The Algonquin

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At the southwest corner of Chase and St. Paul in November 1912, the Algonquin Building Company completed a modern ten-story apartment house that neatly complements the historic 1903 Belvedere Hotel down the block. Architect William Nolting, of Wyatt & Nolting, evidently liked the building so much he moved in and lived there for nearly twenty years. The Algonquin Building Company was organized by Webb & White, a partnership of George R. Webb, a Baltimore capitalist who helped to consolidate the city's many street railway companies, and Theophilus White, a successful executive in the new telephone industry. The partnership purchased the building lot on Chase Street from General Francis E. Waters, a local lumberman and financier.

Designed by architects Wyatt & Nolting and built by J. Henry Smith & Sons Company at a cost of $200,000, the new building was nine stories high with terra cotta details on the first three floors. Each floor contained two "large housekeeping apartments and two bachelor suites."

The firm of Wyatt & Nolting began in 1887, a partnership of Baltimore native James B.N. Wyatt and William G. Nolting. The partnership also designed the Walbert apartments just up the street at Charles and Lafayette. Nolting not only designed the Algonquin but became one of its first residents, living in apartment E-8 from 1917 through 1936. After his death in 1940, the Baltimore Sun devoted an editorial to expressing regret for his passing, describing Nolting as "one of the very small group of architects–small nationally as well as locally–who by main strength lifted American architecture out of the doldrums in which it had rested during the latter part of the nineteenth century and gave it new vitality."

In the 1940s, the building converted its apartments to doctors' offices and became known as the Medical Arts Building. Unfortunately, the property has been mostly vacant since 2010 and a proposed $5 million renovation to return it to use as luxury apartments has yet to materialize.