University of Baltimore Academic Center would be demolished and replaced with smaller structure under new master plan

The University of Baltimore’s Academic Center would be torn down and replaced with a smaller building under a new Facilities Master Plan that has been created to guide the institution’s growth over the next decade.

In a presentation this month, University of Baltimore President Kurt Schmoke said the plan represents an effort to “right-size” the midtown campus, eliminate outmoded facilities, and create teaching spaces that better suit and align with the way its students will want to learn in the future.

The plan’s chief recommendation is to demolish the 226,387-gross-square-foot Academic Center in the 1400 block of North Charles Street and replace it with a smaller academic structure. The Academic Center is the largest single structure on the University of Baltimore campus — actually three interconnected buildings that together occupy a full city block near Baltimore’s Penn Station.

One of those buildings is a structure once known as The Garage — the former headquarters and showroom of the Mar-Del Mobile Company, the first location where Cadillacs were sold in Baltimore and former home of the Maryland Automobile Club. Among other noteworthy characteristics, it was one of the earliest reinforced-concrete structures in Baltimore and one of the first local buildings influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-style architecture.

The facilities master plan states that the replacement structure, which administrators are calling a “center for learning,” would provide about 134,000 gross square feet, or about 60 percent as much as the current Academic Center. Planners say that number is a “guesstimate” and that the exact size of the replacement will be determined during a later phase of programmatic planning that will begin after the master plan is approved.

A related recommendation is to convert the former headquarters of a local non-profit organization, The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore at 101 West Mount Royal Avenue, into a “UBalt Welcome Center” housing the President’s Office, admissions, financial aid and other administrative departments now located in the Academic Center. That part of the master plan already is underway, after The Associated announced plans in July to move to Park Heights Avenue and lease its 36,000-square-foot building to the university. The 10-year lease began September 1 and has an option that allows the university to acquire the building and make it a permanent part of campus.

Other recommendations in the master plan include improving the public realm, including streets and plazas, and making interior and exterior changes to seven other structures on its core campus, such as making façade improvements to the H. Mebane Turner Learning Commons and adding athletic facilities on its basement level.

The master plan also notes that a study is underway to evaluate the benefits of moving the university library’s Special Collections and Archives from the Turner Learning Commons to renovated space in the Charles Royal Building at the southeast corner of Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue. “By relocating Special Collections and Archives to this stand-alone building in a prominent corner location,” the plan notes, “these special UBalt library resources can be made more public-facing in a way to encourage community access” and increased visibility.

In the works for more than a year, the long-range plan was outlined September 16 in a virtual presentation to the finance committee of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents. The presenters were Schmoke; Maribeth Amyot, Advisor to the President for Strategic Initiatives and chair of the university’s Facilities Master Plan task force, and Barbara Aughenbaugh, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President for Business Affairs. An executive summary and the full 96-page report have been posted on the University of Baltimore’s website.

The master plan “aligns the physical campus more closely with the institution’s mission, vision and values,” the executive summary states. “It addresses key issues and opportunities facing the campus today and looks ahead both toward UBalt’s Centennial in 2025 and towards a 10-year future and beyond.”

UBalt “serves a unique student body that is composed of distinct groups of students who require a more modern campus that better supports multi-modal active learning and operations for nontraditional adult students,” the summary states. “The plan leverages needed redevelopment in the campus core to address deferred maintenance and reimagine the heart of campus…These investments will position the institution to remain The University of Baltimore – and The University for Baltimore – for years to come.”

Three-building complex

At last week’s meeting, Schmoke said the master plan was commissioned to guide physical changes on campus between now and 2034. Ayers Saint Gross is the lead architect working on the master plan; architects for any individual buildings arising from the plan would be selected separately.

The connected buildings that make up the Academic Center include the former automobile showroom, which dates from 1905-1906 and features large windows fronting on Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue; a former hotel that rises six stories and dates from 1905, and a four-story annex at the north end of the block that was constructed in 1961. The university’s decision to preserve and recycle buildings from the early 1900s to create an academic center resulted in one of the earliest adaptive reuse projects in Baltimore.

