Lafayette Square Presbyterian Church, 810 North Carrollton Avenue, Baltimore, Independent City, MD
Summary
Significance: Home since 1929 to the St. John's A.M.E. congregation (organized in 1855), this church began as Lafayette Square Presbyterian (organized in 1879), the only congregation of that denomination to locate on the Square. This church, which is faced in the same exquisite green serpentine stone used by Dixon & Carson for the Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church (1873) and the Central Presbyterian Church on Eutaw Place (completed 1879), is an architectural compendium of the partnership's favorite Gothic revival motifs: richly colored and patterned stonework, an abundance of colonettes and thoughtfully -placed carved foliate ornament, modest clerestories, turrets, and towers, grouped lancet windows (often in sets of three), and a clear overall massing expressive of the different spaces within the church. Complementing the steeple on the main facade are two decorative flying buttresses, whose dramatic juxaposition above the north portal identifies this building as late Gothic revival in sentiment and style. The Baltimore Presbytery considered at least one other design submitted by Edmund George Lind, the architect of the Peabody Institute and a number of Gothic revival churches in the city. Severely damaged by fire in 1943, the church was rebuilt by the St. John's congregation within two years despite a myriad of wartime financial and material obstacles.
Survey number: HABS MD-1143
Building/structure dates: 1878-1879 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 1943 Subsequent Work
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