The first "I Am An American Day" parade in Baltimore started at Thirty-third Street and The Alameda on May 17, 1942. The event (and similar marches and rallies across the country) was promoted by the Hearst Corporation, then owner and publisher of the Baltimore News American newspaper, as a way to celebrate the U.S. Constitution. Some accounts suggest the initial idea for "I Am An American Day" came from Arthur Pine, head of a New York public relations firm, after he was asked to promote a new song, “I Am An American,” by Gary Gordon. In 1940, William Randolph Hearst succeeded in pushing the U.S. Congress to name the third Sunday in May as “I Am An American Day” as a way to recognize immigrants who had received U.S. citizenship. The date was moved to September 17 in 1952 and, in 2004, an amendment by Senator Robert Byrd led congress to rename the event from “I Am An American Day” to “Constitution Day.”
In Baltimore, the annual parade moved to the streets around Patterson Park and quickly began to draw thousands of participants. The 1944 march saw an estimated 23,000 people. The next year, around 75,000 people came out to see 100 groups of marchers along with 50 "bands and drum, fife and bugle corps" By the 1970s, the parade had steady attendance from church groups, veterans organizations, and politicians developed into what the Baltimore Sun writer Liz Atwood later called "an opportunity for Baltimoreans to show their pride in being Americans." By the mid-1990s, the parade followed a naturalization ceremony for new citizens. Over the years, special guests at the parade included actors from popular soap operas and Hollywood movies. Huge crowds gathered for the route to watch and hear local high school marching bands and out-of-town draws like the Philadelphia Mummers Quaker City String Band. At the parade's height, the event drew over 300,000 people and lasted four hours or more.
In 1975, Maryland Institute College of Art photography professor Linda G. Rich was among the crowd. According to the Maryland Historical Society, Rich was new to Baltimore and was "struck not only by the patriotic display of the celebration but by the unique characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood: the rows of clean, white marble steps, the vibrant painted screens, the window displays full of religious and patriotic iconography." The next year, Rich, along with her students Joan Clark Netherwood and Elinor B. Cahn started what became the four-year-long East Baltimore Documentary Photography Project that captured over 10,000 photographs capturing the area's strong sense of community and unique identity.
Southeast Baltimore has changed in radical ways since the 1970s and the "I Am An American Day" parade changed as well. Unfortunately, in 1993, the city's effort to raise fees for the event led parade organizers to threaten to move the event away from Highlandtown and Patterson Park. Edwin F. Hale, Sr., then chairman of Baltimore Bancorp, wrote a check to cover that year's extra expenses but, in 1994, no other benefactor came forward and organizers moved the event to Dundalk in southeastern Baltimore County where it continues to be held through at least 2014.
John Payne, in his comprehensive 1798 tome, A New and Complete System of Universal Geography, noted the flouring mills along the Jones Falls near Baltimore. At the time, wealthy abolitionist Elisha Tyson owned two of the ten documented mills: one at the location of what is now Mill No. 1, and another in Woodberry. The Woodberry mill is described as a "handsome three story building, the first of stone and the other two of brick" that "can grind at least eighty-thousand bushels a year."
Tyson's Woodberry gristmill sold to Horatio Gambrill, David Carroll, and their associates who expanded the structure into a textile mill they called the Woodberry Factory. It was the partnership’s second venture in the area after buying and converting Whitehall gristmill (just south of their new factory) for textile production in 1839. The mills manufactured cotton duck, a fabric primarily used for ship sails during a time when clipper sailing ships dominated local trade. Through the low cost of raw cotton cultivated with enslaved labor and an ability to attract workers despite lower wages than competing mills in the North, the mills along the Jones Falls cornered the market. Their largest buyers were in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. They also found markets overseas in British provinces, South America, and England.
The Woodberry Factory was a purely functional building: a long, three story building designed to maximize daylight and accommodate the machinery powered by horizontal line shafts. A clerestory roof provided more light. Each floor housed machinery for a different step in the manufacturing process. A central stair tower was topped with a dome shaped bell tower. The bell rang on a schedule to call nearby workers to the factory for their shifts.
The new textile mills required a large workforce and this large workforce needed homes. To this end, owners erected mill villages close to their factories. Woodberry began as a string of Gothic Revival duplexes built of locally quarried stone and resembling country cottages. The homes included yards for growing produce, raising livestock, and planting flower beds. Gambrill erected a church in the village. A school was also built, although it was common for children of mill workers to drop out early to work in the mills and help support their families. In 1850, an all-in-one general store, post-office, and social hall was constructed near the railroad tracks.
Additional structures went up as operations grew and new technologies emerged. When the factory started using steam power in 1846, a boiler house was built on the side facing the Jones Falls. The factory acquired a fire engine some time before 1854; a shrewd acquisition considering the tendency for factories full of “cotton-flyings” (or fuzz) to catch fire and burn. The most significant addition to the site was Park Mill, built in 1855 to produce seine netting for fishing boats.
By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the mills in the Jones Falls Valley were brought under a national textile conglomerate, the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Mills. In the 1920s, the company began shuttering the mills in favor of its plants in the South. The Woodberry Factory was sold to Frank G. Schenuit Rubber Co. in 1924. In 1929, a six-alarm fire destroyed the building. Residents across the tracks had to evacuate their homes and the blaze was large enough to attract a reported crowd of 10,000 people.
Schenuit manufactured truck and automobile tires, and later manufactured aircraft tires for the military during World War II. The company became dependent on government contracts and nearly went bankrupt after the war. By the 1960s, the company began expanding into the home and garden industry by buying out smaller manufacturers that made wheelbarrows, industrial wood products, lawn equipment, exercise equipment, and lawn and patio furniture. By the 1970s, Schenuit had moved out of the tire business. In 1972, after Hurricane Agnes, Schenuit sold the Woodberry plant to McCreary Tire and Rubber Company. McCreary closed down just three years later when the company laid off all of the plant’s three hundred workers.
