Gothic Episcopal Architecture on Park Avenue

The first true brownstone building in Baltimore, today’s Grace & St. Peter’s Church opened its doors in 1852 as Grace Church on Park Avenue in Mount Vernon. Architecturally, it was the first church built of stone in the city and with stained glass and floor tiles imported from England, the majestic interior of this Gothic Episcopal church, designed by architect J. Crawford Neilson, harkens directly back to its Anglican origins.

In 1912, Grace Church combined with St. Peter’s, then on the edge of today’s Bolton Hill neighborhood, merging high-church and low-church traditions in a single congregation. By the 1920s, what once was a place of worship mainly for prominent Baltimore families, including the nearby Garrett family of B&O Railroad fortune, had begun to change. The church at that time created a church school for Chinese immigrants who worshiped alongside many African American families who had moved to the neighborhood.

Today, the church embraces both Anglican and Western Catholic traditions and its Park Avenue complex includes a magnificent rectory and houses the Wilkes School for children per-kindergarten through fifth grade. Please

707 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

The Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC) collects, preserves, and interprets the history, art, and culture of Maryland. Originally founded as the Maryland Historical Society in 1844, MCHC inspires critical thinking, creativity, and community by exploring multiple perspectives and sharing national stories through the lens of Maryland.

As the oldest continuously operating nonprofit cultural institution in the state, MCHC houses a collection of 7 million books, documents, manuscripts, and photographs, and 350,000 objects in its museum and library located in Baltimore. MCHC also serves as a leading center of Maryland history education for people of all ages.

In January 1844, a group of Maryland residents gathered in the offices of the Maryland Colonization Society at the Baltimore City Post Office and established the Maryland Historical Society. They proposed collecting the "remnants of the state’s history" and preserving their heritage through research, writing, and publications. By the end of the first year, the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) had 150 members. The group quickly outgrew their rooms at the post office and their fireproof safe at the Franklin Street Bank could not hold the growing number of documents and artifacts donated to the institution.

The new committee started work on a grand home for Baltimore’s new cultural institution, including space for an art gallery. They hired Robert Carey Long, Jr., who designed the Athenaeum, a four-story "Italian palazzo" style building with a unique feature for the preservation-minded historical society: fireproof closets.

Membership and donations increased during the 1850s after the society settled in the Athenaeum. Visitors came out for art exhibitions and donated paintings and statues to the society collections. Baltimore philanthropist, George Peabody donated to support the creation of an index of Maryland records in the London Public Record Office and, in 1867, established the society’s first publications fund. Additionally, the MdHS continued its work protecting state history and late in the nineteenth century the state transferred government records into their care.

Like many historical societies around the country, the Maryland Historical Society saw major changes around the turn of the century. Education became an important part of the group’s mission in many historical societies and women gained full membership. Annie Leakin Sioussat and Lucy Harwood Harrison were among the first female members of the Maryland Historical Society and spent decades volunteering their time and services. In 1906, the MdHS launched the Maryland Historical Magazine, a quarterly journal featuring new research and writing on Maryland history.

MdHS moved into its current home at 201 West Monument Street in 1919 soon after the end of World War I. The new building, the former residence of Baltimore philanthropist Enoch Pratt with a state-of-the-art fireproof addition, came as a gift from Mary Washington Keyser, whose husband, H. Irvine Keyser, had been an active member of the society for forty-three years.

As their predecessors had done after the Civil War, MdHS leaders started an effort to collect "the relics" of the recent Great War. In 1920, the state legislature formed a committee including former governor and historical society president Edwin Warfield. This group comprised the Historical Division of the state’s War Records Commission and served as the "official organ" of the federal government in collecting and compiling the military records of those Marylanders who served in World War I. The society initiated a similar agreement during World War II.

The society began expanding the Monument Street facility in 1953 and, in 1968, added the Thomas and Hugg building named after William and John Thomas. Designed by a local firm, Meyer, Ayers & Saint, the new building includes exhibition space, an auditorium, work rooms, storage space, and "to supplement the present Confederate Room--a Civil War Union Room." In 1981, the society added the France-Merrick Wing to the Thomas and Hugg Building.

