Built in 1922, the former Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch No. 19 at 606 South Ann Street was one of a large number of branch libraries that opened in the early twentieth century. Between 1908 and 1920, the Pratt Library opened a new branch every sixteen months including new libraries in Hamilton and Mount Washington. The building boom was supported by a 1907 gift from Andrew Carnegie and by the generosity of local residents and community organizations who donated land and funds to support their construction.
In 1920, 91桃色视频 City acquired a lot on Ann Street donated by the Children's Playground Association and William Hooper Grafflin, a Baltimore native, banker, and board member of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Local architect William W. Emmart put together a design and the contract for construction was awarded to R.B. Mason in May 1921. By June 1922, the new Branch No. 19 was open.
During the early decades of the library's operation, a large number of the patrons were European immigrants, especially from Poland. The population of Polish immigrants in Baltimore grew quickly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reaching over twenty-three thousand people by 1893. A large share of these residents lived in southeast Baltimore, earning Eastern Avenue the reputation as Baltimore's "Polish Wall Street." After the Pratt began offering "book lists" of suggested readings in 1934, a patron at Branch No. 19, Mrs. Charles D. Sadowski, worked with Miss Sara Siebert, branch librarian, to assemble a list of Polish-language books on the history and culture of Poland along with any English novels translated into Polish.
The history of immigration in southeast Baltimore is woven together with the history of maritime industry. For example, in December 1941 at the beginning of World War II, more than fifty members of the National Maritime Union walked from their hall at 1700 Fleet Street to register as volunteers for civil defense activities. Some of the volunteers were unable to write in English but the branch librarian Miss Annabelle Collins helped in "filling out their blanks." The war effort also inspired residents to turn the library's back yard into a "Victory Garden."
By the 1950s, the Fell's Point Improvement Association began regular meetings at the library and, in the 1970s, the librarians at Branch No. 19 began offering a growing variety of programming for patrons. For example, on June 1, 1974, the library hosted a "family fun festival" with "rock groups, movies, a puppet show, storytelling games, a mahic show contests, and a bake sale." On December 22, 1975, the library invited neighbors to join a free "Community Christmas Party" with seasonal movies, tree decorating, and caroling.
Budget troubles for the Enoch Pratt Free Library system in the early 1980s led to a month-long closure for what was then known as the Fell's Point Library Center in 1981. The library declared the large back yard "off-limits" to patrons because they could not afford to maintain or restore the area. Fortunately, residents pitched in to sustain and support the branch. In spring 1985, a neighborhood group, the Owners' Restoring and Renovating Association, secured a $2,500 matching grant from the city's Neighborhood Incentive Program. They planed to plant new flowers and trees and install tables and benches. When other library visitors learned about the plan, they donated even more time and money to raise over $6,000. The community celebrated the new "reading garden" with a dedication on May 17, 1986.
By 2001, however, years of inadequate funding led the Enoch Pratt Free Library to announce a plan to close five small branches鈥攊ncluding the Fell's Point Center. In August 2001, just two weeks before the branches were set to close, then Mayor Martin O'Malley announced that the city had agreed to keep four of the five branches open through partnerships with local nonprofit organizations. The Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center would move into the former Branch No. 19 and turn it into "a center for immigrants to learn language, assimilation and job skills." According to the Baltimore Sun, Clinton Roby, treasurer of Friends of the Fell's Point Branch, was glad the city avoided selling the building to a private investor, remarking, "We were worried the city was going to take the highest bidder. I'm just glad it's not going to be taken away from the community."
In 2018, after fifteen years of service as the Education-Based Latino Outreach (EBLO) center, the former library is again in need of repairs and improvements. Flooding in the basement is a regular concern. Roof leaks have damaged the interior and forced EBLO to move programs out of the building. Residents, local elected officials, and EBLO staff are working together to seek funding for repairs and return the building back into use as a resource for the community.
On October 13, 1935, William 鈥淟ittle Willie鈥 Adams and Victorine Quille were married at Saint Peter Claver Catholic Church. The young businessman and the school teacher each came from different backgrounds. William Adams, originally of Zebulon, North Carolina, arrived in Baltimore at age fifteen. Over the next six years, Adams worked his way up from running numbers and cutting sail cloth into rags at a shop on Caroline Street to owning three businesses (a bicycle shop, candy store, and barbershop). Victorine Adams grew up in a working-class family in Baltimore. She graduated from what is now Frederick Douglass High School and enrolled in the teacher training course at Coppin Normal School (now Coppin State University).
Shortly after completing the two-year training course and beginning work as a teacher, Victorine met William Adams. The pair married in 1935 and, soon thereafter, William and Victorine emerged as an influential couple in the political, social, and economic spheres of Black Baltimore. They owned several businesses along Pennsylvania Avenue (including Club Casino and the Charm Centre) and made loans to Black business owners throughout the city in the 1940s and 1950s. But they also started to use their money and connections to push for political change.
In 1946, Victorine founded the Colored Women鈥檚 Democratic Campaign Committee of Maryland (CWDCC) to interest Black women in politics and increase their participation in the social, civic, and economic development of the city. The CWDCC鈥檚 home base was the basement of the Adams family home on Carlisle Avenue in the neighborhood of Hanlon Park. When they moved to Hanlon Park in July 1949, the couple were the first Black residents in the community鈥攎ost of their neighbors were white and Jewish. The basement served as the headquarters for many voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns, as Victorine trained volunteers how to vote using an instructional model table-top voting machine from the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation of Jamestown, New York.
