Built to house the Baltimore branch offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company following the Great Fire of 1904, this structure was an early commission of the architectural firm of Parker & Thomas (later Parker, Thomas & Rice), the preeminent architects of Baltimore’s Beaux Arts commercial & financial structures of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad vied with the locally owned Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for control of rights-of-way and development rights for lines in and out of the city. While the B&O was the older of the two competing railroads (founded in 1830), the Pennsylvania Railroad had surpassed the B&O in size, scope, and profitability by the 1870s.

Such was the nature of railroad competition in Baltimore that the two lines even maintained separate passenger terminals, with Mount Royal Station serving the B&O (and its dominance of lines running south) and the Pennsylvania maintaining a site between Charles and St. Paul Streets.

In 1900, under the leadership of Alexander Cassatt, brother of expatriate Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the B&O, and the two companies shared a Board of Trustees. Partly in response to efforts in Washington to enact legislation prohibiting railroad monopolies, the Pennsylvania and B&O maintained separate corporate identities during this period, although the “union” of the two companies was celebrated by Cassatt’s pet project, Washington, DC’s monumental Beaux-Arts style Union Station (1902).

When the 1904 Fire destroyed the Second-Empire style B&O headquarters on the northwest corner of Baltimore and Calvert Streets, the corporate officers elected to rebuild a grand, 13-story Beaux-arts tower on a new site, two blocks to the west. The Pennsylvania, by contrast, retained its site and elected the relatively small, restrained building seen today. The interrelationship of the two companies and the coordination of their post-Fire building schemes is attested to by the fact that both the Pennsylvania Railroad building and the B&O tower on Charles Street were designed by the same architectural firm, Parker & Thomas. The modesty of the Pennsylvania’s building (in spite of the company’s essential domination of the B&O) is part and parcel of the effort to maintain distinct identities for the two merged companies.

By 1906—the time of the Baltimore post-Fire rebuilding of both the Pennsylvania and B&O buildings— Cassatt was dead, the Republicans had passed antitrust legislation and the two companies administratively pried themselves apart once again. Thus, what may have begun in 1905 as a somewhat disingenuous attempt to maintain the united railroad companies’ discrete corporate identities through the erection of two separate and stylistically and hierarchically distinct structures, became an accurate representation of corporate separation by the time the buildings were complete in 1906.

200 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Built in 1928, the Lord Baltimore Hotel is a beautiful example of an early twentieth-century high-rise hotel. Designed by prolific hotel architect William Lee Stoddart, it is reminiscent of such famous American hotels as New York's Vanderbilt Hotel or Chicago's Palmer House. The twenty-two-story steel frame building was the largest hotel building ever constructed in Maryland. However, the Lord Baltimore is also a reminder of the city’s history of racial discrimination and the long fight for integrated public accommodation.

In 1954, the same year the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education called for an end to segregated schools, black players from three American League teams with integrated rosters came to Baltimore to play against the Orioles. White players stayed at the Lord Baltimore, the Emerson, and Southern Hotel downtown. But for their black teammates, the only option was the African American-owned York Hotel in West Baltimore.

A year later, in 1955, students at Johns Hopkins University moved the prom away from the Lord Baltimore to the at the Alcazar Hotel in Mount Vernon in protest to the hotel manager’s refusal to admit black students to the dance and his threat to “stop the dance if Negroes attended.” By the late 1950s, after lobbying by Baltimore’s progressive Mayor Theodore McKeldin, the Lord Baltimore Hotel consented to rent rooms to black ballplayers and some conference attendees. In 1958, Baltimore hosted the All-Star Game and six black All-Stars, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, registered at the Lord Baltimore. For visiting black spectators, however, the hotel was not an option. Jimmy Williams, an assistant editor at the Afro American, advised spectators to bring pup tents and box lunches, writing, “The box lunches will be to ease the pangs of an aching stomach… The pup tents will provide a place for them to rest their carcasses after the last door of the downtown hotels have been slammed in their face and the uptown hotels are filled.” Williams predicted visitors would leave “just loving the quaint customs of Baltimore, which boasts of major league baseball and minor league businessmen.”

