There's a comforting home-and-hearth permanence to the neighborhood along Harford Road known as Hamilton.
Its shipshape business district is surrounded by block after block of 1920s bungalows and Cape Cod houses. It's a neighborhood that has weathered good and bad times by never being too fancy or too funky.
And it certainly doesn't change too much.
The recent arrival of some bulldozers in the 5400 block of Harford Road to clear a space for a new Revco drug store was clearly an occasion for discussion. Any alteration to the lineup of merchants along this street is viewed as fodder for conversation.
After all, Hamilton still hasn't quite recovered from the 1955 loss of streetcars on Harford Road. This is the kind of neighborhood where shop clerks still go home for lunch and the children still leave St. Dominic's parochial school in more or less orderly lines after classes end.
"I can remember when that Revco site was a skating rink. It moved up from Washington Street," said Edith Bush-Ireland, a woman who has worked so long at Lakein's jewelry store she's stopped counting the years. She seems to recognize her customers by the facial resemblances to their parents and grandparents.
The Revco location, she explains, was once the home of Temple's ice cream parlor. Across the street, near the jewelry store where she works, was its competitor, the Arundel ice cream shop.
"The bad ones hung out in the Arundel. Temple had the other nicer type," Bush-Ireland explains, as she dissects one of the most universal of social distinctions in 1940s and 1950s Baltimore.
The old Arundel ice cream chain, which had shops in about a dozen Baltimore neighborhoods, sold economical and perfectly acceptable ice cream. For some reason, its soda fountain and booths were viewed as hangouts for the "drape," or juvenile delinquent of that era. In Hamilton, Arundel on the west side of Harford Road got the drape trade while Temple on the east side got the more respectable crowd.
Both ice cream emporiums are long gone now. A Dunkin' Donuts franchise stands nearby to satisfy the craving for a quick fix of sweets.
"Every day I worked I would go home for lunch," Bush-Ireland said of the old days. "On Saturdays when I returned, I would have to push the people out of the way to get back to the counter. Hamilton was extremely busy in the 1950s and '60s before the malls began to open."
"We see a lot more people who used to shop downtown," said Bush-Ireland's boss, Warren C. Lakein, whose family has operated a jewelry store at Harford and Gibbons since 1934.
The business is strictly a family affair. His father and mother, Samuel and Gertrude Lakein, who are both in their 80s, still work some each week. His daughter, Marcia, is the gemologist. And his wife, Marilynn, also works at the store during busy periods.
"We were once the closest businesses to Fork, Fallston, Monkton, Perry Hall and Kingsville. Our customers would come south to shop in Hamilton," Warren Lakein said. His family has been in the jewelry business in Baltimore since 1913.
The Hamilton store still has its own charge accounts. Bills are sent to addresses at such classic Northeast Baltimore streets as Sefton, Gibbons, Arabia, Westfield, Bayonne, Grindon and Richard avenues.
And like old-fashioned business districts, where generations of Baltimoreans returned to shop and chat, there is still a lot of talk about the stores that closed and those that remained.
Gone from the neighborhood business district are Read's (now Rite Aid); Virginia Dare and Martha Washington candies; the Arcade movies (a classic neighborhood movie house that lasted long after others had closed); Wyman, Cannon and Sterling shoes; Young's men's shop; Pond's dress store; Irvin's; S&N; Katz; Lesser's dress shop; the Quickie Restaurant; M. Shaivitz furniture; Pappas market; Maranto's produce; Agostini shoe repair; Josephine's hat shop, and the China Palace. Hergenroeder's bakery was around the corner on Hamilton Avenue.
Still in business are Cooper's Camera Mart; the Hamilton news mart; Harford Cleaners; Hamilton Liquors; John J. Enoch business machines; Carlos shoe repair; the Arcade Pharmacy (still called Purdom's by some ancients), and the Signet Bank. In proper Hamiltonian conversation, it remains the Union Trust Company however.