Preserving and promoting Baltimore's historic buildings and neighborhoods.
Category: Education
Our education programs include technical assistance to property owners, heritage education around the Civil War Sequicentennial and the Bi-Centennial of the War of 1812, and our ongoing Race and Place in Baltimore Neighborhoods project.
This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan is a Gothic cottage used by Family and Children’s Services of Central Maryland.
Image courtesy Jack Breihan
The early Gothic Revival style did not lend itself to rowhouse design, but steep-gabled cottages, sometimes with bargeboarding or “gingerbread” moldings often appear along older road and turnpike routes out of Baltimore. A particularly pretty example, on Lanvale Street in Bolton Hill, has long been used and maintained by the Family and Children’s Services of Central Maryland. Originally designed by Robert Cary Long, Jr., in 1848, it also features bay windows added by Edmund G. Lind in 1862 and a side porch by Lawrence Hall Fowler in 1915.
The popularity of the Greek Revival in Baltimore was not limited to churches and schools; it also produced a new design for the city’s ubiquitous rowhouses. Greek Revival rowhouses dispensed with the dormer window of the older federal style. Instead, the top half-story was lit by a square “attic” window beneath a less steeply gabled roof. From grand examples in Mount Vernon to humble 2 ½ story houses in Fells Point and Federal Hill, Greek Revival rowhouses dominated from 1830 or so until 1860. Two examples saved from demolition and open to view are the Irish Shrine and Railroad Workers Museum on Lemmon Street and the Babe Ruth Birthplace on Emory Street.
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.
This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week arrives one day late, but with two buildings from Dr. John Breihan instead of one. The first of these two Greek Revival churches is St. Peter the Apostle Church built in 1843 at South Poppleton and Hollins Streets.
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.
This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan is McKim’s Free School at 1120 East Baltimore Street,
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.
