Bolton Hill takes its name from an estate, "Bolton" itself named for an English property called "Bolton-le-Moors." George Grundy, a Baltimore merchant who emigrated from England, built the white-pillared, three-storied landmark soon after the Revolution. It sat at the foot of Bolton until 1900, on the site of the Fifth Regimental Armory. Bolton Street was laid out from its front entryway in 1848.

North Avenue, a path west and parallel to the Jones Falls Expressway, Howard, Dolphin, and a line just east of Eutaw Place along Jordan, Jordan Street Green, and a northwest extension of Jordan form boundaries to Bolton Hill. Built atop hills that slope gently toward the central city, edifices sit one hundred feet above downtown and the port. The neighborhood has one shopping center nestled among tree-lined residential blocks (on McMechen), three corner stores and commercial establishments along one side of Mount Royal and the eastern end of North, nine institutional buildings, three urban parks, and no industry. Institutions are interspersed among blocks of row houses, eight to fifteen to a street side.

Except for new town houses along Dolphin Lane, homes in eastern blocks date from 1850 to 1900. Less ornate than Eutaw Place rows, or the elegant architecture along Mount Vernon Place also built after the Civil War, residences east of Park nevertheless had distinctive qualities in high demand by the city's affluent. Streetfront facades set them apart. Along Mount Royal, stone sills outlined windows, and a liberal use of brownstone facade, or massive gray stone at the base, suggested very grand interiors. On other blocks expensive iron fencing and gateways, and patches of lawn rare for nineteenth-century rowhouses, defined the homes as exceptional.

A stream, known variously as the Great Glade, Spicer's Run, and Frick's Run, ran along McMechen and emptied into Rutter's Run at least until the Civil War. Rutter's Run flowed into the Jones Falls. Streets were laid out in a northwestern grid pattern to the Reisterstown Turnpike (Pennsylvania Avenue) and were probably set to run parallel and perpendicular to the turnpike. They were extended to North Avenue by 1870, many named for estate and mill owners or public heroes. Rutter and Lanvale acquired names from two nineteenth-century operators of mills along the Falls. Lafayette Street derives from the French hero of the American Revolution, and John probably from John Eager Howard, Revolutionary War officer and former governor, and once owner of a vast estate west of Howard Street.

First development in east Bolton Hill spread along the blocks west of John, near farms, mill workers' housing, and outdoor, somewhat dirty, businesses. Row and alley houses lined north-south streets and Lanvale. South of Townsend (Lafayette) homes edged the Lanvale Farm located just east of John, a country estate with a grand mansion house. Owned by James R. Partridge, it was farmed by tenants who exported garden produce to the city. Mill workers' shanties, a marble works, and a stone-hauling business ringed the farm. Johnny Jump-up Hill, a wild-flowered pasture land north of Townsend, lured children who roughhoused with 'Falls Roaders,' Irish waifs from the mills. House maids were known to gather on the hill for the ritual of spring carpet beating. Three stone churches were completed by l877 and horse-drawn trolley lines extended on Bolton and McMechen to a station and stables on North Avenue.

Development in the 1880s and 1890s, spurred by the opening of Mount Royal Avenue, obliterated traces of farmland and industry. Rows extended from Dolphin beyond McMechen and became known for quality city services. Homes were all connected to a city water main, blocks were cleaned by street scrapers and serviced by garbage cart drivers, and park ground was tended through private care paid for by residents. Trolleys bisected the neighborhood along John and Park. An uptown train station, Bolton Station, later replaced by Mount Royal station, sat nearby at Cathedral and Biddle. A private hospital, the Hospital for the Women of Maryland, opened at Lafayette and John in 1882. Servants' quarters, three- or four-room row houses, were built along Rutter Alley behind Mount Royal.

Height above the old city and port gave eastern residential blocks the sense of being a haven apart from Baltimore but nevertheless in control of it. The vista to the south was a reminder of the proximity of old Baltimore. Children could spot ship masts and billowing tall sails from third-story windows. Neighborhood legend holds that a bride once began her processional at Brown Memorial Church on Park as a nine gun salute sounded from a harbor meet. Two depressions, 1873 and 1893, and an exodus of first owners to the new (1888) annex, nevertheless changed Bolton Hill even as homes were being constructed. Setbacks forced a few entrepreneurs to convert homes to rooming houses. Clerks and craftsmen rented rooms next to prosperous businessmen's houses and commuted on streetcars. Blocks became the city's well-known home in exile to once prosperous former Confederates, planters, and military officers who had lost fortunes during the War. Charles Marshall, aide-de-camp to Robert E. Lee, and Harry Gilmor, the notorious Rebel raider in Baltimore County, lived on Lanvale. Thomas Dabney, once owner of 1000 acres and 500 slaves, lived with a daughter on John Street and took in boarders.

