“Have you seen how bad the dip has gotten on Lafayette west of Park Avenue?” a friend emailed last week. “It kind of provides some de facto traffic calming.” This provoked reminiscence of the hurricane-like flooding of Bolton Hill after a sinkhole developed 47 years ago at the intersection near Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church.
If you spend time around Park Avenue north of Mosher Street, odds are good that you’re on land once owned by Judge William Frick. His country estate is labeled on the 1851 Plan of the city of Baltimore, situated near the top of what was then called Grundy Street (later Park Avenue), where the Friends School condos are now.
When one thinks today of Bolton Hill or describes it to a friend, it’s likely to reflect a bias for what the City of Baltimore website calls its strong Victorian-era, traditional row house character with relatively intact blocks of structures from the middle-to-late-19th Century. A few of those buildings date back to pre-Civil War times.
What’s the oldest house in Bolton Hill? Most sources will tell you it’s the cottage at the northwest corner of Lanvale and Bolton streets, but those claims may not have been entirely accurate.
This month we are lucky to have several new photos to share, showing Bolton Hill during its “urban renewal” period in the mid-20th century. R. Julian Roszel, Jr. was a president of one of the earlier iterations of the neighborhood association then — instrumental in getting the John Street Park created in 1955. Before the wrecking ball hit several blocks of houses, he had the forethought to grab his camera and snap photographs.
As I walked around Bolton Hill and read all the blue historical plaques on homes identifying former residents, I was motivated to do research on who had owned the house I live in at 1526 W Mount Royal Ave. before it was converted to apartments. Interesting tile work around the fireplaces got me curious as to what inspired a resident to select that design.
At an April get-together, a neighbor mentioned historic artifacts hiding in plain sight on a curb near the northeastern edge of the neighborhood. According to the preservation agency CHAP, the east side of Mt. Royal Avenue isn’t considered part of Bolton Hill; I don’t know what other neighborhood it would belong to. According to the official Live Baltimore neighborhoods map, it’s in-bounds, Bolton Hill proper. I went to investigate.
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.
Bolton Hill’s Eutaw Place has an important anniversary this month: it was on March 19, 1853, that Baltimore’s city council passed an ordinance authorizing the mayor to accept from Henry Tiffany the deed for land now in the 1200 and 1300 blocks of Eutaw Place, to create what was then to be called “Eutaw Square.”
Bolton Hill resident and amateur historian Kevin Cross started pulling at a string of newspaper searches, old books and other historical archives earlier this year, poking around for neighborhood history. As with sweaters, the unraveling string became longer. The result in 2025 will be a new, open section of the BHCA website devoted to stories conveying the history of Bolton Hill, its early residents and builders, parks and architecture and more.
