A Place
to Move About In
1919-1934
B altimore emerged from World War I with its ego wonderfully mended. The city was launched as a modern industrial complex, vital to the American
economy, to whom all the world owed money and brought a tribute of raw materials. Its area had tripled: the annexation of 1918 extended it from thirty square miles to ninety-two square miles, and most of the new belt was as empty and green as Druid Hill Park. As a result of these two changes, Baltimore's self-image took a new turn. Its buoyancy matched the national mood of the '20s. From a population of 729,000, the city expected to reach 1 million by 1930. What Mencken called "the boosters, boomers, go-getters and other such ballyhoo men" were hard at work promoting new product lines in manufacturing and new speculations on the fresh land. In the green annex the factory city and the park city no longer seemed to be in conflict. Industry would be set in a park; workers and neighbors would enjoy "daylight houses" and clean air. The whole city, well planned and well ordered, would be spacious, healthy, and productive. Skyscrapers and smokeless stacks would reach up to where sunshine burst through the clouds. Dirigibles would hang in its skies. European flights would land at a municipal airport built out of the harbor mud off Dundalk. Seaplanes, built in Baltimore, would land in the harbor itself.1 Streams of traffic would flow uninterrupted over handsome viaducts, along elm-lined parkways, and in canyons between sleek rows of skyscrapers. Even when the boosting, the booming, the go-getting, and the ballyhoo suddenly quieted, when construc tion stopped and the factories laid off workers by the thousands, Baltimore pursued its agenda, like a mirage on the horizon, while more and more Balti- moreans echoed Mencken's question, "In what way, precisely, has the average Baltimorean benefitted by the great growth of the city during the past ten years ?~~2
A nnexation came with a whoosh. The pressure for Lebensraum in the old city could be released into the new territory. The city was suddenly rich in space. In the new annex there were two thousand people per square mile, whereas in the 1888 annex there were already twelve thousand per square mile, in the old city limits thirty-tour thousand, and in the pre-1816 core (Fells Point, Oldtown, the inner harbor) there were fifty thousand-twenty-five times the density. At first nothing happened. War priorities were followed by shortages
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of materials, erratic prices, and land speculations.3 But in the mid-20s construc tion hit a peak of 6,000 houses a year, double any previous peaks. By the time it dropped back down (only 119 houses were built in 1934!), the effects were substantial. Population had doubled in the new annex and had dropped by half in the core. A clear pattern was visible that would be repeated in the next genera tion: thinning the old city and filling the new. But the filling would never reach previous densities.
Lower-density development permitted changes in the types of houses built. Frame houses were allowed in the annex. Builders, pressed by the city code, adopted wider frontages, which would admit daylight into all houses, whether rows, semidetached, or detached. Two-story porch-front rows were developed in new sections of West Baltimore. By 1930 there were several thousand in Rose- mont and in the Hilton Avenue section, between Edmondson and Frederick Road. The average price of new houses doubled, and the builders aimed at a broad middle-class market, including the best-paid manufacturing workers. The price of land began to represent a larger share of the cost of a home, while the average household was smaller than before. Middle-class areas had wider lots, and the alleys were lined with garages. The most elegant neighborhoods had driveways and curving streets. The Roland Park Company opened Homeland on the Perine estate, and George R. Morris developed Ashburton on the 165-acre Gittings estate. Apartment houses were promoted between Guilford and the Johns Hopkins campus: the twelve-story Greenway, the Warrington Apartments, and the Ambassador.
The wealthy were moving out. From Eutaw Place old Mr. Strouse moved into the Riviera to die, and Manuel Hendler, the ice cream magnate, took his paintings six blocks up to a mansion on Lake Drive. Shaarei Tfjloh congregation built on Auchentoroly Terrace facing Druid Hill Park. Before the war, 60 percent of Social Register or "black book" families still lived on Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill, 8 percent in Roland Park, and most of the others somewhere in between. By 1932, only a third lived in Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill; nearly
City Hall Plaza before the construction of the War Memorial to the east was the site of this peace celebration following World War I. The temporary decorations included potted plants and brilliant strings of lights.303
half lived in the Roland Park Company suburbs of Roland Park, Guilford, and Homeland, or along University Parkway. "It is no idle jest that Baltimore Society is moving farther and farther out and from all signs soon there will be no more Baltimore society, literally speaking, as everyone will live in the country."4 Green Spring, Worthington, and Dulaney valleys were the most popular, accord ing to the Sun society editor. The way of life there was described as health giving, and the children of the Obers and Ridgleys "can sit a horse as well as their parents by the time they are eight or nine." Ironically, however, the car was essential to the "horsey" set; "Most of the people who live out there have two or more cars."5
Institutions moved as well. The Sulpicians removed their younger sem inarians from the "blighted district" of St. Mary's to Roland Park. The "March violets" of St. Francois de Sales moved their convent and Academy of the Visitation. As investment sought the annex, property in the old city tended to depreciate. "The three-story houses of the last generation grow shabbier and shabbier. . . . Nearly everywhere speculators are converting them into walk ups."6 Commercial uses squeezed out downtown residents, and where residents left a vacuum, businesses sprouted. The car dealers' yards crept northward. "With the invasion of Charles Street, above the Monument, by store fronts of protean and appalling hideousness, the old Baltimore bids us goodbye." The "crest, apex, and masterpiece" of this, in Mencken's eyes, was the filling station at North Avenue.7
Industrially, Baltimore grew in the '20s by capturing its share of the nation's new branch plants. The strategy devised in about 1913 by Griswold, Warfield, Wood, and Aldred-the bankers, steel men, and utilities directors-was to attract outside capital and pursue a full integration of Baltimore into the national economy. The Industrial Factory Site Commission had published maps of sites and rail spurs, a guidebook, an interindustry analysis, a bird's-eye view, a model, and even a movie of the port of Baltimore. All of this paid off in the 1920s in new large manufacturing plants. Lever Brothers Gold Dust Twins built a soap factory at Canton, while its rival, Proctor and Gamble Ivory, built at Locust Point. In the inner harbor, Coca-Cola built a bottling plant and McCormick Spice built at Light and Barre streets. Their rivals, Crosse and Blackwell, built at Canton. Montgomery Ward purchased a site across Monroe Street from Carroll Park for a mail-order operation. Stieff Silver built at the Cedar Avenue bridge. All were substantial sites of ten to twenty acres, and were built on a standard plan of reinforced concrete with walls of glass windows in metal frames. All were relatively clean industries, and the outsides had a whitewashed look. Montgomery Ward and Stieff's were built to face on public parkland. In floor space they were as big as the garment factories of the last generation. Montgomery Ward was a solid eight stories tall, 340 by 400 feet, McCormick's was eight stories, Coca-Cola twelve. But in terms of labor force, these companies operated at only a third or half the density of garment factories. They ran 500 to 1200 workers, or only 50, 100, or 200 people per acre of land,
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comparable to the new residential densities. The decompression of industrial sites arose from the attempt to save labor. Baltimore's new plants in the mid-20s were investing $2,000 for each job created, while the older firms, trying to raise productivity and reduce their work force, invested $6,000 for each job they added. The substitution of power machinery for human labor implied deploy ment in larger spaces. The larger the sites needed and the lower the density of workers on the site, the more appealing were sites farther away from the center, on cheaper land. Consequently the Canton Company, whose land stretched east beyond the city line, was the industrial matchmaker. In this, the company's fifth generation, it finished selling off the industrial land that it had originally reserved. The Canton Railroad was the spine for extension east of Sixteenth Street. The company sold 47 acres to Standard Sanitary, 66 acres to Eastern Rolling mill, and land for expansion of older enterprises. Crown Cork and Seal and Standard Oil, for example, each had a site of 125 acres. The most important new site was Western Electric's 125 acres, planned in one fell swoop. It was formerly the Riverview amusement park, on the waterfront between Canton and Sparrows Point. The fifty buildings, $22 million worth, from one to eight stories high, were grouped in a parklike setting. Western Electric was the epitome of the clean, ultramodern, spread-out industry.
Industrial development spread still farther. At Curtis Bay the work force did not grow in the '20s, although buildings were added at Davison, Glidden, and U.S. Industrial Alcohol, and the industrial spaces there formed an imposing landscape. At Sparrows Point (2200 acres) the work force was reduced after World War I, while production rose. A new rod and wire mill supplied Anchor Fence, and a larger tin mill supplied the can companies. City representatives were trying to bring the Glenn L. Martin Company of Cleveland into a 200-acre site beyond Riverview, adjoining the proposed airport on the Dundalk water front. Offended by high-pressure selling tactics, the volatile Martin selected a vast site of 1200 acres (nearly two square miles) at Middle River. There, beyond any municipal meddling, he could develop his own airport and spread out some of the world's most gigantic one-story industrial buildings.
Services, private and public, had to spread out to follow the people. Per sonnel had to be deployed over a larger area, and capital investment had to be increased to save labor. The fire department had doubled the number of com panies and tripled the staff since the great fire. A fleet of ambulances was added. A scavenger vehicle drove 100 miles a day collecting dead animals. A hundred public health nurses pounded the pavements to make home visits. There were thirty-six thousand streetlights to service. Inspectors of food stores had to cover 92 square miles. Charitable institutions sought greener sites farther from the center and adopted the cottage system for housing their patients. Consistent with the idea that the whole city was a park, public services landscaped their property or located new facilities in the parks. Swimming pools were built in Druid Hill and Riverside parks, with night lighting and a sand beach. A stadium was built in record time to hold the army-navy game of 1922. A
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million-dollar art museum was built on land donated from the Hopkins campus and overlooking Wyman Park. Six buildings were laid out for a million-dollar hospital for communicable diseases on water department land overlooking Lake Montebello. The new municipal office building, central police station, and fire department headquarters were grouped round a plaza or "civic center" in front of the War Memorial hall. All of these projects, including the landscaping ideas and grand Greek facades for the art museum, stadium, and civic center, were conceived by the Municipal Arts Society a generation earlier.
The schools were disgracefully backward, and an impressive school-building program was likewise based on the perceived lag. The new educational philosophy and program adopted in the prewar generation had not yet been translated into brick and mortar. In 1921 the city commissioned the Strayer School Survey.5 Its three volumes comprise the most important single planning document of the generation. It had the virtue, unlike other public plans, of a powerful shock to the public conscience through its photographs of grim base ment toilets, shedlike wooden "fire escapes," and hundreds of children packed into standing-room-only schoolyards. The report put into words the smell of outdoor privies, the memory of ill-ventilated classrooms heated by coal stoves, the eyestrain of classes facing windows or dependent on gaslight at midday. The study put Baltimore "on the educational map." The National Education Association cooperated in the study and publicized the results as a model of self-criticism that other cities should imitate. The shock waves produced public support for three large school loans in the '30s, totaling $32 million. Fifteen new schools were built. Operating budgets and salaries were increased, and resignations checked. Citizens like Mrs. Marie Bauernschmidt, through organiza tions such as the Public School Association, pressed the bosses to rid the schools of politics. "Mrs. B," who had known the Padgetts, Sonny Mahon, and Frank Kelly in her husband's brewery business, moved from traditional charitable work-the babies' milk fund and children's hospital-deeper into politics, and took on the bosses. She employed radio appeals on election eve, and, occasionally, blackmail.
The new schools, like the new factories, were larger and more spacious. The new junior high or combined junior-senior high schools were designed for 2000 to 2500 pupils, elementary schools for 850. These norms survived into the
1970s. An ornamental staircase, a marble trim course, or finials embellished what was otherwise the contemporary three-story, brick and reinforced concrete factory building. The new schools had built into them the philosophy of health and productivity. Playgrounds were added, and lawns, landscaping, and the flagpole. Several were set in parks, notably Montebello School, Clifton Park High School, and Forest Park High School. Frederick Douglass High School was of great symbolic importance as the first colored high school built to contem porary standards. All the new buildings were fully modern in terms of electricity, daylight design, central steam heat, and multiple stairways for quick egress.
iThe design for the new school on Locust Point embodied the strategy of processing the great unwashed and Americanizing the foreign-born worker. It
was situated opposite Latrobe Park and designed to be convertible for light manufacturing. The standard twenty-four classrooms occupied only a third of the building. An equal portion was occupied by new kinds of space for newer programs-kindergartens, auditorium, shops for wood and metal working. The children would be prepared to transfer to the factory when they finished grade 6. The other third of the building was devoted to the healthy body-a suite for doctor, dentist, and nurses, the lunchroom, gymnasium, health classroom, and showers for boys and girls, with flush toilets and drinking fountains throughout.9
Thanks to child labor and school laws of the last generation, school population increased faster than the total population. From ninety-seven thousand in 1919, the pupil population reached a peak of one hundred twenty-eight thousand in 1934, then leveled off. The number of high school pupils doubled. Consequently, the construction of fifteen schools plus substantial additions and repairs did not allow the school commissioners to retire the backward facilities featured in the Strayer report.
