Four freestanding buildings in Charles Village will be demolished to make way for housing for Johns Hopkins University students, under a plan by a Texas-based developer that’s working with the university. Preliminary designs for the development were presented to Baltimore’s Urban Design and Architecture Advisory Panel (UDAAP) last month. If it moves ahead as proposed, this would be the largest residential development in Charles Village since two apartment projects were completed at least 10 years ago: Nine East 33rd Street, a 12-story building that opened at 9 E. 33rd St. in 2016 and consists of 157 apartments with 568 beds, and the 11-story Scott-Bates Commons (formerly, Charles Commons), which opened in 2006 at 3301 N. Charles St. with space to house 600 students. The Abel Wolman House. Photo courtesy Baltimore City Planning Department/Urban Design Architecture Advisory Panel. The latest project would involve the demolition of four of the six buildings on the east side of the 3200 block of N. Charles Street to create a 43,280-square-foot development parcel, nearly an acre. All four of the targeted buildings are vacant and owned by the university. This would be the most extensive demolition of residential buildings in the Charles Village area since the university tore down seven rowhouses it owned in the first block of W. 29th Street in 2022. The addresses were 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 17 and 19 W. 29th St. (there was no No. 13). The 29th Street houses were built in 1911. Hopkins acquired them between 2000 and 2019 at a cost of $2,265,500, or nearly $325,000 per house. The land has not been developed. It is just west of Hopkins’ 16-story Dell House, which opened at 2850 N. Charles St. in 1962 and is vacant and targeted for demolition. The Charles Street buildings slated for demolition are: 3201 N. Charles St.: Gladwyn Manor at Campus Square, a three-level corner property that contains 11 apartments and a garage. 3203 N. Charles St.: a five-level building with 28 apartments. 3209 N. Charles St.: a three-story apartment building whose first-floor windows have been boarded up. 3211 N. Charles St.: Steinwald House, a three-story building that served for many years as the Johns Hopkins Alumni House, home of the university’s Office of Alumni Relations. It was named after Osmar Steinwald, Hopkins Class of 1928 and founder of the Alumni Relations office at the university. The Office of Alumni Relations moved out of Steinwald House more than 10 years ago. It served as the leasing office for Nine East 33rd Street when that building opened. Hopkins paid $9,428,500 to acquire the four properties between 1993 and 2025. As of July 1, the buildings and land have a combined assessed value of $8,213,834, according to state records. In addition to the investment they represent, the buildings likely have sentimental value to certain members of the Hopkins and Charles Village communities who either lived there, had meetings there, or regularly walked or drove by. None is protected by local landmark designation. 3201 N. Charles St. Photo courtesy Baltimore City Planning Department/Urban Design Architecture Advisory Panel. Previous demolitions Several blocks of St. Paul Street have been leveled to make way for new housing, including the sites of Nine East 33rd Street, the Scott-Bates Commons and the University Lofts on the east side of the 3200 block. This is the second time that a substantial portion of a block on Charles Street has been targeted for demolition in Charles Village, after part of the 3300 block was cleared for the Scott-Bates Commons. Under previous Hopkins administrations, several older buildings along Charles and St. Paul streets were renovated to provide student housing, including Wolman Hall and McCoy Hall at 3339 and 3401 N. Charles St., and the 150-unit Bradford Apartments building at 3301 St. Paul St., which Hopkins first renovated in 1991 and further modernized for the 2025-2026 academic year. The only buildings on the 3200 block that aren’t targeted for demolition to make way for student housing are The Study at Johns Hopkins, a 10-story, 115-room hotel at 3215 N. Charles St., and the Abel Wolman House at 3213 N. Charles St., a three-story building that dates from 1938 and was the home of Hopkins professor Abel Wolman and his family. The Study at Johns Hopkins opened in 2023 after a $26 million renovation of the former Blackstone Apartments. Wolman, known as “the father of modern plumbing,” was a member of the first graduating class of Hopkins’ Engineering department and a pioneer in the field of sanitary engineering. Laurence Hall Fowler, a noted Baltimore architect, designed his house, recognizable because of its large bay window facing Charles Street. It’s considered one of Fowler’s most impressive works. When Abel Wolman died at the age of 96 in 1989, the property passed on to his only child, M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman, a geography professor at Hopkins. After Reds Wolman put it on the market in 1992, Hopkins acquired it for $191,000 with the help of a donor, Hopkins trustee Harvey Meyerhoff. It has been used by The Associated: Jewish Community Federal of Baltimore and as administrative offices for the university’s Government Relations department, among others. It currently houses a sociology initiative, the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab. Neither The Study nor the Abel Wolman House are part of the housing project’s footprint. 