First established in 1857, the Maryland Club started in a residence designed by Robert Mills on the northeast corner of Franklin and Cathedral streets and many of the Club's members lived in the area around Mount Vernon Place. At the start of the Civil War in 1861, many members of the Club sympathized with the Confederacy and Unionist members resigned, including Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, the President of the group. Eventually shut down by Union military officials in Baltimore, the building re-opened in 1864 as "Freedman's Rest," offices for the new Freedmen's Bureau and a place to offer support to any "sick, helpless and needy" former enslaved people.

The Club re-opened following the Civil War and prospered along with the economic success of Baltimore merchants and industrialists. The group purchased a vacant lot at Charles and Eager Streets, and hired architect, Josias Pennington of the firm Baldwin and Pennington, to design a new building. The new club house features heavy blocks of white marble from Baltimore County in a Romanesque style. The new Maryland Club opened on New Year's Day, 1892 and has a center of activity through the present.

1 E. Eager Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

There are few places where you can stand in the middle of a room and almost everything you see is made or decorated by Tiffany: glass, paint, finishes, etc. St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church on St. Paul Street, with its entire interior designed by the Tiffany Company of New York, is one of them.

In the 1890's, the St. Mark's congregation engaged architect Joseph Evans Sperry (who would later go on to design Baltimore's Bromo Seltzer Tower, among other notable buildings) to help them build a new church. Sperry came up with a Romanesque design that is known for its heavy stones, arched doors and windows, and short columns. Romanesque design comes from central and western Europe, where many of St. Mark's congregants also traced their lineages. To this day, an Estonian congregation called EELK Baltimore Markuse Kogudus continues to use St. Mark's for worship each month. In 1898, the church was completed and since then has been one of Baltimore's outstanding examples of Romanesque architecture.

On the inside, St. Mark's engaged the Tiffany Glass Decorating Company, under the direction of Rene de Quelen (Tiffany's head artist), to come up with a plan that was equally fitting to the grand architecture. De Quelen used a Byzantine approach, with deep colors, lots of jewels, and many mosaics. Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of Tiffany's founder and then head of the company, had studied art in Paris and had spent time in Spain and North Africa where he learned about this approach to decorating, and is thought to have helped direct de Quelen in his approach. The interior boasts Tiffany windows and Rubio marble inlaid with mother of pearl for the altar, pulpit, and lectern.

1900 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore, MD 21218