While visiting a former John Street neighbor, Barbara White, recently at Edenwald in Towson, neighborhood historian Kevin Cross saw her 1893 copy of Artwork of Baltimore, a volume of 19th century photos published by The W.H. Parish Publishing Co., of Chicago.
Kevin later searched for a copy but couldn’t find one. Eventually, from a rare books dealer in Germany, he located a serialized 1899 edition of the same work, then published in 12 slim volumes by The Gravure Illustration Co. A 2024 article by photography historian Steven F. Joseph explained that the series was “initiated by the W.H. Parish Publishing Co. and continued under its successor the Gravure Illustration Co.”
These series were published for many cities. In Baltimore, they were marketed in part through ads in the Sun:
July 13, 1893 advertisement for an edition of Parish Publishing’s Art Work of Baltimore.
April 10, 1895 ad soliciting sales people to market copies of Art Work of Baltimore.
But no copy of the edition for Baltimore was digitized and available online. Among the photos were Bolton Hill scenes not available elsewhere. The publisher selected photos of Eutaw Place (including the Centennial Fountain), Mt. Royal Avenue, Park Place and Mt. Royal Terrace, among others, to show off the city.
To be able to share this collection with neighbors, Kevin worked with John Loggins to get the photos and descriptive text scanned, edited and put into digital formats. The books are now available in BHCA’s Virtual Reading Room in two versions: a complete version has every page as they originally appeared, https://boltonhillmd.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1899-Art-Work-of-Baltimore-all-12-parts.pdf, and then this version, https://boltonhillmd.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/1899-Text-Pages-Only-Art-Work-of-Baltimore.pdf, contains just the text-only pages, which spanned all 12 volumes.
While those photos were being digitized, BHCA President Lee Tawney invited Kevin to drop by his house to see an album of old Bolton Hill photos and clippings belonging to Brett Naylor. Naylor’s ancestors once owned a massive warehouse, the Monumental Storage & Rug Cleaners, on property about where Bolton Hill Swim & Tennis is today. The warehouse can be seen in a photo from an article that Kevin wrote for the September 2025 Bolton Hill Bulletin.
Talking over the scrapbook with Lee and Brett, it was concluded that the re-routing of the 1100 block of Park Avenue during “Urban Renewal” probably brought about the end of Monumental Storage at that location.
The Naylor family lived on Park Place back then next to Strawbridge Church (now Strawbridge Apartments). Brett didn’t grow up in Bolton Hill but moved to a house in the 1500 block of Park Ave. in 2003 and met Bernard Kerns, who previously resided at 1622 Park Ave. Kerns gave Brett Naylor photos that had been taken of the interior of the Naylor house years prior, before its historic detail was altered by a developer who may have intended to market the property as a 13-bedroom rooming house (not permitted use).
Naylor’s papers and photos were donated to the BHCA’s archived papers held at the University of Baltimore, where Aiden Faust and Thomas Dettling at the Archives scanned them so they could be shared here. For comparison, a video showing the current interior can be seen at this link.
Thanks to Barbara White, Brett Naylor and Lee Tawney for putting these photos on our radar, and to UB archives’ staff for their help.
