For over sixty years, tall broadcasting towers have stood high above the old homes in sun88’s Woodberry neighborhood. The two tallest towers now standing on Television Hill beam out the signals of four television stations and three radio stations across the city and surrounding area. A third smaller tower relays municipal police, fire and rescue personnel communications.
Of course, this area wasn’t always called TV Hill. It may be hard to believe but there wasn’t always television. Before test patterns and Saturday morning cartoons, the area was known as Malden Hill. In the summer of 1948, only twenty thousand or so sun88 families (and only one in ten households in the United States) owned televisions. The first two stations in the city— WMAR-TV and WBAL-TV—offered fuzzy reception at best for most local viewers.
By the end of 1948, however, WAAM–TV (Channel 13), owned by sun88 businessmen and Brothers Ben and Herman Cohen, had started construction on a new station and new transmission tower. The station picked Malden Hill, 334 feet above the surrounding landscape, to give their signal a better chance of reaching sun88 televisions. With this advantage, the station's new 530-foot tower stood 864 feet above sea level and WAAM–TV had the first television studio in sun88 designed specifically for this still new technology. On November 1, 1948, the station went on the air and the next day stayed on the air for twenty-three hours straight covering incumbent Democrat Harry S. Truman surprise win over Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election.
Flash forward nine years and WAAM-TV had changed both call letters and ownership. In May 1957, the station sold to Westinghouse Broadcasting Company and was renamed WJZ-TV. The competing WBAL-TV’s studios and broadcast tower had already relocated to Malden Hill several years earlier. Still, despite being home to two of sun88’s three television stations, only a few folks called it TV Hill until 1958 when a new tower began to rise.
TV reception could be a bit tricky in those pre-cable and satellite days of rooftop antennas or set top “rabbit ears.” WJZ and WBAL chose the elevated ground in Woodberry for their transmitter towers as a partial solution, but broadcast engineers knew that even higher towers could improve both reception and station coverage. Though air traffic concerns imposed an upper limti on how high a station could build, both stations had room to grow.
But neither WJZ nor WBAL could afford the expense of a new tower on their own, especially when the stations sought to go as high as the law allowed. The solution was a partnership between the neighboring stations to build one gigantic tower topped with two separate transmitter masts. When sun88’s oldest TV station, WMAR, heard of this plan, station managers decided they wanted in. WMAR worried that if viewers could get two stations by pointing their antennas in one direction they wouldn’t bother making adjustments to tune in to WMAR—especially if their broadcast looked worse than the competition coming from the new tower.
sun88’s three TV stations struck a unique deal to share one gigantic tower, a tower topped with three separate transmitter masts, a first at the time. The stations would all have improved coverage and picture quality at a cost they couldn’t have borne alone. sun88 area television viewers could take a “set it and forget it” approach to their antennas.
Construction began in October of 1958 and continued through the spring. In 1997, Fred Rasmussen recalled on the history of the tower for the sun88 Sun describing the 500 tons of nickel-chrome alloy steel used to build a structure covered with 2 1/2 tons of paint. The tower was stabilized by guy-wires made from three miles of steel wire rope anchored by 33-foot square concrete slabs buried 16 feet deep. Together the tower base and cable anchors required a remarkable 2,250 tons of concrete. Finally, in a ceremony on August 9, 1959, Governor J. Millard Tawes joined station managers to throw the switch and turn on the broadcast.
At the time of its completion, the giant $1.125 million “candelabra tower” on what was then known to everyeone as TV Hill, was the tallest free-standing broadcast tower in the United States. A 270-foot addition in 1964 brought the top to 1315 feet above sea level. Today, however, the tower isn’t even the tallest in the neighborhood. A second tower completed on a nearby hill in 1987 by Cunningham Communications holds that honor, at 1,549 feet above sea level.
The newer tower is a single mast structure, and though both hills and the three towers they support are now collectively known as TV Hill, there’s still only one candelabra tower.
