About The Book

Spirit of Place: Baltimore’s Favorite Spaces by Sarah Achenbach and Bill McAllen captures how Baltimore’s architecture, neighborhoods and public places and spaces—the celebrated, the everyday and the forgotten—resonate in our lives and memories. We may admire architecture for its design, grace and function, but it’s how we interact with a building or place—the way we inhabit it, and it inhabits us—that gives it its soul.

A one-of-a-kind pictorial and narrative tour of the Baltimore region, the book is equal parts fine art photography book and oral history celebrating 56 places that put the charm in Charm City. Recollections filled with nostalgia, triumphs, yearnings, sadness and hope abound in the book's exquisite black-and-white portraits and engaging reflections, including essays by architect Tom Gamper, historic preservationist Tyler Gearhart, novelist Laura Lippman, and journalist, author and television producer David Simon.

Two of our many favorites:

Jim and Mary Bready
Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch 22, Govans

Author and retired Baltimore Evening Sun writer Jim Bready met his wife Mary at the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Govans branch on a Saturday afternoon, June 21, 1941. The expressions on their faces leave no doubt that theirs is a love that has lasted. Since that fateful day 67 years ago, they’ve made an annual pilgrimage to the Govans Library every June 21. Though Jim missed a couple of visits during World War II, one Bready or the other has made the anniversary visit each year since 1941.
Over the building’s door and front windows you’ll see a wrought-iron bird mounted at the bottom of each arch. Jim likes to think that the birds represent their three children, Richard, Christopher and Stephen. And on the summer afternoon when Bill took the Breadys’ photo, a pair of deer ran behind Bill and his camera—in Govans nonetheless. Mary and Bill saw the deer right away, but Jim, too preoccupied with kissing his bride, missed the whole thing.

David Stambaugh
Call Room, U.S. Custom House

Imagine David Stambaugh in 1967 as a nervous high-school student, sitting on a hard wooden bench, waiting to be called to register for the draft. By then, the Call Room had been chopped up and a drop-ceiling added, but he still found it an imposing space. (His high lottery number and a student deferment kept him out of Vietnam.) Six years later, David started working as a dispatcher at the Baltimore Maritime Exchange, with the responsibility of notifying many interested parties, custom agents included, when a ship was coming into Baltimore. After getting his radio dispatch, ship agents would then bustle through the Call Room to register the cargo manifest and crew list and pay any necessary duties. Today, the thousands of ships a year that pass through Baltimore’s Harbor are all registered electronically, and David, a sailor himself, laments the loss of romance now that the old system has given way to computers. The Call Room, restored to its original splendor, sits empty.
Take a closer look at the murals in the photo. They are the work of renowned American painter Francis Davis Millet. Once considered among the finest American masterpieces, Millet’s History of Navigation portrays more than 125 vessels. Ironically, Millet died at sea just a few years after completing these murals. On April 15, 1912, he drowned after helping women and children into lifeboats on the sinking Titanic.