Mount Vernon Cultural Walk: Preston Gardens

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Cultural Walk is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.explorebaltimore.org/tours. Located at St. Paul Place from Centre to Lexington Streets Preston Gardens hides a significant story of the erasure of Black history. The picturesque linear park was once a free Black settlement of the late 1700s that grew into an influential and prosperous Black community, site of the 1852 National Convention of Free Negroes. Key institutions have their roots here, including Morgan State University; Frederick Douglass High School; Bethel AME, Union Baptist, and St. Francis Xavier churches; and the Afro-American newspaper, which dubbed the neighborhood “the colored Mount Vernon Place” for its elegant homes and social clubs. Prominent Black professionals with offices here included Harry Cummings, Baltimore’s first Black city councilman. Some of the neighborhood’s few surviving structures can be seen on East Hamilton Street. Though many Black elites moved to newly fashionable northwest Baltimore around 1900, the community still thrived in the 1910s when it was destroyed and replaced by Preston Gardens. Baltimore’s chief architect of racial segregation, Mayor James H. Preston, championed the project, using a new ordinance that enabled city officials to condemn and demolish so-called “blighted” buildings. Completed in 1919, Preston Gardens was designed by architect Thomas Hastings, a leader of the “City Beautiful” movement. Ironically, Preston Gardens itself fell victim to urban renewal. In the 1930s, the Orleans viaduct swallowed up part of the park and split the remainder in two. Preston Gardens became isolated and fell into disrepair. Recent renovations have helped to revive the park. Located at