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.

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

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

Revealing his fondness for the history of his own institution, Dr. John Breihan, a professor of history at Loyola University Maryland, offers this week’s Baltimore Building of the Week on the historic buildings of St. Ignatius Church and Old Loyola College, used since the 1970s as the home of Center Stage,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Just a few blocks away from the Peabody, stretching along Calvert Street between Madison and Monument Streets, stands another massive Italian palace, built for another educational institution. The patron here was the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order. Again, we see arched windows with elaborate moldings, and a heavy Italianate cornice unifying the northern half, containing St. Ignatius Church (designed by Louis L. Long and completed in 1856) with the southern (designed by O’Connor and Delaney of New York and finished in 1899). Besides the parish church, this huge redbrick palace housed Loyola College and Loyola High School until they split into two separate institutions and moved away in 1922. Since the mid-1970s the long vacant southern section has been imaginatively re-used for two theaters designed by James Grieves and the firm of Ziger, Hoopes, and Snead for the Center Stage repertory theater.

If you enjoyed the tour of the Peabody Library during our 50th Anniversary Celebration back on June 11, you will likely enjoy this week’s entry in our Baltimore Building of the Week series on the Peabody Institute,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Although a long row of Italianate rowhouses (think Union Square) could look like one of the urban palaces of the Italian Renaissance, Baltimore boasts a few genuine Italianate palaces. In 1857 the international philanthropist George Peabody endowed Baltimore with an institute devoted to music and the arts. The architect Edmund G. Lind designed its initial building in 1859 and a large addition containing a fireproof library built 1875-78. Although the magnificent cast-iron Peabody Library draws the most attention, Lind has done an excellent job uniting the exterior facades of the two buildings beneath a heavy Italianate cornice and balustrade.

This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan are two Gothic Revival churches from architect Robert Cary Long, Jr.– the St. Alphonsus Catholic Church and New Unity Church Ministries, historically known as as the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church.

St.Alphonsus/Image courtesy Jack Breihan

At the same time as he was designing Greek Revival temples for immigrant Catholic and Jewish worshipers, the eclectic architect Robert Cary Long, Jr., also worked in the Gothic Revival. At St. Alphonsus Catholic Church (1845) and the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church (1847 – now New Unity Church Ministries), Long’s Gothic designs were more assured than Godefroy’s seminary chapel four decades earlier. St. Alphonsus, intended for Baltimore’s German Catholics, was based on medieval German hall churches; Franklin Street Presbyterian on Tudor-era architecture in England. In both cases, the church walls were originally coated in gray stucco intended to look like stone. Removing the stucco reveals pleasing pastel bricks, but also exposes them to deterioration that may threaten the long-term integrity of these fine churches.

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