Picture a spring afternoon in 1914. It's baseball weather. Baltimore has two franchises, the Terrapins and the Orioles. A young Babe Ruth has been signed by the second-rate team -- the Orioles.
Waverly's 29th Street is not yet paved and won't be for several more years. It doesn't matter. Nearly everyone arrives by the Greenmount Avenue-York Road streetcar line, the No. 8. The newest cars had varnished wood seats, their bodies smartly painted in red and cream and detailed with fancy gold stripes.
It was still wintry when the first newspaper stories began to chronicle the story of a new player find named Ruth. He was so new that The Sun got his name wrong and called him Frank. That mistake didn't happen again. In April, he pitched 18 scoreless innings.
The story of George Herman Ruth Jr. began in Southwest Baltimore, just a few blocks from today's Oriole Park at Camden Yards. In June 1900, he and his parents were living at 339 S. Woodyear St., a two-story brick rowhouse. The block was all private homes except for a bakery six doors below the Ruths. The baker lived upstairs and his oven was in the back yard.
A federal census taker recorded the household at three people -- George, Kate and their 5-year-old son, George Jr. The elder Ruth's brother John lived next door at 341. At this time, the brothers had a lightning rod and weather vane business. The young ballplayer's family moved several times, but it was never far away from the little streets on the southwestern edge of the downtown manufacturing district.
The picture the 1900 census details is of a hard-working neighborhood. Most of the families who lived here traced their ancestry from Maryland, but about a quarter of the Woodyear Street block had German blood. A few more were Irish. This was a characteristic of Baltimore as a whole at this time. About one in four residents spoke German as their native tongue.
The wage earners in this neighborhood often walked to work. They were sales clerks; plumbers; sewers of pants, overalls and shirts; machinists; stove repairers; grocers; coal dealers; nurses; cigar makers; cigarette packers; errand boys; horseshoers; cabinetmakers; fishnet weavers; jewelers; and picture-frame makers.
Baltimore was a city where racial segregation meant that the black families in Southwest Baltimore could live only on certain streets within a white neighborhood. The main residential black address was Lemmon Street, an east-west back street that runs between Lombard and Pratt. The census says that Lemmon Street residents worked as paper hangers, barbers, day laborers, servants and laundresses.
Calling the neighborhood to work each morning was the shrill steam whistle at the blacksmith shop and foundry of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Mount Clare Shops. Come quitting time Saturday afternoon, many of the industrial workers stopped at the public bathhouse on Washington Boulevard (Columbia Avenue) to clean off the day's soot and grime before the sabbath. The B&O; was a soft-coal railroad. Many a time did a cloud of dust settle over Kate Ruth's backyard clothesline and wash.
The downtown Baltimore of Ruth's adolescence was largely rebuilt after the 1904 fire. New streets, wharves, office buildings, stores and lunchrooms filled the district between Hopkins Place and Jones Falls. The tallest structure was the Emerson Drug Company's Bromo Seltzer Tower, with its electrically lighted 51-foot bottle at its pinnacle. It was slightly ridiculous, but the city was proud of its patent medicine monument.
Without question, Baltimore's choice for a baseball neighborhood was Waverly, site of major-league and International League games from 1883 through 1991.
That spring and summer of 1914, local newspapers were heralding Ruth as the " sensational southpaw." He played his games at a long-vanished field at the southwest corner of Greenmount Avenue and 29th Street, today the site of a McDonald's restaurant, a parking lot and houses in the 400 block of Ilchester Avenue.
All routes from Southwest Baltimore, either from St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys or from a subsequent Ruth family home on West Conway Street, led through a busy downtown crisscrossed by streetcar lines.
As Ruth traveled across the city to Waverly during his brief career with Jack Dunn's minor-league Orioles, he passed near a construction crew laboring to complete the Hippodrome Theatre on Eutaw Street. This was Baltimore's first large movie and vaudeville house, near the site of a bar Ruth ultimately would help his father buy after big-league money began rolling in.
This also was the downtown neighborhood where Ruth got an introduction to a baseball player's salary negotiation. According to a June 1914 news story, Ruth dickered with clothing manufacturer Moses Strouse at his office at Lombard and Paca streets. This was tied to a report that the young pitcher might defect to the rival Federal League, a short-lived but disruptive element in local baseball annals.
If Baltimore in 1914 was baseball crazy, it wasn't necessarily for the Orioles or for Ruth. For the first time in more than a decade, major-league baseball had returned to Baltimore via the Federal League's Terrapins.
The new club naturally outdrew the Orioles. The Terrapins had a new wooden grandstand and park (Terrapin Park), also along 29th Street, stretching through to 30th, east of Vineyard Lane and the 2900 block of Guilford Ave.
Today this site is occupied by the Barclay Elementary School, a soft-drink bottling plant, a warehouse and the bed of the 2900 block of Barclay St.
The Terrapins stole so much business from the Orioles that manager Dunn was forced to sell off key players, Babe Ruth among them. Ruth went to the Boston Red Sox for $2,900 -- far less than the $5,000 a new three-story rowhouse cost on Guilford Avenue that summer of 1914.
Baseball was not all big-league stuff. There were dozens of amateur sandlot clubs that represented every neighborhood, black and white, rich and poor.
The Federal League and the Terrapins evaporated almost as quickly as Babe Ruth's star began to rise. The Orioles wound up playing at Terrapin Park, rechristened Oriole Park. Ruth even returned for a handful of exhibition games.