History of Baltimore City College - Relocation

Relocation

It was not until 1873, when a fire spread from the Holliday Street Theatre to the "Assembly Rooms," that the city council finally decided to expend the resources to erect a new building for the school. The city council acquired a lot on Howard Street opposite Centre Street and allocated $150,000 for the construction of the new building. During the construction, City College was housed in a building of the Baltimore Female College, where it remained until its new English Gothic revival-style building was dedicated on February 1, 1875. While at the Baltimore Female College, the five-year course was reintroduced and the four-year track was eliminated. That allowed students to pursue advanced courses, which included calculus, political economy, logic and higher-level language courses, which were emphasized in the curriculum. Students were expected to learn Latin, French, and German; and Greek was offered as an optional course.

In 1876, ceremonies were held in the adjacent Academy of Music for the new Johns Hopkins University, which had established several buildings alongside City College under its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. Four graduates of City College entered Hopkins as a part of the first undergraduate class. That same year BCC's academic program underwent further changes with the introduction of a one-year track, which provided an opportunity for students who could not complete the entire course of study because they needed to enter the labor market. Courses in the one-year track focused on providing students with pragmatic skills, such as "book-keeping", "commercial arithmetic", and "business correspondence".

City College's first extracurricular activity, the Bancroft Literary Association, was established the same year to provide a forum for student debate. A second debating society, the Carrollton Society, was established in 1878. One of the first athletic teams appeared the following year, when a group of students organized a lacrosse team—the first at a public high school. The establishment of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (Poly) in 1883 was an important development for City College's athletics program. With the founding of Poly, City College acquired an arch rival in academics and sports—particularly football. The schools have met annually in a football clash since 1889. The formal organization of an athletic program at BCC did not begin until 1895. During the early years of the athletic program, City College played chiefly against college teams because few other secondary schools existed in Maryland. City College's 1895 football schedule included St. John's College, Swarthmore College, the United States Naval Academy, University of Maryland, and Washington College.