Born on November 2, 1921, William Donald Schaefer lived most of his life in a modest rowhouse on Edgewood Street. The only child of William Henry and Tululu Irene Schaefer, he attended Lyndhurst Elementary School, Baltimore City College and the University of Baltimore.
After serving in Europe during WWII, Schaefer made two unsuccessful attempts for a seat in the Maryland House of Representatives. In 1955, local political king-maker Irvin Kovens, nicknamed the "The Furniture Man" for his West Baltimore furniture store, and Phillip H. Goodman, founder of the Dandy Fifth Democratic Club, recruited Schaefer to run for the Fifth District Baltimore City Council seat. From this modest beginning, Schaefer went on to become Baltimore City Council President, then Mayor, and Governor of Maryland.
Dr. Alfred T. Gundry established the Gundry Sanitarium on his family farm in the late 1800s, and the Gundry family continued to operate the facility up through 1990. Dr. Gundry served as the medical superintendent at nearby Spring Grove Hospital from 1878 to 1891, where he was a pioneer in ending the use of mechanical restraints on psychiatric patients. One advertisement from 1903 described the santitarium:
“Splendidly located, retired and accessible to Baltimore, surrounded by 28 acres of beautiful grounds. Buildings modern and well arranged. Every facility for treatment and classification. Under the medical management of Dr. Alfred T. Gundry.”
Emory Grove, located in Glyndon, has provided its summer residents with spiritual inspiration and respite from Baltimore City's summer heat for over 145 years. Originally founded in 1868 as a Methodist camp meeting site during the religious reawakening that swept the nation in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Grove now welcomes campers of any denomination. The camp’s 47 rustic cottages only recently saw the installation of flush toilets and electric lights but the lush setting in a cool wooded 62-acres has made it an idyllic retreat for generations of Marylanders.
The Emory Grove Hotel, built in 1887, is a stately Victorian structure on the National Register of Historic Places. At the center of the Grove is an open-air tabernacle that is the heart of the community. Religious services are held weekly along with sing-alongs and dance recitals.
Contained on a little less than three acres across from Clifton Park in northeast Baltimore, the Friends Burial Ground tells the stories of generations Baltimore's Quaker families across their 300 years of rich history in our city. Established in 1713 on a tract of land known as Darley Hall when the Friendship Meetinghouse was built on what is today Harford Road, the cemetery has been in continuous use ever since.
While small, and a bit unassuming, the Friends Burial Ground has approximately 1,800 graves with the earliest legible marker dating from 1802 and, without a doubt, many date from the 1700s. The stone wall around the grounds and the Sexton's House both date back to the 1860s and, in 1926, 122 graves were moved from a Friends cemetery at the Aisquith Street Meeting House in Old Town.
The many notable interments include Louisa Swain, who made history in Wyoming on September 6, 1870 as the first woman to vote in a general election in the United States at age 69, and Dr. Thomas Edmondson who lived in a grand estate that eventually became Harlem Park in West Baltimore. Dr. Edmondson recently resurfaced in the public light as his collection of Richard Caton Woodville’s artwork was exhibited at the Walters Art Museum.
The Institute of Notre Dame is a Baltimore landmark that has educated young women for over 150 years.
Originally established in 1847 as the Collegiate Institute of Young Ladies, the Institute of Notre Dame High School (IND) was founded by Baltimore’s own Mother Theresa – the Blessed Mother Theresa of Jesus Gerhardinger.
A native of Munich, Bavaria, Mother Theresa helped to found the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) in Germany and came to Baltimore with a small group of sisters to educate the children of immigrants and minister to the poor. Mother Theresa purchased the original convent building from the Redemptorist priests assigned to nearby St. James in 1847 and soon expanded the convent into a boarding school when the sisters discovered two orphans left on their doorstep. By 1852, the sisters had built the school that still stands today.
The school continued to grow through the years: adding an auditorium in 1885, a chapel in 1892, additional classroom space in 1926, and their gymnasium in 1992. Since the first graduation ceremony on July 24, 1864, over 7,000 alumnae have graduated from IND including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (1958) and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (1954) who later recalled, “They taught me more than geography or mathematics; they taught me to help those in need of help. They inspired my passion for service.”
The Maryland Art Place is a local cultural institution occupying a five-story Richardsonian Romanesque industrial building on the west side of Baltimore’s Downtown.
The building on Saratoga Street was erected in 1907 as a factory for the Erlanger Brothers Clothing. Owned by New York textile merchants, Abraham and Charles Erlanger, Erlanger Brothers’ best-known product was BVD underwear. Some assumed BVD stood for Baltimore Ventilated Drawers, but, in reality, the letters stood for the names of Bradley, Voorhees & Day, who founded the brand in 1876.
