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E ver the stubborn rhythmic continuity of eleven generations, the growth of Baltimore was geared to the tempo of the world economy. As in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Baltimore's economic motor purred at any outbreak of war and stalled at any threat of "disasters of the peace. The long stagnation of the great depression was broken and a new tide of industry and population rolled in: glue factories and trainloads of workers. From a population of 1.2 million in 1940 the metropolis grew to 2 million in 1970.
Continuity was also preserved in the spatial pattern of growth: population packed into the center, then spilled beyond the city limits into a suburban ring. The city population declined gradually, by about a thousand a year, while the counties mushroomed at a rate of thirty thousand a year. First industry, then housing pushed out into Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties, and then to Howard, Carroll, and Harford counties.
Once the second world war was over, housing starts began to climb, never dropping below three thousand dwellings a year. Construction crested at seven or eight thousand after the Korean War (1954-55), swelled again at the height of the Vietnam War (1965-68), and reached fifteen thousand in the mid-1970s. The metropolitan areas of Washington, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Harris burg reached out to touch the Baltimore suburbs. Washington grew faster, concentrating in itself the federal instruments for managing a war economy and leading the way toward the postwar service economy.
The remarkable transformations of the production engine of Baltimore in this generation stemmed from World War II. Out of them grew radical changes in the metabolism of the city: a higher exchange of materials with the world economy and an insatiable appetite for energy. One can see these changes, like those of earlier generations, as changes of scale. Larger lumps of capital were amassed and incorporated into the fabric of Baltimore, thereby channeling and accelerating energy flows and restructuring human relations within the metro politan area.
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old flat irons and radiators from the alleys of Baltimore did his bit for the Japanese war effort.1 By the time the Japanese invaded China and Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia, the Martin Company had $70 million of British aircraft orders. By August 1941 $1 billion of U.S. government contracts had reached Maryland and fifty thousand people were working in defense plants, about half of them at Martin aircraft. Japanese buyers were no longer allowed to visit the plant. The strategic advantages that had favored Baltimore in World War I made it once again the place to build ships and airplanes. After Pearl Harbor, decisive changes in scale of enterprise were achieved in a matter of months. Martin increased its employment to thirty-seven thousand. Bethlehem Steel achieved the same record. Western Electric peaked at nine thousand, Maryland Drydock at forty-five hundred, and others operated at levels of two or three thousand workers.2 As the defense industries grew, relief and WPA employment dwindled.
Federal finance was the key. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, converted from fighting the depression to fighting the war, provided $70 million for construction of defense plants in Maryland.3 Among them were a sixty- acre Lansdowne site for Westinghouse Electric, "scrambled" facilities (only partly government owned) for steel production at Bethlehem, a tax-free shipyard site at Fairfield, and $2 million capital to Davison Chemical, whose silica gel technology was strategic to the synthetic rubber program. The RFC also siphoned working capital and materials such as scrap iron and chrome ore into Baltimore. In the rubber program it bought up raw materials for industrial alcohol~potatoes and Cuba's entire output of sugar and molasses-and stored them at a tank farm at Morgantown. Virtually all home construction during the war (roughly thirty thousand dwellings) was "defense housing." At Aero Acres, near the Martin plant, streets were named Right Wing, Aileron, Fuselage, and Dihedral. Whole communities were built at Turner.
>,fFederal defense investments had a tidewater suburban locus. The new industrial plants and defense housing were built on the tidewater necks toward Bear Creek, Back River, Middle River, and Curtis Bay. Military bases employed large numbers of civilians and construction workers at coastal plain sites farther from the city: Fort Meade, Edgewood Arsenal, and the coast guard depot at
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The groundwork had been laid during the war, in terms of new product technologies. The sacrifices of wartime, forced savings, and a "baby boom" pre pared the way for a "consumer economy." Backlog orders and expectations of home building stimulated massive investments in telephone equipment, gypsum, titanium oxide paints, chain link fencing, home power tools, and bathtubs. An airplane parts foundry began casting soil pipe for home builders. The recycling of equipment created curious reversals in the flows of materials. For example, Bethlehem Steel transformed a shipbuilding site into a "ship-breaking" opera tion, which supplied steel scrap to Sparrows Point. Morris Schapiro also made a specialty of scrapping ships, streetcars, and ferry boats. Wrecking entrepreneurs flourished on slum clearance projects.
The technological basis for future changes in Baltimore production was generated through wartime problem solving. Westinghouse bought its federally built Lansdowne plant, and converted from x-ray inspection of armor plate to industrial uses of x-rays. Immediately after the war, Westinghouse and the Martin Company launched development work on StratoVision, airborne TV and FM radio transmitters. Western Electric was manufacturing coaxial cable for TV at Point Breeze by 1951. Davison Chemical's methods for packaging whole planes and tanks had industrial uses. Grease coating was replaced by packing with silica gel, a chemically inert substance that absorbs water on an enormous internal surface. Davison's granulation techniques were then applied to its fertilizer. Its related war work on fluid catalytic cracking for aviation fuels was applied to gasoline manufacture at the Baltimore Esso refinery, and later to emission control agents.8
Successive waves of federal investment in weapons systems and aerospace continued to generate waves of industrial technology and construction in Baltimore. Westinghouse Air Arm was involved in radar and automatic pilots for night fighter planes in Korea. It became the Aerospace Division and "spun off" a Molecular Electronics Division, which built a "clean room" of one hundred ten thousand square feet at Friendship Airport, for the manufacture of integrated circuits. Their Ordnance Division, whose torpedoes left no visible wake and sank 2 million tons of Japanese shipping, devised new generations of submarine weapons and submersibles. It grew into the Westinghouse Environmental Center and the Ocean Research and Engineering Center near the Bay Bridge.
Baltimore industry remained intensely interconnected. As some webs were unraveled, others were knitted together. There were two powerful reintegrating forces in this process. One was the technical complexity of the new weapons and aerospace systems, which required an elaborate planned integration of design, timing, and assembly through federal contracts and subcontracts to hundreds of firms. By 1972 the aerospace industry was contributing $1 billion a year to the Maryland economy, and what Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex" had its characteristic spaces in the Baltimore landscape. The sites were linked together by highways in the Baltimore-Washington corridor and beltways around the two metropolitan areas. A second integrating process was the growth of the firm. As in 1898, when accumulation and diversification occurred by merger of firms at the national scale, in the 1960s
firms merged into great corporate families that ringed the earth. Their corporate genealogies, their internal exchange of goods, their internal accounting, and their global communications by telex and computer were invisible to consumers. For example, when W. R. Grace merged with Davison Chemical, internal vertical integration became more elaborate among the divisions: ocean transport, Latin American trade, advertising and brokering, organic chemicals, rare earths, and scrap recovery of nonferrous metals. The worldwide strategies of the superfirms were not visible to most Baltimoreans, but the role of the largest Baltimore plants belonging to "transnational" firms can be inferred from cargo movements through the port.
T he port of Baltimore felt every round of expansion of world trade. After lendlease and firepower for Eisenhower, Baltimore shipped Marshall Plan cargoes to rebuild Europe, then military supplies to Korea and Vietnam. A world trade boom was felt from 1970 through 1973. In boom years the port of Baltimore handled 30 million tons of cargo. The level of activity from year to year still depended largely on world trade in four bulk cargoes: exports of grain and coal and imports of iron ore and oil.0
Changes in the structure of the world economy appeared in the metabolism of the port of Baltimore, as new frontiers and new centers of world trade emerged. Highly specialized products such as coke, specialty steels, and engineering goods moved among U.S., European, and Japanese ports. Japan
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bought metallurgical coal from Baltimore, purchased and built dredges under license from a Baltimore firm, and brought Toyotas into Baltimore for distribu tion on the east coast. Japanese ships also brought Canadian potash from Saskatchewan via Vancouver, and Japanese trading firms shipped goods made in Korea and Taiwan to U.S. department stores. In 1976, $12 billion worth of goods was imported to the United States from Japan via Baltimore, and some what more was exported.
Baltimore was connected with a new frontier of mushrooming cities that performed as it had once performed, as collection points from inland resource frontiers. In 1962, Baltimore was receiving 10 million tons a year of Venezuelan iron ore from the brand-new city of Ciudad Guayana. In 1965 Bethlehem Steel began bringing iron ore from Quebec and Labrador, via Sept-Iles. The port of Baltimore received Chilean copper. These new cities were also a market frontier for American goods: Baltimore periodically shipped grain to Calcutta and Bombay, and bridge steel, soap, fertilizers, and bottle-washing machinery to Mombasa and 5a5 Paulo. As new outposts of rapid capital accumulation, these cities attracted migrants from their backlands, and they became rivals to the Baltimore labor force. Baltimore had struggled to protect and develop its manu factures of shoes, cotton goods, and nails in the 1820s and succeeded in export ing these goods in the world trade boom of the 1870s. Now Baltimore consumers again became importers of shoes, textiles, dishes, and clothing-from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Lisbon, and Port-au-Prince. Earlier frontier cities also emerged as centers competing with Baltimore. Its investors had helped rebuild Atlanta and connect Atlanta and Norfolk with the northeast. Now it found Atlanta a rivaL attracting corporate headquarters and regional sales and insurance offices, and Norfolk, Newport News, and New Orleans functioned as rival ports. Baltimore capital was being invested on the frontiers, and Baltimoreans received dividends, but the headquarters for channeling and managing these investments were not found in Baltimore. Decisions were made in a small number of more central places: New York, London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. Thus, Baltimore was neither frontier nor center, and its growth was hemmed in globally, in much the same way it had been hemmed in regionally in the 1840s when New York and Philadelphia had skimmed the cream of commerce with the nation's inland frontier, leaving Baltimore the "blue milk."
Ships built in Baltimore provided an example of the larger lumps of capital. The Liberty ships were 515 feet long. In 1954 Baltimore shipyards launched the first converted containerships or "sea trains" for McLean, and specialized in "jumboizing" oil tankers. Ships 883 feet long were built for the Alaska oil run. In 1973 an 1100-foot "oilberg" built at Sparrows Point was too large for the port of Baltimore, indeed too large for any American port at the time, and in 1975 they were building five supertankers 1200 feet long. The industrial might of the city had outgrown its commerce. Meanwhile, home-grown commerce had also outgrown local industry. McLean's Sea Land, now a subsidiary of RJR and a major container line on the North Atlantic, ordered "supercontainerships" from German shipyards.
The weight, carrying capacity, and cost of these ships increased more than
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their length. The Liberty ships weighed 10,000 tons. Atlantic Richfield's ships for Alaska were 120,000 tons deadweight, able to carry a million barrels of oil. The 1975 supertankers of 265,000 tons could carry two million barrels. Coupled with the new belts, blowers, and containers for handling mixed cargo, the superships allowed quicker turnaround of the ship, the freight, and the capital they embodied.
The new scale of ships and cargo corresponded to changes of scale in other features of the landscape. The channel would be deepened from 42 to 50 feet. Faster unloading and greater flow of goods across the docks required much larger back-up working spaces. At the 550-acre Dundalk marine terminal, Volkswagens and Toyotas could be driven off the ship into parking lots, in spected, washed, loaded onto car carriers, and delivered within five days. Seven giant bridge cranes were installed at Dundalk to handle containers. New barges for cement were as big as Liberty ships, and a group of sixteen cement silos at Curtis Bay were 190 feet tall, like the Washington Monument. At Sparrows Point a novel shipbuilding basin replaced traditional dry docks, a thousand-foot mechanized ore pier was built, and the blast furnaces of the "world~scale" steel mill were 320-foot skyscrapers. Smaller copper refineries were shut down, and in effect replaced by Kennecott's "world-scale" refinery at Hawkins Point. Such installations had one-story floor plans and required large tracts of land, com parable in size to the original land grants of Maryland in the 1650s. Bethlehem Steel bought 1300 acres for linked industries and future expansion, then evacuated and scrapped its old company town to make room for the electric furnaces. An 1100-acre site was purchased for General Electric's Appliance Park at Columbia, and the overall town plan for Columbia required an assembly of 15,000 acres, five times the initial tract for Canton, an 1830 project with much the same mix of ideas.
