Construction of the Cathedral began in 1907, when President Theodore Roosevelt helped lay the foundation stone. Through world wars, the Great Depression and social change, construction ended exactly 83 years after it began, when President George H.W. Bush oversaw the laying of the final stone atop the towers, in 1990.
The George Peabody Library is a library connected to the Johns Hopkins University. It is focused on research into the 19th century. It was formerly the Library of the Peabody Institute of music in the City of Baltimore. It is on the Peabody campus at West Mount Vernon Place in the Mount Vernon-Belvedere historic cultural neighborhood north of downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The collections are available for use by the general public, in keeping with the Baltimorean merchant and philanthropist George Peabody's goal to create a library "for the free use of all persons who desire to consult it". The library is widely recognized as one of the most beautiful library spaces in the world, Completed in 1878, the library was designed by Baltimore architect Edmund G. Lind in collaboration with the first Peabody provost, Nathaniel H. Morison, who described it as a "cathedral of books". The visually stunning, monumental neo-Greco interior features an atrium that, over an alternating black and white slab marble floor, soars 61 feet high to a latticed skylight of frosted heavy glass, surrounded by five tiers of ornamental black cast-iron balconies (produced locally by the Bartlett-Hayward Company) and gold-scalloped columns containing closely packed book stacks. Between July 2002 and May 2004, the now historic library underwent a $1 million renovation and refurbishment. (Source: Wikipedia)
