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.
Woodrow Wilson came to this house as a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. From Eutaw Place he went on to become president of Princeton University, the governor of New Jersey and eventually President of the United States of America.
The Key Monument on Eutaw Place is a grand reminder of how Baltimoreans have kept the memory of the Battle of Baltimore and the War of 1812 alive over two hundred years. Francis Scott Key was a Maryland lawyer and slaveholder who was on board the British vessel HMS Tonnant during the evening of September 13 and morning September 14, 1814, as part of a delegation to try to negotiate the release of prisoners. Key was stuck on board the British vessel to helplessly watch as the British Navy shelled Fort McHenry and Baltimore throughout the night.
At dawn, Key saw the Stars and Stripes still flying over the fort. That morning, the unsuccessful British allowed Key to return to shore, and on the return trip, he wrote a poem describing his experience the night before. The poem was quickly published in two Baltimore papers on September 20, 1814, and days later the owner of a Baltimore music store, Thomas Carr of the Carr Music Store, put the words and music together in print under the title "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Before his death in 1907, Baltimore resident Charles Marburg gave $25,000 to his brother Theodore to commission a monument to his favorite poet, Francis Scott Key. Theodore selected French sculptor Marius Jean Antonin Mercie known for monumental sculptures of Robert E. Lee (1890) in Richmond, Virginia, and General Lafayette (1891) in the District of Columbia. The Key Monument was added to Eutaw Place in 1911.
The monument was restored in 1999 after a multi-year fundraising campaign by local residents. In September 2017, the monument was spray painted with the words "Racist Anthem" and splashed with red paint to highlight Key's legacy as a slaveholder. The city quickly restored the monument.
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.
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.
When Samuel Posner moved his successful dry goods business to the corner of Lexington and Howard, architect Charles E. Cassell's gorgeous and ornate white Renaissance Revival building—complete with roaring lions and majestic wreaths and fluted columns—made a grand addition to the growing row of department store "palaces" on Howard Street in 1899.
The building played a prominent role in Baltimore's turn-of-the-century transition from smaller, specialized retailers to large, purpose-built department stores. Like many department stores across the country, Stewart's strove to provide a wide range of high quality goods to America's rising middle class and lured customers with its open layout, enticing displays, large plate glass windows, and by being, among other things, the first Howard Street store to install air conditioning in 1931.
Though the Stewart's name, etched in block letters at the building's crest, is still visible today, the store's ownership history is a bit less permanent. Within little over a year of the store's opening, The Baltimore Sun reported that Samuel Posner had sold the business to Louis Stewart and the Associated Merchants' Company (AMC), most likely as a result of financial difficulties resulting from high construction costs. Louis Stewart's turn at the helm of store was brief, too: in 1916 Stewart's was absorbed into a new firm, the Associated Dry Goods corporation (ADG), which consolidated several major U.S. retailing chains, including Lord & Taylor and J. McCreery's.
Many Baltimoreans have fond memories of shopping at Stewarts and recall making day-long excursions to the store. Stewart's, according to local columnist, Jacques Kelly, had "...an excellent men's furnishing department – ties and sweaters" and a wonderful selection of "... china and silver" and "yard good (dressmaking materials)." A high-class store with an elegant interior, Stewart's boasted two restaurants—the Georgian Tea Room and Cook Works—both popular with shoppers, as were the delicious vanilla marshmallow treats sold at the store's candy counter.
Stewart's opened their first suburban outlet on York Road in Towson in 1953 and several other suburban stores shortly thereafter. When the flagship store at Howard and Lexington closed in 1979, Stewart's held a week-long closing sale that brought in thousands of bargain-hungry shoppers. Stewart's was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 and in 2007 Catholic Relief Services opened their offices in the first floor of the building.
