• The Basilica of the Assumption
• The Maryland Historical Society
• The Peabody Institute
• The Enoch Pratt Free Library
• The Walters Art Gallery, and
• Center Stage

In 1789, Father John Carroll (cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of Maryland's signers of the Declaration of Independence) was named by Pope Pius VI as the first bishop of the Roman Catholic Church in America, and Baltimore became the first Catholic Diocese in the United States. In 1805, when Bishop Carroll was planning the first Cathedral to be built in this country, he sought the best architect available, Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Latrobe, an Englishman schooled in Germany who had immigrated to America in 1795, had recently been appointed Architect of the U.S. Capitol by Thomas Jefferson. Latrobe gave the Bishop two designs, one Gothic and the other classical. Bishop Carroll chose the classical design, and the result has been hailed by generations of architectural scholars including Nikolaus Pevsner, who called it "North America's most beautiful church."

The cornerstone of the Cathedral was laid in 1806 but because of various problems and delays (including the War of 1812), the main part of the church was not completed until 1818. The structure was consecrated in 1821 with Archbishop Ambrose Marechal presiding. Although Latrobe's original design for the Cathedral had included a porch, that was not added until 1863, long after the architect's death. Latrobe's son, John H. B. Latrobe, a Baltimore lawyer and amateur architect who had studied under his father, is believed to have overseen the construction of the portico. The eastern end of the church was lengthened as a result of alterations in 1879 and 1890, attributed to architects J. R. Niernsee and E. Francis Baldwin, respectively. Latrobe's design included small rounded domes on the front belfry towers; the present "onion domes" were added at some date after 1821.

The interior of the church has also been praised highly by architecture critics, who have applauded both Latrobe's clean proportions and simplicity of design, which have combined to create, in the words of Latrobe's biographer, Talbot Hamlin, "one of America's truly distinquished interiors." Pope Pius XI elevated the Cathedral to a minor basilica in 1937, and consequently, the papal umbrella is displayed to the right of the altar and the papal bell to the left. In the crypt beneath the archepiscopal throne lie buried a number of prelates, including Archbishop Carroll (he was elevated to Archbishop in 1808), James Cardinal Gibbons (only the second American cardinal), and Lawrence Cardinal Sheehan.

This great church today is the center of a busy urban parish. For more information about the Basilica, its services and other parish activities, follow this link to the web site of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

In January 1844, 28 leading citizens of the state (including John H. B. Latrobe, prominent Baltimore lawyer and son of the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe) established the Maryland Historical Society. The Society initially met in the rooms of the Maryland Colonization Society, but in 1848, it moved its headquarters to the newly-built Athenaeum Building at the corner of Saratoga and St. Paul streets, where it shared ownership and occupancy of the structure with the Baltimore Library Company and rented space to the Mercantile Library Association. When the Baltimore Library Company ceased operations in 1852, its books and partial ownership of the building were transferred to the Society. Outgrowing this space by the early 1900s, the Society found a benefactress in Mrs. H. Irvine Keyser, who purchased the former residence of Enoch Pratt at 201 West Monument Street, had it remodeled for museum use including the addition of a fire-resistant art gallery and library wing, and presented it to the Society in February 1919 as a memorial to her husband. Built in 1847 and standing in the shadow of the Washington Monument on the outskirts of Mount Vernon Place, the Keyser Memorial Building became the permanent headquarters of the Society.

The Pratt House serves as a central hinge in the Society's complex at the corner of Park Avenue and Monument Street. To the west of the Pratt House on Monument Street is the Thomas and Hugg Memorial Building, opened in 1967. Behind and to the south of the Pratt House on Park Avenue is the renovated Art Deco-style Greyhound Bus Garage, which the Society transformed into additional gallery and storage space and opened as the Heritage Gallery in May 1997.

