Baltimore Polytechnic Institute


The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, colloquially referred to as BPI, Poly, and The Institute, is a US public high school founded in 1883. Established as an all-male manual trade / vocational high school by the Baltimore City Council and the Baltimore City Public Schools, it is now a coeducational academic institution since 1974, that emphasizes sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It is located on a tract of land in North Baltimore on the east bank of the Jones Falls stream. B.P.I. and the adjacent still all-girls population of the Western High School are located on the same huge joint campus at the northwest corner of West Cold Spring Lane and Falls Road.
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History

B.P.I. was founded in 1883, after Baltimorean Joshua Plaskitt petitioned the Baltimore municipal and school authorities to establish a school for instruction in engineering. The original school was named the Baltimore Manual Training School, and its first class was made up of about sixty students, all of them male. The official name of the new high school was changed a decade later in 1893 to "The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute" by the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners of the Baltimore City Public Schools. The first principals at the B.M.T.S. were Dr. Richard Grady, followed by two American naval officers, Lieutenant John D. Ford, and Lieutenant William King. Lt. King had such long lasting beginning influence on the new technical high school's academic rigor and traditions giving the school a naval flavor in its early decades. Because of this seminal influence, the connecting structure at the new 1967 campus at Cold Spring and Falls between the two new building wings of the academic and engineering halls which contains the hallowed Memorial Corridor filled with Poly historical and biographical wall plaques, displays and glass exhibit floor cabinets along with at the west end of the stained glass window, statue head bust and B.P.I. bronze seal imbedded in the floor is situated here. This wing was renamed after him as "King Memorial Hall" as one of the three new main 1967 campus structures along with the others in the 1980s after the Institute's centennial celebration.
The first building location designated in 1883 for the new manual training / technical school was located in part of a former grammar (elementary) school building on the earlier former site of the old central City Spring and small surrounding pocket park from colonial era days of old Baltimore Town on now disappeared Courtland Street just north of East Saratoga Street. This area was three blocks northwest of the Baltimore City Courthouse and the adjacent historic Battle Monument square.
It was unfortunately later contained in Baltimore's first "urban renewal" plan with the tearing down of five square blocks in this then northern reaches of Downtown Baltimore of what today would be architecturally significant and historic residential townhouses along old Courtland Street and the original Saint Paul Street, between Calvert Street to the east and Charles Street up the hill to the west. This major demolition project was to permit the construction of new terraced "Preston Gardens" and adjacent Saint Paul Place which ran from East Centre Street in the north to East Lexington Street in the south occurred at the end of the mayoral administration of James H. Preston in 1919–1920. It was occupied by numerous African American black professionals and commercial offices in this downtown district and the razing and creation of the terraced gardens was to protect the nearby wealthy cultural Mount Vernon-Belvedere neighborhood on the heights to the west and north around the historic Washington Monument from any unwanted racial encroachment.
The old Courtland Street was wiped out and replaced by the terraced gardens and a landscaped St. Paul Place in the five blocks. The former B.M.T.S. / B.P.I. building was on the east side after the high school moved further north to East North Avenue and North Calvert Street in 1912–1913. Two decades later by 1935 it became home to the newly established Baltimore City Department of Public Welfare during the famous economic collapse of the Great Depression era and continued there for three decades. The Courtland / St. Paul Street / Place structures complex was later purchased / annexed by neighboring Mercy Hospital,, for its westward expansion located originally one block to the east on North Calvert and East Saratoga Streets, on the northwest corner since the 1840s and its reorganization in the early 1870s. These old 19th century Poly / Public Welfare buildings were then later torn down in the early 1960s for construction of their first modern hospital tower in 1964. It recently also supplemented by additional major construction of the adjacent high-rise Bunting Tower hospital facilities in the 2010s.
In 1983, at the technology high school's centennial observation and celebration, a large historical bronze plaque was placed and dedicated with ceremonies of City officials, B.C.P.S. staff and B.P.I. administration / faculty / students and alumni in the St. Paul Place West lobby of the Mercy Hospital complex commemorating that earlier first home of the Manual Training School for 30 years, later to become "Poly".
It just so happened in an amazing coincidence, that these original Poly buildings were and situated across the same street of Courtland 44 years later, after their long-time arch-rival public high school, The Baltimore City College, was earlier established facing the same street in a rented small two-story rowhouse with pitched roof and dormer attic window in October 1839 where it remained for only a few short years to 1843, also on the same now vanished narrow alley-like Courtland Street!!. Both schools began on the same street a short distance from each other separated by a near half-century of time.