By 1921, the Saratoga Street building hosted showrooms for the Peabody Piano Company where Baltimoreans could purchase pianos, Victor-brand records and Victrola record players. Eventually the building became the Johnson Brothers Radio Producers & Retailers for making early radio receivers and later televisions.
Maryland Art Place started in 1981 when a group of artists and committed citizens began organizing around the needs of visual artists throughout the state and the desire of many people to have more access to and information about artists working in Maryland. The Maryland State Arts Council supported their efforts and, in 1982, this dedicated group of volunteers formed Maryland Art Place (MAP).
In 1986, the Maryland Art Place moved into the former factory on Saratoga Street and, after renovations, opened exhibition spaces on three floors. Long-time executive director Amy Cavanaugh Royce recalled the experience in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, “It's a cavernous building. It has its own aura. I began walking around the back stairwells and the basement and it grew on me." MAP bought the building in 1988.
Today, artists fill the former factory (Jordan Faye Block, a Chicago-born artist and curator, owns a contemporary gallery on the fifth floor) and MAP is building a members gallery.
Of the many Jewish institutions in East Baltimore, the Jewish Educational Alliance at 1216 East Baltimore Street is one of the most fondly remembered. The organization formed in 1909 when the Daughters in Israel merged with the Macabbeans, a similar organization serving local boys.
The JEA building, donated by the Levy family, opened in 1913. It immediately became a refuge where local adults and children participated in activities that included English classes; art, dance, and music programs; citizenship, business, and job training; and athletic, literary, and social clubs. There was also a nursery, kindergarten, health clinic, and rooftop playground.
In 1951, with Jewish families gone from the neighborhood, the JEA merged with related organizations to form the Jewish Community Center (JCC), located in northwest Baltimore, and this building was sold to the maritime Seafarer’s Union. It later became an adult day care center. Through the years, the building was altered so that the original brick facade is no longer visible but it is still the same building that served thousands of Jewish residents in East Baltimore.
with research support from Jewish Museum of Maryland
Today, the entire south side of the block between Exeter and Lloyd is occupied by the Helping Up Mission, a transitional housing and recovery center which has recently completed renovation of the several historic buildings that it occupies. Their building at 1017-1021 E. Baltimore Street has long history of providing care to the residents of East Baltimore since it first opened in 1877 as the Presbyterian Eye, Ear & Throat Charity Hospital.
The hospital’s mission was “to serve the suffering poor of East Baltimore.” By the early 1900s, when tuberculosis was rampant in the neighborhood, its patients included many Russian Jewish families.
Across Baltimore Street from the hospital stood the Brith Sholom Hall at 1012 E. Baltimore Street (demolished in the fall of 1998. A self-help institution for Russian Jewish immigrants, the Independent Order of Brith Sholom formed in 1902. Under the leadership of Cabman Cohen, it helped newly arriving “greenhorns,” raised money for Jewish causes at home and abroad, and served as headquarters for men’s lodges and women’s auxiliaries. It moved to this location in 1914.
Attman’s Delicatessen at 1019 E. Lombard Street is one of just a few delis the remain at the heart of the old Lombard Street market that once stretched from Albemarle Street to Central Avenue. Imagine New York’s famed Lower East Side, minus the tenements. Here, Russian immigrants became fish sellers offering fresh carp in white-tiled pools; poultry dealers selling live chickens, ducks, and geese from wooden cages; bakers and grocers; dry goods merchants, and shochets (a slaughterer who follows Jewish religious laws when killing animals).
Food has a long history at 1019 E. Lombard Street. After starting their business on Baltimore Street in 1915, Harry and Ida Attman purchased this building in the early 1930s. They bought it from Nathan and Elsie Weinstein, whose grocery business also dated back to 1915. Before that, around 1910, Russian-born Joseph Lusser sold fish and poultry here. His family shared the house with two other Russian Jewish families.
The opposite side of Lombard Street was occupied from the 1930s through the 1970s by the well-known Tulkoff’s horseradish plant, now located in Dundalk. Another local fixture, David Yankelove, sold chickens on the north side of the street until the 1980s. David’s father, Louis, had been a butcher here beginning in the early 1900s.
The next row down from Attman’s at 1005-1011 E. Lombard is an early block of houses with steeply pitched roofs that suggest they were built before the Civil War. The deep-back buildings are later additions, constructed to accommodate immigrant families in search of affordable housing. These houses speak volumes about commercial life on the turn-of-the century Lombard Street. From the 1910 census, we learn that 1105 housed a grocer, 1007 was an Italian-owned fruit store, 1009 featured a butter and egg business, and 1011 was a poultry dealer.
