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Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Nothing shows 19th-century Baltimore’s eclectic taste in architectural styles better than the churches erected by the city’s Roman Catholics. Their Cathedral (now the Basilica) was neoclassical, as were the first two parish churches, St. Patrick (demolished in 1897) and St. Vincent de Paul. St. Mary’s Seminary chapel was gothic. Here at St. Peter the Apostle, completed in 1842, the style is Greek revival. The first Catholic parish on the West Side, St. Peter’s was meant to serve immigrant Irish workers at the nearby B & O Railroad shops. Perhaps as a nod to “Jacksonian democracy,” the church is a brick version of an austere Athenian temple, with six white wooden Doric columns supporting a large pediment. The designer was the fashionable local architect Robert Cary Long, Jr. Three years after completing St. Peter’s, Long used the same Greek style on the East Side of town for another immigrant congregation, the Lloyd Street Synagogue. While the synagogue has been preserved as part of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, St. Peter’s is threatened by the lack of ongoing activity. The Transfiguration Community, combining three West Side parishes, recently consolidated worship in just one church, St. Jerome’s.

The bonus building for the week is the Douglas Memorial Community Church at Madison and West Lafayette Avenues,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Tour Information

Date: Thursday, April 22, 2010
Time: 5:30 to 6:00 p.m. — Wine and Cheese
6:00 to 7:00 p.m. — Tour
Place: Wilson House B&B, 2100 Mount Royal Terrace (Baltimore, MD 21217)
Parking: Parking is available on the street nearby
Cost: $15 (includes wine and cheese reception)

2100 Mount Royal Terrace was built around 1880 by one of the wealthiest men in Baltimore, J. Kemp Bartlett. Bartlett was a law partner of William Jennings Bryan, Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, 1904 and 1908. In 1912, Bryan was still the head of the Democratic party but this time decided not to run. That year the Democratic National Convention was held in Baltimore’s 5th Regiment Armory, a few blocks away from his law partner’s house on Mount Royal Terrace. When the convention became deadlocked (after 23 ballots), Bryant, who until that time had been publicly supporting Champ Clark from New York, caused a recess to be called and invited the “kingmakers” to Bartlett’s house, away from the crowds. There he announced that he had switched his support for Woodrow Wilson as the only candidate with a chance of beating the Republican nominee in the general election. Over the next several days, Bartlett’s mansion was the center of a series of deals that gave Woodrow Wilson the nomination (after 23 more ballots) and led to his presidency. Wilson gave his acceptance speech from the governor’s summer home in New Jersey (he had not attended the convention) and then came to Baltimore and repeated it to a much bigger crowd from the 2nd floor balcony of Bartlett’s mansion. During the Great Depression and following WWII, the house was cut into 12 apartments, although fortunately many of the original details were preserved. In 1999, Guy and Clelia Thomas purchased the building and completed wonderful restoration work several years later. The couple now operates the mansion as a bed and breakfast. Please join us and our hosts, the Thomases, on a tour of this 40-room eclectic historic mansion with a rich history of presidential politicking.

Click Here to Register. Space is limited on this tour. Confirmations will be sent by email, and payment will be due upon confirmation. For additional information and questions, call Baltimore Heritage at 410-332-9992. Thank you to Agora and PNC Bank, our tour series sponsors. This tour series is made possible in part by a generous contribution from the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

“Democracy” became a byword for American society in the late 1820s, as property requirements for white, male voters were repealed, and the decidedly un-aristocratic Andrew Jackson was elected President. In architecture, this meant returning to the styles of ancient democracy in Athens. A remarkably fine example of this Greek revival is the McKim Free School on East Baltimore Street. John McKim, a wealthy merchant and a member of the nearby Old Town Friends Meeting, instructed his two sons to establish a school for poor children. The building they erected in 1835 was clearly intended as a monument of democracy. The small school, only 40 by 60 feet, boasted an elaborate (and expensive) stone portico and pediment in the Greek Doric order. Today, a nonprofit foundation preserves both McKim’s concern for disadvantaged youth and his sons’ classical monument.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Another industry to make an early start in Baltimore was the museum. In 1801, the artistic Peale family (father Charles, sons Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Reubens, and Titian) opened the first American museum in borrowed or rented quarters in Philadelphia. In 1814, Rembrandt Peale commissioned this federal-style museum in Baltimore – the first purpose-built public museum in the Western hemisphere. On display were scientific exhibits like the excavated skeleton of a prehistoric mastodon as well as paintings and curiosities. In 1830, the museum closed, and the building began 45 years service as Baltimore’s City Hall. Later it served as Colored Elementary School No. 1. After restoration in 1928 it once again became a museum, this time of Baltimore municipal history. In 1976 the Peale became part of the underfunded Baltimore City Life Museums, the financial collapse of which was the greatest disaster for the city’s history since the Great Fire. Largely vacant since City Life folded in 1997, the city-owned Peale Museum is the locus of a proposal to open a center for local history organizations.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

