Race, class and antisemitism in Baltimore (Dundalk: schools, gated, department store)

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I have no idea as to how Google prepares its list of bestselling books. But the No. 1 bestseller in Maryland for weeks now has been Hutzler's: Where Baltimore Shops. Amazon.com: hutzler's where baltimore shops: Books
In terms of nostalgia, Hutzler's was the tops. It was one of the big downtown department stores -- Hecht, Hohschild-Kohn, O'Neill's and Stewart's were the others. (All are gone now and so are their names). Thousands of aging Baltimoreans wax poetic about the glories of that era, when mail service was so prompt that you could inform a friend by a postcard sent the previous day to meet you at Hutzler's for tea. When the department stores home-delivered everything for free the next day, even neckties or handkerchiefs. If you did not like the color, the free delivery system picked up the returns.
Those were the days, as long as you were white. Because starting in 1910 the department stores told blacks that their business was not desired. Nothing that they might buy could be tried for size, nothing could be returned. This lasted until 1960. Discrimination by Baltimore's department stores was harsher than in Richmond, the erstwhile Confederate capital.
The Jewish Museum of Maryland has dealt with these matters in an excellent book, Enterprising Emporiums: The Jewish Department Stores of Baltimore. Amazon.com: Enterprising Emporiums: The Jewish Department Stores of Downtown Baltimore: Avi Y. Decter, Melissa Martens, Dean Krimmel, Paul A. Kramer, Melissa J. Martens, Mark Neumann: Books Antero Pietila's Not in My Neighborhood, due to be released March 16, delves into the origins of the policies which soured the relations between blacks and Jews for decades. Antero Pietila HOME
If anyone has read the Hutzler book, please tell us about it and its contents.
Let me just talk about the final chapter of Hutzler's. All the Howard Street department stores were in death throes in the 1970s, when a go-getter took over Hutzler's leadership. He built a new mini-department store at Light and Pratt. It was well ahead of its time, its selection was wrong, whatever. It went belly up quite quickly and so did the rest of Hutzler's.

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Here is The Urbanite's February issue on race:

The Urbanite Magazine - Baltimore

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I have no idea who said it originally, but WEAA's Marc Steiner often keeps repeating this definition: "Nostalgia is remembering the past with the pain removed."
I have now acquired a copy of Michael J. Lisicky's extremely succesful Hutzler's: Where Baltimore Shops . The book, which has gone through several printings, is the ultimate nostalgia book. It remembers the good old days, forgets the pain and contains lots of photos that will bring back pleasant memories to those who remember. The most incredible, though, is a unique World War II image of shop floor mannequins with the following banner in the background: "Buy More Bonds to Beat the Japs."
In the end, Hutzler's is a dishonest book, as far as the topic of this thread is concerned. I have no problem with the author pretty much skimming over the segregation era, but I do have a problem with the revisionist history the book presents. The most preposterous is the author's claim, quoting a Hutzler relative, that the family wanted to serve blacks "a long time ago" before repeated protests finally produced desegregation in 1960.
Everyone in this town knows better. It is a matter of documented history (reproduced in Not in My Neighborhood, which will be distributed nationally later this month) that Albert Hutzler, the store's owner, was a leader of segregation in Baltimore. In 1944, as chairman of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, he appeared in court to defend the public library's policy of not hiring blacks by invoking his own store's refusal to hire blacks or serve them.
This is one reason why anyone seriously interested in Baltimore's downtown department stores is far better served by the Jewish Museum of Maryland's admirable Enterprising Emporiums.

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Today's Sun includes this paid death notice, which I partially reproduce:

SALZMAN , Anne Irene Ruth ANNE IRENE RUTH SALZMAN, born June 15, 1912 in Wyomissing, PA to Calvin Ruth and Ellen Haag, died January 30, 2010 at Charlestown Retirement Community. After graduating from Hood College in 1933, she became a social worker in Baltimore. Anne was preceded in death by her husband of fifty years, Sidney Salzman.