The empty space to the right of Attman’s was formerly Smelkinson’s Dairy. During the Riots of 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Smelkinson’s burned to the ground. However, most of Lombard Street survived the riots with little damage and the street remained vital until the late 1970s, when a combination of inner city decline and the rise of the suburban shopping mall caused its small family businesses to close.
In the early 1900s, the Labor Lyceum at 1023 E. Baltimore Street was a busy union hall and neighborhood cultural center. Americans once used the term “lyceum” to describe public halls used for lectures and meetings. The Labor Lyceum was one of many halls serving working class immigrants. Local men and women came here to read newspapers, socialize, and discuss job prospects. During strikes, which occurred frequently, the Labor Lyceum became the center for organizing union members, planning strategy and garnering public support.
In March 1913, more than one hundred East Baltimore female garment workers gathered at the Labor Lyceum before marching to a downtown train station, where they joined other women’s groups on their way to Washington, D.C., for a demonstration in favor of working women’s rights and female suffrage. Today, the Lyceum is the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg building, part of the Helping Up Mission complex.
A few steps away stands the former home of the Arbeiter Ring, more commonly known as the Workmen’s Circle. Established in 1898, the 1,200-member Workmen’s Circle was the center of Jewish socialist and labor activities for decades and moved to 1029 E. Baltimore Street in 1930. From 1909 to the early 1920s, the same building housed Talmud Torah, Baltimore’s first large Hebrew school. Founded in 1889 by recently arrived Russian Jews, the Hebrew Free School, as it was known, attracted students from very poor families and often provided shoes and clothing.
On a vacant lot facing the McKim Center, once stood a mid-nineteenth century Greek revival townhouse that served as the Jewish Working Girls Home in the early 1900s. The home at 1200 East Baltimore Street was a boarding house operated by the Daughters in Israel, founded in 1890 to aid immigrant girls and daughters of immigrants.
The adjoining vacant lot at 1208 East Baltimore Street was the former site of the acclaimed Russian Night School, run by Baltimorean Henrietta Szold, who later achieved fame as the founder of Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization. Szold’s work with the Russian Night School reaffirmed her commitment to the often-despised Eastern European Jewish immigrants, whom she found to be intelligent, cultured, and well-versed in history and literature.
The Russian Night School closed in 1898 after city officials assured its directors that public night schools for immigrants would soon open.
with research support from Jewish Museum of Maryland
This building was slated for demolition in 2023.Â
Looking up at this large, handsome red brick and stone building across Baltimore Street, one can just make out the remnants of “Hendler Creamery Company” written across the front façade. Manuel Hendler (1885-1962) opened this ice cream manufacturing plant in 1912. Born to Jewish immigrants and raised on a Baltimore County dairy farm, Hendler became a household name in Baltimore. His popular ice cream attracted the attention of the New Jersey-based Borden Company, which bought his operation in 1928.
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In the early 1900s, more than 600 people lived in the 70 houses on just a single block of Lombard Street between Lloyd and Central Avenue. For example, two households lived in 1139 E. Lombard Street in 1910. The Bergers consisted of Morris, a 55-year-old pants presser; his 50-year-old wife Eva; their 18-year-old daughter Fannie, a coat operator; their newlywed son, 26-year-old Harris, a pants maker; and Harris’s wife Rebecca, age 20. The Sundicks included 36-year-old Max, a pants presser; his 35-year-old wife Sarah; and their four children ages 6 months to 10 years.
As they made the difficult economic and cultural adjustment to life in America, struggling Jewish immigrants like the Bergers and Sundicks often relied on the many charitable organizations run by uptown German Jews. One of the best known, the Hebrew Friendly Inn and Aged Home (which later became Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital) began in 1890. In the early 1900s, it was located at 1153 E. Lombard Street, just east of Weiss Deli.
On the site of what is today Lenny’s Deli, Louis Herman operated a shvitz bad (Russian bath) in the early 1900s at 1116 E. Lombard. While very few homes featured hot water or indoor bathrooms, going to the Russian baths was generally an indulgence reserved for special occasions. For most residents, bathing meant a trip to the Walters Free Public Bath on High Street near Pratt (demolished 1953) where a nickel bought a shower, soap and a towel.
The Old Hamilton Branch Library at 3006 Hamilton Avenue is a historic branch library building constructed in 1920 to serve the community of Hamilton in the developing Harford Road corridor of northeast Baltimore. The library remained at this location through 1959 when a new Hamilton Branch Library building opened on Harford Road.