Erected in 1879 as an investment property for Arunah Shepherdson Abell, founder of The Baltimore Sun, the Abell Building was designed by famed Baltimore architect George Frederick—architect for Baltimore's City Hall, Hollins Market, and the Old Baltimore City College. Abell spared no expense in constructing the cast-iron framed, masonry façade building and worked to ensure that tenants included multiple, prominent businesses. Though the building quickly became known for its lavish construction, its ornate exterior belied the hard reality that workers within its walls faced. The corner of West Baltimore and Eutaw Streets made an ideal location for local industry along a main streetcar line, just a few blocks from a B&O Railroad station and close to the Baltimore harbor. The grandeur of the building's construction, its two hydraulic elevators, and its imposing size invited immediate recognition and praise in local and national publications. In late nineteenth century Baltimore, as across the country, most skilled professions had declined as craftsmen were replaced by machines that could produce more goods more quickly. Wages for the masses of largely immigrant, unskilled workers who came to cities like Baltimore seeking work in industries remained low and working conditions were unregulated and woefully unsafe. One of the industries that attracted thousands of workers to Baltimore was the clothing or needle trade. In the years following the Civil War, demand for ready-to-wear garments skyrocketed and Baltimore's garment district boomed in response. Strouse Brothers, one of Baltimore's largest clothing manufacturers operated out of this building in the late nineteenth century and was a prominent player in Baltimore's growing needle trade. Strouse ran what was then called an "inside shop"—a multistory factory outfitted with new machines and the latest in manufacturing technology—where workers (largely women) worked long hours to keep the factory's machines running, often earning barely enough to survive. While larger clothing manufacturers escaped the criticism directed to sweatshops by local reformers, producers like Strouse, even when unionized (the United Garment Workers organized in Baltimore in the 1890s), often sent piecework out to sweated workers in small shops or set up their own small, outside sweatshops to avoid paying higher wages or complying with worker demands for better conditions and shorter hours. When the clothing industry slumped after WWI, many of the gains achieved by Baltimore's garment unions eroded as the pursuit of ever-shrinking profits led many manufacturers to once again increase their reliance on sweatshops. Despite the fact that union strikes eventually brought new gains, Baltimore's once thriving garment trade was in sharp decline by the 1930s. Though there are still a small number of women sewing coats and uniforms in various downtown clothing shops, Baltimore's days as a center of ready-to-wear garment production are long gone. Luckily, this handsome brick building weathered the decline of the garment industry and years of neglect. PMC property group acquired the building in 2005 and it now houses well-appointed apartments that feature high ceilings, large windows, and a bit of Baltimore history.
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Spinning wheel manufacturers, cigar makers, tailors, hat makers, multiple banks, and a music school all occupied this site—often at the same time—going back to the early nineteenth century. During the decade after the Civil War, the upper stories provided a home for the James M. Deems Music School established in 1867 by Civil War veteran and well-known composer General James Monroe Deems.
Born in Baltimore in 1818, Deems played music since early childhood—later declared a "prodigy" for his performances with a group organized by his father. He traveled to Dresden, Germany in 1839 to study musical composition and cello with J. J. F. Dotzauer, a famed German cellist and composer. After his return to the United States, Deems became an instructor at the University of Virginia but maintained his ties to Baltimore, convincing Baltimore schools to adopt his Vocal Music Simplified instructional book for music education in 1851. After a brief but active military career during the Civil War, Deems opened his music school on West Baltimore Street sharing the building with the Haydn Musical Association. Even after the school left Baltimore Street in 1877, Deems remained an active composer and educator through his death in 1901.
In the years after World War II, the condition of the block deteriorated as the decline of the clothing industry left many small commercial buildings vacant. Fortunately for this handsome landmark, the building was restored and opened as a PNC Bank branch in 2009.
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 Ěýthe Center for Health Care and Healthy Living.Ěý
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Adorned with graceful arches and elegant art deco lights the eight story Beaux Arts Hecht-May Co. building at the corner of Lexington and Howard streets (designed by Smith and May architects) was originally built in 1908 as an annex to the Bernheimer Brothers Department store. In what must have been a first for Baltimore, the building initially featured a rooftop garden and hosted cow milking demonstrations. The store sold groceries, clothing, and a variety of household goods.
In 1923, Bernheimer Brothers merged with the Leader Department Store and four years later The May Company bought the combined Berheimer-Leader store and incorporated it as one of their outlets. In 1959, the May Co. purchased the Hecht Company and this building became the Hecht-May Company's main Baltimore location. Though this building's life as part of the Hecht Company began in the twentieth century, the story of the Hecht Company reaches far back to the mid-1840s.
Samuel Hecht, founder of the DC-based Hecht Company, emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1844 and worked as a peddler. Four of Hecht's five sons worked in the family business but one in particular - Moses Hecht - stood out as an early and persistent entrepreneur who proved critical to the family's success. Moses began working at one of Hecht's earliest Baltimore outlets, Hecht's Reliable on Broadway, at age 13 and went on to become the store's general manager within two years. He helped to bring the store record profits thanks to innovations like the one-price-per-item policy, guaranteeing everyone paid the same price for the same merchandise without needing to bargain with store employees.
