Where H.L. Mencken Learned to Ride a Bicycle

H.L. Mencken learned to ride a bicycle in the lot behind a bicycle shop owned by Joseph Wiesenfeld at the southwest corner of West Baltimore and Paca Streets. He recalled the story in a piece from Mencken on Mencken, a collection of autobiographical writing originally published in the New Yorker and Esquire during the 1940s:

…in an ancient two-story house which still stands, was Joe Wiesenfeld’s bicycle shop, and at the rear of it was a large yard, floored like a room. On that floor, coached by one of Little Joe’s salesmen, I learned to ride a bicycle. It all seems remote and archaic today, like mastering the subtleties of medieval equitation. But bicycling was a great and urgent matter in 1889, when the pneumatic tire came in.

Wiesenfeld, known as “little joe” thanks to short stature, was a successful Jewish business owner who opened the bicycle shop in 1892. A Baltimore native born in 1864, Wiesenfeld gained local fame at age 15 racing a high-wheel bicycle around Druid Hill Lake and remained an active member and supporter of Baltimore cycling clubs for years. His business soon expanded into a sporting goods store (specializing in saddles and tack) that still stands at the northwest corner of Baltimore and Howard Streets.

Howard and Baltimore Street, southeast corner, August 17, 1914, John Dubas. Courtesy Arthur U. Hooper Memorial Collection/Baltimore City Life Museum Collection, Maryland Historical Society, MC9120 B. via mdhsphotographs

In 1957, Clarence R. Mahrer, a former bicycle salesman at Howard French’s competing shop at 304 West Baltimore, recalled the tremendous popularity of bicycles in the 1900s when Baltimore boasted 80 to 90 bike stores and dozens of bike clubs – the Myrtle Wheelmen, Lafayette Wheelmen, Yale Wheelmen, Peacock Wheelmen and others.

During the 1960s, the University of Maryland urban renewal project led by the Baltimore Urban Renewal and Housing Commission tore down the old bicycle shop, along with over eight acres of buildings on the west side of downtown Baltimore, to make way for parks, parking lots and new construction for the university and hospital. The block where H.L. Mencken learned to ride a bike is now occupied by University Square Park.

Thanks to Patrick McMahon for turning up the inspiring quote from Mencken on Mencken. I’m hoping there may be a H.L. Mencken bike tour in my future.

Sources

Mahrer, Clarence R. “The Days Of The Bicycle Clubs.” The Sun (1837-1986). Baltimore, Md., United States, June 23, 1957. Link to ProQuest.

Mencken, Henry Louis, and S. T. Joshi. Mencken on Mencken: A New Collection of Autobiographical Writings. LSU Press, 2010.

Wiesenfeld, Henry M. “I Remember … …little joe’s Gudgeon Contests.” The Sun (1837-1986). Baltimore, Md., United States, April 28, 1957. Link to ProQuest.

“Bike Ride Through Historic Baltimore” – 1971

While researching the history of the Shot Tower Industrial Park this morning, I stumbled across a unexpected and delightful account of a historic bike tour from May 16, 1971. In “Bike Ride Through Historic Baltimore,” writer Jack Dawson, who also worked as the sports director and evening news sports anchor for WMAR-TV, describes his morning bike ride with the Coleman family, across Downtown, Fell’s Point, and South Baltimore to Fort McHenry. The group set off at set off at 8:15 am with Dawson riding a borrowed three-speed Schwinn, a bit unsteadily at first, explaining that he “hadn’t ridden a bicycle for any distance for at least 15 years.” Jill Coleman had mapped out the route for a “bike hike” organized by the Maryland Commission on Physical Fitness for the following Sunday. The full piece can be found in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database through the Pratt Library website but I’ve pulled a few excerpts:

Randall Coleman was riding his Raleigh in a circle on the parking lot without using his hands. His stepdaughters Caroline, 11, and 10-year-old Weezie (short for Louise), practiced tricks on theirs Schwinns. Mrs. Jill Coleman stood beside her station wagon, warning one of the girls to be careful.

