Group hopes to restore Peale Museum into history, architecture center

(Baltimore Sun) After being closed to the public for nearly two decades, a new day may be dawning for the Peale Museum on Holliday Street if its planned restoration as the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture comes to fruition.
"I think it has lots of significance to Baltimore. It had been the city's first City Hall, an African-American school and where gas illumination was used by a company that eventually became BGE," said Walter Schamu, a partner in the firm of Schamu, Machowski, Grego Architects, which prepared restoration plans with consulting architect James T. Wollon Jr.
... Rembrandt Peale, the son of Maryland-born artist, naturalist and inventor Charles Willson Peale, commissioned Robert Cary Long to design a home for Peale's Baltimore Museum so he could display for the public his collections of paintings; American Indian and military artifacts; and stuffed birds, animals and fish.
The opening of the museum couldn't have come at a worse time — scarcely a month before the British bombardment of Baltimore on Sept. 13 and 14, 1814. Continued