News

May 03, 2023

The Gritty History (and Gentrification) of Fells Point

THE OUTBREAK OF WAR IN 1812, a disconcerting letter from Capt. RichardMoon to

THE OUTBREAK OF WAR IN 1812, a disconcerting letter from Capt. RichardMoon to the Secretary of the Navy was reprinted in The Weekly Register, a Baltimore-basedmagazine among the most widely read of its era.

Referring to himself as the "[former] commander of the privateer Sarah Ann,"Moon reported his Baltimore-commissioned schooner had been captured. Worse,Moon wrote, the British claimed six members of his crew were, in fact, treasonoussubjects of the king and "are to be tried for their lives." Among those imprisoned wasGeorge Roberts, described as "a coloured man and seaman" and someone Moon knewto be born in the U.S., married, and living in Baltimore. Only following further correspondence between diplomats did the seamen escape execution.

After his release from a Jamaican prison, Roberts continued to fight the Britishon the high seas, signing on as a gunner aboard the Chasseur. Newly constructed inthe shipyard of Thomas Kemp at the corner of Washington and Aliceanna in FellsPoint, the topsail schooner quickly became the best-known of the swift Baltimoreclippers. In 1813, the Chasseur raided six British vessels, sending all but one up inflames when they were finished. The following year, its crew, including Roberts,divested another dozen and a half British merchant ships of their cargo, the spoilsshared among its captain, seamen, and shipowner. (During war, the differencebetween pirates and privateers depended upon one's perspective. Governments inneed of naval help sanctioned the often lucrative, if risky, seizure of its opponent'svessels by normally illegal means.)

The Chasseur, from which the popular Southeast Baltimore bar takes its name,also became famous for boldly proclaiming a single-handed blockade of the BritishIsles. In total, the Fells Point docks were home to 58 such privateering vessels,credited with the capture of more than 500 ships. The attempted British invasion ofthe Baltimore harbor in the fall of 1814 (think "Star-Spangled Banner") was in goodmeasure to rid the "nest of pirates" from Fells Point.

When the Chasseur returned and saluted Fort McHenry after the war's end, itscrew were hailed as heroes. The already legendary schooner was dubbed the "Prideof Baltimore." Its ship's captain, the renowned Thomas Boyle, who had lost menin battle and had been wounded himself, praised Roberts for displaying "the mostintrepid courage." Readjusting to civilian life as a free Black carpenter and laborer,the ex-privateer purchased a home for $150 on Ann Street in Fells Point. Such wasRoberts’ reputation, that over the ensuing decades, despite the horrific racism of the era, he marched in uniform alongside the city's prominent citizenson civic occasions. His 1861 obituaries—he lived to 95—recalledhis patriotism, "many hair-breath escapes," and desire to alwaysbe remembered as "one of the defenders of his native city shouldthe necessity have arrived [again] to take up arms in its defense."His "brave character," it was noted, was "adorned with amicable[and charitable] disposition," such that "news of death will causeheartfelt sorrow."

Roberts’ service was not unique, however. It's estimated 20percent of the War of 1812 privateers were African American. OtherBlack Americans, free and enslaved, worked in Fells Point's busyshipyards, building the vessels that undid the British navy and merchantfleet. (In a terrible irony, they were also forced to caulk shipsused in the foreign and domestic slave trade.)

It's no coincidence the Caulkers Association, one of the firstBlack trade unions in the U.S., was formed in Fells Point or that aBlack former ship's caulker named Isaac Myers founded the ChesapeakeMarine Railway and Dry Dock Company in Fells Point, acooperative that employed 300 workers at its peak. Nor is it a coincidencethat Frederick Douglass learned to read and write in FellsPoint and escaped slavery posing as a free Black sailor. The samemonth that Douglass escaped from Fells Point, 133 people of Africandescent were shipped from Baltimore to New Orleans for enslavementon Louisiana plantations.

