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.
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
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.
Special thanks to all of our members who have renewed their support for Baltimore Heritage over the last few weeks. Renewing your support is critical in helping us continue to offer tours and educational programs. Your support also helps us to save historic places like the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, which is celebrating new plans for a $12.4 million rehabilitation, and assist partners like the brand-new G. Krug & Sons Museum. Please join Baltimore Heritage or renew your membership today!
Thank you to everyone who came out and joined us for our Bmore Historic 2014 unconference earlier this month. Read Kate Drabinski’s column for a great take on the day or check out the unconference blog for more details.
“Thing is, though, my job also means that this year’s Bmore Historic Unconference is as much a field trip as a work obligation, and I got to spend the day sharing equal parts curiosity and righteous indignation with a wide swath of Baltimore-area history buffs, museum professionals, preservationists, students, and nerds as we asked those good questions of what counts as history, whose histories matter, and what the heck we should do with them…
Other sessions served as skill-building workshops in oral history, DIY genealogy, connecting youth to history and heritage issues, and how to use open-source web resources to curate online archives and collections. Eli Pousson from Baltimore Heritage shared its Explore Baltimore Heritage app that allows users to pull up historic photographs and narratives of sites all over the city from their smartphones. Drawing on her work in oral history as part of University of Baltimore’s Baltimore ’68 project, Elizabeth Nix led a packed workshop on how to do oral histories. Participants shared their ongoing Baltimore-based projects gathering the stories of such wide-ranging groups as veterans, LGBTQ people, youth, elders, laborers, suburbanites, and alt kids. These projects hope to bring out the many different and diverse ways that people have made Baltimore home.”