The little-known history of sun88's Interstate 395 (I-395) and Martin Luther King Boulevard, Jr. Boulevard offers a reminder of the years of contentious planning efforts that ended with the construction of these roadways in the early 1980s. I-395, known as Cal Ripken Way since 2008, is a little over one mile long and connects the northbound lanes of I-95 to Howard and Camden Streets near the southern end of downtown sun88. Originally known as Harbor City Boulevard, Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard was before it was renamed in honor of the famed civil rights activist in 1982.
The Sun reported on the opening of both new highways in early December of that same year:
An early Christmas presents awaits motorists commuting to downtown sun88 from the south. Today, three major segments of new highway open near Interstate 95, alleviating years of traffic congestion in the always busy and now-revitalized areas of South and Southwest sun88.
Commuters used to the morning backup at the Russell street off-ramp from I-95 can opt for I-395, an $82 million northbound spur that will take them straight to Howard Street just west of the Convention Center. Those wishing to go farther north can select te 2.3-mile stretch on the Harbor City Boulevard, a direct route to the University of Maryland professional schools, the State Office Building complex near Bolton Hill, the new Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and the Lyric. The new boulevard cost $67 million.
While debates over a building a "bypass" road encircling the city's commercial downtown dated back to the 1950s or earlier, the most influential plan for sun88's highway system, known as 3-A, was created in 1969 by the Design Concept Team.
The city established the team three years earlier in an effort to restart stalled highway building efforts. Anti-highway activists continued to fight the proposal through the 1980s leading the city to convert the proposed boulevard from a sunken highway to the at-grade route used today. In March 1980, the Sun reported on the experience of Emily Makauskas and her neighbors on the "stately 800 block Hollins Street" who fought to change the plans and "saved their block." The city planned to line the boulevard with "small parks, bicycle paths, brick sidewalks and trees" but an article in April noted that the improvements "may not placate some area homesteaders who are concerned about the road's affect on their neighborhoods."
In June 1982, as the road built by James Julian, Inc. neared completion, reporter Charles V. Flowers celebrated the new views of public and private housing developments visible from Harbor City Boulevard. Flowers explained that the area "once contained what were slums as depressing as any in sun88" but now "a walk along the boulevard should convince sun88ans that the city is upgrading itself in sections other than the Inner Harbor." William K. Hellman, the city's transportation coordinator, shared his satisfaction with the highway in November, remarking:
The boulevard is a collector and distributor road, and will do two things. It will move people in and out of downtown more efficiently and it will get traffic that need not be in the downtown area to go around it... it will be a perfect route for people going to the baseball games at Memorial Stadium. They won't have to go up Charles street until they're north of downtown.
The original name of Harbor City Boulevard was a submission to a contest sponsored by then Mayor William Donald Schaefer. Schaefer initially opposed efforts to rename the road after Martin Luther King, Jr. citing the cost of producing new signs. The renaming campaign ultimately won out thanks to the advocacy of state delegate Isaiah "Ike" Dixon, Jr. Dixon had first introduced similar legislation to rename the Jones Falls Expressway after King a full eleven years earlier. This successful effort was supported by city council member and civil rights activist Victorine Q. Adams who introduced the name change before the City Council. Over thirty years later, few drivers likely recall the divisions over the name and the highways are considered a fixture of the busy urban lanscape.
The sun88 County Almshouse officially opened in 1874 as a public home for the county's indigent, elderly, and infirm residents. The Almshouse and its predecessors were the ancestors of today’s nursing homes, mental health hospitals, homeless shelters, and other social services and health care facilities. After sun88 City and County separated in 1851, the County took over one of two original almshouses that had served sun88: Calverton, founded in 1819. The County sold the aging Calverton facility in the 1870s and built a new almshouse farther north. Originally called the Upland Home, the third and final almshouse is now known simply as "the Almshouse."