Park Mill sold in 1925, and over the next four decades, the mill was used by a variety of companies including the Commercial Envelope Company and Bes-Cone, an ice-cream cone manufacturing company established by Mitchell Glassner, who invented one of the early machines for that purpose.
Today, Park Mill is leased to a number of small businesses. The Schenuit factory remains empty after yet another fire, one of the only major industrial buildings in the Jones Falls Valley awaiting redevelopment.
Mosque No. 6, the predecessor of the Masjid Ul-Haqq, first moved into their present building on Wilson Street around 1958. The two-story brick building had most recently housed a automotive garage but it dated back to the 1870s and operated as part of P. Bradley’s Livery Stables up through the early 1900s.
By the 1920s, new owners converted the stables into a garage and service station. As Black residents moved into rowhouses along Division Street, Druid Hill Avenue, McCulloh Street, and Madison Avenue the business changed as well. By 1938, the business then known as Jack’s Garage had a Black manager, William Goodwin. That same year, Chandler V. Wynn acquired the business. A North Carolina native, Wynn moved to Baltimore and graduated from Morgan State College in 1931.
Wynn was just one of thousands of African Americans moving from North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore to seek new opportunities in Baltimore in 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In Baltimore, along with New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the migration coincided with a rise of new Black religious movements—including the Nation of Islam founded by Georgia-native Wallace Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Michigan in 1930.
Elijah Muhammad became the leader of the Nation of Islam in 1934. Around 1935, Muhammad helped establish a temple in Washington, D.C. making it the fourth temple after Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The growth of the movement slowed after Elijah Muhammad’s arrest for resisting the draft and spent four years in prison from 1942 to 1946.
Baltimore’s mosque was established the same year as Muhammad’s release and grew quickly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1957, the congregation, then led by Minister Isaiah Karriem, was formally designated Temple No. 6 (later known as Mosque Six) and bought their building on Wilson Street the next year.
Since the end of World War II, the garage had seen use as the Maryland School of Camera Repairs and as a warehouse for the Gelco Corporation, a distributor for aluminum storm windows, doors, and awnings.
In 1958, Malcolm X came to Baltimore to speak and help the nascent temple to raise money and adapt their new building to their needs. On Sunday, June 26, 1960, Elijah Muhammad spoke at Mosque Six before a crowd of nearly one thousand people packed into the building’s main auditorium while another five hundred listened to the speech over a public address system downstairs, and several hundred stood or sat outside the building listening the to speech over outdoor loud speakers.
Within weeks, Minister Isaiah Karriem launched a fundraising campaign seeking $60,000 for the addition of a “gymnasium-recreation center” at the rear of the 300-seat temple. Karriem made the case for the planned addition of a modern athletic facility, saying:
The only way to end juvenile delinquency is to get children in off the streets. We feel that this is a step in that direction.
By 1960, the facility included a business bureau, cafeteria, kitchen, auditorium and minister’s study. According to the AFRO, the “spic and span” cafeteria seated one hundred diners and the “spotless” kitchen, directed by Sister Stella X, was “equipped with modern facilities and utensils.”
Throughout this period, members of the Nation of Islam were subject to close surveillance by the FBI. In January 1972, members of the mosque confronted two FBI agents in an apartment across the street from the mosque where they had set up for surveillance. When the agents drew their guns, the members called the police who, unaware of the identity of the two men, arrested them both. Undeterred, the mosque continued to grow during the 1960s.
Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975 marked the beginning of a new chapter with significant changes in the community’s approach to religious practice. In 1976, the mosque was renamed Masjid Muhammad. Members welcomed Muhammad Ali for a visit to the mosque in 1980 and to a second visit in 1982. In 1994, Masjid Muhammad became Masjid Al Haqq and, in 2003, members worked with the Baltimore Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation to list the building as a local historic landmark.
Faidley’s is as much about the people as the seafood. Whether gathered around the store’s raw bar at one of the stand-up tables near the busy line of workers making crab cakes, customers are often feel like they’re simply sharing a meal with old friends.
Faidley’s started out at Lexington Market in 1886 when John and Flossie Faidley combined their seafood stall with the adjoining business to form Smith & Faidley’s seafood. John’s son, Edward took over the business before World War II, and, 1948, John W. Faidley, Jr. joined him and changed the name of the company to John W. Faidley’s seafood.
A major fire at Lexington Market that same year forced the business to move to the Lexington Market garage but Faidley’s was one of the first establishments to return to the new Lexington Marker in 1952. The idea of selling prepared foods at the stall originated around this time, reportedly after customers smelled a fish sandwich John, Jr. was making for himself—and asked if they could buy one. In 1966, the Liquor Board gave Faidley’s a liquor license making it the first bar in the long history of Lexington Market. John W. Faidley applied for the license after he and his regular customer agreed that “it just isn’t right” to eat crabcakes and steam crabs with no beer to drink.
Over the past twenty years, Faidley’s has won international renown for its crab cakes. The current recipe was created in 1987 by Nancy Faidley Devine, John’s daughter. That was the same year she resumed working at the “family firm” where her husband Bill Devine had worked since he finished a term of military service in 1964.
Not long after, food critics started making their way to Lexington Market and featuring Faidley’s in national publications including the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, and USA Today. Baltimore Magazine gave Faidley’s the “Best Crab Cake” award so many times the magazine had to retire the category. Faidley’s even worked with Old Bay to prepare crab cakes for astronauts on the space shuttle. Unfortunately, NASA officials cancelled their order at the last minute over worries that oil might escape from the crab cake under zero gravity conditions.
The future of Faidley’s Seafood looks just as promising as the past. Damye Devine Hahn, Nancy and Bill’s daughter, is now an integral part of the business and is keeping up Faidley’s fresh seafood and out-of-this-world crab cakes.
