Author: Johns

Johns Hopkins has been the executive director of Baltimore Heritage since 2003. Before that, Johns worked for the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development developing and implementing smart growth and neighborhood revitalization programs. Johns holds degrees from Yale University, George Washington University Law School, and the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment.

Support the Red Line: Transportation is key for historic neighborhoods

For over five years, Baltimore Heritage has advocated for Baltimore’s Red Line light rail project and the positive impacts it offers for many of the city’s historic neighborhoods. Today, we are joining a broad coalition of nonprofits, businesses and community groups to ask for your help in supporting for this transformative project.

We believe that expanding public transportation is important for Baltimore’s revitalization and that the Red Line can be a powerful force in addressing vacant and underutilized historic buildings from Highlandtown to Harlem Park. In 2008, Baltimore Heritage committed to support the Red Line by signing the project’s “Community Compact” with dozens of other community organizations (PDF). In 2010, we expanded our commitment with the creation of our West Baltimore fieldwork program. Over the past four years, we have led tours, organized partnerships, and fought for strategic investments along the Red Line corridor, including at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, American Ice Company, and Lafayette Square.

American Ice Company on Franklin Street, 1938. Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Industry, BGE 11708.
American Ice Company on Franklin Street, 1938. Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Industry, BGE 11708.

The Red Line has enormous potential to spur the reuse and rehabilitation of historic buildings, create new jobs and shape a brighter future for the residents of Baltimore’s historic neighborhoods. Learn more about the potential benefits of this project from Red Line Now.

We need your help to support the Red Line and Baltimore’s historic neighborhoods.

As new and returning elected officials begin to prepare for the General Assembly session in Annapolis this winter, please take a moment to reach out and share your support for the Red Line and historic preservation:

  • Send an email to Governor-elect Larry Hogan at info@hoganforgovernor.com and share your thoughts on what the Red Line means for the future Baltimore’s historic communities.
  • Send an email to your state senators and delegates and ask them to support or continue their support for the Red Line in the Maryland Legislature. You can look up your state senator and state delegates at MDElect.net.

To underscore the rich heritage and importance of the historic neighborhoods along the Red Line that we are working hard to save, we are excited to share our brand-new collection of digital and print publications: Landmarks on the Red Line. With printed brochures and digital tours, we are showcasing the history and architecture of this part of West Baltimore and hope to illustrate the importance of preserving historic buildings along  the Red Line corridor. Please explore our digital histories and pick up a neighborhood brochure at an upcoming Baltimore Heritage event.

Courtesy Union Memorial UMC.
Union Memorial United Methodist Church in Evergreen. Courtesy Union Memorial UMC.

Celebrating the Karen Lewand Preservation Education Fund at the Ivy Hotel

It has been two years since our colleague, friend and inspiration Karen Lewand passed away. The historic preservation education fund that she created is almost two years old as well, and it is our privilege to celebrate Karen’s legacy and the ongoing good work that she made possible at Baltimore Heritage. As a way to say thank you for the over two hundred individuals and businesses who contributed to the education fund in 2012 and 2013, we are throwing a party and inviting you to join us for a reception and tour of the Ivy Hotel in Mount Vernon on the evening of Wednesday, December 3.

Karen and Bob Lewand, June 2010
Karen and Bob Lewand, June 2010

The Ivy is in the middle of a comprehensive restoration to turn the neighborhood landmark into a first-class boutique inn. The 1889 mansion started its life on Calvert Street as a home for John Gilman. William Painter, inventor of the bottle cap and founder of the Crown Cork and Seal Company, and Robert Garrett, double gold medalist at the first modern Olympics in 1896, also took turns owning and enjoying the mansion. The Ivy is a fantastic place and with the help of the Azola Companies, our host and the building’s owner, and Ziger/Snead Architects are returning to its full Gilded Age glory.

Image courtesy Azola Companies
Image courtesy Azola Companies

Special thanks to everyone who has supported the Karen Lewand Historic Preservation Education Fund and for making our work in Baltimore possible.

Holidays tours of a Medieval mansion and great Gothic church! Join our new Behind the Scenes tours

As we head into Thanksgiving and the holiday season, we’re pleased to be able to share a few new heritage tours. We hope you can spend an evening or two with us this fall. OnNovember 19, we’re heading to G. Krug and Son Ironworks – the oldest ironworks company in America and the home of a new museum to showcase 200 years of Baltimore iron-making. In December, we’re starting the holiday season with a tour of the Cloisters, an enchanting medieval house that will be decorated for the holidays. And finally, we hope you’ll join us (and bring an out-of-town guest) for a tour of St. John’s in the Village, a charming Gothic church that is ever so British.

You also might enjoy the first few posts in a series documenting what we are calling the Great Western Rowhouse Roadtrip—an exploration of rowhouse neighborhoods and historic preservation in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Wheeling. Keep an eye here on our blog for more fun posts from the trip!

