of German architect and craftsman Edward Lupus and Baltimore born architect Henry A. Roby - but the building itself is a landmark to the history of philanthropy and social service in Baltimore's Jewish community.
In February 1872, the Hebrew Benevolent Society of Baltimore organized to establish an orphanage for the Jewish community and local German Jewish merchant William S. Rayner donated the handsome Calverton Mansion - an 1815 country home used most recently as the Baltimore Almshouse - as a home for the new organization. Regrettably, the building burned down in 1874 but, despite the set-back, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum rebuilt on the same site, opening their new building in 1876. William Rayner spoke at the dedication, reflecting his hopes and aspirations for the Hebrew Orphan Asylum: "the Jewish community should regard donations as an investment that would bear fruit; some of the children in the future would contribute to the welfare of the community, and the rest would serve as the contributor's advocates in heaven."
While a small group of wealthy German Jews first established and led the orphanage, a broad and diverse community of Jewish Baltimoreans supported the Hebrew Orphan Asylum with donations of all sorts and the Jewish children and families who depended on the Hebrew Orphan Asylum came from all across Europe. The history of the institution follows the history of the Jewish community in Baltimore, as the population at the orphanage grew rapidly along with the increased Jewish immigration from Europe during the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. Many older orphanages closed from the 1920s through the 1940s as care for dependent children moved away from large institutional homes towards foster care or smaller group homes and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum was no different, closing in 1923.
A group of local doctors converted the Hebrew Orphan Asylum to the West Baltimore General Hospital, later known as the Lutheran Hospital of Maryland which remained at the site through the late 1980s. The building was abandoned for over a decade but 91ĘÓƵ and the Coppin Heights Community Development Corporation engaged in a decade-long campaign to preserve and restore this landmark of Baltimore's Jewish history. Today, the building is home to  the Center for Health Care and Healthy Living.Â
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As early as 1796, when the Golden Horse Inn stood at the crossroads of Franklin and Howard Streets, this spot was popular destination for Baltimore residents and visitors alike. The Inn, operated by W. Forsyth, was attached to a large stable to the north on Howard Street and was one of dozens of taverns combinations in Baltimore that served the area's many travelers.
By 1857, the old Golden Horse Inn had been substantially remodeled and its new proprietor, Mr. Daniel McCoy, added two additional stories and renamed it the Franklin Hotel. McCoy's enterprising successor, William Delphy, started his empire next door at the Golden Inn Stables in 1860 and soon opened the Swan Hotel at Franklin and Eutaw Streets, eventually taking over McCoy's Franklin Hotel. The building was renamed the Academy Hotel in the early 1880s, perhaps taking inspiration for the new name from the Natatorium and Physical Culture Society (now the site of the Mayfair Theater) built next door in 1880. By the time of Delphy's death in 1898 the Baltimore Sun remembered him as "one of the best-known hotel proprietors in Baltimore."
As wagon trains and turnpikes were replaced by the railroads, many inns and taverns along Howard Street came down in favor of new banks and theaters. In 1902 when James L. Kernan announced plans to build the Congress Hotel next door, the Academy Hotel was threatened with demolition as many speculated that plans for the new building might become considerably larger if neighboring properties, including the Academy, could be acquired at a reasonable cost. Despite threats, the Academy, widely regarded as a quaint little hostelry and a landmark in the theatrical world, remained in operation for decades. It was renamed the New Academy Hotel after 1915 and became the Stanley Hotel in the early 1920s.
Unfortunately, by the beginning of the 2000s, the building was abandoned. A ghost of the painted New Academy Hotel could be seen on the crumbling western wall of the brick structure. Ultimately, the city identified serious structural issues with the building and it was demolished in 2016.
Designed by early Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long in 1845, the St. Alphonsus Church has been called "the German cathedral" for its Southern German neo-Gothic style. The church was originally established with a large German congregation and the attached rectory functioned as provincial headquarters for the Redemptorist Fathers and Brothers.
