BPI was founded in 1883, after Joshua Plaskitt petitioned the Baltimore City authorities to establish a school for instruction in engineering. The original school was named the Baltimore Manual Training School, and its first class was made up of about sixty students, all of whom were male. The official name of the school was changed in the 1893 to "The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute" by the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners. The first principals were Dr. Richard Grady, Lt. John D. Ford (U.S.N.), and Lieutenant William King (U.S.N.), after whom one of the three main campus buildings – King Memorial Hall was named in the 1980s. The first building was located on the former site of the old central City Spring on Courtland Street just north of East Saratoga Street of which the area was later contained in Baltimore's first "urban renewal" plan with the tearing down of five square blocks of houses along Courtland and Saint Paul Streets to the west and the construction of Preston Gardens and Saint Paul Place from East Lexington Street to East Centre Street in the north in 1923. The former BMTS / BPI building (and earlier elementary school dating back to the 1840s) became home to the Baltimore City Department of Welfare and was later annexed by neighboring Mercy Hospital (formerly named Baltimore City Hospital) on North Calvert and Saratoga Streets to the east and later torn down for construction of their first hospital tower in 1964. In 1983, at the school's centennial observation, a historical plaque was placed in the lobby of the hospital commemorating that earlier first home of the Manual Training School for 30 years, later to become "Poly". It just so happened in an amazing coincidence, that this building was across the street and 44 years later, almost a half-century after their long-time rival public high school The Baltimore City College ("City") was established in a row house in 1839 for a few short years, also on the now vanished narrow alley-like Courtland Street.