In the drive to promote the city's growth from the world trade boom, Baltimore came up against a handicap of its own making. In its perennial zeal for developing trade to the hinterland, the city had allocated most of its waterfront to railroads. The several railroads had provided shipping piers and warehouses and had specialized the port in the handling of coal, grain, ore, and oil. But the railroads had become moribund, inefficient monopolies, short of fresh capital, and were interested only in the "captive" commodities, coal and grain, not likely to move by truck or pipeline. Baltimore's three great railroads, the Balti more & Ohio, the Chesapeake & Ohio, and the Western Maryland, all came into a single vast "Chessie" system in 1965, devoted primarily to moving coal, and managed from Cleveland. They paid little in taxes, but controlled most of the tidewater sites available for industrial development, notably five hundred acres of Marley Neck and five hundred acres in Fairfield. Like Ellicott's wharves in Cheapside in 1818 and Johns Hopkins's Light Street warehouses in 1859, the railroad piers had become obsolete. Each agent of developed land became a vested interest and in its turn an obstacle to growth.
Once again, public investment was essential to break the barrier and allow a new spurt of private enterprise. Developable waterfront land was largely downstream, outside the city limits, and beyond the city's fiscal reach and its
Å_ _The state of Maryland reinforced Baltimore's "world scale" viewpoint when the Port Authority opened its World Trade Center in 1977. The five-sided, thirty-story building perched on the waterfront but its working aspects were minimized, since the original docks were made into promenades, shops, and marinas and the warehouses were pulled down and replaced by hotels, a science center, and an aquarium.
investment horizon. The solution was to create a state agency, the Maryland Port Authority, to overcome the constraints of the "railroad port." In 1967 the Port Authority launched Decade for Progress, an investment plan on the order of $90 million. (A second "decade" may reach ten times that investment level.) Its priorities were to create public land, raise productivity, coordinate all modes of transport, and develop the neglected potential for attracting high-value general cargo. The key strategy was to promote container handling. The federal govern ment would dredge a hundred million cubic yards of muck, to deepen the channel from Baltimore to the Virginia Capes to handle the iron-ore super- carriers. The problem of where to dump the muck, contaminated with chemical wastes, delayed the project for several years. Public investment was also needed for the metropolitan airport. At the end of the war the city abandoned the $7 million mud pie at Dundalk and built a $15 million airport on a 3200-acre site at Friendship, between Washington and Baltimore. Like the port, the airport was taken over by the state for operation, and a State Department of Transporta tion was created to coordinate public investments and manage the entire trans port revolution in Maryland.
Even the so-called world-scale plants in Baltimore were only modest links in the worldwide corporate metabolism of the ~70s.1O The Kennecott copper refinery
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at Hawkins Point, with a rod-casting mill and a sophisticated plant for recycling metals from "black slimes," had a work force of only seven hundred. But the overall growth of Kennecott as a transnational firm occurred primarily outside Baltimore. Kennecott's growth in the '70s arose from transforming and connect ing resource spaces at opposite poles of the earth; its profit level depended on variations in foreign exchange, international tax differentials, and prices of copper and gold. The company mined Australian coal with a dragline bucket that took two hundred-ton gulps and shipped it to Japan, five thousand miles away. It did the start-up engineering for brass and tungsten plants in Japan and Singapore, explored for ores in Papua and Indonesia, and participated in a joint venture with power companies to mine Wyoming coal, turn it into gas, and ship it to Indiana; another with Bethlehem Steel, Rio Tinto Zinc, and Mitsubishi to mine manganese nodules from the ocean floor.
Another giant, the Martin Company, recycled its Baltimore real estate. It demolished the world's biggest factory floor at Aero Acres, redeveloped the region's largest industrial site of the last generation, and built and leased an office tower at Friendship. After merger with Marietta cement, Martin Marietta contributed to building runways, highways, and bridges in the Baltimore land scape. But overall, the corporation has become a diversified and tightly inter woven structure, producing aluminum, chemicals, and aerospace and data systems, and its growth frontier is outside Baltimore, in the southern and western rim of the United States: Charlotte, Atlanta, Tulsa, Orlando, and Denver. Its highest profits have come from an ocean periphery of world growth much like Kennecott's: chemicals from Australia to Indonesia, bauxite from Guinea to a Caribbean refinery and a smelter in the Pacific Northwest. The Baltimore region of the 1770s was a congeries of plantations. In the 1890s it was a single well-integrated plantation. In the 1970s it appeared to be one "quarter" or subsystem in a world-scale plantation.
T he new metabolism of Baltimore involved a new scale of energy exchange. While its population doubled in thirty-five years, electrical energy consumed in its homes and industries increased fivefold, the amount of natural gas used tripled, and the amount of gasoline burned rose sixfold. As one might expect from clues of the 1850s, 1870s, or 1920s, the shift of scale was associated with important changes-technical, managerial, financial, and geographic-in the production and consumption of energy.
The size of electric generating units rose from sixty megawatts-which could keep a hundred-watt lightbulb burning in each home in the metropolitan area-to fifteen times that size. Energy was transported much longer distances. A grid of high-tension lines was built to connect power plants farther from Baltimore: Calvert Cliffs nuclear generating plant and mine-mouth coal-burning plants at Conemaugh and Keystone, Pennsylvania. The high-voltage power lines took the form of a beltway, a coastal plain corridor, and stream-valley radials. The scale of management was boosted accordingly. By 1956, Baltimore Gas and Electric Company was participating in the largest power pool in the country, known as the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection. It
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shared load diversity and introduced automatic load controls. The service area of Baltimore, a few hundred square miles, was plugged into a vast interconnec tion from the Appalachian backbone to the Atlantic. It in turn exchanges power with other systems of the continent: the Northeast New York-Canadian Inter connection, an Allegheny group, and the Southeast.
Changes in the choice of fuels to generate electricity show how Baltimore was plugged into the world and how vast complementary spaces of oceans and continents were connected, to tap Mesozoic pools of oil and gas and Paleozoic deposits of coal. At the end of World War II, 1 million tons of coal were burned annually to make electricity in the Baltimore region. Volume peaked at 5 million tons in 1968, roughly equal to the amount exported through the port. But the Baltimore Gas & Electric Company began converting its power plants from coal to low-sulfur oil, and abandoned its regional energy base in coal. Coal was cut back to less than 2 million tons. In 1974 consumption of oil peaked at 16 million barrels, the equivalent of sixteen trips by one of the oilbergs under construction at the time. Oil was providing three-fifths of the region's electric power, and most of it came from Venezuela, eighteen hundred miles by sea. It was refined at Cura~ao or in Delaware Bay. Refining in Baltimore ceased. Meanwhile, the Appalachian coal was sent ten thousand miles by sea, to make steel in Japan. As conversion was completed and the coal-handling equipment was scrapped, the price of oil tripled (1973), and nuclear power was substituted to produce three-fifths of the region's power.
In the same manner, natural gas was supplied from Columbia Gas System over the Big Inch pipeline from Texas, and in 1978 Columbia was building a new terminal at Cove Point to receive liquefied natural gas (300 million cubic feet per day) from Algeria, forty-six hundred miles away. Like the delivery of electric power, the supply of gas to Baltimore was merely a small excrescence on a larger wholesale system. The Columbia System in turn was a minor participant in an investment pool with other large companies, to bring Arctic gas from Prudhoe Bay and the Beaufort Sea, to pump gas from 370 feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico, to explore offshore Labrador, and finally in a new venture with Exxon to make gas from coal at the mine mouth in West Virginia.
The hum of high tension lines, the snore of the power plant stacks at Wagner Point, and the rush of warm water returning to the bay were signs of a financial circulation. The Baltimore Gas and Electric Company was investing $25 million to $30 million a year from World War II through 1965, then moved up to a level of $250 million a year in the '70s, about tenfold.11 By 1974 the company was hungry for capital, paying interest rates of 10 percent, and novel ways had to be found to finance power development. In preparing to operate the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant, for example, the company had bought some nuclear fuel, but then to raise capital, it resold its nuclear fuel and arranged to lease it, paying over some years as the fuel was consumed. Likewise, federal income tax rules per mitted deferrals on the massive investments at Calvert Cliffs, to be repaid over the future "life" of the property. In other words, the energy push of the 1970s followed the rule by which the B&O pushed over the mountains in the 1830s:
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"This generation can afford to pay interest; let the next generation pay the principal."
Since the energy was supplied from a worldwide resource base, and from a national or transnational managerial and financial base, naturally the scale of public regulation was boosted to federal and diplomatic levels. The Atomic Energy Commission regulated design and fuels for nuclear plants. The regulator of natural gas pricing was the Federal Power Commission. The Environmental Protection Agency affected plant location, design, and the choice of technical alternatives. Decisive elements of tax structure were federal: the corporate income tax, depletion allowances, depreciation rates, investment deferral, and foreign tax credits. Back in 1906 Alexander Brown had consolidated gas and electricity as the last productive monopoly of Baltimore investors, to be kept in check by state incorporation laws, municipal franchise, and a state power com mission. Now the power company had outgrown Baltimore as surely as the B&O Railroad before it, and the arena of control had outgrown the city-state.12 Local management and local government expressed the same sense of powerlessness as local consumers in response to remote events such as high diplomacy in the Near East and the Byzantine politics of the oil companies. Extremes of natural hazard, as in former times, coupled with human error and managerial risk (as in gas storage and reservoir levels) found the population vulnerable: in a cold winter schools were closed to save gas; coal cars, sprayed for dust control, froze solid and piled up in the yards. In a hot summer, electrical "brown out" threatened to stall elevators and immobilize sweltering office workers. Power failures in New York demonstrated the threat of total blackout.
Massive changes occurred in the "consumption" of energy, as well as its "production." Increases in the overall energy metabolism of the Baltimore region were matched by increased energy metabolism of each individual household: a threefold increase in its use of gas and a sevenfold increase in its use of electric power. Population growth did not begin to explain the thirst for energy. The number of households rose faster: as more grandparents, more youths, more students, and more divorced people established separate households they in stalled more water heaters and stoves. More important to this energy revolution was a geographical transformation of the city: the suburban life style. As people spilled into new single-family homes in the suburban counties, the population of cars tripled. In 1964, a boom year in housing, the gas and electric industry launched a program to coordinate the marketing of appliances through the design of dwellings. Manufacturers, sales outlets, and utilities intensified their promo tion, and developers featured appliances in their advertising. More households began purchasing color televisions, dehumidifiers, air conditioners, dryers, and frost-free refrigerators. By 1974 the strong sell was the "all-electric home," as at Red Fox Farms in Baltimore County: central electric heating and air conditioning, the built-in dishwasher, the electric range, water heater, and garbage disposal. Newly built homes were twice as likely to have these appliances as homes built twenty years ago.
The accumulation of little lumps of capital in households was geared to the
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accumulation of great lumps of capital in power plants and supertankers. As the household enterprise substituted labor-saving appliances, domestic servants dis appeared from the labor force and more women went to work to buy the appliances, consolidate the debts, or contribute to the mortgage. Households went deeper into debt. Consumer credit expanded to match the expansion of credit for power generation. In the all-electric home, appliances were covered into the home mortgage itself, and young families undertook heavier burdens of mortgage debt. The new thirty-year debentures of the gas and electric company were paralleled by the extension of home mortgages from the tradi tional fifteen years to thirty.
The strategy of building energy consumption into the landscape and the mortgage implied a geographic pattern. Baltimore County, with a third of the region's population, uses two-thirds of the electric power. In the new structure of life-style differences, the important boundary was between the city and the gas- guzzling all-electric counties. Air conditioning in the all-electric counties and the central office spaces governs the peak loads and design capacities of the power system.
The productivity achieved in such a system seemed remarkable. From the outbreak of World War I until 1973 natural gas prices were held constant. Electric rates fell by one-fourth, and the number of people employed by the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company did not change (about eight thousand). All this occurred in a period when wages rose fourfold, more than enough to cope with a tripling of consumer prices. This kind of growth also characterized the telephone company and the city's world-scale steel, copper, and chemical industries. But paradoxically, the growth added up to stubborn unemployment and equally stubborn inflation, with especially strong pressures toward rising prices for land and rising interest rates in the 1970s and a race to develop yet more distant and more capital-hungry resource frontiers.
The frenzied metabolism also implied immense energy losses in the long hauls of fuels and in local heat wasted to generate 500,000 volts for long-distance transport and then step the power back down to the users' 120-volt level. The big power plants and steel furnaces used water for cooling and radiated heat to the atmosphere, affecting the temperatures experienced in various parts of the city.