Some 250 years ago this month, on the cusp of the AmericanRevolution, Baltimore City annexed both nearby Jonestown andFells Point, taking its early shape. But from its clipper ships andcompelling Black history to its yellow fever outbreaks and child labor horrors; from its boarding houses, brothels, andbars to its inflow of Polish immigrants and landmark"Stop the Road" battle; from its rebirth in the 1970s toits ongoing gentrification—the iconic waterfront neighborhoodwith its "Belgian block" cobblestone streetshas a gritty, colorful, complicated story all its own.

And let's not forget the tales of sailors gettingshanghaied from Fells Point pubs; or the tattooed,hard-drinking, blacksmith and ward boss George KonigSr., whose election-day street fights with the Know-Nothings in the 1850s were straight out of The Gangsof New York; and a certain bar where Edgar Allan Poe issaid to have had his last bender. Its narrow lanes andalleyway are filled with secrets and stories.

he hamlet that sprouted on the small,hook-shaped peninsula on the northwestbranch of the Patapsco River was on landpurchased by Quaker William Fell, whofollowed his brother Edward here from Lancashire,England. It's a bit confusing because all the male Fellsseem to be named either William or Edward, but it wasWilliam's son Edward, a colonel in Maryland's provincialarmy, who first laid out the budding town's streetsin 1763. The Fell family cemetery, awkwardly squeezedtoday between rowhouses on Shakespeare Street, containsthe remains of William Fell, his son, Edward Fell,and his son, William. (There was no Admiral Fell. The Admiral Fell Inn, it's been said, takes its name from an episodeabout a drunk admiral, not named Fell, stumbling intothe harbor—"the admiral fell in." Management at the innhas changed hands since it opened in 1985 and says thename is merely a play on words, but it's too good of a storynot to repeat.)

Edward Fell advertised his plan to sell plots of his landnear "Baltimore-Town, Maryland on a Point known by theName of Fell's-Point" a year earlier in the old MarylandGazette. Grammarians will note the apostrophe after thefamily name, which has dropped out of general use, but notwithout heated debate over the years. More importantly,it was not Col. Edward Fell who ultimately developed thewooded, 100-acre lot he inherited on the water and thesurrounding 3,000 acres he consolidated. He died at 33.Rather, it was his first cousin and wife, Ann Bond—once describedas "the Jim Rouse of her day"—who sold the plots.

Wealthy in her own right, Ann Bond Fell proved a shrewdbusinesswoman. She vigorously promoted Fells Point,which was competing with Baltimore Town for investment.She fended off gossipy attacks in the local broadsides andrumors of unhealthy water in Fells Point. She also struckup forward-thinking contracts, which stipulated that purchasedproperty would revert to her if not developed withintwo years. (The City of Baltimore might take a cue from Ms.Fell in its dealings with developers and slumlords.) She laterremarried a well-to-do county landowner, but not before shemade him sign a prenuptial agreement, ensuring her holdingswould be passed down to her children.

If it isn't obvious yet, the neighborhood street names—Ann, Bond, Fells, as well as Lancaster, Thames, Shakespeare,Aliceanna, Caroline, Bank, Gough, Wolfe, and Washington—date to this 1700s period, marking "The Point" asone of the oldest active waterfront communities in the country.Fleet Street, it's believed, pays homage to Capt. HenryFleet, a British Chesapeake Bay explorer. Other names have changed. Wilk Street, now Eastern Avenue, was known as "theCauseway"—a notorious stretch of "houses of ill-fame" frequentedby sailors. Market Street became Broadway, which since 1786 hasbeen home to one of the city's oldest public markets.

The names of Fells Point's lively alley streets have changed,too. Though not necessarily for the better. Strawberry Alley, hometo the Methodist church attended by Frederick Douglass as a youngman, became Dallas Street. (Douglass later returned and built fiverowhouses on the street, including one available on Airbnb, thatremain to this day.) Happy Alley became Durham Street, whichtoday is full of murals and mosaics celebrating the girlhood homethere of Billie Holiday. The alliterative Argyle and Apple Alleyswere renamed Regester and Bethel Streets.

