A Peculiar Baltimore Landmark Perfectly Repurposed After 100 Years

In the summer of 1911, a new office building ushered in the skyscraper era in Baltimore.  Designed by Joseph Evans Sperry, the Emerson Drug Company headquarters tower was modeled after the Palazzo Vecchio  in Florence, but it’s imitation of the Italian renaissance was cursory.   The grandiose tower was crowned with an electrically lit blue Bromo-Seltzer medicine bottle which rotated every 2 minutes. That’s not something one would find in old Florence! The glow from 596 light bulbs could be seen for miles at night from across the harbor radiating out above the city.

This audacious promotion for headache relief was financed by Captain Isaac Emerson, the inventor of Bromo Seltzer and the owner of Emerson Drug that promoted medicines for the masses.   The Bromo building was called “(…a) monument to Captain Emerson’s aggressiveness” (Baltimore Evening Sun April 14, 1911) and at 356’ above sea level, the tower would remain the tallest structure in the Charm City for 12 years.

In 1936 the unique 51’ tall, 20-ton steel bottle was unceremoniously removed from the tower five years after Emerson’s death due to structural concerns.  Bromo promo remained, however, on the four clocks of the tower.  Designed by Seth Thomas, the 12 letters of B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R marked the hours on the clock instead of the usual numbers.  The letters are five feet high, and the 24’ diameter clock faces are larger than those of Big Ben in London.

Bromo Seltzer was named after Mount Bromo in Java, which Capt. Emerson had observed bubbling and steaming.  The inexpensive remedy was commonly known to relieve hangovers, and the company started advertising it in the 1970s for curing “that” headache.

In 1969, The City of Baltimore acquired and raised the factory building attached to the tower for a new fire station.  In 1973, the tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  By 1975, sodium bromide, a toxic tranquilizer, was removed from the Bromo Seltzer formula, and Aqua-Seltzer began to dominate the fizzy aspirin market through aggressive television advertising.   

The landmark tower fell into disrepair and was mostly empty when it was purchased by City of Baltimore in 2002.  It was re-opened by Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts in 2008 as an artists’ collective space.  The eccentric “Bromo Tower” now contains 30 studio spaces and several exhibit areas.  2011 was the last year that Bromo Seltzer was available in drug stores.  The gravity-driven clocks were restored in 2017 and still keep time!  The quirky nature of the building provides a unique energy to the art created there. The Bromo Tower is the flagship of the Bromo Arts District https://bromodistrict.org/  The Bromo Arts District covers 117 acres on the west side of Downtown Baltimore.

You can visit the tower at the corner of Eutaw Street at Lombard Street on Saturdays and ride the elevator to see the clockworks on the 16th floor The tours attract about 2,000 visitors annually.  The Bromo Tower also houses the Emerson/MD glass museum,  brainchild of Ernest Dimler, featuring his collection of retail containers that used cobalt blue glass bottles and jars.

This view is near & dear to my heart, because my great-grandfather was also a pharmacist in Baltimore, and he probably knew Captain Emerson.

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