Category Archives: Preservation

Join us for a second West Side Walking Tour on January 20!

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Read's Drug Store in 1934, courtesy Baltimore Sun

We’re returning to the Superblock this week for a second lunchtime walking tour on why historic buildings matter to the future of a revitalized West Side and how the proposal for the Superblock threatens to demolish that future. The tour takes place on the 50th Anniversary of the 1955 sit-in at the Read’s Drug Store at Howard & Lexington Streets, so we’ll be sharing a few stories about how black and white civil rights advocates fought to provide African Americans with equal rights to shop, work, and eat on Downtown’s West Side. From the Afro American’s Orchid & Onion 1945 campaign against downtown stores that discriminated against African American customers (“Onions” discriminated against black shoppers and “Orchids” did not) to the 1955 sit-in by the Baltimore Committee on Racial Equality and the students and faculty of Morgan State, Baltimore’s Civil Rights heritage can be found throughout the historic buildings of Downtown’s West Side.

West Side Lunchtime Walking Tour | East Entrance to Lexington Market (Lexington & Eutaw Streets)

Please also join us on February 9 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum for a public forum on Preserving Baltimore’s Civil Rights Heritage. We’ll begin the forum with short presentations by Dr. Helena Hicks, a participant in the 1955 Reads Drug Store sit-in, Dr. Gabriel Tenabe on restoring the home of long-time Baltimore NAACP President Lillie Mae Carroll Jackson, Ms. Tanya Bowers from the National Trust for Historic Preservation on the proposed National Civil Rights Heritage Trail, and more. We’ll follow the presentations with an opportunity for attendees to share their own questions and comments on how we can preserve the stories, buildings and neighborhoods tied to Baltimore’s long civil rights fight.  Stay tuned for further details on our February 9 program!

Baltimore’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum Past & Future on February 5

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This Place Matters: Baltimore's Hebrew Orphan Asylum

Baltimore’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum Past & Future

Come out for a short talk on the history of one of West Baltimore’s grandest landmarks: the 1876 Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Generations of Baltimore residents may recall this building as Lutheran Hospital or West Baltimore General, but it began its history in 1876, built by the Hebrew Benevolent Society as a home for Jewish orphans and dependent children. This striking brick castle, designed by the German-born Edward Lupus and Baltimore-native Henry A. Roby, has endured over 130 years and is now the oldest Jewish orphanage building in the United States.

We’ll discuss history of the building and share a look at the efforts by Coppin State University and Baltimore Heritage to preserve and reuse it. The historic Hebrew Orphan Asylum building has great potential to anchor transit-oriented development around the future Rosemont Red Line light rail station. Eli Pousson, Field Officer with Baltimore Heritage in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, will lead the discussion. Mr. Pousson led the effort to nominate the building to the National Register of Historic Places and continues to work with Coppin State University and the new Friends of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum to support the revitalization of this tremendous Baltimore landmark.

Are you a member of the Friends of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum? Sign up for our e-mail list or donate $20 to Baltimore Heritage and support our efforts to save Baltimore’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum today!

Why the West Side Matters: Read’s Drug Store and Baltimore’s Civil Rights Heritage

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Howard & Lexington Streets 1963, BGE Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Industry

One of the West Side’s least well known but most important stories is the history of the former Read’s Drug Store at Howard and Lexington Streets and its landmark role in Baltimore’s civil rights movement. Built in 1934 by Baltimore architects Smith & May, the press heralded this Art Deco structure as a local landmark from its beginning– a modern flagship store for the Read’s chain, continuing their 50-year presence at the bustling heart of the downtown retail district.

Like many downtown commercial establishments in the early 1950s, the Read’s chain maintained a strict policy of racial segregation at their lunch counters. In 1955, a group of Morgan State students came together with the leadership of the recently organized Baltimore Committee on Racial Equality to organize a sit-in protest at the lunch counter of the Read’s Drug Store at Howard and Lexington Streets. They succeeded in this effort, marking this building as a witness to the first successful student-led sit-in protest in Baltimore and defining a powerful model for the more famous lunch-counter sit-in of Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960. This building is currently threatened with total demolition by the proposed development of the Superblock by the Baltimore Development Corporation and Lexington Square Partners. Baltimore Heritage, together with partners and supporters from across the city, is advocating for the city to reconsider this proposal and encourage the preservation and re-use of this essential landmark in Baltimore’s civil rights history.

