The address is 216 Emory Street, a three-story brick rowhouse in Ridgley's Delight, squeezed into a South Baltimore block so narrow you could reach out and nearly touch the house across the street. There is nothing about the building's exterior that announces itself. No grand marquee, no sweeping plaza. Just a door, a placard, and the small miracle that the building still exists at all.
Walk inside, and you are two blocks and 131 years from where Babe Ruth became the most famous athlete America has ever produced.
George Herman Ruth Jr. was born in this house on February 6, 1895. His father, George Sr., ran a saloon on Conway Street — the same general footprint where Camden Yards now stands — and the family lived above the city's noise and commerce in the Pigtown neighborhood nearby. Young George was, by most accounts, ungovernable. He ran the streets, raided the bar's till, chewed tobacco by age seven, and treated his father's saloon as a playground. He was not so much a troubled kid as one that the city itself seemed too small to contain.
In June 1902, when Ruth was seven years old, his father committed him to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a reform institution run by the Xaverian Brothers on Wilkens Avenue. The paperwork described him as "incorrigible." St. Mary's would become Ruth's home, his school, and the place that changed everything.
It was at St. Mary's that Brother Matthias Boutlier took note of the boy. A six-foot-six French Canadian Xaverian known for his quiet authority, Matthias saw something in Ruth's instincts, his coordination, his obvious hunger for something to be good at. He taught him to pitch. Then catch. Then play every position on the diamond. By the time Ruth was a teenager, he was the best baseball player on the grounds of St. Mary's, and then in the city, and then in the state — by a considerable distance.
Jack Dunn, the owner and manager of the minor-league Baltimore Orioles, signed Ruth in 1914 when he was 19. Dunn became Ruth's legal guardian, a formality required because Ruth was still technically a ward of the school. The young pitcher's teammates, watching Dunn shepherd his latest acquisition around the clubhouse, began calling him "one of Dunnie's babes." The name stuck, abbreviated, and followed him everywhere he went afterward.
Ruth pitched brilliantly for the Orioles that spring. Then Dunn, facing financial pressure from the newly formed Federal League drawing fans away from his park, sold Ruth's contract to the Boston Red Sox that July. Ruth left Baltimore at 19 and never lived here again. He went on to become Babe Ruth.
The rest is the kind of history that people who don't follow baseball still somehow know: 714 home runs, seven World Series titles, the called shot, the hot dogs, the mythology. But it all started here, on a block in South Baltimore, in a rowhouse that barely held the family sleeping in it.
That rowhouse nearly didn't survive. By the early 1970s, the block was slated for demolition. A coalition of preservationists, historians, and baseball devotees organized to save it, and in 1974 the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum opened its doors. Emory Street was recently renamed Babe Ruth Way in honor of the museum's 50th anniversary.
Today the museum does considerably more than preserve Ruth's story. It serves as the Orioles' official museum, stewards the Colts' archives, and functions as a repository for Maryland sports history at large. In its climate-controlled basement, director emeritus Michael Gibbons can pull a file drawer and produce Johnny Unitas' first professional contract — $7,000, signed in 1956. He can show you one of Ruth's 714 home-run balls, the Colts' Super Bowl V trophy, the Orioles' 1983 World Series trophy, and a hymnal in which young George Ruth scrawled what is believed to be his first-ever autograph: George H. Ruth, world's worst singer — world's best pitcher.
Executive director Shawn Herne has spent years growing what the institution holds while searching for space to show more of it. A skinny rowhouse, however lovingly maintained, has limits. With $1.2 billion in state redevelopment funding now allocated to the Camden Yards corridor, the museum's leadership is hoping the area's transformation creates room for its collection to breathe — and for more of Baltimore's sports glory to come into the light.
The museum draws roughly 25,000 visitors a year. It is open daily, two blocks from Camden Yards, on a street that now carries the name of the boy who once ran barefoot through this neighborhood without much of a future. Admission is $15 for adults, $7 for children, and it takes perhaps an hour to walk through it properly.
Worth every minute. Baltimore made Babe Ruth. This is where you can see what that looked like at the beginning, before the legend had time to arrive.
Visit: Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum, 216 Emory Street (Babe Ruth Way), Baltimore, MD 21230 · baberuthmuseum.org · Open daily · Adults $15, Children $7