Relocation

Due to continued growth of the student population of the City's Public Schools system in the early 20th century and especially in the growing demand for higher secondary education at high schools like at the B.P.I.and the rival B.C.C. and the two girls high schools of Eastern and Western, the City's technical school relocated after a long public campaign for larger better facilities ten blocks further north from downtown in 1913 to Calvert Street and North Avenue oversaw the racial integration of the technology high school in September 1952, the first instance in the American Upper South region with the City of Baltimore public schools admitting African-American – then called "Negro"
/ "Colored" students. The Baltimore City Public Schools, had maintained racially segregated schools since first beginning public education for its black minority in Baltimore in 1870. The nationally famous precedent occurred two years before the rest of the nation took up this serious issue of inequality and discrimination addressed finally by the Supreme Court of the United States in May 1954 in the famous case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Previous black students in Baltimore City had attended the Frederick Douglass High School on the westside of town and the later opening Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in East Baltimore. Dr. Dehuff later after his retirement in 1958 and his 37 years career at the Polytechnic Institute, became the president and dean of faculty at the then private institution, the University of Baltimore on Mount Royal Avenue.

Integration/desegregation

Most Baltimore City public schools since 1870
were not integrated until after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of May 1954 in the following September / Fall semester. B.P.I. since the 1920s had an unusually advanced and difficult college-level mathematics, engineering and technology oriented "A" Course, the "Advanced College Preparatory Curriculum" instituted back in the 1920s as part of then Public Schools reform and improvement program. It included calculus, analytical chemistry, electricity, mechanics and surveying; these subjects were not offered at the black high schools in the city before 1952. But a parallel "A" Course centered on the
humanities / social studies / liberal arts was also
longtime since the '20s offered at arch-rival City College with a similar degree of rigorous quality. But its focus was in different fields. Other "A" Courses were similarly available at the two also all-white and all-girls Eastern and Western High Schools, both founded 1844. B.P.I. was a whites-only school but supported by municipal taxes on the general population. No black schools in the city offered such courses, nor did they have classrooms, labs, libraries or teachers comparable to those at B.P.I. or at the similar level of The Baltimore City College.
Because of this, a group of 16 Baltimoreans African American students, with help and support from their parents, along with the Baltimore Urban League, and the NAACP applied for the mathematics / engineering "A" Course at the Poly; the applications were initially denied and so the students sued in local Maryland state circuit court.
The subsequent trial began on June 16, 1952. The NAACP's intentions were to end segregation at the 70-year-old public high school. In the B.P.I. case they argued that BPI's offerings of specialized engineering courses violated the "separate but equal" clause because these courses were not offered in high schools for black students. To avoid integration, an out-of-court proposal was made to the Baltimore School Board to start an equivalent "A" Course at the "colored" of Frederick Douglass High School. This hearing on the "Douglass" plan lasted for hours, with longtime Poly Principal Dehuff and others arguing that separate but equal "A" Courses would satisfy constitutional requirements and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, arguing that the plan was a gamble and additional cost that the city should not take. By a vote of 5–3, the board decided that a separate "A" course would not provide the same educational opportunities for African American students, and that, starting that fall, African American students could attend Poly. The vote vindicated the NAACP national strategy of raising the economic cost of 'separate but equal' schools beyond what taxpayers and their government bureaucracy were willing to pay. Thirteen African American students, Leonard Cephas, Carl Clark, William Clark, Milton Cornish, Clarence Daly, Victor Dates, Alvin Giles, Bucky Hawkins, Linwood Jones, Edward Savage, Everett Sherman, Robert Young, and Silas Young, finally entered the Polytechnic Institute that fall. They were unfortunately faced daily with racial epithets, threats of violence and isolation from many of the more than 2,000 fellow students then at the school on North Avenue. But they endured, kept their cool and composure, knowing what was at stake. The first of those students to graduate from Poly was Dr. Carl O. Clark in June 1955. Dr. Clark went on to become the first African-American to graduate from the University of South Carolina with a degree in physics in 1976.

