Spring has arrived at Fitzgerald Park at Bolton and Wilson streets. Grass is growing, flowers are blooming, dog walkers congregate with mothers with strollers. Few remember when, before the park was developed in the 1970s to honor F. Scott Fitzgerald, there was a thriving Jewish synagogue, and more recently a Baptist church visited by Dr. Martin Luther King, at that site.
The bricks and gardens cover religious and social history dating back to the mid-19th century.Har Sinai Reform congregation. Local worshippers built a temple in 1893 that could seat 1000. Bolton Hill’s Barry Blumberg, a retired banker who lives with his wife, Barbara, on Bolton Street, attended weekly Bar Mitzvah lessons at that building in 1953. After a fire in 1974, perhaps arson, the Baptist church was abandoned.
Neighborhood historian Kevin Cross assembled this detailed chronology; additional photos can be found on the BHCA Instagram pages.
This month the Garden Club holds its annual Spring Plant and Shed Sale and silent auction on April 19 at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Park, on the corner of Bolton and Wilson streets. It’s a good time to recall the story of that lot. Its roots reach back to the mid-19th century, when Judge William Frick owned much of the land north of McMechen St.
That lot was vacant until acquired by Har Sinai Congregation in 1893, to build a new synagogue. Prior to that time Har Sinai – the oldest continuously Reform congregation in the United States, begun in 1842 – had been located downtown. In addition to being more liberal in terms of religious observance, Har Sinai had a progressive history in its social justice positions: an early rabbi there, David Einhorn, had to flee north shortly before the Civil War because of his abolitionist views.
To design its new synagogue on Bolton Street, the congregation engaged the architect Joseph Evans Sperry, who had recently designed Temple Oheb Shalom on Eutaw Place. The cost of the new building was about $100,000, plus about $4,000 for an organ built by Hook & Hastings Co., in Massachusetts, near Boston.
An 1894 article in the Baltimore Sun described the new building shortly before it opened:
It stands upon a lot 79×130 feet and is Romanesque in design. The exterior … is not so ornate as the other beautiful Hebrew temples, recently erected in Baltimore, but relies for its effectiveness upon a classic dignity almost severely plain in its simplicity. The principal feature is the front portico, with its three massive Doric columns and its two stone pillars, upon which are to be placed two large iron lamps. From the portico, five big oak doors lead into the temple, and above the three middle doors three arched windows look out upon the portico from a small gallery. The roof is slightly peaked and is topped off by a small cupola. The material of the exterior is Woodstock granite, which contrasts effectively with the dark red tiling used on the roof.
The interior was described in some detail too:
The interior of the building is one mass of white and old ivory, which is set off by the antique quartered oak, of which the pews are made, and the pale opalesque stained glass used in the four double windows on each side of the temple. … The ceiling is slightly arched and is paneled with more than one hundred small squares, with an ornate rosette in the center of each square. From the heart of each rosette there shone last night a glistening incandescent lamp, and around the walls and over the altar there were scores more of lights, the whole shining with startling brilliancy upon the white walls.
The 1894 article also described a staircase “descending to the basement, in which will be rooms for the trustees and for the Sabbath-school classes, a large assembly-room for the school, and a series of toilet-rooms,” and added: “Beneath the basement is a sub-cellar, with furnaces and bins and a water-motor to run the organ.” The depth of that basement would prove important later.
Har Sinai’s seating capacity was 1,000, and it must have been packed for the dedicatory service on September 28th, 1894. Even Mayor Ferdinand Latrobe was in attendance – albeit arriving late – and also in attendance were Hutzlers and Hollanders, among others.
The 1918 book History of Har Sinai Congregation by Rev. C.A. Rubenstein, M.A., includes the program for that dedication service. A playlist of the music from that service can be heard on YouTube at the link here, except a version of Naumberg’s Mah Tovu was not located on YouTube but can be heard on SoundCloud at the link here; it would have followed “Unfold, Ye Portals Everlasting,” and note that the program included pieces from Handel’s Messiah.
The Sun article the day after the dedicatory service included this note about a clever effect planned ahead for all that lighting in the interior:
The congregation acquired the former Maryland Country Club property at 6300 Park Heights Ave. in 1928. Then in 1957, according to a Sun article, “because so many of its members ha[d] moved outward from the neighborhood of the Bolton Street temple,” they began constructing their fourth synagogue, in northwest Baltimore near Pikesville.
