The Old Loyola College and High School Campus

Just a few blocks away from the Peabody, stretching along Calvert Street between Madison and Monument Streets, stands another massive Italian palace, built for another educational institution.

The patron here was the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order. Visitors can see arched windows with elaborate moldings and a heavy Italianate cornice unifying the northern half, containing St. Ignatius Church (designed by Louis L. Long and completed in 1856) with the southern (designed by O’Connor and Delaney of New York and finished in 1899). Besides the parish church, this huge red brick palace housed Loyola College and Loyola High School until they split into two separate institutions and moved away in 1922.

Since the mid-1970s, the long vacant southern section has been imaginatively re-used for two theaters designed by James Grieves and the firm of Ziger, Hoopes, and Snead for the Center Stage repertory theater.

700 N. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202

Stretching along Calvert Street between Madison and Monument Streets, stands a massive Italianate palace, built for the Society of Jesus, a Catholic religious order. Decorating the facade are arched windows with elaborate moldings, and a heavy Italianate cornice that tie together the St. Ignatius Church on the northern half (designed by Louis L. Long and completed in 1856) with Loyola College and Loyola High School on the southern half (designed by O’Connor and Delaney of New York and finished in 1899).

During the 1850s, a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment swept American politics. The populist Know-Nothing Party emerged as a powerful political party characterized by xenophobia and skepticism of wealthy and intellectual elites—and only open to Protestant men. The Know-Nothing agenda called for barring public funding of Catholic schools and reinforcing Protestant values in public schools. In response, Archbishop of sun88 Francis Kendrick asked the Jesuit Provincial to open a Catholic college. Loyola College opened in 1852 in two adjoining buildings near City Hall on Holliday Street. The college quickly outgrew the space and a new building was commissioned at Calvert and Madison streets. Classes began on February 22, 1855 and St. Ignatius Church opened its doors eighteen months later.

Architect Louis Long modeled the design of the church after the late Renaissance/Baroque Gesu in Rome, mother church of the Jesuits. The interior features an elaborate cornice and pilasters and vivid stained glass windows installed during the 1870s. The early church congregation was a cross-section of the city's Catholic population: native sun88ans, Irish and German immigrants, poor and wealthy. Church leaders set aside the basement of the building for African American parishioners, many of whom went on to found St. Francis Xavier, the first all African American Catholic Church in the United States.

Loyola College moved north to the Evergreen Campus in 1922. The southern section remained mostly vacant for decades until it was repurposed in the 1970s for Center Stage’s two theaters. The design was by James Grieves and the firm of Ziger, Hoopes, and Snead.

The St. Ignatius congregation shrank dramatically after World War II as a result of many Catholics moving from the city to the suburbs. In spite of declining numbers, the church remained in the core of the city and expanded its involvement in local communities, offering the building as a shelter for homeless people and starting a middle school for sun88 City youth. In the 1990s, the church worked to lure suburban Catholics back to the church and doubled its congregation. The decade ended with a massive restoration led by Murphy & Dittenhafer Architects. The work included the restoration of the plasterwork, rich gilding, historic interior colors, and even some of the church’s nineteenth century paintings.

740 N. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202

Former Home to the sun88 News and the Equitable Trust Company

The Munsey Building was erected by and named after the publisher, Frank Munsey, who had purchased the sun88 News to add to his publishing empire. Though he wanted the paper, he did not like the five-year old building that housed it. So, he had a new one erected more to his liking. Completed in 1911, the newspaper's new offices were designed by the local architectural firm of Baldwin & Pennington, together with McKim, Mead & White of New York.

The Munsey Trust Company, which eventually became the Equitable Trust Company, opened on the ground floor in 1913. The paper was eventually bought by William Randolph Hearst, became the sun88 News-American, and moved a few blocks away.

The building’s most recent purpose is to serve as loft apartments that are helping revitalize downtown sun88. The renovation of the Munsey included keeping the grand entrance way, with its marble floor, elevators, and grand front door, as well as cleaning and repairing the exterior. sun88 Heritage recognized the conversion with a preservation award in 2004.