The rebranding of the "alleys" to "streets" after the Civil Warmight be considered the first attempt at gentrification in Fells Point.

The leveling of two majority-Black alley streets—sections ofDallas and Spring, part of a "slum clearance" effort on the edge ofUpper Fells in the late 1930s—might be the second. They were demolishedto make room for white immigrant families—in what becamethe Perkins Homes housing project. Recently, the majority Black residents of Perkins Homes have been movedout and the low-rise Perkins buildings have beenknocked down in favor of a new mixed-use development,which is supposed to include a percentage ofhousing that is affordable for its former tenants.

emarkably, the streets of Fells Point, likemany in the earliest years of the city,were not formally segregated during itsso-called "golden era," which peakedwith the War of 1812 and lasted until the Civil War.(Baltimore's infamous housing segregation law,which stated that no Black resident could move ontoa block in which the majority of the residents werewhite and vice versa, came in 1910.) All seven of theresidential alleys in Fells Point had white and Blackhouseholds, as Mary Ellen Hayward, author of Baltimore'sAlley Houses, discovered when she examinedthe city's first directory to note "householders of color"in 1808. Eight of the larger streets, too, were at least somewhat integrated with Black caulkers, laborers,laundresses, blacksmiths, barbers, and theirchildren—a trend Hayward traces through subsequentdirectories. When Douglass, known as FrederickBailey as a boy, lived in Fells Point with theslave-owning Auld family, "a [nearby] German bakerhad a shop on the southwest corner of Aliceannaand Happy Alley," Hayward writes, "but there wasalso a ‘colored grocery’ on the same block."

Two of the oldest wooden homes standing inFells Point, at 612 and 614 Wolfe Street, becamehomes to Black caulkers in the 1840s and 1850s.All during these decades, as tobacco receded as aneconomic driver in Maryland, the free Black populationin Fells Point and Baltimore grew dramatically.

One of the more unlikely stories of the periodinvolves a French-speaking Black Cuban immigrantnamed Elizabeth Clarisse Lange, who is currentlyunder consideration by the Vatican for canonization.From 1818 to 1828, with fellow immigrantMarie Magdelaine Balas, she offered previously unavailablefree education to children of color out ofher Fells Point home. Later known as Mother MaryLange, she founded the first permanent African-American religious order of nuns, the Oblate Sisters of Providence,and the school that evolved into Saint Frances Academy in East Baltimore(and recently graduated the 2023 NCAA Women's BasketballTournament Most Outstanding Player, Angel Reese).

But even with the presence of Douglass, who, at about 12 yearsold, purchased his first book, The Columbian Orator, from NathanielKnight's bookstore on Thames Street—perhaps worth considerationas Baltimore's first radical bookshop—it is not correct to view FellsPoint through the lens of slavery and abolition, says local Black historianLou Fields.

"The proper lens is economic, it's about the building of Baltimore,and because the Inner Harbor is naturally shallow and FellsPoint has a deep water port, that's where life gets started," saysFields, who has been leading Douglass tours of Fells Point for 23years. "At that time, it was a maritime community. Everybody wasworking to make a dollar, a quarter, or whatever it was." He notesthat some of the first whites to come to Baltimore from Europe wereindentured servants: "The first Blacks who came to The Point, likethe first whites, came to supply a labor force to clear land, buildhouses, and build roads." Landowners found they were more suitedto the work than the Indigenous people—Baltimore is part of theancestral land of the Susquehannock and Piscataway tribes—sothey brought in more enslaved people from the Eastern Shore andSouthern Maryland.

"That said, Frederick Douglass’life changed dramatically becausehe was sent to Baltimore," continuesFields. "He might not have survivedotherwise. But once he's here,he also sees Black men, women, andchildren auctioned off at the foot of Broadway and others separatedfrom their families and put on ships headed to New Orleans."

Eventually, Douglass joins the East Baltimore Improvement Societyon what is now Durham Street, where he gains some educationfrom older free Black ship caulkers and meets his future wife. Therewere physical confrontations between white workers and Blackworkers for jobs on the docks—and Douglass nearly gets killed whenhe's attacked by several men—but he also writes about a pair of Irishimmigrants who encourage him to escape.

