Notice how an entire city block is consumed by this Gilded Age palazzo, the largest private residence ever built in Baltimore, built to express the wealth of the Garrett family who controlled the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at its height. The mansion was originally built in 1853 and expanded dramatically in 1884 by Mary Frick Garrett, wife of Robert Garrett, the B&O's president, who hired Stanford White — the most fashionable architect in America — to transform it into a statement of absolute wealth. White added a Roman atrium with a skylight, an Adamesque music room with a pipe organ, a gallery for the family's art collection, and a ballroom with a polished mahogany floor designed to hold 500 dancers.
The house was later expanded again by Baltimorean Mary Frick Jacobs, the granddaughter-in-law, who added a swimming pool and squash court in the 1930s. The Garretts were one of Baltimore's great dynastic families — John Work Garrett had built the B&O into the most powerful railroad in the East, and his descendants used that wealth to make the family one of the most prominent in American high society. The mansion was sold in 1961 and now serves as the clubhouse of the Engineering Society of Baltimore.
Beyond these walls, Mount Vernon still holds the brownstones and mansions of the merchants, judges, and professors who once called it Baltimore's finest address.