The eleven-story tan brick building rises 188 feet (57 m) from a rusticated stone base to an elaborately-detailed "French Second Empire" styled crown with a traditional mansard roofline.

Howard's lands north and west of old Baltimore Town, known as "Howard's Woods" were eventually used to donate plots for several churches and civic sites including the landmark Washington Monument and the four park-like squares surrounding it, when constructed 1815–1827, along with the old Baltimore Cathedral (now the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary), built 1806–1821, by the famed British-American architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, (1764–1820), a few blocks southwest on Cathedral Street.

Later Howard children and members of the family sub-divided the grand estate beginning in the late 1820s into the 1830s and 1840s for rows of elegant townhouses (and later cultural institutions) extending northward from the harbor-front city, eventually surrounding the old historic mansion situated at the intersection of North Calvert and East Chase Streets until it too was finally razed in the mid 1870s.

Over the years, it has figured prominently in Baltimore's social, political and economic life, especially as it was located in a tiny predominately exclusive residential neighborhood, north of where most of the other downtown hotels were then clustered.

The Hotel Belvedere was known as the premier lodging in Baltimore during the first half of the twentieth century, hosting American Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson, among others, along with such celebrities as Wallis Warfield Simpson (the Duchess of Windsor), (controversial wife, born and raised in Baltimore, of abdicated King Edward VIII of Great Britain in 1936–1937), General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, actor Clark Gable, and many dozens of others.