Behind the Scenes Tour at Thomas Brown Woodwright highlights architectural millwork and antique machines

thomasbrown
Thomas Brown, Woodwright

Thomas Brown, Woodwright custom mills architectural products for historic buildings all over Baltimore and beyond. Amazingly, Thomas Brown does all this mostly on machines that pre-date the Great Depression. The shop uses very few machines built after 1929 and keeps some machines that date as far back as the 1830s. Please join us for a Behind the Scenes Tour of this workshop located in a 1905 former icehouse building in the Remington neighborhood.

Behinds the Scenes at the Thomas Brown, Woodwright Workshop
Wednesday, March 13, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
330 West 23rd Street, Baltimore, 21211
RSVP Today! $15 members | $25 non-members – wine & cheese will be served.
Parking is available on the street. Enter on the Hampden Avenue Side.

You can see Thomas Brown’s handicraft in architectural millwork across the city at places like Hampton Mansion, Evergreen House, and the Garrett Jacobs Mansion. A little further afield, his shop has has helped to restore the Gracie Mansion in New York, the Harvard University Center in Boston, Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Thomas Brown’s workshop has fifteen wood working machines that have vanished from the planet everywhere else except their shop in Remington! What others consider antiquated or outdated, Thomas Brown considers essential to fabricating architectural woodwork for historic buildings.  Please join Mr. Brown as he walks us through his shop sharing the stories of this rare historic wood-working equipment and the architectural woodwork that they produce.

Thomas Brown, Woodwright
Thomas Brown, Woodwright

Let’s Go O’s (and adpative reuse)! Join us for a Behind the Scenes tour of Camden Yards

Camden Station
Camden Station

Camden Yards, home to the Baltimore Orioles, is much more than a ballpark. When the park first opened as the new home of our Baltimore’s baseball team in 1992, the buildings had already served the people of Baltimore for over 130 years. Many of us have visited Camden Yards on game day amid the crowds of enthusiastic sports fans. Here is a chance to see the ballpark at a quieter time and to visit places that are not typically open to the public. Our tour will include the dugout, umpires tunnel, press box, club level, and the JumboTron control room. We will hear about the history of baseball in Baltimore while gaining an appreciation for all that goes into making a home for a great team like the Orioles.

Behind the Scenes Tour of Camden Yards
Saturday, March 9, 10:15 am or
Sunday, March 24, 12:30 pm
333 W. Camden Street, Baltimore, 21201
RSVP Today!  $15 members | $25 non-members
Parking is available at lots B & C located between Oriole Park and Ravens Stadium for a fee or visit the MTA website for details on transit options.

The history of Camden Yards began in 1855 when the B&O Railroad started construction on Camden Station. The iconic B&O warehouse  that frames the west side of the stadium today was built between 1899 and 1905. The warehouse is over eight stories tall and over 1,100 feet long – large enough to hold the freight from 1,000 railroad cars. The station remained in active use by the B&O’s passenger trains until the 1980s making it one of the longest continuously operated railroad terminals in the United States. The building has gone through many changes since its original design of a castle-like façade to today’s ballpark. Today, Camden Yards and Camden Station are a nationally known success story for adaptive reuse and a great place to catch a game!

Photograph of Camden Yards, 2006 by Carol Highsmith. Courtesy LOC, LC-DIG-highsm-04854
Photograph of Camden Yards, 2006 by Carol Highsmith. Courtesy LOC, LC-DIG-highsm-04854

Stewardship of Baltimore City-owned historic landmarks remains a critical issue

"This Place Matters" at the McKim Center
“This Place Matters” at the McKim Center

Last week, the Baltimore Business Journal published a report prepared for Baltimore City by a real estate consulting firm recommending various options for seventeen historic buildings owned by Baltimore City. When the City first commissioned this report last spring, it prompted widespread concern over the future of much-loved landmarks like the Shot Tower, Peale Museum, and Cylburn Mansion. At the time, we called for an open process that would ensure a seat at the table for the many citizens and volunteers who for decades have protected and celebrated these important landmarks. Now that the consultant’s report is final and the City has begun considering options for the seventeen buildings on the list, we believe the need for an inclusive deliberation is paramount to ensure the sites under consideration can be preserved and remain assets for Baltimore.

