The late Joseph “Turkey Joe” Trabert, connoisseur of all things Baltimore and a titan of trivia, years ago challenged me to “name in alphabetical order the streets of the A to K neighborhood.” I couldn’t do it. As a general assignment reporter for the Evening Sun in the late 1970s, I had come to know my way around the city, but had never heard of “the A to K.”

It’s a rectangular neighborhood of 11 north-south streets, a quiet rowhouse enclave north of Eastern Avenue, on the southeastern stretch of the city, between the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus and Patterson High School. The street names are alphabetical, starting with Anglesea and ending with Kane, with Gusryan somewhere near the middle.

Some people still call it “the A to K.” Most of the people who live there, in about 1,100 households, call their neighborhood Bayview, according to Cesar Romero, co-owner with Matt Hart of J.C. Romero’s Cafe, on the C street (for Cornwall), and a former president of the community association.

It’s been called Bayview for close to two decades, says David Jones, the current president of the community association and a resident of Drew, the D street.

But, for some period, the neighborhood was known as Joseph Lee.

Look on a Google map of the city, and you’ll still see that name. In fact, real estate listings continue to refer to the place as Joseph Lee, and city residential parking permits do the same. Wikipedia defines Joseph Lee as “the residential part of Bayview.”

I had never heard of Joseph Lee.

White-hot Bigot

So, with apologies for what might seem like an obsession, I herewith report the results of my weeks-long quest for an answer to this question:

Who was Joseph Lee? And why was a city park and an adjoining city neighborhood, for at least part of its existence, named after him?

Joseph Lee was an early 20th century Bostonian of wealth and privilege, considered “the father of the playground” because of his campaign to have municipalities create play spaces and install recreational equipment for children.

As far as I could tell from various sources, Lee had nothing to do with Baltimore.

But, sometime in the late 1940s, someone – city records do not identify the proponent – decided that the tree-lined playfields and playground just north of the “A to K” neighborhood should be named after him.

By the 1950s, Mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro Jr. (Nancy Pelosi’s dad) was proclaiming one week each summer “Joseph Lee Week,” featuring an “annual Joseph Lee Concert” in the park.

As swell a fella as Joseph Lee seems – after graduating from Harvard, he eschewed a career in law and moneymaking to become a social worker devoted to the playground cause – the man was a white-hot bigot.

He was an officer and financial supporter of the Immigration Restriction League, organized in the late 19th Century by wealthy, WASPy Bostonians to keep immigrants they considered inferior – Italians and Jews, particularly – out of the country.

Lee was the primary backer of the League, according to a book on the eugenics and anti-immigrant movement of the 1920s by journalist and historian Daniel Okrent:

“The one political cause to which this friend of the common man devoted the most time, money and sheer fervor for more than 20 years was the movement to restrict immigration.”

Proudly Diverse Today

Undoubtedly, Joseph Lee, who died in 1937, would be appalled today by the playfields named for him near Bayview. They are used regularly by soccer-playing immigrants from Central America.

“On Sundays sometimes they’ll have a huge soccer festival on those fields,” says Dominic Hart, a 21-year-old senior at Georgetown University (and Calvert Hall graduate) who was home on a Friday, working on his laptop at a cloth-covered table at Romero’s Cafe. “There’s soccer all day, and there’s food and everything.”

More than half of the population of the Bayview neighborhood is Latino, says Jones. City data supports him. The 2020 census showed Bayview’s population at 2,874, with 52% listed as Hispanic or Latino.

Inside his cafe, I ask Cesar Romero about Joseph Lee: Did neighborhood leaders know of the long-gone Bostonian’s bigotry?

“Yes,” Romero says. It was discussed 17 years ago, when the community embraced Bayview as its name, and it was rejected as a name for a new local charter school.

I asked Romero about the ethnic mixture of the neighborhood because he and Hart have had their establishment for close to 20 years and they know their customers.

“Honduras and Ecuador,” Romero says, listing the nations of origin of the neighborhood’s residents. “Colombia, China, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Venezuela, El Salvador and Nicaragua. We have everybody here. This is a melting pot. It really is.”

So there’s some irony for you: While this immigrant-rich neighborhood is officially Bayview today, at some point, it was named for the anti-immigrant Boston Brahmin, Joseph Lee.

I pieced all this together from newspaper accounts, conversations with long-timers who grew up on the I street (Imla) and the H street (Hornel), and a check of municipal records by Rob Schoeberlein, the city archivist.

Rebranded

Mike Ball, a 37-year resident who lives on the E street (for Elrino) provided some helpful background.

“The A to K’s name largely depends upon the generation you’re speaking to,” he says. “If you grew up here, it was always A to K or Joseph Lee used almost interchangeably.”

But a rebranding effort in 2008 led to calling the neighborhood Bayview.

“The name of the association and name of the neighborhood were changed and marketed henceforth as Bayview in an effort to lend a close association to Johns Hopkins Bayview, in hopes this would help real estate marketing, spur economic interest and overall improve the quality of life in the neighborhood,” Ball says.

While Ball’s take on the name seems most convincing, it was interesting, however confusing, to get different takes from former residents.

Melodie Banknell Deacon, who grew up on the J street (for Joplin) knew her neighborhood as Joseph Lee all through her time there from the 1950s to 1971.

However, Denise Valancius-Ditman, who grew up on the same street during the same period, always called it Bayview or to locate it for others, “near Patterson High School” or “near Our Lady of Fatima,” the former Catholic school now a public charter school called Clay Hill.

Barbara Ann Slattery, another Joplin streeter, said, “I don’t remember actually having a name for it. Later on, when I was at Patterson High School, the principal referred to it as the A-K community.”

Jimmy Francis, who wrote a self-published book called “A to K,” refers to his old neighborhood as “the Bayview/Our Lady of Fatima/Joseph Lee neighborhood.” Francis grew up in two-bedroom houses on Hornel and Joplin. Some of the people who contributed memories to the book refer to the “Joseph Lee neighborhood.”

“I love it”

Whatever it was called during that time, natives have fond memories of the place.

“It was a great neighborhood to grow up in,” says Deacon. “Lots of kids, lots of activities, a great recreation center, church and schools within walking distance.”

And that’s still the case, though the rec center is not as well-staffed or as programmed as it once was, says David Jones. The community association president says new lighting is coming to the neighborhood, thanks to a state grant.

But Jones is frustrated with City Hall. He says lights along a path in the park have been waiting for a repair crew for way too long, police seem indifferent about hots spots of public nuisances along the south end of the neighborhood, and Eastern Avenue is way overdue for repaving.

Still, Jones is glad he landed in the A to K when he did, during the housing bubble of the early 2000s, when he found it impossible to afford a house in the District of Columbia, where he had a job. Commuting from Bayview, just a couple of blocks off Interstate 95, wasn’t so bad.

“I love it,” he says of his neighborhood.

Some people who work at Hopkins Bayview moved into the neighborhood – they can walk to work. Many of them make their way across Anglesea and Bonsal to the corner of Cornwall and Bank for lunch at Romero’s. It’s a former meat market with a tin ceiling and wooden shelves, a touch of old Baltimore, that Hart and Romero converted into a cafe and community gathering place.

There’s a large awning over the corner, with some outdoor seating. The menu has hot and cold sandwiches, salads and smoothies, tacos and tostadas, five kinds of pizza and seven kinds of panini. Of the latter I recommend the Venetian – eggplant, mozzarella, onion, pesto and tomato on a warm, toasted pita.

Trivia coda: Of the 11 streets in the A to K, I mentioned 10. Without looking back into the story, which letter did I leave out?
Bonus: Name that street.