Photojournalist Martha Cooper has always been fearless, indefatigable, and intuitive. Now in her 80s, she is best known for her documentation of New York City’s graffiti culture of the 1970s and 1980s and, specifically, the 1984 book she co-authored, Subway Art, which became a foundational text for street art globally.

Twenty years ago, casting about for a project, she came home to Baltimore. She knew the city well. Growing up, she had been influenced by her father, who ran Cooper’s Camera Mart on Harford Road with his brother, and her mother, a Western High School English and journalism teacher. Initially, she considered the rowhouse communities of East Baltimore for her project, partly because she was taken with screen painting. (With degrees in art and anthropology, documenting subgroups has been a lifelong interest.)

Her cousin Sally, however, suggested the neighborhood where their great-grandmother and great-grandfather, rabbi Benjamin Szold, settled after emigrating from Austria-Hungary in the 1850s. In her ancestors’ once-upon-a-time stomping grounds in Southwest Baltimore—aka Sowebo—she found inspiration in children jumping up and down on a discarded mattress and kids kicking around a tin can on the streets of the struggling community.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, right, that’s the kind of place I’m looking for,’” recalls Cooper before a recent showing of some of that work from 2006-2016 at Zella’s Pizzeria on Hollins Street. “I didn’t spend much time looking elsewhere and then I went to this real estate agent who showed me [former City Paper photographer] John Ellsberry’s tiny little rowhouse on South Carrollton Avenue, which he had renovated nicely. I’m like, ‘Great. I’m going to buy this house and I’m going to do this project.’”

She introduced herself and her intentions at the annual Sowebo Arts & Musical Festival by offering free portraits in front of a public mural painted by artist Adam Stab (see above). And soon she began carrying her camera everywhere.

The working-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood surrounding historic Hollins Market has been targeted by real estate speculators for decades. But gentrification has yet to take a firm hold. Cooper notes she never had an incident in her years prowling for pictures, but she did lose money when she resold her home.

Baltimore author and Hollins Market resident Baynard Woods curated the new exhibition at Zella’s, titled “Sowebo Streets,” which also includes neighborhood portraits from an array of local photographers like Shae McCoy, Wendel Patrick, Christian Thomas, Josh Sisk, Myles Michelin, Joshua Kittle, Cheryl Kinion, Jack Radcliffe, Mark Stephen Bugnaski, Patrick Harnett, Bridget Cimino, Dan Van Allen, and Woods.

“I live down the street and get my packages delivered here, everyone does,” Woods says. The exhibition closes April 30. (Hopes to bring the show to this year’s Sowebo Art and Music Festival in late May did not pan out.) “Zella’s owners are great. They’re immigrants. I wanted to do it for the neighborhood.”

It’s a show in a pizzeria and not Paris, which someone else of her stature might dismiss, but not Cooper, adds Woods. “Martha? Right away, she said, ‘Yes.’”

Cooper is also the subject of the 2019 award-winning documentary Martha: A Picture Story, which is available to stream and includes her Sowebo experience and work.

“It was hard to describe immediately, but I what I was getting was pictures of everyday life in the streets,” Cooper says. “Simple things. Card playing. There was graffiti, a skate park, and an arabbers’ stable in the neighborhood, which was always good to photograph. Somebody kept pigeons and pigeon flying has been another interest.

“I also have a bunch of sidewalk pool scenes, one with a big inflatable sliding board in a tight alley,” she adds with a contagious smile. “I mean, I could do a whole zine of sidewalk pools.”

After a 2012 artist residency in South Africa, Cooper paired some Sowebo images with uncannily similar photos taken in the Soweto township, one of the centers of the anti-apartheid movement. The resulting photo essay, “Soweto/Sowebo,” features almost interchangeable images of cookouts, storefronts, children playing, rolling tires down the street, beat-up cars—even vegetables and fruits being sold from horse-drawn carts.

