As we reflect on the events of the past few days in Baltimore, our thoughts are with those who are working to make our historic city a better place – through pursuit of equal justice and the revitalization of historic neighborhoods. While damage to historic buildings is so far limited, iconic landmarks like the Arch Social Club on Pennsylvania Avenue, the city’s oldest Jewish cemetery on North Avenue, the Gwynns Falls Parkway (a brand-new addition to the City’s historic landmark list), and the 1887 American Brewery on Gay Street stood close to the scene of yesterday’s violence. This morning, I hope you will join us in thanking the people who are continuing their committed stewardship of these and other great places that mean so much to our city.
Looking forward, we believe that our work preserving the historic places that matter to our city’s history is needed as much now as ever. The Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Central Branch is open today just as it began: “for all, rich and poor without distinction of race or color.” On the Gwynns Falls Parkway, volunteers are out this morning planting flowers and giving the park a fine spring cleaning. Patterson Park is undamaged and any visitor to Observatory Hill will find locals as undaunted as when we faced down the British in 1814.
We will continue to use our calendar as a resource share community events. We also encourage you to get involved by coming to some of our upcoming talks and tours that explore our shared heritage and the lasting legacy of the city’s past. If there is one theme that stands out to me, it is that we are indeed all in this together.
We look forward to talking, walking, and working with you in the days and weeks ahead.
Have you heard about the Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel project? One replacement proposed for this aging tunnel threatens to demolish several blocks of historic West Baltimore. Four public meetings in April offer opportunities to learn more about the project and share your views.
What is the B&P Tunnel Project?
The Baltimore and Potomac (B&P) Tunnel is a railroad tunnel on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC) line in use between Penn Station and the West Baltimore MARC Station for over 140 years. Today, the tunnel is used by Amtrak, MARC Commuter Rail and Norfolk Southern Railway. It is also a bottleneck affecting the reliability of rail service up and down the northeast. One proposed replacement to the B&P Tunnel (known as Alternative 11: Robert Street South) provokes serious concerns about the demolition of historic buildings in West Baltimore. Please come out to a public meeting this month to learn more about the B&P Tunnel project and voice your concerns about the long-term consequences of Alternative 11 on historic West Baltimore neighborhoods.
Last year, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and Amtrak started work on a study to evaluate the condition of the existing tunnel and propose alternatives for rail service through Baltimore. After public meetings in June and October 2014, the project published a Preliminary Alternatives Screening Report (pdf) that identified and evaluated 16 possible options (illustrated in the map below).
This preliminary review selected four alternatives to advance to a second round of review. Building nothing (Alternative 1) or rehabilitating the existing tunnel (Alternative 2) are two options that are unlikely to meet the long-term need for improved rail service. The two remaining options (Alternative 3: Great Circle Passenger Tunnel and Alternative 11: Robert Street South) both require expensive new tunnels. Unfortunately, Robert Street South also appears to require the demolition of several blocks of historic rowhouses within the proposed Midtown Edmondson National Register Historic District and demolition of the 1911 American Ice Company.
Learn more or share concerns at a public meeting in April
Starting next week, MDOT, FRA, Amtrak and the Baltimore City Department of Transportation are hosting a series of meetings to offer members of the public an opportunity to learn more about the project, ask questions and offer input on the process.
All four meetings are scheduled from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., with a formal presentation starting at 6:30 p.m. The same information will be shared at each meeting in the series:
Monday, April 13 at Gilmor Elementary, 1311 North Gilmor Street
Tuesday, April 14 at Mt. Royal Elementary, 121 McMechen Street
Monday, April 20 at Westside Elementary, 2235 North Fulton Avenue
Tuesday, April 21 at Lockerman Bundy Elementary, 301 N. Pulaski Street
To be added to the project mailing list, or to submit your comments, please email info@bptunnel.com. For other questions or for special accommodations at any of these upcoming public meetings, contact Ms. Odessa Phillip, PE, Environmental Project Manager at the Baltimore City Department of Transportation at (410) 396-6856 or Odessa.phillip@baltimorecity.gov.
On Wednesday, December 10, the Maryland Historical Trust announced the exciting preservation projects receiving the Sustainable Communities Tax Credit in 2015. Next year, the historic tax credit program will invest ten million dollars in nine projects from Western Maryland to the Eastern Shore. In Baltimore, four projects received historic tax credits—supporting a planned investment of over sixty million in the Fell’s Point, Stone Hill, Broadway East and Charles North neighborhoods.