By 1917, the German congregation had largely left the neighborhoods around the church and the building was acquired by the Roman Catholic Lithuanian Parish of Saint John the Baptist. The new congregation took on the historic name of the church and reopened the school in St. Alphonsus Hall, which had been established in l847.
Built between 1856 and 1857 at a cost of $600,000, Camden Station is a grand reminder of the long history of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Baltimore. Designed by Niernsee and Neilson with contributions by architect Joseph F. Kemp, the station served as a passenger and freight station through the 1980s.
One of Camden Station's most notable passengers was President Abraham Lincoln who travelled through the station in February 1861, on his way to his inauguration in Washington, D.C., again in 1863 on his way to Gettysburg, in 1864 to make a speech in Baltimore, and finally in 1865 when his funeral train from Washington, DC to Springfield, Illinois made its first stop in Baltimore.
The B&O Railroad left Camden Station in 1971 and sold the building to the Maryland Stadium Authority. Fortunately, the Maryland Stadium Authority integrated the building into the design for Camden Yards stadium and commissioned local architecture firm of Cho, Wilks, and Benn to restore the facade to its 1867 appearance. The Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards occupied the building from 2005 up until October 2015 when the museum closed after failing to reach a lease agreement with the Maryland Stadium Authority.
Today, from the rise within Riverside Park, established in 1875, a visitor can see the rowhouses and churches of South Baltimore densely packed around the park in every direction. During the War of 1812, this rise, long known as Look-Out Hill, instead offered a clear view of Locust Point and the Patapsco River that made it essential for the U.S. Navy in their efforts to prepare Baltimore against the threat of attack by the British. In 1813 Captain Samuel Babcock, with the U.S. Corps of Engineers, designed and built a 180-foot diameter circular battery with earthen ramparts, a ditch with abatis, and an earthen powder magazine that made up Fort Look-Out. In September 1814, the U.S. Navy assigned Lieutenant George Budd, a Maryland native from Harford County, from the U.S. Sloop of War Ontario at Fells Point to command Fort Look-Out. The U.S. Sloop of War Ontario was a sixteen gun rated sloop of war built by Thomas Kemp at a Fells Point shipyard but the ship was trapped in the harbor by the British blockade of the Chesapeake. In the earliest morning hours of September 14, 1814, the anticipated British attack on Baltimore began as twenty naval barges advanced on the Baltimore harbor while 5,000 troops waited just beyond the eastern defensive line that cut through what is today Patterson Park. Though Francis Scott Key provided the most memorable recollection of that evening's fight in the lyrics to the Star-Spangled Banner, one observer on Federal Hill recalled the efforts: “The night of Tuesday and the morning of Wednesday (til about 4 o’clock) presented the whole awful spectacle of shot and shells, and rockets, shooting and bursting through the air. The well directed fire of the little fort, under Lieut. Budd (late of the U.S. Frigate Chesapeake), and the gallant seamen under his command, checked the enemy on his approach, and probably saved the town from destruction in the dark hours of the night. The garrison was chiefly incommoded by the shells, which burst in and about the fort, whilst they had bomb proof shelter. As the darkness increased the awful grandeur of the scene augmented....” The successful defense forced the British to retreat and sail on to New Orleans where they fought in the final battle of the War of 1812. Lieutenant Budd went on the serve aboard the U.S. Frigate Java at Baltimore and continued to serve in the navy up until his death in Boston in 1837.
