Five commercial buildings have been lost as a result of the five-alarm fire that tore through Baltimore’s Five & Dime Historic District on Sept. 2, and the future of several others remains uncertain.
One of the buildings collapsed and others have been demolished or are in the process of being taken down because they are so structurally unsound that they pose a danger to public safety, according to city officials who delivered a briefing this week to Baltimore’s Commission on Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), which monitors changes to buildings in city historic districts.
The fate of several other buildings along Howard Street is uncertain because they are still being evaluated to determine how much of them, if anything, can be saved.
The affected structures were part of the so-called Superblock, a collection of 18 city-owned buildings that were assembled by the city for preservation-oriented redevelopment and were vacant at the time of the fire.
The area is bounded roughly by Lexington Street on the north, Howard Street on the west, Fayette Street on the south and Park Avenue on the east. No lives were lost and no businesses were displaced but light rail service has been suspended in the immediate area while the cleanup and emergency demolition work continues.
The former Read’s drug store building at 123 N. Howard St., the site of an early civil rights lunch counter protest in 1955, was not damaged by the fire and will not be lost. The former Pickwick Theater at 113 N. Howard St. and the former Brager-Gutman’s department store at the southwest corner of Lexington Street and Park Avenue also survived without substantial damage, but there is some question whether the theater will survive if the adjacent buildings can’t be saved.
The only cast iron-fronted building in the Superblock, at 121 N. Howard St., is being demolished but the cast iron pieces are being salvaged for possible reuse on a new structure.
The briefing was delivered by Lauren Schiszik, CHAP’s new executive director, and Caitlin Audette, Design Planner and Downtown Planner with the city’s planning department. It was Schiszik’s first report to the commission since she replaced Eric Holcomb this month. She had been acting executive director following Holcomb’s retirement.
Most impacted
Schiszik said the fire started in buildings near the northeast corner of Howard and Fayette streets and on the south side of Marion Alley, an east-west lane that bisects the Superblock. But the fire spread northward and some of the heaviest damage to buildings occurred on the north side of Marion Alley along Howard Street, she said.
“My understanding is that it started on the southern portion of the block closer to Fayette Street, but then it jumped…over to 117 through 121 N. Howard,” she said. “These three buildings were built as individual buildings but then they were later consolidated and these were the buildings that were most impacted by the fire. They were all intended to be reused as part of any redevelopment effort, and unfortunately that is not going to happen.”
Here is a summary of the damage:
The building that collapsed as a result of the five-alarm fire was at 224 W. Fayette St. “It collapsed completely and there is no ability to retain anything there,” Audette said.
Other buildings that were heavily damaged by the fire were 109 N. Howard St., 117 N. Howard St.; 119 N. Howard St. and 121 N. Howard St.
The building at 119 N. Howard St. has been taken down in an emergency demolition. The buildings on either side of 119, at 117 and 121 N. Howard St., also are slated to come down because the loss of 119 and the absence of party walls on the first and second levels has made them structurally unstable.
“The interconnectedness of them is the problem here,” Schiszik said.
Another building that was partially damaged in the fire is 227 W. Lexington St., which was connected to the rear of 121 N. Howard St. Schiszik and Audette said the rear part of that building likely will be demolished.
Other losses
Two buildings that collapsed or were taken down last year were at 220 W. Fayette St. and 222 West Fayette St. CHAP previously indicated that it would approve demolition for those structures if a developer were prepared to move ahead with construction of a replacement. The building at 220 W. Fayette St. collapsed in the summer of 2024 and the one next to it was taken down shortly afterwards because it was deemed unstable.
Several other buildings in the Superblock had previously been approved for demolition by CHAP if a developer could prove it was prepared to move ahead with construction of a replacement. They are at 101 N. Howard St. and 226 W. Fayette St.
CHAP also approved “careful demolition” for 105 N. Howard St. and 107 N. Howard St., meaning it wanted a developer to preserve the front facades and incorporate them in a new building. That approval was granted to a specific development team with a specific proposal. The city later broke off negotiations with that team, but CHAP’s approval is a sign that the panel would likely take the same stance with another developer if asked.
Still uncertain
After this month’s fire, the status of the buildings at 105, 107, 109 and 111 N. Howard St. is still uncertain. Contractors, engineers and city officials are still evaluating them to determine what can be saved.