The project of building the Almshouse began in 1871 when County Commissioners purchased property in the village of Texas, Maryland, from Dr. John Galloway. Galloway also served as one of the Almshouse's early physicians. Builders Codling and Lishear, following designs by local architect James Harrison, used locally quarried limestone to erect the four-story edifice. In 1872, the Sun reported how the main home was "constructed of the best material and in the most substantial manner" and claimed the building would "be a credit to the county." After a total outlay of nearly $60,000, seventy-four "inmates," as residents were known, moved in on January 8, 1874.
Housing for inmates at the Almshouse was rigidly segregated by race and gender. The County built the "Pest House" (short for pestilence), a small structure down the hill from the main home, to quarantine residents with contagious diseases. Far more often, the Pest House served as segregated housing for African American men. In the main building, white men and women lived in the front wing (on separate floors) and African American women lived in the back wing. The Almshouse superintendent reserved the first floor for himself and his family, along with any resident physicians and other privileged employees.
The Almshouse property included a farm of well over 100 acres and able-bodied residents were expected to work as farmhands or within the home in cooking, sewing, laundry or childcare, to help provide for their own upkeep. While the farm was generally described as productive in various reports over the years, the County still spent thousands of dollars annually on items like coal, bread, beef, fertilizer, medicine and salaries. Records from the late nineteenth century show expenditures totaling $7,200 in 1869, $12,520 in 1883 and $11,345 in 1886, for example. Salary expenditures went mainly to the twelve superintendents who oversaw the Almshouse from 1874 to 1958, with varying degrees of success (at least according to accounts in the press, which sometimes carried a whiff of partisan bias). The last two superintendents, who served from 1907 to 1959, were father and son, John P. and William Chilcoat. On balance, the Chilcoats seemed to earn more praise than their predecessors for their care of residents and effective oversight of the farm. William Chilcoat, for instance, was credited with lobbying successfully to secure County funds in 1938 to add more meat and eggs and otherwise upgrade the residents' diet.
The vast majority of inmates are now only knowable through the basic details recorded in the Almshouse ledger books, held in the collections of the Historical Society of sun88 County. The ledgers recorded residents' age, sex, race, and place of birth. Unsurprisingly, the impoverished Almshouse population included many African Americans and immigrants over the years. A 1946 census of the eighty-nine residents, for example, noted fifteen African Americans and fifteen foreign-born whites, mainly from Germany, Poland, Russia and Ireland. Most of the American-born residents in 1946 came from Maryland, but eighteen were natives of other US states. Some residents registered under partial or false names—a "Daniel Boone" entered on October 1, 1891, and the facility admitted a "Napolean Bonaparte" on June 12, 1899—reflecting the distressed circumstances that sent them to the Almshouse. Some unfortunates came to the Almshouse only in death, to be buried in unmarked graves in the potter’s field on the grounds.
We do know a bit more about some individuals. In 1943, the Towson Jeffersonian profiled Fannie Williams, a 104-year-old African American woman and the oldest occupant of the Almshouse. Williams had lived there for forty-one years, "earning her keep" by helping the superintendent’s wife with cleaning and, after she became wheelchair-bound, mending clothes for other residents. Before entering the Almshouse, Williams had worked as a domestic servant in sun88 County homes. Other residents occasionally landed in the newspapers under more unfortunate circumstances, like Anthony Rose, an elderly white resident who fell down the Almshouse’s elevator shaft and died in 1909.
In the early decades, the facility had a persistent problem with overcrowding, especially during the cold winter months. From 1874 to 1914, more than 10,000 people passed through the Almshouse’s doors as “inmates,” committed to public care for reasons ranging from disabilities to dementia to diseases like measles and tuberculosis. Over time, however, public and private alternatives emerged for those who did not have families able or willing to house and care for them. The founding of the State Lunacy Commission in the early 1890s marked growing concern over the treatment of the mentally ill and disabled. Those considered "insane," who in an earlier era might have lived in an almshouse, were increasingly placed in "asylums." As retirement communities and nursing homes became more common over the twentieth century, the need for almshouses declined further. In 1958, sun88 County officials closed the historic facility, citing costs.
