Waverly is a neighborhood in the north central area of Baltimore, Maryland, located to the north of the adjacent same neighborhood called Better Waverly and west of Ednor Gardens-Lakeside, north and east of Charles Village (formerly named Peabody Heights when laid out in the 1870s) west of the area of Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhoods, along with the campus of the former red brick H-shaped building for Eastern High School (1938–1984), facing north towards 33rd Street, now renovated since the 1990s into offices for The Johns Hopkins University, a mile to the west. Adjacent to the east of the Eastern High/Johns Hopkins campus is the landmark tree-shaded campus of The Baltimore City College (high school), at 33rd Street and The Alameda. The College is a massive stone structure with a 150-foot bell tower visible for miles, nicknamed "The Castle on the Hill", constructed 1926–1928 of Collegiate Gothic architecture on one of the highest hills in the city, "Collegian Hill", with the downtown skyline visible to the south. City College (also known as "City") is the third oldest public high school in America, founded 1839 in downtown has been through eight different sites in its 179 years of history and five major buildings, each were architectural landmarks in their times. From its beginnings, until 1979, it was a single sex secondary school for boys in the Baltimore City Public Schools, when it co-educated admitting young women. These three major institutions and their sports events dominated the east side of Waverly/Better Waverly for nine decades.
Waverly's boundaries are drawn by Greenmount Avenue/York Road (Maryland Route 45) on the west, To the east is Ellerslie Avenue (and former site of old Municipal Stadium [football only bowl] (1922–1950) / Memorial Stadium (1950–2002), now occupied by a YMCA housing community with the space for the original historic diamond baseball field remaining in the center of the complex. On the east, East 39th Street to the north bordering the tomey mansions of the Guilford community and East 33rd Street (boulevard) to the south.[1] Originally known as the village of Huntingdon in the mid 1800s, just beyond Boundary Avenue (now North Avenue) at the northern edge of the city's limits of 1818, when the three matching old fieldstone structures for the Episcopal Church of St. John's of Huntingdon were constructed with the first in 1847 on Old York Road, the little lane once running north all the way to York, Pennsylvania in the 19th century, now parallel to the east of modern Greenmount Avenue are remnants of that earlier identity, when 25th Street to the south was once known as Huntingdon Avenue.
Waverly Main Street Historic District, an area listed in the National Register of Historic Places, includes all of the Waverly neighborhood, and the portion of the additional Better Waverly neighborhood located to the east between Greenmount Avenue and Ellerslie Avenue by the former old stadiums site. The Waverly neighborhood is also referred to by residents as "Waverly-north" to distinguish it from the area of the historic district overlapping Better Waverly to the south.[3]
Baltimore's former Memorial Stadium for baseball and football professional/collegiate sports was originally located on the opposite side of Ellerslie Avenue from Waverly (and previously a huge football-only bowl named Municipal Stadium (or sometimes called Baltimore Stadium or Venable Park Stadium) seating 100,000 located there 1922–1949, for college/university and high school games until the structure was demolished on February 15, 2002.[4] . For three seasons in 1947–1949, the first professional football team franchise in a new competing league of the All-America Football Conference began play with that first Baltimore Colts team of the AAFC.
When work started in 1949, demolishing the old Municipal Stadium bowl for the replacement multi-sports facility with an upper deck, later renamed Memorial Stadium and opened for professional football with the Baltimore Colts of the AAFC along with three other teams now merging with the National Football League (NFL) for what turned out to be only one season of 1950, before failing in a financial collapse. But then civic efforts were made with new financial backing and three seasons later a second NFL franchise team came to town in the Fall of 1953 which remained here for three decades to 1984.
The Baltimore Orioles in the minor level International League were at the football field since 1944 when a tragic fire burned down their Oriole Park wooden stadium on the northwest corner of Greenmount Avenue and 29th Street and so the minor league "Triple AAA" level Birds relocated to the 33rd Street 1922 football bowl for the rest of the 1944 season and starting in 1945 for temporarily the next decade until razing began in 1949. Then the reconstructed stadium project was put on a crash completion schedule in 1952–1953, when the city also almost simultaneously acquired a Major League Baseball level team in November 1953 for the first time in a half-century, buying out the previous owner when the St. Louis Browns relocated east to Maryland and were renamed the new Baltimore Orioles in the American League and opened their first season here in April 1954, just as the newly rebuilt Memorial Stadium was nearly completed and ready, soon making the Waverly and Greenmount Avenue communities busy and crowded even more than in previous decades on game days.