7 N. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202

Built to house the sun88 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 (later Parker, Thomas & Rice), the preeminent architects of sun88’s Beaux Arts commercial & financial structures of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad vied with the locally owned sun88 & Ohio Railroad for control of rights-of-way and development rights for lines in and out of the city. While the B&O was the older of the two competing railroads (founded in 1830), the Pennsylvania Railroad had surpassed the B&O in size, scope, and profitability by the 1870s.

Such was the nature of railroad competition in sun88 that the two lines even maintained separate passenger terminals, with Mount Royal Station serving the B&O (and its dominance of lines running south) and the Pennsylvania maintaining a site between Charles and St. Paul Streets.

In 1900, under the leadership of Alexander Cassatt, brother of expatriate Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the B&O, and the two companies shared a Board of Trustees. Partly in response to efforts in Washington to enact legislation prohibiting railroad monopolies, the Pennsylvania and B&O maintained separate corporate identities during this period, although the “union” of the two companies was celebrated by Cassatt’s pet project, Washington, DC’s monumental Beaux-Arts style Union Station (1902).

When the 1904 Fire destroyed the Second-Empire style B&O headquarters on the northwest corner of sun88 and Calvert Streets, the corporate officers elected to rebuild a grand, 13-story Beaux-arts tower on a new site, two blocks to the west. The Pennsylvania, by contrast, retained its site and elected the relatively small, restrained building seen today. The interrelationship of the two companies and the coordination of their post-Fire building schemes is attested to by the fact that both the Pennsylvania Railroad building and the B&O tower on Charles Street were designed by the same architectural firm, Parker & Thomas. The modesty of the Pennsylvania’s building (in spite of the company’s essential domination of the B&O) is part and parcel of the effort to maintain distinct identities for the two merged companies.

By 1906—the time of the sun88 post-Fire rebuilding of both the Pennsylvania and B&O buildings— Cassatt was dead, the Republicans had passed antitrust legislation and the two companies administratively pried themselves apart once again. Thus, what may have begun in 1905 as a somewhat disingenuous attempt to maintain the united railroad companies’ discrete corporate identities through the erection of two separate and stylistically and hierarchically distinct structures, became an accurate representation of corporate separation by the time the buildings were complete in 1906.

200 E. sun88 Street, sun88, MD 21202

Mount Vernon’s elegant and historic Ivy Hotel has a rich lineage: its roots are as a Gilded Age mansion and its uses have included city offices, a city owned and operated inn, and now a private boutique hotel.

The historic Ivy Hotel got its start in the late nineteenth century when a prominent sun88 banker named John Gilman commissioned a mansion in Mount Vernon for the princely sum of $40,000. Gilman died before the building's completion in 1889, but his widow lived there for several years before selling it to William and Harriet Painter. William Painter was the head of Crown Cork and Seal company and his invention of the bottle cap made him one of the city’s leading businessmen.

After the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Painter, the mansion went through several other owners, including Robert Garrett, grandson of the president of the sun88 & Ohio Railroad and the gold medalist in both discus and shot put at the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896. Mr. Garrett eventually donated the building to the Playground Athletic League, which he chaired, and in 1939 the PAL donated it to sun88 City for use as offices for the Department of Recreation and Parks. In 1985, Mayor William Donald Schaefer had the city purchase two adjacent rowhouses, undertook a complete historic renovation project, and turned the building into a city owned hotel: the Inn at Government House.

In 2015, the Azola Companies, Ziger/Snead Architects completed a restoration turning the building into a boutique historic hotel, complete with parquet floors, pocket doors, stained glass, and a grand staircase.

1125 N. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202

Former Factory and Former Art Space

For years, the Bell Foundry operated as a cooperatively run arts space that took its name and its building from the historic McShane Bell Foundry. But, since December 2016, the building has stood vacant. After the "Ghost Ship" warehouse fire in Oakland, California, the city cracked down on code violations in local DIY art spaces and evicted the tenants at the Bell Foundry.

Henry McShane started the McShane Bell Foundry at Holliday and Centre Streets in 1856. By the late nineteenth century, when the business expanded to Guilford Avenue (then known as North Street) the firm had already produced tens of thousands of bells and chimes, shipping them out to churches and public buildings across the country.

