The structure has served a wide range of uses in the century since Captain Emerson moved out. Maryland's Juvenile Services Division had offices in the building, as did The Mercantile Club, a private social club for businessmen. Since 1994, the property has been owned by James Crockett.
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The former U.S. Marine Hospital on Wyman Park Drive near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus was built in 1934鈥攂ut the Marine Hospital Service itself dated back over a century earlier.
In 1798, President John Adams signed "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen" that supported the creation of Marine Hospitals in major American ports from Boston to Baltimore. Following the Civil War, a scandal broke out over the mismanagement of the Marine Hospital Fund (supported by a tax on the wages of all U.S. sailors). In 1870, the U.S. Congress responded to the controversy by converting the loose network of hospitals into a more centrally-managed bureau within the Department of Treasury.
Early on the Baltimore Marine Hospital was located in Curtis Bay on the same site later developed at the聽Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard. The Maryland Hospital of U.S. Marine Hospital Service also maintained dedicated wards at St. Joseph鈥檚 Hospital at Caroline and Hoffman Streets before the construction of a new hospital complex on Remington Avenue around 1885. A 1901 directory of Baltimore charities invited sailors in need of medical care to apply for admission at the surgeon鈥檚 office located at the Baltimore Custom House, explaining:
Only those who have served as sailors on an American registered vessel for at least 60 days prior to application are strictly eligible, but any bona fide sailor taken sick or injured in the line of duty will receive attention.
In 1934, the old building was replaced by a modern 290-bed facility making Baltimore's聽hospital the second largest marine hospital in the country. In the 1950s, the hospital began serving a more general population, including both people enlisted in the military and local residents, as the United States Public Health Services Hospital.
In October 1981, the federal government closed all of the U.S. Public Health Service hospitals across the country. Baltimore's old Marine Hospital was taken over by a group known as the Wyman Park Health System and continued to treat many of the patients who had been going there for decades. In 1987, the group merged with Johns Hopkins University. One result of the merger was the creation of a new primary care organization, the Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, that has continued to provide outpatient medical services from the lower levels of the building today.
In 2008, the university considered plans for demolishing and replacing the building. Fortunately, in January 2019, the university announced plans to preserve and renovate the building for continued use by students and faculty.
On July 11, 2015 the Eastern Female High School on Aisquith Street caught fire鈥攋ust the latest challenge for this 1869 school-house turned apartment building that has stood empty since it closed in 2001. Designed by architect R. Snowden Andrews, the Italianate-style, red-brick and white-trim structure is the city鈥檚 oldest surviving purpose-built public school building. It stands as a memorial to the post-Civil War expansion of secondary education opportunities in Baltimore.
The Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation list the building as a Baltimore City Landmark in 1976 and a 2002 Baltimore Sun editorial declared one of Baltimore鈥檚 鈥渁rchitectural gems鈥. The building was renovated and converted into apartments in the 1970s and Baltimore City transferred the building to Sojourner-Douglass College in 2004. Unfortunately, Sojourner-Douglass College was unable to develop the building and after the 2015 fire Eastern Female High School聽continues to stand boarded up and vacant.
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The 82,000 square-foot Reginald F. Lewis Museum opened in 2005 and immediately made history as the first major building in downtown Baltimore designed by African American architects鈥攁 joint effort between Philip Freelon of a North Carolina firm, the Freelon Group, and Gary Bowden of a Baltimore firm, RTKL Associates. Both architects are fellows of the American Institute of Architects, rare achievements considering that in 2016 African Americans make up just 2% of registered architects in the United States.
The museum represents the character, pride, struggle, and accomplishments of Maryland African Americans, and was the second largest African American museum in the United States at the time of construction. The museums took the name of Baltimore businessman Reginald Lewis, the first African American CEO of a Fortune 500 company, TLC Beatrice International. Lewis grew up in West Baltimore and, before his death in 1993, he expressed interest in building a museum to African American culture. The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation, which Lewis established in 1987, provided a $5 million grant for the construction of the museum in Baltimore.
The museum board turned down an offer to reuse the Blaustein City Exhibition Center on President Street after focus groups showed that people were not interested in taking over the site of an old museum. "African Americans are tired of left-over seconds," museum board vice chairman Aris Allen Jr. told the Baltimore Sun in 2005. Architects Freelon and Bowden sought to design a distinct building that evokes the spirit of African American culture. The black, red and yellow facade takes its colors from the Maryland flag. A bold red wall slices through the facade, representing the journey of African Americans and the duality of accomplishment and struggle.
The building won several awards from local and state American Institute of Architects chapter. The museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institute and along with permanent exhibits, includes space for special exhibits, an oral history and recording studio, a 200 seat auditorium, and a classroom and resource center.
The former Fleet-McGinley Company building at the northwest corner of Water and South Streets was built in 1908鈥攐ne of scores of new warehouses and factories built around downtown as the city rebuilt from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. The five-story brick and reinforced concrete warehouse was designed by the prominent Baltimore architectural firm of Baldwin & Pennington for the Johns Hopkins Hospital trustees at a cost of $70,000. One of the building's earliest and most prominent tenants was the Fleet-McGinley Printing Company, established in 1884 as a partnership between Charles T. Fleet and J. Edward McGinley.
In 1914, Fleet-McGinley boasted that their building was "the best equipped printing office in Baltimore" boasting "the most modern appliances and equipment" along with "skilled and competent artisans." In the aftermath of the recent catastrophe, the printer paid special attention to fire-proofing, describing their "fire-proof vaults for the storage of plates, engravings and designs, which make the destruction by fire of such valuable property practically impossible."
