On the west side of Druid Lake, opposite of the Moorish Tower, stands an imposing statue. At nearly thirty feet from the ground to the tip of the sword, the Wallace the Scot statue strikes an imposing figure. Bearing little resemblance to Mel Gibson鈥檚 鈥淏raveheart,鈥 the question remains of why a statue of a national Scottish hero is in Druid Hill Park. Beginning in 1905, the St. Andrew鈥檚 Society of Baltimore, or the Scottish Society, has used the Wallace the Scot statue as a site of pilgrimage. Gathering at the monument on St. Andrew鈥檚 Day, the anniversary of real William Wallace鈥檚 death, and the founding of their organization in 1806, members of the society wear traditional clothing (such as kilts or capes) and celebrate their heritage as Scottish Americans. By the 1850s, more than 100,000 Scottish immigrants were living in the United States and, between 1890 and 1910, this number grew to over a million. Successful Baltimore banker William Wallace Spence was proud of his heritage as a Scottish immigrant and claimed to be a distant descendant of William Wallace. Considering Wallace a personal hero as well as a national one, he shared how he admired Wallace鈥檚 character and saw him as a 鈥渃hampion of freedom whose memory not only Scotland, but all the world should honor." As the leader of the Scottish resistance against English rule, the original William Wallace spent most of his life battling with English forces for Scottish independence. His takeover of Stirling Castle is considered by many historians to be the first major victory for the Scottish resistance. Unfortunately, his victory was short lived and after a defeat at the Battle of Falkirk, Wallace was taken captive and executed in 1305. The statue itself is cast in bronze, a perfect replica of the famous William Wallace statue that stands on Abbey Craig in Scotland. Originally sculpted by D.W. Stevenson in 1881, Spence commissioned his replica at a large scale to make the figure seem more dramatic and imposing. The figure stands at an impressive fourteen feet tall, from his feet to the tip of his raised sword. The sculptor specifically chose the pose for its symbolic meaning鈥擶allace supposedly struck this pose at the Abbey Craig as he watched the army of Edward I gather before the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Stevenson also designed the pedestal upon which the Druid Hill Park statue now rests. The sixteen-foot tall granite base was carved of Maryland granite and is engraved with the inscription "William Wallace, Patriot and Martyr for Scottish Liberty, 1305."
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Founded in 1880, the Woman's Industrial Exchange helped craftswomen discreetly earn a living and operated at 333 N. Charles Street in various forms. Launched by Mrs. G. Harmon Brown, the Woman's Industrial Exchange was founded "for the purpose of endeavoring by sympathy and practical aid to encourage and help needy women to help themselves by procuring for them and establishing a sales room for the sale of Women's Work." It was the third oldest women's exchange in the country. The building was constructed in 1815 and was used as a boarding house before the Exchange bought it in the late 1880s.
The Exchange underwent extensive renovations in 2004 (incidentally, winning a 糖心影视 historic preservation award for the work). The renovations maintained the original materials (and charm), while modernizing the apartments and commercial kitchen.
In June 2020, the Exchange stoped operating and the Maryland Women's Heritage Center (MWHC) moved into the building. The MWHC is the first comprehensive state-based women鈥檚 history center and museum of its kind in the nation. It has adapted the storefront of this landmark building into an exhibit center and small event space. Changing exhibits in the bay window facing North Charles Street feature various women artists and their creations. The center celebrates Maryland women 鈥攑ast and present, famous and not鈥攁nd adds 鈥淗ERstory to history to tell our story.鈥
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The Woodberry Factory and Park Mill were built near the site of an eighteenth-century gristmill. An active industrial area for nearly two centuries, buildings here have been replaced and repurposed to meet changing demands for production of everything from textiles and netting in the nineteenth century to rubber tires and ice cream cones in the twentieth century.
