Behind Baltimore’s Closed Doors

On the corner of East Fort Avenue and Webster Street in South Baltimore, Katie Labor Ph.D. ’23 is making a new friend: the owner of a rowhouse whose exterior brick wall boasts two mid-century murals advertising Fort Avenue Pharmacy, which occupied the space for nearly 50 years.

The owner, Michael Perry, who was heading to his car as Labor admired the mural, takes her inside and on a digital tour of the house’s renovations, flipping through his iPad to show how the basement used to hold swivel chairs and blow dryers for the beauty salon that replaced the pharmacy. Labor beams with excitement.

Her quest to unearth Baltimore’s hyperlocal history isn’t always this easy. As the sleuth behind the X/Twitter account @BehindBmoreLots, Labor typically digs through newspaper archives to find the human dramas behind Charm City’s historic homes and businesses.

“I’ve always liked finding out about the places I lived in, and Baltimore has been fantastic, because everything’s old,” she says.

Labor’s project started one morning two years ago, when she was taking the bus to her job at Johns Hopkins University, where she’s now a pre-professional academic adviser. As she gawped at the more than 100-year-old rowhouses along her route, she began entering their addresses into newspapers.com, where she had an account for genealogy research.

“One of the houses had two articles come up,” Labor says. “One was about a little girl who’d stuck a pencil in her ear, and then two years later, there was another article about the same little girl getting hit by a streetcar. She was extremely accident-prone. I was so charmed by that.” (The girl sustained only minor injuries in both incidents.)

A bit of benign busybody-ness also stoked Labor’s dissertation in UMD’s history department. She pored over American travel narratives from the 18th century to investigate how people’s sense of personal privacy was changing. “It’s a time of transition when most people go from living in one or two rooms to living in true houses,” she says. “People are starting to get more used to the idea of basic personal privacy.”

Thankfully, a growing sense of privacy didn’t keep people from spilling details of their personal lives to newspapers, which for much of the 20th century functioned in part as social registers for cities and towns. In The Baltimore Sun or the Baltimore Afro-American, residents made sure all their neighbors knew about the engagement parties they threw for their daughters or the births of babies.

Most houses held sad stories, too. In one on Light Street, a mother pleaded for help finding her son, a vaudeville and circus performer who’d been missing for four years. In another, a teenager named Alexander was arrested in 1913 for stealing materials to bring gas heat to his house. Several months later, The Sun reported that his father had “started for parts unknown, leaving his wife and children”—exacerbating the family’s apparent financial struggles. Just a few years later, Alexander died after being wounded in battle in France during World War I.

“I think about the things about the past that we’ll never be able to recapture,” Labor says, “and looking at old newspapers, you get those glimpses that don’t get passed down.”