For Bolton Hill, History Is Up Close and Personal
By Frank R. Shivers Jr. 

I'm busy updating my 1978 illustrated history, Bolton Hill: Baltimore's Classic. It tells an important urban story about a rich Victorian past and what some may view as a strikingly heroic last 75 years. About the last 50 years I can write with the confidence of a veteran. For that much of my now 79 years I have lived in the same Bolton Street house. 

Most recently I have led a pro bono group in placing plaques on Bolton Hill houses where past luminaries lived and worked (see photo above). In this project I'm copying London. For nearly 140 years London's street scapes have been adorned with blue ceramic discs affixed where great men and women have lived and worked. "London residences of the ornaments of our history could not but be precious to all thinking Englishmen," said a member of Parliament. 

"Plaques not only honor the great figures who have helped to shape today's world." say the English Heritage sponsors. "They also draw attention to buildings with special associations, ones that forge a link between our environment and the day-to-day 
physical surroundings of famous figures of the past." 

Reading blue plaques on Bolton Hill, as in London, reminds us that great work often takes place in comparatively modest surroundings, and our appreciation of great figures of the past is enriched. Like London's, Bolton Hill's blue plaques honor achievers of national standing. They chose to live in this Baltimore neighborhood amidst diversity of a special kind. And their memorial plaques bring distinction to the place: 

• Gen. Robert E. Lee's aide-de-camp in the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
• Dr. Claribel and Etta Cone, early collectors of modern art now in the Cone Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
• Pioneering physicians of Johns Hopkins Medical School such as surgeon William S. Halsted and gynecologist Howard A. Kelly.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby.
• John Waters, author and film director/producer.
• Edith Hamilton, classicist author of The Greek Way.
• Drs. Alice Hamilton, pioneer in industrial medicine, and Jesse Lazear, medical martyr who fatally proved that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever.
• The Morley brothers--Christopher (author), Frank (author and cofounder of publishing house Faber & Faber), and Felix (president of Hamilton College, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The Washington Post).
• William H. Howell, discoverer of the anticoagulant heparin.
• Gertrude Stein, innovative stylist in literature and early promoter of Picasso's and Matisse's art.
• Jacob Epstein, art collector, philanthropist, inaugurator of matching grants for charities. 
  
  

Such luminaries make it easy to romanticize Bolton Hill. For some the neighborhood is a state of mind as much as a patch of 150-year-old housing stock near downtown. Past images lie just below the surface where residents struggle with urgent urban issues. Since 1914, leaders have fought for the district's survival with iron fists sheathed in kid gloves. They became notorious in the 1960s and '70s for brazen tactics. They rallied at City Hall and in the State House. They even convinced each other that the surgery of federal urban renewal could save the patient. 

Others prevailed on the Sunpapers to picture handsome streets peopled with artists and bankers, matrons and eccentrics, block fairs and garden tours. Young newcomers bought houses and raised their families. They too acquired the peculiar mindset of Bolton Hill, that here was a special community. It was so special as to become the first Baltimore City-designated historic district, and the first in the city to be nationally recognized as well. This was in 1973, with the threat of a bulldozing for a connector road from I-83 to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.  

What was threatened was the unity of a carefully stitched patchwork quilt. Its squares show a good deal of green because shade trees outline 24 blocks of red houses, and nine parks punctuate the whole. The quilt stretches over 170 acres and covers two hills. North Avenue binds the north, Eutaw Place the west and Mount Royal Avenue the east. The southern hem dips down to Howard Street, the Fifth Regiment Armory and Mount Royal Station. 

History gives these blocks their cachet. The place had tone from the beginning. Development began with a Tiffany. An offshoot of the famous family bought part of the country estate Rose Hill and in 1854 laid out a grand boulevard on the European model. Eutaw Place attracted the well-heeled with center garden squares and fountains. Side streets filled with row houses, in the Baltimore model. Later, garden squares on Park Avenue added lungs. At the end of the 19th Century, median gardens along Mount Royal made a green ribbon connecting Mt. Vernon to Druid Hill Park. 

In the early 20th Century, Bolton Hill took on a Bohemian air, with newspaper writers, artists, musicians, authors and professors. Some came for cheap rents on third-floor or basement apartments. It didn't hurt that the Hill offered about the same walkable access that closer-in Mt. Vernon did to the city's cultural institutions, from its own Maryland Institute of Art to the Peabody Conservatory or Enoch Pratt Free Library. 

This spring's first Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage is to Bolton Hill, 10AM to 5 PM on April 24. Tickets are $25. 410.821.6933, mhgp@aol.com or see www.mhgp.org.