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McCulloh from Lanvale to Presstman, Presstman, Madison, North, and a line along Jordan, form Madison's west, north, and east boundaries respectively. Its southern boundary zigzags clockwise from Dolphin and a point east of Eutaw Place along Dolphin. Hoffmann, Eutaw Place, Preston, Madison, and Lanvale. It has seven churches, five private institutional buildings, two schools, and one fire hall.
Blocks south of Laurens, today a mix of contemporary and late nineteenth-century residential architecture, and built on slight hills with a southeastern slope, are site of the first development within Madison or Mount Royal. Houses at the southern edge went up as 'suburbs' in the 1840's, homes built away from industrial and commercial streets. Three-storied, twenty-two by forty-eighl foot row homes, novel in a city of small row housing for workers, extended along Madison from Biddle. But a grand boulevard, Eutaw Place, launched greater and more elegant home construction from the 1850s to the 1880s. City developer Henry Tiffany acquired twenty-one acres of "Rose Hill." an estate near what is now the site of the Key Monument on Eutaw Place, and owned by John Gibson before the Civil War. Tiffany petitioned the city to erect the boulevard in 1854, as he began to market lots for rowhome construction. A 165-foot-wide street with 72-foot promenade in the middle, was built on the path of Gibson Street to Rose Hill. Eutaw Place commemorated the Battle of Eutaw Springs in South Carolina, a patriot victory in the Revolution in which John Eager Howard and the renowned Maryland Line participated. Howard was the eighteenth century owner of much of the land in the 1818 annex.
Tiffany donated land for the promenade with center gardens and fountains, the street a frank imitation of the Champs Elysee of Paris and a prototype for American landscaped parkways. As monuments were erected, it became the match of other well-known urban boulevards such as Commonwealth Avenue of Boston. Ornate iron railings surrounded five block-long parks built Lo Wilson by 1876 and maintained by home gardeners. Park statues near Mosher depict the seasons, elderly men facing four directions. The 'Children's Fountain," acquired from the Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia (1 876), was built between McMechen and Wilson. The Francis Scott Key Monument, three figures and a boat at Lanvale, went up in 1911.
Stately houses, having long vertical lines of neoclassical simplicity but with ornate facades, extended along Eutaw Place towilson by 1880, and Laurens by 1905. The hilltop setting of some gave an added sense of height. Homes at streetcorners and detached estate homes were more ornate with bigger grounds. Private clubs and hotels flourished, the Phoenix, an elegant facility with a largely German Jewish clientele at 1505 Eutaw Place, opening about 1890. The Altamount Hotel at Eutaw and Lanvale, leveled by Urban Renewal in the late 1960s, served a clientage for fox hunts and Pimlico race meets. ltalianate houses, with simple lines but decorative cornices, extended up Madison Avenue in the 1870s and 1880s. Rear alleys were generally erected with carriage houses, not servant housing.
The first generation of post-Civil War home owners included very wealthy merchants and manufacturers of the city, among them Hampden textile mill owner William E. Hooper, at Madison and Lafayette. Large enough for live-in servants, and built with vacant rear land rather than alley housing, these homes were living quarters to both 'Upstairs' families and 'Downstairs' servants. Front rooms were settings for much of the social life of the city elite, except during summer months. Festivities often involved large, extended families. Unmarried adult children often remained home in the middle class Victorian household, men serving apprenticeships or as clerk assistants in the rapidly expanding businesses of their fathers downtown. Daughters of the wealthy, rarely schooled beyond the private academy, formed an active cadre in volunteer women's organizations also nearby in downtown facilities. Matrons selected home furnishings, planned elaborate entertainment. and chose and supervised servant help.
In an era of extensive household labor, servants, butlers, carriage drivers, yardmen, nurses, cooks and chamber maids made up one-third to one-half the residents. They roomed in basements, rear rooms, or occasionally backyard frame buildings. Adult African-American men drove carriages and waited on tables, helped by sons who maintained rear-yard stables. Black women cooked, laundered, and tended infants. White help, mostly young Irish, and occasionally German, girls-some no older than their mid or early teens cleaned and polished. (Four floors of mirrors, glass chandeliers, and marble typically bedecked every house.) Families who lived nearby on alley blocks, or in city immigrant blocks near Mount Clare yards or East Baltimore's Oldtown assuaged some of the loneliness of servant life in isolated, quiet urban mansions.
Alleys hidden from the main streets were as bustling as Eutaw Place was placid. Street policemen or Irish and African-American draymen, often brothers or family friends of domestic workers, traveled side and back streets. Errands or shopping drew workers to the outside world and were excuses to linger at markets or gossip on back stoops. Sundays were the servants' time away from work to attend church nearby or spend afternoons with family.
An exodus of the wealthy to new suburbs began in the 1880s, prompting the sale of large town houses to professional men. journalists. lawyers, and especially doctors. Close to east-west streetcar lines which criss-crossed the City, the 900 to 1200 blocks of Madison became known as "Doctor's Row," a prestigious office location. So many new streetcar lines crisscrossed north-south thoroughfares that offices there were accessible to the entire city. First floors were divided into waiting and examining rooms and offices. Top floors of houses on the Row and nearby were converted into spare rooms to rent, especially to students. Woodrow Wilson lived at 1210 Eutaw while a graduate student at Johns Hopkins. Blocks also became the locale of a tiny women's community, young, mostly single women in the professions who spearheaded movements for social reform and turn-of-the-century feminism in Baltimore. M. Carey Thomas, the controversial president of Bryn Mawr College. lived at Madison Avenue and Lanvale Streets, and in the 1880s raised money for the newly opened Johns Hopkins Medical School with the proviso that it enroll female students. Pioneer physician sisters Cora and Flora Brewster kept offices on "Doctor's Row."