The couple helped many successful Black politicians win office in their campaign to diversify Maryland politics: Harry A. Cole to the Maryland State Senate in 1955; Verda Welcome to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1962; and Parren Mitchell to the United States Congress in 1970. Their home also served as the base for subsequent successful political campaigns by Victorine. She won her own seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in 1966 and became the first Black woman to serve on the 91桃色视频 City Council after a successful race in 1967.
The Adamses continued to be involved in Baltimore politics and philanthropy throughout their lives, whether they were fundraising for the now-defunct Provident Hospital or supporting the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Foundation, which awarded scholarships to Black residents of 91桃色视频 City for undergraduate studies in business-related fields. Their Hanlon Park home sold shortly after Victorine died in 2006. William moved to an apartment at Roland Park Place where he died in 2011.聽
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Baltimore activists have a long history of fighting discrimination and segregation in the city鈥檚 public establishments. In the years after World War II, the NAACP and their allies worked to end segregated seating at Ford鈥檚 Theatre on Fayette Street and drew national attention to the fight for equal rights in Baltimore.
Ford's Theatre opened in 1871. It was built by John T. Ford, a Baltimore native, and the owner of the Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. infamous as the site of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Like many other theatres in downtown Baltimore, Ford's enforced a strict policy of racially segregated seating. As early as 1947, Baltimore鈥檚 branch of the NAACP began picketing the theatre. At that time, NAACP executive secretary Addison Pinkney stated that the protest had gone on for 鈥漷he entire season鈥 and 鈥渞educed the average attendance to less than one-half capacity of [the] building.鈥 Unfortunately, theatre management was resistant to changing their discriminatory policies. Protests continued for five years with national and international stars joining the fight. In 1948, celebrated singer and Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson walked a picket line in front of the theatre. In 1951, Basil Rathbone, the British actor famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, declared: 鈥淵ou may depend on my taking a firm stand of disapproval of the segregated theatre in Baltimore and to inform any management to whom I may in future contract myself and the case of any play in which I play.鈥
By 1950, the protests were hurting the theatre鈥檚 bottom line. The theatre, which was operated by United Booking Office Inc. of New York, leased the building from Baltimore theatre mogul Morris Mechanic. By 1950, United Booking Office reported that Ford鈥檚, once one of the most prosperous theatres in the nation, had its box office receipts cut almost in half, attributing the decline to the NAACP protest and to the poor selection of plays.
In 1952, the protest gained another strong ally: Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin. Speaking in early 1952 at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, McKeldin declared that he wanted Ford鈥檚 opened to African Americans because they had been 鈥渘eedlessly affronted鈥 by its policies. 鈥淲e are going to walk together,鈥 he said. 鈥淚 am an optimist, and we must win. We are going to stop this evil thing.鈥 On February 1, 1952, Ford鈥檚 dropped its segregation policies and was finally open to all.
In 1964, the Sun recalled, "Almost every theatrical star from the last century has played there, from James W. Wallack and Maude Adams to Katharine Cornell, and the building has gained a reputation for everything from cats on stage to deer in the balcony and bats in the dressing rooms." Unfortunately, neither theatrical or Civil Rights聽history could save the three-story theatre from the wrecking ball. The building was torn down in 1964 to make way for the parking garage that stands on the site today.
Trinity Baptist Church at the corner of Druid Hill Avenue and McMechen Street tells the story of Baltimore's connections to the national civil rights movement and radical Black activism in the early twentieth century.
One of the church's influential early activist leaders was Reverend Garnett Russell Waller. In July 1905, Waller joined fellow activists W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter at the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario, Canada in founding the Niagara Movement鈥攁 new civil rights organization that ultimately developed into the NAACP.
Trinity Baptist Church was then located at Charles and 20th Streets and Waller, who served as the Niagara Movement鈥檚 Maryland secretary, lived nearby at 325 E. 23rd Street. James Robert Lincoln Diggs, educator and succeeded Waller as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church beginning around early 1915. Diggs shared Waller's commitment to activism and was also a participant in the 1905 founding of the Niagara Movement.
In 1918, Diggs helped to establish the Baltimore chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in 1918. The UNIA-ACL was first established in Ohio in 1914 by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born activist. Diggs was close with Garvey and presided over his marriage to Amy Jacques Garvey in 1922.
In May 1920, Diggs led the congregation's move to Druid Hill Avenue after the congregation purchased the 1872 St. Paul's English Evangelical Lutheran Church for $40,000. The church quickly put their new building to work鈥攈osting the 1920 annual convention for the National Equal Rights League in October. The conference was presided over by Rev. J. H. Taylor, secretary of the Maryland Association for Social Service, with speakers including founding member Monroe Trotter, lawyer Nathan S. Taylor from Chicago, and Trinity鈥檚 own Rev. Diggs.
The church also served as a center for local activism. For example, on February 1, 1921, 500 people gathered at Trinity Baptist Church at Druid Hill Avenue and Mosher Street to protest the release of a white man, Harry Feldenheimer, on a $500 bail soon after police arrested him for an attempted assault on a 10-year-old black girl named Esther Short. The Afro-American reported that participants in the meeting criticized the 鈥渂rutality of the local police, exclusion of qualified men from the police force and from juries in the city, and the Jim Crow arrangements for colored people in the Criminal and Juvenile Courts.鈥
Regrettably, Diggs health began to decline around the fall of 1922 and he soon entered a hospital. On April 14, 1923, he died at home and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Rev. Garnett R. Waller died in Baltimore in 1941 but the church both individuals supported continues to this day.