Hecht's retail empire grew quickly and lasted for over 100 years. By the late 1800s, the Hecht Company operated a general store at Baltimore and Pine streets, a carpet store on Lexington, and an upscale store known as The Hub at the corner of Baltimore and Light Streets. When the 1904 Baltimore Fire destroyed The Hub's first location, the business relocated to Baltimore and Charles Streets - the site of the Mechanic Theatre today. At their Howard and Lexington location, Hecht's customers could purchase everything from sheets and towels to formal wear and pianos. The store featured an art gallery on the eighth floor and customers frequently punctuated their shopping trips with lunch in the Courtyard Restaurant or tea in the Skyline Tearoom.
In 1949 Hecht's opened a store in Annapolis and continued to open locations throughout the Baltimore-Washington area up until the 1970s. This store closed in the 1980s when Hecht's consolidated several locations. Renovated in 2007, the building is now home to a branch of Rite Aid and the upper stories house rental apartments.
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.
Mount Clare is considered to be the birthplace of American railroading. It holds the oldest passenger and freight station in the United States and the first railroad manufacturing complex in the country.
Mount Clare is considered to be the birthplace of American railroading. It holds the oldest passenger and freight station in the United States and the first railroad manufacturing complex in the country. The first Mount Clare Station building was erected in 1830 after Charles Carroll deeded the land to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company. In May of that year, the first railroad was completed to Ellicott's Mills (now Ellicott City) at a distance of about 13 miles. The first passenger car to make the trip was the horse-drawn "Pioneer" which made the trip on May 25, 1830 in one hour and five minutes. On August 28 of that year, the first American locomotive, "Tom Thumb", made its debut run on the same route, but took ten minutes longer than the horse-drawn Pioneer. The manufacturing complex at Mount Clare became a leading innovator in locomotive technology. Phineas Davis and Ross Winans created the first commercially practical coal-driven American locomotives at the site. In 1850, the B&O erected an ironworks where the first iron railroad bridge was designed. The circular roundhouse was completed in 1884 and was at the time the largest circular building in the world. The Mount Clare Station is now part of the B&O Railroad Museum. The museum has the largest collection of 19th-century locomotives in the United States. Visitors can take take a train ride on the first mile of railroad tracks laid in the country.
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Tracey Clark and Ben Riddleberger purchased the 1885 gas valve building, historically known as the Chesapeake Gas Works, in 2005 to house their architectural salvage business—Housewerks. Riddleberger and Clark have since stabilized and restored the long vacant building (also known as Bayard Station) and have highlighted its many fine details. These include ornamental plaster and woodwork, fireplaces, ten-foot high Palladian windows, and granite walls on the lower level.
Bayard Station was once the headquarters for the Chesapeake Gas Company of Baltimore City, which merged with several other companies eventually becoming BGE. During the station's heyday, the gas works spread over 14 acres. The complex included the Valve House (Housewerks); four large telescoping holding tanks, called "gasometers;" and a series of processing buildings, of which one remains today across Hamburg Street. The gas was manufactured, stored in the gasometers, and then piped into the valve house where it was compressed before being directed into the main lines of the city. (The pipe for the Hamburg Street Line is still visible in the cellar!)
Riddleberger and Clark extensively researched the history of the building and proudly display early images throughout their store. In addition, they worked with the Pigtown neighborhood in 2006 to have the building included on the National Register of Historic Places. With more than a little sweat, the building now is a centerpiece in a quickly changing industrial part of South Baltimore.
Carroll Park is Baltimore's third oldest city park and was originally part of the enormous Mount Clare plantation owned by Charles Carroll, Barrister in the mid-eighteenth century. The park was the site of Camp Carroll during the Civil War and, in the 30 years prior to becoming a park, the area surrounding Mt. Clare was leased from the Carrolls and became Southwestern Schuetzen Park—a private recreation area used by Baltimore's German immigrant community.
In 1890, the City purchased 20 acres of the former estate to create Carroll Park and in 1906 engaged the Olmsted Brothers to develop a master plan. The famous firm’s recommendations respected the historic character of the west side, including the Mt. Clare mansion, while providing for sports facilities on the east, in keeping with the trend toward more active recreation for urban dwellers.
The Carroll Park Golf Course, on a separate parcel farther west, became the focus of Civil Rights protests over segregation and was integrated in 1951; it features a 9-hole executive course. The Gwynns Falls Trail passes through the edge of the golf course and the park.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro was a true Baltimorean. As a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, Shapiro fed his literary ambitions with the city's rich cultural history; for instance, writing love poems at Fort McHenry where Francis Scott Key was inspired to pen the Star-Spangled Banner. In 1939, Shapiro enrolled in the Enoch Pratt Library School at the library's central branch, an experience that would greatly influence his life and his writing.
