A.T. Jones & Sons

Richard F. Messick

Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center

Music

Oak Street Garage

The Oak Street Garage, constructed in 1924 and enlarged in 1927, illustrates the dramatic impact of the automobile. Built and operated by first-generation Italian immigrants, the Oak Street Garage reflects the far-reaching impact of the automobile on Baltimore's urban fabric and economic life.

The evolution of the automobile-related services that it housed and the controversy its construction generated illustrate the striking shifts in the urban landscape and economic fortunes it created in the boom years of the 1920s. The Piraino family owned the one-story storage garage through 1969 and actively operated it most of those years. Neely and Ensor Auto. Co., formerly a high-end carriage manufacturer, was the building's first tenant, occupying a portion of the original garage and all of its addition.

Adapted from the .

Camden Station

Transportation

Eli Pousson

Little Joe's

Recreation

Theresa Donnelly

Mayfair Theatre

Entertainment

Theresa Donnelly

New Academy Hotel

Architecture

Eli Pousson

Baltimore Arena

Architecture

Johns Hopkins

Hecht-May Company

Commerce

Adorned with graceful arches and elegant art deco lights the eight story Beaux Arts Hecht-May Co. building at the corner of Lexington and Howard streets (designed by Smith and May architects) was originally built in 1908 as an annex to the Bernheimer Brothers Department store. In what must have been a first for Baltimore, the building initially featured a rooftop garden and hosted cow milking demonstrations. The store sold groceries, clothing, and a variety of household goods.

In 1923, Bernheimer Brothers merged with the Leader Department Store and four years later The May Company bought the combined Berheimer-Leader store and incorporated it as one of their outlets. In 1959, the May Co. purchased the Hecht Company and this building became the Hecht-May Company's main Baltimore location. Though this building's life as part of the Hecht Company began in the twentieth century, the story of the Hecht Company reaches far back to the mid-1840s.

Samuel Hecht, founder of the DC-based Hecht Company, emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1844 and worked as a peddler. Four of Hecht's five sons worked in the family business but one in particular - Moses Hecht - stood out as an early and persistent entrepreneur who proved critical to the family's success. Moses began working at one of Hecht's earliest Baltimore outlets, Hecht's Reliable on Broadway, at age 13 and went on to become the store's general manager within two years. He helped to bring the store record profits thanks to innovations like the one-price-per-item policy, guaranteeing everyone paid the same price for the same merchandise without needing to bargain with store employees.

Hecht's retail empire grew quickly and lasted for over 100 years. By the late 1800s, the Hecht Company operated a general store at Baltimore and Pine streets, a carpet store on Lexington, and an upscale store known as The Hub at the corner of Baltimore and Light Streets. When the 1904 Baltimore Fire destroyed The Hub's first location, the business relocated to Baltimore and Charles Streets - the site of the Mechanic Theatre today. At their Howard and Lexington location, Hecht's customers could purchase everything from sheets and towels to formal wear and pianos. The store featured an art gallery on the eighth floor and customers frequently punctuated their shopping trips with lunch in the Courtyard Restaurant or tea in the Skyline Tearoom.

In 1949 Hecht's opened a store in Annapolis and continued to open locations throughout the Baltimore-Washington area up until the 1970s. This store closed in the 1980s when Hecht's consolidated several locations. Renovated in 2007, the building is now home to a branch of Rite Aid and the upper stories house rental apartments.

Meghan Gilbert

Theresa Donnelly

Stewart's

Architecture

Commerce

Theresa Donnelly

Read's Drug Store

Civil Rights

Though the Baltimore Sun heralded the structure at the southeast corner of Howard and Lexington as an Art Deco design icon from the time of its construction in 1934, this building's role as an early and vital witness to a historic, but long over-looked Civil Rights sit-in makes the Read's Drug Store building truly noteworthy. Five years before the better known Greensboro, South Carolina sit-in protests at Woolworth's, students and citizens made civil rights history on this spot.