1621 Bolton Street is the childhood home of Walter Sondheim, Jr.: a local business executive and civic leader who is best known for his role as president of the 91桃色视频 City School Board as the city first sought to put an end to racially segregated school following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In their decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In contrast to many southern school districts, Sondheim led the school board to immediately respond to the ruling with a new policy that, at least officially, allowed white and black students to attend any school regardless of their race.
Leaders in Baltimore鈥檚 African American community had lobbied for more resources for the city鈥檚 black students as far back as the 1860s. In 1867, for example, the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of the Colored People successfully petitioned the city to provide funds for the education of black children. And, in 1882, Everett J. Waring, Reverend Harvey Johnson, and others succeeded in pushing the school board to establish the first 鈥渃olored鈥 high school for black students, which went on to become the school we know today as Frederick Douglas High School.
In the early 1950s, Baltimore鈥檚 NAACP and Urban League began advocating to integrate Polytechnic Institute, particularly the school鈥檚 elite engineering program. Their efforts culminated in a contentious hearing at the school board in 1952 where among others, Thurgood Marshall battled against the Poly Alumni Association and others to integrate the school. With Walter Sondheim as the chair, board members voted five to three to integrate, and fifteen African American students entered the program at Poly that fall.
Despite this victory, attempts to integrate Baltimore鈥檚 all-female Western High School and Mergenthaler School of Printing (better known locally as 鈥淢ervo鈥) failed in 1953. Efforts of challenging these decisions were put on hold as Marshall and others from the NAACP knew the case from Topeka, Kansas, Brown v. Board of Education, would be heading to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the unanimous Brown decision came out in May 1954, Baltimore already had years of advocacy and attention to the issue of desegregation.
While Baltimore did not experience the violence that desegregation sparked in other cities, the city never successfully integrated its schools. In the fall of 1954, six white students enrolled in formerly all-black schools and sixteen hundred black students enrolled in formerly all-white schools. By 1960, African American students became the majority in the school system. In 1961, 75% of the city鈥檚 schools were either 90% black or 90% white. In 1973, the U.S. Office of Civil Rights threatened to withhold federal funds charging that the city was not doing enough to integrate the schools.
The First Unitarian Church of Baltimore has stood at the corner of Charles and Franklin Streets for over two centuries. Inside the 1818 landmark, visitors can find beautiful Tiffany glass and original furnishings designed by the architect and crafted by noted Baltimore artisans. Beyond the building鈥檚 remarkable architecture, the congregation has served as the spiritual home to many local civic leaders, such as Enoch Pratt and George Peabody. Recognizing the significance of the building as the oldest purpose-built Unitarian church in North America, First Unitarian Church was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972.
The history of the church began in 1817, when Baltimore had sixty thousand inhabitants and Mount Vernon Place was the undeveloped edge of the city. A group of leading citizens met in the home of merchant and city councilman Henry Payson on February 10, 1817, and, according to church histories, committed 鈥渢o form a religious society and build a church for Christians who are Unitarian and cherish liberal sentiments on the subject of religion.鈥 The original name selected for the church, The First Independent Church of Baltimore, reflected the independence of thought and action that became the hallmark of this group of freethinkers and those who succeeded them through subsequent generations. The church was later renamed First Unitarian in 1912.
Designed by Maximilian Godefroy, the French architect of Saint Mary鈥檚 Chapel and the Battle Monument, the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore is recognized as the finest American example of French Romantic Classicism. Dedicated on October 29, 1818, the church was a daring modern design when it was constructed. It utilizes the basic shapes of the cube and the sphere with a minimum of detail on the flat planes to emphasize the geometry of the structure. The chancel features a pulpit, designed by Godefroy and executed by William Camp, and two sets of sedilia. One set of two chairs and a loveseat was designed by Godefroy and is original to the church; the other set was designed by Tiffany and added in the 1890s.
In the late nineteenth century, the church undertook a major reconstruction of the interior of the sanctuary to improve the acoustics of the space. Joseph Evans Sperry designed a barrel-vaulted ceiling with supporting arches. The reconstruction also added a large Tiffany mosaic, seven Tiffany windows, and a magnificent Henry Niemann organ. The Tiffany mosaic of the Last Supper, designed by Tiffany artist Frederick Wilson, is composed of 64,800 pieces of favrile glass. The Niemann organ and the church鈥檚 Enoch Pratt Parish Hall (built in 1879 at 514 N. Charles Street), were both gifts of Enoch Pratt, a member and leader of the church for sixty-five years.
The First Unitarian Church of Baltimore is important to Unitarian Universalists throughout the country because of a landmark sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing on May 5, 1819, at the ordination of the church鈥檚 first minister, Jared Sparks. The sermon, which defined the essence of Unitarianism in the United States and led to the formation of the denomination in 1825, came to be known as the Baltimore Sermon. Channing emphasized freedom, reason, and tolerance and taught that the way we live is more important than the words and symbols we use to describe our faith, a truth that has inspired a commitment to social justice along with theological diversity.
This spirit helped shape the work of the congregation and its members over the decades. In 1874, the congregation organized Baltimore鈥檚 first vocational school for teenagers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the First Unitarian Church sponsored an Industrial School for Girls, a Boy鈥檚 Guild, and Channing House, a settlement house for South Baltimore. Church members have contributed to the city through public service and philanthropy in many ways up through the present day.
