In 1961, a group of children who played lacrosse and other games on Bolton Hill streets were part of a campaign to create a playground on city-owned property where W. Lanvale St. overlooks the Howard St. underpass at Rutter St., across from MICA. They called themselves “The John Street Park Club.”
One of the club leaders was 11-year-old David Smith, who with his parents and older and younger brothers lived at 1311 Park Ave., across from Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church. The Smiths and several other neighborhood children, with their parents looking on, staged what today would be called a a media event (with parental guidance) that was described in a Nov. 26, 1961 Baltimore Sun article recently unearthed by a neighborhood historian.
The children pulled weeds, raked leaves and planted bulbs while a Sun reporter took notes. The demonstration coincided with a letter from their families to city officials asking that the property be converted to a children’s playground with promised neighborhood support and maintenance.
That David D. Smith, who now lives in Baltimore County, in January became the owner of The Baltimore Sun and affiliated properties and is a sometimes-combative player in city politics. Now 75, Smith recalled growing up in Bolton Hill in a house that had belonged to his father’s father, stretching back to the 19th century. He lived in that house until he was 28 years old and returned some years later to explore re-purchasing it. He also is executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which operates nearly 200 TV stations and has its own network of news correspondents.
Visited at Sinclair’s Cockeysville headquarters, a casually dressed Smith reminisced about growing up in what he believed to be the best neighborhood in those days in the city. “It was idyllic, just wonderful,” he said. “Everybody knew everybody. We played stickball and circle lacrosse; we roamed the neighborhood like we owned it, riding our bicycles everywhere. I sometimes even (stupidly) would grab hold of a city bus and let it tow my bike down the street. We were the center of the universe. We just had a blast,” he recalled.
Smith’s mother gave birth to her children at Maryland Women’s Hospital on Lafayette Ave., now the Meyerhoff House for MICA students. Like their father and two uncles, the Smith boys attended Boys Latin School, then located on Brevard Street near downtown. David Smith left after 9th grade, completing high school at City College. He did not go to a university.
Smith’s father, Julian Sinclair Smith, came out of the military after World War II and studied engineering at Johns Hopkins University. In 1958, he opened a trade school, the Commercial Radio Institute, centered on electronics. David Smith studied there. His father also bought his first broadcast property, Baltimore classical station WFNN (now country music WPOC). He later started a UHF TV station, today’s Fox45, WBFF. David Smith helped create and manage that station and three others his father acquired, the foundation for Sinclair Broadcasting.
By acquiring the Sun in January, Smith returned the paper to local ownership after a 40-year odyssey through corporate media ownership that made the once nationally esteemed newspaper a pale shadow of its past.
“I tried to buy the paper three years earlier, but it didn’t work out,” Smith said. We spoke in a room on the top floor near his Sinclair office, shortly before election day. On the wall were framed quotes from Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and this from Plato: “One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
He spoke angrily about what he sees as today’s Baltimore: “Dangerously broken.” “Third world.” He wants the Sun to “try to tell the people what’s going on.” He said he has told Sun staff members. “Our purpose in life is not to support politicians. Our job is to tell readers what the facts are.” He said Sun reporters will begin drilling down, investigating public agencies that he says are layered with failure.
He was clear that, in his view, many Baltimore leaders are both corrupt and incompetent. He spoke with some admiration of former Mayor William Donald Shaefer and of current State’s Atty. Ivan Bates but had nothing good to say about the unsuccessful mayoral candidates he helped most recently: Thiru Vignarajah in 2020 and former Mayor Sheila Dixon in this year’s Democratic primary.
In 2022 he successfully put forward a city charter amendment to limit elected city officials to two four-year terms. This fall it was his proposal to reduce the size of the council from 14 to 8 members, arguing that the city had lost much of its population without any reduction in government. It failed. According to WYPR news, Smith spent $415,000 supporting the proposal. He also is bankrolling a slow-moving lawsuit against the city’s school system which, he says, corruptly claims to be educating students who never show up for classes.
So, what is his vision for the city he still professes to love? He didn’t answer the question directly. Perhaps it harkens back to his warm memories of Bolton Hill in the sixties, a nostalgia for what probably cannot be done on his terms: making Baltimore great again.
As for the playground campaign 63 years ago? Smith didn’t recall it. But in 2011, Debbie Healy, with her neighbor Valerie Olson, cleaned out the same ragged spot and planted a tree honoring Olson’s late husband. Healy eventually got permission from the city to create and maintain what she named Lanvale Triangle Park. With support from the Bolton Hill Garden Club, she planted and landscaped it, and now she waters and maintains a quiet pocket park overlooking the Howard Street underpass.
–Bill Hamilton
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