Designed by Baltimore architect Theodore W. Pietsch and built by Baltimore contractor R.B. Mason on a property donated through the organized efforts of the Woman's Club of Hamilton and the Hamilton Improvement Association, the Old Hamilton Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library is a handsome example of the work of an accomplished Beaux Arts architect and an enduring legacy of the enterprising efforts of civic and social organizations in promoting community development and civic life of northeast Baltimore during the early twentieth century. In addition, the Old Hamilton Library is distinguished as one of a collection of libraries in Baltimore and across the nation built from the late 1900s through the 1920s with support from Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
In May 1917, the Woman’s Club of Hamilton and Ms. E.W.H. Scott, a library organizer with the Maryland Public Library Association established a “library organization” with the goal of building a free public library in Hamilton. They combined their efforts with the Hamilton Improvement Association to raise funds and purchase a lot for the library at the northwest corner of Hamilton.
The building remained in use as a library for nearly three decades, providing books to patrons and serving as a social center for the broader community with exhibits from local painters and evening movie screenings. By the late 1940s, however, the growing number of library patrons living in northeast Baltimore made it difficult for the small building to keep up. After more years of efforts by local residents, construction began on a new library building designed by architects Cochran, Stephenson and Wing on April 2, 1957. In 1959, a new Hamilton Branch Library opened on Harford Road at Glenmore. The original building passed into use as commercial office building and remained occupied in this use by a variety of tenants through the early 2000s. 91ĘÓƵ worked with the Hamilton-Lauraville Main Street program to list the building on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
Albemarle Square is a new residential development that makes up virtually all the housing in the Jonestown neighborhood today. Albemarle Square opened in 2006 on the footprint of the old Flag House Courts public housing project.
The history behind Albemarle Square is a story of urban change and revitalization. Upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants began to move out of the neighborhood in the 1920s. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the area housed a diverse population of the working poor: black and white, Italians, Jews, and others. Declared “blighted” by city officials, the neighborhood’s sagging old row houses were torn down and replaced by Flag House Courts in 1955. The public housing project’s mix of three massive high-rise apartment buildings and 15 low-rise buildings lasted until 2001, its final years plagued by crime and neglect.
Realizing that “warehousing” the poor in vast concrete structures was a failed solution to poverty, city officials demolished Flag House Courts and designed Albemarle Square as an innovative mixed-income development with architecture that echoes the row houses of old. The residents of the development now include both homeowners and tenants.
The history of delicatessens in East Baltimore is not limited to Lombard Street. In the thoughtfully restored 800 block of East Baltimore Street, Harry Goodman established one of the city’s earliest delicatessens at 825 E. Baltimore Street around 1905 and Herman Buderak followed with a delicatessen at #813 around 1910. In 1915, Jacob H. Sussman, a 23-year-old immigrant from Minsk, moved to 905 E. Baltimore where he operated the New York Import Company.
It is at 923 E. Baltimore where Sussman and Carl Lev went into business together in 1926 as importers, wholesalers, and retailers of “appetizing delicatessen and all kinds of herring, smoked fish, and imported candies.” In the buildings between Sussman’s two businesses, two of Baltimore’s oldest delicatessens operated before 1910: Harry Caplan’s at 915 and Frank Hurwitz’s at 919. Caplan moved his deli several times before settling near Mikro Kodesh Synagogue in the 1920s.
With thousands of rowhouses in every shape, size, and style across the city, not every house stands out. But, 200 ½ East Montgomery Street has earned a rare distinction as the narrowest rowhouse in Baltimore—measuring less than nine feet wide! This mid-nineteenth century treasure was built before the Civil War by the owner of the adjoining house at 200 E. Montgomery Street. Despite its age and small size, the "Little House" features a stylish stained-glass transom and tight brickwork.
In 1974, 91ĘÓƵ honored Mr. and Mrs. John McNair, then owners of the house, at the sixth annual restoration awards in recognition of their work saving 200 and 200 ½ East Montgomery Street from neglect and decay. The couple brought a passion for old houses when they moved to Baltimore from New England and purchased 200 East Montgomery Street (a generous 22 feet wide) and the six-room house next door at 200 ½. The restoration included repointing masonry while matching the original color of the mortar, restoring the interior woodwork, and refinishing the original wood floors.
Immanuel Lutheran Church purchased a six-acre farm on Grindon Lane near Harford Road in 1874 for the purpose of a cemetery. This area, known as Lauraville, was a sparsely populated community of farming families. The church, which served a mostly German congregation, was located at the time on Caroline Street and is now at Loch Raven Boulevard and Belvedere Avenue.
The purchase of the cemetery was financed by selling $5 shares to the members of the congregation. These shares were redeemable, either in cash or in burial lots. The majority of the members took advantage of the latter offer.
A chapel was built in 1882 and a home for the caretaker was added in 1890. The chapel is still used for funerals, Easter Services, and other events. The caretaker’s home is now a private residence.
The cemetery became the final resting place for a few notable Baltimoreans, such as Johnny Neun, a local Major League baseball player, and John J. Thompson, a Civil War veteran who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service during that conflict.
