Since the doors opened at the former Southwestern District Police Station house on聽July 17, 1884, the square brick building at Pratt and Calhoun Streets has served the city in many different ways. When construction on the new building began in the fall of 1883, the Baltimore Sun claimed the new Southwestern district police station would "surpass in size, elegance and completely of arrangement any police building now in the city, and, indeed, it will have few equals in the country."
Builders Philip Walsh & Son and architect Frank E. Davis completed the three-story building with room for 47 officers. The men had been reassigned from the southern and eastern districts to聽serve under聽of veteran police officer Captain Daniel Lepson聽who led the brand-new district.
In the summer of 1944, Baltimore's first police boys' club moved into the upper floors, serving around 120 boys from 8 to 18 years old every day during the first few weeks after they opened. With donations from a local social club, the officers converted the station's third floor gymnasium into a聽 "big clubroom," described by the Sun as,聽"filled with tousle-haired boys noisily pushing at billiard balls, fashioning B-17's out of wood, nailing magazine racks together and eying each other craftily over checker games."聽The city started four boys' clubs in the 1940s, with a segregated facility for black children at the Northwestern District Police Station on Gold Street.
Both the officers and the Boys' Club departed in 1958 when the Southwestern District Police Station relocated to a modern, air-conditioned facility at Fonthill and Hurley Avenues. Following close on their tails, however, were the men and dogs of the department's K-9 Corps who moved their official headquarters from the Northern District station to Pratt Street.
Unfortunately, by the late 1970s, the building fell vacant. The Maryland Department of Social Services renovated the former police station in the early 1980s. When they left, the building fell vacant again. Today, the structure is deteriorating and remains at risk until a new use for this often reinvented building can be found.
Built in 1921, Pool No. 2 in Druid Hill Park served the recreational and competitive swimming needs of over 100,000 Black residents Baltimore. Pool No. 2 measured just 100鈥 x 105鈥 (half the size of whites-only Pool No. 1), but proved so popular that the swimmers had to be admitted in shifts. In 1953, a young Black boy swimming with friends in the Patapsco River accidentally drowned. The tragedy revealed the difficult circumstances for many Black residents looking for a place to swim in Baltimore. The boy lived near Clifton Park but swam in a dangerous river due to his exclusion from the park鈥檚 whites-only pool. In response, the NAACP started a new push to make all of Baltimore's municipal pools open to all races. When the City Parks Board refused to desegregate, the NAACP filed a lawsuit and eventually won on appeal.
On June 23, 1956, at the start of the summer season, Baltimore pools opened as desegregated facilities for the first time. Over 100 African Americans tested the waters in previously white-only Pool No. 1 but only a single white person swam in Pool. No. 2.
Pool No. 2 closed the next year and remained largely abandoned up until 1999. That year, Baltimore artist Joyce J. Scott won a commission to turn Pool No. 2 into a memorial. In creating her installation, Scott asked herself, 鈥淗ow do we make this area useful and beautiful, and harken back to the pool era?鈥 The results combined architectural elements and aquatic symbolism with abstract, colorful painted designs on the pavement around the pool. The designs and interpretive signage have weathered in the years since but Pool No. 2 remained an important destination to explore the Civil Rights history of Druid Hill Park and Baltimore's pools.
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A devout Methodist, Colonel John Berry purchased the site of this church in the early 1800s. Tired of traveling three miles from Calverton Heights to the closest Methodist Episcopal Church, Berry decided to establish a new chapel close to his 91桃色视频 County home.聽A stone chapel was dedicated in the fall of 1836, the church expanded in 1878, and in the 1880s, a Sunday School building was constructed.
By 1920,聽the congregation had outgrown the stone chapel. Even with several later additions since 1835, the building seated only聽275 people鈥攁 fraction聽of the over 450 Methodist families in the parish. The congregation decided to demolish the original chapel and construct a new church.
The present Gothic Revival structure was designed by G.N. MacKenzie and Wyatt & Nolting, a prominent local architectural firm. An article published in The Christian Advocate聽following the completion of the church stated that "A fine plant has been erected with adequate Sunday school rooms, an auditorium that will seat 900, a gymnasium, and other desired features." The cornerstone was laid on July 19, 1920, and the church was dedicated on April 25, 1921.
Bishop Carr purchased the group's first church on N. Mount Street. The small congregation then left the Church of God in Christ for the doctrine of the Apostolic Doctrine in Jesus Name, and was renamed Rehoboth Church of God in Christ Jesus Apostolic. In 1945, the congregation branched off from the larger Apostolic organization, forming its own denomination. The same year, the congregation moved to another church on N. Fulton and Riggs Streets. In 1954, the congregation purchased the former Summerfield Church at 700 Poplar Grove Street, where they are still located today.
