[Editor’s Note: 2/7/2024: This 2004 piece by then-contributing writer Jim Duffy ran in our February issue 20 years ago this month. We re-share it today in commemoration of the 120th anniversary of the Great Baltimore Fire—a “blaze for the ages” that obliterated 86 city blocks, consumed 1,526 buildings, and killed five Baltimoreans.] 

It’s hard to believe that H.L. Mencken could sum the scene up in six words, but there you have it: “The burned area looked like Pompeii.”

Strange, isn’t it, how hard it is to find your bearings in the vast, frozen rubble? What corner is that? Which way is the camera pointed? Wait…yes…there’s the City Hall dome!

A century ago this month, Downtown Baltimore went up in flames. No one knows how the blaze started, though all the experts seem content enough with a piece of pure conjecture about a carelessly flicked cigar passing through a window into the basement of the Hurst building that stood on Hopkins Place, where the Baltimore Arena is today.

Historians are on firmer ground when they rank the resulting conflagration as a city-defining moment, one on a par with the defense of Fort McHenry in 1814, and the 1833 founding of the B&O Railroad. The fire raged for two days, February 7 and 8, a Sunday and a Monday. Stiff, shifting winds pushed the blaze north, then east along a clockwise arc and kept firefighters constantly on their heels.

The Baltimore Sun, Feb. 8, 1904: “There is little doubt that many men, formerly prosperous, will be ruined by the events of the past 24 hours…Many of the spectators saw it all go up in flames before their eyes, and there were men with hopeless faces and despairing expressions seen on every hand. In fact, the throng seemed stunned with the magnitude of the disaster and scarcely seemed to recognize the extent of it.”

It’s still hard to fathom the extent of it. On the one hand, only one person died in the blaze (with four more succumbing later to fire-related causes). On the other hand, the fire obliterated 86 city blocks, consuming 1,526 buildings that housed 2,500 businesses. It was, without a doubt, a blaze for the ages: not as big as the legendary 1871 Chicago fire, but a lot bigger than the famed 1872 Boston fire.

In the old pictures, a few human figures stand amid the ruins. But they’re distant, recognizable now more as types than as individuals—soot-covered immigrant, stoic businessman, grim civic leader, drained firefighter. This being a city (then and now) flush with coincidental small-town connections, it’s natural to take an elongated look, wondering whether any of those lives brushed up against yours over the generations.

Perhaps that immigrant was one of your great-grandfather’s shot-and-a-beer buddies. Perhaps that firefighter started a family tradition that reaches the fourth-generation firefighter in the rowhouse next door. Perhaps that well-dressed man’s name ended up on your business card—the old newspaper clippings are chock full of Venables, Marburys, and Semmeses.

Eventually, the wandering mind makes its way back to the point: What was it like to watch the city burn?

The Baltimore American, Feb. 8, 1904: The Maryland, a lunch room, “was brilliantly lighted and patronized by men of grime and of worry…[W]hile they dined a stringed orchestra played beautifully. Soon the rain of sparks in the street made the young lady waitresses nervous, but the leader of the band and his men kept on, oblivious to all except the time and the tune. Then the general cry for retreat went up and, seizing the cash register and a few valuables, all rushed to the open air and safety.”

Some people credit divine intervention for staving off an even more monumental catastrophe. Fervent prayers issued from St. Leo’s Church found answer when the blaze failed to jump the Jones Falls and ravage Little Italy. Others speculate about a more devilish force, noting that the fire backed off on the brink of consuming the old Monumental Burlesque House.

The Baltimore American, Feb. 10, 1904: “Yesterday, however, it was but a smoldering mass of ruins, with no element of danger of further spread. This brought a feeling of indescribable relief to everyone, and the representatives of the commercial, financial, and manufacturing life of Baltimore were free to turn their minds to thoughts of the future.”

The Baltimore Sun, Feb. 8, 1904: “There is little doubt that many men, formerly prosperous, will be ruined by the events of the past 24 hours…Many saw their all go up in flames before their eyes…The throng seemed stunned with the magnitude of the disaster.”

There are many fine ways to mark the centennial of an event so seminal to this city. Some will chase the fire’s mysterious origins. Some will mourn lost architectural gems. Some will relish the heroics of firefighters (and their horse-drawn equipment). The exhibits, tours, and lectures planned around town for the months ahead promise something for every interest.

My own interest is focused on what happened after the fire. Perhaps that’s because there are echoes of current events at New York City’s Ground Zero in the story of the rebuilding of Baltimore. Everybody back then was stunned to find that “fireproof” buildings were nothing of the sort. Crews clearing the rubble worried that post-fire dust would be the respiratory death of them. Rebuilding plans and proposed memorials stirred passionate debates.

The rebuilding story also speaks to current events close to home. A century after the fire, Baltimore once again finds herself about the hard work of raising a new city. Look at the west side of downtown, where the new Hippodrome opens this month. Look at Inner Harbor East, on its way to becoming a little downtown of its own. Then keep tracking the shore down to Canton Crossing, where things are just getting started. Head up to the East Side, near Johns Hopkins Hospital, where they’ve basically decided to create on purpose the situation faced by city leaders after the Great Fire; they’re reducing the area to rubble and then starting over again with a biotechnology park.

On the morning I write this, there’s a story in the paper about a single property on the west side of downtown that’s been trapped for six years in a purgatory of redevelopment paperwork. Six years! Maybe someday it will win a meaningful approval. Maybe someday after that a shovel will strike ground.

Fanned out across my desk are scores of blurry microfiche printouts of stories detailing Old Baltimore’s response to the fire (we had five major daily newspapers back then). It took just two short years—tumultuous years, to be sure, but two short years nonetheless—to clear her 86-block sea of rubble and raise a completely new downtown.