“There is a picture that I never thought was particularly anything, Baltimore kids riding in the back of a pickup truck, and it was in this small show I had in Johannesburg,” Cooper recalls. “And that was the picture people commented on because they were so surprised that white people would ride in the back of a pickup truck.

“To me, it was just two [similar] pictures. But a friend overheard those comments from the groups of Black South Africans standing around and talking about the photos. It was just the similarities of everyday life. But maybe when you put those two photos together, you find something universal. People overcoming their circumstances.”

This article first appeared in our May 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

Italianate and Federal-style rowhomes constructed decades before and after the Civil War largely define this historic Southwest Baltimore neighborhood’s residential fabric. Large, gracefully restored three-story dwellings line Union Square Park and surrounding streets, while blocks of smaller rowhomes—erstwhile workforce housing for the railroad and factories—emanate in all directions. Neighbors boast of their community’s sense of safety, racial and cultural diversity, and easy access to downtown and highways.

Shop: Hollins Market’s new grocery stall fills a gap for fresh produce and household staples within walking distance, or you can go fill up a shopping cart at Jumbo Fresh Supermarket at Mount Clare Junction. A one-of-one stop for fashionable streetwear is City of Gods in Hollins Market, a fixture since 2009.

Dine: Hollins Market, just a few blocks east, is Southwest Baltimore’s foodie hub with staples including Neopol Smokery, French- inspired Rooted Rotisserie, Zella’s Pizzeria, and the Back Yard across from the B&O Railroad Museum. The market building itself is getting a makeover, with new food stalls forthcoming. Other choices include Jamaican (HeyDaddy’s), seafood (Sea Pride Crab House), and assorted pizza and chicken carryouts dotting West Baltimore and Pratt streets.

Play: The 2.5-acre Union Square Park features its signature Greek Revival Pavilion and fountain at center, built atop a natural spring in the 1840s and ’50s. The park is a regular gathering space for residents (dogs included) and serves as the community’s nucleus. Other play spaces nearby include Vincent Street Park (basketball court, playground) and 117-acre Carroll Park with its nine-hole golf course, skatepark, ballfields, and more.

Arts & Culture: Union Square’s annual holiday cookie tour draws visitors into the homes of proud residents every December (not to mention a new Christmas market, added to the mix just last year). The park often hosts concerts, including weekly jazz and the monthly Sunday Sounds in the Park series from April through October. Historical attractions include, among others, celebrated journalist H.L. Mencken’s house and museum on Hollins Street and the B&O Railroad Museum.

Neighbor Spotlight 

Debra Rahl, 70, and her husband, Francis, have lived in their Union Square rowhome for 45 years. Rahl was a founding member of Union Square’s famous cookie tours.

“My husband and I were looking to buy a house in the city back in 1979. We used to just drive around, and one night we happened to drive by Union Square and we thought, ‘Well, this is pretty, what park is this?’ Our real estate agent suggested we come look at this house on Stricker Street across from the park. We came over and fell in love with it.

“It’s a really diverse community age-wise, and everyone is included in events around the neighborhood. If our neighbors see my husband and me doing something stupid, like trying to carry something heavy into the house, they’re right there to help us.

“Same way with shoveling the snow. When we first moved in, we shoveled the snow for our elderly neighbors. Now when I look out the window, I see someone shoveling snow and I just tell my husband, ‘Step back, we’re the old people now.’ Everyone looks out for each other.”

Neighborhood Stats
Population: 1,011 Occupancy Rate: 75 percent Owner/Renter Split: 37 percent/63 percent Median Home Price: $244,950 Estimated Monthly Mortgage: $2,117 Estimated Rent: $1,081 Walk Score: 86 Bike Score: 57 Transit Score: 77

—Sources: Baltimore City Department of Planning; Live Baltimore 

There is an instant shock when you first step foot in Daniel Van Allen’s home, as your eyes decide where to land first.