The Catholic schools went through the same revolution. Michael Curley, archbishop between 1921 and 1939, is chiefly remembered for his school program. Parochial grade school enrollments rose from thirty-two thousand to fifty-four thousand, and their high school enrollment increased fivefold. (They had formerly depended upon private Catholic high schools for the small per centage who continued.) The archbishop raised $30 million, comparable to the public school investment: Catholics paid twice. Catholics were represented on the public school board, and there was a tacit understanding that the two systems would not undercut each other. The archbishop and Governor Ritchie
In July 1922, the Fordson Industrial Show displayed mechanized equipment- largely useful in agriculture- in the center of Market Place. That same area was rediscovered in the 19705 as the site of weekly farmers' markets.
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both opposed federal aid to the schools; they were for local control and local financing. As the archbishop argued in every parish, in every public meeting, at every choice point, "God wants the school."10
The trends in education matched the trends in work and home: more space per person and more capital per person. Space embodied capital. By 1934 the accumulated per-pupil investment in the public schools was $380, or four times the level of 1918. Like the factory buildings and the homes, it was all borrowed money. The social order of debtor and creditor relationships was translated into grass, concrete, and marble. "Nowhere else in the world, at home or abroad, have I ever found so many shades of green, or so much lushness, or so caressing a rural quiet and peace, or so eloquent an invitation to lie down under a tree and snooze away an afternoon."11 Baltimore had rediscovered its Maryland land scape, but wanted to furnish and reorganize it, to spread out under the trees. Even the new police headquarters in the center of town included an immense gymnasium on its top floor, and the lions in the Druid Hill Park zoo were trans ferred from their smelly, cramped, wooden cages into spacious, easy-to-clean, cement lairs.
T he spread of urban activities onto more generous spaces, coupled with larger scale and more intense specialization to get higher labor productivity, meant there had to be decided increases of traffic. Within the factory the flow of goods had to be speeded up, and more space had to be assigned to moving things between work stages, between buildings, and between plants. Investments had to be made in hauling capacity, communications systems, and regulatory mechanisms to keep flows synchronized. New levels of supervision had to be introduced, and a larger share of personnel assigned to moving things, scheduling, meshing the larger number of specialized operations, and resolving the "jams" produced when things got "out of sync." The smooth flow of traffic became the governing principle of planning: adjusting capacities of new facilities to one another and minimizing resistance, obstruction, or turbulence.
Several of the solid technical achievements and money makers of Baltimore industry in the '20s illustrate the overriding importance of smooth flow. Jacob Blaustein in 1923 began selling his new Orange Gas. Most manufacturers added tetraethyl lead to prevent knocking, but American instead added one-third benzol. Benzol was a by-product of the Bethlehem coke ovens, processed at the Koppers plant. In order to insure smooth flow of his product to the market, Blaustein contracted with Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company (Edward Doheny) for supply from Venezuela via a refinery on Aruba Island. American Oil also built a substantial refinery in Baltimore to make asphalt from Mexican crude oil, and acquired control of Crown Central Petroleum and moved its offices to Baltimore.
Bartlett-Hayward, the country's biggest manufacturer of gasholders, bought patent rights to the waterless gasholder.12 An old-fashioned gasholder was like a huge cup upside down in a pan of water. It was on "lifts" so that the cup could be extended or telescoped according to how much gas was being stored, but the pressure varied. In the waterless device, pressure could be held constant, as it
-Å_ _ In the 1920s, crowds celebrated the opening of a swimming pool in Patterson Park.
should be to maintain a constant-pressure flow of gas to metropolitan consumers. It was an instant success; the company sold one hundred in the first ten years and made new improvements in 1932. The articulation of parts was refined with the object of maintaining the most perfect constancy of pressure and flow. On the strength of this patent, the Koppers Company of Pittsburgh, already producers of coal, tar, gas, and pistons, bought Bartlett-Hayward.
The other great success of Bartlett-Hayward in this generation was the Fast Self-Aligning Coupling.13 The mechanical problem was to connect shafts that were not in perfect alignment. The coupling device, a sleeve with gear teeth that meshed with the teeth on the two shafts, solved the problem for tiny machines as well as for the huge power drives found at Westport generating station or in diesel ships. The mesh took place in an oil bath. Power was trans mitted through the film of oil, so that in spite of the misalignment or varying alignment of the rotating shafts, there was little wear on the teeth, and the couplings lasted for years.
More power required moving materials, and to increase material flows and make them more reliable, more power had to be consumed. The Standard Oil
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pier at Baltimore could discharge six thousand barrels of crude oil per hour. It received a steamer of Mexican crude oil each day, and loaded 100 tank cars of refined products. It had its own distribution fleet of oil trucks and a fleet of Chesapeake Bay oil boats. The new B&O grain elevators used a loop of track:
the empty cars rolled downhill, 115 a day. The grain, dumped automatically into pits, was carried by belt conveyors to twenty "elevator legs," where it was raised 206 feet to run down into storage tanks. When it was reloaded into ships, it was carried on grain galleries, or overhead belt conveyors 4 feet wide. Next door, at the new sugar refinery, a reverse flow of traffic was developed: each day a steamerload of sugar cane arrived, and 70 railroad cars of sugar were shipped inland. The volumes were all mechanically weighed and measured; "No human hand touches the sugar."14 The recipe for a pound of refined sugar called for a quarter pound of coal and a gallon of clean water. So the refinery became the city's largest single consumer of water (2 million gallons a day), and the mains had to be rebuilt. At the Westport electric generating plant, cooling water was pumped directly from the harbor (30 million gallons a day), while coal was supplied by a system of 240-foot towers, much like the grain galleries. Traveling cranes could unload three hundred tons an hour (a four-ton coal car was dumped in four seconds), and automatic scales and stokers fed the coal into the furnaces while automatic regulators and pumps fed the water to the fifty-two boilers. The various water, steam, and hot water pipes were color coded for quick repair, and critical feed systems were duplicated to increase reliability of the overall system and insure flow.15
The continuous flow of gas and electric energy required large spaces and intense capitalization at specialized production sites like Westport and the Canton gasworks, but it allowed users to economize space, capital, and labor. Hutzler's converted its former boiler rooms and coal bins into a bargain base ment. The Belvedere Hotel modernized its kitchens. The Sun used gas to melt typemetal for stereotype plates on new high-speed rotary presses. Smaller enterprises adopted the electric candy pot and the electric enameling furnace. Cleanliness was made possible by getting rid of the coal dust, so by about 1924 there was a visible change in the style of work places. Basements and industrial shops were redone in white tile and electric lighting. Granaries were designed
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with smooth surfaces and no ledges. Dust control reduced the hazards of explo sions and fires, and there were sliding poles for workers to escape.
The feedback is apparent: the more effectively and cheaply flows were sustained, the greater could be the decentralization of enterprise in the urban space. And the more people and activities were spread out, the greater the flows became, and the greater the demand for their reliability. One can also see the interaction of the several subsystems-water supply, electric power, rail roads-carloads downhill and ships outbound, ships inbound and carloads uphill. The whole region can be seen as a single system, operating with as much gravity flow as nature would permit. Oliver Evans's gravity-flow flour mill was expanded to the scale of the metropolitan region. In each subsystem the attempt was made to bring the operation into balance, to maintain reciprocal flows or circuits. The electric power grid, for example, was improved in this generation. The two major power stations were functioning during the war: at Holtwood dam a share of the immense flow of the Susquehanna River was converted into electric power transmitted at 70,000 volts to Highlandtown. In the early '20s the "ring" was completed around Baltimore, so that all parts of the metropolitan region could be supplied through underground cables and cables under the harbor. Power generated from water and from coal were complementary sources. With the cooperation of Governor Ritchie, Frank Furst, and the Baltimore Sun, the Con solidated Gas and Electric Company of Baltimore arranged with its Philadelphia counterpart a division of territory confirming the system boundary. The Pennsyl vania Railroad interests built the Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna. Consoli dated was protected by an agreement that none of the power would be distributed to Baltimore consumers for fifty years. The Pennsylvania Corporation did not pay any taxes to the State of Maryland, but the state received a toll-free bridge on top of the dam, Furst's Arundel Corporation got a $20 million construction contract, and the Union Trust Company received a share of the deposits.16 Simultaneously, the state bought the older "gold mine" bridge upstream and generously paid off the capitalized value of projected future tolls. (Its owners had originally invested $700 capital.)17
Gas distribution was improved in much the same way, by adding gas mains across the Patapsco to Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. A line was run to pipe by products from the Continental Oil refinery at Curtis Bay to the Spring Garden gas plant. The municipal water system was expanded and integrated. The Loch Raven dam of 1915 was raised from 188 feet to a height of 240 feet, drowning the villages of Warren and Phoenix and increasing storage tenfold. A "balancing reservoir was added to equalize the pressures on the tunnel between Loch Raven and Montebello.
Plans to expand port facilities led to discussions of the total gravity system of flows and the problem of coordinating rail and steamship traffic. The new harbor development commission (1920) emphasized the port itself as coupling. "A port may be considered a mechanism for accomplishing the interchange of freight between land and water carriers."18 Baltimore was known as a "railroad port" since most of the docks were owned by the three major railroads, which provided free ship terminals to attract freight. The city envisioned a new group
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In 1922, the completed American Sugar Company refinery complex showed the coordinated transportation advantages of the water, rail, road, and streetcar. The site, directly south of Fells Point, was convenient to the labor supply.of piers in McComas Street as a "union terminal" of the three railroads jointly. The choice among expansion at McComas Street or filling the Patapsco mud flats or developing lower Canton eastward involved a tug of war among the three railroads as well as among the several sets of landowners. The upshot was that the city invested $8 million in McComas Street piers and then leased the piers to the adjoining Western Maryland Railroad. The most pressing need, recognized but not achieved in this generation, was "Unification of the Control and Opera tion of the Port."'9 The city hinted that it would force the B&O and the Western Maryland into reciprocal switching "between the yards or tracks of one railroad to the piers and terminals of another railroad." A related management problem was the need for an outer belt line or cutoff with sorting yards. If through rail traffic could be diverted, the Howard Street tunnel could become a backbone of a rapid transit system. This scheme, too, foundered on the stubborn ness of the railroads. Their rivalries and external considerations were a perennial obstacle to joint operations.
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Plans for a municipal airport were tied to harbor development. Logan Field, the existing airport, belonged to a real estate subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel at St. Helena, and sufficed for the two or three flights a day in 1928. But Mayor Broening's vision of international flights, dirigibles, and an airplane industry called for a more ambitious plan, a starlike pattern of landing strips 2500 feet long in eight directions on 1000 acres off Dundalk. Half would be built up on submerged land from dredging spoils. A new Riverview anchorage would require dredging 8 million cubic yards, and more ambitious plans for deeper channels would require dredging 27 million yards at federal expense. Charles Goob, Broening's engineer, considered the anchorage spoils to be good fill material with 20 percent moisture content. "This material becomes very hard very quickly when exposed to the air, and when placed in a large fill will become firm within a reasonable length of time."20 Airport costs were figured between $3 million and $6 million for land acquisition, fill, and bulkhead. Technical problems and costs were grossly underestimated, and Baltimore's gigantic mud pie became an embarrassment, along with the Orleans Street viaducts proposed by the same administration. Mencken fumed, "All of these projects have three things in common: they were all launched by real estate speculators, they are all com pletely unnecessary, and they will all cost a great deal more in the long run than they seemed likely to cost at the start."21
But what about the banana peels, the crabshells, and the clinkers? The solid waste disposal system had been neglected. Garbage, ashes, and street dirt increased somewhat faster than population. The city was annually collecting half a million cubic yards of ashes and rubbish, plus the "wet" garbage. The radial growth of the city and the lower density of settlement increased the distances garbage had to be hauled in collection, the distances to which it had to be removed to satisfy public sensibilities, and consequently the costs. The city had experimented with feeding, burning, and cooking garbage. It had switched back and forth between public and private management. Each contractor promised the city a cheaper solution, but each was after a larger profit. The improvements of the early '20s were intended to take advantage of economies of gravity and natural recycling. Seven hundred city employees with mules carted the refuse downhill to assembly points, where they transferred the garbage to motor trucks that hauled it down to the harbor. From the docks the garbage was barged to Graveyard Point (Bodkin Creek), eleven miles downstream. There it would be fed to fifteen thousand pigs. The solution had financial appeal: the piggery contractor would pay for the garbage, and the city would turn a profit. The city bought the 160 acres, built the wharf, handled the barging, and employed a veterinarian. The pigs were housed at about the same density as people in the center city, sixty thousand per square mile. They were served on concrete feeding floors by an oil locomotive dump car. Each hog could convert twenty-five pounds of garbage to a pound of pork a day. The price of the garbage was pegged to the price of pork. This happy rural solution delighted the urban taxpayers until the piggery contractor reached the first slaughter season, abandoned the piggery, and disappeared with fifteen thousand dollars.22
In 1924 a steam shovel speeded construction of the Tyson
Street Electric Substation.