O'Connor's, a package store and restaurant, has been located since the early 1920s in the heart of Greektown at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Oldham Street. In the 1940s, this unassuming, two-story, brick building played a significant role in the city labor movement of the New Deal era.
O'Connor's, a package store and restaurant, has been located since the early 1920s in the heart of Greektown at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Oldham Street. In the 1940s, this unassuming, two-story, brick building played a significant role in the city labor movement of the New Deal era. Baltimore steel workers fought to unionize between 1940 and 1942 and turned O’Connor’s into the meeting spot where they could discuss the progress of organizing efforts. Similar meetings took place at the Finnish Hall in nearby Highlandtown at Ponca and Foster Streets. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) moved their headquarters into the second floor of O’Connor’s and, in 1943, the committee became the United Steelworkers of America, a CIO union. Ellen Pinter was part of the Finnish community of Highlandtown, and her father worked at the steel mill in Sparrow’s Point. She saw firsthand the effects of underemployment on the steelworkers and their families during the Great Depression. Some only received work for one to two days a week. Many families ran up debts at the grocery store or fell behind on rent. Some families took in boarders to try to make ends meet. Ellen took a job for $18 week working for the steel workers’ union SWOC around 1937 in the office on top of O’Connor’s. In a 1980 interview with the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, Ellen recollected:
"The quarters were small but the activity was small. I can vividly remember when the miners came to Baltimore and started the big organization drive of the CIO. The men were pouring into that hall with their pockets just bulging with dollar bills as they were signing up men into the union. There was such a tremendous upsurge of interest in the union. Of course, the mills were full of foreign-born people who knew the value of unions because they had come from European countries where they had been a little more politically astute. And Finns were aware of unionization and more progressive thought… Oh I can remember the Italians, the Finns, the Czechs, the Americans, they were organizing left and right then, in Bethlehem Steel Company."Pinter also notes African American participation in the organizing activity—Finnish activists welcomed African Americans at the Finnish Hall during the early days of organizing activity, even though Highlandtown remained a segregated white neighborhood. Racial antagonisms, however, were not absent in the social activities of the union. For instance, Pinter remembers being at a union picnic; a black man asked her to dance and she accepted, only to have a white man cut in and demand to know how she could dare dance with a black man. O’Connor’s still remains in operation today.
Founded in 1911, the Pemco International Corporation site on Eastern Avenue is a reminder of the enduring environmental legacy of Baltimore’s industrial businesses. First known as the Porcelain Enamel Manufacturing Corporation, the company produced porcelain and enamel coating for kitchen and bathroom appliances and tiles; perhaps most notably, Pemco supplied the orange roofing tiles for Howard Johnson hotels and restaurants. Karl Turk, Sr., a German immigrant who founded the company, became a leader in the porcelain industry after inventing a process for coating iron in porcelain. Turk was also the first to add color to porcelain coatings. In 1926, Pemco won acclaim at the Gas Association Conference for a new a line of kitchen stoves in various colors.
The company continued to grow in the years following WWII. According to a Baltimore Sun article from 1958, “The plant has a battery of eight continuous smelters operating 24 hours a day, several days a week to provide porcelain enamels for appliance makers producing ranges, refrigerators, washing machines, bathroom and kitchen fixtures.” The $750,000 Pemco research lab on Eastern Avenue opened in 1962 and was the first business in the city to have its own heliport.
By the next decade, however, the company ran into problems with environmental issues. In 1979, city officials demanded that the company clean the lead contamination on the complex on Eastern Avenue. The following year Pemco’s owner, Mobay Chemical Corp. had to pay a $10,000 fine for “excessive fluoride emissions.” Currently, the site is in the process of undergoing redevelopment plans. Purchased by local investment group MCB Real Estate, the company has plans to develop the site as a mixed-use facility similar to Canton Crossing.
Two aging union halls on Dundalk Avenue help the story of Baltimore’s steel industry. In 1942, steel workers had won their right to unionize and established the United Steel Workers’ of America. When the two-story tan brick building at the corner of Dundalk Avenue and Gusryan Street was built in 1952, it served as the headquarters for USW locals 2609 and 2610. As both groups grew in size, however, local 2610 split off and constructed a modern new building next door. According to Gay Flynn, a steelworker who lived in Highlandtown and worked at Sparrow’s Point, many workers recognized the need for a union:
“A lot of people were afraid to go to the higher-ups and that, to me, is what brought the unions. They have somebody that they can go to and call that’s on their side. They always used to feel that they had nobody to talk to. We used to have a company union and a lot of people looked at that as being just that, a company union. Everybody thought that that union was for the company.”Once the USW started, some, like Flynn, joined to protect their jobs, whereas others saw the union as a necessary way to protect the gains that workers had made in the labor movement. , a 34-year veteran of Sparrow’s Point, former shop steward and member of the alternate grievance committee, views the USW, and other unions, this way:
“Well what I feel is, thank God for unions in America. Because it made me realize that nothing was given freely, everything was born out of struggle. A lot of people today take for [granted] that fact that you get paid vacations. That was something born out of the labor movement—that you get paid if you off sick, that you have workers compensation laws, that you have employer provided health insurance, that you have many safeguards in place, all that were met with resistance when lobbied for that we have in place today that a lot of people think that they are etched into the fabric.”
