The 82,000 square-foot Reginald F. Lewis Museum opened in 2005 and immediately made history as the first major building in downtown Baltimore designed by African American architects鈥攁 joint effort between Philip Freelon of a North Carolina firm, the Freelon Group, and Gary Bowden of a Baltimore firm, RTKL Associates. Both architects are fellows of the American Institute of Architects, rare achievements considering that in 2016 African Americans make up just 2% of registered architects in the United States.
The museum represents the character, pride, struggle, and accomplishments of Maryland African Americans, and was the second largest African American museum in the United States at the time of construction. The museums took the name of Baltimore businessman Reginald Lewis, the first African American CEO of a Fortune 500 company, TLC Beatrice International. Lewis grew up in West Baltimore and, before his death in 1993, he expressed interest in building a museum to African American culture. The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation, which Lewis established in 1987, provided a $5 million grant for the construction of the museum in Baltimore.
The museum board turned down an offer to reuse the Blaustein City Exhibition Center on President Street after focus groups showed that people were not interested in taking over the site of an old museum. "African Americans are tired of left-over seconds," museum board vice chairman Aris Allen Jr. told the Baltimore Sun in 2005. Architects Freelon and Bowden sought to design a distinct building that evokes the spirit of African American culture. The black, red and yellow facade takes its colors from the Maryland flag. A bold red wall slices through the facade, representing the journey of African Americans and the duality of accomplishment and struggle.
The building won several awards from local and state American Institute of Architects chapter. The museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institute and along with permanent exhibits, includes space for special exhibits, an oral history and recording studio, a 200 seat auditorium, and a classroom and resource center.
The former Fleet-McGinley Company building at the northwest corner of Water and South Streets was built in 1908鈥攐ne of scores of new warehouses and factories built around downtown as the city rebuilt from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. The five-story brick and reinforced concrete warehouse was designed by the prominent Baltimore architectural firm of Baldwin & Pennington for the Johns Hopkins Hospital trustees at a cost of $70,000. One of the building's earliest and most prominent tenants was the Fleet-McGinley Printing Company, established in 1884 as a partnership between Charles T. Fleet and J. Edward McGinley.
In 1914, Fleet-McGinley boasted that their building was "the best equipped printing office in Baltimore" boasting "the most modern appliances and equipment" along with "skilled and competent artisans." In the aftermath of the recent catastrophe, the printer paid special attention to fire-proofing, describing their "fire-proof vaults for the storage of plates, engravings and designs, which make the destruction by fire of such valuable property practically impossible."
In 1926, the Manufacturers' Record, a trade publication printed by the firm since the 1880s, purchased Fleet-McGinley and moved their operations from South Street to the Candler Building on East Lombard Street. In 1965, the business (still located in the Candler Building) was renamed the Blanchard Press of Maryland. The building on South Street later served as offices for insurance agents Hopper, Polk & Purnell, Inc., as well as Levy Sons Company, manufacturer of women's underwear. In early 2015, Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake purchased the building from the International Youth Foundation who had occupied the structure for over fifteen years.
Before the rise of textile mills, the fast-flowing water of the Jones Falls instead powered gristmills supplying Baltimore's lucrative flour trade. Whitehall Mill was established as a gristmill in the late 1700s and owned by James Ellicott, a member of the same family that settled Ellicott City. In 1839, David Carroll, Horatio Gambrill, and their associates purchased the mill from Ellicott and converted it to a textile mill for weaving cotton duck, a tightly woven canvas used to make ship sails.
Over the years, the mill was expanded, burned, rebuilt, renamed, and converted to a number of different commercial uses. To house their workers, Carroll and Gambrill built Clipper Village, a cluster of homes located across from Whitehall for the mill's workers. The capacity of the mill was doubled in 1845 and the mill was converted to steam power to keep up with manufacturing demand. By 1850, forty men and sixty-five women were working at Whitehall Mill with an output of 220,000 yards of cotton duck. Carroll and Gambrill quickly expanded by converting other gristmills along the Jones Falls to textile mills.
The three-story granite factory burned in 1854 and, after it was rebuilt, renamed Clipper Mill in recognition of the ships that used the cotton duck cloth for sails. By this point, William E. Hooper, a sailmaker who expanded his business to selling raw cotton to the textile mills, had joined as a partner. In the 1860s, Gambrill sold his shares in the company to Hooper and opened Druid Mill. After another fire in 1868, Clipper Mill was rebuilt at twice its size. The mill was sold in 1899 to the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, a national conglomerate. In 1902, the mill manufactured the cotton duck for Kaiser Wilhelm's yacht, which was christened by Alice Roosevelt as the Meteor III. In addition to ship sails, the mill manufactured other heavy canvas items such as mail bags for the U.S. government.