Not only that: The buildings that burnt had a combined value of $13 million. Their replacements were worth $35 million. The rebuilt downtown had better, wider streets and a better, more productive harbor. It delivered Baltimore into a future much brighter than it would otherwise have found.

How’d they pull that off? Could we modern-day Baltimoreans have done as well? Are we doing our rebuilding jobs as well?

The Baltimore News, Feb. 8, 1904: “To suppose that the spirit of our people will not rise to the occasion is to suppose that our people are not genuine Americans…We shall make the fire of 1904 a landmark not of decline but of progress.”

To be frank, Old Baltimore was in rather desperate need of progress. Downtown streets dated to colonial days. They were narrow, confusing, ill-connected and, as a result, paralyzed by horsedrawn traffic jams. Even pedestrian progress was an iffy proposition, thanks to the mish-mash of utility poles sunk in sidewalks to prop up an ugly, never-ending web of overhead wires.

The city’s wharves and port facilities were all but obsolete. The harbor was so thick with silt that only constant dredging kept its depth at 20 feet. That was deep enough for the old sailing ships, but everyone could see that the future belonged to steamships.

Last but far from least: sanitation. Imagine all the mounds of horse poop on those poorly drained streets. Imagine a city without a proper sewer system, its human waste routed from indoor water closets to stagnant nearby cesspools or into open ditches leading to open streams. The sweepers, shovelers, and scrapers who toiled to clear the muck went by a rather hopeful name: the Odorless Excavators Association. Not even they could prevent the filth from flowing freely on those frequent occasions when the Jones Falls flooded, inundating downtown clear to Calvert Street.

Old Baltimore wasn’t so much oblivious to her problems as impotent in the face of them. Most historians blame a brutal municipal hangover lingering from the Civil War, which created bitter divisions in Baltimore’s population while tearing away at the Southern roots of the city’s cultural and business life.

The “war sapped the vitality of an entire generation,” James B. Crooks writes in “Politics and Progress: The Rise of Urban Progressivism in Baltimore 1895–1911.” “Economically, Baltimoreans became more conservative; politically, they became apathetic; and psychologically, they became less daring.”

Nothing came of sanitation commissions established with great fanfare in 1881 and 1893. At the time of the fire, yet another sewer plan was before the General Assembly. As always, the Odorless Excavators lobbied furiously against it. Other civic-minded initiatives died at the ballot box as cynical voters convinced that official corruption was endemic rejected one bond referendum after another.

Still, some Baltimoreans were trying to revive their tired city. Inspired by the City Beautiful movement, the fledgling Municipal Art Society made lots of noise about better schools, wider streets, and new parks. Under editor Charles Grasty, the Baltimore News had become a powerfully progressive voice. In another hopeful sign, the dashing young Robert McLane was narrowly elected mayor in 1903. (McLane was a few months younger at his inauguration than Martin O’Malley was at his.)

The scenery and the players were now in position. Yet over the ensuing years, historians have gone back and forth on the chicken-or-egg question: Did Baltimore rouse herself just in time for the fire? Or was it the fire itself that finally roused her?

There are moments in the fire story when Old Baltimore seems not a century away, but a millennium. As news of the catastrophe spread across telegraph wires, everyone everywhere wanted to help. There was talk of emergency federal aid. Neighboring states offered money, manpower, and equipment. Spontaneous donations started arriving in the mail at City Hall.

The Baltimore News, Feb. 9, 1904: “Mayor McLane made the following statement to the News this morning: ‘As head of this municipality I cannot help but feel gratified at the sympathy and the offers of practical assistance which have been tendered us…To them I have in general terms replied: Baltimore will take care of its own people the best it can…but we thank you, and we appreciate it just the same.”

Some $60,000 in donations arrived in the mail before McLane’s message got out. All was returned, accompanied by properly polite thank-you-but-no notes. The city did accept $250,000 from the state of Maryland to help the injured and unemployed, but 90 percent of those funds were later returned to the state treasury.

Report of the Citizens’ Relief Committee, 1906: “In view of the enormous losses, the remarkably small showing of only $23,000 disbursed proves that the virility and self-respect of Baltimore’s citizens can not easily be matched, and their spirit of independence and capacity for self-help calls forth, even in this progressive age, wonder and admiration.”

As investigators waded into the rubble after the fire, snippets of encouraging news slowly trickled in. Buildings housing banks may not have been fireproof, but the vaults were, so securities and cash survived. Insurance companies offered public reassurances about their solvency. The predicted riots and looting didn’t materialize. Burned-out businesses scrambled to regroup.

The Baltimore News, Feb. 10, 1904: “RUSH FOR HOUSES. $75,000 Given for Building Worth. $37,000 Sufferers From Conflagration Glad to Pay Any Price For Temporary Quarters. North Charles street is now temporarily the center of the financial district. Almost every building is being offered for sale and some exorbitant prices are being asked.”

Of course there was profiteering: This is Baltimore, after all. What did you expect? But more important was the way some farsighted businessmen sensed straight away that the fire presented an opportunity to tackle the city’s seemingly intractable problems. On Tuesday, Feb. 9, retired railroad executive William Keyser called the first informal meeting of like-minded leaders. A follow-up session the next day included the mayor himself.

The Baltimore American, Feb. 11, 1904: “BALTIMORE BRAVE AND DETERMINED WORLD ADMIRES OUR GRIT…To carry out this civic spirit a meeting was held yesterday at City Hall, and steps will at once be taken to organize a special body that will announce to the world, and then proceed to furnish proof thereof, that Baltimore is fully able to cope with the calamity that has befallen it.”

