Baltimore’s row houses add
to neighborhood health
Baltimore has always been identified with the row house, a major contributor to the health of the city’s strong neighborhoods, stretching back multiple generations to the days when African-Americans from the south and waves of Irish German and Polish immigrants poured into the city looking for inexpensive housing near their jobs.
There has been a certain ebb and flow to the Baltimore row house. Stirling Street in East Baltimore — a block home to 1835 gabled roof, brick row houses — was almost razed in the 1960s before its group of Federal style homes was saved through the city’s thoughtful architectural preservation policy. Federal Hill and Otterbein were considered pedestrian by most locals before the city’s dollar housing program took off there in the 1970s, and renovations and new construction continue today, making the row house heavy area one of the most desirable in which to live and play for young professionals and empty nesters.
But in recent years, in several Baltimore locations where row house rejuvenation never took root — in other words, everywhere but the north-to-south swath of the city, encompassing neighborhoods from Charles Village to Federal Hill, with spur lines jutting into Butcher’s Hill, Fells Point and Canton — progress can now be seen.
When Baltimore decided to tear down its public housing towers at the end of the millennium, the Murphy Homes, Flag House Courts, Lafayette Homes and Lexington Terrace were replaced by row houses designed to nurture a sense of community and friendship, instead of the isolated and impractical nature of high rise housing. In doing so, the city returned to its “architectural roots” by building row houses in neighborhoods it had previously ignored, according to Charles Belfoure, who co-authored “The Baltimore Rowhouse,” an excellent book about Baltimore’s signature housing style.
And this spring, the city housing department announced that it had chosen a developer to rehabilitate 28 row houses in the 800 block of Harlem Avenue and another 10 in the 800 block of Edmondson Avenue instead of tearing them down.
Harlem Avenue, in West Baltimore, has witnessed the city’s ups and downs for almost a century. Once home to a mixture of middle- to lower-middle- class African Americans, today the 800 block reflects the rhythms of a Baltimore where neglect has set in: Over the years home ownership there dwindled, and investment became virtually non-existent; today it is pockmarked with abandoned housing, boarded up and ready for the wrecker’s ball, and empty lots.
If we could travel back in time, I am sure James White would be pleased to see the current plans for his former block. White, a dentist born in North Carolina, lived at 806 Harlem Avenue in the 1940s, after living up the street at number 848 a decade earlier. What was it like for White and his wife Mary to live there with their four children? Did they have happy memories? What was their neighborhood like for them, and did living in a row house enhance their feelings of community? We will never know the answers to these questions and others I would like to ask the hundreds of children, teachers, ministers, stevedores, clerical workers, janitors, cooks and domestic workers that were the Whites’ neighbors on this particular block in our city for a portion of their lives during the 20th century. As rehabilitation comes to this section of Harlem Avenue today, however, it’s comforting to know that an entirely new generation of row house dwellers will move in, witness more change, and observe their neighborhood as their individual histories develop in the years to come.
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