The Warden's House on Monument Street is a remarkable work of architecture and a unique reminder of the history of justice and injustice in Baltimore. The Warden's House was erected between 1855 and 1859 as part of a larger city jail designed by local architects, Thomas and James M. Dixon. Originally, this structure served as both a gateway through the jail's perimeter wall and a residence. The warden's apartment was to the structure's west side and a suite for a clerk was to the east. Unsurprisingly, it more closely resembles a fortress than a house, with battlements on the towers, projecting turrets, and lancet windows.

The main jail was altered beyond recognition and the wall was torn down in the mid-1960s to make way for the expansion of the Baltimore City Detention Center. But the Warden’s House survived and won recognition for its unique Gothic design when the Baltimore Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation made it a local landmark in 1986. The site itself has an even longer history as the site of the city's first jail erected in 1800.

In the eighteenth century, a local sheriff controlled the city jail and, according to John H.B. Latrobe, chief counsel for the B&O Railroad, revenue from the jail's operation made up a "most lucrative part of his income." Prior to the Civil War, some of that income was from the sale of Black Americans who had been arrested as runaways, regardless if they were enslaved or free. If the prisoner could not prove he was free or if an "owner" did not claim them, they would be sold at a court-ordered auction. The jailers and wardens would receive a portion of the sale.

For the new jail, the state legislature established a system where the warden worked under the supervision of a board of visitors and was paid a fixed salary. Though the jail would still benefit from arresting suspected runaways by charging a fee for boarding them.

Early prisoners included famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison who spent seven weeks there in 1831. In October 1832, the jail held seventy-five people: forty as "debtors" and thirty-five on criminal charges. The latter group included two eleven-year-old Black boys charged with setting fire to a lumberyard.

By the early 1850s, reform-minded observers sought a new jail where the city could avoid mixing children with "old and hardened prisoners." In February 1851, a grand jury reported on the "inappropriateness of the structure" and the "limited capacity" of the building (then holding over 240 people) to the judges of the City Court. In 1855, a design competition awarded the project to Thomas and James M. Dixon, construction began in 1857, and, by December 1859, the new building was complete. Supervised by warden Capt. Thomas C. James, the new jail had three hundred cells in two separate wings. The Sun observed: "Baltimore can now boast of a prison in point of appearance, stability and comfort, second to none other in the country."

This public jail and several private slave jails that proliferated in early 19th century Baltimore all made money by boarding the enslaved for a fee. For instance, travelling families or slave traders would all want someplace to keep their enslaved workers while they stopped for the night. As the Civil War began, and especially after slavery was ended in Washington, DC in 1862, these jails were also used by local enslavers to house their enslaved workers in order to prevent them from running away.

The buildings where prisoners were held remained almost unchanged for a century until they were transformed in the 1960s. The Warden's House is one of the only jail buildings that has been preserved. The gateway had long since been converted into the warden's living room. In 1974, they were converted into offices while keeping the building's distinctive interior intact.

At present, change is coming to the Baltimore Jail once again; threatening the Warden's House and the nearby 1898 Maryland Penitentiary with demolition. In July 2015, Governor Larry Hogan announced the immediate closure of the Baltimore jail following years of concerns and controversy over conditions for inmates and corrections officers. In the spring of 2016, the Maryland Division of Corrections (MDC) released their preliminary plan for the demolition of the Baltimore City Detention Center including this local landmark. Planning is now underway but preservationists are still working to keep this unique reminder of Baltimore's history from disappearing forever.

Trinity Baptist Church at the corner of Druid Hill Avenue and McMechen Street tells the story of Baltimore's connections to the national civil rights movement and radical Black activism in the early twentieth century. One of the church's influential early activist leaders was Reverend Garnett Russell Waller. In July 1905, Waller joined fellow activists W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter at the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario, Canada in founding the Niagara Movement—a new civil rights organization that ultimately developed into the NAACP. Trinity Baptist Church was then located at Charles and 20th Streets and Waller, who served as the Niagara Movement’s Maryland secretary, lived nearby at 325 E. 23rd Street. James Robert Lincoln Diggs, educator and succeeded Waller as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church beginning around early 1915. Diggs shared Waller's commitment to activism and was also a participant in the 1905 founding of the Niagara Movement. In 1918, Diggs helped to establish the Baltimore chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in 1918. The UNIA-ACL was first established in Ohio in 1914 by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born activist. Diggs was close with Garvey and presided over his marriage to Amy Jacques Garvey in 1922. In May 1920, Diggs led the congregation's move to Druid Hill Avenue after the congregation purchased the 1872 St. Paul's English Evangelical Lutheran Church for $40,000. The church quickly put their new building to work—hosting the 1920 annual convention for the National Equal Rights League in October. The conference was presided over by Rev. J. H. Taylor, secretary of the Maryland Association for Social Service, with speakers including founding member Monroe Trotter, lawyer Nathan S. Taylor from Chicago, and Trinity’s own Rev. Diggs. The church also served as a center for local activism. For example, on February 1, 1921, 500 people gathered at Trinity Baptist Church at Druid Hill Avenue and Mosher Street to protest the release of a white man, Harry Feldenheimer, on a $500 bail soon after police arrested him for an attempted assault on a 10-year-old black girl named Esther Short. The Afro-American reported that participants in the meeting criticized the “brutality of the local police, exclusion of qualified men from the police force and from juries in the city, and the Jim Crow arrangements for colored people in the Criminal and Juvenile Courts.” Regrettably, Diggs health began to decline around the fall of 1922 and he soon entered a hospital. On April 14, 1923, he died at home and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Rev. Garnett R. Waller died in Baltimore in 1941 but the church both individuals supported continues to this day.

The Arena Playhouse at 801 McCulloh Street has been occupied by the Arena Players, an African American theater troupe, since December 1961. Established in 1953 as an outgrowth of the “The Negro Little Theater”, the Arena Players spent a decade performing at varied locations including Coppin State University, the Druid Hill YMCA, the Great Hall Theater of St. Mary’s Church in Walbrook, and the Carl J. Murphy Auditorium at Morgan State University.

When the theater moved to McCulloh Street at the end of 1961 they took over a building with a long history. Originally known by the address of 406 Orchard Street, the three-story building was erected in the mid to late nineteenth century. By 1890, the building operated as a livery attached to the Hartman & Moore Carriage Factory near the northern end of a row of seventeen buildings between McCulloh Alley and Little Monument Street. Around 1892, Patrick Gaierty acquired the livery and continued to operate it as "University Stables" up until his death in August 1911. Shortly after Gaierty's death, St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal Church acquired the building and turned it into a church hall.

In 1918, during World War I, the church hall was converted into the War Camp Community Service Club for Colored Soldiers with a dance hall, food, bath facilities, and accommodations for two hundred sailors or soldiers. In the 1940s, the building hosted the St. Mary's Hall Nursery School and offered low-cost childcare for local Black families.

By the early 1950s, the city had extended McCulloh Street through the middle of the block leaving two short rows of houses and commercial buildings. The adjoining carriage factory had been turned into a factory for the Baltimore Chair Company. And, by 1960, the church hall had been turned into a 13,500-square-foot warehouse and S.J. Stackhouse & Son, Inc. advertised the building for lease (noting the building's "new hearing plant" and "very good condition").

The Arena Players moved in at the end of 1961 and, by November 14, 1969, managed to purchase the building in a deal financed solely by ticket sales. In 1974, Arena Players met with the Neighborhood Design Center (NDC) to seek the group's assistance in planning the expansion of their 200-seat theater. NDC recruited Leon Bridges, a Black architect who had opened an office in Baltimore in 1970, and Bridges drafted a plan for the redevelopment of the building at an estimated cost of $755,000. Between August 1975 and October 1976, the group undertook a major renovation to add a new large theater to the building. The work was supported by a $50,000 mortgage from the Ideal Building and Loan Association, $120,000 in gifts from community groups and individuals, a $3,000 grant from the Maryland Arts Council, and a $321,000 federal grant administered by the city's Department of Housing and Community Development. The new 300-seat theater was commemorated on October 22, 1976 with a performance of Langston Hughes' Little Ham.

For many years, the Arena Playhouse was one of the only venues dedicated to showcasing the works of Black playwrights and performers. While Black performers now have more opportunities, the theater on McCulloh Street continues to be a treasured institution today.

Built in 1922, the former Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch No. 19 at 606 South Ann Street was one of a large number of branch libraries that opened in the early twentieth century. Between 1908 and 1920, the Pratt Library opened a new branch every sixteen months including new libraries in Hamilton and Mount Washington. The building boom was supported by a 1907 gift from Andrew Carnegie and by the generosity of local residents and community organizations who donated land and funds to support their construction. In 1920, Baltimore City acquired a lot on Ann Street donated by the Children's Playground Association and William Hooper Grafflin, a Baltimore native, banker, and board member of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Local architect William W. Emmart put together a design and the contract for construction was awarded to R.B. Mason in May 1921. By June 1922, the new Branch No. 19 was open. During the early decades of the library's operation, a large number of the patrons were European immigrants, especially from Poland. The population of Polish immigrants in Baltimore grew quickly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reaching over twenty-three thousand people by 1893. A large share of these residents lived in southeast Baltimore, earning Eastern Avenue the reputation as Baltimore's "Polish Wall Street." After the Pratt began offering "book lists" of suggested readings in 1934, a patron at Branch No. 19, Mrs. Charles D. Sadowski, worked with Miss Sara Siebert, branch librarian, to assemble a list of Polish-language books on the history and culture of Poland along with any English novels translated into Polish. The history of immigration in southeast Baltimore is woven together with the history of maritime industry. For example, in December 1941 at the beginning of World War II, more than fifty members of the National Maritime Union walked from their hall at 1700 Fleet Street to register as volunteers for civil defense activities. Some of the volunteers were unable to write in English but the branch librarian Miss Annabelle Collins helped in "filling out their blanks." The war effort also inspired residents to turn the library's back yard into a "Victory Garden." By the 1950s, the Fell's Point Improvement Association began regular meetings at the library and, in the 1970s, the librarians at Branch No. 19 began offering a growing variety of programming for patrons. For example, on June 1, 1974, the library hosted a "family fun festival" with "rock groups, movies, a puppet show, storytelling games, a mahic show contests, and a bake sale." On December 22, 1975, the library invited neighbors to join a free "Community Christmas Party" with seasonal movies, tree decorating, and caroling. Budget troubles for the Enoch Pratt Free Library system in the early 1980s led to a month-long closure for what was then known as the Fell's Point Library Center in 1981. The library declared the large back yard "off-limits" to patrons because they could not afford to maintain or restore the area. Fortunately, residents pitched in to sustain and support the branch. In spring 1985, a neighborhood group, the Owners' Restoring and Renovating Association, secured a $2,500 matching grant from the city's Neighborhood Incentive Program. They planed to plant new flowers and trees and install tables and benches. When other library visitors learned about the plan, they donated even more time and money to raise over $6,000. The community celebrated the new "reading garden" with a dedication on May 17, 1986. By 2001, however, years of inadequate funding led the Enoch Pratt Free Library to announce a plan to close five small branches—including the Fell's Point Center. In August 2001, just two weeks before the branches were set to close, then Mayor Martin O'Malley announced that the city had agreed to keep four of the five branches open through partnerships with local nonprofit organizations. The Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center would move into the former Branch No. 19 and turn it into "a center for immigrants to learn language, assimilation and job skills." According to the Baltimore Sun, Clinton Roby, treasurer of Friends of the Fell's Point Branch, was glad the city avoided selling the building to a private investor, remarking, "We were worried the city was going to take the highest bidder. I'm just glad it's not going to be taken away from the community." In 2018, after fifteen years of service as the Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center, the former library is again in need of repairs and improvements. Flooding in the basement is a regular concern. Roof leaks have damaged the interior and forced EBLO to move programs out of the building. Residents, local elected officials, and EBLO staff are working together to seek funding for repairs and return the building back into use as a resource for the community.

