The Baltimore Rowhouse

The Baltimore Rowhouse PDF

Author: Charles Belfoure

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1568989563

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Perhaps no other American city is so defined by an indigenous architectural style as Baltimore is by the rowhouse, whose brick facades march up and down the gentle hills of the city. Why did the rowhouse thrive in Baltimore? How did it escape destruction here, unlike in many other historic American cities? What were the forces that led to the citywide renovation of Baltimore's rowhouses? The Baltimore Rowhouse tells the fascinating 200-year story of this building type. It chronicles the evolution of the rowhouse from its origins as speculative housing for immigrants, through its reclamation and renovation by young urban pioneers thanks to local government sponsorship, to its current occupation by a new cadre of wealthy professionals.

The North Atlantic Cities

The North Atlantic Cities PDF

Author: Charles Duff

Publisher: Oro Editions

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9781908457530

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The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff, which is available for the first time in the United States, is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of four hundred years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few. The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered--the row house--which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world's great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600s to today as the author theorizes, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay, and the worst catastrophes of global climate change.

Baltimore's Alley Houses

Baltimore's Alley Houses PDF

Author: Mary Ellen Hayward

Publisher: Creating the North American La

Published: 2008-10-31

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13:

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Winner, 2009 Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize. Vernacular Architecture Forum This pioneering study explains how one of America’s important early cities responded to the challenge of housing its poorer citizens. Where and how did the working poor live? How did builders and developers provide reasonably priced housing for lower-income groups during the city's growth? Having studied over 3,000 surviving alley houses in Baltimore through extensive land records and census research, Mary Ellen Hayward systematically reconstructs the lives, households, and neighborhoods that once thrived on the city's narrowest streets. In the past, these neighborhoods were sometimes referred to as "dilapidated," "blighted," or "poverty stricken." In Baltimore's Alley Houses, Hayward reveals the rich cultural and ethnic traditions that formed the African-American and immigrant Irish, German, Bohemian, and Polish communities that made their homes on the city's alley streets. Featuring more than one hundred historic images, Baltimore's Alley Houses documents the changing architectural styles of low-income housing over two centuries and reveals the complex lives of its residents.

Blockbusting in Baltimore

Blockbusting in Baltimore PDF

Author: W. Edward Orser

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0813184053

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This innovative study of racial upheaval and urban transformation in Baltimore, Maryland investigates the impact of "blockbusting"—a practice in which real estate agents would sell a house on an all-white block to an African American family with the aim of igniting a panic among the other residents. These homeowners would often sell at a loss to move away, and the real estate agents would promote the properties at a drastic markup to African American buyers. In this groundbreaking book, W. Edward Orser examines Edmondson Village, a west Baltimore rowhouse community where an especially acute instance of blockbusting triggered white flight and racial change on a dramatic scale. Between 1955 and 1965, nearly twenty thousand white residents, who saw their secure world changing drastically, were replaced by blacks in search of the American dream. By buying low and selling high, playing on the fears of whites and the needs of African Americans, blockbusters set off a series of events that Orser calls "a collective trauma whose significance for recent American social and cultural history is still insufficiently appreciated and understood." Blockbusting in Baltimore describes a widely experienced but little analyzed phenomenon of recent social history. Orser makes an important contribution to community and urban studies, race relations, and records of the African American experience.

The Architecture of Baltimore

The Architecture of Baltimore PDF

Author: Mary Ellen Hayward

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9780801878060

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Romantic stylings follow excursions into the Greek and Gothic Revivals, the rise of the popular Italianate-mode for town and country houses : fine examples of soaring church spires; public spaces like the Peabody Library, and masterpieces of ornamented dignity."

Row House Days

Row House Days PDF

Author: Jack Myers

Publisher: Infinity Publishing

Published: 2005-03

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0741424797

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Fictionalized memoir which explores the dynamics of being raised in a declining Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood. Pint-sized and four-eyed, little Jimmy Morris is near the bottom of the food chain in his working class "streetcar suburb" of Kings Cross. He's a dreamer, schemer, schoolyard scrapper, secret lover of books, and classroom clown ... a kid you can't decide whether to hug or to slap. Meanwhile, the conformity of the 1950s is yielding to those turbulent '60s. Yes, the times they definitely were a changin' with Kings Cross in the eye of the societal storm.

History Lover's Guide to Baltimore, A

History Lover's Guide to Baltimore, A PDF

Author: Brennen Jensen

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1467145769

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"Neither southern nor northern, Baltimore has charted its own course through the American experience. The spires of the nation's first cathedral rose into its sky, and the first blood of the Civil War fell on its streets. Here, enslaved Frederick Douglass toiled before fleeing to freedom and Billie Holiday learned to sing. Baltimore's clippers plied the seven seas, while its pioneering railroads opened the prairie West. The city that birthed "The Star-Spangled Banner" also gave us Babe Ruth and the bottle cap. This guide navigates nearly three hundred years of colorful history--from Johns Hopkins's earnest philanthropy to the raucous camp of John Waters and from modest row houses to the marbled mansions of the Gilded Age. Let local authors Brennen Jensen and Tom Chalkley introduce you to Mencken's "ancient and solid" city--]cBack cover.

The Painted Screens of Baltimore

The Painted Screens of Baltimore PDF

Author: Elaine Eff

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2013-10-23

Total Pages: 618

ISBN-13: 1496803922

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Painted screens have long been synonymous in the popular imagination with the Baltimore row house. Picturesque, practical, and quirky, window and door screens adorned with scenic views simultaneously offer privacy and ventilation in crowded neighborhoods. As an urban folk art, painted screens flourished in Baltimore, though they did not originate there--precursors date to early eighteenth-century London. They were a fixture on fine homes and businesses in Europe and America throughout the Victorian era. But as the handmade screen yielded to industrial production, the whimsical artifact of the elite classes was suddenly transformed into an item for mass consumption. Historic examples are now a rarity, but in Baltimore the folk art is still very much alive. The Painted Screens of Baltimore takes a first look at this beloved icon of one major American city through the words and images of dozens of self-taught artists who trace their creations to the capable and unlikely brush of one Bohemian immigrant, William Oktavec. In 1913, this corner grocer began a family dynasty inspired generations of artists who continue his craft to this day. The book examines the roots of painted wire cloth, the ethnic communities where painted screens have been at home for a century, and the future of this art form.