A cultural district of Baltimore, built from Mulberry to Mount Royal Station in turn-of-the-century years, remolded the social makeup of eastern Bolton Hill after 1900. Enoch Pratt Library opened on Mulberry in 1886, the Lyric Theatre was built near Cathedral in 1894, and the Maryland Institute of Art located on Mount Royal in 1906. Private schools surrounded residential blocks, Boys Latin next to Mount Royal Station on Brevard until 1960, Bryn Mawr for women on Preston until 1933, and Friends School at Park Avenue from 1899 to 1936. Blocks sat closer to cultural and educational institutions than any other nineteenth-century suburban neighborhood. Homes were divided into flats, and new tenants included male lawyers, journalists, artists, writers, and teachers and students in nearby private and public schools. The clusters of housing constituted a preferred neighborhood for generations of Johns Hopkins faculty and students who walked the North Avenue Bridge to the Homeland campus, less than one mile.

South of McMechen and west of Park and Bolton, in southwestern Bolton Hill, nineteenth-century row houses line street sides east of Mason; post 1960 town houses, apartments, and an apartment house sit on streets in the western half. The terrain has a north to south slope peaking at Mosher. Tiny front yards and ornate entry ways distinguish a few older houses; secluded green space laid out in small plots the new housing. The latter is notable for tall-windowed town houses overlooking shrubbery and yards enclosed with iron and brick gates. Park land surrounds the three twelve-storied buildings of Memorial Towers on McMechen.

Earliest development went up south of Mosher along Garden (later Linden) and the Bolton Street Trolley line. Elegant rows, some with carriage houses located on the alleys, were interspersed with individual estate homes set back from the new streets. East-west and north-south blocks to McMechen were finished by 1900. Streetcar lines crisscrossed blocks along Park, Linden, Dolphin, and McMechen. Housing was accessible both to Mount Clare yards and offices, and downtown businesses. The blocks were solidly residential except for a small hotel, the Forbes, near McMechen and Jordan, opened about 1900. The family of city notable James A. Gary, postmaster general of the United States during the William McKinley administration, occupied a brownstone estate house at Dolphin and Linden for many years.

Five blocks west of Park between Laurens and McMechen sit on a slight southward slope from Laurens. Homes along Linden Terrace and the 1600 block of Park Avenue, built near the turn of the century, reflect new tendencies to introduce greater daylight into interiors. Linden homes have first- and second-story bay windows; Park Avenue houses have concave, so-called 'swellfront' walls with windows which front on the street.

On the edge of the Bolton Street trolley line, north-south blocks built up in the 1880s, after development south and cast, and after the construction of a tunnel for the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad under Wilson Street during the 1870s. Row houses had the characteristic ornamentation of Mount Royal. Streetfront facades were decorative. entryways and windows employed elaborate designs of wrought iron, and interiors included as many as five marble and brick fireplaces. Rear lots that stretched to alleys barred any major residential or institutional construction on east-west streets, and guaranteed low population density. The city opened a suburban public school, #14 at Linden and Wilson, two churches were built along Park Avenue; and a synagogue. Har Sinai, was erected on Wilson. The two triangular swaths of acreage northwest of Laurens and northeast of Park above McMechen include real estate given over to contemporary housing, the fifteen-story Bolton North Apartments on McMechen, and two-to-five-room, three- or four-story garden apartments set back from the street along Robert and North (the latter now demolished to make way for new town homes). Three playing fields along North and Robert cover one-third of the acreage: three- and four-story nineteenth-century row houses. two corner shops. and a tiny business district at the eastern end of North Avenue another third. Undeveloped land here situated at the city's 1816 northern boundary was occupied by farms and institutions that used the Boundary Avenue egress before the streets of Bolton Hill were laid out after the Civil War.

Civil War fortifications once sat on Boundary near present-day Park. Thomas Kensett, local inventor of canning processes and owner of a city oyster-packing plant, held property for many years along Boundary. Mt. Hope, a tiny private college, was once located north of Bolton and Laurens. In 1844 the buildings were acquired by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity, who operated them as a hospital, Mount Hope Asylum (later Retreat), until the 1880s. Springs on the property provided water. An institution known as Baltimore Female College, the first college for women in the state, occupied new buildings on Park Avenue from 1874 to about 1890. A Methodist Episcopal school set up on St. Paul Street in 1848 for the "liberal education of young women," it was endowed by the state after 1860, and in 1868 was rechartered as a nondenominational institution.