History
The area currently known as Waverly was previously a tiny village along York Road known as Huntingdon. As wealthy residents began building summer cottages there in the late 19th century, a firehouse, town hall and post office were added to the community. To avoid confusion with other places using the Huntingdon name, this postal village was named for Sir Walter Scott's novel, Waverly.[2]
Baltimore schoolteacher and poet Lizette Woodworth Reese's Waverly, A Victorian Village (1929) uses poetry and anecdotal prose to depict the neighborhood around the start of the 20th century. The frontispiece from this volume, a woodcut of a fruit tree, could be seen at the entrance to the Waverly branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library until its renovation in 2015.
The Waverly library, the fifth most popular branch of Baltimore's public library system, underwent a US$6million renovation project begun in August 2013 and completed in August 2015, nearly a year behind schedule. Founded in 1971 and first renovated in 1986, the 2015 project added 3,000 square feet, 35 additional public computers, and an enlarged community meeting room to the branch.[5]
Rapper and actor Tupac Shakur resided at 3955 Greenmount Avenue in the mid to late 1980s with his family.
Another notable Waverly resident was Major Richard M. Venable, a lawyer who wrote a standard legal textbook and dedicated much of his personal time to improving Baltimore's public parks. Venable Street is named after him (Baltimore Sun), along with his name being originally affixed to the park which would eventually become the site of Memorial Stadium.[citation needed]
Architecture is primarily row houses and wood Victorian single-family homes. Some of the latter are in a historic district designated by the city's Center for Historic and Architectural Preservation.[6]
Baltimore Memorial Stadium was a multi-purpose stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, that formerly stood on 33rd Street on an oversized block officially called Venable Park, which was a former city park from the 1920s. The block was bound by Ellerslie Avenue to the west, 36th Street to the north, and Ednor Road to the east. Two stadiums were located here; a 1922 version known as Baltimore Stadium or Municipal Stadium and, for a time, Babe Ruth Stadium in reference to the then-recently deceased Baltimore native. The rebuilt multi-sport stadium, when reconstruction was completed in mid-1954, would become known as Memorial Stadium. The stadium was also known as "The Old Gray Lady of 33rd Street," and also "The World's Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum" when used by the Baltimore Colts. the latter which was coined by Cooper Rollow.
Charles Village is a neighborhood located in the north-central area of Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It is a diverse, eclectic, international, largely middle-class area with many single-family homes that is in proximity to many of Baltimore's cultural amenities. Nearby are the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Homewood campus of The Johns Hopkins University, Olmstead's Wyman Park, and the weekly Waverly Farmers Market, and the arts district, Station North. Homes are exemplary Baltimore brick and stone row houses, many dating from the 1890s. Running from downtown north is the historic boulevard, Charles Street, where Baltimore's Easter Promenade once took place.
The city of Baltimore, Maryland, has been home to two Minor League Baseball teams called the Baltimore Orioles, in addition to the three Major League Baseball teams that have used the name
Abell is a neighborhood located in the north-central area of Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It is considered to be part of Charles Village, Baltimore.
Throughout the years, a number of teams in the National Football League (NFL) have either moved or merged.
Charles Street, known for most of its route as Maryland Route 139, runs through Baltimore and the Towson area of Baltimore County. On the north end it terminates at an intersection with Bellona Avenue near Interstate 695 (I-695) and at the south end it terminates in Federal Hill in Baltimore. Charles Street is one of the major routes through the city of Baltimore, and is a major public transportation corridor. For the one-way portions of Charles Street, the street is functionally complemented by the parallel St. Paul Street, Maryland Avenue, Cathedral Street, and Liberty Street.