Former Read's Drug Store, Southwest corner of North Howard Street & West Lexington Street, Superblock

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Challenges for preservation and development in the Superblock

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This is our second post in a series on the preservation and revitalization of Baltimore’s West Side. Read our first post for a quick review of the past ten years of redevelopment efforts on the West Side.

200 block West Lexington Street

One of the most significant challenges on the West Side over the past decade has been the preservation and redevelopment of the “Superblock” bounded by Lexington, Fayette, Liberty and Howard streets. These few blocks include a diverse collection of 19th and 20th century historic buildings reflecting the West Side’s past as a thriving center of downtown retail. Among the many contributing buildings within the West Side’s Market Center Historic District are the 1929 Brager-Gutman Building, the 1938 Art Deco Kresge’s Department Store, and the 1934 Read’s Drug Store to name only a few. In 2001, Baltimore City and the State of Maryland established a preservation agreement (known as the Memorandum of Agreement or MOA) that gave the Maryland Historical Trust the authority to review development proposals on the West Side. By 2003, the Baltimore Development Corporation began soliciting bids on the development of the Superblock, then selected Lexington Square Partners as the developer for the area bounded by Howard, Lexington, Park, and Fayette Streets.

Since 2004, Lexington Square Partners has submitted at least five plans for the redevelopment of the site to the Maryland Historical Trust (MHT) and each time MHT has concluded that the plans do not meet the required preservation standards (Baltimore Brew covered this issue in February 2010). The most recent proposal this past November requires the partial or total demolition of 14 of 17 contributing historic buildings in the area, including the complete demolition of 9 structures, the demolition of all but facades on 5, and the full preservation of only 3 historic buildings. Despite this failure to support the preservation principles created to guide the revitalization of the West Side, just yesterday BDC received a 6-month extension to their agreement with Lexington Square Partners from the Baltimore Board of Estimates.

This is not an abstract debate between the relative merits of historic preservation and economic development. Rather, we are dedicated to successfully joining both agendas, recognizing the potential of the West Side’s historic buildings to contribute to the renewed vitality of Baltimore’s downtown. For example, the former Reads Drug Store at the corner of Lexington and Howard Streets (proposed for demolition in current plans) holds a important place in the city’s history as the site of an early sit-in protest against segregated lunch counters. Built in 1934 on the 300th anniversary of the founding of Maryland, the store features several architectural details on a Maryland theme with panels of sailing ships on the outside. At the bustling corner of Lexington Street and Howard Street, the store served as the flagship location of the Read’s chain located at the heart of Downtown. The building is perhaps most historically significant, however, for its role as a witness to Baltimore’s Civil Rights Movement. On January 20, 1955, Dean McQuay Kiah of Morgan State University, along with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a group of Morgan students staged a sit-in at this location to protest the racial segregation of Read’s lunch counters. The sit-in led to the desegregation of the entire Read’s chain throughout the region and helped provide a model that guided later and better known student-led sit-ins in places like Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960. These exceptional and irreplaceable buildings contribute to the rich architectural heritage of the West Side and should be seen clearly not as barriers but as assets to continued development.

Moving forward from ten years of work on the historic West Side

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Tour group looking at a cast-iron building facade on Balimore Street, West Side Walking Tour

A panel from the Urban Land Institute that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake engaged around the redevelopment of downtown’s “West Side” recently delivered preliminary recommendations (more from the Baltimore Sun). As the area continues to be in the spotlight and we continue working towards a renewed and revitalized West Side, we thought it would be helpful to provide a short recap of how redevelopment plans that have evolved from early proposals calling for widespread demolition to current plans based on both preservation and redevelopment.

The “West Side” of Baltimore’s downtown is an area roughly bounded by Pratt Street (south), Read Street (north), Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (west), and Liberty Street/Charles Center (east). From the late 1700s through the 1940s, the West Side grew as a vital center of transportation, commerce, and cultural life. This growth first began with Lexington Market in 1782–a place that inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson to declare Baltimore the “Gastronomical Center of the Universe”– and continued in the early 20th century with the construction of dozens of premiere department stores and movie theaters that many Baltimoreans still remember fondly. Unfortunately, in the late 20th century retail shopping and investment drifted out to Baltimore’s suburbs, many of these businesses closed, and their buildings began to decay from neglect.