Perhaps no other object in the holdings of the Maryland Historical Society attracts more visitors than the original manuscript of Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner. In 1953, Mrs. Thomas C. Jenkins purchased the document from the Walters Art Gallery for $26,400, the same price the gallery had paid for it in 1933 at a New York auction. Jenkins provided additional funding for its display in a carved marble niche. She had previously donated Key family portraits and a room for their display. One hundred forty years after Key penned his famous verse, state and local dignitaries gathered to rededicate this American icon on September 14, 1954.

A newly renovated and expanded Maryland Historical Society opened in November 2003, amidst much fanfare and publicity. The facility now includes the Beard Pavilion and the Carey Center for Maryland Life which features nearly generous exhibition space for museum and library exhibitions, and new storage space for museum collections. In keeping with the founders’ passion for telling Maryland’s story, the society’s leadership, staff, and volunteers carry out today’s mission, securing the institution’s respected place among contemporary cultural organizations. As it has for the past 164 years, the Maryland Historical Society remains the one of the premier institutions for Maryland history.

In 2020, the Maryland Historical Society changed its name to the Maryland Center for History and Culture.

“A History of the Maryland Historical Society, 1844–2000,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 101 (2006).

610 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

A Bar for the "Friends of Dorothy"

Leon's is Baltimore's oldest continuously operating gay bar. In the 1890s, the bar was called Georgia's Tap Room. The bar’s current name comes from Leon Lampe, who owned the bar during the 1930s. During Prohibition, the bar survived as a speakeasy and, after WWII, became a hangout for beatniks and artists with a mix of gay and straight patrons. Since 1957, Leon’s has operated as a gay bar.

In its early days as a gay bar, patrons had to say a password before they were let in the door: “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” A common identifier among gay men at that time, the phrase is a reference to Dorothy Gale of the Wizard of Oz—reportedly for Dorothy's acceptance of her friends despite their unusual identities.

870 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

In 1942, after taking a powerful loss during the early years of the Great Depression, the Hochschild Kohn & Co. Department Store was finally ready to expand. An anchor for this planned growth was their brand-new warehouse at 520 Park Avenue that housed all of the sundry items that the department store offered.

Founded in 1897 by Max Hochschild and brothers Benno and Louis Kohn, Hochschild Kohn was the first of Baltimore’s big department stores to expand beyond the downtown shopping district of Howard and Lexington Streets. The company established its first suburban store in Edmondson Village (1947), then another on York Road and E. Belvedere Avenue (1948). It eventually had stores in Towson, Harford Mall, and beyond.

The warehouse on Park Avenue is a massive building of reinforced concrete. More impressive than the building’s size is that it got built at all. In 1942, the United States had just entered World War II and the federal government strictly rationed building materials, including the concrete and steel the building needed. Company records indicate that it took vice president Walter Sondheim (who went on to lead the integration of Baltimore’s school system after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 among many other civic contributions) pleading with the U.S. War Department that the building justified an allocation of construction materials as it would serve as a distribution center. Sondheim’s persuasion worked, and the building opened and operated as a warehouse and furniture showroom until 1983.

In 1983, the Bank of Baltimore purchased the building and converted it into offices. In 2014, the building underwent another conversion when Marks, Thomas Architects, Kinsley Construction, and The Time Group transformed the building into 171 apartment units with commercial space on the ground floor.

Today, the one-time furniture showroom and department store warehouse that defied war time rationing is now a hub of activity at the edge of the Mount Vernon neighborhood.

520 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

The Hotel Brexton was built in 1881 for Samuel Wyman, a wealthy Baltimore merchant. The six-story Brexton was built as a residential hotel in the Queen Anne Style, with Baltimore pressed brick and Scotch sandstone. Noted architect Charles Cassell designed the building. Cassell was a founding member of the Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the designer of the Stafford Hotel on Mount Vernon Place, Stewart's Department Store on Howard Street, and the First Church of Christ Scientist on University Parkway.

This beautiful building sat vacant for over two decades before RWN Development (and local architect Donald Kann) completed a top-to-bottom restoration in 2010. The work included replacement of over two hundred windows that had rotted or disappeared and the restoration of the original spiral stair.

The Hotel now has twenty-nine rooms (including a "Wallis Warfield Simpson" suite, named after the hotel's most famous occupant) and is part of the Historic Hotels of America network.

