Baltimore’s Skyline Once Had a Rotating Blue Bottle
The Bromo-Seltzer Tower still spells out its product name on the clock, but the enormous illuminated bottle is gone.
The clock faces on Baltimore’s Bromo-Seltzer Tower use letters where numbers would usually go. Read around the dial and they spell the twelve-letter product name. When the tower was new, that was only part of the advertisement. A giant blue bottle turned above the roof.
A Factory with a Tower
Isaac Emerson developed Bromo-Seltzer, an effervescent remedy sold in distinctive blue bottles. His drug company’s Baltimore complex combined manufacturing with a tower tall enough to be seen across downtown.
Completed in 1911, the tower was designed by Joseph Evans Sperry. Its shape drew on the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, with the clock mounted high above the street. The building stood at the corner of Eutaw and Lombard streets beside the company’s factory.
Above it sat a bottle about 51 feet tall. Lights made it glow blue at night, and a mechanism rotated it. The enormous container reproduced the shape that customers knew from the smaller bottles sold by the company.
The Part That Came Down
The bottle was removed in 1936 because of structural concerns. Its disappearance changed the building’s silhouette, leaving the clock tower without its most conspicuous feature.
The factory buildings later came down as well. A fire station replaced part of the old industrial site, but the tower remained. It entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and eventually found a new use with artist studios and exhibits about the company.
The product name survives on all four clock faces. Small cobalt-blue medicine bottles in the tower’s historical collection show the color and shape that once appeared in a 51-foot version overhead.
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Sources & photograph
Adapted from the Hidden Here story catalog. Explore the historical records behind this story.