The university currently has 3,100 to 3,200 students, down from a high point of around 6,000 students in 2014. Schmoke said enrollment has stabilized since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 – “We’ve stopped the bleeding — and the master plan is designed to accommodate a campus with about 4,000 students, a figure the university is aiming to reach by 2032. Of those 4,000 students, administrators say, they expect that 60 percent will be graduate and professional students, 40 percent will be undergraduates, and 70 percent of the undergraduates will be students who transfer from another institution.

Schmoke and Amyot told the finance committee that the Academic Center contains more space than the university needs at present and that much of the existing space is either obsolete or in need of repairs. Schmoke said the master plan doesn’t call for additional square footage: “We’re actually downsizing.”

Of all the buildings on campus, Schmoke and Amyot said, the Academic Center accounts for 47 percent of the university’s deferred maintenance cases. In addition, they said, its layout can be confusing because the three buildings were designed for different purposes and aren’t fully integrated.

For example, Amyot and Schmoke said, the Academic Center has two elevators that are in separate parts of the block but neither one leads to every part of the building. In addition, the floors in the different buildings don’t line up. Students, employees and visitors say it’s a rabbit warren of spaces and that it can be difficult to find one’s way around once inside. Schmoke joked that the Academic Center was cobbled together by “the same person who designed the camel.”

“The building was not designed as an academic building,” Amyot said. “There’s two elevators. You have to know which elevator to get into because you cannot traverse north to south in the whole building on all floors. You have to go down to the ground floor [and switch elevators.] It’s very confusing for students. The building leaks. It was three buildings that were later connected. It’s just a dysfunctional building and therefore, making the investment to replace it is the way to go. That’s the smart choice.”

Another factor in the planning effort, Schmoke and Amyot said, is that teaching methods have changed in recent years, especially with the popularity of online and hybrid classes, and the teaching spaces in the Academic Center are less than ideal for the way university students want to learn today.

“They don’t have tiered classrooms,” Amyot said. “Chairs don’t have wheels on them. They’re on linoleum floors. Many of the classrooms don’t have windows [because] not all the rooms are on the perimeter. We have low ceiling heights…It’s just not great” as opposed to more modern spaces such as those in the law center.

From a campus planning standpoint, she said, the three-building complex stretches from Mount Royal Avenue to Oliver Street and forms a barrier that makes it difficult to see or get from Charles Street to the west side of campus. “The Academic Center is blocking everything off,” she said. “It’s not a connector.”

Non-traditional campus

Instead of trying to reconfigure the existing structure and introduce new technology, the administrators said, the architects recommended tearing it down and constructing a replacement that aligns more with the university’s mission.

Schmoke told the finance committee that the University of Baltimore is different from other campuses in the University System of Maryland because of the students it serves. He described it as a “commuter institution with a heavy focus on graduate and professional programs.” He noted that its student population is older on average than at other state schools and that many of its students are professionals who are taking classes while also holding a full-time job and raising a family.

Schmoke said 58 percent of UBalt’s students are taking graduate and professional-level courses, 42 percent are undergraduates, and the split is expected to remain at about 60 percent graduates and 40 percent undergraduates into the next decade.

According to the facilities master plan, 46 percent of UBalt students attend part time; 50 percent of the undergraduate students are low-income or first-generation, and 47 percent are members of an “underrepresented minority race.”

The median age of undergraduates at UBalt is 28, as opposed to a university system-wide median age of 22 for undergraduates; 86 percent of UBalt students originate from Maryland, and 30 percent are from Baltimore City. Although it’s not considered one of the state’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), UBalt is Maryland’s only four-year institution designated by the federal government as a “Primarily Black Institution.”

Because they have jobs and family obligations, Schmoke and Amyot said, many of the university’s students prefer to take classes online and in the evening, and many of its classes are scheduled after the traditional work day to suit their schedules.

“These folks that come to school to get their bachelor’s degrees are very different than a traditional undergraduate student,” Amyot said. “In fact, most of our undergraduate students, nearly all of them, come to us as transfers. They don’t come to us out of high school. They either have their associate’s degree or they’ve accumulated credits in some other manner and then they come back later in life because they want to complete that degree. And then together with the undergraduate students being older, we have more graduate students than undergraduate students.” As a result, she said, what students at the University of Baltimore want from the physical campus “differs from what you might see at a lot of other universities.”