The boost in the levels of energy circulated through Baltimore thus produced a boost in the circulation of money. The effects of waste heat and overloads were concentrated in some parts of Baltimore, and the cooling effects and savings of human energy were concentrated in others. But the influences on price and supply and the management and investment decisions came from outside Baltimore. The step-up in the circulation of money was most apparent in the growth of the financial system. While employment remained constant in the gas and electric company itself and at the steel plant, the fastest-growing sectors of the metropolitan economy were the "FIRE"-finance, insurance, and real estate, which indeed grew like wildfire. The deepening of capital could be seen on the night skyline in the thrusting up of a tight cluster of thirty-story
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like all the transport revolutions that changed Baltimore's situation in the L world economy, this one also required changes in the internal form of the city. When the shortages of rubber and steel ceased, households bought auto mobiles in startling numbers. The mass transit system disintegrated. Streetcar ridership plummeted after VJ-day. The Baltimore Transit Company collapsed financially, and was bought out by a Chicago group, indirectly connected with General Motors, who converted the transit system to diesel buses and sold out to the city.14 The ferries were eliminated. Trains and electric commuter lines sold off their rights of way. Pennsylvania Station became a half-deserted hulk, smelling vaguely of diesel fuel, marble urinals, and the cigar smoke of vestigial ticket agents. Mount Royal Station auctioned its high-backed rocking chairs and was converted into an art school. Camden Station virtually closed when passenger service was taken over by Amtrak and it was no longer possible to go west by train.
In the 'SOs the capacity of the street system was stretched by ingenious management to accommodate the cars. The "elastic streets" of the '20s were stretched by eliminating the green medians. Henry Barnes created pairs of one- way streets, automated the traffic signals, and introduced a pedestrian crossing interval known as the "Barnes dance." But management was not enough. The mass switch to the automobile required massive investment in new roadbed and the allocation of new spaces. The entire urban landscape had to be readapted. The great public works of the generation were highways and bridges. In style they ran to massive, angular, long, and low slung. Highway investments created a new "hard" landscape. The concrete poured annually in Maryland rose fivefold. It averaged 3 million cubic yards, enough to fill the inner harbor every year, according to Buckler's century-old scheme. Over the whole generation it amounted to 130 million cubic yards, more than equal to all the muck to be dredged to deepen the channel from Baltimore to the Virginia Capes.15 For the parallel Bay Bridge, concrete was poured continuously for six days and five nights, as a fleet of tank trucks shuttled cement from Martinsburg. Continuous casting allowed the core of the U.S. Fidelity and Guarantee Building to rise one foot per hour. The new suburban landscape, whether seen from the air or from the expressways themselves, is a skein of ribbons and bows of bright concrete and green. Standard banked curves, vetch-covered slopes, and wide-angle vision replaced the meanders in schist or limestone, the piedmont roller coaster, and the gentler cuts and curves in the red clay, sand, and gravel of tidewater. All modes of transport were integrated and connected by highly specialized limited access routes. The higher speeds and intensities of traffic reflected an acceleration in the circulation of goods, people, money, and information. The human con necting rod in this system was the driver of the tractor-trailor who hauled his
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piggyback container from ship to railyard on orders from a computer terminal or radio service, and kept abreast of accidents or speed traps on his Citizen's Band radio.
The plans for such a system and the direction of landscape change were already clear by 1937, thanks to bottlenecks recognized in the '20s and the engineering zeal of the depression. The trend toward wider ribbons of concrete, more permanent engineering works, and higher investments per mile was carried out in several bursts of energy. The first surge, prewar, was to construct three- lane highways and bridges to connect all the awkward appendages of Maryland, put stop signs on rural roads and traffic lights in the city, and build high-capacity roads to eliminate "stop and go" driving on the great corridors. Ritchie Highway was built to Annapolis and a dual highway to Frederick.
In the 'SOs the entire secondary road system was rebuilt to reduce curves and grades. At the same time, the state embarked on a set of major improve ments to handle traffic through Maryland: the four-lane Harbor Tunnel, the Bay Bridge on two hundred-foot piles, and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which had grade separations, 3.5 percent grades, three-degree curves, and cost $1 million a mile.
A third generation of projects was the interstate highway system.16 A six- lane Baltimore beltway opened in 1962, thirty-three miles around, with one exit and two bridges per mile. Radial roads followed. The road-making strategy re sembled the public improvement strategies of earlier generations, as highway engineers followed the 1834 advice of John Pendleton Kennedy: "Baltimore must imitate the spider and spread out her lines in all directions." They rediscovered and redeveloped the basic lineaments of the Maryland landscape. New radial toll routes replaced the old post roads and mill roads. Robert Mills's canal plan of 1820 sought to connect Baltimore with the Susquehanna and Potomac water- level routes across the Appalachians. Now Interstate 83 was built from the Susquehanna valley at Harrisburg down the Jones Falls toward the inner harbor, and branches of Interstate 70 came from the Ohio River and the Potomac valley through Frederick into the Gwynns Falls valley. The interstate from Washington entered on stilts through the Spring Garden of the Patapsco. The vocation of the stream valleys had changed from gristmills to cotton mills to water supply to a green network and then to a highway network. On tidewater, limited access roads were braided down the necks to connect with new harbor crossings.
The modern road builders resembled the railroad-building generation in their financial strategy. They assumed that the transport system would pay for itself-tomorrow-and they depended upon the credit of the state. Families and firms passed on from generation to generation their roles as surveyors, engineers, bankers, and brokers. In 1828 Alexander Brown had arranged for the city to borrow money to purchase stock in the B&O Railroad. His successor in the firm's fourth generation, B. H. Griswold, Jr., arranged state revenue bonds for the new toll bridges of the 1940s. His successor, Charles Garland, in the firm's fifth generation, handled state loans for the Harbor Tunnel, the Bay Bridge, the outer harbor crossing, and a second Bay Bridge parallel.
As the railroad makers had found in the 1830s, the great difficulty lay in
threading a way through the developed central city and connecting with the "streets of bustle." From 1942 to 1972 engineers repeatedly proposed crosstown routes, while neighborhoods passed the ball back and forth from year to year to resist demolition, isolation, expropriation, or environmental nuisance. While the beltway and radials, built first and located rather easily, cost $2 million a mile, connecting links within the city limits cost $50 million a mile. At that price, they were distinctly unpopular with city voters, so that the bonds were issued on the credit of the state, and 90 percent of the money came from federal highway trust funds. Baltimore citizens, as in 1784 and 1804, contended fiercely, and complained that their "perverse stars" still submitted them to the whims of an unresponsive legislature.17
Like the railroads before them, the expressways provided the prime basis for land speculation~a struggle to capture prize sites as springboards to private wealth. Whose property would be irrigated by this great watering pot? A sketch map of the expressway system shows where land values ripened, where real estate activity was most intense, and where geopolitical strategies were directed. Roadbuilding gave value to the suburban county ring, then to the great corridors, and above all to the nodal properties where they crossed. Balti moreans, never averse to mixing their metaphors, began to sense an encircle-
By 1972 a large regional shopping center was under construction at the interchange of 1-70 and 1-695, near the Social Security Administration headquarters.
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ment, to see the city as the "hole in the doughnut," and to speak of the "noose" around their necks. Suburban housing developments of six hundred to one thousand units moved outward by rings in the 'SOs between the city line and the beltway, in the '60s astride the beltway, and in the '70s into the more distant counties, onto one-acre and half-acre lots-about the size of the original lots of little Baltimore Town. Apartment and townhouse developments, packaged by the thousand dwellings, followed the new radials that crossed the beltway. Industrial parks were strung along the Harrisburg expressway, the Baltimore-Washington corridor, Pulaski Highway, and the Kennedy expressway. Industry, once con fined to waterfront locations, dispersed somewhat, and eighteen thousand acres were rezoned for industry in Baltimore County. A land use pattern of alternating wedges emerged.
At the crossings of radial highway and beltway where land values rose most, developers competed fiercely and investments were made in shopping centers, office complexes, and mixed-use developments. Here the spotlights played on the circus acts of county zoning politics. Baltimore County remained an astonishing throwback to that litigious, property-conscious society of the eighteenth century. Even in the process of transforming its landscape, a con fusion three centuries old persisted between the public weal and private wealth. Baltimoreans enjoyed a court case as in old times, and the hothouse ripening of land values through public investments resulted in the mid-1970s in the indict ment or imprisonment of the chief executives of the state and several suburban counties. When Spiro Agnew resigned from the vice-presidency and pleaded no contest in such a case, he argued from history: "This is the way business has always been done in Maryland."15
In the 1940s Route 1 between Baltimore and Washington was lined with "one-armed bandits" like Silver Sally, the slot machine that blinked and beeped and gobbled quarters, and occasionally spat them out. Now the expressways with their strings of peach-colored sodium vapor and bluish mercury vapor lights, at a hundred thousand watts per mile, and their streams of white head lights and red tail lights, insured a redistribution of dollars, and turned the city itself into a giant pinball game.
T he work force, as in earlier generations, had to adjust to the alternation of war and peace and revolutions in transport and technology. Between 1940 and 1970 the Baltimore labor force doubled. The number of paid workers grew faster than the population as a whole, and they were able to support larger proportions of babies, youths in school, and retired people. This was accom plished by substituting new sources of power for manpower, and by reallocating womanpower. The share of women rose from 30 to 40 percent of the paid labor force. The change was swiftest in the 1960s, when the number of working women grew 40 percent, of working men only 13 percent. Short-run stresses of the roller-coaster economy were absorbed by hiring or firing women workers, as in defense plants or government contract work. More women in the labor force meant more day-to-day flexibility: a large share worked evenings, Satur days, or the Christmas rush, or filled in for other people's vacations. High turn-
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over in jobs seemed to satisfy the needs of family changes and household investment, as well as changes in production.
The shrinkage of some job sectors and the growth of others was absorbed primarily by reassigning young black women. As power machinery raised pro ductivity in factories and on construction sites, there were no new "blue-collar" jobs. The number of craft workers doubled, proportionate to the whole labor force, but operatives increased less, and there was zero growth of laborers. Like wise, as power machinery entered households, the number of servants dropped by half. Laundresses were made obsolete by the automatic home washing machine. Instead, three types of employment grew. "Pink-collar" workers tripled
-to clean offices and hotel rooms, serve lunches, or mind other women 5 children. Black women filled these jobs. The clerical force tripled. This sector, virtually closed to blacks in 1940, now offered work to twenty thousand young black women, as large as the entire domestic service sector before the war. The numbers of professionals and technicians (chiefly nurses and teachers) grew fivefold, providing the springboard for the rapid growth of a black middle class. Professional and technical jobs for blacks rose eightfold, from two thousand to sixteen thousand.
As in the past, some changes were cushioned by immigration. Foreign immi gration was small: survivors of the holocaust in the 1940s, Hungarians in 1956, Cubans in 1962, Indian, Filipino, and Chinese doctors and engineers in the late '60s, Russian Jews in the 1970s. Highly skilled workers, managers, and pro tessionals moved from the rest of the United States into the jobs created by NASA and Westinghouse. Migrants from distant regions leapfrogged over local migrants in social space: they settled in the suburban counties, southerners more often in Anne Arundel County, northerners more often in Baltimore County. Most important in numbers was the flow of rural Americans into Baltimore. Blacks moved in as machines displaced them from sharecropper farms in North Carolina and Virginia. They were joined by four thousand Lumbee Indians from Robeson County, North Carolina,19 and by whites from small towns and from the coal-mine regions of western Maryland and West Virginia. Like the German and Irish immigrants of the 1830s and 1850s, the newcomers, white, black, and Indian, lived side by side or back to back in East Fayette Street, Pratt Street, and South Baltimore, sharing the lead poisoning, the tuberculosis, and the threat of the bulldozer. The several ethnic groups who competed for the more crowded housing spaces were, as always, competing in the cramped sectors of the economy. Pressures for change produced social tensions among those in closest competition.