John Payne, in his comprehensive 1798 tome, A New and Complete System of Universal Geography, noted the flouring mills along the Jones Falls near Baltimore. At the time, wealthy abolitionist Elisha Tyson owned two of the ten documented mills: one at the location of what is now Mill No. 1, and another in Woodberry. The Woodberry mill is described as a "handsome three story building, the first of stone and the other two of brick" that "can grind at least eighty-thousand bushels a year." Tyson's Woodberry gristmill sold to Horatio Gambrill, David Carroll, and their associates who expanded the structure into a textile mill they called the Woodberry Factory. It was the partnership鈥檚 second venture in the area after buying and converting Whitehall gristmill (just south of their new factory) for textile production in 1839. The mills manufactured cotton duck, a fabric primarily used for ship sails during a time when clipper sailing ships dominated local trade. Through the low cost of raw cotton cultivated with enslaved labor and an ability to attract workers despite lower wages than competing mills in the North, the mills along the Jones Falls cornered the market. Their largest buyers were in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. They also found markets overseas in British provinces, South America, and England. The Woodberry Factory was a purely functional building: a long, three story building designed to maximize daylight and accommodate the machinery powered by horizontal line shafts. A clerestory roof provided more light. Each floor housed machinery for a different step in the manufacturing process. A central stair tower was topped with a dome shaped bell tower. The bell rang on a schedule to call nearby workers to the factory for their shifts. The new textile mills required a large workforce and this large workforce needed homes. To this end, owners erected mill villages close to their factories. Woodberry began as a string of Gothic Revival duplexes built of locally quarried stone and resembling country cottages. The homes included yards for growing produce, raising livestock, and planting flower beds. Gambrill erected a church in the village. A school was also built, although it was common for children of mill workers to drop out early to work in the mills and help support their families. In 1850, an all-in-one general store, post-office, and social hall was constructed near the railroad tracks. Additional structures went up as operations grew and new technologies emerged. When the factory started using steam power in 1846, a boiler house was built on the side facing the Jones Falls. The factory acquired a fire engine some time before 1854; a shrewd acquisition considering the tendency for factories full of 鈥渃otton-flyings鈥 (or fuzz) to catch fire and burn. The most significant addition to the site was Park Mill, built in 1855 to produce seine netting for fishing boats. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the mills in the Jones Falls Valley were brought under a national textile conglomerate, the Mount Vernon-Woodberry Mills. In the 1920s, the company began shuttering the mills in favor of its plants in the South. The Woodberry Factory was sold to Frank G. Schenuit Rubber Co. in 1924. In 1929, a six-alarm fire destroyed the building. Residents across the tracks had to evacuate their homes and the blaze was large enough to attract a reported crowd of 10,000 people. Schenuit manufactured truck and automobile tires, and later manufactured aircraft tires for the military during World War II. The company became dependent on government contracts and nearly went bankrupt after the war. By the 1960s, the company began expanding into the home and garden industry by buying out smaller manufacturers that made wheelbarrows, industrial wood products, lawn equipment, exercise equipment, and lawn and patio furniture. By the 1970s, Schenuit had moved out of the tire business. In 1972, after Hurricane Agnes, Schenuit sold the Woodberry plant to McCreary Tire and Rubber Company. McCreary closed down just three years later when the company laid off all of the plant鈥檚 three hundred workers. Park Mill sold in 1925, and over the next four decades, the mill was used by a variety of companies including the Commercial Envelope Company and Bes-Cone, an ice-cream cone manufacturing company established by Mitchell Glassner, who invented one of the early machines for that purpose. Today, Park Mill is leased to a number of small businesses. The Schenuit factory remains empty after yet another fire, one of the only major industrial buildings in the Jones Falls Valley awaiting redevelopment.
Woodrow Wilson came to this house as a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. From Eutaw Place he went on to become president of Princeton University, the governor of New Jersey and eventually President of the United States of America.
Even before it opened, the anticipation around Baltimore鈥檚 World Trade Center was unmistakable. 鈥淚t promises to be the handsomest building built so far in the redevelopment area, a graceful symbol for Baltimore鈥檚 renewal and an emblem of the historic economic dependence of the state and the city on the sea,鈥 reported the Sun in December 1976.
The idea for a World Trade building for Baltimore began percolating in the mid-1960s. The center would be a grand symbol of the harbor鈥檚 renewal and a hub for maritime business. In 1966, the Maryland Port Authority sponsored Mayor Theodore McKeldin and five other port and city planning officials on a whirlwind trip to Houston and New Orleans to see other world trade centers in those cities. The mayor came back inspired, and Baltimore became one of the sixteen charter members of the World Trade Association.
Construction of the center began in 1973. The five-sided, thirty-story building was designed by the firm of architect I.M. Pei, who was responsible for the design of the glass pyramid of the Louvre in Paris, the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington D.C., and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, among other projects. The building cost $22 million, double the cost of the original proposition. The apex of two of the walls facing the harbor meet at the shoreline and suggest the prow of a ship. It is the tallest five-sided building in the world.
One of the first tenants, The Canton Company, the parent firm of the Cottman Company, who was the operator of the Canton Marine Terminal, signed a five-year lease for 13,000 square feet of space. Over the years, the tower has also housed the headquarters of the Maryland Port Administration, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, and the World Trade Center Institute, a member of the World Trade Centers Association that operates as a private, non-profit international business membership organization. For many years, the Top of the World Observation Level offered spectacular city and harbor views. This level was slated to close to the public in 2025.
After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, security measures at the Baltimore World Trade Center changed accordingly so that boat access to the building is blocked to prevent acts of terrorism. Baltimore鈥檚 World Trade Center is also home to a 9/11 Memorial that includes three 22-foot long steel beams from the 94th to 96th floors of the north tower of the New York World Trade Center. Twisted and fused together, the steel beams and damaged limestone pieces from the Pentagon's west wall rest atop marble blocks bearing the names and birthdays of the 68 Marylanders who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
with research support from Friends of Maryland's Olmsted Parks and Landscapes
Today, Wyman Park is a complex of highly-contrasting park spaces, half-hearted links, and a variety of associated urban edges. The 1904 Olmsted Brothers report singled out the Wyman Park section with its 鈥渙ld beech trees and bold topography鈥 as 鈥渢he finest single passage of scenery in the whole valley.鈥 By 1888, the Wyman Brothers had dedicated a part of their large estate to public uses. The center of the estate would become the new campus of Johns Hopkins University. The school鈥檚 trustees subsequently gave the remainder of the land to the City as a public park. In the 1910s, each section of park received specialized attention from the Olmsted Brothers firm. Although the larger stream valley section was interrupted by railroad tracks and sewer lines, the Olmsted designs treated it as a natural reservation with pedestrian paths and a meandering parkway. In contrast, the plan manipulated Wyman Park Dell into a miniature version of a signature Olmsted pastoral park. Over the years, indifferent landscaping, lack of additional parkway treatments and large parking lots contributed to the erosion of any sense of connectedness between the two main park spaces. Some of the Wyman land was sold back to Hopkins in the 1960s. Buildings began to fill in smaller green spaces in the area. Both main sections of Wyman Park remain valuable natural preserves for their surrounding neighborhoods and the city as a whole.
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The Zell Motor Car Company Showroom on East Mount Royal Avenue was built in 1909 and expanded in 1915. The design, by local architect Edward H. Glidden, remains a unique reminder of Baltimore鈥檚 early automotive history and the changing face of Mount Royal Avenue.
The story of the Zell Motor Car Company starts in 1902 when Arthur Stanley Zell established the business鈥攖he first automobile distributor in Maryland started by one of the first people in Maryland to own a car. Before joining the automotive industry, Zell drove in early automobile races winning a number of records on the East Coast. As a member of the Baltimore Automobile Dealers鈥 Association, Zell helped to organize the first automobile show in Baltimore in 1906. He also served as a founding member of the Maryland Automobile Trade Association and, at his farm at Riverwood, he raised Guernsey cattle, Jersey Duroc hogs, and show dogs. Plans for the firm鈥檚 modern showroom on Mount Royal Avenue first appeared in December 1908 when trade publication "The Automobile" reported that the Zell Motor Car Company had solicited plans for a three-story garage about 50 feet deep by 100 feet wide. The design boasted a large open fireplace (a new feature for showrooms borrowed from examples in Paris), a large electric elevator to carry cars between floors, and a special room for chauffeurs with a 鈥渢elephone connection鈥 to let owners 鈥渂e in touch with their drivers at all times.鈥 The structure, erected by the Baltimore Ferro Concrete Company, cost around $40,000 to build. The Baltimore Sun observed on December 22:
The rapid success of the Zell Motorcar Company in the sale of the Peerless and Chalmers-Detroit motorcars since its incorporation last August has compelled it to seek larger and permanent quarters, its present temporary location at 1010 Morton street being totally insufficient.The building鈥檚 architect, 35-year-old Edward H. Glidden (1873-1924), brought the same tasteful design sensibility he applied to a growing number of apartment houses in the city鈥檚 growing northern suburbs: Earl Court (1903), the Winona (1903), the Rochambeau (1905; demolished 2006), the Washington (1905-6), the Marlborough (1906), and the Wentworth (1908). Not limited to apartments, the architect鈥檚 designs also included the National Marine Bank (1904) and the Seventh Baptist Church (1905) on North Avenue. Gildden鈥檚 later commissions, often with his partner Clyde Nelson Friz, included the Latrobe (1911; Glidden & Friz), the Esplanade (1911-12; Glidden & Friz), Calvert Court (1915), and Tudor Hall/Essex Arms (1910, with Friz; 1922), Furness House (1917), and the Forest Theater (1918-19). The French precedent for the grand fireplace at the Zell Motor Car Company showroom are likely based on Glidden鈥檚 studies in Paris around 1908 to 1912. Zell hired Glidden again in early 1914 to expand and improve the showroom on Mount Royal Avenue, according to a February 9, 1914 mention in Industrial World noting that Gildden had 鈥渄rawn up plans covering the same general design and character of building as their present one.鈥 The business thrived as the local dealer for the Packard鈥攁n independent automaker based in Detroit that specialized in high-priced luxury automobiles. The Zell Motor Car Company also operated a service facility nearby (set back from North Avenue on Whitelock Street at Woodbrook Avenue) from around 1901 up until Packard stopped manufacturing automobiles in the late 1950s. The service facility is better known for the last few decades as the location of Greenwood Towing. Dealerships and service stations on Mount Royal Avenue, Charles Street and North Avenue flourished in the 1920s, endured through the Great Depression in the 1930s and still continued after World War II. Nearby dealers to the Zell Motor Company included Backus Ford, Weiss Ford, Chesapeake Cadillac, and Oriole Pontiac. Unfortunately for the Zell Motor Car Company, whose founder had died in 1935, the end of Packard鈥檚 automobile production in 1956 marked the end of their operation. Like other landmarks on Mount Royal Avenue, such as the conversion of Mount Royal Station into studios for MICA in 1968, the automotive showroom turned into offices and remains in use today. In 2015, the sign above the building鈥檚 Mount Royal Avenue entrance reads 鈥淭he Towne Building鈥 and the structure is up for sale.
