Henry Thompson was born in 1774 in Sheffield, England and came to Baltimore in 1794, where he became a member of the Baltimore Light Dragoons. He was elected captain of this company in 1809, six years after completing a house called "Clifton" in what is now Clifton Park in Baltimore City but back then was Baltimore County. By 1813, Captain Thompson had disbanded the Light Dragoons and formed a mounted company called The First Baltimore Horse Artillery. Brigadier General John Stricker soon enlisted Captain Thompson and his horsemen to act as mounted messengers traveling between Washington and Bladensburg to report on the movements of British troops and ships. The unit also became the personal guard to General Samuel Smith, who commanded the defenses during the Battle of Baltimore and Ft. McHenry in 1814. Henry Thompson contributed much to Baltimore in addition to his War of 1812 service. In 1816, he built and was president of the Baltimore and Harford Turnpike Company, now Harford Road. In 1818, he served on the Poppleton Commission that laid out the street grid in Baltimore that we have today. He was also a director of the Port Deposit Railroad, The Bank of Baltimore, the Merchant's exchange, the Board of Trade, the Baltimore Insurance Company, and, to boot, he was the recording secretary of the Maryland Agricultural Society. Later in life he served as a marshal at the dedication ceremonies of the Washington Monument and Battle Monument, and Grand Marshal of a procession commemorating the death of General Lafayette in 1834. As for Clifton Mansion, Thompson owned the property until 1835. During that time, he hosted a number of notables that include Maryland Governor Charles Ridgely of Hampton, Alexander Brown (considered America's first investment banker), Henry Clay (who early in his political career was a chief agitator for declaring war on Britain in 1812), and General Winfield Scott (who commanded forces in 1812 and later masterminded the Union's military strategy in the Civil War). In 1835, Thompson sold Clifton to a gentleman named Daniel Cobb. Thompson died shortly after, in 1837, and Cobb went broke. After failing to make his mortgage payments, Thompson's heirs reclaimed Clifton. The heirs soon sold the house and grounds to a prosperous and up and coming Baltimore merchant looking for a fine summer estate. That, of course, was Johns Hopkins, and a story for another day.

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2701 St. Lo Drive, Baltimore, MD 21213

As early as the 1840s, a small oasis of green known as Perkins' Spring became a popular destination at the edge of the rapidly growing city. The park's unique value to local residents came from the fresh-water spring that poured out at a rate of 60 gallons a minute. One resident later recalled how their neighbors carried water away "by the barrel in the '80′s, especially when heavy rains flooded and polluted the normal supplies." In 1853, the city purchased a small triangle of land around the spring from the estate of Dr. Joseph Perkins bounded by Ogston Street, George Street, and Myrtle Avenue. The city hoped to protect the spring from development and preserve it as an amenity for a soaring population on the west side of Baltimore. City officials soon improved the new park with a brick enclosure and a cast iron Moorish-style canopy over the spring.

Mayor Joshua Van Sant appointed an official park keeper who lived in a frame house by the park's Myrtle Avenue entrance. The grounds were soon planted with hundreds of flowers of every shape, size and color, coleus and petunias the most common, all grown in the park's greenhouse built in 1887 and arranged in decorative patterns and designs.

Like many West Baltimore neighborhoods, the area around the park was primarily occupied by white households at its beginning but by the late nineteenth century, the city's black community had started to settle in the area. For example, in 1880, a church built by a German evangelical congregation facing the park at the corner of George and Ogston Streets became home to an African American congregation that soon established the Perkins Square Baptist Church. By the 1920s, Baltimore's black residents used the park for every day relaxation and special entertainment. On one warm June evening in 1922, over 3,000 black Baltimoreans crowded into the park to hear the Colored City Band, established by A. Jack Thomas, performing a selection of popular marches and operas.