When World War II began, only one Baltimore factory worker in a dozen was black, and nearly all the black factory workers were employed in the hot spots at Bethlehem Steel. Wartime demand for labor opened more factory jobs to them. "Colored Defense Schools" held training classes in aircraft riveting, industrial sewing, and small part assembly. Some ironies were evident to the black community, but had escaped notice in the white. On 23 May 1943, as the Allied TRIDENT conference in Washington fixed the strategy 0£ global war, the shipyard at Fairfield launched one more Liberty ship. A black opera singer
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christened it the Frederick Douglass, and they celebrated with a lunch at a Negro hotel, while black laborers scraped the grease off the ways to ready them for the next launching.20 The newspapers, in reporting the day's events, made no reference to Douglass's experience as a caulker in Baltimore, where in 1836 he had been stoned by white carpenter's apprentices. Nor did they mention that the ship was built in part at the Key Highway yard, the site of William Skinner's shipyard: in 1858, white gangs had stoned Skinner's men in a renewed attempt to displace black caulkers. Two months after the Frederick Douglass was launched, the shipyards were shut down by a strike that resembled the events of 1836 and 1858. Bethlehem Steel had agreed to train 15 blacks as riveters, and 125 white riveters walked out in protest. The company removed the black trainees from the class, and 600 black employees walked out. When Bethlehem reinstated the trainees, 7,000 white employees walked out. After this escalation and several days' shutdown, while the Air Force bombed Rumanian oil fields and the Marines were landing in the Solomons, the company and the white-controlled union agreed on a compromise. They agreed to principles of seniority and no racial discrimination. Openings would be filled by length of service in the de partment. Riveters would be chosen from among the "holders on" of longer service, holders on from among the heaters, heaters from passers. "No skilled men from the outside will be hired as long as there are qualified men in the department."21 Thus, change could be contained, and the inertia of the past could be preserved. At industries as large and complex as Bethlehem Steel, this strategy resulted thirty years later in a structure of hundreds of watertight compartments of personnel. Seniority rules maintained the segregated structure of promotions, work environments, lines of authority, and pay scales. The caste structure of the factories, which seemed fluid during the war, hardened like concrete.
In the autumn a similar episode occurred at Western Electric. There had been no black employees at Point Breeze, but now seventeen hundred were hired among the seven thousand. The company interpreted presidential fair employ ment orders as requiring the elimination of all separate accommodations, and
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took the signs off the toilets. Twenty-two white women walked off the job, claiming they feared venereal disease. The Point Breeze Employees Association, to which black workers also paid dues, backed the Jim Crow demand. It argued that the city's plumbing code required separate facilities, that there had been hundreds of "incidents," and a "race riot" threatened. The War Labor Board disagreed, and the white workers struck. Five hundred black workers crossed the picket lines to work, in the presence of five hundred police. The week before Christmas the army seized the plant.22 In the aftermath, more sanitary facilities were installed, the "company union" was displaced by nationally affiliated labor unions, and seniority rules were tightened.23
At the end of the war, the black community had to absorb the readjustment to a peacetime economy where services were the growth sectors. The Enoch Pratt Library rejected, one after another, two hundred black applicants for librarian training school. Batteries of lawyers solemnly contended whether it was a public or a private institution. The Public Service Commission, after long deliberation, agreed to license a black cab company, since white drivers were passing up blacks who hailed them. In 1952 the telephone company agreed to hire a few switchboard operators, the streetcar company some motormen, the gas company some meter readers, and the fire department its first black trainees. Within a generation all of these became sectors of opportunity for blacks, but every step was hard won.24
In the 1960s the State Employment Service and the newspapers were forced to drop the racial tags for job openings. Political organization at the national level created counterpressures for "fair employment." Now half the city's population, blacks organi~ed politically to demand their share of jobs in the police force, the courthouse, and city hall, and their share of the jobs generated by city demolition, construction, and purchases. On balance, the changes in occupational roles raised the purchasing power of the black community, and raised the aspirations and visibility of younger black workers and black women. Afro hairdos were a symbol. Older people, whites, and men felt they were invaded'' while younger workers, blacks, and women sensed resistance and hostility to their presence. Consequently, labor force adjustments tended to take the form of conflicts between races, sexes, and age groups.
The arena for strike and boycott changed. The labor movement, as in earlier generations, grew strong when there was plenty of work. "Real" unions replaced company unions in wartime. National steel strikes and dock strikes followed the national business cycle. But union strength ebbed when work was scarce. Con sistent with this pattern, strikes occurred in the growth sectors of the economy, that is, the service sectors, rather than the shrinking manufacturing sectors. Hospital workers unionized in the 1970s. School teachers, police, and musicians held long drawn-out strikes. In these sectors women workers and black workers began to organize. The civil rights movement provided new models for labor and a sense of militancy, just as the labor movement had earlier provided models for civil rights groups. The city'sblack fire fighters formed the Vulcan Associa tion, a union within the union. As black women replaced retiring Jewish workers in what was left of the city's garment industry, the Amalgamated responded
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to their demands for day care centers. But competition between black and white labor reduced the credibility of the unions with blacks, and weakened union bargaining power. For example, the construction industry in Baltimore was only half-unionized.
Worst off were the unemployed. In the late 1960s, ten thousand families in Baltimore were receiving surplus cornmeal and dry milk, or using federal food stamps to stretch their food budgets, which took half their income. Unemploy ment was continually nipping at the heels of the work force. The "normal" turnover of technical advance sifted workers into heaps. At each lurch in the economy, more dropped into permanent unemployment. Unemployment stalked those made obsolete in their fifties. It stalked those disabled by hazardous work. It stalked women who had dropped out of the labor force to raise children. It stalked children who failed in school, truants the schools chose to forget, and products of obsolete "vocational" programs. And it stalked both the youths who had not yet done their military service and those who returned from it.
In phases of economic expansion, unemployment was concentrated in the inner city, but in economic downswing the effects were felt more widely. In the "energy crisis" and disturbances of world trade and money supply beginning in 1973, the whole world tightened its belt. As in all previous world crises, shrinking markets for copper, grain, steel, and coffee were felt in the port of Baltimore. But much more devastating effects were experienced in other parts of the world. Famine this time around was most severe not in Baltimore, but in the African savannas and the caatinga of northeastern Brazil. Cholera was confined to India, Africa, and Italy, and yellow fever to Colombia. Wage cuts ground down copper miners in Chile, as they had the Baltimore railroad workers in 1877. The hours lengthened among garment workers in Hong Kong and Singapore, as they had in Baltimore in 1893. Migrant workers were shipped out of Switzerland, France, and Belgium, back to Turkey, Algeria, and Greece. Baltimore was somewhat insulated, but eventually even its "world-scale" plants had to lay off workers. At New Year's Day 1975 Black and Decker shut down. Thirty-seven hundred were laid off, from the $140,000-a-year president to the newest assembly worker at $7,000. Western Electric laid off eleven hundred, about one worker in eight. Some of the city's oldest large plants were shut down for good: Mount Vernon Mills, the Mutual Chemical bichromate plant, and the copper refineries of Revere and American Smelting & Refining Company. Kennecott shut down its copper refining operation and laid off half the work force for six weeks. Bethlehem Steel cut its white-collar staff by early retirements, stopped overtime work, then laid off workers with least seniority. In 1975 and 1977, Sparrows Point was working at only two-thirds capacity and the pinch was felt throughout Baltimore. In general, women, youths, and blacks ex perienced higher unemployment rates: last hired, first fired. The gains of the fat years were eroded in the lean years.
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j
to graduate and professional schools. The salesman, manufacturer, and small businessman spoke of "my son, the doctor," "my daughter, the social worker," and "my son, the programmer." These children were members of high-mobility professions, and a large share left Baltimore. In East Baltimore and South Baltimore, skilled craftsmen, unionized operatives, and laborers clung tight to seniority rules, union rules, and nepotism to provide niches for their sons in the slow-growth sectors of factory or waterfront. Newcomers to the city struggled for unskilled jobs in the shrinking sectors, but saw that schooling might allow their children to get a toe hold in the growth sectors. In the schools, therefore, were determined the future productivity and adaptability of the labor force, and Baltimore's ability to compete in the world economy. The futures of individuals, families, social groups, and neighborhoods depended upon their schools. The future of the black community and the white, together, was forged in the schoolhouses.
From deep roots in Baltimore, black leaders drew a sure sense of strategy. Schooling was the pathway to freedom and economic independence, the churches were the rallying points, and the courts were the battle ground. It was a strategy recognized in the 1790s, built on by Reverend William Livingstone of St. James Episcopal, by Elisha Tyson and Joseph Townsend and the pastors of Sharp Street church. The Oblate Sisters built on it in the 1830s. Nine-year-old Frederick Douglass and his master, Captain Auld, both knew it: "If you teach that nigger how to read, there will be no keeping him." The Civil War was followed by a round of legal battles for the custody of Maryland children, and from that struggle were founded the Baltimore colored schools. Now a new round of battles had to be waged on behalf of "infant appellants."25
In the civil rights movement, just as earlier in the struggle of the Jewish garment workers, Baltimore was a strategic place. It was a great frontier city, an outpost of the North in the South. Northern in the size and wealth of its educational system and in the values and hopes placed in public education since
Well-maintained rowhouses such as these in the 2500 block of East Baltimore Street serve to define the character of neighborhoods.HEMMED IN
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the 1840s, Baltimore was critical in the civil rights strategy of the 1930s as a beachhead in the legal segregation of the South. After a lull, Baltimore again became a strategic place in the late phase of the 1960s, as a beachhead against the de facto segregation typical of metropoles of the North. Baltimore's nearness to Washington also made it strategic. Along Route 1 traveled the African diplo mats between the U.N. headquarters in New York and the nation's capital. They stopped to eat in Maryland's Jim Crow diners. Baltimore's middle-class blacks kept close social ties with Washington's, and each breakthrough in federal jobs
-from the post office to the army to Health, Education, and Welfar~was an opportunity seized in Baltimore. The rate at which the Mitchells, the Murphys, and the Marshalls shuttled between Baltimore and Washington was a barometer of civil rights storms over the generation. Thurgood Marshall, raised in West Baltimore, went to Sunday school at St. James. When he was excluded from the University of Maryland law school in Baltimore because of his race, he com muted to Howard University in Washington. Back in Baltimore in the '30s, he filed strategic lawsuits. In the 1950s, while Baltimore marked time, he helped forge the array of "separate is unequal" cases from Topeka and Wilmington, Virginia and North Carolina. When he obtained the Supreme Court order to integrate the schools of Washington, D.C., he brought that revolution back to Baltimore. When Baltimore again became a strategic place in the '60s, Thurgood Marshall was himself a justice of the Supreme Court.
Lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had laid out in 1931 a long-term nationwide strategy for the legal battle for integration. They would press first for the admission of blacks to the graduate and professional schools. At that level it would be easiest to prove the inequali ties evident in the education offered to black and whites. The absurdity of the legal fiction "separate but equal" would be made clear. Any attempt to duplicate equal facilities at that level would raise the costs of a segregation policy. Because the number of individuals involved was small, public reaction would likely be limited, and the operation would affect only the most highly educated and cosmo politan populations. Then the pressure would work back to the undergraduate colleges, the high schools, and the grade schools. In such a program, Baltimore was a natural starting point. The University of Maryland's graduate schools in Baltimore-law, medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy-were closed to blacks. In 1935, too late for Thurgood Marshall and for Lillie Jackson's daughter, Juanita, Judge O'Dunne of the Baltimore City Court ordered Donald Murray admitted to the law school. The state proceeded to expand its Negro higher education, to develop a college at Bowie and extend public funding to Morgan College. Marshall was the NAACP's roving adviser to the counties of Maryland where teachers were demanding equal salaries. In 1939 Anne Arundel County was ordered to comply, and the governor and state board of education accepted the principle of equal pay for teachers in the white and colored schools.
Lillie Jackson's five-member NAACP chapter grew to two thousand by the end of the war. Her rasping voice kept on. The black community of Baltimore marched and preached and whined and signified. "God opened my mouth," said
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Mrs. Jackson, "and no man can shut it."26 For fifteen years, however, the situa tion deteriorated in the colored schools of Baltimore. Between 1943 and 1953 the number of children increased 50 percent. Buildings were dangerously over crowded. Thousands of children went to school "on part time." Of fifty-eight city schools recommended for demolition by the Strayer Commission in 1921, thirty-five were still in use-as colored schools. Century-old schools with wooden fire stairs, basement toilets, and little paved yards were being used by "oppor tunity classes" and "special curriculum." More and more of the black children were sorted, often by bureaucratic whim, into these sinks of educational inertia. They were a lumpen proletariat of children.
On 13 September 1952, a decision was taken by the Baltimore City school board, without court action but after unprecedented silent prayer for guidance, to admit a dozen Negro students to Polytechnic High School. The alternative, discussed "on a high plane," was to create a comparable school for blacks. This was testimony to the wisdom of the NAACP strategy of raising the costs of "separate but equal" schools beyond what taxpayers would consider. In the words of Rob Roy, a Hopkins engineering professor on the board, "Segregation is a luxury."27 A token integration of education had filtered down from the graduate schools of the University of Maryland, as far as the elite high schools. The school board's recognition that a matching "colored Poly" was an absurd idea, a contradiction in terms, marked the critical shift of NAACP lawyers, jurists, and the Baltimore establishment toward recognizing that segregated education was everywhere inherently unequal. The Poly case also showed the delicate relation between the civil rights struggle and social status. Four remark able college preparatory schools of Baltimore were providing an elite public education for a small number of white students. The school board decision meant upward mobility for a handful of blacks.