Shapiro later expressed his gratitude to Enoch Pratt Free Library, by capturing it in the lines:
"Voltaire would weep for joy, Plato would stare.
What is it, easier than a church to enter,
Politer than a department store, this center,
That like Grand Central leads to everywhere?"
Open to all Baltimoreans since its 1894 founding, the city's first non-segregated cultural institution does indeed "lead to everywhere," thanks to the library's numerous resources and founder Enoch Pratt's firm belief in inclusiveness. The architecture of the 1933 Central Branch building exemplifies Pratt's philosophy. Designed to mirror a department store, library patrons, not just librarians, could access the books, and large exhibit windows advertised library news to passersby. Following Pratt's requirements, the building's entrance remained without stairs for the convenience of women pushing strollers. This revolutionary design went on to inspire library architecture nationwide.
Shapiro enjoyed studying to be a librarian; however, World War II intervened. "I couldn't take the final exam because I was drafted," Shapiro explained. "Because of my background of two years of college...they put me in the company headquarters office and gave me a typewriter." As the company clerk, Shapiro was never far from writing materials and had "endless amounts of empty time"–-everything a poet needs. He wrote prodigiously, sending his poems stateside to his Baltimorean fiancée, Evalyn Katz, who then published them.
Although 9,000 miles from home, the Pratt Library was never far from Shapiro's mind. He frequently wrote to his former colleagues, signing his letters with "Very best wishes to you and the Library." Meanwhile, the library also contributed to the war effort, housing various headquarters and providing basement air-raid shelters.
When the war ended in 1945, the library returned to business as usual, but Shapiro did not. Having left America only a student, he returned home an established poet. Shapiro published four books and received several prizes including the Pulitzer Prize during the war. Assuming a radically different life than the one he had left, Shapiro taught at several universities, and describes his role as "not really a professor, but a sort of mad guest." He also worked as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, a position known today as the Poet Laureate; edited poetry magazines; and of course, wrote poetry. All the while, Shapiro embodied the philosophy of Enoch Pratt, relentlessly fighting against prejudice and injustices both in his poetry and with his actions, until his death in 2000.
Heralded as "the greatest writer of our time" by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, John Dos Passos spent time in and out of Baltimore from his birth in 1896 and lived here from 1950 until his death in 1970. An acclaimed biographer and novelist, Dos Passos is best remembered for his experimental writing style, often emulating the techniques of the camera and the newsreel, particularly in his trilogy of novels, U.S.A.
While Sartre called him "the greatest," Baltimoreans just called him "John." Dos Passos worked in the George Peabody Library as well as the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Johns Hopkins University Library almost daily during his time in Baltimore. Although Dos Passos once described his ideal working conditions as only, "a room without any particular interruptions," the George Peabody Library is majestic—particularly the reading room, which has been called "the setting of a bibliophile's dream," and "the most beautiful room in Baltimore."
The library was a gift from entrepreneur George Peabody to the people of Baltimore for their kindness and hospitality, and remains free and open to the public as part of the Sheridan Libraries Special Collections at Johns Hopkins University. In the reading room, one can find the library's collection of more than 300,000 volumes housed in five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies that stretch from the marble floor to skylights 61 feet above. There too, one could find John Dos Passos.
Bald and bespectacled, Dos Passos hunched over his desk researching American culture and writing his own works. Often confused for a librarian, he helped library visitors locate books in the card catalog, understand antiquated text, and complete research papers.
Although Dos Passos never wrote a book set in Baltimore, the city provided the author with more than just rooms in which to work. Baltimore helped pique Dos Passos' literary interest. The author recalled as a boy, "I would hide in the shadows so that I wouldn't be sent off to bed. I'd listen till my ears would burst" to stories of old storytellers and watermen, stories in which Baltimore "was the center." Shortly before his death, he described Baltimore as a city that "imbues the inhabitants with a certain dignity" where "neighborhoods had a special flavor."
