The Baltimore Black Musicians Union opened a meeting hall and boarding house at 620-622 Dolphin Street around the 1940s. Due to the discrimination of Baltimore's downtown hotels at that time, traveling black musicians would stay overnight in the rooms located in part of the building. Both locals and traveling musicians also used the building for meetings and socializing.
Even in the late 1970s, the building continued to be used for music education. Former neighborhood resident Catherine Bailey recalled in a recent post on the Baltimore Old Photos Facebook Group:
“I used to have marching band practice in the basement as a little girl. We were the pride of Baltimore!”
The building later operated as the meeting hall for the Elks fraternal organization and as Mrs. Joanne’s After Hours club.
Ellicott Driveway was built on top of the millrace that once carried water to Three Mills operated by the Ellicott Brothers near Frederick Road. In the 1800s, twenty-six gristmills along the Gwynns Falls and others on the Jones Falls and Patapsco River contributed to Baltimore's first economic boom. Besides their Ellicott City mills, the Ellicotts built the Three Mills complex in this area and were partners in the five Calverton Mills upstream at Leon Day Park. The Ellicotts also helped build the Frederick Turnpike so wagons could carry their products to ships at their Inner Harbor wharf.
The Ellicott Driveway was completed by the city in 1917 as the kind of stream valley parkway envisioned by the Olmsted Brothers landscape architectural firm in 1904. The diversion dam for the millrace created a dramatic waterfall: "Baltimore's Niagara Falls." In 1930, the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore praised the route, writing:
"so gracefully following the curves of the stream in Gwynn's Falls park [Ellicott Driveway]... adapts itself to the con91Ƶ of the terrain and... takes full advantage of natural beauty."
Today, the route is closed to cars and trucks and reserves its natural beauty for bicycles and pedestrians along the Gwynns Falls Trail.