Canterbury Hall Apartments

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Canterbury Hall Apartments, also known as Canterbury Hall, sits at 100 W. 39th Street, and is part of the Tuscany-Canterbury Historic District. It was the first apartment building in Tuscany-Canterbury. Its architecture is in the late Tudor Gothic style. George Morris, a well-known real estate developer who sold racially-restricted houses in the 1910s and 1920s, and later was criticized for his anti-Jewish business policies, built the apartment house. Canterbury Hall is not to be confused with a building of the same name in Washington, D.C.

Canterbury Hall was first conceived of as “Haddon Hall.” The landwas sold by the University Parkway Company to a developer, the Fireproof Apartment Company, prior to its construction. The outside consists of brick with accents of stucco, and a half-timbered English style with oak beams. With fifteen apartments spread across three stories, each apartment has gas fireplaces, hardwood floors, glass doorknobs, and other amenities like porches. Each apartment is separated by fireproof walls that are eighteen-inches thick. At the time that the apartment house was built, Canterbury Hall only rented to white people.

Canterbury Hall was designed by renowned architects, Clyde Nelson Friz and Edward Hughes Glidden, as part of their Glidden & Friz partnership. The apartment building opened in 1912, the same year that Tudor Arms Apartments (under the name of Tudor Hall) opened on University Parkway. Unlike Tudor Arms, Canterbury Hall has no elevator.

Over the years, the apartment house became the home of professional chemists, history and English teachers, Goucher College alumni, U.S. military captains (like Henry C. Evans), medical researchers (Paul Galpin Shipley), naval commanders (Frederick J. Bell), engineers, inventors, school commissioners, tutors, and bank executives. Even members of the Glidden family, such as Glidden himself, lived there. It was also a place for cocktail parties, informal luncheons, and weddings.

Although there have been renovations and changes over the years, Canterbury Hall remains intact to this day, serving as a residence for some, and a beautiful, grand, and historic landmark for others.