When the federal government redlined Baltimore in 1937, a curious corridor on maps separated two prestigious neighborhoods, Guilford and Northwood, which both barred blacks and Jews.
That corridor ran along Greenmount Avenue from Woodbourne Avenue to 25th Street. In an effort to protect Guilford and Northwood, the federal government chose that Baltimore corridor as a unique national pilot program to demonstrate how rehabilitation could reverse gradual deterioration and make a neighborhood more desirable for whites and private investment. The Roland Park Company’s president, John McC. Mowbray, spearheaded the effort.
The Waverly Test Program was deemed so innovative and important that the Federal Home Loan Bank Board published a nicely bound 98-page hardcover book to explain the renewal vision. In contrast to the federal government’s subsequent taxpayer-financed urban renewal programs, the Waverly plan assumed that existing homeowners would take out loans to modernize.
Because of its proximity to Washington, the 163-acre Waverly site became a convenient laboratory for Washington bureaucrats interested in studying urban decay. Despite “badly depreciated spots,” Waverly was not substandard. The neighborhood was white, although a “fully developed” black slum near 25th Street “continuously menaces [Waverly’s] social and economic integrity.”
The black slum worried federal officials. If left “unchecked,” it was bound to “adversely affect the equities of all homeowners in the area and the security of all interested loaning agencies,” the agency concluded. Waverly “is essentially sound structurally, economically, and socially. It is worth preserving and it can be preserved.”
At the time that was a remarkable conclusion because HOLC’s redlining maps were based on the premise that once decline started, deterioration and racial change were inevitable.
The Waverly Test Program covered 39 blocks, consisting of 1,748 lots. Of those, 1,214 were occupied by modern row houses of masonry construction, which required only regular maintenance.
Similarly, two-thirds of the 301 detached and semidetached homes were well cared for and equipped with modern conveniences. The rest were “definite neighborhood sore spots,” requiring modernization and extensive repairs.
In an age that did not know neighborhood conservation, HOLC architects had explicit ideas about modernization. They saw no value in the original Victorian architecture of Waverly’s old buildings. Instead, if detached houses were of frame construction, as most were, the HOLC wanted to strip them of all Victorian influences. A pronounced dormer defining the roof line was to be eliminated so that a bay would not look so dominant.
A “more modern” porch would be installed, with new railing and non-Victorian columns. Similarly, a mansard-roofed Second Empire brick building would be altered to look like a Colonial Revival house.
Alternativey, slender porch columns could be added and extended to the frieze. With a fancy entrance canopy, the home could be transformed into an ersatz Greek Revival plantation house, not quite a Tara but far more imposing than before.
The ambitious plan did not stop there. It called for straightening some streets, eliminating others. It envisioned turning vacant land into public playgrounds for whites. All this could be achieved with the demolition of only one building, said the sponsor, Home Owners Loan Corporation.
A steady stream of visitors came from other cities to see Waverly’s rehabilitation plans. But as the HOLC ceased before World War II, Waverly lost its champion.
In the end, all HOLC planning produced nothing. A totally different Waverly redevelopment project started in the late 1940s. It was based on razing 22 acres of black slums, an approach the HOLC had rejected in the Waverly Test Program. A total of 321 housing units were erected on the site.
They were originally built for whites. But after the ghetto started spreading, the city rented them to blacks. That row house development still remains around the Waverly Shopping Center.
Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped Baltimore between 1910 and 1975. His e-mail address is [email protected].
