Maryland Penitentiary meets the wrecking ball
Edifice stood for more than century in center of Baltimore
During the 1890s, quarry workers at Port Deposit and Woodstock labored to cut the thick stone blocks for the Maryland Penitentiary in East Baltimore. Now, that grim-looking slammer is being torn down, with the exception of its main tower building and the warden’s home at Forrest and Eager streets.
The Maryland Legislature back then set aside $25,000 a year until it had the funds to construct a solid new prison serving the state. The result, constructed as a Romanesque castle style popular with prison officials and architects, opened in late 1899. The Sun described it as “the most complete prison in America.”
If the stone walls came from Cecil and Baltimore counties, the iron cell bars were strictly Pigtown, made by the Bartlett and Hayward company on Scott Street. The interior ironwork was painted with aluminum.
“I never expected to live in a silver-plated room,” said one convict, upon seeing his new quarters.
The Sun discussed the prison’s stout walls. Jim Williams, a prisoner from the Eastern Shore who had escaped from a Princess Anne jail, commented, “I’m up against it now.”
“Most of the men had looked forward to moving day with pleasurable anticipation… as something with a break from the terrible monotony of prison life,” The Sun said. “Others looked to the towering buildings with dull eyes.”
The place was supposed to be escape-proof.
“On the faces of some of these [men] despair was written as plainly as if it had been branded with a hot iron’” the newspaper said.
The prison chief, who led its construction, was warden John F. Weyler, who enjoyed a good reputation until 1913 when he was forced to resign a post he’d held for 26 years. A “Report of Maryland Penitentiary Penal Commission” of 1913 “claimed he and his administration were guilt of “mismanagement, cruelty and corruption.”
Among other things, he was cited for taking 3,000 pounds of bread crumbs weekly to feed the animals on his farm. The warden quickly retired but he somehow got a street named after himself at the south side of the Cross Street Market.
The name Weyler soon disappeared from street signs.
One of the more celebrated residents at Forrest and Eager was jailbird Jack Hart, a romantic criminal and escape artist. Hart and his accomplices help up the Norris Construction Company’s payroll clerk at
Madison Street and Park Avenue in 1922. One of Hart’s gang shot and killed the clerk. Ironically, Hart’s getaway car crossed Madison Street and passed the prison grounds where he would later be held.
The warden’s home had a famous visitor in 1932. Actor Henry Fonda and his wife-to-be, Margaret Sullavan, paid a visit (with press photographers), ostensibly to learn the facts of prison life for their production of “The Last Mile,” at the old Maryland Theatre.
As massive as The Pen’s stone walls were, they met their match in a burglar who found a way under them.
The great escape finally happened in1951. “Tunnel” Joe Holmes dug his way to freedom and emerged on Eager Street.
Serving time for burglarizing the homes of Baltimore’s rich in Guilford and Roland
Park neighborhoods, Holmes spent 20 months using a stick with a nail attached to get under the granite foundation walls. He became a folk hero for his perseverance and ingenuity.
Neighborhood activist Christopher Hyde, who lives on East Chase Street, criticized the demolition of the old Maryland Penitentiary. He points out that the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was preserved and made into a visitors’ site.
“The building is symbolic of a lot of things the city doesn’t want to talk about and this building never had an advocate. It was a place where people were once tortured,” Hyde said. “I believe that where the structure sits is a spot, a confluence of downtown, Greenmount and Mount Vernon, that had the potential to sew the city together.”