Budeke's Paint operated in the same storefront on Broadway from 1870 up until 2018. Unfortunately, in the early morning hours of September 7, 2018 a fire broke out on the first floor and grew into a four-alarm blaze that destroyed the stock, a collection of documents and ephemera, and the building’s interior. Fortunately, the fire caused no injuries and the business has continued operations at its Timonium location. During Budeke’s long history, its paint has been used by institutions as diverse as Johns Hopkins Hospital, Bethlehem Steel, McCormick & Co, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Local governments, including Baltimore City and County, have used Budeke’s products in municipal buildings including City Hall.
George H. Budeke was born in 1846 in Hamilton, North Carolina, to a family of German immigrants. He moved to Baltimore in 1859, a year after his father’s death, and became an errand-boy at a dry goods store before moving on to manage two paint stores. Budeke founded his company in 1868 just three years after the end of the Civil War. The business has stayed in the family through five generations. Upon the death of George H., the business passed to his son, George M. Budeke, in 1909. It then passed to a son-in-law, George Gardner, who took over in 1956. Gardner passed the business on to his own son-in-law, Louis V. Koerber, in 1969. Finally, the current owner, L. Bryan Koerber, took over the business from his own father in 1996.
While most customers buy pre-mixed paint today, Budeke's originally sold the essential ingredients separately—turpentine, white or red lead, and a variety of earthen pigments—that contractors used to mix their own paints. Different ratios of the components determined whether painters used the mixture as primer or a top coat. Budeke obtained its stock regionally, including from a number of small pigment grinders who turned raw minerals into various colors out of their shops on Russell Street (near where the Horseshoe Casino now stands). In those days, lead was commonly used as the hiding agent in paint to ensure the pigment covered over the surface that was being painted, but fell out of use due to its toxicity. Lead paint was eventually banned in the United States in the 1970s and replaced with product that uses titanium dioxide instead.
The fire at the original location of Budeke’s destroyed more than a few of old buildings. It also wiped out much of the history of the business. A room on the second floor of its Fells Point shop was a little museum containing artifacts relating to its decades of operation. One noteworthy item on display was a bill from September 10, 1888, for an order by Baltimore’s health department, which consisted of a long list of items totaling $11.92. The corresponding cancelled check for this order, dated September 17, 1888, was found during renovations of City Hall in the 1970s. The contractor who was charged with disposing of old files reviewed some of what he had and realized the businesses still existed and might want the old paperwork. After presenting the old check to the shop on Broadway, Budeke's staff gave the contractor a gallon of paint for his trouble.
In 1914, Luigi DiPasquale, Sr., an Italian immigrant to Baltimore, established a small corner store on Claremont Street stocking groceries and household goods for residents in the developing Highlandtown neighborhood. Over a century later, the business has kept up with the changing tastes of local shoppers. Now owned by Joe DiPasquale, the store on Gough Street is now a unique marketplace that draws shoppers from across the region seeking imported and locally produced Italian food.
Early on, the DiPasquale family butchered chickens and goats to offer fresh meat and produced household products, such as homemade bleach. Of course, Luigi, also known as Louie Moore, DiPasquale also played an active role in the community—organizing a band along with Larry DiMartino at Our Lady of Pompei church (established in 1923). In the 1940s, a growing number of Italian immigrants moved from Little Italy to Highlandtown as commercial development of the downtown area expanded.
In the 1980s, the shop’s current owner, Joe DiPasquale, took an extended trip to Italy, where he travelled the length of the country, fell in love with the country and, most importantly, the traditional foods. Joe’s wife family had only recently immigrated to the United States in the 1970s and he credits them as an influence. After his close study of authentic Italian cooking, Joe DiPasquale always orders the finest ingredients and foods he can find, whether it is imported or domestic. For example, while the Nutella hazelnut spread is produced in the United States, Joe noticed that the Italian-manufactured version offered a better flavor—so the store only stocks the imported option.
In 1988, DiPasquale’s expanded in a move from their original location on Claremont Street to the current site on Gough Street one block away. The business installed ovens to bake their own bread. In recent years, DiPasquale’s prepared foods have been featured on the Food Network’s “Diner, Dives, and Drive-Ins” and on the Travel Channel’s “Zimmern List.” The television fame brought an overwhelming influx of patrons. For weeks, lines of customers looking to buy lasagne and arancini di riso (deep fried balls of rice and meat) stretched out the door.
*As of 2022, Dipasquale's is no longer operating out of this building, but it is still in business in other locations in Baltimore
Founded in 1863 by German immigrants Ludwig Hilgartner and Gottfried Schimpf, Hilgartner Stone has made some of the nation’s finest stonework for over one hundred and fifty years. Of course, the company has made a unique mark on both Baltimore’s sculpture and architecture during that time. The company’s work can be found at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Greenmount Cemetery, Walters Art Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art, the Baltimore War Memorial—along with other major landmarks. The company’s most widely used product, however, may also be one of the most humble: the city’s iconic marble steps.
Born in Hessen, Germany in 1832, Ludwig H. Hilgartner immigrated to the United States at age nineteen in 1851. Hilgartner found work as a stone-cutter and, in 1863, worked with stonemason Gottfried Schimpf to form a new stone company, Schimpf and Hilgartner. By 1870, the company maintained an office on Lexington Street in downtown Baltimore and a busy workshop at the southwest corner of Pine and Mulberry Streets. Just a few years later, in 1873, Hilgartner bought out Schimpf. By the next decade, Hilgartner’s two sons were learning the business as apprentices and eventually joined the firm, changing the name to L. Hilgartner and Sons.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hilgartner’s thirty horsepower stone-cutting engine turned Baltimore County marble into thousands of steps to supply the city’s building boom. The company grew over the years to such an extent that by 1910, it opened a branch office in Chicago. Hilgartner even added a marble purchasing agency in Carrara, Italy and a workshop in Los Angeles to feed the demand created by new aqueduct projects and a burgeoning movie business in California.
