Biography
Jacques Kelly is a native of Baltimore, and he has read The Sun since the mid-1950s, when he was sent to the neighborhood drug store to buy ...
Jacques Kelly
Roaming the neighborhoods around Pimlico
May 17, 2013
Roaming the streets that encircle Pimlico Race Course, I discovered so many places that I had trouble going back to the same locale twice. Outer Northwest Baltimore is a fascinating, at times geographically bewildering, place.
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Renaissance for North Avenue as arts district
May 10, 2013
When Christa Daring was a student, she rode a bus from her Waverly home and crossed North Avenue on her way to classes at the Baltimore School for the Arts.
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With FlowerMart as backdrop, Mount Vernon is thriving
May 3, 2013
As many times as it rolls around, I never outgrow the FlowerMart, which opened Friday and runs through Saturday. It's held in May and timed to take advantage of the best part of Maryland's spring. Any event that draws so many families, especially babies in strollers, mothers and grandmothers, to a hallowed Baltimore neighborhood gets my vote, even if, truth be told, I am not much of crab cake fancier.
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'Sprat' Reeves shares his history, and Guilford's
April 26, 2013
I showed up at the door of a Greenway home I've admired for years. Charles B. Reeves — who goes by "Sprat" — greeted me with his enthusiastic welcome: "Delighted." For the next 90 minutes I tried to take notes about his version of the history of North Baltimore's Guilford.
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Cool potential for former icehouse
April 19, 2013
As many times as I have stood on the MARC station platform in West Baltimore, I never considered there was a fantastic, Jules Verne-like interior just across Franklin Street. I assumed the fire-damaged brick building alongside the rail tracks was just another derelict structure. After a visit there this week, I learned that one of Baltimore's fascinating industrial archaeological sites endures in the Midtown Edmondson neighborhood.
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Lexington Market is in desperate need of a change
April 12, 2013
I laughed at a news report quoting an official who lamented that Lexington Market lacked a French bakery. The Lexington Market I know is a place that has a thriving bakery, but it sells red velvet cake by the slice and at a price to fit its customers' pocketbooks.
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Church bell tower repairs signify change in Oliver neighborhood
April 5, 2013
A few weeks ago, I spent a few quiet minutes in Green Mount Cemetery, where its higher ground offers unexpected views of Baltimore. As I looked to the southeast, something curious caught my eye.
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Dispute over Crittenton Place in Hampden
March 22, 2013
Baltimore has so many hidden streets and lanes, it is no surprise that a place called Crittenton Place stumped the members of the Baltimore City Planning Commission. For the better part of two hours Thursday, I listened to an urban saga about a piece of property and its aged stone buildings that tell an amazing history.
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News that city's population has grown isn't a surprise to residents
March 15, 2013
As I walk around Baltimore, it has become apparent that the city is on an upward swing. I see more people out on the streets and living in places that once seemed underused or headed for trouble. Streets and places I once considered dangerous are not scaring people away.
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Johnston Square appears to be turning the corner
March 8, 2013
The banner at Greenmount Avenue and Preston Street proclaims the Lillian Jones Apartments are coming. For the past year, I've watched this building take shape in a neighborhood that needed all the help it could get. Come spring, new tenants will begin moving into these 74 units of affordable housing.
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Morticians opening grocery in East Baltimore
March 1, 2013
Mortician Erich March told me he was tired of seeing people in his East Baltimore community die of conditions like diabetes and hypertension. He blamed the lack of grocery shopping choices in the neighborhood where he grew up and where his Aisquith Street funeral home is located.
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Remington is making a comeback
February 22, 2013
After walking the byways of Remington, I agreed with my guide, a builder named Roy Skeen, who told me, "This is a neighborhood of nooks and crannies."
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Jewish Museum examines the exodus to the suburbs
February 15, 2013
As a child in the mid-1950s, I asked my mother why we didn't live in a modern house built of new, salmon-toned brick like my schoolmates. We lived in a traditional city neighborhood, in a three-story 1915 rowhouse. We had only a small backyard that lacked a barbecue area or swing set.
