BGE-38845 – The Peale Museum, 225 North Holliday Street, June 14, 1963.

Originally known as “Peale’s Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts” when it opened in 1814, the Peale Museum building has had a number of tenants through the years. The first, as the name suggests, was the museum belonging to Charles Willson Peale—until 1830, it displayed portraits of famous Americans (many painted by the owner’s son, Rembrandt Peale) alongside the skeleton of a prehistoric mastodon and other objects of natural history. Following the sale of the museum, the building then housed Baltimore’s first city hall, a distinction it held until 1875 when the current city hall was completed. Over the next half-century, the building served as the Number 1 Colored Primary School and was leased out to numerous private businesses before being rededicated as the Municipal Museum of Baltimore in 1931.

(Take photo across Holliday St., looking east.)