Before the early 1900s, families in Baltimore never had to tell a kid to “watch out for cars”. However, as the number of cars in the city grew during the early 20th century, playing in the street became increasingly dangerous and even illegal. Criminalizing children at play has a long history in Baltimore from complaints in the Sun about young “baseball maniacs” breaking windows in the 1870s to a 1898 police order designed to “disperse” children from gathering on newly “smoothly paved streets to play.” In 1910, the Children’s Playground Association of Baltimore formed a “Guild of Play” to host supervised street play at locations around the city and started working to keep children safe through building more playgrounds. Despite their efforts and others, more than one in three East Baltimore youth surveyed in 2017 said they didn’t have or didn’t know of any safe place to play in their neighborhood.

The Windy Gates country estate of the Jenkins family from 1882 to 1981 was the centerpiece of a much larger property that in its heyday, lolled down the rolling hills stretching along Lake Avenue from Roland Avenue to Falls Road. On the heels of their work on the Roland Park neighborhood to the south, the Olmsted Brothers were employed from 1902 through 1906, to do extensive landscaping design for the property. This presentation by Thom Rinker will draw on the extensive material to share unique insights into this Baltimore County treasure that still retains a quiet serenity and gentility over the landscape.

Idlewylde, a community of more than 700 homes situated on the Chinquapin Run and Herring Run-B watershed, is the oldest of the suburban neighborhoods of South Towson. The community has a mix of housing styles characteristic of the development of suburban neighborhoods during the time of its growth, ranging from 1920s bungalows and small Cape Cods to brick Colonials and Mid-Century Modern designs. Come learn of this as well as celebrate the heritage of this unique community as shared by two Idlewylde community members who will be available to answer participants’ questions after the presentation.

Public historian and archivist Allison Seyler will detail the evolution of the Hopkins Retrospective Program at Johns Hopkins University. This initiative, created by President Ronald J. Daniels in 2013 was intended to draw lessons from past experiences to look forward to the university's collective future. It was also an attempt to bring together historians and archivists from the institution's different repositories to work on collaborative projects and efforts, ones that might illuminate marginalized or underrepresented groups throughout the university and health system's histories. Over the last 9 years, the program has grown and includes many different components: historical research, oral history interviews, student fellowships, online exhibitions, public programming, and archival processing. Allison will discuss different aspects of this work, elaborate on current projects underway, and talk about the work ahead.