The Hotel Brexton was built in 1881 for Samuel Wyman, a wealthy Baltimore merchant. The six-story Brexton was built as a residential hotel in the Queen Anne Style, with Baltimore pressed brick and Scotch sandstone. Noted architect Charles Cassell designed the building. Cassell was a founding member of the 91ĚŇÉ«ĘÓƵ Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the designer of the Stafford Hotel on Mount Vernon Place, Stewart's Department Store on Howard Street, and the First Church of Christ Scientist on University Parkway.

This beautiful building sat vacant for over two decades before RWN Development (and local architect Donald Kann) completed a top-to-bottom restoration in 2010. The work included replacement of over two hundred windows that had rotted or disappeared and the restoration of the original spiral stair.

The Hotel now has twenty-nine rooms (including a "Wallis Warfield Simpson" suite, named after the hotel's most famous occupant) and is part of the Historic Hotels of America network.

868 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201

The Arch Social Club at Pennsylvania and North Avenues started its life as Schanze's Theater, a movie house constructed in 1912. After serving time as a Wilson's Restaurant from the 1930s through the 1960s (when the lower facade was covered over), the club bought the building in 1972. Originally located on Arch Street, the club was part of the Victorian-era Reformist Movement that promoted working class men to better themselves through lectures and cerebral recreational pursuits. In 1912, a group of African American Baltimore men founded the Arch Social Club to promote charity, friendship and brotherly love. As many reformist Clubs did, the Arch Social Club grew and evolved into a public house and event hall, uses that continue to this day. In 2013, the club brought back the building's historic façade. The newly restored facade more than sparkles at this key intersection in West Baltimore and stands as a bright reminder of the area’s great heritage and promising future.

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2426 Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217

Beginning in 1928 when it was built and for 84 years afterwards, the Monumental Life Insurance Company occupied what was ubiquitously known as the Monumental Life Building. In 2012, however, Monumental Life consolidated offices downtown and moved out of Mt. Vernon. The current owner, Chase Brexton Health Services, bought the building and in short order launched an extensive rehab project.

The 6-story building at Charles and Chase Streets had undergone numerous renovations to suit evolving needs, with major additions built in 1938, 1957, and 1968. Chase Brexton worked within the historic building envelope to create a health center for patients and staff.

The work included repairing the limestone exterior, even keeping and repairing the signature gold lettering spelling out “MONUMENTAL LIFE.” The ground floor, where the most extensive historic fabric remained, included marble walls and floors, which were restored, and imitation gold leaf ceiling, which was refinished using the original methods. An original wood-paneled 1928 Board Room was fully restored after having been subdivided into offices. The upper floors had been used as utilitarian office spaces and these were retained and transformed to meet the demands of serving as space for a health clinic. Within a short year, the iconic Mount Vernon Building had not only found a new owner, but also found a new life and promises to serve as a great asset for years to come.

1111 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

From brewery to apartments, the reuse of the Gunther brewery complex is remarkable for its scope and quality. The building is in what’s now called, aptly, the Brewer’s Hill neighborhood east of Canton. This area started to populate with German brewers in the early nineteenth century and by the Civil War, it was awash with beer. After a brief respite during Prohibition, brewing was back and the original Gunther building, built around 1900, was in full swing. But breweries gradually closed in Baltimore and the Gunther was shuttered and left abandoned for many years.

The work, which earned state and federal historic tax credits, included restoring the facade of the Romanesque Revival-style brewhouse with its decorative arches, pilasters and an elaborate corbelled cornice. The 1949 Stock House and another smaller brewhouse dating to 1950 were also restored. The complex now encompasses five buildings with 162 apartments and retail space.

1211 S. Conkling Street, Baltimore, MD 21224

The 14 West Hamilton Street Club, a group of Baltimoreans who enjoy good company, lively conversation, and decent meals, formed in 1925. Young Princeton graduates in the city, eager to continue the traditions of the campus eating club, and several additional members of the venerable 91ĚŇÉ«ĘÓƵ Club who enjoyed special events with speakers joined forces that year and obtained quarters on this narrow old thoroughfare, which runs for just a few blocks east and west, above Franklin Street and south of Centre, a short distance from Mount Vernon Place. The club grew slowly but confidently. It kept few records and still prides itself on having no officers and as few rules as possible. First occupying a carriage house at 9 West Hamilton Street, then a townhouse at no. 16, the club in 1936 purchased no. 14—the center building of a set of five designed and built by Robert Cary Long, Sr., probably before 1820—and has been there ever since.

The club continues, as originally it did, to draw members from journalism, architecture, medicine, the law, the arts, and scholarship. Founding and early members included, as examples, a juvenile court judge and head of Baltimore social services, Thomas J. S. Waxter; Dr. I. Ridgeway Trimble, a Baltimore native and Johns Hopkins Medical School graduate; the Haverford College star athlete and Harvard-trained member of the Baltimore bar, James Carey III; D. K. Este Fisher, a prominent Baltimore architect; former judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals William L. Henderson; a Cornell University graduate and physician, William F. Rienhoff Jr.; Hamilton Owens, editor of the Evening Sun; the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Sun cartoonist Edmund Duffy and other newspaper editors and writers, among them John W. Owens, Gerald W. Johnson, Frederic C. Nelson, Louis Azrael, William Manchester, and Robin Harriss; the Johns Hopkins research scientist and amateur musician Raymond Pearl; a Peabody concert pianist, Frank Bibb; George Boas, a distinguished Johns Hopkins University philosopher; Sidney Painter, renowned Johns Hopkins medievalist; a University of Maryland Law School dean, Robert H. Freeman; the writer/historian Hulbert Footner; Wilbur H. Hunter, director of the Peale Museum; John Dos Passos and Ogden Nash; and a succession of heads of the Johns Hopkins Medical School—Lewis Weed, Alan M. Chesney, Thomas B. Turner (who celebrated his one-hundredth birthday at the club in 2002), and Philip Bard. Gilbert Chinard, a student of French history and culture at Johns Hopkins, expounded on the delights of French cooking before taking a faculty position at Princeton. The editorial page editor and food critic at the Sunpapers, Philip M. Wagner, established Boordy Vineyards, the first successful vineyard in modern-day Maryland. William W. Woollcott, a free spirit and wit who worked for the family chemical company, once observed, "Here I am, the only businessman in the club, surrounded by parasites." In all, members have shared intellectual curiosity, irreverence, and a devotion to those fine things that deans of liberal arts colleges remind us to cherish—truth, justice, and beauty.

At mid-twentieth century, a Sunpapers columnist and early club member, Francis F. Beirne, published a volume entitled The Amiable Baltimoreans, in which he sketched a portrait of the club. Early in World War II, he reported, a member had explained to a guest that, at Hamilton Street, anyone was entitled to say anything he wanted and talk for as long as he wished, although no one had to listen. The visitor, Lord Lothian, announced that he knew of such a place at home—the House of Lords.

H. H. Walker Lewis, lawyer and anointed club scribe, wrote a delightful history of the club on its fiftieth anniversary in 1975. Not long afterward the club departed long practice and admitted women. To capture the story of that decision and the searching it inspired, Bradford McE. Jacobs, an Evening Sun editorial page editor, contributed a mock-heroic codicil to Walker’s history entitled "A Chronicle of a Certain Episode Which Occurred at Fourteen West Hamilton Street."

14 W. Hamilton Street, Baltimore, MD 21201