Pen Lucy, Baltimore

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Coordinates: 39°20′13″N 76°36′28″W / 39.337, -76.6077

Pen Lucy is a small community in northeast Baltimore, Maryland and part of the development of York Road, a historic Baltimore route to Pennsylvania. The Pen Lucy neighborhood is predominately African American and features many different housing types. The neighborhood is bounded by Argonne Drive (south), East 43rd Street (north), Greenmount Avenue (west) and The Alameda (east). The Pen Lucy Neighborhood Association, Inc. (PLNA, Inc.) is the organization that serves the residents of Pen Lucy.

[edit] Points of interest

[edit] Demographics

According to the 2000 US Census, 3,260 people live in Mid-Govans with 90.3% African-American and 5.8% White. The median household income is $22,356. 87.9% of the houses are occupied and 37.8% of those are occupied by the home's owner. ^[1] Fifty-five percent of Pen Lucy’s 1,500 households are headed by single females. Seventy-five percent of these households include children under the age of 18. More than 27 percent of the entire population is age 18 or younger, with approximately 900 children living in the neighborhood.

[edit] Schools

Pen Lucy has two public elementary schools: Walter P. Carter and Guildford elementary schools. High school students generally attend Mervo, City, DuBois, or Lewis high schools.

[edit] History

Pen Lucy and twenty other neighborhoods in north Baltimore have aligned themselves with the York Road corridor. For the first 150 years, these neighborhoods shared the same history.
The York Road is almost as old as York, Pennsylvania itself. Shortly after 1741, when York was first established as a town, a conference of Baltimore and York tradesmen and merchants met to establish a road between the two young communities.

The first cross-road village, Govans, was established by 1783. In the 1840s Govans developed into a thriving village. For the first half of the 19th century, the larger Govans area was a farm community made up mostly of gentlemen estates and small truck farms. In 1874 the Horse Car Railway connected Govans to Baltimore and Towson. York Road became a mixed-use street with commercial, residential, and agricultural-oriented uses. By the 1920s, Govans was a thriving mainstreet that catered to the newly built suburban neighborhoods. Residential housing began to cater to suburbanites. Houses in the current, eclectic style were built within a short walking distance from York Road. By the mid-1950s, the shopping core of Govans, centering on York and Belvedere roads, also included an A & P grocery store, a Steiff Silver outlet, Read's Drug store, a carpet store, a jeweler, the Senator Theater (opened 1939), banks, several restaurants, service stations, cleaners, barbers, shoe repair shops, and seven other specialty shoe and clothing stores. Govans shopping district catered to the newly developed suburban neighborhoods within the area.

The conglomeration of new suburban developments grew into neighborhoods such as Penn Lucy, Wilson Park, Radnor Winston and Winston Govans.^[2] The Welsh Construction Company, a builder of thousands of rowhouses in Baltimore, built most of Pen Lucy’s rowhouses in the 1910s and 1920s. Some other rowhouses were built in the 1930s and 1940s. Boundary Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church (circa 1902), and the Roman Catholic Church of the Blessed Sacarament (1921) instantly became landmarks in the neighborhood, and their presence solidified the subdevelopments into twentieth-century suburb.^[3]

[edit] Notes