When: Friday, April 09 / 1:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Organizer: Baltimore Architecture Foundation

Add to calendar: iCal / Google Calendar

Categorized under: Virtual Histories, Webinars

The Invention of Downtown

How did Downtown as we know it come to be? Charlie Duff explains using London and Baltimore as examples.

This program is hosted on Zoom. Upon registering you will receive an email confirmation and a Zoom link. If you do not receive a link, please contact ndennies@aiabalt.com. If you do not contact us at least 1 hour prior to the start of the program, we cannot guarantee admittance.

The Baltimore Architecture Foundation (BAF) and Baltimore Heritage present a series of 30 minute live virtual tours and presentations focusing on Baltimore architecture, preservation and history.

Tickets are donation based. We encourage you to give what you can to support BAF and Baltimore Heritage. Your support helps us make up for lost tour and program revenue from COVID-19 and create more virtual programs like this.

In 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed the center of a city of 500,000 people and made 80,000 people homeless

.In 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed the center of a city of 500,000 people, and not one person became homeless.

In between those two dates, the North Atlantic cities invented the Central Business District. From Baltimore to London, the centers of cities became places where tens of thousands of people worked and no one lived.

Join Charlie Duff, author of The North Atlantic Cities, to find out how this happened and what the architectural results were – and why it didn’t happen in Paris, Rome, and the other great cities of Continental Europe.

Image: The Great Fire of London, depicted by an unknown painter (1675)

Register Here


Baltimore Architecture Foundation is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic