Farewell Calvert Street, hello Port Covington

After 68 years at the site, The Baltimore Sun charts a new course for itself

Goodbye train tracks that delivered newsprint right into the building. Goodbye ghost of H.L. Mencken. Goodbye THE SUN sign that glowed for I-83 drivers. Goodbye red brick walls. Goodbye bands of greentinted windows. Goodbye Calvert Street. For 68 years, the brick behemoth at 501 N. Calvert Street has been The Baltimore Sun’s home. Now, with the lease expiring, its journalists and sales, business and administrative staff are moving and will join the printing, production and transportation operation at Sun Park in Port Covington, 3 miles south and worlds away.

As with any move, this one brings both a pang for what is left behind and the uncertainty of what lies ahead in the new and largely unbuilt Port Covington, the peninsula that juts into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River.

Much has changed, for both The Sun and the city, since the paper arrived on Calvert Street on Christmas Day 1950 (the only day back then when it didn’t publish). The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Glee Club performed, and visitors peered through huge first-floor windows to marvel at the new printing presses, which were started by two 10-year-old granddaughters of Sun executives.

One wore “a white blouse and a plaid skirt, predominantly green,” The Sun dutifully reported the next day, and the other “a white blouse and a green jumper.” See SUN, page 16