At the close of the eighteenth century, the far eastern edge of Baltimore was marked by Harris Creek, a modest tributary of the Patapsco that spilled into the River near where Boston Street and Lakewood Avenue in Canton today. In an area of Baltimore that was still sparsely settled, Harris Creek did feature one major enterprise—the shipyard of Samuel and Joseph Sterrett. The shipyard included a large blacksmith shop, sheds for boat builders and mast wrights, and a serviceable road back into Fells Point for workers and supplies. The Master Constructor at the shipyard was David Stodder, an experienced shipwright who held seventeen enslaved people, making him one of the largest slaveholders in Baltimore at the time. Among the ships produced at the shipyard was the 600-ton Goliath, owned by Abraham Van Bibber who also co-owned the privateer sloop Baltimore Hero commanded by Thomas Waters during the Revolutionary War. Van Bibber reportedly intended the Goliath for the East India Trade. The most famous ship to sail down Harris Creek was the U.S. Frigate Constellation launched in 1797. (The second USS Constellation, built in 1854, contains portions of this original.) Stodder built the ship according to the design of Naval Constructor Joshua Humphreys. The Constellation was just one of six frigates that Humphreys designed in the 1790s to pursue Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean. While Harris Creek was filled in during the early nineteenth century to make more land for the quickly growing Baltimore City, evidence of Canton's maritime past endured. In 1908, locals uncovered the charred remains of a 130-foot clipper ship that had burned at its pier and had been buried 400 feet inland from the present shoreline. In the 1880s, Harris Creek was turned into a major municipal sewer with an outfall at Boston Street. In 1901, Baltimore constructed a brick arch bridge to carry Boston Street that has remained there through the present.
On the morning of September 12, 1814, five thousand British troops landed outside of Baltimore and marched on the city of Baltimore with a plan to capture the city. Major General Robert Ross, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who had burned the White House and the U.S. Capitol just a few weeks before, led the advance. However, within hours Ross was dead after being shot by an American – perhaps Daniel Wells and Henry G. McComas although their claim on the deed is now considered unlikely. Following the Battle of North Point, the British forces realized the strength of the defenses at Hampstead Hill, now located within Patterson Park, and returned to the site of their landing to head south towards New Orleans.
In 1896, the federal government took over the British landing site and completed construction on a coastal artillery fortifications to defend Baltimore from naval attack in 1901. In 1900, Secretary of War Elihu Root named the site Fort Howard after John Eager Howard, a Baltimore native and Revolutonary War veteran who is buried alongside veterans of the War of 1812 at Old St. Paul's Cemetery.
In 1902, five of the six coastal artillery batteries were named for men who witnessed the War of 1812 including Lt. Levi Clagget who died at Fort McHenry, Col. Davis Harris who commanded a regiment of artillery, Brig. Gen. John Stricker who commanded the 3rd brigade Maryland Militia, Judge Joseph H. Nicholson who served as Captain of Volunteer Artillery at Fort McHenry, and, of course, Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner. A sixth battery was named for Dr. Jesse W. Lazear, a U.S. Army doctor who died in Cuba in 1900 while conducting research on yellow fever. Known as the "Bulldog at Baltimore's Gate," Fort Howard was manned by the 21st, 40th, 103rd, and 140th Companies of the Coast Artillery Corps but remained quiet throughout WWI and up until the fort shut down in 1926.
Fort Howard was transferred to the Veterans Administration which built a hospital on the grounds in 1943. Today the coastal batteries are incorporated into Fort Howard Park and, while covered in ivy and masked by bushes, endure as a reminder of the importance of the spot from the War of 1812 and on.
The Roland Water Tower was built in 1905 as a 211,000-gallon water tank to supply residents in Hampden and nearby neighborhoods. It was part of a complicated water supply system that included the Western Pumping Station at Druid Lake. The design by William J. Fizone is similar to the slightly larger West Arlington water tower built in the northwest section of the city.
The tower only served that purpose for a few years, however, and by 1930 the tower was taken out of service leaving a curious local landmark empty. Still the tower has endured as an icon for the nearby Roland Park community and local preservationists have organized the Friends of the Roland Water Tower to advocate for the restoration and reuse of the structure.
