Category: Volunteer

Thank You for Attending Our Preservation Celebration 2022!

Last week, Baltimore Heritage had its annual Preservation Celebration and we are delighted we could once again gather in person! We handed out 14 awards to groups and individuals doing fabulous work celebrating and preserving our city’s history and buildings. We gave out 6 micro-grants to 6 very worthy community projects. We conducted our organization’s annual meeting and welcomed a few new board members. And we said a big thank you to our wonderful volunteers. They make historic preservation possible in Baltimore. All the while, we ate delicious food from Trinacria and drank wine from Spirits of Mt. Vernon! Thank you to everyone attended.

 

Award Winners: 

Sonia Eaddy and Nicole King
For tireless advocacy in historic Poppleton

CASA
For the restoration of the 1921 Belnord Theater

Award winners Nicole King (left) and Sonia Eaddy (right) at the celebration!

Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum
For developing a Baltimore Civil Rights history school curriculum

Baltimore City Department of General Services and
Carroll Museums, Inc.
For the restoration of the interior of the Phoenix Shot Tower

The Peale
For the restoration of The Peale

Friends of Patterson Park and
Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks
For restoration of the historic superintendent’s house in Patterson Park

Nia Redmond
For creating the East Baltimore Historical Library

Meadow Development Group
For restoration of The Eleanor at 3400 Auchentoroly Terrace

Jubilee Baltimore
For rehabilitation of the Odell’s Building at 19-21 East North Avenue

Bree Jones
For advancing equitable renewal in historic West Baltimore

Volunteer of the Year – Richard Messick
For enhancing Baltimore’s historic places through years of research, publishing, and tour guiding

 

Pitch Party Winners

$1000: St. Mark’s Lutheran Church
For exterior lighting

Diana Bailey, Executive Director of the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center, receiving her microgrant check from Baltimore Heritage Executive Director Johns Hopkins

$750: Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project
For new cemetery signage

$750: Greater Baltimore Urban League
For a new history exhibit

$500: Maryland Women’s Heritage Center
For a new electronic exhibit

$500: Carroll Museums, Inc.
For a new Shot Tower sign

$500: Filbert Street Garden
For new beehive boxes

Join Us at Our Preservation Celebration 2022!

Join us for our Preservation Celebration 2022 at the newly restored and re-opened Peale Museum! On October 13, we’ll honor our 2022 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. With food from Baltimore vendors, wine and beer from Maryland suppliers, and complimentary valet service, we hope you will join us for what promises to be a wonderful evening. And we couldn’t be in a better historic place than the newly renovated Peale Museum. We hope you’ll join us on October 13!

Register here! Tickets are a suggested donation of $25.

Volunteer Spotlight: Richard Messick

All of our core programs at Baltimore Heritage rely on volunteers to plan them, organize them, and run them. We’d like you to meet some of these great people, and so we’re starting a series called Volunteer Spotlight to share a little about those who are helping us make a difference. 

Our first Volunteer Spotlight features Richard Messick, who has been volunteering with Baltimore Heritage since 2014. When he began working with us, he was first tasked with captioning photos and editing articles for our website. Then Baltimore Heritage received a grant for the Legacy Business Program, and Richard jumped in. To date, he has identified, researched, and written articles on 10 Legacy Businesses that have operated in the city for a century or more. Richard also fabulously leads our tour, Catacombs, 100-Year Vendors and History at Lexington Market, and is a volunteer docent at Evergreen House. 

In addition to our gratitude for all of Richard’s work, here’s what one happy tour participant recently said after taking Baltimore Heritage’s tour at Evergreen: “I recently took a friend to the Xmas tour of Evergreen. It was a first experience for both of us and one not to be missed by anyone interested in art, architecture or design. Our guide, Richard Messick, was excellent and knew the house backwards and forwards.” 

Read the below Q&A session to get to know a little more about Richard.

 

Q: How did you get involved with Baltimore Heritage? 

