Police Department Headquarters, 100 Fallsway, Baltimore, Independent City, MD

Significance: The Police Department Headquarters is significant for its association with the Municipal Historic District, Baltimore City, Maryland. The district consists of a linear area with an east-west axis, roughly extending from St. Paul Street on the west to the Fallsway on the east, and from Lexington Street on the north to Fayette Street on the south. Included in its boundaries is a collection of monumental and small-scale structures unusual for their architectural quality and style. Together, most of them comprise the earliest manifestation of urban design in Baltimore City. The tone for this development was set with the erection of City Hall (c. 1870). By the turn of the century, the nature and appearance of the civic center was of such concern that the Municipal Art Society, founded in 1899, and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, commissioned three nationally known designers, Frederick L. Olmsted, Jr., John M. Carrere, and Arnold W. Brunner, to produce a plan. The solution, published in 1910 as ":Partial Report on the City Plan," was a City Beautiful scheme centering on City Hall with a three-block landscaped mall extending eastward to Fallsway, a boulevard to be built over lower Jones Falls. Flanking the mall on both the north and south sides were to be grand public buildings in the Beaux Arts tradition. While the plan was never implemented, some of its major ideas were. The mall developed incrementally as a series of super blocks, beginning in 1895 with the Baltimore Courthouse, west of City Hall, the War Memorial Auditorium in 1921, east of City Hall and linked to the Plaza, Police Department Headquarters in 1924, facing the Fallsway east of the War Memorial Auditorium, and the old Post Office in 1932, situated west of the Courthouse. Stylistically, each building expresses the Classical style in a manner consistent with its period. Together, these building achieve a monumentality found nowhere else in the city. They are emphatic expressions o both function and symbolic meaning.
Survey number: HABS MD-909
Building/structure dates: after 1983 Demolished
Building/structure dates: 1924-1925
Building/structure dates: 1937 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: 1950-1954 Subsequent Work