Merchants were opening their shops when we turned onto Broadway at 8:30. The neighborhood winos were already congregating on street corners. The driver of a foreign car stopped to let us pedal-pushers pass and flashed a wide smile and a peace sign.

It was obvious Mrs. Coleman had mapped out a good route for the Maryland Commission on Physical Fitness bike hike from 9 a.m. to noon next Sunday, “If we can just get a good day and a turnout, then we’ll be in clover,” she said. “I’ve made the tour four times now and each time I’ve discovered new things. The more you explore, the more you find there is to explore.”

Fortunately, the piece includes a map tracing the route. Many of the landmarks from the ride – the Peale Museum, Old Otterbein Church, the B & O Railroad Museum – remain much the same as in the early 1970s, while other places – notably the Inner Harbor- have been transformed beyond recognition. Now all I need to do is pick up a vintage Raleigh to give this a try myself.

Notes on Urban Renewal in Baltimore – No. 2

From “Main Post Office Planned For 1970,” Carleton Jones, The Baltimore Sun, March 31, 1968.

I have been working on a long post about State Center for weeks but I wanted to share a shorter piece in the interim. I found some time this evening to write up a few notes on the delightfully Brutalist Baltimore Post Office built in 1972 as part of the Shot Tower Industrial Park urban renewal project. I hope to expand on this in the future with more context on urban renewal in Jonestown.

Baltimore Post Office (1972) – 900 East Fayette Street

With a floor area the size of sixteen football fields and a Brutalist façade composed of precast concrete panels, the Baltimore Post Office on East Fayette Street is a stark reminder of the scale and style of early 1970s urban renewal. The Post Office was designed in 1968 by Tatar & Kelly – a partnership of Seymour Tatar & W. Boulton Kelly – with Cochran, Stephenson & Donkervoet serving as associate architects. Further examples Tatar & Kelly can be found in modern buildings from the Enoch Pratt Free Library – Reisterstown Road Branch (1967), Steuart Hill Elementary School (1969) at Union Square, and the Baltimore County Public Library – Towson Branch (1974).

The builder, McCloskey-Leavell from Philadelphia, also developed the property under a build-lease scheme where the post office was built by a private enterprise, giving the federal government a lease and a later option to purchase. When the new building opened in 1972, the Post Office invested $5 million in new equipment with 4,000 employees. A 1971 account in The Baltimore Sun heralded the development as an anchor for the Shot Tower Industrial Park — a 24-acre area bounded by Colvin Street, Fayette Street, the Fallsway and Orleans Street.

Baltimore Museum of Industry, BG&E Print and Negative Collection, BGE.47525, 10/19/1971

Blue Book (1920) – J.G. Valiant Company Advertisements

I turned up these handsome furniture advertisements for the J.G. Valiant Furniture Company in the Blue Book (1920). A few images of Valiant’s (long since demolished) showroom at 224-226 North Charles Street are available online from the UMBC Hughes Company Collection.

Notes on Urban Renewal in Baltimore – No. 1

From a “Development plan for the Maryland State governmental center in Baltimore, Maryland,” 1969.

Over the last few years working as preservationist in Baltimore City, I’ve been confronted with the enduring presence of built history of post-WWII urban renewal. Even beyond such clear landmarks as 1950s Charles Center or the 1970s “Highway to Nowhere,” much of the area in and around downtown Baltimore is indelibly marked by parks, parking lots, apartment towers and vacant houses that can be directly linked the broader mess of politics and policies that we remember as urban renewal. Over the next couple of months, I’m hoping to push beyond my still somewhat muddled understanding of this issue to write up a more comprehensive narrative of post-WWII urban renewal efforts in Baltimore.