That Friday, McLane named an advisory Citizens Emergency Committee. Its roster reads like a guide to the grand institutions and legal patriarchs of modern-day Baltimore: Henry Walters, Theodore Marburg, William H. Welch, Richard M. Venable, John E. Semmes, Sherlock Swann, Henry Stockbridge.

The headlines may have been gushingly optimistic, but the newspapers also carried reports hinting that caution remained the watchword for many Baltimoreans. Unnerved by the thought of thousands of men suddenly unemployed and hordes of strangers in town to gawk at the devastation, residents in a glitzy new suburb called Roland Park hired extra security patrols. The Maryland National Guard was called in to patrol downtown. And every tavern in the city was ordered shut down.

The Baltimore American, Feb. 15, 1904: “The efforts of saloonkeepers and breweries to elude the blockade of police and militia has led to the adoption of odd devices. Every kind of vehicle has been pressed into service to carry beer, and a story is current that an enterprising saloonkeeper in the Eastern district secured his beer by sending a hearse for it.”

Unnerved by the thought of thousands of men suddenly unemployed and hordes of strangers gawking at the devastation, residents in a glitzy new suburb called Roland Park hired extra security patrols.

The new advisory committee threw caution to the winds.  It split into subcommittees that began issuing reports in as little as three days. Streets should be widened. Parks should be built. Electrical wires should be buried. Wharves should be rebuilt. The harbor should be dredged. A proper sewer system should be built. The committee recommended that the rebuilding be planned and executed through a powerful new entity called the Burnt District Commission (whose acronym, by fitting coincidence, matches that of the modern-day Baltimore Development Corporation). Squeezed by a shortage of space at City Hall, the five-member commission headed by Sherlock Swann held its meetings in a janitor’s closet.

The Baltimore American, Feb. 15, 1904: “FINE PLANS FOR A MODEL CITY. The citizens of Baltimore yesterday, many for the first time, had a chance to pause sufficiently in their work to realize that a new era has been entered—that the Metropolis of the South stands upon the threshold of an epoch full of possibilities for a greater, more progressive and more influential Baltimore, whose importance cannot as yet even be estimated.”

The whole city seemed suddenly drunk with civic good will. Newspapers served up quote after hyperbolic quote from businessmen and politicians. Nary a cynical word was heard, even in the face of recommendations that the new Baltimore should be modeled after Paris—that’s right, the one in France. Then the real work began. And it became all too clear that wider streets meant smaller lots for new buildings, that new parks meant lost lots for some property owners, that rebuilt wharves would have to be city-owned—what of their current owners? At the risk being overly harsh, one might say that everyone in Baltimore favored every proposed improvement except the one that touched on his own holdings (and thus was “Not In My Backyard” born). Soon, voices of dissent were raised. Public rallies in opposition were mounted.

The Baltimore World, Feb. 19, 1904: “Delays are dangerous, and the great danger that hovers above Baltimore today is in delay…Every man who by penuriousness or greed puts a stumbling block in the pathway of the city’s improvements hangs a weight about his own neck, for in retarding the work, and hence the city’s progress, he depreciates his own property. Let us hope that no business man or property owner will fail to measure up to the needs of this occasion, or show that his greed is greater than his love for his city.”

McLane and his allies were nothing if not shrewd. The enabling legislation for the Burnt District Commission (which they had rushed through the General Assembly after the fire) gave the two city council branches that then wielded great power in Baltimore zero authority to amend the plan for new streets.

Pass it whole. Reject it whole. Take it or leave it. Those were the only options. Leave it, and pay the price.

The Baltimore American, March 11, 1904: “Baltimore’s City Council will lay itself open to severe public censure if any of the members allow themselves to get into wrangles over the ordinances required for the rebuilding…There is strong public demand…for prompt action, for no squabbles, for a hearty cooperation in every measure.”

McLane explained the strategy in simple, down-home terms: “We do not want to take three bites at the cherry.”

But his quote is rich with between-the-lines food for thought. His way managed all at once to be populist, progressive, and thoroughly anti-democratic. Sometimes, it seems, serving the public good—even doing the public’s will—requires making an end run around the public’s elected representatives.

Said representatives were none too happy to discover their powerlessness. On March 30, the Second Branch of the City Council erupted into open revolt and cast a stunning preliminary vote to dump the whole rebuilding scheme.

The Baltimore Sun, April 2, 1904: “Act, do something! The spirit of hopefulness and courage with which our citizens faced their calamity the day after the fire is being frittered away while Councilmen, intent upon petty features of the problem, demonstrate their incapacity to comprehend its larger features…The people of Baltimore want the work of rehabilitation to begin right away. They want deeds, not words.”

In the end, they got deeds. But the recalcitrant City Council got something, too—a compromise that killed the most controversial of the proposed widenings, Baltimore Street. The roads that were widened (by anywhere from 15 to 63 feet) include Hanover, Charles, Light, Pratt, St. Paul, Calvert, and German (now Redwood) streets, along with Hopkins Place.

An obvious question still lingers: Where’d the money come from? That brings us to a tale of timely good fortune.

The city had long before sunk some money into the Western Maryland Railroad. But by 1874, when John Mifflin Hood took over a bedraggled WMR, that investment looked like a bad bet, likely to end in a total loss. To everyone’s surprise, Hood turned the railroad around. When he sold WMR in 1902, the city cleared $8.7 million. It was a windfall just sitting there in the city’s coffers when the fire broke out.

The Baltimore World, Feb. 19, 1904: “There’s a good deal of silly sentiment about the Western Maryland money that must disappear in the face of a desperate business proposition such as now confronts us. If the Western Maryland money can help us, we should not hesitate a moment to use it.”

The windfall helped Baltimore get off to a fast start, but it didn’t come close to covering the whole rebuilding bill. Fortunately, a once-cynical public had by now changed its tune: Between 1904 and 1911, Baltimore voters approved bond issues totaling $50 million.

