A tree fell in the forest and I wasn’t around to hear it, so to speak. As a couple of my readers know, I lived in Baltimore, Maryland, from 2004 to 2005 in the Hampden neighborhood, a former mill town north of downtown along the Jones Falls. One of the most prominent landmarks in the city is/was the giant complex of jails and prisons that sat just to the northeast of downtown and due east of the redeveloped and elegant Mount Vernon Square neighborhood. So I was stunned to learn that most of the complex was demolished, to be replaced with new drug and life rehabilitation and centers.
Infamous for over a century if not longer for its squalid living conditions and violence, but also for its unique architecture, the prison and later jail was part of the “reform” of penitentiaries that were modeled off of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (I have some old photos I’ll dig out and scan at some time).
The photos of the building you’re seeing here was apparently heavily modified in the mid-Twentieth Century, but was still well known to the people of Baltimore.
Like in Philadelphia, these buildings were built to resemble fortresses in order to convey a sense of security for the populace who lived outside of them.
But it raises an interesting question: Do buildings with horrible reputations deserve to be saved? There are arguments on both sides of the issue, and obviously Baltimore and Maryland’s leaders decided that the terrible legacy, so prominent located in the middle of a city with severe, lingering problems of injustice, needed a “reset” and that the buildings needed to come down. It may surprise some readers, but I agree with them. Having lived in Baltimore, and knowing its deep and entrenched problems, having such a grotesque reminder of the past in plain view of so many people who continue to live there, does not help move the city forward. The French demolished the Bastille; few mourn its loss, and I doubt few will mourn the loss of this American prison, either.