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South Baltimore’s Polish Home Hall will host UMBC’s Departments of American Studies and Visual Arts this Saturday for an event celebrating the culture and history of waterfront, industrial neighborhoods of Curtis Bay and Brooklyn.
American Studies professor Nicole King, and Visual Arts professor Steve Bradley have been working with UMBC students on a collaborative project, “Mapping Baybrook: From Main Street to the Harbor,” that combines research and digital mapping technologies to capture the history and stories of Curtis Bay and Brooklyn, together referred to as Baybrook.
The event, Dec. 1, will also mark the launch of the Mapping Baybrook website, which was designed in collaboration with UMBC’s Imaging Research Center.
A blog post about the project by a UMBC student, whose ancestors immigrated from Poland to Curtis Bay, can be found here.
Scheduled from 1 p.m.-5 p.m., the $10 admission includes a pulled pork barbeque lunch, a copy of Mapping Baybrook’s main streets walking tour brochure, live music, public history programming, a UMBC art exhibition and kids activities. Children under 10 will be admitted free.
All proceeds will be donated to the non-profit Baybrook Coalition for the continued preservation of the historic Polish Home Hall, located at 4416 Fairhaven Ave. in Curtis Bay.
From the event press release:
“This work is funded by a UMBC Breaking Ground grant and illustrates how the successes and failures of urban industrial development contribute to our understanding of historic places and the creation of social space. A central theme of this project is that preserving places through original research, virtual mapping, and public humanities and arts programming creates social space—the room for diverse people and perspectives to come together and enhance today’s urban environments. “Mapping Baybrook: From Main Street to the Harbor” recognizes historic main streets as an essential place for the future development of the community and features the aesthetic resources within the community.”
For more information, Nicole King may be reached by email at nking@umbc.edu.