Eastern Pumping Station/Baltimore Food Hub: Conversion of former pumping station to a mixed-use food center business incubator. Credit: $3 million; Estimated project cost: $15 million
Fell’s Point Recreation Pier: Conversion of the former municipal pier building for use as a hotel and restaurant facility. Credit: $3 million; Estimated project cost: $39.8 million
Florence Crittenton Home: Conversion of former mill owner’s mansion/social services campus for use as rental apartments. Credit: $520,000; Estimated project cost: $2.6 million
Eastwick Motor Company: Conversion of a 1914 Ford dealership for use as an arts organization center and restaurant. Credit: $453,968; Estimated project cost: $6.1 million
Rendering of planned rehabilitation for former Eastwick Motor Company.
You may remember the Eastern Pumping Station from our Behind the Scenes tour last summer. We’ll also be visiting the Eastwick Motor Company next month—a building better known as the former home to Load of Fun and now known as the Motor House. According to a March 2009 study funded by the Abell Foundation, the state historic tax credit program has helped to create more than 26,000 jobs throughout the state. The Baltimore Sun quoted Elizabeth Hughes of the Maryland Historical Trust, “One of the things that they all share, the common thread, is good preservation practices, combined with promise of local economic return.”
Learn more about how you can advocate for continued investments in Baltimore’s historic neighborhoods at the Preservation Priorities Forum hosted by Preservation Maryland on January 13.
We’re glad to share this post from local archeologist Lisa Kraus about a new project we’ve been working on this fall: archeology in Herring Run Park! Lisa and her husband, Jason Shellenhamer, along with volunteers from the Northeast Baltimore History Roundtable have made some exciting finds in just the past few weeks. Read on for Lisa’s reflections on our progress and learn more about archeology in Baltimore.
My husband Jason and I moved to Northeast Baltimore in 2012, and were immediately intrigued by the tantalizing little glimpses of history we saw all over our neighborhood. We spotted a few 19th-century farmhouses sitting a little askew on the predominantly 20th-century landscape. We heard stories about an old pickle factory that once sold pickles for a nickel, right down the street from our house. We spotted a one-room schoolhouse that had been expanded into a social club, and an old stone mill building built into a hillside. We walked through the 19th-century German Lutheran cemetery nestled in the center of Montebello Park. While walking our dogs, we found Hall’s Spring and the shell of the old Eutaw Methodist Church in Herring Run Park, and wondered about the vanished communities those facilities once served.
Photograph by Bryson Dudley, 10 October 2011. Courtesy Monument City Blog.
Since we’re both archeologists and share a persistent curiosity about the past, we started looking at historical maps of Baltimore and trying to reconcile them with the modern landscape. We spent weekends at the archives doing research. It became clear that our neighborhood had a deep history, with European- and African-American settlements dating back to the 1600s and 1700s, and the possibility of prehistoric occupation stretching back thousands of years. To our surprise, we found that very little archaeology has been done in our neighborhood and we started thinking about how we could change that.
Jason head-deep in a shovel test-pit. Photo by Lisa Kraus, November 2014.
Through some sort of cosmic serendipity, right about the time Jason and I started talking about starting an archaeology program in our neighborhood, the Northeast Baltimore History Roundtable approached Baltimore Heritage about starting a public archaeology project in Herring Run Park. After meeting with both groups and coordinating with the Friends of Herring Run Parks and the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks, we set out for the park to see what we could find.
We were searching for sites that could tell us something new, something we couldn’t learn from books, maps or other records. After all, written history often reflects the interests and concerns of a limited group of people. Many wealthy and influential people called Baltimore home over the years, but most of the city’s former residents left few written records behind. Archeology is one of the best ways to learn more about the lives of the poor, the working classes, immigrants, women, children, free and enslaved African Americans, and Native Americans.
Photograph by Lisa Kraus, November 2014.
Very little is known about early residents of Northeast Baltimore. Who worked at the mills, the hotels and taverns, the farms that existed here in the 1800s? Who were the earliest immigrant settlers in the area, and where did they live? Were there Native American settlements and camps here? What were the lives of all these early residents like, and how did they influence the area that eventually became Greater Lauraville? How has the neighborhood changed over time, and what has stayed the same?
Over the last few months, we’ve discovered sites in Herring Run Park that could answer many of these questions, and raise many more. We’re looking forward to working with our partners, neighbors, students and volunteers as we make more discoveries, and we hope you’ll join us!
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.