The former Maryland National Bank building at the southwest corner of Maryland and North Avenues is a faded but still striking example of the modern architecture that accompanied the city鈥檚 growth in the 1950s and 1960s. The Fidelity Baltimore National Bank (a predecessor of Maryland National) opened their first branch location on North Avenue since the late 1930s. In the mid-1950s, the firm built a drive-in on the eastern side of Maryland Avenue鈥攁 structure still in use today as the home of K & M Motors.
The local architectural firm of Smith & Veale (Albert K. Broughton serving as the project architect) designed the modern building and the general contractor was the Lacchi Construction Company. Broughton remained a practicing architect in Maryland up through 2002, shortly before his death in 2005. Reflecting the continued importance of automobiles to retail banking, a large parking lot was located on the southern side of the building and the branch was designed so patrons could enter the bank from either North Avenue or the parking lot.
As the building went up in March 1961, the Baltimore Sun touted the bank as the city鈥檚 first commercial building with a precast concrete frame. The Nitterhouse Concrete Product Company in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania cast a series of t-shaped elements that were then transported to Baltimore by truck.
The Maryland National Bank sold the property in 1990 and, sometime after 1995, the Korean-American Grocers & Licensed Beverage Association of Maryland (KAGRO) moved into the building as their office. In 2015, the Contemporary occupied the building for an exhibition by artist Victoria Fu. The exhibition, Bubble Over Green, is described as multilayered audio-visual experience consisting of moving images projected onto architectural surfaces, aligning the physical site with the space and textures of digital post-production.
The structure has served a wide range of uses in the century since Captain Emerson moved out. Maryland's Juvenile Services Division had offices in the building, as did The Mercantile Club, a private social club for businessmen. Since 1994, the property has been owned by James Crockett.
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The former U.S. Marine Hospital on Wyman Park Drive near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus was built in 1934鈥攂ut the Marine Hospital Service itself dated back over a century earlier.
In 1798, President John Adams signed "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen" that supported the creation of Marine Hospitals in major American ports from Boston to Baltimore. Following the Civil War, a scandal broke out over the mismanagement of the Marine Hospital Fund (supported by a tax on the wages of all U.S. sailors). In 1870, the U.S. Congress responded to the controversy by converting the loose network of hospitals into a more centrally-managed bureau within the Department of Treasury.
Early on the Baltimore Marine Hospital was located in Curtis Bay on the same site later developed at the聽Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard. The Maryland Hospital of U.S. Marine Hospital Service also maintained dedicated wards at St. Joseph鈥檚 Hospital at Caroline and Hoffman Streets before the construction of a new hospital complex on Remington Avenue around 1885. A 1901 directory of Baltimore charities invited sailors in need of medical care to apply for admission at the surgeon鈥檚 office located at the 91桃色视频 Custom House, explaining:
Only those who have served as sailors on an American registered vessel for at least 60 days prior to application are strictly eligible, but any bona fide sailor taken sick or injured in the line of duty will receive attention.
In 1934, the old building was replaced by a modern 290-bed facility making Baltimore's聽hospital the second largest marine hospital in the country. In the 1950s, the hospital began serving a more general population, including both people enlisted in the military and local residents, as the United States Public Health Services Hospital.
In October 1981, the federal government closed all of the U.S. Public Health Service hospitals across the country. Baltimore's old Marine Hospital was taken over by a group known as the Wyman Park Health System and continued to treat many of the patients who had been going there for decades. In 1987, the group merged with Johns Hopkins University. One result of the merger was the creation of a new primary care organization, the Johns Hopkins Community Physicians, that has continued to provide outpatient medical services from the lower levels of the building today.
In 2008, the university considered plans for demolishing and replacing the building. Fortunately, in January 2019, the university announced plans to preserve and renovate the building for continued use by students and faculty.
On July 11, 2015 the Eastern Female High School on Aisquith Street caught fire鈥攋ust the latest challenge for this 1869 school-house turned apartment building that has stood empty since it closed in 2001. Designed by architect R. Snowden Andrews, the Italianate-style, red-brick and white-trim structure is the city鈥檚 oldest surviving purpose-built public school building. It stands as a memorial to the post-Civil War expansion of secondary education opportunities in Baltimore.
The Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation list the building as a 91桃色视频 City Landmark in 1976 and a 2002 Baltimore Sun editorial declared one of Baltimore鈥檚 鈥渁rchitectural gems鈥. The building was renovated and converted into apartments in the 1970s and 91桃色视频 City transferred the building to Sojourner-Douglass College in 2004. Unfortunately, Sojourner-Douglass College was unable to develop the building and after the 2015 fire Eastern Female High School聽continues to stand boarded up and vacant.
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