My excuse for this new effort is a recent idea to organize a bike tour of urban renewal sites in downtown and west Baltimore mapped out here. Accordingly, this project may have a second life for Baltimore Heritage but, for the time being, I’m undertaking this as a personal and independent research effort. The topic feels even more urgent considering the proposal to demolish Baltimore’s Mechanic Theater – a Brutalist 1967 theater built as part of the Charles Center complex. Despite the challenges posed by the Mechanic (and other buildings like it) to sustainability and urban design, I still hold what I might call a Fuck Yeah Brutalism attitude — the belief that the buildings and landscapes of the 1950s, 60s and 70s (and the stories of behind them) make up an important legacy in the social and built history of our region that should be recognized and interpreted, not ignored and demolished.

So this is No. 1 in a new series on urban renewal histories in Baltimore. I’m hoping to make this a weekly endeavor so look out for more soon.

Reading historical fiction and histories in 2011

With the help of a new Kindle last winter, I’ve finished more books in 2011 than I have in years and I thought I might share a few recommendations and highlights. I’ve been especially excited to discover my own love of historical fiction. In the past year I read the first three novels in the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser, the three Baroque Cycle novels by Neal Stephenson, and both The Anubis Gates and Declare by Tim Powers. Although Neal Stephenson and Tim Powers freely mix historical with fantastical details and characters, I was thrilled by how both authors managed to pull me into a version of the past and create a rich sense of place through their writing.

While fiction peaked my interest in European history over the summer, I found my way back to U.S. history with The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore, followed by 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann. All three are accessible histories without abandoning any rigor or credibility — the footnotes are excellent — and offer inspiring departures from the structural constraints of more traditional narrative histories. Jill Lepore’s work does this particularly well as she weaves together the threads of contemporary Tea Party politics, the public memorialization of the Revolutionary War during the 1970s, and unique insights into the lives of Revolutionary period men and women from Thomas Paine to Ben Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom (a topic the author highlighted in a New York Times opinion piece Poor Jane’s Almanac). The concluding passage from the book’s prologue (available for download as a PDF) took my breath away with its evocative and visceral expression of the connections between the past and the present:

Standing on the Beaver watching sea-weedy waves slap the ship’s hull, I thought about how sailors on ocean-faring vessels once measured depth. They would drop a rope weighted with lead into the water and let it plummet till it reached bottom. I like to sink lines, too, to get to the bottom of things. This book is an argument against historical fundamentalism. It makes that argument by measuring the distance between the past and the present. It measures that distance by taking soundings in the ocean of time. Here, now, we float on a surface of yesterdays. Below swirls the blue-green of childhood. Deeper still is the obscurity of long ago. But the eighteenth century, oh, the eighteenth century lies fathoms down.

Charles Mann, unlike Jill Lepore, is not an academic historian but does a tremendous job allowing the work of dozens of scholars to lead the way in 1491 as he tells stories about the presence of American Indians in the Americas before (and after) contact with Europe. These stories of agricultural practices, disease epidemics, and more of the past are placed in a context of debates and discussion between archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, activists and others over the last 50 years or more. In his introduction he suggested a partial inspiration for the book came in response to the woeful failure of school textbooks to capture any of these recent debates and discoveries:

The 1987 edition of American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-known historians, summed up Indian history thusly: “For thousands of centuries—centuries in which human races were evolving, forming communities, and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europe—the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and itsworks.” The story of Europeans in the NewWorld, the book informed students, “is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed.”

Meanwhile, new disciplines and new technologies were creating new ways to examine the past. Demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, and palynology (pollen analysis); molecular and evolutionary biology; carbon-14 dating, ice-core sampling, satellite photography, and soil assays; genetic microsatellite analysis and virtual 3-D fly-throughs—a torrent of novel perspectives and techniques cascaded into use. And when these were employed, the idea that the only human occupants of one-third of the earth’s surface had changed little for thousands of years began to seem implausible. To be sure, some researchers have vigorously attacked the new findings as wild exaggerations. (“We have simply replaced the old myth [of untouched wilderness] with a new one,” scoffed geographer Thomas Vale, “the myth of the humanized landscape.”) But after several decades of discovery and debate, a new picture of the Americas and their original inhabitants is emerging.

