Recently I dined at The Waterfront Hotel, a Fells Point restaurant best known for its role as the bar on Homicide. While the good food and great view of the water are enough to attract most people to the year-old establishment, this restaurant has special significance to me as it was where my great-grandmother grew up. While there, I couldn't help but look around and try to imagine what life must have been life for her in late 19th and early 20th century Baltimore.The Waterfront's website provides a little information about the building's history (like the fact that it built as a private residence in 1771 or that it's the second oldest brick building in Baltimore) but I still wanted to know more. The only thing I could remember was that my great-grandmother, Mom-mom, lived in the house during the Baltimore fire of 1904. When I was young, she told me about how they waited for the fire to move from east to west across the city and wondered whether it would make it to them.
For more information, I checked with my father who said he didn't really know much about the time my great-grandmother lived there but reminded me of a family history written by my great-grandmother before her death. Sure enough, in checking this family history, I found out a few interesting details that I will now share with you.
One of eight children, Mom-mom estimates that her family moved to the house at 1710 Thames Street around 1900. (She would have been around 8 years old at the time.) Her father had been running a men's clothing store around the corner on Bond Street and the family lived above it. The landlord, though, who also happened to be a cousin, was upset because the location did so well. The cousin decided he wanted to set up his own shop there and my great-grandmother's family had to move. "As soon as they moved, the cousins moved into the corner store, and that was the beginning of a feud that was worse than the Hatfields and the McCoys," my great-grandmother recalled.
So back to the Thames Street house. Mom-mom said that in its day, the place must have been a mansion because it was so big. "The rooms were enormous, with plaster cornices," she said. "There was a wide hallway with a magnificent stairway and balustrade running to the third floor." (By the way, if anyone knows what a balustrade is, let me know. I was too lazy to Google it.)
The store was on the ground level of the house. Mom-mom went on to say that the first floor had a dining room and kitchen, the second floor was the living room and her parents' bedroom, and then the other bedrooms were on the third floor. Her father built a three-story extension on to the house that they rented out, mostly to other Polish immigrants. The house itself had no heat and relied on three stoves. Her brothers brought coal up from the cellar every morning so her mother could make the fires. Then there was the bathroom: "We had an outhouse with three holes and you had to be careful where you stepped," she said.
Incidentally, as a side note, I should mention that Mom-mom's brothers are a story all their own. Two of them, Ben and Herman, started Channel 13 (now known as WJZ) in Baltimore in 1948 and went on to buy Pimlico Race Track in 1952. It's nice to know that my ancestors had a part in Baltimore's history.
Mom-mom said that during the Baltimore fire in 1904, people from other neighborhoods sought refuge at their house because they were so close to the water. In preparation for the fire, her father hired a wagon and loaded the store's merchandise on it to save it. "The only problem was that he neglected to get horses to pull the wagon," Mom-mom noted.
It isn't entirely clear how long the family stayed on Thames Street. Looking through the family history, it appears that Mom-mom's father closed the store and the family moved to Clarksburg at some point. But after another business venture went bad in 1915, the family moved to 1207 North Broadway and her father opened the store again back at 1710 Thames. He sold men's clothing and items catering to sailors. In 1920, the family moved to Reisterstown Road.
I plan to return to the Waterfront in the near future. This time I want to explore a little more though. Now that I have a little more knowledge, I want to try to imagine what went where back in the early 1900s. Oh yeah, and the food is really good, too.