The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s hit Hilgartner hard. The company was able to survive thanks to business from the Dupont Company, which had plenty of money and did a lot of building, taking advantage of cheaper prices for labor and materials at the time. All the same, the company had to layoff a substantial portion of its workforce and close some of its factories. Hilgartner continued to shrink until 1971 when the firm was sold. Once the largest finisher of slab marble in the U.S., Hilgartner had shrunk to just seven employees.
Over the last thirty years, the firm has slowly come back to life. Though much of Hilgartner’s stone work has been on a grand scale, some of its smallest works are marble door stops. Probably made with scrap marble, they were popular at the turn of the last century. They made a brief resurgence in 1976 when Hilgartner offered them at the Baltimore City Fair, where the company set up a booth to showcase its work. The City Fair, begun in 1970, was held for 21 years as a venue to showcase Baltimore’s neighborhoods and institutions. The small door stops were so popular that Hilgartner started receiving orders for them to commemorate weddings, births, and other special occasions. The company’s current owner, Tom Doyle, purchased the firm in 1986 and led the business to grow and take on large projects again.
One of Hilgartner’s recent projects was the conversion the former Maryland Masonic Grand Lodge on Charles Street into “The Grand” event venue. When they started on the project, Hilgarten’s masons were surprised to find a room elaborately decorated with a wide array of marble. A little research revealed that the room began in the early twentieth century as a Hilgartner showroom that promoted the company’s offerings. Today, the room is back in operation as one of the most extravagantly decorated ladies rooms visitors are likely ever to see.
Good fortune has played no small part in keeping Hilgartner Stone alive for over 150 years. If it wasn’t for a move from downtown to south Baltimore in the early years of the twentieth century, the business would have burned down with the rest of the heart of Baltimore during the 1904 fire. Since it became one of the few stone companies still in business after the fire, it flourished during the rebuilding. In addition to restoring stone in old buildings, such as St. Ignatius Church on Calvert Street, today Hilgartner also does plenty of new construction like a chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and a new floor under a dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. The company left its long-time home on Sharp Street in 1975 to move to 101 W. Cross Street, and, in 2016, moved again to the current location on Severn Street.
Watch our on Hilgartner!
Like the countless seeds the Meyer Seed Company has sold over the past hundred years, the story of this long-running legacy business starts with water. Before he held a seed bucket or a watering can, the company’s founder, John F. Meyer, worked as a sailor, eventually becoming first officer of the schooner Katie J. Irelan. On September 22, 1897, on a voyage carrying scrap iron from Baltimore to Wilmington, North Carolina, a severe storm swamped the ship. Another ship struggling through the storm spotted the Katie J. Irelan in distress and rescued Meyer and his crewmates less than two hours before the 708-ton ship sank into the ocean. Meyer retired from sailing the next year. Later, Meyer fondly recalled the eleven years he spent on the “adventurous yet hard life” at sea before he “drifted back to Baltimore and decided to stick to dry land.”
Meyer started selling seeds for the long-established Bolgiano Seed Company at the northeast corner of Pratt and Light Streets. In September 1910, he partnered with German immigrant G.W. Stisser to form the Meyer-Stisser Seed Company initially located at 32 Light Street. After the end of World War I, Stisser returned to Germany so, in 1921, Meyer bought out his interest in the business. By 1927, the business boasted a proud motto: “Sterling quality, courteous treatment and punctuality.”
Meyer’s assistant, Webster Hurst, Sr., bought out Meyer (but kept the name) in the 1930s. Today, three successive generations of the Hurst family have continued to run the company and devote their lives to selling seeds. Apparently, the seed business is as much about cultivating people as plants. At least two of the current employees have been with the company for over thirty years. Charles Pearre, a former employee, worked for over fifty years selling and developing seeds. In addition, there are even customers who have bought Meyer Seed for multiple generations.
Meyer Seed is now located in a nondescript warehouse on Caroline Street between Harbor East and Fells Point. Stepping inside, however, offers a rare sight—hundreds of varieties of seeds displayed in big banks of wooden drawers and long rows of bins used by countless customers over the decades.The company’s wide variety of seeds for sale has helped Meyer Seed compete with “big box” stores that don’t offer nearly the same range of options for gardeners.
Meyer Seed has been around long enough to see some of their seeds rise and fall in popularity. After the “Long John” melon was developed in Anne Arundel, County, Meyer Seed was the first company to start selling the melon’s seeds in 1930. But, in the decades after World War II, very few farmers or gardeners planted what are now known as “heirloom” plant varieties like the Long John melon. Fortunately, in 2004, David Pendergrass of the New Hope Seed Company in Tennessee learned of the long defunct melon and obtained some starter seeds from the USDA. The plants grew and Pendergrass reintroduced the melon to the world in 2007. Whether it’s seeds for heirloom melons or cutting edge organic gardening seeds, for over one hundred years, Meyer Seed remains at the center of Baltimore’s seed world.
Tochterman’s ostensibly sells fishing tackle but owners Tony and Dee Tochterman—the third generation of the Tochterman family to run this Eastern Avenue institution—are part of a hundred year long history of customer service that few other businesses could match. In the mid-1990s, a customer came into the shop carrying a gift certificate he found in his late father’s desk—dating all the way back to 1947. Tony honored it anyway. Tony even recalled sending fishing rods to a customer in Nicaragua (a delivery that had to be carried on horseback for the last few miles of the trip).
Tochterman’s Fishing Tackle got started on February 8, 1916, when Baltimore fishmonger Thomas Tochtermann, brought a load of leftover peeler crabs and spoiled fish from the Fish Market by the harbor to his house at 1925 Eastern Avenue. While the fish wasn’t good enough to cook for dinner, local fishermen heading to the harbor were happy to buy it for bait. Soon, people passing by on the Eastern Avenue trolley line started stopping by the house regularly to buy bait and home-made crab cakes from Anna Tochtermann, Thomas’ wife. Anna managed the shop during the day while Thomas worked at the fish market. The business thrived and Tochtermann’s son, Thomas, Jr. or Tommy, took over in 1936. Thomas’ own son, Tony, started working at the shop in 1958—when he was just three and a half years old. In the 1980s, Tony took over and, along with his wife and business partner, Dee Taylor, continues to run the shop today.