"The light broke in upon me by degrees. I went one day down onthe wharf of Mr. Waters; and seeing two Irishmen unloading a scowof stone, I went, unasked, and helped them," recalls Douglass inhis 1845 memoir. "When we had finished, one of them came to meand asked me if I were a slave. I told him I was. He asked, ‘Are ye aslave for life?’ I told him that I was. The good Irishman seemed to bedeeply affected by the statement. He said to the other that it was apity so fine a little fellow as myself should be a slave for life. He saidit was a shame to hold me. They both advised me to run away to thenorth; that I should find friends there, and that I should be free."

"Fells Point is a place with a lot of history, a lot of issues, a lotof different people from all walks of life thrown together in a tightgeographic area," Fields says. "It's the most fascinating neighborhoodin the city."

y the 1960s and into 1970s, much of FellsPoint was set for demolition. Viewed by cityleadership as a waterfront slum, Fells Pointwas deemed better to pave than preserve.The shipbuilding yards had disappeared with theadvent of the steamship, which required a deeper channelthan even Fells Point offered. The canning industry,which overlapped and then replaced the shipbuildingindustry and once filled more than a hundred packinghouses around the harbor, had all but disappeared aswell, following longer growing seasons and a boomingtrucking industry to the south and west.

Rukert Terminals on Brown's Wharf remainedone of the last surviving cargo warehouses in operation.The toxic Allied-Signal chromium plant in now-rebrandedHarbor Point was still a major employer.However, there were few others beyond the sprawlingH&S Bakery plant.

Synonymous with Fells Point since 1878, Baker-Whiteley's tugboats remained a daily sight on thewater, echoing the past as the neighborhood's futurebecame the subject of intense debate, activism, andlawsuits. (The tugboats would leave, too, in the early 1980s, moving to Locust Point after the New York-basedMcAllister Brothers acquired Baker-Whiteley. Ingeneral, port business didn't so much leave Baltimoreas migrate further out around the harbor from Fells.)

Meanwhile, transportation planners laid out aneast-west expressway across Lancaster Street to connectI-70 in the west to I-83 in the center of Baltimore—with I-95 east of Fells Point, one of the finalpieces of Maryland's interstate network.

The city told residents the highway was inevitable,and their rowhouses and businesses stood in the wayof progress. With few options, many took the marketpricedchecks and relocation fees and left, some happilyno doubt, for the suburbs. Whole blocks, almosta hundred homes and structures in all, were condemnedto make room for a massive interchange overtoday's Harbor East and a six-lane, elevated highwaythrough the heart of Fells Point's historic district.

It was in the middle of the Fells Point "Stop theRoad" citizen uprising in 1972 that Tony and LauraNorris stumbled across a dingy bar called The LoneStar among the vacant rowhomes and dilapidatedboardinghouses. Both were musicians and teachers,but Laura had gotten ill and couldn't work for a periodand while they were figuring out what to do next, afriend ventured to Fells Point looking for office space.Unable to find anything suitable, a realtor pointedhim toward a small saloon for sale. "He came backand said, ‘Let's buy a bar,’" the now-82-year-old TonyNorris recalls. "So, I called a Baltimore friend who wasin California teaching, and said, ‘Loan me $3,000,’ orwhatever it was for the down payment. At that time,you could buy almost everything in the neighborhood.I think we paid $14,000 for the liquor licenseand the building, but there wasn't much there. Therewas an old room in the back that had a kitchen thathad never been finished. One of our customers whowas handy said, ‘Well, I’ll help fix the kitchen up.’"

Among some junk and antiques in a midtown garage, Norrisfound a stained glass window dedicated to the memory of a mysteriousBertha E. Bartholomew, which went on display with back lightingbehind the bar. That memorial window provided the inspiration forone of the city's beloved institutions of the past half-century, andmost well-traveled bumper sticker ever—EAT BERTHA’S MUSSELS.

