Polish Home Hall

About this property

Polish Home Hall is a historic building located in the waterfront industrial/commercial/residential and heavily ethnic community of Curtis Bay in southern Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Built on the southwest corner of Fairhaven Avenue (formerly known as Fairview Avenue before mid-1920s) and Filbert Street near the top of the commanding heights overlooking to the east the sloping streets of the neighborhood of Curtis Bay, about four city blocks wide (east to west) and 15 blocks length (north to south). Further east beyond the residential area is a wide belt of a waterfront industrial zone with numerous railroad tracks / sidings and yard plus piers and industrial buildings/warehouses and one of the longest manufacturing assembly plant structures on East Coast of the United States, built in 1887 and massively expanded in 1916 for a railroad carwheel foundry associated with the infamous Pullman Company, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and its "company town" on the southside of the second largest city in America of Pullman, Illinois. Begun by famous inventor and industrialist George Pullman (1831–1897), for building railway passenger cars, overnight sleeping cars, dining and café cars, etc., plus storage/shipping box cars, coal and iron ore cars, cabooses and other various types of rolling stock and their constituent parts required like steel wheels, axles, brake systems, wheel assemblies that were required and much of that industrial hardware for transportation were manufactured by the South Baltimore carwheel foundry company along what was named Curtis Avenue, just west of the waterfront piers, cranes and loading machines with conveyor belts alongside the interspaced rail tracks in Curtis Bay due to its recent new convenient extensions of lines of trackage to the south of old Baltimore City to the southwest areas alongside the outer Baltimore Harbor shorelines of the lower main stem of the Patapsco River and its cove (water body) of Curtis Bay on the southwest shores and its tributary streams of Curtis Creek, Marley Creek and Furnace Branch creek in adjacent rural northern Anne Arundel County. The new rail lines, yards, switching stations and bridges were installed in the early 1890s by the regional dominant line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, first rail passenger and freight line in the nation, begin in 1827–1828, over six decades before and now dominated the industry of the country. This was the inspiring view from the second story assembly hall of the new town hall of Curtis Bay overlooking the. burgeoning busy harbor and railroads documented in a two-foot long panoramic fold-out printed photograph in a descriptive booklet pamphlet on the attributes for residences and industrial possibilities published in 1917 by Curtis Bay Terraces, Inc., a land development subsidiary of the longtime landowners, the South Baltimore Harbor and Improvement Company, seeking to add additional houses on the streets it had laid out on the higher hills to the west overlooking the original three-block wide street grid plat of the late 1880s of the predecessor developers known as the Patapsco Land Company of Baltimore City. This firm had been reorganized in 1874 from the earlier Patapsco Company of the 1850s pre-American Civil War developers of local Anne Arundel farmers and land owners combined with city financiers, businessmen, and a few far-seeing politicians who established and laid out the nearby town of Brooklyn, along the north-south road, (one of two parallel Baltimore-Annapolis thoroughfares of dirt/gravel) from the state capital and county seat of Annapolis, 20 miles south, towards Baltimore to the north.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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