The Maryland Club is a private social club founded in Baltimore in 1857. It occupies an ornate stone Romanesque building that opened in 1891.
History
The Maryland Club’s building (the “Clubhouse”) in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore was constructed in 1891 in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. It was designed by Josias Pennington, a native Baltimore best known for his railway buildings, especially those in collaboration with his partner Ephraim Baltwin, and as the architect for the 1905 alterations and additions to the Maryland State House.
Roughly a decade later, in 1903, the Clubhouse expanded with Pennington’s design of a porch addition to provide outdoor dining space in Baltimore’s hot weather. Since then, this historic Clubhouse structure has changed little, and still handsomely holds the corner of Charles and Eager Streets amidst the stone and brick rowhouses of Mount Vernon.
Architecture
The principal facades of the Maryland Club building stand as nearly textbook examples of that form of the Romanesque Revival known as Richardsonian Romanesque, a style named after the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), which incorporates 11th-and 12th-century southern French, Spanish, and Italian Romanesque characteristics. Employing so many of the design details springing from its founding practitioner’s work and various manifestations in other eastern and midwestern cities, this new building provided the Maryland Club with a structure in keeping with the latest fashions and innovations of the age.
Projects
Preserving this remarkable, memorable building, so important to the neighborhood, the City and the State, as well as to the members of the Maryland Club itself, takes effort. The Foundation aims to help address the recurring challenges of appropriately restoring, repointing, repairing, and otherwise preserving architecturally and historically vital elements of this Clubhouse in Mount Vernon.
In the immediate future, several important projects at the Clubhouse require attention, with an estimated cost of $1.5 million. These will include Chimney capping and repointing, window and door restoration and painting, and roof replacement/repair.
Some of the projects completed with grant support from the Foundation include repairs to the porch tile, where a crack had allowed water damage to the plaster ceiling below.