The Society's activities focus on its museum and library, and it supports an active publication program. The museum exhibits fine examples of Baltimore and Annapolis furniture, silver, china, clocks, portraits, photographs, quilts and textiles. Its permanent displays include the Radcliffe Maritime Museum (ship models, duck decoys), the Civil War exhibit (including uniforms from both sides, as Baltimore loyalties were badly divided), and Francis Scott Key's original manuscript of the Star Spangled Banner, written after he witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British on September 13 and 14, 1814. The Society's library holds a fine collection of bound volumes, pamphlets, newspapers (including almost all Baltimore newspapers from 1773 onward), prints, maps, architectural drawings, sheet music and broadsides, and its manuscript collection offers not only the papers of the Lords Baltimore and Carroll families (as well as other prominent Maryland families), but also a recent acquisition of materials from Baltimore jazz great Eubie Blake. For a more in-depth look at the institution, its holdings and its many and varied programs, visit the Maryland Historical Society at its web site.

George Peabody was born in Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts, in 1795 to parents of humble means. After receiving minimal formal education, Peabody began his career as an apprentice in a grocery store in Salem, Massachusetts. After a brief stint working with his brother in a draper's shop in Newburyport, Peabody journeyed south to join his uncle who was a merchant in Georgetown, D.C.

Peabody enlisted in the army during the War of 1812, and it was there he met Baltimore merchant Elisha Riggs. After the war, Riggs and Peabody moved to Baltimore and set up a dry goods wholesale business in 1815 under the firm name of Riggs, Peabody and Company. The company flourished, in large part because of Peabody's energy and fine business sense, and opened branch offices in Philadelphia and New York. In 1829, the firm name changed to Peabody, Riggs and Co., and in 1830s, when Riggs retired and Peabody became senior partner, the firm was one of the largest and most prosperous mercantile firms in the country.

Peabody built the base of his fortune in Baltimore. By the late 1830s, however, he had moved beyond mercantile interests to become a financier, and in 1836 he decided to move to London, then the center of the financial world. Later, when he began to dispense his great wealth worldwide in numerous philanthropic gifts during the 1850s, he remembered with fondness his 20 years in Baltimore and the many lasting friendships he had made in the city.

In February 1857, Peabody wrote to his friends and other leading citizens in Baltimore with a startling proposal:

...I have determined, without further delay, to establish and endow an Institute in this city, which I hope, may become useful towards the improvement of the moral and intellectual culture of the inhabitants of Baltimore, and collaterally to those of the State; and also, towards the enlargement and diffusion of a taste for the Fine Arts.

In his letter, Peabody outlined the elements of the institute he proposed--a library, a scholarly lecture series, an academy of music and an art gallery--and eventually gave $1.4 million to endow it. The Baltimore of 1857 was a thriving commercial center but at the same time culturally bereft, and Peabody sought to remedy this sad situation with one stroke.

The institute opened its doors in 1866, and the new library was dedicated in 1878. The lecture series was initially well received, but ceased when Johns Hopkins University became well established; the art gallery was eventually superseded by the magnificent Walters collection. The conservatory of music, however, became one of the leading conservatories in the country, and the library, although surpassed in size by the libraries of Johns Hopkins and Enoch Pratt, remained a scholar's treasure. It was also, undoubtedly, Peabody's tremendous gift that inspired those who came after him--notably, Enoch Pratt, Johns Hopkins and Henry Walters--to give generously to the city and people of Baltimore.

Today the Peabody Conservatory of Music and Library are departments of the Johns Hopkins University. Conservatory graduates hold positions of prominence throughout this country and the world as teachers, vocalists and instrumentalists with the foremost institutions and professional musical organizations. Faculty and graduates perform regularly with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Baltimore Opera Company, as well as many other musical organizations in the area. For a brief look at the architecture of the Institute's main building, see the Architectural and Historical Highlights page of this web site. For a virtual tour of the Peabody campus and to find out more about the Institute's programs, please visit the Peabody Institute web address.

Like George Peabody, Enoch Pratt came from Massachusetts and grew up there in modest circumstances. Born in 1808, he attended public schools and the local Bridgewater Academy. With experience working in his father's sawmill and general store, Pratt set out at the age of 15 for Boston, where he found a position as a clerk in a wholesale hardware store that he held for six years. In 1831, he moved to Baltimore and established a company for the sale of nails, horseshoes and muleshoes, which were manufactured in New England towns, shipped in wagons to Boston, Hartford and New Haven, and from those cities by rail and boat to Baltimore.