Walters Bath No. 2 opened in 1901 serving residents living in the busy industrial neighborhoods of southwest Baltimore. The construction of the bathhouse was supported by Henry Walters, art collector and philanthropist. Despite living in New York, Walters supported the construction of four bathhouses spread out spread out across the city to improve public hygiene and sanitation. Bath No. 2 on Washington Boulevard is the only one of the four that still stands.
Designed by architect George Archer, the bathhouse features a less-ornate version of the Renaissance Revival architecture that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century. The forty-foot front fa莽ade with four bays facing the street is the only part that is more than strictly utilitarian in design. A large stone plaque across the top of the building reads "THE WALTERS PUBLIC BATHS."
Unlike earlier luxurious bathhouses, which date back to the early nineteenth century in Baltimore, Walters bathhouses were erected to improve the sanitary conditions of the crowded industrial city that Baltimore had become. The bath offered a shower, spray, or tub bath to those who usually could not afford access to similar facilities. To oversee this step forward in public health, 91桃色视频 City created the Free Public Bath Commission to supervise the bathhouses as well as comfort stations, swimming pools, school shower programs, and portable shower baths, all of which were operating by 1925.
When the building opened in 1902, Bath No. 2 charged three cents for adults and one cent for children for soap and towels, and 2 陆 cents per hour for laundry privileges. Later, the public bath system upped the fee to five cents, a charge that remained until the entire public bath system was closed at the end of 1959.
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The Maryland School for the Blind (MSB) was established in 1853. Formal education for blind people in the U.S. and western Europe was still a relatively recent invention. In 1765, Henry Dannett established the first school with this mission in Liverpool, England. The first school in the United States to follow this model was the New England Asylum for the Blind, now known as the Perkins School For the Blind, established in March 1829.
In Maryland, the new school was established thanks to the efforts of David E. Loughery, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, and Washington County native Benjamin F. Newcomer, a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist. Together, they were able to generate enough interest in creating a school for the blind that the Maryland General Assembly incorporated the school in 1853. David Loughery was appointed the school鈥檚 first superintendent.
Frederick Douglas Morrison, a national leader in his profession, began his forty-year tenure as superintendent in 1864. He had a lasting impact on the school for several reasons. He was instrumental in the founding of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind; he moved the campus to North Avenue in 1868; and officially changed the name to The Maryland School for the Blind. He also founded The Maryland School for the Colored Blind and Deaf in 1872 and served as the superintendent of both schools. The practice of segregated education for black blind and deaf students continued up until 1956.
John Frances Bledsoe became superintendent in 1906 and two years later relocated the school in 1908 to the present campus in northeast Baltimore. During his thirty-seven years at the helm of the school, Dr. Bledsoe oversaw its expansion and professionalization. It was during this period when the school began its residential program with the construction of four cottages and Newcomer Hall. The latter was named for Benjamin F. Newcomer who was one of the founders of the school and who served on the board of directors for over forty years.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic residents of Hampden belonged to the St. Mary of the Assumption parish in Govans, a distant walk from the burgeoning neighborhood. Since the industrial mill village had been built by the owners of the mills for their predominantly white Protestant workers, they had made no accommodations for Catholics to worship in the area. At least until an Irish-Catholic immigrant named Martin Kelly started a small Catholic community. Kelly erected the first non-company housing along Falls Road east of the mills, which grew into the Hampden we know today.
Kelly鈥檚 extended family occupied many of the sixteen homes Kelly erected in the 1850s. Others were likely owned by mill employees who could afford to leave the mill villages or by shopkeepers selling goods to other residents in the mill villages. Kelly built a large home for himself on Hickory Avenue, known colloquially as the Kelly Mansion. Fellow Catholics likely knew the house well. Seeking a place to worship closer to home, Kelly persuaded a priest to hold services in his home's parlor, using the piano as an altar. After Kelly's death, his son John donated the land and funds for a new Catholic church in Hampden called St. Thomas Aquinas.
Rev. Thomas Foley laid the cornerstone of St. Thomas Aquinas Church on May 12, 1867. The building, designed by famed local architect George Frederick and constructed at the cost of $20,000, was completed on June 18, 1871. Archbishop Martin John Spalding attended the dedication.
Today, the church complex consists of the church, rectory, school, and convent. The school was founded in 1873 and the current building went up in 1937. At the time, the school had 320 pupils and a staff of eight, hired from the School Sisters of Notre Dame. In 1973, St. Thomas Aquinas clustered with nearby parishes. Grades one to five attended St. Thomas Aquinas, while middle school students attended St. Bernard's in Waverly. Middle schoolers returned to St. Thomas Aquinas in 1996, seven years after St. Bernard's had become a Korean National Parish (which closed just a year later in 1997).
The school reached a crisis point in 2010 when the archdiocese closed thirteen of sixty-four parochial schools in Baltimore. St. Thomas Aquinas avoided closure due to the leadership of its principal, Sister Marie Rose Gusatus. The school took in students from surrounding parishes. However, the school only remained open for another six years.
In 2016, the Archdiocese closed St. Thomas Aquinas School along with Seton Keough High School in Southwest Baltimore and John Paul Regional School in Woodlawn. While the archdiocese claimed enrollment in Catholic schools had begun to stabilize after decades of declining enrollment, funding remained low as enrollment costs were kept low to make the schools more affordable. Also, in response to the need for costly improvements, the archdiocese decided it would be best to consolidate the schools.
