McCulloh Homes

Upton Courts and the McCulloh Homes public housing project spread over twelve city blocks called McCulloh Homes. Terrain slopes gently to the southwest from Madison to a section of the Bottom near Pennsylvania. Clockwise from northeast its boundaries extend on Madison, Preston, McCulloh, King Expressway, Druid Hill, Preston, Pennsylvania, Dolphin, McCulloh, and Lanvale. It is designated by the north-west street once spelled McCulloch Street and named either for an actor, a prominent banker, or a collector of the portof Baltimore. John McCullough was a popular nineteenth century stage performer; James W. McCulloh, a Baltimore Bank-of-the-United-States cashier who figured in the monumental Supreme Court decision of McCulloh v. Maryland; James H. McCulloch, a one-time port officer and veteran of the Revolution and the War of 1812 battle of North Point. Lawn space and courtyards, the latter named for nineteenth-century alleys razed in the 1940s, abut two- and three-story brick apartments. A recreational park is situated at the northeast corner.

Biddle Street first linked Reisterstown Turnpike and the city in the early nineteenth century. Frame and brick houses of farmers and workers dotted Preston, Biddle, and Ross (now Druid Hill) before 1840; early urban housing was not built along Preston, Biddle, and Pennsylvania until the 1850s, and along Dolphin until the 1860s. Eager to market brick row houses to city merchants, developers not only carved up main streets into building lots but built narrow twelve feet-wide alley homes behind main streets. Both slaves and white and free black servants-drivers, stable men, and domestic workers-lived on a network of back streets, Little McCulloh, Stoddard, Little Biddle, Pear, Walnut, Tiffany, and Camel. By 1860, narrow rifteen-feet-wide row houses extended also on east-west streets, through ways wider than alleys but narrower than north-west streets. Three-story houses were built on Ross and McCulloh, brick and frame shanties in rear alleys.

Craft-workers, wagon drivers, and household domestic workers of recent German descent first inhabited the alleys and eastwest streets. An ethnic Lutheran Church, St. John's on Biddle between Pennsylvania and Ross, served the community for many years. Merchants, bankers, and lawyers settled along McCulloh, which acquired local renown as home to Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War, Levi Stratton White, a notorious Confederate agent, later enlivened Baltimore lore with tales of his McCulloh home located between Biddle and Preston during the war. He published memoirs which claimed he had smuggled munitions into the South from his house. He had hidden in its secret compartments when Federal troops stormed McCulloh in search of Confederates.

Old houses were turned over to student and faculty boarders in the 1880s, blocks occasionally designated as Baltimore's Latin Quarter. Johns Hopkins, the Women's Medical College, City College, and Western High School were all located nearby. In-migration changed blocks again after 1900, African Americans moving onto main streets. The grid of streets and alleys was densely populated by a heterogenous mix of property owners and flat dwellers, workers, and professional people. Institutions followed and encircled the blocks of residences. A home for delinquent or orphaned boys, St. Mary's Episcopal, opened on Biddle near Provident Hospital, which located a thirty-five bed, black-staffed facility there in 1895. An African Methodist Episcopal chapel was built on Biddle Alley, and Grace Presbyterian Church opened on Dolphin. Taverns and a theatre, the Lincoln #2, opened on Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1910s, southern end of the Avenue entertainment district. Small black-operated businesses tookover the streetfront rooms of Druid Hill town homes. The narrow, crowded houses of Biddle Alley, just east of Homes, were the subject of two studies of urban conditions that won local renown, a city poverty commission publishing the first in 1907 and the Urban League the second in 1926. Despite the cleanliness of housing units, the reportsalleged, the high rent block called "Lung Block" bred disease, especially tuberculosis.

The Baltimore Housing Authority, formed to implement the National Housing Act of 1937, designated twenty-one acres as an African American public housing project in 1939. Built east of Druid Hill by the Rosoff Company of New York, 436 units of two- or threestory brick buildings were finished in the early 1940s. Twenty-nine buildings spread over rive blocks. Statuary of two children with book and harmonica bedecked a McCulloh Street entry: project courtyards took the names of old alleys and streets.

Demolition touched off emigration, and public housing rules established a pattern of rapid in-out mobility for twenty years. Old housing was leveled over one year before the projects were ready: wage increases by tenants, all one- and two-parent families until 1956, obligated them to move. Single and elderly people moved in during the 1960s. The remaining nineteenth-century housing west of Druid Hill was razed in the 1970s, replaced with Upton Courts, a mostly lowrise development architecturally compatible with the public housing.