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.
The Bolton Swim and Tennis Club is turning 50 in 2024. This is part of the history of the club, how it was founded, how it struggled, and how it grew to its current size. It is based on interviews with club members, former and current, on newspaper stories and on club records.
Look up and down the stretch of Eutaw Place that forms Bolton Hill’s southeastern boundary today and you’ll still see gorgeous old brick and brownstone mansions – mostly well-kept and owner-occupied. Many of the city’s most prominent and wealthy professional and mercantile families once resided in the houses along the 1300 to 1800 blocks, from not long after the Civil War until the early 20th Century, when they moved out to Roland Park and beyond
There are only a handful of gazebos scattered about Greater Baltimore. One of the older ones is on Linden Avenue, just south of Sumpter Park. But how did it come to be located smack dab in the middle of the brick roadway, blocked off to through traffic? Your intrepid reporter found the answer in Fells Point.
Long before the famous Ripkins, Eddie Murray or Frank Robinson, the toast of professional baseball in Baltimore was a man called Foxy Ned Hanlon who lived in Bolton Hill. Now Tom Delise, a longtime English teacher who lives in the neighborhood, has written a biography, Foxy Ned Hanlon: The Baseball Life of a Hall of Fame Manager, co-authored with Jay Seaborg, a retired history teacher and lifelong baseball fan in Mt. Airy.
For as long as anyone remembers, those graceful park strips that separate the east and west roadways along Park Avenue have just been called the Park Avenue medians or parks. But local historian Fred Shoken has uncovered new information…
Baltimore’s newest arts and education hub is getting ready to open its doors, a big addition to the neighborhood.
Under the auspices of BHCA, planning is advancing for one of the city’s more enduring neighborhood street parties, Bolton Hill’s Festival on the Hill on Saturday Oct. 8 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.
