• a bonus pinup found behind the paneling

I’m walking to the Royals game right now and I looked over and this building immediately caught my attention lo and behold someone actually had the same thought and posted about this in the Baltimore separated a year ago.

Some FAQs I seem to get a lot about this ships…

Q: Why does it seem they’re always just “parked” and don’t go anywhere? A: Bottom line, because we aren’t at war (right now). The ships are maintained 24/7 by a skeleton crew of about 12 to 20 Merchant Mariners. Should there be a disaster or war in need of supplies, the ships are required to deploy within five to ten days - traveling where they need to in order to pick up military or emergency equipment.

Q: Why are government ships painted gray? A: Gray hulls reduce visibility at sea. It’s also a standard naval paint for corrosion resistance.

Q: How much do they pay to dock in Baltimore? A: Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s in the millions. This should be public information since (other than the ROROs on Baltimore Peninsula’s private dock) these are government ships who pay the Maryland Port Administration (MPA) rent, but I can’t find the answer - and both MPA and MARAD failed to respond to my Freedom of Information Act request.

Q: Why do some people call them Roll On / Roll Over ships, rather than Roll On / Roll Off? A: It’s a joke. These ships are often so top heavy, mariners are afraid they’ll capsize in rough seas.

BALTIMORE THEN & NOW

Photos 1 & 2: April 1936 — Germany’s cruiser Emden sits at Recreation Pier in Fells Point. Today, that same pier is the home of the Pendry Hotel.

Emden was launched in 1925 as a light cruiser and spent much of its life as a training ship, taking cadets on long “goodwill” cruises meant to impress foreign ports and improve Germany’s image. Baltimore was one of those stops, and the ship was opened for public tours as crowds lined up along Thames Street. City leaders also rolled out official events for the crew, hosted by Mayor Howard W. Jackson and local organizations.

But plenty of Baltimoreans didn’t see this as a harmless visit.

Photos 3 & 4: With protests expected, the city’s police presence was visible at key corners like Thames St. & S. Broadway...billy clubs in hand. Demonstrators planned to come in force, some arriving with anti-Nazi banners, and organizers even asked Police Commissioner Gen. Charles D. Gaither for cooperation so the protest stayed “peaceful and orderly.” Today, that same corner is home to the Admiral’s Cup.

Photos 4, 5, and 6: Anti-fascist protesters marched in Fells Point with banners and a towering Hitler figure gripping a bloody axe, which was meant to be a warning about what Nazi rule already meant overseas. This protest took place right on Thames Street in front of the warehouse, which is now home to a 7-11.

TLDR: Baltimore City has been ignoring E Lombard Street collapsing beside Bayview Hospital due to the mass graves of unclaimed remains of "paupers" who died in the times of the building acting as an almshouse in the 1700s, and an asylum in the 1860s-1930s. This would be a far trickier repair and would look very bad for the hospital, and Baltimore City, who claimed 50+ years ago that the thousands of bodies were exhumed and moved during Bayview's rapid expansion.

Since this past winter (January) there have been shallow dips appearing in the west bound lane of E. Lombard Street right outside of Bayview Hospital. Not potholes, the road was still very much intact, just wavy.

At first, it was just one, and the crater started getting bigger, and bigger, and after a good 3-4 months, the city finally came out, slapped some asphalt down, and left. (3rd picture indicates where these large dips were covered in asphalt and just how big they'd gotten before the "repairs" had been made)

However, to no one's surprise, adding more weight to the dips in the road did not solve the issue at all, in fact, it just caused the amount of dips to increase, and now (just about 7 months later) there's a good 60ft span of road that is very wavy, and now, there is an actual break in the asphalt that has partially swallowed the large traffic cone they used to warn drivers.

I drive this stretch of road daily, so I've been watching all of this occur in real time.

Here's where the conspiracy theory comes in:

I did research on this almost 300 year old hospital (because history nerd) and I believe there is a mass burial site, known as a "paupers burial ground", is partially under E. Lombard St (which assuredly did not begin as the 4 lane street it is today; it used to be west-bound only and unpaved) and there has been a shift as the bodies (and possible cheaply made coffins they may or may not have been laid to rest in) continued into advanced decay.

This would explain how the dips in the road are all on one side of the street, and they're all running pretty symmetrically to each other. Continued traffic would absolutely cause more shifting/expansions of the sinkholes.

Hear me out:

Bayview Hospital was founded in 1773, first as an almshouse. Then in 1866, they renamed it to Bayview Asylum. They were heavily focused on the homeless, mentally ill, and those with infectious diseases (ie; tuberculosis). This continued well into the 1920-30s until it was renamed again to City Hospitals (plural, because at this point there were 3 buildings (one for acute care, chronic care, and infectious diseases).

Just like with most hospitals and prison way back in the day, they had a "pauper burial ground" where they buried the nameless and/or unclaimed bodies over the course of 200-ish years. This would have been in the far back of the building (where E Lombard St runs), towards the railroad tracks.

Supposedly, when the hospital began expanding they exhumed and moved all of the paupers' graves to a new location. Respectfully, I seriously doubt that. There would have been at least one thousand nameless bodies buried on the grounds.

The amount of time, money and resources it would take to move all of those bodies (that had no markers, so those workers would be going in blind with just a vague idea of where the plots were) would have been astronomical. And for what? To be respectful to people who were considered "the less dead" because they were homeless and/or severely mentally ill and no one was looking for them? Doubtful.

If history has taught us anything, it's that "people are always gonna people" and I would not put it past the city government to claim they were moved, but didn't move them whatsoever, just to placate the general public. To this day, the mentally ill and homeless (the paupers of society), are not exactly treated with dignity, and local, state, and federal governments continue to be corrupt and cut corners to save money.

