Original Emory Street Home of the "Sultan of Swat"

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.

216 Emory Street, Baltimore, MD 21230

The iconic Baltimore & Ohio Warehouse at Camden Yards is an icon of Baltimore's industrial heritage and a unique example of creativity in historic preservation and adaptive reuse. Construction on the warehouse started in 1899. Architect E. Francis Baldwin likely served as the architect having designed warehouses for the B&O at Locust Point in 1879-80 and at Henderson's Wharf in Fell's Point in 1898. When a five-story addition was completed next to Camden Station in 1905, the narrow fifty-one-foot wide warehouse squeezed into the busy railyard by stretching four full blocks along South Eutaw Street. The company boasted that the facility could hold one thousand carloads of freight at once.

The warehouse remained in use through the 1960s but was largely abandoned by the 1970s, in favor of new single-story facilities. By the 1980s, the structure was threatened with demolition to make way for a new stadium. 91��Ƶ and Maryland State Senator Jack Lapides led an effort to fight for the preservation of the warehouse and the rehabilitation of Camden Station. Leadership from the Maryland Stadium Authority responded and, with support from the Baltimore Orioles, architects Helmuth, Obata & Kassabaum and RTKL Associates transformed the vacant warehouse into the star attraction of the new stadium complex.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992 and the ballpark has remained a much-loved landmark ever since. The warehouse is now home to team offices and a private club for the Orioles. In 1993, the building even caught a long ball—a 445-foot shot by Ken Griffey, Jr. on July 12, 1993 during the 1993 All Star Game Home Run Derby—marked with a small bronze plaque matched by those on Eutaw Street for the occasions when a player has hit a ball out of the park.

Play ball! Did you know Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992?

333 W. Camden Street, Baltimore, MD 21201