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a ~r2 T he increase of automobiles was more impressive than any other type ofThe next solution, "more permanent," involved the national garbage syndicate. The contractor built a reduction plant on Bodkin Creek, cooked the garbage into grease, and sold it to the soap companies. The city used the ashes to fill in ravines and built two incinerators to handle rubbish.
traffic. Cars ran on roads, and in spite of their speed, their adaptability to moderate grades, and individual ownership and operation, auto traffic in the '20s added up to a rigid, specialized, and integrated subsystem with many of the properties of the rail, cable, and pipeline systems. The automobile was a marvel for covering the generous distances of the spread-out city, but it nevertheless aggravated congestion and competition for space.
The number of automobiles in Maryland tripled, from a hundred thousand in 1920 to three hundred thousand in 1940. At least half were in the Baltimore region. By 1930 there were only five thousand horses left in the city limits. The horseshoers and livery stables had been eliminated. Wagon peddlers were down to fifteen hundred and were confined to the inner city, essentially their old radius of operation. The horse was not efficient for long distances and low densities of population. The piedmont landscape provided strenuous rolling terrain, and in the tidewater landscape the branching roads onto the necks exaggerated the distances to be covered. The fire department sold its last horse in 1919. The post office substituted motor trucks for both horses and streetcars, and installed drive-up mail boxes at curbs. The gas and electric company built a garage for three hundred company cars. Apartment houses built garages: the Ambassador housed two hundred cars for its 125 apartments. Cars were used for trips to the beach, and the city developed Fort Smallwood bathing beach. In 1930 the city had 929 miles of streets, about 50 percent more than at the end of the war, and virtually all of it was smooth paved: there were only twenty-four miles of cobblestones left.
Congestion was, as always, most acute at the center. A downtown area brand new in 1906 did not yet need to be rebuilt. But the decompression of the city-its more rapid expansion in area than population-aggravated the traffic problem downtown. The central business district had a much smaller residential or nighttime population than before, but continued to pack in higher densities in the daytime. A few prestige skyscrapers and highly specialized buildings were added. One of the first was the fourteen-story Southern Hotel on the site of the old Fountain Hotel on Light Street. Some moved away from the original and most congested district, creating new small centers of congestion around them. Mutual Life Insurance moved from South Street to a five-story building at Charles and Chase streets near the Belvedere Hotel, and Maryland Casualty moved out to Roland Avenue and Fortieth Street. Standard Oil moved up St. Paul Street, its towers facing Preston gardens. The tallest and most solid was the $3 million thirty-two-story Baltimore Trust Company building, bounded by Light Street, Baltimore Street, and Redwood Street. Its internal circulation was a micromodel of the downtown problem itself. All had the finished sobriety and incised or chiseled look of the best factory buildings-smooth, avoiding dust.
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They were modeled after New York City. Mencken remained skeptical, feeling that skyscrapers were a mistake: "There was never any need of them here. .
Wasting millions on such follies is a kind of confession that Baltimore is inferior to New York, and should hump itself to catch up."23 No true Baltimorean, he said, believed that. He knows the difference between a provincial capital and a national metropolis. "He lives in Baltimore because he prefers Baltimore. One of its greatest charms, in his eyes, is that it is not New York."
The problem of parking cars in the central district became urgent. In 1923 Charles Scull, chairman of the board of U.S. Fidelity & Guarantee Company, proposed the solution preferred for the next fifty years: stacking the cars.24 His design for four-story cement parking garages already incorporated the esthetic contradiction of garage design: the problem of combining sloping ramps
This northward view shows the results of a 1915 renewal effort. Preston Gardens relieved the congestion of buildings, while a modern street system accommodated increased traffic.
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with the rectangular framing of horizontal floors and vertical structural supports. It also incorporated the economic contradiction: a parking space would cost about $800, roughly the value of the car itself. The absolute values have changed, but the equivalence remains in the 1970s. A thousand-car garage appeared self-financing, but the more effectively garage building solved the parking problem, the more cars would come downtown, and the more land value would increase. The very success would add to the cost of another garage, and to congestion in the streets.
Most intractable was the effect of the automobile on public transit. Again a vicious circle was apparent. Immediately after the war, patronage began to drop, while inflation pushed up wages. Raising fares to seven cents caused patronage to fall further. The transit company tried "trackless trolleys" on Liberty Road, double-decker buses on Charles Street, and a line of buses on East Fayette Street. It retired the funeral car, the post office cars, and the payroll car, and closed Riverview Park. The form of the street railway system, traced on the form of the city's street space, reflected the differences of density. Service in the suburbs was sparse, with few routes and infrequent cars or skip-stop service, and therefore unattractive to the residents, who had plenty of space to house their automobiles. Lines to suburbs like Guilford and Homeland operated at a loss, and were subsidized by inner-city riders. But dense and frequent service in the center was impeded by the flood of automobiles that poured in from the lower-density surroundings. The streets were "clogged up" with passenger vehicles parked all day. Consultants in 1923 argued that space essential for commercial vehicles, the city's "lifeblood," had been "usurped," and congestion was worse than before the fire and the widenings.25 In the morning rush hour, ten thousand people arrived in five thousand cars, while fifty thousand people arrived in a thousand streetcars. "Whose convenience then should be first con sidered, the fifty-four riding in a streetcar or the two riding in an automobile?"26
The physical squeeze and a capital squeeze worked together. The company was burdened by exceedingly high fixed costs, and declining revenues forced it to try to save on labor. The Brill cars in the basic fleet were usually operated by two people, motorman and conductor. The company now bought a hundred streetcar "trailers" so that a motorman and a ticket taker on the rear platform could together handle a double carload of passengers. The next innovation was the articulated unit or double streetcar. The company also tried the Birney cars, which had no rear doors: the motorman took tickets and made change, but the congestion in entering the car increased the time it took to discharge and load passengers at each stop, adding to congestion in the downtown streets. Gradually the capital squeeze grew worse. Because the Public Service Commis sion allowed a return no higher than 6.26 percent on the streetcar monopoly, the bonds were "watered," and 6.26 percent was paid on "paper assets" or face value of more than $100 million. When in 1928 the courts evaluated the real assets at only $75 million (still generous), the market value of the stock dropped, and new capital became scarce.
The city's advisory engineers at the end of this period pointed to the chief source of urban problems as a mathematical formula most citizens learned in the
seventh grade: the area of a circle equals ~r2. As the radius of the urban circle was extended, its area was extended much more rapidly, proportionate to the square of the radius.27 Because the streetcar and the automobile had each in turn shortened the time it took to travel a mile, vast areas had been brought closer to the center, and the effective radius of a reasonable trip to work or a trip down town had doubled or tripled, and the area opened for development grew four fold or ninefold. When the legislature passed the Annexation Act of 1918, it fired the starter pistol in a race to realize this potential. But the runners had to run faster and faster: the spreading city required more intense traffic, congestion was felt in all systems of movement, most acute at the center-in the smallest circle-and demands were again generated to cut travel time and travel cost, extend the radius, and spread the city further.
T he discovery of bottlenecks to proper flow led to a demand for planning. The two aspects of planning required for the war effort were recognized as essential to the postwar metropolis: a larger role for municipal and state govern ment, and an ordering of priorities. Baltimore had always had fierce discussion of its large projects and a wish book of unfulfilled projects for the future. But these projects were not ordered or scheduled in relation to one another. Since the major changes in the city were lower-density city building and increased traffic flow, one might expect that city planning would focus on these two problems.
The theory and rhetoric of urban planning in Baltimore unfolded out of annexation. The Topographical Survey was set to work to provide a detailed relief map of the annex.25 On that map the survey would then develop a street plan. Water mains, sewers, gas mains, and electrical conduits would be built into the streets. For the first time, forecasting was emphasized. Efficiency and economy in providing the services depended upon an accurate forecast of population densities.29 The city was, in fact, experiencing difficulties maintaining water pressure in tall buildings on high ground. It had had to replace water mains to service a seven-story apartment on Upland Avenue. Lot coverage affected the
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design of storm sewers and the branching of streets. Efficient systems of sewers, gas and water mains, and wires implied a consistent ordering of sizes. Control over density of population would yield the essential data for calculating the sizes of sewers and mains.
Making a plan for the annex led to more comprehensive planning. A City Plan Commission, a Public Improvements Commission, and a Port Development Commission were appointed. Within two years the procedure and main features were framed. A zoning ordinance was passed and a general street plan adopted. The Strayer school survey was reported, a traffic study was made for the first time, and a new recreation study was commissioned from the Olmsted firm. These studies provided an orderly agenda for two generations of public improve ments.
The objective of the zoning plan was to regulate densities. Following the lead of other cities, Baltimore mapped the city according to a triple classification:
building height zones, land use zones, and zones for the number of dwelling units permitted per residential acre. A characteristic feature of planning was hierarchy, or a system of nested restrictions. The "highest" class of land, for example, permitted only single detached dwellings, the second class allowed those and also row houses, a third class allowed all of those types and apartments as well. The height zones created an interesting hierarchy of design, because heights were expressed in terms of the relation between building height and street width. The "21/2 Times" district coincided with the downtown high- pressure water service for fire fighting. (Fire protection was the legal basis for zoning.) The "2 Times" district matched existing apartment neighborhoods on wide streets like Eutaw, Charles, and University Parkway, facing parks. "11/2 Times" districts allowed loft factories, and "1 Times" districts were generally three-story neighborhoods, but might allow buildings to run up to five stories on wide streets. The lowest "forty-foot" zone was much like the city's ancient fire- ladder rule, permitting two to three and a half stories. The law did not, there fore, forbid mixing various uses or heights or densities of development. Dwellings could be built in business zones, and businesses in industrial zones, but the reverse was not allowed: industries could not be built in business zones, nor business in residential zones. In theory, this protected the highest u~e value-the home-against the encroachment of business and industry. The Zoning Commission was definitely opposed, for reasons of fire hazard, to homes over groceries. A tenth of the buildings in the city were of this type. "People should live in the country or suburban parts of town for the sake of health."10 But in practice, industry and business were mapped out very generously. Whole neighborhoods were classified for industry and thereafter left without sewers, storm drains, or code enforcement on the assumption that they would sooner or later be torn down for industrial expansion. Since industry could pay more for land than most home buyers, the hierarchy of market values was quite the reverse: industry chose first, business second, and home builders third.
Riverview Park and Pier had already passed its heyday inThe Zoning Commission had no mandate to change the developed city. Its job, like Poppleton's a hundred years earlier, was to define and coordinate future improvement, in order to permit development of the highest possible
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property values. That meant a cautious, legalistic, and politically acceptable juggling of present and future interests in property. The owner of a store or stable in a residential zone was allowed to keep operating his business as a zoning exception. To protect his future interest in the property, he could sell the business for the same use, indefinitely. The purpose of public zoning, like the private zoning of the Roland Park Company or the Canton Company, was to confirm and protect the existing structure of property values.
T he other concern of city planning was traffic flow. The mayor's charge to the Annex Plan Commission was to develop "a connected community." "Cities have spread, pushing their existing street systems over hills and valleys with a magnificent disregard of man and nature."31 The new theory was to develop the city as "a place to move about in," truly a marketplace. "To say that city planning is a traffic problem is as truthful a generalization as may be made."32 As in zoning, there would be a ranking imposed: several classes of streets with different capacities. Projects would be scheduled in relation to one another. The plan gave first importance to arteries radiating from the city. Because widening the built-up radials was so expensive, new ones were opened: Walther Avenue, Hillen Road, Loch Raven Boulevard, and The Alameda. Most were designed without car tracks. Their curves indicate the changed esthetic, conformity to piedmont topography, the capabilities of the automobile, and above all the difficulty of threading new roads through districts already developed. Of next importance were laterals to connect the arteries, for example, the Cold Spring Lane "inner belt" and an "outer belt" formed by Lake Avenue, Belvedere, and Northern Parkway.~3 Branching off from the radials and laterals was a fine net work of minor streets. To make the plan adaptable over a long future, "elastic streets" were proposed. Wide rights of way would be acquired: "Grass, hedges, flower beds and trees may be used to beautify the right of way or to screen in car tracks and wires." In ten or twenty years, when repaving would be necessary, the parks could be removed and the full width developed. "Then the metamor phosis will be gradual and economical. During the changing process, such streets will be attractive. After the transition they will be adequate and highly
The Age of Viaducts
efficient. . . . At all times their property values will be stable and thereby conserved.~~a4
Highway planning spilled over municipal boundaries. Developing the radials required cooperation with surrounding counties and state government. The automobile offered a springboard for extraordinary growth of state government. It offered, as city street making had in the 1890s, opportunities for state spending and patronage hiring. More wonderful, it also offered revenues such as gasoline and motor vehicle taxes and tolls to support the operation, sufficiently elastic to secure massive loans. The state developed the planning initiative of which the counties were incapable, and created structures for obtaining their cooperation through state matching funds. Road making provided new windfalls for private profit and permitted the revival of the Maryland tradition of close-woven private and public enterprise. An automobile ferry across Chesapeake Bay got under way with the backing of a former governor and New York financiers: they then stood in the way of bridge proposals. To satisfy political pressures from all parts of the state, the tendency was to develop secondary roads for local traffic and neglect primary roads for through traffic. Cram Highway was the first wholly new primary route laid out. U.S. 1 toward Washington and Philadelphia was modernized. It was a good example of the impulse to growth: the more roads were improved, the more cars they carried, and the more roads were wanted. In 1925 the road to Washington, twenty feet wide, was carrying six thousand cars a day. Ten years later, twice as wide, it was carrying three times as many cars, and a plan was hatching to rebuild it again. But the greater traffic raised land values and pushed up the cost of the next widening. Where formerly land owners had donated rights of way, it now became necessary for the state to pay for land.a5
The convergence of all these streams of traffic on the city center refocused attention on the old intractable problem of downtown thoroughfares. A $6 million loan was authorized for the extension of Howard Street and an east-west viaduct. Both illustrated the problem of redevelopment. Threading new streets through intensely developed property could only be done at great expense and "in 3-D."
