The Sagamore Pendry Rec Hotel is a restoration of the 1914 Recreation Pier in Baltimore by Beatty Harvey Coco Architects, a New York-based firm. The project, completed this year, received the Award of Excellence in the category of adaptive reuse/historic preservation in the 2017 AIA New York State Design Awards.
Opened in 1914, the Recreation Pier was the centerpiece of Baltimore City’s historic Fells Point neighborhood. The building served as a community center/dance hall for local immigrants, and the pier was one of the East Coast’s largest points of entry/departure for shipping. The building stopped functioning as a community center and pier back in the 1970s, and the building was permanently abandoned 15 years ago, having deteriorated to the point of collapse.
The 80,000-sq.-ft. Sagamore Pendry Hotel restores the historic head house for use as a hotel lobby, restaurant/bar, lounge and banquet facility and rebuilds the pier with three guestroom levels around a central courtyard with a pool deck at the rear.
Inserting a structural glass wall behind the main arch allowed for the creation of additional ground floor space and gives hotel guests a view onto the street. The third-floor ballroom, pre-function rooms and grand stair were restored to their original grandeur.
Guest rooms were built within and above the original pier structure and wrap a lush courtyard garden that creates a social gathering space connected to the lounge and bar, and a connection to the pool deck at the end of the pier. Private terraces line the outer walls of the courtyard with lattice ivy covered dividers providing privacy. The original steel pier building beams were restored and exposed, creating an intimate cover over the courtyard while exposing a part of the building’s past.
The new construction uses rich materials to complement the original building without distracting from the historic architecture.
