Many longtime Baltimoreans were heartened by the beginning of construction on the 414 Light Street apartments last spring. Finally, after years of waiting for something substantive on the site, a new 44-story apartment tower will rise for hip city dwellers who can afford monthly rents of up to $8,000. Glitzy and full of amenities, the project will be a far cry from the yellow utilitarian building last there, where McCormick & Co. manufactured spices.
McCormick permanently left downtown in the early 1980s, when it moved its remaining manufacturing business to Hunt Valley. Many development plans for the tract came and went, but lack of financing stalled the proposals. In the spice maker's place all of these years sat a parking lot — bland and bereft of the lovely aroma McCormick used to infuse onto the Light Street corridor.
One group of Baltimoreans in particular is happy to see architectural and commercial progress come to this spot at the corners bounded by Light, Charles and Conway streets: the descendants of Patrolman John J. Dailey. Dailey was shot at Charles and Conway streets while trying to arrest three drunk and disorderly Baltimoreans early on the morning of Aug. 26, 1895.
We are a big small town where no one is a stranger to another, William Donald Schaefer believed. As mayor, he always talked about the city's neighborhoods and their rich traditions that connected one to another. Through churches, synagogues, schools and the workplace, all Baltimoreans seem to be linked to one another through a civic DNA not found in other cities, so much so that many newcomers of a certain stock are perplexed when asked where they went to school. They reply with the name of a college, not knowing their questioner wanted to know what high school they attended. Their replies say everything they need to know about a person, Baltimore traditionalists claim.
Dailey's story is truly steeped in such rich Baltimore traditions of community, neighborhoods and connections between seemingly unrelated people. He was the son of Irish immigrants Martin and Bridget Dailey, who settled the village of Texas in Baltimore County around 1850 to escape the Irish potato famine. The Daileys worked in the Texas marble quarries and lime kilns because unskilled jobs were available there and because the quarry owners had a reputation for dealing fairly with the Irish, who faced horrible discrimination elsewhere in the U.S.
Because the Irish lacked a strong business tradition, after years of penury inflicted by the English, many of them found it difficult to move up beyond the lower echelons of the middle class. But the Daileys were trying.
The family moved to South Baltimore, and Jack, as John J. was known, worked as a laborer until he was "appointed" to the Baltimore City police force on June 1, 1888. After a year, he moved to the Southern District, where he would meet his fate six years later at the hands of John Diviney, Roger Dougherty and Dougherty's brother-in-law Patrick Kane — members of the Sandy Bottom Gang that wreaked havoc in the area. Dailey knew his assailants well and had dealt with their disturbances and disorderly conduct before. When Dailey confronted them that night, after an evening of drinking at McDonald's Stone House Cove, a local watering hole in Locust Point, the three assaulted him, knocking him down, taking his gun and firing one shot that shattered his spine and lodged against his right kidney.
At their trial, news accounts described the individual families of the victim and the assailants drawn up on opposite sides of the courtroom. In one dispatch, some of the defendants' children were described playing in the courtroom during its proceedings. In another, Dailey's children were in attendance doing the same. One of those children was my grandmother, Mary Edna Kennedy.
The defendants were convicted of second-degree murder. Dougherty and Kane each were sentenced to 15 years in the state penitentiary; Diviney got 12 years.
So what's this story's coda? Diviney has been lost to history, but not Kane and Dougherty or my grandmother. Fast forward to New Cathedral Cemetery in West Baltimore. There under a sylvan canopy of oaks lies Mary Edna Kennedy with her husband and three of her children. Several rows away, closer to the din of traffic on Edmondson Avenue but within view of my grandmother's final resting spot, lay Kane and Dougherty, two of her father's murderers.
If that's not a true Baltimore story, one with extraordinary connections, even in death, I don't know what is.
Lee McC. Kennedy is a history teacher at the Boys' Latin School of Maryland; his email is lkennedy@boyslatinmd.com.