By the early 1960s, policies finally began to change. After hotel management realized they had rented rooms for the campaign office of segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace in 1964, the management refused to let them stay and the campaign was forced to move to a motel in Towson. In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed at the hotel during a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he gave a lengthy press conference and received symbolic keys to the city from Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III.

The hotel was one of the few historic buildings retained as part of the redevelopment of Charles Center and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

20 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

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.

825 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

This building was slated for demolition in 2023. 

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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Jewish Museum of Maryland

1100 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

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.

1200 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

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.

1023 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

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.

Jewish Museum of Maryland

1017 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

The Levy Building on East Baltimore Street

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.

, December 21, 2016, Jewish Museum of Maryland.

1216 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

A "finely located place for the dead" on Edmondson Avenue

“This is a new and finely located ‘place for the dead,’” The Iris reported in 1846. Early plans included a chapel and a residence for a cemetery superintendent. Lots were priced at the “extremely moderate” cost of $5 for an 8’ by 10’ area.

Just three years later, in December 1849, the Maryland Assembly passed "An Act to Establish the Western Cemetery" allowing the Trustees of the Fayette Street Methodist Episcopal Church to open a "public" or nondenominational 55-acre cemetery west of the city in Baltimore County. Like Green Mount Cemetery, Western tried to create a park-like open space for visitors to stroll as well as greive.

Early burials at the cemetery included both city and county residents from a range of backgrounds. In 1858, the Sun reported on the burial of William Fairbank, a Baltimore County resident who worked as a conductor on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad between 1830 and 1850 and as the keeper of the bridge on the Baltimore and Washington Turnpike. In the fall of 1861, a number of Union soldiers stationed in Baltimore, likely including soldiers recovering from injuries taken at the Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas) in July 1861, died from typhoid fever and were interred at the Western Cemetery.

In 1915, Baltimore City acquired a portion of the cemetery property for the construction of Ellicott Driveway. This required the closure of the “the railroad crossing at the Cemetery lane entrance to Western Cemetery” and an agreement between Baltimore City, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and the officers of the cemetery company.

The cemetery continued to serve as a popular place of internment for military veterans and police officers during the 20^th century. In July 1926, the Sun reported on a huge crowd of “several thousand persons” who attended the burial of Patrolman Webster E. Schumann, noting, “A full firing squad of eight men from Camp Meade fired three volleys into the air and a bugler sounded ‘taps’ as the services for the war veteran ended.”

After World War II, the cemetery, along with nearby Leakin Park, took center stage in West Baltimore’s highway fights. Relatives of the interred joined forces with environmental activists and local residents in opposing the extension of a proposed highway through Leakin Park and into the city. Fortunately, Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro responded to this effort and, in 1969, encouraged state highway designers to consider a new route for the Rosemont section of the East-West Expressway to bypass Western Cemetery.

3001 Edmondson Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21223

The cemetery is open to the public during daylight hours.

Engine House No. 38 on Baltimore Street

The handsome Tudor Revival turrets of the Poppleton Fire Station (Engine House #38) stand out next to the modern glass facades of the University of Maryland BioPark on Baltimore Street. Designed by local architects Benjamin Buck Owens and Spencer E. Sisco, the station opened in 1910 equipped with the most modern fire-fighting tools available.

After the tragedy of Great Baltimore Fire destroyed much of the city's downtown in 1904, the Baltimore Fire Department grew quickly and built scores of new firehouses. A close look above the building's arched entrance reveals a small tribute to the bravery of the Fire Department’s mission with a stone carving of firemen racing to extinguish a fire.

