Growing Up in Baltimore

Another Childhood Bubble Popped

I spent the first six years of my life growing up in Baltimore in a community that I was told was built as housing for returning World War II veterans. Recently, I got curious about my original home and turned to Google.

Armistead Gardens Elementary School

Armistead Gardens Elementary School where I attended Kindergarten and the first half of first grade.

I spent the first six years of my life in a Baltimore City community that I was told was built as housing for returning World War II veterans.
Recently, I got curious about my original home and turned to Google.

I discovered the story of its genesis I believed for decades was simply was not true. Armistead Gardens was built by the Baltimore Housing Authority starting in 1939 to provide low income housing for white men and their families moving into the area from Appalachia—predominantly the states of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee—to provide a workforce for the defense industries like the Glenn L. Martin Company.

It was commonly referred to as the “White Ghetto.” In my memory, the community was not as dismal as my internal image of the horrible conditions in many low-income housing neighborhoods. I thought it was pretty the way a neat block of brick rowhouses with a bungalow on each end filled every street. We lived in one of the bungalows on Hoffman Street. Our home was heated by coal. A truck delivered it to a big brick bin by the front porch that had a hatch into the utility room where my father manually fed the black nuggets into the furnace.

Armistead Gardens
A dirt path across the street led to a huge green space with some playground equipment. Somehow, I thought it was a good neighborhood, even though on that path a boy threw a brick and hit me in the head and on another occasion a boy on the Monkey Bars split my head open when he slammed a board with a rusty nail into my head and pulled. I needed stitches both times and still have scars from both incidents.

When we moved out to Baltimore County into a home my father built in a mixed suburban/rural community, my rosy picture of Armistead Gardens still stayed in my mind. I loved to go back there to visit my grandparents and spent at least one week there with them every summer.

When my mother told me to tell people I moved here from Baltimore but to never say Armistead Gardens. I thought it was a privacy concern and did not realize it was based on shame. My mother did not want any of our new neighbors to know we had been living in the “White Ghetto” of subsidized housing.

I’ve known all my life that my beginnings were modest—I just did not know how modest. But, I’ve come a long way, baby, and that instills me with pride.