John Stuban moved from New York City to Baltimore, Maryland in 1987 and settled in a small rowhouse on Tyson Street. That same year, a group of New York City activists founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The new organization focused on bringing new visibility to AIDS and HIV through disruptive direct action. Since 1981, the number of known AIDS cases had grown from 234 to over forty thousand. Despite the growing crisis, President Ronald Reagan did not even acknowledge the existence of the disease until 1985 and didn't hold a press conference on the topic until 1987. ACT UP criticized the lack of action by the federal government by staging “die-ins,” where protestor laid on the ground wearing t-shirts with the words “Silence=Death” and blocking roads until they were bodily removed by law enforcement. John Stuban brought this same approach to AIDS activism to Baltimore when he helped found a local chapter in 1990. Together with other local activists, Stuban picketed the mayor's home and delivered a coffin to City Hall. A group of ACT UP protestors chained themselves to front doors of the city health department offices. They disrupted a Board of Estimates meeting seeking a promise from the mayor to consider complaints about Baltimore's AIDS programs and distributed condoms to students at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Stuban also sat on the mayor's AIDS advisory committee, the executive committee of the Greater Baltimore HIV Planning Council, and served as the president of the local chapter of the People with AIDS Coalition. In 1994, Stuban died of AIDS at age thirty-eight. In his obituary the Sun described him as "outspoken, uncompromising, and unrelenting in his efforts to pressure local public officials to provide more AIDS care and to demand a fair share of money for AIDS-related research." Garey Lambert, a friend,Ěýprojectionist at the Charles Theater, editor for the Baltimore Alternative gay newspaper, and founder of AIDS Action Baltimore, explained the importance of Stuban's efforts:

He made AIDS visible. He was an inspiration. He was upfront and in your face. He was the guy with the conscience, the guy who kept community scrutiny going on and on, and without that, there would be nothing done.

Known originally as the Hotel Kernan, the Congress Hotel was built in 1903 by James L. Kernan. Kernan was a savvy businessman who sought to capitalize on the ways in which immigration had influenced the tastes of wealthy visitors and Baltimore natives alike. By the 1970s, the hotel also housed the Marble Bar - a nightclub that hosted many early punk and New Wave groups through the mid 1980s. When first built, the hotel included a luxurious Turkish bath and a massive rathskeller, a traditional German bar located in the basement of a building, and two theaters - the Auditorium and the Maryland - connected to the hotel by covered passageways. Thanks to entrepreneurial innovations from low ticket prices to an ever-changing roster of vaudeville performers, Kernan's "Million Dollar Triple Enterprise" soon proved to be a rousing success. Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, and Eddie Cantor - just to name a few - all appeared at the Hotel Kernan. The hotel remained an important part of Baltimore's entertainment history until it was sold in 1932. The Congress Hotel became a nightclub in the late 1970s. Roger and Leslee Anderson, a pair of local musicians, saw potential in the space and began to operate a nightclub located in the old rathskeller in the basement. Now called the Marble Bar, the music club played from 1978 to the mid-eighties. The Marble Bar was one of the first clubs in Baltimore to book emerging punk and new wave bands, and encouraged the growth of all kinds of music; the unofficial motto became "The Marble is the first place you play on the way up, and the last place you play on the way down." Although dark and dank, the Marble Bar still represented a place where musicians and members of the underground punk scene could gather and commiserate - the Marble Bar was not just a nightclub, but the center of a community. At its peak, bands like the Psychedelic Furs, REM, and Iggy Pop played the Marble Bar before becoming nationally recognized, and underground Baltimore stars like Edith Massey found her way to the Marble Bar as well. While the new sound of punk was not setting any trends – the style had already caught on in other cities across the nation – the Marble Bar remained one of the few to embrace that sound, creating a space for underground music in the city amid the more popular disco movement.