Soon enough, we will move on to our reasonably happy ending  ending. But the events of 1904 necessitate a couple of unfortunate detours first.

One is a personal tragedy. On May 30, 1904, Mayor McLane returned home from City Hall, and promised to take his new bride of just a few weeks out for a carriage ride. He went to his room; there was a shot, and he was found dying of a bullet wound to the head, presumably a suicide attempt. The historical record has whispers of domestic troubles and speculations about the pressure of the mayor’s public position. Some even suspected murder. But no plausible explanation was ever offered. McLane served as mayor for just 385 days.

The second detour returns us to larger civic affairs. Though Baltimore seized many important opportunities after the fire, she also missed out on a few. No memorial to the fire ever got built. Parks got squeezed out of the redevelopment plan, including a grand one that would have stretched along the south side of Fayette Street from the east end of City Hall to the west end of the Post Office and perhaps beyond.

Among the many advocates for this plan was Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., the son of the famed landscape architect. The younger Olmsted weighed in on the rebuilding in a report published by the News on Feb. 20, 1904. He suggested an entirely new street slice diagonally downhill from Baltimore and Park to Pratt and Light. Not only would it would ease congestion, he argued, it would also “form a splendid vista” of the harbor. Olmsted saw something in the harbor that few contemporaries did.

One gets the sense that if he were alive today, he would not be surprised in the least by the Inner Harbor. He proposed a pedestrian promenade for the waterfront, lined with plantings and lights. He suggested that scenic overlooks be placed atop the sheds that would sit along the new wharves.

“There is not a more interesting sight among all the activities of a city,” he wrote, “than the coming and going and maneuvering of big vessels and small craft in a busy harbor…My point is that in a comprehensive and intelligent treatment of the waterfront many matters of appearance and recreation can be provided for by the exercise of some thought…[and] without any material addition to the tax-payers’ burden.”

Olmsted wasn’t always so prescient, however. He also told Baltimore not to fret about its trolley lines, because it was inevitable that the city would soon develop a proper subway system.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the famed architect, suggested an entirely new street slice diagonally downhill from Baltimore and Park to Pratt and Light. It would “form a splendid vista” of the harbor.

And so Baltimore’s plan wasn’t perfect. But what plan is?  In “The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth,” historian Christine Meisner Rosen compares how well Baltimore, Boston, and Chicago recovered from their respective fires. Her conclusion is blunt: “Baltimoreans achieved more of their improvement goals more fully than the others, and consequently solved more problems.”

One can only imagine the scene downtown as 1904 gave way to 1905. Six months after the fire, 236 buildings were under construction. One year after the fire, more than 200 new buildings were completed and 170 more were under construction. And two tumultuous years after the fire, Baltimore had earned the right to do a little chest-thumping.

The Baltimore Sun, Feb. 7, 1906: “TWO YEARS AFTER FIRE BALTIMORE IS BOOMING. Marvelous Progress In Building, Manufactures, Municipal Improvements And General Business. RARE OPPORTUNITIES FOR CAPITAL. The Loss of $100,000,000 By The Conflagration Has Not Only Been Recovered, But The Aroused Enterprise Of The People Has Gone Something Like $100,000,000 Better—How One Of The Greatest Disasters Of Modern Times Has Been Converted Into A Blessing.”

The following September, the city threw a week-long Baltimore Jubilee. There were speeches and sermons and cheers. There were parades, concerts, light shows, and carnivals. There were tens of thousands of revelers downtown every night for a week.

Ninety percent of the lots in the burned district were occupied by then. The street improvements were finished—those are the streets we drive today. The wharves were being rebuilt—those are the piers of today’s Inner Harbor. The sewer system was in the works—that’s the one that’s still working (barely) today.

All played a critical role as Baltimore made the transition from one economic era to another, from dealing in dry goods to becoming a manufacturing powerhouse. In 1904, Baltimore’s industrial output was pegged at $150 million. By 1927, that climbed to $700 million.

When it comes to numbers like this, the historians argue back and forth about the impact of the fire. Some say the fire sparked a great revival. Others think Old Baltimore would have managed just fine in the new century in any case.

The Baltimore American, Sept. 10, 1906: “The conflagration destroyed all but hope and courage, and the two combined have raised from the ashes a new and greater city…Even the casual visitor [will be] compelled to admit that the Monumental City contains all that is possessed by any other city in the country.”

Not quite the Greatest City in America, perhaps, but at least Baltimore was in the running.

This story is based in part on interviews with Stephen Heaver of the Fire Museum of Maryland, Jeannine Disviscour and Barbara Weeks of The Maryland Historical Society, historian Dr. Pete Petersen of Johns Hopkins University, and historian Wayne Schaumburg, who has taught classes about the fire at several local colleges.

In addition to the newspaper articles, books, and official documents mentioned directly in the text, the most important written sources for the article were Baltimore Afire by Harold A. Williams, Baltimore on the Chesapeake by Hamilton Owens, Newspaper Days by H.L. Mencken, and “History of Baltimore 1870–1912,” an essay by John M. Powell in the book Baltimore: Its History and Its People.

In the twilight, from a distance, she still looks beautiful. With her fortress-like exterior, silverish-gray and augmented with pink terra cotta brick, she stands apart from the mostly muddy browns and other assorted earth-tones of her neighboring structures; dignified and distinctive, the color of a winter cloud at sunset.

The Belvedere first opened in winter a century ago, on December 14, 1903. She looked like a castle then, too, sitting majestically on the corner of Chase and North Charles. This was quite appropriate, because the Belvedere—or Hotel Belvedere, as she was initially named and as the carved stonework above her grand entrance still reads—played host to some of the most famous and influential people alive. This was once upon a time, when Baltimore was a cosmopolitan city that drew the world to its doorstep.

