The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 264

Front roe Can 1 endor Be aveu fpRE-SEASON THE 'EDEN' IT'S NEW A LITTLE PRIVATE PLACE FOR I THE BOTH OF YOU FOR ONLY i $5321 16' 32' OF PURE PLEASURE (( Gunite Construction 666-1800 LJ OR WRITE FOR 1976 BUYERS GUIDE LwJ i i xip i j' 1 pools div. I irac.figgc?f inc. 10100 Marble Court Cockeysville, Md. 21030 IK HEN Baltimore's inner harbor start The destiny of the Fava front is still up in the air (for the time being it will be stored on a city lot west of the city's salvage depot on West Pratt street), but one proposal is to mount the antique facade on the site of a defunct multi-level, green parking building on the northwest corner of Calvert and Lombard streets facing the Inner Harbor dramatically. Another proposal would use the iron front as part of the renewal of the old marketing district, just across the Jones Falls from Shot Tower Park.

Costs for such a use may exceed $200,000. according to one estimate. LI I ft II ft. li i) I 3 -ri 1 0 I i t' urn. ed getting its epochal new look beginning about 1970.

down came a raft of structures linked to the city's past in an area known to old-timers as Frenchtown. It seems that the Acadian French emigrants, who settled along the western harbor's narrow streets in the late Eighteenth Century, had a life-style all their own. They also favored the upper Paca street area farther north. Like the harbor area, it had reasonable rents. Today the scraped-down acreage awaits a convention center and also, probably, a hotel-office complex, to be linked to the existing Constellation Place building that is to house regional headquarters for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company.

Frenchtown was one of the havens of the famous "iron buildings" of the steamboat past 1850's, 1860's and 1870's monuments, almost always commercial and rising above Baltimore's port life in steps of Corinthian, Ionic, Doric and even, on occasion, Egyptian and Gothic glory. The same sort of building rose at the same time in New York, St. Louis. Seattle and other major centers, stimulated by the discoveries of James Bogardus, a New York engineer. He found that iron fronts could be mass-produced for much less than the cost of dressed stonework.

They gave a sparkling, ultimately fashionable effect for what were then peanut prices. The iron buildings imitated stone, with capitals and columns rising in rhythmic sequence, framing enormous windows that had only recently become practical to make as plate glass by the time the Millard Fillmore era rolled around. Wholesalers, garment manufacturers and the harbor trade in general adopted the building method virtually overnight. The most famous example of the art form (it had a song written about it) was The Sun's pace-setting Iron Building, a victim of the Great Fire of 1904, but in the 1850 one of the seven wonders of American city living. An 1869 sample of the art, once home of the Fava Fruit Company, will be preserved and.

the city government says, probably re-erected after removal from its South Charles street site near where the new convention center is to rise. It will cost $38,000 just to dismantle and save the iron front, a five-bay, four-story model regarded as the most elaborate remaining example in the city. Other fine examples of the ironwork building still exist on the margins of the downtown's near west side and also in the Gay street corridor. (m(r-; I II I III I vi How extensive was the iron front craze jn Baltimore? It was a major architectural force and also a local industry of considerable size, historical experts say. Hayward Bartlett which later became part of Koppers Company, was a major local manufacturer of the formed buildings and in 1854 did the Harper Bros, structure of New York city, regarded as a masterpiece of the style as well as one of the first publisher's showcases built in Manhattan.

The same firm four years earlier also worked on the Sun Iron Building, an early Bogardus opus that was the first large-scale commercial structure in the world built of cast iron. Baltimore's role in commercial architecture of this type, says David G. Wright, a young architect working on the Fava restoration program, has to be "put into perspective where it belongs." That place, he says, is near the top; Nineteenth Century Baltimore boasted both the first and second largest producers of structural cast iron. While the city has been "very considerate" in finding a way to save the Fava facade, Mr. Wright adds that iron buildings, Continued on Vogc 15 THE SUN MAGAZINE.

FEBRUARY 20, 1977 IF ITS BEING BUILT IN BALTIMORE ITS REPORTED TO YOU ON THE BUSINESS PAGES OF THE SUNPAPERS for Convenient Home Delivery Call 539-1280. 12.