Dan Rodricks: Discovering the houses that Frederick Douglass built for the poor

The Baltimore area has a serious problem when it comes to affordable housing, and the Trump administration’s plan is to make it worse. 

The administration has halted a $1 billion program intended to preserve thousands of units for low-income families, an action bound to hurt efforts to maintain and develop housing that’s affordable in Baltimore and the surrounding counties.

There are many departed Americans — the Lincolns, the Roosevelts, the Carters and even the Reagans — spinning in their graves these days, appalled at the Trump administration’s damage to the national purpose in health, education, science, immigration and foreign relations.

And, spinning from the attack on affordable housing would be the great Frederick Douglass.

I assign Douglass to this arena because of a recent personal discovery: The man who escaped slavery in Baltimore to become a powerful advocate for abolition in the 19th Century — this influential writer, editor, orator and diplomat — was also a developer of affordable housing.

Late in life, after his long crusades for human rights, Douglass came back to Baltimore and a street in Fells Point called Strawberry Alley. He purchased, for $1,800 in 1892, an old property there — an abandoned church, or meeting house, he had attended as a young man. He had the building razed and, in its place, Douglass had five rowhouses built. He did this for the expressed purpose of renting to some of the many poor Black families who had been living nearby in what a Douglass biographer described as “miserable shacks.”

Strawberry Alley was later renamed South Dallas Street, and the five houses from 516 to 524 were crowned Douglass Place. The name still appears in marble in the facade of one of the homes.

Douglass Place, also known as Douglass Row, somehow eluded my gaze in nearly a half-century of wanderings through Baltimore, confirming what I’ve frequently said: Unless you look up when you walk around the city, you miss stuff. 

Unless you were to turn into Dallas Street from Fleet and look up, you would miss Douglass Place and the historical marker on the first home in the row.

If not for two historians who conduct tours of Fells Point — veteran guide Lou Fields and a relative newcomer, Emma Katherine Bilski — I would have missed this aspect of Frederick Douglass’s life. Both Fields and Bilski focus on Douglass’s time in Fells Point, before he made his escape (with the help of his wife, Anna Murray Douglass) from slavery. 

Douglass Place is one of the tour guides’ regular stops. 

According to the Baltimore City Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, the Dallas Street rowhouses are the only remaining buildings in Baltimore associated with Douglass’s time here.

While there have been some official recognitions of the homes since the early 1980s, Lou Fields thinks a bigger fuss should be made about them. Two of the homes appear to be unoccupied. My numerous attempts to reach the owners of all five properties have been unsuccessful.

Dallas Street, or Strawberry Alley in the 19th Century, had special significance for Douglass.

“It’s where he started his spiritual journey as a Christian to eventually become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church,” Fields says. “He started his spiritual journey in that block. They had the Strawberry Alley meeting house there, and Douglass, by the time he was living in Fells Point, went to that block to go to church as a kid.”

Many years later, when he was in his early 70s and living in Washington, Douglass visited the meeting house’s successor church, Centennial African Methodist Episcopal, located on a nearby corner. 

According to Joshua Clark Davis, a historian and assistant professor at the University of Baltimore, Douglass might have hinted at his interest in acquiring the old property on Dallas Street by expressing fond and sentimental words about the place: “Whatever successes have come to me in literature, in statesmanship, in learning, the light and inspiration was first gathered in the old church in Strawberry Alley.”

Douglass was likely appalled at the housing conditions of poor Black families in Baltimore, and specifically Fells Point. That was believed to be his main motivation for having the houses built — to respond to the need for decent and affordable housing.

More than 130 years later, Baltimore could use more developers who think as Frederick Douglass did. According to the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development, more than 30,000 people are on the waiting list for public housing.

“Housing instability,” says DHCD on its website, “is a major problem for city residents, many of whom are cost-burdened and ultimately subject to eviction and foreclosure.”

If he walked the city streets today, Frederick Douglass would see thousands of vacant houses, and he’d be pushing developers to make a commitment toward building more affordable housing. 

He would certainly be a leader of Trump protests.

Lou Fields would like to see the city promote the homes on Dallas Street as a place for Baltimoreans and out-of-towners to visit.

“We in Baltimore could do a lot better job by claiming this particular place,” Fields says. “We have not done as much as we should to pay homage to this location. We’re talking about probably the birthplace of Douglass’ spirituality.”

And from that spiritual grounding rose one of the most important figures of the 19th Century, a champion of freedom and civil rights, and affordable housing.