Publication of this book was generously assisted by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Maryland Arts Council; the Bernice L. and Albert D. Hutzler, Jr., foundation, Inc.; Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Levi; Lois and Philip Macht; the Harvey M. and Len ore P. Meyerhoff Fund; and James W. and Patricia T. Rouse.
Copyright © 1980 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, xerography, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 79-21950
ISBN 0-8018-2224-6
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data will be found on the last printed
page of this book.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Archives of the B&O Railroad Museum (Chessie System): 108, 153, 157, 160, 351. Baltimore City Courthouse: 12, 23, 24, 31, 33, 39, 56. Baltimore City Microfilm Archives: 21, 54, 60, 77. Baltimore Department of Housing and Community Development: 116, 378. Baltimore Gas and Electric Company: 43, 84, 113, 167, 247, 248, 260, 261, 263, 265, 269, 288, 290, 296, 309, 313, 315, 317, 318, 322, 323, 327, 337. Baltimore Health Department: 376. Baltimore News-American: 205, 208, 236, 242, 255, 319, 334. Baltimore Sewerage Commission, annual report (1908): 256. Baltimore Sewerage Commission, annual reports (1911, 1912, 1913): 258. Baltimore Sun: 118, 241, 252,310, 341, 348, 375. Baltimore Topographical Survey, atlas (1914): 87. Elinor B. Cahn: 385. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 150, 171, 174, 179, 213, 25~51, 332, 371. Harborplace Limited Partnership, 354. A. Hoen & Co.: 177 (left). Hughes Collection, Edward L. Bafford Photography Collection, University of Maryland Baltimore County Library: 75, 109, 114, 1~, 201, 216, 267, 272, 303, 307, 312, 320. Conrad N. Lauer, Engineering in American Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1924): 211. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division: 78, 104, 106, 164. Maps, Inc.: 361. Maryland Bureau of Industrial Statistics, Eleventh Annual Report (1903): 229. Maryland Bureau of Statistics and Information, Thirteenth Annual Report (1904): 202. Maryland Historical Society: 19, 37, 65, 121, 227, 239. Maryland Mass Transit Administration: 253. National Archives, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers: 59. Oblate Sisters of Providence: 95. Julian Olson: 367. George Peabody Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library: 73. Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University: 192. The Peale Museum: 204, 293. Regional Management, Inc. (Hughes Co., photographers): 304. Linda G. Rich: 90, 223, 364. YMCA of the Greater Baltimore Area: 177 (right).
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1) The Empty Century 1
2) Rhythms of Growth, 1745-1788 10
3) Order and Disorder, 1789-1801 26
4) Commerce Is the Mainspring, 1802-1821 41
5) The Grand Civic Procession, 1822-1837 71
6) A Lifelike Energy, 1838-1865 102
7) A Rent in the Social Fabric, 1866-1877 149
8) Consolidation, 1878~1899 198
9) The Art of Urban Landscape, 1900-1918 245
10) A Place to Move About In, 1919-1934 302
11) Hemmed In, 1935-1979 347
Notes 387
Index of Subjects 419
Index of People 427
vii
Without the collaboration of Phoebe Stanton in teaching and research, I would not have begun this book. At all the choice points Reds Wolman made me feel it was worth continuing. Over eight years Julian Olson photocopied maps, microfilmed archives, and printed photographs; he steadily reformed my punctuation and tempered my language. David Harvey shared his discovery of Baltimore for several years. Ronald Walters commented on an early draft of the manuscript, David Hanna another. Peter Holland read every word and insisted I say what I meant. David Boehlke thought out, collected, and prepared the illustrations and captions. Without David's energies, the book would not be finished. Among the generous contributors of documents were the Baltimore City courts (land records division), the city's reference library and microfilm archive, the bureau of sewers, the mayor's office, the planning, urban renewal, and housing agencies, the Maryland Historical Society, the Maryland Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Peabody Library, the Peale Museum, the Johns Hopkins University libraries, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Jewish Historical Society, the Catholic Archdiocese, the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, the Baltimore Gas & Electric Company, the Union Trust Company, the Canton Company, and Maps, Incorporated. In the course of this research, I have taxed the tolerance of more librarians than I can name personally, and the curiosity and endurance of six cohorts of undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins University. I cannot begin to name the splendid neighbors, friends, and allies, and some rather splendid adversaries, who have lit and focused my view of Baltimore since 1960.
