Where did Babe Ruth grow up and live?

📍Babe Ruth Birthplace, 216 Emory Street, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

1895 – 1902

“I was born on the 6th of February 1895 at 216 Emory Street in Baltimore, in a two-storey rowhouse in the Pigtown neighbourhood — a working-class area near the B&O Railroad yards where my father ran a saloon. My childhood was chaotic and largely unsupervised: my mother died when I was three, my father worked long hours, and by seven years old I was running the streets of Baltimore in ways that eventually led to my being sent to St Mary's Industrial School for Boys, which was equal parts reform school and orphanage. It was at St Mary's that Brother Matthias Boutlier taught me to play baseball, and where the game became everything. Baltimore made me in ways I spent the rest of my life trying to understand — its roughness, its waterfront energy, its particular American grittiness that I carried into every stadium I ever played in.”

👍 LovedThe waterfront energy of Baltimore — the sense of a city in motion, of goods and people moving constantly. Brother Matthias at St Mary's, who gave me the game that became my life. The toughness that a hard childhood in Pigtown produced.

👎 DislikedThe instability of my early family life. The institutional childhood at St Mary's, which however formative was also a deprivation. The poverty of Pigtown that shaped my understanding of what baseball fame and money would mean.

Map showing where Babe Ruth lived — Babe Ruth Birthplace, 216 Emory Street, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Creamer, R. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (1974), Simon & Schuster; Montville, L. The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (2006), Doubleday; National Baseball Hall of Fame archives