The University of Baltimore is focused on what matters to its students, Amyot said.

“In order for our students to attend,” she said, “we need to offer night classes. We need to offer some online classes. We need to offer classes where some students are sitting in the room and some students are remote. Then it works and it’s engaging and folks stick with it.”

There are no residence halls in the master plan because that’s not what UBalt students want, she added.

“Our students don’t want to live in residence halls,” she said. “They already have families. They have jobs. They have living arrangements. And there’s no intercollegiate athletics. Our students are very professionally-oriented.  They’re coming to an accredited degree program really to enhance their career opportunities. They have different needs, and we respond in order for them to be successful. The amenities that they want are not necessarily what a traditional university would offer.”

While UBalt’s business school offers an MBA program that is “completely online,” Schmoke said, many students indicate that they want the option of taking courses either in-person or remotely.

“What we are hearing from our students is that they like the hybrid,” he said. “They like some in-class and then some online. It’s the flexibility that they really like, and that’s what we want to make sure that we can offer. All the classes will have technology that would allow for this.”

Two components

The master plan by Ayers Saint Gross shows the existing Academic Center replaced by a new structure that’s divided into two components. Renderings in the master plan show one section rising five or six stories and one section rising six or seven stories, and they’re connected by a three-level link that doesn’t come down to the ground.

At a potential height of seven stories, the profile would be “more comparable to the adjacent 12-story Angelos Law Center than the previous academic center,” the master plan states. “A two-level roof profile with lower roof to the south can create opportunities for both green roof/event space and onsite power generation through solar panels.”

Renderings in the master plan show that the two sections of the building would be separated at ground level by a pedestrian pathway that runs through the block diagonally. The pathway would lead from Penn Station at 1515 North Charles Street to the new Welcome Center on Mount Royal Avenue. This configuration, along with removal of the existing Academic Center, gives the university an opportunity to enlarge and reimagine Gordon Plaza, the large open space at the northeast corner of Mount Royal and Maryland avenues, where UBalt’s Edgar Allan Poe statue is.

Schmoke and Amyot said development of the master plan has been informed by a community engagement process that has included meetings with stakeholders from both within and outside the university. In addition to representatives of various academic and administrative departments, they said, community groups that have been involved in the planning process include the Bolton Hill Community Association, the Mount Vernon Belvedere Association, the Central Baltimore Partnership and the Midtown Community Benefits District.

According to its authors, the master plan was developed around five principles. They are to:

“Foster a sense of place that reinforces the identity of UBalt as an anchor institution of and for Baltimore.”

“Create a vibrant and inclusive campus that matches the unique needs and priorities of [UBalt’s] non-traditional professional and career-focused student body.”

“Ensure learning environments are flexible and adaptable to meet the evolving needs and priorities of our students and community.”

“Realign and renew existing space to reduce deferred maintenance and prioritize student recruitment, retention, growth and success.”

“Strengthen the pedestrian experience through safe streets and active first-floor experiences.”

The September 16 presentation to the finance committee was the first step in a review process that’s intended to culminate with adoption of the facilities master plan by the full Board of Regents. Once the master plan is adopted, the university will begin another round of planning to determine exactly what programs will be housed in the new center for learning and how much space it will contain. This detailed round of programmatic planning will help architects and planners come up with a final design, for which the university will seek funding.

Creation of the 36,000-square-foot Welcome Center on Mount Royal Avenue affects long-range planning as well, administrators say, because the relocation of any departments there potentially means less space needed in the building that replaces the Academic Center.

The finance committee took no action on the master plan after the initial presentation.  In keeping with the Regents’ standard practice, members of the finance committee will vote at their October 30 meeting on whether to recommend the master plan to the full Board of Regents for approval. If it does, the full board will then consider UBalt’s master plan at its November 22 meeting.

Architectural history

The three-story building at the northwest corner of Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue was the third location of the Mar-Del Mobile Company, an early car dealership that built it for “the sale and storage of automobiles,” according to a 1905 article in The Sun. Previous locations were 101 North Charles Street and 617-619 W. Pratt Street.

