Last year, Dr. Gavin Hamilton lived on the 17th floor of a new building in Baltimore's trendy Harbor East community.
This year, the 32-year-old specialist in internal medicine found an apartment he likes even more -- a converted loft in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. He's so pleased with it, he's throwing an Oscar party to show it off to his friends.
"I like the layout and the high ceilings and the way they preserved the industrial feel of the building," he said. Plus, "it's on the route of the Hopkins shuttle and an easy walk to the train station and Tapas Teatro and the Charles Theatre. I'm very happy with it."
Hamilton is one of the first residents of the Railway Express Loft Building, a former parcel post office one block east of Pennsylvania Station in midtown. The $19 million project opened this winter as the city's newest experiment in creating so-called "live-work" environments for urban pioneers who want to be near the train station and the arts district taking shape around it.
Before the two-level building could open at 1501 St. Paul St., architects and builders had to overcome a variety of design obstacles to retrofit it for 21st-century uses. In the process, they hit upon a formula that could help save other cavernous industrial buildings that pose challenges for older cities such as Baltimore.
Part of their strategy was the introduction of a loft apartment that's unusually long and spacious yet takes full advantage of the building's high ceilings and large windows to bring natural light deep into the living space. Architect Ed Hord of Hord Coplan Macht calls the configuration a "cascading loft."
In a career spanning three decades, Hord says, he's designed nearly 14,000 residences but never anything quite like it. What makes this loft apartment so different from others is that it has three levels of living space, as opposed to one or two in most lofts, and the upper levels look out over the spaces below like tiered balconies.
"I wouldn't be surprised if it's out there," Hord said of the cascading concept. "But I haven't seen it anywhere else. It's a deep unit, but it's not dark at all."
More than half of the 30 apartments are leased, even though the building opened in the winter, the economy is slowing and there was no furnished model. Monthly rents range from $1,250 to $2,350.
Two more initial tenants are Prasad and Nirupama Reddy, an information technology director for a software company and a pharmacist, who moved from Columbia. They're expecting their first baby in a few months and wanted plenty of room, so they rented one of the cascading lofts.
"It's working out great," said Prasad, 30. "We like the open layout. In the daytime, you don't have to turn on any lights because there's so much natural light."
While the building's upper level is devoted to residences, the lower level is filling up with an eclectic mix of commercial enterprises. They include a graphics company, architectural firm, software company, artist, engineer, cabinet maker, three developers and a coffee shop.
Complex location
For both commercial and residential tenants, proximity to the train station was a big draw, said Lone Azola, who's heading the leasing effort. "Amtrak, the MARC trains, light rail, buses -- we are at the doorstep of the hub of transportation," she said.
It's a welcome combination of transit-oriented development, historic preservation and sustainable design, said Anna Custer, executive director of the Live Baltimore Home Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes city living.
"I think it's a gorgeous building and a great reuse of a historic property," she said. "A lot of thought went into making it an attractive place to live. There's so much light in the apartments. We hear the buzz about sustainable communities -- being able to walk to existing city services, leaving a smaller carbon footprint. Projects like that make a lot of sense."
"Not many cities could boast a project like Railway Express," said Kirby Fowler, president of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore. "To be in this historic building on top of a rail line is the perfect confluence of modern living with an industrial past. ... The more we can transform some of our unique buildings into appealing residences, the better."
Although Railway Express is meeting with success now, getting there wasn't easy. The conversion was more complicated than most loft projects, in part because it's so close to the train tracks and the Jones Falls Expressway.
The 77,000-square-foot building was constructed in 1929 as a sorting station for packages arriving in Baltimore by train. Originally connected with the Pennsylvania Railroad, it was later acquired by the city and turned into a maintenance facility for the Housing Authority of Baltimore City.
In 2001, the city housing department decided to make the building available for redevelopment as an anchor for the arts district. It received three proposals and selected a team that included Kenneth Banks, Ronald Lipscomb, Martin Azola, Anthony Ambridge, Stan Keyser and Hord. Keyser was subsequently replaced by Mike Novak. Doracon/Banks is the general contractor. Azola and Associates is managing tenant improvements in the commercial spaces.
Unusual challenges
One factor that made the building difficult to recycle is that it was the first "air rights" structure in Baltimore. It rests on 35-foot-high pillars over land owned by another party, Amtrak, and is surrounded on four sides by bridges. The building's footprint is a parallelogram, with angles determined by the way the rail tracks intersect with the city's street grid. And since the building is on the National Register of Historic Places, the exterior had to be restored in compliance with federal preservation standards.
In some cases where loft buildings are both tall and deep, architects recommend carving out a central atrium to let light and air into the middle. But in a two-story building, an atrium would have occupied much of the potentially rentable space.
The saving grace for this building, Hord said, is that the second level had 17-foot-high ceilings and enormous windows that let light filter deep into the center. Hord and his design team, including project manager and project architect Chris Parts and designer Tarek Saleh, decided that instead of creating an atrium, they would put apartments all around the perimeter and provide access from a central corridor. On the north and south sides, that created some apartments more than 60 feet deep -- longer than many rowhouses. For those apartments, the architects took advantage of the high ceilings to create three levels.
The first level consists of the main living and dining areas and kitchen, close to the outer wall, and a powder room, study and utility spaces closer to the front entrance. The second level, half a flight up, contains a bathroom and bedroom overlooking the living space. The third level, a full flight above the first, has another bedroom-bathroom suite, overlooking the levels below. To provide privacy for its occupants, the designers added an interior window that can be opened and closed when they want.
Once the design was set, construction moved quickly. Work began last February, and the first tenants took occupancy at the end of December.
That timing was just right for Javan Wilson, a 27-year-old Baltimore native who works for the Justice Department in Washington and leased an apartment facing the train station.
Wilson moved from Prince George's County and says she can now take the train from Baltimore and get to work in less time than her old commute to the district by car. She's enthusiastic about the arts district, with its shops and nightlife. She even likes the 51-foot-tall Male/Female sculpture in front of the train station, which she can see practically at eye level from her window.
"It lights it up at night," she said. "I have a really good view."
ed.gunts@baltsun.com