Landscape Information
This five-acre riverfront landscape, a park since 2006, is located on the site of Chase’s Wharf. The wharf is named for Thorndick Chase who bought the property in the Fells Point neighborhood in 1798. The Chase family became successful merchants in the coffee, flour, and tobacco trades. As business increased, numerous brick and wood-frame structures were built on the site, including warehouses, office buildings, and residences. In 1873 the property was sold to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, after which many of its structures were used as coffee warehouses. In 1993 the wharf’s last extant warehouse, an 1840s-era building called the Sugar House, caught fire, destroying the roof and top floor. The city and the Living Classroom Foundation acquired the property in the late 1990s. Michael Vergason Landscape Architects transformed the wharf into a maritime park and the warehouse was restored and converted into a museum honoring the city’s African American maritime history.
Located at the southwestern tip of Fells Point, the park is mostly paved in red brick. White concrete insertions in the pavement trace the outlines of past homes, warehouses, and other industrial buildings. Within the tracings is a modest stand of trees, a group of low, concrete blocks for seating, and a bronze bust of Frederick Douglass by Marc Andre Robinson resting directly on the pavement. Immediately west of the park is a working historic marine railway. To the east are two three-story brick structures—one completed in 2006 that functions as a “living classroom,” the other a restored nineteenth-century warehouse that has been converted into a museum. To the south, the park’s brick paving gives way to a wooden dock that wraps around to the east and extends out into a pier.