Not convinced you must read 1491 yet? Check out this March 2002 piece in The Atlantic for a tight introduction to the book’s themes. While a bit less revelatory for me, 1493 is still packed with fascinating details on quilombos, better known in the U.S. as maroon communities, like Palmares, the appalling conditions for Chinese workers guano mining in Peru, the fiscal implications of the Spanish galleon trade in Europe and Asia and much more. NPR offers a good excerpt of the book to get you started.

I’m currently reading Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson so I hope to share another review of sorts in the next few weeks. For a bit of inspiration closer to home, check out READTHATCITY for a few local history recommendation and a new community of neighbors (The Greatest Book Club in America) who’ll be reading along with you in 2012.

19th century Maryland photographs from Photographicus Baltimorensis

Leo Beachy: The Cove, Garrett County, Maryland, photo courtesy Photographicus Baltimorensis

More tremendous photos, stereoviews, and cartes de visite from Baltimore and Maryland can be found on Photographicus Baltimorensis:

This blog is a product of my preoccupation with Baltimore’s many early professional photographers and the thousands of portraits they took of Baltimoreans between the 1860s and the early 1920s, when Kodak’s advances made amateur photography a viable mass diversion.

It is nice when private collectors share their passion in a way that allows for broader public participation.

Society for Historical Archaeology 2012: Interpreting the Past, Building a Future through Archaeology in Lafayette Square

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to present a paper at the Society for Historical Archaeology 2012 Annual Meeting about my work with Dr. Dave Gadsby on Civil War Archaeology in Lafayette Square. For more on Dave’s past work, check out Hampden Heritage — a blog about his archaeological research with Dr. Bob Chidester and other collaborators in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. Careful readers may notice some overlap with my paper for the American Studies Association meeting back in October. I re-used a few passages that I thought worked well in that paper but I think there is enough new material in this one to make it a novel piece.

Over the past two years with Baltimore Heritage, I’ve worked to connect historic preservation and neighborhood revitalization in the historic neighborhoods of West Baltimore. Baltimore Heritage is a historic preservation advocacy nonprofit established in 1960. We’re a small group, two and a half staff supported by membership and programs. My own position began in fall of 2009 with support from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, to focus on African American heritage city-wide, support matched by grants from the Baltimore Neighborhood Collaborative requiring us to focus our efforts in support transit-oriented community development in an area of West Baltimore proposed for as the location of a new east-west light rail route known as the Red Line.

As part of this broader effort, I worked this past summer with Dr. David Gadsby, Brandon Bies and a great group of volunteers from the Archaeological Society of Maryland to conduct an archeological investigation of Lafayette Barracks—a Civil War camp and hospital located within the boundaries of Lafayette Square park, at the heart of an area known as Old West Baltimore. West Baltimore is not necessarily an obvious place to conduct an archeological investigation or to build connections between heritage and neighborhood revitalization. I often encounter questions from both residents — and, perhaps even more often, people who live outside these neighborhoods — asking why we should bother with preserving or interpreting the history of neighborhoods and communities, whose struggles with abandonment, addiction, disinvestment and violence seem to overwhelm any other concerns? While I can’t put this question aside, I can continue with a perhaps more optimistic thought – how can our shared heritage be used to build better neighborhoods and better lives for West Baltimore residents? Further, what is the place of public archeology in this effort?

Though such efforts are often minimized in favor of the higher priority on “removing blight” or attracting investment into downtown (and always constrained by limited funds), preservation and archeology in Baltimore have an urgent responsibility to connect cultural heritage to diverse communities in ways that go beyond interpreting the past or even highlighting the origins of the city’s persistent inequalities, but to effectively empower residents in pursuit of neighborhood revitalization that respects their own histories. Our work with public archaeology in Lafayette Square began two years ago, when I first approached Dr. Gadsby to ask how we might be able to use archaeology to learn a bit more about the occupation of the park during the Civil War. My quick bar napkin sketch of the area must have been credible enough to convince Dave to come out on a site visit a few months later on a snowy January and then pass his enthusiasm along to Dr. Charles Hall from the Maryland Historical Trust a few months later. We applied for and received a Survey and Inventory grant from the Archaeological Society of Maryland in late 2010 and scheduled our investigation for mid-summer 2011.