Tommy hasn’t left entirely, however. After his father’s death in 1998, Tony installed a small container of his father’s ashes near the front of the store in a display case featuring vintage fishing reels and a signed baseball from famed Boston Red Sox player (and Tochterman’s customer) Ted Williams.
Dee and Tony live right across the street from the store which has lured in customers with a classic neon sign of a jumping large-mouth bass since the 1930s. The store sells over seven hundred different reels and is packed full of fishing rods. In addition to bunker chum (ground Menhaden fish), chicken necks, and clam snouts, the store's live bait offerings include night crawlers, and the ever-popular bloodworms.
The bloodworms are a prized bait for sport fishing in the United States and Europe and, among Dee’s many contributions to the business, is maintaining the shop’s stock of bloodworms that she orders from diggers in Maine and Canada. Known to customers as the “Worm Lady,” Dee counts each delivery by hand and washes the thousands of worms in salt-water (shipped in to match the salinity of their native habitat). Her painstaking work is appreciated, as fishing aficionados go out of their way to get their bait and gear at Tochterman’s.
This business has always been an integral part of the lives of the family for three generations—and touched the lives of countless people heading to the water prepared with the best fishing tackle and advice in Baltimore.
In October 1987, the members of University-Birkwood Association celebrated nearly fifteen years of work on a former parking lot turned green space on Barclay Street. Earlier that year, the small civic organization joined the friendly competition to win recognition as one of Baltimore's "Best Neighborhoods" in the city's fifth annual contest. Like many good stories, the history of this park lay hidden beneath the surface, as the group observed:
"Looking at it today, no one would guess that the little pocket park at Barclay and Birkwood Streets was once a vacant paved lot of little use to local residents. Beneath the cover of green grass and many spring flowering trees, it's hard to believe there still lies a hard asphalt surface."
Over forty years earlier, on December 18, 1945, a small group of residents established the University-Birkwood Association, Inc. paid George A. Cook, a local builder and developer, and his wife Jeannette five dollars for the oddly shaped lot. The property came with a catch—the Association was prohibited from building any structure on the lot for twenty years. Instead, they turned the vacant land into a profitable investment by paving it over with asphalt and charging people who worked nearby to park their cars.
The original agreement against building on the lot expired in 1965 but, by the early 1970s, members of the association had a different approach in mind. In April 1971, the Waverly Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library had moved from a small building at 1443 Gorsuch Avenue to a modern cast-concrete structure at the corner of E. 33rd and Barclay Streets. The library was located on the former site of the BellTel building and, unfortunately for the University-Birkwood Association, Bell System employees had made up a large share of the paying customers for their parking lot. In 1974, the Association's board of directors decided that the lot could better serve the neighborhood in a new way—and voted to convert the parking lot into "green space."
Limited funds for the new open space (and the uncertain prospect of paying property taxes on the lot without no revenue from parking fees) encouraged a creative approach. The Association sold shares to neighborhood residents interested in supporting the planned improvements. Proceeds went to purchase trees, bulbs, grass seed, and fertilizer. Between 1975 and 1978, members dug over thirty holes through the old asphalt to make room for new trees and flower beds. Association shareholders and volunteers spread mulch and seeded the ground creating a verdant lawn still enjoyed by local children. People walking or driving past likely enjoyed the springtime view when, according to the 1987 contest nomination, "daffodils bloom on the bank along Barclay Street and the flowering cherry and plum trees burst into color."
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, around twenty households participated in the University-Birkwood Association's efforts to maintain the lot by pruning, weeding, and mulching during "work days" each spring and fall—and spending countless hours every summer helping with mowing the grass. “The Oakenshawe Green Space is the neighbors,” explained Laurie Feinberg. Feinberg, an Oakenshawe resident since 1987, gained a new appreciation for the green space after having children in 1991, recalling, "There is a whole generation of kids that essentially grew up playing the green space."
In August 1993, the Association board converted the corporation into a new nonprofit organization—Oakenshaw Greenspace, Inc. Beyond the day-to-day tasks of cleaning up litter and dog waste, the group won a grant from the Parks & People Foundation to bulldoze parts of the original parking lot and replace the old asphalt with more grass.
In early 2018, the group decided to donate the property to Baltimore Greenspace—an environmental land trust dedicated to preserving communities’ open spaces and forest patches as spaces for recreation, civic engagement, and community revitalization. At forty-four years old, the Oakenshaw Green Space is the oldest of any of the properties donated to the land trust in their ten-year history. Fortunately, the donation ensures that neighbors can expect many more years of trees, flowers, and community gatherings on Barclay Street.
John Stuban moved from New York City to Baltimore, Maryland in 1987 and settled in a small rowhouse on Tyson Street. That same year, a group of New York City activists founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The new organization focused on bringing new visibility to AIDS and HIV through disruptive direct action. Since 1981, the number of known AIDS cases had grown from 234 to over forty thousand. Despite the growing crisis, President Ronald Reagan did not even acknowledge the existence of the disease until 1985 and didn't hold a press conference on the topic until 1987.
ACT UP criticized the lack of action by the federal government by staging “die-ins,” where protestor laid on the ground wearing t-shirts with the words “Silence=Death” and blocking roads until they were bodily removed by law enforcement. John Stuban brought this same approach to AIDS activism to Baltimore when he helped found a local chapter in 1990.
Together with other local activists, Stuban picketed the mayor's home and delivered a coffin to City Hall. A group of ACT UP protestors chained themselves to front doors of the city health department offices. They disrupted a Board of Estimates meeting seeking a promise from the mayor to consider complaints about Baltimore's AIDS programs and distributed condoms to students at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Stuban also sat on the mayor's AIDS advisory committee, the executive committee of the Greater Baltimore HIV Planning Council, and served as the president of the local chapter of the People with AIDS Coalition.
