Tag: Central Baltimore

Baltimore Building of the Week: Peale Museum

This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week is the first building in the Western Hemisphere designed and built as a museum, the Peale Museum.

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.

Behind the Scenes Tour of McClain Wiesand Custom Built Furniture

In New York, Chicago and San Francisco, the custom built decorative art pieces created by Baltimore’s own McClain Wiesand studio are featured for their beauty and careful craftsmanship. This tour offers a “twofer”: a tour of the McClain Wiesand workshop and an open house of the owner’s fabulously renovated apartments (Moroccan room and all) above his shop in historic Mount Vernon.

Tour Information

Date: Wednesday April 7, 2010
Time: 5:30 to 6:00 p.m. — Wine and Cheese
6:00 to 7:00 p.m. — Tour
Place: McClain Wiesand Custom Built Furniture
1013 Cathedral Street (Baltimore, MD 21201)
Cost: $15 (includes wine and cheese reception)

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Baltimore Building of the Week: St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel

The Baltimore Building of the Week is St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel at 600 North Paca Street in Seton Hill– the first seminary established in the United States. Over two dozen photos of this important building were taken by the Historic American Building Survey in 1936 and tours of both the St. Mary’s Seminary Chapel and the Mother Seton House are offered every day of the week.

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.

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Baltimore Building of the Week: First Unitarian Church of Baltimore

Returning to religious architecture, this week’s entry in the Baltimore Building of the Week series is the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, the very first building erected for Unitarians in the United States, at the northwest corner of Franklin and Charles Streets. Continue to the end for the answer to the question posed in last week’s post on Baltimore’s Columnar Monuments.

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.

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Baltimore Building of the Week: Baltimore’s Columnar Monuments

This week’s Baltimore Building of the Week is not, in fact, a building. Instead, it is three of Baltimore’s notable “Columnar Monuments.” Both the Battle Monument and Mount Vernon’s Washington Monument have also been featured on the Monument City website. Visitors can take a tour of the Shot Tower’s ground floor exhibit, sound and light show, and informational video are available with appointment at 10:30 AM on Saturday or Sunday. The Washington Monument is open for visitors Wednesday to Friday 10 AM to 4 PM and Saturday and Sunday 10 AM to 5 PM up until Memorial Day.

Battle Monument, Image courtesy Jack Breihan
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.

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