A giant carrot, a house made of cheese, and barnyard chickens were among the attractions that greeted visitors to the Baltimore Zoo鈥檚 new Children鈥檚 Zoo when it opened in Druid Hill Park in 1963. 鈥淢ost children鈥檚 zoos are full of fairy tale stuff, like Humpty-Dumpty, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack and the Beanstalk,鈥 declared Arthur Watson, the Zoo鈥檚 director. 鈥淭his one will be different. It will emphasize living things and nature.鈥 And it did, along with its share of whimsy.
The Children鈥檚 Zoo was a combination petting zoo, storybook land, and barnyard intended to make every child鈥檚 鈥渇irst introduction to animals a pleasant one,鈥 said Watson. Young visitors could board Noah鈥檚 Ark (formerly a Chesapeake Bay fishing boat), climb into a tree house, ride a miniature train pulled by a replica 1863 C.P. Huntington locomotive, visit cows in a Pennsylvania Dutch milking barn, and wander in, out, and around other fantastical structures with animals everywhere. Chickens, ducks, and peacocks roamed freely while rabbits, sheep, goats, and donkeys stood within petting distance. More exotic fauna such as monkeys, parrots, and a baby tapir were also in residence but out of hand鈥檚 reach.
Interest in adding a barnyard feature to Druid Hill Park 鈥渢o give city children a view of country life鈥 had been floating around since 1937 when 91桃色视频 City Councilman Jerome Sloman first proposed the idea. It took twenty-six years, and Watson鈥檚 unrelenting advocacy, to turn idea into reality. From the moment he was hired as the Zoo鈥檚 first professional director in 1948, Watson made it his mission to increase attendance. He believed that a children鈥檚 zoo was central to this mission and he eventually secured the necessary approvals and funding for construction. In the meantime, children鈥檚 zoos had become popular all around the country. Watson and his architect, Louis Cuoma, researched similar attractions to help conceptualize their own. Referring to his competition at other major zoos, Watson announced with typical bravado, 鈥淟et them compare our new [children鈥檚 zoo] with those and they鈥檒l find that Baltimore has the best in the country.鈥
The site for the Children鈥檚 Zoo was carefully chosen to avoid tree removal and to be within walking distance of the main zoo. The milking barn was constructed on site but most of the fantastic structures and over-sized animals were created in the big, bright workshop of Adler Display Studios on Penn Street in southwest Baltimore. The zoo-within-a-zoo was enclosed to contain free-roaming children and animals, but also to allow the zoo to charge admission of fifteen cents for each child and twenty-five cents for adults. Watson rightly anticipated that ticket sales would soon cover the $250,000 cost of building the Children鈥檚 Zoo.
While seemingly modest, the price of admission for a family could add up at a time when the hourly minimum wage was only $1.25. The rest of the Zoo remained free but the Children鈥檚 Zoo鈥檚 pay-to-play policy sparked debate in the City鈥檚 op-ed pages. Some felt that the policy was exclusionary while others saw a need for the Zoo to generate revenue in order to grow and improve. Curiosity apparently outpaced criticism, with more than twenty-five thousand people visiting the Children鈥檚 Zoo in its first ten days. It would continue to attract the Zoo鈥檚 youngest visitors for just over two decades, until it was replaced in the 1980s by the expansive Maryland Wilderness exhibit, an ambitious new children鈥檚 zoo with a very different look and feel.
At the edge of the Disc Golf Course in Druid Hill Park where the greens give way to weeds and woods, you might notice a set of stone steps that lead nowhere. Trace their path downward through the wild overgrowth and you can pick out remnants of a stone foundation wall and a rusted iron fence. This abandoned spot used to be a popular destination.
Under the vines and overgrowth are the Three Sisters Ponds, all now empty. There were originally five of these man-made basins, created in 1875 to stock trout, shad, and other local species bred in a nearby fish hatchery house. The picturesque little building, also completed in 1875, was designed by George A. Frederick, the same architect who designed Baltimore鈥檚 City Hall and several other Druid Hill Park landmarks. Early on, the building was described as 鈥渁 two-story Gothic structure of blue stone, with white marble trimmings, the main building projecting from octagonal wings on either side.鈥 By 1925, the building was abandoned and ultimately destroyed by vandals, who broke windows, stripped it of its bronze fittings, and set it on fire in 1940. The city demolished the charred ruins for safety reasons.
At least one of the ponds stocked fish well into the twentieth century, but, in 1884, the center pond became a sea lion exhibit. The pond鈥檚 first occupant arrived by train from California in the middle of the night after an eight-day journey. The sea lion 鈥渟lipped out upon the bank鈥 of Pond No. 2, 鈥済ave a plunge headforemost, and was out of sight,鈥 reported the Baltimore Sun. In 1896, Captain Cassells, superintendent of Druid Hill Park, declared that the sea lions were 鈥渢he show attraction of the park, particularly to every child who comes here.鈥 To give the sleek celebrities more space, the center pond was enlarged, merging five basins into three, but it would still prove to be only a temporary home for such large animals. In 1910, the sea lions relocated to a new exhibit on the main campus of the Zoo a short distance away.
Despite the loss of the sea lions, Three Sisters Ponds remained beautiful, well-tended, and popular for several more decades. The name 鈥淭hree Sisters Ponds鈥 dates to at least the 1920s. Its origin is unknown but may reference the Native American use of the term to describe three staple crops 鈥 corn, beans, and squash 鈥 traditionally grown in close proximity and for mutual benefit. One of the three became a casting pond where anglers could practice their sport inaugurated in 1928 for the Maryland Open Bait Casting Tournament. Another of the ponds, around the same time, became a favorite destination of the Baltimore Model Yacht Club. On weekends, those who sailed model yachts and those who enjoyed watching them flocked to the pond. In winter, ice skaters came.