In July 1954 the D.C. school board, the express target of the Supreme Court decision, ordered the assignment of teachers and pupils without regard to race and according to the most efficient use of space and personnel. The Baltimore school board simply ordered "desegregation in compliance with the law." Baltimore was one of several hundred districts in the nation that an nounced prompt compliance, under united civic leadership. Eighteen hundred black children out of fifty-seven thousand transferred into the white schools- 2 percent among the eighty-seven thousand white children. The city congratu lated itself for several years afterward on the lack of violence. But there was resistance and it was strong and subtle. The school board rejected "deliberate race mixing" and continued to open schools with all-Negro teaching staffs. Nothing was done to compensate for the legacy of ninety years of unequal in vestment in school buildings, or for fifteen years of inertia in the face of growth.
The consequences of those "economies" of the 1940s and early 1950s pro duced predictable responses to desegregation. The school board tolerated "free dom of choice" plans: "No child shall be required to attend any particular school." It left to principals the authority to permit or refuse transfers between schools. It located new high schools in the outer fringes of the city. Families who
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could afford it moved in response. From 1954 to 1970, white children withdrew from the city schools at the rate of ten thousand a year to enter schools in the suburban counties. "The bulk of the educational investment in Baltimore has traditionally been made in the white middle-class child." They were the children who moved out. By 1958, half the children in the city schools were black; in 1978, two-thirds. The resegregation of the region by race, age, and income was accelerated. The city council slashed school board budgets. Teachers' salaries fell relative to the counties. A third of the teachers in the city schools were "provisional." These responses produced the de facto segregation characteristic of northern cities.
As this situation was grasped in the mid-1960s, Baltimore again became a strategic place, a target city. In 1962 the Baltimore Activists documented the grievances of de facto segregation, and in 1967 the National Educational Associa tion picked Baltimore as a symbol of the problems facing large cities: underpaid teachers, undermaintained buildings, understaffed schools, an underfinanced system facing a shrinking property tax base and children with urgent needs. The NEA found the Baltimore school system "not uniformly bad."28 Good things were happening: some children attended superior facilities, some received foreign language instruction and imaginative science and physical education programs. Some had access to fine libraries, cafeterias, gymnasiums, pools, and home eco nomics and science laboratories. Some were getting advanced college preparatory programs or technical training. "On the other hand, some children in Baltimore City are not receiving these things. These are the majority of children." On the whole, they were poorer children, and they were the black children. "The poor in Baltimore are overwhelmingly Negro, and the affluent in Baltimore are over whelmingly white." Both the advantaged and the disadvantaged were responding to the differential of educational privilege. Ten thousand children were dropping out of high school each year, risking unemployment and low pay. The children who stayed in the city, the NEA observed, "become its assets or liabilities- whichever the community has chosen "29
FNew leadership appeared. Constitutional issues and courtroom theater gave way to tactics of financial and political power and displays of naked force. The issue of equality was pushed back from the graduate school, the high school, and the elementary school to kindergarten, the Head Start nursery school, the day care center, and nutrition for newborn infants. A school building program was initiated. The black community demanded community control, parent participation, and decentralization of decision. The new Dunbar High School became a symbol of these desires. But it became evident, year by year, that with all the juggling, the perennial recarving of districts, and the reshuffling of children into buildings, the readjustment of building sites and building designs would not greatly alter the new segregation, which was grafted on a segregated housing market and a county boundary. When Mr. Justice Marshall issued his dissent in a Supreme Court case in 1974, he might have been talking about his home town: "In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities-one white, the other black-but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret."50
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Two Cities
~wo cities-one white, the other black." The reorganization of metropolitan I space was much more complicated. In some ways it resembled the trans formations of past generations. But Marshall expressed a stark political reality, an unprecedented polarization of the city-state.
Growth in one part of the city was associated with stagnation or disinvest ment in another. Baltimore had experienced eleven successive suburban fringes and eleven reconstructions of its downtown and harbor. In between these visible frontiers of physical change were rings of social change, rolling out like ripples in the pond-turnover of landowners, of home owners, of tenants. Each popula tion boom that ran ahead of construction, as in World War II and the late '60s, transformed whole neighborhoods from nine-room row houses to triple deckers of misfit three-room apartments. In other periods, such as the early 'SOs and early '60s, building and home finance surged on the suburban frontier and some neighborhoods raised their home ownership rate, while other inner-city neigh borhoods experienced a thinning of population, higher vacancies, falling property values, and tighter mortgage money. Thus, changes took place on the several frontiers, one in relation to another. The tidal wave of white population that rolled over the suburbs in the 'SOs was matched in tempo by a tide of black migrants arriving in the center, and an intermediate line of breakers where black families replaced white families.Sl
There were two new features of the spatial reorganization of the city in this generation. The first was the jurisdictional rivalry between the city and the surrounding counties. A new ring of growth had always meant redistribution of investment. The frontier between investment and disinvestment had once been the "line of direct taxation," extended in 1817 and 1831. The annexations of 1888 and 1918 provided such a frontier between the old city and its new annex. But capital flows had each time occurred inside the expanded city, allowing the surrounding counties to remain largely rural and undisturbed. Now, for the first time, the line between city and county divided the zones of investment and disinvestment.
The block of West Lexington Street developed by Lewis Pascault in the 1820s showed signs of decline in the 1930s but was still commercially active.The other major feature was resegregation by race, income, and age, at an unprecedented metropolitan scale. There had always been strong contrasts at the
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scale of the block or the neighborhood, between the point and the town, between uptown and downtown. Racial segregation had always existed in Baltimore in a fine-grained pattern enforced by legal power, greenback power, and violence. The nineteenth-century street-and-alley segregation gave way about 1900 to sizeable hemmed4n ghettos in East Baltimore, West Baltimore, and South Baltimore. Now, as the Jim Crow laws were eroding, a Jim Crow space was coalescing, growing larger and more formidable. Other ethnic groups moved outward along traditional wedges, mixing along the fringes, but the black com munity was locked in. Its space expanded grudgingly, explosively, block by block and year by year.
Age differences were also projected onto spaces. The old and the young, fast-growing groups, were sorted out spatially. The "rising values of childhood" were concentrated in the new family-centered environments of the suburbs, while the elderly stayed on in areas of elderly houses and elderly trees. Poverty, also confined to the center, was again perceived as it had been during the cholera epidemics, as an intractable mass: criminal, contagious, immoral. This was the perception of the modern plagues that victimized the inner city: tuberculosis, venereal disease, heroin overdose, illegitimacy. As the process of resegregation moved forward, the confusion, already present in 1934, became more insistent between poverty, black skin, and the inner city. What the genteel Baltimore of 1822 called "pauperism," what prominent Baltimoreans of 1915 called "the Negro problem," the establishment of the 1960s called "the urban problem."
And so the two new structural features of the city were closely related. Suburban growth and inner city decay fed on each other, as they always had. But because people and capital moved across a political boundary, the process was perceived as a political process, a struggle for power. A rival "noncity" emerged. The suburban frontier became the frontier of investment, youth, and higher energy use, the frontier of land grabbing, and the frontier of social exclusion. Thus, all the old intractable problems of ring-by-ring redevelopment, obsolescence, and fiscal squeeze were redefined and perceived as phenomena of race: white flight or black invasion. The presence of the political boundary meant that race space was perceived as a political space.
I n the polarization of the metropolis, what would be the role of government? As in earlier generations, one must situate Baltimore in a government of tiers-the metropolis, the state of Maryland, and the nation. The trend of several generations was toward enlarging the sphere of government and shifting the action to higher tiers. One also has to situate new conceptions of planning in the old tug of war between haves and have nots. It was the job of the city government to devise strategies to develop property and pile up wealth. It was also the job of city government to devise strategies to contain poverty and cope with the costs, the dissatisfaction, and the hostilities generated in the process. This was the same tug of war as in the generation of Raymond, Griffith, Tyson, Poppleton, and Smith.
The clearest trend was the expansion of government at all levels-the federal role above all, then state functions, and municipal functions next. This
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can be seen in the numbers hired or the dollars spent. Spending by governments rose from a fifth of the national product in 1940 to a third in 1976. Throughout the nineteenth century, Baltimore City had spent more locally than either the state or federal governments. But by 1976 federal spending in Maryland reached $6 billion a year, the state budget rose to $2 billion, the city budget to $1 billion. The budget of Baltimore County rose from a trivial amount to half a billion, with a tax base equal to that of the city. From a fiscal point of view, Baltimore was split: the city's tax base and borrowing power were confined. Deprived of initiative and the fiscal room to maneuver, it became dependent on state and federal governments for piggyback taxes and revenue sharing.
As in Poppleton's time, the city prepared land for subdivision and industrial sites, to develop property values. The county government followed the old street-making strategy, with opportunity to borrow on the strength of its rapid growth and youthful population. The county made a much stronger investment in human resources than earlier generations: nearly two-thirds of county em ployees were in the schools. Investment came from higher tiers of government. The state invested in the port, the airport, and highways. Half of the federal billions spent in Maryland consisted of the salaries and contracts of federal installations such as NASA, Fort Meade, Social Security, and the National Institutes of Health, all at suburban sites.32 "Impacted" areas also received grants to build schools for children of federal employees. The federal govern ment invested in highways, water and sewers, and home mortgage insurance. The locus of most of this investment was the suburban belt. Channeled by the planning in the counties, such federal investments were massive subsidies to segregation. In Baltimore County, the new high schools and highways, even the very symbols of home rul~courthouse, municipal building, and school ad ministration building-were situated to demolish or hedge in the small, long- established, black communities of Towson and Turner.55 In 1978 there were only 12 percent black children in the Baltimore County schools.
But another ancient logic of local government also operated. As in Thomas Griffith's time, provision had to be made for the afflicted, and suffering could not be permitted that "might render doubtful the disadvantages of the savage state or the benefits of civilization." Doubters reappeared. Daniel Raymond's old-fashioned phrases on pauperism applied to the "war on poverty" in the 1960s: "The laws of justice, as well as the laws of the land, require the rich either to furnish the poor with labour, or support them without labour."34 But the geographical division between poverty and wealth meant that the city itself was hamstrung as a dispenser of relief. Redistribution from rich to poor could take place only through higher levels of government. City dwellers were eager to promote the sharing of wealth across the city line. The federal government paid out $1.5 billion a year in "income maintenance": sodM security and benefits to veterans, the elderly, the disabled, dependent children, the "medically indigent," and the unemployed. Those transfer payments went heavily to the inner city: in some neighborhoods up to a quarter of all households depended on them, in the suburban ring 1 or 2 percent.
The internal order of Baltimore city government gradually took on a dual
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character, reflecting the tug of war between wealth and poverty. Seven "physical development" agencies concerned themselves with the renewal of street spaces and public works, to add value to the taxable property base, while seven "human resources" agencies concerned themselves with day-by-day spending: putting out fires, carrying heart attack victims to hospital, drying out drunks, and keeping children off the streets. The head of municipal finance was on both teams, between the horns of a dilemma. Physical development was limited to a fixed territory and the taxable base could only be raised 1 or 2 percent a year, yet the need for human resource funding seemed a bottomless pit. The city charter and the state constitution were made of "the same patched-over materials" Niles fumed at in the 1820s, and sober attempts at political reconstruction failed.
The city's urban renewal program also reflected the tension between the two strategies of government. A conception of the relation between physical development and human resources, already explicit in the Emmart report in 1934, reappeared in the MetroCenter/Baltimore report of 1970.~~ To maintain the tax base, the city must embark on massive physical redevelopment of structures and a transport revolution. To retain and attract private investment at the core, it must design a distinctive district of skyscrapers, sanitize and enliven the old waterfront, and still preserve a human-scale streetscape. To protect the core property and allow the polis to survive, a surrounding ring of blight must be razed and the city's "human resources" must be renewed.
