This was built as a luxury Apartment Building for the wealthy

Cecil Apartments - Jackson Towers, Baltimore Maryland

Date added: November 13, 2023 Categories: Maryland House Multi Family

The Cecil Apartment House is one of the first important apartment buildings in Baltimore. Built in the newly fashionable Beaux-Arts style at the edge of Baltimore's most elite downtown neighborhood, it offered an important alternative to the suburban houses of Roland Park. Dating from the very beginning of the twentieth century, the Cecil provided house-sized units with all of the amenities of fashionable residences while adding new features that linked it to elite in-town housing in other cities, including a centralized kitchen that made it possible to reduce household staff. These ideas helped introduce the idea of apartment living in the city. As the first apartment building to be built in the elite neighborhood of Bolton Hill, the Cecil began the transformation from single-house residences. In its early years, the building housed many of Baltimore's elite, including the architect himself. It was designed by a well-known Baltimore architect, Edward Hughes Glidden, who was responsible for a group of important later Baltimore apartment houses, including the Marlborough further to the north on Eutaw Place and the Esplanade on Druid Hill. In addition, Glidden designed offices and commercial structures including Furness House, the offices for the Furness-Withey Steamship lines in downtown Baltimore.

In 1902, when the Cecil Apartments were constructed, apartment houses were rare in Baltimore. Its construction occurred in the same period that the Belvedere Hotel was being planned and built. These buildings were the urban counterpart to the sort of suburbanization represented by the contemporary development of Roland Park, and offered sophisticated residential accommodations in a modern mode in contrast to the isolated and conventional houses of the new suburbs. Buildings like the Cecil Apartments reflected the move away from the red brick and brownstone architecture that had dominated the city and the nation in the latter part of the nineteenth century toward the light palette of the Beaux-Arts-influenced, City Beautiful movement. The Cecil was also original in the designer's shift from the effort to make apartment buildings and hotels resemble large, private houses. In its new scale it reflected the "age's fascination with giantism, as well as the apartment's increasing influence on American life."

Examination of period insurance atlases demonstrates that the Cecil was the first large-scale apartment house in the Bolton Hill neighborhood, and was strategically located in close proximity to important institutions, while a livery stable just to the south on the same side of Eutaw Street would have provided private transportation for the apartment residents without the necessity of maintaining a stable and coachman. After half a century of construction of Philadelphia-style townhouses in Bolton Hill, the Cecil was a logical next step for housing the city's elite. The success of the Cecil clearly paved the way for the construction of the Marlborough, built four years later and also designed by Glidden. The Marlborough project attested to the Cecil's success, and the association of that success with Glidden's design.

Edward Hughes Glidden (active c. 1895 - d. 1924) was born in Baltimore, the son of William Glidden, owner of the Glidden Varnish Works (it is tempting to see in the varnished doors and windows of the lower levels of the Cecil advertising for his father's product). Edward Glidden studied architecture for four years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and then returned to Baltimore where he became Inspector of the Works on the Court House under construction from designs by Wyatt and Nolting. Glidden went into independent practice after its completion in 1900. In 1901, the year before the beginning of the Cecil, Glidden was involved in several other projects near the edge of the Bolton Hill community, suggesting that this area was shifting from its early role as a transportation hub. These included a house on Mt. Royal Terrace near North Avenue for contractor E.M. Noel which was detailed with brick and stone trim and leaded glass. Glidden also prepared plans for a clubhouse for the Baltimore Athletic Club near the northwest corner of Charles Street and Mt. Royal Avenue. Although Glidden designed downtown offices such as the Furness Building, it was for apartment buildings that he is best known. In addition to his other Bolton Hill apartment houses, he also designed the Canterbury Hall Apartments and the handsome Esplanade Apartments overlooking Druid Hill Lake in the northern suburbs. All of these buildings attest to Glidden's Beaux-Arts training, particularly in his careful adaptation of historic styles to modern purpose. At the time of his death in 1924, he was working in association with Hobart Upjohn of New York on a competition scheme for the buildings for Baltimore's City College.