When Bertha's opened, a few other bars changed hands and anotherwise-declining neighborhood—that easily could have gone theway of Philadelphia's waterfront community, which had recently beenwaylaid for I-95—became invigorated by an unlikely youth movement.

Which isn't to say there weren't colorful old joints or neighborhoodstalwarts that stuck around. There were always a lot of bars (andcomplaints about bars) in Fells Point, the nature of an old port of call.Helen's Corner, run by Helen Christopher, whose merchant marinehusband had been lost at sea, catered to tugboaters. Now the Admiral'sCup, Christopher sold it in 1985 with the stipulation she couldcontinue living upstairs for the rest of her life. Jimmy's Restaurant,a greasy spoon and gathering spot for shift-workers and politiciansalike, had been around since the late ’40s. The Acropolis night club,owned by the same Greek family, featured belly dancing. Miss Irene'sat Thames and Ann—home to The Point today—remained a smokey, rough-around-the-edges bar with cheap beer, a bigpool table, and hard-drinking regulars.

But The Thames Café ("Thames and Dames") gotsold and remade as Leadbetters Tavern, named afterthe blues musician Lead Belly. A well-known Baltimorefigure named "Turkey" Joe Trabert openedTurkey Joe's a few doors from Bertha's. A 1775-builttavern called Al's and Ann's on Thames Street wasrechristened The Horse You Came In On in 1972, aftera long-haired, twentysomething named Howard Gerberbought it with a down payment won at Pimlico.Things were a bit looser in those days. The day that The Horse You Came In On opened, a friend of Gerber's literallyrode a horse through the front door and up to the bar. Some believethe saloon is not only the oldest continuously operating bar in theU.S., but also the last stop of Edgar Allan Poe before he was founddelirious in the street on Election Day 1849. (One theory holds Poe'sdeath resulted from a Mobtown practice known as "cooping," inwhich eligible voters were kidnapped, drugged, or forced to drink,and then disguised to cast multiple ballots.)

In 1975, Irish-American Kenny Orye, who convinced some heran guns for the IRA, and Tony and Ana Marie Cushing opened theCat's Eye Pub on Thames Street, taking their name from a West Virginiadistillery where Orye's uncle bought his moonshine. Contrary to what's been published elsewhere,Ana Marie Cushing says with a smile,the previous Harbor View tavernthere had not been a biker hangout,but a lesbian bar. By the late 1970sand early ’80s, the Cat's Eye's backroom had become a place to be afterclosing time, recalled Steve Bunker,a former seaman who operated thenearby China Sea Trading Company with a parrot perched on hisshoulder. "At 3 a.m. you could run into politicos, hookers, sailors,deal-makers, illegal Irishmen, riffraff, and refugees," Bunker, whonow lives in Maine, wrote years later in the Fells Point newsletter."You didn't ask too many questions about your stool mates, you justdrank your beer, passed a joint, and enjoyed the company."

Before Orye died from an overdose at 33 in 1987, he organizedan Irish wake at the Cat's Eye for a departed IRA leader. It was equalparts publicity stunt to raise awareness for the IRA cause and jokeon city officials and the press: The body in the casket wasn't real.Five years after Orye's death, longtime Cat's Eye bartender JeffKnapp, who normally resembled Abe Lincoln and once snuck intothe St. Patrick's Day parade dressed as the patron saint of Ireland,was honored with a New Orleans-style jazz parade for his funeral.

Ghost tours of Fells Point claim the ghosts of Orye and Knappstill work the Cat's Eye bar.

The music and bar crawl culture developed over time as morepubs opened kitchens and got permits for live music. But thingswere not excactly popping in the early ’7os. "When [Bertha's] first opened, someone would say, ‘Let's go over to The Horseor the Cat's Eye for a beer’—there was this sense wewere all in it together—and you’d get into your car anddrive around the corner and have no trouble parkingright in front," the now-84-year-old Tony Norris says."It was that empty down here."

