Look up through six stories of black-and-gold cast-iron balconies to a skylight nine stories above your head. The George Peabody Library was built between 1866 and 1878 as part of the Peabody Institute, funded by a gift of over one million dollars from George Peabody, an Essex County, Massachusetts, merchant banker who had moved to London and made a fortune in international finance. Peabody was one of the great philanthropists of the nineteenth century — he also funded the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and affordable housing in London — and his gift to Baltimore included a conservatory of music, a lecture series, and this library.
The library's reading room is a six-story atrium surrounded by cast-iron balconies painted black and gold, rising from a black-and-white marble floor to a skylight nine stories above. Five tiers of cast-iron railings frame shelf after shelf of leather-bound books — approximately 300,000 volumes in the collection. The effect when you walk in is so overwhelming that visitors routinely stop and stand in silence.
It has been used as a filming location for everything from period dramas to music videos. The library is now part of Johns Hopkins University and is open to researchers and visitors. George Peabody never lived in Baltimore but chose it for this gift because, he said, Baltimore was where his commercial career had begun and where he had received crucial early encouragement.