Category Archives: Preservation Awards

Congratulations to 2012 Preservation Awards Winners!

On June 21, Baltimore Heritage celebrated the best historic preservation projects of the past year and the people behind them. From the rehabilitation and conversion of the largest stone mill in Maryland – Union Mill – to rowhouse rehab work in the Patterson Park neighborhood, 13 projects in all won awards. The honorees included the Friends of St. Vincent Cemetery for their ongoing effort to reclaim an all-but-forgotten cemetery in Clifton Park, to Mr. Stephen Israel for a herculean task of researching, documenting, and photographing every single house in the Ten Hills neighborhood in West Baltimore.

Baltimore Heritage’s board bestowed a special award this year to Karen Lewand, honorary AIA, for lifetime achievement in historic preservation. The award is named after Douglas Gordon, a pioneering advocate who spearheaded the effort to save Mount Vernon Place from demolition in the 1960s. Among many things, Ms. Lewand has been a CHAP commissioner, an advisor to the Maryland Historical Trust, helped found the non-profit organization 1000 Friends of Maryland, and launched numerous innovative education efforts including heritage walking tours, neighborhood research projects, and education programs about historic neighborhoods for Baltimore schools.

Congratulations to all of the 2012 Award Winners!

Restoration and Rehabilitation Award

Garrett-Jacobs Mansion Ballroom Restoration
11 West Mount Vernon Place

The Engineers Club owner; Garrett-Jacobs Mansion Endowment Fund, partner; Thomas Moore Studios contractor; Christiana Cunningham-Adams mural restoration; Walter Raynes panel restoration; Brian Fick contractor; Mary Yeager contractor; Gillian Quinn mural restoration; Matthew Mosca paint analysis; Johnson Berman design consultant.

Lillie Carroll Jackson Museum
1320 Eutaw Place

Morgan State University owner; Gant Brunnett Architects, Inc. architects; Commercial Interiors interior decoration; Hayles & Howe plaster work; Crenshaw Lighting engineers.

Loyola University Francis Xavier Knott Humanities Building
South Chimney Repairs – 4501 North Charles Street

Loyola University Maryland owner; Structural Restoration Services contractor; American Platform & Scaffolding contractor; Whitney Bailey Cox & Magnani contractor.

Adaptive Reuse and Compatible Design Award

10 West Chase Street

WRH Property Holdings, LLC owner; Template Design, LLC architect; Mullan Contracting Company contractor; O’Connell and Associates tax credit consultant.

Fallsway Housing and Resource Center
620 Fallsway

Baltimore City Office of Homeless Services owner; Gant Brunnett Architects, Inc. architects; Roy Kirby & Sons, Inc. contractor.

3000 Chestnut Avenue

Practical Properties owner; 33:D architect.

Restoration Gardens
3701 Cottage Avenue

AIRS/Empire Homes owner; Cho Benn Holback + Associates, Inc. architect; Homes for America developer; Linden Contracting, Inc. contractor; Min Engineer Engineering, Inc. engineer; Mincin Patel Milano, Inc. structural engineer; Gower Thompson, Inc. civil engineer.

Union Mill
1500 Union Avenue

Seawall Development Company owner; Marks, Thomas architect; Hamel Builders contractor; Columbia Engineering structural engineer; Allen & Shariff Corporation engineer; Gower Thompson civil engineer; Poole Design, LLC landscape architect.

Heritage Preservation Award

126 South Patterson Park Avenue

Pagoda Trust LLC, owner.
2214 East Pratt Street

Noel Brown & Sereen Thaddeus owners; Architecture and Urban Views architect; Federal Masonry Restoration contractor; Thomson Remodeling Co. contractor; T & D Development contractor.

St. Vincent Cemetery, Clifton Park

Friends of St. Vincent Cemetery

Historic Baltimore Neighborhoods Award

Ten Hills Research, Documentation, and Recordation
Mr. Stephen Israel

Douglas Gordon Award

A Lifetime of Leadership and Dedication to Historic Preservation in Baltimore
Ms. Karen Lewand, Hon. AIA

Join us next week for our Awards Celebration in historic Bolton Hill!