3203 N. Charles St. Photo courtesy Baltimore City Planning Department/Urban Design Architecture Advisory Panel. Maslow’s Campus Communities Leading the development team for the 3200 block project is Maslow’s Campus Communities,a “purpose-built student housing developer” based in Austin, Texas, and active around the country. Hopkins chose it following a year-long selection process. Other university campuses where it has worked include Princeton; Georgetown; MIT; Emory and the University of California, Berkeley. The architect is SCB (Solomon Cordwell Buenz), a 350+-person, Chicago-based design firm with offices in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Los Angeles. One of its most noteworthy projects is the conversion of Chicago’s landmark Tribune Tower and surrounding buildings to 162 luxury condominiums. In Baltimore, the firm designed 414 Light Street, the 44-story apartment tower that opened in 2018 and is one of the city’s tallest buildings. Associate principal Monica Willemsen is the leader designer on the Hopkins project. Mahan Rykiel Associates of Baltimore has been named as the landscape architect but was not part of the UDAAP presentation. Representatives told the review panel that the replacement building is being designed to house second-year Hopkins students. They noted that it is across the street from Hopkins’ four-level, $250 million Bloomberg Student Center, which opened last summer at 3290 N. Charles St. The student housing development site is bounded by Charles Street on the west, 32nd Street on the south, Lovegrove Street on the east and the Wolman property on the north. Drawings presented to the design review panel indicated the building would rise about 12 stories, with lounges and other public spaces on the first level and apartments above. Current zoning for the block would permit a 12-story structure. The team never said exactly how many students the building would house. If it had 11 floors of apartments and 20 apartments per floor, that would be 220 apartments, likely with more than one student in each. If it had 30 apartments per floor, it would contain 330 apartments. Willemsen said the design team studied several configurations and early on considered tearing down the Wolman house to maximize density, but decided against doing that. She said the team also considered a plan with a wall all along Charles Street but decided that might be too imposing. In the end, she said, the team landed on a “courtyard configuration” that calls for a symmetrical, brick- and cast stone-clad building that would be U-shaped in plan, with two wings framing a central courtyard opening onto Charles Street and the Bloomberg Student Center. The building will be set back 26 feet from Charles Street. First-level spaces will include areas for studying and socializing. A loading dock will be located on the Lovegrove Street side to accommodate move-ins and trash disposal. SCB wants to create a contextual building that will fit in with its surroundings in Charles Village, help activate the area and take advantage of its proximity to the university, Willemsen said. “We want people to come out of the elevator and feel connected to the campus.” 3209 N. Charles St. Photo courtesy Baltimore City Planning Department/Urban Design Architecture Advisory Panel. Response from the review panel As designed, the building would significantly change the look and feel of that stretch of Charles Street because it would be one structure rather than four, and it would be much larger and taller than the detached buildings targeted for demolition. It would dwarf the adjacent Wolman house. The review panel did not question the demolitions, focusing instead on the design of the replacement structure. Members suggested that the team explore other options for the design, including ways to make the building less symmetrical. “You’ve created this structure that’s so symmetrical,” said panel member Osborne Anthony. “For my opinion, you have to have a very strong argument as to why you need to do that…What’s driving the fact that it needs to be so symmetrical?” Just because other buildings in the area are largely symmetrical, it “doesn’t mean automatically that…this here must have symmetry,” agreed panel chair Pavlina Ilieva. Anthony and Ilieva also brought up the need for the new building to respond more to the Wolman house. “I suspect that that building has a little bit more importance than you’re suggesting” with the courtyard design, Anthony said. Once you’ve committed to keeping the Wolman building, “you actually have to involve it into your design thinking,” Ilieva said. “You can’t simply ignore it [and say] ‘Well, that’s there and we’re just going to do the symmetry over here.’ It becomes part of the urban condition…The north edge of the site is very different than the south edge of the site. The south edge of the site is a public street.” UDAAP’s sessions are still conducted virtually, six years after in-person meetings were suspended as a precaution at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ilieva asked Willemsen if she has ever been to Baltimore. “The firm has but I have not,” the architect said. Round-trip flights between Baltimore (BWI) and Chicago (ORD or MDW), a distance of 623 miles, typically range from $110 to $400, depending how early one books, and budget fares sometimes drop as low as $68, according to Expedia. Weeknight rates at The Study at Johns Hopkins range from $239 to $279 per night for a standard room, according to its website. Ilieva urged Willemsen to come back to the panel with something more than a “generic” or “pseudo-historic” solution featuring a precast stone base with orange brick above. “It will be one of the largest buildings, both by height and bulk, in the area. It will dominate a lot of that streetscape,” Ilieva said. “I want to challenge the team…to be very critical about how you are approaching this historic context and just the context of the neighborhood as a whole and the very modern expression across the street. It’s OK if you choose not to be [as bold as the glass-enclosed student center]. Maybe it is something that is a little bit quieter, a little more restrained and whatnot. But I want to put in your head: it cannot be derivative. So it’s really important that this stands on its own, has a voice, a presence and a quality that is warranted by the largest building on the block.” “The mass of your building is much more imposing than anything else around it,” Anthony said. “We’re not here to replicate something from 80 to 100 years ago. We want to learn from it and kind of reinterpret it and bring it into our time.” “How can this building feel contemporary and relevant to our time?” asked panel member Kevin Storm. 3211 N. Charles St. Photo courtesy Baltimore City Planning Department/Urban Design Architecture Advisory Panel. Assembled over four decades According to state land records, Hopkins paid $1,737,500 in 2021 to purchase 3201 N Charles St.  The main building and a garage occupy 7,612 square feet of land. The seller was Gladwyn Manor LLC. Gladwyn Manor bought it in 1996 for $375,000 from Charles E. Miller. The buildings and land have an assessed value of $1,924,367, as of July 1. Hopkins paid $4 million in 2024 to acquire 3203 N. Charles St. from Ann Hurlock Real Estate. It occupies 7,955 feet of land. Ann Hurlock bought it in 2005 from Hopkins Realty LLC for $2.3 million. The building and land have an assessed value of $3,234,067. Hopkins paid $3.5 million in 2023 to buy 3209 N. Charles Street from the Baltimore Adelphic Literary Society, an alumni housing corporation and Greek-letter organization affiliated with the university’s chapter of the Alpha Delta Phi Society. It occupies about 13,702 square feet of land. The Baltimore Adelphic Literary Society purchased it in 2005 for $2.7 million from Hopkins Realty LLC. The building and land have an assessed value of $2,578,367. Hopkins bought 3211 N. Charles Street in 1993 for $191,000 from the Mercantile Safe-Deposit and Trust Co. It occupies 14,011 square feet of land. The building and land have an assessed value of $477,033. Other Hopkins projects Hopkins started construction this spring on another student housing project, a 400-bed residence hall and a 41,000-square-foot dining facility on the west side of Charles Street south of University Parkway. Designed for first-year students, it will replace Alumni Memorial Residence I, which was built in 1923 and frames the east side of the Freshman Quad on the Homewood campus. In 2023, Hopkins acquired the Academy on Charles at 3700 N. Charles St., a 106-unit, 328-bed student housing property. In 2024, Hopkins acquired the 196-unit Waterloo Place apartments at 649 St. Paul St. in Mount Vernon for use as dedicated housing for Peabody Conservatory students starting in the fall of 2026. Other recent demolitions of Hopkins-owned buildings include the Mattin Center, Whitehead Hall and the Carnegie Institute Building on the Homewood campus and the Brady Building, Reed Hall, Hampton House and the Denton A. Cooley fitness center on the East Baltimore medical campus. Recent major preservation projects by Hopkins have included the just-finished renovation of the former Seton High School building at 2800 N. Charles St. for continued use as headquarters of the Johns Hopkins School of Education and renovation of the former Baltimore Marine Hospital on Wyman Park Drive for academic use. No CHAP review Though it contains numerous buildings that are nearly a century old or older, Charles Village is not a local historic district, a designation that would give Baltimore’s Commission for Historic and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) authority to review and approve any plans to modify structures within the district, up to and including demolition. Charles Village is recognized as a National Register Historic District, but that is largely an honorary designation from the federal government that does not include a design review process or enforcement of city restrictions on exterior building changes. There has been talk about the city designating Charles Village a “conservation district,” a new category that would trigger CHAP’s review process when demolition is proposed, but that has not happened. ...read more read less