After nearly two years of construction, Baltimore’s former Greyhound bus station has reopened as the home of Baltimore SquashWise, a community center and place for young people to play squash and get after-school tutoring.
Baltimore SquashWise will have a “Grand Opening Community Day” event on Feb. 28, from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., to show how the building at 601 N. Howard St. has been transformed after a $14.5 million renovation. This event replaces a Community Day event previously scheduled for Jan. 31, which will not be held. A ribbon-cutting ceremony that was originally scheduled for Jan. 26 has been postponed to Feb. 23, from 4 to 6 p.m., but the renovated building is already hosting squash matches after the city issued an occupancy permit last month.
“We’ve really hit the ground running with our programs,” said executive director Abby Markoe. “We’ve been very busy.”
Founded in 2007, Baltimore SquashWise is a non-profit organization that combines high-intensity squash instruction with academic tutoring and mentoring for public school students. Its mission is to provide opportunities for students to succeed in school and in life by increasing access to the sport of squash and providing activities such as afterschool programming, summer camps and community service. It serves students from middle school through high school graduation and offers support for post-secondary education; more than 80 percent of its students go on to college.
Since 2008, SquashWise had been operating out of the Meadow Mill Athletic Club, which closed in 2021. It acquired the former bus terminal in 2021 from the Maryland Center for History and Culture and had a groundbreaking ceremony for its renovations in April of 2024. It has been using temporary space on Sisson Street while the Greyhound building was undergoing renovation.
The 25,000-square-foot building will host SquashWise’s after-school tutoring and sports programs, including local matches and regional tournaments. SquashWise also intends to partner with other educational and cultural institutions in the area.
As designed by PI.KL Studio, SquashWise’s new home contains six squash courts where the bus patrons’ waiting area used to be; a multipurpose space; classrooms; a student lounge; individual changing rooms, and offices for the SquashWise staff. There’s room in the basement for expansion.
Activating the Greyhound station
The renovation brings new life to Baltimore’s Howard Street corridor and activates the long-dormant bus station, which was completed in 1941 and is one of more than 60 around the country that architect William Strudwick Arrasmith designed for Greyhound and its patrons in the 1930s and 1940s. The architecture, representative of the Streamline Moderne style, was part of the company’s brand. Arrasmith’s stations were typically distinguished by a tall pylon with an image of a Greyhound near the top.
Greyhound had its Baltimore station on Howard Street from 1941 to 1987. After operating at the Baltimore Travel Plaza on O’Donnell Street and from a downtown terminal on West Fayette Street, it currently has a station off Russell Street, near the Horseshoe Casino Baltimore.
After Greyhound left Howard Street, the building was acquired by the development group led by Elinor Bacon, who converted it to offices. The Maryland Center for History and Culture, then known as the Maryland Historical Society, bought it in 1999 as an extension of its Mount Vernon campus, which also includes a former Greyhound bus garage. In 2016, the museum’s board decided to entertain offers to sell the bus station and finalized its sale to SquashWise five years later.
The building is located in Baltimore’s Market Center historic district. To qualify for state and federal tax credits for historic preservation, SquashWise and its architects preserved the building’s Streamline Moderne exterior and key features of its interior, such as its terrazzo floors. One of the Greyhound dogs that was displayed outside the building is now mounted in the central area where the squash courts are.
A history wall has been created by historian Keon Rosado and Wide Angle Youth Media to provide information about the building’s past. Mechanized window shades control the amount of natural light that comes in. The teaching spaces are mostly on the second level, along with a balcony-like area that overlooks the squash courts. Exterior lights will be able to change colors so SquashWise can glow orange for the Orioles and purple for the Ravens.
“We really do see ourselves as responsible stewards of the historic preservation of this building,” Markoe said. “We’re doing everything that we can to make sure that we follow the guidelines that have been given to us.”
Unique in Baltimore
The new center is accessible from Baltimore bus and light rail lines and close to several public schools, and SquashWise will be offering memberships for area residents who’d like to use its facilities.
Markoe, who has a background in history, said one of SquashWise’s chief objectives is to provide access to the sport for students who wouldn’t otherwise get to experience it.
“Meadow Mill was an accessible gym” she said. “It was a commercial gym. You didn’t have to be a member of a club, necessarily. But historically, squash is [associated with] country clubs, private schools, elite universities, and just not accessible and frankly not known by very many people.”
At SquashWise, she said, the goal is to “bring more people into the sport,” she said. “Our memberships are going to be at accessible price points because we want to have economic inclusion. Before this, you’d have to basically apply to become a member of a private club, and then have to afford that, in order to play squash. The fact that we’re doing this in a very community-oriented way is for young people and also to bring people of all ages and experience levels in the sport into joining this club.”
Around Baltimore, she said, “there are other squash facilities, but not that are more public-facing.”
While any sport is important for social development for kids, she said, squash in particular is important because it “brings a lot of social capital to it if you really become a player because you’re meeting professors or people who might give you an internship over the summer and we want that social capital to be more broadly out in the community.”
In terms of its programs, “SquashWise is unique in Baltimore in combining squash and educational opportunity” the way it does, “but there are programs like SquashWise in many other cities across the country,” she said. “We’re all independent organizations, but we have an umbrella organization called the Squash and Education Alliance – SEA – and we’re a part of that.”
The model “started in 1996 in Boston, a place called SquashBusters, so we’re nearing the 30th anniversary of this model,” Markoe said. “And then in New York City they opened a couple of programs there, and Philadelphia, Chicago. Baltimore is probably in the mid-range of these organizations. We’re almost 20 years old now.”
1,000 people
Markoe said she anticipates that about 1,000 people will be coming through the Howard Street facility within a year.
“The weeks vary,” she said. “Some weeks we have squash matches. There’s a lot of squash activity. Other weeks we might only have the after-school program and members. Our goal at full capacity is we want to have over 100 members, probably 100 to 150 members. We never had memberships before. When I say members, I mean members of the Squash Club. In terms of our youth program, which we call our Youth Development Program, our maximum capacity was about 75 to 100 young people in that program, and that includes some graduates that we work with. Now we’re talking about doubling the size of that program. That one is a long-term intense college and career readiness program that we do.”
In addition to that, she said, “we’re going to be able to see hundreds of young students a year in, we have something called School Squash, where we take the squash into Baltimore City public schools and actually any school could hire us to do so. We could go into independent schools or go into county schools. We take the squash into the gyms and we teach it there. This past year, we were able to see almost 400 students in our School Squash program. That was middle school, but we could do really any age that’s third or fourth grade or older. Younger than third grade is a little tough to teach squash in a gym.”
Besides the in-school squash programs, she said, “we’re also going to start welcoming schools for field trips… Just like schools go to the aquarium or go to the zoo, we want principals and teachers to see SquashWise as a place where they could bring students.”
Markoe said she’s proud of the way it’s turned out.
“We want this to be a place where we can bring Baltimore together in ways that some communities might not otherwise find a chance to interact with each other,” she said.
How many courts are there?
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