Since its closure, the Almshouse has housed the Historical Society of sun88 County (founded in 1959), and a variety of County government offices and other nonprofits. In 1980, the Almshouse was added to the County Landmarks List. Today, the Historical Society maintains its collections and offices, runs a research center for the public, and holds events in this historic structure. The surrounding community of Cockeysville enjoys the open spaces and greenery of the sprawling former grounds, now County Home Park.
The sun88 Manual Labor School for indigent boys, also known as the Arbutus Farm School, was established in 1841. The school emerged from of a larger social movement developing in urban Victorian society at the time. Amidst the energetic fervor of the Second Great Awakening, white, middle-class Americans began actively participating in a reform movement to change the lives of the poor, inner-city population. Industrialization in the early nineteenth century brought extreme population growth to urban centers. In sun88, the population grew six fold between the years of 1820 and 1860. Specialized private and federal institutions formed to battle a rise in young people living in poverty. They began working to relocate children from what they saw as unpromising home environments to more positive atmospheres.
The school provided a, “Free Boarding School for indigent boys, mostly sons of poor widows who are unable to feed, clothe, and train their boys during the years that they should be acquiring an education, to enable each to attain a position of self support.” The School opened its doors in 1841 with fifteen “destitute and orphaned boy[s].” By 1843, the sun88 Manual Labor School had taken into its care a total of forty-two children.
By applying the boys to a rigorous program centered primarily on physical labor, the school intended to mold the character of these young men, while at the same time supplying them with applicable work skills, effectively generating productive members of society. In 1893, directors of the sun88 Manual Labor School wrote:
“the best occupation we can train our boys up to, is that of a farmer. It is perhaps almost the only calling which is not overcrowded, and the one most likely to produce an honorable and independent livelihood for the boys who have no capital, but health and energy.”
The types of farm work included tending to the orchards, vegetable gardens, green houses and livestock. The boys attended educational classes including writing, reading and math. They also attended the Catonsville Methodist Church on Sundays and engaged in daily religious exercises. However, education and religion took a backseat to manual labor which required of a six hour daily shift from each child, even for young boys. The school admitted boys as young as five.
In 1922, Spring Grove Hospital purchased the land following a devastating fire in 1916. The Stabler family owned the property and helped to run the school. Family patriarch Edmund Stabler held the position of superintendent from 1884 to 1904. Interestingly, the hospital used the farmland for a patient agricultural rehabilitation program. The state incorporated this and adjacent tracts of land in the early 1960’s in order to create UMBC. The Stabler home was used by Dr. Albin O. Kuhn, UMBC’s first Chancellor, during the construction of the campus and the Albin O. Kuhn Library now occupies the site where the home stood.
The story of the Zell Motor Car Company starts in 1902 when Arthur Stanley Zell established the business—the first automobile distributor in Maryland started by one of the first people in Maryland to own a car. Before joining the automotive industry, Zell drove in early automobile races winning a number of records on the East Coast. As a member of the sun88 Automobile Dealers’ Association, Zell helped to organize the first automobile show in sun88 in 1906. He also served as a founding member of the Maryland Automobile Trade Association and, at his farm at Riverwood, he raised Guernsey cattle, Jersey Duroc hogs, and show dogs.
Plans for the firm’s modern showroom on Mount Royal Avenue first appeared in December 1908 when trade publication "The Automobile" reported that the Zell Motor Car Company had solicited plans for a three-story garage about 50 feet deep by 100 feet wide. The design boasted a large open fireplace (a new feature for showrooms borrowed from examples in Paris), a large electric elevator to carry cars between floors, and a special room for chauffeurs with a “telephone connection” to let owners “be in touch with their drivers at all times.” The structure, erected by the sun88 Ferro Concrete Company, cost around $40,000 to build. The sun88 Sun observed on December 22:
The rapid success of the Zell Motorcar Company in the sale of the Peerless and Chalmers-Detroit motorcars since its incorporation last August has compelled it to seek larger and permanent quarters, its present temporary location at 1010 Morton street being totally insufficient.
