All Stories: 530
Stories
Baltimore County Almshouse
The Baltimore County Almshouse officially opened in 1874 as a public home for the county's indigent, elderly, and infirm residents. The Almshouse and its predecessors were the ancestors of today’s nursing homes, mental health hospitals, homeless…
Motor House
Built in 1914 for Eastwick Motors, Baltimore’s first Ford dealership, 120 West North Avenue has been home to a surprising array of owners and occupants. After its days with Eastwick (a proud supporter of Amoco gasoline and its American Oil Company…
Locust Point Immigrant House
Baltimore’s Locust Point was a rapidly growing neighborhood between the Civil War and 1920. One major factor in the neighborhood’s growth was an immigration pier and depot built in 1867 by the B&O Railroad and the North German Lloyd Shipping…
S.S. John W. Brown
During World War II, the SS John W. Brown belonged to a fleet of 2,700 Liberty Ships transporting war materiel and allied troops across dangerous waters. Today, the ship is one of just two Liberty Ships still sailing and serves as a unique memorial…
Zissimos Bar
In Charles Barton's 1948 romp, The Noose Hangs High, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello argue over shrimp cocktails. Abbott tells Costello to imagine he's in Grand Central station with a ticket in his pocket. Where is he going? Costello doesn't understand…
Chase Brexton Health Care
Chase Brexton Health Care was founded in 1978 as a gay men's STD screening clinic. The clinic operated as program of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore from 1978 until 1989. In 1989, Chase Brexton became an independent healthcare…
Medical Arts Building and the Health Education Resource Organization (HERO)
The Health Education Resource Organization (HERO) was founded in 1983 by Dr. Bernie Branson at the former Medical Arts Building on Read Street. Over the next two decades, HERO grew to become Baltimore's oldest and largest HIV and AIDS service…
The GLCCB
This location once served as home for the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore. In 1977, activists involved with the Baltimore Gay Alliance (BGA), established two years earlier in 1975, decided to split that organization into two separate…
Leon's
Leon's is Baltimore's oldest continuously operating gay bar. In the 1890s, the bar was called Georgia's Tap Room. The bar’s current name comes from Leon Lampe, who owned the bar during the 1930s. During Prohibition, the bar survived as…
Baltimore Manual Labor School
The Baltimore Manual Labor School for indigent boys, also known as the Arbutus Farm School, was established in 1841. The school emerged from of a larger social movement developing in urban Victorian society at the time. Amidst the energetic fervor…
The Commons
By 1990, administrators at University of Maryland, Baltimore County faced a problem. The student body had outgrown the University Center within just a decade of its opening. They considered the solution of building a new activity space to make two…
Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park
The Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park was established in April 2001 as part of a larger tree-planting effort that supported projects across the Baltimore region. Designer Renee van der Stelt, project coordinator for UMBC’s Fine Arts Gallery, now the…
Mnemonic (1976)
In the summer of 1976, Marc O’Carroll, a student and artist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), designed and installed the Mnemonic sculpture next to the campus’ Fine Arts Building. The sculpture, a collection of steel trees…
UMBC Research Park
In 1990, Catonsville resident Charlie Kucera discovered an illegal garbage dump at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where the bwTech@UMBC Research and Technology Park is located today. The university cleared away the contents of the dump…
The Quad at UMBC
University of Maryland, Baltimore County shares in a unique American college phenomenon of open or green spaces. Campus open spaces—places set aside for students, faculty and staff to gather informally or formally—help to shape a sense of community…
The University Center
When the University Center, known on campus as “the UC,” opened its doors in 1982 it definitively moved student life to the academic center of UMBC’s campus with a goal of cultivating a cohesive, unified community for students, faculty, and staff.…
UMBC Silo
Visitors and students driving onto the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus often wonder about the unexpected white silo that stands near the entrance to I-95. The silo is one of few remaining reminders of Spring Grove Hospital which was…
True Grit Statue
On a blustery winter day in December 1987, a small crowd of spectators gathered around the Field House at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). They had assembled for the unveiling of a life-size bronze sculpture of the young…
Biological Sciences (Academic Building 1)
When freshmen students arrived for the opening of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus in September 1966, the university had only three buildings: Lecture Hall, Gym I, and Academic I.
UMBC had to locate all of its classes and…
Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery
Constructed of tooled Indiana limestone, glass, steel, concrete, and granite, the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery is at the center of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus both literally and figuratively. Since the library first…
Baltimore Musicians' Union 543
The Baltimore Black Musicians Union opened a meeting hall and boarding house at 620-622 Dolphin Street around the 1940s. Due to the discrimination of Baltimore's downtown hotels at that time, traveling black musicians would stay overnight in the…
Zell Motor Car Company Showroom
The story of the Zell Motor Car Company starts in 1902 when Arthur Stanley Zell established the business—the first automobile distributor in Maryland started by one of the first people in Maryland to own a car. Before joining the automotive…
Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument
This sculpture is depicts Glory, an allegorical figure that looks in this sculpture like an angel, holding up a dying Confederate soldier in one arm while raising the laurel crown of Victory in the other. The dying soldier holds a battle flag.…
Roger Brooke Taney Monument
The Roger Brooke Taney Monument is not explicitly a Confederate monument. However, Taney is most famous for his decision in the Dred Scott case, which advanced slavery in America and is tied to the Confederate cause. Taney served as the chief…
Rev. Harvey Johnson and Amelia Johnson House
As African Americans in Baltimore sought to redefine themselves in the 1880s -- politically, geographically, socially -- the city’s black pastorate served as a vital source of leadership. None of this group stood taller or closer to the vanguard the…
Fire Museum of Maryland
The Fire Museum of Maryland is one of the largest fire museums in America. Located in Lutherville, just north of Baltimore City, the Museum is a leading institution in preserving, restoring, and interpreting the history of the urban fire service in…
Warner T. McGuinn House
A native of Goochland County, near Richmond, Virginia, Warner T. McGuinn was born less than two years before the Civil War in November 1859. His parents, Jared and Fannie McGuinn, sent him to public school in Richmond and then he went on to graduate…
Dr. John E.T. Camper House
639 N. Carey Street is the former residence of Dr. J.E.T. Camper. In 1942, Baltimore NAACP official Dr. J. E. T. Camper and Juanita Mitchell worked with the Citizens Committee for Justice (CCJ), to lead 2,000 people from 150 groups on a march on…
Freedom House
1234 Druid Hill Avenue had a story unlike any other. When builders erected the house in the nineteenth century it was one of many handsome Italianate rowhouses in the northwestern suburbs of the city. In 1899, as the neighborhood changed from white…
Harry Sythe Cummings House
A neglected brick rowhouse at 1318 Druid Hill Avenue was once the residence of Baltimore’s first black City Councilman Harry S. Cummings.
Harry S. Cummings, his wife Blanche Teresa Conklin and their two children Louise Virginia and Harry Sythe…