Category Archives: Baltimore Building of the Week

Baltimore Building of the Week: Charles Village Porch-Front Rowhouses

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This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week returns to Charles Village to highlight the characteristic porch-front rowhouses,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

The same sort of exuberant, uniquely American designs that appeared in the late 19th century reached a high point early in the 20th. The so-called Queen Anne Style had nothing to do with Britain’s last Stuart monarch, but instead mixed various architectural details into a happy pastiche. Here in Charles Village row houses boasted Flemish gables, Italianate brackets and arched windows, classical columns and pediments. Deep front porches offered some relief from the city’s heat as well as sociable contact with neighbors. Lately they have been acquiring vivid redecoration that highlights their architectural features.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Equitable Bank Building

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This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week is our first introduction to Baltimore’s tremendous historic skyscrapers, such as the 1891 Equitable Bank Building that survived the Great Baltimore Fire,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Another uniquely American style of the late 19th century originated in Chicago, where Louis Sullivan gave the new steel-framed “skyscrapers” unified facades of multistory arches. The former headquarters of Equitable Bank (shown here before exterior restoration) is Baltimore’s best version of the Sullivan/skyscraper style. Designed by Joseph Evans Sperry in 1891, it was gutted in the Great Baltimore Fire, but the frame and façade survived. After nearly a century’s service as an office building, it has been converted to residential use.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Richardsonian Romanesque

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This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan is St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church representing the many Baltimore buildings designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque Style,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Still another distinctively American architectural style of the late 19th century was named for the most prominent architect of the day, Henry Hobson Richardson. “Richardsonian Romanesque” was even more robust than the blocky, polychrome Romanesque style that grew up alongside Victorian Gothic in England. Richardson favored very heavy masonry walls punctuated with enormous round arches springing directly from the ground. The best-known Richardsonian Romanesque building in Baltimore is Lovely Lane Methodist Church, designed by Stanford White in his youthful Richardsonian period. Most of the old Goucher College buildings that line St. Paul Street just north of Lovely Lane are also in the Richardsonian style. My featured building is also not far away on St. Paul. It is St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church, designed in 1877 by the socially prominent Baltimore architect James Bosley Noel Wyatt. Wyatt attended Harvard and the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris about a decade after Richardson, and was clearly influenced by his style.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Shingle Style

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This edition of the Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan, highlights an architectural style as common for detached houses of Baltimore’s outer neighborhoods as the Italianate Rowhouse is to the neighborhoods close to downtown,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

The exposed timbers of the Stick Style, found on last week’s Mt. Washington Presbyterian Church, were one way that American builders broke free of the French and English Victorian deigns of the late 19th century. Another way, also based on the abundance of wood for building in North America, was the “Shingle Style.” The origin of the name is unmistakable – buildings (primarily houses) were covered in “cedar shake” shingle siding, allowed to weather naturally. In New England, this meant gray, in Baltimore’s climate dark brown. Other “natural” materials included slate roofs and fieldstone foundations and chimneys. Shingle designs also feature large geometrical masses, like big triangular gables and cylindrical turrets. The gambrel-roofed house depicted here stands in Roland Park, Baltimore’s first “garden suburb.” Developed in the 1890s it broke free of the grid pattern of streets in favor of leafy lanes that mirror the underlying natural topography.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Mt. Washington Presbyterian Church

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This week’s edition of the Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan returns to Mount Washington, home to an Octogan House and the 1807 Washington Mill, to feature the 1878 Mount Washington Presbyterian Church,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

In the decade following the Civil War many American buildings imitated Victorian Gothic and Second Empire from Britain and France. But some American architects struck out on their own distinctively American designs. The Mount Washington Presbyterian Church on Thornberry Road (now the Chimes, Inc.) is an example of the “stick style.” Built in 1878, the church is a celebration of the machine-cut lumber now coming on the market. Exposed wooden beams and vertical board-and-batten siding evoke the Gothic, but are far cry from the heavy masonry of Victorian Gothic.

