The Duchess of Windsor, born Bessie Wallis Warfield, moved into a three story brownstone on 212 East Biddle Street with her mother in 1908. Wallis (who didn't like going by Bessie because she said it reminded her of a cow) was only 12 years old at…
The Edgar Allan Poe statue sitting in the Gordon Plaza at University of Baltimore has a colorful past. The statue was commissioned in 1911 by the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association of Baltimore and was the last work of renowned American sculptor …
Past the brick rowhomes that have come to define Baltimore, Emmanuel Episcopal Church, established in 1854, sits on the corner of Read and Cathedral Streets. At street level, only the abrupt appearance of rubble stone from brick indicates that there…
A novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist, Gertrude Stein is remembered as a literary innovator who fearlessly experimented with language in the early twentieth century. Today, Gertrude Stein is still renowned as a magnet for those who would…
Heralded as "the greatest writer of our time" by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, John Dos Passos spent time in and out of Baltimore from his birth in 1896 and lived here from 1950 until his death in 1970. An acclaimed biographer and novelist, Dos…
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro was a true Baltimorean. As a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, Shapiro fed his literary ambitions with the city's rich cultural history, for instance, writing love poems at Fort McHenry where Francis Scott Key…
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.…
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…
Beginning in 1872, the mansion was the home of Robert Garrett, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and his wife Mary Frick Garrett. After Robert Garrett's death, Mrs. Garrett married Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs and the couple added the ballroom…
Established in 1857, the Peabody Institute is the second-oldest conservatory in the United States and a landmark at the southeast corner of the Washington Monument. Born in 1795 in Massachusetts, George Peabody lived briefly in Washington, DC, fought…
At the southwest corner of Chase and St. Paul in November 1912, the Algonquin Building Company completed a modern ten-story apartment house that neatly complements the historic 1903 Belvedere Hotel down the block. Architect William Nolting, of Wyatt…
At the northeast corner of Charles and Read Streets stands the beautiful Latrobe Apartment House. The name for the building comes from the original Latrobe House, built just after the Civil War and torn down in 1911 to make way for the new apartment…
The Washington Apartment House at the northwest corner of Charles Street and Mt. Vernon Place is a one of the finest Beaux Arts apartment houses in Baltimore. After the controversial construction of The Severn in 1895, many Mt. Vernon residents were…
"Huge and, alas! we must say ungainly," is how the Baltimore Sun described The Severn in 1907. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1972, few locals would still dismiss the grand Severn Apartment House as an intrusion on Mt. Vernon Place, but…
"My library shall be for all, rich and poor without distinction of race or color, who, when properly accredited, can take out the books if they will handle them carefully and return them." These were the words of Enoch Pratt in 1882 when he gave a…
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…
