Stories tagged "Downtown": 36
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Old St. Paul's Church
One of the thirty original Anglican parishes in Maryland, St. Paul's parish has been a fixture of Baltimore since the city's incorporation. Many influential citizens attended this church, including…
War Memorial Building: An Architectural Monument to Maryland's Military Dead
In 1919, the Governor of Maryland and the Mayor of Baltimore appointed a War Memorial Commission that initiated a nationwide architectural competition to design a memorial building dedicated to the…
Fleet-McGinley Company Building: "The Best Equipped Printing Office in Baltimore"
The former Fleet-McGinley Company building at the northwest corner of Water and South Streets was built in 1908—one of scores of new warehouses and factories built around downtown as the city rebuilt…
Pavilion Building at Hopkins Plaza
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…
Interstate 395 and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard: Cal Ripken Way and the Former Harbor City Boulevard
The little-known history of Baltimore's Interstate 395 (I-395) and Martin Luther King Boulevard, Jr. Boulevard offers a reminder of the years of contentious planning efforts that ended with the…
James M. Deems Music School: A Local Composer at 426 W. Baltimore Street
Spinning wheel manufacturers, cigar makers, tailors, hat makers, multiple banks, and a music school all occupied this site—often at the same time—going back to the early nineteenth century. During the…
Baltimore City Hall
Although it imitates the arrangement of the U.S. Capitol with a central dome and symmetrical wings, the Baltimore City Hall is covered in French architectural elements, including banded rustication,…
Baltimore Bargain House: Wholesale History at the Nancy S. Grasmick Building
One of the largest businesses on the West Side in the early twentieth century the Baltimore Bargain House—a mail-order wholesale business that employed over a thousand people and earned profits in the…
Battle Monument
Construction on the Battle Monument began on September 12, 1815, a year to the day after Baltimore soundly defeated the British in the War of 1812, and the monument endures as a commemoration of the…
Peale Museum
On August 15, 1814, almost exactly one month before the Battle of Baltimore and the bombing of Ft. McHenry in the War of 1812, Rembrandt Peale opened "Peale's Baltimore Museum and Gallery of…
Baltimore Arena
In 1961, the cornerstone of the Baltimore Civic Center (as it was then called) was laid, enclosing a time capsule with notes from President John F. Kennedy, Maryland Governor Millard Tawes, and…
Munsey Building: Former Home to the Baltimore News and the Equitable Trust Company
The Munsey Building was erected by and named after the publisher, Frank Munsey, who had purchased the Baltimore News to add to his publishing empire. Though he wanted the paper, he did not like the…
Gayety Theater: A Venerable Keystone of "The Block"
Built in the aftermath of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, the Gayety Theatre opened on February 5, 1906—making this building the oldest remaining burlesque theater in Baltimore. While the theatre…
Pennsylvania Railroad Company District Office Building
Built to house the Baltimore branch offices of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company following the Great Fire of 1904, this structure was an early commission of the architectural firm of Parker & Thomas…
World Trade Center
Even before it opened, the anticipation around Baltimore’s World Trade Center was unmistakable. “It promises to be the handsomest building built so far in the redevelopment area, a graceful symbol for…
The National Aquarium
How the National Aquarium came to be in Baltimore is the story of three different aquariums that, over time, became one.
Our story begins in the middle. In the 1970s, Baltimore mayor William…
American Building
The American Building was home to Baltimore News-American, a newspaper that traces its lineage back to 1773.
Vickers Building
The Vickers Building represents a shift in downtown Baltimore architectural design that occurred directly after the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 and is one of the largest buildings to utilize brick as…
Garrett Building
Robert Garrett was the original owner of the thirteen-story Garrett Building. Among other things, Garrett was a banker, Olympian, collector of medieval manuscripts, and a leader in the development of…
Zion Lutheran Church
The Zion Lutheran Church is a piece of German-American history that dates back to 1755. Originally known as the German Lutheran Reformed Church, it served Lutheran immigrants coming from Germany. The…
Furness House
A slice of English architecture, the Furness House was built in 1917 by architect Edward H. Glidden. Glidden also designed the Washington Place Apartments in Mount Vernon and the Marlboro Apartments…
Dashiell Hammett and the Continental Trust Company Building
Dashiell Hammett found inspiration for his great detective novels like "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" by working at the Pinkerton Detective Agency in what was then known as the Continental…
G. Krug & Son Ironworks and Museum: America's Oldest Operating Ironworks
For more than 200 years artisans here have hammered out practical and ornamental ironwork that still graces local landmarks as Otterbein Methodist Church, the Basilica of the Assumption, Baltimore's…
Hutzler's
"If you wanted the good stuff, you went to Hutzler's," said Governor William Donald Schaefer and for generations of Baltimoreans, Hutzler's represented the height of downtown shopping, simply the…
Baltimore Equitable Society
First established in 1847 by a group of prominent businessmen, the Eutaw Savings Bank spent its first decade operating out of the Eutaw House Hotel located on the same site as the Hippodrome Theater.…
Bromo Seltzer Tower
While few remember the slogan of the Emerson Bromo-Seltzer Company—"If you keep late hours for Society's sake Bromo-Seltzer will cure that headache"—the iconic Bromo-Seltzer Tower has been a Baltimore…
Five and Dimes on Lexington Street: McCrory's, Kirby-Woolworth, and Schulte United
In contrast to the high-end shopping at Stewart's or Hochschild-Kohn's on Howard Street, West Lexington Street offered goods of all kinds at affordable prices thanks to a row of five-and-tens from…
Stewart's
When Samuel Posner moved his successful dry goods business to the corner of Lexington and Howard, architect Charles E. Cassell's gorgeous and ornate white Renaissance Revival building—complete with…
The Baltimore General Dispensary
Up near the top of this handsome Neoclassical brick building at the corner of Fayette and Paca Streets is a stone entablature reading "1801 Baltimore General Dispensary 1911"—a visible reminder of…
Little Joe's
Long before places like Sports Authority or Dick's Sporting Goods opened their doors, Little Joe's on the northwest corner of Howard and Baltimore was selling everything from camping equipment and…