Historic Sharp Leadenhall debuts new website
Project is the latest effort by Baltimore’s oldest Black neighborhood to celebrate its past and secure its future
Above: News clippings shown in a new Sharp Leadenhall website point to its history of displacement for expressway projects. (historicsharpleadenhall.org)
Historic Sharp Leadenhall recently unveiled a new website, the latest effort by Baltimore’s oldest Black neighborhood to retain its identity and geography amid development and gentrification.
“We’re very concerned we’re going to be squeezed out of our own area,” Historic Sharp Leadenhall President Betty Bland Thomas told The Brew recently.
She was speaking at the celebration of another community-boosting effort – placing 60 banners celebrating prominent historical figures with local ties on utility poles in this South Baltimore neighborhood.
“If we can preserve and document this rich history, it might be a way of possibly getting a designation – a tool in the toolbox for the development that is coming our way,” Bland-Tomas said.
Bland-Thomas is a longtime activist in this neighborhood bounded today by Henrietta Street to the north, Ostend Street to the south, Hanover Street to the east and Sharp Street (and I-395) to the west.
Settled by freed slaves and German immigrants in the late 1700s, the area was home to prominent Black intellectuals and institutions, a stronghold of the abolitionist movement, the site of the first school for African-Americans south of the Mason-Dixon Line and a hub of the Underground Railroad.
A 15-minute documentary by The Megaphone Project, “Sharp Leadenhall: A Promise to Keep.”
Historic Black south Baltimore neighborhood and (in blue) Sharp Leadenhall’s current boundaries.
Centuries of History
The new website, built by Baltimore-based Moon Design, includes a century-by-century history section, starting with snippets about the 1700s.
“In 1789, the Baltimore Abolitionist Society was founded – the first of its kind in the South,” this section notes. “The group included Quakers, Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists, centered around what is now the Inner Harbor and Otterbein.”
“By 1857, more than 300 African American families lived in South Baltimore,” the next section says. “The area was home to a broad mix of incomes and jobs, from laborers to lawyers. Immigrants, entrepreneurs, and free African Americans all rubbed shoulders.”
The chronology follows the neighborhood’s ups an downs on through the post-World War II years when displacement for highway construction and urban renewal took their toll and the Sharp Leadenhall/Otterbein area lost thousands of people.
“City agencies consider plans to destroy South Baltimore slum area,” is the blunt headline on one of the old news stories pasted in here.
The website may compress Sharp Leadenhall’s rich and complex history into a few pages and intriguing blurbs, but it gives a feel for all that legacy residents have loved and remembered about the neighborhood.
Late 1970’s Sharp Leadenhall news coverage by then-Sunpapers reporter Mark Reutter. BELOW: More clippings, including a map of the proposed East-West Highway that would have cut across the Inner Harbor. (historicsharpleadenhall.org)
The site also points to recent accomplishments by today’s Sharp Leadenhall residents, including designation by the city’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, and the plans they have to continue working to protect and uplift their neighborhood.
Historic Sharp Leadenhall banner hangs above Henrietta Street. (Fern Shen)