Tucked away in the southeastern corner of Baltimore County, and separated from the rest of Sparrow’s Point by a creek, Turner Station is where many African American workers at Bethlehem Steel and nearby factories lived with their families from the 1800s up through the present. New housing was constructed around World War I in Dundalk for white factory workers, but it excluded black workers. Partially as a result, African Americans focused on building their own community. According to local historian and cosmetologist , Turner Station takes its name from Joshua Turner who first purchased the property in the 1800s:
“It started with a man named Joshua Turner who had purchased this land back in the 1800s and he had purchased it for guano, which is pigeon droppings, and this was [what] fertilized land... There was a lot of farmland near so the fertilizer was to be used for the different orchard farms. I understand there were apple farms and different vegetable farms not too far from here. So Joshua Turner, as I understand, from the records that we had read, had set up a station for the employees that were employed at Sparrows Point and thus this is how the name came about, Turner Station after Joshua Turner.”While Bethlehem Steel built housing for white workers in Dundalk after WWI, they made no investments in housing for black workers in Turner Station. Instead, residents built their own homes and businesses, growing a community outside the oversight of company officials. Beginning around 1920, development started in the neighborhoods of Steelton Park and Carnegie. Turner Station soon became one of the largest African American communities in Baltimore County. The town reached a peak around WWII when wartime workers at Bethlehem Steel moved to the area. According to local historian Louis Diggs, credit for the self-sufficient community’s development belongs largely to Mr. Anthony Thomas (1857-1931) and Dr. Joseph Thomas (1885-1963), Anthony Thomas’ son.
Bethlehem Steel owned and operated Sparrow’s Point as a company town near the expansive mill complex from the 1890s through the early 1970s. In 1916, however, Bethlehem Steel departed from the model of company-owned housing when it commissioned the construction of Dundalk. Initially, the company erected five hundred gray stucco and slate roofed homes on tree-lined streets between Dundalk Avenue and Sollers Point Road. In the center of the community stood a shopping center surrounded by a park.
Bethlehem Steel, which had recently purchased the mills and shipyards at Sparrows Point, faced an increased demand for ships as the United States mobilized for the first World War. The need for shipyard workers and the labor force at the plant grew. In Dundalk, workers could purchase their own homes through payroll deductions, enabling lower-tier managers, foremen, and top-tier skilled workers to become homeowners. Originally, Bethlehem Steel sought to replicate Roland Park, an upscale neighborhood in northern Baltimore; but the demands of wartime prompted the company to rely on the United States Navy to undertake the construction. Expediency was key so the Navy opted to build duplexes which could be built much faster than the planned single-family homes.
Almost everything about Dundalk was influenced by its connection to the shipbuilding industry—the curved streets extending northward from the town center form the shape of a boat. Street names include Flagship and Midship. In just two years, the population of Dundalk reached 2,000; it would grow to 8,000 over the course of the next decade. In 1924, Bethlehem Steel created the Dundalk Company, a corporation to oversee the company’s real estate. Even as it grew, Dundalk remained a segregated white community and closely tied to the operations on Sparrow’s Point.
In the 1930s, when the managers at Bethlehem Steel remained staunchly opposed to unionization, labor activists at Sparrow’s Point faced real challenges. According to Ellen Pinter, men couldn’t wear union buttons for fear of losing their jobs. During the struggles for unionization in the mills, several of the organizers were foreign-born residents of neighborhoods like Highlandtown in the southeastern section of the city along Eastern Avenue. These activists tried to organize their fellow workers by speaking to them in their native languages in places where ethnic workers would congregate. For these activists, immigrant and native-born, public speaking became the best way to advance their cause. Nathaniel Parks, a retired steelworker and former resident of Sparrow’s Point, describes one way that activists exercised their right to free speech during the early 1930s:
“The company never did allow people to come in and talk union at Sparrow’s Point. It was an island…And it happened that the car pulled up a half a block from this corner…And a lady got out [of the car] and a man got out, and they walked over to this iron [street light] pole, and then she handcuffed him to the pole. And then he started putting in his spiel about union: what its advantages was, what they were trying to do. And then, the police, they were in a quarrel; they didn’t know what to do. They ran around trying to find a hacksaw or something to get him untied from this pole. And he got his spiel before they got him. And then when they put him in this patrol wagon and carried him on the other side of the bridge, he was still with his head out of the window…blasting out just about what the union was in for, what the people was in for. Oh, it was really nice to see what was going to happen the way the company was treating men on the jobs in those days…”During the 1930s and 1940s, a traffic island at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and Lehigh Street became a hotspot for pro-union soapbox speakers. Many of these speakers were women, the daughters and wives of steel workers. Most of the work in the steel mills at this time was restricted to men. Male labor activists, therefore, faced the potential of unemployment and blacklists if they were caught organizing. Women, however, did not face this direct threat and used their voices to rally support for the union. Besides speaking in a public arena, like the traffic median on Eastern Avenue, women also went door-to-door and backyard-to-backyard, preaching to women about the union cause as they went about their housework.
