Otterbein Church, now known as Old Otterbein United Methodist Church, is a historic United Brethren church located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The first "German Reformed" church was built to serve the German Reformed and some Evangelical Lutheran immigrants, and later entered the Brethren strain of German Reformed Protestantism in the later Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
Description
It is a two-story brick Georgian structure with a peaked roof, built 1785–1786. It features a square bell tower and an octagonal white "cupola-on-cupola", with much of the original wavy, hand-blown glass window panes still remaining. It had a major remodeling occurring in 1839, and some additional cleaning and restoration of its exterior brick walls and wall-fence surrounding the parish. The tower's bells date to 1789, and are still in use. That same year, the first Conference of United Brethren preachers was held and resulted in the official organization of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, with Pastor Philip William Otterbein, (1726–1813) as a bishop (five years after he participated in the "laying on" of hands on famous evangelist and missionary Francis Asbury, (1745–1816), ordained as the first bishop of the new Methodist Episcopal Church. He was later buried in the adjacent churchyard, surrounding the building.
Location
Old Otterbein Church is located just east of the landmark Camden Street Station and three blocks west of the Inner Harbor. For decades it was surrounded by many blocks in every direction by very densely packed neighborhoods of rowhouses, businesses and factories/manufacturies. Most of these former structures have been razed in the last two decades. Much of this area is now occupied by Oriole Park at Camden Yards baseball stadium (built in 1992), the Baltimore Convention Center (built 1979, with a large 2002 addition), and several large glass-towered hotels of national chains, to the east, west, and north.
To the south lies a several block-sized remnant of the former configuration, featuring many examples of the classic "working-man's" small two-story brick rowhouse. However, some of which were torn down for a proposed cross-town routing of Interstate 95 before it was instead routed further south where it skirts the residential neighborhoods of old South Baltimore and nearby historic Federal Hill, to the Fort McHenry Tunnel and under the Baltimore Harbor/Patapsco River.
History
In the late 1970s, the spared rowhouses were offered up to prospective "urban homesteaders" for the famous "dollar a house" and were gradually renovated, updated and restored with additional homes and "row-house-like" apartments and condos constructed in between the older housing fabric, resulting in "Otterbein now being one of Baltimore's showcase neighborhoods visited now by thousands of tourists who stroll its now tree-shaded streets every week-end. Additional renovations and restorations have spread further southeast to the historically ancient black community of "Sharp-Leadenshall" (named for the two intersecting streets), which also had some new housing complexes built that have held their value in the decades since.
To the northwest of the old historic, now landmark church, jumping across the Camden Yards sports complex, the older community-shattering "urban renewal" style of the 1940s to 50s and 60s had spared also those neighborhoods, so "Pigtown"/Washington Village, Ridgely's Delight" with projects of individual house rows and new replica housing along West Barre Street and South Paca Street all the way to the "west-side" of downtown Baltimore's old "Loft District" along West Pratt, Lombard and Redwood Streets between South Howard Street with most of the major clothing and hat manufacturing structures that dominated American menswear business of the late 19th and early 20th Century (spared by the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, are still there with their solid red-brick Romanesque architecture styles converted over into expensive apartments/condominiums. To the west end of these substantially changed areas is the new "inner beltway" around downtown of the landscaped parkway of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard connecting into Russell Street extending into the Baltimore–Washington Parkway of Interstate 295 and running parallel to Interstate 395, which both exiting the downtown district of the city to the southwest alongside the other western end of the Camden Yards baseball and football stadiums, which crowd the surrounding streets near the church with sports fans several times a week in season.
