A Family Selling Reels, Rods, Bloodworms, and More

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.

Mike Klingaman, "," Baltimore Sun, February 6, 2016.

John Lewis, ": For nearly a century, the Tochtermans have been luring fishermen to an Eastern Avenue shop that’s become a local institution," Baltimore Magazine, June 2009.

1925 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21231

When Baltimorean William Painter invented the bottle cap in 1891, it didn’t take long for beverage companies (beer brewers in particular) to realize its value, and for Painter to realize he needed to build significant manufacturing facilities to keep up with demand. Painter's enterprise, the Crown Cork and Seal Company, opened its first big production facility in 1897 on Guilford Avenue and not long after expanded by opening a larger complex on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown in 1906. The Guilford Avenue complex continued as the base of operations for custom building the sealing machinery while the Highlandtown complex acted as the hub of Crown Cork and Seal’s manufacturing operations.

In 1910, the Highlandtown complex expanded again to include two new buildings. Both used mill construction with brick exteriors and granite trimmings as well as new advances like fireproof elevator shafts, fire escapes and ventilators. The five story building had two massive water towers that held 15,000 gallons each to be released in case a fire broke out inside.

Crown Cork and Seal’s Highlandtown complex became the base of machinery production in 1928 after the owners abandoned the Guildford Avenue plant. Despite its modern fire protections, however, the added activity at the complex and its constantly whirring electrical machines were at high risk of fire. In 1940, managers at the building made twenty-six calls to the fire department, almost all of which appeared unnecessary, until one signaled a very real five-alarm fire. Despite the loss of $500,000 in baled cork, the company minimized the damage and kept churning out bottle caps for the world’s beer brewers.

In 1958, Crown Cork and Seal moved its headquarters from Baltimore to Philadelphia and the owners sold a group of thirty buildings, including the Guilford Avenue complex, to the city for $1.5 million. The Highlandtown plant continued to operate for nearly 30 more years, but finally closed in 1987 as use of aluminum and plastic containers rose and the demand for glass bottle caps waned. Today the building houses artist studios and light manufacturing and is occasionally used by movie studios.

5501 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224

The first Patterson Theater to occupy 3136 Eastern Avenue opened in 1910. In 1918, Harry Reddish purchased the building to renovate and redecorate it. He reopened it two years later and renamed it the “New Patterson”. The Patterson Theater housed a large second floor dancehall with a wide stage and organ that could only be turned on by climbing under the stage. In 1929, the “New Patterson” closed.

The next year saw a larger Patterson Theater, referred to as a playhouse, built in place of the old building. It opened September 26, 1930, showing Queen High with Charles Ruggles. Built by the Durkee Organization, John J. Zink designed the 85x150 ft building. He used a plain brick exterior (one of the plainest Zink ever designed). But the ornate, vertical sign appealed to the public. The interior color scheme consisted of red, orange, and gold with matching draperies and indirect lighting from crystal chandeliers. The theater’s low back chairs and spring-cushioned seats held between 900 to 1,500 people at a time. During its construction, designers took great care to ensure crisp  acoustics for the showing of talking pictures. The Grand Theater Company, an affiliate of Durkee Enterprises, operated the Patterson Theater.

In November 1958 an usher accidentally started a fire that caused considerable damage to the auditorium. By the spring of 1975 the owners twinned the theater into two 500 seat spaces, but the  machinery remained untouched. In 1986, the old machinery proved deadly when a refrigeration company’s employee asphyxiated on Freon gas in the basement cooling system. The theater filled with firefighters who had to remove the maintenance man and set up large fans to push the colorless, odorless gas from the building. The Patterson Theater continued to operate until 1995, but by then the theater only showed discount films. It would be the last theater operated by the Durkee Organization.