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Baltimore Building of the Week: George C. Wilkins House

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This week’s edition of the Baltimore Building of the Week series is the George C. Wilkins House, built in 1876 at the corner of St. Paul Street and Biddle Street,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Although the Victorian Gothic style, with all its spikey verticality and asymmetry, did not lend itself to the rowhouse, this attached house in Mount Vernon displays all these attributes. It was designed by the architect J. Appleton Wilson in 1876.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Greenaway Cottages

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This week’s edition of the Baltimore Building of the Week takes us to North Baltimore at the edge of Roland Park to appreciate an autumn photo of the Greenaway Cottages designed by architect Charles E. Cassell (ca 1838-1916) in 1874.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

These three cottages along 40th Street epitomize the Victorian Gothic style: polychrome stone and tile, steeply gabled roofs, deliberately asymmetric plan. Originally identical, the three cottages have each been altered over the years in different ways. They were built in 1874 as summer retreats for various branches of the wealthy Greenaway family – who made their way north when they wished to flee from the heat of their mansion on Mount Vernon Place. The cottages are currently owned and well maintained by Roland Park Place.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Victorian Gothic Churches

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This edition of the Baltimore Building of the Week series features two Victorian Gothic Churches that should be familiar to Baltimore Heritage members from our Mt. Vernon Open Houses during our 50th Anniversary Celebration and our February Behind the Scenes Tour of First and Franklin.

Mt. Vernon Place Methodist Church, courtesy Jack Breihan

These highly visible churches represent another Victorian style originating in Europe, known here as Victorian Gothic. Like the contemporary Second Empire style, the Victorian Gothic shows off modern industrial materials like polished marble, encaustic tiles, and structural iron. Unlike the Second Empire, Victorian Gothic buildings tend to be deliberately asymmetrical in plan. Completed in 1872, the Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church marked a change in style for Methodists, who had previously worshiped in simple, classical buildings. Not so here! The polychrome exterior combines brown sandstone with a greenish “serpentine” stone and polished marble. At about the same time and only a few blocks away on West Madison Street, First Presbyterian (now merged with the congregation of the Franklin Street Presbyterian) added a radically asymmetric pair of steeples to a pretty antebellum Gothic Revival sanctuary. The steeples, built mostly of iron, are hard-edged and dramatic–anything but pretty.

First and Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, courtesy Jack Breihan

Baltimore Building of the Week: American Brewery

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This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan serves double duty as the first in a new series highlighting the 2010 Baltimore Heritage Preservation Award Winners! The American Brewery Building at 1701 North Gay Street might be the most “Baltimore” of all buildings in the city. It is in the style of High Victorian architecture, as so much of our city was built and it is just plain quirky. Since 1973, the 1887 J.F. Weisner and Sons brewery building (later known as the American Brewery) stood as a hulking shell lording over a distressed neighborhood. Its restoration is a noteworthy symbol of optimism for the historic building the surrounding community. The conversion of the brewery into a health care and community center for Humanim more than fits the organization’s motto: “To identify those in greatest need and provide uncompromising human services.” We are thankful that they chose this grand building in Baltimore to carry out that mission. A 2010 Baltimore Heritage Preservation Award in the Adaptive Reuse and Compatible Design category goes to owner Humanim, Inc., architects Cho Benn Holback + Associates, and contractor Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse.

Image courtesy Chauncy Primm/Flickr 2009

On a prominent ridge-top site in East Baltimore, this flamboyant Second Empire extravaganza was actually a working industrial complex between 1887 and 1973 (with a break for Prohibition). Perhaps John Frederick Weissner, who presided over the American Brewery, hoped that its towering turrets and Mansard roof, visible over much of the city, would generate a profitable thirstiness for his product. After years of vacancy and decay, the brewery buildings have been restored to life by Humanim, a community-service nonprofit active in the impoverished neighborhood around the brewery.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Second Empire Rowhouses

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This week’s featured Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan is the stylish Second Empire Rowhouse,

St. Paul Street, courtesy Jack Breihan

St. Paul Street is particularly rich in rowhouses in the Second Empire style. Note the elaborate window moldings and of course the crowning Mansard roof. These houses were probably constructed in the 1870s, the heyday of the style. The grandest of the Second Empire city houses was the mansion of Enoch Pratt on Monument Street, an 1870s-era remodeling of an original Greek Revival house of 1847. The house has been preserved by the Maryland Historical Society.

Enoch Pratt House, courtesy Jack Breihan