As the decades passed and recreational use of Druid Hill Park changed, Three Sisters Ponds became a quieter spot. One police officer who occasionally patrolled the park in the late 1960s and early 1970s remembered the place fondly. 鈥淭he ponds gave the occasional visitor like me a sense of privacy, escape, and personal oasis,鈥 wrote Philip B.J. Reid, who later became an FBI agent. 鈥淓ncircled by an array of multicolored plants and trees and well-manicured lawns and shrubs, and home to various species of birds and the occasional deer, the setting was beautiful, serene, and majestic.鈥
The City cut off water to the ponds in the 1960s and since then, nature has slowly reclaimed the site. A master plan for Druid Hill Park published in 1995 recommended their renovation, but nothing has happened there yet.
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Disc golfers playing on Druid Hill Park鈥檚 course sometimes toss their Frisbees accidentally over the Maryland Zoo鈥檚 perimeter fence. The discs land alongside a flat, understated red-brick building whose bland exterior contrasts with a fascinating interior. This is the Zoo鈥檚 Animal Hospital. Since 1984, it has been the hub of medical research and animal care for a wonderfully diverse array of wild patients, ranging from five-gram ruby-throated hummingbirds to five-hundred-pound lions.
Before the Animal Hospital was built, the Zoo鈥檚 veterinary staff worked out of a small sick ward in the basement of another Zoo building. Their move into the hospital afforded incredible new opportunities. The facility was equipped with a full surgical suite, an intensive care unit, separate wards for mammals, birds, and reptiles, as well as a quarantine ward, a veterinary laboratory, and a medical library. Today, the hospital also houses the Zoo鈥檚 Panamanian Golden Frog Conservation Center and its Animal Embassy, including an outdoor mews, where the program animals known as 鈥淎nimal Ambassadors鈥 live.
The Baltimore Zoological Society (BZS), a non-profit organization formed to support and ultimately manage the Zoo, first proposed an animal hospital in its 1976 Master Plan. It then took several years to secure the聽necessary funding. Dr. Torrey Brown, then Secretary of the State Department of Natural Resources and a board member of BZS, and Dr. John Strandberg, Director of Comparative Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, were instrumental in the effort. The Animal Hospital officially opened in January 1984 at a cost of $3.8 million that the State of Maryland funded with a grant.
From the beginning, the Zoo鈥檚 veterinary staff has worked closely with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. They have also collaborated with veterinary and human medicine experts to add depth to the Zoo鈥檚 medical program. A local dentist who volunteered his services to the Zoo recalled that 鈥渨hile doing a root canal for one of the Zoo鈥檚 medical staff, I was asked if I wanted to help out.鈥 He went from never doing a root canal on an animal before to adapting his own equipment to the task to eventually becoming a member of the American Association of Veterinary Dentists.
The Animal Hospital has seen its fair share of extraordinary patients, too. There was the male Kodiak bear that broke the x-ray table under his massive weight. And the tiny golden frog that visited the O.R. to have an even tinier tumor removed. A bald eagle, found injured along the Gunpowder River, was treated for broken bones in its shoulder. That same eagle was released soon thereafter by then-President Bill Clinton at a 1996 ceremony marking the down-listing of bald eagles from endangered to threatened. More recently, an African penguin got a new lease on life after successful cataract surgery.
In addition to patient care, the Animal Hospital remains to this day an epicenter of important medical research, veterinary training, and ongoing wildlife conservation work that often involves partners such as the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
On August 5, 1948, Mayor Thomas D鈥橝lessandro and other 91桃色视频 City dignitaries came by motorcade to Druid Hill Park for the official opening of the Baltimore Zoo鈥檚 new Reptile House. They pulled up in front of a small, yellow-brick building a short distance from the Zoo鈥檚 main campus. A crowd of several hundred people gathered for the ceremony and then walked inside, eager for their first glimpse of the scaly and slick, slithering and hopping new residents.
They entered an oval room with a shallow, tile-lined pool at its center where small alligators and turtles swam. Set into the walls of the room were brightly lit tanks containing an eye-popping array of local and exotic snakes, lizards, and amphibians. Artists employed by the City鈥檚 Bureau of Parks had painted woodland, desert, or swamp scenes inside each tank to mimic the natural habitats of the occupants. The visitors moved from tank to tank, admiring the 250 animals ranging in size from a four-inch worm snake to a twelve-foot python. If any visitors looked up to see the murals of marine life decorating the arched walls, they might be reminded of the building鈥檚 fascinating past.
With funding from the federal Works Project Administration, this same building鈥攁 former pump house for a park reservoir that was later filled and turned into a softball field鈥攈ad been converted ten years earlier into Baltimore鈥檚 first aquarium. It showcased Chesapeake Bay fish and several exotic species. There had even been talk of exhibiting a pair of penguins and a manatee from Florida, but neither event came to pass. Unfortunately, the aquarium was short-lived. Fred Saffron, one of its primary backers, recalled that in late 1941, 鈥渙ur biologist had to go into war work, and the park laborers took over. Within a month, the alligators and the terrapin were all that were living.鈥 By the time Arthur Watson, newly hired director of the Baltimore Zoo, arrived on the scene in early 1948, the aquarium stood empty.