Built in 1899, the West Arlington Water Tower was originally used to supply water to the West Arlington neighborhood in northwest Baltimore just across the city line. The community developed quickly around it with the West Arlington Improvement Company building a new septic system and even a "portable school"—later known by the nickname "The Chicken Coop"—for the scores of families moving into the area in the 1900s and 1910s.
In a 1916 feature on West Arlington, calling it the "Suburb of Many Happy Homes," the Baltimore Sun reflected on the water tower as a local landmark that "should not be overlooked," writing, "It is one of the most beautiful in Maryland and commands a fine view for miles over the country. From its top one can look for miles down the bay and see white-winged vessels drifting in the harbor." Next door stood a "handsome tower house" where local resident, Mrs. J.M. Crowley made and sold "all varieties of baskets and tray."
By the early 1930s, however, the tower had fallen into disuse and the city planned to demolish the structure in 1933. When funding for demolition never arrived the tower simply sat and has remained a landmark ever since.
In 1919, the Governor of Maryland and the Mayor of Baltimore appointed a War Memorial Commission that initiated a nationwide architectural competition to design a memorial building dedicated to the 1,752 Marylanders who died in military service during WWI. The design for the monumental building that today faces Baltimore City Hall across War Memorial Plaza was executed by local architect Lawrence Hall Fowler.
A ground-breaking ceremony on November 22, 1921, was attended by Ferdinand Foch, Marshall of France and the cornerstone was laid on April 29, 1923 in a ceremony attended by Acting Secretary of War Colonel Dwight F. Davis, Governor Albert C. Ritchie, and Mayor William F. Broening. The War Memorial was dedicated on April 5, 1925.
The finished building featured a 1000-seat auditorium and a mural by Baltimore artist R. McGill Mackall, depicting, 'A Sacrifice to Patriotism.' In front of the building are two stone sea horses representing the "Might of America crossing the seas to aid our allies." The sculptor, Edmond R. Amateis, included in the statues the coats of arms for Maryland and the City of Baltimore.
The building was rededicated by Mayor William Donald Schaefer on November 6, 1977 as a memorial to the Marylanders who gave their lives in all wars with American involvement during the twentieth century. The War Memorial Building still houses administrative offices for local veterans organizations.
The 1833 McKim Free School building is one of Baltimore’s most important landmarks with deep roots in the city’s history and an unsurpassed 175 year record of education and social service. Founder John McKim came to Baltimore as a young man, established his business at Baltimore and Gay Street and became a successful merchant. During the War of 1812, McKim gave $50,000 to the City of Baltimore to aid in its defense, served as a State Senator, and was twice elected to Congress. His son William McKim who led the effort to realize his father’s vision of a free school did not live to see it as he died in 1834 at the age of 35. The building’s architects have deep connections to Baltimore. Son of Baltimore Revolutionary War hero John Eager Howard, William Howard was one of the first engineers to work for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and took up architecture as an avocation. William Small designed the Barnum’s City Hotel (demolished in 1889), the Archbishop’s Residence on North Charles Street, and more schools across the city. Since 1945, the McKim Center has continued to strengthen the importance of the building to many Baltimore residents as it remains a vital institution serving children and adults in need in the Jonestown community in innumerable ways. The McKim Center has its beginnings in 1924 when the Society of Friends offered the McKim Free School as a place of worship to an Italian Presbyterian congregation. This partnership between the Friends and Presbyterians led in 1945 to the start of the McKim Community Association offering youth programs, athletic training (particularly wrestling—appropriate for a Greek Revival building) and a bible school. McKim’s renowned athletic programs have long outgrown the building but the structure remains in use, along with the nearby 1781 Old Quaker Meeting House, as a safe place for children, managed by the philosophy of “Structure, Discipline and Love.”
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Few places demonstrate the radical transformation of the Baltimore waterfront from the early nineteenth century through the present as vividly as the site of the Battery Babock, a short distance south of where Fort Look-Out once stood in Riverside Park. The area of the battery is marked by a small memorial—a 6-pounder cannon mounted on a granite base erected during the centennial celebrations in 1914. The canon sits between the Gould Street Generating Station built in 1907 and the elevated roadway of I-95, cutting the area off from the Pataspco which served as the route of the British attack nearly 200 years ago.