At the corner of Broadway and Eastern Avenue, stands a modest three-story brick building with corbeling below a flat roof supported by heavy brackets and full cornice line. Over the course of the twentieth century, this building was home to three of the most important unions for Baltimore’s maritime industry: the International Seamen’s Union, the Seamen’s Defense Committee, and the National Maritime Union.
During the early 1900s, workers on board shipping vessels faced harsh living conditions. Ship owners could maximize space for cargo by crowding seamen into tiny living spaces. Quarters were more like cowsheds than housing, although, according to one physician’s report, cattle had it better. When on land, seamen were often forced to stay close to the water in overcrowded boarding houses that were segregated by race. The boarding house owners often supplied food, liquor, and prostitutes at such high rates the seamen often became indebted to them.
The boarding house owners also served as agents, hiring seamen on behalf of the ship owners, so they became “both the seamen’s debtor and his employer.” Their control over the labor force made them powerful players in regulating wages and working conditions; however, this it was hardly absolute. Ship owners had the ultimate control over their workers. Seamen constituted an ethnically and racially diverse workforce, and ship owners often used ethnic and racial antagonisms to divide workers in the effort to thwart unionization. For example, they would give jobs that were traditionally the purview of a specific ethnicity to members of other groups in order to create social schisms. But the nature of their work introduced seamen to people around the world, and many became more open to different cultures and political ideas as a result.
Seamen established their first labor organization, the International Seamen’s Union (ISU), in 1895 under the American Federation of Labor; but, this organization was only open to skilled workers, and their exclusivity limited the union’s strength and weakened strikes. In the 1930s, longshoremen and ship and dock workers formed the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), a left-leaning organization that opposed racial discrimination and worked for higher wages, better working conditions, and fair hiring practices.
The ISU, however, viewed the MWIU as a threat and often worked to thwart their efforts during the early years of the Depression. In the mid-1930s, seamen worked to push the ISU to become inclusive and adopt a more militant position. Consequently, the Seamen’s Defense Committee (SDC) was formed in October 1936 and it adopted the MWIU’s policy of organizing all workers, regardless of position, race, or nationality. That same year, four hundred ISU members from Baltimore joined an SDC strike in support of workers belonging to the Maritime Federation of the Pacific. Meeting at this hall, they voted to use the strike to advance their own demands for ship owners to hire workers—regardless of race or nationality—at the union halls, an eight hour workday, pay for overtime work, and for an end to port work on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Eight hundred workers showed up for picket duty on the first day.
The strike endured despite outbreaks of violence on both sides, but support began to waver as the weeks dragged on. The SDC decided to put pressure on Washington, for the National Labor Relations Board was in the midst of determining the legitimacy of the ISU’s contract with ship owners. On January 18, 1937, a massive group of seamen from ports spanning the Atlantic and Gulf coasts marched all day and night in the cold and rain from Baltimore to Washington in what became known as the Midnight March of the Baltimore Brigade. When they reached Washington, they were joined by thousands more demonstrators. Delegates met with every major head of the government, even President Roosevelt. This gave them the “moral victory” that the strikers sought and led to the strike’s conclusion. The strikers voted to return to work on January 25, ending the 87-day strike. The NLRB gave the seamen a favorable ruling, and during the spring of 1937 the National Maritime Union officially formed, with a constitution stipulating the organization of all seamen, “without regard to race, creed, and color.”
The American Brewery Building at 1701 North Gay Street might be the most “Baltimore” of all buildings in the city. It is in the style of High Victorian architecture, as so much of our city was built, and is just plain quirky. Since 1973, the 1887 J.F. Weisner and Sons brewery building (later known as the American Brewery) stood as a hulking shell lording over a distressed neighborhood. Its restoration is a noteworthy symbol of optimism for the historic structure and the surrounding community. The conversion of the brewery into a health care and community center for Humanim more than fits the organization’s motto: “To identify those in greatest need and provide uncompromising human services.” The project won a 2010 91ĘÓƵ Preservation Award for Adaptive Reuse and Compatible Design recognizing Humanim, Inc., architects Cho Benn Holback + Associates, and contractor Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse.
