Midtown-Edmondson, Baltimore

Midtown-Edmondson is a mixed-use neighborhood in western Baltimore City developed mostly between the 1880s and the 1910s. The neighborhood is mainly composed of residential rowhouses, with a mixed-used business district along Edmondson Avenue, and industrial warehouses and buildings dotted along the CSX railroads that bound its western edge.BoundariesBaltimore City defines the neighborhood as bounded by North Bentalou St. to the west and North Monroe St. to the east, with north borders being the CSX train tracks, then West Lafayette Ave, and the south border formed by West Mulberry Street. Residents of Midtown-Edmondson would also include one or two blocks east of N. Monroe St toward N. Fulton St. The neighborhood includes zip codes 21217 and 21223.HistoryOverviewResidential development in Midtown Edmondson began as early as 1887 when local small builders constructed rowhouses and cottages with creative variations on the vernacular rowhome conventions of the period. These homes were initially designed as summer homes for city residents, but with the expansion of streetcar infrastructure down Edmondson Avenue in the 1890s, rowhouse development quickly became marketed to the city's growing middle class population.The mix of residential and industrial development reflects the uneven character of development in the years following the 1888 annexation of Baltimore County, as neighborhood groups in Midtown-Edmondson fought to secure investment for needed infrastructure and oppose the intrusion of commercial and industrial development, such as the Ward Baking Company in 1925, the Acme building and Interstate 170 (Maryland) highway construction in the 1970s.During the post-World War II period, the population of Midtown-Edmondson and nearby neighborhoods underwent a rapid transition from European American in the mid-1940s to become predominantly African American by the early-1950s. This transition offered many middle class African American households in Baltimore their first opportunity for buying a home and led to the creation of neighborhood organization that took an active role in local civil rights organizing and activism.