We are in Savannah, Georgia this week to spend a couple of days learning with fellow preservationists at the PastForward 2014 conference organized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Baltimore and Maryland are well represented at the conference by staff from the Maryland Historical Trust, Preservation Maryland and, of course, Johns and me!
Since we couldn’t bring you all with us, we wanted to share a few photos from the first few days of our trip – including rowhouses, parks, monuments and more! You can also participate in the conference from home as a virtual attendee.
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.
Have you ever walked past a local landmark and wondered who wrote the plaque? For the historic buildings at Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Campus, the students themselves are telling the stories! The students undertook this ambitious project as part of a course taught by Beth Maloney for the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University in partnership with the Homewood Museum, Johns Hopkins University Archives and MICA’s Environmental Graphic Design class. Thank you to Beth for sharing this great case study in education and interpretation!
As a consultant to museums and historic sites, I partner with working professionals to address challenges, create new material and generate strategies for programming and visitor engagement. In addition to my consulting work, lately I’ve been teaching undergraduate students in a course through the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University. I love how this teaching experience gives me the time to work with and learn from students as we explore informal learning and museum interpretation. And, because the class I teach is a practicum, students work through their ideas by collaborating with a local museum or organization on a hands-on project. This kind of collaborative work is not just valuable for students. For partner organizations, it’s a chance to gain new perspective on material, themes and practice – and leverage fresh energy and people-power to accomplish projects that may not have been possible alone.
Courtesy Maryland Institute College of Art
In the Spring of 2014, we partnered with staff from the Homewood Museum and Johns Hopkins University Archives to create interpretive signage for ten sites throughout the University’s Homewood campus. The broad goal for the project, as defined by the students, was to reveal stories about the property where the Homewood campus now sits in order to draw attention to the layers of history that are around us and prompt a dialog that would nurture a deeper “sense of place.”
Developing the signs was a collaborative and iterative process. Each student researched a site – discovering stories of the people who lived and worked there, identifying primary sources, and developing interpretive text. Once these main ingredients were gathered, students tested and refined their text with peers, faculty, scholars, and visitors to campus.
Courtesy Maryland Institute College of Art
When content and visuals were in final draft form, we partnered with Jeremy Hoffman’s exhibit design course at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Hopkins and MICA students reviewed the sites and stories together and then MICA students developed proposals for both the graphic and structural design of the signs. Over the summer, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the support of the University, the Program in Museums and Society produced and installed the signs according to the students’ vision. A web presence for this work is in the planning as part of the university’s Hopkins Retrospective project, as are related programs on campus.
But most importantly, these signs will only be up for the academic year, so come over to campus and take a look!
MICA design student Katie Doherty. Courtesy Maryland Institute College of Art
Thank you to the nearly 500 people came out and participated in Doors Open Baltimore 2014 tours this past weekend. Congratulations to AIA Baltimore on an exciting first year and we are excited to continue our partnership for Doors Open Baltimore in 2015. In thehistoric mill village of Woodberry, the Greater Hampden Heritage Alliance offered a full day of walking tours led by Nathan Dennies including stops at Clipper Mill and Union Mill. Participants had the chance to pick up the brand-new Greater Hampden History Tour brochure available now along the Avenue.
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!
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.
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.
