The Mount Washington Summer, Split Across The Jones Falls

Mount Washington was sold in 1854 as a rural escape from downtown, and 170 years later the neighborhood still behaves like one. The wooded parcels, the winding roads climbing Dixon's Hill, the stream cutting through the middle of it all. What changed is the interstate. When I-83 was cut through the Jones Falls valley in the second half of the twentieth century, it separated the neighborhood's two commercial cores from one another, and residents have quietly reorganized their weekends around the crossing ever since.

The result is that a Mount Washington summer is not a single place you walk out into. It is a short circuit between three anchors that sit on three different streets, tied together by Falls Road and the trail that runs beside it. Understanding the loop is the difference between running one errand at a time and getting the whole weekend done before noon on Saturday.

The Two Cores, And The Bridge Between Them

Mount Washington Village sits off the west side of the Jones Falls Expressway near the Kelly Avenue bridge, containing several restaurants and stores as well as the Light Rail's Mount Washington Station. Mount Washington Mill, the refurbished textile mill now housing stores, shops and offices, sits off the east side of the JFX near the same bridge. These two areas were at one time viewed as a single area, but since the construction of Interstate 83 they have been separated, and any trip that used to be a two-minute stroll now involves the Kelly Avenue overpass.

That structural fact is the one worth holding onto. It explains why a Saturday morning here tends to move in a defined order: coffee and the market on one side, groceries and a slower browse on the other, and Falls Road running north to fill in whatever was missing.

West Of The JFX: The Village On A Saturday

The Village concentrates along Kelly Avenue, Sulgrave, Newbury, and Smith. It is walkable in a way the rest of the neighborhood is not, and the businesses skew toward the ones that reward regulars.

• Mount Washington Tavern, at the corner the neighborhood organizes around, has been serving juicy burgers, Maryland crab soups, crab cakes, an extensive list of oysters, beer, wine, cocktails, and other favorites since 1979. It is the shorthand answer when a neighbor asks where to meet.
• Something Else Boutique, around since the 1970s for good reason, with its colorful selection of clothing, jewelry, and home goods, is one of the longest continuously operated storefronts on the block.
• Pasha's Hamman Herbal Soaps carries handmade soaps, skincare, and aromatherapy products like grapefruit oil, biodegradable and preservative-free, many using olive oil as a base.
• The Mount Washington Farmers Market runs a few blocks west at 2101 W. Rogers Ave, with over 20 vendors selling fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, pasture raised meat, fresh bread, flowers, coffee and baked goods, dedicated to food grown within a 200-mile radius of Baltimore.

None of these are destinations for someone driving in from Timonium. They are neighborhood infrastructure, and they close early. The Village works on Saturday morning through early afternoon and then quiets down.

East Of The JFX: The Mill, Which Is Not A Copy Of The Village

The building on the other side of the bridge is not a shopping center that happens to be old. It is one of the oldest industrial structures in the country still in daily use. The Mount Washington Mill, the first cotton mill in Maryland, was built in 1810; by August of that year it had 1,000 spindles, seven looms and a dye house. By 1899 it had become part of the Mt. Vernon-Woodberry Cotton Duck Company, a conglomerate of textile mills comprising fourteen sites in Maryland and beyond that would eventually control as much as 80% of the world's cotton duck production before splitting apart in 1915.

In 1923 the mill was purchased by the Maryland Bolt and Nut Company and repurposed for metal fasteners. Hurricane Agnes wrecked much of the industrial campus in 1972, and after another change of hands it was redeveloped by Himmelrich Associates in the 1990s for office and commercial use. That is the building the Whole Foods sits inside.

Today the Mill side of the crossing anchors the errands the Village side cannot absorb. Redeveloped in the 1990s, the complex is now home to upscale shopping, including Whole Foods, Starbucks, Wine Works, and Jupiter's Ice Cream. The grocery run happens here. Wine for a dinner party happens here. The Village handles the boutique and the breakfast; the Mill handles the pantry. Residents who try to compress both sides into one stop end up doubling back across the bridge, which is why the seasoned answer is always the same order: market first, tavern brunch, then cross for Whole Foods on the way home.