The Zion Lutheran Church is a piece of German-American history that dates back to 1755. Originally known as the German Lutheran Reformed Church, it served Lutheran immigrants coming from Germany. The congregation held services in private residences for the first seven years.
The original church was erected in 1762 on Fish Street (now Saratoga Street), a block away from their current site. The number of worshipers grew rapidly over the years and by 1808 the first building on the current church grounds was completed. It is one of only a few buildings standing that predates the War of 1812 and is the oldest Neo-Gothic style church in the United States. Between 1912 and 1913, the church completed several additions including the Parish House, bell tower, parsonage, and garden.
The church possesses a number of historical artifacts including a piece of the Berlin Wall and plaques dedicated to the members of the church who died in WWI and WWII. The church boasts an impressive collection of stained glass. A number of the windows celebrate German heritage and achievements. The Industry Window in the Sanctuary Entrance has an image of the linotype in the bottom-right corner, a device invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in Baltimore.
The Zion Lutheran Church currently provides services in both German and English, making it the oldest church in the United States that has maintained uninterrupted services in German and the only church in Maryland to offer a service in German.
Family-owned since 1930, Zissimos lays claim to being the oldest business in operation on the Avenue.
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 why he should be going anywhere, but Abbott presses him:
"I'll go to Baltimore," Costello says.Lou Costello's connection to Baltimore was more than casual. His aunt, Eva Zissimos, owned Zissimos Bar with her husband, Atha. Eva would host Costello when he was passing through town. His exploits at Zissimos became a riotous neighborhood event. He was known to tapdance on the bar and hand out autographed one-dollar bills to children. Costello was fond of his Baltimore family. During a show at the Hippodrome, he invited Eva's four year old granddaughter, Leiloni Pardue, to perform on stage with him. The last time Lou Costello came to Baltimore was in 1957 on his way to Washington D.C. to perform at President Eisenhower's second Inauguration. He died two years later of a heart attack. Lou Costello's antics at Zissimos are just a small part of the bar's legacy. Zissimos lays claim to being the oldest business in operation on the Avenue. It has been family owned since 1930. Atha and Eva chose the Thirty-Sixth street location because of Hampden's sizeable Greek population. The biggest Greek name in Hampden was Theodore Cavacos. He was the unofficial mayor of Hampden and owned vast swaths of property in the area, including the lucrative Cavacos Drugstore. By the end of the 1950s, there were over a dozen Greek owned establishments in Hampden, several of which were owned by members of the Zissimos family, including a dry cleaners and a restaurant. The history of Zissimos is long and eclectic. Before the building's renovation in 2014, Zissimos looked like a bunker鈥揳 fortified brick facade with a sliver of an opening for a window. The facade replaced a large picture window from which Atha sold hamburgers and hotdogs. The window met a violent end after William Zissimos and his brother Louis took over in 1955. Louis was an undefeated heavyweight boxer in the Navy and took a no-nonsense approach to running the bar. Rowdy patrons who picked a fight with him were thrown out the window, and after shattering the glass too many times, the window became irreparable. Zissimos is a much warmer place today, in large part due to the efforts of its current owner, Geli Ioannou, who married into the Zissimos family. Geli renovated Zissimos and opened the upstairs, once the home where Eva served Lou Costello hot meals, and turned it into the space for the bar's comedy night, "Who's on First?"."Of all the towns in the United States, why did you have to pick Baltimore?"
"I got friends in Baltimore!"