Built in 1970, the Pavilion Building is a companion to the adjacent Mercantile Bank & Trust building – both designed by architects Peterson and Brickbauer. Once home to the stylish Schrafft's restaurant, the Pavilion is now home to the City Plaza Medical Center.

One of the last buildings to be erected around Hopkins Plaza, Pavilion Building on Liberty Street was constructed in 1970. Built by the Manekin Corporation, the structure was planned as a bank for the Mercantile-Safe Deposit & Trust Company. The bank had just moved into a new 22-story tower just north of the Pavilion, designed by the same architects Peterson and Brickbauer who designed the 2-story Pavilion with a transparent glass-clad exterior from the base to the roof. The complex of both buildings received an AIA Honor Award in 1972.

Shortly before construction began, the plans shifted from retail bank to restaurant with Schrafft's chain restaurant occupying the first floor of the $1 million building. The Manekin Corporation planned to lease the second floor of the building as a small shopping center to serve visitors to Hopkins Plaza and office workers around Charles Center. Conveniently, a pedestrian "link" connected the Pavilion to the adjoining Mercantile building up until the walkways were dismantled in the 1990s and 2000s.

When Schrafft's restaurant opened at their new location in 1971, they advertised a rich meal at a bargain price, boasting: "It's mountains of salad at no extra cost, "say when" drinks, individual loaves of hot bread, and 15 tantalizing relishes. Complimentary cigars and candy mints for after dinner. Plus a sumptuous appetizer, a delightful glass of wine and a famous Schrafft's dessert, all included with dinner. And all located near theaters, movies, shopping and sports events. Everything from as little as $3.95."

Founded in Boston as a candy company in 1861, the Schrafft's began opening restaurants in and around New York in the 1950s. As they expanded into cities across the northeast, Schrafft's acquired a reputation as an upscale and tastefully decorated establishment, perhaps equivalent to Starbucks in the present. Unfortunately, as the 1970s continued the chain began to struggle and the Hopkins Plaza location closed within just a few years. Most recently, the Pavilion Building was occupied as the City Plaza Medical Center operated by Kaiser Permanente.

10 Hopkins Plaza, Baltimore, MD 21201

Built in 1928, the Lord Baltimore Hotel is a beautiful example of an early twentieth-century high-rise hotel. Designed by prolific hotel architect William Lee Stoddart, it is reminiscent of such famous American hotels as New York's Vanderbilt Hotel or Chicago's Palmer House. The twenty-two-story steel frame building was the largest hotel building ever constructed in Maryland. However, the Lord Baltimore is also a reminder of the city’s history of racial discrimination and the long fight for integrated public accommodation.

In 1954, the same year the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education called for an end to segregated schools, black players from three American League teams with integrated rosters came to Baltimore to play against the Orioles. White players stayed at the Lord Baltimore, the Emerson, and Southern Hotel downtown. But for their black teammates, the only option was the African American-owned York Hotel in West Baltimore.

A year later, in 1955, students at Johns Hopkins University moved the prom away from the Lord Baltimore to the at the Alcazar Hotel in Mount Vernon in protest to the hotel manager’s refusal to admit black students to the dance and his threat to “stop the dance if Negroes attended.” By the late 1950s, after lobbying by Baltimore’s progressive Mayor Theodore McKeldin, the Lord Baltimore Hotel consented to rent rooms to black ballplayers and some conference attendees. In 1958, Baltimore hosted the All-Star Game and six black All-Stars, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, registered at the Lord Baltimore. For visiting black spectators, however, the hotel was not an option. Jimmy Williams, an assistant editor at the Afro American, advised spectators to bring pup tents and box lunches, writing, “The box lunches will be to ease the pangs of an aching stomach… The pup tents will provide a place for them to rest their carcasses after the last door of the downtown hotels have been slammed in their face and the uptown hotels are filled.” Williams predicted visitors would leave “just loving the quaint customs of Baltimore, which boasts of major league baseball and minor league businessmen.”

By the early 1960s, policies finally began to change. After hotel management realized they had rented rooms for the campaign office of segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace in 1964, the management refused to let them stay and the campaign was forced to move to a motel in Towson. In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed at the hotel during a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he gave a lengthy press conference and received symbolic keys to the city from Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III.

The hotel was one of the few historic buildings retained as part of the redevelopment of Charles Center and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

20 W. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201