Bolton Hill’s own Barry Blumberg recalls going to weekly Bar Mitzvah lessons out at the new building. But it was at Har Sinai on Bolton Street where Barry was Bar Mitzvahed, on a Saturday in June 1953, and he was among the last to do so there. That congregation relocated full-time to its new location in 1959. (Much later, in 2019 Har Sinai merged with Oheb Shalom, its old neighbor from the Mount Royal District.)
In May 1959, title to the Bolton Street property was transferred to the newly formed Cornerstone Baptist Church, led by Rev. I. Logan Kearse. That same month when Cornerstone acquired the property, Rev. Kearse’s close friend Dr. Martin Luther King spoke in “the Temple”:
Rev. Kearse was quite active in the civil rights movement in Maryland, organizing anti-segregation protests and sit-ins that even resulted in his own arrest. And, in 1964, Rev. Kearse was among those accompanying Dr. King to Norway when he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
A block north of Wilson Street, the Sangiamo family lived in the house at 1715 Bolton. Albert “Abby” Sangiamo was an artist and professor at MICA, and Irma worked part-time as a librarian at MICA. Past Google Street View images show the “S” tile Abby placed on the outer vestibule door, a gift from Eva Brann, a close family friend.
Around dinnertime on the evening of Jan. 8, 1969, their young son Dino (now an attorney in Baltimore and colleague of the author) was sent to his room for some long-forgotten infraction. From a window at the rear of the house, Dino saw smoke coming from the back of the Cornerstone / Har Sinai building, and he alerted his mother, who called the fire department. An article the next day noted, “the first alarm was sounded at 6.22 p.m.”; Irma might’ve been the first to report the fire.
The end-of-group house at number 1701 Bolton had an addition added to the rear since this c. 1901 Sanborn map, but the line of sight from the Sangiamo home to the back of Har Sinai / Cornerstone is still clear enough.
Sadly, the building was a complete loss. A later Sun article confirmed Dino’s recollections, that the fire “began in the basement or at ground level at the rear … . The flames then spread upward, reaching the cock walk – the open space between the pitched roof and the ceiling – and racing quickly along the full length of the church toward its Bolton street front.”
Given Rev. Kearse’s activism in those tumultuous times, it’s unsurprising that a Jan. 18, 1969, article in the Baltimore Afro-American indicated that arson investigators were looking into the fire, but the cause was unknown. In the same article Rev. Kearse commented that “the insurance is not adequate.”
Both Memorial Episcopal Church and Brown Memorial were among the many churches that reached out to offer aid to Cornerstone Baptist, offering their sanctuaries for the use of the congregation. In a Jan. 12, 1969, letter to the editor in the Afro-American, Rev. Kearse said they would be using the Masonic Temple on Eutaw Place at Lanvale St. for their meetings.
By a deed dated Oct. 17, 1972, Rev. Kearse transferred ownership of the lot to Baltimore City. A Sun article by Fred Rasmussen, from Dec. 16, 2000, says that after the fire, “the wreckage was plowed under, poured into the church’s former basement, and a park built on top of it.” Past Mt. Royal Improvement Association President J. Michael Flanigan recalls that subsequently, the park was “very little used because the ground was thought to be unstable,” being built over the wreckage piled into that sub-basement. Current BHCA president Lee Tawney recalls the uneven surface and some Brutalist architectural-style small pyramids built up in the park back then.
In 1975, the late Frank Shivers succeeded in getting the city’s park board to rename the lot for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had resided in Bolton Hill. According to Mr. Flanigan, some questioned back then why the park should be named for Fitzgerald, who resided down on Park Avenue. near Lanvale Street. But in his 2008 Bolton Hill book, Mr. Shivers notes that in addition to living at 1307 Park Ave., Fitzgerald “rented office space near the new park.” Research for this piece has not yet identified what address that office space might have been in, and clues from any readers would be welcomed.
While the Fitzgerald name was officially approved by the park board, no sign was placed at the park. “It was Fitzgerald Park, but no one knew it,” Shivers said in Rasmussen’s article. Finally, in the year 2000, funds were raised to improve the park and have the name carved into the pillars at the entrance.
Personal recollections from Barry & Barbara Blumberg, Dino Sangiamo, J. Michael Flanigan, Lee Tawney, and Merry Rogers were indispensable in researching and writing this piece, which was inspired by a talk given at a March meeting of the Bolton Hill Garden Club by Charlie Duff (who also provided some fact-checking). Former Bolton Hill resident Fred Shoken kindly helped locate the song Mah Tovu by Naumberg, as well as Evening Sun images of the burned-out building. Editorial guidance was provided by Sarah C. Ramirez Cross.
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