Photography by David Colwell.

Royalty and presidents. Movie stars and music idols. Sports heroes and global explorers. Gangsters and detectives. Novelists and newspapermen. Developers and financiers.

And with the famous came the fabulous—opulent fêtes that were the very definition of conspicuous consumption. And infamous, as well—murders, scandals, naked women roaming the halls.

This month marks the centennial anniversary of the Belvedere Hotel. “Belvedere” means “beautiful view” or “beautiful to see” in Italian. And, like that rare beautiful woman who has lived a century among the wealthy and the blessed and the elite, the Belvedere keeps many secrets.

“Meet me at the Belvedere
Come before the show
Meet me at the Belvedere
And see everyone you know
Dining with society in a cozy nook
Mixing with celebrities to take a second look…”
—“Meet Me at the Belvedere” by Victor Frenkil

In order to comprehend the magnitude of the Belvedere’s construction and opening, it helps to get an understanding of what a top-notch hotel meant to a city at the turn of the 20th century. It was essentially the equivalent of landing a professional sports team: It signaled to the world that you had arrived, you were a player, you were on the map.

For the upper crust of Baltimore, this type of hotel was an imperative, for two reasons. First—though in the early history of the country, hotels were often viewed as places of ill repute—by the turn of the century, an individual’s travel lodgings were an indication of his or her place on the ladder of success. If a city did not have a hotel in which the visiting elite could recline and look sublime, well, then, how wonderful could that city really be?

But even more important to Baltimore’s growing moneyed class, a plush and regal hotel was needed as a place for capitalist royalty to gather, have parties, dance, gossip, do business and—most of all—be seen and recognized as the rich, powerful, and beautiful people that they were. The construction of a luxury hotel was designed not only to show off the city, but its high society, the so-called “400” of Baltimore’s Blue Book, who gathered there on a regular basis.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the initial $1.7 million to buy the land and construct the Hotel Belvedere—a staggering amount of money for the time—was put up by four of Baltimore’s wealthiest families, including one name that still towers over the city, Alexander Brown, as well as the Parr, Harvey, and Perin families.

The architecture firm of J. Harleston Parker and Douglas H. Thomas Jr, which designed the original Alex. Brown & Sons building on Calvert and Baltimore streets in 1900, was tapped by the gang of four to outdo themselves, spend whatever it cost and create the greatest hotel in the world—something European, elegant, exquisite, majestic, worthy of Baltimore’s aristocracy. They chose a design both populist and regal in the Beaux-Arts style, a style shared by New York City’s legendary Plaza and St. Regis hotels.

Almost instantly, the hotel was a hit. When she opened on December 14, 1903, two weeks before Christmas, with virtually no advertising, the Hotel Belvedere was immediately established as the place to be seen, drawing, according to The Sun, “All of the season’s debutantes…with their own parties or as the guests of others. The main dining room and six private dining rooms were filled to capacity and it was estimated that over 1,000 people dined…that evening.”

Here is a short and far from complete list of guests who stayed at the Belvedere: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard (often). Rudolph Valentino. Gloria Swanson. John D. Rockefeller. Andrew Carnegie. World Heavyweight Champion boxers Diamond Jim Brady and Gentleman Jim Corbett. Ty Cobb. Jane Russell. Lady Astor. Will Rogers. Roy Rogers. Oscar Hammerstein. Cecil B. DeMille. Tom Mix. Clare Booth Luce. Al Jolson. Enrico Caruso. The Duke and Dutchess of Windsor. Groucho Marx. General Douglas MacArthur. Admirals Richard Byrd and Robert Peary. Tommy Dorsey. Cab Calloway. B.B. King. Kenny Rogers. F. Scott Fitzgerald (infamously). The Smothers Brothers. Tyrone Power. John Philip Sousa. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire (separately). Jean Harlow. Jane Wyman. Henry Fonda. Al Pacino. Queen Marie of Romania. Every U.S. President from Teddy Roosevelt to JFK, then toss in Reagan for good measure. Bishop Desmond Tutu. Chiang Kai-Shek. Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop (together).

To the powerful—and those they attracted—the Belvedere was a seductress. She had the best martinis in town, the best chef, the best maitre’d. Songs were written about her. Motion pictures were shot inside her.

Oh, if her walls could only talk. But sadly, many of the Belvedere’s secrets are lost to time. For not only was the hotel a grand getaway for the rich and powerful, she was quite powerful herself, particularly at squelching stories that might paint the palace in a less than regal light.

From before the beginning, the hotel operators understood that if you courted the press, you could control the press. The day before the Belvedere opened, there was an exclusive tour for members of the media—and back then, the media was pretty much the city’s newspapers, which included The Sun (morning and evening editions), the Baltimore Star, and the Baltimore-American—followed by a free banquet, with European culinary delights like oysters on the half shell, potage Ambassadeur, filet of sole, tournedos of beef, and quails farci a l’Estoufade. As The Sun noted, “There are a lot of newspapermen who have never enjoyed a dinner like that, and never will.”

This hand in glove—or perhaps fork on plate—relationship between the Belvedere and the press lasted about 50 years.

“Whenever somebody did a story that did well by the Belvedere, you could go up there and have a dinner on the house,” says Jim Bready, who was a reporter and editor for the Sunpapers in the 1940s and ’50s. “It was in the days before codes of ethics were being formulated by newspapers.”

The Grand Ballroom in 1908.

The Grand Ballroom in 2003.

