The front features two 60 foot flanking octagonal towers are also crenelated and have louvered belfry openings and stained glass Gothic-arched windows.

The manse / parsonage at the north end has similar matching walls of brick, heavy Tudor-Gothic window hoods, and battlements atop the roof and was built in 1857.

They felt the need for a new church in that fast-growing northern section of the city formerly "Howard's Woods" of Col. John Eager Howard's (Revolutionary War commander of the famed "Maryland Line" regiment of the Continental Army) country estate "Belvidere" (mansion located at intersection of North Calvert and East Chase Streets, razed 1875) where the Washington Monument was erected with its four surrounding park squares just two blocks from their new building.

Across Cathedral Street to the northeast was the 1820s era Greek Revival style home with large front columns, designed by Robert Mills (who also did the iconic landmark Washington Monument two blocks away) which later was occupied by the original Maryland Club, an exclusive Southern-leaning dining and leisure society of gentlemen, founded 1857 that was once threatened by Massachusetts State Militia commander, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, U.S.A. when he occupied Baltimore on May 13, 1861, a month after the infamous "Pratt Street Riots", when mobs of Southern sympathizing Baltimoreans attacked passing state militia from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania at the beginning of the Civil War on Thursday/Friday, April 18-19th.

General Butler's troops fortified Federal Hill with a battery redoubt named Fort Federal Hill and with numerous cannons overlooking the harbor basin (later renamed "Inner Harbor" in the 1960s) and surrounding city, "to put a shot into it" if he spied a reputed rebel flag flying or any discontent to the Union Army declared martial law.