Upton West is a fifteen minute walk from Baltimore's Inner
Harbor, University of Maryland Medical System, and downtown Baltimore's shops and markets; including the famous Lexington Market. The Avenue Market, a market for great produce and shopping is only a short walk on Pennsylvania Avenue. On Friday nights, the Avenue Market is the place to enjoy good food and great local jazz talent. Upton has four tennis courts, a baseball diamond and basketball courts sprinkled throughout the area.
Gardens of Hope: A four block urban farming project. This urban farming project includes a butterfly garden for the community children and plots for all neighbors and their families. We utilize this garden to educate community residents on healthy activities. Last year we harvested string beans, eggplants, peppers, herbs, swiss chard, collard greens and even sweet potatoes.
Royal Theatre Monument: The Pennsylvania Avenue Committee, under the leadership of George and Stephanie Gilliam has created a tribute to the great Royal Theatre, once a cultural focus of the Pennsylvania avenue corridor. This monument is expected to be constructed on the corner of Pennsylvania and West Lafayette avenues. We anticipate this monument to be one of Baltimore's greatest tourist attractions.
Upton is one of ten featured Baltimore Main Streets, each of which maintains an organization that collaborates with the city to strengthen and improve these designated commercial districts. The National Trust for Historic Preservation established the National Main Street Center in 1980 to assist with the revitalization of historic downtowns. Historic Pennsylvania Ave., sponsored by thePennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative, is a commercial corridor that has a special place in Baltimore's history, where music greats such as Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway performed in landmark theatres and clubs. It is also home to the Avenue Market. More detail about the Baltimore Main Streets programs can be found at www.baltimoremainstreets.com.
Thurgood Marshall House: 1632 Division Street
Henry Highland Garrett Park
David Family YMCA
Bethel AME Church
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Shaped like a Christmas tree, Upton has zigzag boundaries which extend clockwise from Dolphin and Pennsylvania along Pennsylvania, Preston, -Druid Hill, Biddle, Argyle, Hoffman, Myrtle, Harlem, Brune, George, Fremont, Bloom, Division, Lafayette, McCulloh, and Dolphin. It takes its name from an extant Greek Revival country house on a Lanvale Street hilltop, built before the Civil War. Its original ornate iron work and brick walls still intact, Upton was once the property of United States Senator David Stewart, a wealthy Baltimore lawyer and vice president of St. John's College during the Civil War. Stewart's son, Charles Morton Stewart, owned a fleet of Baltimore clipper ships that could be seen from the upper veranda of the mansion. It has housed a school for special education since 1958.
Nine blocks of street space along the Bottom, developed before the Civil War when housing went up in McCulloh Homes, became a residential section for African Americans in the 1890s, along with neighborhoods to the east and south. They formed the most expansive, densely populated African American section of the city. Fifty-four blocks north of Dolphin and Argyle streets which mark the beginning of a northwestern upgrade were developed out of the Upton and Chatsworth estates. Chatsworth was the eighteenth-century property of Anne Arundel County physician George Walker acquired in 1715. During the Revolution, wealthy city rope manufacturer William Lux once hosted delegates to the Second Continental Congress there.
A monument to African American artistic achievement, Avenue establishments nevertheless carried costs. Segregation confined both the "respectable" and humble folk to housing close by, and the residential covenants widely attached to new housing in the 1920s and 1930s, only reinforced this confinement. Consequently, the Avenue's heavy drinking, loud noises, and exotic temptations were only steps away; that the church-going elderly and peddlers of "hot" goods were housed in the same blocks encouraged parents to be solicitous and the young to experiment. Cab Calloway recalled an Upton childhood:
"One year I was spending three or four hours in church every Sunday, plus Bible classes during the week. Bible school every day during the summer, and singing in the junior choir, and the next I was part of a gang of guys who were basically young hustlers.... I guess I grew up quickly... On the one hand, my family and my music teachers, whom I loved and respected, were rather puritanical people: churchgoing, middle class, strivers. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my time in that rough and raucous Baltimore Negro night life with loud music, heavy drinking, and the kind of moral standards... that my parents looked down on. I managed pretty well in both."
Organized by members of Union Baptist in 1874, Macedonia Baptist was first housed in a stable loft on Vincent near Saratoga and in two separate small churches at Saratoga and Gilmore streets. In 1925, a congregation of over one thousand purchased the graystone on a hill at Fremont and Lafayette. The building's large gallery and ceiling thought to be one of the highest in the city lent it a sense of grandeur.
Newer denominations in older facilities are represented by the Spirit of Truth Church of God in Christ, which refurbished the Enoch Pratt branch at Pitcher and Fremont in 1974: new church architecture by Providence Baptist, Pennsylvania AME, and Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic. Founded in 1928 at Edmondson and Fremont, Providence built one of the city's few solar-heated edifices, a 500-seat brick sanctuary in 1976. Rooftop glass panels caught the sun and collected heat then blown through rock bins. Designed with tower by local architect Peter Powell, it incorporated stained glass from the older church and was built on Lafayette, next to the old Diane theater used by the church as a service building. Pennsylvania AME Zion's new building went up in 1977; the new Immaculate Conception was built of white stucco in curved forms designed by Ferdinand Kelly in 1972.
More than elsewhere, church congregations in Upton promoted the black consciousness movements of the 1960s and 1970s. New Shiloh, set up in 1902 on George and occupying a stately Lanvale Street edifice since 1926, acquired fame for revival and gospel tent services, as well as mass baptisms at Druid Hill Park Lake until the 1970s. Biblical murals were then replaced with "Pilgrimage, in Word, Song, and Prayer," an elaborate mural which depicted the separation of American slave families, singing bonds people, and migration to the North. Bethel kept alive a Pan-African movement, hosting African ambassadors, sponsoring educational programs, and agitating against South African apartheid.
Other institutions and a landmark monument likewise mirror a century of Baltimore African American heritage. Three schools, Samuel Coleridge- Taylor, Joseph Lockerman, and Furman Templeton, are named for a composer of European-African descent whose works have been widely sung in Baltimore, a prominent educator, and civic leader, respectively. East Baltimore-born "Lady Day," Billie Holiday, is commemorated with an eight- and-one-half foot bronze statue, arms characteristically outstretched toward an audience, sculpted by James Earl Reid, in a city mini-park at Lafayette and Pennsylvania. It was built footsteps from the clubs and theaters where haunting melodies and an unusual vocal stylization made her a legend. Notable residents of Upton include Thurgood Marshall, Furman Templeton, Judge Harry Cole and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt. L Schmoke.
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