Carroll Mansion, 1936. Image courtesy Library of Congress, HABS.
Carroll Mansion, 1936. Image courtesy Library of Congress, HABS.

We commend Baltimore City for focusing on the seventeen historic properties subject to the report, some of which are in desperate need of repair. Long term leases, money-generating tenants, and perhaps even outright sale should be considered for some of the sites. Many others on the list, however, have friends groups that have cared for them for years (decades in some instances), that have raised money for their maintenance and restoration, and that are current and active in their work. Clifton Mansion, the Shot Tower, Carroll Mansion, and the Crimea are prime examples in this category. Still others, including the Peale Museum, Roland Park Water Tower, and President Street Station, have groups actively working with the City to gain control and begin restoration. The people who have devoted themselves to the buildings on the list should be part of the decision-making process. The consultant’s report appears to leave out the time, money, and dedication that Baltimoreans have already put into these landmarks and to undervalue their potential for the future stewardship of these historic places.

We will continue to advocate for an open process as the City moves forward in making decisions over the fates of these seventeen buildings. The seventeen buildings on the table deserve to be occupied and restored so that they can remain assets for Baltimore. The seventeen properties addresses by this report include:

Welcoming a Canton neighbor into the Centennial Homes program on March 25

Moskal house 2-8-13We’re excited to welcome our latest home-owner into the Baltimore Heritage Centennial Homes program with a plaque presentation for Mr. Roland Moskal on Fait Avenue at the monthly Canton Neighborhood Association meeting on March 25.

Moskal Centennial Home Plaque Presentation at the Canton Neighborhood Association Meeting

Monday, March 25, 2013, 7:00pm
United Evangelical Church, 3200 Dillon Street, Baltimore, MD 21224
Social gathering starts at 6:30pm and the presentation starts at 7:00pm with brief remarks from the Canton Neighborhood Association President, Daryll Jurkiewicz.

In 1904, Roland Moskal’s maternal grandmother, Maggie Williams, a widow, purchased a newly constructed rowhouse at 3408 Fait Ave. in the neighborhood of Canton in Baltimore City. She paid off her mortgage 17 months later in 1905. Over the last 108 years, Maggie Williams was followed by three generations of her family who have owned and occupied the property including her grandson Robert Moskal. Read on for the extensive profile of the history of this long-time Canton family and their home. Special thanks to our hard-working volunteer Lisa Doyle for her continuing work on the Centennial Homes program.  If you have information on a Centennial Homeowner in your neighborhood, please contact Lisa Doyle at 410-484-7878 or doyle@baltimoreheritage.org.

Explore Baltimore Heritage is public history in action thanks to BreakingGround and UMBC graduate students

Thanks to a grant from UMBC’s BreakingGround initiative this past fall, Baltimore Heritage enjoyed a unique opportunity to work closely with UMBC Professor Dr. Denise Meringolo and nine UMBC students in a graduate-level public history course. The students worked with us to develop short video documentaries on the stories of Baltimore’s historic landmarks for our new website and smartphone application, Explore Baltimore Heritage. The student videos — produced with support from the UMBC New Media Studio — share images and vignettes from the history of grave-robbing at Davidge Hall, the ignominious demise of Edgar Allen Poe and his burial at the Westminster Burying Ground, and the complicated past of urban renewal at Baltimore’s First Mariner Arena.

When we first started working with Dr. Meringolo and her public history students in spring semester of 2012, we developed a project that allowed students to build on on our existing research and tell new stories about historic places like the Baltimore Bargain House or Hutzler’s Department Store with writing and archival photographs. When Dr. Meringolo offered us the opportunity to continue working with her students into the fall, we settled on an ambitious goal: use the wealth of historic photos from local archives to tell stories with short videos. Fortunately, several of the students from the spring semester collaboration decided to continue with the second course and brought valuable expertise on the history of downtown Baltimore to this new challenge.

It has been exciting observe how the students have gained a new perspective on the role of public history in the often political and messy debates around economic development and preservation in an urban downtown. For Baltimore Heritage, the partnership has greatly extended the capacity of our small two-person non-profit and enabled us to expand the featured buildings on Downtown’s West Side.

Please enjoy these great videos on YouTube, check out Explore Baltimore Heritage online, or download the iPhone or Android application today!

This post originally appeared on the BreakingGround blog.