Tall order: The city's weirdest building gets a new life
From The Urbanite
October 7, 2007
by David Dudley
The problem has vexed Baltimore for decades. Yes, it’s an icon. But what do you do with the Bromo-Seltzer Tower? Ever since the original tenants, the Emerson Drug Company, decamped for New Jersey after merging with Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals in 1967, the city has struggled to find an appropriate occupant. A three-hundred-foot-tall replica of the late-thirteenth-century Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the building was the city’s tallest when it was built in 1911, and even though new towers have jostled it out of the skyline, it’s still among the city’s most recognizable structures.
The Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Arts and Culture moved into the building, redubbed the Baltimore Arts Tower, in 1974. But when MACAC merged with the Office of Promotion (thus creating the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, or BOPA) and relocated to new digs on Redwood Street in 2002, it left the tower vacant and its fate uncertain. Plans had been bandied about since the 1990s to convert the narrow structure into high-end condo-style residences that would fit into the West Side redevelopment initiative, but functionality has always been limited by the determinedly strange design: Each side of the building is only thirty feet, and much of the interior space on each floor is devoured by the two elevators and main stairwell. “Over the years, various people have tried to make use of the tower,” says Charles Patterson, a project manager with SMG Architects. “It’s always been problematic.”
The solution to this urban dilemma has a familiar ring: Send in the artists. After years of pushing from BOPA and City Hall, a critical investment from local philanthropists Eddie and Sylvia Brown, and a $1.5 million makeover, the revamped Bromo-Seltzer Arts Tower is scheduled to open this month as a studio facility for painters, sculptors, and other creative types. The year-long redesign, masterminded by the architects of SMG with historic rehab experts Azola & Associates serving as the lead contractors, has turned the notorious white elephant into a functional downtown workplace. For $400 to $1,500 a month per studio (and a willingness to host the occasional tour for the curious public), you can rent a piece of a Baltimore landmark. “We all felt the best use was to bring in artists,” says BOPA director Bill Gilmore. “It’s such an iconic building, it’s a natural.”
One morning in late summer, Gilmore is busy escorting prospective tenants and other interested parties into the building that every Baltimorean has gazed upon but few have entered. Public access to the building has been limited since the city inherited it, and the MACAC offices were no design showpiece—a cramped vertical warren of small rooms. Only the lower floors were occupied, with the upper floors used mainly for storage. “The further up we went, the more pristine the rooms were,” says Patterson.
After stripping the 1970s-era drop ceilings and other modern additions, contractors were pleased to find the original detailing largely intact—the copper-clad windows are still functional and the marble terrazzo floors on each landing gleam. Each floor now boasts three studio rooms—bright, curiously shaped spaces graced with commanding city views—with common bathrooms on every third floor. New pipework provides steam heat, and central air conditioning has been installed throughout. But the key design element that allowed the Bromo to rise again involved a part of the building that few will ever see: a small second stairwell, to conform to modern high-rise fire codes that require a second means of egress. To preserve the look of the outside of the building—which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973—the city nixed the idea of a fire escape or exterior addition, so the architects at SMG needed to nestle the new stairwell into the existing building. “The trick was making a decent fireproof stairwell within the building without ruining the building to do it,” says Marty Azola, president of Azola & Associates. “A modern stairwell is ten-by-twenty feet. That’s literally 25 percent of the building.”
The SMG team managed to hammer out a compromise with fire officials and design a compact custom-built stairway carved into a corner of the floorplan. Dave Offenbacker, an Azola crew supervisor, reports that the demolition work was the biggest chore: The tower is built like a Tuscan-Gothic tank, with reinforced concrete floors and heavy-duty framing. The Azola crew also repointed bricks and stabilized the stonework around the elaborate crenellated crown. Until 1936, a giant 51-foot blue bottle of Bromo-Seltzer sat atop the building. The revolving bottle was lit up with 596 lights and could be seen from the Chesapeake Bay on clear nights, but it was eventually removed because of concerns about structural damage. “That bottle weakened a lot of the bricks,” Offenbacker says.
The bottle-related damage is in keeping with the history of the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, a tale of practical compromise in the pursuit of ridiculous aesthetics. The founder of Emerson Drug, pharmacist- turned-Gilded-Age-grandee “Captain” Isaac Emerson, supposedly commanded prominent local architect Joseph Evans Sperry to copy the Palazzo Vecchio after he returned from a trip to Italy. The massive Florentine palace was a not-uncommon inspiration for American architects of the early twentieth century. (Visit Sioux City, Iowa, to see their stately Bromo-esque city hall.) In the original Italian model, the only permanent tenants of the three-hundred-foot stone bell tower were the Medici counts imprisoned at the top. Likewise, most of the usable real estate in the Emerson facility was at an adjoining factory, now demolished; the tower served more as a giant advertisement for the Captain’s fizzy hangover cure than as functional office space, though company executives were stacked up along its fourteen floors.
The innate kitsch factor of all this did not go unobserved, even early on. “All Baltimoreans may be divided into two classes,” H.L. Mencken observed in 1911, after the building was unveiled. “Those who think that the Emerson Tower is beautiful, and those who know better.”
Times have changed, and the former now far outnumber the latter. The passing of the years seems to have dignified the old building, and the Bromo is now poised to begin a new and appropriately flamboyant third stage in its career. A key feature of the art studio conversion involves the improved visitor access: You may not be able to climb the ladder to the magnificent vaulted clock chamber that SMG’s Patterson calls “the most interesting interior space I’ve seen in Baltimore,” but you will be able to sip espresso in the tiny lobby and second-floor lounge. (For a photo of the chamber, see page 105.) Gilmore has even been in touch with the present makers of the building’s eponymous analgesic. “They sent us some Bromo-Seltzer memorabilia,” he says. “I’ll invite them down to the ribbon cutting.”
—David Dudley is Urbanite’s executive editor.
