BCHS | History Room | Brief History

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Washington Monument Then and Now
— Cator Prints, Enoch Pratt Public Library

1966		Baltimore Orioles win the World Series in four games.
1968		Riots follow the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
1975		Pope Paul VI canonizes Mother Elizabeth Anne Seton.
1976		Tall ships from around the world sail into Inner Harbor for U.S. bicentennial and attract huge crowds.
1980		The Rouse Company's Harbor place opens.
1981		The National Aquarium at Baltimore opens.
1983		Baltimore Orioles win the World Series.
1985		Anne Tyler publishes the Accidental Tourist and wins Pulitzer Prize.
1986		Clarence "Du" Burns, president of the Baltimore City Council, becomes Baltimore's first African American mayor, succeeding William Donald Schaefer, who became governor of Maryland.
1987		Kurt Schmoke wins election as mayor--the city's first African American to be so honored.
1992		Oriole Park at Camden Yards opens.
1992		Baltimore and Washington, D.C., officially join as Washington-Baltimore Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area of six million, fourth largest metropolitan area.

The scrubbed-clean face of preservation and renewal in key places, 1960-1995

Abroad the Cold War's terrors are mitigated once by three English Nobel laureates discovering the structure of DNA. Graham Greene publishes A Burnt Out Case.

Renewal
Renewal of downtown began in 1958 with eighty-three acres of Charles Center. It gave Baltimore a New York look with a new hotel, parking, two theaters, apartments, shops, numerous offices. Then eighty-five more acres were revived all around the Inner Harbor. Today millions go there each year, partly for the series of concerts, shows, and festivals open to sky and water (and mostly free), and partly just to enjoy the sights and to people-watch.

Preservation
Much of Baltimore had been preserved. As late as the 1990s, most nineteenth-century streetscapes were still intact. Landmark structures like the Shot Tower and the Flag House had been cared for. Solid buildings like the B&O Mount Royal Station (it houses a library and studious for the Maryland Institute College of Art) have been recycled. Whole streetscapes have survived through "homesteading," a plan by which one buys a house shell for one dollar. "Shopsteading" has followed.

The city is the front office of civilization still, as H.L. Mencken said, but Baltimore's front office is changing.

Shivers, Frank R., Jr. Walking in Baltimore: An Intimate Guide to the Old City. pp. 1-17. © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press