Bready says that all the key editors in town—a hard drinking lot—were sent huge containers of the Belvedere’s famous martinis on Christmas Eve. Christmas was a good time to do it, because it was the season of some of the hotel’s wildest—and most notorious—parties. One such party was thrown by F. Scott Fitzgerald in honor of his daughter, Scottie—presumably to make her feel better because her mother, Zelda, had recently been committed to Johns Hopkins psychiatric hospital. Instead, Fitzgerald got completely smashed and humiliated poor Scottie by dancing with all of her young friends, then suddenly sending everyone home so he could sit in the ballroom all by himself and continue to drink. This event was too much for even the newspapers to ignore, and Fitzgerald left town soon afterwards.

Yet, for the most part, the scandals were kept mum for the first half of the hotel’s life.

This cozy relationship all came crashing down in the 1950s, when The Sun exposed the “Belvedere and Ballpark Night,” an annual custom where the town’s reporters came to the hotel for free dinner and drinks, then got packed onto a bus for Memorial Stadium where they were ushered to box seats practically on top of the field.

“This went on for some years, until the morning Sun did a story exposing it on the first home local page,” Bready says. “The reason they gave was morality, trying to show the difference between [the ethics] of the morning Sun and the Evening Sun. Actually, the difference was that the morning Sun couldn’t go. They were working, putting out the next day’s paper. It was the Evening Sun that profited from the relationship.”

After the exposé, the papers began to report more legitimately on the hotel. But before then, much of what we know about the Belvedere is a tantalizing mixture of gossip, cobbled-together memory, and semi-documented fact.

We know that in March of 1904, “Mr. Belvedere”—19-year-old William Francis Riesner—was hired as a dishwasher in Hotel Belvedere’s kitchen and began his rapid rise through the ranks. Stubby yet suave, well-mannered and always impeccably dressed, Francis—as he singularly came to be known—was named maitre d’hotel in 1919, a position he commanded for nearly 30 years until his death in 1949.

We know that from June 25 to July 2, 1912, more than 600 guests registered at the Belvedere for the Democratic National Convention. The severely overbooked hotel set up cots in hallways to accommodate the party faithful, who nominated the winning Presidential ticket of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Marshall.

We know that on October 20, 1926, Queen Marie of Romania visited. And, while there have been literally thousands of grand galas at the Belvedere, this was undoubtedly the greatest. All of Baltimore society attended, as a canopy of royal purple was draped over the hotel’s entrance. The Queen’s suite was covered with silk and decorated with Louis XIV pieces, the Ballroom filled with hundreds of the Queen’s most favorite, fragrant roses. Francis even imported an ancient Italian throne and placed it upon a pedestal for the Queen to sit, and gold china stored in the Belvedere basement for over 20 years was hauled out (and partially stolen afterwards).

Clockwise from left: Margaret and Victor Frenkil at a fundraising party in the late-1950s; The Duchess and Duke of Windsor in the Windsor Suite of the Sheraton Belvedere, 1957.

Queen Marie of Romania in War Memorial Plaza after her luncheon at the Belvedere, October 20, 1926 ; Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, December 28, 1940.

We know that an aged and legless Sarah Bernhardt serenaded hotel guests in the lobby as she was carried into the hotel by sedan chair; that in 1946, four-star Chef Joseph Vallegant stood up to the Mob, which was robbing the hotel blind, and lived to tell the tale; we know of the 1913 night when French and Assyrian chefs had a huge screaming match over whether to put rose or carnation petals in the finger bowls (!) and the entire kitchen staff walked out, with more than 500 diners waiting to eat; we know of the day a woman guest complained about the man screaming next door and it turned out to be Enrico Caruso, practicing for his opera gig at the Lyric; and of the tragic evening in May 1937, when an overloaded hotel elevator went out of control, crushing the legs of two 21-year-old girls, caught between shaft and ledge, who were then trampled by the other panicked passengers on the way out.

But mostly we know about the parties: parties with exotic animals like camels and kangaroos. Hawaiian parties with giant four-foot clam shells, countless hula dancers, and monkeys, one party that even climaxed with a simulated Pacific typhoon (and ended with a wet bang when clean-up crews dumped the Hawaiian pond off the roof and inadvertently drenched the guests who were leaving below). Confederate parties, where the hotel flew the “stars and bars” flag on its marquee and decorated the lobby with portraits of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

Today, when the hotel is quiet, you can swear you still hear the tinkling of champagne glasses and the distant strains of Tommy Dorsey.

The parties had to end eventually. And one sobering fact about the Belvedere is this: She never earned her keep. The hotel has had 18 owners in its 100 years, but it looks like only one—the Sheraton Corporation—walked away with any money in its pocket. She is a regal beauty, but she is high maintenance.

While the city’s high rolling forefathers originally instructed Parker and Thomas to spare no expense in building the place, they soon realized what that actually meant, and the Hotel Belvedere was up for sale even before it was completed. Slightly over two years after it opened, the property went into receivership in February 1906, and was purchased by the Maryland Trust Company for $1,500,000—a cool quarter million bucks less than it cost to build.

Hotel Belvedere was next purchased by Union Trust Company, who couldn’t make a go of it, and in 1915, with the first World War putting a damper on travel, the Belvedere went into receivership again. This time, it didn’t sell until 1917, when a Virginia hotel magnate and former circus clown “Colonel” Charles Consolvo bought the Belvedere for the rock-bottom price of $450,000.

Consolvo reorganized the place and took over managing it himself, and by the early ’20s, Hotel Belvedere was roaring. He moved into the hotel with his free-spirited wife and took over the entire second floor for their living area, where Mrs. Consolvo often scandalized visitors by walking around nude.