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Senator Theatre restoration moving along
February 8, 2013
The sight of a few ladders outside the Senator Theatre did not prepare me for the scope of the restoration project that is transforming this Govans-Belvedere Square landmark, a Baltimore treasure being taken apart and reassembled. There will be three newly constructed boutique theaters, too, making a four-screen complex.
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With planned restoration, Hebrew Orphan Asylum to get new life
February 1, 2013
Nearly three years ago, I stood with neighborhood residents and preservationists before what looked like an abandoned and very sad West Baltimore brick castle. Below its remarkable towers and stout walls on Rayner Avenue, I thought that this venerable old orphanage would not make it another year. Clearly at the end of its days, it seemed ready to fall from its embankment and hit the street.
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Unlocking the mysteries of the Jones Falls Valley
January 25, 2013
A few years ago I raised my hand at an auction and bought a box of 19th-century sepia-toned landscape photographs. After hours of looking at them, I detected that they had been taken not far away, in the heart of the Jones Falls Valley in Baltimore City, before an elevated highway and 125 years of development intervened.
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Barclay: a promising neighborhood with strong ties to city's history
January 18, 2013
While chatting with a neighbor this week, I learned she was planning to move to the 2200 block of Guilford Ave. She earned my respect for her decision to move to one of the newly renovated North Calvert Green homes, the sales name for fine 1890s rowhouses that have been made energy-efficient and renovated to the standard of the city's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation.
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Sheppard Pratt gatehouse gets a makeover
January 11, 2013
The whimsical building entered into local legend as the gingerbread home of Hansel and Gretel. The Sheppard Pratt gatehouse is so firmly established as a beloved Baltimore landmark that you almost expect merry gnomes to appear at its slender windows. It's not hard to envision an eccentric witch or two here. There's even a little stream nearby for a troll.
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Refurbishment of Everyman is a show-stopper
December 28, 2012
The sight of a newly resplendent Everyman Theatre made me get off a bus the other day as I was heading west on Fayette Street. I had to get a closer look at the city's newest gem.
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Garden club helped cultivate city neighborhoods
December 21, 2012
Alimay Thompson Kendrick sits in her dining room and recalls the first meeting of a neighborhood club she joined in 1959. It was a garden club, composed of both men and women, all African-American, formed to represent the neighborhoods of Forest Park, Windsor Hills and Ashburton. It was named For-Win-Ash and its aim was to keep these communities green, clean and beautiful.
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Remington corner to become arts, eating destination
December 14, 2012
Who would have thought that an old automobile repair and tire shop promises to emerge as a theater, restaurant and small office building? Look for the Single Carrot Theatre to move into enlarged permanent quarters at the corner of Howard and 26th streets, an intersection now on target to become a new arts and eating destination.
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Wonderful holiday tradition at Highlandtown firehouse
December 7, 2012
When I heard that Highlandtown had rolled out another holiday train garden, I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to the Conkling Street firehouse. What I found was the authentic thing.
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Former Patterson Park High no 'cookie-cutter property'
November 23, 2012
The project manager at the former Patterson Park High School in Highlandtown stood atop a roof terrace and said, "This is not a cookie-cutter property." That's an understatement.
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Transformation of a mill village
November 16, 2012
While on the winding road in the Patapsco River Valley, I thought it had been 30 years since I last visited Oella, the mill village tucked deep into the hills between Catonsville and Ellicott City's Main Street.
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A tidy enclave in Southwest Baltimore
November 9, 2012
In the heart of a little Southwest Baltimore neighborhood are signs saying "Welcome to Wellesley Park" and "Sustain us love."
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The rebirth of Fells Point
November 2, 2012
There's a lesson to be learned in Fells Point's past and present along its main business street. South Broadway, between Aliceanna and Fleet streets, looks like a scene out of World War II Eastern Europe. On both the east and west sides of the street, the once-familiar rowhouse businesses are gutted. Steel beams support what remains, a thin brick crust of 19th-century brick facades. Stand on Broadway, and you'll see straight through to Regester or Dallas streets. But not for long.
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Transformation seen in Brewers Hill
October 26, 2012
There's a transformation taking place this fall that is obvious from the former National Brewery in Brewers Hill. On a terrace just below the iconic Mr. Boh sign, I observed a construction army at work along Conkling and Dean streets. Over the summer, they labored on the creation of more than 600 new apartment rental units in low-rise buildings. Week by week, floors rose. Balconies appeared. Parking decks arrived. And sweeps disappeared down an ancient brick powerhouse chimney.