Northern blocks lay beyond the terminus for horse trolleys on McMechen, but close to track laid soon after the Annexation of 1888 for electric lines to North Avenue and beyond. Linden and John lines extended north and west, as blocks developed with real estate to Druid Hill Park. Three-story and four-story row houses spread across every block in the 1880s and 1890s. Stylish terra cotta and stone carvings next to modern bay windows were used on Laurens and Park. Small interior parks were built by the city within blocks northwest of Linden and Laurens, and Bolton and Laurens, on land donated by developers. With street terraces on broad north-south thoroughfares, they formed a succession of patches of green from Eutaw Place to Mount Royal. The city erected a firehouse on North, east of Mount Royal, in 1901.

Artists and writers won Bolton Hill the reputation of 'Gin Belt,' Baltimore's Jazz Age Bohemian district in the 1920s, and brought the section a measure of fame in the 1930s. F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tender is the Night from a home shared with Zelda Fitzgerald on Park Avenue in the Thirties. Christopher Morley wrote Thorofare. a semi-autobiographical novel (1943) about growing up on Park Avenue.

"Georgetown" replaced "Gin Belt" as neighborhood appellation after World War II, Hill homes being among the first in the City subject to historic preservation and restoration. Home owners had created the Mount Royal Protective (later Improvement) Association in 1928 to stem the tide of suburban flight, home subdivision into flats, and absentee ownership. One of the city's oldest neighborhood associations, it actively promoted demolition projects after 1930, urging the leveling of property next to the Fifth Regimental Armory for more green space. But post-war urban renewal projects west and south converted the Association to the cause of preservation with rehabilitation. The Association sponsored house and garden tours to lure buyers who would inhabit the homes, formed a rehabilitation corporation to purchase properties and resell to live-in owners, lobbied to restrict neighboring subsidized housing projects, and agitated with the city for Victorian-style street lighting.

The charm and dignity of urban living in individual houses with small quaint urban parks was extolled. Exteriors were refurbished, and kitchens and plumbing modernized. Tiny plots of exterior space were set out as hidden retreats or formal gardens for small two-parent families and single professional men and women, as rigidly enforced zoning laws barred industry and stores. Alley properties, like those on 1300 Rutter Street, were reconstructed. Eastern blocks formed the core of the Bolton Hill Historical and Architectural Preservation district designated in 1967 and extending across Mount Royal and Madison neighborhoods. They became a site on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. The former enabled CHAP, the Baltimore City Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation formed in 1964, to review applications for construction, demolition, or substantial exterior structural alteration.

During World War II, accessible Bolton Hill streetcar lines lured both flat-dwellers displaced from housing south and west of Bolton Hill, and defense workers new to the City. Defense workers on Linden Avenue, many transplanted West Virginians who came as single workers or in whole families of workers, briefly won blocks west of Bolton the reputation as the city's "Little Appalachia." Men commuted to the East Baltimore shipyards. The opening of the Twenty-ninth Street bridge in 1937 placed the textile mills of Hampden and Woodberry in commuting distance for women. Taverns featuring country music nestled among homes carved into flats in blocks that brimmed with people. Stoops stayed crowded at night time spring through fall. The Eutaw Place terrace even formed a kind of popular neighborhood sleeping quarters on hot summer evenings.

Blocks in southwest Bolton Hill formed the southern section of so-called Project I in the early 1960s, the first development in the Mount Royal-Fremont Urban Renewal Area. Much of Linden south of McMechen was demolished for green space and residences. North of McMechen Urban Renewal left one single block of Linden Avenue unscathed, and, sometimes called Linden Terrace, it was renovated in the 1970s. Lots were lengthened and alleys closed. The street was closed off to private parking and a Victorian gazebo of brick and marble erected by the city, as thirty-rive houses were marketed to investors. The McMechen Street shopping center and a contemporary park on Laurens were formed from Project I. Blocks with egress on North Avenue were all initially projected to be leveled by Urban Renewal. but amendments to the plans, lobbied for by home owners, salvaged the eastern blocks. Three hundred low-rise units were built west of Bolton, now replaced by a new town home complex called Spicer's Run.

