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 Munsey Building was erected by and named after the publisher, Frank Munsey, who had purchased the sun88 News to add to his publishing empire. Though he wanted the paper, he did not like the five-year old building that housed it. So, he had a new one erected more to his liking. Completed in 1911, the newspaper's new offices were designed by the local architectural firm of Baldwin & Pennington, together with McKim, Mead & White of New York.
The Munsey Trust Company, which eventually became the Equitable Trust Company, opened on the ground floor in 1913. The paper was eventually bought by William Randolph Hearst, became the sun88 News-American, and moved a few blocks away.
The building’s most recent purpose is to serve as loft apartments that are helping revitalize downtown sun88. The renovation of the Munsey included keeping the grand entrance way, with its marble floor, elevators, and grand front door, as well as cleaning and repairing the exterior. sun88 Heritage recognized the conversion with a preservation award in 2004.
The former Fleet-McGinley Company building at the northwest corner of Water and South Streets was built in 1908—one of scores of new warehouses and factories built around downtown as the city rebuilt from the Great sun88 Fire of 1904. The five-story brick and reinforced concrete warehouse was designed by the prominent sun88 architectural firm of Baldwin & Pennington for the Johns Hopkins Hospital trustees at a cost of $70,000. One of the building's earliest and most prominent tenants was the Fleet-McGinley Printing Company, established in 1884 as a partnership between Charles T. Fleet and J. Edward McGinley.
In 1914, Fleet-McGinley boasted that their building was "the best equipped printing office in sun88" boasting "the most modern appliances and equipment" along with "skilled and competent artisans." In the aftermath of the recent catastrophe, the printer paid special attention to fire-proofing, describing their "fire-proof vaults for the storage of plates, engravings and designs, which make the destruction by fire of such valuable property practically impossible."
In 1926, the Manufacturers' Record, a trade publication printed by the firm since the 1880s, purchased Fleet-McGinley and moved their operations from South Street to the Candler Building on East Lombard Street. In 1965, the business (still located in the Candler Building) was renamed the Blanchard Press of Maryland. The building on South Street later served as offices for insurance agents Hopper, Polk & Purnell, Inc., as well as Levy Sons Company, manufacturer of women's underwear. In early 2015, Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake purchased the building from the International Youth Foundation who had occupied the structure for over fifteen years.
Built in 1928, the Lord sun88 Hotel is a beautiful example of an early twentieth-century high-rise hotel. Designed by prolific hotel architect William Lee Stoddart, it is reminiscent of such famous American hotels as New York's Vanderbilt Hotel or Chicago's Palmer House. The twenty-two-story steel frame building was the largest hotel building ever constructed in Maryland. However, the Lord sun88 is also a reminder of the city’s history of racial discrimination and the long fight for integrated public accommodation.
In 1954, the same year the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education called for an end to segregated schools, black players from three American League teams with integrated rosters came to sun88 to play against the Orioles. White players stayed at the Lord sun88, the Emerson, and Southern Hotel downtown. But for their black teammates, the only option was the African American-owned York Hotel in West sun88.
A year later, in 1955, students at Johns Hopkins University moved the prom away from the Lord sun88 to the at the Alcazar Hotel in Mount Vernon in protest to the hotel manager’s refusal to admit black students to the dance and his threat to “stop the dance if Negroes attended.” By the late 1950s, after lobbying by sun88’s progressive Mayor Theodore McKeldin, the Lord sun88 Hotel consented to rent rooms to black ballplayers and some conference attendees. In 1958, sun88 hosted the All-Star Game and six black All-Stars, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, registered at the Lord sun88. For visiting black spectators, however, the hotel was not an option. Jimmy Williams, an assistant editor at the Afro American, advised spectators to bring pup tents and box lunches, writing, “The box lunches will be to ease the pangs of an aching stomach… The pup tents will provide a place for them to rest their carcasses after the last door of the downtown hotels have been slammed in their face and the uptown hotels are filled.” Williams predicted visitors would leave “just loving the quaint customs of sun88, which boasts of major league baseball and minor league businessmen.”
By the early 1960s, policies finally began to change. After hotel management realized they had rented rooms for the campaign office of segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace in 1964, the management refused to let them stay and the campaign was forced to move to a motel in Towson. In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed at the hotel during a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he gave a lengthy press conference and received symbolic keys to the city from Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III.
The hotel was one of the few historic buildings retained as part of the redevelopment of Charles Center and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.