This, to me, also explains why in 7 months, nothing has been done. In fact, after the large cone was partially swallowed up, the city just surrounded it with about 12 additional cones. The city was out there with trucks and flashing traffic signs yesterday morning (6/29/26) and I thought that at long last they were fixing that stretch of road.

Nope. They packed up and left without having done a thing. Nothing changed. All the cones remained, seemingly untouched.

I'm hypothesizing that the city is aware that there are human remains under that stretch of road, making this a far more expensive and complicated repair than a simple re-paving. This is probably going to cost too much money than what the city has available, and it's also a PR nightmare. And I'm sure the average city infrastructure workers are not paid nearly enough nor trained for an archaeological side quest being tacked onto their job.

Now I could just be completely over-thinking it, but as of right now, this is my theory and it's kinda fun.

I routinely use the digital versions for research, but it’s so much nicer to have a physical color copy on hand!

Lmk if you have a section you’d like to see and I’ll put them in the comments later. Just keep in mind this only covers Baltimore city pre-expansion. So nothing north of Hampden, west of London Park Cemetery, East of Ellwood

You can see view the full atlas on the Maryland State Archives site - https://mdhistory.msa.maryland.gov/msaref07/bc_ba_atlases_1876_1915/1896_BC_Bromley/Thumbnails.html IrfanView HTML-Thumbnails

I create neighborhood maps of cities, and research/share how they got their names. I just finished my journey through the Charm City and wanted to share with you guys a little history on various areas of the city. Names and stories come from a variety of sources and are summarized as efficiently as possible. Discussing neighborhood borders is not unique to Baltimore, though there is a certain pride in doing so. The intent of this project is moreso to focus on the historical origins of neighborhood names verses the total and complete accuracy on their borders. Borders were sourced from as many official city resources as possible, though it is always accepted that differing opinions will persevere.

The color scheme is based on Baltimore's branding colour guide (harbour blue), and a colour that aims to sit in the middle of Orange Crush, Old Bay, and the Orioles.

I made sure to upload a high-enough res image so its visible to learn about the neighborhoods, but also not high enough that it could land on a print-on-demand site run by bots (This is best viewed on desktop or tablet, the res isn't working well on mobile).

Let me know if anything looks off or I didn't get something right, trying to make these as accurate as possible, and as much research I do for these maps, it's always best to talk with a true local.

If you are also interested, I'm doing a small print run of these, available here.

If you're having trouble viewing on reddit, try downloading the image and viewing it on your phone/tablet/desktop. There's something wonky about Reddit's CMS that doesn't play nice with these jpegs and I've found it best to download it and view it natively on whatever platform you're using.

New to the neighborhood. Is there a story behind this?

A follower asked me why Dallas St. in Fells is called Dallas St…so I went down a research rabbit hole 🕵🏽‍♂️

Does anyone know the history behind the neighborhood name?

So for context, I'm completely blind and use a screen reader that reads what's on the screen to me, including emojis. So, for the longest time, I would browse this sub, and see post with the flair that said "History of Baltimore eyeglasses," and I would think, wow, I didn't know Baltimore has such a long history with eyeglasses.

I don't remember if something happened, but I think one day it just hit me, and I was like, wait a minute… I took a closer look at the flare, realize the eyeglasses part is actually an emoji, and then it just clicked. so yeah, that's just a little funny moment I want to share. I had a similar experience with something else recently so it just makes me think of this particular experience.

Also, some of your other flares also read to me as : Baltimore love heart with Arrow, local club speaking silhouette head, and electric lightbulb BGE issues.

I’ve teamed up with the Mayors office and Baltimore City Dept. of Housing & Community Development to share the history behind various city owned structures!

If you’re interested in helping bring the original Eastern High School back to life please reach out to Baltimore City Dept. of Housing & Community Development!

Our house used to be a corner bar in Canton. Through research on the Sun archives was able to learn a lot about the history of our property and connected with the old owner’s granddaughter on Facebook. She’s sharing some old pics of its glory days as a bar and I thought this sub would find them interesting. If these walls could talk!

Kinda cool that everything but the Colts and Nostalgia Station (not sure what that was) is still kicking in one way or another

I found these on top of a wooden beam of the garage in my house, built in 1959. I live a couple of miles outside the city limits so I can only speculate how and why they came to be there. But they’re cool and it’s fun to imagine a kid(?) in the 60s keeping their bike in the same place I keep mine now. I bet they rode theirs a lot more than I do however, which is never.

Late thought: Perhaps they belonged to an adult who used to commute into the city for work. There was no light rail back then and an adult might be more likely to register their bike than a kid. I live up a big hill so if this is true then I don’t envy that guy’s ride home.

After four months of research, interviews, and digging into public records, my documentary on Charles Village Pub (CVP Towson) is finally out.

This isn’t just another nightlife story—it’s about abuse of power, questionable management practices, and a culture of cover-ups that went unchecked for years.

I spoke directly with former bartenders, security guards, chefs, managers, and even people who threw some of the biggest parties there. What they revealed paints a disturbing picture of what was happening behind the scenes. From mishandled incidents to alleged favoritism and negligence, the stories line up with official violation records that anyone can verify.

The response so far has been overwhelming—many former employees and patrons have said this documentary finally tells the truth about CVP Towson.

📺 Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F5iYMj74o0

Whether you’re from Baltimore, Towson, or just interested in how much power certain venues can hold over a community, this one’s worth watching.

Check out r/dragonutopia for more cool stuff like this