The Fells Point art scene had begun blossomingearlier. By the late ’60s, the old Hollywood Bakery onBroadway had turned into a full-blown artist colony offormer Maryland Institute College of Art students. Dividedinto 22 rooms and studios, the entire place rentedfor $100 a month, giant bakery ovens included. Othersbegan squatting in and renting previously condemnedhouses from the city while the "Stop the Road" fightcontinued in the courts. By 1973, at least 15 houses thatthe city had bought out earlier were rented to peoplewho wanted to live in and repair them. A $7,500 homewent for $75 a month with the generous provision thatrepair materials could be deducted from the rent—the nascent start of a now-50-year rehabbing movement.

The Fells Point Gallery, founded in 1969 by MICA alumni, became adestination. Then, a second-hand bookstore opened. Many still lookeddown upon "seedy" Fells Point at the time, but others saw it as Baltimore'sversion of Greenwich Village. The Fells Point Corner Theatre,now in Upper Fells, raised its first curtain, appropriately, at the cornerof Shakespeare and Broadway in 1970. The still-thriving VagabondPlayers moved into the former Corral's Bar on Broadway in 1974.

In the late ’60s, John Waters, Glenn Milstead, aka Divine, andfriends began making pilgrimages to Fells Point, finding new partnersin subversion. MICA graduate Vincent Peraino, who was amongthe influx of artists, became Waters’ set designer. Susan Lowe, apainter who later dated Orye (some of her paintings still hang in theCat's Eye), appeared in nearly every Waters film. Other Fells PointDreamlanders included Mink Stole, George Figgs, Paul Swift, PeterKoper, and Bob Adams. "The Hollywood Bakery, that was Vincent'scommune, and it was right next door to Pete's Hotel, where EdithMassey worked as a bartender and we hung out," Waters recalls witha laugh. "It was the worst possible time down there and it was thecheapest possible place. Drinks were 30 cents. Divine hated it. Hecalled it a ‘hobo bar.’"

Waters shot all over Fells Point and Massey opened a thrift store,Edith's Shopping Bag, with Adams following her memorable appearanceas "the Egg Lady" in Waters’ 1972 movie hit,Pink Flamingos.

"Fells Point was welcoming to all kinds of people,that was the thing that was so amazing," Waters continues,noting he once did a fashion shoot at the Apexadult movie theater on Broadway, which somehow coexistedamong the churches and families in UpperFells. "Paul Swift would jump up and dance nakedon the bars. They weren't gay bars. It was gay andstraight. It was trans. Trans even then, and everybodyreally got along. It was just cultural outlaws that didn'tfit in their own minority."

"The artists would hang around with the tugboatguys and stevedores in the bar—we used to open at 8a.m. for guys getting off their night shifts—that's justhow it was then," says Cushing.

At the same time, pioneering preservationists hadmoved to Fells Point. One visionary was Lu Fischer,who lived in Ruxton and was married to a doctor butbought a waterfront rowhouse with intentions of restoringit, unaware a highway was planned throughher block. "Perhaps no other town on the eastern seaboardboasts 18th-century houses facing the watersuch as we have here in Fells Point," she wrote in a letterto The Sun in 1966. Former Councilman Tom Wardhelped found the Society for the Preservation of FederalHill and Fell's Point the following year. Bob Eney,who’d grown up in Dundalk before a stint in the Armyand a career as a department store display artist inNew York, was another champion. Photographing anddocumenting some 200 homes and buildings, Eneyled the successful campaign to get Fells Point listedon the then-new National Register of Historic Placesin 1969—the first inclusion from Maryland—wooingofficials with walking tours, drinks, and dinners atHaussner's in nearby Highlandtown.

According to Eney, one of then-Vice President SpiroAgnew's female staffers, who secretly supported theFells preservationists, passed their completed National Register forms to Agnew to speed approval. Not realizing the obstaclethat placement on National Register would present to the highway heand local contractors favored, Agnew dutifully forwarded them on and"in three days we were on the National Register," Eney recalled in 2004."The contractors [who’d been bribing him for years] were furious withAgnew because he was so dumb. He had no idea what he had done."