In the decades after WWII, city leaders decried poor housing conditions in the neighborhoods around the park and resolved to address the situation through the construction of the new high-rise George B. Murphy Homes. Beginning with a ground-breaking ceremony at the corner of Myrtle and George Streets in December 1961, 758 housing units including four 14-story towers on a 13-acre site were built, surrounding Perkins Square on all sides. The complex opened to great acclaim on New Year's Eve 1963 but by the early 1970s, the housing project had already started to experience challenges. By the 1990s, Murphy Homes became known for crime and violence and plans moved forward for its demolition. Finally in 1999 on a bright July morning, 375 pounds of dynamite brought the towers to the ground. The park and the historic gazebo remain at the center of Heritage Crossing, a $53 million mixed-income development, still offering a restful bit of green for West Baltimore.

George Street and Myrtle Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

Since 1857, Lafayette Square has been Baltimore’s height of fashion. Situated atop a ridge in an area once noted for its fine country villas and breadth-taking panoramic views of the waterways, rolling hills and public landmarks of the bustling nineteenth-century city, the Square was a favorite outlying destination of Baltimore’s leisure and laboring classes. The popularity of the site, fueled by a desire to enjoy the area’s fresh air and fine vistas on a permanent basis, led to the creation of the Lafayette Square Company for promoting the Square as a fashionable place to live. The drive to develop the area around the Square for residential use came to a halt soon after it had begun, however, for in 1861 the City turned the Square over to the federal government for military use during the Civil War. After the war and minus the green fields and majestic oaks—its main attractions prior to 1861—Lafayette Square reverted back to the city and development efforts resumed. Construction proceeded rapidly under the direction of the Lafayette Square Association (a second organization, incorporated in 1865), which, in 1866, enticed the congregation of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension to relocate from downtown to the Square with an offer of a free corner lot. By 1880, Lafayette Square had been developed to a great extent and ornamented with many buildings of grand proportions. The Church of the Ascension (1867-9, now St. James), many imposing residences, including Matthew Bacon Sellers’ impressive brick mansion (1868-9), Grace Methodist Church (1871-6, now Metropolitain), and, perhaps most conspicuous of all, the new State Normal School (1875-6, demolished), set the scale for subsequent building projects in the neighborhood. Although designed in keeping with the Square’s other Gothic revival buildings, the former Bishop Cummins Memorial (1878, now Emmanuel Christian Community) and Lafayette Square Presbyterian (1878-9, now St. John’s A.M.E.) outdid the more conservative-looking churches of the neighboring congregations in both architectural variety and decorative daring and exuberance, signaling that architectural tastes, even within the prevailing Gothic revival style, were susceptible to swift and dramatic change. Lafayette Square changed dramatically between 1910 and 1930. Built-out by 1910 and starting to show its age, the Square could not compete with the new residential developments such as Ten Hills (begun 1909) and Hunting Ridge (1920s) that offered detached, single-family houses and all the modern amenities of the early twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1930, all but two households on the Square had changed hands, and a new generation of residents had emerged, 95% of which African American, whose numbers and diverse backgrounds brought a renewed vitality to the Square. The Square’s new residents worked as maids, chauffeurs, cooks, and laborers, but also as dentists, physicians, attorneys, and schoolteachers. They benefited from close proximity to the neighborhood’s major commercial, retail, and entertainment districts, being just a few minutes’ walk from the shops and other attractions of Druid Hill and Pennsylvania Avenues. In the short time between 1928 and 1934, four African American congregations moved to Lafayette Square. Metropolitan led the charge with a ceremonial march from Orchard Street in 1928, followed by St. John’s A.M.E. in 1929 (from Lexington Street), St. James Episcopal in 1932 (from Park Avenue and Preston Street), and Emmanuel Christian Community in 1934 (from Calhoun). The spacious sanctuaries, the classrooms, and other amenities of the four grand churches suited the needs of these growing congregations, whose active ministries transformed Lafayette Square into a spiritual center for West Baltimore’s African American community. The old State Normal School, vacated in 1915 and later converted to school district offices, received a new lease on life in 1931 as the home of the George Washington Carver Vocational-Technical High School, the first school in Maryland to provide vocational training for African American students.