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Join in our annual celebration as Baltimore Heritage celebrates the year’s best in preservation, adaptive reuse, and community leadership from neighborhoods across the city! This year we are in historic Bolton Hill with five unique open houses followed by good food, wine, beer, and an awards presentation at the Maryland Institute College of Art Meyerhoff House. Our open houses this year are a few of the neighborhood’s best — can’t miss landmarks from a 1848 country cottage on Lanvale Street to the former home of the Bolton Street Synagogue which was converted to a private residence in 2005.

Find more details or purchase a ticket today!

Tickets are $65 for members and $75 for non-members. Special thanks to our lead sponsor PNC Bank and all of our generous sponsors and supporters who make this celebration possible!

Make a nomination for the 2012 Baltimore Heritage Preservation Awards

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For over 50 years, Baltimore Heritage has granted awards from small rowhouse rehabs to major redevelopment and adaptive reuse projects. We’d love to hear from you this year with nominations for any people or organizations you think have worked especially hard to preserve our heritage or revitalize our historic neighborhoods. To give you a few ideas about the great projects that have won in the past, look out for more posts highlighting 2011 award winners over the next few weeks.

Take a look at our award categories and nomination guidelines or go ahead and make a nomination today. It only takes a few minutes to submit a nomination with a brief description of the project and contact information for project participants. Photographs (the more the better!) can be submitted by e-mail to awards@baltimoreheritage.org or by mail on a CD sent to 11 1/2 West Chase Street. The deadline for submissions is April 4, 2012. Contact Johns Hopkins, Executive Director at hopkins@baltimoreheritage.org or 410-332-9992 for more information.

2011 Preservation Awards: Baron and Company Cigars Building

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In June, Baltimore Heritage recognized 14 great historic preservation projects and people who have contributed significantly to the preservation of Baltimore’s historic places. Read on over the course of the summer as we cover these buildings and people, beginning with the Baron and Company Cigar Building.

The Baron and Company Cigar building at 1007 East Pratt Street lies within the South Central Historic District, along Central Avenue just east of Little Italy. Most of the structures in this area are vernacular rowhouses but a few, including the Cigar Building, are much larger industrial buildings that help give the area its distinctive flair. Baron and Company Cigars first occupied the space beginning about 1880, and by 1910 a company called the American Coat Pad Company had moved in. American Coat Pad was an apparel company that distributed throughout the United States, Mexico and Canada devoting itself exclusively to the little poofy parts of men’s and women’s coat fronts. In 2010, Mr. James Seay and his company, Premier Rides, Inc., along with Fishell Architecture, renovated the building into office space for a number of companies and light manufacturers.

The current restoration included saving and restoring existing doors, replicating metal windows where the originals had deteriorated too badly to be salvaged, and keeping the original metal shutters. The interior spaces were largely compatible for light manufacturing, and were kept intact, with much patching of plaster of course. Many of the original interior doors were salvageable and were kept, as was much of the original wooden flooring. Overall, the work seems squarely in keeping with the purposes for which this late 19th century industrial building was built. Starting out life as a cigar company, then as a clothing manufacturer, it has a new lease on life as offices and light manufacturing.

Read on for more shots of the building from before and after this award winning rehabilitation!
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A fantastic (and wet) celebration of this year’s historic preservation highlights

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This past year ushered in great historic preservation work around Baltimore, and we at Baltimore Heritage were pleased to recognize some of the best projects and the people behind them in our 2011 Preservation Awards Celebration last Friday in Union Square. With a series of thundershowers sweeping through West Baltimore exactly at the moment the outdoor program was set to begin, the event was a wet and wild time. Some call Baltimore the “City of Firsts.” We lay claim to the house of the first American saint (Elizabeth Ann Seton), the first umbrella factory (William Beehler, 1828), the first African American Supreme Court Justice (Thurgood Marshall), and the tallest building up to the Civil War (the Shot Tower). And now I think we can lay claim to having the wettest historic preservation awards event ever.