In May 1813, Maj. General Samuel Smith, who commanded the defenses of Baltimore and went on to serve as a U.S. Senator and Baltimore Mayor, declared it “absolutely necessary to erect a small Battery” along the edge of the Patapsco Ferry Branch. The United States government, however, proved unwilling to pay for the new installation. The City of Baltimore then moved to pay for Captain Samuel Babcock of the U.S. Engineers to design the battery and direct twenty or thirty men in digging the foundation.
Battery Babcock, also known as the Six Gun Battery or the Sailor’s Battery, was made of sod and laid out in an arc facing towards the water. Construction was complete by summer 1813 and a company of U.S. Sea Fencibles under Capt. William H. Addison garrisoned at the site. By the fall 1814, the battery was manned by seventy-five sailors from the U.S. Chesapeake Flotilla, a collection of barges and gunboats organized by privateer Captain Joshua Barney who had been forced to scuttle their fleet just a few weeks before. Sailing Master John Adams Webster (1786-1877), who commanded the battery at the time and subsequently left an account in 1853, opens a window onto the night when Battery Babcock, together with Forts Covington and Fort McHenry, repulsed a British barge offensive on Baltimore:
“…Day and night we were on the alert, until hope was nearly extinct, when on the night of the 13th, about eleven o’clock, the bomb vessels appeared to renew their fire with redoubled energy. It was raining quite fast, and cold for the season. The rapid discharge of the bombs from the enemy’s shipping excited great vigilance among my officers and men. I had the cannon double shotted with 18-pound balls and grape shot and took a blanket and laid on the breastworks, as I was much exhausted. About midnight I could hear a splashing in the water. The attention of the others was aroused and we were convinced it was the noise of the muffled oars of the British barges. Very soon afterwards we could discern small gleaming lights in different places. I felt sure then that it was the barges, which at that time were not more than two hundred yards off…”
Canons along the Patapsco opened fire and caught the British flotilla in a cross-fire, destroying two of the barges. Captain Charles Napier, RN who commanded the British flotilla soon called for a retreat.
Perkins Square Baptist Church has been an institution on Edmondson Avenue since the mid-1950s occupying a grey stone church that began in 1913 as Emmanuel English Evangelical Lutheran Church. The two-story tall church was designed by local architect A. Cookman Leach and built by C.C. Watts.
Alfred Cookman Leach graduated from the Maryland Institute Freehand Division in 1896 and worked as a partner of the firm of Tormey and Leach. Examples of Leach’s religious buildings can be found across the city including the Highland Methodist Episcopal Church (built 1906) at Highland and Pratt Streets, the Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church South (built 1927) on Liberty Heights Avenue, and the Alpheus W. Wilson Methodist Episcopal Church South (built 1927) at University Parkway and Charles Street.
Established in 1888, the Emmanuel English Evangelical Lutheran Church had formerly occupied a building at the corner of Schroeder and Pierce Streets. Pastors from ten Evangelical Lutheran Churches throughout Baltimore participated in the cornerstone laying ceremony on July 13, 1913. The church had organized the first of a series of outdoor services the prior Sunday and planned to continue outdoor meetings at the site of their new building through July and August. Within the cornerstone, at the southeast corner of the building, the church placed, copies of The Baltimore Sun, the church constitution, the proceedings of the last synod, a list of officers of the congregation, a hymnal and a bible.
In the decade after WWII, the church, like many largely white congregations in the area, moved west to new neighborhoods at the developing western edge of Baltimore. Under the leadership of Reverend George Loose, Emmanuel Lutheran Church dedicated a new church on Ingleside Avenue in 1957 leaving their building at Edmondson and Warwick to Perkins Square Baptist Church.