Baltimore's Society Visiting Lists ("Blue Books") for the years immediately following the construction of the Cecil demonstrate its immediate success with Baltimore's upper class. The building's position at the southern end of Bolton Hill, close to the Mount Royal station and within easy distance of downtown, was certainly a contributing factor to that success. Many of the early tenants were of independent means: they did not bother to list professions in city directories or in the Society Visiting Lists. For those whose livelihood was included in directories, they are consistently professionals of social standing. The early tenants included professionals like George J. Turner, an insurance broker and William P. Valiant, a manager, who appeared in the building in 1904. Adolph H. Ahrens, a real estate broker, arrived in the building with his wife by 1907. Professional couple Dr. Mary and Professor H.N. Morse were among the first tenants, as were physician B. Merrill Hopkinson and his wife. Attorneys Wm. A. Hanway and R. Lee Slingluff also show up the Blue Books with a residence in the Cecil. Tenants also included manufacturers such as Horace Burroughs, listed in the building by 1907 and a partner in the Burrough Brothers Chemical Manufacturing Company (509-511 W. Lombard St.), and Thomas G. Boggs, the President of the American Mirror Works, who had moved into the Cecil with his wife by 1908. As noted earlier, among the most significant of early tenants to appear in the Blue Books are the architect of the building himself, Edward H. Glidden, and his wife, who arrived in the building by 1910.

The Blue Books also suggest that the Cecil served a somewhat unusual social function, as a haven for single-parent households with dependent children. In the early period, both single men and women, probably most widows and widowers, appear in the building with children, and there is at least one instance of a young married couple living with the husband's (probably widowed) mother. Given that early apartments like the Cecil provided both more services and fewer maintenance responsibilities than single homes, this group of residents would have been logical, and suggests a type of client that would have found apartments particularly attractive. Because of the scale of the units in the Cecil, encompassing several thousand feet per unit, there would have been something of the illusion of the scale of a townhouse, but without necessitating a full staff for maintenance and service.

In the original design of the building, a basement kitchen provided meals to the upper apartments by a dumb waiter, with only modest serving kitchens in each unit. This arrangement parallels the new lifestyle in high-rise apartments described in Henry Blake Fuller's contemporary novel, The Cliff-Dwellers (1893). In that novel, Fuller grapples with the shift from the genteel values of those of inherited wealth and the new values of the monied classes who were driving late nineteenth-century American society. To Fuller, the high-rise world of Chicago represented a new rootlessness, one that differentiated the new from the old culture and which found representation not only in high-rise offices but in the new apartment buildings that were the urban parallel. Though new in form, the new housing was expected to convey the same graces as the city house. Fuller described one such situation:

... their apartment presented to their callers substantially the same aspect that they had offered in a complete house, save that the dining room had been lopped off, along with the kitchen. They were a shade more compact and, if anything, a shade more luxurious. ... Life... had become merely to mean receiving and being received; and to receive at all she must receive correctly and elegantly.

Fuller's apartment paralleled the Cecil's units in their reduced kitchens and dining rooms; most apartment houses offered restaurants on the order of hotels. This permitted dispensing with cooks and wait staff, at a moment when "the servant problem" (from competition with higher-paying industrial jobs) was beginning to become commonplace. Thus, the plan of the Cecil's units, with kitchens reduced to little more than a place to prepare tea, and with a small dining room and a large parlor, was in keeping with contemporary urban fashion, and anticipates many of the conventions of modern living.