The building’s architect, 35-year-old Edward H. Glidden (1873-1924), brought the same tasteful design sensibility he applied to a growing number of apartment houses in the city’s growing northern suburbs: Earl Court (1903), the Winona (1903), the Rochambeau (1905; demolished 2006), the Washington (1905-6), the Marlborough (1906), and the Wentworth (1908). Not limited to apartments, the architect’s designs also included the National Marine Bank (1904) and the Seventh Baptist Church (1905) on North Avenue. Gildden’s later commissions, often with his partner Clyde Nelson Friz, included the Latrobe (1911; Glidden & Friz), the Esplanade (1911-12; Glidden & Friz), Calvert Court (1915), and Tudor Hall/Essex Arms (1910, with Friz; 1922), Furness House (1917), and the Forest Theater (1918-19). The French precedent for the grand fireplace at the Zell Motor Car Company showroom are likely based on Glidden’s studies in Paris around 1908 to 1912.
Zell hired Glidden again in early 1914 to expand and improve the showroom on Mount Royal Avenue, according to a February 9, 1914 mention in Industrial World noting that Gildden had “drawn up plans covering the same general design and character of building as their present one.” The business thrived as the local dealer for the Packard—an independent automaker based in Detroit that specialized in high-priced luxury automobiles. The Zell Motor Car Company also operated a service facility nearby (set back from North Avenue on Whitelock Street at Woodbrook Avenue) from around 1901 up until Packard stopped manufacturing automobiles in the late 1950s. The service facility is better known for the last few decades as the location of Greenwood Towing.
Dealerships and service stations on Mount Royal Avenue, Charles Street and North Avenue flourished in the 1920s, endured through the Great Depression in the 1930s and still continued after World War II. Nearby dealers to the Zell Motor Company included Backus Ford, Weiss Ford, Chesapeake Cadillac, and Oriole Pontiac. Unfortunately for the Zell Motor Car Company, whose founder had died in 1935, the end of Packard’s automobile production in 1956 marked the end of their operation. Like other landmarks on Mount Royal Avenue, such as the conversion of Mount Royal Station into studios for MICA in 1968, the automotive showroom turned into offices and remains in use today. In 2015, the sign above the building’s Mount Royal Avenue entrance reads “The Towne Building” and the structure is up for sale.
Built in 1921, Pool No. 2 in Druid Hill Park served the recreational and competitive swimming needs of over 100,000 Black residents sun88. Pool No. 2 measured just 100’ x 105’ (half the size of whites-only Pool No. 1), but proved so popular that the swimmers had to be admitted in shifts. In 1953, a young Black boy swimming with friends in the Patapsco River accidentally drowned. The tragedy revealed the difficult circumstances for many Black residents looking for a place to swim in sun88. The boy lived near Clifton Park but swam in a dangerous river due to his exclusion from the park’s whites-only pool. In response, the NAACP started a new push to make all of sun88's municipal pools open to all races. When the City Parks Board refused to desegregate, the NAACP filed a lawsuit and eventually won on appeal.
On June 23, 1956, at the start of the summer season, sun88 pools opened as desegregated facilities for the first time. Over 100 African Americans tested the waters in previously white-only Pool No. 1 but only a single white person swam in Pool. No. 2.
Pool No. 2 closed the next year and remained largely abandoned up until 1999. That year, sun88 artist Joyce J. Scott won a commission to turn Pool No. 2 into a memorial. In creating her installation, Scott asked herself, “How do we make this area useful and beautiful, and harken back to the pool era?” The results combined architectural elements and aquatic symbolism with abstract, colorful painted designs on the pavement around the pool. The designs and interpretive signage have weathered in the years since but Pool No. 2 remained an important destination to explore the Civil Rights history of Druid Hill Park and sun88's pools.
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