While growing up in Upton in West Baltimore in the 1950s, the Rev. Alvin Hathaway says, barely a day went by when he didn’t interact with some of the teachers, doctors, lawyers and political figures who lived nearby and whose success made it the envy of the city’s Black population.

It pained him over the years to see poverty and social decay swamp the neighborhood. He wanted people to recall what had made it special and decided to do something about it someday.

Now the Baptist minister and civic leader is about to realize a major part of that dream.

Hathaway’s labor of love of the past five years has transformed a historic elementary school building, P.S. 103, into the Justice Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center. The community hub that he intends to have a regional and national footprint opens Tuesday, marking the birth of a gathering space meant to honor the past and turn that past into a launching pad for the future.

Hathaway, the former longtime senior pastor of historic Union Baptist Church in Upton, is also founding president and CEO of Beloved Community Services Corp., a nonprofit that focuses on rehabilitating historic properties as a way of revitalizing distressed communities in Baltimore. It restores buildings as close to their original condition as possible for use by organizations that provide resources ranging from community spaces to legal, educational, public health and workforce development services.

The Marshall Amenity Center, named for the best-known of P.S. 103’s many successful alumni, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, will boast many such offerings.

One anchor tenant, the Judge Alexander Williams Jr. Center for Education, Justice and Ethics of the University of Maryland, is set to continue in its role as a research hub on legal issues underlying persistent social disparities and provide no-cost legal services to community members. Others will offer STEM-related educational services and exposure to career opportunities. The center will also provide standing exhibits, a speaker series, and matinee showings of first-run movies.

Community leaders familiar with Hathaway’s work believe the center will become the source of stability and uplift he aims for, in large part due to the 73-year-old’s track record of leadership.

“Whenever Rev. Hathaway gets involved in something, everyone seems to gravitate toward trying to help him pull off whatever he’s trying to pull off,” says Ricky Smith, a West Baltimore native who is president and CEO of the Maryland Aviation Administration, the agency that owns BWI Marshall and Martin State airports. “To take over P.S. 103, a building that was failing and falling apart, and turn it into what will become a national landmark, an attraction for many people to visit, and a staple for revitalization in that community, might be the greatest feat of his life.”

A ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday — the 116th anniversary of Marshall’s birth — will mark the facility’s opening. Other events include a reunion for P.S. 103 alumni Sunday and a reception on Monday with former NBA star Carmelo Anthony and John Marshall, a son of Thurgood Marshall, among the expected guests.

It can be hard nowadays to envision the onetime glory of Upton, a neighborhood of about 60 blocks on either side of Pennsylvania Avenue between Bloom Street on its north end and Dolphin Street to the south. About three-fifths of its families with children under 5 live below the poverty level, according to city statistics, and many homes are boarded up or abandoned.

But it was once a bastion of upward mobility and success. Starting in the late 19th century and well into the 1960s, Upton served as home base for some of the towering figures of the early Civil Rights Movement, from the Rev. Harvey Johnson, the founding pastor of Union Baptist Church and an early proponent of racial equality, to Lillie May Carroll Jackson, the legendary president of the inaugural chapter of the NAACP.

As Hathaway remembers from childhood, Jackson’s daughter, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, the first African American woman to practice law in Maryland, and her husband, Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., the NAACP’s powerful Washington lobbyist, lived just doors away.

He recalls growing up among the Mitchells and other prominent families, absorbing their work ethic and sense of purpose. He heard plenty about the legacy of Marshall, who grew up in a rowhouse on Division Street three blocks northwest of P.S. 103, also known as Henry Highland Garnet School.

For Hathaway, Marshall — the legendary attorney who won the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954 and went on to become the first African American Supreme Court justice — represented the perfect “portal” through which to “begin to tell the full story about civil rights and the contributions that these amazing people made to this whole liberation struggle.”

Marshall, he says, was as rambunctious as he was smart. Legend had it that when he got in trouble, the school principal gave him a copy of the U.S. Constitution and told him to go memorize a passage. Hathaway considered the story apocryphal until he read a biography in which the justice is quoted telling a reporter, “Before I left that school, I knew the entire Constitution by heart.” The center will include a “timeout” chair in a restored room on the lower level, complete with copies of the founding U.S. document.

Marshall died at age 84 in 1993.

The vast majority of attention in the $15 million project has gone toward restoring the building to the conditions Marshall and his classmates experienced there between 1914 and 1921.

George A. Frederick, the architect who had designed Baltimore City Hall in his 20s, created it in 1877 as a place conducive to healthy learning, complete with high windows to admit maximum light, bright oak floors to amplify it, and glass-and-wood interior panels that could be removed to double classroom sizes.

After it closed in the early 1970s, the building stood abandoned for decades. A fire destroyed its top floor and roof in 2016, but Blessed Community Services bought it in 2022.

The first order of business for Mahogany Inc., the general contractor Hathaway hired, was to clean and stabilize the structure. They were able to salvage, restore and replace about 60% of the original interior glass. They took each of the removable partitions to an off-site subcontractor for a restoration process so complex it lasted a year.

Sarsfield Williams, project manager for the job, says that was far from the only detail they dealt with. It turned out that the grooved tin ceilings that remained in two classrooms were custom designs. The new versions, he says, are near replicas of what Frederick created.

“That’s just one portion of a historic building that then has to go into modern-day building code requirements, including fire safety, framing and more,” he said. The building also had to win approval from the Maryland Historic Trust.

Hathaway prioritized working with minority-owned firms such as Mahogany, he said, to spotlight excellence within the African American community.

With a boost from the late Democratic U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings and other Maryland legislators, the site was named an affiliate of the National Park Service. That qualified the project for the state, federal and new market tax credits that made sufficient financing possible.

Days before the opening, Hathaway led a visitor through the near-final result, narrating what each area will be used for: classrooms for educational initiatives and tenant space, an auditorium for corporate training and public events, meeting areas for alumni, and even a replica of the campaign office of his late friend, Cummings, another P.S. 103 alum, who died at in 2019 at the age of 68.

Friends and partners looking toward the opening said they appreciated how the Marshall Amenity Center is drawing on history to point to a better future.

Jeanne D. Hitchcock remembers her time as a P.S. 103 student in the 1950s as educational, fun, and a building block for her eventual career as an attorney, a member of Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley’s cabinet and a special adviser for the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine.

“One component of revitalizations like this is reviving people’s spirit of pride,” she says. “What’s being done at P.S. 103 is even an important part of the education of the kids who are here now. It’s significant to their emotional and mental well-being as they forge ahead with their lives.”

Hitchcock is one of about 70 alumni who plan to attend the reunion, Hathaway said, with the youngest in their 60s and at least one guest, longtime educator Warren Hayman, in his 90s.

Janet Currie, the president of the Bank of America, Greater Maryland, was so impressed by Hathaway’s pitch for support that her company became a $500,000 contributor and plans to offer financial education services in the center.

Currie said she expects it will become what Hathaway envisions — a site that “brings to light this incredibly rich history of West Baltimore,” making it “a part of Baltimore’s national narrative.”

For his part, Hathaway says he is far from finished. Blessed Community Services has acquired several other historic properties in the neighborhood, including the former Mitchell home and Juanita Mitchell’s former law office, and he hopes to make them all part of a rejuvenated Upton.

Until then, he says the center should be a statement of possibility for neighbors old and new.

“It’s important for the people who live in this community, and who will visit and work in this community, to see that these were just regular people who did some amazing things,” Hathaway says. “Greatness can begin in you, as well.”