868 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

In August 1933, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved with his family to 1307 Park Avenue. Fitzgerald had been forced out of his previous home in Towson due to a house fire attributed to his mentally ill wife, Zelda. Their rowhouse, a ten minute walk from the monument of Fitzgerald's famous distant-cousin, Francis Scott Key, quickly became a place of turmoil, and was the last place where he and Zelda lived together.

Fitzgerald couldn't get back on his feet at his new home. His first published novel in ten years, "Tender Is the Night," tanked after its April 1934 release, selling only 13,000 copies to mixed reviews, and left Fitzgerald under immense financial strain. Everyone in the house was affected. Zelda and Fitzgerald's daughter, Francis Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, acted as a go-between for their landlord, forced to constantly ask her father for rent money.

Zelda, who spent her weekdays hospitalized at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, had a brief period of wellness during the first few months at 1307 Park Avenue and was allowed to go home and take painting classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. However, her mental illness soon worsened and she was moved to the expensive Craig House sanitarium in New York, only to return to Sheppard Pratt in May 1934 in worse shape than ever.

While Zelda was in the hospital, Fitzgerald's dependency on alcohol grew. Writer H.L. Mencken, a friend of Fitzgerald who lived nearby in Mt. Vernon at the time, wrote in his journal in 1934: "The case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is a boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance."

Along with crippling alcoholism, Fitzgerald suffered insomnia and night terrors. He also became increasingly political, reading Marx and befriending Marxist literary critic, V.F. Calverton, who frequented the Fitzgerald home and who Zelda referred to as the "community communist."

After a turbulent two years, Fitzgerald and Scottie moved out of their rowhouse at 1307 Park Avenue into the Cambridge Arms Apartments across from Johns Hopkins University where Fitzgerald's career continued to worsen. His controversial three-part essay in Esquire, known as "The Crack Up," sullied his reputation in the eyes of his editor and agent.

In April 1936, Fitzgerald transferred Zelda to Highland Hospital in North Carolina and gave up his Cambridge Arms apartment the following summer due to rent trouble. After a brief stint at the Stafford Hotel in Mt. Vernon, he moved to Hollywood to write movies and became further estranged from his wife; she living in mental hospitals on the East Coast, and he living with his lover Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist, in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald's Bolton Hill home at 1307 Park Avenue is now dedicated with a blue plaque in his honor, and remains a private residence.

Rudacille, Deborah.  Baltimore Style Magazine.19. Dec. 2009

1307 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

Designed by early Baltimore architect Robert Cary Long in 1845, the St. Alphonsus Church has been called "the German cathedral" for its Southern German neo-Gothic style. The church was originally established with a large German congregation and the attached rectory functioned as provincial headquarters for the Redemptorist Fathers and Brothers.

By 1917, the German congregation had largely left the neighborhoods around the church and the building was acquired by the Roman Catholic Lithuanian Parish of Saint John the Baptist. The new congregation took on the historic name of the church and reopened the school in St. Alphonsus Hall, which had been established in l847.

114 W. Saratoga Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

First Female Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Born in Central City, Colorado, on November 9, 1871, Florence Rena Sabin, M.D. (1871-1953) was the youngest daughter of a mining engineer. After her mother's death from sepsis, Florence and her sister moved first to Chicago, then to stay with her paternal grandparents in Vermont.

She earned a bachelor's degree in 1893 from Smith College, then went to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she became the first female graduate. She returned to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine a few years later on a research fellowship. She started teaching in the Department of Anatomy in 1902, with a promotion to associate professor in 1905 and finally full professor of embryology and histology in 1917, becoming the first female full professor at the college.

She introduced techniques for staining living cells and played an important role in the reform of Colorado's health laws. Her statue still stands in the U.S. Capitol.

1325 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

Dedicated on December 4, 1870, Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church stands as a monument both to George Brown, whose wife Isabella McLanahan Brown supported the construction of the church in his memory, and the generations of Baltimoreans who have worshipped, performed music, and more in this treasured architectural landmark. While many early congregations left Bolton Hill, Brown Memorial has endured and invested in the preservation of the historic church with a $1.8 million restoration from 2001 to 2003.