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The viaduct idea was seized upon as a solution. Howard Street would have to be threaded east of Richmond Market and west of Mount Royal Station; it would have to go under Mount Royal Avenue and over the Jones Falls, the B&O, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. It would meet North Avenue with both streets on the viaduct, and continue north by way of Oak Street. Oak Street (now Howard Street) would have to be widened. The alignment was expensive but not much disputed, as it would clearly benefit "the Howard Street interests," that is, the downtown merchants and the produce wholesalers, and it suited the residential convenience of the city's leaders in the northern suburbs. But the viaduct to connect eastern and western sections of the city turned out to be the most hotly debated issue of the generation. As it was finally built, in 1930, a viaduct 2200 feet long sprang from St. Paul at Bath Street, over Preston gardens, the Calvert Station tracks, the Guilford Avenue elevated, and the Fallsway, past the old Brush electric plant and Consolidated's new garage, south of Belair Market, to descend into Orleans Street. Traffic from the high-capacity viaduct had to be distributed into the older system of inelastic streets. Ensor Street was widened at great expense. Under the viaduct, a wide entry was created from Calvert into the Fallsway. At the west end of the viaduct, an underpass was built for through traffic on St. Paul Street, and a Y or plaza shunted westbound traffic into Franklin Street and received eastbound traffic from Mulberry Street.
The controversy surrounding the Orleans Street viaduct foreshadowed the problems of expressways in the next generation. Each of several alternative routes offered advantages for different pieces of property and different parts of town. The critical decision was whether the viaduct would angle north or south of Belair Market. The Monument Street merchants wanted it to come north. Expensive properties such as the new Standard Oil building could not be touched, and the route had to fit into the plans of the Pennsylvania Railroad. On the other hand, weeding out black slums was considered desirable. The chosen route would "eradicate a large group of small unsightly buildings" between Gay and Forrest streets and a tracery of alleys south of Belair Market. Certain property owners, such as the Fairfield-Western Maryland Dairy, were eager to be bought out. In 1930, scandal exploded when it was learned that the city had paid out $1 million for property without professional appraisals, normal pro cedures, or public scrutiny.86
Completed in the '30s, the viaduct provided a breathtaking approach to downtown Baltimore. The Baltimore motorist coming home from Philadelphia might swell with pride as he drove onto the viaduct with the cathedral apse before him. But the Philadelphia motorist hurrying to Washington cursed Balti more as he stopped at each light on Orleans Street and then Franklin Street. Baltimore could not be bypassed by automobile any more easily than by railroad. Anyone merely driving through added to the ever more intense traffic flowing across the high ground on either side of those great oases of calm, the old cathedral and the new Pratt Library. The flood of traffic battered the liveability and the property values of all the streets into which it poured-Franklin and Mulberry, Fulton and Monroe, Paca and Greene, McCulloch and Druid Hill. The problem of crosstown traffic was not yet solved.
%Å_ _
E xpansion of government functions forced a streamlining of government itself. The demands of business and industry for new public services were consistent with new forms of participation of businessmen in government. In the late 1920s a whole philosophy of businesslike methods in government was pushed forward by Mayor Jackson and Governor Ritchie, as well as presidents Coolidge and Hoover. The city now had eleven thousand employees in forty-five departments and a payroll of $17 million a year. Departments were consolidated and internal services were centralized-for example, receipts, purchases, payroll, vehicle repair, and complaints. The city's telephone switchboard was reorganized. An elaborate physical inventory was made. City employees tagged the office furniture, posted city land, redrew the tattered maps, indexed the deeds, and insured it all. A civil service commission and a retirement plan were introduced. Businessmen from the large firms~Bartlett-Hayward, Bethlehem Steel, Yellow Cab, Gas and Electric, United Railways, the B&O, the phone company, the sugar refinery, and Continental Trust~offered the services of their accountants, statisticians, and actuaries to the mayor's Commission on Efficiency and
ctQ_
Economy. The city built a handsome office building to new generous space norms of the telephone company: 60 square feet for clerks and stenos, 100 square feet for engineers and draftsmen, 300 for executives.87 In the same vein, Gov ernor Ritchie called a State Reorganization Committee of 108 Democrats who consolidated state agencies into nineteen executive departments and introduced central purchasing and "merit" provisions. as One of his efficiency measures, resisted tooth and nail, was the Fewer Elections Act, a conservation measure that confined the state sport of campaigning to designated hunting and fishing seasons. The city was still an enterprise of greater scope than the state: its budget of $65 million was about double that of the state.
A panoramic view from the city jail in the 1920s illustrates the multiple use of transportation corridors. The streetcar lines were elevated above Guilford Avenue, and the Fallsway crossed rail road tracks that in turn crossed the Jones Falls.Businesslike methods did not interfere seriously with political methods. Mayor Jackson channeled a third of the new $12 million insurance payments on city property into his own insurance firms. The bonding business was handed to Fidelity Trust, the instrument of Furst and the Blacks. State deposits remained concentrated in the same banks, and the same brokers and brokerage attorneys continued to handle municipal and state bonds. Following the gold mine bridge
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affair, the chartering of the bay ferry, and the Conowingo power deal, a $375,000 scandal broke in the State Roads Commission: several employees were sent to the penitentiary. States' rights were consistent with the protection of local fief- doms. "Curly" Byrd was developing another semipublic monopoly at the University of Maryland in College Park.
The drive for businesslike organization was, nevertheless, necessary, and it contributed significantly to the caliber of professionals the city was able to retain. The systems view of the city and its hardening into concrete demanded a much larger role for professional civil engineers. Their broad perspective came from their initial base in the city topographic survey and the state health depart ment before the war. The essence of planning was coordination, and the effective coordination of projects among municipal, state, and federal agencies in this generation was insured by the continuity and rotation of the engineers. Major Shirley moved from the Topographical Survey to the State Roads Commission to chairmanship of the City Plan Committee and Annex Plan Commission. B. P. Harrison, trained at the B&O, worked for the wartime Patapsco River survey, became harbor engineer for the city, then went to the State Roads Commission. John E. Greiner, bridge engineer on the B&O, was chairman of the Port Develop ment Board in 1920 and the Railroad Commission in 1928; he consulted on the Orleans Street viaduct and the state primary bridge program. Ezra Whitman served the water department and chaired the Public Service Commission and the Commission on Economy and Efficiency. Nathan Smith was engineer to the State Roads Commission, the city highway department, and Baltimore county in turn. Abel Wolman moved from the state health department to the role of federal public works coordinator and then advisory engineer to the city. This rotation of personnel was favorable to imaginative and well-integrated solutions, con sistent with the philosophy of the earliest city plan report: "The railroad problem is bound up with the harbor. The harbor development is bound up with the street layout. The real solution can be found for the one only in finding it for the other."59
The technical nature of engineering decisions made it more difficult, how ever, for citizens to evaluate projects like the east-west viaduct or the airport scheme, and to impose their views on their representatives. Land appraisal and cost estimating became highly specialized and technical matters, difficult for citizens to verify directly. The decompression of the city had set distances be tween citizens and their government. Only the planners or engineers could familiarize themselves with the whole spread-out city, its growth tissues, and its circulation systems. Often in their highly personal mix of discretion and indis cretion lay the secret of their staying power and of the city's surge of energy. They developed in the '20s the agenda from which Baltimore was still working in the '70s.
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translated into differences in density of habitat. The competition of Lebensraum produced distinctive race spaces in Baltimore.
In a long and gradual process, by which the suburban counties have shifted from 40 percent black (1810) to 3 percent (1970) while Baltimore City went from 12 to 15 percent to over half, there had been a period of stability and parity-is to 20 percent black in both city and countryside between the Civil War and World War I. But the trend set in again decisively in the 1920s, as blacks continued to enter the city and whites began to exit to the suburbs. White immigration from Europe virtually ceased with the new national quotas after World War I. This affected the age structure. The white birth rate began to fall, and match the low black birth rate in the early '20s. Infant deaths were still twice as high among blacks, but were falling more rapidly. As a consequence of all these factors, the city's black population grew 50 percent (from 1920 to 1940), compared with 25 percent for whites.
The redefinition of race spaces occurred within the city as well. Rings ap peared in the city's social arrangement. In 1920 blacks made up 20 percent of the old city, 10 percent of the old annex, and 4 percent of the new annex. But over the years the differences were aggravated. The old city became 30 percent black, the old annex 14 percent, while the new annex was down to 3 percent. The new low- density habitat was reserved for whites. Although the segregation ordinances had been found unconstitutional, a selection system operated through the collu sion of realtors, developers, mortgage institutions, and suburban residents. Most of the newly developed annex homes were built by large-scale developers. The Roland Park Company employed the restrictive covenant in individual deeds. In areas of modest homes, large builders such as Novak and Keelty worked closely with the savings and loan associations. As mutuals and instruments of white churches and white work organizations (e.g., United Railways and B&O), they did the bidding of their membership in excluding blacks.
The selection process was rigorous with respect to race, and very precise with respect to religion, national origin, and income. In the '30s Julius Levy was the only Jew with a house in Guilford, and the newspaperman, the breadman, and the milkman wouldn't deliver to him. But population groups other than blacks all experienced decompression by moving outward along certain radials or wedges of the city, as defined before the war. In 1920 the foreign born were still concentrated in the core of the city, but by 1930, they were redistributed fairly evenly in all rings of the city, and their children likewise. The children of "native whites" remained at the top of the heap. Two-thirds of them were concentrated in the two annexes, where they formed two-thirds of the population.
The old city had an average density of thirty thousand per square mile, ten times that of the new annex. If one looks more precisely at the bounds of black space, one can find concentrations as high as fifty thousand to one hundred thousand per square mile in the seventeenth ward and just west of Hopkins Hospital, as high as the immigrant clusters around the harbor had been in the late nineteenth century. These densities did not, however, imply crowding of houses. Most people, even in narrow lanes like Greenwillow and Union streets
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(the "lung block" notorious for tuberculosis cases) lived one family to a house, and less than one person per room. Popular assumptions about congestion, breathing space, and promiscuity were not borne out by studies of the Urban League. But because the traditional high-density urban habitat was identified with black space, crowding was blamed for all the problems of the black community, and a negative view was taken of high-density environments. For the first time, "urban problems" were identified with "the Negro problem," and the "slum" was associated more with blacks than with immigrants. The same districts stuck out on new maps made of violent crime, juvenile delinquency, and family service case loads. Social problems were identified with crowding and "dark breeding places." In 1934 a housing study by W. W. Emmart for the Real Estate Board designated a belt of half a dozen neighborhoods as a ring of "blight" around the commercial heart of the city. He recommended that such areas, the locus of crime, delinquency, and dependency, be demolished or at least thinned out.40 One such thinning project was the construction of a large, modern colored school on half of the lung block, over the objections of the black community. The perception was fixed for the next generation of urban renewal as a series of targets for black removal.
Compared with the complete neglect of the Progressive period before the war, the planning of the '20s did begin to create and invest in spaces for blacks. The new spaces were always restricted, and overwhelmed by numbers. When a swimming pool was built for whites in Druid Hill Park, a smaller pool was built for blacks. The state at last built the 100-bed Henryton Sanatorium for black TB patients. The death rate was very high at first because of the backlog of acute cases, but conditions improved. The same differential can be seen in the decompression of the schools. Nearly the whole increase of pupils enrolled in the public schools in the '20s was among black pupils; their numbers doubled. The school board fixed an investment quota: 10 percent of the capital budget for colored schools, to match their 10 percent of enrollment. This was a step forward, but it did not overcome the accumulated gap in facilities. Douglass High School was the symbol of improvement: a third of its graduates went on to college or normal school. There were ten new buildings, three additions, with several playgrounds, cafeterias, gyms, and showers. Eleven hopeless buildings of the 1850s and '60s were abandoned, and for the first time (1934) all the children enrolled in the colored schools were reported to be full-time pupils. However, their thirteen hand-me-down buildings were all buildings recommended by the Strayer report for immediate demolition.
