Save the date! On Thursday, October 19, Baltimore Heritage will be hosting its Preservation Celebration 2023 in the evening (location tbd). At this event, we’ll honor our 2023 Preservation Award winners and, with your help, give out four microgrants to people working on the front lines in our historic neighborhoods. We’ll say thank you to our volunteers and honor all of their hard work this year. This gathering also acts as Baltimore Heritage’s annual meeting where the board will elect its new members. Tickets will be a suggested donation of $25.
Check back in the coming weeks for more information. We hope you’ll join us on October 19!
Baltimore’s annual unconference on people, places, and the past will be at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Friday, September 22, 2023! Students are free this year.
Past, in-person unconferences have been structured around four session blocks: two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We usually have between four to six sessions in each of the time blocks for a total of twenty sessions throughout the day.
Today’s Five Minute Histories video is a bit different! The historic block we are featuring on West Preston Street in Mount Vernon showcases one of the city’s grandest Victorian buildings, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation, as well as Baltimore’s very earliest switch away from Victorian architecture to a new NeoColonial style. This block was also the home of three pioneering women of science in the early 20th Century, as well as Baltimore’s mayor during the great 1904 Fire. The Greek Cathedral has begun seeking authorization to demolish five of the historic rowhouses on the block and we are sharing this video in hopes that it will help convey why we think this block and these particular rowhouses are important and should be reused rather than demolished. Watch the video here:
This is our series called “Five Minute Histories.” We record short videos about different historic places all over Baltimore and post them on our Facebook page, YouTube channel, and website.
On June 20, 2023, Baltimore Heritage awarded Margaretta Callanan with a Centennial Homes certificate. Her family has owned their home on Foster Ave for over 108 years. Margaretta’s maternal grandmother, Barbara King, lived her sixty of her eighty-nine years. Margaretta’s mom, Marie Emily Miller, lived here ninety-four of her ninety-seven years. Thank you to this family for taking such great care of an iconic Baltimore rowhouse!
The Mitchell Law Office in Upton is set to receive $1.75 million from Congressman Kweisi Mfume. This money will be used to transform the building, which was once the office of Maryland’s first Black woman lawyer, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, into a legal hub in West Baltimore. Rev. Al Hathaway of Beloved Community Services Corporation is spearheading this alongside his other project, the PS 103/Thurgood Marshall School restoration. Here is a link to a Baltimore Banner article that ran yesterday.
The Mitchell Law Office on the end, c. 2015
About 7 years ago, Baltimore Heritage secured $10,000 from the National Trust of Historic Preservation to stabilize the roof of the Mitchell Law Office. This was the project’s first funding and helped get the restoration going. We’ve been involved in several ways since then and will continue to help wherever we can.
The Mitchell Law Office restoration joins several other ongoing West Baltimore restoration projects including PS 103 and Upton Mansion (for the Afro American offices), along with the already-completed Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum. We are very near to having a critical mass of nationally important Civil Rights sites that have been restored, all within a few blocks of each other. For several years Baltimore Heritage, Rev. Hathaway and others have been talking about how to put Baltimore on the national map as a Civil Rights heritage destination. We’re making progress!