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Old Goucher boasts diversity in residents and businesses
October 19, 2012
A 25th Street insurance agent, Ken Abrams, got to the heart of what makes his neighborhood stand out. "There is a lot of diversity in the Old Goucher neighborhood. and we are proud of it," he said. "But this feature is not as well known as it should be."
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Jacques Kelly: Group works to preserve Worthington and Greenspring valleys
October 12, 2012
On a fall day, the landscape in northern Baltimore County looks pretty marvelous. Even the old-fashioned rural roads seem unobtrusive. It's hard not to think: Why hasn't all this gorgeous landscape been ruined, as close as it is to downtown Baltimore?
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Mount Vernon becomes a bustling neighborhood
October 5, 2012
The greater Mount Vernon neighborhood has grown stronger, more confident and busier lately. What's been happening in this eminently walkable district?
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Catonsville works on trail project
September 28, 2012
After the frost lowers the mosquito population, a dedicated group of park builders will be clearing a path through the middle of Catonsville. They are reclaiming the old right of way of the Catonsville Short Line Railroad, a route that has been overtaken by weeds and trees since the last train left for good in the spring of 1972.
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Cabbie tells stories of little-known neighborhoods
September 21, 2012
Social observer, career cabdriver and neighborhood storyteller Thaddeus Logan is offering Baltimoreans another volume of his urban epistles. "Hey Cabbie II!" looks at the Baltimore that passes under the radar of the media and the academics. Logan loves Baltimore unconditionally and airs its embarrassments, guilty pleasures and unauthorized stories.
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Progress made in cleaning up St. Vincent Cemetery
September 14, 2012
It's been two years since some descendants began agitating for recognition and reverence for their ancestors' resting place in an unmarked, abandoned 7-acre cemetery surrounded by the Clifton Park golf course.
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It doesn't have name, but more move into downtown area
September 7, 2012
I noticed a moving truck outside the old St. Alphonsus parochial school in the west side of downtown Baltimore on Saratoga Street. Someone was moving into an apartment in this Victorian building, once home to a school that made a a valiant attempt to remain open, The school closed a while back, and the building is now a residence.
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Schaefer was the neighborhood mayor
April 22, 2011
If you lived in Baltimore in the 1970s, it seemed that William Donald Schaefer paved every alley. An exaggeration? Yes. But then, as now, old Baltimore needed a lot of fixing and Schaefer was in his neighborhood mode. He did it well and had the support of some pretty amazing people. He listened to his aides and he also obsessed over letters his constituents mailed him.
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Ritual of opening up the house to the new season
April 17, 2010
The people who sell the bleach, detergents, trash bags, brooms and brushes love to see me coming this time of the year. For two or three weekends, I've been lugging the vacuum cleaner up and down the stairs. I've already totaled one shop vac filter because I did not know you have to remove it before use on a watery Baltimore cellar floor still showing the effects of March's rains and the February thaw.
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Hippo's opening another night to remember
February 14, 2004
AS MY CAB turned south on Eutaw Street on Tuesday night, I asked the driver, "Where are the moving lights?"
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Hoping B&O Museum is able to maintain pieces of history
February 22, 2003
I’VE OFTEN thought that Baltimore possesses three truly great object collections: the Cone sisters' canvases, the treasure of Henry and William Walters and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Yes, the rail museum at Pratt and Poppleton, which suffered such a direct hit from this week's snowstorm, is this country's knockout stable of iron-horse history.
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Saturday nights in 'Perry Mason's' courtroom
February 17, 2001
THE TELEVISION shows of 45 years ago were fairly tame fare compared to what the networks and cable deliver today. But certainly when this medium was relatively new - and the arrival of a fresh set in the neighborhood was still something of a novelty - gathering around the black-and-white screen was an event.
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Chief medical advice from family: Get better
February 10, 2001
IHEARD this week from my sister, the mother of the twin girls who just turned 3. All her children (she has three) are down with the sort of childhood maladies that arrive in the late winter. Her washing machine is working overtime. The children just aren't themselves. Or are they?