In 1994, Stuban died of AIDS at age thirty-eight. In his obituary the Sun described him as "outspoken, uncompromising, and unrelenting in his efforts to pressure local public officials to provide more AIDS care and to demand a fair share of money for AIDS-related research." Garey Lambert, a friend, projectionist at the Charles Theater, editor for the Baltimore Alternative gay newspaper, and founder of AIDS Action Baltimore, explained the importance of Stuban's efforts:
He made AIDS visible. He was an inspiration. He was upfront and in your face. He was the guy with the conscience, the guy who kept community scrutiny going on and on, and without that, there would be nothing done.
Even after his death, the work continued. Over two hundred people attended Stuban's memorial service at Emmanuel Episcopal Church at Cathedral and Read Streets. After the service ended, many of the mourners marched to city hall where they placed an empty coffin on the steps of city hall to memorialize Stuban's death and demand action on behalf of the thousands of people still living with AIDS.
The Billie Holiday Monument on Pennsylvania Avenue commemorates the life and legacy of the famed "Lady Day" who was born as Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore on April 7, 1915.
Billie Holiday's childhood was difficult. Both of her parents were teenagers when she was born. In 1925, a ten-year-old Holiday was raped by an older neighbor and was sent to The House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic penal institution (sometimes known as a "reform school") for Black girls. Holiday was held there for two years. After her release in 1927, she moved to New York City with her mother.
As a teenager, Billie began singing for tips in bars and brothels but soon found opportunities to sing with accomplished jazz musicians including Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. She returned to Baltimore as a touring musician playing at clubs and restaurants along Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately, after struggles with addiction and a sustained campaign of harassment by law enforcement, Holiday died on July 17, 1959 at age 44 and was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Raymond's Cemetery in New York City.
Planning for a statue in Baltimore began around 1971 as part of the urban renewal redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue and the surrounding Upton neighborhood. The original plans included both a statue and a drug treatment center in Holiday's honor but while plans for the center were dropped the Upton Planning Council continued to push for the sculpture.
In 1977, Baltimore commissioned thirty-seven-year-old Black sculptor James Earl Reid to design the monument. A North Carolina native, Reid recieved a master’s degree in sculpture from the University of Maryland College Park in 1970 and stayed at the school as a professor. Unfortunately, by 1983, rising costs of materials due to inflation led to a legal dispute between Reid and the city over payment and delays. The $113,000 eight-foot six-inch high bronze sculpture was unveiled on top of a cement pedestal in 1985 but Reid skipped the ceremony.
Reid's original vision was finally realized in July 2009 when the city found $76,000 to replace the simple pedastal with 20,000-pound solid granite base with incised text and sculptural panels. Inspired by one of Holliday's most famous performances, the haunting anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit," one of the two panels depicts a lynching. The other, inspired by the song "God Bless the Child," includes the image of a black child with an umbilical cord still attached in a visual reference to the rope used in the hanging. At the re-dedication in 2009, Reid celebrated the completion of the work and the life of Billie Holliday explaining, "She gave such a rich credibility to the experiences of black people and the black artist."
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On February 6, 1968, the city paid $1,850 to buy four vacant, vandalized rowhouses on Emory Street—an unusual birthday celebration for famed Baltimore native Babe Ruth. Exactly seventy-three years earlier, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, Jr. was born at 216 Emory Street to George Ruth, Sr. and Katherine Schamberger. Katherine's parents leased the three-story rowhouse but George and Katherine didn't stay there long, moving first to Goodyear Street and then into an apartment above George's saloon on West Camden Street. In 1902, when Ruth was just seven years old, he was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory located at the southwestern edge of the city on Wilkens Avenue.
Ruth went on to baseball fame, playing for the Orioles, the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Yankees and earning the nickname the "Sultan of Swat," before his retirement in 1935. His family's old house on Emory Street followed a more humble course. In 1960, some locals proposed disassembling 216 Emory Street and relocating it to Memory Stadium. "Sooner or later, the urban rebuilders are likely to call Emory street run-down or the area useful for nonresidential construction and that will be the end of Pius Schamberger's house," the Sun speculated in 1961. The newspaper had good reason for their prediction; Saint Mary's School, where Ruth first learned to play baseball, was torn earlier that same year.
In 1967, the building's owner recieved a court order to repair or raze the building. But when the owner scheduled the demolition for December 10, local residents protested and the city stepped in. On November 18, Mayor McKeldin put a stop to the demolition, saying "To allow such a building to pass from the Baltimore scene is to allow an important part of our past to go unrecognized." Next February, the Mayor's Committee for the Preservation of Babe Ruth's Birthplace purchased the block with donations from committee members and the membership of Junior Orioles. While some members of committee worried about the location in a "run-down area" and proposed relocating the building to Memorial Stadium, preserving the building in place eventually won out.
In July 1974, the "Babe Ruth Shrine" opened as a national museum with exhibits on the life and times of Babe Ruth. After Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992, museum attendance soared to over sixty thousand people every year. In 2015, the museum undertook a major restoration to create a new entrance on the Dover Street side block, improve bathrooms, and add an elevator making the museum more accessible to all visitors.
Built in 1922, the former Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch No. 19 at 606 South Ann Street was one of a large number of branch libraries that opened in the early twentieth century. Between 1908 and 1920, the Pratt Library opened a new branch every sixteen months including new libraries in Hamilton and Mount Washington. The building boom was supported by a 1907 gift from Andrew Carnegie and by the generosity of local residents and community organizations who donated land and funds to support their construction.
In 1920, Baltimore City acquired a lot on Ann Street donated by the Children's Playground Association and William Hooper Grafflin, a Baltimore native, banker, and board member of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Local architect William W. Emmart put together a design and the contract for construction was awarded to R.B. Mason in May 1921. By June 1922, the new Branch No. 19 was open.
