James S. Keelty Jr., who built Baltimore County's Rodgers Forge and headed the Baltimore Orioles in the 1950s, died yesterday of congestive heart failure at his home in Mays Chapel, one of the many neighborhoods he helped create. He was 91.
The president of the Orioles from 1955 to 1959, he was the former chairman and president of a homebuilding firm founded by his father in 1904. Keelty-built residences fill large sections of Baltimore City and Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties.
Born in Baltimore and raised on Poplar Grove Street, he attended St. Cecilia School in Walbrook and was a 1929 graduate of Calvert Hall College High School. He earned a law degree from Catholic University of America in Washington in 1934. He tried but failed to make his prep school and college baseball teams.
He joined the business founded by his Irish-born father, James Keelty, who had trained as a stonemason. His father was one of the city's best-known rowhouse builders, and constructed large sections of West Baltimore, including Edmondson Village.
In 1924, the elder Keelty bought 86 acres of a Baltimore County dairy farm -- the basis of today's Rodgers Forge. In a 1986 Evening Sun interview, James Keelty recalled working for his father in the summer of 1933, between his junior and senior years of college, with the construction crew of the first section of Rodgers Forge rowhouses that went on sale in 1934.
"Everyone in the building business thought my father was crazy," he said of the venture that eventually comprised thousands of homes and an adjacent apartment complex.
Because of his father's age and health, it fell to Mr. Keelty and his brother, Joseph S. Keelty, who survives him, to construct Rodgers Forge, which stretches from York Road to Bellona Avenue and took more than nearly 20 years to complete.
Mr. Keelty went on to build Seminary Ridge and Longford North, both in Lutherville, Village Green in Riderwood, Doncaster Village in Carney and Crestwood in Anne Arundel County, among other ventures. Before his retirement in 1968, he purchased sections of the land for what became Mays Chapel, the Baltimore County community where he lived.
"He introduced the rowhouse to Baltimore County in a suburbanized form," said John McGrain, the Baltimore County historian who worked for Mr. Keelty in 1955 as a waterproofer for the last section of homes built in Rodgers Forge. "His neighborhoods have well-established trees, and the houses were quite nice, with vestiges of Georgian Revival architecture."
