Although a transplanted Baltimorean, I have come to appreciate my quirky adopted city. Baltimore has its warts and has endured tough times, but over the years the city and its citizens have been ahead of the curve in many ways to the betterment of us all. It’s worth sharing a few Baltimore and Baltimorean “firsts,” some familiar and some perhaps not so well known. Readers may have their own favorite Baltimore firsts.
Historic Sites
Many of us admire
the Washington Monument on the National Mall, but did you know that the
178-foot-high Greek Doric Washington monument in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon Place,
completed in 1829 using local white marble, was the first commemorative
structure honoring our first president and preceded the stone obelisk on the
Mall by 59 years? Both were designed by Robert Mills.
The first iron
building in America, which opened in 1851 on Baltimore Street, served as the
headquarters of the Baltimore Sun and
became known as the Sun Iron Building. Unfortunately, it did not survive the
fire of 1904, but a number of iron-front buildings still survive in the west
side of downtown Baltimore.
Guinness World
Records credits Baltimore as having the world’s first strip shopping center
with off-street parking. Built at the corner of Upland and Roland Avenues as
part of the Roland Park planned suburban garden community is a half-timbered
Tudor-style commercial building whose shops opened for business in 1907.
Amazingly, 114 years later the center is still in operation.
The Johns Hopkins
University, founded in 1876 as America’s first research university, was modeled
after its counterpart in Heidelberg, German. There have been 39 Nobel Laureates
affiliated with Johns Hopkins, of whom 29 are officially listed by the
University as Johns Hopkins Nobel Laureates. The first was Woodrow Wilson, a
Hopkins alumnus who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. The Johns
Hopkins Hospital, opened in 1889, was the home of the world’s first formal
medical residency program to train young physicians.
The University of Maryland School of
Dentistry, originally chartered as the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery in
1840, was the first dental college in the world and laid the foundation for our
present-day dental profession. The School houses the Samuel D. Harris Museum of
Dentistry.
Industry in Baltimore
Tom Thumb, the
first successful American-built steam locomotive and the most recognized
locomotive ever built, laid the foundation for the B&O, America’s first common
carrier railroad and got railroading off to the races. While Tom Thumb was not
saved, a replica is on view at the B&O Railroad Museum.
Baltimore has the
distinction of being the home of the first umbrella factory in America, founded
in 1828 by German immigrant Francis Beehler. The company’s motto was, “Born in
Baltimore, Raised Everywhere.”
In 1844, Samuel
Morse, using telegraph lines installed along the right-of-way of the Baltimore
& Ohio Railroad, used the language of dots and dashes to send his historic
message, “What hath G-d wrought?” from the old Supreme Court Chamber in
Washington to the Mount Clare Railroad Station in Baltimore. Although
very primitive compared to today’s internet, it revolutionized communication in
its time, and within 10 years more than 20,000 miles of telegraph wire
crisscrossed the United States.
Baltimore is the
birthplace of the first Linotype machine, considered the greatest revolution in
printing since the Gutenberg Press (1440). It is a typesetting machine which allows
its operator to cast type in hot metal as a complete line rather than as
individual characters. The machine was invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, an
immigrant from Germany, who patented it in 1884. It was first used commercially
in 1886 to print the New York Tribune and
remained the industry standard throughout the world until the 1970s, when it
was replaced by photo, and then computerized, typesetting. One of the few
remaining operating Linotype machines can be seen at the Baltimore Museum of
Industry.
The First Shul
The Lloyd Street
Synagogue, built in 1845, was the first synagogue erected in Maryland and is
the third oldest standing synagogue in America. It was built in what was a
thriving Jewish community in East Baltimore. In 2001, excavations under the
building uncovered what may be the oldest mikvah in America. The beautifully
restored Greek Revival-style synagogue is now part of the Jewish Museum of
Maryland.
Ahead of the Curve
The Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra was created in 1916 as the nation’s first publicly-supported
symphony orchestra, and in 2007 its current leader, Maestra Marin Alsop, became
the first woman to lead a major American orchestra. A trailblazer, she broke
the glass ceiling for others who have followed her.
There are a number
of Baltimore-born individuals who left an indelible mark on our city and far
beyond. Thurgood Marshall was the founder, executive director, and chief
counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He argued 32 cases
before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them, the most famous being Brown v.
Board of Education. He was the first African-American solicitor general, and in
1967 he became the first African-American Supreme Court Associate Justice.
George Herman
(Babe) Ruth Jr., the greatest figure in major league baseball, was one of the
first five inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Ruth was born in the
Pigtown section of Baltimore but, because of a lack of parental supervision,
spent his childhood and teen years at the St. Mary’s Industrial School for
Boys. His playing days with the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and Boston
Braves spanned 22 seasons. The Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum is located on Emory
Street in the Baltimore row house where Ruth was born.
Henrietta Szold,
born in Baltimore in 1860, was the most prominent woman Zionist in America and
was the first editor of the Jewish Publication Society and the American Jewish
Yearbook. She was also a founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization
of America, which created the infrastructure for a modern medical system in
Palestine to serve both Jews and Arabs. The Hadassah organization also started
the Hadassah Medical Center, a leading research institution in Jerusalem. Szold
co-founded Ihud, a political party in Mandatory Palestine dedicated to a
bi-national solution. In 1933 she immigrated to Palestine and helped run Youth
Aliyah, an organization that rescued 30,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany.
Henrietta Szold died in 1945 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount
of Olives in Jerusalem.
Although Baltimore
faces major challenges related to drugs, crime, and poverty, we should be proud
of the city’s historic “firsts” and look forward to many more in better days
ahead.