The former Pickwick Theater at 113 N. Howard St. “was not impacted by the fire, miraculously,” Audette said. One of the smallest buildings in the Superblock parcel, it was awarded at one point to the operators of Everyman Theatre, who proposed to make it a location for rehearsal space, a costume shop and other uses related to Everyman Theatre on Fayette Street but Everyman later backed out of the project. Audette told the commission that the former theater is stable but “at risk” of being taken down, depending on what ultimately happens to adjacent buildings.
Asked what the biggest single loss was, Schiszik said she hasn’t thought of it in those terms.
“All of it is a loss,” she said.
She said one of the biggest losses in terms of square footage and frontage on Howard Street is the group of three connected buildings at 117, 119 and 121 N. Howard St. because they will leave a large gap along the street. The buildings at 107, 109 and 111 N. Howard St. would leave an equally large gap if they are taken down.
Cast iron facade
Schiszik said the building at 121 N. Howard St. has received extra attention because it’s the only one on the block with a cast iron facade, and that makes it both rare in Baltimore and more difficult to take down.
Baltimore at one point had 250 cast iron-fronted buildings but now it has only 15, with the loss of 121 N. Howard St., according to Baltimore Heritage executive director Johns Hopkins, who attended the briefing.
“There are not a lot of cast iron facades left in Baltimore but historically, Baltimore was a huge manufacturer of architectural cast iron – cast iron facades, railings, all kinds of things,” Schiszik said. ”There were several manufacturers here in Baltimore and a real strong tradition.”
Schiszik said CHAP has worked over the years to retain as many cast iron-fronted buildings as it can. She said the city is working with an expert in cast iron buildings to deconstruct the one at 121 N. Howard and save the pieces for possible reassembly at another site.
“It had originally been a five-story cast iron façade, built around 1875,” she said of 121 N. Howard St. “Four stories of that cast iron façade survived. It was intended that the façade would be restored in a future redevelopment. Two-thirds of the roof has collapsed. The north side wall has been compromised. There are large holes in the rear wall and another large hole in the south side wall. An emergency demolition is in progress.”
One CHAP member, Sara Langmead, suggested that the city work with an architectural salvage company to find an entity that will take the cast iron pieces and incorporate them in a new structure. Schiszik said she would prefer that the pieces go to an entity that promises to reuse them in Baltimore.
“Our cast iron facades, we have so precious few of them,” she said. “They were a huge industry in Baltimore. They are so very significant.”
For now, “they are disassembling the cast iron façade. It will be retained on site in a secured storage container for reuse…We’re not losing the cast iron.”
“Complicated response’
In 2020, the Superblock buildings were awarded to a development group called Westside Partners, which proposed to construct a mixed-use development called The Compass. But the Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC) terminated negotiations with Westside Partners last year after that group missed a deadline to acquire the buildings and start construction.
At the time of the fire, the city owned all of the buildings in the Superblock and no developers have any sort of land disposition agreement or exclusive negotiating priority to acquire them. For the past year, BDC has been evaluating both short- and long-term options for the parcel and the stabilization of buildings there.
Schiszik said in the briefing that CHAP has been working closely with BDC and the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to assess the fire damage and reopen the area. She said HCD and BDC officials have been good about keeping CHAP in the loop and that representatives from all three agencies are in agreement about wanting to preserve as much as possible.
“Our partners in HCD and BDC have been incredibly collaborative and informative,” she said. “The first thing in the morning, the day after the fire, deputy [housing] commissioner] Jason Hessler called me to let me know what is going on and to talk about next steps, asking for our input. It has been a really positive relationship.”
“One thing that I have been very pleased by,” she continued, “is the fact that our partners in BDC and HCD are lockstep in prioritizing preservation as much as possible. That is one of our ultimate goals. They want to save as much as they can. They understand the value of these historic buildings and retaining historic character. When they are coming to us and letting us know that they are taking buildings down on an emergency basis, they truly have explored the options, and life safety of course comes first…This is not something that we wanted to have happen, but I am heartened by the fact that our colleagues in our fellow city agencies and quasi-city agencies are working in a spirit of collaboration with CHAP.”
The Maryland Transit Administration (MTA), BGE, Maryland State Police, Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and others have also been involved, Schiszik said.
“It is just such a dynamic and complicated response effort, and it is having to happen very quickly because they want to ensure that the street is safe, that there’s no additional damage to either buildings or to people, and that they can reopen the street for MTA as quickly as possible,” she said. “They are moving as quickly as possible to address this.”
