Condos Planned for Baltimore Grain Elevator

11.30.2006

Preservation Online

Is it possible to live in a grain elevator? In Baltimore, an 83-year-old grain elevator is being transformed into 230 luxury apartments, and its developers plan to retain many of its features to remind tenants of its industrial past. When the Archer Daniels Midland Co. grain elevator was built in 1923, it was the world's biggest and fastest. Today its 290-foot tower is the tallest in Silo Point, on the South peninsula of Baltimore. Other than the elevator, the defining features of Silo Point are 187 silos— large, cylindrical tubes 130 feet tall and 16 feet wide—used to store grain. The Archer Midland elevator was still partially operating when Baltimore-based Turner Development bought the 15-acre site in 2003 for $6.5 million. Turner is in the process of converting Silo Point into apartments and retail space, to be completed in March 2008. Its plans include exposed elevators and shafts to showcase the structure's original use. It also will leave the lobby as it was when Silo Point was a grain-storage facility, retaining the original octagonal concrete columns and 27-foot ceiling. Turner Development will preserve 12 of the 187 silos. Last year it sold several acres to Pulte Homes, which is building about 120 townhouses on the site. "You can't reproduce the character of old buildings. They have a uniqueness that is appealing-people would rather live here than in a character-less box," says Patrick Turner, president of Turner Development. "Silo Point a one-of-a-kind place to live in in the world." Turner Development and architect Christopher Pfaeffle have turned a 1920s bowling alley into apartments and a vaudeville theatre into office space. But turning a grain elevator into lofts is tricky. There has been only one other similar renovation: A Quaker Oats plant was converted into a hotel in Akron, Ohio. "The challenge in renovation lies in the compromises with what you have to work with in the building and what needs to go in there, but this is what makes these spaces so much fun," says Pfaeffle, Silo Point architect. "I'm not limited to the norms of construction. Because there is an existing infrastructure, it allows a more creative use of that space."