Westport is a neighborhood in south Baltimore, Maryland. Westport is a majority African-American neighborhood that has struggled with crime, housing abandonment, and unemployment in the past decade. The neighborhood is bordered by the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River on the east, the city neighborhoods of Cherry Hill, Brooklyn and the southwestern Baltimore County community of Lansdowne to the southwest, Hollins Ferry Road and the Mount Winans and Lakeland neighborhoods to the west, and Interstate 95 to the north, along with the South Baltimore communities of Federal Hill and Otterbein. The Baltimore–Washington Parkway runs through the middle of Westport and intersects with Interstate 95, the main East Coast super-highway, north to south, Maine to Florida.
Greenmount West is a neighborhood in the state-designated Station North Arts District of Baltimore City. Its borders consist of Hargrove Alley to the west, Hoffman Street and the Amtrak railroad tracks to the south, the south side of North Avenue to the north, and Greenmount Avenue to the east. Residents in the area include a mix of low, middle and high income families, artists, commuters to Washington DC and working-class Baltimoreans with the majority of residents of African American descent.
The Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello community, often abbreviated to C-H-M, is a neighborhood in northeastern Baltimore, Maryland. A portion of the neighborhood has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Coldstream Homestead Montebello Historic District, recognized for the development of a more suburban style of rowhouses.
Ednor Gardens-Lakeside is a large community in northeast Baltimore, Maryland. It is bounded by 33rd Street to the south, Hillen Road to the east, Ellerslie Avenue to the west, and Argonne Drive, The Alameda, Loch Raven Boulevard, and Roundhill Road to the north. Ednor Gardens was part of a large planned community that was built out from the 1920s through the 1950s by Edward Gallagher, one of Baltimore's most prolific homebuilders at the time. It is notable among its neighbors for the quality of the homes and extensive landscaping. Until it was torn down in 2002, Memorial Stadium was located in Ednor Gardens-Lakeside.
33rd Street, originally called Thirty-third Street Boulevard, is a long, wide, east–west parkway with a broad tree-shaded median strip. It is surrounded by 1920s-era "Daylight-styled" row houses with porches and small front yards. It was designed by the Frederick Law Olmsted Brothers firm, as part of their Baltimore Plan of 1904 and 1921 for establishing stream valley parks and connecting boulevards.
St. John's Episcopal Church, also known as St John's in the Village, is a nineteenth-century Episcopal church building on Old York Road in the former village of Huntingdon (now the community of Waverly in northeast Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The congregation is often referred to as "St. John's of Huntingdon Episcopal Church". It is a Gothic Revival structure built originally in 1847. Also on the property is a cemetery.
Eastern High School, established in 1844 along with its sister school Western High School, was a historic all-female, public high school located in Baltimore City, Maryland, 21218, U.S.A. Its final building, at 1101 East 33rd Street, is to the west of The Baltimore City College, also at 33rd Street, and across the street from the former site of Memorial Stadium. E.H.S. was operated by the Baltimore City Public Schools system at successive locations until it was closed in 1986. The final building was renovated in the 1990s and is currently owned and used for offices by the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
Oriole Park was the name of multiple baseball parks in Baltimore, Maryland, all built within a few blocks of each other.
Harwood is a small neighborhood located in the north-central area of Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It sits east of Charles Village, south of Abell, west of Waverly and north of Barclay. Its boundaries are Guilford and Greenmount Avenues to the east and west, and 25th and 29th streets to the north and south. These streets together encompass about 14 city blocks.
The Baltimore Colts were a professional American football team that played in Baltimore, starting in 1953, to 1983, when owner Robert Irsay moved the franchise to Indianapolis, Indiana. The team was named for Baltimore's history of horse breeding and racing. It was the second incarnation of the Baltimore Colts, the first having played for three years in the All-America Football Conference and one in the National Football League (NFL). This Baltimore Colts team played its home games at Memorial Stadium.
Venable Park is a former city park located in the Waverly neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
Better Waverly is a neighborhood in the North District of Baltimore, located between the neighborhoods of Charles Village (west) and Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello (east). Its boundaries are marked by East 33rd Street (north), Exeter Hall Avenue (south), Greenmount Avenue (west) and Loch Raven Road (east).
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