By 1850, Pratt had accumulated a comfortable fortune and had built the handsome four-story house on the corner of Park and Monument streets which now serves as the home of the Maryland Historical Society. As a New Englander and Unitarian, Pratt was a staunch Union man and advocate of the abolition of slavery, both of which were unpopular opinions to hold in Baltimore in the years leading up to the Civil War. Fortunately for him, Federal troops stationed on Federal Hill in Baltimore with their heavy guns aimed at the city kept Baltimore and Maryland within the Union fold during the war. Not entirely coincidentally, Pratt's hardware business greatly expanded during the war, enabling him to branch out; he invested in transportation, banking and fire insurance enterprises and became one of the city's leading businessmen and financiers.

In 1881, Pratt began building a large structure on Mulberry Street that became the object of much public speculation about its purpose. Finally, Pratt revealed that the structure was to be a library, and made the City of Baltimore an offer it could not refuse: he offered to donate the building (valued at $250,000) and $50,000 to be used in the erection of four branches, plus $833,333.33 in cash in return for the City's promise to create an annuity of $50,000 for the perpetual support of the institution. Pratt further stipulated that his library "shall be open 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." The city quickly accepted this proposition, and the new library opened on January 5, 1886, the first public library system in the United States.

As the rather forbidding architectural style of the original 1880s building passed out of fashion and the library's collection grew, it became apparent that a new building would be required to serve the public most effectively. Hence in 1933, the original central library was demolished and the present block-long building was constructed. Then Chief Librarian Joseph Wheeler and architect Clyde M. Fritz broke with the tradition of building public libraries with monumental entrances at the top of long flights of stairs, and instead brought the library down to the street level and the patrons. In addition, Fritz copied the department-store display window concept, allowing for a row of such windows running the length of the block to be filled with books to lure passers-by inside. This design has since been imitated by library systems in several other cities.

The interior of the central building reflects its era, resplendent with marble, bronze and rich, carved wood, with a skylight in the Great Court just past the main lobby. Full-length oil portraits of all six of the 17th and 18th century Lords Baltimore hang on the walls. The ceiling of the Reference Room is moulded and painted in intricate designs, based on a ceiling in the Vatican. It is an impressive temple to books and learning.

Today the Pratt Library system consists of the central building and 26 branches throughout the city. Although squeezed by declining budgets and increasing costs, the library has forged ahead, especially in the electronic realm, in a continuing effort to reach out to the public. Select this link to explore the rich collection and many services offered by the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

Over the course of a 70 year period, the father-son combination of William and Henry Walters amassed one of the greatest private art collections in the world. Upon his death in 1931, Henry Walters bequeathed the more than 25,000 works of art and the gallery he had built on South Washington Place to display them, plus $2 million for its maintenance, to the city and people of Baltimore.

William Walters was born in Pennsylvania in 1820 and came to Baltimore in 1841, where he immediately became involved in commission trading. He began building his fortune via his directorship of the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad and a company he formed that dealt in foreign and domestic liquor. In time he saw the need for a fast freight service to carry perishable fruits and vegetables from the growing areas of the South to Northern markets in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. With a few friends, Walters began to buy up small bankrupt railroad lines and consolidate them.

Possibly because his business interests had acquainted him with many Southerners, William Walters strongly sympathized with the Confederate cause and chose to leave the United States with his family after Federal troops occupied Baltimore in 1861. From 1861 to 1865, he lived in Paris, where he became familiar with contemporary French artists and began buying their works, including paintings by Corot, Delacroix and Gerome, and the statuary of Antoine-Louis Barye. After the Civil War ended, Walters returned to Baltimore and concentrated on the reconstruction and consolidation of railroads in the South, creating the system that became the Atlantic Coast Line.

