Demolish

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Demolished List

Rochembeau

photo: warwick scales

The Rochembeau Apartments

Built in 1905, the Rochambeau Apartments once stood on the corner of Charles and Franklin Streets. The building was built by noted Baltimore architect Edward Glidden, who also designed the Washington Apartments on Charles Street in Mt. Vernon, the Furness House, and many other buildings in Baltimore. The Rochambeau was a contributing building in the Cathedral Hill National Register Historic District. It was also a truly iconic building along Baltimore's historic Charles Street. The Archdiocese of Baltimore demolished the building in 2006 and intends to erect a prayer garden on the site.

mercy_house

mercy_house2

1820s Houses / 300 Saint Paul Place

Built during the 1820s, the row of houses on the 300 block of Saint Paul Place was erected in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and constituted some of the oldest buildings in Baltmiore. This row was the last row of its type downtown. By 1890, the houses played a central role in Baltimore's African American community as the location of the school for the St. Francis Xavier Church, the first Catholic Church for African Americans in the country. In the early 1900s, the row had both black and white residents at a time when mixed-race blocks were illegal in Baltimore. Mercy Hospital demolished the buildings in 2007, intending to build a new building on the site. The following is an article that appeared in the Baltimore Sun at the time of demolition.

Historic row homes turned to rubble
Cranes knock down buildings to make way for Mercy expansion

By John Fritze: Sun Reporter
Originally published February 24, 2007, 1:54 PM EST

They stood for more than 180 years, but they came down in minutes.

Weeks of controversy surrounding the razing of a block of historic row homes on St. Paul Place came to an abrupt end today as crews from Baltimore-based Potts & Callahan used cranes to reduce the buildings to rubble. The homes are coming down to make way for a $292 million expansion of Mercy Medical Center.

"We're losing yet another set of important historic buildings. This is a real loss for our African-American heritage and the heritage for our whole city," said Johns Hopkins, executive director of Baltimore Heritage.

The city of Baltimore issued a demolition permit in December to tear the homes down after the City Council erased the structures from a list of "notable" properties in the central business district's urban renewal plan, enabling the hospital to begin razing them without a one-year demolition deliberation process.

A copy of an 1827 city directory lists the homes and their owners, including a grocer, a couple of merchants and an auctioneer. In the early 1900s, blacks -- some former slaves -- and whites lived together there, even when the city law kept blocks racially exclusive.

The Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People advocated protecting the buildings because of their former owners and tenants, including the first school in the city to grant higher education degrees to blacks.

Workers said they expected to have the buildings down by tomorrow.