The annual Fells Point Fun Festival, in fact, was first organized asan anti-highway fundraising effort. At the 1969 annual street party,Barbara Mikulski, a then-33-year-old social worker, shouted her oppositionas future Mayor William Donald Schaefer tried to make his casefor the highway. "The British couldn't take Fells Point, the termitescouldn't take Fells Point," announced Mikulski, part of group callingthemselves Radio Free Fells Point. "And we don't think the State RoadsCommission can take Fells Point either."

The granddaughter of Polish bakers, Mikulski is a link betweenFells Point's long immigration history and the fight to the stop thehighway. "My great-grandmother landed in Fells Point somewhere at ‘the foot of Broadway,’ which is what we called thatarea then, not Fells Point," Mikulski says. "Whenshe came to this country and lived on ChesterStreet near Holy Rosary, she could read, but shewas from Poland. One of the things she did to learnEnglish was to buy a newspaper and go down tothe Broadway Market and practice the languageand the exchange of money, and so on. People werehelpful and she could trust that she wasn't goingto be taken advantage of. The churches were likesettlement houses because they were bilingual."

Prior to the Eastern-European wave, Fells Pointwas the arrival station for thousands of farmersand laborers from Germany and Ireland. St. Patrick'sChurch, now serving a Spanish-speaking congregationon Broadway, is the city's oldest Catholicparish, dating to 1792. Germans came to Baltimore early and often, with many fleeing their homes after the failed 1848-1849 revolution. The Irish, in the 1840s and 1850s, arrived as refugees, some in desperate condition as they were pulled onto the Fells’ docks from vessels known as "coffin ships" because of the number who succumbed during the Atlantic crossing.

But by the 1870s, Poles were the dominant immigrant group. The first Roman Catholic Polish parish—St. Stanislaus Kostka on South Ann Street—formed in 1880. The city's first Polish newspaper launched in 1891. A second parish, Holy Rosary Church, where Sunday morning Mass is still said in Polish, was founded in 1887. St. Casimir's in Canton was founded in 1904. Which is not to romanticize the immigrant experience. Women—and children—went to work in the Fells canneries and as seasonal laborers on Maryland farms. Mikulski later bought a house on Ann Street in part, she admits, because it was in the path of the highway. "She was ready to lie down in front of the bulldozer," says Tony Norris, the Bertha's owner, who has known Mikulski since the early ’70s. The Norrises subsequently traded rowhouses withMikulski and remained a neighbor for 20 years. Whenshe was elected to Congress in 1976, her Eastern Avenueoffice was only steps from her grandparents’ bakery.

"It was a great neighborhood because people tendedto live, work, worship, and shop in the same area,"says Mikulski, who was born in 1936 and retired fromCongress in 2017, after becoming the first woman tochair the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.

"In terms of the battle of ‘the Road,’ there was theparochial crowd, the preservationists, [artists], the businessowners—we were all in it. Were the town hall meetingscontentious?" Mikulski adds. "It's Bawlmer, hon."

The fundamental problem behind the conception of"the Road"—including the stretch known as "The Highwayto Nowhere" that got built through majority-BlackWest Baltimore—is officials did not appreciate the valueof working-class neighborhoods, Mikulski says. "Thatwas certainly the attitude of Robert Moses," the NewYork highway builder who first designed Baltimore'splanned east-west highway. "He did not see the value,he didn't see the jobs that were there, and he didn't seewhat I call the social capital. It was the relationshipsthat were, and are, important in those communities."

The artifacts, both living and dead, of those Polishroots are all over. Sophia's Place, a Polish deli sellingstuffed cabbage, among other specialties, continues inthe renovated Broadway Market, as does Ostrowski'sPolish deli on Bank Street. Patterson Park's monumentto Gen. Pulaski, a Revolutionary War hero, and theKatyn Memorial in Harbor East hardly need mention.

Eventually other groups came, though situated fartherfrom the waterfront. After World War II, there was ahuge migration of Lumbee Indians from North Carolinainto Upper Fells. The Baltimore American Indian Centeron Broadway was founded in 1968. And, of course, allup and down Broadway and Eastern are dozens of Mexicanand Central American businesses and restaurants.

