Established in 1922, Olivet Baptist Church has occupied the historic Edgewood Theatre since the late 1960s. Built in 1930, the Edgewood Theatre was designed by one of the city’s most prominent theatre architects—John J. Zink.
Born in Baltimore in 1886, Zink graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1904 and started work with architect William H. Hodges and the local architecture firm Wyatt & Nolting. He began working on theatres when he joined architect Thomas W. Lamb in designing the famous Hippodrome Theatre on Eutaw Street and the Maryland Theatre in Hagerstown, Maryland. Over the next few decades, Zink and his partners designed over 200 movie theatres in cities up and down the east coast including over thirty in the Baltimore-DC area including the Senator Theatre on York Road and the Town Theatre (now known as the Everyman).
In the Edgewood Theatre's heyday, the marquee featured a tall electric sign (a near twin of the Patterson designed by Zink on Eastern Avenue). Like many smaller neighborhood theatres, the business began to struggle in the 1950s and, after a brief second life as an art house theatre in 1962, ended its life as a movie house. That same year, Bishop Wilburn S. Watson joined the Olivet Baptist Church then located in a modest building on Riggs Avenue. In the late 1960s, Bishop Watson led the effort to purchase the former theatre on Edmondson Avenue and convert the building into a new sanctuary for the congregation.
Ellicott Driveway was built on top of the millrace that once carried water to Three Mills operated by the Ellicott Brothers near Frederick Road. In the 1800s, twenty-six gristmills along the Gwynns Falls and others on the Jones Falls and Patapsco River contributed to Baltimore's first economic boom. Besides their Ellicott City mills, the Ellicotts built the Three Mills complex in this area and were partners in the five Calverton Mills upstream at Leon Day Park. The Ellicotts also helped build the Frederick Turnpike so wagons could carry their products to ships at their Inner Harbor wharf.
The Ellicott Driveway was completed by the city in 1917 as the kind of stream valley parkway envisioned by the Olmsted Brothers landscape architectural firm in 1904. The diversion dam for the millrace created a dramatic waterfall: "Baltimore's Niagara Falls." In 1930, the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore praised the route, writing:
"so gracefully following the curves of the stream in Gwynn's Falls park [Ellicott Driveway]... adapts itself to the con91ĘÓƵ of the terrain and... takes full advantage of natural beauty."
Today, the route is closed to cars and trucks and reserves its natural beauty for bicycles and pedestrians along the Gwynns Falls Trail.
Today, the parking lot of the West Baltimore MARC Station and the concrete highway lanes to the east dominate this site, symbols both of the weight of the past and prospects for the future.
In the 1970s major demolition occurred in the corridor to the east to build the first leg in a proposed East-West expressway, envisioned as the eastern extension of Interstate 70. The route was to proceed west along a corridor directly through the Greater Rosemont communities and continue on through the heart of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park. African American residents in this section of the city fought the road plan under the banner of RAM (Relocation Action Movement). The organization joined with city-wide expressway opponents under the umbrella of MAD (the Movement Against Destruction), a coalition that cut across lines of race, class, and differing interests in opposition to various sections of the proposed expressway system. In the late 1960s, the city condemned hundreds of houses along the corridor to the west of this site for the proposed highway. However, mounting protests initially forced the decision to designate an alternate route and eventually to abandon the section through Greater Rosemont and the parks to the west altogether. Soon, the one-mile stretch of expressway that was completed with such controversy and such cost—economic as well as social—was being called “The Road to Nowhere.”
To the west of the station, between Franklin Street and Edmondson Avenue stand 880 houses condemned by Baltimore officials for the proposed construction of the East-West Expressway in the late 1960s, little more than a decade after African Americans had seized the opportunity to acquire homes in neighborhoods formerly closed to them. Witnessing the process immediately to the east where condemnation already had occurred (and demolition was imminent) for the artery to be built between Franklin and Mulberry Streets, Greater Rosemont residents became active in the Relocation Action Movement, which united with others opposing various sections of the proposed expressway system across the city under the banner of MAD.
In April 1968, civil disturbances convulsed the city in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., adding to the general climate of heightened social tension between Baltimore’s citizens and its officials. For RAM, the highway threat was a civil rights issue. As an example, when the group’s proposal for an underground roadway to spare residences was rejected on the grounds that it would be too expensive, a member exclaimed, “It always has been expensive to operate a segregated society.” James Dilts, in a series of articles in the Sun that year, decried the logic of the expressway plan, which he believed amounted to destroying parts of the city and harming its residents, even as it promised to improve the city.
Late in 1968, mounting opposition to the Greater Rosemont route led Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, III, to propose an alternative that would bypass the affected neighborhoods by following a route along the railroad line to the south. However, the following year, when the city announced a plan to sell the formerly condemned houses back to their original owners, only half took up the offer, the remainder having decided to move out for good. A 1970 Sun article referred to Rosemont as “a once stable middle-class Negro community which was devastated by plans to build the East-West Expressway through its core.”
Organized in 1875 by Samuel H. Cummings at Gilmore and Mulberry Streets, the Harlem Park Methodist Episcopal Church relocated to Harlem Park in 1880 under the leadership of John F. Goucher. The church constructed a new building in 1906 under the leadership of Rev. E.L. Watson and then moved again to Harlem Avenue and Warwick Avenue under the leadership of Rev. E.P. Fellenbaum. The new building was described:
“Gothic in design, with an auditorium seating 800 persons. In addition, there will be an educational building, equipped with 10 rooms for Sunday-school work. In the basement will be a social hall. A recreation room with bowling alleys and a lecture room that may be converted into a gymnasium also are planned.”
