Tour the Town Virtually with Baltimore Heritage!

Neighborhood Tour

On the final Friday of every month, Live Baltimore heads out of the office and into one of Baltimore’s 278 neighborhoods. Due to the pandemic, the Live Baltimore team is working from home so this month’s Final Friday was a little different.

Like a lot of organizations right now, we’ve stayed connected over the past several weeks thanks to the power of video conference software (If you haven’t checked out our awesome Zoom backgrounds you can find them here!).

And though we aren’t able to get out into neighborhoods in person right now, thankfully, Baltimore Heritage is producing fabulous Five Minute Histories every day about a different historic place in Baltimore. With a quick share of the screen we were able to watch a few episodes together! First up, the history of Baltimore’s Painted Screens!

Baltimore Heritage Executive Director Johns Hopkins told us about the history of painted screens found throughout East Baltimore. The tradition of painting screens on first-story windows started in a neighborhood formerly known as Little Bohemia (now Milton-Montford) by a Czechoslovakian immigrant named William Oktavek.

Next up— Old Town Mall. The former Bel Air Market was turned into a pedestrian mall in 1968. Johns shares the history of two sites in this video.

While touring these sites virtually wasn’t the same as getting out into the neighborhoods ourselves we still had so much fun watching these together as a group and look forward to keeping up with more of the series in the future!

Interested in learning more about historic sites around Baltimore? You can check out more of Baltimore Heritage’s Five Minute Histories here. Want to see more pictures of Baltimore’s neighborhoods? Check those out on our Neighborhoods page.