Building Description

The Cecil Apartments stands at 1123 North Eutaw Street on the rise that distinguishes Bolton Hill from the older portions of Baltimore. Located on one of the principal residential streets of the city, adjacent to Thomas Ustick Walter's Eutaw Place Baptist Church, the Cecil marked the evolution of elite living that had come to characterize the Bolton Hill neighborhood. The seven-story building takes the form of a T in plan, framing side yards that guaranteed views from its apartments toward Eutaw Street while the central wing faces the street and contains the principal entrance. The building is constructed of multiple shades of light-colored brick, accented with limestone and cast terra cotta ornament. This coloration complements the general classicism of the facade and marks the shift toward the lighter tones of turn-of-the-century, Beaux-Arts design. Within, its spacious halls and generously scaled architectural details denote the rise of the apartment house as a new form of elite residence in Baltimore at the turn of the last century. Despite changes during the last generation, when the building was converted into offices, it retains sufficient integrity to convey its role in the evolution of high-rise modern living in Baltimore at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Cecil Apartments were constructed on the slope of Bolton Hill facing Baltimore, providing its residents with remarkable views of the city. Its setting marks its transitional position between the old city and the already-constructed suburb. Adjacent to it is T. U. Walter's limestone-faced, post-Civil War Gothic church that marks the shift toward historical French sources that would dominate the Gothic Revival of the next generation. The site of the church, on the downslope of Bolton Hill, suggests that it was a late arrival to the successful suburb. The proximity of a turn-of-the-century synagogue and churches of other denominations in the neighborhood indicate the varied peoples who had made it into the Baltimore elite as the last century ended. Behind the Cecil Apartments is a modest, 1930s brick apartment building that has the appearance of urban infill immediately before the Depression as large houses were sold and replaced by apartments. The remainder of the setting has been dramatically changed since the 1950s. The construction of State Office Buildings across the street and to the south, and the demolition of adjacent structures for a parking lot that now borders the Cecil to the south is an indication of the decline of this area as a residential neighborhood during and after World War II.

With the arrival of the new government offices, the owners of the Cecil added "the Governor's Club," a one-story and basement wing in the south courtyard. Soon after, in the 1970s, the entire building was adapted to office uses, resulting in the removal of many of the interior partitions of the upper levels, the painting of the exterior white, and the renaming of the building as the Jackson Towers. More recently, a plan was developed to return the building to apartment use, resulting in the demolition of the second floor and the partial demolition of upper levels.

Although its setting has changed from its original, largely residential and institutional character, the Cecil Apartments still conveys its intended graciousness. Unlike the low-scale, brick and wood frame, early and mid-Victorian domestic buildings that characterized pre-Civil War Bolton Hill, the Cecil Apartments marks the arrival of the new technology of steel construction, towering over its three- and four-story brick neighbors. To emphasize its height, the facade is organized along the lines of a classical column with a base, a shaft and a crowning cap. The basement is clad in roughly squared, light grey granite blocks with orange and yellow veins. Above, the walls are clad in two tones of pinkish-tan and grey-tan bricks. The grey-tan bricks differentiated the quoins and rusticated masonry around the windows of the main floor from the pink-tan bricks that were used for the broad panels of brick of the main wall areas. On the first floor, the articulating detail takes a larger scale than the upper levels and is intended to denote the public spaces that are contained within. Larger-sized windows with half-circle transoms lighted the lobbies and public spaces. A slightly projecting, three-register limestone frontispiece with English Renaissance detail highlights the central main entrance on Eutaw Street. Above the main door is a shield of the Cecil family. The door frame and door are of varnished walnut, attesting to the elegance of the building. English Renaissance details are continued throughout the building's exterior ornament.

Above the first floor, regularly spaced windows of varied sizes indicate the apartments and the positions of bathrooms for each of the four units per floor. Living rooms occupied the corners of the front wing and the outer corners of the rear wing, providing views through pairs of windows toward Eutaw Street. To keep the scale of the windows appropriate to the proportions of the main elevation, and to pick up the rhythm of the first story with its centered door, a blind niche takes the place of windows above the entrance, marking the position of the partition that separated the front apartments. In the past generation, most of the original 3-over-3 light window sash of the upper levels have been replaced with a modern 1/1 metal sash, but examples of the original windows survive in basement window wells and on several of the sash of the upper facade.

The upper walls are articulated to reflect the general Beaux Arts character of the design. This was accomplished with bold quoins consisting of raised panels of brick at the building's corners and projecting brick surrounds around the windows in the "shaft" section (floors three through six). The coursed "rustication" of the first floor returns at the top story, setting the stage for a projecting cornice that caps the elevations most visible from Eutaw Street. Terra cotta shields and swags embellish the top floor of the main facade. The rear (northwestern) volume of the building is more simply treated and on the rear alley facade is clad in red brick below a pressed-metal cornice. The entire facade was painted in the 1950s renovation when the building was adapted to offices and renamed the Jackson Towers.