The project felt all the more urgent in the context of the national and local commemoration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial that seemed ready to take the stories of the B&O Railroad, the Pratt Street Riot, and wealthy, Confederate-sympathizing spies in Mount Vernon as the only stories worth telling. Such choices have consequences for who participates in the interpretation of Baltimore’s history and where that interpretation takes place, likely excluding segregated black, low-income neighborhoods like Lafayette Square. Writer and Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates recently reflected on a similar point in a recent NPR interview on how African Americans have been excluded from the interpretation of the Civil War through Lost Cause mythologies. Coates remarked that, “one of the most depressing things [he] found,” was when a tour guide at the Gettysburg Battlefield park told him, “‘You can sit there for hours — and you can count on one hand the number of African-Americans that come into the battle park.’” In The Atlantic magazine, Coates describes how the “country’s battlefields are marked with the enduring evidence” of the “tireless efforts” by Confederate descendants to present their own story of the Civil War—a story that, despite their defeat in the conflict, erased their ancestors complicity with the system of slavery that Confederate troops had fought for and died trying to preserve. Here in Baltimore, the monuments to Confederacy are one of the city’s most visible daily reminders of the war. Just this past summer, the Maryland’s United Daughters of the Confederacy held a ceremony on Confederate Memorial Day at Baltimore’s Loudon Park Cemetery to honor the 600 Confederate veterans buried there. No memorial exists to honor the free blacks who built Fort No. 1 on West Baltimore Street to protect the city (and encampments like Lafayette Barracks) from Confederate attack. No annual ceremony is held to recognize the hundreds of enslaved men who enlisted in the U.S. Colored troops, mustering at Camp Birney in West Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park.

Lafayette Barracks was located in Lafayette Square Park from 1861 through 1865, housing up to 1,000 soldiers at a time, and was just one camp within a broader ring of fortifications, hospitals and encampments that fed and sheltered soldiers moving in and out of Baltimore during the war. Our initial documentary research, by myself and my colleague Lauren Schiszik, turned up encouraging references that opened a window on the daily life of 1860s West Baltimore—stories of escaped slaves from the Eastern Shore sheltered by Union troops at the camp, stories of violence between soldiers and residents, stories that we hoped might be made all the more visceral through the use of archaeology. Public archaeology built on our continued efforts to explore and interpret complex histories of segregation, urban renewal and civil rights in West Baltimore and provided the basis to expand the visibility of our organizing effort with the Friends of West Baltimore Squares—a new partnership-based West Baltimore organizing and outreach effort we started last spring.

The investigation began on Friday, July 8 with our group of Archaeological Society of Maryland volunteers establishing a grid to guide the location of shovel test pits and the metal detector survey. We started a few shovel test pits that afternoon and began the metal detector survey working along the grid. On Saturday, we expanded the number of shovel test pits, working from east to west along the southern edge of the park where we believed camp activities would have been focused. We also opened up the two units–small square excavations–along the western edge of the park. Finally, on Sunday we concluded the excavation with additional shovel test pits and completing both units.

We recovered a range of 20th and 19th century artifacts including several items that are clearly associated with the Civil War occupation of the park. These latter artifacts include tin buttons from the trousers or underwear of Union soldiers, a button from the dress jacket of a Maryland Union officer, and a small piece of lead shot. Other 19th century artifacts included a pipe stem, many pieces of ceramic, fragments of decorative cast-iron work, brick and coal. The presence of numerous cut or wrought-iron nails in the park is a clear indicator of the structures historically located in that area.