756-760 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Dashiell Hammett found inspiration for his great detective novels like "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" by working at the Pinkerton Detective Agency in what was then known as the Continental Trust Building. He experienced the seedy underbelly of Baltimore city and was stabbed at least once on the job. He was inspired by his intransigent co-workers who served as the foundation for many of his cherished characters. Continental Op, the main character of his first novel, "Red Harvest," was named after the eponymous building. It is also speculated that the falcons that don the Continental Trust Building served as the inspiration for "The Maltese Falcon." "Red Harvest" was a milestone in the detective novel genre. It introduced the world to the hard-nosed detective who lives by his own code. The gritty streets of Baltimore served as the setting for Hammett's personal favorite novel, "The Glass Key," as well as "The Assistant Murderer." Unfortunately, many of the locations described in Hammett's novels no longer exist. The lavish Rennert Hotel, which served as the home base for the corrupt political boss in "The Glass Key" was razed in 1941. Continental Op in "Red Harvest" dreams about a tumbling fountain in Harlem Square Park that was filled in long ago. Hammett was born in Saint Mary's County, Maryland and spent his childhood bouncing between Baltimore and Philadelphia. He started working at Pinkertons in 1915 before serving in World War I in the Motor Ambulance Corps. He soon contracted tuberculosis and was moved to a hospital in Tacoma, Washington. Throughout the 1920's, Hammett lived in San Francisco where he wrote most of his novels, including "The Maltese Falcon." He never forgot his Baltimore roots working for Pinkertons, and his precise memory of streets and locations added a layer of authenticity and realism to his work. Later in life, Hammett got involved with the American Communist Party and was eventually jailed as a result of McCarthyism in 1951 for six months. Jail time took its toll on Hammett, who was already in bad health due to the effect his heavy smoking and drinking had on his tuberculosis. He died in New York in 1961. Today, the Continental Trust Building that housed the Pinkerton Detective Agency is known as One Calvert Plaza. A prominent survivor of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, One Calvert Plaza stands as a monument to skyscraper architecture at the turn of the twentieth century.

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1 S. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

A Venerable Keystone of "The Block"

Built in the aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, the Gayety Theatre opened on February 5, 1906—making this building the oldest remaining burlesque theater in Baltimore. While the theatre interior was subdivided into three separate spaces in 1985, the Gayety still boasts an elaborate, eye-catching, and fanciful façade (designed by architect John Bailey McElfatrick) that is a wonderful example of the exuberance of theater design in the period.

The Gayety is the venerable keystone of “The Block” on Baltimore Street long known as a destination for adult entertainment. “The Block” is somewhat of a misnomer, as the area of arcades, bars, burlesque houses and adult bookshops extended east along Baltimore Street from Calvert Street for approximately eight blocks in the middle third of the 20th century. Due to various cultural forces, and particularly to a concerted “anti-smut” campaign during the mayoral tenure of William Donald Schaefer in the early 1980s, most of this extensive commercial sub-cultural landscape no longer exists, and “the Block” is, in fact, a small representative of a once-thriving red-light district.

The Gayety began after the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed the offices of The German Correspondent. While some downtown theatres moved to Howard Street after the fire, The Gayety, Lubin’s Nickelodeon and Vaudeville “duplex” directly across the street, The Victoria (later known as The Embassy) and The Rivoli all remained in the area and defined this stretch of Baltimore Street as a “popular entertainment” center, with an emphasis on burlesque and vaudeville. Despite the connotations acquired later, burlesque and vaudeville were mainstream forms of entertainment aimed at the working and middle classes.

By World War I, the Gayety’s neighbors had made the switch to showing movies. In the 1920s and 1930s, cinema began to supplant burlesque and, especially, vaudeville as the chief form of low-cost popular entertainment across the United States. Burlesque houses, such as The Gayety, promoted more risqué acts in the effort to give the public something that they couldn’t get in movies, especially after the adoption of the Hayes production code in 1932, which not only banned nudity but placed Draconian restrictions on sexual content and references in film.

From its heyday in the 1910s and 1920s—when The Gayety’s bill included nationally prominent comedians such as Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers, Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton—the Gayety was a “top-of-the-line” burlesque house. In this period (just before and after World War II) iconic strippers such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Blaze Starr, Sally Rand, Valerie Parks and Ann Corio performed there. Following the Second World War, more arcades, as well as adult bookshops, peep shows and show bars cropped up to fill in the vacant spaces and gradually redefined East Baltimore Street as a “red light district,” analogous to New York’s Times Square, Washington, DC’s 14th Street and New Orleans’s legendary Bourbon Street. By the 1960s, The Gayety no longer hosted headline performers, and local news features surrounding the cataclysmic fire in 1969 tended to emphasize nostalgia for its decline. In this sense, The Gayety Theater Building encapsulates the history of burlesque as an entertainment form and its interaction with civic form in the 20th century United States.