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Completed in 1912, the Eastern Avenue Sewage Pumping Station opened as a critical engine of Baltimore’s then brand-new sewer system. City engineers built the station to house enormous steam-driven Corliss pumps capable of pumping up to 27,500,000 gallons of sewage a day. The utility of the building did not prohibit a bit of style. The engineers graced the structure with copper roof, gables, and a cupola, turning it into a handsome monument to the growth and development of the city celebrated by proud civic leaders. In 1960, the city replaced the aging steam-driven pumps with electric turbines. The building continues to operate as a pumping station up through the present.
The Baltimore Public Works Museum occupied the building from 1982 up until the museum closed in 2010. The museum gave visitors a behind the scenes look at how a large city provides public works utilities to its citizens. The museum modeled phone lines, street lights, drains and pipes, and sewage disposal.
Formerly home to a whiskey barrel warehouse and the offices of the Baltimore Copper Paint Company, the Jim Rouse Center of the American Visionary Art Museum serves as a prime example of adaptive reuse in the City of Baltimore.
Built in the 1930s, the simple brick exterior housed an intricate timber framework to support the whiskey barrels, walls, and roof. After many years of vacancy, the building was given new life as part of the American Visionary Art Museum, which recognizes the work of untrained artists.
When the museum was rehabilitated the architects reused portions of the timber framing as a design element, and also brought in other creative materials.The project explores the use and reuse of found objects. Glass bottle bottoms, barrel staves, exposed brick, refurbished windows and neon signs bring an eclectic look to the building, while both recycling used materials and allowing the building to receive historic tax credit certification.
The project received a Preservation Award from 91ĘÓƵ honoring the American Visionary Art Museum, Cho Benn Holback + Associates, Inc., J. Vinton Schafer & Sons, Inc., Burdette, Koehler, Murphy & Associates, Hope Furrer Associates, Inc., Miller, Beam, & Paganelli, Inc., Cramptin/Dunlop Architectural Lighting Services LLC, and Alain Jaramillo.
In the late 1970s, Mayor William Donald Schaefer proposed the creation of a museum to tell the story of Baltimore industry across two centuries of American history. Even before they the new museum found a building, Baltimore City officials organized an exhibit at the Baltimore Convention Center, and put up a display about the museum-to-be during the Baltimore City Fair. Roger B. White, a young city employee hired under the Comprehensive Employment Training Act, led the search to find an appropriate location, acquire collections, and recruit private donors. White found a Platt & Company oyster cannery building on the 1400 block of Key Highway and began the process of turning the old factory into a museum. Once one of eighty canneries operating around Baltimore’s harbor, Platt & Company on Key Highway was one of the last canneries left. The museum developed exhibits on three major periods of Baltimore’s industrial growth: 1790-1830, 1870-1900, and 1920 up through the 1970s. White acquired equipment from the American Brewery and furnishings from the local Read’s Drug Store chain. In November 1981, after years of preparation, the doors opened to the public at the renovated oyster cannery reborn as the Baltimore Museum of Industry. By December, Baltimore City had awarded the museum $25,000 to pay for the cost of school field trips and, in 1984, the city decided to purchase the site. The museum originally leased the building for around $25,000 a year but, after the property sold to Baltimore City, the rent climbed to $85,000. The museum organized a corporate membership drive in order to cover the rising rent. At the same time, the museum sought to triple the amount of space in the facility while adding a pier and waterfront improvements. In 1996, with only half of the renovation complete, Alonzo Decker Jr., former Black & Decker chief executive, donated $1 million to the fund. With this single donation, the museum surpassed its' $3.5 million goal and finished the renovation. For his gift, the Museum inscribed Decker’s name on the wall of the main gallery. Today, the museum thrives as an immersive experience of permanent and temporary exhibits that detail and demonstrate the industrial history of Baltimore. The exhibits include machinery from a cannery, garment loft, machine shop, pharmacy and print shop and the collections include around a million artifacts. With a pier and waterfront area, the museum often hosts weddings and corporate events as well.
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Originally known as Druid Mill, Union Mill was built between 1865 and 1872. At the time, it was the largest cotton duck mill in the United States. A unique feature of the mill's construction is the use of locally quarried stone. The other mills in the area were constructed with brick.
Druid Mill was was the first mill in the area to feature a clock tower, which was clearly visible to the workers living in Druidville located across Union Avenue. The mill joined the Mount Vernon Woodberry Cotton Duck Company in 1899, which had a virtual monopoly on the world's production of cotton duck. The mill was then renamed Mount Vernon Mill No. 4.
Today, the mill is home to residences and businesses, including Artifact Coffee.