The peculiarities of vocational training in the colored schools hint at the more fundamental discrimination in the job market. Ira Reid reported in 1934 that the progressive idea of vocational education had been developed "subjec tively," as the school board stepped cautiously between the demands of the black community for marketable skills and the demands of white elements to keep blacks in their place. "A public school must be careful not to train pupils for such skills, and in such a way as to upset a usually neurotic labor market." Consequently, no construction skills were taught except carpentry, no new crafts
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like radio and automotive work were taught, and the only subjects for girls were trade cookery and cafeteria service.
That was the basic problem: for a fast-growing young population of blacks, the economic space was not increasing fast enough. The constraint of poverty forced half of black women into the labor force, compared with only 17 percent of white women. Ira Reid classified the job market into four parts, according to the way race space was assigned.41 Blacks had a near-monopoly of certain strenuous and dirty jobs~labor in the fertilizer plants, coalyards, lumberyards, digging jobs, porters in stores, and personal service (servant, waiter, laundress). These jobs were confirmed as theirs, since federal quotas cut foreign immigra tion to a trickle. Second, there was a white space clearly staked out in the job market, including city fire fighter, police officer, railroad fireman, accountant, nearly all the construction crafts, the professions, and the public services. (Less than 2 percent of municipal employees were black, aside from teachers.) The boundaries of this white space had not changed. Third, there was a small but growing black space, the jobs Reid c~led "racial service" jobs. Negro public employees and private businessmen served other Negroes in separate institu tions, such as schools, hospitals, funeral parlors, and hairdressers. Reid figured that the purchasing power of Baltimore Negroes was $45 million a year, but he could identify only a few hundred thousand dollars worth captured by Negro businessmen. For example, Negroes paid insurance premiums of $360,000, most of which went to white companies. There were perhaps seven hundred black businesses in all. A fifth were barbers and hairdressers. Only a handful hired more than six people: the Afro newspaper, the American Bottling Company, Druid Hill Laundry, Dunbar Theatre Amusement Company, Metropolitan Finance, and Harry 0. Wilson, banker. The larger Negro entrepreneurs were hampered by discrimination in lending, bonding, and insurance, as well as real
Black employees of the gas andA PLACE TO MOVE ABOUT IN
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estate. The crumbs were left for enterprises like those on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the lung block. The people "massed in the little runaways" of Greenwillow, Union, and Numsen alleys, supported a picture parlor, a soft drink parlor, seven pool parlors, sixteen clothing shops, several restaurants, and two pawnshops. As the number of horsecart peddlers and scavengers diminished, these marginal businesses were left to blacks, while whites began driving trucks.
The fourth category was a zone of competition between race spaces. It was regulated by unwritten rules within white firms and white unions. One such zone was the unskilled but unionized jobs tied in with the white craft unions:
the longshoremen, hod carriers, postal clerks, and post office laborers. Another such zone was in the mechanical and manufacturing industries. Here jobs for blacks had risen from 4 to 18 percent, but three-quarters were jobs without opportunity for further advancement, and their presence depended on the ups and downs of total employment. Blacks were threatened by every layoff. When the overall economic space contracted, the economic space allotted to blacks contracted even more.
The growth of the racial service sector coincided with the growth of leader ship and a stronger voice pleading for equity. Symbolic gains were essential in all social classes. The new colored schools were named for Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The Easter parade on Pennsyl vania Avenue and the live music in its night spots created a backbone for "soul." There were some four hundred social and political clubs in the Negro community. The Urban League and the Maryland Interracial Commission were founded. The Negro churches remained the institutional basis for community, and their distri bution shows the residential pattern.42 Of 216 churches, half were Baptist. They were concentrated in three clusters. The largest was within a one-mile radius of Lanvale Street and Fremont Avenue, the second largest just west of Hopkins Hospital, and the smallest near the tracks south of Camden Station. The older churches were self-supporting with their own paid-off permanent buildings; others were weaker, with mortgages or leases, and the store-front churches "rarely lasted three years." The very names of these Baptist churches imposed a pilgrimage of the spirit on the dense brick rows of Baltimore. Down the alley, around the corner, to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Antioch, and over into Macedonia and Abyssinia, they preached and they sang and they shouted. They drowned out the trolley cars on Fremont Avenue and Caroline Street in their search for the mountaintop experience: Mount Zion, Mount Carmel, Mount Sinai. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills-Mount Moriah, Mount Calvary, Mount Lebanon. The mountains shouted for joy-Mount Nebo, Mount Ararat, Mount Hebron-and the little hills clapped their hands. Under the coal smoke, the neon light, and the July thunderstorms shone out Morning Star and Shining Star, Fountain, White Stone, and Shiloh, Little Ark, Sweet Hope, Rose of Sharon, and New Vine.
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was realized only in part. Some system failures were short-lived and brought quickly under control, such as a sudden increase in the number of fires (from three thousand to four thousand a year in 1920 to 1923) and an epidemic of asphyxiations by gas: 145 deaths in the winter of 1922/23 from gas heaters and stoves. But other system problems became aggravated, such as the traffic squeeze. The one hundred thousand cars were owned by half the families in the city-a tremendous increase in their living standard. But as the trolley parks closed down one by one, as industry decentralized and the trip to the job lengthened, the modest differences of wage or credit required to buy a car created a gulf be tween two ways of life. The man in the automobile had more time and more space, while the man who rode the streetcar had less time and less space. Every municipal dollar, every parking privilege or right of way for the automobile, protected the time and space of half the people at some expense to the other half.
In such a context, stopping a smooth flow of traffic or goods was a weapon. A well-integrated, delicately balanced system was vulnerable to malfunction or sabotage. The interconnection of so many subsystems meant that a breakdown might invade all society. As a result, a strike was perceived as an immense threat to public order, the public welfare, and the American system. A terror of total breakdown led to severe forms of repression like the "red scare" of 1919 and 1920. The labor movement was identified as "un-American," and the sense of patriotic emergency carried over several years after the armistice. The specific issue in most of the strikes of the early '20s was the union shop. Nearly all these battles were lost. The broader issue was that of who would bear the costs of change-the readjustment to a peacetime economy, the impact of technological change, adjustment to international inflation and debt. The labor movement weakened steadily. AF of L membership dropped throughout this period. Indus tries with skilled labor, unionized or ripe for unionization, were weakened by the adjustment to peacetime: steel, shipbuilding, and building. As they recovered, by the mid-'20s, tbc introduction of more machinery, more space, and more capital increased the productivity of workers, and selected groups improved their hourly wage. But factories could cut back on the total number of workers needed, weed out presumed troublemakers, enforce job competition, and prevent labor from claiming its share of further increases in productivity. Unemployment had reached alarming levels by 1927 and 1928.
These trends were reflected in the violent conflict of the early '20s followed by "stabilization" in the late '20s. In the first three months of 1920, six thousand workers at Maryland Drydock went on strike for a union shop. By 1 April they had given in: violence had sown division. In May 1921 the longshoremen were on strike, and the violence included incidents betwen races. The U.S. Navy appeared on the scene, on the grounds that vessels of the U.S. Shipping Board were threatened.
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In August, four hundred shipyard workers were laid off by Baltimore Drydock, and the rest had their wages cut back 10 percent, as the corporation adjusted to the peacetime reduction of shipbuilding contracts. From April to December 1922, five thousand coal miners were on strike in Western Maryland, protesting similar cutbacks. Consolidated Coal again imported strike breakers. Hundreds of dis illusioned miners quit and went to work for the B&O or Kelly Springfield Tire, the only other big employers in the region. Losses were estimated at $5 million to the company and $4 million to the workers. Governor Ritchie let the com panies hire their own guards, but consistent with his concern for the rights of the states, he refused to invite "federal bayonets" into Maryland.44 During the same period B&O shopworkers and Western Maryland Railroad workers went on strike. The U.S. Railroad Board upheld the workers' view, but to no avail. So long as the coal strike went on, the coal-carrying railroads were satisfied with lockout. Among the last of these prolonged and fruitless struggles was the strike of cotton mill workers in the Jones Falls valley. Their wages had been cut by a third to meet competition of new deep south mills. Half were women. "In almost every house there was either a deserted wife left with small children or a sepa rated husband and wife." Many were very old, 15 percent had worked in the mills thirty-five years or more. They still worked fifty-four hours, averaged $15 a week, and lived in company houses. Low rent helped the mills retain their workers, and evictions helped break the strike. The strike petered out, the union dwindled, and "curiously, the union officers are no longer mill workers."45 The companies began selling off mills~for tire, paper cup, vinegar, and raincoat factories. The company was reorganized under Baltimore ownership (1915) but after the strike it relied increasingly for its profits on its own southern mills. It also began selling off the company houses in the valley to the workers, who welcomed the notion that they would henceforth be safe from eviction in case of future strikes. This was consistent with the trend throughout Baltimore toward home ownership among factory workers. Each worker was tied to home and mortgage. Hampden and Woodberry, like Canton and Locust Point, in the '20s got a reputation for stability, and put tremendous energy into their base ball clubs.
The improved circulation in the system as a whole created new moral quandaries. One problem was solved, only to raise others. It became more difficult to see how the whole system functioned. Efficient flow was achieved at the cost of some human relationship. The health department, for instance, discovered how to save foundlings (white) by keeping them at the shelter for unwed mothers (white) and feeding them mother's milk, by breast pump and bottle. New mechanisms also sanitized the flow of money, so that the way nourishment was extracted and fed to the big spenders was intricate, artificial, and invisible. Actual spending by the very wealthy was still much in public view. In the younger generation of Garretts, for example, John collected Oriental art and rare books, and his wife, Alice, embellished Evergreen House with a theater and Leon Bakst's gorgeous red and yellow Russian stencils. They embellished the Baltimore social season with the visits of the Musical Art Quartet and great dancers. Robert threw the discus in the Olympics of 1896, founded the Public
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Athletic League in Baltimore, and chaired the Public Improvements Commission, which allocated the city's spending. The production of wealth, likewise, was in the public view: the sewing machine operators and steel workers paced them selves to new faster machines, all-electric conveyors moved the grain into storage, and no human hand touched the sugar, while the coal miners and long shoremen took their wage cuts. Yet the financial coupling was invisible, so that there was no apparent connection between Baltimore's rich and Baltimore's poor or unemployed. The highly visible large industries were great national firms that extracted wealth from Baltimore to "outside," while the highly visible spenders had inherited their wealth and added to it by quietly clipping coupons at the bank or trading their shares in the broker's office, receiving regular infusions of interest from "outside." Henry Walters's estate in 1931 consisted of $3 million in government bonds, $7 million in railroad securities, and $4 million in other stocks and bonds.
The question was raised, from time to time, as to the advantages of the continued growth of these outside industries in the city. Mencken put the question sharply: "In what way, precisely, has the average Baltimorean bene fitted by the great growth of the city during the past ten years? So far as I can make out, in no way at all."46 He argued that the real improvements of paving, sewers, fire protection, and schools were initiated before the industrial boom, and not to be credited to it, and he saw no source of pride in a rising population. "Everytime they bring in another glue factory, with another trainload of slaves to work it, they fill the newspapers with hosannahs. Well, what is the good of another glue factory? What is the good of bringing in another trainload of slaves?"41
Much of the population was preoccupied with maintaining the flow of alcohol. Baltimore was a center of resistance to prohibition. Governor Ritchie expressed the formal states' rights view of federal prohibition, and Mencken expressed the gut feeling of German Baltimore that individual freedom was free dom to imbibe, and social rights revolved around beer and concerts on Sundays. The "drys," led by Bishop Cannon, were numerous in the rur~ counties of Maryland, especially on the Eastern Shore. When national prohibition came in, Baltimoreans bent their efforts to circumvent it. The city's forty-two-mile shore line was convenient for smuggling Cuban and Canadian liquor. Some breweries were sold, converted, or shut down, but others survived by manufacturing "near beer." They were allowed to produce the real thing, age it, then (supposedly) reduce it to near beer by lowering the alcohol content to the legal limit. Likewise, at the U.S. Industrial Alcohol plant, the world's largest and most modern, in stalled at Curtis Bay at the onset of prohibition, alcohol was again produced in the normal way, then (supposedly) denatured by adding chemicals to prevent human consumption. In fact, a steady supply was diverted to Glidden's adjoining paint factory, from there to the "cracking plants" of a fictitious lacquer thinner company, and into retail trade. (U.S. Industrial Alcohol was later sued by the federal government for $8 million in back taxes on a part of the company's illegal output.)48 Smaller operations moved frequently. On North Avenue, a motor car company produced several hundred gallons a day in a $100,000 Jack
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column still three stories high. The thirsty public was most interested in the more personal retail circuits, and was ready to defend them. Cram Highway was known as bootleg boulevard, and U.S. 1 was spotted with speakeasies. The daughter of Harry Jung, tavernkeeper at Fell and Wolfe streets, told his secrets a good while afterward. He kept his stock of hard liquors hidden behind a slid ing wall. He had two beer taps, one for near beer and one that was supposed to be out of order. It was, in fact, connected by tubes concealed behind water pipes to a stock of real beer in the basement under a pile of coal.49 Federal arrests rose from four hundred to a thousand a year, but agents complained that state and city police did little to protect them from hostile mobs. A mob of five thousand besieged eight prohibition agents inside a saloon near St. Peter and Barre Street for two hours. "If the man we were raiding had not protected us, we never could have got out alive."50
T he great breakdown did not come, however, from the feared halt of labor or a failure in the delicately balanced materials flows. It came, instead, in the
Ccirculation of money. It did not last three days like Baltimore's mass disorders of 1812, 1834, 1861, or 1877. It did not last three months like the bitter winter of 1893 or the fatal summer of 1832. This crisis deepened for five years and per sisted for ten. The headlines announced the stock market crash of 29 October
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1929, a distant event in New York City. Closer to home, the Chesapeake Bank closed in 1930, and in the summer of 1931 an $8 million bank closed in Frederick, together with fourteen smaller farmers' banks. Farm loan defaults were blamed on the drought. On 31 September 1931 the Baltimore Trust Company closed the great bronze doors of its thirty-two-story skyscraper. A year later the Park Bank failed, and anxious rumors provoked a run on the Union Trust Company. In February 1933 the Title Guarantee and Trust Company closed, and deposits were being withdrawn from a dozen banks in the city. Panic threatened. Thirteen million dollars were withdrawn within a few days; on 25 February the governor closed all Maryland banks till order could be reestablished. "Actually there is no sense at all in this local banking crisis," he said.51 Nevertheless, the same thing was happening in other states. The papers reported the "grim and ominous inauguration atmosphere" of 4 March 1933, and Franklin Roosevelt's first act as president was to declare a national bank holiday. "The great financial mecha nism of the United States stood still today."52 This prolonged the bank closings in Maryland till 14 March, altogether three weeks.