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A novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist, Gertrude Stein is remembered as a literary innovator who fearlessly experimented with language in the early twentieth century. Today, Gertrude Stein is still renowned as a magnet for those who would profoundly change art and literature. In 1892, at age 18, newly-orphaned Gertrude and her brother Leo moved to Baltimore. Her experiences in Baltimore paved the way for her later successes, as she wrote in her biting 1925 piece "Business in Baltimore": "Once upon a time, Baltimore was necessary." The siblings lived briefly with their Aunt Fanny Bachrach in Baltimore before moving to Massachusetts for college. In 1897, the duo truly settled in Baltimore, living at 215 East Biddle Street, marked by the traditional Baltimorean marble front steps. The unique environment of Mount Vernon introduced Stein to a variety of people and perspectives that would influence both her literature and her life. The Steins' five-bedroom rowhome was luxurious, dictating a certain lifestyle. Like their neighbors, the Steins kept servants. Through her familiarity with the neighborhood servants, who generally were African American women, along with her experience caring for African American patients during clinical rotations, Gertrude developed an understanding of "black language rhythms" and a knack for reaistic characterization of African Americans, both of which later appeared in her writing. Like their servants, Biddle Street residents also influenced Stein. The gossip that filled the parlors of Biddle Street and the affairs that occurred in the bedrooms above reappeared in several of Stein's works. For instance, Wallis Simpson of 212 East Biddle Street, future Duchess of Windsor, inspired Ida, while Stein's own relationship with May Bookstaver and the ensuing love triangle created by Bookstaver's lover, Mabel Haynes, provided the plot for the novel Q.E.D.Ěýas well as the story "Melanctha." Life in Baltimore influenced more than just Stein's literature. Her experiences, particularly while studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University, prompted her lifelong habit of challenging societal standards. She learned to smoke cigars, confronted sexist professors (thereby earning the nickname "old battle ax"), took up boxing, rejected feminine stereotypes and instead "went flopping around...big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn," as one male classmate remembered. Stein left Baltimore in 1903 after leaving Hopkins following her third year of medical school. However, despite her 39-year absence, Stein claimed Baltimore as her "place of domicile" in her will, as, in her words, she was "born longer [in Baltimore] because after all everybody has to come from somewhere."
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In 1934, Carl Sandburg wrote to Sally Bruce Kinsolving, "The years go by and I don't forget ever the long evening of song with you... at your house and faces and stories and moments out of that visit to Baltimore. I'm hoping to drop in again soon."
On the night of Sandburg's February 1924 visit, like many other nights, the Kinsolving home, Old St. Paul's Rectory, became a sanctuary for poets and poetry lovers alike. As co-founder of the Maryland Poetry Society, Mrs. Kinsolving frequently welcomed a variety of acclaimed poets into her home, allowing members of the society to meet their literary idols. Carl Sandburg, a three-time Pulitzer-prize winner, poet, biographer, historian, journalist, novelist and musicologist, was just one of Mrs. Kinsolving's illustrious guests. Although he visited Baltimore only once or twice, Sandburg and Mrs. Kinsolving maintained a lifelong relationship through correspondence, encouraging each other in their work and exchanging poems and folk songs.
Old St. Paul's Church built the Georgian-style rectory, where Sandburg and the Kinsolvings spent the evening, as a home for the rector in 1791. Once standing at the northern edge of the city with a spectacular view of the harbor, the Old St. Paul's Church and Rectory is a testament to the growth of Baltimore—now located within the heart of central Baltimore, surrounded by contemporary development and its view of the harbor obscured long ago.
Described by H.L. Mencken as "indubitably American in every pulse-beat," Sandburg was born in Illinois in 1878. He quit school at age thirteen, and then worked a variety of odd jobs ranging from a farmhand to a traveling salesman to a milkman to a barber. He traversed the United States as a hobo and served as a soldier in the Spanish-American War in 1898. Through these experiences, Sandburg truly saw the United States, later capturing it both in his own writing and by anthologizing the folk songs he encountered. Sandburg's love of America did not blind him to its problems and he fought passionately against a variety of social injustices.
Sandburg was never a Baltimorean, but was inextricably tied to Chicago, working at the Chicago Daily News and praising the developing industrial city in his work—notably in Chicago Poems. However, his friends in Baltimore were never far from his mind, and their letters never far from his mail box, proving what he'd once written to Mrs. Kinsolving, that "the prairies and Chesapeake Bay are neighbors now."
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.
Up near the top of this handsome Neoclassical brick building at the corner of Fayette and Paca Streets is a stone entablature reading "1801 Baltimore General Dispensary 1911"—a visible reminder of this building's important past.