Modern campus (1960s–present)


In September 1967, after a multi-year planning and construction project, then-fifth principal Claude Burkert oversaw the relocation of his school after 54 years at North Avenue and Calvert Street to its current location at 1400 West Cold Spring Lane, a fifty-three-acre tract of land bordering the
Jones Falls stream to the west and with Falls Road (Maryland Route 25

Academics

Poly is a longtime "magnet school" for over 141 years, with specialized courses drawing students from across Baltimore's regular district boundaries in the Baltimore City Public Schools system. Admission to the Polytechnic Institute is highly competitive. Course concentrations include: the Honors S.T.E.M. Program; the Ingenuity Project offering advanced science, math, and academic research courses; AP Capstone emphasizing Social Sciences and Humanities; Computer Science; and the United States Air Force-sponsored Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. In its 2019 nationwide survey of STEM programs spanning 2015-2019, Newsweek magazine ranked Poly No. 36 among U.S. high schools.

Athletics

In addition to the school's football program, Poly's sports include basketball, soccer, cross-country, track and field, lacrosse, baseball, hockey, swimming, tennis, volleyball, and wrestling. The boys' basketball team won three state championship titles in a row between 2016 and 2019. The Poly "Engineers" baseball team has won nine Baltimore City championships since 2005 under head coach Corey Goodwin.

Football

Since the early 1900s the "Engineers" of the Polytechnic Institute, along with longtime arch-rival The Baltimore City College's, "Collegians" / "Black Knights" had dominated the old public – private schools athletic league of the Maryland Scholastic Association which existed 1919 to 1993 in the local prep sports scene. However, since joining the newer state-wide Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association in 1993, Poly made it to the final playoff football game once in 1993, the semi-finals once in 1997 and the quarterfinals in 1994 and 1998.

