The final service in the old funeral parlor came in the winter of 2021-2022, when Ronald Taylor II, the last mortician to operate at 108 West North Avenue, provided cold storage for the bodies of Baltimoreans who died in the COVID-19 pandemic.

There had been a terrible spike in deaths that winter — the city needed extra mortuary refrigeration to manage the deceased in a dignified and safe manner.

When that final duty was done, Taylor sold the Station North funeral parlor — embalming room, stained-glass chapel, casket showroom and all — concluding a term of service to Baltimore’s departed going back to the original morticians, Stewart and Mowen, in 1914. (The three-story stone rowhouse, built in 1878, was originally a private residence.)

So, if anyone asks, as they are bound to when visiting the place, you can note that the last corpse arrived and departed during the misery that claimed the lives of more than 1,800 Baltimore residents.

The embalming room is now a public restroom. The chapel is part of a future bar-restaurant. The casket showroom is the studio of an opera singer and voice instructor.

And the rowhouse is now called The Parlor, a project of developer John Renner.

It’s one of the bright spots in redevelopment in Station North.

Creative Tenants

After renovating and repurposing the place, with the help of Present Company architects, Renner had no problem renting second- and third-floor rooms to artists and entrepreneurs.

The place is full. Rahzé Sinclair is the voice instructor in studio 204; Raba Abro’s photography space, full of natural light, is across the hall; her neighbor is Shelly Morse, a web designer.

The other tenants include guitarist Walsh Kunkel, Claudia Steer’s NW10 Interiors, and LEMA fashion design. An audio producer named David Lopez has a studio for his work on musical recordings and audiobooks.

The biggest tenant is yet to arrive, but Renner hopes to see No Land Beyond, the city’s first board game bar and game shop, filling out the first floor this summer.

NLB had a popular venue on Maryland Avenue in Old Goucher for several years. Its move to The Parlor will give it a handsome bar in what had been the funeral parlor’s front viewing room, a full kitchen, a game shop and plenty of tables for customers to eat, drink and play Ticket To Ride. (NLB boasts some 400 board games in its library.)

The seating area extends all the way back to what was once the hearse garage. There’s a mini-lounge at the base of the old casket lift.

For Renner, The Parlor will be the first of his undertakings in Station North. He’s also part of the group that last year paid $3.25 million for the North Avenue Market, a block east. The consortium has an ambitious plan for a $32 million redevelopment of the 97-year-old market.

Renner has worked with the Central Baltimore Partnership and the Station North Arts District to make things happen, and there’s some confidence that other dormant commercial properties in the area, including an old bank building at Charles and North — currently a standing protest against ICE — could soon see new ownership and investment.

Renner, who is 48, worked with Cross Street Partners on the Penn Station renovation a few blocks to the south. He says he’s always considered Station North a cool place, going back to his youth in the 1990s and the days of raves. The funeral parlor at 108 West North Avenue offered him a way to get involved as a developer with a keen interest in historic preservation.

“I had left Cross Street Partners and was consulting a little bit and wondering, ‘Should I do my own development project?’” Renner explains. “And the funeral parlor was 9,000 square feet, a good size for a first project for a person who put a little money aside, but wasn’t independently wealthy.”

He looked around and thought Station North could use another bar-restaurant with good food at a reasonable price. Royal Blue, the cocktail bar and restaurant at East Lafayette Avenue and Maryland Avenue, had been doing well. Dutch Courage, the cocktail bar a few blocks north, in Old Goucher, “showed how cool a bar-restaurant in a rowhouse could be.”

Ellen Janes, executive director of the Central Baltimore Partnership, told Renner there was a waiting list of creative people looking for space in Station North.

Renner, who puts himself on the “worrier” end of the developer personality spectrum, had a moment toward the end of construction when he feared he would not get all the tenants he needed at The Parlor; posting notices of studios for rent brought no response.

“And then I realized,” he says, “that young people don’t use Craigslist anymore. Someone said, ‘What are you doing on Craigslist? It’s Facebook Marketplace now.’ So then I started posting on there, and it was like an avalanche.”

The vast majority of tenant prospects he got were artists or other creative types.

A Work in Progress

Renner’s plans for the North Avenue Market are as big as the project will allow, and it’s a huge amount of space — close to 100,000 square feet — with an abandoned 22-lane bowling alley on the second floor.

While Renner already has some tenants there, including Mobtown Ballroom and Currency Studio, the redevelopment plan envisions more retail, a large-scale exhibition hall, studios and maker space, an entertainment venue, perhaps a fitness center and maybe a restaurant or diner.

Pulling off such a project, pretty much an entire city block, requires cobbling together an array of financing sources.

“Attempting to redevelop a building like North Avenue Market is not for the faint of heart, given the relationship between development and construction costs and the rents you can achieve,” Renner says.
The challenge is keeping rents relatively affordable for creatives.

“So, a major redevelopment is not easy, it’s very risky, and it’s definitely not for everyone,” Renner adds.

“If we succeed, it’s because of the fairly specialized talents of the current ownership group in assembling a wide variety of funding sources — historic tax credits and grants — in addition to conventional sources — debt and equity.”

To be sure, Station North is a work in progress.

There are still gaps — vacant commercial properties along the 1800 block of North Charles, for instance  — but a redeveloped North Avenue Market could be the catalyst to help the area reach a critical mass of creatives and supporting customers.

“A lot of people aren’t out looking, like, where’s the next gallery opening?” Renner says. “They’re thinking, where can we go get a drink and get dinner? So the idea is to bring the public in and hopefully they’ll patronize the arts while they’re here.”

The Parlor could be such a place, with No Land Beyond pulling its fan base into the old funeral establishment.

Because of its history, the place comes with a distinct aura. In fact, both John Renner and Raba Abro, the photographer, mentioned something about that while I was there.

So I could not resist asking if anything of the paranormal had occurred. Renner said he, Abro and Rahzé Sinclair had all felt something in the building.

“The electrician who did a lot of work here is the same way,” Renner said. “I think we all feel something lingering from past inhabitants, and if you hear a strange noise, you wonder if it’s something more than just the HVAC system starting up.

“The electrician felt a negative or upset energy when work started and things were messy. The electrician believed the energy became positive when it became clear that the renovation was going to great lengths to respect the historic integrity of the building.

“The tenants are bringing tons of new positive energy, and whatever is lingering from the past appears satisfied, though perhaps inclined to periodically remind us that it’s still here.”