War Memorial Plaza

From its dedication in 1875 to 1917, the new second Baltimore City Hall faced the also the second building of the famed "Old Drury", the nickname of the Holliday Street Theatre rebuilt in brick and stone in 1813, (replacing first playhouse built of wood in 1795), designed by famous local architect Robert Cary Long, with a front facade in stone of Greek Revival style which was the most notable playhouse in Baltimore for decades.

It is said that the first public singing of the future National Anthem reputedly by Ferdinand Durang, (c.1785-1831), occurred on the stage here in late September 1814, near the end of the War of 1812, when the poem of "The Defence of Fort McHenry" written by American Georgetown lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key, when he was on board an American truce ship anchored downriver on the lower Patapsco River from the British Royal Navy fleet as it bombarded Fort McHenry on Whetstone Point guarding Baltimore Harbor during September 12–14, 1814 several weeks earlier and set to music with the tune "To An Anacreon in Heaven", a so-called English social society drinking song.

It was also reputedly said to be re-sung lustily by the "after-the-show" crowd at the next door Theatre Tavern, (to the south, towards East Fayette Street between and adjacent to the "Assembly Rooms" on the corner) of Captain McCauley.

Both influential landmark structures were destroyed in a large disastrous fire in 1873, and the Central High School later moved to new quarters especially built for it by for the first time by 1875 of Tudor Revival/Jacobethan Revival style of building at the southwest corner of North Howard and West Centre Streets, but the venerable Holliday Street Theatre was rebuilt on its original site and later owned by the famous John T. Ford, (1829–1894), local politician/municipal board member and East Coast playhouse operator, who was also proprietor of the infamous Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. where 16th President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865 after the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865).

By the time that the theater and its surrounding block (Holliday to Fayette to North Gay to East Lexington Streets) was torn down in 1917, based on the 1910 plans of Frederick Law Olmsted, to make room for the newly laid-out War Memorial Plaza and Building, as a major rearrangement of a proposed new "civic center" of flanking municipal office buildings and structures providing additional space to be used in future decades, covering up the then unsightly canalized stream of Jones Falls to the east with its periodic flooding problems, and to open up a vista of the elaborate east front of the Baltimore City Hall, an influence of the then-nationwide "City Beautiful" movement among architects and city planners then coming to rise.