Nostalgic descriptions of performances at The Gayety and its peers indicate that, by today’s standards, the performances were quite modest. However, the aura of taboo was a large part of what sustained burlesque in general, and The Gayety in particular, through the mid-twentieth century.

Historic American Building Survey

This story is adapted from published by the Historic American Building Survey.

405 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

This small building sits squarely inside the area decimated by the Great Baltimore Fire and surprisingly survived. It was built in 1901 for Alex Brown and Sons: the oldest investment banking firm in the United States. Noted architecture firm Parker and Thomas designed the building. The stained-glass dome inside is thought to be the work of Gustave Baumstark.

Alex Brown and sons was founded in 1800 and stayed in independent operation for almost 200 years. In 1997, it was acquired by Bankers Trust and was ultimately integrated into Deutsche Bank.

The Alex Brown and Sons Building owes its survival of the Great Fire to its small size. As sparks and embers flew through the air igniting the much taller buildings all around it, a thermal updraft acted as a sort of fan keeping the flying flames from landing on the building’s roof. The heat of the fire was so intense that it caused the brownstone to crack apart near the front door. The broken stone is still visible, since the Alex Brown and Sons firm choose not to replace the cracked stone as a reminder of what almost happened. The building was renovated in 1996 and reopened as a bank, which it remained until 2016. A restaurant opened on the location in 2019, but had to close in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic.

135 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

The American Building was home to Baltimore News-American, a newspaper that traces its lineage back to 1773.

As opposed to the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore News-American was an afternoon newspaper targeted to working class and blue-collar districts. One of the newspaper’s many editors was John L. Carey. He was deeply interested in the question of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War and felt that the two races could never live in peace and offered up the solution to re-settle all enslaved people in Africa. The Baltimore News-American would survive for two hundred years, until its final issue on May 27th, 1986.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the buildings of the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore-News American faced each other at the intersection of South Gay Street and East Baltimore Street. It was one of the most bustling areas of the city, filled with newsies passing out papers and bulletin boards posting the latest news. During elections, the intersection would be packed with massive crowds of people, all waiting to hear the results.

The original Baltimore News-American Building was destroyed by the Great Baltimore Fire and a new towering office, designed by Baltimore native Louis Levi, was built in 1905 by the George A. Fuller Company. The main contractor for the News American Building was Paul Starrett who later went on to be take a leading role in the erection of the Empire State Building.

231-235 East Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

The 1833 McKim Free School building is one of Baltimore’s most important landmarks with deep roots in the city’s history and an unsurpassed 175 year record of education and social service. Founder John McKim came to Baltimore as a young man, established his business at Baltimore and Gay Street and became a successful merchant. During the War of 1812, McKim gave $50,000 to the City of Baltimore to aid in its defense, served as a State Senator, and was twice elected to Congress. His son William McKim who led the effort to realize his father’s vision of a free school did not live to see it as he died in 1834 at the age of 35. The building’s architects have deep connections to Baltimore. Son of Baltimore Revolutionary War hero John Eager Howard, William Howard was one of the first engineers to work for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and took up architecture as an avocation. William Small designed the Barnum’s City Hotel (demolished in 1889), the Archbishop’s Residence on North Charles Street, and more schools across the city. Since 1945, the McKim Center has continued to strengthen the importance of the building to many Baltimore residents as it remains a vital institution serving children and adults in need in the Jonestown community in innumerable ways. The McKim Center has its beginnings in 1924 when the Society of Friends offered the McKim Free School as a place of worship to an Italian Presbyterian congregation. This partnership between the Friends and Presbyterians led in 1945 to the start of the McKim Community Association offering youth programs, athletic training (particularly wrestling—appropriate for a Greek Revival building) and a bible school. McKim’s renowned athletic programs have long outgrown the building but the structure remains in use, along with the nearby 1781 Old Quaker Meeting House, as a safe place for children, managed by the philosophy of “Structure, Discipline and Love.”