Poly and City

The Poly-City football rivalry is the oldest American football rivalry in Maryland and one of the oldest public school rivalries in the United States.—predated by the longtime also famous athletic and academic rivalry between the two New England secondary schools dated back to 1887 between the Boston Latin School and the English High School of Boston. The second oldest public high school in the country is considered to be the Central High School of Philadelphia, founded 1836, all of which with traditions, curriculum admissions standards and famous faculty and alumni similar to its predecessors in Boston and subsequent followers further south in Baltimore.
The rivalry here in "The Monumental City" began in the Autumn of 1889, when a team from The Baltimore City College then situated at North Howard and West Centre Streets since 1875 with its first structure of two. After seven years of temporary exile in a former elementary school building they returned again to the same site at Howard and Centre to a new larger home followed in 1899, remaining there although increasingly overcrowded until the move to the "Castle" in 1928. The City College is reputed to be the third oldest public high school / secondary school in the nation, established 1839. and had unofficial student teams playing rugby and various earlier versions of American football starting back in the 1870s. Meanwhile, the B.M.T.S. / B.P.I. was in its also cramped quarters on Courtland Street and both public secondary schools in those days were with no campus or athletic fields, so forced to use nearby municipal parks like newly purchased Clifton or older Patterson or Druid Hill Parks. The two teams from neighboring all-boys high schools which were seven blocks apart in Downtown Baltimore, met in the new municipal Clifton Park against a team of "scrubs" from the new Baltimore Manual Training School, then located on the northeast corner of the former Courtland / now St. Paul Street and East Saratoga Street in Downtown Baltimore. It has continued annually every Fall season in numerous locations, parks and fields, most notably at the new Homewood Field of the "Blue Jays" of The Johns Hopkins University at their new spacious campus off North Charles Street and University Parkway, where they moved in 1914. City leads the series with the record standing at 66–62–6.
Little is known of the first American football game between the Manual Training School ancestor of the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and The Baltimore City College in the Fall of 1889, except that a junior varsity team from Poly met City's "scrubs", in the newly purchased Clifton Park in the northeast section of the old Baltimore City and that City emerged the victor for the next decade and a half, as the B.C.C. was then playing an ambitious schedule then against several regional colleges / universities opponents and played in a regional football league composed of upper levels of higher education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That began the oldest football rivalry in Maryland schools, the region and the nation, City's "Collegians" continued to win regularly against upstart Poly through 1901, however in 1902, for the only time in history of the series no game was played; though, in 1931, an extra game was played to compensate. Between 1903 and 1906, City won the series, but the tide soon turned in 1907, when the first tie in the 18th match of the series occurred. The next year in the 19th clash in 1908, Poly scored its first victory in the almost two decades long athletic rivalry now gaining widespread popularity and following among Baltimore sports fans and publicity in the sports pages of the several daily papers in town.
Poly dominated the series in the subsequent 1910s. The only year of that decade that City won was 1912, and between 1914 and 1917, Poly shut out City. Poly's streak continued through 1921, completing a nine-year winning streak, which City finally broke in 1922 with a 27–0 victory. During this time for the next three decades, many P.-C. games would be played at the newly built football bowl of Municipal Stadium and Navy, Maryland, Notre Dame and others. In 1946 with the peace after World War II, it was the site also of the first professional football team in town, the first incarnation of the Baltimore Colts in the new All America Football Conference and then followed into the later merger with the National Football League in 1950. Old Municipal Stadium endured up to 1949 housing both minor league Baltimore Orioles of the International League when their old home of Oriole Park on Greenmount Avenue and 29th Street in nearby Waverly neighborhood burned down in a spectacular blaze after the Fourth of July in 1944 and the two pro football Colts franchises when a multi-year project began in 1949 reconstructing, expanding and adding an upper deck to become the new Memorial Stadium reopening in the Spring of 1954 to greet the new Major League Baseball team in the American League of the transplanted new Baltimore Orioles, moving from St. Louis.
