Otterbein (Baltimore, Maryland)

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Otterbein is a small neighborhood of historic rowhouses. The original houses in the neighborhood were constructed in the 1840s and 1850s. The size of the houses, and the social status of their occupants, varied primarily based on their location within a square-block pattern. The largest homes and most affluent residents were located on the primary east-west streets. The smallest homes in the neighborhood were built on half-sized lots along the east-west and even north-south "alleys" on the interior of blocks formed by the primary streets.

In addition to this diversity in housing size, employment, and social class, the neighborhood was also a diverse mix of "native" whites, white immigrants from other states, established and prosperous German and Irish immigrants, newer and poorer German and Irish immigrants, and free blacks. Otterbein experienced a new wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by immigrants from Italy, Greece, Russia, and Poland.

During World War II, a need for war housing led the owners of Otterbein homes to split up the individual rowhouses into many apartments, leading to overcrowding, poor sanitation, architectural sloppiness, and deteriorating physical conditions. The neighborhood was seized by the government during the early 1970s and emptied of its residents, churches, and other institutions in preparation for the building of Interstate 95. A powerful grassroots coalition succeeded in re-routing the interstate and the changed path left the government in possession of hundreds of badly-deteriorated rowhouses in Otterbein. After starting to tear them down, the City of Baltimore decided to keep the remaining houses intact and inaugurate the largest urban homesteading program in the history of the United States. All of the exiting original neighborhood houses were restored in the 1970s as a part of Baltimore's "dollar homes" urban homesteading program.

The neighborhood is very affluent, with some of the highest property values and property tax rates in the city.



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