George Brown was the son of investment firm founder Alexander Brown, a businessman and civic leader who according to an 1873 account by local historian George Washington Howard, "regarded religion as preeminent above all other things and loved his church with all the ardor of his noble nature." After his death in 1859, his wife Isabella McLanahan Brown made a gift of $150,000 to construct and furnish the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church.

The architects were Nathaniel Henry Hutton and John Murdoch, who were among the 18 charter members of the Baltimore Chapter of the AIA. They created a Gothic Revival masterpiece with numerous stained glass windows by artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Murdoch was both a neighbor to the church, living at 1527 Bolton Street, and his funeral was held at the church after his death in 1923.

1316 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

The Brewers Exchange, a gorgeous, three story terra cotta Renaissance Revival building designed by noted local architect Joseph Evans Sperry (who designed the Bromo Seltzer Tower, as well as many other Baltimore buildings) that stands at the corner of Park Avenue and Fayette Streets, was built in 1895 by the ale and beer brewers guild of Baltimore and constructed to serve as a forum for negotiating securities and commodities associated with the local brewing industry.

This handsome building, which features a host of elaborate decorative touches, including two-story half-round Ionic pilasters, cartouches, pediments, window surrounds, and a garland frieze. stands as a monument to the efforts of local Maryland brewers, many of whom were German immigrants who brought brewing techniques and technology with them across the Atlantic and whose hard work established Baltimore as the national center for their trade. Though the exchange only occupied this building for a decade, the still visible "BH" etched in the building's façade serves as a solid reminder of the prominent role brewing had in the economy and culture of Baltimore in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

20 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

In 1761, a group of Scots-Irish "Dissenters" (opponents of the Church of England) came to Baltimore Towne from Pennsylvania to escape the French and Indian War. They founded the First Presbyterian Church, appropriately named as it really was the first, and remains the oldest, Presbyterian church in the city. The founding minister, Rev. Patrick Allison (1740 – 1802), was a Chaplain to the Continental Congress and was a personal friend of George Washington.

After locating in several places downtown, the congregation moved to Mount Vernon and built the current church between 1854 and 1859. With its New Brunswick freestone exterior and 273-foot tall steeple (still the tallest in the city), this Gothic Revival church dominates Midtown Baltimore.

Construction started in 1854 under the supervision of architect Nathan G. Starkweather, a native of Oxford, England, and finished by his assistant Edmund G. Lind. Famed bridge engineer Wendell Bollman and the Patapsco Bridge and Iron Works of Baltimore produced the structural cast iron used throughout the church including the spire, which was not added until 1873.

The church is a notable example of Gothic Revival architecture and a landmark in the City of Baltimore. The interior boasts a triple-vaulted sanctuary with massive plaster pendants and is considered one of the finest Victorian plaster interiors in the country. To pile on to this beauty, the church has many windows from Tiffany Studios, as well as a host of other companies from England, Italy, New York and Boston. In 2009, the church embarked on an extensive restoration plan under the guidance of Murphy and Dittenhafer architects.

In 1973, the First Presbyterian Church united with the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church to form The First and Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, and in 2012 the congregation voted to change it to the simpler First & Franklin Presbyterian Church.

210 W. Madison Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Enoch Pratt was a wealthy Baltimore merchant and major benefactor of many Baltimore institutions, including the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, the Sheppard Pratt Hospital, and of course the Enoch Pratt Free Library. He began to build a mansion for himself and his wife at Monument Street and Park Avenue in 1844. Coincidentally, this is the same year that the Maryland Historical Society was founded, an institution that years later would acquire the building for its collections.

Enoch Pratt was a prosperous hardware merchant, railway and steamship owner, and banker, and originally his new house was three-stories with a basement. In 1868, notable Baltimore architect Edmund G. Lind added a fourth floor, probably in order to keep Pratt in step with the "Mansard" roof trend in Victorian architecture. A new marble portico also was added at the time. The portico had been commissioned by the Clerk of the United States House of Representatives for a mansion in Washington that he ultimately could not afford to build, and Pratt gladly took it off the designers' hands and attached it to his Monument Street residence.

Pratt died in 1896 without any children. He was survived by his wife, who remained in the house until her death in 1911. Soon thereafter, Mary Ann (Washington) Keyser purchased the building for use by the Maryland Historical Society, which has owned the building since 1919.

201 W. Monument Street, Baltimore, MD 21201