04/05/2022
First posted in 2016: After a decade of searching, we found an album of images put together by Good Shepherd Services. The photos show the House of the Good Shepherd which faced Mount St. (formerly on the grounds of what is now the Steuart Hill Academic Academy which faces Gilmor St.). These images and captions provide a glimpse of the past for many who currently live and work in historic Union Square. The first neighborhood structures appeared in the late 1700s. Most Union Square homes were built in the 1850s – *before* the Civil War.
HISTORY:
In the late 18th century the area west of Baltimore's original core around the Inner Harbor contained large tracts of woodlands and farms. Willow Brook was the country estate of Thorowgood Smith, merchant and Baltimore’s second mayor (1804-1808). It was comprised of 26 acres with its Federal-style manor house. Smith ceded the estate to his niece's husband John Donnell after financial reversals. In 1846, John Donnell ceded one square of his land to the city for use as a public park bounded by Hollins, Stricker, Lombard and Gilmor, a public gesture that was also tied to private real estate speculation. By 1852, a fountain, a pavilion over a natural spring, and a cast iron fence had been added to the park.
In 1867, the Donnells left Willowbrook and the house was given to the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. The building served as a convent and home for wayward girls until its demolition in the mid-1960s. The oval dining room was removed from the mansion and recreated in the Baltimore Museum of Art where it remains a part of the American Decorative Arts wing.
The two buildings at 1412 and 1504 West Baltimore may date to the 1820s, making them the oldest in the district. The latter, associated with Malachi Mills, a free African American carpenter, may be the only frame house in the district. A handful of buildings possibly dating to the 1830s survive. The vast majority of extant residential structures in the Union Square district date to the period 1845-1880.
Union Square was the home of journalist and social critic H. L. Mencken for most of his life, and many leading figures of the era called on him there. His father brought the family to 1524 Hollins Street in 1883. Mencken died there in 1956. Writer Russell Baker lived across Union Square from Mencken on West Lombard Street when his family first moved to Baltimore in the 1930s. Writer Dashiell Hammett lived just north of Union Square near Franklin Square as a child, and frequented Union Square's Free Library Branch on Hollins Street.
The district contains a number of architecturally significant institutional structures and churches including the Italianate Hollins Market (1864); Enoch Pratt Free Library (1883), the Colonial Revival former Southwestern District Police Station (1884), Germanic Romanesque Revival former Fourteen Holy Martyrs Church/Praise Cathedral (1902), former Fulton Avenue Baptist Church/Divine Mission (1880s), the Union Square Methodist Church (1853-55), Fourteen Holy Martyrs School and Hall (1928), and a Neo-Classical Revival former city fire station (1902).
1864 to 1964
