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Site #3: Park Heights, 1978-1980

 Series

Dates

  • 1978-1980

Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research use.

Historical Note

During the time that the BNHP was underway, the Northwest Baltimore neighborhood of Park Heights was bounded by Northern Parkway, Greenspring Avenue, Wabash Avenue, and Carlin’s Circle (LBHC). It was and remains home to Pimlico Race Track, which is world famous for The Preakness Stakes—the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown.

Primarily a residential area, the homes consisted of both free-standing units and row homes with porches set among tree-lined streets. This all-Jewish neighborhood changed with the influx of mainly middle-class African Americans for the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, “homes deteriorated when economic and social shifts de-populated this and many other neighborhoods” (Hines, p98).

Around the time of the BNHP, old and new residents were participating in “Pilot Black,” a substantial urban renewal project. It provided 2.5 million dollars in federal community development block grants. Under this program, forty-six homes were either renovated or newly constructed.

Most of the narrators lived in senior housing in the neighborhood and socialized at the Jewish Community Center. This “Eating Together” site is also the site for the bulk of the interviews. Allen Berger (BNHP #062) participated as both narrator and interviewer. He conducted nineteen of the twenty-eight interviews.

Sources:

Fred Hines, “Park Heights” in Livelier Baltimore Committee of the Citizens Planning & Housing Association Beyond the White Marble Steps: A Look at Baltimore Neighborhoods (J.W. Boarman Co., 1979) (PAM 10,988)

“Park Heights Area,” Live Baltimore Home Center, accessed on March 16, 2005, http://www.livebaltimore.com/nb/list/pimlico/.

Extent

29 Items : 29 oral histories

Language of Materials

From the Collection: English

Scope and Contents

From the Collection:

The Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project Oral History Collection contains paper records and audiocassette recordings from 1978 through 1980. The paper records are composed of the files kept on each narrator (the person being interviewed) and the administrative needs of the project. Narrator records contain biography forms, interview notes, and tape indexes for approximately 212 narrators. The interview notes briefly describe the circumstance surrounding the interview(s) session. The tape index includes the name of the narrator, the name of interviewer, the number of tapes, the tape(s) length, and the primary subjects covered. Seventy-nine of the records include transcripts. Transcript length ranges from 8 to 65 pages. Some are single-spaced; others are doubled-spaced. The interviews range from twenty-five minutes to three hours in length. One file, #183, and its accompanying cassette(s) were removed from the collection.

Thirty-two interviewers participated in the project. Typically, the interviews were one-on-one sessions between interviewer and narrator; however, single interviewer and double-narrator situations occurred, as did three group “nostalgia” sessions. Most interviews were prefaced by unrecorded, pre-interview sessions that occurred days before the recorded interview.

Each narrator abstract includes the following information when available: the BNHP interview number; the name of the interviewer; the date of the interview; the place of the interview; the length of the interview; the number of tapes used; the length of the transcript; and the file contents, such as subject index, interview notes, and biography form. The abstracts follow the numerical order of the interview number. However, interview numbers are not consecutive, but site specific. That is to say, any omitted number within a site can be found in another site.

When controversial or outdated terms, especially those referring to race and ethnicity, are mentioned in the abstract, the politically-correct term is used and the term or terms used by the narrator has been placed in parenthetical (“ ”) quotation marks. Specific terms from the interviews and textual uncertainties are often placed in parentheses alone ( ). Maiden names of female narrators are placed in brackets [ ].

Repository Details

Part of the H. Furlong Baldwin Library Repository

Contact:
H. Furlong Baldwin Library
Maryland Center for History and Culture
610 Park Avenue
Baltimore MD 21201 United States
4106853750