HUTZLER’S DEPARTMENT STORE

Built in an eclectic Romanesque Revival style, this was Baltimore’s first purpose-built department store in what subsequently became the fashionable retail center of the city, now an uncommon survivor of late-nineteenth-century department store design. It was built for the German-Jewish Hutzler brothers, who referred to their grand new store as the Palace Building. The striking design features pressed-metal polygonal bays, Moorish arched entrance, pediment ornamented by the Goddess of Justice intertwined with the “Hutzler’s Brothers” name, and stone foliage and arabesque carvings, heads, and rustication. The interior contains a double atrium with two sky-lit courts modeled after the exclusive Bon Marché in Paris. Hutzler’s marked the final transition from specialty shop to dry-goods store to department store, ushered in by urbanization, cheap mechanized production of ready-made goods, and delivery of goods by railway, coupled with streetcar lines providing customers easy access to downtown.

A five-story Art Deco section by Edmunds was later appended, and a new street-level facade of the same polished black granite was applied to the original building to tie the parts together. It was one of the few department stores to expand during the Depression era, further extended by the planned, five-story Hutzler’s Tower. Built of variegated brick forming vertical bands of windows, columns, and pilasters, it has a black granite street facade punctuated by large plate-glass display windows and Art Moderne entrances with sleek revolving doors. Hutzlers ceased operations in 1990, and the buildings now sit vacant.