There are just so many options. And then Van Allen, 70, starts talking and doesn’t stop for three and a half hours, until you find yourself back on the street, your tastebuds still singing from the pawpaws and homemade absinthe you’ve just consumed in his basement kitchen. It’s a wild, slightly disorienting, but amazing ride.

“I’m a Renaissance man,” says Van Allen, the preservationist, activist, outsider artist, and forager. He’s also a founder of the Arabber Preservation Society and a boater on his hand-carved canoes.

His two connecting rowhomes in Sowebo, built in 1850, contain 19 rooms, each with a different theme—Egyptian room, Mayan room, coconut bathroom, voodoo room, walnut room, Hindu room. It’s Architectural Digest meets the American Visionary Art Museum, and Van Allen is curator, docent, archivist, and tour guide. (He does in fact give regular tours of his home to MICA students.)

There is no interviewing Van Allen. There is listening and absorbing and delighting. He knows so much about so much: Chinese gods, antlers, paint-by-numbers, gourds, the Baroque style, straw man art, Fèt Gede (Haiti’s Day of the Dead), furniture restoration, community gardens, the flute-playing god Kokopelli, the underground arts scene, and yoga.

So many of his stories start with brilliant non sequiturs: “I was on stilts” or “I used to keep turtles in here in the winter” or “this was the gourd-atorium because I had all my gourds up here” or “we had house rabbits—five or six of them” or “we used to do guerilla tree planting.”

Van Allen was born in Alexandria, Virginia, but spent most of his childhood in Seabrook, Maryland. “I grew up in a mid-century modern house. [My parents] were of the generation that wanted everything sleek and modern,” he says. “We were the generation that made fun of it.”

“This would be shocking, of course,” he says, looking around his home. “All the clutter. The decorations.”

But later, when asked about using the word clutter, he pushes back. “We keep it from being cluttered. You can see a difference between a museum—our house is more like a museum—and an actual hoarder’s house,” he says.

His connection to his collections isn’t a monetary one—most items were purchased for $5 or less at flea markets or gifted to him—but one of inspiration. “I don’t really value material things. I value art.”

That includes the work of his partner, Katherine Fahey, a crankie artist, who lives with Van Allen. “I’d never known anyone quite like Dan,” she says, tucked on a couch in the voodoo room. The two—clearly smitten with each other—married in early October in Leakin Park.

Fahey says she’s still surprised by something in the house almost every day. “I’ll say, ‘Dan, was that there before?’ and he’s like, ‘Yes, that’s been there since you moved in.’ But he knows where everything is. There was a tiny little object missing over there,” she says, pointing to a corner, laughing. “And Dan was like, ‘Where’s that thing?’”

But judging by Fahey’s growing cricket cage collection, she’s leaning into the lifestyle hard. It’s the Van Allen spell. His gentle way of speaking, the Harry Potter glasses, the occasional top hat. His closet full of leftovers from the 14Karat Cabaret and other festivals. (He ran the Sowebo Arts & Music Festival for six years and volunteered for 18.) It’s the art car parked out back—a painted Volkswagen Transporter—and his deep love for eccentric Baltimore.

“I could live anywhere in the world I want…but I love Baltimore,” he says. “I traveled enough. I really enjoy the neighborhood. Now they’re calling me ‘sir.’”

And the elder statesman of Baltimore’s underground art scene seems perfectly content with that title. We’re standing at the stove that’s been in the house since the 1920s—a Magic Chef gas range—and he’s making coffee with his Bialetti stovetop espresso maker. He must relight the pilot light each time he uses the Magic Chef—but it works like a charm and soon the java is percolating.

“This is the watermelon cabinet,” says Van Allen, pointing to the pantry painted to look like a watermelon rind. “Behind you is the snake altar.” I barely have time to ask, “What’s a snake altar?” before we’re heading outside to feed the chickens.

Later I tell him, “You have a house of stories.”

“There’s many stories,” agrees Van Allen, gesturing to his voodoo altar. “When I first started that, I was like, this is a great place to put little souvenirs and things that have meaning. But the whole house has become a voodoo altar.”