The Industrial Revolution began in England with simple water-powered machines to spin and later to weave cotton. Although Samuel Slater smuggled some of the designs into Rhode Island in 1793, the English mills dominated the market until 1807, when President Jefferson imposed an embargo on trade with England. The Washington Cotton Factory in Mount Washington dates from that year. Besides being the oldest industrial building in Baltimore, it is arguably the third oldest in the USA. Drawing power from the swiftly flowing Jones Falls, the sturdy stone mill was built to bear the weight of heavy machinery. Long rows of windows provided natural light for the three factory floors. This historic building, along with other pioneer industrial buildings on the site, has been imaginatively preserved as part of the mixed office and retail Mt. Washington Mill development. Other textile mills along the Jones Falls south of Mount Washington have been put to a variety of new uses, reminding Baltimoreans of their industrial heritage.

The rehabilitation of the historic mill complex began in 1988 and many more photos of the site may be found on the Mt. Washington Mill website. For more on the industrial heritage of the Jones Falls, check out this history from the Jones Falls Watershed Association or the Maryland Byways brochure on Falls Road (PDF).

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

At a time when neoclassical architecture was in style, this gothic chapel, built in 1808, was an anomaly. Indeed, it is probably the first Gothic Revival building in the United States. It ushered in an era of eclecticism, in which architects worked different styles at the same time. The architect here was Maximilian Godefroy, recruited as a faculty member at St. Mary’s Seminary, founded in 1781 as Baltimore’s first institution of higher education. Godefroy was clearly happier in the neoclassical style (at the Battle Monument and the First Unitarian Church). The chapel is stiff and symmetrical, with “flying buttresses” facing the wrong way, but it pleased his patrons – Sulpician fathers homesick for the gothic monuments of their native France. The Seminary moved to Roland Park in 1927, but the Sulpicians should be congratulated for continuing to maintain this important building.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

If the Basilica is Baltimore’s neoclassical Hagia Sophia, its neoclassical Roman Pantheon stands only a block away. Completed in 1819 to the designs of the French architect Maximilian Godefroy, the First Unitarian Church is a simple cube topped with a hemispherical dome. An arched Roman Doric portico and pediment mark the entrance on Franklin Street (the new prayer garden commemorating Pope John Paul II has opened up the view). Despite its classic simplicity, the dome had notoriously bad acoustics. Eventually a lower plaster vault was constructed beneath it. Baltimore’s other Pantheon is Davidge Hall, the original building of the University of Maryland, at Greene and Lombard Streets.

Finally, Dr. John Breihan provides an answer to last week’s question on the Washington Monument,

On the Washington Monument, George Washington is depicted surrendering his commission as general of the Continental Army. He did this in Annapolis on December 23, 1783. Like the virtuous ancient Roman general Cincinnatus, Washington gave up supreme military power to return to his farm at Mount Vernon.

Battle Monument, Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Completed during the 1820s, two of these towering structures established Baltimore’s distinction as “the Monumental City.” Maximilian Godefroy’s Battle Monument, depicted on the City flag, commemorated the Defenders who died beating off the British attack in 1814. It combines Egyptian and Roman themes, including a giant set of fasces. A gigantic Roman Doric column, Robert Mills’ Washington Monument portrays the Father of Our Country, dressed in a toga, performing what its builders considered his most heroic act. (What was it? answer next week!) The contemporary Phoenix Shot Tower was a monument to Baltimore’s growing industrial sector; it manufactured lead shot for the Chesapeake Bay duck-hunting industry.

Washington Monument, Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Shot Tower, Image courtesy Jack Breihan

Image courtesy Jack Breihan, 2009

By far the greatest architectural masterpiece in Baltimore is its long-time Catholic cathedral, now known as the Basilica of the Assumption. Designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe for Archbishop John Carroll, the Basilica was built between 1806 and 1820. The great domed church with its curious cylindrical towers, our Hagia Sophia, long dominated the Baltimore skyline. To mark its bicentennial in 2006, the Basilica underwent a much-needed rehabilitation of its basic systems and a conjectural restoration of the interior to its appearance in 1820. While some welcome the new bright pastels, others miss two centuries’ accretions of church furniture, gold leaf, and stained glass.

Image courtesy Jack Breihan