606-10 Cathedral Street

Overview

The three houses at 606, 608, and 610 Cathedral Street are all that remain of the elegant nineteenth-century townhouses that once lined this block off West Mount Vernon Place. The Walters Art Museum has acquired the three townhouses. The Museum has not publicly indicated how the townhouses fit into its ongoing planning for museum expansion.

Location

606-10 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Our Approach

Built between 1850 and 1860 on land originally owned by John Eager Howard, the three houses served as primary residences for prosperous merchants in the tobacco and other trades who had flocked to Baltimore’s fashionable new Mount Vernon neighborhood and whose reputations in business and society grew in tandem with the neighborhood’s prestige.

The house at 610, attributed to the Baltimore-based architectural team of Niernsee & Neilson, among the region’s most sought-after nineteenth-century architects, operated for several decades as part of the Mount Vernon Hotel, reputedly Baltimore’s first “family hotel” and the preferred residential hotel of travelers and extended-stay visitors of distinction.