Between financial spasms, the game was to keep up appearances, and there were few hints at the stubborn paralysis of capital. Statements of public officials and bankers offered no reliable clues to the gravity of events. They filled the newspaper columns with reassurances, just as in the cholera epidemic the board of health had buried the dead secretly at night. Monthly figures for relief pay ments by the charitable associations appeared in fine print. The largest, the Family Welfare Association, spent $200,000 in 1930, $600,000 in 1931, and $3,400,000 in 1932, while Catholic and Jewish charities also distributed money, food, and layettes. At Christmas 1931 there were eight thousand families un employed and dependent on relief, at Christmas 1932 eighteen thousand.53 In February, as the bank holiday began, the society page reported a whirl of Sunday aperitif parties at which only "chiff chaff" was discussed, while in one block in Hampden every family was under the care of Family Welfare. In two blocks of West Mulberry Street there were 150 families. "Morale is deteriorating." In March, gay Lenten parties were held. "The country clubs are in great favor, with duets, quartets and choruses, the conversations interrupted by numerous deflec tions toward the tea table, which usually has small glasses-not used for tea."54 As the bank holiday ended, thirty-seven hundred opera lovers turned out in a grand gesture" to welcome Lily Pons and Ezio Pinza starring in Rigoletto. Balti more was the only city in the country that had invited the Metropolitan opera that year. The crowd at the Lyric "came as brilliantly dressed as in many former years. . . . The story was told in the lobby about a certain jewel-laden dowager who used the last of her available cash to pay the servants' wages last Saturday, then borrowed from them enough money to pay for her opera tickets."55 At Arbutus the Methodist church begged the use of a horse so their unemployed could plow gardens. By Christmas 1933 one family in six was on relief~twenty three thousand families. The Baltimore office of the Home Owners Loan Corpora- tion said three-quarters of the applicants for federal loans were desperate, on the verge of insanity or suicide, without food. They mentioned a widow with
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thirteen children, two mortgages, served with an eviction notice. "All they have is an equity in their home."56 The Christmas fashion pages featured chinchilla and "the humble bunny" as favorites with the college set.
Baltimore congratulated itself from time to time on being better off than other cities. Its diversified economy resisted layoffs a little longer. The large proportion of paid-off homes and the existence of ground rents (which did not have to be paid off) meant a somewhat lower rate of foreclosures and evictions. Fewer of the big banks failed, apparently because of their ingrown and conserva tive history and their large holdings of city and federal bonds. The Savings Bank of Baltimore gained customers and discreetly reorganized the interior so that deposits and withdrawals were made at the same counter "to avoid panic." But most observers agreed that Baltimore arrived eventually at the same point, at the bottom of the depression in 1934. There were twenty-nine thousand registered unemployed in the city, another four thousand in Anne Arundel County. The fifteen hundred taxi drivers were working heroic hours but only taking home $8 or $9 a week. Women and girls at Schoeneman's garment factory were earning between $4 and $20 a week for sixty hours. The sugar refinery closed, throwing three hundred more out of work; it had been paying twenty-eight cents an hour. The price of tobacco was below the cost of producing it, and fifteen hundred farms in Anne Arundel County were under the red flag of the auctioneer.
An autopsy of the more spectacular local bank crises is essential because it reveals the connections between the national economy and the Baltimore economy, between the investments of the '20s and the liquidations of the '30s. The Park Bank was a medium-sized operation at Liberty and Lexington streets. Its clientele, mainly women who used the Lexington Street shopping district, had on deposit $3 million. The bank had borrowed more than banking laws allowed, and had made loans to its own officers and directors on worthless "securities." In this way the officers and directors had used $1 million worth of the depositors' money to buy stock in the bank for themselves. They had continued to accept deposits and to declare dividends to themselves when the bank was no longer solvent. Criminal charges were brought against the officers. One shot himself
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during the trial, and the bank president was brought "in prison gray" to recount the "silent run" by which they had siphoned out ~~ney.5T
The Union Trust Company weathered the storm. In a first crisis (August 1932), precipitated by the Park Bank failure, it was bolstered by a federal loan. A fleet of armored cars was assembled overnight from Washington, New York, and Philadelphia to truck in the $20 million loaned by the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation.58 "Having mobilized huge cash resources, the Union Trust Company today met all the demands made upon it."59 It was brought under federal rules of reserve and insurance, and its real estate assets were gradually liquidated, restoring liquidity, making it possible to allow the sixty-five thousand depositors to dip into their deposits normally, and gradually paying back the RFC loan. In the more general bank crisis of February 1933, Union Trust closed again. It reopened in December, salvaged by the same interests that had been supporting its growth for some years. Union Trust was the bank favored with deposits by Governor Ritchie's administration. The president was state treasurer, and during the February banking crisis state agencies had on deposit in Union Trust at least $3 million. The Baltimore and Philadelphia power companies (the Aldred group) also favored this bank, and at the critical moment increased their deposits. This kind of high-level solidarity could either make or break a bank. Bank runs, ostensibly caused by panicky depositors lining up for their small savings, were, in fact, generated by sudden cash flows in the accounts of the large depositors. In the wake of the bank holiday, a thousand prominent names were read to the legislature of those who had made withdrawals of more than $10,000 in the critical week of the run, altogether $13 million. It took hours, while Sun reporters stretched out on a skylight to listen.60 But only the little socialist paper, the Leader, printed the list, at the top of which were the city ($3 million), the B&O Railroad ($2.5 million), the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, and the state (over $1 million each). Close behind were the arch bishop, the private banking houses, Garrett's and Brown's, and several large department stores.
The Baltimore Trust Company made the biggest smash.61 By early 1929 it had become an $85 million bank, second in the city, with nineteen branch offices and a thirty-two-story skyscraper. But it had pursued growth without adminis trative control. It had bought other banks without checking their assets closely. Nineteen vice-presidents all had the power to make loans independently, with no effective checks on the value of the collateral offered. Of the $19 million invested in this way, half was lost. The board of directors included prominent men in Baltimore, all of whom knew something about how to run a bank. But they had simply left the operation to the president. They were on the board in order to attract the deposits of their firms (about a fifth of all deposits) and to get financing for their own ventures. The trust company lent a great deal to its directors, who were not watching each other. Many of their pet projects were so remote from Baltimore that a close watch was difficult. Baltimore Trust lent several million dollars to C. Wilbur Miller, head of the Davison Chemical Com pany, after other banks had ceased to extend credit to him. They poured $1 million into a Puerto Rican sugar company to buy fertilizer from a Davison
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subsidiary, Miller Fertilizer, and still more into a Puerto Rican bank formed by the sugar company. Most of this was lost, the sugar company having already suffered hurricane loses. In the same way, Baltimore Trust was the sole source of capital for another of its directors, C. B. Gillet. The bank lost $1 million on his ventures in hotels in Houston, land development in Miami and Tampa, and a cold cream factory. Some speculations originated as far back as World War I. A group of Quaker investors, Edwin and Philip Poe and Holden Evans, had organized a shipbuilding company (Baltimore Drydock) on the Skinner family's shipyard and a steamship company for South America, to buy the ships the company would build; it would survive on a U.S. mail contract subsidy. The house of cards collapsed. Poe was also a Baltimore Trust director. Still other unprofitable investments were made in Florida cypress farms, Alabama coal mines, and a sand and gravel monopoly on the Mississippi River. "These enter prises did not build Baltimore; they impoverished many Baltimoreans by taking millions of dollars out of the city."62
Baltimore Trust had to be closed and reorganized. "The winding up of an organization, Mr. Baetjer explained, consists of two functions. One is to dis tribute the assets to creditors, and the other is to conserve the assets in such manner that their highest value will be realized."~ The federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) bought stock in a new corporation, the Baltimore National Bank, and supplied it with working capital in cash. The new bank could receive deposits, while the old bank gradually liquidated its real estate and began paying off the depositors. An investigation was made. The courts managed to shake $225,000 out of its directors, deemed "inexcusably reckless" in their administration. When the judge ordered them to divide the sum among them, "the defendants, who included some of the richest men in Baltimore, started squabbling." The lawyers took a hundred thousand. By 1936 the depositors had got a third of their money back. Payments were made every few months, at 1 or 2 percent. By Pearl Harbor Day, they reached half, and at the end of 1942
70 percent.
As in the banks, so throughout the economy, redistribution took place over the whole boom-and-bust cycle. There were losers in every class of society. A bank manager shot himself, and an unemployed Italian immigrant jumped off the Calvert Street bridge into the Jones Falls. Mrs. Jacobs (Mary Frick Garrett) stopped adding to her art collection, and The Johns Hopkins University stopped subscribing to journals. But a person's chances of weathering the crisis or even winning in this poker game depended heavily on his initial position as debtor or creditor and the timing of when those debts fell due. As the ma and pa groceries failed, the chain stores grew. By 1933 the three largest chains had 630 stores with forty-three hundred clerks in Baltimore.64 The two thousand independent grocers rarely employed even one person outside family help. Smaller and shakier banks were absorbed by larger ones. Maryland Trust Com pany was consolidated out of Drovers Bank and Continental Trust. Equitable Trust Company doubled in size between 1932 and 1938. Standard Oil captured Pan American Petroleum and began to squeeze Blaustein for control of American
Oil Company. (He successfully resisted in the courts, but it took twenty years.) Consolidated Coal went into receivership.
The Municipal Office Building was nearing completion at the time of the 1931 Armistice Day celebration at the War Memorial Plaza.The B&O Railroad had to be refinanced in each generation. Each crisis was a brush with catastrophe for its creditors, and required rearranging the financial structure, extending debts to a larger amount and a longer future. After the receivership and reorganization of 1899, its $126 million in bonds came due in 1925; it was refinanced at $350 million, providing new capital and new equip ment. By laying off employees and skimping on maintenance it continued throughout the depression to pay $29 million a year interest to its bond holders. But it had half its debt in short and medium-term loans that came due in the late '30s. To keep the B&O from falling into receivership again, the RFC lent it a total of $88 million, more than any railroad in the country. The B&O debt structure was put "on a long-term basis." Ultimately the loans of the RFC ran until 1965, and the B&O had paid interest comparable to the full amount of the loans.
