• Baltimore City Historic District Ordinance 22-0284, 4/3/2023

Summary Description

Situated near the northwest section of the Poppleton Neighborhood, the proposed Sarah Ann Street Historic District includes a block of eleven brick alley houses on the north side of the 1100 block of Sarah Ann Street and two rowhouses on the east side of the 300 block of North Carrollton Street. Sarah Ann Street, historically known as Harmony Street, is home to an intact row of alley houses. Built in 1870 as a row of twelve houses, each rowhouse had slanting flat roofs of the then popular Italianate-style rowhouse, simple wooden cornices set above a slightly projecting brick frieze decorated with brick modillions. The houses at 319-321 N. Carrollton Street are two three-story brick rowhouses with simple dentiled brick cornices and a tall painted stone base and marble steps. The two houses are the last remaining of 8 rowhouses that spanned from 317 to 331 N Carrollton Street and were constructed in the early 1870s by George Mallonnee.

Summary Significance

Situated in the northwest section of the Poppleton neighborhood, this group of houses demonstrates the distinctive characteristics of construction in the 1870s. The Sarah Ann Street alley houses, represent an increasingly rare building type in Baltimore and other older East Coast cities. Alley houses represent a small-scale house type built on narrow, small streets that paralleled or bisected wider streets with middle class houses. Alley houses provided housing for Baltimore’s working-class residents. They are simplified versions of larger rowhouses ornamented with various architectural styles. Today, the majority of alley houses built in Baltimore (and in other East Coast cities) have been demolished, making Sarah Ann Street a rare survivor in Baltimore and on the East Coast. Alley houses are integral to the historic fabric of Baltimore’s rowhouse neighborhoods, helping to define the intimate, human scale of 19^th-century Baltimore. In the Poppleton neighborhood, the houses on Sarah Ann Street are the last block of alley houses standing.

The properties within the proposed district also provide a significant representation of the under-documented history of Black homeownership and residency in Baltimore in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The houses on North Carrollton Street, constructed in the early 1870s, have been in African American ownership since 1928. The Sarah Ann Street alley houses, built in the same time period, provided affordable housing for African-Americans after the Civil War. Together this grouping of historic homes serve as important resources on African American history in West Baltimore.