View West Side’s Market Center Historic District in a larger map

After years of decline, Baltimore City proposed a plan in the 1990s that took an old-fashioned urban renewal approach to redevelopment and threatened to demolish 150 or more historic buildings (See Baltimore City Council Ordinance 98-333, 1998). In response, Baltimore Heritage and our partner Preservation Maryland developed a preservation based strategy for the revitalization of the West Side (PDF). This strategy proposed focusing new construction on existing vacant lots, rehabbing existing buildings for new uses, and reducing the number of historic buildings slated for demolition. In 1999, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Baltimore’s West Side on its annual list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in recognition of the threat to one of the best collections of historic buildings in any downtown. In 2000, the National Register of Historic Places listed the West Side as the Market Center Historic District designating hundreds of West Side buildings as significant historic structures.

In 2001 with strong encouragement state legislature, Baltimore City adopted a new preservation-based strategic plan (PDF) and signed an agreement with the Maryland Historical Trust laying out a process for preserving historic buildings and moving forward with revitalization. Many of us celebrated the agreement, which has been in effect in the decade since and continues to guide development today. This agreements supported the rejuvenation of nearly 50 historic buildings, including the rehab of the former Stewart’s Department Store as Catholic Relief Services, the Hippodrome Theatre’s transformation into the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center, and the reuse of a handsome retail block on Franklin Street as St. James Place. These projects and many more reflect hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private investment with substantial support from state and federal historic tax credits. However, the real challenge is that redevelopment has taken much longer than envisioned and much of the area, including the Superblock along Lexington Street east of Lexington Market and the Howard Street corridor, is still characterized by vacant buildings and limited street life.

Tour group at the Hippodrome Theatre, West Side Walking Tour

Most recently, Mayor Rawlings-Blake convened a panel from the Urban Land Institute to provide recommendations to jump-start a new phase of revitalization on the West Side. The ULI panel provided preliminary recommendations on December 10, 2010 and final written recommendations from the ULI panel are due to the Mayor in the spring. In one of their most important points, the panel highlighted the West Side’s historic buildings as the area’s greatest asset. Baltimore Heritage is dedicated to supporting a process that can reestablish the West Side as a great Baltimore neighborhood with a distinctive historic character and thriving street life that can attract residents and businesses from across the city and the nation. Our series continues next week with a discussion on the “Superblock” and how historic Lexington Street–formerly known as the heart of downtown–is at the center of this effort to preserve and revitalize the West Side as a great place for Baltimore.

Downtown’s West Side Walking Tour from Lexington Market this Thursday

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The West Side of downtown was in the spotlight last week as the focus of a five-day study by a panel from the national Urban Land Institute (see Saturday’s Baltimore Sun article) convened by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to provide guidance for the area’s ongoing revitalization. The panel presented preliminary recommendations to the Mayor last Friday and emphasized the importance of historic buildings as vital assets for the West Side’s future. Please continue to follow our blog over the next two weeks, as we share a series of posts explaining the history of the West Side preservation and redevelopment effort and a few of the ways this area matters to many people in Baltimore. This series kicks off with a free lunch time walking tour this Thursday, December 16 at 12:15 pm.

Lexington Market, 1903 | courtesy LOC

If you are curious about the history of Baltimore’s West Side and its future, please join us on an informal tour beginning at the east entrance to Lexington Market (Lexington & Eutaw Streets). We’ll look at the  ”Superblock,” historic department stores, cast-iron buildings, and more. It’s likely going to be as cold as all get out, but we’ll walk fast and won’t stay out too long.

West Side Lunchtime Walking Tour | East Entrance to Lexington Market (Lexington & Eutaw Streets)

Fires damage historic buildings in Downtown & Mount Vernon

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Two major fires last night in Downtown Baltimore and in Mount Vernon displaced many businesses & workers and have severely damaged several historic buildings. Thanks to the hard work of the Baltimore City Fire Department and other firefighters from across the region, the fires were contained and there have been no serious injuries reported. The buildings affected by the fires include a small row of theaters built following the 1904 Fire and an 1850s former residence that served as the final home of Baltimore Sun founder, A.S. Abell.

400 block of E. Baltimore Street in 1905, courtesy MHS

See also a 1987 photo & a 2001 photo of the 400 block of East Baltimore Street.

