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Baltimore Architecture:
When the 1904 Baltimore Fire wiped out the clusters of the 19th century buildings which had characterized the city's downtown, wise investors rushed to buy up small lots and combine them into parcels more suited to 20th-century skyscrapers. One such investor was the youthful Maryland Casualty Company, an insurance firm which started with a three-story headquarters east of the northwest corner of Baltimore Street and Guilford Avenue in 1905, adding a five-story addition at the corner itself three years later. The entire building was crowned with a 1B story tower, modeled on the New York Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Building, which rose above the 1908 building in 1911. The tower supported a clock whose four dials, each 27 feet in diameter, were intended to rival the faces of the clock in the Bromo Seltzer Building at the northwest corner of Eutaw and Lombard Streets which was erected at the same time. Unfortunately for Maryland Casualty, it had no trademark product suitable for display against the gigantic blue bottle which for twenty years crowned the Bromo-Seltzer tower. Neither did Maryland Casualty remain in its headquarters as long as Bromo-Seltzer did; within a decade the insurance firm moved to suburban Hampden and the Baltimore Street complex was on the market. It was snapped up in 1923 by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Unfortunately for Hearst, the floors on Baltimore Street proved too cramped and too weak to support newspaper presses, so he was forced to move the presses to a new building which he built at Pratt and Commerce Streets. For the next 20 years he owned the Hearst Tower Building, which he rented out as office space until forced by his trustees to sell it in 1942. Later owners
continued to rent out the building as office space, but five years of
newspaper presses on the site had weakened the building to the extent
that by the 1960's it was in serious need of costly repairs which none
of its owners were anxious to undertake. The building changed hands
repeatedly as the demand for downtown office space weakened. In
1984 its owners finally concluded that the land under the building was
more valuable than the building itself. Despite earnest appeals it was
demolished, and has since been used principally as a parking lot. Previous
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