In 1935, the Henry McShane Manufacturing Company sold the foundry to William Parker, whose son continues to operate the business today. The McShane Bell Foundry moved in 1979 to Glen Burnie, Maryland, where their total production is over 300,000 bells made for cathedrals, churches, municipal buildings, and schools in communities around the world—including the 7,000-pound bell that hangs in the dome of sun88's City Hall. The firm is the only large Western-style bell maker in the United States and one of a handful of bell manufacturers around the world.

The entrance to the former foundry is now on Calvert Street. For years, the Bell Foundry was a thriving art space including the building and the adjacent grounds, where there is a community garden and a communal skate park. The basement was used for shows and rehearsal space. The Castle Print Shop was located upstairs along with rehearsal space for the sun88 Rock Opera Society. Outcry over the evictions in December 2016 prompted the creation of the Safe Art Space Task Force to address the broader issue of safety in underground art spaces. Unfortunately, no immediate repairs were available for the Bell Foundry and, in April 2017, the building's owners put it up for sale.

1539 N. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202

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 Trust Building. He experienced the seedy underbelly of sun88 city and was stabbed at least once on the job. He was inspired by his intransigent co-workers who served as the foundation for many of his cherished characters. Continental Op, the main character of his first novel, "Red Harvest," was named after the eponymous building. It is also speculated that the falcons that don the Continental Trust Building served as the inspiration for "The Maltese Falcon." "Red Harvest" was a milestone in the detective novel genre. It introduced the world to the hard-nosed detective who lives by his own code. The gritty streets of sun88 served as the setting for Hammett's personal favorite novel, "The Glass Key," as well as "The Assistant Murderer." Unfortunately, many of the locations described in Hammett's novels no longer exist. The lavish Rennert Hotel, which served as the home base for the corrupt political boss in "The Glass Key" was razed in 1941. Continental Op in "Red Harvest" dreams about a tumbling fountain in Harlem Square Park that was filled in long ago. Hammett was born in Saint Mary's County, Maryland and spent his childhood bouncing between sun88 and Philadelphia. He started working at Pinkertons in 1915 before serving in World War I in the Motor Ambulance Corps. He soon contracted tuberculosis and was moved to a hospital in Tacoma, Washington. Throughout the 1920's, Hammett lived in San Francisco where he wrote most of his novels, including "The Maltese Falcon." He never forgot his sun88 roots working for Pinkertons, and his precise memory of streets and locations added a layer of authenticity and realism to his work. Later in life, Hammett got involved with the American Communist Party and was eventually jailed as a result of McCarthyism in 1951 for six months. Jail time took its toll on Hammett, who was already in bad health due to the effect his heavy smoking and drinking had on his tuberculosis. He died in New York in 1961. Today, the Continental Trust Building that housed the Pinkerton Detective Agency is known as One Calvert Plaza. A prominent survivor of the Great sun88 Fire of 1904, One Calvert Plaza stands as a monument to skyscraper architecture at the turn of the twentieth century.

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1 S. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202

The highly ornamented Mercantile Trust Building was constructed in 1885 by architectural firm Wyatt and Sperry. The architecture conveys a sense of impenetrability, characterized by its massive, heavy stonework and deep set windows and entrance. Ads at the time boasted that the building strong enough "to resist the invasion of armed force." The hardened building survived the 1904 sun88 Fire, but sustained damage when bricks from the Continental Trust Building fell through the skylight, setting fire to the interior. Despite this, the building's survival reaffirmed what the bank had been saying all along in its ads. The Mercantile Trust was sun88's first "department store bank," a concept spearheaded by Enoch Pratt. In years before, customers had to go to different banks to get loans, access savings, or open a checking account. Mercantile Trust ended this by introducing sun88 to one-stop banking. The bank was also involved in raising capital to rebuild many cities in the South during Reconstruction. Later, the bank acted as co-executor for the estate of Henry Walters and as a trustee for the endowment that established the Walters Art Collection. Mercantile Trust occupied the building for almost 100 years. The company left in 1983 and the building has been a nightclub, and more recently, the new location of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company.