Doors opened at the Baltimore General Dispensary on Fayette Street in February 1912 and is the only surviving building designed for Baltimore's oldest charity,
The Baltimore General Dispensary was formed in 1801 on West Lexington Street to provide medical care to Baltimore's poor residents. In its first year, the dispensary saw a little over 200 patients. Before official incorporation in 1808, over 6,000 Baltimore residents had sought help from the charity.
A second dispensary joined the first in 1826 and by the late nineteenth century the charity had established fifteen additional locations many affiliated with local hospitals. While the building is no longer owned by the group, the charitable work of the Baltimore Dispensary continues through a grant-making foundation providing funds to area hospitals for medicine in their outpatient departments.
Considered a model of its kind, this building featured a large dispensary center on the first floor; however, due to the racial segregation enforced in many local institutions at that time, the dispensary was separated for black and white patients. The rooms on the second floor for surgical and medical aid, including physical exams given by doctors, allowed the charity's poor patients a rare measure of privacy.
With a gleaming black marble façade reading "Charles Fish and Sons Company" and Victorian brick arches above, the architecture of this building clearly points to a varied history. The surprising story of the building begins before the start of the American Civil War with the foundation of the nation's first dental school by local doctors Horace Hayden and Chapin Harris. The School of Medicine at the University of Maryland in Baltimore had rejected their efforts to start a dental school within their institution, perhaps agreeing with the many who saw early dentists as "Ignorant, incapable men whose knowledge was composed of a few secrets which they had purchased at fabulous prices from other charlatans." In 1840, Hayden and Harris turned to the Maryland State Legislature to obtain a charter for an independent dental college—the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery.
Popular from the start, over the next forty years the college outgrew four locations finally moving to the corner of Eutaw and Franklin Streets in 1881. The new building stood as a testament to the growth of the science of dentistry and the professionalization of dentists. The Baltimore College of Dentistry occupied this building until 1915, when it became part of the University of Maryland and moved operations to the main campus a few blocks south.
In 1942, Charles Fish and his family moved their furniture and clothing business to 429 Eutaw Street and etched his name on the lustrous art deco storefront. A Jewish Russian immigrant, Fish arrived in the United States as a teenager in 1909 and lived in Virginia for years before moving to Baltimore. As early as 1945, Fish and Sons were noted for their nondiscriminatory policies, which earned them a spot on the Afro-American Newspaper's list of "orchids"–-businesses that welcomed all shoppers, regardless of color. Unlike many of their neighbors, who held fast to "final sale" and "no returns" policies for African Americans in pre-civil rights Baltimore (and thus were listed as "onions" on the Afro-American's pages), Fish and Sons proudly served and hired all Americans, regardless of color. Fish and Sons continued to operate their business at the corner until 1980.
Davidge Hall, on the University of Maryland Medical School Campus, is the oldest medical facility building in the nation. The red brick structure is named after the school's founder and first dean, John Beale Davidge. It was designed by architect Robert Carey Long, Sr. Constructed in 1812 on land purchased from Revolutionary War Hero John Eager Howard, the building was near the western edge of the growing city of Baltimore and offered medical students and teachers an excellent view of the harbor. In 1814, observers reportedly witnessed from the building's white-columned porch the "bombs bursting in air" during the British attack of Fort McHenry. Although large by early nineteenth century standards, this beautifully restored Classical Revival style building was by no means luxuriously outfitted. Heated by gas stoves close to the ceiling, Davidge Hall was cold, dark, and dank in the winter, frequently filled with noxious odors from the primitive embalming that took place in the anatomy lab and reeked of fumes from chemical experiments performed in the lower lecture hall. Though the practice of medicine has changed and improved over the years and the building has been updated, Davidge Hall has retained many original details and remains an iconic part of the medical school campus. Astoundingly, all of the nearly 20,000 students educated by the University of Maryland School of Medicine to date have passed through this exquisite building's doors. In 1974, Davidge Hall was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1997, the U.S. Department of the Interior named the building a National Historic Landmark. The building is currently used for special events and houses a collection of medical artifacts, including paintings, antique medical instruments, and a mummified human.
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Designed by noted Scottish American theatre architect Thomas Lamb, the Hippodrome Theatre opened in 1914 as one of the first theatres in the United States to operate both as a movie house and a vaudeville performance venue. Local theatre impresarios Marion Pearce and Philip Scheck (who owned six theatres and exclusively distributed Hollywood films), commissioned the theater on the site where the nineteenth century luxury hotel Eutaw House (1835) once stood.