ix
Introduction
There is a tempo and a pattern to urban growth-a dance of larger sweep from generation to generation, as brick rows and marble steps extend over the landscape, as people do their social climbing or take a fall, and move around the corner or up the hill or out to the valley. This book is organized to reflect that rhythm as it was experienced in the neighborhoods of Baltimore. City growth is a boom-and-bust sequence of "long swings," with eighteen years or so Separating the neighboring peaks. This applies equally to North America and Europe over at least two centuries, and to much of the world in the last hundred years.
The reader may not find here, therefore, all he wants to know about Baltimore. The outsider may find that this portrait does not match his private image of the city: baseball, softshell crabs, Eubie Blake at the piano, or Blaze Star on the Block. Some of Baltimore's choice gifts to the nation are not even mentioned:
Harriet Tubman's underground railroad, Albert Fink's bridges, Babe Ruth, or Edgar Allan Poe. Others appear in the cast of the book, but not in their greatest roles: Frederick Douglass and Isaac Myers as national figures in the black struggle, Henrietta Szold in American Jewish scholarship or world Zionism, Charles Carroll as maker of the constitution or Judge Taney as its interpreter, H. L. Mencken adding to the American language and American literary criticism, Tom Winans building railroads in Russia, or the mark of The Johns Hopkins University on graduate education. Neglected utterly are the military exploits of the Maryland colonels and sea captains, and the eight thousand crosses in rows in the national cemeteries at Baltimore.
If these glories are neglected, what remains? This book is about city building, an internal dynamic of the city-state, and how Baltimoreans see themselves and their situation. In that sense, Baltimore is America, in its rhythm of building up and tearing down, swarming and dispersing, getting and spending, birthing and dying, sharing and competing. Just as the story of one farm or quarter-section of forest, a single Square in the counterpane of America, lends an understanding of the processes that formed the landscape, so Baltimore is one square in the great cotillion of the cities.
Some dimensions of Baltimore life must remain understated because they are given their due elsewhere. Excellent modern histories focus on the party politics and political leadership of successive generations in Maryland. The generals and the jurists have their biographies, and there are new works each year on Baltimore clipper ships, locomotives, steamboats, or streetcars. The interested reader can turn to other books for such detail.
Other dimensions are understated because we know too little about them. The most serious gap is our ignorance of the lives of slaves and servants in Baltimore, the urban economy of servitude and its extinction. Another hole in written history is the transplantation of the Polish Catholic community-uprooted from the old world village, heeled in to urban squalor, then thriving in tidy rows of marble steps. A third missing link is an account of the strategies of landowners and real estate investors in each round. Here the reader can only be advised to look out the window and read the landscape. Baltimore possesses some magnificent sources for the books that must be written to fill these gaps. In addition to the resources of the Enoch Pratt Library, the Peabody collection, The Johns Hopkins University library, and the Maryland Historical Society-to all of which I am indebted-there are a barely scratched wealth of maps and surveys, and wonderfully indexed land records and legal archives. In the landscape itself, the city's social record is built into its dwellings, and its technological history is imprinted in the industrial buildings and engineering works.
Meanwhile, a twelfth generation of children of all colors of ribbons and races plays hopscotch on the sidewalks, correcting with chalk a "standard American" grid to match Baltimore tradition, hopping and giggling and waiting a turn, thinking not at all of grown-up games or the place of Baltimore in a hopscotch world.