Walking along Boston Street, people will run into a small store called “Canton Market.” Acting as both a convenient store and sandwich shop, Canton Market serves up a variety of sandwiches such as their cheese steak sub and their turkey club. Canton Market is not the first locally owned casual dining spot in this location. Before Canton Market, this lot was home to the Blue Top Diner.
Bill Tangires, former owner of the Blue Top Diner, started his career working for his father’s business called “Jim’s Lunch.” Bill Tangires continued to work in the food industry and prepared meals for industrial plants. Afterwards in the mid 1960s, Bill Tangires founded the Blue Top Diner. The Blue Top Diner served diner classics from burgers and vegetable-beef soup, to coffee and chocolate meringue pie. The Blue Top Diner was even recommended in a Baltimore Sun Article alongside the famous Double-T Diner.
The Blue Top Diner served a variety of people until the year it closed, including “factory workers, truck drivers, dock hands, business people” and even then Maryland senator Barbara Ann Mikulski. In the late eighties, Bill Tangires sold the diner property to Alan Katz, a restaurant chain owner. A Baltimore Sun article detailing the closing of the Blue Top Diner stated, “An avid investor, he [Bill Tangires] hopes to become a stock analyst with a discount brokerage house, perhaps with the First National Bank company.” Although Bill Tangires left the restaurant business to pursue finance, the property of the diner still remains a part of the food business today.
]]>A large percentage of cannery employees came from east Baltimore’s Polish community. Populating most of Fells Point, Polish families looked to canneries for work. Polish women and children worked at canneries alongside men in order to earn increased wages. Workers’ wages played a vital role in the debate for the ten-hour work day. Cannery workers in favor of the ten-hour work day argued that canning companies overworked their employees. By contrast, cannery workers against the ten-hour day argued that workers should be allowed to work however many hours it takes to make a liveable wage. Workers against the ten-hour law stated in one Baltimore Sun article, “that restricting the hours of labor would deprive the women of an opportunity to earn a living; that the season was short and must, therefore, yield them the largest possible earnings…”
While Polish cannery workers lived in Fells Point, the Polish community did not remain in east Baltimore for the entire year, but rather moved according to the seasons. At the end of the Baltimore City canning season in August, the Polish community in east Baltimore temporarily relocated to the Maryland countryside in search of employment from corn and tomato canneries. Working conditions in the country varied, but overall were still undesirable. In one particular camp, workers had to make their own kitchens from wooden planks and cloth; in another camp cannery waste covered the floor of the employee’s sleeping quarters. At the end of the countryside canning season, Polish workers returned to east Baltimore to enjoy a meager one week of rest before leaving for the oyster canneries in the south.
]]>August Rosenberger got into the broom business by chance in the late 1800s. One of his customers, a farmer who was unable to make ends meet, asked Mr. Rosenberger if he would accept a small shack with one broom machine and one sewing machine in payment for his grocery bill. Mr. Rosenberger accepted and sent him on his way. By 1907, Rosenberger had a successful broom business and he set his sights on Baltimore.
Construction began on the Atlantic-Southwestern Broom Company in Baltimore in 1910. The business continued to grow and between 1922 and 1924, the building expanded with additional buildings to the east and north, adding 57,500 square feet of warehouse and space. Production peaked in 1932 at 3.6 million brooms and 300 employees.
The company closed in 1989. Harbor Enterprise Center opened it's doors in 1992 in the old Atlantic-Southwestern Broom Company and quickly became home to an eclectic mix of artists, woodworkers, and startup companies. Completed in early 2009, the ground floor has been converted to 20,000 square-feet of retail with office/studio space above. The factory is now home to more than fifty local businesses.
]]>The oldest building on the Can Company site was constructed by the Norton Tin Can and Plate Company in 1895, and by 1900, the company was the largest can manufacturer in the United States. The founder of the Norton Company became the first president of the American Can Company.
Throughout the early 1900s, the site expanded to occupy the entire triangular parcel, with the construction of the Boiler House, Factory Building and Annex in 1913, and the Signature Building in 1924. Other structures occupied the site as well, including infill buildings constructed in the early 1960s.
At it peak, the American Can Company employed as many as eight-hundred local residents. However, when the American Can merged with the National Can Company in the late 1980s, the factory was closed, all of the jobs were lost, and the property became vacant. In 1987, the City of Baltimore received a UDAG grant, $8.5 million of which was directed towards clearing the site and constructing a mixed-use commercial and residential development by Michael Swerdlow, including two high rise residential towers. After strong community opposition, a PCB spill on the site, and loss of financing, Swerdlow abandoned the project.
In 1994, Safeway purchased the eastern half of the site and demolished the existing buildings to make way for a supermarket and 300 space parking lot. In 1997, The Can Company LLC acquired the remaining 4.3 acres, which included the most historically significant buildings on the site, and quickly began development to allow its first and largest tenant, DAP Products, Inc., the world’s largest manufacturer of sealants and adhesives, to relocate its 40,000 square foot world headquarters to the site in March 1998. The Can Company is now the home to retailers, restaurants, and offices.
]]>At the close of the eighteenth century, the far eastern edge of Baltimore was marked by Harris Creek, a modest tributary of the Patapsco that spilled into the River near where Boston Street and Lakewood Avenue in Canton today. In an area of Baltimore that was still sparsely settled, Harris Creek did feature one major enterprise—the shipyard of Samuel and Joseph Sterrett. The shipyard included a large blacksmith shop, sheds for boat builders and mast wrights, and a serviceable road back into Fells Point for workers and supplies. The Master Constructor at the shipyard was David Stodder, an experienced shipwright who held seventeen enslaved people, making him one of the largest slaveholders in Baltimore at the time. Among the ships produced at the shipyard was the 600-ton Goliath, owned by Abraham Van Bibber who also co-owned the privateer sloop Baltimore Hero commanded by Thomas Waters during the Revolutionary War. Van Bibber reportedly intended the Goliath for the East India Trade. The most famous ship to sail down Harris Creek was the U.S. Frigate Constellation launched in 1797. (The second USS Constellation, built in 1854, contains portions of this original.) Stodder built the ship according to the design of Naval Constructor Joshua Humphreys. The Constellation was just one of six frigates that Humphreys designed in the 1790s to pursue Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean. While Harris Creek was filled in during the early nineteenth century to make more land for the quickly growing Baltimore City, evidence of Canton's maritime past endured. In 1908, locals uncovered the charred remains of a 130-foot clipper ship that had burned at its pier and had been buried 400 feet inland from the present shoreline. In the 1880s, Harris Creek was turned into a major municipal sewer with an outfall at Boston Street. In 1901, Baltimore constructed a brick arch bridge to carry Boston Street that has remained there through the present.
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