The slums were unproductive liabilities, Emmart had argued. He staked out a belt of redevelopment projects-the inner harbor, the vicinity of Camden Station and Calvert Street Station, the vicinity of St. Mary's Seminary and Richmond Market, Belair Market, and Lafayette Market. He proposed to elimi nate alley dwellings, to consolidate larger lots in central areas, to separate commercial from residential districts. Like Brown in 1894, Emmart wanted a "correct" block dimension and visualized city blocks as self-supporting residen tial neighborhoods with their own automobile parking and recreation spaces. A hop, skip, and jump through the city's succession of "target blocks" will provide a view of the strategies for juggling physical and human renewal.
In 1939 the city condemned a house in St. Johns Court, in Oldtown, as unfit for human habitation. The Citizens Planning and Housing Association was organized. Like the local NAACP, it grew in a generation from seven members to two thousand. A new housing code was passed, and fifty thousand houses were found in violation. In 1945, city block number 1 on Sharp Street was chosen for testing a law enforcement strategy against blight. City agencies tried to coordinate their efforts to enforce the tangle of laws-plumbing code, fire laws, housing code, health laws. Police sanitarians fined tenants for littering, and school teachers enlisted their pupils for clean-up. By 1947 the block was again deteriorating, and the lessons drawn from the experience were to take a larger area than a pilot block, something less difficult than a "rock-bottom slum," and to work with people as well as houses.86
In the next round, therefore, a twenty-seven-block pilot area was chosen in East Baltimore in 1951.~~ A hearing board and housing court were created, and a central corps of housing inspectors was trained who devoted their energy
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Even in the mid-1950s, slum properties were seen as legal problems that called for police action.
to issuing "multiple violation notices." The "battle of the slums" demanded the coordination of municipal agencies and private social services. A private Fight Blight fund was created to finance repairs. In some cases, slumlords sold homes to their tenants to escape responsibility for the violations. Baltimore formalized its unique style of responsiveness, with praise and rage alternating in strong doses.
The city's efforts ran consistently ahead of national legislation. Federal urban renewal assistance increased, often building into federal incentives the latest "Baltimore Plan." Mencken might have snoozed away the summer afternoon in the green of the Maryland countryside, and the Afro-American's society editor escaped the "deep purple humidity" by going to the beach. But in the inner city, summer was the season for painting old tires white and planting geraniums in them, for hosing the marble steps, for leaving dead rats on the landlord's lawn, for sending for the mayor, "the man," or "the man from head quarters." Volunteers-the Brethren, the Jesuits, the Lutherans, VISTA, HOPE, CORE-discharged their zeal, a weekend, a year, or a lifetime of commitment to a block here or there. Out of each pilot block emerged half a dozen salt-of- the-earth residents to add savor to city politics. They organized rat hunts, tore down board fences, and eliminated twenty thousand outside toilets and the unvented and explosive oil stove for heating homes. But in 1960 there were still fifty thousand "defective dwellings."
In 1956 the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency (BURHA) was formed, and chose a pilot block in an area surrounding Harlem Park.~5 Poppleton could not foresee the days when "block clubs" would rework his basic design. In each block, alley dwellings were demolished, backyards evened off, and a park was built in the center of the block, with a basketball court, picnic table, con crete turtles, or spaceship junglegym. Manufacturers devised an all-aluminum face lifting for a hundred-year-old fa~ade. Window frames were reduced to a suffocating modern standard. Public estimators worked out renovation budgets for owners. Rents went up, and the poorest tenants moved. Thirteen years later, when the last of twenty-seven blocks was completed, the city recognized already that the official assumption of renewal as forty years' lease on life was an illusion.
At Pennsylvania Avenue and Biddle Alley the old "lung block" was torn down to expand the school; the school children and two property owners turned a vacant lot into a park. Its population had grown old. For forty years the most investigated block in the city, it was replaced by the 1600 block of Eutaw where
AÇ_ _
in 1956 several children burned to death. A multiple dwelling ordinance was passed to insure secondary egress. Nevertheless, in 1962 five more children died in another fire in the same block. They could not escape because fire exits were nailed shut.
When the 1800 block of Linden Avenue was scheduled for demolition, it was invaded by a platoon of social workers. They tracked a dozen cases of tuberculosis to an old man who was everybody's babysitter. They inquired into the birth control habits of women from Virginia and North Carolina. They introduced neighbors to each other and measured participation in basketball teams and Sunday schools. But by 1965 the people were all evicted. Some kept moving a block ahead of the bulldozer: some children made ten or eleven moves in an elementary-school career. Most moved a few blocks north into the Experi mental Conservation District, set up in 1962. An addition had to be built to the school. Tenants demanded a crackdown on unvented gas heaters and a "rollback"
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of dwelling units in excess of legal densities. Ten years later the school was overcrowded again, and the pilot block of the experimental district was found more crowded and more rundown than before. New demands for code enforce ment resulted in a block of renovated cooperative housing in Callow Avenue.
As reconstruction of Gay Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Fremont Avenue proceeded, housing of the 1830s and 1840s was demolished. Stirling Street, originally condemned as worn-out "negro dwellings," received a late reprieve and became an experiment in urban homesteading. The city gave away houses for a dollar to citizens who could undertake a federal mortgage for their rehabili tation. But all the pr~Civil War neighborhoods of Baltimore were at risk. The core of all three turn-of-the-century ghettoes was flattened. The dozens of pilot blocks, remnants of the salty politics and home-grown ingenuity of a generation, surrounded an inlay of public housing projects: the plain dense rows of the 1940s brightened by their wash lines, the cagelike towers of the mid-'50s with yellow and turquoise balconies, midrise housing for the elderly of the 1960s, and the townhouse groupings of the 1970s.
There were several tense moments in this tightrope act. The spatial concen tration of poverty had suggested, as it did to the yellow fever and cholera doctors, causes in local environments. Could blight be eradicated by tearing down the neighborhoods of the poor? The rate of demolition rose from six hundred households a year in the 'SOs to eight hundred in the early '60s. It leaped to twenty-six hundred households a year in the late '60s, as sites were being cleared for expressways, new schools, and public housing projects all at once. The people evicted were mostly poor, often elderly, and nine out of ten were black.39 They saw urban renewal as "Negro removal" and painted URBAN RENEWAL GO HOME on the hoardings. The demolitions also pro duced a fiscal crisis, as property was removed from tax rolls and the land lay fallow ten to fifteen years, waiting for investor consensus. The planning process created risk. The numbers of buildings abandoned for taxes reached one thousand a year; the official count of vacant dwellings reached five thousand. A vacant house coordinator was appointed, and read the inventory into a com puter. In 1970 the city undertook a program to renovate fifteen hundred vacant homes. The genial vandals of the 1860s reappeared, able to strip a dwelling overnight; they stole the sinks, kitchen cabinets, and copper gutters, or smashed fixtures by sheer destructive whim.
Neither federal transfer payments nor the demolition of twenty-five thousand dwellings nor the construction of fifteen thousand units of public housing could arrest the polarization of the metropolis. Supermarkets, bank branches, and physicians fled the dry milk and tear gas belt and resituated themselves at ex pressway nodes near the green valleys. Because the costs were redistributed through higher tiers of government, evaluation became ever more difficult. As welfare costs accelerated in the '60s and '70s, and the social services caseload rose sixfold, the rhetoric of idleness and stimulants reappeared as in 1804 or 1822. But redevelopment was no longer planned by a half dozen property owners who walked over the ground and assessed the costs among themselves in rela tion to their direct benefits. The complexity of taxing and spending at three
I
levels of government made it impossible for citizens differently situated in income and jurisdiction to discover the extent of their contributions or their benefits. The average county resident paid twice as much income tax as the city dweller, while the city dweller paid twice as much property tax.40 Each simply looked around him, trying to read the landscape. New towers of federal and state government rivaled the new towers of private finance. On the horizon were four massive clumps of hospital buildings and four massive clumps of public housing. At Towson the county built a marble courthouse. At Annapolis the state built a "colonial" brick library. For the nation's bicentennial, Baltimore put up scaffolding and refurbished the dome of city hall.
D espite the feverish rate of change, a system of social relations persisted. Over each building boom the growth process tended to regenerate differ entials of wealth, such that a basic structure of inequalities was maintained. Each generation in Baltimore cast up a few millionnaires, larger numbers of upwardly mobile and hopeful people, and large numbers of the poor and vulnerable. In this generation the old wealth became invisible. The older millionnaires retired to Gibson Island and the Eastern Shore; their children preferred to live in New York and California. In the confrontation politics of the 1960s they abdicated the traditional leadership roles of Charles Carroll and Samuel Smith. The school boards, the task forces, and the blue ribbon commissions became arenas of combat for a wide assortment of parents, lawyers, activists, and neighbors. The politicians and engineers came to depend on a new species of professional "flak catcher." New wealth was often "small potatoes," but more visible and more talked about. Two rags-to-riches examples show how the city's transformation continued to generate profits through the manipulation of its social structure and the reconstruction of its spaces.
When Morris Goldseker died in 1976, his assets were over $10 million. The dollar no longer being what it was in Hopkins's or Garrett's day, he was a small time millionnaire, insignificant next to Alonzo Decker, Robert Merrick, or Henry Knott, but important nevertheless because his strategy characterized a number of entrepreneurs. Of seven thousand black families who became home owners in the 19605, a third dealt with speculators following the same strategy of neigh-
Gay Street, a declining commercial strip before the riots of the 19605, became a showplace of community revival within a decade.
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borhood turnover in a particular ring of the city. Goldseker himself bought seventeen hundred homes in Baltimore in the '60s. On the average he bought a home for $7500 and resold it for $13,000, a markup of $5500.41 People who managed to buy directly from former owners or to get veteran loans paid $10,000 for homes in the same block. The $3,000 difference was known to black buyers as "the black tax." Had they been organized in the same way, elderly sellers might have referred to the $2500 difference as "the gray tax."
Speculators and buyers were also engaged in long-term financing relation ships. Goldseker's practice, for example, was to create a ground rent, worth perhaps $1500. A savings and loan company provided the family with a mortgage for $8500, while Goldseker held a second mortgage of $4500. Under his install ment contract, the buyer earned no equity in the house till he had paid off 40 percent of the purchase price. Then the savings and loan company would "re finance" the house, consolidating the mortgage and adding new settlement costs. Paying off such a double mortgage often took thirty years instead of fifteen. The initial "buy like rent" contracts were not even recorded in the courthouse.42 The buyer's risk under such contracts was so great, his equity so slow to accumulate, and the congeries of creditors so tangled that families tried hard to save rather than borrow, and many black home buyers were people in their fifties. One grandmother burst into tears on discovering that she was dealing with Goldseker.
By that mechanism, whole neighborhoods were simultaneously refinanced and turned over to younger populations-for example, 1,000 homes in Edmond son Village in the early 1960s, 750 in Montebello in the mid-1960s. The new residents had incomes comparable to the former residents, but were paying higher sales prices and higher finance charges, roughly double normal housing costs. Thus, the neighborhoods were drained of money and little was available for maintenance.
In 1968 Goldseker became the symbol of the turnover of white neighbor hoods to black. Activists picketed and chanted outside his downtown real estate office for four months. But they did not regard him as the real target. He could operate only with the collusion of powerful institutions and powerful fears. Financial institutions were perceived as the enemy, and the activists launched a year of research into his sources of credit. Each residential community in the city had its own precise set of financial institutions, and each investor or creditor group in the city was identified with one or another.41 Just as the home ap pliances were plugged into the electric power grid, so were individual home buyers plugged into the financial grid, and the financial institutions were the inner city's transformers and switching stations. Equitable Trust loaned Gold seker $1 million in personal credit to buy houses for resale to people to whom they would not lend directly. Uptown Federal Savings and Loan loaned $2 million to Goldseker's buyers, depending on him to absorb the risk of accumulating the down payments. He provided the ground rents, the second mortgages, and management, when the Federal Housing Authority, local government, and local mortgage bankers were "doing virtually nothing." Goldseker's operations filled a gap where other investors refused to venture. Some building associations like St. Casimir's stuck to tradition and still made small direct loans for modest homes
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in East Baltimore, but most were financing the exodus. They offered home mortgages to young white families to purchase new housing in the counties, while they refused direct loans to black families and elderly couples and "red lined" the inner city. The city's municipal pension fund was typical of such institutional investors as the churches. The fund had invested the savings of city employees, both black and white, three-quarters of them city dwellers, in a thousand mortgages in Baltimore County, but none in the city. Jesuit volunteers picketed Loyola Federal Savings and Loan in the attempt to open to blacks the opportunities that the Redemptorists had created among the German, Bohemian, and Polish Catholics a century earlier. Two dozen other savings and loan asso ciations, like Uptown Federal, Jefferson Federal, Ashburton, Northeastern Bo hemian, and Slovanstvo, had become captives of speculators and politicians. In 1968 alone they made available over $4 million to the buy-like-rent speculators.