The rest of the story:

In 1941, Salzman, a court stenographer, wanted to buy one of seven foreclosed houses in Hunting Ridge, a neighborhood off Edmondson Avenue in West Baltimore that the federal government had designated as one of Baltimore's top ten in its 1937 redlining map. Homeowners’ covenant against Jews had expired there one year earlier. The Salzmans – he was Jewish, his wife Christian -- had “always lived in Gentile neighborhoods,” he wrote to FHA in justifying his interest in Hunting Ridge. Federal bureaucrats were not impressed, and Salzman got a runaround.
He repeatedly offered purchase prices verbally suggested by FHA officials, proposing to put nearly a half down. He was turned down each time, even though he had been pre-approved for a mortgage. Finally, one official, “with evident embarrassment . . . gave as reason for the turning down of my offer the fact of my Jewish extraction, that it was thought best not to sell one of these properties in a restricted neighborhood to me, that it might affect the sale of other properties, and that the Steffey Co. real estate brokers handling the properties strenuously objected to such sale to me, on the same grounds.”
Salzman complained of religious discrimination and charged that FHA engaged in “a needless credit investigation, which with attendant circumstances had led personal friends and acquaintances to doubt my credit standing in the community.” FHA’s state director denied those charges. “Frankly, I was amazed to read the document,” he responded to Salzman’s letter. “There is no religious discrimination on the part of any one in the Federal Housing Administration.”
In the end, Salzman’s tenacity paid off. After he threatened to take the matter to Maryland’s two U.S. senators – “for whatever action they deem proper” -- FHA’s deputy administrator in Washington fixed a definite price on the property. Salzman met the price, got the title to the house in 1941, and lived there the rest of his life.

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We keep losing Baltimoreans knowledgeable about this city's past. Today's Sun, which you may or may not find when the snow melts, celebrates the life of Dr. Randall Beirne, a retired sociology and history professor at the University of Baltimore.
He was a frequent contributor to The Evening Sun , a newspaper (those were strange paper products printed in ink that stained your hands and strained your eyesight in the early history of humanity, some decades before the events depicted in Avatar). His father, Francis Beirne, a Sunpapers scribe, authored the marvelous Amiable Baltimoreans, which would be perfect reading on a snowy day like this with a fireplace roaring.
D. Randall Beirne - baltimoresun.com
The reason why all this belongs on this thread is this: One reason why Baltimore's public transit system is so rudimentary is racial fear, suspicions toward "outsiders" and "those people." That's why the light-rail does not stop in Ruxton, even though trains whizz past the wealthy Baltimore County village.
As the obituary reminds us, the Ruxtonites' suspicions about outsiders have a long history. They also fought against regular commuter trains. Dr. Beirne wrote about that, among many other topics, including Hampden.
I don't believe I ever met Dr. Beirne. My loss; our loss.

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One man's fight against redlining - baltimoresun.com

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Here is a link to Barry Kessler's study, Druid Hill Park: Jewish Baltimore's Green Oasis, 1920-1960.
http://www.bjen.org/documents/druidhill.12_28_09.pdf

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Antero Pietila's Not in My Neighorhood: How Bigotry Shaped Great American City is now out http://www.anteropietila.com. It examines a 100-year span of residential segregation in light of anti-Semitism and eugenics, a white-supremacist academic discipline that begat Baltimore's 1910 residential segregation law that other cities copied widely. The book then looks at restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, white flight, flipping and predatory lending. It may be the most comprehensive treatment of the subject.

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The Jewish Museum of Maryland
presents an author talk
with Dr. Elisa New
Jacob's Cane
Sunday, February 21, 2010
2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Harvard professor Elisa New traces the journeys of two family patriarchs as she unravels the mysterious etchings on her great-grandfather's elegant cane. Great-grandfather Jacob Levy and great-great-uncle Bernhard Baron - both Jewish immigrants from the Baltic states - met in Baltimore and became friends before later turning into bitter rivals. This engrossing memoir/family history vivifies the successes and tragedies of a memorable clan.
Co-Sponsored with Baltimore Museum of Industry.
BMI and JMM Members: Free! Non-Members: $8 (includes JMM

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