Within eastern blocks post-war home interiors attest to the mixed results of efforts to preserve an ethnically homogenous haven. a Victorian preserve between traffic and commercial properties east and south and contemporary residential property blocks north and west. Homes carved into flats continued to rent to students and workers. Refinished oaken doors bore triple bolts, and window ways protective iron grill work. Old and new institutional buildings blended subtly into tree-lined streets of residences, only church spires obtruding above.

The Beethoven Apartments, in the 1500 block of Park Avenue, were erected in the nineteenth century as Baltimore's first streetfront terrace, or group of houses constructed to appear as a single structure. Frank Frick, founder of the Lyric Theater and developer of streetcar lines, and a builder who was enamored of the style of English town houses, built the row of ten five-storied brownstones in the so-called Second Empire style. Elegant mansard roofs extended on several sides, ornate windows and cornices along the streetfront exterior. Several had double cellars. The project was once dubbed "Frick's Folly" by City investors who believed its location, north of urban development, would keep the houses from being sold. With City Hall, they remain Baltimore's only Second Empire public buildings.

Memorial Episcopal Church at Bolton and Lafayette was formed as a mission of Emmanuel Church and located near Park and Dolphin until a tiny structure, now the church nave, was begun in 1861. It was completed before the end of the Civil War in 1864. Named a memorial to Henry Van Dyke Johns and Charles Ridgely Howard, Emmanuel clergy, it is known for very simple ecclesiastical adornments and for paintings and wooden appointments more than stained glass. The south and north transepts were completed after 1900, and a chapel was added in the 1950s. Brown Memorial Church, named for Scottish-born George Brown, and spouse Isabella McLanahan, was built in 1869-70. A founder of Alexander Brown and Sons in 1811, Brown was reputedly one of the nation's twelve wealthiest financiers at his death in 1859. A broad gray edifice with vast Tiffany windows. detailed altar carvings, and a splendid organ, it was a gift of Brown's widow.

Strawbridge United Methodist Church, formed near the present-day Fifth Regimental Armory in 1836, moved to Park and Wilson in 1882, its new edifice's interior the shape of a Greek cross. Interior appointments commemorate Methodist evangelist Robert Strawbridge. The pulpit is made of wood from his eighteenth-century pulpit, the limb of a Maryland tree under which he allegedly preached, and a log from an early Methodist meeting house.

Corpus Christi, a Victorian Gothic edifice, was built at Mount Royal and Lafayette, 1886-1891, a donation of the children of Thomas Courtenay Jenkins and Louisa Carroll Jenkins. Designed by Patrick Charles Keely. renowned nineteenth-century architect of some 600 American churches, it is known for mosaics of Florentine glass and narrow nave windows of a style associated with English designer William Morris. A motif of pointed arches and ribbed vaults extends from the roof line throughout the church, Administered by Jesuit priests until 1976, the church was renovated in 1911 and again in the late 1970s.

The Confederate Memorial on Mount Royal near McMechen, donated by the Maryland Daughters of the Confederacy in 1903, commemorates Maryland soldiers and sailors who served the Confederacy. It is inscribed, "Glory Stands Bending Over Grief." The three and four-story graystone Friends Apartments at Park and Laurens was built by a Friends congregation as a meeting house sometime before 1896. Friends School, formed in rooms of a Lombard Street Meeting House in 1849, took over space here in 1899. Property was converted to apartments in 1974 and then to condominiums in 2007.

Built with contributions from the state and from philanthropists Andrew Carnegie and Michael Jenkins, the square-shaped Maryland Institute of Art building on Mount Royal Avenue dates from 1904-1907. Erected by local builder Henry Smith, it was designed by the New York architects Pell and Corbett, recipients of a Chapter of Architects of New York State award. It replaced the Market Street buildings of the Institute, destroyed by the Baltimore Great Fire of 1904. In recent years, significant modern architectural gems have been added to the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art -- the stunning frosted glass Brown Center and the Gateway Building to be opened in 2008.

The two- to three-storied Mount Royal Elementary and Middle School and Recreation Center buildings, distinguished by lighter brick than nineteenth century edifices, date from 1958 and serve neighborhoods north and west. The town houses of Lanvale Close, surrounding a central, landscaped courtyard, were built by the J. Jay Pecora firm and designed by Bolton Hill architects Barker, Courpas and Stauffer, for individual home owners. They displaced several thousand renters. A home owners tennis and swim club was set up on Dolphin Alley in the late 1960s.