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United Railways was in a worse situation. Its financial position was already weak before the stock market crash, and it had $8 million of bonds due between November 1929 and 1 March 1932, when refinancing was impossible. General Electric, its creditors, forced it into receivership and reorganization. Since Brown's consolidation in 1906, the finance of United Railways had been based largely on bonds rather than common stock, and its paper capital obligations of $75 million or so ran "far in excess of the actual value of the property." In other words, the bond holders had been getting a steady annual return ($3 million) regardless of earnings, and the return was about twice the rate it appeared to be. During the receivership their interest payments were suspended, and after re organization the bondholders were forced to accept debentures and preferred stock instead of bonds, meaning that their future income would depend on the net earnings of the company. The total capitalization was reduced to $50 million, somewhat more realistic, and the company was renamed Baltimore Transit Company.65
The luck of timing also determined the fate of real estate. Paid-off neigh borhoods, including whole communities of German, Bohemian, and Polish, despite bitter unemployment and hunger, kept their homes. Such neighborhoods as Locust Point, Patterson Park, and Canton, and parts of Hampden and High landtown, remained at home ownership levels of 80 or 90 percent. The thousand savings and loans performed feats of solidarity, as parishes rallied to save their neighbors' homes. The St. James Savings Bank, one of the largest and oldest, originally identified with the Redemptorist parish, in many cases foreclosed re luctantly, but rented the home to its original owner and afterward remortgaged it to the same family. In new, more comfortable neighborhoods of the '20s, still trammeled by mortgages, foreclosures were more common, and refinancing often implied social turnover. Ashburton, a development built by George Morris in 1919 under restrictive covenants that excluded Jews and Negroes, became 50 percent Jewish in the '30s. Among investment owners, likewise, those loaded with debt in the early '30s caved in, while others, able to borrow from relatives or keep their savings liquid, picked up properties cheaply at auctions and tax sales. The Needles and Merowitzes amassed property in the black ghettos of South and West Baltimore. For the first time since 1822 the city experienced wholesale abandonment of property. There was a pattern to it: tax abandonment was concentrated in the oldest sections.66 The squeeze followed the same logic as the earlier expansion: in the '20s while the new suburbs were pumped with new capital producing highly visible growth, the black housing market, black businesses, and black institutions were starved for capital and suffered invisible stagnation. In the '30s suburban growth ceased, and the physical meaning of dis investment became visible at the center, as paint flaked, roofs leaked, brick fronts bowed, and back porches sagged. The city razed a substantial number of dilapi dated houses, leaving a missing tooth in blocks west of Lexington Market or in Hill Street and south of Hanover Market. This was consistent with various proposals for "thinning" overcrowded black neighborhoods, but the thinning was illusory. Alongside the vacant houses and bare lots were "converted" homes where families doubled up with relatives or sublet. A proposal to use federal
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funds to build a Negro housing project provoked opposition. George R. Morris, now president of the Real Estate Board, recommended that the city "plow under" the slums, like the surplus potato crop, and convert the land into parks and playgrounds but not build new housing "until the present supply of good housing at fair prices is absorbed." The problem in the housing market, he argued, was like the market for food and coal; there was a surplus, not a shortage. "Conges tion which is due largely to inadequate rent-paying capacity is generally con ceded to be the greatest contribution to slum conditions."07 In the black com munity, rent-paying capacity was certainly squeezed. Negroes were half of the relief rolls, and their unemployment rate rose to 40 percent, among whites to 13 percent. Just as they were expected to make do with lower wages in normal times, blacks were now expected to make do with lower relief payments, about six dollars a week for a family.
I have shown how governments, first municipal, then state, were called upon to play ever larger roles in developing the city and keeping its economic mechanism well greased. But the city-state economy of Baltimore had been absorbed into the national economy. Sooner or later, there would be a corre sponding enlargement of the role of national government. Except in wartime, the federal presence in Baltimore had generally been discreet, confined largely to sorting and stamping the mail in its Gothic post office, looking down the throats of immigrants on the Locust Point pier, and appraising packages and collecting cargo duty in the custom house. From time to time the federal government paid for deeper dredging of the ship channels. Occasionally the federal court inter fered in commercial disputes, admiralty cases, or prosecuted murderous oyster captains or riotous guano diggers. Wartime experience reinforced local resistance to any enlargement of federal power, and the image of the federal government was especially negative in Baltimore in the '20s thanks to the "revenooers" who enforced prohibition. But the financial crisis created an emergency of national dimensions; local agencies called for help, and despite the rhetoric of states' rights, the federal government became a powerful agent of city building and a factor to reckon with in all urban conflicts. The pulling and hawing over con tracts and wages, over road locations and building sites, was symbolized in the travels of officials around the Baltimore~Annapolis-Washington triangle. Balti more had experienced this during the Civil War, but this triangle of negotiation now became a permanent feature of urban development.
The earliest federal priority was to take care of the creditors and restore confidence. Under President Hoover, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) made the massive loans that saved Union Trust Company and salvaged the assets of Baltimore Trust. RFC disbursed $66 million to reorganize Baltimore banks, $50 million to shore up Maryland Casualty, $4 million for U.S. Fidelity and Guarantee, and $88 million to the B&O Railroad. These were among the largest and longest commitments RFC made anywhere.
Relief, on the other hand, was supposed to be primarily local food, clothing, and fuel for the unemployed must spring from a warm human charity among neighbors. Baltimore had always r4ied upon private institutions for this, pro-
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viding meager reimbursement afterward, with minimal supervision. The private charities were overwhelmed by the numbers, and the governor refused to allow the city to borrow money for relief payments. The philosophy of efficiency and economy in city and state government provided no guidance for dealing with the crisis. The swelling burden of "unemployment relief" increased the clamor for "work relief." Private construction had dropped to nothing, and public construction would have to take up the slack. The federal government moved forward certain scheduled projects, such as dredging the Riverview anchorage and building a new post office. Already under President Hoover the RFC pro posed to lend money for public or private enterprise to create jobs, so long as such projects were self-liquidating through tolls or fees, not taxes.
Once President Roosevelt adopted the idea of pump priming by budget deficits, the money began to flow. The federal government would borrow, then lend or grant money to state governments, cities, private institutions, or private enterprise, to put people to work.68 There were two distinct phases and adminis trations. The first was the Civil Works Administration (CWA). It was supposed to tool up fast. Workers were hired from the relief rolls. By Christmas 1933 the CWA had ten thousand people at work in Baltimore. This was its high-water mark and about a third of the goal, but even to employ this number the CWA had to "spread the work." A man was allowed to work only twenty-four hours a week and earn $11 or $15. Work projects not only relieved hungry households, they relieved local emergency budgets. Over the next few months the state ordered the relief rolls trimmed of single men without dependents, then of domestic servants (pressing hardest on the black community), then of all "em ployables." The CWA was criticized for "make-work" of low productivity and repressive character. Work relief was supposed to preserve human dignity more effectively than the dole. Five hundred "high-type men" were hired to trap millions of rats, deliver them alive to the quarantine station on Leading Point, chloroform them, comb their bodies, count and classify the vermin in glass jars, and dissect the rats.69 Most of the tasks were less ingenious, simply pick and shovel work, the same as work relief in 1894. Broadus Mitchell watched from his window at Johns Hopkins the landscaping and lighting project of a hundred CWA workers digging for several weeks in the frozen earth with pick and shovel and sledge. "I venture to say that a steamshovel could do it all in ten hours. Now, why must this Government use sweat instead of steam."70 Never theless, because of its strategy of putting men to work, and even because of its disregard of steam-engine efficiency, the CWA performed a rather special city- building function. It provided landscaping, preservation, and artwork on public sites and public buildings. It restored the Carroll mansion and landscaped the new Philadelphia Road. In seventy-nine schools, always starved for common maintenance, it replastered, repointed brick, repainted, and refinished desks. The CWA was followed by the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which spent $40 million in Maryland (1934-39) along the same lines. The WPA took 88 per cent of its labor, chiefly unskilled, from relief rolls.
The second strategy, the Public Works Administration (PWA), selected projects for their value as future public assets, as well as for their potential for
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A public works project on Calvert Street employed extensive work teams for ice removal in the winter of 1936.
employing people and their chances of getting started quickly. It was this stream of resources that made the depression a city-building period. The criteria were consistent with the City Plan, and Baltimore was in an exceptional state of readi ness with its agenda of the '20s. The PWA in Maryland was headed by a civil and sanitary engineer, Abel Wolman, and housed in the vacant Baltimore Trust Company skyscraper. It spent $100 million over four years (1934-37), and reached a peak employment level in August 1934 of 12,500 men. The unskilled labor, 35 percent of the PWA's workers, was taken from relief rolls. For each person it hired, the PWA figured private enterprise hired two or three more to provide materials and transport services.71 PWA funds allowed the city water department to complete a ten-year program in four years: Prettyboy Reservoir, a second water tunnel from Loch Raven, a "high service" reservoir and pumping station at Ashburton, and a siphon under Curtis Creek. Sewage treatment facilities were expanded at Back River. The city completed plans for the annex using PWA funds. The Herring Run valley was developed: a retaining wall along the run, Mount Pleasant Park and golf course, buildings for Morgan College, the extension of Loch Raven Boulevard, Edison Highway, the Brehms Lane fire house and school, and several streets crossing the run. PWA funds enabled the school board to finish the Eastern High School campus. The city added a wing to the art museum to house Mrs. Jacobs's collection of modern paintings. PWA funds allowed the city to finish its viaducts: Howard Street, Orleans Street, Hilton Street, Twenty-ninth Street, and Cold Spring Lane. Their clean lines, stone work, lightness of cement work, and landscaping mark them as PWA projects, which contrast with massive works of the 1950s alongside. The PWA also contributed to the "$4 million dump" at Dundalk: the fine liquid mud from the harbor refused to settle, and even the two planes that were scheduled each day couldn't land on a bowlful of jelly. Citizens proposed in genious schemes for drying up the airport, as wild and wonderful as their grandfathers' solutions for the basin. An "otherwise sane" structural engineer suggested drying it up with millions of candlewicks. Several private projects received PWA loans. The Pennsylvania Railroad at last undertook its $22 million electrification program~2500 jobs~announced with such fanfare in 1907. The city shared half the bill for grade-crossing eliminations.72
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Highway projects led the agenda of state government. The State Roads Commission was able to provide about half the jobs in the first year of PWA in Maryland. The most controversial was the alignment of the new Philadelphia Road (Pulaski Highway). The most important, because it fixed an agenda for thirty years to come, was the Maryland Bridge Program. Following the lead of New York and the initial philosophy of RFC grants, the bridge program was designed to be self4iquidating. Revenue bonds would be issued, to be repaid from bridge tolls. The bridges were conceived as of part of a total traffic system and a total financial program: they would be scheduled so that each bridge need not repay its cost, but repayment was spread over the whole set of bridges. The earliest was the bridge over the Susquehanna at Havre de Grace. (The "gold mine" bridge was finally abandoned.) The Harbor Tunnel and Chesapeake Bay Bridge were not completed till after World War II.
Because it was important, economically and politically, to spread funds widely over the state, the federal money accomplished a great deal outside the city and prepared the communities around Baltimore to receive suburban influx after World War II. In addition to the State Roads Commission, Mr. Morse of the state health department also had an agenda, with which Abel Wolman was thoroughly familiar. The state leaped fifteen years ahead in sewer and water- works construction. Services of urban standard were provided in Towson, Annapolis, Bel Air, and Frederick. Administration of public construction was professionalized in the counties and the state, reining in small fiefdoms such as Curly Byrd's at College Park. The Civilian Conservation Corps built trails and fire breaks in its work camps in the Patapsco state forest. This provided impetus to the joint effort of federal, state, and municipal agencies to acquire and "park" the Patapsco valley, consonant with the Olmsted stream valley plan. Reservoir projects did much the same thing for the Gunpowder Falls valley. Together, they provided a framework for recreation for what would a generation later be a metropolitan area.
Thanks to the PWA and CWA, institutions long starved for state funds were developed with modern buildings: Spring Grove, Springfield, Crownsville, and Sykesville mental hospitals, Rosewood training school, the House of Correc tions at Jessup, and the Montrose School. The investments crystallized a certain institutional style for a generation to come: isolated campuses ringing the metro politan area. In the city, substantial additions were made to several hospitals. The federal government made sizeable investments in its own property at Aber deen proving ground, the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, the agricultural experiment station at Beltsville, and the coast guard station and ordnance depot at Curtis Bay.
rThe combined effects of the devalued dollar and federal pump priming taught Baltimore to think big, in millions and tens oF millions of dollars, and to juggle the political interests of several levels of government. As federal adminis trator for Maryland projects, Abel Wolman rode to Washington with the mayor and made the rounds of the federal offices; they came home one night with Harold Ickes's check for $3 million. The negotiations worked right down to the neighborhood level. Another nigh~, when they were negotiating to buy the land
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for the Reedbird incinerator, the mayor and Wolman went to see the parish priest, who reckoned they would get their land if they would reroute the trucks through South Baltimore. The contractors also learned to think big. Bartlett- Hayward began building dam gates for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bureau of Reclamation. The Commercial Credit Corporation, which had narrowly extricated itself from a $5 million venture in aviation finance, now went into FHA receivers, that is, Commercial Credit operated as a collection agency for federally insured mortgages.7~ Locally, the dredging, hauling, paving, and brick companies waxed fat. The largest purchases for PWA projects were building materials, including steel and cement, then machinery and transportation equip ment. The Arundel Corporation got contracts for widening Curtis Creek channel. Bethlehem Steel benefited from the deepening of Sparrows Point channel to thirty-seven feet for its ore boats, and a PWA loan to its Sparrows Point railroad. The engineering firm of John E. Greiner had been discredited in the city for its involvement in the scandalous land acquisition and costing of the Orleans Street viaduct, but continued as engineering consultants to the Pennsylvania Railroad (with which the Orleans Street viaduct was "perfectly coordinated") and under- took the engineering work for the Maryland Bridge Program, a relationship good for a generation.