William Read started his Read's Drug Store chain at this corner, but the current building, designed by prominent Baltimore architects Smith & May, was built by Arthur Nattans bought the business from Read in 1899. Nattans grew the Read's chain to over forty locations by the early 1930s and planned the downtown location as a flagship store - a modern and well-appointed building, detailed with ornate terra cotta panels depicting sailing ships and chromed railing with swimming dolphins on the interior balcony elements commemorating the 300th anniversary of founding of the Maryland colony.

Like many downtown lunch counters in the early 1950s, the Read's chain maintained a strict policy of racial segregation. Discontent with the widespread policies of segregation and discrimination downtown led the Baltimore chapter of the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) to start a campaign to end segregation at lunch counters on Lexington Street from Kresge's at Park Avenue to McCrory's right next door to Read's. At the same time, students from Morgan State University began working to desegregate the Read's Drug Store's Northwood Shopping Center location, just outside of Morgan's campus.

On January 20, 1955, CORE and Morgan state joined forces and a group of student activists from Morgan staged simultaneous "sit-in" demonstrations at the Howard & Lexington and Northwood Read's locations. According to an article in the Baltimore Afro American, an unnamed Read's official called Morgan State and pleaded with the school to call the protests off because the stores were losing business. School leaders and protesters held firm and within hours a Read's official announced that Read's Drug Store would end segregated lunch counters across all of their establishments. The front page headline for the Afro American on January 22 read, "Now serve all," with the announcement directly from Read's Drug Stores President Arthur Nattans Sr., "We will serve all customers throughout our entire stores, including the fountains, and this becomes effective immediately." Five years before the iconic Woolworth's sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Baltimore's Morgan State students and CORE activists led one of the first successful student-led sit-in protests in the nation.

Eli Pousson

Hutzler's

"If you wanted the good stuff, you went to Hutzler's," said Governor William Donald Schaefer and for generations of Baltimoreans, Hutzler's represented the height of downtown shopping, simply the place to shop. Many Marylanders still have fond memories of taking a streetcar down to Howard Street to shop at Hutzler's - the grande dame of Baltimore department stores with the richly detailed 1880s Palace building the modern 1930s Tower building next door.

Founded in 1858 as a single storefront at the corner of Howard and Clay streets by German-Jewish peddler Moses Hutzler and his son Abram, the store soon expanded to two additional Howard Street storefronts. Abram welcomed his brothers Charles and David into the retail operation in 1867 and the business incorporated as the Hutzler Brothers Company in the early twentieth century. The store carefully cultivated an image as not only a purveyor of fine goods, but a destination in itself. Hutzler's prided itself on being a place where shoppers could spend an entire day, complete with lunch in The Colonial or the Quixie, a haircut in the Circle Room Beauty Salon, and a shoeshine at the Shoe Fixery on the 8th floor.

The magnificent "palace" building on Howard Street reflects the reputation for class with a ornate Nova Scotia gray stone façade designed by the firm of Baldwin and Pennington. The store continued to grow in the 20th century with the construction of the Art Deco "tower" building in 1932 (which gained five additional stories in 1942) designed by architect James R. Edmunds, Jr.

Hutzler's claimed many innovations in Baltimore retailing including the widespread institution in 1868 of the now standard "one-price policy," which replaced a system of bargaining that favored the loudest or boldest bidder. Hutzler's offered an early liberal returns policy and was the first department store in Maryland to boast a fleet of delivery trucks. Like many department stores across the nation, Hutzler's sought to employ the latest technology; they installed Baltimore's first escalator in this building in the early 1930s.

In 1952, Hutzler's expanded to the Baltimore suburbs, opening a store Towson, Maryland, which was quickly followed by eight additional suburban outlets. Despite their forward-looking expansion, competition from national retailers and the continued decline of downtown business forced the 132 year-old family-owned business to close in 1990.

Theresa Donnelly

Sydney Jenkins

Miller's Court

Industry

Historic Preservation

Erected in stages between 1890 and 1910, the former H.F. Miller & Son Company building consists of a 77,000 square foot brick manufacturing plant that occupies half of the city block bounded by 26th Street on the south, 27th Street on the north, North Howard Street on the west and Mace Street on the east. The complex incorporates the original, four story, "L" shaped brick building (1890-1895), a large three story brick addition (1910) and a two story brick stable that was remodeled as an open storage shed in 1928.