In the century-old tradition of Baltimore's home-grown millionnaires, Goldseker left his wealth "to help people help themselves." The black tax and the gray tax were converted into a capital fund whose income supports legal counseling for the elderly, scholarships, and the diagnosis of iron deficiency among inner-city children. It pays for vocational rehabilitation and housing rehabilitation, and helps "the working poor," black and white, become home owners.
Goldseker's was only one facet of the complicated encounter between the Jewish community and the black community. The Jewish community moving out of Oldtown, Eutaw Place, and Forest Park provided exceptional values for the black community, often by tolerance and a recognition of common experience:
they transferred buildings, resources, legal services, financing, and schools. About 1960, as in 1893, the whole set of synagogues got up and moved. The older, originally German, Reformed and Conservative congregations sold off their temples to the Prince Hall Masons, the Baptists, and the Seventh-Day Adventists, just as they had once sold off their temples in East Baltimore to the Orthodox congregations from Eastern Europe. Baltimore Hebrew Congregation removed to Park Heights and Slade Avenue. Har Sinai, the Strengthening of Faith, the Lovers of Peace, and the Remnants of Israel followed. As in 1893, they rivaled in the elegance of their architecture and the prominence of their international architects; they featured cement curves, circular spaces, and stylized tablets of the law. The younger congregations, principally orthodox or "modern orthodox," established in Forest Park in the 1920s, moved out, too, some along Park Heights Avenue, some along Liberty Road. The institutions moved as well:
Sinai Hospital and the Jewish Community Center. Apartment houses and nursing homes were built. It was harder and harder to find a minyan in Oldtown or Mount Royal.
But once again the newcomers, the elderly, and the indebted were caught in the middle, and looked at their mess of pottage with bewilderment. Middle-aged children in the new "golden ghetto" no longer knew what to do with the four story shell of Uncle Nate's once respectable apartment house, and feared to venture where Aunt Rose's purse was snatched and a rent collector was stabbed. An immigrant couple bearing the scars of the Nazi prison camp bought up a
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dozen houses one by one at auctions and tax sales for $3500 apiece, and "re habbed" them by slopping lead paint on the walls and selecting toilets, tubs, shutters, and radiators from the wreckers' depotoir in South Baltimore, a vast acreage guarded by German shepherds. A delicatessen parking lot became the meeting place of drug peddlers, and the aging partners finally sold out in bitterness to urban renewal. A man of Vilno, survivor of the Dachau camp, lost his delicatessen to urban renewal. A survivor from Chelm suffered five holdups in his little grocery. The two became partners and attempted to buy a new site at auction: their downpayment disappeared into the complicated divorce suit of a Greek immigrant in the state mental hospital. One pharmacist continued to serve his old neighborhood faithfully, but suffered a series of holdups; another adapted his enterprise to selling liquor, "nerve tonics" for the winos, and codeine cough syrup by the quart.
Meanwhile, another millionnaire, diminutive in stature but a bundle of energy, hopscotched through the squares marked out for black players. He was "Little Willie" Adams. Born in North Carolina, he had spent the depression in Frederick Douglass's old neighborhood at the foot of Caroline Street, sorting old leather and canvas and spoking bicycle wheels. His real springboard was the numbers racket. The public placed bets under a quarter at five hundred to one odds, six hundred to one for "big book" from twenty-five cents to $1. A thirty-cent hit, for example, would pay $180. The writer earned a commission of 15 to 20 percent. When Adams "retired" in 1951, he testified to Senator Kefauver's crime investigating committee that he had an average daily play of $1000; he was then sued for nearly $1 million in taxes on unreported income. His profits from the numbers, his whiz-kid arithmetic, and a combination of stinginess and generosity allowed the young sportsman to expand into legitimate businesses. At eighteen, he bought a $300 candy store on Eager Street. He sold snowballs, shined shoes, and added a barbershop. By buying the Sugar Hill Tavern and a Democratic club, he moved into West Baltimore, and from there he extended into fashions, soft-drink bottling, a music company, an amusement park, and the clubs. He became known as the Prince of Pennsylvania Avenue, and admitted, "The height of my ambition is the sky."
Adams was looked to as philanthropist and fund raiser for the NAACP court cases, Provident Hospital, and St. Peter Claver Church. Most important, he became the backer for other black businessmen who moved into the wider economy-meatpacking, food processing, parking lots, retailing, contracting. "Our salvation is in business." He pioneered northwest to a home where his nearest black neighbor was a mile away, although others soon followed. In the white community he gained the respect of contractors, banks, race track owners, liquor interests, and insurance companies, "the people and corporations who bankroll elections."
Adams's economic base rested in the black community, and he was a conduit for the purchasing power and voting power of the black community in the structure of white power. Earlier millionnaires had found ways to exploit con sumer groups in the larger community, even where they exploited workers within their own ethnic group. But the black entrepreneur was still operating in a con-
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fined economic space. The black community could not support a large number of such men, and looked with fascination and ambivalence at its "money-making Moses leading his people from economic bondage."44
Saturday Night I n each generation there has been present a substantial hostility, outrage, and mutual fear among factions of Baltimore society. These feelings have gen erally been deflected from class conflict toward ethnic otherness, turned inward to self-destruction by suicide or alcohol, or diffused in domestic or street-corner violence. The new generation followed the old pattern, with much the same timing as in previous booms. The combined rates of murder and suicide rose rapidly in the late 1960s to a thousand per year, or one death in eleven in the city. Pills and chemical products offered escapes for more people, primarily the young, and the illegal drug industry invited entrepreneurship among dock workers, truck drivers, and politicians, as well as street-level pushers in jails, high schools, and neighborhoods. A new geographic pattern of deaths from an overdose of heroin was traced over the old geography of cirrhosis and TB. As endemic violence rose, the city was again perceived as a place of personal fear and risk to property. It was a return to the Know-Nothing Baltimore of the 1850s, although modern home owners and businessmen preferred guns to ice picks. Police retreated into automobiles and armed themselves with spray cans, space shields, and a helicopter with searchlight. Households in high-density areas acquired larger and fiercer dogs. Where Baltimore citizens had earlier bemoaned the nightly baying of retrievers, they now endured the howls of one hundred thousand nervous watchdogs.
Once again scapegoats were sought, and racial tensions mounted. In the 1830s rumors of conspiracy and repression of blacks were associated, however irrationally, with bank scandals, factory layoffs, and arson. In the 1850s party politics polarized into antiforeign and antiblack factions. In 1886 and 1917 cartoons and letters blamed labor troubles on "foreign anarchist plotters," but shifted their focus among Russians, Jews, Reds, and Orientals. All of these ideas now reappeared: the forms for expressing tension were influenced by epi sodes elsewhere in the world. In the 1930s anti-Semitism festered in Baltimore. In the 1940s racism directed at the Japanese enemy spilled over into domestic racism. When World War II ended, anxieties about foreign spies and dupes were not extinguished. Rumors of treason and oaths of loyalty reemerged. In the 1960s "outside agitators" were held responsible for civil rights demands, for student unrest, and for resistance to the draft for the war in Vietnam.
As in other cities, the hostilities had a geographic expression. A zone of tension ran around the town between blue-collar neighborhoods, black and white, roughly along Broadway, Twenty-fifth Street, and Fulton Street. The old roads of the country trade-Gay Street, Greenmount Avenue, and Pennsylvania Avenue-had become corridors of suburban movement and urban displacement, visible ribs of white commercial exploitation in the black ghettoes. While the overall economy of the Baltimore region was still swelling with prosperity in 1968, the inner-city economy was in a depression as deep as 1934.
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On Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King-the symbol of constitu tional and peaceful struggle-was shot in Memphis. Washington, Baltimore, and a hundred smaller cities began to writhe in grief, anxiety, and rage.45 The event recalled the senseless, the unexplained, the irrational of John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. It recalled the trigger events of "hot summers in Detroit, Newark, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. The "enormities of the old world" cast their shadow over Baltimore. The sequence of events resembled those of 1812, 1835, 1861, and 1877. Rates of arson and false alarms had been rising steeply for eight months. On Friday afternoon in the black ghetto of East Baltimore, small gangs along Gay and Aisquith streets began attacking businesses. They broke windows and tossed Molotov cocktails. Holiday crowds, who knew the difference between looting and scavenging, waited for the police, then gaily carried off cases of whiskey, canned foods, and their neighbors' dry cleaning. On Friday evening the governor declared martial law and sent in fifty-five hundred National Guard to assist the twelve hundred exhausted city police. On Saturday morning the News American could have reprinted Niles' Register of 133 years before: "The state of society is awful. Brute force has superseded the law." On Saturday night troubles spread into West Baltimore along Fremont Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Whitelock Street. The night was filled with red skies and sirens.
On Palm Sunday morning "sunlight crackled." In the outer city the air was scented with new grass. The News American writer continued toward town:
in the inner city the sun sparkled on broken glass, and the wind swept up cinders and smoke. Police cars darted everywhere like waterbugs on a pond. "They had brushed each other, these two cities that make up Baltimore." A young man in a purple suit wheeled home a shopping cart piled high with hams. Crowds grown sullen immobilized a passing automobile, a police car, and rained bottles on fire fighters. The firemen, tired and angry, crouched under their trucks and let a block burn while the National Guard tried to flush the people out of the buildings. On Sunday evening the president sent in five thousand regular soldiers. Tents bloomed again overnight like century plants in the city parks.
By Monday there was a "general, but gloomy, resolution" to restore order. The downtown department store district was cordoned off by four hundred state police. Routes to the suburbs were cut off, and early-morning commuters from the counties were stopped at the border. Lines of bayonets swept surly crowds, one by one, from Gay, Aisquith, and Whitelock streets, North Avenue, and Pennsylvania Avenue. Sleepless street people of CORE and U-JOIN were everywhere, "That's enough baby, you've taught 'em a lesson, now let's calm things down." Major Gelston's credibility and experience in Cambridge, Mary land, provided a basis for confidence. Six deaths were considered riot connected; rumors of sniping were never confirmed. Five thousand were arrested. Twelve hundred fires had burned. Most of the thousand burnt-out stores were white owned, many Jewish owned, some owned by "soul brothers." Some were the same corner bars and package liquor stores Mrs. Jackson was fighting in the 1940s. Some were places that had refused to serve blacks in the 1960s. Governor
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Spiro Agnew addressed a monologue of reprimand to urgently assembled middle- class black leaders; they walked out. For four days, Mayor Tommy D'Alesandro roamed the streets in anxious dialogue with fire fighters, police, street people, and crowd watchers. The governor and the mayor reflected the respective atti tudes of state and city governments that had surfaced in the face of every Baltimore mob for two hundred years.
On Wednesday, twenty-two thousand Baltimoreans, black and white, trooped out to cheer the Orioles' opening day game. The mayor threw out the first ball. That was normalcy. The fires dropped to two hundred, only a third over an average day. A convoy of city dump trucks and an army of sweepers moved down Gay Street. A parade of sightseers crept down Pennsylvania Avenue bumper to bumper, with black "do rags" tied to their aerials. For eight or nine months afterward, arson and false alarms continued at relatively high levels in the city, as children a~~d teens continued to act out what they had witnessed. The rhythm of mounting tension, sudden release, and gradual grim restoration resembled the model of history. Citizens were as baffled as Niles had been in his time as to "whether the effect is periodical or belongs to certain accidental causes-the foundations of which are deeply laid."46
T hus, the Baltimore landscape of the 1970s, the dull red maze of the inner city and the infinite greens of the outer city, the beaded string of viaducts over stream valleys, the ribbons of concrete, and the geometry of the inner harbor, came to reflect a set of human relationships. The urban landscape is a history book, a readable set of social relations. Just as it was for Daniel Raymond and James Gibbons, Baltimore has remained a model of the political economy and a mirror of the human condition.