Falls Road, The Third Line

Kelly Avenue does most of the east-west work in the neighborhood. Falls Road does the north-south work, and it is where the neighborhood's slower, quieter anchors have settled.

The Ivy Bookshop relocated to 5928 Falls Road, into what turned out to be a former meditation center. The property has an idyllic greenhouse and some three acres of lush gardens, open to the public, where bibliophiles can enjoy the grounds as well as Concrete Poetry, an interactive outdoor art installation by a local artist. That is an unusual sentence to write about a bookstore. Most independent booksellers work out of a leased retail bay; the Ivy works out of a green stucco house on a small estate, and the grounds function as a de facto neighborhood garden that most people driving past Falls Road do not realize they are allowed to walk into.

The beloved indie bookstore's new Mount Washington digs turned out to be a former meditation center, with an idyllic greenhouse and some three acres of lush gardens, open to the public.

A few blocks off Falls, on Smith Avenue, sits the other anchor. Mount Washington's ceramic arts nonprofit Baltimore Clayworks occupies two buildings across the 5700 block. The original studio building at 5706 Smith Avenue, formerly an Enoch Pratt Library branch, was purchased from the city in 1980 and houses 15 kilns, 13 artist studios, three large classroom studios, a semi-private studio space and two glaze rooms. The second building at 5707 Smith, a former convent built in the late 19th century, holds the organization's gallery, shops, and administrative offices. Both buildings almost left the neighborhood entirely a few years ago, when a grassroots campaign of Clayworks members negotiated a deal to avoid closure, assume control of the nonprofit and install a new board of trustees. The gallery is open to the public and the summer children's classes fill fast.

The reason to put the Ivy and Clayworks in the same section is that they solve the same problem in a Mount Washington weekend. Once the market has closed and the tavern has thinned out, the neighborhood needs a place to be that is not a screen and not a car. Falls Road provides two of them.

Meadowbrook, Which Runs The Rest Of The Day

At 5700 Cottonworth Avenue, on the far side of the Falls, sits the last piece of the loop. Coppermine Meadowbrook is not a subdivision pool. It is a fifty-meter outdoor tank built in 1930 that has been the training base for a serious swim program for decades. The facility has three heated pools inside as well as a 50 meter outdoor multi-use heated pool and a children's pool with fountains and water spouts. The indoor pool is open year round; mother nature forces the outdoor pool's closure from October through mid May.

Which means, in practical terms, the outdoor pool is open right now. That is the summer center of gravity for a lot of Mount Washington families, and the reason the neighborhood empties out mid-afternoon on hot Saturdays. The club sits on Cottonworth in the flood plain of the Jones Falls, a short walk from the Light Rail stop and the Mill side of the bridge, which makes it possible to combine a grocery run, a swim, and dinner at the tavern without moving the car more than twice.

The Loop, Walked As One Day

Put together, the neighborhood's structural quirk starts to feel less like an inconvenience and more like a schedule. Here is how a resident who has lived here more than a year tends to move through a Saturday in July.

The bridge over the JFX gets crossed at least twice. Falls Road gets driven at least once. The whole circuit stays inside a mile and a half of pavement, which is why the neighborhood feels smaller than the map suggests, and why residents who move away often describe missing the routine before they miss the house.

The other thing worth saying about that routine: it is still forming. The Ivy only opened its Falls Road location in 2020, into a building it now owns rather than rents. Clayworks is operating under a board that did not exist five years ago. Meadowbrook now runs under Coppermine's management. The Mill has cycled tenants steadily since the Whole Foods anchor arrived. What looks like a settled village is actually a set of anchors that have each been renegotiated inside the last decade, which is a useful thing to remember the next time a storefront turns over on Kelly Avenue. The pattern here is that the neighborhood keeps replacing its pieces without losing its shape.

Historic homes in a neighborhood like this reward owners who understand what actually holds the place together. If you are thinking about selling a Mount Washington home this year and want a valuation grounded in how the neighborhood really lives, Jessica Dailey offers a Home Valuation and Concierge Consultation for owners considering their next move.