A lifelong snake enthusiast and a showman by nature, Watson smelled opportunity and was quick to act. 鈥淲hen we open, we鈥檒l have one of the best collections of snakes in this country,鈥 he promised. 鈥淲e鈥檒l be short only a cobra, mambo and python.鈥 To make good on his promise, he sent his newly hired reptile curator鈥攁n eighteen-year-old named John E. Cooper鈥攐n a collecting expedition to the Ogeechee River in Georgia. Cooper returned with many specimens, and somehow Watson also found a python by opening day.
Within months, Cooper left the Zoo, on to future adventures as a biology teacher, naturalist, science writer, cave diver, and expert on crayfishes and cave fauna. His successor, the legendary Frank Groves, would oversee the Reptile House and its intriguing residents for the next forty-four years, until his retirement in 1992.
During his tenure, Groves published countless scientific papers, earned a national reputation as a serious herpetologist, and pioneered breeding programs for several species that had never been bred in captivity before. The Reptile House closed its doors permanently in 2004, but Groves鈥 interests in research, captive breeding, and education passed to his successors and became hallmarks of the Zoo鈥檚 amphibian and reptile program continuing to this day.
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When the first official World鈥檚 Fair in the United States 鈥 the Centennial Exhibition 鈥 closed in Philadelphia in November 1876, the Maryland delegation chose not to abandon their state exhibit hall. Instead, the wooden building (described as 鈥渁 cross between English Tudor and Swiss Chalet鈥) was disassembled piece by piece, transported to Baltimore, and then reassembled on a shady hillside in Druid Hill Park. The structure was well received in its new incarnation. 鈥淚t is the opinion of those who have seen the building at Philadelphia, and since its re-erection here,鈥 wrote a correspondent for The Sun on April 17, 1877, 鈥渢hat it is far prettier in the present situation than among so many other buildings at the centennial.鈥
The Maryland Building is one of only two buildings to survive the exhibition; the other is the Ohio Building. By recommendation of Baltimore鈥檚 Park Commission, it became a museum 鈥渙f interest and attraction to the public鈥 that housed 鈥渃uriosities that have been gradually collecting in one of the basement rooms鈥 of the adjacent Mansion House. The museum opened in April 1877 with Otto Lugger, a trained naturalist, in charge.
For the next many years, Professor Lugger presided over an increasingly eclectic collection that included the basement curiosities as well as assorted donations from eager citizens and the Maryland Academy of Sciences. Thus, visitors could browse 鈥渁 handsome and increasing ornithological collection鈥 in one room, costumes and ceramics in another room, and a center hall full of fire-fighting equipment (including an elaborately decorated hand pumper donated by General George Washington to the Friendship Fire Company of Alexandria, Virginia.)
When the Park Board granted use of the Maryland Building to the Natural History Society of Maryland in 1936, most of the curiosities were removed and distributed around town to the Baltimore Fire Department, the Fort McHenry Museum, and the Maryland Historical Society. In their place came exhibits dedicated to local flora, fauna, geology, and archaeology. Inside the walls of the old wooden building a new museum took shape, one that showcased rocks, minerals, and fossils; birds, butterflies, reptiles, and mammals; and, most amazingly, the thirty-foot-long reconstructed skeleton of a baby blue whale that had washed ashore in Crisfield, Maryland in 1876.
In the 1970s, after a 40-year run, the Natural History Society moved out of the Maryland Building so that the operating arm of the Zoo, the Baltimore Zoological Society (BZS), could move in. By this time, the Zoo had fenced in its campus and since the Maryland Building was on the inside of the fence, it made sense for it to become part of the Zoo. A 1978 renovation outfitted the building with offices and an auditorium, allowing it to function as both BZS headquarters and a public education space. Ever since, the Maryland Building has served as a busy work space for Zoo staff.
The Maryland Building underwent a second major renovation in 2009. With great care and attention paid to the structure鈥檚 historic restoration, it was given a new lease on life, and, in 2010, the project earned a prestigious Maryland Preservation Award from the Maryland Historical Trust.
Visiting any zoo in the world today, you expect to find it surrounded by a fence. It might seem difficult, then, to imagine that for nearly a century there was no fence around the Baltimore Zoo. The zoo was open to anyone who visited Druid Hill Park, anytime day or night.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the Zoo鈥檚 founding in 1876, Druid Hill Park attracted residents of every race, age, and background. The park served as an oasis of natural beauty in the middle of an increasingly crowded industrial city. Visitors strolling through the park would happen upon a small zoo at its center.
By the mid-twentieth century, the Zoo had grown in size and automobile traffic within the park had increased. People could drive past several of the Zoo鈥檚 animal exhibits and sometimes stopped to picnic or just to observe the animals for a few minutes. This casual and carefree approach to visiting the Zoo by day, however, had a disturbing and destructive counterpoint by night. The local press reported all too frequently on grisly acts of vandalism against Zoo animals.
A 1968 report issued by the Baltimore Zoological Society, a friends group that supported the Zoo, noted that over the course of a single year, thirty-one animals were killed by vandals and another forty-nine killed by marauding packs of wild dogs. Stoning and poisoning were the most common causes of vandal-induced death, underscoring intentional cruelty. The Society advocated strongly for a perimeter fence and for charging admission to the Zoo, to protect the animals and to raise the revenue necessary to support their care.