Perkins Square Baptist Church was established in 1881 and takes its name from a small park and fresh-water spring located in the area of Heritage Crossing today. The congregation quickly grew to become one of the largest black Baptist churches in Baltimore and hosted regular community meetings, including a 1905 rally to campaign against the "Poe amendment" proposed by Senator Arthur Pue Gorman and the Maryland Democratic Party to disenfranchise black voters in Maryland. Virginia native Ward D. Yerby became pastor of the church in 1970 and led the move west to purchase the new church in January 1956. Rev. Yerby served as executive secretary of the Governor's Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations in the late 1950s.
At a ground-breaking ceremony for the Immanuel Reformed Church on June 24, 1922, twelve trustees, including Charles C. Zies, Sr. and John H. Weller, signed a contract for the construction of the new building. Plans filed a few days later for a white marble structure with a capacity of 750 people at a cost of $50,000. In May 1924, the new building served as the site of celebration for the “golden jubilee” of the Baltimore Classis of the German Synod of the East of the Reformed Church in the United States, including lectures by Rev. Dr. H.G. Schlueter on “The Historical Background of Baltimore Classis” and Rev. J.G. Grimmer on “Baltimore Classis Then and Now.” A classis is an organization of pastors and elders that governs a group of local churches.
In the late 1950s, the church followed others in the neighborhood in a move away from the area, breaking ground on April 7, 1957 at a site on Edmondson Avenue west of Rolling Road in Catonsville. The new building is a “contemporary brick church.” By 1958, the building was home to St. Mark’s Baptist Church, also known as St. Mark’s Institutional Baptist Church, that continues to worship at the building up through the present.
Organized in 1875 by Samuel H. Cummings at Gilmore and Mulberry Streets, the Harlem Park Methodist Episcopal Church relocated to Harlem Park in 1880 under the leadership of John F. Goucher. The church constructed a new building in 1906 under the leadership of Rev. E.L. Watson and then moved again to Harlem Avenue and Warwick Avenue under the leadership of Rev. E.P. Fellenbaum. The new building was described:
“Gothic in design, with an auditorium seating 800 persons. In addition, there will be an educational building, equipped with 10 rooms for Sunday-school work. In the basement will be a social hall. A recreation room with bowling alleys and a lecture room that may be converted into a gymnasium also are planned.”At a mortgage burning ceremony in 1947, Fellenbaum recalled that some criticized the project, and the $100,000 mortgage, as “Fellenbaum’s Folly.” The congregation laid the cornerstone for the new building at 4:00 PM on May 2, 1925. The Harlem Park Methodist Episcopal Church was dedicated at 3:00 PM on November 21, 1926 with Bishop William Fraser McDowell officiating. In May 1953, the Harlem Park Methodist Church merged with the Grove Methodist Chapel, erected in 1857 on Johnnycake Road in Baltimore County, to form the Wesley Memorial Methodist Church in Catonsville, Maryland. Their building was offered for sale at $210,000. Bishop E.A. Love of the Washington Conference appointed the Reverend N.B. Carrington as the leader of the Union Memorial United Methodist Church and assisted in securing help from the Washington and Baltimore Conferences and the Board of Missions to purchase the property. The church had previously moved from Pine and Franklin Streets to North and Madison Avenues in 1951 and had fewer than 100 members when it moved to Harlem Avenue in 1953. By the time of Rev. Carrington’s retirement in 1961, however, the church had grown to over 600 members. Carrigton began pastoring at Union Memorial United Methodist in 1952, and also worked as the supervisor of the AFRO’s pressroom. He later commented, “I married, baptized and buried many of them down there — matter of fact they call me the AFRO’s chaplain.” Commenting on the success of the church in paying off the building’s $225,000 mortgage in 8 years, Carrington noted, “Those are the kind of people we have in our congregation. They wanted to get it out of the way and they worked hard to do it.”