Roy Wagner’s Baltimore

A red convertible on Cromwell Bridge Road passes construction for an access road to the Beltway in the fall of 1961.

View of the unfinished Cromwell Bridge Road, looking west, in 1957. Loch Raven High School is located to the right of this scene.

A vista of Baltimore landmarks greeted drivers heading north on Light Street in 1956, with the tallest building, 10 Light Street, visible north of the McCormick plant at left. Both the McCormick building and the Tower Building, with its four-sided clock in the 200 block of E. Baltimore St., have been razed. (Roy Wagner PHOTOS)

The slogan for the local drive-in franchise, Ameche’s, was “Meetcha at Ameche’s,” pictured in 1961.

Roy Wagner captured his 2-year old daughter, Helen, at their former home at 6146 Dunroming Road, in March 1958.

Roy Wagner, 87, holds a Rolleicord, one of the old cameras from his collection.

More than a half-century ago, the Baltimore region was in transition, beginning the patterns of growth that we take for granted today. Soon after the city’s population peaked around 1950, its residents began forsaking the old neighborhoods in search of new housing options that were sprouting up around the perimeter of the city and beyond.

The transformation of farmland to suburb was accelerated by the completion of the first portion of the Baltimore Beltway, a six-lane freeway that looped south, west, and north around the city from MD 2 Ritchie Highway to US 40 Pulaski Highway. Roy Wagner, a serious amateur photographer, documented this period when Baltimore embraced all things modern.

Roy Wagner, a spry suburbanite approaching his 88th birthday next month, embraced photography as a teenager. In high school, Wagner began working at Cooper’s Camera Mart on Harford Road during high school, in the Hamilton neighborhood where he was raised, and came to be its general manager.

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