At the same time Poly-City football continued there on 33rd Street also moved into the new rebuilt athletic bowl continuing holding annual gridiron renewals of sports combat here attracting crowds of 30 to 40,000 fans in the pre-national sports franchises era, continuing on 33rd until the 1990s. Scheduled on Thanksgiving Day afternoons and with traditional students, cheerleaders, floats and teams parades west from City's "Castle" and north from old Poly on North Avenue were popular. Plus tailgating in the surrounding old stadium parking lots and checking out the earlier activities of the morning football game between Roman Catholic high schools Calvert Hall and Loyola.
In 1926, was one of the most famous Poly-City games ever played. Prior to the game, the eligibility of City's halfback, Mickey Noonen, was challenged. A committee was formed to investigate Noonen's eligibility, but Noonen's father—frustrated with the investigation—struck one of the members of the committee. The result was that Noonen was not only barred from the "Collegians" team, but also expelled from the Baltimore City Public Schools system. The 1930s ushered in a period of resurgence for the City "Castlemen" team, now ensconced in their new spacious hilltop campus of "Collegian Hill" at 33rd and The Alameda and the landmark "Castle on the Hill" since 1928. Poly, which had dominated in the previous two decades, only picked up two wins in the entire decade.
In 1934, B.P.I. student Harry Lawrence, who had famously kicked the winning field goal against City in the 1926 fall classic, later became the head coach at his former arch-rival City College leading to some of its most winningest seasons and success stories in the following decade and subsequently joining the B.C.C. faculty as a longtime guidance counselor from the '30s into the 1970s, becoming a "Castle" legend and only Poly alumnus inducted into the List of [Baltimore City College alumni|B.C.C. Hall of Fame].
It was during these times that the longtime local afternoon daily newspaper The Evening Sun from the A.S. Abell & Company commissioned a bronze statue of a crouched football player on a mahogany wood base known as "The Evening Sun Trophy" and several were made over the next half century with each school keeping it for showing off in the exhibit glass cases in the following year in the Poly "Memorial Corridor" or City's central "Trophy Hall", and being retired after a number of victories. Several were made over the decades and each school still has some on display as cherished historical icons of past glories.
Colorful printed program booklets were published annually by a joint Poly-City student / faculty committee packed with supporter advertising front and back with team group photos and rosters, player / coach biographies and photos plus the administration, page of City and Poly songs and cheers, photos of each school building and school seals, lists of the previous years of scores of victories and defeats. These now prized collector's items began in the early 1920s and continued up to the mid-1970s. Special thick editions of the two student newspapers "The Poly Press" and "The Collegian". They were also packed with advertising from local commercial businesses and ads from various homeroom / classes, organizations, clubs and individuals. Plus "The Collegian" was printed on orange newsprint paper to match the black ink for their school colors of "The Black & Orange". They frequently continued the fun tradition of making up a replica humorous satire of the opponent's student paper so memorable versions appeared of "The Folly Mess" reporting on the dire terrible situation at the "Baltimore Follytechnique Institution" and equally hilarious "The Collitchin" of the awful horrible climate at the "Dump on the Hump" and making fun of the other's administration, faculty, coaches, collapsing decrepit buildings, worthless diplomas and failed education good only for future criminal successes!!!
Poly won five straight games against City to open the 1950s, and 9 of the decade's 10 games, under its legendary coach Bob Lumsden, for whom the school's current football stadium is now named. Lumsden finished with an 11–7 record against City when he retired as "Engineers" head coach in 1966. He also coached 9–0 Poly to the unofficial National High School Championship Game at Miami, Florida's huge landmark Orange Bowl stadium in 1962, against the Miami High School "Stingarees", but Poly lost by a score of 14–6.
With both secondary schools packed to almost 4,000 male students each because of the post-Second World War "baby boom" plus slowness in new construction and were heavily overcrowded, sometimes operating on split -shifts, but the scholastic sports programs continued to prosper, strive and inspire generations of Poly and City boys.
The "Blue and Orange" team's fortunes changed later in the 1960s, when City was coached during the decade by their legendary coach George Young. Young, guided his "Black Knights" teams to six wins over Poly, and an equal number of the old Maryland Scholastic Association "A Conference" championships. One of Young's most memorable victories occurred on Thanksgiving Day, 1965, at the old Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street, when undefeated City's "Black Knights" beat the also previously undefeated Poly "Engineers" by the largest margin score ever, 52–6.