The money was all borrowed. The U.S. government marketed bonds through special consortiums of bankers, then reloaned the money to the state, the city, or the railroads. The RFC channeled $124 million into Maryland (1932-35), most of it in the form of loans at 3 percent interest. Some were loans to the state government for its share of relief and work projects, to be "repaid" as credits on federal highway funds in future years. The private loans to shore up Maryland banks, insurance companies, and railroads amounted to another $200 million. In addition, the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation refinanced sixteen thousand mortgages in Maryland, or $50 million worth. Four out of five of the families managed to save their homes, but they still owed the money. Instead of Owing it to the bankers, they now owed it to the federal government, which in turn owed it to the bankers. The Federal Land Bank of Baltimore did the same thing for farm properties, and B. H. Griswold (of Alex. Brown) organized an investment syndicate to sell its bonds. Griswold was also chairman of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Commission and organizer of the Maryland Primary Bridge Program; he assured the federal government that the bridge revenue bonds could be sold, and organized the syndicate that sold the first $6 million worth. The need to protect holders of the revenue bonds regulated the schedule and location of bridge construction into the 1970s. Overall, the borrowing strategy of the thirties prepared a new set of debtor-creditor relation ships, a vise of public debt that would perpetuate the bond holders' grip on the Future of the city.
The federal investment strategy was a continuation of the city and state planning of the '20s. In the '20s, private capital flowed into automobile manu facture and sales credit, and public capital into viaducts and highways, while the streetcar system stagnated. In the '30s, the bankruptcy of the streetcar com pany gave it sudden prominence, but the implacable logic continued: more public
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resources were put into viaducts, highways, and bridges. In the '20s Baltimore's private investors put money into English race horses, Puerto Rican sugar planta tions, and Houston hotels, while corporations owned in Pittsburgh, New York, and Chicago invested in labor-saving equipment in their Baltimore factories: the number of jobs in Baltimore did not increase substantially. In the '30s federal funds put people to work temporarily, but were not investments that created permanent jobs. Over the '30s the potential labor force grew by fifty thousand, but available jobs grew scarcely at all, and in 1940 there were still people seek ing work.
What was the climate of opinion in Baltimore? Bankers and business leaders were very much afraid of riot. Stories were still told of how one hundred years earlier the mob burned the furniture and smashed the wine cellars of the trustees who were trying to untangle the affairs of the insolvent banks. The Savings Bank of Baltimore set an example in 1931 by giving $30,000 to the Unemploy ment Emergency Relief Fund "to prevent riots," and in 1932 $20,000 to the Baltimore charities campaign. The other banks followed suit. Baltimore was close to Washington, and hungry people in Baltimore knew that hungry people in Washington had been driven out of their camps by the army. "Give a Job! Share the Work!" people were urged, and invited to take part in Self-Denial Day. The socialist paper suggested instead, "On Your Way Take Home a Brick." Norman Thomas, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger spoke in Baltimore. Ten thousand voted for Norman Thomas and a like number for Broadus Mitchell, the outspoken Hopkins professor who for years had been taking his students through the lung block and to the bachelors' cotillion. Meanwhile, the CWA hired musicians for the park casinos "where the people can gather and dance their blues away.
The federal government attempted to enforce a minimum wage, maximum hours so as to spread the work, and the right of workers to organize their own unions. But the bitter competition for jobs was not a climate that fostered solidarity among workers or among the unemployed. The PWA observed the market wage differential of $1.10 an hour for skilled labor and forty-five cents for unskilled, which split the labor force. The fear of violence kept authorities on edge, and repressive measures worked against labor solidarity. In the summer of 1934 there were strikes in a dozen different industries. Most were not widely reported, and nearly all failed either through outbreaks of violence or the collapse of solidarity. At Canton, five hundred longshoremen massed to impress officials and nonunion stevedores. The longshoremen wanted seventy-five cents an hour. But each time the steamer was brought to the pier, four hundred to five hundred police filled the pier, to prevent the longshoremen from reaching the ship. The police refused to let representatives board the ship to negotiate. They used tear gas, clubs, and the city fireboat to drive the longshoremen off the pier.
Mount Vernon Mills introduced piecework and speeded up the production line under federal rules; a year later the workers joined the United Textile Workers of America. Eastern Rolling Mills laid off 400 workers and tried to go on piecework. This plan might allow the mill to pay five or six dollars instead of the fifteen-dollar minimum wage, so the workers struck. Twelve hundred meat-
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packing workers asked for twenty dollars a week, and the shoe workers wanted twelve dollars. Five thousand Amalgamated clothing workers walked out because the factories had "chiseled down the wage" to twelve dollars a week. The evolution at Sparrows Point was typical of a national pattern. By March 1933, Bethlehem Steel had discharged 1231 workers into the arms of city charity. At its shipyard "peach trees were growing in the ways." But Bethlehem testified against legislative proposals for unemployment insurance by state government.74 By fall a speed-up had raised the accident rate, and workers were signing up with the union. The company fired several hundred steel workers suspected of being union members. Crown Cork and Seal hired armed guards to prevent union organizers from talking to its workers. The scenario on the B&O was also typical. The B&O had borrowed $4 million from the PWA for construction work in this region. At the Mount Clare shops, it laid off, rehired, and again laid off its 2800 shop workers, according to the flow of PWA loan funds. To force its Paw Paw, West Virginia, work gangs to accept thirty cents an hour instead of the legal minimum of forty-five cents, the B&O brought up workers from the Salvation Army Transient Home in Baltimore. They were promised two months of work and put up with ropes around them to grade the mountainside to prevent landslides onto the tracks. Next day, when local workers appeared ready to go to work at thirty cents, the transients were shipped back to Baltimore.75
Much frustration was turned inward or directed against easier targets. Alcohol deaths increased The number of "domestic cases"-suits for divorce and abuse~soared. There were fewer marriages and many fewer births. A larger share were illegitimate, and more infants were abandoned. In addition to the larger numbers of tramps, the Salvation Army and Travelers Aid despaired of the appearance of "the woman hobo" who rode the freights or hitchhiked, "an almost hopeless social problem."76 On the Eastern Shore several Negroes were lynched; a man was burned and his ear cut off.
Just as in the '20s people had been diverted from the workaday world by their preoccupation with maintaining the illicit flow of beer, now they were diverted from the grim world of no work by the sideshow Beer Is Back, In his campaign, Roosevelt had promised an end to prohibition, and the repeal of state and federal laws began soon after his inauguration. As Hitler took full control of Germany, as reports began coming in of atrocities against the Jews, as the Baltimore unemployed signed up to comb rats, as the bank holiday drew to an end and the Park Bank case came to trial, the thirst for beer captured the headlines. No sooner had the state legislature passed the beer bill than "there is enough beer on hand right now, they said, to flood the city, figuratively speak ing, within two hours, and a number of breweries which have been shut down since the prohibition law was passed, are ready to open up on a moment's notice."77 The breweries fenced in adjoining lots to prepare loaded trucks. Three thousand applied for first-night licenses, and got out New Year's Eve noise makers. The clubs and hotels created beer gardens. The Germanic touch was all schmaltz and nostalgia, and the price had doubled to ten cents a glass. A city police officer who had vowed never to raise the flag during prohibition built a flagpole on his house in Potomac Street. On 1 April at one minute past mid-
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A Place to Move About Innight at each brewery the government inspector called "Time!" "As the inspector dropped his hand, the whistle of the brewery sounded, the doors in front of the loading platform swung Open, and beer-truck drivers shoved their vehicles into gear and shot away."78 Gunther's sent the first load to the Germania Turnverein, and forty-six more trucks sped out of Conkling Street, escorted by motorcycles and cheered by a thousand people. A crowd of fifteen hundred roared as sixty trucks dashed out of the Globe brewery on South Hanover Street. Another fifteen hundred mobbed the Southern Hotel. Traffic was "hopelessly tied up" around the Emersonian. Two thousand Negroes collected on Pennsylvania Avenue. At the Rennert Hotel, Mencken drank the first glass, and a case was sent by motorcycle to Frank Furst.
7. Ibid., 22 July 1929.
8. George D. Strayer, Report of the Survey of the Public Schools System of Baltimore,
Maryland, School Year 1920-1921, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Board of School Commissioners, 1921).
9. Municipal Journal, 6 August 1920. On the school investments that followed, see Wol man, Requardt, and Smith, Report of the Advisory Engineers.
10. Archbishop Curley, cited in Dorothy M. Brown, "Maryland between the Wars," in
Maryland: A History, 1632-1974, ed. Richard Walsh and William Lloyd Fox (Baltimore:
Maryland Historical Society, 1974).
ii. Mencken, 13 June 1921.
12. Ferdinand C. Latrobe, Iron Men and Their Dogs: A History of Bartlett, Hayward (Baltimore: I. R. Drechaler, 1941).
13. Ibid.
14. Municipal Journal, 2 December 1921.
15. Ibid., 21 July 1922.
16. Sun, 19 December 1924; 4, 28, and 31 January, 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, and 12 February and 9 and 12 March 1925.
17. See chapter 9, note $5.
18. Municipal Journal, 7 April 1922.
19. Ibid., 24 March 1921. For full illustrations of plans for the port, see original manu script and photographs entitled "Plan of Baltimore, Maryland," dated 24 March 1921, in Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Md., and published version, Port Development Plan of Baltimore, Maryland (Baltimore: Hoen, 1922).
20. Municipal Journal, 24 September 1928. See also ibid., 13 February and 8 October
1928 and 29 March 1929.
21. Mencken, Evening Sun, 22 August 1932.
22. Municipal Journal, 21 February and 19 December 1919 and 22 April 1921.
23. Mencken, 11 June 1934.
24. Municipal Journal, 26 October 1930.
25. Kelker, DeLeuuw & Co., Report on Street Railway Routing and Improvement of Traffic Conditions in the City of Baltimore (1926), and Michael R. Farrell, Who Made All Our Streetcars Go? (Baltimore: NRHS Publications, 1973).
26. United Railways and Electric Company of Baltimore, Annual Report (25th) to Stockholders for Year Ended Dec.31, 1923.
27. Cited in Wolman, Requardt, and Smith, Report of Advisory Engineers, p.1.
28. Municipal Journal, 8 November 1921.
29. Ibid., s November 1920, p.S.
30. Ibid., 7 April 1922.
31. "Report of the City Plan Committee on the Development of the Territory Added
under the Act of 1918 ...," 1 May 1919, in Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Md.
32. City Plan Committee, Municipal Journal, 19 May 1919.
33. Ibid., 21 February 1930.
34. Ibid., s November 1920.
35. Maryland State Roads Commission, A History of Road Building in Maryland (Balti more, 1958).
36. Municipal Journal, 10 and 31 May, 18 October, and 22 November 1929 and 27 July
1931. "Report of Mr. F. L. Olmsted on East and West Viaduct, Baltimore, Maryland, to
Municipal Art Society," 2 December 1929, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Md.
37. Municipal Journal, 25 June 1924 and 25 April 1927.
38. Joseph B. Chepaitis, "Albert C. Ritchie in Power, 1920-1927," Maryland Historical
Magazine 68 (1973): 383-404. See also Brown, "Maryland between the wars."
39. City Plan Committee, "Report," 1 May 1919.
40. W. W. Emmart, Report on Housing and Commercial Conditions in Baltimore Con stituting Studies Prepared for Mayor Howard W. Jackson, Oct. 1934 (Baltimore, 1934). See also "A Report on Slums," Baltimore Engineer 8 (January 1934): 6-10; John Edward Semmes,
NOTES TO PAGES 327-43
415
41. Ira DeA. Reid, Summary Report: The Negro Community of Baltimore (Baltimore:Urban League, 1934). See also Sun, 15 December 1929; "The Lung Block," Urban League Study no.2 (Baltimore: Urban League, 1925).
48. Sun, 14 and 16 January 1934.
54. Sun, 19 March 1933 and 19 February 1933.55. Ibid., 14 March 1933.
59. Sun, 19 August 1932; see also ibid., 20 March and 17 and 19 December 1933.
69. Sun, 10 January 1934.
72. Sun, 31 January 1934.
Wants, 1912-1952 (Baltimore, 1952). Clark J. Fitzpatrick and Elliott Buse, Fifty Years of
Suretyship and Insurance: The Story of United States Fidelity & Guarantee Co. (Baltimore,
1946). Frank R. Kent, The Story of Alex. Brown & Sons, 1800-1900 (Baltimore, 1950). Sun, 4
January and 26 December 1924 and 4 February and 10 March 1925.
74. Ibid., 20 and 24 March 1933 and 10 January 1934.
75. Leader, 26 January, 15 September, and 13 October 1934; Sun, 29 December 1933.
76. Sun, 7 January 1934.
77. Ibid., 15 March 1933.
78. Ibid., 7 April 1933.