The original theatre seated 3,000 people and visitors entered the grand building through glorious doors that featured stained glass transoms, opening into red carpeted rooms adorned with painted gold plasterwork and heavy crimson curtains. The Hippodrome's opening night featured a screening of the film "The Iron Master," vaudeville acts, a man juggling a barrel with his feet, and a group of four performing elephants. Pearce and Scheck operated the theatre until 1917, when it was sold to the Lowe's Theatre Chain, who held it until 1924.
By 1920, around 30,000 people visited the theater every week—one of the most well-attended theaters in the city. After a prosperous decade, in which the theatre often featured three shows a day, declining attendance put the Hippodrome into receivership in 1931. L. Edward Goldman purchased the property, plus debts, for a mere $14,000 and hired Philadelphian, Isidor "Izzy" Rappaport, to manage the ailing venue.
During Rappaport's tenure, the Hippodrome saw a second golden age. Rappaport, who later bought the Hippodrome himself, oversaw the installation of a grand new marquee , outfitted the theatre with new seats, and brought in numerous notable acts, such as Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and many others, securing its reputation as one of America's premier vaudeville houses. The lure of new, high-paying gigs in Las Vegas along with the arrival of television and televised variety shows in the 1950s, however, brought the demise of many vaudeville houses across the country and the Hippodrome held its final live show in 1959. Business continued to decline in the 1970s and 1980s and though it had become the last operating movie theatre on the west side of Baltimore's downtown, the Hippodrome shut its doors in 1990.
Fortunately, this landmark theater has been reborn, reopening in 2004 as the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, combining new construction with the preservation and reuse of the Western National Savings Bank, the Eutaw Savings Bank, and the original Hippodrome Theatre. The Performing Arts Center has brought the Hippodrome back as a state-of-the-art showcase featuring touring Broadway shows and much more.
In 1985, WJZ-TV local news cameras captured the view of the Inner Harbor from above as they documented the quickly changing landscape from the back seat of a helicopter. An aerial vantage point was nearly a necessity to take in the wide range of recently completed development projects and recently announced new building sites. In 1984, developers and city officials had announced twenty projects to build new buildings or reuse existing buildings around Charles Center and the Inner Harbor.
That same year, Charles Center and the Inner Harbor won an "Honor Award" from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) recognizing the conversion of the former industrial landscape into a destination for tourists and locals as "one of the supreme achievements of large-scale urban design and development in U.S. history."
Even before it opened, the anticipation around Baltimore’s World Trade Center was unmistakable. “It promises to be the handsomest building built so far in the redevelopment area, a graceful symbol for Baltimore’s renewal and an emblem of the historic economic dependence of the state and the city on the sea,” reported the Sun in December 1976.
The idea for a World Trade building for Baltimore began percolating in the mid-1960s. The center would be a grand symbol of the harbor’s renewal and a hub for maritime business. In 1966, the Maryland Port Authority sponsored Mayor Theodore McKeldin and five other port and city planning officials on a whirlwind trip to Houston and New Orleans to see other world trade centers in those cities. The mayor came back inspired, and Baltimore became one of the sixteen charter members of the World Trade Association.
Construction of the center began in 1973. The five-sided, thirty-story building was designed by the firm of architect I.M. Pei, who was responsible for the design of the glass pyramid of the Louvre in Paris, the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington D.C., and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, among other projects. The building cost $22 million, double the cost of the original proposition. The apex of two of the walls facing the harbor meet at the shoreline and suggest the prow of a ship. It is the tallest five-sided building in the world.
One of the first tenants, The Canton Company, the parent firm of the Cottman Company, who was the operator of the Canton Marine Terminal, signed a five-year lease for 13,000 square feet of space. Over the years, the tower has also housed the headquarters of the Maryland Port Administration, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, and the World Trade Center Institute, a member of the World Trade Centers Association that operates as a private, non-profit international business membership organization. For many years, the Top of the World Observation Level offered spectacular city and harbor views. This level was slated to close to the public in 2025.
