There's no “I” in Upton. “Love yourself! Love your neighbor! Love your neighborhood!” The historically rich African American community of Upton is a focus of urban revitalization. Together with the Upton Planning Committee, neighbors have created a family atmosphere while working to keep our community safe and clean. Primarily comprised of two sub-neighborhoods, Marble Hill and Upton West, both offer a rich cultural legacy, as well as a family theme throughout the community.
Upton West is a fifteen minute walk from Baltimore's Inner Harbor, University of Maryland Medical System, and downtown Baltimore's shops and markets; including the famous Lexington Market. The Avenue Market, a market for great produce and shopping is only a short walk on Pennsylvania Avenue. On Friday nights, the Avenue Market is the place to enjoy good food and great local jazz talent. Upton has four tennis courts, a baseball diamond and basketball courts sprinkled throughout the area.
Shaped like a Christmas tree, Upton has zigzag boundaries which extend clockwise from Dolphin and Pennsylvania along Pennsylvania, Preston, -Druid Hill, Biddle, Argyle, Hoffman, Myrtle, Harlem, Brune, George, Fremont, Bloom, Division, Lafayette, McCulloh, and Dolphin. It takes its name from an extant Greek Revival country house on a Lanvale Street hilltop, built before the Civil War. Its original ornate iron work and brick walls still intact, Upton was once the property of United States Senator David Stewart, a wealthy Baltimore lawyer and vice president of St. John's College during the Civil War. It has housed a school for special education since 1958.
A monument to African American artistic achievement, the Avenue establishments nevertheless carried costs. Segregation confined both the “respectable” and humble folk to housing close by, and the residential covenants widely attached to new housing in the 1920s and 1930s, only reinforced this confinement. Consequently, the Avenue's heavy drinking, loud noises, and exotic temptations were only steps away; that the church-going elderly and peddlers of “hot” goods were housed in the same blocks encouraged parents to be solicitous and the young to experiment. Cab Calloway recalled an Upton childhood:
“One year I was spending three or four hours in church every Sunday, plus Bible classes during the week. Bible school every day during the summer, and singing in the junior choir, and the next I was part of a gang of guys who were basically young hustlers.... I guess I grew up quickly... On the one hand, my family and my music teachers, whom I loved and respected, were rather puritanical people: churchgoing, middle class, strivers. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my time in that rough and raucous Baltimore Negro night life with loud music, heavy drinking, and the kind of moral standards... that my parents looked down on. I managed pretty well in both.”
More than elsewhere, church congregations in Upton promoted the black consciousness movements of the 1960s and 1970s. New Shiloh, set up in 1902 on George and occupying a stately Lanvale Street edifice since 1926, acquired fame for revival and gospel tent services, as well as mass baptisms at Druid Hill Park Lake until the 1970s. Biblical murals were then replaced with “Pilgrimage, in Word, Song, and Prayer,” an elaborate mural which depicted the separation of American slave families, singing bonds people, and migration to the North. Bethel kept alive a Pan-African movement, hosting African ambassadors, sponsoring educational programs, and agitating against South African apartheid.
Other institutions and a landmark monument likewise mirror a century of Baltimore African American heritage. Three schools, Samuel Coleridge- Taylor, Joseph Lockerman, and Furman Templeton, are named for a composer of European-African descent whose works have been widely sung in Baltimore, a prominent educator, and civic leader, respectively. East Baltimore-born “Lady Day,” Billie Holiday, is commemorated with an eight- and-one-half foot bronze statue, arms characteristically outstretched toward an audience, sculpted by James Earl Reid, in a city mini-park at Lafayette and Pennsylvania. It was built footsteps from the clubs and theaters where haunting melodies and an unusual vocal stylization made her a legend. Notable residents of Upton include Thurgood Marshall, Furman Templeton, Judge Harry Cole and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt. L Schmoke.