Generation after generation, observers in Baltimore looked at the city around them, at the cancers of mortality, at the heartburnings, at the dens and hovels, and they recognized the succession of events. Inequalities of property and of opportunity in the city were built into its Lebensraum. Investment, public and private, functioned as a transmission belt from past to future, imposing the constraints of one generation on the next. Each new wave of investment trans formed the landscape, recycled the assets, created new debts, and regenerated new debtors and new creditors. Each observer drew his own conclusions as to how the transmission belt might be interrupted, and each chose his mode of persuasion: the printing press, the soapbox, the hustings, the plaintiff's box. After John Woolman mourned the "inward desolation" of the slave-holding economy, the next generation of Quakers developed an alternative economy. Elisha Tyson filed suits to adjust the laws to allow it to operate. Daniel Raymond, considering that a great portion of the evils in society arose from the unequal division of property, challenged the inheritance laws. Richard Ely, perceiving that real property was the source of monopoly, proposed preserving future op tions by auctioning only short-term franchises in the use of the city streets. Ely, and after him Jacob Hollander, testified on tax reforms and urged fiscal responsi
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Baltimore's neighborhood re vitalization in the 1970s reflects
a strong commitment to
maintaining the physical integrity of a built environ ment. The greater challenge is the sensitive restoration of
the social structure.
bility, that each generation should pay its own bills. Broadus Mitchell invited his students to look around at the city: he took them to the lung block and the bachelors' cotillion. Another generation of lawyers and parents took its children to court as plaintiffs, and to picket lines. Their children, in turn, celebrated Earth Day and with graceless accuracy concluded, "There's no free lunch."
Coming to terms with the past has always meant coming to terms with one another and with the situations the past has handed down, and taking part in structuring the situation the next generation will inherit. Looking over our shoulders are Elisha Tyson and George Presbury, some assorted Carrolls, Howards, Browns, and Bucklers, Miss Szold, Father Dolan, Brother Alex, Isaac Myers. Portraits on the walls, faces at the windows, they stare from the bricked- up windows of cotton mill and brewery or off the marble steps, watching the children play hopscotch on the sidewalk. Spirits echo through the empty railroad stations. Ghosts are evicted from their churches or dispossessed of their market stalls and horsecarts. Locked-out specters parade through the streets: mourners follow caskets, pickets hop streetcars, matrons carry violets and laundresses their baskets of dirty linen, brickmakers, stonecutters, hodcarriers, brass bands, and Shriners on minimotorcycles, Fourth of July following Fourth of July, one Armistice Day after another. Behind them march generations of frustration, the pea hullers and tobacco girls, the men with round-pointed shovels, and the boys with bayonets, portraits never painted, the embarrassments of history. They pour gin into the gutter, they demolish a printing press, they break into the jail, they make a bonfire of the law books, they throw the fire engine off the
HEMMED IN
1935-1979
386
dock, they stone a regiment, they stop a locomotive. Their chants bounce off brick walls, "Scab! Scab! Scab!" "Take Home a Brick." They repeat slogans scrawled on board fences, Kill Jim Crow, Off the Pusher, Justice Now. They echo the voice of the madman in the almshouse, "Don't come near me!" and the caulkers' appeal for a little corner of creation.
—- Hemmed In
Published documents and mimeographed reports of the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Hous ing Agency (BURHA) and its successor, the Department of Housing and Community De velopment, have been used extensively. Documents of the Community Action Agency and the Model Cities Agency contain comprehensive material on poverty and inner city demands. My perspective on the relative importance of events in Baltimore in the years 1960 to 1973 has been influenced by participation in the Neighborhood Action Group in Reservoir Hill.
1. Sun, 22 February 1937.
2. On Bethlehem installations, shipbuilding, sizes of ships, and technology at Westing house and Western Electric plants in Baltimore, see newspaper clippings in the vertical files, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Md., by corporate names.
3. Jesse H. Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (New York: Macmillan, 1951).
4. Sun, 18 April 1942.
5. Bartlett Hayward Presents This Pictorial Review of Its Industrial Activities (Baltimore:
Koppers Co., Bartlett Hayward Division, 1945).
6. Jones, Fifty Billion Dollars.
7. Sun, 7 July 1945.
8. Davison Chemical Co., Prospectus, 1952 and 1953; Chemical and Engineering News,
25 December 1943.
9. Maryland Port Authority, annual reports and handbooks. Baltimore Bureau of
Harbors, annual reports, 1932 to 1948, contain dredging figures. Wallace McHarg Roberts and
Todd, Inc., for Maryland State Department of Planning, "Maryland Chesapeake Bay Study:
Report" (1972). Knappen, Tippets, Abbott Engineering Co., "Report on the Port of Baltimore
on Behalf of the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland, for Baltimore Association of
Commerce" (New York, 1950). Martin L. Collins, "An Evaluation of Baltimore Harbor Land
Use Potentials" Report for the Maryland Environmental Service, Regional Planning Council
(February 1973).
10. On the far-flung activities of W. R. Grace, Martin Marietta, Kennecott, Crown Central, Black & Decker, Bethlehem, and Columbia Gas System, see corporate annual reports of the 1970s.
11. On energy use, see Baltimore Gas and Electric Company publications: annual reports; residential electric and gas appliance surveys (1972 and 1976); Power Pictorial (1946-49); and Power and Fuel Pictorial (1959). The company supplied summary statistics, copies of reports, and maps.
If annual investment figures are deflated to "real" dollars, there has been roughly a five fold increase of Baltimore Gas and Electric Company investment levels, rather than tenfold. A fivefold increase closely parallels the physical growth rates of electric power produced and fuels and cement consumed in the region. New industry and construction projects are recorded in monthly newsletters of Baltimore Association of Commerce, Industrial Services (former Industrial Bureau).
12. The city's financial institutions and business elite and their limited spheres are
Æ_ _ NOTES TO PAGES 359-70
417
indicated in Chaloner B. Schley, "Baltimore's Role in International Banking," Baltimore
Magazine (December 1971), pp. 24-32; and Frank Defilippo, New,' American, 17 and 18
December 1967.
13. Martin Millspaugh, Baltimore's Charles Center, technical bulletin 51 (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1965).
14. Sun, 17 and 26 April and 9 July 1945. Maryland Commission to Study and Report on the Transportation System Operated by the Baltimore Transit Company, "Report to Gov ernor McKeldin, under 1951 Act of Maryland Legislature." See newspapers during transit strike, 30 January-s March 1956, for discussions of transit company finances.
15. Portland cement shipped into Maryland rose from 1.5 million barrels a year in
1935 to 8 million barrels in 1973 (U.S., Bureau of Mines, Yearbook). About 1.5 barrels, or
550 pounds, of cement are used for a cubic yard of concrete in expressway construction. The
yearly energy requirement to produce the cement alone would be about a million barrels of
oil plus 100 kilowatt hours of electricity.
16. Sun, 4 April 1945; Evening Sun, 14 November 1952 and 20 November 1955; Power
and Fuel Pictorial 85, beltway edition (December 1962); Sun, 29 August and 18 November
1971 and 27 August 1972. Marc Reutter, "The Thirty Years War" (Paper, The Johns Hopkins
University, February 1972). Douglas H. Haeuber, The Baltimore Expressway Controversy
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research,
1974). Urban Design Concept Associates, Segment Area Reports (1 November 1968) and
Point III Reports (July 1970), prepared for Maryland State Roads Commission and Interstate
Division for Baltimore City. On the highways and parks, see James Dilts, Sun, 29 September
1968; "A Study and Recommendations for the Recreational Development of the Patapsco
River Valley Park" (Report to Mayor T. R. McKeldin, May 1946, in Enoch Pratt Free
Library); BURHA, "Jones Falls Valley Woodberry-Hampden Study" (Baltimore, 5 April 1963);
and "Plan of Municipal Art Society and Greater Baltimore Committee for a Jones Falls
Valley Park" (Baltimore, n.d., ca. 1963).
17. See chapter 2, note 25, on the road building controversy of 1784, and chapter 4, note 16, on the controversy of 1804.
18. Joseph Albright, What Makes Spiro Run (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972). See also Franklin L. Burdette, "Modern Maryland Politics and Social Change," in Maryland: A History, 1632-74, ed. Richard Walsh and William Lloyd Fox (Baltimore: Maryland His torical Society, 1974), pp.881-83.
19. Evening Sun, 22, 28, and 29 September 1970; New York Times, 13 September 1970.
20. Sun, 23 May 1943; see also 13 November 1943.
21. Ibid., 31 July-2 August 1943.
22. Ibid., 18 October 1943.
23. Ibid., ii August 1944.
24. Joseph P. Healy, chairman, Report of the Governor's Commission on Problems Affecting the Negro Population (Baltimore, 1943). Sun, 12 February 1950. Baltimore Com munity Self-Survey of Intergroup Relations, An American City in Transition (Baltimore, 1955).
25. To situate Baltimore school integration in the national context, I relied heavily on Richard Kiuger, Simple Justice (New York: Random House, 1977). The term "infant appellants" is attributed by Kluger (p.645) to Charles Black, 1953. For Baltimore reactions to Supreme Court cases, see Afro-American, 14 November and 5 December 1953, and 29 May and S and 12 June 1954.
26. On Lillie Jackson and Thurgood Marshall, see vertical files, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Md.
27. Afro-American, 13 September 1952.
28. National Education Association, Baltimore, Maryland, Change and Contrast: The Children and Public School,' (Washington, D.C.: NEA, 1967).
29. Ibid., p.57.
30. Milliken v. Bradley, 94 5. Ct. 3112 (25 July 1974) applied to Detroit, as cited by Kluger, Simple Justice, p.773.
NOTES TO PAGES 371-84
418
31. Sherry H. Olson, Baltimore (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1976). For population redistribution, see Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, The Johns Hopkins University, Metro News, Occasional Papers, and Census Notes (1971-72).
32. Office of Economic Opportunity, Federal Outlays in Summary: A Report of the Federal Government's Impact by State, County, and Large City (Miscellaneous Publication PB-219, 463, 1972). Federal Outlays in Maryland (OEOOSL-73-21). Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism (M-106, Washing ton, D.C., June 1976). In the mid-1920s, the city budget was $65 million a year, still double the state government budget. In the generation 1919-34 the city floated $60 million of loans, including the public schools loans. Municipal property was valued at $300 million.
33. U.S., Commission on Civil Rights, Maryland State Advisory Committee, "Transcript
of Heanngs, Baltzmore, M&r~a~~nd, January 1971."
34. Daniel Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy (Baltimore: F. Lucas, 1820), p.452.
35. W. W. Emmart, Report on Housing and Commercial Conditions in Baltimore, Con stituting Studies Prepared for Mayor Howard W. Jackson, October 1934 (Baltimore, 1934); John Edward Semmes, Jr., "Baltimore Fights the Slums" (Thesis, Princeton University, 1940) in City Hall Library; Wallace McHarg Roberts and Todd, for Regional Planning Council and Baltimore City Department of Planning, Metro Center/Baltimore, Technical Study (Baltimore, 1970).
36. Citizens Planning and Housing Association, mimeographed press releases, 1942-73;
"Unvented Gas Heaters," Baltimore Magazine (September 1970), pp. 3~34.
37. Martin Milispaugh and Gurney Breckenfeld, The Human Side of Urban Renewal, ed. M. L. Colean (New York, 1958).
38. Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Agency (BURHA), "A Demonstration of Rehabilitation, Harlem Park" (Baltimore, 1965). The pilot block, no. 314, borders Harlem Park on the east.
39. "Displacement and Relocation, Past and Future, Baltimore, Maryland," BURHA stage one staff monograph 5.4, mimeographed (March 1965). Constance L. Barker, "Reloca tion and the Housing Market in Metropolitan Baltimore, 1968-1975," mimeographed (Mary land Regional Planning Council, 1968).
40. Interviews with Abel Wolman and Janet Hoffman, Metro News, 15 September
1974, pp.6-il.
41. Sun, 2 October 1971 and 15 January 1972; Afro-American, 28 February 1976; The Activists, Stop Black Tax (pamphlets, Baltimore, 1970).
42. There are three distinct types of "buy like rent" contracts; the scale of such activity is indicated for 1950s in Baltimore Community Self-Survey of Intergroup Relations, An American City (Baltimore, 1955).
43. On housing and financial institutions, see Lata Chattenee, David Harvey, and
Lawrence Klugman, FHA Policies and the Baltimore City Housing Market (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, 1974); David
Harvey, Class-Monopoly Rent, Finance Capital and the Urban Revolution, University of
Toronto Papers on Planning and Design no.4 (March 1974); and M. G. Wolman, David
Harvey, Lata Chattenee, Lawrence Klugman, and Jeanne Newman, The Housing Market and
Code Enforcement in Baltimore (Baltimore: City Planning~Department, 1972).
44. Afro-American, 20 March, 29 May, and 5 and 19 June 1954; Sun, 11 March 1971.
45. News American and Sun, 4-14 April 1968.
46. Niles' Register, 8 and 15 August 1835.