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Baltimore Federal Savings & Loan Association
Inventory No.:
B-1147
Date Listed:
11/22/2022
Location:
19-25 E. Fayette Street, Baltimore, Baltimore City
Category:
Building
Period/Date of Construction:
1950-1958
Architect/Builder:
Hall, Border, and Donaldson - Architects; John McShaine, Inc. - Builder
Boundary Description:
The boundary of Baltimore Federal Savings & Loan Association is recorded as Ward 04/Section 11/ Block 0635/ Lots 004 & 004A in Baltimore City Land Records, deed references: 16657/0297 & 16074/0383.
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Description:
Baltimore Federal Savings & Loan Association is a five-story Colonial Revival building constructed of steel with a brick exterior. It was built in 1950 as the new downtown headquarters for Baltimore Federal Savings & Loan Association, the Baltimore metropolitan area’s largest savings and loan institution at the time. In 1958, BFS&L acquired the adjoining property at 17 E. Fayette Street and built an addition in a matching Colonial Revival style that has five floors and a setback 6th floor penthouse. The building is located on the southwest corner of Fayette and St. Paul Streets and borders on Wilkes Lane. Its north, south, and east elevations consist of brick laid in a Flemish bond with grapevine mortar joints, double hung windows, fanlight windows, bowed display windows, wood-panel entry doors, balconies with wrought-iron railings, oculus windows, a wood cornice with dentils, gable-roof dormers with double-hung wood windows, and hipped roofs clad in slate behind which is a flat roof with a built-up membrane. The east elevation on St. Paul Street is recessed to originally allow for boxwood hedges in planters behind a brick wall. The interior consists of a two-story main banking hall now used as a Walgreens, an original paneled lobby in the 1958 addition to the upper floors which have been converted from banking functions to office retail space. The building is in excellent condition with its exterior almost 100% intact retaining all its original Colonial Revival design features including its massing, detailing, fenestration, and roof profiles. BFS&L’s original banking hall with the exception of the tellers’ counters is largely intact. The second, fourth, and fifth floors and the sixth floor of the 1958 addition will be converted into apartments in accordance with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. The first floor will remain a Walgreens, and the third floor will remain offices until the expiration of their leases.
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Significance:
Baltimore Federal Savings & Loan Association is architecturally significant because it is an intact example of bank architecture designed in a Colonial Revival/regional style in post-World War II America. It is representative of the preference some financial institutions still had for traditional or regional architectural styles in the late 1940s despite the prevailing style of modernism that had come to dominate American bank and commercial architecture. The choice of an intentionally traditional design reflects the lingering resistance to modernism immediately after the war. The building’s massing, materials, detailing, and fenestration are architecturally accurate of the Colonial period in the Tidewater Region in Maryland and Virginia most notably the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, VA (reconstructed in the 1930s) and the colonial architecture of Annapolis, MD. Its construction in 1950 was the first major business building project in downtown Baltimore in the post-war period when the city’s downtown was in decline. Its 1958 addition matched the original design. The building is also historically significant for social history and community and planning development for its association with historic trends in the city’s and region’s post-war housing boom and suburban development, because Baltimore Federal Savings & Loan Association was the largest savings & loan association and home mortgage lender in the Baltimore metropolitan area in the post-war period. Because of the thrift’s start as Pennsylvania Avenue Permanent Building & Loan Association in 1884, it is also associated with broader historical trends by the key role that neighborhood building and loans played in home finance in Baltimore City’s development.
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