At various times, the Mar-Del Mobile Company sold Packards, Franklins, Waverly Electrics, Searchmonts and other types of automobiles. It was the first dealer in Baltimore to sell Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles and Dodges. It initially sold Cadillacs when it opened on Mount Royal Avenue, stopped selling them in 1909, and then began selling them again in 1922 when it merged with the Baltimore Cadillac Company. Its move to the corner of Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue has been credited with helping to transform that area into an automotive business district with other dealerships operating nearby.

Compared to other car dealerships in the area, Mar-Del’s building was unusually large because the company made it a sort of department store for cars, a multi-purpose emporium that contained sales showrooms, car service bays, meeting rooms for the Maryland Automobile Club and other spaces for car owners and their families to spend time while their cars were being repaired.

Known as The Garage, with 90,000 square feet of space, the building “was once the hub of Baltimore’s early car culture,” according to a plaque in the building’s lobby. “Here, while clients waited for their cars to be serviced, they amused themselves in ‘the most up-to-date place of amusement for ladies and gentlemen in the world.’ In addition to the car showrooms, the building boasted billiard rooms, 36 bowling alleys, a skating rink, women’s gymnasium and restaurant. A few special occasions at ‘The Garage’ reportedly drew as many as 20,000 people a day.”

The building was designed by Clyde Nelson Friz, who also designed the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s central building on Cathedral Street; the Standard Oil Building on St. Paul Street, UBalt’s Liberal Arts and Policy Building and, with John Russell Pope, the Scottish Rite Temple on North Charles Street. The Garage’s “wide overhanging roof and strong horizontal lines showed similarities to the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright,” the plaque notes.

Instead of echoing the Beaux Arts Classical style buildings on Mount Vernon Place, Friz took a daring departure from the more conventional styles of the 19th century for the new building type serving the invention that would largely define the next century, the automobile.

Eschewing classical ornamentation, Friz worked with what is now called the Eclectic style of early 20th century architecture to design a building that combined elements of the Mediterranean Revival style with the popular Prairie style that was emerging at the start of the 20th century from Wright’s studio in Oak Park, Illinois.

“The Midwestern style is most apparent in The Garage’s planar brick facade articulated with deeply set windows, the shorter third-story windows set within the shadow line of the projecting hipped roof, and the excessive masonry corbeling at the first floor openings,” observed architectural historian James Russiello. ” To support the weight of cars and equipment for this modern building, Friz for once hid the modernity of his structure’s reinforced concrete under a cladding of brick.”

Centered above the second-floor windows on the two primary facades were large white letters that spelled out “The Garage.” Early photos show a wide sidewalk along Mount Royal Avenue with cars spilling out of the building.

“While the Mar-Del Company’s new home is no ‘Castle in Spain,’ there is a decided suggestion of Spanish architecture in its appearance and proportions,” observed a 1910 article in The Packard, which called the company’s headquarters “unique and handsome” and pointed to the six-foot-wide balcony that “projects from the second floor along the two main fronts of the building.” The article’s headline was “Bully for Baltimore.”

Windows for gawking

Before the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908 as the first mass-affordable automobile, car ownership was an elite luxury that drew the curious and status seekers. Early auto showrooms were decorated in a variety of styles throughout the East Coast, with an emphasis on large display windows to facilitate gawking by pedestrains on the sidewalk peering deep into the showroom.

“Many of these outfits in the early 20th century were older businesses rehabbing their look as they cautiously adapted in the transitional period between horse-powered vehicles and vehicles with horsepower,” Russiello noted. “As such, new buildings for clubhouse-like businesses offering an array of services are especially distinct.”

Due to their connection to luxury products, Russiello said, auto showrooms were often designed by notable architects, “even as late as the 1954 Hoffman Auto Showroom in Manhattan by Frank Lloyd Wright, which was demolished in 2013 but considered a prototype for his Guggenheim Museum.” In 2014, he said, The Audrain Auto Museum of Newport, Rhode Island, relocated into a restored auto showroom designed by the noted architect Bruce Price, who was born in Maryland, and built in 1902-1903 for Adolph Audrain.

The University of Baltimore acquired the building in 1968 and worked with Allen C. Hopkins of Fisher, Nes, Campbell and Partners to convert it for academic use. “The renovation which produced the new academic and administrative complex was completed in 1971 and earned the architects an award from Baltimore Heritage Inc.,” the plaque notes.