Finally, we want to share our special thanks to Azola Companies for sponsoring our Baltimore Behind the Scenes tours in 2014. Thank you to everyone who has joined or renewed your membership in our fall membership drive. If you haven’t renewed, please consider doing so today. Your support makes these heritage tours and all of our work in Baltimore possible.

The Great Western Rowhouse Road Trip — Rowhouses Pittsburgh Style!

If you’ve been to Pittsburgh, you know it has a fantastic downtown peninsula packed with sky-scrapers built by Alcoa, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, U.S. Steel, and more. Charlie Duff and I avoided this alluring urban hub to explore the city’s rowhouse neighborhoods on a tour led by Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr., president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. And there are more than a few rowhouse neighborhoods in Pittsburgh!

Mexican War Streets, August 16, 2012. Courtesy Joseph/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Mexican War Streets, August 16, 2012. Courtesy Joseph/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Just over the bridge from downtown lies Pittsburgh’s North Shore (where, incidentally the still mostly-new baseball stadium clearly borrows its design from Camden Yards). Deutchtown, a once German neighborhood, has wonderful brick rows, sans the white marble steps found in East Baltimore. The nearby Mexican War Streets neighborhood also contains wonderful rows that resemble Philadelphia’s Society Hill or Boston’s Beacon Hill as much as they do anything in Baltimore. And just one neighborhood over, West Allegheny has the remnants of a rowhouse neighborhood as grand as Eutaw Place but mixed with some whopper free-standing urban mansions the likes of which Baltimore never really saw.

Deutschtown Rowhouses, August 16, 2012. Courtesy Joseph/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Deutschtown Rowhouses, August 16, 2012. Courtesy Joseph/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Unlike Baltimore, however, the rowhouses in these neighborhoods had much more variability. Houses with different brick colors, rooflines, windows, and even front steps joined together to make almost all of the rows we saw. No red-brick and white marble steps as far as the eye can see here in Pittsburgh. Also unlike Baltimore, the close-in rowhouse neighborhoods quickly give way to communities of bungalows and and four squares.

In Baltimore, you can travel out of downtown east, west, north or south for a couple of miles before the rowhouses give way to detached homes. In Pittsburgh, the development pattern changes much more quickly, perhaps due to the hilly terrain. By the early 1900s, it seems that much of the rowhouse development stopped in favor of a mix of bungalows, duplexes, small apartment buildings, and a host of other building types.

There is much to like about Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including Victorian rowhouses and the apparent energy that is going into rehabbing many of them. Rowhouses are not the dominant housing type by any means, but there are enough of them to make Pittsburgh familiar to any of us with a Baltimore rowhouse perspective.

Don’t miss the previous post in our series from the Great Western Rowhouse Roadtrip! More photographs of Pittsburgh’s North Side by photographer Joseph A. can be found in this North Side/Allegheny City Flickr Set. 

Mexican War Streets, April 22, 2013. Courtesy Joseph/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Mexican War Streets, April 22, 2013. Courtesy Joseph/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Great Western Rowhouse Road Trip — Baltimore to Pittsburgh and beyond!

Yesterday afternoon, my colleague Charlie Duff of Jubilee Baltimore and I headed west out of Baltimore. Our quest? Look at rowhouses and rowhouse neighborhoods beyond Baltimore.

250 years ago, settlers piled their Conestoga wagons full of provisions at a tract of land John Eager Howard donated that later became known as Lexington Market and set out to Pittsburgh on what was then the Western frontier. Some of these settlers kept traveling west but some settlers  stayed and even built rowhouses! What are rowhouses like in Pittsburgh? What strategies are preservationists in Western Pennsylvania using to revitalize their historic neighborhoods?

Johns and Charlie in Pittsburgh
Johns and Charlie in Pittsburgh

Today, we will be meeting with the Arthur Zigler, the director of the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation and a veteran preservation advocate in Pittsburgh. We at Baltimore Heritage already have benefited from Arthur’s experience. Our revitalization through preservation work in West Baltimore borrows more than a few pages from Arthur’s playbook that we learned from a visit a few years ago.

After Pittsburgh, our next stop is Cincinnati—the Queen City! A few generations after Baltimore was a launching pad for Pittsburgh settlers, immigrants passed through Baltimore’s Locust Point and headed out  this growing metropolis on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Did Cincinnati go wild with rowhouse building just like we did in Baltimore? What can we learn from their preservation efforts? In the Queen City, we are meeting with Paul Muller, the director of the Cincinnati Preservation Association who coincidentally is wrapping up a conference on the economics of historic preservation.

Charlie and I are not traveling by wagon or train, but in my Toyota Prius. While this lacks the charm and romance of earlier travel, it is a heck of a lot faster for this three-day journey. If you are interested in a slice of rowhouse life outside of Baltimore, stay tuned for a few updates from the front lines in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.