The news the state of Maryland wants to hand over the State Center office compound to the City of Baltimore raises challenging questions.

What is this part of Baltimore? What are its roots?

Originally a neighborhood of chock-a-block 1830s and 1840s rowhouses and the occasional mansion ― the original Bolton estate, which lent its name to nearby Bolton Hill — stood on the site of the Fifth Regiment Armory.

The neighborhood was not fancy. It housed coal and lumber yards and at least two stables ― the Imperial and the Windsor. (In later years, auto dealers would fill the Mount Royal Avenue-Cathedral Street area.)

This was a good location for a stables owner. The wealthy who resided on Eutaw Place or in Mount Vernon could keep their prize animals and others could rent a carriage and hire a driver.

Bernard Mannion was a prominent personage in this neighborhood prior to his 1910 death. A native of County Roscommon, Ireland, he moved to Baltimore in 1864 and prospered in the fancy horse trade. He had a home on nearby Eutaw Place and built his stables adjacent to his home.

He had competition — The Windsor Stables once stood at 932 Linden Ave. Its proprietor was a veterinarian, Dr. H.H. Bye and a relative, F.R. Bye. A 1901 ad for the Windsor noted “elegant rubber-tire carriages with liveried drivers for all occasions.”

Horses (and cows) continued to play a part in the neighborhood. The Western Maryland Dairy and its fleet of horse-drawn milk wagons, whose drivers delivered milk throughout the city was located on Linden Avenue, one of the streets that later vanished.

The state of Maryland intends to hand Baltimore’s State Center Complex to the city for future redevelopment, Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford announced Wednesday in Annapolis. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun)

About 100 years ago, this was a well established African American neighborhood, but change was in the air. Many residents were moving on to newer, and better and larger homes.

As a marker of neighborhood change, look at the St. James African Episcopal Church. That congregation built a fine new church at the corner of Park Avenue and West Preston Street in 1901. By 1932, its members left their old home and moved to West Baltimore’s Lafayette Square.

By the 1930s, however, the neighborhood was in rough shape. Rows of compact, often tiny, houses, built in the 19th century, when Baltimore’s population was on the upswing, declined in value and condition. City directories from the 1930s note a high rate of vacancy here.

It was once a sleepy backwater between Mount Vernon and West Baltimore, but by 1938, the city had built an extension of Howard Street through the area and added a trackless trolley route too. It was no longer nowhere.

And, in the next 20 years, old streets would disappear (there was once a minuscule Camel Street here) and the area would never be the same.

In 1954, the state of Maryland declared this neighborhood to be a slum. Then Gov. Theodore R. McKeldin sent a request to Baltimore’s Mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro Jr. to get wrecking crews out and start leveling the site.

Not everyone thought this slum clearance to be a good idea. Just to the east, on Tyson Street, a group of do-it-yourself home renovators were establishing their own colony.

One of them was Betty Cooke, the jewelry artist whose work and contributions to Baltimore were showcased at the Walters Art Museum. She was taken by the romance and beauty of the 1830s housing, even if it looked beaten up and downtrodden.

“There were plenty of similar houses, largely vacant, on the west side of Howard Street in the 1950s,” she said in a 2019 Sun story. “We had thoughts of buying them and making little courts around the houses. It didn’t happen. They were viewed as slums and all torn down for either the Sutton Place apartment house or the State Office Building area.”

The blocks of old houses were cleared, and architects Fisher, Ness and Campbell created a mid-century modern office building to fill the footprint of the old stables.

A Sun news article compared the bold new plan to consolidate dozens of state offices under one roof, in a tall modern building, to be Baltimore’s version of a United Nations Building.

McKeldin was not in office when the State Office Building opened in 1959. Gov. Millard Tawes cut the ribbon. And, by 1980, the old livery stable’s approximate location was now serving passengers on the Baltimore Metro subway.