The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum

The Peale Museum, also known officially as the Municipal Museum of the City of Baltimore, was a museum of paintings and natural history, located in the City of Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It occupied the first building in the Western Hemisphere to be designed and built specifically as a museum. The Peale Museum was created by Charles Willson Peale, (1741-1827) and his son Rembrandt Peale, 1778-1860). After functioning separately as the Baltimore City's historical museum since the original structure was being rebuilt, restored, and renovated in 1930-1931, and then later merging in with other historic sites, houses and museums in the early 1980s under the expansive efforts of a new ambitious executive director, with the name of the "Baltimore City Life Museums" and a new broader mission in conjunction with the other historical locations/sites /structures in Baltimore. After opening a new three-story exhibition gallery, uniquely using the old cast-iron façade of the razed (but placed in storage in a city yard for 30 years) of the old Fava Fruit Company and being re-assembled on the new structure facing North Front Street and the parallel new President Street boulevard (between East Lombard and East Fayette Streets), the new gallery and the B.C.L.M. ran into financial difficulties in the first year in 1996-1997 after the grand opening, coincidentally during the Baltimore Bicentennial Celebration (of the City's 200th year after incorporation as a city), The Peale branch of the City Life Museums closed unfortunately with the other branches - historic houses and sites later in 1997, after being refused a one-year extension of its five-year subsidy of about $300,000 annually by then Mayor Kurt Schmoke, and its large collections from over 66 years of original existence were disassembled, transferred and handed over to the Maryland Historical Society, founded 1844, now located on the city block on the southwest corner of West Monument Street and Park Avenue, centered in the old Enoch Pratt Mansion and adjacent research library and museum exhibition areas building. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.