St. Mary's Seminary Chapel

St. Mary's Seminary Chapel
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
Baltimore City Landmark
St. Mary's Seminary Chapel, December 2011
Location	600 N. Paca St., Baltimore, Maryland
Coordinates	39°17′45″N 76°37′23″W / 39.29583°N 76.62306°W / 39.29583; -76.62306
Area	6.5 acres (2.6 ha)
Built	1806–1808
Architect	Maximilien Godefroy
Architectural style	Gothic Revival
NRHP reference No.	71001046
Significant dates
Added to NRHP	November 11, 1971[2]
Designated NHL	November 11, 1971[1]
Designated BCL	1975

St. Mary's Seminary Chapel, located at 600 North Paca Street (off Druid Hill Avenue and modern Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard) in the Seton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, is the oldest Neo-Gothic style church in the United States. It was built from 1806 through 1808 by French architect J. Maximilian M. Godefroy for the French Sulpician priests of St. Mary's Seminary. Godefroy claimed that his design was the first Gothic building in America.^[3]

St. Mary's Seminary (now St. Mary's Seminary and University), founded in 1791, is the oldest Roman Catholic seminary in the United States and the site also included a secular St. Mary's College, from 1805-1852. Godefroy also designed in Baltimore, the First Unitarian Church at West Franklin and North Charles Streets during 1817 and the Battle Monument, constructed 1815-1822 in the old Courthouse Square at North Calvert Street, between East Lexington and East Fayette Streets, commemorating the city's dead during the British attack in the War of 1812's Battle of Baltimore with the bombardment of Fort McHenry and the Battle of North Point in September 1814.^[4] The chapel is located adjacent to the Mother Seton House. Originally the chapel was surrounded by a quadrangle of four-story buildings of brick Georgian/Federal design with peaked roofs and dormer windows. On one side was a long seminary building and on the other was an L-shaped larger, but similar architectured structure built for the secular College, after it was established in 1805. These were later replaced on the same site by buildings in 1876-78 of Victorian/Second Empire style with mansard roofs although the central chapel of Godefroy endured. In the 1970s, the Victorian buildings were unfortunately also razed leaving St. Mary's Park with a historic bandstand to now surround the old Chapel and Mother Seton House. To the east in the 1980s was constructed a four-lane landscaped parkway with median strip of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, edged by short brick retaining walls which curved around the west side of downtown Baltimore like an inner "beltway".