Consolvo ran the property at a profit—enough so that he could acquire the plush Jefferson Hotel in Richmond for $1.2 million—until Prohibition hit. Though he surreptitiously ran booze out of the place—bottled whiskey with an audacious Belvedere label, no less, and installed the now-notorious owls in the Owl Bar, which winked at patrons when it was safe to order the hard stuff —profits declined until the Depression, when Consolvo was forced to declare bankruptcy.

In 1942, a group of rich Baltimoreans—including theater patron Morris Mechanic and John McFee Mowbray—bought the hotel from the bank for an undisclosed sum. They held onto it for four years, through the end of the war, then sold it to the Sheraton Hotel Corporation in 1946, an arranged corporate marriage that caused her name to become the hyphenated Sheraton-Belvedere. It might have been a decision made because of money instead of love, but it worked. The next 22 years were the hotel’s most financially stable, though the following five would be her absolute worst.

It was during her time as the Sheraton-Belvedere that the hotel experienced her finest hour. It lasted about a month. Baltimore in 1954 was a racially polarized city. Segregation was the norm, and hotels—especially upscale hotels—were no exception. But the Sheraton-Belvedere wanted to set new rules. One week before Christmas, 1954, Sheraton Corporate hotel manager Albert Fox made a bold decision to welcome African-American guests to Hotel Belvedere. Considering the holiday season, it certainly seemed the Christian thing to do, and Fox later told The Sun that business at the hotel increased significantly.

The world did not stop, but the Baltimore old guard was apparently aghast. Though the particulars are a bit foggy, it seems the Baltimore Hotel Association threatened to throw the Belvedere out of its membership. It was made clear that in Baltimore, hospitality should remain a monochromatic enterprise.

Officially, Fox told The Sun he received no threats or intimidation, but added, revealingly, “If you’re going to belong to an organization…you have to comply with the rules of that organization.”

The Sheraton-Belvedere reluctantly acceded to the wishes of the Baltimore Hotel Association and returned to refusing Black patrons on January 17, 1955.

As for the newspapers, well, none of them covered the desegregation story at the time. It took until March, 1955, almost two months later, when Maryland Governor Theodore R. McKeldin finally made an issue out of it and the media couldn’t bury their heads in their martinis any more. McKeldin slammed the Baltimore Hotel Association following a report from the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations that examined what happened at the Sheraton-Belvedere the holiday season prior.

The Commission’s report got a one-column, thirteen-paragraph story in The Sun, buried inside the paper.

When the Sheraton Corporation was sold to ITT in 1968, the Belvedere began a rapid downward spiral. Less than three months later, the Belvedere itself was sold by its new parents in an 18 hotel package deal to Wellington Associates. Wellington promptly resold the hotel to Gotham Hotels, Inc., who ran it into the ground and closed it.

She then reached her lowest point in September 1971, when, for a brief but horrible period, the Belvedere was leased by Gotham to the shady Snowden Corporation, which was headed by a Dr. Millard G. Roberts, a rather notorious businessman who would reportedly do anything for a buck.

Roberts’ new scheme was to turn the grande olde dame of Baltimore into a low-rent communal dorm for Baltimore students at 35 area colleges and universities. It was like Audrey Hepburn marrying Adam Sandler. Or worse.

Drug dealing was rampant. There were rapes. Trash pickup was irregular and bags of garbage built up in the halls, until windows of the ballrooms were broken out and debris discarded that way. Fire extinguisher fights flooded hallways and dripped down to the floors below. The power was turned off. Then on. Then back off.

In late January, 1972, Baltimore City closed the Belvedere for extensive code violations and the students were evicted.

Gotham defaulted on the mortgage payments for the Belvedere in August, 1972, and the hotel was put up for auction yet again. There was one bidder: Monumental Life Insurance Company, which sat across Chase Street. They paid $700,000 for the property, less than half what it cost to build 70 years earlier.

It took developer Victor Frenkil to save the Belvedere, and, in a way, it took the Belvedere to save Victor Frenkil. If, originally, Hotel Belvedere was built for Baltimore society to impress the rest of the world, Victor Frenkil bought the Belvedere to impress Baltimore society.

“The Belvedere was sacred to old Baltimore,” says Edward Hanrahan, a long-time friend of Frenkil’s who handled PR for the hotel throughout the late ’70s and ’80s. “Victor was never a part of old Baltimore society but he thought this might be a way to make them like him more, and it did. Not as much as they should have liked him, but it made a difference.”

Though terms weren’t initially released, it was later reported that Frenkil bought the Belvedere in 1976 for $650,000. He then secured a series of controversial loans from the city with the support of then-mayor William Donald Schaefer, as he sought to rebuild the place, first making it into apartments, then, at the behest of the city, turning it back into a hotel, then trying for a hotel and apartment mix.

Frenkil had a grand vision for the Belvedere, some of which got done, and some didn’t. He turned the 13th floor cloakroom into Top of the Belvedere (now The 13th Floor) bar. He officially named the bar at the Belvedere the Owl Bar, and brought back the owls, which had been stolen (although Hanrahan now claims to have had them all the time and the entire “hunt for the owls”—which was a huge story at the time—was an elaborate PR stunt that worked fabulously). He built the garage next door, which became a cash cow for him. He installed a swimming pool and racquetball court on the second floor, getting rid of some of the offices. The downstairs coffee shop was turned into shops and offices.

The Owl Bar in the early 1950s (then called the Falstaff Room)

The Owl Bar in 2003.

Other things he was never able to pull off. There were plans to put a glass elevator on the backside of the building that would take guests from the parking garage to the Top of the Belvedere. Expanding the marble staircase was cost prohibitive, so the entire grand marble staircase of the hotel was destroyed—Frenkil engraved little square blocks of it and gave them away as paperweights.

