Lafayette Square, Bounded by West Lafayette, North Arlington, West Lanvale & North Carrollton streets, Baltimore, Independent City, MD

Significance: One of a number of urban squares established in West Baltimore in the nineteenth century to encourage new residential development west of the city center, Lafayette Square defined fashionable city living for over 100 years. The Square and surrounding historic buildings, which range chronologically from the late 1860s to the turn of the century and stylistically from the Gothic to the Queen Anne and Romanesque revivals, chronicle the growth of an affluent West Baltimore neighborhood from its modest nineteenth-century buildings and its remarkable metamorphosis in the early twentieth century into the spiritual and cultural center of West Baltimore's African-American community. While significant in its own right as a landmark in the urban development of Baltimore, Lafayette Square rivals the city's better known squares and institutions in the magnitude of its contribution to the cultural heritage of Maryland's largest city.

For most of the houses on the Square, the three-story, three-bay, flat-roofed, red brick townhouse seems always to have been in fashion, though side yards, mansard roofs, and arch windows helped break the visual monotony of West Baltimore's highly regular and architecturally uniform residential streets. Moreover, the designs of the houses on the 1100 block of West Lafayette Avenue were dictated to a considerable degree by the Lafayette Square Association itself, which after 1865 inserted covenants in the land deeds that set the width of new residences at a minimum of twenty feet and the height at three stories. The Association also prohibited landowners from erecting slaughterhouses and other facilities that were likely to have a negative impact on the neighborhood. The houses at 1110, 1112, 1128 and 1130 West Lafayette (then called Townsend) and at 1103, 1105, 1111 and 1113 West Lanvale Street embody the Association's vision for the Square. Built on speculation in 1867 by the Association itself, the eight houses featured bracketed cornices, marble plinths, sills, and stoops, single-paned sash windows, and imposing bracketed frontispieces with double doors and semicircular transom lights (or fanlights, lunettes).

Built after 1867, the three-story Italianate townhouse at 828 North Carrollton Avenue is one of few houses on the Square that occupies a prominent corner lot. It is best known and revered today as the home of Parren J. Mitchell, professor, scholar, Maryland's first African-American Congressman, and a founding member (in 1971) of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, DC. Ornamented with marble cladding, elaborate window hoods, and a massive bracketed cornice, this house rivaled the townhouses of Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill of the same period in its proportions and detailing while at same time meeting the Lafayette Square Association's requirements for residences.

By the 1880s, alternative styles for houses had taken root on the Square, including the Romanesque and Queen Anne revivals, examples of which survive on the south side of the Square.
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N1967
Survey number: HABS MD-1141
Building/structure dates: after 1857 Initial Construction