In 1925, the mill was sold to Purity Paper Vessels, a firm that manufactured paper containers that could hold semi-liquid foods. The mill's cotton manufacturing machinery was shipped to Mount-Vernon-Woodberry Company's Southern mills in Tallassee, Alabama and Columbia, South Carolina. During the year of the sale, several elegiac articles appeared in the Baltimore Sun that looked back on the time when Baltimore's cotton duck manufacturing was at its peak and its clipper ships dominated international trade. Purity Paper Vessels later sub-leased part of the building to the Shapiro Waste Paper Company. In 1941, half the building was leased by the Army Quartermaster Office to be used as a warehouse for the Third Corps Area.
By the 1940s, the I. Sekine Brush Company, a maker of men's grooming products and toothbrushes, occupied the mill. The company was founded in 1906 and had been operating plants in Baltimore since 1928. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, H.H. Sekine, who had been living in the United States for over twenty years, was arrested and interrogated, along with dozens of foreign-born Baltimoreans connected to nations on the Axis side. At the time, Sekine was operating a factory in Reservoir Hill that the government shut down for two weeks. When it reopened shortly before Christmas, Sekine paid all his employees in full for the time they lost during the closure. Over time, portions of the Clipper Mill property were leased to other companies, including Penguin Books, The Maryland Venetian Blind Manufacturing Corporation, and Star Built Kitchen Units. Sekine maintained operations at the Whitehall mill location until 1992 when it was sold to Komar Industries.
Most recently, developer Terra Nova Ventures transformed the building into a mixed use development with a planned market. Architects Alexander Design Studio restored much of the long neglected mill, bringing new life to the historic structure. Numerous improvements were made for flood prevention, including the construction of a pedestrian bridge over Clipper Mill Road.
The Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, known as the Ma & Pa, connected Baltimore, Maryland and York, Pennsylvania, over a circuitous seventy-seven mile route. In 1881, the Falls Road site became the Baltimore terminal for the Baltimore & Delta Railway (a predecessor of the Maryland & Pennsylvania) originally including a wood frame roundhouse. The original roundhouse burned down in 1892 but, in 1910, the Ma & Pa rebuilt built tracks, roundhouse, the adjoining yard office and power house, as part of a $47,000 investment in their terminal facilities.
The Ma & Pa thrived in the 1900s and early 1910s providing regular commuter service between Belair and Baltimore, country excursions for city residences, and milk and mail delivery between Baltimore and Pennsylvania. The business began to decline after WWI and, by the 1950s, passengers had dwindled to about 12 people per train. After the company lost the contract to operate the Railway Post Office, they abandoned their Maryland operations and moved offices to York, Pennsylvania.
In 1960, two years after the Ma & Pa ceased operations, the city bought the roundhouse and the terminal complex. 91桃色视频 City purchased the buildings for $275,000 with plans to use the roundhouse as a highway department warehouse.
For the past 58 years, the site has been used by 91桃色视频 City for truck parking and winter road salt storage. While the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum has successfully preserved the former Mount Clare Roundhouse in southwest Baltimore as an iconic attraction for railroad buffs young and old, most roundhouses have been lost to demolition or neglect.
Years of service to the Baltimore Department of Transportation has taken a toll on this structure too. Unfortunately, in August 2014, the roof at the roundhouse suffered a partial collapse when the several salt-damaged supports failed. Action is needed to stabilize the building and prevent further deterioration.
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Kennard's Wharf at the end of Philpot Street, the very place where Frederick Douglass entered Baltimore as an enslaved child in the 1820s, later became the site of one of the most successful black-owned businesses in 91桃色视频 City, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company. It was founded by Isaac Myers and other Black labor organizers.聽
A caulker by trade, Myers was born free in Baltimore in 1835. The ship-building/maritime industries, and specifically the caulking trade, of Baltimore were historically interracial. By the close of the U.S. Civil War, black workers were systematically pushed out of this type of employment to make room for growing numbers of white workers in the city. This reality led Myers and others to found the Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society.
In the early 1860's, the union formed a cooperative company. Pooling their resources, the workers issued stock and quickly raised $10,000 in subscriptions among Black Baltimore residents. On February 12, 1866, they purchased a shipyard and railway, which they named the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company. Within months, the cooperative employed 300 black caulkers and received several government contracts. Ultimately it employed a number of white workers as well.聽
The success of Myers鈥檚 union in Baltimore encouraged black caulkers in other seaport cities to organize. Myers was elected president of the (Colored) National Labor Union, the first organization of its type in U.S. history. Myers appealed to black workers to join unions and called on white unions to accept them as full members. Myers also organized and became president of the Maryland Colored State Industrial Fair Association, the Colored Business Men鈥檚 Association of Baltimore, the Colored Building and Loan Association, and the Aged Ministers Home of the A.M.E. Church.聽 He also authored the聽Mason鈥檚 Digest. Myers was married twice and had several sons, one of whom became a leading political figure in Ohio. Isaac Myers died in Baltimore in 1891.