Creative Alliance, a community organization geared toward bringing audiences and artists together, undertook an extensive multi-million dollar renovation of the old Patterson Theater. Renovations began in 2000 when Cho Benn Holback & Associates gutted and rebuilt the building’s interior. Creative Alliance kept the fireproof concrete projection booth but turned the remainder of the space into a multi-purpose art center with galleries, artist studios, a marquee lounge and a flexible theater. While the historic vertical sign was one of the last originals in the city, extensive deterioration meant it could not be salvaged. Instead, Creative Alliance had it duplicated and replaced just before their reopening in May 2003.

Work continued a few years later with the addition of a café. The original concrete fireproof projection booth remained and became the focal point of the dining room. Gabriel Kroiz, Chair of Undergraduate Design for the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University, recalls when the building showed movies:

“I have been going to the building since I was a kid. I saw Star Wars there when it came out. I remember when it split in two and started showing the films two weeks after they had been released for less money and then when they closed.”

Since the opening of the new building, Creative Alliance has hosted hundreds of new events, including live performances, exhibitions, films and workshops.

3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224

Completed in 1912, the Eastern Avenue Sewage Pumping Station opened as a critical engine of Baltimore’s then brand-new sewer system. City engineers built the station to house enormous steam-driven Corliss pumps capable of pumping up to 27,500,000 gallons of sewage a day. The utility of the building did not prohibit a bit of style. The engineers graced the structure with copper roof, gables, and a cupola, turning it into a handsome monument to the growth and development of the city celebrated by proud civic leaders. In 1960, the city replaced the aging steam-driven pumps with electric turbines. The building continues to operate as a pumping station up through the present.

The Baltimore Public Works Museum occupied the building from 1982 up until the museum closed in 2010. The museum gave visitors a behind the scenes look at how a large city provides public works utilities to its citizens. The museum modeled phone lines, street lights, drains and pipes, and sewage disposal.

751 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21202

Package Store, Restaurant. and New Deal Labor Landmark

O'Connor's, a package store and restaurant, has been located since the early 1920s in the heart of Greektown at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Oldham Street. In the 1940s, this unassuming, two-story, brick building played a significant role in the city labor movement of the New Deal era.

O'Connor's, a package store and restaurant, has been located since the early 1920s in the heart of Greektown at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Oldham Street. In the 1940s, this unassuming, two-story, brick building played a significant role in the city labor movement of the New Deal era. Baltimore steel workers fought to unionize between 1940 and 1942 and turned O’Connor’s into the meeting spot where they could discuss the progress of organizing efforts. Similar meetings took place at the Finnish Hall in nearby Highlandtown at Ponca and Foster Streets. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) moved their headquarters into the second floor of O’Connor’s and, in 1943, the committee became the United Steelworkers of America, a CIO union.

Ellen Pinter was part of the Finnish community of Highlandtown, and her father worked at the steel mill in Sparrow’s Point. She saw firsthand the effects of underemployment on the steelworkers and their families during the Great Depression. Some only received work for one to two days a week. Many families ran up debts at the grocery store or fell behind on rent. Some families took in boarders to try to make ends meet. Ellen took a job for $18 week working for the steel workers’ union SWOC around 1937 in the office on top of O’Connor’s.

In a 1980 interview with the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, Ellen recollected:

"The quarters were small but the activity was small. I can vividly remember when the miners came to Baltimore and started the big organization drive of the CIO. The men were pouring into that hall with their pockets just bulging with dollar bills as they were signing up men into the union. There was such a tremendous upsurge of interest in the union. Of course, the mills were full of foreign-born people who knew the value of unions because they had come from European countries where they had been a little more politically astute. And Finns were aware of unionization and more progressive thought… Oh I can remember the Italians, the Finns, the Czechs, the Americans, they were organizing left and right then, in Bethlehem Steel Company."

Pinter also notes African American participation in the organizing activity—Finnish activists welcomed African Americans at the Finnish Hall during the early days of organizing activity, even though Highlandtown remained a segregated white neighborhood. Racial antagonisms, however, were not absent in the social activities of the union. For instance, Pinter remembers being at a union picnic; a black man asked her to dance and she accepted, only to have a white man cut in and demand to know how she could dare dance with a black man. O’Connor’s still remains in operation today.

4801 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224