E. J. Gallagher Realty Company photograph and ephemera collection

In the first decades of the twentieth century Baltimore saw a boom in rowhouse building that came to be dominated by just a handful of builders. One of these developers was Edward Joseph Gallagher, the son of Irish immigrants, whose most successful and well-known creation, Ednor Gardens, became a model for developments throughout Baltimore.

While still a youth Gallagher apprenticed himself as a carpenter and in the decades that followed became one of Baltimore’s premier builders. He was also an amateur painter and earned a law degree upon graduating from Baltimore College Law School at the end of the 1890s. Gallagher’s first building venture on his own was in the Canton section of Baltimore in July 1888, when he obtained two lots in exchange for conveying the ground rents to the prior owner of the land, the Canton Company. The “ground rent” law in Baltimore and throughout Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania was an English Freehold carry over. As practiced in Baltimore, a buyer of a new home could not purchase the land on which their home was built, but had to pay the owner of the land a certain annual dollar rent for five years. At the end of that period, an offer would be made to the home owner to buy the land at a predetermined price. If not purchased at that time, the home owner would pay the annual rent as long as they lived in the house…Continue reading on underbelly, the MdHS Library Blog.