The four damaged buildings from the Downtown fire are located on the north side of the 400 block of East Baltimore Street, including several contributing buildings within the National Register designated Business and Government Historic District. In the late 19th century, these included the German Bank of Baltimore and several commercial buildings which remained up until their destruction by the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. The building at the corner of Baltimore and Holiday Streets was rebuilt in 1908 by Pearce & Schenck as The Grand Theater. Next door, Philadelphia film producer Sidney Lubin established the Lubins Theater which later became the Plaza and, more recently, Gayety Show World.

Mount Vernon looking west down Monument Street, courtesy LOC/Detroit Publishing Co.

The two damaged buildings in Mount Vernon on the west side of the 800 block of North Charles Street are contributing buildings within the Mount Vernon local and National Register designated historic district and date from the early 1850s. The four-story building located at the northwest corner of Charles and Madison Streets is particularly significant as the former residence of A.S. Abell, the founder of the Baltimore Sun. Abell purchased the building from the Kremelberg estate in 1883 and remained in the home  up until his death on April 19, 1888. A 1912 description of the home noted, “The house is a four-story marble and brick building, which included about twenty-five rooms, and a magnificent winding staircase in the center of the dwelling, which towers to the roof, and in itself gives an idea of the elaborateness of the structure.” (More.)

For us at Baltimore Heritage, we are particularly saddened by the damage to the offices of noted preservation architects Murphy & Dittenhafer, located at the top floor of the former A.S. Abell residence, and specifically for our board member Matthew Compton who is an architect with this firm.  As Downtown and Mount Vernon work to recover from these fires, we plan to support efforts to preserve and restore the damaged buildings.

Bittersweet news for the Poe House

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This fall has been bittersweet for Baltimore’s Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. In November, the Poe House was honored by the Maryland Office of Tourism with a 2010 tourism award for its “Nevermore 2009” campaign. The year-long tribute to Poe’s 200th birthday generated $1.9 million in advertising equivalency, over 400 printed articles, and sold out events with people coming from as far away as Europe and Asia.

Unfortunately this fall the Poe House also received news that Baltimore City has decided to no longer provide funding for the city-owned museum. The museum’s sole staff member, director Jeff Jerome, had worked through Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) for nearly three decades. The museum and CHAP are now working to find a solution to keep the building open. They have put out a request for proposals to hire a consultant to develop an operating and financial plan for the long-term sustainability of the museum. The deadline for submissions is in early December and CHAP expects to bring on the consultant in early January 2011.

Good news for friends of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum

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On October 28, the National Park Service officially added the Asylum to the National Register of Historic Places and is featuring the building as the “Weekly Highlight” on the National Register homepage. We were pleased to work with Coppin State University, the building’s owner, to draft and submit the nomination and want to thank all of you who have supported our work.

To stay informed about the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and its future, please become a fan on our new Friends of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum page on Facebook. We would also like to ask you to help us continue our work on the Asylum and in revitalizing historic West Baltimore by supporting Baltimore Heritage. Please consider donating $20 towards our work. It’s tax deductible and we’ll be glad to add you to our email list to find out about our monthly Behind the Scenes tours, spring neighborhood walking tours, and other programs across the city.

Thank you so much for all of your interest and help in preserving this irreplaceable Baltimore landmark. We look forward to sharing more good news in the weeks and months ahead.

Thank you for your support for Baltimore’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum

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This Place Matters: Baltimore's Hebrew Orphan Asylum

The results of the This Place Matters Community Challenge are in and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum landed in the top 10! With 1563 votes we came in 9th place out of 108 contenders nationwide. Congratulations to the winner–the Historic Paramount Theatre in Austin, TX–and thank you to everyone who voted in support of the building.

Special thanks to the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the Coppin Heights CDC, and Coppin State University for joining us in this effort. We also appreciated the great stories from Tim Tooten at WBAL (video), Jacques Kelly at the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Jewish Times, as well as posts on Baltimore Brew and the Baltidome Blog. Friends and neighbors–including the Alliance of Rosemont Community Organizations, the Baltimore National Heritage Area, the Baltimore Red Line, the Evergreen Protective Association, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Temple Oheb Shalom, and Preservation Maryland–generously helped to spread the word across the city.

Although we did not win the $25,000 prize, your support for Baltimore’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum has affirmed our shared commitment to continue the hard work ahead, to preserve the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and restore the building to its historic role as an asset to the community. In the next few weeks, we will follow up with everyone who voted to offer a few suggestions on how you may be able to stay involved with the work to preserve this rare Baltimore landmark.