MHS Library - Baltimore Architecture

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Baltimore Architecture:
Then and Now

The Baltimore Humane Impartial Society Building, 1400-1408 West Lexington Street
image info

Architect:
T. and J.M. Dixon (1851)

The Baltimore Humane Impartial Society, a non-sectarian organization of local women concerned with the plight of the aged, acquired this tract at the northwest corner of Lexington and Calhoun Streets by purchase and donation in the 1840s, and in September of 1849 laid the cornerstone for its "Aged Women's Home." Designed by brothers Thomas and James M. Dixon, the three-story structure, whose apartments opened off a central atrium, was compared by its admirers to a Gothic cathedral and by its detractors to a Chesapeake Bay steamer. But its design, especially the clerestory windows which flooded the atrium with daylight, was unquestionably a departure from that of earlier Baltimore charitable institutions.

In 1864, the Society commissioned an associated home for men between the women's home and Calhoun Street. The Society soon regretted that decision, having sacrificed most of the space that might have been devoted to an expansion of the popular women's home to its new "Home for Aged Men." In 1874 an addition to the Women's Home, which more than doubled its space, was shoehorned in at the north end of the property at the cost of considerable violence to the Dixons' original design. But, after that occurrence, no expansion of either the men's or the women's home was feasible at the site. It was mainly this fact that made so welcome a 20th-century bequest from the Misses Augusta and Roberta McLaughlin that opened the way to the 1959 move of both homes to Chestnut Avenue in Towson, where their parent institution changed its name to the Pickersgill Retirement Community, where it is still in operation today.

The Lexington Street property was sold to the city of Baltimore in the 1960s and its buildings were demolished and replaced by those of Franklin Square Elementary School, which stands on the site today.

Image information:
left: Aged Women's (far left) and Men's Home (right of Women's Home to left). Lexington and Calhoun Street (1400-1480 West).
center: Aged Women's Home.
right: Current View Now Pickersgill Retirement Community.
(CC3009, MdHS/BCLM Photograph Collection).
Photos by John Orrick, 2002.

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Baltimore Architecture - Homepage

Site Contents
1 Masonic Building
2 Enoch Pratt House
3 Graham-Hughes House
4 American Brewery
5 Belvedere Hotel
6 Camden Station
7 Alex Brown Building
8 Williams-Small House
9 Timanus Mill
10 The Pembroke Apartments
11 Merchant's Exchange
12 Old B and O Building
13 Denny & Mitchell Building
14 Guardian Trust Building
15 Old Post Office Building
16 St. Joseph's R.C. Church & Washington Firehouse
17 The Maryland Casualty Building
18 Church of the Redeemer Building
19 The Popplein Family Mansion/Marlborough Apartments
20 Samuel Hoffman, later the Dr. William Osler Mansion
21 Cohen Brothers, later the Dr. Robinson Building
22 Saint Peter's Catholic Church 1770
23 The Baltimore Humane Impartial Society Building
24 Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad Calvert Station
25 The Richmond Market Building Site
26 Dr. Charles Howard's Site and Mount Vernon Place M.E. Church
27 The Stephen Broadbent Mansion "Ever Green"

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