Over the long three day weekend, we had over 250 visitors to the site, including scores of neighborhood residents, local church members on Sunday, Baltimore Heritage members, and even the head of the Baltimore City Department of Planning. On Saturday alone, we had about 160 individuals participate in one of our five walking tours around the site and we gave away around 140 hotdogs to visitors and volunteers. We provided a range of interpretation including opportunities to talk with archeologists and volunteers, a 2005 outdoor exhibit produced by Baltimore Heritage on the social and architectural history of Lafayette Square, a temporary exhibit on the President Street Station set up by volunteers from the Baltimore Civil War Museum, and a brochure explaining the process of urban historical archaeology, the Civil War context of the site and the history of the community in the 20^th century.

We’ve had several subsequent opportunities to continue extending the discussion around Lafayette Barracks—offering a special tour to a group of young people from the nearby Macedonia Baptist Church during the excavation and following up with the same group to present a talk about the artifacts we recovered; a presentation on the investigation to the Department of Recreation and Parks Advisory Board; tabling at Lafayette Square Block Party just a month after the dig with a box of artifacts in hand; presenting to local Civil War enthusiasts through a lecture series at the nearby Mt. Clare House Museum; and starting the planning for a follow-up presentation in the community once we have completed processing and analyzing the artifacts.

We have also connected the investigation to a range of other projects where we’re seeking to engage African American audiences around the Civil War Sesquicentennial, including a walking tour about the history of Frederick Douglass in Fell’s Point and a lecture program on how the National Trust for Historic Preservation is working to expand and improve the interpretation of enslavement at historic sites around the country. In November, we organized a West Baltimore Civil War bike tour that connected visitors to encampments and significant historic places across the area with a role in the Civil War—Mt. Clare Mansion and Camp Carroll, the site of Lafayette Barracks, and the B&O Railroad Museum. This latter program had an additional advantage of building new relationships with local bike planners and advocates who are working to expand cycling infrastructure in West Baltimore communities.

This project was also an important accomplishment the Friends of West Baltimore Squares—a relatively new community organizing effort that we started in partnership with the Parks & People Foundation and a number of community organizations around Lafayette Square, nearby Harlem Park, Franklin Square, and Union Square to encourage the use and recognition of parks and heritage as important assets for community development. Through events and outreach—barbeques, volunteer events at local gardens and walking tours (highlighting history and sustainable storm water management)—we’ve grown a contact list of nearly 400 residents and stakeholders that are interested in staying engaged in West Baltimore neighborhoods. The strong turnout by residents and visitors for our archaeological investigation is both a reflection of our continued work to engage area residents and an important building block in establishing our credibility as a partner who can create valuable opportunities for local residents to meet neighbors and discuss both the past and the future of their communities.

Through these experiences we’ve settled on a set of guiding principles for our outreach work that clearly mirror the values of activist public archeology laid out by Dr. Gadsby and other practitioners within the field.

• We are dedicated to a usable past that seeks out histories of development, struggle, and organizing that offer tools to better understand contemporary concerns.
• We embrace difficult stories, recognizing the importance of stories around enslavement, civil rights, racism and urban renewal to shaping the history of these neighborhoods and continuing to engage residents and visitors at a visceral level.
• We don’t work alone. Our research and interpretation seeks to engage residents and other stakeholders in the interpretation of local history and the development of tours.

Even with modest expectations, it is challenging to evaluate the true effectiveness of these or any efforts that seek to use heritage to support neighborhood revitalization. We’re two and a half staff, a small grant here and there, up against decades of disinvestment and economic inequality. However, I agree with Dave writing in Archaeology in Society, p.72 that the “primary obstacle” for public archeology (and historic preservation) “lies in the need to convince local residents of the relevance of history and heritage for their lives.” Ned Kaufman, a long time director of historic preservation for the Municipal Art Society of New York, offers his own support for this view in Place, Race, and Story: essays on the past and future of historic preservation, writing–

“History offers a way to establish a presence within the public space of political and cultural discourse–and without presence one can hardly hope for leverage. History can’t provide adequate housing, end discrimination or prevent redevelopment, but it can contribute to the debate that is necessary to achieving these goals.”

With patience and many new partnerships, I hope we are starting to make the case this is true.