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Blockbusting in Baltimore: the Edmondson Village Story University of Kentucky UKnowledge United States History History 9-30-1994 Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story W. Edward Orser Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Orser, W. Edward, "Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story" (1994). United States History. 8. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/8 Blockbusting in Baltimore This page intentionally left blank Blockbusting in Baltimore THE EDMONDSON VILLAGE STORY W. EDWARD ORSER THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Copyright © 1994 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 07 06 05 04 03 6 543 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orser, W. Edward Blockbusting in Baltimore: the Edmondson Village story / W. Edward Orser p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-0935-3 (pbk.) 1. Edmondson Village (Baltimore, Md.)-Race relations. 2. Baltimore (Md.)-Race relations. 3. Demographic transition­ Maryland-Baltimore. 4. Afro-Americans-Housing-Maryland­ Baltimore. 5. Afro-Americans-Maryland-Baltimore-Segregation. 6. Edmondson Village (Baltimore, Md.)-Population. 7. Baltimore (Md.)-Population. I. Title F189.B16E266 1994 305.896'07307526-dc20 94-8631 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. §* Manufactured in the United States of America ~A·A'.~ Member of the Association of 'I~ _ American University Presses Contents List of Maps and Figures Vll Preface ix The Trauma of Racial Change 2 The Making of a Rowhouse Neighborhood 21 3 Continuity and Undercurrents of Change 48 4 A White Community Responds to Change 84 5 African American Pioneers 131 6 The Legacy of Blockbusting 160 Appendix A: Suggested Reading 182 Appendix B: Home Ownership on Selected Blocks, 1955-1973 186 Notes 190 Bibliography 226 Index 234 This page intentionally left blank Maps and Figures Maps Racial composition and population for Baltimore City, 1930-1970 / 2 2 Racial composition of the Edmondson Village neighborhood, 1940-1970 / 3 3 Development of the Edmondson area, 1921-1941 / 24 4 Post-World War II development of the Edmondson area / 58 Figures The Edmondson area: rowhouse suburbs, 1938 / 16 2 View up the Edmondson Avenue hill, 1954 / 17 3 Rowhouse styles / 26 4 "Areaway" houses, Edmondson Avenue / 28 5 James Keelty Company's daylight rowhouses / 29 6 Row of daylight houses, Normandy Avenue / 31 7 Rowhouse, Normandy Avenue / 32 8 Section of Sanborn Map, the Edmondson area, 1928 / 34 9 Early Keelty "English type" daylight rowhouses, Wildwood / 36 10 Architectural variety in Wildwood rowhouses / 37 11 St. Bernardine's Roman Catholic Church, c. 1929 / 39 12 Handwritten receipt for a Keelty house, 1922 / 40 13 Edmondson Village Shopping Center, 1952 / 50 14 Newly opened Edmondson Village Shopping Center, c. 1947 / 51 15 Hecht Company Department Store opening, 1956 / 53 16 Christmas lights at the shopping center, 1958 / 56 17 Group homes development plan by Keelty Company, 1950 / 61 18 St. Bernardine's Roman Catholic Church memorial, 1948 / 79 19 Pickets at the Morris Goldseker Company office, 1969 / 134 20 Edmondson Village Shopping Center, 1979 / 155 21 Young Edmondson Village residents today / 158 This page intentionally left blank Preface Each semester in my course on community in American culture, I sud­ denly pose this question to the students: "Imagine an American commu­ nity of twenty thousand people; then imagine that ten years later its popu­ lation is still twenty thousand, but virtually none of the residents are the same; how do you account for that?" After looks of initial puzzlement, hands shoot up: "A flood or other natural disaster?"; "A nuclear acci­ dent?"; "Economic dislocation-they all worked for the same employer, and the plant moved?" The hypotheses go on, but each eventually is dis­ missed by the group as relatively implausible. To be sure, some of these ecological or economic crises might produce massive dislocation, but how to account for an equal amount of resettlement? Then someone eventually asks: "Racial change?" And, invariably, throughout the room there is a collective "oh-yes, sure!"; then class members settle back as if nothing more need be said, because we all, presumably, "understand." Each time this happens I find myself reflecting again on what this exercise says about American culture and ourselves as participants in it: that collective behavior based upon dynamics so powerful that they could hardly be ac­ counted for even by catastrophic degrees of environmental