underbelly
Baltimore Maryland history
Then and Now: The Owl Bar
The Owl Bar has long been a favorite after-work drinking spot for MdHS staffers. A decent beer selection, cheap happy hour specials, and some of the best brick oven pizza in town are only part of the draw though. The bar, tucked in the back of the Belvedere Hotel, has a certain ambience to which [...]
Sunday Best: a volunteer reflects on photo crowdsourcing
Last week the Maryland Historical Society opened a satellite photograph exhibit, “Paul Henderson: Maryland’s Civil Rights Era in Photographs,” at Baltimore’s City Hall. The show marks our latest efforts to identify the people and locations in the Henderson Photograph Collection. Earlier this year, MdHS hosted an event to kickstart this process. The following is a reflection [...]
Everyday People: Paul Henderson Collection Goes to City Hall
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks here in the Imaging Services Department at MdHS. Through some wild confluence of ambition and scheduling, I agreed to curate and deliver a 48-piece photography exhibition the very week of the debut of my new documentary, HIT & STAY, at the Maryland Film Festival. I can’t really [...]
Your Baltimore Canaries: a very brief history of Baltimore’s second professional base ball team
Look up, Baltimore baseball fans! You’ve come a long way. The origin of baseball in Baltimore is a ridiculously complicated affair. Scant photographic evidence remains and accounts in newspapers, which used nicknames for teams and players as often as they did proper names, leave behind a murky, hard-to-follow record. By the 1870s there were already a [...]
Lost City: The Sulzebacher House
West Baltimore was once a densely packed, vibrant neighborhood full of theaters, local businesses, and industry. Drive down many of the streets today and you’re likely to see a vacant lot or a boarded up row house on nearly every other block. But even an empty field has a history. The tiny, off-kilter house pictured [...]
Paul Henderson Collection: Who or Where?
The Paul Henderson Photograph Collection contains over 6,000 photographs of mostly unidentified African Americans from ca. 1935-1965. When the Paul Henderson: Baltimore’s Civil Rights Era in Photographs, ca. 1940-1960 exhibition opened in 2012, several people from the media asked why it was important for MdHS to identify the people Henderson photographed in and around Baltimore. If you’ve ever [...]
“Facing the Masks”: Masked Mystery Solved
Last week we reached out for help understanding a photograph, and wow, did we get it. Our photo from the Hughes Company collection traveled far and wide. The image, known then as “Detective room, Police Department,” was not only a headscratcher, but also a Rorschach Test of sorts. Different eyes saw different things happening. Speculations, observations, [...]
Masked Mystery
Last month we solved a longstanding photograph mystery that we never expected to solve, that is until we rolled up our sleeves and actually tried. Modern digitization technology, more precisely the ability to zoom deep into a photo or negative to see details previously unavailable to the naked eye, coupled with searchable newspaper databases make solving [...]
What’s the Point?
While writing a previous post that looked at the debate over the oldest house in Baltimore, a coworker introduced me to another longstanding Baltimore debate. After reading the post, my coworker gently chided me for the use of “Fell’s Point” rather than the correct “Fells Point.” Not being a native Marylander, I was unfamiliar with [...]
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