In 1926, the Manufacturers' Record, a trade publication printed by the firm since the 1880s, purchased Fleet-McGinley and moved their operations from South Street to the Candler Building on East Lombard Street. In 1965, the business (still located in the Candler Building) was renamed the Blanchard Press of Maryland. The building on South Street later served as offices for insurance agents Hopper, Polk & Purnell, Inc., as well as Levy Sons Company, manufacturer of women's underwear. In early 2015, Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake purchased the building from the International Youth Foundation who had occupied the structure for over fifteen years.
Before the rise of textile mills, the fast-flowing water of the Jones Falls instead powered gristmills supplying Baltimore's lucrative flour trade. Whitehall Mill was established as a gristmill in the late 1700s and owned by James Ellicott, a member of the same family that settled Ellicott City. In 1839, David Carroll, Horatio Gambrill, and their associates purchased the mill from Ellicott and converted it to a textile mill for weaving cotton duck, a tightly woven canvas used to make ship sails.
Over the years, the mill was expanded, burned, rebuilt, renamed, and converted to a number of different commercial uses. To house their workers, Carroll and Gambrill built Clipper Village, a cluster of homes located across from Whitehall for the mill's workers. The capacity of the mill was doubled in 1845 and the mill was converted to steam power to keep up with manufacturing demand. By 1850, forty men and sixty-five women were working at Whitehall Mill with an output of 220,000 yards of cotton duck. Carroll and Gambrill quickly expanded by converting other gristmills along the Jones Falls to textile mills.
The three-story granite factory burned in 1854 and, after it was rebuilt, renamed Clipper Mill in recognition of the ships that used the cotton duck cloth for sails. By this point, William E. Hooper, a sailmaker who expanded his business to selling raw cotton to the textile mills, had joined as a partner. In the 1860s, Gambrill sold his shares in the company to Hooper and opened Druid Mill. After another fire in 1868, Clipper Mill was rebuilt at twice its size. The mill was sold in 1899 to the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, a national conglomerate. In 1902, the mill manufactured the cotton duck for Kaiser Wilhelm's yacht, which was christened by Alice Roosevelt as the Meteor III. In addition to ship sails, the mill manufactured other heavy canvas items such as mail bags for the U.S. government.
In 1925, the mill was sold to Purity Paper Vessels, a firm that manufactured paper containers that could hold semi-liquid foods. The mill's cotton manufacturing machinery was shipped to Mount-Vernon-Woodberry Company's Southern mills in Tallassee, Alabama and Columbia, South Carolina. During the year of the sale, several elegiac articles appeared in the Baltimore Sun that looked back on the time when Baltimore's cotton duck manufacturing was at its peak and its clipper ships dominated international trade. Purity Paper Vessels later sub-leased part of the building to the Shapiro Waste Paper Company. In 1941, half the building was leased by the Army Quartermaster Office to be used as a warehouse for the Third Corps Area.
By the 1940s, the I. Sekine Brush Company, a maker of men's grooming products and toothbrushes, occupied the mill. The company was founded in 1906 and had been operating plants in Baltimore since 1928. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, H.H. Sekine, who had been living in the United States for over twenty years, was arrested and interrogated, along with dozens of foreign-born Baltimoreans connected to nations on the Axis side. At the time, Sekine was operating a factory in Reservoir Hill that the government shut down for two weeks. When it reopened shortly before Christmas, Sekine paid all his employees in full for the time they lost during the closure. Over time, portions of the Clipper Mill property were leased to other companies, including Penguin Books, The Maryland Venetian Blind Manufacturing Corporation, and Star Built Kitchen Units. Sekine maintained operations at the Whitehall mill location until 1992 when it was sold to Komar Industries.
Most recently, developer Terra Nova Ventures transformed the building into a mixed use development with a planned market. Architects Alexander Design Studio restored much of the long neglected mill, bringing new life to the historic structure. Numerous improvements were made for flood prevention, including the construction of a pedestrian bridge over Clipper Mill Road.
The Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, known as the Ma & Pa, connected Baltimore, Maryland and York, Pennsylvania, over a circuitous seventy-seven mile route. In 1881, the Falls Road site became the Baltimore terminal for the Baltimore & Delta Railway (a predecessor of the Maryland & Pennsylvania) originally including a wood frame roundhouse. The original roundhouse burned down in 1892 but, in 1910, the Ma & Pa rebuilt built tracks, roundhouse, the adjoining yard office and power house, as part of a $47,000 investment in their terminal facilities.
The Ma & Pa thrived in the 1900s and early 1910s providing regular commuter service between Belair and Baltimore, country excursions for city residences, and milk and mail delivery between Baltimore and Pennsylvania. The business began to decline after WWI and, by the 1950s, passengers had dwindled to about 12 people per train. After the company lost the contract to operate the Railway Post Office, they abandoned their Maryland operations and moved offices to York, Pennsylvania.
In 1960, two years after the Ma & Pa ceased operations, the city bought the roundhouse and the terminal complex. Baltimore City purchased the buildings for $275,000 with plans to use the roundhouse as a highway department warehouse.
For the past 58 years, the site has been used by Baltimore City for truck parking and winter road salt storage. While the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum has successfully preserved the former Mount Clare Roundhouse in southwest Baltimore as an iconic attraction for railroad buffs young and old, most roundhouses have been lost to demolition or neglect.
Years of service to the Baltimore Department of Transportation has taken a toll on this structure too. Unfortunately, in August 2014, the roof at the roundhouse suffered a partial collapse when the several salt-damaged supports failed. Action is needed to stabilize the building and prevent further deterioration.
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