St. Peter the Apostle Church served southwest Baltimore's large Irish Catholic community for over 160 years. From its dedication in September 1844 through its final service in January 2008, the church earned a reputation as "The Mother Church of West Baltimore" for its role in the growth of the Catholic church.

Built from 1843 to 1844, the handsome Greek Revival building was designed by prominent Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long, Jr. who modeled the church on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, Greece. The building is now owned by nearby Carter Memorial Church.

13 S. Poppleton Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

The 1833 McKim Free School building is one of Baltimore’s most important landmarks with deep roots in the city’s history and an unsurpassed 175 year record of education and social service. Founder John McKim came to Baltimore as a young man, established his business at Baltimore and Gay Street and became a successful merchant. During the War of 1812, McKim gave $50,000 to the City of Baltimore to aid in its defense, served as a State Senator, and was twice elected to Congress. His son William McKim who led the effort to realize his father’s vision of a free school did not live to see it as he died in 1834 at the age of 35. The building’s architects have deep connections to Baltimore. Son of Baltimore Revolutionary War hero John Eager Howard, William Howard was one of the first engineers to work for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and took up architecture as an avocation. William Small designed the Barnum’s City Hotel (demolished in 1889), the Archbishop’s Residence on North Charles Street, and more schools across the city. Since 1945, the McKim Center has continued to strengthen the importance of the building to many Baltimore residents as it remains a vital institution serving children and adults in need in the Jonestown community in innumerable ways. The McKim Center has its beginnings in 1924 when the Society of Friends offered the McKim Free School as a place of worship to an Italian Presbyterian congregation. This partnership between the Friends and Presbyterians led in 1945 to the start of the McKim Community Association offering youth programs, athletic training (particularly wrestling—appropriate for a Greek Revival building) and a bible school. McKim’s renowned athletic programs have long outgrown the building but the structure remains in use, along with the nearby 1781 Old Quaker Meeting House, as a safe place for children, managed by the philosophy of “Structure, Discipline and Love.”

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1120 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

Built around 1842, the Mount Vernon Club is one of the oldest homes on Mount Vernon Place.

Previously known as the Blanchard Randall House and the Tiffany-Fisher House, the home was built by William Tiffany, a wealthy Baltimore commission merchant. The building is a fine example of the Greek Revival architectural style and set a high standard for the new homes being built around the Washington Monument.

In 1941, The Mount Vernon Club, previously located across the street at 3 West Mount Vernon Place merged with The Town Club in the Washington Apartments and purchased the property, then home to Mr. Blanchard Randall, to serve as their club house. The Club has remained at the property through the present.

8 W. Mt. Vernon Place, Baltimore, MD 21201

Built in 1845 at the center of what was a thriving Jewish community in East Baltimore, the Lloyd Street Synagogue was the first synagogue erected in Maryland and today is the third-oldest standing synagogue in the country.

In building the synagogue, the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation commissioned noted Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long, Jr. Long chose a Greek Revival style. Architect William H. Reasin expanded the building in 1861, maintaining the original façade and the classical style of the sanctuary. The building was home to the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation from its beginning through 1889, when it transitioned into a catholic church. St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, one of the first Lithuanian "ethnic" parishes in the United States, owned and worshiped there through 1905.

In another flip, Shomrei Mishmeres HaKodesh, one of the leading Orthodox Jewish congregations of the Eastern European immigrant community, bought the building in 1905 from the Catholic church. The new congregation occupied the building until the early 1960s, when it moved out. The vacant building was threatened with demolition at that time and the Jewish Museum of Maryland was formed to purchase and care for this historic landmark. In 2008, the Museum began an ambitious $1 million restoration project with the help of the national Save America's Treasure's Program. The work restored the building to its 1864 appearance and created a multimedia exhibit, The Building Speaks, to interpret this history. The work also won a Historic Preservation Award from 91ĘÓƵ in 2009.

11 Lloyd Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

High on a hill at 811 West Lanvale Street, behind a chain link fence and past the overgrown yard, is the grand Upton – an architectural treasure by one of Baltimore's earliest architects that has witnessed nearly 200 years of change in the Upton neighborhood that shares the building's name. In the 1830s, Baltimore lawyer David Stewart hired architect Robert Carey Long, Jr. – or so we think, no confirmation of Long as the architect has survived – to design his country villa. R. Carey (as he liked to call himself) was one of Baltimore's first professionally trained architects designing the Lloyd Street Synagogue (now part of the Jewish Museum of Maryland), the Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott City, and the main gate of Green Mount Cemetery among more than 80 buildings across the country. Son of a Baltimore merchant who armed seven schooners and two brigantines as privateers during the Revolutionary War, Stewart became a prominent local lawyer and got involved in politics, serving a brief month as a US Senator in 1849.

The mansion is widely recognized as the last surviving Greek Revival country house in Baltimore. It remains secluded in urban West Baltimore, sitting high above the neighboring buildings and surrounded by brick and stone walls. In the mid-nineteenth century, you would have seen a grand porch with Doric columns and ironwork bearing the Stewart family crest. Inside the building, you could have observed more than a dozen marble and onyx fireplaces, a main entrance hall, a curved oak staircase, and a banquet room that was so large it has since been divided into multiple rooms. David Stewart enjoyed entertaining guests in his mansion and hosted lavish, indulgent parties there so frequently that he developed gout.

After Stewart's death in 1858, the house was purchased by the Dammann family, who owned the house for so many generations that it became known as "the old Dammann mansion." The family left in 1901, and the house found itself empty for the first time, but not the last. The mansion's next owner, musician Robert Young, took a cue from David Stewart and used the spacious and opulent mansion to host "several brilliant social affairs where hundreds of guests moved about in the spacious rooms." Young would be the last owner to use the building as a home, and his time there was short-lived – he found the house too drafty and abandoned after less than 3 years.

The commercial life of the Upton mansion began in 1930 when one of Baltimore's first radio stations, WCAO, moved into the building. Extensive alterations were made to accommodate WCAO – tall twin radio towers were installed at the edge of the property, walls were torn down and rooms partitioned off to create studios and equipment rooms. The next commercial venture in Upton came in 1947, when WCAO sold it to the Baltimore Institute of Musical Arts. Founded by Dr. J. Leslie Jones, the school was originally opened with the intentions of creating a parallel program to that offered at Peabody, a renowned music school not open to African American students at the time, and at its height in the early 1950s had over 300 students. The school eventually closed in the mid-1950s after desegregation granted black students equal access to public music schools. In 1957, the Baltimore City School System moved in to the building and used it first as the special education "Upton School for Trainable Children No. 303," and then the headquarters for Baltimore City Public School's Home and Hospital Services program. Unfortunately, Upton has sat empty since BCPS left in 2006.

Upton has a rich cultural legacy that extends beyond its use as a social hot spot, a radio station, and a school. In the 1960s, the mansion was chosen as the community namesake during an urban renewal project going on in the neighborhood at the time. As a physical landmark of the neighborhood for more than a century, the Upton mansion's name was intended to serve as "the symbol of a physical and human renewal in West Baltimore."

Despite its presence on the National Register of Historic Places and the Baltimore Landmark List, the city-owned building remains empty and unmaintained in west Baltimore. In 2009, Preservation Maryland included in on a list of the state's most endangered historic places, and the building is threatened by vandalism and neglect. Today, the mansion awaits a new owner, someone willing to restore the beautiful building to its historic potential.

811 W. Lanvale Street, Baltimore, MD 21217