Penny postcards reveal 1920s Baltimore as a ‘city of homes’
July 16, 2008
Over July 4th weekend, I was visiting my family at our house in Thurmont. My grandmother was born in a one-room cabin on the property in north Frederick County, and her parents built the first house there in 1920, a pre-fab Sears Roebuck two-story that we now lovingly call “Wild Rose Lodge” because of the flowers that bloom every year there.
Until 2006, I had a great-uncle who lived at Wild Rose Lodge and who had collected an impressive assortment of family and Maryland-related memorabilia — paintings by one-time MICA president Stanislav Rembski, D-Day and moon-landing editions of The Sun, and a letter on White House stationary congratulating my great-grandmother on being “Maryland Democratic Mother of the Year,” to name a few.
I’ve often wandered around the house, opening drawers and poking around bookshelves for interesting trinkets, and this time, I happened upon a real gem – a set of 22 penny-postcard images of Baltimore, printed on a glossy, fold-out, accordion-style booklet, which is wrapped up in a self-created envelope. I realize that’s hard to visualize, but that’s why we have a nice little slide show of a few of the images.
The images, which include Lexington Market, Mt. Vernon Place, City Hall, Penn Station (which once had, apparently, a beautiful, green “sunken garden” in front of it), and several other public places, churches, and places of business in the city, probably date from sometime between 1923 and 1927, based on the 1.5 cent price listed for postage and a short greeting printed inside the envelope from mayor Howard W. Jackson.
Penny postcards were apparently quite popular back in those days (you can read more about them here), as a way of describing a city you’re visiting merely by sending a souvenir collection of images to friends. It’s unclear exactly how or why these 22 images were selected, but in his greeting, Mayor Jackson writes:
“Baltimore is frequently referred to as the ‘City of Homes’, as more than sixty-five per cent of the residences of the City are owned by their occupants. Baltimore has many beauty spots with its splendid chain of public parks and numerous imposing public buildings.”
He also calls Baltimore “a City containing many buildings associated with the earliest history of the United States,” but geez – a 60 percent homeownership rate? Buildings that impose themselves on you? Sounds pretty nice, right?
The main image, titled “Panorama of the Business Section,” is masterfully double-printed on the front of the envelope and on the flap that you use to seal it (they don’t make souvenirs like these anymore, folks). It shows downtown entirely without the harbor, and very few of the buildings were above six stories. The most dominant building is, of course, the art-deco Baltimore Trust Building, now home to Miles & Stockbridge, a large Baltimore law firm, and a Bank of America branch, which still stands, in my mind, as an architectural highlight of Baltimore.
But it’s amazing how few of the landmarks we commonly associate with Baltimore business appear in these images. The Schaefer tower, Legg Mason Tower, T. Rowe Price Headquarters, the Bank of America Building, Harborplace, and the World Trade Center are all decades in the future, to say nothing of Harbor East, which is expected to deliver almost a century after these images were created. Even the wharves along Light Street, shown in one view of the harbor, make this city look foreign to the eye of a present-day Baltimorean.
If BACVA started selling fold-out picture postcard books of notable Baltimore landmarks today, which buildings should be included?
ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer
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I was very interested to read about your great-uncle’s Wild Rose Lodge and the paintings that he had by Stanislav Rembski. My husband and I knew both Stan and Dorothy well and have two paintings of his at the house that we live in. Would you be interested in reading a book of Stan’s writings that my husband compiled? It was a collection of works concerning his thoughts on death-appropriately called “No Fear Of Death”. I would be very interested in what you think either way. Thank you.