Although the interior was modified extensively and administrators have problems with the way the building has been joined with the structures to the north, the exterior has retained many of its original elements, including the solid-to-void ratio of the window and door openings; the Flemish bonded textured brickwork of varied brown hues with deeply raked mortar; brick piers at the base supported on masonry plinths that blended with the sidewalk; the third-floor sillcourse supporting brick-engaged columns between windows, and the projecting hipped roof.

CHAP review

UBalt’s three-building Academic Center complex falls within the boundaries of the city’s Mount Vernon Historic District, where the city’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) typically has authority to review and approve proposed changes to building exteriors, up to and including demolition.

According to CHAP executive director Eric Holcomb, CHAP does not have legal authority to review changes to state-owned buildings in a Baltimore City historic district. Holcomb said CHAP does ask state agencies to present their plans to the commission for review but that doesn’t necessarily prevent demolition.

He pointed to the university’s plans more than a decade ago to replace a structure called the Odorite Building at the southeast corner of Mount Royal and Maryland avenues with a new student center. In that case, some local preservationists argued that the Odorite Building was architecturally significant and should be preserved, but university leaders at the time opted to replace it with a new structure.

If a building is owned by the University of Baltimore, which is a state agency, “they legally don’t have to go through the CHAP process (that’s how we lost the Odorite building),” Holcomb said in an email message. “But we always ask state agencies to comply with city regulations (permits, CHAP review etc.). In most cases they honor that request.”

Asked before the finance committee meeting if university planners had considered preserving any part of the current Academic Center, Schmoke said they did but concluded it would not be as cost effective or space-efficient as building a new structure that’s designed to meet the university’s current needs and the latest standards for environmental sustainability.

“Because next year’s our Centennial, we’ve been looking at what the University of Baltimore is going to look like in the next 100 years, and we know we have to make adjustments to the way people learn now, which is a combination of online and in class,” he said. “We have more physical facilities than we really need for the way higher education is delivered in the future, so we are going to tear this down” and “redesign something that is smaller but also consistent with environmental regulations, the way the law school is…We want all of our buildings to be environmentally-sustainable and meet not only today’s but tomorrow’s environmental rules.”

In addition, he said, “we’re trying to figure out how we can knit the campus more with the rest of the development in the community.”

Use by Baltimore City College

Before the Academic Center is demolished, it will serve as a temporary home for Baltimore City College, a public high school with about 1,500 students. Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners voted 8 to 1 in May to accept an offer from Schmoke, a City College graduate, to have the university house students, teachers and other staffers on its midtown campus while City College’s historic building at 3220 The Alameda undergoes renovation.

The university’s plan calls for City College to relocate to the University of Baltimore campus from August 2025 to August 2028. The Academic Center is one of two major campus buildings that City College would temporarily occupy, along with portions of the William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center. Once the City College renovations are complete in 2028, the high school students and teachers will move back to The Alameda and the university will be able to move ahead with its long-range campus plan.

Although demolition of the Academic Center can’t start before late 2028 because of the lease agreement with the city school board, university leaders say, they can use that time to finalize plans for the replacement project and line up funding. They say the target date for completion of a new campus building and plaza is sometime in the early 2030s.

September 23 was 100 days from the start of 2025, the 100th anniversary of the year UBalt was founded. Schmoke told the finance committee members that the university plans to mark the institution’s 100th anniversary in 2025 with a yearlong celebration that includes events in January, the spring of 2025, and the fall of 2025, looking at its past, present and future. He said the master plan also includes recommendations for adding new signs and graphics around campus that will underscore the university’s presence in the city.

No ’time-out sign’

Schmoke, 74, served as Mayor of Baltimore from 1987 to 1999 and has been president of the University of Baltimore since July of 2014. He said he has no plans to retire and is enthusiastic about realizing a new vision for the university and its campus.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said. “So far my wife hasn’t given me the time-out sign…It’s been a real team effort. I’d like to particularly get through the Centennial and then we’ll see what happens after that.”

The master plan is intended to complement other major development initiatives for midtown, including upgrades to Penn Station and a mixed-use development on Maryland Avenue at Oliver Street, Schmoke added.

“I think it is an outstanding investment for Baltimore, because we’re right in the center of the city,” he said. “It’s coming at the right time.”