At a mortgage burning ceremony in 1947, Fellenbaum recalled that some criticized the project, and the $100,000 mortgage, as “Fellenbaum’s Folly.” The congregation laid the cornerstone for the new building at 4:00 PM on May 2, 1925. The Harlem Park Methodist Episcopal Church was dedicated at 3:00 PM on November 21, 1926 with Bishop William Fraser McDowell officiating.
In May 1953, the Harlem Park Methodist Church merged with the Grove Methodist Chapel, erected in 1857 on Johnnycake Road in Baltimore County, to form the Wesley Memorial Methodist Church in Catonsville, Maryland. Their building was offered for sale at $210,000. Bishop E.A. Love of the Washington Conference appointed the Reverend N.B. Carrington as the leader of the Union Memorial United Methodist Church and assisted in securing help from the Washington and Baltimore Conferences and the Board of Missions to purchase the property.
The church had previously moved from Pine and Franklin Streets to North and Madison Avenues in 1951 and had fewer than 100 members when it moved to Harlem Avenue in 1953. By the time of Rev. Carrington’s retirement in 1961, however, the church had grown to over 600 members. Carrigton began pastoring at Union Memorial United Methodist in 1952, and also worked as the supervisor of the AFRO’s pressroom. He later commented, “I married, baptized and buried many of them down there — matter of fact they call me the AFRO’s chaplain.” Commenting on the success of the church in paying off the building’s $225,000 mortgage in 8 years, Carrington noted, “Those are the kind of people we have in our congregation. They wanted to get it out of the way and they worked hard to do it.”
In 1967, the Baltimore Afro-American called the home in the 2500 block of Harlem Avenue "a typical slice of Baltimore:"
"The 2500 block of Harlem Avenue is a microcosm of middle-class Baltimore. . . . A visit to the neighborhood on a late summer afternoon caught the block in a typical setting. The tall, majestic greystone Union Memorial Church dominates the northwest corner of Harlem and Warwick Avenues. The row homes are separated from the tree-lined streets by carefully tended shrubbery and small neatly trimmed plots of lawn..."
"Warren Peck, at 2507, is an arts and crafts teacher for the Department of Education... He has lived in the area since 1952 when he was discharged from the Army [as a World War II and Korean War veteran] ... Like most of the residents in the block, he is a native Baltimorean... He worked as a Pullman porter for several years before he was drafted into the army, and later returned to the railroad. “There was good money in those days,” Mr. Peck maintains. As a matter of fact, it was primarily money saved up from his railroad work that enabled him to buy the home in 1952, he said. He paid $11,500 for the house when the neighborhood was undergoing a racial change... Mr. Peck is one of 11 teachers living in the 2500 block of Harlem Ave. Among the residents are at least two ministers, a nurse, two proprietors of beauty salons, three Social Security Administration employees, and a number of retired persons."
The article reported the statements of one of the only two white residents who remained on the block in 1967:
"Miss Julia Knoerr has lived with her two bachelor brothers there since 1926: 'The real estate people used to call me all the time, but I settled them–I made it clear that I didn’t intend to move anywhere. . . . I thought it was silly the way people began to move out [in the early 1950s], but some people will complain about anything.' . . . Contrary to claims of opponents of fair housing who say property value drops when integration comes, Miss Knoerr believes that property values have improved in the block over the past 15 years. 'Everybody takes more interest in keeping their places nicer than people used to,' she noted.”
Dr. J. Welfred Holmes, a Morgan State College (now University) professor of English lived at 2559 Harlem Ave. from the early 1950s to his death in 1968. The obituary in the Sun noted that he had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, then taught at several historically black colleges before coming to Morgan in 1946. One of the co-founders of the Evergreen Protective Association, he also was active in Baltimore Neighborhoods, Inc. (a fair housing advocacy group) and the American Civil Liberties Union.
James Mosher Elementary (#144) was built in 1933. The original brick structure, facing Wheeler Avenue, was constructed in simple Art Deco style. In an era of segregation, it was designated a “white” school; children still were required to travel outside the neighborhood for junior high and high school.
In the early 1950s, Baltimore school officials were described as stunned by the scale and pace of racial change on the west side. A September 1952, Sun article reported a spokesperson as saying that “Baltimore never has known anything such as the population shift within the summer months.” The reporter went on to write:
“The ingress of Negro home owners and dwellers in hitherto white neighborhoods in northwest and northeast Baltimore during the summer months has presented a problem which is bound to perplex the School Board until some kind of relief can be obtained either through construction of new facilities or through the use of portables.”
School #144 was specifically identified as one of several schools where there had been “tremendous turnover” from white to black. By 1953 James Mosher–by then designated officially as a “colored” school–was reported to be tremendously overcrowded.
In 1954, immediately following the Supreme Court ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional, Baltimore public schools became the first formerly segregated major urban system to adopt a desegregation policy. The change had little practical effect on schools already virtually all-black, like James Mosher. In 1955 a much-needed addition was completed along Mosher Street in contemporary architectural style. By then school enrollment had surpassed 900, up from less than 400 a few years earlier.
Two new schools, built nearby in the 1960s, provided further evidence of the dramatic growth in the area’s school-age population. In 1960, Calverton Junior High was constructed on the western edge of the neighborhood. The massive complex housed four nearly self-contained units, each conceived as a “school within a school.” In 1963, Lafayette Elementary School was built, also on the west side. It closed as a standard elementary school in 2003 and reopened as the Empowerment Academy, a public charter school.