With the untiring work of a horde of volunteers and board members, and gracious hosting by the Union Square Association and many residents around the Square, 300 people from around Baltimore celebrated the best historic preservation projects of the year (listed below), and got more than a fair share of summer showers. Historic Union Square shone brightly, and despite the rain, or maybe even because of it, many of us reaffirmed our appreciation for Baltimore’s great historic places and those who work to preserve and revitalize them. This is the first in a series of posts that will highlight the people and projects that won preservation awards this year from Baltimore Heritage. I hope you enjoy learning a little more about some wonderful buildings and the great efforts that have gone into saving them.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank our hosts for the event, the Union Square Association, the gracious owners who opened their houses for house tours, our corporate sponsors, all of our volunteers, and the intrepid event committee: Jim Suttner (chair), Elise Butler, Lisa Doyle, Jean Hankey, Lesley Humphreys, Mary Beth Lennon, and Stephen Sattler. Read on for a full list of our 2011 Preservation Award Winners and check out our many photos from the evening celebration on Flickr.

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Open Houses at the 2011 Baltimore Heritage Preservation Awards

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This year, we’re trying something new to help celebrate the Baltimore’s best historic preservation projects and the people behind them–we’re holding our 2011 awards gala outdoors in historic Union Square park. We hope you can join us for a festive evening beginning with a set of private open houses around the Square, including the Hollins Street rowhouse where H.L. Mencken lived and wrote and the grand Turnbull Mansion whose restoration was a true labor of love.

Open houses will be followed by dinner, drinks and live music under the stars in one of Baltimore’s most treasured historic spaces. If you haven’t been to Union Square in a while (or even if you live right next door), please join us in honoring the great work that is going on in West Baltimore and the entire city.

Union Square, West Baltimore | Friday, June 10, 2011

4:30 PM | Open Houses
5:30 PM | Reception
6:45 PM | Awards and Dinner

$60 for Baltimore Heritage Members ($70 for non-members. Join!)
Purchase tickets online today!

Remembering William Donald Schaefer

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William Donald Schaefer shaped the Baltimore we have today perhaps as much as anyone. Baltimore Heritage did not always see eye-to-eye with the former mayor and governor, and indeed we fought vehemently against projects he supported, including highways proposed for Baltimore’s waterfront and the east-west connector in West Baltimore that threatened and demolished historic buildings and neighborhoods. On other issues, Governor Schaefer was a friend and leader for preservation, including the Dollar House Program and preserving the West Side of downtown. Former Baltimore Heritage President Fred Shoken joins us in remembering William Donald Schaefer with a guest post–

The highlight of my career as President of Baltimore Heritage was presenting William Donald Schaefer with the 1993 Douglas H. Gordon Award for Preservation Advocacy.

When the Board of Directors first considered Governor Schaefer for this honor, we envisioned giving the award to someone who after many years of public service ultimately became convinced that preservation was important. We would honor an individual who championed our cause and carried it forward. After reviewing his career in more detail, we realized the opposite was true. William Donald Schaefer was the leader in creating the foundations upon which Baltimore’s preservation movement was built.

While preservationists were busy fighting individual concerns, trying to save one building or the next, William Donald Schaefer saw the big picture. He realized that nothing could be preserved and no community could be revitalized without convincing people to take pride in their neighborhoods. He made it his mission to restore neighborhood pride in Baltimore City, and he was effective.

He knew that people who are not proud of their history, of their community, of their city, will do nothing to preserve their heritage. Without pride of place, there is no preservation. People who are not proud of themselves or of their neighborhoods are destructive. They tear down rather than build up. People who are proud of their history and heritage will preserve the symbols of the past and work to improve the future. William Donald Schaefer worked harder than anyone to restore pride in our neighborhoods. This, more than anything else, allowed preservation to flourish in Baltimore.

There is no doubt that conflicts will exist between preservationists and government officials on particular issues. Preservationists had battles with William Donald Schaefer. Some we won … others we lost, but that was not a factor in honoring the Governor. We honored William Donald Schaefer because deep down he was proud of the history and accomplishments of Baltimore City and the State of Maryland. His pride in Baltimore made him a great advocate in preserving Baltimore’s historic and architectural heritage. In turn he made others proud, which aided the cause of preservation. For this reason William Donald Schaefer deserved recognition from Baltimore Heritage and our thanks.

Fred Shoken, President of Baltimore Heritage, 1988-1994