The main Eutaw Street entrance is approached from a flight of granite steps up the terraced landscape from the front sidewalk. This terrace and the north side yard were raised to accommodate parking in the north yard after World War II. The front door opens into a paneled vestibule that leads up steps into a broad central corridor flanked by Ionic columns and interrupted by a deep archway above which are the stairs. Beyond the archway, the corridor opens into a large central lobby space. On the south side is a handsome wood stair that returns over the archway of the entrance, rising up the core of the building. Beyond, in the center of the lobby is an open, iron cage Otis elevator that was the main passenger elevator. Its original fly-wheel engine is in the basement. Further to the rear, in the central corridor that continues from the lobby, is a modern automatic passenger elevator that serves the upper stories. The central corridor terminates in a service stair that provided access for the servants of the residents from a rear entrance, without their having to enter the public spaces of the building. Unlike the main stair, which is free-standing and occupies a central space in the building, this stair is separated by a door from the corridor and walled in.

On the south side of the central corridor, the original restaurant of the building was enlarged to form "The Governor's Club." It was intended to attract the state workers in the complex of office buildings that were built in the 1950s. To hold this new facility, the building was enlarged on the south side with a modern designed basement and one-story addition that is devoid of ornament and fits within the area of the south wing of the building. This volume has been continuously modernized for additional users, with a modern metal door facing Eutaw Street and providing access to the basement. This new wing contains several large rooms that were paneled in pecan wood with strongly projecting raised panels set within rails and stiles. Gold-painted inscriptions reported the various dates in the late 1950s when the rooms were dedicated to their various functions. A separate dining room in a similar wood, but less completely paneled occupied the room to the north side of the central elevator corridor and was presumably open to the public. In addition to the inscriptions, the rooms can be dated by the use of the still-fashionable Colonial Revival for their stylistic inspiration.

The upper stories contained four large apartments on each floor when first built. Two units shared the front wing, one looking south toward the city and the other with views to the north toward Bolton Hill. Each of these units had a fireplace in the front corner of the living room and a slightly higher level of detail than the rear units.

The rear units each occupied the arms of the T, with the advantage of cross ventilation within the unit, but with slightly simpler finishes and details, lacking, in particular, the embellishment of the corner fireplace in the living rooms.

Despite the obvious hierarchy of front and rear, all of the apartments shared specific planning principles. Living rooms occupied the principal corner with the best views and were lighted and ventilated by three windows, two on the facade facing Eutaw Street and one on the side wall. Immediately adjacent to the living rooms were small dining rooms that were entered from the central hall of each apartment. Contributing to the sense of spaciousness, these halls were oversized in width and connected to the principal public spaces from the entrance door into the apartment. In the front apartments, the next room in the sequence was a bathroom, indicated by a small window on the side facade, while in the rear apartments, the bathrooms were placed on the rear facade. Both sets of apartments had access to dumbwaiter service to a basement kitchen where cooks could prepare meals for the residents above. Small serving kitchens that vented into the central air shaft, made it possible for the tenants to prepare their own meals. Multiple bedrooms filled out the remainder of the space; the master bedroom of the front apartments was denoted by a shallow, two-sided bay.

After the Depression, the upper levels underwent three generations of change. The first change occurred around World War II when the apartments were subdivided to take advantage of the changed housing market of the downtown. This resulted in the addition of new partitions that cut units in half, and the addition of kitchens and bathrooms. In 1959, the building was converted into offices to take advantage of its proximity to the new state office complex. The Governor's Club additional described earlier came at this time. Simultaneously the kitchens and most of the bathrooms necessary for the apartment function were removed, apartment layouts were altered, internal corridors were created and the upper levels were significantly altered to their new purpose. Within the apartments, window heads were cut off to support the frames for acoustical tile ceilings and much of the interior was refurbished with flush panel doors.

A third renovation, begun in 1990, was left incomplete. At that time the entire second floor was gutted to the exterior walls, all partitions were removed leaving only the structural steel columns and the front fireplaces. Similar demolition was begun above resulting in damage to the roof which has substantially affected the upper floors. In its present situation, partitions have been removed leaving evidence of the original plan, delineated in layers of modern flooring.