A: I grew up with Andrew Colletta, a Baltimore Heritage board member, and we cut our tour-guide-teeth exploring Baltimore together. We would take visiting friends on our “Funky Balmer Tour,” a circuit of hidden gems around the city that always ended with a deli stop. Andrew first told me about Baltimore Heritage. 

In fact, Andrew and I became friends because of our mutual love of exploring. Baltimore is our home town. I was born in Baltimore, at the old St. Joseph’s Hospital when it was at Caroline and Oliver Streets. 

 

Andrew (seated, middle) and Richard (seated, bottom) at the Street Car Museum emulating a scene from the recently released Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Also shown are a museum docent (standing, top) and Richard’s brother, Roger (standing, right).

Q: How long have you lived in Baltimore?

A: Besides an 11 year hiatus elsewhere, I have spent my whole life in Baltimore. Both parents were born and raised here. 

Q: Where would you recommend new Baltimoreans go to learn about the city? 

A: Highlandtown would probably be my first stop because its where so many ethnic mixes got their start. It’s still a wonderful mix of ethnicities and still a place to enjoy a variety of foods and meet different people. Food is the start in terms of getting to know another culture.

Q: Favorite Baltimore Heritage tour? 

A: The Gargoyles tour. 

Q: What’s your favorite place in Baltimore? Why? 

A: The Basilica because the architecture is sublime.

Sanctuary, Basilica of the Assumption (Library of Congress)

Q: Favorite hidden gem? 

A: Evergreen [House]. It has a rich history and is filled with art—Asian ceramics; Japanese netsuke; 20th century paintings, sculpture, and art glass.

Q: What about Baltimore doesn’t get enough attention? 

A: The legacy of slavery in Baltimore. Since I have delved into it, I have been amazed at what I don’t know. I have never considered the enormous market for enslaved people in Baltimore and Maryland during the 19th century. The marketing of people was very large here at that time. The change from raising tobacco to wheat in the region caused a surplus of labor, whereas the South needed more labor due to the invention of the cotton gin. Our country was built with cheap labor–indentured servants, slaves, and prisoners. We don’t give that enough attention.

Q: In one word, describe Baltimore: 

A: Worn–like comfortable old clothes. The people and places are comfortable old clothes to me. My aforementioned life-long friend thinks Baltimore suffers from an inferiority complex, which may be true. We just need to put on our Sunday best a little more often just to remind ourselves of our rich, long and diverse history. 

Architects needed to assess the condition of a historic library building in Charles Village

The Neighborhood Design Center and Baltimore Heritage are searching for an experienced architect, engineer, or contractor who can help assess the condition of one of the original six branches of the Enoch Pratt Free Library—a building that now houses the nonprofit Village Learning Place. If you join our team, we need your help in preparing a condition assessment of this St. Paul Street landmark that the Village Learning Place staff and board members can use to prioritize their rehabilitation and preservation projects.

The Village Learning Place is an independent library that houses educational programs, enrichment opportunities, and informational resources for residents in Charles Village and throughout Baltimore City. Over 7,000 Baltimore City residents hold VLP library cards and, at this small brick building, they can find and borrow any of nearly 20,000 circulating books including an excellent collection of children’s literature.

How do you sign up to volunteer?

NDC welcomes volunteers from a range of backgrounds and experiences but this opportunity is best suited to an architect or engineer with previous experience making visual assessments of existing buildings and recommending possible treatments.

  • If you are already registered as a volunteer with NDC, log in to your account then apply for “Village Learning Place Assessment – Senior Designer” on NDC’s list of volunteer opportunities.
  • If you have never volunteered with NDC before, please take two minutes to complete a volunteer application and select “Senior Designer [BaltimoreVillage Learning Place Assessment]” under “Project Sign-Up”.

Please sign up ASAP! Anyone interested in this opportunity can expect to hear back from the Neighborhood Design Center by late January. For questions, please contact Laura Wheaton at lwheaton@ndc-md.org or Eli Pousson at pousson@baltimoreheritage.org.

Courtesy Village Learning Place.