Holding its own in the face of development, Baltimore’s oldest Black neighborhood marks its territory
Sharp Leadenhall hangs up banners to celebrate the area’s past and make sure residents have a say in its future
Above: Historic Sharp Leadenhall president Betty Bland-Thomas at a celebration of new banners the group put up in their South Baltimore neighborhood. (Fern Shen)
The possibility that their community might disappear looms large for the residents of Sharp Leadenhall.
To many people, the historic Black enclave is just a few blocks between Federal Hill’s upscale bar-and-brunch scene and the place where the Baltimore Ravens play, M&T Bank Stadium.
That infuriates John Williams, who has lived in the South Baltimore community for 35 years.
“It’s like everything has been taken away from us. Everything is just Federal Hill,” said Williams, a member of the board of Historic Sharp Leadenhall.
“It seemed like we are losing our identity to gentrification,” said the group’s president, Betty Bland-Thomas.
They were speaking Friday about the origins of a project their group thinks can go a long way toward preventing this erasure:
With the help of the South Baltimore Gateway Partnership and the Neighborhood Design Center, they produced 60 large banners – now hanging from neighborhood utility poles – that say “Historic Sharp Leadenhall” and depict the faces of four prominent Black Americans with ties to the community.
“I’m proud about this opportunity for our community to have an idea, to have partnerships, and then identify the influential people who played a big part in African American history,” Bland-Thomas said.
She was addressing a gathering of about 25 neighbors and supporters who came together at the Martini Lutheran Church to celebrate completion of the project.
Some of them could trace their roots in the area back three generations or more, said Bland-Thomas, a community leader and student of local history who jokingly describes herself as “a newcomer,” having lived there for just 27 years.
“We’re very concerned we’re going to be squeezed out of our own area,” she told The Brew. “If we can preserve and document this rich history, it might be a way of possibly getting a designation – a tool in the toolbox for the development that is coming our way.”
Project partners pose with Historic Sharp Leadenhall board members. BELOW: A banner hangs above Henrietta Street. (Fern Shen)
Rich History
Recent times are represented on the banners by Elijah Cummings, the former Maryland congressman and civil rights leader who died in 2019. Cummings grew up in a Sharp Leadenhall rowhouse, and as a youth helped integrate the nearby whites-only Riverside Park pool.
The other three people depicted hark back to a more distant and illustrious era for Sharp Leadenhall – a neighborhood today bounded by Henrietta Street to the north, Ostend Street to the south, Hanover Street to the east and Sharp Street (and I-395) to the west.
Settled by freed slaves and German immigrants in the late 1700s, the area was home to prominent Black intellectuals and institutions, a stronghold of the abolitionist movement, the site of the first school for African-Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line and a hub of the Underground Railroad.
By the late 19th century, more than 4,000 people lived in the area, which included what is now Otterbein.
Home to prominent Black intellectuals, the South’s first school for African-Americans and a hub of the Underground Railroad.
The new banners include Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, who often used Baltimore as a home base for her missions to rescue enslaved people, and abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, who joined the Sharp Street Methodist Church when he was enslaved in Fells Point in the 1830s.
Founded in 1787 as the first Black Methodist congregation in Baltimore, the church was located at 112-116 Sharp Street, which is between Pratt and Lombard streets.
(“A lot of our history really extends beyond our current boundaries – we want that story to be told, too,” Bland-Thomas explained.)
A minister at the church, William Watkins, was the uncle of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who attended the Watkins Academy for Free Black Youth.
Harper, who went on to become an abolitionist, orator, suffragist and one of the best known Black poets of the 19th century, is also depicted on the banner.
“A lot of times our women aren’t always recognized for the sacrifice and the work that they’ve done,” Bland-Thomas pointed out.
An engraving of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and one of her most famous poems, “Bury Me In A Free Land,” published in 1858. (theotterbein.org, Encyclopedia Britannica)
Population Shrinkage
While last week’s gathering at the church was a joyous occasion, other meetings have been a vehicle to vent community frustration over city leaders’ failure to protect them from development.
That was the case in June 2023, when developer Douglas Schmidt sought a zoning change for a luxury high-rise apartment building with no affordable housing component.
Only Schmidt and the Brandon Scott administration supported the change. Advocates and residents denounced it as “perpetuating the inequitable and inaccessible rents of the White L.”
“Sharp Leadenhall is rapidly losing its identity as an historic Black community in the midst of the overwhelmingly white South Baltimore peninsula,” the Public Justice Center’s C. Matthew Hill testified, shortly before the City Council approved the zoning change.
• Zoning change vote by City Council comes as a blow to a historic Black enclave (6/27/23)
• As development looms, Sharp Leadenall stands up for its park (9/27/17)
Development continues to threaten legacy residents, Bland-Thomas said, marveling that an unimproved lot with an unimproved building on West Cross Street recently sold for $800,000.
A textbook case of displacement for highway construction and urban renewal, the Sharp-Leadenhall/Otterbein area lost thousands of people in the 1960s and early 1970s.
“We knew there was going to be progress, but it was like we couldn’t have input in it” – John Williams.
John Williams said he and other longtime residents recognize that change is inevitable, but they refuse to accept having no say in it.
“We knew there was going to be progress, but it was like we couldn’t have input in it,” he said, recalling how, at first, the Light Rail stop on Hamburg Street only operated on Sunday for football fans.
“We knew that wasn’t right,” he said. “We had to get a petition to get them to change it so we could use it.”
Former Sharp Leadenhall resident Joanie David shares fond memories of the tight-knit neighborhood she grew up in. (Fern Shen)
Williams and others at the meeting were nostalgic about the strong sense of community in Sharp Leadenhall before the area got developed.
Joanie David lived on Lee Street two blocks from the water and recalled what happened when Inner Harbor redevelopment began:
“They started tearing down the unit-block houses.”
“In those days, you could stay outside or sit on your steps ’til the streetlights came on. It was really safe,” she recalled.
“Everybody was close, everybody got along. If you don’t have anything to eat, well, I don’t have much either. But we can share, right?”
But David, like the others on this day, was in a mood to be hopeful thanks to the new banners flying proudly in the community.
Asked to sing for the occasion, she came to the front of the room and performed a hearty a capella version of “Fill the World with Love” from the 1969 movie, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”
That was what was so great about the Sharp Leadenhall she remembers from back in the day.
“It really was a place where you felt the love,” she said.
Historic Sharp Leadenhall board members. BELOW: Area residents Kathy McCauley and Shirley McLamb with Pastor Philip Jaseph at the Martini Lutheran Church where the event was held. (Fern Shen)