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816 N. Arlington Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

High on a hill at 811 West Lanvale Street, behind a chain link fence and past the overgrown yard, is the grand Upton – an architectural treasure by one of Baltimore's earliest architects that has witnessed nearly 200 years of change in the Upton neighborhood that shares the building's name. In the 1830s, Baltimore lawyer David Stewart hired architect Robert Carey Long, Jr. – or so we think, no confirmation of Long as the architect has survived – to design his country villa. R. Carey (as he liked to call himself) was one of Baltimore's first professionally trained architects designing the Lloyd Street Synagogue (now part of the Jewish Museum of Maryland), the Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott City, and the main gate of Green Mount Cemetery among more than 80 buildings across the country. Son of a Baltimore merchant who armed seven schooners and two brigantines as privateers during the Revolutionary War, Stewart became a prominent local lawyer and got involved in politics, serving a brief month as a US Senator in 1849.

The mansion is widely recognized as the last surviving Greek Revival country house in Baltimore. It remains secluded in urban West Baltimore, sitting high above the neighboring buildings and surrounded by brick and stone walls. In the mid-nineteenth century, you would have seen a grand porch with Doric columns and ironwork bearing the Stewart family crest. Inside the building, you could have observed more than a dozen marble and onyx fireplaces, a main entrance hall, a curved oak staircase, and a banquet room that was so large it has since been divided into multiple rooms. David Stewart enjoyed entertaining guests in his mansion and hosted lavish, indulgent parties there so frequently that he developed gout.

After Stewart's death in 1858, the house was purchased by the Dammann family, who owned the house for so many generations that it became known as "the old Dammann mansion." The family left in 1901, and the house found itself empty for the first time, but not the last. The mansion's next owner, musician Robert Young, took a cue from David Stewart and used the spacious and opulent mansion to host "several brilliant social affairs where hundreds of guests moved about in the spacious rooms." Young would be the last owner to use the building as a home, and his time there was short-lived – he found the house too drafty and abandoned after less than 3 years.

The commercial life of the Upton mansion began in 1930 when one of Baltimore's first radio stations, WCAO, moved into the building. Extensive alterations were made to accommodate WCAO – tall twin radio towers were installed at the edge of the property, walls were torn down and rooms partitioned off to create studios and equipment rooms. The next commercial venture in Upton came in 1947, when WCAO sold it to the Baltimore Institute of Musical Arts. Founded by Dr. J. Leslie Jones, the school was originally opened with the intentions of creating a parallel program to that offered at Peabody, a renowned music school not open to African American students at the time, and at its height in the early 1950s had over 300 students. The school eventually closed in the mid-1950s after desegregation granted black students equal access to public music schools. In 1957, the Baltimore City School System moved in to the building and used it first as the special education "Upton School for Trainable Children No. 303," and then the headquarters for Baltimore City Public School's Home and Hospital Services program. Unfortunately, Upton has sat empty since BCPS left in 2006.

Upton has a rich cultural legacy that extends beyond its use as a social hot spot, a radio station, and a school. In the 1960s, the mansion was chosen as the community namesake during an urban renewal project going on in the neighborhood at the time. As a physical landmark of the neighborhood for more than a century, the Upton mansion's name was intended to serve as "the symbol of a physical and human renewal in West Baltimore."

Despite its presence on the National Register of Historic Places and the Baltimore Landmark List, the city-owned building remains empty and unmaintained in west Baltimore. In 2009, Preservation Maryland included in on a list of the state's most endangered historic places, and the building is threatened by vandalism and neglect. Today, the mansion awaits a new owner, someone willing to restore the beautiful building to its historic potential.

811 W. Lanvale Street, Baltimore, MD 21217