or economic impact can be triggered by race, and that such social dynamite is nev­ ertheless so much a part of our cultural surround that we simply accept it as a given, as something that we presume we understand-whether con­ sciously or at some other level of our psyche,and whether we really do or not. The hypothetical, of course, is not hypothetical at all. It corresponds to the real case of the west Baltimore area called Edmondson Village, where roughly forty thousand people did indeed change places--some twenty thousand leaving, twenty thousand arriving--over a period of ap­ proximately ten years, between 1955 and 1965, in an especially acute instance of blockbusting that triggered white flight and racial change on a dramatic scale. As a teacher of American Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a campus located on the west side of the x Preface Baltimore metropolitan region, I continued to encounter references to this particular episode in student family history assignments. Typically they cropped up in interviews with parents or grandparents-whether whites whose families had fled the neighborhood or African Americans whose families had moved in behind them. The range of feelings was wide: among whites they ranged from anger and bitterness to bewilderment and a sense of loss; among African Americans there often were measures of satisfaction with new opportunities but also feelings of disappointment and frustration. The interpretations differed, particularly for those on the two sides of the racially dividing experience, as did assignments ofrespon­ sibility and blame. But common to all was a sense of social dynamics that seemed beyond individual control and a sense of disjunction, as if their lives had been marked at this one key point by a dramatic experience that still seemed unresolved and a legacy that was uncertain. I came to inter­ pret these references as expressions of, and testimony to, the trauma of rapid racial change, and I set out to try to trace its dimensions. If the legacy of that trauma is still somewhat unresolved for Ed­ mondson Village residents, past and present, the fact of the matter is that it still is unresolved in many ways for American culture as a whole, be­ cause the phenomenon was by no means unique to Edmondson Village. It happened in other Baltimore neighborhoods, in sections of numerous cities, large and small,and in many regions of the United States. In some places they called it "panic peddling"-but, by whatever name, it was a process that dramatically changed the shape of America's urban areas in the postwar decades and laid the groundwork for persistent patterns of race and residency. Despite what we like to feel have been significant changes since that era in legislation, in institutional procedures, and in public attitudes, mechanisms that sometimes may have been more subtle and processes that may have been more gradual nevertheless have contin­ ued to produce similar results, if on a less dramatic scale. Therefore, I found it compelling to try to understand the Edmondson Village case for what light it might shed on these larger patterns of race in our national culture, past and present. Blockbusting, of course, was a logical extension of the pervasive sys­ tem of residential segregation that American society had crafted-by law and by custom-to create and preserve a dual housing market in Ameri­ can cities, severely circumscribing housing opportunities for African Americans. In the changing social climate of post-World War II urban America a silent conspiracy that had seemed so unshakable suddenly proved exceedingly vulnerable, even fragile. Ironically, it was not amelio- Preface xi rating racial attitudes or institutional reform that produced the transfor­ mation as much as it was entrepreneurs out to exploit the crevices in the system for financial gain, profiting at the expense of both populations. One result of such cataclysmic change was rapidly resegregated commu­ nities. Whites paid dearly for their decisions to flee; African Americans gained sorely needed residential options, but the toll for them was high as well. This is the story I set out to explore, but it soon became apparent to me that the focus needed to be broader than the episode of blockbusting. In order to try to understand the character of a white community that panicked in this way, it was necessary to look back to the circumstances of community formation and to examine the social and cultural patterns that gave Edmondson Village its particular identity.
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