Baltimore City's public high schools withdrew in 1993 from the old Maryland Scholastic Association, a unique public / private / independent and parochial schools athletic league in central Maryland, organized in 1919, and joined the newer larger statewide Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association, organized in 1946. This was mandated by a new Superintendent of Schools who had earlier spent his career in the neighboring suburban Baltimore County public schools system who were original charter members of the competing MPSSAA which had grown in the postwar period and he wanted the City schools to participate in the statewide playoffs tournaments in the various sports. This change meant that the scholastic football season would end earlier to allow for the beginning of state-wide playoffs in the M.P.S.S.A.A., forcing Poly and City to move their annual century-old game in 1994 from its longtime traditional holiday date for decades of Thanksgiving Day holiday afternoon to the less memorable first Saturday in November, and a subsequent loss of high attendance, publicity and media coverage with occasional radio / television broadcasts. They also missed playing with the longtime holiday double-header tradition with the morning "Catholic Game" at the 33rd Street stadium between Roman Catholic high schools' similar arch-rivalry between Calvert Hall College versus Loyola High School at Blakefield, played since 1920.
Then Poly and City met for the 119th time in November 2007, a contest unfortunately marred by the outbreak of a large brawl outside the new M&T Bank Stadium, southwest of downtown where the annual Fall Football Classic for the oldest public and Catholic high schools had been relocated in the redeveloped Camden Yards Sports Complex. The time before and during the game was peaceful and fun, but trouble and strife occurred after the final whistle. This was the first documented trouble at the Fall Classic since the early 1970s. With games first being played at old Municipal / Baltimore Stadium, the first built 1923 on 33rd Street's Venable Park. Violence had occasionally occurred near a century before and marred the old City-Poly traditions during the 1920s, but happened elsewhere from the stadium on downtown streets with competing colliding school fans parades. Both governor's and mayor's sons from opposing schools were arrested amid the street riots melees. Four decades later, some more serious strife recurred during the socially tumultuous late 1960s era and early '70s outside old Memorial Stadium on the northside of 33rd Street with huge crowds of over 30,000 fans filling up two-thirds of the bowl. But it had been generally peaceful ever since those times of national unrest with racial summer urban riots and anti-Vietnam War and the military draft protests. Things quieted down specially with the traditions begun first in the 1940s and '50s of a "City – Poly Peace Pact" signing by the two secondary schools student leaders with media coverage at the Mayor's ceremonial office at the historic Baltimore City Hall, and its later renewal in the late '60s.
Now Poly and City still met for the 120th time on November 8, 2008, with guarded anticipation and some added security plus an intensive discussion program at both schools the several weeks before. The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and The Baltimore City College then met subsequently peacefully again for the 121st time on November 7, 2009, with the score of 26–20. The renewed tradition again continued with Poly"s "Engineers" and City's "Collegians" / "Black Knights" meeting for the 122nd time on November 6, 2010. As of the 2018 game, City had won the prior and trophy in 7 contests.
Because of the extreme large size of the downtown Camden Yards football stadium with two-thirds of the place with empty purple and black Ravens seats empty, the site was changed to the more cozy smaller Hughes Stadium at the Morgan State University in the northeast city but still able to accommodate a larger than usual football crowd, while the Calvert Hall-Loyola game still continued on Thanksgiving Day morning moved to the Johnny Unitas Stadium at Towson University north of town and between those two Catholic schools home campuses in Towson.

Basketball

In February 2020, ESPN ranked the boys basketball team in the top 25 in the country.

Principals / directors of the B.M.T.S. / B.P.I.

  • 1st – Dr. Richard Grady
  • 2nd – Lt. John D. Ford, U.S.N.
  • 3rd – Lt. William King, U.S.N.
  • 4th – Dr. Wilmer Dehuff
  • 5th – Claude Burkert
  • 6th – William J. Gerardi
  • 7th – Zeney P. Jacobs
  • 8th – Gary Thrift
  • 9th – John Dohler
  • 10th – Barbara Stricklin ^
  • 11th – Dr. Albert Strickland
  • 12th – Ian Cohen
  • 13th – Sharon Kanter ^
  • 14th – Dr. Barney Wilson
  • 15th – Matthew Woolston ^
  • 16th – Jacqueline Williams
  • 17th – Mark Sawyer
^ Denotes interim director while a search for a permanent director was occurring or ongoing at the time

Notable alumni

Arts, literature, and entertainment

Business

Education

Government

Judicial branch

Legislative branch

Military

Sciences

Sports

School songs and hymns

  • Poly Fight Song
  • The Polytechnic Hymn, written by James Sagerholm, Class of 1946 :