Henry Walters, born in 1848, inherited both his father's genius for railroading and his love of art. After the elder Walters' death in 1894, his son joined forces with J. P. Morgan to buy up more railroad and steamship lines and extend the Atlantic Coast Line. In the process, Walters doubled the fortune that had been left to him and was reputed to be the wealthiest man south of the Mason and Dixon Line. He also greatly enlarged the collection begun by his father; it was estimated that from the time of his father's dealth in 1894 until his own death in 1931, Henry Walters spent $1 million per year on works of art. In addition to the painting and sculpture favored by the elder Walters, Henry Walters collected illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, armor, textiles, the works of goldsmiths and silversmiths and a priceless group of ivories, enamels and liturgical objects of the Byzantine and early Christian period, resulting in an overall collection of enormous range.

Given the pace and extent of his collecting, even the museum gallery built by Henry Walters in 1909 could display only a fraction of the collection. In 1974, the Walters Art Gallery opened a modern wing on Centre Street behind and to the west of the original gallery, which tripled the exhibition space. In 1991, Hackerman House (formerly the Thomas-Jencks-Gladding House) opened at 1 West Mount Vernon Place, devoted to the Walters' Asian art collection. Please see the Architectural and Historical Highlights page of this web site for additional detail about the original gallery and Hackerman House. For more information about the Walters collection, museum hours and tours, please see the Walters Art Gallery page of the Museum Tours web site.

In his memoirs, Those Years: Recollections of a Baltimore Newspaperman, R. H. Gardner remarked that the biggest problem he encountered in covering Baltimore theater for the Baltimore Sun in the mid-1950s was "there wasn't any." In fact, when Center Stage opened in 1963, it was the only professional theater in Baltimore until the Morris Mechanic Theatre opened as a road house in 1967.

In 1965, the company moved from its original home into a newly renovated theater on North Avenue in Baltimore. Just one year later, Peter Culman joined the company as its managing director. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Center Stage's subscriber lists and annual budgets both grew steadily, and the company's future seemed bright.

On the morning of January 10, 1974, just after the theater had opened a well-received production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Baltimoreans awoke to a Sun front page headline blaring, "Fire wrecks Center Stage theater." Arsonists, apparently drunk and aiming for the restaurant next door to the theater from which they had been fired, instead set fire to the Center Stage building, completely destroying the theater. In the early morning hours as the fire still smouldered, a downcast Culman had told a newspaper reporter, "This could put us out of business." But an outpouring of support from both the City of Baltimore and the theater-going community allowed Center Stage to continue its "Virginia Woolf" run without missing a single performance. In the best theater tradition, the troupe hastily assembled costumes, props and sets and performed the play in a temporary theater at the Baltimore Museum of Art that evening. The next morning, the Sun's front page story read, "Despite fire, Center Stage goes on."

The search for a new home began immediately, and the company was offered the old Loyola College and Preparatory School building on Calvert Street. This block-long building included an 1856 church at the north end of the block (still in use), and the southern addition of 1899 by New York architects James W. O'Connor and James F. Delaney which had served as the school and had since been abandoned. Because the buildings were located in an urban renewal area, the City of Baltimore condemned them and paid the Jesuits $200,000 in condemnation fees. The Jesuits, in turn, donated the fees to Center Stage and sold the buildings to the company for $5.00. Center Stage then raised $1.8 million through loans, grants from such agencies as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation, and private gifts to renovate the building, a task undertaken by architect James Grieves and theater consultant Roger Morgan. The new complex, including a 541-seat theatre, shops and offices, opened December 9, 1975. The renovation won an American Institute of Architects National Merit Award in 1975 for adaptive re-use of an existing structure.

Today, Center Stage is the envy of many regional theaters for its solid management, its artistic agenda mixing innovative presentations of traditional theater and experimental productions, and its commitment to supporting and developing the work of new playwrights. With Peter Culman still at the helm, the company's subscriber list continues to grow, and the theater continues to search for new ways to bring high quality theater to the public. For more information about the State Theater of Maryland, visit the Center Stage web site.