Baltimore Building of the Week: Italianate Rowhouse

This week’s edition of the Baltimore Building of the Week series from Dr. John Breihan comes a few days late as we finalize preparations for our 50th Anniversary Celebration this Friday. Please join us for the open house tours on Mount Vernon Place at 4:30 PM or for an evening of Preservation Awards, dinner, and dancing starting at 6:30 PM. This single Italianate rowhouse is the first in a three week long focus on Italianate rowhouses in Baltimore,

Image courtesy Jack Breihan

The heavy carved wooden cornice of this rowhouse was based on the palaces of the great trading families of the Italian Renaissance – the Medici, for example. Perhaps the adoption of this “Italianate” style reflected the booming commerce of a growing Baltimore. At any rate, from the 1850s on, Italianate became the most popular architectural style in Baltimore for the next four decades. Unlike the semi-fortified houses of the Renaissance elites, Italianate rowhouses featured huge windows, increasingly taking advantage of advances in glassmaking that replaced multi-paned windows with window frames incorporating extensive sheets of glass, sometimes triple hung for extra height. Arched doorways were approached by white marble steps. Italianate houses could be either brick or stone. But carved wood cornices crowning flat or shed roofs always remained the hallmarks of this style.

Baltimore Building of the Week: Octagon Houses

This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week from Dr. John Breihan is an unusual dwelling type that can be found throughout the country– the Octagon Houses inspired by Orson Squire Fowler. More information on this fascinating example of American vernacular architecture can be found in the Octagon House, 1850-1860 by Deborah Holmes.

Mt. Washington, courtesy Jack Breihan

In 1848 the polymath Orson Squire Fowler of upstate New York (presumably not related to Baltimore’s Lawrence Hall Fowler) published A Home for All, a book extolling an octagonal floor plan as the most desirable residence. Later editions also extolled a primitive form of concrete construction. In this era of eclectic architecture, other free-thinkers were inclined to try it out. There is a particularly fine single-family octagon in Lutherville. Within today’s city limits, Rev. Elias Heiner of the German Reformed Church built an enormous octagon for the Mt. Washington Female Seminary, which occupied it between 1855 and 1861. For about a century the hilltop octagon housed Mount St. Agnes College, until it merged with Loyola University in the 1970s. It now is part of the Mt. Washington Conference Center. Across Smith Avenue at the foot of the hill stand two unusual octagon duplexes (demi-octagons?), reflecting perhaps a Baltimore tendency to turn anything into a rowhouse.

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Baltimore Building of the Week: Cemetery Gates

This week is a bit darker than usual with a set of three historic cemetery gates in Baltimore, including the Westminster Burying Ground, Greenmount Cemetery, and the Baltimore Cemetery on North Avenue.

Greenmount Cemetery, courtesy Jack Breihan

Baltimore’s explosive growth in the late 18th and early 19th century soon created a demand for burial sites. The Presbyterian burial ground on West Fayette Street was established in 1786 and is the final resting place of many eminent early Baltimoreans, including Edgar Allen Poe. The Egyptian-style gate was probably added during the eclectic period in American architecture in the 1840s. Later, still larger cemeteries turned to the Gothic Revival style. Robert Cary Long, Jr., designed the elaborate gatehouse for Green Mount Cemetery in the mid 1840s; the less well known gatehouse for Baltimore Cemetery seems to be from about the same era. It stands at the eastern end of North Avenue.

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Partnering to Preserve the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in West Baltimore

Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 2009

When the recent Urbanite article on the Hebrew Orphan Asylum asked the question, “Can National Register status save Baltimore’s coolest abandoned building?” we must respond, “Yes but not alone.” Preserving the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, better known to West Baltimore residents as the former Lutheran Hospital of Maryland, depends on the continued success of partnerships between Baltimore Heritage, Coppin State University, the Coppin Heights Community Development Corporation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and stakeholders throughout Baltimore and the nation. The Hebrew Orphan Asylum building is important, not only for its significance as the oldest Jewish orphanage building in the United States, but also to the neighborhoods of Greater Rosemont with its great potential to anchor transit-oriented development around the future Rosemont Red Line station. We are working in partnership to bring this historic 1876 building into the future, as a renewed asset to historic West Baltimore.

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