Mt. Washington Mill鈥攈istorically Washington Mill, part of Washington Cotton Manufacturing Company鈥攊s one of Maryland鈥檚 earliest purpose-built cotton mills. In the early nineteenth century, the Napoleonic Wars and the Embargo Act disrupted imports and created new demand for locally-made cotton goods. When the nearly four stories tall stone Mt. Washington Mill began operation in 1810, it could fill this new market.
Located near the center of the complex, the mill was first powered by the current of the Jones Falls. Indentured servants, primarily young boys, worked to make fabrics like ginghams and calicos. The operation grew and the mill began hiring more men, women and children as workers. Most lived nearby in Washingtonville, a company town that, by 1847, included a company store and nearly forty homes between the factory and the railroad tracks. Workers were called to their shifts by the sound of the bell ringing in the mill's cupola.
The mill passed through several hands before 1853 when industrialists Horatio Gambrill and David Carroll acquired the facility. The pair had been quickly erecting textile mills in the Jones Falls Valley for the production of cotton duck, a heavy canvas used primarily for ship sails. By 1899, it had become part of the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company 鈥 a large conglomerate of textile mills comprising fourteen sites in Maryland and beyond 鈥 which would eventually control as much as 80% of the world鈥檚 cotton duck production until 1915, when the conglomerate split apart.
Washingtonville the mill village was soon overshadowed by the residential suburb of Mt. Washington, established in 1854 on the other side of the tracks. Mt. Washington became a fashionable neighborhood for middle-class Baltimoreans looking to get out of the city鈥擝altimore remained easily accessible by train. Life in Mt. Washington was much different than life in Washingtonville. Children were under little pressure to drop out of school to work in the mills to support their families, homes were spacious and built to fine standards, and residents had access to plenty of leisure activities and entertainment, such as at the "Casino" where all sorts of exhibitions and games and held.
In 1923, Washington Cotton Mill was purchased by the Maryland Bolt and Nut Company and repurposed for the production of metal fasteners like bolts, nuts, screws, and rivets. Industrial buildings were added to the campus and existing ones were outfitted for working steel. In 1972, Hurricane Agnes wrecked much of the industrial campus and in response, the factory was sold to Leonard Jed Company, a manufacturer of industrial supplies. It was sold again in 1984 to Don L. Byrne, a manager at the plant, before being redeveloped by Himmelrich Associates in the 1990s for office and commercial use.
Washingtonville never underwent the same revitalization. The village was largely razed in 1958 to make way for the Jones Falls Expressway leaving only a single duplex house still standing today.
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Built in 1928, the Lord Baltimore Hotel is a beautiful example of an early twentieth-century high-rise hotel. Designed by prolific hotel architect William Lee Stoddart, it is reminiscent of such famous American hotels as New York's Vanderbilt Hotel or Chicago's Palmer House. The twenty-two-story steel frame building was the largest hotel building ever constructed in Maryland. However, the Lord Baltimore is also a reminder of the city鈥檚 history of racial discrimination and the long fight for integrated public accommodation.
In 1954, the same year the Supreme Court鈥檚 decision in Brown v. Board of Education called for an end to segregated schools, black players from three American League teams with integrated rosters came to Baltimore to play against the Orioles. White players stayed at the Lord Baltimore, the Emerson, and Southern Hotel downtown. But for their black teammates, the only option was the African American-owned York Hotel in West Baltimore.
A year later, in 1955, students at Johns Hopkins University moved the prom away from the Lord Baltimore to the at the Alcazar Hotel in Mount Vernon in protest to the hotel manager鈥檚 refusal to admit black students to the dance and his threat to 鈥渟top the dance if Negroes attended.鈥 By the late 1950s, after lobbying by Baltimore鈥檚 progressive Mayor Theodore McKeldin, the Lord Baltimore Hotel consented to rent rooms to black ballplayers and some conference attendees. In 1958, Baltimore hosted the All-Star Game and six black All-Stars, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, registered at the Lord Baltimore. For visiting black spectators, however, the hotel was not an option. Jimmy Williams, an assistant editor at the Afro American, advised spectators to bring pup tents and box lunches, writing, 鈥淭he box lunches will be to ease the pangs of an aching stomach鈥 The pup tents will provide a place for them to rest their carcasses after the last door of the downtown hotels have been slammed in their face and the uptown hotels are filled.鈥 Williams predicted visitors would leave 鈥渏ust loving the quaint customs of Baltimore, which boasts of major league baseball and minor league businessmen.鈥
By the early 1960s, policies finally began to change. After hotel management realized they had rented rooms for the campaign office of segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace in 1964, the management refused to let them stay and the campaign was forced to move to a motel in Towson. In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed at the hotel during a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he gave a lengthy press conference and received symbolic keys to the city from Mayor Tommy D鈥橝lesandro III.
The hotel was one of the few historic buildings retained as part of the redevelopment of Charles Center and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.