Renovations – The Peale

Peale Trivia! Let’s Play

The interior foyer of the Peale building, showing a black and white tiled floor and two doorways.

Q. Where did the floors in the current Peale building originate?

The Peale building was extensively renovated in 1930-31 by John Henry Scarff, a World War I Army veteran who later became an architect with the firm Wyatt and Nolting in Baltimore. In 1931, Scarff was “invited by the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore to supervise renovations at the Rembrandt Peale Museum . . .. He planned the reorganization of the museum, selected a director, and outlined new museum policies.”*

A 1991 historic structures report revealed that, “New flooring materials were installed throughout in the restoration of 1930-31. Marble floors in the Loggia, the Entrance Hall, first story Hyphen and hearths came from the original building of the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Mulberry Street. Pine floors for the Northwest, Southwest, and Southeast rooms of the first floor came from dwellings being demolished at the southwest corner of St. Paul and Saratoga Streets. The white oak flooring elsewhere, throughout the building, was new, a materials of excellent quality, mostly quarter-sawn in wide, random widths. Original flooring may remain beneath much of the wood flooring although none is visible except at the landings and floor level stairs, between the newels.”

> Learn more about our unique building history.

*With his military experience, Scarff was called to service again in World War II, this time as the Special Assistant to Huntington Cairns, the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas (the so-called “Monuments Men”). With this, Scarff began “creating policies regarding looted art, forced transfers, damaged monuments, and restitution procedures for displaced collections.” Source: Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art: Restitution, Education, Preservation, website, https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/scarff-john-h.

Going up! The Peale’s elevator reaches new heights

The Peale’s new elevator shaft reach the third floor last week! It will have an accessible, single occupancy restroom next to it when complete, one of five such restrooms that will be available to visitors in the fully renovated Peale.

You might recognize this room as Submersive Productions’ lab at the Peale in 2019. In Rembrandt Peale’s day, it served as a painting studio, and still has the extra tall doorway that allowed for massive canvases, like his The Court of Death (1820, Detroit Institute of Arts), to be moved into and out of the studio.

“Crane Day” at the Peale

Today was “Crane Day” at the Peale as the old cooling tower was removed at the crack of dawn this morning. A new eco-friendly HVAC system is being installed as part of the Peale’s renovations, funded in part by a grant from the Maryland Energy Administration.

The new HVAC system will be not only more reliable and energy-efficient, it will also be discretely installed in the Peale’s attic so that the Peale’s award-winning roof, which was replaced in 2017 by Baltimore City’s Department of General Services, can be enjoyed in its full glory by passing birds, helicopters, drones, and dirigibles.

Big thanks to our neighbors at Zion Church for letting the crane team into their parking lot behind the Peale at such an early hour! Staff are relieved there will be no more trips onto the roof to kick the cooling system back into operation during a hot summer’s performance. We are grateful to all the donors to our capital campaign who made this day possible!

Original stove niches uncovered!

Stove niche in the Peale’s second floor large front gallery.

Architect Robert Carey Long, Sr. designed stove niches into Rembrandt Peale’s museum. They were plastered over later in the 20th century, but were still visible after the Peale’s 1930 renovations. In 2019, street artist Adam Stab did a live painting event as part of his solo exhibition at the Peale, creating a mural over one niche in the third floor “Assembly Room” while Ronald Rucker played his “Electronic Art.”

Adam Stab paints in the Peale’s third floor front gallery as Ronald Rucker plays his “Electronic Art.”

It was hard to say good-bye to Stab’s site specific work at the Peale, but as part of the current renovations, Peale’s original niches have been uncovered once more.

John Scarff, architect of the 1930 renovations, which saved the Peale from demolition, wrote of the niches:

Second floor front gallery in 1936, photo by E. H. Pickering, from the Historic American Buildings Survey at the Library of Congress.

The six stove niches throughout the museum are original and Rembrandt Peale’s account book at the Maryland Historical Society shows that he bought more than one stove for the building. The entirely new radiator enclosures in these niches were suggested by the original stoves in the entrance hall of the Octagon House in Washington, D.C., built in 1800 for John Tayloe.

– Historic American Building Survey (HABS 398-MD) Report by Laurie Ossman, Ph.D., 2001.

“Today really is the pits.”