It's ironic perhaps, but ever since "the Road"though the Fells "slums" was defeated for good in thelate ’70s, gentrification has been a sensitive subject.

By 1985, former warehouses andfactories were already being turned intoexpensive apartments. "Speculators seeFells Point as an opportunity," Bunker,the former owner of the China Sea TradingCompany, said in a Sun story.

"It's just not the same," Manual Alvarez, a chief engineer for thedeparted Baker-Whiteley tugboat company, told the same reporter,adding he had little desire to visit Fells Point anymore. "It's just too...trendy. It's not just the way it used to be."

In an oral history a generation later, Ed Kane, who founded theBaltimore water taxi operation in the ’70s, said he thought FellsPoint "still doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up." It'sbeen in "state of transition," he said, for "more than 200 years."

Gentrification remains a concern for some of the older folkswho recall places like Leadbetters, which was sold in 2016, and theWharf Rat, which was one of the oldest buildings and bars in thecity when it was sold in 2021. They say the original English characterof its zigzagging streets and tiny pubs is all but gone.

Duda's Tavern, in a storied Thames Street building that onceboarded sailors, is still a family-run operation after more than 70years. The Norrises, however, are in the process of selling Bertha's.

A Starbucks has opened, and the Atlas Restaurant Group continuesto buy up property and open bars and restaurants, raisingquestions about Fells Point losing its idiosyncratic touches. Someworry the H&S Bakery plant will leave and be replaced by a highriseoffice or condo complex like those in Harbor East—whereheight restrictions were lifted in the 1990s for the subsequentdevelopment projects.

The numbers speak for themselves: The median home price inFells Point rose from $77,600 in 1990 to $349,650 in 2014. Thepercentage of residents with a BA degree or higher was 33 percent in1990 and 70 percent by 2014.

With gentrification what often comes is a loss of what sociologistscall "third places," where people spend time between homeand work. First United Evangelical, an 1851 German church on EasternAvenue, for example, is now luxury apartments. The 96-yearoldPatterson duckpin alleys are currently under conversion tocondominiums—though some lanes may remain after a protest.

However, the 19th century St. Michael's Church in Upper Fells isnow a brewpub and the former St. Stanislaus today hosts a yoga andfitness studio—21st century "third places." There are others, like thecozy Greedy Reads bookstore, which opened in 2018.

Six years ago, the upscale Sagamore Pendry hotel on Thamesopened inside the long-vacant, recreation-pier building—once hometo the fictitious headquarters of the Baltimore Police Department inthe ’90s show Homicide: Life on the Street.

The question may be, does it matter whether Fells Point residentsknow the Pendry was first constructed as a $1 million—a priceysum in 1914—dual-purpose maritime warehouse/state-of-the-artballroom and recreation center for the Fells immigrant community?

Is preservation still a rallying point and part of theglue that binds the Fells Point community together, andif so, for how long?

"When I was a kid, it was a different world, we didn'thave all these cars, these high-rises and yeah, a lot ofhouses were vacant," says 46-year-old Andy Norris, whotook over running Bertha's from his parents and livesin Upper Fells. "My parents would say, ‘Go outside andplay,’ and I’d take a ball and beat the ball against a vacanthouse and then three other kids would be hangingout with me and we’d play a game of some kind.

"I get the new business owners and the changes,"Norris continues. "I don't hate it, like a lot of the oldtimers.They’re coming from a good place. In theirminds, they’re doing the best thing that they can dofor the neighborhood. I believe that. Now, is it the bestthing for the neighborhood? I don't know. The thingabout Fells Point is that had so much character, andcharacters, such charm. But people got older and soldtheir places and the new people, who are buying them,this is how they see their future."

Norris acknowledges the water and rowhouses willbe always be here. As will reappointed warehouses andThames’ Belgian block streets. But what else?"What I guess I mean, is that a neighborhood or isthat just brick and stone?"