But he made a good go of it, spending millions of his own dollars, but the loans from the city kept coming as the red ink covered more and more sheets of paper. When Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer moved on to the governor’s office, a new administration was not nearly so amiable to Frenkil or the Belvedere. He was forced to sell it in 1991.

His son, Victor Frenkil Jr., who remained in the Baltimore area and now works for Jarvis Steel & Lumber in Brooklyn, removed the owls from the Owl Bar for his dad to keep.

“I took the owls when my father lost the hotel,” says Frenkil Jr., 66. “They were damaged. They were bruised. I had them restored and gave them to my dad as a present, for the memories. He kept them less than a week and then said. ‘These things don’t belong here. They belong to the Belvedere. They belong there.’”

“This whole Belvedere thing with my dad made no sense whatsoever,” Frenkil says.“It was a labor of love, the numbers didn’t make no sense. He could have just torn the building down and built something cheaper. But he didn’t because he loved it.”

Frenkil Sr. died in June of 1998 at the age of 90. Not long before, Schaefer and other friends held a tribute to him at the Belvedere, where he sang the song he wrote, “Meet Me at the Belvedere,” accompanied by piano, one last time.

Of course, no legend of a great hotel would be complete without murders, suicides, and a ghost or two, and the Belvedere does not disappoint.

Being the tallest building in Baltimore for many years, the Belvedere inadvertently welcomed several depressed guests whose sole purpose was to take an early exit through an upper floor window. The most notable of these, according to a 1970s issue of this very magazine, went streaking downward past the living room window of Albert Fox, the manager of Hotel Belvedere at the time.

That story is a fact, but the hotel’s first murder and its ghost may both be legend, since nothing can be found in the newspapers of the time—though from what has been learned about the period’s selective reporting, its absence could hardly lead you to conclude a killing didn’t take place.

Two men—Joe Otterbein, who worked at the Belvedere in the late ’80s, during its last gasp as a great hotel, and Tom Hamrick, the current general manager of the Owl Bar and The 13th Floor bar—both recount hotel oral history that tells of a Baltimore woman in the 1920s or ’30s who caught her husband dancing with his mistress in one of Hotel Belvedere’s ballrooms and shot him dead. His ghost, it is rumored, still haunts the ballrooms of the 12th floor, but it only bothers women.

“None of the girls ever wanted to work up there by themselves,” Otterbein says. “Once in a while, people who worked up there would swear that glasses would fall to the floor and break with nobody nearby, or they’d put something down and a little while later it would be somewhere else.”

As for the second murder at the Belvedere there is no doubt, and its story is pretty squalid. During a period when the hotel was abandoned, Samuel Shapiro, owner of a number of parking lots around the city—including the garage next to the Belvedere—and a two-time gadfly candidate for Baltimore mayor, was shot dead in the lobby of the hotel by a former employee. Shapiro’s body was dragged to the Owl Bar and stuffed into a trunk that ultimately proved to be too small. The killers searched the hotel until they found a larger crate on the 11th floor which accommodated the corpse. (In an odd postscript, the convicted murderer, Douglas Arey, who was sentenced to life, was later the successful bidder for a lunch with then-Governor William Donald Schaefer during a benefit auction for the Center Stage. Schaefer refused, incidentally.)

Finally, near the end of Victor Frenkil’s ownership in the late 1980s, a maintenance man who lived in the building’s sub-basement near the building’s belching furnace, was killed by a former employee he’d fired the day before.

There were also at least two fictitious murders at the Belvedere. During its seven-year run, Barry Levinson and David Simon’s NBC crime series Homicide visited the Belvedere three times: Twice for killings—the first time a prestigious chef, the second a lowly maid—but also for the wedding reception of Detective Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson).

“Meet me at the Belvedere
Right after the show
Meet me at the Belvedere
It’s the last place to go… ”

In the daylight, up close, she shows her age. Standing on a Chase Street sidewalk on a wispy fall afternoon, a visitor needs not look closely to see the splotchy watermarks, like age spots, that garnish her façade. Or the small winding cracks through her stone, the wrinkles that come with changing fortune and time, which are covered up with paint and other forms of a mason’s masking make-up.

Inside the lobby, no longer bustling and now colored with a near-sepia tone of melancholy memory, there is the whiff of mildew. Off to the left and past walls of mostly dead celebrities’ pictures, before you reach the Owl Bar, The Palm Room is plagued by water leaks, though the pool that was installed above during the reign of Victor Frenkil now lies drained.

Upstairs, on the 13th floor and inside the bar of the same name, windows that still provide a breathtaking panorama of the city also reveal that the dormers a floor below are badly in need of paint, chipped and streaked with rust. Still, the view remains the best in the city.

A century has passed and her best days are behind her, though her worst, hopefully, are too.

Today, as a mixed-use condominium, the Belvedere serves many masters. Residents can purchase individual living units, efficiencies or one-or two-bedrooms, ranging in price from about $60,000 to $300,000. The Owl Bar, party rooms, dining rooms, ballrooms, and 13th Floor bar are owned by the canny and flamboyant businessman Tom Stuehler and his catering firm La Fontaine Bleu. It is Stuehler who largely deserves to be credited for keeping the property functioning as a quality Baltimore presence. Finally, there are the restaurants and shops in the basement, including a pretty good sushi bar. But the days of celebrity and fame are behind her, probably forever. All the hot hotels are down by the water now, chasing tourists’ green near the brine.

And yet…she still stands. She still has her past, her history, her memories, entwined with the city’s, tangled to a time that must not be forgotten, knotted tight to its greatness. She still has her aura. She is still worthy of her name. She is the Belvedere.

“Meet me at the Belvedere
And see everyone you know
Drinking with society
Sipping with celebrities
To take a second look
They’ll drink a toast to you
At the Belvedere
You are who’s who!
Let’s go to the Belvedere…”