“Today really is the pits.” That was the clever subject line of an email chain last week between Peale board member William “Chick” Chickering and Jackson Gilman-Forlini, City of Baltimore Historic Preservation Officer, about the digging of the Peale’s elevator pit. Renovation work continued last week as the team exposed original brickwork and early 19th c. joists. Areas for the cafe and elevator shaft have also been laid out in the building.

According to Gliman-Forlini, the interior walls, particularly around the foundation, “are all original to the best of anyone’s knowledge. There’s no record of these having been replaced at any time.” Also original to Rembrandt Peale’s building are the stove niches on the second and third floors, which have now been uncovered.

On the other hand, “the façade was replaced in 1930 with salvaged brick from an 1830s townhouse on the corner of Saratoga and St. Paul that was selected because it closely matched the color, size, and texture of the original façade brick. The exterior wall along Watchhouse Alley was also replaced in 1905,” most likely with new brick at that time. Other features, like the brick wall that bisects the “East Wing” first floor was added in 1930. The flag stone pavers in the current garden date to that era as well. Gilman-Forlini notes that they “originally served as the pre-1930 toilet partitions!”

Dating historic joists uncovered in Peale’s renovations

Over the last few weeks, the Peale’s renovation team has made some intriguing discoveries as they removed a 20th-century ceiling. The image above shows straight cut marks on the room’s wooden joists, indicating that this joist was cut by a “sash-style” sawmill, and therefore, is as least as old as the 1830 conversion of the building into City Hall.

It’s possible that the joists could date to the original 1814 building; however, the team is cautious not to assign the joists to Rembrandt Peale’s original construction because records indicate that a large quantity of joists and framing lumber were purchased by the City as part of the 1830 adaptations undertaken when the Museum was converted into Baltimore’s first City Hall. “There’s a very good chance that much more of the original framing lumber survives than we previously thought. At the latest, these joists date to 1830,” said Jackson Gilman-Forlini, Historic Preservation Officer with the City of Baltimore.

Learn more about renovation work at the Peale from 1830 to the present in this interview with Gilman-Forlini, and stay tuned for more news and photos in this News section, on our Flickr page, and in our weekly emails!

With your support, such discoveries will continue to be made in the weeks and months ahead. We’ve raised $4.8 million to date to return this historic gem to public use, so are nearing the end of the Peale’s $5.2 million capital campaign! Any amount you can contribute will help continue our interior renovations to make the Peale a fully accessible home for Baltimore’s stories.

Donate to help reopen the Peale!

Final renovations at the Peale have begun!

The “Peale Gallery” at the Peale, the room where we have shared the stories of the Peale family and building, has become the site office for the final round of renovations now underway. With Charles Willson Peale watching from the replica of his 1822 self-portrait, The Artist in his Museum (the original is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art), the construction supervisors follow the renovation plans drawn up by our architects at SM+P.

The building has been mostly emptied, but a few heavy objects remain, including that massive Peale replica painting at left in this photo (part of the amazing “Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons” exhibition that told the story of early American museums at the Peale in the early 1990s; you can still get the seminal catalogue of the exhibition in our online shop). You can also just make out an ornate metal window guard serving as a screen in the fireplace this room. It is one of many that were brought to the Peale to save them when the 1820s building whose windows they protected was being torn down – and they weigh a ton, almost literally!

How will we continue to safeguard – let alone move – these weighty objects during the renovations? Stay tuned to find out in the Peale’s renovation chronicles, coming to your inbox in our e-newsletter and available in the News section on our website!

Renovation Update: Ceiling Joists

Peale Renovation Update!

This week we opened a small hole in the ceiling of one of the Peale’s rooms to check on the load-bearing capacity of the adjacent wall. The wall divides the 1814 ground floor room (reportedly where the live animals were kept when Rubens Peale ran the museum), and which was originally the same size as the Picture Gallery above. The renovation plans call for opening the wall up again to create space for a café. In the meanwhile, we get a special glimpse at some original 1814 timber in the fabric of the building! Stay tuned to get weekly updates about our progress and other special insights into the country’s first purpose-built museum.