After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, security measures at the Baltimore World Trade Center changed accordingly so that boat access to the building is blocked to prevent acts of terrorism. Baltimore’s World Trade Center is also home to a 9/11 Memorial that includes three 22-foot long steel beams from the 94th to 96th floors of the north tower of the New York World Trade Center. Twisted and fused together, the steel beams and damaged limestone pieces from the Pentagon's west wall rest atop marble blocks bearing the names and birthdays of the 68 Marylanders who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The houses at 612 and 614 South Wolfe Street are two of the smallest and oldest wooden homes remaining in Fell’s Point. Ann Bond Fell Giles, widow of Edward Fell, inherited both properties following the death of her first husband. She remarried and had several more children. Upon her death, the properties ended up in the hands of her youngest daughter Susannah Giles Moore and her husband Phillip Moore. It stayed in their hands until Phillip died insolvent in 1833 or 1834. The houses were built somewhere between February 1798 and 1801, though likely closer to the later date. 612 was connected to another property at 610 South Wolfe Street in its earliest days, and both were rented to Edward Callow in 1801. 614 South Wolfe Street was also rented out by the owners to Patrick Morrison. Between 1842 and 1854, the buildings became homes to African American ship caulkers Richard Jones, Henry Scott, and John Whittington. The shipbuilding industry in Fell’s Point depended on free and enslaved black labor. Caulking, the process by which a ship is waterproofed and sealed, was dominated by black workers including Frederick Douglass who worked as a caulker in Baltimore in the 1830s.. For a time, the Black Caulker Association held a near monopoly over Baltimore's caulking industry. The Black Caulker Association lost power in the mid-nineteenth century as European immigrants arrived competing for work. The houses on Wolfe Street were named the Caulker Houses in honor of the caulkers who lived there. The houses are also known as the “Two Sisters Houses” after sisters Mary Leeke Rowe Dashiell and Eleanor Marine Dashiell, descendants of the Leeke, Marine, and Dashiell families. They owned the houses prior to the acquisition by the Society for the Preservation of Federal Hill and Fell’s Point.
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713 South Ann Street is a rare wooden house surviving within a row from 711 to 715 South Ann Street. Built around 1800, the 1804 City Directory lists Patrick Travis, a sea-captain, as the resident of the house at the time. The earliest deed located for the property is from 1851 and shows the house being sold to Anna Maria White from John J. Roose on November 28th of that year.
After it was covered by formstone for a number of years, owner and construction expert Glenn Henley restored the old wood facade in 2001.
South Bond Street features a handful of nineteenth century wooden houses, including several built before the War of 1812. A relatively diverse population of European descent made up the neighborhood during the early 1800s. Martin Breitenoder, a German, owned a bakery at 820-22 S. Bond (c.1802). His neighbors included a French cabinetmaker, an Italian named S. Belli, who manufactured “philosophical apparatus and other works in pewter and lead,” and an Irishman who ran a tavern at the “Sign of the Revenue Barge.” Irish, English, and Scottish boot and shoemakers are nearby, one of whom, Edward Hagthorp, made fine shoes at 816 S. Bond.
The street’s finest house, 830 S. Bond (c. 1783) passed from builder Thomas Winning to his daughter in the 1790s before Thames Street innkeeper Daniel James acquired the house after the War of 1812.
809 South Bond Street is a good example of the simple wooden houses that filled Fells Point at that time. Deed research has only identified the owners as far back as 1851, when the property was sold to John Fernandis and Maria Locke.
1627 Aliceanna Street, is a rare eighteenth century wooden house, built in 1797 and once home to "The Academy" run by schoolmaster Nicholas Leeke. Leeke's daughter, Mary, married a young sea captain, Henry Dashiell, who was a privateer in the War of 1812 and lived in a mansion at Aliceanna Street and Broadway. The Preservation Society of Fells Point and Federal Hill was deeded this and other historic properties by the Dashiell sisters, great-great granddaughters of Nicholas Leeke, when the City of Baltimore issued a "rehab or raze" order on the properties in 2006.
Thankfully, after three years of blood, sweat, tears, and many volunteer hours, the once-derelict wooden house at 1627 Aliceanna Street is rehabilitated and now reoccupied as a family home.
Built around 1800, 1706 Lancaster Street was home to Thomas Kemp, a 24-year-old shipbuilder from St. Michaels on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, from 1803 to 1805 on the eve of the War of 1812. During the war, many regarded Kemp as the most skilled builder of privateer schooners. The Rossie, Comet, and Chasseur schooners seized an astounding 80 prizes—Rossie under Joshua Barney’s command, the other two under the celebrated Captain Tom Boyle. Like other shipbuilders, Kemp also repaired, altered, and outfitted vessels, sometimes investing in the ships that came out of his yard. Kemp’s Fountain Street shipyard, several blocks to the north, also produced two sloops of war for the U.S. Navy—Ontario and Erie. His payroll during construction in 1813 reached $1,000 a week, which was quite a sum considering that even skilled workmen earned only $3 a day.