The anticipation of these proposed changes sparked criticism in the op-ed pages of local newspapers. Some writers lamented the loss of unrestricted access to all parts of the park while others charged discrimination. One citizen complained in a letter The Baltimore Sun on July 8, 1970:
鈥淔irst the animals were fenced in, now the public is fenced out. Once the turnstiles are in place and admission fees in force, the days of a casual stop at the zoo... will be over. A zoo visit becomes an organized expedition, money in hand, while penniless urchins are left outside to peer in at their financial betters.鈥
Despite criticism in the press, the Zoo completed its fence project in late 1970, erecting a nine-foot barrier around its three-mile perimeter. The Zoo also began to charge a fifty-cent admission fee to visitors over the age of fourteen. Vandalism and budget considerations prompted these moves, but by then the fence was also required by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Animal Welfare Act of 1966. In addition to the USDA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums also now requires that all of its accredited members (including The Maryland Zoo) have secure perimeter fences to protect animals within a facility and to act as a secondary containment system.
While some may have felt inconvenienced by the Zoo鈥檚 new perimeter fence, the benefits were immediate and undeniable. Within one year of erecting the fence, the Zoo could afford to hire its first full-time veterinarian and reported not a single case of vandalism against its animals.
"Buttercups bloom and children play joyously amid the grasses and sunshine," waxed one Sun reporter poetically of the Mansion House lawn. Since the park's founding in 1860, the grassy hillside attracted thousands upon thousands of visitors for music concerts, Easter egg rolls, public rallies, patriotic celebrations, Boy Scout campouts, private picnics, golf and track practices, and quiet kite-flying afternoons. It has remained open, green, and welcoming鈥攁nd trim鈥攁ll the while.
Before anyone used lawnmowers, sheep trimmed the Mansion House lawn and other grassy spaces in Druid Hill Park. The newly elected governor of Maryland, Oden Bowie, supplied the park with its first flock of Southdown sheep in 1869 from his family farm. The sheep remained at work until the 1940s when they were sidelined by automobiles. (Apparently, with increased traffic inside the park, the sheep wandered in front of cars too often.)
Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, thought that sheep did a better job trimming grass than lawnmowers. Active in the latter half of the twentieth century, Olmsted designed many of America's most famous city parks (although not Druid Hill). Several of these also maintained flocks, including Central Park in New York, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston, and Washington Park in Chicago. Some wealthy estate owners kept sheep for the same purpose, including John D. Rockefeller, who replaced his fleet of lawnmowers with sheep in 1913 after doing a cost and quality analysis that favored the ruminants.
"What a beautifully peaceful thing it was to see the sheep moving out in the early morning and drifting homeward again at the end of the day," wrote Roland Mepham in 1966 of his turn-of-the-century childhood in Druid Hill Park. Mepham's father had been the park's blacksmith and wheelwright. Milton Stanley, a neighborhood kid who often visited the park, was amazed by their canine caretakers. "It seemed a near miracle to an inner city boy," the high school principal recalled in 1979, "that the shepherd dog could perform his job with such intelligence and expertise."
A handful of shepherds tended the sheep over the years. The longest-serving of these was George McCleary, affectionately known as "Mr. Mac." He was a fixture in Druid Hill Park for twenty years, from 1906 to 1926. Devoted to his collies and sheep, he also mentored many young park enthusiasts. Writing in The Sun in 1958, Malcolm Lowenstein recalled visiting the shepherd almost every afternoon after school and "practically living" at the park on weekends. Mr. Mac "was better than any teacher we had in school," he wrote. "His favorite subject was animals, and the good sense exhibited by so many of them. We all learned a great deal about animal and human nature from him."
When Mr. Mac turned seventy-eight, City law forced him to retire. The sheep continued on the job for another two decades but have long since disappeared from Druid Hill Park. They are replaced by tractor-sized lawn mowers whose weekly din is deafening, louder even than a seventeen-year swarm of cicadas. It really makes you think: there is something to be said for sheep and a shepherd, quietly trimming and teaching.
Union Baptist Church traces its origins to 1852 and a group of fifty-seven worshipers meeting in a small building on Lewis Street. It was the fifth oldest African American congregation in Baltimore and financed entirely by African Americans. The first pastor of the church was the Reverend John Carey. In 1866, the Lewis Street congregation merged with members of Saratoga Street African Baptist Church, forming Union Baptist Church. When Rev. Harvey Johnson arrived in 1872, he found a modest congregation of perhaps 270 members.聽
Harvey Johnson鈥檚 dealings with the Maryland Baptist Maryland Baptist Union Association (MBUA) in particular, and with prejudiced white Baptists in general, served as a proving ground for his leadership and vision. He took the skills honed in the battle for equality among all Baptists and transfered those skills as he entered the fight for equaliy among all people. Johnson鈥檚 original cause of friction with the MBUA stemmed from its paternalistic approach to black people and black Baptist churches. Not only did black ministers categorically receive less pay than white counterparts, but black churches were slow to realize full and equal political priviledges within the state denomination governing apparati. This problem was more troubling once, thanks in no small part to Johnson himself, black numbers in the state鈥檚 Baptist churches began grow. By 1885, Union Baptist's membership surpassed two thousand members for the first time.
Rev. Johnson's response to this discrimination was two-fold: economic independence and institutional autonomy. This situation exploded throughout the 1890s as Johnson urged black congregations to free themselves of white purse strings, and to get out of the Union Association altogether. One of Rev. Johnson's most controversal speeches brought this issue to fore. In September 1897, speeking in Boston, Johnson made, "A Plea For Our Work As Colored Baptists, Apart From the Whites." Johnson called for black Baptists to move as a group toward self-determination.
The Union Baptist Church鈥檚 Gothic design features stained glass windows created by John LeFarge, the renowned artist known as the inventor of the art of using opalescent stained glass.