During the early decades of the library's operation, a large number of the patrons were European immigrants, especially from Poland. The population of Polish immigrants in Baltimore grew quickly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reaching over twenty-three thousand people by 1893. A large share of these residents lived in southeast Baltimore, earning Eastern Avenue the reputation as Baltimore's "Polish Wall Street." After the Pratt began offering "book lists" of suggested readings in 1934, a patron at Branch No. 19, Mrs. Charles D. Sadowski, worked with Miss Sara Siebert, branch librarian, to assemble a list of Polish-language books on the history and culture of Poland along with any English novels translated into Polish.
The history of immigration in southeast Baltimore is woven together with the history of maritime industry. For example, in December 1941 at the beginning of World War II, more than fifty members of the National Maritime Union walked from their hall at 1700 Fleet Street to register as volunteers for civil defense activities. Some of the volunteers were unable to write in English but the branch librarian Miss Annabelle Collins helped in "filling out their blanks." The war effort also inspired residents to turn the library's back yard into a "Victory Garden."
By the 1950s, the Fell's Point Improvement Association began regular meetings at the library and, in the 1970s, the librarians at Branch No. 19 began offering a growing variety of programming for patrons. For example, on June 1, 1974, the library hosted a "family fun festival" with "rock groups, movies, a puppet show, storytelling games, a mahic show contests, and a bake sale." On December 22, 1975, the library invited neighbors to join a free "Community Christmas Party" with seasonal movies, tree decorating, and caroling.
Budget troubles for the Enoch Pratt Free Library system in the early 1980s led to a month-long closure for what was then known as the Fell's Point Library Center in 1981. The library declared the large back yard "off-limits" to patrons because they could not afford to maintain or restore the area. Fortunately, residents pitched in to sustain and support the branch. In spring 1985, a neighborhood group, the Owners' Restoring and Renovating Association, secured a $2,500 matching grant from the city's Neighborhood Incentive Program. They planed to plant new flowers and trees and install tables and benches. When other library visitors learned about the plan, they donated even more time and money to raise over $6,000. The community celebrated the new "reading garden" with a dedication on May 17, 1986.
By 2001, however, years of inadequate funding led the Enoch Pratt Free Library to announce a plan to close five small branches—including the Fell's Point Center. In August 2001, just two weeks before the branches were set to close, then Mayor Martin O'Malley announced that the city had agreed to keep four of the five branches open through partnerships with local nonprofit organizations. The Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center would move into the former Branch No. 19 and turn it into "a center for immigrants to learn language, assimilation and job skills." According to the Baltimore Sun, Clinton Roby, treasurer of Friends of the Fell's Point Branch, was glad the city avoided selling the building to a private investor, remarking, "We were worried the city was going to take the highest bidder. I'm just glad it's not going to be taken away from the community."
In 2018, after fifteen years of service as the Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center, the former library is again in need of repairs and improvements. Flooding in the basement is a regular concern. Roof leaks have damaged the interior and forced EBLO to move programs out of the building. Residents, local elected officials, and EBLO staff are working together to seek funding for repairs and return the building back into use as a resource for the community.
On October 13, 1935, William “Little Willie” Adams and Victorine Quille were married at Saint Peter Claver Catholic Church. The young businessman and the school teacher each came from different backgrounds. William Adams, originally of Zebulon, North Carolina, arrived in Baltimore at age fifteen. Over the next six years, Adams worked his way up from running numbers and cutting sail cloth into rags at a shop on Caroline Street to owning three businesses (a bicycle shop, candy store, and barbershop). Victorine Adams grew up in a working-class family in Baltimore. She graduated from what is now Frederick Douglass High School and enrolled in the teacher training course at Coppin Normal School (now Coppin State University).
Shortly after completing the two-year training course and beginning work as a teacher, Victorine met William Adams. The pair married in 1935 and, soon thereafter, William and Victorine emerged as an influential couple in the political, social, and economic spheres of Black Baltimore. They owned several businesses along Pennsylvania Avenue (including Club Casino and the Charm Centre) and made loans to Black business owners throughout the city in the 1940s and 1950s. But they also started to use their money and connections to push for political change.
In 1946, Victorine founded the Colored Women’s Democratic Campaign Committee of Maryland (CWDCC) to interest Black women in politics and increase their participation in the social, civic, and economic development of the city. The CWDCC’s home base was the basement of the Adams family home on Carlisle Avenue in the neighborhood of Hanlon Park. When they moved to Hanlon Park in July 1949, the couple were the first Black residents in the community—most of their neighbors were white and Jewish. The basement served as the headquarters for many voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns, as Victorine trained volunteers how to vote using an instructional model table-top voting machine from the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation of Jamestown, New York.
The couple helped many successful Black politicians win office in their campaign to diversify Maryland politics: Harry A. Cole to the Maryland State Senate in 1955; Verda Welcome to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1962; and Parren Mitchell to the United States Congress in 1970. Their home also served as the base for subsequent successful political campaigns by Victorine. She won her own seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1966 and became the first Black woman to serve on the Baltimore City Council after a successful race in 1967.
The Adamses continued to be involved in Baltimore politics and philanthropy throughout their lives, whether they were fundraising for the now-defunct Provident Hospital or supporting the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Foundation, which awarded scholarships to Black residents of Baltimore City for undergraduate studies in business-related fields. Their Hanlon Park home sold shortly after Victorine died in 2006. William moved to an apartment at Roland Park Place where he died in 2011.
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Baltimore activists have a long history of fighting discrimination and segregation in the city’s public establishments. In the years after World War II, the NAACP and their allies worked to end segregated seating at Ford’s Theatre on Fayette Street and drew national attention to the fight for equal rights in Baltimore.
