By Richard F. Messick
Centre Market, aka Marsh Market, was the thriving heart of early Baltimore commerce, primarily due to its proximity to the docks and the cargo arriving regularly. Vendors filled the space along Market Place from Baltimore Street to Pratt Street at…

By Richard F. Messick
Bernard Moore Campbell and his brother Lewis operated a slave pen at this location, 26 Conway Street, from 1844 to 1848. Like most successful traders of enslaved people at the time, the Campbells relied on agents working the region to supply them…

By Richard F. Messick
Barnum’s City Hotel, located where the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse stands today, was a common meeting place for all manner of transactions, such as buying, selling, or trading of products. It was common to see advertisements for the sale or…

By Aimée Pohl
Tiny Bedford Square in Guilford, at the intersection of St. Paul and North Charles streets, hosts a life size bronze bust of Simón Bolivar. Also referred to as the “George Washington of South America,” the Venezuelan-born Bolivar was the military…

By Julian Frost
Two Art Deco columns, flanking the entrance of the 25th Street Safeway parking lot, serve as the only concrete evidence of the central decision-making site during Baltimore’s era of school desegregation. From 1931 to 1987, a complex of two…

By Aimée Pohl
In 1939 sociologist, activist, author, and cofounder of the NAACP, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois, had a house built at 2302 Montebello Terrace in the neighborhood of Morgan Park. Barred from many neighborhoods by Jim Crow laws and…

By Julian Frost
At the Upton Metro Station at Pennsylvania Avenue and Laurens Street, an explosion of color greets transit patrons at the conclusion of their escalator journey. “Baltimore Uproar,” a monumental mosaic by the renowned African-American artist Romare…

By Julian Frost
As you drive up Charles Street through Old Goucher, you might notice some odd details on the facade of the neighborhood Safeway. A carved sentinel eagle keeps watch, and the word “CADILLAC” is etched onto a stone arch over the market’s main…

By Sydney Kempf
H&S Bakery began first as the vision of Isidore Paterakis, an immigrant from Chios, Greece. In 1943, Isidore Paterakis turned H&S Bakery into a reality by going into business with his son-in-law Harry Tsakalos. What began as a small…

By Sydney Kempf
At the corner of Saratoga and Liberty Streets, people will find an unassuming parking lot. While this parking lot does not appear interesting at first glance, this lot used to be the center of political life as well as a ritzy tourist…

By Sydney Kempf
Walking along Boston Street, people will run into a small store called “Canton Market.” Acting as both a convenient store and sandwich shop, Canton Market serves up a variety of sandwiches such as their cheese steak sub and their turkey club. Canton…

By Sydney Kempf
Formerly located on Boston Street in east Baltimore, Gibbs Preserving Company canned and packaged everything from oysters to jelly to candy to vegetables. The Gibbs Preserving Company exemplified typical working conditions in factories at the turn…

By Sydney Kempf
Edward J. Codd founded the E. J. Codd Company in the 1850s. The E. J. Codd  Company focused on industrial machinery and aided Baltimore’s booming shipbuilding industry by assembling boilers, propellers, and engines. At the turn of the century,…

By Sydney Kempf
In 1894, George D. Scarlett founded the William G. Scarlett Seed Company. Born in Baltimore in 1873, George D. Scarlett was a true entrepreneur who chased the American dream. At twenty-one, George Scarlett began working in the seed industry by…

By Sydney Kempf
In the twentieth century, Pier 8 in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and then Broadway Pier in Fells Point used to be the launching point for the steamboats of the Wilson Line. The Wilson Line extended from Philadelphia to Wilmington to Baltimore and ran a…

By Sydney Kempf
Archibald Hilton Bull founded the A. H. Bull & Co. in 1902. The company originally ran steamship lines from New York to Florida. Eventually A. H. Bull & Co. expanded to include an office in Baltimore. In the early 1900s, when Baltimore’s…

By Sydney Kempf
In 1879, Charles T. Bagby and A. D. Rivers founded the Bagby and Rivers Furniture Company, the predecessor to the Bagby Furniture Company. Bagby and Rivers manufactured furniture and in their 1882 furniture catalog, the company advertises mainly…

By David Stysley
For 50 years, the Hampden and Ideal Theaters operated within a few doors of each other in the 900 block of 36th Street in Hampden. Julius Goodman, who ran the Ideal for many years, described the competition: “Well, we were friendly competitors. We…

By David Stysley
In the Progressive Age (1890-1920), movie theaters were a new and popular form of entertainment. They were being built all over Baltimore, and Hampden was no different. In 1908, Marion Pearce and Philip Scheck (who already owned six theatres) opened…

By David Stysley
Hampden Hall was an important part of Baltimore even before the neighborhood of Hampden was a part of Baltimore. Six years before Hampden was incorporated into Baltimore City, Hampden Hall was constructed as a meeting hall for Civil War veterans in…

By David Stysley
The story of Hampden’s name can be traced back to St. Mary’s Community Center. Originally established as St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, the congregation started meeting in Hampden in the 1850s. Under the leadership of Henry Mankin this congregation…

By Baltimore Museum of Industry
General Ship Repair maintains the rich shipbuilding tradition so long associated with the South Baltimore neighborhoods of Federal Hill and Locust Point. Charles “Buck” Lynch founded the company in 1924, moved to this location in 1929, lost the…

By Baltimore Museum of Industry
The Key Highway Yards along the southern side of the Inner Harbor played a pivotal role in Baltimore’s shipbuilding industry from the 1820s until 1982. Passersby today see almost no traces of this industrial history at the upscale Ritz Carlton and…

By Baltimore Museum of Industry
The Hercules Shipbuilding Company, housed in this brick building, was an active player in Baltimore’s maritime industry, building vessels for commercial and leisure use as well as wartime naval construction and repair. Jonathan and Eleanor LaVeck…

By Baltimore Museum of Industry
All that remains of the Chesapeake Paperboard Co. complex today is the water tower. The site is now known as McHenry Row, a 90,000 square foot mixed use development project that contains 250 luxury apartments, offices, and street level shops at the…

By Baltimore Museum of Industry
The Domino Sugar refinery (and its iconic red neon sign) is one of the last major working industries along Baltimore's inner harbor. Raw sugar arrives at the plant in giant ships and barges, and is unloaded and refined to become white, powdered,…

By Baltimore Museum of Industry
The Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation manufactured chemical components for many industrial applications. Quaker merchant Isaac Tyson Jr. established the company that became Allied Chemical in 1828, mining chromium ore and supplying chrome pigment…

By The Laurel Cemetery Memorial Task Force
Laurel Cemetery was incorporated in 1852 as Baltimore’s first nondenominational cemetery for African Americans. The location chosen was Belle Air Avenue (now Belair Road), on a hill long used as a burial ground for free and enslaved servants of…

By Baltimore Museum of Industry
Today the site of Under Armour's world headquarters, five of these buildings used to house Procter & Gamble's Baltimore Plant: Process Building (1929), the Soap Chip Building (1929), the Bar Soap Building (1929), the Warehouse (1929),…