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The Gunpowder Copper Works, a once-prominent factory located along the Great Gunpowder Falls near Glen Arm, Maryland is the second oldest copper works in the United States. The factory operated from around 1811 to 1858 turning blocks of copper into thin sheets used for covering the bottoms of ships and boats to increase their speed and durability. Possibly the most intact industrial site of its kind along the Great Gunpowder Falls, the factory is located immediately past Factory Road on northbound Harford Road. The Gunpowder Copper Works was established around 1811 by Levi Hollingsworth, a veteran of the American Revolution and a prosperous merchant from Cecil County with major investments in shipbuilding. On a trip to England, Levi Hollingsworth studied the refining, milling and rolling of copper and brought back extensive machinery he needed to set up a factory in America. He likely established the factory soon after leasing a mill from Dr. Thomas Love and Caleb Dorsey Goodwin on this site in 1811. The Copper Works factory complex included two sets of sheet rolls, two refining furnaces, and later, and a cupola furnace for treating the slag. A water-wheel furnished the power. With a factory among in the fertile hills of Baltimore County, workmen eventually took to farming when business slowed. When the crops needed attention, workers left rolling and milling for another day. During the War of 1812, the Gunpowder Copper Works supplied the U.S. Navy with sheathing, bolts and nails. Levi Hollingsworth joined the Fifth Maryland Regiment in 1814 and was wounded in September fighting the British at the Battle of North Point. Shortly after end of the war, the dome on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. was rebuilt using copper sheathing rolled by the the Gunpowder Copper Works using ore mined in Frederick County, Maryland. The Capitol Dome contract brought the mill national recognition as a copper supplier. The profit from the project allowed Levi Hollingsworth to buy out the Ridgely and Goodwin interests in the Gunpowder Copper Works in 1816. By the time Hollingsworth died 1822, the mill was the only copper refinery in operation south of the Mason-Dixon Line. By 1850, the Gunpowder Copper Works had produced between 550,000 and 1.5 million pounds of copper sheeting. After Levi Hollingsworth's death, the Copper Works sold to John McKim, Jr. and Sons. Operation of the copper works continued under the management of Isaac McKim until his death in 1838. Isaac McKim linked the Gunpowder Copper Works to the family's shipbuilding supply business on Smith's Wharf in Baltimore's harbor, now the site of the National Aquarium. After Isaac's death, his nephews bought out the other beneficiaries and ran the Copper Works. Haslett and William McKim were both active businessmen in Baltimore, serving on the boards of the Baltimore Dispensary, the Peabody Institute, the B&O Railroad, and the Maritime Insurance Company. William McKim served as an aide-de-camp to Commander John Spear Smith during the Baltimore Bank Riot in 1835. His uncle, Isaac, had served a similar position to Commander Smith's father, General Sam Smith, during the War of 1812. In September 1843, a notice in the Baltimore American, advertised the copper works for lease including:

"a sheet mill with two pairs of rollers, two pairs of large shears operated by a water wheel, two annealing furnaces, a tilt and bolt mill, a tilt-hammer operated by a water wheel, two furnaces, a blacksmith shop, carpenter and turning shop and a nail machine. Two refining shops with a slag furnace, coal houses and homes for workmen. The Dam is substantial and in good condition, and the water power is among the best in the vicinity of Baltimore. The works are on a good turnpike about 10 miles above Baltimore."