St. Paul and Calvert streets

The wider eastern thoroughfare was the former narrow alley-like Courtland Street, once flanked by rows of small brick and stone townhouses.

Unfortunately, the five square blocks north to south along St. Paul and Courtland were razed beginning in 1919 as the city's first "urban renewal" project and was laid out in a Classical Revival style architecture and landscaped the terraces, staircases and fountains by noted architect Thomas Hastings (1860–1929).

The remaining black and white historical photographs archived in the libraries and historical society are all that's left to show the appearance long ago of this pictureque residential neighborhood and its Baltimore style rowhouses architecture streetscape just on the northern edge of Downtown, similar to others on the western and eastern sides.

[1] Preston Gardens landscaped terraces constructed on five square blocks north to south of razed / cleared townhouses and educational / cultural instructions along with several churches on the northern edge of downtown during the early 1920s, were named for James H. Preston (1860–1938), who was the 37th Mayor of the City of Baltimore (served 1911–1919), and earlier as the Speaker in 1894 of the Maryland House of Delegates (the lower chamber of the General Assembly of Maryland) in the historic Maryland State House on State Circle of the state capital of Annapolis of which he served 1890–1894.

project, for the former site of War of 1812 supporting redoubt battery of Fort Covington from the Battle of Baltimore and later railyards with shipping piers for the old Western Maryland Railway from the late 1890s to early 1980s.

Darby Lux I (1695–1750), an early sea captain / mariner, major merchant and civic leader in the colonial era of the mercantile history of Baltimore who had a house on the waterfront street.