Restoration of a 19th Century Gas Pole and Fire Alarm Box at the Peale

Thanks to the continual help and support of Baltimore Gas and Electric, the restoration of a nineteenth-century gas pole and fire alarm box is complete! The pole was lifted out of the back garden of the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture by volunteer BGE engineers and was taken to be restored by David Conrad of Baltimore Foundry Works on an early Saturday morning in March. The pole was initially installed on the South East corner of Monument Street, and Park Ave (see photograph provided by Kevin Larmore) in 1906. When the City’s call box system was shut down in the middle of the twentieth century, it was installed in the historic Peale Museum’s garden. Now you may be asking, what exactly is a fire alarm box, and why is it significant?

Baltimore first installed its call box system in 1859-1860 and was the first line of defense when it came to fires within the City. Each call box had wiring running to the central office, which was located on the second floor of the Peale Museum building, by then being used as City Hall, from 1859 up until 1896. When the fire alarm box was pulled, the central office would get the signal and would relay it to the appropriate fire station. When the firemen arrived at the scene, they would signal back to the central office by pulling the alarm box several more times, utilizing Morse code to communicate if they needed more men or equipment. In this way, the Peale served as the nerve center for the city’s fire alarm system.

The Peale Museum’s founder, Rembrandt Peale, had introduced another new technology, gas lighting, to his galleries two generations before. In order to attract visitors at night and sell more tickets to his Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts, in 1816 Peale began illuminating his galleries with gas light chandeliers on specially-advertised evenings. By 1817, Rembrandt Peale and his partners had founded the Gas Light Company of Baltimore, which is today Baltimore Gas and Electric, and secured the contract to supply gas streetlights throughout the City of Baltimore. Through his efforts, Baltimore was the first city in the United States, and one of the first in the world, to be illuminated by gas lighting. Gas lights lined the streets of Baltimore up until the late 1950s when they almost entirely removed. Through the restoration of this pole and fire box, it will serve as an excellent artifact to showcase this aspect of Baltimore’s innovative history.

See the renovation process below!

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Peale Center’s New Roof Nears Completion

The Peale Center’s new roof is almost finished. This is the first step in restoring America’s oldest museum building, a National Historic Landmark. Plans call for the building to reopen in 2020 as a center for Baltimore history and architecture.

The work is being done by Ruff Roofers, a firm that has put new roofs on other iconic structures in the city, including the base of the Washington Monument, the Old Otterbein Church, Stanford White’s Lovely Lane Church (Spanish tile), and the copper dome that crowns the cupola of Gilman Hall, centerpiece of the Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus.

The Peale Center’s new roof is a standing seam metal roof, “basically a copper roof with a tin-zinc coating,” according to Tim Caldwell, general manager of Ruff Roofers, who is supervising the work. The old roof on the building, installed in the early 20^th century, was also a standing seam metal roof made of galvanized steel coated with lead. The material was known as terne, and required painting, he said. The old roof had been repaired in 1970, when major renovations were made to the building, but leaks had developed since then, causing damage to the interior walls and decorative plasterwork.

When they tore off the old metal roof, Caldwell said, they found underneath wooden skip sheathing. This was made up of random width boards, some with a bark texture, that were mostly 18-22 inches wide, indicating that had been cut from the center of the tree. This material was left in place, covered with half-inch plywood, and the new metal roof installed over it. Caldwell said the new roof will have a 50-100-year lifespan.

An important element of the project was re-constructing the lantern and skylight that top the rear hip roof of the building. (The main portion of the building facing the street has a pitched roof.) The lantern structure was removed with a crane, taken to the shop, refaced with the same material as the roof, re-glazed, and then put back on the building, again with a crane. The skylight lights the second-floor space that was once Rembrandt Peale’s art gallery and will become a presentation and exhibit hall in the new center.

For a building, the roof is the main line of defense against the elements, according to Caldwell. “It’s amazing how quickly water can do damage; it will rot wood, freeze and expand in masonry,” he said. “The roof is one of the first things you need to do to protect a building.”

Rebuilding and capping the chimneys, re-pointing the exterior brick and restoring the masonry, including the sandstone sills, is also ongoing as part of the same contract. Academy Stone is the contractor for the masonry restoration; this work is expected to be finished in about six weeks. The total cost of the first phase of the Peale restoration is about $700,000, including roughly $500,000 for the new roof. It is being paid for by the City of Baltimore, which owns the building. SM&P Architects is the designer and the Baltimore Department of General Services is overseeing the project.

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