Where We Live

We live in a neighborhood called "Charles Village," just three miles north of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Ours is a diverse community of teachers, artists, social workers, lawyers, musicians, entrepreneurs, and students. Two major institutions -- the Baltimore Museum of Art and Johns Hopkins University -- make us a cultural magnet. We have two vibrant elemntary schools and a major hospital and a number of interesting businesses, like Darker Than Blue and Donna's. Every spring we celebrate with a neighborhood festival.

Ten years ago, Charles Village took over a defunct city library branch and made it into a community learning center -- called the VIllage Learning Place. The American Planning Association named us one of the nation's best neighborhoods for that kind of activism. The Charles Village Civic Association is very active in making the most of neighborhood resources. One of its annual programs is a historic house tour -- where you can visit our hourse: it's called the Snowflake Tour of Charles Village Homes

Original 1897 newspaper ad for new row-houses in
our neighborhood. The one to the far right is ours.

Our neighborhood got its start in 1897. It was called Peabody Heights because of its elevation and it was touted for its healthy air and suburban charm. The surrounding area was mostly pastureland and country estates. The roads were dirt. The horse-drawn trolley line ended just two blocks north of our house.

But the neighborhood was pretty fancy, designed for bankers, executives and business owners. The longest-lived resident of our house, for example, owned a prosperous fertilizer company. Those who got rich moved on. In fact, many of the first home owners in our neighborhood did not stay long before prosperity took them further out of town to even grander neighborhoods like Guilford and Roland Park.

The old cobblestone and brick roadway—and the old trolley tracks themselves—remain under the asphalt of Saint Paul Street. The brick is visible at the curbs of many blocks and the trolley tracks rise to the surface here and there every summer. Driving Baltimore streets sometimes feels like an amusement park ride, offering plenty of bumps and dips.

Our house is something of a landmark because it was the first house built in the Peabody Heights development. As such, it was a showcase house meant to attract and inspire buyers.

If you’ve never heard of row-houses, that’s understandable. Most people are more familiar with the term “town houses.” The difference between the two is that row-houses were designed by the row, which could extend for the entire block. Townhouses were designed individually, giving a block an eclectic and sometimes messy look. Many of the new “townhouse communities” we see popping up all over America these days are actually developments of row-houses, distinguished by their uniform design.
America’s first row-houses—built in Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore during the 1790s—were large and fashionable, designed after similarly impressive houses in London and Paris, and sold exclusively to the well-to-do. Baltimore remains unique among cities for its large number of row-houses, nearly all of them of brick or stone.
Nowadays, in an age of diminishing resources, row-houses are comparatively eco-friendly because they take up less space and demand many fewer resources than a detached house. Row-houses can be as narrow as 8-10 feet and as wide as 30. Some go very deep. Some are no more than four small rooms, two up and two down. Some have back yards, some don’t. Few have front yards.
Our Queen Anne has 20 feet of grass in front of it. This was quite a novelty—and something of a luxury—for a city house in 1897. It was, in fact, an early flirtation with suburbia.