Seeing the Girls’ City

Behind the Scenes of a Hard Histories Walking Tour

I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again. — Jacqueline Woodson author of Brown Girl Dreaming

Baltimore’s streets are haunted by countless ghostly footprints from the past. Some have historical markers, some of them have blue plaques, and some of these footprints—at first glance—are gone from our memory. In a city like this, the work of public history can require us to see beneath the expressways and the demolition to make the past visible again. When Professor Jones floated the idea of developing a walking tour for the Hard Histories Spring 2023 Research Lab syllabus, I jumped at the opportunity to help bring this history (and our research) to life.

A little background: Over the course of my public history career, I have given or worked with walking tours in a variety of ways. This is a wide-ranging genre, even within my own experience: At one extreme, I have given tours as entertainment for tips; at the other, I now assign well-sourced and properly-footnoted tour scripts as reading for Johns Hopkins undergraduates. At present, I’m inspired by Dr. Ashley Minner’s Indigenous Baltimore walking tour brochure, app, and website based on her own archival and oral-history research; Dr. Elizabeth Rule’s Indigenous DC walking tour app; and the Uncomfortable Oxford walking tour project, founded in part by Dr. Olivia Durand, one of my former colonial-history colleagues there. All of these have similar goals to Hard Histories at Hopkins: shattering historical silences and sharing new research with the public.

1896 Bromley Atlas plate showing the JHH COA at its Biddle Street location (Courtesy of Johns Hopkins Libraries)

The Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum (JHH COA) walking tour was not my first rodeo, but I had never before written a script from my own in-progress research. This was a new undertaking for me in multiple ways: Much of my local history work in Baltimore has focused on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indigenous histories of place, an approach to Baltimore geography that ignores the city’s built environment entirely. Instead, I’ve worked to visualize the boundaries negotiated through early Indigenous-colonial treaties, along with important physical features of the landscape like the Piedmont–Coastal Plain fall line and Maryland barrens. It took some new-to-me skills and ways of seeing to research the late nineteenth-century geography lived by children residing in the JHH COA.

First and foremost, I learned to use Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps and Bromley Atlas plates which depict the Biddle Street neighborhood that surrounded the JHH COA between 1875 and 1895. These invaluable sources have been helpfully digitized by the Maryland State Archives and Johns Hopkins University Libraries (among others). I used Baltimore City Directories from that same era to identify businesses in the neighborhood, and learned that when Baltimore’s streets were re-numbered in 1886, the 206-208 Biddle Street address of the JHH COA became 517-519 Biddle. I spent a lot of time cross-referencing Sanborn Maps with insights from local historians and Hard Histories collaborators like Dr. Amy Rosenkrans and Allison Seyler, photos from Hopkins Retrospective, and even Google Maps. Twentieth-century changes to the geography of midtown Baltimore made some parts of this process disorienting.

To tell the story of the Orphan Asylum itself, I used more familiar research strategies. Few of the surviving documents from the JHH COA—housed at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives—date from the institution’s Biddle Street era, so I combed through Johns Hopkins Hospital Board of Trustees minutes for details, and combined them into a skeletal narrative. The JHH COA took over an existing “Colored Orphan Asylum” in 1875, which expanded and then contracted in size due to pressure from a neighboring institution, and finally moved to the Remington site in September 1895.

One detail spoke loudly to all of us Lab members: In 1883, the asylum’s Lady Managers proposed to train some of the resident girls to be laundresses—a dangerous, physically grueling occupation in those days—and in 1884, the Hospital Board approved funds for the construction of new laundry rooms at 206 Biddle.¹ No traces of the JHH COA or its laundry facilities remain on the site today. Neither did individual girls leave testimony about their work there. All we have left to see their shadowy footprints are maps, line items in the Hospital budget, and our imaginations.

Hard Histories Lab members near the Biddle Street JHH COA site (Courtesy of Martha S. Jones)

A good tour is of a doable length, pace, and distance. On an April afternoon, as a group we walked for approximately 1.5 hours, along 1.4 miles, and made eleven stops. Our route centered around the JHH COA’s original Biddle Street site, which today is on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard between Druid Hill and Pennsylvania Avenues. Some Lab members were struck by the proximity of the first Johns Hopkins University campus to the Orphan Asylum, as Emma and Matt explained in their recent Substack posts. Others of us were amazed by the high concentration of historic Black religious sites, both Catholic and Protestant, in the immediate neighborhood, a few of which still operate today. Along the way, we considered the car-centric urbanism that paved over the old Biddle Street in favor of MLK Jr. Boulevard, leaving displacement, historical erasure, and segregation in its wake.

In the face of such erasure, place-based public history helps to write both ordinary and extraordinary stories back into our communal memory. What comes next for this walking tour? Every tour is tailored to its audience, and this one was developed specifically for the Hard Histories Spring 2023 Research Lab. After our immersion in archival records from the JHH COA and scholarship on Progressive-era charity in Baltimore, it was as much a pilgrimage as it was a walking tour. It can however be adapted for a wider audience someday.

For now, the next time you find yourself along that stretch of MLK, Jr. Boulevard, be sure to pause and remember the girls of the JHH COA for me. Maybe, if you listen closely, you’ll even hear their footsteps echoing back.

— Emma Katherine Bilski, MSt (Oxon), MA (JHU), PhD Candidate (JHU)

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1. JHH B/T Vol 1, Articles of Incorporation & June 13, 1870 to June 8 1906, Minutes of the Board of Trustees Johns Hopkins Hospital, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, MD.