The H.F. Miller & Son Company building represented a significant era in the city's industrial history. In the late 19th century the company was one of the largest manufactures of tin boxes in the United States. Between 1890 and 1895 the company erected a state of the art industrial facility which incorporated new types of mechanization that greatly improved the efficiency of the can making industry. The company distributed its wares widely to Canadian, Mexican, European, African and South American markets, as well as in the U.S.

In 1953 the company ceased operations on the North Howard Street site. Between 1954 and 1985 the Miller Factory building was divided into several spaces. A series of businesses including the Commander Garment Company, Rombro Brothers, Ember Reuben and the Majestic Furniture Company occupied the building. During the 1990 census, the building served as the local headquarters of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Since the completion of the census, the building stood vacant until Seawall Development Company began renovations. Combining green construction and a focus on creating apartments for teachers, Miller's Court combines great historic preservation work with an interesting new approach to finding a new life for older buildings.

Johns Hopkins

Howard Street Bridge

Transportation

Art and Design

Great Depression

Built in 1938, the Howard Street Bridge is nearly 1,000 feet long with two steel arches spanning the Jones Falls Valley. This award winning bridge (voted one of the most beautiful by the American Institute of Steel Construction in 1939) was designed by the J.E. Greiner Company, the firm established by one of the nation's foremost bridge builders John Edwin Greiner. Born in Delaware, Greiner got his start designing and building bridges for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad until 1908 when he set himself up as a consulting engineer. The story of the bridge and the extension of Howard Street to North Avenue begins years earlier when local business leaders first began to imagine Howard Street as a major route across the Jones Falls.

The proposal to extend Howard Street north started to build support in 1923 with the organization of the Howard Street Association but without any funding the idea languished for over a decade. Finally in the late 1930s, thanks to a $32,000,000 investment in Baltimore's New Deal work relief programs, construction began. The first steel girders for the bridge swung into place around midnight on December 16, 1937 to "avoid tangling traffic on the Baltimore and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland and Pennsylvania railroads" whose tracks ran along the valley below. Baltimore Mayor Howard W. Jackson presided over a ground-breaking ceremony on July 15, 1937 throwing the first shovel of dirt with a spade after the "motor shovel" they had waiting unexpectedly broke down.

At a cost of $1,350,000, construction on the road extension by the Philadelphia-based Kaufman Construction Company moved quickly and by January 12, 1939, Mayor Jackson was back on Howard Street, joined by representatives from the Public Works Administration and local civic and neighborhood associations. Stretched across Howard Street near the Richmond Market (now part of Maryland General Hospital) was a ribbon, which Jackson cut then planned to "enter his automobile and drive along the extensive and over the bridge spanning Jones Falls... followed by a cavalcade of cars containing Federal and city officials and members of the Howard Street and Mount Royal Protective Associations."

The bridge caught the interest of another Baltimore Mayor one fall morning in 1974 when Mayor William Donald Schaefer drove down Howard Street and was "struck by how rusty and run-down it looked," immediately asking his Committee on Arts and Culture if they could "do something about freshening it up." The committee came up with a proposal to give the bridge a new name "Gateway to Baltimore" and a bold new color scheme worked out with assistance from Don Duncan, an artist employed by the Baltimore City Department of Planning. Fights with neighborhood residents over the color selection broke out eventually resolving with a new red paint job in the early 1980s.

Work began anew on creating a more colorful Howard Street Bridge (along with over a dozen other bridges over the Jones Falls) in the late 1980s when local artist and MICA graduate Stan Edmister conceived of the "Painted Bridges" project to create a "gateway of color" from the suburbs to downtown with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Baltimore Municipal Art Society. For the 15 years, city bridge painters followed Edmister's scheme painting the bridges with industrial oranges, yellows and rusty browns. Edmister explained the colors, noting, "I think the colors I choose blend with an urban environment. They make some comment about Baltimore being a postindustrial town." Mayor Martin O'Malley objected to the color selection in 2004, preferring a Kelly green but lost out to Edmister's proposal in an online poll.

Eli Pousson