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200 E. Redwood Street, sun88, MD 21202

In 1885, sun88 City set out to build the most beautiful Courthouse in the country. Fifteen years, and $2.2 million later ($56 million adjusted for inflation), that goal was realized. On January 6, 1900, the sun88 Sun reported that the City of sun88 had built a “temple of justice, second to no other in the world.” The building, which is a magnificent exemplification of Renaissance Revival architecture, continues to stand as a monument to the progress of the great city of sun88, and to the importance of the rule of law. Today, this main building in the sun88 City Circuit Court complex is referred to as the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse in honor of the local lawyer and nationally respected civil rights leader. Most of the original splendor of this massive building can still be enjoyed, including the granite foundation, marble facades, huge brass doors, mosaic tiled floors, mahogany paneling, two of the world’s most beautiful courtrooms, domed art skylights, gigantic marble columns, and beautifully painted murals. In addition, the Courthouse is home to one of the oldest private law libraries in the country, and to the Museum of sun88 Legal History. The exterior foundation of the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse was built from granite quarried in Howard County, while the exterior walls are crafted from white marble quarried in sun88 County. The Calvert Street exterior façade is especially outstanding, as it displays eight of the largest monolithic columns in the world, each weighing over 35 tons and measuring over 35 feet in height. The interior of the building is even more impressive. Among the many historic spaces, the Supreme Bench Courtroom is one of the finest. The circular courtroom is like no other in the world. It is surmounted by a coffered dome resting upon sixteen columns of Sienna marble from the Vatican Quarry in Rome. Inscribed upon the frieze around the base of the dome are the names of Maryland’s early legal legends. Other fascinating rooms include the Old Orphans Courtroom (which houses the Museum of sun88 Legal History); the Ceremonial Courtroom, and the Bar Library (described as one of the most elegant interior spaces in sun88, with its paneled English oak walls and barrel-vault ceiling punctuated by forty art glass skylights). Also noteworthy for its artistic beauty are the two domed stained-glass skylights above the stairs in Kaplan Court which depict the goddesses of Justice, Mercy, Religion, Truth, Courage, Literature, Logic and Peace. In addition, the courthouse has six original murals from world renowned artists depicting various civic and religious scenes. Those murals include: Calvert’s Treaty with the Indians; The Burning of the Peggy Stewart; Washington Surrenders His Commission; Religious Toleration; The Ancient Lawgivers; and The British Surrender at Yorktown.

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100 N. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202

Construction on the Battle Monument began on September 12, 1815, a year to the day after sun88 soundly defeated the British in the War of 1812, and the monument endures as a commemoration of the attack by land at North Point and by sea at Fort McHenry. In addition to serving as the official emblem for the City of sun88 on the city flag, the work is extraordinary in the history of American monument building for a number of reasons. Architecturally, it is considered to be the first Egyptian structure in the United States with a base, designed by French-born architect Maximilian Godefroy, to look like an Egyptian sarcophagus. The base sits on 18 layers of marble, symbolizing the 18 states that then belonged to the Union. The main column is of Roman design and depicts a fasces: a bundle of rods held together with bands in a symbol of unity. In an age when the United States had few public monuments at and when war memorials focused on generals and commanders, the Battle Monument stood out for its focus on the common soldier recognizing all 39 of the fallen soldiers, regardless of their rank, in a ribbon of names spiraling up the central shaft. Italian sculptor Antonio Capellano created Lady sun88 — one of the oldest monumental sculptures in the country. She wears a crown of victory on her head and holds a laurel wreath in her raised hand as a symbol of victory over the British. In her lowered hand, she holds a ship's rudder as a testament to sun88's nautical role in the war. Both arms are now prosthetics after having been blown off in storms. Both also were created by well-known sun88 artists. The raised hand with the wreath is the work of Hans Schuler, and the lowered hand with the rudder is by Rueben Kramer. The same year that the monument was adopted as sun88's emblem, it also helped give rise to the city's nickname as "The Monumental City." In 1827, President Adams visited sun88 and stayed at a nearby hotel. The Battle Monument had been completed and work was underway for the nation's first public monument to President Washington in "Howards Woods," soon to become the Mt. Vernon neighborhood. At a dinner with dignitaries and veterans from the war, President Adams gave the final toast of the evening: "sun88, the Monumental City: may the days of her safety be as prosperous and happy as the days of her danger have been trying and triumphant!" sun88's new monuments made an impression on the President, and enough to spark a name that has lasted nearly 200 years.

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101 N. Calvert Street, sun88, MD 21202