I was finishing a new book about the same time my backyard got planted for summer. The deadline I faced for Sunday's Charles Village Festival garden walk worked wonders to motivate me. Reservoir Hill is also holding its garden tour this weekend. Both tours offer ways to snoop around and not be chased away, and both neighborhoods have a rich history of international intrigue.
My reading mentioned one of the 20th-century's biggest spymasters, Allen Dulles, who operated a station in Bern, Switzerland, during World War II and was married to a Baltimorean, Clover Todd. They are buried in her family plot in Green Mount Cemetery. He went on to head the Central Intelligence Agency.
But what about Baltimore's other spy controversy? There was a time when Baltimoreans would argue the guilt and innocence of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. To this day, the question remains: Did Hiss, the Baltimore-born graduate of City College and the Johns Hopkins University, willingly hand over classified documents to the Soviet Union in the 1930s? To his death, Hiss professed innocence. The Chambers-Hiss spy case broke in the late 1940s and has been contested ever since.
It was in a house a couple of doors down from my own that I encountered the story of Whittaker Chambers, who admitted to spying for the Soviet Union but later renounced his actions. Although he, his wife, Esther Shemitz Chambers, and children Ellen and John lived there only briefly in the 1930s, 2610 St. Paul St. remains Whittaker Chambers' house in neighborhood lore.
Chambers' story is best read in author Sam Tanenhaus' 1997 biography. It is full of Baltimore's role in the spy belt of the pre-World War II years. I cannot visit Reservoir Hill without envisioning the Communist cells there. It's a neighborhood where the atmospheric architecture suggests all sorts of cloak-and-dagger activity. If you are not a fan of spy stories, the streets just look like, well, old Baltimore.
I was soon constructing a Whittaker Chambers Spy Belt, an imaginary district stretching through Reservoir Hill and along the edge of Druid Hill Park. One key address is 2113 Callow Ave., where a real-life photographer named Felix Inslerman used a Leica camera to take the microfilm pictures of the classified documents that Chambers obtained from his Washington sources.
Tanenhaus informs us that in the period of Chambers' most intense spying, he was living in an Auchentoroly Terrace apartment facing Druid Hill Park.
He was a spy and moved a lot. But he had residences at the old downtown YMCA (now the Mount Vernon Hotel) at Franklin and Cathedral streets; at 903 St. Paul St.; at 1617 Eutaw Place; and on Old Court Road. He also had an alias. He was known as Lloyd Cantrell and listed himself in the 1936 Baltimore City Directory under that name.
The book describes Chambers' wife, Esther, dressed in a "blue-black felt hat, a gray wool suit, a plain white blouse and flat-heeled shoes, her warm eyes all but disappeared behind the thick lenses of severe spectacles." In the 1930s, she was briefly an art teacher at the Park School, then on Liberty Heights Avenue.
The book says that the wives of the two key figures were friendly. Priscilla Hiss and Esther Chambers sat on benches in Mount Vernon Place, frequented the Saratoga Street part of the Hutzler Brothers department store and had chocolate sodas at the Fountain Shop.