There was the Caroline and Bank Streets district, in which a colored school was surrounded by a network of saloons and houses of prostitution. It was found that within a block of the school there were nine saloons and no less than forty-seven houses of ill-repute. It was learned that it was most difficult to keep girls in this school after they became thirteen or fourteen years of age. So powerful were the influences of this neighborhood upon them that at thirteen some of them passed from the school to the houses of prostitution and to lives of shame. In a tour of inspection of this neighborhood young girls were pointed out one after another, who, the previous year, had been pupils of the school. One mother, who had recently moved to Baltimore from the country, told how she had rescued her twelve-year-old daughter from one of those dens, and how a policeman, to whom in her agony and distress she had appealed, threatened to arrest her for disorderly conduct!
Public School No. 116, surrounded by eleven saloons, 8 of which are within 300 feet of the school premises. ]
The Rogers Avenue district, in which another colored school was located, while not quite so bad so far as the number of saloons and questionable houses was concerned, was yet a neighborhood infested with both kinds of places, and the block just below the school, on the street through which nearly half of the children must pass on their way to and from school, was lined on both sides with houses of prostitution, over whose doors, in some cases, the women who kept them had their names printed. Such a condition as this existed nowhere else in the city, and made this particular street a demoralizing influence which was different from any other and in many ways more powerful for harm than any other which was found.
(Click on the map for a slightly-larger version.)
Deaths due to tuberculosis in ten years, 1891–1900, inclusive, in all 11,542. The tuberculosis map of Baltimore City. The lower Druid Hill Avenue district is outlined on the map. This is the tuberculosis center of Maryland and the City of Baltimore. ]
The Druid Hill Avenue district is the largest and most populous colored neighborhood in Baltimore, if not in the world. It probably contains more homes owned and occupied by colored people than any similar residential neighborhood anywhere. It extends from Eutaw Street to North Avenue, and with the adjacent streets covers an area a mile and a half long by from one-sixteenth to one-half a mile wide. The upper part of this district is as fine a colored neighborhood as one would wish to see, and is comparatively free from nuisances of any kind.