DISPATCHES
A Charity’s Move Into an Old Brewery Taps Hope for a Gritty Neighborhood
By Brennen Jensen
BALTIMORE
ON A DANK WINTER AFTERNOON, two leaders of Humanim, a social-services charity in sub-
urban Columbia, Md., got lost driving
around gritty East Baltimore. They
were looking for office space to lease,
but found so much more. They discov-
ered their charity’s future in a hunk
of the past. It was six years ago, and
Humanim had recently merged with a
smaller job-training charity in Balti-
more, an event that sent Henry Posko,
the chief executive, and Cindy Plavier
Truitt, the chief development officer,
looking for a building to house the
combined operations.
A few wrong turns led them deep
into a poverty-stricken area with
blocks of battered row houses. Here
they didn’t find an office building, but
a ghost: a decaying and abandoned
five-story brick edifice of exuberant
Victorian design. It was the remains
of a brewery built in 1887 and locally
referred to as the American Brewery,
after a brand of beer once produced
there. It had been closed and boarded
up since 1973.
“We were just in awe of the build-
ing,” says Ms. Plavier Truitt, describ-
ing how they ultimately pulled over
and slipped inside the vacant struc-
ture through an unsecured plywood
door. “It was dark and we were walk-
ing over debris and into inches of pi-
geon waste. But the more we got into
the filth, the more we realized this was
an amazing gem of an opportunity.
The neighborhood around the building
was just devastated, and we were in-
trigued by what restoring the building
could mean for the community.”
Thus, an act of trespassing began
what Ms. Plavier Truitt calls Hu-
manim’s “roller-coaster ride”: a three-
year, $24-million effort to restore the
brewery, which came to fruition two
years ago when the charity moved
about 200 of its staff members from
Columbia into the erstwhile home of
American Beer. Here, the charity’s em-
ployees provide job training, outpatient
mental-health and developmental-dis-
abilities counseling, services for the
deaf, and other functions.
The move has not only given those
workers an unusual office but also
raised Humanim’s profile among both
donors and the people it seeks to serve.
It has also provided jobs in a strug-
gling part of the city, and raised hopes
for more neighborhood revival.
Award-Winning Design
The sweeping redesign, which was
done by the Baltimore architecture
firm Cho Benn Holback + Associates,
playfully preserves vestiges of the
building’s brewing days, with a dismembered metal beer tank providing
an impromptu cubicle and grain hoppers and conveyer systems retained as
striking artifacts. The project has won
more than a dozen awards from pres-ervationist and architectural groups,
“Humanim has received
more notoriety in the last
three years than we did
in our first 30, and it’s all
because of this project.”
including the American Institute of
Architects, which named it “public
building of the year” in 2009.
“The American Brewery is an iconic
building that represents the best of
The rush of design accolades caught
the charity’s leaders a little off guard.
“Humanim has received more notoriety in the last three years than we did
in our first 30, and it’s all because of
this project,” says Mr. Posko.
‘More Energy Now’
While the building’s many design
awards are proudly displayed in the
lobby, of greater importance is how
Humanim’s high-profile new home has
broadened the charity’s mission and
enmeshed it in broader efforts to alleviate poverty. When housed solely in
a leafy suburban office park, the char-
PHO TOGRAPHS BY BRENNEN JENSEN, FOR THE CHRONICLE
Humanim’s new headquarters (left) has energized the charity,
according to its leaders, Henry Posko and Cindy Plavier Truitt.
ity was a “low-profile, under-the-radar”
organization, says Mr. Posko. Those
days are over, now that Humanim literally looms large over a deeply impoverished neighborhood.
“There’s just a lot more energy now,
greater urgency,” Mr. Posko says.
“We’ve had a unending stream of con-
versations with other nonprofits about
how we might collaborate or form part-
nerships.”
For instance, Humanim has held
meetings with Habitat for Human-
ity of the Chesapeake, a local branch
of the housing charity, and other non-
profit housing developers about how
they might work together to tackle the
blighted housing stock in the shadow
of the brewery. On some nearby blocks,
nearly every house is boarded up.
“I think Habitat and other devel-
opers would love to do work around
there,” says Mike Mitchell, head of
Habitat for Humanity of the Chesa-
peake. “What Humanim has done is
very dramatic and can be a way to pro-
pel a neighborhood toward transforma-
tion. They can be a catalyst, and Habi-
tat wants to support that.”
Mr. Posko says he wasn’t totally un-
aware that moving into the brewery
would thrust his charity into a com-
munity-development role. But he didn’t
fully appreciate how that role would
appeal to grant makers.
“Some funding sources could care
less that it was a historic building,” he
says. “Their focus was what we were
going to do in terms of services from
a location within a neighborhood that
had seen such disinvestment.”
‘Bavarian Pagoda’
The first financial hurdle to rehab-bing the brewery was perhaps the easiest. Humanim purchased the crumbling 30,000-square-foot brewery from
Baltimore City for a mere $2,500. But
the price tag to restore the building—a
structure nicknamed the “Bavarian
pagoda” because of its trio of slate-roofed towers and elaborate windows
and brickwork—was initially pegged
at $10-million. That figure more than
doubled once the full architectural
analysis was completed.
Because the building was listed on
the National Register of Historic Plac-
es, it qualified for $14-million in state
and federal historic tax credits. These
funds, together with other government
loans and grants, were an integral
part of a complex financing package
that also required nearly $7-million in
philanthropic support. The grant mak-
ers that provided assistance included
the Annie E. Casey Foundation and
the France-Merrick Foundation, both
based in Baltimore, and the Kresge
Foundation, in Troy, Mich. The Harry
and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation,
also in the Baltimore area, gave the
largest single grant, of $2.75-million.