Ford's Theatre opened in 1871. It was built by John T. Ford, a Baltimore native, and the owner of the Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. infamous as the site of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Like many other theatres in downtown Baltimore, Ford's enforced a strict policy of racially segregated seating. As early as 1947, Baltimore’s branch of the NAACP began picketing the theatre. At that time, NAACP executive secretary Addison Pinkney stated that the protest had gone on for ”the entire season” and “reduced the average attendance to less than one-half capacity of [the] building.” Unfortunately, theatre management was resistant to changing their discriminatory policies. Protests continued for five years with national and international stars joining the fight. In 1948, celebrated singer and Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson walked a picket line in front of the theatre. In 1951, Basil Rathbone, the British actor famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, declared: “You may depend on my taking a firm stand of disapproval of the segregated theatre in Baltimore and to inform any management to whom I may in future contract myself and the case of any play in which I play.”
By 1950, the protests were hurting the theatre’s bottom line. The theatre, which was operated by United Booking Office Inc. of New York, leased the building from Baltimore theatre mogul Morris Mechanic. By 1950, United Booking Office reported that Ford’s, once one of the most prosperous theatres in the nation, had its box office receipts cut almost in half, attributing the decline to the NAACP protest and to the poor selection of plays.
In 1952, the protest gained another strong ally: Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin. Speaking in early 1952 at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, McKeldin declared that he wanted Ford’s opened to African Americans because they had been “needlessly affronted” by its policies. “We are going to walk together,” he said. “I am an optimist, and we must win. We are going to stop this evil thing.” On February 1, 1952, Ford’s dropped its segregation policies and was finally open to all.
In 1964, the Sun recalled, "Almost every theatrical star from the last century has played there, from James W. Wallack and Maude Adams to Katharine Cornell, and the building has gained a reputation for everything from cats on stage to deer in the balcony and bats in the dressing rooms." Unfortunately, neither theatrical or Civil Rights history could save the three-story theatre from the wrecking ball. The building was torn down in 1964 to make way for the parking garage that stands on the site today.
Trinity Baptist Church at the corner of Druid Hill Avenue and McMechen Street tells the story of Baltimore's connections to the national civil rights movement and radical Black activism in the early twentieth century.
One of the church's influential early activist leaders was Reverend Garnett Russell Waller. In July 1905, Waller joined fellow activists W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter at the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario, Canada in founding the Niagara Movement—a new civil rights organization that ultimately developed into the NAACP.
Trinity Baptist Church was then located at Charles and 20th Streets and Waller, who served as the Niagara Movement’s Maryland secretary, lived nearby at 325 E. 23rd Street. James Robert Lincoln Diggs, educator and succeeded Waller as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church beginning around early 1915. Diggs shared Waller's commitment to activism and was also a participant in the 1905 founding of the Niagara Movement.
In 1918, Diggs helped to establish the Baltimore chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in 1918. The UNIA-ACL was first established in Ohio in 1914 by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born activist. Diggs was close with Garvey and presided over his marriage to Amy Jacques Garvey in 1922.
In May 1920, Diggs led the congregation's move to Druid Hill Avenue after the congregation purchased the 1872 St. Paul's English Evangelical Lutheran Church for $40,000. The church quickly put their new building to work—hosting the 1920 annual convention for the National Equal Rights League in October. The conference was presided over by Rev. J. H. Taylor, secretary of the Maryland Association for Social Service, with speakers including founding member Monroe Trotter, lawyer Nathan S. Taylor from Chicago, and Trinity’s own Rev. Diggs.
The church also served as a center for local activism. For example, on February 1, 1921, 500 people gathered at Trinity Baptist Church at Druid Hill Avenue and Mosher Street to protest the release of a white man, Harry Feldenheimer, on a $500 bail soon after police arrested him for an attempted assault on a 10-year-old black girl named Esther Short. The Afro-American reported that participants in the meeting criticized the “brutality of the local police, exclusion of qualified men from the police force and from juries in the city, and the Jim Crow arrangements for colored people in the Criminal and Juvenile Courts.”
Regrettably, Diggs health began to decline around the fall of 1922 and he soon entered a hospital. On April 14, 1923, he died at home and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Rev. Garnett R. Waller died in Baltimore in 1941 but the church both individuals supported continues to this day.
1621 Bolton Street is the childhood home of Walter Sondheim, Jr.: a local business executive and civic leader who is best known for his role as president of the Baltimore City School Board as the city first sought to put an end to racially segregated school following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In their decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In contrast to many southern school districts, Sondheim led the school board to immediately respond to the ruling with a new policy that, at least officially, allowed white and black students to attend any school regardless of their race.
Leaders in Baltimore’s African American community had lobbied for more resources for the city’s black students as far back as the 1860s. In 1867, for example, the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People successfully petitioned the city to provide funds for the education of black children. And, in 1882, Everett J. Waring, Reverend Harvey Johnson, and others succeeded in pushing the school board to establish the first “colored” high school for black students, which went on to become the school we know today as Frederick Douglas High School.
In the early 1950s, Baltimore’s NAACP and Urban League began advocating to integrate Polytechnic Institute, particularly the school’s elite engineering program. Their efforts culminated in a contentious hearing at the school board in 1952 where among others, Thurgood Marshall battled against the Poly Alumni Association and others to integrate the school. With Walter Sondheim as the chair, board members voted five to three to integrate, and fifteen African American students entered the program at Poly that fall.
Despite this victory, attempts to integrate Baltimore’s all-female Western High School and Mergenthaler School of Printing (better known locally as “Mervo”) failed in 1953. Efforts of challenging these decisions were put on hold as Marshall and others from the NAACP knew the case from Topeka, Kansas, Brown v. Board of Education, would be heading to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the unanimous Brown decision came out in May 1954, Baltimore already had years of advocacy and attention to the issue of desegregation.
While Baltimore did not experience the violence that desegregation sparked in other cities, the city never successfully integrated its schools. In the fall of 1954, six white students enrolled in formerly all-black schools and sixteen hundred black students enrolled in formerly all-white schools. By 1960, African American students became the majority in the school system. In 1961, 75% of the city’s schools were either 90% black or 90% white. In 1973, the U.S. Office of Civil Rights threatened to withhold federal funds charging that the city was not doing enough to integrate the schools.