A section of Eutaw Place to North was built with a wide carriage path, footways. and grassy plots in 1874. Encouraged by the prestige of Madison as gateway to Druid Hill Park, and by the extension of Eutaw Place, row houses spread over every Madison block north of Laurens between 1875 and 1905. Named the city's seventh historical preservation district in 1977, and sometimes called Madison Park, blocks north of Laurens, with Reservoir Hill blocks between North and Druid Hill Park, encompass Baltimore's grandest urban residential architecture. On Madison, straight-lined Italianate dwellings in the 1800 block yield to palatial structures northward. Eutaw Place homes have the uniformity of scale characteristic of row blocks, bulwith streetfrontfacades individualized home to home. Second Empire houses with mansard roofs were built in a group near Madison and Bloom, later called the Kenilworth Apartments, and at six locations beginning at house number 1912 and moving northward. Neo-Georgian brickwork was subsequently superimposed, affording an appearance of stately orderliness. Houses with facades of Queen Anne-Aesthetic and Romanesque styles were built in the 1900 and 2000 blocks of Madison. The former have an asymmetrical design with ornamentation in cut glass, terra cotta, and stone. Roughhewn stone facings and large rounded arches characterize Romanesque surfaces. Stylized windows of careful workmanship, broad steps and decorative iron railings, door and window arches thatmatch, and touches of brownstone and marble, recur on both Madison and Eutaw Place.
Families of German Jewish descent claimed the northern section of Madison as home before World War 1, five synagogues being located within it and close by between 1893 and 1903. The first residents immigrated from downtown areas just as newly immigrating Russian Jews began to populate Jonestown and East Baltimore, home to the first generations of German Jews early in the century. These blocks became 'Uptown' in the larger Jewish community, a center of ethnic leadership and a symbol of success. The Hutzler, Fried, Friedenwald, Levy, Moses, and Sonneborn families, headed by department store magnate,. garment manufacturers, and civic leaders, built and owned houses. Spacious interiors, with formal as well as "family" parlors and multiple stairways, provided families luxury and live-in servants work. Elegant carriages seen in Druid Hill Park on Sundays were identified as from the neighborhood. The blocks were known to be quiet in summer when whole families-with butlers, maids, and coach and stable men migrated to country homes in Baltimore County.
The automobile transformed Madison after World War I, professional men following their clients to new suburbs, homes converted into rooming houses and flats, and churches and institutional buildings sold to African-American congregations. Blocks became burgeoning eastward extension of communities along Pennsylvania Avenue. For flat dwellers, the rented space was often roomier, streets less crowded than the narrow old blocks south and westward. In streetcar and later in bus and auto eras, institutional facilities were accessible to, and drew members beyond, the neighborhood.
African-American families acquired housing in northern blocks after World War I; many were headed by men of community status, notably butlers, caterers, head servants, and supervisors in upper-class clubs, hotels. and estates. Others were newspaper editors, educators, and clergy. Carved into flats during World War II, many houses reverted to individual ownership in the 1970s.
City Temple of Baltimore's congregation (Baptist) organized around first pastor William Payne to form a city ministry. It acquired Eutaw Place Baptist, a spiraling Gothic whitestone at Dolphin and Eutaw Place, in 1969. The edifice was designed in the late 1860s by Thomas Walter, architect for the wings and dome of the United States Capitol.
The three-storied, red-brick Booker T. Washington Junior High (Western High until 1931), at McCulloh and Lafayette, was designed by architect Alfred Mason in 1895 and heavily ornamented with stone and brick. An unusual bell-shaped dome caps one of two large towers.
The four-pillared Douglass Memorial, once Madison Avenue Methodist Episcopal and built on a lot donated by Henry Tiffany, has been an active community institution sirce the 1920s. It pioneered non-profit. community home rehabilitation in the 1970s, acquiring twelve vacant three- and four-story row homes on 1300 Madison and converting them into apartments with common yard areas for longtime residents.
The elegant Marlborough Apartments (1700 Eutaw Place), erected in 1904 on the location of a nineteenth-century mansion, the Popelein mansion. closed in 1970. Claribel and Etta Cone, friends of Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude and Leo Stein, once housed their collection of twentieth century art there. The Marlborough re-opened in 1977, with rehabilitated living units for the elderly, funded by Federal grants.
Allowed by Urban Renewal agencies either to restore or build institutional buildings on Eutaw Place sites north of Mosher Street, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers put up a two-story gray brick and limestone headquarters on the site of the old Phoenix Club in 1963. School 11, Eutaw-Marshburn, south of Wilson, was completed in 1970. Payne Memorial AME, a Sandtown congregation formed in 1883 and named for a denominational bishop, built a contemporary brick church with yard in 1988. It replaced the facility built by the congregation in 1927 on the site of St. John's Independent Methodist Church.
Berea Seventh Day Adventist Church acquired the Madison Avenue Temple, Madison and Robert, in 1951. The Lloyd Street congregation of East Baltimore had put up the temple sixty years before. Red and brown tiles on a dome-shaped roof contrast with the lightness of granite and decorative carvings of sandstone. With huge rounded arches and massive oak doors, and a sanctuary capable of seating one thousand, the building dominates two rows of Madison Avenue.
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