Have you ever seen a handsome building in Baltimore and swear that you had seen it before? Maybe around Florence, Italy? Join Dr. Ralph Brown for our fun bike tour around Baltimore and you’ll swear you are back in Florence—even for just a few hours. Florence has Michelangelo’s David, the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Medici, the Arno River spanned by the Ponte Vecchio and great gelato. Baltimore has the Bromo Seltzer Tower, the Jones Falls and, of course, our own tasty gelatos in Little Italy.
We’ll re-discover the sights, sounds and tastes of the great Renaissance city of Baltimore has while learning something new about iced desserts and Baltimore’s key role in their history.
Contained on a little less than three acres across from Clifton Park in northeast Baltimore, the Friends Burial Ground tells the stories of generations Baltimore’s Quaker families across their 300 years of rich history in our city. Established in 1713 on a tract of land known as Darley Hall when the Friendship Meetinghouse was built on what is today Harford Road, the cemetery has been in continuous use ever since. While small, and a bit unassuming, the Friends Burial Ground has approximately 1,800 graves with the earliest legible marker dating from 1802 and many undoubtably date from the 1700s. The stone wall around the grounds and the Sexton’s House both date back to the 1860s and, in 1926, 122 graves were moved from a Friends cemetery at at the Aisquith Street Meeting House in Old Town.
The many notable internments include Louisa Swain, who made history in Wyoming in 1880 as the first woman to legally vote in the United States at age 69, and Dr. Thomas Edmondson who lived in a grand estate that eventually became Harlem Park in West Baltimore. Dr. Edmondson recently resurfaced in the public light: it is his collection of Richard Caton Woodville’s artwork that is currently on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum.
Please join us on a tour of the site with long-time caretaker Adrian Bishop, who will share his knowledge of the cemetery and the Sexton House on the grounds that he and his wife call home, together with Ms. Frances Ferguson, who has been digging graves by hand at the cemetery for over 40 years.
After decades of neglect, it takes a bit of imagination to look at the cavernous A. Hoen & Co. Lithography Plant and see a unique opportunity for neighborhood revitalization. Fortunately, an exciting partnership between the American Communities Trust, Humanim, East Baltimore Development Inc., Big City Farms, Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition Inc., Woodberry Kitchen and Johns Hopkins (whew!) is leading the way to transform the plant and the nearby Eastern Pumping Station site into the new Baltimore Food Hub. By fall of 2014, these long vacant historic buildings will be bursting with entrepreneurs, urban farmers, students, and job trainees working with food-related businesses and learning about healthy food and sustainable agriculture.
The A. Hoen Co. Lithography Plant includes a series of buildings from the mid 19th century through the turn of the 20th century and remained in use by the company up through the 1980s. Established in the 1840s, owner August Hoen became a pioneer in both the technology and business of printing – distributing affordable color maps, books, decorative prints and more across the country. Built in 1890 just a few blocks away on the opposite side of the railroad tracks, the Eastern Pumping Station was once stylish industrial landmarks in northeast Baltimore even rivaling the architecture of the nearby American Brewery Building (then known as the Bauernschmidt and J.F. Weissner Brewery) with a more dignified Romanesque style. Architect Jackson Gott who designed the Pumping Station completed a number of projects for Baltimore City included the Maryland Penitentiary in 1893 and the Southern District Police Station in 1896.
Join us to discover more on the fascinating history of both buildings and the exciting future of food and healthy living that their preservation and re-use promises for East Baltimore! Our tour guides will include project manager Gregory Heller from Econsult and Bill Streuver, President of the American Communities Trust.
Over the winter, Bryan Blundell from Dell Corporation had approached Direct Dimensions with a project to completely laser scan the Two Sisters Houses in Fell’s Point. On a sunny afternoon in March, myself and another technician with Direct Dimensions took our laser scanning equipment down to Fell’s Point and in just 30 minutes created a perfectly accurate 3D digital model of the exterior of the property.
The Two Sisters are two of just a handful of remaining wooden houses in Baltimore’s Fell’s Point. These buildings were donated to the Preservation Society by the Dashiell-Marine family. The name, The Two Sisters, recognizes the efforts of the Dashiell sisters, Mary and Eleanor, to save these and other buildings in Fell’s Point. Since that time, the Society has worked steadily to develop a plan for the saving and utilization of these significant architectural examples of early life in Fell’s Point.
3D scanning is one of the many modern technologies that can be used to help reveal some of the secrets and stories that are part of these amazing structures. The scanning can provide a baseline documentation of the building’s current state, allowing the planning team to design necessary structural supports, and to also serve as a 3D, “as-built” blue print for documenting current conditions and future preservation efforts.
What is 3D scanning?
Laser scanning is the process of collecting millions of individual measurements using laser light. Think of a range finder. A laser beam leaves the scanner on a specific orientation and the time it takes to reflect off a surface and return to the scanner establishes the distance. This happens thousands of times per second. By moving the equipment to various positions and perspectives, an entire site can be “scanned” in 3D. Once the data is merged, the resulting “point cloud” can be used to create traditional drawings, 3D models, and virtual reconstructions & walkthroughs.
So far, Direct Dimensions has only scanned the exterior on Wolfe Street, and will complete the project with funds provided to The Preservation Society by an African American Heritage Preservation Program Grant from the Maryland Historical Trust. This initial scan effort is also valuable as an archived “3D snapshot”, a record of the state of the structure in the spring of 2013.
