My wife, Gale Tucker, and I purchased this building on Park Row intending to tear it down. The seller, a bank president, agreed it is slowly collapsing, and all he wanted was the value of the land alone. We owned the property for three years before learning how much it is really worth.
The evidence is obvious. This building has three front doors, but only one of them enjoys the shelter of its spacious porch. What are the other two flanking doors for?
Inside the center door, there’s a foyer, with a door that opens to the rooms on the left, but there’s no door anywhere inside to access the facilities on the right. We have to go outside, on to the porch, and into the rain before we can enter those facilities. How does that make sense?
Architecture is a language about what we dearly want, as well as a means to get it. Yet I failed to understand what the setup meant, even though I’ve spent forty-some years working with historic structures. As a society, we don’t want to recognize our 88 years of Jim Crow segregation, from 1876 soon after the Civil War until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This building was built in 1928, at the top of the Roaring 20s, a time of liberation, at least for us, and not so much for them. As we experience the next four years, it may be helpful to remember who we are capable of being for a full third of the history of our country.
Peter Newlin is the founder at Chesapeake Architects in Chestertown.This video is approximately five minutes in length
Caroline Gabel says
If only these walls could talk!
Peter Newlin and Gale Tucker asked this question of a building they had acquired on Park Row. And the walls answered, revealing a story of racism hiding in plain sight, here in Chestertown, planned and built not even 100 years ago.
It took Peter’s keen eye, understanding of “normal” architecture, and willingness to inquire into, and tease out, the mystery of the enigmatic doors and walls on this building. To face his building’s shocking past, and remind us of racism in the recent past, and that racism still exists in too many hearts.
We must be grateful to Peter and Gale for saving and restoring this building, and preserving its meaning for us to see today. Sometimes it seems that the Roaring 20s and the attitudes they engendered toward some of our fellow citizens are not all that far in the past.
Kathleen James-Chakraborty says
A sad history indeed, but not surprising considering how African-Americans were treated in Chestertown at this time. I grew up hearing reminiscences from black friends about being treated in segregated wards of Kent and Queen Anne’s hospital. I remember, too, a fatal fire on South Queen Street in the early 1960s, and the very poor state of some of the housing along the railroad tracks there, owned by a man who lived in an eighteenth-century mansion, and also opposite the Garnett School. People were living in firetraps with little plumbing and electricity and very little heat. In comparison the slums of Washington, DC, and Baltimore, most of which had been built as middle class housing, still looked in these years quite palatial at that time. And the color line was also very clear regarding who could live where both in town and in the outlying suburbs. There were no blacks in Byford Court, Byford Heights, College Heights or Foxley Manor, which unlike the new suburban housing for blacks on Quaker Neck and Flatland Roads had town water and sewage.