The Location of the Cathedral

The choice of locating Baltimore's new Cathedral on Charles Street was surely guided by the hand of God. (The property borders on the west side of the 5200 block of North Charles Street, which is a main artery dividing the city east and west.) This street, according to some, is named after Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and a cousin of America's first bishop, John Carroll.

Also, Baltimore's "paltry pro-Cathedral" of St. Peter (1789-1821) was once located off the west side of the 300 block of Charles Street at Saratoga. Baltimore's Basilica is also on Charles Street (in the 400 block) at Mulberry. And O'Neill's Department Store, the business house of the donor of the new Cathedral, stood off the west side of the 100 block of Charles at Lexington.

Northern Parkway, which used to be called "Belvedere Avenue," passes just north of the Cathedral, a busy road that got its original name from the colonial estate of General John Eager Howard. In 1804, this general sold a plot of land to Bishop Carroll for the construction of the Basilica. Less than a mile west on Belvedere is the theology department of St. Mary's Seminary, one of the many educational institutes in the immediate vicinity. To the west of the Cathedral is Gilman Country School, to the south is Friends School, and to the southeast is Loyola College, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and a department of Johns Hopkins University.

The Cathedral property itself was purchased in three sections from the Roland Park Engineering Company: 15.8 acres in June, 1925; 5.3 acres to the south in July, 1947; 3.9 acres to the north in October, 1949. These combined 25 acres were once part of the 390-acre Homeland estate sold to the Roland Park Company in 1924 for more than a million dollars. This company, founded in 1891, turned the Roland Park area of Baltimore into America's first planned suburb and inspired the nation's pioneer zoning laws.

In 1911, the company acquired and developed the adjacent area known as Guilford. The layout of roads and building sites in the Roland Park-Guilford-Homeland area was made by Frederick Law Olmsted of Boston, one of the great landscape architects of the world. The same firm of Olmsted Brothers was chosen to landscape the new Cathedral's grounds.

The Homeland estate had been connected with the Perine family since 1799, when the widowed Mrs. Hephzibah Perine married Mr. William Buchanan, the owner of 150 acres in what was then Baltimore County. Her son, David Maulden Perine (1796-1882), eventually gained control of this property, adding to it until it comprised 390 acres and extended from York Road on the east to the tracks of the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad on the west, from Melrose Avenue on the north to Homeland Avenue on the south.

Mr. Perine, who gave the name "Homeland" to his estate, donated the land and the stone for the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, which is located on the other side of Charles Street a few blocks north of the new Cathedral. Incidentally, both David Perine and his heir, Elias Glen Perine (1829-1922), maintained city homes on Cathedral Street within the shadow of the Basilica. In 1919, all of Homeland was incorporated into the city as part of the "New Annex." In 1922 Elias Perine died, and in 1924 the property was sold by his family and trustees to the Roland Park Company.

Three decades later, ground was broken for the new Cathedral. - more