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1120 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Long before places like Sports Authority or Dick's Sporting Goods opened their doors, Little Joe's on the northwest corner of Howard and Baltimore was selling everything from camping equipment and fishing gear to bikes and saddles. In addition, Little Joe's (named for its proprietor, Joe Wiesenfeld, who was just shy of 5 feet) sold a variety of "sundries" and toys, including electric trains and, for a short time, cars and auto-related accessories. By the turn of the century, Wiesnefeld, who opened a bike shop at the corner of Baltimore and Paca Streets in the early 1890s, had expanded his business and moved the shop to this location. In 1909 Wiesenfeld opened an auto annex on West German Street , where his staff repaired and sold cars.

Wiesenfeld's goal on opening Little Joe's Sporting Goods was to sell everything that the multiple department stores in the area didn't and for years he did just that, offering the neighborhood access to goods that would otherwise not have been readily available. This location of Little Joe's was closed in 1925.

6 N. Howard Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

In 1961, the cornerstone of the Baltimore Civic Center (as it was then called) was laid, enclosing a time capsule with notes from President John F. Kennedy, Maryland Governor Millard Tawes, and Baltimore Mayor Harold Grady. Located on the site of the former Old Congress Hall where the Continental Congress met in 1776, the arena opened a year later to great acclaim as part of a concerted effort to revitalize downtown Baltimore. Through ups and downs and a number of renovations, the arena has become woven into the fabric of the city.

In its early years, Baltimore’s professional hockey team (the Baltimore Clippers) played here, as did the Baltimore Bullets, the city’s former basketball team. In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered a speech called "Race and the Church" at the arena as part of a gathering of Methodist clergy, and in 1989 the arena hosted the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships. And then there are the concerts. On Sunday, September 13, 1964 the Beatles played back-to-back shows at the arena to throbbing young Baltimoreans, and the arena is reportedly one of the only indoor venues in the U.S. still standing where the Fab Four played. In the 1970s, Led Zeppelin played the arena and shot a few scenes for their movie “The Song Remains the Same” backstage. Also in the 1970s, the Grateful Dead performed many shows here, including a performance where they played the song “The Other One” for a reportedly record forty minutes.

Finally in 1977, Elvis Presley performed at the arena just weeks before he died. The tickets for the show sold out in 2 ½ hours, and although there were no untoward incidents reported while The King was onstage, he did apparently lose his lunch in a corridor in the back.

201 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

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.

307 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

A Local Composer at 426 W. Baltimore Street

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.

426 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

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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1 S. Eutaw Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Wholesale History at the Nancy S. Grasmick Building

One of the largest businesses on the West Side in the early twentieth century the Baltimore Bargain House—a mail-order wholesale business that employed over a thousand people and earned profits in the millions that grew to become the fourth largest wholesalers in the county. Driven by the devotion of Jewish Lithuanian immigrant Jacob Epstein, the Baltimore Bargain House became a hub for Southern Jewish merchants and a local business community. When firm's grand showroom at West Baltimore and North Liberty Streets opened in 1911, a crowd of 500 local businessmen, the Mayor of Baltimore, and the Governor of Maryland all attended the dedication. After spending years himself as an itinerant peddler, traveling throughout Western Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Jacob Epstein first opened a small wholesale store in Baltimore in 1881. Epstein focused his attention on the American South, working specifically with Jewish peddlers and merchants. In the early 1900s, Epstein treated hundreds of merchants to annual visits to Baltimore to restock and view new merchandise. Arriving from North Carolina, Tennessee, and across the South, these merchants helped grow a successful and extensive business in Baltimore. Between 1881 and 1929 the Baltimore Bargain House was one of the most significant businesses in Baltimore, with gross sales over $34 million in 1921 alone, comparable to over $410 million today. To operate the Baltimore Bargain House, Epstein also built a local community of employees, which included over 1,600 people. The workforce was relatively diverse, comprising of immigrants from various countries as well as industry experts from across the nation. Many workers remained employed at the Baltimore Bargain House for decades. Although remarkable for his considerable business acumen and the success of the Baltimore Bargain House, the business' founder, Jacob Epstein was also well known for his extensive charitable donations to local Jewish groups and to institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art.

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6 N. Liberty Street, Baltimore, MD 21201